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Lessig, Zittrain, Barlow To Square Off Against RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's case in Boston against a 24-year-old grad student, SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, in which Prof. Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School, along with members of his CyberLaw class, are representing the defendant, may shape up as a showdown between the Electronic Frontier and Big Music. The defendant's witness list includes names such as those of Prof. Lawrence Lessig (Author of 'Free Culture'), John Perry Barlow (former songwriter of The Grateful Dead and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Prof. Johan Pouwelse (Scientific Director of P2P-Next), Prof. Jonathan Zittrain (Author of 'The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It'), Professors Wendy Seltzer, Terry Fisher, and John Palfrey, and others. The RIAA requested, and was granted, an adjournment of the trial, from its previously scheduled December 1st date, to March 30, 2009. (The RIAA lawyers have been asking for adjournments a lot lately, asking for an adjournment in UMG v. Lindor the other day because they were so busy preparing for the Tenenbaum December 1st trial ... I guess when you're running on hot air, you sometimes run out of steam)."
I submitted a story about this Monday, Constitutionality of P2P law "under attack" (rejected) after seeing it in an AP story in the Chicago Tribune. That story quoted NYCL, who it of course called Ray Beckerman. I wondered at the time why he hadn't submitted it himself.
But at any rate, for the corporate media spin on this, here are a few links:
Billion Dollar Charlie vs. the RIAA
Legal Jujitsu in a File-Sharing Copyright Case
Lawsuits Brought by Music Industry Are Unconstitutional, Lawyer Says
Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits (AP)
Law Professor Takes on RIAA
Prof: Penalty unfair, will help with $1M download lawsuit
RIAA defendant enlists Harvard Law prof, students
Harvard Professor: File-Sharing Lawsuits Unconstitutional
Free Martian Whores!
The RIAA holds copyrights on recordings. The copyright on songs like Happy Birthday is held by songwriters' associations like BMI/ASCAP.
Since I keep getting modded down, I feel compelled to provide userful information. I apologize for the way I stated my first comment, but the RIAA is the guardian of an industry so antiquated and oppressive that having sympathy for these guys is a little like feeling sorry for a Georgia slaveholder after watching Sherman's troops fire his mansion and scatter his livestock. Here's an industry so bloated with executives and middlemen, all of them greedily slurping up profit, that the people who actually write the songs and play the music -- the "talent" -- are getting royally screwed in the royalty department. It's been like that for years. Anyways, harvard has the court documents posted here for all to see.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Well, this is one of the main thrusts of why the MAFIAA is trying to prop up their business model though lawsuits and buying legislators. If they have copyrights that are perpetual, or at least so long that they may as well be perpetual, no one will be able to create or even express *anything* without their permission and without paying them a hefty sum. Couple that with international cooperation in IP legislation, and the future looks incredibly grim for any kind of free expression.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The RIAA holds copyrights on recordings. The copyright on songs like Happy Birthday is held by songwriters' associations like BMI/ASCAP.
BMI and ASCAP are Performing Rights Organizations, and as such don't hold copyrights. They administer the payments of performance royalties to copyright holders.
The "Happy Birthday to You" copyright is held by Time Warner.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
No one in their right mind on Slashdot should want to abolish copyright. As authors of free software under licenses like the GPL, we actually depend on copyright law to keep our creations free.
But what we're keeping them free from is mainly compilation copyrights.
The problem is that software couldn't be safely released into the public domain because somebody else could fix a bug or make a useful mod, copyright the fix or upgrade, and everybody else (including the original author) are hosed. They can't fix or upgrade it in the same way themselves without being in trouble. So putting software in the public domain means losing, not just control of its future (which is OK), but possibly the use of future versions (which is not).
GPL and other "free" licenses head this off by keeping the copyright alive, using it as a bludgeon to prevent others from capturing the freed software, while allowing its use by those who agree to leave it free, including its future versions.
