RIAA watch

If you ever wondered whether anyone was keeping an accurate count of all those RIAA lawsuits against individual P2P file sharers, wonder no longer. RIAA Watch says the total is now 10037.

"The total number of file sharers sued has now broken the five-digit barrier, coming in at 10,037 people sued by the RIAA since September 2003. This is an astounding figure. I just checked the Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics and found that this one wave of litigation represents 2.3% of all civil cased filed in federal court. (The average number of civil lawsuits filed per month for 2003 and 2004 was 21,363; in the 20 months since the RIAA began suing file sharers, the recording industry filed 502 lawsuits on average each month.) And given the news reports of $3,000 average settlements, this means the RIAA's probably collected over $30 million from individual file sharers."