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RIAA Says No Mystery In Rash of College Complaints
Doug Lederman writes "As colleges receive exploding numbers of complaints from recording companies about alleged illegal downloading of music files, theories abound about whether the industry is changing its criteria, aggressively targeting users who merely make downloaded music available to others rather than actual infringers. But after weeks of silence, the president of the RIAA says No: Better technology, he asserts, is merely resulting in better enforcement."
RIAA: *Jedi hand wave* Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
What a colassal house of cards the RIAA has built for itself. They are doing everything BUT look at the core reasons why people are buying fewer and fewer CD's. It's got far less to do with having to pay for it than it does with the overall quality of their pap...I mean products.
It's not better technology, it's better targeting. College students are 'soft targets'. They have limited funds, hence they are more liable to share music and less likely to be able to fight back. The RIAA doesn't want to try and extort from someone capable of fighting back, you know.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Previous technology: Flip a coin. Heads -> you are innocent.
New_and_Improved technology: Throw a die. 1 -> you are innocent.
So how long before they target kindergartens? Those little bastards aren't buying any CD's, clearly they're stealing them!
This isn't about technology. The RIAA's aggresive war against users isn't based on good or bad technology. It's just a bunch of lies.
* An IP address can't be used to pinpoint a user, and that's a FACT. What does that have to do with better technology?
* The companies they hired to do their investigations weren't authorized by the government. That's ILLEGAL. What does that have to do with better technology?
I've always thought you should use plenty of soap and water after contact with the RIAA. You never know what you'll catch.
steampunk web design
Principal Skinner: There's no mystery about what happened to Groundskeeper Willy. Why, he simply disappeared. Now let's have no more questions about this bizarre coverup.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
I, myself, am creating art. Photos and a bit of music. Also some mediocre short stories. While my products are definitely not good enough yet to ask money for them, I can understand the desire to earn a living by doing what you like the most.
I think that all digital art will become free for those who do not want to earn money from it. If a magazine wants to use one of your photos or if a corporation wants to use your music for an add, you should get paid. The rest will come from donations from fans or derived products.
But yes, you wont be able to earn as much money that way and the RIAA will milk the old system dry before adapting. This is logical. Even the oil industry will pull something like that. I'm sure of it.
Aren't the folks making music available the actual infringers? (Assuming the conversation is limited to music copyrighted by an RIAA member and not openly traded such as in the case of bands who allow taping and trading of tapes of live shows.)
Who are the actual infringers, if not the folks making the music available to others?
If I leave my apartment door open and you walk in and help yourself to my friend's beer, who's the thief: you or me? Even if I advertise on Craigslist "my friend's beer is unguarded in my unlocked apartment", it's still you stealing it...at best, I'm contributing to your stealing it."Better technology," any of us with a brain asserts, "is merely resulting in better clients. Next up: IP obfuscation"
morons
9 thousand lawyers versus 90 million technologically savvy, music hungry, poor teenagers
place your wagers
you lose, morons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Really, the RIAA is just casting a wider net. By putting out more notices:
A) They are more likely to deter casual, nontechnical users who get them, most of whom will either stop or reduce their P2P use.
B) They are more likely to scare others; e.x. "Yo, did you hear? Joe Smith got a warning about music downloading!".
C) Many colleges and ISPs (Dartmouth and Optimum Online, at least) will often reduce the speed of account holders who have been the target of DCMA letters.
D) For settlement offers, the wider the net, the more fish you catch. If people put up an ounce of resistance, just drop the extortion attempt and move on to the next guy.
Not really that surprising. The technology hasn't improved, the RIAA is just sending out more letters.
That sentence alludes to the "making available" debate. Is merely offering a song in a P2P program ("making available") already copyright infringement or is only the actual act of making a copy an infringement?
As long as they are not facing serious consequences for filing lawsuits against dead people, the homeless, children, and people who don't own computers.... this will only get worse.
