Post reporter Marc Fisher wrote that the RIAA pleading asserts that defendant Jeffrey Howell's conversion of CDs into MP3s constituted unauthorized copying of copyrighted recordings.Sites around the Net responded to the news with outrage.

"This is so clearly not against the law that I'm shocked the RIAA would bother with the attempt. Why, oh why, does the music industry insist on making things hard for itself? Apparently because it's run by complete bozos," wrote News.com's Matt Asay.

News that the RIAA, which earned widespread opprobrium for its prosecution of Jammie Thomas, is flexing its muscles against consumers, was enough to make the blogosphere's collective blood boil. If accepted, the argument that merely ripping a CD to MP3 for personal use is illegal would cut to the heart of the fair-use exception of copyright law.

Manufactured Controversy

The only problem: No such claim was made. What RIAA lawyer Ira Schwartz wrote in a supplemental brief was: "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."

The critical phrase there is "shared folder" because the rest of the brief makes clear that the RIAA is claiming that Howell not only ripped his CDs but also put them in his shared folder in Kazaa, thus making them available for worldwide distribution. The RIAA has successfully argued that mere presence of copyright files in a shared folder constitutes "distribution" under copyright law.

"This is a garden-variety case with a very typical dispute over what constitutes distribution," Eric Goldman, director of Santa Clara University Law School's High-Tech Law program, said in a telephone interview.

Sensationalism Sells

So where did the idea come from that the RIAA was claiming something more? The most likely source is a blog called Recording Industry v. The People, which wrote on December 10, "The RIAA's brief makes the novel contention ... that making personal copies of songs from one's CD onto one's computer is an infringement."

That is a "pretty aggressive characterization," Goldman said of the post. "I'm not persuaded" the language means what the post says it means, he added. "It's a well-known phenomenon that sensationalism is part of the media -- that's true for traditional media, and it's true for blogging as well." (continued...)

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