(OK — note I have now REALLY fixed the PayPal link — it goes to Fab, where as previously somehow it went to me before. I have redirected all funds sent to my PayPal account to her account. Thanks for your patience! So far, we have raised about $420 for Fab — a little over 10% of her settlement.)
By now most of you have heard me talk about Fabiola, my talented, hardworking former student who I taught nine years ago, when she was twelve. Some of you also know by now that Fab is one of the thousands of students who the RIAA went after for illegal file sharing last year. I’m writing this to ask you to help me help her.
The RIAA threatened to pursue legal action against Fab for sharing nine songs. The settlement they offered her, as they did so many students, was $4000. Four thousand dollars for nine songs. (Update: Fab tells me they are asking for this in payments of $725 a month.)
Fabiola is studying at the University of Rochester on a full scholarship. There would be no way her parents could have paid for her college education. Fab is the first in her family to go to college. Being the eldest of three girls (one of whom is autistic), she has always been that archetypal kid acting as a go-between for a mother who speaks no English and various social service agencies.
Never content to rely on handouts, Fab has always fought hard to better herself. She seeks out extra help from teachers when she knows she is struggling, and she worked hard to get herself from one of the city’s poorest schools in the South Bronx to a sought-after magnet high school. She got herself into a summer undergraduate research program last year, where she wrote about the causes of genocide. She’s majoring in political science with a minor in creative writing.
Since Fab got that letter from the RIAA, our friendship has gone quiet. Normally she calls me weekly, but the past few months have had her feeling down and out. As for me, I’ve felt so miserable about not being able to protect her from this that I was ashamed to give her a call. I took her to visit colleges, helped her with her college application, wrote letters of recommendation for her; but once she got there, the sharks got her.
So here is a link to a PayPal account Fab set up with my help. (Update — as of December 2009, we have reached our goal, and so as promised I have taken down the link.) A number of my friends I’ve told this story to have said they’d like to help Fabiola defray the cost of her RIAA settlement; I’ve already got $100 to pass on, and a promise of matching gifts. I hope you’ll help out, too.
If you feel strange about giving money to her for this reason, consider first that the money collected by the RIAA may not ever make it to the artists who are supposedly being hurt by file-sharing. The money retrieved by the RIAA seems to be used to shore up a dying industry, and little else.
I care a lot about Fab. I want to help give her the best start in life she can get. I don’t think she deserves a financial handicap because the music industry was taking steps to protect its doomed business model. Can I just say? When I’d help Fab in high school with her new computer, doing tech support over the phone, I’d ask her to read me what it said in an error window, and she’d read me everything on the screen from the upper left to the lower right. She started out at a disadvantage due to a truly crummy early education. She’s done everything she can to overcome that disadvantage. I aim to try to erase the rest of it in any way possible.
If you want to know more about this issue, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a FAQ to help students facing RIAA action, and it’s a good place to start. Slashdot’s Your Rights Online section has also been a go-to source for me in understanding what’s going on. Then there’s RIAA vs. The People, a blog written by a lawyer who contributes regularly to Slashdot about this issue. It’s pretty heavy on the legalese.
Further fine print: Once we hit $4000, I’ll remove the button and close down the campaign. Should we happen to go over $4000, Fab and I will determine how best to get the remainder to other students in a similar situation, through some consultation with the EFF, New York Country Lawyer, and/or the Berkman Center students who are working on similar cases.
Thanks, everyone.
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