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RIAA Settles With 12-Year-Old Downloader
Murdock037 writes "It looks like the RIAA has rushed to settle with 12-year-old Brianna LaHara, after serving her with a lawsuit on Monday. It looks like her single mother will be paying a $2,000 fine to the RIAA for her daughter's song-swapping, which they had thought was legal. Said Brianna: 'I am sorry for what I have done. I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love.' What a relief this must be for the Rolling Stones."
Ah, yes. The multi-billion dollar company vs. the 12 year old girl who lives in a city housing project. Truly a battle of titans.
Everything I say is a lie...
At least the net is now free from 12 year old girls pirating music. Now back to the pRon.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
It was very kind of our beloved RIAA to reach such an amicable settlement with this 12-year-old girl's mother. Now 50 Cent will surely be able to afford that ivory backscratcher he has had his eye on.
The RIAA's heart grew three sizes that day.
And they made little Cindy-loo-Who pay only $2000 and apologize. Grinches, I tell ya.
As terrible as her crime was, everyone needs a second chance. This $2000 slap on the wrist, while barely an inconvenience for the family, will surely be a reminder for the girl later on.
Stay on the straight and narrow, Brianna!
That's a ton of lunch money. At least the girl will be famous in her middle school. More than I ever got.
The RIAA: Making the world a safer place, one hapless victim who can't afford a good lawyer at a time.
Do not believe the lies. The RIAA did not settle. The RIAA has achieved complete victory against the file swaping aggressors. Brianna LaHara martyred herself upon our ranks of lawyers. Our dogs will eat her stomach while our women beat her face with their shoes.
Sincerely,
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf
Minister of Information, RIAA
I got a greater deal. For $9.99 a month I subscribed to a Usenet server, and I am able to download any kind of warez, p0rn, mp3's, DivX's, you name it.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Hey, just configure your browser to ignore the standard tag. That's why I used it. :)
I'm just waiting for the RIAA to sue some deaf dude. You know it's only a matter of time.
At either the voter registration office or your local gun range. Depending on how much patience and faith in the system you have.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
They all of the sudden started speaking in polished engligh?
Polished what?
I just downloaded the Fox in Socks mp3...
If they come after me they are in for one hell of a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Hey, cut them some slack. They spend every work day consorting with record industry types. What do you expect?
But why? To prevent looking like a bully? They still do. If they really wanted to avoid a PR problem why not simply not sue her?
Just because they get the subpoena doesn't mean they have to follow up on it.
Mark my words, one of these days one of those subpoenas will find a lawmaker's kid on the other end, and the RIAA will run away from that court room as fast as they can.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
I hope one day these RIAA suckers go after the wrong person. Think about it... hacking into a computer system to see what songs Lil' Johnny has recorded off Sesame Street. Then, sue them for breaking and entering a private computer system. Here's even a formula for punititive damages: $2,000 / [Poor family's monthly expendable income] * [RIAA monthly profit] That'd really shove a broomstick up their sorry a$$es!!!
"What did you do today?"
I bumped up the size of my Freenet node space.
The new ads on TV say for comcast high speed cable advertise
"Download music with amazing speed".
I'm sure the RIAA is loving this..
I do really like Itunes though.. 10 million songs sold so far. Its a little too easy to use. . When it hits Windows things will get interesting. This seems like an ideal time to release it.
I downloaded every Metallica track I could find.
Unless you're hungry or have a self-image problem, you're not likely to find a wallet with more money in it than your pride is worth to you.
No one needs morality when there isn't enough to eat, yes. It's why I had NO major complaints when I lost my wallet once only to find all my cards returned via US postal service. I was like 15/16 at the time, probally had enough cash for a school lunch as well as a driving permit, phone list, and misc other shit. Actually only the cards and misc crap was mailed back to me, the few bucks and wallet were never returned. All and all I can't complain.
I don't see it as a self image problem. Either the person who found my wallet needed my few bucks, didn't have any moral issues keeping the few bucks, or the wallet was actually run over and the contents scattered across the roadway. It would only be a self image problem if they percieved them selves as being honest yet using the finder's keepers rule.
