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December 31, 2007
Unbelievably standing up for the RIAA (this one time)
Yesterday, Marc Fisher of the Washington Post wrote a piece entiled "Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use." (Free registration might be required to view.)
One of my favorite bloggers, Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber, referenced this briefly yesterday. I've seen this crop up on lots of other blogs and various media outlets, and the story is always presented in basically the way that Fisher presented it:
[I]n an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
The problem is that's not what the brief says at all.
I was as outraged as you probably are when I first read about this brief a few weeks ago. So I looked up the Atlantic v. Howell brief. It was easy to find through Google, but here's a link for you: Plaintiff's supplemental brief in support of their motion for summary judgment pursuant to court's order of October 3, 2007. (PDF format).
Read it for yourself. When you read the brief it quickly becomes clear this isn't a case about converting CDs to MP3s, but a case about someone who plopped his converted MP3's into the Kazaa file-sharing service. What the brief actually says is:
Defendant admitted that he converted these soundrecordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use. . . . Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs. Moreover, Defendant had no authorization to distribute Plaintiffs’ copyrighted recordings from his KaZaA shared folder." (p. 15)
Note the "and" in that second sentence. This is boolean logic at its simplest. Not once in this brief -- not once -- is it even remotely implied that "copy[ing] their CDs onto their computers," as Fisher said, is an illegal act in and of itself. The entire case revolves around taking those MP3s and making them available to other people via the Kazaa file-sharing service. Had Howell just converted his CDs to MP3s and dropped them into a location on his computer that wasn't shared with millions of other users, we might assume that there wouldn't be a lawsuit taking place.
In other words, in the Atlantic v. Howell brief, the lawyers for the RIAA are not objecting to a user copying CDs onto a computer, but to a user putting the ripped audio files into a shared folder that he knew would distribute it via the Kazaa file-sharing service -- precisely what the RIAA has been objecting to for nearly a decade.
I'm no apologist for the RIAA; I loathe their policies and their tactics. But loathing the RIAA isn't an excuse for letting sloppy, misleading, and irresponsible reporting go unnoticed. I haven't seen any coverage of this case that has actually reported the full context, i.e. that the RIAA was objecting to the converted files in question being shared over the Kazaa service.
There's nothing new -- or newly nefarious -- here. The only new thing here is that the defense lawyers are being much more clever this time around about taking language about "unauthorized copies" out of context and spinning it to their advantage in the media and blogosphere. And the media and bloggers are eagerly taking the bait without doing the simple legwork that any resepectable journalist, blogger, or thinking person should do.
Posted December 31, 2007 04:17 PMPosted December 31, 2007 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
December 14, 2007
Flickr Uploadr is Bettr Than Evr
I've been disappointed that I haven't made better use of the digital SLR I bought last year, so I hereby dub 2008 the Year of Photogregory. Or Rittography. Or something clever that combines my name and photography.
I did get good use out of the Nikon D50 a few months back on my vacation to California for (a) Tim & Sharon's San Francisco wedding and (b) driving down the coast in a convertible Mustang.
And yesterday I finally got around to starting to get good use out of my Flickr account via the newly released Flickr Uploadr 3.0. The Uploadr is quite nice and takes nearly all the pain out of uploading batches of photos to Flickr. (The only remaining pain is the fault of Verizon DSL, not Flickr.)
So enjoy some brightly colored San Francisco pics which make the pallette of colors in last year's vacation to Edinburgh look damn near monochromatic.
Still to come on my Flickr account: photos from last year's not-so-monochromatic trip to Nice and the driving-down-the-coast-in-a-convertible-Mustang portion of this year's vacation. And promises of more regular, non-vacation, man-about-town photos as I reclaim my creative life in 2008. ;-)
Posted December 14, 2007 07:26 AMPosted December 14, 2007 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 03, 2007
Why I want to be an Italian semiotician/novelist when I grow up
From a New York Times Magazine interview with Umberto Eco:
I am wondering if you read Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code,” which some critics see as the pop version of your “Name of the Rose.”
I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” which is about people who start believing in occult stuff.
But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy and other occult practices explored in the novel.
No, in “Foucault’s Pendulum” I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.
Point Umberto!
I've frequently said that The Da Vinci Code is a dumbed-down knock-off of Foucault's Pendulum. I'm glad Eco agrees.
Posted December 3, 2007 07:03 AMPosted December 3, 2007 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)