RIAA Targets New Colleges, Still Avoids Harvard

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Billboard reports that the RIAA has filed its eighth round of 'early settlement' letters to twenty-two colleges. Continuing its practice of avoiding Harvard, the RIAA's new round does not include any letters to that institution, where certain law professors have counseled resistance to the RIAA and told the RIAA to 'take a hike'. The unlucky institutions on the receiving end of the 403 new letters include Arizona State University (35 pre-litigation settlement letters), Carnegie Mellon University (13), Cornell University (19), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (30), Michigan State University (16), North Dakota State University (17), Purdue University — West Lafayette and Calumet campuses (49), University of California — Santa Barbara (13), University of Connecticut (17), University of Maryland — College Park (23), University of Massachusetts — Amherst and Boston campuses (52), University of Nebraska — Lincoln (13), University of Pennsylvania (31), University of Pittsburgh (14), University of Wisconsin — Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee, Stevens Point, Stout and Whitewater campuses (62)."

403 Error:

403 new letters

I accidently associated the 403 letters with the 403 error, and thought it was some geeky way of describing them, haha. 403 letter: Forbidden You may not download our musics!

Re:403 Error:

Now it is, this will forever be apart of geek lore like the 419 scams, in Korea jokes, in Soviet Russia jokes, goatse.cx and most of all the Cowboy Neal option.

I guess now every nerd will be sending the MafIAA a 404 reply letter saying sorry resource not found, go blow smoke up somebody Else's ass because it wasn't me.

Dangerous move...

Cornell University (19), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (30), Michigan State University (16)

They should be careful. Didn't they hear that MIT students are Fearless [slashdot.org], bomb-wielding [slashdot.org], genetic-mutant creating [slashdot.org] hacking [slashdot.org] terrorists?

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And that MIT is located right next to Harvard...

Re:Dangerous move...

And that MIT is located right next to Harvard...

Correction: Harvard is located right next to MIT.

This only means the RIAA has no case

If the RIAA really had a case, they'd talk to kids from Harvard too. And since the Harvard kids were told to say no, the RIAA could sue the Harvard kids to oblivion. This only means one thing: the RIAA letters are extortion, plain and simple.

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Duh! Everyone knows this. It is just that most people have second thoughts when they are facing the dripping fang vampire all alone. Harvard just let the students know they would not be alone. The other schools are willing to throw the students under a

Re:This only means the RIAA has no case

Duh! Everyone knows this. It is just that most people have second thoughts when they are facing the dripping fang vampire all alone. Harvard just let the students know they would not be alone. The other schools are willing to throw the students under a bus. Not surprising, really...

One interesting note on that point is that the Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Boston University is acting as an expert witness on behalf of the students [blogspot.com].

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Chairmanship of a department is not an honor (at least in an engineering field). It's typically passed around as a hot potato (haven't been chairman yet? you're next!) because it's a huge time drain and a distraction from the research the faculty want to

Re:This only means the RIAA has no case

Following a shipwreck a lawyer, priest, and newspaper reporter were stuck in a raft close to shore, but in waters clearly infested by sharks. After many hours of miserable huddling the lawyer screamed "I can't take it any more!", dove into the water and swam towards shore. The others shouted protests, but to everyone's surprise the sharks parted and let the man swim safely to land.

"It's a miracle!" exclaimed the priest.

"No... professional courtesy", explained the journalist.

And that also explains why the RIAA isn't going after the Harvard kids.

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What's the alternative? That RIAA is prejudiced against Harvard? Not likely. When you have a trademark, you can't make the decisions about who you enforce it against. You have to treat all cases without prejudice and enforce it across the board. Why is it

Re:This only means the RIAA has no case

For starters, it's different here because Copyright and Trademark law are completely different, with different justifications and goals.

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Copyright infringement suits can be filed against any alleged perpetrator in any fashion. They don't have to do it evenly. In fact, it's impossible for the RIAA to even sue all file-sharers, as there are dozens of millions.

