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RIAA Announces New Campus Lawsuit Strategy
An anonymous reader writes "The RIAA is once again revising their lawsuit strategy, and will now be sending college students and others "pre-lawsuit letters." People will now be able to settle for a discount. How nice."
They are going this route because people are starting to get their legal fees paid when the RIAA loses.
What better way to stop that from even happening by not taking them to court?
Why are they targeting college students? Not because they are the biggest file sharers but because they have the least amount of money.
Is this true? Does anyone have sales or statistics?
Who cares if it's true? They say it is, and there's not exactly a pirate's lobby to refute them. Truth is completely and utterly irrelevant. It's not a question of what's right or wrong, it's a question of what you say and how loud you say it. And the media cartels own the conventional news sources.
None of this applies to RIAA's actions in this case. Threatening you with a civil suit for the commission of a tort is not a crime; it happens every day.
Threatening you with a civil suit for the commission of a tort is not a crime when all you demand is a cease and desist. Demanding monetary compensation I would think would be a different matter. If not extortion, how about blackmail? "We know you've committed a crime. Pay us to keep quiet about it or we'll see to it that it goes on your criminal record, which you'll have to disclosed to any future employer preventing you from getting any well-paying job in the future."
And such payment won't be legally binding, so they could still press charges, and your payment will be used as evidence of your guilt.
IANAL.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
So much for the female readership of this site.
;p
Oh wait...
How long is it going to take before the public has had enough of this garbage and put a stop to it?
it could be stopped tomrrow.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Pirates" can not be blamed for the failure of media companies to adapt to and profit from the Internet.
DRM was an attempt to put the Internet back in the bottle.
People expect to be able to download stuff at a reasonable cost, (and some amount of information people expect for free).
People expect to to their play and copy purchased media without barriers.
College students will "copy tapes", as they have no spare book or beer money to spare. if you use legal threats or take money from them, this will not increase sales, or create new fans.
The story has not changed since the days of Naptser and mp3.com. People would buy DRM-free media over the Internet for a reasonable cost.
But if MAFIAA refuses to sell unencumbered media, it is hard to buy it.
People do not want to go back to CD's and people do not want to go forward with DRM.
So to protect against a vampire, hire a vampire? Either way, your financial blood gets drained.
Don't forget that many college students also have parents who are putting them through college, and will be the ones to foot the bill for these "offenses." That fact could be playing a large part in this.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
Except when they target students on financial aid, whose very education could be depending on the few thousands of dollars they're demanding!
If anything, the RIAA is going to create a whole generation of people who could've afforded school, but thanks to those annoying bastards can't really finish their degree, are left with huge loans and don't have a degree allowing them to pay their debts. The RIAA is really pissing me off, they're not helping educate people, they're helping them drop out of school and get even further into debt!
If the RIAA had any kind of patriotic interest whatsoever, they would stop suing students right NOW and instead try to have lotteries for scholarships for people who legally buy music. That'll get any students' attention, and they'll want to buy music in the process!
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Welcome our independent artist labels, err, overlords. Maybe national CD sales aren't down, just "RIAA member" sales are down. I've purchased nothing mainstream for almost a year. I buy all of my CDs straight from the artists. Support your local talent. In New York City Subway, concerts come to you.
We are all just people.
"Threatening you with a civil suit for the commission of a tort is not a crime when all you demand is a cease and desist. Demanding monetary compensation I would think would be a different matter. If not extortion, how about blackmail?"
Listen to the AC; he's right on this one. Settling out of court happens all the time. Even "good" companies and people do it.
The trouble with calling this "blackmail" or "extortion" is there may be a day down the road when you think you've been wronged, or you know you've wronged another person, and settling out of court is the quickest and cheapest way for you to get things right.
""We know you've committed a crime. Pay us to keep quiet about it or we'll see to it that it goes on your criminal record, which you'll have to disclosed to any future employer preventing you from getting any well-paying job in the future."
Huh? I've read TFA; the RIAA isn't threatening (either explicitly or implicitly) to ask the feds to press federal charges in these campus cases. While the amounts of the purported infringement may technically fall into criminal infringement territory, the feds have better things to do; they tend to go after cases where the amount of infringment is in the high five figures and beyond. You know this; I know this; the RIAA knows this and the kids doing the file sharing probably know this.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Okay, maybe I'll get modded down for this (or get modded up for writing that old cliche), but what exactly is wrong with this? The RIAA is locating pirates via IP and, instead of suing them, offering them a quick and easy settlement.
