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

This will....

[Anonymous Coward]

This will obviously lead to anti-dusting legislation shortly.

Re:This will....

[dr_dank]

We already have the Dusting My Computer Act.

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". ;-)

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.

Non-RIAA Labels of the World, Unite!

[kthejoker]

How come non-RIAA labels can't form an "anti-RIAA" coalition? Most labels not on the RIAA are pretty hip, they have tracks for download without DRM on their sites, they're real big on freebies and artist promotion, and they're generally more about the music itself than the big labels.

So why can't they generate some sort of composite publicity for their activities? Why can't they call themselves soemthing fun like "AWESOME" (Association of Wedding Evil SOBs Out of the Music Enterprise) and run press releases like the RIAA? Donate some money to the EFF? Have some benefit concerts to Kill the RIAA?

Get your acts together, people! Let's synergize our paradigms, or something! Go go go!

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?

[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:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[sjwaste]

I'm wondering if the blame doesn't lie with the clerks. Let's face it, federal judges have enormous case loads. I'm not sure if the 2004 case reference was at the district level, but it's especially busy there.

So I'll ask, where were the clerks, if this account is correct? Federal clerkships are fairly prestigious, and many clerks are young enough to have direct exposure to this technology. Are they not doing the research? I'm fairly certain any due diligence by the judge would be carried out by the clerks on these matters.

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.

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.

Does this mean

[Howler]

...that if the RIAA is sponsoring a "Reign of Terror" that everyone at the RIAA can be arrested, send to GITMO and tried under the Patriot Act? Would would a military tribunal say about the RIAA? Hmmm.. :-P

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[lgw]

This is the truth of the DRM war.

Today geeks are pissed, mostly because we see a dark future if trends continue, and consumers aren't upset by this. However, consumers *will* be upset if trends continue! If DRM moves to a place where consumers choke on it, it will be as dead as Divx, and all technology assoiciated with whatever consumers hated will be dead as well, as fast a a boy-band becomes no longer cool.

I work with engineers who are working on the TCG standards, and there is a lot of awareness of this problem. If, as many Slashdotters fear, Trusted Computing gets used to lock down consumer DRM, then Trusted Computing is dead, and years of work are wasted.

This doesn't mean that DRM is going away, however. There's plenty of room for less intrusive DRM that won't annoy the average customer, but will still seem restrictive to geeks. iTunes is there, more or less, for example.

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.

a fun if possibly illegal idea

[DaveV1.0]

1) Steal the identity of the heads of the RIAA.

2) Using those identities, set up bank accounts, rent a cheap apartment or office somewhere, get broadband, hook up a computer with P2P software and loaded with songs. Use the identities to set up websites where people can download songs. Infringe on those copyrights!!!!!!

3) Watch the ensuing hilarity as the RIAA sues it's own heads for infringement.

Re:technology is outstripping Justice's understand

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

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

I actually have to disagree there.

If you dissosciate yourself completely from the RIAA's music, you deliver the message loud and clear that it is the music, not the company that you object to. Sure you can "make sure you let everyone know your position and explain why you're taking that position", but that level of detail doesn't reach the sales figures of the RIAA. Show demand for the music (if there is any demand for it), just not the company's "Reign of Terror". So called piracy boycotts the business model thrusted upon us every time we want to listen to music, but still retains the demand for the music. I know everyone has said it, but give me a good-quality, DRM-free system (read: the system allofmp3.com uses), and I will be generous with my hard-earned cash.

Please note also that boycotting music (or movies for that matter) is not easy for everyone. I love my music, and I couldn't imagine my life without it. Right now, the RIAA could boycott me and I'd come crawling back, humble and submissive, within weeks.

Why does the RIAA does the ivestigation?

[houghi]

The RIAA is trying to conceal the information about how it conducts its investigation,

That should not matter. What they should do is file a complaints and then the COURT should do the investigation. The fact that they even know who the person is, is a bad thing. What is happening is:

RIAA to ISP: Give us all the details of IP XYZ:
ISP: OK, there you are:
RIAA to ISP: Sue this basterd, he must die.
COURT: Sure, whatever you say.

Here is how it SHOULD go:
RIAA: We want to report a copyright crime:
Court: Ok, please specify
RIAA: IP adress 127.192.168.172 at GMT 23:12 shared song "Some_music by Some_person_or_band" wich is in violation of ....
Court: Ok, we will see what is going on.
Court to ISP: Give us the data of the person who connected with IP on ...
ISP: There you are
COURT: Ok. Now let us proceed.

What happens in Belgium is that the court says: Fuck off if they don't ask money for it. We ain't got no time to do that. Come back when we have nothing to do or if you have people who are SELLING the stuff for profit.

Also if the local RIAA would come with the adress of the person, a serious investigation into the ISP will be done because of violation of the privacy laws AND the evidence (the name of the accused) will be dropped as evidence, making them loose the case almost immediatly.

America: Home of the give-your-privacy-away-for-free. :-(