to lose something so precious over so little money. With all the billionaires running around, someone should step up and pledge the money to keep Arecibo online.
I wouldn't say he was being a pedant, just clarifying my point. It is good to get some accuracy around here with regard to legal stuff. I was trying to make the point you did about how the RIAA goes after uploaders and why they don't go after downloaders, but I guess my statements were not accurate.
Besides, isn't law a profession of pedants?:) I want it to be clear what the law is, because the RIAA has been doing everything in its power to obfuscate the law.
You do not understand what I was saying. Let me make it clearer.
There is in fact no law against 'downloading' copyrighted songs without authorization.
Neither is there any law against 'uploading' copyrighted songs without authorization.
There is a law against making copies of copyrighted songs without authorization.
And there is a law against distributing copies of copyrighted songs to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by license, lease, or lending without authorization.
There is not any law against "mak[ing] a copyrighted work available for copying w/o permission".
I don't get it, you told the Court you may file Rule 11 sanctions and the Judge yelled at you for that. Have you actually filed them? Dear nomadic, I've pointed you to the public record. I can't comment on it further than that.
The RIAA lawyers are representing civil plaintiffs, not criminal defendants, and they are making false representations to the Court about the evidence.
Lawyers represent their clients. You'd be doing better to direct your anger at the RIAA for the lawsuits and not their lawyers. Isn't that the infamous "Ve vere only obeying orders" defence? Actually that defense wouldn't work for lawyers, any more than it does for people on trial for crimes against humanity.
Lawyers live under a set of rules and practices which requires them to stand up to their clients when their clients' notions are wrong. The RIAA lawyers are liars. They daily sign court documents representing to the Court that their investigator "detected an individual", when their witnesses have been forced to admit under oath that he did NOT "detect an individual". Some day the lawyers themselves will be brought to task for having 'obeyed their clients' orders'.
All the lawyers I know who are doing it are making huge financial sacrifices, either getting paid next to nothing, or a fraction of their normal rates.
If you insist on me explaining to you why your fantasy isn't reality, I'll do it just this once:
Poor and working class people can't afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves. That's what it costs to defend a federal copyright infringement case being brought by litigants like these who stonewall every discovery request served upon them, bury their opponents and third party witnesses in an endless stream of discovery notices, and make any frivolous legal argument they can think of making.
If you happen to represent 2 or even 3 of the defendants in that courthouse, which is unusual, there would be some slight economies of scale, but none which compare to those enjoyed by the plaintiffs' law firm, which is representing the plaintiff in 300 cases, and which has a lawyer crawling around the courthouse full time every day.
Not me. Sorry to disappoint you. I guess there are at least two of us who write more eloquently, and with less spelling errors, than you. Probably there are tens of thousands of us.
20 years from now our children won't be watching cartoons like Captain Planet, which reflects the hippy nature of the 70's. Rather they'll be watching something subtly using themes of the goodness of sharing, and the evils of the RIAA. "Linus Torvalds with the power of Open Source!" *cut scene to Linus and a team of ninja penguins stopping a kid from cracking a program and giving him an open source alternative* "Mark Shuttleworth with the power of Benevolence!" *cut to Mark in a space shuttle signing a contract to pour money into a new open source development* "Bram Cohen with the power of File Sharing Protocols!" *Just show him solving one of his many rubiks cubes. It's awesome enough.* FSF with the power of Legal Aid! *Show a personified version of FSF smacking down a court order against an innocent mother* By their powers combined, they form internet's greatest hero! Captain 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0! Kickass. Why wait 20 years?
But on behalf of those of us who live in the real world, I ask you to please stop beating your gums unless you can cite to a single specific real world example of that ever happening.
There is in fact no law against 'downloading' or 'uploading'. There is a law against making copies without authorization. And there is a law against distributing copies to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by license, lease, or lending without authorization. The RIAA is trying to rewrite the copyright law. Don't help them.
There is no legal terminology "making available". That is something the RIAA lawyers made up. They can cite no part of the Copyright Act that refers to it, and they have themselves stopped using it in their complaints, realizing it was indefensible.
