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Judge: Schools Don't Have to Help Music Industry
peg0cjs writes "www.canoe.ca reports that a federal magistrate has ruled that two North Carolina universities do not have to reveal the identities of two students accused of sharing copyrighted music on the Internet. U.S. Magistrate Judge Russell A. Eliason ruled that the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University do not need to cooperate with the RIAA in identifying two students accused of music piracy. The two unnamed students, who go by the aliases "hulk" and "CadillacMan", allegedly used University computer systems to distribute copyrighted material. The lawyer for one student said, 'We would never condone music piracy. What we're interested in is the rights of the individual -- privacy rights being protected.'"
Now only if ISP's felt the same way . . .
Good: 1
Evil: 42
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
What about when you've only been accused. Innocent until proven guilty, or something like that? (US) Think before you post, Poindexter!
Note to RIAA: Not ALL our base belong to you.
Yea Biotch!
I own this school! wooo! Party on Wilmington St tonight! gonna get LAID!
Booyakasha!
> "We would never condone music piracy," attorney Michael
> Kornbluth said. "What we're interested in is the rights of the
> individual -- privacy rights being protected."
This seems like a pretty weak legal argument to me. If the crime had been assault or theft of a laptop or breaking and entering would anyone with material evidence of the crime be justified in not cooperating with the investigation in order to protect the privacy of the alleged perpetrators?
Wait! Aren't we all supposed to be on the same Team here? There's no "I" in "SCHOOL"
I'm sure most people in the music industry at one time went to school, right? Therefore schools should be helping the music industry. It's plain and simple "IF A THEN B" logic, people.
Oh won't someone PLEASE think of the children!
Or at least think of how Chewbacca, living on Endor would gladly give up his privacy rights to help out the music industry.
(yeah, yeah...mod me either off topic or funny)
finally some sense. If the university breaches your privacy by handing over your details without a search warrant/appropriate court demand/whatever then you have a case to bring a suit against them. Same goes for ISPs, phone companies, cable companies or whatever.
Isn't there something about probably cause? Surely I can't ring up MIT and say "One of your students who goes by the name Stud Muffin has been posting copies of my material online, take it down now" and expect to be taken seriously without providing some evidence?
IANAL
I didn't RTFA
I am a leaf on the wind
anyone care to explain?
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
Since the RIAA != A local, state or federal law enforcement agency, the RIAA has no legal ground to demand student information. They need to go to court just like every other person or corporation in this country.
Yea for logic and reasoning in the legal system!
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
All government funding to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University was suspended today for failing to trample all over students right to privacy and bowing down to commercial interests.
Unnamed sources were quoted as saying that individuals attending any organization receiving government funds have no expectation of privacy.
I'm glad someone's standing up for pirates, but couldn't you use the same argument (privacy) these schools are using to defend withholding the names of people running a kiddie porn ring or some other illegal activity? They should address the IP issues instead of using privacy as the standard by which their actions are to be judged. This could be an opportunity to take a stand and make a statement instead of a ruling that will be overturned. Thoughts?
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
That's all well and good, in North Carolina. But, how is it going to play as a precedent in other courts? Particularly of interest is the federal level. I haven't kept up on the various decisions lately, but I believe other court rulings have supported the MPAA/RIAA.
I sincerely doubt that a judge in California will see things the same way. Of course, I've been wrong before.
Additionally, what's the motivation for organizations (schools or ISPs) to fight for privacy versus just rolling over? I don't hear much of an outcry from the public over this bullshit, so it's not like they're really trying to protect their images. And, we all know that corporations don't go to much effort just on priciple (schools are a bit better in this regard).
