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RIAA Hearing Next Week Will Be Televised
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "One commentator labels it 'another fly in the RIAA's ointment.' In SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the Boston, Massachusetts, RIAA case in which the defendant is represented by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson and a group of his students, the Judge has ruled that the hearing scheduled for January 22nd will be televised over the Internet. The hearing will relate to Mr. Tenenbaum's counterclaims against the record companies and against the RIAA. In her 11-page opinion (PDF), District Judge Nancy Gertner labeled as 'curious' the record companies' opposition to televising the proceedings, since their professed reason for bringing the cases is deterrence, 'a strategy [which] effectively relies on the publicity arising from this litigation'."
Televised means remote vision: that can happen over the internet as well as a TV. Actually the article uses televised in a general sense and uses the term narrowcast when going into details. which works for me.
Television (from Merriam-Webster) - an electronic system of transmitting transient images of fixed or moving objects together with sound over a wire or through space by apparatus that converts light and sound into electrical waves and reconverts them into visible light rays and audible sound (emphasis mine)
televised over the internet - means that the television is going out over the Internet to computer endpoints. That the television SET is often abbreviated as television is simply laziness and a bastardization of the language, not that the usage in the summary is incorrect.
The current order is only for the hearing on Jan 22, as NYCL pointed out, which only involves the legal arguments for motions entered by the Defendant's counsel. Further coverage of the rest of the case will be decided then. The judge made a lot of sense in her opinion though, I especially liked this bit:
"Public" today has a new resonance, especially in this case. The claims and issues at stake involve the internet, file-sharing practices, and digital copyright protections. The Defendants are primarily members of a generation that has grown up with the internet, who get their news from it, rather than from the traditional forms of public communication, such as newspapers or television. Indeed, these cases have generated widespread public attention, much of it on the internet. Under the circumstances, the particular relief requested -- "narrowcasting" this proceeding to a public website -- is uniquely appropriate.
Nice to see judges are starting to catch up to this generation.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Of course the RIAA wants the public to hear about this case to deter anyone downloading their stuff.
But they want people to hear it from them. Not directly from the court proceedings. Any idiot knows that your statements are only half as powerful if the other side can retort. And few people are interested in hearling both sides of the story, unless it is hassle free do hear it, they're perfectly happy when they just hear one side telling them "the truth". Do you have an idea how incredibly harder it gets to spin something when the other side can call you bluff and show that you're lying through your teeth?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think this case is about distributing, just downloading, but in the typical cases it is about distributing..
All of their cases are about distributing.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
It won;t escalate like most of us would like. When it's looking like things will go bad, they'll "settle" and not allow it to follow through making a precedent.
In a counter claim, the defendant has to "agree" to settle, and I don't think Nesson and his students are looking to do that.
Consider if you had spent a year creating a great program, perhaps something to make web browsing impervious to spybots. Then at the end of the year your employer shows you the door, and never pays you, but instead distributes your program for free over the net... It's called theft of labor.
It's called "theft of labor" because, in your example, we're assuming that the employer and the developer had some form of agreement that the employer later violated. Theft of labor, as far as I know, is used to describe situations where a person is deceived (or possibly forced) into doing work.
Therefore, if a musician records a work of his own accord, and without having entered into any agreement with that musician or deceiving him in any way, I copy his songs, then it's not called "theft of labor". It's called "copyright infringement".
Or, at least, it's called "copyright infringement" if the work has been copyrighted, I don't have any license to copy it, I am not exercising fair use, and the work has not been released to public domain. Otherwise, it's just legal copying.
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is right. I don't infringe on others' copyrights, and I don't condone others doing so. It just happens that the crime of copyright infringement is a different crime than theft.
You would actually get that effect by running just slower than the speed of light. For them, only a short while would go by, while it will be years for the rest of the world. There's still the question of in what location they were while running though, and why nobody noticed them.
Of course, you can't really go back in time by running faster than light. It's simply not possible to move FTL, since it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate.
Disclaimer: this is all based on what I remember of high school physics
RIAA appeals ruling.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.