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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.
Instead, the industry has focused on lawsuits against for-profit piracy outfits
I expect this from MSNBC, but this is a WSJ article.
Nope, no sig
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.
"Filing suits against individual users is complicated. Entertainment companies frequently hire services that specialize in tracking copyrighted material online. But to get the name of an individual user, they have to send a subpoena to that person's Internet-service provider. Even for the ISP, linking the Internet address to a name can be complex. Moreover, it's hard to verify which person was logged on to an Internet connection at a given time."
So in other words to find most individual users they will have to invest time+money, yeah this'll fly for an association thats primary concern is profit!!
crazy dynamite monkey
maybe they'll sue themselves out of business, lawyers ain't cheap and even if they bust half of the teens they prosecute they won't recoup their losses
going after users doesn't work, ask the DEA
stupid wars on freedom waste time and money, why not go the way of BMG and at least attempt to make a profit from it insted of trying to slow your demise.. death to teh riaa
This isn't about an industry that is feeling smug and self-assured...This is a LAST DITCH EFFORT to assert their right to exist. And in the long run, I don't think its going to work.
RIP RIAA -- 2006
their profits will be -$2,000,000,000 and they will claim it's "Due to piracy".
:-)
The funny thing is, they'll be more correct than any of the other times they have made that statement.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
"The United States versus KazaaLite User "SpankyPants27", AKA 64.123.25.14"
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
Say I own the "rights" to 500 songs. I bought the CD, tape, payed for an individual mp3 download, whatever.
/tunes shared out.
How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does? If user X downloads them, and keeps them permanently, or sells them, or otherwise violates HIS local copyright statutes, I don't see how that's my fault for simplying for having
The only problem that I can see is that a lot of independent musicians, artists, and whomever else use some of these file sharing programs purposely to get their music out and about in the market. They can't afford the gigantic charges of advertising and can't contend with the other paying bands who get their stuff on the air.
Theres a TON more out on these networks than just illegal files, but I do agree with you that the majority is such (and it's unfortunate).
Years from now, law students are going to have to remember the names of groundbreaking cases that formed the latest incarnation of IP law...
RIAA v. l33t d0Wn104d3r
RIAA v. i oWnz j00
RIAA v. cr4pfl00d3r
Can't wait to see how those textbooks handle it...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity. I think this is part of the reason P2P networking has not been used to come up with more innovative technologies. Also, independent artists -- who could benefit immensely from distributing their music through P2P instead of through recording companies -- have been reluctant to embrace P2P as a truly new way of doing business.
So this might be good. Granted, the RIAA won't _stop_ prosecuting P2P networks, but at least they'll be shifting some of the blame to the people who actually use these networks for illegal activity.
But it won't help them. People like free music, and they'll fight tooth and nail when you try to take it away from them. Imagine the public backlash they'll have when they trace some huge fileswapper, have the Feds bust down their doors, only to find that their suspect is a 15-year-old whose father works at a university and whose mother is a nurse. They'll have to arrest someone, and no matter who they do, they'll be setting themselves up for negative publicity. Online file-sharers will be galvanized to the "cause" of free music, and the RIAA's troubles will continue to pile up.
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
Use of object has absolutely nothing to do with the legality of that object. If it did, scissors would be illegal because you could kill someone with 'em. Rather stupid, I know, but I'd rather not see P2P die out because it's being used for piracy NOW and the system itself is found illegal rather then down the road when networks like these might actually be productive.
Can they leagally go after the people with legitamate MP3s who happen to make them available on the internet or those who illegally download them?
To better explain: if I leave my doors unlocked and someone steals my CDs I may be a moron for not locking my doors, but I certainly didn't commit a crime (the thief did).
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?
I am sorta hazy over both issues.
