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RIAA College Litigations Getting A Bumpy Ride
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's juggernaut against colleges, started in February of this year, seems to be having a bumpier and bumpier ride. The normal game is to call for a subpoena, to get the name and address of the students or staff who might have used a certain IP address. The normal game seems to be getting disrupted here and there. A Virginia judge threw the RIAA's motion out the window, saying that it was not entitled to such discovery, in a case against students at the College of William & Mary. A New Mexico judge denied the application on the ground that there was no reason for it to be so secretive, in a case involving University of New Mexico students. He ultimately required the RIAA to serve a full set of all of the underlying papers, for each 'John Doe' named, and to give the students 40 days in which to review the papers with counsel, and make a motion to quash if they chose to do so. In a stunning development, the Attorney General of the State of Oregon made a motion to quash the RIAA's subpoena on behalf of the University of Oregon, on grounds which are fully applicable to every case the RIAA has brought to date: the lack of scientific validity to the RIAA's "identification" evidence. The motion is pending as of this writing. Students have themselves made motions to vacate the RIAA's ex parte orders and/or quash subpoenas in over half a dozen cases. Much combat remains, but the RIAA's campaign is no longer a hot knife cutting through butter on the nation's campuses."
I, for one, welcome our new common sense-endowed judicial overlords.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
They're gonna need a bigger lawyer.
dontsuemebro?
I hate to make predictions anyone else can make, but it's starting to smell like the beginning of the end for the RIAA and their shady tactics. Sounds like they're consistently meeting an increasing resistance. I guess sooner or later they'll realize that their best choice is to adapt and evolve and move on to a new "business plan".
You just got troll'd!
Are there any colleges left that aren't doing serious port blocking and packet shaping? Where my daughter goes to school, hosting P2P shares is going to get you a knock on the door from the network guys.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It is nice to see the legal system acting sensibly regarding RIAA. I have been watching from sidelines I have hated how RIAA has mis-used (IMO) the legal system. I do wonder, though, what process a human soul must go through to file lawsuits against single mom's and 80-yr old grandmothers (and the occasional dead person) and not even blink. RIAA lawyers must be getting paid a lot of money.
Bearded Dragon
I'm wondering if anyone here knows anyone that's had to deal with this mess. I have a friend at my school who was downloading illegal movies and got caught. But he wasn't charged or sued or anything; the MPAA basically told my school to "make this IP stop downloading our stuff" so he got kicked off for a while and told not to do it again. Most schools probably have a very good idea who is using what IPs. Mine can tell what room a rogue router is plugged into, even without an IP. And our IPs (we don't use NAT) are linked to a specific MAC address (we register the MAC addresses, which is a PAIN). I don't really see why the RIAA can't keep doing this, even though its stupid.
Why did it take so long for people to finally stand up to them? It's not like there weren't plenty of opportunities..
Federal funding has the universities by the balls. And you know who has DC by the pocketbook. It's no secret that the youth are the minority in voting percentages. If the youth don't vote, there is nothing to counteract that money. Make your voice heard to these politicians and try turn this into an issue of awareness that is discussed.
My work here is dung.
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but it doesn't seem right to me that we should be applauding flagrant violations of intellectual property rights. Everyone will be up in arms when Microsoft misappropriates or ignores GPL copyrights, but somehow, because it's the big, bad RIAA/MPAA, we are supposed to turn the other cheek? I'm sure I'll be modded down by the groupthink moderators here, but really, is this the outcome we're all rooting for? Ignoring copyrights?
Because the legal system no longer supports their efforts to force an old and decayed business model upon their "customers", the RIAA has turned to a much more partial audience - the legislature.
Their recent attempts to buy legislation include:
- Criminalization of unauthorized file sharing
- Transferring the costs and burdens of initiating lawsuits to the Justice Department
- Denying Federal Financial Aid to the universities and colleges that do not persecute file sharing themselves.
Whether or not these efforts will succeed remains to be seen, but what is clear is that they are getting desperate. Why they do not pursue alternative revenue-generating options and alter their business model to suit the times is a great mystery to me. At this point, it appears as if they are not meeting their corporate charter, which requires that they do what is in the interest of their stockholders.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
"Much combat remains, but the RIAA's campaign is no longer a hot knife cutting through butter on the nation's campuses."
