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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.
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?
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.
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
That's not at all what I got out of it. Whether we agree with the law or not, Joe broke it. The University appears to be interested in protecting him (and all students) as much as possible. This would include disciplinary action by the school that would allow the student to move on after college rather than being burdened for the rest of his life by criminal charges and unjustified financial debts. Bear in mind that the RIAA may choose to smack down the University because their equipment was involved in this incident. Therefore, they have to play ball at least a little. They could have chosen to just tell Joe: "Sorry, you broke the law. Suffer the consequences. Try to enjoy what's left of your life." Instead, they at least had to guts to send an open letter which not only expresses their disappointment to the RIAA, but also informs the public and other universities about the situation. This can be a pretty powerful blow if other universities demand a written contract governing actions to be taken before they are willing to work with the RIAA on anything.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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.
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
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"'
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.