Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Who Has Been Sued By the RIAA?
First time accepted submitter blackfrancis75 writes "We keep hearing different figures quoting the thousands of people who've been sued by RIAA for illegally downloading online music, but I don't know anyone personally to whom it's happened. In fact it seems no-one I know knows anyone to whom it happened. Do you know anyone who was sued for 'piracy', or were you sued yourself? What was your experience?"
I've been sent 2 or 3 legal threats from copyright holders and my ISP over the years. I ignored them and nothing ever happened.
My sister was sued by the RIAA for making files available on Kazaa. She ended up settling with them.
A friend of mine has to bootleg internet access because he bootlegged everything else too much.
I think that might be more common...they get your ISP to "ban you" from their service. But, I'm sure he got legal threats. I just don't remember any specifics past that.
... all they need to do is to claim everything, including birdsongs, belongs to them
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/2141246/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-copyrighted-music
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"We keep hearing different figures quoting the thousands of people who've been sued by RIAA "
The people actually sued by the RIAA for file sharing is actually zero.
nil.
Nobody.
Because they don't own the copyrights. It's the studios that do. These studios are members of the RIAA, but in the US, at least, to have standing to sue, you must have the actual copyright yourself. The press always confuses the RIAA with the studios, because the RIAA has the loudest mouth.
We saw lack of standing with SCO. They kept insisting that they owned the copyrights to SysV, but the plain language of the APA didn't say they do, and in order for copyright to change hands (in that case from Novell to SCO) there has to be a positive statement *in writing on paper* that the copyright is transfered.
The judge in the case and Novell eventually got SCO to fuck off, but it took 7 years.
Similarly in these cases, it's not "The RIAA vs Joe Blough," it's "IRS Records vs Jane Sawless" because the RIAA does not own the copyright to "I Stabbed A Monkey" but IRS Records does.
--
BMO
I mean, other than to make a metacomment, such as this. At the time I'm posting this, the only posts that are admitting to this are AC.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because I am not allowed to talk about it as part of the settlement.
My wifi is open (but I keep my own activity logs in case the FBI does a kiddy porn raid). The RIAA sent me some nasty letters demanded money. I told them to fuck off. They filed a lawsuit. The judge wouldn't allow my evidence. Apparently, calling a judge a cocksucker is a good way to spend the weekend in jail for contempt of court. Who knew. We're still pretrial (it's dragged on for over a year and a half now).
It wouldn't surprise me if there's something akin to a non-disclosure agreement in the settlement offer, thus ensuring nobody should give specifics or post under their primary username. That's also likely the reason the submitter hasn't found much information about the experience.
At one point, I thought that the settlement that the RIAA pushed people to accept included clauses that prevented people from talking about the settlement. The RIAA, however, had no such restrictions. This way, the RIAA could say all they want about the "dirty, rotten pirate" they stopped but the sued individual couldn't provide their side. I'm not sure if this is still true, but could be part of the reason why we don't hear of many people on Slashdot who were sued.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It was during 2007 while I was just finishing up my PhD in the States. I got a court summons the same month I defended my thesis. My guess is that I got careless with my music downloads while I was getting lots of music to burn through the hours while working on my thesis. I just ignored it, defended my thesis, and went back home in Europe as I was planning to anyway. Got a few threatening letters forwarded to me for a while after... Ignored those, too, and never really heard anything else after a while.
I didn't get sued, but when I was in college I got an email from my university's IT department that if I didn't respond before 8:00 am the next day(which was about 16 hours away from when they sent the email) they would cut off my internet. Why? Because they received a letter from one of the MPAA members(I forget which one now, it's been a few years) saying that I was torrenting some random disc of a TV show off some Spanish torrent site. I basically responded to the IT department saying that I couldn't stop seeding the torrent file because I never had it in the first place and requested some more information on the actual complaint they had been sent, I'm not sure how they handled the complaint with the company but I never heard anything else after that.
That is exactly the issue. Happens all the time, especially in the medical field. You get a payout and are barred from saying anything to anyone. This leaves everyone else in the dark as to how bad things really are.
The closest I've heard of anything like this was a co-worker who received a letter from his ISP with a cease and desist. The letter listed the infringing files that he downloaded by name. It said something to the effect of "if you do this again you may be disconnected and/or sued". He still downloads things.
Yeah I don't know anyone either, probably because thousands of people sued out of over three-hundred-million U.S. citizens doesn't make for a very high probability that you will personally meet someone who has been sued. The original submitter is a joke, and should never have been approved on this site.
I know of someone who was sued by the RIAA, the fines are on the order of the following
1. pay 5k through an automated settlement system
2. try to fight, and get offered a settlement where you pay 125k (this effectively happens the moment you force one of their lawyers to be on the phone for more than 5 minutes)
3. continue to fight and see them try to charge you with the full 250k per infringement that they're allowed to hit you with.
The person I knew had a good case to fight it with, but had no conceivable way of coping with a 125k settlement. (they actually hadn't downloaded any of the songs )
Over the course of downloading several terabytes of materials in several thousand torrents, I've received 2 letters neither of which threatened legal action but were along the lines of, 'we caught you, it's illegal, stop doing it'. One was for a movie I had never downloaded, the other was for a tv series which is available freely on the Internet from their website that I had been downloading.
My response to both is the same. I've never seen the movie I was accused of torrenting and never will and I stopped watching the tv series.
