Posted on 11/07/2005 1:34:43 PM PST by GreatOne
Grokster, the free music-swapping website that prompted a legal battle ending in the US Supreme Court, agreed to shut down its service under a settlement with the US music industry, industry officials said.
Grokster will shut down its peer-to-peer (P2P) network that had been accused of massive copyright violations, prompting a lawsuit that ended with the highest US court ruling that it contributed to piracy, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
"This settlement brings to a close an incredibly significant chapter in the story of digital music," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the RIAA.
"This is a chapter that ends on a high note for the recording industry, the tech community and music fans and consumers everywhere. At the end of the day, this is about our ability to invest in new music. An online marketplace populated by legitimate services allows us to do just that."
The RIAA, which spearheaded the legal effort against P2P networks, said a consent agreement would be presented to court.
"The settlement includes a permanent injunction prohibiting infringement -- directly or indirectly -- of any of the plaintiffs' copyrighted works," said the RIAA in a joint statement with the National Music Publishers Association.
"This includes ceasing immediately distribution of the Grokster client application and ceasing to operate the Grokster system and software."
In June, US Supreme Court ruled networks such as Grokster may be held liable for infringement if they encourage people to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted songs, films or other content. This opened the door for the music industry to pursue damages.
"The owners and operators of Grokster -- like numerous other online services all across the globe -- heard nine US Supreme Court justices speak in a unanimous voice -- a voice that was heard loud and clear," Bainwol said.
"As the court articulated in no uncertain terms, there is a right way and a wrong way to conduct a business. This settlement makes clear that businesses are well aware when they are operating on the wrong side of that line."
I could see the logic of the original Napster lawsuit, wherein the files were all stored at a central hub, and people were making money off of advertisements. But pure p2p software should not be touched, imho. I'm sure that the people who use these softwares would not be running out and buying the music/movies to begin with, so I find it hard to believe that the industries are losing that much money.
I'm not a downloader, as I've seen the inordinate amount of fines that have been imposed ($600,000), which are ridiculous. Those statutes are intended for those actually making a profit off of pirated movies/music, but these dopey judges have been convinced to use them for straight sharers. Not right.
As long as RIAA focuses on producing soundtracks for MPAA cr@p such as Brokeback Mountain, the recording and movie industries will consign themselves to oblivion.
<-----Gay cowboys who eat pudding...and favored to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year.
The FBI is on its way, you TERRORIST!............
On a related note, is it illegal at any time to download songs just to listen to them on your computer or is it only illegal if you burn them to a CD?
??? If I recall correctly, Napster was also P2P. I'm pretty sure I remember on-demand uploads as well as downloads.
As for the rest of your questions, I think the difference is analog vs. digital. The n,000,000th digital copy is as good as the original.
The media you own is for you alone yet not your own.
I might have some sympathy for the recording industry if they hadn't tricked some of their stars into signing away all rights to their music....
Of course it is (except when the provider -- e.g. Yahoo! Music videos -- has a deal with the copyright owner).
There just ISN'T enough worthwhile music being generated to fill an 80GB hard drive
Movies will be next
The strategy that the RIAA is taking implies that the former is true, that even downloading is illegal. Suing grandfathers whose grandson downloaded music seems to be their tactic.
I guess we should not borrow our friends' music either. Should we listen if we didn't pay for it?
Circulating is fine. Copying is illegal.
This could be a good thing for the indie artist. But then it could also be a bad thing if the RIAA would want to stop us from offering our own music for free.
LOL! They REALLY do that in the film?!
The music they're producing now sucks so bad it's not worth paying for it. The rights of the old music I steal are not owned by the musicians, so I don't care if they don't get my money. I can copy any music I want by running it through analog, and it looses no quality. Digital --> oversampled analog --> digital. They have over priced their product, and they have reduced it's quality -- they've screwed themselves. Ha.
Youre joking, right? I have a second 250 gig filled with mp3s from USenet of my fav genres (celtic, jazz, new age, game soundtracks, military, movie soundtracks, rock, etc).
And wonderfully encrypted/decrypted with a click of a mouse, via DriveCrypt Plus!
