Take a hike, students tell RIAA
p2pnet.net news:- “While the RIAA is touting a settlement percentage north of 25 percent with its recent campaign against file sharing at US colleges and universities, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of students are shunning the insta-settlement approach,” writes Ken Fisher in Ars Technica, going on:
“According to the RIAA, some 116 students have used their new web site to settle copyright infringement claims, but that means that another 284, or 71 percent of students contacted through the program aren’t taking the easy way out.”
But is it the easy way out?
When a student pays three thousand or more dollars to Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA, he or she is also owning up to a ‘crime’ which doesn’t exist and a charge which hasn’t ever been proved in a US court.
And can the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) be trusted with the information it gathers every time a student incriminates herself? Who knows what it’ll do when, one day, it decides to re-visit these so-called file sharing ‘crimes’ and it has all those names and addresses to look to?
Meanwhile, “All I know is that the RIAA isn’t earning any friends with their tactics,” writes Tash Costa in the Nevada Appeal, going on:
Their claims of lost profit are blatantly false; the music industry is healthier now than it has been in years. I come from a family of stagehands – my father, mother, husband, sister, brother-in-law and myself have all done stage work. I can tell you that the rate of concerts coming through the area has had a marked upswing in the past few years, be they independent label or mainstream artists. Despite all of the free music hubbub, there are still people wearing band T-shirts, sporting band bumper stickers and hoodies, and hanging band posters up on their bedroom walls.
In December of 2005, RIAA president Cary Sherman admitted that all he knew about the people the RIAA is suing (over 20,000 to date) is that they had Internet access accounts. What that means to me is that the RIAA is or could be suing anyone with Internet access because they may have illegally downloaded files, and are attempting to scare them into settling out of court.
In fact, according to the MIT campus newspaper “The Tech,” the RIAA has suggested to students that they ought to drop out of college to be able to afford RIAA settlements. They’ve also sued people who don’t own and never have owned a computer.
Anyone who had an enemy in school recognizes these tactics. They’re bully tactics, designed to scare people into paying for something they might not be guilty of, or to scare them into admitting that they are guilty. The RIAA doesn’t want to go to trial – they want you to settle out of court. It’s dangerously close to extortion.
You’re dead on, Tasha, except for one thing.
This isn’t dangerously close to extortion: it is extortion, and the Big 4 are getting away with it, ably assisted by the mainstream media who continue to report it as though it’s perfectly normal and acceptable.
But what else is new?
Also See:
Ars Technica – Students largely ignore RIAA instant settlement offers, March 26, 2007
so-called file sharing ‘crimes’ – Big Music victimizes students, March 26, 2007
Nevada Appeal – The RIAA gets taken down a notch, March 26, 2007
what else is new – The real p2p pirates and thieves, November 18, 2005
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
March 26th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Besides the obvious method of boycotting their products, what other ways could we put the hurt on the RIAA or MPAA? Could an application such as Spammer Slapper be used to consume their bandwidth? How many users would it take to have an effect on their bill? Would this be construed as a DOS attack, I’m not wanting to take their site offline, just increase their bill?
March 27th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Perhaps using the broadcast (A.M. radio, for instance) media against the Soulless Ones (RIAA). For instance, broadcasting from the N.Y.C area, in the 5a.m. to 10 a.m. (Monday through Friday) time slot is a talk-show known as “The Curtis and Kuby hour” (Curtis Sliwa and Ron Kuby), both of whom sound rather enamored of anything “RIAA”, “anti ‘pirate’”; ad nauseum.
Perhaps it is time to “give these guys” (RIAA included) some inkling of what is *really* and “actually” going on in the world.