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White House Lauds MN RIAA Win, Analysis of Victory
cnet-declan writes "The Bush administration's copyright czar says the RIAA's $222,000 recent jury verdict against a Minnesota woman shows copyright law is 'effective' and working as planned. C|Net's coverage has comments from Chris Israel, the U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement. Israel is formerly a senior Commerce Department official appointed by President Bush in July 2005 who previously worked for Time Warner's public policy arm (Warner Bros. Records is one of the plaintiffs in the RIAA case). The site also features an interview with Rep. Rick Boucher, no fan of the RIAA, on whether Congress will change the law, an analysis of why U.S. copyright law is broken, and four reasons why the RIAA won."
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:) that is put out there for your consumption. I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back hard. It's already showing some resistance (file sharing and what-not) to being in favor of one side heavily over the other with respect to the original idea of copyright. Some term extensions are fine with me. But the current system of life of the author + 70 years AND digital rights management is obscene and a kick to the crotch of the idea of copyright.
At this point, I kind of get a kick of seeing how the copyright system is thrown in favor of those who are responsible for most of the "content" (not worthy of the term "music" eh?
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
I will be amazed if history does not label him the worst President we have ever had, along with the worst Presidential crew (cabinet and appointees) we have ever had.
The guy and his friends, as a group, have been almost unbelievable. What is even worse, is that on the rebound, a lot of people might actually think that voting for Hillary is a good idea. (shudder)
If you do not know who Ron Paul is, do yourself and others a favor and look him up. But if you really do not think honesty is important, go ahead and vote for any of the others.
Not surprised that she lost. She was uploading music, that she had downloaded. So, it started out not hers and then she gave it away. Copyright laws EXPLICITLY prevent that. OTH, had she bought the CD, or simply borrowed from friends, and the only offered it to friends, then I believe this would have been an interesting case.
It will create more siphons, but hopefully, the press will point out that this case was NOT about downloading, but about uploading to strangers.
As to the white house, I only hope that the more that laud this ruling, the more that it comes to haunt them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No it wasn't, and that is the problem a lot of people are having with this ruling. On this occasion I would recommend that you make an exception and RTFA. This case was not about uploading, the RIAA never proved that she uploading anything.
Jury Instruction 15: The act of making available for download copyrighted material is in itself an act of copyright infringement with a fine of $750-$30000.
Based on a screen-shot of kazaa showing some song names against her IP address they have fined her $220000. If you can't see why this is a travesty of justice then stop and think about it for a second. They have not shown that she violated copyright. Instead they have altered the law to say that "if it looks like you were going to violate copyright" then that is now a crime.
Thank god I don't live in America, and the laws here are a little more sane.
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Just a question ... are Americans teaching their children that it is good to share, or that it is bad to share?
...its about prolonging the inevitable death of the labels business.
........ no sale.
.. then I won't listen and won't know about artist I might just like enough to buy.
Remove the labels and replace them with a business model that understands the enormous cost savings of technology and the internet for production and distribution.
It should be obvious, even from the court records.
I very rarely buy music and when I do I try to buy directly from the artist, but this does not stop me from lisening to a great deal more music than I have purchased (not rented).
I don't pirate but I have heard mixes others have done that remined me of plenty of songs and artists I liked years ago. But at about that time this RIAA crap started up and I figured I liked the artists and their works, not the contradictory business model of the labels as represented by the RIAA. So of course I dropped the idea of locating the music I heard on such mixes, that I might buy it.
I mean since the Mix was illegal, I wasn't supposed to hear it and certainly in not hearing it I wouldn't be remined of
I don't Pirate nor do I support rabid dogs out to bite th hand that feeds them.
The music industry labels has a history of questionable dealings such as Payola to get radio stations to play.... This sort of thing was determined to be illegal, unfair, etc... But the objective was that of getting coverage.
Now that there is plenty of coverage.... they are complaining... Why? because they are not controlling it, its more open to public choice....
Such controlling bias is not beneficial to but a few artists.
So in the mean time I wake to music I don't pay for, drive to work and back with music I don't pay for and when I get an itch for irish music I tune into livelreland and I don't pay for that either.
