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.

Reversing a series of decisions in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Washington, D.C., court said copyright law did not allow the group to send out subpoenas asking Internet service providers for the identity of file swappers on their networks. The ruling came in favor of Verizon Communications, the first ISP to challenge the recording industry's actions. 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.

The motion was filed by a pair of Sacramento, Calif., attorneys who said the RIAA had gone too far in its effort to protect its online copyrights.

"This is more invasive than someone having secret access to the library books you check out or the videos you rent," Glenn Peterson, one of the attorneys, said in a statement. "The recent efforts of the music industry to root out piracy have addressed a uniquely contemporary problem with Draconian methods--good old-fashioned intimidation combined with access to personal information that would make George Orwell blush." In their briefs, her attorneys argued that the RIAA's unconventional subpoena process has violated her rights to due process, privacy and anonymous association, along with her contract with Verizon.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:
"We are not unsympathetic either to the RIAA's concern regarding the widespread infringement of its members' copyrights, or to the need for legal tools to protect those rights," the court wrote. "It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite (copyright law) in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry." 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 :rolleyes:

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.