Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Our Information Technology department, upon receiving this letter, contacted your office twice by phone (leaving messages for Jonathon Whitehead) and three times by e-mail in an effort to update our reference materials and procedures with you." Read between the lines, you schools are not out to save you. Here is proof they are working with the RIAA and the RIAA is looking to "set examples"
This is all well and good but what exactly are the implications here. Obviously the university can't condone priracy, but the idea of course is that a University does need to be a place for the free exchange of ideas and they need to protect their students.
I guess what's importain here is that the RIAA can more easy track a static ip whereas for a dial up connection they have to go though the ISP. Though I'm starting to wonder how they knew anyway who it was without the university's co-operation.
Reguardless, what can we realisticly expect Universities to do to help students? Any takers?
Everyone knows the RIAA is a bunch of publicity seeking, money grubbing pricks. They are going to do anything and everything in their power to make it look as if they are being vicitmized and driven out of business. The only allies they have are those that they bought. Hopefully universities and ISPs will realize that cooperation with the RIAA will only cause them more headaches and lawsuits in the long run as the RIAA lashes out and sues everyone in sight.
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
It's probably a safe assumption that hundreds of students at any given university are sharing copyrighted media files at any given time on various P2P networks. The students being selectively prosecuted in these lawsuits were probably chosen because of the large amount of material they had in their shared libraries or becuse they went to better known or reputable universities. 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.
I've received numerous parking tickets in NYC when no other cars on that street received any, simply because I don't have NY plates and would be less likely to contest the tickets. However every single one was dismissed on grounds of selective prosecution, and that's just a $50 parking ticket. We're talking about a $97,000,000,000 lawsuit against a few people that were doing the same thing as hundreds of other people at their university, and millions of other people nationwide. Give me a break, these lawsuits are just plain rediculous and the world knows it.
Precisely.
If the RIAA is actually trying to stop P2P music sharing, then shutting the offenders down after the fact is only somewhat effective; the material still gets out there.
Moreover, killing the servers isn't much of a deterrent - the worst that usually happens is loss of the ISP account or connection. Some schools might take disciplinary action, but most students I know don't perceive it as enough of a threat to stop them.
Before this, most students thought "I'm not big enough of a target for the companies to come after me". I guess this is their attempt to change that image - these are only local P2P network operators, and not even in the same galaxy as Napster/KaZaA/Chinese bootleg mills.
"If they send someone here, I'll arrange the usual 'accident.'" -- Alice, "Dilbert"
Having served on a comittee that heard some of these cases come up, the RIAA generally asks that the school shut down the site, cut of network access, and turn over the students name.
Fortunately, this is illegal in most countries. Why is a university permitted to share the identity of students with the RIAA in the U.S., by the way? (I doubt it would matter in this case, however. Most likely, these students were tipped off by an insider.)
Sharing with your friends doesn't pay. -- Your RIAA.
This is probably due to the fact that MTU students provide more revenue to the school than the RIAA does; and the fact that MTU doesn't want to see a drop in enrollment as a consequence.
But still...just because your university isn't allowing you to break the law, doesn't mean they're conspiring against you.
This comment is brought to you by the drug caffiene, and the number 5.
Ah, but the university is not "banning" the acts, CDs etc, but rather, "not allowing them within the university (campus, systems, etc), in order to prevent illegal copying". So they are helping the RIAA, rather than acting against them. Officially. Of course, the student body can spin it the other way ...
The dilemma for the RIAA, is that to guarantee no illegal copying, they have to stop making music (media, performances, etc) available for public purchase.
This spin on the problem brought to you by the "it's coming straight for us" department of hunting.
ISTR that in the Kevin Mitnick trial, companies including Sun claimed that Kevin's actions had cost them $billions in lost sales. However, some share holders took legal action against them, because by law, publically listed companies must disclose losses of this scale in a formal statement. The fact that none of them had suggested that either (a) they had not incurred the losses they claimed, or (b) they were guilty of misleading their shareholders.
I was wondering if a similar approach could be used in this case. Mythical multi-billion-dollar losses are being arrived at by multiplying hypothetical figures together once again. Anyone know what happened to Sun et al in the end?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
All this made me wonder if free broadcast is copyrighted. I mean, you never see that FBI warning at the beginning of a movie on broadcast (free) tv. You never hear any copyright warning announced on the radio before or after a set of songs. So, if you recorded FM broadcast, and parsed the songs out as mp3s, could you trade those? It's more work, but would it be legal? Most of the mp3s out there are 128kbs anyway - I imagine the radio rips would be comparable. So, we leave our computers on recording the genre of choice, save them all as decent quality mp3's, and after a little p2p, the only songs the RIAA cares about are available. So, the only problem (if recording radio is legal) is proving that your particular song came from radio ... and getting enough people to participate.
By innovation I didn't mean this case specifically, I meant anything that distributes music electronically (Napster, Kazaa, etc.). The student could get hit for a lack of originality charge if such a thing existed. If the RIAA had foresight, they'd have found a way to do e-distribuition themselves before Napster meant something other than a sleepy infant or a nickname.
If you think that the RIAA is not involved in practices of intellectual monopolization, please name some record labels disassociated with the RIAA that are not under extreme pressure to join and can actually compete. In Nashville my (very limited) experience was that almost all of the labels had affiliation with said organization. Most of the people distributing music online are doing so for free or with small labels that are looking for other ways to compete with the RIAA. I think they are trying to make industry-wide prohibitions on how music gets distributed electronically but haven't been successful yet and that there are agreements between labels, though I can't prove the latter and the former is thusfar based on circumstancial evidence.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Since I run a very similar indexing and search engine at Wesleyan University, I'm more interested than most in how this is going to turn out (and a bit worried that I'm going to be sued too, though it was really cool when PySMBSearch got mentioned in the analysis posted by the Princeton student). The idea that I could be liable for up to 15.1 billion USD (checking just a second ago, there are 100,921 files ending in .mp3 returned by my search engine) just for indexing other people's files, without explicitly providing any method of accessing them is just ridiculous.
I haven't taken the search down yet, but I'm seriously considering it, given how much the RIAA is asking, and given that I'm doing no more than any of the current defendants were (though I'm not sharing any copyrighted materials myself, so they wouldn't have the "direct infringement" case).
As a student of Michigan Tech I thought everyone might want a little inside scoop on what this lawsuit has been like for a student of MTU. Starting off the first thing I saw about the case was on slashdot. I expected Tompkins to send out a letter to the all-student list the next day or two, but this didn't happen...so I waited. I got an email from my department System Admin saying we shouldn't pirate musics, etc. Finally on April 7, four days after appearing on slashdot, we got a email "from" Tompkins about the case. Looking at it a little further many student, including me, noticed it was simply a copy of Penn's States letter with Penn State replaced with Michigan Tech (Penn State copy here http://www.politechbot.com/p-04614.html)
Then on the 8th we got another letter, informing us that the last email wasn't really written by Tompkins! Here are a few quotes from the letter:
The letter written over my name should have clearly stated that this was not my work. This is no different than what we tell students in the classroom every day: cite your sources when you are quoting directly from someone else. Give credit where credit is due. I did not do that and I apologize.
Unfortunately, I had not seen the letter, but I was told that the Michigan Tech letter would be similar to the letter from Penn State. I didn't realize that my letter would be a duplicate. The staff member, as happens often, handled the details.
And now our President "writes" another letter to the RIAA, I wonder if one of his staff memebers copied and pasted this one too from some other email. Other than this life at Tech is exactly the same, classes are still held, to much dismay, and the campus resnet is still kicking.
Oh ya, all quotes from are from MTU, wait no, Penn State's...crap how do I cite this one.