Digital Trends
“No two ways about it: Piracy is legally and morally wrong.”
We’ve all heard it a million times. We’ve heard the analogies to walking out of a store with a CD under your jacket, sending software developers straight to the unemployment line or ripping food right out of a poor key grip’s mouth. And for some of us, we’ve even seen people we know ensnared by the law when they finally get caught gorging on free motion pictures and music.
A while after peer-to-peer file sharing first became all the rage, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began filing tens of thousands of lawsuits against individuals it believed were guilty of violating copyright and illegally distributing music files online. Many of the accused simply shut down their shares and apologized, paid settlements, or tried to fade into the woodwork—but not Minnesota’s Jammie Thomas. Thomas sought her day in court and argued she’d never illegally shared or downloaded music…but the jury found her guilty of making music files available for download and fined her a mammoth $220,000. In late 2008, however, the case was declared a mistrial, with Judge Michael Davis saying he had committed an error of law by instructing the jury Thomas could be found guilty without any actual proof she had distributed copyrighted material.
I received an interesting question this last week from a guy trying to choose between two brand new notebooks in HP’s line: the DV2 and DV3. In answering his question, it occurred to me that people often don’t think about what they want to use a notebook for before making their selection. While Windows offers consumers more choices, that can also be one of the problems, because folks don’t know how to choose. Let’s use these two notebooks as a way to help pick the notebook that will best serve you. We’ll start by introducing you to the DV2 and DV3 and then go into how you might choose between them.
Since 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 lawsuits against individuals it believes are copying and distributing music illegally via peer-to-peer filesharing services like Gnutella and BitTorrent. The RIAA intended the lawsuits to be a warning against Internet users downloading music illegally, but instead gave rise to a severe consumer backlash against the recording industry: unsurprisingly, customers did not like to be made to feel like criminals, and the RIAA didn’t help itself when it flung lawsuits against children, single mothers, and even a deceased individual.
Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America won a jaw-dropping legal victory when a federal jury ruled against plaintiff Jammie Thomas and awarded the RIAA $220,000 for making 24 songs (and, allegedly, thousands of others) available via the file-sharing service Kazaa. Now, the RIAA might be singing a different song: U.S. District Judge Michael Davis has declared a mistrial in the case, saying he committed a "manifest error of law" by instructing the jury that Thomas could be found guilty without any proof of actual distribution of copyrighted material.
Disabled single mother Tanya Andersen is going to be a folk hero. She took on the might of the RIAA, challenging them to prove she’d pirated music – and won. Now the RIAA has to pay a whopping $107,951 in legal fees, and she’s filed suit against them.
It all began four years ago when the RIAA accused Andersen and her eight-year-old daughter of illegally downloading gangsta rap. Andersen claimed her innocence, even offering to let the RIAA inspect her computer, but they refused, threatening her with prosecution unless she handed over several thousand dollars.
A brief filed by the Recording Industry Association of American in the case of Capitol v. Howell set blogs alight this week with cries of unfairness, by those who believed the RIAA was claiming that even private copies of paid-for CDs were illegal. As it turns out, that’s not the full story. A careful examination of the brief shows that the RIAA is taking the same stance it has always taken: sharing music is illegal.
While the Recording Industry Association of America carries out its hunt for illegally file-sharing college students without obstructions in most cases, Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers has taken issue with the RIAA’s approach in his own state. Last week, Myers’ office filed a 15-page brief in a U.S. District Court that questions the legitimacy of the RIAA’s tactics in pursuing alleged file-sharers.
Among the issues raised in the paper are the RIAA’s method of using subpoenas to acquire student names from colleges based on IP addresses, then abandoning the legal system and pressuring students to settle out of court. This method could deceive students into thinking there is more evidence built up against them than actually exists.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been very active in filing suits and claiming damages on behalf of its members for illegally downloaded music. But it’s taken on a Texas woman and suddenly finds itself with a legal fight on its hands. Rhonda Crain has filed a countersuit against the RIAA in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division, claiming that Sony BMG Music Entertainment and others in the Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit illegally employed unlicensed investigators and were aware that they were disregarding the laws of her state. According to documents filed with the court, Crain claims that when suit was filed against her, the plaintiffs had “agreed between themselves and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign. On information and belief, the private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation. Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.” Crain also claims that she did not infringe on copyright-protected music. Her lawyer, John Stoneham, has asserted that no-one contact her before the original RIAA suit was filed, and that the only evidence produced has been a screenshot of a peer-to-peer file sharing network and Crain’s account status with her ISP, with no apparent connection shown between the two. Stoneham argues that the $115 million settlement file-sharing network Kazaa has reached with the RIAA should cover all infringements, and that plaintiffs are barred from recovering damages twice on the same alleged infringements. Crain is seeking reimbursement for having to defend the suit. She has asked the court to throw out the case, and to grant her “all other relief as the court may deem equitable and proper including an award of damages.” There was no comment from the RIAA.
The Record Industry Association of America’s plan to round up music-swapping college students and sue them has been going smoothly in some parts of the country, and hitting snags in others. A federal judge in New Mexico dealt the process a major blow Wednesday by denying the RIAA the subpoenas necessary to discover the names of 16 alleged violators at the University of New Mexico, Ars Technica reported.
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