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Judge Rakoff Explains MP3.com Ruling
Saint Aardvark writes "Wired News reports here that Judge Rakoff explained his ruling on MP3.com. According to him, MP3.com was "simply repackaging" the recordings, adding nothing, and therefore unable to claim fair use. "
Ouch. The way Rakoff explains it, when you purchase a CD or other recording, you purchase the rights to just that copy of the IP. It means that mp3 players and converting music to mp3s are pretty much illegal, unless the record labels and artists themselves give explicit permission otherwise, whether through a blanket authorization or case-by-case. I'd be interested if anybody who studys IP case law can cite other cases where this view of IP is contradicted.
Either that, or hope the record companies are generous enough to loosen the rules of "what you can do with that $13 CD".
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1) If I only own an audio CD player, they save me the cost of having to buy a CD-ROM drive to play my music on my computer or portable system.
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2) MP3.Com saves me the time it would take me having to extract all the digital audio from my CDs. Also, they are saving me the cost of having to buy a CDDA program.
3) MP3.COM is saving me the time and possibly bandwidth charges that I would incur by uploading my 200 CD collection. Nealy every high bandwidth connection is capped on the upload, which means it would be impossible for me to stream my audio to my computer at work from my computer at home. It would take me three months of solid uploading to get my entire collection online somewhere that I can download at the full 128/160/192 bitrate.
4) MP3.Com is saving me the time it would take to encode all my music to MP3 files, which are most definitely more versitile. They are also saving me from having to buy an encoding program.
5) This may not be a feature yet, but certainly MP3.Com could store multiple bitrates of my songs, so that I could custom tailor it for the device...64kbps mono for my Rio, 128kbps for my home DSL...192 for my fat connection at work.
6) MP3.Com is saving me hundred of dollars in media costs. I would need 12 GB of space to store my collection...and since this is 12GB of data that is READ-ONLY, that is a real waste of hard drive space. WORM media is a better choice, but you can't store 12GB on anything currently available.
It looks to me that an obviously technophobic judge has made a very, very narrow ruling that make very, very broad use of the word "repackaging". When you are talking about adding value, this "repackagin" is adding a lot of value. For him to dismiss all the above as just mere "repacking" is almost like say "I had a bunch of music I could only listen to at home on my stereo...yada yada yada...now I can listen to it any time, any where." That's a pretty big yada.
Oh, one other thing...how many companies out there keep separate copies of files for each user when they are the same file? Of course not, that's what links are for. It seems like MP3 could get around this problem by giving users the tools...having them encode all their music...then uploading it back up to MP3 (essentially doing the fair use part themselves). The end result would be no different than what you have now.
If I was MP3.com I would wave a magic wand and then tell the courts and RIAA "We didn't make that music. It was uploaded by hundreds of users who own the albums". Of course, they would have to "delete" any albums that no one had (yet) registered but assuming someone does, it wouldn't be too hard to suddenly "recover" it.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
When I started to read about it, I realized how many factors have to be weighed in order to make a legal decision like this one. As much as many of us would like to believe it, the issue cannot be boiled down to "mp3 format good, media companies bad.".
If you are interested, check out the Copyright and Fair Use Web Site at Stanford.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
An interesting ruling. As far as I could figure it out, the main defence of MP3.com was: this is just space-shifting (which courts accepts as legal under fair use) of the recordings which users own. The judge said: no, digital copies are not the all the same. The crux of the matter seems to be that MP3.com ripped its own copy of the CD [call it copy1] and played it to a user who certified that he owns a copy [copy2] of that particular song. Because copy1 and copy2 are not the same thing, allowing the user to listen to copy1 is copyright infringement.
Note that services like iDrive, to which you can upload all the mp3s you want, are quite safe since there is only one copy of the CD that's being shuffled between hard drives.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Radio stations pay *royalties* when they rebroadcast copyrighted music. The whole point of MP3.Com is that it claimed it didn't need to pay royalties for rebroadcasting copyrighted music.
1. I make a copy of a CD I own onto audio tape for my private use... Fair use.
2. I make an exact duplicate of a CD I own for backup or convienence for my own use... Fair use.
3. I make an MP3 from a CD I own and serve it over my home intranet for the purposes of conviencence and entirly for private use... Fair use.
4. I put that MP3 on my private internet server so that I can listen to it wherever I am... Fair use?
5. I use a public service for the same purpose...only they rip (most of) the CDs (even more convienence) and take reasonable steps to assure that I own them... Not fair use.
I think that as long as reasonable steps are taken to confirm ownership, there should be no problem with this type of service.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
Judge Rakoff seems to ignore that fact that the digital copies are nearly indistinguishable.
Not at all. It's a difference of opinion: you say that digital copies are all the same and any copy is as good as any other copy. Rakoff disagrees: he distinguishes between copies on the basis of their ancestry. This is a perfectly valid viewpoint.
In the MP3.com case, Rakoff in particular makes a legal distinction between a copy that MP3.com made itself (call it copy1) and a copy that a user owns (call it copy2). The way MP3.com used to work is that if you can prove to it you have copy2, it'll play copy1 for you. Now, from an information-theory point of view, copy1 and copy2 are very, very much alike. Legally, however, they are quite different, since different entities own them. Rakoff pointed out that difference, and was correct IMHO.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
mp3.com defense budget - $ 35,192.63
RIAA prosecution budget - $2,462,898.35
Any questions?
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IIRC, there was a case many years ago involving two phone companies. Company 1 invested a great deal of time in putting together a list of phone subscribers. Company 2 "borrowed" the same list and made it available under their imprint. Company 1 sued them for copyright violation. Who won?
Company 2!! It was ruled fair use. They did not add any value to the list, merely reprinting it.
The name of the case escapes me at the moment; however, it was a precedent-setting case and any capable lawyer out there could probably come up with it in a few minutes.
I think the judge's ruling will be overturned on appeal because of the case that I have cited above.
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