Yesterday’s post about the mean and stupid RIAA has created some debate in the comments section. And in the meantime, the RIAA has a few more nasty tricks up its sleeve. ZDNet reports:
Some of the world’s largest record labels are quietly financing the creation of programs by small software firms that, if implemented, would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to a published report.
To those who argue that laws should be obeyed ‘coz that’s what they are there for:
Citing industry executives, The New York Times reported in an article that appeared on its Web site on Saturday, that the efforts bear varying degrees of legality including attacking a computer’s Internet connection to slow or halt downloads and overwhelming distribution networks with programs that masquerade as music files. [Trojan horses and viruses]
To those who venerate the Constitution and let it inspire their opinions about the changing reality of copyright enforcement:
Last month a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that file-sharing services Grokster and Morpheus were not guilty of copyright infringement.
If upheld, the ruling on Grokster and Morpheus could make it harder for the record industry to go after technology that allows people to trade files, provided the companies that offer such tools have no control over how their technology is used. As a result, record companies are going to have to find other targets for their legal wrath.
Perhaps legal intimidation, coupled with ‘aggressive’ technology may be effective for a while, but the ‘problem’ with technology is that somewhere, quite soon, one or more clever little buggers will find a way around it. Turning nasty to those who want to listen to music, i.e. record companies’ actual markets, does not strike me as the best business strategy. Free markets mean that the players are able to freely satisfy the demand they identify. It does not mean violation of property rights and free-for-all but I cannot accept that is what the RIAA is fighting against. Their desperate efforts to recoup losses has far more to do with overpriced contracts with top chart artists, bloated marketing budgets and costly advertising wars about places in the very top charts that make the artists so expensive, than with any copyright infringements.
If you are a business in free markets and a new phenomenon emerges that may just jeopardise your distribution system (in this case, internet and P2P replacing CDs and other off-line media), you do not go around intimidating your current, former and potential customers. You find a way of accommodating that demand, adjusting your business model or finding an alternative way to satisfy it. That’s free market to me!
As Michael Page, an attorney who represented the defendants in the Grokster and Morpheus case predicts:
It puts pressure on the labels to take seriously that the public wants electronic distribution. They’re going to have to stop trying to figure out a way to make the Internet go away and figure out a way to use it.
Perhaps, unless you think you have enough muscle to try to curb the markets and customer behaviour and make sure that your oligopoly prevents any new entrants from making impact on the balance of power in the industry. Oh wait, that sounds just like the RIAA…
This debate is not exactly about copyright and intellectual property. The reason we are having it is that it is easier for the RIAA to go the route of legal intimidation and obstreperousness (the US is, after all, the land of lawyers) than giving in to more uncertain and painful pressures of market forces and customer demand. Oh, and of progress and technological development…
Note to our ‘in-house’ entertainment industry expert: Is this what you had in mind, Simon? Surely not.
Rather than getting bogged down by the nit-picking of copyright lawyers, it’s worth examining a little more closely these fine upstanding fellows who are currently wrapping themselves so tightly in the flag of legality.
I strongly recommend that anyone curious about how record companies operate reads ‘Black Vinyl White Powder’ by the music business manager, Simon Napier-Bell. He gives a clear and accurate account of just what record companies are like and how the music business operates.
Rather than running to the courts like so many affronted virgins, they should be profoundly grateful that their piratical and racketeering activities weren’t the subject of proper legal scrutiny at almost any time during the past 50 years.
This sort of hacking activity was specifically allowed by a new law in Congress either earlier this year or last year. I have no problem with that sort of activity.
The people copying these pirated songs are theives, the record companies are just defending their rights.
The rest of your post reads like a marxist screed on the evils of capitalism.
This is what’s so vexing. Almost all defenders of the practice of music theft eventually justify their actions on the ground that they simply don’t like record companies.
“Free market” doesn’t mean that everything at the market is free.
Della:
I’m not sure whether your saying that because it’s law passed by Congress it’s automatically OK, or that you just think that hacking is an OK activity generally.
Might I suggest that it’s not unreasonable to have a problem with a system, legal or otherwise, that allows private corporations the right to hack and manipulate an individuals computer and home network. Not to mention the complete lack of accountability involved.
