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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."
Oh don't worry, they'll come up with a way to justify the cost.
"See, we have a team working full time copying the bits by hand."
or else!
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.
I've always been amazed by the gall they have quoting that number. What other type of copyright infringement can claim 757.6 times the value of the product as damages? When the SPA goes after companies using pirated commercial software they don't look at an old copy of Windows 98 and try claiming $8000 as damages, do they?
Trolling is a art,
The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download
downl0wned!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Am I the only one that gets some sort of happiness from the RIAA's obvious abuse of copyright laws? The more and more they are able to stretch them, the more and more obvious it becomes that the whole deal needs an overhaul. At one point lawmakers are gonna put their foot down and make sure this comes to an end, and that it can never happen again, right?...........right?
You can find many other such artists, and free, legal music hosting sites in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I just don't get it. Damages of $750 dollars for downloading a song? Let's be reasonable. I mean, I hate Celine Dion as much as anyone but I don't think the RIAA should be forced to pay more than $500 for every time I download one of her MP3s.
No, but you should.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
As the saying goes "What's good for the goose is good for the gander". If the RIAA can press for wide ranging discovery that is intrusive for the defendants, they have to be able to do the same to plantiffs when they're after information that is relevant to their defense.
I would hope that a judge wouldn't accept costs more of than 70c per song since that's about how much they get from iTunes (the cost per download shouldn't include Apples cut of the 99c since of course that's Apples income not the Record Companies). I'd run whatever they come up with past an accountant though given the recording industrys penchant for creative accounting.
Is it just me or is there a ridiculous number of exhibits and motions in this Lindor case? I count 239 links on Ray's blog just for this one case. I noticed this link from December 14, 2006--a year ago--in which the plaintiffs appear to be stalling on this very issue. The letter makes reference to a hearing from August of 2006. Has this one issue really been going on that long?
According to the copyright office, damages go from 750$ to 30,000$. Unknown infringement is no less than 200$. Known, willful infringement is no greater than 150,000$. These all are statutory damages.
I guess the next question is to actually ask if these statutory damages are constitutional or not, which is being asked now. Really, what else is there?
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.
Fighting the mob is very difficult — but they are trying. At least, a watered-down law may still be a law they may be able to enforce...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone on Slashdot been on the receiving end of an RIAA suit, or possibly a lawyer dealing with a client who has been? Or not even directly involved, but just know someone who's been through this ordeal?
Every time a story like this comes up I read as many comments as I can and think, "Well fuck, if it's this obvious to everyone here that what's happening is out of line and in some cases illegal, why can't that message be communicated more broadly?"
I have an extensive list of information I've been saving from Slashdot just on the off chance I ever get an RIAA letter in the mail (I d/l maybe an album per month, 90% of the time I buy it after listening). If I find myself facing one of these suits, I would immediately turn over to my lawyer everything I've compiled to be sure they're aware of what should be argued and what RIAA claims are total BS.
Is there an existing repository for information like this, or is it time people like us Slashdotters created one?
Name...That...Autocomplete!
While the Brooklyn bench has its issues, the RIAA, etc have no "home court advantage" in NYC, nor do they impress the Court system on any level. Unlike a smaller burg this will cut no ice in NYC. RIAA, welcome to an unimpressed, hot Bench. Bout time.
Just because there's a statue that says X, doesn't mean said statue is legal. It appears that they are claiming it's a 5th and 14th amendment violation, specifically the due process parts. My guess is the argument is based along the lines of the fact that the fines are excessive in relation to the damage. While it is not uncommon for fines to exceed damages, there is generally a somewhat reasonable limit to it. 1000 times, which is what it being claimed (the claim the songs are worth basically $0.70 to the record companies) is well, stupid. Imagine if you took something from a store, maybe you didn't even mean to you just weren't thinking. So they press charges for shoplifting. You then find out that there's a $3000 fine for that $3 pack of gum. A bit excessive maybe? Or how about you are in an accident that's your fault. You cause about $1000 worth of damage to the other guy's car. However you are informed the fine for doing that is $1,000,000.
So their argument is, and I think quite reasonably, that the fines are just unconstitutional. Remember: Laws have to be legal too. Plenty of times in this country idiot legislators pass laws that are in contradiction to higher laws. Just because there is a statue setting damages at a minimum of $750 per song, doesn't make it right.
