Has RIAA Abandoned the 'Making Available' Defense? 125
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's standard complaint (pdf) was thrown out last month by a federal judge in California as speculation in Interscope v. Rodriguez. Interestingly, the RIAA's amended complaint (pdf), filed six days later, abandoned altogether the RIAA's 'making available' argument. (Whereby making files available at all for download is infringement.) It first formulated that defense against a dismissal motion in Elektra v. Barker. This raises a number of questions: Is the RIAA is going to stick to this new form of complaint in future cases? Will they get into a different kind of trouble for some of its their new allegations, such as the contention that the investigator "detected an individual" (contradicting the testimony of the RIAA's own expert witness)? And finally, what tack will defendants' lawyers take (this was one lawyer's suggestion)?"
This complaint is no better (Score:5, Interesting)
This should be rejected summarily as well.
How about a complaint? (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=37857&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=50 [slyck.com]
At this point.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, this is the same crew that established 'payola' in the late 1950's and refined it in the decades since despite several court cases decided against them for this.
Reminds me of a Pennsylvania farmer I once knew. He made his living by poaching deer and selling the meat to some fancy, high dollar Maryland and D.C. restaurants. He would get caught poaching, pay the stiff fines out of a roll in his pocket and claim that it was only 3 days profits, and only got caught several times a year. Just a small operating expense...no big deal. He just laughed it off and even bragged about it.
I see the same mentality with the RIAA and MPAA, just throw crap against the walls as fast as you can...surely some of it will stick!
Remember: IP means Internet Protocol.
I'm not intentionally distributing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wonder whether that defense would work?
Re:Safe yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not yet. The RIAA didn't drop the complaint. They just amended it.
In the meantime, fly under the radar. Swap USB drives.
But ofcource (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot is just a pro-piracy site (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't bother us (well, me, at the very least) so much that someone who illegally copies content gets busted and has to pay for it. What bothers me is the blanket/boilerplate way this is tried. The content industry usually has little to no evidence and abuses the court system for practices that smell a lot like extortion. "Pay or we drag you to court and your expenses are insanely higher" is the message.
Interesting enough, every single case is dropped as soon as the defendent has the guts (and money) to stand up against the threat.
So far they failed to present a single solid case. They rely on judges who don't know jack about the matter, on people who cannot afford to actually go to court against them and on scaremongering.
And yes, that's what I'm against. I can rather live with a pirate in freedom than with a corporation having the right to extort money from whoever they please.
Re:They've lost the battle. Not the war. (Score:3, Interesting)
For tapes and CDRs this didn't bother businesses so much. Hard drives do. Furthermore, unlike tapes and CDRs, Hard drives are by magnitudes bigger and can be used more often than just once or a handful of times. Not to mention that businesses are running rampart against this kind of "tax", because, well, just because you CAN store copyrighted content on it doesn't mean you DO. It's a given that a tape was mostly used to store just that. I give you that a large amount of CDRs are rather used for copyrighted content than backups. Hard drives, though...
Also, how much should you pay? A hard drive of today can store up to a TB of data. Or, in CDRs, about 1500 times the storage of a CDR. Now, let's assume about 10 cents RIAA tax on a CDR and extrapolate it to the TB of a hard drive. Should we have to pay 150 bucks extra for the media industry for every HD? Actually, more because of the forementioned reusability of HDs.
How should this keep businesses (who don't care about content, they need their HDs to store their own products, databases, customer data and so on) competitive on the global market, when you're supposed to pay actually twice the price for your storage? Worse, the first thing many people would do is to buy abroad (funny enough, the RIAA tax has to be paid by "the first person who makes the item commercially available in the country", i.e. the hardware seller. Not the buyer. Do the math). Which in turn would certainly make the local computer companies go berserk.
The problem they're facing today is that they don't know how to react. P2P has become a problem for them, and people don't burn the content to CDRs anymore, they store it on their HDs, on servers, on USB HDs, simply because
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still... (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, don't tell me about "deer resistant" plantings. There are very few (VERY FEW) plants that deer will not attack. The deer here are so hungry they will eat holly, they will strip pine bark, they will eat rhododendron. They are desperately hungry. Want to grow a vegetable garden to help save the planet? "Thanks, a salad bar!"
Even if you can keep deer off your property, which requires a hideously ugly 10 foot (yes, 10 foot) deer fence and a driveway gate to go with it, the ticks are picked up by chipmunks, squirrels, mice, etc. and spread around regardless. Around here, Lyme disease testing is routine. You feel sick, they test you. Half my neighbors have had it (and it's no joke).
The only solution is to cull the herd to a reasonable level. Deer sightings should be rare, not "Gee, there were six of them chewing the shrubs this morning," or "wow, I passed 13 deer corpses and the 13 totaled vehicles to match on the way to work this morning." If you open the front door and hear them galloping down the driveway as loudly as a John Wayne Western, you know what I'm talking about. One idea is to form a human chain a couple miles long and march right through the woods flushing the bastards into a pre-arranged corral. Then all you bleeding heart animal lovers can pay for the tranquilizer guns and the cattle trucks to move them 600 miles north where they belong; either that, or we shoot them on the spot and give the meat to a homeless shelter.
I'm not a violent person. I don't hunt, and I don't own a gun. But this is ridiculous. They have to be culled.
Re:Slashdot is just a pro-piracy site (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm getting REALLY royally pissed at "nothing to hide" bullcrap. Sorry, but my privacy is the only thing I will defend with my life. It's neither your, nor any country's, nor the RIAA's business what's on my PC, in my apartment or on my mind.
Yes, I have something to hide. It's called my private life. You want it? Over my dead body.
Re:Only if you can claim to be "dumb" (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily. You could say you only intended to share the files with yourself in another location. IANAL, but I don't believe the law requires an individual to take any special security precautions when dealing with copyrighted materials.