RIAA finally gets it handed to them

[PaulKay]

arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070207-8786.html

Victim of RIAA "driftnet" awarded attorneys' fees

Some interesting quotes

Will this cause the RIAA to rethink its litigation strategy? Probably. The industry cartel will have to tread carefully with any secondary infringement claims now that there is case law that owning an Internet account used for infringement does not automatically make the owner liable for said infringement. Attorney Ray Beckerman told Ars that he believes there are huge implications from this opinion. "It sends a message to the RIAA... that there are consequences to this 'driftnet' litigation strategy," Beckerman said.

The ruling also opens the door wider for a "prove it was me using the computer" defense. The RIAA's strategy of relying heavily on IP addresses to identify infringers is likely to draw even closer scrutiny as a result of this ruling. This is the first ruling that we know of where a direct relationship between an IP address and an accused party was demonstrated, but deemed insufficient to prove infringement.

In short, it means that merely owning an account used for infringement doesn't rise to the level of liability under the Copyright Act.

I don't exactly approve of file sharing, but I think the RIAA's "sue everybody in site" strategy is like trying to kill an ant with a scattergun. So these kinds of rulings can only help give some of those innocent victims some degree of recourse at least.

[Tim Alexander (fmrly. Camalex)]

"Music should be freeware?" -- see this below

www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2007/tc20070206_576721.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_digital+entertainment

And if you follow Steve Job's logic -- music sold online should be freeware. So I suppose the outome of all of this is that music will no longer be an industry. Music will be purchased like wallpaper and venetian blinds. Online and you'll always pay 70% off. Music as a valued commodity will decline as generations of Ipod users "get it for free."

I was told once that "when you get something for free, you never value it as much as if it came with a price tag." Recorded musical performance is devalued as an art form when it can be mass reproduced in a product form that has virtually no price. If you can copy it for free, why pay for it? And if it's free, why value it? If there's no money in it, why encourage our kids to do it?

Jobs needs to look into all of the copyright protected software his company produces and wonder what it would look like if someone suiggestedit all should be freeware. He'd lose his mind... and his company.

[Doug]

I was told once that "when you get something for free, you never value it as much as if it came with a price tag." Recorded musical performance is devalued as an art form when it can be mass reproduced in a product form that has virtually no price. If you can copy it for free, why pay for it? And if it's free, why value it? If there's no money in it, why encourage our kids to do it?

Recorded music was the end of value for music. A country with only 100 million people had 4 to 10 times (depending on who's list you look at) than todays country with 300 million.

Seeing the "music industry" die the death of the buggy whip doesn't bother me at all.

[timfarney]

And if you follow Steve Job's logic -- music sold online should be freeware.

Read the article you linked. That's not what it says. Not even close. Among the things it says that are not that is the fact that through the end of 2006, Apple sold 2 billion songs (at 99 cents each) on iTunes. And you think their CEO really wants music to be freeware? Somehow I don't think that's what he's proposing.

Tim

[Russell Letson]

Isn't there a difference between doing away with corporate control of how content is played and stored and declaring open season intellectual property? There is plenty of evidence that the big content companies would love to impose a licensing (as distinct from first-purchase) model on movies and music (not enough money in books, apparently) in order to evade long-standing principles of fair use and the aging of content into the public domain. If you build copy/storage controls into the technology itself, it doesn't matter what the law allows you to do--the tech prevents backups, rearrangements, media transfers, time-shifting, and other practices that need not harm the rights of the copyright holder. SCMS and DRM seriously compromised DAT and Minidisc as live-recording formats--unless you bought much higher-priced "professional" (trans.: not crippled) units that allowed transfer of data. (Sony finally got a clue and removed the worst controls from what will probably be their last MD model.)

Jobs seems to be engaged in some sort of clever propaganda and/or positioning war with the content companies, but it's hard to love DRM--it allows corporations to trump fair use and maybe eventually put a meter on your stereo and TV (anybody come across a no-record flag on digital cable yet?)

[j]

what Tim said. Jobs is saying that rather than licensing Apple's DRM system (which would make keeping it a secure DRM system pretty much impossible) he would rather have DRMs abolished. Hence you would buy songs online with no restriction on how to use them (i.e. what you do when you buy a CD at a music store).

Everyone is jumping at Apple's throat about the fact that music bought on iTunes can only be played on iPods, but if you read the whole article they posted yesterday you can see how

a) it's really not that big of a deal considering that, on average, music purchased on iTunes amounts to about 3% of the music stored on any given iPod

b) licensing the DRMs would make them pretty much worthless, as leaks on how to break them would happen more frequently, and Apple would have a much harder time repairing them. If DRMs get broken, the major labels selling on iTunes have the "option" to revoke the entire catalog in a matter of days. Not pretty.

I think abolishing DRMs is a very sensible proposition, and not just because it comes from Jobs. In the long run, respecting intellectual property is in everyone's best interest, and the answer to piracy rests more in proper consumer education rather than trying to put limits on the consumer's experience.

J

[Doug]

The answer to piracy is to quit thinking that the recording is the song.

