p2pnet - rss feed: Pay $5,100 or else, RIAA orders diabetic student
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Purdue University sophomore Andi Fine received an email, last year, saying she was being sued for downloading 568 songs.
She thought it was a fake. But it wasn’t. It was another extortion demand from Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA.
Pay $3,000, or be sued, it told her.
Fine is an insulin-dependent diabetic who’s putting herself through school, at the same time struggling with health-care costs, says the Gannett News Service.
She didn’t have the money to ’settle’ or fight the charges and when she did neither, “she was notified that the cost to settle had increased to $5,100 and could eventually more than double,” says the story.
“There have been so many times when I felt like my head was going to explode because I’m trying to figure out what my next move is,” it quotes her as saying.
Last week the House approved a higher education bill ordering schools to report what they’re doing to prevent illegal file sharing by users of its networks and to “explore” purchasing technology that would block it, says Gannett News.
Big Music is, “attempting to force universities to purchase expensive and unreliable technologies in an effort to try to just get to zero violations,” it has Doug Wasitis, Washington lobbyist for Indiana University, saying. “We’re trying to push back and say there are other ways to do this.”
Under the ‘other ways’ category, Greg Jackson, chief information officer at the University of Chicago, recently confessed to policing the uiversity’s networks on behalf of the Big 4’s RIAA, for exzample.
It’s a matter of dollars and cents, he told the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, admitting his department, “spends from $100,000 to $200,000 a year responding to complaints of illegal file sharing from RIAA and other organizations [read Hollywood’s MPAA] he said, pointing out he’d rather be spending it elsewhere, but it’s “not an unreasonable amount”.
And, “we want to play nice,” says Cindy Frank, director of service delivery and project management for information technology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Playing nice” cost the school half-a-million-dollars and, “We’ve negotiated very inexpensive deals for students,” she goes on.
“Napster is $2 a month and offers 3 million songs. We have also spent a lot money and time marketing them. We encourage these legal metods for downloading music.”
Put another way, the school has spent a lot of taxpayer money to market and promote Napster, at absolutely no expense to Napster, so it can peddle Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG ‘product’ to students, who risk being sued by the RIAA if they don’t co-operate.
Now, “Merri Beth Lavagnino, IU’s chief information policy officer, said the Recording Industry Association of America called her in the fall to ask what IU was doing differently because its monitors hadn’t found any recent violations,” says Gannett News, continuing:
The school had received 353 copyright infringement notices from the RIAA from Sept. 6 through mid-February 2006, the 21st-highest number among schools nationwide. Those notices are given to get schools to find the users responsible and stop the activity.
Lavagnino said there’s a problem with fewer than 1 percent of IU’s students, in part because IU spends $400,000 a year on education and prevention programs. That includes warning students about the legal issues. [Our emphasis.]
Purdue spokeswoman Jeanne Norberg said Purdue uses public forums, the web, internal communications and the news media to combat the problem, and according to Purdue’s Web site, itl had a “National Cybersecurity Awareness Month” in the fall that included a lecture by a student who was sued by the industry, says Gannet News.
Fine, meanwhile, “is hoping the industry will settle her case by allowing her to pay only for what it would cost to legally download the songs from sites that charge about $1 a song,” says the story.
She shouldn’t hold her breath.
Click here for p2pnet’s RIAA war against students in a nutshell.
It’s a retrospective/indictment of the Big 4 labels, of schools, administrators, and educators who’ve yet to take a stand against them and includes landmarks in the 11-month old ‘reign of terror,’ including the start of the extortionate “early settlement” sale, the sudden withdrawal of a case in which a 17-year-old student was subpoenaed in class during school hours, the call by Harvard law professors for universities to fight back.
Also See:
Gannett News Service - Congress, colleges clash over file-sharing fight, February 14, 2007
policing the uiversity’s networks - RIAA goes after University of Dayton, February 1, 2008
we want to play nice - Vanderbilt ‘plays nice’ with the RIAA, December 5, 2007
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February 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Another life potentially ruined by the RIAA. How do these people sleep at night? I know, on a mattress stuffed with all the profits they’ve stolen from artists over the years, and squeezed out of poor college students.
RIAA, you make me sick!
February 15th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
You know, sometimes you feel like “OK, I’m going to go legal on this”, so you actually look for a music CD of an album you like, in my case it was Dream Theater’s Falling Into Infinity, and because it just happens to be theur hottest album apparetly, they’ve what appears to be differential pricing, they want $19 for it, and I was like “screw you! who the hell do you mada fakas think you are?” I am not foo-king paying 19 bucks. What a rip off! And they cry they’re being devastaated by file sharing, well! With those prices, what the hell were they expecting?
February 15th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
This is going to end up in a blood bath.
February 18th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Record companies have been ripping people off for years charging $15-$20 per cd, it went down to $12 for a lot of them but they still charge the old rip off rate whenever they can, not to mention the old “import” scam where they charge even more!! Then they get all pissed when people tel them to fuck off and download songs off the internet. Time for all those dinosaur record execs to get new jobs, supervising shuffleboard matches on cruise ships to the music of Perry Como.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:52 am
What happened to charging upfront for something? Have you ever bought something off Ebay? Seems this would solve a lot of problems. RIAA is just setting the trap and the universities are allowing them to do it. I wouldn”t doubt if some college representatives are on the take.