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RIAA Backs Down On "Unlicensed Investigator"
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Texas grandmother Rhonda Crain got the RIAA to drop its monetary claims against her after she filed counterclaims against the record companies for using an investigator, MediaSentry, which is not licensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas. The RIAA elected to drop its claims rather than wait for the Judge to decide the validity of Ms. Crain's charges (PDF) that the plaintiff record companies were 'aware that the... private investigations company was unlicensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas specifically, and in other states as well... and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign.' Similar questions about MediaSentry's unlicensed investigations were raised recently by the State Attorney General of Oregon in Arista v. Does 1-17"
No one connected with the RIAA mob has any accountability.
Even if RIAA loses money on this, it doesn't matter much. Until some RIAA board members are facing real prison time, they will use whatever tactics the manage to get away with.
We are all just people.
Ray is definitely fighting the good fight in taking a lead on all the RIAA nonsense, but one thing miffs me quite a bit. Why is it that every time he writes about someone who got sued, it's always "Texas grandmother So-and-So" or "Mother-of-two Blah Blah" or "Penniless, Starving Immigrant Family With Two Unwell Cats" or whatever? What difference does it make in this case that she's a grandmother? I see nothing in the summary of the TFA that explains why this is in any way relevant.
/CF
I mean sure, it's useful to keep in mind that there are human beings involved here, but any more than that is a fairly obvious attempt at clouding objective discussion by appealing to sympathy. It annoys me constantly, and I would think any semi-intelligent person would see right through this. If the facts are so firmly on the defendants' sides as Ray would have us all believe, why is it necessary to resort to such blatantly manipulative appeal to emotion?
In response to several questions that have been raised:
1. The case is now closed, counterclaims and all.
2. I have a hunch MediaSentry is not licensed anywhere.
3. The injunction is a consent decree. It doesn't carry with it any implied finding of liability at all. It's merely a promise, by a 70-something lady who never heard of filesharing, that she will not in the future engage in unauthorized filesharing of plaintiffs' recordings.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
They aren't licensed anywhere.
When is piracy not bad?
The problem is the loaded term "piracy". Is it bad to download a few songs from an artist that you've heard of but never heard? I've done that several times. In the vast majority of those cases, I would not have bought the artists albums if I had not downloaded their songs first. In some cases, I didn't like what I heard & left it at that. In several other cases I have since bought albums by those artists, and in at least a few cases, I now own every CD available from the artist. So would you call my "piracy" in these cases a bad thing, even though they ended up resulting in more money in the artists pocket?
Depends of your personal definition of "piracy". The term "piracy" was, right from the start, a new term intended to be as loaded as it could be to refer to the unauthorized commercialization of copyrighted works. In that time, no normal person could possibly consider that guy selling bootleg tapes/books to be a menace to society. After all, the only thing that that guy did was duplicate something and sell it cheaper than others. That couldn't possibly hurt society.
So, in order to fight that perceived source of lower profits, the companies that were in the business of selling authorized copies of those works decided to shut that down. As they weren't able to gather public support for that battle then they decided to start a public relations campaign against the unauthorized commercialization of copyrighted books (their competition). The first step was coining a negative image to the unauthorized sellers, which originated terms like "bootlegger" and "pirate", evil figures associated with violent, organized crime. It's easier to fight someone/something when they are evil. There was no surprise a while back when some american retarded record company spokesperson started associating "piracy" to terrorism.
Now those companies intend to include in that definition people who have absolutely nothing to do with the old definition of "piracy". Now the record companies, motivated by greed and the lust for control, want to label anyone who downloads anything remotely copyrighted as a "pirate". There is no commercialization of any copyrighted work. Now, instead of attempting to smear and fight the distributors, they are trying to attack the end consumer.
Does it make any sense to label as pirates people who bought unauthorized copies of copyrighted works? Obviously not. Yet, the record companies are trying to go the extra nonsense mile and pin that nasty, loaded label on people who access those works without ever exchanging any money.
So it isn't a question of "when is piracy not bad". As questionable as "piracy", the unauthorized commercialization of a copyrighted work, may be, the real question that must be placed here, and unfortunately you failed to understand, is why is non-"piracy" actions being labelled as "piracy" in the first place? If I download something for personal use after paying absolutely nothing for it then how exactly can you claim that I'm commercializing an unauthorized copy of some copyrighted work? Moreover, why should anyone be called a "pirate" if what that person is doing is perfectly included in their nation's fair use doctrine?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
None of the cases are about 'piracy'. In copyright parlance, 'piracy' means large scale commercial reproduction and resale of copies. Not a single case brought by the RIAA has involved 'piracy'. It is the MPAA/RIAA propagandists who have been trying to rewrite the definition of the term 'piracy'.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful