RIAA Says Accused Students Are Settling

As we've been reporting, the RIAA has been offering settlements to college students suspected of sharing music online. Reader Weather Storm notes that more than a quarter of the alleged music pirates have accepted the RIAA's offer. Quoting: "...an attorney Ohio University arranged to meet with its students... said $3,000 is the standard settlement offer, though cases have settled for as much as $5,000."

Re:WTF? Welcome to 1984

[QuantumG]

man, what the fuck does that have to do with the warning against the "ideal society" promise of communism and its incompatibility with human nature that was the center point of the work entitled 1984 and a number of other works by Orwell?

Re:As these CRIMINALS should - guilty - pay the pi

[troll -1]

As these CRIMINALS should - guilty - pay the piper or don't do the crime

This is a civil matter, not a criminal one. No crime has been committed. No one will be found 'guilty' of anything. If they refuse to settle they could be found 'liable' for copyright 'infringement' in court.

Try not to get too emotional about this. It's irrelevant what one thinks is wrong or right. The RIAA cannot go on indefinitely suing the whole world. And file-sharing is not going to go away any more than the Internet. It's likely that as more artists target their audiences directly, online, the less we'll have need for an organization like the RIAA. History and a new economic model will defeat them.

Re:Some students

[freedomlinux]

IANAL, yet. However, considering this is a civil case, I would like to remind everyone that there are no questions about criminals, guilt, or public defenders. The correct terms would be defendants, liability, and expensive private lawyers. Yes, $3,000 appears to be a lot of money, and 25% of students appear to harbor some amount of guilt. However, I suspect the true story is far different. Reevaluating the numbers, 25% of students have realized that it is cheaper to pay $3,000 than to fight the **AA with a $100+per-hour lawyer.

Also, I hope that last bit at the end is a sick, sick joke. While I do not need to introduce my politics into this discussion, the purpose of law is to provide order and retribution for offenses, so as to avoid violence.

Re:Never mind the pirates

[E8086]

agreed, it seems very difficult to cheaply prove that you are innocent, everyone's guilty in the eyes of the MAFIAA
RIAA: points and yells "WITCH" multiple times at the top of their lungs
not yet accused of anything defendant: no I'm not
RIAA: yes you are, media sentry(or whoever their bounty hunters are these days) said you are
not yet accused of anything defendant: well, they're wrong
followed by lot of "yes you are" "no I'm not"

While at college I heard that lots of file was sharing going on, but never saw it happening myself and am unable to even guess at how much really happened. These RIAA 'lawsuits' are nothing more than a witch hunt, there is no real proof that the person they think did the file sharing really did, or did not do the file sharing, especially since they havn't realized that IP!=specific person. And they can't even produce a mac address, as if just about every router doesn't have a clone mac address option along with plenty of software to do the same locally. Some of those who are doing something wrong and are really trying to not get caught will have their regular nic for their usual online activities and a second, possibly purchased second hand and paid with cash for everything else. If the university's network has dhcp of mac, it's easy enough to get the mac of a neighbor. The only evidence I'd accept is a video, not a picture since there's not way to tell what program that perso sitting in front of the PC was really doing when yhe picture was taken. Various law enforcement agencies have found evidence in pictures and text posted to myspace, perhaps the MAFIAA should have their IP bounty hunters shift to reviewing clips of college parties on youtube to see if they can find anyone using some file sharing app to download the party sound track. If not that then there's always the chance of an error in copying an IP or a low quality screen capture or smeared ink on a printout, is that a 0 or a 6 or an 8? And the 5 or 7 minutes differance between the ISP's clock and the RIAA's clock and/or the RIAA's failure to idenitfy AM/PM and time zone and date will result in either the right person of a half dozen wrong persons given how quickly IPs can change hands over a day.

Class Action jackpot

[ymenager]

By the reports from the court proceedings of some of the few cases that have progressed this far, it certainly looks like RIAA has been proceeding without any kind of proof that will stand in court (for example see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200703020 73736822 [groklaw.net] another good site is http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] ).

Give them time to sue a few thousands more, and sooner or later some lawyers will realize the bloody fortune they will make by suing RIAA for what they've been doing. And when they start doing so... Well, not only those lawsuits will stop, but those execs will be the ones doing some paying up... and it's not going to be thousands but millions.

Re:Where have all the ethics gone? Long time passi

[raehl]

puts artists back into the caste they used to be in - able to subsist only via the graces of the the elite and wealthy

That's where they are NOW. What do you think a record company is if not a means for the elite and wealthy to select which artists get promoted?

There are very, very few artists who are able to make any money touring etc. without signing over their CD sales to a record company.

