RIAA ‘making available’ is dying
p2pnet news | RIAA News:- Confused by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s bottom line as they struggle to prove their customers aren’t customers —- rather, they’re criminals and thieves who get up in the morning determined to screw the Big 4 out of their profits?
This might help.
ZDNet’s Richard Koman interviewed Recording Industry v The People’s Ray Beckerman, the New York lawyer whose blog has become a repository of scores of legal documents pertaining to RIAA cases, and an archive of stories centring on the bitter sue ‘em all campaign being waged by the Big 4.
Judges are telling the organised music extortion outfit if it wants to hang people for allegedly pilfering copyrighted music online, accusations aren’t enough: hard proof is required.
“The entire litigation model is based on the statutory damages under the Copyright Act,” says Koman, following his chat with Beckerman, and going on >>>
Those start at $750 per song and go as high as $150,000 per song. These were the damages that a jury nailed on Jammie Thomas – $9,250 per song for a total of $222,000.
In the Thomas case, the judge went along with the ‘making available’ theory of copyright infringement and allowed the mere presence of P2P-accessible files to be the basis for those damages. If the Howell decision is followed – and it will be, Beckerman said, by appellate courts as well as district courts – the industry will have to prove actual distribution. That will prove to be very difficult to do – ‘I believe they won’t be able to prove actual dissemination,’ he said – and thus they will not prevail on the distribution part of copyright infringement.
There is another part, however – the reproduction right. Basically, the right to reproduce (think Chinese copies of DVDs) is distinct from the right to distribute. The actual damage from illegal reproduction is only about 40 cents per song, Beckerman said, counting the royalty and other costs. If the RIAA can only prove illegal reproduction, not distribution, they have a problem.
Statutory damages of $750 on a 40 cent lost profit claim is a multiplier in the thousands, which will be held unconstitutional, Beckerman predicted. In restaurant cases where the operator didn’t pay performance royalties when music was played in the restaurant, the reasonable ration was found to be between three and four times. With the payoff cut down from a minimum of $750 to a couple bucks, it will no longer make sense to sue users.
In other words,”making available is dying,” but, “it may take a long time before it finally dies,” Beckerman told Koman.
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.Stumble It!
ZDNet – The end of RIAA litigation, April 30, 2008
organised music extortion outfit – Another bad day for the RIAA, April 29, 2008
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May 1st, 2008 at 10:44 am
extortion is illegal these fools need broke down and locked away for crimes against the usa and international communitys if bin laden was to sue our kids there would be a war in afghanistan so why allow these criminals to extort our kids friends and family there a form of legal gangsterism how yah like your medicine now mr lamy or is it lamer eh ?
May 1st, 2008 at 11:36 am
Ever the law catch up with these parasites at the RIAA and their victims will be compensated or we will take care of them ourselves.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Judge decisively rejects RIAA legal theory
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3782
There, I just LINKED to another site!
May 1st, 2008 at 2:36 pm
but that site you linked to isn’t offering (non RIAA) music.
So your link isn’t evil according to Big4!
May 1st, 2008 at 5:28 pm
How long before the amount of money they are spending to try and extort people becomes too much of a burden, and they give up, and redefine their market?
Is it really purely about money? or is it power as well? or just spite?
May 1st, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Clearly it is an issue of both control (power) and money. They crave control over “their” intellectual property. They are, and have been for decades, abusing the copyright/patent system. Copyrights are constitutionally mandated yes, and rightfully so. An individual deserves to make profit from their work. This encourages them to produce more creative works and enriches the community as a whole. After they have had the opportunity to complete monopolistic control, government mandated and protected, these works are expected to become basically a public property (remember that thing about enriching the community?) However, how long and how much control should they have over their government mandated monopoly?
Copyrights (my history is a bit hazy on this) were originally instituted to permit monopolistic control for 14 years. Over time, individuals amassed more and more copyrights, and those began to be organized into trade associations, conglomerates, corporate entities etc. To protect their copyrights they hired lawyers. This began to cost a lot of money. Since these organizations last longer and require a much more constant and predictable source of income they decided to ask their friends in government for extensions to the duration of copyrights. These copyrights began to lost longer and longer, now works rarely ever become accessible to the public. Since they have managed to extend a government MANDATED AND PROTECTED monopoly far far far far beyond what was originally expected, how far should they be able to push the legal system, since these works now never seem to manage to enter into the public trust? Personally, I think they’ve pushed damn hard enough, and now it’s time for everyone else to push back.
/soapbox off
P.S. I thought this relevant:
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. — Ayn Rand
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:50 am
This is fantastic News and everyone should take notes on this valuable precedent, and those who’ve been victimized can hopefully now appeal for compensation and damages. Also it is logical and correct.
I knew the Court system would eventually have to start siding with the real victims and the writing is on the wall for this madness to cease and desist.
I don’t care how many overpaid lawyers you have, when this kind of decision is made, they are stumped and get their teeth kicked in, and rightly so.
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:00 am
So how would this ruling apply to bit torrent? And is it legal to download copyrighted material, at least in certain countries with it? I understand that the bits are encrypted, but I think not all use that option or are able to with their particular client.
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:02 am
Is it only distribution (uploading) that may be considered illegal then? And what about content already stored on PCs or media, in share folders or not?
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:21 am
You assholes have lost the plot. I wonder how much fucking money these damn judges are going to suck out of us make things go our way?? (angry)
Look, it’s not about right or wrong, it’s about making us as much bloody profit as possible out of YOU, okay? BTW Wrecking some poor saps life with extortion letters is just the icing on the cake and is great fun to watch!