The individual defendants don't get the benefit of the economies of scale If that's the case, then defense attorneys come along and play the other side of the economy of scale. Many lawyers/firms make their name/bucks by doing the same thing over and over again. They become a chemical-company-suing specialist, or they're a whiplash specialist or they're a specialist on suing asbestos manufacturers or... defending RIAA claims. They do the research inside and out how to do what they need for these "stamped out" cases as you called them, and use prior knowledge to bring prices down.
If big company X really is suing people at the kind of rate where lawyers give them economies of scale (I don't particularly know of this happening, but it seems possible), then the other side has the same opportunity. Nice try, but it doesn't work that way. There's no money to be made representing defendants with little or no money who are being sued by big companies. As you said, you "don't particularly know of this happening"... that's because it's never happened.
I would like to suggest that this fund auction off "Lunch with Ray Beckerman" once a month. Maybe other celebrities will donate their lunches to the fund as well. That could generate both revenue and keep the fund in the news.
How about it Ray? Great idea. Except you're forgetting one thing. There are very few people who would want to have lunch with me.
Because they are promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs, that's why. They see the connection between the shoddy evidence gathering of the RIAA and the possibility that merely possessing certain software programs will be considered as evidence of infringement.
The FSF has a policy against using proprietary software; it's not as if they are defending the illegal downloading of copyrighted material. Rather, it seems they are concerned, and rightly so, that a judicial precedent may establish the mere possession of file sharing programs as a de facto evidence of guilt, regardless of whether or not any infringement actually occurred.
Think about that for a moment. The whole Web is just one large, distributed, filesharing program. Imagine the consequences if everything was outlawed because of what it could be used for, rather than outlawing the specific act it might be used for. Even though the RIAA cases deal with copyright, it is more of a war on technology than anything else, and it has far-reaching implications for even those who do not infringe copyright. The real problem that the RIAA is fighting is filesharing itself - it could completely supplant them as the arbiter of music; their very survival depends on keeping individuals from sharing music - copyrighted or not - amongst themselves. The RIAA knows very well that once musicians discover publishing via filesharing, their stranglehold on the industry is over.
So what does the RIAA want? That's right - to control your computer, and dictate which software you are allowed to run. That's the only way to protect their content monopoly, and you can bet their going to try any means possible to accomplish it, consumer rights notwithstanding. Superb analysis.
The amicus curiae brief submitted by the US Internet Industry Association and Computer & Communications Industry Association in Elektra v. Barker made a similar point about the RIAA's legal theory.
But this would be true whether the FSF were there or not. Like I said before, I don't think FSF is fighting for these people's innocence or guilt, I think they're fighting for fair representation on both sides with regard to technical issues. Letting the RIAA run rough shod over non-technical juries starts setting precedents that could seep out to other areas, namely open source programming vs. IP vultures. Well said, kcornia. Thank you.
In my opinion, that case probably involved a zomby computer. If the defendant had been able to afford an expert, the outcome probably would have been the opposite of what it was.
"What about having a disinterested party as the fund adviser? I frankly don't understand your point (or why anyone modded you up), and if you RTFA you'd see that Ray Beckerman is not the "sole" advisor. "The Fund will be advised by Ray Beckerman, the author of Recording Industry vs. The People, along with a group of selected attorneys acting as advisors"
I also want a VERY interested party to decide where funds should go, and why wouldn't it go wherever it hits the RIAA the hardest? You do realize it is a common law system right? Court decisions are relied on by other courts, meaning that if you hit the RIAA hard, you might knock them out for all future lawsuits.
If the objective is to kill these RIAA lawsuits in the most efficient and effective manner, then why the hell wouldn't I want Ray Beckerman managing it?! Hell - I'm donating BECAUSE Ray is managing it, and being in Canada I don't even get a tax dedcution! Thank you very much, kwandar.
I know most of my fellow Slashdotters don't like it when I say this, but I'm sure the guy who posted the parent post is an RIAA troll. He just joined, this was his first comment, he started out "I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy" (which is always a dead giveaway), and his profile is silent. Plus he made an asinine suggestion which would play right into his employer's -- I mean the RIAA's -- hands.
I think Beckerman is the perfect guy. I certainly wouldn't WANT a disinterested party fighting for me! If I'm in court, I want everyone on my side to be passionate about helping me win. Thanks sm62704.
