Tomasulo.net

The RIAA recently filed lawsuits against 4 college students -- including 2 at my alma mater RPI -- seeking damages adding up to $97,800,000,000. The students had all set up general search engines to index the public or "shared" folders of all the the computers on the school's network. The RIAA is claiming that this creates an "emporium of music piracy". Zack Rosen has put together a page linking relavent news stories, and providing an execellent explaination of file sharing and the difference between this and the Napster case. The two main weaknesses here are that (A) these search engines provided little service beyond what can be done with a few clicks in the Windows Search tool and (B) since these were on university networks and not limited to audio files there was likely a great deal more authorized material than un-authorized. We do not make useful tools illegal simply because they can be used in the comission of a crime. Napster was brought down by the fact that it was MP3-only, and never seemed to have anything but "unauthorized" content on it.

One favorite link is this Open Letter to the RIAA from MTU President Tompkins, taking the to task for neither providing promised support to the University's anti-piracy initiatives, nor including the University in its investigation of their student.

This, of course, doesn't even begin to address the idea that the RIAA doesn't speak for all it's artists in these anti-piracy crusades. There are plenty of artists who understand that file sharing expands there audience in ways that commerical radio refuses to.