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RIAA Sues the Wrong Person
Cildar writes "In the 'oops' category, the RIAA was forced to withdraw its suit against a 66 year old computer neophyte (read Apple User for god's sake) when they discovered she thought 'Kazaa' was a magician playing at local kids' birthday parties. The story is as reported in the Boston Globe." Update: 09/24 15:19 GMT by T : Note, the magician crack is a joke ;)
check out cnn article on this http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/09/24/kazaa.s ues.ap/index.html
That's super funny; only one problem. It doesn't seem to mention the magician thing anywhere in the linked article.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Read the article again. It was the plaintiff's lawyers that dropped the suit, not a judge.
</pedant>
However, for some of us, the whole purpose of open source licenses is as a weapon against copyright. RMS talks about the rationalization that it was okay to use copyright, which he did not agree with, as a means to fight against copyright. Hence, copyleft.
It's interesting reading, even if you don't agree.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Please note that the judge did not dismiss this case, the RIAA withdrew it.
Unlike criminal cases where a judge is involved from the very first, civil cases, i.e. mere private squabbles over money, aren't State issues. It is often months after a filing before the parties have so much as a priliminary hearing and are strongly encouraged by the system to settle things amongst themselves long before that date.
If someone breaks your window and you sue them to recover damages, then they come to you and say "Hey, what gives? Why don't I just fix your damned window?," and you say ok, then there is no longer any issue of law to be settled.
You go down to the courthouse and say, "Ummmmmm, nevermind," and it's over.
No judge.
The RIAA withdrew its complaint (while reserving the right to refile. Nice guys).
KFG
To be exact, contracts would still be in force. So someone who signed to keep the code secret could still be sued.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
dismiss with prejudice means the issue is dropped or settled and can never be reopened. It's usually in the defendants best interests to have this.
dismiss without prejudice means they can come back and reopen the suit at any time assuming they have evidence or reason to.
The RIAA basically left an avenue open in case this 66 year old woman is actually violating copyright on her Apple with Kazaa. lol
Reverse engineering is not the same as opening source! The good idea behind the GPL is that it forces those who adapt the source to release their modifications. Can you imagine a world in which the only way to access source was through reverse compiling? Eccch.
peop;e who work for MS could release code
Abolishing copyright does not also abolish contract law, so NDAs would still be valid. And if the code covered trade secrets, it would be unusable.
To all those who say that GPL does not depend on copyright law, I say: why is GPL far more popular than the more permissive BSD license? I have never heard an effective response to this question.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
My impression of Canada on IP is that they fall in line behind the U.S. for fear of trade retaliation like higher tariffs.
I beg to differ.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
While funny, this is completely true. Here are the relevant three paragraphs from the article indicating the RIAA is ready and waiting to do exactly that:
Moreover, Ward uses a Macintosh computer at home. Kazaa runs only on Windows-based personal computers.
Beeler complained to the RIAA, demanding an apology and "dismissal with prejudice" of the lawsuit, which would prohibit future lawsuits against her. Foley Hoag, the Boston firm representing the record labels, on Friday dropped the case, but without prejudice.
"Please note, however, that we will continue our review of the issues you raised and we reserve the right to refile the complaint against Mrs. Ward if and when circumstances warrant," Colin J. Zick, the Foley Hoag lawyer, wrote to Beeler.
See, they're ready to refile at any moment against this grandmother for using Kazaa with her Mac.
The sum of $150,000 per song is based on the statutory damages allowed for willful infringement in copyright law.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If they are tracking people by their IPs. What about DSL and leased IPs? What if your lease goes to someone else and they go after that person? Am I looking at that wrong or do they find a way around that? Like a date and time or something... I dunno it all seems so dumb to me.
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
That's not the case at all. They're suing for statutory damages not lost profits. The difference is that while lost profits are actual damages, statutory damages are punative damages. Please see 18 USC Sec. 504(c)(2).
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Lots and lots of hours in court & legal fees. Plus, we're all guilty, right?
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Please read this informative article before you risk your future life and happiness - think hard if it's worth stealing a $20 CD instead of buying it!
Foley Hoag: Law Firm
Colin Zick: Lawyer at Foley Hoag
Rosen: Presumably another Lawyer at Foley Hoag
Schwartz-Nystrom: Another firm, presumably pure scum.
It was in English.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
"Even in civil cases (IMO) higher standards of proof ought to be necessary before the courts get the ball rolling."
This is the function of the priliminary hearing, for the judge to make a determination of whether the suit bears enough merit to be heard formally. (Two suits against McDonald's for making people fat have been thrown out for being without grounds at this point in the procedings)
All grievences have a right to procede at least this far. Grievences, by their very nature, require some sort of third party arbitration. In most cases this really should be done by private arrangement, since such grievences are inherently private matters, and many courts make trying to arrange such private arbitration part of the priliminary procedure.
Judges hate civil cases. They are always messy and squalid affairs that always boil down to someone's dog having pissed on someone's rose bush. (See SCO vs. IBM).
If they weren't messy and squalid they wouldn't exist in the first place.
KFG
Ummm you set your IP and MAC to one in use, but don't connect it until they drop off (shut down for the night, then go live taking the assigned connection. You need to be on the same cable segment to do it. I've not done it, but I've heard about it by someone needing to hide identity. ..FYI. I'm not connected to cable. No wire is in place to the house.
The truth shall set you free!
