In a move that is long overdue,
Quote:
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The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers' access if they ignore repeated warnings.
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This ends a practice that may have only made the situation worse with respect to piracy, and most certainly brought undue hardships to families that were under the RIAA legal guns.
With a new policy of warnings and then loss of internet access, maybe we can all focus on reasonable consumer markets for electronic music sales which are actually a good deal for the consumer.
On the negative side, it is unlikely that anyone will have the money, endurance or desire to fight accusations made by the RIAA. In other words, if someone is unjustly accused of sharing copyrighted music, is there any hope? Probably not. Will this lead to heavy handed and unjust control by the RIAA? One can hope that level heads will prevail, and current file sharers will enticed to become legal purchasers, and innocent file sharers (non-copyrighted music, for example) will be left alone.
Does this matter for e-books? Of course... all content buyers win every time we see DRM usage limited, or we see the consumer enabled to make personal copies of content, or we see heavy handed law enforcement become more balanced. It would be impossible for e-book publishers and sellers to ignore the news of the day for a related industry. Maybe in the book world, some of the pain brought about in the music world will bring perspective that allows everyone to win with e-books - before we make pirates out of every good citizen willing to purchase e-book content fairly.
From
Yahoo! Tech.