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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!"
The DMCA not infinite-reaching? Time to rewrite it or get a refund - they didn't get what they paid for!
They can't collect the full 97 billion, obviously, but most of that is punitive damages, which are immune to bankruptcy. So, if the RIAA wins, the defendants will be in debt to them for the rest of their natural lives, unless one of them gets very, very rich.
fp?
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Maybe the student in question could pay the $97 billion using those great credit cards they're always handing out on college campuses!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
He makes a lot of good points, and the gist of it is that the RIAA's case is pretty poorly made. But that's something that most people already know, maybe even including the RIAA. Thing is, they don't have to win in order to be effective. They could get creamed in court and it still wouldn't matter. All they have to do is scare the living bejezus out of a handful of people and they'll get what they're after. Aiming a multi-billion dollar lawsuit at one student has a pretty sobering effect on anybody that's nearby and watching, and the RIAA has the resources to file suit all day and night, win or lose.
Of course, based on some of the numbers that have been coming out over the last few years, they might actually stand to gain more by collecting the $96 billion from this one guy than by ending file sharing.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Dan Peng, a Princeton sophomore, for direct and contributory infringement of their members' copyrights. This essay analyzes that contributory infringement claim. Peng allegedly operated a computer service called "wake" which cataloged the publicly-shared files on the campus network. The RIAA draws a parallel between "wake" and Napster, and calls upon the court to apply the reasoning from the Napster case. Their analysis falls short in three respects:
1. "Wake" differs fundamentally from Napster in that it (allegedly) indexed a pre-existing network, just as Web search engines index the pre-existing web. Napster, on the other hand, created the network on which its users traded music.
2. Napster's software indexed and shared only MP3 audio files. Wake, on the other hand, (allegedly) indexed all public documents on the network, which substantially expands its range of non-infringing uses.
3. "Wake," as a pure search engine (rather than a search-engine-plus-file-sharing-system, as Napster was), is protected by the DMCA, a fact which the RIAA does not address.
...the artists what THEY thought of this? I'm sure that at least some of the artists being shared are among the 90% or so of musical artists that are in favor of file sharing; or did the RIAA simply add up the files and multiply by 150,000 each?
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
Every 142th american is in jail now... You want to increase the number?
Lawsuite like this are why I gave up downloading music and moved onto downloading only porn...
_______
cheap web site hosting
Wake.princeton.edu was just the beginning. What the RIAA is trying to pre-empt is a university-sponsored effort to lash together 32, then 256 PCs for "testing networking, filing and interpreting research" according to an article in the campus paper, the Daily Princetonian!
How so? Well the "Prince" reveals that the university has just installed its first brand new Beowulf cluster to do just that!
Beowulf lurks around every corner, I tell you!
Ok... so basically what the article is saying is that RIAA hasn't hopw of winning the indirect infrigement charge and if the kid can get a decent legal representative he can eat the direct damage charges a long with those. So I have a few questions/points I want to raise.
1. Has the RIAA left themselves open to a countersuit for such a poorly founded lawsuit?
2. How can we inform the public at large at how poorly this (and other) RIAA finding is founded.
3. The author repeteadly apply's internet conventions and precedents to the lan, this makes sense to me, but will it make sense to the average computer user?
Thats all folks,
Nalanthi
I can't find my
Looks like the guy wrote an indexing service for Windows SMB file shares on the local LAN. Made it real easy to copy mp3's from everyone elses systems. But that's just it, the same thing could be accomplished with start>search>files & folders, this just simplified that by indexing everything so you wouldn't have to go comp by comp.
Doesn't look like they have a leg to stand on. They just need to hope for a relatively intelligent judge and/or jury, depending on how far this goes.
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
As a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, I recieved a rather lengthy education in the facets of Copyright Law (which is essential when producing creative works). While my knowledge pales in comparison to Mr. Barillari's, I can safely say that the RIAA has no case against Mr. Peng.
The basis of Copyright Law is simple: A copyrighted work can not be used to make money by anyone but the copyright holder. If Mr. Peng were "bootlegging" copyrighted music - ie Making CDs and selling them for a personal profit - then yes, he would be in violation of Copyright Law. But this wasn't the case.
WAKE, the program Mr. Peng used to index publically available files on the campus network, is not a file trading system, like Napster or Kazaa. Like Google, it's just a search engine. All it does is let you know what's out there and where. To download something you find using WAKE, you'ld have to go about it in some other manner.
Also, the nearly 650,000 files that the RIAA claim's Peng was distributing weren't all his. How can they sue him for something that's not his? It's yet another attempt at a power grab by a bunch of rich folks who only want to get richer. Sad.
