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3 New Defendants Named In MP3s4free.net Case
As reported in The Australian, three new respondents have been named in the mp3s4free.net link site case, including an employee of the ISP which is said to have hosted the site. The music industry says that ISP employees will be targeted in the future, but given an amnesty if they "inform the music industry."
Now it's illegal to _LINK_ to websites that have content that _MAY_ infringe on someone's copyrights?
And what law makes that illegal? The DMCA?
But your honor, I had no idea www.FreeWarez.com/MP3s contained copywritten material! It was simply my duty to the public to let them know it was there. .... yeah right.
on the other hand how many levels can this cover? for instance, what if on my personal homepage i link to another friends personal homepage who in turn ends up linking to a whole bunch of sites that the DMCA doesn't like ? does that make me an infringer?
Of course, it might be safer to simply have no music whatsoever in your house.
I RTFA and it appeared to be that an ISP and specific employees are being sued because one customer put up links to some files that might breach copyright. Can't say I agree with the music industry on this one.
So the RIAA will bring charges against you if you don't squeal?
Its been established that they cant sue ISPs, right? But now they're threatening the employees? Theres something very wrong with that. This is like someone not being able to sue the post office for a delivery of something illegal so they sued the individual postal carrier who delivered it. Insanity abounds...(and before anyone flames me, i do understand the difference between transporting illegal materials and civil copyright infringment)
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
What about search engines that point out these illegal sites? They still post link.s
I wonder if Slashdot can be successfully sued for this link?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Is Washington even aware of this? What large organizations are opposing the RIAA and the MPAA? How can we fight this BS past hoping that these cases don't stand up in court?
Several students at UMR were targeted by the MPAA recently. From what I have gathered, one of them was not even aware that they were sharing a camcorder recording of Matrix: Revolutions over a P2P network because it was uploaded to them via Windows file sharing. True or not, since all this evidence is so circumstantial, is it not possible to say "someone hacked into my computer and put it there" or "that was uploaded to me", despite how ridiculous it might seem?
When it comes down to it, no matter how much copy protection is involved, no matter how difficult it is to distribute - if it produces sound or video in the end, it can be copied, even if it requires the extreme of a dark room and microphone. The industry will still make money; people will still buy the media. When will they wake up?
[c0d3fu]: jwjb62@umr.edu || james@macrohub.com
>So, the industry is saying "give us information
>or get sued." Sounds like intimidation and
>coercion to me.
It may seem that way to you, but use of the civil legal system and its guarantees of due process of law will not be regarded as improper by any reasonable person. If They were doing something plainly illegal, it would be different, but properly using the legal system to ask the state to settle their grievance with you, is hardly "extortion."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I've basically given up hope on the RIAA. I haven't bought a CD in over a year, and don't play to start using itunes or any other of those crap pay to listen services anytime soon. No amount of me posting on /. has seemed to make them change their ways so maybe a couple hundred less dollars a year will work. Then again, probably not.
From the introduction:
The article discusses at some length how you can work to make file sharing legal.It has been Google's #1 hit for the query legal music downloads for about three months now, and recently has been on the second page of hits recently for the much more popular query music downloads.
Traffic to the article has been climbing steadily, especially since the RIAA lawsuits were filed. It's looking like my copy of the article will get about 19,000 page views this month.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
To give a real life analogy.
I see a guy selling bootleg DVD's on the street. I walk up to a random person and point to the guy and say "He's selling bootleg DVD's".
I get arrested for "linking" to him.
Sounds stupid? Thats because it is.
Certainly, if every copied MP3 or other media is a 1:1 correlation with a lost album sale, and every "shared" MP3 is responsible for hundreds of lost sales, then one city BUS must then be responsible for the loss of the sale of 40-60 automobiles?
And further, for every car not sold, there is also a loss in license plate fees, gasoline sold. toll road fees and parking fees.
Seems like that would be a perfect test case as the names of cars are copyrighted, as are certain design details, and of course, the purchaser must hold a "license" to operate it on the road.
Oh, wait, some bus riders own cars and some car owners ride the bus!
Maybe there is some truth to the idea that the acquisition of shared downloads has an impact on media sales, but it is obviously not of the magnitude the bastards claim.
We are required by law to be able to log sufficient information to associate IPs with customers if informed to do so by authorities. We may well be required (waiting for legal counsel answer) to keep these logs for several years. Not doing so may lead to criminal charges. By the way, incompetence and lack of resources aren't a defense any more than your cheap-ass landlord can get away with "but those smoke detectors are so pricey".
Not logging customer data is ultimately more expensive to us anyway. When AOL emails us up and says "67.32.1.1 is spamming, drop them or we drop you", a hundred bucks for a RADIUS log drive suddenly looks cheap compared to two fscking weeks of losing customers while I call their incompetent support line to get out of their blacklist.
The whole usenet thing is problematic, although the issue isn't piracy, it's kiddy porn. Usenet admins have been arguing about whether a common carrier defense would work for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, thus far no Usenet providers (or ISPs for that matter) have been charged that I know of, the authorities seem much more interested in the people who post this filth than in us. They change newsgroups regularly, and tracking readers isn't as trivial as grepping RADIUS logs, we'd basically have to monitor every newsgroup.
But if advised to do so we'll drop our news server faster than you can blink, and our customers can go to giganews et al where they have deep pockets. I'm not going to prison just so you can read alt.binaries.kinko-the-clown or whatever they're using these days. But beyond that, I don't personally give a rodent's posterior whether you're sharing the entire first season of Gilligan's Island on gnutella and sucking a month's worth of alt.binaries.mp3s.circle-jerks, as long as you don't saturate the DLSAM and we don't get a subpoena.
Don't like it? Use an anonymizer, find an open wireless access point, run freenet, and/or pull a full newsfeed (oh and have you priced OC3s lately? cuz that's what you'll need for a full feed).
BTW, you're largely right about the economics of smaller ISPs, although many of them seem to forget that customer service is ultimately the most important part of the business.
Well, I know nobody will ever go for this, but wouldn't a `better' response from the ISP be: "provide us with funds to monitor this, and we'll do you a service by monitoring this".
The ISP has no real obligation (no business contracts, etc.,) to even care about RIAA. Why in the world would an ISP bend over like this?
I understand if the music industry was paying them to monitor illegal activity and they weren't doing their job, but forcibly making someone do something is plain weird/stupid/wrong - capitalism doesn't work like this. If RIAA wants something to get done, they should pay (not threaten).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
We get this article printed in the Austin-American Statesman. Granted, it's old news if you follow this mess but at least that is reaching mainstream press.