Slashdot Mirror
Grokster Decision Won't Stop RIAA, MPAA Suits
akahige writes "According to this Reuters article, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the operators of Grokster and StreamCast are not liable for copyright infringement. On the other hand the *AA is appealing the decision to the Supreme Court, and has no intention of ceasing litigation against these or other P2P services. Next up, eDonkey. If ever there was a case where voting with your dollar made sense it was this one -- but too many people just can't get enough of Britney." We mentioned the court's decision a few days ago; this article stresses that the industry is gung ho to overturn it, and that this decision covers only part of the case.
...just pick one person, in the whole of the usa, let's call him "subject 0".
Wait, let's find the first person sued by the riaa, call him "subject 0" and everyone in the usa give him $$ to buy CDs.
he'll turn around and round-robin the CDs to random participants in a p2p legal country, who will donkify the cds.
then everyone, i mean everyone in the usa, whores the music.
can the *AA sue every single music listener in the usa? have they ever sued downloaders (usually only shares...)
oh well i think it would be funny. one person buying cds, one group of people sharing (out of legal reach) and everyone else paying a buck every couple months and just a-whorin' away.
Why not just fund your own shitty record company, then find people that have copies of your artists in unprotected ('shared') folders available via ftp, or http. Then sue Microsoft, because they make Internet Explorer, and the DOS FTP client. You can even produce a lot of data to turn heads, i'm sure 99.9% of all illegal software distributed around the world in the past 10 years was sent via FTP --It must be stopped!!
Or turn it into another suite based on the same principals. Sue Grokster because they are facilitating in the trade of child pornography, or sue M$ because people use IE for the same..
I believe the /. editors were referring to the "Haves" and "Have-Mores" to supply their conditional campaign dollars to the GOP clearly stating that Bush should back off persecuting evolving technology. Oh wait, those would be the *AA stockholders...
It doesn't matter worth a damn if the MPAA / RIAA think they can buy judges on the Supreme Court to rule in their favor (like Judge "non-recusal-though- I -used-to-work-for-the-movie-industry" Kaplan). Every one of the anti-consumer rulings so far has violated the civil rights found in the U.S. Constitution. We, the people, know this. And we aren't going to take it sitting down. Any ruling is not going to be worth the paper it's written on if it continues the ruse of ruling against fair use, free speech, free assembly and free association. I didn't pay $1,000+ for my personal computer to have some white man in a robe* tell me what software I can or cannot run on it, and what networks I can or cannot connect to. (*with few exceptions)
Iam returning it tomorrow to walmart as a vote against RIAA
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Anymore, whenever I buy a DVD or CD, I make a point to buy it used, from places like Amazon. So far I'be bought several used movies that way and the quality has been all but indistinguishable from new. Just remember, every penny you put into their pockets is another penny that's available to pay their lawyers on this jihad.
Anymore I think of it this way:
- Tickets to Spider-Man 2: MONEY FOR THEIR LAWYERS.
- DVD of xxxxxxxx movie: MONEY FOR THEIR LAWYERS.
- xxxxxxx music CD: MONEY FOR THEIR LAWYERS.
And what galls me the most is that the bastards are probably laughing to themselves that we're so addicted to this stuff that we can't help but pay them to do this. Well I for one have decided, no more. NOT ONE RED CENT.
Someone also needs to remind legislators that the US != Internet. Instant Induce act makes law, all the US based P2P companies move to Togo, Nigeria, Trinadad... (and the spyware with it)
Nothing will change except a bunch of Americans losing even more rights.
-Electrawn
If a case has gone to court I'd like to hear about it. I have the feeling the RIAA doesn't want to take the chance of losing, which could happen if a case went before a jury... After all a jury could easily have one or two members with a folder full of mp3s on their computer at home, and worry that they're going to be next.
They could care less about the money. I really don't think they even care about the lawsuits. This is all P.R., pure and simple. It's an ad campaign. And it definitely works-- P2P goes on, but many casual users (or would-be casual users) are being scared away.
First, IANAL.
In my country (Norway) we have quite good Fair Use laws (y'all will probably remember the "DVD-Jon" case and its positive outcome).
We can:
1. Copy any media (CD, DVD, LP, MC, VHS, whatever) for our own use as much as we want to.
2. Share with family (parents, siblings... maybe 1. cousins but that's it)
3. Share with close friends, and this is interpreted in a strick sense. Your best friend that you grew up with? Sure! Someone from class or a cow-orker? Nope, not close enough.
This complies with my sense of justice pretty well. After all, is it fair use to share your new CD with music with people you meet on the bus?
As a compensation for this, artists get paid from a fund. It's the same fund that was started when MC copying started and is/was funded by sale of empty music cassettes.
