Those are great links. The whole process of the John Doe lawsuit has always bothered me, and I’d like to see someone make the RIAA explain their evidence gathering once and for all. Tho this little tidbit was curious.

The RIAA has done more to harm the sale of music than help it.

xoxo,
nina

* * * * *

The Myth Of The Bandwidth Crunch Just Won’t Die
from the this-again? dept

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me on this topic. The sad reality is that the music industry is in fact a business and a commercial enterprise. Their goal is to sell records. As a consumer, I’ve made the choice not to purchase CD’s unless it’s something I can’t acquire thru iTunes. 99% of my music purchases in the last two years have been thru iTunes - albums, individual tracks, compilations, as well as videos, movies, and iPod games.

I think the biggest problem with record companies is their out and out refusal to adapt to a changing market. What insults me more are all of these supposed ‘iTunes killers’ that amount to nothing more than renting music to the consumer with these multi-tiered subscriptions plans. Steve Jobs said it best, “People want to own their music, not rent it.”, and that’s the truth. The greed of the record industry couldn’t be any more naked with these subscription sites, and when you stop paying, your music just goes POOF! and vanishes or is rendered unplayable. Which means you could conceivably wind up paying for the same piece of music hundreds of times over. The RIAA would just love that now wouldn’t they…

The lawsuits are certainly a scare tactic, and to some degree that maybe causes someone to think before they download or distribute music thru a fileshare P2P network, it’s hard to say - but the bigger problem are the tactics being used by the RIAA and the fact that the courts have allowed these cases to proceed where there are clearly questionable practices going on. From the way I see it, all it takes is for the RIAA to send you a demand letter threatening a lawsuit against you and there’s not much you can do about it other than try to settle or fight it in court and we’ve seen what happens there. But what scares me is that the courts seem to have thrown true due process and discovery rules right out the window and that’s far more dangerous.

Sooner or later the record companies are going to have to adapt, but I predict it will be later… not sooner. Tho I often find myself feeling a bit nostalgic for the days of hip independent record stores, albums on vinyl, and the whole culture of being a music fan. These were places where people could go and just immerse themselves in the music. It was a way to stay connected to the music and the people who made it. When you picked up an album, you’d just sit there and stare at the cover art and just lose yourself in the feelings the music would evoke, and I really miss that. There used to be a few really cool indy record stores and used record stores in the Boston area and they’ve all sadly gone away. Newbury Comics is still there, but it’s just another corporate temple… not the same anymore. And Strawberries became FYE…. the huge Tower Records near Berklee Music School is gone. Even the Harvard COOP is more like a big corporate Barnes & Noble now… It makes me really sad sometimes that music has become such a corporate beast that has less to do with music than it does with the bottom line. The days of local bands have almost vanished because there’s no place left to play. All the cool clubs have closed or they’ve become dance clubs with celebrity DJs. It just kind of sucks now…

But thanks for sharing your thoughts with me!

xoxo,
nina

@Jon Bailey:
Although there is a loophole that allows subpoenas to be warranted through that tactic, it’s wholly immoral, and most judges throw the evidence obtained with said subpoenas out when they see such an under-handed, cutting-the-legal-system’s-corners trick.
Aside from the judge’s indiscretion to allow it, the ISP company is also legally able to fight it, and should be obligated to do so in order to protect your private information (as they outline in the contract they make you sign).
Further, the thing that worries me most is the fact that the RIAA was able to garner the contents of Ms. Thomas’ hard drive.
Sure, she’s a downloader, and the RIAA wanted to make a point. But, if anything, she should be the one winning out of this as she’d be able to sue her ISP for breach of contract and the RIAA for invasion of privacy.

Also, this “backdoor-subpoena” tactic is generally thrown out because you have to have valid proof of suspicion in order to obtain a warrant to search the contents of someone’s home, computer, etc. The RIAA cannot provide any reliable, publicly-obtained proof to warrant such an issue, so that they managed to squeeze a subpoena through all those channels, and then get it by the ISP’s lawyers and this judge is mind-boggling, at best.

