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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."
The question is, why the hell didn't universites see the RIAA's challenges for what they were(bullshit) and begin to fight against the RIAA for their students much sooner? Last I checked, students pay the tuition, not the *AA's.
;)
Here's the top-25 universities which handed out copyright infringement notices during the 2006 - 2007 academic year.Note the geographic locations of the majority of the list.
1. Ohio University - 1,287
2. Purdue University - 1,068
3. University of Nebraska at Lincoln - 1,002
4. University of Tennessee at Knoxville - 959
5. University of South Carolina - 914
6. University of Massachusetts at Amherst - 897
7. Michigan State University - 753
8. Howard University - 572
9. North Carolina State University - 550
10. University of Wisconsin at Madison - 513
11. University of South Florida - 490
12. Syracuse University - 488
13. Northern Illinois University - 487
14. University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire - 473
15. Boston University - 470
16. Northern Michigan University - 457
17. Kent State University - 424
18. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - 400
19. University of Texas at Austin - 371
20. North Dakota State University - 360
21. Indiana University - 353
22. Western Kentucky University - 353
23. Seton Hall University - 338
24. Arizona State University - 336
25. Marshall University - 331
From the 2008 list we see that the RIAA seem to be bolder, but the trend as before remains the same, for the most part. Texas Christian university? Thou shalt not steal
For a minute there I thought this meant Duke Nukem Forever had been released, and it was about Duke fighting the RIAA in a court of law. Man, that would kick ass.
Now, if only Duke could retroactively do this. I know one of the people at Duke who got bullied into paying the RIAA money last year. Being an international student, he felt he couldn't risk having a lawsuit on his record, so he paid a few thousand dollars, stressed out about it, and I do believe his grades suffered as a result. Duke has a Law school. Why doesn't it (and other similar schools) just make defending students against the RIAA part of the law school curriculum? Sounds like great practice, and it would do some good!
I prefer disarmament.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
I would imagine they were tired of tracking down all of these students in order to forward the RIAABS. I doubt they're really thinking of the students, they're just saving themselves a little work. If the RIAA has any actual proof they'll come up with a court order, then Duke will track them down. In the end, Duke will likely have to track down fewer students that way.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...
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!
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.
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
If they're anything like my dorms, every machine has an Internet-facing IP.
They seemed a lot more decent than the people I've seen from the RIAA.
It's a low bar.
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.
I know Slashdot users tend to stay in basements, avoid sunlight, yadda yadda etc, but rugby and lacrosse are two very different things...
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."
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.