Back in 2000 during the Napster lawsuits, every Slashdotter including the editors said the RIAA should go after individual infringers rather than P2P networks. Well, now they're doing that, and you don't like that either. What's changed? Are you just opposed to the RIAA protecting its own intellectual property period?
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm talking about people like myself, who don't use P2P download, yet STILL get those freaking letters! It's like living next door to a drug dealer and the cops accuse you of dealing along with him! I have no issue with them trying to make downloaders pay, but people who DON'T download, and who don't have enough money to spend on that, that's extortion and it's illegal.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
You're not a customer.
By selling products created by artists who sign contracts with them, not giving shit away for free and having freeloaders defend it by scapegoating them as bad guys.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Personal responsibility and ownership of one's actions goes a long way here. Having that fast Internet connection sure makes it tempting to build your music library with P2P, but it's essential to understand the potential consequences and to also understand that you don't need to have that music -- and if you just can't do without music, there are plenty of free and legal sources. Trust me: I got through all seven years of college without once firing up a P2P app. Those kids could have, too.
I can certianly see a few pissed kids wanting to share the damage back to the RIAA. Somehow I see entire external hard drives loaded with MP3s being passed down the dorm hall for everyone to take a copy and add to the library just to spite the RIAA. The sneaker net will be back in full force. I remember those days with 12 inch LP's and cases of blank cassette tapes.
Portable hard drives are like cassette tapes on steroids. I have a 400 gig one. Too bad I'm no longer in a dorm.
The truth shall set you free!
The point of your post is well taken but I see it from a different direction.
The problem with the media industry's heavy handed approach to copyright, puts
a damping effect on anyone who actually wants his copyrighted work to be freely
distributed. Part of the reason for this is that the idea has been firmly ingrained
in the minds of millions that "copyright" means "illegal to copy or distribute", which
is not always the case. Copyright and controls on distribution are related but not the same.
Also, people tend to assume that "copyrighted material" refers only to those items represented
by large corporate entities, and that individual works (insofar as people realize these even exist),
do not carry the same protections. Finally, the actions of the media industry puts a cloud of doubt
on the distribution channels themselves. The very protocols become synonymous with "stealing". This
definitely creates a chilling effect for anyone who would like to take advantage of those distribution
channels for purposes that are 100% legal.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Copyright holder organizations have shown a consistent behavior in the face of technological change: seek special protection through lawsuits and legislation. They will do the same with the scenario you envision. When hardware & software improve to allow tools to play and produce real-time film-quality images, they will also allow the tools needed to identify and report "infringing" material in real-time. (Just as they are doing now with MP3s and Flash video)
Dated: Oct 12, 2020
Dear MPAA Customer,
Our software (part of Windows Awesome! Control) has indicated that you have played/created a Video Game or Reenactment which contains scenes similar to works copyrighted by one or more of our members. This action is in violation of the Think Of the Children! Copyright Extension Act of 2017. This letter is to inform you, as per section 16C of the TCCEA, we have been authorized to remove $300,000 from your checking/saving/federal loan package. Please note, this action does not prevent the MPAA or any of its members from taking further legal action against you for this or any other offense.
Have a nice day,
The MPAA
You can be assured that when people start making movies on their own computers, the MPAA will start suing people who use themes, characters, dialog, music, lighting, etc... similar to those used in the studios' films. Then as now, they will go after the people least able to challenge them and most likely to settle. And then as now they will do a full-media blitz to convince people that they're doing all this in defense of the poor, oppressed artist.
It's possible that at some point in the future, the people the MPAA goes to for their custom-made legislation will be the same people the RIAA/MPAA are now suing and maybe then their well of new legislation will finally run dry. And maybe, just maybe, some courageous legislators will actually fix the copyright law to favor musicians and their fans over media conglomerates.
I wouldn't hold my breath.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I look at it this way:
1. College students as a whole can barely afford books, rent, or food, let alone music.
2. College graduates can afford lots, including lots of music CDs.
3. as a consequence of 1. and 2. it can be said that college students are a tiny market which will become the largest market for premium content, due to their massive disposable income.
