Slashdot Mirror
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."
Disgusting. Totally and completely disgusting.
It would be one thing if the RIAA were to settle, such that $2,000 were donated to a charity. Even that would be a pretty low blow. But actually adding the cash from this girl and her mother to their corporate coffers?
Repeat after me, everyone: I will never buy another CD from the RIAA again. (Since I normally buy about 50 a year, this should even the score on this despicable incident by 2008.)
David Stein, Esq.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
While I'm against downloading and sharing of music I think that this will really screw the music companies in the long run. One of the first rules of business is not to make your cusotmers your enemy. There is a percentage that only steals and never buys, but a lot of people who download end buying the CD. This may piss them off enough that they may look to other forms of entertainment or look at used CD's.
Something doesnt add up reading that article. Hey single mom your daughter steals music. Oh, ok. Gee, thought it was ok cause we paid a service fee that let us. Hell, here's two thousand bucks I had kicking around. Hey, my daughter even feels bad about it even.
I dunno, I just felt like they arent real people after reading this article.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I donated to www.boycottriaa.com
I renewed my membership to eff.org
I committed to not buying music
And I wrote my representatives
What did you do today?
I can't imagine that many artists the RIAA represents are happy with some of the RIAA's behavior. I am sure they are having some of the same reactions that many folks have with Clippy......"Stop trying to help me!!!"
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
They're trying to scare us.
That's probably not their goal - well, not their primary goal. Consider this:
I'm increasingly annoyed about the amount of attention that this whole issue is garnering. Notice how little (OK, none) of the public debate is substantive: whether people should be allowed to download music for listening purposes; whether the interests of media providers outweigh the privacy interests of citizens; whether it's fair to allow the RIAA to charge people $15,000 - or even imprison them, or destroy their computers - in defense of fifty-year-old music tracks. It's just assumed that the RIAA has the right to lash out in order to protect its license to Johnny B. Goode.
Even incidents like this are to the RIAA's benefit, because it keeps the issue in the public consciousness. The longer it stays there, the stronger the public presumption that they're fundamentally in their rights, that it's OK for the RIAA to take drastic measures. Hell, just look at the typical responses: "What she did was illegal, but..."
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
This $2000 slap on the wrist, while barely an inconvenience for the family,
yes, $2000 for a single mom with two children living in the projects. more like this is all they had in the checking account.
I'd love to get the list of songs and publish
which artist 'profited' by suing a 12 year
kid.
I bet that would play big with the public.
That's why RIAA will continue to "win" these. They carry the big stick.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Apparently you don't understand the following words...
The family lives in a city housing project
Housing projects are typically not the domain of people who can afford $2000 fines. In many cases that amount of money could pay the bills for a few months, or maybe a month, either way it is an awful lot of money. To say that it is a slap on the wrist and that it is barely an inconvinience for them is to really be sitting up in some sort of ivory tower wholly unaware that there are people in this country where $2,000 is a big deal.
Sherman responded that most people don't shoplift because they fear they'll be arrested.
Maybe I'm a sucker for humanity, but I believe most people don't shoplift because they think it is wrong, not because they will get caught. It's interesting to see that the RIAA has such a low opinion of human nature.
I'm sure there will be plenty of threads here along the lines of: "$29.99 for all you can download... come on.... an "honor roll" student thought that a legit deal?"
Honestly, I don't think they really gave it too much thought. I mean, I doubt most non-geek types who do use peer-to-peer file sharing systems give the whole subject more than a passing thought. Though as others have mentioned, I'd be interested to know exactly what kind of volume of music the RIAA claims this 12-year-old girl shared to garner herself one of 200-some-odd lawsuits, supposedly aimed at "top" file-sharers.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
They have these rights because they were given them by you.
Then where do I sign up to take them away?
> Even incidents like this are to the RIAA's benefit, because it keeps the issue in the public consciousness. The longer it stays there, the stronger the public presumption that they're fundamentally in their rights, that it's OK for the RIAA to take drastic measures.
Several people have suggested setting up a donation fund for her. If we could get her name and do that, and convince non-Slashdotting music downloaders to do the same, even very modest sums of money would quickly add up to a very large sum, attracting the media's attention: "Geeks Help Poor 12yo Pay RIAA Fine".
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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Rest assured, you weren't hurting artists. You were hurting some rich RIAA execuative who likely has billions of dollars to his or her name.
Imagine if the richest man in the world ordered a poor man to pay him a month's salary because the rich man felt his wealth was in jeopardy. Now, imagine this rich man had an army of slaves doing his bidding, who all work to make him money. Doesn't that sound silly? Well, that's what the RIAA.
