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RIAA Settles Suits Against Students
wo1verin3 writes "Cnet's News.Com has reported that the RIAA has settled the suits with four students accused of sharing songs. The settlements will see each student making payments to the RIAA totaling between $12,000 and $17,000, split into annual installments between 2003 and 2006."
... that's fucked up.
I think the RIAA should sue all of us, and then we'll all turn to buying CDs! Brilliant!
...they got off cheap.
but geez, poor scapegoats, I could be next...and school leaves me broke enough already.
Unfortunately, this is the way it had to end-- the RIAA would lose face to the public if they went for criminal charges, and the $12-17k is a realistic warning to other file traders. If they suit had been for a hundred million trillion dollars (or however must Hilary--err, the RIAA-- estimated as damages), it would have also been a defeat in the public's eyes. $3000 a year, hmmm $300 a month for "unlimited" MP3 downloads? Sounds like a marketing campaign!
Actually, that does sound pretty good, would you pay, say $59 a month or something for unlimited mp3s? I might...
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
and how much does the artists get?
I bet these kids ended up paying more than 99 cents a song.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
12000 - 17000 songs they could have downloaded from apple's site ;)
...and kind of ridiculous. Having been a fulltime student, I had to work 40-60 hour weeks in the summer and part time during the academic year to make the cash for tution books and rent. And that was with help from the bank of mom and dad.
What is the logic behind these damages? Were the students in question getting rich of sharing files? Even if they were before (doubt it) they certainly aren't now.
I was looking forward to them being sentenced to 200 million years hard labour at Burger King to pay off the initial amounts that were being bandied about.
Still 17K is not funny when you are still in school
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I'm not surprised that this case didn't go to trial -- there was too much risk for both sides. Even if the students could afford to defend themselves, there is no way they could risk losing millions of dollars. On the RIAA side, they would be in trouble if the case went to trial whether they won or lost. If they lost, they would not be able to use the threat of lawsuits as effectively in the future. If they won, the bad publicity from getting such an obscene judgement might cause people to question current copyright laws. With this settlement, the RIAA maintains the status quo.
Was Daniel Peng the same student who was threatened with the $98 billion lawsuit? Because after reading Joseph Barillari's analysis of the lawsuit it seemed like Dan would have had a pretty good defense to either have the case dismissed or to be acquitted.
Was paying the $17,000 really in the end the wiser decision? It just seems like he had a solid argument, especially given the recent development with Morpheus and Grokster.
More seriously, the RIAA does not want this, or similar incidents, to get to court. Because then, the judge will make a ruling, which may just be against the RIAA. By attacking small targets, they are able to push for a settlement.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Both sides? Obviously the kids probably couldn't afford attorney fees and the RIAA would have dragged it out forever, but doesn't this just make the RIAA look like they were in it for the money instead of a lesson? Going after poor college students for nothing more than downloading music? I hope the RIAA is happy because of this they probably lost a couple hundred customers and everytime they do it they'll lose more.
I think the RIAA is getting off rather light. What they're doing is illegal and they know it. Why else would they resort to suing college students, spamming kazaa... its all desperate measures. they deserve whatever comes their way. i dunno about you, but i'll keep on trading till cds are 5 bucks each...
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
Nobody gets jail time for copyright violations. You pay a fine, you say you're sorry, you move on and download more shit.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
From the article:
"...said Howard Ende, a Drinker Biddle, and Reath attorney representing..."
How do legal firms wind up with names this stupid? There is the oft-mentioned Dewey, Cheatham and Howe but maybe in this case they should have gone for Bendham, Ohver and Quick.
Besides, in my book if your last name is "Biddle," you're automatically an asshole.
My
Limekiller
Please comment on this idea.
It is legal for me to listen to a CD and then sell it to a friend, buy it back, etc, over and over.
Let's say that we form a Co-op with 100 members. Each member kicks in $100, giving us a budget of $10,000 with which to purchase CDs. $10 from each member is reserved. The CDs are ripped and encoded.
Let's say I want to listen to a CD. My $10 on reserve buys that CD from the Co-op. While I own the CD, I get to listen to the encoded music (I do not take physical possession). During that time, no other Co-op member may listen to the CD (unless there are additional copies available for purchase due to popularity).
Essentially, a locking protocol would maintain a 1:1 relationship between the listener and physical media.
Once I am done listening, I sell the CD back to the Co-op and my $10 is freed for the next selection.
