MemoryStone

The music labels’ case against Jeffrey and Pamela Howell has taken on mythic dimensions over the last few weeks after the Washington Post went a little nuts and implied that the labels were suing the couple for making personal rips of their CDs (it later corrected the story). The truth is that Howells are being sued for having those rips in a shared KaZaA folder. But lost in the controversy over the RIAA’s refusal to say that personal CD ripping is legal is the fact that the Howells aren’t being sued for swapping songs with thousands of people around the world; instead, they are charged with making songs “available” for download. In a new amicus brief (PDF), the EFF argues that there’s no such thing as “attempted copyright infringement.”