RIAA Announces New Campus Lawsuit Strategy 299
An anonymous reader writes "The RIAA is once again revising their lawsuit strategy, and will now be sending college students and others "pre-lawsuit letters." People will now be able to settle for a discount. How nice."
A Rose by Any Other Name... (Score:5, Interesting)
College student feeling the wrath (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't remember if they said what would happen if I didn't delete the file (which I did, I'm not going to stick my neck out for the principle of it) but I'm sure it would have been ugly. I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA is doing this too - intercepting communications out of your friendly campus and then telling the campus to enforce their restrictions. Way to scare your customers. How do they stay in business?
Any other people get busted/almost-busted/pseudo-busted at their university?
Re:Piracy is hurting? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sneakernets: The Original P2P System (Score:5, Interesting)
Where is the story here? (Score:2, Interesting)
So admit you are breaking the law and do it like a criminal, out of the open and looking over your shoulder. Swap with people you KNOW. If you are doing it online do it in closed groups with crypto and in cells to minimize the damage from infiltration.
With a little thought put into it there could be almost as much file sharing as now, and if the natural urge to go for a hub/spoke arrangement can be curbed there wouldn't be much that could be done to stop it.
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Interesting)
Are they still bothering to obtain evidence? (Score:4, Interesting)
Leveraging the university? (Score:3, Interesting)
From TFA, it seems to me that one of the new aspects of this strategy is: So the student gets a letter delivered through the university. It's not clear if some kind of university action is implied or explicity stated in this letter, or if the universities have agreed to cooperate with the RIAA. Either way I bet getting the university to communicate with the student is a way of providing additional leverage. Perhaps now you are not only threatened with financial damage but with your educational status being revoked?
Re:College student feeling the wrath (Score:3, Interesting)
We would track down students after receiving a complaint letter and make sure the offending material was removed from the network. We would document this process and then a clean version was returned to the complainant. Typically we also showed them how to disable sharing on whatever they were running in order to reduce the likely hood of a repeat offence. The student would also have to have a meeting with a student coordinator for their building and usually ended up making some kind of awareness project.
In the days of Napster, the university was threatened by the RIAA to release student information. Luckily (or not) we had just had an issue with an estranged parent getting information on a student and the lawyers had read up on their state privacy requirements. The university unilaterally said "No". Since the laws haven't changed, the students are still protected from lawsuits from the RIAA/MPAA/BSA using the DMCA to fish for info.
Piracy for the Poor (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:We Will Sue You (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A Rose by Any Other Name... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Except when they target students on financial aid, whose very education could be depending on the few thousands of dollars they're demanding! If anything, the RIAA is going to create a whole generation of people who could've afforded school, but thanks to those annoying bastards can't really finish their degree, are left with huge loans and don't have a degree allowing them to pay their debts. The RIAA is really pissing me off, they're not helping educate people, they're helping them drop out of school and get even further into debt!"
Personal responsibility and ownership of one's actions goes a long way here. Having that fast Internet connection sure makes it tempting to build your music library with P2P, but it's essential to understand the potential consequences and to also understand that you don't need to have that music -- and if you just can't do without music, there are plenty of free and legal sources. Trust me: I got through all seven years of college without once firing up a P2P app. Those kids could have, too.
It's like anything else: if you participate in any illegal activity, there's a chance that you will get caught. I hope that most people understand this before they get to college. In this case, if your financial situation is such that paying a ~ $3.5K settlement would force you to drop out of school, then think very, very carefully before deciding to get heavy into P2P. We can't directly control the RIAA's actions, but we sure can control our own.
Re:A Rose by Any Other Name... (Score:5, Interesting)
Missing the point about the MPAA (Score:2, Interesting)
Since all the downloading results from an inability to come to an agreement of what price people will pay to watch MPAA product, then if people can't watch MPAA product then they will watch something else.
MPAA product is in its most basic form a sequence of video images edited together in standard film 'grammar' devised over the past 100 years that tells a standardized story (one of the 100 basic plot variations that literature and drama majors study). That's it. It's what all the fight is about.
The greatest misconception of the MPAA is that they are the ONLY source of quality video entertainment available and that all people will naturally chose to 'steal' their product when given any opportunity and technical means to do so. This is actually true at the present time for most people but will, within a decade, not be true given the incredible advances in video games.
Within a decade, games will cease to be only limited first-person shooters and cartoonish extensions of ZORK-style fantasy scenerios. They will take on the characteristics of MPAA product such as photo-realism, emphatic actors and characters, complex story and plot development, and scene editing that approaches standardized film grammar. Plus they will be fully interactive and allow multiple viewers/players to develop the plot line and dialog with each other. Basically 21st-century interactive synthetic cinema (it doesn't even have a real name yet, except for term 'video games') will be to the 20-century MPAA product what movies are to photographs. A completely different dimension and experience only historically and superficially related to the previous media.
When this begins to happen then the MPAA comporations will really be up shit creek. Because they will have alienated all their potential customers and supporters back when their could-have-been customers were young as a result of their clumsy and repulsive gangster tactics that used on college students back at the beginning of the 21st century. By the time that interactive synthestic cinema begins to really take off, the MPAA will have created such a wall of hatred and repulsion between themselves and their former customer base that they will not be able to make any connection between the corporations that they represent and their former audience. They will be as obsolete as 'white-only' drinking fountains, with the same general public repulsion.
