p2pnet - rss feed: 100 new RIAA victims
p2p news / p2pnet:- ‘RIAA’ stands for Recording Industry Association of America, the pseudo-trade organization being used by the Big Four music cartel to terrorize Americans who share music online.
It’s a given that whenever the RIAA says ‘black,’ think ‘white’. And even Recording Industry Association of ‘America’ is spurious: the cartel, which owns the RIAA lock, stock and barrel, comprises Vivendi Universal (France), EMI Group (UK), Sony BMG (Japan, Germany) and Warner Music, ostensibly American but headed by Canada’s Edgar Bronfman jr.
Currently, a 14-year-old American school-girl is among the victims as the Big Four threaten their own customers with court unless they buy ‘product’.
But the girl, Britanny Chan, isn’t alone. As part of its sue ‘em all campaign, the RIAA has launched yet another mass case against ‘John Does’ who don’t even know they’ve been sued, says Recording Industry vs The People.
The cartel is now trying to force ISP Time Warner Cable to hand over the names of 100 customers in the New York metro area.
The August 31 subpoenas have an October 26 deadline. But at least one “Jane Doe” is making a motion to quash the subpoena, says Ray Beckerman, one of the lawyers acting for RIAA victims.
Everyone whose name the cartel gets will be ‘instructed’ to contact what amounts to a blackmail ‘settlement’ centre backed by the record labels. This centre will typically initially attempt to extort around $7,500 from the RIAA victim, eventually going to around $3,500.
The people being scammed are all very ordinary men, women and children who don’t have a hope of being able to match the resources wielded by the multi-billion-dollar cartel. So some of them pay up, and around 3,500 of the approximately 15,000 victims have so far ‘settled’.
That’s $12,245,000 at a very conservative estimate.
No one knows what happens to the money, but one thing is certain: not one penny of it reaches the performers the RIAA’s owners purport to represent and who, they claim are suffering terrible hardships because of file sharers.
However, the tide is beginning to turn against the music industry as people decide they’re not going to stand still while Vivendi Universal, EMI, Sony BMG and Warner rob and terrorize them in a bid to bludgeon them into buying the grossly over-priced, lossy music tracks the cartel is touting.
One of them, Tanya Andersen, a disabled mother who lives in Oregon, is even turning the tables against the cartel, suing them under a US law normally reserved for prosecuting Organized Crime.
For now, the latest case is Interscope Records v. Does 1-100″ under docket number 05-CV-7667 (RJH).
“As with all of its other cases, the RIAA sought and obtained an ex parte order granting it discovery,” says Recording Industry vs The People.
Ex parte means without the other side having notice, or an opportunity, to be heard in opposition.
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi
See:-
among the victims - Big Music wants Britanny Chan, October 5, 2005
Recording Industry vs The People - Interscope v. Does yet another RIAA p2p case, against 100 “John Does” in Manhattan Federal Court, October 5, 2005
stand still - The ‘We’re Not Taking Any More’ club, September 17, 2005Organized Crime - Victim sues RIAA under RICO Act, October 2, 2005
They depend on us. We don’t depend on them. Bug the hell out of your local congress person, MP, or whoever is supposed to represent you, wherever you are. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.
October 8th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
Bad link:
or now, the ” target=”_blank”>latest case is Interscope Records v. Does 1-100″ under docket number 05-CV-7667 (RJH)
October 8th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
Fixed. Thanks …..
Cheers!
October 8th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
Is this article saying that the music industry can demand the identity of an individual without them even knowing about it to be able to fight them off?
October 9th, 2005 at 3:41 am
I believe your isp is supposed to inform you that they’re giving your identity to a third party, but many don’t do this apparently.
Of course by the time you have been informed they’ve already got all the details.
October 9th, 2005 at 5:47 am
hmm.. maybe somebody should give the RIAA a list of their own ip addresses and say that those “ip’s” have illegal music on them.. i wanna see them start a lawsuit on themselves..
October 9th, 2005 at 5:53 am
That’s a good one, I haven’t thought that one up! I’m going to use it once in a while….
October 9th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
“hmm.. maybe somebody should give the RIAA a list of their own ip addresses and say that those “ip’s” have illegal music on them.. i wanna see them start a lawsuit on themselves..”
I would laugh my ass off if that happened and it got posted as a massive bust only to find their own computers.
October 9th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
Perhaps subscribers should start sueing their ISP’s.
October 9th, 2005 at 5:31 pm
What would be even greater is some hacker install Kazaa and some hit pop tunes in the RIAA’s system. they can hide it in folders the industry employees wouldn’t know about then enable the share option.
October 10th, 2005 at 3:23 am
If it states in their privacy policy or terms of service that in the event they receive a subpoena for identifying information about you that they will notify you and they fail to do so then they have committed a breach of contract and you have an actionable claim.
It’s not clear what kind of compensation you would get for it, should you press the matter. In the best case, where you prevail against the RIAA, the actual damages would be the cost of defending yourself.
Some people, who knew nothing about filesharing have had unpleasant surprises in the form of a subpoena and lawsuit due to erroneous recordkeeping or misinterpretation of whatever records were kept. These would include several people who exclusively used Macs, but were accused of infringement using a p2p client that only runs under Windows on a PC.
The ISPs could do themselves and everyone else a favor by simply switching to ‘ephemeral’ logs. The recording industry most certainly knows the meaning of that word as it figures prominently in the rights and royalties sections of contracts. If at time X, the status of their network was nominal operations, there is virtually no reason (from a technical point of view) that at time X + 36 hours, a technician would need to examine logs that mapped specific IPs to specific users. If someone hosed the backhaul on their node, or crumped an upstream router, or ran their upstream full bore for several continuous hours, they would know this already and would be able to identify and deal with that party.
After that, they can just aggregate data, discarding the specific logs mapping an IP to a user (for DHCP and PPPoE. Those with static IPs might be out of luck here.)
Then, when confronted with a subpoena they can respond that the data sought is ephemeral and permanently erased after 36 hours. As long as this is a written, stated policy and consistently followed, the party issuing the subpoena has no recourse. What no longer exists (or never existed in the first place) can not be remanded to a third party.
There is no legal requirement for an ISP to keep any user logs at all. In the USA, virtually all broadband internet connectivity service is priced soley by connection speed and type (static or dynamic IP) and not by connect time or actual throughput (quantity of data sent and received,) so user IP information is totally irrelevant for billing (or tax) purposes.
The ISPs would be doing us a big favor (and saving themselves cost and expense) if they’d simply stop collecting this information and archiving it forever like sports statistics.
–TG
October 10th, 2005 at 7:11 am
“The ISPs would be doing us a big favor (and saving themselves cost and expense) if they’d simply stop collecting this information and archiving it forever like sports statistics.”
If they did that the industry would lobby congress to require ISP’s to maintain logs.
October 11th, 2005 at 5:37 pm
my question really is this, since mp3’s arent perfect digital copies which most lawsuits are claiming shouldn’t they be thrown out. I mean yes they are better quality then a copy from radio, but they are still not identical or close to identical to the decompressed originals on master tracks or cds. (if you have a really good sound system you can tell the difference)