My prediction: While the RIAA might get some considerations, they won't get anywhere near what they want. Peng won't see any jail time, and the RIAA will have a black eye.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
The president of Michigan Tech sent a letter to the RIAA offering his dissapointment about the whole fiasco -- in a politically correct way of course. Nice to know that although the University does try to uphold the DMCA, they officially disapprove of this newest stunt.
for any of that to matter the Judge and Legal counsel would have to be technologically literate.
Not really. The case spelled out, even in the executive summary, is quite clear. In addition, the possible repercussions of this case are so significant that I can't imagine that Mr. Peng won't have the best possible legal council.
Think about it... If wake.princeton.edu is liable for $150,000 dollars for every copyrighted song they liked to, so is Google, Yahoo, Inktomi,... I guarantee that they (knowingly or not) link to more copyrighted material then wake did.
The DMCA spells out very clearly what a copyright holder needs to do to deal with copyright violations on the web. In this case, the RIAA is trying to be lazy & not have to send out thousands of cease & desists. Unfortunately for them, they have no legal ground to stand on.
I find it very funny that the official phone number ot the RIAA is 1-800-BAD-BEAT;
;).
I mean concidering that 95% percent of the new music they release these days is less than stellar; perhaps they really are advertising the fact that they represnt music with some bad beats
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
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
It's only $96 billion dollars...
;-)
Can't he set up an online donation fund or something?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
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
here is the google cache of wake.princeton.edu.
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
Anyone want to comment on using strong encryption to prevent evidence gathering? There are a few projects out there that let you have very, very strong encryption for your OS of choice. Anyone got any articles on this?? Is there some reason these can't be used? Does the 5th amendment apply to giving up your decryption keys? Inquiring minds want to know!
It seems to me observing what goes in through the network cable is circumstantial if you have no actual files on the computer. At least, no useable files. Why doesn't everyone use ridiculously strong encyption? I mean enforcing copyright is one thing, but this is overboard.
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.
The campus network here at Iowa State University is indexed by software called strangesearch. There have been a few concerns about the legality of running a network search engine which is used primarily for sharing music, movies, and porn. Recently, four students were arrested for sharing child pornography. The interesting thing is that without StrangeSearch, law enforcement would have never seen material on the students' computers! (Ever try to look at files shared on several thousand individual computers?) For this reason, nobody plans to shut down strangesearch.
A version of FreeNet for colleges/LAN, however...
Mr Barillari wrote a nice article, but since he's not a lawyer, he doesn't know a pretty important point: this is just the complaint. The RIAA doesn't have to provide a watertight legal/logical argument in its complaint. It doesn't even have to allege true facts, as long as it reasonably believes those facts have a chance at being revealed true during discovery. All the RIAA needs to do in its complaint is state why the court has jurisdiction, hit each element of its claims, and claim whatever relief it wants -- bam, it has a complaint.
So it's nice and all that he argues all those points -- he may even be right on some of them -- but it's not like the complaint is the sum total of the RIAA's argument.
I suppose that depends on the station, but being a college radio DJ, I'd say that's a big part of it. The DJs listen to obscure stuff and like it. I, at least, like sharing my tastes with the world at large. And if we expose people to the music and they like it too, they might buy a record or go to a show. Which helps the obscure artists and gets us more good obscure music.
The Music Director at my station told me the other day that our station has a responsibility to expose people to music they've never heard before and wouldn't hear anywhere else. I'd have to agree.
You are right, though, that Eminem is getting waaaay more in ASCAP royalties from radio play than is Black Heart Procession.
Rot-13 my address to e-mail me.
"So I hurry back to little earth / For another life another birth"
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.
what is SO hard about this concept?
I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's flawed, in fact, in law and in logic.
Criminal = in breach of the criminal law. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the person in the aforementioned case is being sued for copyright infringement, a breach of civil law? Ergo, not criminal.
Again, I'm completely unaware of any criminal statutes that prohibit downloading copyrighted material. Again, not criminal.
If you actually bothered to read the article, you'd find that all that the guy did was create a Google like search engine that indexed all files on SMB shares in Princeton. I don't see the owners of Google getting arrested, but the RIAA clearly wants to send a message to young people, and they have decided to do this by targetting the brightest and best, and hitting them with an outrageous law suit which appears to stand little real chance of success of anything other than ruining an innocent young man's life.
Now *that's* fucking criminal.
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!
and don't make a move for your gatt too soon.
the "No Electronic Theft (NET) Act" signed into law by Clinton expanded the types of activity that result in copyright infringement becoming a criminal offence.
the Act criminalizes the reproduction or distribution of one or more copyrighted works that have an aggregrate retail value of $1000 over a period of 180 days.
that's about 50 CDs copied in 6 months.
>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
If they win, I demand that every RIAA artist grab a shotgun/pick ax/shovel/machete/whatever and march towards the RIAA buildings to demand their fair share of the $97 billion.
After all, that's $97 bill that was stolen from the artists because of lost sales, right RIAA??