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RIAA Headway Dwindling
JKnowledge writes "This article points to the fact that Yahoo! and various other ISPs are joining in Verizon's fight for the privacy of thier users. Perhaps this silly debacle in the rights of Anonymous Cowards will soon lose steam and sink into the rot that it rose from."
It's about time that these big companies like Yahoo and Verizon stepped up to the plate to bat for us. End users are not going to self-assemble into a class-action lawsuit with high-priced lawyers that can do battle with those of the RIAA. The only entities capable of protecting us in the courts are those able to afford the lawyers- so big ISP's fit the bill perfectly. They have the most to lose, but the most resources to fight against that loss, and by proxy they are fighting for us, the end users.
The RIAA is doing the equivalent to what the US Government is doing to find "terrorists". Don't get me wrong, there needs to be national security but this is getting ridiculous. The RIAA reminds me of McCarthy. I am glad to see Yahoo! and others stand up to them.
Is it strictly off of record sales?
I wouldn't think they'd be hard to put out of business, or at least dent them enough to hurt their lawyers.
I've found that artists listen to their fans. If we can come up with a better solution for the artist I bet it wouldn't be that difficult to get them to hop on.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Disclaimer: I haven't read the legal brief.
"The music industry pays the RIAA to investigate and prosecute copyright infractions. They don't pay us a penny to do that. They don't pay ISPs a penny to do that. Even if they did, it would be a violation of due process and subscriber privacy."
So what if they did pay? It seems that the anti-RIAA people (telcos, ISPs, civil liberties) are still partly in it for the money. After all, the payment issue shouldn't even arise when the problem at hand is the DMCA's "turbocharged" subpoena clause.
The groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Alert, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and National Consumers League, argued the RIAA is relying on a portion of the DMCA that violates Americans' right to be anonymous online
Everyone has certain rights (such as anonymity) until they commit a crime. Pirating music (whethey they're justified or not) is still a violation of copyrights. Why do ISPs have the right to refuse handing over the information when they can be considered criminals?
Is it because they don't provide the actual connections for the P2P network?
(Not a troll, just curious)
Quote by the RIAA:
"They (the ISP's) are trying to avoid the cost of identifying infringers as provided for in the DMCA by imposing unrealistic and burdensome obligations on copyright owners instead."
What?? You mean they are suggesting the RIAA use the law like everyone else has to? The nerve of those ISP's!
I'm pretty sure that it's the obligation of the copyright owner to preserve their copyright.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
even though it's not fun to admit, people DO pirate music.
Well I'm probably risking getting labeled a troll for this, but oh well. Virtually everyone posting on slashdot seems to think that pirating music is their right. However, just because you may believe in open source and the accompanying ideals of free (not as in beer) software does NOT mean that you can force these ideals on the record industry. They (and the artists who choose to sign with them) obviously feel that they own the intellectual property rights to the music. If you want to argue there is no such thing as intellectual property that makes most of this moot, but it also opens up a whole new can of worms that I have never the time nor the desire to delve into.
I certainly think there are a lot of things wrong with the record industry and how it is driven by the dollar and not the music, but like it or not it is their right to sell the music. This is just the same as any developer who sells proprietary hardware; they spent the time to make it and it is their right and their right alone to decide if and how they wish to sell it. If people pirated software as much as they pirated music, there would not be a software industry left standing.
Software developers take measures to make sure their works aren't pirated. Yes there are extreme examples like M$, but what about say game developers who require you to have the CD and/or a CD key to play the game. I know this is not a foolproof method, but it is fairly simple and helps cut down on piracy. No one jumps on these developers for doing this, yet the RIAA can't even be mentioned on slashdot without hordes of people mudslinging. While I don't agree with stuff like the legislation to DoS P2P network users, the RIAA also tries on much more legitimate legal grounds to stunt piracy. Is it really that bad of them to try and protect what is legally theirs in the first?
