Jul 23 2003
RIAA lawsuits continued…
From the Boston Globe Online (emphasis mine):
| …like many students on college campuses in Boston, yesterday, the 19-year old said she’s going to keep downloading.”I would definitely have to know someone who got one” of the subpoenas, said Bedell-Healey, who lives in Needham. ”No, definitely not going to stop until I know someone who’s getting sued.” The RIAA has not specifically said what damages it will seek. But under federal law, it can ask for $750 to $150,000 for each illegally shared song.
The industry is demanding information from Boston College about three students, including two who used the screen names ”TheLastReal7” and ”Prtythug23,” who shared music using KaZaA, a program developed by Sydney, Australia-based Sharman Networks Ltd. In a subpoena addressed to MIT, the association is demanding the name, address, and phone number of a student who used the nickname ”crazyface” to download at least five songs, including Radiohead’s ”Idioteque” and Dave Matthews Band’s ”Ants Marching.” |
”These universities have chosen to litigate this in an attempt to deny copyright holders the right so clearly granted in Congress,” Lamy said, referring to the colleges’ refusal to release the names of the students.
I’m sorry. I just don’t see copyright brokers as the people who should win out in this war. The people want to download music, but they have no way to pay for it, legitimately, online. And paying $0.99/track on an 15 track disc for the electronic download somehow implies that it costs more to provide the electronic distribution than the distribution of a physical disk with a 12 page 4-color insert.
This all stinks of Corporate America, and I’m sad Eldred v. Ashcroft didn’t clear the courts. If I thought, for one moment, that the RIAA was actually representing The Artist (a la Everyman), then I’d feel differently. But this is sad and ridiculous.
One Response to “RIAA lawsuits continued…”
Amen, brother. I definitely think Lessig got the shaft. At the very least, it did give rise to the Creative Commons Project – but that’s small comfort in the light of this ridiculous behavior. (Have you had a chance to meet Professor Lessig yet? I got to hear him speak at SXSW this year. Wonderful guy, brilliant and very funny.)
As for MP3 sharing, my friend Derek recently had some great insights into the matter – if it’s legal for me to loan a friend a CD, and it’s legal for me to time-shift (a la TiVo) a recording to experience later, shouldn’t it be legal to loan a friend a CD and let them make a copy to experience later? The main hullabaloo the RIAA was making before was that Napster was encouraging piracy on a mass scale, right? Couldn’t you logically, legally scale back the sharing to a more personal, social-software level?
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in these recent lawsuits, all of this malarkey has just devolved into a witch hunt. If the RIAA is levelling multimillion-dollar lawsuits at folks they can only prove downloaded five songs, it’s easy to imagine the Hawthornian torch-and-pitchfork crusade they’d level at any system designed to be a modern-day extension of the “Dude, you’ve never heard Eddie from Ohio? I have to make you a tape!”
I figure it’s only a matter of time before these horrified middlemen get sliced out entirely, despite all their flailing and wailing. I can’t wait for the day when I can simply PayPal five bucks to my favorite band and download a new CD’s worth of MP3s. They’ll see a greater percentage of the profit, I won’t have a bunch of pieces of round plastic cluttering up my shelves, and I can take great pleasure in the knowledge that somewhere out there some Hillary Rosen clone is stewing in her bitter, frustrated nostalgia.