Blogging Vermont Style is designed to entertain, inform and engage readers with a variety of topics ranging from world politics and green tech to the truly absurd crap that begs to be shared...
The federal judge who presided over the nation's only peer-to-peer copyright-infringement trial announced from the bench here Monday that he is likely to declare a mistrial.
"Certainly, I have sent a signal to both sides of where I'm headed," U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said during a 70-minute hearing in which lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America and defendant Jammie Thomas sparred over whether a jury verdict against Thomas should be overturned. At issue is whether the RIAA needs to prove that copyrighted music offered by a defendant on a peer-to-peer network was actually downloaded by anyone. During Thomas' trial last October, Davis, on the RIAA's recommendation, instructed (.pdf) the jury that no such proof was necessary; if Thomas had the music in her Kazaa shared folder, where it could be downloaded, she could be found liable "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."
But in May, long after Thomas had lost the trial and was dinged $222,000, Davis developed second thoughts. He wrote in an order that he may have committed a "manifest error" with that instruction. "I think I surprised everyone," Davis said at the outset of the Monday's hearing. As the hearing wrapped up, there was little evidence that the RIAA's lawyer had changed the judge's mind.
At this point I will pause to pat myself on the back. I was asking this very question about "availability" being the same as distribution about three years ago. As I've said before, it will be a painful lesson for the RIAA/MPAA goon squad to learn. There's no winning when one tries to pull the wool over the collective eyes of Judges accross the country. The manner in which they slid in the jury instructions regarding availability was underhanded and surely didn't go unnoticed.
The act of making music available online may not be a copyright violation after all. And if that's the case, Jammie Thomas of Minnesota may not have to pay the $222,000 judgment won by record companies last year, an amount Thomas' attorneys argue is unconstitutionally excessive.
In his blog on Thursday, Google senior copyright counsel William Patry wrote, "Today, district judge Michael Davis issued an order indicating he may order a new trial based on an entirely different ground: concern that Jury Instruction N. 15, which permitted the jury to find infringement based on the RIAA's making available theory, may be contrary to the Eighth Circuit's binding precedent in National Car Rental System, Inc. v. Computer Associates Inc., requiring the distribution of actual copies."
I've never been able to get my little pea-brain around the "making available" argument. It simply goes against everything our system stands for. I mean, come on, we live in a country where "if the glove doesn't fit..then you must aquitt." pretty well sums up our judicial philosophy. If you can't prove that someone actually broke a law by a preponderence of the evidence you simply have no case. So, I could never understand how the "making available" theory passed the smell test.
As I've stated in previous posts, I think the RIAA's shady tactics are starting to unravel. You can be sure this won't be the last ruling that doesn't go the RIAA's way. My limited courtroom experience tells me that the Judiciary doesn't like to have the wool pulled over its eyes and like an elephant, it never forgets. The days of the RIAA lawyers sliding shoddy legal practices by Judges are numbered. It will be amusing to watch as they go down in flames right before our eyes. I'm pretty sure I won't be shedding any tears...unless they are accompanied by some serious belly laughs. As a wise man once said, "Fuck the RIAA!"
I was having a conversation with my friend "Buzzy" earlier and he was talking about baseball. As it always does, the conversation came around to steroid use, the hall of fame and previously long standing records. I grew up as a Cincinnati Reds fan. When I was a kid, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench and the gang were kings. I can't really condone gambling while participating, but then I think about the people who have already forgiven Bill Belichek and the Patriots. The steroid users and the New England staff were cheating and Rose was gambling. They may get a pass while Rose is tarnished.
I may be biased, but I doubt the MLB will run Bonds and others out of town, never to return, as they did to Rose. I think the numbers should speak for themselves, but unfortunately there is a "yet to be determined" MLB era that will forever be a black eye to the league. I don't think you can do anything but put an asterisk on a whole era of baseball. It's too difficult to compare the numbers.
