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I think you mean the MAFIAA

On the internet all it takes is one hole. One weak link in the chain.
This will achieve nothing. It will solve nothing.
Determined users will find ways around it if they have not yet. This will not generate revenue and just feed the hate for the MAFIAA

It's not even about legality. Look at any banned substance, if there is a demand for it, there will be a supply. This ruling follows a token law that has no bite, has no teeth and is actually counterproductive. I did not even know about those other two sites until today.

Maybe the way forward is to also take out a super injunction not to make the ruling public. That'll make sure no one knows.

They call themselves that, troll: http://mafiaa.org/

No, they don't. whois is your friend.

The MafiAA, as some like to call it [...]

They call themselves that, troll: http://mafiaa.org/

Small problem with that amazing(tm) idea. The MAFIAA(tm) does not want this to happen unless they are compensated(c) every time someone even utters one of the copyrighted or trademarked words that their pyramid-scheme(r) has come up with. In their view(c), the entity formerly known as Netflix(tm) is giving away their content(c) and the MAFIAA(tm) isn't being compensated(c) for this release(r). They want to be compensated(c) every time someone sings(c), views(r) or in any way shape or form performs(tm) their material. Enjoy your freedom ... soon it will no longer be free(c)(tm)(r).

Becareful, they may become a Slander/Libel Troll and sue anyone that calls them "Mafia" or their business a "Protection Racket".

I wonder why the music and film industry associations haven't already done that.

http://mafiaa.org/

You must be new here.

• Foreign: Sony Pictures is a foreign (Japanese) business, as are the foreign companies that produce films to be distributed by MPAA affiliated distributors.
• Mob-run: The mainstream Music And Film Industry Associations have been compared to the mob.
• Cyberlockers: Netflix is a cyberlocker secured with a cyberlock backed by the DMCA.
• Illegal: You'll see once Hollywood accounting methods become better documented.

Reading the proposals by the MAFIAA I can not help but notice that they keep on referring to the act of copyright infringement as 'copyright theft'. As far as I know copyright law does not deal with theft, it deals with infringement on the limited rights given to the copyright holder. Copyright theft sounds more like someone breaks into some fictional 'copyright register' and steals the actual copyrights, denying the original copyright holder of those rights in the future.

I can only assume that the actual laws which they buy are worded more correctly but if ever someone were to be sued for 'copyright theft' I assume this would be grounds for dismissal. After all, the copyrights can not be stolen if the copyright holder still has them and copyright law does not deal with stolen property.

ASCAP - Yes, this is the moffia

You misspelled MAFIAA. ASCAP, along with other BMI, SESAC, and foreign performance rights organizations, together with record label trade groups like RIAA, make up the M in MAFIAA.

WTF are you talking about? There are no encrypted binaries involved.

Mac OS X has them; I assumed that Windows might have started to do the same. I just assumed that Microsoft was doing something alongside Protected Video Path and Protected User Mode Audio in Windows Vista and Windows 7 to satisfy nine major publishers of non-software works. And even if Microsoft doesn't currently use encrypted binaries or encrypted installers, once this workaround for 17 USC 117 becomes more widely known, it will.

Grow down! The mafiaa tag is hilarious.

sends a very strong signal that the legislation works.

Or it might be an indicator that the legislation has a chilling effect on free speech and fair use.

Which is the way it's supposed to work...

According to its designers, the MAFIAA, anyway.

Someone explain to me exactly how the riaa and their like are not the exact same thing as the mafia?

www.mafiaa.org

Link Here

Take a bunch of cheapend shared accounts, and you'll get way better ROI, and still, for the most part, do not sacrifice any reliability at all. Cost: Greater setup time, depending upon on several contingency factors.

Are you seriously proposing this as a way to run a business? That strikes me as seriously retarded. I know a lot of people who run a lot of sites, and depending on their bandwidth draw and other needs, they'll rent servers, they'll rent a cabinet and buy bandwidth, or they'll use one of the reasonably priced CDNs. But I've never heard of anybody doing this unless they're running something semi-legal and want to dodge MAFIAA threat letters.

Swapping your shit around between a bunch of cheap hosting accounts strikes me as a) very Fisher-Price, and b) totally pointless. Good sysadmins cost real money, and for all the time spent on jiggery-pokery, it seems like a much better deal to just get a discount CDN or a cheap colo'd pipe, and let the sysadmin spend their time on something useful.

I wonder: did they invite people like Cory Doctorow?
Did they invite people like Eric Flint?

Or are they only going to listen to voices from the dark side, the side that believes culture was invented to make big companies rich and where "non-commercial" is a profanity?

No it is not...
It's like suing the whole country but for cheaper and with higher monthly compensations

The music industry is an archaic culture... it's too old to work, crapping it's pants and hitting anyone who gets in reach of its walking stick. But it still wants to get paid more for doing nothing
You don't download? Well there is a saying in a very similar culture: "If you beat your wife everyday and you don't know the reason, don't worry she knows".

