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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.
Well that explains the lawyers with frickin' lasers mounted on their frickin' heads...
i want 2 copies of each CD!!! :)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Oh, I just had to say it..
Throw me a frick'n bone, people.
But Dr. Evil, that kind of money doesn't exist in 2003!!!
U.S. gdp is 10.2 trillion...
Right, like the RIAA really lost $97.8 trillion worth of potential income from STUDENTS.
That could buy a really large Beowulf Cluster.
"RIAA starts funding US military actions in countries with highest piracy rates"... you can buy many missiles with $97.8 trillion.
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
And we thought the prices of CDs were high before. If this is any indication of where things are going I doubt I'll even be able to afford a single cd.
http://www.maximum-cars.com - My little hobbie.
Assuming a person lives for exactly 76 years.... With that sum of money a person would have to spend $40.78 every second for his/her entire life, every day, and including during the night. That isn't taking into account the massive interest it would generate. Isn't that amount of money larger that the GNP of the US for a several year period. Honestly though, how do they expect to prove that each and every song did $150,000 worth of damage. If each album has 12 tracks and retails for $15, they'd have to prove that each album he offered caused 120,000 less copies of that album to be sold. Please!
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
John Ashcroft says there is no such thing as excessive punishment! (unless if it's drunk driving and snorting coke and you're in Texas and... oh, never mind)
$150,000 * 652,000
... ohh, about a factor of a thousand?
= $97,800,000,000
= $97,800,000 thousand
= $97,800 million
= $97.8 billion
I think they're off by,
Dude, I'm thinkin' that if I were staring down the barrel of $97.8 TRILLION dollar lawsuit, I'd be tempted to find a country without extradition treaties. Preferably a friendly, inexpensive country with a tropical climate and lots of nude beaches.
What's the statute of limitations for copyright violations?
Brought to you by:
The United States of America(R) (A Wholely Owned Subsidiary of A Consortium of Multinational Corporations)
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,
How else are they going to buy more laws? I mean, come on, buying laws isn't cheap.
That kind of money could buy a lot of laws.
Brilliant!!!
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
... but they were violating copyright, and the RIAA has every right to go after them for whatever damages they see fit.
Though, whether this holds up in court (90+ trillion??) is another matter.
Pokey The Penguin!
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.
Can somebody explain to me why an indexing system, which simply provides a catalog of what's on a network, is "a sophisticated network designed to enable widespread music thievery"? What if nobody was sharing music? I'm concerned, because if this precedent is set, then potentially any program whatsoever that can be used illegally will be illegal. I don't want that to happen.
The Eighth Amendment says: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Are we talking about a claim of actual damages? If so, the RIAA is claiming that it and its members would have made up about 99% of the U.S. economy had this one person not pirated that music. Or are we talking about statuatory damages? In that case I think the eighth amendment would come into play -- that part about excessive fines in particular.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
It makes me sad to think about someone facing that kind of lawsuit. So, to feel better, I'm firing up my Kazaa client and downloading some happy songs. I suggest you all do the same, just not on any school campus.
Sit back and relax as Windows 98 installs on your computer.
Sure...97.8 Trillion might sound like quite a bit upfront...
:-)
However, after all of the lawyers take their cut, the appropriate RIAA officials remove their share and court costs are assessed, I calculate the net gain for the actual artists to be somewhere in the neighborhood of about $20 bucks and smack on the ass!
- n2q
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
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*
Ya think?
Hmmm, should we seek some reasonable amount to compensate for our loss? Something like $4,000 or so? That ought to cover it.
Umm, no... we need to send a message. We need to make sure that it gets in the papers. Let's sue them for (wait for it...) a _million_ dollars!
What?! Are you nuts? You'll never collect, these kids don't have that kind of money and no judge in the universe is going to award that kind of judgement! You might as well sue them for a hundred-trillion dollars.
Oh, I see... Then we'll do that! That way they'll know we are _serious_!!!
*groan*
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Ok, so I believe that the article is off in their calculations and it should be billion with a "B". At any rate, it seems that given the silly amount of money they are going after, the "accused" would simply laugh that sort of claim off. Yes, stealing is stealing. However, this sort of suit does nothing to help the RIAA's case. They would be far more effective by bringing more realistic suits in terms of dollar amounts that would actually perhaps frighten folks and keep them from posting media to the net for download.
