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Analysis of RIAA vs Princeton Student
An anonymous reader submits: "Joe Barillari, a computer science student studying
under Prof.
Ed Felten, posted an analysis on his blog of
the lawsuit
filed by the RIAA against a Princeton college student for running "Napster-like" networks. He
argues that the case doesn't quite live up to its contributory infringement
claim due to limitations in the DMCA. A good
read!"
Based on the article the RIAA claims have serious flaws. I dont doubt that the wake system did 'facilitate' illegal sharing of material by making it easier to find if noting else but it does not seem to fit many of the criteria to satisfy the claims. From what I cam make of the article it almost looks as if MS are much much to blame for providing the file transfer infrastructure !!
Given the way things are going though I think its only a question of time before the network and infrastructure admins are the ones held liable for the software running on their systems. Massive lawsuits against students are ridiculous and will damage public perception. How long before they go after the universities etc who at least will have insurance to cover the financial claims.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Actually, if the RIAA starts filing lawsuits, willy-nilly, with no care if they win or lose, and are merely using the lawsuits, or threats of such as a scare tactic, well, judges (some judges) hate that shit.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Every 142th american is in jail now... You want to increase the number?
_______
cheap web site hosting
On the original Slashdot article, people pointed out that the number of songs was unreasonable - it was more songs than Amazon carrys, by several factors of ten.
So my question - I suppose that the "list of files" contained multiple duplicates. Can you imagine how many individual copies of a given Eminem song MP3 there would be on a college campus?
Given that he mantained a list of networked files, and there were bound to be duplicates, how can the RIAA sue for (the number of songs in the list) x $150,000 (the maximum per song)?
if there were three copies of Dave Matthews Band's "Crash", would that not be suing for $450,000 for one song?
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Turn in everybody! 280 million people can't be arrested. Let the law fall through sheer weight of numbers!
Not everybody in America downloads MP3s illegally.
Some of us [gasp] buy CDs! Some of us believe that folks should be reimbursed for the products/services they provide.
And just because a lot of people do something that's illegal does not make it right.
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
The University grants students a "reasonable expectation of unobstructed use of these tools [telephones, the Internet]," knowing that the former will be used to call both classmates (academic use) and parents (nonacademic use), and the latter will be used both for class research (academic use) and reading Slashdot (nonacademic use). The University does not restrict use of the network for legal, non-academic file-sharing, so long as its bandwidth use is not excessive.
Bah! Slashdot is a great research tool.
Other than that, Way to go Princton, that's a great user policy. Please educate my cable and telephone companies.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The analysis points out a number of weaknesses in the RIAA argument.
But there are two strengths of the RIAA charges that the analysis glosses over:
1) Peng is charged with a substantial amount of direct copyright infringement on his own system(s). The liability he may have for these issues could easily force him to settle with the RIAA without ever bringing up the more-questionable "contributory infringement" copyright issues to court.
(That said, the RIAA charges are largely missing details of these charges, focusing instead on the sexier napster-like namecalling. It's not clear whether this implies the direct-infringement evidence is weak, or merely not useful for PR purposes.)
2) It seems to me that the 3 legal requirements the analysis outlines to declare something as 'contributory copyright infringement' should not be too hard for the RIAA to demonstrate: "that an act of direct infringement took place, that the alleged contributor knew about the act, and that the alleged contributor facilitated the act". If all three of these are demonstrated, the question whether the DMCA safe harbor provision comes into play is at issue, but I don't see that as providing Mr. Peng much protection if he knew about specific infringing incidents and did nothing but continued to facilitate them, particularly if he joined in and participated in them. This would clearly be up to a court to rule upon, but it is not an easy win for Mr. Peng.
I think the Barillari analysis demonstrates that someone in Mr. Peng's position might conceivably have a good case for operating a Samba indexing service on campus and not being guilty of contributory copyright infringement. I don't find the analysis particularly compelling that Mr. Peng won't get the axe. That said, I wish Mr. Peng the best.
--LP
I would think a lot of people are watching this case, to be honest. It's distinct in that the RIAA is targeting a student directly and is asking for damages that would financially cripple this guy for the rest of his life. They're trying to send the message now that they're coming after you the student with an army of lawyers and punitive damages so large that you'll wish you'd never even heard of music.
