What the RIAA really said.

[Chris Gehlker]

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.
---
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely  
or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

-Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate  
(1872-1970)