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Duke Demands Proof of Infringement From RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a report at p2pnet, Duke University has told the RIAA that it will no longer forward the RIAA's 'early settlement' letters to its students unless the RIAA submits 'evidence that someone actually downloaded from that student,' and said that 'if the RIAA can't prove that actual illegal behavior occurred, then we're not going to comply.' While it is good news that a university is requiring the RIAA to put up or shut up, the forwarding — or not forwarding — of letters is pretty insignificant. What I want to know is this: 'When the RIAA comes knocking with its Star Chamber, ex parte, 'John Doe' litigation to get the students' identities, is the University going to go to bat for the students and fight the litigation on the ground that it's based on zero evidence, and on the ground that the students weren't given prior notice and an opportunity to be heard?' Over 1,000 infringement notices were sent to Duke students in the last year."
I prefer disarmament.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
One word, FEAR
Seems to be in fashion these days, it even works on our Congress, Senate and the President(s).
You can sell anything with Fear.
Oh, I forgot the Fear cousin "Intimidation"
So if the University says "bugger off" to the RIAA, why doesn't the RIAA go after the University as a contributor?
Because
(a) it has no legal basis for doing so, and
(b)universities fight back. The RIAA lawyers don't know what to do with people who fight back. Their game is picking on the defenseless.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
let's hope this sends out a ripple of nerve to the other universities and more of them have the guts to stand up. If nothing else, this would skyrocket the administrative costs of these previously cheap mass shakedowns and hopefully put a stop to them.
FGD 135
Something tells me it's a bad idea to sue a school full of law students, law professors, and likely a few more lawyers on retainer or payroll, when you don't have a legal leg to stand on.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
From what I understand, the RIAA doesn't have a specific name they are sending to, they get it down to a room at best, with a "John Doe".
Then they send a form letter with a settlement, and try to get the individual to give up who they are and pay up. It's more like mail fraud on the RIAA's end, really.
So if the mail isn't addressed to anyone, who isn't getting their mail?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Sure, Duke is bold now that NewYorkCountryLawyer and other lawyers stood their ground in a proverbial Battle of Thermopylae defending a bunch of homemakers and retirees against the RIAA army! While it certainly helps now, we needed the universities' collective might in 2005, not 2008, and perhaps a lot of people wouldn't have been put needlessly through the wringer!
Location is not the point here. Much more telling is noting the lack of significant law school.
How long before the dorms are nat'ed so the ip goes to a lot more then just 1 person?
When I hear about these RIAA letters-of-doom-death I always wondered, are the Universities even legally required to forward them to students? Why don't the Universities say, "no way, you deliver your own threat letters to people."
The university should have also stated that the evidence must come from investigators licensed in the state of North Carolina.
I seriously doubt that each letter costs less than $3000 to send out, when all of the legal and P2P spying costs are factored in.
From what I've heard, the money "earned" from the legal crusade of the RIAA mostly goes right back into the costs incurred in perusing new victims. Not a cent goes to artists, but I highly doubt that any of it does to the executives either.
What do think about people who are pirating music and/or movies?
The term "piracy" in the world of copyright infringement means:
-large scale
-commercial
-running off of exact copies for commercial gain.
I have never met anyone who is doing that so I have no real opinion of them as people.
I have seen poor people going around in the streets selling pirated copies, and they do not seem like evil people. They seemed a lot more decent than the people I've seen from the RIAA. They don't even seem to be aware that what they are doing is contrary to copyright law.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
3,000$ = typical settlement amount.. READ THE POST!!!!!!!!!!
I mean seriously, how can you proof that someone at IP-Address X offered a file.
The typical way is that they show a screenshot of some programm as well as someone claiming under oath that it's real. Well let's see where someone evil could modify that information to blame someone else:
1. the application: It can display any IP-Address it wants, even random numbers
2. the video card driver: It gets commands to write strings. It's trivial to exchange strings here and most video card manufacturers refuse to provide the source for their drivers.
3. many routers can simply do some kind of "NAT" to change the address. This could be done, in principle for certain ports and fully transparent.
4. the operating system: Of course that's the easiest place for changing any information going into the application and going out of it.
5. the font: Yes, this is obscure and might be noticed, but if I make a font which makes 8s look like 1s and 1s look like 8s, It will seem as if there is a different IP-Address on the screen.
So, there is no possible way they can actually proof anything. Plus they have a motif to modify their system in one of those ways.
As long as we don't have true trustworthy computing, which would mean we have to cut down the software stack of our computers to less than a kilobyte, it's hard to proof anything with a computer. Should we get TGC-style trusted computing, there will be _no_ proof a computer has been modified.
Harvard and other big-name schools like that, especially Ivy schools which are older than the Revolutionary War, have endowments in the tens of billions. As you can see here, Harvard has nearly $40 billion on hand -- more than the GDP of some countries in the world.
Who the hell is going to try and push back against Harvard and why would they need government support? I think that's hardly a fair indicator.
The same spies that push porn spam while they "investigate" or that use automated "investigation" that can't tell the difference between a file sharer and a printer? Yeah I kinda doubt it is really costing them much for their "investigation work" there.
