RIAA Wins In Court Against UW Madison

Billosaur writes "A judge has ordered the University of Wisconsin-Madison to turn over the names and contact information for the 53 UW-M students accused of file sharing over the university's networks by the RIAA. 'U.S. District Judge John Shabaz signed an order requiring UW-Madison to relinquish the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses for each of the 53 individuals.' The ruling came as no surprise to the university, which had previously rejected the request of the RIAA to hand out their settlement letters to alleged copyright violators on their campus. The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."

Re:Where's your 'haha' tag now?

[TheMeuge]

They hope to indicate to the consumers that they are fully in control. The idea is for everyone to understand that they WILL buy RIAAs music or else. In the meantime, they'd like to recoup their legal fees and maybe even make some extra money by taking the kids' lunch money.

"RIAA will have a hard time tracking down..."

[dpbsmith]

"The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway."

I didn't think they needed to? I thought that when the RIAA comes calling, what happens is that you get a notice saying you've already lost a court case some out-of-state court, because the judge rubberstamped their claim that this IP address is you, and now it's up to you to either a) pay a lawyer, go to court, and try to prove your innocence, or b) pay the nice RIAA their reasonable thirty-five-hundred dollars and get on with your life.

Re:Where's your 'haha' tag now?

[Anonymous Coward]

They have radio (free music) and empty-v (more free music) that you can sample at a far higher quality than any lossily compressed file. But they can't control P2P or MySpace. Those two things are the only ways indies can be heard.

They don't want to stop you from downloading Aerosmith's song "Changes", or Black Sabbath's song "Changes", they're trying like hell to keep you from hearing the (fictional, this is just an example) Blue Vaginas' "Changes".

Do you have any idea how many songs there are named "scatterbrain?"

Watch for the RIAA to work on getting MySpace shut down next. This isn't about losses from "piracy", it's about losses from competetion. And the indie bands ARE their competetion.

THAT'S what it's REALLY about.

-mcgrew

So the thing to do...

[Robber Baron]

So maybe the thing to do, if you're potentially in the **AA's sights is to set your P2P app to save all your swag to a USB HD and stash it in an undisclosed location if you think they're going to come calling. They could look for it, but I'm pretty sure they couldn't force you to reveal its actual whereabouts.