Slashdot Mirror
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.
If you want music, buy it! If it's not valuable to you, don't.
The RIAA ought to keep on doing this until the public gets either so fed up with these antics or simply doesn't have enough money to buy the CDs altogether.
Though they've made around 6M dollars, this is a losing strategy in the long run.
I have been pwned because my
It must cost the RIAA more than $3,000 per case to file against file swappers. Lawyers don't come cheap...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
1977 people still only represents a tiny fraction of p2p users. ~.049% of the p2p users (I assumed the low amount of 4million at any one time). Take the number of user to a resonable 15million and we get .013%. I guess free is still greater than cheap to many people.
"The RIAA has been averaging $3,000 per settlement so far."
...so are they giving all the money they've received to the authors/performers of the music? How do they decide who gets what and what's the money used for.
I remember when they first started sueing, the file trading slowed down for a while. I think it went back up though. Do you think most people think they won't get caught? After all, when there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people on a p2p network, sueing 532 people is only a fraction of the overall filesharers.
--
Smack your momma good deals!
$3000 per settlement?!?! Uh oh I think the RIAA just found a profitable new business model.
Still, only close to 2000 lawsuits is only a fraction of the entire music-swapping community.
It is a weak terrorist-like tactic. Even though they only get a tiny fraction of the population, they hope that this will scare everyone individually.
Well, good luck to them.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Troll me if you will, but realize that the
RIAA do have some claim to the money.
I mean, artists make it, people want it, and they
buy it. But guess who makes the people want it:
the RIAA folk.
That's right. Somebody has to pay for the promotion,
the studio time, the slot on MTV and ClearChannel
so that the general population knows what to like.
I find it amusing how we pay them to tell us what
to like, but somebody has to.
I've seen numbers that claim 50,000,000 people in the US use P2P applications.
What's your source on this?
I'm reminded of why I quit buying their stuff and started buying better music instead.
Rank Presidents by th
from the wired article:
"This is a group that does not appreciate as much as the general population that it is illegal to share copyright music on a peer-to-peer network," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "More education is necessary. One form of education is lawsuits."
you know, i bet he goes to bed all fuzzy inside.
london is drowning and i live by river
" If they'd actually put all of these lawyer's fees into a better way of selling music they'd be making far more money."
iTunes.
And in other news, Water still feels wet, the sky hasn't fallen, and SCO still hasn't had all their cases dismissed with prejudice.
C'mon people, this doesn't even count as news anymore. People violate copyrights, people get sued. Let it go.
Now, what I consider the bigger "news" from this involves the experiment the RIAA has run on the level of stupidity in the general population. 1977 suits so far, and people still keep using Kazaa to download this crap. Get a clue, Kazaa users! At the very least, switch to a different P2P app. Perferable one with at least a tad bit of privacy, like FreeNet.
Or better yet, just go back to the way that has worked for the past 30-40 years, from the days before P2P - Swap music and movies privately, offline, with your friends. You can get the same stuff, with absolutely no chance of an RIAA nastygram as a resuly. You can even do so as a sort of buying pool, where you and a dozen friends agree not to overlap in your purchases, thus maximizing your available music library. "Need" to find something really obscure, possibly out-of-press (print? Whatever you call music that you can no longer buy new, for any price)? Hook up with a fan group, where you can get material far more obscure than even Kazaa's bottom-20 list.
Or, best option of all, just buy from indie labels. Hey, we all have a favorite band, and I'll admit even I will buy whatever a handful of RIAA-signed groups puts out. But for the rest of the "fluffy listening" music, look into companies like Magnatune, or go direct to the artists' websites. The musician gets a FAR bigger cut, you pay less ($5/cd on average, in my experience, for buying direct from the artist), and best of all, the RIAA gets nothing.
50 million users? That's like 1 in 6 Americans! I think I have to call bullshit on that. Maybe 1 in 6 in certain demographics but definitely no way it's 1 in 6 period.
IMHO, of course.
