Slashdot Mirror
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."
I've been swapping a lot of Japanese "dating sims" in order to improve my social skills with chicks - am I in any danger of being sued, or is this ONLY for music? What about games, bishoujo games in particular?
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.
For one, you can't stop it by going after people that don't have enough money to pay for cds. CDs printing costs are in like the cents (30-70 cents) to make the CD ready for packaging.
They charged 15 dollars for most. Only give the artist maybe 70cents-1 dollar for each record sold. If they ultimately actually lowered the price to a more convient number maybe people will by them.
Or even maybe have them actually good music to purchase. Going after college students who have enough to worry about is a horrible way to get support. Its a negative campaign that'll end up hurting them.
We need to start using only P2P software that allows connecting through anonymous proxies. Those proxies should of course be located in countries that are known to be unwilling to collaborate with US/European authorities. It would make P2P much slower but should put these lawsuits to an end.
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
Those Colleges and Universities that haven't agreed to pay tribute to the RIAA by forcing all students to participate in things like the new Napster (participate = include the fee in the student's tuition) will be "strongly urged" to do so at the point of the RIAA's legal gun.
Oh, well, at least it's a good education in the way the outside world "works".
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Good model to get more people buying music. Pissed me off so much I haven't bought a cd in years.
And I will not till they stop this BS. Remember all these losers back in the 60's and 70's I'm sure they copied there buddies music if they liked it.
It's the same shit.
The way to stop this crap is boycott music period. Listen to the radio if you must. A one year boycott and they will crumble like a cracker in a vise.
What's the difference if you get it off the net or get it off FM? I'm sure if they like the music they'll go and buy it to support the band so they can make more for them to enjoy.
Is there a current, up-to-date list of the sued IP addresses? The EFF's doesn't seem to have been updated anytime recently.
This makes a whole lot of sense if you think about it. They want to take the money from the people who can least afford it cause they can only afford to buy so many cds a year compared to someone who is out of college and has a job. This is like pro-active gestapo marketing...take all the money you think your customers should have bought. I mean these kids waste all their money on hundreds of dollars worth of books a semester and tens of thousands of dollars on tuition, room and board...they really need to get a piece of that pie! Don't you wish the government was on the peoples side just once where they could actually look at something like this and realize...Hey they aren't on the peoples side! This is not what America wants. I bet things will change when a politian's daughter accidently gets sued because the RIAA forgot to check their list properly just like they didnt care about spyware and spam until their computers started to get effected. Keep on downloading Jenna and Laura Bush!
Trix are for kids!
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.
Good work RIAA. Keep pissing off and targeting the students today. All your doing is devising your demise in the future.
The university students today will be in the work force in the next few years, and then the main force of the work world not long after, as the baby boomers are getting all to be seniors.
So good work. Keep pissing us off. Keep targeting us. Your end will be tragic, except you can go fuck yourselves because nobody will care.
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.
but most file swappers,I'll put myself on a limb here; would not even know what that means.
Most file swappers are just interested in getting something quick and free, not any social cause.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
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
Jeez, hate to sound like an old-timer here, but there is no way you'll get caught sharing files if you take your iPod to your neighbor's dorm room.
Hell, they probably have some original CDs you might want to rip tracks from. Not to mention the library, which probably has thousands of CDs available (my public library sure does). Ya, I know it's illegal, but chances are, no one else is using that CD's track at the moment.
I mean, sure, centralized P2P is convenient, but a lawsuit is pretty inconvenient. Go back 10 years and use SCP to download music. Just trade lists on chat rooms like we used to do. Hell, you can trade lists over SCP as well.
Give up on the whole centralized P2P networks and do some social engineering, you'll never get caught.
Disclaimer: I own *cough* all of my MP3's original media, Really!!!
That storying is trying to 'hint' that all P2P traffic is for 'piracy'.
P2P is agnostic.. its a concept, not a action... a more accurate study would be the USE of the P2P networks they are 'surveying'.
Just spreading more half truths and misconceptions...