This whole music suit thing brings up another interesting exchange I had last week. One of the campus network guys was asking if I had any music on my workstation. I said yes, about thirty gigs or so, to which he replied, I had to take it off as the RIAA was "querying" systems on the network to determine if they contained music files. I replied as every song on there was purchased, paid for, and personally ripped from CD via iTunes, and I had every CD for which there was music for, I was not going to remove the music. Additionally, while my workstation was on the network, it was not open, the songs were not available to the outside world and anyone wanting those songs would have to hack into my system. So, no. I would not remove them. Even if the RIAA does somehow "query" my system, (Is this somehow possible if the system is "secure"?) they would be barking up the wrong tree.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Are people eager to jump in and replace them?
Student 1: Hey man, the mp3s are down... how the hell am I going to get my muzak.
Student 2: Didn't you hear, the RIAA shut them down!
Student 1: Crap. We should probably start something up to replace them, then.
Student 2: You didn't let me finish, they're getting sued for 97.8 trillion dollars!
Student 1: Hmm... on the other hand, maybe we should make a website about cats.
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 even know what to think about this.
From an artist's point of view, does this help the artist? I'm not a musician and have never seen any of the contracts that the RIAA makes with its musical talent, but from a select few artists that have spoken out against the RIAA, I get the impression that file sharing is definately not the thing that's keeping money out of the pocket of the musician.
So, if this kind of action isn't for the good of the artist, then is it for the good of the company? I don't run a business of my own, so perhaps I'm under some false impressions, but it seems to me that the number one goal of business is to keep your existing customers excited and to constantly be trying to pull in new customers. This action as far as I can tell does exactly the opposite on both counts.
And what about file sharing in the first place. I still don't understand why the people involved in this debate keep talking like a 128k bitrate encoded mp3 is just as good as the original wav. Now this is something that I've personally investigated and analyzed, and can concretly say they are definately not of the same quality.
And what about the statistics. Which do you believe? I've looked at the RIAA's statistics showing how much revenue they lose because of file sharing. I'm not a statistician, but I really don't understand how they can claim that every traded song would have equaled an album sale. I've also looked at the statistics of the number of album sales during the years of Napster. While Napster was running full tilt, albums sales were hitting record numbers. Napster gets shut down, and the sales plunge. Once again, I'm not a statistician, but it seems to me that if I'm to be asked to believe that every song download == a missed sale, then I must also believe that Napster _created_ song sales instead of decreasing them.
So, once again, I'm back to wondering why the RIAA is taking such a hard line. I think that until we understand the motivations of the RIAA that things will certainly continue to get worse instead of better. Of course there's always the possibility that the RIAA doesn't really understand themselves what kind of road they're choosing for themselves.
In a sense I hope things get much much worse. Perhaps when a school teacher gets thrown in jail because he/she played a copyrighted song in class the public at large will finally wake up, realize what they've lost, and take it back. I'm a firm believer that Freedom can never be truly lost, just temporarily suspended.
Anyway, that's my little rant on the subject. I appologize if it came off as a confusing diatribe, but unfortunately I don't see anything but confusion when I think about the current state of copyright.
RFC2119
Will you accept a check?
Assume an average 3-minute 128kbps MP3 - about 3 MB. 3 MB * 652000 = 1956000 MB. About 2 TERABYTES.
Did this guy have a 20-disk RAID in his box, or am I missing something?
Statutory damages do not require that they show any actual loss or that the infringer made any money. They only need to show that they owned the copyright and that infringment occured.
Also, this would be a civil case so the money is for damages, not fines.
I go to MTU but live off campus. Even with my previous 3 years on campus I had never heard of anyone running this. Most everyone just runs kazaa, napster, limewire, edonkey, etc ... resnet (the dorm 10mbit ISP) had blocked some services for a while with the PR saying all the sharing was taking up bandwidth needed by staff & faculty. I'm sure a group of people lost their MP3 hook-up but with the prevalance of other methods for sharing and the fact that we had fast (up to 800KBps downstreams) from the internet (not LAN) I doubt it will hurt the avalability.
... he came in 2nd or 3rd at the regional ACM programming contest last year and a lot of people know who he is. RIAA did their HW and picked a public person to take down to try and scare everyone else. Honestly I hope there is something the 4 students together can do to maybe counter-sue the RIAA on haraasment/defamation grounds for the unneeded size of the lawsuit. The RIAA may have $$ but some lawyer may see the national press this is getting and start thinking about some face time. Thats probably just wishfull thinking but I can hope.
Now on the other hand it has put a pretty big tremmor through the school. The student here was pretty much the CS department brain child
Just to pick on a different number for a while:
652,000 songs that the student was allegedly serving? Even at 15 tracks per CD, that's more than 43,000 CDs. Assuming they're just 3 minute long pop songs (no symphonic movement long tracks), it would take over 11 years to listen to them once, if you worked at it 8 hours a day.
I did a search on Amazon's "Popular Music" section for "CD" and got 4117 hits. 11023 hits on "All Products", which includes computer books with CDs, books about CDs, and whatnot.
Just how many music CDs are in print in the first place? No matter how dedicated a pirate, I doubt this guy has a collection of every track ever laid down on any medium by any musician.
And if the music industry really is churning out this many tracks: no wonder they're crap.
Incidentally, 652,000 * 150,000 = 97.8 billion, not trillion. But it's still a silly number.
according to some popular sites on the web, the human being is worth real rough about 2 million bucks, if you want to buy the parts, i mean. so at 2 million a person... (no really, at least one site told me 2 million- www.humanforsale.com).. er.. this is the part where i wish i finished high school math (i was worth about 850k so bear with me) 97 trillion = 97 000 000 000 000 divided by 2 000 000. so ugh. thats like 97 000 000 divided by 2, right? so 48.5 million people. So the RIAA should just collect those college students and their immediate and distant families and stop when they hit 48.5 million people. then they can just pack 'em up and drive them over and shut the hell up.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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
97.8 Billion US$ = approx. Earth's accumulated GDP Nov 10, 1998 - Dec 31, 2001.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2000/02/ data/#1
What are busines school's teaching students these days???
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
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...
No, the $97.8 Trillion figure must be right. Otherwise it would mean that the music industry plays with numbers, making things artificially high when it suits them and artificially low when it suits the need to cheat the artists. Since it's an entire industry doing this as a collaborative effort, it would even rise to the levels of felony crimes including racketeering if it were shown that they have a long history of bogus math behind their accounting.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
http://www.riaa.org/contact.cfm
You know that when people file suit, the initial amount is always an insane amount. Now, what would be news is if they WON that amount. Like that woman who won 28 billion dollars from the tobacco industry. That amount was reduced by three orders of magnitude, but that's still a lot of money. I somehow doubt that the students will have to pay quite as much as the initial claim is for. That isn't to say that the RIAA is right or anything like that, but I just thought I'd let you know that before you jump to any conclusions... em, too late for that, I guess...
Danish != nationality
payments reduced to a comfortable amount.
And the payments may even qualify as tax deductable.
Let's look at the numbers: 652,000 songs
If we assume there are 20 tracks on an album (that's a large number, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt), that gives us 32,600 albums. Now, let's assume that every artist puts out an average of 5 albums.
Using these numbers, we'd find that this ONE guy has successfully collected the entire repertoire of 6,520 different artists.
The storage space required for all those songs (stored as mp3s) would easily be in excess of 2TB.
I seriously doubt the RIAA looked at every single file to verify it was in fact a complete, *unique* song within the collection, and that the copyright to every song belonged to them. For them to do so remotely would require them to download continuously for ~23 days at 1MB/s.
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
Maybe this might work out best in the long run. The way I see it, eventually they're going to get a life-ruining judgment against a student who isn't all that stable to begin with, and then maybe said student will snap under the pressure of owing a billion or so to the RIAA. Then, instead of being a good little debtor (slave) for the rest of their lives, they'll go get a Glock and shoot up a record company's headquarters, operating under the idea that they might as well take some of the bastards with them. If they get lucky and tag an exec or two before they're killed it might cause the record companies to back down a bit, seeing as siccing the lawyers on a poor student ultimately ended up with a bloodbath.
