Illegal downloading sued

The RIAA had documented songs that the student had downloaded illegally. But I got busted and I regret every song I ever downloaded. College students have a large effect on these numbers since 65 percent of students report they have downloaded music illegally, according to a survey performed by the Business Software Alliance.

The fact that college students are such a high percentage of the problem, is why they are the ones targeted right now, according to the RIAA Web site. This program was not in place, however, until mid August, which was after the twenty students received settlement letters. NMU Day of Giving hosts fifth annual fundraising event. Career Services partners with Alaskan school for teaching opportunities.

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The North Wind. The RIAA accused her of downloading and distributing more than 1, music files on file-sharing site KaZaA, but took legal action on 24 works for efficiency. Court papers show Thomas-Rasset testified she had not heard of KaZaA prior to her case and after being found guilty, she filed a motion that any statutory damage awards would be unconstitutional in her case.

Her lawyer Kiwi Camara said in an email they would try to take the case to the US supreme court. Technically yes. Willful online infringement of contentthat you know is copyright protected can have jail time as a penalty, in addition to the fines and damagesyour actions caused. In practice this is only applied tomass-distributors who post content for people todownload. Simply put: yes, you can most definitely get caught torrenting.

Theauthorities and ISPs can easily catch people who distributecopyrighted material without any privacy precautions. More and more, people are asking me if they can get sued by the entertainment industry for downloading, music, movies, games or television shows.

The answer is YES, maybe. It's easy to get a false sense of anonymity while on the Internet. So many people on it, so many websites, so many files available to download and share. Downloading and sharing files are among the more popular tasks web surfers do from their computers. From music to movies to games, there are so many files out there just waiting to hop onto your hard drive.

And what if something you download is copyrighted, and it turns out you're a pirate? In the vastness that is the Internet, who's gonna know? The fact is, anyone who has an interest in protecting copyrighted material may know. Take the case of college student Cassi Hunt. The Recording Industry Association of America RIAA , an organization that acts as a watchdog for copyright infringements against recording artists, filed a lawsuit against Cassi in They sued the MIT student for allegedly downloading over two-hundred songs from a file-sharing website.

In some cases they demand immediate payment, while others have been threatened with legal action. Obviously, someone is watching what you download or share with others over the Internet. It's also possible that Internet service providers may provide them with logs that reveal illegal activity.

And if you use software such as LimeWire that enables automatic sharing of downloaded files, it's very easy for a third party to catch you in the act.

Peer-to-peer P2P file-sharing services like Limewire and BitTorrent allow users to share files and exchange directly from their hard drives, without going through a website or centralized file sharing service. There are a lot of BitTorrent software and sites available; uTorrent and TorrentSpy are among the more widely used.

Software like this has been at the forefront of intellectual property debates; although the P2P and torrent software is legal to use, a lot of people are illegally downloading and sharing copyrighted files like music and movies. See What is Limewire File Sharing? So how do you know what is legit or not? Here's a good rule of thumb to follow: If a popular song, movie, tv show or computer game is offered as a free download on a file-sharing service such as LimeWire, Bittorrent or Kazaa, it's almost certainly an illegal copy.

It doesn't matter if you're downloading for 'personal use' or that you're not selling the files to anyone. If you download copyrighted material without the owner's permission, you have violated the law, and there's a chance you will be called on it. With services like iTunes, or Napster, you pay a small fee to download music.

And because Napster and iTunes have agreements with recording labels, there are no legal or copyright concerns. If you are paying for the file, chances are the site offering it is adhering to copyright laws.

Unless you know for sure the files you are downloading or sharing are not copyrighted, there is always a risk that you can find yourself named in some class-action lawsuit filed by the RIAA or the MPAA. And yes, there are programs such as PeerGuardian, Protowall and others that will help to anonymize your Bittorrent activities. Will they protect you percent? Maybe today Is it worth the risk? You can safely download by using sites that only search for legal files. Don't get a false sense of security by thinking why would anyone go after you when there are millions of people downloading files.

There are individuals who are paid solely to seek out copyright infringements. He said he plans to appeal the decision because he was not allowed to argue a case based on fair use. The case is only the nation's second music downloading case against an individual to go to trial. After Tenenbaum admitted Thursday he is liable for damages for 30 songs at issue in the case, U.

District Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the jury must consider only whether his copyright infringement was willful and how much in damages to award four recording labels that sued him over the illegal file-sharing. In his closing statement Friday, Nesson repeatedly referred to Tenenbaum as a "kid" and asked the jury to award only a small amount to the recording companies.

At one point, Nesson suggested the damages should be as little as 99 cents per song, roughly the same amount Tenenbaum would have to pay if he legally purchased the music online.