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Judge Orders MP3.com to Pay $118M Damages
jbridleman writes "Fox News is reporting that MP3 must pay $118M to Universal Music Group for copyright violation. Much less than the $450M UMG wanted." They're calling it willful copyright violation. Says that if MP3.com is forced to pay this much for every album they made available with their beam box software, it could cost them over 3 billion dollars.
first off, most of the (>=+2) comments so far seem to agree with the judge, think that the ruling is fair (perhaps the fine is high). these people and the moderators, need to spend less time sucking on the mass media pipe, and more time thinking for themselves - better yet, given the results so far, they might be better off not thinking for themselves and just spend a bit more time listening to rms, because they have become victims of the riaa/bsa/... propaganda he has cautioned about. you are thinking way inside the box.
beam it allowed:
a user to listen to his/her collection of music
that is all. the judge, and the fools that agree with the decision, have been caught up in the concept that mechanism matters. it does not. so long as the owner is the listener, any number of miles of wire, copper or aluminum or fiber, any transport format, any means of display (speaker or eg braile), is fair use.
the complaint is that beamit was a performance because it played music from cds mp3.com owned. this is bull. totb.
beamit's use of the cd serial number is nothing more than a means of compression.
the copyrighted data was read from the cd, sent to the remote site where it was stored, and then sent to the owner in another location. the format and the compression scheme changed along the way, but the end result is that the owner is listening to his own music
My blog
I'm allowed to copy CDs onto my disk drive. What's the difference?
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The judge reduced the amount drastically because mp3.com was acting with much more care and responsibility than other internet start ups. And I believe the fact that UMG was the only label not to settle out of court, the judge made a ruling comparable to those other settlements.
The ruling, while sucking big time, is relatively fair.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
mp3.com did broadcast the music, albeit to a selected audience. However, according to current copyright law, it does not matter whether the person being distributed to has a valid license. It only matters whether the person doing the distributing has a valid license.
I repeat: under current copyright law, there is no such thing as a 'right to listen.' The only right that copyright law effects is the 'right to distribute.' And without an explicit right to distribute (such as that purchased through ASCAP or a similiar group), the only distribution rights that anybody has are those that fall under the notion of 'fair use.'
I don't buy for one second that my.mp3.com falls under any sort of fair use. And apparently, the courts did not either.
It's a $250 million aware, not $118 million. I'm not sure where people got the 118 number from. It's not in the article anywhere....
Prevents a bot from spamming or DoSing /. I think. If that's the real reason, they could say so rather than inventing some fiction about giving others a fair chance to post.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Yeah, but if you borrowed the CD, you could also rip it and encode it yourself too. As others have pointed out, the only way to infringe via Beam-IT is to already be in a position where you could infringe without Beam-IT, plain and simple.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Exactly, I was thinking the same thing. A reasonable fine would be a small multiple of the amount of money that MP3.com earned through advertising. $118 million (or whatever the figure was) is insane! Where is MP3.com going to get the money to pay for this anyway??
On another note... I wonder if the artists whose CDs were allegedly "ripped off" will see a single cent of this money? Nope, didn't think so.
Well, maybe when people say "Viola" they intend you to hear the zing of a chord being played on the viola.
When I say comparable, I am saying within the same realm as the other settlements, which were actually around $20 million. $118 million is considerably more than that, but drastically less than the $450 million UMG was originally asking for.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I think that MP3.com was trying to be an honest business, but the IP laws in this country are so screwed up that they made an honest mistake.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
They distributed it to whom? People who had already paid for use of the copyrighted material. Does this require permission from the copyright holders?
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Yes, in a way, by putting it up for all to see, CNN (for example) is giving permission for the data to be copied anywhere.
That's not quite right though. What if I printed off the CNN.com website and started handing out the copies to people? And charging enough to make a small profit since I'm giving them a more portable copy? Would that be okay? I'm guessing "no". So how is this different from the ISP case? I don't think it is.
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They're playing this game of whack-a-mole. Wonder if they'll manage to whack all the moles...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was confused by that too. Signal11, care to clarify?
Bite the hand.
To me, the $118M sounds like a punishment. A harsh punishment at that. Besides, I don't think MP3.com had any bad intent in doing the whole thing. I guess the judge did?
Well, technically just copying it onto your hard drive falls within the bounds of fair use (not to hear the RIAA tell it, but really it does). Now actually distributing it over the Internet probably is a copyright violation, due to the current copyright laws.
Unfortunately, the only people who could currently implement Beam-It legally would be the recording companies, who are of course the last people to take an interest in doing so. Oh well.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Nonsense. Ass/u/ming that mp3.com owned the CDs, they can copy them all they want, put them on hard disks, etc. without owing a dime. Copying the data to other media wasn't infringement. Sharing/redistributing ("beaming") the data, on the other hand, was infringement.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This ruling, while unfortunate, might well be the best possible result at this stage. The damages are large enough so that mp3.com has every incentive to appeal and (hopefully) get as much as possible reversed. I still think the judge's initial ruling was as wrongheaded as possible: my.mp3.com was a service that could only make the record companies money (I can do more with my CDs, therefore I will pay more for them and buy more of them). The only complaint the record companies could possibly have was that they were not making enough money off of my.mp3.com, and that complaint should have been laughed out of court.
At the same time, the damages are small enough that mp3.com can survive its current legal troubles no matter what happens (they have about $150 million socked away for legal costs and Universal, with the largest music collection, would get the bulk of the damages in any case). And, in my opinion, the survival of mp3.com is important because they are one of the more interesting music-on-the-Internet companies. Right now, most of the artists I listen to are on mp3.com and I want mp3.com (and those artists) to grow and prosper.
Too late buddy. The MP3 owner has actually bought this one. Check.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Anyway, with mp3.com, copyright holders see the money for every person that listens to the music. Big diff' 'tween napster and mp3.com.
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They should send them $118M in Holiday in towels. Think they'll get it?
I don't like this ruling, but I think it's probably "right" in the eyes of the DMCA. On the other hand, I think the judge missed a perfect opportunity to apply some real Solomonesque justice here. There is clearly an enormous desire on the part of the consuming public to be able to download music via the web. The RIAA and friends have been unable or unwilling to meet this demand, and thus companies like MP3.com and Napster have appeared to fill the vacuum. I think the ideal resolution for this court case would have been to find MP3.com guilty as charged, but set aside the damages until the RIAA supplied a viable, approved method of distributing digital music via the web.
If I record a cover of Purple Haze, and it hits the top 40 on radio, the Hendrix family gets royalties and I get nothing.
Thogugh, I'd rather have seen mp3.com win..
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
I use Myplay to store my MP3s online and although I haven't tried it, they even have a share music option. What is the difference between Myplay and MP3.com? Is Myplay next?
I do know that with MyPlay you have to actually upload files you already have. From what I have read here Mp3.com would let you listen to the music without uploading if you prove you own the CD? I guess that could be the key difference.
Anyone have an understanding of this?
The counterargument for the labels would be that if you can make extra money streaming bits to someone who already owns them, why shouldn't that money go to the record companies rather than to the people who came up with the service?
er, maybe because the people who came up with the service provided the service, not the record companies that have for years refused to provide this service.
No, I prefer Steg and Ale. Followed by a salad.....
Radio stations pay royalties to the composers via ASCAP and BMI. The performers and copyright holders do not get royalties.
The artists don't see enough of the profits from a CD. And that's why we've flocked to Napster and Gnutella and the like.
While I agree with the overall tone of the poster, that line is so full of baloney.
People "flocked" to Napster because they could finally used their dormroom ethernet or cablemodem for something other than Porn or MMORPGs. People "flocked" to Napster because they could listen to music and decide if they liked the music without buying the CD [some did buy, some didn't buy].
You don't find ways of spending zero, if you're worried that one of the two selling parties is already getting shafted when you spend non-zero.
[
I have a collection here at home, it is on CDs. Many radio stations digitize their CDs by loading them onto harddrives as part of their daily program. It is cheaper. Their catalog is even online, in a form, as most of them fax daily playlists out to record stores, as well as posting them online.
MP3.com digitized those files and then offered to share them with anyone who had a legally purchased copy. MP3.com was providing a service - namely, rather than encode the MP3's yourself and waste your CPU power, they would do it for you. As the CD you have is a bit for bit duplicate of the one MP3.com has, whether you encode it or they do, it is the same file.
MP3.com provided a translation service, specifically allowed under fair use guidelines, the only difference is, they were a business and not an individual.
I still think the BeamIT software was not a copyright infringement. How can it be an infringement if I can listen to only things that I own? They are just adding value to my CDs, for no cost to me. How does that infringe on a copyright? They are like my own radio station. Radio stations don't infringe on copyright. but I digress....
By their own logic, they should be suing every maker of audio tape/cassette recording equipment, every maker of audio tapes/cassettes and every broadcaster.
MP3.com was no more encouraging pirating than the radio DJ who advertises 'what's coming next' or an advertisement free hour.
Note to self: do not buy MP4 domain name. Wouldn't be able to cover court costs.
I bought a portable CD player the other day. I wouldn't have bought it if it weren't for the CD's that RIAA produces. The manufacturer profited from the RIAA's music by allowing me to listen to the RIAA's music in more places. The manufacturer didn't have an agreement with the RIAA to profit from their works. Yet they did it anyway.
Your analogy is flawed for two reasons.
1. Yes, the device manufacturers are in bed with the RIAA and their ilk. Witness the infamous tax on all digital recording devices paid out by the US Gov to organizations such as RIAA.
2. The manufacturer did not load your personal music device with all of the music you already own. If they had, they'd be in just as much legal trouble as MP3.com.
-thomas
P.S. I can see both sides of this issue. I think MP3.com is the best attempt so far at bridging the gap...
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
I have a collection here at home, it is on CDs. Many radio stations digitize their CDs by loading them onto harddrives as part of their daily program. It is cheaper.
At this point, I guaran-damn-tee someone will bring up the "radio stations pay royalties" point.
Why do they pay royalties? Because the listeners might not have purchased a copy of the music being broadcast, and the station is running advertisements to make money. That first is especially important here. With radio, the listener more often than not does not have a legally-acquired copy of the songs being played, therefore the station has to pay for public broadcast of that music to people who haven't paid for the music.
Now, we come to my.mp3.com. I didn't use it, so I don't know if the client and any web pages involved in selecting songs had ads, or if the service itself cost anything - if so, mp3.com loses on that point for profiting from to copyrighted works without providing proper royalties to the copyright holders.. I'll come back to this point with regard to the punishment.
my.mp3.com and each listener legally purchased the CDs. Each listener had to prove they had the CDs before they could stream the songs from mp3.com. Therefore, both streamer and listener have legal copies, unlike traditional radio. This is where the radio argument falls down; my.mp3.com is not like radio. I can do the same thing by ripping my own CDs, setting up a shoutcast/icecast streamer, but requiring a password to activate the streaming so that not just any joe schmoe can abuse my collection. It's not public broadcast, and as long as no advertising without copyright holder approval is inserted, it can't be subject to broadcast royalties; you're all listening to the same song, it's a private directcast unlike radio that no one else can tap into, and all parties involved have paid for their copies and associated fair use rights. The only potential extra copy being made is the bits being sent from my.mp3.com to the listener, and those fall right back into the ether as soon as the player is done with them; they are not being stored.
