EFF Calls RIAA Tactics 'Reign of Terror'

nanday writes "What happens when the RIAA prosecutes people for alleged illegal music downloads? In an article on Newsforge (also owned by OSTG), lawyer Ray Beckerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the RIAA's favorite tactics, and why they play fast and loose with the law. Beckerman also explains why two of these cases may stop the RIAA in its tracks - and what you can do for help." From the article: "In UMG vs. Lindor, the defendant 'is a home house-aid who's never even used a computer,' according to Beckerman. 'She's never operated a computer, she's never even turned on a computer. The only connection she has ever had to a computer is that she has on occasion dusted near the parts that she believes are a computer. And yet she is being pursued as an online distributor in peer-to-peer file sharing.' Since Beckerman became involved in the case after it had gone to federal court, he has tried to learn the details of the charges -- so far with little success. 'The RIAA is trying to conceal the information about how it conducts its investigation,' he says. 'They have stalled every discovery request we've made' -- presumably because to reveal this information would also reveal the weakness of all the similar cases."

Comments

technology is outstripping Justice's understanding

[yagu]

Case in point from the article:

The trouble is, Beckerman says, "The judges have no clue. They actually won't let me talk about it. There was a case in 2004 where an elderly judge was told by a lawyer in his brief from the RIAA that from the meta-data and the hash, you could tell that these were illegally copied files, which was, of course, nonsense. But the judge actually referred to that in his decision as to why he was upholding the subpoena." Often, the judges make decisions without hearing oral arguments at all.

It would be nice to think the courts and the justice system (the jurists) would apply due diligence but for myriad reasons they don't or won't. Considering technology, the RIAA, and the gazillion combinations of playing with digital media it isn't clear a judge could ever be educated enough to understand the technical issues. Instead, the deepest pockets win because they can afford the biggest megaphone -- they've convinced the legal system via FUD that consumers are evil and piracy is rampant and must be stopped.

Problem is, customers aren't evil, piracy is not rampant (yeah, it exists, but it's not the monster the RIAA claims it is), and it doesn't need to be stopped.

My biggest fear is the momentum is too strong, the RIAA has gotten too far along and has won enough battles it's beginning to look like they may win the war. And, the prediction in the article:

Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and one of Defective By Design's chief organizers, wrapped up the call by emphasizing the need to support the defendants in these cases. What the RIAA is doing today with music downloads, Brown warns, other organizations may be doing next year if digital rights management technologies become commonplace in hardware. He urged call participants to blog about the call to educate others, and announced that a recording of the call would be available shortly on the Defective By Design site.

is likely to be the outcome.

Of course it seems obvious to me the ultimate result of all of this nonsense is the buying public either is so angry at their treatment, or confused by all of the rules and regulations, the promising landscape of new and great electronic gizmos will suffer its own (and hopefully temporary until all the goons leave town) recession. To quote the scathing Paul Thurrott's outrage against Microsoft's false positive to his "piracy", "Ah well". ;-)

Countersuit

[pete6677]

Until one of their wrongly sued victims files a countersuit and wins big, they have no motivation to stop this. They don't care about losing a few cases. In most cases its enough to just scare people into paying their extortion fee.

Re:Countersuit

[DeathKoil]

Given how much money it would cost to go after the RIAA I'm not too surprised that no one has filed a countersuit yet. However, so far every story I've heard about the RIAA sueing someone has been that the person was either a child/teenager or a family that doesn't much cash. It would be interesting to get demographic information about who the RIAA has gone after so far.

Why is anyone surprised?

[cloudkiller]

This is what happens when you have a government that can be purchased. Make no mistake about it, in the US laws/justice/rights/people/myself is for sale and the RIAA/MPAA is buying. As long as they have money they will be able to manipulate any system set up in the US to serve their needs.

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[FinchWorld]

If the judge of such cases (and/or jury depending on how the case works) does not understand the issues, then they should not preside over it.

Would you allow a technition to fix a photocopyer when he only knows about air conditioning?

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[Roody Blashes]

Problem is, customers aren't evil, piracy is not rampant (yeah, it exists, but it's not the monster the RIAA claims it is), and it doesn't need to be stopped.

You fail to understand the enemy, and that is why you will lose.

The RIAA and MPAA are not fighthing this fight because they believe piracy is a problem now. They're not spending all this money fighting it because they want to get a couple extra bucks in sales.

They're fighting it because they recognize that p2p has the potential to completely decimate their supply channels by allowing every Tom, Dick, and Harry to interrupt their entire business plan with a mouse clicks.

This is a fact. Whether you believe it will actually happen or not is up for debate, but the RIAA and MPAA do believe that it will, or that it's likely enough that going on this campaign now is in their best interests.

