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RIAA Sues 12-Year Old Girl
tcp100 noted an article running at fox about
The RIAA suing a 12 Year Old girl: "'I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,' Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother."
You can tell a lot about the RIAA based on the fact that they are willing to pick on a 12 year old girl!
At least pick a fight with someone CLOSE to your own size.
That's just one more would-have-been future customer that how hates the RIAA and won't be buying their CDs when she has money.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The New York City papers are all over this -- it's on the cover of both the Post and the Daily News. They skew really sympathetically towards the girl and her family, who apparently were paying $29.95 a month for Kazaa "service", and apparently thought there were thereby legit.
This is really going to help the cause against the RIAA's draconian retributive lawsuits, as it will appeal to the hearts of the populace at large. Bad PR, RIAA, baaaaad PR.
:wq
Your grain of salt for the article:
Fox is one of the four motion picture studios in the MPAA that do not share revenue with a major U.S. record label. (The others are Disney, MGM, and Paramount.) Anything that makes the RIAA look like the bad guy benefits Fox indirectly, as every dollar spent on recorded music is a dollar not spent on a Fox movie.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If they're suing the person responsible for the internet connection, how did they come up with the girl's name?
The RIAA fully realize that they are the 'bad guy' and that they are seen as such by the eyes of the world. They have one goal in mind, and one goal only--protect their way of business and revenue stream at any cost.
I agree this looks really bad on the RIAA (I don't remember minors being targetted before), but those who think this spate of publicity is going to stop them are dead wrong. They've already shown that they're willing to go to any length to kill the file-sharing phenomenon.
I can see the outcome of this case right now: The RIAA will probably have to respond to the negative publicity and probably drop the suit against the twelve-year-old girl. The rest of the cases will go on as planned. One poor target isn't going to be the downfall of their enforcement operations.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
This is like an early Christmas present for RIAA detractors. Their lawsuit-by-scattergun approach has caught the worst target possible: A 12-year-old honor student who had no idea she was doing anything wrong ("But we were paying for it!"). What a PR nightmare.
Too bad it won't last. This particular case will get resolved as quickly and quietly as possible. You'll be able to feel the breeze from the RIAA quickly brushing it under the rug. Or, worse, if they're smart they will dismiss all charges (and give little Brianna lots of free music) in exchange for her too-cute 200-word essay on "Why Filesharing Is Wrong".
The EFF and other RIAA opponents could get heavy mileage out of this case if they tried, but I fear they just aren't coordinated enough to counter the RIAA's spin.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
They paid a $30 service fee, leading them to believe it was ok. This isn't about not knowing the law, this is about Kazaa leading them to believe that by sending them money, they'd be legal. That's the real travesty here.
The family paid the money, they just paid the wrong people.
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Something cleverThe real need here is education. I have a coworker who buys CDs every week; I let her know that the people making and selling them them would sue her, have already called her a liar and a thief, and that she is supporting an industry that treats its artists in a similar manner to her working for a year and getting paid $100 dollars.
Sadly, our conversation was not preserved for posterity, but the end result was disappointing (not that I expected a different outcome).
Her CD purchases are continuing unabated because she, like most other Americans, *don't care* about things outside their paycheck every two weeks, what's going to happen on Big Brother 12, and how to protect their children from the 'evil world' without leaving the comfort of their reclining fat-cradles.
I don't buy CDs, and haven't for almost 10 years. I can't even give price as a reason, as I could get a wide variety for $5 (due to where my wife works - a subsidiary of the Big 5). I don't trade RIAA music, because I make my own.
Read my Journal and buy my non-RIAA CD you pirating whores. Put your money where your mouth is. Or go and tell someone why they shouldn't buy CDs. Educate the mouth-breathers, because in the end, when they are forced to struggle out from their comfy chairs, cheese-fed Americans can still fight for you.
Here is a more important legal question. Can non-emancipated minors assume debt? I don't think so, this is why banks won't issue credit cards or loans to minors without an additional signature from an adult. Even if RIA successfully sues this girl, she won't have to and cannot be made to pay. The lawsuit against her is completely stupid.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Well, I am waiting for them to sue someone who really matters, like Bush or his daughters, or heck even the Pope would be entertaining
You know, someone with a billion dollars to fight back. If they are truly doing blind suing they should hit one of those sooner or later, and if they don't, that says something about this "blind suing" that they claim to be doing.
Suing blindly leads to uncomfortable lawsuits.
~ kjrose
We can blame Fox all we want but they are really the only ones who could do an article like this. Who else:
CNN - Owned by AOL Time Warner (Warner Music, etc.).
MSNBC - Joint Venture with Microsoft (not about to attacked RIAA).
ABC News - Owned by Disney (we know how they feel about Copyrights).
CBS News - Owned by Viacom (also owns MTV)
Fox, as far as I can tell, is the only one not totally in bed with the RIAA and if there is anybody who can piss them off and get away with it it is Rupert Murdoch.
In this case, the mother paid $30 to allow her daughter to download music on kazaa. Sounds like her mother is going to take the brunt of the punishment.