I wasn't sued, but I was one of the first to receive a cease and desist letter from them back in 1998. I was a student at Indiana University and ran a server there in my dorm room which hosted one of my friend's website who had copyrighted "top 40" mp3s on it. Other than the university lightly punishing me, nothing really came of it.
I was USAF stationed in Germany. I wont lie.... I download a few things from Torrents... 99.9% of that was TV Shows since it was hard to watch 6 hours ahead (AFN is crap)... Right before i left Germany, i got a certified letter in the mail stating (in german) that i download Bens Fold Five or something. Anyone that knows me, knows i listen to metal.. and metal.. and mostly all metal... Also, they said i downloaded it around 8am on a sunday.... Again, anyone that knew me knows i dont even wake up till noon on sundays... The letter stated that i owed 6000 euro to some lawyer in Munchen. Well, since it came to me and not the base legal office, i ignored it... and left country a few months later (my tour was over)... So, i was never sued by the RIAA directly... but i was told i owed money for a song i allegedly downloaded.
Disclaimer: I am not in the AF... I do not represent the AF.... I may or may not have had a few drinks... and i "CBF"ed to capitalize my "i"s or even use correct grammar... Get over it...
You fall and receive 6334 damage.
You die.
So I used to work in the part of an ISP that dealt with the copyright complaints and law enforcement requests. The large copyright owners (like record companies) were the only ones that really sent us anything. They hired companies that represented them, collected info off of torrent clients, file sharing programs and websites and then sent complaints to us. That I know of, no request ever came for actual customer records. None... ever. While I worked there, no requests ever came, no that worked there could remember it ever happening, and I'm still friends with people that work there and they still tell me they've never had a request. We got law enforcement requests... but even those we're pretty rare. Local police don't really seem all that interested in anything more than emergency requests revolving around hostage situations (typically crazy boyfriends locked himself in girlfriends house with a gun/knife) The FBI would send requests to us, but they were often very elaborate requests having to do with con-artists or embezzlement cases where they were just looking for billing records. Wire-taps are VERY rare.
I'm not sure how many people get sued, but I serviced several million customers and none ever got anything more than a meaningless email from their ISP that likely went to a mailbox they hadn't used in years. I've believed for a while now that the lawsuits you hear about are more likely just scare tactics and there's really not that much legal action taken.
The people who live a few houses away didn't quite get sued by a recording company, but close enough I think. I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but they're friends of a friend.
They received one of the "pay us $X and we won't take you to court" letters -- apparently one of their kids had been using Limewire or the equivalent, and had the download folder set up to make files available on the network. I have a feeling this is how most of the people who received such a letter got "caught."
Last I heard, they quietly paid the extortion fee. I hope a revocation of computer privileges for the offender, or some other disciplinary action on their part, followed.
While I was living at Bruce Hall at ANU, I woke up one day to find my network connection didn't work. I phoned the campus IT support and they told me they'd disconnected my port for torrenting a crack for the Sims 2 that my partner wanted. Ironically, despite all the less-than-legit stuff I'd torrented in the past, this was for a game she legitimately owned but the CD drive in her machine was broken. Given that we were poor students and unable to afford a new one, I got her a crack for it.
I got it reconnected after I wrote them a thing saying I'd be a good boy. Only time it happened in about four years.
Posting AC to avoid raep.
I've already noticed that most replies of being caught(or allegedly so) said they were in college, and having lived in a town with two universities while frequently going to college parties, I have met people(college students) who claim to have settled out of court with a representative of the music industry. It's difficult to discern truth from fiction story time, however, college campuses would be a good place to look for people who have settled out of court in a way that would have pushed their situation from the public eye(thus keeping them from being included in any kind of statistics), because most campuses have already made deals with the RIAA which allows them to spy on the students through their WANS.
And what if you don't accept the payout?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
tl;dr. So did Ike end up getting sued by the RIAA or not?
I called the police when I was trying to download some porn and accidentally ended up with some pirated songs instead. It was Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, so they didn't punish me.
Then you spend the next decade or so wrapped up in litigation and spending thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Oh and you don't respond to this Ask Slashdot because doing so would probably get you in trouble with the judge.
(For the record, I've been threatened legal action by the RIAA once and my ISP twice. I ignored them every time and nothing ever became of it.)
But really, TPG are the only ISP I know of in Oz that send out infringement notices (purely to cover their arse).
my bosses son was sued by the riaa for downloading a bunch of mp3s. she had to foot the bill as well.
I'm a singer-songwriter, and post all of my songs on my website for free download in a variety of formats. I sometimes wonder if I'll get a take-down notice from the RIAA or some similar simply due to some undiscerning software they might run. I doubt it, but it would be interesting.
There have been a few news stories about the grandma who was sued, or the cute college coed that was sued, too. Not that I know them, but the people do exist.
Back in 99/2000, the university at the time called me in to judicial affairs because the MPAA had sent a letter or other wise contacted them about a file that was available on my "personal page" hosted at the university. Now granted I hadn't had access to the page in over two years or so at the time as I was now out of school and no longer had access. Anyhow, the file was the source for DeCSS, which the MPAA contacted the school about because its "copyright violation", which the judicial affairs lady told me the university took very seriously (but the lady didn't seem to understand I had no control over or access to the page anymore, as I was no longer a student).
I also interned under a guy who had received two notices from Comcast within a week or so of each other (which he had shown me).. his first and second strike letters for downloading TV shows and movies
It happened to The Offspring. They got in trouble for putting their music up for free.
(I still can't figure out why they chose to distribute their music in Quicktime format)
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
All the posts that I've seen from people who said that they simply ignored threats from the RIAA are stating that nothing ever came of the threats.
Are there any accounts of somebody who tried to ignore it, and found that they could not?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
My students who live on campus will receive disciplinary action for downloading music via torrent or whatever program they are using. They are required to attend a couple sessions on the illegal nature of their activities. The sessions including watching a few videos & sign some papers saying their sorry or some such nonsense. I've had 3 or 4 claim this has happened.
Kind of funny this came up, I havent been sued by the RIIA but New Sensations inc has me in their sights.
I was contacted by my ISP that a company New Sensations representing copyright holders of about 7 adult movies I had allegedly downloaded. They listed the titles downloaded and the times. They also included a link for each case for a settlement I could just pay online. The settlement offered is 200$ per title and there are 7 which comes to 1400$.
The thing is I didnt actually download any of those files the internet while being in my name is used by a friend not even in the same house.
So I am wondering how I should handle this I could ignore it, but the email has language that seems to state if I dont take the settlements by april 5th they will proceed to sue. I contacted the eff about this but they just reffered me to some lawyers I could contact
Interesting scenario. My mentor's friend was going to play a fundraiser at a bar or some other public venue. He's in a record contract and an ASCAP artist. Now this is a little different than posting your songs online for free, but he was told by ASCAP lawyers that the venue would have to pay $XXXX in order to pay for the ASCAP licensing as they would be performing ASCAP songs. Obviously they could not afford this fine, so he came up with the idea that he would only use his own original compositions. The ASCAP lawyers stated that, because he was an ASCAP artist, his songs cannot be performed either without violating their licensing agreements. I don't think he's with ASCAP anymore.
Long story short...probably. Furthermore, ASCAP can make the *AAs look good, but at least the majority of the money ends up in the hands of the artist with ASCAP (or so I've been told by many ASCAP artists).
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
You can't afford $0? $0 bankrupted you? Mod funny but informative, certainly not.
That's the actual value, in contrast to their settlement letters.
I've been wondering if they'd ever get brazen enough to send me one but then I remembered that private trackers + peerblock generally = you'll never see a letter in your lifetime.
In 2001 I was a student at Iowa State University. There were some people running a search spider on campus that would look through all open SMB shares and index them. If I would have lived on campus I'd have more immediate details about what actually happened, but I do know that they were expelled and settled out of court, I just don't have the details.
Strangetalk.net is a message board a lot of students use, but I haven't been able to find a lot of details in the archives either (admittedly, I didn't look too hard)
I changed my MAC daily with a spoofer and hung out on guest network.
That is exactly the issue. Happens all the time, especially in the medical field. You get a payout and are barred from saying anything to anyone. This leaves everyone else in the dark as to how bad things really are.
Except, the settlement in this case would be the person paying the corporation, not vice versa. Why on Earth would the corporation NOT want to make that information public? The effect of suing in the first place is to strike fear of financial ruin into the hearts of all who would share anything. There would be no gag order, and speculating anyone ducking as an AC would be most likely doing so because they are still engaged in illegal activity, as far as the members of the RIAA are concerned, and don't want to get caught again. Maybe? I have not personally been "served" with any nasty-grams, but worked for many years in IT at a university where cease and desist letters were almost a daily occurrence for a while. Have never known anyone personally to have been served or sued.
my question is... where do you find/get access to these trackers? :/
Why would one spend thousands in legal fees? I mean, if somebody is willing to pay somebody to keep their mouth shut about something, then they are already clearly at a disadvantaged point anyways. I mean, if you don't have any proof of what you're supposed to keep quite about, then there's not any sense in them offering you a payout anyways, since it would be your word against theirs. And as long as you had such proof, you could trivially present it in court yourself... no legal fees involved whatsoever.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
After he died. It actually made Slashdot.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Then their member corps sued us. Money is only part of it. It's more about ego and control.
From my ISP on behalf of Starz, for downloading Torchwood - Miracle day. Apart from a 'we are watching you closely now' warning, that was the end of it.
I had a friend whom RIAA fucked with. All I have to say is that his experience makes me want to (turn a blind eye to those who) fuck with RIAA.
My roommate downloaded a lot of movies on Bittorrent. I told him to cut that shit out and use usenet or rapidshare/megadownload/et al, though mostly because his upstream was sapping our limited bandwidth. We go a C&D after a few months, it scared the hell out of him, which was pretty fun. I'm in Canada though, as far as I know actual lawsuits over this stuff are exceedingly rare here.
This was a few years ago, but Shawn Hogan was sued by the MPAA for downloading "Meet the Fockers". He was prepared to fight it in court, but the MPAA settled with him eventually.
Dag nabbit
Every private site/tracker I've ever gone to the trouble of getting access to has so little content as to be pointless. They've got a few hundred torrents listed and they're all crap. every last one one of em. even if one of them were good, you've got like 5 people seeding anything. if you're lucky.
Perhaps I'm just not leet enough to get access to the super secret mega underground pirate bay equivalent.
I was under the impression that copyright covered the distribution of a property, not where you get it from. A holder can decide who gets to distribute the product, but they have no real say in how I get it right? Outside of something like buying actual physical stolen CDs which is already covered by existing stolen property laws.
I always figured the worst they could do was pull strings with the ISPs to get someone's service shut off. The only stories I remember reading about were against filesharers who actually distributed (parts of) songs. I think if they had a legal path to sue the so-called pirates that download music it would be a bigger deal than it is.
Digital law in America is stupid.
