April 13, 2005
RIAA Goes After i2hub, Sues College Students
Do check out Ed Felten’s analysis of the news.
Here’s another angle on why going after i2hub users may be important
from the RIAA’s perspective. As Felten points out, we don’t know
how the RIAA got access to i2hub, but let’s assume that, in general,
it’s more difficult for them to access this P2P system. If that’s
the case, perhaps they’ve had more trouble employing “speed bumps”
like spoofing and interdiction to impede infringement. And
following from that, though the 400 mbit Internet2 connections are
fairly unnecessary for downloading music, perhaps downloading on i2hub
has been substantially easier because the system is less
polluted. Don’t have strong evidence to back that up, but, if
it’s the case, then going after i2hub users would be more pressing from
the RIAA’s perspective.
Maybe the lawsuits were filed to put more pressure on university
administrators to work out agreements with Napster, Rhapsody, et al a la Penn St. (Frank appears to see it that way.) However, students at Rochester, which has signed up with Cdigix, as well as students at UCB, which signed a deal with Rhapsody, were also sued. I wonder if the universities feel any differently about those deals now.
Filed by Derek Slater at 1:10 pm under General news
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