The RIAA effectively takes music from artists and gives them slave wages for their music. When the RIAA takes music from artists, the artists no longer own it.
Since the RIAA owns the music, there's no way you can hurt the artist by downloading music. Only the RIAA hurts artists. Hopefully, people will keep downloading songs so the RIAA will go away!
Join Tor today!
They have these rights because they donated tons of money to the republican and democratic parties. They bought the congressional votes.
That's because the media has no incentive to report on the other side of the issue. The media makes its money through copyright, and they're not about to give anti-copyright people a voice. That would be fair and balanced....
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
$2,000? Come on. She didn't pay one cent.
Read the quotes in the article and determine if that is what the mom or kid said based on the news reports. What? They all of the sudden started speaking in polished engligh? They suddenly saw the light after vowing to fight?
What I think happened here is that the RIAA swooped in and offered them a deal. More than likely they pushed the money to her somehow and it came back. Nice and neat. That's only my opinion without any facts.
This is too nice and neat. Think about it for a minute and consider the chance of this actually happening. Notice there hasn't been any press releases about other settlements.
The RIAA is going too far in trying to protect and aging and useless distribution method.
I'm not a lawyer but given that most of our nation acts on "precedence" do the "confessions" of the defendants named in the lawsuits give the RIAA some sort of legal precedence? Y'know, in case someone actually decides to resist their claims? Given that most (all?) of the defendats we have heard form so far have admitted guilt in writing in exchange for a light fine, does this mena maybe they are building up to something larger ot just playing the media game and getting people to settle via legal muscle instead of taking ludicrous claims to trial?
Oddly enough, this reminds me of Microsoft's old buisness tactics of muscling out other computer software companies...
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
I beg to differ. This doesn't endear them in any way. They can't scare people into buying their music, only to not copying it. That doesn't make them any money -- only buying does that.
What the record companies need to do is embrace the new technology, and get rid of the dead meat that can't follow the times (i.e. RIAA). There's multiple ways that the record companies can take advantage of P2P file trading, they just have to blink a few times first and stop holding on to old ways.
How? One such way could be to seed the P2P engines with music files with more than one song in the MPEG-1 container -- the first one being an MP3 (MPEG-1 layer 3) in low quality like 32kbps, allowing people to listen as much as they like, and the second part of the file being a locked high quality version of the same song, requiring unlocking. $0.50 per song per device doesn't sound unreasonable -- that's cheaper than the current $.99 for those who only wants to listen to the song on one device and the same price for those who wants to put it on more than one device.
I am certain that many people would welcome and embrace a system like this, where files can be distributed freely, and you can listen before you buy, but only get bad FM quality unless you pay. People with no money, like kids, would be happy that they could listen to music for FREE, while asking their parents to unlock the songs they want. Others can listen to a great variety of music and find something they like, without spending hours in the record store with headsets.
Good musicians would benefit, as they can find their way to the market without massive advertising. Record companies would get more surprise hits, and broaden their offering without spending fortunes on physical distribution. Releases would be time coordinated across the world. BUT -- it requires new thinking and embracing the new technology instead of fighting it.
Right now, people loathe the scare tactics of RIAA and the record companies behind. CD sales go down, not up. For a very good reason. Like I said before, you can't scare people into BUYING, just into not copying. And that won't make them a dime.
Regards,
--
*Art
I'm never buying another RIAA-backed CD again. Period. That simple.
I'm a musician. I gig, I play music every day, I record music and I already own a large collection of CDs. Quite honestly, I haven't heard anything in pop music come out in the last five years, besides a very precious few artists, that I've thought was worth the $18 anyway. So it's no big loss to me.
If a new musician comes along whose music I feel I must have, I'll either purchase a CD with a friend and share ownership or I'll employ any of a number of methods available to me to get the music on my hard drive. But since most new music has been utter crap, and it's so rare that I ever hear anything that makes me feel I absolutely must have it at my fingertips, I don't expect this is going to be a big problem for me.
But I do have a big problem with giving another single dime to an industry that fines 12-year-olds in housing projects $2,000 for gay-for-display Britney Spears and nursery rhymes. It's comical, but it's also bullshit, and having been involved with the music industry before I can honestly say it's right in line with their standard operating procedure.
The normal recording contract is roughly 40-60 pages long. By contrast, a typical book publishing contract is 4-12 pages. Typical recording contracts tie up artists for advances, deny artists royalties on new technology media, and itemize costs well into the future of the artists career. The record industry operates like the mafia. So as far as I'm concerned, they can go straight to hell.