I have a friend who received a letter from lawyers claiming to represent the german copyright agency. He settled for over a thousand euros. It may have been one of those scam groups that just hope you don't challenge them. No way to tell now.
Where are the people posting, "No, I haven't been sued, but my neighbor who runs an open AP has, muahaha!"?
Why would one spend thousands in legal fees? I mean, if somebody is willing to pay somebody to keep their mouth shut about something, then they are already clearly at a disadvantaged point anyways. I mean, if you don't have any proof of what you're supposed to keep quite about, then there's not any sense in them offering you a payout anyways, since it would be your word against theirs. And as long as you had such proof, you could trivially present it in court yourself... no legal fees involved whatsoever.
If you think American courtrooms are a place where everyone is truly equal in the eyes of impartial law, honest guys always win, where you have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong, and having the facts on your side means you will certainly prevail without tremendous cost and heartache to yourself ... well ... perhaps one day in a more enlightened future we'll have something like that, but we definitely don't have it now.
And the thing about having someone at a disadvantage is to understand it is rarely absolute. Sun Tzu talks about never allowing your forces to completely surround a disadvantaged enemy and cut off all possible avenues of escape because desperate men will fight very hard, causing you grave losses (and making them that desperate is not something you need to do to have victory, just something you might do for your own short-sighted gratification). It's just a metaphor for the value of wisely used restraint.
You may have the advantage over a company of an embarassing incident that would make them look bad for about a week or two until the next scandal at the next company. They may pay you to go away and keep it to yourself because the bad PR and expense of playing hardball isn't worth their while. But if you want to press the matter, you'll find yourself against an immortal nonhuman organization with very deep pockets that can tie up years of your life and many thousands of your dollars. Oh, and you still might lose.
The settlement system works because most people are simply not that dedicated and rarely feel like they have a good reason to be. It's quite enticing to them when they receive an offer to take a decent sum of money they can have right now.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
nonsense
the cases are almost always a range of greys. even if you are asleep and a car breaks through your bedroom wall and injures you the courts can have a field day with you. Did you light your yard well enough? did you have substandard walls. can I collect a jury that does not like your kind of people (whatever kind you might happen to be). Was the car defective... even open and shut cases if they know they are going after a non lawyer they will likely try to shaft you in ways you do not expect.
Also the judge is not likely to be impartial when he finds out that you were offered a settement and refused it and refused to pay a member of his former profession that will require more work from him.
I ran a TOR exit node on my laptop at work (at a university laboratory). After only about two weeks, the IT guy came downstairs with an official looking letter saying that my IP address had been named in a slander lawsuit. Apparently some business guy was trying to tarnish the name of some other business guy, and he was using TOR to do it. He had written a bunch of nasty stuff to blogs and send some angry emails or something. Anyway, the letter insisted that I appear in court in Los Angeles (I lived in Boston), but we sorted it out by explaining how TOR works--lucky for me, too, because there allegations of CP in the lawsuit.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
I worked with a band here in the UK a few years ago who shared a name with the biggest album from a group who were big in the 80's (thats not where they got the name from, it was just a massive coincidence.) They were making next to nothing, but trying to raise their profile, and the cheapest way of doing this was by distributing music over t'interwebnets - and as hosting on this side of the pond was expensive, they took the cheapest route and went for an American host. Can anyone see where this is leading? Suffice to say, they bit the bullet, canned their American host, and got one here in the UK.
As an ISP (bigwig.net) I had a letter informing me that a user was hosting infringing links and asking me to remove all infringing links.
As well as pointing out that I wasn't hosting any copyright files, I pointed out they were in a better position than I was to know which links were infringing and which were not, as I had no way to know whether or not anyone had received permission from the copyright holder. I asked them to identify all of the infringing links.
I never heard back.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I had a friend who was sued while we were both freshman at the University of Pittsburgh in 2004. I forget how many thousands of dollars she had to pay. I only found out about it several years later, but I'm pretty sure she was one of the people sued when the RIAA got on i2hub (internet2 only DC++ server)
I'm in the middle of a lawsuit now.
I received a letter from a scummy law firm in another city. They blitzed the city I live in... more than 10,000 letter sent out apparently. They had "proof" in the form of an IP address that was apparently assigned to my account at my ISP and a P2P log showing that someone at that IP apparently downloaded a movie made by the production company they were representing. I've never heard of the movie. I go look it up on IMDB... it appears to be some terrible low quality, low budget SciFi that no one watched... ever. I certainly had never heard of it, and I never downloaded it.
The law firm was demanding money. If I didn't pay up the "I'm guilty" fee, then they said I'd be taken to court and sued for 10's of thousands. I called a lawyer who is well known for defending this sort of crap. He looked at the letter I received, immediately recognized it, and said.. IU know these guys, let me add you to the big pile of people I'm representing on this same threat and I'll make it go away. That was over 2 years ago...
I have had two letters from him informing me what's going on. Basically he said that this rogue law firm was full of crap, that there was now a Class Action suit open against them and they had a fixed period to reply... the law firm never said a word, so now the second letter said that it's going to court with more than 1000 people being represented... but it could take years for it to reach an end. Basically he said.. don't worry about it, it'll be tied up in the courts for years and it's not cost me a cent.
and received cease and desist orders for downloading them, where you downloading recordings, like from a dvr or rips from dvd's?
I ask because I've always wondered if the MPAA really went after people downloading tv shows considering you can legally make recordings of them and watch them for free.
My local public library has CDs, DVDs, audio books, ebooks and of course dead tree books and magazines all available to borrow for free.
