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RIAA Moves Against College-Network Fileswapping
pazu13 writes "The RIAA is taking action against college "Napster networks". It's suing four network operators, two at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, one at Princeton University, and one at Michigan Technological University. Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources."
STARVE the RIAA.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
maybe say because NOT ALL SONGS are on the radio? or avialable for preview?
So NFS and windows file sharing are illegal now? It is almost impossible for network admins to know what is on every single network share on the LAN. Especially if people are running shares from their desktop machines.
I support the recording industry locating and suing and/or prosecuting people who illegally violate copyright on publications of all kinds. But that is the people engaged in the illegal activity. Peer to peer networks have legitimate functions and can be used in a non-infringing manner. They should have similar common carrier status to the phone companies.
If they were locating and prosecuting some students engaged in illegally copying copyrighted content, that would be different.
This action may be legal, but it isn't right.
Because there are a lot more artists than what you see on MTV, Radio, and Amazon. In fact, much of the music I listen to is not available by any of the sources you mentioned. And if Amazon sells it, it is likely imported and lacking samples.
How is this an example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? These kids broke the law and the record companies are taking legal action against them for it. And as far as I'm concerned, they deserve to pay the price for their actions. Organized illegal file swapping is organized crime, nothing more and nothing less. If you're big enough to make a name for yourself on campus, you need to deal with the consequences.
why not listen to the radio, MTV, or the short samples available on Amazon.com
because i'm not interested in who corporate america wants me to like/listen-to/buy. money/power to buy airtime does NOT constitute talent!
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
...how we are going to be able to find older, less popular music titles? Case in point: for some time (years), I was looking for Red Seven's self-titled album or CD. My local record stores told me it was out of press, so I couldn't order it. I couldn't find it any of the used record stores around town. Finally, after a lot of searching online, I found one song from that album through a gnutella client (Note to RIAA: I'd be glad to send $1 or whatever to the rights holder in exchange for a full-quality *.wav). Until the music industry gets off its hands and makes it easier for the public to find and *pay for* the music it wants, without all the nutty paranoia, the KaZaA's of this world are not going to disappear.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
because it's not on the radio MTV,
because it's not on MTV or the short samples available on Amazon.com
because they are short, sound like crap, and take an awful lot of effort to listen to a series of them.
Seriously, there are a lot of us who don't listen to "the popular" music, and even if you do, you maybe get to hear one or two songs on the radio. (MTV is even worse.)
There is no way, short of borrowing a CD from a friend or using P2P to listen to an "album" a couple of times to see if you want to buy it.
Believe it or not, there are people who use P2P networks to listen to non-mainstream artists they've heard about, to evaluate new music, etc. And believe it or not there are people who buy more music because of what they've heard on P2P. I can say this because I am one of those people.
Too late. Music industry is run by corporations, and they already do that. If you're listening to bands outside of all this, it doesn't effect you anyway.
"The recording industry has stepped up its campaign against campus music swapping, filing suit against four university students who operated file-search services on their school's internal networks. "
Wouldn't it be cheaper to offer an educational discount on music CD's, thus encourage more CD purchases?
"Derp de derp."
How about finding the artist's web page and listening to a few samples stored therein? If they are indie bands then you should be able to find legal copies of their work on their sites, right?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Censorship at college?
Theres been censorship at college forever. Even a good science student like myself has been exposed to it.
Oregon State 1992 - History of Western Civ "no blasphemy" on the midterms or finals. That was tough, the instructor was a hardcore Catholic, how can one talk about the Reformation without it being blasphemy?
There is academic censorship everywhere.
Gee, I though College was about learning, not about downloading music without fetters.
I'm not there for downloading or going to parties, I'm there to get a degree.
or don't go to college and actually learn something useful other than how to kiss a professors ass.
Give me a fucking break. File sharing on college campuses is about nothing more than getting free music. Ask the average kid with a new Dell on a wired campus what he or she does with that computer - well, they "download music and burn cds, duh". Most of these kids aren't even aware that this type of stuff is a violation of copyright (whether or not you agree with that is a different story altogether).
The "sampling music" argument is such bullshit it makes me cry inside. Admit it. You're getting something you used to have to pay a pretty penny for for free, have been for a few years now, and now it's being taken away, campus by campus, server by server. Don't expect this to change anytime soon - the recording industry probably has more resources to proctect their copyrights than some college kids crying about not getting their free music any more. Note that the same can be said for the movie "trading" that has increased in recent years.
