Blackmoor Vituperative

Ray Beckerman is calling for new legislation to protect investors in tech companies from frivolous RIAA lawsuits. Why should investors get special treatment? The problem is not that investors are being sued. The problem is that anyone is being sued.

What we need is not additional legislation to protect investors. What we need is the arrest and conviction of RIAA’s board of directors under federal Rico statues.

Last April, Shepard Fairey mobilized his legal team to send Baxter Orr a cease and desist order threatening legal action against him. The Austin, Texas, artist made a parody of Fairey’s Andre the Giant design, adorning it with a SARS mask and the title “Protect Yourself.”

Now the Associated Press is suing Fairey for copyright infringement for using a wire service photo as a model for his artwork

What comes around goes around. Personally, I think both suits are absurd, and simply illuminate the absurdity of our copyright laws and the legal system that keeps them in place.

In the context of a restitution motion, in United States of America v. Dove, the RIAA’s “download equals lost sale” theory has been flatly rejected.

In a 16-page opinion, District Judge James P. Jones, sitting in the Western Disrict of Virginia, denied the RIAA’s request for restitution, holding the RIAA’s reasoning to be unsound:

It is a basic principle of economics that as price increases, demand decreases. Customers who download music and movies for free would not necessarily spend money to acquire the same product. Like the court in Hudson, I am skeptical that customers would pay $7.22 or $19 for something they got for free. Certainly 100% of the illegal downloads through Elite Torrents did not result in the loss of a sale, but both Lionsgate and RIAA estimate their losses based on this faulty assumption.

(from RIAA’s “download equals lost sale” theory rejected by federal court in Virginia; restitution motion denied in USA v. Dove, Recording Industry vs The People)

I love Lawrence Lessig. He is one of a tiny handful of clueful people that actually gets some attention from the media. If only lawmakers paid attention.

You have probably heard it by now, but Apple has announced that all music on iTunes will be free of DRM.

iTunes is still AAC-only, so I won’t be using iTunes, myself. Still, this is a milestone in the fight against the corrupt Digital Rights Mafia.

Remember Worlds.com? The 3D pioneer is still around and they’re ready to sue. In fact on Christmas Eve, the company sued NCSoft, for violating patent ‘690, a system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.

NCSoft’s games, such as Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars and Lineage, are all said to violate the patent. And NCSoft is just the start. World.com’s IP lawyers feel that they have a “very robust patent,” reports Virtual Worlds News.

(from Worlds.com patent litigation could ripple through virtual worlds, ZDnet)

Even if patents on software were not inherently absurd (and they are), this is a patent on something which had been widely implemented and had even appeared in movies decades before Worlds.com applied for their patent in 2000. Even EverQuest was using virtual avatars for a year prior to Worlds.com’s patent application. Surely the USPTO had heard of EverQuest? How clueless could they possibly be? What technologically illiterate boob signed off on this?

In a stunning about-face, the Recording Industry Association of America is set to abandon its long-held policy of mass lawsuits against file-traders, opting for deals with ISPs that could eventually result in users’ Internet access being terminated.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the RIAA has reached preliminary agreements with major ISPs. Under the deals, the RIAA would email an ISP when it detects a user illegally serving up music. The ISP would forward the note and ask the user to stop. After a few follow-ups, the user would notice his broadband service is appreciably less broad, and ultimately would simply be cut off.

Helping to transition the industry to this point has been New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whose office kept the RIAA and ISPs talking. “We wanted to end the litigation,” said Steven Cohen, Cuomo’s chief of staff. “It’s not helpful.”

But the RIAA will not be dropping the many, many cases still outstanding. Recording Industry v The People, Ray Beckerman asks:

Meanwhile, what about the unfortunates who are presently entangled already in these unjust lawsuits? Why won’t the RIAA drop those cases too? If it was bad business to start them, why isn’t it bad business to keep on throwing good money after bad? I hope consumers will remember this 5 1/2-year reign of terror, and will shun RIAA products, and I hope the legal profession will place a black mark next to the names of those “lawyers” who participated in this foul calumny.

For its part, the RIAA says the litigation strategy was a success. Chairman Mitch Bainwol, said, “Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed,” meaning people are much more shy about engaging in P2P filesharing.

(from RIAA to drop mass lawsuits against filesharers, ZDNet

Is this an improvement? Perhaps, but only if it means that RIAA has decided that suing their customers is now and forever a vile, business-impairing practice. Frankly, I do not give them that much credit. And remember, sharing is not piracy.

More misdeeds of the Digital Rights Mafia…

The Recording Industry Association of America has done a number of distressing, disgusting, and disgraceful things in its never-ending quest to fill its coffers with ill-gotten gains from every American with an internet connection. The news out of Pittsburgh, however, carries what we have to class as the most depraved stunt we’ve seen them pull so far.

According to the Pittsburgh ABC-affiliate, the latest amusement for the vampiric-nitwits in the RIAA’s legal department has been to sue nineteen-year-old Ciara Sauro for allegedly sharing an industry-crushing ten songs online. […] The evil file-sharer they’ve decided to go after is no iPod-toting high school student with a P2P fetish — she’s a disabled pancreatitis patient who has to be hospitalized weekly while she waits for an islet cell transplant. Now, thanks to the RIAA’s steamroll-for-justice campaign, she’s on the hook for $8,000 — in addition to the mounting medical bills she and her mother already can’t afford to pay.

[…]

Although we really didn’t think it possible, we’re left with an even lower opinion of the RIAA than we had before — and a few choice phrases we’re too polite to print. The acrid taste left by their actions is tempered, though, by the knowledge that Ciara Sauro now has an experienced advocate of her own. We wish her a speedy resolution to the matter at hand, a healthy transplant, and a rapid recovery.

(from Linux Journal, RIAA preys on teen in need of transplant)

It has long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Digital Rights Mafia (aka “DRM”), the media robbers barons, and their government shills would happily twist our legal system into a pretzel in order to serve their own interests. It should come as no surprise that they are now working behind closed doors to subvert the governments of the world on a grand scale. It’s called ACTA, and it’s a significant step in the elimination of what we generally call “civil liberties” — the rights guaranteed to US citizens by the documents on which our government is founded.

SPECTRE could only hope to have this kind of influence.

A companion to Sharing is not piracy, to help convey the difference between copying and piracy. Feel free to use it as you wish.

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