Will AT&T Be Reading Your Mail?

According to the New York Times AT&T is considering scanning your emails and internet transmissions for inappropriate content. Ostensibly for the purpose of curtailing illegal downloading, I have a difficult time believing it will stop there. Once the system is in place, I see this bagman for the RIAA and MPAA moving up the ladder to hitman, with its first contract being Net Neutrality. Strangely, some companies believe a free and open Internet is not necessarily the best vehicle for a fleecing of biblical proportions.

While such a proposal is obviously horribly bad for consumers, it may not be all that great for ATT&T shareholders either. According to Slate.com, Title 17 of the United States Code, Section 512, insulates AT&T from liability for copyright infringement, but only so long as AT&T does not "select" the material it chooses to transmit. Moving itself outside of this rather broad "safe harbor" could expose AT&T to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential liability.

In classic doublespeak, AT&T asserts the goal of the program would be to make "more content available to more people in more ways going forward." Strange. Sounds a lot like the utterly ridiculous pay-more-get-less palaver so prevalent in the Net Neutrality debate. Don't worry though, according to James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T, the ISP behemoth is apparently committed to "figure out a friendly way to do it." With friends like that ...

Brett Trout

ATT RIAA MPAA

Making a Copy of Your Own CD is a Crime

At least according to the head of Litigation for Sony BMG, Jennifer Pariser. Ms. Pariser stated that making a copy of your CD for your own personal use constitutes stealing. And the RIAA appears to agree. A post by arstechnica, notes that just last week the RIAA filed a brief in Atlantic v. Howell, stating unequivocally that MP3 copies defendant made of his own CDs were "unauthorized."

See You Have to Buy the CD, and the MP3, and the ...
Apparently aware that the demise of DRM is a foregone conclusion, the RIAA appears to be taking the stand that the only allowable electronic version of a song is one you purchased as an electronic version and never moved from its original download file. At some point it would seem the RIAA'a arguments would start failing to pass the laugh test and start garnering them sanctions under the Copyright Act, or at least warrant attorney fees for the defendant.

And Anything Else We Think Of
I guess the first step would be for these defendants to stop representing themselves. Not only do they lose out on the availability of attorney fees under the Copyright Act, but they stand a very good chance of setting horrible precedent. Each bad case inches us ever closer to the RIAA's apparent vision of a everyone paying separately for each song for each player they want to use.

Brett Trout

RIAA downloading Atlantic v. Howell

MPAA PWNED

Origins of the Word
Sorry. My kid gets to say "pwned" all the time (usually when I take up the controller against him on Madden) and it just looks like so much fun. According to Slashdot, Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett has just slapped the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) upside the head with the DMCA, making the term pwned singularly apropos.

Such Noble Intentions
The MPAA, intent on bring Hell's wrath down upon unwary university students, developed a program which monitors university computers. The program ostensibly tracks students illegally downloading movies. According to the Washington Post, however, the software apparently does a lot of other nasty stuff as well, not the least of which is opening up university computers to anyone on the Internet.

You Were Serious About That?
Intent on suing everyone using its copyrighted material without payment, the MPAA created its new University Toolkit. The irony is that the MPAA created this new software using other people's copyrighted material without paying for it. Since the software code used was under GNU GPL license, the MPAA had a right to use the software without paying for it, but only if the MPAA let everyone know what changes it made to the software.

How Many Lumps Do You Want?
Apparently, the MPAA's license enforcement against poor college student division is so busy that it conscripted all personnel from its license compliance division (word on the street is that the remnants of the license compliance division will soon be merged in to the Do-what-we-say-not-what-we-do division). Software developer Matthew Garrett, upset over the MPAA's flagrant copyright infringement, sent a Take Down Notice to the MPAA'a internet service provider, which resulted in the University Toolkit link being removed from the MPAA website.

Too bad the link got shut down; I would have loved to have heard the MPAA arguments as to why it does not have to abide by the copyright laws it wants to sue everyone else over.

Brett Trout

MPAA Ubuntu RIAA Linux Matthew Garrett

RIAA "The Rhythm is Gonna Get You"

Welcome to the jungle Ms. Jammie Thomas, single mother of two. November rain came a month early when just last Thursday a Minnesota jury found the Native American liable for illegal file sharing. I save the best for last. The verdict was for $222,000, which likely left Ms. Thomas cryin'. For the RIAA, the verdict was nothing but hella good, leaving the RIAA now and forever a very valuable precedent in its possession.

After being contacted by the RIAA for illegal file sharing, Ms. Thomas' indignation was coming out of the heart. She felt the RIAA was building a mystery based upon what she felt must have been somebody hacking or spoofing her account to make it look she was the one committing the copyright infringement. Her don't stop believing attitude continued to take her one step closer to the verdict she faithfully felt in her one honest heart the jury had to hand down.

Deciding let's wait awhile, Ms. Sullivan and her attorney refused to settle with the RIAA, opting instead for the here we are, come and get us approach. Unfortunately, the iris popping verdict leaves nothing but bills, bills, bills in her future.

While Ms. Sullivan is indeed mulling over an appeal, she does not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. To appeal she still has to come up with the money in the interim. If she wants to continue the fight, she will likely have to come up with even more cash, possibly asking friends, family, altruistic lawyers and different people to "pour some sugar on me" in the form of donations.

In an effort to prevent this precedent from increasing the weight of the RIAA'a already heavy hand, I say file the appeal and run baby run. But then again, I am not the one at risk of turning into a basket case tousling with the RIAA for the next year or more. (I'm actually surprisingly bold from the sidelines).

