Newsflash: RIAA now required to present actual evidence in piracy trials

Another delightful legal misstep on the part of the indefatigable RIAA.

CNet: Mistrial for RIAA's $222,000 defendant

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Duluth, Minn., declared a mistrial in the case against Thomas, who was charged in October with violating copyright law by making 24 songs available for others to download on the Kazaa network.
Davis set aside the verdict on the grounds that he misguided the jury, telling jurors that simply the act of making a copyrighted song available for sharing amounts to infringement. The judge first indicated in May that he was considering granting a new trial.
...
The Recording Industry Association of America argued that the jury instructions were valid. "Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners' rights online--and would solely benefit those who seek to freeload off plaintiff's investment," RIAA attorney Timothy Reynolds wrote in a court filing.

Oh no, imagine the terrible burden involved in actually proving that a crime occurred, rather than that it could have potentially occurred. Poor, poor RIAA.

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When The RIAA Loses, Everybody Else Wins!

I don't generally make a practice of finding joy at other people's failures. But there are some exceptions. I'm always willing to take time out of my day to laugh when the RIAA fails.

MarketnewsGadgetTalk: Music File Sharers: 1, RIAA: 0

The District Court of Arizona has ruled in the case of Atlantic vs. Howell that simply keeping music in a "shared" folder on one's PC doesn't constitute illegal file sharing.

The whole file sharing issue is far from over, and I don't expect the RIAA to pack their marbles and go home just yet. But every time they lose a case, an angel gets it's wings!

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This Just In: Nobody likes the RIAA

My alternate title for this post was going to be "HEY, HEY, RIAA! HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU SUE TODAY!?"

But I thought that younger readers might not get the reference.

My point (and I did have one) is that in a cursory sweep through the blogosphere I couldn't find a single blog post defending the RIAA's terror campaign of suing peons for illegal filesharing.

A wonderfully thoughtful and cogent example of the vox populi against them is this one:

Just a Girl in short shorts talking about whatever: Fuck the RIAA

“This is what can happen if you don’t settle,” RIAA asshole attorney Richard Gabriel told reporters,. “I think we have sent a message we are willing to go to trial.”

But, I am venturing to guess there was as much music being shared last night as there was prior to the verdict. Take a look here.

I get tired of beating this horse, but I never get tired of the outrage I feel at the music industry (overall, though there are exceptions that get it) and it's inability to face the music.

By the way, allow me to draw your attention to the great point made here last week by regular reader/commenter Charles Farley:

I'm not sure I understand the profiling model the RIAA uses. Sure, they want to make examples out of common folk by extorting settlements out of them. But why do they file suit against single mothers, the elderly and the developmentally disabled?

These are the folks who are the "least example worthy" IMHO. They are folks who either had relatives or kids illegally download the best of Fred Durst or Fergie...and lo and behold, the 5 figure lawsuit shows up.

Where is the vetting of the potential plaintifs? The real criminals most likely the children of white upper middle class or well to do parents. They can afford the bandwith, computers and iPods needed to download the gigabytes of drek they do.

Why haven't people who have the money to mount a serious defense ever sued? My guess is they are waiting to get precident set (which they just have), get it affirmed a few times and then move their sites up the income chain.

Why aren't they suing the parents who are investment bankers and criminal litigators?

The RIAA should go big or go home.

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RIAA drops the hammer on poor single mother

I know that's a real tear-jerker headline, but what else are you going to make of a case like this?

Yahoo!: 24 illegal song downloads cost US woman 220,000 dollars

"This does send a message, I hope, that downloading and distributing our recordings is not OK," Richard Gabriel, the lead attorney for the music companies, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Don't forget that this happened in the USA, where the appeals process means that this is still not over, not to mention the other 26,000 cases that the RIAA still has on the docket.

And for what? I think the best sound byte today was the ever quotable Joe Wiesenthal from Dealbreaker who said

Labels Win Suit Against Song Sharer (NYT)

FInally, the scourge of illegal file sharing will be stamped out for good, now that someone has finally had the book thrown at them. This is all it took... now watch the profits roll in at the big labels.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

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Back again

Was sidelined last week with the flu. As a result, I had to content myself with expelling bile in the traditional way, rather than printing it on my blog.

Here's some highlights from what I missed last week:

TWICE: Circuit City Restructures Amid Flat Panel Profit Woes
Circuit City got fleeced so badly by the Christmas pricing bloodbath that they've shaken up their management team, and are consolidating their stores, which is code for jettisoning loser locations that they probably would have axed eventually anyway.