If I were one of the players who did pretty good, but didn't juice, I would be outraged. I'm not sure who I would be angrier with, the players who brought a cloud over the game, or the league who looked the other way. Just like back in the playground days, the cheaters ruin the game for everyone else.
I don't believe that Rose's gambling has ever effected the out come of a game in which he was participating. That said, his actions did far less damage to baseball than the current parade of players who keep popping up in steroid probes. Is it fair that Pete Rose gets banned for life and these other players walk away with an asterisk? Where's the parity in that?
It's time for professional sports to clean it's own house and restore the integrity of their respective leagues. There is far too much money involved to not have strict enforcement of cheaters. I thought that CommisionerGoodell took a step in the right direction in handling the Patriots videotaping. I just don't think he went far enough. He could have hit them a lot tougher in the wallet. The fines he levied could be recouped by raising t-shirt prices 50 cents. Why wouldn't he park Belichek at home for a season and make an example out of him? I mean come on, Pac Man shoots up a strip club and he's out for just a season. It's not exactly exemplary behavior but again, it's not cheating. In the old west you would get shot under the table for cheating (shhh...don't tell Pac Man). Kidding aside, it does go to show how serious the integrity of the game should be taken.
So, I'll ask again and again and again....Why is Pete Rose forced to watch from the sidelines? I just don't get it...
Our friends at the RIAA have been tossed out of court in case where the presiding judge described their lawyers as sloppy, but not intentionally misleading.
The dispute arose when they tried to serve a homeless man by attaching service in "a conspicuous place" at known bogus addresses. The freakin' guy was homeless! Of course this whole scenario shouldn't shock anyone who is familiar with the over the top behavior of the RIAA goon squad.
MSNBC's First Read looks at Hillary Clinton's records and news coverage of the release of these records. Clinton's records do not provide many specifics, including one "private meeting" after another without mention of who the meetings were with.
I was a Bill Clinton supporter for most of the 90's. Now in hindsight (yes, I know it's 20/20), I realize that most of that support was due to the fact that I despised the Republicans and their sleazy Congressional tactics. The Clintons are probably equally painted with that same brush. If you look back at Whitewater, Monicagate etc.....you suddenly recall all the vague answers and semantic replies that would leave you to read between the lines. The problem is that under closer scrutiny, one began to realize that they were lying through their teeth. The only upside was that the Republicans were so hypocritical you felt like you should sympathize with the Clintons. The constant barrage of attacks against them left a lot of the country feeling sorry for Hillary.We are now in a much different place as a Nation and we simply cannot tolerate the lack of transparency and the outright exaggeration of accomplishments. Having weathered constant battering by her political opponents, simply doesn't translate into any kind of tangible experience. You can be sure that those same opponents are salivating at the chance to do it again. The Republicans smell blood in the water and are working themselves into a frenzy in anticipation that she will win the general election. It's no wonder they are encouraging Republicans to vote for her in the primaries.All these "private meetings" and other vague descriptions in her schedules, don't give us any hope that any thing has changed. I'm an independent, and I'm a little unsold on the experience of Obama as well. On the plus side, he hasn't been entrenched in Washington as long as Hillary or McCain. It would appear that once again we are going to end up having to vote for the lesser of two evils. I'm beginning to think that a McCain/Lieberman ticket might not be too bad, and I don't think we should be too quick to dismiss Obama's ability to be an agent of change. The one thing I can be sure of is that we don't need 4 more years of the Clinton BS machine.
None of the estimated $400 million that the RIAA received in settlements with Napster, KaZaA, and Bolt over allegations of copyright infringement has gone to the artists whose copyrights were allegedly infringed. Now the artists are considering suing the RIAA.
I think the RIAA's demise is inevitable and I've been advocating major artists to sue these jokers for quite a while now. Set aside this revelation (no surprise really) that they haven't shared a dime with the artists and consider the scenario where a major artist sues them for not doing enough to protect their royalties. Also, reverse the "made available" argument against the RIAA. Weren't these the same people who helped develop the digital format in the first place? 20+ years ago, the RIAA members were promising us audio nirvana in the form of CD's that were cheaper to produce and never wore out. They told the public and the artists that the cheaper production costs would translate into less expensive products for the consumer and higher returns for the artists.
