~ryanlowe/blog: Students Settle with RIAA

Students Settle with RIAA

Students being sued by the RIAA for setting up massive file-sharing systems on university resources have have settled for amounts between $12,000 and $17,000. I shook my head when I read this from the article:

Despite the settlements, the students did not admit any guilt. "I don't believe that I did anything wrong," 18-year-old Peng said in a statement. "I am glad that the case has been settled amicably, and I hope that, for the sake of artists, the larger issues can soon be resolved."

These kids had many many thousands of files shared on these systems. Just because they disagree with the way record companies share their revenues with artists doesn't justify breaking the law. If they're going to share files illegally the least they can do is not hide behind some bogus excuse -- own up to it.

If they said "we wanted to impress girls with our l33t collection!" then I would accept that. But these systems were just ridiculous - you'd never be able to listen to all of that music in a lifetime. Count your lucky stars boys and girls, you got off easy.

Posted at May 01, 2003 at 07:12 PM EST
Last updated May 01, 2003 at 07:12 PM EST

Comments

From what I understood, they were not originally charged for sharing files, but for creating a "napster like file sharing system".

BUT, what they did was to make an app that crawls the network and create a searchable database of all files (music, non-music, etc) that are shared. If they settled because of this, then that is dumb. That is like having google responsible for what it crawls. Like google (and the students) I believe, they would have a black list that they would not search that host.

Yes, having songs that they don't have the rights to is bad, but the original thing was to charge them for all rights on the network. Crazy.

It is really just a scare tactic to put fear into the publics hearts. It is just a PR thing.

The part that annoys me, is the school that some of these guys go to have agreements and a process to go though if there are copyright violations on the network. They by-passed this an sued them. Bad form. :-P

» Posted by: JimboJones at May 2, 2003 04:52 PM

I understood that they actually had the files -- that's why they could be charged with copyright violations. They used the crawlers to "collect" files from (probably) unsuspecting members of the school network. Then they used these super servers to distribute the songs. Talk about bad form. Dummies.

» Posted by: Ryan at May 2, 2003 06:43 PM

From what I understood, at first with the charges they were brought against these guys because of the sw that they built. It crawled, indexed, and allowed searching. It didn't actually hold the files, it just mades links to them. And from what I read, they didn't use these servers to distribute the songs, just used to to find them.

And really, I doubt that when people share files, you can call them "unsuspecting" that people could / would access them.

There was a good break down of one of the lawsuites here: [http://barillari.org/papers/peng/peng.html]

» Posted by: JimboJones at May 2, 2003 10:15 PM