Nope, now they're lobbying to make it mandatory for colleges to purchase each student a Napster or Rhapsody account or LOSE FEDERAL FINANCIAL AID.
Someone just needs to shoot every RIAA member in the head right now. If anyone will donate to my legal defense fund, I'll be more than happy to pull the trigger. My finger's been REALLY itchy as of late.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I hate RIAA but I have to say I'm surprised to see "the system" siding with the little guys and not the big corporations here. Certainly don't see much of that any more. Come on: everyone knows college students steal music. The people who got rounded up were breaking the law with 99% certainty. The law may be silly and outmoded, but it's still the law, and it's the job of the judges and attorneys general to uphold it. So I'm surprised to see them throwing up so many roadblocks. Usually the courts law enforcement and in this country adopt a very "can do" attitude when it comes to big companies getting screwed out of money that's rightfully theirs.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
how about donttagmebro and be done with it already...
Its about time.
You know what frustrates me more is that nobody is counter attacking the RIAA's methods. If I run a open wireless network and you connect to it and access my connection/file then you can get arrested.
But if the RIAA accesses my computer and records a list of files on it, they are just as guilty as the person access my wireless hub.
Or what about the fact that dorm rooms are shared rooms. So an IP address is not tied to an individual, but a pair of people. Or my personal IP at home is shared with my family. Or I might run a open access point that people can access. Why cant I pass the supena off to them as if I was an ISP or College. They are not the end point and how can you prove that I one as well. Just because I own the network, they do too.
If companies would learn to let some stuff slide under the rug, they would be much better off. How big did the Dimond Rio lawsuit make mp3s? How big did the Napster lawsuit make file sharing? Yes, it still would have been an issue. But all that news didn't help them as much as it hurt them.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Universities are obligated to record attendance and appearance of every meeting of two or more students and give RIAA an identity of someone seen handing out pirated CDs based on his/her dress style. Just because our means of communication changed, does not mean our human nature is fundamentally altered in respect to need for privacy, or tendency for abuse of power. What's so hard to understand?
I am glad that some common sense still exists within the U.S. legal system, this RIAA fisaco had gone on far too long. And now that they intend to 1) go after students and 2) threaten education functions, what's next? Going after single mother? Oh wait... they already did that... maybe stealing candies from babies would be next...
My experience is with large UK universities and small American liberal arts colleges. My liberal arts college blocked torrents if you weren't paying attention, but there were enough workarounds that effectively you could do anything you wanted to. Both of the large British University networks that I've used have almost completely blocked everything except for http. Where I am now, they allow Skype, but that's the exception-- almost nothing else is allowed.
It's really simple; you stop enabling the RIAA when you stop purchasing RIAA music.
I haven't bought a single music CD since 2002, except for direct purchases from local bands. I had been buying CDs quite regularly and in large quantity since I got my first CD player in late 1983 and so I suppose I was one of the best customers.
But no more. I don't upload music and I don't download it either; I won't give the RIAA any excuse for whining about copyright infringement. But I swear that I will never spend a single penny for RIAA music no matter what the format until the monopolistic miscreants are gone.
Hey, RIAA! I've gone five years without contributing to your war fund! And I'm sure I can keep going.
Everyone else: Take the pledge and watch the greedy bastards suffer.
Not that you are capable of understanding this, but copyright is NOT an absolute. The copyright as we know it now is a recent 'invention' and was introduced in response to technological changes (music recordings). Is it that strange to rethink copyright again now technologie has once again changed the world?
To give an example, before the printing press was invented, the only way to spread written texts was by copying them. Someone, monks in the west, sat down, and simply copied an existing work word for word. That was the only way to make more then one copy, unless the original author fancied writing all the copies himself.
There was no such thing as copyright, you had the original author and book, and people copied that work for distribution.
This changed with the inventing of the press, all of a sudden an original work could be turned out in any number desired (more or less). This changed the name of the game, as all of a sudden you had a new industry, that of the printing press (publishers if you like) who could take works and reprint them and sell them at volumes large enough to make a business. Before that books were simply to rare and expensive for all but the most powerfull to posses.
