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Domain: barillari.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to barillari.org.

Comments · 4

  1. Re:You sure about that? by dougmc · · Score: 1 · on Slashback: Australia, Nomenclature, Books
    From here --
    In the Michigan case, Oppenheim said, the student ran a network offering more than 650,000 music files for downloading, in addition to 1,866 songs from his own personal collection.
    And this analysis of the case against Peng says that
    he himself [the defendant] is copying and distributing hundreds of sound recordings over his system
    (that text is from the RIAA's complaint.) If true, then he was actually offering mp3 songs for download.

    This analysis does not cover the possible direct infringement --

    Direct infringement carries a presumption of harm, but we have to wait for the findings of fact to be issued to make a determination of the extent of that harm (and this paper does not consider those direct infringement issues.)
    But apparantly he was accused of direct infringement as well. I don't know how accurate this accusation is, but it was certainly made.
  2. It's not about direct copyright infringement by snol · · Score: 1 · on RIAA Settles Suits Against Students

    In at least some of the cases (haven't looked into all of them), the students themselves sharing files wasn't the issue. See this for details. The guy was running an SMB share indexing service; a search engine, more or less. Nothing was indexed that people weren't already sharing. Of course most things indexed were probably illegal for the individual students on the network to be sharing, but they were shared independently of the existence of the search engine. The slippery-slope argument of course goes directly to Google being responsible for the same sort of contributory (rather than direct) copyright infringement.

  3. A Good Defense? by kolors · · Score: 5, Interesting · on RIAA Settles Suits Against Students

    Was Daniel Peng the same student who was threatened with the $98 billion lawsuit? Because after reading Joseph Barillari's analysis of the lawsuit it seemed like Dan would have had a pretty good defense to either have the case dismissed or to be acquitted.

    Was paying the $17,000 really in the end the wiser decision? It just seems like he had a solid argument, especially given the recent development with Morpheus and Grokster.

  4. Personal interest in this case by moyix · · Score: 2, Interesting · on MTU President Peeved At RIAA

    Since I run a very similar indexing and search engine at Wesleyan University, I'm more interested than most in how this is going to turn out (and a bit worried that I'm going to be sued too, though it was really cool when PySMBSearch got mentioned in the analysis posted by the Princeton student). The idea that I could be liable for up to 15.1 billion USD (checking just a second ago, there are 100,921 files ending in .mp3 returned by my search engine) just for indexing other people's files, without explicitly providing any method of accessing them is just ridiculous.

    I haven't taken the search down yet, but I'm seriously considering it, given how much the RIAA is asking, and given that I'm doing no more than any of the current defendants were (though I'm not sharing any copyrighted materials myself, so they wouldn't have the "direct infringement" case).