Ford Hits Back On Ridiculous Lawsuit Demanding $2,500 Per CD Ripper In Its Cars

Copyright

from the let-us-explain-to-you-the-law dept

Back in July, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit filed by the AARC — the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies — trying to make use of a misreading of the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) to pretend that it means that Ford and GM have to pay royalty money for every CD ripping car stereo they install. As we noted, the AHRA is basically a deadletter law. The law itself effectively killed any possible innovation in the area that it was designed to tax for royalties — machines that make repeated copies of content. The recording industry tried to pretend that basic MP3 players met the definition and sued one of the first such players, the Diamond Rio. The court soundly rejected the argument in that case, and thanks to that, probably 99% of you have MP3 players (or, nowadays, smartphones that play MP3s). In our original post, we went into much greater detail about why the AARC was clearly misreading both the law and the caselaw in a desperate attempt to kick up some royalties from the big automakers.

Ford (along with Clarion) have now responded and do a damn good job explaining why the AARC is simply wrong. The the filing is pretty short and sweet in explaining the problems with the AARC’s argument:

Congress enacted the AHRA in 1992 to regulate a then emerging technology that for the first time enabled high quality serial copying of copyrighted musical recordings. ?Serial copying? refers to the creation of copies of a musical recording from another copy of that recording as opposed to the creation of copies from the original recording. This activity concerned the music industry, which was a proponent of the AHRA. However, rather than directly prohibit serial copying outright, Congress exempted certain products and devices? specifically including computers and hard drives?from compliance while requiring other specifically defined ?devices? to also incorporate technology to prevent serial copying. The automotive navigation systems here are exempted.

Neither Ford nor Clarion is in the business of facilitating the serial copying of music. Ford is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world; it builds and sells some of the best-selling cars and trucks, certain models of which include navigation systems. Clarion manufactures and supplies Ford with navigation systems for its vehicles. Each such navigation system is a complex computer and includes a central processing unit that interprets and executes complex instructions and a 40 GB hard drive for storage of an operating system, computer software programs, databases, and other information (?Nav System?).

[….]

By its own Complaint, Plaintiff admits that this feature of Defendants? Nav System consists of recording CDs to the system?s own hard drive, where the music is stored with various software programs and other data. It alleges nothing about making serial copies of CDs, digital audio tapes and the like. Under a plain reading of the AHRA, these automobiles with a Nav System are not capable of making a ?digital audio copied recording? of a ?digital musical recording? as defined under the Act. This is because the AHRA states that digital musical recordings do not include (1) material objects in which one or more computer programs are fixed or (2) material objects in which data other than sounds are fixed. Here, the Nav Systems are nothing less than automotive computers with hard drives containing both programs and data other than sounds. They do not reproduce digital music recordings in materials objects addressed by the statute, that is, CDs, LPs, cassettes, or digital audio tapes. The Nav Systems are outside the AHRA?s scope.

Not surprisingly, the filing relies heavily on the ruling in the Diamond case, and I see that one of the lawyers listed on the filing is Andrew Bridges, who handled the Diamond case in the first place. You never know how these kinds of court cases will turn out in the end, but it seems unlikely that the AARC is going to get rich off of this last gasp effort to squeeze money out of automakers.

Filed Under: ahra, audio home recording act, cd rippers, copyright, mp3 players, serial copies
Companies: aarc, clarion, ford, gm