A Copyfighter’s Musings

What’s scarier: that the four college students sued by the RIAA will have to pay between twelve and seventeen thousand dollars over the next three years, or that this sum might be cheaper than lawyer fees had this gone to trial.

Good to know that suing defenseless college students running (probably) legitimate services is enough to get you that much money.  The RIAA can now recover all of its “losses” by picking on people who weren’t even infringing.  (Here’s the qualification: this settlement could correlate with the direct infringement alleged by the RIAA. If that’s the case, this is only a little less disgusting.  It’s still crazy that they will end up paying that much money.)

And, because this isn’t going to trial, I can almost assure you that we won’t hear about these students for awhile.  John’s worries may very well come true.  This story will get buried.

Filed by Derek Slater at 6:27 pm under General news
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Professor Felten links to this article about a possible settlement.  I hope it’s a decent settlement for the students – it’s probably just going to be a matter of taking down their search tools, maybe minimal fines. 

In lieu of the Grokster/Morpheus victory, it’s too bad that these won’t get litigated.  They don’t seem like Napster in many key respects, and it’d be nice to continue to draw out these differences within the courts.

Filed by Derek Slater at 4:32 pm under General news
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