Acceptable Losses

We have a calculation in print that it would take the RIAA over 2,000 years to sue each and every P2Per.

There’s a few problems with this.

First, the RIAA isn’t going after file downloaders; they’re going after file fencers.

Earlier statistics on this indicated that only about 10% of participants actually “share” and only about 1% seriously “share” (i.e. provide most of the downloads).

Given that, the time frame drops to a bit over two hundred/twenty years. Still not exactly a huge risk.

However, this is a prototype project. Get a bunch of cases together, work them through, and see what happens. If things work well, they have a new proven weapon. If it doesn’t, they’ll drop it.

In the great scheme of things, this is probably considered more a bargaining chip with Congress than anything else. It gives them a non-political option. They can say, “Look, if you don’t help us out with something like DRM, what else can we do?”

It’s a good argument.

Will this prototype stop P2Ping? I doubt even the creators of this strategy think that. Will it put a dent in it? So long as it is perceived by people that this isn’t perfectly safe (and media will play a big role in this), it probably will. Not as much a dent as RIAA and Company would like or probably think, but it likely will be sizable.

This is an armed reconaissance, not all-out war, and it’s an option, one of many options, and probably one of the last options.

If in the course of time, it is used (and it probably won’t), the numbers will be a lot bigger than 75 per day.

But that’s not what I find scary about this.

Acceptable Losses…

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