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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.
Leonard Kleinrock.
/.'ed. Great way to use that Berman-Coble DOS self-help!
Unfortunately the RIAA page is
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Going further, what's to stop IRC and a number of FTP servers? I still host a ton of content on my FTP server, and it is NOT anonymous (yeah-yeah, insecure blahblah). Or, I could burn info to a CD and send it wherever to whomever, or even just email a MP3 if its small enough...
ineffective at best, i say.
----rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
it is rather unfortunate that the RIAA's product is less talented than it's lawyers :|
It is unfortunate, but a quality product is not what makes money in this day and age, it's having lawyers that can twist the crap out of your product to make it look good, and make everything else look evil (aka Microsoft), and marketing crap well (again, Microsoft)... All the RIAA needs to learn to do is market their crap WELL, and we're all doomed!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Well, *obviously not*. I mean, major record labels didn't turn a profit while Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, Aimster, FTP, HTTP, TCP/IP, The Internet exi - oh wait, yes they did.
Does that answer your question?
"Old man yells at systemd"
What the people want is free music
Uhh, no.
What the people want is easy access to music, and the ability to sample.
For the 10,000th time...
This is just a summary judgement request. I've never been involved in a case (thankfully few) where both sides didn't file requests for summary judgement. Its just lawyer chest thumping. The lawyers says "My case is so strong there is no possible defense." Then the judge whips out his denied stamp, whacks both summary judegment requests and the case proceeds.
Now, if the judge grants this, then that would be newsworthy.
If a lawyer filing a summary judgement request is news, then you probably ought to cover every time they take a leak too.
People want the SONGS they want, at a low price, delivered through a digital medium.
What they DON'T want is inflated CD prices full of crap they don't want to listen to.
The whole music industry is based on the idea that "we can get one catchy song, pay ClearChannel to play it over and over on their station, and all the suckers will buy the whole album" - That's why singles have all but disappeared as of late.
That's why they are so pissed. They put up this big front of how morally objectionable trading songs over the net is, when the true motivation is that P2P apps let people get the one song off that craptastic album they actualyl want instead of going out and dropping $16 on a CD that they'll never listen to, aside from that one song.
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 birth of the Internet which occurred when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet
Out of curiosity, what was the point of having the first host, as opposed to the first pair of hosts? "Hey, look at me! I'm networking with myself!"
In about thirty years I'll tell you how I was the first host on Internet 3. :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
With this logic, PC's should be banned,
*DING* You win the prize. You now understand why you need to never give them any more money ever again. They DO want to take away computers and they won't stop with any halfway methods (because those methods will always be beaten) and they will work their way toward a world where there are no computers (Except for *_approved_* *_trusted_* minions of the copyright industry. To do your part, stop giving them any resources they can use to destroy freedom. That means no more money for the copyright industry forever.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
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.
the IMP (Interface Message Processor) is a big green refrigerator sized box, and can be found on in the engineering library in ucla's boelter hall. it was the first node of the packet switching network (the second being at stanford university, connected via a leased 56k line) now known as The Internet. and kleinrock set it up (and the packet switching theory behind it). more than anyone else (well, maybe vint cerf), he can be called the father of the internet.
having said that, this has absolutely no relevance to this case.
> 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.
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"
Better question... What have they done?
(and yes, I've donated (far too much) money to them, and have seen absolutely no roi)
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
You don't see the pr0n stars complaining and thier, um stuff, get's traded more heavily than the copywritten music on KaZaA.
No, not the stars, but the copyright holders on all that pr0n care. I don't know how this has eluded the like of /. yet, but read the CNN/Money piece entitled
"Porn outfit bids for Napster"
from yesterday:
HAND
I used to take a more moderate position on copyright, but the entertainment industry has changed my mind. I look at it this way:
Option #1: Retain copyright. Result: vital political liberties are demolished to control the flow of information for the benefit a few massive corporations. 99% of artists work day jobs.
Option #2: Abolish copyright. Result: political liberties survive and massive corporations continue to be massive corporations. 99% of artists work day jobs.
The common themes are rich corporate pigs and starving artists, and the only variable is political liberty. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
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