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.
Didn't a judge tell them they couldn't do this before?
Actually you can get it off TechTV and not have to install Kazaa on your comp. http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/sto ry/0,24330,3464142,00.html
Moo!
I mean, come on. This isn't going to work. They can't sue everyone in the country, and sampling has proven itself ineffective at best. They need a new strategy, if they ever hope to stem the tide. Legal alternatives may be doing well too, but sometimes you just can't be free. They should just give up and find some other way to increase sales. Perhaps they could make better albums.
SAILING MISHAP
It must cost the RIAA more than $3,000 per case to file against file swappers. Lawyers don't come cheap
The RIAA is basically an association of lawyers paid by the various member labels to do exactly this kind of thing.
my pet machine
Bankrupt the RIAA
It must cost the RIAA more than $3,000 per case to file against file swappers. Lawyers don't come cheap...
This (bankrupting the RIAA by giving them $3000) is as brilliant as bankrupting Microsoft by buying cheap Xboxes (which is to say, not at all brilliant in the least).
Are you kidding? What legal uses?
/devil's advocate
I'm being sarcastic, but only to an extent.
From the RIAA perspective, there is no legal reason for you to be sharing their music via p2p. Even if you legally own the CD, and you legally have backup copies, sharing them freely is not legal.
I emailed the RIAA several years back (when this first became an issue during Napster) and asked them about the only legal use I could think of - downloading music that resides on a CD you own because it's faster than ripping to your hard drive (it was much slower for me then).
I've seen numbers that claim 50,000,000 people in the US use P2P applications. Let's do the math:
In approximately 8 months the industry has sued 1,977 people. That's 1 in every 25,290.84 people. Now we get into speculation. Assume:
they keep up their current trend of filing that many lawsuits every 8 months.
the number of P2P users in the U.S. stays static
you were born today, will live for 74 years and are precocious enough to use P2P software today, the day of your birth.
That's 195,064 file sharers they'll sue in your lifetime. Heck, you have a 1 in 256.33 chance of being sued over your entire life, you lucky newborn!
Oh, there's one assumption I forgot to mention:
Assume: The RIAA racketeers are still in business your whole life.
NB: My math may be off, I've had a few cold ones.
Trolling is a art,
Now it seems that all the music downloading news is about the pay per download sites, the music piracy issues have taken a back seat in the headlines. I'd say this round of lawsuits gets little coverage because the shock and awe factor is gone. Time for the RIAA to move on to a new tactic to grab the attention of all those harmful pirates.
The suits need to ramp up and continue [even faster] at all costs; I'm in great favor of the industry pursuing people as quickly as possible and winning the suits whereever appropriate.
Not because I'm some sort of RIAA nazi, but rather because it is neccessary in order to drive forward new methods of distribution, as well as innovation for smaller, non-mega-supra-corp bands. 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. The mega-bands might even make enough fuss due to lost sales from their mad-as-hell fans.
Me, I'm just sitting back enjoying the ride waiting for that day.
I recently received five different cease 'n' deceist letters from five different film companys for five different movies. That bit-torrent will get you.
I wonder if the RIAA is gonna gun for me next.
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
Anyone else find it interesting that the RIAA has sued more people than Americans have died in the Iraqi war? According to Yahoo! News, "584 U.S. troops have died -- 396 from hostile action." Compare this with the 1997 file sharers sued by the RIAA. The RIAA has sued over 3 times as many Americans as have died in the war. Looks like this really is a war on file sharers. Too bad that we can't shoot back as we can (and do) in Iraq.
Note to the mods: I'm not trying to be flamebait here, I just want to point out something that I find iteresting.
First point: Don't use Kazaa. Get your music from somewhere else like a bittorrent site or something.
A person could always gather up an old machine with two network cards and run all your traffic through it like a proxy server (I think, I'm not an expert) and then when they try to access your machine to check your public shares they wouldn't find anything because they would be scanning the proxy server.
No quoting me on this though, because I'm not an expert on it.
At some point, funding the RIAA would become prohibitive for the powers that be in the music industry.
