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RIAA Chats With Song Swappers
einer writes "Orignally seen
on Drudge; in reaction to their recent loss in court, an IM was sent to 'hundreds of thousands' of grokster and Kazaa users by the RIAA warning that they were NOT anonymous and that they could face legal consequences if they did not stop sharing copyrighted material. The IM was sent to users hosting copyrighted songs for download. Is this a scare tactic or an honest attempt to reform the p2p user community, or both?"
"They simply cannot subpoena Grokster or KaZaA (thanks to the recent ruling) for users' names -- let alone actually find their e-mail address to send a nastier C&D 'letter'."
Forgetting the Verizon rulings so quickly? They just wanted to sue the companies that make the software out of business. In terms of going after the users, they've got court backing on that one - they simply go to the ISP. Heck, they don't even need a warrant, judge's order, or even probable cause.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Yes, and yes.
-completely anonymous users, file transfers, hosts, etc.
Freenet is still suseptable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Your ISP could log everything you insert. Also, it won't protect you from your own software. For example if you publish a word document with your name and LAN address embedded in it, you've pretty much given up your privacy.
No, because Madonna owns the copyright of that "song" she can distribute however she wants. It still remains her copyright, which means no one else could publish it -- though she would have a hard time getting any damages if she tried to sue anyone after intentionally releasing it to P2P.
They are right, of course. Which is precisely why you should all use Freenet which IS anonymous, totally distributed, and has a much better distribution model in that popular content is automatically cached all over the net and all downloads are automatically "swarmed" so you don't get stuck downloading Madonna's music off of someones 56k modem. Using 60 download threads I can consistantly get 90k/s on recently inserted files, no matter what the connection speed of the person who made them available.
The RIAA and MPAA have always had the ability to track the downloads of songs, using an IP address or some ungodly hostname like pool-2-246.manhattan.ny.ny.us.fooisp.com The RIAA is asking for Verizon to hand over who was using that IP/hostname at the timestamps specified. Verizon contends that you need a real warrant, signed by a judge, to get access to their logs. I agree with that totally, but apparently they have yet to find a judge with sufficent clue.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
That is why there are separate music CD-Rs and data CD-Rs. The music CD-Rs have the built-in tax, the Data CD-Rs do not.
The original basis of the AHRA was because the record companies were so scared of DAT (how prescient of them). The compromise was the Serial Copy Management System which is built into consumer digital recorders. You can make any number of copies of an original CD. But you can't make a digital copy of another copy. Because SCMS is not built into computer CD-recorders, it is not included in that definition.
A copyright is any of the exclusive rights granted to the author of a work under the Berne Convention, or under local copyright laws, such as USC Title 17 for those of us in the US. These exclusive rights can be transferred, as occurs with Copyright Assignment to the Free Software Foundation, but even such a transfer isn't the copyright itself, but a transfer of ownership of copyright.
The GPL not a copyright, it is a license, and a non-exclusive one at that. A person who makes use of the GPL to redistribute or modify software doesn't have a copyright for the software, they have permission from the copyright holder to do certain things under certain conditions. The GPL makes use of copyright law, but that doesn't make it a copyright.
Music licensing is more complicated. Sometimes a license is given to redistribute a work, or to use a sample in a recording; sometimes music is licensed en masse . Sometimes copyright is assigned to various parties, sometimes it isn't, sometimes it is assumed as part of a "work-for-hire" contract. Sometimes the copyright is split, the songwriter having copyrights for the lyrics, the band having copyrights for the score, the producer having copyrights for the studio recording, and these can get licensed in whatever ways. But, again, the license is not the copyright.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, the above should not be interpreted as legal advice. Determining which parties own which copyrights can be a complicated issue demanding professional legal help.
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Open mind, insert foot.
If Madonna creates a new recording, and it is not explicitly released to the Public Domain, it is copyrighted. Whether she owns the copyright or someone else does is a different question; as I understand it, the producer traditionally owns the copyright to a music recording, not the artist, but the industry is known for complicated contracts so it's anybody's guess who actually owns the copyrights.
If the RIAA has a license with the right parties to redistribute this work without restriction, then I would think it would be perfectly legal for them to put up a Grokkster node and distribute it. Users downloading the file would be downloading it legally. The legality of such users redistributing it is a complex legal question that I'm not going to try to properly answer. I would presume that the RIAA would say redistribution was illegal, but your argument that under the circumstances, sharing was assumed and therefore allowed might hold real water here. If the RIAA is working in certain ways with the police, Entrapment may also be a defense.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, the above should not be interpreted as legal advice. Redistributing copyrighted works over the internet without a license carries with it a high risk of legal complications, I suggest getting professional legal advice before considering it.
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Open mind, insert foot.