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MP3.com Sued for 'viral' Copyright Infringement?
Are We Afraid writes "Apparently the RIAA isn't the only one looking to make money off of MP3.com. They have just been sued by a group of independent artists for, get this, "viral copyright infringement". What does that even mean???" They claim that people who downloaded MP3s from mp3.com contributed them to napster, so MP3.com owes them. It's really bizarre.
Anyone with half a brain should comprehend that if you release you music on one site, you can expect it to be posted to some other site.
I guess they should have used SDMI or something, oh wait, that wouldn't work either.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
If people cannot sue gun companies for what people do with guns, then I sincerely believe this lawsuit will be fighting an uphill battle trying to sue mp3.com for what other people did with their downloaded files.
This is like laws that permit gun shops to be sued for selling weapons later used in crimes. Silly. Damn silly. Thank you, DMCA. You've opened up the Bottle of Stupidity and let the genie loose. It's now becoming quite apparent that the only way around this is to scrap every copyright law and develop a new set for today's methods of content distribution.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
Back in the glory days, I made a purchase at cheap-cds.com, and the CDs I bought were AUTOMATICALLY made available on my mp3.com account! Unfortunately, I only listened to them about 3 times each at work before mp3.com locked everything up in response to the Universal complaint.
Think about it: mp3.com was everything Napster claimed to be. "I have the right to space shift! I have the right to backup!" Well, mp3.com actually allowed for just those things, with (and admittedly cursory) verification that you actually owned the CD you were listening to. All arranged in neat lists, with high-quality mp3s and decent bandwidth. If, for example, cdnow had the option to charge an extra 50 cents or buck per CD to enable functionality like that, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
A much bigger concern with mp3.com, it seems, and one that's widely ignored, is the way they screw over their own independent artists. They take a big share and charge huge fees for services like "payback for playback," and you have to sign away all kinds of rights to put your stuff up there. But all this about "contributory infringement" (I can only assume that's what they meant by "viral"?) is hogwash. Bring back my online music locker!
This should be interesting.....it'll all boil down to who the judge is and who cluefull/less he is.
Lets recap: the service that mp3.com offered required you to prove that you had the CD. They used their special little app that would then be queried by their servers for a number of random pieces from the CD. If all the pieces lined up, then you 'owned' the CD, and they put it in your locker for you. Even Bruce Scheiner (sic? i can't be bothered to look it up) evaluated their protocol and found it cryptographically secure.
So - You can only get access to the mp3's from mp3.com if you already own (or are at least IN POSESSION of) the CD. Therefore you could rip the mp3's for napster yourself. Getting a streamed version from them gave you nothing - except slowing you down.
But with the typical justice system they'll get reamed........ again..........
While we're at it, why doesn't somebody sue MCI Worldcom, Sprint, and any other backbone provider for upkeeping the Internet which allows file sharing to occur in the first place?
This kind of litigation is ridiculous. It's merely an attempt to bleed more money out a dying company, and any judge with half a brain would realize the absolute dangerous precedence this would set. Anyone who merely touches a certain technology could be sued if the tech was used for copyright infraction. "Oh, those CDR manufacturers should be sued, since they're making discs that carry pirated material. They're accessories to infringement."
Once again, I say puuhleeeze. This whole attack on "piracy" is doing nothing but making the recording industry look bad. It pushes people to find better ways to circumvent the process and causes others to completely boycott legitimate music purchases all together.
Industry, find someway to make the customer happy without ramming lawsuits and unethical CD mods down our throats. Customers, support reasonable attempts at legitimate digital music, but let your voice be heard when abuse of the law and standards occurs. Until then, a lot of good people will lose out.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
I really don't like this trend of everyone and their dog suing MP3.com. I, and many of my friends, depend on MP3.com as a means of distribution for our music. I've also found it a wonderful place to find new music. I don't even go into record stores any more, simply because I appreciate being able to listen to the music I want to buy before I buy it. Even if people just click and download songs to try them out, we get paid.
I'm not going to be rich because of it, but for at least one friend of mine's band (The Brobdingnagian Bards: http://mp3.com/thebards), it's a really good step on the way to being able to make music for a living.
For all its flaws, it's a great service both to music fans and to musicians. I hope that a few bad apples won't ruin it for the rest of us.
Bzzzt. Wrong! If your wish comes true, these hapless artists will set a precedent for the legal validity of "viral criminal activity" claims.
How will you feel when the lawyers come after you, simply because you committed a lawful act that allowed someone else to commit a lawful act that in turn allowed someone else to commit an unlawful act?
You better hope that cowering under the covers in your bedroom doesn't enable one of your employer's subsidiary's employees to embezzle from the company!
"But the artists were robbed!" you say. "They deserve to get some money back!" Sure thing, pal. It doesn't justify them beating it out of me with a stick, though. Let them sue Napster, or some other actual "criminal". Getting robbed is no excuse for breaking the system. Unless they're anarchists, of course - in which case, they probably shouldn't have been sucking up to MP3.com in the first place. Posers.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
At least they aren't suing:
* Intel/AMD for providing chips that enable computers to function. Thus making Internet piracy possible.
* U Illinois for creating a means of accessing web sites where said info can be traded (watch out Berners-Lee!)
* The US government for funding the creation of the internet, which has enabled piracy to run rampant.
* My parents. For obviously not teaching me right from wrong.
I'm so sick of law suits I can't even tell if I was kidding....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Why? Because I was playing some MP3's that I downloaded from Napster in my car with the windows rolled down as I was driving down the street = unauthorized public performance. Honda should be ashamed. of themselves for robbing hard working artists this way.
RIAA will soon insist that car manufactures locked windows in the upright positions when music is being played unless it comes from a royalty-paying souce.
On a side note...this is why you NEVER EVER settle a case out of court. MP3.Com settled and has been taking up the ass ever since (insert obligatory goatse reference). The newest game in the music industry is to flaggelate the expired equinine. Napster is still fighting. And really, if they do lose, could they possibly any worse off than MP3.Com?
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
You want the answer? Neil Stephenson knows. The only thing to be gained from such a lawsuit is a majority share (read: control) of the company. MP3.com screwed up, and now a consortium of independent artists are going to step up and try to do it better. This makes perfect sense. The RIAA is going to end up owning Napster, so the Indies need a way into the market, too.
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MP3.com purchased all of the CDs containing those 900,000 songs. Why shouldn't they have right to compress them and put then in a database (that is what they were sued for in the inital lawsuit, not distributing the music afterwards)? That seems like fair use to me (but not judge Rakoff, I guess). Once you pay for the music, why shouldn't you be able to shift it to another format so that you can use it more easily? Forget for a second about what they wanted to use it for - they got in trouble for the shifting, not for the intended use. The previous ruling would indicate that the shifting would have gotten them in trouble regardless of the intended use.
That created a vast bootleg library, from which MP3.com subscribers could download songs.
What they fail to mention is that users were only allowed to download songs on CDs that they owned. You had to run MP3.com's "beam-it" software on your PC and insert each CD that you wanted to be able to use with their service before you could download any music from that CD. Nothing here was "bootlegged".
The judge in the previous case ruled that the service was not legal, but I still think it should be. Everybody involved had paid for a copy of the music that they came in contact with and my.mp3.com only served to increase the value of owning a CD (I used it all the time because I could listen to my 150+ CDs from anywhere and it encouraged me to buy more CDs).
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
...especially when you compare the percentage of money and rights they give to their artists to what the RIAA typically gives its artists.
;)
And for a lot of us, it's a great way to supplement our income from gigs and real album sales.
The $19.95 "Premium Artist" service done right is actually ludicrously easy to break even with. I have yet to have a month where I even came close to going negative, and my only form of advertising is a link at the bottom of my slashdot sig!
Also, just because you put songs up on MP3.com doesn't mean you have to put ALL of them up there. In fact, not doing so is a great way to draw listeners into buying your CD's and attending your gigs.
So I don't think MP3.com is ripping me or anyone else off. I think the people who complain about such things are the people who tend to complain about everything -- the ultra-paranoid who think EVERYONE is out to rip them off.
Or agents of the RIAA. (hehehe...just kidding)
MP3.COM IS VIVENDI.
Did you not notice when they were bought out? Have you not read the contract/artist agreement mp3.com artists are required to agree to that gives Vivendi PERMANENT RIGHTS over the artist's music even after you leave? Did you not notice that they are leaving it open for mp3.com to insert promotional materials INTO that music via language that gives them carte blanche to edit and alter what you give 'em?
mp3.com IS the stranglehold of a major label. Vivendi. Read the contract- better yet, run it by an entertainment lawyer if you don't believe me. mp3.com DESERVES to be destroyed to keep people like you from mistakenly touting it as some kind of independent resource when it is now a wholly owned part of Vivendi and YOU PAY THEM to participate in the 'royalty' like programs they have- which, I might add, are arbitrary and obscure, meaning that they are free to simply never pay you!
Go ahead, people, sue mp3.com! You're really just suing Vivendi- which probably doesn't care whether mp3.com lives or dies. Buying out mp3.com was a purely strategic move, and now Vivendi artists top the charts at mp3.com, with indie acts actually kicked off the service and their 'money' withheld through trumped-up charges if they have the nerve to chart higher than the Vivendi acts... do some googling for 'Analog Pussy mp3 vivendi artist activity', see for yourself.
mp3.com are NOT YOUR FRIEND.
Not even kidding - imagine a worm thar tried to send just one .mp3 to each person in an address book. The bandwidth consumption would be HUGE. Considering the default Napster download paths are often in place, lots of users will have .mp3s in a known location (still) ... oops.
As I see it, and as I think the courts & the lawyers (IANAL) see it, Napster was a store that hung a big sign in the window, "do illegal trafficing here", and then pretended that they didn't know about it.
There's a difference between the bartender who doesn't know that drugs are being traded in his restroom, and the bartender who gets the word out that he's a haven for dealers.
"Buying CD's does put money into the artists pockets, but only a SMALL part of the total cost."
Read the thread: I was referring to MP3.com's DAM CDs, which put a large portion of the total cost directly into MY (a musician's) pocket. Moreover, DAM CD purchases on MP3.com indirectly help me (an artist) to make money in other ways on MP3.com.
This is not true for CD's you buy in a record store, but it is certainly true for DAM CD's on MP3.com.