Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Good article on p2pnet about RIAA's effect on a student

Good article on p2pnet.net:

‘You’re jerks!’ - students tells RIAA

p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG and their RIAA have extorted students across America out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It isn’t know exactly how many have been blackmailed into ’settling’ with the RIAA in the hope of avoiding a civil lawsuit, but it can’t be more than a couple of thousand and as p2pnet posted recently, “given that the US Census Bureau Back to School: 2006-2007 was projecting 7,600,000 students would be enrolled in American colleges and universities by that fall, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the RIAA student victimisation programme is going nowhere, and fast.”

All it’s really doing is further alienating the very people upon whom future sales depend.

Even the name RIAA is a mockery.

It’s short for Recording Industry Association of America but only one of the Big 4, Warner, is American, and that’s run by a Canadian.

The other three members of the organised corporate copyright music gang are Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain).
Complete article






Keywords: digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property






3 comments:

bobble said...

I read the article on p2pnet and said the same thing there I'll say here, the more fundamental issue with the girl being sued is why did she stupidly install p2p software on her work (university) computer and open herself and employer up to the potential liability she now faces?

Buried in every employee handbook is language that you won't install junkware like that on your work computer and I'm sure her job at the U was no different. She should have been fired for doing something that stupid in the first place.

Anonymous said...

Granted, that was hardly a smart move on the girl's side, but that isn't the point here. The point is that she's being sued for songs which she already owns legal copies of, and for an amount that far exceeds what she'd have to pay if she had shoplifted extra copies of said CDs from a shop.

The RIAA has had a long history of treating their customers like dirt, but when they appear as dirt themselves in front of everyone else, as the same dirt they try to portray their paying customers as, the backlash is going to be strong and potentially irreparable.

-- DTS

bobble said...

I agree about the RIAA treating artists and customers like dirt but if the girl already owned the cd's, why did she need to download the songs again on her work computer? I have plenty of cd's also and to rip one takes very little effort and minimal attention.

That was either bonehead (non) move #2 on her part or not quite the truth because it just doesn't add up logically.