In reality, the price of music went up, and the artists share of profits decreased. This is the business model the labels are trying to preserve in the "download age".
Just think of how much more profit we can make when we get rid of all this pesky packaging and disc pressing. We'll just tell the artists we need to keep screwing them because of the high cost of digitizing music and the prohibitive cost of digital distribution.....ummmmmm yeah, that's the ticket!
I thought the rant from the member of the Cocteau Twins in the posts from the story were very interesting. Anyone who doesn't understand how badly artists get screwed and how greedy the labels are should give this a look. There are thousands of stories from artists just like this...or worse.
This is yet another angle in the file sharing debate. Do we really want ISP's to be the gatekeeper of all information that travels over the internet? Doesn't this go against all the principles the web was founded on?
I think this case is interesting in that the IFPI (international RIAA organization) is using the "making available" argument just as was used to bring down Napster. In a weird sense, I hope that they get some traction on this case as it brings a lot of attention to this aspect of the debate. I think this "made available" could be a dangerously slippery slope for the RIAA folks to perch upon.
Consider this scenario. An artist, who feels that the RIAA has not done enough to protect them from losses due to internet file sharing, decides to sue their (RIAA member) record label for "making available" a digital format of their work. One might consider the CDA format from the retail cd or a digital version from iTunes "making it available" for illegal filesharing. After all, the record labels are the ones responsible for the original distribution into the public realm. As I've said repeatedly before, "No one was filesharing vinyl!"
As more artists perform their own marketing and distribution duties, they will become more and more annoyed by how much the labels have been gouging them all these years. The recent internet release from Trent Reznor and NiN should really make a lot of major artists stand up and take notice. Perhaps some more major artists, like Prince, who are fed up with the industry's inability to protect their profits, may just decide to bring such a suit. It's only a matter of time....
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Comcast has confessed to slowing down certain peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic, but is it being clear enough about what it's doing? That's perhaps the key question that emerged by the end of a lengthy public forum convened by the Federal Communications Commission on Monday here at Harvard Law School. While none of the FCC commissioners was willing to solidify an answer to that just yet, two MIT computer scientists on an afternoon panel accused the cable company of behaving badly on multiple levels.
As most readers of this blog know by now, I am in full support of net neutrality. While one has to understand the concept of the need to "manage" network traffic, it is incredibly naive to think even for a second that how to do this should be left to the sole discretion of the ISP's. The internet has flourished thus far as a communication medium that is unfettered by government interference. The ISP's were exstatic that they now had a whole new revenue stream to tap into and they gladly made the investment necessary to profit greatly from it.
With the advent of VOIP, video, bit torrent etc..., the internet has outgrown it's infancy stage and has reached the point of being a young adolesent. The ISP's should have seen this coming when the net was in its toddler stage, but they chose to favor immediate profits over long term viability. They've now come to a point where the existing infrastructure can't keep up with the demand needed for today's services. The ISP's seem to want to punish the consumer for their bad business choices. This stone age mentality seems to mirror the strategy of one of my other "favorite" subjects, the RIAA. Businesses that are unwilling to change, because they refuse to make necessary investments, should not be coddled by the government or further supported by the public.
Once again, RIAA President Cary Sherman shows us how scary his organization really can be. He now lends his support to filters installed on our PC's and cable/dsl modems to detect copyright infringement. Look how quickly they are trying to backpedal from this ridiculous position already.
These folks are bound and determined to alienate every potential consumer of their crappy products that they can. I hope that when the time comes to look back on this whole debate, after he has single-handedly burnt the recording industry to the ground, people will realize what a fucking idiot this guy is. Tell me who the hell would want any company or government monitoring what you do in the privacy of your own home? What's next, the porno industry making your monitor a two way screen so they could see who's whacking off to illegally downloaded porn? Would anyone accept a device installed in your car that would alert the police when you've broken the speed limit? The big brother implications here are really scary. As Mr. Bean would say, people should "be afraid, very afraid".