Of course, like any other company that mistreats a cusomter, the simplest solution is to simply cease doing business with them. However, since the majority of people who are aware of this problem seem to be comprised of either theives or theif sympathizers who would rather just keep fueling the fire by stealing music, there's nobody really out there with any effective grassroots campaign to expose this disgraceful behavior.

If you want to put an end to this, the simple answer is to cease all activities involving consumption of the product. Don't steal it, don't buy it, don't listen to it on the radio, and make sure you let everyone know your position and explain why you're taking that position WITHOUT making it sound like you're just whining that you're coming under fire for wanting to steal things.

No income = dead cartel. Very simple equation.

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[Epeeist]

> Of course it seems obvious to me the ultimate result of all of this nonsense is the buying public either is so angry at their treatment, or confused by all of the rules and regulations

Unfortunately I think you are wrong.

If you were right then people would have got rid of their crashing, malware prone MS desktops years ago. As it is they moan and groan, but still don't switch to anything better.

I think the same will be true about restrictions management. People will grumble but accept it as normal. It is only the activists who will attempt to do something about and they stand a good chance of being dismissed by the (bought) legislators who can point to the fact that most people accept and are therefore happy with the situation (yes, I do know there is a non seqitur there).

Nice use of the Oxford comma by the way.

Have faith?

[MarkByers]

Honestly, the idea of DRMs pisses so many people off that they simply can't stay around for long. The consumer hates not being trusted, and won't buy things that have DRMs.

Most people, when they installed the Sony rootkit, did not even know that they had installed DRM on their machine, what it's purpose was, how to remove it, or even why they should care.

DRMs will be a thing of the past in the next decade, I have faith.

My prediction: DRM will be even more common next decade. CD sales will continue to fall and DRM'd content sales will continue to rise. The difference between you and me, is that I will be trying to raise people's awareness rather than just sitting back and letting it happen.

Re:Have faith?

[MarkByers]

I'm not sure how you inferred that I wasn't going to take an active hand in educating people

I associate 'having faith' with religious nuts that failed to win an argument using logic so they just claim 'This is true, please just accept it and don't think about it any more.'

Sorry if I jumped to a conclusion.

DRM will only fail if everyone (well, enough of the population that it hurts sales figures) takes a stand against it. If DRM becomes successful, vendor lock-in will be even more of a problem than it is today. You can't just leave this something like this to chance. I'm glad that there are at least two of us that will help to educate others about the problems of widespread acceptance of DRM, however I am worried that there are not enough of us.

Re:Have faith?

[MarkByers]

No, the main problem with DRM ... is how its been implemented. They have tried to tie the media to specific devices on which it plays.

Oh really?? And here was me thinking it was just a way to prevent illegal copying...

I have commented on this before, but it seems that I am the only person on Slashdot that understands that DRM cannot prevent illegal copying.

Re:Have faith?

[SatanicPuppy]

I see two possibilities...

One, we get "good" drm, which is to say, DRM that is both hard to break, and mostly transparent to the user (good quality, not good ethically). Right now DRM is really obvious, it's like a leash, and every time you try to exercise your rights, that leash jerks you up short, causes anger and irritation. It's also easy to break, so the benefits of breaking the DRM and getting full use of the content are way ahead of the actual hassle of breaking the DRM. In my opinion, the best way to get "good" DRM would be to stream everything from central servers, and make it available through a range of wireless integrated devices. This is obviously serious future tech, but the potential exists already, so it's not farfetched.

The other possibility is that the current distribution model will break down as artists opt-out of the restrictive RIAA practices, and some more organic system grows up in its place, where content is not so rabidly protected, and artists are more directly compensated by their fans.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a little of both, in the next 10 years. All these subscription sites are technically crappy implementations of the first concept...Pay a subscription fee and access the music all you want, in any number of crappy non-portable formats. But if you could browse it in your car, or anywhere else through a range of compatible devices interconnected wirelessly? Who gives a damn if you can't copy it, if you can access it any time, from any where? It'd be the death of the physical media sales, so they won't support it for a while to come, but it's the best approach for them. They keep control, they get your money.

As far as the second goes, there have been independant artists and independant labels for years, but they're exploding now, with all the production costs going down. They have so much less to lose, and so much less access to physical media stores, they're trying all kinds of new methods of distribution, and it's not unlikely that some of them will be popular enough to pull in some of the mainstream.

Re:Have faith?