[Tim Alexander (fmrly. Camalex)]

So I am getting a lesson here -- I may have misread this issue entirely. I'll take another look -- I heard the blurb on CNN misinterpreted the concept. I'll be back when I understand it a little better.

[Supertramp78]

"The answer to piracy is to quit thinking that the recording is the song."

Are you suggesting that nobody has a right to keep people srom stealing recordings of their music?

[Doug]

Nope I'm saying that music isn't the recording. The recording is a physical object and once you bought it you can do with it as you like.

Intellectual property doesn't exist ( Property is a physical thing. ) and current intellectual property laws don't help but hurt creativity. The system as it is, is designed to produce rich companies and 1000 millionaires and a million people not making it as pros.

[billhammond]

dougheard said:

Nope I'm saying that music isn't the recording. The recording is a physical object and once you bought it you can do with it as you like.

Intellectual property doesn't exist ( Property is a physical thing. ) and current intellectual property laws don't help but hurt creativity. The system as it is, is designed to produce rich companies and 1000 millionaires and a million people not making it as pros.

So, let's say you have a half-dozen Lyle Lovett CD's. You choose two or three tracks from each and burn them onto a master CD, call it "The Best of Lyle Lovett" and slap some Internet art on it for packaging, then start burning copies of the CD.

Since they were your CDs, you should be able to sell the collection copies for whatever you can get for them, right? Maybe sell them on the street, outside Lyle's concerts?

[Supertramp78]

"Intellectual property doesn't exist"

so much for patents.

"Congress shall have the Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

So much for that piece of paper...

[Deleted]

This can be sliced more ways than you can imagine when it's analyzed via litigation but I am glad to see the "pay me anyway" law suits filed by RIAA being dismissed.

I sometimes wonder how many people get duped into paying these things because they have a computer and may not be aware of what has or hasn't been downloaded and what kind of legal alternatives they may have.

A couple of years ago there was a movie service that came in my e-mail. Little did I realize that by opening the mail and closing it that I was signing up for the service. I never used their "trial offer" and thought nothing else of it until 7 days later when they began sending me video pop-ups with some babe telling me my "trial period" was up and I was now obligated contractually to subscribe and pay for their service.
Initially I just closed their annoying little pop-up videos. But when they continued everytime signed on I opened their order page, copied their web address, and blocked them. "Gotcha" I thought to myself. Score one for the feeble southern geezer!

[Doug]

I understand the problem with patents etc. But "Intellectual property" just doesn't exist. Property is a physical thing, you can put you hand on it.

You can protect something that is physical but there is no way to protect intellectual property and it's a good thing or we'd all be paying UG's g------great grandkids for the wheels on our cars or paying some guys g------great grandkids for using a G chord. Once you throw it out in the world anybody can and will use it.

So everyone of you who drive a car or play a song is stealing someones intellectual property.

If you want to do something with you intellectual property to make it pay you need to sing the song or build the car.

[timfarney]

billhammond said:

dougheard said:

Nope I'm saying that music isn't the recording. The recording is a physical object and once you bought it you can do with it as you like.

Intellectual property doesn't exist ( Property is a physical thing. ) and current intellectual property laws don't help but hurt creativity. The system as it is, is designed to produce rich companies and 1000 millionaires and a million people not making it as pros.

So, let's say you have a half-dozen Lyle Lovett CD's. You choose two or three tracks from each and burn them onto a master CD, call it "The Best of Lyle Lovett" and slap some Internet art on it for packaging, then start burning copies of the CD.

Since they were your CDs, you should be able to sell the collection copies for whatever you
can get for them, right? Maybe sell them on the street, outside Lyle's concerts?

Oh, I think that's a mild example. In Doug's world as defined here, Sony could buy one copy each of all of Rhino Records' biggest sellers, copy the music, copy the artwork, put them out as Sony recordings, undercut Rhino's pricing (or simply force distributors and retailers to sell their version of Rhino's products or lose access to the massive Sony catalog), put Rhino out of business and then immediately open a small niche market business like Rhino, with Rhino's catalog no less, and never pay a single artist royalty.

Sony could steal from whoever the other majors are these days (I lose track), and vice versa. No one who ever created, recorded, packaged, or marketed music would make any money off of the success of that music because they only money they'd ever get would be what they were paid up front, and that wouldn't be much, because the companies with the money to produce, market and distribute wouldn't be willing to throw it away. In Doug's world, there would be no music business.

There are so many problems with the notion that "there's no such thing as intellectual property," that we could talk about it all day and not touch on all of them. But it sure sounds nifty, huh?

Tim

[PaulKay]

I think one of the so far unstated reasons for much of the music piracy problems is because of the ever growing durations of copyrights written into law (the Sony Bono legacy). It takes so long now for anything to make it into the public domain that one needs to ge back to music created 2 or 3 generations ago to find anything that isn't protected. Digitital files of recordings will have to survive 100 years or more (given the author has to die before the ticker starts) before it will move into the public domain. If copyright durations only lasted as long as patents do, I think this would be less of an issue.

