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Univ. Help Desk Staffer Extorts Over Copyright Violations
McGruber writes "The Atlanta fishwrap is reporting that an University of Georgia 'IT security support' employee was accusing students of copyright violations, then demanding money to clear their names. Sounds like he's been caught stealing the RIAA business model."
Doesn't seem like that was actually a part of his job, he was just blackmailing them with information he misappropriated from work.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Mods on crack as usual. GP (modded "Troll") is correct (according to the article, anyway) and parent (modded "Informative") is wrong.
It's called a "Protection Racket", and it's not a 'scam' as much as 'extortion'. 'Scam' would imply more fraud than demanding something under threat.
Article in the Athens (home of UGa) paper -- http://onlineathens.com/stories/020310/uga_558085836.shtml.
Here is *a* useful article:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/540/01/
This is why we need business method patents!
The Mafia would have prior art claims over the RIAA and MPAA.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
How can someone possibly "hold copyright on the media"? I believe you mean "hold copyright on a creative work".
Umm, no. While the RIAA is despicable, they have actual legal standing to claim damages (as much as I may disagree). They can go to a court and use the legal process (i.e. laws on the books) to exact money out of file sharers. The IT guy is not using the legal system (he has no standing to do so) and is in fact committing actual crimes.
Police set up a sting operation and had a plain clothes officer meet the employee who demanded the money.
I work at UGA. While I didn't know this guy, I do know he did a lot of work in campus-wide anti-virus. So his job was a lot more than just e-mailing students who sparked a DMCA letter.
Well, he did have another job function that I know of, but they didn't mention it in the article.
Always fun when you see your place of employment in a newspaper article.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
I work on a campus as well, and we do pretty much the same thing. It's not our job to police the students systems, if they want to steal crap virus infected music that's okay with me. But when they do it over our network there's hell to pay. We currently use a 3 strikes policy, we look for specific protocols, not data itself, and if we detect torrent or generic p2p traffic we disable their internet access. Once that happens they need to go to the student IT office to have their systems checked out and any offending apps removed. We always give them the choice not to remove the apps, but we wont allow them on our network until removal is verified. On the 3rd offense they need to set up a meeting with the dean of students to have their access restored. Very rarely does it get this far. On another front, if we detect that type of activity on a staff system they're reprimanded and educated about the risks associated, then fired on the spot if it happens again. We don't do this because of any extortion attempts by the RIAA, for us its purely a security and bandwidth based decision.
But.. P2P protocols have significant non-infringing uses. The IP protocol itself is P2P. Filtering on protocol is stupid IMO. Do you block gopher, FTP and Usenet as well?
It is an odd balance because people on a university network are far less likely to get sued but at the same time far more likely to receive some sort of punishment for their infringement (and its still only uploading that you get busted for). It is much easier for the RIAA to pick up a university IP and send a letter but the punishment is far less severe than a lawsuit.
Bottles.
If you know somebody who has Lexis-Nexis access, the article written by the Syracuse Post-Standard is there and that article went national via the AP. Slashdot picked up that story, but trying to find something from 2002 is nearly impossible these days.