First of all, as someone wrote above, the RIAA are lawyers. They don't hire lawyers like you and me do. Secondly, if their expenses get unacceptably high, they simply start suing for more money (plus court costs) and/or settle less often.
Why is it that no one uses the most obvious defense of plausible deniability:
THERE. DONE.
Even if they only have to prove a preponderence of the evidence, they would STILL have to deal with all of those items AND in the end you would still have a hard disk with no songs to beat them over the head with. It seems to me they could NEVER win one of these cases.
I don't know about anyone else, but that's much cheaper than settling for several thousand dollars. And that's if you don't hire a lawyer and contest that the RIAA don't have the right to get your personal info and the ISP don't have the right to hand it over as at least one person has done successfully.
I mean FFS, if people can get away with the "a virus hacked into my computer and did it" defense for criminal cases...
Liberty.
Everyone bitched about how piracy was the only option since the RIAA didn't want to allow tracks to be sold online. You've been able to buy individual tracks music online now. It's not like you have to buy albums full of filler tracks anymore. Either stop listening to major label music or pay the $0.99 per track. If this was a story about GPL violations, my how the tables would be turned.
Also, everyone bitched how the RIAA was attacking the P2P networks themselves instead of the users participating in the unauthorized distribution of the copyrighted materials. The RIAA is doing exactly what everyone suggested - going after the pirates.
As for the argument that your chances of getting caught are pretty slim - yea, it's just like speeding on the highway when you're keeping up with traffic. You're still breaking the law. Just don't be surprised if in the future there's cameras along the highway that take a picture of your licence plate, and later in the mail each and every one of you get a ticket. That's what happens when you pay more attention to the methods of enforcement than the laws. Likewise, if you keep ignoring the copyright laws, eventually there will be better ways for the RIAA to catch more people and it won't be a matter of enforcement anymore.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Starting that sentence with "though" makes it sound as if 6 million dollars is a substantial benefit. It's not. God only knows how much money the RIAA makes. Six mil is not so much as a scratch on the armor.
If it hasn't become obvious to the RIAA that suing people is a losing strategy by now (it's already obvious to us), then they'll be doing this until someone stops them. I just hope that there is some actuary within the ranks that is getting ready to tell the RIAA to stop with the lawsuits.
After all, actuaries control the fate of the entire world. Who doesn't know that?
And now, for a sig that's a complete copout.
Are any of these guys sued fighting back or are they just making the $3000 settlements?
Would'nt it make sense if they got together and fought the RIAA? I know it seems easy to say n not to do when your sued by a giant but wouldnt they just keep suing people if no one fights back.
Lord of the Binges.
You must be the bastion of editorial integrity with your pre-judgement of the RIAA statements as "propaganda." Here's to hoping you never work for a real media outlet.
"I'll be honest you with man... I think the Internet is the greatest invention the world has ever seen. If a kid can't be at a Slipknot show, he could be with you intimately at home, regardless of where he is around the world. MP3's I think are fine, but it's very dangerous when certain people get a hold of an album before it is released and leak it out to the public. Then people download it and distribute it... You have to understand; if you're a musician, you learn how to, and I'm gonna quote something from Henry Rollins here: "You learn how to starve creatively". This is our livelihood, and MP3's can be very dangerous. I'm a great supporter of the Internet. Our Slipknot1.com page got over 230,000 [Actually over a million] hits last month, and it's a great way of reaching out." Quoted from a slipknot article. Disturbed(www.disturbed1.com) also supports p2p and people downloading their music, as long as they support the band in some way(cd's merchandise concert tickets etc) I lost the article though..
http://nng.audiodragon.net
Here's my problem statement:
1. File sharers like the p2p model as a way of finding new music. They like it partly because it's free, but my suspicion is that there's more to it than that. They like the model. Radio is dead, and the RIAA killed it, via ClearChannel. I'm going to suggest that, given a workable model that preserves file sharing, but allows musicians and their promoters to earn revenues, file sharers will move to a legal model. But it has to preserve the basics of the current open file sharing model.
2. File sharers want to use whatever client they feel like. Any "legalized" file sharing method which forces users into using a specific locked, closed source client is likely to fail.
3. A flat fee system, with built in means to prevent cheating (leaking to uncontrolled distribution) and gaming the system (permitting individuals to artificially inflate download numbers for a particular song) would generate sufficient revenues and a method for divvying up those revenues that would be acceptable to the music industry and musicians.
That's a tall order, but I think it can be done. Consider this:
If you pay a flat fee into my proposed system, you have the rights to:
a. download content with copyrights held by participating contributors freely, by any method.
b. upload that participating content, but only to those that have also paid the fee.
I believe this can be done. To meet my criterion 2, it has to be done by defining a protocol, not a specific client. Criterion 3 can be met by making it trivial to police, to ensure that subscribers aren't cheating. So here's my protocol, at least in a cartoon-back-of-the-envelope form:
Subscribers use a client which authenticates with the license administrator's server. This authentication may be long term, results in a symmetric key shared with the server and bound to a subscriber's identity, and which is your proof that you are a participant. The protocol requires that, prior to actually sharing any content (but not necessarily advertizing it) you perform a 3-way authentication with the party that wishes to share your content and the administration server farm. This can be done using a Needham-Schroeder protocol, by which the administration server pushes, on request, a symmetric key to the two parties. By using this protocol, you have fulfilled your obligation to only upload content to participating subscribers. Your proof is provided by the administration server in distributing the key. Note that you don't need to know the identity of the other party; you only know that they are a subscriber. The symmetric key you share with them is then used to encrypt the content you send them.
Data gathering in this scheme is trivial; the administrators take a sample of the content which has been distributed by scanning the upload directories of subscribers. What is measured is the relative distribution of content, not the number of uploads, and because you don't know the identity of the scanning party, it's very difficult to game the system.
Policing is also simple. The administrative server can ping authenticated subscribers to verify that they aren't using any other file sharing protocol.
So, there may be some things in here you find objectionable. But is this a fair compromise? Could this work?
Comments?
Krill
What would happen if U.S. users were to download via a proxy of some sort in a foreign country that does not honor the demands of the RIAA with their statements of copyright violation. I know that a lot of servers of questionable content have been moving "overseas" and I am curious as to how effective such a tactic would be in practicality for p2p users.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
Bonch's post
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.
Your a naughty slashdot user, you didn't read this article from 4 days ago!
m l?tid=126&tid=141&tid=188&tid=95
File Sharing Increases CD Sales
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/19/0112230.sht
My opinion: It's time to make 'illegal' file trading legal by reducing copyright to nonobscene levels. A monopoly on information and the right to gouge consumers for 95 years (if your a corporation, even longer if your an individual ;) ) is bullshit. Time for these companies to realize it is the
people can change the laws, and will do so soon enough.
Colleges and universities have pretty cleanly divided up the "education and research" responsibilities. Mainly, the colleges have the former, and the universities the latter.
Believe it or not the universities probably do provide the broadband for exactly this sort of student use. It's the same reason they ignore rampant alcohol use on campus, and the same reason they overemphasize sports teams. Major universities these days provide cardboard standup undergraduate educations, and seek mainly to entertain and divert their undergraduates' attentions, while they use their tuition dollars to build "research prestige".
For a good book on this subject, and the plight of higher education in America, pick up a copy of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Ruining Undergraduate Education . Though it views the issue through the lense of sports (obviously), the main focus is on the downward spiral that is undergraduate education at most American research universities (which, coincidently (wink), tend to correspond with the NCAA Division 1-A).
ok, so what I am tring to figure out is that with the growing number of viruses and worms that are being put out every day, people deside to go after microsoft.... Ok now, I wonder wy there has not been a attack yet on the recording industry. The odds of them sueing a pissed off cracker is much higher then not sueing one. Sooner of later there is going to be a revolt against them, and then what will they do? Also going after the colleges has to be the dumbest idea. I graduated from one of the colleges on there list, and I know from experiounce that the computers are used by at least 20 people a day and are goasted every week, so what are they going to do wait for class to start and hand whom ever is at the computer a suit? Get real...
They're using the law against us, why not use it to fight them? They're soon going to stop suing people if they know they can get their cases beaten in the courts.
I'm pretty sure this is the fastest way to beat them, or at least slow them down a bunch.
That assumes that the duplicator costs nothing to operate (which, given that it's a large, expensive, physical object we're talking about, is unlikely). Of course, that highlights the limits of the analogy - a car is not like a cd, both in cost and nature.
Of course, you also assume everyone would use the duplicator rather than buy an original. If the cost (in the full sense of finance, time, etc.) isn't significantly less than the cost of buying an original, then I'd say anyone who wants one and can afford one will still get an original. And if the cost of using the duplicator is significantly cheaper, then that would imply that the original is over-priced. All of which leads to the really interesting question of: what are the implications of someone who couldn't afford an original using the duplicator to get one?
-
Becuase if they were they wouldn't be settling - they'd stick it to 'em.
I agree with your post, but regarding this one sentence. I remember being a college student paying my own way (or rather having to take out loans to pay my own way) and a $3000 settlement is much more than sticking it to a college student. Depending on their school that's a semester or more of tuition/books/living expenses. I think the fact that the RIAA has made it clear that if you try to fight the minimum settlement amount they'll accept will go up (way up if I recall what they said correctly) shows this is at least partially about the money. Yeah they're scared of P2P because it represents a new way to distribute music and a new way for people to encounter good music (something the RIAA really doesn't seem to have a clue about, as you said), but there's some serious greed there too. Remember the settlements (and judgements) the RIAA gets go to the RIAA. Not to the artists, not to the recording companies, not to the poor innocent workers the RIAA has tried to hype as the real people hurt by piracy -- only to the already over-paid lawyers that make up the RIAA.Given that fact alone, you can understand why the RIAA won't back down from cases, even when it's apparent they've really screwed up (suing 12yo girls for instance). They want the money to pad their already overstuffed pockets. This kind of falls under "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely", except in this case it's greed instead of power.
I worked many more years ago than I care to admit in a record store and I got a very handsome discount on music (OK, it was pre-CD and we did actually have some 8-tracks. Yeah, that long ago). Know what? I bought loads of music out of my wages and I didn't care that much if some of it was cack. Now I can afford to buy some music but as I see such a load of rubbish on sale (Dido? Am I the only one who thinks she's mooing?) I don't buy much at all. And I don't download. You've got to really want to hear something before you'll bother with the faffing around in p2p to find a decent copy.
Music is overpriced. People know that the price of a CD is too high for its value in terms of entertainment.
As purchasers listen to their new CD they realise that they've got 2 or 3 decent tracks and a load of filler. How much did I pay for this junk? As resentment builds and they see the tracks they want to hear available on p2p networks, they choose to get the music they want, rather than the music the industry wants them to have.
The industry is pricing singles at too high a proportion of the price of a full album. Result: death of the CD single.
The price of a CD album is set at an artificial point to seem more valuable than the nearest rounded-down price point (example: $18.99 rather than $14.99). Result: resentment by buyers, who seek out cheaper sources for their CD's until the industry says Whoa there! WE can offshore production to save money and increase profits, but you suckers can still pay our price in your home territory rather than buy offshore.
Unless the price of CDs and DVDs falls to a lower price point the industry will face continuing efforts to circumvent copyright. Let's face it, if a CD cost half of what it does today, would you bother to download it? To rip it? The industry is NOT giving artists big royalties and they're not investing heavily in A&R. They are just coining it, and getting scared that the public have rumbled their cosy little game.
When a commodity is overpriced in the martketplace, the price must fall or the market will collapse.
> Their goal isn't to make money off these people via these lawsuits. Like someone else mentioned, these lawsuits probably barely pay for themselves, what with legal costs and all.
What lawsuits? I haven't heard of any. These are all out-of-court settlements. They don't cost anything -- just sending a standard letter to people (fill in IP address only) threatening to sue, and then getting the check. There is legal paperwork too, but don't tell me its prepared for every offender individually.