Slashdot Mirror
University of Ohio Abandons Students Attacked by RIAA
newtley writes "The University of Ohio was putting a brave face on being #1 on the RIAA hit list, but it now appears they have caved in to RIAA intimidation. Now, 'It appears that many institutions are simply prepared to wash their hands, refusing even to question the tactics of the industry,' let alone giving students meaningful legal assistance, says Ohio lawyer Joe Hazelbaker. He's written to OU associate director of legal affairs Barbara Nalazek saying, 'Ohio University has an obligation to protect the privacy of its students and their records, which includes directory information.' The Recording Industry vs. The People blog is hosting a letter universities whose students being attacked might want to consider."
First, campaign contributions to the best opponent of the Senators Disney. Make it perfectly clear that you're contributing against Senator Disney. If you've got some extra time in the summer, volunteer for one of their campaigns.
University students are adults. Why should Ohio University - or any other nearby entity with deep pockets - step in to help them?
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Actually, I'm not sure what legal assistance they're supposed to be giving. I mean, what brain-dead college student doesn't know that downloading copywritten music and movies is legally wrong? Who hasn't been told? Who didn't get the memo?
Or is using the school's network the determinant factor? If I commit a crime on the school's streets or property, can I assume that I automatically should get "legal assistance" too?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
If students get sued into oblivion, they can't pay tuition. And if the college does something meaningful and beneficial for their students, they're a lot more likely to actually see donations later on.
I'm by no means suggesting that the college has any obligation to provide any assistance, but it's certainly to their benefit in the long term.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
But whatever happened to taking responsibility for what you do? Why would the university expose itself to lawsuits unnecessarily?
Yes, the lawsuits are a bunch of bull, and yes, the RIAA is a bunch of thugs. But I have no doubt that the university told people that file sharing is a good way to get sued, and they went ahead and did it anyway. I have no sympathy for these people. As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that file sharing can make you the target of a lawsuit, but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the students did it because they wanted free music, not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
If you want to change the situation, downloading files and trying to get sued isn't going to fix anything. Donate to EFF, move near the RIAA headquarters and intimidate them directly, or some other more direct means would be more effective.
It sounds to me like we're making a classic stupid military mistake: we keep on defending ourselves, at our homes, schools, and workplaces.
So let me ask: how do we take the fight to them? How do we start fscking over the RIAA / MPAA / Disney / NJ Turnpike Authority?
Well, don't lump every Slashdot reader in with "we", as a lot of us don't download music and find the whole issue a big murky grey area best avoided..
But the way to fight back is to, well, fight back. The university has a law school, put it to use. Every single case should be disputed (as long as the student is willing) in a protracted legal battle. Send in the would-be lawyers to do the grunt work. Make every case a long painful debacle with endless deliberation before it even gets to court. And try to get them to try them in Ohio, because those big-city RIAA lawyers are not going to want to camp in the Midwest for a long trial (or pre-trial process.)
If their students are being singled out the University may have a case, too. Targeting a particular institution with endless lawsuits could possibly be considered some sort of harassment, as it certainly will turn away potential students who don't want to be randomly and possibly mistakenly targeted by a RIAA lawsuit (I certainly would take that into account if I was choosing a college, or my child was.)
Bascially, generate a lot of negative press for the RIAA by causing them to drop or lose a lot of lawsuits. Because that's what all of this is, a massive PR campaign on their part to stigmatize downloading music. The RIAA is not doing this for the money; they do not care about the college student's $5000. That's petty cash, one of their typical A&R guys or lawyers blows that in a weekend. Even lawsuit played out to the end against a college student with $60-100k in damages will most likely be defaulted on. They are losing money by suing random downloaders... But they are generating a lot of news, and a lot of fear.
What needs to be done, in my opinion at least, is make the lawsuits no longer worth the effort. They've been successful as a PR campaign-- casual downloaders now think twice, parents and institutions are now keeping an eye on what their children/students/employees are doing. I don't think further lawsuits are going to change anything (but remind people that yes, it can happen, which I suppose is the point) as the kind of people who think "it won't happen to me" are going to keep doing it.
I have a friend who doesn't approve of illegaly downloading music. He occasionally buys a second hand CD for a couple of bucks, then immediately downloads high-bitrate rips of the same album from bittorrent, because more often than not the disks are scratched and he can't be bothered spending hours trying to make a decent rip of his own. I always wonder, what exactly is he giving back to the artist? Aside from a few fairly abstract arguments to do with the price point being higher if consumers know they can sell CDs they buy second hand, in what way does buying second hand CDs benefit the artists/RIAA more than just downloading the damn thing?
