What the RIAA really said.

[Craig White]

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