True but there is still free music sites like download.com and soundclick.com where indie artists offer their music to the public free.
Same difference really. You could have an online lending library circulating hundreds of legally purchased copies of songs and movies, as long as no two people are listening to the same copy at the same time.
Absolutely correct. If you are into independent artists, you will find a lot of free music out there that is 100% legal to download.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that some obscure provision of the (sic) Patriot Act allows for just that. They could reenact their Elian Gonzalez routine on some kid with an iPod.
Interview with South Park creators.
Q: Cartman once described independent movies as "gay cowboys eating pudding." Now we have "Brokeback Mountain," an upcoming movie by Ang Lee about gay cowboys.
MATT STONE: If they have pudding in that movie, I'm going to lose my mind.
TREY PARKER: No, if there's pudding eating in there, we're going to sue.
******
Spoiler Alert for Brokeback Mountain (assuming you'd actually want to view the damn thing).
From Rotten Tomatoes:
"Set against the sweeping vistas of Wyoming and Texas, the film tells the story of two young men – a ranch-hand and a rodeo cowboy – who meet in the summer of 1963, and unexpectedly forge a lifelong connection, one whose complications, joys and tragedies provide a testament to the endurance and power of love. Early one morning in Signal, Wyoming, Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet while lining up for employment with local rancher Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid).
The world which Ennis and Jack have been born into is at once changing rapidly and yet scarcely evolving. Both young men seem certain of their set places in the heartland – obtaining steady work, marrying and raising a family – and yet hunger for something beyond what they can articulate. When Aguirre dispatches them to work as sheepherders up on the majestic Brokeback Mountain, they gravitate towards camaraderie and then a deeper intimacy. At summer's end, the two must come down from Brokeback and part ways.
Remaining in Wyoming, Ennis weds his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams), with whom he will have two daughters as he ekes out a living. Jack, in Texas, catches the eye of a rodeo queen Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway). Their courtship and marriage result in a son, as well as jobs in her father's business. Four years pass. One day, Alma brings Ennis a postcard from Jack, who is en route to visit Wyoming. Ennis waits expectantly for his friend, and when Jack at last arrives, in just one moment it is clear that the passage of time has only strengthened the men's attachment. In the years that follow, Ennis and Jack struggle to keep their secret bond alive.
They meet up several times annually. Even when they are apart, they face the eternal questions of fidelity, commitment and trust.
Ultimately, the one constant in their lives is a force of nature – love."
That's as powerful as syrup of ipecac.
OK, so your musical tastes are wider than mine. Do you have any problems having enough hard disk space on your machine to store all the music you would want to hear?
What does encrypting do?
I was an original participant at Napster, Morpheus and later KaZaA. Much of the old 50's and 60' blues singles I traded with friends can't even be found in record stores.
What this is all about is the RIAA was asleep at the wheel when the cyber market was being discovered. They could have bought out Chad Fanning (Napster) for a song, a desk job and a couple of pairs of NIKEs. If they had, they would have made BILLIONS by now selling single tracks and obscure hits that were buried in albums of trash in the days of LPs.
Now, the industry that ripped off artists and destroyed lives time and time again has taken it to the public big time with their subscription services where you can "listen" to selected cuts as long as you keep paying a monthly fee. NO THANKS! I'll readily trade with anyone who wants to share their personal digital property with me and visa versa.
The music or movie company was paid by your friend so he could listen to that tape. Just whoever has the tape - not everyone who once got their hands of the tape, for now and evermore.
The music or movie company was paid by the radio or TV station so they could broadcast the media to everyone with a receiver. The radio or TV station I assure you paid a hell of a lot more for the broadcast rights than your friend did for the single tape.
The right to tape a copy of a broadcast - for personal use - has long ago been affirmed by court rulings. And the media companies didn't fight too hard at the time, because the quality of a VCR or cassette tape based on analog broadcast left a lot to be desired.
But make a copy not from analog broadcast? Another matter entirely: My neighbor at my dorm at Michigan Tech got busted hard by the FBI for maintaining a huge collection of copied VCR tapes. The fact that students borrowed these tapes from him - making him a mini-Blockbuster video - probably was his demise.
Believe it or not copyright law is there for a reason. Are the media companies a bunch of talentless hacks preying on the talented? Yup. But now that we have a distribution system that finally lets us leave the media conglomerates behind - essentially taking the idea of a band selling tapes out of the trunk of your car up 3 orders of magnitude - we have this "theft of copyrighted materials is cool" culture.
Musicians and movie makers need to pay mortgages too. Just because you don't like the middlemen they do business with doesn't justify your stealing their goods.
That was actually the MPAA, not the RIAA. Kid downloaded 4 movies on grandpa's computer using Imesh. Grandpa finds out and deletes the movies. Still getting sued for $600,000, most of that the insane fine schedule laid out in the statute. I could see suing for the price of the movie/song, but adding the fine is just ridiculous. Again, why I don't do these things (which is why they sue - to scare people away).
Not to mention Sony's latest tactics with their hacked-up CD they're putting out. If I didn't boycott them already for giving these idiot Hollywood and music elites a stage to spew their garbage already, it wouldn't be hard for me to stop patronizing them now.
Very good analysis. I agree that the becoming a mini-Blockbuster was your neighbor's demise. As soon as someone else makes a profit off the work with proper attribution, I fully agree to prosecute.
Don't give them any ideas.
I think the last go-around, Phillips (who owns the CD format) threatened to sue licensees who sold such bastard disks using the term "CD" or "Compact Disk". They have their format's reputation at stake!
I wonder how the RIAA and MPAA are picking their targets? Seems that they're going after the poor and weak to make an example of them; purposefully going after hard-luck cases. I've heard that the MPAA is going after people harder (from chatrooms I've Googled) and wanting over $10,000 to settle, not the $3000-$4000 the RIAA has been accepting. From the grandpa/grandson article, seems that they're setting themselves up on these programs and entrap people into downloading from them, then suing them.
That's a lot different than the common definition of your term, "file sharing."
What he was doing was denying Blockbuster the rental fees.
Just try to find the songs you want on those legit services. Half of what I want isn't available. For the record, I buy my songs, but the record labels sure don't make it easy.
I know a lot of musicians. Some are very accomplished. One, in particular, is one of the gifted on keyboard. He should be able to do well on his talent, but he is looking for work since his skill is not in demand. It's too bad. The market for his stuff is severely limited, yet trading music files for free is very common. He gets zilch from that, so he cannot afford to just put it out there because he needs an income. So, the result is that our musical world is smaller than it should be. The P2P afficianados will never hear his work, although I have since his keyboard is right behind my bass and he plays for the fun of it before the rehearsals and shows. It's a loss.
You want a legitmate Federal copyright on music? Go get an amendment passed.
Oh, I need to pay my mortage. Send me $1500 for your persual and electronic copying of my last post. Just to be fair, eh? After all you DID say that the "need to pay a mortgage" trumps anything.
There was a hysterical send-up of this situation done by David Spade on his cable show recently. He was explaining this whole concept to a kindergarten class (that was being taught to share by their teacher) and had the lead singer from Soundgarden (I believe) come in to berate the class for sharing music with each other. Really funny.
There are copyrights. That is what converts property to capital, and capital is the engine that drives the economy. Ignore property rights and undercut the economy. Useful or not, when art becomes property, it has a parallel, dual, life and the dual is useful, more useful by far than the art itself.
True.
Once upon a time, though, there was.
LVM
Who's left ?
RIAA is pretty much destroying a nice piece of technology.
WinMX is also shut down.
Decentralized systems like Bittorrent.
RIAA is pretty much destroying a nice piece of technology.
Yep. There was a recent article about how the Web would never be allowed to come into existence in today's legal climate.
Is it really?
100,000 people each sharing individual copies of 10 songs, with wireless technology and lightning fast data transfers, has the same effect of those people downloading songs from each other as they do now, except much more efficient. Any song you want to hear, for free, at the touch of a button, borrowed from a friend on the other side of the country or the world. That's a lending library, perfectly legal, and the recording industry would love to criminalize it, publishers are trying to force people to not let others read their books to the extent of putting purchaser agreements in the books stating that the buyer alone can read it.
Limewire is still very much alive, with NO spyware.
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