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RIAA's 'Misspeaking' May Have Affected Verdict
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "David Kravetz of Wired.com covered last year's Capitol v. Thomas trial gavel-to-gavel. It's worth noting, then, his article saying that the RIAA's recent statement — that Sony's top litigation lawyer 'misspoke' during the trial. She said that making a copy from one's own cd is 'stealing', which (in his words) may have caused a major miscarriage of justice. Wired further points out that later on in the trial, during the RIAA's examination of Ms. Thomas, 'On the hard drive she [turned] over were thousands of songs Thomas said she ripped from her CDs. The RIAA's Gabriel suggested to jurors that copying one's purchased music was a violation of the Copyright Act. Gabriel, for example, asked Thomas whether she had ever burned CDs, either for herself, or to give away to friends.' Gabriel, the RIAA's lead attorney, apparently misspoke too — prejudicing jurors along the way."
Please, your Honor, don't take what I actually said to heart. What I really meant to say was a complete reversal of the actual meaning of what some may interpret to be a broadly misunderstood fabrication of opinions based on statistical evidence to the contrary.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Is any of it grounds for appeal?
can a lawyer be disbarred in the US for "mispeaking" under oath and saying something untrue about the legality of a defendant's conduct, while being questioned as a witness for the side that pays her salary?
why the hell not?
Is this grounds enough to declare a re-trial?
I would hope so.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunately for Thomas, it doesn't matter. The evidence was overwhelming, and unlike most of the RIAA's targets, Thomas was guilty and the evidence suggests she knew what she was doing was illegal (she destroyed her original hard drive).
Yeah, right...
"Miscarriage of justice" will happen if all the MAFIAA is condemned to the gas chamber, and even then...
Cry me a river.
how long until
There's a great essay, "Against Intellectual Property," by Brian Martin at deoxy.org ( http://deoxy.org/aip.htm )
Martin attacks the very idea that intellectual products can be considered property at all: "The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to." He demolishes many of the standard rationales for IP and cites many abuses of it, such as: "The neem tree is used in India in the areas of medicine, toiletries, contraception, timber, fuel and agriculture. Its uses have been developed over many centuries but never patented. Since the mid 1980s, US and Japanese corporations have taken out over a dozen patents on neem-based materials. In this way, collective local knowleilge developed by Indian researchers and villagers has been expropriated by outsiders who have added very little to the process.5
Vandana Shiva and Radha Holla-Ehar, "Intellectual piracy and the neena tree," Ecologist, Vol. 23 No. 6, 1993, pp, 223-227."
I recommend this essay highly.
This is classic, Fair use anyone, if i was defense, i would pull that card like there was no tomorrow
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
Can we please redefine copyright law as being applicable only when a protected work is copied between two people? This way, reselling a used CD would still be OK (right of resale, copyright law does not apply). And making a copy from one media format to another, or a temporary copy to RAM, or a backup copy, or transcoding, would all be legal and not under copyright law either, because there would not be any exchange between two people.
I suspect that this is how copyright was originally intended to apply, and I think it makes more sense. Let people do what they want with their media, as long as they don't copy and distribute it to another person. Thats when copyright law should apply.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your gcc compiler. Learn digital elecronics!
Sometimes I even violate copyright by singing along to a song without having bought a performance license! Even worse, I might sing the song at a different time, thus time-shifting/reproducing it! If I hum it in a public place, that compounds the crime because then it's a public performance.
Since I want to avoid becoming a career copyright-violating criminal, I am moving to Antigua, land of the free, land of RIAA-copyright-free.
Sadly, I wish everything I wrote above was bollocks, but far fetched and silly as it might be, it seems the Recording Ass of America don't see it as such.
It's Miss Saigon , not Miss Peking.
Also, the RIAA shouldn't take credit for the work of Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Richard Maltby, Jr.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Before the DMCA, I believe all of what you just described was acceptable as "fair use".
After the DMCA, it's still alright for actual CDs, but many other things (movies) are copy protected, and it is illegal to break copy protection for any reason.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
if Cary Sherman and Jennifer Pariser have told the judge that Ms. Pariser "misspoke".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
In order to ensure I comply fully with the copyright law, I will not rip CDs to my computer.
Instead, I'll download the music from Kazaa.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
I would find it easier to believe that this is how the RIAA actually feels.
First, its duels [...]. Secondly, [...].
First, it's "it's." Second, if it's "first, ..." it's "second, ...."
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Fixed that for ya. That'll be $5 plus $0.05 per view. Cash only, please.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If Thomas' lawyer didn't pick up that lie by Sony's lawyer to convince the jury that Sony would lie about consumer rights and RIAA rights, then Thomas' lawyer should be fired.