With music this mattered, before a composer who wrote a piece of music had one copy of it. If someone wanted another copy of it, they had to deal with the composer, distribution was limited. When printing of sheet music became possible all of sudden a piece of music was worth more then just the money you could get from performing it, you could write music and sell it without ever touching an instrument. The music industry had been born.
It is hard for us to imagine, but once people traded music sheets as eagerly as we trade MP3's.
Times changed again when music itself could be recorded, first by automatic instruments, later the music performance itself.
Over this time, the music industry (the people selling others people work) and the artists and the composers have been in a constant struggle as to who should receive what amount of money. The original sheet publishers offcourse preffered to simply take the music, or pay a mininal one time fee, and collect all the profits they could. The performers want to just pay a minimal fee at most and be damned how many times they perform it or how much they get paid for it, the composer wants to see money for each copy sold and each performance.
All this eventually, over many changes led to copyright as we know it now. The best you can say for it, is that it kept everyone quiet. Not exactly content, but quiet.
But things changed, tech moved on once again and deeply cut for the first time into the publishers, all of sudden you didn't need a huge press anymore, (either to print books OR press vinyl/CD's etc) but end customers could reproduce music easily on their own. In a way going back to the original situation where if you wanted a copy of something, you made it.
The industry seems to have responded by making copyright even stricter, seemingly wanting to expand the lifespan to infinite, this despite the fact that for instance Disney is famous for NOT paying for the copyrighted works of others who just happen to fall outside that new protection, Pinocio was famously released JUST after the copyright expired.
But the main question is this, why should we keep a law that has been recently introduced to deal with changing tech, now that tech has changed again? Copyright is NOT a natural thing, it is something invented by lawyers to product an industry, why should we as a society keep it if we no longer need it, want it.
Once there was a law that required a man with a red flag to walk in front of a motorised vehicle, that was introcued to protect the horse carriage industry. We changed it when it became clear that new tech of the automobile had made the horse obsolete. That industry was simply forced to adopt or die. Why should the music industry not do the same.
and if you cry out, but that would mean, no
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If the police had to play by these rules, every criminal would walk. 40 days is a lot of time to destroy all evidence of your criminal activity.
I'm not going to pay for what I can get for free, and neither will anyone else. Sucks to be you I guess, missing out and all.
Blar.
Actually, the Oregon argument scares me. If the argument wins in court, it could have disastrous consequences. Let's say I start getting death threats from a certain IP address and the police want to find out who's threatening me. Would a decision on the Oregon argument mean that I couldn't get information from an organization running NAT because the "lack of scientific validity" of my evidence?
Kudos to those who are standing up to the RIAA mafia. Sure, they need to protect copyrights, but they are going about this in the wrong way. They could all but completely eliminate the problem by dropping prices on music recordings. It's akin to the government increasing revenue after taxes are lowered. By lowering the prices of music recordings, the RIAA will create a situation where more people will prefer to buy a clean, high quality recording with the attached artwork and whatnot, because it will provide a higher value than a crappy downloaded version.
Google is a better company than Microsoft.
UC Berkeley doesn't block ports (P2P ports, at least) and the only packetshaping that goes on is at the border (commodity ISP traffic costs money; the packetshaper ensures that the University doesn't have to spend through the nose in any given month). You are of course given a bandwidth cap, but it's currently 8GB/week.
n/t
And our IPs (we don't use NAT) are linked to a specific MAC address (we register the MAC addresses, which is a PAIN).
It's stuff like this that made me into a hacker in college. Lemme tell you kids a story...
In college I spent a good amount of time on the mainframe. A Vax. Learned about *nix a bit, did my C programming classes, did my time there. It went well. Then I found out this thing was on something called the Internet. No, really! It was connected to a bunch of other computers all around the world!
So I got heavy into that. Mostly for downloading Amiga games, I must admit.
But then I discovered something called MUD. Multi-user dungeon. The great-great-grandfather of WoW. And played that a lot. But the sysadmins got grouchy and closed my account. "The mainframe is not for gaming." After a while and a few promises, I got my account back. But you know what? That really pissed me off! I'm paying to be a student there. It's *my* money. I have to pay a general course fee that goes to paper, lab supplies...and the internet. And they're telling me how I can use my portion? Sorry, that doesn't fly with me. That's when I got into hacking.
