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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
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
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.
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?
Seriously, did you just conflate the "human soul" and "lawyers"??
While I'm sure there are some lawyers with some redeeming qualities, and who do important work (eg, ACLU, EFF, etc)
Rightly or wrongly, as a group, they don't have the greatest reputation for having scruples. I don't think there's a whole lot of soul searching or angst going into their decisions other than "do I want the red BMW, or the black one?".
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
I think that's the point - in many of them, no human soul, brain, or eyes are doing so becuase they automate this stuff and don't do anything I'd call due diligence.
One thing I don't get - the whole 'single mom' thing gets a lot of play - but I don't see any reason why she'd get a pass where a 19-year-old kid wouldn't, *if* there's actually evidence she actually did what she was accused of. Probably still dumb to sue her though simply on PR grounds. I often wonder if their PR department hasn't been infiltrated by people whose goal is to bring down the organization from the inside. They're that bad.
"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.
The legal system has always made sense in respect to these issues. The only reason why the RIAA got as far as they did as quickly as they did is that they had the element of surprise. (In a military sense.) They were able to use that surprise of legal threat to do quite a bit of damage before the legal war machine spun up to full defensive power. Now that things are spun up, the system is slowly beginning to repel the RIAA attacks.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is mostly speculation on my part... but:
For awhile the RIAA was sending out random letters to people, offering settlements. Probably many people did settle, for undisclosed sums in cases that were never made public.
But the RIAA decided to step it up a notch, and create a publicity campaign along the lines of "steal our stuff and you'll get caught" by suing tons of people simultaneously. However this seems to be backfiring: the publicity is making people realize that this is a widespread problem, and is making the weak points in the RIAA's accusations publicly known. So, people are more willing to fight when they: (1) realize there are many other people in the same situation as them, and (2) exchange information on "how to win."
Now this situation is far from over, and it may indeed turn out that many of these accused people will go to trial. Some of them may even lose, and have to pay egregious sums (e.g. $200,000 for sharing ~20 tracks). However the publicity with respect to these infringement cases is making it much easier for people to organize and fight. It is also making the RIAA (and associated labels/business sector) look evil and incompetent.
So, in a twisted sort of way, the publicity blitz to stop filesharing may actually make people more brazen.
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.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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 equal protection under the law were an even approximately achievable goal, I might agree. But it isn't, since most legal burdens are not shared equally simply because of the accidents of circumstance: CEOs don't get traffic tickets not because they don't speed, but because by and large they don't drive. Most people I know including myself can't afford to not drive to work, hence me and my driving brethren are burdened by a law that does not touch one of my fellow citizens, simply because he can hire someone else to do his driving for him (or charter a plane, or take a taxi).
Since in this example converse unequal obligations (like, for the CEO, obligations not to defraud or embezzle or to comply with industry regulations which most people need not concern themselves with) are not policed with the same proportion of state resources nor are leveraged with proportionate penalty when those duties are breached. Even if they were, the power to defraud or outright distort the regulations as they are written (never mind corrupt their enforcement) is unequal. e.g. I have next to no chance to affect the speed limit regulations in my state, however Mr. Pharma CEO has a great deal of say in influencing the regulations over at the FDA.
Since docking middle-class or poor people lots of money in fines and/or throwing them in jail has never, shortly said, made any of their lives better (or, I'd imagine, reformed them in an significant way), why do we continue to endorse the meaningless and destructive platitudes of incarceration? "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" is meaningless to a person who needs to be on time to a meeting to keep their job but must speed because they had another obligation to drop off their kids at school, and yet cannot afford a speeding ticket.
Of course, I'm not saying there is much of an imperative in copying music (nobody's livelihood rests on the ability to get free tunes/movies), but rather that the underlying mechanism is deeply flawed in its punitive aspect, and that flaw resonates with people confronted with examples of particularly acute disproportionality (single mom w/ two kids, etc).
p.s. I got out of college not so long ago, and while our culture demands more and more that people go to college to be employed, the institutions for the most part remain a significant bastion of monied privilege.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
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."
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.
Well, the submitter of the article is a lawyer, not your typical ./ techie. :)
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!