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RIAA Admits ISPs Have Misidentified "John Does"
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has sent out a letter to the ISPs telling them to stop making mistakes in identifying subscribers, and offering a 'Pre-Doe settlement option' — with a discount of '$1000 or more' — to their subscribers, if and only if the ISP agrees to preserve its logs for 180 days. Other interesting points in the letter (PDF): the RIAA will be launching a web site for 'early settlements,' www.p2plawsuits.com; the letter asks the ISPs to notify the RIAA if they have previously 'misidentified a subscriber account in response to a subpoena' or become aware of 'technical information... that causes you to question the information that you provided in response to our clients' subpoena'; it notes that ISPs have identified 'John Does' who were not even subscribers of the ISP at the time of the infringement; and it requests that ISPs furnish their underlying log files, not just names and addresses, when responding to RIAA subpoenas."
...the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
It's a justified analogy to what the RIAA is doing, but I welcome the work they spend trying to button up music "piracy." For one thing, the costs of the RIAA are pushed onto the consumer -- leading to higher prices of the music they're trying to protect, giving consumers more reason to work with alternative distribution mechanisms. This will also hopefully lead to more anonymous forms of file sharing, or even file-piece sharing, where you're only hosting a tiny portion of a specific songfile. At what point would a "pirate" not really be guilty of much if they're only sharing a small portion of a particular songfile, say 0.01%?
ISPs are being financially harmed, too, because they're going to have to keep these logs, and also keep them consistent. DHCP makes things more difficult since it increases the amount of tracking they have to do. What all will they track? Port usage, IP address, data transfer totals and rates, etc? As the ISPs have to spend more for legal aid and log data stores, their costs will go up. I can see a market for third party services off-shore that allow you to transfer all of your data through their proxies for a given price -- especially as bandwidth prices fall as bandwidth becomes a commodity.
Consider this: most of us demand fast (low latency) response to websites we browse. We need less response time for some use -- e-mail, file sharing, software patches. The RIAA is powerful in the US, and its power is growing internationally, but it is impossible for a cartel to control everything -- we even see that in the energy market as alternative forms of energy are a barrier to the oil cartel increasing their costs beyond a certain price point. All the RIAA can do is make their overhead so expensive that artists find reason to pick alternative distribution mechanisms.
I'm noticing that medium-level artists are finding more ways to produce an income without the sale of recorded music. I received an e-mail about David Martin, an artist I never heard of, offering a free T-shirt if you pre-buy his album. That's value added incentive to buy HIS album, rather than bootleg it. Good idea. His downloadable music is right from his site, a great way to get music without worrying about the RIAA. What will the RIAA do when their legal costs outweigh their collections, which then creates a high overhead for their artists in the form of lowered commissions?
Are these "early settlements" financially profitable for the RIAA? Lawyers aren't cheap, and settlement lawyers even less so. Even if you agree to a settlement, they still need collections agents to process the payment and make sure it is done in full.
This form of cartelization can't last forever, not with the Internet changing faster than the law can control. I'm surprised the RICO act doesn't cover an industry where 90% of published music is controlled by one cartel. The law fails us in both cases, as the law always does. If you're in a band that isn't in the top 1% of music sales (the long tail is appropriate here), do you find that you make most of your music from ticket sales, beer sales percentage, and T-shirt/sticker/button sales? Why would you need the RIAA?
When will artists start appearing with logos imprinted on their merchandise that says "0% of the proceeds of this CD/t-shirt/sticker goes to the RIAA cartel"? If you're in a band, maybe that time is now. Maybe it is time for small to medium artists to be the ones to inform the customers that there is NO reason to buy a CD or a download from a distributor affiliated with the RIAA?
I can't wait for the day when the RIAA goes back to what they started doing -- making sure that music sounds good across all playback systems through equalization and consistent sound modification.
If you go out of your way to make it easier to harass your customers, we'll be happy to give you a little something extra... Wonder if we can get a list of ISP's that are volunteering to comply with this.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
IANAL, but isn't this "pre-lawsuit settlement opportunity" plain-old extortion? "We know you did something illegal. Pay now and we won't bring it to light."
