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April 5, 2003
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RIAA Seeks Estimated $97.8 Billion From MTU Student
Lawsuits against four college students accused of trading copyrighted songs are the biggest punch yet by the recording industry against its core audience, and has experts worried that the next step will be suing the colleges themselves.
The Recording Industry Association of America filed the suits Thursday in three federal courts, naming one student each at Michigan Technological University and Princeton University and two others from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who ran Napster-like file-sharing services on their campus computer networks.
The damages sought by the suits are astronomical: $150,000 per song, the maximum allowed by law. Multiply that by the 652,000 or so songs the RIAA alleges student Joseph Nievelt offered to other Michigan Tech students on his service, and the scope of the suit is clear.
That total? About $97.8 trillion -- yes, trillion with a T -- Lawsuits against four college students accused of trading copyrighted songs are the biggest punch yet by the recording industry against its core audience, and has experts worried that the next step will be suing the colleges themselves.
The Recording Industry Association of America filed the suits Thursday in three federal courts, naming one student each at Michigan Technological University and Princeton University and two others from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who ran Napster-like file-sharing services on their campus computer networks.
The damages sought by the suits are astronomical: $150,000 per song, the maximum allowed by law. Multiply that by the 652,000 or so songs the RIAA alleges student Joseph Nievelt offered to other Michigan Tech students on his service, and the scope of the suit is clear.
That total? About $97.8 trillion -- yes, trillion with a T -- (Editor's Note: 150k X 652k = $97,800,000,000 which is nearly 98 Billion) or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics. And that's just Nievelt's case.or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics. And that's just Nievelt's case.
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50 million historical documents posted on Web
Researchers, genealogists and the plain curious can now use the Internet to check more than 50 million historical records at the National Archives, from Civil War battles to family immigration files.
Before the system became available, people had to either visit the Archives and spend hours combing through documents or request the files by phone and pay to have them mailed.
"Now, people can pull these electronic records at their own convenience," said Michael Carlson, electronic and special media records director for the archives. "It's totally self-service from your desktop."
The records available on the database system represent a small fraction of the archive's electronic holdings. They were selected because of their analytical and statistical nature -- most deal with information that easily can be looked up based on specific names, dates, organizations, cities or states.
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Iceland Plans to Catch Hundreds of Large Whales
Whale conservationists around the world have condemned Iceland's proposal submitted this week to the International Whaling Commission to begin whaling under the convention's scientific research provisions.
The plan would allow Iceland to catch 100 fin whales, 50 sei whales and 100 northern minke whales each year. Both fin and sei whales are classified as endangered by IUCN, the World Conservation Union.
Although Iceland has declared that the "research proposal" is confidential, details were leaked in the Reykjavik newspaper "Morgunbladid." The paper quotes Fisheries Minister Arni Matthiesen as saying that the aim of the research is to investigate the cetaceans' diet, their distribution and numbers, and their interaction with other marine species. These are the same justifications used by Japan which takes almost 900 minke whales a year under the guise of scientific research.
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