Of course the irony is that this highly public and potentially embarrassing court squabble follows the Record Industry Association Of America's announcement that it is ending its onslaught of litigation against individual file sharers and concentrating, instead, on a new strategy neatly stolen from their counterparts in the UK, the BPI, ie entering into talks with the internet service providers about them taking a more proactive role in policing online piracy, by sending out warning letters to persistent file sharers, possibly threatening disconnection.
As in the UK, the ISPs seem willing, albeit reluctantly, to mail out letters telling customers who file share that they are bad people and should feel ashamed of themselves for infringing copyrights. They are less keen, however, on the proposals they cut off customers who ignore the warning letters and continue to upload or download illegal content.
Talks between the RIAA and ISPs in the US are ongoing (as are talks between the BPI and ISPs over here), though CNet recently quote an AT&T spokesman thus: "We believe that consumer education is a key component to enabling customers to find and use legal methods to access the content they want. We have also consistently said that automatic cutoff of our customers is not something we would do".
As previously reported, the UK ISPs are not all that keen on the forced disconnection proposals either. While the BPI say that that is only one of a number of options they are proposing, some reckon the industry hope the government will force the net firms to disconnect persistent file-sharers by introducing laws similar to those being developed in France.
However, some in the ISP sector say they doubt the government would ever actually introduce such draconian laws, and IP Minister David Lammy recently said he thought such rules would be too legally complex to actually work.