12 Year Old Girl sued by RIAA

What's funny is that she thought by paying for Kazaa plus (which I only recently heard about, and I think is one of the stupidest moves Sharman has made), all the music she downloaded was legal. People need reality checks.
 
She's 12. For me this whole action makes as much sense as RIAA started to brake to homes in the 1970s and 1980s when the radio cassette players became popular, and the kids were recording songs from radio ...

Makes me really want to buy these t shirts. (from http://www.thinkgeek.com)

riaa-shirt.jpg
 
They had a statistic on the news last night that said that over 40% of teenagers didn't know that file-sharing on services like Kazaa is illegal.

Of course, you'd be bound to notice the fine text of Kazaa's privacy policy in amongst all those ads for online casinos. :-(
 
"It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres.

That pretty much sums up this whole issue. There is a gigantic industry going against a belief (right or wrong) that is embedded in the minds most of society that there is nothing wrong with downloading free music.

What I wonder is how did they get a 12-year-old's name? Do you have to register your name with Kazaa? Just curious how a minor's name was obtained. Of course, she could have lied about her age.

d8n_two
 
Well. If everybody just listened to the RADIO, RIAA would loose a lot. No income from sold cds either ...
 
Yea, thats a good point...they would of come to the person who's paying ISP, right? Its not like the ISP account is registered under the 12 year old. And the RIAA said they didnt get any background info on anyone, so how could they have known that he/she (her mom or whoever is paying ISP bill) could have a 12 year old? Hmm...
 
Or if they had an airport or similar at home without passport, even their neighbors could have downloaded mp3z or pr0n on their bandwidth. :p
 
I heard that the next big concern of the RIAA are hard disk recorders that capture digital satellite radio feeds (XM, Sirius). Record it, rip it, ta da. Near CD quality music for free.

Technology has the recoding industry on the ropes.

d8n_two
 
Originally posted by d8n_two
That pretty much sums up this whole issue. There is a gigantic industry going against a belief (right or wrong) that is embedded in the minds most of society that there is nothing wrong with downloading free music.

d8n_two

Exactly.

P2P is like looting.
It's not legal, but if others are doing it, and you think you can get away with it, then what's to stop you??
 
This really gets to me.
"Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," said Cary Sherman, the RIAA's president. "But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action."
Yeah, I'm sure the RIAA absolutely hate cracking down on people for sharing music. I bet it's one of the low points of their day. :rolleyes:

So, when our monetary product is regularly stolen when we pay exorbitant fees for CD's that should cost a maximum $7 or $8, does that mean we get to take "appropriate action" as well? And what exactly is appropriate action, suing a 12-year-old whose age you didn't know but whose name you did? :mad:

Whatever happened to that one *person* who was head of the RIAA? I forget her name...

watch the language arden...
 
Now, is there a fund being built to help this family defray the costs?

The online community tends to do these things, I wouldn't mind throwing a couple of dollars in the bin to help out...
 
Originally posted by Giaguara
Well. If everybody just listened to the RADIO, RIAA would loose a lot. No income from sold cds either ...

Every time a song is played on a radio station, the station takes note of it, and pays the proper royalty fees to the RIAA, which in turn goes to the publisher, and the artist. Music is not "Free" anywhere.
 
I hope this happens a lot. Yup, the RIAA has every right to sue a family when a child (naively) steals music. You can't expect children like this to understand the consequences that can arise from stealing music. Even if they realize that its stealing, no kid is going to believe that someone can actually track you down...they're going to say to themselves, this is wrong but how can I get caught? the internet is huge...

So this lower income family now has to shell out 2 grand to a money mongering giant. It makes the giant look REALLY petty in the eyes of EVERYONE.

"Are you headed to junior high schools to round up the usual suspects?"
-Sen. Dick Durbin

http://www.theregister.com/content/6/32740.html
 
I'd like to see some artists now saying something about this. Like, someone steps up and says "poor child, here I'll pay your fines and give you my CD collection for free." Or someone who says that they don't want to work anymore for an industry which sues small children. Or some band going to give a huge free concert. Have artists lost their balls? Come on! Is nobody going to challenge the Rec. ind. A$$ of A.?
 
Dealing with minors is a different law set altogether. All I know is RIAA better handle this one with kid gloves.
 
Originally posted by adambyte
Every time a song is played on a radio station, the station takes note of it, and pays the proper royalty fees to the RIAA, which in turn goes to the publisher, and the artist. Music is not "Free" anywhere.

This is not true. Terrestrial radio stations (in the US, anyway, not sure about other countries) are exempt from royalty fees. In fact, record companies often pay radio stations fees to play their songs, which is why you tend to hear the same 20 songs looped over and over on your local ClearChannel(tm) stations, and is one small part of why radio today is so generic and crappy.

The RIAA WAS able to impose varying levels of royalty for internet-based broadcasters, including "per-play" fees, with some exemptions and special cases for smaller webcasters.

Fees paid to "the artist", what little there are, tend to be arbitrarily decided by the RIAA and actually have almost zero bearing on whether or not that artist's song was being played or not.
 
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