Jay,
Gabriel said defensive hacking was illegal, I said it wasn’t. I do not think hacking is OK any any old situation, just as I think that shooting people, or holding them against their will is not OK in any old situation. But potentially shooting criminals, and putting them in jail can be justified as tools in the enforcement of the law.
I have no problem with private individuals or companies enforcing the law if that’s what needs to happen to stop the law breaking, so long as the actions they take whilst doing so are proportionate and the law just.
If the record companies were locating the thieves and then sending round a death squad, which is as bad as some are trying to make the hacking sound, then there would be a big problem.
Della:
The rest of your post reads like a marxist screed on the evils of capitalism.
I have my doubts about your understanding what capitalism and marxism is. I know what marxism is since I fought it since the tender age of 10 and what capitalism is since I benefited from it since the age of 20.
Get a grip!
P.S. I never said defensive hacking was illegal! I said that those who argue it’s OK to fine those who share MP3 files because they are engaging in an illegal activity, should note that the recording industry doesn’t play by legal rules either…
I am not thrilled with the defensive hacking, and it sounds like some of the more extreme versions of it continue to be illegal (see the posts at theVolokh Conspiracy on this topic). Nonetheless, once you agree that (a) copyrights are legitimate property rights and that (b) filesharing of copyrighted material without paying royalties is a violation of that property right, then the question becomes what measures may be taken to prevent the theft from occurring.
Given that the current generation of filesharing programs are decentralized, going after the central server/company (as was done with Napster) won’t work.
So, for all you property rights defenders out there, how can copyright holders defend their property rights in a world of decentralized filesharing? Or, in the alternative, how would you restructure copyright so that unlimited free distribution of copyrighted material via filesharing is not a violation of property rights, while still preserving some property rights and incentives in the content producer?
Problem would be to be able to catch the approx. (and still growing) 60 million people who are estimated to be into filesharing. Going after Napster was both dumb and smart. Dumb because it was the people using Napster who were sharing the files, not Napster itself. Smart because since it was so popular, when it was brought down, the fileshare-lovers were temp. out of function. However, there are a multitude of similar Napster programs out there, just pick one. In the future, to go after the authors/programers of such software programs like Napster would only be dumb and a waste of time. In the future, to go after all who share files would only be a waste of time. They are so many.
PS. I’m looking for this song by U2, can anyone share it? 😉
Physical property and “IP” are mutually exclusive: IP asserts a “right” to reach into your house and take control of what you do wtih your computer. Is it any surprise the RIAA want to take this to its logical extention via hacking?
Gabriel,
You may have started fighting Marxism at 10, but it is apparent you gave up some time ago, at least so far as music is concerned.
>Physical property and “IP” are mutually exclusive: IP asserts a “right” to reach into your house and take control of what you do wtih your computer.
IP asserts nothing – it is an inanimate legal construct. Certain holders of intellectual property rights may be claiming the legal authority to reach into your computer (which may or may not be in your house) to determine whether you are violating their rights. I admit that, as a general proposition, this is troubling, but I am not so sure that it can be rejected out of hand.
Refusing property owners the only viable means of defending their property rights amounts to expropriation, and monitoring individual computers may be the only way to defend intellectual property rights in the current digital era.
Try an analogy: I find that some things have been stolen out of my garage, and that there are footsteps in the mud leading from my garage to yours. If I can see my stuff in plain sight in my garage, should I be able to go in and take it back? Should I be able to open your garage door to see if you have my stuff?
These seem to be the kinds of “legal hacking” that the RIAA or other IP owners could engage in with respect to your computer. Damaging your computer would be illegal, of course, and should not be allowed under any circumstances.
Mind you, I think all the criticisms of the RIAA’s past practices and boneheaded attachment to music on disk are right on, but they do not address the underlying problem: how do you protect intellectual property rights in the digital era of free, massive, and instantaneous copying and distribution?
I’m honestly looking for answers here. So far, no one seems willing to argue that filesharing is not widely abused and a violation of existing copyright, and no one seems to have any realistic proposals for either reforming copyright or protecting intellectual property against filesharing.
This is a serious problem, folks, and bashing the record companies is not a solution.
This is a serious problem, folks
I don’t agree. The damage estimates put forward by the industry are a complete fantasy: they estimate the number of files dowloaded, multiply that by what it would have cost had the user bought the song at the industry’s suggested retail price and pretend that the resulting figure is an amount somehow mysteriously sucked out of their annual bottom line. It doesn’t work like that.
