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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.
accusing the RIAA of encouraging cooperation with universities but then bypassing those procedures with the current suit
For some reason, I mis-read "suit" as "stunt." On reflection, I do believe I had it right the first time.
Awful lot of law-stunts going on these days.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Maximum transmission unit President? Who does he report to - the Emperor of TCP/IP?
The RIAA are pushing forward with a number of highly publicized actions in order to draw attention to the problem (as they see it) and try to scare people off. There is nothing to be gained by them dealing with people through the sort of process described Mr Thompkin's letter.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
The RIAA seems to consider itsself a pretty powerful force, but really, they're just another sales organization. Universities, on the other hand, hold substantial power as gatekeepers to one of the music industry's largest customer groups. If colleges start banning RIAA-affiliated bands from performing on campus, and eliminate all RIAA-affilitated material from their on campus stores, the message to the RIAA might become a little clearer:
You are an unnecessary organization.
Music can and will be made, produced, and sold without you.
Leave us alone or cease to exist.
"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?
Universities should also fully cooperate with the BSA. Otherwise they could be in big trouble...
[--------**-] -- sacrasm meter
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.
They pick a small technical school (no offense to MTU). If they want some publicity, they should go after a large law school.
Oh, yeah, they want good publicity.
fair points, well made etc. Builds a little, seeming to draw to the conclusion and then ends with
Taking all of this into consideration, we realize the seriousness of the allegations against Mr. Nievelt and will cooperate fully in resolving this matter.
Was I the only one expecting to see "Fuck You" - maybe even all in caps?
Your organization responded to none of these messages.
That's because everyone in the RIAA was too busy either pushing lawsuits or restoring backup copies of their webpage.
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
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.
There is an important point here for universities.
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.
The fully cooperating university must be aware of what this last step means. It means the RIAA has the power to bypass any intermediate sanctions and sue a (usually poor) college student directly.
You would be surprised, but losing dorm room internet access for a year is considered a pretty significant sanction. This raises the issue to whole new level, one that is rarely seen on a college campus in another context.
The schools involved need to jump into this with their eyes wide open. It doesn't seem they were that aware in this case.
With the RIAA? If the RIAA had notified the school of the transgressions, I think they would have had a much better success rate in reducing piracy. Because they pursued legal action, they now have pissed off everyone in that community.
I wonder, if they pursued legal action at Michigan State University, could they be held legally accountable for the ensuing riot?
Tom
(Modified a bit...)
LANDO: LAWSUITS? That was never part of the deal!
DARTH VADER: I'm altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it any further.
Vader leaves
LANDO (to himself): This deal is getting worse all the time!
So sayeth the editor
Attention universities: lawsuits are your reward for being a "fully-cooperating site".
The university isn't being sued, it's the student. The president dislikes the bad publicity that the lawsuit is generating, and I can't blame him for that. It drives away potential students when they find that one of the places they're looking at allows the RIAA in so easily. Sure, you can find out about how MTU was 'fully-cooperating' with the RIAA with a little bit of research, but now anyone who has a slight interest in the RIAA knows about it.
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.
If you don't notice a student with a Massive MP3 server on your network, fire your admin. In my epxerence comanpies and universities realy arn't paying this much attention. They draft polocies and put procidures in place to basicaly cover there asses. They realy don't care about stoping it.
Perhaps this well be enough of an incentive for network owners to take this stuff seriously. It's breaking the law, and just because you don't agree, dosn't mean you should ignore it.
If you realy hate the DMCA, then protest to your congressmen or support one of the numerous organizations out there dedicated to getting rid of it. But don't act surprised when some acutally inforces the law and uses the system. The RIAA are acting within there rights, the music distributors are not.
"Failure is not an option, it's part of the standard package"
... not that the RIAA filed suit without informing MTU what it was doing, but because he actually expected advanced notice!!!
Let's get real here! The RIAA has been exploiting the DMCA since it passed! If anything, somebody at some time is going to have to stand up for "fair use" rights (whether this student is guilty of infringement or not!). My sense is that universities, who have the most to gain from strong fair use laws, should step up to the plate. Instead, in a prime example of the pussification of America, universities cowtow and kiss ass to the RIAA out of fear of legal reprecussions.
