One Incubus song - Wish You Were Here. It was before the album was released. I bought the album the day it was released. I was going to anyway. Are you happy, Sony Music Entertainment?
Here’s the email I received from Penn State (my current internet provider) reprimanding me for my atrocious actions:
On September 27, 2001, our office received a complaint that a PSU Great
Valley Dialup connection appeared to be providing/serving copyrighted
materials (in this case sound recording(s) owned by Sony Music
Entertainment, Inc). The Dialup logs were examined and your userid was
associated with the specific date/time of the complaint. Possessing or
distributing copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright
holder is a violation of University Policy AD-20.
As is standard with such cases, the issue was referred to the Office of
Judicial Affairs (OJA) for further action. Staff in OJA/Student Affairs
determined that you were no longer a student and had graduated.
Please take all copyrighted materials off of your machine immediately and
then send positive confirmation to security@psu.edu when you have done
so. If we do not receive word that the material has been removed, your
account may be prematurely disabled.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact our office via E-mail or phone.
Sincerely,
PSU Computer and Network Security
Do you feel guilty for downloading illegal mp3s? When I do it, it doesn’t even register in my brain that I am committing a crime.
The student-run newspaper at the University of Vermont just ran an article about the same thing last week. It seems that SONY is really cracking down all over the country, especially on college campuses and (for some reason) particularly on Incubus songs and Michael Jackson songs.
One word…Leverage. Colleges are responsible for their students’ behavior. Lawsuits can hurt their grants and loans and such. Also, Colleges have mass bandwidth and also have lots of security. Makes it much easier to screw with some college kids over an MP3 rather than attempting to contact every ISP…
Well, what have you done? Have you removed the “illegal” material from your hard drive? I mean, since you now own the CD, why don’t you show them the CD? Or does it even matter to them? You are allowed to make MP3s of music when you own the CD, after all.
Man. I am glad I don’t hunt for MP3s so much anymore. (Since they got rid of Napster.) Of course, my musical tastes are weird (obscure film music) so I doubt Sony would care. But still - how unsettling.
They didn’t get mad at you for downloading it, they got mad at you for providing it to others.
It’s surprising how many people use file sharing utilities like Kazaa and Napster and don’t realize that it works both ways, that usually if it’s running in the background and you’re connected to the internet, people have access to the files you have downloaded (BTW, I’m not saying that the OP doesn’t know this, this is people in general). Working for an ISP I’ve gotten calls from network administrators who have no idea why their connections appear to have slowed to a crawl - we check their utilization stats, and it turns out that their T1 is being used to 99% of capacity, even though there were supposedly only a few people using it at the time. Usually what’s happening is that a lot of their employees have file-sharing utilities downloaded on their computers and leave their computers on at all times. They have lots of popular songs downloaded, and when people go looking for the music they want their copies show up as being available through a fast connection. We had some employees in my call center get in trouble when it was discovered that their workstation was eating up a considerable percentage of the bandwidth because they had a HD full of .mp3s and .mpgs that were constantly being accessed from around the world.
