by Fred -

The WSJ Gets it Wrong Again and/or The RIAA Lies Once Again

The RIAA Logo.

It turns out the Wall Street Journal’s sloppy journalism cuts both ways. On Friday I blogged about how the WSJ was reporting that the RIAA had ceased filing lawsuits against individual file sharers. Stupidly, I didn’t really think about their source or attempt to verify the claims myself. Neither did the Associated Press.

Ray Beckerman (who had skeptically acknowledged these reports when the WSJ article first surfaced) has discovered that the RIAA filed another round of lawsuits against individuals just last week, a discovery that directly conflicts with the WSJ piece.

The WSJ’s article suffers from exactly the same flaws as its piece on network neutrality; high on conjecture, low on meaningful facts about the get of the article. The lead establishes that the RIAA is “set to drop its legal assault” but goes on to describe the negotiations the RIAA is establishing with the ISP industry. Noticeably missing from the rest of the article is any evidence demonstrating that the RIAA is actually stopping its legal assault.

So we only have ourselves to blame — we read what we wanted to read and without Ray Beckerman’s excellent sleuthing, we might still be giving the RIAA credit for coming to its senses.

Whether it was the RIAA lying to reporters (which Ray seems to believe is the case) or the WSJ trying to see a story where there wasn’t one, this was a case of not thinking critically enough about sources and evidence based reporting. Either way, if the network neutrality article didn’t give you enough reason to distrust the WSJ’s technology reporting, this incident should. This also leads me to believe that the WSJ has under-critical technology reporters rather than a malicious agenda to purposely misunderstand technology topics.

There’s a lot to be cleared up in this situation and there is probably some truth to the RIAA winding down their lawsuits, but I don’t think we should hold our collective breath or consider this the victory we initially did.

by Fred -

The RIAA’s Loss

The RIAA has announced that they have stopped suing individual file sharers for copyright infringement.

The suits were based on the questionable notion that making files available in directories through peer-to-peer software like KaZaa was a violation of the copyright of the owner of the works. The RIAA was not going after people downloading music, or even people who had sent a file to someone else, but rather the set of people who had shared directories with files that looked like music and were available for public perusal.

This was problematic because the copyright statute doesn’t actually say anything about “making available.” The right to control who distributes one’s work is one of the rights granted to authors by the statute, but the RIAA had no evidence that file sharers had actually distributed the files, just that they had made them available and that the files could potentially be distributed.

Consequently, the RIAA had to argue that “making available” was actually part of the copyright statute when it wasn’t. When the handful of suits (out of 35,000) made it to court, some Judges started to realize this, and through the selfless and amazing work of Ray Beckerman, the legal community slowly turned against the prosecution.

All in all, the RIAA’s campaign to sue their own customers was a disaster. CD sales continued to plummet and filesharing’s popularity only increased. This is not to mention the public relations catastrophe the industry now faces. Musicians hate being associated with large corporations that the public perceives as evil, and more substantively, musicians have not seen any of the settlement monies the RIAA has been collecting on their behalf.

THE RIAA TOOK MY MUSIC AWAY

The RIAA is claiming that the campaign “was successful in raising the public’s awareness that file-sharing is illegal” which is demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the law and technology.

So what is next? The RIAA claims that they will be making deals with ISPs to institute something roughly similar to a 3-strikes and you’re out policy against file sharers. The terms and details of these agreements are not flushed out (and will probably never be made available to the public), but on some level, this is a less vicious form of negotiation with the technical realities their industry is facing.

But there is already evidence of ISPs acting in haste to dismantle legal file sharing outfits. TorrentFreak has a story about an open source software tracker having their service revoked by their ISP because they were accused of hosting an illegal torrent of the game Command and Conquer. YouTube already engages in auto-take-downs of videos that are supposedly infringing.

I’m a huge fan of the site LegalTorrents.com and have used it for distributing the uncompressed (~1gb) versions of two Creative Commons videos, A Shared Culture and Media That Matters: A CC Case Study. Because everything on LegalTorrents is free to share (under an appropriate CC or similar public license), it is the perfect counterexample to the RIAA’s claim that file sharing is inherently illegal.

Put another way, file sharing in and of itself is not illegal (just as crowbars in and of themselves are not illegal) and sites like LegalTorrents demonstrate this. We should not let the RIAA use the fact that they’ve abandoned their campaign as a positive cover to privately intimidate ISPs into breaking the Internet.

More importantly, we should keep the pressure on ISPs about preserving network neutrality. When used on the public net and ISPs, deep packet inspection filtering and application layer filtering are violations of network neutrality and if the RIAA is successful in pushing these technologies as “solutions” to the file sharing problem, we are going to have a much larger problem on our hands than 35,000 dispersed lawsuits.

by Fred -

The WSJ Showing Its Cards

By now everyone knows about the Wall Street Journal’s shoddy net neutrality hit piece.

The article went to great lengths to conjure that Net Neutrality support was waning among its most ardent supporters — Google, Lessig, Obama and others had all said or done things “recently” that indicated they were no longer pushing as hard for the net to stay neutral.

In the last two days, virtually every individual mentioned in the piece has come out against the WSJ and argued that either their positions were misinterpreted or that their quotes were taken out of context.

The WSJ has claimed that their piece has “gotten a rise out of the blogosphere” and has not issued any retractions or corrections to the article.

Other bloggers are commenting on the particular misunderstandings and misinformation in the article, but I’m interested in analyzing the WSJ’s behavior as I believe it is symptomatic of a larger affliction of the newspaper.

Here are some things I think are noteworthy about the situation:

  • The WSJ initially discredited the blogosophere as a legitimate voice in this debate.
    Would they have said that they “got a rise out of the newspaper industry” if they had written an article that got the NYTimes, Washington Post and CNN complaining about inaccuracies? Rise probably isn’t the right word, as Jay Rosen said.
  • This seems to be an example of mainstream press trolling bloggers.
    Typically, bloggers are the ones accused of trolling the mainstream press.
  • Both the original article and the follow up posts are outside the WSJ’s paywall.
    Further evidence of the desire to troll the blog world.
  • The comment system for WSJ is plagued by spam.
    This indicates an immature and underdeveloped comment community. This is not to say that the WSJ should start heavily moderating their comments, just that they obviously don’t seem to care about them.
  • The general attitude of Us vs. The Internet of the article and responses indicates a deep misunderstanding of conversations on the net.
    The net is no longer a community in and of itself; it holds digital representations of an infinite amount of communities that exist in reality. Things used to be otherwise, but to still think so demonstrates a dated perspective.
  • WSJ’s technology writers are either vastly under-skilled for such reporting or are interested in remaining ignorant of the real issues.
    Even if one could make the specious argument that Edge caching does violate network neutrality (and I don’t think anyone believes it does) it wouldn’t be doing so in the same way the telecommunications companies are interested in violating network neutrality. Edge caching does not violate network neutrality in the same way the telecommunications companies are interested in violating network neutrality. More specifically, Google’s movements to place caches at ISP level is not as controversial as the WSJ would like it to be. Despite having many opportunities to get the story right, the WSJ has repeatedly ignored the technological subtlety of the details and has misquoted others who were trying to set it straight.

Network neutrality is one of the primary reasons why digital journalism is viable, and the reason why newspapers are threatened online, so there is no surprise the WSJ sees the principle as a threat: they think it is in their interest to do so.

As Gandhi put it:

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”