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MIT, Boston College Refuse DMCA Subpoenas
phreakmonkey writes "Here's an interesting change of pace- According to today's Boston Globe, MIT and Boston College have both refused to turn over the identities of students to the RIAA under subpoenas. Citing failure of compliance with court rules and student privacy concerns, both colleges have refused to give out the names, addresses, or phone numbers of students based on their Kazaa screen names and IP addresses. I wonder how long the schools will be able to keep the RIAA's pack of lawyers at bay..."
More than simply the temporary blockade for the army of RIAA lawyers which that organization will refer to them as, these new subpoena challenges will hopefully catalyze a new set of appeals that finally lead to some kind of constitutionality ruling, by the Supreme court, about the controversial section of the DMCA which allows these privacy infringements, and consequently, about the heavily-industry-influenced DMCA as a whole...
If there's one thing I can say about the colleges who did this, it's that I have respect for them. By not backing down and not giving into the demands of coporate america, they are setting a precedent for others, and are showing that we are not all going to bow to them. Respect.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
I'd be impressed if Harvard did it... I'm fairly certain that they have enough lawyers to defend against the likes of the RIAA :)
Imagine the turmoil to a school administrator, knowing their students' life savings are about to get sucked up by the RIAA for sharing a few songs.
I hope more colleges follow their lead.
The BC guy even said that once the subpoena was filed 'correctly' they would comply (not they have a choice, of course). But this is more of a procedural issue then anything else. Of course, it shows that they are not interested in simply handing over names and IP address without actually needing too.
I wish my school was more interested in protecting student rights. The University "Police" gladly assisted in a 'raid' on a couple student's dorm rooms, after checking their class schedule to see when they had class, and thus out of the room (which is a pretty big assumption, given the propensity to skip class around here... but it turned out to be true)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Would be sweet if the nerds down there would unleash some futuristic greedy-bastard-ass-kicking robots as a preemptive strike ;)
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
In what I've read so far, the two Boston colleges refused the subpoenas based on (1) they were filed in a Washington DC court and served in Boston's district, and (2) the colleges were not given sufficient time to prepare the information before the stated due dates. Essentially, in order to comply with the suits, they would violate their own respective privacy policies. However, there was nothing stated that the respective colleges would not comply once the suits are resubmitted according to their guidelines...
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
Talk about burying the lede. The Boston Globe buried the most important issue in the last paragraph:
It is this issue that might make a difference. If the provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act for issuing subpoenas without judicial action is ruled unconstitutional, and the ruling is upheld, then the efforts of the RIAA will be stopped in their tracks until the law is rewritten.
The rest of the university objections amount to no more than a short-term fight over notice and venue:
Even if MIT is right, these are problems the RIAA can easily remedy. If the RIAA has to file the actions locally, instead of filing them all in Washington, D.C., it will. If the RIAA has to provide more time for notice, it will. Neither of these issues will halt the onslaught for long.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Having famous, reputable organizations defying the RIAA is very important, because it lends credibility to the fight against the music industry, which is crucial at this point.
Despite all this battling against the RIAA's lawsuits, though, it seems to me that the real issue here (which isn't being addressed) is not file sharing but everything the RIAA stands for and represents. Why isn't anyone attacking their price-fixing and essential monopoly of the industry? I know there was a lawsuit against them for the price-fixing, I believe, but I for one am not seeing any changes.
Obviously, I'm not the most informed on the details of the whole issue, but is it possible that the RIAA's big scare tactics and legal onslaught against file sharers is just to take peoples' eyes off of the real problem?
Education institutions, on the other hand, have previously existing restrictions on handling and protecting student records as defined by FERPA. As the article states, MIT expresses willingness to comply with properly issued subpoenas. Essentially, these institutions are asking the courts to establish which law has primacy, FERPA or DMCA, because the current situation potentially leaves them open to lawsuits brought by students over violation of privacy as outlined in FERPA if they comply with the DMCA-based information requests.
