What the RIAA really said.

[Joshua Zeidner]

  Just wondering Craig, do you have some kind of personal stake in
these matters?  Are you a lawyer?  do you represent some group?  Or
are you just really into this issue?

   seems like you're putting a lot of effort into this.

   btw- any Ron Paul supporters on this list?

  -jmz


On 1/1/08, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 20:04 -0700, Chris Gehlker wrote:
> > On Jan 1, 2008, at 6:28 PM, Craig White wrote:
> >
> > > It's not straw-man arguments at all...A business exists behind a NAT
> > > router and the RIAA would never differentiate between whether the
> > > files
> > > were shared within behind the NAT router or through the NAT router.
> >
> > It's a straw-man argument because the guy was using Kazaa. Courts,
> > juries and politicians understand the common sense distinction between
> > choosing to listen to a CD you paid for on your computer as opposed to
> > a stand alone CD player and "stealing" music with Kazaa or one of its
> > competitors. This is precisely why the the original story, which
> > asserted that the RIAA didn't understand that distinction had legs.
> > But the RIAA understands the distinction perfectly well.
> >
> > The RIAA has always had one strike against them. Copyright law doesn't
> > criminalize downloading audio files, it criminalizes uploading them.
> > And yet most of us learned on the playground that sharing is good and
> > stealing is bad. So the RIAA has had to walk a fine line. They have
> > had to convince the courts that the person they are after has done
> > something illegal, uploading, while also convincing the courts, the
> > politicians and the general public that they are doing something
> > wrong, downloading.
> >
> > The RIAA will never convince anyone that that merely turning on you
> > computer is wrong. You know that. That's why you want to convince us
> > that that is indeed their position.
> >
> > You are perfectly correct that if college students download a bunch of
> > music files that they didn't pay for, nobody is going to care whether
> > the files resided on a server or a genuine p2p network. But you are
> > pretending to miss my point which is simply that people distinguish
> > between paying for your music and not  paying  for  it.
> >
> > Let me recap.
> >
> > Initial reports in the Washington Post and elsewhere indicated that
> > the RIAA had made a big mistake by asserting that there was something
> > wrong with ripping you own CDs to your own computer. Many people,
> > myself included, trumpeted this news widely.
> >
> > Later reports clarified the issue. The RIAA was accusing Hansen of
> > using Kazaa, not of merely ripping his own CDs for his personal
> > listening.
> >
> > Some people made various arguments that the original reports were
> > correct and that the RIAA must somehow have meant what they were
> > originally alleged to have said.
> >
> > I think arguments of the form 'The facts are not as I understood them
> > but my position remains unchanged' are inherently loosing. I think
> > those of us who aren't willing to say 'It's perfectly OK to use Kazaa'
> > should pick a better battle.
> ----
> The stipulation regarding Kazaa by the defendant states that the
> defendant was interested solely in exchange of pornography. It's clear
> that Kazaa had other uses besides illegally sharing music files.
>
> Your predicate assumes that everyone is knowledgeable that the purpose
> of Kazaa is to illegally share music but I know that to be not true. My
> guess is that if you polled 100 people off the street, what does the
> software Kazaa do, that only 10-20% would actually say illegally share
> music files.
>
> Through their attorneys, RIAA claims that the pornography files were
> listed amongst the music files but as I hope you will now agree, this
> doesn't mean that they were physically stored in the same location but
> rather could just as easily (if not more likely) have been in an
> entirely separate subdirectory but that distinction wasn't available to
> their researcher.
>
> The other fact is, we install software all the time without really know
> what it does. I can assure you that my 10 years of using Linux has
> taught me just how little I understand about the software that is
> installed on my computer.
>
> Now, when you talk about 'courts, juries and politicians', I have to
> take issue. First, because politicians are often technologically
> challenged, witness Sen. Ted Stevens description of the Internet as a
> series of tubes. Courts are merely the instruments of the adversarial
> system and thus we are left to the juries...and when the jury is
> specifically instructed that the rules to be followed are...
>
> "The act of making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic
> distribution on a peer-to-peer network, without license from the
> copyright owners, violates the copyright owners' exclusive right of
> distribution, regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."
>
> you should note that this jury instruction is sufficiently flawed to
> provide solid grounds for appeal, so says the EFF
>
> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/capitol-v-thomas-key-appeal-issue
>
> quite simply, juries aren't even remotely to "understand the common
> sense distinction' as you suggest and your suggestion is entirely naive.
> Juries are hammered on the concepts to consider only the evidence
> presented in court and your notion of juries using their common sense is
> considered 'jury nullification'
>
> You're trying to make the issue hinge on the usage of Kazaa. Previous
> litigation revolved around Napster. I wouldn't doubt that other
> litigation claimed issues with Limewire. Do you really believe that they
> are going to ignore SMB/CIFS/NFS/AFP software/protocols?
>
> and lastly...the original link...
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122800693.html
>
> suggests that she was indeed charged $9,250 per song she 'downloaded'
>
> you might want to revise your comments in light of the facts
>
> Craig
>
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