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Analysis of RIAA vs Princeton Student
An anonymous reader submits: "Joe Barillari, a computer science student studying
under Prof.
Ed Felten, posted an analysis on his blog of
the lawsuit
filed by the RIAA against a Princeton college student for running "Napster-like" networks. He
argues that the case doesn't quite live up to its contributory infringement
claim due to limitations in the DMCA. A good
read!"
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Dan Peng, a Princeton sophomore, for direct and contributory infringement of their members' copyrights. This essay analyzes that contributory infringement claim. Peng allegedly operated a computer service called "wake" which cataloged the publicly-shared files on the campus network. The RIAA draws a parallel between "wake" and Napster, and calls upon the court to apply the reasoning from the Napster case. Their analysis falls short in three respects:
1. "Wake" differs fundamentally from Napster in that it (allegedly) indexed a pre-existing network, just as Web search engines index the pre-existing web. Napster, on the other hand, created the network on which its users traded music.
2. Napster's software indexed and shared only MP3 audio files. Wake, on the other hand, (allegedly) indexed all public documents on the network, which substantially expands its range of non-infringing uses.
3. "Wake," as a pure search engine (rather than a search-engine-plus-file-sharing-system, as Napster was), is protected by the DMCA, a fact which the RIAA does not address.
...the artists what THEY thought of this? I'm sure that at least some of the artists being shared are among the 90% or so of musical artists that are in favor of file sharing; or did the RIAA simply add up the files and multiply by 150,000 each?
Wake.princeton.edu was just the beginning. What the RIAA is trying to pre-empt is a university-sponsored effort to lash together 32, then 256 PCs for "testing networking, filing and interpreting research" according to an article in the campus paper, the Daily Princetonian!
How so? Well the "Prince" reveals that the university has just installed its first brand new Beowulf cluster to do just that!
Beowulf lurks around every corner, I tell you!
Looks like the guy wrote an indexing service for Windows SMB file shares on the local LAN. Made it real easy to copy mp3's from everyone elses systems. But that's just it, the same thing could be accomplished with start>search>files & folders, this just simplified that by indexing everything so you wouldn't have to go comp by comp.
Doesn't look like they have a leg to stand on. They just need to hope for a relatively intelligent judge and/or jury, depending on how far this goes.
As a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, I recieved a rather lengthy education in the facets of Copyright Law (which is essential when producing creative works). While my knowledge pales in comparison to Mr. Barillari's, I can safely say that the RIAA has no case against Mr. Peng.
The basis of Copyright Law is simple: A copyrighted work can not be used to make money by anyone but the copyright holder. If Mr. Peng were "bootlegging" copyrighted music - ie Making CDs and selling them for a personal profit - then yes, he would be in violation of Copyright Law. But this wasn't the case.
WAKE, the program Mr. Peng used to index publically available files on the campus network, is not a file trading system, like Napster or Kazaa. Like Google, it's just a search engine. All it does is let you know what's out there and where. To download something you find using WAKE, you'ld have to go about it in some other manner.
Also, the nearly 650,000 files that the RIAA claim's Peng was distributing weren't all his. How can they sue him for something that's not his? It's yet another attempt at a power grab by a bunch of rich folks who only want to get richer. Sad.
My prediction: While the RIAA might get some considerations, they won't get anywhere near what they want. Peng won't see any jail time, and the RIAA will have a black eye.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
The president of Michigan Tech sent a letter to the RIAA offering his dissapointment about the whole fiasco -- in a politically correct way of course. Nice to know that although the University does try to uphold the DMCA, they officially disapprove of this newest stunt.
Take a look at Title 17 of the United States Code. This "fair-use-is-not-a-law" bullshit was an argument that Jack Valenti made in an interview a while back; amazingly, no one called him on it.
Has anyone started a defense fund?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The RIAA is actually on pretty solid ground after coming off of a success with Napster. They've established that evil young ones share their music, that it's illegal, and that they're within their rights in trying to shut it all down. I doubt they're doing that badly in the court of public opinion either (slashdot aside, of course). So I don't think the courts are going to consider all of this frivolous just yet.
