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RIAA Sues 261 Major P2P Offenders
circletimessquare writes "Yahoo!/Washington Post is reporting that the RIAA is suing 261 fileswappers whom they consider to be 'major offenders' in illegally trading music online. Remember to visit the EFF when full lawsuit details are released, and see if you're one of the unlucky few." Details of the amnesty program reported last week were also released, with the RIAA announcing it "...would require file sharers to admit in writing that they illegally traded music online and vow in a legally binding, notarized document, never to do it again."
The RIAA sues people?
Never!
Putting the romance back into necromancer.
What the heck do I do now????
Since they know they can't stop downloaders, they figure if they make it a point to go after the biggest file sharers people will become paranoid and turn file sharing off. They'll become leachers.
Of course we know what happens to a P2P system with all leachers and no sharers...
the EFF needs you donations more then ever. Remember, you don't have to do anything wrong to find yourselves in a position to prove your inocense. Yes, under these circumstances, you have to prove your inocense, simple disgusting.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"...and vow in a legally binding, notarized document, never to do it again."
If P2P trading of Copyrighted music is illegal (and we know that it is), why require this? Is it purely a move to allow easy prosecution should they offend again? Or do they think that prosecuting under copyright law might not work in some cases?
oooh no, too rich innit
Last count 4+ million users on Kazaa. It looks like the RIAA is having an effect. Too bad it's the opposite effect they want. M
to get people to take their amnesty plea bargain... even though the damage is already done, they are still at it.
Runnin' On Empty
A demand to sign a notarized admission of guilt is just _not_ an amnesty (literally -- a forgetting). Is there no limit to the way in which these people will twist words so that they are not saying what they appear to be saying?
If your one of the unlucky ones, you can't get out of it, because only the ones not sued can admit to fileswapping.
What are the chances the RIAA will become another place employers add to their list of sources for background checks?
i hear a cash register drawer opening and see an RIAA exec, with his hand out, smiling..
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
Well... this is going to be a fun morning for those 261 people.
*Random guy turns on computer*
You've got subpoena!
I'm going to guess they don't even know about it! Good for me.
If you do the crime; you should be willing to do the time.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
nanny nanny boo boo :o)
I likely wouldn't be scared in the least if the people filing these suits were actually reasonable.
You know what?
I myself just got back into my dorm and seeing this article made me think. Many thousands if not millions of students are going off their dialup/cable/dsl home connections and back to the fat pipes the universities have. As much, I would expect P2P usage to rise again, but how much more with RIAA lawsuits?
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Check out my blackbox styles
All the people sued in this case have been sharing more than 1000 songs. It is clear that their intent was piracy. Whether the RIAA is scum or not is irrevelent. These users took a major risk and are now paying for it.
With the tens of millions of users on P2P sites what is the probability that you will get sued ? My guess is you have a higher risk of getting into a car accident. Also what are these RIAA moron going to do when they find out the person they have sued lives in Azerbijan or Malaysia ?
I'm not sure how justice works in the USA, but here in the UK you are notified if someone initiates legal action against you...
I will not ever pay for an RIAA member label music product until such a time that they end their predatory lawsuits.
Frankly, this won't be a hard promise to keep, since most mainstream music sucks.
PS - The radio is still free, and I have an TV/FM tuner/capture card.
You can rate this article if you have a Yahoo! account...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
This tactic is obviously not working. It is just a matter of time before the RIAA is no more.
Filing for RIAA amnesty may immunize you from civil litigation, however that affidavit becomes excellent fodder for your prosecution under CRIMINAL statues. Certainly RIAA owns one or two over-eager district attorneys wanting to make a name for themselves.
The you're off to a lovely federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison, or forking up hoards of fines.
261 Major P2P Offenders
So, is that the equivalent of 50 file swappers, downloading really fast?
Alright... well grab some popcorn, now we get to see the RIAA going after 70 year old grandmas and 13 year old girls who have all of 7 songs shared, while others continue to pump out mp3s by the thousand and never missed a beat during this whole fiasco.
Scaring the crap out of some poor little girl or old grandma might be some sort of sick pleasure for big wigs/artists up in the RIAA, but I'm sure the consumers will just love to watch theirselves getting bossed around with what they can and can not exactly do with something they bought.
The consumer has been scammed since the minute they bought the disk, overpriced and all. Hopefully they wake up soon.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Pack your suitcase for prison!
In prison lingo, "pack your suitcase" means stuffing your ass full of cigarettes and narcotics.
Their ink cartridge ran out, and they realized that it was cheaper to stop than buy a new one.
Best Windows Freeware
Every time I see this "Vow not to share files" or references to "Illegal P2P applications," I start wondering if the wording is such that the victim will not be able to share any files whatsoever, legally or public domain. I can see these huge corporations not really understanding the difference between serving copyrighted music and serving a distribution of GNU/Linux over KaZaa. I'm sure that they would like neither to take place.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Is when the United States had the right to authorize business entitities to enforce the law. Is that really the country you want to live in? A country where any company can subpoena you?
Entering your username or IP address into the subpoena query page seems to be a great way to make sure the RIAA checks out your username or IP address.
Even if you won't donate, at least go to the action center and send some angry letters to your senator.
EFF Action Center
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
In short, a levy is paid on blank "audio" media (how they tell the different between blank "data" CDs and blank "audio" CDs is a bit beyond me). This levy gets dispersed to copyright holders in some magic way; in exchange Canadians are expressly allowed private copying, including peer-to-peer file sharing.
Blame Canada.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Let's switch to freenet, and chalange them to catch us . http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
I wonder about you slash trash who work for companies that rely on selling software for revenue yet get your panties into a bunch when the RIAA goes after people who are illegally distributing music on P2P networks. I mean, you act like a bunch of hypocritical children when you develop all sorts of excuses in case you get caught ripping off someone else's work. "No judge, it wasn't me downloading those MP3s, it was my ten year old nephew." "I ripped those MP3s myself, but I accidently lost the CD." "I swear I don't know how those files got there. I don't even listen to pop music." Keep blowing air out of your ass, nobody believes you. Maybe the RIAA is going too far with their tactics, but you know what? I don't care. They do not produce any goods necessary for you to live. The same with the MPAA, Microsoft, and the media companies. If you don't like their tactics, boycott them. Revenue is their Achille's heel. Voting does not help, all candidates likely to win office are financed by these companies. Writing to representatives does no good-- your representative, as a consumer, is well aware of your pain. Writing them only tells them what they already know. Unlike you, they know all to well what damage a loss of campaign contributions might do to their career. You can bet which way they will vote. The solution to this form of corruption is to cut off funding from the source. That is you.
Now, I think there has been some confusion between needs and wants around here lately. A need is something necessary for life: air, water, food, shelter. A want is everything else, even things you don't want but someone else (e.g. your boss) wants you to have (e.g. a pager). There's nothing wrong with wants; you can enjoy life and surround yourself with them. The problem is when wants substitute for needs. If you can't live without your cable service, something is wrong with you. Cable service (TV and Internet) are not something you need to survive. You won't die tomorrow without it. Needs are important.. if you don't have them, you die. If you keep only a cellphone and credit card with you at all times in case of an emergency, you aren't prepared enough. Cellphones and credit cards can't provide you with anything you need to live, and thus aren't needs. If there's a power outage or a network disturbance, you will be in trouble. Also, you are stuck with monthly payment and interest rate increases at the whim of corporations. Complain and protest all you want, it won't make a difference. The only way to make a difference is to sever your dependence on wants. These dependences are the puppet strings of CEOs and shareholders. Don't make yourself vulnerable to companies, make sure you know how to live without them. Type "survivalist" into any search engine and there will be plenty of sites that will teach you how to be self sufficient, if necessary. Some groups providing the information are right-wing fundamentalists who are predicting armageddon, others are in it as a hobby, others fear nuclear war, still others want to protect themselves from terrorist attacks/computer infrastructure shutdown (y2k), and there's a few who plan for a secession from the Union. Ignore the wild agendas and learn for practicality's sake. It could save your life. Only you can cut yourself free from corporate control.
I've downloaded gigs and gigs of stuff.
Unlike any Corporate settlement in the last 30 years...
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
You, the people are simply reaping what you sowed. You slept at the switch whilst the croporations stole your power, you only deserved to lose it.
Boo Hoo! The artists are getting ripped off! Can we keep it real for a moment?
The "Artist" doesn't deserve squat.
There. I said it. You can go mod me down, call me Satan, whatever it is you do to those with opinions different than your own. Or you can grit your teeth and read on:
Most "pop" media (music, movies, even books) churned out today is more a product of the producer/publisher than it is a work of art. Except in rare circumstances, the writers, musicians and actors are merely useful brand names, interchangable and of no consequence to the studio's bottom line. Listen to two supposedly different albums with similar production credits. You'll see! Those identical drum beats and background orchestras aren't coincidences. This canned art is inserted as production's way of applying a dose tried-and-true to that brand new artist. "Artists" rarely exert any creative control over the work that will eventually bear their names.
Brittney Spears is hired for her ability to excite teenage boys (and some adult men) and her ability to sell Pepsi, and she is paid handsomely for it. Like most pop "artists" she is barely a part of the product upon which her brand name is stamped, and deserves little, if any, of the proceeds from record sales.
Run fast.
Run fast dropping bits of cash to distract them as you go.
Run fast dropping bits of cash to distract them as you go running to another country.
Run fast dropping bits of cash to distract them as you go running to another country carrying armloads of CDs with MP3s on them.
Run fast dropping bits of cash to distract them as you go running to another country carrying armloads of CDs with MP3s on them to Asia.
Run fast dropping bits of cash to distract them as you go running to another country carrying armloads of CDs with MP3s on them to Asia where you become a successful black market music distributor.
Run fast dropping bits of cash to distract them as you go running to another country carrying armloads of CDs with MP3s on them to Asia where you become a successful black market music distributor and retire to the Bahamas.
Run fast dropping bits of cash to distract them as you go running to another country carrying armloads of CDs with MP3s on them to Asia where you become a successful black market music distributor and retire to the Bahamas and thank the RIAA for your new life.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Not being a legal beagle, will there be any legal recourse for those who might be aquitted?
Personally, I would think it tough for an individual to smack back the RIAA in such a case without the aid of a constituency of an equal or greater legal power.
Question is, do any such organizations exists?
--- have you healed your church website?
What is their definition of 'major offenders', I wonder if that definition changes from 'case to case' so to speak.
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
My bad -- the EFF kindly anonymizes such queries, which is of course, the point :)
"...would require file sharers to admit in writing that they illegally traded music online and vow in a legally binding, notarized document, never to do it again."
Offenders must also confess to having been to the proletariat areas and consorted with the prostitutes, or they go to Room 101...
...to see how this all plays out.
What will they use as "proof" of filetrading?
Most modern systems are multi-user, so if all they have are IP's, how will they identify which user is in violation? Will they treat it like they treat automobiles, where the person on the title (in this case the owner of the dialup/cable customer) has the responsbility for the charges, or at least identifying the real culprit.
How will they close the "it was a trojan!" loop hole, where by you can duck responsibility if you can prove your system is insecure.
This will certainly set many precedents that we will have to live with in the future, lets hope they get it right (whatever "right" may be).
/* * pope1 */
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.
All you have to do is teach someone who doesn't know. Explain to them how to aquire MP3s and how to go about downloading them. If they're worried about the lawsuits, introduce them to usenet, the land of the plentiful.
If they don't already have a CD burner, talk them into getting one. Explain to them that a CD burner is around the cost of 5 CDs.
Show them these articles and explain the manipulation the RIAA uses to get their way.
Last, but not least, explain to them that they don't ever have to buy another CD ever again. It's about time the general public raises their voice and responds with, "Yeah, whatever. We're not afraid of you and we're not going to give you another dime."
the RIAA site is waaay slow....
Can some people not stop sticking the hornets nest with the stick?
They issue subpoenas, sue users, and people attack them?
Besides - The people getting sued are illegally downloading songs! I know that the RIAA does lie, but they are still technically breaking the law people.
In 1999, almost no one had a huge collection. Most people had a few, and everyone swapped with everyone else, resulting in big collections. Take out the people with big collections, and other people with big collections will still develop.
Damn, they've got me!
I'm kazaaliteuser..
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Unfortunately, the output remaining tends not to be compelling, their target audience has a number of other venues for their spending (video games, DVDs, online activities) and the economy goes south.
So which Business school teaches that the best way of addressing these sorts of problems is to spread fear/resentment/anger amongst the audience you are attempting to win back?
And as a side note, if getting the music listened to by potential buyers is such a bad activity, then why to record promotion people give away free singles and CDs at events? Why do companies allow songs to be played on the radio? And if pirating is such a depresser of CD sales, why was one of the most pirated CDs around, The Eminem Show, such a sales success? Could it be that people liked what they heard and were willing to pay for it?
Pick up the soap.
KFG
First we cry foul when companys sued and tried to regulate Internet Service Providers, into requiring them to keep the laws for their users.
Then, they became something of a "common carrier."
Now, RIAA is actually going after the people *who are breaking the law* and yet you are still complaining about it?
So what if its some 14-year-old kid in his house downloading the latest MP3 from his favorite band. It's still *breaking federal law* and, under that law, allows monetary damages to be collected by the person whose copyright was infringed.
This right is executed all the time in copyright infringement cases; if it didn't exist, nobody would protect their IP. IP violation fines are the deterrant to copying protected works. Just because the kid isn't even legally an adult yet, doesn't mean he can't break the law just the same.
Federal law allows up to $150,000 / violation. A violation is one infringed work (i.e. 1 unauthorized mp3 file. An "authorized" file is one you have permission to own -- either in writing by the copyright owner, for example, or because you own the CD and ripped it to your hard drive for easier listening.) In this respect, RIAA's $50k and we'll be done with it is more than reasonable, because *the government* would allow for fines of up to $4.5 million!!! for an amount such as 30 songs.
RIAA should produce better music if they want to maintain their customer base and prevent piracy. There needs to be more tangible benefits to purchasing the legal version of the song vs. downloading it. For me, this benefit is the fact that the CDs (1) sound considerably superior to the average 128kbit MP3 file (2) I can feel like I am at least pretending to support the artists I like, many of whom are on indie labels anyways, and (3) I get a physical product that I can take with me in my car to play on my car CD player, which doesn't like burned CDs; and I can make as many mp3s of it as I want, as long as I don't share them.
RIAA could adjust its business model, make it better to purchase the CD vs stealing it. Or, switch to a different modus operandi all together, and provide some new kind of operation.
Here's Illiad's take from Sunday's User Friendly .
Humour or prescience? I'm not sure, but I love the form number.
The Seventh Rule: Take others more seriously than yourself, particularly when you are leading them.
This would be a good time to move to freenet. It might be slow but as more people use it the faster it will get and the less (almost no chance) of a chance that you will get one of those pesky little letters from the RIAA.
Support freenet and end the RIAA's little game!
with the RIAA announcing it "...would require file sharers to admit in writing that they illegally traded music online and vow in a legally binding, notarized document, never to do it again."
Considering that when companies get litigous with each other nobody has to admit any wrong doing nor do they have to vow to behave in the future.
Seriously though that is not the smartest move. Someone care to explain how the RIAA is the only party that has the power to prevent lawsuits from other sources armed with this legally binding information?
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
I am curious as to how people are really going to react. only 260?
That's doesnt seem to enough to cause critical mass and that may be RIAA strategy. Dont overdue it, becuase it will come back. Of course, i could be wrong since it seems that a senator is starting to ask questions about the RIAA's right to by-pass law.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Ouch. All right. I promise to delete them all. The funny thing is, with only sharing mp3s, I'm not even getting into the biggest DC hubs.
I find it funny that people have to admit guilt to the RIAA that they've done something wrong but when everyone knows they are guilty of price-fixing they don't have to admit guilt. Just give people $20 checks no matter what they have bought wich is pocket change to them and be off scott free to keep price-fixing.
They really looking at all the files shared? Or are they looking at how many?
...
If they're looking at the # of files I wonder what they think of my shared Gentoo distfiles mirror
...they're not a government. They have no legal standing which would permit them to prosecute or pardon anyone for crimes.
Promising not to prefer civil charges is awfully, awfully magnanimous of our RIAA overlords, but it's not amnesty. And incidentally (pardon my native cynicism), but why do I doubt that the RIAA is willing to enter into a binding contract not to sue? Especially after you've been so kind as to provide them with your identity?
Like King Canute, they're trying to sweep back the tide.
Unlike King Canute, it's starting to look like they might be successful, at least on the short term.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
Maybe you'll remember some other instances of people breaking the law...the Boston Tea Party...Minutemen militias...refusing taxation without representation...the Declaration of Independence...the list goes on...
Our forefathers saw that the system was wrong, they rebelled, many died. But in the end justice prevailed. Many people will get sued, bankrupted, go to prison; but I think that it's all our sincere hope and belief that rightousness will defeat corruption and that the RIAA will lose its stranglehold over american culture and society.
Does anyone other than I sense the irony in the fact that shortly after a great story on the Church of Scientology losing in court a case which they based on the illegal distribution of copywrited material we have this one? Those who have seen the scientology material without going through the progressive levels of brainwashing (and commisurate outgoing of money) probably agree it's worth less than the latest Brittiny Spears clones' or formula boy band CD.
Take a minute and read through the two stories, the comparisons will leave you ROFL.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
we should be screaming. They can take our money, pull us into court, and wreck our lives witn no proof.
A corporation should never have the ability to do criminal investigations. ever. It totally circumvents the constitution.
These people are running amok, with no checks and balances. All this for possible copyright infringment. Copyright is the will of the people, enacted through congress, perhaps these people had better remember?
distributing music, in and of itself, is not always infringement. Used music stores come to mind.
The real problem for them is that the same music can be redistrbuted over and over again, easily. This is no different then any other advances where information can be spread more easily. There model needs to change, and it will. Unfortunatly lives will be dis-perportionaly destroyed in the process.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Given that every week brings news of real attacks on important freedoms, I fail to see why these RIAA lawsuits are garnering so much Slashdot press. The people being sued by the RIAA right now are criminals. Say that again with me: criminals. Distributing copyrighted works without(nay, against) the consent of the copyright holder is illegal. Scum or not, the RIAA owns those songs. If you don't like the rules, you have a computer and you have a congresscritter. Heck, you might even get out a real sheet of paper and an actual pen to voice your concerns. Believe it or not, money alone is not enough to elect a politician to office. They need votes too, and to get votes they have to care about what people think.
Some people have suggested that the EFF waste time and resources defending these people. I very much hope that the organization will spend its time on more important things than petty criminals, like:
DMCA
UCITA
Censorware
All of the above are far more important to the future of internet freedom than somebody's self-proclaimed "right" to give Britney Spears MP3s to their friends.
If we want to save P2P from the RIAA, then it's time to start emphasizing the legal uses and stop defending people who are too stupid to be worth our time.
Visit the
Well, since they are suing sharers and not downloaders, I wonder, what would they do with a P2P network, where shared files would never exist on any particular machine, but rather as bits and pieces spread on the whole network...
my ip, 192.168.1.101 isn't on the list. so far...
i wonder though, is my other ip, 192.168.1.100?
1000 songs shared is NOTHING.
If they're saying the people, who they're suing traded ON AVERAGE 1000 songs, that means some of the people they're suing shared far less than 1000 songs.
1000 songs is...hmm...7 - 8 CD-Rs of music or roughly 80 albums (assuming none of them are mix albums or bootlegs). That's peanuts.
There are people out there that are distributing several orders of magnitude more music, EVERY DAY, and yet RIAA is claiming these people are the real problem. Bulls***. This is yet another RIAA lie that's going unchallenged, because the hack-journalists writing these stories know even less about file trading than the RIAA does.
If RIAA was trying to stop illegal trading of copyrighted music, they'd go after the mp3 ripping groups, who are the main source of the stuff that's circulating on the Internet.
But no, they'd rather use intimidation tactics disguised as some sort of campaign to get rid of "major infringers".
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill the RIAA
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
RIAA announcing it "...would require file sharers to admit in writing that they illegally traded music online and vow in a legally binding, notarized document, never to do it again."
Riiiiiight.
Can anyone show me a link to the RIAA's website with the text of their generous offer? All I can find are stories that begin with "Apparently" or "Industry sources state that".
Let's say I'm as strange as the guy who bought a SCO license, and I decide to go for this. How do I do it? Does anyone know, or is it another vapor-offer?
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Never cave into the "dark side"! Tell them lick the toe jam off of your feet and if they still press the issue, explain to them that nothing has changed, that fair use is still the law in your mind. If RIAA actually stops threatening people and actually starts suing people, enough people will bitch and have the law makers change their tune. Civil disobediance has worked well in the past, and will continue to work in the future. Don't you just love the media's coverage on copyright law in the digital age?
--freenet offers anonymity and encyrption, 'nuff said
dunno, delete all mp3's and deny everything and suggest somebody haxored your box and turnt it into kazaa slave?(and migrate to some less open network that allows usage of proxies or proxy-nodes to hide your identity)
it's not that far fetched even, except the choice of program being kazaa.
seriously though, what do these cases have even? or can you sue anybody and get the court to believe that proof that nobody else but you verifies as true holds??
if they're big time why don't they the officials to do official investigations and raise criminal charges? because that's not so easy?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They certainly aren't making examples of these people.
If anything, they're creating animosity against themselves. Shooting themselves in the foot and kicking themselves in the ass.
These lawsuits are even more reason to not buy another CD ever again.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
the law hasn't caught up with changes to morality which technology has wrought (as it has throughout human history)
you can't steal electrons and magnetic spins and bits that are effortlessly reproduced
you can steal atoms, like a car
at the very least, you must admit that they are not the same, and perhaps a new language has to be invented to descrive what file sharing is, for it is certainly not "stealing": you don't go out and physically remove the only file of a song on someone else's computer and leave a void when you "steal" music on the internet
there is nothing morally wrong with file swapping, unless you consider millions of teenager's love of music to be of secondary consideration to the financial well-being of a monopoly/ cartel
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They ruined your life, you have nothing to live for. Buy an uzi and get them first.
I'd be interested in seeing the legal fees charged by the lawyers filing these suits, up against the "lost earnings" generated by the files the 261 shared.
Add in the cost of researching to find the greatest violators..I'll bet the results are pretty telling.
"We spent $3 million identifying and prosecuting 261 people who cost us $100 billion by illegally trading high-quality versions of Britney Spears' newest album."
Wowzers.
Chicks dig my good /. karma.
at how many young kids there are that don't have a clue that they are doing something "wrong"...or that the files they are downloading are automatically being shared by the client software. And did anyone mention that these sales lost to file sharing seem a bit ridiculous? Other factors? poor economy... ebay... walmart... cheap cd burners...
The radio is still free, and I have an TV/FM tuner/capture card.
If only we could automate the process of acquiring music through radio and automatically separate, encode and label the tracks we could all have huge free legal music collections.
Hmmm.. maybe it's easier to do it with those audio-oriented digital cable channels? They already have the track info, but you have to OCR it which is difficult considering you don't know where the text is or the colors etc.
Or perhaps that satellite radio thing would work better? There the track information is already present and I bet the quality's pretty decent too.
The "amnesty" program appears to create a cause of action for breach of contract -- kind of a "backup" weapon against these egregious violators.
At first blush this appears to also be a means of getting around the general un-enforceable nature of "shrinkwrap" or click-through licensing. The record labels would love to bind everyone who buys a CD to a contract promising not to illegally distribute its contents... with a liquidated damages clause specifying that should they catch you on Kazaa they get some huge, pre-defined sum.
Such a contract would make their lawyers' lives much easier -- but there's no way to easily bind everyone who buys a CD in this way. The law generally requires people to know the terms of a contract for it to be enforceable, and the music industry does not want to cover the front of each CD with a dense batch of legalese. Putting the terms inside the CD wouldn't work either -- just look at the problems both companies and users have dealing with software licenses that require installing the software to view the license.
Therefore, it appears the music industry is choosing to pursue a top-down approach, where the end users most statistically likely to pirate -- those who have already done so with a reckless disregard for the law -- are legally bound to not do so again. There is no way for these traders to claim they thought their actions were legal after signing this affidavit.
The file-swapping "industry" follows the common model of a relatively few number of users are providing the vast majority of the content. The music industry, I believe, feels it can stem the tide of piracy by corralling these relative few.
Also, since copyright violations are much harder to prove than breach of a (relatively) plain-language contract, the record companies are cutting to the chase, tilting the odds of a pro-RIAA judgment further in their favor.
Look for this to become a trend.
I've got 1000's of songs on my HD. Probably close to 60G worth.
None of it came from Kazaa or Napster.
I must be a pirate. After all, its "clear that [my] intent was piracy"
Moron.
Want to know how to avoid being sued by the RIAA? STOP SHARING THEIR MUSIC!!
I'm not trying to be flamebait - I hate them as much as any of the rest of you - but get a clue, folks!
The way to really do something about the whole 800 lb. gorilla that is the record industry is to STOP SHARING THE MUSIC.
When everyone stops, and their record sales continue to plummet, they won't be able to blame the internet for their problems.
"Gee, maybe it's not the internet! Maybe its the quality of our music and the money that we're charging for it."
--
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
The cut-off for "major offender" is about 1,000 songs? Call me crazy, but I don't think I know anyone with less than that. I have 1,800+ (all legally obtained archival copies, of course), but was still less than almost everyone else on my hallway during Freshman year. Hell, even my boss has 1,500 on his computer at work. I don't know whether it's good or bad that the RIAA has so little comprehension of the amount of files people are sharing.
http://cyclocosm.com Pro cycling at its worst
Ok i havnt RTFA and i dont no much about American copyright, but isnt there a law that says you must uphold copyright infringements, i.e you have no choice in who you sue, you have to sue everyone who infringes your work?
Either way, i wouldnt mind writing and signing a document promising that i will never buy a CD, do they have any of those forms ready yet?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Darl McBride announced today that he was pleased to bring his "vast experience of intellectual property protection" to the world of online music traders.
"My expertise at lawsuit threats is unprecedented, and I know our cause is just" he said in a statement earlier today.
Give me a break...
If you're sharing them on Kazaa, you're infringing on the copyright of the rightful copyright holders.
I'll say that again for the slow folks in the class. If you are distributing songs to which you do not own the copyright, or you do not have the express consent of the copyright holder to distribute them, then you are breaking copyright law.
Fair Use does NOT, and has NEVER allowed you to distribute copyrighted works in their entirety. You can excerpt portions of a copywritten work for purposes of review or criticism, or for academic purposes (ie, used as part of classwork).
It doesn't allow you to distribute the songs to 100,000 of your closest friends.
Downloaded Lilo & Stitch a short while ago because I thought my 3 year old son might like it.
He did, so last weekend I bought the DVD.
Ditto with several CD albums. In all other respects about 80% of my MP3 downloads represent stuff I have/had on a purchased CD because it's easier than physically ripping the tracks singly off tons of CDs.
I can see both sides of the P2P/RIAA argument but there's gotta be room somewhere for a legitimate 'version' of this type of activity.
I will NEVAR buy another song from teh MPAA
"I am Sparticus! And so's my wife!"
I haven't downloaded a mp3 file since Napster. And I don't even have any of those because I didn't bother to back anything up. And guess what!? I'm not on the list... GOOD JOB RIAA!!
File downloading is legal, sharing or uploading is not. It's that simple. See my analysis at greplaw for more info.
I'm one of them (anonymous)
Hi troll,
They issue subpoenas, sue users, and people attack them?
The general stupidity of l33t hax0rz aside, what reason for attacking a company would you prefer they use? The company is friendly and accepting of communities sharing and expanding their stuff? Can you think of one single better reason to attack a company than that they're assholes and trying to sue you, your friends, and everyone else? Idiot.
Besides - The people getting sued are illegally downloading songs!
No, they are sharing songs. They are not making any COPIES. They are not violating COPYright law. The downloaders are making COPIES. Do you sue a library if someone takes one of their books and photocopies and binds it? Idiot.
I know that the RIAA does lie, but they are still technically breaking the law people.
Idiot.
The cut-off for "major offender" is "about 1,000" songs? Call me crazy, but I don't think I know anyone with less than that. I have 1,800+ (all legally obtained archival copies, of course), but was still less than almost everyone else on my hallway during Freshman year. Hell, even my boss has 1,500 on his computer at work. I don't know whether it's good or bad that the RIAA has so little comprehension of the amount of files people are sharing.
http://cyclocosm.com Pro cycling at its worst
I'm not to keen on all the various settings of Kazaa, as I haven't used it in a while; though it is still isntalled on my machine.
Some questions..
1) Kazaa only shares files in your shared folder, right? So files on the rest of your PC are fine?
2) When you exit Kazaa (and by exit I mean Kazaa is not running) it no longer shares files, correct? What I mean is, it doesn't run as a service in the background on Win32, right?
I always do a double take when I click the [X] button to close Kazaa but all it does is minimize the application to the icon tray.
--anon
yse! exactyl waht i'ev bin doing sinec 30 yrs .. i will nevar buy anything againfrom this peopel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Since when was 1000 songs a "major offender"? They ain't seen nothing. I know I've got 20,000 and I've got friends who have that then some.
They don't own the "whole" copyrighted work. The songwriter still has rights. If you confess to having these songs, expect to find yourself sued.
Heh, defaultuser@kazaa being sued for sharing "MC Hammer - Too legit to quit".
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads There is hope that we can get out of legal mess. This article says that 90% - 95% of artists are unsigned. There has got to be plenty of quality out there, waiting for the people to find them. With good collaborative filtering, we can find the music we want without those bastard lawyers. Musicians, don't sell out! We want to support you! Let us hear your work, and the money will come. I am downloading iRate right now.
and, i will NEVER buy another movie from the RIAA!
