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RIAA Gives Up on Lawsuits...by George Ziemann -- December 19, 2008 No real details. Don't really need any. In was a stupid idea in the first place -- they never won a contested case, spent a fortune persecuting their former customers, destroyed sales, and ensured that anyone paying attention despised them. Now that the colleges were prepared to charge their students a $5 a month extortion tax to make the lawsuits go away, the RIAA suddenly stops and saves them the trouble. Now we have something to look forward to. It's going to be pretty tough to out-stupid the lawsuits. But they're just the ones to go that extra mile. ...to Be ISP NazisFrom the Washington Post:
Proving that you violated a law that doesn't exist has gotten so tedious. The courts expect this thing called "evidence," and they refuse to let you collect fines just because someone is dead. Now the ISPs will let the RIAA be in charge of the Internet. No proof required. No annoying defense attorneys. It'll also solve the problem of critics and competition. "No Internet for You!" False VictoryThe college students probably feel like they won something here. The RIAA has been through 35,000? cases with no one ever asking the simple question of whether what everyone is being sued for (not-for-profit individual sharing) is even an actionable offense. That was the point of the Sony-Betamax case. In that case the answer was "no." No one has even bothered to ask that yet. After 5 and a half years. They gave you 35,000 chances. Instead, everyone wrote checks to the RIAA. The colleges were a test. If the RIAA could frighten the colleges enough to get them to roll over like a trained puppy with the offer of forcing every student to pay $5 a month, without even questioning the validity of the threat, why stop there? If the educated people can be made to comply so easily, it'll be a breeze to run this same scam on a much wider scale. And pretty soon, the entire country will be paying the RIAA $5 a month not to get sued for something that may not have been actionable in the first place. Of course, most of the college crowd thinks downloading is illegal -- because that's what the RIAA told them. Elliot Van Buskirk at Wired points out that the problem goes much further:
EMI is said to be opening its own music site. Downloading cannot be theft AND their primary delivery system. That myth will have to change soon. No change is necessary to the law. There never was one. Misdirection ContinuesThe record labels are not victims. They probably would have tried this con in the 60s if they thought they could get every person with a transistor radio to pay them $5 a month or lose the ability to find out if schools are closed today. Before all this started, the government was on the RIAA's case for antitrust, price-fixing, and assorted other activity. That's all gone now. The major labels have gone in together to create MySpace Music. They're going in together for this $5 tax scam. They stopped competing with other and became a team. No one seems to have a problem with that. And now, RIAA gets to unilaterally decide what is and isn't allowed on the Internet and who is and isn't allowed to even use it. The evidence? Because they said so. They're going to keep using their award-winning detection system, which hasn't identified a dead person as a pirate all week and never was used successfully to win a trial. This way, it won't matter if the RIAA doesn't get to be Copyright Czar. ISP Nazi doesn't even have to report to Copyright Czar. Or the judicial system. The Song Remains the SameI find it immensely entertaining that the RIAA will be sticking with its primary message:
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