Thomas should get a new trial, with a new lawyer, and the two old lawyers should pay for screwing up the entire trial.
--
make install -not war
IANAL, but I don't believe you have to destroy your backup CDs when you sell the original. I could be wrong, but that is how I manage to bring the actual cost of a CD down to a reasonable level.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Or at least partly. They confuse the issues so badly I didn't know what to think the other day when I first saw it. I'm not even sure if they're talking about the article story or not:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2008/01/02/lklv.hostin.music.chetry.cnn
Tag lost or not installed.
Judges give instructions to the jurors hearing a case, including instructions about the nature of the law pertaining to the case at hand.
If the lawyer "misspoke," in his statements to the jury, wasn't it the job of the judge in the case to point out the actual requirements of the law? Otherwise, why have a judge? We should just make our legal system a contest between two people making up the most plausible bullshit they can muster.
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Well there IS that whole bit about overruling or sustaining objections and such.
And what does my age have to do with anything?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is it just me, or is that article summary a total mess of disconnected sentence fragments? Maybe we should edit those things to be readable...
illegal my ass. charging $20 for a cd should be illegal. especially if all you want is one song and you can't get it from i-tunes. if i spend $20 on a cd, you better believe i'm creating a backup copy on my computer. until they make indestructible cd's, i'll keep doing that.
IANAL, but the aforementioned act appears to include language specifically designed to allow home digital and analog recording of copyrighted material.
Have gnu, will travel.
I am moving to Antigua, land of the free(*)
(*) Footnote:
Free for the first $21 million per year, usual charges apply thereafter.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I actually believe he has been, and she's looking for a new one to handle her appeal.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When I buy a CD, I have PURCHASED the CD and the data contained on it. It is now my property. Period.
When you buy a cd, you puchase the disk and the music/data on it. You do NOT purchase a license to simply use the disk and listen to the music. That being said, if I buy a CD, then I should have the right to make as many copies of the music on it as I see fit, as long as I don't sell those copies to other people.
If the RIAA wants to start this whole EULA-esque crap, then they should state that you are not buying a CD, but rather purchasing a license.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
A practicing Jew? What parts do you need to practice? Do you keep putting your kippah on the wrong way around?
Yours,
A Jew Who's Quite Good at It.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Either that or he fired her
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When you or I do it, it's called "perjury".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
In fact, I often wonder that people wrap GPL'd software in the same "I Accept" boxes on Windows installers, for instance. Not only is there no need to accept the GPL to run a single copy of the software, but there'd be no point.
I realize this is slightly offtopic, but I often hear words like "militaristic" used to describe the GPL, people reacting by going to BSD licenses and such. But any version of the GPL, even v3, does not take away any rights that you have under copyright law. It only gives you additional rights that you didn't have before (like that "site license").
Now, other things (EULAs) are generally trying to limit your rights under copyright law. I'm fairly sure that the only way this can work is if you were given an opportunity to read and accept/decline the license before money was exchanged. It is also where the whole "Windows Refund" concept came from -- people discovered some language in the Windows EULA which says that you can deny the license, return your copy, and get your money back. At the time, this made a lot of sense -- you couldn't buy a laptop without Windows, and you weren't really given the option to read the license before you brought that laptop home, so at the very least, they should be forced to take the entire laptop back -- at best, they take the copy of Windows back and give you a refund.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
When the "liberal masses" wake up, seeing your "negro" tags everywhere would likely remind them that racism still exists. It would thus work against you.
Also, define "cultural threat"?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
For CDs, that is still true. For DVDs, not so much. And I imagine it would apply to any of the bastardized CDs (Sony rootkit, etc).
This is because, as I said in my other comment on this thread, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection. It doesn't matter that what you're going to do with it constitutes fair use; the act of circumvention is itself illegal.
So, in theory, if you have a CD with the Sony Rootkit on it, you're not allowed to rip it, because to do so, you'd have to "circumvent" the DRM by disabling AutoRun, or by using Mac or Linux.
This should hold for EULAs, also. All they have to do is provide built-in DRM which you have to go through to do anything. Then, they don't even have to declare what you can and can't do in legal terms -- anything the DRM explicitly allows you to do is legal, anything else is not.
And that, boys and girls, is the real reason for the War on Piracy: Control.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
RIAA's out of court comments aside, is this not something that could be cited in a future case? I mean, RIAA did prevail in the case, all testimony is kept on record, and unless the verdict is overturned, the lawyers comments will be a future quotable. I am dubious of RIAA's intentions and it is not out of this realm to imagine some exploratory litigation.
There is no security when liberty is sacrificed.
What about the bleeding idiot that served as Thomas' lawyer? He or she or it should have been objecting madly to the question and climbed the RIAA lawyer's frame about that "mispoken" statment on cross examination. Thomas's lawyer should be looking at a lawsuit on grounds of a lack of competence and probably for sleeping through the trial.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I have nothing against most jews. But I'd gladly kill every mohel out there.
Oh that's right, I don't buy CDs anymore except direct from the artist at a show. The legal battles initiated by the "industry" have long ago convinced me this is the only ethically correct option.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Wow, you sniveling little thieves at slashdot never grow up do you?
Give it a break. Just pay for your music and stop fucking leeching off the rest of us, and you will be amazed how hassle free life is. Who gives a fuck what happens to thieves like you lot?
Even if she thought the question was about downloading (and not ripping) she still answered with a NO. She said if I download a song from itunes which I paid for, I am NOT allowed to copy it, not on the same harddrive, a cd, another harddrive or anything else.
I'm not sure if I saw it here or not, but an interesting direct impact from the RIAA's behavior as of late has been record industry stocks slipping. More here: http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2007/12/17/5-stocks-under-10-for-2008.aspx
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This effectively results in a trial that will not go the RIAA's way and they will loose it right? Then if that is the case, it effectively can reverse several other trial outcomes based on the same kind of mis-statements by plaintiffs council; and on appeal, get them all overturned.
Boy;... That would spell eminent financial doom for the RIAA because of the consequential litigation snowball, they would be defending themselves on and on and on for all those malicious prosecution claims.
Wow.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
what does this all mean? if you buy a music CD you can play it anyway you want for yourself. put a copy in your car put a copy in your ear, anyplace you like
BUT DON'T PUBLISH A COPY
if you publish a copy -- e.g. off a web site or network share off a P2P net -- you are outside of "home use"
publishing is reserved to the copyright holder by US copyright law, and guess what, Clones: you ain't gonna change that. The law will likely be clarified however.
when I started imagining what's going on over there in RIAA-land right now between Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation at SONY BMG, and Cary Sherman, who has publicly gone on record as saying that Ms. Pariser "misspoke" under oath.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
here is the law
is a PC a "digital audio recording device" it is certainly capable of being used that way, -- but -- that is NOT it's primary purpose. A PC HAS NO PRIMARY PURPOSE it is a general purpose machine.
now if you put a sound card in your PC and announce that your PC is your Music Library system then that is just something you are saying
copyright law was intended to protect the right of the owner to regulate the manufacture and distributions of copies of the copyright material.
what we need is the law clarified with the addition of a paragraph on computers and networks
if you post any material to a web site or on a P2P share you have published that material and if the material is copyright protected then you have trespassed on that copyright and can be charged with a crime.
it is the duty of the Congress to clarify the definition of a digital recording device it is not up to the court to wreck someone life with a test case. If the law is NOT CLEAR then the defendant must go free and if there is any remaining issue that has to be refered to the Congress -- NOT to the Court. The court does not make the law only Congress can do that and it's about time this trouble with "juducial activism" got straightened up too.
"To reach the level of perjury you need to show that she knowingly and intentionally lied. There are two problems here -- First, she only said it once and claims that she didn't hear the question."
How on earth could anyone ever be tried for perjury then? Tell your lie, under oath, then claim that you didn't hear the question.
"Your answer was false"
"Yes, your honor, but it's not perjury 'cause that *is a *true answer to some other question. Just not the one I was asked"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Yes, making a copy of a CD for personal use is legal.
No, it's not "fair use," as I understand it, if you're making a copy of the entire thing, because of test number 3 of 17 USC Sec. 107. (Go watch A Fair(y) Use Tale again, or check out the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use web site: Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials forpurposes of commentary and criticism.)
Rather, 17 USC Sec. 1008 provides an explicit exception for "noncommercial use by a consumer." Prior to the addition of Chapter 10 by the Audio Home Recording Act in 1992, ripping a CD was copyright infringement.
"Fair use" doesn't mean, "that seems fair." It's a specific limitation on copyright law, and one that is not involved in ripping entire CD's.
I'm still wondering why biologists continue to use lab rats to experiment on when there's so damned many lawyers about...
Pure economics. Priced any good rats lately? Priced any good lawyers lately? For the few things that a lab rat won't do, there are plenty of lawyers to chose from. Bring your wallet.
The truth shall set you free!
I'm a little ignorant in the land of copyright law, but where does copying songs from a CD to one's iPod fit into all this? I was under the distinct impression that doing so was decidedly legal.
well, hopefully the USA will continue to violate the WTO agreement(s) and thus allow Antigua to continue, or even better, the EU will win a similar right and make it my duty to ignore US copyright!
The RIAA can get away with saying that making a copy of a CD you already own is infringement in their eyes. This is their position. It's what they believe. It's not perjury.
Technically, it may actually be infringing activity.
