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MPAA Goes After Gnutella
President of The US writes "C|Net is reporting that the MPAA is going after individual users of Gnutella through their ISPs. 'What we're trying to do is educate the population about what is appropriate, both from an ethical standpoint and from a legal standpoint,' is what they are saying, but it looks like more of the usual intimidation tactics. It looks like they want to scare individual users from even trying to share movies, for fear they will be cut off from their precious broadband. Will the ISPs cave in?"
Yes, they will. But its gonna be interesting to see where this goes.
Welp, considering @home has a heck of a time making a profit, this will hurt them. They'll have to hire people to police us. Service fees will increase for everyone, pirates or not.
Interesting note.. DSL was not mentioned that I noticed. Perhaps MPAA is more scared of telcos? Clip my @home, I'll get DSL. Since I haven't been a subscriber to @home for at least 24 months, no profit was earned once they disconnect me. It costs @home about $500 in materials and labor to do an install, they do NOT charge the customer a dime for that, its free. The main thing being hurt here will be @home. Perhaps that will please the MPAA? Without cheap fat pipes we can't trade big stuff. There is a larger issue here, far beyond copyright. These tactics will raise your bandwidth costs, its that simple. This won't last long, ISPs won't continue to hire staff, eventually they'll get fed up and something will change.
Because all "rock stars" (By that I mean all music producing artists who are famous, from rap, pop, rock, etc) Are just drug smoking, booze drinking, sex mongers! They waste their money on expensive clothes and expensive drugs and expensive houses! Plus in the case of TLC, they are arsonists.
All the sudden you are all enraged and furious and threatening protests and boycotts...
Until the next anime show you want comes out on DVD...
It's pathetic...
It happened with prohibition in the 1920s.
It happened with Jim Crow laws in the 1960s.
When the law is wrong, and normal channels of protest and change are ineffectual, flouting it is the RIGHT thing to do.
Do YOU want to take the chance of getting your life fucked up for all eternity?
Article here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/18347.html
Libraries have photocopy machines, yes? Maybe you say copying one article is not the same as copying the whole magazine. Well, I say copying one audio track is not the same as copying the whole CD. Same? Different? How?
Trolls are like clowns.
/. tent
There are funny clowns
There are angry clowns
There are sad clowns
There are bored clowns
There are clowns that eat you when you sleep
Room for all under the big green and white
--
If people dislike the DVD restrictions so much, why do we buy them?
Why aren't we boycotting this format? Because it won't be effective? Then educate people. I feel no strong urge to run out and buy a DVD player. When you get down to it, there's not really a whole lot of advantage over older formats.
Why DVD?
--
Here's what gets me: the MPAA is working to 'educate' people as in, beat into their brains a particular view of things. Now, government could do this as well, but it's difficult because there's a lot of precedent to suggest that this is not the place of government- that government is for establishing a social framework within which people can make up their minds. This move by the MPAA is an ideological power-grab: expressing the idea that people do not have a right to make up their own mind if the result is at odds with what is profitable for the corporation. In practice, either the government or the corporation can send police and have you put away for ten years- this should be obvious in this day and age.
Does this provide evidence that corporations are more powerful than governments?
If they were to be kept to comparable powers, which would make more sense: to give government the fully exercised capacity to brainwash its citizenry, refusing to tolerate 'dissent'- or to hold corporations to the same standard that government is vaguely held to, and take the position that, although there is debate on the subject, it may be that the MPAA does not have the right to 'educate' the citizenry in this one-sided manner?
Isn't this what we've always asked for? Target the specific lawbreakers, not the network as a whole?
Why not, seeing as how it isn't? Sure, its wrong, but stealing isn't the only kind of wrong there is, so why try to apply such an innappropriate label to the act? It's wrong because it's copying without permission. That's not stealing, it's plagerism.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Not to defend the communist idiot, but the word "stealing" also implies that you took the rights to the property/wealth/etc AWAY from the original owner, not that you merely copied them. (Stealing is like using the "mv" command, while pirating is like using the "cp" command.) This type of crime needs a brand new word to describe it, since it's a crime that only became possible in recent times (making perfect copies effortlessly that are 100% as good as the original is something our laws and language haven't evolved to handle yet.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
All the RIAA did was prove the first one. They failed to prove that the content was what they thought it was (Just because I share a file called "one.mp3" doesnt' mean that this is the Metallica song called "One".) They also made no attempt to prove that the recipient didn't already have a copy of the song in question. If I already own a copy of the Metallica Black album (that contains "One"), then if a friend gives me an MP3 of that song, nothing illegal has happened. It's merely a change of format, which IS protected as fair use.
The assholes at the RIAA coerced Napster into kicking people off with only the first criteria above being met. I fear the MPAA will do the same thing. They don't exactly have a great track record with being fair and understanding. And the DeCSS case has already shown that they don't mind painting everyone with the same brush just to get the few actual criminals in a group.
I'm fully in favor of MPAA and RIAA going after the actual culprits (instead of a large group that happens to include some culprits along with a bunch of innocents). Once that actually starts happening, then you can gloat if people continue to complain.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Bull. He's still got them. "Take" means to REMOVE the thing in question from one place and put it elsewhere. It does not cover the act of making a SECOND thing that is identical to the first. I'm not defending pirating, but it really doesn't fit the existing terminology and trying to pigeonhole it into the crime of "theft" drags along some connotations that don't apply. We hate theft because it deprives the original owner of the thing in question. Piracy is different. It is more akin to copying the answers off of someone else's test in school.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It's a far cry from the Napster case - going after individuals. Even more interesting, it's not going through the courts, so you wind up with a huge industry consortium seeming to conspire with huge broadband suppliers against a few people without due process.
I doubt those people will earn any sympathy in the community, but it'll still be a tough PR battle for the MPAA.
The next step down the ladder is the pursuit of individual music traders. I don't know if that will *ever* fly.
And there does appear to be a large body of people who fit into that area of the venn diagram.
A large body? How bout some names to back this statement up?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Speed the plow man! Where can I sign up?!
To start with, that argument is nonsense, because for every "use" there must be a "what for". If a piece of information in crucial to my competitive position in business (as patents are) then if you use it without my permission, you literally have deprived me of the use of it. If I have invested money in developing that piece of information, I have done so on the understanding that the information is valuable enough to enable me pay back that investment through the use of that information; if you take it without my permission you are literally stealing cash.
Intellectual products are social products.
To what extent individual laborers should be allowed to receive the market value of their products is a question of social policy.
Ah, now we cut to the chase. You mean there is no room for individual achievement in your socialist collective utopia?
That won't work. There's no way a small company could capture a market large enough in a so little time that, say, Sony Corporation couldn't get a competing product out of the door, at a better price, everywhere in the world, and market the hell out of it.
It sounds paradoxical, but patents do promote diversity by making it possible for small innovators to compete on equal grounds to large incumbents.
The courts, eh? What if the courts decide that, say, farmers, should work without pay? After all, we all need food, right? They should be glad to do it to feed the rest of us! In fact, paying farmers is stealing from society!
The short answer is, any society that passed such a law would starve, and would deserve it.
What are they going to do, join the workforce like everyone else?
Any other industries you think should be provided by slaves?
If your friends come over and watch the movie, that's fine. If your friends come over, and you give them a copy of the movie that they keep and take home with them, that's when it becomes illegal.
I don't dispute that it's illegal, but what I fail to understand is why I should feel some moral revulsion at it. If I lend a book to a friend it's OK. (right now; check back in a few years once the book industry gets their lobbying up-to-date..) If I copy a few pages out of a book and lend it to a friend, this is illegal, fine.
But trying to tell me that it's a despicable act, equivalent to breaking-and-entering or to accosting ships on the high seas, is something that just fails utterly to convince me.
Every piano teacher or conductor I have known occasionally gives their students/conductees photocopies of pieces of music which are either expensive, hard to get, or are simply one piece from a weighty volume where the student doesn't want or need the rest. Are you accusing them of being conscienceless scumbags?
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
"That doesn't change the fact that it is theft. Taking something without permission is still illegal."
So if I meet you in the street and you light my cigarette, I've stolen the fire from match manufacturers?
We need to start a What Would Dogbert Do?" movement.
I don't think it is valid to compare a flame made with a cheap lighter to copyright ownership of intellectual property. Bic doesn't licence lighters, they sell them, and the music and movie owners licence movies, they don't sell them.
If you don't like intellectual property, fine, but the GNU-ish ideal isn't exactly taking over the world that I can tell, despite what the "free software" fans like to think. I probably won't be writing free software because I need to do something that MAKES MONEY, and I can't live on tips and I can't support users thousands of miles away.
It is the software or music owner's every right to determine the distribution and sales method of the product they make, and I believe in fair compensation. Yes, some companies take it too far, but there is the other extreme of sharing movies that you don't own the rights to share.
The analogy is sort of misleading here.
If I carry my DVDs across the country and watch them with my sister, it's OK. She doesn't get a copy (physical or digital) of the movie.
If I'd give her a copy of the movie, instead, it'd not be honest because she should buy a copy of her own.
Now, "sharing" in RL is using a single copy of the movie and presenting it to many people. One copy sold, one copy distributed.
"Sharing" in digital sense is giving many people a copy of the movie, a privilegde that should belong to the copyright holder - one copy sold, n copies distributed => n-1 copies not paid for.
Number of people who saw the movie is irrelevant. Number of copies, then, is.
People use ethics and morals as shades to cover ones eyes. A societies value system is based off self-interest. Morals, ethics and laws are tools used by the majority to impose regulation over society as a whole. (At least in theory).
To share or not to share digital data is a question of self-interest both individually and collectively. Is it in your self-interests to reward a software author? Depends. If your contribution ultimately benefits you then yes, otherwise no.
I believe it is in myself interest to give back to someone who gives to me. What I give back should be of equal value in what I feel I received.
In the case of non-material objects I not the author should determine the value received. In the case where someone posses something I want then a agreement as to the objects price must be found.
In a society where its members understand the meaning of "enlightened self interest" it becomes common sense to reward those who add value to their lives, in such a system what need is there for patents and intellectual property laws? The need for these things come from the belief system that people is un-trustworthy and selfish by nature. Which is always the case when a society is short sighted and unable to see that it is ALWAYS in ones self interest to reward those who bring value to their lives.
-- You can be a geeklord too
Paradox: Slashdot has continually said that the MPAA should got after individual copyright infrigers rather than services like Napster. Yet as soon as the MPAA does that it becomes labelled "intimidation tactics".
Answer: There is no Slashdot.
At least, not in the sense you mean. There are hundreds of thousands of readers here, tens of thousands of occasional posters. We do not agree on everything. Slashdot does not march in lockstep with libertarianism, communism, or whatever gestalt you think you have assembled from hundreds of people shouting at each other every day.
In this case in particular, a large number of Slashdot readers apparantly believe that copyright violation is wrong, but that copyright violators should be individually punished, not the authors, possessors (DeCSS), or providers (Napster) of tools they happen to use. I fall into this category, for example. On the other hand, there are a large number of Slashdot readers who believe that "intellectual property" isn't property, and that because copyright violation isn't theft it isn't wrong. "President of the US" may be in this group.
There is no hypocrisy here, because the two groups do not overlap.
Uh, as a matter of fact, the guy who submitted this article was the one who said 'intimidation tactics', not slashdot itself, or any of the authors at slashdot.
Part of "what it all comes down to" is that because they've never been challenged before for distribution channels, they haven't bothered to create services to take advantage of current technology even when those could help them. On the few occasions I used Napster or similar services it was either to listen to a few songs from groups or albums I hadn't heard before to find out whether I wanted to buy the music OR to get copies of songs on albums I already own when I was away from my physical CDs. These are both legitimate services that the recording/distribution/publishing industries (whomever you want to blame) don't offer. I'm no enemy of music publishers; I have over 500 CDs most of which I've purchased new.
As far as "socking it to 'The Man'", I think that's more true than you give it credit. The publishing industries have been gouging consumers since the beginning. How much of that $15 you pay for a new CD do you think actually gets to the artist? I don't mind paying for the music, but very little of the cost of a CD goes to compensate those who actually make the music. I don't care about the physical media, and the production of that and the packaging and distribution of the physical storage is most of the cost. The technology is there; I should be able to pay something more like $5.00 to get the right to download an album and then do with what I please (within normal copyright restrictions) of which only a small fraction would have to go to distribution. But that isn't going to happen, because the artists have contracts with record companies, and record companies have no desire to make less money.
Hopefully what has been going on in this realm recently will show that consumers want a different type of service, but I'm afraid that all that the record companies are seeing is piracy and all they will do is make the problem worse by making music even harder to listen to.
How is my taking a book out of the library, or a cd or a dvd for that matter, different from sharing music on the web? My wife and I have bought exactly four books since September while in that same time we have read over 60 books. So, basically, we have denied the publishing houses of about $600 or more. Should we be looking to be arrested for this subversive behavior?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Games? 6 months? Only if you work for 3doa.
john gilmore summarizes why many of us feel that eliminating scarcity is a good thing:
http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html
Just asking - I mean this article's comment posting is littered with uninformed biased op-ed pieces you could have lifted from the MPAA website or Foxnews. You do realize that your're whoring yourself out in the name of 'being cool on /.' Right?
And why is that? because if it just was about the poor starving artists than someone other than Don Henley or Alanis Morisette would be testifying in Congress. Because if it was about compensating the actual artists then you would hear someone demonstrate how they were actually harmed. They would trot out their facts and figures and point to an amount. But they don't they merely accuse in the blandest of board statements and if you press them they will carp "Well it's unethical and un Judeo-Christian !!!!!" Because the facts don't exist. Prices are up and unit sales are up and this entire issue is about the record industry's ability to dictate the retail price. For if it were not they would come to some compromise about micropayments. Let's say each track was worth a dime - would the MPAA bite? Of course not. What the industry is telling you is they get to set the price and no one else. Micropayments could support.
Same with movie industry. Find me an artist who was impoverished by a movie theater not raising their ticket prices from 7 to 10 dollars. But if you had a way to sell one viewing for a buck would they do it even if that meant distributing that viewing to a hundred million PC's? Of course not - they want your ass in the seat for 10 bucks for the first two weeks of distribution. After 2 weeks the movie theater starts to make some money so the distributor needs to pull it out and replace it with another movie that can make THEM money for 2 weeks.
On a related front did you get a load of the suits on the news yesterday, from Disney who actually said that paying TV and movie writers any more than they get now could destroy the entire industry and imperil the US's place at the top of the entertainment food chain.
But I guess none of that matters when most of the folks here who post are either in the paid employ of PR industry or deluded apologists.
Pushing all of the development risk to the artists and all of the revenue side of the equation between the consumer and the artist is not going to change how artists are compensated one iota. Record companies will continue to collect 98% of the backend revenue and large chunk of the front end 'coopted sales' piece as well.
Movie companies will continue to shift all of the risk to development and production companies while banks finance the whole shebang and movie companies take in 80%+ of all gross revenue the first two weeks of theatrical show and 100% of the video sales. Artists will continue to get the proverbial shitty end of the stick.
Normally, I just leave out of discussions like this, but I need to comment on a common misconception.
The marketing of physical products vs. intellectual property isn't as different as you might think. A lot of people forget that zero marginal cost is NOT equal to zero total cost. Just because there it is harder to see the correlation between the expenses a company incurs to create a product and the amount they charge does not mean you can steal their product.
Look at this way: You are essentially arguing that consumers should only be responsible for paying for marginal costs. With software, since marginal costs equal almost zero, you therefore argue that you can steal it.
But does that mean that I can just walk into my local clothing store, grab a few new shirts, pay the cashier just enough to cover the actual cost of the cloth plus enough to pay for whatever labor went directly into the production of the shirts, and walk out? Of course not! If we did that, every business on the planet would go out of business.
Now, you may reply that we can't do that since there are buildings to maintain and all that. Exactly. Just like the software vendors have fixed costs to hire their employees and get them to write software. Just because there is a level of abstraction between the price of a product and its need to offset these fixed costs, does not mean that you can disregard it.
So, now everybody repeat after me, "Zero marginal cost != Zero fixed cost."
until then, follow your concionce! its a far better guide than current american laws.
Holly bejesus! I hope nobody follows that advice. Do you want anarchy? You can't just disregard a law if you don't like it. If you don't like the laws, call your Senator. In the mean time, you have live with them. There is a process for disagreeing with the system. You can't just go off on your own every time you disagree.
It's interesting how he makes an argument that is perfectly valid, however you attack him as a biggot or corporate whore. In fact, you shouldn't be scolding him. You are 'ethics major', therefore you understand that ethics is based on value systems. He has a particular value system and you have a particular value system. His value system doesn't match your value system so you flame him. Making analogies between hitler and 1980's corporate gluttony, doesn't make sense.
It would seem that you don't truely understand ethics at all. Perhaps you need to rely on your 'sociology major' work more.
Just buy used cds and vcds, like I do - that way you're not supporting MPAA and the RIAA. They can't bitch when you own the media the mp3/divx is cut from...
;)
and stop buying those crappy dvds - half the anime dvds are no better than VHS quality and for some the VCDs. VCDs have no region locks either - and are a good choice for ppl that use a tv card instead of a tv anyway.
Companies won't sign blanket contracts.
What if the company would have researched the same or very similar idea and thus You'd only bring them some minor enhancements? Would they have to pay You? And if they decided that the price in the contract is too high for the enhancements and wouldn't use Your work, only their own research, would they have to pay?
The first contact between the person with an idea and a company willing to listen would be such that neither party would be paying anything for the other party. You could sign NDAs (both ways), and the person would then tell the rough version - the idea, and why it's worth something.
Only then could the company consider the idea, and whether they already have research done on a subject similar to that idea. And, if they decide to rather use their own research than whatever the person could provide, they can call it quits knowing that the person can now go to another company and if the other company listens, they may be ready with a product similar to what the company had considered pretty much the same time this company can. Which would mean competition.
So, it may be worth to buy the idea just to keep it out of other companies' hands. But, if one company has considered it, and some individual has come up with it, how likely is it that a competitor in the same business area has considered it already?
On a related front did you get a load of the suits on the news yesterday, from Disney who actually said that paying TV and movie writers any more than they get now could destroy the entire industry and imperil the US's place at the top of the entertainment food chain.
Changing "US's place" for "Holywood's place" and I think you clearly set your position... Let's remind that US's film industry also suffers a lot due to the golden spot of a small LA downtown...
Why should he suggest an alternative? The current system is flawed. If there is no alternative, then we are doomed to life without any new music, software, books, and so on. We cannot allow this to continue. Destroy all intellectual property laws now. There will be a brief period of confusion, but comeon, you really think the world will just give up on these things, just because ONE business model loses the government protection it needs to survive? A new way WILL be found, but we can't pretend to know what it will be. The only way to determine what business model WILL work without intellectual property laws is to force it, by removing the laws, and watching what happens. Of course, this will never happen, as the large corporations that run our world would have to change, and they will do everything in their power to prevent it, and the masses have been brainwashed to believe that what is 'right' for certain existing businesses is 'right' ethically, morally, and practically. As many others have predict, I predict things will get worse and worse, then finally collapse whne it gets so bad that there is no denying that intellectual property is bunk.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
*snort*
So? everything is a social product. Let's say you manufacture something. You do not do this in a vacuum. You do pay the people who contribute directly, employees, supplies, etc. But, what about the guy that built the building that you work in, the guy who paved the road that you drive your products over, the folks who built the truck that you use to transport goods. Do you have to include them in a cut of your profits? Do they, therefore have the right to take your goods?
The answer is: no. Those people have already been compensated by you in some manner (you rent or bought the building, you paid taxes to get the road paved, you bought or rent the truck). In the case of intellectual property, why would we treat anything differently? The intellectual work performed by someone should be just as valid in the marketplace, and be justly reward, as phsyical labor.
The second point is utterly baffling. Let me get this straight: if you are a dull, plodding worker who punches a time card, by all means, you should benefit from your labor. However, if you're talented, gifted, or busted your ass to be able to creating something new, innovative, and popular... well, jack, you don't get squat for that.
What a load of horse shit. Who the hell is this Hettinger dweeb to decide that if I make a symphony, that I can't benefit from it monitarily? Because "natural talent" is involved? Does that mean that since I'm out of shape, I should get paid more to go dig a ditch than someone who's fit, since it is a lot easier for him? No, the end result is what we judge. In Hettinger's mind, for the greatest reward, I should find the job I'm least suited to do, and go struggle with it. Obvious idiocy.
From the practical, market standpoint, if we want to see more of something, like innovation, we reward it. Of course, the market isn't perfect. I think it's pretty obscene that someone playing a child's game ends up making more than several hundred teachers, who are responsible for educating our young. But, unless someone can wave a magic wand and remove the necessity for people to pay for food, shelter, and the other necessities, not to mention luxuries, we need to somehow compensate people for the intellectual work they do. The market is the only functional way we have found to do that. And to enable the market to work, we have to treat intellectual labor as if it were physical labor, within the bounds of copyright law.
Yet as soon as the MPAA does that it becomes labelled "intimidation tactics". I read the article and from what I gathered Excite@Home told people if they didn't stop sharing copyright material they would lose their service.
Point: Why is it the ISP's job to terminate a user's service if the MPAA simply alleges that a user may be illegally copying a movie that is protected by the MPAA?
If there is an allegation made, it is up to the MPAA to prove that allegation, and up to the courts to determine if said allegation is correct, and for a judge to award damages based on a legally made judgement.
In this case, the MPAA is acting as the prosecutor, judge, and jury, and is making the ISP do the dirty work of punishing somebody who may have simply had a "matrix.mov" file that was an animation of a mathematical matrix being inverted.
This sort of intimidation is not only illegal and immoral, but is reprehensible. The MPAA is not trying to, quote, educate the population about what is appropriate, both from an ethical standpoint, and from a legal standpoint, since they are not acting legally or ethically themselves.
People using Gnutella should be afforded the benefits of being innocent until proven guilty. And, if I were to be one of the people targeted by MPAA's Stalinist tactics, I would expect them to show me notarized evidence of (1) exactly what of their intellectual property I have supposedly pirated, (2) proof that I had offered it on the Gnutella service, and (3) that I had actually pirated (or gave to somebody) that item. If any of the above three things are not given to me when they make their accusation, then the do not have any chance at all to win in a court case, and as such, any preliminary action taken against me by anybody, including my ISP, is totally unwarranted.
Remember, this isn't about piracy. It's about intimidation tactics.
If the MPAA can have my ISP shut me down just by asking my ISP to do so because they simply say that I am a pirate without any proof, then I should have the same legal rights to have the internet hosting service that provides, say, MPAA.ORG disconnect them just because I claim that they are guilty of slander and/or libel for calling me a pirate.
Until such time as human beings have as much rights as big-bucks trade organizations, there is little hope for America to be the "land of the free."
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Personally I don't see this as a bad thing. The reason we boot troublemakers isn't because we disagree with what they're doing, its because we get so many complaints.
If we are common carriers, this becomes our defense, "I'm sorry but we are not responsible for the conduct of our users. Please contact this user directly if you wish to pursue action against them."
This would lighten the administrative burden significantly.
Is inviting some friends over to see a movie illegal? After all, they may not buy the movie after they've already seen it...
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
No - however, if you choose to PUBLISH what you read/download, you are REDISTRIBUTING, and can't do so without a permission. This does, however, more or less apply whether or not the author applies a copyright statement. In other words, just because something doesn't have a copyright-statement doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted.
- Vegard
The answer to this and other tantalizing questions is of course - privacy.
- Use freenet.
- Subscribe to a Zero-Knowledge type of service.
- Use trusted, logless proxies with SSL.
By default there's no privacy on today's internet, but the technology is there. So far the convenience factor has prevented most privacy technologies from achieving critical mass, but draconian content-control powergrabs by the MPAA and RIAA might just tip the balance.
