Oregon ‘Ground Zero’ in RIAA Battle Against File-Sharing

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Oregon ‘Ground Zero’ in RIAA Battle Against File-Sharing

Posted Nov 30, 2007, 03:47 pm CDT
By Molly McDonough

Updated: Oregon's attorney general is going to bat, yet again, for university students being targeted by the U.S. recording industry.

In filings this week, Attorney General Hardy Myers' office said the Recording Industry Association of America's litigation tactics may violate his state's data-mining laws, Bloomberg News reports. And his office called for an investigation of the recording industry's tactics.

ComputerWorld dubbed Oregon "Ground Zero" in the battle between the RIAA and music pirates.

The RIAA has issued subpoenas to the University of Oregon to reveal the identities of 17 students who are alleged to have violated copyright laws. They are among more than 20,000 individuals, mainly in academic circles, who have been targeted by the RIAA for copyright infringement since 2003.

"The larger issue may not be whether students are sharing copyrighted music, but whether plaintiffs' investigative techniques and litigation techniques are appropriate," the AG's filing in federal court in Eugene, Ore., said.

The University of Oregon is the first school to file a motion to block the RIAA's subpoena, according to Bloomberg. And this is the second time in a month that Myers has fought RIAA attempts to turn over the names of students.

Bloomberg reports that the IP addresses of the Oregon students were obtained by investigators from MediaSentry, which is not licensed to engage in data-mining activities under Oregon law.

The RIAA characterized the AG's attempts to block the subpoena as "misguided," the Associated Press reports.

But Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who has defended individuals in RIAA lawsuits, says the Oregon AG's move to question the RIAA's tactics is long overdue. "The RIAA has been bringing fake copyright infringement lawsuits, the sole purpose of which is to get the names and addresses of John Does," ComputerWorld quotes Beckerman saying. The strategy is then to drop the case and pressure individuals to settle, he added.

Updated at 5:17 p.m., CST, with more details.

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Posted by Kiki - 6 months, 4 weeks, 13 hours, 1 minute ago

Thankfully more and more people are standing up to the RIAA juggernaut.
Posted by SB - 6 months, 4 weeks, 10 hours, 39 minutes ago

I will admit to my ignorance of intellectual property/copyright law, as I am just a lowly 1L, but I don’t really understand what the RIAA is doing here. Let’s face it, music is a sociological phenomenon more than anything else, and turning people away in their formative years is a really dangerous long term move. I just wonder if there isn’t a more reasonable way to go about protecting their monopoly?
I know I should be complaining about huge law firms, the woes of the solo, or some other subject here instead, but I would rather see a reasoned discussion of real substance on this subject. Obviously the recording industry faces a paradigm shift as they no longer have a monopoly on distribution.
They still have a huge say in the talent pool, especially in the areas of marketing, production, performance, and I’m sure I have missed plenty here. Couldn’t they leverage that into another business model? What would that model look like? Perhaps it would be more in tune with one purported aim of copyright which is to (paraphrasing something I read, I haven’t studied this yet!) encourage the development of new and innovative technologies/arts/directions that would presumably better the lot of us?
As a music fan, I can say with certainty that the current state of affairs, starting shortly after “memorializing techniques” were invented, is the progressive homogenization and centralization of a supposedly “artistic” field, and we are all the worse for it.

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