I support going after the people breaking the laws rather than the P2P networks, definitely, however something just doesn't seem right to me about the way this is going. Sure, it can be just the big fishes now, but if they eventually start going after everyone with 10-20 gigs shared, well, that's a lot of people, and I'm one of them. It's not because I'm stealing music, I swear I'm not, it's just that I use mp3 to test out music I'm considering purchasing, or to discover bands I never would have dreamed of listening to otherwise. Seriously, with a 5 minute investment I can hear almost any band in the world by simply picking one I've never heard out of someone else's directory. I can't even begin to imagine how much music and music related merchandise (Tickets and such) that I've purchased over the years because of things I heard on mp3. Literally, probably at least 60-75% of my collection of nearly 400 CDs. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money that I didn't mind spending. Though, it's also a lot of money I'm not going to be spending anymore. I'm personally boycotting first run music stores if the album I want is on a label that is involved in supporting the RIAA. I just can't reconcile my love for music with my hatred of them blaming the fans, the customers, legitimate customers such as myself, for their slagging profits. Cut the prices, guys. Just slash them heavily. THEN think about going after people who still share 500 gigs, but damnit, please don't blame the customers for your losses due to greedy price fixing, and backwards attitudes towards fair use.
go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
While it could be argued that RIAA is just taking an expedient course of action, this is the one thing that they should have done.
Go after the burglars - don't penalize the manufacturers of crowbars.
I'd just as soon live in a free society where I have my choice of combining Napster with crowbars as long as I don't infringe on someone else's rights.
However, I will admit that trading an MP3 from a CD of mine that I've ripped to someone I don't know for a song which I don't have constitutes a commercial transaction (albeit cashless) and, while copyright exists, the possessors of the it should have the exclusive right to charge for distribution. Exactly and only that.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
We've now reached the endgame... When the whole music industry comits mass suicide like Metallica did when filing suit against 300,000 of it's own fans.
I've been waiting for this to happen, as this will push things to a final resolution.
BTW, Why can I buy a movie that has been out for 3-4 months for $15-16 on DVD, with extra features, etc, but a 20 year old album costs more than that? I can buy DVD's of older movies for around $10.
Yet, DVD sales boom. The best anti-piracy protection is reasonable prices. So long as the RIAA engages in illegal, anti-competitive practices (the FTC found them guilty of CD price fixing again), I say they deserve whatever happens to them.
It's a Mexican standoff... Pirates will pirate from P2P networks, the RIAA won't obey the law.
If it can be heard, it can be ripped. If it can be ripped, it can be traded. No amount of lawyering can change this, and indeed, the music industry will only become an even greater villian to the average Joe by the attempt.
Sell CD's for $10. Watch the sales rise. Quit wasting $millions bribing stations to play songs they will play anyway. Watch profits rise...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
But many music executives, watching revenue sag as home compact-disc copying has soared, feel that they have little choice if they are to save their business. World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
/., but I have to say it again. If they would just realize that people WANT digital music that they can download and throw onto a custom CD/MP3 player/etc, then they could give this up now! Yes, there'd still be copying of CDs, and all that, but it would drop. If they have lost revenue because of filesharing, not their own lack of quality, then setting up a system where we can buy ONE song would do wonders for their revenues. They are, bluntly, idiots.
Or could it be because people are getting fed up with the latest crap from Britnay Spears and N'sync? I have bought 5 albums in as many years. They were all albums that I knew I would enjoy, start to finish (w/ maybe 1 or 2 songs as exceptions). I didn't buy the same album over, and over, and over again.
Hell, I download a few songs that I want to hear, but there's no way I'm paying for an album for one song. I know that argument has long been shouted loudly and proudly from our ranks here on
On a side note, RE: the article, I don't see how they can get someone beyond reasonable doubt. It's a simple matter to give the HD a complete wipe (7 times over, 1s and 0s) and users can just claim that they downloaded a song from Kazaa to hear it before they bought an album. The only way they could truly "get" someone is if the user had perpetually downloaded copies of the same song.
Anyway, that's my $.02
Later.
That suing your customers is NOT good marketing...
Anyone care to speculate how hard it'd be to graft some sort of encryption into Gnutella? Stuff that deliberately obfuscates IP addresses, etc, at least enough to make it hard to identify users?
BTW, wouldn't breaking such encryption be a DMCA violation?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
IANAL, but wouldn't a shared warning file protect you?
Have it say something like, "By downloading files from my computer, the recipient agrees not to press charges resulting from the contents of the file."
Hell, it's about as legal as a EULA.
