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RIAA Afraid of Harvard
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a report on p2pnet.net, the RIAA's latest anti-college round of "early settlement" letters targets 7 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth. This is perhaps the most astonishing display of cowardice exhibited to date by the multinational cartel of SONY BMG, Warner Bros. Records, EMI, and Vivendi/Universal (the "Big Four" record companies, which are rapidly becoming less "big"). The lesson to be drawn by other colleges and universities: "All bullies are cowards. Appeasement of bullies doesn't work. Standing up to bullies and fighting back has a much higher success rate.""
It is well worth trying out the Freenet p2p network. It is an anonymous distributed data storage system that is ideally suited to filesharing. I have been using it for the past few years and just recently it has got a lot faster and more usable. Music and movies are regularly shared and it can only take a few hours to get a full album. Speeds are slower than bittorrent etc., but that is to be expected - you never get something for nothing.
The more news slandering them the better. They stoop to suing children, single mothers, the estates of the deceased..ya know years after they were found guilty of illegal price fixing that they practiced for over a decade. Then they get pissed off at us when they don't keep up with technology?
Yeah, see i really could care less how low anyone stoops against them. In fact, you think of the most immoral acts that could be committed to their employee's, and i still wouldn't care.
As everyone knows (;-), Yale and Harvard are also primary competitors in their law schools, and Yale turns out about as many lawyers as Harvard. In fact, there have been some interesting studies done comparing the two schools, which have radically different teaching cultures in their law schools. The conclusion seems to be that both work quite well, and their graduates have roughly the same success rate after graduation.
...
So what's going on between the RIAA/MPAA and Yale? Does Yale's reputation as being the "nice" law school (if that's not an oxymoron) result in them being attacked more or less? Anyone have data?
Just curious
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Actually, "NewYorkCountryLawyer" is the Slashdot ID of Ray Beckerman, attorney at Vandenberg & Feliu and long standing pain in ass of the RIAA. Charles Nesson and John Palfrey wrote the original Harvard response to the RIAA which was orignally covered at Information Week, then picked up by P2PNet and Ray Beckerman's own blog, amongst others.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Everyone thinks it's just Harvard that isn't being touched. To the best of my knowledge (haven't checked recently, but I tried to find any instance of this about 6 months ago), they have yet to touch a single Berklee College of Music, or Julliard student/faculty member. I mean, it's not surprising. It would be pretty funny for the RIAA to have tried to sue John Mayer a few years ago (when he was attending Berklee) only to have some of their member companies trying to woo and sign him a few months later.
Then again, while music students have more music downloaded/shared in general than almost anyone else I know, they also actually purchase more music than anyone I know.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Hi Ray,
Many thanks for your fine work in this area.
I have an experience leading to a question. I was involved in a civil suit, the other side's attorney pulled shenanigans, lying to the court, etc. My lawyer was incensed, and it seemed the suit was going to drag on for years, so he offered to settle with me for my hoped-for amount out of his pocket provided I release him to sue the other attorney (he was going to make way more money that way, he was that confident). I was ok with that, so that's how it went down.
From that, I learned that attorneys can be sued for shenanigans - malfeasance? - and that's my question(s). Could the RIAA be stopped that way? Attorneys are officers of the court, that makes them liable for malfeasance charges, doesn't it? If not in court, what about the Bar Association(s)? (All I know about the bar I learned on TV.....)
Can't the attorneys be punished and thereby discourage those practices? Is our system so broken that the answer is really no?
Thanks,
Earl
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
I wonder if with this many clear examples of deceit, whether there may be either a case legal against either individual high profile lawyers or some other kind of action or censure can be taken against them. I'm just thinking off the top of my head about something you do for a living but my first instinct is that if a few of these lawyers were actually disbarred or their reputations were tarnished rather than embellished by working for the RIAA, might that be an effective tool against their using such tactics? At the very least some of the smarter lawyers who use these tactics might deem it not worth the risk?
I also wonder if there might be a way to bring in this evidence at each and every trial. Unfortunately I can think of one very negative side effect for those defending against such tactics - weighing this evidence might make trials more costly (favouring the RIAA's deep pockets). However if it were presented well might it not be the difference between winning and losing? If done right is there any chance that showing this consistent abuse might result in similar actions being thrown out summarily?
Surely there is something in the system that attempts to limit repeated abuse/harassment? Some kind of provision for those who cry wolf and tie the courts up. If not there sure ought to be.
Are these thoughts pure fantasy or might this work in the real world? I defer to your wisdom in this. I am certainly not a lawyer. (I'm not even an American).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
A civil litigation lawyer has several respinsibilities:
1) To represent his or her client(s) in the best and most effective manner possible.
2) To plead cases that they can win - to do otherwise violates Responsibility #1
3) To make money for their client or to prevent their client from losing money by counseling them not to try a case that is not winnable and/or to settle out if necessary to minimize damages.
The attorneys for the RIAA are civil litigation attorneys.
When the target of litigation is Harvard University, arguably the most prestigious law school in the world, by counseling against pressing action against the university, these attorneys are flfilling all three of these Responsibilities because you can bet your bottom dollar that the legal counsel for Harvard University will most assuredly make the pressing of ANY case against them an EXTREMELY costly affair, indeed! Not to mention that trying to win against the best law school in the world is a really, really tough thing to do...
And, by doing so, they are effectively representing their clients.
In any law practice, that's a Good Day at the office!
Why?
They don't really need to cost us anything. They're a self-autonomous entity, capable of earning the money to sustain itself off people who like what they do, and because there are many people out there who do, they are very valuable. The only reason they're having any significant impact on the rest of society is because of piracy. I would have thought that piracy itself would be the liability here.
An analogy: a man keeps getting assaulted by assassins, and cries foul murder over and over again. Everybody is sick of him screaming. Would the sensible approach be a) dispatch with him, or b) dispatch with the assassins?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
and from what I can tell
:)
1) most kids here are too busy with chairing their Model-UN-Investment-Banking-Labor-Movement meeting to even care about music, so they listen to a few cds and buy tracks from itunes (like many college campuses with high tuition, most kids have some hardware from apple) and hear most of their music on the loudspeakers at god-awful binge drinking parties
2) the few kids who listen to a lot of music are into indie bands, and the RIAA seems to go after folks who download more popular tunes. also there's pretty significant downloading/computer-illiteracy here (kids dont have the time to waste playing with the computer, and thus dont really understand where to get music illegally)
3) there's only like a couple hundred cs majors here, and there's only one out of that group with immaculate taste in music (me!) so I'm probably the only person at harvard that the RIAA could ever be angry at, but I don't download music.
There's nobody to sue!
Note to reader: The error bounds on this comprehensive study may be non-trivial.
My take is that collective sum of knowledge does not change much over time, neither growing nor shrinking. Could you build a crossbow? How hard would it be for you to even FIND a person that could buid you a crossbow? That was state of the art awhile ago. That knowledge is all but lost now. Now can you find someone that can get you a handgun? The technology does not disappear or spontaneously materialize, it merely changes/evolves collectively over time.
Fifteen years ago I was on top of the world in what I chose to specialize in. How useful is it today to program assembly on a 6502? Did I lose knowledge? I think so - in that respect the knowledge did not evolve and became worthless. Unless I replace it with new knowledge, I am at a net loss. Just because I learned last week how to do Java does not mean I know 2x as much as I did before. I'm just treading water at 1x.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
RIAA #1: "Hey, lets go sue the organization filled to the brink with the best damned lawyers in the whole world."
RIAA #2: "Uh, now that you put it that way, let's not."
Table-ized A.I.
If they sued a university or college, they'd have a fight on their hand... which is what the RIAA assiduously avoids.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Now, I wouldn't say that all my profs had the upper hand on me in all subjects, but I would never dare to claim I know more about their subject than they do. Take my math prof. CS is (fortunately) here still seen as a subclass of a math degree (generally it IS nothing but applied math), in other words, you spend a good deal of your bacc years in math classes.
Now, he was already challenged by turning his laptop on, which is why he was one of the few who refused to use anything but chalk and blackboard to do his lectures. No powerpoint, not even overhead projector, the less tech the better.
Do I know more about programming than he does? Heck, anyone who has touched VB does. Would I dare to say I can hold a candle to him in math? Never. And I was good in math.
You will never know as much as your teacher in his subject after leaving him. That is a given. If your teacher is your primary if not only source of information about a subject, you're prone to know less about it than him. At best, you can know as much as he does. And even after leaving him and continuing on your own, he has a head start you can hardly catch up to.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I enjoyed your most persuasively written post, although perhaps not as much as the RIAA's lawyers did. However, I can assure you that my rules regarding bullies are not "myths" but rules drawn from intensive personal experience on the streets of South Ozone Park, Queens.
I am sure even you will agree that
1. Appeasement would never deter a bully.
2. A 'dork' or 'loser', or apparent dork or loser, standing up to a bully, enjoys the element of surprise.
3. Courage is a measure of internal fortitude and heart, not a measure of physical prowess.
4. Throughout history, there have been many instances in which courage carried the day against physically superior force.
As to any suggestion that the RIAA lawyers, who likely occupy leadership positions within your organization, will prevail... we shall see, we shall see.
With all due respect to the fine work carried on by your organization, I must reiterate; all bullies are cowards. I call upon your members to follow the lead of Darth Vader, and abandon the ways of the Dark Side.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Could you build a crossbow? How hard would it be for you to even FIND a person that could buid you a crossbow?
I have a set of Popular Mechanics Do-it-Yourself Encyclopedias that has complete instructions, photos and diagrams for building a powerful crossbow using a leaf spring out of a car. The copyright date is 1955, so the books aren't THAT old.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Got any proof for that, any links of real studies and surveys or is that just some comment you pulled out of your ass with no real basis in reality, just wishful thinking.