RIAA Wrath Hits Teen
from the misguided-attacks dept
Earlier this year there was a lot of news about how the RIAA had actually gone after students for file sharing, and convinced them all to pay out some money in a fear-mongering move to try to scare people. Of course, the big problem in all of this is that nothing these students did was actually illegal. While most of the initial reporting on the subject seemed to assume that these kids were definitely “thieves”, now it appears that the press is beginning to realize that the RIAA basically hounded a bunch of innocent college kids just to make an example of them. In this particular case, the article talks about how the student simply built a search engine for the university’s network -which is basically the same thing the other students did. In no way was the search engine specifically designed for music. It just searched the files that anyone on the network made available. This isn’t illegal, but now this guy is being forced to payout the entire contents of his bank account, so that the music industry thinks it has scared students into stopping file sharing.
