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."

Comments

Slip of the CNN anchor's words...

[moogla]

So what did the government... I mean the RIAA [claim you did]

Sounds like something a slashbot^H^H^H^dotter would say about them. I agree with the goatse man post a few comments up.

Re:As we have known all along

[Keighvin]

Such threats are called baratry, and as has featured prominently on /. serveral times it is now a viable economic model for some companies (especially those wielding unenforceable patents).

The most disturbing issue about the RIAA's work to shut people down, is that they're going after those who do little economic harm in order to frighten their uninvolved or only marginally involved (in the file trading scene) supporters into compliance somehow. Why do you want to threaten your customers?

My fix :-)

[A nonymous Coward]

I'd like to see the legal system set up so that neither party can spend more than the other, with some minimum allowance. For instance, if the RIAA wants to sue a student, and the student doesn't want to spend more than $100, the RIAA can't spend more than that, plus some basic allowance, say $1000. If the RIAA wants to spend more, they have to get the student's permission to loan him the money, and if they lose, they don't get the money back.

Apply it to governments too, so a state can't send in the well paid DA and his staff to prosecute some illiterate scum bag for a capital offense, while the public defender is only budgeted for one hour of time.

And yes, I do know about snowballs and hell.

Re:My fix :-)

[realdpk]

How about this? If you prevail in a suit against you, you win the amount sued for! ;)

So the RIAA comes after you for billions like they did here (IIRC?), you have a huge incentive to fight back and get justice. Then again, the RIAA wouldn't be suing folks for billions if they had that much to lose.

Oops...

[TubeSteak]

A. JORDAN: We didn't have any choice. The RIAA had a deadline. What they didn't tell the press, when they first hit Jesse with the papers, is while they were serving the papers on him, they also had a letter that they didn't give to the press and they told us that, oh, that was supposed to be the cover letter to the papers that he received, gee, we'll get it to right away. It was an offer to settle.

that's a mighty convienent mistake considering the media attention this has gotten.

I'd have to agree with the father, this was just a big PR trick for the RIAA and its a shame they aren't suing someone with the $$$$ to fight back.

Re:Guilty!!

[Dylan Zimmerman]

Really, a more applicable analogy would be "if people use Google to find child porn, is it Google's fault?"

In 2000, the RIAA claimed that sales dropped 4.1%. Meanwhile, they cut their album inventory by about 25%. They are making more money per release in the past three years than in the history of CDs.

How, exactly, have the RIAA stolen music? If they have, then that's quite interesting, but if you're just talking about paying the artists next-to-nothing, then that's not stealing. The artists signed the contracts. If they didn't hire all sorts of lawyers to go over them and make sure that there weren't loopholes, then that's their problem.

I actually met a contract lawyer once. He said that out of all of the recording industry contracts that he had reviewed, not one had been payed correctly. The artists were almost always owed significantly more than they had been payed.

Re:Summary

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

And twice the interviewer thought the student was being sued by a government body. Has the RIAA so ingrained themselves in the collective unconscious that reporters now think them part of the US govt?

Cover Your Assets

[jhines0042]

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Re:As we have known all along

[DunbarTheInept]

Let's call a spade a spade. It's stealing. We all do it, but it's stealing.

It is not stealing. Copyright infringement is NOT STEALING. It is a crime. It is wrong. But it is a different kind of crime from stealing. Calling it stealing is like charging and assailant with murder when nobody actually died from the event in question.