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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.
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.
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.