The site where it was uploaded is sometimes not very user-friendly.
I’ve uploaded a PDF version to my own webspace:
https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/RIAA_Tenenbaum_District_Court.pdf
I’ve already said that i’m quite happy with the reduction in the fine, and i think the RIAA have gone about this whole thing the wrong way. I’m quite happy to see them smacked down like this.
But…
What do you do for a living? How would you feel if someone told you that your livelihood, the thing that puts food on your table and a roof over your head, should be considered a “gift to humanity,” and that you should do it for free? Would you work every week for nothing but the satisfaction that other people are benefiting from your labor?
As the economists say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Everything that comes “free” has been produced by someone, paid for by someone with their money and/or their labor. If we suddenly decide that music is not property, that its transfer should not be restricted, and that we all have the right to download and transfer as much of it as we want because it’s a “possession to all of us,” then what we’re effectively saying to musicians is, “Hey, work for us for free. We love what you do, but we’re not interested in rewarding your talent enough to even allow you to pay the rent.”
Do you think this scenario would result in more or less music in the world?
and IMHO the problem is much more than thinking some large organization gets the money. One good thing digital technology has done is allow small local and independent artists to produce their own product and promote it.
The down side is that the concept of “music should be free” and that making and distributing copies is just fine, affects them as well as major artists and labels. Here in Nashville there are a lot of artists and writers who have their own CD to sell and sre available on several web sites like CD baby.
It’s the mindset and it’s so casual. A friend at work was telling me about a particular new artist he liked. He brought in a copied CD for me and I listened. Like the guy but not what I’d spend my $15 on. I’m more a specific song kinda guy or I want to hand my money to the artist at the show. My friend just casually offered me this copied CD. Um thanks but no thanks. If this guy is a rising artist I’d rather buy his stuff or not.
The mindset also seems to be some social buddy system. Something friends and acquantences do and/or are expected to do as a favor because it’s so easy. It’s a mindset that needs to be replaced with the reality that taking creative property and giving it away to others is not cool , although I can’t see that realisitically happening any time soon.
I actually hope that people will begin to support local artists they like. When you give ten bicks to a local cat for his CD then you know that artist is getting a huge percentage and it really helps.
Thank you.
If you’re a musician, you should be playing live for a living. Or getting paid directly for creating music, such as for a movie soundtrack or art exhibit. If you’re looking to get paid by recording and selling CDs, well…I don’t know what to tell you. Technology and consumer preference has sorta made that business model obsolete, has it not? If you’re going to release an album of several songs on compact disc, don’t you have to accept at this point that many people will just download it for free from a blog? If that’s the case, what purpose does huge punitive damages serve?
Thanks. My brief read of it confirms my initial suspicion (which probably makes my analysis less reliable, but oh well). It is a well-reasoned and careful opinion, but the discussion of actual damages to the record labels is a bit of a weak point.
She writes comparatively little about the damage done to the record labels (only three paragraphs in an otherwise very long opinion), and relies mostly on assumptions, which although reasonable, were not the subject of any fact-finding.
In particular, the assumption that the damage to the record label are a function of multiplying the downloaded tracks by the profit reaped per track seems at least questionable. I actually agree with that result, but I’m not sure it was proper to reach that conclusion without an adversarial evidentiary hearing.
But you’re the one arguing about “should” and “what’s fair” when talking about artists who can’t make money from music.
So which is it? Are we going to talk about what’s fair and what should happen, or are we going to shrug our shoulders when somebody gets screwed by the system? Because I can guarantee that if we take a mindset of shrugging our shoulders at the unfairness of it all, then your artist friends are going to be the ones who get screwed, because 1% make music and 99% consume music.
So if you can’t come up with a fair way to compensate artists for their work, without screwing over random people, then we’re headed for a world where everything is available free. And the law won’t help much because there are plenty of countries where our copyright laws don’t apply. All this is available in China, Russia, and India, and the authorities there don’t care.
Randomly bankrupting a couple of college kids every year won’t change the perception of young people about whether it’s OK to share music files. In fact, rather the opposite. You can’t appeal to fairness when someone gets slapped with a half-million dollar fine for sharing 30 songs.
Gigantic damages against a tiny random sample of file sharers is a horrible strategy and worse than useless. The only way to stop file sharing through legal means is if people felt there was a reasonable chance of getting caught.
We’ve been over this many times. The purpose of copyright law is to advance the useful arts and sciences by granting creators a temporary monopoly over copying their work. This worked incredibly well in the industrial age when copying a book or a record was a difficult undertaking. But things have changed, and our copyright law doesn’t work under the current technological conditions, just like modern copyright law would have been wildly inappropriate back in the Medieval era when books had to be copied by hand.
My personal solution is to stop trying to prevent copying, and have all ISPs collect a few bucks a month from everyone with a network connection, and that money goes into a fund which compensates artists based on how often their work gets copied, streamed, or downloaded.
This has a chance to work, despite some hurdles. But simply insisting that our current copyright scheme HAS to work, just because it worked in the past, because anything else is unfair, is foolishness. It used to work, now it doesn’t, so we need a new system.
