Woman ordered to pay $222,000 for illegal downloads

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(banjoman @ Oct 9 2007, 02:58 AM) [snapback]523024[/snapback]</div>

This is a very important point. Most of the music industry has nothing to do with making music. It's about music distribution and promotion. The actual artists see very little of the money people pay for CDs, which is why the music industry is fighting so hard to maintain a strangle hold on music distribution. Technology has made prerecorded CDs unnecessary, but without them, the music industry has no mechanism by which to extract the bulk of the money. What we are witnessing is an industry that no longer adds value trying desperately to maintain the status quo.

Tom

 

What about used CDs? Same as used cars? should toyota get a slice of a used car sale? Should record companies get to share in the used CD market? What prevents me from selling my used CDs, getting more used CDs, ripping them, selling those used CDs, and repeating?

Lala.com. How about hearing from the Floridians and the waiting period and fingerprint to sell used CDs law?

What's the difference between the above scenario(s) and sharing MP3s thru the internet?

When I but the CD is it not mine to do with what I want, just like the Prius I bought? What did I just buy? Is it the same or even a good comparison?

I've made copies of tapes in my younger years (dual-deck recorder, still works!) and no one complained. No one sued me. Am I too naive to think I bought the cassette, now I have it, i can do with it what I want. did we lose that freedom somewhere?

I've done the same thing with blank CDs and CDs I bought. I've several CDs that I don't have anymore, but I have the MP3s. Am I breaking the law? Can I just give a CD to a friend, as a gift? Here, have it, I have it on my iPod now, I don't play it anymore. What is the fine line here?

 

Re: WEP, I know there's no excuse, and I don't seriously endorse unsecured wireless... I too run WEP access points and even though I know I have no tech-savvy neighbors, I still don't feel good about the lax security!

Banjoman, thanks for articulating how I feel

An important extension of your point I think is that while the industry gets its money from distribution, musicians (and I don't just mean pop super-stars, but everyday run-of-the-mill musicians) largely make their money by performing their music live, getting paid per-gig, and are not in the position to except or receive any royalties, even if the group they are hired to work for records and sells their music.

Everyone in my family is a musician, and I mean every one. My parents (both biological parents and my step-father), my 3 siblings, my wife and myself have all been paid to perform music, and 3 people in that group actually do it for a living. Not a single one of us has ever been paid royalties for recordings of our performances, although recordings have been made and sold.

Adding to that, I think all of us, having never expected payment for recordings, would gladly offer them up for free online because we've already been paid, and giving it out increases our exposure.

So from my personal frame of reference, I don't sympathize a lot with RIAA when they try to squeeze extra money out of consumers for selling them pieces of plastic they don't want or need.

People love and need music, and musicians will keep on making a living regardless of how the industry deals with digital media.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(finman @ Oct 9 2007, 06:34 AM) [snapback]523074[/snapback]</div>

The analogy here would be to books. When you buy a book you have the right to read it, and the right to give it away or lend it, but not the right to make a copy of it. The physical book is yours to do with as you like. The content is protected by copyright, which preserves the right of the author (or the author's assigns) to be the sole distributor of the content.

When you copy a book you are breaking the copyright law.

The difference between a book and a CD is that it is so much easier and cheaper to copy a CD. And the difference between a tape and a CD is that a copy of a tape is never the same quality. The copyright issue is the same, but the ability to produce an exact copy, with no loss of sound quality, makes the copying more attractive, so that more people will do it.

My mother is a publisher. I can assure you she is very upset when a pirate publisher prints copies of her book and sells them. He is depriving her of sales and is stealing her copyrighted material. But it does not happen often because printing books is expensive, distributing them is difficult, and there are more profitable forms of crime than pirating books. The RIAA is understandably upset when it sees people making exact copies of its CDs and distributing them. It views this as depriving it of sales. The problem is that, first, it is overcharging for CDs in the first place, and second, it has gone ballistic and pursued draconian, and ineffective measures against people who are often small-scale offenders.

In a just society, everyone would do the work she or he is capable of doing, be it running a company, singing songs or writing them, or picking lettuce in the hot sun; and everyone would be paid according to the amount of work they do and the energy they put into it. There is no justifiable reason why a rock star or a corporate CEO should get more money than a farm worker doing back-breaking labor in the hot sun while poisonous chemicals are being sprayed in the next field over (and sometimes, usually by accident, in the same field they're working in!) But we live in a capitalist country, and nobody should be surprised when a wealthy industry takes draconian measures to protect it's source of wealth.

