New RIAA File-swapping Suits Target Students 287
Fletcher writes "The Recording Industry Association of America filed another round of lawsuits against alleged file-swappers, including students on 13 university campuses.
The 750 suits come just a few days after Internet researchers released a study that found peer-to-peer traffic had remained constant or risen up to the early days of 2004, despite the pressure of recording industry lawsuits."
Not news any more. (Score:4, Insightful)
99% of the whole point of these lawsuits is to get filesharing fearmongering into the news where it can "deter" and influence politicians.
Personally, I don't feel like it's newsworthy any more, and I don't see any reason to actively help RIAA in their fear-spreading mission.
Who's being sued? (Score:3, Insightful)
this is an important question because one could say that the universities allowed them to swap files by not-not-allowing (:p) and so the students could use this in there defense (however crooked and twisted a defense it is...).
Re:Who's being sued? (Score:2, Insightful)
> or the campus/university
As the RIAA are scumsucking filth, they'll attack those with the most to lose from a loss to their "alleged" lawsuit, and coerce thousands in settlement from them.
It's Just (Score:4, Insightful)
Go RIAA... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go RIAA! Way to sue some people who are unlikely to be able to defend themselves. You truly have a gigantic collective business mind.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, when will this business model of suing some of your most interested customers cease? When the weather report in Hell changes?
So the RIAA targets those.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It really is kind of like the schoolyard bully shaking down the smaller kids for their lunch money. Why does the RIAA exist these days, anyway? I haven't heard a single thing about what they've done other than file lawsuits....
Re:It's Just (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I see nothing wrong with sharing information (I think it is wrong to claim to be the author of the information if you're not - i.e. plagiarise), but copyright is just government-supported censorship.
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah really, if nothing else it's raising a whole new generation to hate and loathe the RIAA. I know when I was a kid I'd never even heard of the RIAA except, maybe, when Al Gore's wife (you know, Tipper) was trying to get music censored-- then I seem to recall the RIAA actually being out against that (hence the "explicit lyrics" labels). But todays young adults? I don't see them having any love for the RIAA.
So.. way to go guys, keep it up! Another 4-5 years of this and you'll have a nice chunk of the next generation totally hating you!
Re:P2P via anonymous proxies (Score:2, Insightful)
They can't stop it (Score:2, Insightful)
You cant stop information freedom, RIAA. The genie IS out of the bottle.
Sue People Who Can't Afford Books Let Alone CDs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who's being sued? (Score:2, Insightful)
The RIAA or any plaintiff in a civil action is likely to go after wherever the big money is. In this case, it's the university, not the starving students.
They are probably banking on a win or a painful settlement that means other universities will 'get the message' (whatever that is) and clamp down on students in turn.
Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
What the RIAA is doing here is cementing P2P as the way to get music. They think they're creating negative associations with P2P, but what they're really doing is creatin negative associations with the RIAA. It's basic psychology. We hate being told what we can't do by large oppressive corporations, and it only makes us want it more.
"There is no such thing as bad publicity." But what they don't realize is that this is publicity for P2P, not publicity for the RIAA.
University students today, CEOs tomorrow (Score:3, Insightful)
The university students today will be in the work force in the next few years, and then the main force of the work world not long after, as the baby boomers are getting all to be seniors.
So good work. Keep pissing us off. Keep targeting us. Your end will be tragic, except you can go fuck yourselves because nobody will care.
Re:P2P via anonymous proxies (Score:2, Insightful)
How does BitTorrent fit into all of this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will the RIAA change the number of songs shared before legal action is taken or will BitTorrent users get a free ride?
I love to view this as civil disobedience.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Most file swappers are just interested in getting something quick and free, not any social cause.
RIAA & unauthorized filesharing are *both guil (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, now that you've commented on it, you're complicit in that too... ;)
Yes, it is absolutely correct that the point of the lawsuits is to get publicity for this issue. And it is correct that Slashdot is participating in that process.
However it is also worth differentiating between "filesharing" and "unauthorized filesharing."
These suits (as opposed to the Napster, Grokster, etc.) are about unauthorized filesharing, and not the technology itself.
Indeed, those that constantly act as apologists for unauthorized filesharing are just as guilty as *IAA for endangering an emerging technology.
These are college students, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, they probably have some original CDs you might want to rip tracks from. Not to mention the library, which probably has thousands of CDs available (my public library sure does). Ya, I know it's illegal, but chances are, no one else is using that CD's track at the moment.