If the world doesn't wake up to the corporations and governments infringing on our rights to privacy and presumed innocence we will all be living in a place far worse than George Orwell could ever have imagined. If you really want a glimpse of where we are headed and what a slippery slope we are on, I suggest reading the book Farenheight 451.
Below you will see an edited version of a video taken at a recent conference where Cary Sherman is on the panel. The video was edited from the full hour and a half taken at the conference down to 6 minutes to point out some of the highlights of the draconian ideas the RIAA ass monkeys support. If you are interested in seeing it in it's entirety, I would certainly recommend you do so.
If we all educate ourselves as to what we are up against, perhaps enough people will scream as loudly as possible so that the morons in Washington, and politicians around the world, will stop listening to the intense lobbying efforts these jokers are making. They are completely within their rights to distribute and protect their copyrights as they see fit. Just as we are well within our rights to not buy their junk. But, if they are able to pursuede lawmakers into passing legislation that allows them to monitor us 24/7, it sets a very dangerous precedent. Once something is written into law, it is difficult or impossible to change. What the RIAA is now proposing is a right to monitor activities in our home. The police or FBI aren't even granted such a right. Why should a corporation be granted such access? I particularly don't buy Sherman's assertion that this all could be done "anonomously". How long would it be before the RIAA folks persuade lawmakers to give them the right to have access to this "anonomous" information in order to bring more lawsuits? I also found it amusing how quickly the woman at the end of the forum was cut off when she tried to point out that Sherman never said they wouldn't sue people for ripping legally purchased CD's to their mp3 player...
Again, I can't urge you enough to contact your representatives and demand that they not cave in to pressure from these groups. Keep in mind that most of our folks in Washington are too old to be "net savy", so they listen with great interest to lobbyists who represent these media dinosaurs. The problem is that they don't really understand the technology or the dangers of its misuse. If you doubt this, all you need to do is revisit the Ted Stevens "the internet is a series of tubes" speech. Lawmakers may not understand the "internets", but the two things they do understand is the power of money (from these lobbying organizations) and the power of votes (from the likes of you and me). This is where the battle will ultimately lie. Remember, the politicians don't bother to read my blog, or the millions of others like it, but they do read polls and they do count votes!
Using Burlington Telecom's municipal broadband network as a model, 22 rural Vermont towns are poised to pool their resources and launch a fiber-optic project that could go online by the end of 2009. Steve Willbanks, chairman of the Strafford Selectboard and a key player in the emerging network, said commercial broadband providers could not meet the needs of rural Vermonters.
"These fiber-optic connections are absolute necessities; not luxuries," he said. "We need them for our economical and cultural development. We've had seasonal residents tell us they'd move here in a heartbeat; they'd telecommute if they had access to broadband.