Of course, the bigger reason the record cartel is going after MP3.com for this is so that they don't have any outside competition in the streaming arena; just watch as they all throw up their own Beam-it style services Real Soon Now. And you can bet they'll cost money to use.
mp3.com should be forced to compensate companies for any ad revenue/subscription fees they made in relation to my.mp3.com. On this point, I don't think "copyright infringment" is the proper term here. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a proper legal term for "unlawful profit from use of a copyrighted work". Copyright infringment sounds too much like selling extra copies, while here everyone had a copy, paid for them, and the only extra "copy" was a stream of bits that disappeared after passing through the player software.
Cyberspace is not meatspace, and should not be defined or limited by meatspace rules, because there are about 6 billion things you can do in cyberspace that are impractical or impossible in meatspace. Millions of copies of a chunk of data can be made and wiped out in a matter of seconds; this, I think, is the reality that nearly everyone - record execs, real-worlders, and geeks - still haven't come to fully realize. It works by different rules by default; therefore, it's absurd to force ethereal, ever-changing and infinitely malleable cyberspace to conform completely to meatspace rules. The implementation shouldn't be the problem here, only proper compensation. I don't think compensation here = $25k/CD, not by a long shot. A better solution would be to determine the ad revenue from my.mp3.com, double that, there's your punishment to be divided between all plaintiffs. Anything more is improper.
my.mp3.com was a great idea. If there hadn't been an ad near any part of the service, the record companies wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. Never mind that a lot of legal wisdom and commonly-used analogy collapses when applied to bits, bytes and data structures that can be created and destroyed at will; law and the human habit of making bad comparisons will have the hardest time adjusting to the new world. As it stands, the cartel (actually, the artists, but that's another hill of beans) has a right to be properly compensated for money made off their holdings, but not for any sort of "piracy"; all copies (with the possible exception of one) were meatspace-defined legal.
What a mess. I guess in closing, I think lot of IP law will have to be rethought and retooled to ensure that what can be done in cyberspace isn't stifled by meatspace rules that make no sense in the ethereal. As long as the holders have been paid for copies and fair use rights, and are being compensated for any ad/subscription revenue, there shouldn't be a problem.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Yes it did. That's what this whole case is about.
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
The case on the RIAA/MPAA vs. God for creating organisms with ears, eyes, and memory, is still pending.
You really shouldn't be punished for your beliefs.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Yes, that is what I meant. When I tried to correct it, slashdot locked me out and I couldn't post for several minutes. I gave up posting the correction and instead wrote a feature on the FBI's violence report, available here and submitted the analysis to slashdot for rejection. :/
Instead, they keep squashing the good ideas leaving room for a mixture of good and bad ideas to to come. Face it, nature abhors a vaccum, and without MP3.com filling the vaccuum with a controlled way of digitizing music for the masses, Napster clones are all-the-more-likely to increase in numbers and proliferation.
The record labels should've just picked the lesser of the evils and taken control of it. Instead, they are attacking everything and offering nothing themselves.
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Any lawyer could have told them that what they were up to was illegal before they did the R&D - betting your company's existance on beating a legal challenge is not good business practice.
/. about how innovative my.mp3.com was despite all their technology having been depolyed months before my.mp3.com by myplay.com.
mp3.com knew the risks...
Of course they did get all the free PR - something that legal systems like myplay.com seem to be3 missing out on. So much so that I keep seeing posts on
give credit where credit is due....
Fine, is there a cddb.com like database we can check to see if the CD we're about to buy is represented by UMG?
What so many people miss in all the squablling over mp3.com and Napster (the corporation) fail to realize is that the whole controversy would have been squelched if the people doing the broadcasting had paid dues to an association like ASCAP for the permission to broadcast.
For example, if Napster had notified each installation of Napster (the software) as a server that people serving up files were liable for securing permission for broadcast of the music (and if Napster servers had secured permission) then there would be no basis for any lawsuit.
The problem, IMHO, is not that people want free tunes (just turn on the radio or fire up Real player and point it at your favorite online radio station). The problem is that these organizations like mp3.com and Napster think that they can get out of the costs of doing business.
Under present law, broadcasters need to secure the right to broadcast copywrited media and that is all there is to the story.
Would it be viable if we only went to Cheapo Records from now on and only bought USED CDs? I mean, money's changed hands already, and I don't see how they'd profit off a sale of a used CD for less.
Mp3.com may very well be guilty under the law of copyright infringement. They do indeed seem to have distributed copyrighted works they didn't secure a license for.
However, compensatory damages could arguably be a sum total of.... $0. Why? If you're looking at lost revenues, then EVERYONE they distributed to ALREADY had the CD in hand. Everyone distributed to either already had purchased, or had the power to create unauthorized copies without the help of mp3.com. There is no such thing as the sale of a recording lost to mp3.com's service. So why any judge should award compensatory damages is beyond me. Absolute worst case scenario should be that mp3.com might have to give up the some large portion of an estimate of the amount of revenue they received from the BeamIt service.
Now, punitive damages might be different story....
Tweet, tweet.
Doesn't it have to be proven that damage has been done? Obviously, no damage has been done, as Mp3.com has ADDED value to CDs. RIAA member companies should sell more CDs because of this.
IANAL, so I'm not sure that that is right.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I know that this does squat. My 150 dollars a year is hardly going to make a dent. That really isn't my point. Personally, I can not with a good conscience endorse their behavior with my dollars any longer.
I'm out
V
I never did agree to their new artist agreement- slashdotter mp3.com artists, don't agree to it, it gives mp3.com perpetual rights to your stuff and is unilaterally changeable by mp3.com on five days notice and _you_ have to keep hunting for notices, they won't actually _inform_ you of a change. Anyhow _I_ didn't agree to this and I'm now busily taking over for what they used to do for me, with a twist.
I'll be getting rid of the mp3.com site ASAP- go ahead and download anything if you want but I don't expect to get a cent from this or from any current CD sales. The other local bands ought to be happy 'cos I tend to monopolise the top 20 charts in my town *g* sometimes my stuff has _been_ the top 20. Now they can feel like rockstars- paying a damned high price for it with that dangerous artist agreement. Again, mp3.com is no longer safe to host your music at- they're not as bad as farmclub but they could be just as bad in five days flat with no direct notice to you.
I've ordered a CD burner- and I'm making an order for 100 Mitsui gold/gold _printed_ CD-Rs. We're talking over three dollar media here- $3.29 _per_ _blank_. I'm setting up a situation where I have a 'house label' with _extremely_ posh impressive media and packaging- which has a lighter area, to silkscreen or simply _write_ in specific information about the CD. The place I'm getting the CDs from is synthemedia.com, let me get my orders in first now ;) there are some lovely details about this arrangement, for instance the full-bleed printed-white-surface CDs not only look terrific but Mitsui gold/gold is supposed to have better archival status than even commercial aluminum CDs, lasting for over 100 simulated years in destructive climate testing.
The neatest part is- instant super small pressing runs with flashy packaging. I'm going to start fishing for recording studio business at my usual $75 an hour- and each hour gets a free fancy CD of the final project. (haven't worked out the details on stuff like 'burn time' for large numbers of CDs- should talk to my bank about financing a duplicator if it becomes a serious constraint). For advertisement I can have a bunch of the CDs around town, with an audio demo recorded on it.
The overall idea is to assault the major label industry machine on a basis of quality- hit them with the appearance of indie CDs coming out, that are not only higher quality audio, but are flashier CD prints (a lot of major label CD prints seem to be one or two color prints! Cheap bastards...) and a range of music availability that (due to extremely low production runs) can afford to be absurdly eclectic and specialised- and the media is rated to last much longer under normal conditions- AND you're allowed to copy it and make mp3s of it and put it on your computer for noncommercial use- 'fair use'. (*g* I'm tempted to start talking in terms of warranty replacement of media. What kind of warranty do you get on major label releases? ;) )
Looks like airwindows will finally start to come into its own with all this- I have to be grateful to mp3.com for going down in flames at this time, because it gave me the massive kick in the butt to stop thinking like a musician (wanting to buy a Yamaha DX7 and rebuild my fretless electric guitar) and start thinking like a studio owner/indie label (buying the MEANS OF PRODUCTION). Looks like it's about time to revise airwindows.com to focus on the stuff I'll be doing along these lines, too. It's more fun sweeping the floor when it's your own store ;) and I hope to be doing stuff that slashdotters will find insanely cool.
Thanks mp3.com- it's been real- hope your bigwigs have good golden parachutes. Thanks for the $260, keep the change, and who _did_ you get to write up that new artists' agreement? Universal lawyers?
MP3.com did have an honest business distributing music in the MP3 format, and the RIAA was unable to touch them. That business involved distributing MP3s by musicians with the musicians' permission. It was great, too, and it openly defied the "music industry" while the industry could only look on in total frustration and impotence, not having a single legal argument against them.
And then mp3.com did something incredibly stupid: they started their my.mp3.com service, and "beamed" MP3s by musicians who were not signed with mp3.com. That was begging for trouble. I wish they had spun this ridiculous idea off to another company, since now the totally legitimate parts of mp3.com are now endangered by huge settlements.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There's a reason why programmers buy houses in Silicon Valley and major label musicians file for bankruptcy- programmers are paid for what they do, and major label musicians are not (if they have attack dog lawyers, like Metallica, and a really hard-nosed business sense, they have a better chance, though they still won't be in the same income bracket as the comparable tech professional)
Oh, and musicians don't necessarily get money from their works after they die, either. Though the power-grab assigning copyright to the labels forever seems to have been disabled AFAIK (due to much lobbying by high profile artists like Don Henley), artists still don't own their mechanicals- the 'masters'- just (hopefully) ownership of the song itself- and even then, only after 20 years when the label can't hang onto it any longer.
Frankly I think we'd be better off paid _your_ way: a flat salary, something nice and cushy but nothing like winning the lottery. We already have the 'my work belongs to the company' part ;) (no, I'm not actually a major label artist _really_ ;) )
(I thought it was only 100,000 but the article mentioned 150,000)
Seems pretty steep, but I think the law was made long before distribution of the internet was even concieved of. Probably wanted to make it extremely steep for just 1 violation. But Imagine, getting 200,000 consecutive life-time sentences for dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima or something.
Rader
- The lawsuit is not about any particular format. MP3.com copied 45,000 copyrighted CDs onto computer servers. Whether the copies on the servers are in MP3 or any other format is irrelevant -- the suit is about the unauthorized copying and has little to do with technology at all.
(emphasis mine)...
However, MP3.com does not own the rights to most, if any, of those 45,000 albums, and it had no right to copy them into a digital music library without getting authority from the people who own the copyrights.
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Argh, I can't find the text of Rakoff's ruling anymore, but yes, he agreed with the RIAA on that point.
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Don't distribute music (you don't have rights to) to people who already paid for the music?
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Oh, rubbish. When you form a company you get a lawyer. They knew they were breaking the law, they just went ahead and did it anyway. The fact that you and countless others think this law is wrong is irrelevant. You don't break the law as a business unless you're a damned idiot or a plain crook. Either way, MP3.com is hardly coming out of this smelling of roses.
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Yes, Sturgeon's Law still applies, and most unsigned acts are unsigned because they suck. But with thousands and thousands of acts to choose from, and the option of pre-listening via MP3 (with the artists' explicit consent), it's not hard to find the good stuff, either.
What the record companies are afraid of isn't piracy. It's the loss of mindshare and their inability, as large bureaucracies, to manage a future music business full of tens of thousands of performers with relatively small audiences instead of a hundred or so industry acts. What we're seeing is the battle between the music industry and the emergence of net-empowered musicians. The future belongs not to a few acts with millions of fans, but to many acts with thousands of fans.
It will be a shame if this is delayed -- it can hardly be stopped at this point -- by the music "industry".
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Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Just go to Best Buy ;0)
Get the CD, Use the Beam-it software,
take it back to Best Buy and explain to them you suddenly realized you didn;t actually have a cd-player, and that you thought they would play in you vcr or something. Atleast they let me do this(and yes I do have a cd-player
Used CD's. The store gets paid for their effort in bringing buyers and sellers together, and they get a bit more on top of that. This is completely legitimate. Yet they're still profiting from other's copyrighted works without permission.
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Here are the dots...
Courtney Love does a good job of connecting them.
The Tick - "Spoon!"
NEO - "There is no spoon."
"Bah!" - Dogbert
The artists don't see enough of the profits from a CD. And that's why we've flocked to Napster and Gnutella and the like.
Can you please connect the dots for me?
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
Given that MS gets fined $1M dollars for attempting to put a company out of business by pulling a bait-and-switch, doesn't look like the world is flat on a legal basis does it?
That's OK, the world is not flat on a reality basis either.
Or did you mean the playing field? =)
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
Of course, if you take the number of CDs in that database (10,000) and multiply it by the apparent damage to the label (0) you'll reach the number that I think is reasonable...
Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
How could this possibly be argued?
MP3.com took all their CDs and ripped them. They provided me a tool that took some checksums from random parts of my major-label CD. Since enough of them passed, MP3.com gave me the ability to listen to their MP3s of that CD. I never encoded my CD into a listenable format. (Well, actually I did, but not with their tools.)
MP3.com copied and distributed the music. They can't legally do that. Now they're paying the price. End of story.
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..!!in an intastella burst i am back to save the universe!!
The difference between mp3.com & myplay is that myplay is potentially in the pocket of TimeWarner through the AOL/WinAmp ties.
There is something called FAIR USE
That's right... there IS something called fair use, but it doesn't allow redistribution, which is exactly what mp3.com was doing.
MP3.com may not have had the right to copy this music...
That's not the point. They have that right under fair use. What they don't have the right to do is redistribute the music, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. That is why they were sued and lost.
Radio stations pay good money to broadcast music, regardless of how many people listen to them, and how many of those own, or don't own, their own copy of that music. It's nice that my.mp3.com was trying to cover their butts by insisting that you have the CD in your CD-ROM drive (once... which brings up the whole borrowing a CD for a couple minutes issue), but they were still redistributing the music without consent.
I don't like the implications, but they really blew the pooch by not consulting with a knowledgable copyright/IP lawyer first.
Eric
2) My intention was to point out a case where it's legal to profit from someone else's copyrighted songs.
Yes, the laws say that mp3.com was wrong. I think the laws should be changed.
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Until then, I will continue scouting for mp3 hosting sites to let _them_ deal with the risk of this kind of squeeze- if there are any out there which don't have insane clickthrough contracts. I'm a dangerous client- I can read. *g* I swear, too many of these damned contracts and agreements seem to assume the artist doesn't have a functioning brain...
Beware, folks. This opinion is from someone who apparently is employed by a company under the Universal umbrella. Do a 'whois' on naughtydog.com to see for yourself (they made the Crash Bandicoot series of games for Sony PlayStation).
Besides, whether or not MP3.com really broke the law still seems like a gray area to me. It seems odd to me that the judge didn't even bother to examine the scheme closely and ponder the unintended legal consequences that would result from such a hasty decision like that.
I hope MP3.com appeals. I really want to see a better clarification of what the law allows and what it doesn't, because the District Court is a rather low place on the totem pole.
Um, if it was only able to be heard by a select group of people, it wouldn't be a broadcast. It would be similar to something like HBO, where only permitted users (should) be able to recieve the material. HBO and similar stations pay royalties per subscriber. That's the arguement against MP3.com, it doesn't pay royalties on songs, nor does it regulate who can recieve data from them. It was, in a sense, broadcasting. And radio stations, through market studies, know approximately how many listeners they have on average. This information is compiled to help advertisers know when to post their commercial, as well as so they know how much to charge for commercial airtime. I wouldn't doubt for a second that the RIAA also uses this information to deterimine how much to charge the radio stations, but I cannot say this for sure.
Also, the radio station/mp3.com anology doesn't quite hold up well for this reason: when was the last time you purchased a CD or searched MP3.com by artist or song title BEFORE hearing it? If you never heard the song, how would you know it existed? Radio stations give bands HUGE exposure, something that listen on demand services such as MP3.com cannot do, because they can't control what music gets used. There are 3 main ways that music gets exposed, MTV, radio, or through a friend. That friend probably heard it first on MTV, the radio, or got it from a friend who heard it on MT.....
Still, the RIAA is dumb for not harnessing the potential of this technoligy. Could you imagine the "New Artist" section of Napster if the RIAA submitted mp3's? This is where they could fill the pitfalls of radio, people like me who rarely listen to it. I find popping in a CD to be much more convienent as I don't have to listen to commercials, songs I do not want to hear, or worse yet, annoying DJ's. I have not all day to listen to the radio for some amazing new song that I probably won't hear them name anyway. But if I could go to RIAA.com, pick a style, and see what's new on my own time, hell yeah! RIAA, wake up and smell the cable modem cooking... you can't stop it, so figure out how to use it to your advantage!
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Buy the CD, they said
We'll help you use it better--
What a nasty plan!
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
It doesn't matter whether or not the users of Beam-It had the 'right to listen' to the music, what matters is whether or not mp3.com had the right to distribute the music. Your 'right to listen' is non-existent as a legal concept. The only right the court is concerning itself with is the right to broadcast, which mp3.com (rather stupidly) neglected to acquire.
Think about it, when radio stations broadcast, they don't care whether or not the listeners already have a license to listen to the tunes, but you can bet your sweet hind end that they care about whether or not they have a right to broadcast those same tunes over the air
Why don't we go for 15 minutes without thinking about Microsoft? Is that ok with you? Think you can handle it? Different case, different situation, different judge, different crime. Got it?
If I only had access to first-tier music distribution, I'd:
In the end, that's probably a win for the big music distributors. What little they'd lose in revenue from the non-mainstream music loving public they'd more than make up for in being able to more accurately predict music buying trends.
I'm pretty sure this is what they've figured out too, and they're working on that future.
Gotta go have some doubleplus goodthoughts.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
--- Of course there's a difference. We recognize the motive in many crimes that are prosecuted -- if you kill someone by accident you'll probably get less time than if you do it on purpose.---
If you kill someone by accident, it's called Manslaughter. This can happen a lot in car accidents. There are lesser forms also, such as Reckless Endangerments, etc, etc.
But that's criminal law. I don't think mp3.com was in criminal courts, just civil courts. And then again, I don't know a damn thing about the law, I'm not a lawyer (that is why I still have a soul)
The first thing you'll get, when running a rogue mp3 web site, etc, is a letter in the mail from their lawyers. A cease-and-desist letter. After that time, if you don't cease, then they can take you to court and will show the letter they sent, proving that you did indeed know what you were doing wrong, because they told you what you did wrong.
But remember, the RIAA hands out these letters by the hundreds, and it doesn't necessarily mean they're right. But they're on a mission, and that's to scare everyone straight, and if that doesn't work, sue them if they have enough money.
Waiting for my letter....
Rader
I bought a portable CD player the other day. I wouldn't have bought it if it weren't for the CD's that RIAA produces. The manufacturer profited from the RIAA's music by allowing me to listen to the RIAA's music in more places. The manufacturer didn't have an agreement with the RIAA to profit from their works. Yet they did it anyway.
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The only way the my.mp3.com service could be legal would be if it was operated by a not-for-profit entity, and even then, it would be heavily challenged in court.
Kinda for the same reason I can't hold a party in which is sponsors where I make money and play a bunch of music foreveryone, even if I check to see if they bought the cd's themselves.
I don't know what world you live in, but my people call them bars or dance clubs.
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
I produce IP on a fixed salary, but both me and the company are opposed to copy protection. Why? Mainly because it's a pain in the ass.
Also, if someone is unable to backup their software because of copy protection, then when their hard disk goes bad, or the monthly Windoze reinstall reformats it, and they lose their stuff, it would be our fault instead of theirs.
You can't have copy protection and still allow for Fair Use. There just isn't any way to do it, whether it's software, music, movies, or whatever.
Note: if someone took advantage of the lack of copy protection in our products, and actually went ahead and infringed, and we found out about it, we'd be all over them like make up on Tammy Faye Baker.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Does anyone know if MP3.com was charged per-CD in their MyMP3 database or was it per download of songs? IMO it seems that an infringement would have occurred only when the song was downloaded but it seems from reading the news stories that they were charged for every title in their database, regardless of whether the CD or song was actually used or not. Doesn't distribution have to occur to commit infringement?
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Of course the next step is to shut down those personal storage sites, which will occur right about when someone realizes they can transfer files between the lockers and suddenly you don't have to worry about download times on Napster anymore.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
free money for the labels, but since this isn't from the sale of records, it won't go to the artists, and they will get fucked yet again.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
The best answer is listen to classical music, most of the composers are dead and don't worry about royalties any more. Chopin really blows your mind.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Of course, it's nearly impossible for the 18yo to prove they won't drink it themselves, thus the law. But if they could, I don't see any problem with it.
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Well, your equivalent in the music industry is the "studio musician", who does stuff like soundtracks for beer commercials. Quite often, these guys are really talented musicians, but also, usually not very good or prolific writers, so they play music written, arranged, and produced by others. They often get salaries, work from 9 to 5, never tour, usually never play outside of a recording studio. If they suck, their manager hears their music and says: you suck, you're fired.
Then there's the free-lance consultant programmer, who may write shareware for Kagi, or do database or web programming for fees. If they're smart, they'll include royalties in their contract, in case some other contracter comes in later, maybe to fix a bug, or update features, looks at your source code, decides he likes it, copies it, uses it in other projects later. That is where your copyright infringement and royalties would come into play.
Now, just like any shmo with Netscape can view your source, any shmo with minimal talent can listen very carefully to a song played, and transcribe it, and learn to play it himself. If he plays it professionally, he's infringing, though there are these "cover bands" that play at your local nightclubs and stuff, who do this all the time, and AFAIK, don't pay royalties on the songs they cover. (Free Bird!)
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I've always wondered, is there a difference in penalty for WILLFUL and UNWILLFUL violations?
Really, I imagine there isn't.. Why can't the courts just come out and issue a Jon Katz like article/post/story/whatever to the general public and finally lay down the legal opinion on this? We all know it's screwed up, let's just get the flaming over with now.