I often borrow books and read them for free, borrow DVDs and watch them for free.
Libraries have always been pirate havens.
He got one of those pop-up lawyers that have now been hounded. He paid up £600 (if memory serves), he has a house though and was worried about losing thousands. I have nothing so it would have been interesting for them to try to sue me - although I have a wife so hmmm :)
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
I do have a plan if I ever do. Step one is to request a letter stating which movies/music/games I have been accused of downloading. Then I will go out and purchase those titles. This might be expensive, but will certainly be cheaper than paying a settlement. When I am asked why I would download the file of the internet if I own it I will site fair use and state that I was aquiring digital backups of my media.
I haven't tried this of course, but as I understand it fair use is an untested defense and may be a viable means of preventing a huge lawsuit. Even if it wouldn't hold water in court it may be solid enough to have a RIAA/MPAA lawyer looking for a softer target.
I took offense at the fact that it was modded to +5 Informative,
Please get a life
None of this involves directly RIAA and majority does not involve court proceedings.
I can assure you that one does exist, at least, as I'm on it... but it's one of those 'first rule of fight club' things, and even if I told you registration has been closed for a long time now.
I received two cease and desist letters for two different movies I allegedly obtained via peer to peer networks. Downloading is frowned upon; uploading is how they get you.
In Germany one exaggerates their problems by ignoring legal notices. The courts often rule against the defendant for their lack of due diligence. The process looked like the following for me.
1. Legal firm sends a cease and desist letter with affidavit they represent appropriate rights holder. The letter lists IP address, file downloaded with hash. It demands you to sign a statement that admits guilt and circa 1000 Euros in damages. The deadline is absurd, usually a week, then damages increase.
2. I send my lawyer the original paperwork via courier plus a signed power of attorney form.
3. My lawyer revises the original statement so no guilt is admitted but I have taken proper steps to secure my network connection.
4. I pay my 300 Euro bill lawyer fee.
5. Two weeks later my lawyer gets a letter stating that I still owe damages. My lawyer writes me to ignore this as there is no legal justification for said damage amount. The courts ruled that 100 Euros is the cap on first time infringement, but that does not stop people demanding more.
6. I have not heard anything from either case since, but I’m out 600 Euros.
Multiple articles like the following have been published highlighting the racketeering going on in these cases but the courts do little to change things. http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Schwierige-Gegenwehr-1069835.html
There is little legal defense for such infringements in Germany, at least not for the general public. Evidence may be destroyed due to data retention policies. For example, my second letter arrived eight months after the supposed infringement; my ISP deleted those logs long ago so data verification is not plausible. This continues even though officials recognize that the error rate in matched IP address is high.
There is no open Wifi defense or even a community household defense. Courts will adjust damages if your child uploaded something against your wishes, but that’s about all. There was once a case where the family proved they were out of the country at the time, had no Wifi, and won.
In short, there is little recourse for someone in Germany if they get sued. Both sides can negotiate the damages and culpability but good luck getting a court to throw out the case or side with the defendant.
Private trackers sometimes have files for special tastes; they seem to keep rare, cult-followed material longer than the more popular ones do. It's hard to find great movies like El Topo or music by, say, Ellen McIlwain or Jackie and Roy anymore with bandwidth and storage going to 15000 seeders for the latest screamer instead.
show me a non-iPod media player that plays Quicktime??
Epic fail.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Liars then, the majority of money ends up in ASCAP management and lawyers. Being a member of ASCAP is not only stupid as it is counter-productive.
They mean money not morals...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
When no one wants to sue you for the stuff you share online! If it wasn't done in the past year or two, the RIAA/MPAA/etc don't seem to care about it.
Years ago, the technical contact for the company that hosted my personal website received a letter by the IFPI (international analog of the RIAA) where they informed him that *I* was in breach of the law, since I had an MP3 that belonged to them (a whole copy of George Harrison's song Beware of Darkness, if you must know) and that steps had to be taken to remedy the situation.
I immediately removed the file (I *was* in breach, there really isn't any question about that) and the tech contact wrote them back telling the situation had been corrected and the user (me) apologized for the inconvenience. We never heard back, so it's safe to assume that the IFPI felt satisfied with this.
(posting as anonymous coward for obvious reasons)
Several years ago when my Tivo fried, I downloaded the TV shows that were on it that I lost. One day I got a letter from my ISP saying that my IP address had been monitored while downloading "24 s02e05 xvid axxo.avi" or something like that. The letter said it was illegal to do so, and that I should delete the offending file immediately. There was no threat of what would happen if I did not do so, nor what would happen to me if I did so again. Ironically, I had been downloading nearly that entire season of 24 at the time, and that was the only episode that I was flagged for.
I work for one of the smaller ISPs in the UK serving mainly business customers. From time to time we've had emails from various sources purporting to represent the rights of copyright holders. These have all appeared to originate in the US and quote US legislation, an allegedly offending IP and the time at which they state the incident occurred. A few of the IP addresses have even fallen within our address ranges. Where this is the case I've always replied back asking for more information and pointing out that the legislation they are quoting is not relevant to UK law and asking for the UK equivalent under which they propose to press their claims. I've never heard back from any of them.
I hope to get a nasty little threat from the RIAA or MPAA or the like. I am so looking forward to a nice 20 year long battle where I in turn go after THEIR assets, THEIR senior partners, THEIR personal properties.
I will keep them in a courtroom just out of spite, and frankly, I don't care if the final results are legal or not.