In fact I'd say on average over years, the music I listen to is better than 90% music I didn't pay for. And all without pirating. Most of which I wouldn't buy anyways, regardless of the fact that by the time the radio stations stop playing it, I'm sick and tired of it anyway and certainly won't have anything, and I certainly won't allow an illegal mix years later wrongly influence me to go out and buy....
Why buy and why pirate when there is plenty free and legal.....
If they shut down internet radio
Perhaps the Labels should just shut down all radio stations music playing..... That'll save them.
RIAA wants to get $150,000 per infringement. If they nailed only 1/10th of the users on just the eMule network right now, each for a single infringement, they would net far more money than they normally make in a year. How can you seek damages so far removed from reality? RIAA wants us to believe that the $40 billion dollar music industry is the being victimized by eMule users to the tune of $600 billion worth of copyright infringement at any given moment.
+0 Meh
This "copyright czar" Chris Israel should better check his kids' (if he has any) pcs and ipods. The majority of the families in the US are at risk for a similar verdict.
But then of course his risk is quite diminished: the Bush administration has an effective system for preventing that their friends are prosecuted. The time that justice was blind is behind us.
Ok, this is years back in school. But I do believe there is an ammendment in our constitution stating that "Fines and penalties should be fair and affordable".
Back then they saw the value of using a fine as a means of punishment. The thing is they also saw that you cant issue a fine of $220,000 against a person who makes $30,000 a year. It is unrealistic and unfair.
Though for many politicians making these obscene laws, $220,000 fine to them is like $220 for us everyday people. Their problem is they cant see nor understand what life is like for the vast majority of people in this Earth.
This country needs another Abe Lincoln. A poor man who worked his way up the political ladder. Too bad he'd be filtered out of the system before even starting.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
They did that once. 'America', I think they called it.
> Breaking copyright is wrong,
It isn't.
> whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law.
If the law is unjust, it's not only wrong, but your obligation to break it. If the world worked by your logic, the civilisation would have never developed past the slavery, monarchies, colonialism, and so on, because every of those steps required breaking some kind of then effective, but unjust law. If you didnt ignore, fight and break unjust laws, you wouldnt even live in the US but would be a massively exploited british colony. If you happen to be black, you would still be prohibited from learning something and would have the lagal status of a "thing", could be sold, bought and auctioned, and if youre a woman, youd be prohibited from voting, studying, appearing on streets without a burqa and so on.
FUCKING NOBODY who is not profiting from artificial, enforced scarcity, perceives either this judgement or the underlying copyright fascism as "just" or democratically approved, and without massive civil movements, there seems just to be no way to change the laws, because the persons in power simply "dont allow" the people to do it bacause they know that copyright, as we know it now, wouldnt survive a single night if people _really_ decided democratically about it.
3. Does the law set proportionate punishment?
The people who wrote the GPL were trying to simulate a world without copyrights by using copyrights in an unusual way. In a world without copyrights, there would be no need for such a simulation.
The problem is that she is a human being, who is probably going to pay for the rest of her life for the "copyright violation" of just making the stuff available, rather than a corporation, who could either afford it or just go out of business, while the corporate officers pocketed the money and go on to start up the next shady deal.
I'm not recommending it, but it would illustrate her plight if she would commit "sepuku" in front of the RIAA offices for TV cameras, in exchange for her kid's safety, as this would illustrate the actual attitude of the RIAA (I like to think that the sight of a woman gutting her self like a fish all over their carpet might give some of them nightmares, but I don't really think it would.)
Basically, she was a single individual going into a system designed for corporations to KILL each other.
Now her life is ground meat. She'll spend her life paying for the mistakes on lost of peoples' parts.
In old Imperial Japan, her head would have been separated from her body.
Those ARE the stakes.
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I don't suppose there's a Civil Liberties Czar by any chance...
Two things need to be attacked;
The length of time of IP. That has become silly. In particular, America's pushing our version is the worst. Australia's was actually, pretty fair. Hopefully, more nations push back against US and push for something like Australia's was.
DMCA WRT DVDs/Music. We bought the movie and/or music. It is our right to back it up and use it how we see fit. As long as we are not distributing it, then there should not be an issue.
While I agree copyright is ocmpletely out of whack, do you think that'd restore balance to copyright? People today pirate the latest music, movies, tv and software. Yhat has extremely little to do with the length of copyright, do you think people would be happy if they could now watch the first season of Babylon 5, and in a few years could upgrade to Windows 95? That the 30 year olds can finally get the music they listened to in their early teens? That any of them would stop what they're doing and wait it out the next 14 years, even if we went all the way back to the copyright law of 1790? I think the general population would be as piss poor at keeping their end of a fair bargain as the RIAA/MPAA would be.
The truth is that even though the DRM systems get broken quite often, they're effective against the "now now NOW!" generation. If a DRM system isn't broken for a few months, it's a boon to sales. Can't pirate Wii/xbox360/PS3 games (or requires some ugly hardware hack that might brick your system on the next update)? Of course that helps against piracy. The RIAA/MPAA so desperately want in on that, but only recently are they starting to see that it's just not possible. People want to take the music with them whereever and play on whatever devices they got, and the end-produce (i.e. the image and the sound) can always be captured, and everything else is gravy.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In a world without copyright, free software has no protections. Evilcorp can take your code, extend it, release it closed source and give you the finger because you have no claim of ownership over it. If that's the world the FSF wants to live in, they can convert the license on all their stuff to the BSDL and enjoy it now.
A world without copyright doesn't mean that everyone includes the source for their programs... It will also raise the cost of software dramatically. Autocad might cost $300k because a large architecture firms will buy one copy to install on all of their computers. Yeah, they could get it third party for free but then they wouldn't have any support to go with it. You can say the free software community will just develop a competitor, but again, that's going to rely on coders putting in a ton of effort to be feature comparable to Autocad and anyone can take that code, extend and close it because nothing protects it. Even with the protections of copyright, there still isn't a viable FOSS 3D CAD application which competes with Autocad that I'm aware of.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
In response to such outrageous abuses many propose "no-buying-cds" days and other utterly useless measures.
But what would really hurt their pride and lessen their damage would be for the community to set a fund and help this person with her legal fees.
This would really show that the people won't tolerate someone's life being ruined to set an "example" and instill fear in everyone else.
(note: I'm not an American citizen, somebody please set it up instead)
The $ amount is scary, but what is even more scary is the White House praising that a woman's life was destroyed, saying that this is how it was supposed to work, too. Mindboggling. Good thing I don't live there...
Now, excuse me while I go and see what I can do to support local "EFF" organization, so that kind of crap won't ever go through here.
Give it a few years and movies are where songs are today.
About 20 years ago, making and recording a song was expensive. You needed some studio, good (==expensive) equipment, some way to market and distribute it, in short, you needed the aid of a studio. Today, this all vanished. You can create great music "at home", with rather low cost, your average monthly income will buy you whatever you need.
Let technology grow a little and we got the same with movies. We are already today at the point where great FX are no longer a matter of multi million dollar hardware but rather one of skill and a decent but affordable FX program. Video cams getting better and cheaper every month. Professional editing software also dropped from many thousands to a few hundred bucks. In no more than 10 years, the movie studios will face the same problem the music studios have today: They become obsolete for the ambitioned creator.
They don't "feel" the pressure yet from both sides, only from the customer side where movies are now being shared like songs have been for over 10 years now. Only recently (i.e. about 5 years now) bandwidth has been large enough that it becomes an issue. Now they react. Now it's too late.
We'll see more laws about this. In 100 years, we'll look at those laws with the same chuckle we now feel when we see laws for the protection of horse drawn cabs, about a man waving a red flag in front of a car or similar crap, lobbied in by a dying business.
Unlike them, the **AAs have a choice, though. They can turn from the middleman that tries to hold artists and customers in a stranglehold to a valuable marketing and PR tool for the former. They have all the necessary tools, knowledge and people to push your songs into the charts and make it a seller. They are, if anything, great at creating a hype. If they can change to this model and become an "advertising agency", they can survive.
If they instead try to cling to a dead business model, they will perish.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
One of the problems that the current RIAA approach is that they are ignoring the large scale publishers by going after these petty criminals. And this Minnesota woman mentioned in the articles is just that. She is accused of opening up to some friends a couple of CDs worth of MP3s.
I have seen some very large scale operations of blatant copyright violation in the past, including network sharing of copyrighted material. For crying out loud, I've had co-workers hand me nearly their entire CD collection compressed as MP3s on a couple of CDs.
