I would agree with you if I thought that piracy were morally wrong (that’s another thread! please don’t bring it in here). I don’t, though, so I’m all for giving advice on how to avoid the scum suing her.
Couldn’t she just ignore it? What can they do, really?
I still disagree.
Even if your actions are morally wrong, when you’re being accused of something based on shaky evidence then you can and should defend yourself. It doesn’t matter if you actually did what you’re being accused of.
Usually the way it works is the MAFIAA contractors search for and download the content to which their employers hold copyright. For P2P to work, usually, you need the other person’s IPN. They download the copyrighted work and log the IPN. Usually they’ll filter the list for the most commonly appearing IPNs, and send out the form letters to the folks responsible for the relevant IP block.
There is no sneaky third party monitoring of network traffic. Someone uploaded copyrighted material without permission from an IP that was at some point in time associated with your daughter. The question is whether the time the copyright infringement occurred was at the same time that the IPN was associated with your daughter. You will have no way of knowing this until you’re already deep into a fairly expensive legal exchange.
Chances are also good that, even if your daughter is not guilty of these specific allegations against her, she’s not innocent of copyright infringement. If your fight, valid evidence of other infringement will be discovered… so though you may defeat the original claims, you’ll be open to greater liability. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
The fair and righteous thing, IMO, is to fight… but not everyone can afford to fight. Use the resources provided above, talk to a legal-type familiar with the issues, and figure out which option is best for you.
Actually, there is no evidence of anything. Her hard disk died about 10 days before she received the letter. She took it to the school’s IT people who hooked it up to this “big machine” and the discs wouldn’t even spin. I’m not sure who’s side this hurts.
You’d better get proof that it was wiped before she got the letter, pronto. If they see the hard disk wiped, the judge will declare her guilty and award the RIAA whatever the hell they want.
If that’s the way it works, wouldn’t the downloader be more guilty than the supplier of the data? No copyright violation occurs until it is actually transmitted, right?
Yeah, but the supplier is actively making the content available for download.
Also, the downloader is the owner of the copywrite, and can therefore do whatever s/he damn well pleases.
How so?
But just think – if the downloader accidentally downloaded the wrong song, he would have to fine himself. Sounds like a dangerous occupation.
And the word is copyright, y’all.
So are the college students being sued for downloading or hosting?
Well, if you own the copyright, then you can distribute, download, display publicly or do whatever you want with your work. Whose copyright are you violating by downloading your own work?
The RIAA has said in the past they will only go after those uploading the music.
Remember that the RIAA stance is that each individual disc is its own license to the work. There was at one point a filesharing business that allowed you to upload an MP3 into their servers and then stream it to yourself; to save disk space they only kept one copy of each unique file around. So, for example, two copies of the same song by Britney Spears, ripped and compressed using identical software, would be uploaded, but each user would have the single archive copy streamed. The RIAA was able to argue that this was not legal, even though the user theoretically owned a license to the song he or she was listening to.
By the same logic, an RIAA member downloading someone else’s copy of a song to which the RIAA already owns the rights is technically illegal. I’m sure they’ve got a contract specifying some sort of byzantine agreement – e.g. RIAA’s legal dept. charges their contractors for each file downloaded, but RIAA’s accounts payable reimburses said contractors for “business expenses”. Something extra-slimy like that.
IANAL but I understand that in the general case a contract to perform an illegal act is unenforceable. It would be interesting to purchase a contracting company that did this digging for the RIAA and immediately stop sending the RIAA names (or perhaps send them the names of your own employees). When the RIAA sues for breach of contract, force them to prove that downloading/uploading music isn’t illegal. 
IANAL however this seems odd to me.
Your daughter was given a form letter with her name handwritten on it, that does not sound very professional.
I wonder whether this is some sort of ploy to get your daughter to disclose her identity and address to the RIAA. My guess is that the university is not permitted to hand out information to third parties.
My inclination would be to write to the Dean of Student Affairs (that is an amusing title :)) asking exactly when and how the university got the right to hand out personal information to 3rd parties - also demand copies of any correspondence with the RIAA concerning your daughter. To prevent their first rebuff enclose a letter from your daughter authorizing you to act on her behalf.
You’ve then got the fallback that she was not present at the time, and the dead hard disk is a further fallback.
My guess is that if you engage in lengthy correspondence with the Dean, you’ll get enough to find out what has been going on - and probably incriminate the university - although it is most likely one or two officials acting outside their remit.
I would definitely talk to your BIL, but the very first thing I would do is tell your daughter not to worry about it - even if they can make a case, it is not worth your while having her distracted during her finals.
As an after thought, it might be amusing turning the tables, you might consider an official letter from your BIL accusing the Dean of personally disclosing personal information, knowingly acting against your daughter’s interests, colluding in harrassment and generally being a turd.
If you make it clear that you consider it his/her personal initiative - in the absence of evidence to the contrary - and that you are holding them personally responsible, then you’ll scare the daylights out of them - and probably when they run for cover their superiors will hang them out to dry.
Fortunately she took it to the school IT people, who promptly ordered a new HD from Dell. Documentation of the early demise of her hard drive should be easy to obtain. However, note the peculiar timing of the sending of the letters. At the end of the semester, and in this case, the first day of exams. I have no intention of having my daughter worry about getting this documentation at exam time. It is available however, and will be no problem to obtain.
And once again, are there any oranizations that will help will a civil lawsuit. My daughter has both no money and no income, and I am not getting any more involved in this than information gathering.
@Dauerbach
IANAL - but I really like baiting people who get ‘legal’ on me (or my friends).
The trick is to be perfectly reasonable and to play each card at a time.
- never show more than one card
Basically the idea is to expose your victim to maximum anguish and expense while spending nothing oneself, and thoroughly enjoy the process.
Your daughter has a legitimate grievance against the Dean of Student Infatuation, he/she has been disclosing confidential information about her use of TCP/IP - and the onus is on the Dean to show that they have not. The Dean has also been acting as an agent of a 3rd party, not connected to their employer. Just serving that pseudo writ is curious.
With a BIL who has letter headed paper, and a few terse letters from you, you could really impress your daughter - and make life miserable for a jerk that is probably doing a favour for an ex alumnum who has got a job in a law firm working for the RIAA.
In your daughter’s case, I would tell her to relax, and after the exams find out who also got those intimidatory letters.
The trick is to get the opposition to waste their money on lawyers
Have you contacted the university’s office of Student Legal Services? A chunk of the $45K/year you’re spending for her education goes to fund that office; you might as well get some use out of it. At the very least, they can point you in the right direction.
Just to clarify, and get our semantics straight, because we have three terms here: downloading, uploading and hosting…
To me, hosting is putting a file on a storage device accessible by others. The host is then a passive participant to future transfers. (Example: My web site is hosted at an ISP.)
Downloading is actively running a process that brings a file IN to your computer.
Uploading is actively running a process that sends a file OUT of your computer.
Yes, I know that one person’s download is another’s upload, but I will differentiate by who initiated or controls the transfer.
In common file sharing, there is a host and a downloader, and the downloader initiates the transfer. So if the RIAA is “go[ing] after those uploading the music,” no such person exists. Could you please clarify?