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RIAA Sues 12-Year Old Girl
tcp100 noted an article running at fox about
The RIAA suing a 12 Year Old girl: "'I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,' Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother."
You can tell a lot about the RIAA based on the fact that they are willing to pick on a 12 year old girl!
At least pick a fight with someone CLOSE to your own size.
That's just one more would-have-been future customer that how hates the RIAA and won't be buying their CDs when she has money.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The New York City papers are all over this -- it's on the cover of both the Post and the Daily News. They skew really sympathetically towards the girl and her family, who apparently were paying $29.95 a month for Kazaa "service", and apparently thought there were thereby legit.
This is really going to help the cause against the RIAA's draconian retributive lawsuits, as it will appeal to the hearts of the populace at large. Bad PR, RIAA, baaaaad PR.
:wq
Your grain of salt for the article:
Fox is one of the four motion picture studios in the MPAA that do not share revenue with a major U.S. record label. (The others are Disney, MGM, and Paramount.) Anything that makes the RIAA look like the bad guy benefits Fox indirectly, as every dollar spent on recorded music is a dollar not spent on a Fox movie.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ok so this girl could now get sued for $150000 a song. In reallity unlikely, but just who is going to get the benefits of this cash windfall.
Will it be the artist that has been "ripped off"?
will it bollocks, bet your ass that all the money goes right back into RIAA profits, to push the next clone boy band through their one hit of fame and (RIAA's) fortune.
CJC
If they're suing the person responsible for the internet connection, how did they come up with the girl's name?
The RIAA fully realize that they are the 'bad guy' and that they are seen as such by the eyes of the world. They have one goal in mind, and one goal only--protect their way of business and revenue stream at any cost.
I agree this looks really bad on the RIAA (I don't remember minors being targetted before), but those who think this spate of publicity is going to stop them are dead wrong. They've already shown that they're willing to go to any length to kill the file-sharing phenomenon.
I can see the outcome of this case right now: The RIAA will probably have to respond to the negative publicity and probably drop the suit against the twelve-year-old girl. The rest of the cases will go on as planned. One poor target isn't going to be the downfall of their enforcement operations.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
1. "ignorance of the law" is no excuse
2. I suppose the girl might have been lying about not beiing aware of breaking of the law.
Ignoring points 1. and 2. for the moment, one of the main issues with file sharing is concern that people are losing track of what "intellectual property" is. I don't mean this as a "KaZaA is evil" or "Damn the RIAA!" rant, just that this seems like very concrete proof that we have reached the stage of the game where some people who are trading the files are unaware that they are doing anything wrong. (And please don't respond "I'm only hurting an evil corporation so it's okay." I mean entirely unaware of violation.)
So if you are totally, totally aware of wrongdoing, does 2. apply?
Pfah. I was trying to come up with some grand conclusion for my brilliant point above, but I really can't. At best, it's proof a sea-change in the concept of intellectual property, but it would sound a tad pretentious to make such a claim. And filesharing advocates have already been making it for years.
It wasn't me, it was the one-armed
Anyone remember the burning times? Nothing like staking out 12 year old girls. RIAA is showing their true colors, who would have ever figured they were so petty and money-hungry as to go after little people who really don't even hurt the industry??
"Sheep just follow the easiest path and run from scary noises and intimidating creatures." - Me
This is like an early Christmas present for RIAA detractors. Their lawsuit-by-scattergun approach has caught the worst target possible: A 12-year-old honor student who had no idea she was doing anything wrong ("But we were paying for it!"). What a PR nightmare.
Too bad it won't last. This particular case will get resolved as quickly and quietly as possible. You'll be able to feel the breeze from the RIAA quickly brushing it under the rug. Or, worse, if they're smart they will dismiss all charges (and give little Brianna lots of free music) in exchange for her too-cute 200-word essay on "Why Filesharing Is Wrong".
