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RIAA Seeks Summary Judgement Against P2P Services
kanad writes: "RIAA seeks summary judgement against Musiccity , Kazaa and Grokster. In other words they want the above to be banned even before the trial. RIAA accuses them as Napster clones.
Read the
official statement here BTW does anybody knows of 'Leonard Kleinrock' described as "one of the original founders of the Internet" in the article and an expert witness ?" I wonder whether the mimeograph machine would survive if it was invented today.
sue if you're not happy with something, and everybody's guilty until proven innocent. well, nobody's innocent anymore, are they?
:|
it is rather unfortunate that the RIAA's product is less talented than it's lawyers
I don't know what it does, so I'll claim it's a napster clone...
It can be used to cut into our profits, stop it...
With this logic, PC's should be banned, as they can copy music, MSN and AOL should be shut down, since they provide access to the internet, which has illegal copies of music, and hell, XM radio should be shutdown as well, since it is hackable and can have music ripped off of it...
BLAH! Put the RIAA out of their missery, and MINE!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The RIAA has seen what the people want, and refuse to offer them that service. Because of this, people are going to take an alternate method of getting what they want.
:)
All of this litigation is, frankly, nonsense.
If the goverment is for the people, (i know it really isnt) and the people want to be able to download mp3s. Then this should be reflected in the law of the land.
Maybe we could vote on it?
no
It seems that the majority of creators aren't getting the chance to make that decision. The RIAA with its arrogant presumption is making the decision for everyone by pursuing these services.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Do Kazaa, or the other people making the clients have *anything* to do with the actual network anymore? If say all of these companies were shut down, would the Kazaa/Morpheus/Kazaalite/whatever clients still talk to each other? Is it really as decentralized as it's touted to be?
Putting aside the technical difficulty of shutting down a P2P network, some of this software may stand a chance in court. They are very much geared to 'file'-sharing rather than music sharing. That improves the chances that some court might see them as substantially non-infringing. Moreover, they are software programs, rather than centralized server, making the case for "the users are responsible for their own actions" stronger.
None of it matters in the end, though. There are three types of people out there: 1) There are those people who don't understand computer technology. 2) There are those people who understand it a little because they've used it. But they don't really understand it. They think that the icon is the program. They think of electronic mail as 'mail, but electronic.' And they have a fuzzy perception of information ownership. They think of people who alter the information on their computers in ways that were not intended as 'hackers' and slightly nefarious. 3) There are people who understand how computers work, and have a good idea what is happening with the 1's and 0's at any given time. Sure, they couldn't build their own OS, but they understand how it works to some degree. (Like someone who couldn't fix his car, but understands the basic concept of an internal combustion engine.)
Unfortunately, it is highly probable that the judge will belong to category 1 or 2.
It wasn't much of a problem before. Most pirates wouldn't have paid the money for it anyway. But now they've drug the rest of us into it and now we are all criminals!
:-)
:-) and it sure isn't $20!
I've gotten so fed up with this crap. I really quit buying CDs now. I download the songs I wanna hear. Not because I want to steal them but because I don't want to give the RIAA any more money they can use to get me, or the rest of us, up our respective a$$es. I support my favorite artists by going to concerts (yeah I know the RIAA gets a cut but what can you do?) and buying merchandise like the concert T's. God, I can't wait to see Disturbed and Korn next month!
Really, this wouldn't be such an issue if they were not a$$ raping us $20 for a CD. We all know now, how much it really cost to burn one!
