RIAA ‘legal CD copying’ row gathers steam
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- “Following a crusade on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America by News.com journalist Greg Sandoval, the Washington Post posted a correction to a column about a file sharing lawsuit which was misleading headlined ‘Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use’.”
So said Ryan Singel in Wired on Tuesday, as Recording Industry vs The People notes.
p2pnet posted last week:
Speaking of getting stories wrong, “An executive with the music industry’s lobbying group engaged in a verbal sparring match on Thursday with the Washington Post columnist who alleges that the organization is trying to outlaw the practice of copying CDs to a computer,” says CNET News’ Greg Sandoval, going on:
“National Public Radio hosted in on-air debate between Marc Fisher, the Post columnist, and Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The way I saw it, Fisher was ill advised to debate. What was exposed was a reporter who doesn’t want to admit to making a mistake and has dug his heels in.”
It’s still very much open to question whether or not Fisher, Ray Beckerman and others are wrong and in the meanwhile, IMHO, the story isn’t the sparring match between Sherman and Fisher.
It’s testimony, under oath, Sony BMG ‘expert witness’ Jennifer Pariser, a Sony BMG lawyer, gave when she stated, “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.”
According to the RIAA read [Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US)], ripping CDs —- even those you’ve ‘legally’ bought and paid for —- is illegal.
Period.
Full stop.
End of story.
The Pariser statement came during the farcical Jammie Thomas trial. As an RIAA star witness, Pariser was billed as “the top litigator for the Sony BMG Music Group.
It couldn’t be clearer and unless and until the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) states plainly (with no if’s, but’s and maybe’s) in a document which can be produced in court that copying a CD or, come to that, a DVD, for personal use is legal, that’s the way it is.
But according to RIAA president Cary Sherman, Pariser “mispoke” herself. Sherman stated:
The Sony person who (Fisher) relies on actually misspoke in that trial. I know because I asked her after stories started appearing. It turns out that she had misheard the question. She thought that this was a question about illegal downloading when it was actually a question about ripping CDs. That is not the position of Sony BMG. That is not the position of that spokesperson. That is not the position of the industry.
Now, in Wired, Ryan Singel makes it plain he’s alongside others who are sticking to their guns in the face of panicky back-tracking on the part of individuals and entities which formerly took the same view.
“In the confusion following the Washington Post’s RIAA story, and its subsequent ‘correction,’ journalists and advocacy groups alike are missing an important fact: the RIAA has repeatedly taken the position that ripping MP3s from CDs you own is illegal, and it’s using that argument to harm consumers,” says Singel.
Of course, confusion, and not clarity, is exactly what the RIAA and its masters, the Big 4 labels, want and strive for.
Singel goes on:
In the first ever trial of a person accused of sharing copyrighted music files over a peer-to-peer network, a Sony executive described ripping songs as stealing. Then the RIAA’s lawyer grilled Thomas on the stand about whether or not she’d gotten permission before making personal copies of her music. (THREAT LEVEL’s David Kravets covered the trial gavel-to-gavel.)
Every three years, the Librarian of Congress decides what exceptions will be made to a federal law that makes it illegal to defeat copyright locks. That law is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In 2006, a number of exemptions were proposed.
The RIAA, among others, opposed these exceptions. In a February 2, 2006 letter (.pdf) to the Copyright office, the group wrote that ripping MP3s from CDs — also known as device shifting — was not covered by Fair Use and thus was infringing. They also said that making a back-up copy of a CD was also infringing.
Back to the Washington Post ‘correction’, it’s wrong, said Singel:
The RIAA has not and will not say that ripping MP3s for personal use from a lawfully purchased CD is legal, despite Sandoval’s lobbying for the group.
Earlier, “In fact, the RIAA does not recognize that you have a legal right under the Fair Use doctrine to rip your CDs into MP3s to listen to them on your computer or digital audio player,” he says.
And, RIAA spokeswoman Liz Kennedy, when asked “point blank” if the RIAA believes it’s legal to make MP3s, “refused to answer the question and instead sent this boilerplate text from the RIAA’s anti-piracy website”.
As p2pnet posted here, the site says it’s, “okay to copy music onto an analog cassette, but not for commercial purposes,” and:
It’s also okay to copy music onto special Audio CD-R’s, mini-discs, and digital tapes (because royalties have been paid on them) – but, again, not for commercial purposes.
Beyond that, there’s no legal ‘right’ to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won’t usually raise concerns so long as:
The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own
The copy is just for your personal use. It’s not a personal use – in fact, it’s illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.
In a second post, yesterday, “The RIAA believes that if you want to listen to copyrighted music you bought on CD on your digital music player, you should go to Amazon or iTunes and buy a digital copy there,” Wired went on. “Anything else is infringement in their eyes – even if they have no way of catching you do it.”
