The day the music industry truly sunk...

Are these people gluttons for punishment, or what?

Greed is an ugly thing. The ironic part is that Napster actually helped the music industry sell albums.

There's a certain arrogance there that's nauseating.


<font color=green>The Netherlands is where you go when you're too good for heaven.</font color=green>

excuse me while i vomit

<i><font color=red>What you need and everything you'll feel is just a question of the deal In the eye of storm just think of the lonely dove the experience of survival is the key to the gravity of love</font color=red></i>

from the milwaukee journal sentinal online.
<A HREF="http://www.jsonline.com/bym/tech/news/may03/137896.asp" target="_new">http://www.jsonline.com/bym/tech/news/may03/137896.asp</A>

The music industry on Thursday settled the first lawsuits it filed against four university students last month, closing a chilling chapter in the continuing battle over digital music on the Internet.

Under the deals, the students must pay $12,000 to $17,500 each to the Recording Industry Association of America, which is the music industry's lobbying group that filed the lawsuits. They must also stop running the Napster-like file-sharing systems that got them in trouble.

"Under copyright law, we could have obtained judgments for amounts that were exponentially more than the settlements," said Matthew Oppenheim, the association's senior vice president of business and legal affairs. "Indeed, had we only sought minimum damages, the judgments would have been more than $1 million."

Oppenheim said that because there were no legal issues to determine in filing the lawsuit, there was no need to go to trial, and it was in "everyone's best interest to come to a quick resolution."

But some experts called the industry's tactics heavy-handed and warned that they could prompt a consumer backlash.

"A better choice is to create products that consumers want and charge a reasonable price," said Peter Swire, a professor at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University and former chief privacy counsel for the Clinton administration. "The marketplace doesn't think it is reasonable to pay $17 to get a hit single."

Future lawsuits
Because the lawsuits were the first of their kind - and because the students had limited means - the recording association believes the settlement amounts are appropriate. But the group warned that "any future similar enforcement actions may require stiffer settlement obligations."

Oppenheim declined to discuss future anti-piracy efforts, but he said the association is "looking at a range of things to do . . . and nothing is off the table," including possibly filing lawsuits against people using popular peer-to-peer file-sharing programs.

"I think we are increasingly trying to communicate to individuals who are engaged in this behavior that it is illegal, and they face consequences," Oppenheim said. "We've started sending instant messages to individuals using these programs, educating them about the ramifications of copyright infringement."

The lawsuits - which were filed April 3 - accused Daniel Peng, a student at Princeton University; Joseph Nievelt at Michigan Technological University; and Aaron Sherman and Jesse Jordan at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of breaking copyright law by providing thousands of songs to other students over their campus networks.

They also accused the students of contributing to much broader infringement by running programs that indexed tens of thousands of songs stored on other computers connected to the campus network by students who chose to make them available to copy.

The students were not running simple file-sharing programs such as Kazaa or WinMX, which let users share the music and movies over the Internet and download them from others running the same programs. They were running sophisticated Napster-like systems over their schools' local area networks, and the four students were chosen because the association found their Web sites to be among the most active.

A federal judge in California ruled last week that two such file-sharing programs, Grockster and Morpheus, are not guilty of copyright infringement. The judge ruled that those services, unlike Napster and the programs that the university students used, were comparable to videocassette recorders that allow consumers to make their own copies.

The music industry blames free peer-to-peer music file sharing networks for its current depression, as sales of CDs have dropped dramatically over the past few years. File sharing fans say that the music industry caused the creation of systems such as Napster - which was shut down by court order in 2001 - by selling CDs at inflated prices.

<b>THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH IS EXTREMELY DISTURBING

Sniffing out violators
Swire said the association's war on piracy has used several "aggressive strategies," including attempts to force Internet service providers to turn over their subscribers' personal information when they suspect copyright abuse.<i><font color=red> The industry is supporting a bill that would let copyright holders hack into people's computers in efforts to sniff out copyright violations.</b></i></font color=red>

"For years, changes in technology have caused industries to say the sky was falling," Swire said. "The VCR was going to kill TV, and player pianos were going to kill the market for live performances. We know that did not happen, but it takes time to work out the laws and business models."


<i><font color=red>What you need and everything you'll feel is just a question of the deal In the eye of storm just think of the lonely dove the experience of survival is the key to the gravity of love</font color=red></i>

More victims for my pus-ridden genitals.

Wingding - a sperm bank's worst nightmare

The music industry can suck my hairy ass. I will download music till the day I die!!!

My <A HREF="http://forumz.tomshardware.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=faq¬found=1&code=1" target="_new">Virtual Fight Club</A> is doing so well I might make a sequel!

I got a good idea as distributed computing project: lets connect all our PCs together and makes thos RIAA PCs beg for mersy.

My dual-PSU PC is so powerfull that the neighbourhood dims when I turn it on