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RIAA To Stop Prosecuting Individual File Sharers
debatem1 writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA has decided to abandon its current tactic of suing individuals for sharing copyrighted music. Ongoing lawsuits will be pursued to completion, but no new ones will be filed. The RIAA is going to try working with the ISPs to limit file-sharing services and cut off repeated users. This very surprising development apparently comes as a result of public distaste for the campaign." An RIAA spokesman is quoted as saying that the litigation campaign has been "successful in raising the public's awareness that file-sharing is illegal."
I mean, their current methods have apparently atleast been in breach of investigative laws in several states and they may still end up in mess because of it, but ending the thing will atleast lessen the exposure..
Alternative explanation is that they have actually understood that extortion is bad.. nah.. not likely.
Not only do I know that its illegal, I encourage it!
Thanks RIAA, for letting me know all about the super fun world of piracy.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Meanwhile, music sales continue to fall. In 2003, the industry sold 656 million albums. In 2007, the number fell to 500 million CDs and digital albums, plus 844 million paid individual song downloads -- hardly enough to make up the decline in album sales."
Wow, so now that people are given the option of buying only the track they like instead of the whole album... album sales are dropping. Imagine that! I guess blaming it on piracy is easier than making all 12 songs on an album worth buying.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Working with the ISPs is an arms race at best. The ISPs block stuff, P2P devs come up with more and more devious ways to work around the blocks. Plus, in markets where competition is good, consumers will just vote with their feet.
Give it up, RIAA. Come up with better ways of making money. No one is willing to spend $20 to buy an album with 1 or 2 good songs on it. And few are willing to pay for what they will always be able to get for free.
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For the individuals caught in them, the RIAA individual lawsuits really, really suck. Extortionate demands, no real ability to defend yourself(if your day in court costs you more than you can afford, it isn't your day in court), etc. On the other hand, though, the lawsuits as a tactic have been magnificently ineffective, and do very little to project RIAA power beyond those directly affected(and, indeed, the seem to project displeasure much further than they project obedience).
Focusing on the ISPs is potentially much more sinister. ISP user agreements, for anything other than expensive business accounts, typically have pretty broad service agreements, so they almost definitely won't even need to involve the courts to cut you off. If the RIAA and friends are successful, they could easily obtain de facto veto power over almost anybody's internet access, without any actually illegal conduct(unlike their present tactics). There is no reason to suspect that they would be any more discriminating or accurate in using such power than they currently are in filing lawsuits(probably less, in fact, since it will be cheaper than lawsuits), so the circle of the affected will be even wider. Not good.
1. announce an end to lawsuits
2. mediasentry keeps logging traffic
3. ???
4. file thousands of simultaneous lawsuits
5. bask in your crapulence
Because they were starting to lose.
They were starting to get in trouble with the courts, because they were filing lawsuits, and they in many cases had insufficient evidence to prove wrongdoing.
There were many cases where they were prosecuting innocent people, and this would ultimately be seen as harassment/abuse of the courts, resulting in sanctions for the RIAA.
The new approach will be more expedient, and less costly, since their victims don't get any due process rights.
They just send a letter to your ISP, and your ISP assumes you guilty.
You no longer have a chance to prove your innocence. If the RIAA doesn't like you and wants your connection turned off, they'll now have the means to make it happen, if your ISP joins their program.
See the article:
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones. But ISPs, which are increasingly cutting content deals of their own with entertainment companies, may have more incentive to work with the music labels now than in previous years.
So, they're going to try running their extortions entirely outside the courts now? This'll be a good test of the ISPs.
An RIAA spokesman is quoted as saying that the litigation campaign has been "successful in raising the public's awareness that file-sharing is illegal."
If it's so illegal, then why did they sue for damages (that is, compensation) rather than prosecute file-sharers for a crime? You don't sue people because they robbed banks or stabbed someone, you sue because they owe you money for some reason.
So the real message they were sending to the public is, "File sharing takes money out of our pockets." Well, duh.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
An RIAA spokesman is quoted as saying that the litigation campaign has been "successful in raising the public's awareness that file-sharing is illegal."
That says it all really. They have managed a disinformation campaign to make people think that file sharing is illegal. No mention of the fact that it is perfectly legal if you have rights to the work, it is public domain, or you are using it under "fair use" terms, or a number of other more obscure legal circumstances.
Think of it this way, nobody bats an eyelid when you say "filesharing is illegal", but you would get some surprised looks if you said "video recording is illegal" or "photocopying is illegal" - they have managed to taint the technology with a possible illegal use.
