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RIAA Grabs Student's Life's Savings
An anonymous reader writes "ABCNews is reporting on a 19-year-old college student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He created a site named ChewPlastic.com where students could search for files on the university network. Mind you, this is not a music file sharing software, this is just a search engine. Presumably, the search engine was being used to search for music files as well. The folks over at the RIAA did not take too kindly to the idea, and sued the student. He settled but denies any wrongdoing. What was settlement, you ask? His life's savings."
Google cache of chewplastic.com.
The original domain is down, and he's got a Paypal link on his page to help him recover his 12 grand.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Pearl Jam walked away from Epic records (see here). I submitted it here, but it was rejected. And here I was thinking that /. would appreciate that a major act was walking away from its label to distribute its music directly to their fans.
I guess since it didn't contain an anti-MS, pro-Linux slant, its not newsworthy.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Not in a civil case. That only happens in criminal cases.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
No you don't. You get a free five dollar credit IF you sign up and IF you put $100 in your account and IF you authorize PayPal to drop that $100 in a money market account that may lose value. And PayPal only tells you about the next step in the process after you complete the previous step--so each time you think "I'll finally get my five bucks!"
No thank you.
Clearly too many posters don't get to the heart of the matter, which I thought was transparent. Evidently not.
The goal of the RIAA is to scare people with examples to prevent the activity. It would hardly be an example if their target was a struggle, wouldn't it? They've already tried to scare the downloaders of songs. Now they are moving up the chain to those that setup the tools in their environment. If this doesn't work, they may consider a move up the chain again and sue school administration. The theory would be that school administration would put pressure on the students (various ways academic institutes can apply) to stop their activities. Perhaps deploy a strategy/policy for computer network usage to restrict it (ie IT department of the school). But this is probably an option that they wouldn't want to take since conflicts between schools and students usually end up ugly. But it would allow the RIAA to push their agenda without getting their hands too dirty, letting the schools do the dirty work for them.
"To fight the bugs, one must first understand the bugs." - StarShip Troopers
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp