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3 New Defendants Named In MP3s4free.net Case 274

Posted by timothy from the piling-on dept.
As reported in The Australian, three new respondents have been named in the mp3s4free.net link site case, including an employee of the ISP which is said to have hosted the site. The music industry says that ISP employees will be targeted in the future, but given an amnesty if they "inform the music industry."
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3 New Defendants Named In MP3s4free.net Case More

3 New Defendants Named In MP3s4free.net Case

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  • Let me get this straight.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pilot1 ( 610480 ) on Sunday November 16, 2003 @11:59PM (#7491026)
    Now it's illegal to _LINK_ to websites that have content that _MAY_ infringe on someone's copyrights?
    And what law makes that illegal? The DMCA?

    • Re:Let me get this straight.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:02AM (#7491039)
      And what law makes that illegal?

      It's the golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules. Historically this has only been countered by popular uprisings, public execution of tyrants and corrupt officials, and running carpetbaggers like the RIAA and their ilk out of town on a rail.

      Give lawyers power over policy in YOUR community, and this is what could happen to you!

    • Re:Let me get this straight.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Now it's illegal to _LINK_ to websites that have content that _MAY_ infringe on someone's copyrights?
      And what law makes that illegal? The DMCA?

      Hrm.. "As reported in THE AUSTRALIAN". You'd think that might be a hint it's not the DMCA.
      • However, Australia does have the Digital Agenda Act - which is basically our version of the DMCA.

      • Re:Let me get this straight.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @03:33AM (#7491702)
        Australia's elected government no longer has much interest in maintaining regional trade relationships, instead preferring to set up trade agreements with the US. This includes implementing DMCA style laws crippling fair use. The governments understanding of technology issues is quite minimal - our recent communications Minister has gone on the record equating broadband with pornography, and in parliament labelled senators from the Democrats opposed to internet censorship as paedophiles, and Electronic Frontiers Australia (our equivalent of the EFF) as a pornography group.

        It's likely that US technology law will continue to be adopted through futher trade agreements without question.

    • Re:Let me get this straight.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mausmalone ( 594185 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @01:20AM (#7491348) Homepage Journal
      Unfortunately, this makes my office's legal department edgy. We recieved a positive review from USNews and World Reports and wanted to link to their site... but our legal people wouldn't let us link without written permission from USNews. Since when is "Ranked #2 by USNews" and a link to their site something they'd object to?
    • Did you bother to read the article? This happened in Australia. They don't have the DMCA in australia. But judging by the way officials of the music industry can obtain warrants to bust into homes and businesses, it seems they are further along than the USofA any way. Hell, they make the DMCA look like one of those stupid sodomy laws.

  • familiar (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:01AM (#7491035)
    but given an amnesty if they "inform the music industry."

    "Do you now, or have you ever been a contributer to online music sharing? We'll let you go if you simply provide us with a list of music sharers."

    • Re:familiar (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ezraekman ( 650090 )
      This isn't funny, it's scary. This isn't a joke; it's really happening. I hope to God that this gets thrown out. If this type of activiy becomes standard, we'll have witch hunts all over again.

    • Compulsary reporting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrLint ( 519792 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:13AM (#7491094) Journal
      Well at this point I feel I need to say this again.

      Back a while ago I was ranting about how some ISPs feel the need to aggressively log everything and even pay people to read them all.. sad really. I had mentioned that 'soon' the media companies would try to press into legislation making it mandatory to report the alleged 'copyright violations' of their users. I use quotes as real violations and what the **AA considers to be violations are a set of diverging functions.

      Well my warning went unheeded, and look what happens. They now want to grant (presumably non-binding) 'amnesty' for probably breaking NDA, privacy, and perhaps the law, out of coerced self interest.

      What does this have to do with my thing about logging? Well mark my words! If the **AA even gets a wiff that extensive traffic logging was going on and the ISP didnt report 'copyright violation' your amnesty is out the window. What? You say there are too many logs to read? Too bad you had the logs in your possession, you should have checked them. You purged the logs? Oops sorry you destroyed evidence you should have kept.

      Its about to get a lot more ugly boys and girls.
      • IF your ISP is an idiot, then they might say something. If they're not idiots, they'll point to the DMCA and say "You didn't serve us a DMCA-compliant notice that your copyright was being infringed, now bugger off."

        I'd expect most ISP's will do the latter, if only because they don't want to be burdened with the expense of even trying to report anything to the RIAA.

        "Report the copyright infringement we know you're doing or else we'll sue you for the copyright infringement we know you're doing but won't te
    • In my UN-professional opinion, this sounds like an attempt to coerce breach of loyalty. That is, if you're employed by the ISP, you are bound to serve its interests, such as honoring the privacy of users except when established procedures for revealing information are being followed. This puts the ISPs in a rather difficult position, because their only hope for maintaining authority over their employees and control of their customer's private data is to promise to defend any employee sued for following co
    • Ooh! Can I inform the music industry? "Your business model is faulty in the current world." "Your mamas dress you funny." Wait, stick around, I'll inform you lots more!
    • but given an amnesty if they "inform the music industry."

      "The last time the RIAA spoke of amnesty I was a boy. And many good-natured music fans, who would not be criminals, were lured by them under a pledge of amnesty to a court where he had them financially hanged. I was very young, but I remember the RIAA's notion of fair-use."

  • Inform the music industry? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Worldly Iconoclast ( 724498 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:02AM (#7491038)
    Do they mean, "rat out others?"
    And going after the ISP only shows that they aren't trying to protect their artists and only want cash flowing into their pockets. That is the same as arresting a landlord because his tenants had some pot in their apartments.
    • Sometimes landlords ARE penalized for having drug-using tenants with "padlock laws".

      This witch-hunt MUST end. It is bad enough that such tactics have been used MANY times in history and people still love to apply the idea again. In Salem and in Europe with the witch trials, in the US against the "communists and terrorists" and the people that make infringing copies? What is worse is that they are yet again trying to throw due process out the window to persecute people that MIGHT have something to do wit
    • Doesn't being employed by a company protect you from lawsuits directly related to your job?

      They are obviously just trying to con people into squeeking.

  • How very nice of them. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BJH ( 11355 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:03AM (#7491040)
    He said employees of ISPs who were aware of illegal activities being carried out at work would be targeted in future if this case was successful, but would be granted "amnesty" if they informed the music industry.

    Yeah, that's a good way to attract new customers - rat out your PAYING CLIENTS to the music industry's Doberman lawyers.

    Hey, ISPs - are you listening? The answer to this one is never do anything that could make you aware of illegal activities, OK? It doesn't mean that you should sniff all traffic going over your pipes.

    • Re: ISPs - are you listening? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:50AM (#7491260) Journal
      Yep, you're absolutely on target here, and yet, most employees at ISP's still tell me I'm wrong about this one.

      The secret has always been to operate in such a way so you're not snooping on anything your customers are doing. You simply provide the connection to the Internet, and ensure your servers are properly providing the services they're supposed to be providing.

      As soon as you start selectively filtering out the "alt.binaries" newsgroups because you're concerned about the "pirated files" going through them, or start sniffing packets looking for customers running p2p file sharing programs, you're illustrating that you do, indeed have the ability to monitor and control the traffic.

      IMHO, a smart ISP will not attempt to monitor or log any specific information about the content being sent/received by customers. Then, there's a strong legal defense of claiming "It's unrealistic to expect us to be able to keep track of exactly what our users do when they're online." (And honestly, with the shoestring budgets most smaller ISPs run on - I'd think this would be the complete and utter truth anyway. It blows my mind that some of them still waste time sifting through logs and trying to censor things out, when they can't even seem to answer their phones for tech. support, or call people back in a timely manner.)

      • Re: ISPs - are you listening? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by shostiru ( 708862 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @03:14AM (#7491674)
        I run an ISP. We've considered it. It's a horrible idea.

        We are required by law to be able to log sufficient information to associate IPs with customers if informed to do so by authorities. We may well be required (waiting for legal counsel answer) to keep these logs for several years. Not doing so may lead to criminal charges. By the way, incompetence and lack of resources aren't a defense any more than your cheap-ass landlord can get away with "but those smoke detectors are so pricey".

        Not logging customer data is ultimately more expensive to us anyway. When AOL emails us up and says "67.32.1.1 is spamming, drop them or we drop you", a hundred bucks for a RADIUS log drive suddenly looks cheap compared to two fscking weeks of losing customers while I call their incompetent support line to get out of their blacklist.

        The whole usenet thing is problematic, although the issue isn't piracy, it's kiddy porn. Usenet admins have been arguing about whether a common carrier defense would work for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, thus far no Usenet providers (or ISPs for that matter) have been charged that I know of, the authorities seem much more interested in the people who post this filth than in us. They change newsgroups regularly, and tracking readers isn't as trivial as grepping RADIUS logs, we'd basically have to monitor every newsgroup.

        But if advised to do so we'll drop our news server faster than you can blink, and our customers can go to giganews et al where they have deep pockets. I'm not going to prison just so you can read alt.binaries.kinko-the-clown or whatever they're using these days. But beyond that, I don't personally give a rodent's posterior whether you're sharing the entire first season of Gilligan's Island on gnutella and sucking a month's worth of alt.binaries.mp3s.circle-jerks, as long as you don't saturate the DLSAM and we don't get a subpoena.

        Don't like it? Use an anonymizer, find an open wireless access point, run freenet, and/or pull a full newsfeed (oh and have you priced OC3s lately? cuz that's what you'll need for a full feed).

        BTW, you're largely right about the economics of smaller ISPs, although many of them seem to forget that customer service is ultimately the most important part of the business.

      • You're rigth. And infact clueful service providers are taking this route already. For example Supernews, a comercial nntp-provider purposefully does not keep any logs with the customers ip-adress or other identifying information in it. Because if they don't have the info, it can't be subpoenad.

  • RIAA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Preach the Good Word ( 723957 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:03AM (#7491046)
    See what really frustrates the hell out of me is that I want artists to succeed. I don't want them to be slaves to the RIAA, and I don't want them getting screwed over by pirates. The problem is that in the RIAA's efforts to protect their profits (they don't give a hoot about artists), they are making it much harder for me to listen to music the way most people want to.
    • I agree.... it's painful to know that the biggest threat to artists is a beaurocratic legal organization put in place to "protect" them.

      So how is "informing" any different than posting a list of links? The only difference is that they're saying only they have the right to know who's sharing.

      Snitch to the RIAA? Fuck that, if you're gonna snitch about illegal activity to anybody at all, snitch to the police since they're the only people who have any right to do anything about it.

  • Not again... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qweezle ( 681365 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:05AM (#7491052) Journal
    ...This is just another hopelessly idiotic example of the music industry using their coercion tactics to force people into complying with their own rules, not the rules necessarily of the state, the government, nay, the music industry's rules.

    I don't even see how this was illegal:

    The website, www.mp3s4free.net, was alleged to contain MP3 audio files which infringe upon the copyrights of the record labels, but is in fact a collection of links to other websites on the Internet, and other MP3 files distributed by permission of the Copyright holders.

    All this site was doing was referring to other websites, which may have been illegalt themselves, but a links page that refers to them is not illegal!

    Hell, there are sites out there that tell you how to build bombs, sites with "art" that is really just child pornography, sites claiming to be legitimate businesses which scam people out of their money for all kinds of items, and they are going after a page of links?

    Let me repeat, a links page is not illegal. This is yet another example of the music industry throwing out ridiculous propoganda to spread the word on their "illegal music crackdown". Stupid.

