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RIAA Victory Over Usenet.com In Copyright Case
ozydingo writes "The RIAA has scored a victory in a decision on a copyright case that they filed back in 2007. US District Judge Harold Baer ruled in favor of the music industry on all its main theories: that Usenet.com is guilty of direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement. In addition, and perhaps most important for future cases, Baer said that Usenet.com can't claim protection under the Sony Betamax decision stating that companies can't be held liable of contributory infringement if the device is 'capable of significant non-infringing uses.' Bear noted that Usenet.com differed from Sony in that the sale of a Betamax recorder was a one-time deal, while Usenet.com's interaction with its users was an ongoing relationship. The RIAA stated in a brief note, 'We're pleased that the court recognized not just that Usenet.com directly infringed the record companies' copyrights but also took action against the defendants for their egregious litigation misconduct.'"
OH GNOES!!!!!
Usenet is still being used? I didn't think anybody posted there anymore. Oh wait, that's right -- it's only used for sending spam and trading copyrighted files. So, by shutting it down, they can claim to be fighting internet piracy under the guise of fighting spam. Sounds like a win-win for them!
I think we may be losing.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
So what does this mean for my precious, precious news....
...do not piss off the judge! It really is batshit stupid to do things like destroy evidence and make witnesses vanish (even temporarily). Why not go to court naked except for a t-shirt that says "Guilty as Hell" on the front and "Kiss my hairy butt" on the back?
The only way to handle such things is to find a way to be the victim of the situation, to prove that you did what you could to help, and that the case is unfair, aggressive, and misplaced.
And, if you don't like the law, work to change it, don't sell ways to get around it. Bad laws exist because people pretend they are helpless to change them.
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Doesn't that cover about anything on the internet, ftp, http, ssh.... Gee they could sue just on a grounds that the technology "maybe" used for illegal activity.
Hmmm.. sue the founders of tcpip because they allow for the "transport" of such illegal activities...
This legal decision has restored my faith in the legal system. A small group of people were able to fight for their rights against a huge behemoth corporation and win. ~
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
She had a good run of life; the best of the Internet's early years were spent in her company, and well before Facebook or Twitter existed Usenet was the original crowdsourcing environment on the Web. But then the Eternal September happened, and well, she was just a gibbering, incoherent wreck after that, filled with barely comprehensible screeds by Holocaust deniers and recommendations for means of male enhancement.
She'd been suffering terribly the last few years of her life, kept alive mostly by a continuous IV drip of copyrighted materials. But the government told the hospital "no more heroic measures," and she was just too weak to survive on her own after the stream of movies, porn, and cracked software was removed.
So does this mean Google is in the same boat? Technically google can do the same thing with filetype.
filetype:iso has been one of my greatest search modifiers when looking for my pirated copies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bear noted that Usenet.com differed from Sony in that... ...they weren't a multibillion dollar multinational corporation with deep pockets and more lawyers than law school reunions.
Kids, forget the internets.. I've got a whole NEW way of file-sharing with no pesky lawyers, no judges, no colluding ISPs, no Orwellian gubment "oversight".
It's called a "flash drive".
1. Put a song or movie onto your flash drive and give it to a friend.
2. They give it back to you with some of their songs or movies on it.
3. ???
4. We both haz profits!!!!
I'm curious - we frequently hear of the RIAA suing this, that, and the other thing. Is there somewhere we can go to see just how many concurrent ongoing cases involve the RIAA on a global scale?
I'm guessing no.
Though I posit that if we had access to a simple count of current litigation broken down by who is suing whom, the RIAA would be somewhere near the top in terms of the number of suits they have filed and are currently working.
Back in my day (I'm 48)....
When I was a young whipper snapper in the 70's-80's. I'd buy an album and copy it to tape for my car. If asked by a friend for a copy, I'd take a blank cassette tape and make a copy in my cassette recorder with the high speed dub feature.
I'd also ask friends the same, and they'd make me a tape of an album I didn't have.
I'd also buy cassette tapes of music at the store.
Now my 69 Dodge Dart back then is carting around 150-200 cassette tapes, some my own made copies, some a friend made copies for me and other store bought tapes.
