Downloading music from iTunes or another legal site is not technically more difficult than downloading from a P2P site. So does “easier” equal “free”? If not, what are you really trying to say?

NPR got the writer of the WP story together with the president of the RIAA for a very interesting conversation. More here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/01/rip_this_and_sue_that.html

http://as4me.com/blog/2008/01/humor_from_hollywood.html
“All I could think of was the ludicrous hypocrisy of the ‘piracy is stealing’ campaign Hollywood keeps running. Make stealing look hip and cool in movie after movie, grind morals down into the dust and make good folk look square…then turn around and tell people stealing from you is bad. Uh…yeah.”

Ben I think that all depends on who owns the music. If the label pays the session players as a “work for hire” then the labels own the tracks and can do what they want with them. Including leasing the tracks to other artists for projects. This is a very common practice. Maybe what you meant was when a group pays 10 bucks for a performance track and then think they have the right to steal it and use it on their own recording. Now that is stealing and needs to be stopped.

I don’t recall meeting many “Union” players in the SG studio’s I have visited. Are there any?

The point of the lawsuit is that this person was making copyrighted worked available to others and that it was in fact distributed to others without authorization or payment to the rights holders.

I’m still admittedly a little perplexed why the RIAA gets such bad press for protecting the intellectual property rights of its members. The press doesn’t smear a retailer who prosecutes shoplifters. Why is the record industry such a pariah?

I would still point out, though, that the minimum fine for simple song theft according to the law is $750 per infraction. That’s the cost of the 99 cent product times 750, even if you merely avoided paying the 99 cents it would have cost you to buy it legally…simple theft. The Supreme Court has established that 500 times actual damages is unconstitutionally excessive, yet this law has a multiplier of 750 for the minimal infraction.

Some of you may say that’s just semantics, but in fairness, there is a “fine line” (you can pay me later, Doug) there.

For further clarification, it seems their big concern in this case is that the defendant had place his ripped files in his Kazaa shared folder…offering copyrighted files to others for download whenever he was online.

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/12/riaa-files-supplemental-brief-in.html
(This site seems to think the shared folder charge is an afterthought inserted into the brief.)

If the shared folder issue is the heart of their case, it seems they would be going after him with simple piracy charges…offering something to strangers that he didn’t have the legal right to offer. How his legally owned files came to be on his personal computer is really irrelevant to the question of whether or not he’s sharing them with the entire world.

My question would be whether or not the RIAA had a court order to “wiretap” as it were, his personal activity on his own computer. If not, couldn’t he counter sue the RIAA for invasion of privacy?

The courts have held you can make copies for your own use, as long as nothing changes hand. You can’t loan your cd to a friend for him/her to make a copy, or make a copy for Aunt Sophie (’cause she can’t afford to buy a cd), or borrow your brother’s cd to make a copy. That’s the same principle that’s upheld in the case noted in the above-mentioned article. Song sharing.

That would include transferring your old vinyl, 3-tracks, or cassettes to cd or digital files; transferring your digital files from your PC to your ipod; or burning songs from your PC onto a disc to listen to in the car. As long as nothing changes hands, it’s been deemed ok by the courts. Nothing more stingent has been tested in the courts.

The case quoted in this article does not just say the lady only stole the songs. She was fined that heavily, because she SHARED the songs. So the analogy goes beyond stealing $20.

I think, based on what the courts have done in the past, and even what this judgment is, it’s probably going to be difficult for RIAA to enforce it’s no uploading rule. But then, that’s just IMHO.

As for the question about radio, yes, Shawn is correct. They are supposed to pay a licensing fee (equivalent of paying a royalty), based on their listenership. Those fees are then dispersed to the writers and publishers of the songs that are played. So, theoretically, no one is being cheated out of his/her rightful moneys. And because of this process, if the artist did not write the song, the artist often does not make as much money as the writer. (That’s not necessarily the case in gospel, but other genres, at least.) If fact, under the current process, artists receive no airplay royalties — only the writers and publishers.

Hope that helps answer some of the questions, as I understand the situation.