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RIAA Threatens More Music-Lovers
Xenographic writes "According to this article at SFGate, the RIAA has warned 204 more people that they are pursuing legal action against them. After the uproar over the last batch of lawsuits, however, they're not (yet) suing the people in question, but intend to allow them to settle out of court, first."
"they're not (yet) suing the people in question, but intend to allow them to settle out of court, first."
is that legal? can you say extortion?
extortion ( P ) Pronunciation Key (k-storshn)
n.
1. The act or an instance of extorting.
2. Illegal use of one's official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage.
There must be some other way to handle this situation. I know that I was one of those crying "foul play" when the RIAA started (or was rumoured to have started) sabotaging various peer-to-peer services with faked files. But looking back I must admit that that was a rather cool tactic to use. They entered the game and adapted to the existing rules and exploited them. The coolness stopped there, however.
Lawsuits are, in circumstances like these and my opinion, the unfair way out. Using a measure that is not available to both sides. More or less exploiting the legal service because you cannot (or don't want to) compete in any other way. And don't let me get started on copy-protection. Hardly anything has pissed me off as much as when I bought a CD that I couldn't rip and put on my mp3 player. Incidentally that was the last CD I bough. I remember seeing a discussion featuring Chuck D. and Lars Ulrich at the height of the Metallica/Napster controversy. Ulrich's favourite word was "control". And that is the way it is, huh? It's all about control where it should be about respect.
Fans don't agree with the way things are going anymore. Instead of adapting to their wishes you decide to sue them. That is what living in a free country with a free market is all about. The need to adapt is gone when you have the courts on your side.
Hank! White!
You have to give people some notice of a lawsuit, even if it's right when you serve them with it. There's nothing wrong with settling out of court, either, so this is almost certainly legal in that regard, unless they find some way to accuse them of barratry (disclaimer: IANAL).
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There are some interesting bits in this regard in the article (yeah, I know, no one reads those, so here are the best bits:)
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"Our objective here is not to win lawsuits; it is to foster a business environment where legal online music services and bricks-and-mortar retail stores can flourish."
[
The RIAA's letter warns that "ignorance of the law is not a defense. What that means is that it does not matter whether you knew it was illegal. Whether or not you intended to infringe does not matter. If you violate the record companies' copyrights, you will be held liable for damage as a result."
The letter also warns the recipient that deleting infringed songs would be considered destruction of evidence "now that you are aware that a lawsuit may be filed against you."
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That last bit is particularly interesting. What if they've misidentified people (yet again...) and there AREN'T any files to destroy in the first place? Would they take the non-existance of the infringing files to mean that the person had destroyed them?
In this case, the RIAA is saying "give us a small amount of money (like $2000) or we'll sue you for a lot (like $200 000), and even if you win the case, you'll still need to pay your lawyer $2000 anyways." If any innocents get sued, they'll get shafted no matter what they do. I don't mind the RIAA suing people who infringe copyright law, but I'm worried about the "innocent untill proven guilty" thing not occuring in this case.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okKeep in mind that most laws were written hundreds of years ago. Back then, there was no feasible way to catch law-breakers, so the punishment was extreme in order to deter others from doing the same thing.
Now it is becoming possible to track individuals via purchasing habits. Who thinks that terrorists and causers of violent chaos use valid credit cards and real ID?
For suing children, feeble little grandpas, etc.
They'll screen these people they've threatened (giving "generous" out of court settlements to the bad PR cases,) and then sue whoever they think they can get away with - or, their target demographic.
I'm no hypocrite, so I support unrestricted file sharing. However, even with my eyepatch on, I can see that the RIAA members are fighting for their economic survival. P2P may not have had a significant impact on CD sales *YET*, but it absolutely *WILL*. On top of that it will fragment the market and seriously weaken their distribution monopoly, etc. etc.
These are all good things for our culture but bad for the livelihoods of the people in the biz.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Actually mob rule is the basis of law in america. It just happens to be based on the christian mob. Since we all live in a country that is run by christians it's not considered mob rule, it's just the way it should be. There is a reason things like sodomy, adultery, abortion, and many other non-christian behaviors were (and some still are) illegal for so long. For some reason forcing women to wear cloth from head to toe in a muslim society is backward and wrong but sticking a man in jail for sodomy in texas is the good christian thing to do. The one constant in society is mans intolerance for people not like him. Get enough like minded people together and it stops being wrong and starts being 'just the way it is'.
You want an answer to the piracy problem: Meet half way. It's obvious people want more choices than the century old album, and it's just as obvious that the record companies want to keep their iron fist wrapped around peoples musical outlets as well as their wallets. Neither side is totaly right or wrong. In fact, I'd say both sides are just as stubborn and closed minded. There is some common ground.
Joe Haldemann has tried to predict what would happen in such a situation, in The Forever Peace. Basically, he depicts a world where developed countries have gotten ahold of technology (nanoforges) that can produce any object given some very raw materials - put in sand, some metal scraps or ore, some oil or oily plants, along with some digitalized blueprint, and get a computer out. He describes how this technology would completely turn the occidental world into a neo-communist society with some capitalist principles still applied (everyone gets a weekly set of tickets that are used at state-controlled nanoforges).
In such a society, brands don't exist anymore, but there's still a form of intellectual "property": for example one character uses up some leisure-tickets to buy what would be an expensive jewel ring to us. The design belongs to some association of jewellers.
But also of importance is that the nanoforges are very, very closely controlled by the State so that the technology doesn't get leaked to the third-world. In your example, you wouldn't be able to copy your friend's laptop, you'd have to get an official authorization in exchange for a hefty number of "nanoforge tickets". This resembles the type of laws the RIAA/MPAA want to impose on copyrighted works, with them granting the authorizations in exchange for money.
Please excuse the long rambling, it's late here.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Transparency - never understood what that means until we were discussing it at work r.e. credit card processing.
OK... Imagine that the internet is a library, but you don't need a library card. What's wrong with that?
Ever hung out with record industry execs? Any idea what these folks are like as people? What do they imagine the internet as?
So actually, the internet as someone who thinks it is a library is not completely correct, it's a little more complicated than that. But on the other hand, the way the music industry folks see the internet is not completely correct either.
What does harm? An individual person that downloads (the personal computer) a file, or the internet as a whole? Neither? Litigiousness? Well, we can't get rid of the internet, because the internet is not the problem. We can't get rid of personal computers, but can we get rid of litigiousness? It's hard enough to spell the darn word.
Litigiousness is the problem. Plain and simple.
I was listening to this album that I like today. Cat Stevens - Foreigner. When I was really young I bought that album at a used record store for 50 cents. It was one of the first albums I ever bought. So of course, I had to buy the CD when I saw it at the record store about two years ago. It's not always available.
Anyway, the CD is almost completely white, with a silver edge around the outside, and the words "Cat Stevens" in missing white so the CD silver shines through, and the name of the album in smaller black letters. A simple, cool look. At the bottom there is this trumpet in a rectangle with the letters A&M beneath it. And just today I thought -- that's kind of silly - such a simple look, but you can't keep the darn label off the artwork. Imagine a Picasso or Jackson Pollack with an art gallery logo stamped on it. It's crazy.On the automobile side, there are engines like the 351 Cleveland - named after the factory it was made at.
It's a "dark" thing - the label the artist is on is AS important as the name of the album, perhaps even more so. The label is the next important thing besides the name of the act. That's why we have this problem. We don't have the "factory logo" stamped on the designer clothes. Just where the clothes were made or where the fabric was imported from. What mill was that cotton made at? Who knows? Who cares?
Popular music is about the labels, to some extent. And our culture is litigious. What we need to do is free music, and we free our culture. When I, as an artist, write a song, I have to worry if maybe I subconciously heard that song somewhere and instead of writing that song, I have to try to make sure that everything I compose is original according to some algorithm. It's extremely crippling - I've tried it. You just have to forget about it. Folk songs, for instance, other cultural treasures, are "open source". Public domain. Row row row the boat. Swing Low. But these things they are suing the people for, it's a different story altogether. That's the problem. It's a closed industry, and the industry is excessively litigious. The ultimate solution to the remaining problems is freedom of speech and a willingness to cooperate.
It's unfortunate that these things are going on. Too many people have died, too many people have suffered, sacrificed, and some very evil people have gotten rich.
I always wonder about this. ISPs reuse IP addresses and often I'll get left-over P2P traffic from whoever had my IP before me. It would be very easy I'd think for the RIAA enforcers to finger the wrong person if their log time stamps were off (and I'd hardly put much faith in their accuracy) or the P2P network had stale data.