The next person at my campus who talks about their "rights" being taken away when the RIAA comes in to shut down some kid's MP3 server gets a punch in the face.
While we're at it, let's sue ISPs for spreading virii through email, Cisco for building routers that forward packets used by P2P apps, and ATT for providing the backbones that transport these packets. I just don't see where the NetOps are responsible for this.
No.
Not all p2p is illegal though. Why should services be shut down if they have completely legal purposes?
The following from the bottom of the article:
RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.
Sounds somewhat monopolistic to me. How about getting the government to file an anti-trust case against the RIAA. It would be difficult to be an artist and not support the RIAA in some way monetarily.
It's not specifically spelled out in my previous comment, but the college students now are also the future consumers of tomorrow the second we're out of college driving the American economy. I know car dealerships such as Mercedes will let teenagers test drive cars even though they know they won't buy them, but they also keep in mind that the teenagers that express an interest in buying a Mercedes now are also probably the most likely to be the ones buying one in ten years. Likewise if the music industry of today, learns to treat its customers as customers rather than thieves, it will have a lot to gain in the future.
It's over. The genie is out of the bottle. The RIAA wonders how it will control and profit from music distribution. It won't.
How will artists make money? Just like they do now, from live appearances, endorsements, and the other trappings of fame. They already make on avearage less than zero from record sales royalties. As more artists realize this and release music royalty-free (except the ones under dealth-penalty lifetime contracts) the need for record labels will finally be over.
How will artists get the money to record? Please. The requirement for expensive studio time isn't just over, it never existed. Some of the best music you'll hear on the radio came from live sessions on what are by today's standards junk equipment. And for those that want to use multi-track mixing, 24-bit mixers are about as expensive as a new Statocaster. The popularity of ~128Kbps MP3s shows that music isn't about perfect fidelity for most folks. You wan't better fidelity? Go to a show.
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
> Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources.
I'm sorry, I don't believe you.
Look, the rhetoric of "I want to have file sharing programs so I can legitimately and legally under fair use laws make backup reproductions" is getting old. Not only do I not believe you, but the media does not believe you, the law does not believe you, and the industry sure-as-hell does not believe you.
People want to steal and pirate music and movies. They are doing it, and no amount of legislation and regulation is going to change that.
What does this imply? Well, quite rightly, a fundemental transformation of the actual value of art and entertainment media itself.
This has been going on since the invention of the printing press -- since the age of the bard. Over time, the cost of reproduction goes down, and thus so does the value of the individual unit of media.
The industry can fight it, but it will lose over time. That is inevitable.
However, profit can still be made. The winners will be those who offer media that can not be reproduced digitally (vinyl, packaging, etc), and those who adapt the earliest and fastest to the future economies of entertainment. Those that predict the changing value will have a head start on capturing the emerging market.
In other words, an hour of music is no longer worth $15 - $20. The earlier the industry realizes that, they better they will do.
And the sooner consumers stop trying to deceive themselves, the lawmakers,and the industry, the better this will be for all of us. Legislature is being crippled by a lying consumer (fair use, my ass), a lying producer (free market, my ass), and people trying to take advantage of the deception (Microsoft DRM, my ass).
"As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading. And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a changing."
PS: Don't believe there is a trend? Think about music in the middle ages. You had to pay someone to play. And when they were done, they were done. You'd have to pay them again to hear the music again. By the beginning of the 20th century, you could spend a fortune on a record player and another fortune on some vinyl, but you could listen as often as you liked. By the end of the 20th century, cassettes and CDs were ubiqituous and cheap, but had a cost associated with physical reproduction. Today the physical costs are nil. See the trend?
"The targeted systems operate similarly to the pirate peer-to-peer network Napster -- the online service found by a U.S. court in 2001 to have engaged in wholesale copyright infringement -- but instead of being open to anyone with access to the Internet, they reside on a specific college's internal computer network, known also as a "local area network." ...
"This is a particularly flagrant way to illegally distribute millions of copyrighted works over the Internet," added Sherman.