Somehow, I also guess that there will be references to Shadowrunner in there too...
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
That having been said, I personally think the $118M is awfully high (and should be knocked down on appeals). A copyright violation should only be considered when a my.mp3.com user downloaded an mp3. I imagine the damages in that case would be much lower. But what do I know. Turning lead into gold (turning "copyright violations" into cash) isn't my area of expertise.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
> friends, co-workers, kids, and what not? These are the people using services like BeamIT.
Well-said.
In a spirit of vicious irony, I present the following sample from NWA's "100 Miles and Runnin'":
For you young 'uns who don't remember, NWA is where Dr. Dre's got his start in 1989-1990. What goes around comes around.I mean, there goes a ton of their investment capital into the pocket of Universal.
Then again, they couldn't have been too bright in the first place if they thought they were going to get away with this.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Dang, I guess you only hve the *rights* that you do not intend to use
--Shaddup and support your local PBS station Plan for it
the artists should sue the record companies for a share once MP3.com has been bled dry.
Well, I should hope that law doesn't really exist.
Reeks of the fucking Stamp Act. It would only prove further that this compa^H^H^Huntry is totally screwed up (I actually did start typing company, it was an accident, but makes a good point). There will be some sort of political revolution within the next 20 years, hopefully it will be for the right side (ie, not the big business' side). I'm all for free enterprise. It just makes no sense that a bunch of money grubbing fuckheads (the RIAA, duh) could tax media I wish to buy because someone else might do something they don't like with it! It would be one thing if they owned the patents on the medium, or if they were the sole supplier/distributor. But they want to bake a cake and eat it too. For most audio media, they're getting you coming and going (CDs cost an obscene amount, and audio CD-rs cost a similarly absurd amount).
So anyways, although I'm fairly sure such a law does not exist, I feel it would be our civil duty to break such a law if it existed. The effort against piracy is almost halfway legitimate, but the real reasons are so obvious (to us, the educated consumers) that their moves reek of Orwellianism. I certainly don't want to live in a country where I can't record a CD without being accused of being a pirate...
Okay, I'm a little upset today, and this whole issue is such utter bullshit that I may have gone a little ballistic. But fuck the RIAA.
-tsunake
Exactly. While people may like to look at the poor shareholders (who admittedly got screwed by mp3.com's poor decision), I'm feeling more sorry for those independent artists who were using mp3.com to distribute (or just give people a place to hear) their music. I personally have found plenty of very good stuff there (like Basque...mmmm) If this ends up being the end of mp3.com they're the ones who are really getting hurt.
Gee... you'd almost think the RIAA had some sort of interest in seeing mp3.com fail and just happened to get lucky thanks to my.mp3.com....
do they really think that this will deter people from trading mp3s? i guess it'll make some companies cover their ass better.
I'm just saying, they did take mine back because I played really stupid. Maybe the guy who did shouldn't have.
Perhaps you could take them home, upload them, then Scratch them or something, and see if you could talk them into taking them back
Copyright provides a fairly big hammer if somebody chooses to be a bozo and, say, start a competing business by first duplicating as much of your web work as he can get.
By itself, laws cannot prevent acts, but they permit enforcement (people generally being happier with their police and other authorities if these officers appear to be acting in accordance with laws produced through some due process, rather than imperial edict or personal whim), and thus can provide some deterrent value. Combine this with a fairly large number of institutions -- like, I'd suspect, pretty much any business, government agency or university -- that have policies against either violating laws in general or copyright in particular, and there's a fair bit of (post facto) teeth.
Could a schmuck rip off all your work? Yes. But that clearly risks sanctions that wouldn't happen w/o both copyright law and an enforcement system, so any schmuck who's considering ripping off your work and making a business out of it has to consider the consequences.
And somehow I don't see many beserk "distributions of passion" occuring where pure emotional surges cause unthinking violations of copyright...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
"broadcast", according to the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary (not a legal dictionary I realize) is "to make public by means of radio or television". Assuming we'll extend it to the internet, the point is clear: broadcasting is making something public. mp3.com did NOT make the streams and music public, clearly something else other than broadcasting. Lets call it narrowcasting.
Next, you're assuming that narrowcasting = distribution. All our distribution laws and legal precidents are written with the assumption that the distribution is of new material.
'Distributing' to people who already own the material is a legally grey area, though I personally believe it to be a very clear moral one.
And finally, mp3.com was not sued for rebroadcasting or narrowcasting or distributing music in any fashion. They were sued and now fined for creating a database (or catalog) of music and profiting from it.
Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
They don't need permission from anyone to copy the music for their own internal use, according to non-RIAA fair-use interpretation (and contrary to YOUR opinion, fully in line with society & court decisions).
They DID violate distribution rights (from what I've read, they were trying the "quantum" version of information theory - if you can't tell the difference between US doing the copy, or the USER doing the copy, then there is no difference) - which the judge laughed at, just before he threw the book at them...
The difference is that myplay only provided the space for people to store mp3's which they extracted on their own. The copyright violation takes place during the distribution and unauthorisded ripping.
;-)
The share feature is like a radio station, your playlist sequencing has to comply with the radio rules i.e. you can't legally put up the whole of dark side of the moon or some similar album.
Oh.... and myplay is usable over netscape on linux - my.mp3.com kept crashing on me.....
Hey... they even use icecast - so I'm happy
You do forget to address the outrageous amount being charged ("awarded") for each CD copied from optical media (on which it was bought) to magnetic media (a backup copy). Where in the world does the Judge get $25,000 per backup'd up CD from? Also, why is a business not allowed to make backup copies of music it has licensed (which mp3.com did when it bought the CD's) when an individual is? I say MP3.com was well within its rights when it backuped up those CD's to its hard drives, just as I am when I do. Streaming the music to other licensed owners seems to be the only grey area, though the judge exonerated them on that... Maybe because if you and I are both licensed to have the same IP then we can obviously share our copies of that IP. Duh!
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
The reason for the large damages? The judge wants to deter other people from "infringing on copyrighted materials". Anyone notice a drop in music sharing? Anyone? Bueller?
This is really stupid and I hope MP3.com approves it. There was already an analysis of the My MP3 protocol put up. There was no way to infringe. Period. MP3 is shelling out twenty five thousand dollars per CD - payment for what? If this is the modern definition of compensatory damages, I'm shocked.
It is currently very trendy in the legal circles to slam a technology company. These judges want to get a name. (I defended copyrights, can I be a Supreme court judge?) to get higher in their career as poloticians. Is it very obvious as to what is happening, and the mp3.com case was very weak at best. Napster is going to get slammed hard, and then they will try to go after hotline, and all the other "sharing" and "warez" systems that have been here a long time. NOW, if gnutella is able to Hash the searches and transfers or make it impossible to pin down who is offering what (disallow any identity in the system and set up "reflectors" for requests) things will go smoothly.
I dont care what judge you are and what army you have, you will never stop the sharing of music. We will always have tapes, cd-burners, etc... and the poor teenagers and college students, that when they get older will buy more audio, will probably think twice about actually buying that CD, based on the actions of the industry.
I know that I will never give money to a Country Club again, after the crap pulled on me in college. (Golfers are snooty buttheads anyways) and my son will think twice about giving a RIAA company money, after the shaft they give to the fans and artists.
It's a choice of the lesser of two evils.. and they are more evil than copying.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe they should see if they could pay in stock options! that way Universal would atleast to be forced to take a look at MP3.com's buisness model, something they have obviously not done yet :)
2) Businesses ARE allowed to make money from the RIAA's music without permission. For instance:
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I think that eventually trading music will cease to become economically viable. It's only vaible now because they control distribution. You cannot control distribution over the internet.
Musicians are not special people. If they cannot make money making music then they're going to have to find something else to do. There are plenty of good independant artists on mp3.com if you search for them.
This is kind of like the free barcode scanner thing. If it's a flawed business model it will fail over time.
Music and software are kind of similar. They are both very easy to distribute and can be created only by a small portion of the population, and people want both. Music and software both have their inherent problems (RIAA, IP, M$FT), both of which will need a solution. Opensource solves software's problems. What's the solution for music?
The sony manager said a while ago about how "they will not lose their revenue streams" when speaking about music piracy over the internet. That's kind of like "refusing to lose the revenue stream from recalled firestone tires". Natural selection will take place.
I say the Record companies shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways. Either I own the CD outright, and should be allowed to do whatever I want with it (e.g. make as many copies as desired for my own use) or I own a license to the material on the CD, in which case it doesn't matter where the bits are being played back from, as long as the bits are identical to the bits I licensed. Which is, RIAA? I guess it must be "Whichever we think will maximize our profits in any given situation or lawsuit." Yeah, that's what I thought...
CNN is reporting up to $250 Million.
The investors behind the company would have considered these things too, and nixed the project if they thought it was illegal and therefore a financial risk. I'm sure they had lawyers look at it. Maybe they should sue their own lawyers for giving them bad advice.
And if they really didn't think about it until they got sued, well, even then they could have bailed out, shut the service down, and settled out of court with the RIAA. If they knew they were breaking the law and had no chance of winning the lawsuit, that's the only thing that would have made sense.
Therefore, even after they were sued, they must have believed they would win in court. Nothing else makes sense!
If you believe they knew they were breaking the law and would lose the lawsuit, maybe you can explain: Why would they do anything that suicidal? Why didn't they settle out of court? What did they possibly hope to gain?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
As much as I hate to say it, MP3.com was engaging in distributing copyrighted material without permission and deserve to lose the case. I think it can be easily argued however that the penalty was too large. I also believe that the fault lies with the government and its inability to establish laws dealing with these issues before they erupt like they have. At the same time however it doesn't give someone the right to violate other's rights because it's over the internet.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
For the actual law, see the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, Chapter 10, Section 1004(b).
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From the same site:
In particular, the 1995 addition created the exclusive right to perform sound recordings "by means of a digital audio transmission."
Oh, that's simple. People were downloading music.
Someone said "Hey, this is wrong"
People suddenly came up with a lame excuse, "Uhh, yeah.... well we're doing it because you ain't giving enough profits to the artists!"
Some other dude said "Yeah! Yeah! What he said."
Can you reference those court decisions? I've been looking, but it takes a lot of time.
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Granted, this could be hacked pretty easily. But I'm sure the majority of users wouldn't know how, so I'm at a bit of a loss to see where the willful loss is here.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Get a fucking life, Mr Whois. We all have to make a living somehow.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Founder's Camp
Founder's Camp
News for non-Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Title says it all. Is this to be payed in a lump sum by such-and-such a date, or is it amortized over a period? And in what form does said payment take?
Additionally, if they appeal, is this payment frozen until the new decision?
-TBHiX-
Not particularly well-versed in the outrageous settlements granted under U.S. law.
It wasn't public performance.
Yes it is. 'Public' is not necessarily plural. Go follow the link and learn what words mean in this context.
Thank God this Judge had some common sense. The advent of MP3 has been nothing more than a world wide conspiracy of THEFT of artistic rights from copyright holders. How dare MP3.com feel that they could wrench away control of an artist's work. The arrogance of it all makes me sick. Artists deserve the right to control their intellectual property, i.e., their art. Napster & MP3.com have been the #1 enemy of those that create by stealing those creations and giving it to those that feel everything in life should be free -- and making a buck to boot off that theft!!!
