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RIAA Must Divulge Expenses-Per-Download
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process."
Wouldn't it be ironic if the lawsuits brought by the RIAA in an attempt to preserve/enhance strong copyright ended up severely diminishing U.S. copyright law instead?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Yes, they do. They claim whatever they can get away with. And considering if you have a site license with MS, you agree in part of the license terms to be searched AT your cost.
And if you legally fight them, they have Congress on their side: you pay THEIR lawyer bills.
"I've always been amazed by the gall they have quoting that number."
That's the minimum statutory amount. Per S504:
Note that the record labels are asking for the minimum allowed. Could be much worse!
"What other type of copyright infringement can claim 757.6 times the value of the product as damages?"
Any other type of infringement where the retail value of the product is around a buck -- that is, not much. The $750 is arbitrary; ie. it'd be the statutory minimum amount if you were nailed for sharing copies of, say, PhotoShop... in which case the ratio would be much lower than 750:1.
The $750 minimum is out-of-date; a remnant of the days before it was so easy to share so much music. It was written in a time when it took a lot of work to distribute 1,000 unique pirated songs.
Ask 100 people and you'll get 100 answers, but I think that a more fitting statutory minimum should be in the neighborhood of $50 per work. Yes, I know, information wants to be fweeeeeeeeeeeeee, but for as long as copyright law is still around, the courts should be able to issue judgements that are an effective deterrent. If I were nailed for sharing 100 songs and the RIAA could only collect a statutory minimum of $5K from me rather than $75K (as under current law), I'd still get the point that perhaps I shouldn't have helped make other people's information so free after all.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
They were in a lose-lose situation before they started. Ignore the problem, and the copyright law is useless. Try to enforce your rights, and the legal protections degrade, as you observed.
No, really it wasn't. The biggest problem they had was that they weren't selling a product wanted to buy, and that they weren't putting most of the money into making a compelling product. Most people are decent enough, but most people aren't sufficiently stupid to pay for an item that they don't value.I bought many CDs in the couple of years up until the lawsuits began, I bought a few since, but at this point I won't buy any, and I discourage people from giving me any albums. I'll still buy indie albums, or at least the ones that come from non RIAA affiliated labels, when I can be reasonably sure they aren't paying dues.
They wouldn't be this unpopular if they were just enforcing their legal rights, they're this unpopular because what they are engaging in better resembles extortion than seeking legal relief. Their lack of interest in following typical courtroom procedures, and the very fact that their evidence is frequently unverifiable all but ensures that they will be both loathed and despised for years to come.
They also wouldn't be this unpopular if they were prosecuting their own relatives for similar acts of infringement. I think that was one of the more egregious points, when that child of an executive was caught red handed. Rather than being forced to settle or being drug into court, he was given a stern lecture from his father.
Honestly, how can anybody observe any of that, and still feel like it was a lose-lose. They didn't have to destroy their own image to make the pirates pay. The amount of damage they have themselves willfully inflicted on themselves has been huge. What with the random lawsuits, DRM and the rootkit ready audio CDs.
What we're seeing now is reality reasserting itself over these nonsensical laws. If the RIAA had recognized what was happening and concentrated on developing a workable business model, they wouldn't have put themselves into a lose-lose situation. But the industry as it pre-existed were so abusive of performers' rights that I'm not sure that was even possible. The Internet has made the value of the distributor nearly worthless -- anybody can distribute now, just slap your MP3s onto a web server. Since any workable business model has to accurately reflect the value the distributor adds to the music production process, their revenue would've gone from >95% of the pie to less than 5%. The MPAA is in much better shape because movie production involves a lot more capital (they add much more value to the process), and their final product is more realistically priced ($20-$30 for a DVD or BR/HD-DVD feels about right to me for the value I'm getting, so I don't have much problem justifying to myself paying for it).