If all the users of kazaa (~4million when i checked) send each user being sued 1 penny.. why that would be more than enough money to cover a settlement charge, around $40,000 to each user at a cost of 2.50 or so to each user. A small price to pay in order keep open filesharing up and running. I dont even want to begin to think HOW that would be done though :)
The RIAA finally does what geeks have asked for years by going after the offenders instead of after P2P technology itself. And geeks still object. Film at 11.
I've got a very novel idea for avoiding a RIAA lawsuit. It is an idea that I'm sure will be unpopular, and I'm therefore also sure that this message will be moded down as flaimbait even though it is nothing of the sort, because that is how simpleminded moderators deal with a differing viewpoint here.
But my idea is simple...don't want to be sued by the RIAA? THEN DON'T SWAP COPYRIGHTED MUSIC WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
There's other kinds of musics out there.
exclusively reserved for the copyright holder.
Only the copyright holder has the right to authorize the distribution of their copywritten works.
It's that simple. If you're distributing songs you don't own the copyright to, you are breaking copyright law.
in the tried and true american tradition, the riaa is trying to incite fear in the file sharing populace.
given the shear number of file sharers out there, 261 people is pretty insignificant, much less than 1%. given that in the last five years, about 26% of drivers where involved in car accident (source) you should be more worried about crashing than the riaa suing you.
i'm sure the riaa realizes this but also knows that fear is a powerful motivating force. they're just hoping that hearing about these lawsuits will turn many of those who now share into leachers, or knock them off the network entirely.
for a lot if interesting info about the culture of fear in america you can look here
this is the net result of this stupid campaign: people are setting up FTP servers and snail-mailing each other mp3 compilations. OK, it's not as user-friendly & Napster-cool but the point is: MP3 trading will never stop.
there's no place like ~
Repeat after me: Copyright infringment != Stealing
The real question is: Is it a violation of the law, and if so, it it a justifiable violation of the law? I just don't see it being justifiable beyond simple selfishness. File sharing is something we like to do, and it's fun to get free shit, but that doesn't make it moral.
Not to say I haven't partaken, but I'm not going to give the EFF money over this. There are other causes that are far more worthy.
Like, I dunno, feeding starving children or something.
I only download pr0n!
All we need now is an article posted bashing SCO and another one bashing Microsoft. Then the day will be complete.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I know this has been said several times before, but how exactly does suing anybody, even the most blatant pirates, help their situation? They want to show that they are serious about protecting their (overrated, in my opinion, and overpriced, as has been shown by the FTC) content. But suing CANNOT POSSIBLY WORK! The only thing that it will do is promote people in the US to leech from people in countries that don't care about US laws. Someone will come up with a way around the roadblocks the RIAA is trying to set up. They started with Napster, a centralized and rather good P2P app. When that went down, people moved over to decentralized P2P apps, so that taking down one server didn't mean the whole network came down. All that taking down one server means is that 10 more are going to take it's place. So what's the next step? Completely anonymous sharing? Everyone using kazaauser as their user name?
Seriously though, all this is going to do is make everyone in the US turn their sharing off, so that no one can see what files they have. All files will be hosted in other countries where the RIAA has little to no power. What will the next step after that be? Probably to sever all links to everything outside the US...who knows. All that's for certain is that it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
Universal Music Group is cutting its prices by 30% (and note that UMG is by far the largest music multinational). Many think that this will push down many cds below the magic 10 dollar mark.
/. gripes against the music industry: the labels taking too big of a piece and over inflated SRPs. The only one left would be that the RIAA is a vindictive/cruel/abusive litigator... but how much effect does that have on a purchase? How many folks upon hearing this decide to not buy a cd (or pick up something indie... say Interpol Turn on the Bright Lights which was selling at 9.99 for the last year)?
I guess it's up to each to decide if these two cancel out. Of course this does answer two of the biggest
What is music when you despise all sound?
1)Yup, thats right...assuming you didn't tell it to share your system root ;)
:-)
2)Depends - did you right-click exit in the tray or just click [x]? It keeps running in the tray - worse still, it allows much more bandwidth for uploads when the system is idle - typically when its in the tray and you've gone to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom or whatever.
Hope that helped
I just checked my two IP addresses (10.0.0.1 and 127.0.0.1). Neither of them were subpoenaed.
Woohoo! I'm safe!
Is it antithetical to the American Dream to say to those dishwashers and Guitar Center clerks that no, even if you succeed wildly, you will only make a few hundred thousand dollars a year? Maybe. But frankly I don't care. If we end up with fewer 14 year olds picking up Fenders with dreams of Escalades and more picking it up because of a desire to make music I'm not going to call it a bad thing.
Besides, as things stand all but the largest acts make their money touring. Record companies provide distribution, marketing and studio time but take nearly all the profit from CD sales. In the digital age the internet can take care of distribution, word-of-mouth unrestricted by geographical space or sampling fees can be a potent marketing engine (as anyone with winamp, AIM and a college broadband pipe can attest), and cheap digital recording will put the ability to make albums into the hands of anyone with $2000 and a friend who can install Linux.
The recording industry's functions are not really needed any more -- and I suspect that the duplicitous way they approached their business and treated their customers will ensure that their demise will be surprisingly quick and violent. Small labels will exist to provide support to bands, of course, but there's no longer any reason why they can't compete with the big guys except for the big guys' anticompetitive practices.
Anyone agree, or am I spouting gibberish?
Kentucky Fried Grease?
That's not insightfull, that's just trolling. (Or perhaps he's retarded, but still)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
2) 200 defendants in the last case blame the last "Blaster" worm and claim they had no idea their computers were sharing files.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
RIAA free music. I mean its funny they complain about their numbers dropping while attacking some of their most devoted fans.
On the other hand there are lots of musicians begging for exposure that are even willing to give their music away for free.
1sound.com
www.mp3.com
iuma.com
And it just goes on.
Quack, quack.
Several people have wondered about the probability of getting into a car crash vs. getting sued by the RIAA.
Assuming 261 lawsuits, 60 million file sharers, 42,000 annual traffic deaths (in 2002), and a US population of 280 million, you're more likely to get killed in a car crash in the next two weeks than to have been sued by the RIAA.
Something to think about next time you drive to the record store to buy an RIAA CD.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77207&cid=6872 019
Sharing music online doesn't hurt my willingness to buy a CD. The fact that radio stations repeat the same music constantly for days at a time hurts my willingness to buy a CD. If I've heard te same piece of crap song 50 times a day for the past 3 months I don't want to own it, let alone pay for it. If they RIAA wants to do something useful to boost sales they should regulate how many times a day a song is played on the radio on one day. (Does it not occur to them that the radio stations freely distribute music, and more people know how to listen to the radio than know how to download music? It's also completely legal for them to stream their radio broadcasts over the internet, music and all.) Besides. I don't like physical media. You have to keep up with it and it gets damaged too easily. Only for the car do I burn mp3's to CD.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Unless some unscrupulous person spammed the page such that the signal to noise ratio was too low.
I noticed eDonkey2000 is not among the list of P2Ps for which EFF advised turning off upload. Is it because donkey is too small or is it because it is immune from RIAA?
good riddance i say
Luckily for me, 127.0.0.1 came up with no results. I'm so relieved! You'de think with keeping my IP static, they certainly would have gotten me by now.
F33r muh l00pbacK!
Has anyone written a FT/Kazaa client that generates fake download listings?
For example, you search for "Metallica" and my Kazaa/FT client generates a fake listing (from some source list of Metallica songs I guess), and "offers" these songs to download. You try to download them, and you get added to the queue, but never successfully start the download. Thus the RIAA would try to prosecute you, but you have no actual files for share (although it would appear you have a large number of legitimate files available).
So one could setup honeypots for the RIAA...
I noticed you can search the EFF database of people being sued by user name or IP address. I take it when they go after someone based on IP address, the ISP has to cooperate so that the IP address is resolved into a real person. What if someone makes an error in pulling the IP? Or what if no log exists but someone else just happens to get that IP address later and the lawsuit gets pinned on them? What level does the RIAA have to take to make sure they are after the right person?
What happens when their information is wrong? It could be very expensive to defend yourself if you were fingered by a dynamic IP address.
'Same speed C but faster'
...is actually pretty simple: Boycott the Music Industry. It's all over-marketed crap anyway - the Madonna/Britney Spears kiss, for example, wasn't an artistic expression, it was a shock statement made to get people to watch the awards program and pay money to RIAA for the music manufactured by their neutered artists.
Stop stealing music. Stop buying music too. Support your local artists. Go to a local nightclub, watch the local bands, and happily pay the cover charge. Buy only CD's the performers sell themselves, and don't steal their music, because you'll be ripping of a performer, and not RIAA.
Your local garage band won't be a technically proficient, but they will be more honest and original, even if they are a cover band playing other peoples' music.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
A while back (less than a year, not sure if they still do this) mp3.com radio broadcast streaming mp3s of popular music that were saved into my temporary internet cache in mp3 format. I still have these files (renamed to my music folder)
Are these legal copies of the music?
I still say that if someone were to develop a RIAA tarpit, this would stop them from collecting IP addresses.
The tarpit is simple. run the program whenever you turn on your PC. If the RIAA comes sniffing around your IP address, they have to "access" the files you are sharing. Instead of giving them your real file sharing details, you give them bogus files. Since they are not REAL, they cannot touch you legally.
Of course your tarpit would be logging their IP address (which you can get), although I'm sure they are not going to be dumb enough to use the same IP bank as RIAA's network.
Imagine if everyone would do this. I don't have a lot of time or resources to get involved in this project, but want to throw out this idea, in the hopes that some other enterprising nerd can take up the challange.
Looks like they got all 261 file swappers.. now we can all breathe a little easier!!
"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." - Burt Bacharach
Please help me!
The Corps dragged off my baby!
Oh, wait, it was a dingo. nevermind.
Wish that report was public. Here's a summary of the report. This one is interesting too. If you have to login, u:billmonroe p:banjo.
-Paul
DON'T apply for Amnesty! It's a trick! And if you get sued, don't settle! The RIAA is suing people like nuts right now because everyone is settling. They are pretty much getting tens of thousands of dollars for free. Forget selling music, they're making up their lost money by stealing money from college students.
The amnesty is a trick. The way it works is they get you into a contract that says you will stop sharing music. Once you're in that contract you no longer have the option of fighting them in court. They will sue you for breah of contract as opposed to copyright infringement, and then you're screwed.
If you get sued fight them tooth and nail. Get a good lawyer, and some help from the EFF and other folks. We just need one person with balls enough to fight, and when they win it will set a precedent. Everyone else will be able to fight and win by default. If I got sued, I would fight.
Don't let the greedy RIAA get away with this crap. Fight!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It isn't the rightness or wrongness of the actions of those being sued that most /.ers take issue with. The fines these people will face are grossly disproportionate to their crime; so great, in fact, that I would be very surprised if even one of these cases went to trial, which is traditionally where we decide which laws, if any, someone violated.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
In today's headlines (such as Columbine H.S.) I seriously think that this could happen if the RIAA ruined the wrong person's life.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Well, IANAL but if I was in your shoes I'd take the following road:
1) Question the RIAA's copyright on the MP3 files. This can be fought using two arguments:
a) Did the RIAA make the MP3 file? No.
b) Should they inherit the copyright on the MP3 file? This should be a dispute between the person that originally encoded the file and the RIAA.
c) Can a judge decide who owns the copyright on the MP3 file? Not really. This is where argument 2 comes in.
2) MP3s are just random bitstreams.
a) Until they are put through a specific algorithm, MP3s remain random bitstreams that could really be anything from Madonna's latest single to a recording of modem line noise.
b) Whats to stop the RIAA from taking a sample from your hard drive, putting it through any algorithm it damn well feels like and then making it out to be copyright infringment?
c) The bitstream may be a derivative of the original song and it may not. Whether this is merely co-incidence is up to the person that created the MP3 file in the first place. This is where the argument from 1c comes into play. How can the judge declare that you're violating copyright when only the person who originally created the bitstream knows how it was created.
While none of those have been tested in court, I wonder if they would work.
Now to prevention. Use the overly broad DMCA against them. Before starting a transmission for a file include this message in clear ASCII:
"This file and any contents within have been encoded. This file is intended to be received and decoded by any member of the public wishing to use these files. However, these files may not be decoded if the person's intent is litigation. Any attempt to decode this file will be in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act."
Sure its a long shot.
Any lawyers care to comment?
How long until some out of country ISP (that doesn't have to comply with the RIAA) starts offering a P2P tunneling service?
The only thing the RIAA will achieve in doing this is to make sure all of the big trader's IP numbers resolve to an off-shore ISP.
If that's the case, you'd better guard the dead tree version as well if you have it. Don't leave it on your kitchen table, on the patio or at the laundromat. People that didn't pay for it should not be allowed to view it.
Too bad the RIAA can only speak for preformance artists. If the writer, label, distributors, FBI, etc decide to come after you they will have a signed, notarized confession. Amnesty my ass....
I'll take my chances at being the unlucky 0.0000001% of the population. The fact I don't use kazaa and keep my blocklists updated just adds a couple more zeros to that percentage.
As a side note, did anyone see how CD sales dropped over 30% when P2P usage dropped 20%? I would like to hear the RIAA's excuse for that one. Spin away....
There is a very simple way to have the RIAA put a stop to all this: stop buying records from them. Zero, zilch, nada.
/. that even if only us were to boycott, its impact would be felt by the RIAA...
If all p2p users were to do that, the RIAA would backtrack in an instant. I think there are enough readers in
Wrong. Under current legislation (we all know who paid for that bill) simply sharing a file is illegal infringement. Even if no one downloads it, it is still infringement.
What you say makes sense morally, but is not representative of US law.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
you could check out http://www.last.fm
a free radio station that streams you personalised content and has a LOT of non-mainstream stuff
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Here are some quotes by judges I've actually witnessed in court
1. Who are you and why were you present in the courtroom,
2. Why should we take your quotes out of context, at face value, and
3. What were the ultimate outcomes of these cases?
unless there are some very good logs kept binding hardware addresses to IPs, etc...?
This story of a supposed penitent former file swapper has made it onto the oh-so-objective cnn.com.
If the headline of this article read "FSF sues 261 major corporations for GPL violations" I wonder how the comments might differ.
Enforcing copyright is enforcing copyright and if you want the GPL to be enforcable then you better learn to deal with RIAA's copyrights being enforcable too.
Unless the Democrats decide they don't like those appointments, which is why they've been delaying every single one of Bush's nominations to the federal courts.
I don't know what wingnut propaganda outlet you get your news from, but it's obviously rotted your mind. To date, Bush has had 117 federal judicial nominees approved by the Senate. This is completely in line with historical norms. Reagan had 293 appointments over his two terms, Bush Sr. had 150 appointments, and Clinton had 306 over his two terms.
So I fail to see where you see evidence that the Democrats are delaying appointments. If there were any delaying going on whatsoever these numbers would be much lower.
