> 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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