What will it take to start an uprising?

dajoki

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Mon Dec-31-07 03:47 PM
Original message

What will it take to start an uprising?

Matthew Hubbard's blog
What will it take to start an uprising?
by Matthew Hubbard | Dec 31 2007 - 8:36am |
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/11819

The Washington Post reports that the recording industry, pretty much finished with punishing the file sharers from the Napster era, has decided that owners of CDs are committing theft when they download a song on a CD they own to the computer they own. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122800693.html?hpid=topnews<br%20/>

I realize that more serious problems face this nation and the world. That said, just what will it take for people to wake up to the fact that laws enacted today are not made to protect the public, but instead to deprive us of rights that older laws clearly gave to us? In the old days, the record industry tried to tell us that putting music from vinyl onto a blank tape was "theft", when it was obviously covered by the fair use rule. That didn't go anywhere, but plenty of ideas too stupid to fly even in the not-very-bright Reagan era are fully flight ready in the amazingly stupid George W. Bush era.

I blush to paraphrase Pastor Niemöller, but when they came for the Napster users, I said nothing because I wasn't a Napster user. When they turned bankruptcy into indentured servitude, I said nothing because I didn't think I would go bankrupt.

What will it take? When will people stop saying nothing when being bled dry?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122800693.html?hpid=topnews<br%20/>

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Still, hardly a month goes by without a news release from the industry's lobby, the Recording Industry Association of America, touting a new wave of letters to college students and others demanding a settlement payment and threatening a legal battle.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."