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Collegiate Resistance To RIAA In Michigan
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "There are now at least three complaints being investigated in Michigan against the RIAA's unlicensed investigator, SafeNet a/k/a MediaSentry, one of which was filed by Central Michigan University itself. Two other complaints have been filed by students, one from Northern Michigan University and one from University of Michigan. This appears to be part of the growing sense of exasperation colleges and universities are feeling over the RIAA's harassment."
And here I always thought RIAA stood for Really Intelligent American Aliens - imagine that!
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
The worst defense is a bad offense.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Thanks for the updates -- with so little in the way of good things happening on various political and legal fronts, it is great that you spend the time to keep fellow readers informed and encouraged.
That ain't liver; that's beef kidney!
If he can beat the Chinese, we can beat the MPAA!!!!!
FUCK artists, and FUCK their rights. We deserve to have everything they work on without paying them for it. Any kind of industry representative group trying to prevent the violation of artist rights is obviously "harassment."
It's so funny seeing artists trying to prevent people from ripping them off. Screw you, losers! Go on a tour or sell t-shirts--I'm sure somebody else will buy 'em and justify my piracy. Stop "harassing" me for freeloading off your work!
(expecting to get modded into oblivion for this sarcastic post, but who knows?)
Took them long enough to become exasperated. With the notable exception of Oregon - and even there it took more than one suit to get the State A.G. involved - all of these colleges/universities/bastions of free and open thinking and individual rights have been very slow to fight back against these spurious lawsuits. Too much of a "Not the University's problem" type of thinking on display here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What are the penalties in Michigan for practicing as a private detective? Some states (like Texas) have some pretty strict laws regulating this profession.
Have gnu, will travel.
...RIAA's unlicensed investigator, SafeNet a/k/a MediaSentry, one of which...
This is Slashdot. Isn't that supposed to be:
s/SafeNet/MediaSentry/g
Don't mess around with a directional Michigan, or you'll get beat.
It's about the only thing thats going "right" here lately then...
It's a leather thing
Ithaca College has already bent to the demands of the RIAA. Their administrators will release the information of any student to any organization claiming to be working for them. It's almost embarrassing. I hope this changes. I really do.
The problem that college CIO's (and CTO's) are describing are, as the "exasperation" article suggests, very much of their own making, but the article, and most likely the information officers themselves, is misstating the origin of the problem, and that may be complicating their legal responses.
The fundamental problem is that colleges have been hiring the wrong people into CIO/CTO positions and giving them the wrong mission. College CIO's fundamental job is to provide reliable information services on a limited (often far too limited) budget. People are hired into these positions for their willingness and ability to reduce costs while maintaining security and a high quality of service on the campus. In my experience (and I have had a number of them), they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the educational mission of the college and the freedom of educators to accomplish that mission if it will save a few dollars.
In the early part of this decade the RIAA's tactics worked perfectly with the goal of cost control. Large music and video downloads were overwhelming campus gateways and forcing ever larger expenditures on maintaining them. Blocking the ports most commonly used for music and video downloads was an easy solution to this cost problem, so the RIAA provided an excuse for cutting costs. A series of RIAA initiatives that played to CIO cost cutting and revenue enhancement were all easy to adopt.
The take down notices were another story. CIO complaints about having to devote personnel to this task started immediately, and it is getting worse as the costs grow. Legal costs are particularly problematic, especially if they get billed to the CIO's budget. With the costs of RIAA enforcement spinning rapidly out of control, CIO's are caught in a difficult trap of their own devising, and complaining that costs are an issue now will not impress judges who see a precedent in prior complience with RIAA demands.
The only way out of this mess is for colleges to do exactly what one of the judges suggested: to execute take downs without an investigation such that a student can sue the university and the RIAA for a abrogation of their rights, preferably as a class action. The universities could potentially then join the students in suing the RIAA, arguing that the RIAA forced them to abandon due process at the insistence of the courts, largely because Universities can't afford to do the RIAA's investigations for them, but RIAA evidence is often weak and inconsistent.
I don't know if this can be done (the details of this are a lawyers job to sort out), but I doubt that AG's are going to be able to help much given the precedents that colleges have alredy set for the wrong reasons. An avalanche of investigations forced on the courts might lead the courts to start to set the standards of evidence that the RIAA has to meet before filing a take down to begin with.
The real problem is that no such standard currently exists.
The other solution, of course, is legislation. LOL.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
yesterday there was an article of the EFF website commenting that other colleges (Virginia Tech mentioned) were trying to deflect RIAA harassment.
Formal complaints are much better, but the article did bring up a good point; maybe things would be easier for the campuses that didn't log student's network behaviour, or made logs such that certain behaviours weren't linked to any particular student. Would this be reasonable?
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Gotta lover a gimper. What's a gimper, exactly?
Or just drop the requirement to register the MAC address to a username.
Then all you could give the RIAA would be the MAC address that IP was assigned to at that time, if a judge requires them to keep logs.
