Greene's Grammy Speech Debunked

jonerik writes: "Today's New York Times has this article which debunks at least part of NARAS president Michael Greene's much-publicized speech at last week's Grammy Awards ceremony in which Greene claimed that he had hired three students to download a whopping 6,000 songs "from easily accessible Web sites" over two days. Leaving aside for a moment Greene's bizarre admission on national TV that he'd hired three students (at least one of whom, Numair Faraz, is a minor) to break the law (the No Electronic Theft Act), Faraz has been interviewed by the Times, saying that they spent more like three days on the project and that the other two students (both unnamed, though both are apparently attending U.C.L.A.) barely used P2P file-sharing programs at all. Instead, they used AOL's popular Instant Messenger to receive song files from friends."

Comments

Re:What do you expect

[wurp]

If they accept that Napster improves sales, why the hell would they fight against it? It seems much more likely to me that they don't accept the facts themselves.

And... all of this AIM versus p2p stuff is a red herring. We shouldn't be arguing over how many files you can download in a certain period of time, or what mechanisms you use to do it. Our concept of intellectual property is broken, and they are pushing through laws that hurt the public good more and more deeply, while we quibble over what program was used to download files!

What we need to focus on is that they are doing things that reduce software reliability (SSSCA will do that), hurt people (snuffing our ability to copy will do that), and retard progress to protect an industry that is composed of trivial entertainment. Don't be distracted from the issues.

Re:New math

[UM_Maverick]

Don't forget about all the bandwith it would use...

18.25 trillion songs, at an avg of 4 megs/song works out to a little under 2,314,815 megs/second (assuming I didn't screw up the math)

woah...where do I sign up for *that* connection?

Re:The DOJ should now be forced to prosecute him

[darrylballantyne]

According to Numair, there was an agreement signed beforehand. You'd think that the agreement would indemnify him - but no, it actually indemnified NARAS, not him. So, if someone's thinking about suing, they'd have to go after Numair & Co. - which wouldn't be very nice.

Of course, it should also be noted that "prosecution for criminal offenses cannot be waived by the aggrieved party" - so the government could go after them if they wanted to. (See http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap5.html# 506 for the relevant criminal code).

In fact (and here's the interesting part) - they DIDN'T EVEN DO ANYTHING ILLEGAL. *Downloading* is in itself not illegal - it's uploading that's illegal. Non-commercial downloading is specifically exempted. From NETA:

TITLE 17
Sec. 1008. - Prohibition on certain infringement actions

No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.