Yes, in theory it sounds really exciting. People coming together to take on one of the greediest corporate helldemons out there, for the good of the land. But the sad reality is that 99% of people complain and never do anything about it. You would think the average American/European consumer who essentially has the say whether a given product/service is a "keeper" would be a vocal voice when it comes to asinine legislature. But people assimilate.
It could be justifiably compared to the nerdy kid and the schoolyard bully. You let him pick on you without fighting back, and just open the floodgates of abuse. RIAA has tested the waters, and they came to the conclusion that people will put up with their shit.
This just goes to prove the notion that indifference of the users to take any swift action is not an OSS centric problem. People from all walks of life use "portable music", and when the time comes to take a stand and rage against the machine, everyone just thinks they cannot make a difference on a personal level. It multiplies into millions of ignoramuses, and in turn empowers **AA to swing their dick in any preferred direction while knocking civil liberties around.
How long will it take before people realize that just by talking about it, evil will not just vaporize into thin air?
Copy protected CDs --> Idiotic Windows XP Authentication methods --> DRM --> Crippled hardware --> Palladium --> Microchips under your skin... what's next?
Raise your hand. Make a Fist. Fight Back!
You would think the average American/European consumer who essentially has the say whether a given product/service is a "keeper" would be a vocal voice when it comes to asinine legislature. But people assimilate.
Don't drag us poor Europeans into this. Copyright is still a civil matter here and I hope it stays that way. They are trying to force a DMCA type law on us but it is not here yet and we don't want it. The last major case in the UK by MS was hailed as copyright/piracy in the press but the guy was convicted of fraud in reality as he sold the Windows CDs as Windows CDs instead of admitting they were fakes. If he had admitted they were fakes to his customers he could only have been sued rather than prosecuted for a crime.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Burning CDs. Not lossy, but slow and hard to distribute. Same sort of distribution as the tapes, but with the possibility of n+1th generation copies.
Ogg/MP3/WMA - initial, insignificant quality loss, with no further loss on generational copies. Seriously easy to distribute. When I am on Gnutella, I usually limit to between 4 and 6 simultaneous uploads. They are always maxed out, with a queue of people waiting for the slots to become free. If I left my computer on the network for 24 hours, I could reasonably expect to have uploaded a couple of hundred songs. See the difference?
Now, I've already admitted to pirating music - the important fact is that I realise it is wrong, rather than trying to claim I have a God given right to so so.
Here in Belgium we have SABAM, which I think should be kind of neutral because it groups artists, authors and publishers.
This means that it should maybe be possible to co-operate with such an agency and an online download system, which makes music available for the price that the artist wants (and should get). Downloads and payments on that system could be transferred to the agencies' database for payment to the artist, while at the same time the artist could get weekly and monthly reports about the amount of money he should get.
What could be needed to offer artists freedom of corporations ?
The biggest problem I see here is to know what the overhead costs are in setting up and maintaining this system, cost which of course should be spread over all the artists and works. Thus, the more artists and works there are on the system, the lower the cost per item, which means that people would probably pay a much fairer price.
ISPs don't have the right to refuse to hand over subscriber information, as long as the copyright holder or its assignee begins a "John Doe" court proceeding in which the target of the suit is uniquely identified by their actions. The ISP is then handed a subpoena, as in any other civil case, that requests information that is important for the court's decision, such as information that can positively identify the John Doe. The ISP will legally have to comply with this subpoena by providing the subscriber information to the court.
However, the DMCA has a special provision, intended to speed copyright holders' takedowns of infringing material from web sites, which allows the rights holder to expedite the removal of such material by requiring the ISP to remove it within a short period of time of receiving the request and notifying the ISP client. The client can halt the takedown by formally claiming that the material does not infringe, thus leading them to some serious legal problems if they are not telling the truth. This section of law was not written in such a way that it is clear whether it applies equally to material that is stored on the computers of ISP clients rather than on ISP company web servers. (Remember, to anyone over forty, internet = web.) Thus the possibility for the current legal conflict.