I mean, sure, centralized P2P is convenient, but a lawsuit is pretty inconvenient. Go back 10 years and use SCP to download music. Just trade lists on chat rooms like we used to do. Hell, you can trade lists over SCP as well.
Give up on the whole centralized P2P networks and do some social engineering, you'll never get caught.
Disclaimer: I own *cough* all of my MP3's original media, Really!!!
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if it was specifically targeting people who couldn't afford cds, they are noncustomers benefiting (arguably with most major label crap) from copyrighted works without paying. Lower prices don't necessarily imply that violators will purchase enough to achieve higher profit for the recording industry either. There are goods, and major label crap is one of them, which consumers will not purchase at any price. They may, however, consume them at no cost. The common response that someone who wouldn't have paid anyway should be allowed to violate copyrights is ridiculous. If that were the case, even people who are willing to pay $15 (or whatever) for a CD have little, if any, reason to pay.
Under current law, they're going at it exactly the right way - filing against flagrant violators of their copyrights.
P2P Usage Truths (Score:3, Insightful)
P2P is agnostic.. its a concept, not a action... a more accurate study would be the USE of the P2P networks they are 'surveying'.
Just spreading more half truths and misconceptions...
I know personally my P2P usage has gone WAY up in 2004, I now get most of my BSD ( and related ) ISO's via torrents now.. Last I heard that's legal traffic.
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How does BitTorrent fit into all of this? (Score:3, Insightful)
since BitTorrent isn't a huge central network it's quite likely IMO that Torrent users are mostly safe.
It's much easier to track copyright violations on networks like Kazaa than monitoring some websites and the irc for torrents.
But even if the RIAA manages to monitor the entire net some day they'll still have to deal with offline trading. It's so convenient today to copy some friends Music Collection onto mobile storage. Thousands of *new* songs transfered within minutes. And there's nothing the RIAA can do about it. Whatever steps they take, there will always be unauthorized copies around. They should realize that they can't do much about it. The next step would be to come up with a business model, which takes into account that they can't win this war.
WOW! I never thought of that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok...let's take an average hollywood movie that cost today around 50 million give or take to produce. Some cost upwards to 100 million. And that's just from producing the movie itself, not including the marketing for it. Yet the DVD, where they make a ton of cash from, costs only 20 bucks when it hits the stores. 20 bucks.
The RIAA claim that the CD's cost so much because they spend so much on the artists, the promotion, the artwork etc etc so the price point is 17 bucks for a CD with 72 minute of music. Now I KNOW a music CD doesn't cost 50 million dollars to produce and market. No way NEAR that amount.
This is just blatent money-grubbing bastardship in it's prime. I how can they possibly defend themselves with this?
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet, the same people bundle big sheaths of newsprint up and then pay someone to haul it away.
What's up with that? Didn't the pages of paper cost the same, no matter what the value of the content printed on them??
RIAA needs a decent business plan (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, sueing college students is not a good business plan.
Provide a decent service and the people with money to spend on music will mostly use it. And all the students with _no_ money will still continue to download their music for free.
This ill will campaign does nothing but make people even more content to share music now that doing so is a slap in the face to the clueless and tyrannical RIAA.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
They targetted the companies/people producing the apps, and there was outcry here - "The tool has legitimate uses! Go after the users who misuse it!".
Now, they're targetting the users who misuse it - and yet still there is outcry here. How is this a YRO issue? You have no right to distribute copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. That's partly why the GPL exists, to grant you those rights.
Don't like it? Work to change it. But don't admonish the RIAA for upholding their rights, while cheering on others when they go after GPL violators.
Re:It's Just (Score:1, Insightful)
Huh? How do you censor something that is actually available legitimately via legal tender and played on the radio?
I can't believe the amount of deluded people here with crazy ideals and even crazier reasoning behind those ideals.
Copyright protects a persons work from being exploited by people or entities which do not hold copyright to the work. It allows a person to stipulate terms of how their work may or may not be copied.
It is law that protects every individual who creates a work. In some countries, you don't even have to assert copyright, you automatically get it as long as you put your name to the work. It is a means to protect ANYONE and EVERYONE who creates a work, including you. It's not just high quality art work either, you write your resume? You hold copyright over it, even without stipulating copyright in some countries.
If the copyright terms don't sit well with you, then don't acquire or accept the work. It is that simple. It is not your right to infringe on the copyright wishes of the copyright holder. Don't like it, don't use it.