Adds Single:
Taken apart, what does it mean? Ripping MP3s is unauthorized. Under copyright law, anything unauthorized is infringing, unless the Fair Use doctrine defends the action as “non-infringing.” But the RIAA doesn’t believe that Fair Use covers MP3 ripping. So when they say unauthorized, they mean “infringing.” But that infringement won’t “usually” bother them until you start distributing.
But once they go after you for distributing, they are going to also go after you for copying. They did it to Jammie Thomas. They are and will do it in the Arizona case, where when asked by a court if a file sharer who ripped MP3s had “illegal copies,” the RIAA told the court that Jeffrey Howell had unauthorized copies on his computer.
For clear propaganda reasons, the music industry won’t publicly say it considers ripping MP3s to be copyright infringement.
They did say it in Jammie Thomas’s recent trial, but when called on that testimony in a public forum, RIAA president Cary Sherman conveniently says the Sony executive “misspoke.” By that point the $222,000 damage had been done and Sherman was free to say anything he wanted on NPR.
The RIAA sued the first MP3 player, it sued XM radio for making a device that let users record broadcasts — again a legally recognized fair use — and it forced the crippling of DAT audio recorders. The RIAA is also hard at work putting small web radio stations out of business with usurious royalty rate increases.
The RIAA is now working with the nation’s ISPs to find ways to snoop on Americans’ internet communications to find copyright infringement. That sets up a perfect situation for the RIAA to send automated letters demanding a $5,000 pre-lawsuit payment because you emailed an MP3 to your fiance — a song which you legally bought on CD. Hell, it could go after you for ripping a CD at home and then e-mailing it to a personal account in order to listen to it at work. From a network perspective, it all looks like infringement.
And yet, instead of pouring heat on the RIAA to clarify its legal stance, bloggers and journalists are filling in the gaps left by the RIAA’s silence on its position with generous suppositions on what the RIAA’s muddled public pronouncements mean and examining how it is legally clever of them.
That’s dangerous. The RIAA doesn’t believe Americans have any right — or Fair Use legal defense — to play copyrighted material on the device and in the format of their choosing.
That belief has been and will continue to be a threat to innovation and new technology.
The failure to recognize that simple truth will blow back in the form of more draconian public policies and laws, as well as more crippled devices.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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January 10th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
“The copy is just for your personal use. Itâs not a personal use – in fact, itâs illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.”
Oh YA? I am doing this days and night 24 Hour a day just to bother the RIAA! I have a box specially dedicated for that on all the major p2p network. But I recognize the right for the music parasites to die and to go BK.
Let’s taze all of them with our new Tazer/MP3 device!
January 10th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
“anything unauthorized is infringing” This would be a violation of the constitutional amendement 8 but this guys beleive that they are above the unfortunatly for them so do I.
January 10th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Read:
âanything unauthorized is infringingâ This would be a violation of the constitutional amendement 8 but this guys beleive that they are above the law; unfortunatly for them so do I.
January 10th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
:The RIAA doesnât believe Americans have any right.” We will alway have the right to get ride of them and we are exercising this right right now! Bye Bye Bye parasites!
January 10th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I said this on the Ryan Siegel blog but:
The RIAA believes that all of us are pirates. To them, there is no such thing as Fair Use. They also think that everyone owes them a living. They want us all to be their slaves. We cannot be their slaves because most of us are slaves to the U.S. Government. So now, they want to take over the government.
To them I say: take a number and stand in line. There are a whole lot of plutocrats running this country, and they aren’t going to step aside from a bunch of whiny “Culture Warriors”. It’s hard enough keeping Bill O’Reilly in check. Anyway, the problem is that the Mass Media Cartels want to own culture (or American Culture, at least). There’s a bit of hubris there, I think.
Our only choice if Free Culture: we need to dominate the space by promoting user-generated content. This is the message of “Steal this Film, Part II”. We need to stop our consumer culture, and start producing our own. The cartels will end when they have been effectively silenced, abolished, and ignored. The Internet is the medium which allows us to tell our own story, create our own culture. This is why the cartels fear us. We are the masters of this new realm. They’ll do anything to control it, because ultimately cartels and oligarchies are all about control.
They have to realize that, on the Internet, nobody is in control. There is no man behind the curtain, because there is no great and powerful Oz, only a protocol stack. What’s funny is, they could have made another mint by now if they had just embraced network effects and fired all their lawyers. Lost opportunities, wasted years, all because they couldn’t see the genius behind the Diamond Rio PMP3.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Anyone know of a program for making decent mp3 rips from my cds? My desire to further irritate the riaa drives me to ask this.