Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

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Speaking as someone who worked to get a 1201 exemption, and who personally shit in the MPAA, RIAA, and ESA's Cornflakes, I can confirm the 1201 process is stupid. Mainly because the RIAA,MPAA, and ESA always show up tp fight the exemption even when they know literally NOTHING about the exemption being asked for.

We petitioned for an exemption to allow museums and libraries to reboot old MMOs in closed rooms with no network connections. That's because we couldn't get anything more from the Copyright office. Still, the RIAA's lawyer was there to lie and not understand a god damn thing we said, and accuse us of making tools that could be used to pirate any MMO.

I begged for them to tell me where to find such tools, as it would make life so much easier. Their lawyers were complete imbeciles who seemed never to have touched a computer, yet here they were telling a group of game programmers what they could and could not do with their programs.

Fucking horrible people, all of them.

There must be more to your story.

The RIAA generally doesn't have any involvement in video games, other than where its members license music to games (i.e., GTA), and they generally wouldn't have any grounds for being part of the proceedings you've described if their involvement was just the music licensing.

I can see the ESA being a huge dick in these proceedings, because it's their job to do that, but the RIAA literally wouldn't care as long as somebody paid the music licensing fee (for that low volume of users the licensing fee would generally be less than $100 annually, all inclusive).

I've been on the other side of an RIAA negotiation, and they were very easy to work with. We theoretically owed them millions of dollars for several years of unlicensed music streaming, and they waived the statutory penalties they were legally entitled to in exchange for us agreeing to pay a few hundred dollars of royalties a year to stream their members' music. All told, we paid less than $2500/year for streaming licenses for all of the Big 3 labels and a dozen or more smaller labels.

Transcripts of these hearings are publicly available. This seems to be the hearing GP was referring to (it's proposed class 23 in this hearing): https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/1201/2015/hearing-transcripts/...

Appears the same lawyer was representing ESA/RIAA/MPAA.

I briefly started reading some of them a while back and they're, uh, frustrating to read.

Lot of interesting info in there, thanks for the link.

Did you file ethics complaints with the RIAA lawyers' bar association(s)?

This is fascinating and sad to hear. Do you have any theory why people won't get together and do something against these organisations? It is hard to see how they are working in the interests of the authors, but rather they seem to care about institutions that exploit them.

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