But losing small court battles for six-figure judgments is really nothing for these guys. What they got in exchange was thousands of newspaper articles and blogs talking about people being sued for file sharing. The FUD Factory worked! You can't buy that kind of press. Anything under a million is a bargain.
That's a fact. While we don't have any good idea about exactly how many people the **AA have gone after, best estimates put it at 20,000 to 30,000 people. We have no idea how many of those cases have been settled, but it's safe to say "the vast majority". 20,000 * $3000 per case = 60 million dollars.
$60,000,000 extorted from their customers.
Now, does somebody want to estimate their legal fees?
I'm part of a similar student-technology group in the US (http://www.yale.edu/its/stc), and our focus is very much on tech support. Our situation is different; we have a hundred members, and we focus on fixing people's software and hardware problems and providing direct education through a combination of helpdesk and house calls, all free of charge. But that's one possibility; you could morph your organization into a free tech support group, either for general computer issues or for specialized tasks like web development.
And far and beyond the thing to do with your hardware is convert it to number-crunching. Either run the machines for other people, and let them submit jobs to you, or just donate the machines to your favorite science department. My college's chemistry department is perpetually hurting for processing power; they don't own any department-wide machines, so if a lab has detailed calculations to perform, it has to buy its own hardware or rent time from a lab that already owns some. Donating all your hardware to a computation-heavy department could be a huge favor.
Ah, but they're hiring people who are eager to learn, unlike crotchety old been-around-the-block sysadmins who, when they hear about problems with their systems, just shoot the messenger and have done with it. I'd trust supaneko ten times more than one of those; he'll just be making mistakes, while they're busy making bad decisions.
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+1, Actually makes me optimistic about the future of humanity
OK, Hooray for the small guy!
But losing small court battles for six-figure judgments is really nothing for these guys. What they got in exchange was thousands of newspaper articles and blogs talking about people being sued for file sharing. The FUD Factory worked! You can't buy that kind of press. Anything under a million is a bargain.
That's a fact. While we don't have any good idea about exactly how many people the **AA have gone after, best estimates put it at 20,000 to 30,000 people. We have no idea how many of those cases have been settled, but it's safe to say "the vast majority". 20,000 * $3000 per case = 60 million dollars.
$60,000,000 extorted from their customers.
Now, does somebody want to estimate their legal fees?
I'm part of a similar student-technology group in the US (http://www.yale.edu/its/stc), and our focus is very much on tech support. Our situation is different; we have a hundred members, and we focus on fixing people's software and hardware problems and providing direct education through a combination of helpdesk and house calls, all free of charge. But that's one possibility; you could morph your organization into a free tech support group, either for general computer issues or for specialized tasks like web development.
And far and beyond the thing to do with your hardware is convert it to number-crunching. Either run the machines for other people, and let them submit jobs to you, or just donate the machines to your favorite science department. My college's chemistry department is perpetually hurting for processing power; they don't own any department-wide machines, so if a lab has detailed calculations to perform, it has to buy its own hardware or rent time from a lab that already owns some. Donating all your hardware to a computation-heavy department could be a huge favor.
Ah, but they're hiring people who are eager to learn, unlike crotchety old been-around-the-block sysadmins who, when they hear about problems with their systems, just shoot the messenger and have done with it. I'd trust supaneko ten times more than one of those; he'll just be making mistakes, while they're busy making bad decisions.
Just wipe out my Windows partition! Like I'm going to put up with this crap.