Sony is a file sharing thief
p2pnet.net News:- What with its continuing incendiary batteries and rootkit spyware disasters, you’d think Sony was in enough trouble.
But Vivendi is in effect claiming Sony is something it and its Big Four Organized Music cartel colleagues (of whom Vivendi is one) accuse their own customers of being.
The people who run Sony are “criminals” and “thieves,” says Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, to all intents and purposes.
Sony’s Grouper application gives users a way to share music videos with each other and, in entertainment and software cartel parlance, that’s a criminal offence not even second to murder and rape.
Sony, however, is dismissing the UMG allegations.
“In a filing with the U.S District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Grouper denied the copyright-infringement allegations and said Universal was using the lawsuit to boost a rival video-sharing site in which it has a stake,” says Reuters, going on:
“Universal, owned by French media group Vivendi and the world’s largest music company, has been leading an aggressive drive to get paid for all uses of its works on new digital services over the Internet.”
Grouper, “denied it was engaged in mass copyright infringement and said that – like other such sites – it cannot prevent third parties from violating the company’s terms of service that prohibit copyright infringement,” says the story.
Interestingly, the entertainment cartels, with the Big Four Organized Music family in the lead, are using the US Supreme Court Grokster decision to kill independent p2p sites so they can later be resurrected as corporate p2p distribution systems.
Grokster says companies are liable for what users do with the software.
“Grouper also said it was fully compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and was carrying out the requests of copyright owners to remove materials that users may have improperly uploaded to the site,” says Reuters.
“Individually and collectively, through the Recording Industry of America (the ‘RIAA’) and other organizations and companies,” the Big Four have engaged in unfair business practices, “for the specific purpose of eliminating sources of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing and acquiring a monopoly over digital distribution of commercially valuable copyrighted music and movie content,” says LimeWire, one of the independents being attacked.
In a court document, “In fact, these same persons and entities have been both secretly and publicly engaged in promotion of their own digital distribution technologies which permitted exchanges of copyright infringing files, such as instant messengering, email and other similar technologies only, in each case engineering the technologies to use a central server thus retaining for themselves the same knowledge and control held by Napster,” says the company.
Vivendi’s Universal also sued News Corp for alleged MySpace copyright infringement, and not only but also, UMG’s Doug Morris said GooTube consistently violated music industry copyrights, just before it and Google reached an accord.
Also See:
Reuters – Sony says Grouper site not afoul of copyright law, November 22, 2006
being attacked – LimeWire versus the RIAA: Part II, November 17, 2006
sued News Corp – Vivendi’s UMG vs MySpace, November 21, 2006
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November 23rd, 2006 at 2:39 pm
man this is getting better and better every day.
these people will sue their own moms for giving birth to them and tapin it
November 23rd, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Sit back and enjoy the show.
November 24th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
When some other people do it they’re punishable dangerous criminals!!… but eh, if they do it themselves its seems its ok? What kind of mixed message is that.