> RIAA apologizes for erroneous letters
 > By
 > Declan McCullagh
 > Staff Writer, CNET News.com
 > May 13, 2003, 4:41 PM PT
 > update
 > The music industry's antipiracy efforts took an embarrassing turn Tuesday
 > when the
 > Recording Industry Association of America acknowledged that it has
 > erroneously sent
 > dozens of copyright infringement notices.
 > The RIAA said Tuesday that a temporary worker was responsible for firing
off
 > legal
 > notifications last week that invoked the
 > Digital Millennium Copyright Act
 >  without confirming that any copyrighted files were actually being offered
 > for download.
 > "We have sent two dozen withdrawal notices--all appear related to this
 > particular
 > temp," the RIAA said in a statement. "We apologize for any inconvenience
 > this may
 > have caused."
 > On Monday, as
 > first reported by CNET News.com
 > , the RIAA withdrew a DMCA notice to Penn State University's astronomy and
 > astrophysics
 > department. Sent during Penn State's final exams, it prompted the central
 > computing
 > office at the campus to threaten the department with having its Internet
 > connection
 > severed unless the infringing material was removed.
 > The problem, however, was that no infringing file existed on the
 > department's computer.
 > The RIAA's automated program apparently confused two separate pieces of
 > information--a
 > legal MP3 and a directory named "usher"--and concluded there was an
illegal
 > copy
 > of a song by the musician Usher.
 > In a second incident, Speakeasy, a national broadband provider, said
Tuesday
 > that
 > the RIAA had apologized for sending it a cease-and-desist letter alleging
 > illegal
 > activity on a subscriber's FTP site devoted to the Commodore Amiga
computer.
 > The
 > RIAA's form letter sent to Speakeasy last Thursday alleged the
Amigascne.org
 > site
 > illegally "offers approximately 0 sound files for download. Many of these
 > files contain
 > recordings owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists
as
 > Creed."
 > The errors represent a black eye for the RIAA's latest efforts against
 > piracy, which
 > rely on automated crawlers to scour the Internet in an attempt to find
 > material that
 > is being distributed in a way that violates federal copyright law. The
RIAA
 > refuses
 > to disclose what techniques its crawlers use, but the group appears to
 > employ companies
 > such as MediaForce and MediaDefender. Its copyright enforcers are not
 > required to
 > listen to an allegedly infringing MP3 file in its entirety, the RIAA has
 > acknowledged.
 > RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy would not say who the temporary employee
worked
 > for,
 > whether the person had been fired or who else had received DMCA notices.
 > "We do not discuss employment details, other than to say, 'We are taking
 > appropriate
 > action against this individual,'" Lamy said. "As we said, 24 withdrawal
 > notices have
 > been sent, all apparently due to mistakes this temp employee made." Just
as
 > the RIAA
 > doesn't publicize the names of whom it sends cease-and-desist notices in
 > order to
 > protect their privacy, Lamy said, the group will not publicize this temp's
 > name.
 > While the RIAA said that only 24 faulty letters have been sent, a
comparison
 > of the
 > tracking numbers inserted in the Penn State and Speakeasy notices shows
they
 > differ
 > by 136 numbers. That difference implies that hundreds of additional
 > notifications
 > may have been fired off around the same time, though not necessarily by
the
 > same
 > RIAA worker.
 > Speakeasy said Tuesday that it accepted the RIAA's apology.
 > "Speakeasy routinely monitors abuse allegations from outside parties and
 > forwards
 > notices to its subscribers when appropriate. In this particular case, our
 > abuse department
 > notified the subscriber of the RIAA inquiry and Speakeasy simultaneously
 > contacted
 > the RIAA to question the '0 files found' portion of the original letter,"
a
 > spokeswoman
 > said. "Speakeasy is satisfied with the RIAA's timely response."
 > Kurt Hoffman, Speakeasy's chief operating officer, said the company
believed
 > RIAA's
 > notice to be an honest mistake and that Speakeasy will not pursue legal
 > action.
 > DMCA litigation
 > Under section 512 of the controversial DMCA, a representative of a
copyright
 > holder
 > can send a "takedown" notice to a university or other Internet provider
 > requesting
 > that copyrighted material be removed. Anyone receiving a false notice can
 > sue for
 > damages and attorney's fees, but only if the sender "knowingly materially
 > misrepresents"
 > information.
 > Cindy Cohn, legal director for the
 > Electronic Frontier Foundation
 > , said Monday that section 512 hands too much power to copyright holders.
 > "If you
 > have a good-faith belief that use of the material is not authorized by the
 > copyright
 > holder under copyright law, that's the only standard you have to meet,"
Cohn
 > said.
 > "You can't be liable if you're wrong unless you knowingly and materially
 > misrepresented.
 > I think the situations where there will be liability will be very small."
 > Section 512 of the DMCA is also what's at issue in the RIAA v. Verizon
 > lawsuit, which
 > is
 > before a federal appeals court in Washington
 > . The law permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a service
 > provider
 > to turn over information about a subscriber. The service provider must
 > promptly comply
 > with that order, and no judge's approval is required first, a process that
 > Verizon
 > says is not sufficiently privacy-protective.
 > While this appears to be the first time that mistakes by the RIAA have
been
 > made
 > public, other copyright holders overreached. A site that offers the
 > open-source OpenOffice
 > program received such a notice from Microsoft's representatives after an
 > automated program searching for MS Office
 > became
 > confused
 > . The Church of Scientology invoked section 512 in
 > an attempt to get Google to delete links
 >  to both the church's copyrighted work and a critic's Web site.
 > Disruptive effects
 > Erroneous takedown notices sent under section 512 can be disruptive. At
Penn
 > State,
 > where a song by the astronomer a capella group
 > The Chromatics
 >  about a
 > gamma-ray satellite
 >  apparently triggered the RIAA's notification-bot, the astronomy
 > department's system
 > administrator spent four days dealing with the fallout. "I knew the DMCA
was
 > not
 > the greatest law ever made, but when this came down the pike, I was caught
 > completely
 > off guard," said Matt Soccio, the department's network and information
 > systems manager.
 > Sam Kielek, who is an administrator for the Amiga site he runs from his
home
 > with
 > a DSL connection, said he believes Speakeasy took a clearly erroneous
 > complaint from
 > the RIAA too seriously. A note to Kielek from Patrick McDonald in
 > Speakeasy's abuse
 > department defended the RIAA, saying the group's investigators must have
 > found something:
 > "If the current complaint does not have any scan results, this would mean
 > that at
 > one point it did--otherwise, they would not have sent out an e-mail in the
 > first
 > place--and they are making a formal notification about it."
 > Kielek said: "I'm unhappy with the way Speakeasy handled this entire
 > ordeal...I wanted
 > Speakeasy to make more of an effort to look at an obvious error in this
 > e-mail. The
 > way the e-mail could have been written is to say, 'We received the e-mail
 > from RIAA
 > saying that there were zero files. So there was an error.'"
 > The Amigascne.org site is devoted to collections of "demo" files, which
show
 > off
 > the capabilities of the Amiga computer, which had superior graphics when
it
 > was introduced
 > in the 1980s. "There are some files with the suffix mp3 but there is
nothing
 > I could
 > find that I could associate with any artist that I know of," Kielek said.
 > Steve Pollo
 > Lansing, MI
 >
 >
 >
 >
 >
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