Do We Want ISPs Penalizing Music Fans? 263
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Noted singer songwriter Billy Bragg has written an excellent column in The Guardian, coming out against the pro-RIAA '3-strikes' legislation the big 4 record labels are trying to push through. In the article, entitled 'Do we want ISPs penalizing our fans?', Bragg writes: 'Having failed miserably in previous attempts to stamp out illicit filesharing, the record industry has now joined forces with other entertainment lobby groups to demand that the government takes action to protect their business model.' He goes on: 'Fearful of the prospect of dragging their customers though the courts, with all the attendant costs and bad publicity, members of the record industry have come up with a simple, cost-free solution to their problem: get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them. They are asking the government to force the ISPs to cut off the broadband connection of customers who persistently download unauthorized material, without any recourse to appeal in the courts.'"
Court first then cut. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't cut the broadband for any crime until it's proven in court.
It's not the role of the ISP to act as a police for a third party.
More importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
The chap from TFA seems nice enough, and it is good that he is thinking about the question; but, thing is, it isn't his call. Allowing penalties to be assessed for private gain, without any sort of judicial process, is a grotesque parody of justice. It should not be countenanced anywhere. I'm glad that there are some on the music side that are uncomfortable with the idea; but that isn't the point. The point is that "3 strikes" and its ilk are wholly unacceptable. If they agree, great, if they don't, tough.
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Enough already (Score:5, Insightful)
If the RIAA can just call up my ISP and demand that they disconnect me, that makes a mockery of due process. Innocent until proven guilty, remember? Or are "pirates" (and the occasional misidentified laser printer) just too evil for due process?
Re:Less relevant every day (Score:3, Insightful)
If they shut down Another Great Music Tracker, I'm going to law school.
If they shut down Another Great Music Tracker, it will be replaced by Two Lesser Music Trackers. Stamping out the "problem" is the worst thing they could do. As long as there is a demand, the community will supply it.
Re:Enough already (Score:4, Insightful)
Disable YRO on your browsing options. [slashdot.org]
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Interesting juxtaposition (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we have two [slashdot.org] adjacent [slashdot.org] /. stories: one about ISPs being responsible for users' behavior, the other about ISPs not being responsible for users' behavior.
What is needed is a clarification, likely from SCOTUS, on whether ISPs are "common carriers" or not. If they are, then ISPs have to monitor postings and downloads (punishing people according to ... uh ... well they're not police or courts so it's really unclear how they're supposed to detect & respond re: users' behavior). If they are not, then ISPs can finally tell everyone else to take it up with the actual legally-identifiable offender.
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the ISPs won't play along, the content industry will have legislation passed to make them play along.
It isn't about 'piracy' for most of us. (IMO) (Score:5, Insightful)
Under the current situation, and the future one if RIAA has it's way, the National Anthem of the USA, that's the "Star Spangled Banner" for those who don't know, wouldn't exist under their rules. It was a (somewhat) popular piece of poetry that people started singing to a very popular piece of music. That made a fantastic hit that inspired people so much, they made it the national anthem. These days, the insane copyright lengths combined with the dubious 'enforcement groups' would have prevented any such thing from ever happening.
Have you wondered why nobody ever sings "Happy Birthday" on shows and movies anymore? Someone decided to enforce their copyright... Another piece of classic americana and culture down the tubes because of this subject. What's the next thing we'll loose? Yes, some of these people are breaking laws.
Yes, we talk about it a lot.
But you need to understand, if somebody doesn't raise a fuss and find a way to stop this, what will our children have left?
Unfortunately, the answer is not much...
Re:No... (Score:4, Insightful)
But how do I get my money BACK? I'm more interested in getting my money back (Like at a real merchants) then I am at writing a letter to someone who will never read it. If I got my money back I could still boycott the company and have lost nothing from my bank account.
Why can they sell me buggy software with no return policy and I lose money, but if it happens to them it's a huge legislative issue?
