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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?
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?
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.
They could start by not being raging cockbags.
Insisting on DRM (which only hurts people who pay for music), insisting on charging more than people are willing to pay (hence a slump in CD sales), suing twelve year olds... etc etc.
Also, they don't really have a right to make money. If they can't figure out a way to make their music and make a profit, I guess they'll have to stop making music, won't they? Guess they'll have to get new fucking jobs and pay their way.
"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
Actually, people still pay for music in droves. Itunes is doing amazingly well and, IIRC, revenue is still going up, just not as fast as the music industry thought they were going to. The backlash isn't only caused by the ability to copy for free, it's because we used to pay for tapes and then, suddenly, they offered cds for almost twice as much. Then tapes were phased out, cds became common place, and the price stayed roughly the same. Artists began putting out crap where half the cd isn't worth listening to and another 1/4 is only tolerable, with one or two tracks worth listening to. Besides, with radio stations the RIAA has been giving music away for a while now.
They've had multiple and free distribution streams with a copyable medium for a while now, so perhaps it's time they look at the industry as a whole and try to work with the market and technology rather than against it.
This is not the end.
This is not the beginning of the end.
This is the end of the beginning.
Technoli
They're way ahead of you: http://www.news.com/Democrats-Colleges-must-police-copyright%2C-or-else/2100-1028_3-6217943.html?tag=nefd.lede
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.
great plan kid, try explaining to the tens of thousands working in the music industry how they tell the mortgage provider that "my business plan is not to earn money".
You did tell this to the blue collar assembly line workers of America, who get laid off in droves because of cheaper labor costs outside of the country, right? Closed factories and all that.
Why should white collar workers be coddled?
If corporate America gets to screw over the middle class without any repercussions, it's about time they got a taste of their own medicine! Vive la revolution!
Please don't compare physical goods to IP. They are not the same thing and you can't compare the two. No matter how many times you repeat this bullshit about stealing, piracy has nothing to do with stealing. Piracy is copyright infringement, no more no less.
Learn some basic economics. People respond to incentives and people are opportunistic. If they have an opportunity to get something for free (vs paying for it), they will do it. This has nothing to do with being self righteous, it's just the way human nature works.
This has nothing to do about being moral or immoral. The digital age simply increased (by several orders of magnitude) the possibility of being opportunistic with regards to IP. You can't set the clock back and you definitely can't change human nature.
I love when MPAA bitch that they won't make movies because of the risk of piracy. If you're so concerned about, bail out of the media business. Supply and Demand will determine what happens next...
point - lacking the right to make money, does not imply people have the right to steal from them. Of course, typically seen in the context here, it does imply that.
The problem is more the methods of the RIAA, which can be just as dishonest as those of the pirates. I'm more a fan of "if it's worth having, it's worth paying for" myself, thus if they ask to much I just go without.
The RIAA should not have the right to restrict fair use (trying to prevent people from legitimately copying/playing their music on their MP3 players or computer), reselling used CDs (remember to destroy your own digital copies if you do this), have more than one person listen to product in a single playing, etc. Heh, all that and I still haven't gotten into their dubious legal tactics.
Likewise, a customer does not (and should not) have the right to pass off the copyrighted works without giving up their own right to use it.
Both sides are slighting the other in this case. The pirates because they have a gimme-gimme spoild-child attitude of wanting to get everything they want and bitching-and-moaning for it, and the RIAA for blatantly abusing their customers.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I agree about the payment...
What is a fair payment?
If I have $10 for entertainment and you are trying to sell me 3 songs, what's fair?
If I have $10 for entertainment and you are trying to sell me 300 songs, what's fair?
If I have $10 for entertainment and you are trying to sell me 3000 songs, many dvd movies, cable, dvd television series, video games, what's fair?
Especially in the case of 3000 songs, the people that produced those songs are mostly long dead.
There is no reason other than greed and highly artificial monopolies that you should not be able to buy "every hit from 1926 to 1957" for $20 on DVD. If we go by the original copyright laws, "all music up to 1979" would be copyright free and extremely cheap.
They used their money to pervert the law. They are using their money to try and sustain that perversion (to "forever less one day").
Copyright is a special privilege granted for a limited time to encourage people to produce product. With literally thousands of bands, hundreds of tv shows, thousands of movies, tens of thousands of books, I do not see why they need such encouragement. I certainly do not see how John Lennon is going to be encouraged to produce more music by extending the copyright after he was dead.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Oh please. Both the American auto industry and the American music industry are in trouble because of outdated business practices and unappealing products. The people who will be laid off will be laid off for those exact reasons.
As for work not being fairly compensated - are you kidding me? Can you point me to any other job where you can do work for a few hours, and then reap income for the rest of your life? Not only the rest of your life, but potentially the rest of the lives of your children? If anything, compensation for creative works is unfair, but in the opposite direction of what you're thinking.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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."
The word "steal" get thrown around a lot. Well, one must consider that the Media Barons might have stolen from us. I have yet to see a single creative work that is not based on previous works. I can guarantee that not one single creative work has been produced where every person was paid for their contribution. This is why the idea of "Intellectual Property" is absurd. What is not absurd is the idea that a short term monopoly be given to encourage the production of new (derivative) works. Unfortunately, copyright law has been perverted to the point that works which belong in the public domain are being held hostage by the Media Barons. This really is one of those magical black and white issues.
1) Intellectual Property really exists, and the current crop of media producers are stealing from everyone before them just because the "rightful owners" don't have the resources to protect themselves.
or
2) Intellectual Property is not real, and copyright has been abused and corrupted to deny citizens of their natural right to use and relay ideas to others.