Or not, in which case the ultimate result might be even more dead record people.
As a fellow CS student at MTU, Joe Nievelt is not only one of our best undergrads, and not just one of the best in the region but one of the nation's best as well.
As for what was actually going on, I don't live in the dorms, and hadn't heard of this until after the news stories came out, so I didn't know about it. However, Tech is small, about 6,000 students total, maybe a quarter of that live on our small campus. I did live in our dorms my freshman year and the dorm lans were limited by the building you were in, so they're fairly small networks, I couldn't believe the RIAA would target this guy.
1. Find student with mp3s.
2. Sue student for $97 Billion
3. PROFIT!!!
Holy shit, it works!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The size of a dollar bill is 6.6294 cm wide, by 15.5956 cm long, and 0.010922 cm in thickness.
A stack of one dollar bills worth $97.8 trillion would be 10 billion meters high or slightly more than 25 stacks of bills that each would reach to the moon.
Laid end-to-end the bills would stretch 15.25 trillion meters. That's long enough to stretch from the sun to pluto almost three times over.
That many dollar bills would cover the entire 68 square miles of the District of Columbia in a pile of bills two feet deep.
Oh, wait. Now I get it.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
That's Trillion with a "B"
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
And the judge will laugh at them. If they had sued for maybe $100 or so, the amount a student MIGHT spend in a years time, it would be better. The fact that they shared them might fall under some other clause, but not for attributable software losses, for that they'll have to go after the people who downloaded all the files indivually.
People are focusing on the wrong thing. The point isn't $97T, $97B or $100K. The point is that the RIAA is finally going after a law breaker. They went after colleges and other carriers for too long even though *they weren't breaking the law*.
Now they are going after the kids that actually broke the law and everyone is still pissed.
Hell with that. These kids should be the ones being put to trial. Maybe now the laws can be shown for the unmitigated sillyness that they are and either shown unconstitutional or at least have a $97B judgement against some kids show the public how out of control this all is.
This is the right suit. Let's make sure it's the right result by now dwelling on the RIAA and instead dwelling on the law.
I've got some downloading to do. I only owe them $687.3 million.
Here is an idea:
Why don't you all just sod off and NOT BUY ANY MORE CD'S!!!!!!!
Then, the RIAA constituent companies will lose money and be forced to deal with the issue.
Listen to the radio, got to concerts, gad, get out from in front of the computer(yes I see the irony), put down the porn and go out and do something. Read a book. A real book. Not some Piers Anthony sexual romp.
Go to the library, sit, where it is free, and read book, for free. Grahm Greene's "The Power and the Glory" is good. Maybe "Heart of Darknes" by Conrad. Edmund Morris's "Theodore Rex" and "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" are good choices.
If the students were being fined for the VALUE of their "theft", they would be much better off. They are aledged to have denied the RIAA income on some 650,000 songs. At 50 cents a song, they would only be down som $300,000 and mearly ruined insead of owning the RIAA the assets of a small oil rich country. Actually proving the value of the losses is impossible of course because, in reality, there were none. All the students in question did was index other people's shared files and the fault was not theirs if the was any fault at all.
The whole case is absurd and will eliminate any residual good will the major music labels have. It's so obviously stupid that 36 year old farts like me can see it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... the RIAA has been heard screaming, "You are our BITCH!!"
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
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!
that it's incredibly unrealistic to say that suing the shit out of every pirate in the United States is going to have any bearing on the general trend. The other point is that the Music "Industry" itself is unnecessary - middle men whose only real job is to make themselves seem necessary. They need rouse themselves from their stupor and realize that they have to adapt to a new technological world or else die. The longer they think that scaring people and alienating customers will help, the more likely the eventuality of their death. They need to make it easier for the public to pay for online music than it is to get it at the moment. until then, they have no chance in hell. Moreover, RIAA serves corporations rights - if talent can proliferate naturally through MP3 file sharing, then why do we need corporations? RIAA is about protecting the profits of the music distributors, not the artists themselves.
All this lawsuit will do is cause this guy to file personal bankruptcy and he won't have to pay a thing.
The RIAA is just out to prove a point.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
In N. America, 1,000,000,000,000 is one trillion.
In Europe, it's one billion.
A N. American "billion" is "thousand million" in Europe.
They've had us by the large boxes?
Or did you mean cojones?
And $12? Where are you getting CDs so cheap?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
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.
...would I have every thought I would be so happy for my campus' overly protective firewall.
-CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
...the RIAA has now calculated that total sum of money owned by all the pirates in the world now exceeds the total value of Earth. Because of this, Earth today filed for restructuring under Chapter 11, making RIAA the supreme dictator. All hail RIAA!
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
File trading is so easy and so desirable on the small scale, that it's impossible to deter it using the courts. You can't haul in everyone who trades files -- so you have to increase the deterrence by really walloping the few that you can. The problem is that there's little difference (to a student) between having to pay 97,000 dollars, or 97,000,000 dollars. Upping the ante by another factor of a million, to 97,000,000,000,000 dollars, isn't any more of a deterrent -- at that point it devolves to abstract numbers.
Another millieu that shows the same kind of saturation deterrence is the drug war (spit). It's easy, cheap, and desirable enough for many folks to smoke pot, that the courts literally could not handle them all. Stiffer penalties don't work so well, because the penalties are already so unreasonably stiff that they don't affect most peoples' risk assessment.
When this phenomenon occurs in photography, it's called "reciprocity failure" normally, each additional photon hitting a piece of film exposes the film the same amount, regardless of the actual intensity -- so you can photograph a dim object, with a longer exposure time. But for very long exposure times, that picture breaks down: the partially-exposed silver halide grains repair themselves in between photon strikes, so exposing film to a weak light source for a very long time doesn't have the effect you'd expect. It makes sense to think of file trading and the drug war as examples of deterrence reciprocity failure.
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
Yeah, and that Rosa Parks bitch should have just took her black ass to the back of the bus.
Obeying bad laws is not "good".
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You live in a country with an incredibly good road system. You can get *anywhere* in the continental US by road. You can't get more than 15 miles away from a road in the continetal US.
And Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden all have poor transportation?
You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing. You have readily available food. You have electricity.
Again, CA, FR, GB, IT, DE, SE don't have these?
You live in a place that has as many cars as families, because cars and gas are just that damned cheap here.
Is this a good thing? Do you know how much O2 a 5-liter Uh-mer-kin muscle car chews up just from driving to and from work on a semi-daily basis? Do you have any idea how many CO2-consuming organisms it takes to support your average Camero or Mustang owner? Why do we have so many cars here? Why aren't they needed in Manhattan or in most of Europe? Because our automotive industry killed our light rail industry in the first half of this century. We produce 3% of the world's oil. We consume nearly 60%. Hence our current predicament with our dependency on foreign oil. No, having that many cars is not something to boast about.
You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world).
In most Iranian metropolitan areas, women can walk around at 03:00 alone without fear of abduction or harassment. People there don't give it any thought. I can't name one major city where this is true in the United States.
This is a nation in which *anyone* can get a job. Not necessarily a good job, or the job they want, but you can land a job that'll pay well enough for you to eat every day.
Unemployment in Switzerland has not reached more than 6% in over ten years. It averages around 3%-4%. You should read this if you want a better handle on what it means to be employed in this country.
I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear. Some places it looks a little brown, or have hard water, etc., but you can drink it without *dying*.
Once more, CA, FR, GB, IT, DE, SE don't have these?
You have incredible medical care. I know many places have better systems for covering payment, and it's free in many places, but there's very few places in US where you can't get immediate medical care.
The US has the best doctors in the world. We also have the highest liability. Does this seem odd to you? We are encouraging our doctors to become mediocre because it's not worth it to practice. I've talked with a fair amount of doctors (my family has more than its fair share of people working in medicine). They almost unilaterally have two pieces of advice for people in this country:
1. If you're thinking of becoming a doctor: don't.
2. Don't get sick, because unless you're rich, you'll get shit for care.
It's simply that, the particular set of advantages you get by being an American and living here on American soil is almost impossible to get anywhere else. Many places have worthwhile tradeoffs, but you can't get all the above just about anywhere else.
