Your Children’s School is allowig outsiders to arrest them on campus for file sharing crimes

Michael Goldstein of Stun Mobile Media and the USA Group have been following the court cases of file sharing of illegal content over the internet, and came across the new alarming article by Melissa Santos about a school’s identifying its students under threat of subpoena. For the school to avoid a lawsuit of their own, they are turning in and pointing out students.

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The University of Washington announced a new policy about illegal music file-sharing on campus:

• The school will not shield students from lawsuits from the recording industry.
• The school will track students down and serve them with legal notices.
• The student legal notice informs about settlement options prior to a lawsuit.
• The school will not pass the students’ names to the association.



A University of Washington spokeswomen said about the legal notices:
• The school will forward notices of pending lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America to students who engage in illegal downloading on the university’s computer network.
• The notices say offending students have 20 days to settle with the association by paying it between $3,000 to $5,000
• If the offending student does not pay the settlement, they will be taken to court without possibility of a settlement.
Eric Godfrey, a student spokesman for the students at the University of Washington Seattle campus, informed students of the University of Washington policy Monday through a disturbing campus wide e-mail. The email said: “some students have letters on the way.”

Where do students typically use their computers?
Students can use the University of Washington Internet network not only in dorms and in campus computer labs, but also in fraternities, sororities and other housing off-campus.



Other University’s are wondering if their students need to worry. Spokesman Mike Wark said of his University, that it has not been a discussion of the school’s administrators on their policies concerning illegal file-sharing.



While no known students of the University of Washington have been prosecuted for illegal file-sharing to date, the music companies are getting their message across to try and stop illegal file-sharing.




With the current speed of downloading and file sharing moving at speeds that don’t deter file sharing, and taking no longer than an IPOD song to be downloaded, it is no wonder that the music industry is taking notice and trying to crack down on file-sharing services. Their current campaign is to target individual downloaders at some token schools and Universities without going all out to war.


The recording companies started sending pre-lawsuit letters to certain universities earlier this year as a strategy to combat file-sharing on campuses. By making their message known through the press and the courts, they might not have to crack down at all schools.

Michael Goldstein, who regularly writes about the casual illegal downloading by today’s teens to portable computers, mobile phones, MP3 players, suggested that the teens will grow up and continue to see nothing wrong with illegal file-sharing as adults. Mr. Michael Goldstein’s Stun Mobile Media and USA group tackle this idea with a suggestion and implementation of creating content enriched with advertising. It’s like giving your kids vitamin enriched food and drinks. It tastes the same, and they don’t see or hear the difference, and its better for you. Mr. Goldstein finds it hard to police all teens and adults who continue illegal file-sharing, rather he suggests looking at the problem with a new solution.
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Mobile phone Video game addiction is a mental disorder like Alcoholism

Michael Goldstein of Stun Mobile Media and the USA Group have been following the real life addictions that online videogame content and mobile phone games can cause.

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To classify video game addiction as a mental disorder, similar to alcoholism has the dirty fingerprints of the medical establishment, who look for new income sources to peddle pharmaceuticals and medical office visits.



To no surprise, the American Medical Association (AMA) has ordered studies on the addictions to video games, while other medical associations such as the American Psychiatric Association want a new diagnosis added as a billable medical code.



While occasional use of video games is harmless and may even help with some disorders like autism, doctors said in extreme cases it can interfere with day-to-day necessities like working, showering or even eating.




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A Mother fights the studio bulldogs to save son from his file sharing crime

Michael Goldstein of Stun Mobile Media and the USA Group have been following the court cases of file sharing of illegal content over the internet, and came across the case of a single mother Tanya Anderson.

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Tanya Anderson, the single mother from Oregon previously sued by the RIAA — which dropped the case just before losing a summary judgement — is now
suing the RIAA and their hired snoop Safenet (aka MediaSentry) for malicious prosecution. Read More

The legal savvy single mother Tanya Anderson proved a worthy opponent with some legal successes so far, is asserting claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. (RICO)



A reader at Groklaw has already learned that Tanya Anderson is seeking to have the RIAA forfeit the copyrights in question as part of the settlement (search the page for '18.6-7').

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Will parents pay their kids illegal file sharing ticket or will they be sent to jail?

Michael Goldstein of Stun Mobile media and the USA group reacts to a dilemma of how the parents will respond to an ultimateum by the recording studios to get paid and to prosecute students at the University of Washington.

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Several readers let us know that the University of Washington has announced that it will pass on RIAA settlement offer letters to students identified, presumably by IP address, as suspected file sharers. "The notices say offending students have 20 days to settle with the association by paying it about $3,000 to $5,000 or be taken to court without possibility of a settlement." The Vice Provost for Student Life sent an email to all students saying, "The University has been notified by the RIAA that we will be receiving a number of these early settlement letters. After careful consideration, we have decided to forward the letters to the alleged copyright violators."

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http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/96215.html

Mobile Content can include music or ringtones by Amy Winehouse, Beyonce or movies like Knocked Up

Big entertainment is coming to your small screeen mobile phone.