I'm not going to be doing it alone. The other attorneys working with me will also be folks who have demonstrated that they are "passionate" about beating the RIAA in its war against (a) people, (b) copyright law, and (c) science.
I would think the best way to help the average Joe is to give his average lawyer a set of clearly-defined, well-argued precedents and examples to base the defense on. Having the precedents and example arguments be stronger will help more people in the long run than trying to help everyone at once.
There's no way the fund can help everyone directly; I imagine it will help more people in the long run by carefully choosing its battles and winning them well than by diluting its resources and helping lots of people who, while individually deserving, won't have the same multiplicative effect on the resources spent. Well spoken, evanbd. Couldn't have said it better.
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to lose something so precious over so little money. With all the billionaires running around, someone should step up and pledge the money to keep Arecibo online.
You do not understand what I was saying. Let me make it clearer.
There is in fact no law against 'downloading' copyrighted songs without authorization.
Neither is there any law against 'uploading' copyrighted songs without authorization.
There is a law against making copies of copyrighted songs without authorization.
And there is a law against distributing copies of copyrighted songs to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by license, lease, or lending without authorization.
There is not any law against "mak[ing] a copyrighted work available for copying w/o permission".
See Warner v. Cassin transcript of June 29, 2007, proceedings.
And?
The RIAA lawyers are representing civil plaintiffs, not criminal defendants, and they are making false representations to the Court about the evidence.
Lawyers live under a set of rules and practices which requires them to stand up to their clients when their clients' notions are wrong. The RIAA lawyers are liars. They daily sign court documents representing to the Court that their investigator "detected an individual", when their witnesses have been forced to admit under oath that he did NOT "detect an individual". Some day the lawyers themselves will be brought to task for having 'obeyed their clients' orders'.
All the lawyers I know who are doing it are making huge financial sacrifices, either getting paid next to nothing, or a fraction of their normal rates.
If you insist on me explaining to you why your fantasy isn't reality, I'll do it just this once:
Poor and working class people can't afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves. That's what it costs to defend a federal copyright infringement case being brought by litigants like these who stonewall every discovery request served upon them, bury their opponents and third party witnesses in an endless stream of discovery notices, and make any frivolous legal argument they can think of making.
If you happen to represent 2 or even 3 of the defendants in that courthouse, which is unusual, there would be some slight economies of scale, but none which compare to those enjoyed by the plaintiffs' law firm, which is representing the plaintiff in 300 cases, and which has a lawyer crawling around the courthouse full time every day.
Not me. Sorry to disappoint you. I guess there are at least two of us who write more eloquently, and with less spelling errors, than you. Probably there are tens of thousands of us.
I understand. I'm just trying to clear up some of the misinformation spread by the RIAA's professional disinformation squad.
Dream on.
But on behalf of those of us who live in the real world, I ask you to please stop beating your gums unless you can cite to a single specific real world example of that ever happening.
You just don't know what you're talking about.
There is in fact no law against 'downloading' or 'uploading'. There is a law against making copies without authorization. And there is a law against distributing copies to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by license, lease, or lending without authorization. The RIAA is trying to rewrite the copyright law. Don't help them.
There is no legal terminology "making available". That is something the RIAA lawyers made up. They can cite no part of the Copyright Act that refers to it, and they have themselves stopped using it in their complaints, realizing it was indefensible.
That doesn't provide much help to those who are being sued.
The amicus curiae brief submitted by the US Internet Industry Association and Computer & Communications Industry Association in Elektra v. Barker made a similar point about the RIAA's legal theory.
In my opinion, that case probably involved a zomby computer. If the defendant had been able to afford an expert, the outcome probably would have been the opposite of what it was.
Thanks, Weaselmancer. I am really excited about what the FSF has done here. Ti makes me feel we're not so all alone.
I know most of my fellow Slashdotters don't like it when I say this, but I'm sure the guy who posted the parent post is an RIAA troll. He just joined, this was his first comment, he started out "I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy" (which is always a dead giveaway), and his profile is silent. Plus he made an asinine suggestion which would play right into his employer's -- I mean the RIAA's -- hands.
I'm not going to be doing it alone. The other attorneys working with me will also be folks who have demonstrated that they are "passionate" about beating the RIAA in its war against (a) people, (b) copyright law, and (c) science.