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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.
As a RI resident, I can pretty confidently say that there no "College of Rhode Island".
it could have been rather comical to see RIAA go up before a judge that had told them to stop the bundling
.Yes. It would have been priceless.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
As far as I'm concerned, you're asking half of the Great Imponderable Question. I'll add the other half:
1) They can't be making any money off this. The kinds of people they sue aren't among the wealthier members of society. There's a big difference between getting a judgment and actually collecting the money.
2) It's not acting as a deterrent. People are still out there doing what they do as recording sales continue to fall.
So the other half of the question is: Why do they keep doing this?
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
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.
As far as I'm concerned, you're asking half of the Great Imponderable Question. I'll add the other half: 1) They can't be making any money off this.
Losing money hand over fist.
The kinds of people they sue aren't among the wealthier members of society.
Usually.
There's a big difference between getting a judgment and actually collecting the money.
That's right. And each default judgment cost them plenty.
2) It's not acting as a deterrent. People are still out there doing what they do as recording sales continue to fall.
So I'm told. So the other half of the question is: Why do they keep doing this?
My theory is that (1) a corporation is managed by its management, (2) the management in the case of the big 4 record companies are total failures, and (3) this campaign was based on a premise that they fabricated to deflect attention from their own failure: that the existence of p2p file sharing software is the sole reason for their failure. They had to push the campaign to try to pretend they believed in the premise.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
If you read the judges' order you won't find the words "in Austin" there.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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
Did you ever read Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam"? She defines folly as an organization or government's deliberate pursuit of policies that are against their own best interests, often despite ample evidence and warnings. Aside from the semi-mythic Troy and the very real United States, she also looks at the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, England at the time of the American Revolution, and a couple of others. It's a fascinating book, even twenty-odd years after its first publication. Every time I read one of these RIAA posts, I'm reminded of it. Their actions seem to me to meet all her criteria for folly.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
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
Granted, but then why are they only avoiding Austin?
Why they would violate the order, and flagrantly violate the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, on a daily basis, for 4 years... is a question I can't answer. You would have to ask them.
The reason they were avoiding Austin is no doubt that the judges who issued they order that's been violated would probably hold them in contempt and might even put them in jail.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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
...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
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.