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RIAA College Litigations Getting A Bumpy Ride
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's juggernaut against colleges, started in February of this year, seems to be having a bumpier and bumpier ride. The normal game is to call for a subpoena, to get the name and address of the students or staff who might have used a certain IP address. The normal game seems to be getting disrupted here and there. A Virginia judge threw the RIAA's motion out the window, saying that it was not entitled to such discovery, in a case against students at the College of William & Mary. A New Mexico judge denied the application on the ground that there was no reason for it to be so secretive, in a case involving University of New Mexico students. He ultimately required the RIAA to serve a full set of all of the underlying papers, for each 'John Doe' named, and to give the students 40 days in which to review the papers with counsel, and make a motion to quash if they chose to do so. In a stunning development, the Attorney General of the State of Oregon made a motion to quash the RIAA's subpoena on behalf of the University of Oregon, on grounds which are fully applicable to every case the RIAA has brought to date: the lack of scientific validity to the RIAA's "identification" evidence. The motion is pending as of this writing. Students have themselves made motions to vacate the RIAA's ex parte orders and/or quash subpoenas in over half a dozen cases. Much combat remains, but the RIAA's campaign is no longer a hot knife cutting through butter on the nation's campuses."
Are there any colleges left that aren't doing serious port blocking and packet shaping? Where my daughter goes to school, hosting P2P shares is going to get you a knock on the door from the network guys.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Federal funding has the universities by the balls. And you know who has DC by the pocketbook. It's no secret that the youth are the minority in voting percentages. If the youth don't vote, there is nothing to counteract that money. Make your voice heard to these politicians and try turn this into an issue of awareness that is discussed.
My work here is dung.
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but it doesn't seem right to me that we should be applauding flagrant violations of intellectual property rights. Everyone will be up in arms when Microsoft misappropriates or ignores GPL copyrights, but somehow, because it's the big, bad RIAA/MPAA, we are supposed to turn the other cheek? I'm sure I'll be modded down by the groupthink moderators here, but really, is this the outcome we're all rooting for? Ignoring copyrights?
Because the legal system no longer supports their efforts to force an old and decayed business model upon their "customers", the RIAA has turned to a much more partial audience - the legislature.
Their recent attempts to buy legislation include:
- Criminalization of unauthorized file sharing
- Transferring the costs and burdens of initiating lawsuits to the Justice Department
- Denying Federal Financial Aid to the universities and colleges that do not persecute file sharing themselves.
Whether or not these efforts will succeed remains to be seen, but what is clear is that they are getting desperate. Why they do not pursue alternative revenue-generating options and alter their business model to suit the times is a great mystery to me. At this point, it appears as if they are not meeting their corporate charter, which requires that they do what is in the interest of their stockholders.
They could start by not being raging cockbags.
Insisting on DRM (which only hurts people who pay for music), insisting on charging more than people are willing to pay (hence a slump in CD sales), suing twelve year olds... etc etc.
Also, they don't really have a right to make money. If they can't figure out a way to make their music and make a profit, I guess they'll have to stop making music, won't they? Guess they'll have to get new fucking jobs and pay their way.
It's really simple; you stop enabling the RIAA when you stop purchasing RIAA music.
I haven't bought a single music CD since 2002, except for direct purchases from local bands. I had been buying CDs quite regularly and in large quantity since I got my first CD player in late 1983 and so I suppose I was one of the best customers.
But no more. I don't upload music and I don't download it either; I won't give the RIAA any excuse for whining about copyright infringement. But I swear that I will never spend a single penny for RIAA music no matter what the format until the monopolistic miscreants are gone.
Hey, RIAA! I've gone five years without contributing to your war fund! And I'm sure I can keep going.
Everyone else: Take the pledge and watch the greedy bastards suffer.
Not that you are capable of understanding this, but copyright is NOT an absolute. The copyright as we know it now is a recent 'invention' and was introduced in response to technological changes (music recordings). Is it that strange to rethink copyright again now technologie has once again changed the world?
To give an example, before the printing press was invented, the only way to spread written texts was by copying them. Someone, monks in the west, sat down, and simply copied an existing work word for word. That was the only way to make more then one copy, unless the original author fancied writing all the copies himself.
There was no such thing as copyright, you had the original author and book, and people copied that work for distribution.
This changed with the inventing of the press, all of a sudden an original work could be turned out in any number desired (more or less). This changed the name of the game, as all of a sudden you had a new industry, that of the printing press (publishers if you like) who could take works and reprint them and sell them at volumes large enough to make a business. Before that books were simply to rare and expensive for all but the most powerfull to posses.
With music this mattered, before a composer who wrote a piece of music had one copy of it. If someone wanted another copy of it, they had to deal with the composer, distribution was limited. When printing of sheet music became possible all of sudden a piece of music was worth more then just the money you could get from performing it, you could write music and sell it without ever touching an instrument. The music industry had been born.
It is hard for us to imagine, but once people traded music sheets as eagerly as we trade MP3's.