What teens use their mobile phones for today, will be very different a year from now. While mobile content currently involves ringtones, and text messaging, and downloading your favorite song and mobile video game, the near future will bring live mobile tv, movies on demand, and banking services. The GPS tracking in all phones might be used for advertising when passing the stores signal. amp'd and helio are using the GPS tracking now as a premium service to find your friendds, with all other mobile services like verison, sprint, at&t, t-mobile following. Other countries are the testing grounds of what we can expect in the USA, so you only need to check the internet to find out what the newest technologies and advancements are in mobile phone technology. Stun Mobile media is at the forefront of the emerging and constantly changing mobile phone explosion. Stun mobile media's main interest is in mobile marketing in all media content sources, from mobile video's to music to mobile video games, to text messaging.

Michael Goldstein is COO and chief creative for Los Angeles-based Stun Mobile Media, specializing in the acquisition, creation and distribution of mobile content. He can be reached at mg@stunmobile.com.

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Premium content is free on YouTube. Are the studios coming after your kids?

Kids have grown up stealing music, and now they're uploading premium content they don't have permission to use. So now what's going to happen? Are the studio's going to come after your kids and arrest them, or are they going to find ways to use this as a promotion tool.

If You Can't Beat 'Em…

Content owners need to rethink how they deal with online video sites



One of the biggest problems that content owners face today is that kids have grown up stealing music. The music industry fought this fight too long and as a result has lost this generation, which now expects to receive its video content in a similar way. Today's kids don't distinguish between web video and television—to them it's just content. Perhaps the lesson that traditional media companies should take from this example is to find ways to join consumers, not beat them.





What irks the studios is that disruptive companies like YouTube have built strong businesses based on users uploading premium content they don't have permission to use. It's not so much the fact that the content is on the platform. It's more that YouTube is not rewarding the studios as content owners with the advertising dollars it has been able to monetize from their content.







Alan Bell, Paramount Studios' executive vp and first chief technology officer, doesn't dispute that "YouTube is an efficient sharing platform," but he adds, "It's just not being used properly. Logically, it seems that a good idea is to have companies like YouTube simply develop software that serves the needs of the entertainment industry."

That would seem like an easy enough task, but before this happens, the parties need to resolve who owns the content copyright. Who is going to exploit the copyright? Who sells the advertising? And what assets go to what platform at what time?

"You write YouTube a letter and the content gets removed within eight hours," explains Bell. "But the site is so vast that the next day it's up on the platform again, posted by another user. One solution is to write software based on keywords that recognizes what content is up there. If it can recognize it, then it can be monetized.

"The technology of rights management today is not yet perfect," Bell continues. "So what we need to do in the meantime is to distinguish between 'fair use,' 'popular use' and 'reasonable use.' Identify what people want to do with those rights, and then package and market those rights accordingly."

This all makes sense, but I can't help but wonder if the studios are overthinking this a little. They are obsessed with their intellectual properties, and justifiably so. But we're not just dealing with IP piracy, we're dealing with a social lifestyle phenomenon.

"Everyone wants to consume their media the way they want to consume it. You can't control that," acknowledges Stefanie Henning, senior vp, global marketing and new media for Fox Television Studios. "But we do want an environment where consumers can get to our content in the best format possible on a platform that we're able to monetize."

Instead of waiting for YouTube to come up with a viable solution or worse yet, fighting the way consumers have grown accustomed to doing things, perhaps the studios should embrace it.

I'm not saying that the studios stop monitoring content posted on YouTube. Rather, I'm suggesting that content owners like the studios give consumers the same tools they've grown to expect from sites like YouTube.

"Users want to be passionate about what their interests are. The habit of sharing them has become a cultural phenomenon," says Richard Rosenblatt, founder and former chairman of MySpace. "Online Communities like YouTube, MySpace and me.TV are all about embracing self-expression."

Whether studios like it or not, users are going to find ways to rip off clips from favorite television shows like NBC's The Office. So let's give it to them. The TV studios already have the eyeballs and the advertising inventory. They also have branded content that keeps users coming back. Logically, they should be able to sell advertising, no matter where the audience is. The studios need make video clips available on their Web sites—not just what they want people to see, which they are already doing, but what people want to see.

Equally important, they need to provide the video-embed codes so users can share the content on any community pages they want. If users go to the studio's host site only once to get the codes to share on their community pages, it doesn't matter. Because with the right technology, the studio's host site can stream advertising to those feeds as part of the user experience.

Once users discover that some of the coolest clips from their favorite TV shows are posted online via the studio's site immediately after a show airs, the amount of unauthorized uploading of video content on sites like YouTube should diminish.

Better yet, the networks will have engaged thousands of users legitimately to virally market their content all over the Internet—just as they're already doing thanks to sites like YouTube.

To take it one step further, it wouldn't surprise me if the studios find ways to sign users up and reward "power users" for influencing the communities they reach—just like marketing practices in the early days of the Internet.


Stolen from a recent article by Michael Goldstein:
Michael Goldstein is COO and chief creative for Los Angeles-based Stun Mobile Media, specializing in the acquisition, creation and distribution of mobile content. He can be reached at mg@stunmobile.com.


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