Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Knoxville News Sentinel Reports on RIAA Attack on Tennesseeans

An excellent article in the Knoxville News Sentinel describes the RIAA's stepped up campaign against Tennesseans, including lawsuits against individuals, and a flurry of letters at the University of Tennessee.

Among other things, the article points out:

-the University's concerns about the genuineness of the RIAA's claims, and
-a lawsuit against a man who's accused of using Kazaa who never heard of Kazaa.

Suing downloaders

UT students face deadline; music industry files suit against Tennesseans

By ANDREW EDER, edera@knews.com
March 14, 2007

As the clock ticks down on a settlement offer to 28 University of Tennessee students, the recording industry has fired another salvo against alleged online music pirates.

Various record labels filed 63 lawsuits nationwide on March 6, including seven in Tennessee, charging users of commercial Internet service providers with downloading and distributing copyrighted music using online file-sharing programs.

The Tennessee lawsuits included one against a Sevierville woman, who could not be reached for comment Tuesday. In all, two were filed in the U.S. District Court in Nashville, two in Memphis, one in Knoxville, one in Winchester and one in Columbia.

The move came following a Feb. 28 announcement by the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group for the major record labels, that it was targeting university students across the country for potential lawsuits unless they paid a settlement fee, believed to be thousands of dollars. The deadline for students to accept the settlement is Monday.

Complete Article

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

4 comments:

AMD FanBoi said...

I'm just curious. What is the breakdown by filesharing networks (e.g. KaZaA, iMesh, Limewire, Bittorrent, etc.) in the RIAA suits so far? Only occasionally does an individual get identified in the press by the alleged system they employed, but where is the RIAA finding their victims?

AMD FanBoi said...

The letter includes a sample of the offending files and advises students of their obligation to preserve any evidence against them, warning them not to delete any audio files or peer-to-peer programs.

Is this an actual obligation if legal proceedings haven't been commenced against you yet? How can they tell you what you must, and must not, do with your own property before you've been served with proper legal papers?

Scott said...

Since it's in the Knoxville paper, maybe Glenn Reynolds will wake up and take notice. As it is now, he doesn't pay attention to RIAA issues unless they're reported in Boing Boing.

Anonymous said...

Good question amd fanboi, considering these p2p sites are supposedly shut down (yeah, right)....unless the riaa plans to keep suing their x-customers into the next millenium..sigh...I mean going after the college set..that's just about the riaa's last hope of hanging on to any kind of customer base.

Whoever the riaa is listening to, to keep these lawsuits going?, continues to be just really, really bad advice!