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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."
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.
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
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 ;)
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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.
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.
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
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.