14 responses so far ↓

• 1 trav // Jan 22, 2003 at 1:57 pm

  If you thought we had a constitution before, then this should be your wakeup call.

  There’s a great article in the WSJ that talks about the risks to personal privacy from this ruling. Unfortunately, its subscription-only, so you’ll have to settle for this soft treatment:
  Yahoo’s weak take

• 2 nic // Jan 22, 2003 at 2:13 pm

  Um..what on earth does this have to do with the Constitution? Yes, some of our rights are probably being curtailed by Herr Ashcroft in his authoritarian pursuit of national security, but I’m not sure any rights have been infringed here. The whole Napster thing always looked like theft to me anyway.

• 3 trav // Jan 22, 2003 at 5:17 pm

  oh god, do we have to go down this road?

  copyrighting of recorded music is intellectual theft, as has been since Edison. the record companies have been holding out the revenue received for record sales from artists since the dawn, and artists have not done well as a result. I mean, geez—look at Wacko Jacko.

  now, suddenly, everyone can copy and distribute recorded music for free, thereby eliminating the chokehold the record companies have had on the music industry for most of a century. The labels see the handwriting on the wall, and have responded in the manner to which the media conglomerates have become accustomed: they sue the living shit out of everybody to block your rights to privacy, prohibiting distribution of music—a work of art in which they had no creative input—which they nevertheless consider their own property.

  It’s not just the RIAA that’s in on this. The movie distribution sector is mobilized in support as well, paranoid that they’ll lose control of their ability to charge you $11 to see Cathy Bates’ jubblies and then tell you it’s a ‘challenging performance’. If that emperess ain’t wearing new clothes, then who is?

  This is just the latest in a decades-long pattern by the media establishment to choke off competing distribution channels via any means necessary. When it was private firms blatantly pirating stuff back before the 90’s, they either sued them out of existence in California’s tailor-fitted copyright fantasyland of a legal maze, or they bought them out and brought the channel in house.

  With the advent of the internet, they couldn’t absorb the distribution channel (since the dist channel is the Government itself, and they aren’t quite that big yet), so they instead sued the gatekeepers in a tactic borrowed from the ambulance-chasing soak-the-rich malpractice lawyers that introduced the lunacy that the most successful medical system in the history of the world needed reform. Wake up, kids, it’s not the medical system that needs reform, it’s the torts that have shackled it in the chains of minimum exposure and enslaved it to the Fieldmaster of Malpractice Litigation.

  The question remains: What happens when the PRC starts funneling copies of Britney Spears Tuesday Porn Night over its own domestic ISPRC onto the web as the local dons turn a blind eye, flooding the Web with cheap shots (sic) that render any revenue from hollywood-sanctioned exploitation impossible? Are they going to be able to employ ambulance-chaser litigation against China under the WTC? Don’t make me laugh. Will they instead provoke us into war—”I want my Pay TV”—using ink and ethernet by the barrel? If we don’t re-visualize our tort system and identify the bright line between the Institution of the Press and the business of the media, then the very cabal of extortionists and thieves forcing a phone company to name names of somebody who called a few friends and played a song for them over the line will slide down the slope until it feels free to wag our dog.

  Remember the Maine, because Big Media would rather you forget.

• 4 NAME WITHHELD FEARING INCARCERATION // Jan 22, 2003 at 5:47 pm

  Truth is, it’s a losing battle for the industry bastards.

  My music collection hasn’t increased by 600+ cds in the last few months because of downloading. That’s happened because I have a portable 20 gig hard drive/mp3 player that USBs into both PCs and Macs, letting me dump and aquire music from friends with digital collections in a snap. The result for artists? I’ve been turned on to a ton of non-corporate music I would’ve never heard and have spent a lot more on concert tix. Playing field levels. That seems like a good thing to me, especially since only the top .002% of musicians ever actually make money on CDs to begin with. It’s a beautiful, ungraceful death for the suits and I’m glad to be a part of it.

  By the way Scotty, if the RIAA asks you to turn over my name after their robots pick up on this post, please think of my poor children and take one for the team.

• 5 tone // Jan 22, 2003 at 8:53 pm

  wow. i am just panting here on the floor.

  where’s my thorazine?

• 6 nic // Jan 22, 2003 at 10:41 pm

  I still don’t see any evidence that this person’s rights were violated.

• 7 trav // Jan 23, 2003 at 9:09 am

  I’m no copyright lawyer, but the slippery-slope implication of this ruling is that you can be held liable for any playing of a CD you buy, if it is recorded. Worse, information you submit under well-established ISP privacy agreements is now available to any entity that believes you might be violating their notion of a copyright online. This includes potential hard drive seizure, monitoring of email, personal credit history and online purchase patterns, etc etc.

  How would you like the fact that you could have all of those things checked and seized without warning, for downloading, say, a jpg off the web, sug?

  What this person did in equivalent was call a friend and record a tape of a song his friend played over the phone. The only difference was that he used a computer instead of an earpiece, so the recording was better.

  For that, RIAA was allowed to take all of the personal information that he submitted to start his Verizon account, assumedly under a privacy agreement that had a clause against illegal materials. But is broadcasting or receiving broadcasts of legal material illegal?

