And just 12 percent of users with household incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 were downloading by the end of the year - down from 28 percent. While 56 percent of students said they downloaded last spring, only one-quarter acknowledged they did by the fall. The survey found less downloading among every type of user. "A substantial portion of people who are swapping music files online don’t want to be breaking the law." "The suits obviously were a watershed moment in the file-sharing world," Rainie said. In one notorious case, the RIAA sued a 12-year-old New York girl, Brianna LaHara, whose mother eventually paid $2,000 to settle. Some defendants said they had never installed file-sharing software others countersued, claiming privacy violations. Most defendants quickly settled for a few thousand dollars, but the lawsuits were also a public-relations boondoggle. We will continue on this course, which is critical to creating an environment where legal services can flourish." "This campaign has had a profound impact on awareness. "This data suggests to us we're on the right track," Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. Beyond their punitive impact, the lawsuits were meant to scare other users from free downloads to for-pay services that charge by the song. In September, industry lawyers filed the first of nearly 400 lawsuits, saying they could collect up to $150,000 for each violation under a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The RIAA began sending subpoenas to Internet service providers last July, demanding the names of users who it alleged were downloading music using free file-sharing software. It made at least 2,444 requests, according to a database maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has opposed the industry's efforts.
He attributed the drop to lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents record labels, against individual Net users found sharing files. While the popularity of some Internet applications, like chat rooms, has leveled off since Pew's first survey of online usage in 2000, no other type of usage has ever shown a decrease, Rainie noted. "We've never seen anything plummet like this," said Lee Rainie, director of the nonprofit Pew project. Other file-sharing programs suffered similar drops WinMX had just under 6 million users in November, down from 7.5 million users a year earlier Grokster dropped from 1 million users to about half that during the same time period. According to comScore's tracking data of desktop applications, about 25 million people in November were running the KaZaA service, which allows users to download and share files, compared to a peak of 35 million in June.
There was also a significant drop in the use of online file-sharing programs.
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