Yeah, I'll bet they settled in a day. Because the Brianna story was like the world walking in on the Devil raping a kid, so the RIAA tried to turn it into a finger wagging story.
They suck. I wish them all, to the last of them, the absolutely very worst things in life. Fuck 'em.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
And a 12 year old girl is one of those?
/., she would not even in the top 2/3.
Granted, 12 year olds, especially girls, may listen to a lot of music. But I find it quite improbable that she could be among the top 0.0006%, once you look at all the college kids and 20 somethings, with far more free time on their hands, and far more varied music interests.
I'll bet even among the small community of
More likely some backroom fool just shotgunned at random.
Obviously they've tried to turn their own prosecution of a little girl into a morality story, where she learns the wrong of her actions, and the victorious and righteous RIAA benevolently show mercy to the poor wayward lamb by reducing billions in punitive damages (losses that they've already theoretically suffered!) to a scanty $2,000. Punishing her is bad enough, but the fact that they are punishing her and making her advocate their zealous position is the most disgusting fact of all.
Don't feel sorry for this 12 year old. I'm sure people will be sending money to this family on the margins soon, probably much more than $2000. Don't get me wrong, I think they should, and I'll be sending a check for a few bucks when I know an address to send it to. DO feel sorry the six or seventh child they do this to, because they won't have the celebrity of being first that will lead to being bailed out.
I moonlight at a club that plays a lot of live music. Musicians can make a fine living playing live music (or for those who can only make good music in a studio, autograph signings or TV appearances Lip Syncing their hits (ala Britney Spears)). What is the great good done for society having its citizens to spend a huge percentage of their income on music and movies, making a few artists, and more importantly Mega-Media houses, obscenely wealthy? How much better could that money be spent on average? Life without art would be impoverished, but giving recorded music away for free would not end music, nor leave our lives impoverished, nor would all artists starve.
How about sponsoring music you like? How about shareware music? Same for movies. If Spielberg had a list of projects he might produce, given the financial incentive, I would donate to see the project I like produced, then distributed to patrons first who have sponsored it, then offered cheap to non-patrons. Maybe even getting some money back, if the project does really well outside the original patronage. How about $1 HDTV movies over the internet, with a suggested $1-$5 donation per viewer, if they feel they liked what they see? Only quality (OK popular) movies make money past production cost.
I'm all for compensating people fairly for their intellectual property, but I would hardly call most music "intellectual." Granted that's a judgement call, but think of all the scientists and engineers who produce the technology that keeps the 6 billion people on this planet alive, and yet stringing 4 minutes of words together, is what possibly earns somebody millions. Granted not many win that 4 minute lottery, but it does happen, and far more often than the engineer or medical researcher who works his whole life on life saving project gets well compensated. You spoiled-whinny-self-important artists Grow Up, and see what's really important in life. Quit robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
BTW,. Where do I send the check?
Letter To Iran
Ah... how I wish consumers acted as rationally as this.
Do you know what consumers see? They see "Britney Spears CD, $12" and they buy it. They see nothing of the underlying struggle of fair-use rights vs. corporate gluttony, of technology vs. copyright. They will eagerly support a monopoly without care if it keeps feeding them their boy-band fix. Their collective attention span is pitifully short and easily distracted. Just try getting the masses to boycott. The public, in short, is all talk.
Your mother doesn't want to know what copyright is all about; she just wants that new Yanni CD. Your little brother doesn't care that he's feeding a monopoly by buying that 50 Cent CD, and your sister doesn't give a damn that buying the new Justin Timberlake disc is feeding the RIAA's legal-enforcement hit squad. They don't care. They just want their music.
We understand the issues in this struggle, but we are a small minority. You must come to grips with this regrettable fact.
That is why Star Wars is still not on DVD, despite our petition. And that is why the RIAAs don't see the world as we do, and act as we think would be in their best interests. Indeed, if they stopped selling CDs tomorrow and shifted to an online-downloading-per-subscription scheme - even one that's eminently fair and consumer-friendly - you know what the biggest public statement would be? "I don't want to use that Internet thing for music! Where are my CDs?"
(Amazingly, even economists are now coming to grips with the fact that they've overestimated consumer rationalism. The models that they built on such assumptions don't seem to reflect reality... and the hot new trend in economics research is consumer irrationalism. This is not a troll comment - it's an observation by my stepfather, who is a macroeconomist at a local university. This, by the way is good news: I'm hoping that it's the start of a revolution in economic thinking - that consumers can't protect themselves from market consolidation and monopoly abuse... which is why America now has. like, two competitors in every profitable market.)