On the other hand, if signing over your CD sale revenue to a record company enables you to make a bunch of money touring, it's not really a bad deal for the artist. It's just a bad deal for the consumer who ends up paying for albums that they could get for free without affecting the artists revenues at all.

Re:Got them where we want them.

[r_jensen11]

If one of the parties can prove that the contract was signed under duress, that is the party's signature was extracted by physical or mental coercion, then the contract is null and void.

Huh, here's what my Business Law by Mann & Roberts book says:

Duress
A person should not be held to an agreement he has not entered voluntarily. Accordingly, the law will not enforce any contract induced by duress, which in general is any wrongful or unlawful act or threat that overcomes the free will of the party.

Physical compulsion
Duress is of two basic types. The first type, physical duress, occurs when one party compels another to manifest assent to a contract through actual physical force, such as pointing a gun at a person or taking a person's hand and compelling him to sign a written contract. This type of duress, while extremely rare, renders the agreement void.

Improper Threats
The second and more common type of duress involves the use of improper threats or acts, including economic and social coercion, to compel a person into a contract. Though the threat may be explicit or may be inferred from words r conduct, in either case it must leave the victim with no reasonable alternative. This type of duress makes the contract voidable at the option of the coerced party....
The fact that the act or threat would not affect a person of average strength and intelligence is not important if it places fear in the person actually affected and induces her to act against her will. The test is subjective, and the question is this: Did the threat actually induce assent on the party of the person claiming to be the victim of duress?
Ordinarily, the acts or threats constituting duress are themselves crimes or torts. But this is not true in all cases. The acts need to be criminal or tortious in order to be wrongful; they merely need to be contrary to public policy or morally reprehensible. For example, if the threat involves a breach of contractual duty of good faith and fair dealing, it is improper.
Moreover, it generally has been held that contracts induced by threats of criminal prosecution are voidable, regardless of whether the coerced party had committed an unlawful act. Similarly, threatening the criminal prosecution of a close relative is also duress. To be distinguished from such threats of prosecution are threats that resort to ordinary civil remedies to recover a debt due from another. It is not wrong to threaten a civil suit against an individual to recover a debt. What is prohibited is threatening to bring a civil suit when bringing such a suit would be abuse of process.

Basically, because what the RIAA is not physical duress, it is considered voidable, not null and void. It is at the discretion of the party that was coerced to decide whether the contract exists or not. Also note that many of the stories brought up regarding the RIAA (Going after a person's surviving family, going after grandma & grandpa, etc) are clearly against any morally reprehensible.

Man Arrested for Uploading Movie to Internet

[westlake]

There is nothing "criminal" about copyright infringement. Someone can take you to court and sue you, but there is nothing criminal about that. It certainly isn't considered "theft" by the laws of this country: never was, never will be.

Copyright infringement is a crime under American federal law and you can do hard time.

Scream "Copyright infringement is not theft!" all the way to prison if you like, but it isn't going to change a damn thing. Man Arrested for Uploading Movie to Internet [foxnews.com]

The movie was a watermarked Academy screener easily traced to Nunez's sister - exposing family to professional sanctions and criminal prosecution does not have the look of a victimless crime.

The theft of intangible property is by no means an unknown concept in American statutory law. The Economic Espionage Act of 1996: The Theft of Trade Secrets is now a Federal Crime [execpc.com]

Re:As these CRIMINALS should - guilty - pay the pi

[Anonymous Coward]

Please understand that copyright infringement *can* be a criminal offense before posting such idiocy. I'm tired of hearing the same old argument: "Copyright infringement is a civil offense.", it isn't. Please read USC Title 17, Chapter 5, Section 506 "Criminal offenses". Of course, this is slashdot, so who gives a flying fsck about something as stupid as actual facts. Go ahead, mod me down, you'll still be wrong. At least try google before posting such bald faced assertions.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506 [copyright.gov]

Andrew

Re:As these CRIMINALS should - guilty - pay the pi

[Runefox]

Because the RIAA have a history of bullying people, not even completing the judicial process, and even accusing them of not showing up in court, when they had. There's a lot of underhandedness in what the RIAA has done and continues to do. Here's [riaalawsuits.us] a fairly decent breakdown of it, if you can be bothered to read it. Basically, more often than not, the RIAA will play every card in its hand to ensure that not only do you pay them, but also that they don't have to pay for your attorney in case of their loss. In the end, there's a good chance that you have to pay someone, and these lawsuits can be stalled for years by the RIAA (resulting in skyrocketing attorney fees), so many see it as simply easier to pay them off.