This verdict would seem to turn the patent system, which is flawed in any case, into a mandatory license to print money. If manufacturers can be sued for not including patented technology in their products where does stop? This seems badly flawed. If you don’t realize a table saw is dangerous before you buy it, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to walk around without protective head gear. And you certainly shouldn’t be allowed near power tools. Instead he’s awarded $1.5 million for not following basic safety rules.

More here:
Tool Maker Loses Lawsuit For Not Violating Another Company’s Patents

Not content simply to defend Jammie Thomas-Rasset in her high-profile retrial next week in Minnesota, lawyer Kiwi Camara is joining forces with Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer.

The goal is nothing less than to force the industry to pay back the alleged “$100+ million” it has collected over the last few years. Perhaps the RIAA had good reason not to send those settlement letters to Harvard for so long.

Camara is attacking both the use of MediaSentry as an unlicensed private investigator and for using an illegal “pen register,” considered a type of electronic surveillence.  Also, Camara maintains that the copyright registrations are not valid beciase they don’t contain the original recording and that the RIAA failed to produce certified copies.

Teaming up with Harvard Law professor and longtime RIAA foe Charles Nesson, Camara wants to take back all of the money the RIAA has extorted from people over the years by filing a class action suit. We’ll see if the claims made in the case at hand gain traction.

Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits – WSJ.com

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

Jeff Price: The Democratization of the Music Industry – Entertainment on The Huffington Post
The advent and general adoption of the Internet, digital media and hardware took control of the global music industry away from the record labels and media outlets and handed it to the masses. For the first time in history, through sites like TuneCore, all music creators can choose to be their own record label. There are no longer subjective gatekeepers controlling who gets let “in,” promoted and exposed. The choice is ours. Now, anyone can be famous.

Loss of control over the product and the associated revenue stream.

History suggests copyright crusade is a lost cause – Ars Technica
The fundamental lesson is that property rights are not—and never have been—created by Congressional fiat. Property rights emerge spontaneously from the social fabric of a community. The job of the legislature is not to create a property system from scratch, but to formalize the property arrangements that communities have already agreed upon among themselves. A system of property rights will only be effective if it is widely viewed as legitimate.

If copyrights are a form of property right, then the history of American property rights provides clues about how the copyright system will need to evolve in the future. It suggests that Congress’s current strategy of imposing ever more draconian penalties for breaking laws that lack broad public support is a recipe for failure. Congress may be forced to concede, as it did two centuries ago, that property law must accommodate the actions of ordinary Americans, and not the other way around.

The LA Times published  an op-ed piece about this last month.

When the RIAA loses its mind – The Carpetbagger Report
Matt Yglesias noted that, given this RIAA position, Hillary Clinton might be vulnerable to an expensive lawsuit, but I’d set my sights a little higher:

In the video linked below, we see that President Bush’s iPod contains songs by the Beatles; since no Beatles songs have been licensed for the iTunes Music Store yet, these must have come from ripped CDs. Remember last February, when the RIAA told a federal agency that ripping CDs is illegal? I wonder if they’ll bring charges.

Hmm, the RIAA vs. Bush. Who to root for, who to root against….

Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use – washingtonpost.com
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

Long held legal ruling uphold personal use exemptions to copyright laws. The RIAA would like nothing better than to hobble PCs, CD recorders, DVD burners or anything that threatens and already collapsed business model. What better way to ensure long term survival than suing your customers?

And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Madonna Dumps Record Industry
The only real question now is how fast will the music industry model come tumbling down. When Radiohead led the way in offering their music directly to fans many predicted that the move was the beginning of the end; Madonna may well be the tipping point from where we will now see a flood of recording artists dumping record labels and where todays model will shortly become a footnote in Wikipedia

They added no value to the CD’s I buy. They basically exist as parasites that siphon off profits from artists and hold prices artificially high.

Sony BMG’s chief anti-piracy lawyer: “Copying” music you own is “stealing”
Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,” she said.

Victorious RIAA defendant gets attorneys’ fees, turns to class-action plans
In his order awarding Andersen attorneys’ fees, US Magistrate Judge Donald C. Ashmanskas noted that he had to make a decision on this case “without ever addressing the merits of the claims or the counterclaims.” Despite that, Judge Ashmanskas noted that there had been a “material alteration of the legal relationship of the parties,” and that with the sole exception of attorneys’ fees, Andersen had gotten “all the relief available to a defendant of a claim for copyright infringement.”

Judge Ashmanskas also cited the RIAA’s admission that the “evidence uncovered during discovery proved inconsistent and inconclusive,” a fact for which the labels could provide no explanation. He concludes that the RIAA lacked the prima facie evidence to support the claims of infringement.

“Whatever plaintiffs’ reasons for the manner in which they have prosecuted this case, it does not appear to be justified as a reasonable exploration of the boundaries of copyright law,” wrote the judge. “Copyright holders generally, and these plaintiffs specifically, should be deterred from prosecuting infringement claims as plaintiffs did in this case.”

The RIAA seems to be unable to pay the attorney’s fees ordered after they unsuccessfully  hounded yet another consumer for file sharing.

Hahahahahahaha!!!

