Proof of infringement.
How did they obtain it, and what proof do they have.

So far, they have been unwilling or unable to produce proof of
ANY SPECIFIC INFRINGING ACT.

Admit nothing, DEMAND PROOF of specific incidents ( date/time
source ).

To date, the RIAA is stalling in cases where such proof has been
demanded.

=================

…YET….

- People cannot have the responsibility to verify anything you buy or are given to make sure that the product is clean, not a forgery, not stolen, or does not infringe a patent or a trade name, or a copyright. As a corollary, you have to be a insane (as RIAA and their lawyers and some judges seem to be) to imply in lawsuits that ordinary citizens have the obligation to verify the legal status of what they have received and are thus responsible when illegally (as may have been a copied mp3 file) made or labeled products are downloaded or copied or accepted or purchased.

- When one receives a file, as I have many times, through the Internet it stands to reason, one does not know the copyright status of the original recording and/or song.

As the son of a deceased composer, many persons, mostly music collectors, have sent and given me copies of records of my father’s songs, through cassettes, CDs and through e-mail MP3s. For many songs, that is the only copy of the song I have. According to the RIAA theory of “you are a thief” if you download, I am a thief. A thief for downloading songs through email, and by accepting home copied CDs and cassettes.

It is a good thing I am a thief like Santangelo is callously called. Otherwise many of my fathers songs and their copyrights would be lost forever, as the songs cannot be licensed for recording by anyone but we children of the composer. If RIAA and the RIAA lawyers calls me a thief for that, they can f*** themselves.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

You buy a CD with 10 songs. Your adult child “borrows” it from you without letting you know. You ask your child if he/she took the CD. Your child admits that he took the CD, took it to work and someone took it without your permit.

You must decide what to do. You are a RIAA lawyer, brainwashed by greed you decide you will sue your child. Something akin to suing customers.

Since taking a physical CD, that costs money to reproduce, and costs $20 to buy, you must decide what damages you will claim in the lawsuit you will file against your child. Your child is unemployed and has five kids to feed, your grandchildren. As a lawyer, you know that your child’s problem are none of your business as you have been trained to be objective and to forget all the emotional crap of the person you sue.

Your options are then to sue for the cost of the CD, $20.00 or claim statutory damages for copyright infringement, which you could if you get the record company to sue… for theft of intellectual property. After all if “stealing” (as your customers call the act of copying downloaded files) files which cost nothing to reproduce and therefore have a real value of $0, then stealing a real objects (a CD) that costs money to reproduce is also stealing.

So you make your decision: You will sue your child for copyright infringement. After all no one should have possession of music files without paying for them. Your son had the obligation of buying his own record, and should never have taken your CD. You also take into consideration that the purpose of borrowing CD is always to copy them into the computer and into a blank CD and if that is tolerated, it will mean the end of RIAA, your customer.

After you sue your child and your child, crying, says to you: Dad, why did you do this to me? You should reply: Because I am a lawyer that works for the interests of my customer. You are child will tell you: No, it is because you and RIAA are bastards.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

” If someone makes an obscene phone call on your phone, and does it without your knowledge or permission or understanding are you then responsible for whatever they said ?”

I don’t think it’s right under normal circumstances to be held responsible for what some one else does or says without your knowledge or permission or ENCOURAGEMENT ( regarding the capitals even the US Supreme court seems to think of it this way based on recent decisions regarding file sharing). And so I would, if I believed Ms. Santelangelo (and from what I have read I do believe her) vote to aquit.

To analyze this we need to ask several questions:

WAS THEFT COMMITTED BY SANTANGELO?
WERE THE DOWNLOADED FILES COPYRIGHT PROTECTED?
WHAT ARE THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER?
ARE COMPUTER FILES MATERIAL OBJECTS?
WERE THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS VIOLATED?

======================================================

WAS THEFT COMMITTED BY SANTANGELO?

If Santangelo had actually copied the songs into her disk drive and if that was a crime and the damages that she was required to pay should be about 1/2 the price of a CD of 12 songs, or about $10.00.

RIAA has repeatedly claimed that copying songs to a disk drive is theft (downloading). Then we are talking about the theft of the equivalent of 1/2 a CD. A CD is a physical object.

If a customer of a CD store were detected walking out of the store with an unpaid CD, a likely intentional theft, the store owner could file criminal charges or could ask the return of the CD or could ask for a payment of the CD or could file a claim for the payment of the CD in a small claims court.

There is no way the store could profit from the theft and there is no way, (this is very important) that copyright infringement could be charged, since theft of a physical object such as a CD is not protected by American copyright law. The copyright law says it. Physical objects are thus protected from theft by the local penal code. Plain common sense says that if theft of physical objects is not copyright infringement then theft of a files is also not copyright infringement. We have to remember, RIAA says that copying files is theft.

Here is Puerto Rico no one will be prosecuted for minor theft, of property valued less than $200, so the store owner here knows that he can file criminal charges but his complaint will be ignored by the Police Department, who doesn’t even have the resources to go after big time crimes. So the only real and practical options for the store owner is to have the CD taken away from the thief, or get payment from the CD.

WERE THE DOWNLOADED FILES COPYRIGHT PROTECTED?

Furthermore, illegal copies of works on which a copyright subsist may itself have no copyright protection. This could mean that the unlawful copies can be freely copied by others. So in a p2p net, the downloaded copy was an unlawful copy of a lawful derivative work, A sound recording of a song is just that, a lawful derivative work. The downloaded copy thus had no copyright protection and that made copies of it lawful. Put differently, an owner of an unlawful copy cannot claim protection for that copy. Neither can anyone else because the copy is unlawful. This is based on what is said in the first chapter of the American Copyright Act:

“(a) The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.”.

So copying a lawful derivative work without authorization from the copyright holders (the record company and the author of the song) could be unlawful because the derivative work (of the song) is legal. This is why copying a lawful CD and selling it is infringement. But copying an unlawful copy of a CD is not infringement because the unlawful copy has no copyright protection. Admittedly this is a loophole argument that could be used by Santangelo’s lawyers, but that is exactly what lawyers frequently do to win cases.

WHAT ARE THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER?
ARE COMPUTER FILES MATERIAL OBJECTS?

Per the American Copyright Act, the exclusive rights of copyright holder are to make material copies and phonorecords and distribute them. These copies are defined as “material objects”, Certainly a bunch of computer bits (0 and 1) are not “material objects”. They are magnetic states. While the bits have logical properties they have no physical (dimensional/weight) properties, so they cannot be described as material objects. There is no material. You cannot see or weight a computer mp3 file any more than a radio wave. I doubt they can be described as material objects any more than light waves. If light waves were classified as copies on the retina, then all copyright hell would break loose, since capturing light waves on the retina and the brain would be the equivalent of capturing an electrical signal of 0 and 1’s (an mp3 file) on a hard disk. Seeing would then be copyright infringement.

WERE THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS VIOLATED?

Certainly not, because at no time were the song files turned into MATERIAL OBJECTS by anyone. Therefore there was no copyright infringement.

BTW: Has anyone sued anyone for making light wave copies, ephemeral as they are, of the movies on a television screen?

Note: The above is is a legal opinion from a non lawyer.

AN POST BY SOMEONE ELSE ON P2PNET

I like what another P2PNET reader writes under the title “Good thoughts on What’s Copyright”. Parts of that post is included::

“Now in a quick slight of hand, corporations are wanting IP elevated to physical status for damage relief. Simply it is a way to collect on something that should have never been ranked as high as it is. Trading or giving an idea to someone else doesn’t make you poorer nor does it deny you possession of that idea afterwards. In much the same way, neither does trading files. P2p is rapidly becoming a culture thing, not a mass piracy manufacturing ring as the cartels would have you believe.”.

“The answer to this in their minds is to sell something that doesn’t cost so much to manufacture. Say software, things that are protected by copyright and patent. Only if they can get and keep the idea that an idea is worth big money can they pull this off. So far the laws are bending over backwards to meet these ideas but the reality and the intangable are having a hard time seeing eye to eye.”

“I don’t call 1’s and 0’s tangible property. Get a power surge, a virus, or a simple deletion that removes those items and show me where that physical is. There is no way in my mind that 1’s and 0’s have the value of physical property. Especially when considering that the programmer is paid once for the job yet the copyright holder expects to be paid each and every time as if you had purchased something tangible. I see nothing that tells me I bought a product under these terms. The world of legal has yet to apply common sense to laws to reflect this lack of value, still being stuck in the manufacturing era.”

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com