RIAA admit: lawsuits failed; try new method that won't work

According to Rolling Stone, the RIAA have finally realised that the idea of suing your own customers is about as expensive and futile a way of trying to promote digital sales as it could come up with, and so they won't embark on any new lawsuits:

“We’re faced with the reality of ‘this shit isn’t working.’ And legally the ground is getting shakier in terms of winning these lawsuits. And it’s costing money,” says a major-label source familiar with the lawsuit discussions. “So, time to move on.”

Wow, if only, you know, everyone in the world outside the major labels had warned them of that five years ago that they'd just end up pouring cash away and starting to lose cases, huh?

You've got to love that "legally the ground is getting shakier" - what that means, of course, is that it's always been legally shaky but people are now starting to realise that if they challenge the demands of the RIAA, they're more than likely to win.

Still, never ones to totally lose heart in a losing battle, the companies aren't going to abandon cases that are already in progress. "This is expensive and isn't working, so let's just carry on for a few more months and stop".

The new plan that won't work is to try and make the ISPs police their customers' behaviour, building on the failed work done by RIAA's UK client organisation the BPI. We could tell them now that it's going to be a miserable failure, but let's not bother: they'll work it for themselves sometimes round the time of the 2012 Olympics.