RIAA Campaign Against Students Hits Stormier Seas 296
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "It's been astutely observed that the RIAA's "ex parte" campaign against "John Doe" college students seems to have run into much stormier waters than its campaign against regular folks. Discovery motions were thrown out by the judges in cases involving the University of New Mexico and the College of William and Mary, and motions to quash have been made by students at Boston University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of South Florida. The RIAA might find it particularly troubling that the students are coming in armed with substantial expert witness declarations attacking the entire underpinning of the RIAA's case, that the students are finding each other and banding together, and that the Chairman of Boston University's Computer Science Department went to bat — as an expert witness — for the BU students."
good (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The flywheel is spinning (Score:1, Informative)
Guess University of Washington is one .. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does this have broader implications? (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely.
Suing students has never been a good idea (Score:5, Informative)
-smart. Well, there are those and those, but usually, they got more brains than your average Joe.
-political. Not as much as they used to be, and certainly not "party political" anymore, but they do have agendas they believe in.
-young and thus enthusiastic. They didn't yet grow up into "meh, what can I do?" apathetics.
-free. Yes, there IS stress towards the end of a term, but hey, it's August! Many students still enjoy holidays, and few if any have papers due soon. They got spare time on their hands.
If you look around the world, you'll notice that pretty much every revolution, from political to social, contained students as a key element. Many social revolutions of the 60s have been driven by students, in Germany, in France, in the US.
Now, you're suing smart people who believe strongly in their freedom and their rights and do care about it, with plenty of spare time to defend themselves. Could it be that this wasn't the smartest idea?
Re:Students are the biggest activist demographic (Score:2, Informative)
Oh please! We all expected big changes after getting rid of Nixon. What we got was a whole lot of nothing. Once the iPod generation gets a taste of that power, they will just become like the rest already have. What's that saying? "A republican is just a democrat with money." You believe that after 20,000 years, this is the epiphany? I don't think so.
Re:History lesson (Score:5, Informative)
RIAA's then-prez Rosen got into a Debate with The Oxford Union and she got a serious shellacking. This was 2002.
"The Oxford Union debated the proposition that "the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music" (via The Reg and NTK). Final scores: 72 ayes, 256 noes. A pretty resounding defeat. The report notes that a few of the more memorable bits of the debate include Hilary Rosen lying about copy-protected CDs in the US (or at the very least being deliberately ingenuous about it), Rosen also getting shocked at how many people said that they do buy music because of filesharing, and a few unsupported assertions about the importance of the music industry which no-one was allowed to contest. For more background on this debate, see the Campaign for Digital Rights."
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/26/2
Do ya think they learned from that?
Naw.
You could ask Google. (Score:4, Informative)
* Simply having files containing potentially unauthorized copies of music is not a violation: the entity distributing the music is responsible for any copyright violations.
* That the RIAA has not shown that the defendants were aware they they were even potentially distributing the files.
* The only distribution that the RIAA has shown to have been performed by the defendants was authorized by the RIAA and therefore wasn't a copyright violation.
This is actually pretty solid, and while of course there are several things the RIAA can do to cover these gaping holes in their approach there's not much they can do about the current case if these arguments prevail.
Re:Students are the biggest activist demographic (Score:2, Informative)
The AC above is entirely right - on an even bigger level than he indicated. The Federal Government subsidized a lot of the cost of developing the medium we call CDs (players, discs, etc) on the basis that it would make music more cheaply available to the masses.
Ironically, price have still escalated at a rate greater than that caused by inflation, considering the massive drop in costs to produce such products (players, discs, etc).
The public has a right to be upset with the current scheme of things. WE subsidized the move to CDs (through OUR tax dollars) with the promise that it would make CDs more affordable - yet the profit margin on them still increases regardless of the dribble the RIAA and its members try to spout.
Currently, at only 1000, I can be gouged 50 cents (each) for a CD - while the record companies literally pay pennies... compared to somewhere decently over the dollar mark when this whole thing started. Printing and packaging has also decreased (though by a lesser margin) over that time frame.
Re:From a link in the article... (Score:3, Informative)
However, there has been a *very* strong swing toward making cohesive albums in the past few years (to the degree that some artists are cutting songs from albums and releasing them as b-sides).
To the same effect, it's perfectly reasonable to release a 40-minute album, or even just an EP, as long as that limited selection is good. Voxtrot [wikipedia.org] comes to mind as being a current band with several fantastic EPs, and one mediocre LP.
In fact, the most successful and talented musicians are the ones who write albums that are cohesive, and more or less good the entire way through. I don't think that any serious musician wants to be a one-hit-wonder.
Would you rather be Rick Springfield or Pink Floyd?
I think we've already established that popular music isn't necessarily good music (especially for the past 5 years or so, where the industry has absolutely and completely gone to hell).
Go listen to an album by The Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, The Decemberists, Of Montreal, or any other respected independent artist, and if you enjoy it, chances are that you'll find yourself enjoying the album, instead of the songs.
I brought this up a little over a month ago [slashdot.org], and listed a few albums that have stood out to me in the past few years.
In fact, this summer alone has produced several albums that have quickly made it near the top of my list of all-time favorites.
If you listen to tracks from these albums without hearing the whole thing, you're seriously missing out. Anybody familiar with 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd should know exactly what I'm talking about.