getting caught by the RIAA

I go to a really small college and people have actually been charged a lot of money by the RIAA. Earlier this year, 4 students were charged money by the RIAA. I'm actually posting because I got warned by the RIAA. I got a letter from the RIAA and I had my network taken down by the college for a few days. Basically, the letter from the RIAA was to the college and was just warning if they didn't take action, the college would be sued. I got caught for one song from my Azureus torrent file. It's kind of weird because I downloaded the whole album in a torrent file, but they only caught me for one song (which was Feist - Mushaboom by the way). According to this woman I talked to, they just search for specific songs randomly. I'm surprised that I would get caught using torrents though. I've been really careful about trying not to let this happen too (like seeding only if I have to and I do buy music from iTunes and CDs too). Anyway, I had to delete the file (and to be safe, I deleted all the files of that album) and I stopped all my files in Azureus/Azureus from running.

At first I thought they might have charged me thousands of dollars so I'm so relieved that didn't happen. It has happened to people at my school though, so I guess I'll only download music when I'm at home (haha, I can't imagine not downloading... and some of the stuff I wouldn't even be able to find on iTunes). I'm also part of a private torrent site (IndieTorrents), but this torrent happened to be from a different site. Has anybody else experienced something like this?

I worked for my school's IT department a year or so ago and had a girl call about her network connection not working and it turned out the school turned it off because they got a letter from the RIAA. She had to come in and talk to the head IT guy who told her "the RIAA says downloadin's bad, m-kay" then we turned her internet back on. I could tell they didn't really care that kids were downloading songs, they had more important problems everyday to deal with. But with the RIAA able to threaten them with expensive lawsuits, they have to do a song and dance to make them happy. I found out that our school (about 5,000 students) gets two to three letters every year.

with regards to that phoenix program will it block my isp from knowing if i download anything?

obviously this new crappy law has come in to place and i want to download free still but don't want a warning letter to come through or have my net cut off

liberalkid said:
Just use mp3 blogs and download albums from mediafire, megaupload and the like. Since what they generally get people for is uploading or making available, using third party hosting services takes away a fair amount of the risk.
As well as evolving more independent tastes. Here's a valuable resource to help get you off RIAA releases: http://www.riaaradar.com/

no, the riaa is too distracted with p2p. they're kind of slow with all these complicated internets.

I have a list of p2p's linked on my page. It shows the RIAA's level of monitoring for each p2p site. PeerGuardian and Bluetack are only effective if they are updated daily. I don't advocate sharing of copyrighted material, but I don't like the hired spies (Media Defender, Net2EZ, ServerBeach, Dedibox, Ecatel, Phyber, Transnode, Softlayer, OVH SAS, Securest, Barak, etc) obtaining information about my surfing habits without a court approved search warrant. It is a simple matter of personal privacy.

I got probably the exact letter crazystargirl did, with one difference: I didn't actually download the music they accused me of downloading. I've never used P2P or torrents, and the network they said I used first of all, wasn't the school's network, and second of all, wasn't even the network for my wireless router. I've contacted both the RIAA and my school about this, and I'm still waiting for a response, but mostly I'm freaked out now because someone's obviously piggybacking my ISP and if they keep doing so I could get charged for someone else's selfishness and stupidity.

The authorities go after their "hot" products which usually means any recently released movie, record album, video game etc. If all you're downloading is free jazz from the 1960's or something obscure, your chances of being caught are less. Oh and PeerGuardian is a false sense of security in my opinion.

People who make money from piracy should be put in jail.

esquali said:
People who listen to The Eagles should be put in jail.No, people who pay for The Eagles should be put in jail.

LastAsron said:
esquali said:
People who listen to The Eagles should be put in jail.No, people who pay for The Eagles should be put in jail.
The Eagles, and all affiliated with the uploading, downloading, or listening of the Eagles, should be put in jail.

Luuuuuuuuuuuuv The Eagles!

Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv them.