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NYT Promotes File Sharing
aisaac writes "An article in today's NYT comments intelligently on filesharing. Key points: downloading music is not illegal, peer-to-peer enables this useful and legal activity, and a list of good places to find good music online (including the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress. The Induce Act is briefly mentioned without analysis, but the article does not mention that some of the Act's sponsors and cosponsors have expressed a willingness to consider ammendments to restrict the application of the Act. (This according to a letter I received from Senator Sarbanes.) Let's keep the pressure on!" A Congress call-in day is being organized.
Of course, both parts of that statement are, at best, half-true. Downloading copyrighted material may or may not be legal, depending on the will of the copyright holder. Same with making such material available on the internet. And generally, if sharing it is illegal, so is downloading it, which makes their statement wrong no matter how you look at it. Perhaps everyone should have to be educated on what you can and can't do within copyright law before they're allowed to touch a computer.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
DOWNLOADING music from the Internet is not illegal.
But that at least seems to be based on what is involved in the lawsuits and not purely on the law or so this next quote seems to say:
But the fine print of those lawsuits makes clear that fans are being sued not for downloading but for unauthorized distribution: leaving music in a shared folder for other peer-to-peer users to take.
I understand that the lawsuits have focused on people who have uploaded music and the conventional wisdom is that if you only download you won't get sued.
So, I am still confused and the article only confused me further
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Better make sure the bands you cite share your ideals. What about Velvet Revolver's copy-protected CD?
You're joking, right? The RIAA couldn't be more pissed about people downloading indie music, not bacause it violates their rights or their ill-gotten revenue stream, but because both downloading and indie music are the greatest long-term threat to their business model they've ever faced.
And I'll give them this: they should be terrified. They've milked a monopoly for decades and have forgotten how to compete, and now that they have competition they have no idea how to respond to it in an effective way.
Hint to the RIAA: suing your customers and bribing Congress to pass legislation aimed at peotecting your monopoly status is not an effective response...it tends to piss people off and then they tend not to buy your products.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
Yes, that will be the end result of all this, as they really wont succeed in getting the concept of P2P outright banned, since it has too many legal uses.
But if they can monitor and control all media content on the wire ( or at least they believe they will ) then it will just push the 'criminals' top other means..
We all know banning something that has a criminal use does not reduce crime.. it only shifts crimes to other areas and methods. and restricts law abiding citizens from the 'something'...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That may be true for your countrys legilisation, but here in Norway it is perfectly legal to download any copyrighted material from any location, as long as it's done in a private (not corporate) manner. This is covered by fair use in our laws. This does however not cover executable programs, so games etc is illegal.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
Here's a hint: Velvet Revolver is not some band playing at your local bar in front of 5 people, who are going to be googling their own name and following a link to a geek website and then changing their mind about whther they'd rather give their music away for free or take the millions of dollars they're making. They don't care if you go to their concerts; when you sell all of the available tickets, it doesn't bother you when some guy didn't want a ticket because he's too cheap to pay for your album. Really.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Actually, dipshit, downloading copyrighted material that you don't have a license for *IS* illegal.
Then why have none of the lawsuits gone after people for it? Read what the people being sued are being sued for. So far, it appears to be legal to upload copyrighted material you have the rights to. That is, if I own the CD and share it out so that anyone can download it, I have not broken any law or copyright. It has never been tested whether you have the right to download a copyrighted piece and listen to it.
The only thing that they have filed lawsuits for is sharing/uploading material that you do not have any rights to. Why? Because that is the *only* thing that is explicitly illegal.
Learn to love Alaska
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Behind the scenes, I'm quite sure the RIAA isn't doing it all because they feel that Kazaa will ultimately cause them to go bankrupt. What they are really afraid of is permitting artists to see the potential of online music distribution. If that happens and the artists realize they can do just as well by going online and connecting directly to their fans and listening audience, then they will see a better alternative to the perennial shafting they inevitable receive from the RIAA. Once that occurs, the RIAA will become irrelevant and that's what they are deathly afraid of.
Interestingly enough this has happened throughout history just in the realm of music. The first instance (that I'm aware of) was when player pianos first came out. The sheet music industry was all up in arms and declaring they'd be destroyed, that no one would pay for sheet music when they could just have a player piano play it for them, etc. Their reaction was quite similar to the RIAA's reaction over P2P and online music downloading, albeit a bit tamer (IIRC they didn't try to sue people/companies selling rolls for the player pianos.) In that case Congress finally intervened and passed the first compulsary licensing laws. Anyone could create a roll for the player pianos based on existing songs but had to pay so much per roll sold to the composers.They're trying to turn back the clock by painting everything related to online music with the same brush. Let's hope it doesn't work.
As history goes on there are more occurences, the radio industry came along and caused great upheaval as well, particular to the vaudeville acts. Some managers of vaudeville companies refused to allow their performers to perform on radio at all. There was also concern that radio would destroy composer's livlihood. The same laws congress passed before came to the rescue and radio stations were required to pay so much to the composers of the songs they played. The next big upheaval was sound recordings. Everything played out pretty much the same. In every case compulsary licensing was the solution. (Granted it was a compromise solution, but it worked.) Outside of the msuic business there's also the infamous VCR that the MPAA was convinced would utterly destroy them. (Funny how wrong they were.)
