RIAA-style copyright extortion at UGA
p2pnet view Crime | RIAA:- RIAA-style extortion has reached a university in Georgia, USA.
The Recording Industry Association of America, owned by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian), operates along Mafia lines.
Its enforcers routinely demand payments from alleged copyright infringers, threatening them with dire consequences unless they come through with ’settlements’ usually starting at around $3,000.
In Britain, this type of scam is now big business, one of its practitioners, ACS:Law, even having caught the attention of the House of Lords.
Now, “A security analyst at the University of Georgia is charged with extortion after he allegedly tried to shakedown a student who illegally downloaded music using the UGA computer network,” says WSB News, going on >>>
37-year-old Dorin Lucian Dehelean of Atlanta is accused of contacting the student last month to notify her she’d been caught downloading copyrighted material. UGA Police Chief Jimmy Williamson told the Athens Banner-Herald he offered to “make the situation go away in exchange for money.” The student notified her academic advisor, who then called campus police.
Dehelean was arrested after a plainclothes officer, pretending to be the student, gave the suspect an undisclosed amount of money. If convicted, the former employee of UGA’s Enterprise Information Technology Services could go to prison for up to ten years.
Dehelean’s job at the university “required him to check the weekly report from the Recording Industry Association of America that showed UGA which IP addresses on the campus network were used for illegal downloads of music, movies and other copyrighted material”, adds the story.
UGA police believe “other members of the university community may have fallen victim under similar circumstances,” says the Oconee Enterprise.
“They have requested contact from any individuals who may have received similar offers or have been involved in actual transactions involving Dehelean or others”, it says. ” The University of Georgia Police Department said that victims could be assured that they were not in danger of prosecution.”
Will RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol (right) be indicted on similar charges?
Stay tuned.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
big business – ACS:Law-type scams ‘big business’, January 28, 2009
WSB News – Student Shakedown at UGA, February 3, 2010
Oconee Enterprise – UGA police arrest Watkinsville man, February 5, 2010
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February 8th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Since the RIAA is allowed to commit this type of crime why not this guys?
This logic escape me.
February 9th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
This guy went about it all wrong. If he had recorded some cheap karaoke tunes, registered a no-cost copyright, and quietly seeded them on the university network, he could have demanded (and likely received) thousands of dollars per “infringement” – and the police would have never got involved.
Instead, he’s facing a jail term for receiving chump change. Idiot. Wannabe extortionists would do well to get legal advice before acting. Extortion is legal when extortionists get to write the laws, and freelance profiteers can safely exploit those laws.