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RIAA Seeks Estimated $97.8 Billion From MTU Student
theodp writes "The Detroit Free Press does the math on the damages sought by the RIAA from the Michigan Technological University student. The total? About $97.8 trillion--yes, trillion with a T--or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics." Update: 04/05 21:58 GMT by M : The Free Press can do the math, but not very well: the numbers provided show the RIAA is seeking some $97 billion dollars, not trillion. I'm sure the student is *much* happier. Headline updated.
It really bugs me when the RIAA calls copyright violation, "Stealing." This is not stealing music. If I were to steal music, I would walk into my local Circuit City, grab some CDs, and run out the door. They lose their merchandise, I now have their CDs.
/. knows, is NOT stealing.
...I'm such a music lover that I'd be downloading probably 50 songs a month, probably more. That's $25 that the record industry would get out of my pocket that they would have never seen before.
Downloading or having mp3s, as I'm sure every person who reads
At the same time, while I understand the need for deterrent from downloading copyrighted mp3s, I still don't understand why the RIAA seems to be resisting the method of distributing music digitally. Are they planning on going back to cassette tapes? We've got this incredible method of getting into almost everyone's home to distribute music and reduce their costs, and all they want to do is sue people who are allegedly taking their business away.
Not that this is a justification of my downloading mp3s, but I wouldn't have bought probably 3/4 of the mp3s I have because I simply want one song off of the CD. If the record companies would just come up with a service that charged 25-50 cents a song,
From the Article: "Stealing is stealing," Oppenheim said. "Those are major, significant networks. This was a student who created a piracy bazaar."
Yes, stealing is stealing.
Stealing is especially stealing when your corporate interests have bought and paid for laws, which are now being used to essentially ruin the lives of (ie: steal the futures of)students who never would have even heard your product had it not been for file-sharing.
I don't agree with most arguments for file-sharing. It is common sense that the artists and lavels should make money for the songs, and there should quickly set up some usable system - a good one does not currently exist. When it does, I and many, many, many people like me will eagerly use it.
But $98 TRILLION??? [choke] That's just stupidly extortionate.
While I don't attend any of the affected colleges, my college (Gonzaga University) at one point did have a search engine (developed by a student, put on his personal web site) that searched everyone's PCs who had enabled file/folder sharing on the network (Windows).
:).
People found out about it via word of mouth, eventually the network people found out, first forced him to make it "Opt-In" (it searched everyone's PC whether you wanted in the database or not), and then decided to shut it down entirely because of the availability of copyrighted files on the search engine.
At first, when they told him to make it opt-in, they also made him put up a warning that stated to not make available copyrighted files...yeah, that really did the trick.
So, in conclusion, we don't have a search engine anymore, but I was lucky enough to have bookmarked a couple people's IP addresses so I can access their PC's still
Oh, and BTW, our network admins have pretty much blocked all P2P/file sharing programs network ports, it's pretty much impossible to download anything that's not over the WWW/FTP.
"If you agree that you're liable in any way, then you have no alternative to monitor the networks," she said. "You're putting yourself in a position that you can't possibly fulfill."
This goes with what many people said years ago, networks, and possibly search engines should be common carriers. They shouldn't care anything about the content, they should just locate it and move it around. If the content happens to be 'illegal', go after the individual.
This student, and the uni's network staff didn't pirate 10 gazillion songs, other people did. Go after them. The brain dead napster lawsuit didn't help matters.
I'm waiting for the RIAA to sue google for letting people find mp3s, and AOL for running a broadband network that facilitates the sharing of illegal files.
*sigh*
You are all missing the point here:
Whether you are talking frigging Gazillions or about one single Dollar, it doesn't matter, because you have already conceded that the student has to pay *something* and is therefore considered guilty as charged.
That precedent, no matter how high the compensation for the RIAA will eventually be, will change the way people are going to use net.
Either you live by the rules set up by the RIAA, MPAA, BSA or you are threatened to lose your complete financial independence, because the rules allow for a "swift punishment".
Welcome to a world in which the consumer is criminalized to an extent that his risks of non-compliance are too high.
"Going forward, I wouldn't think there was a university in the country that wouldn't notice this kind of activity on their servers,"
I cannot give any indication of real-world reaction in the US, but I have conducted research in the UK on the subject. I interviewed network administrators from 5 UK universities last year when writing my thesis on business p2p. They indicated the impact of p2p downloading upon network resources was negligible in comparison to academic use of the network. I've also traded emails with other universities (who didn't have the time to see me or were a considerable distance away) who were similarly unconcerned by the amount of bandwidth used by p2p apps.
Lets do some other math here using the following factors:
Moneys sued for my RIAA: $97,800,000,000
Average life expentancy in the US: 76 years
Average cost of a CD: $15
Number of Months in a year: 12
US Population as of April 1st 2000: 281,421,906
Which brings us to the following formulas:
97,800,000,000 / 281,421,906 = $347520 per citizen
$347520 / $15 = 23168 CD's per person in the US.
