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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."
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?
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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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.
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"
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.
It's really going to take grass roots effort to remove this RIAA threat. It's the only way to really combat a monetarily powerful organization.
Speaking of grassroots, the Dean Campaign should take note of folks distrust of the RIAA. If they promise to do something about the RIAA, then they'll probably wind up with a few thousand more votes than they may have had. If nothing else, bringing this up in a fair political manner about it might put a stop to some of this insanity.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
But I'm not entirely sure that bankrupting someone is a reasonable punishment in all instances.
I'm fed up with the pro-infringement people who will make any excuses they can to avoid paying artists for the work they've done, work the artists have done believing that, as the law says, people will pay in some way for using that work. Part of me is glad they're finally getting slapped.
But at the same time, it's undeniable that current copyright law is extreme, and needs to be liberalised with specific rights given to content users; that it is extreme in certain areas (I can't watch a DVD *I* bought under Linux? I can't convert it to a different format? I can't back it up?) unfortunately goes some way to discrediting copyright in others, to the point that people seem to be more willing to engage in the blatent ripping off of artists.
Thousands of dollars in fines per download is also doing nothing to improve the credibility of copyright law. It just promotes an "us vs them" attitude, which is very obvious in the average Slashdotter's blind, uncompromising, irrational, hatred of content producers.
Things have to change.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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?
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?
You're oversimplifying the situation. I'm about 40 and stopped buying music in about 1993. Ironically once alternative music broke into the mainstream, it became impossible to hear new good music.
/. mentioned the Japanese duo Puffy in their signature. I downloaded some songs, fell in love, and bought one of their CDs that night. Here's another example, I hear some Junior Brown in a Spongebob episode, download some of his stuff, and buy his first CD about a week later.
However, I started buying music again after Napster came out. Suddenly, I was exposed to tons of music that never made its way to radio.
Whenever I hear about new music, I download a few samples, and buy what I like. I went from buying no music to about three CDs a month. Here's a great example, someone at
Exactly how does me buying MORE music justify me also paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil fees and being placed in jail with murders?! Either I'm crazy or the law needs to be changed.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
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.
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!
I already wrote about this in another thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77293&cid=6876 918
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.