RIAA Campaign Against Students Hits Stormier Seas

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "It's been astutely observed that the RIAA's "ex parte" campaign against "John Doe" college students seems to have run into much stormier waters than its campaign against regular folks. Discovery motions were thrown out by the judges in cases involving the University of New Mexico and the College of William and Mary, and motions to quash have been made by students at Boston University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of South Florida. The RIAA might find it particularly troubling that the students are coming in armed with substantial expert witness declarations attacking the entire underpinning of the RIAA's case, that the students are finding each other and banding together, and that the Chairman of Boston University's Computer Science Department went to bat — as an expert witness — for the BU students."

Comments

good

[batray]

The resources available at a university should help counter the RIAA's unconscionable tactics.

Re:Does this have broader implications?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Forgive my near-total ignorance on matters of copyright law and my failure to RTFA, but if these college kids' cases are attacking the basic underpinings of the RIAA's case, is there a chance that this will benefit the regular folks who are under attack? Yes.

Absolutely.

Suing students has never been a good idea

[Opportunist]

Let's looks what students usually are:

-smart. Well, there are those and those, but usually, they got more brains than your average Joe.
-political. Not as much as they used to be, and certainly not "party political" anymore, but they do have agendas they believe in.
-young and thus enthusiastic. They didn't yet grow up into "meh, what can I do?" apathetics.
-free. Yes, there IS stress towards the end of a term, but hey, it's August! Many students still enjoy holidays, and few if any have papers due soon. They got spare time on their hands.

If you look around the world, you'll notice that pretty much every revolution, from political to social, contained students as a key element. Many social revolutions of the 60s have been driven by students, in Germany, in France, in the US.

Now, you're suing smart people who believe strongly in their freedom and their rights and do care about it, with plenty of spare time to defend themselves. Could it be that this wasn't the smartest idea?

Re:History lesson

[TheHawke]

Another history lesson to top it off..

RIAA's then-prez Rosen got into a Debate with The Oxford Union and she got a serious shellacking. This was 2002.

"The Oxford Union debated the proposition that "the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music" (via The Reg and NTK). Final scores: 72 ayes, 256 noes. A pretty resounding defeat. The report notes that a few of the more memorable bits of the debate include Hilary Rosen lying about copy-protected CDs in the US (or at the very least being deliberately ingenuous about it), Rosen also getting shocked at how many people said that they do buy music because of filesharing, and a few unsupported assertions about the importance of the music industry which no-one was allowed to contest. For more background on this debate, see the Campaign for Digital Rights."

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/26/21 53231

Do ya think they learned from that? ....

Naw.