RIAA Lawsuits from a John Doe's Perspective 629
An anonymous reader writes "Nick Mamatas was sued by and subsequently settled with the RIAA for file sharing. He wrote a piece for the Village Voice describing his experience, and he goes on to briefly discuss the implications of "John Doe" file-sharing lawsuits. He argues that the labels are using these suits as a source of profit; he also claims that when his lawyer contacted the RIAA to discuss the suit, he was put in touch with a regular staffer, not another lawyer. 'It feels like they're doing a volume business,' Mamatas' lawyer notes."
Shareholder Profit (Score:3, Interesting)
Proof? (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, why aren't people going to court over these lawsuits? I don't see why you would even need a lawyer. Just go to court and say "I didn't do anything illegal. Show me proof beyond a reasonable doubt that I did."
I mean, other than a record company CLAIMING that someone at some IP address was sharing certain songs, what proof is there? If something goes missing from my garage, I can't just point a finger at a neighbor and tell the judge "no, I KNOW he took it - I saw it!". You have to have more proof than that. Something unbiased and irrefutable, preferably from an independant party.
Short of confiscating your computer, finding an installed P2P application ACTUALLY RUNNING AT THE TIME, with a configured shared directory full of copyrighted songs that you are not legally licensed to distribute and your software is actively serving them to active downloaders at the time that it is being viewed by a judge - what proof is there?
Another way to share files. Legally. (Score:4, Interesting)
One point on the Riaa lawsuits . Is it really like breaking into BEST BUY and stealing CDs' and movies ? Aren't these MP3's,Camcorder tapings, Divix, AVI and Mpegs just average to bad copies. If so then how could it be counted as theft ? Shouldn't there be a consideration to quality. Wouldn't you equate this to recording RADIO with tape ?
Re:Proof? (Score:3, Interesting)
Therein lies the problem, you did nothing illegal. This is a civil case and not a criminal one. Reasonable doubt is not the standard here. Basically you're looking at a "Preponderance of the evidence". Basically the judge listens to you, then the RIAA and decides who sounds better. So if the RIAA has anything better than "you did it", you better be just as well prepared and then some...
What about the insecure wireless router defense? (Score:1, Interesting)
Thank you DirecTV (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why are these suits wrong, exactly? (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't put me down on the side of the RIAA - mass subpeonas are a cheesey way of using a loophole in the law. But don't lionize the people who got caught. Civil disobedience is one thing, being stupid and getting caught at it is another. Everybody knows what the RIAA is doing...so by now, the people getting caught are just playing the odds and losing. And I'm still trying to figure out exactly what civil right the music industry is violating anyway...being a bunch of luddites and treating your customers like criminals is bad business, but it's not trampling on anybody's rights.
I bet the musicians will see none of this (Score:4, Interesting)
100% profit (after lawyer's fees)!
Re:Someone tell me if I am wrong, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
are you trying to be funny? copyright was not intended to give basically perpetual profit to a corperation. it was originaly, what, 7 years? it's now life of artist, plus 75 years. that's 75 years that *record company* is able to sell the song exclucively at pure profit. no artist royalites.
your copyright system is a equally screwed up as your patent system. both need a serious overhaul, soon.
Re:Why are these suits wrong, exactly? (Score:3, Interesting)
1) It is very difficult to really prove actual loss from people downloading music. The problem is the RIAA wants music to be a commodity (which would have a reasonably predictable demand and intrinsic value) when it's actually a luxury (which is subject to people simply not buying it anymore). Because of this, it's almost impossible to link change in sales with illegal downloads. That makes P2P, and the people who use it, little more than a scapegoat.
2) Given the number of ways one can obtain music illegally, it seems likely that getting an accurate estimate of illegal traffic would be nearly impossible.
3) Given 1 and 2, it seems wholly impossible to produce a realistic dollar value on each illegally downloaded song. You can't conclusively prove that you lost X revenue, and there is no way to know that one song has been illegally copied Y times, so how can you claim that each illegal copy of the song is worth X/Y dollars? This is how the value of the lawsuits are determined, and usually for extremely unrealistic amounts of cash. If the lawsuits were for a few dollars a song that might be one thing, but they're suing for hundreds or thousands of dollars a song...
4) The lawsuits are not focused at the source of illegal music, they are targeted at the market, in a sense. To make a slightly inaccurate analogy: You can jail every drug user you find, but it won't get the dealer off the streets. The RIAA hopes to scare the public into not downloading music anymore, but obviously the people that download music NOW don't give a rat's ass about the legality of it, so that isn't going to work.
That being said, maybe not charging $25-$30 for a craptacular CD would improve their sales... Viable and profitable alternatives for legal music distribution are staring the RIAA right in the face and they just don't seem to care!
=Smidge=
Re:It doesn't matter .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's a profit center!! (Score:3, Interesting)
lawyers fees are profit in that scenario, profit for the lawyers. they're running a nice little operation that doesn't need any major effort from them(just hire a helper to answer the phone as seen, have a printer printing out the complaints and off you go - practically printing money for your law-firm once you get the rights from riaa to start doing it).
No Different than the DirecTV Lawsuits (Score:4, Interesting)
The **AA suing people is no different than what DirecTV [slashdot.org] has been doing [cnn.com] for a few years [directvdefense.org].
The "problem" with these lawsuits is that it will cost you more to defend them than to settle.
Additionally, both the **AA and DirecTV typically sue you civilly where your guilt or innocence is based on a "preponderance of the evidence" [law.com], not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is, if their heavy-handed attorneys can make some jury full of idiots think it's 51% likely you did it, then you lose. You get no court appointed attorney and you don't get to plead the 5th ammendment without any negative inference. These **AA attorneys have these cases cookie-cuttered/boiler-plated out and don't care whether you are guilty or innocent. They care about billable hours and whether they think there is enough evidence for them to win.
And when you lose under the DMCA, you lose big time. You not only risk hefty fines, but attorney fees that are often in the tens of thousands. Look at the PACER reports of those people who try and fight these corporations in court -- the defendent typically has one attorney while the plaintiff often has four to six attorneys on their side. Is it NO WONDER nearly everyone settles, even if they are innocent?
So learn from the mistakes of those poor slobs, many who were innocent, but settled anyways.
BE ANONYMOUS.
Because if you get sued by one of the above, you always lose.
If you are gonna do anything that even remotely has the risk of you getting targeted for a lawsuit by one of these big corporations that could care less if 10% of the people they sue are innocent, make sure there is NO WAY it can get tracked back to you.
Profits != illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
> file sharing is bigger than ever--and so are the
> record industry's profits. As a result, it's hard
> to see the suits as anything other than a
> wrongheaded attempt by the old media industry to
> push upstart innovators out of the marketplace
> rather than working with them."
This is a ridiculous argument.
If the record industry is making bigger and bigger profits, that in no way obliges them to ignore illegal downloads of their product.
Like it or not, it is their product; they *own* it. If someone starts distributing it for free, then they'd be mad not to try to stop it happening.
For the record, I think IP laws, as exist in much of the world, are fundamentally flawed and will be substantially revised within the next several years. Business models that they encourage - companies like Eolas with no employees and no tangible assets, holding patents with ridiculous scope, capable of suing huge corporates and/or stopping development dead - doesn't benefit society at all and won't be acceptable to either individuals or major companies in the long run.
The record companies will die out in their present form, because they can't put the genii back in the bottle now. All they've ever offered as pluses to music creators are marketing and distribution; the Internet already handles distribution better than the record companies could ever do, so all they now bring to the table is marketing.
At this point, many established groups - the ones who generate most of the profit for music companies - think they're now big enough to do their own marketing. If these groups stand up and say "We'll do our own marketing", what does the music business have to offer them?
Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of is underwriting their touring costs; a really big group (think "U2") spends big dollars putting a tour together, and would probably appreciate someone else underwriting the tour and would be happy to share the profit on that basis.
insecure access point (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It doesn't matter .... (Score:0, Interesting)
The problem with file sharing is that it allows the consumer to obtain the music at a price (free) that the record company paid real money to make. Additionally, the consumer obtained a product without the consent of the record company--any legitimate business transaction requires consent from both the seller and the buyer.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. If all consumers obtained music from the record company without the company's consent, then there would be no economic incentive to produce music. The result: No new music would be produced by the record company.
At this point, the Slashdot crowd starts talking about how people should make music "for the public good" or because "people just want to make music for fun". These kinds of economic approaches were tried in the 20th century, and universally failed.
Re:I don't feel his pain (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course they have a right to let non-lawyer emploees handle assembling case records, fielding calls from opponent lawyers, and so on. The US has a legal right to send its troops into battle armed with nothing more than sharpened sticks and trash can lids,* but what does it say about the balance of power if we were fighting any foe where that would work?
Letting non-lawyers handle pre-trial relations with opposed lawyers is generally considered just as dumb as going into court without lawyers at all. It's suicidal - UNLESS you have such OVERWHELMING POWER THAT YOU OWN THE LEGAL SYSTEM. If I were a shareholder in any RIAA related company, I'd be asking what the hell they were doing, taking risks like that - OR - I'd know there were solid bribes and blackmail in place to let them get away with such apparent foolish risk taking.