Imagine all the music created in the 50's, 60's and 70's all being in the public domain right now for example. People can freely duplicate off-patent products galore from that time period, but not the music. What's wrong with this picture? Is the value of the transistor any less valuable than the value of Mickey Mouse or a Beatles song? The big companies won out in getting the US government to extend copyright protection for ungodly long durations and now they act surprised when people find it unreasonable and just ignore those copyrights.

[timfarney]

What's wrong with this picture? Is the value of the transistor any less valuable than the value of Mickey Mouse or a Beatles song?

Yeah, I think it is. A transistor patented a couple of years ago is probably obsolete today. The Beatles catalog probably still outsells most of the new stuff released in 2006. Why should the companies that manufacture, market and distribute the discs get rich off of George Harrison's work, but not his son? Should there be reasonable limits? Maybe. Maybe anyone should be able to perform or even record covers of material without fees after the death of the author. But reproduction and sales of the original recordings should, I think, be protected for at least the first generation of the author's heirs. Or am I misunderstanding copyright law?

Tim

[Russell Letson]

I've followed the arguments about copyright term, nature of rights, and so on (or tried to anyway), and it seems to me that Paul K's reading of the driving forces behind current copyright law is on the, uh, money: both the term extensions and the digital copyright upgrade (DCMA) to the old law serves the corporations that came to control huge catalogs of movies and music--and in music especially, these are aggregators, not creators, looking to protect assets and maximize return on investment. About the only part of all this that might serve an artist or his estate is the extension of the term to X years after the original owner's death (currently 100, I think)--and even that includes different terms for corporations and natural persons. The argument that 1) it's reasonable for a creator to want to leave something to his heirs and 2) we're living longer than we were when the old terms were specified does make some sense. But it also seems pretty obvious that the "Mickey Mouse protection" extension from 75 to 100 years came at the behest of Disney and similar outfits, and that when the next deadline heaves into view there will be yet another demand for extended protection.

Then there's the interesting matter of trademarks, which need never expire--imagine being able to sell early Mickey Mouse cartoons but not being allowed to use the name. And notice that some artists have started trademarking their names--Harlan Ellison (tm) for one. So a century or so hence you could market a digital edition of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" but not be allowed put the author's name on it because the inheritor corporation retained owership of the trademark. But I digress.

The trickiest part of this whole business isn't even who-gets-paid-for-how-long--it's who-dictates-conditions-of-use, which is a big part of the DCMA, which criminalizes things like even *discussing* encryption schemes in technical terms. It's illegal to circumvent data-protection schemes, even when traditional fair-use principles say that you are entitled to, say, make a backup copy or extract a sample for inclusion in a review or scholarly publication. This goes beyond the (I think over-aggressive) assertion of use rights that results in music publishers insisting on formal permissions for quoting a couple lines of a song in a story or novel (or demanding extortionate payments for same)--it makes it a crime to bust encryption or copy-protection, period. And increasingly the "rights control" tech is built right into the playback/display hardware--high-def video users are already struggling with no-copy flags as well as technical issues surrounding connecting devices.

I'm a writer and thus have an obvious stake in the protection of intellectual property (work-for-hire contracts--boo! hiss!), but the kind of work I do also requires reasonable access to and use of other creators' products. If I were writing a book about film or TV instead of Hawaiian music, the permissions and fees would be so complicated and expensive that the project would be impossible. Which reminds me--Chapter 3 needs my attention, so enough.

[timfarney]

FWIW, I agree that it's probably more about protecting the profits of corporations than the rights of artists. But the rights of artists are all wound up in the same laws. Another 100 years of protection for Mickey? Nah. No need for that. But what Doug is proposing, or probably not really proposing, probably hasn't even thought through, but is inherent in the "there's no such thing as intellectual property" would be extremely damaging to the arts.

Now, go get to work on that chapeter.

Tim

[PaulKay]

[quote author=timfarney board=tempttt thread=1170952208

A transistor patented a couple of years ago is probably obsolete today.
[/quote]

Funny thing about your argument Tim is that you made my point for me. If the transistor were protected to the same extent that copyrights protect music, the transistor very likely WOULD NOT be obsolete today because nobody else could build off that work. They wouldn't have been able to invent "transistors on a chip" like ICs withought paying a royalty on the initial transistor patent for many many years. And every and all improvements would be paying royalties to this day on that original patent. And any and all products built with transistor technology in it would have to pay a mechanical royalty on every unit sold!!!

Technological progress would most certainly be seriously impeded if it were protected like copyrights. So one could easily argue that constraining intellectual property also constrains progress in music, art, etc. Somebody who writes a song with x number of notes that match a copyrighted song better watch out. Just ask George Harrison.

Why shouldn't the children of the transistor patent benefit from their father's original work. That argument goes both ways my friend.

Another interesting irony in all this is that patents have such a short protection period because it was deemed "in the public interest or public good" to free patented work for future advancement. But the ability to build off musical works is NOT in the public interest? Apparently so. So one could then conclude that musical works have less intrinsic value to the public good. If that's the case, why protect it 93 years longer? Why protect it at all?