23168 / 76 = 304 CD's per year/person in the US
304 / 12 months = 25 CD's/month for their entire life from birth that each person in the US must by to be equal to the damages they are filing for.
Now there is a possibility that there was a math error as some have suggested and it might be 97.8 billion dollars instead of trillion.
If so that just breaks down to 23 CD's in each person's lifetime for every person born. Which there is no way in the world that one person could of downloaded that much.
Given that they are roughly charging $1 per track(23 * population * average tracks on a CD) is roughly 97.8 billion.
Then take into account that an average MP3 is about 5 megs, that comes out to 5 * 97,800,000,000, or 489,000,000,000 Also known as roughly 489 Terrabytes of music.
Which brings me to the question who's network attached storage solution did they use to store all that alledged music?
I don't agree with most arguments for file-sharing. It is common sense that the artists and lavels should make money for the songs
Hear, Hear. I don't condone the theft of media either, but the RIAA has behaved so poorly, I find myself unwilling to argue in their defense, even from a strictly philosophical *theft is wrong* sense.
The RIAA is of course going to be disliked by heavy p2p users, but things like this, and lobbying to make firewalls illegal just serve to alienate themselves from reasonable individuals, who would otherwise argue in their defense. This is absolute madness.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
The fact that an MTU student was chosen leads me to believe that the RIAA isn't going to stop with the students. Perhaps they are hoping to receive a billion dollar judgement that the student will be unable to pay so that they may go after the university itself, citing that they allowed this sort of thing to go down on their networks, leaving the RIAA with a large amount of 'unrecoverable damages' Now, IANAL- but as a former MTU student, I have seen how much the school has "cooperated" with the RIAA. As early as 1998, I was removed from the dorm LAN due to my operation of an FTP server with an easily remembered password, which generated alot of traffic. By going after students early, MTU has opened themselves up to lawsuits due to making a pseudo-admission that they feel it is their responsibility to monitor the networks. Serves the 'U' right, in my opinion, for attempting to help the RIAA.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
Deportation? Deportation to where I hear you asking... Why the new colonies in Australia and America of course...
Wasn't that latter country (ostensibly) founded on the idea of stopping cruel oppression by a rich elite?
The Google Cache shows that Aaron developed a P2P indexing service. Is research now a crime? Is maintaining an index of publicly available services a crime? If so, then google is guilty of theft. Google Cache of FlatLyn resaerch paper
No, they don't have to prove that. All they have to do is prove to the judge that the copyright violation was "willful" and the Copyright Act allows for the judge, at his or her discretion, to impose up to $150,000 in statutory, (not compensatory or punitive) damages per infringement.
I'm just curious, but at some point, doesn't it make sense just to leave the damn country for good? I mean at least we can still come and go sort of freely (for now)...why don't we all just go? No country can have power without a reasonably large populace underneath it. Clearly, this one is broken, and there is a lot of resistance to fixing it.
Speaking of which, whatever happened to John's Switch To Canada parody?
moto411.com
You can't really compare this to a "Library of Congress", so I'll try using the McDonald's coffee lawsuit as a unit of measure.
The plaintiff in that case suffered third degree burns over 6 percent of her body from one cup of coffee. A jury awarded punitive damages in the amount of two days worth of profits from McDonald's coffee- which turned out to be $2.7 million dollars. (On appeal a judge lowered the award to $480,000- or about a third of a day's coffee profits- and it was finally settled for an undisclosed amount. But just to be conservative, let's use the 2.7 million figure, since that's the one everyone is familiar with.)
$97.8 billion divided by 2.7 million means we're talking about the equivalent of 36,000 McDonald's coffee lawsuit jury awards. To get a punitive damages award against you this high, you would have to amass over 4500 gallons of overheated mediocre coffee- enough to fill 81 standard 55 gallon drums- and pour it all on an old lady wearing synthetic fabrics. Actually, more than one old lady. For that kind of money you could completely cover 2,173 old ladies in third degree burns over 100% of their bodies. McDonald's would have to sell coffee for 198 years just to break even if it did something this bad.
Remember kids, sharing files is wrong!
What's the statute of limitations for copyright violations?
Three years. Or is it 5? I think it's three.
I've had a couple CS classes with him. He is smarter than the professors and I've never seen him not know what to do or not be able to answer a question. For proof of his work see, the Top Coder competition from last year.
n t. asp
h tml
http://www.cpwire.com/archive/2002/4/22/1045pri
He finished fourth at this nationwide competition at MIT. www.topcoder.com
If they even take a small chip out of him, he should countersue. MTU needs to stand up and not call him "dumb". See the link here:
http://wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,58351,00.
MTU watch yourself. If MTU continues to mess with you...Joe...transfer to a school that will protect your rights, or at least stand up for you.
May the RIAA burn.
See you at the MUB.
Can't we just buy the RIAA, and be done with? According to this chart:
http://www.riaa.com/pdf/2002yrendshipments.pdf
if I'm reading it right... the various media companies had 12.6 Billion in revenue in 2002. That's revenue, not profit. The $97B still looks pretty silly, eh? Anyone know what the profit amount is? Surely it's much less.
