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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."
Demanding money with an accompanying threat is still EXTORTION, whether there's an actual lawsuit or not.
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Well I got hit by something similar. I downloaded a torrent of Green Street Hooligans, didn't even watch it. Recieved an email from the campus computer folk, told me that Universal informed them of my "copyright infringement", and if I delete the file immediately and tell them that I did so, nothing would happen, but if I did it again, I would lose my Internet connection.
I don't remember if they said what would happen if I didn't delete the file (which I did, I'm not going to stick my neck out for the principle of it) but I'm sure it would have been ugly. I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA is doing this too - intercepting communications out of your friendly campus and then telling the campus to enforce their restrictions. Way to scare your customers. How do they stay in business?
Any other people get busted/almost-busted/pseudo-busted at their university?
Interesting. The Canadian music industry has actually benefitted from downloading. Even my cat knows that an MP3 is not the real thing and Im not planning on shelling out any money for a cd with 1 or 2 good songs. I end up test driving a lot of stuff before surprise, surprise I end up buying it. It just makes sense. This whole thing could have been done differently if the RIAA hadn't listened to the "wisdom" of people like Lars Ulrich. Sell Mp3s super cheap right off the start with a online purchase coupon that gives them a discount on buying the cd copy. Incentive marketing but the RIAA would rather be a fat old dinosaur. And we know what happened to the dinosaurs... Okay Im out of here before that Archangel Michael guy gets all preachy and self-righteous on me. I can already hear him saying "be a good boy and stand in line, individual thought is bad"
It might not be nearly as convenient, but I've been hearing that in the dorms my fellow students are posting the names of songs that they would like to "buy". Some cheap 32-128MB memory tokens float around; discreet messages are sent telling them to keep an eye on "the SanDisk with a sticker on it" or the "green Dell one that has a crack in the casing".
Really, this is just another incarnation of the 'I'm anonymous on the Internet.... What? I ain't?' You can't just flaunt the law and expect to get away with it forever. Doesn't matter whether you 'feel' you should be allowed to share music/video with a couple million of your best friends, the law in most countries says you can't.
So admit you are breaking the law and do it like a criminal, out of the open and looking over your shoulder. Swap with people you KNOW. If you are doing it online do it in closed groups with crypto and in cells to minimize the damage from infiltration.
With a little thought put into it there could be almost as much file sharing as now, and if the natural urge to go for a hub/spoke arrangement can be curbed there wouldn't be much that could be done to stop it.
Democrat delenda est
Mee Too! I've never downloaded any cool, free MP3s yet, but I'd like to. Can I settle in advance, then copy the living crap out of my soon to be new favorite P2P service? How much is that going to set me back to begin with? This may become a viable new distribution model!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
They could just send a letter to every student and figure the ones with guilty consciousness are going to settle. With all the popups I am getting about winning various sweepstakes, it may even be legal.
From TFA, it seems to me that one of the new aspects of this strategy is: So the student gets a letter delivered through the university. It's not clear if some kind of university action is implied or explicity stated in this letter, or if the universities have agreed to cooperate with the RIAA. Either way I bet getting the university to communicate with the student is a way of providing additional leverage. Perhaps now you are not only threatened with financial damage but with your educational status being revoked?
Please share with the poor who will never see this stuff any way. Copying isn't stealing, it's sharing ideas. Don't let these dying businesses try for force their old ways upon you. Make them get with the digital age and employ different business practices if they want to continue to have a business. Of course, even with sharing, as we all see, they will still continue to make millions of dollars from their crappy uncomfortable ad-ridden theaters. Don't let their greed fool you.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
That's absolutely hilarious, and yet so disturbingly accurate. But what happened to the kids of the RIAA executive who got sued for piracy? A "stern talking to"? Well can't the colleges promise to give the students a stern talking too instead? Or does that only work when someone rich gets sued by accident?
All this discussion seems to miss the point about what happens if the MPAA actually is successful at stopping downloads of 'product'.
Since all the downloading results from an inability to come to an agreement of what price people will pay to watch MPAA product, then if people can't watch MPAA product then they will watch something else.
MPAA product is in its most basic form a sequence of video images edited together in standard film 'grammar' devised over the past 100 years that tells a standardized story (one of the 100 basic plot variations that literature and drama majors study). That's it. It's what all the fight is about.
The greatest misconception of the MPAA is that they are the ONLY source of quality video entertainment available and that all people will naturally chose to 'steal' their product when given any opportunity and technical means to do so. This is actually true at the present time for most people but will, within a decade, not be true given the incredible advances in video games.
Within a decade, games will cease to be only limited first-person shooters and cartoonish extensions of ZORK-style fantasy scenerios. They will take on the characteristics of MPAA product such as photo-realism, emphatic actors and characters, complex story and plot development, and scene editing that approaches standardized film grammar. Plus they will be fully interactive and allow multiple viewers/players to develop the plot line and dialog with each other. Basically 21st-century interactive synthetic cinema (it doesn't even have a real name yet, except for term 'video games') will be to the 20-century MPAA product what movies are to photographs. A completely different dimension and experience only historically and superficially related to the previous media.
When this begins to happen then the MPAA comporations will really be up shit creek. Because they will have alienated all their potential customers and supporters back when their could-have-been customers were young as a result of their clumsy and repulsive gangster tactics that used on college students back at the beginning of the 21st century. By the time that interactive synthestic cinema begins to really take off, the MPAA will have created such a wall of hatred and repulsion between themselves and their former customer base that they will not be able to make any connection between the corporations that they represent and their former audience. They will be as obsolete as 'white-only' drinking fountains, with the same general public repulsion.