My neighbor, whose wireless I steal (TimeWarner Cable) had all his HTTP requests redirected to a copyright notice one day... or something like that. He had to click a checkbox that said, "I am aware of the copyright infringement."
The page he was directed to said,
1. Please see the following list of infringing material.
2. For any questions, call this number and reference the following reference number.
However, there was no list of infringing material, and there was no reference number.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Perhaps you misunderstand...
I was suggesting that one *NOT* take the payout.... and if they felt it was a worthy enough cause, to simply disclose the knowledge that they have.
I'm pretty sure that in American court systems, you cannot actually win a case against somebody who has simply embarrassed you by telling the truth without divulging any information they already received payment to not disclose (confidential information or stuff under NDA, for example), no matter how good your lawyers are. If you know of a specific precedent that indicates otherwise, share it.
Again, however... If they felt they had a case to sue you in the event that you disclosed it (after not accepting the payout), then why would they offer you a payout at all?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
he shouldn't have settled. his son would've been liable only for shown damages(extremely hard to show).
When giving legal advice that is utterly, 100% incorrect and potentially harmful to the recipient, it's usually a good idea to include a disclaimer about how one is not a lawyer.
Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. This is not legal advice, but is for [my own] amusement only.
I know of someone who was sued by the RIAA, the fines are on the order of the following
1. pay 5k through an automated settlement system 2. try to fight, and get offered a settlement where you pay 125k (this effectively happens the moment you force one of their lawyers to be on the phone for more than 5 minutes) 3. continue to fight and see them try to charge you with the full 250k per infringement that they're allowed to hit you with.
The person I knew had a good case to fight it with, but had no conceivable way of coping with a 125k settlement. (they actually hadn't downloaded any of the songs )
Statutory damages are "up to $150,000 per work infringed" (17 USC 503(c)), not $250k.
I work somewhere alot of record people come to eat.
So.... it all works out in the end.
Yep, there is better. But it's invitation only, and you are responsible for the behavior of those you invite.
Send your buddy one, and your buddy breaks the rules? You're both banned.
I've sucked a (fairly obscure) 25gb torrent down in about 1.5 hours.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I've been sent two scare letters due to file sharing, one legit (Monty Python) one not (Drive?!). I've received plenty of other legal threats over my websites, and my response is either to ignore them or to publicly mock the threatener.
My brother in-law was sued as a college student. Settled out of court for mid five figures. He still 'pirates' music and other media.
My ISP (Suddenlink) turned off my internet because I downloaded a movie. I had to call them up, check off on some papers (online) and promise I would never do it again. The guy I talked to asked me if I had wireless, I do, and told me to re-check the security settings. He said it was'nt a big deal. It was sorta a pain in the ass because I had to issue new certificates for my servers (they rebooted my cable modem with a new IP address). Yeah, I know, boohoo...
I have been wondering the same thing about my own music, a lot of which is freely available on my (admittedly horribly designed) website. So far no false accusations of 'making available' other people's music. But I half expect to hear something, some time.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Just a guess, but maybe the person they had handling the file compression was a pre-OS X sound guy who was stuck in his ways and just compressed the files the way he always did. Were they .aif? Maybe the band just didn't know any better, or perhaps were not directly involved in the process.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Come on, what was the name of the band?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
They will take your wife and sell her into slavery. But you knew that, right?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
you do know it's basically an IQ test, i'm sorry but if i got threatened and my option was 5k, 125K,250K and i hadn't downloaded the file, i'd tell them to piss off, and you know what would happen nothing, these guys are not that smart. There is not much difference between this and Nigerian Royal family email's.
I worked for a ISP for six months and about a week before they fired me they had me try and figure out what IP's were associated with which accounts when the automated tool they used failed to produce results. This was with zero training on how to do this. It was for a law enforcement request.
To me it demonstrates that they don't know 100% of the time who has what IP. They probably have a good idea most of the time, but it's not 100% unless you have a static IP.
Further, in the instance, they knew the didn't really know, gave the job to someone who they knew wouldn't find the answer and got rid of me to help cover it up.
An IP address is just one piece of evidence but it does not 100% correlate to an individual account holder but the courts don't seem to quite get this yet. It's not like a phone number which has to be correlated to the subscriber for you to get incoming calls.
Why would the judge be less likely to be impartial to me if I had refused to accept money to keep my mouth shut?
Bearing in mind that we're not really talking about being sued by the RIAA here anymore. An above poster brought up being offered a payoff in certain fields to keep quiet about some stuff.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They were pissed about the downloading, but all they could make stick legally was the uploading (you do not have the right to make copies if you were not granted that right).
I used to have a reference to a decision which explicitly said downloading is illegal, but I can't find it now to see if it has been overturned or the law updated to say that explicitly. A lot of people think only the uploading is illegal, but that is no longer the case (take with a grain of salt as I lost my citation). As Skarecrow77 said, uploading is far easier to prosecute so they will go that route if possible.
The "making available" theory is nuanced. You can leave files open on an FTP server, and no crime has been committed. If your stash is discovered and a transfer takes place (usually to someone like MediaSentry which validates the content and records the IP address), you have uploaded a copy without authorization. "Making available" has generally been tossed out, but you can bet that if it is discovered by someone who does not want you to make it available, they will initiate a transfer and you're hosed. In legal theory, you're safe. In reality, assume you are not. Advertising it makes no difference, just makes it easier to find.
