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.""

Comments

Try Freenet

[FreenetFan]

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.

What's happening at Yale?

[jc42]

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 ...

Re:Submitter is Charles Nesson, Professor of Law

[Zocalo]

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.

Berklee and Julliard also immune seemingly

[TibbonZero]

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.

Re:Cowardly? Give me a break.

[earlymon]

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

Re:Cowardly? Give me a break.

[syousef]

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).

I'm a senior at Harvard

[ystar]

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. :)