Once Again, The RIAA Shows How Easy It Is To Infringe On Copyrights

from the oops dept

One of the regular claims from the major labels and their representative groups, like the RIAA and BPI, is that copyright infringement is serious business, and everyone "knows" when copyright is being infringed. They always seem to brush off any claims of accidental infringement as if that's impossible. And then, of course, they get caught doing it themselves. Over the weekend, TorrentFreak had the story of how both the RIAA and BPI violated the terms of licenses for open source software they used on their website, which makes it infringing. To their credit, both organizations fixed the violations pretty quickly upon being contacted, but it again raises a larger point. With the state of copyright law today, it's incredibly easy to infringe. Law professor John Tehranian did some research a few years ago, into how much of his normal daily activity could be considered copyright infringement, and realized that under today's insane statutory damages rules, he had a daily liability of $12.45 million -- and that wasn't because he was downloading music. It was just everyday activities that people do all the time.

So, there shouldn't be anything wrong with the RIAA and BPI screwing up like this and infringing on some copyrights. It happens. But one would hope this leads those organizations to realize that their extreme claims about copyright infringement and their ridiculous support for statutory damages are way out of line with reality. But, since they remain such big supporters of statutory damages, and always seem to push for the maximum, would each organization be willing to donate $150,000 (the statutory maximum) to the open source projects which each of them used without a proper license? It seems only fair.

Filed Under: accidental infringement, copyright, licenses
Companies: bpi, riaa

How Long Can You Go Without Infringing On Copyright?

from the not-long-one-imagines... dept

A couple years ago, we wrote about a research paper looking at how often you infringe on copyrights in an average day to show just how ridiculous copyright law has become. Now, riffing on a recent post we did about how people take different views of copyright depending on whether they're making use of others' content or having their own content repurposed, one of our commenters has written up a blog post for Dvorak.org, discussing how hard it is to not infringe on copyrights, noting that the original system was not built for a digital world:

As copyright was originally enacted, it was next to impossible to accidentally infringe. In the good old days in order to infringe on a copyright you had to physically publish a song or a book without permission by printing it onto paper via a printing press. There was no other way to copy or infringe on a song or a book and there was no such thing as a performance right protected by copyright.

Nowadays we infringe copyrights numerous times throughout the day without even thinking about it. Watching an unauthorized SNL clip on YouTube. Playing the radio in the background at work where customers can hear. Loaning a copy of your Finding Nemo DVD to play at your kids' daycare. Downloading clip art to use in a personal scrapbook. Scanning your own wedding photos. Forwarding a funny photograph to a friend. Loaning a co-worker some software. Etc., etc., etc...

Copyright laws are so utterly pervasive in our lives that we simply cannot reasonably function without at least some innocent infringement. I personally think it'd be easier to avoid jaywalking and speeding than it would be to avoid infringing. So my question to you guys and gals, how long do you think you could last without infringing a copyright?

Indeed. It's interesting to note that some have compared copyright to speeding, but it's true that people are probably "infringing" a lot more often than they speed... and lots of people speed quite a bit.

Filed Under: accidental infringement, copyright, infringement