Well, the horse you're quoting is the RIAA, not the judge, and it's quite contrary to the law as written. If the judge's opinion turns out to be based on the above statements, then Mp3.com's appeal should be pretty easy.
Again, this assumes that mp3.com owns the CDs that they used to build their library. If they built their library by other means, then I am wrong.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Fair Use takes another blow to the skull. Kind of feeling screwed here. Thank you Universal, (whip snap!) for merging, (snap!) and wrecking A&M (snap!), and for not compromising and screwing over the consumer in general. (snap!) Thank you very much! - May I have another, please?(snap! snap!)
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Hmm... But what about those companies that sprung up a while ago who would copy your vynl records onto CD for you? Of course, you had to send them your record for them to copy from - but I don't really see why that would make a difference. Say they had already copied the same record for someone else, but still had the CD. Would it be illegal for them to duplicate that CD rather than make a new CD from your own vynl?
MP3.com provided the service of translating CD's to mp3s for you. The fact that they use one particular physical CD rather than another (i.e. the one they bought rather than the one you bought) is surely irrelavent.
Does anyone else feel that this amount is completely unjustified, when one takes into account that because of the mp3s being out there, CD sales have increased? Okay it was a violation of copyright laws, but because you steal a CD at a store, the government doesn't bankrupt you. MP3.com did not ask people to pay to use their site and only made money by advertisements; as such doesn't this seem a little extreme?
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I think there are two possible outcomes that the industry-fed lawyers and industry-fed politicians are heading towards: 1) A substantial Federal income tax will be levied on all citizen/consumer/pirates/scum (that means you) which will be deposited directly to RIAA/MPAA members (minus the gov't payoff) 'cuz you're gonna break the law eventually (or break the laws that haven't been written yet). or 2) For the common good of the nation, music and all other forms of media will be made illegal because citizens/consumers/pirates/scum (that means you) are just going to do naughty things eventually. Besides, if you are sitting around listening to that subversive noise, you are not being a productive citizen and maximizing profits for the mega-corps that, by judicial decree, now own you, your time, and your thoughts. Plus, item 1) will be implemented anyway to compensate for loss in income to the mega-corp. This would be a whole lot cheaper than wating resources on the media protection arms race and by implemeting 2), the corporations can be profitable without producing anything, which obviously, is the end game they are working towards. --
What happens when this doesn't get paid? Sounds like a pretty pathetic scare tactic by the judicial system and RIAA. Will this get resolved with $118M worth of banner adds? Even if they bankrupt the ohh so threatening business, all they accomplish is slowing down development.
The rest of your post made sense, but I have to comment on this bit:
It is true the artists don't see enough of the profits. It is true that I (and probably most other people) would prefer if the lion's share of the money went to the artist instead of to the fat-cat middle-men.
But by and large, people have not flocked to Napster and Gnutella because of the profits (or lack thereof) seen by the artist. People have flocked to N and G because of two reasons:
And to hell with the artists profits, because using Gnutella/Napster doesn't alter the profit-picture for the artist one little bit.
If they want to improve their financial position, the artists had better start bypassing the middle-men. When I do buy music, I'd much prefer to pay the money to the artist, direct. But in return I want them to send me a CD direct, and most artists are not set up to market their own disks. And ten years ago it would have been impractical for them to do so, but now...
They should send the money with PayPal...
^_^
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The RIAA went ape-shit over them sending electronic version of CD's they owned in streaming form to consumers.
Streaming audio to those consumers who have paid for it is obviously where the industry is going. The simple solution to the RIAA's problem of people ripping/sharing CD's is not to sell CD's any more! Instead, the consumer will buy a license to stream the audio off some server whenever they like.
Now whoever offers this service will make a mint of money as people pay various monthly fees for various "packages" as per cable TV, etc. And the RIAA obviously wants to be the only game in town when that day comes, so you can count on them jumping hard, onto the spine of anyone who tries to set up any service similar to this.
Many of you are supposed to be the tech wizards of today but are as clueless as the Judge is when it comes to bits vs. atoms and the fundamental change that is happening around you.
Persons that come down against mp3.com in this thread (some quite brutally) show that for all that web site building they're doing, they still don't get the point, the essence, of what's going on here as society digitizes itself.
The laws need changing. Your point of view needs changing as well. --
If you were to meet someone on the street, and they asked the way to the nearest bank. They then
left you, and robbed that bank. It's not YOUR responsibility.
But if they came and asked you for plans to the bank and dynamite for the vault and lockpicks for the door and an electronic combination-cracker and you gave them all this stuff..... Wanna bet you'd be liable?
IANAL either, but I know a little about copyright. The data format has absolutely zero to do with the cases (either of them). Damages come in two flavors: actual and statutory (potentially plus attorneys fess, for either). Actual damages are what the copyright holder lost plus what the copyright infringer gained, while statutory damages are set by the court within a sort of fixed range per work infringed. The range moves up when a court finds that an infringement is "willful" and moves down when the court finds the infringement is "innocent". The range for statutory damages is set in 17 USC 504, paragraph c, with the "normal" range at $750 to $30,000, with the ceiling for "willful" set at $150,000 and the floor for "innocent" at $200, all per work infringed.
In the MP3.com case, Universal did not request actual damages, but elected statutory (it's either/or and the copyright owner must choose). The judge had already found "willful" infringement but apparently didn't see the need to set the punishment outside the normal range, setting it at $25,000 per CD.
For Napster, the total dollar amount of the MP3.com award isn't relevant, the benchmark is the "per work" part of the award. In other words, the precendent for Napster is $25,000 per CD. However, Napster didn't do anything to attempt to limit usage of the service and the little evidence of intent I've seen suggests that Napster intended to create an unregulated sharing service. If the appeals courts agree that they're liable, I'd expect a higher per CD damage award, on more CDs. However, I think Napster has a chance to win an "ISP" defense based on on appeal and there's also a fairly good chance of winning an appeal on the issue of "contributory infringement" - I think Judge Patel is stretching the theory of contributory infringement to get a particular result and I'm not sure appeals courts will agree that it stretches that far. There are also other legal "outs" for Napster, this brief (PDF) lists several potential good ones.
For MP3.com, the design of their service creates a very different case and any chance of winning on appeal will depend on getting court to look at the end result of the service (which is itself lawful), and not the implementation details.
Do NOT try to go into an honest business distributing music in the MP3 format. It will only get you sued into oblivion. Instead, trade MP3s illegally.
Or so this case would make it seem.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
heh. ditto. right on. etc. its raining in the desert.
Too bad that Microsoft didn't aquire mp3.com sooner. Then that possible $3 billion would be coming out of Bill's pocket.
I know it's not that much to him, but it'd still hurt at least a little.
--Dave
Rader
ah.. but whereas MS only fucked some consumers up the ass without lubricant, MP3.com actually had the NERVE to have tried to bend the revenue-stream of a company. Can't have that.. how else are politicians going to survive if they can't get their money from industry?
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
They'd probably kick an ass or two! That's what Microsoft would do!
-- This space intentionally left blank.
Sure there is--that's what this trial was about. Maybe you mean that you don't think what they did should be illegal, or that you think it wasn't morally wrong? They were distributing music without the permission of the copyright owner. It may have been logically equivilant to the CD owners exercising time and space shifting rights, but the physical act was different, and unfortunately the law makes a distinction in this case.
This whole situation is just wrong, and MP3.com is getting the shit end of the stick.
Well, yeah, what do you expect? Either the recording industry was mad that MP3.com thought of it first, or their lawyers smelled money and jumped.
-RickHunter
According the NPR news, the judge just ordered MP3.com to pay $25,000/CD. UMG claims MP3.com copied about 10,000 CDs while MP3 says it's less than 5,000. So the total amount to be paid will vary according the number of CDs determined (by the judge?) to have been copied.
Surprisingly, the majority of the opinion here seems to be against copyright protection for music and patent protection for new inventions.
In real life, most peoples wages depend on copyright. Even RMS uses copyright protection to enforce its GPL terms.
That doesn't excuse stupid patents from the USPTO or judges that issue brain dead judgements covering all benefits from copyright, which is not what the law says....
Because the poor record companies are sure that I was borrowing my friends CD's and beaming them to mp3.com and listening for free....I mean I can at least see where they are going after Napster because of BLATENT pirating going on...But my.mp3.com was as legit as possible....I mean you had to own the CD to be able to listen (unless you wanted to break the law...and at that point their is no stopping anybody...I mean you could just rip the CD the old fashioned way...)
And further more, the best feature was the fact that you could actually purchase REAL CD's from the partner vendors and then be able to listen to them while you were waiting for the Snail Mail to drop off the shrinkwrap....(How is that not a win-win situation for the record labels, vendors, mp3.com, and the consumer!!!)
Basically all this says to me is that the RIAA says fuck the consumer....
Note to RIAA: None of my friends even own any of the CD's that I prefer...So buzz off...
The record companies still claim they will give ME the (ex)consumer a legal way to partake of technology -- but by smashing one of the only companies that came up with a feasable solution where everyone in the food chain could possibly flourish -- I know that it is just a blatent lie...I think that my.mp3.com was only a few months away from revolutionizing how CD's were purchased online, (hell, I bought 10 or 11 CD's from their partner sites, in the same timeframe that I usually would have made it to the brick and mortar's only 1 or 2 times -- only to find that their poorly stocked shelves did not contain anything worth listening to.....)
Sad day...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
You know I have yet to see a difference betweer napster, Mp3.com and the radio? The radio plays songs all the time that we can download yet they are not being sued. What the RIAA doesn't understand is that all they are going to do is piss off most of the folks out there. These services are great they allow me to listen to things before I buy the cd. There were statistics done that a large percentage of users that used these services only kept the songs for about a month I believe it was before they deleted them and either bought the CD or didn't listen. Yes you will always have the ones that want it for free. But you know what? You can't stop them. Even if these sights become illegal people will always find a way.
It is better for everyone to think you are a fool then to open your mouth and remove all doubt. ~Shakespear
I don't know what world you live in, but my people call them bars or dance clubs.
Yes, they are called bars and they are also legally called on to pay royalties on music they play -- there is a standard contracting arrangment.
my.mp3.com wasn't making copies for personal use. They were making copies to distribute to others as a business providing a service. I'm on mp3.com's side on this, but it's not quite the same thing as making a copy for personal use.
Exactly. If you think about it, really, this is much more willful infringement than Napster: they ripped the CDs, put them on a jukebox, and offered them to the public without permission as part of a commercial service with ads.
I would really like to know why they played into the RIAA's hands so foolishly. The only thing I can think of is that they may have wanted to use this to kill SDMI dead, and they may have figured that they'd get all the labels to settle. But it was a pretty dangerous thing to do, when they really didn't have to.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
IANAL. IF MP3 has done anything wrong, it is from their profiting off of the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. In that case, I can see their having to pay out any earned [advertisement] revenue's based on the market they've created.
Somehow I'm doubting that they really earn $400 million or even $100 million purely based on these advertisements. I could be wrong, I don't know how much advertising pulls in these days.
