9 ms·

Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an

by dizzy9 7mo ago

Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. The legal maximum was $150,000 per infringement: when a staffer leaked an early cut of the Wolverine movie, the studio could only sue for that much.

jazz9k 7mo ago
Children can commit crimes too. It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.
- bravetraveler 7mo ago
  'Same thing', hah. This was edited out, but I'm quoting it anyway: > I should trot out all of the justifications here. I'll start: personal use instead of profit. Certainly a difference, not convinced justification is required or even advisable.
- functionmouse 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- cindyllm 7mo ago
  [dead]
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  A child stole a candy bar from my shop, time to bankrupt his whole working class family! ^ sociopathic legalists really do think this way.
  - Shadowmist 7mo ago
    That child was just a fan of chocolate!
- mchaver 7mo ago
  Children are afforded more lenience in sane societies (before the law and in social contexts) because they are still developing and not as well socialized/experienced as adults. I assume most pro-piracy people support personal use and not commercial use of content.
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    The issue is that child labor laws encourage children to pursue cybercrime if they want to make money since legitimate companies will not hire them. This results in a lot of incentive for children to commit cybercrime such as piracy and without the disincentive of punishment they are free to do it. These 2 things are incentivizing antisocial behavior in society.
- themafia 7mo ago
  We support copyright reform not piracy. The reason we do is because corporate giants have weaponized the system for their own ends and not for our useful promotion of the arts and sciences. So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.
  - tliltocatl 7mo ago
    The only copyright reform I support is abolishing this abomination altogether.
    - otterley 7mo ago
      I assume you do not write software to earn a living?
      - tliltocatl 7mo ago
        I do. And I get paid because I write it fulfill to the customer's need that's not covered by an existing solution, not because some law prevents using what already exists.
        otterley 7mo ago
        And if that was stolen by someone else to give to other customers for free, how might that impact you?
        tliltocatl 7mo ago
        It wouldn't impact me at all. Without our hardware it is useless. And customers need certifications, support and availability guarantees. Customers aren't paying shit for code. They don't need code. They need solution to their problems. Of which my code is a very small (if critical) part of. And yes, that's totally irrelevant. Because the mere fact that some people depend on some evil for their living doesn't justify its existence.
ohbleek 7mo ago
So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?
- bsenftner 7mo ago
  Of course not. It is just yet another example of a 7-8 figure expensive attorney and their billions dollar corporation wasting everyone' time, tax payers dollars, and demonstrating that the law applies to us and not them. I expect them to just stop showing up in court in time. What can the court do when these people own the people that write the laws?
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    There really should be some type of panel for frivolous legal arguments. If they are used by corporation all of the lawyers, leadership and shareholders involved are thrown into jail. Could even get jury on this and have them give majority opinion.
    - post-it 7mo ago
      That seems like a bad idea to me.
- yorwba 7mo ago
  People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use. If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    It has been often said that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
b112 7mo ago
Way to leave out context! By no means were they suing for downloading alone. They were suing for sharing while downloading, and seeding after, and as "early seeders" they helped thousands obtain copies. Right or wrong, it was absolutely not about just downloading. It wasn't about taking one copy. In their eyes, it was about copyng then handing out tens of thousands of copies for free. Again, not saying it was right. However, please don't provide an abridged account, slanted to create a conclusion in the reader.
- misnome 7mo ago
  Did you even read the title of the article? This is exactly what they are claiming is fair use.
  - jazzyjackson 7mo ago
    Parent post brought in the comparison to stealing a CD, but torrenting isn't just taking a copy, it's distributing to others, hence the absurd damages claims
  - tzs 7mo ago
    They are replying to what a comment said about past file sharing cases.
mikkupikku 7mo ago
Remember that Metallica band members played an active driving role in those lawsuits against their own underage fans. It wasn't just the RIAA / record company organizations behaving cruelly, it was Metallica themselves. Fuck Metallica.
- reactordev 7mo ago
  Killed Napster and forced them overseas to create one of the most toxic streaming platforms for music the world has ever seen. Spotify. Sean Parker used to be cool…
- roegerle 7mo ago
  how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    They didn't. I haven't bought a Metallica album since the black album. That was a decade earlier, because everything since sucked, but as I got older I thought about maybe expanding my tastes. I avoided Metallica specifically for their disrespect of their fans.
    - DaSHacka 7mo ago
      Did they not? Seems like they're still quite popular, and I knew people in HS (for reference, late 2010s to early '20s) that were big into the band. Additionally, looking at Google Trends[0], it seems they peaked in 21st-century online popularity in 2008 and had another notable uptick in 2017. I think a lot of us want the assholes to have suffered real consequences for their behavior, but want is different from did. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F04rcr&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
      - petre 7mo ago
        Yeah, they're popular like Ariana Grande is after the Manchester bombing. But just about everything they released after the Black album is kind of lame. The Budapest tickets sold out pretty fast, but they're still lame regardless if people go to their concerts. Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse. And they're not a cult band like Death or The Sisters of Mercy either.
magicalhippo 7mo ago
At least it brought us some fun Flash animations as a result, in the form of Metallicops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_jLAisPzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_jLAisPzk
- mxmilkiib 7mo ago
  "Napster bad!", classic
tzs 7mo ago
You are off a bit on the numbers. First, though, the RIAA suits were not for downloading. The suits were for distribution. Here is how their enforcement actions generally went. 1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range. 2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1]. NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go. 3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed. Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees. 4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k. [1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.
- themafia 7mo ago
  > the RIAA suits were not for downloading They were not all the same, some were fairly complicated cases, and one was undoubtedly for distribution. `The court’s instructions defined “reproduction” to include “[t]he act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network.”' From: https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-2820/11-2820-2012-09-11.pdf?ts=1411170528 https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-282...
ufocia 7mo ago
Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.
- kmeisthax 7mo ago
  Furthermore, in most copyright lawsuits that nerds like us actually care about (i.e. ones involving service providers and not actual artists or publishers), the number of works infringed is so high that the judge can just work backwards from the desired damage award and never actually hit the statutory damages cap. If the statutory damages limit was actually reached in basically any intermediary liability case, we'd be talking about damage awards higher than the US GDP. Linear arithmetic is one hell of a drug.
  - Aerroon 7mo ago
    Or said differently: the law is stupid
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    That makes running a seedbox sound like a threat of global economic mass destruction.
- trinsic2 7mo ago
  >If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them. Beyond what level? I am loosing you on that.
scuff3d 7mo ago
Those kids should have just pirated all the music they could, turned it into a multi billion dollar business, and had lawyers fight for them in court. As long as enough money is involved you can just about anything you want. Stupid kids
kristofferR 7mo ago
Yeah, but remember how joyful we'd have been if copyright had been this weak in 2003. As long as this flows down to regular people instead of just corps, then copyright won't halt societal development as much as previously anymore. The weakening of copyright is a great thing. Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the corner. Now look at copyright, the law about the restriction of the right to copy to a select group. It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip. This might be relief, we might hopefully get past copyright and patents and just have innovation free for all.
- lux-lux-lux 7mo ago
  I rather doubt this more laissez-faire attitude towards intellectual property will be extended to those without.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  > It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip. Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public? Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?
- 7speter 7mo ago
  Sure, it can flow down to regular people now, because regular people don’t have access to 10s of millions of dollars to train a trillion parameter llm…
Arubis 7mo ago
Sure, but these are BILLIONAIRES. Some of society's most vulnerable members. We need to protect them! The kids can take the hit.
falkensmaize 7mo ago
I always wondered - were the huge fines applicable because they shared the files, or because they downloaded the files? The two things were always conflated and poorly understood in media reports at the time. Seems like it would be impossible to prove substantial damages from one individual downloading an album, because you have only lost the potential single sale. No different than a kid stealing a single CD in terms of lost revenue. Sharing the song on Kazaa or Limewire or Napster however means that they could have potentially illicitly provided the album to thousands or even millions of potential customers, more akin to stealing a truckload or even a whole store full of cds. In that case, it does seem plausible that you could prove (or at least convince a judge/jury) significant damages more in line with the exorbitant punitive sums. Since they “caught” you by setting up fake peers that recorded your ip when sharing, I always assumed it was the latter that actually got people in trouble.

by dizzy9 7mo ago

jazz9k 7mo ago

Children can commit crimes too. It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.

bravetraveler 7mo ago
'Same thing', hah. This was edited out, but I'm quoting it anyway: > I should trot out all of the justifications here. I'll start: personal use instead of profit. Certainly a difference, not convinced justification is required or even advisable.
functionmouse 7mo ago
[flagged]
cindyllm 7mo ago
[dead]
mikkupikku 7mo ago
A child stole a candy bar from my shop, time to bankrupt his whole working class family! ^ sociopathic legalists really do think this way.
- Shadowmist 7mo ago
  That child was just a fan of chocolate!
mchaver 7mo ago
Children are afforded more lenience in sane societies (before the law and in social contexts) because they are still developing and not as well socialized/experienced as adults. I assume most pro-piracy people support personal use and not commercial use of content.
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  The issue is that child labor laws encourage children to pursue cybercrime if they want to make money since legitimate companies will not hire them. This results in a lot of incentive for children to commit cybercrime such as piracy and without the disincentive of punishment they are free to do it. These 2 things are incentivizing antisocial behavior in society.
themafia 7mo ago
We support copyright reform not piracy. The reason we do is because corporate giants have weaponized the system for their own ends and not for our useful promotion of the arts and sciences. So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.
- tliltocatl 7mo ago
  The only copyright reform I support is abolishing this abomination altogether.
  - otterley 7mo ago
    I assume you do not write software to earn a living?
    - tliltocatl 7mo ago
      I do. And I get paid because I write it fulfill to the customer's need that's not covered by an existing solution, not because some law prevents using what already exists.
      - otterley 7mo ago
        And if that was stolen by someone else to give to other customers for free, how might that impact you?
        tliltocatl 7mo ago
        It wouldn't impact me at all. Without our hardware it is useless. And customers need certifications, support and availability guarantees. Customers aren't paying shit for code. They don't need code. They need solution to their problems. Of which my code is a very small (if critical) part of. And yes, that's totally irrelevant. Because the mere fact that some people depend on some evil for their living doesn't justify its existence.

ohbleek 7mo ago

So, does this mean that people can simply argue in court now (if they were to be prosecuted for downloading media via bittorrent) that it is fair use if they used it to train a local model on their machine?

bsenftner 7mo ago
Of course not. It is just yet another example of a 7-8 figure expensive attorney and their billions dollar corporation wasting everyone' time, tax payers dollars, and demonstrating that the law applies to us and not them. I expect them to just stop showing up in court in time. What can the court do when these people own the people that write the laws?
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  There really should be some type of panel for frivolous legal arguments. If they are used by corporation all of the lawyers, leadership and shareholders involved are thrown into jail. Could even get jury on this and have them give majority opinion.
  - post-it 7mo ago
    That seems like a bad idea to me.
yorwba 7mo ago
People could always simply argue in court that their torrenting was free use. If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
- dotancohen 7mo ago
  It has been often said that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.

b112 7mo ago

Way to leave out context! By no means were they suing for downloading alone. They were suing for sharing while downloading, and seeding after, and as "early seeders" they helped thousands obtain copies. Right or wrong, it was absolutely not about just downloading. It wasn't about taking one copy. In their eyes, it was about copyng then handing out tens of thousands of copies for free. Again, not saying it was right. However, please don't provide an abridged account, slanted to create a conclusion in the reader.

misnome 7mo ago
Did you even read the title of the article? This is exactly what they are claiming is fair use.
- jazzyjackson 7mo ago
  Parent post brought in the comparison to stealing a CD, but torrenting isn't just taking a copy, it's distributing to others, hence the absurd damages claims
- tzs 7mo ago
  They are replying to what a comment said about past file sharing cases.

mikkupikku 7mo ago

Remember that Metallica band members played an active driving role in those lawsuits against their own underage fans. It wasn't just the RIAA / record company organizations behaving cruelly, it was Metallica themselves. Fuck Metallica.

reactordev 7mo ago
Killed Napster and forced them overseas to create one of the most toxic streaming platforms for music the world has ever seen. Spotify. Sean Parker used to be cool…
roegerle 7mo ago
how they were able to recover from that is beyond me.
- dotancohen 7mo ago
  They didn't. I haven't bought a Metallica album since the black album. That was a decade earlier, because everything since sucked, but as I got older I thought about maybe expanding my tastes. I avoided Metallica specifically for their disrespect of their fans.
  - DaSHacka 7mo ago
    Did they not? Seems like they're still quite popular, and I knew people in HS (for reference, late 2010s to early '20s) that were big into the band. Additionally, looking at Google Trends[0], it seems they peaked in 21st-century online popularity in 2008 and had another notable uptick in 2017. I think a lot of us want the assholes to have suffered real consequences for their behavior, but want is different from did. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F04rcr&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
    - petre 7mo ago
      Yeah, they're popular like Ariana Grande is after the Manchester bombing. But just about everything they released after the Black album is kind of lame. The Budapest tickets sold out pretty fast, but they're still lame regardless if people go to their concerts. Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse. And they're not a cult band like Death or The Sisters of Mercy either.

magicalhippo 7mo ago

At least it brought us some fun Flash animations as a result, in the form of Metallicops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_jLAisPzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_jLAisPzk

mxmilkiib 7mo ago
"Napster bad!", classic

tzs 7mo ago

You are off a bit on the numbers. First, though, the RIAA suits were not for downloading. The suits were for distribution. Here is how their enforcement actions generally went. 1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range. 2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1]. NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go. 3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed. Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees. 4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k. [1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.

themafia 7mo ago
> the RIAA suits were not for downloading They were not all the same, some were fairly complicated cases, and one was undoubtedly for distribution. `The court’s instructions defined “reproduction” to include “[t]he act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network.”' From: https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-2820/11-2820-2012-09-11.pdf?ts=1411170528 https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-282...

ufocia 7mo ago

Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.

kmeisthax 7mo ago
Furthermore, in most copyright lawsuits that nerds like us actually care about (i.e. ones involving service providers and not actual artists or publishers), the number of works infringed is so high that the judge can just work backwards from the desired damage award and never actually hit the statutory damages cap. If the statutory damages limit was actually reached in basically any intermediary liability case, we'd be talking about damage awards higher than the US GDP. Linear arithmetic is one hell of a drug.
- Aerroon 7mo ago
  Or said differently: the law is stupid
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  That makes running a seedbox sound like a threat of global economic mass destruction.
trinsic2 7mo ago
>If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them. Beyond what level? I am loosing you on that.

scuff3d 7mo ago

Those kids should have just pirated all the music they could, turned it into a multi billion dollar business, and had lawyers fight for them in court. As long as enough money is involved you can just about anything you want. Stupid kids

kristofferR 7mo ago

Yeah, but remember how joyful we'd have been if copyright had been this weak in 2003. As long as this flows down to regular people instead of just corps, then copyright won't halt societal development as much as previously anymore. The weakening of copyright is a great thing. Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the corner. Now look at copyright, the law about the restriction of the right to copy to a select group. It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip. This might be relief, we might hopefully get past copyright and patents and just have innovation free for all.

lux-lux-lux 7mo ago
I rather doubt this more laissez-faire attitude towards intellectual property will be extended to those without.
fc417fc802 7mo ago
> It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip. Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public? Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?
7speter 7mo ago
Sure, it can flow down to regular people now, because regular people don’t have access to 10s of millions of dollars to train a trillion parameter llm…

Arubis 7mo ago

Sure, but these are BILLIONAIRES. Some of society's most vulnerable members. We need to protect them! The kids can take the hit.

falkensmaize 7mo ago

I always wondered - were the huge fines applicable because they shared the files, or because they downloaded the files? The two things were always conflated and poorly understood in media reports at the time. Seems like it would be impossible to prove substantial damages from one individual downloading an album, because you have only lost the potential single sale. No different than a kid stealing a single CD in terms of lost revenue. Sharing the song on Kazaa or Limewire or Napster however means that they could have potentially illicitly provided the album to thousands or even millions of potential customers, more akin to stealing a truckload or even a whole store full of cds. In that case, it does seem plausible that you could prove (or at least convince a judge/jury) significant damages more in line with the exorbitant punitive sums. Since they “caught” you by setting up fake peers that recorded your ip when sharing, I always assumed it was the latter that actually got people in trouble.