RIAA to Sue You Now 831
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC reports that apparently the music industry feels so satisfied with going after file swapping software makers that they want to sue the pants off the file swappers themselves. Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention." This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly
illegal.
Gaaah! FUD from hell (Score:4, Informative)
I expect this from MSNBC, but this is a WSJ article.
Advantage of Gnutella (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Advantage of Gnutella (Score:2, Informative)
Re:After suing 20,000 people... (Score:4, Informative)
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your 0.02, so :P
Um, not anymore... [yahoo.com]
Bury them in proof, nice programming exercise. (Score:3, Informative)
The downside of course, is that filesharing users would get sick of downloading garbage files, but then again it also might push people to start using P2P for legit purposes...
Re:Interesting Question... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, if the RIAA-vs-mp3.com case is precedent. In that case, mp3.com had a CD, and a challenge-response protocol virtually guaranteed that a user had the CD. But my.mp3.com transmitting a song to the user, was found to be copyright infringement.
Already Happening (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's All Thanks to Slashdot Polls... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/
Re:Advantage of Gnutella (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, Hilary Rosen is a gigantic fucking stupid neanderthal cunt who should be shot into outer space naked.
If I were a label musician, well, first off I'd be completely fucked having sold my career to the mafia, but second, I'd be wondering why an organization that I subsidize "for my protection" is spending my money to stop people from hearing about my music.
I haven't bought a single CD in the past two years unless I previewed songs via mp3. I buy far more CDs than the average person. Copyright infringement has made me spend more money, not less, on the CDs I want to own. It's also completely eliminated purchases I'm not satisfied with and made me a happier customer.
It's also let me buy music I never would have known about otherwise, because the music industry does such a shitty job of letting people know about its artists. Imagine a bookstore that had the best-seller list in display cases, the vast majority of their inventory in a back room where you can't see it or know what's there, and no ability to browse whatsoever (though you can listen to someone read chapters aloud in between endless advertisements). You have just imagined the current operation of the music industry and their partners in crime, the playlist managers. And you've just seen how phenomenally fucking stupidly the music industry is behaving; someone has set up a lending library around the corner and they are trying to shut it down on the theory that one person bought it and others are enjoying it for free (the CARP fees for webcasting are an offer to take $1 from the library each time a book is loaned (for free)). Don't tell me that getting mp3s and burning CDs from it is stealing unless you want to get smacked; it's like going to the library and photocopying a book; you aren't likely to do it to save money, because if you could just buy the damn thing it would be much quicker and easier and possibly even cheaper and definitely better than making a copy. ($20 CDs kinda fuck up that equation, but I don't recall the part of copyright law that says you can raise prices indefinitely without consequence)
If the RIAA really went after individuals, they'd be shooting their best customers and their best new promotional vehicle since radio. Really smart!
they threatened me back in 2000 (Score:1, Informative)
>We have received a complaint from the Recording Industry Association
of
>America that you are hosting an unauthorized music site using your
@Home
>Network service for connecting to the Internet. It is located at:
>
>> ftp://000:000@127.0.0.1/
>> This site, which was accessed on 11/07/2000 at 12:47 p.m. (EST),
offers
>> approximately 650 sound recordings for download. Many of these
recordings
>> are owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists
as
DMX,
>> Dr. Dre, Eminem, Fatboy Slim and Nas.
>>
>We are requesting that you immediately remove any files which you are
>distributing in violation of copyright. Please reply to this email
with
>your assurances that these infringing activities will not continue.
Re:Where is this illegal? (Score:5, Informative)
From your comment I can infer that you feel buying the cd/tape/mp3 grants you copyright ownership and, therefore, distribution rights of said contents.
It does not. Fair use and personal use are not the same thing as putting songs into file sharing systems where who knows how many people will access them. Why do you think Diamond won the lawsuit over the RIO mp3 player and Napster lost theirs?
Libraries walk a fine line on this issue. It troubles me greatly that the book publishers and other industries (assuming the rumors are true) are trying to limit libraries' ability to provide materials to the public. More and more the U.S. drifts toward a "if you do not have money you are worthless" attitude toward its own citizens. That's why the health care in this country is so fscked up.
But I'm straying from the topic. I think the difference between a library's CD collection and file sharing is that only one person can have a copy of the cd at a time. Yes, 1000 people might check the CD out over the time it survives in the collection, but 1000 people don't have it all at once. Isn't file-sharing usage somewhere in the millions of people? That's a different scope now isn't it?
More importantly, you only get the CD for a limited time. If you don't return it you are usually charged the cost of replacing it.
Neither of those are true for file-sharing and I think they are significant differences.
-r
Re:Going after users/file sharing (Score:1, Informative)
Mostly Playboy and Penthouse filing suits against people who regularly post half their back-catalog (and probably the other smaller pornographers just send Cousin Vinny over with a sledgehammer). But yeah, most pr0n industry types understand that this ain't gonna kill them off or really crimp their revenue stream. The value they offer isn't so much in the material itself, but in ad/spam free collections, live chats, requests, rare/uncommon archives, complete sets, constant availability, etc etc. None of those are available from "free" pr0n sites or usenet.
Then, for better or worse, there's little way for users to tell who is a legitimate poster of pr0n and who isn't, so it's basically finders-keepers on that score. But if you don't have explicit permission (no pun intended) to share pr0n, don't. You will be engaging in unauthorized duplication.