I for one will lose no sleep when someone steals from the rich. I hope they get away with it. But I won't raise the roof when they get caught. As we always said on the inside: "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." I'll cheer if the RIAA falls on its face. But I won't hold my breath waiting for it. In a capitalist country the corporations own the government, and they'll use that power to suck up as much money as they can.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(qbee42 @ Oct 9 2007, 08:07 AM) [snapback]523059[/snapback]</div>

Yeah. And when artists make maybe $1.40 off a cd sold for $14-18, there's no reason to not simply give away the music or let your audience decide what to pay to for it, as Radiohead has done with its latest album.

 

Well that's cool... I'll just have to buy that to help them prove the point It doesn't hurt that I like most of their music too.

 

I just want to throw in my two cents here:

According to the law, it's perfectly legal to download music, etc online. In this case, the RIAA didn't even attempt to show that she downloaded anything, because it's a lost cause, legally.

Again, according to law, it's illegal to share copyrighted protection with the public. In this specific case, the RIAA was able to decently show that she had made available 24 songs online. However, i would say that make available is much different from sharing. How many people downloaded those songs? Unknown, no one ever came forward with that information.

Copyright law is supposed to be just and fair - let the punishment fit the crime. If i share one song with 20 people, let me pay for that song 20 times. In this case, she shared 24 songs an unknown number of times. Lets say each song was $0.99 (the price on iTunes) - The fine attributed to her would be equivalent to 224,242 song sales. That means that they assume she shared each song 9343 times, which is a pretty large number. At 3MB per song (probably on the low side), that would have been over 650 gigabytes of data she shared, or the equivalent of a month or more of constant, full use uploading (based on average cable internet speeds). I don't know how many of you have used P2P services like bitTorrent before, but you don't get that type of constant uploading. In fact, you probably use less than 1% of your bandwidth for uploading, especially if you're only sharing 24 songs. Lets be generous and say she utilized 5% - thats still TWO years of sharing those same 24 songs in order to share them enough times to hurt the industry that much.

So basically what it comes down to is let the punishment fit the crime. Simply making something available for download isn't illegal - make the record companies prove that it was downloaded, and how many times it was.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(eagle33199 @ Oct 9 2007, 12:56 PM) [snapback]523258[/snapback]</div>

I don't believe this is true. It is illegal to download and use music that you have not paid for, period, according to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Can you give a source for the assertion that downloading for personal use is legal? Not that they won't prosecute, but that it is legal?

In Canada, it is legal to download under their copyright law, but not the US, as I stated in my earlier post. Several of the cases have been for downloading only, and not distribution, including this 12 year old who thought that when she had her mother pay for a Kazaa "subscription" she was paying for the songs:

The recording industry's sales are down a paltry 4%, and they are still a 33 BILLION dollar business. For much of their history, they have been comparable to big tobacco in the way they have treated consumers (i.e. - play-ola, root-kits on CDs that infect computers, etc.) and artists who they cheat "legally" by restrictive contracts. Talk to any musician stuck in a cycle of playing college campuses for 4 years and you'll get the real story.

Digital media sales have nearly made up for the drop in CD sales, and the music industry is still extracting subsidies in the form of beneficial legislation from our politicians. They should watch out; the union effort in this country got a huge boost when the Pinkerton guards shot strikers, even though the law said they could. Artists should start distributing their songs themselves, without the music industry or Apple's cut taken out.

Brianna helping her little brother with his homework in her project apartment, and getting sued for downloading Britney Spears songs doesn't compare favorably with the antics of the artist, does it? They should back off until they get under 30 billion or so.

 

"AHRA Royalties

[edit] Payment of Royalties
Under the AHRA, importers and manufacturers pay royalties on “digital audio recording devices†and “digital audio recording media.†Those who wish to import, manufacture and distribute must seek a statutory license from the Copyright Office. Royalties are based on “transfer price,†either the sale price or the price recorded for customs purposes in the case of importers.

For digital audio recording devices, manufacturers and importers pay a 2% royalty on the device's transfer price, with a minimum royalty of $1 and a maximum of $8 ($12 for dual recorders) per device. For digital audio recording media, manufacturers and importers pay a 3% royalty.


[edit] Distribution of Royalties
Under the AHRA, royalties collected by the Copyright Office on digital recording devices and digital recording media are divided into two separate funds, the Musical Works Fund and the Sound Recordings Fund. One third of the royalties goes to the Musical Works Fund, which splits its cut 50/50 between writers (distributed by ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC) and music publishers (distributed by Harry Fox Agency). These parties receive royalties according to the extent to which their recordings were distributed or broadcast.