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Nothing like having the *AA park their domain on godaddy, complete with such relevant ads as "Gnutella P2p: Download free MP3 music" or "eDonkey Free Downloads: Unlimited music, movies and games. 15 billion files". Also listed are ads for "American Legal Funding: pre-settlement advance, pay only if you win" and "Illegal Downloading: Experienced, aggressive criminal attourney in Texas"
On top of that, two separate ads for "The Beacon Review" and "The Download Guide", which were amusing to compare side-by-side.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I'm certainly no lawyer and I don't know for a fact that this idea could work, particularly since I'm not sure what the terms of settlement may be but...
Why doesn't each and every person who has settled their case with RIAA counter-sue, providing this letter as evidence that they have been co-erced into their agreement with evidence that has now proven by RIAAs own admission to be suspect. Sue for damage to reputation, hardship caused by the settlement etc. Sue individually, not as a class action. Even if the cases weren't won, I'd imagine the number would keep the RIAA legal team tied in a knot for some time. Use the same frivolous tactic back against them.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Giving the RIAA a real presence on the internet beyond their press release regurgitating main site will give everyone the world over a big red bullseye on which to lock their sights.
I can't wait to hear about the hilarious exploits of various hackers having their way with those servers.
This is nothing more than an attempted end-run around the courts. Having proven that they are willing to go to court in a few thousand cases (out of a few million, and rising, number of filesharers), the RIAA wants to dispense with the courts altogether. Before they couldn't get their message to you that they knew who you were, and were gonna get you if you didn't fork over thousands of $$$s first, without a court subpoena. And a few million [Who is] John Doe lawsuits weren't going to fly there. Now they claim their victims are crying out for this solution, and it is a "favor" for the ISP's to offer it. And oh, if you RTFLetter, they don't want the ISP help desk employees directing any of these victims to other web-sites any longer. Sites that might tell them what their actual rights truly are, or where lawyers can be found. That's verboten.
So this becomes a quick, cheap route to shake out those willing to settle at the first whiff of danger, and a great time and money saving opportunity for the RIAA. Anybody think that this won't just increase the number of threats they make? Like to maybe everybody Media Sentry and their still questionably secret methods can point a finger at (and we know which finger they're pointing). The record companies are certainly trying to find a way to collect their due from everyone in the entire country who they believe has infringed their copyrights, under their own expansive and untested definition of what constitutes infringement!
All this on the same day a report has come out saying that filesharing, at least back in the 2002 timeframe when the record industry claimed they were being "devastated" by P2P users, say that the effect of P2P filesharing was "statistically insignificant" in causing the drop in CD sales.
So where do I find ISP's who don't keep logs?
But what really pisses me off about this is the continual recording industry refrain of: "We doing it for the (starving) artists." What I hear is that the record companies are trying to reduce the royalty payments from digital sales -- sales that occur at virtually no cost at all to the record companies themselves -- to the artists themselves.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
After all, this is what top of the range direct mail houses do to ensure that their clients do not send the same letter to the same household under two different names, or that the new Porsche brochure is addressed to the father and not the 15-year-old son, so an equal standard should obviously apply to cases where a lawsuit might be involved. They could reasonably argue that a judge in a court does not have access to the necessary technical skills to make a proper judgement on correct identification, so it would be improper to release data that could not be fairly assessed by a court.
Assuming one dollar per record, the ISPs could be entirely funded by the "music industry" in short order.
Pining for the fjords
Having been employed at an ISP a few years ago, there are a few typical reasons that a "John Doe" gets misfingered:
1.) The time is off on the RAS, radius server, or other networking gear during the timeframe the RIAA asks records to be preserved for.
2.) The admin is having a bad day and messes up the time zone shift from RIAA's request to UTC or whatever time zone the records are kept in.
