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RIAA Apologizes for Incorrect Infringement Notice
theradixhunter writes "News.com is reporting that the RIAA has apologized to the Pennsylvania State University for sending a threatening letter making an incorrect allegations of copyright violations. It appears that the automated system that the RIAA uses picked the term "Usher" and the extenstion ".mp3" on an FTP site hosting the work of Professor Emeritus Peter Usher and falsely assumed that the files were songs by the musician Usher. The university accepted the apology saying "that this was an honest mistake by the recording industry" and Spokesman Tysen Kendig said Penn State "remains committed to working closely with the RIAA"."
Once again, I feel it's appropriate to slam MediaForce and their gang of sleazebag nerds that write the software that does this.
For shame....
Why should the RIAA check their "sources"? They're making a lot of money/press by blackmail and coercion.
Just a matter of time before they pick on the wrong people.
It would be interesting to see how many time the RIAA systems access servers with restricted use policies: "Ve haf found der pirate!!!!" "No, you've trespassed on the private server of esquires Anastacia Lopez and Santana Aguilera of the law firm that prosecuted the tobacco settlement. Pay up."
Fact - My first name is Rock (R - o - c - k)(Yes that's what my parents choose)
Fact - I'm in the Radio business
Fact - I have lots of Mp3's named rockxx.mp3 on my computers (where xx is a number)
I can't imagine the drool that would be produced by the RIAA if they were to ever come across my hard drive. I'm sure they would think "Pay-Dirt!!" When in actuality it's just another voice in the crowded radio dial.
I'll have to warn my good buddy John L. Zeppelin to be on the lookout for the RIAA piranha. (His real name too!)
And it would also appear that simply using a phony filename extension will be enough to fool the "automated system." From now on, I and all my partners in tune trading criminal activities will use .RIAA to denote classic .mp3, and .MPAA instead of .mpg or .mpeg, but only on even numbered days. Other times we'll switch 'em around. That oughta hold 'em off for a while.
Oops! Did I just divulge a circumvention technique? Will I be liable for prosecution under DMCA or US-PATRIOT or some other silly-ass law?
.nosig
is there any database of RIAA server IP's or their minions? Just on general principles I would like to block them all. Their actions are damn close to illegal search and seizure, at least IMHO.
Yea, it's real easy to make false and unsubstantiatable allegations first, then apologize if someone their false when someone provides proof. That's alot easier and cheaper than actually verifying the validity of the accusation first. The RIAA doesn't give a flying fuck that this costs individuals and universities thousands of dollars. Not their concern -- after all, in the US, you're free to make false and ludicrous accusations against anyone without any proof.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This gives me a great idea. Just like RIAA/MPAA is flooding p2p networks with fake files we could flood their search methods with fake files.
If every internet user with a webpage hosted 2-3 blank mp3 files with names like "BritneySpears-Baby.mp3", etc... The time it would take RIAA/MPAA to find all of them and verify them as blank would flood their capabilities.
Where the Music Matters
The direct connect hub that a student ran here at Cal Poly in California raised its head too high and got cut off -- the student got a judicial review and ran off with his tail between his legs.
Even my Residential Advisor got nailed for a movie. People get their ports shut off and get called in by the dozens. My friend who works in the Residential Network offices, in addition to telling us what they're cracking down on, told me that they get a good deal of letters from the MPAA and the RIAA, demanding specific students knock it off: under the DMCA, our school acts as an ISP, and can be held accountable. It hasn't really deterred anyone, and there haven't been any criminal charges, but students get nailed all the time.
Except those who still know how to lie low and run Hotline servers.
this is a bit of good reading from Steve Albini. If you don't know who he is, well, he has been a figure on the indoe music seen from bands like Big Black and Shellac. He has engineered albums from Nirvana as well. His production style is often imitated. In short, he's the shit. Go here to learn something
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Penn State is working closely with the RIAA because Barry Robinson a lawyer for the RIAA is on the Board of Trustees so instead of representing the interests of the university and protecting the students, Penn State president Grahm Spanier has chosen to let a trustee influence university policy for the sake of the crooked organization he works for. I should post this AC but I really dont give an fsck. Penn State is dedicated to building unnecessary buildings while removing as much parking as possible. I now have to walk 20 mins from a staff parking lot to work so fire me before I die of heat stroke this summer ;)
Notice the Prof is now looking into the excess dammage by the DMCA and is contacting Congress? We need more of these to hit Congress.
The truth shall set you free!
Kind of reminds me when I was in high school. I had an mp3 of "Hack the Planet" (from H2K) on my network drive, and the school deleted it, locked my network drive, and called me to the office for having "illegal mp3's". I never got an apology though...
Hogwash. Making copies of anyone's copyrighted materials is permitted by US law. Distributing those copies is another matter entirely. I propose they rename it to copyanddistributeright.
Sorry I forgot the block in the closing blockquote.
I can understand this for a startup company, as long as the company quickly moves to start covering the costs of its labor. But in the case of a wealthy organization, this means that the wealthy organization just *chooses* not to give economic justice. More for me, nothing for you.
I have been seeing this more and more, and it is part of what ails America. It comes from the move to give more to the investors, and comes from the blinds that are provided by corporate coverage, in which the investors can't see the plight of their workers.
But let me point out the results of economic injustice: if there is economic injustice, then the victim's investments remain unpaid, and in that case, it does not pay for the victim to invest!
In the case of inventors who can't afford to patent and defend their inventions, because the patent system only benefits wealthy corporations, the proper response is to not devote effort to inventing.
In the case where your compensation is not based upon justice, it does not pay to invest in an education that will make you a more valuable employee.
In the case where businesses are taxed to death, so that other businesses can recieve lucrative government contracts, it does not pay to start a business and help the economy: it pays to work your own garden instead.
In the case where individuals are taxed to death, to pay for more tax collectors, the farmer's strategy doesn't pay -- only the highway robber's strategy pays. If you want to see what this is like, look at Congo/Zaire.
If you think it is getting bad, and the problem is the government, then tell the government. If you don't think they'll listen, then it's better to leave, and find a better place.
Here's How.
If you think it is getting bad, and the problem is the people (yeah, they're all good people, they just, well, you can depend on them to do really evil things), then it's doubly important to find a better group of people.
Here's a hint.
If worst comes to worst, duck, cover the ones you love as well as possible, stay out of the way of wars as much as possible, and try to live with as much justice and charity as possible.
But the bible is absolutely right: when we choose to withhold a man's wages, we commit violence. When we choose economic theft as a regular diet, we commit murder. And we recreate our world to become a horror. Our spiritual failings definitely bring physical problems and death.
Just my two cents. That's all.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Here's another fun twist: Its legal to "quote" music, up to 30 seconds of it. So imagine zillions of files on the net with suggestive names that actually contain a small sample of an appropriate tune... There'd be enough of these misidentification screwups to, perhaps, make for a good class action suit against the RIAA.
Don't those DMCA threaten & harass letters almost always include a statement along the lines of: "I hereby swear, under penalty of PERJURY, than I am the copyright holder or the legal representative therof."???
Said statement was obviously NOT true in this case, and I don't think those letters include a disclamier like: "unless I get CAUGHT lieing, and apologize afterward".
So do those "swear under penalty of perjury" clauses have any real legal validity? If so, isn't it appropiate for some RIAA/Metallica drones to be shareing bunkspace with Charlie Manson in the very near future? After all, when a regular citizen does it, perjury is a pretty BIG deal. Why should the RIAA/Metallica enjoy any immunity?
Or are those lines not, in any way, legally binding? If that's the case, why include them at all?
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
While an FTP site with anonymous access is much less private than a phone conversation or an individuals car or home, does this start to push into the realm of search warrants?
There is certainly a fuzzy area as to whether the public FTP site "consents" to entry and search in the same way a suspect can consent to letting authorites search his home or whatever.
However, if that consent has not been granted, I would think it could be a very swift and definite supreme court decision that information gleaned by a global search, without consent of the owner of said system, would not be permissable evidence for legal action.
As an analogy, if the police have a warrant to search through business papers at your residence, and they find a stash of herion in the cabinet under the sink, they cannot try you for possession -- there is no reason to believe you would keep business papers under the sink, so the authorities were making an illegal search when they found the evidence.
IANAL, but I assume hiring a private detective to break and enter to discover evidence also renders said evidence unpermissable. Having someone who is not working as an authority of the law (ie, RIAA) making the illegal search does not render the evidence permissable.
If the FTP banner contains text indicating that the site is to be used for only certain purposes and that using the site indicates agreement to the terms, wouldnt this be illegal search and seizure?
I take issue with that. As the Director of Technology Affairs for Penn State's Undergraduate Student Government, I'd just like to say that Penn State is not spineless in the slightest. However, they only show this amazing amount of courage when slapping around students. As you may have noticed in all sorts of press (NYTimes, USA Today, others...), Penn State recently nailed a bunch of students with violations of the DMCA. What they didn't tell you (thank you, press) was that Penn State blatantly violated its own policy of not monitoring student network activity. I know what you're thinking...but they could be sued if they didn't comply, right? Nope. Penn State INITIATED the investigation. They didn't get any kind of takedown notice. Fortunately, a student body of 40,000 does give us SOME pull in the student government. One of the people in Judicial Affairs was quoted in the school newspaper as saying that they only gave them a slap on the wrist because they wanted to avoid a lawsuit...which any student would have been perfectly justified in filing. Unfortunately, since we're poor college students, it's too damn easy to kick us around.
-Mike-
It's still working without the "www."
Nothing to see here; Move along.
*Many people have dogs who do not have families and there are many gay men who get married.
This information brought to you by a bored pedant
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I think there is a correct assumption that what is public is public - otherwise the whole internet breaks down. However,
I wonder if a "robots.txt" file is a "technological measure to effectively control access to a copyrighted work", and a RIAA spider that spiders a server with such a file violates the DMCA.
Stephan
I have a mind to start a new sourceforge project - a bot that creates a tar-pit website to confuse this kind of bot.
It would grab the album chart from FreeDB and then make a pseudo random listing of 20 or so artists. Clicking on an artist's name would reveal the names of the albums, and clicking on the album name would reveal links to song downloads as MP3s.
Each page would have a 10 second delay on loading, and each MP3 download (which would be white noise) would be downloaed at about 10 bits per second. The idea would be to tie-up as many threads on thhe RIAA servers for as long as possible.
Next, the system would run on a wildcarded domain name so that it would look to the RIAAbot as if it were a large number of sites. Each of these sites would link to each other creating a vast low bandwidth tarpit.
How about that then?
That's the point of those lines: you aren't supposed to send out harassment letters unless you are sure that you are right, to prevent things like this.
by mistakenly planting bogus files with the same name that they don't own. If RIAA mistakes someone else's file as one of their copyrighted ones (and we see how easy that was to do) they could be interfering with the distribution of someone else's property. That's in the same category as spamming, or worse. I hope there would be a way for the victim to get legal compensation ... seems like just a matter of time before it happens.
All sigs should be as funny as possible, but no funnier.
Sorry about the hyperbole, but you get the idea.
So if everyone were to just ramble on into a microphone about their favorite (or despised) artist, and then name it accordingly (eminem.mp3, madonna.mp3) and share it, the RIAA would have to keep paying lawyers for every warning they issue. The costs add up.