And while the MAFIAA beats people it can't walk, it just loses more ground. Thanks god there are people who come and do the job for them, otherwise they would be asking for more laws to protect them... wouldn't they?

What you're thinking of is the Music And Film Industry Association, the international division of the Music And Film Industry Association of America.

Unfortunately it is the "allowing content to be created" part the has been trolled around since the '70 by the RIAA and recently by the MPAA... Everybody knows that if that was true then there would'nt be any music by now.

The last year we, the costumers, have been exposed to frequent scripwriters strikes. They clearly stated that MPAA associated corporations keep most profits for themself and then starve honest content creators. This is enought to debunk the myth.

Now it is also more than clear that part of the money goes to borderline legal firms like Logistep who (ab)use loopholes in international law to violate citizens privacy and honestly in europe we don't tolerate this. We rate privacy more than corporate profit over here... http://www.mafiaa.org/

The thing is, there is a problem here. A lot of people do hide behind anonymity using systems like BitTorrent and sites like TPB because what they're doing is immoral and/or illegal. ... The site has been used extensively in support of activities that are illegal, unethical and/or damaging to others, and the operators are well aware of this.

yes, damn those immoral abolitionists working in the illegal underground railroads stealing the legal "property" of slave-owning plantations. Think of how much they cost the cotton industry!

informed people already call them MAFIAA(TM)!

MAFIAA(TM) - Music And Film Industry Association of America(TM)

http://www.mafiaa.org/

Don't give the mafiaa any ideas!

I don't understand your response about insurance agents disabling the brakes of other drivers. How is Novell disabling others brakes? All they have done is made their car safer and security sells, like a Volvo.

1. Those vendors with patent portfolios will be more attractively priced than those who don't.
2. Those vendors without patent portfolios will be priced out of the market.
3. Companies now investing in patent portfolios will have less incentive to lobby against a patent system from which they increasingly benefit.
4. Members of the F/OSS community become increasingly disincented to contribute for fear they may in turn be held liable.

Sorry bud, GP got it right. MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America, while RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America.

And together they form the MAFIAA = Music And Film Industry Association of America!!

If I purchase any media that comes with "pirate tax" then I'll have no problem using pirated stuff. Heck, I even should do that. It's paid for already after all.

Fuck http://mafiaa.org/

They've decided to merge into the Music And Film Industry Association of America(TM), Inc.

You must've missed the announcement back in April...

The IFPI is the international counterpart of the RIAA not MPAA. The MPAA is movies, the RIAA is music, the IFPI is music.

True, but does it matter? MPAA and RIAA, are both Music And Film Industry Associations. Besides, Sony (of rootkit notoriety) is in both, and so were Warner and Universal until recently.

Think about what we are saying here folks. Piracy is wrong. It is at the VERY LEAST immoral.

Is it more immoral than the vast theft that was perpetuated on the public with each extension of the term of copyright? All those works were created, published and sold under the terms of copyright at that time. Yet, the MAFIAA was able to unilaterally change those terms by bribing enough people in congress.

If stealing millions, maybe even billions, of dollars worth of content from the public is not only OK, it is sanctioned by the people who should be looking out for the public's interest in the first place, then on what grounds is it immoral when members of the public do the very same thing back to the MAFIAA, except on a much, much smaller scale?

However, so far as we can discern what the contents were based on the name, which is a jury question, it's still possible to win a suit without actually showing what the contents are. But I wouldn't like to have to do that, since it's not a strong position.

I have not seen the screen-shots mentioned, but if they include the file's hash, and the RIAA can produce their own copy of the file that has the same hash and is an actual copy of the work in question, that ought to be sufficient. Unless they wish to argue that the defendent's software was handing out bogus hash, which might result in a bad trip.

FWIW, I know a guy who regularly shares non-American, and presumably non-MPAA, movies via his preferred p2p apparatus. He recently told me that he decided to stop sharing Blood Rain for fear that the MAFIAA wasn't smart enough to distinguish it from BloodRayne.

Clearly the reason people are purchasing vinyl is to take advantage of the analog hole. I think the MAFIAA needs to increase their level of "campaign contributions" with a few more fact finding trips to the bahamas so as to assure passage of the AMCA - Analog Millenium Communications Act before this piracy destroys the entire American economy.

I especially love how they're using large chunks of badly written text in favor of comparative screenshots of each movie!

That's because of the DRM, since they plugged the analog hole there is no way to get a screenshot anymore.

You laugh, but if the MAFIAA get their way, they are in for more than a few surprises like that.

What about the (RI|MP)AA?

What is proof of music ownership? I can't find a good answer anywhere. Let's assume some random person is hauled into court allegedly for having music that he has not legitimately bought.