  • In related News (Score:2, Informative)

    by nfras ( 313241 )
    ARIA have issued several Mark "Chopper" Reid [amazon.co.uk] orders (similar to threats). In a prepared statement they said that "full cooperation is expected. I mean, it's very hard to host a website with no fingers."
    Electronic Frontiers Australia said "strewth, blimey, look at that little beauty!" before calming themselves down with a Fosters and throwing several prawns on the barby.
    • before calming themselves down with a Fosters


      You had me going up 'til there. Most Aussies HATE Fosters. VB (Victoria Bitter) is the preferred poison. ;-)

      • VB (Victoria Bitter) is the preferred poison. ;-)

        Preferred by you Mexicans maybe - "poison" being the operative word. The only beer that tastes worse than VB is Powers.

  • Relevant section of copyright act (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:10AM (#7491078)
    It's reasonably clear that it's not illegal, to quote the COPYRIGHT AMENDMENT (DIGITAL AGENDA) ACT 2000 - SCHEDULE 1--Amendment
    of the Copyright Act 1968:

    "A person (including a carrier or carriage service provider) who provides facilities for making, or facilitating the making of, a communication is not taken to have authorised any infringement of copyright in a work merely because another person uses the facilities so provided to do something the right to do which is included in the copyright"
    • But this is in Austrailia, correct? What does the law there say? Also, doesn't this state that a ISP isn't liable or responsible for the filesharing that its clients do? So why do they have to bow to subpeonas from the music industry?
      • But this is in Austrailia, correct? What does the law there say?

        That was the Australian legislation

        Also, doesn't this state that a ISP isn't liable or responsible for the filesharing that its clients do? So why do they have to bow to subpeonas from the music industry?

        Take down first, ask questions later?

  • Blackmail (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:11AM (#7491082)
    'The music industry says that ISP employees will be targeted in the future, but given an amnesty if they "inform the music industry."'

    So the RIAA will bring charges against you if you don't squeal?

  • How about..... (Score:4, Funny)

    by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:11AM (#7491083) Homepage
    How about suing the dog of the kid that live's next door to the ISP's employee's mother-in-law's sister's step-son's friend ?
    I am sure he is also connected in some way or OTHER to this, no ?

  • Great choice. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nutt ( 106868 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:12AM (#7491088)
    "He said employees of ISPs who were aware of illegal activities being carried out at work would be targeted in future if this case was successful, but would be granted "amnesty" if they informed the music industry. "

    Ok, so now you can either be sued by the music industry or you can "inform" them and possibly get fired for doing so. Great choice there.

  • Chain of illegality (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hi_2k ( 567317 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:13AM (#7491091) Journal
    Website links to sites that link to ways that you can possibly illegaly download music. Employee of ISP that hosts the website gets sued. Next up: a filesharers father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate as the defendant.
    • Hmm, so if a site linking to illegal site is illegal itself, then logically one can conclude that a site linking to a site which links to illegal site is illegal as well. If you go up this chain far enough you'll find RIAA.org's web site at the top of the chain, I would think.

      And we've finally found the missing link between RIAA and MPAA.

      Lone Star, you are my nephew's janitor's wife's tailor's cousin. So, I'll sue the crap outta ya!
    • you forgot the electricity company...

  • RIAA and it's ilk are as busy screwing the artists as they their customers. Here's a posting by Janis Ian [baen.com] about her experiences as a "represented artist" and why she supports p2p file exchanges.

  • Is it just me, or is it extortion? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digitalvengeance ( 722523 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:21AM (#7491129)
    Merriam webster's dictionary of extorting:

    To obtain from another by coercion or intimidation

    So, the industry is saying "give us information or get sued." Sounds like intimidation and coercion to me.

    • >So, the industry is saying "give us information
      >or get sued." Sounds like intimidation and
      >coercion to me.

      It may seem that way to you, but use of the civil legal system and its guarantees of due process of law will not be regarded as improper by any reasonable person. If They were doing something plainly illegal, it would be different, but properly using the legal system to ask the state to settle their grievance with you, is hardly "extortion."

      • Interesting point of view.

        To clarify, its not the use of the civic legal system that I object to. Rather, its the fact that they are threatening to do something obviously inappropriate (sue an employee of a company that did nothing illegal and may have had no knowledge of the illegal operation) if said employee does not cooperate. (By cooperate, I mean sell one's soul to the industry.)

        I guess what it really comes down to is this: Did the employees themselves do anything that is illegal or otherwise viol
        • You can file a suit against anybody for anything. Whether the state will choose to acknowledge your position as having sufficient merit to proceed, is entirely a question of law and process. If you are sued, you either get your day in court to testify, or the plaintiff will piss off. I'm not sure I see the problem, really.
    • Well, I know nobody will ever go for this, but wouldn't a `better' response from the ISP be: "provide us with funds to monitor this, and we'll do you a service by monitoring this".

      The ISP has no real obligation (no business contracts, etc.,) to even care about RIAA. Why in the world would an ISP bend over like this?

      I understand if the music industry was paying them to monitor illegal activity and they weren't doing their job, but forcibly making someone do something is plain weird/stupid/wrong - capitalis
      • To a certain extent, I agree with you. However, I also have a serious concern. If ISPs start taking compensation from various individuals or organizations to monitor their customers, where does the privacy line get drawn? Can a spammer pay to obtain usage statistics for users? Can the government pay for email logs without any sort of legal clarification? The idea is solid in principle, but I am concerned with the implementation and what effects we may see as a byproduct.

        Secondly, I'm concerned with false

  • Illegal to link? (Score:5, Funny)

    by obsidianpreacher ( 316585 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:21AM (#7491131)
    Well then, it's now illegal to link to websites that may contain copyrighted material. Gotcha.

    Well, here's a link [pigdog.org] to a page about a DeCSS program (no, not the one you're thinking).

    Here's another [cracks.am] that distributes freeware.

    Oh, and a link to Disney [disney.com] just for the hell of it.

    A note to /. mods, editors, hosts, OSDN, etc.:
    The (RI|MP)AA will not come burn your house down if you "inform them" of me this second! But the instant that you mark me as +1 Funny and click on, they're going to get you, too!

    Pass this on to 15 of your friends within the next 1000000 minutes or you'll have bad luck forever and your dog will die, too!
  • I bet the next step is suing people who hum copyrighted material. Then they'll sue people who heard someone humming a copyrighted song unless they nark on the guy. I think the final step will be to sue every person on Earth, dead or alive, deaf or dumb. They'll just claim DMCA.

  • Suing ISP Employees?! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:27AM (#7491152) Homepage
    Its been established that they cant sue ISPs, right? But now they're threatening the employees? Theres something very wrong with that. This is like someone not being able to sue the post office for a delivery of something illegal so they sued the individual postal carrier who delivered it. Insanity abounds...(and before anyone flames me, i do understand the difference between transporting illegal materials and civil copyright infringment)

  • Bad news for Google... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by darnok ( 650458 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:30AM (#7491171)
    if having links that go to sites-that-may-or-may-not-be-naughty is going to be illegal.

    Might make a mess of that IPO

  • Conversations from Cell Block H (Score:4, Funny)

    by violet16 ( 700870 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @12:43AM (#7491230)

    Criminal 1: What are you in jail for?

    Criminal 2: Murder. You?

    Criminal 1: I worked for guy who ran an ISP who had a customer who set up a site that had some links to another web site that stored some files that may or may not have infringed copyright law.

    Criminal 1: You BASTARD!

  • Oh no, you mean it is going to be that much harder for people to steal things? Even with the popular excuse "I only wanted one song", how many of you are still stealing with the advent of all of these online music stores, where you can buy songs for 1$?
    • Are you an RIAA shill or just a tard of the sort that used to be called "useful idiot"?

      A 128K MP3 is the digital equivalent of what comes out of your FM radio. Did you get written permission from the artist's label to listen to each of the Britney Spears songs that comes out of your radio?

      Kill yourself, you're a MUSIC thief.

      • 128k is FM Quality? Are you insane? I am not an RIAA shill, quite the opposite, but I am opposed to stealing, it is just wrong. The artists already get squat from record sales, why take even more away from them? Something is after all, better than nothing, last time I checked. 128k is fine for 99% of people out there, it is more comparable to CD than FM, if I had said 64k you would have been correct. Well, it should be fine unless you are a complete audiophile, in which case, nothing less than 320k will suf

  • Legal Ramifications of the Case (Score:5, Informative)

    by spin2cool ( 651536 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @01:13AM (#7491328)

    There are two potentially disasterous legal precedents that coud be set by this case:

    They are both found in this quote from the second article:

    "The Federal Court action seeks declarations that both Mr Cooper and his ISP have infringed the copyrights of the music labels by making and/or distributing copies of copyrighted music, and seeks permanent injunctions and damages against them both."

    It's going be be impossible to prove that he made copies of the music, because he didn't. They're relying on nailing him on distribution charges. So the key element in this case is the definition that the court adopts for "distribution". In my opinion, distribution is the act of actually transmitting the file.

    However, if the creation of a link is acknowledged as being considered distribution (and thus copyright infringement), the results for search engines like Google could be disasterous.

    The other major point is that they're trying to hold ISP's responsible for the actions of people they host. This, also, could have far-reaching ramifications for the internet community.

  • IANAL, but isn't there *something* in all those constitutional ammendments or previous rulings, that prevents businesses and individuals from over burdening the courts with frivolous law suits? Possibly could call all this frivolous because of the scale of attacks, and the lack of actual proof of damages alleged by any of the **AA's?

    I thought the burden of proof was on the **AA's to provide, not just their words and "studies." Something is just plain wrong here, and it's getting fishier every day. Won't so

  • Lame! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by c0d3fu ( 594060 )
    Is Washington even aware of this? What large organizations are opposing the RIAA and the MPAA? How can we fight this BS past hoping that these cases don't stand up in court?

    Several students at UMR were targeted by the MPAA recently. From what I have gathered, one of them was not even aware that they were sharing a camcorder recording of Matrix: Revolutions over a P2P network because it was uploaded to them via Windows file sharing. True or not, since all this evidence is so circumstantial, is it not

    • Re:Lame! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Froggy ( 92010 )
      Is Washington even aware of this?

      I don't know. I'd like to think we in Australia still retain a modicum of self-government, but our Prime Minister does have an embarrassing tendency to roll over wagging his tail and widdling uncontrollably whenever your President says "here, boy!" so American involvement is not out of the question.

      You were aware this was an Australian case, weren't you?

      What large organizations are opposing the RIAA and the MPAA?

      We have the EFA over here, which is like the EFF with o

  • I'm done buying music (Score:3, Interesting)

    by obsid1an ( 665888 ) <obsidian@@@mchsi...com> on Monday November 17, 2003 @01:47AM (#7491443)
    I've basically given up hope on the RIAA. I haven't bought a CD in over a year, and don't play to start using itunes or any other of those crap pay to listen services anytime soon. No amount of me posting on /. has seemed to make them change their ways so maybe a couple hundred less dollars a year will work. Then again, probably not.
    • I still have the original Napster beta install on my computer, for nostalgia purposes. When file sharing was simple, and nobody was getting sued. I still purchased CD's during the Napster days, but after finding out about price fixing, and all the lawsuits, I decided to give in to my hatred towards greed (even though I realize they are trying to protect their industry). I have not bought ONE cd, aside from demo cd's released by my friend's bands, since Napster was in beta. And I never will.

