CRIA Prepares To Sue P2P Copyright Violators

ergo98 writes "The Canadian version of the RIAA, the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association), has begun laying the PR groundwork for an initiative similar to that pursued by the RIAA in the US - threatening to file lawsuits against individual file sharers (specifically uploaders). They claim that CD sales have dropped by 23 per cent since 1999, attributing that drop to P2P, and apparently it isn't enough that the Canadian music industry gets a hefty presume-you-are-a-criminal levy attached on various devices and media." Many readers also point to the Globe and Mail's version of the story. dsanfte writes "They will apparently only be targetting uploaders, because in the Copyright Board's judgement, P2P downloading is legal under Canadian law."

Comments

it makes little difference

[toddhunter]

Without the uploaders, you will be hard pressed to find downloaders anyway.
What about this though, someone creates a virus that intentionally leaves a limited back-door into your system. This lets anyone log on, look at media files on your computer and download them.
Then you never made your files available for sharing, the downloader is liable for breaking into your computer, but it just happens that you don't want to lay any charges.
If only there was a way to get a virus onto a windows computer without people being seen to knowingly install it...

Re:it makes little difference

[slash-tard]

Well a back door is essentially the same thing.

But.. how can half of a 2 way process be illegal? It seems to me this is similiar to it being legal to buy something but illegal for someone to sell it to you. Im probably missing an obvious example of this but I cant think of any now.

I think lawyers do stuff like this on purpose to increase the demand for themselves.

Re:it makes little difference

[MouseR]

But.. how can half of a 2 way process be illegal?

Jurisprudence.

There's no way, unless videotaped or via some sort of audio record of your wrongdoings, to prove that you intentionally and wilfully acquired something illegal.

It is, however, your responsibility to ascertain that acquired merchandise is owned by the provider.

However, due to the previous item, you can not be liable for acquiring a product that was wrongfully acquired by the provider.

An example of this is buying a packaged CD or a pair of jeans at a flea market. You're buying it in good faith (aka, exchanging money for it) from a reseller wich assures your it's original, top-quality stuff.

Said CD might very well be a cheap duplicate (often the case) or contraband (counterfeited) brand pair of jeans.

The buyer can't be held responsible, but the seller is responsible for having resold something that was not legal.

If caught, the buyer would have to hand over the bought merchandise (usually to serve as evidence, then destroyed) and the seller would face criminal charges.

If, however, the buyer actually resells the stuff, he becomes as guilty as the original seller, for it is his duty to make sure, before reselling, that the merchandise was genuine.

This same process applies to P2P music.

The down-loader can not be held responsible for downloading an illegal song file wich he acquired from an up-loader. Said up-loader must make sure, before uploading the song, that he has the rights to do so. The down-loader can't be held responsible if the up-loader didn't have the rights, because he's not in a position to know (I mean, legally... but we all know that's crock).

live with dust or 'on the edge' !!

[velkr0]

Are they hoping that they can scare me into buying music again. I used to buy cd's all the time, and i currently own over 330. But, buying cd's is simply a pain, since i lose them, they get punked and of course they collect dust on my cd rack...

MP3's on my iPod always stay nice and shiny, and follow me everywhere i go!!

Canada needs iTMS soon, because i still have a bit of cash in my budget for my favourite tunes!

Stay out of trouble by downloading legal music

[MichaelCrawford]

From Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads:

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Besides giving you lots of links to legal downloads, the article goes on to discuss how you can change the law to make p2p filesharing of proprietary files legal. I think that could happen if I could get all sixty million US file traders to read the article in time for the November 2004 elections. So far the article is getting read by about 500 people a day, but it needs to be read a couple of orders of magnitude more often between now and November if it's going to effect the election. Please read What You Can Do To Help.

Please copy and distribute this article. It has a Creative Commons license.

Re:yes....

[Anonymous Coward]

jobs are the last to come back.

the people still out of work, remind the ones that are still working that "we ain't out of the woods"

and while consumer spending _is_ up, buyers are very fickle right now. and with the riaa doing a nice job of making nice with the general public, don't be surprised when they've effectively stopped p2p, and people STILL AREN'T buying their tripe.

if it takes the destruction of the music industry, before we get a new paradigm,

so be it.

a lot of ppl better start learning how to bus tables.

A new legal P2P Music Sharing system for Canada?

[Vic Metcalfe]

If I wrote a program that allowed users to put a CD into their CD-ROM drive and allow other users to rip a copy of that CD over the Internet, would that be legal? It looks to me like it might be.

I'm very very tempted to write such a program. We pay the levy anyway, might as well take full advantage of it. I just don't want to loose my house, business, etc when I get sued.

Should taxpayers pay for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

When my car is stolen, when my house is broken into the police says "sorry, no resources" to catch them...
Should taxpayers really pay police, FBI, etc. for playing collection agent for the RIA?

Recording Industry vs. World - round 2. Ready, ste

[grmb1]

BTW, in Russia downloading music is too expensive. Average home broadband bandwidth is around 0.1$/MB. However pirated CDs full of MP3s cost about 2$ and are on sale everywhere - flea market, regular shops (govt. doesn't give a fuck). The choice of MP3s is amazing - rarities, bootlegs, full discographies, etc....

So, USA people, welcome to Russia!

Hmm...could be a good idea for business... "Fuck RIAA, buy our exclusive 'Russia CD-Tour'.".

Fair enough...

[rokzy]

...IF THEY GET RID OF THE LEVY

I thought the justification for the levy was to legitimise downloading mp3s? If they now want to get rid of that "service", where's the justification for the levy? Maybe they're trying to pull another scam like when CDs were new;

1980s
1. raise prices because of set-up costs
2. forget to lower after making money back
3. profit

2000s
1. raise prices because of mp3 traders
2. forget to lower after putting traders in jail
3. profit

Another wonderful idea.

[rice_burners_suck]

Hey, let's sue our fans!! What shall we do next?! Hey, I have another great idea: Every time someone buys blank CD media, they are immediately arrested and imprisoned for a period not less than 20 years in a maximum security prison for each blank CD, alongside murderers and rapists, whose crimes are certainly lesser than that of music piracy. After the 20 year per blank CD period, the person is released from prison and allowed to take their blank CD(s).

This law would ignore the fact that blank CDs are used for mostly legitimate reasons, because piracy, being worse than murder or rape, should be handled under a no-fucking-around policy. And all books should be burned. And all people whose skin is not within 0.0000000000001% tolerance of a specific shade should be hung.

Entrapment?

[NonaMyous]

The only way to determine if a file on an uploader's system contains copyrighted material or not is to download the file and examine it. There's no copying and therefore no copyright infringement until the file downloaded.

How does the CRIA prove copyright infringement without having been responsible for causing the infringement in the first place?

News from the CRIA web site

[Txiasaeia]

On their web site here, they mention that they "know of [Canadian] users of file-sharing services who are individually uploading and distributing four and five thousand copyrighted songs to potentially tens of millions of people. This is indisputably an illegal practice." (Dec 5 2003)

Perhaps this indicates a lower limit of who they will be targeting, people who have four thousand songs available to share? Yes? Maybe?

Re:yes....

[CrowScape]

Actually it's probably more due to competition from the DVD arena. When I spend money on entertainment, it's in the form of a couple DVDs that I can pick up for 17-23 USD, a much better bang-for-my-buck than even $13.50 for CDs. And no, I don't download mp3s. My DVD collection has fast outpaced my CD collection, and I wouldn't compare DVDs to VHS, as I rarely touched that God-awful format. For Christmas I used to have people asking for CDs, but as my friends and relatives started aquiring DVD players, they also started replacing their CD requests with DVD requests.

Of course, this is all anecdotal

Re:Three words for Canadian CD-R/RW buyers

[ADOT Troll]

For every downloader, there must be an uploader. Someone made the data being downloaded available for access. Someone set up the machine that hosts said data. Someone arranged for a network connection to be set up for that machine. Someone controls the machine that is sending the data stream, and that person, or people, would likely be considered the uploader in any legal situation. It's a dinky distinction, but I've heard about the gaping loophole in Canadian law that allows this to take place. I'm tempted to investigate the legalese myself just to see if that loophole really does exist.

That said, CRIA is a bunch of money-grubbing goons, the exact equivalent of the RIAA. I haven't bought a CD in years, due to my own personal lack of disposable income available for frills like CDs, but even saying that there are very few new discs I would purchase, and not many old discs I have the time and money to hunt down. I have some news for CRIA--the economy's sucked as of late, one of the largest markets is still crawling out of a very bad summer (did you idiots forget SARSstock???), and music that gets radio play has become, for the most part, so derivative it hurts to listen. Thank goodness for community radio and bars with live music.

The Silver Spoon

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes a certain quality of ass-ness to keep pushing for a bigger and shinier silver spoon. Eventually somebody is going to beat them over the head with it.

Unlike in the US, Canadian artists, musicians, etc, live, primarily, at the pleasure of the Federal Government. If it wasn't for the continual payments, and play-list regulations, Canadian creative types would be working in the factory. Hopefully they figure out the precariousness of the situation before they piss off the people who have made them possible.

Xtal's Pissed Off Music Kiosk

[xtal]

What's to stop me from setting up a kiosk on my property (or with the permission of a landowner) with a batch of CDs and a CDR. It's cheap enough to do this I might just do it to make a point. I don't think anyone would steal the physical CDs, but you could always jukebox them.

Under the current law, so long as I do not make any money, it is legal for someone to come up to this Kiosk and make all the copies they want. If this bullshit continues without the CDR levy being dropped, and my lawyer agrees with my interpretation of the law - I might just do this.

How is this any different than uploading a ripped version of the CD anyway?

We need new laws

[oystur]

When a business is reduced to suing customers you know you've hit a dead end. The music industry needs to issue licenses to file sharers and if they won't then we need to change the law. There is power in numbers and Click the Vote is organizing a grassroots movement to achieve just that.

Philosophy

[AvengerXP]

Uploading, downloading, borrowing, distributing. All these are definable and open to interpretation. The philosophical repercussions are great but whether you like it or not, the bottom line decision will be because of a single character, a byte if you will.

'$'.

And that decision is : "Sue everyone, make cash, everyone's a pirate, screw personal rights".

In the long run, fair use and personal private copies and yadayadayada will not mean anything because of the said character.

Re:Of course you're 16

[qeveren]

Dear pedantic Slashbots: If cable theft is stealing, why is MP3 downloading "infringement?" Face it; it's stealing

Cable theft is theft-of-service. Downloading copyrighted MP3s is copyright infringement. Legal definitions, is how they're different. ;)

Re:Three words for Canadian CD-R/RW buyers

[beakerMeep]

Who are you going to sue ? The government ? For making a law you don't like ?

Right. Because that's SO UNHEARD OF.

Re:Three words for Canadian CD-R/RW buyers

[Goldberg's Pants]

All the uploaders can be in countries that can turn round and say "FUCK OFF" to the recording industry, and me, sitting in Canada, can legally leech the shit out of it all and be perfectly safe.

I am disgusted at the levy I have to pay on blank CD's, especially when I do home movies for my Dad of his grandson, and pay the fuckers in the recording industry money to be able to do it, but at least the government had the balls to say "Fine, in that case, downloading is legal". In fact that almost makes the levy worthwhile for the comedy it has provided seeing this happen.

And if you want to avoid the new levy on MP3 players, just buy off of Ebay like I just did. Paid less than half price for a Panasonic MP3/CD player.

Re:yes....

[Goldberg's Pants]

I'm 32. I grew up during disco. It hurts me as I mostly HATE disco. However, there's a great deal of 70's music that kicks ass. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd etc... I still listen to The Wall now, over 20 years after it was released. I can't think of ANYTHING released these days that people will be listening to in five years, let alone twenty.

The reason? Image. Back in the 70's it was about the music. It didn't matter if the singer had 3 eyes and no nose, and looked like a melted mouse mat, so long as he could sing. (Christ, look at the Floyd guys, hardly photogenic...) These days, if you don't have the looks, you don't get your video anywhere, you don't get the promotion... Basically the whole industry has become style over substance, hence we'll never see classics like "The Wall" again.

You only need to take a look at American Idol, Canadian Idol, Pop Idol etc... To see why the music industry is totally fucked and why nobody is buying anything.

Re:yes....

[Anonymous Coward]

A Newseek article about a year ago showd the decline in CD sales but also showed the very steep rise in DVD and games sales. I can't remember the fugures but combining the sales of the 3 showed a considerable overall ris ein sales. CD sales may be declining but entertainment sales are rising and fast.

Re:yes....

[3terrabyte]

Yep, lots of interviews with teenagers show that DVD's seem to be a better entertainment dollar. Plus they're new. The sales of DVD players are still going up. So that means more and more people getting DVD's now. Also, people have already replaced their tapes & vinyl, so CD's are no longer 'new'. People are still replacing their VHS.

The computer game market is still going up, up, up, also, so there are at least 2 different entertainment genres in direct competition with music. There is only so much money for a consumer's disposable entertainment cash. Why the Music Industry thinks it's their god given right to make money in a recession is beyond me.