Anyone who argues for them needs to be in the business like I AM.

if you dont understand what youre talking about, then you make a fool out of yourself.

20 years of making my OWN brand. Indie.

and guess what .. my music .. IS DOWNLOADABLE . FOR FREE .

RIAA, you greedy asshats. its about the MUSIC .. MUSIC ..

besides, everyone knows you make your money playing live, signing tshirts etc..

if i was not interesting, and could make my brand, then i dont expect you to buy my products.

my music is for the ears .. it is only the gateway into my brand.. the moron IDIOT GREEDY FOOLS who support this EVIL system called RIAA have no respect for us artists who understand you must give to get.

get real. if you like my music, art. then come see me play, meet me, and buy my products.. my music however, is free to listen to .. if and only IF you listen AND THEN like my stuff.. THEN please donate..

All you idiots out there who dont understand that you have to give away samples to make a business, ie BRAND you are greedy and will fail.

do you honestly think any large riaa made star is getting what they deserve? hardly. exposure for a price, sure..

but as an artist, with albums, and art, and a brand to promote,

GET A CLUE. IF YOUR BRAND IS GOOD, THEN DOWNLOADING HELPS YOU!

No one likes the RIAA, but this whole thing is taken out of context. Shady, evil context, sure- but nevertheless, the statement was “Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format, and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs.”

The statement is much longer, but that’s the banana sandwich line, and it’s true. Once you rip music and SHARE it, yeah… that’s illegal.

However, having said that, I’m calling on my political MySpace page (www.myspace.com/sandpaper4thesoul) for a total boycott of music CDs and RIAA labels in 2008. The boycott may or may not work, but if my personal boycott helps a larger effort- so be it! -SP4TS

I am all about paying artists for their music, but when you download a CDs worth of music from ITUNES, you pay the same amount as if you bought a physical CD at the store. Somebody is making out like a bandit, and it’s not the artists or the consumers.

RIAA’s insistence on holding on to an old business model and alienating the buyers of their wares is dooming the music industry. Alternative distribution models are being developed, and the suits will end up holding the jewel-case. Won’t make me sad in the least.

This story has been submitted to Stirrdup. Your support can help it become hot….

do 10’s of millions of people instantly become criminals if the judge rules on this??

something similar happened in canada recently when a ‘technicality’ suddenly made canadian citizens no longer citizens.

whoever says these ‘technicalities’ should be enforced should be fired, and subject to therapy.

why don’t they criminalize the poor or the handicapped while they’re at it?
after all isn’t that fascism?

Take a page from the Jericho Campaign in a way -
Write letters, make incessant phone calls, use emails in a wonderful fashion, and oh yeah…….. take all those MUSIC CD’s they think they have the right to use control over us about, and mail them to them… think of it, we sent over 40,000 pounds of nuts to CBS, if everyone took those CDs they no longer like, want, enjoy and sent them to this Greedy Monster, how many square feet of holding space would they need? If you want to see something funny, just look at this youtube of the peanuts being delivered to CBS back in May -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoxePewKK8o AND http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL6a4GmN5rw AND
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PgPbN12JQg
Just to show ya a few. My point, PEOPLE DO IN FACT HAVE POWER, you just need the fire and the ideas on how to DISPLAY that power to the TPTB .

peace

Where I live DVD sales have broken new records this year. How come people are prepared to buy a DVD but not a CD? The music itself is not the problem. So how come it works for film guys? Maybe because I can play my DVD anywhere. I don’t have idiots trying to control the way I watch that film.

If the majors are even slightly serious about their own comeback the will turn away from the RIAA and get back to what they are supposed to be doing. Selling bloody music! It is a pain doing business with you guys. Make it fun and you are on to a winner - duh!

*defendant ripping from cd = unauthorized use (possibly within “fair use”, but the riaa lawyer isn’t going to cede the point for free)
* defendant copying from original ripped output folder to shared folder = unauthorized use, via the “making available” argument

The analogy would be something like an assault trial that happened on someone’s driveway: the prosecutor might say

* defendant illegally trespassed onto my client’s driveway
* defendant then assaulted my client

it’s possible that the defendant was not illegally trespassing (eg, the defendant was invited in, then an altercation ensued), but an aggressive prosecutor might be inclined to cede as few points as possible.

I find the nay-sayer’s dismissals disappointing, here, because one of the underlying issues is quite serious.

Say Joe Q Goodcitizen never pirates music and always buys cds. Say Joe Q Goodcitizen also rips all cds he purchases to his computer, so that he can listen to them on his ipod or on his computer speakers, without the inconvenience of going to his cd shelf and finding the specific cd he wants to listen to.

So far, we tend to think Joe Q Goodcitizen has done nothing wrong, and thus should have nothing to worry about. But, could he prove he has done nothing wrong, if the RIAA brought suit against him (as, say, the current user of an IP address that was using Kazaa once…)?

If “doing something wrong” = “putting files on p2p networks” he can probably avoid anything more than the hassle of the lawsuit: the onus on the RIAA would be to show that he actually shared stuff, and as he didn’t they would have a hard time showing he did.

If “doing something wrong” = “ripping mp3s of purchased cds, until fair use is successfully argued”, he might be worried: what happens if he lost a cd in a move? Does he have any documentation that he at one point owned the cd in question (ie, an itemized receipt showing he purchased it)? Does he have any documentation showing he “lost” the cd (which probably doesn’t invalidate his fair-use defense to the mp3s he ripped) and that he didn’t, say, sell it to someone else (which would probably invalidate his fair-use defense) or give it away (which also would probably invalidate his fair-use defense)? Can you prove that this CD you brought to court is “yours” (in which case fair use defense probably succeeds), and not one a helpful friend loaned you for the duration of the trial (in which case fair use defense probably fails, if discovered)?

And this is really the issue at stake: as a matter of odds, even law-abiding citizens who engage in “lawful” format-shifting will likely be unable to successfully prove ownership of every ripped album on their computer, if asked to do so in court (keeping itemized receipts for things like music cds is rare, losing cds or throwing out cds that skip-to-the-point-of-unplayability is common).

So long as format-shifting is not “legal” by statute but only by means of a fair-use defense, then, just about every RIAA lawsuit runs the risk of becoming a fishing expedition for statutory damages deriving from that user’s ripped m3ps for which documentation is lacking: given the expense of proving ownership of each and every album in a sizable collection so as to run a fair-use defense, and the size of statutory damages per failure, a settlement wouldn’t be imprudent for most people.

Hence the real depravity of the lawsuits: the lack of clear fair-use guidelines for things like format-shifting (and by clear, I mean clearly delineated in statute) and the typical lack of reliable provenance information with most digital forms of intellectual property. Means that even the law-abiding are risking serious legal hassles if such lawsuits become more frequent: can you prove that .pdf from JSTOR got onto your computer while you were connected to JSTOR via a paying subscription (legal!), instead of out of someone’s shared folder on kazaa (illegal!), if put to the test? — there’s nothing in the file that’d distinguish between those two sources, and most people/services don’t keep logs wth sufficient detail to prove you got it cleanly.