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Inquiry Into RIAA's Piracy Crackdown Tactics
MongooseCN writes "Sen. Norm Coleman started an inquiry to check the RIAA's tactics on attacking online music swappers. He believes the RIAA's tactics may not be taking into consideration the damage they do to innocent people. It's good to know that someone remembered people in the US have Rights." As a former roadie, Senator Coleman doesn't oppose file sharing penalities, he merely wants to make sure the punishment fits the crime.
Why did they have to wait so long? Couldn't this have been done _before_ so many people lost their money/got expelled. Do we really need to make so much noise before they make things happen? All in all, I'm glad they finally got their act together, but I worry that the only reason they're doing this is because the RIAA has something else planned.. Apparently, you only have rights if you belong to a group big enough to actually influence politics.
He believes the RIAA's tactics may not be taking into consideration the damage they do to innocent people
I'd be more intrested in questioning the legality of the RIAA's 'tactics'.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
to answer the first post - it took this long because now is the perfect opportunity for a politician to finally speak out and garner some public support for their election given the latest round of subpoena's has indicted innocent victims or third party individuals who were a matter of circumstance. It's best summed up in this paragraph:
>>> "The industry seems to have adopted a 'shotgun' approach that could potentially cause injury and harm to innocent people who may simply have been victims of circumstance, or possessed a lack of knowledge of the rules related to digital sharing of files," Coleman wrote. >>>
Before it was students etc they were filiong against and the claims were pretty justified - there wasn't much leeway for a politician to step up - now there is a distinct case to be made and popular support to be garnered from it.
Fear Breeds Knowledge
At the end of the article:
"I must confess, I downloaded Napster, and then Napster was found to be the wrong thing," he said. "I stopped."
So, he's a former roadie, and a Senator, and he waited until the justice declared Napster the wrong thing to stop using it? when he downloaded songs off Napster, shouldn't he have sensed that guilt that should have come from his being a former roadie, and his current position as (supposedly moral) senator?
So yeah, go Senator, but I wonder if he's not just another file swapper with a louder voice than everybody else, who tries to hide the fact behind "I recognize the very legitimate concerns about copyright infringement" statements, so as to not be labeled as a pirate by the RIAA.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
class-action lawsuit against the RIAA by the innocent people caught in their massive web.
Fight fire with fire.
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Isn't this the guy ... Who, after his political opponent Paul Wellstone was killed in an airplane crash, gave his first televised interview posing against a small private plane in a hangar?
Dunno; would that be relevant, somehow? Is nobody allowed to have private planes after their political opponents die in plane crashes?
And so on. Interesting opinion. Unfortunately, it's incorrect.
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun back, Dowling v. the United States: 'It follows that interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: "Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner," that is, anyone who trespasses into his exclusive domain by using or authorizing the use of the copyrighted work in one of the five ways set forth in the statute, "is an infringer of the copyright."'
I know that this is playing to the gallery, but if we're simply going to redefine terms to suit ourselves, how about try a bit of it ourselves. For example:
Then we get a go:
Not perhaps technically accurate, but hey, they started it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Point 2: The RIAA is seeking the close assistance of republicans with point 1.
Point 3: Sen. Norm Coleman is a republican.
Point 4: The parties mentioned in (3), merely question the methods that the RIAA used to get their subpoenas and whether or not the penalties are affecting "innocent" people. He does not think that P2P is legally or morally OK to use. In fact, he calls the copyright infringement "theft", which clearly it is not.
Theory: RIAA uses its connections to the Republican party to pass new laws, all the while the unsuspecting consumer is egging the republicans on because they are "talking a good talk". While I'm optimistic at the sound of this inquiry, I won't hold my breath for a favorable outcome, and I am suspicious of Coleman's motives.
There's a thriving industry of indie music already. Most indie bands do indeed tour, at least nationally and quite a few internationally.
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
Why not write to your elected representatives and propose a bill to limit the term of copyright to five years from the receipt of the first royalty payment, or five years from the date of publication if no royalty payments are rceived within that time, after which the work enters the public domain. This term should not be extensible under any circumstances and, if any technological measures are used to prevent copying, at least one unprotected copy should be placed in escrow with the relevant authorities in order that the work can actually be placed in the public domain. Circumvention of protection on a work which has, or should have, already entered into the public domain should be explicitly permitted.
The whole idea of copyright is to provide a limited term of exclusivity so you can make money from your work, in return for the promise that one day, your work will enter the public domain. Frankly, five years should be enough time for anyone to make a fair profit {which is why I think it should be counted from the receipt of the first royalty payment}; and, if you haven't made any money out of it in that time, you're never going to, so you should cut your losses.
I'll maybe rewrite this in more bill-like terms and repost it, if anyone else thinks it's a good idea.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"any idiot could walk into a courthouse, lodge a form with a court clerk and the process is started."
Wait a minute. Could *I* do this? Could I perhaps inadvertantly target, say, certain industry associations, because my spidering software had mistakenly identified them as distributors of my IP? Could I then hold them to the same standards of proof that they are holding random Kazaa users, and force their lawyers to establish a precident, as the defendants, for just what you have to show in court before you can win such a case?
Seriously, it seems that there's a nice legal hack to be had in creatively abusing the ability to send subpeonas without a judge. Could someone who IAL suggest some possibilities?
While I respect your relatively low user id #, your views are somewhat mislead. Understand that here in America (don't know if you're american or not) we have a rule by majority. Concentrate on that word..majority. It takes a larger group of people to get hurt or angry before something will be done about what is hurting them. Until now the RIAA had both the loudest and the most numerous voice, thankfully the right number of people have spoken up for some action to finally be taken.
I will conceed that some corruption happens on the hill on a daily basis, it's gonna happen because some people feed on that. However, I will not conceed the point of view that all people who make a living running this country are corrupt. They do what is either in the best interest of their constituants, or they listen to those people when they change their minds (as a majority). He still needs to get votes to keep his job.
On a side note, yes attorneys have a large voice in DC, but that's because they hire a ton of folks to do lobbying for them. It's not what you say, it's how many voices you say it with.
Whatever man, I spelled it write!