JW said it best. The amount of money they spent on a lawsuit this drawn out is large enough that they’re only sinking their own ship. All they’re really trying to do is make everyone so paranoid to stop downloading because they might be next. The truth is (and they know this, they’re just hoping others are too stupid to), they’re well aware they can’t stop it, they just want to make people fearful of “who’s next?”.

Thanks for sharing all of this with me, and I know these are topics you’re very familiar with.

I understand the idea of the “John Doe” filings, but doesn’t the RIAA seem to be abusing the concept? And should we expect a certain amount of privacy from the companies we pay to for service when the fundamental question about whether file sharing is actually a crime is still somewhat ambiguous?

I think the PR in this case is awful all around, but I don’t think Jammie Thomas was goaded into fighting this case by proxy for other interested parties, because she received no legal support from organizations like the EFF. I think, and this is a guess, that she fought it because she wasn’t able to pay whatever settlement the RIAA was demanding from her, and I think she just rolled the dice and decided to try her luck in court. Tho I think the judge’s instructions to the jury will be ultimate grounds for appeal. I think that aspect of the law is incredibly grey and murky at best.

The larger problem I see with all of this, and the RIAA is just one example, is the ever shrinking slice of privacy we have in our society. Between the government and corporations I think we’re falling down that perilous hole of turning into more of a surveillance state than we ever have been. I see all of these things as dangerous and fundamentally related.

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with me, and please give my love to Crystal!

xoxo,
nina

Well, I think a lot of this comes down to your perspective. We (the people) still like to think we live in a free country, where the idea of an ‘American Dream’ still exists, and where we have free speech and constitutional protections — and increasingly, we’re being proved wrong.

The real problem is that the United States, and increasingly the world, are moving towards a form of government called Corporatism; where big government and big corporations work hand in hand to shape just about every aspect of society. Naomi Klein’s latest book called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism talks a lot about how the worse things are for the rest of us, the better it is for corporations doing business with our government. So it kind of seems like there’s an incentive there, don’t you think?

Ever see the movie Rollerball? (The original!) — It’s something like that.

Thanks hon!

xoxo,
nina

Domo.

Yeah! My Red Sox won 10-3! What an exciting game!

xoxo,
nina

“There’s no real clear law that I can find which says that an ISP must cooperate with a private entity (maybe someone can help me out here).”

There actually is. The RIAA file a “John Doe” lawsuit and then got a subpoena to force the ISP to give up the name and information. When they got that information, they then amended the lawsuit to include her name. That is how they operate in all of their cases.

Subpoenas have been a part of US law since the beginning so there isn’t much out of the ordinary there and little the ISP could have done.

“Why not go for the jugular and throw everything at her and hope to get some of what they were looking for?”

Several reasons. One is that they felt the case was strong and that they didn’t need to. It also saves time not having to list, identify and prove every song. If they had done that, the case would probably be going on for the next ten years. Also, a single mom who is already saddled with $222,000 in damages would have been hit with many times more. It would have gone from bad PR to unbelievably horrible.

“In his instructions to the jury, Judge Michael Davis told jurors that that the mere act of leaving copyrighted tracks in a public directory from which downloads was easy was essentially as bad as proving that actual downloads of these infringing files took place”

His opinion is not an outlier and there are many judges who have agreed with him and a few that have disagreed. When you get copyright in a work, you get a set of exclusive rights, one of them is to publicly display or perform the work. The argument is that making them available for download is a form of public display. That is, for better or worse, a protected right under copyright law.

That will probably be an issue for the Supreme Court though.

All in all I’m no fan of the RIAA or their tactics. But they won this case for good reason, they chose their easiest and most solid case as a lead off and walked a single mother right to bankruptcy.

Part of the blame also goes to the anti-RIAA lobby though. They pushed this woman, who was almost certainly guilty of the infringement, into fighting a case she could not win. Now, other cases with a better chance of success have an uphill battle due to precedent and a single mom has to worry about how she’s going to feed her kids.

To me, no one looks like a hero.

Just my thoughts on it.

The amount of money they spent doing that is significant enough that they could have just done the right thing in the first place and saved that money and been ahead of the game.

Btw, some towns are rejecting corporate personhood. Which is a good step in the right direction.