Because we live in a world where you can do more time for hacking than running over a dozen people at a farmer's market, I'm not going to say too much more. But I will tell you this - two things happened.
And what you've got going here. Same thing. I'll give you a pointer on how to proceed. I'm not suggesting you actually do anything, just read the following. How to change your mac address. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what you could do with that info.
Have fun, be safe, and remember that knowledge is the key to the universe and all that. =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I appreciate the use of "quash" instead of the typical slashdot "squash."
Our school had a similar position with copyright infringement where we had one of our own little internal filesharing operation. More or less when a 'complaint' was found/filed, policy dictated to stop the kid like mentioned above. However, all it boiled down to was a 100 dollar fine and a slap on the wrist.
Funny story is, one of the first people who got hit with the fine, they got him on, and ONLY on a copyrighted pron movie... apparently ignoring the thousands of MP3s, game ISO's, and other mainstream films.
Priorities, man.
I hate to make predictions anyone else can make,
Then why did you just make one? I mean, sure, it is obvious why the thought occurred in your head, but if you hate making obvious predictions so much why did you go to all the trouble to type it up and submit it to slashdot?
I think you don't hate it at all, you just said that so people wouldn't call you "captian obvious," even though that is exactly what you are being.
And is it just KaZaA, and a bit of Limewire that gets their attention? I've not seen any list of how many lawsuits/discovery requests have been filed so far sorted by P2P system used.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They're talking about transfers via the *internet*, on college campuses, correct? I couldn't imagine the RIAA being effective over College intranets.
Your argument would be valid if sharing music had consequences as dangerous as ignoring a death threat, and NAT is just one of the many flaws in the RIAA arguments. Moreover, that's just the technical side, we haven't even started on the abuse of procedure which is what is biting them as well (although I can't help wondering why it took so long for judges to recognise the abuse).
But the best argument is that file sharing is not going to kill anyone - ignoring a potentially valid death threat is. Not just from a human perspective, also from a liability perspective it strikes me as having just a little bit more power and I deem it thus less (not "NOT", just "less") likely that someone will make dumb absolute statements like the RIAA has made.
Insert
1: The RIAA claims that because they don't know who their Doe defendants are until after they have conducted discovery (meaning that they get the ISP under court order to reveal which subscriber was assigned a specified TCP/IP address at a given time), that they cannot serve them with papers and allow them to participate in the court proceedings.
2: The RIAA claims a need for Expedited Discovery (they get it right away, rather than waiting through hearings of whether they're actually entitiled to it, or not) on the claim that ISP server logs are only kept for limited periods of time, and if they don't get it immediately -- rather than waiting for a proper judicial process that protects both the Plaintiffs', and the Defendants', rights -- that it will be lost to them forever.
Both these claims are bogus garbage. Litigation documents sent to an ISP can be passed along to the subscriber of the service that the ISP intends to identify if forced by the courts. This can be done without telling the RIAA who this person is yet. And as for preserving evidence, once it becomes a matter of a lawsuit, ISP's can and do preserve the access logs forever, again not turning them over to the RIAA hounds until all proper procedures are followed.
However, when the only person the judge hears from are the RIAA lawyers, there is no one present to argue the opposite side. As such, the RIAA has been able so far to run roughshod over the rights of the Defendants, dismiss that case before their use of the evidence gathered in the method above can be challenged in that case, and then take what they illegally got away with there and use in individual cases where, to my knowledge (IANAL), how they got your subscriber information cannot be challenged.
So ex parte basically means in secret, or without the other party present, which is a lousy way to conduct justice!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Copyright terms of life of the creator plus 75 additional years do not benefit me in the least. In fact, they have stolen the Public Domain right out from underneath me, which is one of the things our Founding Fathers specifically tried to prohibit when they said secure for a limited period of time in the United States Constitution. Unfortunately, even the Supreme Court let this awful decision by a bought-off Congress and a weak President (Clinton) get through. We have been robbed by all three branches of our government!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Copyright is a dying concept, I'm glad to be part of its death.
Blar.