Why didn't they use this tactic against Napster? At least they aren't attacking the tool and are focusing on the people violating the law. What possible excuse could the MPAA have for treating Gnutella different other than, "We could attack the tool with Napster." Bah.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
When the producer of intellectual property recieves intellectual property protection, the producer almost always only recieves protection on what the producer adds. In other words, even though that piece of IP is probably ultimately derived from public works, it is truely not the public works that are adding the value to the end product or service. If the IP producer adds nothing of value, he simply won't sell his product or service (because all that is public can already be had by other means); nor will the public be deprived of the works that the producer derived his work from. If, on the other hand, the producer adds value the public still gets to keep all that was public, while recieving the benefit of the producer's innovation, albeit for a price.
Now granted, there have been some rare and notable exceptions, but these are issues of abuse of the system, not the system itself. I don't have time to address the other "points", maybe later...
topic.
Easy. Do you prefer to pay for something, or not to pay for something? I prefer not to. I don't care that it's not legal so long as there's basically no chance of being caught.
I think that's the basic mentality.
The MPAA should go after individuals instead of technology platforms. But what their doing is an ip-terrorism tactic; Forcing their concept of Intellectual Property of the world by creating an atmosphere of terror. People are uncertain if they are legal or not, or what the legal status of IP should be or even is. The MPAA wants peole to be afraid, deathly afraid, that they might run afowl of the MPAA. The MPAA want people to be afraid so there is a lower probability that they will be challenged and thus a greater probability that the MPAA will get their way as legistlation changes. The MPAA doesn't have a legitimate platform, if they did they wouldn't need to terrorise citizens around the world. They want you to believe that if you enjoy any form of entertainment using a digital technology platform without their specific and ongoing approval that you will befall an uncertain fait. That uncertainty combined with specific horrifying examples of what they've done to those they've accused of minor and uncertain transgressions constitutes terrorism.
The MPAA is an IP-Terrorists.
So civil rights protection is the 60s was not useful legislation?
Internet access is not a civil fucking right. Besides which you are paying for a service from a corporation. If they are threatened with a lawsuit if they don't axe your account they're going to drop your account faster than you can say "Wait that's unfair". Internet access is not fucking essential either. If it was so fucking essential you wouldn't be downloading movies under questionable legal premises would you? As for the ISPs think of it this way, they're making a scant revenue (40 or so dollars a month, a decent portion of which is not profit) from your personal account. If the MPAA sues them the legal bills merely for serving a court summons will cost more than you pay in a year.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Stop whining about ISPs axing accounts of people downloading files of questionable legality. It is a VERY simple calculus for the ISP. You pay them x numbers of dollars per month which over the course of a quarter amounts to so much revenue (4x). Then say the MPAA comes along and says "Cut of Joe GnutellaUser's broadband account or we'll see you in court for aiding his downloading of illegally copies movies!". The ISP quickly calculates the revenue you add for a quarter and compares it against the cost of an attourney showing up in court. If what you add to the company's revenue is less than what stand to cost them, they cut off your account.
It can be argued that you can rip CDs to MP3 and share them over services like Gnutella and Napster as you're not making money or anything and there are no glaring warnings against said practices on the CDs. However, if you watch one of your downloaded movies and see the FBI warning about copying and redistributing the movie you're about to watch the thought should occur to you that you're not quite operating within the bounds of the law. Whether thats right or wrong doesn't matter. What does matter is that warning as well as explicit copyright prevention measures gives the MPAA plenty of legal backing to persue people making copies of and trading their movies via the internet. They aren't taking away any of your fucking civil rights. They are upholding their fucking copyright like the copyright laws REQUIRE THEM TO. Yes the sales scheme and market control the MPAA uses is fucked up. I think Joe Valenti is a dipshit both personally and professionally and the MPAA is a crock of shit. This still doesn't give people reason to whine after getting caught trading legally questionable material on peer to peer sharing services.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
More importantly, I wish I had the sense of humor to be a troll. Then again, we've got plenty of funny trolls; if I had a sense of humor I'd be more use as a moderator instead...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Bravo! Annoying as they sometimes are, there's something about having an active and humorous troll culture that just makes /. fun. Maybe because they don't take anything seriously - and wouldn't we all be better off if we were a little less serious? Sometimes I wish I had the time to be a proper troll, but oh well.
Man, I miss MEEPT...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
As I understand it, there's no objection to someone having a private copy of a CD in MP3 form. The objection is against putting it up on Napster for multiple other people to grab.
If you're argument is that *some* of the people getting your MP3 copy may have paid for the music in another form, I think you're trying to hide behind legalisms...
As I remember it, the phrasing has something to do with brief quotations for purposes of review. Don't see how that applies here at all.
You might be thinking of the practice of "sampling", which arguably is allowed under the doctrine of "fair use".
Copying != taking.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Going after users who they have witnessed infringing, is a hell of a lot better than going after toolmakers whose tools may or may not be used to infringe.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Oh yeah, it's pretty easy to share a couple GB of movies over a 56k modem connection. If the MPAA is so damn evil how come everyone wants their product?
Slashdot has continually said that the MPAA should got after individual copyright infrigers rather than services like Napster. Yet as soon as the MPAA does that it becomes labelled "intimidation tactics". I read the article and from what I gathered Excite@Home told people if they didn't stop sharing copyright material they would lose their service.
What, exactly, is the problem with that?
In response to the numerous posts claiming copying movies, cd's, etc. is pure theft, try and keep this in mind: In the case of music, I will agree, since the lack of export and content controls on music is only just now starting to be addressed. (The RIAA would love to have, for example, region-encoding of CD's.) But in the case of movies, I have no sympathy for the MPAA or for anyone else. They've made this bed, now they have to lie in it.
.avi's, not because it's my first choice, but because it's the only choice I'm given. And how can you claim it's theft, if the very organizations that claim I'm stealing are the ones making sure I can't get it through any other means?
I'm perfectly happy to pay for movies. I make enough money to buy DVD's, and the respect I have for the filmmaking process dictates that I support artists I enjoy -- I WANT them to make more movies, so I'll do what I can to encourage that. But what do I do when the MPAA et. al. have backed me into a corner with content controls? If I can't get a copy of uncut Evangelion on DVD, of COURSE I'm going to download it! Would I have bought it were it available? Yes, absolutely! But I'm not given that choice.
Anime isn't the only example, I'm not even much of an anime fan. LEXX, the series, is available on DVD... In Canada. They don't have US distribution rights, so no LEXX DVD's for me! So I'm going to download the
Other examples are similar to the Evangelion one, where I'm ONLY given the option to buy censored/dubbed/cut/pan'n'scan versions of my favorite movies and shows. This trend will only continue; as the ack-acks as I saw them called try to control content further and further.
Piracy will grow, not because it's getting easier (Although that contributes) but because increasingly the methods used by people to get media not easily available to them (Such as overseas mail-order) will not be available due to digital content restrictions.
It's funny, because a lot of people dismiss the fanatical types by saying no one cares if they pirate stuff, it's the mainstream they're worried about, since it's a much larger demographic. What they don't realize is that the hardcore fans will be the ones who are constantly upgrading technology to fight content restrictions, and once they write it it's available to the general public. In other words, this isn't just Bubblegum Crisis fans making tapes, this is more akin to the fans making the VCR's (Via things like decss) and handing them out for free. Much more powerful.
-- If we were in any other industry they would've shot us a long time ago.
From the Ranger Inc. website:
Searching.
We never sleep. Our IOS software is constantly searching the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our intelligent scanning probes are customized to each client's needs and patrol the Internet searching for suspicious sites.
Hmmm...
Ok, lets do this: Form a company (Tonto Inc.?) that lives to bushwhack these nasty little critters.
Offer a bounty for the "skins", like they used to do for wolves and such.
Or maybe "turn" them like double agents, feeding bogus info into the intel databases...
(big grin)
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
Until these guys go after Microsoft and their
Windows File Sharing.
Most @home AUPs read in something about users not allowed to run servers. This would include your Quake 3 server, 5GB pr0n ftp, and gnutella servers. I _think_ things like PCAnywhere could qualify as *personal* use, but most other servers would not qualify.
But most gnutella clients are also servers. The client is fine - a legitmate network client tool, much like lynx, telnet, or ssh - but the server part is not permitted - much like apache, telnetd, or sshd would be frowned upon.
Most people seem to forget that these lines are intended for *personal* use only. More bandwidth comes at a cheaper price because some company will pay more for the right to run services - a premium.
In the end, make sure you read your ISP's AUP to understand where you stand. If they do not allow server software, chances are the MPAA will only need to mention "server" to get you in trouble.
Sorry, but that's the way it is - as I see it.
;P
---
Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Yes,I'm concerned about the MPAA using heavy-handed tactics and intimidation. Their approach seems to be "someone may infringe, so we best scare you pre-emptively." Usually scaring people pre-emptively is often considered terrorism or harassment, but I digress.
What is ignored all too often in stories like this is that there are companies out there spying on us. They monitor transactions, scan files, etc. just to see if we might be doing anything illegal.
Now if our government did this, people would be up in arms. But apparently monitoring me and my ISP without given cause beyond "you might be doing something" is just fine and dandy if you're a company. The threat to the internet is not the governments directly - it's governments that allow this to go on.
I suppose Big Brother is OK as long as he evolved via Free Enterprise. And sadly, intellectual property issues or not, this is plain disturbing.
You know, I have to wonder if some class-action suits are in order against the MPAA and the cyberspyers. Invasion of Privacy? Slander? RICO? arassment? I'm sure some lawyers out there could make quite a witch's brew of legal trouble.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
This is a bit obscure, but the reason napster is different is because
- napster is a corporation
- Napster's business plan is based on attracting users to their service because they *know* those users will use it to pirate music. They know people want to do that. That's called contributory infringement.
That's very different than Gnutella, where the tool exists in it's own right and is obviously not limited to mp3. If you are an individual, and you are offering up copyrighted material for public download, why *shouldn't* they go after you?
is an urban myth, along with thinking saying 'no law enforcement personell are allowed to log in'. It's like asking 'are you a cop' to an undercover cop. Not gonna help you one bit.
Lots of BBS' tried to call themselves 'tryware' and such. I doubt that was ever used in court. It doesn't matter if it's for 24 hours; if it's protected by copyright, you don't have *any* right to distribute it, for 24 hours only or not.
An injunction against a trader forbidding them trading movies online?
Believe me,the *first* time they break that injunction by trading again, the judge will *NOT* be happy, or lenient.
You are assuming that there must be a way to keep the status-quo with regards to how musicians live and work, while providing a different method for them to receive compensation. That's not a fair way to look at things. There is no natural 'right' for musicians to exist; they exist because of the laws and desires of the society they are part of.
A more realistic way to look at this is to say: If we abolish copyright, will we still have music? Of course we will. How will it work? That doesn't *matter*.
The MPAA controls _entertainment_.
I no longer feel the need to be entertained by such a fascist organization.
Think I'll spend my time learning or working or reading and leave all the mass media crap I used to pay for at the mall.
Turn off the TV, Stop going to the Movies, we don't need entertainment at this price.
Barnaby
This is, of course, why people should download data with an anonymous system, so they can't be tracked. So go use freenet
This sounds like my previous occupation, where myself and a few choice friends operated a "Vehicle Lending Library" where we would temporary borrow a strangers car for 24 hours and then leave it in a ditch somewhere.
According to the street legends at the time this was perfectly legit as long as you dumped the car with a full tank of gas.
You are an ultra right-wing piece of shit. The rich get their money by exploiting the poor. So getting money from rich people and giving it back to the poor isn't stealing.. it's justice.
-Splat
One of the big problems here is that according to copyright/fair use law, I as a consumer am allowed to copy anything I purchase. I am also allowed to give these copies away. I am *not* allowed to sell them. The MPAA/RIAA want to take this right away from consumers now that making copies is trivial.
In the past, copies were generally not as good a quality as the original, and I had to purchase the media to put the copy on. Digital copies can be exact copies of the original with no loss in quality, and most people have plenty of space on their hard drives for some MP3's, etc.
How can you determine what is a pirated copy and what is a fair use copy? Or would you have use give up the right to copy legally purchased data altogether? I have over 1,000 CD's, and I have ripped many songs off of those MP3's to be used on my computer, because it is more convenient than constantly swapping CD's. Is that illegal? What if I want to copy those MP3's to another computer? Is that illegal? What if I want to send an MP3 to a friend because I think he might like the band- should that be illegal? Where exactly would *you* draw the line as to what's legal and what's not??
The dry fish swims alone.
Well there are a few good sources of non-hollywood movies on the 'net, some of which are pretty good. There are also all kinds of festivals with cheap movies in meat-space.
I'm one of those people who basically thinks IP rules are BS. I download MP3s of songs that aren't public domain, I play pirated games, but not exclusively. When a game is good, I'll often go out and buy a copy even if the illegal version works fine, why? I think the price is right for that game, I want to encourage more games like it to be made, and plus I get manuals and stuff. Many of the pirated games I try out last a day or 2 on my drive because they turn out to be crap. This isn't something you can always determine using the demos of the games. Who is hurt by this? Nobody really. If I had to buy every single game I played I'd be very careful what I bought. This would mean I'd never take a risk on an interesting concept, and would stick to well known, well reviewed games.
Anyhow, that's my take on it. I also think movies are an interesting case. I don't mind shelling out big bucks to see a movie in the theatre. Why? Because I don't feel like I'm paying for a license to see the movie once in a particular setting, I feel like I'm paying big bucks to be shown the movie on a huge screen with a great sound system, comfy chairs, and someone to clean up after me. For similar reasons I'll sometimes pay to play games in an arcade that I already have at home. They have better controllers, they make it easier to play against someone, they have great big screens, etc.
I used to work somewhere where we were talking to Sony about working with them, we found out they're not interested unless you're going to be selling something like a million units of something. (It's been a while so I can't remember the exact details).
If your market is small enough, the huge fish won't care. If it's going to be a huge market then either go with a company that can get a lot of VC funding, or go with a huge company.
Patents sometimes make it possible for small companies to compete, but only if that small company can find $10,000 to get the patent, or the $50,000 to defend that patent. So that's not really a "small" company anymore. And it will only work if that patent doesn't depend on one of the tens of thousands of patents that one of the big companies already owns.
Basically, if Sony wants your market they'll find a way to get it, patent or no patent. I personally can't remember the last time a tiny little company used a patent to fight off a big company.
And the average cost of getting something patented is about $10,000. That'll buy an awful lot of lawyering.
Ok, so Mozart died nearly penniless. You claim he had to "fight for every penny he did get", implying that he went through much of his life poor. Where do you get this from? From the biographies I've seen he was bad at managing his money but was paid lavish sums at various points in his life for his work.
You also claim that "He may have been able to create more incredible music had he had the luxury of not having to take students". Yes, that's true. But it could also be that if he had had a very easy life his music would have been less intense and emotional. It's sad, but often the best art is the result of suffering.
The fact is, Mozart did produce amazing music back when the concept of Intellectual Property didn't exist, and he's not an isolated case. The economics change when IP exists, but the fact is that great art will be produced whether or not IP rules exist.
It's debatable whether or not IP rules benefit the artist in these days where IP is everywhere. Most IP producers are simply forced to hand over IP rights to their employers/managers/producers, whatever. But even more debatable is whether or not IP rules benefit society in general.
In an extremely simplified case, which is better for society?
Sure, there's an easy way around patents. You go to a company and say:
"I have a really great idea that I can't afford to make on my own but that's right up your alley. If you'll just sign this contract I'll tell you all about it"
The contract would essentially say "If you use this idea you agree to pay me XXX dollars or YY cents per unit sold. In exchange I won't tell anybody else about the idea".
Now once the company starts producing the units anybody can duplicate the invention and make their own, even improving on it. If the company is smart they'll keep the project under wraps until they're ready to hit the market, then they'll go out there with a reasonable price and large quantities. If they do things right it will take a while for competitors to have a means to challenge them. They will have trouble meeting the price unless they can take advantage of economies of scale, and if the invention is fairly complex it will take a while for them to figure it all out so they can make their own version.
The only tricky thing is making that initial contract well. You have to make sure they don't get away with building something just different enough that it doesn't qualify then not paying you anything. But any good lawyer should be able to word it properly.
The best thing about this system is that it only works for useful, non-obvious inventions. If someone were to try this with an invention like "you click once on something to buy it", copying the invention would be so trivial that nobody would want to pay much for the right to use it first.
Actually, your argument is the one with the leaks:
If someone shares a CD, nobody will buy music any more.
How many times have i read on /. someone saying "i haven't bought a CD in months - it's all Napster, dOOd!"... ?
If Linux is available on the web free for download, nobody will buy it.
SubPop Records is not RedHat. How do music companies of the future make any money? Music doesn't require tech support, it doesn't need service and you don't need to customize it.
If AOL keeps giving out CDs with 75 years of free service, nobody will buy it.
Don't be silly. They don't give away 75 years of free service.
If I download some grainy version of The Matrix recorded in a theater with a video camera, I'm not going to buy the Dolby 5.1 DVD.
Your weakest point yet. You assume that people are interested in more the visuals more than the story. But there are plenty of movies where the visuals are really not that important - the story is almost the whole thing. You can generally get the story that from the dialogue and broad visual strokes - humans are really good at picking up facial expressions from blurred, distorted, grainy, etc. images (see picasso et al.). You don't need DVD quality (or even 8mm film quality) to tell a smile from a frown.
People who manage to find and watch a pirated copy of the next Woody Allen movie are probably not going to rush out and buy it on UltraGroovyTech DVD for the awesome effects; they've already got the whole thing from the copy - the story.
Next!
indeed.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
A more important point: whether or not I charge for it, you are NOT entitled to do what you want with whatever it is i create, without permission.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Please note that this horribly overused argument is blatantly wrong; the reason is that IP laws give the creator exclusive control over distribution. Exclusive control over distribution is, in effect, the asset. Once you start distributing someone else's IP, without their consent, you've destroyed the value of the asset.
The ease of doing something is no measure of the right to do it. Morality has to be part of this.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
- Make the MPAA/RIAA prove you downloaded something you don't legalyl own! As for "sharing" to others. Put all
.mp3's and movies in .zip files with a text file that states that "you can only download and keep this file if you legally own the original (cassette,record,VHS,Beta/DVD). IF not you must immidiately delete this file."
Why even say you downloaded them at all? You have the original, you have a digital copy, you made it from the original as far as they know. No way to disprove this, either (unless the movie has one of those stupid 'bugs' somewhere on it)._______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
FC Closer
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
The MPAA and RIAA are'nt afraid of Napster per se., but that Napster has the potential to replace them. What if Napster changed a bit and started soliciting the artists themselves for original music? The web right now has the ability to replace the MPAA and RIAA with work. Then the artists might be able to make the money instead of them.
One basic rule of buissness is this: get products and supplies from as close to the source as possible. Eg. the manufacturer
If the artists woke up and started distributing music/movies straight from the studios the RIAA and MPAA would be made obsolete. The RIAA and MPAA could not compete in this kind of market
Napster and similar products have the ability to to bypass the 3rd party. Furthermore; it gives the studio direct feedback as to what people actually want. (gee Star Wars X was just down loaded 2e7 times last month - maybe time for a series)
Seems like the MPAA and RIAA are trying desperately to protect their cash cow. Once artists/studios wise up, the days of MPAA and RIAA are numbered. They know it.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Simple: Because we want the movies, and more specifically because we want the picture quality, audio quality and extras that the format provides.
Mind you, most people I know have region-free DVD players, and just buy whichever versions they prefer (usually R1, since they come out earlier and often have more extras). Also, shops in Denmark sell both R1 and R2 discs (too little demand for others), so in practice, the region coding system is simply not in effect over here. Or rather, it's only in effect for those who don't know about it, or are not willing to pay extra to get earlier or better versions.
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- 'K' in Men in Black.
Your bank account can be represented by a bitstream.
New versions of Gnutella clients should make it possible to block known audit nazis like Ranger Inc, possibly by a list of known IP-addresses. A community based effort to maintain a web page with offending IP's wouldn't be too hard to maintain.
Has anyone spotted Ranger Inc and know what IP's they're operating under? Anybody got any other information about how the operate?
/cj
Theft is depriving someone of the use of their property. If I copy a song you've written, are you deprived of the use of it? No, you can still play that song as many times as you want. You have not been deprived. There is no theft going on.
Copyright was invented to promote creation of new art, through granting temporary rights to works. However, the world is rapidly changing.
The problem your friends are having and which is going to get worse is that the idea of small local bands worked fine while distribution was limited. How many Gaelic folk music creators do you think there are in the world? 250? 1000? How many albums do they release per year? One? A half? Best case, that would be 125 albums per year, for the crowd interested in gaelic folk music. Now, that works fine while just the greatest 5 are distributed around the world, and the rest are sold at local sites, since you'd get a small selection.
But enter the Internet. And you have 125 albums per year available over the net. Only the absolute cream is _ever_ going to get a demand at all. You're competing on a worldwide basis, and there creative people are a dime a dozen.
Im sorry, but your friends just arent needed anymore. I've never bought more than 20 cd's in a year and I never will. I dont, nor does anyone else, want to listen to five songs at once 24 hours per day, 365 days per year just to hear all the available music in the small segment (altho larger than gaelic folk music) I am interested in.
That, not the copying of music, is the problem facing small scale bands (and largescale ones as well... it isnt strange the big music companies can get away with screwing artists over... the line wanting to replace them as lifetime debt losers of the month is long).
Copyright was dreamed up to promote creativity. We do not need that promotion as much anymore. The hobbyist people and those being creative for fame or for fun will more than satisfy ability of consumers to consume.
Uh, if we're hurting individual artists so much, how come artists like TLC, who were once extremely popular, still went bankrupt (this is before Napster of course)? I don't condone theft, but if you can't see that CD sales goes to the managers and NOT the artists in most cases, then you're pretty naive. (Now, if the manager IS the artist, like in many cases, then your case holds up - which is why I always buy the CDs of indepedents and other artists). Check out the dozens of wonderfully written articles on Salon (several well written ones by Courtney Love, to have my point proven).
So, what if, like me and most of my music, I make a copy for my friends who then keep it for, say, 2 months before taping over it with something else... is that illegal? How is that different then me just temporarily lending my own copy whenever they felt like watching it? I personally will never and have never kept any "illegal" stuff I've downloaded/copied for more then a short period of time...
You got an insightful for basically trashing every single popular artist out there... now THAT is just plain silly. TLC has more then enough proof to show their manager screwed them over (they've done so many interviews with news and other shows it's ridiculous)...
Anyways, I dunno why I'm even responding to your flamebait/troll comment... ugh.
Sharing movies is illegal. If someone shares a movie, they aren't going to buy it. That's money lost for the makers. What's wrong with crime prevention.
I'll make sure never invite friends over to watch a movie I rented - since I'm sharing the movie with them and all... wouldn't want the multi-billionaires to be harmed by me not forcing my friends to cough up $4 each at Blockbluster...
It won't happen.
If ideas can't be property because they are social products, then private possessions or property of almost any kind should also not exist. I cannot build a car without suppliers of energy; miners; rail and port infrastructure. Nor can I sell it without roads.
A car is a product of a social process, one that is mediated by the exchange of money for private goods and exaction of taxes for public goods.
And, it seems to me that it would be disastrous to build any kind of a system based on rewarding people for the the amount of effort or risk they undertake. How many fools do you know who take unnecessary risks, or monomaniacs who work endlessly at pointless tasks? Capitalism is reasonably workable because people are paid based on the willingness of other people to pay them; we don't always like the results, but it is better than most. The relationship between risk and reward is not mathematically fixed -- it is just in practice people are unwilling to take higher risks if the expected return is higher. To say people should be rewarded for risks sounds like the same thing, but it is not -- in fact it is logically inconsistent.
Private property and possessions are a social convention that works for some kinds of things, because there is a maximization of effeciency if we allow peole to claim exclusive benefits from their work. More cars get built when the companies building them and consumers buying them get most of the benfit, than if the benefit were spread among all producers and consumers. Land gets used more wisely if you have to deal with what's left after you exploit it. There is a happy confluence between the pursuit of private gain and the maximization of public benefit; therefore the public can be expected to support private property.
Ideas are a different story. The efficiency of idea production is not enhanced by restricting the flow of ideas or the benefits of ideas in the same way that physical goods are. Society does not benefit from the restriction of ideas, and therefore can't be expected to support it. Private individuals only benefit from the restriction of ideas in that it is inconsistently practiced.
Songs, recorded performances and software are probably somewhat in between physical artifacts and pure ideas. Personally, I think that the main historical reason to support copyright was the need to attract the investment for expensive duplication, transport and marketing. I doubt that there would be fewer songs, or less variety , if there were no commercial market for music. However, it is probable that the existence of a private market for music means that different kinds of music are made than if there were no. No Phil Spector, no wall of sound. No Britney Spears. Probably plenty of corner jive, hip hop, folk, garage rock. Everyone would have a day job.
The big question is absenting the cost and complexity of producing and distributing physical artifacts, is there a need for private property in music? Commercialism changes the kind of music that is created, but whether this is benefical or not is questionable. My tastes are pretty non-commercial, but there is some commercial stuff I like a great deal (not Britney Spears).
One more thing. The thing about ideas, or songs, is that once they get into your head you really can't get voluntarily get them out. Some people here are probably old enough to remember Bobby Goldboro. He should have pay rent on all the brain cells in which "Honey" ("She wreckecd the car and she was sad/And so afraid that I'd be mad/But what the heck?")has taken up unwelcome residence.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
love that good old law and order...
try to think of what it would be like if everyone praticed the ideal of:
"do what you will"
self-interset and self-preservation would make it so that it wouldnt be taken to extremes, or if someone did they soon would,uh have others take extrem action.
we have laws so that, our betters (those who can buy laws) can take extrem actions and get away with it. not so much as self-preservation, that just an excuse...
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
What, like Slash?
(Disclaimers: I haven't worked on Slash, I'm just defending the poster. I do agree with you that the MPAA is doing the right thing for them (for once))
If you don't think that stuff (like books, patents, software, games, movies, music) that can be represented digitally should be paid for, then how do you propose that anyone gets paid to product this stuff?
I'd love to see what happens to any of these fields when the only way of getting paid is via pay-pal donations. Geez.
Personally I'd rather pay $20 to buy the Matrix on DVD than to download some free-the-bits moviemaker's amateur effort and give him a 25c donation. Luckily it'll never happen, but it sure would suck it the law came down on your side and destroyed the business model for high quality digital content.
Just imagine the countless hours tracking and prosecuting this type of stuff just to make the smallest dent. Then think about all of the lawsuits for defamation of character, etc. that they will recieve for not really having any real proof (I.E. IP spoofing, etc.).
Next they are going to have to hit all of the fserve users in IRC (goodluck) and then they are going to have to contend w/ FreeNet (going to need even more luck).
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
MPAA: This user is trading illegal copywrited material, is a bandwith/resource hog, continues after repeated warnings and you are facilitating him.
... ... ok.
Broadband ISP: Errr
User: defamation of character
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
Bob: But IP's can be spoofed. Meet my expert witness...
Do I understand that in this example Bob is a millionair Gnutella user? How else can he afford to defend a case against the MPAA to the point of being able to present expert witnesses?
LOL... yeah, like there's not a zillion ambulance chasing lawyers out there just waiting to sink their claws into the movie/records industry.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
If you can spoof an IP and successfully transfer a movie file *FROM* the spoofed address, please let me know how.. we could re-implement the idea and do it intentionally...
Like they are going to spend the time downloading each movie they see. LOL.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
You would be a defendant. You don't get any money from that.
Not in a counter suit for defamation of character.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
Freenet, by it's very nature, is private. If all you do is pass keys around to a small group of people, the MPAA/RIAA isn't going to do anything. However, if you put up a web page with keys to copyrighted material, they are going to shut you down.
,etc. Yep, their gonna stop that.
ROFL.. you obviously havn't seen the problems w/ all of these free website (geocities, etc.). Hundreds of them are created every day for these sorts of purposes (although they get shutdown fast... but more still pop up in their place). Those pages are a dime a dozen (err.. less actually)... if they get shutdown, nobody cares.
Let's don't forget newsgroups and IRC bots hosting searchable lists of keys. ICQ/AIM groups, etc.
Freenet may not be a direct alternative to napster/gnutella but that's what it's going to become. If you can't see that, maybe you should open your eyes a little wider. It's right there in front of your face.
I'm amazed that people who constantly claim that no copy protection cannot be hacked still feel that they can come up with a technical solution that will completely protect them from being sued for copyright infringement. Talk about hubris.
LOL.. I was thinking the exact opposite. The people who think it can be stopped are ignorant.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
http://freenet.sourceforge.net
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
Sharing movies is completely different from sharing MP3s. A movie costs a couple of orders of magnitude more to produce than an album, yet most DVDs sell for only 2x the price of a CD. Buying CDs is a complete ripoff compared to buying DVDs. If MP3 trading really ramps up, then a couple of record company executives have to buy one less Ferarri that year. If DivX trading puts a dent in movie ticket and video sales then it could force smaller studios out of business. The MPAA definitely has a point here, although I don't know if attacking ISPs is the way to go.
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
I agree. Let these things fail now, and hard. I think Hollywood and the Music industry have gotten greedy, or rather their greed is only now apparent. I wouldn't mind going back to small movie budgets and small local bands rather than the bloated pop that is thrown at our feet. I think a change is in the air. We probably wouldn't ruin so many talented artists by giving them more money than they think they could spend either.
this sig is deprecated
Interesting post... I'd like to make one small point, though:
In today's world, the distribution cost of what is known as "intellectual property" is not the cost of a CD, or some small number, which when multiplied by the scale of the theft, becomes a real number. It is zero. Not very small, but zero. Because music doesn't have to be stolen on CD's, it can be transferred over Napster for absolutely no money at all. And even a billion times zero is still zero.
So I'd like to reiterate the original poster's point: the economics of physical goods don't apply to the economy of intellectual property not because the marginal cost is small, but because the marginal cost is zero!
Not buying something deprives the artist or wallmart in the exact same way as copying the CD does. Every CD that you don't buy deprives the artists of profit that "could have made".
So if don't buy the album because I don't like it then I am not a criminal.
If I don't buy the album because I can listen to the one decent song on the album from my computer then I am a criminal and should be locked up.
I guess intent is everything.
War is necrophilia.
"The rich either have worked harder or have had their risks pay off. This is not an injustice."
Statisticly most rich people have inherited their fortune. they neither worked hard nor took risks (unless you thing riding the polo pony after a scotch is kinda risky).
And guess what since the only way to get money is to either print it or convince someone else to give it to you then the rich did get their money from the poor. Bill gates got to be rich by people giving him money for windows. Money always flows from the poor to the rich. Frequently if the uphill flow goes unchecked the number of poor incease so much that they end up killing the rich. So far societies have set up mechanisms to keep this from happening through taxes as welfare and such. The idea is to keep milking the cow without killing it. Keep that money flowing, keep the number of poor to a managable lever, keep the poor entertained by religion or television so that they get distracted. It works very well in the U.S. Everybody thinks they are middle class and everybody thinks they can get rich only if they tried hard enough. Statisticly of course they have a better chance of getting hit by lighning. Most of us will stay in the wroking class all our lives. No rolex, no mercedes, no penthouse suite in manhattan.
War is necrophilia.
It's not unethical it's the american way.
When faced with stricter environmental controls the chamber went to their puppet in washington and said "it costs too much to make our factories run cleaner" and the their puppet relaxed the clean air requirements.
When faced with increased costs to prevent RSI the chamber went to their puppet and said "it costs too much to buy ergnomic keyboards and chairs" and the puppet dropped the law.
In America it's perfectly OK to say "it costs too much to do the right thing". Good and right have to be balanced with the cost of doing the good and right thing. It's all a cost benefir analysis. The only difference of course is that I don't have a puppet in washington.
War is necrophilia.
Which website is that?
Best Slashdot Co
No. What you described above would be a clearly illegal act of theft. Just the same as if you went to a bookstore, bought a book, copied it, and gave the copies to friends. You have copyright violation confused with plagiarism.
let them read it, copy it, whatever
That's copyright violation, and was illegal before the DMCA.
I just cannot claim it as my own work
Because that would be plagiarism.
Best Slashdot Co
Exactly my point. Well spoken!
- Nothing more, nothing less
Someone posted a citation from this page so I surfed there and read a bit more and found a very interesting example:
I wonder if this works here in Sweden also. Very nice and ethical way to earn some money, don't you think...
- Det är inte ofta man ser en levande kofta
MPAA: This user is trading illegal copywrited material, is a bandwith/resource hog, continues after repeated warnings and you are facilitating him.
... ... ok.
Broadband ISP: Errr
End of story.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
MPAA: This user is trading illegal copywrited material, is a bandwith/resource hog, continues after repeated warnings and you are facilitating him.
... < looks up EULA >... ok.
Broadband ISP: Errr
<Broadband ISP pulls plug on user>
End of story.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
You would be a defendant. You don't get any money from that.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I doubt that this tactic would be very effective because you would also get other users and it doesn't take that much to verify a file or not.
After the 5th time downloading a huge file of junk, a user would never come back. Less users means less usefullness of Gnutilla.
To verify a file all you have to do is pick several random frames in the file and show it to a person for a few seconds. If it is junk, then ignore. If its something interesting, continue to verify and then proceed as normal
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
>Here, they're just pathetic.
It is actually an excellent tactic.
Most of these areas have a limited number of cheap broadband options. Since MPAA is using the ISPs, a legally responsible corporation, against them, this will scare the sh*t out of the individual users. Either stop doing it or lose their sweet broadband. Which one would you chose?
This will be doublely effective because movie files can only be effectivly traded through broadband connections and university/college students are about to go home for the summer so the content available will be dramaticly reduced.
MPAA doesn't even have to go to court with any individual user to make this tactic very effective, all they have to do is convince (not legally court-style prove) the ISPs that these high-usage users are doing something illegal and breaking their EULA.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I'm not in the music biz, but it seems to me record labels should instead be *services* that artists can *employ*. There should be many and they should compete, just like garages compete for your car service dollars. Instead of the other way around, where all the artists are competing and clawing their way up to get noticed by a label which has an steel grip on a physical supply chain of artificial scarcity, which will exploit them, chew them up, and spit them out. "Some of your friends are already this fucked"...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"In the case of intellectual property, why would we treat anything differently?"
Please tell me how someone can have "compensated" any given artist, philosopher, writer, mathemetician, scientist, etc., etc., for something they invent. Markets are based on scarcity. Ideas are infinately duplicatable. Please show me a formula which generates a market value for an idea (no, as shown above, you can't use "effort", as a stupid person who works very hard, very long may create something a smart person could create in a much shorter time with much less effort).
"Who the hell is this Hettinger dweeb to decide that if I make a symphony, that I can't benefit from it monitarily?"
That's not what he's saying. He's just skeptical on the policy of granting a *monopoly* on that thing. A temporary monopoly probably *should* be created to generate incentive. However, total patent and copyright lengths are totally out of wack. What *possible* incentive could be conferred by copyrights which last 70 years **after the creator's death**?
Some people seem to think that a free market is some magic that solves all problems. "We don't *have* to deal with moral/ethical/social issues. The free market will decide!"
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
As a specific example, it should be noted that Mozart did not benefit from anything like the copyright notions we have today. He was paid by people who wanted new Mozart music, despite the fact that there was already Mozart music in existance, often memorized by musicians able to play it back at will.
Mozart also died pennyless and was buried in a paupers grave. He may have been able to create more incredible music had he had the luxury of not having to take students and fight for every penny he did get.
On the other hand he may hove gotten rich and turned into a major slacker. It's possible, but somehow I doubt that anyone who would continue to make music in the circumstances he was in would stop doing so once the going was easy.
What was your point again? I forgot...
-Rob
It's really interesting watching the sort of "consumer" ethics and morals being pushed on Slashdot - basically "if it's not a physical thing, it can't be stolen". So following that logic - it has no value. So all the Slashdotters who are making their living by writing software or creating web pages or doing graphic design or *anything that doesn't produce a physical object* (a printout doesn't count btw) shouldn't get paid since their work has no value. Cool - I don't have to pay my web designer any more. :>
I don't agree with everything the RIAA and MPAA does - they seem to be far more concerned with protecting the recording and movie companies bottom lines than any artist's rights. I definately don't agree with their methods and attitudes in the various cases they've brought against file sharing agencies. However, I don't think that copyright laws should be abolished. By and large they serve a worthwhile purpose. They aren't always used as they should be - and we should be aware of this and attempt to stop it. However, they are often the *only* protection an artists or author has. If the artists or author chooses to give away the fruits of their labors, that's fine. That's their right. However, if they wish to be paid for it - that's their right too.
ObTagLine: The more you run over the 'possum, the flatter it gets.
I'm not going to get in to whether its right or wrong to pirate peoples work but I will answer a couple of your points.
:)
and they don't feel in the least bit guilty about the fact that they're committing a criminal act
That's because they are not taking something from anybody. All they are stealing is the potential for them to make more money. The "victim" doesn't lose anything physical.
To explain....
Using copyright together with non-redistribute licenses is based on the idea of artificial scarcity of a product. This is completely non-intuitive and unnatural-feeling to many people. It has worked so far, because a significant part of the price paid is for distribution and duplication. These days however, those two cost next to nothing and the people are starting to feel more and more that it's unfair to charge for these things if they can do it themselves. The industries business model is starting to fail. Remember that copyright is something that is not naturally present. It can only happen when some large authority intervenes and removes freedom from some people in order to grant protection to another group (and of course the two overlap)
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
Personallty, I would feel great because I do such things for the love of it and I want it to be shared by as many people as possible. (My main problem is that I'm no good at it
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
While you can rant about things being RIGHT, and WRONG, sometimes there is more than one side to the story.
Why does Dave Mathews support Napster? Why do so many others? It's because copying is NOT theft. When you copy a Sting CD, he does not suddenly lose 15 bucks. He loses and gains nothing. If you chose to buy his CD he'll get about a buck... since he's been around long enough to get a VERY good contract deal. In general artists don't get even a tenth of the money from an album sale that the label takes. If you go to his concert, or join his fan club though, then he'll see some cash
So... using napster is not theft and using it doesn't "take anyone's money". If you really like the RIAA, buy the album. If you like the artist go see them in concert and buy a T-shirt.
I think the RIAA is a bunch of ass ponies, and that making a business of gathing a monopoly of other people's music related IP is the truely unethical act here. The reason our founding fathers created IP laws was to encourage more innovation. With the advent of rediculously long copyright lifetimes, long trademark lifetimes, software patents, and attempts to make file sharing illegal, it is clear that our IP laws are no longer working as intended. They stifle more innovation than they encourage.
Trying to shut down file sharing is just further evidence that the RIAA is run by some unethical types. People who chose to invest in companies such as RIAA members are chosing to put money against the advancing free trade of information. I think that they might want to reconsider their options now that we are living in a wired world.
I'm a gnu world man.
Yeah, but when I xored my 6G .VOB file with /dev/null, I still got the first 6G of the movie :)
I dunno, criminalizing millions of people overnight seems to have worked fine for the laws that support the War On Some Drugs.
Sure, it's buggered the population and turned the Fourth Amendment into toilet paper, but it's not like that's stopped it or anything.
Probably because a guy on a cablemodem sharing movies with other people not on his ISP's network costs his cable company a small fortune in transit charges.
> those 62 MILLION Napster users are going to have to go somewhere to get their fix....
USENET is ill-suited to the distribution of large binaries, but I'll bet it's cheaper from an ISP's point of view to have a 4-5 Terabyte RAID array and an OC-3 (A full USENET feed is 250G per day) to download and serve the alt.binaries.* hierarchy over its own wires than it is to have "those 62 million P2P users" snarfing the same stuff from other networks.
Consider - 500 people downloading a 600M DivX'd movie is 500 * 0.6G = 300G.
When it's 500 different movies, something like USENET breaks down. But when it's 500 people all downloading The Matrix, it's cheaper to grab it once from a feed and serve it over your own LAN.
Wow, great plan. Then you'd get to spend thousands defending yourself in court. And at the end of the day you'd have gained...nothing.
I agree. Ethics, shmethics. Right and wrong is totally subjective. Do whatever you like.
Say, you use hotmail? I hate people who use Microsoft products. I guess I'll hunt you down and kill you. I'm certainly not going to let you live because some say it's wrong according to ancient rules of "moral" conduct.
Like trying to brush away a few bees, when a swarm is attacking you.
No luck.
The only thing that would make me think twice before using gnutella would be if the MPAA banned me from broadband. Maybe they'll blacklist people, so no ISP will give you broadband. Now THAT would suck.
Here (Germany) the law realized, that stopping people from copying movies in their homes and giving them to friends is unenforcable. So it is *allowed* to make copies for private use (so to follow the law by the letter you may not give away a copy, but you can lease the movie to someone, he copies it (he may even give it to you to copy it for him) and returns the "original").
To compensate this there's GEMA: for blank media a certain amount is paid to GEMA which (supposedly) hands it on to the artists. Now this system is getting out of hand since the GEMA wants money for anything "computer" since you can make copies with computers. We'll see where that leads to.
I wonder if there really is a law forbidding to make copies of movies for private use, since that seems pretty much unenforcable and hence even unethical. There's quite a difference to *publicly* sharing movies via gnutella in my opinion and i think these issues shouldn't be confused.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
For the sake of variety and the small artist, you definitely should be against the RIAA side.
RIAA wants to make sure that no alternative channel will possibily get any efficiency. Napster is very effective in spreading non-RIAA music.
Sure, your musician friend might lost some original sales they generate from thier fixed number of audience. But they will gain more audience in brand new ground because people accidentally download thier music. This is free advertizing for them, sorta like putting thier songs on radio for the masses. How do you know that some Japanese won't like thier scottish music? Napster expands the market beyond normal means of advertisement. It should be more rewarding to an artist that more people are listening to thier music. How to survive? Be creative. sell stuffs. do concerts. or...
As a visual artist, I tend to think that the most important thing is to spread the music. I mean, what good does it do if you keep your music in your house and let no one listen to it? I know of a few small record labels and artists that give away thier MP3's at will. This is not to say that all musicians should do the same, but under current circumstances, it's the best optimization - sure beats whinning.
If I were a musician, I'd do music to give it away on Napster or whatever channel, and find a real job like librarian or programming or something. In fact, I am an visual artist and programming is what I do. When you decided to become an artist, you have decided to choose a tough life. You must prepare for yourself. I remember Robin William's Oscar acceptance speech: "When I told my father that I wanted to by an actor, he said to me, 'that's ok, son, you can be whatever you want to be. Just make sure you learn something to make a living, like welding or something." Most artists are quite prepared to be poor. They have other means of making a living - barely, but that's the price they pay for choosing it.
Keep in mind, not all of us Napster users are cheap bastards. Some people are well-to-do but simply are unwilling to buy CDs that they havn't tried. Eventually they will buy.
You're not going to make much money from doing live performances unless you're hugely popular.
For most, the money gained from doing live shows is about enough to pay for the transportation rental and buy a few drinks.
You also forget about the solo musicians (such as myself) who don't have the option of playing live.
If music is what I want to do with my life, why should it not be an option? If I don't want my songs included on services like Napster and Gnutella, why can't I opt out? For me, CD is not simply a distribution method. There is something to be said about the track order and the booklet and the time I spend on the artwork. It's something that I am putting a lot of effort into assembling and creating and if someone is going to view it, I want it to be done right.
You may argue that $16 is too expensive for a CD. You're right. You may also argue that the artists are getting ripped off by the labels, adn that's also correct. But how exactly do you think you're helping the artists by not supporting them at all? What alternative is there right now, selling MP3s online? Yeah, like I really want to exclude:
- Those without credit cards
- Those who do not purchase items online
i.e. Younger people
Plus, I don't *want* to sell MP3s. I think they sound like shit. I didn't spend all this money on 24-bit recording equipment and pay so much attention to detail so someone will just encode it as MP3 and make it sound like an FM broadcast!
And the fact still remains that online sales are pathetic compared to real stores. Especially with music. So if I want to gain exposure as an artist, I need to get in stores. It's the sad truth.
I'm not saying I am against anyone who trades my songs on Napster... Right now it doesn't matter. I'm simply against this whole mindset where you feel like you DESERVE the music for FREE just because the record companies are charging too much. What sense does that make!? All you're REALLY doing is fucking over the artists even more.
Um, if it isn't worth it then don't listen to it...
Your examples really seem out of place. This 'protest' you mention only makes victims of the artists.
If you like a song or an album enough to listen to it, you ought to support the ones who created it. Independent artists who are selling CDs for reasonable prices are also losing sales to P2P sharing, so what's your justification for that? _Exposure_? It's less than what you think.
Maybe you don't have to buy their CDs if you honestly believe the record labels are that evil. But what are you doing instead? How are you helping to support the artists which you appreciate?
-vl
That's unfair. I never said anything about companies losing profits. I'm not even against Napster. I'm against this whole new mentality that it's alright to download an album for free just because you don't want to give money to a record label. It seems more of an excuse than anything.
;P I'm always trying to write better music, I don't have resources to "market it relentlessly", and I do have a job.
I'm also not saying everyone is like this. I've downloaded albums on Napster (before they actually released, or if they were not available in the US) and bought them soonafter. I've also downloaded albums to get a feel for them and decided not to buy at all. To me that's ok. To me that's akin to sharing music with a friend.
But you're failing to acknowledge a very large portion of the Napster users who download whatever they can and never bother to purchase any copies. We'll use "just about any college student" as an example.
Another thing that has probably been mentioned: trading tapes isn't quite the same as trading MP3s. While MP3s are not perfect, most people can't tell them apart from CD audio.
I think the following true: If someone purchases a CD with money they worked for, they are more willing to give it a chance. Should we have everything for free that isn't perfect, forgetting the ones who put time and money and energy into it?
Thanks for your advice.
-vl
Here is a SIMPLE way to get their butts! .mp3 files that you own the CD/Cassettes/records of. Only download the movies of VHS/Beta/DVD etc.. you own. Then when the MPAA/RIAA has your ISp shut you down you simple file a lawsuit against both your former ISP and the MPAA/RIAA for violation of your rights under "The Home Recording Act" and violation of your rights to "Fair Use". And sue the S*** out of them! It would be easy to prove in court since you could bring in the exibits of
.mp3's and movies in .zip files with a text file that states that "you can only download and keep this file if you legally own the original (cassette,record,VHS,Beta/DVD). IF not you must immidiately delete this file."
Simply download ONLY
1) you original cassettes,records, VHS/Beta/DVD's you own.
2) the downloaded version to show you only downloaded what you own.
Make the MPAA/RIAA prove you downloaded something you don't legalyl own! As for "sharing" to others. Put all
Use the defense that you are ONLY providing a "Archival Backup Service". Which by the way is LEGAL! Even in the Software world. You are legally allowed to make at least ONE backup of what your purchased by copyright law.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Well, what about my no-budget Kung Fu movie that me and my TKD friends put together and want to spread around to try to get our faces out into the martial arts stunt scene? It's perfectly legal for me to be distributing that movie to anyone and everyone I can get it to. But if all of my avenues of distribution are shut down I have to start either burning my own DVDs to pass out or making my own VHS cassettes, both of which are prohibitively expensive on our current budget. This kind of thing helps people like us who are just trying to get exposure just as much as it hurts the people who already have exposure and are trying to sell their image for money.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Sharing movies is illegal. If someone shares a movie, they aren't going to buy it. That's money lost for the makers. What's wrong with crime prevention.
When someone borrows a book from me, that's money lost for the publisher; since my friend would have otherwise had to buy it.
The same goes for libraries as well. What happens when electronic books are the norm? What then? Only those with enough money to perpetually fork over the pay-per-use fees will have the privilege to learn to read?
A very big problem is that there is a direct privacy violation in monitoring machine contents and the contents being passed around the internet just in case someone is violating copyright. It also puts a huge cost on all internet services and provider including P2P ones. And it limits the amount and kind of encryption and encoding that can be used.
Do you want a free (in the sense of rights and contents) internet or not? The real casualty of efforts like the MPAA is likely to be that freedom.