Is this legal? Has it been tried? Thanks!
Exactly. Why the constant use of the word 'sharing' when 'illegally distributing' would be more accurate? I'd love to see someone create a system that actually allowed true borrowing of other people's music/movies. Something that makes sure only one person at a time can play it. See how popular that is with the college students...
So I'm going to get their money's worth. Starting now.
I guess that Hillary Rosen can finally get that cute little Miata that she's had her eye on. /nod to Norm MacDonald and Weekend Update
Seriously - let's set up a fund to help them pay off their debts to RIAA. I'll put in a buck for that.
Anyone?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
It was not a music-sharing service. It simply indexed the contents of all of the public shares campus. If I typed in RedHat 7 it would return a list of places where I could get the ISO. There was nothing about it that was specifically directed towards infringing.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Oh really! People I know who were caught with illegal drugs in college weren't fined anywhere near this much. That is, the very few that were stupid and obvious enough to get caught.
1) There will be tons of lawsuits filed.
2) Million-dollar lawsuits are unpayable for the "common people," but $15,000 is well within reach. That means those sued will _have_ to pay it, and no judge will dismiss the settlement. It's feasible and doable to pay $15,000 over five years. Chump change to the RIAA, yes -- but most importantly: This will be a self-supporting business. Settlement money will fund new lawsuits. The RIAA is not after the money, they're out to threaten and terrorize anyone who uses file-swapping, and literally, the lawsuits will "pay for themselves."
This stinks... If you thought the Microsoft tax was bad, get ready for the RIAA tax!
Time to expand my musical tastes.
independent-artists.com
boycott-riaa.com
Why RIAA Keeps Getting Hacked
RIAA Affiliated Labels
Hmmm. Can't seem to get to the RIAA site right now...
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Both the students and the RIAA, actually. The RIAA is going to have to make some drastic changes if they want the music business to remain viable. The students, on the other hand, can wait for the paperwork to be finalized and immediately file for bankruptcy. It's very doubtful they have anything at all of value for the bankruptcy court to make them sell in order to pay off creditors, and it's even more doubtful that the RIAA will pay their lawyers to show up at the bankruptcy hearing for that small an amount. The students won't have to pay them a cent.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Or why not call it a Black Market? I mean, that's what it is. The RIAA price fixed CD's and now they have a black market. Econ 101.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
No...these "kids" wrote samba (windows network share) spidering/indexing programs that made it easier to find files that might be located on open shares on your network.
This is NOT the same as Joe Sixpack hosting gigs of mp3s on his own computer and making them available to everyone else, this is a matter of going after students writing software that has the potential to be used maliciously (sound familiar?)
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
>>Nobody gets jail time for copyright violations.
>Under the DMCA you can get jail-time.
That's exactly why the DCMA should be repealed. It lets the RIAA, the MPAA, Adobe, etc. shift the cost of enforcing their copyrights onto the taxpayers.
Copyright violations are normally a civil offence, meaning if you violate my copyright I can sue you. But under DCMA, if the material is in digital format violating my copyright suddenly becomes a criminal offence. Why?
What they should have done is not bothered hiring attorneys at all, appeared pro se, and then taken it to a jury trial and turned it into a circus. Believe me, that scenario would have the RIAA shaking in their boots. There would be massive publicity, the RIAA would have been completely trashed before it was over and no one would have cared who won in the end. This is their nightmare scenario, and if anyone else out there gets sued, don't take the easy road with settlement. Go in there and humiliate the RIAA.
IAAL
Okay... I'm really confused about the legality of everything now...
;)
If I buy a CD, I am legally allowed to listen to it. Correct?
Am I legally allowed to play it for a friend while I am present? I would think so.
Am I legally allowed to lend it to a friend for his sole listening? I should think so.
Now... Can I listen to a CD with a friend via the telephone? Doesn't seem illegal to me? Is it?
What about streaming a CD via a webcast to a friend and myself? This is very similar to listening on the telephone... Probably not legal... Why? Is this considered a "public broadcast"? What about the telephone version? Nobody would consider a telephone conversation to be a public broadcast would they?
The line between illegal and legal seems to be very arbitrary, and rather contrived.
Maybe they should follow the Open Source model and give the music away and make money on concerts, t-shirts, etc.
This would also be similar to the way Art sells... $$$ for an original painting, $$ for a limited print, and next to nothing for a poster. I figure it's just a case of particular industry that has become over-inflated in comparison with other industries and is facing a market correction... You can see the panic in their eyes!
Actually, one of these guys was running a search engine. Since when is that illegal!?
I'd love to see someone create a system that actually allowed true borrowing of other people's music/movies
You may have heard of this - it's called a library.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Or you can call the RIAA a cartel, which is exactly what they are.
Kazaa won't "bring down copyright". It will just undermine the value of one particular type of commodity that had to be made ARTIFICIALLY SCARCE to begin with.
Rampant piracy is, infact, capitalism at work.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In other words, the "streaming only, no save to disk" thing might have a hole in it.
/dev/audio (or whatever they use) to filename.mp3 (or whatever format)" (which would, of course, not even remotely work). If you wanna get your rocks off by stealing music, go right ahead. Apple just wants to make sure that it's not convenient or easy.
Of course there's a "hole" in it, you dickhead. Hold a fucking microphone up to the fucking speaker. What the fuck.
Calling shit like that a "hole" completely misses the point. Nobody cares if you ""tee" stdout (aka >&1) from
You know what it's like? You calling this a "hole" I mean. It's like if I put up a fence around my property. You're on one side of my property, and on the other is a Krispy Kreme. You can smell those donuts, and man, you want 'em bad. You look and look at my fence, but then you suddenly realize that you can just go AROUND my property, around the perimeter of my fence, to get to the Krispy Kreme. And after you do, you come back with your face smeared with glaze and say, "Hey, d00d, there's a hole in your fence look how clever I am!!!!!1" And I'm all, "Shut the fuck up you fat fucking pig, you don't even understand what my fence is trying to protect so you just shut your fucking mouth. Bitch."
Yeah. That's what it's like, that shit right there. Yeah.
What are you talking about? Copyright means the right to control distribution (i.e. "copy" + "right"), not the right to control reception. If you are distributing copyright works, that is the violation. Otherwise every time I buy any copyrighted work anywhere I'd have to go through a lengthy process of verifying that the seller had the right to sell that work in order to protect myself from liability.
If I'm listening to web radio, am I going to be liable because the "broadcaster" didn't pay his/her ASCAP/BMI fees? I sure as hell hope not. Ditto if I download any other file. Maybe if I am knowingly involved in receiving illegal copies I can be held liable for contributory infringement of some sort, but how am I to know that it's not the record company sharing those files on Kazaa? (just an example... I don't actually use Kazaa)
I do not have a signature
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Piracy these days is like liquor during prohibition. It may be illegal, but that's not stopping the masses. I wish the RIAA would just accept that and stop wasting their money busting harmless college kids who just want to listen to music. The RIAA is fighting for a lost cause.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Napster provided an index of only MP3 files and means for people to connect and talk to each other to swap files. These guys were running an indexing program that searched all the shared drives on the local network and produced an index of the files.
Doesn't matter.
Contributory infringement: if you know or have reason to know of direct infringement, and induce, cause, or materially contribute to it, you're liable too. You don't need knowledge of specific acts of infringement according to the Napster court; just infringement generally. Providing the technology isn't enough to give you knowledge if there are possible substantial noninfringing uses. But if you know or have reason to know for some other reason than the capabilities of your technology, that won't really help you. Particularly if you know of specific instances of infringement and don't purge it from your system insofar as you're capable and legally able to.
Vicarious infringement: if you have the right and ability to control the direct infringer's action, and get a direct financial benefit from the infringement. There can be financial benefit if infringement is a draw for paying customers. In Napster it attracted users who might someday be paying users, so it qualified. If you were a landlord for an actual place where this occurred and got a cut of the profits (as opposed to a flat rent that never varied) that would count too. Helping to sell ads might qualify as well. And if you have a legal right to control what's done over your system, and the actual ability to do so, you must be forever perfectly vigilant to never let any infringement occurr, or at least persist once you know of it. A system that didn't let you delete stuff off of it might help you, but it would probably be hard to build one that really worked like that and certainly to avoid the court not really believing you since it seems like such bad faith thing to do, viz. willful blindness. Even if the material isn't quite on your system, the index of material still has to be policed, since it basically corresponds to the infringing files and is what's actually helping the infringement occur. Wrong spellings don't help, since you have to police with common sense, just as users can decipher the typos with common sense.