Oh yeah, the 24 tracks Ms. Sullivan was accused of making available online? Read the above post a little more closely to find them all. Cheaters can check out the more mundane list here.

Brett Trout

RIAA copyright downloading

Bill Forces You to Pay For RIAA Policing

According to a recent article by Ken Fisher, writing for ars technica, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wants to use your tax dollars to do RIAA's dirty work. Senator Reid's amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act (HERA) withholds federal funds from US colleges and universities that do not fall in lock-step with arbitrary file-sharing protocols.

Now the good news; your tax dollars get to pay the US Secretary of Education to conduct an annual audit of the top 25 file-sharing schools to determine who gets blacklisted from federal funds. Plus, with over half of the schools on the most recent list being state schools, you also get to pay for all the internal software, hardware and peoplepower required to keep your state school of the blacklist.

Given that anti-file-sharing technology is known to interfere with the legitimate transfer of information, taxpayers would be paying millions of dollars to stifle the legal transfer of information in schools. Isn't that the raison d'etre of a school? Even Senator Reid has to see that.

Brett Trout

Harry Reid RIAA P2P Higher Education Reauthorization Act

Rock Music is Now the Establishment

In an interview with Out-Law.com, Blur drummer Dave Rowntree notes:

“DRM [copy protection] was doomed to fail because the people who it was designed to stop, as in the counterfeiters or the mass file sharers or the people doing it for political reasons could easily bypass it [] but the people who were caught in the trap of DRM were the ordinary people who wanted to play their CDs on their computer as well as their CD recorder or who wanted to make a tape of it to put on in the car who were doing things that most people regardless of the law would regard as legitimate activities. ”

Not surprisingly, these are the same copyright concerns I voiced last November on the David Lawrence Show. Near the end of the show I stated the present iTunes DRM strategy simply was not viable and a change would happen within a year. As I predicted, Apple is now offering a non-DRM version of iTunes music and sales are climbing.

States Dave Rowntree “[The music industry has] become very much the establishment…by the time that the industry was starting to fight what they saw as the war against file sharing they really weren’t in anybody’s good books any more, they didn’t have the goodwill of the people whose behaviour they were trying to control.”

Look for more music providers to quickly follow suit or become non-players.

Brett Trout

downloading copyright DRM Apple

RIAA Boycott in Full Swing

See your alma mater on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) list of “Downloading's Most Wanted”? According to the RIAA, these are the top 25 music-pirating schools in the country. See your alma mater? No? That might be a good thing.

I was initially surprised none of my alma maters made the list. Then it dawned on me. It was not that the students at my old schools were no longer hip, it was that they were too savvy to leave a trail of breadcrumbs from the bakery to their dorm rooms. You see, in my experience, the RIAA does not pursue the most prolific copyright infringers.

Vying for the title Worst Company in America the RIAA pursues children and dead grandmothers. It is not that the mega uploaders from the former Soviet Republic, and mini-mega downloading pirates here in the United States are less culpable, it is just that they leave fewer tracks. The also have enough organized crime connections or too little money to make pursuing them any fun. So, in their infinite wisdom, the RIAA goes after the end user. I mean it worked so well eliminating the drug problem, why not expand the theory to music downloading?

Far be it from me to dissuade anyone, including the RIAA, from defending their intellectual property. As an intellectual property attorney, this is my bread and butter. My concern is that, from my vantage, it seems as if the RIAA is targeting the weakest, least culpable infringers, rather than the real bad guys. Sure, you could spend the next four years in federal court convincing a judge that your roommate did it. You might even win. The problem is that who are you going to find to defend you for less than the RIAA's $5,000 demand? It is just easier to pay. Unfortunately, the RIAA uses that $5,000 to finance more lawsuits against other people just like yourself.

I personally believe that if we could cut out the RIAA, we would have a lot more music, more cheaply, with fewer restrictions, with more money going directly to the artists. This may be at the expense of manufactured commodities like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, but I for one am willing to bite that bullet. The RIAA’s attacks on privacy and free speech have prompted Gizmodo to start a boycott of RIAA musicians during the month of March. I would encourage everyone to visit Gizmodo, examine the reasons behind the boycott, join the resistance and maybe even slip a buck of two to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Brett Trout

RIAA copyright downloading

Happy Holidays - You Dirty Infringers

Entities like Microsoft, Sony and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are trying harder and harder to thwart copyright infringers. Unfortunately, as you can see from the foregoing links, while those efforts may tend to capture a small-time infringer or two, the anti-infringing efforts tend to make life much more difficult for the rest of us. Ironically, from what I can see, the anti-copyright initiatives do very little to thwart the technically savvy who, not surprisingly, tend to engage in much more copyright infringement than the average hip-hop downloading granny.

I realize that granting me the fully paid up, perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide license like I get with CDs and DVDs is no longer in vogue. I am all for a little capitalism, but I must appear absolutely covered with fleece. I also had not realized that it must be considered poor etiquette in certain media licensing circles to leave me the least bit bewhiskered. Shearing consumers bald, however, cannot be successful in the long run. While consumers are willing to pay a fair price for entertainment, integrating enjoyment limitations into media and placing monitoring software on customer’s computers will ultimately backfire.

In fact, it already has. I spoke with Santa; he has had enough. Don't tell my kids, but I have it on good authority that come December 25th Santa will be sliding down the chimney with our family's first ever Mac.


Brett Trout

microsoft apple copyright infringement