Lawrence Lessig on copyright law in the digital age.

First of all, it infuriates me that the federal government is working as private cops for the RIAA. Think about how they pushed through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and forced the music and computer industries to use copy protection.

It also maddens me because the Founders only allowed ten year copyrights, after which the rights were turned over to the general public, to benefit from the work.

It's time to come up with a saner version of digital copyright, because this is crazy and wrong:

MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota woman ordered to pay a recording industry trade group $1.5 million for illegally sharing music online doesn't plan to pay those damages as her attorneys continue to argue the amount is unconstitutional, she said Thursday.

A federal jury found Wednesday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset, of Brainerd, must pay $62,500 per song — for a total of $1.5 million — for illegally violating copyrights on 24 songs. This was the third jury to consider damages in her case, and each has found that she must pay — though different amounts.

And after each time, the single mother of four has said she can't pay.

"I can't afford to pay any amount. It's not a matter of won't, it's a matter of 'I can't,'" Thomas-Rasset said Thursday. "Any amount that I pay to them is money that I could use to feed my children. Any amount that I pay to them is money I could use to clothe my kids, and pay my mortgage so my kids have a place to sleep."

The Recording Industry Association of America has said it found Thomas-Rasset shared more than 1,700 songs on the file-sharing site Kazaa, but it sued over 24 of them. RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said the association made several attempts to settle with Thomas-Rasset, at first for $5,000, but Thomas-Rasset refused.

Duckworth said the RIAA was thankful the jury recognized the severity of Thomas-Rasset's misconduct.

One of the main reasons I despise the RIAA is that I know how many artists have been screwed out of their copyrights and the money that goes with them -- by the very same people who claim to be looking out for their interest.

This is like a bigtime Mafia chieftain complaining that a low-level crook is taking all his money.

If the RIAA (and the movie industry) are really all about protecting the artists, here's a suggestion: adopt generally recognized standard accounting practices, so artists know exactly how much they've earned.

Because right now, they can't -- not without a subpoena.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation points out that the proposed FCC net neutrality policy allows the same thing they stopped two years ago -- namely, the lawful use of downloading services. They're asking us to sign a petition:

Remember what put the debate over net neutrality into high gear? In 2007, EFF and the Associated Press confirmed suspicions that Comcast was clandestinely blocking BitTorrent traffic. It was one of the first clear demonstrations that ISPs are technologically capable of interfering with your Internet connection, and that they may not even tell you about it. After receiving numerous complaints, the FCC in 2008 stepped in and threw the book at Comcast, requiring them to stop blocking BitTorrent. The Comcast-BitTorrent experience put net neutrality at the top of the FCC agenda.

Yet now that the FCC has formally issued draft net neutrality regulations, they have a huge copyright loophole in them — a loophole that would theoretically permit Comcast to block BitTorrent just like it did in 2007 — simply by claiming that it was "reasonable network management" intended to "prevent the unlawful transfer of content."

You heard that right — under these conditions, the new proposed net neutrality regulations would allow the same practices that net neutrality was first invoked to prevent, even if these ISP practices end up inflicting collateral damage on perfectly lawful content and activities.

When we saw the loophole, we had to ask ourselves, "Is this real net neutrality?" And the answer was simply, "No." The entertainment industry is already pressuring ISPs to become copyright cops. Carving a copyright loophole in net neutrality would leave your lawful activities at the mercy of overbroad copyright filtering schemes, and we already have plenty of experience with copyright enforcers targeting legitimate users by mistake, carelessness, or design.

If net neutrality regulations are to be taken seriously at all, then the loophole must be closed. Sign the petition to demand real net neutrality from the FCC.

Hey, it's the weekend. Let's look at public policy on something that doesn't involve torture:

At the Tech Policy Summit yesterday, David Carson, the General Counsel of the US Copyright Office spent a bit of time at the beginning of his talk explaining why the Performance Rights Act made sense. This is the bill that would make radio stations pay musicians (rather than just songwriters as it is now) for every song they play on the radio. The recording industry insists that it's somehow unfair that radio stations have been promoting their music for free, and Carson seems to believe their explanation 100% (which is, unfortunately, quite typical of the Copyright Office). He argued, unconvincingly, that while radio used to promote artists (the reason that stations don't need to pay musicians), it no longer does so. That makes no sense. While there are alternatives out there for promoting artists, and radio may not have the impact it once had, that hardly means that the stations aren't promoting the music.

And, of course, the most damning argument against the recording industry's demand for money here is the fact that, for decades, the industry has (illegally) had the money go in the other direction. The system of payola has shown, quite clearly, how much the recording industry values airtime, in that it's willing to pay radio stations to play its music.

So, can anyone explain why it's illegal for record labels to pay radio stations to play music, but it's okay for Congress to force radio stations to pay the record labels for playing their music? It defies common sense.

Yet, with a nice push from the Copyright Office, the bill is moving forward, and will face a full House vote. During the Committee debate over the bill, Rep. Daniel Lungren made a perfectly reasonable suggestion: why not wait until the GAO had a chance to do an economic analysis of how the bill would impact radio stations. Considering that the bill is effectively a tax on those radio stations, this seems like a perfectly reasonable idea... but it resulted in Rep. Howard Berman (who represents Hollywood, always) accusing Lungren of trying to kill the bill. Isn't it great when simply waiting to find out what kind of impact the bill might have gets you accused of trying to kill it. Apparently in Congress, it's all about shooting first and asking questions later.

That said, Peter Kafka, over at AllThingsD, has made the best point: most people don't care about this bill because they don't realize that it's really a bill to bail out the RIAA by creating a radio station tax that goes straight into the recording industry's bank accounts. So, rather than call it the Performance Rights Act, it should more accurately be called the Britney Bailout Bill.

If the RIAA wants it, I'm against it. (But then, I do tend to lose patience when the federal government is deputized as an exclusive security force for multinational corporations!)

And don't believe the hype that this is all about "the poor artists and songwriters." The record companies steal every damned penny they can siphon away from the artists (one of my best friends used to be engaged to the bass player in a very well-known '80s rock band, and oy, the stories she told about how little they got from their best-selling debut album). Read the seminal Salon piece "Courtney Love Does the Math" - or look at the lawsuit the Dixie Chicks filed against Sony Records.

Next up: magazine and book publishers push for legislation to require makers of photocopy machines to include technology that determines whether teachers are making illegal copies of copyrighted materials for their classrooms!

Because now ISPs have agreed to spy for them:

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

[us album sales]

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones.

I appreciate the fact that the music business is in the midst of considerable turmoil. CD sales are abysmal, record companies are losing a lot of money, and music pirating has become fairly routine, prompting thousands of lawsuits from the RIAA against consumers. It’s an industry facing major, system challenges.

But if the music business wants to get back on track, this definitely isn’t the way to do it.

[I]n an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. “The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”

It’s as if the industry is anxious to destroy any remaining goodwill it may have left.