This general extortion campaign directed against college students will eventually backfire in a big way when the MPAA comes to realize that they can't get anyone (except media history majors) to download their precious product. By then it will too late for them.
Re:A Rose by Any Other Name... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:College student feeling the wrath (Score:2, Interesting)
You're not out of the woods just yet, buster.
What your campus IT dept. received was the same email/letter that any ISP receives about a DMCA infringement (do a WHOIS about any domain, and you'll find the listing for abuse, usually abuse@domain.tld, where such requests can be sent). The correspondence, from a watch dog group hired by the professional association (RIAA, MPAA, ESA, etc.), documents where and how they caught you pirating their copyrighted material (e.g. a log of you contributing to a torrent, or some files you were sharing on a DC++ server). It also serves as a cease and desist for the ISP. Your college/university may, as mine does, take it upon itself to enforce certain regulations for these offenses (e.g. my university will take disciplinary action on the second such infringement).
However, the fact that the university (or even your ISP) has taken some sort of internal action does not mean that the issue has been resolved with the professional organization. This organization can, and increasingly more often does, still subpoena the ISP for the personal information of the owner of the infringing computer/account. While you will be informed quite shortly about the DMCA abuse letter (within days), the subpoena can come much later (on the order of months).
Several years ago (about 3) I was caught for pirated material by the ESA. Luckily, they did nothing more than send the DMCA email. I've wisened up, and am much more careful about where/what I share. However, many other students have not. In the recent years over 100 students' identities have been subpoenaed, several months after receiving DMCA infringement notices about their individual abuses.
Reverse Tactics (Score:3, Interesting)
Start out with this content is copyrighted by "Your Name"
Then you can just spend some time saying la, la, la, la, la, la, la or whatever
trips your trigger. Now put it on a p2p network share folder changing the name to metallica.mp3 or whatever trips your goat. Place a sniffer on the connection, when the goons grab your file
trying to figure out if you are hosting copyrighted tunes you slap them with a big ole fat lawsuit
for copyright infringement.
Re:ReRetaliation under the wire. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A Rose by Any Other Name... (Score:3, Interesting)
Look up the term. They are demanding money "or else we will sue," without bothering to even interview the person that they BELIEVE to be the culprit. That's barratry as I understand the term.
In today's world of homes where several family members, dorm mates, roommates, cohabiting parters or whatever other domestic situation is present in a residence, happen to SHARE a computer, there is NO way for the RIAA to actually know for certain WHO is actually using a specific computer at any given moment, especially when people can have multiple user accounts under one master billing name.
And while liability may be attempted to be tied to the master account holder's name, this could prove problematic if the master account holder is a deceased GI in Iraq whose twelve year-old kid is actually using his own user account, UNDER the master account, to do the downloads!
What are they going to do? Dig up the dead GI?
From what has gone on so far, this is not all that far-fetched a scenario...
What the RIAA really is doing.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is wrong with this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Flip on your local radio station. Anything that gets played gets pre-approved by the RIAA. If you're an indie artist, you can kiss air time goodbye. You don't get any.
Most people still get exposed to new music and artists on the radio. That means you get zero publicity for your work while the lastest Brittany Spears song will be played until you're ready to gouge out your own ear drums with a cocktail fork.
Then, if by some miracle you do get signed, the record label-RIAA cartel fronts the money for the production of an album, foists off a producer on to the artist that will get the "right sound" based on what the record label executives think you & I like, and then bill the artists out the ass for "production costs" which have been know to include things like hookers for the label executives. Honestly, you'd be better off charging the production on your MasterCard since, with the fees and such the equivalent interest rate is about 41% APR, whereas your credit card has a maximum of 25% in most states. Keep in mind that it takes a minimum of 2 years to bring an album from concept to distribution. $100,000 at 41% = 141,000 (year1) 141,000 at 41% = 158,000 (year 2) 165,000 by year 3. That's just for a low budget CD. Now that money plus a bunch of fees comes out of anything that the artist might get.
Recording contracts have this clause in them called recoupment. What that means is that the artist doesn't get a dime until the record company gets all and I do mean all of it's investment back. Record contracts are usually 20-40 pages of legalese describing what the artist owes the record company and how the proceeds from any sale of anything from T-shirts to CD's are to be distributed. Typically, artists get less than $1.00 of the $16.95 you pay for a full price CD. If you buy the CD from a discount store (read Wal-Mart) or a club (e.g. BMG Music Club), it may only be a few pennies per CD.
Next, since you have an album you have to go on tour to promote it. Guess what, the label fronts the money again and takes it out of your hide later, along with interest. It works roughly the same way as your recording session. And yes, Virginia, recoupement comes into play again. If the tour doesn't make money, you don't get paid.
Now add that to the fact that they routinely cheat the artists out of the comparative pittance that they're due. Then consider that this entire industry would be completely and utterly non-existent without the artists, do you really think that they deal fairly with anyone? Sympathy for the RIAA? Hah, more like sympathy for the devil.
2 cents,
QueenB.
Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)