The actual title of this article is "Record Industry Sues 493 More US Music Swappers," and goes on to say that the Recording Industry Association of America has now sued 2,947 people since last September to try to stop people from copying songs through P2P systems.
The headline "buried the lead." The bigger and more important story is that P2P network use grew by 2 MILLION IN 6 MONTHS! Thats huge growth. New artists are already embracing this technology, and because the smart ones will own their Intellectual Property or use Creative Common's licenses, the RIAA and its 6 dinosaur music conglomerates won't be able to do a darn thing about it.
"Despite the lawsuits, more people than ever are using peer-to-peer networks to copy music, movies and other files directly from each others' hard drives. As many as 9.5 million Internet users were logged on to peer-to-peer networks at the same time in April, up from 7.4 million simultaneous users in September 2003, according to the research firm BigChampagne.""Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) said last month it sold 70 million songs through its iTunes service in its first year. But peer-to-peer users download that many songs for free every few days, BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland said. Though the industry's legal campaign may dissuade some, the user base will keep on growing, he said.
"Think of a snowball rolling downhill. It's still an emerging technology," he said.
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