Where I work we do not block P2P. We can't, really, as it is an academic freedom issue in addition to having many, many legit usages. I mean try getting Linux without bittorrent, and WoW's patcher is BT based. We do deprioritize P2P traffic to ensure it doesn't use an unfair amount of the network, but it is allowed. That it is sometimes used for illegal things is not out problem. HTTP, FTP, e-mail, all are sometimes used for illegal things but we aren't blocking any of those either.
We are not interested in playing network police.
"To give an example, before the printing press was invented, the only way to spread written texts was by copying them. Someone, monks in the west, sat down, and simply copied an existing work word for word. That was the only way to make more then one copy, unless the original author fancied writing all the copies himself."
Indeed. And it should be added that this had a TREMENDOUSLY positive effect on civilization. This is a clear example of the positive impact that copying existing works can have. And reinforces your statement that copyright is not an absolute.
Perhaps the most powerful example is that of the writings from Ancient Greece (Plato, Aristotle, and many more). These authors had the most profound effect not just on Western European civilization, but on the Arabic and Slavic/Russian worlds as well. If these works had been DRM'd, we wouldn't have them today. In fact, we are BARELY lucky to have them at all, as all modern copies (Arabic and Western) are due to single copies being made from the Byzantine Empire. We came THAT close to losing all trace of them.
Losing them would have had a disasterous effect on Western Civilization. Medicine, Mathematics, Geography and Philosophy would have gone back to the stone age. In fact, up to the early 1900's, these Greek classics were still the mainstay in College Educations in the West, believe it or not. It's hard to believe that the best books, for the top elite, were the mainstay of Education for over 2,000 years.
In short, the ability to copy works freely has had a far greater postive effect on Civilization, and for a longer time, than has the ability to restrict those works.
Clears up a lot. Knew it was a one sided argument, but why they'd use it and what impacts it had I was drawing a complete blank on. Concur on #2...if the recordholders knew they were going to have a lawsuit associated with them in the future they'd keep it otherwise risk getting hit with destroying evidence.
Point #1 sounds like they want the John Does found liable before they're even named. Am I close on that?
Well said! I think I know who should be updating the wikipedia article :)
The RIAA is slowly being 'dragged and dropped' into the dust-(delete)-bin of history ... they just do not get it ... and of course the RIAA is just the foremost of the 'archival archosaurians' who want a pound of flesh - even for such a property as a song sung by a many decades deceased crooner ... The age of the 'Digital Gutenberg' arrived a long time ago in the age of the new technology ...
... and all that which was/is 'ethereal' and 'intangible' can/could be digitized will be/has been ... These are the lessons of history ... "Do not try to extoll the virtue of nor sell 'immaterial' aspects of the Emperors New Clothes" ... the public values intangibles less with each new quantum leap in technology ...
.... "So It Goes" ....
Pandora's box was opened in the "digital decade" of the last century
Such is wanton lust for lucre by these 'music merchants' sic who extoll their sleazy litigatory licentiousness when dealing with music fans/listeners that they will indeed kill the golden goose er they truly see the light
Fixed that for you. There are often more "sides" of an issue than those which are brought before the court.
http://outcampaign.org/
I own over 300 CDs, been buying them since 1990. Back then "The Wall" would give you a new CD if yours broke...just bring in the bits and there you go. Now I'm told I'm only liscensing the content. This industry gets more and more protection from the government and they use it to squeeze the customer harder and harder. I dislike the fact that a failing business model is protected by law to ensure the profitability of a non-necessity. I dislike that when I buy a movie I am forced to watch commercials and be talked down to by FBI warnings...I bought the damn thing, didn't I? If I were to rip that DVD to a hypothetical disk array in order to strip off the annoying non-movie parts, I am breaking the law.
I suppose I could simply not use their content, but when it and advertisements for it is blasted at me whenever I go out in public or watch commercial TV, I just get all bitter. Since they have all this money, they can spew advertising at me for the crap deals they off on their content. What is my recourse? "ignore" it? I'm getting tired of that. I want to hit back at these douchebags for polluting my life with their advertising and then making the product such a shitty deal.
So, intrusive advertisment combined with a raw deal for the consumer equals a desire to get back at the rich bastards running the show. How better than to use their content without permission? It's the best revenge.
Alternatively, I buy my music from emusic.
Blar.