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
Produce a product that anyone else can copy and you'll soon go bankrupt. That's capitalism. What you describe is a system of government backed monopoly.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
- free up bandwidth for us non copyright infringers
- result in fewer infringers on p2p networks, thus substantiating the slashdot choruses of "go after the users, leave technology alone" and "p2p apps such as kazaa have many important non-infringing uses."
- drive people to the newest pay-per-download service of the week. after all, a two years ago you couldn't log on to slashdot without seeing a "if they only charged 99c per song download there would be no need for things like kazaa" and "I'd gladly pay 99c per song so that i dont have to buy 'filler'")
- by going after college students, the RIAA (or whoever) can't be after money, since they ain't got none. The riaa will doubtlessly lose more money in lawyer fees than they will collect in judgements. they MUST be about sending a message, therefore. this is a good thing, because that is the right message to send--copyrights (such as the ones that form the basis of the GPL, Britney's music, and the bulk of work done by software developers who visit slashdot) should be respected, completely anti-copyright idiot/zealots notwithstanding (bring on the flames).
but, of course, instead of responses consistent with the old slashdot argument of "leave the technology alone, go after the infringers", expect to see the regular carping and whining here about the RIAA.Most of the people being sued cannot afford the lawyer and time required to defend these lawsuits, so it is economically cheaper to settle than to take it to court.
Plus, if you actually are guilty of swapping files illegally, it makes it that much harder to win in court.
Are you kidding? What legal uses?
Downloading non-RIAA files.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
There is a flaw in one of your assumtions
they keep up their current trend of filing that many lawsuits every 8 months.
Right now the courts have no precedence on how to handle cases like filesharing. Once it is decided what evidence is needed for the RIAA to get the names of filesharers from the ISPs each case will take a lot less time which will allow them to sue more people. This in turn will cause some people to stop filesharing so the odds of you being sued when you share files will increase. This will cause more people to stop filesharing.
I beleive the RIAA is going to stop large scale filesharing. The only question is how long it will take.
but there are a lot of bands i like that are on the *warning* list.
if i just stop buying their albums won't the RIAA assume that others (or me) are just stealing them anyway, and use their lost sales as statistics to why more, tougher draconian laws must be passed?
catch 22
That guilt was predetermined. If we know that someone is guilty before a court proceeding, why have courts at all? I mean if someone's accused they MUST be guilty, right?
Give me a break.
You have no idea if these people are liable (this is civil court, it's liability, not guilt). For one, there is no gaurentee that those files were actually copyrighted files. There are TONS of misnamed files (either delibratly or accidentally) on any given P2P network, and no the RIAA doesn't bother to download and check. Even assuming they are actually the songs they claim to be, there is no way to know that the files were on the computer you think they are. Kaazaa particularly is not known for it's accuracy in pulling lists from computers, it gets it wrong sometimes. Even supposing it is the right list, you have no idea if the person who is associated with the IP is actually the right person. Maybe they have wireless and someone used it (seriously, it's easy to break in, even if they use WEP). Even if it ends up being their computer, you have no idea that they were the one responsible. Virsues, worms and hacks are RAMPANT, and it wouldn't be out of the question for someone to use a hacked box for P2P to shield themselves.
So basically they are saying "Well this IP, which might or might not be for this computer, which might or might not have been under this person's control, might or might not have had this list of files which might or might not be what they claim to be is infringing on our copyright." What? You mean you think you can predetermine guilt from that? Give me a break.
Given your numbers an illegal file sharer can calculate their monthly financial risk from RIAA lawsuits.
Your numbers are:
Time (T)=8 months
Probability (P)=1/25290
Cost (C)=3000
With monthly financial risk = (P*C)/T, if each month you put away 1.483 cents, you would on average have enough money to pay your settlement fees by the time you were sued.
Now assume that the RIAA gets more aggressive and settles less, and through the courts gets a $1 million verdict in 100% of the people it sues (1977 people / 8 months). The monthly financial risk then is $4.94 a month.
So even if your punishment is $1 million, the financial risk of getting sued is less than any online music service with a monthly fee. It's also less than 5 songs on iTunes a month, which probably isn't nearly as many songs as Kazaa users download. Why does the RIAA think their legal efforts will convince people with such a low financial risk?
And here's an interesting twist -- why doesn't an insurance company insure people against RIAA lawsuits for $10/mo so they can download as much as they want on Kazaa? Isn't this similar to what Redhat is doing to protect its customers from SCO? I'd much rather pay $10/mo to download whatever I want without risk of being sued than pay the same money to MusicMatch for their inferior service. And if everyone did the same, peer-to-peer services would blossom again with tons of quality content from all genres imaginable.
my blog
When the music industry starts paying back all the musicians that they have ripped off, then and only then will I consider the piracy being perpetrated against them wrong.
These are the people who caused many of the founders of jazz, blues and rock and roll to die in poverty. What is happing now is not piracy, it is devine justice.
I would say listening to it first is a pretty good way to decide whether something is valuable to you.
Slashdotters love to say this...as though the majority of the people on Kazaa are "sampling" all those albums in order to run to the store and purchase them to re-get them.
I don't get this incessant need to avoid stating the OBVIOUS TRUTH, which is that p2p is used for a shitload of outright piracy and avoiding paying for stuff. I'd say over 90%. You're being foolish and purposely stoic if you pretend otherwise.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the RIAA suing people who are illegally distributing their product. I don't get the opposition to that either.
If you love the music industry executives, thier spouses and mistresses AND thier nosetrails... buy the overpriced shit they sell you.
When translated to reality, reads:
"I'm justifying stealing some artist's music because I don't like that an exec who heads the label makes money in a capitalist system. I'll ignore that the artist willingly signed their contract and that distributing intellectual property without the copyright holder's permission is illegal.
Instead, I'll sidestep the issue of ripping off artists and say, "Here, look at this, it's a rich RIAA exec and his wife!" Thereby completely distracting the issue with something irrelevant that the anti-social, anti-capitalist, generally-broke Slashdotters can rally against.
And we'll pretend it's actually WRONG for the RIAA to be suing people still illegally distributing their product--even after all the awareness of its immorality and illegality. Never mind that when Napster was being sued, Slashdotters were saying the RIAA should be suing individual downloaders instead because they're the ones breaking the law!
Now they're doing exactly what Slashdotters said they should do, and suddenly it's wrong. Because I'm really trying to justify the piracy I participate in daily on my DSL connection. I'm going to pretend it's not illegal, not immoral, and I'm going to rid myself of the guilt of downloading by trying to remove the image of me being a criminal and instead paint the RIAA as the bad guy."
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Once the RIAA/MPAA has shot themselves in the collective feet enough through negative press and marketing, consumers will demand alternative bands, distribution, technology, etc.
You're kidding, right? Have you met anyone under 20 recently? 90% of the kids out there don't even know what the hell a RIAA is, nor do they care. Neither do they seem to care that an album costs $18. You know why? All their friends are buying Linkin Park CD's and they don't want to be left out. At any cost.
Face it, the RIAA is selling to a largely agnostic market. It's just the same as the Nike sweatshop phenomenon.
I'm sure no one would mind if I stole both cars so I could try them each out. I'll buy them if I like them. I swear.
> I really hope I get to metamoderate that +1, Insightful moderation...
+1 insightful, +1 funny.
What does it matter in the end? In my book, you should only metamod mods that were in the wrong direction, not just the wrong reason.
Lets say the average teenager/youg adult (who downloads music) spends $200 a year on CDs. That's give or take 10 to 15 CDs a year.
A $3000 suit would be about 15 years' worth of CD buying. This doesn't take into account revenue from advertising on MTV, posters, fan clubs, concerts etc.
In the long run, I think its in the record companie's interests to settle other ways or find new ways to distribute music. Ticking off you fan base for 15 years is not worth it.
His comment deserves both. Actually that's the way it really works. The RIAA can't protect artists without having any source of income, you know!
p.s. I know the parent would agree with me on this, so trolls please don't suggest using spyware or a trusted computing platform (users aren't going to go for either of those).
No problem.
Why are you proposing "solutions" here? Aren't you and the *AA supposed to work it out yourselves? I am suspecting you're an *AA supporter, or a wannabe.
.mp3 or other more free formats and distribute them in current P2P? You want DRM in your songs and BigBro to watch you? The stupid suggestions only work, if the customers cooperate. If you have customer cooperation, you wouldn't have people uploading and downloading stuff they didn't pay for - this is only a problem for most, if not all, *AA style businesses.
This is for the moderators on crack:
What's to stop someone from ripping songs to
The whole point of the *AA's monopoly is to rip off musicians, to solely use their distribution systems, and to use DRM file formats for pay-per-play, if possible. If they change, they no longer have a monopoly.
These lawsuits are perfect. The only effective way to defeat the *AA is to boycott them permanently en masse, and support the alternatives simultaneously.
Isn't this why Open Source is thriving today? It started with people boycotting closed source, and developed Open Source. If you can't write a half-assed song, look for Free alternatives; and stop proposing solutions, even stupid ones, for the *AA.
Now ask yourself. How well would this work for those who don't want to play by someone elses rules? Part of the mess the worlds is in, is exactly because there are those who think that societies rules don't apply to them. You not only need to come up with something that functions, but also know how people will try to avoid it. Now you know why our laws read like a phone book, instead of a pamplet.
> The RIAA has been averaging $3,000 per settlement so far.
How much have they lost in negative sentiment? I don't buy many CD's in comparison to some people, but I estimate that I have chosen NOT to buy at least 20 or more CD's in the last year or so as a backlash to the Labels. My consumption of CD's has fallen by about 20%. Tough Titties, RIAA and ARIA!
If you're looking for American music, iTunes is great. I like mainstream music, and I have bought a bunch of it through iTunes. It's way better then the record store or the CD clubs that I used to belong to to get my 10 CDs then quit.
.99 a song, you bet your sweet arse I will.
BUT
iTunes does not have American Indian music.
iTunes does not have a lot of Italian music.
iTunes does not have a lot of Folk music.
iTunes is missing a lot of non mainstream stuff, despite their commitment to independant bands. I'm sorry, but if I can't buy my music online, or at the store, I still want to listen to it, so I'm going to swap it. If you offer me the opportunity to buy it for
People don't have the right to distribute material covered under copyright laws without the holders' permission.
Copyright holders have to allow certain uses for the distribution of their works (educational, etc.)
Why is that when copyright holders and their supporters (e.g the MPAA/RIAA) ask us to "respect copyright", they conveniently neglect their own imposition of copyright protections that can be easily dismantled by anyone but those willing to follow the law, and thus designed only to remove copyright-enabled privileges from those who do follow the law? Respect works two ways - yet for the RIAA, respect for copyright law is only reasonable when it benefits them.
Copyright infringement won't improve the artists' share of their own revenues (though P2P and legal downloading of songs may do that), nor will it halt the erosion of the rights of the people over copyrighted works. However, without copyright infringement, these issues would have been considered by very few, and probably ignored by most. Would song downloads (outside of the album format) have come about without the threat of copyright infringement? Since there was no competition with the RIAA, there was no alternative to choose that offered these until copyright infringement made it clear that a lot of people wanted songs, not albums. The RIAA is the limiting case - they have both colluded to maintain prices and selection and have also helped to erode the rights of the people over copyrighted works. By colluding, they negated legal ways for individuals to choose other ways to get music, and circumvented the ability of the market to control their behavior. This didn't leave much alternative for lots of people, and feeling screwed, they did what in other circumstances their consciences would have inhibited - they infringed the copyrights of others.
I don't disagree with your premise - there are good reasons why copyright infringement is a crime and why those who engage in it should be pursued. The problem for me is that copyright law is supposed to guarantee both my rights in using their works (but not distributing them) and the rights of the copyright holders to sell and distribute their works - at this moment, copyright law seems to be applied selectively to those who infringe the rights of the holders of copyright and not for those who infringe the rights of the people to use the copyrighted works. The RIAA in particular has short-circuited the ability of the market to enforce the rights of the users of copyrighted works, and the gov't has followed the money to the copyright holders' pockets. I am frustrated with the situation - I won't copy, but I don't know how else my rights as a user of copyrighted works will be taken seriously.