Source
What if instead of RIAA amnesty stuff some million or more people wrote in to say that they swap files including music and consider it a perfectly right thing to do regardless of RIAA backed laws of the day. What if great numbers told the record industry to either adapt or perish? What if a substantial number of folks refuse to buy any new albums at all until the RIAA stops its antics? Our lawmakers are not going to stand up to these dinosaurs. It seriously is up to us.
I wonder if Courtney Love will and other artists will sue their labels again when and if the RIAA gets some money in damages from these villains. Something tells me that the labels will keep the money just like any other infringement case. The artists won't see a dime.
I'm an actual U.S. patriot, I study the constitution and the history surrounding it.
For over 200 years the "crime" of copyright infringement was only applied to commercial outfits who made profit off of copyrighted material. And copyright was ALWAYS meant to be temporary.
But with legal and legislative manipulation they've made copyrights basically eternal and all encompassing.
If you think you're a good citizen because you respect laws that were bought and paid for by international corporations, then you're nothing more than a lamb raised to fatten the wolves.
I am more than resource to be exploited, and while I don't trade music, I will speak out against the degredation of our country's legal system, and it's society by greedy CEO's and their pet lawyers.
Let's get some copies of the CDs that have people reading the holy Koran that are sold on Islamic web sites.
We'll convert them to MP3s and add them (correctly labeled) to the lists of files available for downloading on thousands of P2P file sites.
Then, when the RIAA orders these sites to shut down, we'll send e-mails to the Saudi Arabian embassy complaining that the RIAA is trying to destroy the sharing of the word of the prophet.
The Saudis will put out the word to their old buddy Osama that the RIAA is now an enemy of Islam and issue a fatwa authorizing its destruction, like the mad Ahyatolla in Iran did to Salmon Rushdie. A modest reward of a few million bucks will help encourage the faithfull to answer the call. After all, what's a few million to the Saudis when the recordings of readings from the holy Koran is at stake?
The RIAA will be so busy trying to hide from a billion fanatical Moslems that they will lose interest in destroying the lives of the ordinary people who are more interested in just listening to music than killing them.
'When you have multiple enemies with great strength trying to destroy you, the best way to fight back is to get your enemies to turn against each other and ignore you. ' - Machievelli (more or less)
Let's Just Do It! We have to start doing something creative to protect ourselves from these assholes!
are people in the UK at risk of being sued or something like that?
Actually, here in Canada we have a wonderful loophole that circumvents that "distribution" problem. Details here.
You can take the file from me, but I can't give it to you. Yes, logic is a 4-letter word in Canada.
video killed the radio star.
internet killed the music cartel.
enjoy your game of whack-a-mole.
napster was centralized, so you took it down.
kazaa could track users, so you went after them.
the next network will have decentralized, masked users.
and what of the pool of canadian and european teenagers? they will always be there for the american teenager's who suffer under the heavy hand of monopoly.
the law hasn't caught up with changes to morality which technology has wrought (as it has throughout human history).
you can't steal electrons and magnetic spins and bits that are effortlessly reproduced.
you can steal atoms, like a car.
at the very least, you must admit that they are not the same, and perhaps a new language has to be invented to describe what file sharing is, for it is certainly not "stealing": you don't go out and physically remove the only file of a song on someone else's computer and leave a void when you "steal" music on the internet.
there is nothing morally wrong with file swapping, unless you consider millions of teenager's love of music to be of secondary consideration to the financial well-being of a monopoly/ cartel.
if you think i am off the legal path of how to properly phrase this situation, you haven't spoken to many teenagers lately. this is how they understand the situation.
in the game of a dying lumbering dinosaur and its legion of lawyers versus millions of teenagers worldwide with no disposable cash, i side with the teenagers.
tough luck dinosaur, don't suffer too much in the tar pit, but you're clearly doomed. it's as plain as day. everyone can see it but you.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It happens that many of the links in my article are to either Slashdot stories or Slashdot comments.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Pardon my ignorance, but how exactly does the RIAA know *who* the fileswappers are? If I use Kazaa (what am I saying, I *do* use Kazaa), how would the RIAA find my real name, and my address?
I use a dynamically assigned IP address, a fake username, and a firewall.
Are the lawsuits being handed out to fileswappers who used less security?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I'll send you a casette.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
We've downloaded the amnesty documents from the RIAA owned Music United and made them available on boycott-riaa.com for those of you who don't want your ip grabbed by the borg.
2 page PDF describing the program
2 page PDFof the affidavit.
Remember the RIAA only represents the interests of labels and performers and can only give amnesty for those rights. The RIAA doe NOT represent the copyrights of the publishers and songwriters who could still sue. And they could subpoena the RIAA for that information. This is a publicity stunt. If you accept the program, bend over and spread'em you're about to get screwed.
Could help some poor soul.
If you swap copyrighted files you ARE breaking the law... it's that simple. If you like a certain CD, don't be cheap, fork over the bucks or shut the heck up. If you cannot afford the CD, don't whine about the price. Life sucks, wear a friggin hard hat. Life was not designed for you to get everything you've ever wanted. Also, don't forget the artists who want to be paid for their work... If they don't get paid, you get no new music.
-Cnik
While I don't necessarily like his music (I really don't), Moby definitely knows what he's talking about. He posted a really interesting write up on his thought about changing the music industry. He makes some excellent points, and I think it's high time the industry starts looking to change rather than hanging on to their obsolete business model.
You arae not allowed to make copies of recorded music, PERIOD! Read the disclosure on any disc you buy. You do not own something that you paid for, you only own the right to listen to it. "Warning: All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws." I'm a musician of 22 years, and I STILL find this unacceptable. Music is meant to be shared. If it wasn't, there would be no radio. You can hear the songs for free on the radio, but you can't make your own copy. The artist is the one that owns the song, and do you know what the royalties are they get off each disc? Try 4.5 CENTS off of a $17.99 cd. I say rip off the industry as much as possible. When the artists start to see more money, then we can think a little more on this topic.
The music is all around us. I can hear it. Can you?
Everyone, including myself, has already sounded off their opinions about every facet of this issue. Even this story isn't really "news"; it's simply an official statement of something we knew was inevitable. Rather than revisit old arguments, then, let's try to offer some new thoughts. And in that spirit: If any defendants are reading this, now, here are a few tips, should you go to trial. (I have studied law, and I have served on a jury. If that qualifies this advice, so be it.)
Please don't read my journal
Why would I want to give money to the EFF? I don't think that the cause is bad but come on, it's time to take things seriously.
A while back, a leader of the EFF (sorry, can't remember his name) was interviewed on The Screen Savers on TechTV. He came off as an idiot. He wore a Star Trek uniform (a really bad one, BTW) and acted like a snotty teenager.
Are these the people that are fighting for my rights? I don't think so.
Basically I just reached my personal tipping point and donated $70 to the EFF.
If anyone else is interested:
https://secure.eff.org/
Peace.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Kuro5hin has a recent article which explains the issue, including pointers to archives with about 40,000 music titles that are legal to download.
Boycott the RIAA, and start downloading / buying music that isn't theirs. Support artists who make good music and don't have access to the RIAA's media juggernaut.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Look, sharing files is illegal. When you buy a CD, or a consumer videotape, you DO NOT also buy the rights to distribute that content. Think of the FBI warning that comes before all those tapes saying how public display is against copyright law. And downloading an mp3 is NOT acceptable under fair use, even if you own the CD. And remember, these are civil trials not criminal. Therefore there is no such thing as "innocent until proven guilty" it's all about who has the best story, and if the RIAA can pull out logs of your ip address, and the best thing you can say is 1)someone hacked my machine or 2)i already own CDs for all that music i share [which as said above is still illegal] 3)I didn't do it, it must of been someone i invited over who downloaded all that, well then you are screwed.
I hate the RIAA as much as anyone here, I completely believe that they deserve to suffer. However, when you break the law to get your point across you lose any hope of the people in power to listening to you. Congressmen and judges know the law and follow it because it is their lives. When someone wants to get a point across and does so by breaking the law and from benefitting from it, then you look like a theif (in their eyes copyright infringement=stealing) who is too much of a coward to admit to what you have done. Now if your goal is to Fuck The System, then be my guest and break the law. Instead, if you simply want to change the laws to something a littler nicer, claiming that you download mp3s to fight back is counter-effective. Do cable theives claim that they do it to battle against the cable monoply? And if they did, whould you even bother to listen to them? The only people that are actually doing anything useful are the lawyers and the EFF (and the true boycotters) who are doing the needed work to protect us. So, next time you want to download a song, think about the message you are sending. Are you going to be one of the people that simply yells "Fuck the RIAA" and then does whatever you want? Are you going to be just one more statistic that the RIAA uses on congress for them to change the laws for the RIAA? Or, are you going to actually stop listening to anything coming out of the RIAA, and stop sharing and telling friends about RIAA supported music?
p.s. A great way to download lots of legal mp3s is through IRate
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
the rule of unintended consequences
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's been #8 at Google for a while, for a search for schizoaffective disorder.
It was quite a life-changing event for me, to write that article.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Download for freedom!
Violate copyrights against oppression!
I download to fight corruption!
Rip Rip RIAA!
Can someone tell me what's so horrible with someone charging money for a song? Is a street performer a bad person when she asks you for money? Is a musician a bad person when she asks you to buy a ticket to be allowed to visit her show? Is she a bad person when she initiates legal procedings against people who repeatedly enter her shows without paying or people who start distributing illegal videotapes of her shows?
How did you determine that free song downloads were a god-given right on the order of human self-determination?
...stating that they would never mislead the public about decreasing CD sales, increased piracy, and that little debacle about price fixing.
Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing. We'll make you sign this binding agreement never to do this illegal thing ever again, while we'll go about price fixing and law-dodging and make every attempt to keep it out of the news.
*chuckle* In english, it's actually possible for one word to have two meanings depending on it's context.
I know alot of people who were drunk through their entire college career - and maybe even through high-school, but I think you take the cake for doing it in gradeschool too.
This interesting piece comes from the EFF.org site and discusses how to avoid the long arm of the RIAA.
Its a good read.
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/howto-notgetsued.php
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Dear RIAA:
I swear under oath that in the last 12 months I have legally purchased at least 5 CD's of your artist's music. I further swear that I will permanently refrain from ever doing it again. I hope this meets with your satisfaction, as treating your customers as thieves can only have one intended result.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
you must believe that 2+2=5.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Piracy, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Mr. Senator,
There is a phrase that has been a part of United States Government for the last 225+ years, and I'm sure you are familiar with it:
"Innocent until proven guilty"
There is a phrase that all of us should strive to live up to. Reversed, it resembles totalitarian regimes of the past, including Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. It is something that every American should strive to live up to in both their personal and professional lives.
Unfortunately, the United States legal system appears to be moving away from that ideal.
The RIAA is now sending subpoenas and notice of lawsuits to citizens throughout the United States, and these citizens will have to defend their innocence in a court of law, rather than the plaintiff backing up their accusations with incontrovertible evidence.
Let me give an example:
1. John Q. Wallet goes and Legally buys a CD from the local Fred Meyer / Best Buy / Circuit City, and takes it home.
2. John has a slow computer, but an MP3 player and wants to listen to his music under Fair Use Rights, upheld through case law in the courts. "Ripping" said music takes longer than downloading it off his high-speed internet. He downloads the music he has a legal license for.
3. John gets picked up on some type of scanner that the RIAA has on the Internet.
4. John gets served with a copyright infringement lawsuit, ending up paying countless dollars in legal fees to prove that he had the CD, and the fair use rights to the intellectual property contained on the media.
I have a real problem with this, and I hope you do too. Artists should be paid for their compositions and performances, but customers should be able to use their licenses for whatever they want within the law.
Example 2: Sharing
If I leave my car unlocked in a bad neighborhood, does that make me a felon if my car gets stolen?
If I own a store, and someone shoplifts from me, does that make me the shoplifter?
Are the cable and satellite TV companies getting sued when someone commits Theft of Service?
Then why are the people hosting files on the Internet getting sued for having files available for download?
As we speak, the "Filesharers" are being served with court notices. These are people that possibly aren't doing anything wrong, but the RIAA is sending their lawyers to work, without any hard evidence of wrongdoing. I'm sure you understand the law far better than me, but I see this as a criminal court -vs- civil court loophole:
If you have evidence, take it to a judge and he'll sign the arrest warrant. If you don't have evidence, file a civil suit and bury them so far under paperwork that they will be ruined financially when they eventually file for bankruptcy.
Innocent people filing for bankruptcy after being sued by a corporation with hundreds of lawyers and hundreds of millions of dollars. That is an America I would rather not see happen.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
there's no evidence that p2p has had a negative effect on record sales. in fact, sharing your competition's music might increase interest in that very music. just as radio play would. the effect would be to stimulate music sales for your competition and degrade your own music sales.
of course, you also are making the assumption that there's any sort of competition at all. there's plenty to suggest that the members of RIAA are collaborating to gouge the consumer and keep out alternatives.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
She later clarified that statement by saying, "In some cases it was only one song, but on a really, really, fast connection"
Is the Canadian Industry Minister into industrial rock ?
> Not correct. You can give him a copy. You cannot sell him a copy.
The courts have yet to determine whether "putting up to share on your own FTP site, while leaving an area of your own FTP site open for other file sharers to write files into upon your request" constitutes a "sale" ("an exchange of goods for consideration") or not.
Some argue that it's not a sale, after all, no money has changed hands, right?
Others argue that because you are receiving something of value (namely the MP3z you download from other peers) in exchange for providing something of value (namely copies of the MP3s in your upload/share area), that you have indeed received "consideration" for making your files available, and therefore - at least insofar as the law is concerned - you have "sold" a copy.
A hint as to who's going to win this one when it comes to trial: Check to see if the law in question uses the word "money" or the word "consideration", and check with your favorite landshark as to what "consideration" means.
I started downloading MP3s back before napster was popular. It was all FTP back then baby - and it sucked. I was also on a dial up - which made it suck about ten times more. Since then - many services have come and gone - but my current and personal favorite is emule plus (from the edonkey network) I will admit that I download CDs that I do not own through this program - and then often I'll burn them and give them otu to friends as well. But I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.
Why? Before I started downloading music I bought maybe 1-2 CDs per year at a used cd store for $8.99 each. This is in Oregon - so no tax. So I spend under $20/year on CDs. I had never been to a concert. Now - I go to multiple concerts per year, each of which cost about $50 or so. I'd go to more if more bands came out by me. I don't buy any CDs. So - before I was spending $20/year - now I'm at $100 or more/year. And the majority of that goes to the artist - not some riaa creep.
I don't see anything wrong with this, personally.
can't be adapted to suit. The money being expended is likely a small fortune and the victim (RIAA) gets little in return. Bad PR, administrative fees, maybe/likely court fees(I don't know who is going to pay the lawyer fees but I cringe to think) etc.
I've always supported civil fines that arrive in the mail (similar to photo speed traps). Seems an appropriate fit to this specific violation, 500% of the cost of the song, 20% administrative legal fees plus tax.