College campuses are significant too, at least in the reasoning of the RIAA. It's the right demographic mixed with the right networking infrastructure, and huge amounts of mp3 swapping occur there. I don't know about most universities, but the one I attended had an Internet2 link, and that just made the flood of mp3s all the more epic. I think there's a reasonable case to be made that intra-university mp3 trading is a pretty large piece of the pie.
I'm drawing on my own experience a lot here, but I remember we never thought much about the RIAA a few years ago, but that was because they were too preoccupied with Napster at the time. I do know a few people who had pretty large shared collections, though, and I know that they would have been watching this unfold with a great deal of concern.
It's funny, I was at Princeton as a coach during my grad studies and I was amazed at the network in place on campus. Not only was it blazingly fast, but everyone connected to the network had shared drives.
Some of the shares were at C:\ level and gave full rights. Others had Gigs upon Gigs of pirated software and movies. It was somewhat of a competition between users and they became popular for having a good loot of files. Not particularly intelligent IMHO.
I couldnt agree with you less. The issue is the broad reaching implications of such a case. Wake is a search engine which searches for files. You can use google also to search for files on internet using advanced search. Does this make search engines illegal. I guess this is a chance to take RIAA head on. Give examples of google, Lycos search, Hotbot.... all these are search engines.
What RIAA says amounts to like, "This guy built the road on which trucks ferry pirated CD's... Arrest him!!"
Whoa what is it all coming to! I Hope the guy wins, or it will set a very very very bad precident. Meanwhile a stronger public campaign is needed against RIAA.Dont Buy CDsMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires attorneys to conduct a reasonable inquiry into the law and facts before signing pleadings and can result in appropriate sanctions against attorneys, law firms and parties. In other words, filing a frivilous suit or a suit that you know is, excuse my french, full of shit can get you sanctioned by the court.
I wonder if in addition to a court sanction, falsly accusing someone else of copyright infringement can be construed as libel (and if in person, as slander). And if so, what kind of pain and suffering psychologically speaking these students have gone through as a result.
The older among you will remember Archie, the internet's first search engine, out of McGill, which indexed all known FTP servers and let you search for files.
Wake is effectively identical.
Archie was the grandfather of the web. One would hope a court would not declare it retroactively to have been illegal.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I only hope that when the student wins, the judge awards his costs to the RIAA, making them pay for harassing him. Can that happen in the US? It sure does happen in the UK, which may be part of the reason that frivilous lawsuits are less common over there.
I wonder if the student can counter-sue for libel, slander, defamation of character, mental anguish, loss of grades, etc??
I wonder if in addition to a court sanction, falsly accusing someone else of copyright infringement can be construed as libel
If you do it on the stand, its called "perjury" and gives you pretty nifty jail time. If you were a lawyer, when you're done with the jail time, you start looking for a new career.
Considering the RIAA claimed that this guy had several hundred thousand mp3s available, when it turned out to be more like a few thousand, that might be grounds for it.
This might be an interesting way to strike back at the RIAA: Get as many of their lawyers disbarred as we can. Eventually the lawyers, who are rather fond of their cozy lifesucking lifestyle, will figure out that the risk of losing their blood supply is greater than any chance of having a slice of a $97billion settlement.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Nor does something being illegal make it wrong.
OTOH, a lot of people doing something _should_ mean it isn't illegal. That is, after all, what things like democracy are about.
IANAL!
I am not a lawyer.
Lawyer not am I.
I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. You are not a client. What I'm saying is probably 100% wrong and anyone who relies on it is a flaming idiot.
That said, I see several things wrong with your post. First off, *none* of that amount is punitive damages. They are statutory damages provided for under 17 USC 504. It should be noted that the amount in question is discretionary, the court may award it, but does not have to. I have a hard time believing that a jury would sock a college kid with $97B in damages.
Secondly, he could probably get around this via the "super discharge" provisions of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Under Chapter 13, the only kinds of debts that are not dischargeable are child support, student loans, and damages resulting from DUI accidents. I'm assuming you're referring to the 523(a)(6) exception to discharge for willful injury to property of another. It does not apply to Chapter 13. In fact, there is no exception to discharge at all for punitive damages.