I know personally my P2P usage has gone WAY up in 2004, I now get most of my BSD ( and related ) ISO's via torrents now.. Last I heard that's legal traffic.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Get your copy here. It's an onion-routing network, and open mix-net if you like. It protects your anonimity by using a number of proxies to channel the data, and encrypting the data such that one always knows only the next hop to send it to.
In contrast to, e.g., Ants or MUTE, finding your data scales as log(N) (N: number of nodes in the net), whereas Ants and MUTE scale as N^2. And in contrast to Freenet and friends, this actually works.
Now, you can already just put all your music files in the eepsite/docroot folder of your install, and post your key on forum.i2p. That's enough for anonymous sharing.
Even better: A BitTorrent system that works completely within I2P is in the works ;)
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
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
The boy actually *did* prevent the dike from collapsing. The story is about how the boy's courage and endurance saved the town.
HTH
I'm getting so tired of this kinda stuff by the RIAA. Maybe they could deter copyright-infringers by actually providing a comparable service. And not iTunes selling tracks for USD$0.99. I mean seriously. This seems like a ploy for the RIAA to make more money than with CDs. Now they've dispensed with any physical material, any shipping and distribution - AND they charge the same amount for a CD. Except buying from iTunes versus a regular CD I am limited to where and how I can play it. And the quality is worse, and I don't even have any liner notes.
Seriously, sueing college students is not a good business plan.
Provide a decent service and the people with money to spend on music will mostly use it. And all the students with _no_ money will still continue to download their music for free.
This ill will campaign does nothing but make people even more content to share music now that doing so is a slap in the face to the clueless and tyrannical RIAA.
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.
There are several sites that carry a wide variety of music from independant artists.
There's dmusic.com, Musician MP3, Sound Click, Vitaminic, CNet Music, and even modarchive.com, Just to name a few. There's a bunch of other sites to get music from independant artists so there is no need to even use P2P to share RIAA music let alone purchase it.
This would be the proper way to protest the RIAA. If everyone did this, they would see their profits fall and at the same time, see that file swapping is way down, then they would have no choice but to confirm that they're really the ones to blame for the decreased sales. The biggest challenge is trying to get people that love the "Cookie Cutter Boy/Girl Bands" to switch over.
Actually, I need to thank the RIAA, and---of course---ClearChannel. By promoting only mainstream music (Mindless "Pop-40," Mainstream "Alternative," thug-only "Rap," catch-all "Jazz," Balding "Rock," and baroque-only "Classical") I pretty much only listen to indie bands these days. I only listen to the radio to catch NPR/CarTalk. Oh, and I have disposable income to spend too! Too bad I won't be spending it on those over-hyped, culturally-void, no-talent "acts" y'all have sunk so much money into "promoting." Boo-friggin-hoo.
Yeah, right.
The RIAA tried such an argument vs p2p networks, fortunately the judge strongly disagreed.
You wouldn't either want to blame the goverment for crimes which they could prevent or reduce if they only imposed complete surveillance on everybody, would you ?
I, for one, hope they will not even try blaming it on the universities and am confident they won't try, because it would support the RIAA's stance to require more surveillance and control on neutral technologies like the networks in general(internet, p2p, university ones).
They used to simply use the catch-22 situation, where if file sharing went up and sales went down after they filed lawsuits they simply said to themselves, "This proves we need to file more lawsuits! What we're doing just isn't enough!" and if file sharing went down (according to now discredited figures, since people were just moving off of Kazaa) and sales went down, they'd say "It works! Now let's keep up the good fight to improve those sales!"
Well, this last period, file sharing has gone up and sales have also gone up. There just isn't any way to justify lawsuits using this information, according to the RIAA's own spurious justifications.
Except to say, that is, that knowing the impending backlash was coming, the RIAA probably steeled themselves against any public pressure--and along with it rationality-- before they began to file lawsuits. Looking at Cary Sherman's statements, for instance, its hard not to notice he never actually addresses the efficacy or goals of the lawsuits. He just parrots "We are within our rights. We can't stand by while thieves are stealing our music. Artists need to be paid," and similar argumentively disconnected soundbites.