It's not like this is unreasonable. File sharing of copyright music for example, is not like sharing the recipe for an AIDS drug which has licensing pricing that is artificially kept at the high level that Americans can afford (versus nations too poor to afford them). I mean, this is a luxury of artwork which has terms designed to protect the artists and the people involved in sustaining that artists industry.
If you are not willing to spend the requested price for the artwork, then stealing it is not a valid action.
I agree that the RIAA are probably a bunch of bastards, to fans and artists. But if the artist chooses to operate through them, then that is the artist's decision! We do have the internet after all and the artist could choose to cut out the RIAA if they wished. They probably won't get air play, but you can set up an internet radio station if you want...
THAT is where the revolution should be. Artists could move away from the likes of the RIAA and move towards internet radio/TV exposure and internet trading of their high audio quality work. Stealing from everyone involved in creating a CD, including the artist, is not legitimate, not a revolution and will not go on forever.
We will loose some rights if people choose, on a large scale, to break the law. Imagine if governments decided to ban crypto usage to people who don't hold a "crypto license", or ban P2P completely or worse still, tax internet usage to subsidize the losses to the music, movie and software industries! There are subsidies on photocopies and (were?) on blank tapes due to this type of problem. DAT tapes it seems, were ALWAYS expensive. Good people could ultimately suffer because of some thieves who choose to use a great technology (P2P) to infringe copyright.
The fact is government, law, corporations and artists will not allow this to go on unpunished. If you don't like the business practices of the RIAA and the "Big 5", then vote with your dollars. Stop buying (impact their profits), stop copying (legitimize yourself) and write to them (advertise your reasoning) to let them know that you have ceased to be a consumer of those products, in protest of their actions.
Performing criminal acts, merely gives them reason and justification to stop you from doing it, take compensation from you and maybe even ultimately impact your rights.
The importance of having and sharing the luxury of the latest top 40 songs, might not seem so high when you have lost assets, freedom and rights.
Re:Who's being sued? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
There are two ways to change a law: either buy the people who make the laws, or break the laws until they're impossible to enforce. The former is not an option, since the RIAA and MPAA have far more money than the average college student, so mass civil disobedience is the only other option.
If Americans had listened to people like you in the 30s, they would still be unable to legally drink beer: Prohibition wasn't ended because the law-makers had a change of heart, but because it was so widely broken that it became impossible to enforce. Similarly, racist laws in the 60s weren't repealed because the law-makers decided they were a bad idea, but because black people and the anti-racist groups led campaigns that made the laws impossible to support.
Finally, current copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional, and therefore there is no reason for any American not to break it. While the laws may be within the letter of the Constitution, they're clearly not within the spirit, and if the courts hadn't gone out of their way to prevent jury nullification after it proved such a success in ending Prohibition, no jury would punish anyone for file sharing today.
Value (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I need to thank the RIAA, and---of course---ClearChannel. By promoting only mainstream music (Mindless "Pop-40," Mainstream "Alternative," thug-only "Rap," catch-all "Jazz," Balding "Rock," and baroque-only "Classical") I pretty much only listen to indie bands these days. I only listen to the radio to catch NPR/CarTalk. Oh, and I have disposable income to spend too! Too bad I won't be spending it on those over-hyped, culturally-void [backstreetboys.com], no-talent [msn.com] "acts" y'all have sunk so much money into "promoting." Boo-friggin-hoo.
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, yes, to say that rock stars don't deserve money for their work. They don't. Most of what the 'produce' is just stolen from lesser-known albums of many years ago. Plus most rock stars are assholes. And far, far overpaid. (Seen Rod Stewart's huge mansion in last month's Architectural Digest?)
For one, you can't stop it by going after people that don't have enough money to pay for cds.... If they ultimately actually lowered the price to a more convenient number maybe people will by them.
Sure you can. Just take all of a person's money and they don't buy any more bootleg CDs.
When a cartel controls the price, they always raise the price. Noticed the $59/barrel oil yet?
Going after college students who have enough to worry about is a horrible way to get support. Its a negative campaign that'll end up hurting them.
They're in it for the money, honey. College students have the money. When you run a successful extortion campaign against people who have money, and you do it over and over successfully, you don't get hurt in the long run. You get rich.
College students never fight back against extortion and they have a lot of money. They're willing to give up their money to extortionists especially when threatened by extortionists with lawsuits and criminal records that the extortionists claim will destroy their future careers.
