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RIAA Grinds Down Individuals in the Courtroom
Iphtashu Fitz writes "The Associated Press recently reviewed many of the copyright infringement lawsuits that the RIAA filed against individuals charged with illegally sharing songs on P2P networks. According to the article over 800 of the targeted individuals have settled for approx. $3000 in fines. One man in California had to refinance his house to pay his $11,000 settlement. Many of the defendants are unwilling to face the possibility of even higher fines by fighting the suits in court despite the fact that it could resolve important questions about copyrights and the industry's methods for tracing illegal downloads. It seems that even some of the judges presiding over these cases question the RIAA's tactics. 'I've never had a situation like this before, where there are powerful plaintiffs and powerful lawyers on one side and then a whole slew of ordinary folks on the other side,' said U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who blocked the movement of a number of these cases in her courtroom for months. She wanted 'to make sure that no one, frankly, is being ground up.'"
I wonder if it is legally possible to mount a class-action defense? The defendants could then pool their resources for lawyerage, expert witnesses, etc. If a class of parties can act as a plaintiff, why can't a similar structure be used in defense?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Shouldn't it be up to the people to decide the laws, not organizations? When did it come to organizations, companies, being more powerful than the government? The government is suppose to be by, for, and of the People.
Exactly. I am vociferously opposed to copyright law, and hold that there should be a "doctrine of first communication" that prevents anyone preventing you passing on information.
But fact of the matter is there are now absurd huge quantities of _really good_ stuff available perfectly legally for free on-line, often from bands in your locality that you can toddle on to live shows for too - there's simply no need to support the old monopolies by continuing to give them mindshare. This is a bit like with software - software piracy _helps_ microsoft and autodesk, because they stay as the "standard". Recirculating the crap that the old monopolies put out preserves their mindshare.
Stop listening to crap, download http://irate.sourceforge.net/ and start rating. Pretty soon, you'll have a better and more novel and varied music collection than the old companies could hope to provide.
It is a response I have made in the past to their "we are losing money because of the downloads."
Horseshit, try again.
The person who has nothing but downloaded MP3s and CD-Rs burned from downloaded MP3s was NOT going to buy the album in the first place. Instead, the person would have bummed a copy off of a friend who had purchased it.
IMO, downloading MP3s is no different than when we used to trade tapes at the skating rink or youth center. These tapes were often made from the radio (remember sitting with your finger on the PAUSE button?)
The facts are that MP3s are LOW quality (completely horrid, as far as I am concerned,) and CD-R media has a finite life-span. Anyone who is genuinely concerned about their music is willing to buy the CD/tape/LP/8-track if only for the quality of the sound.
I started out in digital music back with the music rack that came with some sound card back in early days of Windows 95. I would use a friend's Win95 computer to sample a track mono, 8-bit at 11kHz, then upload that to my Amiga at 2400bps over the phone. I would convert it to IFF with Fibonacci-Delta compression and play the songs back later when I felt like it. I got about 1MB per 1 minute of music. The playback was usable, but still horrrible. To me, a 44kHz 16-bit MP3 at 192kb/s sounds just the same. I would rather buy the CD and listen to it in the CD player. Not quite as portable, but at least hi-hats are not turned into high-frequency slosh, and vocals do not sound as is sung through a fan.
One big question I have is, for the purpose of non-profitable distribution, can an MP3 even be considered the original product? Because that seems to be part of the argument.
More questions which could be asked in court, on the record, and give the US legal system a chance to decide once and for all what is allow, and where the limitations lie.
OK, here's my little mini-rant on the topic of legal protection and public health care.
Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States or the amendments thereto is there a guarantee for health insurance. Or a guarantee that the government will take care of your doctor and drug bills when you get old. Nowhere. Go, read it, I'll wait.
Done? OK, but you'll notice in several places a reference to "equal protection under the law".
Don't socialize medicine. Socialize the legal profession. There's a constitutional basis for it, or at least more of a constitutional basis for it than socializing medicine. Give everyone equal protection in a court of law, something these people (and people accused of drug offenses) don't have.
Let's have lawyers like the Canadians have doctors. Let's have Johnnie Chochran representing some rich white kid who downloaded music from whatever kids are downloading with these days, and let's have it cost him absolutely nothing.
TThere is one major flaw with everyone getting really pissed at the RIAA. Although I think their tactics are low and they are targeting the wrong people, they all have one thing in common. They are all committing illegal activities, and they know it. Although we like to think that just because millions of people are doing it, it somehow makes the action not quite as wrong, stealing music isn't legal.
I am not saying for a minute that I have never done it, but I would know that if I got caught it would be because I was doing something wrong, not just because 'the man' is after me. Same with this DirecTV thing. Their were cheating them out of programming by getting a smart card that was illegal and getting them products for free. Why is it that people think stealing technology is fine? I still can't go to the store and grab some Twinkies off the shelf and it be ok. And please don't give me this 'it doesn't cost them any money for me to share songs or TV' stuff. 'I would have never bought the CD anyways'. Well I don't think the 'I wasn't going to buy that Twinkie anyways' would work in court. You buy the CD for entertainment, and now you are taking it for free.
Again, I have done it myself, but at least I can admit to myself that it is wrong and I could get caught. If I did it would be 100% my own fault.
There are several thousand cases now to analyze. If the RIAA is actually selecting poorer than avarage plantiffs (as some here have alledged), this will show quickly in proper statistical analysis (plot the location of the plantiff on a map, look in the government's poverty index to see what the average inocome in that location is, assign points to an appropriate scale, i.e. 1 point/1,000 $ US).
If it's there, and can be statistically proven, the next step is to tell the media the RIAA is selectively targeting poor people. A good strong piece of evidence, like RIAA plantiffs averageing 20% below median income, deserves a nice simple "National Enquirer" type headline, like "RIAA out to crush the working class", don't you think? Offer the press a chance for one like that, and some of them will bite.
While you're at it you could analyze those plantiffs on ethnic lines if they are willing to share the data. If the RIAA has selectively targeted poor people, it would be very hard for them to avoid having selectively targeted minorities at the same time, although they could possibly have deliberately thrown out a percentage of minority cases to avoid the appearance. I'd suggest if this proves fruitful, rather than contacting the media directly with the allegation that the RIAA is selectively targeting black people, you let the NAACP bring the allegation, as in such case, there WILL be a class action countersuit filed, but it will have 22,000,000 members.
Of course, it's possible there is no consistant pattern. In this case, wait until a couple of months go by where the numbers of plantiffs that are poor or minority is statistically high, and then make the claim "In recent months, the RIAA has switched tactics, to selectively target poorer people."
Who is John Cabal?
The point is not that the people being sued probably were committing acts illegal where they lived. The point is that a massive organization is steamrolling over individuals to make an impression, whereas those individuals would never have bought for example, enough music to refinance their house, etc. The RIAA is also doing things which they didn't used to do 10 or 20 years ago, when people recorded a lot of their music off the radio as one poster mentioned.
I don't buy RIAA music, haven't since I noticed the price of CDs in the stores was getting intolerable, this was 15 years ago. Somehow though I don't think removing one customer from their market is going to make a big dent.
Look, they're asking for it. This wave of litigation against individuals seems like a first for the judge because usually, customers don't tolerate that kind of shit. The RIAA believes it can get away with it and continue to feed you shit at high prices and you will continue to buy it. They are DARING you to fight back. Think about it.
So what else can you do? Well, if you are in business you could financially support non-RIAA or anti-RIAA bands, stations, software, or organziations. If you are in the prime RIAA demographic you can work hard to get all of your friends to stop buying RIAA music (especially the ones who are visible about it).
Ad agencies are beginning to realize the P2P type social networking (not just Internet-based, think word of mouth) gets much higher quality candidates (potential customers) than ordinary advertising. This can be turned around on the RIAA and suitable software / funding could magnify it. I think the iPod thing at Duke is fantastic. Now think of how to ensure that those iPods could massively reduce the amount of income the RIAA would get from that University, think and do something about it.
I don't buy RIAA music. I do like to watch live concerts on TV, and sometimes like what I hear on the radio (though I don't hear much of that either these days). These days cellphone subscriptions are starting to have a very large effect on record companies by removing disposable income from young people that would have gone to the RIAA. I am not for promoting illegal activities. I do see though a very unsettling trend of corporations taking over America (and elsewhere) and believe that litigation by the RIAA against potential customers , and the media slant on the affair (well there is a law against it so..) is a symptom of that.
The RIAA is within its legal rights at the moment to take these kinds of actions. It think it will be interesting to see their response if their customers exercise their legal rights to not purchase, to publicize, to organize, and to legally foment discord and financial destruction in the RIAA. Perhaps a good first plan of attack is to create a fund to hire artists away from the RIAA.
Remember, it is a lot like smoking. Every time you buy an RIAA product, you are saying "Thank you, please hit me again" to these nasty people. But the RIAA is always looking for new customers and new artists, every year. There is no reason why we couldn't start to put the pressure on them. Food for thought.
The problem being that practically speaking; you cannot shut yourself off from the media. Even if, as I do, you
Don't watch tv
Don't listen to the radio
Only listen to music you, yourself like (RIAA or otherwise)
Only get your news from NPR
You are _still_ bombared with crap whenever you go into your local store and when you go to work. God help you if you carpool.
You know, you can sit here and claim stuff like this but the reality is that the rich white guys in their BMWz are probably much better at watching out for cops (because they have an awful lot more to lose), and black guys do really stupid things in their beat up cadillacs which the cops simply cannot ignore. As a Philadelphia resident I can vouch for this. And it's not a racial thing, plenty of white guys in beat up cadillacs do stupid shit and get pulled over too, and plenty of black guys in BMWs do just fine. The IRS probably goes after Joe Sixpack because the tax shelter is legal plain and simple and what Joe sixpack did (maybe not in this instance but others) blatantly violates tax laws. And as for the straight pipe. The noise is a dead giveaway, and the power company... well corporations in the US have something called pollution credits...oh nevermind.. Falling on deaf ears. Yeah I understand there is problems but lots of people get what's coming to them. Act like a victim, become a victim... Use your brain and beat the system. Jealousy is a bitch. I drove a massively beat up car with window tint for a long time and never had a problem and drove a much nicer car when I was younger and had all kinds of problems. Why? Because I did STUPID things that the cops noticed. One thing I learned about people is they don't like to learn from mistakes and they like to play dumb a little too often. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that hrm.. Downloading this music from the internet that I would otherwise have to buy might not be kosher. You have no reason to know that buying cocain down on the corner is illegal but you know it don't you? Not to defend the RIAA. They're wrong every way you can possibly look at it. But people whine way too much these days. Stop whining and do something.