Don't buy new albums, and don't download their albums. Try it for a year. You should be able to survive that long.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Almost as if the university is responsible for the students behaviour. Aren't people responsible for their own actions these days?
Deleted
You can steal CDs, you can't steal music. Just to prove the point, I'm going to go download the Metalica discography again (straight to /dev/null of course).
The best way IMHO to really beat the RIAA is to not consume their products in any form. If DRM prevents you from making a backup copy, don't buy the CD, don't download, listen to something else. Then if their revenues drop, the execs can't point to the evil pirates as scapegoats to appease the shareholders.
To take a page from Oscar Wilde, "The only thing worse than being pirated, is not being pirated"
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Nobody is dying or being raped. They are downloading music for free. The two are very different things. Nobody is being oppressed here. They're merely suffering consequences for breaking [mostly unfair] laws.
That's the point. At the least, they can make it more difficult for pirates to rip artists off.
Why do you "fucking hate" a company legally protecting the rights of its represented artists? We go after stolen GPL code violations all the time here on Slashdot. But piracy of music artists, game developers (like John Carmack at id), movie studios, and so on is okey-dokey?
"Sufferin' succotash."
Actually, the existence of a second-hand market is part of what allows them to sell the CD for $9 (or whatever) in the first place -- people will spend more up front if they believe they can get some of it back later. The value of the used CD is factored in to the price of the new ones.
Going by your original logic, half a million people now have an extra $9+ to buy another CD. This would seem to be an improvement from the "available money" point-of-view.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
What the fuck are you talking about?
You are right. They did not steal. Copyright infringement and theft are not the same thing.
However, they did break the law. Copyright infringement is against the law.
Le français vous intéresse?
Personally when Ohio University went looking for donations later I'd tell them to go talk to the RIAA. Not like they'd get their money from them but after being backed out on I would certainly feel abandoned and unwilling to donate to a school who provided only as much as I paid for. Either I paid for my degree or I didn't have enough money to pay for it and we'd be square. I kn ow it's not the University's responsibility for backing up the student for something that is illegal but they should make a stand. Universities are where we look to for change. Maybe that's just one more thing that our educational system is losing?
"copyright infringement != theft. That's why people aren't locked up for it. They're sued."
Serious question here: why do you say this? People do go to jail for copyright infringement; it's usually reported here on Slashdot with the expected response. It looks like you've been around on Slashdot to see this covered. If you can honestly tell me that you've never heard of somebody being locked up for copyright infringement, I'll beelieve you -- I'll just be very surprised!
I'm certain it's fairly common knowledge that "crimes which involve theft" and "crimes for which you can go to jail" are distinct sets. There's a union between the two, to be sure, but unless I've misread you, you're stating that the latter is a subset of the former. To use a touchy example, the crime of rape. Yes, yes, one could say that a rapist "steals the victim's innocence," but it's not theft. Yet -- just as if you pirate enough software or music -- you can go to jail for it.
"When you pay for that System of a Down CD, 95% of that money (number made up off top of my head, point is, vast majority) goes to... the RIAA/its affiliates. Bands make money off of tours, merchandise, etc."
Very true. Another example: I'm director level at a computer peripheral company. I'm responsible for some $40MM worth of business, yet my salary is (sound familiar?) less than 10% of gross sales. My company, like record companies, uses the rest to pay everybody else who was involved in creating, shipping, and selling my products.
This is, sadly, how it works with most industries. I'll grant that this is a surprise to most people and it really is via the record industry that many Slashdotters have learned this unfortunate fact about the business world -- but two wrongs still do not make a right.
What somebody needs to do is come up with a business model for a record company where the record company funds all the costs of production, promotion, distribution, and so on, yet does not attempt to recoup those costs before paying the artists. The first Slashdotter to do this will be very popular indeed.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
The unfortunate fact is that most Slashdotters have zero business knowledge, except how to use the phrase "change your business model". What they do know about is software, specifically free software. Since this also fits on a CD, they have difficulty understanding why the music business can't work like open-source. Nor do they see any double standard in demanding that copyright defends the rights of open-source developers and their licences, but leaves the holders of music's copyrights with no recourse to law.