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
The RIAA views the average person (customer) as a morally bankrupt thief who will steal at every opportunity, unless they are constantly subjected to campaigns of fear and shame.
Offensive. Not that the RIAA hasn't already earned my lifetime contempt and made it my mission to make sure no one in their cartel ever sees another dime of my money. Then again what is a few dollars in lost music sales when you can shake down single moms and 12-year-olds for thousands.
I'm sure there will be plenty of threads here along the lines of: "$29.99 for all you can download... come on.... an "honor roll" student thought that a legit deal?
We're talking a 12 year old girl who is book smart. That doesn't mean she has common sense. Common sense might make you go "hmmm" but when you can get 12 CD's for just a penny, Kazaa could easily confuse a 12 year old into thinking that she could have unlimited downloads for $29.95.
I don't think she's stupid. In fact I think most people are unaware that this is an illegal activity, especially if they are paying for a service.
'Same speed C but faster'
How is the RIAA getting the information...I mean technically.
I read about how they release a subpoena on 'x' who downloaded 'y' songs. Now, what I want to know, is, apart from having a packet sniffer in sharman networks, how can they know what you download. Sure, they can interrogate your ports, if they've reverse engineered the fasttrack protocol then they can maybe list your songs...but how do they know how much your downloading, and how do they know that those songs are even music...they could be someone just f$#@ing with them. And finally, I thought the fasttrack network operated on a PKI set up, with the heads of the network holding the keys. If so, how the hell are they even interrogating your system unless their also liscencing the keys...in which case, they would have to get them from the same guys that give you kazaa.
If anyone can shed some light on this it would be greatly appreciated
Fining a poor single mother $2000 USD, sets a pretty good example for the rest of us heathens, right? Wrong. It just makes me angry.
What a terrible thing for such a big company to do!
I think we should all boycott any band affiliated with the RIAA until the RIAA agrees to pay the child's way through the college of her choice. A nice set of CDs from her favourite artists would be an added touch, too.
She's poor and they're picking on her!
The RIAA is just a nasty group of miscreants that I would love to see vanish from history as a failed example of another misuse of economic power.
I dunno. I was thinking about this. I asked myself why it was right that I didn't care that people were downloading music, but computers getting hacked and people being sued for millions of dollars(settling for thousands) is so hard for me. I realized that the truth is, the RIAA is ruining peoples lives. Like something out of a nightmare best left in Soviet Russia, the RIAA is indiscriminately cutting people down for a crime most sane people would put on par with jay walking. These lives don't deserve to be ruined for personal non-commerical infringement.
It's been a long time.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
"I don't think she's stupid. In fact I think most people are unaware that this is an illegal activity, especially if they are paying for a service."
One of the arguments I've made all along is that the RIAA has completely failed to educate people on this topic. You're supposed to know what copyright is and how it works to know you can't do that. Is a 12 year old supposed to know that? Is the average Joe even supposed to know? Maybe. But consider this:
- Radio is free. Buy a set, or build your own, and you get music.
- Radio makes money from ad revenue. So radio's not exactly begging you to go buy CDs.
- A logical conclusion can be drawn that the purpose of buying a CD is the convenience of playing a song whenever you want. Nobody ever though of buying a CD as a license to hear the song!
- When you rent a movie, it's spelled out for you in that FBI warning what you can and cannot do with a movie. You can't show it publically, for example. (I remember noticing that in grade school on a rainy day when they decided to show us Star Wars.) CD's have no such warning.
- Computers come with CD-Roms, which are perfect for putting CDs into.
- Blank Audio CD's are sold as audio CDs.
One has to ask, how's the general populace supposed to know what's happening here? How're they supposed to know it's 'wrong'? Why did the RIAA wait until it had blown out of proportion to start all this shit?
If they want my sympathy, they can forget it. At this point, even if they come out with a great MP3 service, I really don't think I can drag myself to get my credit card out. Taking $2,000 from a 12 year old girl who couldn't possibly have known better? And the protestors think Nike is bad?
The effects of this settlement will be to simultaneously make the RIAA more bold and to weaken the resolve of its victims. The RIAA will be encouraged by this case because it escaped the potential public relations disaster of having to press a lawsuit against a 12-year-old from the projects. It not only got the story to go away, it also got the family to repent, thereby encouraging others who have strayed from the path of Righteous Consumerism to return to the flock. Today has made the RIAA more confident of its ability to bully its own customers, and it will be more aggressive with its litigation campaign as a result.