__
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
More than simply the temporary blockade for the army of RIAA lawyers which that organization will refer to them as
Considering MIT has a 5 billion dollar endowment, I doubt very much that the RIAA will be able to outspend them. Besides which, after a while you start getting diminishing returns when hiring lawyers; once you have a large legal team working fulltime on a case, throwing money at them doesn't do anything.
It's not OK to share Metallica tunes! Have you heard their latest album? It's crap, and it's a waste of valuble bandwidth.
I bet making shitty music is their new plan to stop people from sharing it. They should should send this idea over to the patent department, I'm sure it would go right through.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
...I must say your argument is utter hogwash. It is merely the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy" strawman dressed up in different clothes.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (copyright infringement), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their a reasonable expectation of privacy when transmitting your IP address to millions of other users when using Kaazaa? Hardly.
How is it privacy infringement? You're doing something illegal (conducting illegal business on the telephone), you are then caught, and you are then identified. Is their [sic] a reasonable expectation of privacy when you are talking on the telephone on a switchboard of millions of other citizens while talking? Hardly.
One reasonably expects one's communications to be private, whether it is by mail, telephone, or internet. Even large private meetings (private business teleconferences, etc.) have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The internet is really no different, and were lawmakers and the law at all sane ISPs would have the same common carrier status afforded the Bells.
You want to arrest someone for doing something illegal on the internet? Fine. Get your subpeana, go through the standard wiretapping process (complete with court order, etc.) and then invade someone's privacy as part of an official investigation by law enforcement who are held accountable to the public.
Do not allow private corporations and their lawyers to simply invade one's electronic home and communications at will, bypassing the entire intent and letter of the reasonable search and seizure clause of the constitution, and accountable only to their own shareholders. Or, if you do advocate such obscenely undemocratic violations of people's basic civil rights to due process and privacy, do not expect any legitimacy or sympathy from the rest of us, regardless of how despicable the actions were of those you are trampling over the constitution to get.
Next you'll be arguing the police should put cameras in our homes or listen in on every phone call, simply because somewhere out there there is a dirty old man molesting a child or someone contracting a murder for hire.
"Do it for the children! Stop Crime!"
What you suggest is the digital equivelent of a camera in every home and a wiretap on every phone, and it has no place whatsoever in a free society irrespective of what crimes a few idiots (or a billion idiots) may be committing.
Constitutional safeguards and legal procedure is there for a very important reason: to afford all of us protections regardless of our guilt or innocence. A damn good thing, too, as with the current laws on the books every single one of us is guilty of breaking some law, somewhere, nearly each and every day we get out of bed. Want private thugs in pin stripe suits enforcing all those laws against you, and breaking down your door to do so?
No?
Then stop advocating unconstitutional and draconian behavior, merely because the target of your particular ire threatens your outdated business models, or offends your notions of right and wrong. Because I guarantee you, somewhere, sometimes, you are offending someone else's notion of right and wrong, and once you open up that door you too will be on the wrong end of someone else's personal or business "enforcement action," and civil government accountable to the people will have been replaced by corporate, plutocratic fascism accountable to only a few CEOs and shareholders as they trample over the rest of us.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Ever hear of a wonderful thing called Due Process. Well, it's all going out the window now. Unless you are rich enough to hire some good lawyers you no longer have the right to Due Process.
If somebody believes they have evidence of criminal behavior they should have to take it to a Court of Law which would then issue a subpeona or warrent. But in our New World Order big corporations merely have to finger you and you are presumed guilty. So lovely.
So what about the rest of reality?
.torrent file out and dealt with the central tracker issue, finding people becomes that much harder... Is the person unknowingly distributing the information, or do they do it on purpose... It puts an interesting twist on the questions. It's like in the article where they traced a IP to a room, but they don't know which machine was using it, so Oooops! my hard drive had a catastrophic failure that involved my trading it with a friend and losing it somewhere... Now who do you sue?
