Legal Song Download Service?
from the that-doesn't-seem-right... dept
Beck writes in with a link to the latest Cringely piece saying: “He details an idea he has for a music download business that bypasses the RIAA, an idea that lawyers tell him is legal. He wants to form a corporation that buys thousands of CDs (one copy of each CD) and makes them available for download to shareholders of the corporation. Since each shareholder is an owner of the company, legally (he claims) each shareholder owns each CD and is therefore entitled to make copies under Fair Use. To make money from this he will charge the shareholders a small fee to process the download.” We’ll wait for some more lawyers to comment, but this doesn’t sound at all legal to me, no matter what Cringely says. The fact that they’re giving the music out to everyone – even if they are, technically, owners, would probably not fall under fair use, but “performance” or “broadcast”, which would quickly make the scheme illegal. Then, there are a bunch of other problems with the way he wants to set up the business, but that first problem seems to be the biggest.
Comments on “Legal Song Download Service?”
Not legal at all
Fair use is primarily a non commercial defense. A business is by defenition, commercial. One of the few fair use defenses businesses have relate to the press, but not other types of businesses.
The legal reasons that this would be copyright infringment are almost identical to the reasons that MP3.com lost their suit over Beam-It.
-Gene
Re: Not legal at all
Even Beam-it was more legal than this. Just incorporating doesn’t mean you can make unlimited copies of anything as long as you keep it within the corporation. Otherwise Wal-Mart would buy one Windows CD and make copies for every PC they own.
One could form a corp. or a co-op and lend discs out to shareholders/members, Netflix-style, but that’s all.
Re: Re: Sort of Off-Topic
Sort of an off-topic question. Let’s say I downloaded songs “illegally” and received one of these recent lawsuits.
If I had CDs for every song I downloaded (I downloaded them since they were skipping, it was easier than recording, whatever), do they have a case?
Re: Re: Re: Sort of Off-Topic
The subpoenas (they’re not lawsuits yet…) are all for people who are sharing stuff outbound. In other words, it’s for people who have a large number of files available for outbound sharing – not those who downloaded a lot. So, while your point is good, I don’t think applies in this case.
The RIAA is going after those who share outbound files, with the idea being that if you stop people from sharing outbound, there won’t be anything left to download (other than the spoofed files the RIAA puts up themselves).
No Subject Given
The flaw with this scheme is that no investor would ever fund it – Hummer Winblad has been threatened with getting sued over Napster, and any VC who invested in this type of deal would surely get slapped with some billion-dollar claim from the RIAA.