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RIAA Wins In Court Against UW Madison
Billosaur writes "A judge has ordered the University of Wisconsin-Madison to turn over the names and contact information for the 53 UW-M students accused of file sharing over the university's networks by the RIAA. 'U.S. District Judge John Shabaz signed an order requiring UW-Madison to relinquish the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses for each of the 53 individuals.' The ruling came as no surprise to the university, which had previously rejected the request of the RIAA to hand out their settlement letters to alleged copyright violators on their campus. The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."
...how i hope that the ip-adresses can be matched to the biggest computer pools available at UW. and that all the login-data was lost in a miraculous backup-failure.
did i say anything? why is it ringing at the door at that late time of day? what the f...AAAAAAAARGH...
connection reset by peer.
They didn't "win in court". They filed suit, which UW Madison said they'd have to do before they'd give up the records.
They hope to indicate to the consumers that they are fully in control. The idea is for everyone to understand that they WILL buy RIAAs music or else. In the meantime, they'd like to recoup their legal fees and maybe even make some extra money by taking the kids' lunch money.
Scare tactics. FUD. Call it what you will, but they hope to accomplish punishing/cowering a generation of kids so that they can continue their outdated business model.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."
The moral of the story is if you download illegal music; do it from a university and with a forged MAC. Of course, who's mac is it anyway? Are they going to get a subpoena for every single person that uses the university's network to supply their network cards so the mac address can be examined? That should be fun...
For years, we have been struggling with performance of SSL, difficulty of choosing good passwords, vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms. No more! As evidenced by RIAA lawsuits, a new 100% reliable way to identify yourself online has been discovered - an IP address! After all, it's found to be a proof of identity in legal proceedings! Starting immediately, banking websites no longer have to ask for those pesky usernames and password. They can just use an IP address provided by ISP to give you an unrestricted access to your bank account. After all, US courts did much the same thing for RIAA.
Can we please for all future articles involving the **AA, instead of saying "**AA does something stupid again," we say "Sony and friend do stupid things again?" Slashdot can do its part in ruining the big labels/studios by revealing the true culprits.
It was an ex parte proceeding. It was not a "win". There was no one else in court. No one to oppose it.
It was not against University of Wisconsin. It's against the "John Does".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
How does monitoring which IP addresses were on these networks necessarily imply that they were trading copyrighted material? The same goes for the 24,977 shared audio files, who can say that those weren't audio recordings of lectures given by professors, or poetry, or local bands trying to get promotion, etc? Hell, for that matter, who's to say they were music/movies at all? Couldn't they have been ISO's of Linux Distro's, JPG's of the topless drunk prom queen, PowerPoint presentations that study groups were collaborating on via the internet?
I realize that probably not everyone is innocent here, but in terms of PROOF, I just don't know about "facts" like these.
"The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway."
I didn't think they needed to? I thought that when the RIAA comes calling, what happens is that you get a notice saying you've already lost a court case some out-of-state court, because the judge rubberstamped their claim that this IP address is you, and now it's up to you to either a) pay a lawyer, go to court, and try to prove your innocence, or b) pay the nice RIAA their reasonable thirty-five-hundred dollars and get on with your life.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's directed more at Universities and parents. They know full well kids wont take the moral high ground and stop pirating. They are aiming these suits at the kids to show parents who the boss is. I know several parents who've taken action against there kids for fear of the RIAA knocking on their doors. My father, when this all began, even took time out to come talk to me about whether or not I was pirating songs on his cable modem (I was 25 at the time and staying with them while in college still).
Lawsuits are rarely profitable on a corporate scale. They are more or less used to scare a certain segment of the population, in this case, parents and gaurdians. This in turn puts pressure on the actual offenders. They aren't looking for compensation for the theft which is what lawsuits were supposed to be for to begin with. Instead it's being used as a message which, to me, is an abuse of the system and the judges and lawyers involved should be taking action to stop it as it significantly reduces the credibility of their own system.
Dear Mr and Mrs Joe Average
We, the RIAA, represent copyright holders of digital content, and as such, it has come to our attention that you own a computer which is also connected to the Internet via Globalcom ISP.
We have acquired web surfing logs from Globalcom, and have determined that several people in the Northern Hemisphere have been downloading music files illegally. Since you connect to the Internet via Globalcom we are prepared to offer you a discounted amnesty program. You may choose this option, sending us the requisite $5,000 payment via check or major credit card, or you may choose to wait till we take you to court, confiscate your computers, all the computers you have had access to, and the computing and entertainment devices of yourselves, all your family members, and anyone who has been within 50 feet of your wireless router.
We cheerfully await your reply and are certain you will do the right thing.
Sincerely,
The RIAA
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
By your reasoning, money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth.
It is. Has been for some time now- ever since the US government decided to try to create one world currency only loosely linked to a commodity instead of strongly linked (the fiat petrodollar). Of course, the final thing that killed it is the number of banks that keep extra dollars around that only exist in cyberspace- there are far more "dollars" out there than can be accounted for by the government printing offices.
After all, if I counterfeit money, I'm not hurting anyone, right?
Given that the government has been counterfieting money since the 1930s, how could you?
People still want music and are willing to pay for it.
Now that is a separate issue. The broken business model is the one of artifical scarcity- the music isn't scarce anymore. NEW recordings are what is scarce. Therefore, I'd propose a whole new business model for the music industry- low bandwidth (8 bit, 22khz, mono) recordings for free, higher quality tracks (16 bit 44khz stereo) for $.25 (double what the bands get now from ASCAP/BMI), and all of the money going to the band. Forget the record labels- and if you want a CD, buy the tracks you want off the band's website and burn it yourself. No DRM or copyrights. This encourages the bands to continue to put out new stuff- as high quality bitrate recordings will get out into the wild on the filesharing networks, the sales will drop off for older tracks,so to keep making money bands will have to put out new stuff.
Copying it because it's easy is no more ethical than counterfeiting money.
Wrong end of the stick. Copying it because it's easy means that the copying itself has very low real ecconomic value- it's the creation that should have high ecconomic value. The RIAA is in an obsolete business model, because their business model depends upon getting money from COPYING other people's work. They need badly to become extinct as the buggy whip makers. The artists are who deserve the money, not the RIAA.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
'More than likely, when the next generation gets into power, they'll remember this and pass legislation that will move the pendulum the other way to the detriment of the copyright holders.'
I doubt it, this generation has learned the same lesson the Vietnam baby boomers learned. They've learned that you can't beat the man. They will grow up to do the same thing the baby boomers did, sell out and sell out hard.
'As far as outdated business models are concerned, there are legal ways to get this material, so the "outdated business model" argument is no longer valid.'
Are they still charging based upon artificial scarcity and the number of 'copies'? Supply and demand dictates that productions and distribution bottlenecks define costs. The music industry is based around old bottlenecks that no longer apply. Bittorrent and Digital copying means that 1 song is no more valuable than 10,000 songs. You can set up a studio in which to record and cut albums for less than 5k now. There are and always have been plenty of talented artists, they are a dime a dozen (sorry artists, but its true). Music is cheap to produce and in virtually unlimited supply.
Once upon a time when market dynamics changed this drastically companies went out of business, even huge companies, and new ones sprang up that worked differently. Now D.C. has sold out to the point that those companies effectively buy legislation to keep them relevant.
Music was never a good way for an artist to make a living. Most bands sound great when coupled with great recording. Its time for professional music to be about concerts and recorded music to be free promotional material. The recording industry should effectively be artist unions that do just that, offer high quality recordings as REASONABLE prices perhaps even free recording and hosting with union dues.
'No. That's like saying 1 dollar is no less valuable than 10,000 dollars. Just print more money. What are the consequences? Inflation. This means that everyone who has money pays when you print and use conterfeit dollars.'
Dollars aren't worth any more than counterfeit in and of themselves. They are supposed to represent value. Music doesn't represent anything, it has only its innate value. You are right, technology has made it cost nothing to copy something as much as you like and the people have spoken, they don't see anything wrong with using that technology. This has ALREADY devalued songs to the point where they don't have a value worth measuring.
'Ultimately, the more people distribute music for free, the less the song is worth, because a cheaper source exists for free, so you need to charge less to entice people to buy the legal copy.'
Did you even read the post you are responding to. I maintain that free sources of all the music are already plentiful enough that the value is nothing. At least that is the value to the ones receiving the music. The artists can realize greater value from the recorded music by using as promotional material. Those same artists can make a living by PERFORMING music, privately and publically. Those artists can form unions that provide bittorrent trackers and P2P networks to distribute their music. Those same unions can provide recording time at cost, union dues might be enough to cover cost and if not a small surcharge (no greater than cost) would be charged. Either way, cheap equipment and software packages have made professional grade recording affordable for garage bands.
'The value of something is defined by it's demand, not by it's cost to reproduce.'
No, demand is only one side of the coin. The other side is supply. Despite your last statement that demand is the only factor everything else you have said admits that the existing ready supply of free music that is large enough to fill the demand has effectively reduced the value of recorded songs to nothing. The answer is to let the multi-billion dollar industry that revolves around song recording to collapse and let new markets that accept this reality spring up. Not to pass laws to attempt to artificially inflate the value of the recorded songs to something rather than nothing.
In fact, to everyone reading this thread. I know a few local bands. Would anyone be willing to donate bandwidth to host the torrents and trackers so that I can help get a union like this started?