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."

Comments

Re:A Rose by Any Other Name...

[garcia]

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.

Re:Piracy is hurting?

[ZachPruckowski]

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.

What is wrong with this?

[Overly Critical Guy]

People will now be able to settle for a discount. How nice.

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?

Re:What is wrong with this?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's already been shown that the *AA groups do not have a great track record of verifying copyright violations, they are bound to send these letters to at least a few people who have not violated a copyright.

now that *is* extortion. if you get a letter from me saying give me money or I'll sue you for violating my copyright when you are certain that you have not? what would you do? could you prove in a court that you did not? it's a civil case, the level of proof is much more lax than in a criminal case. if i can convince a jury that it is more likely that you did than that you did not...then i win and the court orders you to pay me.

of course give me some cash now and we don't have to go through that dance. lets just make life easier for the both of us and no one gets hurt. except you.

Re:What is wrong with this?

[troll -1]

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?

Well, I hope you don't get modded down because you express a popular view, though not necessarily one held by many slashdot readers.

Perhaps many of us here are just plain irritated by stupidity, some of us are even inconvenienced by it.

Let's be real, the Internet is the best content distribution system ever. The Internet is a giant file-sharing network by definition.

For hundreds of years great works of art were produced with no copyright laws. We live is a very small part of history. Obviously artists need to get paid for what they do. But the costs of making quality recordings are greatly reduced compared to what they once were. Most bands I know today have their own web sites and distribute their music freely with the aim of making enough money to continue doing what they love by attracting enough people to see them perform live. For most artists today, the era of the highly paid entertainer is dead. It takes a new generation to realize this.

The problem with the RIAA is that they're out of touch, out of time, and out of their heads. Deep down they must know they cannot possibly win in the end. But they're like the old horse and buggy manufactures who cannot bring themselves to face the reality of a new world.

All the lawsuits and threats of lawsuits in the whole world will never stop people from sharing music. This is not an opinion or an emotional argument, it's a fact based on reality.

Re:A Rose by Any Other Name...

[Goeland86]

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.

Re:When will we just say enough is enough?

[westlake]

How long is it going to take before the public has had enough of this garbage and put a stop to it?

as long as it takes the geek to admit that he isn't entitled to everything that isn't nailed down.

the divide between town and gown is an old one, of course.

off-campus, no one cries in their beer when a free-loading student with time on his hands, a pricey computer and unlimited bandwidth has to cough up some cash or forfeit some privileges.

Re:Pre-lawsuit letters are cool

[Sj0]

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!

Re:We're all "customers"

[cpt kangarooski]

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.