Open post to RIAA student victims
p2pnet news view | RIAA news:- The RIAA is still going to the wall with its Sue Every Student We Can Lay Our Hands On campaign.
Slowly, but very slowly, a handful of the universities involved are realising their duty rests with protecting their students, not acting as unpaid copyright cops for Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG.
In the meanwhile, sadly, it’s up to students to look out for themselves and each other because very few people in school legal departments will be doing it for them.
All too many universities are channelling an RIAA ’settlement letter’ to their students and if you’re studying at one of these institutions but don’t all for this so-called RIAA settlement scheme.
It’s phony. You’ll be asked to pay $3,000 in return for which you’ll be given the erroneous impression that you’ll be safe. In reality, however, all you’ll be doing is paying three thousand dollars to have your personal information permanently recorded by the RIAA, not to mention you’ll be incriminating yourself.
And remember: the RIAA acts in the interests of the Big 4 members of the organise music cartel, and only theirs.
If at some future date they decide it’s time to escalate their attacks on file sharers, they won’t think twice about using the names they’ve compiled at the literal expense of students who’ve signed the spurious settlement documents.
Liam over at Liam’s Blog thinks you might be interested to know the following >>>>
Everyone is up in arms about the increased amount of subpoenas that are being distributed throughout the U.S. especially to university students. What I don’t get is why so many people settle these lawsuits. I mean I know the legal fees can be daunting, but many people who have fought the RIAA in court have won. In fact just recently someone was awarded their attorney’s fees because the judge knew the RIAA was in the wrong. This could set precedent for other similar cases, meaning whenever they sued you and lost, they would have to foot the bill. Did you know they NOBODY has ever actually been successfully convicted of file sharing by the RIAA? So why then are Universities continuing to allow them to victimize students?
So if you get a subpoena in your mailbox but you weren’t the one who downloaded the infringing copyright, what are your options? Well believe it or not, you have a lot of them. When they subpoena you, they have grabbed your dynamic IP address, contacted your ISP -for colleges this is usually their IT dept.- and then some days later the ISP finds whoever currently has that IP address and charges you with the action. For starters you should know that a dynamic IP address is just that, dynamic. It constantly has the ability to change. In fact, right here at Plymouth State University, it could change once every 24 hours! Or even more if you are moving around to different buildings or using the wireless. So someone else could have downloaded files, and now that you have their IP address you get charged! I know, doesn’t seem very legal does it? The RIAA knows this and yet they continue to sue as a SCARE TACTIC, not because they actually have a chance to win with a judge who knows the basics about internet protocols.
Okay, so that aside, you’ve still gotten the notice, so what do you do then? Well if you are running something like a tor server (http://tor.eff.org) then you probably got blamed for another person’s traffic. Tor works by routing your traffic through other people’s computer to mask your identity, likewise, other people’s traffic flows through your computer as well. So if they did something, it may look like it’s coming from your IP address, and you get charged even though you didn’t do anything! Again, not an outrageous possibility, but of course, if you can prove you had tor installed, then it becomes that much harder to prove you downloaded the information.
Okay here’s the next big one. Do you have an unsecured wireless router? If so, ANYBODY who was driving by or in the next building who is using your internet could have been the offender. Again, there would be no way to prove that you downloaded it, unless they got the court to give a warrant for your computer and found the offending files on it. Keep in mind, that in the court of law it’s innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.
So now you know some simple ways to fight those nasty little letters you might have mistakenly received. If there is anyway someone else could have downloaded it and not you, then technically you shouldn’t be able to actually be convicted. Of course they can charge you, but the real question is whether or not they could win. While I offer no type of legal advice, and this entire posting is merely opinion, feel free to do some research on your own and find other facts that make the RIAA’s subpoena’s just not make sense. They’ve sued 10 year old girls and senior citizen’s who’ve never touched a computer in their lives. Just know that it’s not some advanced techniques they are using to “nab” you, but things a third grader could do. And they have no physical proof they’ve you done anything, they only have circumstantial evidence to support their case, and not any fact.
Ray Beckerman, the New York lawyer, who’s both acting for RIAA victims and compiling a detailed list of RIAA cases on Recording Industry vs The People, also took the trouble to prepare an Open Letter to Universities Whose Students Have Been Targeted by the RIAA.
“Please be sure to pass this along to anyone who works in the administration or counsel’s office of a college or university whose students have been targeted by the RIAA,” he says, continuing >>>>
Once the RIAA has obtained whatever “settlement” money it can squeeze from students and parents willing and able to pay the money, it will bring a “John Doe” proceeding. Contrary to the spirit of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, it will do everything it possibly can ex parte. It will file the complaint without notice to anyone, and submit the ex parte discovery order application without notice to anyone. Then, once it’s gotten an ex parte order signed by the judge, it will give minimal notice to you with minimal notice to your students.
Typically, “John Doe” will receive only a copy of a subpoena and a copy of the order with a letter from you, and will have just a few days, or at most a couple of weeks, to respond before his or her personal confidential information will be divulged. Meanwhile, if the student were to confer with a lawyer the lawyer doesn’t know what to say, because he or she has no copy of the underlying summons and complaint, no copy of the papers upon which the ex parte order is based, and no copy of the judge’s rules, all of which a defendant normally does receive in any normal litigation.
What you should, at a minimum, do for your students.
What you can do is insist that the RIAA stipulate with you that (a) any motion for an order granting discovery of the students’ identities will be on notice, both to you and the students, rather than ex parte, (b) that the RIAA must furnish to you, for each “John Doe”, a copy of the summons and complaint and exhibits, a full set of the motion papers, and a full set of all other court documents which are required to be served on the defendant when an action is initiated… for you to distribute to the affected students.
If the RIAA refuses to so stipulate, you should go to Court yourself and get an order requiring them to comply with these fundamentals which are required by due process.
What you should also do.
The courts have held that in order for a claimant to get an order for discovery of confidential names and addresses of a John Doe in a copyright infringement case, it must make a prima facie evidentiary showing that it has a case for copyright infringement against each “John Doe”.
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=warner_does1-149_memooflaw*
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=warner_does1-149_replymemo*
Since the RIAA has been proceeding ex parte, however, and since they weren’t challenged by the ISP’s, judges have signed off on the orders even though supported by mere conclusory hearsay of suspect reliability. (Compare the courts of the Netherlands and Canada, where the ISP’s challenged the application for “John Doe” information, and the Courts refused to grant the discovery orders, due to the unreliability of the RIAA’s investigative “method”).
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/#Foundation_v_UPC_Nederland*
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/#BMG_v_Doe(Canada)*
The lack of reliability of the RIAA’s “investigatory” technique is becoming more and more well documented. See, eg. the February 23, 2007, deposition of the RIAA’s expert.
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=umg_lindor_070223JacobsonDepositionTranscript*
See also expert witness statement of Prof. Pouwelse and Dr. Sips:
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=foundation_upcnederland_witnessdeclaration*
and amicus curiae brief of the ACLU, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Association of Law Libraries, and ACLU Foundation of Oklahoma, in Capitol v. Foster decrying the RIAA’s “driftnet” litigation strategy:
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=capitol_foster_amicus
Accordingly, we believe you should oppose the RIAA’s application for an order of discovery.
Likewise, if you learn of the RIAA obtaining such an order ex parte, you should move to vacate the order ex parte.
Sincerely yours,
Ray Beckerman
You might also want to consider this, from a story p2pnet posted a while back >>>>
“Years ago, college students were our best customers,” says RIAA spin doctor Cary Sherman (right). “Now they’re among our worst customers.”
Maybe that’s because years ago, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) weren’t trying to sue students into buying ‘product’.
The quote comes in an Associated Press story on the fact the RIAA is again running wild through the US school system, sending out what it calls “pre-litigation” letters to college students across America, ordering them to pay a ’settlement’ amount.
Or else.
In their most recent attack on the people who used to be their best customers, the Big 4 music cartel sent out another 405 blackmail letters to 23 universities and is now promising to send “hundreds” more every month, says AP.
This harks back to the days when the RIAA routinely fired subpoenas at men, women and even 12-year-old children every month. The University of Wisconsin is refusing to forward RIAA ’settlement’ letters, wrote Nick Penzenstadler in the University of Wisconsin’s online Badger Herald.
And, quoted by Penzenstadler, dean of students Lori Berquam said, “Housing is kind of like easy pickings. It’s like they are any easy target because there are 5,000 of them on our campus. My fear is that this is just the residence folks are being targeted, but who knows about the rest of the country.”
Thanks wholly to unstinting and constant help from the mainstream media, who re-publish Big 4 RIAA statements as though they’re factual documents from credible sources, the impression given is that students, and anyone else, are in very real danger of being singled out by the Big 4 enforcement unit.
In fact, the chances of any one person ending up on an RIAA hit list are similar to them being struck by lightning or winning millions of dollars in a lotto contest.
Meanwhile, is the RIAA effort paying off? Is it making an impression on file sharing or file sharers?
Not in the slightest.
In fact, the numbers of people using the p2p networks and independent online services and sites, rather than those backed and supported by the corporate music industry, are growing “There are nearly ten million people using only the most popular networks at any given time (to say nothing of private, invitation only, small group sharing etc.) and there are – very conservatively speaking – more than a billion files a month,” BigChampagne ceo Eric Garland told p2pnet recently. He went on:
The IFPI and RIAA project the volume of downloads to be far greater than that (estimates approaching 3 billion/month), but we do not know the basis of these projections.
We have observed no decreases in file sharing activity. On the contrary, the aggressive growth in popularity of BitTorrent clients (and increases in gnutella users by way of Limewire et al) demonstrate very much the opposite.
Proportionally, the growth rate in file sharing of film and television (and other multimedia) now exceeds that of popular music. We have observed no net decline in music, and music remains the most popular entertainment on P2P networks.
Garland puts the number of downloads at perhaps three billion a month. However, a new IDC white paper says it’s probably more like one billion a day.
But the corporate music industry, with its high prices, product of questionable quality and thin catalogues, doesn’t even begin to figure in this.
The RIAA and its owners would do better by putting the many millions of dollars they’re wasting on suing their own customers into finding ways to tap this potentially huge consumer base of music lovers. Instead, they’re, “just hoping somebody is going to figure all this out for them,” say retailers.
Don’t just stay tuned – do something.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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August 1st, 2007 at 6:06 am
Business is supposed to be easy to understand, give customers what they want and they’ll buy it.
Try to feed them crap they’ve never asked for in the first place, and they won’t buy.
In years from now, all those RIAA stories will be classified as “Everything you should not do if you want to have a successful business and happy customers”.