-Michael
This verdict is a good thing. It will make people realize that if a company or individual (ie Napster) does something, they can be held responsible for it, however if society at large does something (ie Gnutella, Freenet) then it will become a trend.
There's no question to me that the original intent behind Napster was to pirate music over the internet. I make no value judgment here, that's the truth. The supplemental benefit of getting some unheard artists a quick listen is beside the point. So now people use Napster as a "resource" to download music before they buy it...but this is something that's already available via real audio or other such media files on various online resale merchants. sarcasmEither that, or god forbid, you might actually have to go to a record store! My lord no. Please. Stop this now! /sarcasm
My problem with Napster is actually my problem with the RIAA (who by the way are worthy of a fate far worse than death). The artists don't see enough of the profits from a CD. And that's why we've flocked to Napster and Gnutella and the like.
This verdict is a good one. It will force the masses to the free versions of Gnutella and such. It will still force the RIAA to reconsider micropayment schemes and other such problems of intellectual property, but if it makes us think, then it is a good and fair verdict.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
pfft, if you only knew.
Behold, the power of Grits!
I didn't think about it that way. The Big-5 could create their own service that did the same thing as MP3.com, and then that MP3.com's service would be damaging to their own service.
However, damage isn't done UNTIL the "Big-5" create their own service.
In any case, this sure is a whole lot of bullshit them being AWARDED so much money for this. They should have received compensation for legal fees and for having to waste their time, and that is all. No damage was done.
But what can we do? I already don't buy ANY music by artists that are signed with any RIAA labels. And on the occasion that I do... nevermind, I haven't for a long time.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
This is the same logic for going after 2600 in the MPAA lawsuit. Yeah DeCSS is EVERYWHERE, but when they release the successor to DVD, they will have a precedent to stop any reverse engineering of it. Keeping in mind, of course, they had a better chance of winning against 2600 (those EVIL hackers who do such things as posting security problems in a public forum, just like Microsoft does over at Bugtraq) than say the NYTimes. Even wonder why news organizations weren't in the lawsuit? They have better lawyers.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I'm allowed to copy CDs onto my disk drive. What's the difference?
from what i've heard, no, you're not allowed to copy cds onto your hard drive. you're not allowed to make a copy of a cd in your cdr drive. you are, however, allowed to make copies on cassettes and in component cd writers designed specifically for audio cds.
unfortunately, i don't know the law that grants/denies these rights (perhaps the home recording act) and i don't want to look it up right now.
Mp3.com did NOT rent out what they had "copied". You had to have proved you had the CD in your own little ocmputer, or had bought the CD from one of their partners, before you could listen to mp3.com's CD.
Let me repeat that: You had to have your own copy of teh CD before you could listen to mp3.com's copy.
So where's the rental? Where's the theft?
--
Infuriate left and right
WSJ and the FoxNews article are listing the award as 250 million.
There's a fundamental differance between what radio does and what mp3.com was doing. That being that radio broadcasts to anyone within listening difference, regardless of whether they have the CD or not. Mp3.com required the listener to have the CD. Therefore, a better similarity would be comparing it to using the actual CD rather than the radio. If you're listening to the CD, no royalties are paid (after the initial payment to buy the disc - which has already been paid in this case).
The only problems with the mp3.com technology that should have landed them in legal trouble would be if they put no effort into security. Having never tried to crack it myself, I can't say one way or the other. Another potential hotspot would be that people could borrow a CD from a friend once, throw it in the computer and make mp3.com believe that they owned it. These two problems could (notice I don't say "would") lead to lost sales, but not to lost royalties.
Addlepated - punk & metal
The payment is for percieved (the MP3.com lawyer has pointed out that they didn't have any actual evidence whatsoever) lost earnings. I'd be curious to see if ANY of the money makes it to the artists on the label and how the label plans to make that split?
Seagram's was a small distillery in Ville LaSalle, Quebec, Canada until they hooked up with rhum runners for the duration of the prohibition.
My father worked for the Ol' man Seagrams back then, for the princely sum or $37 even weeks and $42 odd weeks and my mother still has the original architectural plans for the expansion required by the orders of booze coming from Capone, Lanski et alia.
This is his grand son's shame and a sham. So much for his motivation. He doesn't care about this as anything but a white-wash on gran-pa's past.
Now the only recourse all the artists who were on MP3.com will have is to start a class action suit against Seagrams & Universal for record deals (with record releases,) because a lot of them can't get their music out to the public any more.
The law is stupid enough to do it too. Its a double-edged sword and all these idiotic retrograde groups are falling on it.
The MPAA and RIAA have managed to make linking illegal, peer-to-peer file sharing illegal and don't get me started on the Millenium Copyright Act... Well if they can get it enforced anyway. (Will MP3.com relocate to SeaLand?)
Eventually, the industries will realize that their "representative groups" and industry associations, those intellectually-challenged neo-Luddites that have been against every innovation since the player piano roll, the reel-to-reel tape, cassette, VCR, DAT ad nausium, have cost them millions at every turn.
You don't fight technology, you figure out how to make a buck from it. You know it won't last for ever. But instead they're trying to command the tide, to put the genie back in the bottle, to un-invent teh atom bomb, the hand-gun or the pointed stick.
It doesn't work that way. Its never worked that way and its not about to start because somebody's ashamed of what his gran-pa did for a living. Bigger and better have tried it and failed.
Real criminals will keep ripping them off, easily in the case of the MPAA since the MPAA seems to be too stupid to improve their encryption but instead wants to bury all our heads in the sand instead, knowing that you can write a virus, bring down half the mail servers on the planet cause billions in damages and not even come to trial.
The only people they are hurting are their legitimate clientelle. And I now ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to buy or see, read or hear anything by produced Universal or drink any of Seagram's booze EVER AGAIN.
I don't need to be regarded as a criminal simply because I'm alive.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ahhhh, I see.....yes that *is* silly. Apologies for being dense.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
If MP3.com is to be martyred to teach the rest of us a lesson, the attorneys had better be prepared to shut down the other web souces as well. Most software providers are not intimidated by this action and will continue to distribute their client software which makes server based mp3 files unnecessary.
why a legal webcasting system will never be made unless you sleep with the RIAA. The RIAA is really silly, since all of the publicity about getting free MP3's via these websites have been made, more and more Joe Sixpack people are finding out where to download these programs.
Message to RIAA: Lawyers and these silly court decisions are sucking you dry!
Sig it.
I just saw this site called Ace-MP3. They actually sell CD-R's of MP3's on it. They have 12,500 albums to choose from (and we're talking about good ones, and 'copyrighted' ones too)
You can mix and match albums. It costs $25 for 1 CDR, (about 10 albums on that CDR they say). However it comes down to about $5 a CDR if you buy enough of them.
Check out the stats: 12,500 albums, 550 GB!
AND they claim that they're paying ASCAP licensing fees, so it's all legit! I can't believe it. If this is true... why haven't we heard of this place?!!! I can't believe it, personally. Coming from Russia, makes it less believable too, but they sure are acting like it's the real deal. I'm interested in any info anyone has!
Rader
At this point, it is time for the internet community, or at least those who are being persecuted, to refuse to play the game anymore.
... but it is our backyard, and we are the players. Without our willing cooperation, they are powerless. They rule with the consent of the governed, or in the very least without the governed being actively agianst them.
The courts have largely depended upon citizens and companies willing cooperation. Granted, with a court order, the assets of a corporation can be seized, but what if said company has no assets within the United States? Then the government would be reduced to seizing the property of a "person" that does not exist within its boundries. While this can certanly be done, even these United States would not sit for it for very long.
That which exists in only a cyber media does not and cannot fall within the jurisdiction of a land-based government.
surely, you would say that it is these courts that own the bat and ball and make up the rules
They may stop MP3.com, though the judge has issued a ruling which violates both the principles of copyright, and the meaning of fair use.
From here, we know what is coming. And we have two options. We can either sit idly by and watch events unravel to determine the course of our very lives, or we can refuse to play the game. By refusing, we need merely not admit to the existence of laws which we feel immoral, perhaps even ignore the existence of the US government itself.
Too bad I am posting this after several hours discussion, i doubt that anyone, even the moderators, will read this post.
Chris Nichols
This can only mean bad things for Napster...
"Well you see, Your Honor, in a previous MP3 related case the defendant was found guilty of damages greater than $100 million..."
IANAL, but it seems to me that this case might be referred to as precedent in the Napster case. (I know, MP3.com was hosting files, Napster wasn't, but just because the educated majority of slashdot readers know the difference doesn't mean the US Judicial system does.)
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
It is not clear which suit this is for. I know they have at least a couple suits going against thm right now, one of which I belive is completely bogus, but they will lose.
There is/was(?) one case again them for the myMP3.com "service", where cunsumers had to prove they owned the CD before they were given access to the music. The RIAA went ape-shit over them sending electronic version of CD's they owned in streaming form to consumers. The consumer had already proved they had possesion of the physical media!
Hope this article is not about that case.
Looks like it may be time to start some organized site to politically fight these media giants (RIAA/MPAA,etc.) I have already written my representitives. There has to be a way we can be heard as a group. I know many of you, like myself, are deeply concerned about these issues.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
With how sick i am of hearing about mp3 distribution sites losing to music megaindustry in general i think they should gather about $118 million in pennys and air drop them all from half a mile up over the recording studios. Dont think the music industry will ever ask for another cent after that.
Yet despite all the controversy i still to this day have no trouble finding a MP3 or a copy of DeCSS on the internet, glad to see the legal system is as effective as always.
-its not a rule, until somebody breaks it too many times
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Reading the article, I think that everyone should have found the following lines disturbing: In making his ruling Wednesday, the judge said it was necessary to send a message of deterrence to the Internet community to prevent future copyright infringements. "They need to understand that the law's domain knows no such limits," said Rakoff. What does that say about the current state of affairs in our legal system, not to mention DeCSS, (well, maybe it's not legal for me to do that anymore). In my opinion this is just another judge who is ticked off at the younger generations cause they have the balls to change things, not to mention they don't need the manual to figure out point and click. Just keep supporting EFF
I also fail to buy the argument that the RIAA deserves money from a service that they do not, and do not want to provide. LET ME LISTEN TO MY MUSIC HOW I WANT, WHEN I WANT, WHERE I WANT so long as I have payed for the rights to listen to it. If I don't want to spend the time to copy the music myself, or upload the music to my own private server myself, so long as I am able to show ownership of the right to listen to the music let me listen to it!
I will delve a bit into deep opinion here, but I think the big reason that the record industry is after MP3.com is NOT because of the copyright issue of beam-it and my.mp3.com. The big problem they have is that they know they are no longer necessary. MP3.com is able to provide a huge promotion coverage for a band. They provide cd distribution for a band. They provide this for anyone, and at NO CHARGE. Talk about the end of the nasty record industry tradition of pouring your blood sweat and tears into a demo, running it around to a million agents to get it listened to, and hoping for a deal where you get even 1% of sales from the music you record. Beat the record industry, buy only music distributed by companies that believe in new distribution methods that give increased value to the artist and to the consumer.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
The copyright violation was in ripping the cds, not in making them available.
