When the RIAA sued 261 music sharers, the press was ready. Journalists knew the suits were coming--it was only a question of when, and who. But for the targets of the lawsuits (the vast majority families with children) there was nothing inevitable about it. Imagine getting hit with a lawsuit for more than the value of your home because your kids went to the wrong webpage and downloaded the wrong program.
My role in this started a month ago, when my site was contacted by a programmer who, appalled by the story of Brianna LaHara, wanted to collect donations for people who'd been sued. We worked out a simple "P2P" Defense Fund.that could go up quickly without any legal hassle or red tape, and we started calling people who'd been targetted. The first phone calls were a shock: until then I'd thought about the lawsuits in intellectual/strategic terms (is this a good move for the RIAA or not, etc.) but on the phone these were real people with tough, complex lives:
My husband and I both work full time to make ends meet. We have 4 children ... We are middle class and live from paycheck to paycheck. We are good, honest people. This lawsuit has devastated us.
Musicians and independent labels are speaking out against the RIAA lawsuits, and one independent musician is even donating proceeds from his CD sales to the Defense Fund. An opportunity exists to stop future lawsuits.
By using a peer-to-peer contribution system, we were able to avoid legal hurdles and red tape, and ensure that all donations went directly to the people who had been sued. Each recipient can set up his or her own PayPal account, and our site can track the amount of money each person received. A Perl script on our page rotates the recipient in the "Contribute Now" box so that whoever has received the least money so far is at the front of the line. Jason Rohrer, the programmer behind the open-source broadcast protocol konspire2b, wrote the code and it works great. Donations distribute evenly over time, and we don't have to touch the money. This peer-to-peer, no-middleman approach seemed like the perfect response to major label middlemen. The hard part was contacting the families who'd been sued and getting them signed on.
It might be hard for many k5 readers to appreciate how completely adrift these families were. Almost none had heard of the EFF, and most didn't even have email addresses. Many were singled out as "major downloaders" simply because they didn't know how the software worked: people who use Kazaa frequently don't keep all their music in their shared folder (especially since news of the impending lawsuits began circulating) but most of these people didn't know what a "shared folder" was. It seemed that the RIAA's criteria had selected for people who didn't know that much about computers, and who didn't understand how filesharing software worked.
The vast majority of those sued were families with young children. Even if their parents aren't computer literate, any 13-year-old with a screen name will learn to use Kazaa from a friend in a matter of minutes. One father who'd been sued was angry at his son, but couldn't honestly blame him. "He said 'dad it was just a website' so I asked him to take me to it. And he was right, it was just a normal website and it didn't say anything about it being illegal." Not only does it not say anything about being illegal, Kazaa's site had 5 colored hearts across the top and looks like a toy.
The RIAA's criteria also singled out people who love music. Several of the people we talked to were musicians, and many owned hundreds of CDs. One man John, who is signed up on the fund, is a professional gig musician in Chicago. We couldn't contact him at first because he was playing guitar that night, and every night that week. A woman who signed on to the fund told us about her family's interest in music,
We have three daughters, ages 20, 18, and 12, all whom are musically talented .... our eldest daughter is majoring in Vocal Performance at ______ University.... collectively we own over 500 CDs. Many of the downloaded songs are actually singles from various CDs we own ... the girls enjoy creating their own mixes.
Many musicians oppose the lawsuits, and some are joining to help those who've been sued and to fight the RIAA and the major labels. Independent musician Scott Andrew LePera is donating proceeds from his new CD to families sued by the major labels. He's selling his folk-pop record "Where I've Been" through his website for . The CD has 6 songs to play on a CD player plus two whole albums in MP3 and Ogg format, all released under a Creative Commons license. If his fans think they're getting more than their money's worth, they can "tip" him by paying more than . This month's tips will go to the Defense Fund, and he's raised about 0 so far.
Even major label musicians are speaking out against the suits. Musicians like Moby, Bob Weir (from the Grateful Dead), and Gregg Rollie (Santana and Journey) sounded off to the San Francisco Chronicle against the lawsuits and the major labels' business practices. "For the artists, my ass," said David Draiman of the band Disturbed, "I didn't ask them to protect me, and I don't want their protection."
The punk-rock and pop-punk label GoKart Records is fighting back against the RIAA lawsuits by making several of their new releases available as free downloads. In an interview with O'Reilly OpenP2P GoKart's founder Greg Ross says that what the major labels really hate about filesharing is not lost sales, but lost control: "with few exceptions ... the access to fans is controlled by the five major labels. But they can't control what people download. All they can try to do is control people's access to downloads, or scare them so they won't."
