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Interview with Student Sued by RIAA
TinoMNYY24 writes "Jesse Jordan, owner of chewplastic.com, was on CNN this morning discussing the RIAA settlement. You can read a poorly spelled transcript of the interview. Jesse is one of the two students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that were sued by the RIAA."
RPI's other search engine, run by a school-funded computer club, was taken by the school's request.
It simply ran a Windows Share crawler which indexed files people were already sharing over the standard Microsoft networking tools. When you searched, it would provide a link to the file in question with a url pointing to the windows name of the computer and directory the file was last indexed in.
It is very very similar to google and web services. They both index public information, and rely on the technology of the client and server in question to procede further with the connection and transfers.
The reason I think these students were targetted was because they also were sharing, or had on their computers music that (allegedly, this is what I hear) didn't belong to them. So while the lawsuit about the search engine itself is sketchy at best (imo, ianal, etc), if they didn't settle a music piracy suit could probably easily be brought up against them.
Consider spending months and months, and 100s of thousands of dollars to defend yourself.
Yes you could countersue, and you might get your court costs covered. But where do you get the money you need to fight with (not even considering you might never get it back, even if you win)?
The US justice system is a tool for people/companies with money. If you can't afford to fight a suit brought against you, then you have to settle (which despite not admitting wrongdoing, always makes you look guilty.)
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Help Jesse pay the $12,000. Go to Chewplastic.com and click the "contribute via paypal" link that's at the top of the page right now. Fuck the RIAA.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The kid set up a paypal link on his site (chewplastic.com) so help him pay the rediculous extortion by the RIAA. I threw the kid $20 to help.
These people look deep into my soul and assign me a number based on the order I joined.
You can kill people with a gun, but I haven't seen any lawsuit against S&W for creating a tool that can be used to commit a crime.
Cincinnati recently dropped their suit against gunmakers. Expect to see more of these.
05/01/2003 "CINCINNATI - The City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to drop a lawsuit against gun manufacturers and distributors, but retained the option of refiling it within a year.
The council's 8-0 vote followed the recommendation of its lawyer, who said the litigation appeared to be an uphill battle.
Cincinnati was among about 30 cities and counties nationwide in recent years that had sued the gun industry, seeking to recover costs of responding to crimes committed with firearms.
The firearms industry has said it is not liable for the lawful manufacture and sale of non-defective products. A number of the lawsuits have been dismissed by courts.
Cincinnati's lawsuit, filed in 1999, was rejected by an Ohio appeals court in 2000. The state Supreme Court reinstated it in 2002."
Right before the site got /.'d he added a paypal donation thing to the top. For anyone that can't see the page anymore, the paypal address is jordaj@rpi.edu. The last time I saw the page there were 1200+ users online. If we all donate $10 that covers what he owes and he can use anything leftover to fight back against the RIAA. We all need to take some action against the RIAA before this gets even worse. Where this guy has already been in court with the RIAA and his lawyers are familiar with them, we could get him to take some kind of action against them with all of us supporting. I dunno, I'm not familiar with the legal process or how our laws work, but I know taking $12,000 from a poor college student for downloading a few mp3s is not justified.