The RIAA's Rocky Road Ahead

The RIAA's new plan to enlist ISPs in its war on file sharing, once it announced it was calling a halt to new consumer lawsuits, is running into rough sledding. Wired reports on the continuing legal murkiness of the RIAA's interpretation of copyright law. And one small ISP in Louisiana asks the recording organization, "You want me to police your intellectual property? What's your billing address?"

Comments

Re:Multiple interpretations

[MRe_nl]

"It is just a matter of money before those ISPs start cooperating."

From the article;

"First, when a media company demands he kick a customer off the network, there is very little in the way of proof offered that the person in question has committed a crime, according to Scroggin. Yet, entertainment companies want Scroggin to simply wave goodbye to a customer who might have signed up for a three-year plan. At $40 per month, that customer is potentially worth $1,440 to Scroggin over the life of the plan. That, says the ISP owner, is unreasonable.
Next, it's expensive and time consuming to ask highly paid technicians to chase down IP logs and customer IDs, Scroggin said, noting that it's especially difficult nowadays because it's extremely easy to spoof IP addresses.
And then there are the letters Scroggin receives from Hollywood that demand he act or else.
Scroggin warns that the film and music industries must try a new tack if they want cooperation from ISPs."

It seems it's not just a matter of money, it's a question of proof, technical feasability, willingness on the part of the ISP's and quite a lot of money.

Makes some sense

[Jay Tarbox]

The equipment and software to do filtering properly (up to layer seven) can cost a lot of money. Most ISP's don't already have this stuff unlike corp or edu environments which may already have this gear to protect their internal networks.

They wont win

[johnsie]

This whole story bores the crap out of me... It's been going on pretty much since the mp3 was invented. I remember it being an issue back when the original mp3.com was founded in the 90's. The RIAA cant ever stop people recording or distributing sound. Maybe they have some influence in the US, but there are billions of people on the web who don't live in the US and will continue to copy and share music/videos. I've heard that there are chinese p2p programs like ppstream that allow you to watch hundresds of recent movies on demand and there's nothing the Americans can do about it.

Re:They wont win

[pipatron]

It started a long way before any computer was invented. I guess the first one was the copying of musical scores. Then there was automatically playing pianos that would kill the pianist industry... then there was (in random order) radio, FM radio (this was a separate threat because the quality was better and stuff), record players was a threat to the performing artists, tapes, cassettes, recordable CDs, etc etc.

Just face it, they will use every excuse imaginable to maintain the status quo. The arguments will be the same, they will pay a big amount of money to the politicians, and no matter what laws are in place, people will still keep making music.

There is never any proof.

[Nabeel_co]

What it always comes down to is that the RIAA never has any proof. When you buy a song, you get a right to use license, which means you have access to one copy of song/album xyz to listen to. But you could loose or have your copy stolen from you, that doesn't mean you lost the right to use license.

How can they prove that you never purchased what you downloaded? They can't!

Remember Eiffel 65? I had their CD, then I lost it, so I hit up WinMX (I think it was at the time), and downloaded it. What do you have to say about that RIAA? It is perfectly legal for me to download that CD because I'm not infringing on any copyrights.

They prey on weak poor families who can't defend them selves, often with "proof" that is questionable at best.

There will come a time when people like those who work at the RIAA will be healed accountable for what they do to the less fortunate people on this planet.

Re:There is never any proof.

[Hatta]

Remember Eiffel 65? I had their CD, then I lost it, so I hit up WinMX (I think it was at the time), and downloaded it. What do you have to say about that RIAA? It is perfectly legal for me to download that CD because I'm not infringing on any copyrights.

That is not true. It is illegal to make a copy without their authorization. The fact that you bought a disk entitles you to nothing except using that disk.

Not saying it's right or fair, but that's what the law is today.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[Anonymous Coward]

Here comes the french grammar nazi:

It's "Au contraire".

Re:Multiple interpretations

[TapeCutter]

It's more insidious than that. Here in Australia...

The top 3 ISP's are Testra, Optus, iiNet. iiNet is a distant third with about 5% of the market.
The only serious cable TV companies are Telstra and Optus
The only serious telco's are also Telstra and Optus.