The AHRA specifically does not even speculate on whether this non-commercial use is or is not infringing. It just says "No action may be brought..." (This is not the same as "fair use," btw).
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
While reading his essay, the same thought keeps coming up again and again:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that his argument appears to be significantly based on collectivism means a great number of people are going to very strongly disagree with it, and the odds of it gaining broad acceptance are near zero. This kind of thing:
There's also some sloppy thinking going on:
That's not at all a contradiction; it's simply a tradeoff.
As far as I can tell, he has that exactly backwards. Innovation has increased as protection has increased; if anything, that suggests that protection is correlated with innovation.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but the evidence he presents doesn't point the way he says it does. I don't suppose that should be surprising, though, since he appears to make claims about how other people think based on his own personal feelings:
Based on what does he make this claim? Has he conducted a representative survey of writers? Or is he simply putting his own beliefs in the mouths of others?
Assuming you completely ignore the companies whose very lifeblood is their patented IP. If any company could legally crank out knock-off drugs as soon as they'd reverse-engineered them, what would be the incentive to spend large amounts developing a new drug whose costs would take several years of sales to recoup?
He appears to be talking about all IP as though it were just about music and books.
And an author's most personal creations could be freely used to hawk toilet paper and sex toys.
Creative control is about more than money.
*****
Basically, his argument is long on idealism and short on realism. I see three main fatal flaws with it:
1) It pretends all IP is like copyrights on art. Not all innovation follows that model; new drugs are one example.
2) It's strongly collectivist. That's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly going to be unpopular with many, many everyday people.
3) It makes a number of factual assertions that appear to be based on his personal opinion, rather than actual facts. That makes it easy to dismiss the entire argument as fantasy.
He has some very interesting points, but unfortunately it's preaching to the choir - unless you already agree with him, he's unlikely to be convincing. I agree that there are some very serious problems with current IP legislation, but I disagree that his essay lays out either a sensible or a compelling approach to changing that.
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Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Someone should mod you up for "informative".
/. posting where I got the "decidedly legal" idea about space-shifting. From that posting, TFA makes that claim, and references the Rio case that is discussed in the wikipedia article you shared. But in the Napster case, it seems that the context of that ruling [against space-shifting] would not include ipods*. The MP3.com case seems to be in a similar context. Is it true that the law differentiates between various kinds of space-shifting? If so, then it looks like copying to an ipod is legit.
Anyways, I found the
*or any other portable mp3 player
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Nobody ever could "know" all of that law. If you add state laws and federal regulations you're talking in the hundreds of thousands of pages of law.
Yet "ignorance of the law is no excuse."
Seems to me to be a double standard. Every person is assumed to know all the laws, so if they fall afoul of one they are not allowed, under the lae, to claim ignorance of the law, but a judge is allowed to skate because 'There are hundreds of thousands of pages' of laws.
No, sir, nothing wrong with THAT law system!
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Actually, lawyers aren't under oath and aren't giving testimony themselves, so they couldn't be committing perjury.
Rapidly developing new high-impact drugs can't be done by a guy plinking away in his free time. Huge quantities of work - and money - are involved.
And how does the money get from them to the people who'll do the research? How are you going to avoid the economically-rational strategy of using research paid for by others without paying for it?
Public funding is one way, but are you proposing that governments should be the only source of funding for research? If so, doesn't that come with risks of its own? If not, what is the economic rationale for person X or company Y to spend their own money on a 10-year research project rather than waiting to use the fruits of others' spending for free?
Have you thought this through in pragmatic, rather than idealistic terms? You can't simply wave your hands and assume the money will come from "somewhere".
You're simply wrong. R&D is crucial to certain businesses - where do you think those new drugs come from?
You're drawing a false analogy here. A lemonade stand is akin to a drug production company, not a drug development company. Of course R&D costs don't matter if you specify an industry where those costs are zero.
Service to whom? Who exactly do you expect to pay the hundreds of millions it takes to develop a new drug?
A company? What's their motivation for paying $500M for a new drug when they could reverse-engineer a competitor's drug for $5M?
A wealthy individual? He has no more profit motivation to do it than a company does, and if he needs it for his own ailment, the average 10-year turnaround time will make him likely to look to more readily available forms of treatment?
Joe Average? Why would he? His personal contribution will be less than 1% of 1% of the funds, meaning it makes effectively no difference if he contributes or not, meaning it's economically rational for him to keep his money. Classic free rider problem.
A government? Sure, but only if it's willing to use its tax dollars to subsidize every other country in the world.
Money doesn't just appear because you think it should. None of your arguments contain any economic rationale for why new money would be put up for drug development.
You realize you're not actually disagreeing with me here, don't you?
Sure, the hard-core libertarians and colle