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."
I am assuming the name for this site is derived from the only remaining use for CDs?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
I guess the "and your firstborn" clause of the settlement wasn't made public.
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.
what is it with government and big business.. they crap on us and we allow it. They lie to us and we allow it. We elect them.. we need to change things. If you don't vote don't bitch! ROCK THE VOTE.
Now we know where all the ex-KGB agents went. They now work for the RIAA. It's a sad time when your afraid to develop something because it 'MIGHT' be used for illegal things. Bastards!
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
Anybody else find something wrong with that quote? His father is quite right -- by allowing him to deny all charges, they're basically saying he didn't do anything wrong...yet they take his $12,000.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
The news report goes on to state that the RIAA is now prowd owners of an old bike, a Pentium II numerous games, a pair of worn-out jeans and a large untidy pile of magazines.
If you could please send the proper paper work we can get started ASAP. The bully only stays a bully so long, then someone comes along and beats the ever living shit out of that bully and makes them realize that they aren't allowed to be a bully any longer.
Bring it, I'm tired of you picking on all my peers and I'm ready to kick your ass. Remember when you take me to court, IT ALL COMES ON THE TABLE, and I'll subpoena everything!!!
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Suing Yahoo because someone found copyright material on an unauthorized page? GASP!
Won't happen. Google and Yahoo are companies that can afford lawyers. They can afford litigation costs, whereas the poor college student can't. Him only giving over his life savings was probally a bargin for his point of view, since he didn't have to pay a lawyer to sit though an actual trial.
Remember, the wolves go for the weak caribu first. When they go for the strong ones, they have to spend a lot of energy running it down, and it isn't worth it to them.
So this kid gets sued by the RIAA for writing a generic search engine, is forced to settle for $12,000 (his entire life savings), and his only real shot at recouping all his settlement money is flushed down the toilet by a massive denial of service attack "unwittingly" perpetrated by Slashdot?
:(
This world is a cruel, cruel place.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I'm torn between the idea of helping out this guy who got the ol' shaft, and paying off the RIAA. I'd rather donate to a legal defense fund than OK paying off the music Mafia.
My first reaction to the story was to wish someone had referred Jesse and his father to the EFF instead of letting the RIAA bully them into a settlement.
/.'ers X $1 each)
Upon futher reflection though, perhaps the Jordans have made a huge personal sacrifice as part of a very strategic move against the RIAA. IF, and it's a big if, the facts of the case do make it out to the public (i.e. that he was just making a search engine for the campus network, which has plenty of legitimate uses) this may be the match lighting the fuse of a popular boycott of the RIAA.
Maybe not, but whether the plan works or not, we should all donate a bit and help Jesse get his life savings back. (12000
~Kirk
Do you really thinkg a college student with a life savings of $12,000 could take on the RIAA and it's team of lawyers in a US court?
Seriously...
Hmm, lets see, life savings....
I'm graduating in a few weeks, here in the good old United Kingdom. My life savings....
-£12,000 student loan
-£2,500 credit card and bank overdraft
-£6,000 borrowed from parents.
£32.56 - investment account from about 20 years ago
£1.52 - current account from about 8 years ago
PIII-600, cant liquidate it cause its a tool of a trade.
come on RIAA, I've got 8,000 mp3's and a copy of "find", sue my ass so I can become bankrupt, lose all my debts, and be free with a degree!
- Do a couple of something like: dd if=/dev/zero of=LOTR.Two.Towers.Complete.dvdrip.divx.avi
- Make a webpage with links to your fake warez and post it to search engines.
- Repeat the previous with different variations
- Wait for your ISP or the RIAA to contact you.
- Reply with a polite and legally correct letter asking for proof that you have infringed on someones copyright... This letter could be prepared by someone from the filesharing community who has studied law. Please someone fill in the details here
- Goto 1.
IANAL, would this work? A couple hundred thousand of these fake cases could perhaps force the RIAA to go after the real bad guys -- the ones that make pirating a business.5,000 music CDs printed at a cost of 5 bucks each, and sold for 15 dollars is 50,000 dollars profit. In record contracts, usually you have to sell millions before you see an equivalent amount of money. People pay as much for a band t-shirt.
The best act of revenge against the RIAA would be to encouraged this with every local band you know. This would choke them off. Best of all, a good band could grow the business to be really huge, they would just cut out the middle men every step of the way.
If most bands did this, the big record companies would to cut back to their own traditional staples, such as classical music. And even then...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Very true.
The RIAA apears to want to put the fear to create any sort of software than can in any way be used to diminish their earnings, no matter what else it can be used for, into all programmers worldwide.
Bullying individuals, is not only cheaper for RIAA than attacking companies with adequate legal defense capabilities, is is sending the message to programmers worldwide just as well or maybe even better, because the victims are more like you and me.
Why didn't university help him?
Were they afraid to help him, or just plain indifferent?
It would seem that morally the right thing for the university to do would be to pay for an adequate legal defense and counter attack for their student, because the student has been a very good example for the other students in the university by creating a usefull piece of software for the benefit of his fellow students, and are being victimized because of it.
Maybe the university is afraid that if they helped the student, half the other students and their parents would be begging the university to pay their legal fees, in all sorts of cases that did not merit the universities help. We will never know, unless someone gets an interview with the persons in the university administration who made the decision not to help their student.
Why should someone ask permission to search for files?! You're buying the RIAA's ridiculous argument that searching is illegal or is somehow wrong. As stated before, Windows has the built in ability to search for MP3s files on a network. Google allows people to search for MP3s. The internet is dead without the ability to search across it. I think others are right, the RIAA is attempting to shut down the internet by making searching illegal. These are just tiny steps in that direction.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The biggest problem I've had is that no candidate supports my position. If I disagree with everyone, who the FSCK should I vote for? The lesser of several evils?
I'd run myself, but even disregarding the money issues I'd have, there are minimum ages for members of Congress...
Show me a candidate who represents me, and I'll vote for him.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Everytime I hear people suggest going to concerts to support their favorite artists instead of buying CDs, I laugh. It's not the answer for every situation.
Most of my favorite music are '70s music, ranging from pop to rock to disco, and British and Australian music ranging from pop to opera. Most of the '70s music stars are retired or semi-retired and no longer tour, so the only way I can hear their music and support the artist is to buy their CDs.
For the British and Australian music, since I live in America, it's all but impossible to go to the concerts of British and Australian musicians I like. Again, the only way I can hear their music and support the artist is to buy their CDs.
The current American music, the ones I can go to their concerts, are complete and utter crap, including both the "top 5" music labels and the independents. I can't stand most of it at all, and the rest I'll tolerate at best. So what am I to do? I don't want to support the RIAA, but if I want to hear the music I like and support the artists I like, the only option I have *is* to buy CDs issued by the "top 5" music labels.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Hey if the RIAA wants MY life savings, they can have it! Here! Reaches in pocket, pulls out a quater, two dimes, a nickel and 2 pennies. 52 cents! My entire life savings! I spent the rest on overpriced CDs.
My journal has hot
>Why didn't university help him?
Or, to put it another way, "Just how much of a typical university's operating budget is comprised of funds from corperate sources?"
I wonder if universities are becoming less and less 'able' to help bite the hands that feed them. There've certainly been a number of high profile cases in the past 15 years where students have run afoul of corperate wishes, and the university has sided with the corperation out of contractual neccessity.
"Old man yells at systemd"
> The only thing I can do is stop buying music
Wrong. You can donate to the EFF. You can purchase music or otherwise support artists on CD Baby, an "online record store that sells CDs by independent musicians" (not distributors). There's pleny of things you can do to thwart the efforts of the RIAA mafia.
Very few articles make me angry. This one did.
Where the fuck have you been lately?
I dunno... $7 for a CD single with 1-3 songs (one of which might be a remix) vs. $15+ for the full album. Doesn't take Alan Greenspan to determine which is the better value there.
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!
1) this will encourage people in the future to settle if they think they'll get paid off
Even if he manages to recollect all $12,000 (which I doubt will occur), he still hasn't been "paid off". He's only not lost all of his money. He would be no better off than he was before if all of the settlement is donated back to him.
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.
I disagree. A good defense attorney would be able to get the case dismissed if the RIAA failed to go anywhere with it in a reasonable amount of time. $12,000 should have been plenty of money for what in reality is a very, very simple case with little evidence to present and so forth. This isn't Congress - the RIAA can't just indefinitely filibuster.
In the event that the court found in the kid's favor, it is likely he could have countersued, FOR FREE, if some lawyer decided they had a good chance of reaching into the RIAA's deep pockets. The lawyer's fees would come out of the RIAA's settlement.
The way they handled this is completely stupid, in my opinion.
couldn't the student have claimed that he was protected under section 512 of the dmca? seems to me (admitidely after only a very quick glance) that he qualifies for the safe harbour provision.
... how embarressing! :o)
ooh, this is my first ever post. been reading for ages and just never said anything
he would have lost in a second and probably would have ended up owing the RIAA millions. Yet this way he still gets to dny any wrongdoing and may actually manage to have some money
I'm not saying that the settlement amount is right. I'm saying that that's the only way for him to not have his life ruined utterly by the RIAA
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
No it isn't. It is a contract issue. Why doesn't anyone understand that "free speech" only applies to the government not being able to censor speech. If you write an article critical of the government and the newspaper decides to publish it, the government can not come in and tell the paper to remove it. That is free speech. If you write an artle critical of the govennment, newspaper, your dog... whatever and the newspaper refuses to publish it--thats business--you can always try to buy ad space but it is not a "free speech" issue.
If you sign a contract (legal settlement) and agree to do or not do something then it is something that you agreed to in a contract in exchange for some consideration and has nothing to do with free speech.
if he gets his money back then he is no worse off financially, and now he knows that they suck big fat major ass. Now he has a purpose in life, to screw them in the a-hole. You can't put a price on that. Plus, you can bet that the RIAA didn't come out ahead financially. They were probably spending $12,000/hour on all the lawyers to take down this one kid. But at least they got lots of positive press out of it. Nothing says "I love the community" more than stomping on the financial future of our nation's youth. I propose a national "hug the RIAA day" to show our appreciation to these fine people.
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