US schools say No! to RIAA extortion letters
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- The Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG and RIAA sue ‘em all campaign launched at students across America, falsely accusing them of being file sharing criminals and thieves, has had, and is still having, a seriously detrimental effect on their studies.
But now, “Administrators and IT chiefs at public universities nationwide say the recording industry’s search for students accused of online piracy is cutting into their faculty’s work day,” says eSchool News, going on:
“In recent months, some universities have refused to forward ‘pre-litigation’ letters to students offering them a settlement to avoid further legal action from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
It’s, “between the recording industry and the people who may be violating their copyrights,” the story has Brian Rust from Wisconsin at Madison’s Department of Information Technology, saying.
The school has, “seen a steady increase of subpoenas and ‘cease-and-desist’ notices forwarded from RIAA officials in recent years,” it states, with Rust declaring public institutions are an easy target.
“We’re very transparent about access to our network,” he says.
Interestingly, “Rust … says UW will, ‘participate in the study and provide documentation of the extensive steps taken to dissuade students from copyright infringement,’ p2pnet quoted the school’s Badger Herald as saying in May last year, continuing:
“The University of Wisconsin was one of the universities declining to act as an unpaid RIAA copyright cop, refusing to forward RIAA ’settlement’ letters to students.
“The ‘UW-Madison and all of our peer institutions have gone to great lengths to notify people, warn people and post notices via e-mail,’ the Badger Herald has Rust declaring.”
‘Not our role’
University of Kansas vice provost for information services and CIO Denise Stephens says her the school, “decided to stop forwarding pre-litigation papers to students because the practice did not fit the mission of the college,” according to eSchool News.
“We really had to make a decision philosophically about what our role was in this whole issue,” she says, also pointing out UofK has seen a rise in RIAA “cease-and-desist” notices.
“We’d be acting as a go-between for an external party seeking to get information about our students,” she declares in the story.
“We decided that was not our role.”
Nor is it the role of any other teaching establishment in America, or anywhere else in the world, a fact that’s escaped significant numbers of administrators who continue to act as unpaid RIAA copyright enforcers.
Adds the story:
“The RIAA did not return messages left by eSchool News. In courtroom arguments and media reports over the last year, however, the group has argued that compliance with subpoenas has not been a burden to universities in the past, so it should not be considered a burden now. But higher-education officials insist compliance with the RIAA is requiring too much of their time as the organization’s anti-piracy campaign has become more rigorous.”
eSchool News – Colleges push back against RIAA’s methods , August 29, 2008
p2pnet – Congress in RIAA school attacks, May 3,2007
Badger Herald – Congress steps into RIAA feud, May 3, 2007
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August 30th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Too little too late. They abandoned their students for the RIAA, so they deserve to suffer.
August 30th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
True, it is too late, but it is better that the schools admit their mistake, of working with the RIAA, now than never. The schools don’t deserve to suffer; nobody does, except for the RIAA and their goons. However, I bet the school administrators that foolishly helped the RIAA will probably end up being fired by their own schools.
August 31st, 2008 at 3:10 pm
to bad for universities if they won’t to be a volunteer in a musicterrrorbrigade created by diaaariaaa to scary people out of internet where new more effective businesses from musicians and their customers are brewing! If UNI will no cooperate then how music-middlemen-kings suppose to maintain their mansions, to fill their Maserati tank with high octane expensive fuel and to keep army of lawyers to fight for them?