RIAA robs student of life-savings.

[spacedtedybear]

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/TechTV/techtv_RIAAvsteen030609.html

Basically what this whole deal says is " Give me all your money, or we'll drag this into court which will eventually drain your savings away anyways through legal processes."

[Miscue]

Those rat bastards.

[bornl33t]

welp looks to me like the RIAA is stealing. I just lost all guilt in stealing from them.

[shartley]

[jdev]

damn riaa.

reason being i listen to the radio and rarely buy CDs. sucks that an orginization like that can go around strong arming people like this, esp. a 19 year old college student..

[Python14]

He got what he deserved. He'll get over it, he's still got the rest of his life left to make his fortune in some other gray area.

[-=Squid=-]

I think I am going to have to agree on shartley...As much as I download software, there is no justifying it other than its what I WANT to do. If somehow I were to be caught, there would be no excuse.

[cphilip]

You play...be prepared to pay... nuff said

[Jack_Dubious]

JDub

[AlabamaMan]

The kid wrote that software to find files on a school network. Technically there is nothing wrong with that. He made a program that finds files that other people have shared. He is not shareing them, and his software is not shareing them. He can claim all day long that stealing copyrighted material was not the intention of his software, and it may not be the intention.

On my school network people share all kinds of files. Patches to fix bugs in video games, video files, as well as all kinds of freeware, and shareware. This is how i share the video files of my teams paintball tournaments. It is the only way to give my team access to the 5 gig files that come off my camera. If people at my school used this software, i'm sure they would find the files that i share. See us play, and more of them would come out to watch.

There are plenty more legitimate uses for his software than stealing. There is no way for the RIAA to prove what his intentions were.

People took something that he had created, and something that was helpful. Turned around and used it for something that was wrong. In my opinion the kid did nothing wrong.

[spacedtedybear]

?I don?t promote piracy.? No, he just promotes copying, storing, and distributing copyrighted material without proper compensation to the copyright owners.

If you read the article very carefully, all he did was created a seach engine that finds files on his school's network. For those who a bit slow ,it means that the search index does not search for things outside the schools network system.

If creating a search index is illegal, why hasn't Google or Yahoo been sued? The only difference between the student's program and that of Google is that Google's search index is world wide.

What users put on their website
whether it's porn, swapped files, or pictures of their paintball guns, a search engine
does not differentiate what is illegal or not and automatically cancel it from it's search results.

[shartley]

Originally posted by spacedtedybear


If you read the article very carefully, all he did was created a seach engine that finds files on his school's network. For those who a bit slow ,it means that the search index does not search for things outside the schools network system.

If creating a search index is illegal, why hasn't Google or Yahoo been sued? The only difference between the student's program and that of Google is that Google's search index is world wide.

What users put on their website
whether it's porn, swapped files, or pictures of their paintball guns, a search engine
does not differentiate what is illegal or not and automatically cancel it from it's search results.

[Miscue]

A file sharing program should not be illegal, as it is a useful tool that can be used for legitimate purposes.

Now, if you make such a program or search engine, there is NO method to prevent piracy. NONE. Any attempts to do so can be circumvented.

This is like, blaming a fax machine for the transmission of copyrighted material. Fundamentally it is EXACTLY the same, the difference is the medium of transmission being used, the versatility of the types of data being transferred, and the ease/speed in which you can distribute it.

What's the difference between a search engine that's intent was to be used legitimately, or to be used illegally? None. What's the difference between a hammer that the user uses illegally or legitimately? None. Does this mean you should get rid of hammers?

[gimp]

Well. I go to RPI, and I used chewplastic all the time. I just skimmed that article. There were actually 2 people at rpi that the riaa went after. The 12000 is nothing compared to what the riaa wanted to get from both of them. This started over a month ago. I was under the idea that the RIAA had realized that what they did was legal, and decided to go after them for all the illegal mp3s they had on their computers. There was one article about it saying that the RIAA was going to try to get the maximum for each illegal mp3 on their computers. When you calculated it out, it came to way over a billion dollars. I have a feeling the RIAA did this to scare everyone who keeps sharing. The last figures that I heard they had settled on were around 16000, for each kid. I dont know why they only mentioned one kid in the article. Maybe the riaa dropped the other suit or something.

Chewplastic is just a search engine. You can search for anything. I used it for cheating on schoolwork most of the time. Thats not the RIAAs business though The other search engine was called celery, or phynd. I can't remember which is which. Actually, I think that chewplastic was just an interface for the phynd engine. I can't remember. Anyway, I'm pretty sure they both worked the same way. Every hour or so, they would scan the whole network, and keep a database of everything on it. Then people could just search through the database and find stuff really fast.

I'll go out on a limb here, but I'd say that the RIAA is discriminating against college students. If they're gonna sure for providing a network search engine, then they should be sueing microsoft. You can search the network with windows XP. How is that different? Microsoft is doing the same thing, it's just hella slow.

One last thing. I'm pretty sure that one of the services, maybe both were school projects. They wrote the search engines for a class, then get sued for it. RPI already sucks money out of your butt every time you flush the toilet.

[FalconGuy016]

The RIAA is a useless money stealing middleman that we have no need for for music. Do you know how much money an artist gets per CD sold? A ridiculously small amount, like a penny per CD. Artists make all their money on tours. Why do we need a record company to make our cd's and steal all the money from it? What does a record company really DO? Sure they have a lot of big money and can throw your band around so everyone can see, but if you make good music, you dont need someone's help! People will want to hear your music, and they wont care if it has some record company label on it or not! These days all you need is a nice computer, nice soundcard, and some recording equipment and software and you can start making music. No need for a recording studio anymore. In fact, there are many people trying this very method, but unfortunatly most radio stations only play songs from record companies ONLY as an agreement and would not play an independant band. I know this because there are many good independant bands out there (we have a station that plays them along with other normal music, needless to say this station is very popular) but you never hear them on major radio stations, which is the number one way to get your name out so people can buy your cd's. CD factories stamping out cd's is also DIRT cheap, but they all have an agreement with record companies! Its very hard to find if it is possible at all to find someone to make regular (silver back) cd's for you because of that, even if you can pay just as much as a record company would. Record companies might have been useful in the past, but now they are all just greedy, useless, money sucking corporations.