<p>He got caught. The bad thing is that the people that do it the most and are best at it know how not to get caught, while guys like this don’t really know any better and do get caught.</p>
<p>"so if my friend buy a CD, then it should be legal for him to copy songs from his CD to his own computer, right?
Then he just give the CD to me as a present, it couldnt be illegal right? now I own the CD, I could repeat the cycle.
what is the difference then… "</p>
<p>No. That’s not Fair Use™ according to the terminology. You now have two copies of the same material. You have not paid for two copies. This is copyright infringement. Is anybody going to care? Of course not!</p>
<p>There have been many more similar cases that were settled before they went to court resulting in a significant fine and a black mark on your permanent record.</p>
<p>Oh, they care. As many are finding out the hard way. There’s a big and legal difference between making one copy and passing on the one original to one other person and making it available to millions of unseen people online.
Pink Floyd has been selling many copies of Dark Side of the Moon for decades. Two years is not adequate. Maybe 30 years would be reasonable.</p>
<p>the RIAA is just making an example for themselves, the message is dont steal “music” if thats what you wanna call it these days, its unfortunate that a 25 year old grad student’s life had to be ruined my condolences go out to him and his family, the RIAA isn’t out to destroy everyones lives they dont have the financial or legal power to do that so they create examples like this to scare the public, take what you want from it</p>
<p>^i think most people find that the fine is exorbitant and does not fit the crime, LasMa. how much would you get fined for stealing almost anything else in the world? </p>
<p>There is no way yet to completely mask the use of torrenting. Nothing. There are services which download FOR you and allow you to direct download it, but your own computer/ip is open to the world if you torrent. That is the necessary risk. There are talks about the development of Onion routing (check on wikipedia), but that is still in development and not ready to be implemented on a worldwide scale. </p>
<p>Direct downloading is completely legal, and nobody can be sure of whether those downloaded files are legitimate or not without some serious compromises to security. P2P networks are legal in and of themselves, but everyone knows that the content which is downloaded is illegal. That, combined with the fact that torrents require that you upload simultaneously, is the difference between a file storage site, such as megaupload, and torrenting.</p>
<p>He used Kazaa and Napster to do his thieving. He should have been executed via guillotine.</p>
<p>Yea, the guy wasn’t very smart about the whole affair. The people who get caught doing these things are the ones who seed gigabytes of data back into the cloud once they’ve gotten their music.</p>
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Really? It must make the RIAA’s day making hardened criminals out of 13 year old girls and college students.</p>
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<p>I’m not arguing that the proposed fine is reasonable. In fact, I bet it gets reduced on appeal.</p>
<p>I’m just pointing out that this Boston U student broke the law, and when you choose to break the law, you better be prepared to take the penalty. That’s just how life works. :)</p>
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And when a law is clearly defunct or fails to serve its intended purpose, that law needs to be amended. What the RIAA is doing is directing the attention away from the faulted copyright laws by launching obscene terror campaigns (there’s really nothing else to call them) and propaganda based on the flawed copyright laws themselves.</p>
<p>And I’d like to make it clear that outright allowing music piracy is a formidable solution as well. I think software such as Spotify and websites like Qtrax have the right idea in terms of the compromise the music industry has to undergo - the next obstacle is figuring out how to integrate protected (unowned) music onto portable music players.</p>
<p>College students yes–13 year olds are exempt as juveniles–no record.</p>
<p>Simple way to avoid it–stop stealing music. Or anything else.</p>
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<p>I completely agree. That is achieved through legislation, not through criminal activity.</p>
<p>BTW, how do you propose that musicians and others in the industry get paid for their work, if virtually no one pays for music anymore?</p>
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Look up Qtrax. Free and legal way to download music because it pays the music industry and artists through the revenue it generates from advertisers. It’s still very patchy but it’s a start.
Spotify is a tool that allows users to listen to full songs/albums/everything, but in order to actually have a file copy of a song, it must be purchased (spotify provides links to iTunes, Amazon, etc). It is also in a rather preliminary mode, but it’s also a giant step forward.</p>
<p>I don’t know for sure if these two services are the keys to the future, but they sure are going about finding a solution in a much better way than the RIAA is.</p>
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I’d like to just make a point - virtually everyone I know with an extensive taste and serious passion for music of many different types was able to develop a taste because of illegal downloading. These same people are also those who have most avidly supported their favorite artists, purchasing merchandise, going to concerts, and yes, especially purchasing albums that they appreciate.</p>
<p>Clearly not all music pirates have the same intentions in mind. If literally no one stole music, it would be almost impossible for a music underground to develop, let alone exist as triumphantly as it does today. With that said, condoning music piracy on all levels is once again not the ultimate solution.</p>
<p>I highly doubt that they are going to force the student to pay $4.5 million considering most state laws fine only up to $15,000 for $1,000 worth of stolen merchandise and 30 songs are no where near $1,000.</p>
<p>^A judge ordered the student to pay $675,000.</p>
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<p>Tours/ticket sales, ringtones, CD sales, other promotional activities (allowing your singles to be played on commercials/television/movies, signing your face to a campaign or product, etc). Also, like someone said before, the artists aren’t being paid directly from the downloads/Itunes. And I’m willing to bet that many musicians/record companies are making more from the above than they would on Itunes downloads.</p>
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<p>Or you could just keep downloading, since the RIAA stopped suing people almost a year ago (this is a really old case).</p>
<p>Also, I would like to add that the notion that virtually no one is paying for music is false. There are significant declines within the contemporary pop mainstream, but for the next several tiers below that, many artists are seeing their album sales increase with each album. As a whole, yes; there are fewer album sales than there were 10 years ago. But this is due to the extreme shift of contemporary pop sales from albums to singles, a shift which has paved the way for more of a balance to occur within the realm of record sales.</p>