Alternatives, maybe capitalizing on some of the interest by flooding the networks with privately produced works (with a modest twist on exclusive rights), encouraging a community(ies) that offer centralized exposure and accurate numbering. Little to no investment and allows artists access to tools that are out of reach to most (tie ins with local radio stations through contests (exposure through a successful signing) as well as amateur hour or top 10 or whatever). It's quite complete.
Potential outcome (of tech) include using my molded lcd touch screen on my remote to route a play list (local/internet) to my home entertainment system or...
"sk8boyben"
c u l8r boi
The Grateful Dead
Widespread Panic
Phish
Moe
Those are four I listen to - excellent music - freely available via Torrent. Plenty more out there if you go looking. Oh, you want ass sucking top forty crapola? Well that, my friend, will cost you $15.98/CD and it won't change.
The bands don't suck, they do what the RIAA member execs tell them. The RIAA doesn't suck, they enforce their copyrights. The fans? Yes, most of the fans suck, and specifically their taste in music is the source of the sucking.
I will now go chill out and listen to some feelgood hippie music I downloaded
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
It seems like the music industry is dying because it has vastly overestimated the value of the product it sells.
When CDs first came out, they were about the coolest way to spend money. There were no DVDs, movies came on cumbersome magnetic tapes which degraded quickly, and the software of the day just wasn't compelling to most people (and also came on cumbersome magnetic media).
The prices for CDs have hardly fallen since.
Today, you can spend $20 on a DVD. Technically, it's also just a piece of plastic, but it carries a couple of hours of data for the eyes as well as the ears. Or you can buy a video game for $35-$50 that lets you actively participate in the entertainment. Being non-linear, a video game could provide anywhere from 0 to thousands of hours of entertainment. Then there is cable TV, where for the price of a couple CDs a month, you get 24-hour access to lots of different crap.
With a CD, you get about an hour worth of music (I've seen some go as low as 40 mintues), and even if you really like all the songs, it only engages your ears. Hence, on average, CDs are less entertaining.
Nor is the CD a convenient format for anything but home use. Keep your CDs in your car, and they inevitably get ruined or stolen. So for your convenience you burn yourself a copy for your car, making it more valuable to you. But the industry isn't simply failing to increase the value of its product, it's trying to interfere with the ripping and burning that could make the content more convenient (and hence more valuable).
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Don't mean to be trite, but there are lessons in copyright law that dictionary.com can't teach.
To Wit:
-Copyright law exists in fact to further the interests of useful arts and sciences, NOT to create a system of property ownership.
-The Framers of the constitution knew very well that copyright law was antithetical to society's free exchange of ideas.
-Copyright law is a limited grant of license for the narrow purpose of encouraging innovation, not an inherent (moral) right.
-Every creative work owes to the generations and society before it, and thus to the public in general.
I realize that the RIAA/MPAA have more soundbites using the words "stealing" and "theft" than I have calling it "copyright infringement." But just because Britney Spears goes on TV and spuriously appeals to our moral duty not to 'steal,' that doesn't make her right (and don't be fooled by her excellent understanding of semiconductor physics.
C'mon...Don't make me pull out my Thomas Jefferson quote again... :)
Grassroots is the only way, huh? Haven't terrorists been keeping more powerful enemies at bay in asymetrical confrontations like this for decades? Wouldn't attacks upon the executives and upon company property slow them down a bit? I'm not advocating it; I'm just saying it looks like the way things may be headed if the law truly is unfixable.
At 5 years in prison, all lawyers fees, and $150,000 per song, the penalties for filesharing 1 whole album are more than those for theft, burglary, manslaughter, rape, and arson. It's only a matter of time before SOMEONE decides that there is no justice in American laws.
I'm a gnu world man.
I already wrote about this in another thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77293&cid=6876 918
OK, fine. Then I want my money back for all of the piece-of-shit CD's I purchased because I had no means of sampling the music first due to them prohibiting me from listing before buying.
*cry* *Waaah!* So what? How the hell did you ever believe you had this right? It's not up to you - it's up to the company who owns the product as to whether or not you get a preview.
After that, I want my money back from the illegal price fixing that has gone on for years. Then throw those execs in jail because after all, if you are willing to do the crime you should be willing to do the time.
That's some real pitiful justification for the act. Can't come up with anything that could hold water?
Additionally I want my money back on crap CD's I bought that had noise added in to the songs to make MP3's I burned useless. I wanted to listen to those in my MP3 player while I excersised but apparently they knew better.
"want"?? Again with "want"? You didn't produce/make/manufacture those CD's so where the hell is this "want" right coming from eh?
Good God man where do you come from where you think everyone should do _your_ bidding all the time?
Way to cherry pick the intransitive form of "take". Here's a link for you explaining intransitive verbs: http://www.testmagic.com/grammar/explanations/verb s/trans_intrans_linking2.asp
This one made me laugh:
So they want to be able to use all the tools we create and all the benefits of efficiency and ease of use to make profit and make weapons, but the common man can not download a fuckin mp3?
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Have you ever READ the WSJ copyright statement? Or most others, for that matter? If you have, they usually EXPLICITLY forbid unauthorized duplication - physical or electronic or otherwise - and authorized usually means "in writing". If you make a copy for your "personal viewing pleasure", you're making an UNAUTHORIZED copy, whether or not it's protected from unauthorized access.
Yes, there's fair use. But true, legal fair use is actually very limited in its application.
Look, no matter how much we geeks LIKE the idea of freedom of use of information, there ARE laws and regulations. Just not agreeing with a law doesn't make it NOT a law. You can't run a stop sign just because you don't like the law. Doing so affects other people negatively. Same with copyright violations - you can't ignore them just because you don't like the law. Doing so ultimately impacts someone else negatively - if you studiously followed the requirements of the copyright law, you'd be paying the various companies more money for the privileges you apparently believe are yours by birthright. So in the end, it's ultimately theft of money from the copyright owner, no matter how much you don't think it's theft. And when an officer of the law comes after you, there's no defense that reads "I didn't think the law was valid."
If we don't like the law, we need to change it using established means in the courts and the legislatures. But until then, like it or not, it's still the law.
Sorry for the rant. It's just that we Americans are so individualistic and privileged that we tend to get looney ideas about right and wrong that look flat-out stupid to outside observers.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
great sellar AAAA+++++++ thx
But then, this is the RIAA we're talking about, so I have no doubt they are going to respect Orwell's copyrighted vision.
261 Major P2P Offenders
I wonder if they get some sort of discount with that too.
- shazow
THAT'S IT! THAT WAS THE LAST STRAW. Those assholes aren't getting another cent from me.
WAY TO GO RIAA- YOU REALLY FUCKED THIS ONE UP!
Canada's first black beauty pagent winner loses her crown because she knew how to say "no" to the sexual advances of an old maggot-ridden-cunt.
Sorry for the snark.
Seriously, I don't believe that's correct. Regardless of any contract existing between you and the RIAA, prosecution for copyright violation and civil litigation for damages incurred should proceed along the usual lines.
You cannot enforceably contract to forbear from illegal activity any more than you can contract to commit illegal activity. Or rather, you can do so but the promise is not binding. Such a promise, I believe, is contra bonos mores and unsupported by consideration.
IANAL, but I play one on Slashdot.
an mp3 is not the original quality off the CD, mp3 is a loss language which (unlike .wav and .shn files) means... do they really have a copyright on that mp3 as it's a modified version of the song?
What is slashdot?
It would be easier to be offended if they guy could spell correctly...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
http://www.zug.com/gab/index.cgi?func=view_thread& sort=funnymtd&head=1&thread_id=33571
Take a laptop or a USB hard drive around to
friends and combine your mp3 collections.
Burn a CD spindle or two full of mp3s and
pass it around some more. Ask your co-workers
to borrow their CD collection a little at a
time.
These methods are a little more work than
downloading from KaZaa, but the RIAA can't
spy on you as easily, either.
Your search for "KazzaLite" returned 260 records.
Krispy Cream is people
if the internet becomes too dangerous a place to trade media files, people will mail back and forth CDRWs or usb hard drives. anything will be better than the shudder-inducing act of lining these media companies' pockets any further by actually *buying* something [[blech!]].
Right. 80,000,000 users of KaZaA alone and 261 are being sued.
That gives any given user a 0.000003625% of getting sued.
If you're concerned about odds like that, I hope you never step into an automobile.
Oh, and buy a lottery ticket. Or twenty.
Who said there was?
This is unauthorized duplication and is not allowed.
Yes. But so is unauthorized distribution, which is what happens when you "give" your WSJ issue to someone else. It is not "yours" to give, now is it? You do not own the content, so how can you give it away and still be within the law?
The reason that one is illegal and the other is not is related to the economic damage to WSJ that each method can cause. If I scan it and put it on my web site, it might be read by hundreds or thousands of people, and there's a decent change that some are reading it as a substitute for buying their own copy.
It might be read..A decent chance that some are reading it as a substitute... Can this ever be proven? If I scan WSJ and put in on my website, which few people ever visit, am I off the hook because the economics say so?
A WSJ issue is only really useful for a day...
Perhaps in your view, but that might not be the case for others.
Great. I'll fire up Kazza and file share about five songs. That should keep the RIAA off my back; since the scale is smaller, I'm off the hook.
I've seen lots of straw man arguments to the effect of "there should be no difference between loaning my friend a CD and putting the CD on a P2P network!", but there clearly is. The law works like this in other areas as well: selling a joint is seen as different as selling ten kilos. Stealing a $5 bill is seen as different as stealing $50,000.00. I am not trying to equate copyright violation with drug dealing or stealing cash, but the same principle of the economy of scale applies.
You're talking about criminal law, not civil. And I think you've had one too many economics classes. Economics 101 does not and should not drive copyright law. You can't be a little bit pregnant.
Unless the Democrats decide they don't like those appointments, which is why they've been delaying every single one of Bush's nominations to the federal courts.
I don't know what wingnut propaganda outlet you get your news from, but it's obviously rotted your mind. To date, Bush has had 117 federal judicial nominees approved by the Senate.
He's wrong when he talks about "every single one". In face the Senate has approved nearly all of his judicial appointments - to LOWER courts.
But the minority leadership has also imposed an ideological test for UPPER court appointments - appeals and supreme. (These are the courts which interpret the meaning of the law in a binding fashion, rather than merely applying it on a mass-production basis.)
And having done this, they've broken precedent by using the filibuster to block those key appointments, effectively requiring a supermajority vote despite the constitutional prescription that they be approved or rejected by a simple majority.
This is a power-grab, pure and simple. During the term of Democratic presidents - especially recently - what the Rs characterize as "activist judges" who "legislate from the bench" were the bulk of the appointees. These are the people who base their rulings on what they want the law to mean, and redefine words to change the meaning of the law. "The Constitution is a living document." (meaning it can be reinterpreted according to "customs and usage".) "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." Or of "right". Or of "the People". Or of "establishment of religion". Or of "welfare". Or of "militia". Or of "necessary and proper".
The Rs approved these appointments without filibustering. They were playing by what they understood the rules to be. They expected to have their own turn to appoint judges, swinging the lower-level judicial bias back in the other direction. They expected the upper courts to keep the lower in check - because the upper courts settle disputes when lower courts interpret the law in differing, or new-and-improved, ways.
And the upper courts turn over more slowly, so the Rs didn't expect them to go too far overboard before they had a turn to appoint. And the Rs tend to appoint "strict constructionists" - people who, despite what their own biases might be, try to interpret the law using the meaning the words had AT THE TIME THE LAW WAS WRITTEN.
But having swung the pendulum to their side, the D's are now using the filibuster to block anyone appointed to the Supreme Court and/or the appeals courts whom they perceve as conservative and characterize as "extreme right-wing" - which means to the right of Karl Marx.
So by blocking a few key appointments they can maintain, and even increase, the leftward swing of the top-level courts which rule the rest - and by extension rule the country - despite being a minority in the Senate. They can afford to let the lower court appointments go through: With the left half the lower court judges reinterpreting the law, and the upper courts overruling the right half when they disagree, the Ds' goal is achieved.
Unfortunately, if the top of the court system goes sour on a systematic basis there are only three ways things can go:
1) The Executive branch goes along with it. And the gone-sour courts rule the country, while the Constitution - especially the Bill of Rights' limits on government - goes out the window.
2) The Executive and Legislative branches combine to turn it around - with appointments and perhaps an occasional impeachment. The Constitution is upheld and strengthened, as was intended. But this is what the filibuster is blocking.
3) The Executive branch to stops enforcing its rulings. Again the Constitution goes out the window. But this time the whole rule of law goes out with it. Once the Executive branch is ignoring the Judicial, why should it obey the Legislative? The Rubicon is crossed, the Republic becomes the Imperium, the President become
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do I have to admit to being a member of the communist party when I sign it? Also, am I required to name other illegal file traders to prove that I have changed my ways?
Anything you might ever need to say about anything has already been said better by Penny Arcade.
well i fer one am a stone bone pirate. i'll never buy another cd in my life if i can get off da net. i have not bought a cd in three years. fuck the riaa.
let's see.. 270,645,714 kazaa downloads..
Only 270,645,453 more lawsuits to go!
1) changed the definition of financial gain to mean "receiving anything of value" such as a copyrighted work- so running an FTP site that receives files is now financial gain, as is a program that sends and receives copyrighted files- but it's much more complicated than that....
Does this mean i can become a multi-millionare if I mail myself a thousand copies of.. say Autocad?
And if I destroy them... can I make a tax deduction?
1. Get program X (or any copyrighted data)
2. Copy and KEEP it for yourself.
3. PROFIT!!!
4. Repeat from step 2
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
The RIAA only makes money from the Record Companies. They don't make squat from you, and, unlike SCO, there's no stock to run up. The RIAA's only job is to convince the Record Companies that they need them, and bill them by the hour. While there once was a real purpose for the RIAA, it's long since autotelic.
Techies are smart, but they make up for it by being gullible and naive -- all the threats, DDoS and negative press just makes the RIAA richer and more powerful. The Record Companies will lose money, but the RIAA will make sure you get blamed while they get that money.
Cringely would properly call the RIAA sharp. Some sources for their money are:
1) Charging the Record Companies for the legal advice (and purchased politicians) to allow them to avoid paying artists and/or taxes.
2) Convincing the Record Companies to spend that saved money on Payola, and grabbing consulting / finder's fee kickbacks from both the indies and Clear Channel.
3) Charging $500 an hour to defend (in the press, running MD5s and in the court) the Record Companies against the issue of the day (Cassette tapes, dirty language labeling, Napster, PTP), which the sharp RIAA lawyers constantly troll for in the first place.
4) Day-to-day activities like fudging sales figures downwards to convince the Record Companies that they need them more than ever.