Re:A plan (Score:3, Insightful)
You think the RIAA will apply this policy of theirs evenly and fairly? Anyone with power will be an exception to the rule.
Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no moral right to acquire property without the permission of the people who created it or who now own it.
There is no moral right to control what others do with their property.
Obligatory car analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, if the DMCA-takedown notices and John Doe suits are to be taken into consideration, there is ZERO accountability for these corporate police.
If the ISP's are going to have to count off these 'strikes' merely on RIAA say-so, then a great many will be falsely impugned. If for no other reason, these sleaze balls have demonstrated that being lazy is far easier than putting forth any actual effort in an investigation.
"We couldn't tell who was doing the actual file sharing, so we instructed the ISP to mark a strike against the entire block of addresses..." This doesn't seem out of character for this group. Giving them more power HAS to be a bad idea.
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who's got the entitlement problem here? The people who wish to use their property as they see fit? Or those who wish to control what other people did with their creation after they sold it off?
I'd say anyone who expects to get paid for their work for 70 years has a pretty big entitlement problem.
Re:Not for the ISP to do ... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a very fair point and it's taken.
Godfrey v Demon, however, did have a chilling effect on Usenet provision in the UK because no ISP wants to have to police their Usenet service in such a fashion. Hosting a full Usenet service is (or at least was in those days) expensive just in hardware terms, adding people to police take-down notices is a burden too far.
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Enough already (Score:3, Insightful)
For most people on slashdot, the RIAA is just a justification to make themselves feel better about downloading instead of buying.
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not convinced any more.
Granny is probably on the cheapest 0.5-2Mbps package, whereas the downloader is paying more for the premium, faster packages.
Add to that the whole new class of broadband media consumers using iTunes and YouTube and Hulu... well, I think the early part of this decade where the downloader was the biggest hog and only paid the minimum is over.
Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no moral right to acquire property without the permission of the people who created it or who now own it.
Absolutely right. But completely offtopic - this discussion has nothing to do with property. It has everything to do with copyright. Copyright is not property. Copyright is a time-limited privilege ultimately granted by the citizens for the holder thereof to exclusive sales of the work that is to be duplicated and sold. Unfortunately, right now due to ridiculous changes in copyright law brought about by lobbyists working for greedy corporations, the 'time-limited' portion is currently way out of line of the intent of copyright. This is why so many people now simply disregard copyright entirely. As a general guideline, if copyright duration on average lasts beyond the work's relevance, then copyright is not serving its purpose.
Re:I really don't care anymore... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the RIAA interprets your "not buying their music" as being the same as "another Internet pirate illegally downloading/sharing their music." After all, they reason, their music is vital to everyone's life and anyone who doesn't buy the minimum that the RIAA deems necessary must be pirating the rest. (This comment would be going for the Funny tag if it weren't true.)
Re:Obligatory car analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
No but if the auto dealer had good reason to believe his car was going to be used illegally he shouldn't be selling it, just like a shopkeeper selling solvents for example.
You mean like every sports car made?
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the RIAA's efforts are "cut from whole cloth". They don't care about 3 strikes or doing an upstanding investigation, that's all window dressing to them, hoops to be endured, wide spots on the road to their real destination.
The real object is to kill the Internet. Kicking everyone off is one way to do it. They'd absolutely love a mistake that chopped thousands of people's access over one alleged infraction, as long as it didn't start a successful revolt. If they thought it could be done, they would cut to the chase and demand the courts and legislators shut down the whole Internet for aiding and abetting the crime of copyright infringement. Then there'd be no need to fool around with 3 strikes per person and investigations and such nonsense.
Unconstitutional and illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
Your "appeal" is to sue your ISP.
This is effectively a law that defines a punishment, enforced by a private business. First off, private businesses are not police. Second, this law sentences you (disconnection from ISP service, DICTATED BY LAW) without fair hearing; that is unconstitutional.
Come on, aren't any of you lawyers?
