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RIAA Backs Down In Austin, Texas
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In November, 2004, several judges in the federal court in Austin, Texas, got together and ordered the RIAA to cease and desist from its practice of joining multiple 'John Does' in a single case. The RIAA blithely ignored the order, and continued the illegal practice for the next four years, but steering clear of Austin. In 2008, however, circumstances conspired to force the record companies back to that venue. In Arista v. Does 1-22, in Providence, Rhode Island, they were hoping to get the student identities from Rhode Island College. After the first round, however, they learned that the College was not the ISP; rather, the ISP was an Austin-based company, Apogee Telecom Inc., meaning the RIAA would have to serve its subpoena in Austin. The RIAA did just that, but Apogee — unlike so many other ISP's — did not turn over its subscribers' identities in response to the subpoena, instead filing objections. This meant the RIAA would have to go to court, to try to get the Court to overrule Apogee's objections. Instead, it opted to withdraw the subpoena and drop its case."
Once again, they back down, meaning that they performed the legal equivalent of "Ha Ha Ha, just kidding, can't you take a joke?" At some point, they're going to get slapped down hard for these tactics and on that day, there will be much cheering from Slashdot.
No problem.
Hey, Ray, by the way, I think I speak for lots of people when I say thank you for what you're doing in this area.
Pity nothing's going to happen to them over this.
It doesn't seem to matter if they drop every case that's going badly for them, it has no real effect on the other half.
The RIAA cannot be forgiven for the things they try and pull, or the extortion they have forced onto many people. But it drives me nuts the people that still continue to grab their music illegally which just helps prolong and reinforce the idea that the RIAA is needed (to record companies). Buy a CD, buy from iTunes, buy from Amazon, I don't care. I know people who can absolutely afford to purchase their music legally, but don't. Not because of any stance against record companies or compensation for artists. They just do it, 'because'. It's free after all. BLARG.
/RANT
Sorry. Just had to say it.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Quantifying the amount of money lost to pirating must be next to impossible. First off, you have to deduct the number of people who would have never bought it even if there weren't a free version available. Then you have to deduct the number of people who actually do buy it after pirating it as sort of a test run to see if they'd actually like to "own" it. Only after you filter out those cases can you truly get down to the list of people who pirate and even if they had the means to buy it wouldn't because they don't believe they should have to pay for it.
as far as I'm concerned the only people they should be going after are those who sell bootleg copies, as they are actually making money off of it.
It actually is closer to infringing on copyrighted goods, because that's exactly what it is.
Stealing means what was taken was against the owner's consent, and that the owner is now deprived of that good. Copyright infringement, on the other hand, means that you have made an unauthorized copy of a work and are selling it/giving it away/making more copys, which is the case here.
Ok, even though the comparison with stealing is a poor one it's good enough to draw some paralells.
Shoplifting happens. bad thing, yada yada.
Now to combat that walmart pushes through some ridiculous legislation and then hires companies to spy on shoplifters,people who might be shoplifters and people who live near possible shoplifters.
Normal customers who pay for their goods start getting patted down regularly, denied entry or exit from the store and called criminals and threatened with legal action if they tried to sell things second hand.
When they catch some 13year old stuffing a 5 dollar item into his coat they take him to court and sue him and his family for $100,000 .
In their crusade to catch the shoplifters they extort records out of local organisaitons with threats of legal action and generally abuse the legal system to find the home addresses of people who might be shoplifters.
They threaten tens of thousands of families with similar suits and offer a shoplifter settlement where you can pay a few thousand in exchange for a promise of not being sued.
Some of the people who get accused of being shoplifters are of course innocent and were simply falsely identified as shoplifters but since there's still a chance of losing absolutely everything and the weight of evidence is not the same as a criminal case those families can't take the chance of losing all their worldly goods and have to pay out of fear.
Imagine a world where walmart acted like that.
Now imagine where the public sympathy would lie, with the kids who are shoplifting or with walmart?
Sure violating copyright is wrong but violating privacy laws and generally abusing the legal system is much much worse.
this is what kills me, and why their business is such a damned train wreck. They are letting people with no [expleteive deleted] business sense make the decisions (namely the legal teams)...
Exactly. The lawyers have been running this operation for their own benefit.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
the /. crew
So you are attempting to lump together everybody on Slashdot who is not you as "the /. crew"? Strange.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
...this is another example of the moral bankruptcy of the self-righteous.
Not all of us are "justifying personal acts of piracy". Some of us just
realize that there is more to this issue than the plush lifestyles of
A&R men or their victims.
A lot of work is still subject to "ownership" that should no longer be.
Some works are no longer even available and may be lost permanently.
Creativity is threatened by effectively perpetual copyright and the social
costs of allowing publishers to lock away works that are older than any
participant of this forum are absurd. The consequences are rediculous
when compared to genuine acts of theft that would have been
acknowledged as such by Hammurabi himself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You should read some of my posts, because I actually have said it. Here's the executive summary:
(Please try to consider the following from a layperson's or "common-sense" perspective, rather than a lawyer's one.)
Because of this, I have to conclude that copyright is not, in fact, a property right. Therefore, I take issue with your use of "owner" and "property" in the quotation above.
Now, if you rephrased that to say "I have not seen any one saying there is something 'wrong with a copyright music holder protecting their government-granted monopoly'" then that would be different.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Umm. He said 40 miles square. That would be about 1600 square miles, so he thinks it's bigger than you do. :)
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.