Meanwhile, hundreds of families and individuals are suffering needlessly as part of the major labels' scare campaign:
Our second daughter is a nursing student at ____ University. As you can imagine, the tuition bills for educating her and her sister are tremendous. We are hardly in a position to pay the price to the recording industry as their sacrificial lamb.
So far, the Peer-to-Peer Legal Defense Fund has raised over 00 for 12 families and individuals, but it will take a lot more money to make a significant dent in these people's legal fees and settlement costs. You can contribute here, and you can choose who receives your donation by clicking on "Full Recipient List" (if, for example, you want your donation to go to someone who is fighting the lawsuit.)
The following are some other great resources:
RIAA Radar - Make sure the music you pay for is RIAA safe.
Boycott-RIAA - News and information.
StopRIAAlaawsuits - An open coalition of sites that will call for a one-week boycott of major label CDs when the next round of RIAA lawsuits are filed
Downhill Battle - Music activism site (we started the Defense Fund)
The Problem with Music - Famous rock producer Steve Albini's famous critique of the music industry.
Weed - Share an artist's files freely, listen 3 times for free, then pay to unlock. Artists get half and filesharers even get a cut. Uses DRM, but clever enough to deserve a chance.
OEbase - An online music store that only sells handpicked (really good) music. Free streaming and MP3s of lots of independent and unsigned bands.
In my opinion, the whole purpose of the RIAA threatening downloaders with lawsuits seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines is to terrorize naive people into declaring their "guilt" and then "settling" the lawsuits for "only" a few thousand dollars!
What the defendants in these cases need is:
1) backbone
and
2) a decent attorney that is willing to take the cases to trial! The RIAA's whole legal house of cards will collapse as soon as these lawsuits start clogging up court dockets... and the defendants will almost certainly win their cases if they coherently argue their defense before decent juries!
There is nothing different between taping uncut movies broadcast on cable TV or satellite services and making a digital recording off shared internet files.
The recording industry claimed that the advent of cassette recorders would destroy their industry...it didn't. The major film studios made the same Philistine argument when VCRs came out... and the VCR turned out to be practically the best thing that ever happened to the major studios! There is absolutely no evidence that could be adduced to show that file sharing, in the long run, won't wind up being as beneficial to the major record labels as the previous technological "breakthroughs" were!
I strongly feel that once some of these cases reach the courtroom, the RIAA will recieve such a beating at the hands of competent juries selected to hear these cases that the RIAA's thievery will be exposed to the world for what it is: a naked grab for expanded profits backed up by unconstitutional legislation written by the record industry's own bought-and-paid-for Congressmen and Senators!
As far as I know, lawsuits such as those the RIAA are launching against music fans in the US are NOT taking place in any other nation! What jury will believe that only the US' music industry "realizes" the extreme danger that file sharing poses to the "health" of the musician-swindling multibillion-dollar music bizness?
Good luck with the fundraising campaign for the defense of the people being attacked by Big Vinyl, and
here's looking forward to major defeats being won by those file sharers with the guts to stand up to these music industry bandits!
Varlet
"Workers Of the World, Unite!"
Contrary to popular belief, copyright isn't just a way for corporations to take away your rights. Copyright gives individuals the right to make a single copy of any work, digital or not, for personal use or to give to someone else.
Copyright protects your right to make a backup of your software, or a copy of an MP3 music file, or a DVD.
This is why software has a "software license" that you must agree with before using it. The "license" is an agreement between you and the software company to give up your rights. Likewise, similar "licenses" show up on DVDs and have started showing up on music.
The Digtial Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a further incursion onto your rights that you once had under Copyright. The DMCA should have been called the DM No More Copyright Act, because it gives all those rights over to the person who owns the copyright.
Under the DMCA, the voting machine and ATM manufacturer Diebold issued a cease-and-desist order to the ISP that hosted the website blackboxvoting.org, an advocacy and research site critical of various methods of electronic voting. Just prior to the California recall election, Diebold, who provides voting machines to the state, silenced it's greatest critic.
Also under the DMCA, a Russian programmer who explained flaws in various e-book "protection" schemes, and wrote software to disable these protections, was arrested after he flew into the US to discuss these flaws. This arrest was at the request of Adobe Systems (the people who created PDF files and Adobe Photoshop). You can do a search for Dmitry Sklyarov and read about his case. http://www.freesklyarov.org/
The latest incursion into this realm is encoded right into the (infamous) FTAA, under the guise of protection for intellectual property. Like the DMCA, these new so-called protections restrict freedom of speech and thought, and will tend to accrue to the wealthy, greater wealth. Here's an article about it:
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/8546
Also, the DVD media companies are after a website that tells you how to copy DVDs. What ever happened to freedom of speech?! Here's an article about this:
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/8558