MPAA / RIAA Ponder Suing Persistent BitTorrent Pirates
Later this year, the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) will start to track down ‘pirates’ as part of an agreement all major U.S. Internet providers struck with the MPAA and RIAA. — The parties agreed on a system through …
Context & Ripple Effects
The lawsuit talk marks a possible reversal of strategy: the RIAA abandoned mass litigation against individual file sharers back in 2009, and since then the labels and studios have pinned enforcement on the graduated-response deal with major U.S. ISPs rather than the courtroom. That system — run through the Center for Copyright Information after years of delay — is confirmed to begin tracking pirates later this year, with the RIAA's chief saying in March that Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon were preparing to implement it by July 12.
Against that backdrop, the rumored reconsideration of suits against 'persistent' pirates fits a broader pattern: the MPAA asked a federal judge in March to preserve data on all 66.6 million Megaupload users explicitly for future lawsuits, and has already framed faster broadband as a piracy threat rather than an opportunity. The studios' history here is checkered — the MPAA was caught uploading fake torrents in 2007 — so any return to individual litigation would land on skeptical ground.
First-order effects
- Repeat BitTorrent users on major U.S. ISPs move from anonymous risk to identified targets: once the CCI alert system goes live later this year, their infringement history becomes evidence a rights holder could act on.
- Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon shift from passive conduits to active enforcement intermediaries, obligated to deliver escalating copyright alerts on the MPAA/RIAA's behalf.
Second-order effects
- If lawsuits resume, expect subscriber churn pressure and customer-service friction at participating ISPs, whose billing relationships now carry legal exposure they did not price in when signing the agreement.
- Privacy tools — VPNs and anonymizing services — gain a mainstream marketing hook among ordinary subscribers who previously saw no need to mask their traffic.
Third-order effects
- Copyright enforcement migrating into the ISP relationship itself — alerts first, lawsuits as backstop — would make broadband providers the structural chokepoint of content-industry policy, a role negotiated privately rather than set by legislation.
- The model, if it holds, gives other rights holders a template for outsourcing detection and escalation to access providers, entrenching a two-tier internet where traffic flagged by industry partners is treated differently.
The trend: U.S. copyright enforcement is shifting from direct mass litigation by the labels toward ISP-mediated graduated response, with lawsuits repositioned as a targeted backstop against repeat infringers.