Fisher, Beckerman, stand firm in RIAA row
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- The mainstream media and various ‘gurus’ and ‘pundits’ are retreating en masse following suggestions the RIAA may not have said what it said in the Jeffrey Howell case.
Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA asserted making MP3s from personal music files and putting them in a shared folder is in and of itself a copyright infringement, we said in our first post on this.
“Washington Post sticks by RIAA story despite evidence it goofed,” says the headline to a CNET News item by ex-Washington Post reporter Greg Sandoval, referring to the same issue.
His story kicks off:
It’s late on Wednesday evening and the Washington Post has yet to correct a story that accused the recording industry of trying to paint law-abiding music fans as criminals.
But the paper should make things right and soon.
Sandoval goes on to quote the RIAA’s Jonathan Lamy as saying:
The Washington Post story is wrong. As numerous commentators have since discovered after taking the time to read our brief, the record companies did not allege that ripping a lawfully acquired CD to a computer or transferring a copy to an MP3 player is infringement. This case is about the illegal distribution of copyrighted songs on a peer-to-peer network, not making copies of legally acquired music for personal use.
Numerous commentators? Hardly.
After reading Lamy’s statement, Fisher didn’t back down, says CNET, quoting an email it’d received from him which stated:
The bottom line is that there is a disconnect between RIAA’s publicly stated policy that making a personal copy of a CD is ok and the theory advanced by its lawyers that in fact, transferring music to your computer is an unauthorized act.
Nor did Recording Industry vs The People’s Ray Beckerman (right) back down.
Said Techdirt in a story questioning Fisher and Beckerman’s stances, the latter,”still has failed to explain how the RIAA’s filing actually says what he claims it says.”
Beckerman told me:
I agree one hundred percent with Mr. Fisher’s comment that “The bottom line is that there is a disconnect between RIAA’s publicly stated policy that making a personal copy of a CD is ok and the theory advanced by its lawyers that in fact, transferring music to your computer is an unauthorized act.”
When the RIAA puts in court papers in the Howell case that it did not mean that the copies themselves were unauthorized because they were ripped from cd’s into mp3’s, then and only then will there be any security on this issue.
I know the RIAA lawyers well, and I am absolutely positive that they meant what they said, and were trying to hoodwink the judge into giving them language they could then use as a precedent in other cases, trying to take advantage of the fact that Mr. Howell has no legal representation.
They may back down due to the firestorm of public reaction and the dive in their stock prices, but I am completely confident that this is the game they were playing.
Said Sandoval of Fisher, “He took one more shot before signing off: ‘Rather than suing its customers and slamming reporters, the RIAA might better spend its energies focusing on winning back the trust of an alienated consumer base’.”
Fisher got that right as well.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
Also see:
Canadian Press – ‘Harry Potter’ star among celebrities donating glasses for Holocaust exhibit, January 3, 2008
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January 4th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
As I wrote earlier this evening in a response to another site’s comments on the RIAA/Fisher dispute, what’s up with RIAA members embargoing (presumably) certain pieces included in their commercial CDs from being downloaded tp MP3 players with out first notifying the customers of the embargo. I purchased Josh Groban’s hit “Noel” at Borders for my spouse, with the intention of downloading it to my computer and transferring it to our IPod. Prior to the completion of the download, a text screen came up informing us that we were not authorized to download five of the approximate 13 tunes. There was no notice of any kind at the Borders store where the CD was purchased nor was there a warning on the CD itself or the wrappng it came in.