But while killing coypyright would kill free licenses, it would also kill the thing they were created to prevent. Yes you wouldn't be able to use the copyright underlying the license to force somebody who didn't distribute the upgrade source to chose between releasing it or stopping distribution of the object (and paying big penalties). But then he couldn't use copyright to keep you from reverse-engineering his object code and distributing equivalent source, either. B-) With the original problem solved we could dispense with open licenses and some of their additional downsides (such as mutual incompatibility).
(Granted GPL has since been upgraded to provide some protection against patents, which WOULD be lost. But that's a kludge providing very limited protection. Meanwhile software patents are being attacked separately.)
= = = =
Having said all that:
My own opinion is that copyright (with reasonable term, without a ban on reverse-engineering, and without junk like "look and feel", "interface operation is a 'performance'", and "similar function is a derived work") is the right protection for software. It bans straight copying, giving adequate time for original developers to get a product established in a market before clones can appear and imposes adequate development costs on cloners, without setting patent-style boobytraps for others who independently develop the same ideas.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Is this pro-bono or not? Anyone know?
My guess is yes. The Judge specifically asked Prof. Nesson to take the case. It's in this transcript, where she asks Mr. Tenenbaum if he'd been contacted by Prof. Nesson yet.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Well, no. Kid Rock actually licenses his music from other when he uses it. He didn't just create a song that took parts of other people's works then think no one would care, I saw him explain this a while back when he did a cover of a Metallica song. About the only thing having the same song label (if that is true) has to do with it is perhaps more favorable licensing agreements or access to the artists.
Author/editor Eric Flint (of the Baen Free Library fame) wrote a whole series of wonderful essays on copyright as editorials in the "Jim Baen's Universe" magazine. You can read them all for free (and I urge you to go read them.. he make a whole series of great points).
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
About the only thing having the same song label is that the label owns the copyright to the recording. Paul McCartney tried to buy the copyrights TO HIS OWN SONGS from the label, but was outbid.
Free Martian Whores!
Or have they filed millions of copyrights?
Copyright 2234257612, Happy Birthday to You, Aaby version.
Copyright 2234257613, Happy Birthday to You, Aaron version.
Copyright 2234257614, Happy Birthday to You, Abe version.
They only need a copyright on one version, and all the other versions are derivative works, which is a reserved right under copyright.
That's why you can't make a proprietary Linux kernel by changing one variable name.
The Name Game is the same way.
The stupid part isn't being able to copyright a song that has a lyric that changes every time. The stupid part is that it's such a fundamental part of our culture that most people don't even realize it's copyrighted, and yet it's going to be for quite a long time yet.
The enemies of Democracy are
OK, so I obfuscate the code before compiling it to make it difficult and they will always be 10 steps behind me with less then usable crap going around.
Reverse engineering isn't as easy as saying it. Look at SAMBA in which they had tried for how many years to reverse engineer some of Microsoft's authentication schemes just to reliably be on a windows domain network let alone participate as a server. Look at the open source exchange boxes and clients and how they still haven't really got it.
The stupid part is that it's such a fundamental part of our culture that most people don't even realize it's copyrighted, and yet it's going to be for quite a long time yet.
Until 2030, as it was registered in 1935, if we assume that copyright is not lengthened again. But for us to assume would make an ass out of u and me.
2. Stupid itunes making it a hassle to give my wife a copy of something WE own legally (or often was free in the first place).
Ever tried Floola? It works great for me. Never had a need to use itunes since.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Listening to music does not violate even the current draconian copyright laws.
I don't think the laws are as draconian as many assume; it's the MAFIAA's incorrect interpretation of the copyright laws that is "draconian". Actually the words I would use are "ludicrous", "frivolous", and "fictional".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
A lot of people complained about copyright even when terms were quite short. Publishers on one side of the Atlantic tried desperately to ignore the copyrights of publishers on the other side for decades. And copyright never made any sense at all to most of the world's population, being a peculiar Western concept that only rose within the last several hundred years. Even today, if you tell the typical Indian, Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia that there should be a law to prevent them duplicating media as they see fit, they'd think you're a madman.