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RIAA Threatens 15-Year-Old
MunchMunch writes "It looks like the RIAA is still going after teenagers--this time, 15-year old Megan Dickinson was caught sharing 1,100 files. At the maximum statutory damages for copyright infringement, this makes Megan's liability at least $825,000, at most a mere $165,000,000. Naturally, the RIAA benevolently offered a $3,500 settlement to avoid these moderate, legally sanctioned damages. As we can hardly forget, the RIAA has already used this technique to settle with a 12 year old. Megan's unsurprising take: 'Yeah, it seems ridiculous.'"
Between this type of scare tactic and the saturation of the P2P networks with garbage files, I think they days of the current generation apps and networks could be numbered. The average file-sharing home user scares fairly easily. I'm not saying these networks will dissapear, but they will cease to be the giant beasts that they are today. I think IRC and new networks like Waste will continue to reign/rise up in the place of the Napster paradigm.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Every time I read stories like this, I feel an extreme sense of paranoia that the RIAA is going to come busting down my door and demand money for my songs. Then I realize...I turned off file sharing, which makes the penalties MUCH, MUCH less. The penalties for DISTRIBUTING music run about 750$ per file. The penalties for downloading music run about 99c/file (You just have to reimburse them for the cost of buying), under Title 17, Chapter 5, S504, b. If bad comes to worst, I'll sort through my selection of 400 some-odd files, count out how many are indie or not coverred by the RIAA, which will be around 300, and then pay them their $1,000 and be on my way, having beaten the music industry. Then I realize once again, they're not coming for me because I don't use FastTrack. [Note, IANAL]
Has anyone considered a class action countersuit on behalf of p2p users for harrassment and extortion by the RIAA. This sort of thing was being done by SmartCard readers recently harrassed by DirecTV.
"Where is my mind?"
The key to being safe from the RIAA: Don't listen to music owned by the RIAA.
Can you actually sue a minor in the USA? Hell, I'm 20 and I can't drink beer there, but a 15 year old kid can get sued? What the fuck is that?
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
And copyright infringement is not theft.
By offering to settle for less than it will cost to even defend against such a suit, they've pretty much guaranteed that nobody will actually let it go to court. And the people that actually have enough money to fight this just on the principle of the thing have much more to lose if they lose -- so they're likely to settle as well.
Presumably, their purpose is not to make money, or even to punish those they sue ... instead, the idea is to scare the 99.99% of the people out there that they don't sue.
RIAA really pisses me off, which I am sure is a sediment of many here in /.
If you have sediment in your piss, I think you have bigger problems than paying too much for your CDs.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
read 504(a)(1) and (2) ... the plaintiff is entitles to ask either for actual damages OR statutory damages. In your case you can bet they'll go for statutory. If you've got 300 infringements then you're paying between 750 and 30,000 per.
any time before final judgment the plaintiff can ask for statutory damages.
if you were to make that argument in court the riaa lawyer would chuckle and say something to the effect of "thanks for playing, game over." and then you'd get the hose of justice where i'm sure you don't want it.
This shouldn't have been modded down. Though I'm sure no one or very few who read this site agrees with the tactics or business practices (I find it disgusting) of the RIAA, they are in the right by the simple fact that She has no right to distribute the works they publish. None. Whether distribution of there copyrighted material actually harms them is up for debate, but the legal fact of the matter is that they may pursue copyright infringers. It is not her content to distribute.
I remember most Slashdot posts back when the RIAA was trying to get Napster shut down. They were to the effect, "Napster is just a tool, it can be used to share legitimite things too! Go after the actual offenders, not the tool!" Now the RIAA is going after the actual offenders. Guess the general opinion has changed since those Napster days. I called bullshit back then too, we all knew Napster was all about illegal file-sharing back then. Don't believe me? Go back and look through the Slahdot stories covering those issues, you'll see what I mean.
This mantra is starting to disturb me. In my opinion any law that allows corporations to sue perfectly normal teenagers for hundreds of thousands of dollars is wrong and needs to be changed.
I think it's good to protect ownership of creative content but protecting the right of a company to make a profit by distributing music made by someone else has little to do with any issue of creativity or authorship.
The argument that people are hurting "the artists" by trading music on the internet is extremely weak. Most active musicians make most of their money by playing live shows.
Record companies made their money by distributing music to consumers more cheaply than any alternative means. The cost of buying a CD is factors of magnitude less than the cost of hiring your favorite band. In an age where the distribution of recorded music was difficult this made sense. It no longer makes sense. Most of the cost of recorded music goes to promotion and distribution, but the internet has made promotion and distribution cheap and easy.
It's time for a new business model. Perhaps less music will be recorded if there isn't a profit to be made anymore, but maybe more people will be involved in the creative process.
O new art woe are we.
Or there's Ross Plank who was accused of being a big trader of latin music. Except, he doesn't speak spanish, and doesn't particularily like latin music anyway.
The problem with all of this is, the RIAA is bringing civil lawsuits against these people, which means you can either hire a lawyer, which will cost you more than the settlement, or you can just pay the settlement. And guess what! You're not even "innocent until proven guilty" in a civil trial. All the RIAA needs to prove is "more likely than not".
We have other names for this kind of behaviour like extortion. Do you think most people can afford skip work to appear in court for four or more months, and pay a lawyer to defend them? It's easy to get people to settle when the cost of fighting it would break them. It's truely a sad system, when accepting a guilty verdict is cheaper than fighting for your innocence.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I, like a minority of /. readers, totally agree that downloading music is illegal. However, a reasonably intelligent computer-using friend of mine told me she wasn't going to start using the iTunes Music Store, because it was probably cheaper to keep using Limewire which only costs her $20/year. I quickly explained to her that the $20 only covered the use of the software and that it didn't make it legal to download music. She was VERY surprised to learn that and I was VERY surprised that she didn't realize it.
However, most people don't "get it" like we do and still need to have it occasionally explained to them more fully. Not that she is absolved of any responsibility, as I'm sure the fine print makes this all very clear, but there can be mitigating circumstances.
Just my $0.02.
As I see it, and I have a feeling that the founders of this country might agree, excessive copyright terms steal works from the public domain.
Copyright is supposedly a limited monopoly on distribution of a given work granted by the public in return for the owner's courtesy of sharing their work. This was meant to encourage creators to share their work widely, as it would enrich the public domain when the clock ran out on the limited monopoly.
However, copyright terms have been getting longer and longer. Since the moment distribution of recorded music became commercially possible, new works have stopped entering the public domain.
Add this to the fact that the RIAA does do an incredible job of promoting their own music, but doesn't do such a good job of making it clear that their music is used with permission. Usually the use of music in a movie is mentioned late in the credits, when most of the audience has wandered out. Listening to the radio spew out song after song at no cost to me other than the time spent dealing with (listening to or avoiding) commercials, I hear no legal notices explaining that the songs were used with permission from the relevant parties. Stations have to pause periodically for identification. Perhaps it would clarify to the general public that the music is used with permission if they would pause from time to time in a similar manner to explain whose permission allowed them to play such music and to remind the public that the music is a tightly controlled resource.
When you see a trademark used in print, there's a little symbol used to explain to people that the symbol in question is, indeed, trademarked. The fact that copyrighted works require no similar annotation allows the RIAA to dangle their music in front of our noses before slapping us the minute we start to believe that they're actually giving it to us for free.
All of this has lead to a public which doesn't understand why the radio can redistribute music, but we the people cannot. The situation also leads me to believe that the public is attempting to get a refund for the time-limited monopoly it has granted.
To put it in real-world terms, if I agree to let you borrow my car for a few hours in exchange for you washing it for me, that is a reasonable deal. You have exclusive possession of my car, but I benefit in the end.
However, if you were to try to extend the term beyond hours to days or even weeks without offering me significantly more benefit, I'd definitely reconsider the arrangement.
The RIAA hasn't brought the car back yet, and Congress keeps telling them that they can extend the joyride longer and longer. Decades beyond the death of the creator is too long, and the public is saying that the RIAA needs to wash the damned car and bring it back to the public with whom it belongs.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
This fifteen year old is accused of illegally distributing music and faces a fine of up to 165,000,000 dollars.
Glad to see we have our priorities straight...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Is this a joke? Prohibition today is more destructive, more wasteful, and more immoral than ever before. For christ sakes, the US has the highest inmate/population ratio in the world, and over half of those "criminals" were convicted on non-violent drug offenses.
Alcohol prohibition was certainly destructive to society, driving up the murder rate and transforming a legitimate, peaceful market into a free-for-all for violent criminals. How exactly is modern prohibition any different?