TWICE: Traditional PDAs Down, BlackBerry Sales Up
In my opinion, the PDA category died when the Blackberry and units like the Palm Treo arrived four years ago, this is just the body cooling off.

CE Pro: Apple's Steve Jobs calls for and end to Digital Rights Management, RIAA tells him to mind his own knitting
I'll link to it later, but last week I read a great essay from a technologist who described DRM as "the world's longest suicide note."

Bloomberg.com's Mark Gilbert reworks the "you have two cows" joke to poke fun at the finance world reported on Dealbreaker.com

Currency Market
You have two cows. China has 1 trillion cows. Guess who sets the price of milk?

Bond Market
You have two cows. One is Brazilian, one is Australian. They yield 25 quarts of milk per day. That's half as much as three years ago, when you traded your less-lactiferous German and U.S. cows for them. You are thinking of swapping for a pair of Namibian cows. They only have three legs but, hey, they produce 26 quarts per day.

Pension-Fund Management
You have two cows. How boring is that? You pay a month's supply of milk to a consultant, who advises you to sell one cow and buy two aardvarks instead. The aardvarks die. The consultant charges you four months of your (now reduced) milk supply and advises you to sell half of your remaining cow and buy a wombat. The wombat dies. The consultant charges eight months of milk for a copy of his new report, ``Two-Cow Strategies for Alleviating the Impending Pensions Crisis.''

And below is the funniest video on YouTube last week:

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RIAA sues ALLofMP3.com for US$1.65 trillion, says: "Go Big or Go Home!"

TechCrunch.com: AllOfMP3 Responds To RIAA’s $1.65 Trillion Lawsuit, reported on by LongorShortCapital.com.

The RIAA, having decided that suing dead people and little girls isn't ludicrous enough, have opted to go for broke: history's largest civil damages claim, filed in the USA, against a company with no US presence, which is obeying all the laws of the nation in which they operate.

Got that?

Long or Short Capital's analysis of the claim lays bare its fundamental worth:

If AllOfMP3.com has destroyed $1.65 trillion of value or committed acts worth $1.65 trillion in punishment, there is implicit in that the idea that the RIAA stakeholders are worth a minimum of $1.65 trillion plus whatever fair market values would peg them at. A quick perusal of the enteprise values of the constituents of the RIAA make it clear that they are not worth even $100bn, much less 16x that.
Also implicit in the $1.65 trillion number is that AllOfMP3.com has sold somewhere close to $1.65 trillion worth of music in its 3-4 years of mainstream existence. In 2004, there was $30-40bn of total music recording sales (and the RIAA does not represent all of that figure). The GDP of Russia is about $1.5 trillion. In 2005 there were $1.1bn of digital music sales. So in 3-4 years, AllOfMP3.com did the damage worth the revenue equivalent of 40-55 years of total music recording sales or 1x the GDP of Russia.

There's really nothing else to add here. No one, not even Dave Barry could make this up. If the trend of surreal news stories continues to prevail, it bodes ill for media outlets such as The Onion, since satire and reality have become indistinguishable.

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RIAA slapped with lawsuit

from the fine folks at CE Pro

The RIAA has made us feel a lot of
emotions in the past few years -- disbelief after claims that they are
responsible for
"containing" piracy, joy that they have to withdraw suits that have no merit
and disgust over their handling of a recently deceased man's case.
But not until today have we felt that "ah-ha" moment,
where someone has decided to sue the RIAA. Taking on the recording industry
giant is file-sharing network Lime Wire,
alleging "antitrust violations, consumer fraud, and other misconduct."
According to court documents, Lime Wire alleges that the RIAA's "goal was
simple: to destroy any online music distribution service they did not own or
control, or force such services to do business with them on exclusive and/or
other anticompetitive terms so as to limit and ultimately control the
distribution and pricing of digital music, all to the detriment of
consumers."

I'm having trouble formulating a coherent analysis, as I am simulaneously overcome by evil glee at the notion of the RIAA getting a dose of their own medicine, and am distracted by the hoots and whistles as the needle on my IronyMeter® is registering off the charts. It's hard to be thoughtful and insightful when you're impaired by fits of giggling.

Regardless, I've been ranting and railing against the RIAA and their myopic, paranoid approach to the music business for years. It's nice to see someone with (presumably) deep pockets stand up to the RIAA's bullying, and challenge the inherent ridiculousness of their conduct. Their McCarthyesque approach has won the Music Industry zero friends over the years, and has probably harmed their cause more than it has helped. I can't wait to see how this turns out.

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