RIAA President Says Copyright Law "Isn't Working" 473
Kilrah_il writes "Apperantly not satisfied with the current scope of the DMCA, RIAA President Cary Sherman wants to broaden the scope of the law to have content providers such as YouTube and Rapidshare liable for illegal content found on their sites. 'The RIAA would strongly prefer informal agreements inked with intermediaries ... We're working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we'd like to extend that kind of relationship — not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers ... [But], if legislation is an appropriate way to facilitate that kind of cooperation, fine.' Notice the update at the end of the article pointing out that Sherman is seeking for voluntary agreements with said partners and not to enact broader laws without their cooperation."
hmmmm (Score:1, Informative)
Notice the update at the end of the article pointing out that Sherman is seeking for voluntary agreements with said partners and not to enact broader laws without their cooperation.
In other words he wants large sums of money from YouTube & RapidShare unfortunately the courts decided they didn't have to pay. So hes trying to get them to voluntarily pay extortion money but... when that doesnt work he'll be forced to get copyright law changed again.
Re:Why stop there? (Score:5, Informative)
Youtube and RapidShare encourage people to post content then basically look away until someone complains about it.
Youtube and rapidshare allow people to post content and the law doesn't require them to do anything until someone complains about it.
Despite that, both companies will block previously uploaded content by hash and Rapidshare relatively recently stopped their rapidshare
points program because they say it encouraged uploading of copyright infringement.
All that said, I loathe the idea of "informal agreements inked with intermediaries"
Copyright is a public policy issue and it should be decided by the public, not by a cartel of businesses.
definitely something isn't working (Score:3, Informative)
Here is the main content of TFA:
RIAA President Cary Sherman said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains loopholes that allow broadband providers and Web companies to turn a blind eye to customers' unlawful activities without suffering any legal consequences.
"The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search all the places infringing content appears, such as cyberlockers like [file-hosting firm] RapidShare."
- you see, DMCA isn't working for RIAA.
In response to a question from CNET, Sherman said it may be necessary for the U.S. Congress to enact a new law formalizing agreements with intermediaries such as broadband providers, Web hosts, payment processors, and search engines.
The RIAA would strongly prefer informal agreements inked with intermediaries, Sherman said: "We're working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we'd like to extend that kind of relationship--not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers."
- makes sense, make it increasingly difficult for US economy to survive.
Last week, the RIAA and a dozen other music industry groups called on Google and Verizon to crack down on piracy, saying in a letter that "the current legal and regulatory regime is not working for America's creators."
- RIAA considers itself a 'creator' apparently.
Clearly the law is not working. The correct fix is to abolish patent and copyright law altogether. There should be nothing of the sort, all government intervention into economy must stop, and this does include creating any sort of barriers of entry into any industry. Copyrights and Patents are like any other regulations, are designed to make competition less likely, to make the monopolies of the existing powers more persistent and pervasive, this of-course helps the government to maintain its power in a number of ways: obviously government makes much more money from monopolies than from actual competing businesses, who wouldn't bother giving the government officials those nice fat bri.. contributions.
All government regulations do this: they tax, they subsidize, they regulate, all that it ends up doing is creating barriers to entry, creating moral hazards, helping big monopolies and destroying competition, all of this of-course helps government officials but totally works against sound economy and competition.
Copyrights and patents must be abolished, that is the correct way to help the economy and not by helping some specific people to maintain their monopoly while giving them ability to drag any competition through a bought court system with their ill gained money.
Re:What a coincidence (Score:3, Informative)
The "New World Order" that the *IAA seeks is one where everything is assumed to be copyrighted (by them). If you want to distribute something, it must have their approval (probably to the tune of $thousands + $hundreds per minute of media for "analysis" to ensure it's not infringing). Sounds farfetched? RIAA's Sound Exchange is already THE government-mandated recipient of all royalties for music played on "internet radio". Even if the song wasn't written, performed, or recorded by anyone associated with the RIAA.
The big Picture (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
What if it was intentionally uploaded by the copyright holders themselves, or by those they authorized to do so?
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/broadcast-yourself.html [blogspot.com]
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-viacom-wanted-to-buy-youtube-uploaded-its-own-clips/32061 [zdnet.com]
quote:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
Re:Why stop there? (Score:3, Informative)
I thought the answer is 'go after the deepest pockets and just hope the settle out of court'?
Re:I agree (Score:4, Informative)
CH = Copyright Holder
CH 0000001 has 30 pieces of work that they want MD to monitor for and prevent from being displayed.
CH 0000002 has 1700 pieces and wants the same thing.
MD gets about 2000 files uploaded everyday, so that means they have to check all 2000 against 1730 pieces of work. Not fun for them, and what liability do they have to face if they miss one?
Ah... we forgot something... There are THOUSANDS of CH with quantities of works ranging from 1 to many thousands. The amount of work (and liability) that MD would have to deal with goes up at an insane rate. MD has NO vested interest in those pieces of work, and can not be expected to take on the task of policing the activities of other people, even though they use the service provided by MD. Are you expected to check the criminal record and intentions of everyone that walks down the sidewalk in front of your house because the police don't want to? No. It's up the the CH to defend their own copyright, and not to force someone else to do it for them.
Re:... what about the people ? (Score:4, Informative)
Because the paid damn good money to get their guys into office!
Source Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept. [wired.com]
Re:What a coincidence (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. If you read Youtube's position on fair use appeals on videos, they pretty much say as much flat-out. "We consider almost no fair use appeal to be valid, and if you make such an appeal, we're likely to sanction your account."
Re:What a coincidence (Score:3, Informative)
E-gads, my grammar is terrible in that post...
Re:What a coincidence (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a slice of the mandatory and automatic internet radio royalty fight, from the point of view of a broadcaster:
http://somafm.com/crb/ [somafm.com]
More recent stuff from the same guy is
http://somafm.com/blogs/rusty/labels/IREA.html [somafm.com]
You can look up the CRB and SoundExchange elsewhere (like soundexchange.com).
Re:What a coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
Do you really, really just want to listen to such music? Because you know, you can already. You can go listen to local bands and ask for their demo tapes, and stay away from all the artists that belong to some label working with RIAA.
Except, you can't. Venues have to pay "preemptive royalties" (mafia protection) so they don't get sued for local [slashdot.org] artists [thetimesnews.com] playing cover songs [boycott-riaa.com]. They can collect royalties [dailykos.com] for songs they don't even own [slashdot.org]. And they have no intention of making sure even their own artists [techdirt.com] are fairly [slashdot.org] paid [slashdot.org], either.
Re:What a coincidence (Score:3, Informative)
Right, except that there are physical limits to what you can accomplish when recording in a bedroom. The homemade vocal booth might fare a bit better...if this hypothetical poor musician manages to scrape together the cash for this and for the necessary professional recording and mixing equipment, and has the construction and audio engineering skills. So basically what you're saying is - music for the people, but only where the people are financially well-off home owners with a loads of free time and the ability to independently build and operate a professional recording studio in their basement.
Yeah, I see why that's totally changed modern music.
that link sig (Score:1, Informative)
It leads to here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ [youtube.com]
Slashdot's bracketed-domain-name thing helps, but I like the "TinyURL Decoder" Greasemonkey script for such purposes: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40582 [userscripts.org]
(already modded in here, hence anonymous)