And as for your CDs, you have a license to listen to the physical copy. When someone takes them from you, even if you left them on the street corner, you lose both the license and the physical item. You are not making a copy, and you are not making an unauthorized distribution. Unauthorized by you, but the copyright holder does not care so no violation. Please do not confuse digital goods with tangible objects, there is very little overlap legally between them. The legal system is still arguing about whether digital goods can actually be stolen. Occasionally, a story like that pops up, but it is usually settled on a case by case basis, I'm not aware of any solid decision or law about virtual goods.
That is why we have the "copyright violation isn't stealing" argument pop up. While you are taking something without paying for it, the entire collection of IP laws were specifically set aside for instances where copying is involved. If copyright were the same as stealing, you could be accused of both at the same time. A very simple argument made by the simplest of lawyers would get one or the other charge thrown out, because they are mutually exclusive. There is no correlation between physical objects and copyright. (Unless you want to be pedantic and say that you are giving away or selling physical books or discs that you copied from an original, which is very clearly not stealing except in the moral sense, and very clearly copyright infringement).
They will take your wife and sell her into slavery. But you knew that, right?
I sold her already. You do know we are in a recession.
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
Back in the day (was this around 2001, maybe?) I received a threatening letter about DeCSS. It's been a while, so I can't remember all of the details. If I recall correctly, I'm not even sure if was even hosting it -- I think maybe I was just hosting a set of links, as this was when someone was trying to make the case that merely linking to certain material was illegal.
The letter was sent from the MPAA to my ISP, and they just forwarded it on to me, without any particular comments or threats. Keep in mind that this was back when there were plenty of small, independent ISPs to choose from, and they generally weren't asshats and had some modicum of respect for your privacy and wouldn't just bend over to idle threats from corporations.
I responded with a somewhat strongly and carefully worded, yet polite, letter; informing them that I was not breaking any law, that I was not going to comply with their threats/demands whatsoever, and if they wanted any action on my part that they should obtain a court order.
I never heard anything more about this.
Back when Napster was big, around the year 2000, I ran a fairly large public server on the OpenNap network from my college dorm room. It was accessible from anywhere on the internet, not just the university. I had permission to run the server from my school's IT department (thinking back on it, who would give such permission now?) The school received many cease and desist notices and forwarded them to me, but never asked me to take the server down, and I never did until the end of my freshman year. I just ignored the notices and nothing ever became of it. I went home for the summer, and took the server down as I didn't have any bandwidth at home to host it on. The following year, I didn't bring the server back up, as things with Napster were falling apart at that time. I know that millions and millions of songs were transferred through the server, which only acted as a "tracker" -- no song data was actually transferred through it.
Bravo sir! A sensible recourse in these straitened times.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I saw thousands of takedown notices issued to users of an vpn network I supported at a previous job. I'm not aware of a single case with movie/music downloads where legal authorities got involved involved or any money changed hands. We simply forwarded the complaints to the end users.
They opened it a few times, although I wish I had been in it beforehand because of how great aforementioned $secretsite is.
Also, the ratios of people that use said site (whose name has not been mentioned, hahaha) are quite impressive. I'm at around 3.0 and plenty of people are in the 20.0 and above (and we're talking PB's of data as opposed to my TB's). They definitely don't carry everything, though.
A friend I know got sent a notice for downloading apple osx. I believe he used demonoid. I have seen the mpaa send notices out when kazaa was popular. They would upload movies that belong to warner brothers and wait for people to use aol to download them. At that time aol was owned by warner.
Yeah, I never thought I'd max my downstream until I found that stuff. At that point with those speeds, I have no incentive to try to act like I should somehow accept DRM for just about any product.
Movies to pay for? Only independant documentaries.
Games to pay for? Only if it's a subscription that's worth it.
Music to pay for? Isn't it funny how techno artists are one of the few types who are smart enough to give their music away for free and thus it's worth it to support them/buy the albums.
Ebooks? hahaha.
Man I can't wait until "content owners" (as they are content shares) wake up to all this.
Asking people if they have done x or y or z on an public internet forum, especially one that allows one to post as "anonymous coward" is simply absurd. It's no more than an unverifiable pissing contest. What's next on slashdot, a thread titled "Have you ever browsed for free porn?" Come on!
The site I'm not naming is a tracker, so you can't browse others - it sounds like you are discussing something like a secret dc++ hub. There must be a great many secret services like that.
A friend of mine got a nasty letter about a pr0n movie. After that I started using Peerblock to protect myself. http://www.peerblock.com/
This guy on o k c u p i d says he was sued
h a d a 6 0 3
Spaces for privacy.
You seem to have lost part of the causal chain. I see what you're saying but you've missed a piece somewhere.
In the point that was brought up, the RIAA was suing someone...the NDA was part of a settlement offer...sure you can *not* take the offer, but then you're still stuck with them suing you...extensive legal fees, yadda, yadda.
They also can try to insist on an NDA being part of what they win if they win the lawsuit.
It is such an issue that I was addressing... *THEY* are offering to pay *YOU* to keep quiet... I had confronted that post with the notion of just not accepting the payout, wondering what they would do... which, in turn, spawned this subthread.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I sent email to the web developer and never got a reply. My guess is that's who was responsible.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
you're part right - it's not about being "leet" but there's 2 trackers for music that I'm a "member" of that have pretty much everything you could ever ask for.
