Frivolous lawsuits, II

Holy cow, two of you.

But seriously, do tell us how you really feel about this.

To do a little blog whoring, I had a post on this at the beginning of last month (A Chill Blows Through Standover House) that shared Hogan's stage with someone who has rather less money, and proportionally bigger cojones.

"A group of US record labels agreed to drop a music piracy case in the US after the alleged file-sharer argued that it could not be proved that she downloaded any illegal music. The case may set a precedent that undermines scores of other music piracy cases.

Tammie Marson [a round for the lady please] of Palm Desert, California refused to pay the initial $3,500 demanded by a group of record labels and opted to fight the case in court.

[...] The record companies Virgin, Sony BMG, Arista, Universal and Warner Brothers agreed to dismiss the case and pay their own legal costs. ... If this becomes a popular defence it could seriously hamper a huge number of file-sharing lawsuits taken in the US against individuals. [Ya think? And watch it propagate]

In a digital world, the most important digit may be the middle one.

Earl: Yeah, the story is more than a month old. I wrote it in July but other things kept pushing it down the queue. I'm traveling again (for a change) when posting is more difficult so I yanked it out of my pocket since it wasn't time sensitive.

What separates this case is that the deep pockets of the defendant can force some discovery and perhaps establish a pecedent.

This is excellent.

The idea of a business model based on suing one's customers is so full of perverse incentives and so positively self-contradictory it's astounding. The shareholders of companies that engage in that kind of crap should be suing their boards of directors and senior management for malfeasance.

Oh I do hope this guy forces it into discovery. And if the bastards drop their action against him, he ought to countersue for a general tort. That of course will get it back into discovery, where they will offer to settle by paying him, but he, having earned his wealth the old-fashioned way (by working for it!), has no incentive to settle.

And I say this as someone who's worked professionally in the music recording/production industry, for various bands including a few whose stuff you have undoubtedly heard and in at least one case seen.

Sure, piracy ought to be prosecuted. Go after the mass-producers of counterfeit CDs, using conventional police investigation techniques to catch them. But all this snooping small guys' internet records and creeping Big Brotherism and outright extortion of innocent parties, is a remedy worse than the petty thefts that even the biggest downloaders commit. And in any case, as everyone in the music industry knows, a little bit of bootlegging sells an awful lot of legitimate records, so MPAA & RIAA should quit their whining and deal with it.

I should also add, I have no use for anything that comes out of Hollywood these days. The real world is more exciting than formulaic trash with superfluous murders and explosions.

Except for the violation of the law which I think is BS anyway and could be easily fixed by super encryption codes that are downloaded ONLY from the manufacturer for a one time use this is crap. Last year I read that kid downloaded a CD illegally and her single mom got a settlement order for something like 200,000. Give me a break. They leave candy out, then wonder when someone comes in and takes it. Then they say the candy was worth 200K a piece. Hows this? We caught you. Here is a bill for 15.95 for the CD that you downloaded. Now if you dont pay that then we will have legal recourse. Mom would pay that in a heartbeat.

This is a lawyer scam is all. It is the current law but write those Congressmen and ask that the law be changed to that. Its enforceable, its fair and it takes the teeth out of the shitsucking lawyers. I doubt that they will be able to in short order continue justifying these huge numbers. They make more by suing than they do from selling rap songs.

Randy, not that I think your solution isn't a good one, but if I'm going to pay $15.95 for a CD, I damn well want the jewel case, the liner notes, the album art, and the physical disc. Someone has to be paid to produce that stuff; the recording artist's time and effort isn't the only component to producing a physical CD. I haven't bought any music on a major label in years, and I'm still trying to figure out why an equally professionally-produced CD from an indie often costs $8 versus the major's $15.95 or more...

I also want a better-quality copy than you're likely to download, thanks. So I think if you can absolutely prove that someone downloaded something illegally (which is tough anyway, as this case shows), bill them, but not for the whole cost of the physical CD. Proving it would be the hard part, though.

Any legal remedy with international ramifications should also take local variances in copyright law into account. For instance, because of where we each live, I am legally allowed to file-share; you are not. (Good thing, too, because a lot of what I want isn't available for sale here.)

I must admit that I certainly find these suing and intimidation tactics appalling in more than one way. There has got to be a better way to handle this problem, and I'll applaud any precedent that sets things moving in a more rational direction. I think "motherfuckers at the MPAA and RIAA" is appropriate terminology.

But I also find the pervasive rationalization of theft to be appalling. I don't understand how so many people can knowingly take another's property without a legal right to do so and then try to justify this through equivocation and misrepresention. "Well... it's not exactly stealing... cuz like art and music should be free anyway... and the record companies only put out bad stuff anyway... all the movies suck anyway... those guys are all so rich anyway... everybody else is doing it anyway... "

Seriously, this isn't okay.

Umm, I think that the reason an indie or an artist who sells their recordings directly to the public can do it for 8 bucks or so is that the actual cost of pressing CDs is very, very low.

Back in '99 I did the mastering of a live recording of a Utah Phillips concert for the Philly branch of the IWW, who wanted to make a CD out of it to sell as a fundraising item. I also arranged for the pressing.

We supplied a Red Book CD-R as a premaster, camera-ready artwork for the silkscreen on the CD itself and ready-made booklets and tray cards. For a 2000 copy run, the cost- which included the CDs, jewel boxes and assembly of the whole package, was 88 cents apiece.

I donated my labor, as did the woman who did the graphic design, so the only costs were printing the booklets and tray cards and the CD manufacturing itself. It turned out to be quite a profitable item for the Wobs.

If you can keep the costs of recording, mixing and mastering down, there's plenty of room to put out a CD at an attractive price and still earn a fair return on your work.

Being rather intimately acquainted with the sheer amount of human labor that goes into getting to the point where you have something ready to press up as a CD or vinyl record, I agree with Edmund. To appropriate the product of someone else's labor without consent or compensation is, simply, theft. No amount of rationalization or tu quoque slagging of the eeviil entertainment corporations can alter that.

Edmund, Ktesibios: I don't file share but I am not so upset about it either. I think the underlying legal and other issues are not quite clear. Nor do I think it is irrelevant that the music industry screws the artists. They are stealing from the artists, too, and they do it regularly. They do not pay royalties they owe and have to be forced to do so when an artist is able to prove that they are doing this.

They are also stealing from me by preventing me from taking music I have paid for and using it as I please, playing it at home, at work or wherever. I bought and paid for the license to it. If I want to lend it to a friend, as I did regularly with tapes and LPs or use it in my car or on vacation, etc., they shouldn't be making it impossible for me to do it. There is theft and there is theft. Lots of people take pads of paper or pencils from the office and it adds up to a lot in the aggregate but it doesn't hurt many people. File sharing may have sold more music than it has "stolen" because it is the sample that gets someone interested in an artist. We don't really know what its effect has been and I don't trust the figures of the music industry (the same people who opposed VCRs and cassette tapes).

DRM schemes steal from me by preventing me or making it difficult to do what I should be legally entitled to. They steal from others when they sue them frivolously and baselessly on the basis of poor evidence in these ridiculous lawsuits. The $3500 the extort from families is much more harmful to those victimized than file sharing is to the record industry. Their sales are declining because CDs are overpriced and much of the money is wasted on marketing, legal fees, etc. The only way they can "win" is to control the internet, because it obviates their main value added, distribution.

Holy crap, I agree with Revere on something besides bird flu preparedness!