It's fairly obvious that the guy had a lot of mp3s and was facilitating trading of mp3s. Now legally (as the article points out), I think he's going to do okay. But nobody's going to take the RIAA to task for coming after this guy. If (hopefully when) he gets off, if the public takes any notice at all, they'll most likely see him as a guilty student getting out on a technicality. The RIAA will probably come out looking legitimate either way, so they won't be losing face with this suit.
All of this is from a purely objective standpoint, of course. Personally, I'd love for the RIAA to get cooked in court *and* in public opinion.
This is pretty analogous to that one day a year that your main local library calls up every TV station and newspaper in town, and gets the cops to raid some unsuspecting person and make them spend the night in jail for overdue books.
Not sure if this is still going on anywhere, but my local library system was pretty notorious for using these kind of tactics as a sort of negative-reinforcement PR a few years back.
I call it a shakedown.
At any rate, it looks like the RIAA is taking a page from ol' George W.'s book. War by PR.
Doesn't matter if they win or loose. They got their money's worth the moment the media picked up on the story.
--dr00gy
here is the google cache of wake.princeton.edu.
Except that lawyers don't take the stand. If you put a lawyer on the stand it might go like this:
Lawyer A: Did you file the complaint?
Lawyer B: Yes.
Lawyer A: And at the time of the filing, did you believe the assertion contained therein to be true?
Lawyer B: Yes I did.
Lawyer A: But, in fact, they weren't true, were they?
Lawyer B: No they weren't.
Lawyer A: What happened to the complaint?
Lawyer B: The opposing side filed a motion for summary judgment and it was granted.
Sorry, but that isn't perjury.
The campus network here at Iowa State University is indexed by software called strangesearch. There have been a few concerns about the legality of running a network search engine which is used primarily for sharing music, movies, and porn. Recently, four students were arrested for sharing child pornography. The interesting thing is that without StrangeSearch, law enforcement would have never seen material on the students' computers! (Ever try to look at files shared on several thousand individual computers?) For this reason, nobody plans to shut down strangesearch.
A version of FreeNet for colleges/LAN, however...
I suppose that depends on the station, but being a college radio DJ, I'd say that's a big part of it. The DJs listen to obscure stuff and like it. I, at least, like sharing my tastes with the world at large. And if we expose people to the music and they like it too, they might buy a record or go to a show. Which helps the obscure artists and gets us more good obscure music.
The Music Director at my station told me the other day that our station has a responsibility to expose people to music they've never heard before and wouldn't hear anywhere else. I'd have to agree.
You are right, though, that Eminem is getting waaaay more in ASCAP royalties from radio play than is Black Heart Procession.
Rot-13 my address to e-mail me.
"So I hurry back to little earth / For another life another birth"
Napster did indeed offer indexing, but Napster created the network that was being indexed. So Napster was liable for the damages.
This network however, was a pre-existing Windows SMB file-sharing network, which could operate (and indeed did) without the WAKE-service he is being sued for.
See the difference? Its like Google should be held resposible for copyright infridgement, when they merely locate a site that breaks copyright law. The siteowner is the one that should be sued, not Google. And indeed noone sues Google, so why suit for this?
It's stupid, stupid, stupid and anyone within their right minds should be able to see that.
Which ofcourse excludes the RIAA completely.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
what is SO hard about this concept?
I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's flawed, in fact, in law and in logic.
Criminal = in breach of the criminal law. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the person in the aforementioned case is being sued for copyright infringement, a breach of civil law? Ergo, not criminal.
Again, I'm completely unaware of any criminal statutes that prohibit downloading copyrighted material. Again, not criminal.
If you actually bothered to read the article, you'd find that all that the guy did was create a Google like search engine that indexed all files on SMB shares in Princeton. I don't see the owners of Google getting arrested, but the RIAA clearly wants to send a message to young people, and they have decided to do this by targetting the brightest and best, and hitting them with an outrageous law suit which appears to stand little real chance of success of anything other than ruining an innocent young man's life.
Now *that's* fucking criminal.
and don't make a move for your gatt too soon.
the "No Electronic Theft (NET) Act" signed into law by Clinton expanded the types of activity that result in copyright infringement becoming a criminal offence.
the Act criminalizes the reproduction or distribution of one or more copyrighted works that have an aggregrate retail value of $1000 over a period of 180 days.
that's about 50 CDs copied in 6 months.