This is not to say I haven't used the finder's keepers rule my self, but only after a good honest effort of trying to find the rightful owner. This happened once with a bankcard that I find stuck in a machine. I contacted the bank to report that it had been found, they wanted me to cut it up, I tried again to report it found, they said it was reported stolen. I asked for the address of the account holder so I can mail it back, they said they couldn't do that. I asked if I could give them MY address so the account holder could contact me to retrieve it, they said they couldn't do that either. I asked if I could mail it to them and they can mail it to the approperate address, they said no. I gave up on this and finally used it to apply bondo, and it might very well still exist in a bondo segment in my old car.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I've still working out the details for the following experiment, so please bear with me.
Parts sealed in a metal box:
- Laptop "A" running WinXP, sharing teenrock.mp3 via [insert favorite p2p app here]. The sound has been removed from this machine.
connected via an ethernet crossover to
- Laptop "B" running [insert your favorite linux distribution].
A twelve year old girl is placed inside the box with directions on how to copy teenrock.mp3 from Laptop A to Laptop B so that she can listen to it. There stands exactly a fifty percent chance that she will understand the provided directions (pretend with me). The twelve year old girl is removed from the box after one hour has passed.
The question: Did the bank account of any member of the Recording Industry Association of America just lose $150,000.
Bonus question: In addition to the possible $150,000 she might owe the RIAA, does she now owe Darl McBride $699?
Ha ha ha ha!!! Puny human males sued a puny human female and settled for $2000. Morbo would have torn off her arms and eaten her alive.
"Keep it in the news that the RIAA squeezed $2,000 dollars out of a poor pre-teen who thought she had paid for the service to begin with. If they're going to play PR games, there's no reason people who despise them can't do the same thing."
I say we buy $2,000 worth of CD's and return them the next day.
"Derp de derp."
Apprently stealing is legal so long as you don't like the people you steal from.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It's been a long time.
People who prey upon 12 year olds
-Catholic Priests and other Pedophiles
-The Tobacco Companies
-The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
(Score:0, Interesting)
Mother: Okay, so what do I owe you?
RIAA: Let me see...$150,000 [click click] times 951 [click click]...carry the two...Comes to...$142,650,000 dollars.
Mother: Did you say 142 MILLION?
RIAA: Yes.
Mother: I'm leaving.
RIAA: Wait! Wait!
Mother: What?
RIAA: I mean 142 million in make-believe money.
Mother: Hmm... Still sounds still a little steep.
RIAA: But everyone has unlimited make-believe money.
Mother: But 142 million is too much.
RIAA: Okay. Then how much can you afford?
Mother: $3000 maybe.
RIAA: Thats all? Well....Okay...We'll do $3000 I guess...
Mother: But my makebelieve purse is in the car. So can you loan me $3000? In make-believe money of course.
RIAA: Why not just pay me in make-believe make-believe money?
Mother: [thinks] Okay here.
RIAA: [quickly stashes $1000 of it into pocket] Well this settles it then. You are free to go.
[One Hour Later]
NEWS: Slashdot: RIAA Settles With 12-Year-Old Dowloader for $2000.
I'd love to get the list of songs and publish
which artist 'profited' by suing a 12 year
kid.
Apparently she was big into Frank Sinatra. Damn his dead and buried corpse for suing a 12 year old kid! How dare a dead guy sue a 12 year old kid?!?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
i've got an idea re: how we can screw the RIAA. well, maybe not totally screw them, but just kinda mess with their heads. i hope someone reads this amidst the 600+ posts here and will comment on it. here it is:
i'm a bad singer.
i'm a poor guitarist.
i make really bad songs.
years ago, i decided that i will only use my god-given powers for good. and thusly, i hereby declare a RIGHTEOUS WAR upon the RIAA. here is my battle plan:
1. create several anti-RIAA songs. these can have catchy titles like "A RIAAL PAIN IN MY ASS," or "Fuck Tha RIAA," or even "The RIAA Took My Crack Money - All $2000 of It!"
2. offer them on p2p networks as "Metallica - King Nothing Style Song By Herr Doktor," or something similar. the songs will have some identifying tag in their names, or artist field.
