More on RIAA's legendary care for the law

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First:

http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5129687.html

A federal court of appeal has ruled against RIAA's use of subpoenas to extract swappers' personal information from their ISPs. Verizon, of such ISP's wins the case.

Second:

http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5066754.html?tag=st_rn

A file swapper challenges a RIAA subpoena. She sues them for privacy infringement.

Last but not least, RIAA seems to have no qualms breaking their beloved copyright laws when it comes to money. How? Sharman have already sued them for using a non-official cracked version of Kazaa to track down swappers. Basically, RIAA were using Kazaa Lite, a rip deprived of all Kazaa's ads and spyware.

Also, they seem to have used another protected technology to track down individual swappers.

Unfortunately, I have no links at hand for the last two, but I'll look for them and paste them here when I get them.

My conclusion is that it's all about money. The big and the small. It's not the law that matters. It's not even rights. Rights are used as tools and the law gets shaped to make some rights more important than other rights. Ultimately, it's a big fight for money where the stronger one wins and the means aren't important. Each party protecting its own interests, the law doesn't play a substantial role.

Thoughts, please.

 

From your first link:

Unless I misunderstand, the courts have basically said that they can't find in favour of RIAA only because there is no law to support such a finding.


There has been a few debates in the Alley in the morality of burning/downloading, and there doesn't seem to be any consensus. I'm of the opinion that, because of copyright laws, it's not right to, in essence, "steal" other people's work.

 

Heh, i just gotta say what happened here in Slovenia.

RIAA-type organisation, turned in "Jocker" magazine as a very likely pirate organisation. "They get games before they are released, which probably means they get them from internet" and stuff like that. In truth Joker (the correct name) is a magazine just like PCgamer, and at that the leading one in Slovenia, and normaly gets games from developers usually before the games get released.
I guess they havent heard of anything like that

 

In the Netherlands, Kazaa has been ruled not only legal, but it is not responsible for file swapping. Also, the US Dept. of Justice just ended an antitrust investigation into online music companies, and found nothing.

 

To be honest, I've not kept up with it a whole lot. I don't listen to Brittney, and the stuff I listen to sounds like complete ass using anything other than .ac3 to encode it. So, I buy stuff because I can't get no sat-tis-fac-tion any other way.

FCC, CIA, FBI, NSA, AEC. All of these are government agencies. That is, there is a specific law for their mandate. Their powers and their responsibilities are layed out in a single law, and under the jurisdiction of the Executive branch.

The RIAA is not a governmental agency. It's just a collection of a businesses that fund Senators and Representatives.

You file a lawsuit. You go to court, and request documents. The prosecution attorney files a subponea for those documents, the judge signs it, and the cops raid the house.

What the ISPs have been doing is saying "We are not prepared to defend or argue for our customers, in this manner. We feel that we have to trust the intentions of the RIAA, in the interest of our own business."

But it's difficult to just up and boycott all these ISPs, at one big time, to convince them that it's their best interest not to sell our information to their "business" partners. So, they fold, and throw in some bandwidth gobbling sheep to be slaughtered.

I don't know how it can be any other way. Except that the RIAA really does need to file the lawsuits. And the judge really does need to sign the subponea.

But it's probably in most ISPs "Terms of Service" that they will release your information to whatever other business that requests it, and provides a description of "copyright violations" and IP numbers.