Times changed again when music itself could be recorded, first by automatic instruments, later the music performance itself.
Over this time, the music industry (the people selling others people work) and the artists and the composers have been in a constant struggle as to who should receive what amount of money. The original sheet publishers offcourse preffered to simply take the music, or pay a mininal one time fee, and collect all the profits they could. The performers want to just pay a minimal fee at most and be damned how many times they perform it or how much they get paid for it, the composer wants to see money for each copy sold and each performance.
All this eventually, over many changes led to copyright as we know it now. The best you can say for it, is that it kept everyone quiet. Not exactly content, but quiet.
But things changed, tech moved on once again and deeply cut for the first time into the publishers, all of sudden you didn't need a huge press anymore, (either to print books OR press vinyl/CD's etc) but end customers could reproduce music easily on their own. In a way going back to the original situation where if you wanted a copy of something, you made it.
The industry seems to have responded by making copyright even stricter, seemingly wanting to expand the lifespan to infinite, this despite the fact that for instance Disney is famous for NOT paying for the copyrighted works of others who just happen to fall outside that new protection, Pinocio was famously released JUST after the copyright expired.
But the main question is this, why should we keep a law that has been recently introduced to deal with changing tech, now that tech has changed again? Copyright is NOT a natural thing, it is something invented by lawyers to product an industry, why should we as a society keep it if we no longer need it, want it.
Once there was a law that required a man with a red flag to walk in front of a motorised vehicle, that was introcued to protect the horse carriage industry. We changed it when it became clear that new tech of the automobile had made the horse obsolete. That industry was simply forced to adopt or die. Why should the music industry not do the same.
and if you cry out, but that would mean, no
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
great plan kid, try explaining to the tens of thousands working in the music industry how they tell the mortgage provider that "my business plan is not to earn money".
You did tell this to the blue collar assembly line workers of America, who get laid off in droves because of cheaper labor costs outside of the country, right? Closed factories and all that.
Why should white collar workers be coddled?
If corporate America gets to screw over the middle class without any repercussions, it's about time they got a taste of their own medicine! Vive la revolution!
Please don't compare physical goods to IP. They are not the same thing and you can't compare the two. No matter how many times you repeat this bullshit about stealing, piracy has nothing to do with stealing. Piracy is copyright infringement, no more no less.
Learn some basic economics. People respond to incentives and people are opportunistic. If they have an opportunity to get something for free (vs paying for it), they will do it. This has nothing to do with being self righteous, it's just the way human nature works.
This has nothing to do about being moral or immoral. The digital age simply increased (by several orders of magnitude) the possibility of being opportunistic with regards to IP. You can't set the clock back and you definitely can't change human nature.
I love when MPAA bitch that they won't make movies because of the risk of piracy. If you're so concerned about, bail out of the media business. Supply and Demand will determine what happens next...
I agree about the payment...
What is a fair payment?
If I have $10 for entertainment and you are trying to sell me 3 songs, what's fair?
If I have $10 for entertainment and you are trying to sell me 300 songs, what's fair?
If I have $10 for entertainment and you are trying to sell me 3000 songs, many dvd movies, cable, dvd television series, video games, what's fair?
Especially in the case of 3000 songs, the people that produced those songs are mostly long dead.
There is no reason other than greed and highly artificial monopolies that you should not be able to buy "every hit from 1926 to 1957" for $20 on DVD. If we go by the original copyright laws, "all music up to 1979" would be copyright free and extremely cheap.
They used their money to pervert the law. They are using their money to try and sustain that perversion (to "forever less one day").
Copyright is a special privilege granted for a limited time to encourage people to produce product. With literally thousands of bands, hundreds of tv shows, thousands of movies, tens of thousands of books, I do not see why they need such encouragement. I certainly do not see how John Lennon is going to be encouraged to produce more music by extending the copyright after he was dead.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Oh please. Both the American auto industry and the American music industry are in trouble because of outdated business practices and unappealing products. The people who will be laid off will be laid off for those exact reasons.
As for work not being fairly compensated - are you kidding me? Can you point me to any other job where you can do work for a few hours, and then reap income for the rest of your life? Not only the rest of your life, but potentially the rest of the lives of your children? If anything, compensation for creative works is unfair, but in the opposite direction of what you're thinking.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The word "steal" get thrown around a lot. Well, one must consider that the Media Barons might have stolen from us. I have yet to see a single creative work that is not based on previous works. I can guarantee that not one single creative work has been produced where every person was paid for their contribution. This is why the idea of "Intellectual Property" is absurd. What is not absurd is the idea that a short term monopoly be given to encourage the production of new (derivative) works. Unfortunately, copyright law has been perverted to the point that works which belong in the public domain are being held hostage by the Media Barons. This really is one of those magical black and white issues.
1) Intellectual Property really exists, and the current crop of media producers are stealing from everyone before them just because the "rightful owners" don't have the resources to protect themselves.
or
2) Intellectual Property is not real, and copyright has been abused and corrupted to deny citizens of their natural right to use and relay ideas to others.