-dk
Today's civil tort system serves the role that the machine gun-toting Pinkerton guards served during the Gilded Age - crushing profit-threatening dissent . I don't see how anyone could think otherwise. If suing someone who is not particularly wealthy is guaranteed to bankrupt them, I simply cannot understand how anyone has any respect remaining for the civil tort system. One thing that an honorable person can do to fight this practice is, if serving on a jury in a tort case, simply refuse to vote in favor of any corporate plaintiff, no matter what the evidence, i.e. nullify. On the scientific side of the question, contribute to research on anonymous/encrypted communications that could make electronic censorship irrelevant, no matter how fanatical or well-funded the censors are.
Many of the posts so far seem to be saying that someone so young should not be responsible for these actions. I wonder what we would say if she were responsible for Blaster?
Although it *does* beg the question: if a 12 year can't assume debt, then how exactly did they get her name in the first place?
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Her mom shoulda signed up with the ISP, no? So her mom is the one paying the ISP bill.
And her mom is probably the one that registered Kazaa.
And if the RIAA claims they don't know any personal details about the people they're suing -- then how did they get the name of the girl?
Unless her mom did something weird like register a bunch of credit cards in her daughter's name in order to get credit. But, nah, no one would do that
(Just curious
The article quotes the girl's mother as saying "There's a lot of music there, but we just listen to it and let it go"
The defense arguments will be interesting when they undoubtably say the clients didn't have the technical knowledge to understand that "download and listen" really means "download and provide." It's possible that users deleting the file transfer log line in Kaaza (erm, not that I know what that is or have ever seen it before) may have assumed the file was gone too. But lo, the hundreds of songs they "just listened to" were saved and now available for mass download from their machine by the whole world.
Sheesh this is going to be fun!
Now imagine for a moment that you're the 14 year old child living in that house, with a comptuer in your room that's hooked into the home network. Or heck, even an 19 year old, on break from college. Yep, that child just might have kazaa. Oddly enough, man wealthy people don't give their kids piles of money, some of them want their children to actually earn a respectable living. Can you imagine that?
Downloading copyrighted material IS illegal, and I doubt you'll catch any higher ups doing it
I know someone who's father is the president for a very very very large IT corporation, and he's got 30gigs of mp3s available for anyone to sift through at all hours of the day. Although his father might care about this, he certainly doesn't.
Higher ups tend to have more money to spend.
Yes, but they can be just as lazy as those who aren't as rich, and it's a hell of a lot easier downloading the latest single off Kazaa than it is to walk into the store and buy the album. And did it ever occure to you that rich people might be rich because they don't like to throw money away, are thrifty, or know a good deal when they see one?
Higher ups probably don't have the knowledge to get on a P2P network, or don't care enough,
Only a fool would think someone richer is either dumber or more ignorant than they are. <sarcasm>Yeah, they probably don't even know what the internet is and still send birthday wishes via telegram.</sarcasm>
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Note that CNN.com (RIAA member Time Warner) ran the story about the 261 lawsuits in the top spot _all_ day long yesterday, despite a fairly busy news day with Dubyuh's speech and the Palestine situation.
Today, no mention of the targeted 12 year old girl on either CNN.com or ABCnews.com (RIAA member Disney).
CBSnews.com (now expanding their holdings to include Universal) is running the 12 year old girl story in the number two position today.
Freedom of the press!! Yay!!!
Rich people are cheap, if they weren't cheap, they wouldn't be rich. This is more likely how it would go.
To Mr. Billionaire,
We sincerely appreciate your continued investments in our MegaMultiNational Record Company. As an expression of our thanks we are sending you a copy of every album in our vault, once again, enjoy the music and please don't sell our stock as it will trade at $2.00 tomarrow if you do.
Sincerely,
Greedy Record Company Bastards
Well, there's at least one artist whose done filesharing. In the April 26, 2001 issue of Rolling Stone Joe Perry (guitarist for Aerosmith) says something along the lines of:s p?cf=18) but they only give you an excerpt, not the full story.
I really hope they don't shut Napster down. I've been using it to introduct my kids to rare old stuff that you can't find anywhere else.
I looked up the story online (http://www.rollingstone.com/features/cs867main.a
So if I photocopy a book in its entirety and start giving out copies, does that make it OK?
Yes. Provided that book was published in the U.S. prior to 1923. In that case you are in the clear, both legally and ethically. Why is the ethics of this dependent on the age of the work in question? Your answer to that question is the basis for the answer to your next question.
At what point do we protect the rights of the producer of a good to make sure they are able to make a living off of it?
There is no such thing as a right to make a living. There is also a big difference between producing a good for sale and controlling the right of others to make similar goods (even when similar means to the point of the goods being indistinguishable). The clause in the U.S. Constitution from which copyright derives is not there to promote any right to make a living or any sort of inherent property right that attaches to the realm of the intellect, the stated purpose is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". The question really ought to be: is the law achieving its stated goal?
I do not have a signature
I've been waiting for something like this to happen. Now the parents can go after no only the RIAA, but also their ISP. The internet privacy act protects children under 13 from just this sort of thing. When the RIAA sopneaed the girl's ISP, they were not allowed to give her information up.
Looks like we finally have a case that'll make this circus stop.
Learn something new.