You are welcome to draw your own conclusions as to why the RIAA client corps aren't getting upset about the non-lawyer involvement. Maybe most of them just aren't watching all that closely and in a few months we'll start seeing some investors making a (IMHO much needed) reassesment of the RIAA's strategy, or maybe this should be all the proof anyone needs that the whole thing is about power and not justice.
* Actually, I'm not sure the Geneva convention allows sharpened sticks, unless they are sterilized regularly.
Re:It doesn't matter .... (Score:1, Interesting)
Due to not being able to secure a job after spending over $50k in student loans to get a piece of paper framed on my wall that supposedly is a declaration of how smart I am and how damn hard I had to work to be recognized for it. I still have to pay back the money the government lent me to go to school, however.
It's been 2 years this April since I graduated, and I still haven't found a job in my career path. My education acquired training is fast becoming obsolete (I was in computer science, after all), and the student loan interest relief program that the government has graciously offered for graduates who have not yet secured gainful employment is going to run out eventually (currently, it's the only thing that's kept my loan in good standing for the amount of time it has been).
The number of former students who are and/or will be declaring bankruptcy in Canada is absolutely staggering, and I anticipate that unless our government does one whollop of a massive job and career creation program in the very near future, I imagine that the student loan program (which was the only thing that even enabled me to go to school in the first place) will be cut, forever, and only the people who can already afford to go to post secondary will get higher education. In a country that's supposed to be fairly socialist, this isn't a very pretty situation.
I give it 5, maybe 10 years.
Re:I don't feel his pain (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm...I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It doesn't matter .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Shareholder Profit (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't feel his pain (Score:3, Interesting)
- His complaint is that while the RIAA
- claims these lawsuits are being filed to combat online filesharing the reality is that they're doing it to make money. He's not trying to say he shouldn't have gotten in trouble when he was caught. I would say he does have a ligitimate complaint about his lawyer not being able to speak to a lawyer on the RIAA's side. If they're working out a legal settlement both parties need a lawyer to protect everyone. That the RIAA doesn't seem to care enough to even do that speaks volumes about their real intents with these lawsuits.
He was caught with his hand in the cookie jar and doesn't like it. Well, sorry. If he did not want to be sued and pay up he should have not violated the law. He, like everyone else, must face the consequences of their actions.- Precisely, and if the RIAA is indeed filing these lawsuits just to make money (aka extortion through the courts) then THEY need to pay the penalty for that as well. Just because the guy was breaking the law sharing music doesn't mean the RIAA suddenly can ignore any and all laws.
Calling downloading "civil disobedience" is an insult to those, like the civil rights protesters and the protesters in Tiananmen Square, who have used civil disobedience to try to right the wrongs of society.- I disagree. This whole mess is making public how very wrong our legal system has become. Our congressmen pass laws that benefit the corporations while ignoring the citizens. The public domain has been obliterated since copyright keeps getting extended. Our fair use rights are being taken away in the name of fighting piracy. In some ways these are more insidious than previous wrongs, in those cases the wrongs were more noticeable, these current ones get hidden by smoke, mirrors and lots of FUD.
File sharing is stealing to avoid paying the cost, not civil disobedience--it directly benefits the protester. Civil rights protesters did not directly benefit from their protests. The only thing they got was a change in the laws--the whole point of their protest..- Well frankly did you even stop to think about that sentence before you wrote it? It's a huge nonsequitor. Yes the civil rights protestors benefited from their protests. (And I'm talking about the US Civil Rights movement against segregation of blacks and whites.) They got to stop being segregated among other things. Nowadays the whole attitude that blacks are inferior is almost completely gone. I'd say that's a HUGE benefit, it made their lives (and the lives of th children) much better.
If you steal music, then, as a law breaker, what right do you have to complain about the RIAA?No, they did not just get a chage in the laws, they got a change in attitude towards them and their plight. All this filesharing, even if not done for protest reasons, is bringing attention to bear on the out of control copyright laws and the power of corporations. That's a VERY good thing, as it's starting to make even folks who aren't tech savvy mad as well.
By your logic, no one who was falsely arrested/prosecuted would ever be able to speak up about it and end up being punished for a crime they didn't commit. They'd also not be able to complain that the punishment was more severe than the crime warranted. Look what happened in Iraq in Abu Gharib when the prisoners there had no way to complain about their captors' treatment of them. Granted it's not on the same scale but it's the same point. If the RIAA is making you homeless because you can't afford to fight them (even if you're really innocent) then by God you better be complaining.
