RIAA rejects McGuinness ISP police plan
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- There’s that ‘D’ word again.
Like their opposite numbers in Hollywood, through their many and various so-called trade organisations such as the RIAA, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the multi-billion-dollar Big 4 record labels, frequently claim “devastation” at the hands of their own customers whom they’ve labelled file sharing criminals and thieves
Now once again, “Piracy is devastating the industry,” according to RIAA spin doctor Cary Sherman, speaking at a State of the Net conference hosted in Washington by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, says GCN.com.
Strangely, though, he doesn’t seem taken with an idea mooted by U2 McGu (U2 manager Paul McGuinness) that ISPs become Big 4 copyright cops, ratting out their clients to the corporate music industry.
“I don’t think anyone here is trying to relegislate this issue,” CNET News has Sherman stating. “We’re much more interested in finding a marketplace way of going about this.”
By “relegislate,” Sherman was referring to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, “which contains a section that generally lets service providers off the hook for copyright infringement on their networks, provided that they take down offending material when it’s called to their attention,” says CNET.
Rather, he believes “filtering technology … would identify and block illegal transfers of protected material”. It’s not a perfect technology, “but it has a lot of advantages”.
However, Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn, “strongly disagreed,” says the story. “It is not only a bad business practice, but it is bad policy,” it has her declaring.
Filtering, “ignores legitimate use, won’t stop determined pirates and degrades network performance,” she said, instead advocating new business models such as, “licensing agreements between Internet service providers and content providers that would provide payment to copyright holders for material downloaded downloaded by subscribers, regardless of the source”.
For the moment, “none of the sides are advocating that the government require network operators to police the content of their networks,” says GCN, going on:
Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), recently remarried widow of recording artist Sonny Bono, is an advocate of strong copyright protection. Her approach to policing is to blame the protocol. Most online piracy is done over peer-to-peer networks, which are bandwidth hogs, Bono said. Let the networks choke off P-2-P traffic and they will stop piracy, she said.
But, “No one seemed to take that approach seriously.”
The solution to protecting rights of creators and users is to “focus on what technology is good at,” says YouTube product counsel Mia Garlick in the GCN piece. That’s to say, “identifying files”.
Filtering is no good for “making judgments about the legitimacy of those files or their use,” says Garlick. “That requires human policy and decision making, and a dispute resolution process.”
Also See:
GCN.com - Balancing rights at both ends of the pipe, January 31, 2008
ratting out their clients – U2 manager attacks ISPs, January 29, 2008
CNET News – RIAA: No need to force ISPs by law to monitor piracy, January 30, 2008
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February 1st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
“We’re much more interested in finding a marketplace way of going about this.”
Yea they have realy tried that huh?
By trying to delete the current marketplace and replace it with their own DRM stores thats slow/closed and obviously not the way people want to distribute/share..
February 1st, 2008 at 1:27 pm
filtering = censorship
censorship = no freedom
no freedom = RIAA
enough said