“Testimony today in Capitol Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas quickly and inadvertently turned to the topic of fair use when Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, was called to the stand to testify. Pariser said that file-sharing is extremely damaging to the music industry and that record labels are particularly affected. In doing so, she advocated a view of copyright that would turn many honest people into thieves,” Eric Bangeman reports for Ars Techinca.
“Pariser has a very broad definition of ‘stealing.’ When questioned by Richard Gabriel, lead counsel for the record labels, Pariser suggested that what millions of music fans do is actually theft. The dirty deed? Ripping your own CDs or downloading songs you already own,” Bangeman reports.
“Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, ‘When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.’ Making ‘a copy’ of a purchased song is just ‘a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy,” she said,” Bangeman reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “twilightmoon” for the heads up.]
We have a burning (pun intended) desire to whip up an Automator Action that infinitely duplicates Sony BMG tracks and continuously sends them, uh, “elsewhere” (as in, many, many, many “elsewheres”) for “backup.”
Frankly, Jennifer, I don’t give a damn.
Suppose you buy a song from iTunes Store (w/ DRM, for example).
You back it up (to prevent data loss in case of HDD failure) – you steal it.
You copy it to your laptop – you stole it twice.
You put it on your iPod – you stole it three times already.
You listen to it (that means it’s read from the iPod’s HDD into the RAM that acts as a cache) – you stole it again!!!
Shame on you, thief!
What about just buying used CD’s so that Sony doesn’t get any (additional) revenue?
That’s what I do.
The lawyers probably consider that stealing, but I don’t.
Them good Finlanders up there in the Duluth area have common sense so it will more than likely be that the judgement will be for the defendant and they will force the court cost and attorney fees upon the music industry. Just my two cents for what its worth, hey!
The so called lawer had better read and understand the Digital rights law from 1986. Which in essance says that ANY medium you purchase. Be it book, cd, tape, etc, etc you have the legal right to make 1 backup of that item. So by all of these company putting anti copy on their stuff they are the ones breaking the law.