The RIAA recently sent 47 letters to students informing them that they might owe large sums of money for their downloading habits. To check out the article, click here. As you might read, one girl owes $3000!.
If you would like to check out a copy of the letters students have been receiving, click here:
http://www.purdueexponent.org/extra/RIAAletter.pdf
Should this be happening?? Should Purdue be working with the RIAA against it's own students? As of now, Purdue says it hasn't provided the RIAA with student information unless it has received a court order to do so.
I'm pretty torn on this subject. While I agree it's morally wrong to own songs without the artist receiving some money for his work, I'm not going to sit here and act like I don't do it myself. I think there are much worse problems on college campuses than illegal file sharing though, and I feel that there is too much focus on this and too little on other things. I guess now that I've thought about it, I'm leaning towards saying it's okay to download and share. I just don't think it's that big of a deal. Musicians make millions anyway and who does it hurt if you simply download a song? No major ramifications I can think of.
The RIAA is cracking down everywhere, and college students who excessively download should be careful or they might get in trouble. A little thing I read the other day I found interesting. Now I'm not sure if this is true, but the RIAA is cracking on those who illegally share fires. I read that this means you can download the files illegally, but you must not share these files once you have them. So apparently it's safe to download, just unsafe to share. Again, take this with caution because I do not know the reliability of my source.
4 comments:
I think it's an interesting idea you suggest, that the government could be better spending their money elsewhere. What people need to realize is that the problem's not going to go away. The RIAA can crack down as much as they want, fine as many people as they can get their hand on (I'd be curious to see what how many of the people caught actually get charged), and there will still be literally millions of people left downloading more than ever.
I don't claim to know anything about law enforcement, but you'd think that when the problem spikes that out of control, with little tangible damage being done to anyone, they would stop pouring so much money into an impossible solution.
My next question is are they actually making money with this endeavor? For every poor sucker who gets nailed for 3000 dollars, is the RIAA actually making a profit, because if not I think you hit the nail on the head: they're wasting their damn money.
It's a great thought and I'd love to see some actual dollar values for some of their crack-downs.
PS - is it really safe to admit to downloading on these things? I mean, who knows what (completely worth-while) monitoring systems these guys have implemented...
I think that you may be right about only getting in trouble if you share the songs. After all, once you have them, how can they tell where they came from? You might have just gotten them from a CD you bought. The problem is that most people download music from P2P programs like Limewire, Torrent, etc. These programs automatically use you as a source while they are running. If you look while you have them open, you can find what people are downloading off your machine. To stop from file sharing, you need to not be using the P2P programs at all, which means you wouldn't have the songs in the first place.
It is ridiculous to think that the school would be helping them with this. We are adults and should be treated as so. The school should not be used in an intermediate in any way. And there is no way that this is where the governments funds and tax dollars should be allocated.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that people are making too big of a deal about illegal downloading. Millions of people are doing it now and it isn't going to be put to a halt anytime soon. I also think that it is an invasion of privacy when the RIAA searches files on your computer without any sort of warrant. This sort of behavior needs to be stopped by the music industry because college students already have plenty of important things going on in their lives and this is just making things harder for them.
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