Cuban Says RIAA Damages Should be $5 Per Month 693
Thomas Hawk writes "Mark Cuban is arguing over at Blog Maverick that with the introduction of Yahoo!'s new $5 per month music service that this needs to become the new de facto 'damages' that the RIAA ought to be able to claim when suing kids. After all, when the kids could have paid for the music via Yahoo! for $5 a month it makes it hard to say the music loss is worth more than that. 'The RIAA can no longer claim that students who are downloading music are costing them thousands of dollars each. They cant claim much of anything actually. In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.'"
RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
disingenuous if I understand it correctly (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Upload, not download (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:That doesn't compute. (Score:3, Interesting)
Punitive damages can be significantly more than actual losses. That's deliberate.
Re:First off somebody has to share for people to D (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, they will not play on iPods, only certain Microsoft backed "Play for Sure" devices.
Third, free is still cheaper than $3000, assuming you're 20 and live another 50 years.
Fourth, P2P files are unencumbered with any DRM. Thus, you're getting more value for NO money.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Upload, not download (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand that in Canada and a few other nations there is an excise tax on blank media to account for the potential piracy. It doesn't resolve the problem completely - people who have only legitimate uses for the blank media still pay the tax. But people with a computer and a CD-R drive don't have to pay the tax. And you only pay the tax in proportion to how much blank media you use. PLUS, the tax is relatively small for average-joe-burner. How do we implement such a "more fair" system for downloading media?
We make only the music downloaders pay the "tax" which, in this case, would be a $5/mo fee for Yahoo! music or the fee for another music provider of your choice.
Re:First off somebody has to share for people to D (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Upload, not download (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, so they can claim damages $5 per person who they can prove downloaded your uploads, perhaps with the cost split evenly between the uploader and the downloader, to be completely fair.
They could sue for more as punative damages, I suppose, but they can't claim any more damage than that, since that is now what the market value of unlimited downloading has become.
(Unfortunately, that's not entirely true. $5 only buys you the right to listen for a month, not download and keep. Therefore the true "damages" they can claim are still a buck per song upload. Even so, it's a hell of a lot less than they are claiming... and they would have to prove that each download was an actual person illegally getting the song from you, not just their law firm downloading the same track 6,000 times.)
Re:Upload, not download (Score:3, Interesting)
A car (Score:2, Interesting)
I can rent a car for 50$/day.
So I guess I can steal Mark Cuban's car and if I accidentally get caught after a week I simply owe him 350$, right ?
long term thoughts (Score:2, Interesting)
$5 a month for how long???? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can someone get caught with millions of songs, delete them, and just pay a 1 month ($5) Fine? or does a 15 year old get caught with 1 song have to pay $5 for the rest of his life ($4,200 assuming a 85 year life span)?
Re:Upload, not download (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Upload, not download (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true.
Just read the copyright notice inside any music CD, the part about "public performance".
I think subscription services will fail... (Score:3, Interesting)
But I'm making a prediction that those services will fail. They all use the same DRM backed by Microsoft. (AKA, Play for Sure) One day someone will find a way to bypass the DRM and free all those songs. Suddenly, those hundreds of thousand of songs you've downloaded will be yours permanently.
Of course, they'll "fix" the problem but it'll happen again and again. Eventually the music industry will tire of being screwed and they'll make you buy the music outright. At least I hope so.
Re:Mark Cuban is the Best! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Upload, not download (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, it's most likely that for such an offense, there'd be no case brought against you at all. Just like if you got caught stealing one CD from the store. Mall security would probably throw you out and they might tell you never to come back, but unless you're a real pain in the neck about it, they're unlikely to call the police.
You'd probably need to wrack up about a grand worth of damages before anybody will pursue legal action (the cost a lawsuit is too high, and small claims court is designed to be enough of a burden on the plaintiff as to not make it worth the effort in most cases). You're talking probably $1,000 worth of theft before you're brought up on misdemeanor charges and probably at least 4-5 times for felony charges.
Naturally, this passivity can be mitigated. If you've been caught stealing CDs and escorted out of the mall six times already, they may decide you're enough you're enough of a hassle to pursue legal action.
Anyway, my point is that the punishments are probably not identical but they're not as disparate as you seem to think.
Yahoo owes 'em big (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Finding First Uploader, Counting Uploads (Score:4, Interesting)
Some P2P applications do this as well. It raises a good question though -- what happens when you're only uploading small chunks? Is it still infringing because it's still part of the song?
What would happen if a P2P client broke files down into really small chunks so you download non-sequential chunks (though all at once, to save overhead) from different sources.. Each individual person would NOT be uploading actual music (if you tried to play the individual upload stream, it would either not work or be random garbage), they'd be uploading essentially random streams of data. Once you had all these random streams from different sources, you could reassemble it back into a song.
Re:Upload, not download (Score:2, Interesting)
You can get the music any many different formats. Try it for free before you buy it. Hell- even keep it without buying it- no DRM in the songs.
The best thing is- the artists keep HALF of the money you donate which is very satisfying. Much more satisfying than paying for a CD full of songs recorded by people who have been DEAD for 40 years (and should really not be copyrighted any more IMHO).
Plus easy straight forward licensing for bars, music videos, movies, etc. etc.
I particularly like Ehrin Starks (piano and cello) and bought a physical CD of it or 12.47 including shipping- AFTER I got to sample the music, burn my own CD of it, etc. for free. Why did I buy it when I'm normally so jaded-- because it feels good to support music presented this way. I don't feel like a sucker.
Serving, not uploading (Score:3, Interesting)
To change infringement to theft, it is like saying if your CD collection is stolen and you didn't keep it behind a locked door, you're liable for the theft.
And there is no uploading in P2P. It's all downloading and serving. They are going after the people who are serving.
Re:A car (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about a penalty? (Score:2, Interesting)
>doesn't cost me $5. There is a penalty above what it
>would have cost me to purchase it
If you steal a $5 object from a store, you are in fact stealing. Copyright infringement is not automatically stealing. Copyright infringement needs to reach a fairly high threshold to be criminal.
Unless you download $1,000 worth of music, downloading music without purchasing it isn't stealing. Not legally, anyway, at least in the United States (this is 17 U.S.C. 506).
At $5/month, you would have to keep downloading infringing material for 200 months, or about 17 years, to reach the point of it legally being "stealing".
But since the $1,000 threshold has to be reached within a 180-day period, that's impossible. So if downloading unlimited music files is worth $5/month, then downloading infringing copies can never be worth $1,000. At best, it will only be worth $30 (over any 6-month period), and thus is not legally stealing.
Incidentally, your argument about the penalty for stealing being more than the cost of the object stolen "because there is a chance that you won't get caught" (a) follows from a faulty premise (the penalty is not always going to be more than the cost of the object stolen), and (b) is not in any way the basis for U.S. criminal law as far as I can tell.
Jerry