In terms of "selling piracy", the MPAA/RIAA have won. The public really buys into the idea of it being stealing (as opposed to copyright infringment), and doesn't seem to get too pissed off over the draconian punishments that have been handed down. Even people who are fairly technically literate, or well versed in law, often don't see the distinction between theft and infringement. It's pretty sad. Who else is up for forming a non-profit, whose mission is to educate the public on intellectual property issues? Lastly, if the public doesn't understand the issue all that well, can we really expect much better of the judiciary? In an ideal world, the judiciary represents the populace (of course, I'd hope them to be much smarter than the average asshole on the street though).
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
The civil liberties crowd will be happy that we're back to innocent until proven guilty -- "there's a large chasm between suspected and convicted" after all.
As long as the *AA's have the bank accounts and the lobbyists, these cases will just be a bump in their road.
And that really really blows.
This isn't a criminal charge, it's a civil action. Also, it's generally one based on rather weak evidence. The RIAA has companies that work for them that scan the filesharing networks for people sharing lots of files. They don't download and check them (at least not last I heard) they just get a list and assume it to be true. They then file a John Doe suit against the person behind the IP they supposedly came form and try to get their name.
Well there's a lot of problems here. First, as noted, they don't really check to see if the files are what they claim they are. I mean just because they claim to be song X doesn't mean that's actually their contents. Second, not all file sharing networks, Kazaa in particular, are that good at reporting files on a computer. Sometimes you'll ask it for a list of a host's files and it'll give you a list for a different host. Now, even if it is the right list and they are legit, you have no idea what might be behind that IP. Maybe it's an open wireless access point, maybe the box was hacked. You don't know that the person who was allegedly in charge of the IP is actually responsable.
So this is a pretty weak case to ask a school to violate it's prvacy policy for. This isn't like a criminal investigation, where probable cause would have to be presented to a judge to get an order to have the school give up the information. The RIAA is essentially going on fishing expeditions, and then forcing a settlement because a trial is too expensive and scary. Big difference for a normal sriminal investigation.
Even in a civil case, you must have probable cause to go into someone's bank records, medical records, phone records, search someone's house.
The school said, we are going to require you to have some basis to invade these student's privacy -- nothing is wrong with that. If this is a criminal case, the police would have to get a warrant from a judge. Here in a civil case, the school is saying get a judge to order us to.
This test has already come up in many courts. The plaintiff (RIAA) has to show that there is a likelyhood that they would be successful, before unmasking these people.
This comes from many cases where employees or investors have commented about companies and the company files suit only to unmask the people, then drop the suit. One of the early decisions was released in 2000.
Fight Spammers!
So, no police turning up, no-one behaving like police to try to 'stamp it out', no-one going to jail even if they did do it. Taxpayers won't pay for the police or the jail, they have better uses for their tax dollars.
Go to a judge. Tell him about the John or Jane Doe. See if the judge will force John or Jane to come along and tell his or her side of the story --- for all I know, maybe their computer was broken into, or maybe their open WAP was hijacked.
Believe the judge. It's his duty to uphold the law as between civil litigants in the best way he sees fit.
Getting John or Jane Doe's details, and then intimidating them, well, that might be a crime.
How about no one 'stole' anything. Does the RIAA no longer have their copy of the music that was allegedly stolen? If they do, then nothing was stolen.
What they have is an allegation that copyright infringement took place. No mention seems to be made as to what proof they have, its possible they dont have any.
They dont get to find out who (may) have been at that IP address and ransack that persons computer looking for proof (or threaten to sue them then settle for $obscene_amount)
What the music industry doesn't seem to understand is that they are going through a fundamental shift in their business. Things are never going to go back to the way that were before the MP3-P2P revolution. If the music industry succeeds in stopping file sharing of music recordings, they will end up shrinking their industry much more than would happen if they let file sharing continue unharrassed.
File sharing is critically important to the industry because it is becoming the only way that people can find new music that they like. The old method of music sales, which was a single song or group of songs unalterably imprinted on a plastic disk (or tape spool in the case of cassettes), enforced the perspective that the only 'natural' way to market recordings was to have every disk have the same price for every song sold to every listener. This seemed obvious and actually did work well for 100 years.