But let us be honest here,this has absolutely NOTHING to do with artists or creators,and is nothing but unrestrained greed from non producing middlemen. How else can you explain getting up in court and with a straight face saying Ripping your CD to your iPod isn't fair use because you didn't get prior "authorization"(in the form of giving them another check) first.
And finally,since we always have at least a few "get the dirty evil pirates" every time we have this conversation,I am going to say this again: There is NO WAY that anyone can stand up here and with a straight face say that copyrights are anything but broken. If you try,I have one sentence for you: Steamboat Willie is still under copyright. The man has been dead for half a century,and yet his FIRST work,one that was made when most cars had to be started with a freaking handcrank,is still under copyright. I think we can all agree that is severely fucked up. Copyright was supposed to be a contract,nothing more or less. We got a richer public domain in return for a LIMITED monopoly on a work. The fact that Steamboat Willie is still under copyright should prove the contract is broken and not worth the paper copyright laws were written on.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm surprised Duke is actually doing the right thing here. Based on their track record, I expected the students to be expelled, their sports team disbanded, the coach fired and have full page ads run in local papers signed by their professors denouncing them. I mean, that's what happened the last time Duke students were accused of something based on flimsy evidence.
I guess Duke learned the expensive way that their students don't check all their rights at the door when the are admitted to Duke.
And if anyone's smart enough, they've dropped their own router on that line to help obscure everything.
"Yea, my router has that IP Address, but there's over four hardwired computers and six laptops connected to it. You got a MAC address identifying which computer was doing what? No, my router doesn't keep logs. No, I will not turn logs on, you cannot tell me what to do with my legally-purchased hardware."
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They should also demand that they don't just download .5% from the student either. They should demonstrate that they actually got a working copy of the song from that individual student.
is the University going to go to bat for the students and fight the litigation on the ground that it's based on zero evidence, and on the ground that the students weren't given prior notice and an opportunity to be heard?
The thing is, the RIAA doesn't really want to sue people. They want people to roll over and pay the $3000. That's almost entirely free money - they pay some small amount per IP to their dogs at MediaSentry, they pay some paralegal to fill in blanks on a form letter, and they pay some postage in order to send them out. Then they just wait until the money starts rolling in. A 10:1 profit margin wouldn't seem unreasonable, even if you factor in the supposed "losses" due to online sharing.
But every time someone fights back, whether it's against the RIAA's ex parte tactics or in a full-blown lawsuit, it costs them big. There are real lawyers getting paid real money to litigate real suits. Any returns are years off, and it's a roll of the dice as to whether they'll see anything for their efforts besides a bill from the defendant's lawyers.
The only reason that the RIAA files these lawsuits is because a few people have called their bluff. Imagine if the mob decided that breaking people's kneecaps was too risky/costly. Once people found out, nobody would pay them the protection money. Very similar situation with the RIAA: if the RIAA started ignoring people who ignored their settlement letters, and other people found out about it, then nobody would pony up the $3000. (Which, of course, is why these articles usually get tagged "mafiaa".)
By not forwarding the settlement letters, Duke complicates the cash cow portion of this formula. Ostensibly, the RIAA could find some way around this, but it'll undoubtedly be more complicated and cut into their settlement revenues. At some point, there's a line at which any hoped-for decrease in sharing is more than offset by the increase in pre- and litigation costs, and once the RIAA actually realizes that, their litigation campaign will stop. While many of us believe that the RIAA has been past that line the whole time, it'll take a lot more people fighting back to convince the RIAA of that.
Oh, and a ruling on unconstitutionally high damages favorable to the public interest wouldn't hurt, either.
Filesharing is nothing more or less than Civil Disobedience against a law that has gone beyond unConstitutional (copyright is specifically defined in the United States Constitution) despite the Supreme Court recently allowing Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to stand. Current copyright law has completely stolen the Public Domain, which can only be reclaimed by amending the laws back to reasonable again through Congress (fat chance!), a constitutional amendment defining exactly what a "limited" term actually means, or the outright destruction of Big Music since now any even reasonably competent band can record, produce, and distribute their music outside of the traditional channels for a tiny investment in hardware and software.
Now isn't Civil Disobedience also Protected Speech?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You sir do not go far enough. The constitution of the U.S. calls for copyright "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." First, while it's debatable, I, like you, believe that "limited times" should not be even close to the lifetime of the author, or even more than 7 years (at least for non-commercial uses). Second, how the heck does Steamboat Willy promote "the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? How does Britney Spears promote it? They don't, and should never have been granted copyright in the first place. If we had sensible copyright then we might have the resources left over to protect the material that really does need to be protected; instead we're left with a system that raids DVD factories in Indonesia for pirating _Don't Mess With the Zohan_ while ignoring copyright infringement on products imported to the U.S. from overseas which violate truly useful copyrights such as those for ICs and full product design.
To anyone who may have misunderstood my point...
Duke is fighting vigorously to protect people from charges of downloading but when the Duke Lacrosse team was falsely charged with gang rape they were completely thrown under the bus.
The more serious the accusation, the more important the presumption of innocence.