THE RIAA LAWSUIT

3/4/00 - As many of you may or may not know, the RIAA has filed a lawsuit against Napster. In its suit, the RIAA is seeking damages of $100,000 for each copyright-protected song swapped to date. With over 200,000 songs available presently, that brings the suit to a surrealistic 20 billion dollars. The lawsuit has no solid foundation in any sense, when you combine the facts that there are no copyrighted MP3 files lying on Napster's servers. As well as a fact that Napster doesn't even keep an indexed file of any the songs swapped from user to user on their servers. Case in point, the RIAA needs to take action against irresponsible users, not a company trying to further the digital music revolution. Combine this with the fact that the RIAA is shelling out threats to literally every university with a network without any legislation or solidified evidence behind them, which would probably explain why Indiana University's IT Policy Officer, Mark Bruhn, is not returning my calls nor is he being cooperative in any respect. The facts remain that SAUC will be persistent in this matter of establishing lines of communication with the students and administration of universities across the nation, and we encourage all students to start picking up the phone and getting involved. Cheers to Lightspeed Systems for helping us solve the bandwidth problem. They are in talks with many universities and we will have the latest news as it comes. Have a great weekend. Petition count: 8,956.