And if you think the level of competence at the RIAA is better than MediaSentry's, why don't you take a survey of the record company shareholders and ask them how competent the RIAA was in administering this campaign.
Why would I abrogate my opinion of their competence in favor of a large group? The shareholders have no unique access to information (as a group, no doubt some officers, etc. do). They have no unique education which makes them qualified to render judgement.
I'm not saying the shareholders are any wiser than you or I (Indeed, the fact that they are shareholders in such mismanaged companies might even tend to indicate otherwise.). I'm just saying that (a) they are the group for whose benefit the companies are supposedly being managed; and (b) they have not benefitted.
The kind of people the RIAA tends to go after are file share[r]s, people who use a lot of bandwidth.
Actually they do not go after the heavier file sharers, most of whom use BitTorrent, and have been for years. Every single case I've seen has been based on either the Gnutella protocol or the FastTrack protocol. I have never seen a case from the RIAA based on BitTorrent. The kind of people the RIAA has been going after are (a) people who never did any file sharing at all, but have enough money to pay a settlement, and (b) kids who did a modest amount of file sharing. All of which explains why their 'terror' campaign hasn't worked; the people they would like to deter are actually laughing at them.
Mr. Beckerman, I frequently enjoy your coverage of legal battles around copyright and the RIAA, but please take care with your superlatives so that your important message remains strong. "creating a climate of *terror*" seems over-the-top. Maybe sticking with "fear" is more appropriate in this case. (Hope this is taken as the constructive criticism that it is intended. I want your message of sensibility to prevail!)
I don't worry about what people think. I tell the truth as I perceive it to be. If you'd spoken to the victims of this on a daily basis for the past 4 years, as I have, I think you'd wish there were a stronger word to describe the terror, anxiety, humiliation, and degradation to which Matthew Oppenheim and his gang of thugs have subjected them.
It wouldn't terrorize you, no doubt, and it wouldn't terrorize me, either. But not every RIAA defendant is like you or me.
there is a baseline level of incompetence which is unacceptable even for the RIAA
On that I beg to differ. The incompetence was something the RIAA was at all times aware of, and condoned. They didn't care if they got 20,000 or so 'false positives'. This was about creating a climate of terror. They were interested in getting something done cheaply, and it creating widespread fear. As it turns out the only people who ever came to fear the RIAA were the people who were not computer savvy and were not big file sharers.
And if you think the level of competence at the RIAA is better than MediaSentry's, why don't you take a survey of the record company shareholders and ask them how competent the RIAA was in administering this campaign.
I really wonder what relation this had to the RIAA's big fake 'announcement' last month. I hope the WSJ and other journalists are asking the right questions.
In a regrettably "subscribers-only" story, the Wall Street Journal online edition notes that they have received confirmation of the RIAA's having dropped MediaSentry.
So, has the "content" industry's strategy of enforcement through oppression, FUD, and deception finally developed enough cracks to let the real light in?
NYCL I love you. I was surprised to find you were the older of the ones pictured on your website, thinking my elders didn't have a clue about technology. For that I am sorry.
You are not on the side of your clients, at least not publically on riaavsamerica blog. You are on the side of what you believe to be true, based on of your countless university hours and countless hours in reality on top of that.
There have been very few people, since I first became aware of politics in the early Clinton days, who took a stand on belief rather than financial or political gain. Your continued investment in the purely informative postings you continue to provide, as well as your cameo commentary on aggregators such as this, suggests you are trying to follow the law, as opposed to following the money.
I could be biased, being on a certain side of the RIAA cause. But I have thought for a number of years -- no one in this country would give up their home for a cause. Few would go to jail for the confidentiality of their sources. If we had a civil war we would struggle to find someone to fight. Because everyone has a decent job, or at least most people do (unemployment isn't that high), and those who don't, don't automatically have to become toilet cleaners.
Our economic status was, for a while, equal to none. And throughout that, you posted information, then questions, then support, then as we see here back to information again, for the good of... not yourself certainly.