The remaining two thirds of the royalties are placed in the Sound Recordings Fund. Four percent of these funds are taken off the top for nonfeatured musicians and vocalists (distributed by the American Federation of Musicians and AFTRA), what remains is split 60/40 between two sets of “interested copyright parties.†Interested copyright parties, a heretofore unknown category in copyright law, is defined by the act as featured artists receive 40%, and the owners of the right to reproduce sound recordings(an individual or company, mostly the record label, who owns the master sound recording) receive 60%. These parties receive royalties through the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies (AARC) according to the extent to which their recordings were sold, based on sales in the United States, both digitally and retail.

Distribution of AHRA Royalties Sound Recordings Fund Musical Works Fund
Record Labels (sound recording copyright holders) 38.4% Music Publishers 16.65%
Featured Artists 25.6% Songwriters 16.65%
Non-featured Instrumentalists and Vocalists 2.7%
Percentage of Total Fund 66.7% Percentage of Total Fund 33.3%
The inclusion of this last group, reproduction rights holders, was unprecedented in United States copyright law. Almost thirty-nine percent of the royalties collected under the AHRA go not to songwriters and musicians, but to the record labels who own the right to copy and distribute their recordings. The justification for this cross subsidy is that the copying enabled by the digital technology is a loss of profits for the recording industry, and that they should be compensated for this loss.

It is unclear whether the recording industry ever thought that revenue from royalties would compensate for revenues lost to the first generation copying authorized by the AHRA. Given their willingness to block all distribution of all digital audio recording media and devices in the United States, that the combination of SCMS and the price premium imposed by royalties was intended to cripple the market. It is also possible that given a new technology, and the Act's unprecedented provisions (royalties, legislative mandates for copy protection), they could not predict the impact of the AHRA on adoption of the new technology.

Regardless of their intent, AHRA royalties have never been a significant revenue stream for anyone, least of all the recording industry. Revenues for the Copyright Office's Digital Audio Recording Technologies (DART) Fund peaked at $5.2 million in 2000, and have been declining, at times precipitously, ever since. Revenues for 2005 were approximately $2.4 million. According to its website, the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies (with its 38% share of all DART royalties) has distributed less than $19 million since 1993, a figure which includes home taping royalties from three other countries."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act

Help me understand how this fits into this discusssion, as I'm not clear on ANY of this! What's legal, what's not, why are CD burners and cd media (heck, DVD burners and DVD media now!) allowed to be sold for what purpose, etc. Too many legalese words...

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Oct 10 2007, 12:01 AM) [snapback]523460[/snapback]</div>

I've read the full text of the DMCA, have you? At every point it talks about transmitting copyrighted musical work, it starts out as "the transmitting entity does not..." The only place it mentions the receiving entity is in reference to the transmitting entity - (paraphrasing here) The transmitter shall not transmit in such a way as to cause confusion by the receiver.

Go read it yourself, and please point out the section i missed that says it's illegal to receive copyrighted musical performances unless the transmitter has a license. It's only illegal to transmit without a license, anyone can receive legally.

BTW, you can read the full text here: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Digital_Mill...m_Copyright_Act

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(finman @ Oct 10 2007, 08:37 AM) [snapback]523539[/snapback]</div>

The short answer is that CD and DVD burners and media have completely legitimate, legal purposes. I can use them to back up important information. I can use them to make personal use copies of copyrighted work that i've obtained legally. Once you've purchased a copyrighted work, you are free and clear to reproduce it as many times as you want - so long as that reproduction is solely for personal use and you don't distribute it to anyone else.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(eagle33199 @ Oct 10 2007, 06:47 AM) [snapback]523545[/snapback]</div>

Well, not exactly, thanks to the DMCA. If the original is copy protected, you are prohibited from "circumventing" that copy protection, even to make a backup.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(eagle33199 @ Oct 10 2007, 06:47 AM) [snapback]523545[/snapback]</div>

Are you an attorney? I'm not an attorney, and not qualified to give you an opinion on the writing in the law itself.

I can, however, point you to cases where people are sued by the recording industry, and the recording industry wins, for downloading copyrighted songs from P2P networks without paying the royalties.

Oh, wait, I did that already.

The RIAA has examples of how you can break the law and expose yourself to civil fines in their lawsuits. They have hundreds of successful suits under their belt. They specifically mention that they go after "recipients only" who download from the Internet yet never share the files with others. From Piracy Online - The Law:

They provide other guidelines, with cites to case law and other acts:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(finman @ Oct 10 2007, 08:37 AM) [snapback]523539[/snapback]</div>

I use my CD burner to back up my files.

I use my DVD burner to burn DVDs I create. The last one was my nephew's graduation. I'll be doing my Guatemalan Brother's Son's wedding soon. And I'll also be burning my National Board Certification documentation DVDs for my portfolio next March.

Isn't that what they're for?

 

When a recording "artist " reaches national status he/she commands a very large recording fee from whatever studio records the album. Add to that the general overhead of maintaining a studio, recording engineers advertising etc. This is not a cheap product to produce and it is indeed copyrighted material. Less then one album in one hundred makes any money for a studio. We are not talking about some wannabe country western singer trying to get name recognition from a home made CD. Illegally downloading recorded music is criminal and no different then stealing software or shoplifting something out of a store. The recording studios have to take a stand or risk going out of business. The woman who was prosecuted knew exactly what she was doing and even changed her hard disk before the trial in a feeble attempt at innocence. She was an idiot and deserved what she got.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(alanh @ Oct 12 2007, 04:59 PM) [snapback]524857[/snapback]</div>

Very true - it's illegal to circumvent any form of DRM - like the encryption on DVD's or on music purchased through iTunes, etc. However, you are allowed to still make copies of anything. There's nothing illegal about making a byte-for-byte copy of a DVD, so long as you don't circumvent the encryption while doing so.


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Oct 12 2007, 11:01 PM) [snapback]524986[/snapback]</div>

This case was the very first case where it went to trial and the two sides were argued infront of a jury. Everything else was settled out of court - mostly because no one knew what would happen, court costs would be high, and the potential fine much higher than what the RIAA was willing to settle for. Yes, the RIAA has won every case to date, but that was only through settling, not from going through the whole process.

The RIAA knows they have absolutely nothing against anyone for downloading, only for uploading. To the best of my knowledge, they have never gone after anyone for downloading - only for sharing.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(eagle33199 @ Oct 15 2007, 07:50 AM) [snapback]525823[/snapback]</div>

You remind me of the guys who say the income tax is illegal.

With hundreds of cases out there, as pointed out in this thread, you still claim its legal. Are you willing to pay to settle the cases brought against fellow PC'ers? Settling a case for thousands of dollars so I don't go to trial is not my idea of "winning".

 

really? there is only one other person here who thinks this is just a little excessive?!

 

It is a unfortunate American trait that when a penalty for an illegal act is just a hand slap, the illegal activity just continues.

Perhaps we should make "plagerism" legal since so many students do that, too.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Oct 15 2007, 10:57 PM) [snapback]526180[/snapback]</div>

What i'm saying is that the law, in this realm, is completely out of touch with reality. The fact is it doesn't say anywhere that it's illegal to download music, only to share it. It's the same with anything else copyrighted - it's not illegal to obtain it, but it is illegal to distribute it. Perhaps, with the new ease of distribution, it should be illegal to knowingly receive copyrighted material.

Please, show me one case where someone was sued for downloading songs. The case you mentioned earlier, Brianna LaHara (the 12 year old) was one of 261 lawsuits filed simultaneously for sharing music, not downloading.

From your own link earlier,

(emphasis added). Says nothing about downloading being illegal in the US.

Why do you think i should be willing to pay for what others do? I really don't understand where that question is going - if someone on PC was sued by the RIAA, i would expect them to take whatever actions they deemed necessary - either settle for a few thousand or fight it. I don't see why i should be willing to pay for their settlement...

As for your idea of winning... yes, a settlement is technically a "win" for the RIAA - however, it's not a win that proves anything, other than the fact that the potential fines are excessive and most people take the safe route and get out for a few thousand.


As for this case, Jammie Thomas is appealing on the grounds that the fine is excessive. The Eighth Amendment protects from excessive fines - essentially saying let the fine fit the crime. As i pointed out earlier, the fine amount would be equivalent to over 9 thousand sales of each song. If you ask me, there should be a fine for sharing music - something fixed, regardless of the number of songs shared. since most cases are settling for around $3k, why not set it near there? If the RIAA wants to get more money from people, force them to go to court and prove the severity of damages caused by that individual. If I'm on a jury for a case like this and they can show that 250,000 downloads had been streamed from an individuals computer, then i'd certainly be willing to award them $250,000. Instead, if they can only show 100 downloads, then they aren't getting $250,000. It's completely out of touch with the damages inflicted on the company.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Godiva @ Oct 15 2007, 09:50 PM) [snapback]526200[/snapback]</div>

Off-topic warning.

I am reminded of the Tom Leherer song, which included the lines: