Unless you've been out of the loop for the last week, you may have run across some articles about the RIAA's lawsuit against Jeffrey Howell, a resident of Arizona. A Washington Post article has received a lot of attention and has generated a good deal of criticism (and some disbelief).

What people are so angry about is the belief that the RIAA has argued that personal copies of songs ripped from CDs are illegal. If read the brief (you can view it here) you'll see the RIAA's argument is something different. The issue in this case is that the defendant made available to other P2P users, by placing in a shared folder, songs that he had ripped to his hard drive. Rather than being a personal use or fair use issue, this appears to be a "made available" issue. The brief specifically claims the defendant engaged in unauthorized distribution of the plaintiffs' material. Perhaps the Post got caught up with this particular sentence in the brief: "Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs." When read in context of the entire brief, the Post's interpretation of that sentence just doesn't work.

This difference in interpretations reflects what William Patry calls a "calculated rhetorical shift" on the part of the press. The Patry Copyright Blog has a post titled "The Establishment Press Takes On The RIAA" on the subject. It's good reading because it boils the issue down to its basic elements: a (debatable) fight against copyright, journalists acting as activists and the impacts of subtle, semantic twists. From Patry's post:

"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. The brief also goes on to allege in great detail that the copies placed in the shared folder were actually disseminated from Howell's computer, thereby stating a traditional violation of the distribution right, even aside from the making available/deemed distribution theory."

A few blogs pointed out the error in the Post's interpretation (this Slashdot link to an Engadget post is a good example) but as in politics the first salvo is the only one remembered. Journalists around the world have already taken as fact the Post's interpretation of the brief.

[music jobs] Brand and Online Marketing Manager at The Ascot Club/Am Only; Brooklyn, NY.