[kimvette]

If my impression of the ..AA is right, the intent is NOT to curb "piracy" but to eliminate ALL legal exceptions to copyright (e.g., Fair Use) and eliminate ALL limitations of duration (e.g., no more limited monopoly, no more social contract under the constitution which gives useful inventions and arts to the public domain) on copyrights. They want to make it so Mickey Mouse NEVER goes into public domain, while they're allowed to re-interpret shakespeare, grimm, aesop, and so forth ad-naseum and yet have their reinterpretations of those public domain works to be protected by copyright for all of eternity.

They KNOW they cannot prevent this so-called "piracy" but they want to brainwash me, you, politicians, and of course the children to believe that fair use does not exist, and copyright should never, ever, ever expire and works should never, ever enter the public domain. We don't grant a 10-year, 20-year, 30-year, or even 70-year monopoly on works now. Thanks to DRM and the DMCA, they now have a de-facto state-authorized-yet-unconstitutional unlimited copyright, and they want to reeducate us all to believe that this is how it should be, despite what the constitution states in black and white about the limited duration monopoly.

Re:Have faith?

[insanemime]

The other possibility is that the current distribution model will break down as artists opt-out of the restrictive RIAA practices, and some more organic system grows up in its place, where content is not so rabidly protected, and artists are more directly compensated by their fans

Unfortunately I don't think that will happen with the artists. Remember the stink over ticketmaster and their "service charges"? Some artists came out aginst it and swore it was not right but now it is just business as usual. Artists do what the label tells them to do (with some big name exceptions who run their own lables now).

Re:Have faith?

[SatanicPuppy]

Ticketmaster is a more interesting case, because they have access to a resource that is a seriously tough nut to crack. You can record, mix, and burn your own CD, but if you want to play a venue bigger than your local bar, you're going to have to play their game (or find a nice field somewhere, build your own stage, etc).

Record companies, on the other hand, only have that sort of stranglehold on the retail outlets, and retail outlets have been slumping for years. I think the indies are in a really good position right now, and I think that's only going to get better.

Re:Have faith?

[GWBasic]

The *AA's intention is to make as much money as possible. Period.

Really, they are only hurting themselves (and artists who only make money from CD sales, like Wendy Carlos). At this rate, they will sue themselves out of business, because up-and-coming artists will find other ways to make money.

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[geoff lane]

The piracy that costs the companies that the RIAA represents are the undocumented pressings that appear from CD factories throughout the world. Compared to that, the kids sharing a few files is inconcequential.

The copyright industry is a menace

[CurtMonash]

Besides the nasty tactics outlined in the article, the RIAA et al. are a serious menace in at least two other ways.

First, they are a prime mover behind laws mandating a long audit trail (e.g., two years) recording who accesses which web sites. (Child porn is the other common motivation.) To date, this has been more of an issue in Europe than the US.

Second, there's a huge threat going forward as Layer 7 inspection by ISPs becomes commonplace. At that point, it will be at least theoretically possible to harass somebody for ANYTHING they download, upload, whatever, because intermediaries such as ISPs will have complete access to that information.

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[andrewman327]

Why doesn't the EFF provide experts to file briefs outlining the flaws in RIAA's claims? Do lower courts not accept amicus curiae briefs?

I agree that there is a problem with judges not compeltely understanding technology, but they are taught to be open minded. Remember that a lot of the people dues by the RIAA are guilty. Just because many of us feel things should be different does not change the fact that some of these people are violating the law. However I do not believe that the legal actions of the RIAA are in the spirit of American jurisprudence, nor do they meet the required burden of proof.

She can't recognize a computer?!?!?

[Dutchmaan]

"The only connection she has ever had to a computer is that she has on occasion dusted near the parts that she believes are a computer."

Ok, maybe she hasn't used a computer before.. Thats fine, but unless this person is uncontrollably stupid "dusted near the parts that she believes are a computer." How many people in a normal society would even be able to recongnize a computer! I think this person is playing extra stupid as part of her defense.

Re:She can't recognize a computer?!?!?

[LoveGoblin]

I'm sure you're right in that they're playing up her computer illiteracy, but still...you've never heard of anyone who thinks that the monitor is the computer?

Tactics in court

[Opportunist]

The development is not a good one, neither for the efficiency nor the reputation of our courts. The tactics are always the same. First, accusations are peppered all over the net to people who might have something to do with it. Now, the average person is no lawyer and can't afford one, so one of two happens:

1. They pay, because the accusation says "Pay or it gets more expensive", even if they didn't do anything.
2. They go to court where the case is immediately dropped by the RIAA unless they REALLY hold some evidence.

Now mix in that the average judge knows jack about internet or the way it works (I only say "tubes". Ok, no judge but a politicians, but similar species and cranium). To make matters worse, many judges refuse to hire experts to get an informed input about it and instead rely on hearsay or what accuser and defender claim would be true. It's stunning that the judges don't even bother considering that either of them could be lying to win his case (again an example where in the presence of computers usually intelligent people turn into gullible morons).

This makes trials more gambling than anything resembling justice. Justice has the problem, like many parts of the legal branch, that the advent of the internet and computers in law and crime changed a lot of parameters. Most of all they changed that a lot of the things happening in and around computers cannot be grasped with "common sense" (not that it was all that common in court rooms... but I ramble).

In "normal" cases where everyday things are happening, judges can cast a sound and sensible verdict even if they don't know too much about the underlying matter. If a customer and a mechanic are going to court over breaks that should've been fixed and weren't, a judge can make a fair decision based on looking for parallels that he can understand.

Those parallels don't exist in a world that is very artificial and virtual, where property can be multiplied without any quality loss, immediately and inifinitly.

That's why judges are out of their league when dealing with the 'net, computers and IP. And that's why we get unjust and unsensible court orders. And that's why companies who can afford pepperspray sueing do it.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again...

[Ciarang]

I couldn't agree more.

I suggest that for a popular musician, there is more than enough money in touring, etc to become very wealthy, and a semi-popular one could easily make a living. The only trouble is that doesn't leave anything for the record company execs to get rich on. The argument in the past of course has been that the record company is needed to promote, fund and make the artist popular in the first place. (An unpleasant side effect of this is that the same parasites get to choose what gets to be popular, or at least narrow the potential field down to a few favoured runners)

Most definitely NOT so any more, we're seeing examples already of musicians hitting the charts out of nowhere after building up large followings online. Sadly of course, they sign to the record companies along the way, but they could just as easily public domain* their recorded material and earn well from performing and appearing. In fact, since spreading their music is their key to success, I will replace "just as easily" with "really should" I see that as the way of the future - what we're witnessing now are the last frustrated kicks of a dying beast.

*sorry, yes, I know public domain is not a verb

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[dr_dank]

If you want to put an end to this, the simple answer is to cease all activities involving consumption of the product. Don't steal it, don't buy it, don't listen to it on the radio, and make sure you let everyone know your position and explain why you're taking that position WITHOUT making it sound like you're just whining that you're coming under fire for wanting to steal things.

No income = dead cartel. Very simple equation.

Then the RIAA would point to declining record sales as proof of further harm by piracy. Doesn't matter if P2P went dark tomorrow; they would find a new scapegoat and continue abusing the legal system to ensure their profits. These people don't deal in facts or logic, only in what will scam them more dollars for their member companies by any means necessary.

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[ajs]

They're fighting it because they recognize that p2p has the potential to completely decimate their supply channels by allowing every Tom, Dick, and Harry to interrupt their entire business plan with a mouse clicks.

This is a fact.

Please, cite a source. Any source.

I'm in full agreement with you on the theory that this is the RIAA and MPAA's motivation (though I think it goes deeper than that, and gets a bit darker as they don't merely wish to preseve, but expand their control over distribution), but this is still just what we think the RIAA and MPAA think. It harms our case when we say that this is "a fact".

Stupidity is not terrorism

[radtea]

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is waging a "reign of terror" against "defenseless people" in its efforts to prosecute people for illegal music downloads.

Over a hundred years ago Marx wrote, "What party in the opposition has not been called communistic?" or words to that effect (quoting from memory--dunno where my copy of the Communist Manifesto has got to.) For most of the century that followed it was safe in some circles to paint anything you didn't like--union organization, civil rights protests, anti-war activity, to name but a few--as "communist."

Today, we see the same trend with "terrorist". I have seen and heard accusations of "terrorism" against patent trolls, aggressive commercial competitors, angry former spouses...you name it. Terrorism is the trendy term-of-the-day for anyone you don't much like.

I'm tempted to put in some fairly obvious but sure-to-be-modded-flamebait links to stories on current events that might accurately be described as a "reign of terror" against "defenseless people", just to contrast these with the legal manueverings of the RIAA. I'm sure readers can think up their own links, which will vary depending on political persausion, but in every case they will involve stories where innocent people are living in fear of being killed by bombs, rockets, swords and guns. THAT is a "reign of terror", and I'm damned sure that most of those people would change places with the folks being sued by the RIAA in a moment.

So please, could we stop the hysteria and quit calling everything we don't like "terrorism"?

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[Secrity]

I fervently hope that Trusted Computing dies a horrible death. As far as "years of work being wasted", the work shouldn't have been done in the first place. I don't care if my computer or any software that I have legally obtained trusts me. Remote attestation and sealed storage are especially treacherous features of Trusted Computing. I should be the one controlling my computer, not the computer manufacturers, software publishers, and content providers who wish to control my computer using the friendly little name "Trusting Computing".