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The RIAA Sues 482 More People
An anonymous reader writes "Today the RIAA said they have sued another group of people, 482 to be exact, for copyright infringement. The RIAA used their 'John Doe' litigation process in this round of law suits, because they do not know the names of the copyright infringers. After appeals court ruled that Verizon does not have to provide names of customers to the RIAA, the RIAA started using the 'John Doe' litigation process." (Similar stories at Wired News and CoolTechZone).
I wonder when they'll ever figure out that suing your consumers is not an effective business model?
Help a college student
I don't know about anyone else, but these "sue to scare" tactics just don't worry me. They have failed to change my computing in anyway. I still download music; in fact, I may download more, just to site them. IMHO I feel they are just alienating more people with each lawsuit.
First I'm not a lawyer, this is merely what I've gleaned from other articles on the subject. AFAIK, the RIAA or their agents collects the IP address of people sharing (large?) amounts of music on various (Fasttrack & Limewire?) p2p networks. They then sue "John Doe" (the legal term for anonymous coward) and supena the owner of the IP address at the time of the incident. Once the name and address are in hand the copyright holder or their agent begins a formal lawsuit (and usually tries to settle out of court for an apology, cash (3k-10k), and an agreement not to share music. The threat is the huge penalties if you are convicted of copyright violation for each song you were sharing.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
So according to Wired's total (and their settlement estimate), the RIAA is looking at $10,500,000. That's pretty impressive for a bunch of copy-n-paste lawsuits. Any lawyers want to estimate the RIAA's legal costs for this campaign?
I have two questions regarding this: 1- The RIAA is filing "John Doe" lawsuits (they will add the names later after the discovery process or warrants are served or whatever). At this time, they are trying to use the ip addresses to establish the identity of the people they are suing. How come the ip addresses are not posted in the news stories or on the eff page if it is public information and is in the lawsuit? 2- Exactly how is the RIAA obtaining their information? Are they seeding songs with data in the tag so they can then say in court that this song was slightly modified and now has a unique filesize or date in the tag and we alone have put this song out there and let people download it? And if so, can they legally do that? They are not a law enforcement agency, can they say that the laws regarding copyright don't apply to us since we own the copyright? OK, more than 2 questions: 3- Exactly what applications are the people using when they download this stuff? Kaaza? If it is Kaaza, are they then looking int he default shared Kaaza folder for the song they have seeded? I have found NO websites that have this info. Any thoughts?
I wonder why more people don't realize this, the RIAA are actually balancing on the edge of a knife with this one: They want to stop copyright infringement, but they don't want to draw too much attention to the copyright infringement via P2P issue, because they realize that if too many people start paying attention to it, the masses will realize what the law actually says regarding this.
Downloading isn't the key issue, uploading is. Copyright infringement is traditionally defined by unauthorized distribution - so they really only have the right to go after those who are illegally distributing their content. This means the uploaders. Depending on your P2P client, it is possible to prevent uploading, or at least stop uploading by removing the file from the P2P system as soon as it's downloaded - of course, in some cases this will render individual P2P networks unusable if too many people do it, but some, like Emule/Edonkey, have the ability to upload while downloading... so unless they catch the culprits very quickly, removing the files from the shared directory and thus preventing further uploading will take all of a few minutes, and no charges can (theoretically) be pressed.Brandon Glass's personal site.
As much as i hate the idea of RIAA and MPAA sueing fileswappers, at least now they have to show a little merrit in the case before they can automajicaly get the realname and personal information of the accused. I think this is a giant step forward in corecting some flaws in the DMCA that allowed anyone to get personal information about anyone else if they insinuate that they have violated thier copyrights.
To me finding that RIAA has to now get some aproval (form a court) before getting the infromation they are seeking is the true news worthy potion of this article. I think most people havn't really had problems with RIAA and the likes going after people breaking the copyright laws, thier problems was with the way they went about doing it. Some will always have issues with others trying to protect thier investments and there will be some that still don't like the lawsuite/extortion ways RIAA is doing it. As i see it now one down and more to go.
Thier extortion tactics, whiel can be viewed with good intentions leaves alot of problems open to come back and haunt people. Maybe there should be a test to what how they actually gather evidence and how that evidence is displayed.. also it would be nice if all the lawsuites could be lumped into some class action deal were people could share the cost of actually defending themselves from it.
And as for the number of good Artists, hundreds? Seriously, I am willing to bet that most people who have 50GB of mp3s have less than 1GB of music they really even remotely like. You have to sift through piles and piles of pure crap to find the gems.
So any figures I see about the amount of $$ someone has 'stolen' by downloading gigabytes of music I have to reject because they would never buy all that crap and if they had to, they would have given up long ago without finding anything they like. I for one have bought way too much music ever since I started downloading it. If its good I buy it. I have close to 1000 cds and over 100 vinyl.
