p2pnet.net reports a new wave of attacks on colleges. Still do not see Harvard among the colleges:
RIAA attacks another 18 US schoolsComplete article
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA has kicked off the new year with renewed attacks on university students across America.
It boasts it’s sent out a new “wave” of 407 extortionate ’settlement’ letters to 18 universities, using “evidence of significant abuse of campus computer networks for the purpose of copyright infringement” as the excuse.
Targeted are:
Arizona State University (33 pre-litigation settlement letters), Bowdoin College (11), California State University, Monterey Bay (25), College of William and Mary (15), Duke University (16), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (19), Mount Holyoke College (15), Rhode Island College (22), Saint Mary’s College of Minnesota (13), Stanford University (15), Texas Christian University (14), University of California, Berkeley (26), University of California, Los Angeles (26), University of Connecticut (25), University of Iowa (24), University of Nebraska-Lincoln (22), University of Texas at Austin (50), and Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (36).
The Big 4 are using their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) as a front end in a vicious attempt to use legal systems not only in America, but around the world, to force ‘consumers’ into buying corporate product.
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17 comments:
Harvard, Oh Harvard, where are you?
Come to think of it, Oregon, Oh Oregon, where are you this time too?
And to the rest of you colleges and universities, where are you? Putting up a fight to protect your student's from faulty, illegal, ex parte driven subpoenas, or missing in action?
XK-E
And...no University of Maine either? Is the RIAA scared of the law students?
MIT? Are they asking to have their technical information raped in court and exposed as a fraud?
I notice something in the list. MIT.
Perhaps now that their students are involved, you might want to make contact with appropriate individuals and arrange
for faculty there to help ( at least for cutrate prices if not for free ).
No. I am not talking about legal help, I am talking about expert witnesses. As the "engineering captiol of the world" I believe there faculty would be hard to refute.
It's not just MIT (not the engineering capital of the world, sorry)... try UC Berkeley (arguably the second home of unix)! Or Virginia Tech. Or Stanford.
Likewise, I know that UCB and William & Mary have well respected law schools, hopefully they'll all get into the act. Hopefully they'll all coordinate their defenses, too.
I think that the Universities need to be reminded of the Harvard letter from Charles Nesson & John Palfrey, and that they should actually adopt said letter and mail them back to the riaa!
RJ
One thing comes to mind is how do they choose these schools and why so few at each school?
Each of these schools has thousands of students and they can only find a dozen? There are how many schools in the US?
I don't know if any argument can be made around selective enforcement. It can't be totally random. At what point does it cross into a SLAPP lawsuit? Terrorism by legal means?
Because there is no way they can argue that they are simply enforcing their rights. This is intimidation only.
I'm glad you guys have so much confidence in MIT. So far MIT has been a complete wimp. I'm hoping it's a sleeping giant and that this was its wakeup call.
Nohwhere Man,
Excellent points. And I hope that they realize that this isn't a debate about whether or not file sharing is wrong, or who did and who didn't do it. That's not the issue here.
The legal issue here is whether or not these lawsuits can be pursued using the current laws, tactics, and methods employed by the RIAA.
---
Russell,
SLAPP is a good word to describe this. Personally I prefer Barratry.
XK-E
Believe it or not, it appears we just had a visit from Richard L. Gabriel -- "RIAA Richard" -- himself. I first published then rejected his attack for being off topic and for trolling. He didn't identify himself. In case you're interested, the comment was a link to a full length interview with one of his idiot clients' PR representatives.
Dear Richard,
I know you're ashamed of who you are and what you do, and I don't blame you for that.
But next time, if you want to participate here, please identify yourself more clearly.
Oh and please follow the standards set forth in our comment policies, such as staying on topic, and not making misleading statements of law or fact.
I know, from having read your papers and communicated with you frequently these past several years, that these are difficult ideas for you, but I have to ask you to live up to the same standards as my other readers.
[b]So far MIT has been a complete wimp. I'm hoping it's a sleeping giant and that this was its wakeup call.[/b]
Hopefully, since they're going after their students now.
To my knowledge though, they haven't gone after UC-Berkeley before, which is also poking the bear. Hopefully that bear gets mad.
Well Berkley has a law school, and no doubt a legal clinic. So let's hope that either the university gets on the stick -- like the University of Oregon did -- or that the legal aid clinics get into the action, like the good folks at the Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic at the University of Maine Law School did.
I wouldn't put too much faith in the UC system to step forward and defend its students. UC Santa Cruz had the opportunity to try and quash a subpoena brought by the RIAA--but instead they just coughed up their students' information. But who knows, since Berkeley is the UC's shining gem, maybe they'll actually intervene on their students' behalf this time.
-PLM
Yes, but even if they do just hand over the info, I don't think it'd be too hard to find a professor willing to testify that the RIAA is using junk science and can't be trusted since it's a major computer science school that's contributed many things in the field, most notably the BSDs.
I read somewhere that one student at one of the colleges got two pre-litigation notices in the same batch. Didn't say why or how, although perhaps his IP number had been reassigned. Does he now have to settle twice through their automated system? Or is it possible to explain to a live person who can actually fix the process what happened to him?
-Dodge Magnum
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