I had been through two airports, a nap and pretty much the entire Wall Street Journal by the time I noticed the article on the RIAA's move away from consumer lawsuits (existing lawsuits will move forward). A key excerpt:

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy. ...

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

This is big news for all sorts of reasons. It marks a move away from the RIAA's fruitless war against file sharers that has harmed the industry's image while doing little -- just how much impact is up for debate -- to keep people from using P2P networks to illegally acquire music.

By using ISPs to help prevent piracy, the RIAA is shifting much of the burden to parties that can have a great impact on consumer behavior. Good for the RIAA, possibly bad for consumers. This brings up questions of whether or not ISPs should be given such a role in oversight and enforcement, especially since US companies have not had the sort of government encouragement and overall discourse that has sparked similar coopoeration in other countries. In this case, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo brought together the deal between ISPs and record labels.

I never got the feeling that private industry was moving toward self-regulation in order to stave off a less desirable government intervention. I never got the feeling ISPs felt so threatened by potential record label lawsuits they would be compelled to cooperate rather than litigate. Without the help of Cuomo's office, it seems unlikely that labels could have brokered this deal. Going to Plan B makes sense when Plan A ran its course years ago, but time will tell how this will work out. (It could be a short honeymoon if ISPs tire of playing Music Cop and push back.)

Working with ISPs in this manner seems like a natural precursor to ISP-based music services, or possibly (though I think it's a long shot) a blanket download license offered to broadband customers.

Read about a similar deal between UK lables and ISPs that took place over the summer.

For additional reading, check out Fred von Lohman's post at the EFF blog ("But the news today is not all good," he writes) or any of the 40 or so posts currently listed at the top of Techmeme.