  The endgame of this is that the record labels are working towards a per-listen charge for every song under their bullshit copyrights, and even conventional radio will go away when digital satellite radio hits the big time. The reaction then will be that nobody except the worst pop music manufactures will record with them, meaning that the creative acts out there will resort to independent channels for music distribution. Then the record labels will set up a partnership with the big ISPs to block music distribution outside of industry-approved channels. Then they force those channels into every public place they can, to give you no choice but to listen to what they produce and approve. They’ll establish a legal construct to institutionalize it, if they can get their hands on a few congressional stooges.

  In the meantime, the true believers will go back to listening to Bessie Smith 78s on their Victrolas, because her records have lapsed into the public domain despite Disney’s effort to extend its own copyrights over images and product into perpetuity.

• 8 scotty the body // Jan 23, 2003 at 11:01 am

  yeah, how about that Disny “Sonny BOno” thing?

  Basically, what they’re saying is “we haven’t made all the money we’d like to make off this, so we’d like to change copyright laws.”

  Unbelievable.

• 9 trav // Jan 23, 2003 at 12:53 pm

  The principle behind the 70-year copyright rule is that the item falls into the public domain roughly after the time that the first adult generation at the inception of the copyright goes feeding the trees.

  The same rule applies to the census detail schedules, on the basis of right to privacy. Otherwise, nobody would provide any useful information to census takers.

  Turn that logic on its head and tell me that it’s good for private firms to be liable for privately-submitted information.

  One other item of interest: Suppose that the dude who gets busted for distributing or downloading this crap offers a defense on the basis of the fact that, in publishing his written word online, he’s a contributing member of the Press establishment, and as such, his anonymity is sacred. Where does that leave the media beasts now?

• 10 Kenny // Jan 23, 2003 at 1:36 pm

  Hillary Rosen must think it’s a losing battle:
  http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?guid=%7BD9504256-147E-4021-9880-F4717119B9DB%7D&siteid=myyahoo&dist=myyahoo

• 11 tone // Jan 23, 2003 at 9:06 pm

  well,

  “the slippery-slope implication of this ruling is that you can be held liable for any playing of a CD you buy, if it is recorded.”

  that’s already the case (assuming you mean recorded without permission) and has been for a long time. what sucks is, now they can catch your ass.

  the only thing they can subpeona is i.d. information. nobody can check out your online purchases. we’re not talking about the police.

  they could seize your computer – only after they prove you were willfully trying to gain financially. and you could go to jail.

  “But is broadcasting or receiving broadcasts of legal material illegal?” – nope.

  i’ll read the case and report back later.

• 12 Anonymous // Jan 25, 2003 at 12:42 pm

  i feel like maybe i can offer a framework for arguement on this deal. here we go.

  this case seems to be more about what is speech on the internet (and i think that arguing file swapping of illegally copied music is speech is a losing proposition) and what activities will remain anonymous over the internet, and under what circumstances.

  trading music files over the internet violates the rights of copyright holders anyway you look at it. copyright infringement has been illegal for a long, long, long time. whether or not musicians get rail-roaded when they sign away copyright to record companies is a whole different issue.

  this case represents the first time the record companies have tried to use a special subpeona power under the digital millenium copyright act to get the identity of a user from an isp. the isps (i mean ISPs) are arguing a technical point in the dmca to say that p2p file swapping doesn’t qualify for the special subpeona power. so then, how would a copyright owner get the identity of an alleged infringer from an isp without the dmca? why is the dmca subpeona power more to the riaa’s liking?

  this is critical. and i think this is where you have to decide a few things. first, you must ask, is there any point at which activity occuring at an ip address is so demonstably illegal that the identity of the user should be revealed? if you say that some things qualify (could be child pornography, could be illegal file swapping), then you must ask, what safeguards in the accusation process will protect against fishing expeditions?

  now i could bore you with the difference between getting a subpeona under the dmca and getting one the traditional way. but would you keep reading?

  here’s the old rule:
  http://www2.law.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/foliocgi.exe/frcp/query=%5Bjump!3A!27rule45!27%5D/doc/%7B@509%7D?

  here’s the new one, designed specifically for catching copyright infringers:
  http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/512.html
  (pan down to section (h))

  if anyone gives a shit about what is different, i’ll resond to that.

  my initial reading is that the dmca subpeona is more efficient and has some pretty decent safeguards against fishing expeditions.

  so, the constitution is just fine. and remember, there are some other huge industry and lobbying forces that will keep the riaa in check.

  as for extending copyright protection periods, that disney stuff was indeed horrendous bullshit.

• 13 tone // Jan 25, 2003 at 12:51 pm

  oh, and i wanted to address this one:
  “One other item of interest: Suppose that the dude who gets busted for distributing or downloading this crap offers a defense on the basis of the fact that, in publishing his written word online, he’s a contributing member of the Press establishment, and as such, his anonymity is sacred. Where does that leave the media beasts now?”

  well, freedom of press doesn’t allow you to engage in illegal activity. but if he is saying that he copied music in the process of researching a news story, then he might qualify for the “fair use” exception.

  also, that would present the same problem the subpeona for identity raises. how do we know that he is using the law in good faith?

• 14 nic // Jan 27, 2003 at 11:40 am

  thank you

  that was more or less my gut reaction on this issue

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