To answer your main question,

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Or, to sum up your post a little better, the RIAA only goes after people who can't fight back.
The RIAA likes to take candy from babies, but avoids the ones with guard dogs.

Re:This only means the RIAA has no case

Maybe potential law students would be wise to consider which school's the RIAA consider's easy pickings and which ones are untouchable when sending out applications.

On way...

This wouldn't exactly do the torrent community any favors, but if I were running a torrent client from a campus LAN, I'd block inbound connections from IPs not on my campus. If they cant see me sharing, they cant sue me.

Kinda find it interesting that one of the best law schools in the country isn't receiving these threats.

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Just because *they* can't directly see you violate copyright, doesn't mean other people can't report you. I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA isn't below hiring a bunch of 'snitches' or setting up 'snitch' lines to report ANti-American behaviour. Respecting copyright i

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Sadly true. I attended Purdue myself and (years before the RIAA started mailing out these letters) knew several people who had received notices that they must cease and desist or face the possibility of not graduating. To support this effort, certain par [sony.com]

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They'd still see your ass on the torrent, though. It's not like they have to actually test to see if you're actually sharing real chunks.

A person can't run a honeypot and learn about networking and security anymore?

Re:On way...

A person can't run a honeypot and learn about networking and security anymore?

Only if you are a media company. ;)

Active Music Trading on Freenet 0.5 and 0.7

Music and movies are being traded on Freenet under a 'culture freedom' movement. You shouldn't be able to be caught if you don't want to be, it's all a matter of your risk tolerance.

More Absurdity

UMASS Boston doesn't even have dormitories, so how do they expect to be targeting specific students?! These blanket accusations to "set examples" and try to deter file sharing is absolutely despicable, and more colleges need to take hints from Harvard and not be intimidated by baseless claims that are already crumbling in the courts. All colleges that don't stand by their students and hand them over to the pack of lying dogs at the RIAA are complacent with the same absurdities and the students ought to wonder what they've been paying for at their respective colleges. The insanity continues, Fight the RIAA, Fight for your Rights!

Perfect picks.

Wonderfully, it seems the RIAA is picking a bunch of colleges with both the money and the staff to assist in defending their students. With other colleges already taking similar stances, I expect that many of the current round will do so as well. Thus, I expect the RIAA to soon learn that this method is fraught with enough reasons to ensure they fail.

My only worry is their attempts at creating circumstances and/or laws that "coerce" the colleges to give up their (possibly) innocent (or not) students without due process.

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I go to the University of Pittsburgh, and they want no part of getting in the way. If the RIAA files a notice the University will tell them whose IP it belongs to and even assist them.

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Plus, they've decided to pick out quite a few public institutions of higher learning, who will bring to bear their considerably larger legal resources, being both entities of the state AND members of large university systems. On a side note, I was wonderi

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In the case of Carnegie Mellon in particular, I remember the policy being that CMU will pass the information requested by the RIAA right through to them, and has explicitly told its student body that it will not shield them from investigation and prosecuti

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Wonderfully, it seems the RIAA is picking a bunch of colleges with both the money and the staff to assist in defending their students.

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that universities have money for everything except the students. (Yes, I atte

No one likes the RIAA

If The RIAA were an ice cream flavor, they'd be pralines and dick.

This can only mean one thing...

...that the RIAA is run by Harvard grads.

Figures, corrupt lawyers and all...

In related news...

Harvard professors receive 22 requests for counsel about 403 RIAA letters ...

How to beat the RIAA

* Don't listen to artists from member labels. Well, at least not new artists
* Don't buy their product. If you MUST buy, find a way to buy directly from the artist, or download artist-authorized bootlegs and send your money to the artist.
* Don't download RIAA product. Downloads only help them to justify their whining.

Re:How to beat the RIAA

For your own sake, don't listen to it. This applies regardless of the RIAA's tactics.