No, I wouldn't tell them that. I would almost certainly tell them one of the following:
A) "I downloaded your CD off of Napter--You guys rock, I went out and bought a copy the next day!
or
B) "I downloaded your CD off of Napster--Aside from that single you guys have that's on the radio 50,000 times a day, you guys suck. I got rid of it faster than you can say "cookie cutter boy band".
Of course, that's just me--I buy CDs--if they're actually worth it
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
It's hard to define hurt.
I've been writing software and giving it away for 5yrs. I'm even losing money on domain names and web hosting.
The only difference is that some of these artists want money for their art. That's fine.
But just because one downloads their songs, it doesn't mean they won't buy the album. Half the albums I now own I have downloaded songs from. All the albums I plan to buy I have the mp3s to about half the songs in them.
It should be clear to you that merchandise in shops cannot be duplicated, while mp3s can. To try to simplify things as you have done just to make your point is no excuse.
---
Let me rephrase this:
**Piracy goes up when the cost of a product or service excedes the cost assumed by the consumer to be a reasonable price for that product or service.**
to:
**Piracy goes up when the cost of a product or service excedes the cost assumed by the consumer to be a reasonable price for that product or service, or when the prduct or service is not available in all venues or mediums that the consumer thinks they should be.**
To sum it up, they are not providing the products, and services, that the consumers want on mediums, and venues, at a price that the consumer deems reasonable.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I do not condone or condem the use of these technologies. I do believe in the Fair Use of stuff you already own.
When will these people learn (RIAA & MPAA & Microsoft) that you really need to fight piracy with the cost to the user. Piracy WILL ALWAYS EXIST!
**Piracy goes up when the cost of a product or service excedes the cost assumed by the consumer to be a reasonable price for that product or service.**
Given this, the rise in MP3 File sharing becomes obvious, and the solution becomes even more obvious low the price. If consumers could afford to buy a CD whether or not they like the CD, they would buy them. When the RIAA released there numbers the vast majority of the loss was in singles. Customers wanted to here more songs before they bought and album.
For the MPAA, if they insured that videos could be bought at a decent price and view on all applicable mediums, they will not have to many problem. Right now, DVD is causing problems because Linux users can't view it.
I wish these companies would hire some people with intelligence instead of the greedy, money grubbing people they hire now.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
ISTR that the "loophole" is about as valid as the ubiquitious, "This is not spam" disclaimer, or the abandonware myth -- namely, no factual basis whatsoever.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Same issue as with Napster renaming -- if you rename it so that nobody can find it, well, MPAA wins because who's going to be downloading your file? And if the name mangling scheme is obvious or otherwise decently publicized, they'll find it soon enough.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The distributor of music sets the terms of sale/distribution; it's up to the consumers to abide by them. ToS usually include following copyright laws...
The vendor sets the terms. Not you; your choice, under the law, is to accept or reject the transaction in toto. You can send feedback, but you cannot demand changes in ToS. If you buy a CD, you have accepted these terms, and are legally obligated to NOT reproduce it or redistribute it except as the law allows.
Vandalism that damages a Coca-Cola is still vandalism, and a criminal offense. Writing a negative review is completely different; that's a matter of speech, and is protected so long as it's factually correct (Well, in the US, truth is a defense against accusations of libel/slander. Not necessarily so in other nations.) and isn't violating other contractural violations, like having signed an agreement to NOT produce a review. Likewise regarding food impurities -- if you're right, that's fine. If you're committing libel, that's not.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
It's about contracts -- whether or not you abide by the terms of sale, chosen by the vendor within the constraints established by law.
And yes, the owner loses something -- they lose control, which is an incredibly valuable asset; it's the sole reason, in fact, that publishers pay artists in the first place.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
That doesn't mean that they're allowed to obstruct justice. Subpoeaning testimony isn't exactly the same thing as holding them responsible for their users.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Do you even have a conscience? That seems... unlikely.
Keep in mind that what the artist sells to the publisher is, primarily, the right to distribute his works. Taking that right for yourself, for free, says a LOT about what you think the true value of an artist should be: nothing. Under your terms, publishing companies should simply take music and publish it without regards to the original creators...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Ah, but the debate is often irrelevant to the truth. The heliocentric model of the solar system was correct long before anybody proposed it, let alone before it was widely accepted.
Whether or not you THINK something is wrong is irrelevant if it IS wrong.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Who forced you to attend the concert?
Who forced you to buy the t-shirt?
Who forced you to listen to their music?
If you aren't willing to pay, don't play. It is perfectly possible to get by without a single music CD, tape cassette, record, downloaded music file, or anything like that at all. Try it.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Probably multiple reasons, such as --
...versus how many have heard about Napster, Gnutella and their ilk? How many know how to search USENET amidst all the spam?
* How many novices even know what USENET *is*, let alone use it?
* Many news servers don't propagate binaries groups anyways, I suspect.
* It's impossible to determine who is downloading off of USENET, because that's handled locally -- a user subscribes to a group and reads posts off his local server (usually).
* It's sometimes difficult to do anything to the originating server, because they may not care a bit about US law.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Combined with the traffic statistics and other logs that your ISP probably keeps, they've got a very strong circumstantial-evidence case. IP spoofing is irrelevant because your ISP *knows* what IP they've assigned to your connection, how much data you're transferring, when, and to whom.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Exposure doesn't buy food. It doesn't pay rent.
So this costs you $1000+ $1*#cds? OK, so say you sell 2000 CDs: $1000+$2000=$3000. Say you sell half your CDs. $3000/$1000= $3. See my point?
.10 per CD to press, I'm unimpressed.
Given that major labels expect to sell 10's of thousands of even a bad cd, and it costs thm
It still seems to me bands should be looking to make most of their money off of live performances...
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
Your points are all well taken -- but miss my point entirely. What if your singing isn't worth $16 a CD? One of the ways consumers have to tell you that is to not buy your CD, but grab the admittedly crappy mp3 for free.
Is it theft? Yep. But is it also a protest? Yep.
Was the Boston Tea Party illegal? Yep. But damned effective.
And I can't help but think that while the Mona Lisa is priceless, a poster (cheap knockoff? like an mp3?) is 6 bucks. Hmmm?
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
I love the Ack-Acks (RIAA/MPAA). They are doing a fine job panicking as people realize the current value of their service, and are attempting to hang on to their business model with a death grip.
Look, 60 million napster fans and who knows how many video downloaders have been hit in the face with the fact the margin cost (cost to reproduce) a CD is virtually nothing. A little more than virtually nothing to reproduce a DVD, just longer because of current bandwith issues. So they can legislate all they want, but people are now aware that the only value-add the Ack-Acks add is deliver a physical product from burn-in to your local Best Buy.
And Gee!, that's gonna be irrelevant to a large portion to the population in a few years -- legitimate or not, digital dupes of oves and songs WILL be available somewhere.
It *isn't* irrelevent yet because of technology limitations. Napster is rife with lousy recordings, bad bitrates, misnamed songs, etc. Movies take up to large a percentage of a users hard drive.
So why aren't the Ack-Acks pushing to explore new value-adds while they still have the upper hand. Wouldn't it be nice to go to amazon and select 10 songs, and order a custom CD (not MP3 version either, true blue uncompressed versions)? Or select music label appproved MP3's, where you now there are no artifacts , at a specified bitrate, for $1 a song? Choosing from 40 different version, some live, some different studio riffs?
People get it -- the copy of the Madonna (insert an artist you like here) album isn't worth $16 -- it's worth maybe $1. You know where the money in art has been, historically? Live performances! That means concerts for Music and movie theaters for movies.
The Ack-Acks don't get it.
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
Well spoken.
These are indeed the most relevant aspects of the whole debate: while I cannot defend the actions of individual pirates with a straight face, I think that framing it this way really gets to the heart of the issue...
Once again 'pirate' is being used in the new post-IP revolution definition. It once meant re-selling music without compensation to the artists. The entertainment industry fought a prolonged propaganda and lobby war to change this, and in is curoiusly quiet about the massive true pirating occurring in the far East. Instead they lobby to see 'pirating' cover fair-use as well. That truly is an ethical problem.
On the assumption the story Nova Scotia story is true, I'll never buy anything they release. I'll never be given the option to buy anything they release because commercial radio will never play any of their music. The only chance of my hearing it is an enthusiast convincing others on P-P sharing or Usenet to try it. The band could put snippets on a web-site, but I'll never visit it because I'll never know who they are. I suspect smaller artists will benefit most from the free distribution because it gives them exposure the music industry never will. Why else would so many bands with prooduct in stores have music on mp3.com? For the $456.27 in mp3 earnings?
I think it's obvious that not all artists are affected by sharing equally. The absolute top earners may lose some potential sales but ethically I don't give a damn. They already make obscene amounts of money and society has no reason to structure its laws to help them make even more. Given the poverty in which so many live, for me the earnings of a Brooks or a Spears is a larger ethical problem than their not getting paid for every listen.
It's currently an unproven supposition that P-P sharing harms artists, with no unbiased third-party data behind it. In fact, the music industry is doing great right now. Any 'study' (scare quotes intentional) released so far showing negative effects has been commisioned by the entertainment industry. Would you trust studies paid for by the tobacco industry on the effects of smoking? Most would consider it an ethical problem too.
There's one important point that you, the MPAA, the RIAA, and almost everyone else is missing. No one, especially not you, has shown that artists have been harmed by the trading of music over the internet. In fact, I've heard that CD sales have actually increased due to the existence of Napster. I myself have actually used Gnotella to research different types of music and to make a CD purchase. That's a CD I probably never would have bought without the help of Gnotella.
The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is wrong.
Congradulations, you've apparently fallen for the industry's (MPAA, RIAA) propaganda. Not all users of these systems are thieves. Consumers want choice, and will do what's in their best interest. If the industry continues to fight basic economic priniples, the consumers will continue to suffer. The industry is basically trying to extract every bit of profit from the consumer. They are in fact trying to extract monopolistic profit (Or do you have another explaination for region coded DVDs? Can you say price fixing? That practice has been found to harm consumers and the economy and is actually illegal in the US.) The industry has created this black market through their bullying of consumers. They have no one to blame but themselves.
Also, it is not a forgone conclusion that this trading of music is unethical. People are simply behaving as economics would have them behave. Give people a better choice and they'll take it. Also remember that some degree of music trading is be inevitable and should be ignored (Because the cost of trying to stamp out the last few percent far outweighs the benefits).
Check out AbiWord.
No, my argument doesn't use the buzz word of the year "IP". It also has nothing to do with right and wrong. Right and wrong are largely subjective and I try to stay out of the business of deciding which is which. My point is that no one has shown that the RIAA has been economically harmed by Napster or its like.
Are you implying that individuals can't be pirates, or that pirates aren't individuals?
No, I simply needed two different terms, for the purpose of this discussion, to differentiate people who download music for their own use and those who duplicate CDs for sale (Yes there are differences, and scale is just one. The other relates to harm done).
Just because the RIAA charges artificially high prices does not make it any more right to steal from them.
There you go with that right and wrong stuff again. Think about where you get your idea of right and wrong. What's your reasoning? It's a very difficult thing to quantify. Also, what is it that I'm supposed to have stolen from them (and please don't say IP). Tell me what's their actual real world loss? Is it the $20 I would have spent on a cd? Like I said before, there's no guarantee that I would have bought the cd if the download wasn't there. If cd sales have increased as a result of Napster, how have they been harmed. This is a key point, for example, you must show that you have been damaged in order to receive damages in a lawsuit.
Pardon me? No, it isn't. Hackers are those who jury-rig or recode stuff (the "Scottys" of the computer world) and crackers are people who break other people's systems or software for fun or profit. Pirates are just pirates.
I meant only in terms of people using the wrong terminology. A person who downloads a song off of Napster for their own use is not a pirate. The term pirate is a loaded word used to elicit a predictable emotional response. By labeling someone who downloads a few mp3s off of Napster a pirate, you demonize that person by assinging to him every negative image that the word pirate brings with it.
In either case, your argument needs rethinking.
My argument is fine as long as we agree on a few assumptions. Right and wrong has nothing to do with it, economics and logic do. The RIAA/MPAA is taking these measures to maintain their monopoly power, not because some kid is stealing metallica songs(Do you really think they care about right or wrong? What they care about is money). They won't say this of course because it would sound bad. You seem to accecpt their lies and you even go so far as to help spread the lies around for them.
A corporation is a rational thing, they're not going to go after someone on Napster/Gnutella just because. If they go after them, they have a reason for it. All I'm trying to do is point out the real reason, it's not because they think they're losing cd sales. Its because they are afraid of losing control over the supply of music.
Check out AbiWord.
The law is there to protect IP rights, not to prosecute as few people as possible.If a significant portion of the population decided to start shoplifting, would that suddenly make
it right?
The US constitution allows Congress to grant copyrights specifically in order to promote scientific progress.
Intellectual "property" rights are consequently granted by a society that wants to achieve a certain outcome. They are fundamentally different from real property rights, and certainly are not "natural" rights.
The reason why the computer users are prosecuted are financial interests of the companies involved, and those alone are by no means a reason to grant copyrights, at least not in the framework of the US constitution.
Of course the real interesting strategy would be to find some alternate powerful (in the sense they can afford to lobby legislation) economic player that would actually profit from people sharing files over the internet.
With point-to-point traffic predicted to overtake downloads of centralized content soon, it is clear who this is: The ISP's and infrastructure providers (phone companies, network equipment manufacturers etc.)
I would not be surprised if this will be reason enough, in the end, for the ISP's and others not to cave in.
The people most harmed are the musicians.
Musicians have already been screwed beyond the point of screwing them further.
The RIAA believes that not only should artists be in debt to them, but their creations are works for hire.
When was the last time you had a job where you did wirk for hire and you were more in debt to your employee?
They are affected by napster, because it is a small market for such things. They can barely support themselves as it is, and are only kept afloat by sales of albums.
Wait... hehe... so 2+2=3 now? Like in a smaller market more people are downloading their work?
The final irony here is that the spread of napster and gnutella, and unauthorised piracy generally, would mean the collapse of such small outfits and an increase in musical homogenousness.
Music outlets are already homogenous. I would so love to have a text to speech system that randomly played songs off napster and read the album and track info from the files.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
MP3s came from the development of MPEGs. Movies were shared first not audio.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Yes, anon.penet.fi was forced to reveal info to the scientoligists, but that individual server vas run by A PERSON. Freenet is distributed, without central authority.
You are the same decaying organic matter as the rest of us.
I actually doubt this possibillity: /. i think).
Data which is not requested enough will "fall out" of the nodes used to host it, and unless at least SOMEONE requests it, it will never leave the originating node. Falsly labeled data has not been a (major) problem with other P2P-systemsm, has it? If there are not more "saboteurs" than normal users, the data inserted by normal users will not be overwhelemed by the "fake" data. IAMAFD (i am not a freenet developer) though, so you should read available info on the Freenet architecture yourself. I beleive Ian Clarke answerd the quetion regarding "data poisoning" i an earlier interview (on
You are the same decaying organic matter as the rest of us.
I absolutely agree that copying copyrighted works without paying for them is theft: someone is being denied the income from their copyrighted works.
However, I do not agree with this: The people most harmed are the musicians. When you pirate music, you are stealing from the artist who slaved to create it for you.
From CD sales, the artists get just about nothing. From CD sales, almost all the proceeds go to the distributors and publishers. The artist must play concerts to get revenues. Whether this is ethical in its own right is a second and largely unrelated discussion.
The artist is harmed by this theft of copyrighted works, but in most cases the distributors and publishers are harmed more.
[
Sharing movies is NOT illegal!!!!
Sharing someone else's copyrighted works is illegal and I fully understand the MPAA's position here. If fact I hope they go after enough people that the public will finally wake up to the problem that is the MPAA. The MPAA wants to keep intellectual property as the mainstream media most Americans watch, but I foresee the net and personal video content overtaking television in less than 5 years. Mpeg-4 has nearly lossless compression at a high enough bitrate. I, personally, am getting near DVD quality video from my old analog VHS tapes by using some cheap high quality NL editting software.
How would I feel if half the world got to see (and liked?) something I worked 6 months on? I'd love that! I'd be extremely happy. Of course it'd be free. Why wouldn't I want to give away that work for free? Or is it just people like you who don't like to give away free things? I support the GPL, free software, open source, and sharing. Can you say the same?
Greed is for ugly old men like Jack Valenti. Please don't be greedy.
P.S. it is a white-collar crime. Do you think those game developers or holiwood actors will EVER have to worry about putting food on the table? Seriously. Almost ANYONE living in west Africa has a harder life than these poor affiliates of the MPAA that aren't getting paid every penny they demand. Maybe we should steal movies and send the money to 3rd world countries. Wouldn't that be a better cause?
What is ethical about restricting people so they can only enjoy your art in the specific ways you meant for them to enjoy it.
Let me ask you this. Would it hurt the MPAA or their affiliates if I never watched those movies, avoided their commercials and never purchased them? If that wouldn't hurt the MPAA, then how could it possibly hurt the MPAA for me to view a movie that is of lower quality than the original (second generation copy on lossy compression) using a distribution mechanism that costs them nothing? Either way they wouldn't be getting any money from me. Now if I saw that movie and wanted to see it in the original quality, or widescreen, etc. Then I would be more willing to purchase it knowing I enjoyed watching it than if I had never seen it at all. So in this scenario I have the potential to give affiliates of the MPAA some money if I pirate some of that copyrighted work, whereas they have no chance at getting any money otherwise.
I'll tell you what. I'll play fair. I won't pirate any video from the net, ever. I won't watch any of their movies. And I won't ever send them a penny. Happy?
The internet allows independant film, like open source software, to dominate the market because it does not put unreasonable restrictions on the consumers. Some open source software may be of lower quality/stability than commercial software, but in time it will only get better and it will never cost you any more than you choose to pay. I just hope more people will buy into this concept and play fair. Artists need money to eat and live (assuming they don't have real jobs) so I'd happily send an artist some money if I liked their art. Unfortunately most artists are clueless about how to use the net to distribute their art (even the almighty MPAA has problems with this), or are just scared they will never make any money... that's their problem, not mine. I'm an artist, but it won't affect my day job, and I know how to use the net so go away and quite your bitchin.
I mean /dev/random, heh. /dev/null's got a lot of stuff in it but it's not very random.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Gotta wonder how thorough that investigation was by Ranger Online. What would happen if we all put 6 gigabytes of /dev/null on our FTP servers under the filename "Matrix.vob"? Do they just look for filenames or do they actually download the content and make sure its actually infringing material? And once you have 6 gigabytes of random, it's pretty easy to make a 6 gigabyte "Matrixkey.vob" which when xored with my 6 gigabytes of random, produces the first 6 gigabytes of the movie. Or another 6 gigabytes of random.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What a load of horse shit. Who the hell is this Hettinger dweeb to decide that if I make a symphony, that I can't benefit from it monitarily? Because "natural talent" is involved? Does that mean that since I'm out of shape, I should get paid more to go dig a ditch than someone who's fit, since it is a lot easier for him? No, the end result is what we judge. In Hettinger's mind, for the greatest reward, I should find the job I'm least suited to do, and go struggle with it. Obvious idiocy.
You misunderstood. He said that the effort put into labour does not correlate with the reward obtained for that labor. The guy who is lazy and does only what is required of him, can reap the same or better rewards for his efforts, as the guy who is talented, motivated and works hard. He is merely pointing out the fact that the magnitude of effort expended in labour does not correlate with the magnitude of the reward received. In other words, the argument that artists or inventors deserve a reward in proportion to the effort they expended creating intellectual property does not stand. The market sets the reward they get, amount of effort has nothing to do with it.
So bugger off with that line of thinking, we ain't buying it.
Furthermore, inventor Number One and Inventor Number Two may create the same intellectual property, and even if Number One expended much more effort than Number Two in creating the same invention, Number Two gets the reward because he filed the patent first.
Get it?
Edith Keeler Must Die
The article sounded like they took the mere use of the Gnutella network as proof of copyright infringement, in which case they're totally ignoring due process. I think the burden of proof should rest on the MPAA not the gnutella users.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
And then you say, "But I did have to Fork out 60 bucks to get to your stupid concert and I also bought your stupid T-Shirt for another 40 bucks. So that's 100 of my dollars that you now have for my 2 hours of un-garaunteed music." I'm not saying that taking the music off the Net is legal, but it sure does offset the money made off of CD sales. MUSIC COSTS TOO MUCH. I see downloads as a nice way to protest the cost of that.
Record companies only exist to SCREW ARTISTS and make money off of them. They claim to be taking all the risk, but the only risk they take is if they forward money to the artist, which they can write off if they fail to make a profit. Artists, on the other hand, are expected to pay for the recording and distrobution, and get as little as a PENNY per record to pay back their debt. A few exceptions exist, but these are usually artists that have been around for a long time and reworked their contracts numerous times (read - sure things like Metallica)
Most artists make money with LIVE SHOWS, not records, so the RIAA is full of shit when they tell you they're protecting artists rights - they're just protecting big business and the record companies monopoly on music.
Ask yourself why huge recording artists like Limp Bizkit, Madonna, and Alanis Morissette support mp3s. It's an alternate, cheap distro method and it boosts support for their live shows where they make money.
Enough said.
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
See Linux. Ten years free, and still going strong.
-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
it's going to cost us well over a thousand dollars
Now print 1000 copies of that CD you just recorded, and lo and behold! the price per CD went from $1001 to $2 ($1 for the CD, and $1 by splitting the recording costs over the number of recordings produced). The more prints you make, the closer the costs approach $1 per CD. See? The recording companies make hundreds of thousands of prints for a popular album; for all intents and purposes, each CD costs them $1.
-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I believe that's what Freenet does, and then some. Add encryption, untraceability, etc. and you have Freenet. ;-)
-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
It wouldn't be violating the GPL unless they refused to give out the changes they made to someone who had purchased it.
;-)
But hell, if they did violate copyright, then I'll just get myself a free copy of Windows and everybody has what they want.
-----
"Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Couple that with the technology that Digital Fountain uses (a method of streaming media via UDP that can reconstruct the original media despite some significant packet loss %) and it should be possible to build a legal distributed P2P network that one could illegally download MP3s from ;)
And how can the receiver request lost packages? Not from the sender, he doesn't know who it was.. How can he even request the file without knowing the senders ip??
I read slashdot for the articles.
The RIAA/MPAA is going to have to go after individual users to succeed in stopping peer to peer file sharing.
What they shouldn't do is try to stop technology. People should have a right to create whatever software they wish.
It was good that they stopped Napster because Napster was not a technology but a coporate entity.
In the end I think there are far more people sharing files than there are record execs. Trying to stop individual users will make people hate them and hate the laws that stop them from doing what they want. This makes me think that MPAA/RIAA will not succeed and that makes me happy.
Was this story really submitted by the President of the United States, as the "mail to" suggests? Wow, maybe I was wrong about that Bush guy. (or not)
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
I do find it interesting, however, that the RIAA has not proposed this solution either.
I would have no problem using a song-trading service that charged me a royalty fee and sent it directly to the artists. Not the label mind you, as I am not getting any physical product from them, but the artist themselves.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
You're assuming those who get music of the free services won't consiously support the artists they listen to most. I'm also from Nova Scotia; a local band (the sycamores) both sells cds and gives away mp3s on their website. I first listened to the mp3s; I now listen their cds. By asking these services to be stopped, you're asking people to abbridge their right to use that which they have bought for their own ends, in order to protect a third party. Unless the free services actually do harm to the third party (musicians, that is), you should not be so eager to end trading. And, were you to have followed the news, you would know - music sales have risen every year since napster and it's breathren have been around.
Have you seen read any record contracts lately? The terms these artists are getting, are piss poor. As simple as that.
TLC had AFAIK the best selling RNB record EVER. They still went bankrupt - and this was prior to Napstermania. The record company got nearly all their dough. Take a listen to Courtney Love, and her rundown of the economics of a record deal.
Sure, it's not nice to download MP3s that are copyrighted. However, it's an excellent way for me to make sure the record I wanna try out is not a total piece of crap. I honestly don't want waste 18 bucks on ONE good song.
Since I found mp3s, the quality of my record collection has kept up, even though I spend less time reading reviews and articles and such. If I see a review that tickles my imagination, I'll just jump online and check it out.
There is no way to control this. However, you might wanna follow the numbers. Has CD sales gone up or down since napster started to get popular? Up? Maybe I'm not the only one using it in an ethical manner?
Since you sound fairly conservative, I'll bring out the big gun - gun laws. Guns are designed to kill. People use them to kill. Still, they are legal, since they CAN be used in an ethical manner - which means self defense and against out-of-line police. I see that as a fairly utilitarian justification. My justification for mp3s and napster and gnutella is equally utilitarian. I want to keep it because it can be used in an ethical manner, and because evidence suggest that it is mainly being used in an ethical manner. Those punks that never buy anything they have on mp3s are like the criminals that are allowed access to guns since we the lawabiding citizens also want the right to protect ourselves. We the lawabiding mp3-users want the right to make sure we're not bying crap. This generalizes directly to movies.
Do you now feel vaguely better about napster and gnutella?
Stop the brainwash
As i've said before, real change is never asked for, it is always forced... One good example I can think of is prohibition: some people wanted their alcohol, so they brewed it up themselves. eventually "the system" realised that it wasn't worth it, and gave in..
---
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Exposure is the only thing that can get an artist sales, and thus food and rent. Exposure comes before anything else. Why do so many artists sign up with the record companies? For one thing, because the record companies have the power to make them famous.
Exposure is not only needed, it is the first thing needed. Those "friends in the recording industry here in Nova Scotia" may be better off because of things like Napster. They certainly are not starving because of Napster. They are starving because either their music isn't popular right now or because the RIAA members haven't seen fit to give them their 15 minutes of fame yet.
Would I have ever bought an Arthur C Clarke or Larry Niven book if I hadn't first seen them in the library or at el cheapo used book sales? Because I read them for free when I was young, I bought many books when I got older.
How is copying music, theft?
How is descrambling radio waves, stealing cable?
How is downloading e-books for free, piracy?
Someone please explain to me why it is wrong to copy something that can be coped endlessly at no expense to the author.
Non-physical objects, people - what does the artist lose? By your standards, it is wrong for me to listen to music cds from the library, or read books from the library, or listen to music but not commercials on the radio.
By your standards, even having a mute button on the tv remote control is "enabling piracy." What, you mean fans of a tv show might not want to watch commercials? Horrors! Let's tie them down and turn the volume up!
Someone explain to me the difference here, please.
"someone is being denied the income from their copyrighted works."
Who says they deserve that income?
Neither nature nor man rewards effort. Only results get rewarded - thus, the argument that artists deserve money because they work hard doesn't work at all. Plenty of artists work hard - yet only the Britney Spears of the world get rich.
The RIAA doesn't reward effort either. They reward looks and dancing ability.
"What's wrong with crime prevention."
Nothing, per se, but there are many wrong ways to prevent crime. Legal bullying of ISPs for something their users did? That's crime prevention, and it's wrong.
"I don't understand why people are so defensive of pirates. I hear people talking about it all the time, and they don't feel in the least bit guilty about the fact that they're committing a criminal act."
If people believe a law is stupid or wrong, they'll be quite proud of breaking it. Speeding is one example of many.
If you want to convince people that "piracy" is wrong, you first have to convince them that copyright is right.
"How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?"
Not 6 months, but I've put one and a half months into a piece of free software: cfract, a continued fraction converter. It's quick and dirty but quickly getting better.
"You underestimate the value of a CD."
You're not talking about value, you're talking about cost. Value is subjective, varying wildly from one listener to another.
There is no copyright involved with matches. Matches are physical entities that can be wholy transfered to other people. Music has copyrights associated with it. You do not have the right to distribute that music without the owner's consent.\ =\=\=\=\=\
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Nope. If I were to take someone's life I would be taking away thier right to live. I havn't moved that life from one place to another, I took it, and it jsut went away. If I copy software I take away the owner's right to distribute it the way he wanted. Copyright laws give the creator the right to distribute the works way they want.= \=\=\=\
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That doesn't change the fact that it is theft. Taking something without permission is still illegal.\ =\
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Well done. Well done. Almost as good as Will the Real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
The poor cook he caught the fits
The poor cook he caught the fits
And threw away all of my grits
you seem to have confused ethics and legality.
it is not inherently unethical to break copyright law. laws are made up by elected officials, who can hardly claim to be examples of virtue or ethical conduct that the rest of us should follow. rather, the law merely says that there are penalties associated with certain activities regardless of whether those activities are ethical or not.
intellectual property isn't property in a real sense. the notion of tangible property is a natural one, because it is the nature of most tangible property that it cannot be used for multiple purposes at once. it's useful to have the concept of ownership attached to tangible property, because otherwise a great many disputes would arise from conflicts over who can use that property.
intellectual content is different in several ways.
the concept of exclusion doesn't apply - multiple people can be using the same content at one time.
neither do the laws of supply and demand apply -
unlike tangible property, intellectual property is often made more valuable when a greater number of people are using it. furthermore, copying of intellectual property serves a socially valuable function that is not served by theft of tangible property. which is not to say that copying is inherently defensible in all cases,just that it's not the same thing as theft. it has different economic and social effects.
the idea of copyright comes from an age where it was expensive to publish things, and few people had that capability. in order to provide some protection to the authors of works from rampant copying, governments made publishers (owners of printing presses) responsible for securing permission from authors. this worked entirely because with the technology of the time there were inherently few publishers and because they had large investments in equipment and material that they needed to protect. copyright was never an inherent right in the same sense as ownership of tangible property - it was just a mechanism to provide some incentive to authors to produce new works. it was based on the economic and technological realities of the time which no longer apply.
recent changes in technology have made copyright obsolete. yet governments, lawyers, and media houses insist that this obsolete mechanism is still in the interests of society, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. meanwhile they are doing their best to erode various measures (such as "fair use" and the doctrine of first sale) which were intended to help strike a balance between the interests of creators and the interests of society.
you might be fined for breaking copyright laws.
you might even go to jail if you break the DMCA.
but that doesn't mean it's unethical.
it just means that we're being threatened with
loss of money or freedom for doing what are sometimes perfectly reasonable activities.
it's perfectly reasonable and natural to share music and films with your friends, even if you do so over the net. this is part of the exchange of ideas in which we are all privileged to participate, every bit as much as the creation of the work itself. creators need some ability to be compensated for their works (if they are in demand) but that's hardly tantamount to giving them the ability to control how their work sare used or to demand tribute everytime someone wants to share the experience of that work with a friend.
we need to find another point of balance. existing notions of copyright don't serve us anymore, and need to be discarded. it's not unethical to challenge these notions; rather, it's essential that we do so.
What you have failed to recognize is that there are several rights associated with ownership of property. The right to use your property is only one of them. Another is the right to exclude others from your property.
The fundamental problem is that a free market economy does not work when it comes to production of things like music or computer programs or other intellectual property. Economists can mathematically prove that for market forces in a free market to lead to the right production level for a given thing, that thing has to have certain properties. Real property has those properties. Intellectual property does not.
This means that to have the right level of production of movies and music and computer software and other intellectual property, intervention is necessary.
Only two systems have been discovered that work.
1. The government pays for the production of intellectual property. Anyone may freely reproduce and distribute it.
2. The law restricts reproduction and distribution of intellectual property so as to give IP those same properties of real property that are necessary for a free market to make the right production decisions.
If anyone has a third system that would work, a lot of people would like to hear about it.
MPAA... variety, no way. The companies that make up the MPAA put out mostly trash. Even bands that were incredible pre-major label are ruined by going commercial.
Ummm small bands benefit from the spread of their music to a wider audience. I've heard many up and comers use the same arguments you have with the opposite conclusion.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I should have rephrased that, it was late. If the majority of the people decide it should be LEGAL than it will be made legal. At least that is how it is supposed to work. Legality is not a question of right and wrong at all.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
The reason the MPAA and RIAA are taking such a heavy attitude is that they are looking at the death of thier business.
Thier business is selling copies of copryrighted materials. There are some sidelines in promoting the creation of these materials, but the basic business is selling copies.
Now right or wrong thier basic business model has sprung a small but growing leak, and, I for one don't see how they can stop it. Its just so easy to download MP3s, is just so easy to rip a CD, its just so easy to post the files on a server.
If this continues the music business in the US will look like the music business in the Arabic world, where, because copying is the norm, and, nobody but nobody pays full price for a cassette, you have artists as big as Springsteen or Bon Jovi whose only way to earn money is to do concerts.
Artists who would be billionaires if they were as popular in the US, make a reasonable living but are not rich. Artists who are popular (but not quite so popular) play in nighclubs thier whole lives or drive taxis.
Its the future -- get used to it.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Digital delivery will doom them whether it is paid for or not.
BTW, the only movie I have ever "pirated" off of the net I bought as soon as it was available on DVD. All those nice extras, value added, who'da thunk of it?
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Who steals from them is MPAA...
I think you may have something mixed up there. I'm pretty sure 70 years is the original copyright span. 20 years is for patents. Pipe of a different color.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
But it doesn't cost money. Copying information is not the same thing as stealing a physical object, because copying takes nothing from the creator of the information. It just doesn't give them anything.
Intellectual property protection is the creation of artificial scarcity. If you don't speak Econ 101, that means it's like charging people money for breathing air. There's plenty of air, it's not a scarce resource. Information is the same, because you can make as many copies as you want without diminishing the original.
I'd suggest you take a moment and consider the reasons behind the current dispute between major drug companies and South Africa. IP protection is not a black&white issue, and it's worth questioning deeply and seriously.
I suppose we should also cry for those poor guys at Netpliance too, huh? Or how about all the people who build their houses on a flood plain?
As bandwidth and storage become cheaper (and thanks to good old Gordy Moore, they will continue to), unauthorized copying of information will become more and more common. There's just no stopping it. Eventually, most, and maybe even all business models based on charging money for copies of strings of 0s and 1s will collapse. This is just a fact of the nature of our reality. Personally I think it makes morse sense to figure out how to live in the world we're heading for, rather than jumping up and down screaming about how wrong it is.
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
I may not pay for my music, but that's becuase I am lazy, not an ingrate. What I can get free, I do so. If only there was a way I could tip those guys directly. (Why in the world did these guys sell all their profit-making rights to the Labels? You tell me that.)
The only thing that makes this hard to fight is most of us have EULA that do not permit us to run servers of any kind. However, if that wasn't the case, I would load up my Gnutella node with legal content, public domain movies etc, and append illegal filenames to the end of the legal file names. Then when you get wrongly accused of distrbuting copyrighted content you can fight it and claim you were the victim of a witch hunt ;)
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
Are copyrights and patents the only way to encourage further accomplishments? I would like to think not, for the same reason you stated, that they restrict the use of such information.
Take for instance the following idealized (post MPAA) situation: A musician or group of musicians creates music, which is distributed freely by whatever means possible, with the only costs being those of distribution. The public that enjoys the music gives the musician(s) money, not to pay them for the music they received, but simply because they want more music from this person/group. Granted, there are a couple conditions that would be needed to make this possible, i.e. enough money going around that people have some to spare for such things (commissions?)
On patents, I don't see a way of obviating them in the following situation: someone invents something, but doesn't have the immediate resources to produce it for sale. (Insert big company name here) likes the idea, produces it, and makes any/all profits from it. Of course, that gets back to the issue of whether he's entitled to any such gains from his invention in the first place.
Any ideas on how to make these things possible without patents? I know I for one would like some means by which to make money off of an idea of mine (though I wouldn't feel entitled to it).
Yuck, my first long post.
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Just to point out for those who haven't done much international travelling lately...
I am currently in Germany, and now realize what I'm missing by buying DVD's in the US. Here they come with at least 2 language tracks and usually around 7 sets of sub-titles. Great tool if you're trying to learn German, by the way. But of course I didn't bring any of my Region Code 1 movies with me, because that's not allowed by the MPAA, your and my media police/lawmakers.
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I agree with the latter part of your comment, in saying that we're grossly overcharged for music. (Really, I'm one of those free-information hippies, but I want to see any step in the right direction).
To my point, the problem with your comment (and that of many others here) is that the argument of "They industry hasn't lost any money", while currently true, won't be for long. As higher-quality more-portable media becomes available, there will be little reason remaining to purchase the industry-pressed disc. At that point they will start losing money. (Well, there's a difference between losing money and just not making as much, but you get the idea.) The industry knows this, and is trying to stop it while they still have some control.
What they don't realize is the major fallacy in saying they're trying "to educate the public" about ethics, etc. The public, in majority rule, decides itself what is ethical and right.
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An explanation of it's features (taken from the website) follow:
ELF is a software program that can be used to share and receive files across a network anonymously in order to allow the storage and sharing of information without fear of reprisal.
Key Features
All packets, including search and file transfers are routed through multiple clients with no traces to allow tracking of users
Files are identified by using the MD5 hash of the file to ensure that the file received is the file that was requested, and was not corrupted during download.
Files are requested using their MD5 hash, and are simultaneously downloaded from all responding clients, in order to increase speed and reduce bandwidth use on individual file sources. Additionally, file downloads may be resumed later at the position the download was halted
Searches are sent through the network of connected clients, who respond immediately with any results that apply. Additionally, search results are cached at each client for 5 minutes, which reduces the network load for common searches
Clients may be configured with bandwidth limitsthat control the data-throughput, so as not to fill the network pipe or cause flooding in other machines.
Use of a seeded random number progression XOR encryption scheme greatly increases the difficulty of deciphering data using a packet sniffer. Additionally, an HTTP request header is used to mask the traffic as a webpage request.
ELF is a real-time, peer to peer file-sharing client uses a decentralized client network (known as ELFnet) to allow searching and retrieving of shared files. It bears some resemblance, both in concept and form design, to GNUtella, although the protocol layout and software design is actually quite different.
Commands are relayed between clients as an ELF packet, which is formatted data written onto a TCP/IP packet. The term "Packet" as used hereafter, will refer to ELF packets, NOT TCP/IP packets unless otherwise noted. Each packet is given a 6 byte unique id and an expiration time. The current expiration time is 5 minutes, but may be shortened or made user-configurable based on observed network behavior in future releases. The unique packet id is used to ensure that duplicate packets received from different sources are dropped. These ids are also used in reply packets to route them back to the sender, along the path of the packet that requested the response. Routing information at any given client only tells which connection sent the packet and where it went, NOT who the ultimate source or destination was.
Packets types are as follows:
All packet information is transmitted as binary in an attempt to both reduce packet sizes and obfuscate the packet data against real-time monitoring by packet sniffers. Additionally, transmitted data is also xor encrypted using a seeded random number generator to increase the security against monitoring. This is done so as to make it less obvious that the client is running ELF, NOT to guarantee that the sent data won't be decrypted if enough time and effort are spent. It doesn't matter either way, since the decrypted data doesn't contain information that would be useful in tracing who sent or received files.
If you don't believe that stealing mp3's is actually stealing or unethical, or any of the other things it has been called, consider this:
If you were to actually meet the people who have written this music, and tour the country playing just to make money to put food on their family's plates, would you fess up to doing this? Would you tell them: "No, I didn't buy I your CD. I downloaded it off Napster. I didn't even have to pay for it."
You've essentially just told them that you stole the money right out of their pockets. Most of these people are honest, hardworking musicians who want to make enough to play without having to get another job. Would you stand behind your own actions?
But you have corporations who exist solely through copywrites that they buy and gaurd. For me, I would feel great if someone was giving away something I spent 6 months of my life developing. It's a matter a pride in my work. I am less interested in money than I am recognition. Even if I get no money off of what I develop, the popularity of the product makes the services that I can provide much more attractive. And people will always need informational services, such as programming custom solutions.
Taking information is not theft, as information is infinitely reproducible. Businesses such as the MPAA and RIAA should not even exist. To me, your argument is no more convincing than that of a slave-trader, who says that elimination of the slave trade will eliminate jobs for his white workers, and reduce the profits of cotton farms. There is a much greater moral imperative than the measley economic gain that is wrongly given to these amoral corporations.
I can see a crackdown on servers coming. The day may come when you won't be able to accept incoming TCP connections on consumer ISPs. Everything has to go through an official "server".
The Economist this week has an excellent article on the moral ground, or rather lack-there-of, for intellectual property. Unfortunately, it's on the pay section of their website.
The gist of the article goes something like this:
Furthermore, consider a hypothetical static economy (nothing new is produced). Property rights for tangibles in this situation, in economic terms, insure efficient distribution of the static amount of real goods. Expensive items go to valuable uses. Intellectual property rights do no such good in this situation. Jill can use a particular song for a valuble purpose (as a national anthem(?) for lack of a better example), while John can listen to the same song to get jazzed about doing some house-cleaning. Neither Jill's nor John's use of the same song takes any value away from the other, nor prevents anyone else from 'consuming' the same song.
Of course, we live in a dynamic economy. New things are made (and the new is often preferred just for being new). In such a dynamic economy, intellectual property right provide the impetus for someone, anyone, to produce new intellectual property at all. Of course, consuming intellecutal property still does not harm, or remove any value, for other would-be-consumer of the same intelluctual property.
Thus, the value to society of intellectual property law is to strike a balance in encouraging the producers of intellectual property on the one hand, and not robbing the consumers of intellectual property blind on the other.
In music, an economist might argue, the balance had already gone too far to the producers (the recording industry). Thus the amazingly fast growth of Napster, aka file-swapping, (remember how fast even non-techies took to Napster?) -- retail music was simply priced much too high, and the applicable terms of copyright were (are still) to much in favor of the producers (RIAA).
The question is, does the same situation hold for movies? I think the absurd amounts of money flowing around Hollywood make the answer obvious. Of course it is not a crime to be, or to get, rich. However, radically skewed wealth often indicates unstable (unjustified?) "bubbles" created by periods of massive change, or by out-of-kilter (or outright unjust) laws. Witness the Industrial Revolution, the Robber Barons, Bill Gates/Larry Ellison, etc. (mostly as examples of the former case).
Nice the see that the MPAA explicitly agrees that what is legal behaviour and what is ethical behaviour are two separate things.... Legally, they're probably within their rights. Ethically...who knows?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
All is well and good, except this.
Your friends are losing money from going through even a small distributors. Think of the fact that I doubt seriously that there is much advertising for your friends band. I have never even seen much advertising when I am up in Halifax for many bands at all.
Where do I find more information? Places like mp3.com where I can find and hear a few songs and if the musician does not even sell things, PAGE views get them money. Its a nice service and we get some decent music. If they had thier music for sell, with some sample mp3's on the WEB, I bet they would have more exposure.
Gnutella has a lot of non-comercial products on it, will the MPAA go after people who happen to have a name like "Metallicock" or something that is CLOSE, and they think it is REAL? see: www.joecartoon.com for Metallicock group.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
bzzt but thanks for playing. If you manufacture something, then you have created a thing. When you sell the thing, you no longer have it.
Translation: because I think my social planning ideas are valid, the State should use its power of coercive force to create an artificial situation of scarcity so that a market can come about.
Keep in mind that the whole concept of "intellectual property" is fairly new. The world went on nicely for quite some time without it, with PLENTY of significant works of art produced. As a specific example, it should be noted that Mozart did not benefit from anything like the copyright notions we have today. He was paid by people who wanted new Mozart music, despite the fact that there was already Mozart music in existance, often memorized by musicians able to play it back at will.
I decided to do a little to verify this claim of yours. Impact on the employees, obviously, comes from impact on the bottom line where managers react by cutting expenses. This usually occurs in companies seeing only small profits or are in the red.
So, let's start with the 2000 annual budget report of News Corp, parent company of 20th Century Fox. This company reported an overall profit of $11.6 billion in 2000, $9.7 billion in 1999. In 1998 they reported an overall profit of $8.3 billion. Unfortunately these reports don't seem to separate revenue from expenses, but you can see the point pretty clearly anyways. Also I am making the assumption that this company is more or less representative of the industry as a whole, which might not be the case.
From this, you can clearly see that the amount of profit taken by these companies is rising. Now, has piracy notably affected the bottom line? Any effect it may have had is lost compared to the massive sales increases of the past few years. So is it hurting workers? Again, any effect it may have is insignificant.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
I have a solution for your friends: They might try printing somewhere on the CD/Album cover some plead for the end user not to make their works available online. My guess is that most of the Gaelic folk song audience is comapssionate, and would be quite understanding of the artist's plight; hence they would not make it available to download for others. I'm not saying that the music should not be ripped, and encoded to mp3; clearly it is up to the user how they wish to listen to it.
I'm sure that this would have a positive affect on the both the artists, and the audiance, as it will likely thwart much violation of their property, and it will strengthen the bond (by mutual understanding) between the audiance and artist.
Good luck on getting this to work with a large label, however.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Nonetheless, the costs of recording/mixing is greatly exagerated by the recording industry. I know many bands who have recorded an entire CD for something in the order of $1000 to $2000, paid by the musicians themselves out of pocket money. And the resulting quality is excellent.
Of course some artists have egos so large they can only tolerate recording studios with private golf courses and outdoors heated olympic swimming pools. Well fuck'em.
The CD cost is all lawyer and manager fees, operation costs, the rest of the money goes into an account that says "Britney Spears Marketing Funds" or something similar. I just happen to not like paying for those things, which is why i rarely buy CDs.
If the producer were sitting in the same room with you, would you still warez his work?
If you ask a friend to spend time with you, would you express moral outrage if he denied you? For those who refuse to recognize IP itself as property, remember that it takes time to produce.
IP theft is easy when the victim is someone you don't know, don't have to face, don't have to talk to. Try doing it to a friend. Get indignant when they say "I spent a lot of time on this, I think you're asking too much of me". See how long you have a friend.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're unamerican?
Anarchists hawking goods to protest the capitalist system. How very... American.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Someone with Mod points mod this up.
Something to think about.
A lone beacon of hope in a copyrighted world.
Oh, so you think it should be legal to print books without paying to the author? I just copy his manuscript and print it 100000 times. This doesn't stop him from reading it, just 100000 other people gain that ability.
What do you suggest book authors should live on? If they don't own their "intellectual property" because it's not a physical object that can be owned (in your definition), please suggest a different model that allows people to make a living from writing books.
Oh, that's still rather ethical compared to withholding food from people that don't have money, or killing people that happen to be soldiers of a different country.
This is not really a question of ethics. You could easily say all of Capitalism is ethically wrong...
The question is more if copyright is useful. I happen to believe professional book writing mostly exists because of copyright. Since I think it's good that people write books and earn money from that, and I don't see a different way to pay these people, I support copyright on books.
He says he thinks anything representable in a bitstream can't be owned, by principle.
To me that means he says sharing files is ok.
On the first point, it's not even clear that sharing files on Gnutella or other services is illegal. Some places (Canada comes to mind) it is definitely legal; see other posts citing media taxes which are theoretically used to compensate artists for the copying. In the United States, we have the Audio Home Recording ACt, which makes it legal to copy music and share it. The catch in this case is that the law has been interpretted to apply only to devices legally recognized as "audio home recording devices" which means mix tapes are protected, but MP3s aren't.
As for the second point, as has been pointed out before, copying data is fundamentally different from stealing merchandise, in that nobody is deprived of anything (and don't tell me about lost profits -- contrary to popular belief, corporations do NOT have a "right to profit"). Nor is this a case of stores protecting their property, either -- the MPAA is harassing consumers for their post-sale activities, which may or may not be in line with the doctrine of first sale.
Anyway, even if the MPAA is legally within its rights, and the Gnutella users are legally in the wrong, it isn't clear that this situation will continue. Some interpretations of the Constitution (not the Supreme's opinion, but that could change) argue that copyright law as it currently stands violates the 1st Amendment and perhaps the Copyright Clause itself, and there ARE those in Congress who would like to fix it.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Before I enagaged in a little unauthorized copying with Napster, my music collection was small and not very varied. Now it's much larger, and incredibly less homogenous. Explain to me again how unauthorized copying destroys diversity?
Strict copying restrictions don't empower the artist, the empower the distributes, since copying circumvents distribution but not creation. Because it is in the best interests of these distributers to promote homogeny (makes their job easier if they get to sell a smaller variety of product, since so much of their expenses are advertising), empowering these distributers destroys variety and the small artist.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
All great artists are misunderstood, but not all who are misunderstood are great artists.
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share and enjoy
As RMS put it in one of his documents, money is a token representing property. If you make a counterfeit $20 bill, you are in effect shaving a small amount off the value of all the legitimate bills in circulation -- taking existing property from existing owners. If you copy a CD or a book, there is now one more copy of that work in the world, but you have not deprived people who already have the same work of their ability to enjoy it.
2. As long as you've got commercial copyright laws to prevent someone from profiting on an counterfeit copy of your book, I don't think you need to worry too much about non-commercial Internet copying. Even if you put the book out in unprotected electronic form, paper books are much more convenient to read than computer screens, and most people who are interested in the book would buy for this reason alone.
Umm people voluntarily allow that when they publish open source software. Look at Linux...
A legally enforced monopoly is not the only way creativity can be rewarded...
Legally enforced monopolies (i.e. making it ILLEGAL to COMPETE) are anti-capitalist (they are a himderance to the free market) and have socially harmful consequences. We appear to be reaching or even past the point where the bad outweights the good.
One final point, it is better to get the law changed than to break it.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Do I understand that in this example Bob is a millionair Gnutella user? How else can he afford to defend a case against the MPAA to the point of being able to present expert witnesses?
sure you can! in fact, juries do it when the occasion calls for it - its called jury nullification. the basic idea is that bad laws do not need to be blindly followed. enter the human element. we're not machines and we can think on a per-situation basis (at least some of us can.)
the colonial americans "ignored the law" of the british back about 200yrs ago and in the US this is regarded as a just and right thing. by your reasoning, there's never a reason to break or bend a law.
I repeat, the individual's conscience is what matters - and each person has the right to make his/her own mind up. laws surely aren't perfect and I bet a lot of folks break silly laws all the time without even thinking about it (ever see the 'sodomy' laws in various states? do you realize that oral sex falls under this definition; even between a consenting man and woman, even if married? should we blindly follow THAT law just cause its written?)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
right on, bro!
when I followed the grateful dead, I went to EVERY concert that I was capable of flying or driving to. at $35/ticket plus concessions, and with every show being a 100% sellout (most of the time this was true), the band did very very well.
they did so well that they proclaimed the music to belong to the audience afte the show ("If we're done with the music, you can have it")
very few deadheads cared about the studio albums. they were dry and boring compared to the live performances. this is why the band got so rich from the live shows - everyone always made the effort to come out and see them in person. and the resultant show tapes? they were usually traded for free (or for the actual incurred cost of the material and shipping - but NO PROFIT was allowed).
so even though their cd sales weren't all that hot (they rarely had top-10 hits in songs or albums) they were one of the most frequently touring bands in history (and most financially successful from the live tours).
all this is to reinforce my first point: that artists should only get paid when they perform. paying for past performances, at least in the music context, will soon be a thing of the past; RIAA or not.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
uhm, because it is different!
stealing software is quite different from stealing hardware. when you steal hardware, the inventory level of a store just went down. not so with software (ignoring the cardboard and plastic container for the software, which is nil for this argument's sake).
when you engage in profit-oriented software business, you must realize that the very nature of your goods is quite different from all the other kinds of hard merchandise.
the profit models of hard merchandise simply are not applicable to software. this is the revolt that we're seeing in the youth today. they fully know that 'stealing' a song doesn't cost the shopkeeper, the music industry or the artist nearly as much as if someone stole a cd player, itself. the rules should be different since the end effect on the 'harmed party' are quite different.
consumers today recognize that new catagories need to be defined for software sharing. if the legal system can't keep up with the times, historically people have always started grass roots movements to overturn the laws. unfortunately the laws are bought and sold by payoffs and it will be quite a long time before the revolution finally causes real change.
until then, follow your concionce! its a far better guide than current american laws.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
the notion of being paid royalties for past performances needs to be updated to today's reality. I fully agree that artists should be paid for their one-of-a-kind art. I'd have no problem paying for the time or materials or talent of a painter who paints a piece of artwork. but when he tries to get returning profit due to the mass production of said art, THAT's where I disagree. I disagree that the number of items that were mass produced (this has nothing to do with the artist, its a pure mimeo task) should cause the artist to become richer.
I would also have no problem paying for a concert ticket since the artist is clearly WORKING for his/her money at that instance. but I won't pay for copied music (whether copied by the music industry or via pirates or even end consumers) since the artist didn't earn anything in this respect (IMHO).
I guess I challenge the notion of being paid royalties AT ALL in the artistic world. I think this model is pretty well broken in today's economy. at one time, the distribution of music did cost a serious amount of money. now, cd blanks are 50 cents and burners are on many budget pc's. bandwidth is cheap and available today. the distribution middleman just isn't a requirement anymore; and I see no need to continue to pay his ransome for a job that is no longer needed.
micropayments to an artist is the clean way to go. if someone produces something I like, I'll drop some quarters into his paypal (etc) account, DIRECTLY. no middleman, no RIAA, no MPAA, etc. this is regardless of how I came upon the music. I don't want to pay distribution since I don't see the value in that anymore. I will contribute to the artist if I feel I should patronize them - but again, this is quite different from paying distribution fees (most of which goes into the record companies pocket and NOT the artist).
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Digital copying is not ethically wrong. In the worst case, digital copying may bankrupt some musicians. Well, mechanical looms bankrupt some textile workers. No one has a guarantee that progress won't disrupt the way they make a living.
We may need to increase private or federal funding of the arts, now that copying requires only a mouse click and not a CD factory and a national distribution system. But banning digital copying is akin to Luddites smashing looms.
I wish your friends the best!
Pirating may be illegal, but I do not think that makes it wrong.
Movie prices are horrendous now. $8.00+ to see a movie here. Most often that $8 is used to see two hours of shit that the movie conglomerates pump out because they know people will pay to see a movie they have not seen before. I don't believe huge profits justifies mediocrity. Before anybody says "well you paid to see it" let me just say that I paid to see a movie. I did not pay to see a load of shit displayed before my eyes. There are very few decent movies around now, and that means odds are you are going to see a bad one. Take notice of how most of the movies pirated are new releases, not old films. I think this speaks for itself.
If pirating movies is the only way to get the movie companies to stop releasing shit, so be it.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
When I read this yesterday I thought to myself "does this mean that the MPAA is going to ask the Mayor of San Francisco to better police music and film traders around the streets of San Francisco?".
What the MPAA is doing by asking the ISPs to monitor their users is exactly the same thing. The ISPs do _NOT_ have the resources to monitor thousands of users on a 24/7 basis, and why should they?
In case the MPAA does not know it, ISPs provide a SERVICE to the user, hence the S.
Should the CHP ask Ford Motor Company to monitor speeders and drunk drivers too?
If we catch someone drinking and driving in a Ford vehicle, we will hold you personally responsible for having provided this individual a car!
Get real..
Maybe now that K-Mart has brought back the "Blue Light Specials" back, the MPAA and their attorneys should go looking for a clue on sale.
I haven't gone to a theater, bought a DVD, or rented a movie since I got on Gnutella. That stuff's great! My computer monitor is more than adequate for viewing and the sound system is killer.
I thought there were a few court cases and judge's decisions stating that ISP's were *not* liable for user content? For example, the good old Blumenthal v America Online Inc. suit said as much.
I'm no lawyer, but if that's correct, the ISP's in question, being not legally liable for anything, don't have to so much as pay attention to the MPAA and its requests to boot users off their broadband lines.
Isn't it interesting to see how the Internet is taking shape, and is becoming more and more like any other neighborhood?
We started of with a few huts, lousy roads, a gung-ho attitude but now the roads are becoming better and the cities bigger we have also introduced highway patrols to stop speeding motorists from 'uncivilized' behavior. (eg. have your local government come swoop in on those trucking around stolen goods)
With a few kicks here and there, a couple of arrests, a kangaroo court and you have the net-citizens behave like any other good members of your (a) socialist state (b) communist paradise (c) capitalist nation (d) religious order (e) fill in the blanks.
Sure, there are a couple of rough spots in town and a few slippery characters, but its too easy to swoop in with hidden camera's to notice the license plates of those upstanding citizens visiting the prostitutes and send a notice in the mail. Police in many "civilized" countries have been doing it for years.
1984 ? Long past. The net is just as easy to police as many an uptown neighbourhood.
On the issue of illegal music? As long as the citizens of (a)-(e) won't say with a straight face that copying, selling and distributing music over the net is legal the cops of (a)-(e) will just swoop in an arrest any offenders stupid/unlucky enough to get caught.
Nuff Said for now.
Why does it need to be a movie? Why not just have it be a text file with a particularly useful matrix described inside of it as well as its derivation and suggested use (say, the family of matrices for computing 3D splines for example). I realize that parodies and satires are considered fair use, but it would be even funnier if they came at you for something that had nothing whatsoever to do with their interests. That would make it obvious that they were more interested in finding people to pick fights with than they actually were in protecting their IP (which, IMO, is an oxymoron).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"
That doesn't change the fact that it is theft. Taking something without permission is still illegal.
"
So if I meet you in the street and you light my cigarette, I've stolen the fire from match manufacturers?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
"
The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is wrong.
"
It is not theft.
Theft is the act of taking property away from someone else without payment.
The music has not been taken - it has been duplicated.
Legally wrong I will grant you.
Ethically, much more debatable. Copyright is a recent invention - two hundred years ago it would have been ethically and morally right.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I didn't say you used a match to light the cigarette.
You may have lit it off another cigarette, another random burning source. The point is that the cost of duplicating fire is zero - just like IP. If duplicating fire doesn't steal off the bloke who creates matches how come duplicating a random piece of IP steals off an IP creator?
My point is, stealing is absolutely the wrong term for this.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Please note that this (horribly overused) style of analogy is blatantly wrong; the reason that copyright infringement is not theft is that, unlike the car, the original owner does not lose their ability to use their property. A new user simply gains that ability. Things that have this property, such as anything that can be represented in a bitstream, should not be able to be owned. To try to enforce the laws of physical theft on such items is silly and is destined to fail.
Because the first post-Napster P2P program the mainstream press mentions is Gnutella. When people discuss the limitation/demise of Napster, they say "so we'll just use Gnutella." It's a PR decision: even if other P2P programs are actually more popular and better performing, Gnutella has the biggest profile and thus is the next thing to kill.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Second, with GPL code, YOUR USERS ARE LOSING! You are mostly correct in saying that the author isn't losing anything. However, the whole purpose of GPL isn't to give the author complete power of the code. The GPL is used TO promote freedom of code, and you are taking that freedom away from them, on code that they have the right to use. Your programmers gain, because they have to do less work, and your users lose, because they have no freedom with the code.
IANAL, but I remember a little think in the DMCA saying that ISPs can't be held liable for their users activities.
Is there some other out-moded, ill-fitting technology we can through in their tracks? Maybe we should bring back Beta. Or, make vinyl pirated copies of new CDs.
thelocust[dot]org
If your friends come over and watch the movie, that's fine. If your friends come over, and you give them a copy of the movie that they keep and take home with them, that's when it becomes illegal.
Stealing from the rich is no less a crime than stealing from the poor.
I think the main difference, here, is that we're not talking about lending the movie(CD, whatever) to a friend for a spell, or making a copy of a "few pages" (minutes). We're talking about, in theory anyway, perfect digital reproductions of the original.
I'll grant you that it's not the most heinous thing one can do, but it's not exactly a victimless crime, either. I mean, right now, even today, I can probably go and download the new Dave Mathews albumn in it's entirety off Napster. Assuming the whoever put it up made a quality rip, I can then create my own copy of Everyday in less than an hour, and for no more than the cost of my cable modem. Is DMB significantly hurt by my doing this? Of course not. But by the same token, is Wal-Mart significantly hurt if I go in and lift a bag of Sam's Choice Hot Grits? Not any more so than DMB, but it doesn't make it right, in either case.
Old arguments I know. My main point is this: It's entertainment media. No one's rights are violated because they have to plunk down $20 for the Matrix or DMB. If you think the price is a rip-off, then you don't buy them. That's a choice you make as a consumer. But your miniature boycott of the product does not give you the right to obtain said product (that you would otherwise have to pay for) for free from another source.
"What we're trying to do is educate the population about what is appropriate..."
What they don't realize is that they don't get to decide what is appropriate. It's us, the people, the society, the culture, that get to decide.
Just because they pushed a law through when no one was looking doesn't make them the 'appropriate' authorities.
This all goes back to this article posted a few days ago on Kuro5hin. Perhaps someone should forward it to their lawyers...From the Ranger Online press release: "IOS Technology gives Ranger the first online product control, anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting system with offensive capabilities.".
Does this mean that their IOS (confusingly similar to a Cisco Systems product name, no?) software has the capability to break into a target system if they suspect it is violating their client's copyrights? Isn't that illegal (at least in the USA)? I find it disturbing that any reputable company would advertise software with "offensive capabilities" which are probably illegal in the country they call home....
if further goes on Our intelligent probes assess the behavior patterns of the site and decide whether its actions look suspect. If the assessment is positive then our probes dig deeper into the site and analyze its content. Algorithms are continually modified based on the ever-changing nature of the Internet.
Almost seems like a click-thru terms of use, stating that "I am not involved in assesing the legality or illegality of the contents of this web site" would be enough to give their "case building" pause.
A message from our sponsor
See Linux. Ten years free, and still going strong.
What if someone (i.e. Microsoft) downloaded Linux for free, then included parts of it in the next version of Windows, violating the GPL? Do you believe that only certain Copyrights should should be enforced?
Everything in this post is false.
The problem is that they aren't taking the individual user to court, they are *asking* the ISP to ditch them.
An ISP does not care about the finer points of copyright law, and they almost certainly will not bother to check if the material being shared is actually in violation of copyright. Gnutella shares many things, not just MPAA movies.
If they were really going after the individual user, this is what would happen. Naughty Nate the Gnutella addict would wake up one morning to a letter telling him he's being sued for copyright infringement and many $$$ in damages.
That would be harsh, but then a court, not an ISP or the MPAA would decide if punishment was appropriate.
THAT's going after the user. What they're doing is intimidation.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Gnutella and Napster are theft on a huge and organised scale.
That's like saying that FTP and HTTP is theft on a huge and organized scale as well. I personally use MP3.COM and Gnutella for trading of legitimate music (either not copyright or non-importable music items, as well as my own music items as I am a musician). The real reason the RIAA and MPAA are afraid of these systems is that it cuts them out as the middle man. If we just paid the artists, we'd be paying them $2 a CD, not $16.
Nevertheless, I boycott by not paying for the CD's, not by stealing. So, yes, stealing is not ethical but nieither is threatining a public prototcol for file sharing.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
But you are talking facts.
The Earth going around is a physical fact.
Sharing being wrong or not is an OPINION
>How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
I don't know, ask Linus or the rest of the open source community. Movies are monopolized and over-priced. I paid $8.00 to go watch it in a theatre, over $20 if you count the popcorn. I made my contribution. Why should I go out and pay another $20 for something I already paid for? If it was to pay for the cost of the media and shipping and handling with a slight markup for effort by the producer and all middle men, sure, I'll pay another $8. That's $16 to see a movie on a date and then unlimited times afterwards; where do I sign? If demand is low and supply is high, go back to BUS X100 or ECON E202 and try to make the curves intersect at the sale price.
Since Kaplan used to work for the MPAA in their legal department, I think that's a safe bet.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
stealing software is quite different from stealing hardware. when you steal hardware, the inventory level of a store just went down. not so with software
It's supply side stealing vs. demand side stealing. Piracy steals from the demand side. Reducing demand for someone's product is not a bad thing in itself; for instance it is OK if you are offering a competing product. This is not what is happening here.
I am definitely of the opinion that property law will have to be revamped extensively in the face of digital information as property, but I will hardly join in the ill conceived and intellectually disingenuous argument you make: "See, they still have their product, so I didn't really steal it!"
This digital information (e.g. movies, software) was damn expensive to create, even if it is "free" to duplicate. If you want the law to permit duplication of digital content even without the creators authorization, then expect a lot of cheaper-to-produce content out there. "The Phantom Menace" might be that last Star Wars movie, since there would be no reason to produce another. If producers see that the size of the market for actual sales is dwindling, replaced by a mass of people who will get a free copy if they can, then why invest in creating the kind of whiz-bang feasts of decadence that we have come to expect?
Now, an argument can be made that this is not a bad thing. It may indeed usher in a new era of of emphasis on quality rather than quantity in any given work. You can also argue that the marketplace of ideas will be richer, with more people participating.
But please, don't say it's not stealing.
Bingo Foo
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taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
You are an ultra left-wing econonomic ignoramus. Almost everyone, rich or poor, gets their money by working and/or putting themselves or their well-being at risk. The rich either have worked harder or have had their risks pay off. This is not an injustice.
Simply claiming for yourself the rights to the property/wealth/etc. of any other person is stealing. How can you even attempt to argue this point?
Unless they are slaves or there is collusion going on in the labor market (which is illegal unless you are a union) "the poor" are not exploited. They are free to choose if and/or where to work. Of course they don't have as many choices as someone who is well-off, but they can make choices to become well-off. Yes it's hard and it takes time, but it is not unjust. After all, economics isn't about money, it's about choices.
Sometimes I'd like to see what would happen if we let people like you experiment with a world where you implement your economic schemes and remove all incentive to excel. (oh yeah, it's called "communism.")
Bingo Foo
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taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Not so. Here's something I stole from www.m-w.com. Look at transitive sense 1A and 1c.
Main Entry: 1steal /'stOl/; stolen /'stO-l&n/; stealing : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice : to come or go secretly, unobtrusively, gradually, or unexpectedly : to steal or attempt to steal a base : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully <stole a car> b : to take away by force or unjust means <they've stolen our liberty> c : to take surreptitiously or without permission <steal a kiss> d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of <steal the show> : to move, convey, or introduce secretly : SMUGGLE b : to accomplish in a concealed or unobserved manner <steal a visit> : to seize, gain, or win by trickery, skill, or daring <a basketball player adept at steal ing the ball> <stole the election> b of a base runner : to reach (a base) safely solely by running and usually catching the opposing team off guard /'stE-l&-b&l/ adjective : to gain an advantage on unobserved : to grab attention from another especially by anticipating an idea, plan, or presentation also : to claim credit for another's idea
Pronunciation: 'stE(&)l
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): stole
Etymology: Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan; akin to Old High German stelan to steal
Date: before 12th century
intransitive senses
1
2
3
transitive senses
1 a
2 a
3 a
- stealable
- stealer noun
- steal a march on
- steal one's thunder
synonyms STEAL, PILFER, FILCH, PURLOIN mean to take from another without right or without detection. STEAL may apply to any surreptitious taking of something and differs from the other terms by commonly applying to intangibles as well as material things <steal jewels> <stole a look at the gifts>. PILFER implies stealing repeatedly in small amounts <pilfered from his employer>. FILCH adds a suggestion of snatching quickly and surreptitiously <filched an apple from the tray>. PURLOIN stresses removing or carrying off for one's own use or purposes <printed a purloined document>.
I totally understand that the "Free Tibet" reference appears out of character with the rest of the above post. It is the strongarm takeover and anticompetitive, illegal tactics that MS uses I was referring to. The casualty of DR DOS and the "Microsoft tax" on OEMs are the shining examples.
Bingo Foo
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taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Sorry let me clean this statement up.
Old: What if the courts decided that information such as, music and movies become free?
New: What if the courts decided all information was free, such as mp3's or mpegs?
And no, these entertainers would still make money, off of endorsements, concerts whatever. Slaves, eh? If you think celebrities would be slaves, suddenly being black in the south during the 1800's doesn't sound so bad.
Rehab is for quitters...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
I had a good laugh while thinking about this. What if the courts decided that information such as, music and movies become free? It's not exactly like all these entertainers will stop entertaining...
Hi thanks for calling Pizza Hut this is Brittany (Spears), can I take your order?
What are they going to do, join the workforce like everyone else? No they will continue to make money making music, doing concerts, making movies, commercials and television shows. People will still pay to go to concerts and movie theatres. Also hopefully this will create better competition, maybe they won't blast us with such shit anymore and expect us to eat it.
Oh and the MPAA and the RIAA? F**K EM!
Rehab is for quitters...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
But its gonna be scary as hell to see where this goes
.sig; I leave tomorrow morning.
Have you ever read 1984? Ferenheit451? Brave New World? Tireless 'mind/masses control' tales - never more poignant or insightfull than today.
Read
If copyright infringement were legally identical to theft, there would be no need for a separate statute. Theft is theft and copyright infringement is copyright infringement. Using the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is just corporate propoganda. If you want to stick to the law, then you should stick to the law.
Who does the MPAA think they are? They're not the US government. Who gave them the right to spy on people and then contact ISP's about banning users? If I ran an ISP I'd laugh at them and tell them to call the feds or something. The MPAA are nobody special, yet they're acting like they are.
> it looks like they want to scare individual users from even trying to share movies,
And the problem here is?
Sharing movies is illegal. If someone shares a movie, they aren't going to buy it. That's money lost for the makers. What's wrong with crime prevention.
You don't get front-page articles on slashdot about people putting locks in shops to stop people to stealing the merchandise, so why should it be any different when try and stop other kinds of crime that costs money?
I don't understand why people are so defensive of pirates. I hear people talking about it all the time, and they don't feel in the least bit guilty about the fact that they're committing a criminal act.
Moreover, it's not simply a 'white-collar', victimless crime. Piracy does hurt people.
Games, which people constantly defend the pirating of, cost millions of dollars to create. Talented people put their very being into creating them. The same goes for movies.
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
And that a supposedly reputable website was defending this theft?
I can't see how people can object to actions that stop piracy - people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things. They are wrong. The people working for record and computer companies have jobs and families too. And these are the ones that get hurt by the revenue lost.
It's never the big boss that gets hurt. Not Julia Roberts or Leonardo Di Caprio. It's the man who's packing the videos for $8/hour. It's the guy making them. He's the one losing the money.
These are the real victims of this crime, and I feel horrified that slashdot can condone it.
The laws are only useful if they serve the interests of the majority of society.
Clearly the tide is shifting against intellectual property rights for a variety of reasons. The big point about Napster/Gnutella etc is that they have a superior distribution model as opposed to traditional stores.
With drugs we see that some countries are ignoring patents and produce AIDS drugs at rock-bottom prices. Countries like Russia and China are ignoring software piracy because the benefit of piracy is large for society if you don't happen to host MS in your country.
Some companies need to think about their role in society and see whether there is no other viable business modell - e.g. being a provider of trust or intelligence rather than rely on unenforcable laws.
I vaguely remember this. The warez sites have disclaimers stating this. But even if this loophole existed, it would probably only be for sites that allow users to upload without verification. I don't think it would apply to file sharing utils since the users know what the files they're sharing are.
They're apparently going after any large entity that is an enabler of copyright infringement against them, so where will they stop? They've gone after indexing services, now they're going to internet providers. Isn't the RIAA already working on something against any portable MP3 players?
Who's next, PC manufacturers. After all, if we didn't have fast machines, then it would take to long to encode an MP3, and therefore make it easier on them.
As far as Gnutella, why doesn't everyone just change their settings to the same network speed. Everybody say they're a 56k user until this is over. I wouldn't think they could get away with singling out several users without going after all of them.
Right. The internet makes possible what would have been an unthinkable absurdity in the real world, since the only major obstacle keeping two connected computers from sharing files is bandwidth and disk space-- neither of which are difficult to obtain. Your newspaper analogy is not comparable. The newspaper company itself provides content online for free in many cases. This does not give you the right to print it out and give away free or sell versions of their newspaper on the street (again, somewhat absurd) or give you the right to make an exact duplicate of the online newspaper and serve it to the public yourself. You do retain fair use rights to the news you read, and as long as the online paper isn't in some unprintable PDF file, saving a copy (hard or soft) for your own needs is entirely possible.
I never once made a statement that internet sharing shouldn't be allowed because of a supposed drop in profits. If you read my post I said internet sharing is probably helping these companies make MORE money.
And let's get one thing straight. Most musicians have little control over their creations. This is even more true with the MPAA than with the RIAA-- but fortunately for the actors and others involved in movie production the movie industry pays its people well and the workers are often unionized in a way that prevents the outright exploitation that occurs so frequently in the music industry.
I do not have a signature
I don't see how the DMCA is even relevant when it sounds like what they're going after is people sharing movies (although it does appear on second thought to be related mostly in how it puts some teeth into sending a letter to the ISP, but that's not fundamental in my mind). It's one thing to have rules against things like DeCSS which is a tool, one that allows a user to act within both ethical and (previous) legal boundaries-- providing for the ability to use one's DVDs in a manner not provided for in existing hardware or software perhaps. But when has it ever been ethical or legal to share a complete copy of a movie?
And yes, I'm aware that there is a Fair Use clause, but it does not allow third parties to completely independently to provide me with a "backup copy" of something I own unless (maybe) they do it by acting on the original copy I do own. The situation on Gnutella is analogous to me setting a streetcorner stand with CD-writers and a large collection of CDs, then strangers can come by and make a copy of any CD they want, provided they bring a blank CD-R along. Whether they have their own copy of the CD is irrelevant to whether what I'm doing is legal or ethical.
On the other hand, if the entertainment industries seriously think Gnutella, DeCSS, or Napster are having any effect on their business, they really should guess again. In fact, it seems to be helping them. When I go looking for independent music, I rarely find it. Instead, I get in the habit of downloading their pop music (since it's free), but then I'm hooked so instead of saving my money for independent label CDs at a smaller record store, I just go plunk down my money at Sam Goody for some mainstream crud. I don't have the bandwidth to do movies, but I'm guessing it's the same with Gnutella and divx movies.
I do not have a signature
The porn studios are MPAA members. Very few people offer full-length porn on the gnutella network (200+MB files). But there is a proliferation of cut, paste, and spit-shine porn clips out there. Do Jackie V. and his "IP replaced my id" cohorts plan to cuff me for DLing these fine specimens? If they'll leave their hands off of my hands on, I've got no problem with them de-broadbanding some schmuck who tries to DL "Battlefield Earth," or "Dude, Why am I Famous?"
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Oh come on, mod this up!
"Stop saying 'Don't quote me' because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying" -KMFDM
--Iwan
Now how are they going to crack down on Freenet, Mojo Nation and all the other anonymous distributed systems? And how long until they go after Shoutcast and other streaming services?
^]:wq!^M
Can you run Gnutella through zero knowledge?
Now it's happening. I, for one, would not be willing to lose a broadband connection for running Gnutella. I'd shut it down in a heartbeat.
The "spirit" of this rule is to prevent someone with a "Hot Prawn" business from serving Megabytes of information and choking the bandwidth from the occasional user. There are times when traffic brings my local node to its proverbial knees, so its not an unwarranted provision.
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Intellectual labor /= Intelectual Property.
IL is not the issue IP is.
It takes brain power to design a car. As much or more than to program a word processor.
But when you have a car, and it gets stolen, you no longer have a car.
If you have a word processor program, and it gets stolen, you still have that word processor program.
Supply and demand... when you have a infinite supply (any IP) the value is low.
Therefore copyrights exsist to protect I.P. FOR A LIMITED TIME. (exact words in consitution)
So, the question is... how long is reasonable? 7 years was the orginal plan.... now it is 75 years with unlimited renual. That is just wrong.
Also, when one of your "starving artists" records a CD, they get perhaps 0.5 percent of the profit.. 1/3 goes to the store that sells it... the rest to the record label. Usually what happens is that it is not even that good... because when you record with a lable, THE RECORD COMPANY OWNS THE COPYRIGHT, NOT THE ARTIST WHO SANG/WROTE IT? WHAT IS UP WITH THAT? In my opinion, It would not be a bad thing to see several industries go out of business... MPAA and RIAA members included. Starve the theives.
==>lazn
heh...my ISP (apparently) doesn't keep logs...and they think I'm a Baptist Church on the other side of town.....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
yeah genius....they love to get rid of thier customers....the bandwidth is there to be consumed...and it's not going away...in fact every year more & more fiber gets put in the ground.....but all this fiber doesn't mean a damn thing if they don't have any customers to sell it to.
But, I don't guess your in the telcom industry are you?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
"Why would that get rid of their customers? If the mpaa/riaa rid the earth of file sharing, I really doubt that anyone would take it out on the isps? "
If they are blacklisting customers because the RIAA is threatining them (ISPs), then yes they are getting rid of their customers. Sorry about the genius comment. It seems we are arguing the same point.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Where Do you see a ship?
theft:The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same.
When I steal someone's car, I have a car, he doesn't, I stole it. When I copy someone else's movie or MP3, I have it, he has it. I didn't steal anything, I copied it.
I'm copying things I wouldn't have bought. Not a chance in hell I buy the things I download, and if there's something I find valuable: I buy it. Besides, listening to more songs gives me a chance to hear new artists whose music I might buy.
Well, just my $.02
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
Who would pay for cable access with NO gnutella, NO napster, inability to play online copied games etc. etc. I've found that Gnutella and Napster both made cable modem access more useful to me, and I suspect that this is the same for others. If ISPs keep caving into the MPAA/outside interest, pretty soon there will be less incentive to buy broadband access. Thus, the ISPs have an incentive to resist the MPAA, if they look at it this way.
What is it about books that makes people pay money for them? Part of a book's worth is the information that it contains, the other part of its worth is the convenient package that it comes in, allowing the purchaser to tote the information around, quickly find the point where they left off, etc.
Obviously this "book" product is a combination of two activities, "book writing" and "book printing (and distributiuon, etc.)."
So if it became legal to take any text that you find anywhere and print it up and distribute it in book form, the authors would all starve to death, right?
Maybe not.
If the above scenario happened, there would be no financial incentive for authors to write... for a while. However the printers would quickly run out of new material to print (having re-printed all of each-others products) collapsing their own market. At that point any printer that wanted to keep his business afloat would start paying authors to write stuff.
Not all of the printers would do that... some would just take that new content and re-print it in some format or distribution that is more convenient to some segment of the market.
That would create two distinct types of book printing businesses: A first that seeks to make money by developing (or funding the development of) new content, and another that seeks to make money by formatting and distributing existing content in ways that others haven't.
Unless I'm mistaken the result would be: authors getting paid, publishers making money, and consumers getting choices that they don't have today.
It's too terrible to contemplate, isn't it?
I am a CO2 producer here to stand up for my rights. I spend every hour of my life creating CO2. You rotten people are using your 'plants' to take my CO2 and convert it to O2 (stripping off my C copy protection) which you then use for your own purposes!
And don't tell me it's ok just because every living thing does it! Stealing is stealing!
Time to take my meds.....
Viv
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Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Anyone know what the IPs of these Ranger clowns are? We can just block their IPs at the firewall. No more searches...
Viv
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Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Any idea how I could create a 10K parody of The Matrix? I just think it would be funny to share a file that is clearly too small to be the film, to see if you get told to stop sharing the MPAA's intellectual proprty.
This is what prevents me from writing up a secret contract that says "Stonehand must give me all his money and his firstborn child", hiding it in my desk drawer, and then sending out police/lawyers/etc to enforce it whenever I need extra money or whenever Stonhand does something I don't like.
The alternative isn't much of a contract--it seems more like a protection racket.
-Bryan
Have anybody thought why so many people act illegally and unethically ? Did their mother teach them how to behave in life ?
Most people that share copyrighted material are perfect normal citizens in everydays life. So? Why do they do this?
People common sense says it is wrong to kill or to steal. Most criminals also realize that thier behaviour is not good. But why common sense fails when talking about sharing copyright material? I think copyright law is an "artificial" law.
If you have a chair, and I build a copy of your chair, I feel I have the right to do it and to use the chair. No "copy protection" law can stop me.
What musicians should do? I think they should do what all musicians have done before the recording industry appears, play live presentations. From Mozart and Beethoven to street performers, all them got money from their shows.
Probably they wont get rich doing this, but neither do doctors, policemen, or most people in the world.
Copyright law is like "alcohol prohibition law" in 1920s. An unpopular law that will disappear.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Long ago, anime fans got together to trade tapes with either raw or fansubbed anime videos... Usually cash would change hands, enough to cover the price of the tape itself (or postage in the event that they were on a mailing list)...
The same happens today, on Usenet and/or websites, either offering tapes for trade or full episode downloads... Now considering that this was, in essense, far more beneficial for anime releases in the US (would there have been any interest in Tenchi Muyo if not for the fansub tapes that were made?), would it be fair to say that anime tape/episode trading was in fact stealing from the Japanese?
Considering that this was being done decades hence, while the anime fans in Japan were doing more than enough to cover the costs of production, it would seem that this is an adequate business model for the US markets to observe...
In my own history, I've purchased DVD's based on what I've downloaded and enjoyed... The MPAA's attitude that the download of movies equals theft is incorrect... If you watch a movie that is crap, then you're out the $7+ you paid for the tickets... The movie industry then profits from it, and decides that the crap in question is justification to produce more crap similar to the crap you wasted your money on...
If you go to a restaurant and the food sucks, you can get your money back, or at least a free meal to make up for it... If you purchase any equipment that doesn't function, or functions improperly, you can get a refund or exchange... If you watch a movie for free and then pay for it if you like it, then it's the same exact thing... If I downloaded a movie I liked, I'd hold onto it til the DVD came out (which is where most movies really make their profits to begin with), and if not, there's 600+ megs of HD space I could use for something better...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
'What we're trying to do is educate the population about what is appropriate, both from an ethical standpoint and from a legal standpoint,'
Thats exactly why I'm protesting the DMCA. They read my mind. Glad to know we are in agreement here.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
Of course, there's another tack... suppose I sign up with an Offshore ISP which chooses to disregard the MPAA? This would hurt domestic ISPs should something of this sort happen.
Once again, it's pounding the thumb with the hammer, harder, to drive the nail into the board.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There is no absolute right and wrong from an ethical standpoint. Both sides have good arguments. Content producers deserve compensation. Content consumers deserve to be able to access said content over new medias. They deserve not to be charged indefinitely for finite goods.
In the absence of an absolute moral/ethical standpoint, we have only the "legal" one. The law in the United States (for example) should protect the rights of the public. We have a government of the people. What we say goes. We just have to get involved in the process. So far, only the MPAA has been involved. But, we outnumber them :-) .
This crap is here to stay, the big corporations should just get used to it and improvise a little. People become millionaires every day by coming up with new, fresh ideas. A lot of these huge companies were started that way, but have since become as quick witted as a retarded three-toed sloth.
If the MPAA or the RIAA would stop their bitching for 2 minutes and really THINK about it, they could find a way to make money off of this practice again.
Think of it this way. Why do people want to download movies instead of paying $6 to go see one in a theater. Well it's cheaper! So what if the producers started distributing movies in more than one format? One goes to the screen, and a week later the same movie comes out on the Net, only it's not absolutely perfect quality, and/or it has commercials. There you go, they just got their $6 per person back. Would you download the movie directly from the producing company if they applied these modifications? I know I would! Free movies? I'm all over that! Who cares if there are commercials every half hour? People sit on their butts all day and watch TV as it is now, and they get commercials every 15 minutes!
Sorry to put it this way, but it is fucking retarded for everyone to go running to their lawyers every time someone is breaking new ground and a little dirt gets sprinkled on their driveway because of it. Take it all in and innovate a little. Everyone would be a lot happier in the end.
If you read the article, it says:
"It's kind of a natural flow of events," McNealy said. "The MPAA is sending a message it is not to be trifled with."
WHO THE HELL PUT THEM IN CHARGE? What do you mean, "not to be trifled with"? Of course we can trifle with them! It is because of them we exist!
When did Copyright change, from a tool to enable authors to profit from their works for a few years, into a club that corporations can use to kill individuals and that has prevented anything from entering the public domain since the early 1900s.
With the flow of information increasing so rapidly, Copyright protection shouldn't extend more than 10 years at the most. 15 years for patents.
-------
-- russ
"You want people to think logically? ACK! Turn in your UID, you traitor!"
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Bravo my good sir, Bravo !!
Yours,
Bob
All the best,
--Bob
Has the MPAA ever tried downloading a movie off of the internet? I have.. It takes forever. I downloaded the Matrix off of an opennap server... why... Because I wanted to for my computer. I already own The Matrix on DVD, so that's not why... I just wanted it on my computer. I'm to cheap to run out and buy a DVD drive for my Linux box since the MPAA makes it illegal to use DeCSS so now their forcing me to download it off of the internet to watch it. (not really the case but funny to think of it in those terms).
Now with MP3's, I love my MP3 Player. I use it for working out, listening to songs on my computer. 95% of my MP3's are songs on CD's I already own! I was just too lazy to burn every CD just to get one song.
The other 5% are songs I downloaded off of the internet becuase I wanted to listen to them but were not CD's I ever would have bought in the first place! If there was no MP3's then I would never have noticed the difference. I certainly wouldn't have gone out and bought them. The RIAA never lost a dime on me.
But why go after me? Doesn't make much sense. You're just pushing the comsumer further away and pretty soon they'll hit someone who'll be a new age martyr....... Then they'll really feel the consumer pain.
Linuxrunner
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
And going against the community on /. shouldn't be considered a troll, how well I know. :)
--
--hongpong.com
That is, what I gather from the article is that the MPAA actually hired a firm to determine whether the Gnutella users actually were trading the MPAA's copyrighted movies, and provided evidence to the ISP's. We hope they actually downloaded "The Matrix" and checked to make sure that it was actually the Movie, and not some guy's Film Project.
If, instead, they are simply trying to get ALL Gnutella servers shut down, regardless of whether they were actually serving the MPAA's copyrighted movies, (or all servers that serve files named "The Matrix" without checking them first), then all the good things I have said go out the window, and we should all get out our Clue Sticks again.
I can just picture this. Big goon-like MPAA hitmen standing outside a theater beating the sh1t out of movie goers.
the stuff I share has a big electromagnet under it with a panic button, and is stored behind a door with a magnetic field generator.
I think it would be better if you attached a nuke to it. That way when they come in to take your equipment it vaporizes the evidence and the others.
They call me Moderator. God of Slashdot.
One of the major arguments that the MPAA used in their actions against Napster was that there was a company there that was making money off the illegal sharing of files. I knew it was crap when I heard it then. Who's making money off Gnutella?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
> There is a difference between an individual downloading
> a Brittney Spears song and a music pirate who copies CDs/DVDs
> in bulk and sells them for profit. It has not been shown, and
> I do not believe that individuals downloading mp3s for their
> own use has harmed artists or the RIAA. First of all, it can
> not be proven that the individuals do not already have
> the cd or that they will not purchase the cd in the future.
> Secondly, and most importantly, it can not be proven that
> the individual would have ever bought the cd if the download
> wasn't available.
Sorry, but this argument kills itself. There are two stances when it comes to IP; that it's a real thing, or that it isn't. If you believe that IP is really property, then there is no difference between a person stealing one copy and a person stealing thousands of copies. If you think there is, try stealing only one CD from a record store, then tell the police, "I didn't steal every copy, so I didn't do anything wrong." Both your first and second points describe fair use, which only makes sense if you feel that IP is real property, so your argument dies.
> By confusing individuals with pirates, your helping
> spread RIAA/MPAA propaganda and contributing to their efforts
> to maintain their monopolies and in turn to harm consumers by
> charging artificially inflated prices.
Are you implying that individuals can't be pirates, or that pirates aren't individuals? Just because the RIAA charges artificially high prices does not make it any more right to steal from them. Again, this assumes that IP is real property, but if it isn't, it can't be stolen, so the term "pirate" is meaningless. The legal answer to overpricing is to buy elsewhere, or boycott. Neither of these is a good solution in the real world, which is why we have this mess in the first place, but those are your only legal options.
> Its sort of like the whole hacker/cracker debate.
Pardon me? No, it isn't. Hackers are those who jury-rig or recode stuff (the "Scottys" of the computer world) and crackers are people who break other people's systems or software for fun or profit. Pirates are just pirates.
> The bottom line is that the MPAA should not be going
> after individuals, the cost of doing so outweighs the
> benefits they receive from forcing that individual to
> buy a tape,cd,dvd or whatever.
Irrelevant. They can pursue anyone who steals their stuff, and if it costs them more than they get, then it's still their choice.
> I think they know this and are just trying to use intimidation
> to help maintain their monopoly. That's one of the reasons they're
> going after individuals, first, its much easier than tackling some
> overseas pirate operation and second, the profits they
> receive from being a monopoly are much greater than those they
> lose to pirates who are selling their movies/music.
If they feel that the deterrent effect is worth the cost, then that is also their right. Again, if you believe that IP is real property, then it's their real property, and the reason they enforce that property right is irrelevant to the discussion.
In a nutshell (I did promise that with my subject line), if IP is real property, then there's no difference between a person copying an MP3 of a song (that they don't own) and a pirate making thousands of copies, other than scale. They're both thieves. If IP isn't real property, then there's no difference between them other than scale, because neither is doing anything wrong. In either case, your argument needs rethinking.
Virg
> Go pick up a CD or a video. Find the "license",
> and tell me what the terms of the license are.
That's easy. It's the part that says, "Copyright 2000. This Album may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the express written consent of the publisher" and "...for private, non-commercial use only" and such. You own the CD and the jewel case (or the video cassette/DVD), not the content. You would have every right to take that tape home and record videos of yourself dancing around your bedroom on it, if you wished. You can use the CD as a blade in your circular saw, if that's what floats your boat. But (and the courts back me up on this), you can't reproduce the content except as allowed by fair use under the law.
Virg
> So if I meet you in the street and you light my cigarette,
> I've stolen the fire from match manufacturers?
Of course not. But I may have, if I stole the matches. Please tell me you were only being facetious to choose such a bad example as to compare physical property to intellectual property.
Virg
You try to force a distinction between taking real property and intellectual property by pointing up the difference between "theft" and "piracy" and then saying that piracy isn't stealing because the original user still has the information. Are you really trying to say that the dilution of this information does not take value away from it? Take your example to a logical extreme. Let's say I don't make one copy of a CD, but 600,000. How does it look now? Will you stand behind the idea that the original owner hasn't lost anything if I give away all of those CDs?
The right to control distribution of information allows the creator to create a supply deficit of the information, thereby driving up its value and enabling him/her to derive a return from it. This was the original intent of copyright law to begin with. Unauthorized distribution of the information takes away this value, such that the owner can no longer profit from it. If you think that's not a tangible loss, then I ask you to explain how writers make a living. If you think taking that profit potential isn't stealing just because it's unrealized, then you're mistaken.
By the way, if you copy my answers on a test because you didn't want to study, you get a better grade than you otherwise could. Since most teachers grade on a curve, you're biasing the curve, and I don't get points on the test that I would have gotten if you had been honest. But, hey, piracy is different, after all, since you didn't take anything from me. At least, nothing tangible...
Virg
> You said:
"...and the music and movie owners licence movies, they don't sell them."
A minor point, but I didn't say that. I wasn't the author of the grandparent to my post.
Virg
I have to admit, "caveman" is appropriate nomenclature for your attitude about all of this. Let's address these points, shall we?
> You could say the same thing about street vendors
> giving out newspapers for free, when you can get them
> for free online, but then again, that would be ridiculous
> wouldn't it because of the cost to do so?
You are right in saying it's ridiculous, but it has nothing to do with cost. In your example, the vendor bought the papers from the publisher, and then sells them at a profit. If he chooses to give them away, the publisher won't care, because he already bought them. By the same token, the publisher assembles the web site with their own content, which they give away for free, assumably in the hopes that visitors will earn them ad revenue or whatever else they do to turn a profit. To match your (and the parent article's) example, this street vendor would have to steal the papers off of the loading dock of the publisher, then give them away. Or, in the case of first purchase, buy one paper, and run off a photocopy for anyone who wants one for free. There are few besides you who wouldn't think that was wrong.
> The fact remains, you would have to supply all the
> CD-R burners, buy all of the hundreds (thousands even)
> of records, then give up your entire day to give it all
> away for free.
See above. Just because I'm paying for the toner in the photocopier and that first paper doesn't make it right. I have a right to give away my time and materials, but no such right to give away their content.
> If the artists don't want there music to be copied,
> why not just do shows only? Oh yeah, they can't reach as
> many people.
Completely irrelevant to the question of right versus wrong. To say that the artist has to tolerate stealing to get wider exposure is realistic to the real world, but only because thieves like yourself think that access to the information gives you some default right to do anything you like with it. It's stealing. It's stealing. It's stealing. All of the discussions you want to make about the ease of distribution via the Internet don't change this.
I find that most IP laws are heavily biased toward the content holder, and the whole thing is in sore need of review and change, but giving away something you didn't create just because you can is still wrong.
Virg
I Have major problems with this statement. By this logic, since all the jocks in Columbine High School teased and tortured the Trenchcoat Mafia, it was perfectly acceptable.
I'm not one to go in for the something is naturally right or wrong of absolute ethics either. In order to determine right and wrong, you should look at whether it helps or hurts the society. Anything that doesn't hurt the society should be allowed.
I am under the personal belief that allowing the MPAA and RIAA to continue to control pop art is detrimental to our society. However, I could be wrong.
"So? everything is a social product."
Bingo.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
But, I have read a book on copyright law and taken a course on Internet intellectual property law. I wound up doing all that because I was threatened with a law suit for having registered my family name as a domain name.
The law allows the owner to use copyright law to control the distribution of their property as they see fit. The difference between web pages you can down load for free and mp3s that you can't is very simple. The web page owner let's you look at the page for free because they make money by selling advertising to other people and maybe by selling products and services to you. It might surprise you but there are many many web pages that you CAN NOT look at for free. The most useful databases and documents require payment to view them. Companies I've worked for have paid tens of thousands of dollars to see some of those documents.
The owner of the mp3 makes money by selling music.
Just like any other kind of property the owner gets to decide what is done with the property. Most owners are out to make the most they can from the property they own. So the web page owner lets you look at the pages for free and makes money indirectly from you while the MP3 owner makes money from selling music and considers "free" access to be theft.
Think of it like this. A free web site is a lot like a store. Their aren't very many stores that charge people to get in and look at the products (but there are some). An, mp3 is a lot like a watch. A store will let you look at a watch for free. They'll even let you try it on. But, don't try to take the watch home for free. You'll wind up in jail.
StoneWolf
Most movies are totally commerical enterprises with the studio owning and paying for everything. You cannot claim that you're copying the movie to promote the artist - like in music. They want you to pay for the movie, so they get paid.
Perhaps if the Movie Studios^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCartels didn't want people to share "perfect digital copies" of movies, they shouldn't have made such copies of movies (i.e. DVDs) in the first place. No one twisted their arms and told them to digitize their "intellectual property." In search of a perfect distribution format, they got EXACTLY what they wished for...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
- What a user does with his/her computer is the user's business, unless 2...
- Under 1, the user does something to another user's computer that that user doesn't consent to/like.
You get the picture. Now, I understand that the MPAA is concerned about its "IP." Actually, when I go to the movies, I pay for the privelege just like every good little American should. But when it comes to the movie industry's digital adventures, I really don't give a shit. What I do with my box is my business, what you do with yours is yours.Let's get drunk and delete production data!
According to CNET:
The MPAA said the crackdown is the result of a month-long investigation by Ranger Online, a company it hired to scour the Web and find cases of copyright infringement.
Dude, you have some more numbers to look up I do believe.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
The assumption of an artists right to persistant compensation is really the hingepin of why Intellectual Property is un-natural, artifical concept and is now becoming logistically indefensible.
When a plumber fixes my toilet, he has no royalty on future flushes.
Why is an artists work for hire accorded such special persistant compensation status?
Copyright is a monopoly on the intangible and subjective and hence has become an odeous burdon and scourge upon our global society. It is now time to rid ourselves of the this childish, protectionist legal snare. Enforcing it can only lead to centrally controlled, corrupt regime of freedom and thought control.
Oh yes, I can hear your response now..."But no one will make movies or write music and the world will end!"
Bullshit. And even if that were true, SO WHAT?
