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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.
Thank goodness I only share and download pornography!
Seriously though, they need to make sure the
punishment isn't worse than the crime. Ruining
a college student's record/life may not fit that
description.
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.
"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'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,
It is a weak terrorist-like tactic.
How is this measure, which is entirely legal and non-violent "terrorist-like"? Or is everything we don't like supposed to be referred to as "terrorism" now? I didn't get the memo...
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
Dont forget oldversion.com
You can also pick up AOL 1.0 while your there.
And the best place to get Kazaa Lite these days is... yep, Kazaa !!! And if you're silly enough to download a binary executable off Kazaa without checking an MD5 sum or something, you might even get bonus Trojan Lite (tm) software!
True, because the next step of piracy will be to skip the RIAA all-together and kidnap the recording artists themselves and force them to record the MP3s at gunpoint.
And it works. When you use a p2p application, do you share all of your music? How much do you have?
I have 8GB of music on my work computer. It's all legal - I own the CD or vinyl to match each one. But you have to admit - it's easier to download a copy of a song than it is to "rip" it from vinyl.
If I shared all that music, I would expect to be sued by the RIAA. They target people sharing a lot of music.
So... I don't share it. That means that there are 8GB of music that AREN'T available for download. In fact, by scaring people into not sharing their music, they are winning.
I'm not going to spend $3,000 for "the cause."
Well, that is -precisely- what I do when it comes to music, especially when it comes to electronic- music, where there are so many DJs/groups releasing songs/remixes/mashups; with many only being released on wax, etc.
Tell me, if I hear a snippet of say, something like, "D-Funktional" by Mekon featuring Afrika Bambaataa, where I can go to hear the full version?
The answer is nowhere. And this is why P2P rocks.
I would say listening to it first is a pretty good way to decide whether something is valuable to you. At least that's the way I choose which CD's to buy: download songs from p2p/usenet, and buy the CD if I like it.
The Record Industry's business model is geared towards them telling you what you should be listening to, not the other way around. They simply are not going to stand for listeners being able to pick and chose music on their own. The best way out of their trap is to find some independent bands that you like and avoid RIAA stuff altogether.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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 ;)
Not with that broken link, you can't.
Say it with me, folks: Slashdot breaks up long lines, rendering most plaintext links more trouble than they're worth. And enclosing links in anchors is easy. Why, scientists have shown that even a monkey can enclose a link in anchors. Are you stupider than a monkey?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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
That AC is overrated.
/. it gets interesting when people discuss, explain their position. Saying "the answer is 23!" does not say anything about what you think the question is, or what the logic behind "23" is. You could shout "buy!" and I could shout "don't!" all day, and nothing useful would come out.
If you want music, buy it! If it's not valuable to you, don't.
No, don't buy it ! If you want music, get it through the most convenient, cheapest way you can ! If it's not valuable to you, don't bother.
Now that I gave a reply in the same tone of your post, let me rumble a bit.
Here at
How about bringing us all more about what you think. For instance I would like to remind you that laws should reflect the best interests of society. They are generally very, very arbitrary in their content.
Music was historically freely available -- those who liked it, listened to it, those who had talent, repeated what they listened to. After thousands of years of Music being free, and some (how many?) hundred years of copyright law, I would say it is fair to ask: "It the copyright way of treating musical works really the correct one ?". If so, why ?
Music is, at its core, a comunal event. It was alway played to be listened. The player needs the listener as much as the listener needs the player. Why should the listeners pay the player, and not the player pay the listeners ? The answer is, because the extra-hyped, created celebrities, super publicized top performers are few in number, and many groups of people would like to have the same performers coming over to play, so an auction effect raises stakes and pays them a lot.
BUT is this fair to equally talented, not so famous bands ? No it isn't. Is the star creation system, through major labels, an optimal allocator of musical talent -- I do not believe so. So why not let the labels starve, and stop feeding the star system, so that each one starts looking around for local talent, which will not be as expensive ?
I would rather have a new world than risk a world in which I need to pay for each time I press play on my music jukebox. One Microsoft is enough, already.
Sorry for the long post. It's late at night and I decided to throw my 25 cents in.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Last time I commented on a related topic, someone responded by commenting that the song he/she/it downloaded lead to he/she/it buying the songs in question. (or somethign to that effect), as if that was somehow a rebuttal to my comment.
I'm sort of tired of people who cite increased CD sales to somehow justify piracy. That's totally beside the point. It's the copyright owners' prerogative to dictate how the works are sold, or not sold, for that matter. If the copyright owners didn't want the increased sales from allowing P2P, that's still their prerogative. It does not change their right to distribute or not distribute the work as they please. They can sew the master copy inside a matress and sit on it, if that's what they want to do.
Our prerogative, as consumers, is to not pay for said works if we don't agree with the terms under which they make it available. That's it. Piracy is piracy whether or not P2P leads to million or billion CD sales. Smart labels will realize this and capitalize on it; stupid ones will fight until they run out of money and lose to the others with a little more business savvy.
The industry's treatment of artists is also a completely separate discussion. No matter how crappy the artists' deals are, it STILL doesn't transfer copyright to pirates. If you don't like the way the labels do business, it's your prerogative not to buy from them. It still doesn't grant you rights to use the works they have the rights to without permission.
If you don't like the copyright laws, try to have the laws changed. However, until the laws do change, you STILL don't have the right to pirate copyrighted works.
Nobody forced these kids to distribute these files. If they were in fact participating in piracy, they deserve whatever reprimand they get.
Get it through your thick skulls -- It's the copyright owners' right not have their work distributed through P2P.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."