the RIAA have finally outdone themselves....

Leeoniya

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here's an article i ran into earlier today:

sms news
RIAA sues the dead
@ Feb 06 2005, 19:21 (UTC+0)
From: Kirt :

Death is no obstacle to feeling the long arm of the Recording Industry ***. of America. Lawyers representing several record companies have filed suit against an 83 year-old woman who died in December, claiming that she made more than 700 songs available on the internet.

"I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do it to appropriate people and not dead people," Robin Chianumba told AP. "I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park to attend the hearing."

Gertrude Walton, who lived in Beckley, West Virginia hated computers, too, her daughter adds. An RIAA spokesperson said that it would try and dismiss the case.

However the RIAA's embarrassment doesn't end there. Chianumba said that she had sent a copy of her mother's death certificate to record company lawyers in response to an initial warning letter, over a week before the suit was filed. In 2003 the RIAA sued a twelve year-old girl for copyright infringement. She'd harbored an MP3 file of her favorite TV show on her hard drive. Her working class parents in a housing project in New York were forced to pay two thousand dollars in a settlement.

You can't be too young to face the consequences of being social, it seems. Only the unborn, it seems, have yet to receive an infringement suit.

But here's another interpretation of this distasteful litigation. Wouldn't the RIAA members be better off if a traditional compensation scheme, such as the one used by radio, was extended to digital music?
 

idleprocess

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The RIAA represents an industry fundamentally unable to handle any signifigant change to their marketing model or cashflow that they don't slowly implement over time.

If they seriously think that suing people for petty infringement is going to alter the nature of P2P networks on the internet, they're fools. They don't even seem to be trying to go after big-time bootleggers. If they were going after people that were major distributors on the P2P networks, I'd give them some respect for defending their copyrights - but not lawsuits filed against random people that might have shared a song or two over something like Kazaa.
 

cratz2

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This is a joke, right?

Can someone provide a link to a reputable news service? I would hope not but if so, I think I need to go to throw up in my left boot!
 

James S

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Whats important here is not that they are suing to try to defend their copyrights, they may be behaving like scum but that is within their rights.

What this means, or what this makes even more obvious, is that they are suing without any human in the loop to vet the stupid things. They scan for filename fragments and pull up results that are ludicrous and never checked by a human. I believe that they have told the courts over and over that they have checked and rechecked the info that their suits are based on real information and not just the output from search engines.

Unfortunately, the fact that this stuff is happening over and over again shows that they are just cutting and pasting the output from their search engine into their court documents. Which is specifically not allowed.
 

cratz2

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OK... Where's that left boot ?!

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/jpshakehead.gif
 

senecaripple

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a couple of more cases like this and the judges will view the riaa as a waste of taxpayers money and will no longer issue them citations. give it 5 years.
 

UncleFester

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The paranoia sp of the RIAA and their ilk (motion picture too) just amazes me. Does anyone remember when cassette rocorders were going to put the musicians and recording industry out of business? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/aaa.gif Then, Oh No, digital tape recorders.... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/aaa.gif Don't forget VCRs /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/aaa.gif Then CDR /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/aaa.gif Now DVDr /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/aaa.gif Internet file sharing /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/aaa.gif
 
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