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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."
IANAL, but I think the problem is that they would have to show that they were doing that before this request to itemize the costs was made. Otherwise they could make up anything they wanted.
"Yes your honor, we encode the bits into a 1 oz. gold coins and mail them to our other office where they are melted down and made into a plaque for this specific case"
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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.
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 $500 for every time I download one of her MP3s.
According to the copyright office, damages go from 750$ 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?
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!
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.
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
2. It took us 6 months to get the revenue information. Now it's been 4 1/2 months so far to try and get the expense information.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
This is one of the most honest and unbiased assessments of the whole copyright issue I have ever seen on Slashdot. shark72, you have obviously reached a higher echelon that is beyond the reach of this site's populace. Go! Leave us to our one-sided demise and forge new hopeful alliances to spread your even-handed message!
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
Except it wasn't lose-lose. CD sales were up during Napster. Studies show those who pirate are more likely to buy cds. File sharing is just free advertising. This abuse of their customers has lost them business (I have not bought a cd in 4 or 5 years due to these lawsuits). The correct strategy was for them to ignore personal copying and go after commercial piracy, but they were too big a control freak to do that.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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).
Like the phone company did back in the day when they went after some kids for allegedly hacking a 911 system when actually, they downloaded a 'confidential computer text file' reputedly worth over $80k when they were selling copies of it for about 30 bucks. IIRC, they wanted to charge the kids for the cost of the computer system used to create the document, the time logged by the person that typed the document up, plus the salary of said typist's supervisor for the time the typist reputedly spent creating the document.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.