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RIAA Sues a Child
dniq writes "You may remember the previously posted story about a case against a mother, which was dropped by the RIAA right after her lawyers moved to dismiss the case.
Well, guess what? The RIAA has brought a lawsuit against the mother's daughter - now a 14 year old girl - and moved for appointment of a guardian at litem."
Am I a thief? yes.
Tell me again, since when copyright infringement became theft?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I did think that the McLibel case was the biggest PR disaster a corporation had ever got involved in ..http://www.mcspotlight.org/ .I do not think any media organisation is going to let up on this one .
Well done to the RIAA , they have just managed to out do McDonald's PR disaster .
I really did not think they would be that stupid , Even if they win their reputation will be completely destroyed
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Well, the last artice on slashdot was gross misinformation. The judge basicly said "Continuing as the same case is more complicated and has no advantages. If you want to do it, file a new case." Which they did.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you don't want to support this kind of thing, don't buy any more music from RIAA labels.
Use RIAA Radar to find out if an album is published by an RIAA label. If that's the case, and you want it anyway, don't buy it new, but used (for instance at ebay, amazon marketplace or even a used records store).
Support independant labels and artists by buying their stuff!
If you'd still like to support a band that's signed with an RIAA label, go see them live (and maybe buy a t-shirt there).
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
Until then, I'd really suggest you not make blanket statements for which you are not logically equipped to back up.
Copyrighted works have value and, in the case of music, it is demostrated value (people pay for it). Because people are obtaining the music without paying for it, against the wishes of the copyright holder, when they would have had to pay for it
Used music purchases are often against the "wishes" of the copyright holder, do not benefit the copyright holder, and deprive the copyright holder 'income'. Copyright law wasn't about protecting holder's incomes, in fact it was really the opposite. Copyright law was designed to force things into the public domain, as the common law at the time allowed for the argument of perpetual copyright. It isn't until recently that there is all this crying over derivative works, insanely long copyright terms and instant copyright of everything without application and without application for extensions. These benefit the corporations, the holders, and do not benefit the people or public in any way. It undermines the public domain and reduces creative possibilities.
Unless you can prove that all the people who downloaded the work would never have paid for it, arguing that downloaders would not have bought the music does not stand.
Actually it is a valid argument. If those in favor of stringent copyright laws want to argue in favor of "lost sales" without providing any proof to the matter other than made up numbers, then yes, the otherside can say "I wouldn't have bought it anyway."
I'm not against copyright and I do believe that creators deserve protection. But there needs to modifications to take into account current technology, and the lifetime of a copyright needs to be severly reduced to encourage innovation and allow the public domain, and thus the public, to flourish. And, contrary to what people want you to believe, the point of the following line is to LIMIT the term of IP protection: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
No no no. Real piracy involves ships and assorted pirate accessories (for the modern-day pirate, that means small arms, for the more historically-inclined pirate, muskets, swords, cannons, eyepatches and parrots). And usually plenty of violence, keel-hauling and making people walk the plank.
Completely wrong. Guild and innocence only refer to criminal procedings, and is determined at the end of the trial rather than at the start. In civil procedings, the defendant can be found liable or not liable.
This still doesn't cover copyright infringement.
Theft of services means you agreed to have someone perform a service for you, like a doctor's examination, and that person expended their time and labor fulfilling that agreement. When you skip out on paying them, that is theft of service.
In the case of theft of service, the doctor has expended time and physical labor performing the service specifically for you, and there is external, independent evidence that that's the case. You have interacted with the person performing the service.
In the case of copyright infringement, there isn't necessarily any interaction with the copyright owner. The copyright owner has no way of even knowing about the infringement without snooping into your private life to uncover it.
Here's yet another way to look at it: service is a limited, finite resource. The doctor has limited time. The theatre you sneak into has limited seats. Like physical property, theft of service is taking away something the provider had (time, physical space to rent, etc.) and no longer has as a result of the theft. Copyright infringement, on the other hand, involves an infinite, unlimited resource. In and of itself, the act of making a copy has absolutely no effect on the copyright owner and deprives the copyright owner of nothing that the owner had before the infringement took place.
