I don't blog much about the minutae of the cascade of digital music-related lawsuits in part because there are people who obsessively blog these things and I've lost patience with it over the years. One place that hasn't lost patience and generally does a very good job with the details is Recording Industry vs The People.
Yesterday they published an entry that caught my eye because it goes to the heart of something I've been wanting to see for a while: someone is trying to kick the legs out from under the set of suppositions that the RIAA are using to sue the pants off everyone and anyone.
Here's a short list of things the RIAA would like us to believe and have (by and large) gotten judges to agree with:
- You are not allowed to make MP3 copies of tracks on CDs you legally own
- Placing MP3s into a file directory that might be accessed from outside your computer is equivalent to giving away copies
- An IP address is equivalent to a personal identifier
There are more, of course, but let's focus on these for a moment as we've further developments to discuss in
Atlantic v. Howell, a case I pointed to in December of last year. At that point, there was contention over whether the Cartel were backtracking on the question of whether CD owners have the right to rip their own CDs.
Well now we a judge rejecting the RIAA's motion for summary judgement in the case. If the judge had bought into the RIAA's premises above the case would've been another slam-dunk win for the Cartel. Instead Judge Wake appears to be ready to change his earlier stance and agree with the defendants (and their EFF counsel) that simply placing copies in a directory is not a "distribution". This is key because if there's no distribution then there's no copyright infringement.
Furthermore, there's a good question to be argued as to whether the defendants are even the ones who put that MP3 file there. Such an issue would be settled by a trial, but the RIAA doesn't want trials. Its jihad is based on filing and rapidly settling thousands of these lawsuits. Having them go to trial would prove time-consuming, risky, and expensive even if the Cartel won.
For a large variety of reasons, the Cartel can't afford to wage this war in the court trial dockets. It needs to be conducted in the mass, scalable fashion whereby the threat of the judiciary is used to extort payment from consumers... err, victims... err, named defendants.
Despite the amount of time this case has already dragged out, it's still in the very early stages. As Eric Bangeman pointed out in his ars technica story on the denial, Judge Wake's reasoning is at odds with other judges' decisions on similar issues. For the great majority of cases, the RIAA is being successful in its jihad. My guess is that they'll argue this case a little further to see if Judge Wake can be swayed back. If he continues to rule against them, they'll drop the case before it goes to trial - they have no incentive to get an actual verdict on the books against them and an appeal would be even more expensive. So long as the tide continues to run in their favor, the Cartel can keep going even if it has to drop a case now and then. To truly kick the legs out from under them would require an act of Congress or a decision by a much higher-level court. Neither will happen soon.
May 5, 2008
Posted by Alan Wexelblat
Cory Doctorow has structured an interesting...something around his book Little Brother. I don't know what to call this - it's part charity, part pay-for-value-received, part experiment.
The idea is that Cory gives away this book - it's online for free. But there are people (true fans, maybe?) who want to donate to Cory in return for the value they receive with this book.
Cory doesn't want direct donations, not least because he doesn't want to cut his publishers out of the loop. In the donation page linked above he points out that they add significant value. So what he's proposing is a method for people to get copies of the book into the hands of teachers and librarians, who otherwise might not have funds for it or who might have to pay out of their own pockets. Librarians or teachers who want to receive free copies put in requests and they're matched up with people who want to donate. Cory and his staff are apparently donating their time and administrative effort to coordinate the giving.
This is my little signal boost for a guy who seems to keep showing how giving away his books makes things better.
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