I'm sure that most people want to know what is happening with respect to the DMCA and the RIAA being annoying to all of us... But what is the RIAA or equivalents doing in the rest of the world along the same vein? I live in Canada and use random P2P utilities often. What are they going to try up here?
And that leads to another issue, if they don't bother people in other countries, what happens when people figure out how to use locations in other countries to hide their actions? Hackers do it, I've seen that plenty, what happens when the P2P downloaders figure out how to do it and automate it. Or create zombie programs that basically turn any infected computer into a P2P forwarder, like the spam virii that are out there these days?
And then there will be the day when something like waste or freenet will be common... what do they do then? I may chose to let the software and network store a certain amount of information on my system, but I don't know what is in there, and cannot find out. Will I still be liable?
This random collection of (possibly badly placed) lawsuits will definatly lead to people just finding a way to stop the lawsuits. Lawsuits are annoying, and people find ways to avoid things that annoy them.
As I said about BT, if someone started to get a good setup that used Freenet to get the
Anyway, just my thoughts...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
but the real issue is neither P2P nor the the RIAA's price-fixing and other disreputable goings-on.
The real issue, why BC and MIT said "Hey, wait a minute!" is Internet privacy. I agree with the previous poster who gave the nice example of the telephone service -- we expect (and should, given the tenets of the US) an assumed privacy in our communications. Once reasonable evidence is brought forth, conforming to the search and seizure laws, then communication can be monitored, and after that, the law can be brought down on the offender.
It seems to me that the RIAA is trying (and often succeeding) in skipping a step -- that of monitoring after evidence is brought forth (a la a search warrant). They're monitoring and then getting the names to prosecute.
Then again, I'm going off hearsay I read here.
(Just for the sake ot argument, although I'm not arguing with you)
It didn't say downloading with the intent to share. It said downloading.
Define "distributing"?
Matthew Oppenheim is the lead lawyer for the RIAA.
Jonathan Lamy is another legal lackey.
Amy Weiss is head of the RIAA Dis-Information Ministry.
If you want to contact the RIAA here is their phone number and address:
RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOC OF AMERICA
1330 CONNECTICUT AVENUE NW SUITE 300
WASHINGTON, DC 20036
US
Phone number is 202-775-0101 (Apparently this number was copywrighted by an individual who now wants to sue the RIAA for using it)
Here is the board of directors for the RIAA (from www.boycott-riaa.com):
I wanted to make sure everyone understands who is behind the decisions the the RIAA makes. If it is going after users, or going after software companies etc. These are the people who make those decisions. Remember when you buy recordings from the RIAA members you are helping to finance their assault on the copyright laws of this country, on the people who love music, and yourself.
Bill Evans
Roger Ames, Warner Music Group
Michele Anthony, Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
Val Azzoli, The Atlantic Group
Jose Behar, Univision Music Group
Bob Cavallo, Buena Vista Music Group
Ronnie Dashev, Maverick Recording Company
Clive Davis, RCA Music Group
Tracey Edmonds, Edmonds Record Group
Dick Griffey, Solar Records/J.Hines Co.
Zach Horowitz, Universal Music Group
Don Ienner, Sony Music U.S.
David Johnson, Warner Music Group
Lawrence Kenswil, Universal Music Group
Mel Lewinter, Universal Music Group
Alain Levy, EMI Recorded Music
Roy Lott, Virgin Records
David Munns, EMI Recorded Music Worldwide
Antonio Reid, Arista Records Inc.
Sylvia Rhone, Elektra Entertainment Group
Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, BMG Entertainment
Tom Silverman, Tommy Boy Music
Andy Slater, Capitol Records
Thomas Stein, BMG Entertainment
Tom Tyrrell, Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.
