‘Innocent Infringer’ goes to Supreme Court
p2pnet news view | RIAA:- Several years ago a federal court in Texas ordered the RIAA, in an ‘innocent infringement’ case against teenager Whitney Harper (right), to either accept $200 per infringed work, or to go to trial over the innocent infringement issue, says Ray Beckerman in Recording Industry vs The People.
Maverick records was the name at the top of a lawsuit lodged against her. It’d claimed she’d violated its copyrights, said p2pnet when the case first came to light.
A small record label trying to protect its bottom line against the evils of file sharing?
Nope.
Maverick is yet another Warner Music company and only one of the numerous labels owned by one or other of the Big 4.
Harper is now 22, but she was only 14 when Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA went after her.
“Recently, an appeals court reversed, saying that the defendant could not avail herself of the innocent infringement defense since there were CDs, bearing copyright notices, available in stores, even though the copies she had made were from mp3 files which bore no such notice”, says Beckerman, going on:
“Now, a petition for certiorari has been filed on the defendant’s behalf, arguing that the 5th Circuit’s ruling would make it impossible for anyone to interpose an innocent infringement case, even where they had never seen a copyright notice.
“The lawyers filing the petition on defendant’s behalf are the same firm that represented Jammie Thomas-Raseet in her second trial, and the motion which resulted in her verdict being reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000.”
Recording Industry vs The People – Petition for certiorari filed on ‘innocent infringement’ defense in Maverick v Harper, May 27, 2010
p2pnet – Another victim says No! to the RIAA,October 1, 2008
$1.92 million to $54,000 – Jammie Thomas-Rasset award reduced …,January 22, 2010
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
May 28th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
If the RIAA’s 2003-2008 lawsuit campaign was a mistake, as they now admit, then why are they still fighting these few remaining cases tooth and nail?
May 28th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
@RW:
“If the RIAA’s 2003-2008 lawsuit campaign was a mistake, as they now admit, then why are they still fighting these few remaining cases tooth and nail?”
Several reasons:
1. They’re technologically illiterate: They have NO idea how *any* technology actually works. They are also deathly afraid of the idea that the rabble — populace at large — has access to recording equipment . Whether it’s the (sadly incorrect) claim that “home taping is killing music” (which — IF ONLY it had been true — would have neutralized these corporate vermin decades ago) — or Jack Valenti comparing the VCR to the Boston Strangler, the “empty suits” (and heads) in charge of these corporations are too stupid — and too afraid — to actually try to understand where technology is headed.
2. At the same time, they’re trapped in what they see as an unsolvable contradiction: many of the same corporate megaliths who own the labels *also* have high-tech divisions — Sony, as just one example. They’ve *got* to keep “innovating” at least minimally enough to keep up with what *other* companies are doing, and — horror of horrors — they’ve also got to provide at least a minimum of interoperability between different devices. You can only get away with vendor-lock in and obscure, proprietary formats, to a certain point.
(Hint: even if a company nominally “owns” a specific format, to the extent that it becomes anywhere near ubiquitous, everybody and their cousin already knows the specs, so it’s effectively an “open standard” to anybody with a brain — in other words, everybody except corporate lawyers.)
So they *have* to provide support for multiple formats, because if they don’t, nobody in their right mind will actually buy their devices or technology. Inconvenience your user-base enough, and you lose them.
They’ve known about the dangers of proprietary, non-standard formats for a hell of a long time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record
Pay particular attention to the stuff about different speeds of “78 rpm” records.
So, the label-guys are hopelessly fucked: they don’t understand p2p or computers very well, but they themselves are often owned by corporate giants who *produce* digital technology. They also know they can’t really *do* anything against (so-called) “online piracy”. Glickman admitted as much in interview after interview (see: “Steal this film II”, for example).
They can’t even make it particularly “inconvenient” — all they know how to do is get their lobbying front-groups (oops, I mean “trade associations”) to bribe (oops, I mean “financially contribute”) their way to making already-bad “laws” worse, in the (mostly) stillborn hope that somehow, some way, they’ll manage to harass or intimidate an infinitessimally-small fraction of the millions upon millions of folks engaging in various forms of “infringing” conduct *as a matter of course* — WITHOUT simultaneously pissing off enough of those millions of folks, in the process.
The thing is, they’re already irremediably fucked, hence all the breathless urgency about bullshit like ACTA (which even THEY know doesn’t stand a chance in hell of actually turning the tide in their favor.)
The main reason they keep tilting at windmills, though, is because they’re just too stupid (and too greedy) to stop.
They most likely won’t stop until the fossils running the labels all join Valenti in hell (and a new generation of empty suits take their place), or their sorry excuse for a “business model” comes crashing down.
It was really funny to see Lily Allen frantically backpeddling, trying to gloss over her infamous “mp3 mixtapes”.
“Anti-piracy activist” + “Mp3 Mixtape” = tantrum.
May 28th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
“The lawyers filing the petition on defendant’s behalf are the same firm that represented Jammie Thomas-Raseet in her second trial, and the motion which resulted in her verdict being reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000.”
This lawer is a moron.
If it was me I would have agree to pay the formidable amount of $0.0000000000 assuming that few parasites among the swarm after me would have managed to survive.
May 29th, 2010 at 8:51 am
“Recently, an appeals court reversed, saying that the defendant could not avail herself of the innocent infringement defense since there were CDs, bearing copyright notices, available in stores, even though the copies she had made were from mp3 files which bore no such notice”
Even if a record has a copyright notice, it means nothing, but the court is too dumb to understand. I shall explain.
Right now you can buy a public domain Chopin (etc) music score with a (worthless) copyright notice pasted on it. You can also buy a pre-1972 record with a copyright notice even though these records never had any (USA) copyright protection (that came with the Sound Recording Act of 1971).
Since the worthless copyright claims are openly allowed (never heard that anyone has been penalized for making false copyright claims) no one can be penalized for ignoring a copyright notice. These are generally worthless for public domain works or for pre-1972 recordings or (I claim) records published with no year on the record label.
See Copyright Law Center to check the facts:
http://www.copyright-laws.com/pgs/copyright-basics.html
Again, the courts are too dumb to understand the copyright mess that they themselves (with the assistance of Congress) have created.
May 29th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Then corporate parasites of the entertainment parasites and their lawyers are not innocent. We can not expect justice from our governement therefore we have to render justice ourself.