RIAA to drop extortion notes, says UCLA official
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- A significant, and frightening, number of otherwise intelligent US school administrators have been totally sucked in by the RIAA university extortion scam.
Under it, the major labels and movie studios use administrators and teachers as unpaid corporate copyright cops and fronts, working against the same students they’re supposed to be educating and advising.
The effect is: Buy corporate ‘product’. If you don’t, we’ll make your life thoroughly miserable.
Milllions of people in the US, including students, have shared music online, and still do, multi-million-dollar efforts by the corporate music industry to halt the practice having proved to be totally fruitless.
The Big 4 have, though, been able to turn subpoenas against an infinitesimally small number of P2P file sharers into a climate of fear, using the services of an online bounty hunter called MediaSentry to provide much of the information used in the lawsuits.
Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG and their RIAA were ultimately forced to fire the company, and in a new PR stunt, claim to have stopped suing people.
Except they haven’t.
Particularly heavy file sharers
Only one day after Christmas, in UMG Recordings v Briggs “the RIAA served a summons and complaint on the defendant on December 26, 2008,” a mere eight days after announcing it was ending its sue ‘em all campaign, noted Ray Beckerman in Recording Industry vs The People.
Now, “My understanding is that the RIAA has opted to no longer pursue the pre-litigation notice system, or any of their other litigations,” Kenn Heller (right), associate director of the UCLA Center for student programming, is quoted as saying flatly in the Daily Bruin.
“What that means, on a positive note to UCLA students, is that they won’t be getting any of those notices, whether they were apprised of it through the university or not,” Heller declares.
“The announcement could mean the end of the RIAA’s years-long legal campaign against individuals caught sharing files illegally,” says the story.
However, even the RIAA doesn’t claim that’s the case.
It’s, “reserving the right to sue people who are particularly heavy file sharers, or who ignore repeated warnings,” says the Wall Street Journal, which broke the ‘news’.
‘… the RIAA’s decision changes very little’
“The group said that it will be working with Internet service providers to detect delinquent file-sharers whose internet connection could be interrupted or disconnected entirely if they choose not to comply with warnings and notices,” the Daily Bruin goes on.
It also has RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol saying while the specifics of the RIAA’s plans to work with ISPs “will be determined in ongoing negotiations,” he noted the, “growing willingness of Internet service providers to protect the integrity of legal Web commerce”.
However, maintaining its standard, even that statement is unadulterated RIAA PR BS.
AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Charter Communications surely represent the principal US providers, said p2pnet recently.
But, “not one of these major ISPs felt able to confirm the bald, unequivocal RIAA statement that it’d ‘hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs’,” we said.
And, “All I can tell you right now is that we have an agreement on principle with several leading ISPs but not all, and the agreement on principle is confidential,” said RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth according to Wired.
Meanwhile, “the RIAA’s decision changes very little about file-sharing penalties at UCLA,” says Heller in the story, adding:
“(The announcement) doesn’t change very much as far as the current process in place. When the university receives a verifiable complaint from a copyright owner, the university will still respond as it has.”
He was also, “careful to caution that students should not misinterpret this announcement to mean that illegal file-sharing at UCLA is acceptable,” noting RIAA suits are, “only a fraction of those handled by the university, but that it now seems that any students who are caught sharing files will not have as much reason to worry about the possibility of being sued”
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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