Ten Reasons Why

The Washington Post got the message (if not from me, then from other sources with a wider audience), and published a correction to Marc Fisher’s inaccurate story on Atlantic v. Howell. The correction reads:

A Dec. 30 Style & Arts column incorrectly said that the
recording industry “maintains that it is illegal for someone who has
legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.” In a
copyright-infringement lawsuit, the industry’s lawyer argued that the
actions of an Arizona man, the defendant, were illegal because the songs were located in a
“shared folder” on his computer for distribution on a peer-to-peer
network.

At least they corrected it. But it reminds me that the standard print newspaper practice of burying corrections someplace deep in the paper (and, in the case, website) is as atrocious as it has always been. Corrections, especially for regular columns, should run in the same space that the original ran and run above the lede, not at the bottom of the column.

Intellectual Property

If I had any doubt that my interpretation of the RIAA’s Atlantic v. Howell brief and the Washington Post’s lousy reporting on the case was dead on, those have been washed away by William Patry, current Senior Copyright Counsel at Google and former copyright counsel to the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. Patry also pretty much wrote the book on copyright, the “book” being a 7-volume, 5500-page treatise on copyright with a foreword by former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor.

On The Patry Copyright Blog, he writes:

On page 15 of the brief, we find the flashpoint:
“Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recordings into the compressed
.mp3 format AND they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the
authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs.” I have capitalized the word “and” because it is here that the RIAA is making the point that placing the mp3 files into the share folder is what makes the copy unauthorized. The RIAA
is not saying that the mere format copying of a CD to an mp3 file that
resides only on one’s hard drive and is never shared is infringement.
This is a huge distinction and is surprising the Post didn’t understand
it.

Pretty much spot on the argument I was making. Vindicated! :-)

Intellectual Property