So this still seems wrong to me, as contributory infringement. Maybe not vicarious, but I don't know all the details of what the people here were doing or planned to do. Most important was what they actually knew -- but unless these guys were naive pollyannas, I don't see much wiggle room there.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You're right. It will absolutely destroy capitalism. I mean, yesterday, there I was, driving around town in the Porsche I downloaded through Kazaa. Then I went home just in time to eat the steak dinner that had finished downloading.
Get real. The only part of "capitalism" this hurts is the music industry and the movie industry. (And I daresay it hurts the music industry a lot more, as it's still easier to go out and buy the DVD rather then wait 196 hours to download one.) And if the music industry insists on ignoring that basic tenet of capitalism, supply and demand, then they deserve to get the shaft.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
First off, we do -not- buy CDs from record labels that align themselves with the RIAA. This is a no-brainer.
Second off, we do -not- download music by bands that are the larger whores of the industry - Britney Spears, Creed, Eminem, etc. (My question to you is, why do you want to? They suck and are horribly unoriginal).
Third, any music that we download that is under the mandle of the RIAA, we pay for - by mailing, paypaling or handing the musicians we like money for the downloads. You will likely get a large degree of personal grattitude from someone when you hand them 15$ and say, "I downloaded your albums online, so I wanted to pay for them, because they were good." $10, even, would speak more than buying their stuff. You paid for it because you liked it.
<b><i>More importandly still</i></b>, however, is that we must support our <a href="http://www.wipeyoureyes.com</a>local bands, or our local 'scene'. You can do this by going to shows, buying their CDs, t-shirts and other merchantdise, and just giving them a good ol' pat on the back. (Might not want to try this with some guys, they'll snap your neck if ya do... crazy hardcore drummers) If we don't do this, then all traces of good music will soon disappear, due to discouraged musicians trying to feed themselves, and there being a decreasing pool of 'indie' artists from which the larger msuic industry can choose their whores from.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The only thing that really concerns me about the RIAA and MPAA is copyright protection technology.
I buy a CD, I rip it and store it on my PC, I put the CD in a binder. I then listen to it via my PC (which has much higher quality stereo components than anything else in my house). If I want to listen to that CD in my car, I burn it to a CD-R so I don't have to worry about damaging it and I listen to the CD in my car.
AFAIK this all falls under fair use. So copyright protection would essentially force me to either A) spend more money and buy a new CD everytime I damage one and have to lug thousands of CDs around or B) force me to circumvent those measures so I can use fairly a product I've legally obtained.
Copyright protection is illegal.
As much as I'd want people to help me out if I were in the same position, I don't think paying the fine for these guys is a good idea. First off, they didn't have to settle. If they had just stonewalled and let the RIAA get all puffed up, then it would have gone to trial at some point. Then maybe the RIAA could have had their asses handed to them, along with that waste of human space Hilary. Second, by paying the fine the RIAA gets their extortion money, just that much quicker. As many have pointed out here, perhaps this could really be the start of a new revenue stream for them.
I own appx. 4000 vinyl lp's, hundreds of tapes, & mostly used CD's, and I have dozens of hours of my own music to wade through. I stopped buying new CD's when I realized what it cost to produce them as compared to their ridiculous retail price. It didn't help to understand also how the artist's almost always get screwed too. OK, maybe every once in a while I just have to have the new Steve Morse, Duke Robillard or Elvis (Costello), or maybe something from an independant label but generally speaking, the 'music industry' has lost my thousands of discretionary entertainment dollars. Forever.
So if you can live without most of the crap that passes for innovative music these days, simply don't buy their product. It's that easy. Fsck them and their greedy pinhead lawyers. It's a simple war of attrition. HEY - and pick up an instrument. Learn how to make your own damn music. Why buy the milk when you can own the cow? That'd really piss em' off heh heh.
And don't listen to the radio either. Clear Channel and it's cult mentality sucks worse than rehashed disco.
that to work off their debt the RIAA would exploit these students in media campaign where they confess theirs sins against the recording industry and warn how P2P file swapping can ruin your life.
Probably wouldn't impact other kids, but scare the bejesus out of some parents who would have all the more reason to further restrict little Johnny's and Jane's Internet access.
All opinions aside, this is a devastating fine for these kids. We should start some sort of paypal donation jar for them. In fact, wouldn't it be neat if the Kazaa people added a new button that said, "Donate here" so that way, we could all band together, make a donation, and essentially nullify the RIAA's fines, rendering them useless. That would be a BEAUTIFUL smack in the face to the RIAA... :)