RIAA Claim of Stopping Suits "Months" Ago Is False

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claimed that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits 'for months,' and according to the Wall Street Journal report discussed here yesterday, the RIAA stopped filing mass lawsuits 'early this fall.' Knowing that the RIAA has a problem with telling the truth, I did a little investigating, and found out that the RIAA had, in fact, commenced a wave of lawsuits just last week. Why would anyone believe anything their spokesperson says? This is an organization that has a tendency to misspeak a lot, if you know what I mean, even when under oath." CNet has a copy of the RIAA's new form letter that it will ask ISPs to pass on to alleged copyright-infringing users. It says, in part, "This letter does not constitute a waiver of our members' rights to recover or claim relief for damages incurred by this illegal activity, nor does it waive the right to bring legal action against the user at issue for engaging in music theft."

Comments

Re:it's a trick

[aurispector]

I can't help but wonder how much their actions are being guided by the big recording corporations vs. the lawyers running the organization. Their actions are all over the map - they can't seem to decide whether to keep mugging downloaders for the cash or to run a PR campaign against file sharing.

For years, existing technology dictated a particular business model that made them all a lot of money. Now, technology has changed, but they see the old business model as their birthright. What the record companies have to do is abandon the media sales paradigm - which is apparently a tough pill to swallow for them - and start offering ad-supported "free" downloading of low bitrate mp3's. Selling vinyl records or cd's or preloaded chips or whatever is going to be a sideshow from now on. The availability of free, legal downloads will basically undercut the file sharers if they actually provide consumers with better value than the torrents, e.g., wallpapers, videos and other content.

Their insistence on charging 99 cents per track for downloads reflects their continued greed and cluelessness. Downloading a given CD @ $0.99/track as MP3s is a far worse deal for the consumer than a CD purchase when you factor out the cost of production and distribution costs associated with CDs. Additionally, the CD is a relatively permanent offline master copy - I've lost track (no pun intended) of how many times I've lost music due to hard drive crashes, data corruption, etc.. If they charged 10 cents a track for high-quality downloads it becomes an impulse buy - I'd gladly buy tons of high quality tracks at that price provided at least some of the revenue went to the artists. I'm not blind to the fact that record companies give value back to the artists in terms of management expertise and promotion but their cut is inevitably going to be a lot smaller - something they refuse to accept.

These are just mis-directed DMCA notifications

[Omeganon]

While they don't explicitly identify them as such, the content of the e-mail is essentially a DMCA notification. Since the content is not stored on the ISP's systems, and is just a transitory communication over the ISP's network, the ISP is not obligated to perform any action whatsoever. They could >/dev/null 2>&1 them and there's nothing the RIAA could do about it.

To be valid, the DMCA notification needs to be directed to the party hosting the content, in this case the end-user. The ISP for that user is not obligated to 'pass on' the notification to the end user any more than they would be to 'pass on' a notification meant for another ISP. It is the complainants responsibility to identify the correct destination for the DMCA notification, not anyone else's.

Even _if_ the ISP were hosting the content on systems they own, the only obligation they would have would be to remove the specifically identified offending content from their systems. Per the DMCA, the alleged offender would have 10 days to contest the validity of the DMCA notification at which point the ISP would be required to re-post the content if they did so. The claimant would then need to begin legal proceedings to obtain further relief.

Seems to me to be a re-hash of a previously failed tactic. Once the RIAA found this was a dead-end, they began their DOE lawsuits.

Re:What is your agenda?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Just for the record, the ad for Tom Cruise's web site was placed by Google AdSense, not by me. Also it had to do with his movies, and had nothing to do with his religion. But the Ghirardelli chocolate ad is an "affiliate ad" -- i.e., one that pays my blog a commission if someone were to click it on and buy some stuff...so I did, in fact, pick that one. Personally, I think Ghirardelli chocolate is great, and people might want to buy some as gifts around Christmastime.