Um, I think they were trying to make the point that she has an Apple as Kazaa doesn't run on Apple, per TFA.
Let's read the comment again:
In the 'oops' category, the RIAA was forced to withdraw its suit against a 66 year old computer neophyte (read Apple User for god's sake) when they discovered she thought 'Kazaa' was a magician playing at local kids' birthday parties.
It is quite clear that neophyte is being equated to Apple user and the comment is meant to be read as "She's obviously clueless about computers, after all, she's an Apple User. And she thinks Kazaa is a magician. What a moron!" In other words, the person who submitted the article was just being a jackass and doesn't deserve to be defended. Her computer's ability to run the software was never brought up; instead, she was portrayed as too clueless to use it. And since there are Kazaa clients available for Macs, the point about her not being able to run it is moot.
The could currently do this with the BSD license but haven't (yet :))..
Yes they have.
The TCP/IP stack for Windows 9x, and I believe Windows NT also, came from BSD. They certainly don't like to admit it, but there are certain fingerprinting techniques that show that it is true.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Apple's WiFi solution (airport) is "falling-off-a-log" easy. If you've already got a cable modem/broadband setup, you pretty much just plug it in. The software included walks you through configuring the network. Its much easier than installing a home based router, for instance. Since every mac since the original iBook (in 1999) has had built-in wi-fi options, its not unusual for her to be running a wireless network.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Interesting story at CNN (rejected by Little Timmy): Kazaa just sued RAII for copyright infringment... CNN,
mlnet, poisoned, and iSwipe are all very functional Mac OS X Kazaa clients.
What is more disturbing is that the RIAA stated that IPs are unique identifies. Apparently they never heard of dial-up. In fact even Comcast states that your IP address is not unique (so does Qwest and MSN DSL server). So their argument that somebody screwed up on Comcast part is wrong. It's that their whole way of doing this is completly flawed to begin with.
If they are going on that fact why not have everybody spoof the RIAA IPs and have them suing themselves. Note: I am not recommending doing this just making a point.
That 1 or 0 on the disk isn't really a 1 or 0...
.95, likewise, a .05 would still be a 0(of course, these are just made up values.)
When you go from a 0 to a 1, it may be more like
The charge for each bit is not precise, just in a range. You can recover data back (with more sensitive read heads than a normal hard drive has) about 7 'layers' of writes deep... It's extremely expensive. See the GNU shred utility for ways of making sure that data is really gone, I think the docs for it have some of the reasons why in them as well.
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
uhh guys, there are kazza clients for mac, sigh
:P
macs can do anything my POS xpmachine can do
multi-net
http://www.multinetx.com/MnX/
mlmac
http://www.abyssoft.com/software/mlmac/
among other programs i know exist, (my father uses some obscure one)
still someone useing wi-fi could have been leaching, My sister uses someone elses wi-fi node in her DC apartment, and even if they did run WEP, i would teach her how to break it in a couple hours so there is nothing they can do there.
(i have agreements with neighbors to leach my bandwidth, so i can claim ISP safe harbor clause if i agree to remove material under the DMCA)
could have been ip hijacking, could have been a open proxie a l33t haxor d00d setup
who knows
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come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
This is interesting. I hadn't really thought about it either. Could I create a piece of software called "MILF Hunter" that would interpret a JPEG to let you know if it contains a MILF? Can I copyright this and put it out for sale at $200 a pop and then start subponeaing people that have files matching "MILF Hunter" in their Kazaa search results?
That's a silly scenario; as nobody would really benefit from it. However, here's another one:
Lets say the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security Dept, or whoever hires an outsider to create a copyrighted pro-revolution/2nd ammendment video. Lets say this gets "leaked" to the P2P networks and people start downloading it that agree with such views. What's to stop this outsider from subponeaing ISPs for personal information about people that have this song in their shared directories and fining them back to the stoneage with trumped up charges? Once they're fined and convicted there's a handy little public record for the federal government to use in tracking down and keeping tabs on people that they don't neccessarily like.
Far fetched? Yes. But there's a darned good reason that the US government was setup in a manner that seperated powers of government into three seperate branches. The judges do not create laws (well, they do now), the executive branch does not sentence people (they do now -- think military courts over "national threat" issues), and the legislature is bound by the US Constituion from enacting laws that would violate our God Given Rights. I remember something nestled into the constituion about congress being told that they "shall not infringe" on our right to keep and bear arms. Why the hell aren't people supporting HR 2038 being brought to treason?
Let's face it. The average American with their 2.5 kids and a steady job are letting their government walk right over them and they never bat an eye. The average citizen couldn't tell you who wrote the Declartion of Independence or what the first 3 words of the Constitution are. The 10th ammendment has probably never ever entered into their thought process when mulling over political decisions.
If people don't start standing up for their God Given Rights that are protected by the highest law of the land we're headed for trouble. The govermnet does not grant you "permission" to Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness. They are inalienable rights that cannot be taken from you protected by law.
Due process and trial by jury are NOT privledges. They are your rights. They are being stomped on and it's time to get pissed off about it and let your fellow man hear your words and take heed before things get any worse. Get the word out, get the people to start thinking for themselves again, and get our government out of our day to day lives and back into the little box of control we call the Constituion. Do that and this DMCA nonsense will disappear.
While we're at it, lets try and squash this bipartisan bullcrap too? If you feel the need to have to pick between two parties lets just make it Libertarian and Strong Libertarian, OK?