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Judge Rakoff Explains MP3.com Ruling

Posted by Hemos on from the finally-something-to-post dept.

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. "

8 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Interpretations of IP by Stickerboy · · Score: 5

    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. Re:Interpretations of IP by Mindwarp · · Score: 5

      OK, first off IANAL.

      Now that's out of the way...

      Fair use allows us to 'space shift' (i.e. duplicate for the sake of changing the playback format/medium) works purchased by us for our own personal use. I don't believe than anything in Judge Rakoff's summarization contradicts that on a personal use basis.

      I think what has caused the adverse ruling against MP3.com is that they had effectively duplicated and broadcast the artists IP without the artists or recording label's permission. We're not talking fair use, we're talking re-broadcasting. Ultimately this is all coming down to the fact that mp3.com were extracting value from the artists IP without being under license (how many extra CD sales did MP3.com process due to this / how many extra site-hits did they score?)

      Just my take...


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  2. What is MP3.Com adding? Let's look... by JoeShmoe · · Score: 5

    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.

    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.

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    1. Re:What is MP3.Com adding? Let's look... by Tackhead · · Score: 5
      > 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".

      That's my problem with the ruling.

      • Premise1: The aim of copyright law is to protect the IP of the owner
      • Premise2: a secure technology which requires ownership of physical media is a good mechanism to ensure that the downloader has a license (in the form of physical media) to listen to the content embedded thereon.
      • Premise3: Space-shifting is legit because it's fair use.
      • Conclusion: Any technology which requires users to prove ownership of a piece of music before allowing them to space-shift ought to be, a priori, legit.

      It should make no fscking difference whether MP3.COM does the ripping and asks you to prove you own the CD, or if myplay.com requires the end user to do the ripping and upload the MP3.

      Since what's really happened is:

      • Services like mp3.com which do the ripping for you and require proof of ownership of physical media are Deemed Naughty.
      • Services like myplay.com which require the end user to do his or her own ripping and uploading as proof of ownership of physical media are Deemed Non-Naughty
      And since:
      • Nobody's seriously argued that owning the CD doesn't constitute proof that the owner has a right to listen to the content on it.
      • Nobody's overturned space-shifting as fair use lately
      I can only concluce that the first premise is false, and that RIAA really doesn't give a wet slap about consistent enforcement of intellectual property rights as anything other than a club to beat an old enemy, MP3.COM, into submission.

      Am I the only one on the face of this earth who doesn't see a glaring inconsistency here? If it were about protecting intellecutal property, RIAA would be arguing that both mp3.com and myplay.com ought to be burned to the ground

      You can't have it both ways.

      • If you care for consistency in the application of IP law, you must conclude that either mp3.com and myplay.com are legit, or both are violating (or facilitating the violation of) copyright. I don't care which side of that fence you fall on - the as long as you don't try to have it both ways. End users who own media should be able to space- and format-shift, or they should not. In terms of protection of intellectual property, the mechanism is utterly irrelevant.

      • Furthermore, if you reject this conclusion (that the method of shifting is irrelevant) on the basis of law - if you really believe that what mp3.com did is/ought-to-be illegal, but that what myplay.com is doing is/ought-to-be allowed - and you still pretend to give a damn about consistency in IP law, you must conclude that IP law as it exists on the books is fundamentally flawed and needs to be rewritten.
      A final note to Judge Rackoff - and it's a pity we can't bring him in for an interview - but if we could, I'd like to ask him the following:

      Is space- and time-shifting legal, regardless of mechanism, or not? To be sure, the law makes a distinction in terms of mechanism, and it's on those grounds that you've rendered your judgement. But you've utterly failed to explain why the mechanism matters in anything but the most narrow legalistic sense. In so doing, all you've accomplished is to bolster the argument that IP law as it exists on the books is hopelessly outdated and needs to be thrown out and replaced with something that accomplishes what it was intended to do.

      Trying to pretend that mp3.com and myplay.com are somehow fundamentally different bespeaks a grave lack of understanding of what IP law was designed to accomplish, and with all due respect, brings both the law and your court into disrepute.

  3. Important to understand Fair Use doctrine by dave_aiello · · Score: 5
    I think it's great that a story about the details of the judges ruling made the cut as a Slashdot story. I have gotten myself into discussions with lawyers about this issue, and they keep pointing me back to the "Fair Use" Doctrine.

    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.


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  4. Digital copies by Kaa · · Score: 5

    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

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  5. Re:How does this differ. . . by briancarnell · · Score: 5

    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.

  6. This Ruling Against Precedent by Randym · · Score: 5
    1st: IANAL.

    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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