Well, what's worse? Allowing the RIAA to slowly weaken fair use so that any lawsuit becomes a multi-billion dollar slam dunk for them, or stepping up to the plate (and paying the legal fees) to defend now?
Either way, the universities (whoever) are going to be out of a lot of cash. But, by fighting now, they at least can say they had the balls to do something about it!
-A
Hello there,
I go to the University of Iowa.
We had a service here for a while called "HawkSearch" (our team being the Hawkeyes), run by a student. It existed for a while in the form of a http search page. One day, an article was written about it in the paper. The University had Hawksearch down within 10 minutes, and everyone they could prove used it had their internet connection shut off.
Of course, the university isn't stupid. They know exactly what I know, which is, every student in the school with a computer has kazaa and 80% of them run it like a vital piece of their windows XP. p2p will never die, so we have to live with it. until everyone realizes this (which may never happen), there will be this ongoing, useless struggle where some people suffer and some don't - it's the luck of the draw.
As for local area network sharing... it's just the wrong place to do it (on campus). I mean, if one of your friends wants a CD, they can borrow it. If you want music off the radio, you may tape it. I mean, let's be honest - your friends burn your cds, and you burn theirs. Is this worse or better? Better because it's not on a large scale?
p2ps next stage (if wide area sharing dies, IF) will be small local area networks, and without a university packet sniffer to rat out a small percentage of the guilty people, there will be no way to prevent it.
Let not the guilty go unpunished? Ha.
"It was like trying to hand out speeding tickets at the Indy 500."
- Apocalypse Now
Set aside, for a moment, the credibility (or lack thereof) pertaining to this case. What scares me is the way a large bullying corporation can intimidate and screw individuals through litigation. Even if they lose the lawsuit, if they can prevent individuals from creating software and services which fringe upon RIAA financial interests and venues of profitability, then they will see themselves as successful. Must we all be looking over our shoulders anytime we work on projects which potentially could be used for piracy in addition to legitimate purposes? Will I be the next person in the RIAA's crosshairs, meat for a litigation nightmare.
Thanks be to the RIAA for creating a reverse fortune lottery. Millions of Americans are players. I wonder who'll be the next lucky winner who gets his/her life screwed? Perhaps the RIAA can kill two birds with one stone -- innovation and justice.
Are they going to sue everybody? I don't understand why artists stand behind this organization. have they all gotten so greedy that they're willing to alienate their fans to this point? this is absolutely ridiculous. 97 billion?!!??!? are they out of their minds? this is just getting stupid now. it reminds me of the iraqi information minister "we are in control, the usa is running away in fear" Denial. It runs rampant among out of control regimes.
A physical or digital signature of the owner of an exclusive copyright right (i.e., the copyright owner himself or the owner's exclusive licensee of the right(s) to reproduce, distribute, display, perform or create derivatives) or the owner's authorized agent;
A description of the works claimed to be infringed;
A description of the allegedly infringing works, sufficient to enable the agent to find them;
Sufficient information to enable the agent to contact the complainer;
A statement that the complainer believes in good faith that the use of the material is not authorized by the owner, the owner's agent or the law; and
A statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that the complainer is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of one or more exclusive copyright rights.
Usually #1, the physical or digital signature of the copyright holder, is never sent with the complaint. So the college responds with a request for the signature. Usually there is never a reply back.
A lot of the work in tracking down pirates is done by third-party companies which have to send the signature request back up to the people they are working for. This small but significant bit of red tape seems to become an annoyance enough that no signature is provided. Thus making the complaint more or less dead.
So one can be fully-cooperating with the MPAA but at the same time not cooperating in a way the MPAA would like, mainly to ignore the signature requirement and just shut off whoever is providing the pirated content.
Let the superpowers of rights restriction destroy each other...then we can have free mp3 and divx files of the legal battles.
This isn't about those schools. It didn't matter whether the President of MTU, of Princeton or of Wake bent down and licked the choccy starfish of the RIAA---they wanted to make this a loud, ugly lawsuit. Two reasons:
(1) Chilling effect. Every local sharing service I know of is shut down. The UConn Phynd hub had a message up the day of the lawsuit, and the website had vanished the next day. By making every kid in American thinking "I could be next0rz!!", they shut down every Phynd/Direct Connect/Flatlan system in the nation. But that's just gravy, because the real goal is...
