From: Fred Benenson > I'm not sure you mean decimated -- unless you mean reduced into 10ths.
I mean decimated as in "1 : to select by lot and kill every tenth man of" http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/decimate > Does this mean ratting out your roommate if they're filesharing? I don't see why. It just means that if any student is accused of file-sharing because of activity associated with their account at a particular time, that all students effectively declare "I'm Spartacus!" and confess en masse to culpability. > I think if a student goes against the RIAA they should be entitled > to attorneys fees, at least, and certainly punitive damages if the > RIAA has fraudulently filed suit against them. If students can receive assistance from the university all well and good, but in order to assure any litigation applies to all students or none at all, the university cannot cave in to the RIAA on one or more students' behalf. > This is an interesting position, but unless the university is allowed > to "forget" which user is attached to what IP, I doubt this would fly in court. It doesn't matter whether the university provides account details. Account use does not equate to 'in flagrante delicto' - unless the user is caught on CCTV or something. > I have no problem calling it extortion. Well, that's a start. :) > I dig your intention, but I think there are specific demands we > can start making at our universities about how they deal with > the RIAA's threats. This does not sound like the voice of traditional student militancy. ;-) If you don't act as a single, powerful corporation you will be decimated, with multiple corpses of 'educational' carrion. The university is looking out for itself to a large extent, it will only shield its students for as long as this remains within its interests. I'm not a student of course, but I'm curious as to why the RIAA can be so nasty to students and yet students have remained largely quiescent. I was therefore wondering if my 5 point manifesto by way of example had any resonance. In other words, is student militancy dead, or is it simply pining for the Fjords? Maybe, I thought, you might disabuse me of any such notion and convince me it was thriving, albeit perhaps underground and out of sight. > Ray Beckerman has a good open letter explaining this here: > I'd be interested in endorsing, even using this letter, as part of > a campaign across our chapters. > Thoughts? I expect it's good legal advice. But, it is reactive. However, I wouldn't look to lawyers for recommendations of proactive strategies. Sometimes it's better to send the troops out from siege and onto the battlefield. The RIAA is a bully. It picks its victims off one by one. If students learn anything about how to combat bullies it's that collective action can be a cure (bullies are invariably cowards unless the odds are stacked), whereas the shelter of the school provides only respite. If you think the RIAA will soon give up, no worries. However, if the music recording/publishing industry is in decline through failure to adapt to the loss of its staple diet then its hunger pangs will intensify rather than diminish, and this pack of wolves may become more fierce rather than less. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