RIAA:"It's 70 cents for the song and $749.30 in cost of PR for restoring faith of our customers/artists/record labels"
Judge:Are you sure?
RIAA: "Ok, it's really 70 cents for the song, $749 for lawyers and $.30 in PR"
Judge: Come on now?
RIAA: "Alright, it's $.03 for the song, $200 for lawyers and $549.97 for your reelection campaign and all the free downloads of "The Gap Band" you can handle? How's that sound judge? Judge? Judge? Is this thing on?"
Quoth the Wikipedia "Punitive Damages:"
"statistical studies by law professors and the Department of Justice have found that punitive damages are only awarded in two percent of civil cases which go to trial, and that the median punitive damage award is between $38,000 and $50,000.[7]
In response to judges and juries which award high punitive damages verdicts, the Supreme Court of the United States has made several decisions which limit awards of punitive damages through the due process of law clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. In a number of cases, the Court has indicated that a 4:1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages is broad enough to lead to a finding of constitutional impropriety, and that any ratio of 10:1 or higher is almost certainly unconstitutional."
If the song costs $1, and punitive damages of $749 are assessed, it's almost certainly unconstitutional. So why should it be legal statutorily?
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
So if you find that iRATE doesn't work well for you today, give it a week or two and it should work much better.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I asked my crystal ball (my magic 8 ball is in the laundry, sorry), and here's what we got.
RIAA lawyer: "You asked for the reason of asking for 750 dollars per song shared, and here's the result:
70 cents per song earned.
An average of 1100 downloaders per song and per source.
That would net about 770, we rounded down in favor of the defendent."
Judge: "I see. And where do you get those numbers? The 1100 downloaders per song and source?"
RIAA lawyer: "Statistics" (slams five pounds of paper onto the judge's desk."
Judge: "I see. But wouldn't after some time a saturation set in? With everyone feeding 1100 downloaders, and each of them again feeding 1100..."
RIAA lawyer (pauses): "Indeed. Well, then let me also file against the defendent for running a pyramid scheme."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Remember Minority Report? The wooden balls?
Those held a single name. Imagine the size of the balls you'd need to record an entire song.
Movie makers; they have the biggest balls in the industry.
They are not trying to preserve copyright, they are trying to make it into something unAmerican that violates the US Constitution. In other words, their actions have destroyed copyright regardless of success or failure. They have used several techniques to make their exclusive franchise eternal, have redefined the meaning of the franchise from protection against commercial publication to nonsensical "making available" and "unauthorized copy," and worst of all have made a civil mater into a criminal one with unusual punishment. To do this they have trampled free speech, due process, the fourth amendment and have technically sabotaged legitimate competitors. That's not copyright, it's information and market control straight out of the former Soviet Union.
It will be good to get back real copyright law and put it in balance with the way information really flows. The goals of copyright law is encouragement of the public domain and to advance the state of the art. People should not lose their house for sharing a few songs, books, movies and other material with their friends. Businesses that can't compete in freedom don't deserve to exist.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The Supreme Court held in State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co v. Campbell et al. 538 U.S. 408 (2003) that a punitive damage award that is more than 10 times higher than the actual damages is presumably a violation of due process. Thus, it logically follows that statutory damages ($750) that are more than 1,100 times higher than actual damages are an even greater violation of due process for two reasons: First, the ratio is significantly higher, and second, the goal of statutory damages is compensatory rather than punative, so there is less of a reason to make the damages a high number; it should bear a relation to the actual damages. The sole purpose of statutory damages in copyright law is due to the fact that actual damages are often hard if not impossible to prove. But if actual harm can be quantified in any reasonable manner, then a statutory damage award must still bear a reasonable ratio to that amount or else it would violate due process. More than 10 to 1 is improper for punative damages, I'd say more than 2-3 to 1 is improper for statutory damages (since the purpose is not to punish, but merely to compensate the copyright holder). The copyright holder can seek punative damages at trial and if they can prove their case and entitlement thereto, they can get punative damages up to 10 times higher than actual damages. But for congress to mandate a statutory damage amount over 1,100 times higher than the actual harm/loss (per infringement!) simply must be an unconstitutional violation of due process to be consistent with existing Supreme Court precedent. This is particularly true if one argues that a portion of statutory damages include punative damages.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I've been thinking about different arguments in regards to fair use(specifically: the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole) and the technical nature of how bittorrent works.