(2) Precedent. If they can get these kids to knuckle under (which they most certainly will do, given the threat) and waive their federal appeal in return for a reduced settlement (pay $1k/year for the rest of your life, for instance), a big, shiny precedent will have been set---that the original settlement amount ($98B or whatever it gets reduced to) is a legit fine for the offense. Then, armed with precedent, they go after the bigger fish---KaZaA, ShareReactor---for setting up similar services.
It's dastardly clever.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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.
Our RIAA is acting as though it were Standard Oil from ~1900. Anyone that interferes with it becomes a target for outrageous lawsuits nad public humiliation in hopes that everyone else will cease and desist. What is most concerning here is that the RIAA is a de facto trust that is likely breaking the law by monopolization of intellectual property and distribution with respect to music. Technical innovation is being stifled by the DMCA because they apparently can't keep up to date with current means of distributing music. Mostly this is about greed: both on the part of the RIAA to maintain its non-realistic profit expectations and of some people who refuse to pay for music at all. There are some people out there engaged in blatently criminal acts of intellectual property theft as currently defined by the law.
What we need to do is 1) Reform the current laws (maybe with a "DMCA Lite"?) 2) Educate incoming freshmen at major universities about what the hell can happen to you for getting involved in this crap and 3) putting the RIAA in check by either legal means or a boycott on their products. Standard Oil did the same sorts of things to potential competitors and had all kinds of legal protection before TR came along and broke it up, but GW is certainly not interested in hurting potential campaign donors nor is anyone else I can think of given the proximity of a presidential election. Certainly the RIAA does not expect to collect 0.097 trillion dollars from a student but I'll wager a Golden Dollar or two that we'll hear that exact same number used in reference to Congress on why the RIAA needs "protection" against a new technology they can not use to their benefit. Allowing this sort of corporate welfare hurts both the consumer by allowing higher prices and the entire populace by allowing a de facto trust to run into the rights of the people simply for corporate benefit. Can anyone else present potential solutions to this problems?
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
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"'
Don't expect your school (or any other common carrier) to take your heat or cushion the consequences for what you do. You think what you're doing isn't bad? Fine, make your case in court, or with the public, or with your legislators; that isn't the issue. Don't drag your school into it. Even if your school has been shielding you up to now, it is apparent that the RIAA now sees through this.
IMHO, this is probably a good thing. While I believe this president desires to act in his students' interest and likely just wants the RIAA to go away so he can getback to his real job, waging this war through proxies is probably really just imposing additional burden on the school and really hurting everyone. And it must be damned unsatisfying for the RIAA. And it just muddies the issues. Let the engagement really begin, and if the results turn out to be radically different than peoples' sense of justice, then public policy can be revised as a result of it.
There isn't any reason for the schools to be a major part of the process, except to perform their duties as a common carrier. Just let it go, president Tompkins, and in a few years -- one way or another -- you won't have to deal with this crap anymore.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
Here are two past Slashdot articles that are on point:
... the very type of system that the Princeton student is being brought up on charges for running.
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
He wimped out at the end. This letter basically says "I'm mad at you, but I'm not going to do anything about it. Please don't hurt me."
He should have told the RIAA to go screw themselves and try pressing charges on 15,000 students all sharing files openly. In which case, of course they would just press charges against the university.
It's unfortunate how much fear the RIAA wields. This letter is essentially pointless, and will have no effect. I'm sure the recipient had a good chuckle and threw it away.
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).
I'd say to consult a good lawyer copyright/IP lawyer about this.
I'd say chances are however that the networks were ratted out to the RIAA by a student, who probably got little more then pizza money for it in return. Otherwise, unless the university itself got pressured into granting them access to snoop, they would have had to break in themselves -- which is illegal.
Would really be interesting to find out in a deposition just how the RIAA accessed these computers, and whether or not those who did give them access can be proscuted.
IT IS MY BELIEF however that none of these cases are actually intended to come to trial. Too much information would be released to the public, any high profile loss would really hurt all their efforts, and outcomes of trials are always uncertain. I hope there is someone of that group willing to fight this as far as necessary.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.