MTU President Peeved At RIAA

mcdude writes "The president of Michigan Technological University has responded to the RIAA suit against one of his students, accusing the RIAA of encouraging cooperation with universities but then bypassing those procedures with the current suit. Curtis Tompkins says, 'I am very disappointed that the RIAA decided to take this action in this manner. As a fully cooperating site, we would have expected the courtesy of being notified early and allowing us to take action following established procedures, instead of allowing it to get to the point of lawsuits and publicity.'" Attention universities: lawsuits are your reward for being a "fully-cooperating site". If you missed the lawsuit news, see our earlier story.

Comments

but what did the student do?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, he's getting sued for a maximum of almost 100 billion dollars (not Trillion, like one article implied). This figure comes from ~650,000 mp3 files @ $150,000 each. But what did the guy do? He kept a database of what was on the university lan. That's it. He didn't create a file-sharing client, or write protocols for distributing music. He actually only had a relatively small mp3 collection on his machine (1100 files if IIRC).. and I know a dozen people that legally own enough CD's to make a 1100 file collection.

To think I was going to set up a web-interface lan spider here at my university.. if i only had an extra ethernet port around here. That would put any lawsuit in the $23 Bil range for me. Scary.

Re:Pick your targets well

[rhkaloge]

From the original article, they are also after students at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute and Princeton University. Not bad company for MTU.

Skippy
MTU Classes of 98 and 00

Re:Duh

[hammy]

I'm not sure about the case at MTU but the this isn't the case at princeton. The student being taken to court at princeton was running a service that provided a searchable database of all files on window shares on the network. The defendant only had "a couple of hundred" files shared according to RIAA's brief. Note too those windows shares were only accessible on the Princeton n/w not the internet. They weren't targeting a user with a large number of files shared but the person who provided the search database.

Re:Duh

[regen]

It would seem to me that with millions of users on these P2P networks at any given time, a plea of "not guilty" on the grounds of selective prosecution would be a no-brainer.

Except for the fact that it is a civil suit and not prosecution. Private companies and individuals can do thing, such as selectively suit other entities, that the government cannot.

Re:The New Standard Oil

[rgmoore]

For the RIAA to be in violation of antitrust law, it'd have to (for instance) make secret agreements between major labels about what new acts get signed, or set industry-wide prohibitions on how they distribute music over the internet.

How about price fixing? Because the RIAA has settled a federal lawsuit over price fixing (The CD Minimum Advertized Price antitrust case), which certainly sounds like the behavior of an illegal trust to me. Of course, given recent behavior on the part of the Justice Department there's no actual risk of anything other than civil lawsuits over that kind of thing. The US government seems uninterested in enforcing anti-trust laws.

Relevant Slashdot Reading (Slashback)

[telstar]

Here are two past Slashdot articles that are on point:

Rosen, Valenti Warn Colleges About P2P
Handling Campus AUP (non-)Violations?

The second one is particularly interesting as it deals with Windows file-share indexing ... the very type of system that the Princeton student is being brought up on charges for running.