I bet that most audio copying today does not go straight to P2P networks. How many of you rip your CDs to a) play them on your DAP (mp3/ogg) player or b) have a copy in your car, but do not put the ripped files on P2P? I bet there are a lot of you out there. Maybe this can be used to make statistics to counter the RIAA drivel.
Any time I rip a CD with CDex, it does a lookup to freecddb.org. There are other services for this, like gracenote and others. We could assume that the total hits to these pages, minus lets say 10%, are legitimate rips of CDs. Then we would have an estimate of the amount of legal (legal as in fair use) ripping out there.
//TheToon
One of the goals of the RIAA seems to be to ban music production outside of their studios. Ie: Make anything that can record music illegal unless controlled by the RIAA. This would allow them to control digital and recorded production and in turn the entire industry.
Artists would then have to chose between:
1: Get signed and sell your music
2: Play gigs only
As most people know, alternative 2 isn't possible for all music styles. Number 2 would also be difficult, you'd have to go by word-of-mouth alone.
Why are you using MSIE anyway? Google for "IE + security" to see some of the reasons not to use IE.
Not quite true. It doesn't matter if you're in Holland, Switzerland, Belgium or wherever the rules have been relaxed - growing, importing, supplying, buying etc. strictly speaking are still illegal or very restricted, it's just that the authorities turn a conveniently blind eye to the illegal activities provided they are small enough operations. In Switzerland, for example, in the German areas of the country (Zurich etc.), it is quite normal to see people sitting on public stairs openly smoking. In Holland, this can be frowned upon (especially outside Amsterdam), coffee shops are the place to be, not openly public spaces. On the other hand, coffee shops in Switzerland are far less open about their presence than in Holland but again strictly speaking, in Switzerland, it never was illegal to grow industrial quantities of weed whereas selling the product for smoking and possession is... (although some Cantons might have relaxed the laws lately, I haven't kept up with changes).
Did he inhale?
I still boycott the RIAA but I listen to Rush, Rush is an independent band atleast in Canada(they actually own their own copyrights, besides being great musicians they were smart thinkers back in the day), but in the US their music is distributed by Atlantic and Mercury (now part of Universal). To get around this to make sure Rush will get the most of my money off the sale, I have a friend buy it from Canada, then ship it to me, and I give him the money. Then I get the Anthem label only and the funny British spellings.
And, really, why should they? MSFT knows that they'll lose a certain percentage of companies audited by BSA, but not all of them. And there will be more new ones to take their place. MSFT losing one customer is meaningless but the BSA action would likely boost licensing from a thousand others who heard about it.
RIAA gets a double bonus from their legal action. Not only does it scare away people sharing copyrighted music, but it also taints all downloaded music, even from legal sources. Can't have muscians getting popular outside the major labels, now can we?
The CD music business is hugely profitable and a collalition of five or six companies pretty much own the lift. The whole pipeline is set up to control prices. So the RIAA lawsuits protect that turf while they figure out how to squeeze even fatter profits out of iTunes and other legal download companies. The lawsuits will likely continue because there is no downside for the big labels. Unless you think our spineless Congress will step in and do something for the average citizen...HAHAHAHA! Don't hold your breath.
The only recourse I think consumers will have is to unionize. Consumer unions. Where groups of people band together to negotiate for something like cell service. I do that for some of my customers. Negotiate big software and service purchases. And, let me tell you, vendors would roll over and bark like dog if I asked them to. My customers get a better deal because they're buying in bulk. Consumer unions could do the same thing.
The downside would be, taking an example like cell service, everyone has different needs and wants different features. That's what fragments the union. Another problem is when the union leadership turns into AARP, which started selling its constituency instead of representing them. I personally get some pretty incredible offers from vendors, as would the leadership of a consumer union.
Still it has potential. A consumer union with enough members could pretty much dictate price and service terms, but it's like trying to herd cats keeping them together.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Actually, the Betamax ruling had relatively little to do with the Grokster case. The two laws in contention were: 1. Contributory infringement 2. Vicarious Infringement for more reading on contributory infringement, check out (Adobe Systems Inc. v. Canus Prods., Inc., 173 F. Supp. 2d 1044, 1048 (C.D. Cal. 2001)) and (A & M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 114 F. Supp. 2d 1019). and for reading on vicarious infringement have a peek at (Fonovisa, Inc. v. Cherry Auction, Inc., 76 F.3d 262) The Fonovisa decision is particularly interesting. It deals with a swap-meet operator who basically operated a brick-and-mortar version of a P2P network. The precedents in that case are very intriguing when applied to P2P. If you read the judge's ruling in the Grokster case, he does say that there is a loophole in copyright law which allows P2P to operate legally, and he gets in a call-to-action for congress to close this loophole.