And since a MAC address is easily spoofable, there goes any ability to tie the IP to a computer, much less a person.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Why is everyone backing the college. Clearly the RIAA is acting in a moral way, as evidenced by all the recent court rulings.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
If you really want to support the artist, DON'T buy the CD and then go see a concert. Buy a t-shirt, even.
Fixed that for you.
Download the track/s then send the band a check for their good looks, straight teeth, whatever, anything that will shield them from a possible claim down the line from disbursing a cut to the record companies.
I look for a band run site, not record co. operated, and an address to mail a check:
Yo, Slash, Edge, Duke here's that money I borrowed for that round of coffee when we were kids.Oh, BTW, nice band.
Cunt punt!
Everyones a troll, I just have the balls to admit it!
If the RIAA offer to take you on at that point, *resist the urge* until you are so established that you've reached the end of your performing career. At that point it might make sense to sell out to Sony for far more than your brand will ever be worth. (Worked for Michael Jackson, who sold to Sony for about 1 Billion at the dead end of his career. Just another way to stick it to Sony =).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
All of this is now relatively irrelevant.
The RIAA and MPAA bought themselves some of our representatives and they have added some Peer to Peer technology restrictions to the requirements that publicly funded colleges will have to abide by in order to get their money. This memo discusses it, but basically they will have to:
Disclose annually to students that file sharing is bad and illegal
Certify to the Secretary of Education the school will "effectively combat" copyrighted file sharing
Offer alternatives to "illegal filesharing"
Once again our representatives have sold out.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/epo0815.pdf
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
though in this case it is because the labels have all the power, all the strings and they WILL rob steal and lie about money to make sure they get it all.
this is not a lot different than if they didn't go with a label.
Now, where you're RIGHT in saying the small artist needs a label is one which is employed BY the artist. Works FOR the artist. Gets a reasonable portion of the money but doesn't get ALL the money and pass some on to the artist.
In other words, if they weren't like the middlemen we have now.
On the one side that is amusing (but it must be said that the humor here *is* quite special), on the other side you must be really short of amusing things if Slashdot is your only outlet. There's also YouTube :-)
You ought to come down here for a break (he says looking out over the sunlit lake which is full with sailing boats)..
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I was once upon a time a network admin at a major university in Michigan. All the DMCA complaints would reach my desk eventually. Typically, it was our policy to just report the computer as botted and save the student the hassle.
I'm surprised the great state of Texas isn't pursuing the RIAA for violation of their PI License laws regarding digital investigations. I wonder if they are licensed in the state of Texas...
They could easily collect a lot of cash and get several arrests from the RIAA(or agents) by using every suit they've filed in Texas since 2006 as evidence.
If the law gets overturned, computer professionals win.
If the RIAA gets fined and their people arrested, everyone wins.
I don't see a bad outcome of any states with laws like this filing suits against the RIAA, no matter who wins. It seems like all that would need to happen is for the victim of an RIAA suit to file a complaint about an unlicensed investigator.
Imagine if the RIAA's contractor had to fight lawsuits and answer charges in every state that has laws like this. They'd be in real trouble and possibly do some jail time.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
The RIAA and school CIOs may have a shaky alliance now, but what happens when this generation of harassed kids/college students gets power.
What happens when this young generation becomes CIOs, lawyers, politicians, etc.? Do you think that they will even hear the RIAA?
To the RIAA's credit, they were trying to serve the _real_ CMU.
$5,000? Lawsuits ain't cheap. Capitol vs Foster, defendant asked for ~$68K in lawyer fees for the full case. I can't imagine that RIAA's expenses were less than that. But maybe RIAA gets a bulk discount on "court proof" from Media Sentry...
So... say, 2 or 3 settlements, or a motion and a half?
Losing money is never fun, but I'm having a hard time seeing the fine being anything serious.
In the pocket. If the RIAA keeps on with is bs. Universities need to just stop any and all music from coming into their networks. Ban all websites that have anything to do with music. Just say. Sorry but we don't want to be held liable. And we'll be damned if you're going to sue any of our students. So in order to stop that nonsense we just won't have any music available on our interwebs. When you're ready to be reasonable we can talk. oh and tell you're lawyers to go to hell. F the RIAA!!!!!!
Bullying the largest segment of your paying customers - not a good business model.
No wonder the recording industry's sales have been plummeting.
The RIAA blames plummeting sales on file sharing.
They're too stupid to recognize that bullying your customers drives away sales.
It's been shown time and time again that the biggest downloaders are also the biggest purchasers of CDs.
It's also been shown time and time again that "illegal" file sharing is tremendous free marketing, spurring on sales that would not have happened otherwise.
I'm all for respecting intellectual property.
But the RIAA really is shooting itself in the foot.
Good. The sooner they're dead, the better.
Really, the big record labels are less than useless nowadays, and operate their business just like the mob.
Hmm, I guess tastes differ. The YouTube link was to one of the earlier appearances of Stephen Fry, with one of the funniest sketches he did at the beginning of his career. Nerev have I heard "oh shit" being said in such a meaningful way since :-).
But hey, we can't be all into English Humour, although I have seen Monty Python phrases spread throughout both UK and US English now :-).
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