19 thoughts on ““Music industry hails $2,000 win over child”

  1. I’m waiting for someone to claim that the computer was infected with a virus that caused the computer to download music.

    Also, isn’t there file sharing technology that makes users untraceable?

  2. You have to wonder just how much music this 12 year old was trading in order to get singled out by the RIAA. Somehow I doubt she downloaded only a couple songs a week.

  3. Hmmmm… has the RIAA hired the same PR firm that Gary Condit used? What’s next for the recording industry — beating up old ladies in the street? Kicking puppies?

  4. The twelve year old had over 1,000 songs in her kazaa directory according to one story. I don’t think it has been emphasized enough in the stories I’ve read that the RIAA isn’t going after downloaders per se. You get their attention by ‘sharing’ over a thousand titles. Those titles might have been downloaded or ripped from CD’s you own. In fact, is a downloader even guilty of copyright infringement? I suspect only the uploader is committing infringement. If that brief analysis is true I wonder what the RIAA could do about a file sharing system where all the uploads are from a country without copyright law (Cuba, for example)?

  5. No, anyone who makes an unauthorized copy of a work (which you do when you download a file) is guilty of copyright infringement (unless of course you can prove that your copy was legally made under the ‘fair use’ doctrine). So downloaders can be sued for copyright infringement. In the past, they weren’t sued because it was not considered cost effective to do so. It seems that the RIAA now thinks that suing downloaders is cost effective (at least in the long term).

  6. “The twelve year old had over 1,000 songs in her kazaa directory”

    String ‘er up!

    She’s 12.

    Fuckin’ Americanz…

  7. “Also, isn’t there file sharing technology that makes users untraceable?”

    This is weird.
    EarthStation5 claims to be offering a p2p client/network which does just that.
    The weird to me part is the company claims to be based in a Palestinian refugee camp.
    Comments in usenet indicate it’s slow, with minimal offerings, and some rumor that it’s actually an RIAA trap. Heh.

  8. I figure the music industry owes me money. I’ve purchased the same songs several times on different media: LP, eight-track, cassette, and CD. I downloaded them the last time. I guess if the RIAA sues me, I can show them my collection of retro media as proof of purchase.

  9. Does this qualify as child molesting? Just watch this kid sue RIAA back and become rich… Dumb asses leave the girl alone before it’s too late.

  10. I’m celebrating this victory over the little delinquent by burning my CDs and posting them on LimeWire. :p to the RIAA.

  11. Peter, thanks for jogging my memory about the remarkable theories that exist about copyright infringement. As I recall now my favorite is that when listening to a CD on a computer the audio data is copied from the CD into memory. That copy in memory is considered an infringing copy for which someone is supposed to pay. But in its beneficence the recording industry was choosing to overlook this insidious mass larceny, Similarly the former head of the RIAA, Hilary Rosen, explained that every time you rip a CD to your hard drive you were guilty of copyright infringement but they were choosing to overlook this lawlessness but reserved the right to pursue it eventually (possibly with the eventual government mandate of TCPA, making non-compliant computers illegal to own and operate?).

    I entertained my flawed idea of infringement because I was so emphatically trying to correct the common reporting of the current targets being chosen because they were downloading music. Many or possibly all were, but they were chosen because they were uploading (or more precisely offering for upload) so many titles. It is possible someone might have simply ripped his own large collection of CD’s, made it available on kazaa, and never downloaded a single song. I bother making the point because downloading is still a largely invisible activity.

    I’m still curious what will happen next, assuming the peasants do not storm the RIAA castle and burn it to the ground (figuratively or literally). There will certainly be a tendency for many to step away from the cross hairs and remove all the shared files. But the internet is international in scope and there will continue to be locations which will not be within the reach of the RIAA. Other than disastrous public relations with a group that includes many of their own most enthusiastic customers it is hard to imagine how this can have a lasting useful effect given the international scope of the network.

  12. Brian, regardless what Hilary Rosen and the RIAA might think, making copies of a CD you legally obtained for your own PERSONAL use will probably be considered by the courts to fall under the ‘fair use’ doctrine. The courts have ruled in the past that it’s o.k. for owners of LP’s and CD’s to make cassette tape copies of the albums for their own personal use, so I don’t think the RIAA has strong legal leg to stand on in regards to making copies on your computer (on the hard disk or in the CPU memory) of CD’s that you have purchased. Distributing those copies to other people is where the RIAA could have grounds to sue you.

  13. Yes, I agree that it was an odd claim (CD to HDD is infringement). I would be more skeptical but I heard it directly from her at a P2P conference to which Tim O’Reilly had invited her to speak. She also made the threat that they intended to implicate P2P as a terrorist tool. I think the mindset at the RIAA is almost fascinating to observe. They have a lot of money and influence to throw around so observing them is more than just recreation.

  14. The most entaining quote from that article for me was

    “Others facing lawsuits include Timothy Davis, a Yale University professor, who allegedly downloaded about 500 songs, and dozens of teenagers.”

    Dirty old Timothy. Can you prosecuted for downloading teenagers? I’m worried!!!

  15. Great headline, but the battle is lost – buried deep in the article is the sentence “The recording industry has been struggling for years with falling sales due to Internet copying.” Not “falling sales that the industry blames on Internet copying,” but as a simple, cause-and-effect statement of fact. No other potential causes for the falling sales are suggested.

    Like most battles over social norms (which is what this is – the legal aspects are just codifications of the norms), it’s unlikely that either side will get all of their positions adopted — and a common strategy in such fights is to espouse positions more extreme than those you actually hold in hope that a “compromise” will be what you really wanted in the first place. Here is evidence that the RIAA has successfully implanted with at least one journalist the “all declining sales are due to downloading” position, which may be more valuable to them in the long run than the cost of one clever negative headline.

  16. Bob B, excellent distillation of the current state of affairs. I especially like the insight that each side ends up taking the most extreme position.

  17. Did you know she was downloading nursury rhymes!?

    Heck, it’s not as if she was downloading Yanni or something-that would certainly be a punishable offense.

  18. The sued party is her parents, I believe, not the little girl. I am not sure where I picked that up but it sounds true.
    As one who does not care much for popular music my interest is like Philip’s – fun to watch the furor.

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