If they'd charge a reasonable price and quit a$$ raping their customers and a$$ raping the bands they are pretending to protect (what is it, most bands get $.50 - $1 per CD sold? more? less?), they wouldn't have this problem in the first place!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
History is an great thing to bring up, actually, because this pre-emptory banning of P2P services is ridiculous. When Thomas Jefferson put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution of the United States, he did so because he realized that information leaks; once people learn something, they can reuse that knowledge. Jefferson believed that if there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artists would not . So in the US Constitution, it says: The reason why this is important is spelled out in Jefferson's own writings: His assumptions are based on the fact that you can not control what people do with information that you give to them. If you hand someone a book, they can transcribe it. If you give someone a physical invention, they can disassemble it. But if you give them a new form of media, say, a song on a copy-protected CD, and they can no longer listen to it except on approved devices that they cannot copy from, why should the government provide the same protection to you? The record companies and movie studios want to have their cake and eat it too. They want traditional copyright protection, technological copyright protection, and a government guarantee of technological copyright protection. They want to deprive all those bearded Linux hippies their DeCSS, so they can't watch bootleg Buffy the Vanpire Slayer DVDs in their parents' basement. But if they have technological protection, then why should the government give them traditional protection? It was only there because information was hard to protect as property.
How far are we going to let the copyrighters go? We need to remind people that copyright, like most laws in the US, is a balance between two forces, and the scale should not be tipped too far to one side.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The reason that Napster was extremely successful and these P2P apps have been somewhat successful is because they lowered the transaction costs for successfully downloading, i.e., for every CHOSEN file they made it quicker (searching), easier (less work to download), faster (downloading...more servers...higher probability of finding a fast server), and require far less technical ability (the users skill). If you force the users back to IRC, FTP, and such you're going to:
A) Cut out 95% of the users because they won't have the necessary skills to complete most of the downloads they desire.
B) Cut out most of the people that have (or acquire) the skills because finding the files, the sites, and acquiring the trust or the ratios (maybe not necessary in this system, but that is the status quo and human nature). The few that are willing to put up the effort likely are not RIAA's better customers anyways.
C) Reduce the # of downloads of said users, by virtue of the fact that each one simply takes them longer.
Very effective.
I _could_ download the Sopranos off the internet. I could have my friends tape it for me, or Replay it over to a VCD, but I don't, because HBO is easily available to me at a reasonable price.
Charge me $40-$60/month (which is more than i'm paying for CD every month these days), give me access to every song I want, and you'll make a killing.
Its a new era, you need a new billing scheme. Look at cable companies. Does anyone think that stealing cable is justified? They don't charge by the show, and conversely, nobody says "I'm not really stealing cable, because there's no way i'd watch 200 channels anyway." or "Yeah, i'll watch Showtime because I can, but if I couldn't get it for free, I wouldn't watch it."
It'll never happen though. They'll charge $18.99 for a highly restrictive format download of a shitty CD, then moan that nobody is buying it because of piracy.
> Would the record companies be able to sell into a meat-space distribution network?
.. there would not be a need for their business model.
... maybe the artists would have fought the Napsters such that they could pay proper royalties and such, but the whole point is there is no intrinsic need for the RIAA/Big label style business model for artists to earn a profit. Thats all. There isn't. Its no use wondering if the RIAA wouldn't have existed had they come in at the same time as Napster, because in that case, we'd give RIAA none of our business (I have to go to the store to buy the CD? But these other guys, I can do it from home! And make my own mix CDs! And they take less of a cut off the profits! And I dont have to buy 15 songs all at once!) and Napster all of our business. And then youd simply have the artists ensure that they were getting paid for making music. They wouldn't kill off the most innovative, competative, exciting and practically unlimited shelf-space model of p2p networks, they'd just make sure that they were in the loop.
No, but correct me if I'm wrong in stating thats the whole point of the market. There would not have been a need for them. Mind you, there may have been a need to regulate or mandate these distribution networks such that artists had to get paid, but the way the RIAA conducts business (shelfspace, adspace, and no space left over for anybody else)
But thats okay, see? I can't link the intrinsic need for the Big Label business model to the existance and development of music
We're so used to the RIAA approach that we think its required for artists to earn a living. So who cares if the RIAA's members could have survived with their approach had Napster been around at their birth? Its not like the RIAA are royalty-giving saints and p2p networks are all socialist devils. P2P networks can't pay the artists for copyrights mostly because the labels own the copyrights and dont want the p2p networks to be able to pay so that they can own all the parts of the music industry. (IE, they want to own the entire vertical market, and use the limited shelf and ad space available to artificially control who gets to profit off the music industry.)
Sorry for all the italics and bold. The only way to progress is to rip down what already exists, if you get my drift. Humans find a system that works, in the end. Any one group that becomes very powerful, such as the RIAA, simply injects unnatural market forces and distorts the perception of 'need' in a market. Its not that p2p networks dont want to be able to support royalty payments, its that the RIAA doesn't want anybody else to participate in the very market it was created to own.
The worst part is, the RIAA represents a group of labels that supposedly reps the entire music industry and yet represents itself like one company that needs to maximize all potential sources of profit. If that isn't cartel, I'm not sure what is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Here is what I want:
The ability to download a low quality version of a song to see if I like it. If i like it, i am given the option to buy that track at a reasonable cost (I'd pay ~$1 USD, but demand a bulk discount for a whole CD): I want this track that I buy to be available NOW, in many popular formats including a lossless format suitable for burning. I want the right to copy this track to kingdom come, from my car to my home and portable.
The record companies will say that then users will take this files and exchange them all over with their friends but think about this: I have money and my time is worth money -- it it technically "cheaper" for me to pay $1 for a high-quality song and have it NOW than to spend 5 hours finding a low-quality and corrupted copy off some P2P service. As an extension of this, those who can't afford to pay for digital music cannot afford to buy the CD anyway, so no one is loosing a sale anyway.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
At age 6 he was stealing hardware
to listen to free music
Nice story if you haven't seen it before, a little overblown though
Great post. Clearly you are in tune with the mechanics of this situation.
I always found it funny that, armed with the DMCA, you can pretty much 'invent' your own copyright terms, since circumventing protections that violate the law of copyright (notably that the work must return into the public domain after some-odd yeats) is itself against the law.
Basically, we've arrived in a situation where the copyright holders can write their own blank cheques of ownership, which was one of the reasons copyright law was enacted in the first place (yes, to mandate ownership and royalties to the author, but also to break the monopoly that the Royal Family-approved publishing houses had on the social culture at the time.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
I gave $1000 to the EFF last month.
What have you done?
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
...but every time litigation, news, or threats regarding P2P services and copyrighted material are posted, they are put under the category 'Your rights online'.
What, exactly, is our legal 'right' regarding copied copyrighted material and the internet? Defending P2P networks that claim that they cannot control what goes across their network misses the point.
If I create an underground network in 1935 whose stated purpose is 'to distribute manufactured goods', and the police make the discovery that 90% of its traffic is in illegal alcohol, I can't say 'Well, hey, I just run the network. It's not my problem what goes across it.' I as the maintainer of the subset distribution network am responsible for what happens on it.
The distribution network is shut down, because it is proved illegal actions run across it. In fact, the police do everything they can to pat themselves on the back; a successful bust against illegal liquor! Don't like it? Repeal prohibition.
Before the discussion even begins, this is not the same as 'The interstate system', which generically transports automobiles regardless of their destination or purpose (see also, the Internet). Musiccity has a stated narrower purpose, and it can be trivially proven that a significant amount of copyright violation occurs across its network, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Anyone remember 'corporate responsibility' from this year? It makes the premise that the CEO or officers of a company are aware and truthful about what goes on inside their business. This level of ignorance on the part of a corporate officer deserves the hardest slap the government can deliver.
If one wants to talk about one's 'rights online' regarding P2P traffic, what precisely is the framework?
1) That we have the right to copy music at will, irregardless of existing Berne copyright law?
2) That people who do infringe copyright unfairly prevent those who don't from using a P2P network legally?
3) That we're utterly unable to check what traffic goes across a small, managed network, or prosecute those who do?
If we're talking about the legality of P2P, let's make this easy. Ban file extensions that can or may contain music files. Toss people in jail who don't respect them.
Or, *gasp*, lobby to change the fundamental aspects of the copyright LAW, to allow P2P networks, *as they exist*, to run. Unlikely, but whining here doesn't change the fundamental situation. P2P networks carry substantial infringement traffic.
Whether they make the labels money or not is irrelevant. It is illegal. Change the law or convince the RIAA to stop prosecuting, then you can talk about whether it helps or hurts the labels on an even keel.