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New RIAA File-swapping Suits Target Students
Fletcher writes "The Recording Industry Association of America filed another round of lawsuits against alleged file-swappers, including students on 13 university campuses.
The 750 suits come just a few days after Internet researchers released a study that found peer-to-peer traffic had remained constant or risen up to the early days of 2004, despite the pressure of recording industry lawsuits."
99% of the whole point of these lawsuits is to get filesharing fearmongering into the news where it can "deter" and influence politicians.
Personally, I don't feel like it's newsworthy any more, and I don't see any reason to actively help RIAA in their fear-spreading mission.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Who's gonna take the heat for the file swapping? the students or the campus/university?
this is an important question because one could say that the universities allowed them to swap files by not-not-allowing (:p) and so the students could use this in there defense (however crooked and twisted a defense it is...).
I own a pump action golf ball cannon. I made it myself.
Wrong! No matter how you try to spin it, trading copyrighted material over the internet is against the law. Don't like it? Change the LAW.
[sarcasm]
Go RIAA! Way to sue some people who are unlikely to be able to defend themselves. You truly have a gigantic collective business mind.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, when will this business model of suing some of your most interested customers cease? When the weather report in Hell changes?
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
.....who not only cannot afford to fight back, but can't really afford to pay their fines in the first place. Since these people are students, it's not as if they can hire Johnny Cochran or someone to defend them...this, I dare say, makes the RIAA's number of 'sucessful suits' more effective, as more of them are settled out of court.
It really is kind of like the schoolyard bully shaking down the smaller kids for their lunch money. Why does the RIAA exist these days, anyway? I haven't heard a single thing about what they've done other than file lawsuits....
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
I love how DVDs' prices are decreasing and will one day be lower than audio CDs' prices. How is it possible for such an old technology to be so expensive? (I know the answer but I'd really like their point of view...)
Major corporations attempt to imprint branding on us when we're young so that we'll be loyal to them later in life because we'll view those brand as canonical.
What the RIAA is doing here is cementing P2P as the way to get music. They think they're creating negative associations with P2P, but what they're really doing is creatin negative associations with the RIAA. It's basic psychology. We hate being told what we can't do by large oppressive corporations, and it only makes us want it more.
"There is no such thing as bad publicity." But what they don't realize is that this is publicity for P2P, not publicity for the RIAA.
The RIAA says that it's only going after people sharing 1000 or more files. Most people probably only use, at the very most, five BitTorrent streams at once. Let's assume that each instance of BitTorrent is a CD with 20 songs. That's at best comes to a user sharing 100 songs at a time, well below the RIAA's threshold.
Will the RIAA change the number of songs shared before legal action is taken or will BitTorrent users get a free ride?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Well, now that you've commented on it, you're complicit in that too... ;)
Yes, it is absolutely correct that the point of the lawsuits is to get publicity for this issue. And it is correct that Slashdot is participating in that process.
However it is also worth differentiating between "filesharing" and "unauthorized filesharing."
These suits (as opposed to the Napster, Grokster, etc.) are about unauthorized filesharing, and not the technology itself.
Indeed, those that constantly act as apologists for unauthorized filesharing are just as guilty as *IAA for endangering an emerging technology.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
You're making the common mistake of comparing victimless crime to victim crime. Granted, if I download a CD rather than buying it the RIAA doesn't get my money, but if it's a CD I wouldn't have bought, no one has lost anything. Whereas, in your carjacking example, the victim has definitely lost something, whether the thief would have otherwise bought the car or not.
Look at the average DVD, it's what...about 20 bucks give or take a few bucks plus or minus. OK, some are 30 bucks but most are around the 20-24 dollar point.
Ok...let's take an average hollywood movie that cost today around 50 million give or take to produce. Some cost upwards to 100 million. And that's just from producing the movie itself, not including the marketing for it. Yet the DVD, where they make a ton of cash from, costs only 20 bucks when it hits the stores. 20 bucks.
The RIAA claim that the CD's cost so much because they spend so much on the artists, the promotion, the artwork etc etc so the price point is 17 bucks for a CD with 72 minute of music. Now I KNOW a music CD doesn't cost 50 million dollars to produce and market. No way NEAR that amount.
This is just blatent money-grubbing bastardship in it's prime. I how can they possibly defend themselves with this?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
They targetted the apps, and there was an outcry here - "The tool has legitimate uses! Go after the users who misuse it!".
They targetted the companies/people producing the apps, and there was outcry here - "The tool has legitimate uses! Go after the users who misuse it!".
Now, they're targetting the users who misuse it - and yet still there is outcry here. How is this a YRO issue? You have no right to distribute copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. That's partly why the GPL exists, to grant you those rights.
Don't like it? Work to change it. But don't admonish the RIAA for upholding their rights, while cheering on others when they go after GPL violators.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Robin Hood was the hero. When did our society stop caring about the poor and the oppressed and become so reverent of wealth and power?
Test 1 2 3 4
I don't find it surprising that the RIAA is going after university students, because that's a demographic whose spending on music has definitely declined.
P2P is not really the reason, however.
When I was in school in the early '90s, very few people had TVs in dorm rooms, and of those only a very small handful had VCRs. Also, I'd guess that by the time I graduated in '96, only about 25 percent of dorm rooms had computers. I never saw a single game console at university until the end of my junior year.
What this means is that the students had a fixed entertainment budget, and when they couldn't get beer, about all they could buy was CDs, or film/concert tickets (or less-than-licit substances).
Back then I copied music like crazy from CDs to tape, but I also bought loads of CDs.
Now, however, pretty much every room has a computer, and pretty much every computer has a DVD player. I don't know the prevalence of consoles, but I reckon PS2s and X-boxen are pretty common.
Eight to ten years ago CDs had the students' entertainment budget line pretty much all to themselves. Now CDs have to compete with DVD and game sales and rentals.
It's not about file sharing, but about more products chasing the same dollar.
The drop in CD sales has less to do with sharing, which I don't think is any more common now than it ever was, and more to do with the fact that the consumer's percieved value of a CD has dropped thanks to competition from other media.
The only possible answer for people trying to sell CDs is to lower the price.
Why hasn't somebody created a service or open-source system to let artists sell their owns CDs via the web?
I imagine the system wouldn't be a terribly hard coding problem, there is already some online store software about. As for offering it as a service, it wouldn't be too hard to cover up for the bandwidth/hosting costs and still allow musical artists to keep much of the profit themselves.
Kind of like how MovableType did things; made a blog application, gave it away for free, and offered to set it up/host it for you for a fee.
With new developments such as FLAC, it wouldn't be hard to distribute replicas of albums online, without the middle man.
It seems to me that this whole music piracy issue stems from the financial inconvenience of legally getting music, and the group attacking us because of it is the one responsible for the problem.
Let's cut him out.