found drama

A little article the peers might enjoy: RECORD INDUSTRY MAY NOT SUBPOENA ISPs! The appeals judges said they sympathized with the recording industry, noting that “stakes are large.” But the judges said it was not the role of courts to rewrite the 1998 copyright law, “no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry or threatens being to the motion picture and software industries.” The particularly interesting points:

• …the 1998 law doesn’t cover the popular file-sharing networks… Meaning the judges are siding with the users and not the RIAA or even copyright law. B/c if this was really about copyright law, then copyright (which predates *all* of this) would trump even the DMCA and we would instead by reading about how “the 1998 law” wasn’t even necessary.
• [The] …ruling throws into question at least 382 civil lawsuits the [RIAA] filed … nearly six months ago. Meaning (hopefully) that a lot of these will never see the inside of a courtroom. Now we just need Vivendi-Universal to reimburse Brianna and her family their $2000.
• But my favorite part is this: Verizon ha[s] argued … that Internet providers should only be compelled to respond to such subpoenas when pirated music is stored on computers that providers directly control … rather than on a subscriber’s personal computer. And the courts’ response — [how that] makes little sense from a policy standpoint … [and] create[s] a huge loophole in Congress’ effort to prevent copyright infringement on the Internet.

Anyone else want to field that last one b/c it just boggles the mind. But then again, technicalities of the law are quite different from technicalities of info tech now aren’t they…?

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