Hello? LAN = local network. Internet = connection of network*s*. Not exactly the same thing.
survive. Drop CD prices to $4.99!! Personally i would rather have my music on CD if I could buy 3 or 4 CD's for the same price as one Brittany Spears album. I would be plenty happy to buy TONS of music. I just can't justify spending $15 on a damn CD that I don't even know for sure I like. So what do I do? Download a couple of songs and give it a spin, find out I don't like the CD and never buy it. CD's only cost $0.01's to manufacture anyway. Pellets go in, CD's come out. Come on tell me, if you could buy a CD for the same price as a gut bomb at Macindon's would you buy a handful on a whim?
(reposted from "Would Free Music Sell Cars?" makes more sense in this discussion)
because the only good songs if there are any on an album these days with a scant few exceptions in the past decade were the ones they already played. The point of swapping to taste test is to check out the rest of the album before dropping the cash.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
No, people don't prefer MP3s over CDs. They prefer affordable music over expensive overpriced music. CDs sound better than even a well-encoded MP3 because it's not compressed, and because it's uncompressed, it can be encoded to your choice of compressed formats with the least loss of quality. Even if they ignored the Internet and MP3s, I'm sure people would buy more music if they did just two things.
1. Drop the price of CDs to the same as cassettes and LPs, say $10.99-$11.99 regular price and $7.99-$8.99 on sale. And don't even say inflation; until the late 90's cassettes were sold for about 2/3 the price of CDs. That's still more expensive than your $.25/song MP3 vending machine, but for a fan, it may be worth having the CD and album liner art, etc.
2. Bring back CD singles and price them the same as 45 singles, say $3.99.
#3 would be to get rid of Clear Channel, but that's just wishful thinking.
This is the most absurd thing I have read in recent days. The notion of stealing music inorder to preview it for later purchase is insane. Would you steal a CD from the music shop only to turn around and go make a purchase of the exact same thing. NO, you would not!
People think up the weirdest shit to justify that their actions are legitimate, and many times they belive their own lies. I can speculate that some folks steal music, and then go out and purchase some of the tunes they stole. But how many tunes are sampled, yet never purchased. Also, a sample of music is typically a segment of the audio, not the entire tune. People do not trade samples, they trade entire tracks/albums.
Simply put, napster is not designed to be a preview service. It is designed to move mp3 files from one computer to another, and search the data of remote computers for whatever your criteria is(genre, artists, albums, etc). I'm not sure what is worse, people who download music from napster, or peope who make their albums available on napster. The people who share their tunes are facilitating a criminal activity by the people who steal (aka download) the music.
My opinion on the entire mess is that if Napster could hurt the music industry, it probably does. Dowloading a binary file is inocent in of itself. A downloader has no notion if the binary they download (mp3's) are copyright, or not. The notion of a filename is meaningless as files can be renamed, so respect of copyrights based on recognition of the bands name in the filename is a flawed argument. Clearly the criminal liability points to the people who make music available for download, but since in napster downloaders, and publishers are one in the same. Thus, the method of correcting the criminal situation is to remove the napster servers.
</rant>
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Well, tough shit that you can't sample. There is absolutely no right to try before you buy.
When you go to the movies, do you pay on the way in or on the way out? On the way in. You ask friends, read reviews, and watch ads/trailers before you buy your $10 ticket. And if you don't like it, don't make that mistake again.
If you want a book, you can either get it at the library or buy it. Didn't like it? Sell it to a used book store, because the food-smeared pages of your LoTR aren't going back on the new bookstore's shelf.
It's nice to try before you buy, and if you really do that, congrats, you're more honest than 99% of the population. But just because you like doing it doesn't mean you get to do it. No matter how big or small, the record company paid to make that record, and you have no right to deprive them of the ability to get a return on their investment. It's not that hard to figure out what you aren't going to like before buying, and you don't have to p2p to do it.
I don't download, and I'm generally quite happy with the music I buy, and it sure as hell isn't because I can hear it on Clear Channel 1000 times before I make my purchase. I read reviews and do my homework. You should try that before whining that people don't want you to have unlimited free, perfect samples of everything you've ever wanted.
Unlike Napster or Kazaa, which helped create a network of computers that would not have existed otherwise, "Phynd" and the others search a network that already exists.
Okay. Phynd is a straightforward SMB indexing server. As per comments here from one of the RPI students, one of the persons charged wrote some of the Phynd software, and the other person admined a Phynd server for RPI. The RIAA is *not* going after the people who are serving infringing data, but after the CS students who wrote indexing software...because it's more convenient for the RIAA.