3. make tons and tons of copies of these songs, naming them as different songs of various RIAA-affiliated artists.
4. ask you, the public, to always search for and download one of these crap songs every time you p2p.
perhaps some will be daring enough to host huge caches of these crap songs with fake titles. and maybe the RIAA will try to persecute us! and then we can win in court or something. something big. i think it's a money-making scam waiting to happen!
seriously, though. we're all waiting for the RIAA to bust the wrong guy, so why not make up a bunch of us as wrong guys for them to bust? trade in legitimate mp3s, but try to sucker the RIAA into prosecuting legal traffickers?
we should be taking the battle to THEM. ya, you know: the one being fought in the STREETS. of the INTARRNET. peezout, yo.
I s'pose that makes me slightly insane, since I'd put it about on par with shoplifting. Extrapolating from a lot of vague data from the Web, I'd say about a third of us have snagged something off a shelf at some point, and it's when we were a teen or young adult.
One estimate has about 30 million active shoplifters at a time in the U.S.. Since half of 'lifters are between 18 and 30, and a third are from 13-18, I'll pretend that 24 million shoplifters are between these ages, which according to U.S. Census is around a third of folks in this age group.
So, we can unsafely assume about a third of us have shoplifted. Market researchers say about a fourth of us have participated in music filesharing. We'll pretend for a moment that all of these files were copyrighted. So, assuming (yes, another assumption - I like making assumptions, because it saves research) that the financial loss of a CD is about equal to 12 downloaded songs, we're looking at an equivalent of shoplifting a dollar or so worth of merchandise per song.
We'll ignore the fact that shoplifting has greater physical costs, such as the overhead for the merchandise space, shipping, and manufacturing, while copyright-infringing-filesharing only has production costs. We'll also ignore the fact that the author of this post has had a few beers.
For shoplifting a buck's worth of product, I'd expect to see restitution in the form of cost plus a fine, maybe a couple hundred bucks, and a criminal sentence appropriate to the offender's record. For most folks, that'd be a first offense, and prolly a lil' community service. Maybe unsupervised probation. For repeats, probably longer, supervised probation. Time served, if any, either way.
Since the demographics are not highly dissimilar (compared to violent crime, grand theft, and the like), the penalty ought'a be similar. Cost (about a buck per song), a couple-few hundred dollars on top as a slap on the wrist, and some community service or probation. Repeaters (I emphasize that "repeat" means "doing it after being convicted", not "doing it more than once before getting caught".) should probably be hit about as hard as repeat shoplifters, with, like, actual jail time.
It should be clear at this point that I support U.S. copyright law more-or-less in its current form. The musicians had rights, they signed a contract giving them away, they didn't get lobotomized first, so the RIAA owns those rights. I don't much like the RIAA, but I didn't like Sam Walton, either - and I don't think that gives me the right to take his stuff. I disagree with copyright torts of this nature, though - I think it ought'a be criminal, not civil. For one thing, criminal law gives protections to alleged offenders that civil law doesn't, thanks to that Constitution thingee.
I suggest that civil law shouldn't (in a perfect world) apply to corporate actions against private citizens acting privately. They should, in my mind, have to convince law enforcement-types that said citizens did something bad.
This is prolly obvious at this point, but I'm not, like, a lawyer or anything.
It's not exactly relevant, but here's a guy who's written a lot about shoplifting, but doesn't appear to have gotten laid since Jimmy Carter was in office.
If the media companies are so hard up as to need to extort $2K from a kid, perhaps we should start up a new charity to help them out?
Luckily, here in the UK, we can still (generally) rely on the BBC to offer unbiased news reporting.
Just think how many CD's this poor girl will have to pirate and sell on the streets to try to raise the money to pay her fine.
You know, the Romans used trained giraffes to rape people to death. Now, I'm not suggesting that we do that to the RIAA. I'm thinking that a sufficiently large and determined horse should be sufficient.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
And prison sentences ought to be proportional to life expectancy. Women should get slightly longer sentences than men, and non-smokers should get considerably longer sentences than smokers. God damn healthy do-gooder freaks.