Anyway, for 250M Americans, that's about $48/year/person. How about we just include that amount in our taxes, and we all get all the free music we want? Let the record stores, P2P services, etc... all compete to sell $.50 CDs, all the downloads you can eat, etc..
I'm sure the dollar amount will be much less if we just consider the profit amount, too. Then radio stations dont have to pay licensing fees, and the RIAA can let go all the staff who have to track piracy, thereby increasing their per-employee performance.
We'll still let them exist so they can tell us who the top 40 are, who has gold "records", which record companies and artists get how much of the share, etc.. you know, all that stuff they are supposed to exist for.
Heck, I've got more money and kids than most people.. I'd be happy to pay a proportionally higher amount to help subsidize poor people. Put it on my phone bill, $4/month, like we do to subsidize people in the middle of nowhere and old people.
The student is accused of using an SMB-crawling daemon to provide a campus-wide file indexing/search service.
If you think that's illegal, I hope someone nails you to the wall next time you link to a site containing copyrighted material.
It hard to target the poeple who simply download, and a bit easieer to go after the folks who are making music available for public consumption without a license (a student is't a radio station). It is much easier to go after the people who facilitate the prior two people's ileagle activity, and I have no sympathy for the student. He obviously wan't very smart, and dind't need to go to school anyways.
I do think the $$$ amount is a bit excessive, but this fellow "created a bazzar of illeagle activity", as the article says. I would place the fine at $20 per unlicense song swap! Depending on the actual amount swapped it would bring the fine down into the hundreds of millions instead of billions.
Encryption; Thats is what the file swappers are going to have to resort to. Terrorism in the eyes of the Justice dept, since only criminals/terroris use crypto! Hehe... They had better watch out cuz they might go from bad to worse, from the pan to the fire as Tolkin would say. I mean it seems obvious to me that in order to swap files people are going to have to embrace crypto on a person by person basis until crypto is a common notion in America. on second thought, what am I saying... this would hinder crypto... stay away file swappers! stay away!
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Copyright laws were never meant to be abused in this way. Its a shame that our society has let this situation progress to the horrible condition that it is presently in. Reading this article reminds me of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, I really feel like never paying for a CD again. The thing that really boils my blood is that its a giant corporation that is sueing these poor college students, not the artists - the ones who should really own the music that they produce. The artists get ripped on their own works of art, and the consumer gets ripped off paying for it. The only people that win are the recording labels. I'll "steal" all the stinking music I want. Copyright laws were intended to protect someone from claiming that they produced an original work or idea, not to give mega-corporations the right to rip everyone off. Thomas Jefferson wrote about copyright laws and he said that the right of owning property is something that a society grants its citizens and it is not a natural right. The society can change how it looks upon property (copyright laws) at any minute. I think its time that we change the way our copyright laws work. If Congress won't listen to its citizens and only to corporations that pad their pockets, they it is time that we rebel! We have a right to rebel and change our government when they listen to corporations over citizens. This is something that our founding fathers, and many intellectuals throught history would support. Why are we letting ourselves get walked all over, when our country is supposed to be one of "freedom", "democracy", and "rule by the people"? We need to change this now before it is too late!
SIGFAULT
This will cost me Karma, but here goes.
.18c/KWh for electricity, but that's a fair trade as far as I'm concerned.
I can think of a lot of places which offer exactly the set of advantages you comment on here. America is not the only country with good roads. Nor is it the only country with clean running water, gas, and electricity.
As you admitted yourself, there are many places with better health care.
Now, America DOES have the largest standing military in the world, more or less, and the largest defence industry. I'm not exactly sure that's something to be proud of, considering the problems that this has caused recently (viz., "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and the many indirect links to Israelis in Palestine and the West Bank.)
You name me one advantage which life in America has over life in, say, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, England or even friggin France.
The only advantage of America's which used to be bandied about was 'Freedom' (note the capital F and the 's.) This is increasingly under fire from fascist groups such as the RIAA. This, I think, is what the original poster was saying.
I'll admit to obvious bias, in this instance, because I live in Australia. The Victorian state and federal highway system is better than pretty much anywhere else in the world (save maybe Germany,) and the water here is soft and not overly chlorinated. Admittedly, I do pay about
I don't hate America, but there are places that are as good, if not better.
You're doing it wrong.
I think Ireland has got some kind of deal where the Government subsidizes the artists. I wouldn't mind if the U.S. set up something like that.
I would. Of all of the things I don't want my tax dollars spent on, subsidizing Britney Spears, Linkin' Park, The Backstreet Boys, P.O.D., Eminem, your poverty-stricken friend, and whatever the other current "real talent" happens to be, ranks pretty high up there. I'm sure the people that get slammed with the high end of the progressive income tax is really looking forward to subsidizing musicians so college students can feel better about downloading music off of the 'net.
If you're content with the results of socialized art, consider taking up residence where that is the cultural norm. That way you can pay the regressive tax on sales that always seems to accompany artist welfare, and the rest of us can stick with simply purchasing that music we actually value (definitely a luxury), and not what you want to hear.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.