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RIAA: ISPs Should Pay For File Sharing

January 20, 2003 by

A Reuters story quotes RIAA head Hilary Rosen as saying that ISPs should be held responsible for their users’ file sharing:

“We will hold ISPs more accountable,” said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera.

“Let’s face it. They know there’s a lot of demand for broadband simply because of the availability (of file-sharing),” Rosen said.

[…]

Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to their customers who frequent these file-swapping services.

Perhaps she is suggesting a compulsory license (users pay a flat fee, then get free access to copyrighted music), as others have suggested before. If the RIAA were supporting a compulsory license, that would be big news.

More likely, her plan is a lopsided one in which users pay a fee but don’t get free access to music, or anything else, in return. If so, the plan would probably only increase the number of users of file sharing systems. Many users already find ways to rationalize their use of file sharing. Imagine the user who, unlike many of his peers, has resisted the temptation to use file sharing; and then he learns that he is being forced to pay the RIAA anyway on the assumption that he is a file sharer. What are the odds that he’ll start using file sharing, since he’s paying for it whether he uses it or not? Pretty good, I’d say.

The RIAA’s biggest problem is the public’s fading respect for the legal limits on file sharing. A step that erodes that respect even further is exactly what the RIAA doesn’t need.

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Court Throws Out No-Reviews Clause in EULA

January 18, 2003 by

A court has thrown out a software contract clause prohibiting customers from publishing reviews of a product, report Matt Richtel at the New York Times and Lisa Bowman at CNet.

A New York state court made the ruling in a suit brought by the New York Attorney General’s office. The clause in question says, “The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc.”

Richtel reports that the court found the clause to be “deceptive.” I haven’t found a copy of the court’s opinion, so I can’t be sure what exactly that means. But the New York Attorney General had argued that the clause was clearly unenforceable, so that inserting the clause was essentially a way to trick users into believing it was illegal to review the product.

More on this once I find a copy of the court’s opinion.

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Siva's Multimedia Blitz

January 17, 2003 by

Siva Vaidhyanathan offers a post-Eldred perspective over at Salon.

He’s on television tonight too, talking about copyright, on “NOW with Bill Moyers,” airing on most PBS stations at 9:00 PM.

Also check out his new blog.

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Eldred Loses

January 15, 2003 by

The Supreme Court has ruled in the Eldred case, upholding the copyright term extension by a 7-2 vote.

More later, once I get a chance to read the opinions.

majority opinion by Justice Ginsburg;
dissent by Justice Stevens;
dissent by Justice Breyer

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When is a Mandate Not a Mandate?

January 15, 2003 by

The conventional wisdom is that yesterday’s deal between the RIAA and tech companies includes an agreement to oppose government mandates of DRM such as the Hollings CBDTPA. But look at this sentence from paragraph 6 of the joint statement (italics added):

The role of government, if needed at all, should be limited to enforcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional specifications reflecting consensus among affected interests.

This is suspiciously close to the approach taken by the Hollings CBDTPA, under which industry groups would have been asked to agree on a DRM “standard” and then government would have mandated compliance with it. (The only difference I can see is that the CBDTPA had a backup procedure under which the government would have chosen the “standard” if industry failed to agree.)

Now, you may object that the “if needed at all” clause weakens my argument. But bear in mind that they could just as well have omitted the quoted sentence entirely. Had they done so, the document would have been clearly opposed to mandates. Instead, they chose to put the sentence in, indicating at least some support for CBDTPA-like regulation.

This is consistent with the phenomenon I noted in my previous posting: the goal is not to prevent or reduce regulation, but to make sure that the regulatory framework can move only in the direction the signatories want.

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