RIAA Targets New Technology

Hiawatha Bray in today’s
Boston Globe reports on the
latest round of RIAA lawsuits, the biggest yet.  This time they
are targeting college students using Internet2 and a file sharing program
called "i2hub".

Dozens of Massachusetts college students will be hit with lawsuits from
the recorded music industry today for allegedly illegally swapping thousands
of songs over a superfast experimental network, called Internet2. At
the same time, the motion picture industry will launch its own lawsuits
today against students who have been sharing movies over the same network.

Eleven of the suits will be filed against students at Harvard, 22 at
MIT, 25 at BU, and 25 at the UMass-Amherst. On average, the file-swappers
were offering to share 2,300 tunes on their computers.

Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association of America said yesterday
it would file suits against an unspecified number of students at
UMass-Amherst and six other universities who have used Internet2 to
swap movie files.
”We found treasure troves of people who are misusing the Internet
for copyright theft," said Dean Garfield, the association’s vice
president and director of legal affairs.

UMass-Amherst student Wayne Chang, 21, is the founder of the i2hub
Organization, which makes and distributes the i2hub file-swapping software.
In an exchange of e-mails, Chang said he has no control over the files
exchanged by i2hub users. ”i2hub does not host any files centrally," he
said, ”nor does it have any indexes of files on the network."

Scary stuff. Whatever happened to the 4th ammendment? We recommend storing
media on DVD’s unconnected to the net. Can anyone point us to an article
on the technical specs for i2hub? It’s new to the Dowbrigade…

from the Boston Globe