Please, do not humor me with a personal reply as you so frequently do here. Instead, accept the thanks of a million geeks who could not otherwise provide any feedback in any fashion.
You are the last starfighter, the last true outpost in American society. If we can't understand the digital revolution and all of the intricacies that it introduces, we are in a world of hurt. And if "we" have cushy enough jobs and a reliable paycheck due to minimum wage hikes, there is no incentive to take the war into a public and therefore personal (or vice e versa) space. I see it with my colleagues and read about it here. No one wants to fight.
So what if you were Skywalker? Or Mowgli? Or for shit's sake Neo... The fight is the same, the truth is the same, the enemy is the same. The fight is the same, and most people don't know it is happening. But if they knew where to look, they might have more than just a feeling.
Thank you for your kindness. But I am not the last starfighter, I am one of many. And when we are no longer here, there will be others to take our place.
I couldn't really figure out what NYCL's summary was trying to say here, other than link to the 10-page declaration as simple info.
Are we meant to read something into this, other than the general "Labels are doing shenanigans again" message?
Or does this feed into the RIAA issue or even into current cases in some specific way?
I wasn't really "trying to say" anything, just reporting on some interesting facts. Yes this plays into all of the record companies' stupid cases, in MANY ways, relevant to MANY issues. No way could I now start discussing that in a public forum, but lawyers representing defendants will have a field day with this stuff...
I think what you're missing is spelled out fairly effectively in the linked declaration. EMI sued MP3Tunes not for redistributing their IP, but for linking to locations that did. More specifically, they required not only that they remove specific links to specific songs as they had done initially, but that they remove links to every EMI song in existence claiming that they had not authorized ANY of their songs to be distributed online. MP3Tunes declined to do this and was sued. This, however, gives examples of several places where EMI HAD authorized their songs to be distributed as MP3s and thus not every link to every song they own is an infringing link.
And the accompanying memorandum of law gives you the context in which the declaration was being submitted.
What do you think this is, a peer-reviewed scientific journal?
You mean it isn't? Cmdr Taco lied to me?
Yes he did. Next time, get the straight scoop from CowboyNeal.
CowboyNeal told me that getting published on Slashdot was comparable to being in the Harvard Law Review. If he wasn't being straight with me... well, then, I've just lost my faith in humanity. After all, according to the Slashdot poll, CowboyNeal is the leading candidate for United States Copyright Czar. If you can't believe him, who can you believe?
Cliffski is not from the U.S. He is a UK games designer who apparently has gotten ripped off, so that he enters each and every RIAA thread to (a) support anything the RIAA says, and (b) make ad hominem attacks on my character. In this discussion, e.g., he said that court proceedings should NOT be televised because of the way the lawyers act. When I noted that all the televised proceedings I'd seen, with the single exception of the first OJ Simpson trial, looked exactly like the untelevised proceedings I'd seen, and asked him for some examples, he ignored the question and started attacking my litigation track record.
I respect Cliffski for not being anonymous, and I respect anyone's right to disagree with me on anything, but I have noticed a lack of intellectual integrity on his part which I do not forgive and do not respect.
If his ox has been gored by copyright infringement, and he wants to be a strong advocate for enforcement of copyright laws, fine... but he should support his arguments with facts, law, and public policy considerations, and when he's been caught saying something that is not supportable, he should concede the point and move on.
Oh, that's too bad:-(
(What were they thinking? sheesh!)
My sentiments exactly.
The only good news I can relate is that PJ at Groklaw sometimes puts in the time to convert some of the more important
documents to readable HTML; maybe she'll do it with this.
I'm replying here since I know you'll probably get an email alert.
Please provide this kind of stuff in text or xhtml format excepting for the rare case where absolute positioning of elements is required.
I find pdf format really annoying to deal with since it's hard to manipulate/search/sort/etc using standard tools.
Thanks.
S
Sorry. It was the decision of the federal court system, not my decision, to adopt *pdf as the format.