This is also completely missing the Chinese CD copy pirates that even have complete CD pressing facilities, print up scanned jacket inserts, and sell the CDs as the real thing when in fact that isn't the case at all. And don't tell me these CDs don't end up in the USA, as I know for a fact that they do. This kind of activity is blatant copyright violations and involves criminal activities where not only is the "criminal" making money off of the duplication of the content, but it also does real damage that can be measured in a genuine sense where some individuals are buying this content thinking it is the real thing, completely unaware that it was made through an illegal process and the artist gets absolutely nothing in return.
I've also see websites... and they still do exists... that have hundreds or even thousands of CDs worth of data, and even hundreds of complete DVD movies available for download in blatant disregard for copyright laws. I know some of them have been shut down, but that just means they are avoiding to advertise on Google and other search engines, and you have to "go underground" to find these websites. If you search hard enough, you can still find them.
What this woman did was the equivalent of a shoplifter taking some candy or other low-value merchandise from a store. Certainly it is illegal and perhaps needs to be prosecuted. But it doesn't need to become a national news story, nor draw the attention of multi-national corporations to fly their lawyers across the country in order to prosecute individuals who are for the most part clueless to begin with. Certainly the $300,000 fine+ court costs is way over the top.
I would also like to ask this rather tough question to the RIAA: If any of this money is collected, will even a single penny of that money go into the hands of the artist you were representing?
This is tragedy compounding the situation, as copyright law is really there to protect the content creator. These organizations like the RIAA do very little to help the plight of the ordinary musician, nor does a prosecution like this ultimately help out a journeyman musician. I'm not talking the grand masters that are at the peak of popular culture and earn their deservedly millions of dollars. They can usually negotiate reasonable recording contracts and keep most of their money. I'm talking the more ordinary folks who are getting screwed over by the RIAA, where a prosecution like this will result in that same Minnesota woman simply declaring bankruptcy to get out of the debt, and the RIAA will then claim what little was paid toward the fine as legal costs. The only people who "won" in this case was the RIAA lawyers themselves, and not their "clients" for whom they were supposedly representing.
That's what it boils down to, and that's also what made the communist countries fall. The people did not support the system that held them down. You cannot, at least in a democracy (or something resembling it) create laws that the majority of people either don't care about or oppose.
Imagine you know a murderer. Would you go to the police and tell on him? Most likely. Even if he's your friend. He killed a person! Most people would certainly support a law against murder. NOt because they're directly affected, but because murder simply is something that does not appeal to us. Maybe it's part of our culture, maybe even religion, maybe just the fear that you could be next, but generally you'll at the very least consider turning him in.
Now imagine you know a filesharer. Would you even ponder going to the police? Most likely not, because at the very least you don't care about copyright laws, and if you do, you'll more likely support your friend against those laws.
Most people either don't understand copyright laws, don't understand their purpose or simply don't know something like this even exists. "Virtual property" is a quite artificial concept and hard to grasp. It's not one of the things that make sense immediately, and even when you grasp the idea intellectually, it still doesn't "feel" wrong to copy content. You didn't really "steal" anything, it's still there. That someone didn't get money who should've gotten money, or whatever reason is usually given, is something that doesn't immediately affect us.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just imagine what would happen if everybody unsatisfied with the current laws started their own "revolution", bringing your country into chaos.
I'd imagine that there'd be a lot fewer laws, as only the ones that everyone could agree to would be on the books. I'd also imagine that, eventually people would get sick of all the rebellion and would form a government that'd be agreeable to all.
I'm from Hungary (sorry for my English), and here some far-right groups tried to make a "revolution" and a "real political transformation" last year - of course they failed pathetically.
That's because they didn't have any popular support. Without that kind of support any protest (for right or wrong) will fail. The monks protesting in Burma were crushed too. Does that make their protest wrong?
Nevertheless, it would be terrible if everybody broke the laws they found unjust.
So the mass campaigns of civil disobedience that led to independence for India, civil rights for African Americans in the US, and the end of apartheid in South Africa were terrible?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Depends on who is winning the big money. Don't forget, this administration is really big on tort reform, limitations of damages, etc.
The fundamental idea is that some defective product can kill you or disable you for life, and you'll get less than the record company will if you pirate a few of their songs.
The administration has come out in favor of the "ownership society," remember. (By the by, "creators" are not necessarily "owners," either.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.