This list is directly from the RIAA website.
lawmakers who do the RIAA's bidding:
Rep. Robert C. Scott
Rep. Adam B.Schiff
Rep. Bob Goodlatte
Rep. Darrell Issa
Rep. Ed Bryant
Rep. Elton Gallegly
Rep. Henry Hyde
Rep. Howard Coble
Rep. Howard L Berman
Rep. James Sensenbrenner
Rep. John Conyers, Jr
Rep. Lamar Smith
Rep. Lindsey O. Graham
Rep. Melissa Hart
Rep. Ric Keller
Rep. Robert Wexler
Rep. William L. Jenkins
Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Sen. Fritz Hollings
Sen. Gordon Smith
Sen. Joseph Biden
Sen. Rick Santorurn
Sensenbrenner,(head of the copyright committee) took an RIAA funded 18,000 trip in Jan of 2003 to Taiwan and Thailand to warn them about copyright. This is Illegal. Learn more about it and write your represenatives requesting an ethics investigation here(webcasters alliance):
http://216.116.171.66/zzformpage.asp
The RIAA is DIRTY! Use the system to beat them at their own game. We out number them about 1,000,000 to 1. Never forget that, write congress today.
(Sorry for the double post, keep forgetting to change the formating.
You don't have to worry about DMCA-style laws up here. Check out here for why. Basically, we have bill C-6 (The Privacy Act) and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to protect us. To boil it down, when the last stages of these laws come in to effect in jan2004, any non-journalistic/artistic business has to have a court order signed by a judge (not just a stamp from a clerk) to release any information about an identifiable person. So if an (RI|MP)AA-type organization sends just a subpoena to your ISP, your ISP is then supposed to tell them to go screw themselves. Gotta love it!
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
My evidence:
1) Article title: "BC, MIT decline to name students in music-use case", as opposed to "music-piracy" or "song-stealing" case. OR
2) "The recording industry's strategy -- pursuing both high-profile users with hundreds of megabytes of music as well as small-time downloaders -- is intended as a wake-up call to Internet music enthusiasts like Alexa Bedell-Healey - as opposed to "illegal file-swappers" or "song-traders"
Any article can be written to have a slightly positive or negative tone while still remaining "truthful" to the facts of the story. The name of the game to write more "positive" sounding articles like this one that portray the RIAA in a slightly negative light.
blue
In fact, MIT's lawyers determined that what the RIAA wanted them to do was illegal, and if there's anything MIT doesn't want, it's lawsuits from the families of students. In order to avoid liability, MIT in fact has to resist the subpoena as much as possible (I'd actually be interested to know if any Northeastern studetns and families are considering suing Northeastern over complying with subpoenas there).
MIT may be willing to comply with a proper subpoena (and, in fact, pretty much has to agree to comply with a truly proper one), but this could be the beginning of a long process. First, the subpoena has to be filed in a court that has jurisdiction over MIT; then they has to be given sufficient time to obey the law regarding informing the students. But it is also possible that subpoenas filed without a judge's approval (which may be done under the DMCA) may be unconstitutional, which is working its way up the court system.
By the time a subpoena reaches MIT which they can follow without being liable to suit by students' families, these students may well no longer be students, and the IP addresses may no longer be theirs, and the records may have been routinely purged.
For that matter, by now the students (who have seen their pseudonyms in the local paper and on slashdot), may have gotten different KaZaa names and IPs, such that when the RIAA gets the proper paperwork through, the address will be registered to one Jack Florey, resident of fifth east, who was just here but left down the stairwell at the other end of the hall... and, of course, the current records will be long gone, per institute policies, as required by federal law.
Ownership of culture. That's what it boils down to. American culture is owned by corps. It's taken to the extreme. Hell you can't even sing "Happy Birthday" to someone at work unless you pay the RIAA a royalty.
A people's culture is a lot like food and water. And there's a huge cartel that owns most of American culture. And they keep changing the laws, so they will keep owning it forever.
This is wrong.