RIAA now *literally* shaking down little girls for their lunch money.

That's a weird statement, no?

Against a 12 yr old kid? WTF will be next: suing pregnant moms for playing the MP3s they download to their embryos?

'Reality check' to thread

It's not like they purposely sued the kid--they just farmed the user names in question and the contact info on the acct. I was under the impression only the power users were getting picked up by this?

Yeah, but in this case, you'd still have your car.

Depends on what you say, of course. The idea I got from the article was that the mother (or whoever) had paid to use the service. (I thought I read that.) In that case, how could it be considered a crime to download files from it?

You stole that idea, Nichole!!!

(I'm actually not debating the right or wrong of this issue cos I don't give a crap, just the fact that somehow the fact that the person doing this is under 18 and an honors student somehow means they're not liable is ridiculous to me)

Only if it wasn't written down. It was, so I can block any subpoenas.

>Brianna and the others sued yesterday under federal copyright law could face penalties of up to $150,000 per song, but the RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000.

i.e. that's all the money they had in their bank accounts. this is incomprehensible evil.

The RIAA can't be play stupid now as it is, cause they HAVE set their cause back with this bad publicity: who will want to support an industry that is willing to sue children? (Their rep saying "we don't have details on those we sue" is bull, since they could make an effort to discover the info before sending out the subpoena.)

ok then, 'super duper' evil. how's that?

I don't have anything to go on beyond the above linked article to go on, concerning the cases where they're 'settling' for $3000. In previous cases though, the RIAA lawyers have been settling out of court in exchange for the entirety of the defendants' savings accounts. One of the preliminary cases involving college kids actually hosting the file, the amount was $17,000. Now that they've moved on to suing people who download, I'm not surprised they're encountering people with only $3000 in the bank, and not surprised to hear they're claiming it. $3000 barely even begins to cover their legal fees, but they're taking people's entire savings. this is their penalty, this is what they want people to learn.

Right. Play our game, pay our outrageous prices, or we will break you. It's not "incomprehensible," but for me it calls to mind Johnny Friendly in On The Waterfront.

suing middle class families, and settling OUT OF COURT for their life savings. is what's happening. is all.

I have no idea how the 12 year old ended up as a defendant. It's an irrelevant glitch on the surface of the issue. the cnn.com story (http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/09/downloading.music.ap/index.html) doesn't mention the 12 year old girl, it's not impossible FOXNEWS is running with an unverified factoid that other news agencies are checking on more carefully before uploading their stories.

The artists are still the ones losing out here, if theyre not seeing a cent of this suit money the RIAA is grabbing (does anyone know the deal?)

Which is a shame because for things like bootlegs and obsoltete/out of print recordings, filesharing is a marvellous idea.

Assume this suing can only apply in the US as it stands now?

that girl's family is in a lot of undeserved financial danger. they need to retain a lawyer immediately. I feel sympathetic towards them.

so everyone's okay with these people being 'made examples of' because after all there's no excuse for illegal behavior? I'm just checking here.

what the RIAA is doing is arguably illegal. they could be taken to court for market failure; when the market fails to provide a feasible alternative to an emerging technology, they have no legal grounds to criminalize this emerging technology. It's been tried before: Sony v. Universal re: Betamax, home taping. Sony is a big enough corporation to fight, they fought, they won. There is no one organization big enough to fight the RIAA, and as a result, they are picking off individual families, penalizing them by taking their life savings, and the rest of us are buying into it.

Their mouths are already watering drawing up the business models for internet distribution, it's a world of infinite renters in their eyes. And I'm sure their terms will be just reasonable enough. But suing people for using the internet to learn about music which many people then proceed to buy (I'm buying more records than I did before the age of the internet myself, how about you?) before they can even scrape together a legal alternative is desperate, and evil. They are the criminals, they are fucking thugs.

even this FOX story, 'the RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000', oh wow, how generous of them. after all they downloaded so much more than $3000 'worth' of physical objects and they're settling for everything they have.

I'll be a lot less forgiving of all this unauthorized downloading once there is an alternative; I'll be shopping like there's no tomorrow even. But that's completely besides the point.

(ooh look a flying pig)

oh look, her mom settled. for two thousand dollars. I love how the story says 'potential minefield', thank god it resolved without controversy, that is, they live in a city housing project and they've settled for two thousand dollars.

--
"We understand now that file-sharing the music was illegal," Torres said in a statement distributed by the recording industry. "You can be sure Brianna won't be doing it anymore."

Brianna added: "I am sorry for what I have done. I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love."

The case against Brianna was a potential minefield for the music industry from a public relations standpoint. The family lives in a city housing project on New York's Upper West Side, and they said they mistakenly believed they were entitled to download music over the Internet because they had paid $29.99 for software that gives them access to online file-sharing services.

*bleeeccchhhhhhh*
blaaarrgghh
cough

Ah, farting in the wind feels sooooo good.

Anybody know? I would guess that none of any settlement money would ever be seen by artists, since they get paid a flat sum and/or royalties, both stipulated in an contract that wouldn't have a clause for this sort of thing. The lawyers will probably get most of the loot. But this really is more about the record industry getting money from the music consumers they didn't sue than the ones they did.

I'm sorry for that little girl, but I'm keeping her money because I need to buy a very big new hard disk. And a 40 gig iPod.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/09/music.swap.settlement/index.html

the caption beneath her is the funniest thing I've read in the last three minutes. That's such a great smile.

interesting how the program most people I know use isn't on there...

Soulseek never seems to get namechecked in these things, despite everyone here loving it. Maybe it's cause Kazaa et al. are better for popular things.

"I am sorry for what I have done. I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love." really is the quote of the year.

Please won't someone make this the new FT/NYLPM tagline?

Does the internet work differently for kazaa users? "Without recording them"? Doesn't it save the track to your hard disk, or "record" it, if you will?

I like the concept of music being emancipated, though. "Fly, fly away, little song!"

I wish Jess was still called Strongo Hulkington.

The suing is just evil, but I'd say it's a pretty effective deterrent. Aren't we just all getting angry and not a little nervous about our (illegal) toy being taken away?

If we're going to be morally watertight about stealing the property of others.

let me be the first to admit that my upstream ranting about 'life savings' seems paranoid, now that the cnn article mentions fines in the $3000 range. the initial settlements against those college kids were in the $12-17,000 range, and did constitute the entirety of those kids' savings, so the rant did have grounding in precedent. One thing is certain, at $3000 a settlement, they're barely recouping legal fees, the RIAA is investing in these lawsuits as a means to educate the public. No checks for Momus.

Mark C wrote:
>not a little nervous about our (illegal) toy being taken away?

remember, Universal was suing Sony to make Video Tape Recorders illegal, and people were thinking they were going to win. after all, taping copies of films off of television was clearly 'illegal'. Sony had vested interests in fighting back, and won, and now VTR's don't seem illegal at all. But at first, no one was sure.

The RIAA has no Sony to sue this time, filesharing is a technology being developed by many different entities. But this means there's no Sony to fight back; by bringing suit against individuals and picking them off one at a time, they're much more likely to win this PR battle of convincing people that using this technology is illegal. It's illegal? It doesn't have to be, but they're unwilling to provide a legal alternative.

Why aren't they? Why isn't the RIAA simply adapting the proven success of the Apple Music Store business model? Simple, it's too generous to customers. Physical media is a thing of the past, we no longer get to 'own' our music. We get to rent it. But it's going to be a few more years before people are ready to relinguish our 'property right', so until then they'll just tax us $3000 a pop for trying to use the technology we already know works.