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MP3.com Pays Damages to Sony
Spudley writes "According to this story on the BBC MP3.com have agreed an out-of-court settlement to pay Sony music $20 million in damages for their past copyright infrigements. The deal also covers the future - MP3.com will from now on pay royalties to Sony. However, the judge has ruled that the trial must still take place, in order to make a ruling on other copyright cases against them."
Looking beyond the specific case to the general question...
It's surely news to nobody that traditional approaches to copyright don't mix well with the net. What possible solutions to this are there?
We can abandon the notion of copyright. That raises the question of how creators are to be compensated. Personally I give some of the software and fiction I've created away - but not everyone is happy with this, and I wouldn't be happy if some of my favourite authors (say) had to gave up writing because they couldn't make a living from it.
The Street Performer Protocol will doubtless be familiar. That's one approach that might be useful. Another approaches might be for the state to support artists - this already happens to an extent anyway in some countries, but has the difficulty that you end up with a bias towards whatever the state (or its agents) prefer. (But would that be worse than a bias towards what the record companies prefer?) You have to collect the money, too, and new taxes are rarely popular.
We could do it through voluntary donations - charity, essentially - but that could be a bit hit-and-miss.
If we want to keep the notion of copyright, we could enforce it very strictly. But that would be expensive and intrusive even to do badly, and is surely impossible to do well.
We could all fit hardware-supported digital rights management subsystems to our computers, but that would again be intrusive and may be hard or impossible to do well; it'd only take one "chipped" PCs for the copyrighted cats to get out of the bag.
One can imagine a system where the content provider distributes (via the net, radio, etc) encrypted content to a tamper-proof player (hifi, TV, walkman, toaster, etc) in your home that they've sold, rented or just given you, and charges micropayments for each performance. The infrastructure costs would be hideous, though, as would be the impact on individual choice of playback equipment, and again once unencrypted versions of the content becomes available the whole systems falls apart.
We could just ignore the problem, and trust that unauthorized copying isn't such a huge problem after all. This might even be true; I still buy music CDs despite knowing that digital copies are often (illegally) available for nothing, for example.
Any other suggestions?
This is not what this means. The reason that mp3.com got in trouble was that they were giving you their copy of the music without paying royalties to the record companies.
Here is the rational. Any two rips of a track on a CD will produce different mp3's due to changes in variables beyond our control (unless somehow you find a way to control everything). In this way, the court is able to see an mp3 much like a copy of an old LP onto tape, each copy is a bit different.
Thus, when mp3.com makes a rip, they have in effect converted the music into another format (this is legal). However, they then give this legal copy away to people who have "proof" that they own the CD already (this is illegal as it is not in fair use to give away a fair use copy to someone else).
The best analogy I can give to this is that of a radio station. They convert the music they have purchased and convert it to another form, then pass it out over the radio waves. However, they can't do this for free, they must pay a fee to the record companies for the music they play, because they have given their "fair use" copies out for free (even to some people who own copies of the music).
This is why other places which offer to store mp3's which you rip aren't getting in trouble, because they are offering you a way to store and play your own fair use copies. So mp3.com was not letting you play music within your fair use guidelines and that is why they got in trouble. This is a case that I personally think was decided correctly, in a legal sense. I think its kinda screwed up that this doesn't work, but hey, the law hasn't had time to catch up with the new ideas yet.
"This settlement affirms and upholds the right of copyright owners to be paid for the use of their works on the internet,"
Let us not forget, that means Sony, not Bruce Springsteen.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Minor differences in mp3s of the same song because they were ripped from two diffent copys of the CD, or because of different compression schemes, or whatever, is really quite ridiculous.
I know what the law says, but in this case it's merely a technicality. I believe the Supreme Court would find this hair splitting as ridiculous as I do. After all, we're not talking about different versions, or remixes, or anything else, and unless quality control at the pressing plant is horrible, their should be no discernable difference in encodings.
So, again, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that this is the point of contention, and it ultimately takes copyright, which grants fair use, and splits some fine hairs and creates a technicality. It's not in the spirit or intent of copyright law.
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
How much "damages" in dollars did Sony pay to movie companies or to the MPAA (before Sony became a move company and bought Columbia Pictures) for its movie piracy device known as the VCR back in the late 70s? Answer Zilch. As usual justice is only for those with deep pockets.
For Sony to sue MP3.com is a little like the guy who kills his parents then asks the judge for mercy because he's an orphan.
So much for MP3.com being free... how much do you think they'll charge now? Of course, there's already plenty of reasons to boycott Sony anyway...