Looking to find a better way to deal with the individuals illegally trading music, the Recording Industry Association of America announced a new strategy through which the people responsible for these music sharing actions will no longer be taken to court, but their Internet connections will be completely cut off.

This will be possible through the RIAA’s partnership with several Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which will monitor and identify the users that leave music files available online for others to take. The first step will be to send out three emails requesting the immediate stop of these actions and if no measures will be recorded, the users’ Internet connections will be terminated.

The association explained that it will still bring to court the individuals labeled as heavy users and will also complete all the currently ongoing lawsuits. Starting with 2002, the RIAA sued over 35,000 people on different counts of music piracy – but the actions seem to be a lot less efficient than expected, which is why this alternative was introduced. There have been many faulty lawsuits, such as the well known case of a deceased woman sued for these music sharing accusations.

"This means more music fans are going to be harassed by the music industry," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He continued by saying that "The problem is the lack of due process for those accused. In a world where hundreds of thousands, or millions, of copyright infringement allegations are automatically generated and delivered to ISPs, mistakes are going to be made. ... Anyone who has ever had to fight to correct an error on their credit reports will be able to imagine the trouble we're in for."

The EFF criticizes the new plan but also offers its opinion on a positive solution to the problem – the RIAA should embrace a voluntary collective licensing regime, through which users would each pay a small monthly fee and be free to trade music files. The conclusion reached by a survey conducted earlier this year pointed out that about 80 percent of peer-to-peer users approved the idea of such a system, which means that the companies involved would be able to gather these individual fees and cut their losses short, depending on the quantity of downloaded tunes.
"The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders," the EFF points out. "The more competition in P2P software, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom for fans to upload what they care about, the deeper the catalog."

This would indeed represent a good solution, as the music share among internet users did not record any kind of reduction since the RIAA began its lawsuit crusade, and it would enable a widely accepted pay and monitoring system for an illegal action that is currently going on for free without any sort of proper verification or idea on how to fully stop it.