Quote - I guess I could look this up, but how successful was RIAA? I don't hear much about lawsuits anymore...so...was it a successful campaign to stop MP3 downloads?

Roughly %95 of digital music is pirated-- so not so succesful. data from IFPI (**International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

The single success has been with the torrents, where "sharers" are advertising their IP address. The RIAA has been able to identify a bunch of users -- or rather IPs-- and has made this mode of sharing risky for people in the US and a few other places.

There is an effort underway to attack the direct downloaders, but they're a much tougher target. Ultimately, that's where the solution lies-- Rapidshare and the others are not small fry, they're eating up a lot of bandwidth.

For 3d artists, you should know that at this point the film and tv industry is also very concerned about this, and their lawyers are working to get the same sites closed that are bugging you. You've got to figure that Disney lawyers are not dumb about this sort of thing, nor do they sit on their hands. Its just a hard problem-- back in the day, Napster was easy, they hosted stolen content on their servers in the US.

Now, you've got a web bulletin board with a link to a file on a server in some third country. Not at all an easy problem

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