World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
Name one GOOD album that was released this year (Mainstream please)! I cant think of ONE MP3 that I have downloaded that was released in the last two years...
put out a quality producat and people WILL buy it, music today is like the "K-car" or the 80s... no soul...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
They sued Napster, it pushed people to true P2P networks like Gnutella. Now they go after the people on the networks, won't this just push people to something like Freenet? (Freenet masks users and files so it'd be more difficult to target specific people for trading specific things)
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
On the basis that the RIAA has been found guilty by the FTC of price fixing, AGAIN... It would at the very least make things a little less black and white...
And might sway a jury.
Remember, in the USA, jurors have the right of "jury nullification", to judge that the criminal is the LAW in question, not the accused...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
The RIAA and the authorities will spend exorbitant amounts of money just to find and prosecute one or two people. The hope is that after they make 'an example' out of one person, they can say, "See? We can find you and prosecute you." It's solely for deterrent value, because they're clutching at straws now. Leave the problem alone and it will only get worse. Try a solution, no matter how asinine, and it just may pay off. At least that's what I think. Someone enlighten me.
Guilty party? excuse me? havnt you ever heard of fair use? maybe these people actually own all the music. the guilty party would be those downloading from these innocent victims being sued.
It's a stupid idea, the second one big distributor gets busted, 3 more are going to pop up, it'll take an enourmous amount of resources to even make a dent in the supply of songs. In the meantime, they'll have to raise the prices of CDs, yet again, to finance this legal effort, and people will even buy less CDs and download more music.
They're just digging themselves deeper into their graves. They're approach should be through sound economics, not through evil lawyers (that's another issue all together!).
Give us an incentive to buy your CDs and we'll buy it. Stop blatently rip us off!
That means you should only be under suspicion if you are sharing music that is not yet released (Eminem was a recent one that I heard of being out there well in advance). That's it. Otherwise who knows maybe some insane freak does buy every song on the top 100 list. There is no probable cause, no reason to sue.
Buying the music doesn't give you the right to share it. So the insane freak still could get into trouble.
> How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does?
Here and there in the midst of all this discussion, I've occasionally run across an estimate from the publishing industry that each book sold is read on the average four times. One of their interests is cutting this number down and making people pay for the books they read.
Now, I have very few books that I've ever loaded out to anyone, and I doubt if any of my couple hundred books have been read by three other people. So where could all these extra readers be coming from?
Right. Libraries. The publishing industry doesn't make much of a public fuss of it, but one of the goals that they are starting to consider reachable is using the growing copyright restrictions to shut down public libraries. In the eyes of publishers, libraries are nothing but open copyright violations. All the arguments being made about "piracy" apply directly to libraries.
In the 1800's, the development of the public library system was one of the really significant advances in public education. We are seeing an attempt to end this social experiment, and to restrict education to those who can afford the publishers' price.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
1. Notified of lawsuit against you
2. Drive to local music store
3. Buy CDs of songs downloaded
4. Show up to court
5. Laugh in face of RIAA as they accuse you of stealing what you already own
6. Yawn.
So what if everyone out there has an mp3 of random backround noise listed as a hit song? Or even better, what if we all have ten, twenty, or even 100 hit songs? If the RIAA wants to go after users, shut the RIAA down by making them find so many copies of barking dogs, farting babies, and happy birthday listed as Eminem and Moby that lawyers and staff get wasted working around the false hits and it costs too much to keep up. Someone could even create a program to create random tracks from libraries of samples.
The downside of course, is that filesharing users would get sick of downloading garbage files, but then again it also might push people to start using P2P for legit purposes...
I'm not quite sure who said it, but when the vast majority of people disobey specific laws, those laws become unenforceable due to the sheer amount of effort needed to curtail offenders.
Look at prohibition as an example. The government tried to make alcohol illegal, but due to the overwhelming amount of people who simply ignored those laws and continued to consume it anyhow, it was eventually repealed when they discovered just how much effort would have to be put into stopping offenders. Similarly, music trading will never be stopped, simply because people will move between media as necessary, even going so far as to design an anonymous program which does not allow the tracking of IPs or other identifying sources.
Oh, and don't forget the good old days of searching through websites for mp3's.
I just graduated from college with a liberal arts degree. If they want massive amounts of money from me, they're just going to have to get in line and wait their turn.