NBC: Peer-to-peer costs corn farmers money
But the bigger issue here is that NBC wants the FCC to require ISPs to filter content. How this would work, exactly, is not explained, and as the public interest groups point out in their filing, “nearly any Internet protocol can be used to illegally transfer copyrighted materials—instant messaging, the Web, e-mail, and many other protocols are capable of being used for this purpose.” The groups also argue that such filters (assuming that they work well, and this is a major assumption) would hinder fair use and would basically put the FCC in charge of setting Internet technology policy. After the agency was smacked down by the courts for exceeding its authority when it came to the broadcast flag, FCC officials are probably not in the mood to tackle such a controversial new policy.

One of the most important points made in the reply concerns NBC’s charge that network neutrality (which this is all about) would prevent most “network management” tools from being used. Packet shaping, prioritization, deep packet inspection, bandwidth throttling—NBC argues that all of these tools would become illegal. This is a crucial question, since many of these management tools serve a useful purpose; does anyone not want VoIP traffic to be moved through network with less latency than, say, a P2P download?

Slashdot | RIAA Wants Agreements to Stay Secret
‘The plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have. …As such, they are guilty of misuse of their copyrights.’

Basically it sounds like their making the argument that because they’re acting has a cartel they’ve violated anti-trust laws and misused their own copyrights. The former may well be true and the latter looks like something of a stretch to me.

Oh the irony of the the CEO of Warner Music admitting he’s “fairly certain” his kids prirated music. I wonder what kind of consequences they got?

THEY will take my remote control away only when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

This thought followed my first reading of a patent application for a new kind of television set and digital video recorder recently filed by a unit of Royal Philips Electronics at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The design appears to threaten the inalienable right to channel-surf during commercials or fast-forward through ads in programs you’ve taped.

A second, calmer reading of the patent application revealed that the proposed design would uphold the right to avoid commercials, but only for those who paid a fee. Those disinclined to pay would be prevented from changing channels during commercials. If the viewer tried to circumvent the system by recording the program and skipping the ads during playback, the new, improved recorder would detect when a commercial segment was being displayed and disable the fast-forward button for the duration.

The developers of this technology insist that it would “give consumers the freedom of choice” to pay for the ability to skip commercials. What I truly hate about that is the way the language is twisted and spun to make the taking of a currently enjoyed freedom as a good thing. There’s no way in hell I would ever pay money for that crap, no fucking way.

Is the next step the forced insertion of a urinary catheter to make sure you don’t get up to go to the bathroom during a commerical? I’m sure somebody somewhere is looking into that right this minute…

This is horrible policy that attempts to enshrine in law the concept of “customary use.”

In essence, instead of allowing “fair use,” which is a forward-looking concept that enables a user to reasonably access a certain amount of content under certain conditions, “customary use” would make any new technological feature by its very definition a tool of copyright infringement. Moreover, the FCC would have the power to determine if a new feature falls into the “customary use” category. As EFF points out

That mean new uses are not allowed, unless approved by the FCC. I can’t think of a better way to stifle technical innovation. The point of this is to protect the RIAA from the “evils” of people recording off the air. It allows their lobbyists a crack at killing off any innovation they deem a threat to their business model. They have deep pockets and we have congressional representatives too willing to do their dirty work for sufficient quid pro quo.

The RIAA presented a laundry list of requests they filed with the FCC on this issue in 2004:

* Receivers may only record or permit recording of covered content: (a) in direct and immediate response to a consumer pressing a record button; (b) based on a date and time preprogrammed by the consumer.

* Preprogrammed recordings shall be for a minimum period of 30 minutes in duration.

* A replay buffer may be used to initiate a recording of a previously broadcast transmission provided that the buffer does not exceed 30 minutes in duration.

* Each recording of covered content shall be stored and retrieved as a singe continuous session and may not be divided into recordings of individual songs on an automated or non-automated basis using ID information or audio characteristics.

* The application of these usage rules to covered content shall be stored and associated in a robust manner with any recordings of such covered content.

* ID information shall be recorded only in a manner that effectively limits its use to display during simultaneous audio playback.

* No recording device shall record covered content based on ID information.

* All recordings of covered content must employ robust encryption methods to bind and limit playback to the recording device.

* Playback of covered content shall be solely on a session basis and shall not be linked in any way to ID information.

* Playback of covered content shall be at normal speed (defined as within 10% of the speed at which the content was originally recorded). Playback may skip forward and backward at higher speeds within the recorded session without playing any sound provided that no skipping, either forward or backward, shall be permitted to the beginning or end of a song using ID information.

They want to prevent time shifting of content, commercial skipping and they don’t want the ID infomation used to seek and record particular content. If these rules are forced on an unsuspecting public they will be cracked in the first week.

There’s no justification to change the rules to protect their business model. Regardless of what means of distribution are used artists will still want to create and the public will still want to enjoy content. There is no real issue with the willingness to pay for good content. We need to create payment systems that directly benefit artists, rather than punishing consumers.

The real problem is that technological developments are squeezing out the middle men. It’s become easier than ever to create and distribute your own content over the internet, without the publishers, distributors and other assorted middlemen. This is what they fear. They aren’t necessary, why do we pay them again?

The RIAA maintains that making back-up copies or ripping a CD to listen to on an MP3 player is an infringing use, but they allow it ’cause they’re such nice pople…