Quote:
Originally Posted by gideongallery
1. the record companies know they don't have the right to the songs
2. they put it on a list
3. and decide to settle up with the artist later if they can find them
4. when artist (or their heir) complain about it they don't pull the work, they keep selling it
i would say that an order of magnitude worse then the we will take it down if you file a valid DMCA complaint way
which means if they can get away with it by making a token attempt to find the artist they will open a giant loophole for every torrent site to walk thru.
this is canada, where we pay a piracy tax on recorded media to pay artist for piracy
where the supreme court has ruled that three conditions of a contract has been met for legitimizing "piracy" (offer acceptance, consideration)
so your statement is total fucking bullshit.
see above about how much more of an abuse the record companies actions are
if they get away with it with a bullshit arguement that it was an honest mistake, how long do you think it will be before a torrent site start making the same "Token effort" to get out of the liablity.
remember that this record company can't hide behind the arguement that they are providing fair use services (backup recovery, timeshifting, access shifting) because they
were actually selling the content directly on cd (commercially bought and therefore exempt from the piracy tax).
this is a bad case for the RIAA/CRIA they are damed if they win / and damed if they lose.
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I see this case ending one of two ways and neither are good for torrent sites or their users.
1. The record companies settle with the artists. They agree to pay those on the list whatever they are owed plus legal fees and maybe a little bit more.
If that is how it ends then these same copyright holders can go after torrent sites and say that they are using their copyrighted materials to make a profit and are not paying them for it. The torrent site will try to hide behind a safe harbor/fair use defense and we will finally get some kind of ruling about this.
2. The record labels lose and have to pay up. I don't think the final amount would be 60 billion, because something like that would be held up in court for years and years and years.
But let's just say that it ends up being that amount. Now we have basically a second legal president for the $20,000 per track argument. There were individuals who have been hit for that amount and now the record companies themselves have been hit for that amount. So the labels can now go after more people with a blanket number. If they find you are sharing songs on the network they hit you for 20K a song. They could, technically, also go after the torrent site for that amount. If you are linking to a torrent of a song they could argue that this is distributing that song and hit you for 20k for every song listed on your site. Doesn't mean they will win that much, but it could shut a lot of sites down.
They could try to force the torrent sites to prove just how many of their users are using these torrents for fair use and how many are just downloading it and sharing it because they want it for free.