The EFF and other RIAA opponents could get heavy mileage out of this case if they tried, but I fear they just aren't coordinated enough to counter the RIAA's spin.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
They paid a $30 service fee, leading them to believe it was ok. This isn't about not knowing the law, this is about Kazaa leading them to believe that by sending them money, they'd be legal. That's the real travesty here.
The family paid the money, they just paid the wrong people.
----------
Something cleverFirst off, let me say... I do think the RIAA are a bunch of right bastards! That said, this article is a friggin joke, written with the intention of pulling at the heart strings.
First off... they wouldnt be sueing a 9 year old girl... they would be sueing her mother. Her mother got dupped into paying for the Kazaa service, her mother owned the service, and her mother is the childs legal guardian. The article should read "RIAA suing the mother of a 12 year old girl". Also, the article says "we" not "she"... if the mother listened to the music, and from the sounds of the article, she was active in downloading it... she is the guilty one.
"It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres. "This is a 12-year-old girl, for crying out loud."
Ummmm... yes... it was like you were doing something illegal. Its called theft.
Like I said, im not pro- RIAA, I think there a pack of dinks... but I hate journalistic drivel like this. Who gives a shit that mommy is an honour student? That she was helping there son with homework when they got the notice... Its all designed to villify the RIAA and deflect that fact, that yes, this household was infact commiting a crime.
Really... do you have to frame the case in the way they did to vilify the RIAA? Is there not already enough hatred of them already?
Oh well, >shrug I hope the average reader is smart enough to see through the emotional fluff of this article, although somehow, I doubt it.
There is still the principle of First Sale that the RIAA has not demonstrated has been violated. Digital duplication is still a bit murky in the legal tradition. They are also applying a law designed to snare the real pirates, makers of bootleg CD's, to individual users. And of course, there is the ever present Fair Use provision. You also have the issue that the RIAA does not have any rights to the music in question. Those rights belong to the individual labels.
None of these matters have been tested in a court of law. The RIAA strategy was to trick these folks into settleing, because none had the legal means to mount an appeal.
However the case turns out, I for one am declaring Shenangans on the RIAA.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The article states that the girl (and I assume her mother) set up an account with Kazaa for their music download service. Couldn't they then say they were mislead by the service? Of course Kazaa probably has its back covered by some fine print. "...service shall not be used in the exchange of illegal software or files..." some such.
Kazaa seems to be an anachronism held over from the late '90s: all venture capital, free product, and all Underpants Gnomes three step plan to Profit!!!
What is music when you despise all sound?
At the end, I foresee this low-income-single-parent family will be offered the following deal:
It's not like they care about their image at this point... I'd think it would be a pretty effective move (and very little cost, other than air-time)Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
The real need here is education. I have a coworker who buys CDs every week; I let her know that the people making and selling them them would sue her, have already called her a liar and a thief, and that she is supporting an industry that treats its artists in a similar manner to her working for a year and getting paid $100 dollars.
Sadly, our conversation was not preserved for posterity, but the end result was disappointing (not that I expected a different outcome).
Her CD purchases are continuing unabated because she, like most other Americans, *don't care* about things outside their paycheck every two weeks, what's going to happen on Big Brother 12, and how to protect their children from the 'evil world' without leaving the comfort of their reclining fat-cradles.
I don't buy CDs, and haven't for almost 10 years. I can't even give price as a reason, as I could get a wide variety for $5 (due to where my wife works - a subsidiary of the Big 5). I don't trade RIAA music, because I make my own.
Read my Journal and buy my non-RIAA CD you pirating whores. Put your money where your mouth is. Or go and tell someone why they shouldn't buy CDs. Educate the mouth-breathers, because in the end, when they are forced to struggle out from their comfy chairs, cheese-fed Americans can still fight for you.
It's not just the children, they're also apparently suing a 71 year old grandfather:
Here is a more important legal question. Can non-emancipated minors assume debt? I don't think so, this is why banks won't issue credit cards or loans to minors without an additional signature from an adult. Even if RIA successfully sues this girl, she won't have to and cannot be made to pay. The lawsuit against her is completely stupid.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Setup or no, when a law is passed that automatically defaults the majority of citizens as being criminals, there's something wrong with the law, not the people.
Depends on how you define citizens. If by citizens you mean those that can vote, then what happens when they lose their right to vote after a criminal trial? I guess they aren't citizens.
maybe slave labor. My favorite is all the things that require a criminal background check. They won't even be able to get an apartment without lying.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Well, I am waiting for them to sue someone who really matters, like Bush or his daughters, or heck even the Pope would be entertaining
You know, someone with a billion dollars to fight back. If they are truly doing blind suing they should hit one of those sooner or later, and if they don't, that says something about this "blind suing" that they claim to be doing.
Suing blindly leads to uncomfortable lawsuits.
~ kjrose
but, whether its the US or UK, when its a civil suit it just gets transferred to the parents.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
What new law was passed that criminalized this behavior? Wasn't copyright infringement been illegal long before file sharing became popular?
The problem here is not new laws outlawing a common behavior, it is the common acceptance that breaking the law is OK. I worry about this, now that I have a kid - I am not sure how to explain to him that breaking some laws is OK but not others, that stealing is OK as long as you are only hurting some big faceless entity that charges too much for their stuff anyway.
I don't agree with the RIAA's tactics, I think they are going overboard, but I have chosen to respond by boycotting albums on record labels that are members of the RIAA. A specific band's music is not essential to my health and well-being, and there is plenty of music out there that is not owned by RIAA companies - and those companies I give my dollars to.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Where are the musicians in all of this?
Frankly, I'm appalled that more *musicians* haven't spoken up and said, okay, we don't want you stealing our files -- but, for fuck's sake, I don't to part of anything or any entity that sues 12 year olds and 71 year olds.
Me, I'm a writer, not a musician, but if I heard that 12 year olds were being sued by my publisher, I'd be pissed off, appalled, and shocked -- at my publisher, not at the 12 year old.
Of course, I want to paid for my work. But I don't want my work to used as a political leverage for fat cats to get even fatter. The musicians are being used and taken advantage of by the RIAA. They're pawns, and they have a moral -- yes, I said it: "moral" -- responsibility to speak up and tell the RIAA to back the fuck off the fans.
I believe this is another approach on the part of the RIAA to deal with the Kazaa service. sinec they couldn't get Kazaa shut down like they did Napster, they are trying to scare people away from subscribing to the service. I think they picked this girl deliberately.
I know there are a number of organizations who "sell" free software such as Kazaa for a one off or monthly fee. I wonder if they have left themselves liable for misleading the public (claiming for the fee, they provide free music etc)?
I for one would like to see them go down.
I know, I know... I need to learn a little English.
I don't understand what they are trying to accomplish by charging so much per song ($150,000?). Who in their right mind has that sort of money. They are counting on an out of court settlement, anything else would bankrupt the common person.
At this rate, I might as well start breaking into cars and stealing CDs. If I got caught, I'm sure the fine would be no where near $150,000 dollars.
You would think having people pay for the songs they have ($1 or 2 dollars per song), then sign some "promise not to file share again" form would be most beneficial.
We can blame Fox all we want but they are really the only ones who could do an article like this. Who else:
CNN - Owned by AOL Time Warner (Warner Music, etc.).
MSNBC - Joint Venture with Microsoft (not about to attacked RIAA).
ABC News - Owned by Disney (we know how they feel about Copyrights).
CBS News - Owned by Viacom (also owns MTV)
Fox, as far as I can tell, is the only one not totally in bed with the RIAA and if there is anybody who can piss them off and get away with it it is Rupert Murdoch.
Here in Denmark afaik it woulndt be the girl getting sued - APG (the danish version of RIAA) targets the owner of the connection (which is also a fun legal question - but nobody has yet to challenge it in court since APG seems to back off if you tell em to fsck off) and a kid could never get ADSL or something like that since it requires a contract and shes a minor.
In this case, the mother paid $30 to allow her daughter to download music on kazaa. Sounds like her mother is going to take the brunt of the punishment.
-dk
Today's civil tort system serves the role that the machine gun-toting Pinkerton guards served during the Gilded Age - crushing profit-threatening dissent . I don't see how anyone could think otherwise. If suing someone who is not particularly wealthy is guaranteed to bankrupt them, I simply cannot understand how anyone has any respect remaining for the civil tort system. One thing that an honorable person can do to fight this practice is, if serving on a jury in a tort case, simply refuse to vote in favor of any corporate plaintiff, no matter what the evidence, i.e. nullify. On the scientific side of the question, contribute to research on anonymous/encrypted communications that could make electronic censorship irrelevant, no matter how fanatical or well-funded the censors are.
Many of the posts so far seem to be saying that someone so young should not be responsible for these actions. I wonder what we would say if she were responsible for Blaster?
"Asked if the association knew Brianna was 12 when it decided to sue her, Weiss answered, 'We don't have any personal information on any of the individuals.'" Sure, no personal information other than your name, address, ISP, music tastes, etc.
As of April 21, 2000, some commercial Web sites will be required to obtain parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under the age of 13. The FTC called the rule "a definitive move" that "puts parents in control over the information collected from their children online."
So when did this parent give the P2P people the right to disclose the personal informaion about her child to the RIAA?
Didn't the RIAA break the law by collecting this information?
Another link about this law.
What new law was passed that criminalized this behavior?
Copyright infringement is a civil matter. The DMCA simply makes it alot easier to harass people for alleged infringements.
Wasn't copyright infringement been illegal long before file sharing became popular?
The DMCA has removed a fair amount of the due process necessary to prosecute an infringement claim. Of course, the RIAA would have probably done what they're doing even without the new laws, but there's no reason to make their job easier at our expense.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Although it *does* beg the question: if a 12 year can't assume debt, then how exactly did they get her name in the first place?
...
...)
Her mom shoulda signed up with the ISP, no? So her mom is the one paying the ISP bill.
And her mom is probably the one that registered Kazaa.
And if the RIAA claims they don't know any personal details about the people they're suing -- then how did they get the name of the girl?
Unless her mom did something weird like register a bunch of credit cards in her daughter's name in order to get credit. But, nah, no one would do that
(Just curious
"As the law stands, she IS doing something illegal and the law is (pseudo) blind to age."
How did you get insightful from that comment?
The law for minors is _completely_ different than that of adults because of the relative difference in terms of knowledge of right and wrong.
People have already pointed out that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but does anyone actually know the law that isn't a lawyer?
Does everyone consult when they do everything?
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
So, if downloading a song from a modulated electromagnetic wave to a magnetic tape is not illegal, why is downloading a song from a network of computers to a magnetic storage medium illegal. Seems about the same to me.
The article quotes the girl's mother as saying "There's a lot of music there, but we just listen to it and let it go"
The defense arguments will be interesting when they undoubtably say the clients didn't have the technical knowledge to understand that "download and listen" really means "download and provide." It's possible that users deleting the file transfer log line in Kaaza (erm, not that I know what that is or have ever seen it before) may have assumed the file was gone too. But lo, the hundreds of songs they "just listened to" were saved and now available for mass download from their machine by the whole world.
Sheesh this is going to be fun!
I wonder if this could end up hurting iTunes. Little Jimmy asks his Dad for an iTunes subscription for christmas, and Dad says no. He read in the paper that downloading music off the internet was illegal. This could really put a damper on legitimate downloading services.
Now imagine for a moment that you're the 14 year old child living in that house, with a comptuer in your room that's hooked into the home network. Or heck, even an 19 year old, on break from college. Yep, that child just might have kazaa. Oddly enough, man wealthy people don't give their kids piles of money, some of them want their children to actually earn a respectable living. Can you imagine that?
From the EFF Website:
In other words, if you ADMIT GUILT, while you may be sparing yourself the wrath of the Rabidly Insane Assholes' Association, there's nothing to stop individual record companies, or individual bands (i.e. Metallica) from suing you.
But Maaa! Everyone else has a
If being financially successful means spending most of your waking day wrapped up in work, who needs it? I'd rather make less money and have time to do worthy things like playing with my daughter, or reading Slashdot...
He does seem to have alot of time on his hands. I believe last i heard, he has spent over 53% of his time in office on vacation.
Downloading copyrighted material IS illegal, and I doubt you'll catch any higher ups doing it
I know someone who's father is the president for a very very very large IT corporation, and he's got 30gigs of mp3s available for anyone to sift through at all hours of the day. Although his father might care about this, he certainly doesn't.
Higher ups tend to have more money to spend.
Yes, but they can be just as lazy as those who aren't as rich, and it's a hell of a lot easier downloading the latest single off Kazaa than it is to walk into the store and buy the album. And did it ever occure to you that rich people might be rich because they don't like to throw money away, are thrifty, or know a good deal when they see one?
Higher ups probably don't have the knowledge to get on a P2P network, or don't care enough,
Only a fool would think someone richer is either dumber or more ignorant than they are. <sarcasm>Yeah, they probably don't even know what the internet is and still send birthday wishes via telegram.</sarcasm>
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Slightly off topic, but I agree with you on this. Why doesn't anyone share ISO images of audio CD's? You could make the ISO, then gzip it and share that. The recipient would simply unzip it and burn the image. Your sound quality would be perfect, not like MP3, and it's a lot more convenient than searching for the song list then all the songs. I guess the compression wouldn't be anywhere near as good as MP3, though.
Note that CNN.com (RIAA member Time Warner) ran the story about the 261 lawsuits in the top spot _all_ day long yesterday, despite a fairly busy news day with Dubyuh's speech and the Palestine situation.
Today, no mention of the targeted 12 year old girl on either CNN.com or ABCnews.com (RIAA member Disney).
CBSnews.com (now expanding their holdings to include Universal) is running the 12 year old girl story in the number two position today.
Freedom of the press!! Yay!!!
Rich people are cheap, if they weren't cheap, they wouldn't be rich. This is more likely how it would go.
To Mr. Billionaire,
We sincerely appreciate your continued investments in our MegaMultiNational Record Company. As an expression of our thanks we are sending you a copy of every album in our vault, once again, enjoy the music and please don't sell our stock as it will trade at $2.00 tomarrow if you do.
Sincerely,
Greedy Record Company Bastards
Well, there's at least one artist whose done filesharing. In the April 26, 2001 issue of Rolling Stone Joe Perry (guitarist for Aerosmith) says something along the lines of:s p?cf=18) but they only give you an excerpt, not the full story.
I really hope they don't shut Napster down. I've been using it to introduct my kids to rare old stuff that you can't find anywhere else.
I looked up the story online (http://www.rollingstone.com/features/cs867main.a
I still don't get where you call it 'stealing'...
Person A pays person B a lot of money to distribute an item for free to anybody and everybody is ok.
Now, person C puts a very small amount of this out, and it's called 'stealing'.
Weird if you ask me. But that's about the way it's being taken.
In this case, person A is the recording industry, person B is a radio staion, and person C is a private individual.
Lets say, for example, person C records the track from a radio broadcast. This is effectively given away free, by the recording industry. More accurately, they pay to have it taken off their hands and given for free. The caveat is that the receiver of the track will be listening at a lower quality.
If you want the nice product with good quality, and you think it's something worth hanging on to for posterity, you buy the CD.
If person C distributes this given away copy, is it stealing? Not really. It may be in breach of some contractual obligation on retransmission (depending on where you are in the world and your local laws), but it's not stealing.
Stealing from the company would be breaking into their warehouses, and taking the master copy, or some of the physical media.
Anything else is breach of copyright, or some other contractual structure.
There IS a difference.
Morally, it hits a kinda grey area. You aren't truly damaging anything (quote the 'loss of revenue all you like', but the industry has tried to maintain a luxury price tag on music, while complaining that it doesn't fit with the movement patterns for the commodity market. Duh, of course it won't. Bad economy, loss of luxury sales. Commodity items aren't as badly hit. Recent lowerings of price plans show that they're beginning to wise up on this, and finally aim at commodity market, rather than luxury, which is where they should have been positioned for years).
Also, being that they were found guilty of price fixing, and not a lot has honestly been done about it (prices still extremely high, and artificially maintained), it could equally be argued that they have been stealing from the consumer (yes, they were found guilty in a court of law of price fixing, which does actually deprive a consumer of resource, namely money).
So, morally, is it bad to steal from a thief (who believes that stealing is ok)?
Grey area. You're abiding by what someone else believes is ok, which may be less than your usual standards. But, you're simply playing by someone else's rules.
Otherwise where would we be? Say it's ok for a thief to keep their ill gotten gains?
Bear in mind also, that all this file trading/sharing is frequently used as a means of seeing if a track is worth expending your money on (it's still a luxury price tag. It's non-trivial cash for a goodly many people), for obtaining a permanent, good quality archive. Not in all cases, admittedly, but in most.
Personally, I don't know anyone (apart from a few posters here) who share to hoard, and have never gone and bought stuff they found in random browsing that they liked, and wanted a 'proper' copy of.
Again, it's morally grey. It's not a bright and shining example of being the model citizen, and it's certainly not being a thief.
I'm not saying 'You are wrong' here, just pointing out that I think your perception may be flawed in the greater debate, by omission of certain considerations.
Also, mine is also conceivably flawed by things I omit. I just believe this is a grey area. Like any tool, it can be used for many things, and sharing is not, in my opinion, stealing. It's 'try before you buy' luxury sampling.
So if I photocopy a book in its entirety and start giving out copies, does that make it OK?
Yes. Provided that book was published in the U.S. prior to 1923. In that case you are in the clear, both legally and ethically. Why is the ethics of this dependent on the age of the work in question? Your answer to that question is the basis for the answer to your next question.
At what point do we protect the rights of the producer of a good to make sure they are able to make a living off of it?
There is no such thing as a right to make a living. There is also a big difference between producing a good for sale and controlling the right of others to make similar goods (even when similar means to the point of the goods being indistinguishable). The clause in the U.S. Constitution from which copyright derives is not there to promote any right to make a living or any sort of inherent property right that attaches to the realm of the intellect, the stated purpose is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". The question really ought to be: is the law achieving its stated goal?
I do not have a signature
I've been waiting for something like this to happen. Now the parents can go after no only the RIAA, but also their ISP. The internet privacy act protects children under 13 from just this sort of thing. When the RIAA sopneaed the girl's ISP, they were not allowed to give her information up.
Looks like we finally have a case that'll make this circus stop.
Learn something new.
Well, your average 50-something CEO probably doesn't p2p, but many of their teenage sons do. In my experience, males go through a period of adolescence where they enjoy doing mischievous things. Story:
My father's boss is a single-digit millionaire. His ISP was contacted (probaby by the MPAA) because his teenage son was amassing an enormous pirated movie collection. ISP threatened to cut their service, and I haven't heard the end of that story. But it goes to show that boys with free time, a ph4t computer, and a fat pipe will be boys.
There are two issues here. The Supreme Court decision was only about the various Florida recounts, and that was what Gore said he disagrees with but accepts.
Then there's the Electoral College, which ensured that the few hundred disputed votes in Florida were so important, even though everyone accepts that Gore had about a half million more votes than Bush nationwide. This is obviously unfair, but Gore isn't the best person to criticize it. Before the election, some of his supporters were speculating happily about the opposite outcome (Bush winning the popular vote and Gore the presidency). Unfortunately, there's little chance of it being changed, as the constitution was designed specificially to be unfair in this regard. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!) The very people who benefit most from the College are those who would have to remove it.
You know, that's an interesting point, and one that was made to Benjamin Franklin when he started the first lending library. "Now who is going to pay for books?"
Well, I happen to believe that great-great-great-great-grandpa Ben had the right idea. The benefit to society that the free exchange of ideas must be weighed against the cost to society of some measure of *gasp* copyright infringement. Hence, the doctrine of "fair use".
Wanna know why the loudest defenders of file swapping are civil libertarian groups? Because this really is about civil liberties. We shouldn't have had to wait until a group of billion dollar companies sue a 12 year old girl -- for compensatory damages -- to figure it out.
-- Free Brianna
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
The real problem I have with 'Intellectual Property' as it stands today is the stifling of our economic system. As more and more ideas become owned and licensed, the barrier to entry rises in more and more industries. This has a negative effect on consumers (because prices will rise due to lack of competition) and creators (because it becomes more expensive to create, due to either license fees for ideas, or a requirement to do every stage of creation alone, without the help of the existing body of ideas/support/etc). The only beneficiaries are the owners of the ideas, which often are not even the people who created them. The narrowing of the pool of innovators acts to stifle innovation.
Sure, many of the "innovators" being prevented from entry are just cheap knock-offs (like the myriad of Harry Potter clones that are being sued now). But sometimes one of them rivals the popularity of the originals (Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, arguably, is entirely derivative of a combination of Lord of the Rings and Dune).
What does this have to do with music swapping? The RIAA and affiliates have made it much harder to get started in the music business. Radio stations are no longer independant. Music distribution is, in general, closed to non-RIAA members. The alternative to the RIAA isn't much of an alternative at all, having neither the quality, the quantity, nor the community that their affiliates possess.
This is, thankfully, improving thanks to the internet and places like mp3.com. It still has a ways to go, though. But there is another problem.
Unlike a TV set, music is not a commodity, but a creative work (well, except for the latest boy-band... they're commodities.) If I don't want to buy from the RIAA, I have no option to get songs I like. With court actions like the one I mentioned above, independant recordings of the same song become impossible.
Which leaves the "alternative" of lesser-known, non-RIAA-affiliated bands in the same category as buying a microwave oven instead of a TV. It might be a great microwave oven. But it's not a TV.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
A lot of these posts raise the question of ethics. I doubt that there is any single person that would be able to define ethics. This is one of those studies in Philosophy, along with Aesthetics, Metaphysics, etc, that raise the classic questions that cannot be answered. Even though many have tried to prove their arguments, questions such as "Is there a god?", "What is thought?" etc.. are still hotly debated. If you think about it though, generally the ethics of a society is decided by the society. In a democracy, this means that the majority decides the rules.
For me, I think that we shouldn't be basing our argument on "ethics" of pirating or copyright enfringement. I definitely think that the majority rules. Apparently there are a couple billion users of Kazaa every day. This seems to be a majority of people out there, who believe either that what they are doing is right, or they know it's "wrong" and still do it. In either case, it's the _majority_ that is deciding to download these songs and thus I think that these copyright laws are not democratic.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Fuck the RIAA. Fuck all the huge corporations who want a profit at the cost of anyone who gets in their way. Fuck you for trampling our rights, for poisoning our environment, for corrupting our courts, for buying our media, and for claiming to have the rights of an individual. Your response to online filesharing has convinced me to never buy another CD again. If it hurts the artists eventually, so be it. If it has the net effect of ridding the world of your insane monopoly on MUSIC, then it will be worth it. We will find a better way.
My question is "is there a middle ground?"
Rather, what is the solution that could satisfy both the content creators and the content consumers?
I often hear the argument that you can legally record music off the radio, so therefore downloading MP3's should be legal too. Additionally, it is argued that exposure to music is beneficial to the artist themselves, however, if you download a high quality track, what is the motivator to ever purchase that music legally?
My proposal is to make low-bitrate audio files legally tradeable. I know that I would rather have a 128+ quality file for my library, and if the limit were 96kbs, I could listen and freely trade that lower quality file.
It is a win/win situation. I am able to share/distribute/expose music I like in a format similar in quality to radio recordings, and have an upgrade path for the music that I actually enjoy and want to own.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON