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Record Industry Sues 532 More U.S. File-Sharers
Patik writes "The RIAA today issued 532 new subpoenas for music file swapping, many of them college students using their campus networks. They will not say which ISPs or colleges were involved, but that the users were sharing "substantial amounts" of music files. This brings the total number of subpoenas to 1,977. The RIAA has been averaging $3,000 per settlement so far." Readers Digitus1337 and Warpedcow point to stories respectively at Wired and Reuters.
C'mon guys !! use Kazaa Lite, not the full version!! At least give yourselves a chance. And the best place to get Kazaa Lite these days is... yep, Kazaa !!!
The list of colleges was included in the RIAA press release:
The individuals included in today's legal action were on the networks of the following universities (listed in alphabetical order of state or name): University of Arizona; University of California, Berkeley; California State University -- Northridge; University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; Drexel University; George Mason University; George Washington University; Georgetown University; Indiana University; University of Indianapolis; Loyola Marymount University; Marquette University; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; New York University; University of Northern Colorado; University of Pennsylvania; University of Southern California; Stanford University; Vanderbilt University; and Villanova University.
http://www.cpwire.com/archive/2004/3/23/1540.asp
It is valuable to me ... just not *that* valuable.
Remember: spread the word, but don't sound like a fanatic.
Maybe they used a computer to print out seperate forms for each one? The restriction was against all-in-one subpoenas IIRC...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
Mute has been making some substantial gains. Even if it's not 100% bulletproof, it's still small enough that the RIAA doesn't bother with it when there are bigger fish to fry such as Kazaa and Mp2p.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
I didn't say it was terrorism ya fool. I say the math they're usuing to get the desired effect isn't far removed from the math that terrorists use to get us. Just for the record, the RIAA et al. are well within their rights to prosecute people for illegal copyright infringements.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
CNN's search page
The American Heritage Dictionary's definition of the word "terrorize" includes:
And that, essentially, is what the Recording Industry is achieving with these lawsuits. Right or wrong, they cannot possibly sue everybody who illegally redistributes their music over the popular file sharing networks; the best they can hope to accomplish is to file suit against enough people to scare the rest into submission. I believe that this is what the grandparent poster meant by calling the RIAA's methods "a weak terrorist-like tactic".
(I do agree with you, though - the word "terrorism" is unbelievably overused nowadays.)
You're also supporting racketeering, extortion, and harassment. Do you feel good about that?
"Well, it took an hour to write, I thought it would take an hour to read."
I'm an editor at the my college's newspaper. I received this in my inbox today from The Collegiate Presswire:
Looks like the new lawsuits are just a part of a well-planned campaign to strike fear into us immoral college students. I guess this "conference" will consist mostly of the RIAA spewing propaganda with the hope that the editors and reporters in the chat will carry it back to their publications.
This news is very depressing. Shame on the RIAA for suing students! They could at least go after people who can afford the court fees.
I've found this site to be a good source of free downloadable MP3s. Gotta go grab more in light of this recent news ;)
Most of these people can't fight back. It takes alot of money just to hire someone and show up in court let alone all the time needed before hand. $3,000 is cheap compair what it will cost to fight this and in the end you may still end up owning the RIAA.
What I'd really like to see is a bunch of musicians who are fed up with the RIAA's crap get together and take a stand. If a bunch of us put together a collection of free tracks and make it available from a single machine via Kazaa or similar, it would send a message that P2P can be used to the industry's benefit.
As a potential side benefit, it would show up as thousands of mp3 files. The presence of such a system would mean that the RIAA would have to check to see if an RIAA member is the rights holder on every single song on every single server. Otherwise, they might inadvertently sue our honeypot server or someone redistributing the contents thereof. As it stands, they can probably get away without doing that because the majority of songs are almost always by RIAA member labels. I believe the word I'm looking for there is slapp-back. There's nothing like a multi-million dollar countersuit to bring this crap to an end.
And even if they didn't end up suing us or someone else for distributing files that we/they had the legal right to distribute, the mere existence of dozens of such authorized servers with frequently-changing IP numbers would mean that the RIAA's server searches would get utterly bogged down by all the bogus super-servers. Either way, they would have to reevaluate whether the benefits outweigh the effort, which would be good for everybody, IMHO.
They might break even if everyone settled, but again, having worked in a law firm, I know there are a lot of people who just can't pay or be tracked down.
Well God knows, time was you could actually hear good music for free on the radio. But the RIAA took care of that already.
But that's beside the point. I'm assuming you know the difference between MP3 and PCM. How can you say that one is "re-getting" something when the two codecs are so dissimilar? Is one "re-getting" something when you buy a CD of something you taped off the radio? No, because you are buying it in a different and superior format. And yes, I now own *dozens* of CD's that I wouldn't were it not for P2P. I can't speak for anybody but myself.
You know what I wonder? I wonder how many of you "stealing-is-stealing" people have had dual cassette decks.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
Allofmp3.com is 100% legal, in Russia. Here is their stated legal info: All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3-03-79 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting. Users are held liable for the use and distribution of the MediaServices site information materials according to local legislation.
Bork Bork Bork!!
they are asking $3000 to settle out of court or about $100 per song they will be asking if it gets to court.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
"I mean if someone's accused they MUST be guilty, right?"
That's what the Ian Huntley case seems to be saying to me. He had accusations on his file therefore he's automatically a sex-offender. It turned out that he was but if somebody really wanted to they could ruin somebody's career by getting a few people to accuse a teacher, for example, of sex crimes then as far as I see it that person won't get a job if the accusations stay on their record.
I agree. It is all economic. The RIAA, and soon the MPAA, screwed themselves out of their biggest revenue generator, the next format. From vinal to tape, from tape to cd, from vhs to dvd, THESE are the real money makers it seems to me. Constantly upgrading both the hardware (Sony makes DVD/CD/MD players just as they do music) and the medium media is reproduced on is part of their verticle intergration business plan. Only when they moved to digital they didn't cover all the angles, they didn't protect their media and thus ensure they could control the next roll out of upgraded hardware and medium. Digital media can be transformed into anything! It can't be controlled! This is a huge revenue potential lost! How much money do you think the record companies made when people trashed their tapes of copyrighted material THEY ALREADY owned and bought CD's of the same copyrighted material THEY ALREADY owned because it was of superior quality and convienence? OODLES! How much could they make doing the same thing with the transition to digital? OODLES!
This is their lack of fore-sight, and if anything the copyright holders have already been over compensated. As for any plans by anyone to charge for this media in the future, its all bunk! Why would I pay for anything I could get for free? Oh wait... bottled water... nuts. I guess maybe if you can convince a consumer you are selling something superior in quality and convience then you deserve suckering them out of money. Do you think the record companies can do it? Maybe that's because they have nothing left to offer in the vein of convienence or quality.
Ok lets make a dir of 100000 files of everysone possible. Faked.
Make an app that generates these files then shares them.
If 100000 people run it, (well not only will we get 'bad' fake files, but RIAA might start sueing) then you can sue them for wrongfull sue.
At least it would use up all their resources if suddendly 50000 people have 100000 files each.
You'd have to mix them in with the regular shared files in such a way that it's not possible to recognize which are real and which are fake, or the RIAA would recognize the fakes and not do anything about them.
At that point, you decrease the effectiveness of the filesharing network so dramatically it becomes inherently useless.
I never download music anymore. When I want the latest CD I go right to my local library and rip it with CDex. No P2P software required!
Is what would happen if you went out and bought all the CD's that you were accused of downloading? Couldn't you then say that you were simply downloading digital backups to listen to on your computer?