So, theft is truely the wrong word for this act and very misleading. That isn't to say that, because of its constant use in the wrong sense, it will not come to acquire that meaning (since language ultimately depends on common usage), but currently it is a biased and purposely misleading word when used to describe copyright infringement.
All of the above, by the way, has nothing to do with the ethics or legality of copyright infringement. That is an entirely different issue. But it is important to distinguish it from theft before such discussions even begin, if those discussions are going to be rational.
Wrong. "Theft of services" is an actual defined crime. "Criminal infringement of copyright" is not theft - see how the word "theft" doesn't appear anywhere in that phrase?
The Supreme Court ruled that copyright infringement is not theft in a 1985 case, Dowling v. United States
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Wow, talk about spreading FUD! A guardian ad litem is "A guardian appointed to represent the interests of a person with respect to a single action in litigation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_ad_litem.
No one is taking this girl from her mother.
Find me in ~/.sig
Yes the RIAA is a trade organization, but for the most part they represent the music studios, not the artists. See, the studios got an exception put into Copyright law which says that musical works performed by an artist belong to them, not the artist. Normally copyright is assigned to the creator/author/artist, unless it's a work for hire - I commission you (pay you) to create a piece of text, software, music, and it belongs to me even though you created it. Except the music studios didn't want to pay the artists so they bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobbied some Congressmen for a change in copyright law which says that audio recordings are a work for hire even if you don't pay the artist. That way they get the copyright, the artist gets "paid" a percentage of the album sales, and the costs of producing the album get taken out of the artist's cut. In other words, the artist pays for making his own album, but the studio gets the copyright.
So yes the RIAA is composed of members, but the members aren't the ones creating the music. They're simply the ones distributing music, and they're scared out of their wits because the Internet drops the cost of distributing music so close to zero that they children they're suing can do it.
Intellectual Propert - A product of the intellect that has commercial value, including copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes.
You just lumped copyrights, patents, trademarks (which you call "appellations of origins"), and trade secrets (which you call "business methods, and industrial processes") into one category. Those rights are more different than alike, and for this reason, many critics discourage use of the umbrella term "intellectual property" to conflate them.
Intellectual property is a term used by a great many people to cover well, all of intellectual property.
The term "intellectual property" is not used in the United States Code, and for a good reason: the different exclusive rights that make it up have different purposes and raise entirely different sets of public policy issues.
Let's look at the ways to possible hear content:
...
1. CD's and cassettes (if they still exist) that you purchase at the store.
2. Legally Downloaded music from a store like iTunes.
3. Television and Radio with the host of radio stations and the few television radio stations.
4. Illegally downloaded music.
it items 1-3 money gets back to the RIAA, in element 4 it does not. This means that the RIAA is being deprived of income.
You forgot live shows. Do you claim that live shows should be just as unlawful as element 4 because like element 4, they don't result in a lot of revenue going back to the label?
Now if our fictional person X (and more importantly the multitudes of persons X) is downloading music and not listening to the radio or watching MTV (or VH1 or whomever), they are collectively hurting ratings for stations and networks.
No, they are hurting the ratings for Music_Radio_And_Music_TV_In_General. Those services that are full of illicit file-sharing have their own ratings.
So to re-hash, the courts and legal system seem to be against you when it comes to this idea of the actual quality of property that IP has.
But they are against you when it comes to the conflation of different legal traditions into "intellectual property". For instance, the court in Sega v. Accolade ruled that you can't use copyrights or trademarks to simulate a patent, and this was upheld post-DMCA in Lexmark v. Static Control.
sharing music in the P2P manner is ILLEGAL.
Is it still prohibited even if such noncommercial sharing has been authorized by the author using a license such as CC by-nd-nc? Or do you claim that independent authors of musical works do not have the authority to grant such a license because they can't prove that their work is original?