Checking the stats on the front page just now, the better of the two has 1.3 million torrents on it - 611K unique releases. The numbers are different because many releases are available in multiple formats (FLAC, 320k mp3, 256k mp3, etc)
You do need an invite, and that can be problematic if you don't know anyone personally that is already a member. But like Trent Reznor once said about the precursor to these sites that was rudely taken down by the UK (USA?) gov't, "I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made **** a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If **** cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. "
So it's well worth it to put in a little effort to find an invite. if you're into that kind of thing, and worried about getting a nasty RIAA letter.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Years ago I use to take over for our local abuse coordinator at Time Warner when he was out of town. On average I'd say we'd see a couple subpoenas for customer information a week. I can't say that these all lead to lawsuits but some of them did. Normally to get to this point, customers would have been warned a couple times about file sharing and continued to do so. Generally the RIAA, MPAA, or other copyright holder would send a complain to the cable company who would then contact the customer associated with the IP address letting them know that they were caught downloading copyrighted content and to please stop doing so immediately. They generally would get a couple of these notices before you'd see further action where they copyright holder would get a court order to acquire the customer information and doing with it whatever they would (be it filing a lawsuit or otherwise). At that point it was really out of our hands as we couldn't refuse to turn over the customer info when it was court ordered for us to do so. Either way, they had multiple chances and were obviously being stupid by continuing to use public torrents. These companies go after the low hanging fruit and torrent users are ripe for the picking. Never saw a single complaint where someone was using usenet, IRC, etc. It was always torrents.
nothing to see here - keep moving.
I don't know anyone who has been sued either. Even people with kids - not even a warning letter.
I knew one of the maintainers of Phynd when I was at RPI. It was a simple indexing program that would crawl the public shares on the campus network and create a searchable dB with a simple web interface. Worked quite nicely, all thing considered, but since it also picked up any illegally shared items it was hit by RIAA during the initial anti-share crackdown. They were probably legally ok (index service, not a repository), but the suit was settled since that was the easier (and likely less expensive, given lawyer costs) option.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
I'm talking about torrents/magnets as well. I don't trust DC++ hubs - not for reasons of legal concerns but more because it's a bit harder to get feedback on if a file is legitimate and that actually the speeds are lower than what you can achieve with private trackers.
My parents got a nastygram from Telus a few years back. Nothing official ever came out of it.
Unofficially, from the movie title they found out that their boarder was using the 'Net to torrent All The Movies (as in, his hard drive was full of stuff he never watched and never intended to watch), and was sucking up all the bandwidth to do it. Said boarder was told to knock it off, and everyone's life improved.
I live in Canada. My ISP passed a message on to me from someone claiming that I was sharing their movie online. The ISP did not disclose my info to the company complaining and just asked me to "stop it". I wasnt sharing the movie they claimed, but I was sharing my internet connection with some friends and neighbours to use. So I switched the password to be safe. I then went out and rented the movie they claimed I was sharing. It was a piece with Nicole Kidman. And I tell u it was the biggest piece of crap I ever watched. What a boring and stupid movie.... I would never share that to anyone except maybe as a joke to waste their time. Anyhow, Im glad I live in Canada where the ISP is not required to disclose my personal contact information to those who claim I am doing them harm. To be honest sharing this movie to the public is probably the only way to get them to watch it. Complete Junk... good thing I didnt get sued over that sh@t.
I dont watch movies from hollywood anymore and I dont buy music from big distributors. I only listen to radio and watch free TV for that and record from there legally. I use the airwaves and dont pay for a cable line. The good stuff comes over the air and if it doesnt, it should be available free online if it expects to survive. The movies from 3 years ago available free on TV has the same small percentage of good to bad movies. I download all my music from http://jamendo.com where the music is free and legal to take and share. I wish more people would just give up on trying to steal stuff from an industry that spends so much money trying to make you want this crap in the first place. If you think about it... most of what you get from them is complete garabage anyways.
I was sued by the MPAA for running a tracker that someone happened to upload a couple of movies onto.
By that point, I wasn't even really involved in the tracker anymore, though it bore my name. I fought, said I didn't pirate their stuff and I didn't monitor what users uploaded, that I didn't keep any IP logs. They won, I paid them a few thousand dollars.
(Internet rumor has it that I fled to Mexico because of this, but truth was I had real life bullshit going on at the time that caused me to move; The MPAA thing was done before I moved.)
Posting AC, because of the settlement. I was sued in the very first round of 'John Doe' lawsuits brought in MN by the MPAA. This was in the early days of torrents, when everyone was more innocent and didn't know about PeerBlock/PeerGuardian. Ended up settling for $3500.
Honestly, the biggest impact? I don't download movies much at all. Out of the last couple terabytes of stuff I've grabbed through bittorrent, I've gotten maybe 4 movies. I was "scared straight". Netflix helps out a lot with this too. If I'm gonna sit down and watch a movie, I'll just find something streaming. /Mostly gets games and TV shows
The story of a guy who got tracked down for uploading an unreleased kaiser chiefs album was all over the news here, pretty and very real ... sued by the local version of the mafiaa and some publishing houses. The cops, who dont have time to solve all cases, did have a lot of time to shift throught ip-lists to track this guy down. Result : the judge (who i suppose thought as well this was a total over-reaction) fined the man 500 euros, but the damages went up to 65k, something the average joe here makes in about four years. So if he doesnt eat or pay other bills that cd will be paid back four years from now. The guy is ruined for life. Very real indeed, totally out of balance compared to what you get for other 'offenses', its better to be caught dealing heroin or kicking someone into the hospital than it is to upload a cd, that's the only message i could make from it (apart from the fact that copyright organizations are nothing but extortionists hiding behind laws)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?