Just in case any one was wondering this women was awarded the legal fee’s http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070207-8786.html
[quote=“brent_strong,post:12,topic:26087"”]
The only problem is that it costs money to go to court, even to just request the records. Most people probably figure lawyer costs + the chance of having to pay 10x the settlement amount isn’t worth the time/money. It’s extortion made possible by our court system.
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I realize that it costs money to go to court but the RIAA is using this “settle out of court” scheme to target those that don’t have the funds or knowledge to fight back.
It’s pretty apparent they target a lot of people that aren’t computer savy like middle age parents (like in this case). If you want to argue that go ahead but most of thse people wouldn’t have gotten caught in the first place if they were more careful and had a better understanding of safer downloading. The majority of these people (something like 95%) download music off clients like limewire or kazaa not realizing thats one of the most unsafe methods to download anything. Most of these people don’t even know what a torrent is, or the fact that its the hardest method of downloading for the RIAA to keep track of especially when using an IP blocker such as peerguardian 2 with updated block lists. Not to say that you still can’t get caught but theres much less risk involved.
Just another example that comes to mind is the girl that got interviewed in the downloading and filesharing edition of that RIT Magazine “The Reporter”. She was one of the people that was sued by the RIAA for using the DC++ hub here on campus last year, which the RIAA claims was something like the 2nd largest illegal file sharing network in the world. She claimed that some friend just told her about it, and she didn’t know she could get in trouble for sharing her whole music collection.
I mean obviously its personal preference when it comes down too it whether or not you want to fight it. Personally I would rather not go down without a fight but thats just me and not everyone can afford that.
[quote=“Tunerfreak,post:18,topic:26087"”]
i know but Shockwave said that he would say anyone that takes the settle before court from now on is an idiot but from now on they will be keeping those records from now on so it dont happen again
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Yeah but excluding the daughter in the article, the mother was claiming that she hadn’t downloaded a thing, and asked for their records to prove it. As it turns out it was actually someone using an IP address assigned to an internet account in her name.