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WASHINGTON - Cracking down on college students, the music industry is sending thousands more complaints to top universities this school year than it did last year as it targets music illegally downloaded over campus computer networks.

 

A few schools, including Ohio and Purdue universities, already have received more than 1,000 complaints accusing individual students since last fall

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Purdue, which has received 1,068 complaints so far this year but only 37 in 2006, said it rarely even notifies students accused by the RIAA because it's too much trouble to track down alleged offenders.

:lol And a collective cheer goes out from the Purdue students to whomever passed the bong to the person in charge of enforcing this.

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I take it they can not tell the difference between someone grabbing legal stuff vs. illegal stuff.

 

I'm almost sure they don't care because nobody here really uses torrents to download shows and stuff...

 

Thats why I use stuff like album base, since they can't track downloads from YSI, Sendspace, etc.

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Thats why I use stuff like album base, since they can't track downloads from YSI, Sendspace, etc.

This is the first I've heard of album base...how does that work?? Do people upload stuff similar to a sendspace kind of thing?

 

I'm not sure this is any more secure since anyone who goes to that site can see that it is obviously dedicated to distributing illegal music files...I wonder how hard it would be to make them turn over a user list, since you have to register for the site. Interesting...

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This is the first I've heard of album base...how does that work?? Do people upload stuff similar to a sendspace kind of thing?

 

I'm not sure this is any more secure since anyone who goes to that site can see that it is obviously dedicated to distributing illegal music files...I wonder how hard it would be to make them turn over a user list, since you have to register for the site. Interesting...

 

Honestly at this point I'm more worried about my college finding out than I am about the RIAA finding out. I mean, I doubt the RIAA is going to go after me for downloading leaked copies of The Arcade Fire...

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The RIAA makes me sick. If people felt like they were doing something that caused harm to the musicians whose music they were downloading, I think (hope) it would be a different story. But really, it's only the record company that it's doing damage to. Given a recent article where I read, for every $.99 spent on itunes, $.05 goes to the artist. God forbid President Cary Sherman got a ding in his seven or eight figure salary. I can't help but think there a worse things going on.

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It used to be that Grinnell had a particularly good internal network (with its own search service) for sharing music/videos. This was particularly nice for checking out albums before I bought them, or just watching a cartoon or something after class (before Youtube really became a phenomenon at all). But then last year they reorganized the campus network to prevent spam from assaulting computers and now we're in "clusters" that can't share outside of basically our dorm group, so that basically died. Pretty much any external bittorrent client here won't function after they found some people who were eating up lots of bandwidth. Oh well, I don't really download music at all, haven't since the old days of Napster and dial-up internet.

 

Frankly the RIAA are a bunch of f*cks, but that's nothing new. No matter what they do in terms of litigation with colleges/individuals/whatever they really aren't going to stop downloading ever. Digital Rights Management is a whole other stupid plan on their parts, but really I can't see them succeeding. The internet just makes it too easy for people to sidestep whatever new regulations they've made. There are always new loopholes to exploit. And really people could always go old school and just rip albums from each other.

 

I'm sure it's profitable for them to go after people, but really I don't see why record companies don't just harness the whole process, use it as a way of promoting stuff, and look for alternative streams of revenue and putting more incentives towards consumers for dishing out for the actual product. They could also...gasp...heaven forbid, lower prices, take a short term cut in profits and lure people back to buying the still immensely profitable CD, and then work on technology to make that more cost-effective for themselves to maintain their (high) bottom line.

 

I just don't see the big fuss, inevitably the 4 record companies that are the RIAA (and own pretty much any major label under that) control 75% of the market, that's enough to do what they want and set prices regardless of downloads.

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I just don't see the big fuss, inevitably the 4 record companies that are the RIAA (and own pretty much any major label under that) control 75% of the market, that's enough to do what they want and set prices regardless of downloads.

I think their point is, it doesn't matter what the price is if everybody is stealing the music. They don't make any money that way.

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I think their point is, it doesn't matter what the price is if everybody is stealing the music. They don't make any money that way.

I get what you're saying, but I just don't know that everyone is stealing the music. I mean obviously there are tons of people downloading and its clear their profits have been going down, but they are still cashing in big on a lot of album sales regardless. I just feel like at some point they just need to suck it up and accept a certain margin of loss from downloads and just concentrate on better ways to actually encourage people to buy their package.

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No doubt the RIAA makes a lot of money, and surely much of that is at the expense of the artists, but if no one buys music, who's going to produce the artists' albums?

 

If literally no one buys music, I doubt anyone (RIAA labels or not) would be willing to make albums. But that has nothing to do with how sorry I feel for the poor RIAA and its members, who are having a hard time making as much profit as they used to. Because that's sad.

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I get what you're saying, but I just don't know that everyone is stealing the music. I mean obviously there are tons of people downloading and its clear their profits have been going down, but they are still cashing in big on a lot of album sales regardless. I just feel like at some point they just need to suck it up and accept a certain margin of loss from downloads and just concentrate on better ways to actually encourage people to buy their package.

Fair enough, and I do my share of downloading (allegedly), but it's not like the cut the RIAA takes from cd sales is pure profit. There is an ungodly amount of overhead involved, and remember they are taking their cut from the wholesale price of the cd (or iTunes or whatever), not the retail price. Obviously, there are huge sums of money involved here - and of course the RIAA would keep more of their profit if they trimmed their litigation budget - but it's not as if $10 of every cd sold goes right to Tommy Mottola's diamond-encrusted money clip (it has to go to his bank first).

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If literally no one buys music, I doubt anyone (RIAA labels or not) would be willing to make albums. But that has nothing to do with how sorry I feel for the poor RIAA and its members, who are having a hard time making as much profit as they used to. Because that's sad.

 

I bet you didn't buy an authorized copy of the Wilco chord book for guitar and piano either you thieving bastard.

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i think it is ridiculous to suspend a kid from college for downloading music, i don't care how much he or she does it.

 

i could think of worse things to do in my free time.

Why is it ridiculous to suspend college students for using university infrastructure to break the law?

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Why is it ridiculous to suspend college students for using university infrastructure to break the law?

caliber beat me to it.

 

Given the aggressive stand that the RIAA has taken, it's perfectly understandable.

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