The RIAA goes completely insane

[Karl Kuehn]

On Dec 31, 2007, at 10:51 PM, James O'Shea wrote:

> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/31/riaa_cds_copies_computer/>
>
> Anyone who has ever copied a CD onto a computer, an iPod, or other  
> digital music system is, apparently, a felon. I await my letter from  
> the RIAA. This should be interesting.

	The Register has this a bit wrong. The guy is being sued because he  
shared the music on Kazza, not because he ripped the music to his HD.  
And there was a round of news about this, and it looks like he is  
going to loose on those counts.

	But this is somewhat significant because the layer on the RIAA's side  
has been sliding language into his legal briefs that seems to say that  
ripping songs from a CD to a computer is "unauthorized copying". There  
are two ways of reading that statement: 1) it is illegal to format- 
shift information from a CD to your computer, even for personal use.  
Or 2) that the format-shifting was no explicitly authorized by the  
record label, so is "unauthorized" (by the record label), but does  
fall under fair use.

	There is some fear, and fear-mongering, that this language might make  
it into the judge's ruling in the case (which is probably going to be  
against the defendant), and that this might give the RIAA a bigger  
stick to wave both in the declaring format-shifting illegal (and allow  
them to win their other cases more easily on this point), or that it  
might shore up the very infirm legal ground in the dispute over  
ringtones (one of their arguments is that format-shifting is not in  
the CD agreement).

	In any case, the Register has completely failed to do any research on  
this topic, and should be slapped around a bit. If it wasn't for the  
obvious negligence of many "reputable" new organizations I would point  
this out as a place that differentiates bloggers from new  
organizations... *sigh*

--
	Karl Kuehn
		larkost at softhome.net




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /mailman/archive/macosx-talk/attachments/20071231/dd35db21/attachment.html