If you are able to run malicious software in administrator mode, you can do anything at all, not just compromise signed code authorization. Heck you could replace the whole OS.

You have to wrap your head around "untrusted computing" -- its all about not trusting the owner and operator of the system. Sure you can run in admin mode, but you can't (normally) replace the whole OS because the new replacement parts won't be cryptographically signed by MS and so won't be allowed to execute.

Blue Pill's claim to fame is that it can turn off Vista's requirement for signed drivers - thus letting you execute arbitrary code in the kernel - which means that the MAFIAA can no longer trust MS to lock you out of your own computer.

Do you agree that IF the antitrust laws are to be applied, the system also NEEDS patent/IP/copyright laws? (or else you end us with a stagnant Kraplikistan of middle ages)

Copyright at least is completely unnecessary. Patents may be as well, but their uses are significantly different from the uses of copyright that I haven't thought enough about them to say.

The reason why copyright is unneccessary is we are now at the point of societal development where distribution of information has zero marginal cost. Similarly, distribution of money could also have zero marginal cost, if we didn't have so much banking related legislation clogging up the tubes.

So, given zero cost to distribute information and zero cost to distribute money in return, it is entirely reasonable to expect a commission-based market for creative works to thrive. Just as the vast majority of white-collar workers and just about all blue-collar workers are paid for their work and not the end product, artists can be paid for the work of creating and not for the end product. And, just as the vast majority of white-collar workers and about all blue-collar workers are evaluated for FUTURE pay by the quality of the work they produce, so can artists.

Or, to put it more simply, artists are hired to produce "something" - a song, a painting, a movie, whatever. They are paid via a comission which is the sum of money paid into escrow in aggregate by all the people on the net who are willing to hire the artist. Artist releases the end result and collects the money. If the work sucks, he's going to have to accept a lower rate of payment for his next project. If it rocks, then he can expect to get a hire rate on his next project. If his work his popular enough, he may find the apparently contradictory situation where he can get a higher rate, and yet because his last work drew such a large audience that the number of new customers brings the average payment per customer down to less than what it was for the previous job. A win-win situation for all concerned.

This is true capitalism - private ownership of the means of production - the artist owns his own skills, time and equipment and sells their use for as much as the market will bear. No need for redefining information as property, property that is not a means of production but only the result of production and thus not really property under the definition of capitalism in the first place.

Patents can be different because they are not always a 1:1 translation into the end product. They may only be related to tools used, but not ever delivered to the customer. So there is a bit more to think about than there is for simple copyright. I tend to favor trade secrets over patents (trade secrets for which there are no laws enforcing their secrecy either, if you leak it, that's your problem, and you can't unleak it, you might sue the leaker, but that's it) but that's just a gut feeling, not one based on any analysis.

PS, I am beginning to think that companies like VISA and Mastercard are to electronic funds exchange as the MAFIAA are to electronic information exchange. They both have a vested interest in preventing society as a whole from realizing zero-marginal cost exchanges and have probably purchased pleny of legislation to keep themselves entrenched. I expect that VISA and MC are just the tip of the iceberg though.

Say what you will about the RIAA, at least their name is clearer.

I think the name MAFIAA is even clearer. :)

To me, it seems reasonably appropriate for the G8 to look at it.

But what can they use to put pressure on the Russians? Mr Putin has threatened to turn off the gas before, and he might do it again if he don't like being pushed around by the MAFIAA.

Lots of reports of features falling out of the Vista - but there is one (anti-)feature that never gets that kind of press - "Trusted Computing," aka support for Defective Recorded Media (DRM).

It is like it is more important to microsoft that they cater to the MAFIAA than it is for them to provide features that their paying customers might actually want.

I sure wish I had a couple of bazillion dollars to piss it away on developing stuff that nobody wants to pay for. Except I'd spend it on designing and building the world's best yacht - with the largest capacity of nubile beauty pagent winners.

Mob based power has existed throughout history

What are the major differences between short-lived mobs such as these and more permanent mobs such as Cosa Nostra and Yakuza? Can a mob of fair users overpower the MAFIAA?

Perhaps you're thinking of the Music and Film Industry Ass. Of America?

> (MP|RI)AA

I think you meant MAFIAA. http://www.mafiaa.org/

Of course they are: http://mafiaa.org/.

the RIAA and MPAA joined forces to have one global association called MAFIAA (Music And Film Industry Association of America).

About time someone came out with this joke :)

I'm gonna cover up my obvious spelling error by suggesting that by MPIAA I really meant a hybrid cross between the RIAA and the MPAA. You all buy that, right?

Not if the accepted abbreviation for "Music And Film Industry Associations of America" is MAFIAA.

How can the Mafia sue the **AAs for stealing their business model if "there is no Mafia"?

You seem not to get it. The **AAs you speak of are the Mafia (music and film industry associations). Here's proof.