Now, before anyone does anything in reliance upon what I have posted, see the first few lines!
No, it can't.
If you go to a court in Germany and demand 96 billion euros, the court will first decide what is the "disputed value" of the court case - that is 96 billion euros, then the court fees are calculated as a percentage of this. Lawyer fees are also calculated as a percentage of the "disputed value", and all these fees would add up to about 3 billion euros.
After the court decides how much the defendant has to pay, the cost is split accordingly. Lets say the court would convict these students to actually pay 9.6 billion euros, payable at 100 euros a month over the next eight million years, then this is 10 percent of what the plaintiff demanded. Accordingly, the students pay 10 percent of all fees, the plaintiff pays 90 percent. That is about 900 million euros to the court, 900 million to their lawyers, 900 million to the students' lawyers.
Guess what: Students are bankrupt, RIAA is bankrupt. Victory against the empire of evil with a minimum of collateral damage.
You all probably know this, but I didn't until recently.Anyway:
He is being sued for a pure indexing service! No files supplied, no network established, just searching the (pre-existing) local princeton SMB-network. Which ofcourse is filtered, so it's only useful for Princeton-students.
If assisting people in finding information that has been put public by others can give you a 96 {insert redicilously large unit here} dollars fine, I'd f*cking flea the country allready!
This is madness. I'll go and get a criminal record now, to ensure that I'll never ever will get the chance to enter US territory.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I wonder how Princeton Law is going to come out of the woodwork on this one, and how RIAA will counter that sort of muscle. The endowment and funds at Princeton might be in jeopardy (since their computer networks facilitated the alleged action in the first place). If so... I'd expect them to bring out the big guns.
Perhaps some high profile Princeton Law lawyers will feel compelled to help their alma mater... perhaps the law school will take it upon themselves to defend their own?
Interesting developments lay ahead!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I think you misunderstood the analysis. It said he might get off of the contributory infringement charges, but the analysis specificly avoided the direct infringment charges. Simply because if the facts show the defendant is guily of direct infringement, then he will lose (that part anyway).
My worry is he may also lose on the contributory infringment (I don't think the paper said he would for certain win it), even in a small way, and the RIAA will use this precident to go after anyone who creates generic technology which may possibly be used for copyright infringement. The RIAA, MPAA, and friends are really the oppressors of the information age. Goodbye internet!
>If the RIAA triumphs over these students, and they face punitive damages of such astronomical proportions, I would hope that they'd be put on 24/7 suicide watch.
... ENOUGH! This shit has gotten blown WAY out of proportion and if they want some blown out of proportion shit then I can give them some blown out of proportion shit.
... imagine just how bad it could get if someone with $97B worth of 'I was wronged' focused at a particular institution (I am not disputing whether or not what he did was wrong, I am merely attempting to empathise with him.)
... until this guy has done what he feels is worth $97B.
...' and gives them the chance to drop it and they don't - he is justified in doing $97B worth of damage.
Oh man has nobody the ability to see the silver lining in these most evil dark clouds? I am glad that this didn't happen to me, but you gotta ask yourself - what is your price? At what price do you say
The Gulf War II is costing, oh I dunno, maybe $1B a day. Ninety seven billion dollars will buy 9,700 days worth of $1M bad days - and for $1M I would do horrific things against humanity (assuming you classify the RIAA guys as human.) That Malvo guy has shown what a loser with no motivation and a gun can do
Now maybe Princeton college kids are wusses, maybe not, but if this guy was a Texas A&M or UT/Austin student it would really suck to be an RIAA executive after pushing him over the limit. If the guy's life is already ruined, and methinks that may be the case, suicide would be the LAST thing you need to be worrying about. I would be watching for Ryder trucks that smell like nitrates parked out in front of the RIAA building
This kid needs a copy of Sun Tzu. And a small bankroll (+/- $10,000.) And an attitude check. If he walks up to the RIAA guys cool as Cool Hand Luke and asks 'Are you really, really sure this is what you want? Reality check fellas, because I can blow shit out of proportion too
Sucks to be him, but if he is going to go down for $97B, he might as well make a statement worth $97B.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer