E-Mail This Article to a Friend MP3 WORLD File-traders win pretty BY CAMILLE DODERO

There’s always outlandish comedy in the news, but this past year, when the greedy Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued hundreds of unsuspecting file-sharers for copyright infringement — holding each person liable for up to $150,000 a song — the headline humor seemed more farcical than ever. Especially when two of the RIAA’s targets were Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old girl living in a New York City Housing Authority apartment, and Sarah Seabury Ward, a 66-year-old Massachusetts woman whose Macintosh computer wasn’t even compatible with Kazaa, the peer-to-peer software she’d supposedly used to share files online. But last Friday, a federal court ruled that Internet service providers aren’t obligated to reveal users’ identities to the RIAA — a court order that not only threatens the civil suits still pending, but prevents the trade group from continuing its high-profile scare tactics.

The Phoenix spoke with Walter McDonough, professor of copyright law at Suffolk University Law School and general counsel for the Future of Music Coalition, about what last week’s federal-court decision actually means.

Q: What are the implications of the federal court’s ruling?

A: Oh, it’s huge. It’s going to be more difficult for the RIAA and eventually the MPAA — the movie people — to get the identity of people they want to sue. If they can’t determine the individuals’ identities, this throws up another roadblock in their way. This is not a win. It’s a pretty big loss.

Q: How might the RIAA deal with file-sharing in the future?

A: Record companies are going to have to come up with alternative payment systems. Like a bandwidth tax that would have ISPs charging consumers $5 or $10 a month so they can have unlimited downloads. There’ve already been some experiments in Canada with things like this: the Canadians tax blank CDs and CD burners to build royalty pools to pay people. And that may be the only solution.

Q: The RIAA said that court decision "means we can no longer notify illegal file-sharers before we file lawsuits against them." So how will the RIAA identify users?

A: I don’t understand how they’re going to get people’s identities — it’s certainly going to make it a lot more difficult. The universities have their own agenda in terms of how to defend these lawsuits, and you have a lot of file-sharing coming out of the universities. But the overall majority is coming from the ISPs, people using broadband. So they’re going to really take a step back here. Clearly, time and time again has shown that litigation is not an answer to this — all you do is alienate the audience.

Besides, record sales are back up. The record companies are going to have a good quarter — they’ve never been able to establish a connection between peer-to-peer file-sharing and declining record sales.

Q: Wouldn’t RIAA defenders say that the anti-pirating campaign has caused record sales to increase?

A: No. You had about a year and half of truly bad music. If you look at OutKast, they’ve sold millions and millions of records because OutKast is great. Before that, you had a slew of really bad music. The single-least-important thing [contributing to the drop of CD sales] was file-sharing. It’s a big complicated picture. When people say that peer-to-peer trading leads to declining sales, they’re doing the industry a massive disservice.

Q: So with this ruling, can 12-year-old girls like Brianna LaHara rest easy?

A: I’m more concerned that they’re listening to really bad music. I think that’s a much bigger problem than file-sharing.