3.) (Rarely anymore...) The request from RIAA fails to indicate an IP or time or some other piece of information to clearly identify what account / user was responsible is being targeted.
Requests from the MPAA, FBI, and local law enforcement can be even worse. Many were still giving timeframes of HOURS, when you could point to 10-30 or more possible infringers.
Anyway, this sort of recordkeeping is trivial for any ISP - just plunk the accounting information in a database and (depending on the size of the ISP) you know who had what IP address where up to a year ago with a simple query in a matter of seconds.
Before this post becomes flamebait, let me just say that the best course of action I found was to simply relay the notice to the customer if that's what the requester wanted, as the ISP itself has no quarrel with RIAA or the customer. ISPs simply provide a series of tubes - what comes out of your straw is your own business.
Oh yeah, and ISPs don't like getting sued. So they follow the law.
But misidentification happens rarely. Good admins do their best because they know what's at stake for a customer.
I won't disagree with your comments on civil disobedience, as I don't want to get on Thoreau's bad side. However, I do think that one has to believe that what they're doing is fundamentally right for it to be civil disobedience. My opinion (and of course there's no way to back this up) is that most people who break copyright laws do not think it's the right thing to do. They just think it's not that bad. It's no big deal, etc. I imagine it's hard to keep a straight face and claim that it's the right thing to do.
Are copyright laws broken? Absolutely. However, I don't know how anyone can think a two-year rule is unreasonable. (By that I mean at least two-years. I've set it below where I think it makes sense.) I suspect that most downloaded music violates even that simple two-year "rule". Should people be able to copy music they've bought to other devices for their own listening, or even for playing at parties, etc.? Sure. Again, that's not what I think we're talking about here. I hear these excuses trotted out, but I suspect they're just that. Excuses.
You mention that people misconstrue civil disobedience to mean that it has to involve getting arrested or cited. Well, I think people also misconstrue civil disobedience to mean doing the wrong thing because I feel like it and I don't think I'll get caught. That's what it sounds like to my ears, anyways.
Again, I'm not defending the RIAA. I'm just defending Rosa Parks, the Boston Tea Party, and I'm trying to defend civil disobedience (perhaps imperfectly).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
There is a difference... I take the original statement of "Americans have not only forgotten..." as refering to the general citizens of the USofA. Iraq was not caused by this overwhelming need of the general citizen to invade another country but a calculated action by those in power who wanted to fill thier meglomania and make some money.
You would be surprised at how many people pirate specifically to make a statement.
I know plenty of people who could easily afford iTunes or CDs or DVDs or what have you, and who USED to be good customers, but as the RIAA got slimier and slimier they have taken a 'not a penny to the RIAA/MPAA' attitude and have gone to great lengths to buy stuff from outside their control when they can, and pirate when they can't. Such people could be easily brought back into the fold if the politics of all this changed.
Well sir, I'm an open Pirate.
I live in Canada in Guelph Ontario and attend the University of Guelph.
I pirate Software, music, movies and books. And I maintain a share ratio of 1.2 (Which I'm quite particular about). I believe information should be free though labour should not. I donate money to artists I think are worth while, usually web-comic artists and occasionaly local performers.
For me it is not about saving money, before I became a pirate I didn't spend much money on media.
What I did do before I was a pirate was take those little magnetic stickers found on the back of CD's and attach them to my monitor, one for each cd I purchased.
Those stickies cost more than twice what it costs to burn a cd and buy a jewel case and were a constant reminder of what the information age is all about.
Meanwhile items like well designed combustion engines are kept out of the hands of developing countries through I.P. Which I discovered on trips to the third world as a volunteer.
At which point I decided that it was time we seriously considered a reset on information laws to allow the third world to benefit from the works of humanity.
I started ripping music and movies which were not available through local distribution (Largely chinese films which have since become more popular and English electronic music which has also found broader western acceptance since). If you drop by Socis and ask for my Nick you can meet me, feel free to bring the police.
I.P. is still a font of imperialism and until I feel that as a society we have examined it as such I will continue to be a pirate.