When file indexing services become illegal because one of the servers that they index contains potentially infringing information (as just happened), the world has turned completely upside down. Google indexes copyright-infringing images and text every day, and in *far* larger quantities than these SMB indexers. Should *they* be served with a lawsuit and ordered to shut down? How about Yahoo? AllTheWeb has an FTP search engine, not that far from an SMB search engine...is *that* illegal as well? Hell, if you have a multi-user system, a user stores infringing information in his account, and your cron daemon runs updatedb, you're in the same boat as the students that got charged.
I'm very, very uncomfortable with this, and I feel that the RIAA has gone too far.
May we never see th
Look, guys -- file-swapping of RIAA content is, in fact, copyright infringement except in certain VERY NARROW circumstances. Napster lost big, and didn't contest the 9th Circuit decision, so here we are: it is contributing to such infringement to run a Napster-like network.
Why would we revile RIAA for asserting these rights now. This isn't some technology regulation, like DMCA -- it is enforcement of entirely legitimate intellectual property rights against actual infringers.
I would rather they went after the students actually doing the swapping, but we lost the server battle, at least for now.
Sampling? Right. Like my old roommate who used to suck down MP3s ten at a time on Napster and had well over 3000 MP3s (which I'm sure he backed up from the roughly 15 CDs he owned) on his Winamp playlist. He's going to get around to buying all those CDs he's been sampling, sure.
But seriously, I think retail stores are going to make the "sampling" argument irrelevant. Just tonight I was at a music store called Coconuts and they have little devices set up where you scan a CD and -POOF- you can listen to snippets of every track on the CD. Seriously, it's not like you can only listen to top 40 albums, I mean every damn CD I picked up had its tracks available. What more do you want?* You can sample music and purchase right on the spot. As more and more stores latch on to this technology you're going to have less and less ways to rationalize your behavior.
* Inevitably, someone will point out that thirty second snippets of songs just aren't enough and therefore these kind of efforts by music stores are worthless.
How is it "working" for you? What are you getting for not buying CDs? You think you are voting with your dollar but the RIAA isn't hearing you. They see a decline in sales and assume that all losses are due to piracy. So, they start adding DRM and making disks that can't be played in any computers. Maybe someday the price will be down to 8 bucks but it will probably only play in Windows 2005 using Super Secure Media Player 10.
Consider this example, a store sells a shirt that come in red and yellow. You and a bunch of other people like the style but want it in blue. So you all "vote with your dollar" and refuse to buy the shirt. How is the store ever going to know that it could have a lot more sales if it offered the shirt in blue? Unless you tell the RIAA why you aren't buying CDs, your vote is likely not being heard.
Theft or not, I'm concerned about my own privacy. It find it disturbing that people watch what I download. Hence the *secure* *encrypted* P2P that I look forward to. A managed P2P network where there are no direct downloads, (every encrypted packet follows a routing pattern, but is still fast). Ought to provide for secure filesharing/messaging. and cracking it to track users is a violation of the DMCA. Piracy will always exist, but my point is that the RIAA/MPAA want others to be legally obligated to fix their problems/sales. But tell me this: Who was ever all that interested in VCR??? Who did you know that had a library of 100s of tapes? Not many. Now compare that number with the number of people you know with just as many DVD/CDs? (likely) Went up didn't it! The point is that as technology progress, so does it's usage. That includes both sales and piracy. From banning CD burners to making mp3 players build DRM into their lastest player, am I not the only one who sees this as ridiculus?!?!? If the RIAA/MPAA doesn't like what's going on, then they need to take of their little white gloves, fire the lawyers, and compete. They can easily stop leaked albums months before release by investing in security. Maybe they should abandon cds altogether and move towards developing something new? I think they can learn alot from console companies, who are at the absolute forefront of DRM/Copyright protection. From the PS/2's bluebacks, Nindtendo's cartriges, and Microsofts 2048-bit key ---it works! Fighting the pirates is a losing battle in the long run, if you win you will have sued all of your customers instead of sold to them.
As opposed, of course, to the idea of trivializing the countless murders, rapes, and thefts commited by pirates on the high seas by using the term "piracy" to describe someone breaking copyright law.
They have succeeded in knocking down your site with the threat from high-profile proscutions. That was their intent, and they have succeeded. That might be enough for them since it is unlikely they have the legal resources to fight everyone at once.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."