RIAA suing another 717 file-swappers

The RIAA is suing another 700+ alleged file-swappers:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said Thursday that it had filed 717 new lawsuits against alleged file-swappers, including 68 unnamed people at universities.

Fun times. Hopefully they weren't accidently targeted, like Rosario. In related news, the MPAA has filed it's own series of lawsuits, and released a cool new tool called "Parent File Scan" for parents to make sure their kids aren't doing bad things and won't get their parents sued into oblivion:

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) also made available a new free software tool so parents can scan their computers for file-swapping programs and for movie or music files which may be copyrighted. The group said its lawsuits were targeting people across the United States, but did not say how many people were being sued.

Unfortunately, it seems that cool new anti-piracy tool for parents has a very liberal idea of what constitutes bad things on someone's computer:

It searches for and identifies virtually any audio or video file, including popular formats like MP3, Microsoft's Windows Media, the AAC files that Apple Computer's iTunes software often uses, or MPEG video. The software makes no distinction between legally acquired or illegally downloaded files, however--which can total in the thousands.

...the software identified Mirc--a client for the Internet Relay Chat network, where files can be swapped, but where tens of thousands of wholly legal conversations happen every day--and Mercora, a streaming Web radio service that uses peer-to-peer technology but does not allow file swapping.

Allow me to translate:

Hello, parents. We're the MPAA. We have no compunction about being forced to turn our legal bazooka on your household for the actions of your child. We don't want to do it, but you're forcing our hand here. Since you would probably like to keep your house, we suggest you police your computer with our software for things your child may be doing that could come back on you.

Since we are unable to tell whether you are already a customer and your child is simply exercising their fair-use rights by ripping their songs to their hard drive or iPod, you should just play it safe and just not allow that. You may have bought those songs on iTunes, but since we aren't able to tell, it's probably best to just not allow digital songs in general.

We also don't know if that movie file is a home movie, a funny clip they downloaded from the web, or a DVD of Hell Boy they got from peer to peer software which we'd have to sue you for. They could have ripped it themselves to watch, but if they did that they would have violated the DMCA to get it off the DVD and that's illegal. It would probably be better, just to be safe, if you just didn't allow any type of digital media on your computer until we say its OK. You simply can't know whether what they are doing is OK or not. Or rather, we can't know. Thank you for being understanding.

Basically, a targeted Chilling Effect campaign towards parents. Lovely.