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RIAA Sues Nearly 500 New Swappers
Digitus1337 writes "Wired has the story. " U.S. music industry group says it has sued 493 more people for copyright infringement as part of its campaign to stop consumers from copying music over the Internet.
The Recording Industry Association of America has now sued nearly 3,000 individuals since last September in an attempt to discourage people from copying songs through peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and LimeWire." "
I don't like "John Doe" lawsuits. Today it's your IP address, what is it tomorrow? Your street address? Your DNA? Is there going to be a story on the news about shopkeepers who are suing a set of fingerprints for theft damages?
I know that this is a civil case, not a criminal case, but I think you should still know who you are suing before you can do it. If the RIAA can't figure out who say, 66.35.250.150 is, they can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned. Figure it out and come back, or don't, and drop it. And while you're at it, don't use our criminal justice system to go fishing for you.
I'm interested to see what happens when the RIAA sues a downloader who happens to have already purchased the CDs of the songs he is downloading -- which, in my opinion, would give him a right to those songs since he's already purchased them.
For me personally, I've sometimes downloaded songs from CDs I because 1) it's sometimes faster than ripping it myself, 2) the CD is scratched or broken, or 3) I still have the case but the CD itself was stolen. Would downloading an MP3 of a song from a CD I rightfully purchased make me a pirate?
Why not have a panel of like-minded legal experts sit down and prepare a self-defense template for these mass suings? If the cases are all the same, a cookie-cutter defense should work too. As cases filter through, the defense template could be refined. It would enable individuals to defend themselves against the lawsuits, yet with the experience gained through a peer-to-peer legal network.
I guess the underlying problem is what to do about the apparent file sharing that the internet has given us.
Suing people won't stop piracy.
Any amount of software to stop piracy will be circumvented/broken (see how long a piracy-catch in a Linux kernel will last before it gets cut and rebuilt).
This is one of those things that our tech is going to force us to change socially.... how/when/to what, I'm not sure.
the riaa tends to be trying to kill a swarm by swatting at individual bees. for every one they swat, a new one is bred. they'll have to sue for a long time for them to get their desired results, and by that time people will have moved on to better distribution channels. ...one of which is right here:
www.allofmp3.com completely thwarts the RIAA while still paying the artists a modest sum (probably comparable to what the RIAA pays them).
$0.01 / megabyte download (pennies per song, less than $0.50 per album), perfectly legal (all RIAA propoganda and misinformation aside), and none of the money goes to fund these lawsuits. Even better, a portion goes to the actual artists directly -- a requirement of Russian copyright law.
Legal, so cheap it is almost free, and it absolutely thwarts the RIAA's ability to even think about suing anyone.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"1.2 million people file lawsuit against RIAA this month. The court system is grinding to a halt, and congress begins deliberations to resolve the problem."
Open Standards Portal
This use to be a big IRS tactic. Go after the guys without the funding to take you on. If the recording industry sued someone with the money and the inclination (sp?) to take them on through a significant series of appeals, then I think that the laws would be changed.
Also, Congress needs to hold hearings on this. The General Accounting Office [GAO], the investigative brance of the Congress, helped get the IRS inline. Now, my personnal feeling about anything being done is that it would be unlikely. (I mean, come on, we call them Congress instead of Progress.) But, just maybe, someone will get a clue.
The RIAA is trying civil court because they know that they can use the 'perponderance of the evidence' to thier own advantage. If they think they are right, let see some criminal charges. Gutless wonders
In God we trust, all others require data.
Simple. Threaten to kill yourself if they follow through with the lawsuit. If even one person actually follows through with it, the outrage would be outstanding.
Don't mod this funny, I'm actually being extremely serious. And yes, it would work. The one thing corporations do not want is a young male or females blood on their hands.
Brilliant! These folks know that the RIAA doesn't want to actually take anyone to trial, just scare the bejeezus out of Mommy and Daddy so they don't let their kids use Kazaa. The risks are much too high for the RIAA if they should lose, and IMHO it's too much for them to prove, particularly in a college dorm-type setting, that the person they sued was actually the one doing the infringement. What about the wide-open Wi-Fi defense, or the zillion other instances where you just can't prove who was using a specific IP at any given time?
There seems to be nothing open and shut about this sort of thing, especially since most people infected by the bagel virus have no idea that they are spammers, will they be prosecuted under the CANSPAM Act?
~ there are 10 types of people in this world, those that can read binary and those that can't
You've been subjected to a frivolous suit and you can't afford a lawyer, so what do you do? If you have lots of company, you all pool your chips and file a class action countersuit. There are limits to just how far baseless suits could go before the consequences become unacceptable. A litigant both unscrupulous and incautious will be eaten by his own greed.
In the meantime, I suppose you do negotiate for a smaller out-of-court settlement or plead "no contest", hoping to recover your loss later when the class suit wins. Audacity usually succeeds in the beginning -- it's only later that it becomes plain whose was the stronger position.
What you don't do is meekly take whatever deal they offer. You push back with whatever you have. Negotiate the best deal you can, and if that is not good enough then you have some breathing space to gather the power to force renegotiation for more favorable terms. And don't agree with false charges; just put off fighting to disprove them until you are prepared to win. In any conflict, never give up anything that doesn't buy you something better.
[*sigh* in case it's not obvious, IANAL and this is not legal advice.]
No need to go to those extremes. Just band together with like-minded lawsuit recipients, and go on a hunger strike! The novelty of it would probably get you enough media coverage to make the *IAA folks rather nervous - like roaches, they really don't like it when people start shining spotlights on them. They want the media to report people folding, not people fighting back and questioning the flimsy sheaf of "rights" that the media conglomerates have built empires around.
