<p>Why two kay – thanks</p>
<p>The penalty is outrgeous. Did they go after this particular kid because his family was rich or jewish?</p>
<p>The fact that they’re charging the BU student is ridiculous. Everyone who is sane downloads their music illegally, whether through Limewire, Kazaa, Bearshare or torrents. The BU student is even dumber for getting caught. Had he used a torrent, or DOWNLOADED (not UPLOADED) he wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble. He shouldn’t even have plead guilty in the first place, and probably should have gotten a much better lawyer than that dimwit Harvard professor (I got that last part from the comments on the [url=<a href=“http://www.boston.com%5DBoston.com%5B/url”>http://www.boston.com]Boston.com[/url</a>] website, how he should’ve claimed that someone else downloaded the songs on HIS computer).</p>
<p>remember, guys, that the torrent comes from somewhere. someone had to upload it first. also, you must upload if you download, otherwise the system fails. of course, you can stop the torrent once dl is finished, but you are still part of the upload network while you are downloading the file. we can’t all be leechers.</p>
<p>i engage in copyright infringement. i know it is not legal. i personally do not want to pay a dollar for a song, since I do not possess that much money. However, i do not download music from filesharing. I use sites where i can directly download without uploading. still illegal, technically. </p>
<p>i think that the fine is absurd on all levels. that’s like saying that stealing a pack of gum and giving out the sticks should be penalized with a $150,000 fine for each stick. It’s absolutely absurd.</p>
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<p>Shh! Keep it on the DL</p>
<p>I’m not against the RIAA punishing illegal music downloaders (although it would be hard to argue they AREN’T fighting a losing battle). I’m against the heinous penalties. Thirty songs is two CDs. If that guy stole two CDs from Walmart, he’d be out about $200 and a night in jail. If that guy had stolen someone’s paper and used it as his own, he’d be out of school, but not much else (not that that’s not a big deal). But if the guy downloads thirty songs, he’s out almost $700,000 (up to $4.5 billion). So whether it’s stealing or copyright infringement, the punishment does not fit the crime.</p>
<p>The way i look at it is this:</p>
<p>I own a computer and have the right to use it as i please. If i want to go to a certain site that i know i can download free music, i should have the right to do it. It is the governments job to block those sites and/or to force companies that create music cds to make it impossible to load data to a computer. Basically create cds that only work on cd players. Don’ t know if that’s possible but it probably is.</p>
<p>ps. If i were to download music from a foreign country could i still get in trouble? Also, if i was downloading from my laptop would that make it any harder for them to figure out where that ip address is located?</p>
<p>Regardless of the merit of dowloading illegal/unauthorized/proprietary content from the web, this legal battle agains the technological means by which downloads occur resembles the early battle that Holywood set up against the early VCRs, when they were perceived as a threat of copyrights because their users could store content rather than just watch content over TV ou on the movie theater. Results are well known.</p>
<p>Even earlier than VCRs lawsuits, RIAA itself tried to fight against cassette tapes duplicators. The reasoning was that the major use of such technologies were allegedly copyrights’ infringment, therefore they should be banned. If such argument were to prevail in the past, we wouldn’t even have copy machines today.</p>
<p>Changed my mind…</p>
<p>nYc91 is absolutely right.</p>
<p>The business model for selling music has failed with the current legal restrictions. If I don’t have to pay for the music I want, if I’m give ample tools to acquire said music for free, if it’s not causing physical or financial harm to the artist, and if the artists gain a greater fan base because of freely offering their music to the public, I personally don’t see it as wrong.