Really, the RIAA is just casting a wider net. By putting out more notices:
E) Students move from a visable P-P application back to secure sneaker-net trading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
Instead of a dribble of songs from slow university connections, a few DVD's, loaded iPods, and USB external hard drives get lent outside of trackable channels.
For my middle school kids, it's the norm. They have Comcast and no P-P software. It's all sneaker net and iPods. I'm suprised the RIAA isn't bringing up the RIO lawsuit again and try to fight iPods and other external hard drives as massive tools of infringement. After all, in their book, tools for making availiable is a crime.
The truth shall set you free!
...is that the RIAA lawyers know that their cash cow is about to go poof very soon. Therefore, they are getting all the milk they can from the cow before it leaves the barn.
"This is America... where the will of the few outweigh the outrage of the many..." - Unknown
...is the number of false positives that are popping up.
I'm responsible for DMCA notices at my campus, and after a 1.5 year lull without a single one, I've received over 2 dozen, none of which are attributable to any IP given out by our DHCP server. One IP was a terminal server with no access to the internet.
(I'm posting anonymously because I don't like the spotlight. Talk to any college staff member and you'll get similar comments about this recent flurry of notices.)
The RIAA are trying to get as many cases on the books as possible before any ruling in their current legal battles is made. They probably think they will loose and will push for the judgement NOT to be retroactive. i.e. all current cases can go forward and they are free to extort monies to settle or going to trial. It's called hedging your bets...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
RIAA needs to take a step back and look at their business model. Ford used to create cars with bolts and pieces that were so unique that nobody made part for their products except them. That backfired at some point and they started to go with the flow. Musicians need to get a grip on where the money that is paid for their music goes. Reduce the big overhead of managers and promotions people and get back to making music. If you can do live performances and get rid of the ticket brokers overhead, you can make enough to live on with just a few concerts in medium sized venues each year. If you can not perform live, then you best not expect to make a killing in the industry since you probably do not have real talent, but just know someone that can mix down anything and make it sound good.
In most cases, when you make the black market seem more dangerous, and there is still a demand for an item, the illegal market will grow. If CD's were priced to make enough to cover costs of production and a small amount for the musician and composer, they would sell like crazy, especially if there was something that set it apart from the mainstream duplicated junk that is generally available. It is much the way the TV industry has gone, 3 networks with reasonable quality, then it became 200 channels, most of which is not worth burning the screen by playing. Quality will win out in the end, if there is a reasonable distribution method and pricing for it.
When using intimidation tactics, isn't it better to increase your pressure as it gets closer to finals for students- hold back until mid semester and then bomb the schools and students . . . Nothing would hasten a quick settlement like the pressure of upcoming finals.
Note that the RIAA is no longer referring to MediaSentry as its "investigator", instead referring to it as a "contractor" or a "vendor". I wonder if they think that will make their legal problems go away.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
This is so wrong, and the RIAA continues to get away with it because they refuse to admit to any errors in their methods. If the unreliability of the RIAA IP identification methods got wide circulation they might not be able to pursue any of these cases based on IP address/timestamp information alone.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I call your attention to the What's interesting ... thread above in this discussion where the poster is pointing out just how unreliable the RIAA method of identifying IP addresses and timestamps is proving to be in the real world. If this is the only method the RIAA has at their disposal to identify lawsuit targets, and it's as widely bad as the poster states, this might serve to rip apart the RIAA cases at the very beginning.
While not an exact analogy, although the basis of it in terms of unreliability is the same, imagine if people tried to use fingerprint data in court in a world where 1 out of 10 people had the same fingerprints. No court would accept that. If the RIAA is so provably wrong so often, then maybe the courts shouldn't be accepting this data as identification of anything at all.
(Note: this would also explain the two tier system of the RIAA cases. First a multiply joined John Doe case to get identities, followed by extortion, followed by individual cases. The first case filters out all the bad or unidentifiable addresses when the ISP says they can't identify a user for that IP address/timestamp. Of course, if the RIAA is following this stragety then they already know how flawed their methods of identification are, and are using this method to compensate for it by having addresses that at least identify somebody.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."