Judge Rakoff referenced the lawsuit Castle Rock vs. Carol Publishing where a company produced a book of trivia from the Seinfeld show. The book had a lot of direct quotes from the show. Carol Publishing Group lost the case and had to stop publishing the trivia book.
But if you look at it, the public had already payed (through advertisements) for the right to view Seinfeld. Yet the public wasn't legally allowed to view the copyrighted works in another form (the trivia book) without Seinfeld being further compensated.
In this case, the judge decided that it's even worse that the copyrighted works weren't even slightly modified.
Copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to benefit from the copyrighted works. Since MP3.com was making money from the songs being in MP3 form even though the consumers had already bought the CD's, it was obvious that the MP3's have further financial value, and that the RIAA were the only ones who should have benefited from that additional demand since they still held the copyright.
--
Personally I believe that the courts have gone way overboard in supporting anyone who can spell intellectual property". In this particular case, however, I can see the plaintif's point and generally agree with the outcome. Either we have copyright laws or we don't. I can't see how the outcome could have been any different.
My understanding of the current MP3 case is that mp3.com is storing copies of CDs (in mp3 format) in central repository for listening anywhere on the internet after the customer has proven that he/she owns the same CD. So mp3.com had to copy copyrighted material in order to do this. End of story. They violated copyright laws by doing this.
Contrast this with the DECSS situation or the :Cue:Cat situation. In both cases, someone has simply reverse engineered the transmission medium/format and developed code to use the devices in ways other than what their developers originally expected. In and of itself this does not violate copyright law, nor does it necessarily encourage people to do so. (The :Cue:Cat situation seems like a real fishing expedition).
In my opinion, the organizations trying to put a stop to healthy re-adaption of their technologies, as in the DECSS or :Cue:Cat cases, are true villains. Their harassment and bullying tactics need to nipped in the bud ... and quickly.
But knee-jerk flaming of anyone who doesn't support the total elimination of copyright protection doesn't help things. The general public won't be able to distinguish between the mp3.com case and the DECSS/:Cue:Cat situation. All they see is that the open-source community can't have (won't allow) an open discourse about the new legal situations that are arising. We're being pigeon-holed and dismissed as a bunch of anarchists because of this.
the radio piece I heard said that the judge could have ordered more but gave them the 25,000 $ because mp3.com was behaving well. MP3.com has settled with others for abour 2 million.
Amen... I agree 100%
AFAIK, the problem comes in when a company does it for the public and profits from it without compensating the copyright holders of the Seinfeld show.
So, you are allowed to listen to the music in any form you want to, but an outside company can't profit from helping you listen to the music, unless they have a deal with the RIAA.
--
You don't allow OTHER people to make copies of your copies. mp3.com did. It's not cut and dried - it's a gray area. mp3.com knew they were on shaky legal ground when they started, and they lost. Sort of...
Geez with the amount of laws in place it's becoming very easy to break a few ones.
Used CDs are covered by the first sale doctrine, a specially granted right. ISPs are given special rights under DMCA. Napster tried to argue they were an ISP in their case, and the argument was firmly rejected. CD players do not depend on the RIAA, but even if they did, they are not transferring the data user to user, so this is specious.
This being said, There are cases in which commercial use of IP without permission is considered Fair Use. The most obvious example is for reviewing purposes.
I am not anti-MP3.com or Napster. I unfortunately think we will have to change laws so copyright holders must demonstrate damage being caused by the current offenders. By this test, MP3.com is certainly okay. Napster would be shaky, but less so than currently. It would be a fair resolution.
Everwhere else you pay damages if damage has been done, and only as much as the damage was (that's why it's called that way). Not so in the USA...
its all about closing the HREF block.
/comments.pl in order to allow everyone to have a fair chance to post.
It's been 1 minute since your last submission!
Also[oT]:Isn't this a little silly?
"Slow down cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait 1 minute between each submission of
Sig it.
That kinda confused me at first...
Mikael Jacobson
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
And out of this $118M, that would be, lets see, carry the 2, umm, NOT ONE THIN DIME for the supposed "victims" of this heinous piracy, the poor starving artists. You're entitled to all the justice you can afford. - Clayski
One thing that bothers me is the claim that my.mp3.com "allows people to listen to songs but not download them their computers." (sic)
That's untrue. My.mp3.com streams its files via http. How hard is that to capture? trivial. I used wget to grab whole albums that I had on my.mp3.com. In a twisted logic, it's the fastest way to rip the stuff you own.
This is just another example of a phrase I've been using when talking about this age: "to experience is to own". It's very, very, very hard, if not impossible, to present someone with the experience of a medium without their being able to capture it in some (useful) way. At some point, the signal will hit an interface not controlled by the media player : sound driver, video drivers, etc. Two simple examples are doing a screen capture to grab an image being displayed and (can't find the CNET article right now) that software that replaces your sound drivers on windows with a custom driver that can also record whatever is being played.
So, my.mp3.com might have stopped the clueless (wget impared) from getting the files, but let's be real (no pun intended), the songs were technically downloadable.
-- adam a 62 69 74 65 20 6D 65
The parent message is a piece of crap, instead moderate that first reply way up there. We are not talking about thinking inside or outside the box or RMS or blah blah blah. We are talking about willfully violating a law. Do you choose to ignore every law that you do not agree with? That is not the way our country operates, for better or for worse.
Maru
US Code Title 17, Section 106 lays out the sorts of things that a copyright holder is allowed to do, and no one else is. They're along the lines of exclusive right to reproduction, exhibition, and the like.
Nowhere in copyright law does it mention the exclusive right to profit from one's copyright.
For instance, copyright holders don't benefit from the lending or sale of used works.
--
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
MP3.com was keeping copies of the songs on their servers, but they supposedly put up a firewall of sorts to keep everybody from getting those songs -- The BeamIt Software. Once BeamIt saw that a user had a specific CD in their drive (with certain track lengths in a specific order), it would allow that user access to those songs (with those track lengths in that order).
:) I want to test the waters here on Slashdot..
THE PROBLEMS: The BeamIt software can't tell that a CDR is in the drive instead of the real CD. Therefore it will allow someone access to MP3 copies of songs they didn't own. The BeamIt software can't tell that the person beaming CDs into his account isn't the actual owner of the CD in his drive. The My.MP3.com site can't tell that the person logging into the account isn't the owner of the account.
I also wonder if MP3.com payed for the CDs they ripped from to make those MP3s? I'll probably never know, BUT they obviously didn't read the part about "unauthorized reproduction is prohibited by federal law".. ALSO! The fact that they are allowing more than one person to listen to the same MP3, could they be tried under the laws against rebroadcasting copyrighted material?
Sure, you could say that the people doing all this are breaking MP3.com's terms of use, but MP3.com is at fault for allowing people to break the law and not doing anything about it.
I hate to sound grouchy, but I'm just playing Devil's Advocate!
should have read the RIAA's document on what they consider to be IP, http://riaa.com/MP3lawsuit.cfm. I myself think MP3.Com did no wrong but the RIAA is too powerful.
:)
Hi big boy. How's the commute treating you? And your girl, is she ok? You know who you are...and so do I.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
But Imagine, getting 200,000 consecutive life-time sentences for dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima or something.
Haha, you think laws apply to wars? I guess we should just lock up all the verterans, they are murdurers.
-----------------------------
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Unless or until I find another good place to host that stuff (I'm batting 0 for 3 now, still with no luck at all)...
Napster is the only legal way to get my music online. And that state of affairs might persist for a while... I certainly cannot afford to do it on my own airwindows.com site, and I'm not seeing whole bunches of indie mp3 sites, much less ones that make some pretense of paying me like mp3.com did. So it's Napster or... silence...
*g* I just get a huge kick out of this for some reason. I guess it's my sick humor or something. "Oh please Judge Marilyn, don't hurt my only remaining way to legally distribute my music over the net! I beg of you!" Think that'd work? *hah!*
$118M in fines sounds like a lot of damages - in fact it sound like a lot more money that can conceivably have been incurred by UMG. So are these punitive damages then? Given that market sales continue to rocket up despite all the RIAA media spin that seems to give the impression that the arrival of MP3s is the end of the world as they know it and that they are already having to beg on street corners in order to pay for the Ferrari, I'm not sure where this figure has come from.
Given that MS gets fined $1M dollars for attempting to put a company out of business by pulling a bait-and-switch, doesn't look like the world is flat on a legal basis does it? The software industry easily pulls into the $100Billion dollar category so I can't believe the stakes are 100 times higher for UMG...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
$118 certainly sounds a little too less. I wonder if that's even enough to pay for one meal of a UMG executive?
Or do you mean $118 MILLION? ;)
From this site:
Specifically, section 109(a) of the 1976 Act confirmed former section 27 of the same; "the physical act of renting, leasing or lending phonorecords . . . for direct or indirect commercial advantage [is] a copyright infringement."66 The actual infringement occurs at the instant the unauthorized copy is created.67 However, "the elimination of the . . . right to rent, lease or lend is the legislative instrument employed to [prevent violations]."68 Less than half a decade later, the recording industry and Congress were again faced with the same problem, albeit from a new and more powerful recording medium called "digital." (Bold emphasis mine)
There's probably more, I just haven't read it yet.
If you were to meet someone on the street, and they asked the way to the nearest bank. They then left you, and robbed that bank. It's not YOUR responsibility.
How Jaded Are You?
Anyone else notice that the name of Universal's lofty, verbose windbag is Katz? Strange coincidence, I suppose...
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
MP3.com was distributing mp3's to users who already owned the CD's, so the copyright holders were getting their money.
MP3.com was making money for providing access to someone else's intellectual property, yes. But ISP's also make money for providing more convenient access to other's IP. That's value added, so I personally think it's okay to make money then.
MP3.com shouldn't have to pay, it hasn't been shown that anyone was harmed.
--
http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/09/06/mp3.lawsuit/inde x.html
Is much better!
MarNuke
It's funny that many of these companies trying to persuade the big corps to MOVE AHEAD on technology and provide what the customers want get hit hard with lawsuits and C&D's and whatnot... These big corps have the money because they're quashing alternatives. I'm not saying mp3.com was right, but why the hell can't I walk into a Sam Goody or Best Buy and buy myself an MP3 CD?
Also, why is it that the DoJ isn't going after these companies for price fixing and antitrust violations for quashing technological bypasses? And why the hell are we passing laws to benefit these big corps who are keeping technology from moving forward?
It's all just hilarious when we look at it. In 225 years we've gone from A Nation of the People, for the People, and by the People, to a Nation of Money, Corporatism and Lawyers. It took the Roman empire, what, 800 years to collapse?
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I saw an envelope in my parents house today with "KEEP (re jargon!)" handwritten on addressed to the Company Secretary, My Father's Name, His Address...No company mentioned. I had to peek inside (they often leave computer related junk mail around for me to see/dump) and saw it was from the Irish Music Rights Orgainsation. Now my father's main business (based at home) is software development and has family members as occassional employees beyond himself. I just had to include the full text/html (all emphasis theirs) of the two pages because they are such incredible reading but in brief summary they are requesting that as public music in work requires a licence, they want a declaration on music use in the place of business and the equipment (including private)......Read on...
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
WTF??? This is the kind of thing which pisses me the *hell* off!
I can understand that the artists created something which has been made commercial and that everyone wants to get a piece of the pie, but someplace like mp3.com is *not* where you are going to lose millions of dollars from! If anything you are going to get people to buy even more music since it is more like a try before you buy scenario!
But, you can't give it to anyone else. "the copy or phonorecord is retained and used solely by the transmitting organization that made it, and no further copies or phonorecords are reproduced from it"
--
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mywebj/
If you don't like the new mp3.com contracts, or if you think mp3.com won't be able to recover, then help out on the project and start your own server.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
Radio stations do not pay royalties for musical recordings. They pay royalties (via BMI/ASCAP) to songwriters and composers, not recording owners. And guess what? So does MP3.COM!
Why don't radio stations pay royalties to recording owners? Because Congress decided not to grant an exclusive right of performance for these particular works. Why? Just because.
Copyright is about an arbitrary compromise between creators, users, and society, and in particular, radio stations have lobbyists such as those which work for the NAB.
Copyright is not about what is morally right and wrong. Anyone who claims it is is trying to sell you something.
Bottom line: Radio stations have juice in Congress, and Internet companies like MP3.COM don't, at least not yet.
I know this whole thing is sort of old hat, but don't these big corporate music types have any sort of PR looking out for their image? Do I just hang out with too many 'liberal' computer users, or what? Just about everybody who I have even begun to bring this up with thinks that the RIAA are all stupid, and all news items pretty much just make them want to use Napster & co. even more.
So sayeth the none, this day of justice. - The Psychotronic Gizmonator was here -
Ever since I first read about this service,I was wondering how in the heck they'd justify the copyright violations? Radio Stations pay fees to do it.
Right. It's a neat idea, one who's time might be coming, but they should have known that Big Media wouldn't give up their cash cow without a fight. Get your head out of the sand.
-----------------------------
1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!
A couple of years ago, before an easy to use client for MS Windows came out, MP3 trading took place in the "underground" beneath the radar screens of news media and corporations. This happened every day on FTP servers, IRC, Web servers, and word-of-mouth. There was no "easy way to get MP3's" for the common idiot.
Well, all of this lawsuit action going on is only making it worse for them. They are shooting themselves in the foot and don't even realize it. MP3.com is the whipping boy being made a public example of. You think that's bad? Wait until the Napster trial! Mark my words -- they will get shut down and go out of business. If the judge is this harsh on a "semi-legal" form of music sharing - Napster is going to bend over and get it up the ass repeatedly in something that resembles a massive prison gang-rape.
So, the file trading will go back underground to FTP sites, IRC and Gnutella where they can't stop it. It only seems fitting. But, they are so stupid they'll never figure it out.
Wouldn't that imply that MP3.com has caused that much of a decrease in UMG's sales? I find that highly unlikely. Decisions like this simply make my blood boil. I mean, I have a hard time accepting the validity of the case to begin with, but putting that aside, how can they justify that much? Did anyone even attempt to figure a reasonable amount? Or does everyone involved realize that the it would be hard to prove any difference in sales, since all cd sales have been increasing for several years now?
---
The other question basically is, do independent labels stand a chance in the current environment but will they become much more popular in one in which the music of an independent label is freely distributed, copied, and used by the consumer where the Industry Music is locked down?
I fully admit I am more attracted to underground bands, even when their 'underground' status is actually part of marketing. Who would care about a song if it couldn't be completely enjoyed in all its potential forms?
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Did the major record labels forget these things too?
i can still get mp3s of albums that I don't own, by uploading other mp3s of albums I don't own all thanks to audiogalaxy, and mp3.lycos.com
and what about the vqf audio format, sure it's not as widely supported, but it seems to be okay to use. It's not part of the whole MP3 CONTROVERSY.
I think the owner of http://www.vqf.com/ should make a similar service, and wait and see what happens.
[mrzer0]
When you pirate MP3's, you're downloading Communism! Well I guess that makes me a Commie.
uNF!
WTF? There is no freakin' way that my.mp3.com kept people from buying 10 million CDs.
According to the article, they copied 5-10K CDs from Universal. That's $12K per CD, and at $15 per CD, that's 787 people per CD who would have bought 2 CDs (because they already have 1) if not for my.mp3.com. Yeah right. Like I'm going to buy another copy of each of my favorite CDs.
Bastard idiot f*ckhead moron stubdick pencilneck piece of sh*t judges should break out a fscking calculator every once in a while.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Does anybody even read the articles?
Why didn't MP3.com start a SEPERATE business for my.mp3.com? Wouldn't it have made alot more sense, considering that what they were doing was very questionable legally, and they KNEW that there would be some legal battle over what they were doing. All the damages accrued on behalf of my.mp3.com is going to pull down mp3.com, which is a great service. Could they have legally formed a seperate company that would have done the same thing but not effect the financial status of mp3.com should it all go down like it has? Is this going to bankrupt mp3.com? bah.
-WG
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
I'm sorry, but isn't it $1 million PER DAY? That adds one hell of a difference.
Looks to me that the RIAA has figure out these lawsuits can be just as profitable as selling music!
:-)
The Music industry has found another "money for nothin" (and your chicks for free!) revenue stream! (Hmm, now 'll probably get sued for using that line...
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Radio stations don't infringe on copyright.
They do if they don't follow the licensing rules.
Note that nowhere on that link, or at any other similar organization, does it say "None of this applies if you broadcast to people who already own the CD of the song you're playing."
For mp3.com to claim that proving the listener's ownership made them magically exempt from all laws governing public performance always did strike me as pretty questionable legally. I'm totally unsurprised at the decision.
MSNBC
Wired
Yahoo!
ABC News
Enjoy~
If I owned any stock in them, I'd be demanding that they take everyone who went along with it out back and have them shot. Lucky for them, I don't. Lucky for me too; at this point you're probably more likely to get your investment back if you'd been burning it in the fireplace.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
At $25.000 per CD, this is really getting out of hand. Even if the judge said he could have been much harsher, this is ridiculous. At $15 per CD, that's like saying the industry lost the sale of 1667 copies for each of the CDs. Part of the amount is punitive, I know, but still...
Software piracy cases are judged equally stupid. A couple of local software pirates were convicted of massive piracy (they readily confessed to it), and the software companies simply multiplied the CD count by the suggested retail price to come up with an enormous $400.000.000 claim against two teenagers. Do they really think that each and every pirated CD equals one sale less? Of course it doesn't! From my experience, a good guess would be that maybe 1 in 50 pirates would seriously consider buying the expensive stuff they pirated.
This is not a defense for piracy - not at all. It's merely a call for a "reality check" on the part of the music and software industries to take a realistic approach on these things. It's OK to defend your copyright, but do so in a reasonable fashion, and come up with damage claims that reflect how the actual world works. And I don't need to make comments about clueless judges - their actions speaks volumes on their own.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Doesn't this sound just like the companys are trying to get the mp3.com domain?
Proof: Look at the French fishermen and Lorry drivers. 2 weeks ago the fishermen blocked up the French ports protesting at fuel prices (compared to US they are EXTREME, just over a dollar per LITRE, UK even worse). 3-4 days people were blocked in their cars, 10 cars every 15minutes were allowed through.
When that was finished it was the time of the lorry drivers, they blocked petrol refineries and distribution points. Petrol distribution in France became non-existant. Now the French have asked the European Union to do something about petrol prices.
See what boycotts can do? Come on someone, arrange a boycott, that's the way to go.
c0rarc
Burris
how much do Artists see from that penalty fee? Somehow I think I already know it: 0.00$ Thank you. Well at least the fat boss of can now buy another luxury Yacht in Monaco... Another reason not to buy any music anymore as long as artists and consumers are ripped off by mega-corps with lawyers...
Umm big radio stations get PAID to play the music.
I know this first hand, and I know what crap goes on to try and cripple smaller stations.
If you think a radio station (large one) pays for the music it plays then you are gladly eating the FUD that the riaa feeds you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It says that the judge is trying to send a message to the "Internet Community" that copyright infringement can not continue.
Who exactly does he think the "Internet Community" is? A limited bunch of hacker punks who are going to see this, get scared, and stop trading MP3?!
Does he not realize that the "Internet Community" is millions strong, and includes his neighbors, friends, co-workers, kids, and what not? These are the people using services like BeamIT.
As long as it's available, everyone will trade music and other media as long as it's practical to do so.
And I agree with previous messages that there really isn't any indication that any copyright infringement ever took place.
This whole situation is just wrong, and MP3.com is getting the shit end of the stick.
My first reaction was that it had to be punitive, since the RIAA's total loss in sales amounted to about $0.00. After all, despite the fact that my.mp3.com was technically distributing copyrighted content without permission, they were sending it to people who already had it. The challenge/response protocol really looked pretty good. I don't think hardly anyone got sent an MP3 from my.mp3.com who didn't already have the CD, unless it involved people sharing accounts, the way some pirates use iDrives, for example.
The problem is that we're fooling ourselves by just looking at album sales. RIAA didn't lose album sales, but they did lose royalties. For example, when the radio plays a song, they don't get off the hook for paying royalties just because you, the listener, happen to already own the album.
Could the lost royalties possibly add up to $118M? That's mind-bogglingly hard to believe, and still suggests that most of the damages are punitive. But I dunno... Consider that they are doing point-to-point transmissions instead of, say, MBONE broadcasts. What if each transmission is required to have the same amount of royalty paid that a radio station would pay (even though there's only one listener)? If so, then it is actually conceivable that they could accrue royalty liabilities at a rate several orders of magnitude faster than a radio station would.
Just something to think about. I don't know if the $118M figure was just pulled out of someone's ass or what, but it seems possible to me that it might be more compensatory that it first appears.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They did. It does.
Sean
Well, it has to be said with just about every /. story, so I guess it's my turn. RTFA. A lot of people are saying, "boy I'm pissed, how did they lose any money?". The fine is NOT damages. This is not compensatory payment. Right in the article, it says: "Universal had not alleged damages". These are punitive damages, meant "to send a message of deterrence".
On another note, to clarify how this is different from you uploading your music to i-Drive and listening to it from there. First of all, there is the difference that i-Drive doesn't know what you're uploading-- they just provide space. Second, you actually have to upload the file to i-Drive, which is time consuming. MP3.com is saying, "here, since we already know what you're going to upload, let's save you the time". But that's where they get into trouble, because they're using Universal's property (the music) to provide a service to you.
Just because it is possible to take advantage of the system does not mean the system is at fault.
...because that's talking out of both sides of their mouths. MP3.com's defense is that their system allows only owners of CDs to listen to them online. They can't turn around and then say "Well, it's not the system's fault if the system doesn't work. People are taking advantage of it."
With that logic, why don't they put digital copies of every CD ever made online, and require people to click on a dialog agreeing that they will only listen to CDs they own?
George Lee
They could have stuck to working with indie artists and distributing their music. I still think that business model has potential. I've bought several great CDs from them, at well under what they would have cost at a music store.
Of course, that business model would probably work even better with Ogg Vorbis files -- no patent royalties to Frauhauf.
Oh well. Someone will come along and fill that niche.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?