Watch out, RIAA's set a precedent
Summary: While the final outcome of RIAA's court victory last week against Jammie Thomas remains uncertain, the ruling reminds us that the nearly 20,000 lawsuits filed by the industry group obviously stand a chance in court. Regardless of your own feelings on the matter, as has been noted in this column before, the downloading and sharing of copyrighted materials is illegal.
While the final outcome of RIAA's court victory last week against Jammie Thomas remains uncertain, the ruling reminds us that the nearly 20,000 lawsuits filed by the industry group obviously stand a chance in court. Regardless of your own feelings on the matter, as has been noted in this column before, the downloading and sharing of copyrighted materials is illegal. For some reason, RIAA has chosen to sue individual file sharers rather than the sites that enable file sharing (like Kazaa, Limewire, and their ilk), leaving the countless students who share files every day vulnerable to lawsuits.
RIAA has already exerted pressure in a variety of ways on universities and colleges, and many are either providing names and access logs and/or blocking all file sharing on campus. While the group has its legal hands full right now, it is only a matter of time before they begin holding institutions accountable for the activities to which they turn a blind eye or otherwise enable, even through naivete.
Universities have been the subject of significant scrutiny for long enough that most higher education IT groups understand the legal and technical components of file sharing on campus, even if the students do not. However, for K-12 administrators, this is largely uncharted territory. What are students downloading using your network infrastructure? I found a machine last year sitting on our network in the back of an office downloading and seeding as fast as our backbone would allow. The system was running XP Home and was not on our domain, but obviously had Internet access. I just happened to notice traffic issues on a particular switch.
How about laptops on your network? Most of us allow them and even encourage them. Despite various access controls, it's still easy for kids to download and upload music, movies, games, and software once connected to most networks. We can bock ports, throttle bandwidth, and block individual sites, but this becomes a management issue bigger than many of us. So what should we do? We need to protect ourselves legally, but should also do our best to protect and educate the students.
An important first line of defense remains a very clear, strictly enforced acceptable use policy for students and staff; now, more than ever, that policy should include specific language relating to file sharing. Talk back below and let us know what else you've done legally and/or technically to mitigate the problems associated with illegal file sharing.
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Talkback
Downloading?
Whether it's ethical or not is another question.
Not quite correct......
Those update files that users download from Microsoft, are shared, copyrighted data.
Plugins such as Flash, Quicktime, Reader, etc. are shared, copyrighted data!
That ruling is incorrect and needs to be overturned.
re: Not quite correct
The holder of IPR (copyright is almost but not quite the same thing) can decide to make pages or files available - it's HIS choice.
That's where music copying hits the fan. Those music files you got off kazaa or wherever were copied without the permission of or against the wishes of the copyright holder, whether that be the music company, the performers or the composer.
The court case is about copying without permission.
The morality of chasing individuals is a completely different matter, one the RIAA and the music industry will be pretty hard-nosed about. How long they can keep this up remains to be seen.
I would prefer they chased the people doing the sharing rather than the downloaders. Compare with drugs. Both using and supplying are illegal but which is worse? And no I'm not saying downloading equates with taking drugs, before the knee-jerk reaction kicks in.
I'm confuddled.....
The problem with this particular case,
Jurors need to be informed that theirs is the ultimate power, especially via jury nullification (a tried and true power that dates back to the Magna Carta and British Common Law).
How to get out of Jury Duty
Personally, I wouldn't try it, I'd be concerned about judge deciding to treat it as
contempt of court. Well, you know, it would be. :)
Courts hate members of the Fully Informed Jury Association, because the doctrine of
jury nullification CAN void statute and case law in many cases (though I suspect not as
many as FIJA would like you to think).
Here's a better example
Now, on the other hand, if I bought the novel, made several copies, and distributed them to various people, we have a totally different situation. That would be illegal and immoral. Some might even go as far as stating that the manufacturer of the machine on which I made the copies could be held liable. After all, they provided the tool by which I was able to break the law.
Check out Baen Books, They take it that one step further
Uh... nope!
RE: Here's a better example.
the key word is "AND"
* Downloading copyrighted works
* Sharing copyrighted works
However the following IS ILLEGAL:
* Unauthorized acquisition and redistribution of copyrighted property
The RIAA needs better lawers, and we need a better fkn average IQ on the jury's in these kinds of cases.
our capital federal republic dictates laws
RE: Watch out, RIAA's set a precedent
BB
No. Not a thief.
Theft is the act of taking something [i]away from[/i] its rightful owner, such that said rightful owner is [i]deprived of[/i] the property. If I steal your car, you can no longer drive your car. If I steal your money, you can no longer spend that money. But if I copy a file, the copyright holder still has the file and can still sell (or license) copies of it.
