Crusader War College

Link: http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9839170-1.html?tag=nl.e501

There was an earlier news story going around that the RIAA, the legal watchhound for the music recording industry, was changing its position on private ripping of CDs in a legal brief filed in a lawsuit, maintaining that the process of ripping is illegal copyright infringement in and of itself. The earlier position was that, as long as the ripped MP3 files were used ONLY by the original purchaser, and not shared with others via the public internet, ripping was legal.

The link is to an article at Crave that outlines the position that the RIAA was unfairly maligned: the Washington Post reporter having made the accusation based on extracting a clause from a larger, two clause, sentence. This is called Dowdification. However, the following quote from the Crave posting is illuminating:

Still, Fisher received little support from respected and independent copyright experts. William Patry, the copyright guru at Google--not exactly known as a lackey for copyright holders--wrote on his blog that the RIAA is being "unfairly maligned" in the Post story.

Patry does, however, caution that recent statements made by the RIAA and included in Fisher's story reflect the group's growing tendency to use language as a means of control.

Fisher quoted Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, who testified recently in court that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song."

Patry disagreed.

"This new rhetoric of 'everything anyone does without (RIAA) permission is stealing' is well worth noting and well worth challenging at every occasion," Patry wrote. "It is the rhetoric of copyright as an ancient property right, permitting copyright owners to control all uses as a natural right; the converse is that everyone else is an immoral thief."

In short, the rhetoric is being used to fabricate an expansion of the idea of copyright beyond its intention.