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RIAA Trains Legal Sights On Aimster
AdventureExtreme writes: "The recording industry filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Aimster on Thursday.
The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan on behalf of major record labels including Universal Music, Sony Music , EMI Group and Bertelsmann's BMG. " An RIAA lawyer is quoted as saying that they plan to seek a Napster-like injunction to bar Aimster users from trading in copyrighted materials. (FAT32 file systems are widely used for copyright violation too; are they next?)
Okay then. Fire up Napster or Aimster, and search for a High Quality JPEG reproduction of the Mona Lisa. How about a file which describes the inner workings of a Floppy drive? Or perhaps the entire text of 'Macbeth'?
Disappointed? Now search for an mp3 audio file of 'It's gonna be me' by N*Sync.
See a pattern?
Just because M$, the MPAA, and the RIAA are losing money because *some* people use the internet and file sharing services to distribute copyrighted materials doesn't mean they can restrict MY rights in any way.
WELL. I mean shit, why should we put our bags on the belt and walk through metal detectors at the airport because *some* people use bombs to blow up airplanes? They're stomping all over my right to privacy! Just because the FAA, the airlines, and the airports are losing money doesn't mean they can restrict MY rights in any way.
There may be a problem with the distribution of copyrighted material on the internet -- but that doesn't give organizations like [Microsoft], the [RIAA], the [MPAA], or the [BSA] the right to violate MY rights. (l33t-speak edits are mine)
There may be a problem? Where have you been sitting for the past two years? Regardless of what you may think or what blind eye you choose to turn to the situation, the RIAA isn't going to pounce on something with no justification. Sure they love to overcharge for albums. Sure they rape the artist on profits by keeping the majority of it for their own greedy bank accounts. But I dislike the RIAA for the same reason I dislike Napster and its friends - they all screw the artists. Go ahead and say "Oh, well, they make enough money as it is!" Should they be condemned for cashing in on their talents? Every one of you would do the exact same thing given the chance. I see nobody stopping you from climbing into a studio and putting out an album.
They can't say "we're going to force services like Napster to filter out anything that has the digital music contents of X" -- that violates my right to distribute parodies
Why not? You write a book and decide to sell it for $12.95. I steal the manuscript from your desk, make a shitload of photocopies, and give them away. Are you as an author not going to attempt to regulate that?
And last I checked, parodies differ greatly from the content they parody. Name a parody that is an exact duplicate of the original, and I will withdraw this argument.
they now have to make their product inferior via unnecessary bloat.
Companies have the right to make their software as inferior and as bloated as they damn well please. Consumer reaction will determine whether they continue that process.
They can't say "we're going to keep tabs on every log of the internet," and log IP's, and request that ISP's give us the personal information of IP's that distribute "copyrighted files" -- that's a violation of the right to privacy.
I don't recall anyone ever stating that they were going to attempt to "keep tabs on every log of the internet." And guess what, bucko? Once you're assigned an IP on the internet, your privacy is all but gone. DoS a major government website from your IP, and you'll see how private your connection really is.
In other words, they are free to protect their rights, so long as they do not in any way violate my rights, or anyone elses.
Oh, I see. So they're perfectly within their freedom to protect themselves, just so long as it doesn't inconvenience you, right? Because all of the 'rights' you are arguing about aren't rights. You're merely pandering to popular opinion hoping to score a bit of brownie points. That stack of pirated CDs in your closet is inconsequential, because if they get seized, they're invading your right to privacy.
Aww. It pains me so.
You want to fight something? Fight the RIAA. Fight Napster. Fight the Napster clones. Fight for the rights of the artists. Get out there and spread the word of what's happening, and how the RIAA and all of the file sharing services are ripping off the artists. Do something. Do anything!
Why aren't you doing anything? Oh. That's right. You're only interested in free music. That being the case, you probably just "Pshhh'd" and "Bah'd" your way through my post, because your mind is still too busy trying to justify your actions.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
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Actually, if they could manage to ban FAT32, that'd be the first good thing to come out of these lawsuits.
Maybe we can convince them to ban NetBIOS while they're at it.
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You know, there's a real simple way to deal with this kind of thing. On the day that Aimster gets shut down, everybody who's ever used Napster, Gnutella, Aimster, etc. should STOP BUYING CD'S FOR A MONTH! Just start making a list of the CD's you WOULD have bought, and get them a month later.
Hell, you've got how many CD's? And how many gigs of mp3's? You can put off new CD's for a month, can't you?
