RIAA to Sue You Now

An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC reports that apparently the music industry feels so satisfied with going after file swapping software makers that they want to sue the pants off the file swappers themselves. Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention." This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.

Comments

Gaaah! FUD from hell

[drew_kime]

Instead, the industry has focused on lawsuits against for-profit piracy outfits

I expect this from MSNBC, but this is a WSJ article.

Advantage of Gnutella

[hatter3bdev]

One of the things people have been claiming to be a disadvantage to gnutella is now showing itself as an advantage. People cannot browse your file lists in gnutella and thus cannot see how many illegal files you are swapping. They only learn of what files you have when they do a specific search for them.

Re:Advantage of Gnutella

[MadAhab]

I thought that the protocol allows for getting full listings, but that the clients, in general, do not. Gnutella is now at an advantage in that it really is really distributed. People who run big OpenNap nodes might find themselves getting nastygrams.

On the other hand, Hilary Rosen is a gigantic fucking stupid neanderthal cunt who should be shot into outer space naked.

If I were a label musician, well, first off I'd be completely fucked having sold my career to the mafia, but second, I'd be wondering why an organization that I subsidize "for my protection" is spending my money to stop people from hearing about my music.

I haven't bought a single CD in the past two years unless I previewed songs via mp3. I buy far more CDs than the average person. Copyright infringement has made me spend more money, not less, on the CDs I want to own. It's also completely eliminated purchases I'm not satisfied with and made me a happier customer.

It's also let me buy music I never would have known about otherwise, because the music industry does such a shitty job of letting people know about its artists. Imagine a bookstore that had the best-seller list in display cases, the vast majority of their inventory in a back room where you can't see it or know what's there, and no ability to browse whatsoever (though you can listen to someone read chapters aloud in between endless advertisements). You have just imagined the current operation of the music industry and their partners in crime, the playlist managers. And you've just seen how phenomenally fucking stupidly the music industry is behaving; someone has set up a lending library around the corner and they are trying to shut it down on the theory that one person bought it and others are enjoying it for free (the CARP fees for webcasting are an offer to take $1 from the library each time a book is loaned (for free)). Don't tell me that getting mp3s and burning CDs from it is stealing unless you want to get smacked; it's like going to the library and photocopying a book; you aren't likely to do it to save money, because if you could just buy the damn thing it would be much quicker and easier and possibly even cheaper and definitely better than making a copy. ($20 CDs kinda fuck up that equation, but I don't recall the part of copyright law that says you can raise prices indefinitely without consequence)

If the RIAA really went after individuals, they'd be shooting their best customers and their best new promotional vehicle since radio. Really smart!

Re:After suing 20,000 people...

[Stavr0]

Yep. Classic Business Software Alliance warped logic: every pirated item = lost sales i.e. poor student with Gigs and Gigs of MP3 would have bought each and every one of those albums at the full price of $16.99. Riight.

My $0.02 will always be worth more than your 0.02, so :P
Um, not anymore...

Re:Interesting Question...

[Sloppy]

Also, if User A has a Old97s CD and legit MP3 copies of the disc on his machine and I also own the same Old97s CD and download his copies (instead of burning my own) did either of us break a law?

Yes, if the RIAA-vs-mp3.com case is precedent. In that case, mp3.com had a CD, and a challenge-response protocol virtually guaranteed that a user had the CD. But my.mp3.com transmitting a song to the user, was found to be copyright infringement.

Re:Where is this illegal?

[r_barchetta]

From your comment I can infer that you feel buying the cd/tape/mp3 grants you copyright ownership and, therefore, distribution rights of said contents.

It does not. Fair use and personal use are not the same thing as putting songs into file sharing systems where who knows how many people will access them. Why do you think Diamond won the lawsuit over the RIO mp3 player and Napster lost theirs?

Libraries walk a fine line on this issue. It troubles me greatly that the book publishers and other industries (assuming the rumors are true) are trying to limit libraries' ability to provide materials to the public. More and more the U.S. drifts toward a "if you do not have money you are worthless" attitude toward its own citizens. That's why the health care in this country is so fscked up.

But I'm straying from the topic. I think the difference between a library's CD collection and file sharing is that only one person can have a copy of the cd at a time. Yes, 1000 people might check the CD out over the time it survives in the collection, but 1000 people don't have it all at once. Isn't file-sharing usage somewhere in the millions of people? That's a different scope now isn't it?

More importantly, you only get the CD for a limited time. If you don't return it you are usually charged the cost of replacing it.

Neither of those are true for file-sharing and I think they are significant differences.

-r