Slashdot Mirror
The Napster DMCA Defense
kabloie writes: "This Cnet article at Yahoo! sheds light on the defense strategy of
the folks at Napster in their suit with the RIAA, which invokes the service provider provision of the DMCA. The lawyers interviewed say that if Napster wins this one, the RIAA (et al.) will be heading back to the legislative well again . "
How it all works
or Ignoring that Cognitave Dissonance
You may notice a large number of posts made on Slashdot concering Napster, or similar programs such as Gnutella or FreeNet. Often these will be posted under "Your Rights Online" (YRO), in order to show how the use of Napster affects your "rights". You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a conservative (yes, I mean it) site such as Slashdot.
Let me explain to you. In the back of their minds, most Slashdot readers ("Slashbots") know that they simply don't want to pay for anything which they can get illegally for free. Most people are exactly the same way. Napster et al allows them to get music for free, so they use it. They know that this is copyright violation, which is a bad thing to do. This brings them feelings of guilt which they want to do away with.
How do they do this? They rationalize it away. It's the copyright laws that are wrong, not them. DCMA needs to be rewritten. The MPAA needs to be destroyed. It's an expression of free speech. And those greedy record companies take all the money anyway. Never mind that with pirate mp3s the artist never sees any money anyway. This way, they are sticking it to "the Man", who exists to make life difficult for 31337 Linux users like themselves. Yes, it is flimsy, and yes, it allows them to take the moral high ground by robbing hard-working artists. Yes, many will say that modern popular music is all horrible anyway, and that their favorite music is the only worthwhile type, but then go on to slam others for being "elitist" in any discussion in which Gnome or KDE is mentioned.
And what about the Corel Linux beta? Didn't that violate the GPL by attaching a boilerplate disclaimer saying that only people over 18 years old could download it? And remember the cries of the Slashbots that Corel should be sued, destroyed. boycotted, etc.? All because Corel who was helping out the Linux community mistakenly added a certain clause to their beta, which violated the GPL. As you can see, the "community" is quick to cry foul when the copyrights on their software is violated, even by companies with good intentions. Our copyright good, yours bad.
It's called "hypocrisy" and if you read Slashdot enough, you'll have to get used to it.
Now ask yourself exactly why ther is coverage of Napster on a site obstensibly devoted to Free Software. Napster is proprietary as hell. Those protocol specs had to be reverse engineered. Isn't proprietary software bad? Isn't all free software superior? Isn't "open sourcing" a piece of software the best way to improve it?
These are all bleatings of the party lines. Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise, or it gets ported to Linux. Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest. Napster is one example. WordPerfect is another. Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community". The only one being helped is Andover.Net who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all.
Stop lying to yourselves.
The problem isn't napster. It's people who are using it illegally. What these people are suggesting is like shutting down the Internet because it is widely used to commit copyright infringement. You don't go after the internet, you go after the people who are misusing it.
Now, that said, I don't think that Napster is that much of a drain on the music industry. I WANT to support the artists I like. Otherwise I might not be able to get any new music from them because they can't make any money at it. What I don't like is the current setup that the industry has. They make huge profits and most artists barely make a living (if even that). They jack up the cost of music for consumers, while providing no real benefit for us. If we could get our music from the artists without paying for all the unnecessary overhead, we'd pay a lot less for the music and the artists would get a lot more of the money. That's why I think the RIAA is bad. They are getting in the way of what needs to be done to change the system to benefit both consumers and artists. They're doing this because they realize that the unnecesary middle-men won't be able to leach off of a new system the way they've done with the old. They won't be able to control who gets their music produced and who doesn't. They won't be able to make artists give up their rights to the music they create in return for a chance at making a living as a musician. They realize they might have to make themselves useful for a change.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Reading between the lines...
San Francisco intellectual property attorney Neil Smith of Limbach & Limbach acknowledges the law is ambiguous but said he believes Congress intended it to protect (multi-billion-dollar) Net access providers like America Online, AT&T WorldNet and MCI Worldcom (who have paid lobbyists millions), definitely not companies like Napster (who are tiny little startups which can be effectively controlled).
Bah.
---
"The DMCA was never intended for companies like Napster."
So remember kids, the laws are written for the protection of big business, not for the people or small business.
Don't forget to boycott big music labels and movie studios.