This is a digital age and people should also understand it is ridiculously difficult to completely protect your intellectual property when you yourself put it out in the open. </p>
<p>As a DJ and a poor college student, I just cannot pay for all the music I want. Call me a thief if you will, but think about the situation. There is a group called Chewy Chocolate Cookies that offers a good example of how I think artists are changing in the way they sell their product. They offer much of their material for free (singles, EPs, mixtapes, etc.), usually for the mere cost of your participation on their email list. I assume this pays dividends, or else it doesn’t make sense to me.</p>
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<p>OH GOD NO. I am in no way a small-government conservative or anything, but there is a thing called NET NEUTRALITY that needs to happen. The government should have NO SAY in how the internet is run, because the internet does not exist within borders.</p>
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<p>Of course not, then it wouldn’t be a CD. They are burned/pressed with a very specific format, which is read by CD players. A regular CD player reads a CD-Rom 100% exactly the same way your computer reads it. There is no difference here, it’s a data format.</p>
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Depends. If you are using a torrent or Limewire, and are doing some uploading at the same time, YES. If you are VPN’ing directly into a server, no.</p>
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<p>No… um… the internet doesn’t work like that. Read this:
[Internet</a> Protocol Suite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP]Internet”>Internet protocol suite - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>[Unless you mean connecting to like a random WiFi hotspot. Then yes you would have a different IP, but their is logging that goes on there (maybe) that ties in your MAC address, but generally that’s almost impossible to trace to you specifically. In general your IP address is useless unless your ISP tells them who used that specific IP address at that specific date/time. That’s how they get to the individual: through the ISP.</p>
<p>The RIAA is setting itself up to either:</p>
<p>1) Fail </p>
<p>OR</p>
<p>2) Be complete Rat-Bastards</p>
<p>Because by hitting single users this hard, all they are creating is indignation from everyone else in the world because everyone knows that practically everyone downloads this music illegally. They’re trying to make an example, and all they do is anger the community, which incites people to pirate more.</p>
<p>Furthermore, services such as iTunes frustrate people because a pittance of the purchase price actually makes it to the artist. Artists who have offered their music free online and requested donations have consistently averaged roughly the same or more as iTunes music costs per song, and they don’t have to give 60% to apple.</p>
<p>The harder the RIAA tries to make examples of people like this, acting like these people are the only ones who are doing this, and trying to make the downloaders the bad guys, the more they will seem unreasonable to the average person, and the more they will be viewed as the Bad Guys, which encourages people to feel justified in defying them.</p>
<p>holy crap $4.5 million is insane… I wonder what songs he was downloading. They better have been good. If it was Britney Spears or something, I’m just going to kill myself.</p>
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<p>I actually read not long ago that the RIAA was going to cease going after individuals, and focus on ISPs, as for the ISPs to step it up on their part. Not sure what the source was, nor if it did/is still going to happen.</p>
<p>I wonder what happened to the student… is his life screwed?</p>
<p>i remember when they did this to a little girl a few years back. i guess they like ruining otherwise innocent people’s lives.</p>
<p>On an individual basis, it will never be cost-effective to prosecute everyone who uploaded a dozen files here and there. However, by overpunishing and ruining a few individuals life, they expect to deter such behavior in a larger scale - I doubt -.</p>
<p>Worst part is that punitive damages pushed in a court cannot be discharged even in the person files for bankruptcy. They stay for up to 40 years on the record. Her life is definitively ruined.</p>
<p>So are they just going garner his wages for the rest of his life?</p>
<p>Regarding this individual – he could have easily settled for $4K. Lied in sworn statements. Continue to download while being sued.</p>
<p>(Taken from Boston Globe article – [BU</a> student fined $675,000 for illegal music downloads - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/08/01/bu_student_fined_675000_for_illegal_music_downloads/?page=2]BU”>http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/08/01/bu_student_fined_675000_for_illegal_music_downloads/?page=2))</p>
<p>A few years ago, he received a letter from the recording industry at his home in Providence demanding payment for songs he had shared online with potentially millions of other people. He is among about 18,000 people against whom the industry has sought to enforce copyrights.</p>
<p>Most settle out of court for $3,000 to $5,000, but Tenenbaum took the matter to trial. Although Gertner precluded both sides from presenting evidence about negotiations, Tenenbaum said on the witness stand and in an interview yesterday that he wanted to settle but the record labels kept increasing the sum. At one point, he said, he offered $3,000, but the labels insisted on $4,000.</p>
<p>Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the recording industry, said Tenenbaum neglected to mention that at one point he demanded thousands of dollars from the labels and that he flagrantly continued to download.</p>
<p>In the only other downloading lawsuit to go to trial, a federal jury in Minnesota in June ordered a woman in that state to pay record labels $1.92 million for infringing on the copyrights of 24 songs.</p>
<p>Tenenbaum did not appear to help his case with his three hours on the stand Thursday. He matter-of-factly admitted lying in sworn statements to the record labels and falsely blaming others he said might have had access to his computer in Providence, including his two sisters, friends, and house guests.</p>
<p>After the verdict, Tenenbaum acknowledged that his lies might have hurt him with jurors. He said they never heard about how he had already admitted some of his falsehoods in other sworn statements.</p>
<p>There seriously needs to be a reshaping of the way the music industry works. Right now, it’s basically buy the ****ty music the RIAA actually cares about, or download a bunch of underground stuff in order to branch out and discover new artists, and pay for what you like (basically, an honors system). I follow the latter, but obviously that won’t always work for a large-scale market. But whatever the RIAA thinks the solution is, they’re wrong. And instilling fear-mongering might sway the naive and the uninformed, but they’re going in the opposite direction of whatever a functioning solution may be.</p>
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<p>Let me know if your taste in music is more expansive than that of a 10 year old and then we can debate over the merits of downloading music.</p>