"Banning repeat offenders will reduce your congestion issues and your costs." - RIAA
"That sounds good to us! We already impose limits on high-bandwidth users; if you back us up we can ban them completely!" - Comcast
"Excellent." - RIAA
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
An RIAA spokesman is quoted as saying that the litigation campaign has been "successful in raising the public's awareness that file-sharing is illegal."
It's also raised public awareness that the RIAA is the scum of the earth who will sue 12 year old girls for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've personally never understood the concept that any kind of publicity that could make people spit on you when you walk on the street could possibly have any positive value down the line.
A knife is a pretty poor weapon for hunting wild animals; you have to get awfully close to use it.
It's a bit more use for cutting them up after they're dead.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Which leads me to ask - what would entice an ISP to follow the RIAA's 'suggestions'? Very few of them have anything to do with the entertainment industry directly.
Most, if not all, major ISPs in the US have television offerings with pay-per-view and premium channels. Verizon, Comcast, Cox - just off the top of my head. Piracy is competition for those services.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Top Gear is the best show on television.
That is all.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Citation needed please. Specifically I would be interested to know how many people the RIAA has sued, and of those people, how many have been found innocent in court. Anyone who has settled must be excluded from this count since their guilt or innocence has not been proven. Thanks.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Just don't buy a car based on their reviews! :) It is entertaining, though, I'll grant that.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
When you actually had to break the law in order to get the RIAA all up in your jock, non-law-breakers such as myself were left in relative peace.
Since they've now explicitly and announcedly decided to adopt a strategy of technology control measures, they just became a thorn in every geek's side.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Not really, a lot of people speak chinese, but they're all in one place (China). English is far more widely distributed: the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Other large English-speaking groups in virtually every other former British colony (India, for example).
Wherever you go in the world, you're not going to have to look too hard to find someone with some useable level of ability in English, you can't say that about Chinese.
FGD 135
You ARE a lemming ...
Bread Knives cut bread, but they can ALSO kill people.
Cars take people to work, but they can ALSO kill people.
Dogs are nice pets, but they can ALSO kill people.
With that logic, maybe we should just ban everything, just in case ?
I don't want my viewing habits tracked, they have no guaranteed right to track my viewing habits anyway, and they'll be receiving the same amount of ad revenue regardless of whether I watch their ads or not.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
...and that enemy is small independent content creators who are gradually making RIAA artists irrelevant, but who rely on consumer-grade internet connections to get their product out. It's probably too much for ISPs to actually watch what their customers are pushing through their pipes, and an independent musician legally uploading files to a sharing site (or recording engineer/CD plant, etc.) looks an awful lot like an evildoer. Easier to just stop all of the traffic.
I think the general rule for the "come to X country and learn its language" is for people intending to live there, not vacation there.
If I was moving to Thailand, I'd sure as Hell learn Thai as soon as I could - preferably before I got there. You're just so disadvantaged not knowing the local tongue.
That aside, we're becoming a more globalized world every day. I've done odd jobs and had guys ask me in Spanish if they needed extra people. I don't speak the language, but I can understand it to a degree and get out a few sentences.
If you're going into business, Chinese or Arabic should be a goal for you. Quoting:
Albert Saiz, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Elena Zoido, an economist at the consulting group LECG , published a study comparing wage premiums for American college graduates who spoke Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese as a second language.
In their findings, the law of supply and demand prevailed. With its 1.7% wage premium, Spanish was the least valuable, followed by French (2.7%). Knowledge of German, Italian, Russian and Chinese was slightly more valuable, translating into an average 4% income boost.
Those gains are paltry compared with simply staying in school a bit longer. In the same study, Saiz and Zoido found that an extra year of schooling yielded an 8% to 14% wage premium.
Of course, learning to speak a foreign language is not just about increasing one's income. It's silly to try to put a dollar value on the ability to read Sartre in the original French or chat about the latest telenovela in a café in BogotÃ.
But if income maximization is the key, savvy college students would do well to learn high-demand languages instead. According to the MLA, enrollments in Chinese and Arabic between 2002 and 2006 spiked by 51% and 127%, respectively. Enrollments in Spanish courses during the same time increased by only 10.3%.
In addition to Chinese and Arabic, the top 10 most popular languages for American college students include Japanese, Latin, and Russian. American Sign Language is actually the fourth most popular language course, but when excluded from the list of foreign languages, ancient Greek slips into the top 10 with roughly 22,850 enrollments.