I agree that that’s pretty much what it has become. I agree that , being realisitic and practical, musicians have to look to other areas to make money. That doesn’t mean downloading for free should be okay and not prosecuted. That’s why most social sites that are successful have guidelines about posting videos and music. The new independent artists must get their songs available for sale as individual tracks either on thier own site or on some other site. If that’s available, if you can give someone a lousy dollar for their song you like , why justify taking it for free?
People who provide the downloads of creative and intellectual property ought to face the most severe penalties. I don’t think you can prevent people from making copies at home to hand to friends, but those providing other people’s work for free on some network, ought to be pursued. Moreover, I’m suggesting a change in the mindset that justifies it. It may be futile , but that’s my take on it. Let’s not continue to pretend that having the technology available makes it okay to take someone else’s work for free.
As someone else suggested, think of any artist you may know or your own work or someone else’s. I think part of the reason the justification works is we depersonalize the act. Keep in mind it’s actually a person you’re taking something from.
I’ll see if I can find the story, but I do recall reading a news story some months ago about it coming out that the cash stops with the RIAA.
Did I support that fine. No.
I agree it’s a bad strategy. As I said, I think the peope who offer file sharing networks have a greater responsibility to supervise and should face more penalties.
Measuring which artists works are downloaded and how often would be quite a chore. In some ways the technology has already changed the market because now we can download individual songs and find those songs on the internet without being concerned about what our local store carries. That ability and change in the music model ought to be enough but it isn’t. I don’t think your idea is a bad one. Some companies are now charging a flat monthly fee for downloads and must figure out some average.
That’s not close to anything I argued. I’m all for new developments in the model that help the consummer and the seller. THat’s how it works. My objection here is to the mindset that because it’s easy , and lots of people do it , it’s okay. It still isn’t okay to take someone else’s work for free. Offering easy and inexspensive alternatives is helpful.
Do you think college students should pay some penalty? What do you suppose would be reasonable? I suspect that no matter how easy we make it for people to get and pay for an individual song there will be people eager to get all they can for free. I think there needs to be some penalties in place for aggregious offenders.
“Obscurity is a far greater threat to any artist than piracy.” --Cory Doctorow
Okay, I’ll create an analogy and take the heat about how it doesn’t apply.
Assuming the downloaded songs realsitically sold for $1 each, what do you suppose the punishment should be if someone stole 30 $1 items from their local qwik stop. If you’re in college and over 18 that makes you an adult right? with adult consequences.
Do we take into consideration the fact that he admitted to downloading around 800?
Can we downgrade it to recieving stolen property rather than stealing it yourself.
So if someone offers to sell you CDs you know they stole , are you guilty of anything? What’s a realisitic penalty?
It can be true that having your music out there and listened to, even if it’s a copy, can be a good thing and can lead to work and future sales.
I’m fully behind the prosecution of people who receive shared files. The fine should be the cost of the file plus a punitive cost associated with the file. I would think $1 for each file acquired illegally(cost) plus $3 (3 times the cost per file) is a reasonable sentence.
What would you do about court costs?
If, under your scheme, you download 100 songs, that means that if you get caught and prosecuted, you owe the record labels $400.
In order to get that judgment, however, the record companies need to hire a bunch of lawyers who bill at $500 an hour each.
Do we treat it the same in regard to volume? This kid admitted he downloaded at least 800 files.
I agree that this is much more realsitic in terms of actual damages but the result is no real deterent. I think there is a more realisitc middle ground.
Do you think , if found guilty, they should also pay the cost of prosecuting the case?
It should definitely not be a linear amount based on the number of files. There are lots of people out there with hard drives with 50,000+ mp3s that never listen to a single one of them. They download anything they come across on impulse, and sure as hell aren’t costing any artists $50,000 worth of damages. It’s also pretty common practice to download entire albums, even if you’re only after a single song, because albums are easier to find. I think the fairest system would simply be a small set of set fines depending on severity.
$3,200 fine isn’t peanuts. But ultimately we’re looking at theft so how do courts take the theft of an $800 camera left sitting on a picnic table? Or how does the courts view the theft of 800 pencils one at a time since the downloads were probably a series of thefts.
I think the people making the files available for download are the worse offendors. I didn’t see the details from the OP but IMO there’s a difference between dowloading songs and posting them to be downloaded. If the guy was part of a peer sharing program and making songs available for others to download then that a different tune.
Sites that offer other people’s work for download need to be cracked down on. Some person is maintaining and perhaps paying for the site. I have several friends who download movies, sometimes before they are out of the theaters. I’m surprised with modern technology that theses sites and their operators can’t be located and cracked down on.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do not believe the defendant in this case was running any kind of website or network to distribute files. He downloaded music off a peer-to-peer network, and when you do that it automatically makes you seed the file you downloaded unless you go through very specific steps to prevent it. I would wager you that at least 95% of people that download music have also been guilty of distribution. Probably more like 99%. I would also be very interested to know what his download:upload ratio was, because for most casual users it tends to be very low since they only keep the client open when they’re actually downloading stuff.