4. It seems that because of 3. it is unwise to piss off said demographic.
5. I'm a professional, but I haven't bought a CD (or pirated music -- they don't even deserve mind-share!) in 7 years, because behaviour like this seems unethical to me, and pisses me off.
6. ???
7. Profit!
It's been a long time.
Admit it--you just want to pirate music without any consequences.
Who the hell wouldn't want that? I would like very much to have a complete copy of the sum of human knowledge -- every book, every song, every film, every picture -- at my disposal. And I think that most people would probably like the same. Even if we only used a small fraction of it, it would be a great thing to have. And to get it for free (or nearly so) would be even better, since it's the cost of the thing that is generally the big obstacle to having it.
Are you saying that you don't want a copy of everything there is, for free?
Remember: copyright is like a necessary evil; it does a bad thing (temporarily and partially restricting the free flow of knowledge and culture) for a good reason (to encourage the creation of more knowledge and culture which can be partially shared immediately, and fully shared after a while). If implemented properly, the good outweighs the bad. But copyright is never a tolerable or desirable thing for its own sake, and it is always wrong to support copyright in cases where it would not produce more good results than bad results.
Piracy is basically a good thing (it is the free flow of knowledge and culture) but which can have bad, or more accurately, self-defeating, results (in that it reduces the encouraging effect of copyright). Still, if the good of piracy happened to outweigh the bad -- i.e. if the good of freely flowing information was better than the reduction of encouragement to create -- then piracy would be preferable to copyright.
We don't have to have absolute copyright or absolute piracy. We can vary them. We could arbitrarily say that copyright applied on weekdays, and not on weekends, if we wanted to. If this produced a better outcome than seven days a week of either copyright or piracy, then it would be what we should do (barring something better yet).
So maybe it would be a good idea to allow ordinary individuals, acting non-commercially, to pirate music without consequences, accepting that there would be a bad effect in that less music might get made, and accepting that there might be a good effect in that people would be more free vis-a-vis music, while we still kept copyright for commercial purposes as well as for corporate entities.
Don't dismiss the idea out of hand, and even if you ultimately don't think that it would produce a better outcome than the current system, if you think that there could possibly be any improvement to the current system -- particularly one that people could live with and which they'd be inclined to do anyway, even if there weren't a law about it -- then surely it would be worthwhile to consider it.
To quote George Carlin's description of the current generation: "Gimme that, it's mine! Gimme that, it's mine!"
Meh. I agree, that people are greedy. People who listen to music are greedy, and want free music. People who make music are greedy, and want to be paid for their music. Neither side is good or bad. Copyright, as a utilitarian system, handles this adeptly. The genius of copyright is that you can appeal to the long-term greed of music listeners by getting them to suffer some short-term deprivations, and you can use those deprivations to appeal to the short-term greed of the music creators, who suffer long-term deprivations. Everyone ends up a winner, so long as you do it right. But for decades now, we haven't done it right, and it's getting worse. The reason that piracy wasn't such a big thing in the past is not because people acted differently. People have always acted the same. It's because more things were legal, so the same sort of conduct in the past was unremarkable, while now it is notable. Conduct hasn't changed, but the laws around it have, and not for the better.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Will someone just bitchslap these shitfaced cockmasters with RICO already!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Students who don't have the money or time to fight the mafia are a easy target.
"Never say Never."
Apart from the answers listed above, I would like to point out that the current legal atmosphere is in favour of the guy with the deep pockets.
If you get sued by the RIAA and you go to court, there is a chance that you'll win. This will cost you a lot (a LOT) of money and time, sometimes even years of your life. Sometimes you'll get cost awarded to you as in a recent case, but the RIAA will appeal, taking more time and more money. If you win without being awarded legal costs, you will most likely have spent more money than the RIAA was going to settle for.
Then there's the chance that you'll lose, and you'll have to pay everything the RIAA asked for, plus your legal cost and if you're very unlucky theirs as well (I think, IANAL).
So, basically, going to court will cost you, even if you win.
The RIAA knows this. That's why it's a little cynical that they're offering a "discount" now, don't you think?
Class justice. Text book example.
Student: guilty until proven innocent (hardly has a way out except pay)
**AA: legal until someone puts up enough cash for an investigation and is not shot down by "funded" politicians.