This is a significant defeat for the opponents of the RIAA. They allowed the RIAA to turn a public relations disaster into a minor victory, and it happened simply because RIAA lawyers got the family to settle before EFF lawyers got her to fight. This war over electronic property rights is primarily a war of public opinion. The RIAA does not hope to stop file-sharing by directly suing every file-sharer. The purpose of these lawsuits is to marginalize file-sharing in the cultural consciousness as "piracy," to make it a fad just like M.C. Hammer or the Boy Band du jour. Had the EFF gotten the family to aggressively contest the case, they could have inflicted heaps of public relations damage on the RIAA. Their failure to take advantage of this opportunity is a considerable setback.
------- Was it just a coincidence I got moderator points the first time I logged on to
Give ME a fucking break. Most people think getting slapped with a law-suit ruins their life for at least a little while.
What IT do YOU wish to protect, because that sounds like a motivation for your position. Who are you defending with this statement? The RIAA, who have been convicted of price-fixing (definitely against the law), who are famous for gouging their artists, who are buying our congresspeople and suing 12-year olds, and yes, college geeks?
The core of your comment is dead-wrong on two, albeit to some eyes, subtle, counts. The RIAA are NOT the creators of this music, they are the marketers. Since when do you defend salesmen? Second, no one, not even those admired artists, creates in a vacuum. They live in the same social milieu, the same web of relationships, the same ocean of memes of all sorts, as every other human member of our social species. Your statement is not really wrong, but it is entirely incomplete, and this issue is not black and white. Even property, under the law, even in America, is not sacrosanct, though it may seem sometimes like it is. Government and society have the legal power to override the rights of property owners for a variety of reasons. Copyright was never meant to be even that strong. It was supposed to promote an incentive to create, not stifle it, and now there is an equally important reason - while you're busy defending the 'rights' of any copyright owner to do anything he or she wants in order to 'protect' that "copy"right, what happens to civil liberties, freedoms, privacies, ability to resist coercion in a number of open and subtle ways, adherence to ideals of honest day's work for honest dollar (instead of the older definition of piracy, or highway robbery), and on and on? I happen to think quite a few of those are more important than absolute copy"right", especially for a bunch of parasites like the RIAA.
but don't rationalize your petty criminal behavior.
You mean civil behavior don't you? After all, none of these people are being accused of even as much as shoplifting. It's more along the lines of making unauthorized copies of a library book and leaving them on your front steps on a busy city street where anyone can pick up a copy. It's just copyright infringement. The point is, illegal or not, the punishments are absurdly out of proportion to the acts (at least to anyone not on the RIAA payroll).
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Jesus Christ, man. You took a feedbag to the all-you-can-eat buffet, and pitched a fit when they decided to only let you take one plate of food at a time. 1800 files in how many days? You had to have been running an automatic downloader.
I mean, I sympathize to an extent, but if the contract doesn't mention the method of download, you're not covered one way or the other. Your ad absurdum argument re: spyware, etc., on the download service doesn't really apply. If you'd made an argument about the service being Windows-dependent (if the DM's ActiveX or a Windows executable), that may have had some wings. However, as it is, I think that the customer service team at emusic was being rather patient with you.
I am dazzled by the lack of knowledge by "Jerry" (1) The child did not know she was stealing. A website fooled her into thinking she was downloading these songs legally. This is akin to someone setting up a fake checkout in a store. Who would be prosecuted in that case? I would imagine in any court in the land would prosecute the person who put up the fake checkout. She had no intent to break the law, and the website in question had intent to mislead her. (2) In Jerry's opinion appearently there should be an income limit for owning computers. Tell me, how musch should one make before they are "allowed" a computer? How much did this computer cost? Thrift shops regularly sell 300mhz machines for around $100.00 in my area. Is it O.K. for a poor person to spend $100.00 on something that her child will need to gain job skills in the future? Or should poor kids just play with sticks and Boxes? (3)This I find in particularly poor taste: The assumtion that public housing families are all on crack. Sorry buddy, not every poor person is on crack, just like not every rich person is a thief. (4) Finally, how do you know the mother doesn't have a job? The vast majority of assistance recipients do work. (5) Corporate welfare costs American taxpayers 8-10 times more than poor person welfare. Whos robbing us taxpayers? Poor people who NEED the money, or Rich people who use it to eek out another few million? Maybe Jerry should spend some time in the real world instead of in his insulated lifestyle. The American public should be outraged by what the RIAA has done to this family, and I for one willk not buy one more CD until they give this family back their money and issue an apology. I agree that musicians have a right to protect their creative properties, and that companies have the right to make money from products they produce. But the fact is that the record industry is a Dinosaur wallowing in a mud pit. They need to make a product that the public wants to buy instead of using litigation to attempt to make income.