I'm pretty certain it was a troll. Like a jerk I fell for the first one. But his followup set off unmistakable signals that he was no English barrister.
No I wouldn't 'comment on the legality', for to do so would be like giving legal advice. I can say that I published it without express permission from the U.S. government or from the Court Reporter or anyone else. Nor can I predict how history will view the trial. I can only say that (a) the transcript itself, and (b) a vetting of the MediaSentry, Jacobson, Best Buy, and Thomas testimony by the tech community will be enormously useful to all of us who are representing other victims of the RIAA's campaign.
Has anybody been reading the testimony of the RIAA's investigator and of its expert witness? It would be interesting to get some discussion of that going on here, like the one that's started on my blog.
The ads are in the sidebar. If an ad wound up covering the article, and there was a white space in the sidebar, it's something with your browser. Please try refreshing the screen; I'll bet it goes away. Thanks.
Thank you, macraig. Although I have explained in several interviews how I got myself into this pickle, I don't think I've ever done so on/. So perhaps it's just as well that you pried it out of me.
"when she testified under oath that making a copy from one's CD to one's computer is 'stealing'."
That one baffled me. I am neither a lawyer nor an American. However, I would assume that a witness' opinion of the legality of a given action is completely irrelevant. Establishing the legality of a given action is a task for the court, not a task for the witness.
Agreed.
So why was a witness asked about the legality of copying a CD?
Beats me.
And why was she breaking her oath (as NYCL is somehow implying) when she did not know the correct answer?
She knew the correct answer. She was deliberately misstating the law in order to improperly inflame the jury against Ms. Thomas, convincing the jurors that even had Ms. Thomas done nothing but copy some CD's onto her hard drive, that in and of itself was a copyright infringement.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you think the level of competence at the RIAA is better than MediaSentry's, why don't you take a survey of the record company shareholders and ask them how competent the RIAA was in administering this campaign.
Why would I abrogate my opinion of their competence in favor of a large group? The shareholders have no unique access to information (as a group, no doubt some officers, etc. do). They have no unique education which makes them qualified to render judgement.
I'm not saying the shareholders are any wiser than you or I (Indeed, the fact that they are shareholders in such mismanaged companies might even tend to indicate otherwise.). I'm just saying that (a) they are the group for whose benefit the companies are supposedly being managed; and (b) they have not benefitted.
The kind of people the RIAA tends to go after are file share[r]s, people who use a lot of bandwidth.
Actually they do not go after the heavier file sharers, most of whom use BitTorrent, and have been for years. Every single case I've seen has been based on either the Gnutella protocol or the FastTrack protocol. I have never seen a case from the RIAA based on BitTorrent. The kind of people the RIAA has been going after are (a) people who never did any file sharing at all, but have enough money to pay a settlement, and (b) kids who did a modest amount of file sharing. All of which explains why their 'terror' campaign hasn't worked; the people they would like to deter are actually laughing at them.
Mr. Beckerman, I frequently enjoy your coverage of legal battles around copyright and the RIAA, but please take care with your superlatives so that your important message remains strong. "creating a climate of *terror*" seems over-the-top. Maybe sticking with "fear" is more appropriate in this case. (Hope this is taken as the constructive criticism that it is intended. I want your message of sensibility to prevail!)
I don't worry about what people think. I tell the truth as I perceive it to be. If you'd spoken to the victims of this on a daily basis for the past 4 years, as I have, I think you'd wish there were a stronger word to describe the terror, anxiety, humiliation, and degradation to which Matthew Oppenheim and his gang of thugs have subjected them.
It wouldn't terrorize you, no doubt, and it wouldn't terrorize me, either. But not every RIAA defendant is like you or me.
Any ideas where they go from here?
