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Anonymous User Challenges RIAA Subpoena
Arclightfire writes "First there was the setback of a New England judge throwing out an attempt to uncover the names of students at MIT accused of piracy and now CNet is reporting that a 'Jane Doe' is arguing that the subpoena violates her right to due process." There's also a Reuters story.
I'm just curious as to how much money the RIAA is spending on all these court battles (which they will be foreced into)! Maybe they should be spending that money on finding new Artists or reducing the cost of exsiting material? Perhaps even setting up their own "online" song distribution system (as theres obviously a market for it [iTunes etc])
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
For its part, the RIAA said that Jane Doe's motion to intervene matters little, because a federal court has already upheld the validity of the subpoena process.
"The courts have already ruled that you're not anonymous when you're publicly distributing music online," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president at the RIAA. "Her lawyers are trying to obtain a free pass to download or upload music online illegally. Their arguments have already been addressed by federal court and been rejected."
The obvious problem with this is: who says she's "publicly distributing music online"? A court of law? A judge? No, just the RIAA. Sure, it may later be shown that she was, in fact, doing what they claim. They may have enough evidence against her to convince a judge to issue a warrant or a subpoena. Or, the RIAA may have made a mistake again. We have legal procedures in place to prevent abuse of the system, and these procedures are not being followed. In the past, the RIAA hasn't been exactly careful when determining who is or is not distributing copyrighted MP3s.
Even scarier:
"We informed the recording industry that one of our customers intended to challenge and asked the RIAA to deal with the lawyers directly.
Instead, according to Deutsch, the RIAA went to court recently and filed a motion to compel Verizon to provide the name.
Surprisingly (for those of us who have long considered them to be an evil company), Verizon is clearly doing all the right things here. They're only doing what they've already been forced by a court to do.
I wish Jane Doe the best of luck. She'll need it. Oh, and by the way, the first article mentions the EFF is working on fighting this too; they're always accepting donations.
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It seems to me that whether she is guilty or innocent is irrelevent. The complaint here is that the RIAA is "circumventing" due process with their subpoenas, and it needs to be corrected.
And the FBI is violating the privacy rights of child pornographers who use the internet to distribute the content by using the same methods.
One should read their ISP's Terms of Service. If it says "we will assist law enforcement authorities and copyright holders" (maybe not in so many words) then yer screwed. And even if it does not say that, then your complaint is with the ISP and not the RIAA. Afterall, as far as they are concerned, you're violating their copyrights (or the copyrights of their members; no matter how much you agree with them or not).
So these days, instead of people becoming educated and reading contracts they get into, they get mommy and daddy to hire a lawyer to sue for them.
I assume you mean this 'setback':
But Judge Joseph L Tauro said because the subpoenas were issued in Washington, DC they cannot be served in Massachusetts.
This really isn't a 'setback' at all. It was simple a procedural error. Those subpoenas will be filed again but this time in Massachusetts. Then they will be served.
Then there's this from the article:
"This is more invasive than someone having secret access to the library books you check out or the videos you rent,"
LMAO! So in other words, not very invasive at all. Besides, last time I looked checking books out of the library and renting videos was legal. Maybe because both are paid for! (Libraries operate on taxes in case you didn't know. That's what makes it a Public Library.)
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That's a pretty lame excuse... I have several friends who have used Kazaa, most of which are PC novices, and everybody knew it first and foremost as a passport to free music. I don't think that argument will hold any water in court, particularly since(as noted above), she admits "participating" in the sharing network. There are plenty of reasons to despise the RIAA and their tactics, but this lady better have something good up her sleeve...
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Ah, but no one has ever proven in a court of law that trading/sharing files on a P2P network is illegal. Maybe they've proven that people downloading them *can potentially* damage their industry, but it's never been proven illegal to share files. Not only that, what if someone is using a file-sharing system to download the music, listen once, then delete the file? That is a legit use, just like me handing a tape to my friend to listen to for a week is a legit "fair use" doctrine. What the RIAA is so scared of, ultimately, is that it's near impossible to actually make it harder to share the files. In the days of cassette's and CD's you either bought a recordable tape to dub your friend's CD or tape, or you you couldn't get a copy of it. It's almost worth the extra $5 to just buy the full tape. But now you don't need to buy anything other than the computer and internet connection to get TONS of stuff for *nearly* free. The cost is far, far less. So the RIAA and MPAA see their profits dwindle because they've got nothing new or innovative to offer. Guess what, that's their problem, not mine. And no, they cannot abuse the law to force me to do it their way. That's a monopoly, and what even bigger industry giants like Microsoft have already been convicted of.
