THE Recording and Motion Picture Industries have sent letters, ‘informing’, 40 different Universitites, within 25 states, of the alleged file-trading going on between students on the schools’ Local Area Networks (LANs) and the possible consequences of such activity.
Unlike the typical monthly rounds of RIAA lawsuits against P2P users for the alleged, “copying and re-distributing of copyrighted works”, these students are able to avoid such lawsuits by trading music with each other– over the schools’ networks.
Some would call such activity ‘fair-use’ since the students are merely trading with each other, all of whom go to the same school and therefore are classmates; the same way ‘fair-use’ laws should protect a person copying a CD for a co-worker. But not the RIAA.
“Piracy on campuses has been a concern for quite a while, and we have been actively engaged in a number of efforts with universities to get the word out to students,” said Gayle Osterberg, an MPAA spokeswoman. “This particular trend or growing problem is something that is a more recent development, and we are working on all fronts to stay on top of all means of piracy and addressing them.”
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation has suggested a compromise, in which the school would pay a base yearly fee to the RIAA and allow the students to just continue as they have been.
“The (music) labels sent a very similar letter to universities about Napster in 1999 or 2000,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Here we are, seven years later, and the problem from their perspective is bigger than ever.”
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They need to tell the RIAA/MPAA to go jump in a lake! There isn’t a THING legally they can do about a closed network and they know it!
ha ha That RIAA. Always trying to get laid.
It’s not piracy if every student there can barley afford to live in a dorm. Just as Indonesia or Vietnam:
being poor + pirating = screwing the class system up the ass.
The RIAA needs to stop being a whiny baby. The milk was sour too long and now it is too sweet and the whittle babie wants sour milk like a Paris Hilton album (okay ROTTEN milk in that case).
Geez anyone opposing abortions now?
how many of those kids are going to care? i mean if you are skilled enough to use a LAN you arent going to be intimidated by your school making an anoucement that piracy is illeagal. this isnt napster where every soccer mom was on it because it was easy to do.
This isn’t the first time they have done this.
I hope that the schools don’t cave on this. This is no different than borrowing a c.d. from a friend and making a copy of it. Even if they do try to sue each student what are they going to get? These are small networks closed to the outside world. The “illegal distrubution” here is extremely small. It would cost them more to go to court than what they would get. And what are they going to do to prove it? Plant someone at each school? The only way they can achieve anything here is by intimidation. And has anyone thought of this: isn’t this an attempt to hinder the free exchange of ideas at a university? Isn’t that what “education” is all about?
i tired of this argument that the RIAA is not gaining any money from lawsuits. court costs? lawyer fees? don’t you all know that when a plaintiff sues the defendant the defendant is usually responsible for paying those fees if they lose? when a settlement occurs the plaintiff works in any fees.
so if the RIAA did sue one of the schools or all of them dont act like if the RIAA wins or gets a settlement they wouldn’t make any money. you guys know the RIAA is not suing and doing shit like this to make an example or a point to deter filesharing. if that was true the labels would just tell the other branches of their companies to make it more known that this is happening and limewire etc is illegal. most people sued do not know this since not everyone is p2p news junkies or even cares to understand how p2p works or anything surrounding it.
the labels could simply tell parent companies like Time Warner (owner of CNN Time Magazine CNN Headline News etc.) Vivendi Universal (merger with NBC MSNBC CNBC Newsweek etc) to spread the word but I watch the news avidly and have found it extremely rare to see anything about filesharing.
so the RIAA wants this to continue because it’s profitable. There’d be no other reason.