-jwb
On the subject of Napster, you are wrong again. Napster is a peer-to-peer file transfer tool, with a centralized directory service. You may be using it to commit crime, but I am not. Please don't project your own moral shortcomings on the rest of us.
-jwb
Translation: if someone else uses our law, we'll change it so they can't. Laws are only for the use of our large, moneyed conglomerate and should never end up helping the little guy.
I wish there was a legal fund one could contribute to that would be guaranteed to finance a challenge to the constitutionality of the DMCA. Rather than supporting a bunch of different legal battles at once or supporting different advocacy groups (although groups like the EFF fill an essential purpose, don't get me wrong), it would be more efficient to have one case go "all the way".
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Come on guys, is that any way to talk about Hilary Rosen? You don't have to like her, but this is just a bit much! ;-}
Eric
So, copying CDs to your hard drive isn't legal, and it certainly isn't legal to distribute them.
Two words: Fair use.
Under the fair use policy of the US you are allowed to make a limited number of copies of something if you paid for it already. You just can't distribute it.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Napster is just reflecting what people have been complaining about for a long, long time - The cheesy mass-produced music that we just love is too damn expensive. Very few CDs are worth the obligatory $15, IMHO.
If the record industy wasn't such a bloated near-monopoly very few people would bother to copy and distribute copywritten music. Think $4 CD's and Napster becomes the underground/independant savoir it should be. It'll never happen, the music industry doesn't care about selling a quality product at a competive price, it only cares about hyping the next sensation and making teenagers spend mom's last Jackson on some CD that'll be in the discount bin in 18 months.
If there was real competition the radio would be chock-full of the great music that doesn't usually get signed instead of ballads about teenagers in love and the stores would be full of good, cheap CDs. The blame does belong on both the industry and consumers, more so on the industry for targeting their collective crap at the most impressionable demographic and selling some naive idealized love/lust. This isn't a freedom of speech issue, but do you really think anyone would care about Spears or Brandy if it wasn't for the huge amount of advertising bullshit constantly being poured into mass-media?
Real competition just isn't possible with the media control and advertising budgets record companies have, independants suffer and will continue to suffer until something is done. This is business in American in a nutshell. In the mean time why not steal and piss on the companies you don't like, you can still be moral and disobey the law and not be a hypocrite.
You'll have to pardon my ignorance, but why is Napster under fire from the RIAA? Truthfully, Napster itself has done nothing illegal. How is Napster any different than, say, freshmeat.net? Freshmeat is giving away free software, shouldn't the SPA be all over them too? Of course not, because all the software on Freshmeat is open source.
Legally, MP3's are ok. I can chock my hard drive full of MP3's as long as I a) legally purchased that music or b) have consent from the authors/publishers to store it. I have a lot of cool MP3's on my hard drive that I put up on Napster that are 100% legal for anyone to download, possess, and redristribute. That's what Napster was supposed to do. The fact that yahoos trade illegal MP3's isn't the fault of Napster. Period. That's like saying if I store a pirated copy of Photoshop on my ftp site that my ISP is to blame, not me.
Maybe I'm way off on this, since I haven't been following this issue very closely. That's just how I feel.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I hate to argue against these guys, but that is going to be a very difficult thing to convince the judge, if phrased like that in from of a tech-savvy judge. Not only do they provide the protocol, but an indexing database server as well (as I understand the technology at least, I may be wrong.) Web(http) and FTP, the two example given cover the actual wire protocol.) The protocol's dont index the information which is available on the web, or ftp. There ARE services which can legally index the information, which is where I see their loophole being. Google hasn't been sued yet for carrying a database which contain links to software cracks (which they do if you type in the "-softwarename- crack" in their search.) It will even rank them for you, with the most linked to one first, and a cached version of the page!
I think it would be much better for them to take that line. I think (I am no attorney) that all they would have to do is prove they are linked to legit MP3's as well.)
Indexing content is consider "ok" on the internet, and so is deep linking. I don't think their argument on it's own can stand up, but these two together could create a fairly solid defense.
Don't take this as legal advice, or anything like that. This is my uneducated knowledge of the laws-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Well, well. I'm glad to see that the DMCA is finally being put to good use. What do you want to bet the MPAA and RIAA are going to be upset if all their precious (gollum - oops, sorry) money they spent to lobby for the DMCA ends up supporting the very thing they wanted to stop.
kwsNI