Of course Tesltra's and Optus' cable/isp/phone divisions are divided into seperate bussiness on paper but they already "volentarily" pass on MAFIAA paperwork to users, iiNet passes the paperwork to the police and are now being sued by the MAFIAA. The MAFIAA are trying to set the precednt that what Teslstra and Optus do is actually now the law under the US-AU trade agreement. Over the next few years I think we will see more and more telco's and content producers jump in bed with each other for their mutual advantage (ie: squeeze independent ISP's out of the market from both sides of the equation).

Re:Multiple interpretations

[mcgrew]

DOOM had no better graphics than its predecessor Wolfenstien. The physics in 1995's Road Rash were a bit lacking, but the graphics were every bit as "pretty" as 1997's Quake II, which wasn't really any prettier than the original Quake.

Screamer II was the epitomy of insane graphics - no PC on the market at the time of its release was fast enough to run it in its highest resolution and all the extras turned on. By the time computers caught up with it, it wouldn't run on them because it was a DOS game and running it in DOS mode had no sound.

IMO the PC gaming companies are insane. They write these games for rich kids, and rich kids only - you have to have thousands of dollars worth of equipment, then pay $60 and up for the game itself. It's madness. They should write for today's top end machines, not tomorrow's. They should write the games so that if you have a video card that costs twice what an Xbox costs you'll get the graphics, yet if you have a normal $50 video card the game will still play.

And they should sell them for a far lower price. A movie costs from millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, but I can buy a DVD for between five and twenty bucks. It is a rare game that has a production budget of over ten million, yet they sell for three times what the most expensive DVD costs.

Sorry George, sorry Warren, but you guys are thieves like that Madhoff guy. Sixty bucks for a game is an incredible ripoff.

I used to be an avid gamer, no more. The equipment hurdles are far, far too high and the price of the games themselves is insane. Drop your equipment requirements down to the average PC and cut the price by at least a third, and you'll sell ten times as many games.

A sixty dollar game that needs a $2000 PC To run? You guys are insane.

Re:Viable business model?

[secretcurse]

You're confusing the RIAA with the record labels it represents. The RIAA does absolutely nothing for or with artists. The RIAA is an industry trade group that represents the music labels and is uninvolved with artists. Its business model is to collect money from the labels it represents and to sue people. You're absolutely right about the outdated business model of labels and the way the digital age has revolutionized recording and distribution.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[Garwulf]

There's a lot of faulty logic here.

"If that were true, copyright infringement wouldn't be considered a significant problem because only a tiny minority of people would be doing it."

In what industry? In the majority of industries, piracy is NOT the norm, and it is only the minority who are doing it. The only industry where I've seen any respectable figures that measure piracy is the games industry, and they are quite alarming.

Also, you're projecting the human instinct to get free swag as a social statement - it's not. People will generally take anything they can for free, even if it's something they'd never use. And, the internet is a place you can get a lot of things for free. So, having pirated material easily accessible simply means that people have easy access to it, and are likely to use it, not that the law is broken.

Now, what can and can not be enforced is a different matter, and far more complicated.

"I think the RIAA's "interpretation" to be quite in line with both the general principles behind copyright (control over a work by its "creator") and the letter of the law (term extensions, DMCA, etc)."

Considering that your opinion is not shared by the courts, who have repeatedly hammered the RIAA on legal grounds, among others, I think your opinion is somewhat flawed. If the RIAA really did represent the letter or spirit of the law, they would have won more cases, and a class-action suit would not have been filed against them.

Tell me - have you ever actually read the law? Have you gone to the source itself?

"It would certainly be a major blow to the distribution industry, and several other hangers-on, but about the only creative industry I could see really suffering would be books (which are already in significant trouble due to several other factors)."

Sales may certainly be dropping, but the book industry is one that frequently does over a billion dollars of business per month in the United States alone. It's still pretty big.

Aside from which, you've made another leap of logic here - you're assuming that the distribution industry doesn't impact the creative end. You can have the most wonderful book, painting, song, or film in the world, and it doesn't mean squat if you can't get it out to people. Content distribution itself isn't necessarily cheap - trust me on this one, I have to do it. It certainly isn't often easy.

"I think people now have a much more accurate idea of what copyright does and why, and just how far away that is from the struggling inventor or artist that is offered up as a justification for it. Further, I think that is finally helping them realise that the extraordinary privileges (both in scope and generosity) society heaps upon "creative artists" is rarely provides a worthwhile ROI."

And I think you just proved my point about misinformation and the difficulties in making people understand what copyright really is and does.