5) Silly stuff like billing hours for moving their web site weekly. They play some things so incompetently I'm amazed they've been able keep a straight face. 'oh yea? Watch what I can get away with!'
show me an instance in human history where you could absolutely effortlessly copy something and it was called stealing.
come on now, you seem to be chock of full of historical examples
you can't.
this is unprecedented.
technology changes human morality. wrap your mind around that. do you want me to spice up my post with cliff claven historical examples? or shall i leave it to your abilities to see how that statement is true?
music was once the sole provence of wandering minstrels. they had an economic model: perform for your money. there was NO MIDDLE MAN. and so will the future economic model of music be. all the recorded material will be superfluous electronic flotsam and jetsam, under no one's economic control.
why? simply because there is no way to assert control. therefore, there is no economic model in it.
the riaa has no moral highground, they are merely defending a rapidly fading historical model of music distribution. the internet replaced their business.
try that morality on for size.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hell - Use those holes in windows for something. A virus that scans your system and emails everyone in your addressbook a copy of your mp3s.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
You are a little wrong about innocent until proven guilty. Only in a criminal action is that the case. In a civil suit (which is what RIAA suing a person is), the RIAA only need prove thier case by a "preponderance of the evidence." Or namely that it is more likely than not that you broke copyright law.
It is a much lower standard than in a criminal court, and has been a hallmark of the US legal system for centuries.
then we are ok?
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Disclosure: I don't listen to modern music, except when in the company of others. I do not download music in any form. I do not buy music in any form. The following is casual observation
Music today is too simplistic to deserve a lot of money.
Most mass-marketed songs have a simple beat, and a half dozen notes and/or chords, played ad nauseum.
The lyrics frequently make no sense. Not the airy, ethereal nonsense of the 60s. I mean garbled, like the "artist" is purposely trying to sound like s/he can't sing clearly.
Many songs are nothing but shock value. "Profanity" can be used in an artistic way, but when it rises past a certain point it becomes pointless.
Even 20 years ago, music was better. I don't particularly like anything made in the past 60 years, but even music from the 1970s is more musical than the cacaphony produced today.
How often did you hear that ? Time to fight back ? Tired of that phrase ? Maybe you shouldn't - since nobody does it, right now.
... are ... doomed ... to looose!
It is time to fight back. No, I don't mean to step up to protect your rights. To Speak out against the overreach of copyright law. "Getting involved" or some such nonsense.
The problem is, all that is really defense. And defense, by definition, is war on the territory your enemy choses, at the time of your enemie's choice. You are doomed to loose.
You
It is now time to take the fight to the enemy. The RIAA, by suing ordinary citizens and publicly declaring its intent to instill fear in everyone's hearts, has officially declared war. War on You, The People. And still it is You The People who governs this land. Now this is personal, and this is everyone's fight. Stop begging for mercy from an overbearing oponent. Write off the those who get sued - that is Their War, and Their time. Those few are doomed anyway, soldiers who have fallen, if you want so.
Now your target is the music industry itself. Destroy the music industry. Defeat them utterly ! Attack their livelyhood. Drive them to bankruptcy ! Identify their weaknesses, and attack them there.
Destroy the music industry
It is up to you! You The People. Pass laws that undermine their revenue. Pass laws that curb their marketing. Seize their IP assets for misuse. Pass taxes that reduce their profits, have DAs raid their coke snorting execs, destroy the careers of their political lackeys. Do whatever it takes.
And, above all, be open with it. Cry out loud, that nothing will satisfy you than their utter defeat. Go and win the public debate. Dont appeal to politicians, appeal to the people. Be Creative to get your message out. Others have well developed tactics for that - use them.
Drive them into defense. Get them into hiding. Make it so that music execs' children will hesitat to admit their parent's jobs. That churches exclude them from posts. Make them universally hated and feared. Make it that their execs cant even sleep at night any more because their fear of you, and of failure, is haunting their dreams.
And then go out for the kill. And kill the beast, have no mercy! Dismantle the RIAA, RICO the Big five, put their execs to jail, and fire the rest.
Someone should send the leading music indutry people a good book on the history of another large and powerful institution. An association of huge wealth and immense power, that grew arrogant and became so full of itself that it started to ignore and trample those who actually ruled the land.
And when the last Templar Knights agonized towards their deaths on the fires on Paris streets, their once mighty order became all but a footnote of failure in history.
Or a perpetual memento: "Such is the fate of those, who deem themselves above all others, and their power beyond limits"
I see that RIAA has taken action against downloaders. What I find interesting is an article in the new Wired magazine about a company called champagne that collects download information and then sells it to the record companies so that they can use it for marketing research. Basically it'll tell them what cuts are hot off an album and how to select the next 'single.' The information can also be used to convince music stations to play certain songs due to the download popularity. So my point is--why are they suing on one hand, while using the services as a valuable marketing tool? It seems so counterintuitive.....
# nohup
Conversely, I could argue that sharing your competitors music could saturate the genre such that people get tired of it and move on.
My claim is no more spurious than yours...
From site:
;-)
Concerned that information about your file-sharing username may have been subpoenaed by the RIAA? Check here to see if your username or IP address is on one of the subpoenas filed with the D.C. District Court. This information is drawn from the court's publicly available PACER database and will be updated when that system is updated.
Now ask yourself - which IPs will RIAA check first?
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.
Windows and linux versions, debian packages even.
Granted, you're not going to get anything you've been hearing on the radio.. And for me, most of the songs suck. But a few have been good, and finding good music I haven't heard is pretty sweet.
A cheap shot such as "to the right of Karl Marx" makes you look like even more of a partisan/conservative than you no doubt already are. Insults mostly serve to shore up your base and piss off your opponents. The rest of your post carries your message much more effectively.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
By the way, 19 September is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. ;D
Talk Like A Pirate Day - September 19
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
If they were suing 261 individuals, mostly university students, for GPL violations and asking millions of dollars in each case, I think most if not all /.ers would think they'd gone off their rocker and stop supporting them.
It isn't the going after the P2P users that angers me, it is the bully tactics. This asking millions in damages is a load of shit. Sharing a single song is not something that should bring $150,000 in damages. Also the tactic of using the outrageous amount to force a settlement instead of a trial is crap, and I think extortion.
If the police decide to crack down on speeding, I won't complain. If they decide to do it by ramming speeder off the road, beating the shit out of them, and hauling them to jail, I'll get angry. The RIAA's response is totally out of porportion with the act they are going after.
Simple: the Internet is more efficient than their corporations. They are fighting (and suing) to keep their inefficient distribution system in place because most of the money in the record industry pays for distribution (publishers, distributers, retailers).
It is simple to set up a licensing scheme for music content, but they don't want it because the price would go way down if music simply shot over the network to those who wanted it. If consumers had real choice over which songs they wanted to pay for. If we found out about good music by hearing DJs spin who make the same amount of money as the rest of us.
Ignore the smoke and mirrors of the current litigation and support systems like iTunes where you pay what songs are worth. Cut out the RIAA middlemen! Artists deserve to be paid for creating music. Copyright law was invented to incent artists. The RIAA has hijacked that system through its monopoly on distribution and now is the time to take it back from them!
They are not the same, and if you can't see the difference then you are not thinking about this carefully.
You are not taking anything from the copyright owner when you copy a song. All that is happening is you are depriving them of potential income.
At no point have you stolen anything, apart from something they might have had. There is no definition of stealing which includes potential loss under its banner.
Yes you are right in that you are not meant to own the media without having paid for it, but personally all I see is a load of insanely greedy people in an age when the cost to them of a copy being made is zero.
Why doesen't someone copywrite/patent/whatever a method of encryption that can be used to mask IP's and users over the p2P network, license it to kazaa/morpheus/limewire/etc for free and then DARE the RIAA to crack it and bust users? Doesen't the DMCA prohibit this kind of activity?That way we can play one monster against the other! Either the DMCA will break the RIAA or vice versa. Either way its one less to deal with!
"There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness" -Microsoft
Really. There are. I buy a CD now and then and often find myself enjoying many of the songs on them.
~ Aero
Beck
Bjork
Eminem
Smashing Pumpkins
Bruce Springsteen
Nirvana
Everything But the Girl
William Orbit
Thievery Corporation
Stereolab
Portishead
Frank Zappa
Mars Volta
Beastie Boys
Fatboy Slim
PJ Harvey
Tori Amos
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Dylan
Lou Reed
Massive Attack
Rolling Stones
Kruder & Dorfmeister
Neil Young
Air
Missy Elliott
Metallica (Pre-black album, at least)
You're trying to tell me that all these artists, who I would qualify as geniuses, who all have major label contracts and are likely represented by the RIAA, sound the same? You're trying to tell me that all their music is written by their producers? Your argument is only valid if the sample group is "Britney, Christina, NSync and the Backstreet Boys," and even then, they deserve a lot of the revenue their songs generate. They're not in the music industry, per se -- they're in the entertainment industry. They're meant to be fluff. You think it's easy? You think it's a cinch to memorize all those crazy dance moves, and keep your body in tip-top shape, so as to maintain your attractiveness? Take your tinfoil hat out of your ears man.
c-hack.com |
I all sides to the current arguments on this subject and could easily side with most. What gets me of late is the people who say this argument is nothing but two spoiled kids arguing over a topic of inconsequential value. This would be my reply yot that...
1)Yes we have some very important issues in this day and age. War, economy, healthcare, etc.
2)There are better rights to fight for than downloading music without fear of retribution.
3)The RIAA is grasping at straws.
With all of that being said I can move on to my point...
This isn't simply about downloading music or demonizing and archaeic institution/business model.
This isn't about spoiled kids whining about a god-given luxury.
The underlying theme here is illegal, unethical, and forgoing of certain rights as guaranteed under our constitution. I'm not talking about our right to download free music. I'm talking about punishing copyright infringement reasonably if at all.
Why aren't people upset over a corporation issuing it's own sopoenas without judicial oversight?
Why aren't people challenging their local politicians over passing such bills?
Why are politicians selling our rights as guaranteed under the constitution in exchange for campaign donations?
The laws being past as related to the drm and dmca reach much farther than downloading mp3's. Just think of how it pertains to the future and the extent the corporations will go to to protect their outdated business models. They don't give a damn if you rot in jail for enternity as long as the profits keep rolling in and the American public does nothing to change it. I guess you could say the entire world does nothing as a whole except whine and complain isntead of actually mounting some kind of grass roots uprising.
I hope everyone understand that I'm not even talking about mp3's. I'm talking about our laws and rights and where this is all leading in our collective futures. I'm not some right wing, over conservative thinker with alterior motives protecting my own personal interests. I'm about protecting the rights I've always had and I can see them slowly slipping away, bit by bit. I don't want it to be too late when "joe Average" starts to understand because by then it will be too late and there's no new "America" that we can set forth on ships to regain our freedoms.
The time to act is now and time is of the essence. Don't make this about music. Make this about maintaining what we have always had. The fight with the RIAA is the first of many battles of which will be a long, drawn out war of attrition. Our power is in our voices, pockets, and numbers. We cannot let the greedy few sell our rights in exchange for money and job security.
We can win this...
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
You mean the constant barrage of threats and suits against students didn't make you want to rush out and buy as many CD's as you could? You must be up to no good.
Word to artists: If you want to succeed you better go independent. Or you could whore yourself out to the RIAA and let them manage your "art" for you.
I will never buy a major label CD again.
According to the yahoo article, file sharing cost the industry $700 million last year. it also estimated that there were 57 million users in the US. correct me if im wrong, but thats an average of $12 per person... why sue people over an average of $12? hell, i wouldnt sue if someone ripped me off $12
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
I completely concur. I don't think the right to exchange information is holy or somehow a human right which you're suggesting here. Consider slander, spam, or malicious information. Malicious information is for instance a virus, or even something as simple as telling a very gullible person that to cure his headache he merely needs to jump off that tower there...
:-).
Given the obvious advantages of free information flow (it is for instance the underpinning of a free market, and necessary also for a "democratic" society), I'ld say information should not be needlessly restricted unless there is a very good reason for it.
Supposedly, copyrights/patents are a required to encourage the production of new knowledge.
I would say it's clear that they do encourage some creation of knowledge. By their very nature, however, they also limit it's applicability and extension, therefore also discouraging the creation of such knowledge. Furthermore, I think a better system could be instituted.
Given that copyrights use market dynamics to encourage creation, whilst those dynamics work only in situations of scarcity, and that information itself (not the distribution thereof!) is not scarce, we can conclude that a system that tries to encourage new knowledge without enforcing scarcity would be optimal, as doing so would bring encouragement without destroying the actual point of the knowledge in the first place.
People regularly comment on the fact that communism (specifically in Russia) collapsed because it (it being the abstract administrative process that is communism) is a fundamentally bad match in the real world (in which resources are scarce). Generally it's not so widely noted that the same could be said of our current Intellectual Property mess.
Fortunately, we already have a mechanism to support non-scarce goods (aka social goods) in our society! Subsidizing knowledge production is a far superior solution... and we already do it to some extent with schools, art grants, universities, etc etc etc.
The question then becomes: how to divide such grants? I don't have an easy answer to that but a model ala de references by academic papers (or for that matter hyperlinks in the net) comes to mind.
To draw an analogy: in our current situation, knowledge is exclusively controlled by it's creator, which is comparable to how a completely "closed" internet portal would control its content and display information and news depending mostly on how much it can pay to create or buy that information from some news service or equivalent. The subsidized model which supports knowledge creation is more like the net at large with hyperlinks forming the votes for who's cool and who's not. Even without a framework specifically designed to support it, google seems capable to extract useful information from those votes
I kind of thought that everyone was taking for granted that those being sued are probably guilty and that their antics have finally caught up with them. But this post of yours sounds as if you geniunely believe that these people are innocent. Do you believe that they are innocent and that the RIAA has unfairly targeted them? Or do you believe that they are guilty but that the RIAA is a greater offender and therefore should be thwarted at every turn?
Will these individuals be tried by a judge or a jury? I can't see a jury handing down a guilty verdict.
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." It is codified into the constitution, the supreme law of the land, the law to which all other laws must adhere. Therefore, if the fine is excessive, which it CLEARLY is, it is unconstitutional and should be stuck down. THAT is why I bitch. We not only have a concept of the punsihment fitting the crime, we put it in our highest law. Ruining someone's life be forcing them to pay millions of dolalrs is not a fair punsihment for sharing digital data.
RIAA Says It's Not After Small-Time Downloaders
I saw this link on /., and I'm reposting it. Send it to your friends. Stick it to the RIAA. Don't buy their music. How? Click this link.
I will assume full responsibility for taking part in the the decline in CD sales the RIAA bitches about. I haven't purchased a CD from those assholes in years. Fuck you, RIAA.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
...if I converted all 250 of my legally purchased CD's to MP3s and allowed them to be shared?
That would equal approx. 2500-3000 song titles, but all very legally residing on my machine. If not, I would LOVE to do this, go to court, and win.
Any help here? Thanks... I only ask because it seems that they only have a case if you are sharing ILLEGAL copies of the titles. Is this correct? Otherwise I just don't see the "crime". The "crime" would be committed when someone "steals" it from me, right? Didn't I read about that girl that is fighting the claim due to her saying that she owned the music, but the RIAA said they can tell if the songs have been "stolen" from somewhere else?
Thanks. If this is true I'm a converting and sharing madman...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
"If I leave my car unlocked in a bad neighborhood, does that make me a felon if my car gets stolen? ....
Then why are the people hosting files on the Internet getting sued for having files available for download?"
Availability. If you are a person who's handing out drugs to 12-year-olds, if you're leaving guns laying around, if you're leaving bottles of whiskey on your passenger side seat -- in all cases you are the agent by which something considered negative is happening.
In this case, it's considered negative to content creators to have their content distributed without their consent. By making them available to download, you are no different than people in Hong Kong who hawk copies of DVDs and music which haven't been officially released yet. Yes, you aren't charging anything, but you are dilluting its value by making it available without control. You damage the value of the rights which control the content as much as if you were on a Hong Kong street corner yourself.
Maybe if you'd look at things logically, instead of trying to fop off an illegal activity as legit, you'd see this.
I don't share copyrighted material on P2P networks because it's wrong. I do not have permission to distribute, disseminate, or otherwise share something unless I own the entire rights to it. If I do not respect this, how would I expect other people to respect these rights in regards to content I create (specifically, my writting and GPL programs which all fall under the same copyright law)?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Also note that the Freenet project needs money to continue to pay its full time programmer. It is GPL software but it is very challenging code to work on and really needs dedicated people. So go to The Freenet Project Homepage and download a copy of the latest version and hopefully make a donation!
It's either freedom in the form of Freenet or lawsuits from the RIAA/MPAA/Your local government. Take your pic.
Are using Kazaa in a way that could be defined as fair use behavior.
I worked at Future Shop (www.futureshop.ca), a large Canadian electronics retailer for three years.
I worked in the upgrades dept and sold cd burners, dvd writers (when they recently came on to the market), etc.
9 out of 10 customers bought burners and wanted *detailed* instructions on how to download and burn music cd's or dvd movies that they did *not* own and usually expressed *no intention* of buying such content.
The lone customer usually bought his burner for data backup or for digital photography use.
Is it any surprise that most countries with rampant piracy and weak IP/trademark laws usually has very little mainsteam entertainment and media?
-p
The people being sued had 1,000+ songs for download, with a most likely intent to violate copyright laws.
...that has not been established anywhere, except that RIAA is claiming it. The issue here is that under due process the RIAA should have to show "reasonable cause" to a court before being able to subpoena private customer information.
Think of in a real life situation. You can't get the registration info off the DMV based on a licence tag number and a clerk-stamped paper, you can't make the phone company give you the home address of an unlisted phone number with the same either.
It's not as if it's the RIAA that has been granted these powers, it's everyone with a copyright (and even I have the copyright to my school essays). Certainly, I wouldn't try it now, but if precedence says this is ok, I can file just the same request. And the ISPs will just have to bend over and give me the information. Is that a good thing?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You know damn well you will go out and BUY the latest Phish CD or what ever tripe it is you listen to while stuffing your face with whatever kind of manufactured flamebroiled grease your weak and spineless ass requires to stay fat...
The new technology allows for small operators to distribute music. The RIAA has imposed a tax on Internet Radio so right now this is not much of a threat.
In movie land however:
"This Is Not A Love Song - the new feature from Full Monty writer Simon Beaufoy - stalled almost as soon as organisers flicked the switch allowing viewers around the world to stream it to their screens. ... Organisers of the online screening have since said they had not expected the project to spark such international interest and their website simply could not handle overwhelming demand."
BBC
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Hon. Senators & Representatives,
I thought it wasn't frowned upon for corporations to sue every company in a business market (that being P2P). In a sole bid to dominate said market by introducing their own product (Code-named B5).
The RIAA has initiated litigation against Napster, Morpheus, Grokster, Audiogalaxy, KaZaA users, college students, ISPs, and many more individuals. Settling most of these lawsuits for substantial sums of money, far exceeding the damages any reasonable person could associate with the 'illegal' activities. Even more remarkable was the defaming of this whole market of P2P ("Peer-to-Peer") by calling it "Peer-2-Porn" and suggesting child pornography is the primary use of these networks.
After all these efforts to end ALL successful P2P software programs, the RIAA then proceeds to introduce their own product after having done significant harm to the market.
Certainly this behavior should be looked into and your constiuents recommend a Congressional Investigation.
Well, I guess we know who your new cell mate is going to be.
I don't know about him, but I can't see that we've been provided with enough information to form much of an opinion. The RIAA are accusing some people of copyright infringement. We don't know who the people are, what the evidence is against them or whether they're admitting liability. Right now, I don't think there's anything to go on at all.
would require file sharers to admit in writing that they illegally traded music online
It was my understanding that one had the right to not implicate oneself in a possible crime (unless you take the stand in your own trial, then you have to answer the responding questions), so just how do they plan on getting away with this?
We've tracked 458 songs to your home IP address:
Responses: Hacked, local network, wireless stealers, virus, whatever. If one can escape a illegal porn conviction with a virus plea one would think that you could escape kazaa with a hacker plea (and yes, hackers do plant this shit... somebody left anon FTP open at work and we were flooded with porn/warez/music in hidden folders).
And sign a paper stating you'll never do it again? Or what, next time it's notorized that they get to beat you with bamboo canes or take your firstborn? Do signatures under threat or duress count??
Sorry, mommy, I'll be a good boy??? Sounds like the RIAA wants us to go buy a few hundred useless CD's and back to playschool with us. Judging by their math (high-speed=2 CDRs) and/or mentality... I think that perhaps it's they that need to hit gr5 math again.
Probably the second. Sharing mp3s and movies (with friends) is just like recording from the radio, or letting them borrow your cds, or VHS tapes. Sharing with everyone is different, but which is worse: sharing music, which, from experience, has actually influenced me to buy cds of artists I wouldn't have otherwise bought, especially since they're all from overseas...or frivilous lawsuits designed purely to spread FUD to everyone in the country, and world.
This same thing happened when VHS tapes came about, when the film industry thought tapes would put them out of business. If the RIAA just accepted the fact that they can't stop progress, they might just stop with their frivilous mafia-style lawsuits.
The idea of fragmented files gave me a brainstorm:
After somebody seeds the original work out, it spreads in the network as parts of the original (file), ensuring that nobody shares out a complete work. Perhaps it is a crypto-generated file, wherein two parts must be added together epoxy-like in order to be usable.
After X-many people have downloaded your seed-file (the complete), you are automagically fragmented so that you yourself no longer have the complete file but only share part (or both if it can still work) of the seed file.
Now the two parts of the seed. Let's say resin and hardener, are neither in any way a copyrighted work. They're not a split portion of a file, but perhaps two keys that could be combined via mathematical formula once downloaded to make a whole (perhaps incorporating compression as well).
Since people are already used to downloading file-portions on kazaa, this isn't really a new trend. But you never are sharing out an individual piece of copyrighted work, or even a playable/usable portion. You just have a piece of data, useless unless merged with one or more pieces of data and manipulated mathematically.
People have already mentioned that in some ways patching a file to achieve a result is different legally than distributing a full file. And since both formats are just data, not even the original stream, they can't themselves be copyrighted.
Anyone think this would work? We've got resin, we've got epoxy... but hey as long as your clear off your downloads you're never giving out an actual copyrighted work....
If you did sell them, knowing their intended use, you're in no position to pontificate.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I've used this comparison before and I'm using it again now: If I leave my front door open one day and somebody waltzes in and walks off with my television, do the police arrest me (for leaving the door open) or the person who walked off with my tv (for stealing)? The latter, of course.
So when I leave my files available for download, what law have I broken? I'm just leaving the front door open, letting people peruse. It's up to THEM to break the law and download the file. If I own every album that every MP3 I possess comes from, what law have I broken by *ALLOWING* others to download from me? I'm not encouraging it, I'm not endorsing it, but I'm allowing it to happen.
So I'm lost. Why hasn't this issue been raised yet? Are we waiting until the first court case to bring up that leaving the front door open is not illegal? Having an open file share with no password on a Windows platform computer isn't illegal, so why should this be?
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Something I've wondered about is the legalities of 'fuzzy' recordings.
eg : you download a 160kbps MP3, the RIAA gives you a court order for copyright infringement. The copyright is for a song that they have the rights for.
But is their copyright valid for the digital representation of the song? The RIAA'd argue yes , of course it is, after all CD's contain binary 16 bit samples of audio at 44.1kHz.
But, even with your leet 160kbps mp3, you don't have an exact duplicate in it's entirety - not by a long shot. Could you argue that your MP3 is just a summary of the original work? It's 1/10th the size, isn't it? To draw (hah!) a parallel in the art world, does my rough sketch of monet's sunflowers constitute copyright infringement? Hardly.
Take a leaf from the SCO debacle, and print out a copy of both the CD digital audio and your MP3 onto paper and politely ask the prosecutor to underline the offending parts of your data for you. Just the sheer difference in size of your printouts would go some way in convincing the court that they are not the same.
If they pull the "for all intents and purposes" response, just wheel out the expert witnesses and the double-blind tests, and the sonographs of distortion. You should be able to prove that the audio that your collection of bits on your drive represent is completely different to the audio from the collection of bits on the CD.
What am I missing here? Why is this defence not used?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
STOP BUYING MUSIC CDs
Just in case it may not have been clear. The money used by music labels is funneled into RIAA which in turn is used to sue the people. It's not hard to boycott the music industry, just don't buy any more music, once the profits drop, the music industry will realize that people are serious about this. Right now they don't really care about people, they care about themselves and profit.
We all should stop supporting mmthe music industry, stop supporting the one-hit wonders, stop supporting sell outs, just stop supporting them.
You want music go to a live concert, but stop feeding the monster that is trying to feed on us.
a) Did the RIAA make the MP3 file? No.
I see that we switch between a "concrete" object and intellectual property when it suits us. Neither did the "owner" of the MP3 make the file. The codec is IP of a German firm, and the actual program is IP owned by probably yet another company. But the media isn't the issue.
This would never stand in court, because it's ridiculous. The copyright still applies when a radio station broadcasts the music (the radio station cannot "sell" the content, only ad spots.) Likewise for television broadcasts. Yes, the intellectual property is still the property of the copyright holder, regardless of the media. I think you may be confused with artists who got screwed because their contracts named specific formats, such as LP disc, and they got the shaft on tapes and CDs because they sold out copy rights to their distributor. Since Kid MP3 wasn't party to the contract between the artists and the producers, he isn't granted the rights to redistribute the copyrighted material on other formats.
It's very simple, and I don't understand why everyone is making such a big issue out of it. Copyright terms are what need to be addressed. Kid MP3 isn't helping the cause by infringing copyrights.
nt
Many people without direct legal experience aren't familiar with what lawyers call "the laugh test." If you couldn't float a defense to a judge or an attorney without them laughing, saying "sheeyeah, right," or something similar, it is said to have failed the laugh test. The defense you've suggested would fail for a number of obvious reasons, the first one being that you don't even believe it yourself.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
You just described one of the many features FreeNet already has.
Plus it's all encrypted.
Too bad many downloads are broken due to nodes being transient.
It works great for text though.
Read the site if you want more information on the functionality of Freenet.
Wouldn't YOUR ISP's ToS forbid this?
-insert a witty something-
"LOGICALLY, I should have every right to share, without any finical gain, media in my pocession with whomever I wish."
Except that without any actual media to share, you're suddenly in position of being a content mass duplicator and distributor without permission of the original producer. That's illegal.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It is clear that their intent was piracy.
Pirates sailed the ancient sees and profited by killing people and physically taking the gold away from them. A fundamentally destructive act and the selfish goal was personal profit. Taking gold from one person to another was also zero sum at best.
File sharers share files by allowing others to see the 1s and 0s on their hard drive and replicate that pattern on their own drive. In doing so they are setting those bits to a certain shape which is more interesting than random chaos. This is a fundamentally constructive act, and not zero sum. Granted it is very difficult to create that musical shape in the first place, but replicating it is so cheap it might as well be free. For the first time in human history we have something that has nearly broken the limits of entropy and scarcity.
Most filesharers I know believe in this naive yet idealistic view, even if they don't actually think about it cognitively. "This music is something good. By making a copy, there is more goodness in the world. Nothing was destroyed." File sharers don't gain anything of value by sharing the files they have. You don't get paypal-ed a dollar every time you give someone anything on Kazaa. Actually, you lose your available bandwidth and now expose yourself to unreasonable punishments. Most sharers feel it's worth the risks to make others happy, Do Unto Others etc...
It's the same naive desire of a little kid in a grocery store picking up an apple and going "Here mommy! I gave you an apple!" Except with filesharing the apple doesn't even disappear from the storeshelf. It's more like taking a picture of the apple for your own reference.
The main problem in the IP industries is they want to try and pretend that after the initial copy, entropy and scarcity still exist in the digital world so they can support old business models. They want to create artificial scarcity with encryption schemes and complete access control. In effect, adding artificial entropy back to the only system humanity ever managed to make that was free of it.
Once IP is paid for, it needs to be as free as possible. This isn't obvious in music, so let me make a short jump to medicine. It costs perhaps $.01 in bandwidth to transmit the "recipe" for a drug that cures AIDS, or heart disease, or any number of illnesses. For the first time in history we could easily replicate those recipes worldwide. And yet drug companies do not do this, on the pretense of "recouping costs" even after a drug is long profitable. Is it morally right to make easily-replicated information that can improve peoples' lives artificially scarce? On the other hand it takes a great deal of financial energy to create a viable drug or other work of intellectual property.
The best answer I can think of for Intellectual Property is communal pre-paid investment. A group of all interested investors (honor system I'm afraid) pay in advance to create IP. Once the costs of creating the IP are covered (paid in advance by people willing to acknowledge that they will benefit from its creation), everyone is ENCOURAGED to replicate the work as much as possible, and preventing replication of something that is good for humanity is made illegal. It's impossible to steal something that is freely copied.
Maybe individual people are too lazy to take that altruistic approach. Perhaps then governments could force people to take this moral approach.
It'll never happen you say?
If humanity can't get over the urge to hoard IP instead of sharing it, forcing each other to reinvent solutions to solved problems, or find some way to solve fair IP use, maybe we deserve to go extinct.
I've heard of people simply trading 100GB hard drives with 20,000 songs at an average of 224kbps. It can't be stopped. I'm glad to see them sue, as it will force a backlash over time.
Make a program that detects that the computer has been switched off for more than a few days (after seisure) and then it could assume, "ok why are we off? we never turn off at home, we must have been seised", 2. then the program can pop up a dialog asking some silly secret message, "Hey BOB, your 12:30am noodles are ready, OK / CANCEL" Hitting any of these two will ZAP THE HD/BIOS/VIDEOBIOS, and render the PC useless.
Ofcourse you personaly will just kill the process. Tricky, but it would work if you personally never switch the PC off or have some double check to see that its still logged in via your ISP, not on a network inside the FBI/RIAA. Then again if the PC knows its running inside RIAA or FBI LAB, you could ran a allout virus attack/ipscan/DOS attack.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The problem with this idea is in how computer forensics are done. I'm sure the RIAA and it's vast herd of lawyers will be smart enough to hire people to do forensics on the computer to prove their allegations.
When doing forensics, the first thing you do is make an exact bit-for-bit copy of the entire drive to another drive. Generally you also want to copy it to a drive of the same size/brand/model as well. Then the copy is hooked up to a computer that has the forensics tools on it. But it _DOES NOT BOOT FROM THE COPY_. The tools all run from the forensic computer's drive, generally they include the ability to set the drive to read-only access as well to prevent accidentally screwing up the evidence.
The main purpose of this is to insure the evidence is not messed with, if you do make a big blunder, you just go back and re-copy from the original pristine drive, and start anew.
So, your program would never run, and you'd still be up the creek without a paddle. Not to mention that unless you did a major overwrite of all the slack space on the drive after deletion (and we're talking multiple passes of writing random data), the files would still be recoverable to use against you.
Perhaps you should just rig up a device that blows a hole through your hard drive if the computer receives more than a certain amount of movement, you'd know to turn it off before you moved the thing, but the RIAA and company wouldn't.
More seriously, given the RIAA's new hobby of collecting victims via bot which looks for MP3s and filenames which resemble anything their members sell, we have no idea at all whether or not they have infringed on any RIAA copyrights at all.
However, the behavior of the RIAA member labels tells me that they do indeed deserve to be thwarted at every term.
If they actually cared about piracy instead of making the Internet useless for distributing music for anybody but them, they'd be going after the pirate CD PRESSING PLANTS in Asia, not individual P2P users in the US. If you hadn't heard, pirate CDs and DVDs are sold openly all over Asia, with the artists making not a cent. You'd think the 0wn3d politicians of the *AA organizations would be trying to do something about it instead of attacking individuals.
What they deserve is to follow their ancestors to the tar pits, and switching our entertainment dollars from RIAA label music to music made by anybody but RIAA label employees is the way to give them the push they deserve.
Tech Public Policy stuff
However, everyone deserves a fair day in court. And more to the point, since most of us have read a hundred similar debates on the P2P subject, I thought I'd take an opportunity to steer the discussion in a different course, which I thought might prove interesting or helpful to some folks.
cribPlease don't read my journal
Am I #1000?
The law says "whole or part" of the copyrighted work. CDNOW probably gets away with this because the RIAA allows it because it promotes cd purchases. If you could get around with "part" of a file then this would have been solved years ago by chopping off the last 1/10 second of the song.
But it's good that we're still trying to think of ways around this monopoly
See Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 38(b): "Any party may demand a trial by jury..."
cribPlease don't read my journal
Gee, that gives me an idea... what about a P2P app that only gives downloaders access to a part of the file, while making sure another peer elsewhere share the other parts. The client downloads and merges them automatically, of course, but the shares are never, at any time, providing access to a complete file. Coordinating who shares what might be difficult, maybe those with odd-numbered IP get to share parts 1 and 3, and the even-numbered share part 2 and 4 from a file chopped up into 4 bits? I wonder how lawsuit-proof this idea would be. ;-)
How about a program sending two or more different checksums, say for like 2-3 bits, so you can reconstract it yourself? Noone actually transfer any part of the work individually...
Kjella
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I made a little website, http://www.tcnj.edu/~pompeli2/respectmonopolies.or g/ . I haven't decided whether to actually get the domain, respectmonopolies.org. You guy tell me what you think about it. I actually made it before I saw disrespectmonopolies.org so I didn't copy that at all.
I've been saying that for quite a while... eventually someone is going to come to their last $1000 and, rather than throw it to a lawyer will buy an AK47 and a crate of ammo. then they walk into the RIAA headquarters and start spraying bullets in every direction. either that or a bag of fertilizer and some gas. on a different note the riaa web site seems to not be thouroughly /.'d yet, How about everybody picking a different page on their site and making it their homepage
i found this interesting quote on their web page regarding how to spot pirated CD's
The record label is missing or it's a company you've never heard of.
It has cheaply made insert cards, often without liner notes or multiple folds.
sounds like they want us to believe that all legitamate music is made by them..
The sound quality is often poor or inconsistent.
no... that is RIAA music for sure
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
In the USA, you can buy Music CDR's. A royalty has been paid on the music CDR's.
My dumb question is; Just what can I record on them that the royalty payment provided?
Don't mention things already in my library like 8 tracks, reel to reel tapes, compact cassettes, LP's, etc. They have had their royalty paid.
Can I legaly borrow a CD and copy it onto a Music CDR? If not, then what can I legaly record.
Please provide a refrence to support your answer. I have 2 boxes of Music CDR's that I'm trying to figure out how to properly use the pre-paid royalty on.
The truth shall set you free!
Whew! Looks like I'm safe! I did a search for 127.0.0.1 and it came up clean. :)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Excerpts from RIAA propaganda HQ
THE WE READ WHAT IS ON THE PRESS RELEASE AWARDS
Eminem
Britney Spears
THE IT'S ABOUT THE QUALITY STUPID AWARDS
Stevie Wonder
Neil Young
Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins
Beach Boys' Brian Wilson
Goo Goo Dolls' John Rzeznik
E Street Band's Danny Federici
THE BREAKING-AND-ENTERING POLICE REPORT AWARDS
Creed's Scott Stapp
Nelly
Rusted Root's Jim Donovan
Everclear's Art Alexakis
Luciano Pavarotti
Victoria Shaw, Country Music Singer
Troy Verges, NSAI 2002 Songwriter of the Year
OK, you have two major problems with this otherwise good idea:
1. If, as reported by the AC above, 'The DMCA only prohibits breaking encryption for copyrighted items', you have have some copyrighted info to secure. Your IP address, your net traffic, and someone else's music are 3 good examples of stuff you can't copyright.
2. You would have to sell your encryption software to the most poplular p2p networks (currently Kazaa etc) or create a more popular network. Why do I say sell? Well, you may be releasing your encryption protocol under the GPL, but there are costs involved with implementing it. Sharmen Networks et al are businesses - interested in the bottom line. Therefore, your ideas must increase or retain enough advertising space to pay for the costs involved. Writing and destributing new versions of their software, defending allegations about supporting Copyright Infringement, etc, etc. Think about it from their perspective.
If you can defeat those 2, then you have an idea on your hands.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
I was talking with some friends about this the other day. While it sucks for the network users, it just comes down to the fact that you would have to be friggin INSANE to leave your computer sharing lots of files right now. Why not just put a sign up that says "Hey, RIAA! Come sue me!" No thank you.
If everyone believes that then the whole P2P network will collapse and the RIAA have won their battle. If no-one believes this then the RIAA will have a futile time and ultimately will lose the war against P2P. Much like the fortunes of companies rise and fall its perceived future, which may bare little resemblance to its actual performance.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
That said, apparently you haven't read Cryptonomicon. The single most effective way to tamper with electronic evidence is to build a giant electromagnet around your doorframe. Now, the RIAA could hire data recovery experts that charge hundreds of dollars per hour to reconstruct the data on your hard drive...
But chances are that such attempts would fail to get a complete picture of your data. If you're running RAID-0, even better. Of course you'll find yourself in a FBMITA prison for perjury, but they'll never catch you for filesharing.
Man, I can't believe that one day I'm telling people to back up their stuff, and the next day I'm telling them how to engineer data loss...
Judge: you were distributing music for which you have no copyright.
"Freedom" fighter: yup.
Judge: you owe the RIAA 1500000000. Next.
If you are guilty, you would be stupid to fight.
If you are not (i.e. you were sharing stuff which you are actually entitled to share) you should fight with all your might.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Be advised there is an all points bulletin for Jason Shirley, white male approximately 5'10, 165lbs with a clean complexion and blond hair, to be apprehended for thought crimes. Please send a fully outfitted team for apprehension as the perp is considered armed and dangerous.
:
/. persona, and you can just be you. I find it amazing how bad this conversation has turned given the way you act, and are perceived by the people that know you in real life. Don't be mean on /. Jason, it isn't necessary and it doesn't represent who you really are in real life. Just be you.
The apprehension is to happen at or about the following location
20345 NW Colonnade Drive
Hillsboro, OR 97124
Authorized agents are hereby instructed to start a 24x7 wiretap on (503)531-1409 listening for more evidence of thought crimes.
Do not, understand do not, apprehend the perp if he is alone; he is to be apprehended with an oriental female, approx 5'5" 110 lbs, delicate facial features and slight of build.
Both are to be taken out to the stronghold outside of town where the perp is to be bound and repeatedly subjected to blunt trauma until he no longer responds to that sort of stimulus. He is then to be left alone and the female bound and brutally gang raped by the senior black officers while he is forced to watch and listen. After that please pour one liter of methanol over the perp and light him on fire - a liter ought to be enough to burn the fatty solids out from under the epidermis across 90+ percent of his body. Video tape this event and save it for use as a psychological torture for the female. If he survives, proceed with blunt trauna to the head and torso until dead.
Retain the female, keeping her prisoner and having her brutally gang raped by the black officers and beaten daily for four weeks, sever both of her achilles tendons and sever the tendons on the back of her hands rendering her phalanges inoperative and a complete invalid. During the nights of these four weeks replay the video tape of Jason being burned alive, volume turned up to insure his screames are forever imprinted in her nightmares. Once she is verifiably pregnant with the baby of her rapists wrap her up in a blanket and dump her in town where she will be found and receive medical attention - the intent is not to kill her, but to merely destroy her life after letting her know that if Jason had simply been nice when given the opportunity, it wouldn't have happened, and her mulatto baby will be a lifelong reminder of the event.
-:-
Just kidding Jason.
Jason, I understand your stance perfectly. You like to stir the bees nest and talk smack in forums. You admittedly take an unpopular stance merely for the sake of argument, "testing ideas and debate strategies." You lash out with personal attacks without really considering that there is a person on each end of this connection. I reached out, asked nicely - but you seem to get some sort of excitement that comes from going outside the digital realm, dragging real life into it. You are not Xerithane (13482), you are Jason Shirley - a real live person with feelings, a nice cushy consulting job in Oregon hacking on Unix machines (hacking = the original definition, not the media bastardized definition) and enjoy providing your girlfriend with the nicer things in life.
Insults and laughing at people is a perfectly valid "debate strategy" inasmuch as lighting a man on fire is a perfectly valid "debate strategy" - but neither is particularly appealing to me right now. You propose that copyright infringement can be interpreted as stealing, I suggest that both are explicitly described on the lawbooks and are two entirely different things. We can discuss that like two professionals in this industry without bringing my parents, the Star Wars Kid, or your girlfriend into the discussion - can't we?
I tell you what, next time I see you I am going to reach out as my way of reconciliation, shake your hand and invite you out to lunch or out for a drink. We don't have to discuss copyright laws because we already agree to disagree on the matter. I won't even bring it up. I will just be me in real life, not my
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
What's sad is if someone does do one of the things you or i mentioned, our posts could be investigated as an "obvious lead."
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Has God given them special rights so they can remain profitable forever? Nonsense. With advances of technology, certain things won't be profitable anymore. And one of these things, is earning money with copies of software. That is, the video, or audio content which is simply a form of data.
Absurd patents granted for 2 centuries are also halting progress to the point of stagnation in a sea of patents. Have you seen recently the Knoppix page? How and when, the people of europe was consulted to make such a decision? Why the so called "representatives" are making decisions while turning their back to the people who put them in there? This must come to a stop.
Either they win and instate a police state world where everyone must be a subject of corporations (Fascism) and then a major portion will be forced into outlaws, or we, the people, get our voice heard and declare them with their stupid laws obsolete. I am sure not all the countries of the world will accept Washington's views, even with all their strong influence.
In my country IP concerning medicine is officialy ignored. National health has priority over the greed of foreign industries. I think Brazil and some country in Africa also proceeded like this. Of course, many foreigners also come to our tropical jungle to steal the knowledge of our natives regarding healing properties of herbs or other plants and they go back to their home countries and then patent their drugs as it was their property. Its an absurd pillage of the wealthy against the poor, and our people is not tolerating this any longer.
In practice, no one respects any copyright here either. 80% of the software used here is not "legit". Who cares? You can't enforce property laws on "fictional objects". You can not equate stealing (as RIAA loves to) with copyright infrigment. When you steal, a physical object is removed. When you copy, the source remains unaltered. How then, can you call people making copies "Thieves, Pirates, etc" when there is not any murdering, violence or lost of REAL property involved? Its a NONSENSE invented by THOSE WITH POWER so they can maintain their BUSINESS.
Well, i say, THEY HAVE TO GO, NOT US. They can eat their IP and copyrights and patents and scream bloody murder pirates till they exhaust in desperation, WE DON'T CARE. "Copyright infrigment" will NOT STOP, EVER.
Unless they realize this and adapt to the new era, they don't deserve any consideration.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
In this thread, some of you have spoken about a Fight against the recording industry. Some of you have discussed your personal rights and freedoms, misuse of the law, RICO statutes, the definition of a copy, fair use, and a variety of other viable topics, including the issue of legal vs illegal, right vs. wrong. Then there are those who offer ways around the law, ways to still share music and avoid the RIAA.
You can all argue these points indefinitely, which is exactly what the RIAA wants. They have broken the war into so many fronts, many of which are facades, in order to defuse the opposition and spread it over so many topics and skirmishes. It also allows them to focus on their main goal while everyone else tries to figure out the most important battle to fight.
There is only one way to kill the RIAA -- give them exactly what they've been asking for. But most Americans' personal credo of "I want more and I want it now!" stands directly in the way of the simple path to the end of this foreign terrorist organization which is firmly entrenched in our government.
Pull the plug.
Stop buying new music from RIAA labels. Stop sharing their music. Stop downloading it. Turn off the radio. Whenever a band shows up on TV, change the channel. Stay out of the record stores.
Do this and it will be over in a few months. You won't even know when new releases come out, so you'll have no reason to go looking for them, no reason to buy, no reason to even be interested.
They will lose the correlation between file sharing and CD sales, especially if sales and sharing drop significantly in tandem. It deflates all of their arguments while achieving the true goal of removing their ability to pay for litigation, which ain't cheap.
Drain their funds. Stop feeding their legal fund and motive. Pull the plug.
I figure that I already have enough music, legally purchased and in my possession, to listen to for another 4 decades, if necessary. I know I will never buy another CD as long as the RIAA continues to be allowed to monopolize the market for recorded music and engage in activities which should certainly be considered as terrorism.
No matter how they change the law, twist the law, distort the law and control the government, no one can force me to spend my money on, or even listen to, music released by the RIAA labels.
I stopped funding the RIAA more than a year ago. Were I inclined to support an artist, I would NOT buy their CD (provided I was even aware that one existed) but send them money via www.musiclink.com, which takes the labels out of the loop.
Pull the Plug and the Music Cartel dies.