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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."
Kid: "Mommy, can I go to the store by myself?"
Mom: "No, son."
5 minutes later
Kid: "Daddy, can I go to the store by myself?"
Dad: "Sure, son. Here's a dollar. Get a candy bar".
1 minute later
Mom: "SO I HEARD YOU WENT BEHIND MY BACK AND ASKED YOUR FATHER TO GO TO THE STORE"
Kid: "I just mentioned it to him. I don't want to go anymore. Thanks, bye!"
Mom: *Result Pending*
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.
I wish we could just take all the lawyers that flagrantly violate court orders like that and put them in jail for contempt. Alas, our judicial system is such that these violations either go unnoticed or at least barely noticed by the district attorneys. They've got bigger fish to fry. But, man, once just once, one of them should teach these guys a lesson.
My blog
We are sorry you do not have a license to signal the retreat. Please withdraw your last post immediately. Thank you.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
As a RI resident, I can pretty confidently say that there no "College of Rhode Island".
While it is a good thing to see more of these ludicrous John Doe cases dismissed, it could have been rather comical to see RIAA go up before a judge that had told them to stop the bundling. I mean come on, it always works out for you when you ignore the order of several judges.
Government - If you think the problems we create are bad, you should see our solutions!
Probably not. I expect they'll continue with their bullshit in other states while lawyers who haven't done their homework will not be able to help their clients.
That's just what I expect, though, because I know that it's better to expect the worst and hope for the best.
No, it was entirely my fault. I was working from memory. The correct name is "Rhode Island College".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
So can we expect ISPs to start incorporating in Texas the way that credit card companies like to incorporate in Delaware? Granted, the former would be for protection from industry harassment and the latter is for protection from usury laws, but if I were an ISP I'd certainly look on Texas as a nice place to call "home" for legal purposes.
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
How can they keep doing this? I'm amazed that nobody from the RIAA has been slapped with contempt of court or some other law.
Free Martian Whores!
Seriously...where the hell are their accountants at? Anyone who actually has gone through the required business classes would be well aware of how insane their imaginary losses are. Now, that is not the same as using those insane numbers to further a media blitz, but internally that nonsense does not stand up to any kind of sanity test. So...with a more realistic number on "lost sales" I can't imagine that there is a terribly high real return on their lawsuit happy nonsense. I imagine the costs of these constant legal battles take a pretty huge chunk of change.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I see a very bright outlook for Apogee Telecom's ISP business this year.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
That has to be one of the best summaries I've ever read on slashdot. I didn't even have to RTFA and I am up to speed on the story.
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.
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.
Am I missing something? So what made this illegal? If they didn't do the act in Austin then they didn't do anything illegal. I am no fan of RIAA but to call something illegal when it is not is wrong. They complied with the judges wishes and stopped doing what they were doing in the Judge's jurisdiction.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
It's not the lawsuits that cost the RIAA a ton of money. It's all because of pirates. Y'see, if it weren't for pirates, then they wouldn't have to spend all this money on lawyers in the first place! So there ya have it... even the legal costs are a direct result of piracy. It makes PERFECT sense!
Oh hey, and on a random note, I've got this really awesome bridge for sale out in London, if you're looking to buy.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
Stealing of information by copying has been punishable by law for many years - way before the Internet.
No, infringing copyright by copying is punishable by law. Stealing by copying isn't, because you can't steal something by copying it.
It is a flawed argument to think stealing information is not a bad thing.
No one said that is wasn't a bad thing. The point was that is isn't stealing. An action isn't automatically stealing just because it is bad - if I beat you up, I won't get convicted for stealing, but I will get convicted for assault.
Many companies have their entire business model setup on proprietary information - the people here a /. may not like this - but guess what - the people here at /. were not the ones investing tons of money/time into those soft-products.
There is nothing wrong with having your business model set up on proprietary information. What _is_ wrong is abusing the legal system to catch people who may or may not be breaking the law at the expense of a large number of innocent people.
Also, that nice new fancy drug that you or your family/loved ones are taking to save their lives...that formula is most likely (for new drugs) a closely held secret by a company that spent many millions in R&D. Without these copyright protections said companies would have no reason to create life-saving medicines.
You seem to be confused. You can't copyright a physical object such as a drug - you have to patent it. You can't keep patented IP a secret, since the whole point of a patent is that it is published.
The patent system has a lot of problems, but it has nothing to do with copyright, is not the matter under discussion and last I heard the drug industry didn't go around suing random people without any credible evidence that those people have done anything wrong.
Just like drug makers have to protect their recipies from international infringements so do people who want to profit from their music.
Nothing wrong with a copyright music owner protecting their property.
So what has this got to do with stealing?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Most of us have no problem with WHY the RIAA is doing the things it does -- our problem is the 'how'.
the /. crew
So you are attempting to lump together everybody on Slashdot who is not you as "the /. crew"? Strange.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Pirating is not stealing because stealing has it's own definition.
Such definitions are relevant and important and have real moral consequences.
I'm always amused how the morally pompous have no problem being LIARS in order to make their point.
Also, "before the internet" is a weak metric for ethics. Human society is far older than that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...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.
Theft is a synonym for stealing.
Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. I am not aware of a synonym for it.
The RIAA uses the terms "piracy" and "stealing" in referring to copyright infringement, but do so inaccurately, as part of their propaganda.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
So you subscribe to the same dishonest debate tactic.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Anyway, would you condemn copyright infringement -- for the record?
Yes I am opposed to copyright infringement.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Again, you seem to have a problem with the definition of "taking".
You're trying to make a point, and I understand what you mean, but you're really arguing something that's irrelevant. You are also making people focus on the wrong thing, dragging what point you were trying to make off into the weeds. When someone says "pirating is not stealing", they are not talking about what you're talking about when you say "pirating is stealing".
If you would drop the semantics and make your point without using the words "pirate" or "steal" and instead use "copyright infringement" you would start to see how your arguments actually aren't that different from the ones you're arguing against.
Also, note that US copyright law considers the financial impact of any potential infringement, among other things.
"Piracy" has generally been when someone copies something and sells it, like the Chinese DVDs or Windows for a dollar. Clearly you are reducing the market value, if people no longer have to pay full price. More recently, "piracy" is being used in the sense of simple copying for personal use, for situations like downloading music that you already own so you don't have to convert it to FLAC/MP3/AAC. This could be considered fair use because there is no financial benefit to you and no financial loss to the vendor (ignoring the uploading part, since those parts would be available regardless of whether you were uploading them because you got them from somewhere, so your actions are not materially contributing). So even talking about "piracy" is a muddy conversation if you don't clearly define what you're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Comparison_to_theft
http://www.copyright.com/Services/copyrightoncampus/basics/fairuse_rules.html
And if anyone wants to copy this the next time someone like this pops up, i release any copyright claim on this comment and it is public domain. Copy, paste, improve.
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
Stealing of information by copying has been punishable by law for many years - way before the Internet.
Yes, it has. Do you know why these laws were established? (Hint: The reason had nothing to do with compensating creators for their efforts). That's a prerequisite for understanding how they should be applied with the existence of a world-changing technology like the Internet?
It is a flawed argument to think stealing information is not a bad thing.
You're the one arguing that information, which by it's very nature is infinitely reproducible and has no inherent scarcity, unlike physical objects, should be arbitrarily restricted, at great expense to society. The burden is on you to show why it is bad to copy information.
Many companies have their entire business model setup on proprietary information
True, and in fact I make my living that way. But irrelevant. Buggy whip makers had their entire business model set up on producing implements for controlling horses. Times change, businesses must change with them.
Without these copyright protections said companies would have no reason to create life-saving medicines.
Copyrights have nothing to do with medicines. You're thinking of patents. They're different, and have a completely different purpose.
BTW, I'm a big fan of copyright law, done right. Our copyright law is screwed up, and what the record labels have been trying to do is even more screwed up than the law, but it's still a very good idea if done correctly.
