RIAA Sues Man for Ripping Legally Owned CDs to His Computer

[Lemur]

Well, this is cute. Congress wants to tie college funding to how well they comply with the RIAA. Lovely. H.R. 4137 is our friend. No, really.

[Blodrast]

They've been pushing that for months (at least)...
Corporatism kinda sucks for the average Joe, doesn't it... I'm looking forward to the loud protests and noise-making against this... oh wait, there won't be any, because most folks don't care, and they don't think it matters. Yeah, it's been repeatedly said before, but apathy is the worst of them, and we'll all pay dearly for it.

Look, I'll show you some silver lining... unfortunately, it's across the pond.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...shot-down.html

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Proposed EU ISP filtering and copyright extension shot down

By Jon Stokes | Published: January 22, 2008 - 12:53PM CT

This past November, EU regulators in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education began looking in earnest at Europe's cultural products and heritage as an engine for economic growth. The idea behind this investigation, which took its original impetus from a 2006 study on "The economy of culture in Europe" and culminated in a draft report submitted by French socialist MEP Guy Bono entitled "On cultural industries in the context of the Lisbon strategy," is to consider ways that EU regulation might give a boost to the so-called "cultural and creative sector."
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The draft report contained language that the caused alarm among European music and movie business trade groups, so Europe's version of Big Content immediately set about lobbying to not only "fix" the offending point (number 9, quoted below), but to convert it into a power grab by proposing alternative language supporting ISP-level copyright filtering (c.f. similar efforts in the US) and the extension of copyright terms.

Here's point 9 from the draft report; see if you can spot the language that made Europe's content industry nervous:

9. [The European Parliament] urges the Commission to rethink the critical issue of intellectual property from the cultural and economic point of view and to invite all those active in the sector to join forces and seek solutions equitable to all, in the interest of a balance between the opportunities for access to cultural events and content and intellectual property; draws Member States' attention on this point to the fact that criminalising consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution;

All that talk of striking a "balance" between access and intellectual property, and the negative reference to industry tactics that "criminalize" consumers spawned a flurry of lobbying activity, and by the time the dust settled lobbyists had succeeded in getting the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy (ITRE) to submit an amendment to the draft report urging European ISPs to implement filtering mechanisms for the purpose of copyright enforcement.

The European recording industry followed up this move with another amendment, proposed last week, to extend EU copyright terms to match those of the US (the author's life plus 70 years).

The EFF's Danny O'Brien sent a heads-up to BoingBoing that, as of today, the Culture and Education Committee rejected all of the proposed filtering and copyright extension amendments. Clearly, they're not going to let the ITRE or the European recording industry push them around, which is great news for Europeans. Now if we could only get the US Congress to show as much spine as the French (ouch).

[TB666]

Wow, nice work EU.
Probably the first time they ever did something good.

[Blodrast]

MPAA: Errr, oops!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study

By JUSTIN POPE – 15 hours ago

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.

In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.

But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.

The MPAA says that's still significant, and justifies a major effort by colleges and universities to crack down on illegal file-sharing. But Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, says it doesn't account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren't necessarily using college networks. He says 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks.

"The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem on this campus, then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry," Luker said. The new figures prove "any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself."

The original report, by research firm LEK, claims the U.S. motion picture industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide, with most of the losses overseas. It identified the typical movie pirate as a male aged 16-24. MPAA said in a statement that no errors had been found in the study besides the percentage of revenue losses that could be attributed to college students, but that it would hire a third party to validate the numbers.

"We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report," the group said in a statement.

Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents higher education in Washington, said the mistakes showed the entertainment industry has unfairly targeted college campuses.

"Illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing is a society-wide problem. Some of it occurs at college s and universities but it is a small portion of the total," he said, adding colleges will continue to take the problem seriously, but more regulation isn't necessary.
On the Net:

* http://www.mpaa.org

[doc_bean]

In my old university server all p2p programs are banned to cut donw on downloading, also stricter download limits have been enforced throught the years (there used to be a system where you got 10GB a month but downloading at night only counted for half, I believe, last year it was 3GB download a month, no special night download). They were necessary to keep everyone surfing at a decent speed.

Of course, it didn't help illegal downloading much, this is the age of portable HDs, so less people download but as much (or more) people can get a copy.

The idea that college students pirate the most seems to be according to my own experiences. I don't think the RIAA missed the ball completely here, for a change.

For the record, I didn't participate in any illegal downloading or trading.

[Vladimir]

Does anyone over 30 actually care about this? Of all the things happening in the world, THIS is something tweens to 20 somethings are up in arms about. I hope you all like working until death.

[Blodrast]

Does anyone over 30 actually care about this? Of all the things happening in the world, THIS is something tweens to 20 somethings are up in arms about. I hope you all like working until death.

I'm over 30, so I guess I'd qualify. Yeah, I guess I do care when they arm-wrestle other countries into passing laws for their own benefits; I do care when they have enough influence to determine the creation of a new gov't agency specifically to deal with copyright, in other words, to enforce the **AA's whims; I do care when they have enough clout to decide that Universities should no longer get federal funding unless they do the content industry's work; I do care that corporations pass their own laws, for all practical purposes. You should, too - or otherwise enjoy when you get a settlement offer for the low, low sum of $3000, because the *AA thought you downloaded and shared their copyrighted crap - regardless of whether you did or not.

I also care when they use lies to justify and promote these things.

If you're ok with being ruled by corporations, by all means, don't worry about any of these.
All the big corporations with their oligopolies and their immunity from the law have your welfare in mind, don't worry about anything.

But yeah, most people, like you, don't see themselves directly affected by this, so they don't care. Monkeysphere and all that. But you're wrong when you think that not everybody is affected...

[Lemur]

Vladimir, you sound like one of those crunchy hippies yelling about how we should drop everything until we solve global hunger. To which I say, dude, you're harshing my mellow.

Abuse of intellectual property is a real problem. Do people over 30 care? Well, I'm over 30, and so is my brother, and so are most of my friends, so there's the answer to your rhetorical question. Most of the serious commentators and litigants on this issue are over 30 as well, so good luck trying to pin this on Gen Y whining.

If you can't see how DRM abuse, lawsuit abuse, ever-extended copyrights and the death of Fair Use affect you, then have a nice day. Good luck getting the next generation of disc player working with your HDCP-enabled TV, by the way.