I love it when things I've been saying for years come closer to reality. The telecos and cable companies have been screwing us rural Vermonters for years now. There are many areas of Vermont that still don't have cable television, never mind broadband internet. Any number of utility companies could have invested some of the millions they've made by providing crappy service over the years. Instead they relied on bogus arguments and empty promises to shun people who simply want access to services that so called "third world countries" already provide at a much cheaper cost. The infrastructure is already, for the most part, in place. Verizon could have upgraded their central offices around the state to provide statewide DSL, Green Mountain Power could have rolled out BPL service and the cable companies could have been far more agressive in running the cable to provide broadband service. Instead they've complained about the costs of doing this in the same breath they ask for rate increases. I think the Public Service Board has dropped the ball in a major way in this regard. It would have been easy for them to freeze rate increases until these companies show some real progress in adressing the issues. Instead, they chose to approve rate increases with conditional empty promisies from theses crooks. Now, we have Verizon pulling out of the land line business in Northern New England altogether, when for years they have been promising to provide statewide broadband services as well as statewide cell phone services. What's their excuse for not investing? "It's no longer profitable" is the answer they give. Sure, now that they've milked every last penny they can out of us and broken every promise made to regulators, they want to get out. As they pass off their crappy, ancient network to Fairpoint, they are delivering fiber optic FIOS service to the rest of New England. I have yet to hear them complain about the cost of doing this. Go figure. The cable companies haven't faired much better. At the rate they are rolling out service to rural communities, I'll be dead and so will you. Again, they've made broken promise after broken promise. The end result is that there is no competition for them and they like it that way. They continue to fight any stipulation that would require them to lease, at a reasonable rate, their network to competitors. This stipulation has been hung around the neck of Verizon since the break-up of the baby Bells. The end result has been lower prices and competition for our telephone services. Fairpiont has had to follow these rules as well, and they still believe they can be profitable and competitive in the phone service arena, but if deep-pocketed Verizon and the cable companies have been unable or unwilling to make this investment, one has to seriously question the ability of a much smaller company like Fairpoint to make good on the promises to provide statewide broadband. I wish them luck, tempered with a healthy dose of pessimism. The naysayers that are against municipal broadband always have the same arguments. "This is socialism" and "Let the market dictate who gets broadband". The reality is that we are left without any viable commercial solution. This is not an opinion, it's a fact. The commercial intrests are just not interested in being the savior of half a million rural customers. The state of Vermont needs to be competitive in attracting jobs and agressive in promoting the quality of life we have here. That is an impossible task if we are stuck without a level playing field. If you're looking to relocate your company, are you going to choose a state where the basic infrastructre to run your business is non-existent or are you going to choose the state where your employees can have fiber run to their home. The rural beauty of Vermont is very attractive to corporations who would like to offer this as an alternative to grid-lock and urban sprawl, but moving here is simply impossible to sustain their business. The fact that, in this day and age, we don't have the basics has got to be a major concern as they look to future growth. I would encourage everyone to support the current program being proposed by the East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network and tell your local lawmakers that you would support a similar statewide program. As usual, we are left to solve our problems ourselves. Perhaps some day the corporate bean-counters will realize that there are a half a million customers in Vermont who simply want the same services that are available to people in the more populated regions of the country. What's more, we don't expect it to be free, we're willing to pay for it!
Here is an interesting link that explains some of the technical details as well as some of the costs involved. It also discusses some other places with similar programs already in place.
Comcast, and other ISPs advertise with certain upload and download rates, conforming to simple DOCSIS capacity numbers. However, they miscalculated and found that there is more to the Internet than browsing, gopher, and email. Heavy-users broke their excel return-on-investment predictions and marketing campaign promises. Their flat-rate offers simply became too popular for the capacity that was bought and installed.
This really echoes the point I've been making for a couple of years now. Charter also uses bandwidth throttling to cheat us of the bandwidth we pay for. I think a class-action lawsuit is an appropriate response to this practice. There is no other way to describe it, other than simple fraud.
A whistleblower who lost her job and was gagged by the Bush administration after revealing careerism, corruption and widespread incompetence at the FBI detailed her difficult search for justice to an audience on Monday at the American Library Association's annual conference. Sibel Edmonds, who the FBI hired as a translator shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 after reporting a range of problems at the bureau...
What transpires is without a doubt a huge misuse of the public's trust in some mythical right to a fair trial.
Actualy a scrapped Ford design, the Think City will reportedly be available in the US starting in 2008. For those of you who fancy an electric vehicle with refreshing Norwegian simplicity, it will be significantly cheaper than the Tesla Roadster sports car that goes for $98,000. The Think car will cost around $17,000, but consumers will have to lease the battery for an additional fee.
The Think batteries are actually made by Tesla Motors, but are used in a much more humble, practical manner.
This is some rather odd taxidermy for sale...but I think I like it. Christmas is coming....(hint,hint!) As best I can guess a Stoat is some kind of Brittish weasel...a Tory perhaps?
There are some other intereating items here as well...
The federal judge who presided over the nation's only peer-to-peer copyright-infringement trial announced from the bench here Monday that he is likely to declare a mistrial.