College students are perfect targets for the RIAA gangsters. Since RIAA extortion is so amazingly successful, (and a far more secure profit center than selling records, which is hit-or-miss at best), you can expect it to expand in the future to thousands of lawsuits every month.
The only way that non-violent people can stop themselves from being constantly 'shaken down' by extortionist gangsters is to hire people who are more violent than the gangsters or have immunity from laws against violence. The problem with hiring mercenaries to destroy gangsters is that the mercs often want as much in payment as the gangsters are taking. The problem is the same with those who have legal immunity to use violence against gangsters (that is, the FBI and the police). They demand less money for their services than the gangsters, but claim instead the right to use violence against you to support any 'Mickey mouse' law or regulation that gets passed by corrupt politicians.
Sooner or later, because they appear to be picking their targets at random, the RIAA is going to try to extort thousands of dollars from a person who doesn't have the money and doesn't care what happens to corporate lawyers who are trying to destroy their life. This person will contact the lawyer for a meeting upon receiving his extortion notice. At the meeting the person will pull out a gun and calmly, coolly, and without remorse or emotion blow the brains out of the RIAA lawyer all over the table.
By picking their targets at random, the RIAA appears to ignore the principal tenet of being a successful extortionist:
You can take many, many things from a rich person before they even notice that anything is missing,
but you can only take very little from a poor person before they kill you to protect whatever little material things that they have.
RIAA's own logic doesn't hold up. (Score:3, Insightful)
They used to simply use the catch-22 situation, where if file sharing went up and sales went down after they filed lawsuits they simply said to themselves, "This proves we need to file more lawsuits! What we're doing just isn't enough!" and if file sharing went down (according to now discredited figures, since people were just moving off of Kazaa) and sales went down, they'd say "It works! Now let's keep up the good fight to improve those sales!"
Well, this last period, file sharing has gone up and sales have also gone up. There just isn't any way to justify lawsuits using this information, according to the RIAA's own spurious justifications.
Except to say, that is, that knowing the impending backlash was coming, the RIAA probably steeled themselves against any public pressure--and along with it rationality-- before they began to file lawsuits. Looking at Cary Sherman's statements, for instance, its hard not to notice he never actually addresses the efficacy or goals of the lawsuits. He just parrots "We are within our rights. We can't stand by while thieves are stealing our music. Artists need to be paid," and similar argumentively disconnected soundbites.
Well, news flash, RIAA--copyright is pragmatic. You enforce it to increase sales, not for moral (that is, constitutionally unfounded) rationales. You may have the right but how about a reason? How exactly can you justify enforcing it to a cane-flogging-for-jaywalking extremity, infuriating your customers, while when it is rising your sales are also rising?
Re:It's Just (Score:1, Insightful)
What you want to copy or "pass on", goes against the wishes of the person who created that information. THAT IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT! They should be able to apply those restrictions if they wish, they are the creator and you must either agree to those terms or not accept or acquire their information.
Should I be able to get a copy of the information regarding your bank account? No?! That is censorship! Oh no, wait, that would come under privacy wouldn't it? Because you want that information to remain private, so that your finances are protected.
The point is, that when a person buys a legitimate copy of some music, they are also agreeing to abide by the copyright on the packaging. If they then disobey that copyright, after agreeing to it, they are guilty of copyright infringement. They are wrong to do that. Don't like copyright terms, don't buy or copy music that you know is copyrighted.
And MY COPY is NOT THEIR COPY. It's a DIFFERENT PHYSICAL THING.
Do you not even realise that this is WHY COPYright exists in the first place? You people AMAZE me!
I agree that this makes the thought of theft, murky. However, the theft is not just in the copying of the raw data, the theft is in depriving artists and the industries of income, through infringing a clearly stipulated copyright.
Your problem arises because you consider the information itself to be a "thing". It's not. It has no existence independent of its physical substrate. Current law tries to thingify information, and is therefore stupid.
No, actually the information is a "thing". It is uniquely identifiable as the artists work and sought after as such. Just because it is easily copied, digitally perfect or with loss, to a separate medium, does not make it any less the work derived from the artist.
If it were not a uniquely identifiable "thing", then it would not be sought after as the original artists work. Unfortunatly for your argument, it is uniquely identifiable as a particular copyrighted work of a particular artist. The fact that this information on any given "physical substrate" is so sought after, goes against your argument. Even just the fact that you choose to use the term "information" when you should mean "data", argues against your own point. Do you know the difference between "information" and "data" in computer science terms?