I realize that many of the above comments don't apply to everywhere in the world, and I apologize to the denizens of any nation that may be that much better, but I think that most of them apply somewhere.
The truth is that many cities outside the US are more livable than those within its borders. Hell, there are 9 countries which rank higher than we do in an audit of world democracies.
Please don't misunderstand. The US is a great place to live...one of the best in the world. I'm just real tired of its citizens thinking that this country's shit
moto411.com
"right now (forgoing the orwellian near future, for a moment), there is simply no better place to be."
Wow what an odd thing to say. Do you really mean that? On what basis do you form that argument. Let's look at some of your statements.
"You live in a country with an incredibly good road system. "
Well I didn't know this was so important but I have traveled to many countries with real good road systems. Last I checked all of europe had good road systems as did japan, australia, new zealand, and even a few asian countries.
"You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing. You have readily available food. You have electricity. You live in a place that has as many cars as families, because cars and gas are just that damned cheap here."
Let's see I guess the above mentioned countries all also have clean water, food, electricy and cars. Gas is more expensive in most fo the world but the public transportaion is great too.
"You have the best military in the world. "
No argument there. We likes to kill!. We spend more of our taxes on military then anybody else. We would rather have a bigger bombs then affordable health care and education.
"ou don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world)."
We have one of the highest crime rates in the world and the highest murder rate. US is quite possibly the most dangerous place to live when it comes to being victims of violent crime.
"This is a nation in which *anyone* can get a job. Not necessarily a good job, or the job they want, but you can land a job that'll pay well enough for you to eat every day."
Most of europe, canada, new zealand, and australia enjoy great unemployment rates. Also if for some reason you can't get a job they have great social programs to make sure you don't starve or die of disease. I think they have us beat on that one.
"I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear. Some places it looks a little brown, or have hard water, etc., but you can drink it without *dying*."
Yes I know all those europeans die every day from drinking the water. I also heard of the great water pestilence in japan and china. It is said that if your lips ever touch water in singapore you simply keel over and die.
"You have incredible medical care. I know many places have better systems for covering payment, and it's free in many places, but there's very few places in US where you can't get immediate medical care."
US health care is great if you can pay for it. Otherwise you have to declare banckrupcy after vising the emergency room. Other countries seem to be able to make sure everybody can get decent health care and preventitive care. Last I checked US was somewhere around fourth or fifth in infant mortality.
"but I see every day how much worse it could be, and I'm happy for what we have."
It could always be worse. I bet even people in cambodia were saying that during the reign on Pol Pot. Sure it can always get worse but if you ever take the time to actually travel you will find out that it can get so much better too.
War is necrophilia.
Lawrence Lessig has a good response on his blog...
Time to write my Congressman again...
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
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.
(apologies for the US-centric nature of this post)
... laws ad nauseum, but as of right now (forgoing the orwellian near future, for a moment), there is simply no better place to be
Americans wonder why people could hate the US so much they flew airplanes into buildings. Americans can't grasp with their limited intelligence and stunted ability to reason why most of the world despises them. They are so out of touch with reality, they have to repeat your little mantra constantly to try to keep the truth at bay. The complete fiction of your post shows exactly why America is in for a long, rough ride over the next decades, until it once again learns humility and respect.
Sure, there's some dumb
Start with the fucked up state of the American justice system, which allows (encourages) large corporations to write the laws. That's the original topic of this thread, the RIAA has turned a simple copyright dispute into a major theft crime, with punishments far exceeding any other property theft crime. Its not just a few laws which are fucked up, its most of them. And its not just americans suffering under those orwellian laws, citizens in other countries also have to fear the long reach of American laws. The FBI, the military, the CIA, and other enforcement groups have kidnapped citizens from all over the world to bring them to the US to stand trial, but the US threatens any country which puts a US citizen on trial. The US constantly demands extradition of other country's citizens, but hasn't once in the last 35 years extradited an American to another country to stand trial.
You live in a country with an incredibly good road system.
America has overextended its road system, which has led to a huge shortfall in maintenance. I've driven around the US twice now, and found the roads away from the interstates to be in appalling shape. Big cities in the poorer parts of the country have really poor maintenance, lack of street signs, non-functional traffic lights, potholes big enough to break axles. Most western countries have far superior road systems, you just have never left the US and driven on truly well kept modern roads.
