Meet John Doe

The Village Voice: "The RIAA runs its lawsuits as a volume business, and sometimes downloaders just gotta settle" This article is written by one of the "John Does," Nick Mamatas, who was targetted an settled with the RIAA.

"For me, the experience of settling with the RIAA was almost painless—except for the thousands I agreed to pay. Dragging my "shared" folder to the trash icon, promising not to download anymore, and acknowledging that illegal downloading is wrongful were easy enough. I happened to know an intellectual-property lawyer who agreed to handle the negotiations pro bono. He was the one who called the RIAA settlement center number and spoke not to a lawyer, but to a staffer empowered and trained to negotiate. "It feels like they're doing a volume business," my lawyer told me...

Annalee Newitz, policy analyst for the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the practice of suing not just a single anonymous person but dozens at a time is called "spamigation." "That's one of the slimier things that entertainment companies are doing," she says, because mass lawsuits allow "companies to sue hundreds of people for the same cost as suing only one. So instead of respecting the defendants' due process rights and suing them individually, the companies are able to cut down on court fees and sue them as a group. This makes it much easier for companies to sue people willy-nilly, even if they aren't sure that the person being sued is in fact infringing, because it doesn't cost them any extra money to add another name to their suit...

And downloading? Well, I'm done with it now, except for legal amazon.com freebies, but even my close friends haven't been scared off. One scoffed at my settlement, and said that if she were sued, she'd fight the RIAA in court. For her, downloading is "civil disobedience" in protest against the legal digital music systems that just don't have all the music she wants. Of course it's easy to strike a rebel pose like that . . . until you become just another John Doe."

When you consider the minimum damages award per song downloaded is $750, you can see what he means. The one person who did challenge the RIAA in court lost and was ordered to pay $22,500, ($750 for each of 30 songs). Could have been worse. She was originally accused of having downloaded thuosands of songs. So the court award could be considered, relatively speaking, to be reasonable. Proportionality of the damages? Now that's a different matter entirely.