Slashdot Mirror


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."

5 of 1,228 comments (clear)

  1. SCO by foo(foo(foo(bar))) · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    and in other news, SCO is sueing RIAA for eating into the profits they were going to get by selling a unix liscense to this site.

  2. Re:RIAA Protest? by doppleganger871 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Being born and raised in NJ (living in upstate NY now), I have seen how all the new immigrants to NJ have ruined the state. Seems that the majority of NJ residents now just roll over and let the place turn into a socialist-type state. Can't do anything there anymore without a permit. Shit, can barely own a gun, and you sure as hell can't keep it on you.

    Even a Pellet Air Pistol, which I can buy in Wal-Mart up here, could get you arrested for having it in your posession in NJ. If that's not early-nazi germany, i dont know what is...

  3. Re:RIAA Protest? by FooGoo · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I agree. Then I made the mistake of moving to cali. You haven't seen socialism until you lived here.

    --
    People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
  4. Re:I could never settle. by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    That was almost reality here in California. A law firm called the Trevor Law Group was shaking down small businesses to settle out of court on asinine technical violations (complete bullshit stuff like abbreviating something that's supposed to be spelled out in a newspaper ad). The Trevor folks, unable to find any actual complainants for such silly things, set up fake charities to enter into the "complainant" line on the forms. It was legal terrorism, pure and simple. They even singled out businesses owned by legal immigrants who spoke poor English or did not fully understand their right, so they're a bunch of racist cockgobblers as well.

    A local radio show took up the cause, held protests outside the Trevor LG offices and hammered at local politicians on the air, but things are still up in the air. The California State Bar can't even decide if these Trevor LG assholes should face disbarment. Nuisance suits, extortions, fraudulent charities, clear patterns of racist intimidation and the Bar and the State Attorney General are sitting around all like, "Oh, gee, we can't just rush into this, gosh, we have to analyze this, ummmm, huminahuminahumina..." and so on. There might even be a change to the law that will allow such extortion lawsuits EASIER to file. This is what happens when your state is run by evil, corrupt hippies who no longer possess functioning brain cells

    Anyway, one woman called into the radio show, and said that at an early meeting amongst all these target small business owners (they formed a group to fight back, and they are the ones who initially informed the radio show), there were some who were seriously advocating hiring assassins of some sort to take out these scumbag lawyers. That's how desperate and frustrated some of these folks felt. They were faced by an unstoppable (by conventional means) system run by the lawyers and for the lawyers.

    It's sad, but I don't think the pendulum is going to start to tilt the other way until some poor sap who lost the farm because he forgot to stamp a barcode on his apple crates one day walks into the law firm that victimized him and sets off the 100 pounds of explosive strapped to his body.

    --
    --- Ban humanity.
  5. repost... by Dominic465 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    (1) Software project management techniques seem to vary by discipline. Some groups follow the traditional âoewaterfallâ(TM) model others follow Rapid Programming models â" Do you try to follow a particular style?

    (2) Classic project management spends a lot of time accounting for resources. I can imagine that an open source project has people signing-on and dropping off. How did you keep assignments & scheduling under control?

    (3) Have you come up with any tips or tricks that work for managing your project that might be useful to other software development Project Managers?