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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.
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?
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"
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"'
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.
It mostly has to do with MTU's legal role as the student's loco parentis (I think that's the correct term, but it has been nearly 40 years since that was a part of my life). Whether MTU intended to or not, this public letter to the RIAA seems to me to be a good first move in setting the basis for MTU filing a countersuit, or stepping in to defend the student, or both.
MTU is saying that it has a mechanism in place for justly disciplining its "children", that RIAA knew of this mechanism, or should have known of it, and that it is inappropriate for RIAA to involve the US legal system when MTU's judgment and disciplinary process was available and would have dealt properly with the situation, with much less damage all the way around. MTU can also argue, and probably would have to do so, that RIAA has damaged its student's reputation in a way that demands some form of compensation. The courts are generally favorable toward this kind of argument.
RIAA screwed up royally on this one. If they push this, it will blow up in their faces, because no university can afford to back away from this fight-- it challenges the nurturing role of universities and colleges and is an attack on principles of western civilization that were established hundreds of years ago, with the first universities.