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riaa strikes against some college students

Im not going to continue back and forth on this because the discussions/arguments on here tend to get circular quickly.

However, after my last post i ran into my dean in the hall...she is a bankruptcy expert (just named to head the ALI's bankruptcy panel) and she agreed that in such a circumstance it would be the best way to handle the situation if you were one of the college student and they let a judgment that huge stand against you (though we both doubt they would). She also kinda agreeded with Kid Red. In many cases filing wont kill your credit. the REASON goes on your credit report. im sure if a car dealership or mortgage company saw that you filed to avoid a ridiculously MASSIVE judgement against you while in college they would not give it alot of pull. If they asked you about it and you explained (which also happens) im quite sure it wouldnt make little impact.
 
Fear

There can be no question of the legality of the unauthorized redistribution of intellectual property. Although most seem to think that it is a victimless crime it is not. The problem being, unfortunately for the victims, is that they are almost universally despised for their draconic business measures, for being bullies, for lying and for extorting artists to obtain ludicrous wealth.
But these practices have evolved in response to changing environment. The record companies are not nearly as vital to the music industry as they once were. The RIAA constantly is battling to prove its worth to the artists, who are drastically under payed and incessantly bullied. When an artist makes 3 cents per album (0.2% of the cost of a 15 dollar record) the only incentive that said artist has to stay with the label is the fact that there is no where else to turn.
Technology, such as the internet, can be the medium that artists utilize to reach listeners. In their heyday file-sharing clients allowed a much greater breadth of content than radio; many unknown bands, and those that the labels simply swept under the rug for not fitting the current musical trend gained an audience that they never would have had otherwise. They sold records that never would have left the shelf.
One of the most vital functions the record industry performs is telling the listeners what they want to hear. A trend is identified and those that exemplify it are more aggressively advertised. Not having that control does not sit well with the record industry; to profit the most a company must only produce as much of a product is necessary and they must be able fulfill demand when it is present. This requires them to predict what will sell and the easiest way to do that is to control the wants of the consumer. Every unsold compact disc is 75 cents of manufacturing cost that is lost. The aforementioned environment in which the listener had greater liberty to discover personal tastes defeats this control.
By suing college students they wish to personify the technology it self, not the act of sharing intellectual property, as evil. They have chosen to forgo public image to maintain the hold they have on the market and to insure their future relevance.
By threatening exorbitant fees they however have made the consequences much less tangible to others that distribute music. If they instead of fining one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per song had asked for one hundred or five hundred dollars they could have made an impression on others. It is much easier to imagine having to work off forty-thousand dollars than tens of millions.
The most grievous act that the RIAA has committed is not the virtual indenturing of artists nor is it the saccharine lies of the PR department or even the cost music; the most heinous thing that they have done is sabotaging the development of technology and personal rights.

There is no honor amongst thieves it seems.
 
Maybe Steve Jobs was only partly correct that this is a behavior problem and not a technology problem. What we need is a new method of distributing music (using technology). Will the first step be the new Apple Music Service?

Many may have read "Fight music theft--give it away" at . This may advance the discussion, even if it is hard to imagine how it would actually work.

IMO this controversy is very difficult for our society, where one side has the current law on its side, and the other side has very sympathetic arguments and reflects the thinking and behavior of many.

[First post after registration]
 
I think it ultimately comes down to the idea of "the cure is worse than the disease"

The disease is P2P swapping.

The cure is arresting college kids, suing them for millions, shutting down networks, banning technology (which never works and is in the realm of theocracies) and removing privacy to make darn sure everyone is honest.

Which one of these options is worse for society?
 
Sorry, Personal attack

I must bash someone today and I picked this thread, sorry.
peterjhill, I totally and utterly disagree with you.
First, they weren't use Limewire or Kazza.
They had a private Network of servers that only the school users themselves have access to.
No, there wasn't outside sharing, sorry, no.
This was a group of school computers networked sharing files.

They shoud go after Limewire before Users and schools.

Geez, you go after the maker first not the users.

When you crackdown on drugs you go after the head... not the users!
 
Re: Sorry, Personal attack

Originally posted by MrMacman
I must bash someone today and I picked this thread, sorry.
peterjhill, I totally and utterly disagree with you.
First, they weren't use Limewire or Kazza.
They had a private Network of servers that only the school users themselves have access to.
Click to expand...

So, lets look at where they are doing this:
two at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one at Princeton and the fourth at Michigan Technical University
Click to expand...
. So what that this was only confined to the local university. Of course the RIAA is going to go after them. How big are these Universities? Are these the only P2P apps that users on these campuses are using? With an application like this, it would be trivial for someone to steal tens of thousands of songs and movies in days. No like Limewire, where there is no way you can say, find all the users on the local network and tell me what files they have.

It is not a good thing that they are only sharing with the nearest 5000 people. If you don't understand that, well, then that is your problem.

When you say "Go after the maker" and not the users, how the heck do you know that the users that they arrested are the ones that wrote the software? If that were the case, then it would be more than fair to say that they were responisible for 150,000 songs each. That would be 37.5k songs for each one in the suit.

Princeton, 6,632 and 12,000 Employees = a little more than 2 songs per person

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 6,000 Students, 400 faculty, unknown # of staff = 6.25 songs per STUDENT (also same number for princeton students only

Michigan Technical University: 6,600 students
Student/faculty ratio 12:1 (550 Faculty), the numbers look to be the same for RPI above.

The 150,000 songs does not seem to be so bad know, does it. Even if only 1 and ten students in the three universities used P2P, how likely is it that they downloaded more than 63 songs? Pretty likely. That is 6 very short CDs. Even if it was 1 in 50, that would be 300 songs per person.

I hope that math is not to difficult here.

How many people do the average Limewire user actively share with per year (as in how many people download music from their machine?) In this situation, how many do you think their are.