Re:Court first then cut. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with that point of view is that the MAFIAA doesn't care if you're DOWNLOADING music at all. It's what files you are making available for download that they will be looking for.
IANAL, of course, but you obviously haven't been listening to the MAFIAA and all of their adds targeted at "illegal" downloaders. You also haven't been paying attention to the RIAA cases that have been going on, or their public statements about piracy. The fact that they call it piracy just emphasizes my point, because downloading copyrighted material has nothing at all to do with theft or piracy, nor even does distributing it. Sites like ThePirateBay don't help the image, but it's still not piracy in the slightest.
Some of the first lawsuits involved mix-tapes, VCRs, media-shifting, time-shifting, etc. Ripping CDs to mp3s, recording live TV to watch on your own schedule (TiVo went through hell, if you don't recall, to solidify their legality), making backup copies of your DVDs and CDs, they've all been in court because the media companies don't want ANY of it. They want you to pay for each and every copy you own, and further they would love for you to pay for each and every person who hears their music each and every time they hear it. A CEO of one RIAA company (I don't recall which, unfortunately) even stated that ripping CDs was stealing, and had to backtrack the statement.
What they are left with now is pretty much the only thing that is actually demonstrably illegal: distributing copyrighted material without authorization. It's all that is left, and that's why they are desperate. They want to shut all of that other stuff down by convincing the legislature to create a law to force ISPs to shut down users downloading copyrighted material - an activity that has been demonstrated in court to be completely legal.
What makes it really sick is there is an express denial of due process. That makes the proposed law not only morally wrong, but unconstitutional as well. I wonder how long it would take to get to the SCOTUS?
Re:I really don't care anymore... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the RIAA interprets your "not buying their music" as being the same as "another Internet pirate illegally downloading/sharing their music." After all, they reason, their music is vital to everyone's life and anyone who doesn't buy the minimum that the RIAA deems necessary must be pirating the rest. (This comment would be going for the Funny tag if it weren't true.)
Yes it is true. But I think it's really just a handful of executives. The same ones who never figured out how to make money on the internet. So to make themselves look better, they are trying to scapegoat copyright infringement. The record companies' real enemy is obsolescence.
We need to automate music and crush the industry (Score:3, Insightful)
We need to automate the generation and production of music, and crush the music industry like a bug.
Listen to this sample. [vocaloid.com] That was created with Yamaha Vocaloid. [vocaloid.com] The product sells for $179.95. [soundsonline.com] It's better than many singers. We're getting close.
This technology is like MIDI players, a generation later. You need the composition and instrument models. Then the player puts it all together. You can mix and match; choose a different singer or instruments. (Question: is there enough compute power in an iPhone to run this?)
If this catches on, the music industry will be crushed.
There's still a need for composers. Easy Music Composer [softpedia.com] isn't quite good enough. Yet.
Re:Obligatory car analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
You completely missed his point.
Yes, it's wrong to claim that sports car drivers are all criminals, just as it would be wrong to say the same for all Internet users.
Should a car dealer not sell such cars to people who come in, ask about upgrading the performance and handling, ask about options for tinted windows, ask about the mechanics of transferring their personalised plates onto the car, ask to take a test drive under load of a route from a bank to an airport, show no interest in security or insurance details, and then say "Yeah, we're just looking for a good getaway car"? Well, maybe not so much.
Maybe, but how would that apply to Internet use? Perhaps if someone signed up asking for where they can download Photoshop, you might have a point, but this argument doesn't apply to the way that ISPs sell Internet access, since those users do not ask about any such upgrades.
But there are also good reasons that pretty much every justice system considers assisting illegal activity and/or inciting illegal activity itself to be illegal.
Which is off-topic here, as that requires knowledge or intent. If you want to compare to other systems, the obvious example is common carriers such as the postal service.
yet we spend little time considering whether all these blanket exceptions and "get out of jail free" cards we give to facilitators are universally justified and in the interests of fairness.
Which ones do you mean?
A private corporation (Score:2, Insightful)