More Folks Agree To Pay RIAA's Extortion Rates
from the pay-up-or-else dept
The RIAA continues their PR (not legal) campaign against file sharing by announcing that 63 more people have agreed to settle with the RIAA and pay up for sharing music. On top of the 12-year-old girl, this makes a total of 64 people. 12 of those settlers weren’t even sued, but had simply found out that the RIAA had sent out a subpoena for their info. They don’t say how much the settlements were for, but other stories on the matter suggest that the RIAA comes in with a “take-it-or-see-you-in-court” offer of a few thousand dollars. Meanwhile, they’re also claiming that nearly 1,000 people have taken them up on their worthless “amnesty” offer, that says they really really promise to leave you alone if you really really promise to stop sharing music.
Comments on “More Folks Agree To Pay RIAA's Extortion Rates”
agreed?
“The RIAA contends the DMCA subpoena is perfectly legal and was agreed to by ISPs during the 1998 negotiations over the DMCA”
Which ISPs agreed to it? and who gave them the authority to represent the rest of the ISPs?
Re: agreed?
It’s actually true. The major ISPs agreed not to protest agains the DMCA when it was first proposed because of this arrangement. At the time, the ISPs were afraid that the DMCA would make them liable for any infringing content that was posted. They weren’t worried about file sharing, but they were worried that one of their customers would post a lible filled rant about someone on a website hosted by AOL and AOL would get sued.
So, the agreement was that the content providers could send the ISPs a “takedown notice” or a subpoena for info and everything would be okay. The big ISPs agreed.
The issue was never that ALL ISPs needed to agree, but the ones with enough clout to hold back passage of the law.
None of this, by the way, had much to do with file sharing. Much of the current ISP complaints say that that original agreement was about posting stuff to a website that was hosted by the ISP. They say that stuff hosted on a home computer, but accessed via the ISP shouldn’t count.
Re: Re: agreed?
I appreciate it. That was very informative.
-The same AC
Techdirt’s a great site. Keep up the good work!
Extortion
Would someone please publish a list of RIAA members so that I can be sure I never, ever, never-ever-ever again buy anything one of them sells.
I would rather never listen to recorded music again than in any way support these greedy, money-mongering drones who comprise the RIAA.
Stealing is reprehensible but the underlying cause is the way in which RIAA members package and price recorded music. The courts are inadvertently but effectively supporting gouging by RIAA members.
Re: Extortion
You can get the RIAA Radar bookmarklet. Then, when you’re on the Amazon page of any artist, you just click on the bookmarklet and it tells you whether or not the album is from the RIAA or not.
I went through a sampling of my albums and found that over 95% of them are not from RIAA supporters. And, almost invariably, the few CDs that were put out by RIAA members I had bought used – meaning they didn’t get any of my money anyway.
Re: Extortion
The information is available for free @ http://www.boycott-riaa.com
Re: Extortion
Try this link:
http://www.riaaradar.com/
It let’s you easily identify what labels are listed under the RIAA umbrella.