Re:How to beat the RIAA

I would advise against it. 4 of 5 backup singers say that "that shit is B-A-N-A-N-A-S."

Harvrd Legal Counsel

If Harvard's professors really do have a valid defense that is intimidating the RIAA from suing them, they should do some pro-bono work for the other schools that ARE getting sued! Help out your fellow institutions for the betterment of everyone!

Bullies

Perfect life lessons in this one...

- Bullies won't go after you if they are afraid that there's a chance of getting their nose bloodied.
- Don't have to run faster than the bear... just faster than the slowest guy running from the bear.

Harvard students are excluded from these notifications, not because of their innocence, but because of the fact that there are literally thousands of easier targets to go after that have no chance of fighting back!

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Does anyone?

RIAA does target Harvard...

I went to Harvard for college...

http://www.thecrimson.com/archives.aspx?SearchTerms=RIAA&SortField=0&PageSize=10&News=1&Opinion=2&Sports=3&Magazine=5&Arts=4 [thecrimson.com]

I hope the Crimson's servers stand up.

The RIAA frequently targeted students individually, and AFAIK continues threatening letters occasionally to individual students if they can figure out who you are. As you can see from the Crimson archives there was some pushback from the law school profs.

Back in the late 90's, your (fixed, non-DHCP) undergraduate IP at Harvard mapped to username.person.harvard.edu or something like that, making it trivially easy to see who was where, and you would 'magically' get spam for visiting websites, as your email was [e-mail]. This was changed around '99 or so, now it is a roamXXX.student.harvard.edu I believe, and DHCP'd to a real IP address. This helps protect anonymity and individual student's activity, and Harvard does not give out the mapping to individual students.

Harvard internally sends curious emails reporting "excessive bandwidth" use to us, which also still continues AFAIK. Several of my friends received these, we think it was in the neighborhood of > 10 GB per day use. They basically said to quit it, or we might look further as to what you are doing, or bring you in front of a disciplinary committee. This was back in the days of i2hub (remember this?), and most of my friends just throttled their bandwidth with no further problems -- very scared of the hassle of defending yourself even if it is "legit" activity.

Mickey Mouse...

The day I can use Mickey Mouse in my own work is the day I give a damn about the RIAA's "losses".

Re:Mickey Mouse...MOD UP PARENT

The day I can use Mickey Mouse in my own work is the day I give a damn about the RIAA's "losses".

This is a very wise, if obscure to many, comment that copyright law has been so skewed towards the big corporations that civil disobedience is more than justified. Study the history of copyrights and you'll understand why the Founders of the USA democracy specified that secure for a limited time was part of the United States Constitution. Unfortunately, Congress (Republicans), the President (Clinton), and most of all, the Supreme Court of the United States have totally let us down on this issue over the last decade. The RIAA is now hard at work to steal back what little of the Public Domain still remains.

At the very minimum, DRM should be legally required to expire on the day that the copyright for the work it's protecting expires!

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I'm sure the computers 70 years in the future will have no problem dealing with whatever "DRM" we put on our stuff now. Granted eventually Moore's Law will end and that principal will no longer be true.

The evidence strongly implies that Moore's law will e

side bar

I've seen numerous high rated posts on to this article with comments about how universities are failing to protect their students from the RIAA. As a general statement, I disagree with that assessment. Read before replying... As a recent grad from a major university in Boston, I can attest that universities are not charged with protecting or providing legal assistance for their students. In fact, pretty much any news story that I see about a student or group of students breaking the law includes expulsion of the students involved. The exception is that minor drug and alcohol offenses are treated as addictions and resolved with some form of mandatory counseling. Sometimes students are expelled for being arrested off campus (nearby)! Universities largely take a cut-and-run approach to problem students. So, the way they are acting with the RIAA is NOT a surprise at all.

