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."

Comments

Re:Thou shall not steal!

[mi]

No, at most it loses marketing potential. That is a fictive amount, so it is impossible to quantify how much is really lost.

As long as it is above zero — and you don't dispute that — the actual figure is irrelevant to our determination. Even if it were zero, the act of taking something illegally is defined as "stealing", whether or not the original owner has lost anything. From Princeton WordNet, once again: larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing — the act of taking something from someone unlawfully.

Thus the term "stealing" is, in fact, quite accurate Only if you also accept that corporate espionage is stealing, and phishing is stealing, and murder is stealing.

Why not? Corporate espionage is, indeed, commonly referred to a "stealing secrets", phishing is known as "theft of private data", and murder — the premeditated taking of life — can be viewed as a (particularly disgusting and reprehensible) form of stealing too.