Ambitious students with an interest in geopolitics can try taking up Swahili, Urdu, Farsi and Bahasa Indonesian. These are among the FBI's most sought after foreign language skills.
If you learn Farsi, Arabic, etc. you're practically guaranteed a cushy desk job on a government payroll. FBI, NSA, CIA, military, embassies... there's a huge shortage. This is a community that recognizes how valuable certain skills are in this modern age like knowing the latest and most useful computer languages are. Nowadays, it's not just computer languages you ought to be studying.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Almost a third of people at Central and South Americas speack portuguese. Don't let the number of countries, only one, fool you, Brazil is quite big. You should also discount the countries where spanish is the official language, but most people simply don't use it, the ones that speack french, german, english...
Besides that, great rant :)
Rethinking email
It looks like the RIAA could be lobbying governments to force ISPs to forward infringement notices.
I am worried about this because if some jack-ass at MediaSentry goes and mistakenly identifies my IP because I'm sharing some linux distros or whatever, then I get a note from my ISP saying they're slowing my service down because I'm a pirate. Now, I'm forced to sue the ISP in order to get the service I paid for. All the onus is on me to take action against the ISP to clear my name, this is much, much worse than what was happening before because rather than the RIAA having to prove that their copyrights have been infringed upon, it will be up to the accused to prove that he or she isn't guilty.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
you forget how difficult it is to type English. you need to remember how to spell out thousands of English words each containing many letters. Typing thousands of Chinese characters is basically of the same complexity.
What does that have to do with what he said?
English is in fact the most widely spoken language, and it is a second language to the largest number of people.
There are more native speakers of Chinese, but with the multiple dialects, you've already got a huge problem. English has lots of differences depending on where you are, but you can still communicate with people, and you can always ask for clarification for specific terms.
None of this has anything to do with China or Japan becoming an economic power. If anything, your point highlights that Japan's industrialization and rise as an economic power did not result in the spread of Japanese. To the contrary, it resulted in westernization of Japan, and a huge increase of people learning English in Japan.
I've gone back and reformatted the comment for readability, again, my apologies
I'm sure this will be flamed, but I'm so very happy to see this happen.
Suing their customers was one of the stupidest moves in the world. They alienated their customer base. They initially chose to fight the market instead of working with it and the long term consequences will probably be dire. When the market started to demand a digital format they should have immediately reacted (or perhaps should have seen the writing on the wall and been proactive) and begun selling online, as they do now.
Consider this: College students, on the whole, have low disposable income. The "goal" of college is to increase your earnings potential and have more disposable income. If you sue a college student there is a good chance that you will force them to leave school for lack of time, energy and funds to finish college. The earnings potential of that college student lowers to near zero.
Most people don't steal or commit crimes, even if they know they won't get caught, if they have a choice. Once these college students become professionals and increase their disposable income the time/cost of "stealing" music becomes not worth it and they'll start to pay for their music (assuming a good product, of course). Most industries work with law enforcement and law creation to mold the system into what they want. Although I agree that lobbying will make it harder to download in the long run, that's the point and that is their goal. They will try to take a mile and other groups will have to fight against them to limit how much they take. That is the system that we live in, and that is acceptable and accepted behavior from an industry.
Music Piracy, in a way, is a new entrant into the Music industry's marketplace. A competitor as it were and should be treated as such. I'm glad to see that is finally happening. Now they have new challenges to face. Album sales, and total sales, are declining. If the average album has 11 songs and they sold 840 million singles, then they sold about 80 million albums worth of music, plus the 500 million albums, bringing them to 580, about a 12% drop from 650 million.
They have a product set, they have a set of target markets, now it is time to go back to the drawing board and create a new strategic marketing plan. Product, Place, Price and Promotion. Cost vs Differentiation. Leadership vs Adequacy.
That's just a few ideas that come to mind immediately on ways that they might consider improving their marketing, more research is obviously needed.
I know four languages, and I found that every language has its own nuances of meanings [...] If you come to my country, learn my f[****]n' language! What would you think, if I came to the USA or UK, and *expected* you to speak German (or Luxemburgish, which happens to be my mother's tongue)?
Your arrogance disgusts me. It's always English, English, English!
English is [ironically] the /lingua franca/ of international business and the GP is right in that most everywhere you go you'll find someone with a smattering of English. Of course that's true for other languages too - it often depends on the visiting tourist population as well as past colonisations.
I only learnt French and Russian at school but do try to speak the language appropriate to any country I visit: Mandinki, Kswahili, Spanish, Tunisian, etc., ... I live in Newport, South Wales now so I should really be learning Urdu.
Chinese is a complex of many different dialects and writing styles - partially pictographic/ideographic, partially derived from phonetic symbols (for which the phonetics have mutated and drifted) it may be widely spoken (eg by 80%+ in the PRC) but doesn't seem to lend itself to modern technological input methods.
From what I understand Mandarin users enter characters as pinyin using latin characters, presumably different fonts then are used to switch between traditional and modern character sets? Why then bother with the transliteration, just use pinyin.
Personally I think English should be rationalised with simplified and logical spelling applied - but it would probably just be "corrupted" again in a short time.
Mandarin and Hindi are often listed as the most spoken languages but I think in both cases they encompass a lot of dialects. Perhaps Spanish would be a better international language?
But I'm guessing you'll just say I'm an arrogant European then?
This is an example of the ineffectiveness of "Hanlon's Razor" (Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity), but I think my more cynical "mcgrew's razor" applies here: Never attribute to stupidity or incompetence that which can be adequately explained by greedy self interest.
Free Martian Whores!
Have you considered that maybe it's not because he is arrogant, but because he is factually correct? English is the common language of communication throughout Europe (and the most of the world in general), like it or not.
And no, it's not my native language, so don't tell me I'm arrogant.
many of us who stopped buying their products will take a while to bring back into their fold - if ever
I hope it's never.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
This has less to do with the RIAA deciding to switch tactics in enforcing copyrights and it has more to do with the RIAA not wanting a legal precedent set about file sharing.
The mods hate me.
Goodbye cruel world.
(Inserts gun in mouth.)
"Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night
"Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night
- Marvin the Paranoid Android
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Speaking as a P2P developer, this again raises the question of why the DMCA safeharbour provisions have never been applied by various defenses. (NYCL!) This change in behavior amounts to overly broad DMCA takedown notices, which conspicuously weren't part of RIAA scare tactics before.
1. If I was aware of a potential defense that was never articulated in a filed public legal document, I wouldn't discuss it with an anonymous stranger on Slashdot.
2. If you are so knowledgeable about this defense which all of the defendants' lawyers have overlooked, why don't you make your case for it now, and tell us what section or sections of the DMCA you are referring to, what other legal authority you have for it, and how it would be applicable to a person who is a engaged in file sharing over Limewire or Kazaa. That would be helpful.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Because the ISP's know damn well what will happen when people find out who they are. Someone needs to dig this up fast and post it far and wide. When these ISP's are raped by class action lawsuits and face customers bailing in droves, you will see a different tune.
Excellent point, plasmacutter. If one has a choice of ISP's, as most people do nowadays, why choose one that's in bed with the RIAA?
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I'm a native German and English speaker myself. Sitting in both boats as I do, I can understand the sensitivities involved with favoring one language over another. But I find that English is really easily the best language for international communications.
English has several features that I think make it a better language. It's semantically open, unlike French. Adding new words to English is very simple. We can even create new verbs and nouns from the last names of people (ie. bork). It adapts existing foreign words easily. I'm often able to use "über" and "verboten" in English without getting at looks.
English doesn't require special accent marks in order define meanings. English has simplified definite and indefinite articles. Compared to German, "a", "an", and "the" are much simpler. English features no real gender. No worries about matching verbs, nouns, and articles; or even changing the meaning of a word. For possession, the Saxon genitive is efficient and simple. It accomplishes more in less space to say "John's car" rather than "the car of John". English also features simplified demonstratives, and very simplified declension of nouns. None of the der, den, dem, des conflicts that plague German and make it difficult for non-German speakers to learn. In English the placement of adjectives doesn't affect its meaning. In French you have scenarios like "un homme grand" (a great man) and "un grand homme" (a tall man). In English, you rely on the context of the adjective. Finally, English has a more direct simplified sentence structure.
of course, English has its downside, thinking contextually in English to find meaning vs thinking literally in French can create some confusions, I'm sure.
Sure, some people advocate English everywhere just because they're linguistically lazy and somewhat arrogant, but truly, there legitimate reasons for stressing English as an international language of commerce vs say, Irish where it can take an "aoi" to stress a "long i" sound, or Chinese were choosing a written form is as much a decision about your politics as it is about efficiency (simplified used in China vs traditional used in Taiwan).