When a college passes a RIAA extortion letter to a student that they believe is the intended recipient, the college has done nothing wrong. In fact, I think it would be a liability to not pass the information along. I know that I would never want my university to act as a legal threat filter on my behalf because in the end, it isn't the university being held responsible, its me! The bottom line is that everybody who receives a threatening letter - be it legal or other - should consult with a lawyer and respond appropriately.

Many of the posts did recognize the *real* problem with some of these institutions: unethical cooperation with RIAA. Providing *any* information about a student, whether that information be an IP address, mailing address or name should be illegal. I know that recent laws have made it impossible for even my parents to access my student records and GPA without my express permission (which I have given :-) ). It should be the same for every other bit of personal information I have on record with my university. Every school that receives a bunch of these letters should have their legal counsel reply with another letter stating something like:

"This school acts as a neutral internet service provider. The intended recipients/users have been notified. It is up to them to respond individually. If you require any additional information, please obtain a court-ordered subpoena."

So for now, the real problem seems to be that many schools lack a fair and effective internet/data privacy policy.

Re:side bar

As a recent grad from a major university in Boston, I can attest that universities are not charged with protecting or providing legal assistance for their students.

Yes but they should not be jeopardizing and destroying their students' due process rights, either, as many of them are doing. This [blogspot.com] is what they should be, and in my view are legally obligated to be, doing.

Re:Wait a second...

Different group of guys. Just because they all have Slashdot accounts doesn't make them the same.

Personally, if it hurt the RIAA I'd be all in favor of distribution of their copyright works. Unfortunately, I don't think it does, it only exposes you to risk (not much, but some). As such I think it's stupid. (OTOH, you'd need to pay me large sums to listen to most of what they release as music. $100/hour might do it, if it weren't too loud...and I could play computer games at the same time. So my opinion of relative worth vs. risk may not be normal.)

Re:Wait a second...

The problem is that the RIAA has a long history of filing lawsuits based on little or no evidence, which is how they've ended up suing at least a few families that have never owned computers and a dead grandmother who lived a similarly PC-free life. We're up in arms because of their shotgun, witch-hunt style tactics, especially since the cost and difficulty of defending yourself in court over something like this means that many people end up having to pay for crimes they never committed.

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Having seen many discussions along this line over the past year or two, I've picked up on a couple of different motivations from people opposing the RIAA/MPAA. Most opposition appears to fall into these (simplified) categories:

The first group is the "all

Re:Wait a second...

Sounds like a good subject for a Slashdot poll: What is your least favorite thing about the record companies that make up the RIAA?

For me, it would be hard to choose, although my choices would probably be these (in this order:)

1. They screw the artists with contracts which basically amount to indentured servitude.
2. They screw the consumers with excessive markups (made possible by # 3 below)
3. They have destroyed the integrity of radio with the ongoing practice of payola
4. They engage in mean-spirited legal attacks against defenseless people
5. They eat babies.

Well, that about sums it up for why I don't like major labels. Luckily, there are tons of great bands putting out their own stuff, so I can support the bands directly and avoid giving any cash to Their Satanic Majesties. Really we don't need these companies. We can support our local music scenes and independent touring bands. Do it for the poor little babies that the RIAA would purchase and eat if they got your money. That's right - think of the children!

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My university is on the list. What slash /.ers want to give advice for what I can do about it?

Organize a protest.

Get everyone to pick a nice day and download something illegal and free. They are not going to go after 5000 students. Maybe even load up

Re:So I am on the list.

My university is on the list. What slash /.ers want to give advice for what I can do about it?

Go to Ray's blog and read up on the legal motions filed by students at other universities to challenge the RIAA's misuse of the law and true lack of evidence. And them file similar motions for any students sued at this university.

Re:So I am on the list.

My university is on the list. What slash /.ers want to give advice for what I can do about it?

Here [blogspot.com] are my suggestions.

Re:Good For Them

Actually irregardless [reference.com] is a nonstandard word meaning irrespective and regardless.