Yeah, I agree. I used to be very anti-piracy. I knew that the labels were corrupt and everything, but it wasn't enough for me to justify breaking the law and pirating more than the occasional song. When the lawsuits started though, that was it for me. Legal or not, I'm not willing to pay money to a company when I know my money is going to be used to do things like that. It may be wrong of me to pirate, but IMHO what they're doing is more wrong than what I'm doing.
Nobody likes lawsuits (except, perhaps lawyers). But in all likelyhood, they will remain part of the response to unauthorized file-sharing.
Even the EFF acknowledges this. Not so long ago the EFF suggested that the RIAA should be suing infringers and in the EFF's more recent file-sharing solution "white paper" they continue to suggest the same. (under "What about file sharers who won't pay?" you'll see "Copyright holders (and perhaps the collecting society itself) would continue to be entitled to enforce their rights against 'free-loaders.'"
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
and every.damn.one. of them was used!
SWING OUT SISTER -- Kaleidoscope World
White Zombie -- Astro-Creep 2000
Alice Cooper -- the eyes of...
GRAVITY KILLS -- Gravity Kills
SNAKEFARM -- Songs From My Funeral
AMANDA GHOST -- Ghost Stories
EVERCLEAR -- Songs From An American Movie
RICKIE LEE JONES -- FLYING COWBOYS
ELECTRIC SWING -- Big Band Crazy
NO DOUBT -- Return Of Saturn
Various Artists -- HOUSE OF BLUES SWINGS
BIG BAD VOODOO DADDY -- This Beautiful Life
CHICAGO -- Night And Day (Big Band)
DUKES AND GANNON -- SIX SHOOTER
PHIL COLLINS -- NO JACKET REQUIRED
DUKE HEITGER AND HIS SWING BAND -- RHYTHM IS OUR BUSINESS
VARIOUS ARTISTS -- THE UNPLUGGED COLLECTION
DON HENLEY -- THE END OF THE INNOCENCE
ANGEL CITY -- Face To Face
XFILES SOUNDTRACK
VARIOUS ARTISTS -- SKA WARS
take that RIAA!!!!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
....want a serious, across the board fundamental change in the US. The government is corrupt, broken, out of control. Think about what we do. Millions trudge to the polls and allegedly "elect" a mostly priveleged millionaire class of people to a professional and pensioned "career" of outright "rule" over us. they DO NOT in fact, represent us, you and me, they represent and work for some fairly wealthy and exalted inteerests qwho have nothing in common with 99% of the US population. Nothing. And MOST of them are lawyers, and/or are connected financially to international conglomerates, in a big way. This is just an OBVIOUS conflict of interest. WHAT ELSE are you going to get but more complex and weird laws when it PROFITS the very people who "pass" them all the time? Then, while congress is in session, they spend all their time passing new laws,by the thousands, never ending, with little effort made to even have a modicum of constitutional review, common sense review, or to see if perhaps some of the older laws they have passed need to just be removed, a law-code review if you will. It doesn't happen, there's NO incentive for them to do so, because they control the system, they control the mass media, they control the social engineering brainwashing facilities called "public schools", and they PROFIT from it to extreme and obscene levels.
It's NUTS. It's getting worse, there's no end to the amount of laws passed, no top end limit, we are over 3 million laws on the books now, and these people in washington are SO FAR REMOVED from what it really is like in the US outside of the completely artifically maintained washington DC/NYC/LA axis of profits area, they really have no clue what they are doing other than maximising profits for themselves and their rich buds. No clue and they DON'T WANT a clue. They are trained actors and script readers, they "campaign" by 15-30 second sound bite, directly or indirectly, and by the acceptance of out and out bribes called "campaign contributions", but these public uttered "sound bite" words have little meaning, they just parrot what their focus groups tell them that will result in the same people "voting" for them over and over again, no matter what really happens.
The system is broken, terribly. It needs to change. Change at the federal level is just way to hard, SO, we need to elect some governor some place who can be the executive branch leader that at least can get ONE state back to what we are supposed to have,set a clear example of what it really was designed as, an independent state with loose ties to the federal government in a "union", BUT NO MORE, *full, default and complete* constitutional rights, and he has got to be unafraid of serious confrontation. That's the highest level we can hope for to look for any significant change for the better, IMO.
The Libertarian Party Free State Project is one example, Mack for Governor in Utah is another (He has a decent credible chance, too). There might be more, those are the two I am aware of right now where this sort of effort is being undertaken.
A success in these matters will go a long way to re establishing the court system like it is supposed to be, especially with jury nullification, speedy trials, and always having a jury trial if the matter in question is over 20$. You get some honest working class people on juries, and STOP the mostly completely criminal DAs and judges intimidating and instructiong them illegally, you'll see nonsense like in this article struck down, because people can see it's absurd. BUT, it HAS to be done at some decent level, local it doesn't matter, federal is impossible, that leaves the state level.
Should NO information cost money? Your "I'm taking, but you're not losing" argument boils down to solely that copyright is an artificial restriction placed on information. The whole point of copyright is that we, as a society, have decided that information should be artificially restricted. I don't think many people on either side are arguing against copyright (but I don't know, maybe you specifically are). The real question is where exactly the restrictions should be placed.
Get this through your skull, it's not stealing.
The word stealing has more than one meaning. "I stole the book", "I stole his research", "I stole a kiss". Insisting people only use your definition is a political move, so please don't treat people as ignorant or stupid as to the meaning of a word because they don't agree with your meaning.