How To Settle With the RIAA With Ease

Sorry to pull you away from the reams of torrents out there. We know how much fun downloading those brand spankin’, newly ripped albums can be. And those screeners? So great. Pirate Bay even did the favor of cataloguing the Oscar nominees (and then the winners) for everyone. Wasn’t that a kind thing to do? That site made especially to complement the red carpet doesn’t look too shabby either. More Web 2.0-ish than the old place, don’t you think? Where was I? Oh, right.

So you’re probably aware of all of the lawsuits being thrown around by the RIAA and the MPAA to try to combat illicit activity. They can’t seem to kill off these rogue technologies roaming the tubes. They’re like the offspring of spiders and cockroaches or something. They always find some way inside, and they multiply like crazy. Despite the near-vertical uphill climb, the regulators still bother to pepper the World Wide Web, picking off IPs and sending off documents to their corresponding addresses.

Now the RIAA is making it easy for those declared enemies of the Association to settle cases online. The place to go: P2PLawsuits.com. We’re not legal experts, and don’t read all of those white papers made available to the public by bodies like the RIAA that nobody but the lawyers who wrote them would read with relish. But our hunch is that this particular entity has got some weight to it. Which means they’ve got a lot of money. Not billions. That kind of cash could be found in the hands of the Big Four. But they’re not doing bad at all. No rusty shingles over at headquarters. Uh-uh.

Taking that for…I don’t know, whatever what it might be, you’d think they could pony up a bit of extra cash to erect a half decent place to “facilitate” the payment process. But that would be unlike them. Like their foes, they’re naughty by nature (Had to use the pun. Had to.) Who are we kidding? Greed and extra expenses do not go together well.

About the actual web space.

What you’ll find at P2PLawsuits.com are four buttons total, not including the header. One, titled ‘Have Questions About a P2P Lawsuit?’, leads to an FAQ page. Below that is button linked to MusicUnited.org. Near the upper right hand corner of page is a ‘Help’ button (Looks out of place, doesn’t it?), which more or less gives you guidelines on how to “pay up” offline. Right in the center of it all, outlined in blue, is a button that reads ‘Do You Want To Settle a Case Online?’ and depicts a computer generated image of a scale from the 1700s. I may be off a few centuries on that, but you get the gist. (Three links exist at the bottom left of the page: ‘Home’, ‘Terms of Use’, and ‘Privacy Policy’.)

This, my fellow netizen, is where you may deliver the demanded dough with ease, from the comfort of your home, and have some peace of mind knowing that the cash will go to the coffers of the RIAA lickety split.

They should definitely consider adding a contact field, or at least an email address where people can get in touch with them. You know, so people can send them suggestions.