The music industry and RIAA seemed to live through that era. If one friend bought an album, all his friends would get a cassette copy if they wanted it.
I don't ever recall the cops ever asking me if I got pulled over for speeding or something..."BTW son, Do you have a license for all those home recorded cassette tapes back there."
Seriously, what are the RIAA trying to prove here. I just can't wrap my head around all this frivolous suing.
Now get off my lawn, etc...
Why? The rules don't seem to apply to SCO (unfortunately).
Use this link to avoid registration or see the same exact same story on CNET.
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Now and Forever,
Remember the songs from a CD,
Can always be sold again.
Lock it as tight,
as DRM will allow,
Until all the money is gone.
The Freedom that existed,
Is all over now.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They shouldn't have been advertising the availability of illegal material, they dug there own grave by literally saying "come here to download any copyright material you want and we will help you get away with it". Usenet is useful for many things that are perfectly legal, I feel no remorse for usenet.com because their own arrogance brought this on them.
Andnothingofvaluewaslost
Use this link to avoid registration or see the same exact same story on CNET.
Thank you. I am starting to feel about nytimes.com the same way I feel about tinyurl.com - if it appears in the URL, I know the link is probably not worth visiting.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This has nothing to do with the rights of the artists. It's purely about the copyright.
May they live forever, only wishing they could finally die from the horrors.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Maybe it's because I'm not really involved in the legal system, but I find the way the jduge sanctioned usenet.com to be very troubling.
If you'll read the article, you'll see that usenet.com destroyed evidence and arranged for witnesses against it to be out of the country for the trial. For this, usenet.com absolutely deserves to be sanctioned.
But the judge's sanction was effectively to rewrite the DMCA. Lawmakers inserted a Safe Harbor provision into the DMCA that shielded service providers from responsibility for criminal activity of their users. When Judge Baer sanctioned usenet.com by preventing them from raising the Safe Harbor defense, he effectively rewrote the DMCA in a way that lawmakers never intended!
Without the Safe Harbor defense, usenet.com's case was lost. I'm not sure what the appropriate sanction should be for usenet.com's blatant discovery violations, but a judge rewriting a law as it applies to just one company seems wrong to me.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I just illegally traded 300 albums online thanks to P2P. I did that by hiring an illegal alien from Home Depot to do it! All while being an underage kid driving without a license backwards with a large bag of weed in the car held by a rebellious and naked nun!
Top that RIAA!!!
The music industry and RIAA seemed to live through that era. If one friend bought an album, all his friends would get a cassette copy if they wanted it.
But what happened if the friend tried to make a copy for his friend, and that other friend tried to make a copy for his other friend. Surely you remember that, don't you? The quality stank so badly nobody wanted to listen to that copy, thanks to lossy analog dubbing.
With digital media, each copy is lossless, so if a friend copies a song for a friend, who copies it for another friend... even 10, 20, 1000 friends down the chain, and the music still has its original quality.
So I don't think your Dodge Dart comparison is particularly apt here. The game has changed.
Now mow your fucking lawn, pops.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
When a judge is dealing with a nothing-to-lose frivolous lawsuit, they have to be very careful, because they know that any attempt to punish them for misbehavior will be used as an excuse for an appeal.
Don't buy tunes from GOONS!!
No one gets usenet versus Usenet.com (nor I really). But it certainly has some interesting implications, for example, almost every ISP in Australia has a usenet feed and a full alt.binaries tree. That could make for some "fun times" and i cant only imagine what will happen if the RIAA equivalent in AU gets to mess with our little comunist firewall... err, i mean saviour of our childrens minds.
Given there are already cases against the ISP's in court already.
But, does it really matter? Yeah, usenet was good while it lasted and if this is about to spell it's final "for whom the bell tolls", then so be it. One of the big problems with usenet in the modern era was lack of knowledge of its existence. For example, in my day I sold and bought things on Aus.ads.forsale and now everyone uses ebay cause they know it exists.
But, some of that "social fabric" is changing as well (to more modern things I mean). Take twitter and facebook as a semi-evolutionary step, sure you probably cant easily share copywritten (?) work on them easily, but how long until the google wave becomes a simple, all-access protocol capable of doing the same?
The internet does route around the damage that people do to it, and techo's come up with better tech for avoiding rediculous litigation - but more importantly, they get better at quickly making things that are hard to blame on any one person or organisation while people like the RIAA are struggling to grapple with putting together a case based on incomplete evidence from yesterdays protocols.
Block Bittorrent in AU? go for it, we'll get something else (we had kazaa, napster, emule, etc etc already and we learnt from the various mistakes present in those protocols). In short, techno-people move quick, bit corp's move slow and we're always going to be ahead.
Personally when it comes to all these things all I know is that it puts me off watching movies or listening to music because if I happen to have an MP3 of a song from a CD that was later stolen, chances are I could be possibly in trouble. In alot of industries thats called shooting yourself in the foot.
Oh, and did anyone see that little news report in AU about how movie piracy was funding terrorism? I wonder how much the RIAA payed to have that little piece put on the air (in all fairness, it was physical media piracy as opposed to sharing on the internet, but still)...
guns are also capable of non lethal, non criminal uses. but close to 90% of the violent crimes involve a gun.
so ?
Read radical news here
So, this means if a guy bootlegging movies were to record those movies onto Memorex blank DVD's, then Memorex would be liable for copyright infringement, right?
The Snopes article you reference and that statement that the copyright on Happy Birthday expired some time ago everywhere except America are in no way mutually incompatible. In fact, based on the information given by the Snopes article I would have to conclude that in the EU it expired in 1991, 75 years after the death of Mildred Hill.
So, since it's no longer difficult to make & distribute copies of music, why are the companies that make up the RIAA still charging the same prices?
Why is Walmart selling CDs for $10 when I can get the same songs for free? Why is Apple selling songs for $1 when I can get the same songs for free?
Now you say, "you're not getting those songs for free! you're stealing". And I say "Who am I stealing from?"
RIAA is suing the pants off everyone they can because the services the member companies provide (finding musicians and recording and marketing their music) no longer justify the fees they're extracting.
Personally, I've stopped purchasing/downloading music entirely. I'll start again when the money I pay for music actually goes to the artist.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Was the RIAA around back in the days of the cassette tapes?
The RIAA has been around since the days of LP records. It first standardized RCA's "New Orthophonic" curve as the industry standard for pre-emphasis on vinyl.
Why did they not go after people copying those tapes?
It did.
[Google's] business model is not build around enabling piracy, very much unlike sites that depends on it to exists and make profit, hence [the notice and takedown procedure of 17 USC 512] works and there is no reason nor legal grounds to sue them.
If you take infringing works off YouTube, which Google owns, what do you get?
... or will soon be, since the judge ruled against it. And when Usenet.com is hut down, there will no longer be a Usenet to worry about, and the RIAA types can go way happy. So everybody calm down.
The RIAA really needs to die. They are an annoyance to virtually everyone.
Of course we can see how up to date they are chasing after Usnet. That's so 1999 of them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They had illegally copied files on their servers, they didn't even own the originals (so backup excuse is out) and they charged for the service and did not pay any royalties even to independent artists and developers. So too bad for them, but if I'm selling my cool program for a miserable 5 bucks I expect that at least people ask me before starting selling it.
There is no TPB all over again here, they were plain criminals.
Nothing to see here, walk along people.
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Date: Wed Jul 1 14:10:45 CDT 2009
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For your newsgroups file:
alt.binaries.music.publicdomain Your great++ grandfather's music collection, someday, maybe, please?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
"The RIAA stated in a brief note, 'We're pleased that the court recognized not just that Usenet.com directly infringed the record companies' copyrights but also took action against the defendants for their egregious litigation misconduct.'"
that's the pot calling the kettle black.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
It's your reading comprehension that is problematic. There's a list of things that the poster thinks infringe copyright. Lending and giving away books is in this list. The next item raises the question of doing the same with e-books in the future. That doesn't change the status of lending books as an item in a list of infringing activities.
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
By default, copyright belongs to the artist. It's the right to restrict or allow, as they see fit, who may copy it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The concern should be that our rights are slowly but surely being taken away! Sure, copyright infringement is a law breaker in some states oral sex is a crime too! Seriously, what's next on the list?
This will be appealed and overturned