What somebody needs to do is come up with a business model for a record company where the record company funds all the costs of production, promotion, distribution, and so on, yet does not attempt to recoup those costs before paying the artists. The first Slashdotter to do this will be very popular indeed.
I'm afraid you're assuming that the average Slashdotter is looking for solutions. What they're really looking for are excuses, and will continue to find them no matter what.
"Copyright infringement is against the law."
freeing slaves was once also against the laws of your country!
hiding jews from evil nazis was once also against the law in my country (germany)!
point is, just because something is "against the law" does not make it automaticly morally wrong.
and as long as the labels do not offer the product for sale themself that got infringed by those millions of people then there is not even a single cent monitary damage!
(this is just some generalized ramblings, thought I would stick it here in this thread, it's ontopic but widely varied)
I wanted a used but serviceable electric drill, a simple plug in model, the old one I had had for years finally went TU. Picked one out, maybe half price of new, pay for it, go home, use it. Now, it's a black and decker, they got paid once for the drill, but nothing on the resale-should they be?
Anyway, the digital point is moot, the tech genie is out of the bottle now and in widespread use. It's our first replicator technology, folks thinking they can still charge a huge per unit markup for copies that quite literally at best only cost a few cents need to realise they have been put into the position of buggywhip makers and sellers. Sorry if that hurts their plans and all, but those are the facts. the future world is *not* going to be paying huge amounts of money for single copies of digital bits, no matter what those bits are. We still are some, but that is only from inertia. If that means 15/16th of digital bits creators go broke or have to switch to doing it for a hobby, that's life.
I'm a blue collar worker, as in hard labor worker for not a lot of money compared to the business and IT people here. I have already been told that my labor is now only worth a dollar an hour or something, because it can be reproduced in china for that sum, and society seems to think that is OK, that I have to "deal with it". It's rather an unpleasant FU from my fellow americans, but oh well, that's reality, I *have* to deal with it because there is no sympathy of note, nothing that is effective anyway, it's not really personal as another saying goes, it's just business. OK. I went from middle class to now pretty far down the pole, barely above poverty level. I get by, but that's it. Trying to do better, but working a few jobs doesn't leave a lot of time for much else.
So... you digital content creators.. you are no longer the elite either, you are at the tail end nadir of that point, and digital reproduction-replicator technology- makes your efforts quite a bit less valuable per unit then you think they should be. That's reality,. you'll have to adjust eventually. Single copies of your stuff are worth pennies, not dollars.
The handwriting, as they say, is on the wall. It won't happen overnight-cars didn't replace horses overnight either, chinese furniture didn't replace my furnbiture over night, but eventually it finally did, and with digital bits -it's happening. My only advice is adapt and change as fast as you can, prolonging it makes it worse. Jump at the high point, don't hang on except as a hobby. You may be making the big bucks now, and may for some more years, but eventually-you won't be, there's tens of millions more people a year entering the digital content "business", whether it is in the arts or sciences, and the ability to reproduce the work for pennies isn't going away. And you will NOT get much notice either, business and society doesn't work that way.
How many buggy whips have you bought lately? You have a much larger pool of workers every year all trying to sell stuff that is only worth pennies per unit, and it's beoming easier to make those copies, even cheaper than pennies, and the pool of creators is exploding. This is called a "bubble", a normal economic term.
The *only* reason you can still get dollars per unit now is inertia, but eventually that will go away, like alcohol prohibition. At first it was rigidly enforced, then eventually it was so universally ignored that they finally dropped the notion of trying to restrict technology, which after all is what booze making was, just simple chemistry. Simple chemistry and human nature doomed prohibition. Simple electronics and human nature will doom high dollars per unit digital copies of bits, laws or no laws.
You won't be able to restrict replicator technology, so the sooner you adapt to that reality and change course the faster you ca
If I manage to capture a screenshot of the RIAA homepage containing false adverse remarks about me, can I sue them for defamation, given that it is trivial to produce such an image?
Suppose a student who is being subjected to this blackmail just reformats his hardisk, destroys any cd's he might be possessing containing any infringing material and claims he never had anything to do with any p2p downloads, what then? What evidence is there to incriminate the student?
Ah, but there is also another place to hit the university in pocketbook: the Alumni. If you are an alumnus of the University of Ohio and feel they are taking the wrong stand, be sure to let them know the next time they want a few bucks for the school. Enough of that, and the private universities and colleges will tell the RIAA to stick it.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch