[Upd-discuss] [jpt@cif.rochester.edu: Re: [jpt@cif.rochester.edu: RIAA v. MP3.com Inc.]]

[Richard Stallman]

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To: rms@gnu.org
Subject: Re: [jpt@cif.rochester.edu: RIAA v. MP3.com Inc.] 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:48:09 MST."
             <200002221948.MAA03874@aztec.santafe.edu> 
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 17:00:05 -0500
From: Jonathan P Tomer <jpt@cif.rochester.edu>
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> It would be good for someone to (1) get to the bottom of what is at stake
> in the lawsuit, (2) explain what the RIAA is trying to do, and (3)
> analyze this from a political standpoint which rejects the assumption
> that copyright law defines right and wrong.

here's an attempt. feel free to publish, excerpt, modify, whatever.

- --p.
"When you look back after you're dead, you'll regret what you didn't do,
not what you did." -- Momus, "Steven Zeeland"
PGP 5.0 key (0xE024447449) at http://cif.rochester.edu/~jpt/pubkey.txt



On RIAA v. My MP3.Com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The service at issue here is MP3.Com's (no longer) new "My.MP3.Com" feature,
whose fundamental purpose is to store music for you to listen to, free of
charge. The difference between the music you can get from My.MP3.Com and
other music you can get from MP3.com is that My.MP3.com provides music with
copyright licences which forbid free redistribution -- that is, music which,
if you wanted to listen to it, you'd ordinarily need to buy a CD. MP3.Com is
not challenging this copyright, and whether they should be or not is another
issue. Rather, they have elected not to provide copyrighted music to you
unless you can demonstrate that you have obtained license to hear that music
already, in the form of physical proof that you have bought a CD.

Any reasonable person, even if he accepted for the moment that a record
producer is entitled to claim copyright to a work of music, should have no
objections to this service -- after all, MP3.Com isn't even attempting to
share copies of these "protected" works with people who haven't gotten
copies already. In fact, when one rejects the concept that copyright is a
matter of natural law, MP3.Com seems just as bad as the recording industry
itself: they have lots of music and the means to distribute it, but they
refuse to share with anyone who hasn't been OK'ed by the self-styled
"owners" of the music.

But, unfortunately, not everyone is a reasonable person, as the decision-
makers over at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were all
too happy to demonstrate late January, when they filed a lawsuit against
MP3.Com, Inc. for infringement of copyright. What claims could RIAA possibly
have against MP3.Com -- even given that infringement of copyright is an
offense worth noting? In their open letter to the CEO of MP3.Com, Inc. which
accompanied the suit, they say things like "Simply put, it is not legal to
compile a vast database of our member's [sic] sound recordings with no
permission and no license." In the current state of legal affairs in the
world, that would be true -- but MP3.Com did have a license. They bought a
copy of every single CD whose contents are available through
My.MP3.Com. Certainly it is legal to compile a vast database of sound
recordings, even those "belonging" to RIAA members, with a license -- I
offer as an example my friend Seth's music collection, which weighs in at
about six hundred CDs, most of which are copyrighted by RIAA members. Surely
that qualifies as a "vast database of sound recordings."

So what is really at stake here? This isn't going to be a groundbreaking
case on the issue of whether or not copyright is a valid concept; both
parties have taken that point entirely for granted. One might thus be
tempted to dismiss the case as irrelevant since it won't gain the free world
anything, but that would be a mistake. RIAA is not just trying to keep their
copy-"right"; they are trying to claim as inalienable a privilige of another
sort. They want not only to control who can have a copy of "their"
information, but what they can do with it. If they succeed, what's to
prevent them from deciding that the CD you just bought can only be played on
one CD player, and if you want to use it in another one you need to buy
another CD?

The essence of RIAA's case is summed up by the following statement, again
from their letter to MP3.Com: "[W]hatever the individual's right to use
their own music, you cannot exploit that for your company's commercial
gain". That's clearly a fallacy: if a company can profit by helping me
exercise my rights, they're on far firmer moral ground than a company that
profits by denying me rights they don't want me to have.
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