Dear RIAA: It's Not 'Working Together As A Team' When It's Under Threat Of Regulation

from the do-these-guys-ever-make-sense dept

I've been trying not to respond to every RIAA blog post these days, but it's hard to let certain things go when they so rarely make any sense. For example, RIAA President Cary Sherman recently talked up the new regulations that force colleges and universities to "take proactive steps" to stop file sharing. He goes on to make it sound like universities decided to do this in the spirit of "teamwork" with the RIAA, rather than because they risked serious financial consequences under the law for not complying. He also leaves out the fact that tons of colleges and universities are pissed off and complaining about how much time, effort and money they're wasting on this just because Sherman and his friends still don't seem able to embrace modern music business models. Colleges and universities have enough to worry about without the government forcing them to act as the RIAA's police force. If it were truly about teamwork, Cary, you wouldn't have had to spend so much time getting Congress to pass a law to force them to do this.

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ISP Copyright Filter Debate Continues: Verizon Stays Away, While Rep. Bono Is All For Filtering

from the not-so-much-a-debate-as-posturing dept

With the entertainment industry actively pushing for ISPs to filter unauthorized content, it seems that the discussion is getting wider and wider attention. Rep. Mary Bono (now Mary Bono Mack), who is rather infamous for the last copyright extension efforts, and who believes that fair use is theft, has now stated that it should be the ISP's responsibility to filter out unauthorized content. Thankfully, she hasn't reached the point of making it mandatory, but it's not surprising to hear her say that she supports the concept of ISP filtering. Not to be left out, Cary Sherman of the RIAA chimed in to note that he doesn't think we need new legislation, but that ISPs should voluntarily start filtering content.

While AT&T agrees (for reasons that still don't make any sense), it's nice to see Verizon feels otherwise. Verizon's Tom Tauke says that the company is not interested in becoming copyright police, noting the inevitable privacy questions this would raise: "We don't want to get into the business of inspecting the bits and figuring out what is and is not appropriate traffic." As much as we tend to disagree with Verizon's position on many policy issues, the company has at least a decent (though, certainly not wonderful) record in protecting privacy. Remember, it was Verizon who initially stood up to the RIAA on trying to get information on customers without filing lawsuits.

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Should RIAA Win Against Jammie Thomas Be Tossed After RIAA Admits It Misspoke On The Stand?

from the one-would-think... dept

Well, well, well. This morning when we pointed out that the RIAA's responses to the whole Howell affair were rather lacking, we missed an important point. In the NPR debate between the RIAA's Cary Sherman and the Washington Post's Marc Fisher, while Sherman may have had the stronger case (this one time!), he did make one interesting statement that could have much wider implications. When pushed on the Howell case, rather than admitting he was wrong, Fisher moved on to a different situation: the infamously incorrect statements by Sony BMG exec Jennifer Pariser, who said on the stand, in response to a question about whether it was okay to make a personal backup copy from a CD, that saying so was "a nice way of saying, 'steals just one copy.'" As we (and many others) pointed out at the time, this statement is blatantly false.

When Fisher brought it up, Sherman responded by saying:

"The Sony person who (Fisher) relies on actually misspoke in that trial. I know because I asked her after stories started appearing. It turns out that she had misheard the question. She thought that this was a question about illegal downloading when it was actually a question about ripping CDs. That is not the position of Sony BMG. That is not the position of that spokesperson. That is not the position of the industry."

This actually is somewhat believable, as the industry does believe that downloading a single copy is the equivalent of "stealing just one copy," (even if that's questionable in itself). However, Sherman also claims "other reporters and bloggers had called about Pariser's quotes and chose not to write about them after learning she had erred."

It's not clear who those other reporters and bloggers are, but it's a bit surprising that they would then choose not to write about it. After all, it was a recording industry exec admitting she had made false statements under oath -- and those false statements were part of the case that helped Jammie Thomas lose her lawsuit. That has folks like Ray Beckerman wondering if the RIAA had notified the judge that Pariser had misspoke. Considering that we never heard the judge tell the jury to ignore those statements, at the very least, it would appear that the jury was never told that Pariser misspoke -- which certainly would suggest that Thomas has grounds to call into question that original ruling against her.

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Lawsuits Don't Create New Markets

from the kicking-and-screaming dept

The RIAA has apparently been getting a lot of negative publicity for its six-figure judgment against a single mother for file-sharing. RIAA president Cary Sherman has a taken to the Web to defend his organization's actions. Personally, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for Jammie Thomas given the strong evidence against her, but I did think Sherman made a couple of misleading arguments. First, Sherman claims that the lawsuits have "created a legal marketplace" for music. But the primary way you create a "legal marketplace" for your products is to offer better products. The market is growing because services like Apple's iTunes make it convenient for consumers to get the music they want in a convenient and flexible format. But the major labels can hardly take credit for that, since they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into signing on to the iTunes store. Sherman says he'd rather be "helping artists make great music that we can distribute in lots of exciting new ways that music fans want." But for the most part, their approach has been the opposite: doing their best to sue new music technologies out of existence and sharply limiting the ways consumers can listen to the music they want. Secondly, Sherman repeatedly equates copyright infringement with theft, going so far as to say that the jury found Thomas "liable for copyright theft." But of course there's no such thing as "copyright theft." As the Supreme Court and others have pointed out, copyright infringement and theft are two different crimes, and it's misleading to treat them as if they were identical.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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