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RIAA Files 531 More Lawsuits
nuclear305 writes "CNN is reporting that the RIAA has filed 531 'John Doe' lawsuits against defendants in Atlanta; Philadelphia; Orlando, Florida; and Trenton, New Jersey. Of course, once these thugs find out who you are, you can pay them off for the small fee averaging $3,000."
The rejected story:
That's the story that didn't get posted, but if any of you got a nastygram from your ISP, you deserve to know about this. Point your ISP to the Slashdot posting with the torrent and demand that they reinstate your account, and more to it: demand an apology from Microsoft. There are plenty of comments from others about this being the Linux 2.6.2 kerenl. MS is having ISPs shut off accounts for downloading Linux!Of course, once these thugs find out who you are, you can pay them off for the small fee averaging $3,000 You mean, once these thugs find out who my neighbor with the unencrypted 802.11b Access Point is, he can pay them off... provided they can prove it was actually him, and not any one of his neighbors that made copyrighted material available without authorization...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Way for Microsoft to jump the gun.
How credible does this make Microsoft look now?
If you're religishitty, KILL YOURSELF!
Yes, the RIAA is out of control and really should stop to think about what they are doing to their reputation by suing all these people. That is a given.
However, they are well within their rights to be doing what they are doing. It is the music traders who decided that copyright did not apply to them who took the first step in breaking the law, and it is they who ultimately hold responsibility for their actions.
I remember back when the RIAA started out shutting down P2P sites like Napster that people were screaming about how Napster wasn't at fault, it was the individual members of the file sharing community who were responsible for violating copyrights. The thought went, "if the RIAA wants to sue anyone it should be those users individually, and it would be unfeasible for the RIAA to do such a thing because how much could they really gain by suing kids in their basements? Happy days!" Well, now the RIAA is doing exactly that. It's kind of ironic how those users who thought they could hide in anonymity behind the crowds of file sharers are now finding that there is no hiding because the RIAA is just going to catch everyone with a wide net.
I don't think the RIAA is going about this the right way, but I can't see how they are overstepping their legal bounds.
I have been pwned because my
"CNN is reporting that the RIAA has filed 531 'John Doe' lawsuits against defendants in Atlanta; Philadelphia; Orlando, Florida; and Trenton, New Jersey. Of course, once these thugs find out who you are, you can pay them off for the small fee averaging $3,000."
I think that many of the RIAA's tactics are heavy handed and will ultimately be detrimental to the RIAA. I think that the penalties for copyright violation under U.S. law are unduly harsh.
Its use of the DMCA to get subpoenas without judicial review was a threat to liberty.
But the RIAA does represent copyright holders, and 'John Doe' suits against alleged copyright violators are entirely appropriate. It's by means of such law suits, rather than additional legislation calling for mandatory DRM or special police powers for copyright holders, that the RIAA can protect its rights without infringing ours.
So labelling the RIAA "thugs" in this case is entirely inappropriate.
Or would you also label the Free Software Foundation "thugs" if it attempted to enforce the provisions of the GPL against a company using GPL'd source in a released product without also releasing the source code?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
If you only download music, it is your fault if you get a lawsuit or get busted.
Reason being is you are listening to bad music. Stop supporting or even ripping off the RIAA and wake up to the fact that any music that is associated with them is terrible.
./revolution
YAWN
I'd be willing to pay
- as much as $0.025 (2.5 cents) per song
for the right to have 256-bit mp3's of the top 10,000 songs of all time. That translates to 10000 *But, what I'd really like to do is pay that directly to the artists involved. Or, I'm willing to pay the copyright owners, as long as that's not a firm that's rampantly cheating the artists out of their fair share.
I say, let someone accumulate enough distribution rights, and I'll be willing to purchase some music online. Until then, I'm sticking to my old LP's, some CD's I have received as gifts, and what I hear off the air. I don't like being a criminal, but I also don't like being price-gouged (or a party to price-gouging of recording artists who aren't really that wealthy either).
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
I know about half these customers are coming from Cox accounts.
Agreed: unpleasant business though it is, they are well within their rights to sue copyright violators. It is, in fact, what they ought to have been doing all along.
However -- and this is a big however -- they are completely outisde their rights using the powers the DMCA has given them to bring about these suits. Under the bill of rights, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure, and deprivation of property without due process of law, the RIAA would have to get a warrant issued to be able to shut down people's ISP accounts. The burden of proof would rest with the accuser.
However, the DMCA places the burden of proof on the accused. Basically, the DMCA makes it so that an ISP has to take action against anybody accused of copyright violation, regardless of the merit of the claim. The accused has to (at the very least) file a legal counterclaim just to get their account back -- not an easy thing for somebody who's not a lawyer and isn't up on the vagaries of the DMCA. And it's without any oversight from the judicial system.
This unreasonable power lets the RIAA use these lawsuits not as a valid round of legal complaints (which they would be), but as a bullying tactic. They needn't be careful about the accusations they make; they pay no price if they're wrong, and achieve the desired intimidating effect just the same.
Lawsuits were already enough of a big, ugly stick before the DMCA. So yes, they're within their rights to bring the suits -- but not by the methods they've chosen. They'll have my sympathy when they stop trying to dismantle my rights; until then, their business model can crash and burn for all I care.
Sell stuff you can't even hear! That's like selling stuff you can't even see!
I wish they'd try to sue me! They'd be in for a _really_ nasty surprise. I own all the music i download, i'm just too lazy to rip the songs from cd. I have 250 cds in my collection, it takes an average of 2 minutes a song to download a 192kbps copy, vs 10 minutes a song to rip/encode. I also have company lawyers that bite. Hard.
Civil disobedience. The practice of this ideology and method of protest begun many decades ago, but it has changed from protesting government actions (or inactions, whichever the case may be) to protesting government, corporate, and/or organizational practices. It may not occur to you, but it may be that some these illegal file-sharers are only breaking the law in protest of exploitation and high prices. Alternatively, if you wish to view civil disobedience as pertaining only to governmental practices, you could see the participation in such civil disobediance as protesting the lack of government action to stop such disservices to the community.
I cannot say I speak for file-sharers, but we all must take into account the culture of rebellion, especially against lawyer groups and corporations, in analysing the file-sharing movement and practice.
(The RIAA does not need to operate the way it does today. It could, for example, simply apply itself as a marketing, CD manufacturing, and distribution service, still garner substantial profit margins, and NOT take the copyright of the artist and cheat the artist of his/her/their proper compensation in practicing that business model. Things could be made better in this regard, for this subject, and there are people, plebs if you will, who are making the demand for change; the actions those individuals take in stating their demands are not necessarily organized or nonagressive in nature.)
~UP
Eat the Path.
Most people infringe copyright because:
Obviously, the industry wants people to want music, so they can't mess with 1.
There are two ways to eliminate problem 2. The most damaging way is to make copyright infringement harder, because that involves destroying the Internet. The non-destructive way to eliminate problem 2 is to offer cheap, non-DRM music downloads to as many people as possible (minors included), but this is only easy when the problem 3 is dealt with.
The only real way to eliminate problem 3 is suing people. It doesn't take many people getting in trouble to scare the general public away from copyright infringement, especially if there are easier alternatives (see above). I think it's great that they're doing this, because it allows them to offer cheap unencumbered music downloads, which is much better than their current policy of corrupting our government and destroying the Internet.
that Bugs Bunny cartoon where the plane is in the nose dive for what seems like forever and stops right before it hits the ground because it ran out of gas. In this case though, the plane isn't gonna stop.
BOOM.
Bye bye RIAA.
Since most of us have already stolen $3,000 from them anyway in CD's we saved money on...er, almost forgot, no-one was going to buy 214CDs this year, and there is no such thing as property rights in non-scarce goods anyways. Oh yea, that's right, copyrights are just an artificially State-created monopoly with no moral authority, and no-more legal authority than the dictates of a mafia organization.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
In Europe there is a simple way to avoid paying these fees. Simply import the media from a neighboring country that does not charge the fees. This may apply to Canada as well.
Those same recording media fees are charged here in the USA, too (on blank cassettes and "Music" CD-Rs). This was made law at the same time as suits against consumers for making copies were prohibited!
I keep wondering how they are suing noncommerical infringers considering that the law says they can't sue them.
Title 17, Chapter 10 "1008. Prohibition on certain infringement actions No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings."
I guess it must be that this section protects the act of making the recording but not distributing it. Thus, it would be legal to use the "digital audio recording device" embodied in your computer and favorite digital music software to make a copy of music available via P2P but not to let others get your music files.
(I'm no lawyer, but I play one on slashdot.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on Slashdot.
I'm interested to know how soon they will reprosecute you after they have caught you. If this is effectively a license to download music for 10 years or so, then I think it's worth it (I'd pay $300 a year to download unlimited music). Even better would if we started a P2P union and everyone paid $5 a year and everyone's fines was taken out of that pot. To stop the RIAA from demanding a list of the union's members, you could encrypt members details as they joined, so that the union itself didn't know who was it's members. When someone gets prosecuted they provide a decryption key for their details so that it can be checked whether they are a member. If they are, their fine is paid by the union. Anyone up for it?
Then stop using them. They'll go away.
...
Looking for new and interesting music?
The AMPFEA.ORG Files Repository contains a signficant daily portion of new music which has been released on the 'net by independent artists.
The new-music mailing list is a handy, moderated list for new music announcements from fresh artists around the glob.
Go here if you've got music of your own online that you want to announce to the new-music list
You don't *NEED* record companies any more, in order to find good music. You only need them to make you feel good about belonging to a society...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Using lame with Easy CD-DA extractor on my 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 processor, and a 40x CD-rom I still can't encode faster than 5x.
Sure, if I encoded using Xing, I could encode 32x realtime from cd on my old 800 Mhz, but you get what you pay for. That goes for time as well.
The MP3's I get from lame (usally preset: extreme) beats the hell out of the ones I gett from Xing at any bitrate. You know... Like multipass videoencoding takes alot more time, but results in a better quality/bit-rate.
And... yes. With a good broadband-connection it's faster to download than encoding yourself, but then you'll have to take whatever you get. No quality-control whatsoever.
And then there's meta-data consistency in your MP3-collection. If you got a large hard-drive MP3-player, you really want that meta-data to be correct and consistent.
And, yes, you guessed correct. I make my own MP3s. Downloading is just too much work.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
some these illegal file-sharers are only breaking the law in protest of exploitation and high prices.
It's only civil disobedience if you disobey an unjust law to protest that unjust law. The appropriate way to protest exploitation and high prices is a boycott.
1) MS sends a letter to the ISP notifying them of alleged infringement.
2) The ISP notifies you.
3) You should inform the ISP that you were not infringing.
If you do so within a certain time frame, your ISP is off the hook and they can reinstate your account (if it got suspended).
Otherwise, they are legally obligated to cut you off.
I am sure that others, more knowledgeable in this field, will be able to point you to the exact wording that you should be using in your reply.
Personally, I would add a blurb that MS is abusing the DMCA provisions by not checking the "allegedly infringing" material so the ISP should not take any action against its customers without giving them a chance to deny these allegations first.
I would also phone the ISP and ask them whether it is their policy to suspend accounts without any proof of wrongdoing and, if so, you have a list of IP addresses that "allegedly" infringe on your intellectual property rights and you demand that they are suspended at once according to said policy.
Otherwise, inquire why do they help convicted monopoly abusers continue their practices by bullying the ISP's customers.
A barrage of phone calls to the above number mentioning anticompetitive practices may also be in order.
I love how the RIAA spokespeople keep claiming that p2p filetrading is a threat to the future of music itself...as if music didn't exist and prosper before the RIAA got a hold of it...Seriously, does anybody really think that the RIAA, and mass commercialism of music has actually done anything to improve music?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
You know, and this is only vaguely related to the "Friday Apple Fun" story, can the RIAA really claim to own silence?
What if I make a bunch of MP3s, with appropriate lengths, filesizes, and ID3 tags, and put them up for share? The catch is, there's no music in them. Just total silence. Granted, I'll piss off everyone who tries to download them, but what happens when the RIAA goes to sue me? Did I infringe their copyright simply by giving the files the same names as song titles?
They're suing people who make copyrighted materials available for other people to download. I could go to a store, buy a bunch of cd's, rip them, and make them available on kazaa. The fact that most of the music people are making available was downloaded from someone else doesn't make a difference.
Yes, the RIAA is an evil cartel of music labels forcing out good music for cheap glitter at high prices, but they are within their legal rights to sue. They want to go back to the way things were, they charge whatever they want and people buy it.
Face it, they're an abusive husband. But they do have the right to sue their ex-wife for busting up their pickup truck's windows out
Rather than download the music, and serve as the middleman for both the p2p programs and the RIAA, just boycott all RIAA labels. If you visit the RIAA website (www.riaa.com) you can click on a list of record labels and see all the large industry players they represent. I printed the list, and have it with me inside my wallet. Whenever I go out and buy music, if the artist is affiliated with the label, I dont buy it. Granted, its a sacrifice sometimes, but its the greatest power you all have, even you lefties that hate corporatism, its the power of the consumer. They cant sue you for not buying their product cant they? Thats how you fight them, by not buying anything that's RIAA related.
I agree, this is their product and they have a right to defend it, but going after your customers (and yes most of these people purchase music)by suing them and bullying them around is not the way to go about. I dont really have too much respect for the p2p guys either because they are well aware that file sharers can get in trouble and yet most of them still advertise crap like oh our program was downloaded one hundred million times last week, giving you a false sense of security. I say, dont do either of them a favor, and dont download or upload anything until both of these entities resolve their issues. And in the mean time, boycott the RIAA.
203 - are from Comcast 27 - from an Orlando ISP Still leaves 301 unknowns
Not that I condone p2p downloading, I mean hell I'd rather spend $15 on a non-RIAA affiliated artist than help these scum bags in anyway, and certainly not through legal relief. However, Comcast has over 5 million members, I am sure 203 of them are not the only ones uploading and downloading. You also have to ask yourselves something, I guess, they have only gone after east coast based ISP's none of the West Coast or Mid West giants (SBC, Charter, ect.) have been served, so makes me wonder if this little suit war will have any effects at all. I mean hell, they cant be everywhere all the time, first, and second, what happens when you get a situation where half the people you sue start fighting back, more legal costs acrue. Dont know how effective these suing tactics will be, I am sure that for the short run they may work, but for the long run, well I dont see it happenning. Think about all the crap that p2p networks are coming out with to protect your anonimity. Very difficult for the RIAA to keep up, and very expensive as well, sooner or later when they have extortioned enough people I am sure they will have to concede. But people like you and I that dont download on p2p can still help the victims these jagoffs are pursuing, boycott anything thats RIAA affiliated.