Copyright infringement is illegal and should be punished as such. But it is no more theft than the hand-painted animated drawings of little nekkid baby Cupids in Disney?s original [i]Fantasia[/i] are child pornography (no matter how much Senator Orin Hatch might wish to re-define that term to include such drawings).
It's obvious why
The legal system is broken, it's whomever can afford the best attorney, not who's right. I've always wondered why an artist can say "go ahead, we don't care if you download (Southpark as one example). Yet Viacom turns around and says, "download it and we'll sue you into a homeless shelter".
Was it Peter Blake who said...
Watch out, RIAA's set a precedent
suppress and control new technology (along
the lines of computers, rockets, bombs, and
such) and use it to promote his regime,
while he imprisoned all opposition.
And where did it get him?
You are right, though. The RIAA
bears "watching out" for. Like any snake or
rabid animal.
RE: Watch out, RIAA's set a precedent
You have one of the toughest, and most important, jobs in this country. Teaching our youth the significance of copyrights, and the pros and cons of a copyright free or copyright compliant society, is as important as any subject matter on the agenda these days. Probably more imporant.
The economic stakes in this game are enormous.
I know. I have a 16-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old son. They have both been taught (through peer-to-peer learning as much as anything else) that "borrowing" and "sharing" music, movies, and artwork over the Internet is an accepted norm. More education is critical. I doubt that any of their teachers would be able to pass a test on the current copyright laws in this country ... let alone overseas.
Perhaps if they see a few incidents like the recent one out of Duluth on the evening news, they (both teachers and students) will start to pay attention. Piracy is a complex problem, and all of us are needed to help turn this ship around and headed back into the right direction through these rough, and pirate-infested, seas ... the cyberseas.
I do agree with you, however, that the middlemen have to be stopped for this mission to succeed. We cannot all sit back and watch Google, and some of the other self-proclaimed "technology visionaries", routinely infringe copyrights every second of every day without recourse ... and then expect any of these education or compliance efforts to work.
Thanks for writing about this vitally important subject. Copyright education is more important today than at any time in my 30+ plus years in the technology field. The best way to keep piracy out of our workplaces is to work together to eliminate it in our schools and at our homes.
Parents, responsible students, and teachers can make a significance difference if we work together and do not allow the anti-copyright folks (many of whom have probaly never had a real job or family to protect ... and certainly have never developed any copyrightable works) to poison the minds of our youth.
Stealing other people's property ... whether it's physical property or intellectual property ... is bad, and there should be very serious consequences if and when someone is caught.
Sorry, Ms. Thomas. Perhaps your mistake will help out some others along the way. Quit your whining. You got caught breaking the law.
Keep up the dialogue.
George P. Riddick, III
Chairman/CEO
Imageline, Inc.
griddick@imageline2.com
Irony
The public library in this town has hundreds of DVDs, thousands of CDs and tens (perhaps hunderds) of thousands of books. They are not paying one penny of royalties to anyone when they loan them out, dozens of times a year, to people who, likewise, aren't paying a dime to anyone for their use. The legal theory behind this is that it constitutes "fair use", since the library isn't making money by reproducing them (though they do charge for each page duplicated on their copying machines, some of which your company provides). The RIAA allows this. They pray that nobody mentions it though, because under their legal theory every library in the country is guilty of hundreds of thousands of violations every year - unless the law contains an exemption that private citizens don't have.
Bottom line, George: If I ain't charging money for, or making money by, copying something I bought or was lawfully given it traditionally and historically constitutes "fair use" regardless of who I choose to share it with. The RIAA wants to change that. They want to be paid every time someone so much as looks at something they hold a copyright to (this, incidentally, is called rabid greed, and is something you really don't want to teach your children is good). Sadly for them, no matter how much they want it, they ain't gonna get it. It's too easy to copy. It's too easy to share. It's flat out impossible to nail even one millionth of the people doing it. And sooner or later, someone is going to get the libraries involved as part of a lawsuit under a "selective prosecution" theory and bring down the whole house of cards.
The trick is to promote education
methods of muddying the waters and trying to
confuse "copyright infringement"
with "theft". There IS a world of
difference, but you refuse to see the finer
points of the law while at the same time
trying to use the law to prove your flawed
logic.
Just because you have been burned yourself
is no reason to be bitter against the public
at large.
http://sec.edgar-online.com/1999/05/17/17/0000929624-99-000969/Section8.asp
ITEM 1. LEGAL PROCEEDINGS
http://www.bustpatents.com/awards.htm
Patent/copyright infringement
lawsuits/licensing awards
Grgeory Aharonian
www.patenting-art.com/economic/awards.htm