Don't think it won't be noticed. These suckers keep REAL careful track. A sudden drop is gonna be noticed BIGTIME.
It's all about the money. Vote with yours.
Current copyright laws are, in my opinion, going to put the 20th century's greatest artistic outpourings into a legally mandated black hole. Most artists and authors have an expectation that their work will immortalize them. Otherwise we wouldn't have such things as the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame (as biased and political an organization as it is) or the Grammys, or the Oscars, or any other prizes and awards for great contributions to the field.
The problem with this expectation is that in order for your work to be immortalized, it has to survive beyond the first generation of its fans. Just because the Baby Boomers put down in their book that Bob Dylan was somebody fuckin' great, doesn't mean that I will. And it is my generation that will be responsible for ensuring the longevity of art created by my parents' generation. In order for a work to survive past a generation, copies have to be made. Lots of them. Vinyl albums are incredibly fragile, and are easily scratched by careless children, and left on radiators or in attics and warp. CD's get dropped behind the sofa. Cassette tapes are left on the dashboard and melt. Boo.
Since copying all of these media is now illegal, I won't be making any copies of them. The only entity authorised to copy the media is the record company. They only make copies when they think they'll get a sale. Now, as the generation who popularized the work starts dropping off, sales of the work drop off as well. Fewer copies are made. But the copyright term still stands. Before the copyright expires, virtually every "consumer" of his work will have expired as well. Their collections will be sold at estate sales, thrown in the trash, or left in the attic to decay.
Finally, the copyright expires and people are now free to distribute their own copies of the work. But who cares anymore? The first generation that will be legally able to make free and clear copies of Bob Dylan's work, as I understand it, will be my own grandchildren, who will not be born for another twenty years.
The possibility exists that there will be few private copies after 75 years. The company that owns them may clear them out to make more room in their vault.
Put that in the wayforward machine and imagine any type of bleak orwellian culture you like. The results are in the long-term detrimental to that which most artists crave: their continued adulation by a rapt audience. It is the cheer of the crowd that keeps them going. Knowing that the cheer goes on after their funeral has to be a significant part of what they expect as their legacy. Over-restrictive copyright laws will cut that legacy short, and their life's work will be merely "product," to be disposed of immediately upon consumption.
This is also the justification for EULA's and reverse engineering laws. After all, if you're not copying anything what does it have to do with copyright? Here is the relevant paragraph:
... which indicate that the copy created in the RAM is not fixed. ... The law also supports the conclusion that [the defendant's] loading of copyrighted software into RAM creates a `copy' of that software in violation of the Copyright Act."
In MAI Systems Corp v Peak Computer Inc 991 F2d 511 (9th Cir 1993) the United States Federal Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit held that "copying" for the purposes of US copyright law occurs when a computer program is transferred from a permanent storage device to a computer's RAM. At 518 of its reasons the Court said: "After reviewing the record we find no specific facts
How we know is more important than what we know.
No. They'll just revive the old punishment of chopping it off. After all, they say you are a thief.
This is getting stupid. Next thing you know, you'll be hearing about a lawsuit against Cisco, for routing the packets which are infringing copyright.
You poke fun at the idea that fat32 is used to facilitate piracy of IP, but what about AIM itself? after all, isn't Aimster a plugin-like program to use the AOL Instant Messenger software to trade music? Not to mention that you can just trade files directly with AIM...
AOL/Time Warner are in the uncomfortable position of needing to sue themselves into oblivion.
He added that the legal action in New York will seek a Napster-like injunction to bar Aimster users from trading in copyrighted materials.
Does this remedy make sense? Without a central sever, how could AIMster bar trading of copyrighted materials?
Incidentally, why is AIMster incorporated? Is it to provide the individuals with a legal umbrella? (It is hard to believe that they have get-rich plans. They seem pretty clued.)
And, hey, wasn't AIMster already suing for a declaratory judgement on its service?
The Backstreet Boys. QED.
Timorhy refers to CPRM, the Content Protection for Recordable Media standards initiative. This would in effect prevent the transfer of certain content on particular media. The proposal it to implement the 'protection' in hardware with a software interupt, which means probably software could simply bypass the system. It's not entirely clear, as the spec isn't fully defined. This is a vary scary deal which hasn't gotten much press in the United States. Read up. This is important stuff.
--CTH
--
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In a world where the organizations with the most money get to tell the other organizaitons what to do, the fact that the RIAA and MPAA are actively attacking anything that allows people to share their music/movies doesn't surprise me. The quality of most MP3s / DivX movies is nowhere near that you'd find on a CD or DVD, and the mediums aren't that big of a threat to the companies producing the media.
As a result of Napster, record companies actually INCREASED their profits, because people were less reserved about buying a CD if they knew that they would like some of the songs on it before hand. I would -never- but CDs, because I didn't know if I'd like them, but by being able to try it out before I buy it, I purchased an entire CD of music that I downloaded off of Napster.
I have DivX movies on CD - but also a DVD-ROM drive and DVD movies, legally purchased, because I want the higher quality for some things. A $3 burned DivX of a movie is like an MP3 of a song - it's a good trial, and if I like it, I go out and buy the real thing.
The major entertainment associations feel threatened by the new technologies that make it more difficult for them to keep tabs on distrubution. This doesn't mean that the file-sharing is wrong; it means that the RIAA's rules need to be adapted to the Internet age. The best thing they could do that would increase their sales would be to stop policing swapping of MP3s. Then, people like me would go out and buy CDs again, instead of going through the hassal of using Gnutella to find MP3s and burn them onto CDs.
My $.02 and a few killobytes.
Back in the days when people had dial-up access, that wouldn't have been such a big deal. If your ISP drops you, you just sign up with one of the dozens of other ones in your town. But today, with DSL businesses dropping like flies, and many homes that can't get DSL due to the length of their local loop, many people have just one choice for broadband access: cable modems. Now cable modems are great, but in almost all locations, there is a monopoly. (In my case it's the @HOME service.) So if you get kicked off, you're screwed big time!
This is a big stick the MPAA or RIAA can wave at infringers. They get one warning letter from their ISP and if they offer any more infringing materials subsequent to the warning, they get the boot. It's one thing to lose your Napster account, but quite another to be forced to spend the rest of your days at 56K!
To make matters worse, the MPAA or RIAA doesn't need to prove anything in court. All they have to do is convince your ISP (and @HOME has very strict usage policies) and you're toast.
Roughly the same argument applies for college students with campus access. They could lose their accounts just as easily.
So, Gnutella might not be so invulnerable after all.
I'm not saying whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but something to think about before you conclude that Gnutella can't possibly be touched.
It all goes back to the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.
... but Peak, as an unauthorized repair center (read competition), did not.
In this case, it's the RIAA and MPAA. Napster is most likely to wither and die in their fight not because the RIAA may or may not have a better legal case, but because the money will run out. 2600's fight against the MPAA may fall victim to the same problem, even with the support of the EFF.
This is not new.
Several years ago, a case out of (I believe California) called MAI vs. Peak Electronics wound up being granted review by the Supreme Court of the United States.
MAI's claim against Peak was that Peak violated MAI's copyright because the act of turning MAI's computer on made a copy of data contained into ROM, and that making this copy without a license was a violation of MAI's copyright. Never mind that the copy was required for the operation of the computer -- the whole point was to squash an independent service provider and force repairs to go only to MAI-approved repair outfits. Customers had a license to make a copy, and authorized repair centers had that same right
Peak had to settle (they lost, essentially) because the money ran out. They couldn't file the necessary briefs with the Supreme Court because they didn't have the cash to pay the lawyers.
It's the Golden Rule. It doesn't matter that the law is a bad law, or that the copyright owners are money-grubbing b*st*rds whose only interest is in lining their own pockets. It's that they have the money, and we do not.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
From a legal point of view, the RIAA has a point. No, this is not flamebait, but the Napster case did set a legal precedent for saying that any service that can be used to transfer copyrighted materials can be challenged and.or shut down. After all, Aimster is capable of fulfilling the same functions as Napster, to an extent, which makes the precedent very "on point".
The only hope for Aimster, as I see it, is to argue that there is a difference in emphasis between the two services. Napster was intended for sharing hard-to-find media files on the internet, and distributing them easily. The naturally leads to ease in distributing copywritten materials.
What Aimster could argue is that the emphasis of Aimster is not on large-scale copywritten file sharing as with Napster, but on providing users a way to share files between each other on a smaller scale, as with email or ICQ. Aimster can be used to distribute copywritten works, but it lacks the file-searching ability of Napster, among other things, that made it an ideal medium for distributing copywritten works. It's also less easy for a person to give everyone on the service a given file - each potential recipient has to be approved by the person distributing the file.
In other words, Aimster is more akin to an instant messaging client that a large-scale file-sharing network, and that is the only hope it has for survival. Unless, of course, the judge in this case is smarter than the one for napster.
I'm the stranger...posting to