University of Ohio Abandons Students Attacked by RIAA 242
newtley writes "The University of Ohio was putting a brave face on being #1 on the RIAA hit list, but it now appears they have caved in to RIAA intimidation. Now, 'It appears that many institutions are simply prepared to wash their hands, refusing even to question the tactics of the industry,' let alone giving students meaningful legal assistance, says Ohio lawyer Joe Hazelbaker. He's written to OU associate director of legal affairs Barbara Nalazek saying, 'Ohio University has an obligation to protect the privacy of its students and their records, which includes directory information.' The Recording Industry vs. The People blog is hosting a letter universities whose students being attacked might want to consider."
Re:Victims? (Score:2, Insightful)
How about personal responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another one bites the dust (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is using the school's network the determinant factor? If I commit a crime on the school's streets or property, can I assume that I automatically should get "legal assistance" too?
Re:Another one bites the dust (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm by no means suggesting that the college has any obligation to provide any assistance, but it's certainly to their benefit in the long term.
It may sound quaint... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, the lawsuits are a bunch of bull, and yes, the RIAA is a bunch of thugs. But I have no doubt that the university told people that file sharing is a good way to get sued, and they went ahead and did it anyway. I have no sympathy for these people. As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that file sharing can make you the target of a lawsuit, but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the students did it because they wanted free music, not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
If you want to change the situation, downloading files and trying to get sued isn't going to fix anything. Donate to EFF, move near the RIAA headquarters and intimidate them directly, or some other more direct means would be more effective.
Re:How about personal responsibility (Score:2, Insightful)
Reason 2: Because sometimes when hatred for the RIAA and reason get into a fight, reason gets its ass kicked.
Pick one, or both. Personally, I'm going with the second one.
Re:Victims? (Score:3, Insightful)
So let me ask: how do we take the fight to them? How do we start fscking over the RIAA / MPAA / Disney / NJ Turnpike Authority?
Well, don't lump every Slashdot reader in with "we", as a lot of us don't download music and find the whole issue a big murky grey area best avoided..
But the way to fight back is to, well, fight back. The university has a law school, put it to use. Every single case should be disputed (as long as the student is willing) in a protracted legal battle. Send in the would-be lawyers to do the grunt work. Make every case a long painful debacle with endless deliberation before it even gets to court. And try to get them to try them in Ohio, because those big-city RIAA lawyers are not going to want to camp in the Midwest for a long trial (or pre-trial process.)
If their students are being singled out the University may have a case, too. Targeting a particular institution with endless lawsuits could possibly be considered some sort of harassment, as it certainly will turn away potential students who don't want to be randomly and possibly mistakenly targeted by a RIAA lawsuit (I certainly would take that into account if I was choosing a college, or my child was.)
Bascially, generate a lot of negative press for the RIAA by causing them to drop or lose a lot of lawsuits. Because that's what all of this is, a massive PR campaign on their part to stigmatize downloading music. The RIAA is not doing this for the money; they do not care about the college student's $5000. That's petty cash, one of their typical A&R guys or lawyers blows that in a weekend. Even lawsuit played out to the end against a college student with $60-100k in damages will most likely be defaulted on. They are losing money by suing random downloaders... But they are generating a lot of news, and a lot of fear.
What needs to be done, in my opinion at least, is make the lawsuits no longer worth the effort. They've been successful as a PR campaign-- casual downloaders now think twice, parents and institutions are now keeping an eye on what their children/students/employees are doing. I don't think further lawsuits are going to change anything (but remind people that yes, it can happen, which I suppose is the point) as the kind of people who think "it won't happen to me" are going to keep doing it.
Re:Stop Downloading Crap Music? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't give them your money then (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting - "abandons" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:here's a tip (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Victims? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best way IMHO to really beat the RIAA is to not consume their products in any form. If DRM prevents you from making a backup copy, don't buy the CD, don't download, listen to something else. Then if their revenues drop, the execs can't point to the evil pirates as scapegoats to appease the shareholders.
To take a page from Oscar Wilde, "The only thing worse than being pirated, is not being pirated"
Nice try. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is the RIAA accomplishing? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the point. At the least, they can make it more difficult for pirates to rip artists off.
Why do you "fucking hate" a company legally protecting the rights of its represented artists? We go after stolen GPL code violations all the time here on Slashdot. But piracy of music artists, game developers (like John Carmack at id), movie studios, and so on is okey-dokey?
Re:Stop Downloading Crap Music? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the existence of a second-hand market is part of what allows them to sell the CD for $9 (or whatever) in the first place -- people will spend more up front if they believe they can get some of it back later. The value of the used CD is factored in to the price of the new ones.
Going by your original logic, half a million people now have an extra $9+ to buy another CD. This would seem to be an improvement from the "available money" point-of-view.
Re:Slashdot's hugely biased reporting (Score:2, Insightful)
You are right. They did not steal. Copyright infringement and theft are not the same thing.
However, they did break the law. Copyright infringement is against the law.
Some compulsive thoughts... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How about personal responsibility (Score:1, Insightful)
Additionally, since the chance of a random lawsuit against an innocent party is real, Ohio should be protecting their interests as a business to keep their tuition money coming in. If they put up a fight the RIAA would move on to another school that didn't, or change tactics altogether. No parent should consider for a moment sending a child to a school where they have a very real chance of being bankrupted at 19 by a random lawsuit.
Re:Slashdot's hugely biased reporting (Score:4, Insightful)
"copyright infringement != theft. That's why people aren't locked up for it. They're sued."
Serious question here: why do you say this? People do go to jail for copyright infringement; it's usually reported here on Slashdot with the expected response. It looks like you've been around on Slashdot to see this covered. If you can honestly tell me that you've never heard of somebody being locked up for copyright infringement, I'll beelieve you -- I'll just be very surprised!
I'm certain it's fairly common knowledge that "crimes which involve theft" and "crimes for which you can go to jail" are distinct sets. There's a union between the two, to be sure, but unless I've misread you, you're stating that the latter is a subset of the former. To use a touchy example, the crime of rape. Yes, yes, one could say that a rapist "steals the victim's innocence," but it's not theft. Yet -- just as if you pirate enough software or music -- you can go to jail for it.
"When you pay for that System of a Down CD, 95% of that money (number made up off top of my head, point is, vast majority) goes to... the RIAA/its affiliates. Bands make money off of tours, merchandise, etc."
Very true. Another example: I'm director level at a computer peripheral company. I'm responsible for some $40MM worth of business, yet my salary is (sound familiar?) less than 10% of gross sales. My company, like record companies, uses the rest to pay everybody else who was involved in creating, shipping, and selling my products.
This is, sadly, how it works with most industries. I'll grant that this is a surprise to most people and it really is via the record industry that many Slashdotters have learned this unfortunate fact about the business world -- but two wrongs still do not make a right.
What somebody needs to do is come up with a business model for a record company where the record company funds all the costs of production, promotion, distribution, and so on, yet does not attempt to recoup those costs before paying the artists. The first Slashdotter to do this will be very popular indeed.
Re:Slashdot's hugely biased reporting (Score:3, Insightful)
The unfortunate fact is that most Slashdotters have zero business knowledge, except how to use the phrase "change your business model". What they do know about is software, specifically free software. Since this also fits on a CD, they have difficulty understanding why the music business can't work like open-source. Nor do they see any double standard in demanding that copyright defends the rights of open-source developers and their licences, but leaves the holders of music's copyrights with no recourse to law.
What somebody needs to do is come up with a business model for a record company where the record company funds all the costs of production, promotion, distribution, and so on, yet does not attempt to recoup those costs before paying the artists. The first Slashdotter to do this will be very popular indeed.
I'm afraid you're assuming that the average Slashdotter is looking for solutions. What they're really looking for are excuses, and will continue to find them no matter what.
Re:Slashdot's hugely biased reporting (Score:2, Insightful)
freeing slaves was once also against the laws of your country!
hiding jews from evil nazis was once also against the law in my country (germany)!
point is, just because something is "against the law" does not make it automaticly morally wrong.
and as long as the labels do not offer the product for sale themself that got infringed by those millions of people then there is not even a single cent monitary damage!
so I went into the pawn shop (Score:5, Insightful)
I wanted a used but serviceable electric drill, a simple plug in model, the old one I had had for years finally went TU. Picked one out, maybe half price of new, pay for it, go home, use it. Now, it's a black and decker, they got paid once for the drill, but nothing on the resale-should they be?
Anyway, the digital point is moot, the tech genie is out of the bottle now and in widespread use. It's our first replicator technology, folks thinking they can still charge a huge per unit markup for copies that quite literally at best only cost a few cents need to realise they have been put into the position of buggywhip makers and sellers. Sorry if that hurts their plans and all, but those are the facts. the future world is *not* going to be paying huge amounts of money for single copies of digital bits, no matter what those bits are. We still are some, but that is only from inertia. If that means 15/16th of digital bits creators go broke or have to switch to doing it for a hobby, that's life.
I'm a blue collar worker, as in hard labor worker for not a lot of money compared to the business and IT people here. I have already been told that my labor is now only worth a dollar an hour or something, because it can be reproduced in china for that sum, and society seems to think that is OK, that I have to "deal with it". It's rather an unpleasant FU from my fellow americans, but oh well, that's reality, I *have* to deal with it because there is no sympathy of note, nothing that is effective anyway, it's not really personal as another saying goes, it's just business. OK. I went from middle class to now pretty far down the pole, barely above poverty level. I get by, but that's it. Trying to do better, but working a few jobs doesn't leave a lot of time for much else.
So... you digital content creators.. you are no longer the elite either, you are at the tail end nadir of that point, and digital reproduction-replicator technology- makes your efforts quite a bit less valuable per unit then you think they should be. That's reality,. you'll have to adjust eventually. Single copies of your stuff are worth pennies, not dollars.
The handwriting, as they say, is on the wall. It won't happen overnight-cars didn't replace horses overnight either, chinese furniture didn't replace my furnbiture over night, but eventually it finally did, and with digital bits -it's happening. My only advice is adapt and change as fast as you can, prolonging it makes it worse. Jump at the high point, don't hang on except as a hobby. You may be making the big bucks now, and may for some more years, but eventually-you won't be, there's tens of millions more people a year entering the digital content "business", whether it is in the arts or sciences, and the ability to reproduce the work for pennies isn't going away. And you will NOT get much notice either, business and society doesn't work that way.
How many buggy whips have you bought lately? You have a much larger pool of workers every year all trying to sell stuff that is only worth pennies per unit, and it's beoming easier to make those copies, even cheaper than pennies, and the pool of creators is exploding. This is called a "bubble", a normal economic term.
The *only* reason you can still get dollars per unit now is inertia, but eventually that will go away, like alcohol prohibition. At first it was rigidly enforced, then eventually it was so universally ignored that they finally dropped the notion of trying to restrict technology, which after all is what booze making was, just simple chemistry. Simple chemistry and human nature doomed prohibition. Simple electronics and human nature will doom high dollars per unit digital copies of bits, laws or no laws.
You won't be able to restrict replicator technology, so the sooner you adapt to that reality and change course the faster you ca
What can constitute adequate evidence? (Score:2, Insightful)
If I manage to capture a screenshot of the RIAA homepage containing false adverse remarks about me, can I sue them for defamation, given that it is trivial to produce such an image?
Suppose a student who is being subjected to this blackmail just reformats his hardisk, destroys any cd's he might be possessing containing any infringing material and claims he never had anything to do with any p2p downloads, what then? What evidence is there to incriminate the student?
Re:Another one bites the dust (Score:3, Insightful)