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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.
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..
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.
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