Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Wired.com Refutes Washington Post "correction" of Marc Fisher's column

Wired.com has ably pointed out that the Washington Post's "correction" of Marc Fisher's December 29th column is wrong, and Mr. Fisher's column correctly and accurately described the contents of the Atlantic v. Howell supplemental brief filed by the RIAA.

"RIAA Still Thinks MP3s Are a Crime, Despite Post's False Correction of File Sharing Column -- Updated" (Jan. 8, 2007)

The article also gives some insight into who is behind the campaign to rewrite the truth.





Keywords: digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property






5 comments:

Scott said...

From the comments in this article:

"...in oral argument in front of the Supreme Court (MGM v. Grokster)

DONALD B. VERRILLI, JR., ESQ., Washington, D.C.; on behalf of the Petitioners -

"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their Website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."
"

Anonymous said...

If merely ripping songs to a hard drive, or portable music player, were illegal, then Apple should have been hauled into court the day after it released its iTunes software with exactly this capability. As for burning to a CD-R, doesn't everyone remember Apple's Rip-Mix-Burn ads? The RIAA's overlooking of this most blatant promotion of ripping CD's certain must be considered to give tacit approval to the practice. That should estoppel them now from arguing otherwise.

Overall, this is seeming to be the story that refuses to die – which is a good thing! This attempt to make a small back-step correction from being too extreme at the trial and having the threat of having to rehash this at the appeal's court level is coming up all out of proportion now by raising questions that the RIAA absolutely doesn't want to have answered.

Any correction to it should have simply noted that while the RIAA does believe that it is illegal for Americans to make digital music files from legally purchased CDs, they have not sued anyone for doing so in absence of a belief that person shared such files on the internet.

Actually, any correction should have simply noted that the RIAA opinion of copyright law making it illegal for Americans to make digital music files from legally purchased CDs is simply that – their opinion. It's not backed up by any law at this time.

Also, CD's themselves are digital music files. They're just rather BIG digital music files.

XK-E

Anonymous said...

Scot said:
"From the comments in this article"

Also in the comments on the article, further down:

"In follow up, one can see that the RIAA lawyer was actually lying in Grokster. The RIAA, to my knowledge, **never** told the public prior to (or even after) Grokster that was legal to rip CDs, only various euphemisms for "we probably won't sue you."

One would think that after Grokster the RIAA would have to tell people that ripping CDs was legal, however in the case against Thomas their lawyer asked if she'd ever made copies of her own CD's for herself **or** her friends and if she'd gotten "authorization" from the copyright holders to do so, clearly implying that ripping CDs **for yourself** is illegal.
IMO"


In the follow up article, Wired Blog writer By Ryan Singel, it is shown that in 2006 and prior to Cary Sherman's attempt to obfuscate the RIAA's actual position on CD ripping the RIAA filed a statement with the US Copyright office saying that "device shifting" and backup copies are infringing uses and must remain so.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/riaa-believes-m.html

Nohwhere Man said...

One question that I haven't seen addressed- isn't there a fee imposed on blank CDRs and DAT tapes (other media, too?) to recover the lost royalties of copying CDs/etc?

If that is still being collected, where is the money going? Wouldn't it also estopp the RIAA from attempting other recoveries? Or, does payment of this fee allow me to legitimately copy a CD that I've purchased onto a CDR, for myself or for someone else?


Another concept-
Microsoft Windows allows one to -share- directories between systems; it's intrinsic to the operation of a Windows network. While I wouldn't suggest it, it's quite easy to share a directory/folder on a windows box and make it wide open to the Internet. Granted, there's no mechanism for a client to search multiple sources for some content, but -that-s not essential to a "peer-to-peer" network. Put some files in it and world can get them. Why isn't the RIAA doing after the deep pockets of the seller of this p2p software? (rhetorical question)

Anonymous said...

Nowhere Man,

Regarding fees on blank CD-R media to compensate for copying, that is true in Canada, but only partially true in the USA. In the USA, standard CD-R media for computer uses does not have any copyright fee collected. "Music" CD-R media (marked in some special way as for Music, and costing more) does. What's the difference? As far as the media goes, nothing except that the media code on the CD-R itself is different. Your computer doesn't care. It will burn either type of CD-R, and you just pay more for the "Music" version. Home stereo equipment CD-R recorders do care, and will only burn to proper CD-R "Music" media, forcing you to buy the more expensive CD-R's to use in your stereo CD recorder. This affects very few people, those being either the computer-phobic who make their CD's using their stereo instead of their computer, and the foolish ones who believe that "Music media" CD-R's somehow give you better sound than regular CD-R's. How the actual money collected is distributed is anybody's guess.

XK-E