Well, news flash, RIAA--copyright is pragmatic. You enforce it to increase sales, not for moral (that is, constitutionally unfounded) rationales. You may have the right but how about a reason? How exactly can you justify enforcing it to a cane-flogging-for-jaywalking extremity, infuriating your customers, while when it is rising your sales are also rising?
They charged 15 dollars for most. Only give the artist maybe 70cents-1 dollar for each record sold.
I don't mind repeating this like a broken record. Eventually everybody will get it. Musicians usually get paid NOTHING for CD sales. Yes, by contract they get a small percentage, but that same contract also lets the record company first deduct all expenses of manufacturing, advertising, distribution, etc, etc, which usually leaves a ZERO net payment. For a more detailed explanation of how this works, read this article by Janis Ian, who has recorded more than 25 albums over nearly 40 years, and has yet to see a record company check with a plus sign on it.
The short version is: Musicians make money primarily from live performances, same as they did for centuries before recording technology was invented. What CD sales do for them is give them exposure, which generates audiences for concerts. They get the same exposure whether you buy a CD, download it, listen to it on the radio or find it lying on the sidewalk. Paying for the CD does not help the musician.
Record companies, on the other hand, make nearly ALL their money from CD sales. They justify all their business practices because they lose money on the songs that don't sell well enough to cover expenses. Essentially record companies are venture capitalists who seize all profits from a company until the startup expenses are covered, and then continue to get most of the profits after that.
Would you finance your startup like that? I didn't think so.
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
Distribution of music without the authors permission is common and legal. It is called mandatory licensing. Radio stations do not have to ask permission to distribute music. Anyone know what the per play cost is for a radio station?
Perhaps what he should have said is that the brain-dead oligopoly in charge of music and content distribution in this country needs to go. Nothing to do with the ethics of buying music or what constitutes good music. This is a matter of a group of companies that have used abusive tactics to suppress competition and maintain high prices, to the ongoing detriment of the consumer. Believe it or not, there are laws against such behavior. Microsoft used similar methods to eliminate even potential competitors, was taken to court, and ruled an illegal monopoly. Granted, the RIAA is merely a front for a number of massive corporations (hence oligopoly) but the effects of their collusion are identical and just as illegal. These people are unlightened capitalists (in much the same way as Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are unlightened) who willing to spend unlimited funds fighting to maintain their ill-gotten position, but are totally unwilling to compete for it.
Perhaps if Sony, Vivendi and the rest had to actually compete (with each other and anyone else) for our business on the merits of their product, we would see improvement. But so long as the RIAA's member companies are permitted to collude at every level, and so long as the RIAA is allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars filing lawsuits, creating undue influence in Congress, rewriting copyright law and all the other (possibily treasonous) activity of which they've been guilty, the situation will continue to worsen from the consumer's point of view.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Ogg Stream
4b. Is anyone actually claiming these people have not been illegally copying music? If so, great, love to hear from you.
Is anyone claiming they can prove that they have? If so I would love to hear from them. The truth is that the RIAA are actually on shaky legal ground when it comes to traditional standards of evidence and proof. It's just lucky for them that they don't need any. To be accused is to be guilty when it comes to file sharing of copyrighted works.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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.
There is quite a few programs out there right now that allow you "record" songs from streaming radio stations. ie. station ripper, rmbsoft audioripper. etc.. more available here - http://all-streaming-media.com/record-audio-stream /record-winamp-radio.htm
I see this like recording songs from the radio or movies/shows from the tv which im not too sure of but is legal.. right?
How would this be looked at by the RIAA?
Nevermind that copyright was a priviledge granted on the condition that it should eventually, after a limited time benifit society and culture by release into the public domain. With the new de-facto perputual copyright, the grounds on which the priviledge was granted is gone. So is my respect for copyright.
If you have any difficulty comprehending this simple connection, well I'll bother you again some time later.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.