You have running water. Reliably. You have indoor plumbing.
You obviously don't live in a large east coast city. About 5% of americans in large cities don't have access to indoor plumbing. That figure climbs to about 8% in rural areas. Compare that to the UKs 3% figure, or Denmarks less than 2% figure.
I can drink the water anywhere in this nation without fear.
Then you have never been to western Nevada, where the arsenic in the tap water is well above lethal levels. Or Love Canal. Did you see the movie Erin Brockovitch, about a power company poisoning the water table for a whole bunch of communities in California, which killed hundreds of people over a couple of decades, with the "authorities" ignoring all tests showing how bad the contamination was?
You have readily available food.
Unless you look at statistics on malnutrition in the OECD countries, and realize the US has the highest per capita problem of starvation and lack of proper food distribution. Paradoxically, Americans are the most overweight, and the most obese people on the planet. 69% are overweight, and 32% are obese. The next highest countries have figures like 40% overweight and 12% obese. France has declared a national problem, because 5% of the population are considered obese, when the number had been less than 2% until the last decade.
You have electricity.
Unless you live in the western US, where due to criminal actions by a number of large corporations, the electicity supply over the last few years have brought the US down to 3rd world status for reliability and price. Most of the world has reliable electricity.
You don't have to fear for your life walking down the street (well, in some places, you do, but it's safer here than much of the rest of the world)
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Obviously, the RIAA is alienating the biggest consumers of music by making them bankrupt.
Oh, wait, it's been doing that for years.
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
1) Why hasn't an organization arisen to challenge the RIAA? I mean, it's my understanding that being a member of the RIAA is *not* legally required of a record label. When one considers the tons of indie labels out there that, thanks to free downloading off websites and through p2p networks, it makes me wonder why large groups of independents that have good talent and catalogs, like Caroline, Epitaph, Six Degrees, all the way down to little labels like ESL, tru thoughts, fork in hand and others haven't forged an alliance simply to combat this insanity. This seems like a golden opportunity to seize the thunder of the big six and woo bands to the "free music" side of the aisle. But then, when one considers how often bands tend to jump around labels, maybe the problem is more endemic to record labels than just the big six...
2) Speaking of bands, where are "the talent" in all this? why don't we hear from the bands beyond the occasional (apparent) nutcase voicing his opinion then going back to the label lounge? We keep hearing about how the big nasty RIAA is pimping their work and buying out their right to their creative work (if I have to hear Tom Petty's sob story one more time I'm going to puke), but why aren't so many top label bands coming out in favor for/against the RIAA behavior? Many of the A-list acts can certainly get along just fine no matter what label they're on, so if they can extricate themselves from the labels, why don't they? If Fred Durst really thinks mp3's should be free, why doesn't he just jump ship and release his band's own stuff on his own terms? Oh wait, he's VP of Interscope. Nevermind....
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
Government has a terrible flaw, and that flaw is that it has the potential for democracy. Coprorations are perfect tyrannies.
The problem with setting up a tax is that this is exactly what these corrupt, free-loading assholes want you to do. My response is, "Fuck you!". I'll pay their fees as soon as they reduce copyright terms down to 20 years, and give a substantial portion of their money to fostering competition in this corrupt, price-fixed industry. Until then, no thanks.
Huh? How is UNIX more fascist than Windows?
You know, that's exactly the bullshit attitude complained about.
"I don't like what you say, so piss off" isn't exactly a mature response, you know. I didn't realise that the American constitution gave the "right to free speech, but only if you agree with me".
You know, you Americans have vilified the French because they disagreed with you. They didn't attack you, and they didn't insult you, but your leadership, and the common people of the USA, decide to smear the French disgracefully, simply because they said they thought you were wrong. And you wonder why the rest of the world doesn't like you.
Voltaire (a French philosopher) once wrote "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too". Some good advice. An American woman, Evelyn Hall, paraphrased this to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". You know, there are some places where that's taken as a goal to aspire towards, not something to pay lipservice to and ignore.
Go troll somewhere else, you stupid git.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"