Students are fans: RIAA’s Duckworth
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- “College students are some of the music industry’s best fans,” says recently appointed RIAA spin physician and former MPAA employee Cara Duckworth, explaining why Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA is trying to sue students in universities across America into becoming compliant consumers.
“Years ago, college students were our best customers,” said RIAA fiction coordinator Cary Sherman.
More recently, the spindustry enforcement unit began flooding US universities with extortion letters designed to intimidate recipients into both incriminating themselves and admitting to copyright infringements.
Thousands of students have been thus threatened but to date, not one of them has appeared in court, let alone been found guilty of anything.
School administrators are coerced into to carrying the letters and despite the lack of favourable (to the Big 4) resolutions, the heavyweight RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is still able to create the illusion it’s winning cases.
The RIAA contacted the University of Wisconsin-Madison demanding that it forward extortion letters to students.
“The university refused and now a federal judge has ordered it to hand over the names of 53 students, p2pnet posted, going on:
The Capital Times has Ken Frazier, interim cto at UW-Madison, saying it may not be possible to link each of the 53 Internet connections to an individual and indeed, although the RIAA is at pains to give the impression that IP addresses lead directly to people, IP addies are no more than links to computers which can be used by anyone with access to them. And if unprotected Wi-fi is involved, they can be secretly taped from outside.
“Students share Internet ports and computers, and some IP addresses may lead to common areas such as labs,” said Frazier in the story.
Now Duckworth says the RIAA going after the university because, “at the time of capture we only have [an Internet Protocol] address – which is unique to each computer, also saying so-called pre-litigation letters, “include settlement offers of $3,000, with the second wave increasing to about $4,000 and the last stage ranging up to $5,000 or higher,” says the Daily Cardinal, adding:
“According to Duckworth, the RIAA’s settlement offers are considered a discount because copyright law allows for $750 to be recouped per infringement.”
The RIAA calls its victimisation campaign an “initiative to raise awareness to the law”.
“We don’t think that there’s going to be a silver bullet solving piracy – there is no way of solving piracy – but our goal is to contain the problem,” she says, according to the story, directly contradicting her boss, Mitch Bainwol, who a year ago claimed unauthorized song swapping had already been properly “contained”.
Then, “We believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat,” he stated unequivocally.
Also See:
recently appointed – New RIAA misinformation director, June 12, 200
best customers – The RIAA university lament, April 19, 2007
p2pnet – Give IDs to RIAA, UW-Madison told, April 27, 2007
Daily Cardinal – RIAA files new copyright suit against UW student, September 7, 2007
directly contradicting her boss – P2p file sharing contained: RIAA, June 13, 2006
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September 7th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
So if they acknowledge the fact that they’ll never be able to put an end to filesharing, then why the hell are they ruining people’s lives? So they’ll be able to scare people into switching over to overpriced, DRM-infested, spyware-monitored, poorly catalogued “legal” P2P?
This is pathetic.
September 7th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Why? This is what they do. End of story.
September 8th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I would like to correct Cara. Students WERE fans, but the “music” industry flushed that down the toilet with their sue them all campaign and lousy product. I haven’t patronized the media mafia in years!
September 10th, 2007 at 6:29 am
“then why the hell are they ruining people’s lives?”
Simply because suing people IS their new business, and it makes far more money than simply selling CD’s (which is more and more becoming a front to hide their real operations).
Most people’s CD collection is worth 3000$, and the RIAA sue the ordinary fan for more than 3000$, and they do it every week… its a huge pool of money they’re putting their hands into.
Do the maths