From the press' perspective and from the general pundit perspective, all of us knew these suits were coming for a long time and when we talk about them they tend to get couched in terms of inevitability or a new business strategy. But the people that are getting sued are just regular folks who never thought twice about Kazaa and were completely blindsided. The record companies are stomping on them to make a point and it's really brutal.
The Defense Fund actually runs on a peer-to-peer model: rather than collecting the donations centrally and then later distributing them, we use PayPal accounts so that donations go directly to people that have been sued and have signed up on our system. Our open-source software tracks donations and presents the person with the least donations so far to receive the next contribution-- money gets spread out evenly over time, without a middleman. We think it's a cool system and a good political response.
We hope the Defense Fund will give some people the ability to fight and will help alleviate some of the financial damage to the families that have to settle, people are seriously talking about taking out second mortgages or not being able to afford college tuition. From a political standpoint, if we can take away the damage, then the lawsuit scare strategy doesn't work as well. The donation page is here. ... Thanks for reading. I think this is a good and reasonable response to what amounts to arbitrary sniping into a crowd of 60 million people. It could have been you, or your kids, or your parents.
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