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity.
Whether you like the RIAA or not, this is a pretty acurate description of what most P2P networks are. Log onto Kazaa or Gnutella and see what is there. It seems like a bunch of pirated MP3, some pirated movies, some pirated software, and lots and lots of porn (some of which is priated, the rest is wholesale stolen from porn sites). There is very little "legal" content on P2P networks. Even the few independant artists who have released their work on P2P networks get very little traffic, because P2P is set up mainly to be used by searching, and it's hard to search for new material since you don't know what it is your looking for (yes, you can find some stuff based on looking at a users files, but even then, you need to find the user somehow). The P2P networks are painted as havens for piracy because that is how they are used, and mostly what they were designed for.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Show me proof that more than 1% of assault rifles are used for something other than harming/killing people.
That argument doesn't fly with our government when peoples LIVES are at stake, why the hell should it when only some sleazy corps profits are?
jello.
aka aron.
"Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention."
Gee, I dunno where the RIAA would get any ideas about how much disk space that we use to store our MP3's.
Note to RIAA: "If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I believe piracy-for-profit is evil.
Trading mp3's or copying millions of albums where no one profits... that it is okay.
Because that is where theft comes into play. That _is_ money that could go to the RIAA's pit-o-cash.
Get your Unix fortune now!
SeeUsueMe
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Give us an incentive to buy your CDs and we'll buy it. Stop blatently rip us off!
Let me get this straight. You think that CDs are too expensive, therefore the RIAA is ripping you off. So you take music from the publishers (and, indirectly, from the RIAA) without paying for it, and this is okay.
Wait. I must have missed something.
And everyone who has ever downloaded an mp3 you've put in to a file-sharing system has been your personal friend? Someone you have met/spoken with frequently/some other activity generally shared among friends? Or are they strangers from around the world and you have no idea who they really are?
You are stretching the definition of "friend" just a bit.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
You are correct but unfortunately the statute was amended by the DMCA. Now the definition of "financial gain" includes the "receipt or expectation of receipt of copyrighted works." In other words, they amended the law to forbid "trading." It's going to be difficult to assert that you setup a file-sharing client with no intent to download anything else (assuming file sharing on computers is even protected by AHRA, which it probably isn't.)
Burris
Ok, let me fill you in on the part you're missing.
John makes music for a living. His record company rips him off with a crappy contract, but it's better than starving or having to work at a regular job full time so he couldn't focus on his music.
But Bob down the street doesn't care to pay for John's music, even though he enjoys it, so he downloads it off a p2p network. Then he "shares" it with everyone else on p2p networks, so they can do likewise.
Except that it's JOHN'S music being "shared" and John never said it was ok to just give away is music against his will, and doesn't see a fucking CENT from the exchange of that music.
Yes, p2p, and the entire digital realm for that matter, is great for avoiding the zero-sum problem of most markets. However, this doesn't mean it's alright to take other peoples work and do what you will with it. (with respects to Fair Use, of course.)
Finally, YES, a handful of artists use p2p to give out their music, but go browse a Kazaa users' shares sometime... tell me how many of those songs you REALLY think were put there by the artist/publisher for legal distribution.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Just because I can't afford all those CDs, should I not be allowed to listent to music? [...] And don't tell me to listen to the radio, because radio sucks ass.
Well... um... yes. If you don't want to listen to free music, and you don't want to (or can't) pay for music, then you don't get any music. That how a capitalist market economy works.
I guess you could make the case that being deprived of music is a moral wrong, and try to get somebody with money to back a charity for people who can't afford music. A church would probably be willing to help you out, but I'm not sure you'd care for their selection.
Your other option is to hum.
Or you could look at it from another viewpoint, that of the record industry. See, the record industry has been bitching and moaning about this big problem that they created due to their own greed. It's called payola. They have to pay so that the music they sell gets exposure to listeners around the country and around the world. They have been doing this forever. First they were paying radio stations to play their songs. Then when that was outlawed, they started paying some middleman to pay radio stations to play their songs. Now they're complaining that it's just too expensive and that the government should put a stop to it, boo hoo hoo. Oh yeah, and in the meantime, they are going to shut down napster and kazaa and anyone else that gets their music out to listeners around the world. Can't have that happening, can we.
Now you might say that people who download songs will just listen to them on their computer and never pay for the CD, but I don't think there's any evidence that that happens on a wide enough scale to really have that much of an impact, and there is a decent amount of evidence that seems to say that Napster and others have had a positive impact on CD sales. I think that what the record industry should really do is work on their public relations problem. Get rid of Rosen and put an artist or several artists in her spot. They don't even have to be Britney-class superstars, and in fact, they shouldn't be. They should represent the vast majority of artists that make something around minimum wage or a little better. Kind of like the artistic middle class. They could help to persuade people that artists really need their support in order to continue to make the music that the fans love. That could probably make a huge impact on people. But if they really want to make it work, then they should knock off all the damn price-fixing crap and lower the price of CDs. They should probably stick an MSRP price on each CD too, so that stores couldn't just double the price without facing some serious questions. I think that the statement to fans would be that the record industry wants to do good by them and help them find the music they like and help artists to make a good living. Oh, and they would save all those millions that they've been flushing down the payola toilet too. Now most of us can't imagine this happening in a million years, but if anyone has the muscle to get a message out to fans, it's the record industry.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Tell me, who gets hurt when I download that new Britney Spears song?
You do. Ugh.
All kidding aside, you're just wrong, for reasons that I guess I won't be able to explain to you. Taking something without paying for it is wrong. In this case, it also happens to be illegal. If you would acknowledge that it's wrong, and that you shouldn't do it, but that you do it anyway, then you and I could see eye-to-eye. I have no problem at all with hypocrites. I'm a huge hypocrite myself in a lot of ways.* But I do have a problem with people who can't seem to understand basic issues of right and wrong. That saddens and disturbs me.
* Not with respect to downloading MP3s, though. I was on an MP3 kick for a while about three years ago, but I quickly got bored with it. The music was all of absurdly low quality, and it was more trouble than it was worth to find and download stuff I liked. So I ditched all of the pirated stuff and ripped my collection of 300+ CDs at high bit rate instead, and ran cables to wire my server (upstairs) into my stereo (downstairs). It's about nine days of music on continuous random shuffle. Much better than the crap I got off of Napster. Ugh.
I've grown tired of responding to incessant peer-to-peer/music industry/IP/Congress (they all seem to revolve around the same issue) stories, so I will simply state my position on the whole matter once and for all.
1. Filesharing networks are a tool, as is a car or a firearm or an aircraft. There are legal and illegal uses for all of them. The fact that a majority of users misuse filesharing networks is no more relevant than the fact that a majority of American motorists break the speed limit. Period. End of story.
2. Certain songs are copyright their respective copyright holders, in this case the Recording Industry Association of America. Those songs are their intellectual property. This is not a gray area. Now, should it be demonstrated and upheld in a court of law that they, the RIAA, have abused this copyright, this may change. Hasn't happened yet.
3. End users that have not paid for said music or otherwise acquired a LEGAL license to said music do not have the legal right to possess their own distinct digital copy of said music for any purpose other than parody. In English: If you didn't buy it you don't own it.
4. End users who download music that they do not otherwise own are committing theft, recognized as a crime in most countries. End users who back up their music are not, so long as they have purchased said music.
5. End users who make available copyrighted material that they have paid for but others may not are abetting theft. Analogy: You set up a card table outside a record store. You offer CD's burned with music. You put up a notice stating that you may only take the CD if you already have bought the music legally. You do not attempt to verify whether or not anyone has done so. Right. Sure.
6. Suing someone for engaging in the above practice is indeed legal. That person is willfully distributing something that is not theirs to distribute. This is illegal.
7. To copy-protect a CD to prevent ripping is a violation of fair-use. However, fair-use is not defined in stone. Moreover, to circumvent the copy-protection is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998). Like the law or not (I don't), it is law. It conflicts with fair use, therefore the courts must decide boundaries.
I could go on, but that about sums it up. I dislike the RIAA intensly for the way they treat artists, end-users, et al., but they do have legal standing here. As for CD-ripping, I can only hope they get knocked ass-over-teakettle.
This is not a troll, but what I hope is a clear stating of the matter as I see it.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.