RIAA's 'Expert' Witness Testimony Now Online

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The online community now has an opportunity to see the fruits of its labor. Back in December, the Slashdot ('What Questions Would You Ask an RIAA Expert?') and Groklaw ('Another Lawyer Would Like to Pick Your Brain, Please') communities were asked for their input on possible questions to pose to the RIAA's 'expert'. Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, was scheduled to be deposed in February in UMG v. Lindor, for the first time in any RIAA case. Ms. Lindor's lawyers were flooded with about 1400 responses. The deposition of Dr. Jacobson went forward on February 23, 2007, and the transcript is now available online (pdf) (ascii). Ray Beckerman, one of Ms. Lindor's attorneys, had this comment: 'We are deeply grateful to the community for reviewing our request, for giving us thoughts and ideas, and for reviewing other readers' responses. Now I ask the tech community to review this all-important transcript, and bear witness to the shoddy investigation and junk science upon which the RIAA has based its litigation war against the people. The computer scientists among you will be astounded that the RIAA has been permitted to burden our court system with cases based upon such arrant and careless nonsense.'"

Comments

OT was Re: Just an off-topic question

[vic-traill]

OverlyCriticalGuy

You noted your post explicitly OT, so I don't think you're trying to usurp the main thread.

Ray Beckerman - who's postings and efforts I enjoy and admire tremendously - appears to be a little pissed at your post for going OT, but I'm going to take up your question anyway, mainly because I've spent some time talking to musicians, and one musician in particular, about your question.

Off-Topic

My conversational straw poll indicates that the CRIA (the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA) has been successful in getting musicians to believe they need to be partners with CRIA in a fight against music piracy. I think it's an easy place to take musicians to - it's a hot button topic, and nobody wants to feel they're getting ripped of in life.

But a musician's goal in life shouldn't be to minimise piracy, but rather, from a business perspective anyway, to maximise sales of their music. I don't think that the existence of some amount of piracy is causally linked to less sales; rather, piracy *may* be a component of a new distribution model which can help the artist sell *more* material.

So *if* some of an artist's material is pirated, but overall more people are listening to their music and more people are buying their music, do they really give a shit about the piracy that *may* be occurring?

Framed in those terms, musicians I talk to (and I know this is representative of no more than just those musicians) become a lot less uptight. And for those that still feel they're getting ripped off somehow, the Copying Levy in Canada would seem to take even that away (if the dollars collected under the Copying Levy actually got distributed to artists, 'cause I've never met anyone who's seen a penny of it, which is just another instance of the industry ripping them off, but that's another conversation).

So quit worrying about piracy that may or may not be happening, and embrace that new distribution model and sell more stuff.

I'm not an artist making my living off CD and digital copy sales, so I suppose its easy for me to say, but indie artists I know make their sales at live gigs, and I don't think that that is going to change, or that piracy has shinola to do with that. The opportunity to sell digital copies on-line to a much broader audience is an additive element - gravy on existing sales.

This has nothing to do with the sleazy civil suit stuff exposed in the deposition from Ray Beckerman's blog, which is a pretty incredible read. Interestingly, in Canada, the Copying Levy is the basis for the presence of digital music in a shared folder *not* being a problem, as I understand it. Michael Geist's blog is loaded with informative material on this matter from a Canadian perspective. For example, here's a summary of *CRIA* survey material that suggests that those who download the most music via P2P also purchase the most CD's:

http://michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_conten t/task,view/id,1168/Itemid,85/nsub,/

All of which suggests that the sort of RIAA thuggery shown in the article's linked deposition shoots the industry in its own feet, and then shoves said feet into their big mouths.

text != ascii

[kennygraham]

The "ascii" link isn't encoded as ascii, it's encoded as ISO-8859-1.

ISO-8859-1 != ascii

UTF-8 != ascii

"plain text" != ascii (sometimes)

</rant>

Re:Just an off-topic question to Slashdotters

[Overly Critical Guy]

None of those questions have to do with the RIAA and the questions this expert was asked. Mine did. Next.