Think about it, how much of your collection is something you'd buy or already own and how much is refuse you have collected and somehow can't delete? How many people have binders full of software they never use, music they don't like, and movies/tv shows they haven't watched or don't like? I know several.
The RIAA is being VERY STUPID. The only thing they are going to do is make P2P stronger. Probably stronger than the internet.
It will eventually become very decentralized, very efficient, probably encrypted, use really good hash file verification systems.
And it is going much faster than it probably would have if the RIAA didn't step in....
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Would you be the one to spend 10, 15 thousand dollars in court and lawyer fees to say "fuck you?" to an RIAA lawsuit claiming you illegally offered to let people copy a work you did not have the copyright for? Especially if you did it? Would you be the guy who, knowing that they have records and evidence that you did IN FACT allow their computer to access and download copyrighted material you hosted, claimed to be innocent? Would you spin some story about a theiving roommate, or a computer virus, or a cell of terrorist hackers? Where's the reasonable doubt needed to assert your innocence in the face of solid evidence proving your guilt?
And would you stand up to them, knowing your guilt, knowing the court's award would be much higher than the $3000 settlement they offered you, just because you were an idealist?
Methinks you'd have to be a very rich, foolish idealist. And if you're a rich, foolish idealist, I'd rather see you devote your energies to promoting a more palatable green party in this country than waste it fighting a copyright infringement lawsuit with that group of assholes at the RIAA. We broke the law, we got caught. Pay the fine, get it over with.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
1. Giving you book to a friend is different, in that you no longer have the book.
2. 'Sharing' is a cutesy word for distributing. You are no different from the music store, except that the artist gets zero compensation from you.
3. The entire Internet is not your friend.
4. Just because the RIAA is wrong doesn't mean we have to be.
If they lost ALL their customers, they would go straight to congress with some fabricated numbers and force a way back into our pocket books... somehow. Much as they do with taxes on music CDr's..
Perhaps a national 'pirate tax', beacuse you know, EVERYONE is doing it, right? Bah.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think you are right, RIAA right now is the biggest factor in the move towards anonymous P2P. I dont think there would be 1/10th the progress without their actions, LOL.
OK, analogy #2 -- MegaCinemaCorp has you and your friends
/steal/ anything. I wouldn't have paid for a
/sampling/ it. Yeah, that's it, I just
arrested for sneaking into the movies without paying, aka
'theater-sharing'.
"But, but, I was just copying the movie onto my eyeballs.
I didn't
ticket anyway, so it's not like you lost a sale..."
"I was, uhhh,
wanted to see if it was worth it before I paid the
full ticket price."
"Yeah, and I already saw the movie yesterday, so I should
be allowed a couple of 'backup' viewings, in case maybe
I missed any good scenes when I ran to the john."
"And I snuck in for free because you're a big evil greedy
corporation that charge too much for popcorn and exploit
your minimum-wage help! Take that, Capitalist Pigs!"
[ Any other standard pro-theatersharing arguments
I've failed to satirize? ]
>;k
The issue is not free music, it is the method of shopping. For a while I was happily shelling out my monthly fee to e-music. They supported the type of shopping I wanted to do. I want to go, download a bunch of stuff that I could potentially hate and listen to it. Hopefully I will find a few golden eggs. Every month they got my check (credit card actually, but who is counting?). Then they decided to go to a more 'regular' installment where you have to buy x number of songs at x price, completely missing the fucking point as to why people would pick e-music over any other service.
Look, all that I want is to be able to explore new music. I want to do it simply and easily. I don't want to dick around and spend my time searching for it. Nothing under the sun is going to make me buy a horde of CDs hoping that some of them don't suck. Nothing is going to make me go out and research which bands suck and don't suck before I buy them. I honestly don't care enough to waste my time doing this. I'll happily shell out my money for the right to explore someone's database of music. I'll shell it out every single month. Hell, I do it already for movies. I couldn't be happier with NetFlix.com - care free exploration of movies at a flat rate. They get my 20 a month instead of blockbuster now because they realized that I am a different type of shopper. I used to pirate movies all of the time, until I found NetFlix.
Until these idiots listen to the market, it will be NetFlix for movies and my P2P of choice for music. The first company to satisfy my music buying style gets my cash. NetFlix won my movie dollars, now hopefully some idiot will win my music dollars. They can sue their asses off. I break the law all the time; I speed, I smoke the evil herb occasionally, I drank under 21 (when I was still under 21), and I merrily pirate music. It is just another calculated risk. Most people violate the law reguarly knowing a potential risk involved with doing it. The RIAA will never win this game. Only growing the balls to compete in the market is going to win me back.