Even with this system, what are the students going to do when the latest Dixie Chicks is not available on the private P2P network, they are going to fire up Kazaa and download it off the network. Are they going to turn off sharing, I doubt it, opening Kazaa up to the rich source of ILLEGAL data. What are they going to do with the file they just got off the network? Share it with everyone on the private network.

All this private network does is create a large group of users with the likely hood of a huge amount of illegal material, connected at high speed to the Internet, who still have users connected to traditional (Limewire, Kazaa) P2P networks.

What is wrong for going after people committing crimes? If they aren't crimes, the students are welcome to fight their case in the court of law and challenge the legitimacy of that law all the way to the supreme court. Do these students believe so much that the music should be free that they will fight the case? I doubt it, they will probably settle for something that is painful, but still affordable.
 
Re: Sorry, Personal attack

Originally posted by MrMacman

Geez, you go after the maker first not the users.
Click to expand...

I think it's important to remember the whole "fair use" thing. P2P networks should exits, Napster included, because of the ability to use them in completely legal and benefitial ways. Plenty of musicians, from the no name college garage bands to even artists like Chuck D and the Beastie Boys, have released music that they WANT to see distributed openly via the internet. The first thing I did when I finished my first homemade album was to get it up on the P2P networks so people could download it. I was pissed off when Napster got taken out - it made it harder for me to share my own stuff with the world.

The only truly illegal thing happening in this entire situation is the downloading and sharing of copyrighted music (copyrights which prohbit such distribution) - and this is a "user" problem. The whole idea of "intellectual property" is a bunch of BS, to me, but that's a personal decision. If an artist wants to make money off their creations by limiting the free exchange of their works, then that's fine. Don't forget, though, as pointed out above, the artist gets bunk from the album sales (depending on who you are).

The RIAA needs to get taken out, as do some of these huge conglomerate media companies. In their place should be some sort of system in which artists can choose to sell their craft via the internet for a price determined by themselves (hopefully the rumored Apple music network thing turns into this). As the price of pro-sounding studio set-ups starts to come down, as it has been, a record-companyless world seems to be feasible.

The internet is the number one most powerful distributing tool in the world today. It's sad to see the industry neglecting this technology and squashing software, networks and systems which may some day revolutionize the way music is distributed. I'm hoping the artists starts taking matters into their own hands, and begins the revolution themselves (with the help of Apple, of course).

Davis
 
Originally posted by alex_ant
I agree it's unfair - it's unfair that music companies are having their products stolen left and right, raising prices for everyone else. Everybody who participates in P2P and distributes copyrighted material illegally should expect to be punished. Those who aren't punished should considering themselves lucky, but should not be surprised if/when their luck runs out.
Click to expand...

But because the record industry isn't responsible enough to punish offenders they want to take away the right of Fair Usage.

These copy protected CD's are coming, and they won't work with your iPod.
 
I'd also like to point out that the recording industry had all-time record sales when Napster was around. Now Napster is dead, economy slumped and the record industry is still pinning the blame on P2P.

Two years ago I would probably buy on average a CD a week using Napster to find songs from artists I like, artists that aren't (and won't) be played on the radio. Napster's gone now and they're lucky if they can sell me a cd a month. I think a lot of people did this.

And don't even get me started on the kind of recycled fabricated pop crap the recording industry wants you to listen to.

I've always wondered is popular music really popular because people like it or is it popular because the recording industry shoves it down our throats every 3 hours?
 
Originally posted by NavyIntel007
I'd also like to point out that the recording industry had all-time record sales when Napster was around. Now Napster is dead, economy slumped and the record industry is still pinning the blame on P2P.

Two years ago I would probably buy on average a CD a week using Napster to find songs from artists I like, artists that aren't (and won't) be played on the radio. Napster's gone now and they're lucky if they can sell me a cd a month. I think a lot of people did this.

And don't even get me started on the kind of recycled fabricated pop crap the recording industry wants you to listen to.

I've always wondered is popular music really popular because people like it or is it popular because the recording industry shoves it down our throats every 3 hours?
Click to expand...

I buy maybe 3 CDs a year now for the past few years, largely due to the price fixing. One month they were $11-12 for a good classic rock CD at Circuit City, the next they were $18-22 -- WTF!?!.

Previously, I'd amassed some 300+ of them in about three years. Now I just buy from artists I know I'll like -- U2, Radiohead, etc., but even then I usually have to think about it awhile, IOW, I'm no longer excited about music.
Thanks, RIAA.
 
my idea for a solution

this is to me a good solution for the record business.

first put up ALL cds that have copyrights online for streaming. this way peopld can listen to albums before they buy them, at a semi low quality, and then they can choose to buy them. there is no downloading of the stream...this i think would boost sales big time, cause people now adays want to listen to a record before they buy it instead of spending $18 on cd they've never heard. so instead they resort to p2p....

second...as far as p2p is concerned, it should be used, but it should be illegal for copyright albums to be on it. how this is regulated? this is the only flaw in my idea. i guess i just have faith that if people want to listen to something they will buy it. its what i do and a lot of people do, but a lot of people don't.

thirdly, and this is pretty obvious...LOWER CD PRICES! have a cutoff at $15 or something...get them all under that first, and see how sales do, you can bet they'll go up a little...and then try lowering prices even more. and for christ sake give more money to the artist! there the ones who made it, there the ones who put there heart and soul into it, they deserve a fair share.
 
i completly agree with you.
when you preview a cd online, it gives you an really bad quality 30 second clip of the 1st 4 songs only. kinda stupid, but that's what they do:rolleyes:
 
here is another question. what if i had lets say a hotline server. and only people on campus could get on and get music. could the only way the riaa could find out about is that someone told them?

iJon
 
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