The trade groups also claim that widespread copyright infringement on the Internet hurts sales, in turn affecting the artists who depend on royalties.
[4] In March 2007, Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) members sued Eircom Limited, the largest broadband provider in Ireland, over alleged illegal file sharing by subscribers.
The case was taken on appeal to the High Court of Australia where it was dismissed unanimously, finding that iiNet "had no direct technical power" to stop users from downloading copyrighted material illegally.
[14] In 1998, the RIAA sued the operators of two more sites, resulting in permanent injunctions and monetary damage awards against the defendants, who were also required to perform community service.
[16] In a controversial May 2006 raid, Swedish National Bureau of Investigation and local police seized the servers of BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, causing a three-day outage.
[17] The raid appeared to be motivated by pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a group that filed police complaints in Stockholm and Gothenborg in 2004 and 2005 against The Pirate Bay and sent a letter to Sweden's state secretary requesting action.
[20] In January 2012, the Hong Kong-based file sharing website Megaupload was discovered to be hosted on servers in the state of Virginia, allowing the US government to take action against it.
Aiplex Software, an India-based technology company, revealed in 2010 that it has made denial-of-service attacks on torrent hosting websites on behalf of movie studios.
[27] From 2005 through 2008, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) saw lawsuits against individual consumers as a way to combat the problem of Internet-based copyright infringement.
[31] In that case, Tenise Barker, a 29-year-old nursing student in the Bronx, moved to dismiss the RIAA's complaint for lack of specificity, and on the ground that merely "making available" does not constitute a copyright infringement.
[34] In March 2008, Judge Karas ruled in "Barker" that simply "making available" (such as dropping a file in a shared folder) did not constitute copyright infringement.
[38][39] The RIAA and MPAA contracted MediaSentry, on behalf of plaintiff labels and studios, to collect information about IP addresses sharing potentially infringing files on peer-to-peer networks.
The RIAA names defendants based on ISP identification of the subscriber associated with an IP address,[51] and as such do not know any additional information about a person before they sue.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union and Public Citizen oppose the ability of the RIAA and other companies to "strip Internet users of anonymity without allowing them to challenge the order in court".
[59] Another defendant, Tanya Andersen, a disabled 41-year-old single mother living in Oregon,[60] filed counterclaims against the RIAA including a RICO charge.
[62] Thereafter, Ms. Andersen sued the RIAA, the record company plaintiffs, Safenet (MediaSentry), and Settlement Support Center LLC, for a huge list of accusations including fraud and negligent misrepresentation, violations of ORICO, abuse of legal process and malicious prosecution[63][64] subsequently amending her complaint to turn the case into a class action.
[71] In September 2008, Charles Nesson filed a counterclaim on behalf of Joel Tenenbaum for abuse of process, claiming "ulterior purposes" of intimidation of other users.
[74] In UMG v. Lindor,[75] the defendant argued that the RIAA's damage theory was unconstitutional because it sought 1071 times the actual cost per track in online stores ($.70).
After a Brooklyn Federal Court judge upheld the legal theory behind the RIAA's assessment of damages in November 2006,[76][77] UMG dropped the lawsuit.
After three trials and multiple appeals, at one point of which statutory damages awarded were $1,920,000,[78] the Supreme Court refused to hear Thomas's case in March 2013.
[79] In 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen, the ACLU of Oklahoma Foundation, and the American Association of Law Libraries submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of the motion for attorneys fees that has been made by Deborah Foster in Capitol Records v. Debbie Foster, in federal court in Oklahoma, requesting that attorney's fees be awarded to the defendant and alleging a pattern of inadequate investigation and abusive legal practices by the RIAA.
[80] The RIAA asked the Court not to accept the amicus curiae brief, claiming that the "Movants attempt to paint a false picture of Plaintiffs and the recording industry run amok".
The judge ruled that the RIAA's withdrawal of the case—after one and a half years of litigation—did not immunize it from possible liability for attorneys fees, holding that the defendant was a "prevailing party" under the Copyright Act.
[88] The Court subsequently ruled that defendant was entitled to be reimbursed for her reasonable attorneys fees, since the RIAA's pursuit of its case was, at best, "marginal", and was being pursued to extract a settlement from someone who was clearly known not to be the direct infringer.
[82] The Court noted that the mere fact that Ms. Foster was a person who paid for an internet access account was not a basis for a copyright infringement lawsuit against her.
Hilary Rosen was the RIAA's president and chief executive officer from 1998 to 2003 and under her leadership, the company commenced a legal campaign to reduce illegal file-sharing.
"[91] In December 2008 the Wall Street Journal reported that the RIAA had dropped its program of mass lawsuits in favor of cooperative enforcement agreements with a number of ISPs.
[95] To date, the RIAA has sued more than 20,000[96] people in the United States suspected of distributing copyrighted works and settled approximately 2,500 of the cases.
Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has called these types of lawsuits spamigation and implied they are done merely to intimidate people.
In a Brooklyn case, Elektra v. Schwartz,[99] against RaeJ Schwartz, a Queens woman with multiple sclerosis, the RIAA's lawyers wrote to the judge that they were in possession of a letter in which "...America Online, Inc., has confirmed that defendant was the owner of the internet access account through which hundreds of plaintiffs' sound recordings were downloaded and distributed to the public without plaintiffs' consent."