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RIAA PR Success = Kazaa Blowback and the Wounding of Innovation? |
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The RIAA's lawsuit effort is probably not making them too popular, but it is having another interesting and (unforseen to me) consequence - those being sued are getting upset not only with the RIAA but with Kazaa for seemingly misleading them into participating in illegal activity.
Read on for examples:
Frank Field's Furdlog has pointed out some interesting quotes from a WIRED article on the RIAA lawsuits (Rude Awakening for File Sharers):
"My mom paid $29.95 for Kazaa and assumed she was using a legitimate service," said Marilyn Rodell, whose mother is being sued. "How was she supposed to know the difference between Kazaa and something like Pressplay where you pay $9.95 a month?" ....
And many insisted they went out of their way to sign up and pay for a downloading service that they believed was legal.
Those thoughts were echoed by Vonnie Bassett from Redwood City, California, who said she assumed Kazaa was "a valid business" and was unaware that "its customers are allowed to do something illegal." ....
According to Marilyn Rodell, her mother played the songs she downloaded through Windows Media Player. She didn't realize those songs resided in a folder on her computer, a folder that was open to anyone who wanted to download a song from it through Kazaa.
"My mother has been painfully law-abiding all her life, and is beyond horrified that she became a criminal simply by subscribing to a service that appeared to promise her unlimited access to music, movies and books," Rodell said. ....
"Kazaa has a very pretty, very professional-looking Web page. I paid them a fee and assumed it was a legitimate way to buy music," said Karyn Columbine, a Manhattan resident who insists she was "shocked and scared" when she discovered that the fee she paid to Kazaa didn't cover legal music downloads.
The Boston Globe also has a similar article in which lawsuit target Nancy Kinchla, a clinical researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute said, "She [her teenage daughter] wasn't selling the music. They should really go after Kazaa or people who are making money by bootlegging CDs." (Dozens in state face RIAA suits).
Combined with the influential voice of such as Prof. Douglas Lichtman, who believes that Kazaa should be the proper party to be liable (see, Sue Kazaa Not Consumers?), this is a pretty good PR bonus for the RIAA. If Congress chooses to take action due to the large public outcry over these lawsuits, what action are they likely to take? Seems to me that their safest course of action (keep the RIAA happy, ameliorate the public outcry) may be to create large amounts of liability for file sharing networks and the technologies that support them. Because I am a fan of innovation and the freedom of programmers to create new and interesting tools, the "Freedom to Tinker" as its been called, I am strongly opposed to this and would rather see file sharers be sued.
Some might argue that we should have another solution, such as a compulsory license. However, given the many concerns, difficulties and opposition such a shift in copyright law would create, wouldn't it seem easier to Congress to make a law targeting Kazaa instead? There will be opposition to a law targeting Kazaa (it will likely be seen as overbroad by members of the software industry and the programming public), but I doubt there will be a politically viable alternative.
Although the RIAA has been hypocritical and disingenous, to say the least, in regard to trying to tie P2P to porn, given the above reactions of people being sued, it just might be part of an extremely clever plan of the RIAA's to get the law changed to outlaw Kazaa. These sorts of reactions by sued consumers might even be enough to sway some jurists as they consider the Kazaa case under appeal.
Perhaps complaining about the RIAA taking action against blatant copyright infringement is not the best course of action. Perhaps it would be better to acknowledge the RIAA's justifications for doing so and maintain a firm position against making technology providers liable for the misdeeds of their consumers.
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The problem is SUING kazaa (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, September 11 @ 11:58:26 EDT | Sharman networks, or whoever owns KaZaA this week, has made a mastery of avoiding lawsuits by: changing ownership of KaZaA, using shell companies, incorporating in places like Vanatu...
There is no question that KaZaA as a company is legally vulnerable and probably legally responsible, if not to the customers to the RIAA. It's just a measure of KaZaA's success at avoiding lawsuits that has caused the RIAA to go after the users. |
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Proposed Solution (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, September 11 @ 12:02:14 EDT | My proposed solution is to introduce pay-per-download sites, which would allow artists to charge a small fee. People will be more willing to pay to download tracks if they know the money is going directly to the artist, not subsidising the hype machine for the latest boy band / girl band / soap star turned pop star. Sure you've got the risk that they'll pay once and make many copies, but there has always been that risk with CDs, cassettes, LPs, reel-to-reel tape and 78s. And as any form of copy prevention will be ripped off by some means or another, I wouldn't even bother trying ..... just sell the files unprotected. Honest people wouldn't even think of illegally copying anything anyway. Imposing a copy prevention technology is more likely just to encourage people to try and crack it. |
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Re: RIAA PR Success = Kazaa Blowback and the Wounding of Innovation? (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, September 11 @ 12:29:56 EDT | Isn't Kazaa at fault for not stating that downloading music you don't own is illegal? I'm not talking about having it embedded within the EULA (few people bother to read it anyway) but a splash screen that pops up stating it.
I've never downloaded Kazaa due to the spyware in it, so I don't know if they say something about the legality of downloading copyrighted information.
Isn't it along the same lines as the warning labels on any appliance we buy. "Do not put hand in blender." Some things need to be said. |
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Riiight (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, September 11 @ 12:55:08 EDT | It sounds like these people are making excuses. Seems a little like "sue McDonalds because I'm fat".