Data is raw values suitable for processing by a computer but meaningless to a human. Whereas information is meaningful and identifiable to a human. Problem is, that regardless of whether you consider an mp3 file of your favorite song, to be data or information, is beside the point, because when that data (thats what it is) is processed through the program it is intended to be processed through (the type of program that you WILL process it through), it resolves to uniquely identifiable information, typically of an artists copyrighted work.
In the good old days ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:RIAA again going for the little guy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:RIAA again going for the little [crimminal] (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps if Sony, Vivendi and the rest had to actually compete (with each other and anyone else) for our business on the merits of their product, we would see improvement. But so long as the RIAA's member companies are permitted to collude at every level, and so long as the RIAA is allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars filing lawsuits, creating undue influence in Congress, rewriting copyright law and all the other (possibily treasonous) activity of which they've been guilty, the situation will continue to worsen from the consumer's point of view.
Re:WOW! I never thought of that... (Score:3, Insightful)
You mentioned $17 for a CD... the average price of a new CD is now down to $13.29 [npd.com]. That's a historic low, particularly when you take inflation into account. Some CDs will cost more (those pressed in smaller amounts, those that cost more to produce) but if you're still paying $17 for a typical new release, you're shopping at the wrong store.
You're correct that a CD doesn't cost anywhere near $50MM. The typical cost of sale for a CD is about six or seven bucks. This includes accruing for marketing, but I don't believe that it includes accrual for returns (which is a big cost at retail... the profit margin of a product is zero if it doesn't sell). They sell it into the channel for nine or ten bucks, so their net profit , if they're lucky, is two or three bucks, or around 25% - 30%.
If that makes your blood boil, believe me, you don't even want to think about the money-grubbing bastardship (I love that phrase!) behind the retail sales of food at your supermarket or clothes at the department store. Record companies would love to get those kinds of margins. I work in the computer peripheral industry and our margins when we sell into the channel start at 30% and go up from there.
As somebody else has pointed out, DVD sales of a film are just frosting on the cake. The film company makes most of their money on the theatrical release. A record company has one shot and one shot only to recoup their investment on a CD -- by selling the CD. The money collected from radio airplay, public performance, etc. goes to the artists who wrote the lyrics and music, not the record company.
Re:Okay, a few things... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is anyone claiming they can prove that they have? If so I would love to hear from them. The truth is that the RIAA are actually on shaky legal ground when it comes to traditional standards of evidence and proof. It's just lucky for them that they don't need any. To be accused is to be guilty when it comes to file sharing of copyrighted works.
Why dont they sue compton gang members :) (Score:1, Insightful)
Then we can see if there will be a 'drive by' to some RIAA house hold executives
Basic economic principle (Score:3, Insightful)
P2P is not really the reason, however.
When I was in school in the early '90s, very few people had TVs in dorm rooms, and of those only a very small handful had VCRs. Also, I'd guess that by the time I graduated in '96, only about 25 percent of dorm rooms had computers. I never saw a single game console at university until the end of my junior year.
What this means is that the students had a fixed entertainment budget, and when they couldn't get beer, about all they could buy was CDs, or film/concert tickets (or less-than-licit substances).
Back then I copied music like crazy from CDs to tape, but I also bought loads of CDs.
Now, however, pretty much every room has a computer, and pretty much every computer has a DVD player. I don't know the prevalence of consoles, but I reckon PS2s and X-boxen are pretty common.
Eight to ten years ago CDs had the students' entertainment budget line pretty much all to themselves. Now CDs have to compete with DVD and game sales and rentals.
It's not about file sharing, but about more products chasing the same dollar.
The drop in CD sales has less to do with sharing, which I don't think is any more common now than it ever was, and more to do with the fact that the consumer's percieved value of a CD has dropped thanks to competition from other media.
The only possible answer for people trying to sell CDs is to lower the price.
My question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
I imagine the system wouldn't be a terribly hard coding problem, there is already some online store software about. As for offering it as a service, it wouldn't be too hard to cover up for the bandwidth/hosting costs and still allow musical artists to keep much of the profit themselves.
Kind of like how MovableType did things; made a blog application, gave it away for free, and offered to set it up/host it for you for a fee.
With new developments such as FLAC, it wouldn't be hard to distribute replicas of albums online, without the middle man.
It seems to me that this whole music piracy issue stems from the financial inconvenience of legally getting music, and the group attacking us because of it is the one responsible for the problem.
Let's cut him out.