I don't know. Chapter 11?
there is a baseline level of incompetence which is unacceptable even for the RIAA
On that I beg to differ. The incompetence was something the RIAA was at all times aware of, and condoned. They didn't care if they got 20,000 or so 'false positives'. This was about creating a climate of terror. They were interested in getting something done cheaply, and it creating widespread fear. As it turns out the only people who ever came to fear the RIAA were the people who were not computer savvy and were not big file sharers.
And if you think the level of competence at the RIAA is better than MediaSentry's, why don't you take a survey of the record company shareholders and ask them how competent the RIAA was in administering this campaign.
I really wonder what relation this had to the RIAA's big fake 'announcement' last month. I hope the WSJ and other journalists are asking the right questions.
Now the story is online for all to read!
In a regrettably "subscribers-only" story, the Wall Street Journal online edition notes that they have received confirmation of the RIAA's having dropped MediaSentry.
So, has the "content" industry's strategy of enforcement through oppression, FUD, and deception finally developed enough cracks to let the real light in?
I think so, Jane.
NYCL I love you. I was surprised to find you were the older of the ones pictured on your website, thinking my elders didn't have a clue about technology. For that I am sorry. You are not on the side of your clients, at least not publically on riaavsamerica blog. You are on the side of what you believe to be true, based on of your countless university hours and countless hours in reality on top of that. There have been very few people, since I first became aware of politics in the early Clinton days, who took a stand on belief rather than financial or political gain. Your continued investment in the purely informative postings you continue to provide, as well as your cameo commentary on aggregators such as this, suggests you are trying to follow the law, as opposed to following the money. I could be biased, being on a certain side of the RIAA cause. But I have thought for a number of years -- no one in this country would give up their home for a cause. Few would go to jail for the confidentiality of their sources. If we had a civil war we would struggle to find someone to fight. Because everyone has a decent job, or at least most people do (unemployment isn't that high), and those who don't, don't automatically have to become toilet cleaners. Our economic status was, for a while, equal to none. And throughout that, you posted information, then questions, then support, then as we see here back to information again, for the good of... not yourself certainly. Please, do not humor me with a personal reply as you so frequently do here. Instead, accept the thanks of a million geeks who could not otherwise provide any feedback in any fashion. You are the last starfighter, the last true outpost in American society. If we can't understand the digital revolution and all of the intricacies that it introduces, we are in a world of hurt. And if "we" have cushy enough jobs and a reliable paycheck due to minimum wage hikes, there is no incentive to take the war into a public and therefore personal (or vice e versa) space. I see it with my colleagues and read about it here. No one wants to fight. So what if you were Skywalker? Or Mowgli? Or for shit's sake Neo... The fight is the same, the truth is the same, the enemy is the same. The fight is the same, and most people don't know it is happening. But if they knew where to look, they might have more than just a feeling.
Thank you for your kindness. But I am not the last starfighter, I am one of many. And when we are no longer here, there will be others to take our place.
I couldn't really figure out what NYCL's summary was trying to say here, other than link to the 10-page declaration as simple info. Are we meant to read something into this, other than the general "Labels are doing shenanigans again" message? Or does this feed into the RIAA issue or even into current cases in some specific way?
I wasn't really "trying to say" anything, just reporting on some interesting facts. Yes this plays into all of the record companies' stupid cases, in MANY ways, relevant to MANY issues. No way could I now start discussing that in a public forum, but lawyers representing defendants will have a field day with this stuff...
I think what you're missing is spelled out fairly effectively in the linked declaration. EMI sued MP3Tunes not for redistributing their IP, but for linking to locations that did. More specifically, they required not only that they remove specific links to specific songs as they had done initially, but that they remove links to every EMI song in existence claiming that they had not authorized ANY of their songs to be distributed online. MP3Tunes declined to do this and was sued. This, however, gives examples of several places where EMI HAD authorized their songs to be distributed as MP3s and thus not every link to every song they own is an infringing link.
And the accompanying memorandum of law gives you the context in which the declaration was being submitted.
What do you think this is, a peer-reviewed scientific journal?
You mean it isn't? Cmdr Taco lied to me?
Yes he did. Next time, get the straight scoop from CowboyNeal.
CowboyNeal told me that getting published on Slashdot was comparable to being in the Harvard Law Review. If he wasn't being straight with me... well, then, I've just lost my faith in humanity. After all, according to the Slashdot poll, CowboyNeal is the leading candidate for United States Copyright Czar. If you can't believe him, who can you believe?
It's probably got something to do with the fact that it's a big *pdf document, which is a pain to load.
Cliffski is not from the U.S. He is a UK games designer who apparently has gotten ripped off, so that he enters each and every RIAA thread to (a) support anything the RIAA says, and (b) make ad hominem attacks on my character. In this discussion, e.g., he said that court proceedings should NOT be televised because of the way the lawyers act. When I noted that all the televised proceedings I'd seen, with the single exception of the first OJ Simpson trial, looked exactly like the untelevised proceedings I'd seen, and asked him for some examples, he ignored the question and started attacking my litigation track record.
I respect Cliffski for not being anonymous, and I respect anyone's right to disagree with me on anything, but I have noticed a lack of intellectual integrity on his part which I do not forgive and do not respect.
If his ox has been gored by copyright infringement, and he wants to be a strong advocate for enforcement of copyright laws, fine... but he should support his arguments with facts, law, and public policy considerations, and when he's been caught saying something that is not supportable, he should concede the point and move on.
So far that has not been his style.
Not in my copy. I just accessed it and those pages were fine.
Oh, that's too bad :-(
(What were they thinking? sheesh!)
My sentiments exactly.
The only good news I can relate is that PJ at Groklaw sometimes puts in the time to convert some of the more important documents to readable HTML; maybe she'll do it with this.
I'm replying here since I know you'll probably get an email alert. Please provide this kind of stuff in text or xhtml format excepting for the rare case where absolute positioning of elements is required. I find pdf format really annoying to deal with since it's hard to manipulate/search/sort/etc using standard tools. Thanks. S
Sorry. It was the decision of the federal court system, not my decision, to adopt *pdf as the format.
I'm pretty certain it was a troll. Like a jerk I fell for the first one. But his followup set off unmistakable signals that he was no English barrister.
No I wouldn't 'comment on the legality', for to do so would be like giving legal advice. I can say that I published it without express permission from the U.S. government or from the Court Reporter or anyone else. Nor can I predict how history will view the trial. I can only say that (a) the transcript itself, and (b) a vetting of the MediaSentry, Jacobson, Best Buy, and Thomas testimony by the tech community will be enormously useful to all of us who are representing other victims of the RIAA's campaign.
I cant seem to find out what finally happened after the verdict -- did she (Thomas) have to pay up the $222,000.00 ?
Nothing happened with it. It was set aside. A new trial is scheduled for March 9th.
Has anybody been reading the testimony of the RIAA's investigator and of its expert witness? It would be interesting to get some discussion of that going on here, like the one that's started on my blog.
The ads are in the sidebar. If an ad wound up covering the article, and there was a white space in the sidebar, it's something with your browser. Please try refreshing the screen; I'll bet it goes away. Thanks.
Thank you, macraig. Although I have explained in several interviews how I got myself into this pickle, I don't think I've ever done so on /. So perhaps it's just as well that you pried it out of me.
"when she testified under oath that making a copy from one's CD to one's computer is 'stealing'."
That one baffled me. I am neither a lawyer nor an American. However, I would assume that a witness' opinion of the legality of a given action is completely irrelevant. Establishing the legality of a given action is a task for the court, not a task for the witness.
Agreed.
So why was a witness asked about the legality of copying a CD?
Beats me.
And why was she breaking her oath (as NYCL is somehow implying) when she did not know the correct answer?
She knew the correct answer. She was deliberately misstating the law in order to improperly inflame the jury against Ms. Thomas, convincing the jurors that even had Ms. Thomas done nothing but copy some CD's onto her hard drive, that in and of itself was a copyright infringement.