It may actually be true that some people didn't realize they (not KaZza) were breaking the law. But ignorance isn't really an excuse. I'm sure they would be able to make that argument in court and maybe it would be taken into account when deciding how much they have to pay. |
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Users, not Kazaa are liable (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, September 11 @ 13:02:08 EDT | Obviously no one bothers to read the " End user license aggreement [www.kazaa.com]", just because the front of their website says that you can "Search for and download audio/music, document, image, playlist, software, and video files." doesn't mean that you can do this with everything.
The terms of use clearly states in section 2.6, that you can't use Kazza to "Transmit, access or communicate any data that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights of any party". |
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Re: RIAA PR Success = Kazaa Blowback and the Wounding of Innovation? (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, September 11 @ 15:21:43 EDT | It's always about their lawsuits... why does no one ever talk about the music the RIAA makes:
http://noneinc.com/RIAAEM/RIAAEM.html
PeterALopez
-part time music fan |
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Re: RIAA PR Success = Kazaa Blowback and the Wounding of Innovation? (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, September 12 @ 03:43:02 EDT | This "idea" sounds very strange to me. Sueing Kazaa for selling something with that you can download illegal data? Why no one sues the weapon industries for selling deadly guns?
Every few days, I tell my teammates that its illegal to copy copyrighted music or software - often I just hear : "Yes, I know but everyone does it...."
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Re: RIAA PR Success = Kazaa Blowback and the Wounding of Innovation? (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous on Friday, September 12 @ 08:20:08 EDT | The problems I see with the current round of RIAA lawsuits are:
- Imbalance of power: the RIAA has far more money to spend on lawyers than virtually any individual.
- Law enforcement by private entity: the sheer scale of P2P infringement makes it materially different from the more ordinary sorts of infringement (bootlegging, organized piracy) contemplated by the civil remedies provided for in current copyright law and makes this situation more analagous to a law enforcement situation than to the typical civil action.
- Inordinate potential damages: the RIAA could claim six-figure sums per file, far out of all proportion to the actual harm caused by an individual participant in a P2P network.
- Nearly impossible for wrongly accused to prove innocence: if a person were to be wrongly accused by the RIAA (I do not know that this has happened, but if these suits continue it will), they would have to defend themselves against the RIAA's high-priced attorneys in a protracted civil suit in order to clear themselves--something not possible for many potential defendants.
My thought is this: why not make file sharing-style infringement a criminal offense, but one that carries penalties more in line with, say, a parking ticket.
Yes, it sounds like a Bad Idea for both the RIAA and downloaders (criminalizing infringers and lowering penalties to insignificance), but hear me out.
The RIAA is still responsible for finding infringing downloads on offer. They then transmit the information to a law enforcement agencey (probably a department in the DOJ) who will obtain the necessary subpoenas/warrants to identify the individuals and issue citations for, say, $20 per file (the acutal number may be wrong, but you get the idea). Repeat offenders could face higher fines, while the prosecutor would be free to cut deals for first-time offenders by throwing out some counts in exchange for a guilty plea on others. A minimum fine ($100, $500--whatever makes sense) could be imposed to make it economically viable to prosecute even reletively small-time sharers.
After receiving the citation, the infringer would have the option of simply paying the fine, or of having a hearing. As the stakes are typically much lower than in a civil or most criminal proceeding (no jail time, no seven-figure remedies), the hearing could be a streamlined procedure not unlike traffic court, with an option for a full trial if the defendant so wishes (the trial might be mandatory in cases involving fines higher than some arbitrary dollar figure). Either way, a conviction or dismissal of charges would confer immunity from a civil suit based on the actions for which the individual was cited.
The monies collected would first go to paying for the bureaucracy necessary to run the system. Monies remaining could partially go to the government (as incentive to continue prosecuting the cases) with the lion's share going to the record companies for distribution to the artists, as do the fees currently collected on DAT and audio CDs.
What this achieves is the following:
- The accused now has the greater rights of a defendant in a criminal trial, rather than the more limited rights of a civil defendant.
- The prosecution is now being carried out by a government agency, ostensibly responsible to the public will and subject to the checks and balances that have evolved over the past 200+ years, rather than an industry association responsible only to its members--themselves corporations responsible only to shareholders whose only interest is in profits.
- The per-file fee is now capped at something more in line with the actual harm caused by a single file being made available for copying.
- The more streamlined hearing format would prevent the RIAA from dragging out a trial, burying a defendant under discovery requests and other bully tacti
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Re: RIAA PR Success = Kazaa Blowback and the Wounding of Innovation? (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Monday, September 29 @ 06:46:28 EDT | I don't buy this "I never knew it was illegal" crap. Were these people living in a cave when the RIAA threatened to sue MONTHS before they actually did? Were they oblivious to all the expensive "P2P is Stealing" campaigns put forth to win our hearts and make us think we're helping the artists?
Sorry, but if these people just ignored the signs, they got what was coming to them. They obviously weren't cut off from the rest of the world, because they were online long enough for the RIAA to scan hundreds of their MP3s that were shared online.
- "But I don't have time to waste reading these stupid EULAS!"
Now's the time to stop acting like dumb, oblivious sheep and work to change some of those laws. Either that, or pay your $10.000 settlement and move on. |
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