You morons just get back in those record shops and BUY BUY BUY ok? (Full price, not the unprofitable budget crap.)
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:31 am
The entire RIAA is dying as expected.
We don’t need these parasites.
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:37 am
“if bin laden was to sue our kids there would be a war in afghanistan”
I believe that the US army should conduct military operations against the headquarter at the RIAA, MPA the extortion center and the world head quarters of the 4 major labels. None of these are US company.
We are paying federal taxes for something.
I am waiting but I will not be waiting too long.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:49 pm
The ruling said in part that if Mediasentry was authorized to download copyrighted works then they can’t use it as evidence. So the RIAA needs to get third party involvement to prove distribution. But can you imagine how that could be done? A third party means someone who has no connection to the RIAA and is NOT authorized to gather evidence for them.
So that person we imagine would be some concerned citizen wishing to help out the RIAA and report themselves for unauthorized file sharing. That person wouldn’t be the sharpest tool in the shed would they? And how could you trust the word of someone who would knowingly do something illegal to show that someone else has done something illegal?
Which in fact is what the RIAA does however. It’s a bit like someone going to the police to report that they bought drugs from a person and wishes to dob them in. Not very smart, or believable. Not that there’s anything wrong with file sharing.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:03 pm
What if someone reported to the police that they saw someone exceeding the speed limit in their estimation. How far would that evidence hold up in court? Well we all know that would never eventuate. Can a third party inform for file sharing? If not it means they will have to prove distribution has occurred some other way. Could only be done illegally I’d say, which should negate the validity of any evidence.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:11 pm
They are like drug cartels suing everyone who grows their own
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:11 pm
They are like drug cartels suing everyone who grows their own or shares with someone else
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Good points to the guy who gave the history lesson on copyright. Also interesting to see an Ayn Rand quote.
Glad to see somebody still thinks that creative people deserve respect (it seems like both the RIAA and the p2p crowd lose sight of that fact pretty easily….)
Also glad to see that there’s actually some good articles here now. (No more bullshit about “civet cat crap cofee” or whatever other stupid shit Jon was on about.)
Still, i’d urge everybody to go over to the following sites for a far more lucid and detailed examination of the pros/cons/issues of copyrights/patents/”intellectual property” law in general:
http://www.questioncopyright.org
http://www.torrentfreak.com
Those two sites — unlike this one — don’t feature “celebrity gossip”, for one. Additionally, they don’t compare the RIAA to the mafia (which, shitty as the RIAA is, is just a disingenuous comparison). Jon Newton has, for some unguessable reason, amassed himself quite a little following here, but the vast majority of that fan-base is completely unjustified.
Jon: You could do a hell of a lot more for “the cause” by, for example, giving people a more in-depth primer about copyright law and how it’s metstitized into it’s current form, or putting up info on how to publish under “Creative Commons” licenses, or about all the “netlabels” that are out there putting up huge amounts of TRULY indie (independent) music FOR FREE — NOT just siphoning off of the RIAA’s product-base.
True, you DO feature occasional articles about Linux, but…..too much celebrity gossip, and WAY too much “heartstring-tugging” crap instead of substantive discussion or info.
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:44 am
WHAT OF SAVE AS?
If making available is bad, it is small stuff compared to the greatest copyright infringement threat. It is the “save as” option in web browsers and all sorts of programs, mostly used through the mouse aNd of course the operating system and the computers themselve, all of whom are also guilty of making available.
It is estimated that daylY 100 million computer users, while browsing the web use “save as” an average of 1.5 times to copy the contetbs of web pages we writers write, without our authorization.
That adds up to 150,000,000 copyright infringements per day or 720,000,000 per year. And this has been going on for many years. The worst part is that copyright organizations and lawyers have ignored this. The american Copyright Office has never expressed an opinion on the matter. Neither has any legislator. This is very serious.
We writers thereby propose that “save as” be banned and that we writers be compensated by everyone that sell computers, mouses, operting systems and software with “save as” feature. After all all we writers do not expressly authorize “save as” copying and that is not ok.
Let this be a warning, “save as” is a threat to the livelyhood of writers and is costing the economy the loss of millions of jobs as shown by recent recession like economy end employment statistics. Thank God (or Bush) there is a war on Iraq that is creating millions of military and armament industry jobs.
Urgently we need to put an end to “making available” and “save as”, worldwide. And a reminder to politicians out there, we writers could easily control 100% of the votes in all countries of the world if we put our keyboard and mouse to work on it, so take us seriosly.
RV
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:18 am
@ Henry
What’s up, Henry? You’re almost civil.
On the ‘celebrities’ – http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14704 (that still applies – look at the number of visitors for most of them). And they often provoke interesting discussion.
The guy who runs TorrentFreak is a friend and gets quoted here from time to time. His bailiwick is Torrents.
http://www.questioncopyright.org? New to me, but I’ll check it out. However, Ray Beckerman, Lory Lybeck, Jordan Glass, John Hermann, et al, are where discussions on copyright are at for me.
“This site sucks worse every time I come here,” you said of p2pnet recently [http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15565 ] and I responded, “But he doesn’t just burst into flame. He also offers constructive criticism.”
I wasn’t, of course, being serious Now, though, I am. Thanks for the criticism. There’s enough crap flying around already. Neither of us needs to add to it.
Cheers!