If no one complains, nothing will ever change, it's as simple as that.
Re:I don't feel his pain (Score:3, Interesting)
The value in a copy of some media is in two things: the cost it took to make it the original, and the cost it took to make the copy of it.
That should really be, "The value in a copy of some media is in two things: the market price to make the original and the market price to make the copy of it."
It is a subtle difference but an important one - value is in the eye of the buyer, not the creater. A movie might cost $50M to make, but if it sucks dodo ass, and only ten people pay the $10 ticket price, then its value is only $100. The reverse is also true, if some genius makes a film for $1000 and 50M people buy tickets for it, then the value is $500M. Which leads to my next point:
True artists (and true scientists for that matter) do things for the love of their craft. The only reason they need to be paid for it is so that they can afford to do their craft.
I like to believe in idealism as much as the next guy on slashdot, but I have no faith in a business model founded on idealism. Cold hard cash is what makes the world go 'round. Fortunately for both of our perspectives - getting paid up front for creation works just as well for the idealist as it does for the greediest, pseudo-artist money-grubber.
"Stars" (defined as having the "star power" to draw a large audience) should have no problem asking for, and getting, very large sums of money in exchange for the creation of new art. Sums VASTLY out of proportion with the actual cost to create that art. As long as they can convince people that their art is "worth it" they should have no problem raking in the dough.
Create a Honeypot (Score:2, Interesting)
If it's on filename alone then someone who has the necessary time and resources could create a honeypot experiment. AFAIK this is not illegal but could give the pretext for being tested in court.
I'm no expert but I can see it going something like this:
Create several gigs of files composed of random gibberish
Files should be suitably named & sized to catch the eye of the watchers
Take MD5 sums so the file can be later verified by an expert.
Share on a popular network
Wait
h are_settlements/ [theregister.co.uk] has set in here as well.
If suitable documentation was kept it would blow the RIAA evidence out of the water. Prosecution would also become that much more difficult if a computer forensics expert was required for every case.
Note: Personally I don't illegaly download music and don't necessarily approve of those who do, however I disagree even more with the strong-arm tactic of the RIAA.
Also I don't reside in the US, but the rot http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/04/bpi_files
Financing the arts and sciences (Score:3, Interesting)
I envisage a world where people are not caught up in the busy-day-to-day work of just surviving, and have free time to do what they love and share it with others. Our society seems wealthy enough that we're supposedly not concerned strictly with survival anymore, and are making leaps and bounds in the arts and sciences - so why are so many people still working their asses off doing things they hate? Where is all this extra effort going? It seems to me it's either profiting only a few fortunate individuals ("Remember, your time is our money!"), or a lot of it is just wasted effort in an inefficient system. Or both.
Think about it. Naturally, we tend to want to get done what needs to be done, and then have free time to do what we want. A lot of people want to be creative. If they had the time and means to be creative, they would be, simply because they *want to*, for its own sake. Profit does not have to be an incentive to do art, people simple need the economic ability to pursue it.
Are we really still so caught up with survival that we can't afford free time for art? How has civilization progressed at all if we're still spending all day - more than our ancestors used to, even - *just making ends meet*? Where is all this labor going?
If we as a civilization really can't afford to be doing this, then we just shouldn't be doing it. The reason why in ancient times wealthy patrons financed the arts without respect to "intellectual property" was because they wanted beauty in their world, and they were far enough removed from survival problems to be able to afford it. If a given society didn't have any people wealthy enough to afford it, art didn't get done, cause people were too preoccupied with things like food and shelter.
In our supposedly egalitarian society where we (in theory) strive not to have a few wealthy and powerful barons surrounded by masses of grovelling peasants, then if *anyone* is wealthy enough to be able to finance the arts (either their own works or the work of others), then *many* should be afforded the same priviledge. If we as a society aren't that wealthy, then we shouldn't be wasting effort that is better spent keeping people alive. But it seems to me that we as a society are plenty wealthy to keep everybody alive and comfortable and give them enough free time to pursue the arts for their own sake. So why don't we have that time? Where is it all going? What's the problem in this system?
One way or another, "intellectual property" like copyright just doesn't make any sense, and is a broken hack, a kludge, to try to allow equality opportunity to pursue the arts and sciences. Unfortunately like all hacks and kludged it is easily exploitable and is now being turned against its original purpose. It just doesn't work.
The only sensible way is to pay for the arts up front and allow for their free (as in speech) replication. In a ruthless cut-throat barbaric old-world kingdom, the wealthy princes could afford to finance the arts and give them away. In a supposedly advanced and egalitarian civilization like ours, we should all be able to afford it. So why can't we?