Ioman
07-03-2003, 08:35 AM
Article from New Media Age:
"The news that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has trained its guns on the general public for the first time in its latest bid to combat copyright piracy has been received with mixed reactions from all sides of the industry.
The reason is clear enough. For the past three years the high-profile trade body has been in intense battles with the enablers of super-charged consumer piracy. This has involved lawsuits against file-sharing networks Napster, Grokster and Kazaa, as well as airing concerns
about the increasingly cheap availability from consumer electronics giants of CD copying equipment.
Technological advancements over the past few years have taken us from getting a friend to make tapes of their CDs, to that same person offering music to millions at a time. And this, naturally, is what concerns the record industry.
When it won its case against Napster in 2001 and eventually had the site closed down, the RIAA thought it had killed off the problem. But with the next generation of peer-to-peer networks came a new problem. Services like Grokster and Kazaa don't use a central server. So when RIAA took them to court, the judge decided last month, after much wrangling, that such P2P networks couldn't be held responsible for the content that was illegally shared on them since the network owners didn't have any control over what content was exchanged between users.
This ruling is the key reason behind the RIAA's change of tactics, from targeting the enablers to targeting the users. But it has also fuelled an encouraging court win against US ISP Verizon, which the RIAA had sued for refusing to disclose the identities of four users who had been heavy file-sharers of copyrighted content.
RIAA president Cary Sherman argues that the law is clear and says the main targets are really those distributing substantial quantities of music. "This activity is illegal. You're not anonymous when you do it and engaging in it can have real consequences," he says.
While Sherman might seem to simply be following on from where former RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen left off, in threatening everything and anyone who dares to even consider copying a tape, the new approach has the dual role of both scaring and educating the public.
In the past few weeks Apple's iTunes has been highlighted as a huge success by the music industry. Last week Apple revealed it had already downloaded over 5m paid-for tracks (at 99¢ each) since launch.
Apple's success can be used as evidence that if there were no services allowing illegal copyright infringement then the fledgling legal services would be doing much better. This is because the Apple store, which is only available to Macintosh users running OS X, serves a market that was already starved of any of the popular file-sharing systems available in Windows formats only.
That said, many think attacking consumers is a rocky path for the RIAA to take. Grokster president Wayne Rosso says the move is simply a "scare and intimidation" tactic and doesn't believe it will work.
"They're not going to sue 57m Americans. And what are they going to do about the 100m file-sharers outside the US?" he demands.
Wippit founder Paul Myers agrees. "It will raise awareness but it's not going to do the US music industry any favours."
Grokster says it will now mobilise its 3m users to write to their local congressmen and women to demand the US government force the record majors to provide online music services with blanket licences, enabling more independent legal music services to become reality.
"If there are blanket agreements everyone will get paid and no one needs to be sued," says Rosso. "As it stands, the record industry will make an example of a few people, but it won't make much of a difference to the numbers who are downloading music."
Pinpointing the target
A closer reading of the RIAA's statement on the matter shows that even the trade body may not be as ****sure as it initially sounds.
For one thing, the statement seems to emphasise the act of uploading rather than downloading as a crime. The RIAA says, "It is illegal to make available for download copyrighted works without permission of the copyright owner." And elsewhere it states that it will use its scanning software to find a user "who is offering to distribute copyrighted music files".
Both these sentences and others within the mainly aggressive-sound
ing statement imply that the RIAA realises there may be limitations in proving in court who's actively touting material and who has ripped MP3s for their personal use.
That said, it's clear there has been a change in attitude by the networks themselves and their partners. Kazaa, for instance, this week launched version 2.5 of its system, which is designed to enable more legally licensed product. (Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh are all pushing for majors to offer blanket fee licences for online music.) Indeed, NMA sources reveal that some very senior executives in the music industry are unofficially meeting with some of the P2P networks to see if there's any possibility of their working together.
Myers, whose Wippit is described as the only legal P2P network and who has had difficulty negotiating online music terms with the record companies, says that the only reason that so many people are sharing music files is because they can't get them elsewhere. "Any label that doesn't offer music to legal services like ours deserves to have its music pirated," he says.
The RIAA naturally disagrees and points to the relatively limited subscription services available on Pressplay, Listen.com, MusicNet and others. But the success of Apple's à la carte model has encouraged many of the big players to want to get involved. AOL Time Warner chief executive Richard Parsons has said that his company hopes to have something up and running by the end of the year, as does Microsoft.
The market has certainly opened up, and it'll be interesting to see if the RIAA does pursue any major cases against consumers by mid-August, as promised. It's doubtful this will help sell more records, or indeed downloads, in the near future, but it might be one way to give the wider mainstream legal download market a kick-start. RIAA goes hunting To gather evidence, the RIAA will use scanning software, like that provided by NetPD, on the peer-to-peer network to scan the public directories. When the software finds a user who's offering to distribute copyrighted music files, it downloads some of the infringing files, along with the date and time it accessed them. The RIAA will collate additional information from the system to enable it to identify the violator's ISP. It will serve a subpoena on the ISP requesting the name and address of the individual whose account was being used to distribute copyrighted music. The first lawsuits, estimated to be in the £100,000 range, could take place as early as mid-August this year."
"The news that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has trained its guns on the general public for the first time in its latest bid to combat copyright piracy has been received with mixed reactions from all sides of the industry.
The reason is clear enough. For the past three years the high-profile trade body has been in intense battles with the enablers of super-charged consumer piracy. This has involved lawsuits against file-sharing networks Napster, Grokster and Kazaa, as well as airing concerns
about the increasingly cheap availability from consumer electronics giants of CD copying equipment.
Technological advancements over the past few years have taken us from getting a friend to make tapes of their CDs, to that same person offering music to millions at a time. And this, naturally, is what concerns the record industry.
When it won its case against Napster in 2001 and eventually had the site closed down, the RIAA thought it had killed off the problem. But with the next generation of peer-to-peer networks came a new problem. Services like Grokster and Kazaa don't use a central server. So when RIAA took them to court, the judge decided last month, after much wrangling, that such P2P networks couldn't be held responsible for the content that was illegally shared on them since the network owners didn't have any control over what content was exchanged between users.
This ruling is the key reason behind the RIAA's change of tactics, from targeting the enablers to targeting the users. But it has also fuelled an encouraging court win against US ISP Verizon, which the RIAA had sued for refusing to disclose the identities of four users who had been heavy file-sharers of copyrighted content.
RIAA president Cary Sherman argues that the law is clear and says the main targets are really those distributing substantial quantities of music. "This activity is illegal. You're not anonymous when you do it and engaging in it can have real consequences," he says.
While Sherman might seem to simply be following on from where former RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen left off, in threatening everything and anyone who dares to even consider copying a tape, the new approach has the dual role of both scaring and educating the public.
In the past few weeks Apple's iTunes has been highlighted as a huge success by the music industry. Last week Apple revealed it had already downloaded over 5m paid-for tracks (at 99¢ each) since launch.
Apple's success can be used as evidence that if there were no services allowing illegal copyright infringement then the fledgling legal services would be doing much better. This is because the Apple store, which is only available to Macintosh users running OS X, serves a market that was already starved of any of the popular file-sharing systems available in Windows formats only.
That said, many think attacking consumers is a rocky path for the RIAA to take. Grokster president Wayne Rosso says the move is simply a "scare and intimidation" tactic and doesn't believe it will work.
"They're not going to sue 57m Americans. And what are they going to do about the 100m file-sharers outside the US?" he demands.
Wippit founder Paul Myers agrees. "It will raise awareness but it's not going to do the US music industry any favours."
Grokster says it will now mobilise its 3m users to write to their local congressmen and women to demand the US government force the record majors to provide online music services with blanket licences, enabling more independent legal music services to become reality.
"If there are blanket agreements everyone will get paid and no one needs to be sued," says Rosso. "As it stands, the record industry will make an example of a few people, but it won't make much of a difference to the numbers who are downloading music."
Pinpointing the target
A closer reading of the RIAA's statement on the matter shows that even the trade body may not be as ****sure as it initially sounds.
For one thing, the statement seems to emphasise the act of uploading rather than downloading as a crime. The RIAA says, "It is illegal to make available for download copyrighted works without permission of the copyright owner." And elsewhere it states that it will use its scanning software to find a user "who is offering to distribute copyrighted music files".
Both these sentences and others within the mainly aggressive-sound
ing statement imply that the RIAA realises there may be limitations in proving in court who's actively touting material and who has ripped MP3s for their personal use.
That said, it's clear there has been a change in attitude by the networks themselves and their partners. Kazaa, for instance, this week launched version 2.5 of its system, which is designed to enable more legally licensed product. (Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh are all pushing for majors to offer blanket fee licences for online music.) Indeed, NMA sources reveal that some very senior executives in the music industry are unofficially meeting with some of the P2P networks to see if there's any possibility of their working together.
Myers, whose Wippit is described as the only legal P2P network and who has had difficulty negotiating online music terms with the record companies, says that the only reason that so many people are sharing music files is because they can't get them elsewhere. "Any label that doesn't offer music to legal services like ours deserves to have its music pirated," he says.
The RIAA naturally disagrees and points to the relatively limited subscription services available on Pressplay, Listen.com, MusicNet and others. But the success of Apple's à la carte model has encouraged many of the big players to want to get involved. AOL Time Warner chief executive Richard Parsons has said that his company hopes to have something up and running by the end of the year, as does Microsoft.
The market has certainly opened up, and it'll be interesting to see if the RIAA does pursue any major cases against consumers by mid-August, as promised. It's doubtful this will help sell more records, or indeed downloads, in the near future, but it might be one way to give the wider mainstream legal download market a kick-start. RIAA goes hunting To gather evidence, the RIAA will use scanning software, like that provided by NetPD, on the peer-to-peer network to scan the public directories. When the software finds a user who's offering to distribute copyrighted music files, it downloads some of the infringing files, along with the date and time it accessed them. The RIAA will collate additional information from the system to enable it to identify the violator's ISP. It will serve a subpoena on the ISP requesting the name and address of the individual whose account was being used to distribute copyrighted music. The first lawsuits, estimated to be in the £100,000 range, could take place as early as mid-August this year."