I suspect the RIAA & MPAA will ultimately be unsuccesful, once the cat's out of the bag you can't put it back in. Mp3s aren't going to go away, even if they manage to legislate them as illegal. They also have quite a few artists already embracing online distribution, once there's a few success stories (and there will be, it'll just take some time) other artists will follow suit. Granted it may be a while but major changes never take place overnight, there's always an adjustment period. The member companies of the RIAA & MPAA would find it in their best interests to look at history and see what happens to those who try to keep progress from occurring. Those companies that don't adapt die, and that's where the RIAA's members seem to be heading. Given the way they treat their artists not many people will miss them either.
So downloading "any copyrighted material" is legal but downloading programs are not? That doesn't make sense. Isn't a program copyrighted material? Anyway, why did programs get special protection? Just curious. (I am not Norwegian.)
SilentChris, I speak as a P2P (well, free, not commercial) developer. So I have some bias in that I don't like the big companies going after me. Someday, if I manage to find work doing what I like to do as a hobby, I'd like this to stay open.
As for the "drug trafficker's road", I can't agree with you. A road has only so much benefit for non-traffickers, but significant benefit for traffickers.
You point out that there are a great deal of illegal files on P2P networks. This is true, but consider why.
P2P filesharing does not inherently have any illegal characteristics. It is simply a transfer medium, much the same as the Internet is a transfer medium.
P2P filesharing systems almost always have two interesting characteristics:
(a) They provide resources for distributing a popular piece of data to grow almost without bound.
(b) They distribute costs of distribution of data across all consumers of that data.
Both of these characteristics are very valuable. The first tends to mean that the network does "more of what we want". It gives us the data we want without limitations based on how much bandwidth someone can get to distribute data. It means that I can create a rendered movie (a la Red versus Blue), post it to Slashdot, and *still* obtain the bandwidth necessary to distribute it -- I probably would not otherwise be able to do so. This is a case in which P2P filesharing has significantly allowed greater distribution of desired data.
The second means that there is a significant problem handled. We have no micropayment mechanism in place, so people are unwilling to pay for a file they download that might incur costs of half a cent in bandwidth. However, when millions of people download a file, they incur significant bandwidth costs. P2P filesharing provides an economic solution to this problem -- it has all consumers of the data automatically contribute to the cost of the data distribution. This is not a trivial problem to otherwise solve, and again provides significant benefits. It allows *anyone* to publish any amount of content, no matter how limited their means.
Now, you talk about illegality. Yes, this is true. However, consider why there are so many illegal files being traded. For a long time, it was kind of a pain to massively reproduce and distribute works. This let us create a mechanism for funding content production based on tying resource allocation to the content creator to the publication/distribution mechanism. We had big publishers spring up, take money for content creators, handle the difficult and expensive distribution, and then provide resources for the content creators to continue to create content. This worked very well for the era of books.
The problem is that P2P filesharing, very simply, makes it cheap and affordable for *anyone* to distribute data. There is a tremendous *demand* for copyrighted goods being distributed freely. P2P filesharing's solving of an economic problem and inherent efficiency make it much easier to supply any kind of content. Since supply is up and the demand for illegal content is so high (and not addressed by our existing distribution mechanisms -- on purpose), illegal content is currently the majority of the content on P2P filesharing networks. This isn't because of any inherent property of P2P filesharing -- it's just because that's what people want.
Now, you could ban it. You could say "This mechanism is so efficient and good that it allows people to do things that they couldn't do before. Our current system to fund content creation can't handle this. We're going to ban it." It does solve some social problems, but there are serious problems with banning such systems:
(a) We live in a global Internet. If some guy in Madagascar can create a P2P filesharing system, everyone can obtain it.
(b) Anonymous systems have nowhere near reached their full potential. As pressure against P2P filesharing users goes up, systems simply provide greater securi
May we never see th
True. But they do pay dearly for the priviledge. And only a small number of songs actually make it to radio play. See this Salon article
Instead they could get one million listeners for free, using P2P channels.
It does not make sense....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
While the lawsuits have to date focused on uploaders (unauthorized distributors), every U.S. court that's looked at P2P systems has held downloading to also be an infringement of an exclusive right (reproduction). See, for example:
"We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders' exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs' distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs' reproduction rights." A&M Records v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004, 1014 (9th Cir., 2001).
"Just as in Napster, many of those who use Defendants' software do so to download copyrighted media files, including those owned by Plaintiffs, and thereby infringe Plaintiffs' rights of reproduction and distribution." MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 259 F. Supp. 2d 1029, 1035 (C.D. Cal. 2003).
Did anyone ever stop to think about the different evidence problems in suing for downloading vs. suing for uploading? If you're uploading, I can come along and download from you, record the TCP/IP packets, and have enough to start the lawsuit process. But to go after you for downloading, I'd have to make the material available for you to download from me, which raises a bunch of hairy issues...
This is novel ground being tread. These are (AFAIK) the first end user P2P suits to hit the courts. I imagine the attorneys are being as pragmatic as possible, going for the cleanest targets and the low-hanging fruit first. Once a few of these have gone to trial (and assuming success), emboldened, I think you'll see downloading cases sooner than later.
geek. lawyer.