Telcos Stand Against RIAA

john82 writes "In an interesting and insightful article, NetworkWorld Fusion discusses how lawyers for SBC and Verizon are fighting the RIAA's attempts to monitor their customers. As we've heard before, RIAA wants the telcos to report when users download any copyrighted material. Lawyers for SBC and Verizon are fighting back. They also claim that the RIAA is trying to grant themselves powers that are outside of even the Patriot Act. Now where have heard that before? NWFusion also points out that RIAAs handwaving, threats, tantrums have less to do with protecting the rights of musicians, than with protecting the revenue stream created by an out-of-date distribution system." In other RIAA news, taped2thedesk writes "According to the Washington Post and Ars Technica, the RIAA will now contact P2P users before suing them." The RIAA's not so bad, they'll settle out of court over the phone, if you don't mind paying up instead of getting a lawyer.

Comments

Goodbye RIAA, hello independent labels!

[kevin_conaway]

Bleh,

Though I havent bought a cd in a while (ive just been listenening to classic rock on the radio), ive decided recently that its time for some new music. I bought a few cds off cdbaby.com and have been very pleased. The music rocks and the service rocks! I hope their prices and all else stays the same.

The crap that the RIAA is pushing these days isnt even worth my time.

Re:Time to pick up a feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully if the RIAA directly contacts people it'll come to light all the quicker how random their contacts have been. So far they've claimed to be taking legal action against 300+ people for file trading. Their record at the moment stands at suing four children under 12, almost 10 people who don't have machines to run the software they claim they used, or even accounts with the ISPs they claim they used to download software from, and six people who don't own a PC or have internet access to begin with. By my reasoning 4+9+6 makes for 19 out of that 300 who obviously aren't file trading how the RIAA says, AT LEAST

There are certainly people who will have the software able to trade, the machines to run it, on ISPs the RIAA claims, but who DON'T trade. Whats their error rate hitting then? somewhere up around 10% of people they're taking legal action against

It's shotgun tactics.

Heh.

[SatanicPuppy]

I used to do work for a telco (cable), and about the only thing they're CAPABLE of monitoring is usage. We had problems auditing for signal piracy, more less software piracy.

No doubt the phone companies are more on the ball, but even then I'd be surprised if they could tell what exactly was coming down the pipe without copying it and reassembling it themselves. Probably the most they could do (economically) is flag high use addresses for the RIAA to check.