Then digitization hit. Digitization takes any media and separates it into parts in ways that were impossible and inconceivable before the medium is converted into a digital format. This happens to every media that becomes digitized. These separated forms are then recombined with other forms that have become separated from other media. All the wealth that is created from commercializing digitized media comes from the recombination of these separations into new formats that were impossible before digitization. Usually the new products are inferior in quality to previous pre-digital products, but this is ignored by customers because the new products have so much more utility than the previous higher quality but more expensive products.
Examples abound: the typewriter keys split from the printing of letters and combined with television to become the word processor. The piano split between the keyboard and the sound of the hammered strings to become the sampler. The light bulb split from the generated heat and combined with offset printing to become the LCD graphics display terminal....and so on.
Digitization split the recording from the disk. The recording combined with the telephone to become P2P and the disk combined with the telegraph to become the CD-R. The $15 group of songs on a disk became the $0.15 CD-R with 10 albums worth of songs. This isn't going to change back regardless of the draconian incarceration laws passed by the music industry. They're just going to turn ordinary college students into hardened criminals and dedicated revolutionaries. Just to attempt a vain effort to preserve an outmoded pop-music distribution method from its inevitable transformation.
The new method of music distribution will be centered on the marketing to the individual listener/customer instead of marketing individual disk recordings. The industry has to get used to the principal that in the new era, every listener is going to pay a different amount of money for each recording in their collection. Currently with file sharing, that cost is $0.00 with the listener/consumer having to do all the filtering of the junk and uninteresting recordings available on the Kazaa. (a new noun meaning the underground file-sharing network, as opposed to 'being in Kazaa'). The music industry will reap unimaginable profits off file sharing when they learn to filter the astronomical amount of recorded music to individual listener's tastes.
This is where their real future lies, not with harassing and alienating their customer base.
Here's a page describing the type of Subpoena being used by the RIAA:
Subpoena Defense Alliance
You have to understand the entire system of the United States is to protect the citizenry from a violation of rights. If you're rights are violated in the gathering of evidence, then that evidence is moot, and is inadmisable in court. If the government is going to get you thrown in jail or put you at a disadvantage (in this case ruling in favor of RIAA) then they have the duty of due process. Just because some one took something that wasn't their's doesn't mean that the person doing the taking forfiets their rights. That is part of liberty and freedom. And the right to privacy is a protected right under the Ten Amendment as affirmed by the courts. If you do are doing something illegal, and the right to privacy shields the view of that act, then you can not be forced to reveal your identity if unless that act committed in private has public consquences (for example, the unenforceable sex laws that legislate what is legal or illegal in the bed room have been ruled illegal on the grounds that they violate the right to privacy and the acts committed do not have a public consquence. This principle is how a meth lab can be shut down or a child pornographer is stopped.) Anyhow, I would love to read the issues and how the issues of privacy came into play. I would be willing to bet that the reason the judge ruled in favor of the students was because of some agreement between the students and the school. However, the AUP of UNC reads, "Users have no Constitutional expectation of privacy in any information on the UNCP technology infrastructure. " With such an explicit statment I would be willing to argue that there are larger issues than what appears on face value.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Copyright infringement is only a criminal offense if it is done for profit, or the work which is copied has a retail value over $1,000.
Law enforcement does not investigate civil cases.
So, it's more like:
1. The RIAA suspects someone has infringed on their IP and files a John Doe lawsuit in federal court.
2. The RIAA has to figure out who this person is before they can go much further in court.
3. The RIAA requests the court to issue a subpoena on the ISP to identify the infringer pursuant to 17 USC 512(h).
4. The ISP responds to the subpoena, and the RIAA now knows who the infringer is.
5. The RIAA amends their complaint to include the infringer as the defendant.
6. The lawsuit proceeds.
None of this has anything to do with warrants or the criminal system.
What?