  • Links to Tens of 1000s of Legal Music Downloads (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @02:00AM (#7491493) Homepage Journal
    Please read my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads [goingware.com]. It is under a Creative Commons license - please copy and distribute it. I'm also asking for translations; a Romanian translation will be posted as soon as I'm done converting the translator's word document to XHTML.

    From the introduction:

    You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America [riaa.org] or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees [divinemaggees.com], Oliver Brown [kingturtle.com] and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL [looppool.info].

    If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

    The article discusses at some length how you can work to make file sharing legal.

    It has been Google's #1 hit for the query legal music downloads [google.com] for about three months now, and recently has been on the second page of hits recently for the much more popular query music downloads [google.com].

    Traffic to the article has been climbing steadily, especially since the RIAA lawsuits were filed. It's looking like my copy of the article will get about 19,000 page views this month.

    • "You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America [riaa.org] or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music."

      Are you personally supplying this warranty, because the RIAA is a runaway train right now, and I doubt piddling technicalities like them not representing a given artist will actually matter.

      Certainly they don't seem to be slowed by the idea that suing your customers is a business plan born out of Pre-2000 internet incubators.

      Seriously, if people are

  • AUTOMOBILE comparison (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tintruder ( 578375 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @02:48AM (#7491619)
    Is it possible that the auto manufacturers could utilize the same basis for calculating lost sales and then sue the public transportation utilities?

    Certainly, if every copied MP3 or other media is a 1:1 correlation with a lost album sale, and every "shared" MP3 is responsible for hundreds of lost sales, then one city BUS must then be responsible for the loss of the sale of 40-60 automobiles?

    And further, for every car not sold, there is also a loss in license plate fees, gasoline sold. toll road fees and parking fees.

    Seems like that would be a perfect test case as the names of cars are copyrighted, as are certain design details, and of course, the purchaser must hold a "license" to operate it on the road.

    Oh, wait, some bus riders own cars and some car owners ride the bus!

    Maybe there is some truth to the idea that the acquisition of shared downloads has an impact on media sales, but it is obviously not of the magnitude the bastards claim.

    • Owning cars and riding the bus are both legal activities. Purchasing CDs is legal but distributing the music contained on them is not legal. If government were to legitimize distribution of content by anyone then there would be little or no reason to purchase the original.

  • what we need (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @04:15AM (#7491794)
    Is a new law that gives ISPs the same Common Carrier protection as Telephone Companies get.

    i.e. basicly "Internet Service Providers are not responsable for content hosted on or passing through their networks".

    Would put an end to a lot of this crap.
    • ISP A hosts kiddie porn site, you find it, report it, they don't remove it because they're not responsible.

      Not a good idea. They should be held liable for things on their network that it's proven they know about.

      As for things going through their network, I agree with you.
  • Since they are suing employees of the ISP for something the ISP's customer did, does that mean that they themselves as individuals (organization president perhaps) can be sued for the actions of any customer of theirs? All millions(or whatever) of them? Thats alot of liability there, now I know why they need to do anything for money, at any moment the shitstorm could pour down on them and they need to be prepared.
  • We need to tell them just how much we detest this behaviour that ARIA, RIAA and similar orginasations have been displaying at the moment.

    The only contact they list on their website is an e-mail address (aria@aria.com.au), which I bet they do not even read.

    But the Australian White Pages lists them. I stongly urge all Australians to call ARIA (+612 8569 1144) and let them know what they think. Alternatively you can post them with snail mail, I suggest sending all of your junk mail to them. Their snail

  • links to our beloved Britney Spears' [google.ch] music.

    It's been my favourite P2P app for a few months now ;-)

  • Why just a while ago www.riaa.org was hosting illegal mp3s. Why any good citizen should have called that in immediately!

  • And at the same time (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Photon Ghoul ( 14932 ) on Monday November 17, 2003 @09:08AM (#7492393)
    We get this article printed in the Austin-American Statesman [statesman.com]. Granted, it's old news if you follow this mess but at least that is reaching mainstream press.

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