So, why are the ISPs bothering to fight this? You are right that it is all about money, of course, but I seriously doubt that it's over the money that the ISPs could otherwise extort from copyright holders for this service. Try reading the sentences
as rhetorical, as in "I don't know why I, as a state warden, have to execute this mafia informant who happens to also be a murderer - the mafia doesn't pay my salary, and even if they did, it would be against my conscience as I don't believe in capital punishment." Instead, the money in question is what the ISPs would lose if they were seen by their customers as ready to interfere in this way with client use of the leased bandwidth, or more likely, the money that it would cost to even try to police copyright infringements that occurred through internet services and were stored on client hard drives. If you don't think it's really that much of a big deal, I'll illegally email you a song to prove the point.A more interesting question, though, is why doesn't the RIAA just follow the standard process and obtain a John Doe subpoena? They must have the evidence to do this. One possibility is that they would rather set a precedent that they can request takedowns of infringing material stored on client hard drives using the easy, no-fuss method as they read Congress as having intended it. Note that this is what they claim as their motive.
However, this rationale doesn't hold very much water, since it makes no sense for the RIAA to try to file a lawsuit against any significant number of file traders in an effort to eradicate infringement. The whole strategy must revolve around suing a small subset of file traders in an effort to remove those nodes which offer the largest set of files and to scare off all of the rest, in effect "firing into the crowd". It would simply be too expensive to police infringement by catching all copyright violators - that's more than half of American teenagers, and even an expedited discovery process is not going to make that cost effective. In the case of a small number of lawsuits, whether the discovery is expedited or not makes little difference and is not worth fighting over, except on principle (which the notoriously mercenary RIAA asserts as a secondary motive, of course.)
A moment of thought indicates that a much more likely reason to wish for the expedited process in this case is so that the RIAA can see who the defendant will be before they actually launch an infringement lawsuit. With the so-called turbocharged subpoena process, the RIAA can make a blanket call for the identity of one hundred infringers, investigate each person on the list, and choose the one who's a baby-beating homeless crack-ho terrorist hacker to hit with a lawsuit. As noted above, with the demographic reality of copyright infringement, they really don't want to follow standard practice and blindly file a John Doe lawsuit - heavens, that person could be the eleven-year-old granddaughter of one of the RIAA executives, or Jenna Bush. Knowing what you're getting into before making public legal filings that could be very embarrassing later is almost mandatory in this situation, and you can expect the copyright holders' organisations to press for this power as strongly as they can.
A final comment: the civil liberties organisations are not in it for the money.
You know, everyone just bitches about the RIAA, DMCA, and other such infringements on our freedom. The answer is simple... BOYCOTT!!! If a company supports the RIAA or uses the DMCA to infringe on our rights, dont support their products in any way. If Congressman Dipshit supports a law in favor of these, vote for his opponent. If Sony uses the DMCA do crack down on something that affects your life in such a way that you do not like, buy their competitors products. Spread rumors about how a mother lost a lawsuit when her babys hand was mangled in a DVD player, and Sony won the counter suit. Resist buying that PS2 and buy something else. At what point did we lose control of our lives? Why is it that big corporations can shit on us and tell us what we can and can not do with our products? Fsck them... They can kiss my ass. I wont be bullied by big corporations or their advocate groups. Im sick of these guys hideing behind "policy", something that is on paper. It cant physically prohibit you from doing something, so why are we subject to it. Its simple, dont buy the products of the supporters of the RIAA. Make them lose money. If they lose profit over it, they will discontinue contributions to such an agency, so the RIAA will be disbanned, the Chairman will be out of a job sleeping on the street in a cardboard box, so that we can all laugh at them and urinate on them in their sleep. Get control and do something about it, your the consumer, and your supposed to always be right...