I say more power to this anonymous "Jane Doe." She'll most likely win.
As a couple of others have pointed out, it does not matter if she is guilty or not. She could be the bloody Boston Strangler (and I am sure Jack Valenti would liken her to that) for all anybody should care. Rights are something that everybody has, and they have to be protected.
She is innocent until proven guilty (remember that phrase?). In other words, she is innocent until convicted in another trial with another jury completely unrelated to this.
The RIAA and the record industry as a whole are on trial here, not Jane Doe.
She should have your blessing, too, because she is fighting for your freedom from tyranny.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
If you download an mp3, get it of a cd, you will open it and play it with MS installed apps.
So how exactly would a complete and utter noob get to install kazaa to play an Mp3? I know far more people that are convinved that Windows Media Player is the only way to play their music, and who think that since it has windows in front of it Linux can't play Mp3s.
Oh and yes they are of course right. Kernels are well known for not playing music :)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
illegally uploaded/downloaded music, her anonymity should be protected. The RIAA is trying to extort money from individuals and frighten the community. They are NOT attempting to prove cases in court. In most cases, they couldn't. But the threat of extensive expensive litigation against a well funded corporate entity is enough for most people to buckle and settle.
Regardless, since when is ignorance an excuse?
... since the last decade of the 18th century (in the USA, anyway).
... until we have licensing for the use of a computer system, with basic computer-education to insure everyone is expected to have a certain level of knowledge, it is clear the law does not require that people know (or necessarilly be responsible for) anything their computer is doing without their knowledge.
Umm
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance of the activity almost always is.[1] It goes to intent, it goes to motive, it goes to opportunity. If someone buries a body on your property without your knowledge, you are generally not tried for collusion with the murderer. If you are, and you can demonstrate that you didn't know it was happening, you are most certainly acquitted.
If many people are using Kazaa because they believe they need it to play back their own, legally ripped mp3s, then the RIAA doesn't have much of a case. Copyright violations have to be willful and intentional to receive most of the punitive rewards, and with computers things are even murkier, as trojan horse programs (which Kazaa arguably is, in this context), worms, and viruses often hijack people's computers to do things they have absolutely no idea are being done.
Or are we going to arrest everyone whose computer has been comprimised by SoBig.F or whatever it's latest iteration is, for DOSing Microsloth's web services? After all, "ignorance is no excuse..."
[1]Willful, or negligent, ignorance of course is an exception. Having a good idea someone is doing something neferious, but saying "I don't want to know!" isn't enough to get one off. However, true lack of knowledge that something bad is going on, even on one's own property, is in most cases a valid excuse. However, a computer user not understanding what a trojan or trojan-esque program is doing on their computer hardly qualifies
And I don't see even this government stooping to licensing computer use anytime soon.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
this person knows how to rip her own music from CD. She's not using Kazaa to listen to her collection.
... I have almost all of my music on my hard drive in ogg format because it is easier and more pleasant to have all of my music at my fingertips than to fish around for CDs every 42 minutes, and NO, I absolutely do not under any circumstances engage in illegal file sharing), and then showed her another (or the same) nifty program to play them back. That program happened to be Kazaa, and it is perfectly likely that she had no idea it was making a chunk of her hard drive (and all of her music) available for others to copy.
This isn't Joe Blow downloading songs and thinking that he has to use Kazaa to listen to them.
"This person knows how to drive a car. She's not using her Corvett to drive down the highway."
Did you even think to semantically parse the statement you just made?