I’m sure there’s some degree of actual lost sales that can be attributed to file sharing, but I believe it to be a fraction of the amount of money the industry has lost by offering crap products at wildly inflated prices.
[Incidentally, there isn’t a single illegal MP3 in my collection, but there are a number of CDs I’ve bought because I got free sample MP3s from the seller. Given the choice, I’d rather have the piece of plastic. In fact – at least in terms of my own purchases – the record industry’s real complaint of lost revenue should be with Amazon’s “Buy It Used” program. The seller does the listing and the shipping, Amazon rakes off a couple of dollars, and within days I get a guaranteed CD for a fair price. I’m amazed no one is complaining about this one yet].
Well, as many of you probably know; the format mp3 isn’t illegal in itself. When it comes to ripping music from CDs and converting them into mp3’s, that’s not illegal either. What is illegal is to burn them on a CD and sell it, not to just burn them. About filesharing: depends on which country you live in. Here, (in Sweden), you can make a “backup” copy of an original CD (if you own it that is) and you can lend it to family and friends (the term ‘friends’ is vaguely defined though). The only real problem is when you start to download music, burn it on CDs and then sell it. However, they can only catch and punish you if you start to burn the music on CDs and sell them, meanig that you can download and burn as much as you want. There are, though, laws being passed about downloading music without having the CD itself being illegal as well…
There are different laws in different countries.
T Hartin writes: “I’m honestly looking for answers here. So far, no one seems willing to argue that filesharing is not widely abused and a violation of existing copyright, and no one seems to have any realistic proposals for either reforming copyright or protecting intellectual property against filesharing.”
I can’t make an argument that ‘theft is right’ without sounding like an idiot. Theft is not ‘right’ and the IP laws are fairly well understood, and for music at least, vaguely sensible. One might argue about the terms of the copyright but the principle behind them is fairly standard.
The problem is that the law is unenforcable and that because people do not see the problem with downloading music, they’ll ignore the law. Laws that are unenforcable and go against ‘the public morals’ are consistently ignored, and that’s really all there is to say. Drug laws pretty much everywhere, drink driving laws in (parts of) the US, recording things from videotape and copying CDs for use elsewhere in the UK (yes, I checked this, it’s illegal to make a ‘favourites tape’ or similar from media you own in the UK.)
This can be taken really as an ‘environment variable.’ Given that, the record companies can now shrug their shoulders and try to be the good guys and profit from it, or they can be… well, I might say it, ‘typically American’ and get in a fit of rage about it and launch massive attacks everywhere. Attacking your customers is clearly a #1 corporate policy. How can they possibly lose?
Anyway, you can’t attack the law rationally, because closely examined it makes sense. You still can’t enforce it, and if you start prosecuting people by the million then you’re just going to make enemies. The law is fine – it does actually make sense. It just needs not to be enforced in the ‘virtual domain’ – indeed, as it is currently. I don’t see the current situation as a problem, and to be quite honest, it isn’t. CD sales fell, but consumption of other media rose, and other changes occured. I personally believe that the companies are interpreting a change in market segmentation as the end of the world. They have fallen into the standard trap of believing they have a legally defined right to make a profit. Oh well!
“Refusing property owners the only viable means of defending their property rights amounts to expropriation”
Precisely MY point.
I don’t consider IP, or anything else non material, to be property. Property exists because of the “sandwich principle”: if I eat your sandwich, you don’t have a sandwich anymore. Matter has this property, perhaps the EM spectrum (within localized geographic areas) does, but ideas and patterns and techniques do not.
If you grant a monopoly on an idea you are expropriating the property that other people might use to duplicate the idea. To do this you have to grant the “idea owner” permission to snoop on how other people are using their physical property, and to intrude themself upon land they don’t own, and mess with property they don’t own, so as to interdict unlicensed use.
Hence, IP is mutually exclusive with physical property. Hence also, hacking is merely an extrapolation of the trend.
Hypothetical:
RIAA has installed an anti-copy program on your computer which includes files of totally legal music.
A Spammer sends you an e-mail that the anti-piracy software recognizes as “theft”. The RIAA software then does it’s number on your computer.
Who is liable? I’d say RIAA.
Do they want to take this kind of risk?
i.e. are they stupider than rocks? It is possible.
“I don’t consider IP, or anything else non material, to be property. ”
I would have to disagree with this arguement because everyone has the right to privacy. If a record company can hack into your computer, how is this any different than a hacker getting say your credit card number from your computer.
While I feel that IP rights are important, I feel the record companies are fighting the very medium that is the future of business. In my IT studies the integration of business and computing is inseperable. To me it makes as much sense as someone who made horsedrawn wagons trying to fight the combustion engine. You might delay it for a little while but sooner or later you are going to be forced to change or go out of business.
The Andrew Ross Sorkin article in the NY Times (May 4th – “Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy”) does state that this is rather more of a Big 5 record companies action, rather than a RIAA thing. Given that the music industry tends to hold Hilary Rosen and Co. in much the same regard as the hardened denizens of Kazaa do, it would amuse me to thinkt that the RIAA could well be dropped deeply into the mire without really understanding what the music industry is up to.
Some of the proposed control (or Search And Destroy) methods are quite horrific, ranging from:
“A more malicious program, dubbed “freeze,” locks up a computer system for a certain duration — minutes or possibly even hours — risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called “silence,” scans a computer’s hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too.”
to
“Other approaches that are being tested include launching an attack on personal Internet connections, often called “interdiction,” to prevent a person from using a network while attempting to download pirated music or offer it to others.”
In this respect I had a chat with someone at BMG UK this morning who was of the firm belief that such a method is the ONLY (his word) way to proceed. His feeling, and this is apparently widely felt, is that Apple Computer’s alternative could not be feasible since it would not only significantly reduce income to the industry but also would remove ‘control’ of product placement away from the record companies.
The Andrew Ross Sorkin article in the NY Times (May 4th – “Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy”) does state that this is rather more of a Big 5 record companies action, rather than a RIAA thing. Given that the music industry tends to hold Hilary Rosen and Co. in much the same regard as the hardened denizens of Kazaa do, it would amuse me to thinkt that the RIAA could well be dropped deeply into the mire without really understanding what the music industry is up to.
Some of the proposed control (or Search And Destroy) methods are quite horrific, ranging from:
“A more malicious program, dubbed “freeze,” locks up a computer system for a certain duration — minutes or possibly even hours — risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called “silence,” scans a computer’s hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too.”
to
“Other approaches that are being tested include launching an attack on personal Internet connections, often called “interdiction,” to prevent a person from using a network while attempting to download pirated music or offer it to others.”
In this respect I had a chat with someone at BMG UK this morning who was of the firm belief that such a method is the ONLY (his word) way to proceed. His feeling, and this is apparently widely felt, is that Apple Computer’s alternative could not be feasible since it would not only significantly reduce income to the industry but also would remove ‘control’ of product placement away from the record companies.
The future is here, get used to it, and stop crying like a bunch of spoiled capitolist babies, your era of FAT, RICH, CORPORATE monopoly is OVER. The sooner you get used to it, the better, and I hope that this new age gets right under your collar and you have stressed induced stroke, and if not, I highly suggest you kill yourself at the next available oppertunity, by any means necessary.
The future is here, get used to it, and stop crying like a bunch of spoiled capitolist babies, your era of FAT, RICH, CORPORATE monopoly is OVER. The sooner you get used to it, the better, and I hope that this new age gets right under your collar and you have stressed induced stroke, and if not, I highly suggest you kill yourself at the next available oppertunity, by any means necessary.
The future is here, get used to it, and stop crying like a bunch of spoiled capitolist babies, your era of FAT, RICH, CORPORATE monopoly is OVER. The sooner you get used to it, the better, and I hope that this new age gets right under your collar and you have stressed induced stroke, and if not, I highly suggest you kill yourself at the next available oppertunity, by any means necessary.
The future is here, get used to it, and stop crying like a bunch of spoiled capitolist babies, your era of FAT, RICH, CORPORATE monopoly is OVER. The sooner you get used to it, the better, and I hope that this new age gets right under your collar and you have stressed induced stroke, and if not, I highly suggest you kill yourself at the next available oppertunity, by any means necessary.
The future is here, get used to it, and stop crying like a bunch of spoiled capitolist babies, your era of FAT, RICH, CORPORATE monopoly is OVER. The sooner you get used to it, the better, and I hope that this new age gets right under your collar and you have stressed induced stroke, and if not, I highly suggest you kill yourself at the next available oppertunity, by any means necessary.