This general extortion campaign directed against college students will eventually backfire in a big way when the MPAA comes to realize that they can't get anyone (except media history majors) to download their precious product. By then it will too late for them.
Ok turn on your mp3 recorder right now and record a copy of your voice.
Start out with this content is copyrighted by "Your Name"
Then you can just spend some time saying la, la, la, la, la, la, la or whatever
trips your trigger. Now put it on a p2p network share folder changing the name to metallica.mp3 or whatever trips your goat. Place a sniffer on the connection, when the goons grab your file
trying to figure out if you are hosting copyrighted tunes you slap them with a big ole fat lawsuit
for copyright infringement.
Got Code?
That's why Microsoft is going to enforce an environment where all music and possible "Premium Content" has to be vetted by someone who has legitimately bought governance like the music industry. If you can't afford to buy the government then you should pay like the good little serf you are.
As much as i hate the RIAA, as i am sure everyone else does....they are using a major loophole with these letters. I'll explain why. First off, if this WAS illegal...the RIAA wouldnt have publicly annouced it...they would have just done it and saw how much money they could make before someone blew the whistle on them. second, the definition of Extortion (accounding to britannica) is as such: Unlawful exaction of money or property through intimidation or undue exercise of authority. It may include threats of physical harm, criminal prosecution, or public exposure. Some forms of threat, especially those made in writing, are occasionally singled out for separate statutory treatment as blackmail. now, the loophole lies in the wording that the RIAA chooses to use. By calling the money they want from the person in question a DISCOUNT makes this not extortion sadly. By saying its a discount, they are saying that the person in question has a choice to pay this fee or not; and if not then they will sue. By definition, extortion is FORCING someone to pay money and/or property...so by calling it a discount gives the user the right to ignore it and take it to court or chose to pay it. In no way is this forcing the Receiver to pay, its giving him a choice to. Thats why these shanangians are legal, as of now. Using a loophole like that is terrible IMO. the fact that the RIAA is targeting specificly college students with this new strategy is extremely shrewed as well. They are targeting college students...not because of the access to broadwith or because The RIAA wants to ruin thier lives...its because they are the most likely to pay this insane fee. Thats right, they are picking on kids that are typically ages 18-23 because they are easy to scare into pay by sending them a possible law suit. On a general role, the average college student music downloader knows nothing about the RIAA and its scare tactics. So imagine you are kid, newly on your own in college...and one day after downloading the entire internet music database...you get a letter of impending legal action from the RIAA. In a huff, you carefully read over the letter hoping that it is a joke. But it isnt...but as luck would have it...the RIAA is offering that you pay a fraction of what they would estimate you'd pay...a god send for the average college student. And college students would pay the few hundread dollars so that they arent sucked into paying awhole lot more. The RIAA pretends to bring down the hammer on the average college students, and uses the fact that most students are either on ficantial aid or their parents money as a legal way to extort them. The RIAA offers a choice, and uses the recievers self-dought to excerise legal extortion. I hope this is stopped, this flagerent disregaurd for fair law must be stopped. But as i see how these letters are worded, and though it seems to be absolutely illegal, i'll bet all my illegally downlaoded music that its 100% legal as of now. I wonder if they would actually persue the people who dont pay if there is enough people that do actually pay up.
The RIAA and protecting intellectual property are almost oxymoronic. If the money collected was going to the artists, no one would really have much to say. However, it does not. It goes to "feed the beast" that is the RIAA.
Flip on your local radio station. Anything that gets played gets pre-approved by the RIAA. If you're an indie artist, you can kiss air time goodbye. You don't get any.
Most people still get exposed to new music and artists on the radio. That means you get zero publicity for your work while the lastest Brittany Spears song will be played until you're ready to gouge out your own ear drums with a cocktail fork.
Then, if by some miracle you do get signed, the record label-RIAA cartel fronts the money for the production of an album, foists off a producer on to the artist that will get the "right sound" based on what the record label executives think you & I like, and then bill the artists out the ass for "production costs" which have been know to include things like hookers for the label executives. Honestly, you'd be better off charging the production on your MasterCard since, with the fees and such the equivalent interest rate is about 41% APR, whereas your credit card has a maximum of 25% in most states. Keep in mind that it takes a minimum of 2 years to bring an album from concept to distribution. $100,000 at 41% = 141,000 (year1) 141,000 at 41% = 158,000 (year 2) 165,000 by year 3. That's just for a low budget CD. Now that money plus a bunch of fees comes out of anything that the artist might get.
Recording contracts have this clause in them called recoupment. What that means is that the artist doesn't get a dime until the record company gets all and I do mean all of it's investment back. Record contracts are usually 20-40 pages of legalese describing what the artist owes the record company and how the proceeds from any sale of anything from T-shirts to CD's are to be distributed. Typically, artists get less than $1.00 of the $16.95 you pay for a full price CD. If you buy the CD from a discount store (read Wal-Mart) or a club (e.g. BMG Music Club), it may only be a few pennies per CD.
Next, since you have an album you have to go on tour to promote it. Guess what, the label fronts the money again and takes it out of your hide later, along with interest. It works roughly the same way as your recording session. And yes, Virginia, recoupement comes into play again. If the tour doesn't make money, you don't get paid.
Now add that to the fact that they routinely cheat the artists out of the comparative pittance that they're due. Then consider that this entire industry would be completely and utterly non-existent without the artists, do you really think that they deal fairly with anyone? Sympathy for the RIAA? Hah, more like sympathy for the devil.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
I wonder if you could fire back a pre-lawsuit threat to countersue them for legal fees and offer to let them settle for a discount...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?