Of course she knows how to rip her own CDs. A friend probably showed her this nifty program to rip her CDs onto her hard drive (for convinience
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
She ADMITS to using Kazaa to share. She KNOWS how to rip her files (and if anyone showed her how to rip them), I will put money on the fact that they told her to use either WMP or WinAMP.
The question that I didn't see answered, which is going to be very material to this case, was: what was she downloading? If it was music from independant artists or freeware, then she has done nothing wrong. Now I admit, most likely, she was downloading copyrighted music, and therefore in trouble, but if she claims she didn't, and can explain away her sharing as the legal kind, then the onus shoud be on the RIAA to prove otherwise, if they can't, and the judge isn't just another coporate worshiper, then she may just get away with this and set a very nice precident, something along the lines of, you actually have to file a suit and ask the judge to let you subpeona those records before getting them.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Copyright is a strict liability offense. This means that civil copyright violations do not have to be willful. A willful violation is more serious than a non-willful violation. Copyright law raises the maximum salutatory damages from $30K to $150K if the action is shown to be willful.
... copyright law is far more evil and perverse than even I believed. The idea that someone can sneak into your office, use your copy machine to illegally copy and distribute a book, and then get you thrown into jail for up to five years and fined $250,000 per offense is utterly and completely unjust, and worthy, quite frankly, of a violent change to the system (if need be).
Good God that's appalling. You are correct
Or is this limited to the copyright violator? If so, my point stands. It is not the unwitting user who has accidentally, and unknowingly, made a file accessible to others to download who has violated copyright law, it is the person actually doing the dowloading.
So, unless contributing to another's act of copyright violation doesn't require knowledge (which means the scenerio I outlined above is possible, in which case we should all be polishing our revolutionary guns [toung in cheeck, folk, toung in cheek. Holster those handcuffs, Mr. Spook.]), then the unwitting Kazaa user whose files someone else is copying is still off the hook.
Otherwise, quite frankly, any use of any computer within the boarders of the United States carries with it an unacceptable level of liability, and we should all either relocate to a saner jurisdiction or go back to using abicusses.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Now I admit, most likely, she was downloading copyrighted music, and therefore in trouble, but if she claims she didn't, and can explain away her sharing as the legal kind, then the onus shoud be on the RIAA to prove otherwise, if they can't, and the judge isn't just another coporate worshiper, then she may just get away with this and set a very nice precident, something along the lines of, you actually have to file a suit and ask the judge to let you subpeona those records before getting them.
The thing is, she is entitled to due process whether or not she is innocent or guilty.
The fact that she is very plausably innocent (though quite possibly not) should serve to underscore this point to the unwashed masses whose kneejerk response is to scream for the pirate's head on a platter hours before the court papers are even filed, but it should have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on her contention that subpeanas being issued without court order identifying individuals for acts of potential barratory by a cartel are inappropraite and probably unconstitutional.
Copyright law is appalling in that one can be put into prison for 5 years for doing something utterly unwittingly and unknowingly. If in fact one can go to prison for utterly unwittingly and unknowingly contributing to someone elses violation of the law (who themselves may be doing so utterly unwittingly and unknowingly), then we really are living in a police state the awful powers of which we are just now waking up to.
It has been rather obvious to anyone in the digital world that copyright is the tool for oppression and censorship of those in the developed world (in the latter 20th century and 21st centuries, at least), but to think that people can be imprisoned for events to which they are peripherally bound without their knowledge is truly unthinkable. I'm not talking about ignorance of the law, which has never been an excuse, but ignorance that an action has even been committed (by oneself, or someone one has a connection to that makes them an unwitting contributor).
Certainly if this woman didn't know Kazaa was sharing her files with others on the internet, she not only wasn't aware of the copying that was going on, she wasn't even aware that she was contributing to the potential act.
Any system that would hold someone in such circumstances guilty of anything or hold them accountable for even one penny of damages, much less imprison them, is a system that needs to be scrapped immediately and, if necessary, forcefully. (to my knowledge, however, contributory copyright infringement does require knowledge of the fact, or at least "any sensible person should have known", but IANAL and I could be wrong. If I am, it is past time to emigrate or take up arms, and the former is a much higher percentage game than the latter, so I'm outta here)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy