Slashdot Mirror
Taking a Closer Look at the P2P Subpoenas
An anonymous reader writes "Cnet is reporting a federal appeals court on Tuesday scrutinized the details of a 1998 copyright law, wondering whether it permits the wide-scale unmasking of alleged peer-to-peer pirates by the music industry." The issue, of course, is the constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena process which is among the more evil components of the often-criticized law.
Judges are political appointees. If the political parties are paid off by RIAA, MPAA, etc the rulings will be in favour of the RIAA and MPAA. There are a lot of good judges out there, but $$$$ unfortunately wins
Scott McIntosh, an appellate lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department, assured the court that "we don't think the constitutional questions are substantial ones."
That sounds extremely accurate to the RIAA's view. Nobody has rights, but they have copyrights!
how many of us in the pre-internet days went to the library to photo copy a text book for a paper and then after the paper was done threw out all the copies?
is this copyright infringement???? probably.
so drawing from this it seems like the RIAA is only interested in short term profit. i mean i use kazaa and i can never find a good selection of Carol King or Arthra Franklin songs. does the RIAA itself feel that their artist have no long term value????
Still looking to find a legal loophole to avoid being penalized for knowingly breaking the law. Sad.
That someone knowingly breaks an unjust law imparts it no justice.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
What their tying to do is (a) use an aggressive interpretation of a new law to their advantage while (b) circumventing standard legal procedure for filing of civil suits.
Throw in the fact that there is a related article on cnet about how the RIAA is claiming that P2P networks are "rife with child porn" in order to make P2P seem like more of the devil's work.
Not that I pirate or condone piracy, but I'll never understand why:
If I record a song/tv show off the radio or TV, then let a friend borrow and copy it, why this is illegal.
This friend could've recorded the song/tv show off the radio/tv themselves.
I suppose you could make an argument over different markets, but lets face it. For pretty much all the popular songs floating around p2p these days, they pretty much play in every market, as every market has a "popular" radio station. All probably owned by ClearChannel too.
I know people have been making arguments about perfect copies and such. But MP3s are lossy. And many of the songs are floating on P2P before the CDs are even released, so they were probably recorded off the radio anyways. Besides, I heard that most of the MP3s floating around P2P are only 128kbit/sec recordings anyways...
The judges are not bothering to consider whether the DMCA is constitional, nor if the way it is being abused is constitional, but whether or not it was intended to be used the way it is - this is NOT a good sign. It isn't going to help on the larger issue, but maybe it'll clean up the smaller one.
Wow, judges doing their job? Handing down rulings based on law and precedent, rather than trying to legislate from the bench based on politics and personal agendas?
I'm not shocked. These are District of Columbia judges, not Californias.
Ginsberg doesn't seem to understand the difference in usability for the average user between an FTP site and a P2P file sharing network. Not that his comments are invalid, but certainly the scope is very different. How do we educate our judicial system?
He understands it perfectly. FTP is not the super-hard 1337 h4x0r tool you think it is. It's dead simple.
P2P is just FTP with a centralized list/searching tool.
Main thing I think we need to remind our congressman about - the RIAA is NOT a law enforcement agency, and should be slapped the hell down if they think they can step into that role.
What does that have to do with anything? The RIAA like anyone else has the right to sue in civil court to resolve grievances. This has nothing to do with criminal law enforcement. There's a big difference between a subpeona and a warrant, or a civil judgement and a fine.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I've written thousands of lines of code and I've never seen one cent in royalty payments. I've always been paid for the code I could write, not for the code I've written. I don't see any value in the notion of intellectual property at all. It's a dumb idea.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
Forcing the RIAA to first file "John Doe lawsuits" does not make the burden of identifying users "much more complicated." It may, however, make it initially more expensive.
As stated in the linked article, the RIAA contends that the DMCA allows "copyright holders to glean the identity of alleged infringers without filing a lawsuit first." As also stated in the article, Judge John Roberts, one of the judges of the three judge appellate panel, questioned that interpretation.
If the RIAA is incorrect, and it is forced to first file "John Doe" lawsuits, it will initially be more expensive in that they may have to pay a filing fee for each lawsuit. (It may be possible for them to file a single lawsuit in each jurisdiction where each such suit names numerous "John Doe" defendants. However, in some jurisdictions they may have to pay more for a large, multi-defendant suit.) Once the "John Doe" lawsuits are filed, the RIAA can subpoena the relevant ISPs to identify the "John Doe" defendants. It is, for an entity as well-funded as the RIAA, at most a relatively minor procedure hurdle.
The reason why I say forcing the RIAA to first file "John Doe" lawsuits may only be "initially" more expensive is that in many cases the RIAA would have to file a lawsuit anyway -- i.e., in every case where pre-lawsuit subpoena to idenfity the downloader did not lead to a pre-lawsuit settlement.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Yes. It's called a public library, and it's been one of the strengths of American society ever since Ben Franklin instituted the first one.