Oh, and I don't infringe on copyrights per the law, even though I think the law is wrong to the point of evil.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I debated modding you up instead of posting since i think your downmod was unfair.
But I wanted to address your points more, and folks can see your post by looking at the reply posts parent.
1) Stealing is not Piracy is not Copyright Infringement.
2) The laws surrounding stealing (or many other crimes) have not been adjusted for inflation resulting in "felonies" for what should be misdemeanors. When the laws were passed, you would have to steal half a year's earnings to qualify for a felony-- now I earn more in a day.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement
3) The United States has the most people imprisoned in the entire world. It's reaching a level that we can't even afford to incarcerate everyone. Mostly because of drugs and the felony issue.
4) Copyright has been distorted by corporations from 28 years to basically forever (not yet but they are shooting for it 10 years at a time).
So where do I stand.
1) Infringing up to 20 albums (240 songs) within a 28 year period should be a misdemeanor subject to a $500 fine.
2) Infringing more than that should be a felony.
3) Infringement after 28 years should be a misdemeanor unless you are selling them for profit.
4) Devices used directly to infringe can be confiscated tho unrelated data should be returned to you as soon as possible (so yup, you lose your computer and maybe your CD burners)
5) Where the material and the laws seem unreasonable, I'll infringe and I will suffer the consequences when caught. I have little respect for this body of laws, which I mainly see as against the original intent of the copyright laws. The intent was to create properties which would rapidly enter the public domain where it would be used to make other new creations. The intent was not to provide an income stream for life and lock up melody and word sequences for multiple generations (and soon "forever less one day")
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Here's why I download all the hell I want:
If the RIAA were to obtain my hard drive, they'd find that I have HUNDREDS of full albums that they gave away FOR FREE.
I can point out EVERY site that I downloaded a song from, and most of them just happen to be directly from the artist's site.
So tell me, how the fuck can they justify suing for shit they're giving out for FREE? I've got 80+ gigs of 192-320kbit MP3s, EVERY LAST ONE LEGIT.
What we need to do to put a stop to this is file a collective lawsuit, millions of people against this conglomeration of assholes. Make the justice system listen to our voices until they go DEAF from it. Maybe then we'll put an end to this nonsense.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The term is defined as: larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing -- the act of taking something from someone unlawfully . A song copied unlawfully is certainly stolen.
Herein lies the rub: You define stealing as the act of taking something from someone unlawfully, then you indicate that copying is stealing.
Copying and taking are not synonymous. I'm either making a copy of something, or I am taking something.
Stealing is the act of unlawfully taking property from someone else, from which if I take the property from the owner means the owner no longer has possession of the property. To steal something the original owner must be deprived of the property, because a requirement of stealing is to take.
If I make a copy of the property, be it a car, a piece of furniture, a chapter in a book, a photograph, or bits of information, the original owner still has possession of the property as I have taken nothing. Therefore it is not theft or stealing, it is copyright infringement.
This is why copyright infringement is not prosecuted under criminal theft laws, they are not the same.
I however, am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
As long as it is above zero — and you don't dispute that — the actual figure is irrelevant to our determination.
"Impossible to quantify" does not rule out the quantity "zero", so your claim is false. Alternate universes where certain things may or may not have happened cannot be used as evidence of loss. Copyright infringement is no more "stealing" based on loss of potential sales than is using deceptive advertising to pull in more sales at a store. Deceptive advertising is illegal, but a competing store has no claim on the profit made via that deception.
Seriously, it's no more difficult than looking at the relevant sections of law. "Theft" or "stealing" is defined by law as the unlawful taking of real property. Songs and other such fruits of our common culture are not real property. That's why copyright law is covered by its own section in the US Code--- because it isn't covered by the sections on "stealing".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I am opposed to copyright infringement.
And with that, a million voices on Slashdot suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
The only voices that would be silenced would be those of the very few who might think that a man who's devoted the past 34 years of his life to the rule of law would be in favor of infringing upon someone's legal rights. In fact, it is hard for me to imagine anyone on Slashdot who would sincerely have believed anything else.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful