ISP Sued By Irish RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "An ISP in Ireland has been sued by the Big Four record labels because its subscribers have engaged in P2P sharing of the record companies' song files. The record companies claim the ISP should be buying Audible Magic's CopySense, the software being peddled by the RIAA's expert witness, which supposedly would filter out copyright infringement. Of course, not everyone agrees."

Comments

Re:Bad Title

[Jafafa Hots]

He meant the Irish version of the RIAA - One of the As in RIAA stands for "America."

Here's the only two things you need to know

[TubeSteak]

While the record companies had taken various measures to discourage record piracy, including public awareness campaigns and legal actions against individuals engaged in piracy, these had proven very costly and time consuming and were not enough to stop people using illegal services on a broad scale. AND

[Eircom] ... had no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network. There isn't much more to say.
The ISP has no obligation and the *AA can't seem to "educate" themselves out of their problem.

Lets burn our public libraries

[CrazyJim1]

People are using books that they didn't even pay for there. I think this is causing a big impact on book sales. More authors would make books if it wasn't for the Library. It is in the public's best interest to burn their libraries.

Re:Lets burn our public libraries

[wvmarle]

Not a very apt comparison.

Books from the library are read there, or borrowed to be returned later. The number of copies in existence remains the same (unless people go to a copy machine to copy the book - a non-trivial and fairly costly operation, probably more costly than going to the book shop and buy yourself a copy).

Libraries can be compared to music/video rental shops (many book libraries also do this). Those disks are rent or lent, and are returned a week or so later.

Music and video downloads (and e-books) however DO increase the number of copies. And copying is as good as free in effort and cost.

Of course the publishers also complain about libraries (not so much, they are considered a given due to their long historical existence), and video rentals. They claim it also lowers sales. Just like reselling used copies of books/CDs/DVDs. But no matter what, on-line file sharing is in a league on its own.

Re:Lets burn our public libraries

[mr_matticus]

The Library has paid for one copy of the book No, usually libraries buy many copies, particularly for important or popular works. Those copies wear rapidly and will slowly be pulled from circulation. Eventually, the library's collection will stabilize at a lower number, lasting a long time. The kinds of books ordered individually are not ones that sell tremendously well to begin with. Multiplied across the thousands of libraries in the country, most specialty books are quite buoyed by library sales--sales they would not have otherwise made because the market for the book is limited, or the cost of the production run is more than most of the market would spend on it.

which does in the end withhold possible profits from authors and publishers as hundreds of people can read the book for free. No. Reading the book is always free. Possession of the copy is what costs money, and it's not free. Running even a small library system costs millions of dollars per year--it's more like social insurance, spreading cost instead of risk. And again, many of these books rely on libraries for a significant portion of their revenue in the first place--revenue that would not be replaced by customers if libraries were to vanish suddenly.

Libraries don't pay a special version of the book licensed for lending, publishers are not compensated any more for books going to libraries then to anyone else No kidding--that's because there's a statutory license for libraries. It's part of the negotiated copyright bargain. Furthermore, there was a time when libraries did pay more for the books. Not for licensing, but for library binding. Today, mass production and lower overall product quality just means that libraries just replace worn out copies more frequently instead of investing more in a longer-lasting copy to start (also because people are far more abusive with library materials than in past years).

There is rarely incentive for me to buy the book after I've read it at the library. If that's the case, then there isn't incentive to buy it, independent of the existence of a library. A library offers a large collection available to all at a lower cost, because everyone contributes a fixed amount. There's absolutely no reason to expect that net sales would increase without libraries. My city's library materials budget is approximately $7 million annually. I sincerely doubt that if that number dropped to zero, that people would offset that loss with increased spending. I think instead that people would just read less. The people who buy books might even buy less without a library, especially given the cost of investing in them--and they are an investment, except trade paperbacks.

laws have been passed that don't just allow it, but encourage and set up the system. Libraries predate the library exceptions to copyright law. We have decided as a society that libraries are a valuable resource, and we protect them in copyright law and other places because that's part of the social contract in granting copyrights. It's not accurate to say that publishers lose money to libraries, because copyright wouldn't exist without libraries to ensure that knowledge doesn't get bound up in copyright. It's explicit in the simple passage of the Copyright Act, and contrary to popular Slashdot belief, it is still a functional bargain.

Sued for not buying something?

[zmjjmz]

That's messed up.

That's nothing, my house was robbed...

[Anonymous Coward]

So I'm suing my town and state because their roads were used to transport the stolen items away. That could have been easily avoided had they employed a security guard from my company at each of the intersections...

Re:"Obvious ways"?

[aj50]

However, BitTorrent and P2P in general do have some quite specific traits. Since they all rely on connecting to other peers to download, you can easily guess that someone's using bittorrent because they have ~40 open connections, most of which aren't doing much. Encryption does nothing to help this.

Re:fight it

[L4t3r4lu5]

IANAL, but I thought threatening legal action (and engaging in it for not conforming) into parting with funds for a particular purpose was Demanding Money with Menace.

Extorsion, maybe?