Recorded Threats

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a notice to Pennsylvania State University alleging that the astronomy department was using one of its FTP sites to unlawfully distribute songs by the singer Usher. It threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if the school didn't remove the site, but the department couldn't find any such songs on its computers. Eventually, the system administrator realized that the department employed a professor named Peter Usher, and that the "illegal" site featured a song about the Swift gamma ray satellite, which Penn State helped design. An automated copyright crawler used by the RIAA put the two pieces of information together, prompting the threat.