Torrents are made up of a bunch of little pieces. Could someone even prove that you actually had a substantial amount of a specific file if you were in a swarm of seeders? Could you claim fair use given the fact that you might only have a piece of a file in question? Just a thought...
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
Punitive Damages: "are those with the intent to punish the defendant. The hope is that awarding punitive damages will deter similar actions in the future both by the defendant and others similarly situated."
encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/ne/Negligence
but also are "Damages awarded in addition to actual damages when the defendant acted with recklessness, malice, or deceit."
https://www.legalexplorer.com/AM/Template.cfm
Punitive can be and are usually significantly higher than an infringement's monetary value because they are meant to PUNISH and DETER future infringement.
Even if the actual cost is revealed, the damages will not decrease. If anything, it is an opportunity for them to INCREASE the amount of statutory damages that they can collect.
They are not stupid, they are in more control of what happens than it may seem because they have control of the cases. If they come across someone who they think could possibly beat them or damage their cause, all that they have to do is simply drop the case from court. Conversely, because they are the ones filing the suits, they can hand pick the courts that they want to take their cases to. Thus allowing them to not only collect minuscule and essentially irrelevant monetary damages from the victims of their suits but simultaneously re-write copyright case law to their hearts content!
(Yikes, it's scary to find myself offering an argument for the RIAA's side of something. I'll take a long shower after posting this, but anyway...)
IANAL, but I can't think the courts would refuse to admit a methodologically sound series of independent experiments into evidence, whereby the experimenter seeds a number of files (of varying popularity) with unique, recognizable bitprints, then measures and documents their distribution. The RIAA probably holds the position that a filesharer is responsible not only for the direct downloads he generates, but for subsequent distribution of the file as well. 10 * 10 * 10 gets you over 750 pretty fast.
Admitting the study into evidence might make them have to adjust the damage amounts to consider each song's popularity, but it could conceivably justify an average of 750 copies in circulation * $0.99, over time.
Pi Ran Out
"Is there precedent for different types of encouraging licenses similar to the software world? (Share only, derivatives allowed, etc.)"
Creative Commons has the Attribution-ShareAlike license. Which is sort of like the GPL for non-code.
There is also the Free Art License:
http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/
I put my stuff under CC BY-SA as well:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22drew%20Roberts%22
And people use it:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Peter%20Rodgers%22
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22drew%20Roberts%2C%20Thorsten%20Wilms%22
Plus, a group of people on the Linux Audio Users mailing list is starting up to make music together under a CC BY-SA license.
Does that help you at all?
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
DRM=Digital Restrictions Management
.wav and replaced the two that wouldn't play with songs sampled from my cassette copy. As I have a very good used cassette deck I paid $50 for (that originally sold for $600), there is little audible difference between the digitally mangled CD and the cassette's sound, whether played on my home JBL three ways (12 inch woofers) or the six speaker car stereo.
I think of it as "dumb record mangling." My copy of the CD of Led Zeppelin's first album (that I bought at Recycled Records) has two songs that won't play, despite the fact that there are no visible scratches or other defects.
So I ripped all the songs to
In fact, the DRM on that CD and listening to my workaround to its designed defects is what convinced me to stop replacing my tapes and LPs with CDs, and to write the above linked article.
I'd already got a CD copy of their Presence album and it lacked presence. So I tried sampling the LP and guess what? My burned CD of the LP sounds better than the factory CD, which obviously suffers from bad remastering.
The record companies are obviously run by idiots who think their customers are all fools. Sadly, the idiots may be right.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This is an interesting ruling to me because I guess the claim is that the RIAA companies are providing the music to some of the services at around seventy cents per download "wholesale", but we all know that their actual cost is much lower. Their cost was incurred by the production of the music and it's marketing, but the cost of downloading the music is born by the folks at each end of the wire, i.e. the person who shared the file and the person who downloaded it. The existence of the music on a shared drive doesn't even prove that a cost of downloading was incurred. So the rulings on this part of the trial are interesting in terms of not just this lawsuit but others which may follow.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...