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

Multiple interpretations

[BadAnalogyGuy]

"What's your billing address?"

That's not exactly an unequivocal rejection.

Where would all you music sharers be if the RIAA responds with a valid billing address? It is just a matter of money before those ISPs start cooperating.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[Thanshin]

It's worse than that; it's a new justification for the RIAA to ask for money.

RIAA: "Pirates are generating losses of millions of dollars. They force us to pay large amounts to every ISP so they enforce our demands."

"Now when we catch a pirate we'll of course ask for compensation of all those millions."

Soon sending a song through the web will bring larger fines than experimenting with nuclear weapons at home.

I can see the prison conversations.
"What are you here for?"
"Eating babies. And you?"
"Whistling a song in public."
"Friking depraved garbage! I hope you rot in hell."

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.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[drsmithy]

As a legal user of P2P, and as a PC gamer (linux only, though), I really hate all the copyright infringements going on.

If copyright law were a more reasonable reflection of reality, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much copyright infringement going on.

I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.

And you'd be wrong.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[Kjella]

Soon sending a song through the web will bring larger fines than experimenting with nuclear weapons at home.

The fines are already at the level where it doesn't matter. The median household income in the US is about 50k$, and at 150k$/song you're being sued for your life earnings for sharing a CD with 15 songs. If you're sharing your music collection with your friends, say 200 CDs * 15 songs then even at a 750$ statutory minimum you're also looking at the same. It's the point where it just doesn't matter - if I owed 2 milion dollars or 200 million dollars or 200 trillion dollars it wouldn't matter. It's a "life" sentence for sharing music files...

Re:Multiple interpretations

[Bert64]

Piracy was already rampant when monkey island came out. It came on floppies which were easily copied.
But the fact is, making good playable games is less profitable than making lousy games with pretty graphics.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, contrair

Here here, it's a doggy-dog world.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[BAKup]

As a result I feel it's necessary to "test drive" media before purchase. With CDs I can get legal samples online, but with TV shows on DVD there is no method except to download it and see if it's any good. It's illegal, but I do it because I don't want to get stuck wasting thousands of dollars on trash.

Other options.

1. Netflix. They even happen to have Galactica 1980 on watch it now.
2. Reading reviews online.
3. Reading reviews in magazines.
4. Netflix.
5. Asking friends about shows.
6. Hulu.
7. Youtube (Ok, this one isn't fully legal)
8. Blockbuster.
9. All the other video rental stores.
10. Did I mention Netflix?

I know not everything would be on all the options listed, so there's up to 8 other options, unless you don't have any friends, then there's only up to 7 options.

So don't say the only option you have is to download.

Re:Multiple interpretations

[AGMW]

Here comes the french grammar nazi

Interestingly, not in France it wouldn't, as anything 'Nazi' is banned in France under French law ... indeed they could, using popular jargon, be referred to as Nazi nazis.

Do I win a t-shirt?

Re:Multiple interpretations

[MartinSchou]

Consider this one.
From that site:
On November 4th, 2008 millions of Americans were shocked that a man of Barack Obama's limited experience, extreme liberal positions and radical political alliances could be elected President of the United States.

Let's look at these by themselves:

*limited experience
True, from what I hear, Obama's not very experienced. On the other hand, having seen what experience did in the hands of George W. Bush I'm not sure experience is a good way to judge someone's competence. And while I'm not an expert on that subject, I don't think someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. had a lot of political experience before his rise to fame. After all - what we look for in a leader is not always that they're experienced, it's that they inspire us.

*extreme liberal positions
Which ones are they? Granted, I'm European, so a lot of the ideas that we have over here are quite radical in the US. Like the right to abortion (least up here in the civilized countries in Northern Europe), socialized medicine (personally I'd skip socialized road works over medicine), free educations for everyone (up to and including university). They don't say what these dangerous and "extreme liberal positions are" so we're left to guess. Maybe it's his idea that you should be able to vote when you're 18?

*radical political alliances
And again - which ones are they? Joe Biden as VP? That's hardly any worse than Sarah Palin for VP. And if experience is a requisite for being president, then how the hell can you elect Sarah Palin as the VP candidate? She had less experience than Obama to begin with. And being a mayor of a city with 8,000 people is hardly indicative of ones ability to lead a nation. I'm not judging, just curious about why "these people" don't settle for one standard instead of two

But, in the end I think Obama was elected because he presented himself of much more of a change away from Bush' policies than McCain. The Daily Show (the horrorible embodiment of liberal media bias) had a nice segment where they contrasted McCain's campain comments with Bush' from 2000, and it certainly sounded like they had the same speech writer. Of course the nice clip where they contrast Karl Rove's ridicule of a potential VP candidate for Obama for only having been the mayor of a city with 200,000 people followed by the same Rove's grandstanding and overstating Palin's work as mayor for Wasilla, a city with less than 6,000 people (according to the 2000 survey).

Maybe the public in general figured "New guy or the guy who wasn't as good a candidate as Bush was in 2000? Fuck it, I'm not going for the guy that'll be even worse than Bush!"

Re:Multiple interpretations

[IndustrialComplex]

I agree with you in principle, but I have to disagree with you on your analysis.

While you say that copyright was fine, until the public became aware of it, I would argue that copyright was not fine. It has morphed from the original concept of protecting works for a long enough time so that the creator could gather compensation to something that exists for such a long duration that copyrights today are effectively granted in perpetuity.

The life of the author plus 50/70 years is a damned long time. And it has now placed copyrights beyond the lives of human beings. That has made them the currency of corporations, and are no longer within the means of trade for us mere mortals.

I disagree entirely with how copyrights have become the currency for corporations.

Legal?

[houghi]

What is the legality of this? RIAA tells them that they represent Metallica and I have a rar file called metalica. This would mean that the provider opens my rar file and looks into it. They should not be allowed to do so. Privacy and such, you know.

In Belgium what happens is that a letter is send to the provider that user X with IP Y at time Z was downloading a file that they believe to contain copyrighted material. The provider then could do several things. Basicaly 1) forward the letter or 2) ignore it.

No information could go to the local RIAA. This is called privacy. So the only thing they could do was try to sue. However the courts said that they would not follow up unless people where making money out of it.

So copying songs and selling them: burn in hell.
Downloading them and sharing with friends or strangers: nothing happens.

The fact that I have 60 petabyte of songs downloaded does not mean they lost money. I stopped buying long before the internet made it possible to download. I shared music with friends on casette. Hey, that is a good casette, can you make me a copy? How did you get it?
Well, I got copies from friends and using my dual-cassette player copied the different numbers so I had my own music, minus the crap.

When I think since when this has been going on, I am getting old.

Re:Legal?

[Donkey_Hotey]

I have 60 petabyte of songs downloaded

Is there that much recorded music in the world?

Maybe not by itself, but if you added rap and pop there might be...

But...

[davester666]

why does the RIAA have to pay this ISP? Part of the value that the ISP provides to customers is the ability to pirate music. Therefore, the ISP should be paying for this.

And the ISP should send the RIAA a pony.

And a cute little puppy.

Whups, sorry about that. I channeled the RIAA there for a second.

Re:But...

[Sique]

Hey! This screams for a car analogy ;)

1. Part of the value that the car manufacturers provide to customers is the ability to use the road. So car manufacturers should be paying for roadbuilding :)
2. Part of the value that light bulb manufacturers provide to customers is the ability to travel at night with your car, so the light bulb manufacturers should be paying for car building.
3. Part of the value that roadbuilding provides to the road users is the ability to get away from a crime scene very fast, so road builders should sponsor the local police.

Any more ideas? :)

Re:Viable business model?

[meringuoid]

I can't believe sueing people like the RIAA does is a viable business model. The costs must outweigh the benefits by far. Even if the RIAA manages to win a case against a poor grandmother who has never heard of P2P and the like, she won't be able to pay the fine because the costs of defending herself have bankrupted her for good.

It's a terror campaign. The idea is to intimidate the public so that they're afraid to pirate. It doesn't matter if they lose money suing one victim, if a thousand others are thereby frightened away from piracy.

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:Viable business model?

[tsa]

All those members are commercial companies. They will eventually stop funding the RIAA because the RIAA wastes their money on futile attempts to eradicate illegal copying.