Maybe, just maybe, once copyright is gone the way of the Dodo, we'll find that the entertainment Industry is guilty of retarding the sciences and arts on a criminally global scale by wasting all of our time with this pablum and worse, being guilty of wasting our children's potential by smothering them with violence and lowest common denominator thinking.
Your 'morality' argument, Sir, is scandalously threadbare and truely revolting in light of the moral sewer that your precious entertainment industry has made of our national, ney, Global culture under the protection of copyright.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Could this be a joint effort by the RIAA/MPAA?
I can't be the only one to have noticed this.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
When will the 'morons' of the MPAA/RIAA get it through their thick skulls that NOTHING can stop the technological revolution which has been rotating its gears for the past 5 years? Money, as well as ALL Intellectual Property, is destined to become non-existant in the next decade anyway - especially with Nanotechnology on the horizon. They had better learn to just give up this stupid fight, otherwise, the transition they will need to make in the future will be a very difficult one.
This was just the kind of situation Gnutella was designed to prevent, and I think it will.
Even if MPAA files injunctions against each and every one of the thousands of movie traders out there, they still won't be able to stop the flow of movies because most of these guys can simply get a new account somewhere else once their ISP has caved. Heaven forbid, if they run out of broadband options, then they just sign up for any of the myriad free 700 hours of AOHell.
Yeah, the MPAA is evil, Blah, blah blah. Here, they're just pathetic.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
you lose! Remember, @Home and the like have service agreements which basically give them the right to kill your account with almost no reason. Most providers don't allow servers; it can be argued that ICQ is a server. Hopefully only a few will be picked on (the cost of suing an ISP/individual users, and finding them, and gathering evidence is only worth it if you try to make an example of someone), and the rest will be left alone.
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
> But then again. I'm not in 'the land of the free' so I can 'freely' copy all the stuff I want =)
Does that mean Europe (more specifically, the EU)?
Then I hate disappoint you. If you have been following what's going on, we can't either do that soon.
Rather than try and shut down gnutella completely, they'll go after the individuals commiting the crime, rather than some 3rd party scapegoat.
Of course, everyone here wants everything for free. Tough. The world doesn't work that way.
-
Okay, so this may not apply anymore, but...
Back in the days when I ran a BBS, there was the constant threat of being siezed for software piracy. However, a loophole had been found that allowed us to act as a "file lending library", allowing them to download any content legally for 24 hours, and then it must be erased.
Now, this may have been a mass net myth, but wouldn't it ease the situation with gnutella (and other p2p systems)?
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
This is a test for my new .sig.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
As plesent as that sounds, that is really dumb. It would be nice to be able to send them a message that way, but it will acomplish nothing. We have to do it legally. They are following the laws they made, screwing us. So we have to screw them by making laws. Get involved, don't bomb them. If it does ever get to be like 1984, I will gladly thow in 500, but until then do damage legally. Go to a library, borrow CDs, buy second hand CDs, don't buy movies, rent them, or watch them on TMN, with a bunch of friends. That way you are still not breaking the law, but it hurts them.
First, I will say, that this is about the MPAA, not the RIAA. This is about MOVIES not MUSIC. So yeah, your tired-old argument has some essense of validity... in a completely different discussion!
Okay, I'll bat this one around a little though this post seems a bit "troll-ish."
The [musical] artists being harmed are not being harmed and I will tell you exactly why. The music is bein distributed in an entirely different format; a format that does not appear in their contract as being one that receives royalties. Why is that relevant? First, people can't BUY MP3s yet and that's the format they want them in. Downloading them saves the trouble of authoring them. (...then I go into "fair use" doctrine...) Studies have shown that people would rather not buy at all if they can't get what they want at an appropriate price and level of availability. (I like to collect Japanese pop music but I can't buy it in the U.S. can I? But I certainly wouldn't fly to Japan to buy it!)
Here's what I call the ass-kicker of all this. The RIAA has been working on a way to license MP3s or a similar format for digital distribution so they can make a few bucks on MP3s. But did you know that the RIAA has no intention, thus far, of including royalies to the struggling artists? Consider that kind of back-stabbing when you think about your arguments about what the artists are not recieving and how they are being screwed by their fans.
Frankly, the argument loses integrity in the face of the RIAA doing to the artists what you claim the fans are doing...only they are doing it harder and in the ass! What the fans do, we do out of appreciation, love and admiration. What the RIAA does is strictly for the money.
Um, yeah, probably time for a new one! The movie and record industries have a business model that hasn't changed since it's inception. They basically made money off of the fact that people couldn't get their hands on content in an efficient and reliable way. Anything that was obtained had to come fro them. Now that this has changed they cry about it. "How are we gonna make our millions now? Now that we can't rely on the disparity of people?" boo-hoo. I say fuck that! If content is good then the people who made it will receive everything they deserve! Take a band like Radiohead - they give their stuff away for free! They are a content provider that is confidant in the fact that they will get what they deserve because they make a quality product. People will buy their album for its artistic value if not anything else. The record industry makes most of its money by tricking people into buying crap and hoping they won't return it cuz all but one of the songs on the album suck ass! Just my two bucks worth.
IMO, the BEST way ISP's can protect themselves from being terminally harassed by various corpers trying to harass their customers over IP would be to NOT keep logs more than 12-24 hours MAXIMUM. This would keep logs long enough to be able to trace a cracker should a break in occur, but be short enough to both protect their customers AND themselves from harassment.
:)
It would be very rare for the MPAA/RIAA et all to be able to get and serve any kind of "search warrant" for server logs in less than a 24-hour time frame.
Of course, in the case of the MPAA, they probably have "judge" Kaplan's cell phone number, not to mention a nice little rubber-stamp of his signature and thousands of "fill in the blanks" search warrants
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"That said, this is exactly what the MPAA should be doing. Not attacking the enablers, but attacking the actual movie fans themselves."
You are correct. This is what I want to see them and the RIAA do. Why? Because this will ultimately lead to the demise of the DMCA. This is our ONLY shot to wake the masses.
Suing the customers is never a sound business model. Just ask Rambus. That's why the RIAA attacked Napster itself, instead of users, because the centralized nature of Napster allowed it. The only way to attack Gnutella IS to attack users.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Never even mind the manufactured bands that don't write music or play instruments and sometimes don't even sing (Britney was caught lip singing at a concert, but that was covered up pretty well) -- the fact is that there's no evidence that pirating music affects record sales negatively.
Very few people seem to be downloading entire albums and most research indicates that record sales are helped when people have access to individual songs for free. The MPAA's complaints only seem to have any weight to people who don't know or don't understand the facts. Many musicians do want their music to be available for free. Offspring wanted to give away their latest album on their website, but it was their record company that nixed that idea. Don't say that it's the musicians who are being hurt when they're the ones who want everyone to have access to their music most of the time.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
"The people most harmed are the musicians."
Bullshit! If musicians are the real victims then why did Alanis Morrisette and Don Henly stand up in front of congress with their bald faces hanging out and support Napster. The RIAA wants to turn around and have congress pass a law to allow them to do the same thing as Napster without paying your beloved musicians one extra cent.
Why don't these people just setup a firewall to deny access to any MPAA IP or other 3rd party services.
Since the MPAA portscans you, as well as trys to connect on common service ports, why not setup a firewall? I have been scanned several times, and I know from others in the community the process is completly automated. Why not just block them from discovering you run these services in the first place?
It would actually be a good idea for some organization associated with Gnutella to establish a central list of hostnames, IPs, etc. which are known to represent the MPAA and other bloudhounds.
After all, you can't tell what files you have when you're getting a connection refused.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Wow, mod this up!
Post it somewhere where I can reread it at my leasure.
just replace that "We do not agree on everything" with:
we do not agree on ANYTHING
and that's a GOOD thing.
I also just want to affirm the basic content of this message. Anyone who illegally trades copyrighted materials has committed a crime and must expect the potential consequences. And let the punishment fit the crime. Loss of broadband seems a valid (not excessive)punishment for abuse of its power. Call it passive resistance or protest if you want but getting caught and punished is part of the game. Hey, they could be cutting people's hands off.
To my mind the biggest danger of all this copyright bruhaha is how it endangers the legitimate use of these kinds of tools by people who actually want to harness the potential cornucopia of digital duplication and interchange for use with intellectual property they actually own. The tail of bootlegging/pirating is wagging the dog of unleashing the scarcity-destroying power of digitalized intellectual property. Certainly the publishing/duplication industry is the ultimate villain but people who pirate/bootleg copyrighted materials are their unwitting stooges for creating a world where information is kept in chains.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Slashdot has continually said that the MPAA should got after individual copyright infrigers rather than services like Napster. Yet as soon as the MPAA does that it becomes labelled "intimidation tactics". I read the article and from what I gathered Excite@Home told people if they didn't stop sharing copyright material they would lose their service. What, exactly, is the problem with that? When "Slashdot" says the MPAA should go after the users, we meant legaly. We didn't mean buring putting on a cape and dealing with the users on their own. There is nothing legal about using your clout to shut down the user's internet connection. They might as well be getting the electric company to shut off power to their homes. If you have a legal problem with me, then SUE ME!
Arguments that intellectual property shouldn't exist are as arbitrary as arguments that it should. The only thing that matters is what can be sustained, and unfortunately for the industries that make their money off of controlled, copyrighted content, such control is destined to evaporate.
I gotta troll here! This is the funniest thing I've ever seen on my brief time on slashdot! Kudo's for the rhyme dude!
I thought the whole idea of copyright, and the right to make your own copies revolved around getting something for free (or a reduced price) that you would have bought otherwise? I thought deeply about this the other day:
It is perfectly legal for me to view a website that has news everyday, like Slashdot. Hell, I can even archive every one of their stories and commentary on my computer (my browser even does it for me by caching webpages autmatically!). I can share that webpage with my friends, let them read it, copy it, whatever, I just cannot claim it as my own work, and neither can my friends. So why is file sharing of mp3's any different? You hear a song on the radio, internet, CD - you make a copy - you share it with your friends of Gnutella, Napster, etc. How is that different as long as you're not passing it off as your own work? I think what we should fight is those people who download mp3's, make CD's, and sell them as if they're a distributor of such works. Then the MPAA should have full legal recourse to go after those offenders. But to say that free file sharing is breaking copyright/fair use laws is utterly ridiculous.
So you're calling me a theif of music because I might download a couple of your friend's songs in mp3 format, even though I would never go out and buy their album because it is not carried in any store here in Ohio, USA? C'mon! That's silly. If nothing else, your friends just got more exposure than they could have ever hoped for because now I know they exist, whereas before Napster, I didn't.
True, but I just stated that I wouldn't have the means to buy any of their stuff anyways. Ever heard of the corporate term: 'networking'? It's where you get your name out there, and eventually, you get a really good job, contract, etc. because people already know who you are. Isn't that how the band 'Linkin Park' was discovered. On MP3.com? I would argue that they are paying the rent and eating well these days.
Even though it may be ethically wrong to trade these movies and the like, its a horrible standard we're allowing to be set. Everytime a new technology that could possible benifit people comes out it is quickly grabbed up and controled or destroyed and illegalized. How long until distributed file systems are illegal all together (or highly regulated)? More of this will happen, everytime a peice of technology comes out that doesn't fit into CORP X's bussiness plan they'll destroy it. One day, someone might figure out how to build things like transporters and replicators and we won't be allowed to use them because it would be an intrusion on GAS COMPANY X's market or it'll be said that replicators will demotivate innovation and they should only be used to corporations. It's competition, if the majority of people want to trade music online, then it is their duty as a bussiness entity to ensure their profits. Create a better product or find profit elsewhere. "AH! They're doing something we can't control, kill them!" If were going to keep doing this we might as well just write the bussinesses permanent existance into law. Section II (a) CORP X will exist under this goverment forever. (b) CORP X will not have and challengers to their market and profits. (c) CORP X will provide all legislators with %0.03 of their annual profits. (d) Not taxes will be paid by CORP X.
Irrelevant!
Dime store philosophers, ivory tower academics, Congressional representatives, and record company IT departments can (and will) prattle on and on for years about intellectual property rights, encrypted digital music protection formats, whether we're really hurting the big rich heartless record labels or the little independant groups by unrestricted mp3 trading on the Internet...
The de facto reality of the situation is that all this abstract intellectual posturing is completely and totally inconsequential, and always will be. The oft-quoted "The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." And it does.
Every new encryption scheme for digital intellectual property will, sooner or later, be broken by someone, somewhere, and the code will be all over the world within half an hour. Bandwidth, disk space, and network address space will increase exponentially. Peer to peer file sharing infrastructures will evolve and become exponentially more efficient, more anonymous, and more distributed. In 5 or 10 years you will be able to get first run, DVD quality commercial Hollywood films on your hard drive in 10 seconds before they're even released with a few clicks of your mouse.
Mob rule. It ain't pretty, but ultimately, that's reality; abstract notions of 'right' are defined by society, not the other way around. It was illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition. One could make the argument that it was thus morally 'wrong' to violate the laws of society by doing it anyway, but millions of people did just that, because they personally did not feel that it was 'wrong'. Prohibition was, consequently, rendered impotent and meaningless, just as intellectual property laws are now.
What we are witnessing here is evolution. Survival of the fittest social paradigm with regard to intellectual property. In this case, "fittest" means "acceptable to the biggest chunk of society". There are two primary competing paradigms, the classical "copying others' IP is stealing" paradigm, and the still emerging "information wants to be free" paradigm. The DMCA and whatever other swan song laws and encryption schemes purists of the first paradigm will come up with in the next few years are the dying gasps of the former. The latter is about to hit critical mass and will supersede the former in the next 10 or 15 years.
Before you flame me for not caring about all the starving artists who will be put out of business and be forced to get real jobs from the loss of CD sales, bear in mind that I am not saying that what is happening is a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing. It's the reality of the situation. I'm not advocating it, I'm saying that it's going to happen; it's already happening, whether you or I like it or think it's 'wrong' or not. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. The intellectual polemics about the morality of the situation are interesting but ultimately futile. Sure, you might eventually convince a few thousand people to not trade mp3's out of some sense that it's not 'right', but that is, practically speaking, totally meaningless, since there are literally millions more who don't think it's wrong.
-kwertii
This is only going to cause broadband providers to kick up another service charge. They'll probably name it something like "Internet Port Protection Scanning Service".
Avg. Live Expectancy of a SysAdmin, 45 Years.
To me, this isn't any different then taping a song off the radio or making a copy of a buddies tape or CD. Doing this is NO BIG DEAL!!! So the corprate world only made $200,000,000.00 this year, WOOPTY FREAKIN DOO! Plus, to sit here and say that none of the people agreeing with them never did anything like this is the most hypocritical thing I've ever heard... Nobody ever rented a movie and taped it? Never copied a record/CD to tape? Never? Man, you guys are SAINTS! When I grow up I want to be just like you. I wish I was a programer just so I could create an e-mail/instant messenger is completely independant from the isp, limited in e-mail size only by the size of the hard drives of the two computers that are comunicating. If anyone knows about something like that, please let me know.
"The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.
The people most harmed are the musicians. When you pirate music, you are stealing from the artist who slaved to create it for you. Gnutella and Napster are theft on a huge and organised scale. Gosh, it seems to me that the industry does the same thing. Stealing from the musicians that slaved to create a product for them. The only difference is that these companies can make millions off the people they abuse. I'm not advocating piracy, I'm pointing out the fact that the system is lose-lose. Give copyright back to the artists.
You underestimate the value of a CD. I'm in a band that's recording a demo tape consisting of three songs. Studios are going to cost us about $50/hour to record, plus the same price for the time it takes their technicians to work with the sound itself and to mix it. For one single track, it took about six or seven 'takes' (recordings) of each instrument to finally get something we liked. With four instruments (two guitar, bass, drums) and vocals, that's about 35 takes total. Now, considering that it takes us half an hour to set up and take down drums each day, that's quite a bit of time. True, we could have gone to a studio that allowed us to all play at once and do six or seven takes *total* (and I wish we had). But most of those places also charge hourly totals to pay their technicians/engineers/producers. To record our demo tape, it's going to cost us well over a thousand dollars. Actually, no, I'm lying - we're not paying a dime, because we have some really cool friends who believe in our talent. Yeah, printing a CD is cheap - about a dollar, if you do it through the indie companies (probably cheaper if a major label does it). But it's the other things (recording, engineers, producers, managers, agents, lawyers, etc.) that cost a lot of money. Plus, the labels actually *are* needed for some bands and the people there *do* deserve money. Just not that much.
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I don't understand why they are going after gnutella? Why not go after something alot easier to attach like usenet? Alot of movies, mp3's, warez etc is posted on usenet everyday yet i don't see the MPAA or anyone targeting the big news servers with their threats. Anyone know why?
I think it is wrong to violate an agreement you make in the purchase of something.
I think it is foolish to agree to terms that take away our freedom to share what we purchase (especially when there is NO harm in doing so).
In other words, I think we should only agree to terms, and purchase from those, that honour the rights and freedoms we cherish.
I believe you are taking the argument far too radically and out of context. He is saying that isn't right for you to own an idea (and therefore lock that one idea from everyone else), since all ideas are built from prior ideas and influences. You're stopping other people from having the chances that you did. On the second account, however, save for some ad hominum attacks, i agree with you. It is seemingly plain wrong that compensation should be distributed by the labor involved. Who will judge it? It just runs into many more problems than it (Intellectual property) currently has. Personally, i think that when you buy something, it is then yours. If i buy a car, i should be able to modify it in any way i feel like it. Similarly, if i buy a program, i should be able to modify the code to better suit my needs. As far as the movies are concerned, the MPAA, actors, directors, et cetera, have made massive amounts of money on them and, frankly, they're just being greedy. Putting flags on everything that says 'mine' then fighting everyone off who dares come near their ideas. It's intellectual territorialism and it will not work in the long run. As far as it simply not being 'ethical', i'd just have to respond that ethics is a product of your society, not of some hidden form lurking behind reality, but that's spilling onto a whole host of philosophical arguments, and i think i'll just let it drop there.
A different kind of animal
Interesting debate so far... And while I don't have any real contribution to add I do want to refute a particular claim of yours.
Similarly, if i buy a program, i should be able to modify the code to better suit my needs.This is simply not so, you have purchased the compiled program! Not the source code and as such you can't modify the 'source code'! On that same thread I do believe that your argument still stands, as you should be able to play around in the machine code, reverse engineer it (though I'm not as comfortable with that), write add-ons that manipulate it and all that fun kind of stuff! :-)
However if you have purchased a program in all it's glory not just the executable, then quite simply it comes down to the agreement between you and the provider.
An extension of your analogy of purchasing a car would in my mind be, you're purchased the actual car, you have not purchased the plans/schematics etc to build the car yourself (doesn't stop you from figuring it out yourself though).
The biggest difference to these anologies as I see them is that to in effect reverse engineer a cars design/schematic is very time consumative and hence requires a lot of effort and time (which in itself discourages a lot of people from doing it), however with programs, there are lots of tools out there which you just run over this new app, and with virtually zero effort on your behalf you have the source (equilavent to the car schematics in this analogy).... Is this a problem? Should programs be harder to reverse-engineer? At the moment to produce a similar effect as is in with physical products there are artificial restrictions (laws), which are perhaps going to far... What is the right balance? Hell should there even be a balance?
Just my two cents...It's in that place where I put that thing that time
Is it just that sharing big files will get you a letter of threat? In that case you can't share your Linux ISO's anymore... I don't think they are allowed to do that.
If they look for specific files (*.mov?) All you need to do is rename it Linux-distri.iso and you're done.
My point: going after file sharing systems will just never work. That's just attacking symptoms. The real problems is that people *want* to share files. This 'need' can be made smaller by decreasing prices for CD's, and making less-strict copyright rules (e.g. CD very cheap after 5 years). A compromise should go both ways.
But then again. I'm not in 'the land of the free' so I can 'freely' copy all the stuff I want =)
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Both are wrong, but it's obviously better to steal from the rich.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
hah, sure the poor have a chance... and back in the real world, this is how it works:
poor people start out disadvantaged - is this insurmountable? no. but they are disadvantaged - by elementary schooling (poor families cannot live in areas with high property taxes -> high property taxes feed into the school system -> the children of the wealthy generally have the opportunity to have a far superior average schooling). it is more difficult then to get into and pay for college. and they are much less likely to have contacts in industries or be the beneficiaries of nepotism. let's just look... how hard did George W. work?
The rich make money off of corporate profits - the poor make money off of wages. THESE TWO CONCEPTS ARE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED. the wealthy have a vested interest in keeping wages low, so that they themselves make more money. you are so naive!! the wealthy don't make money from wages, they make money from stocks... poor people are paid less and laid off to make the stock prices higher.
to briefly counter your last point, lets take a brief look at China and Europe. Their is one communist state that is doing pretty well, and a whole host of SOCIALIST countries that have consistently higher standards of living than the USA. (oh, let's not overlook canada)
go listen to rush limbaug and let your brain leak out your ears you dittohead... theres some trickle down that's at your level.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
You so thoroughly answer your own question, it's hard to reply to this seriously.
"So? everything is a social product. Let's say you manufacture something. You do not do this in a vacuum. You do pay the people who contribute directly, employees, supplies, etc. But, what about the guy that built the building that you work in, the guy who paved the road that you drive your products over, the folks who built the truck that you use to transport goods. Do you have to include them in a cut of your profits? Do they, therefore have the right to take your goods?
The answer is: no. Those people have already been compensated by you in some manner (you rent or bought the building, you paid taxes to get the road paved, you bought or rent the truck). In the case of intellectual property, why would we treat anything differently? The intellectual work performed by someone should be just as valid in the marketplace, and be justly reward, as phsyical labor"
this is precisely what the author meant by compensation.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
"The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is wrong." Ethics, shmethics. What is "right" and "wrong" is such an overwhelmingly subjective matter that I often find it more convenient to act as if those concepts don't exist in reality. Like with the case of Napster, Gnutella, iMesh, etc--the systems are there, I like free music, therefore I will use the systems. For me, it's not a matter of who's hurting who, or whether this or that corporate entity is "evil." I'm certainly not going to stop downloading because some say it's wrong according to ancient rules of "moral" conduct.
The coolest voice ever.
I cite the work of geneticists as another example. Curiosity is the essence of the scientific mind; scientists generally work out of a desire for knowledge. It certainly is the driving force behind experimental genetics--and yet there are "bioethicists" who would thwart the acquisition of new information because of centuries-old codes of conduct that more often than not have their basis in religion. In religion!
No consensus is ever established in debates over what is "right" and "wrong"; always it is realized that such arguments serve to delay actions, and steps are taken foward in the name of self-interest--with Joe User's usage of Napster, or experimental genetic research. Progress is due to leaps like these. The discussions over what is "moral" continue forever afterwards; they demonstrate their own obsolescence.
The coolest voice ever.
And as for Hotmail--heh, you think that's my primary address? It stores more spam than anything else. :)
The coolest voice ever.
Yes, but the nature of the heliocentric model was that it dealt with independently observable physics and objects--i.e. something that was capable of being forcibly recognized by everyone. Like 2+2=4, it's a fact with an immutable basis in reality which exists regardless of whatever doublethink one practices. However, the same is not true for ethics. They exist only with a totally subjective basis in individual minds, that is, they do not exist in a state that must by definition be recognized by everyone. It therefore cannot be proven that something is, universally and forever, "right" or "wrong," and so your statement "Whether or not you THINK something is wrong is irrelevant if it IS wrong" is inapplicable.
The coolest voice ever.
Firstly I find it hard to believe there is rampant piracy of their music, but more importantly any minor losses Napster might cause are nothing compared to how much of their earnings will be leeched by the record label.
Furthermore Napster makes it possible to hear music that would otherwise be out of reach, either because it is no longer in print and the label refuses to re-release or because it is too obscure for music stores to keep it on the shelves.
The recording industry is comprised of liars and thieves who use every trick to justify their theft from musicians; their manner of operation and tactics are indistinguishable from those of the Mafia and other organised crime organisations.
So anyway, stop blaming everything / everyone else for the state of the music / video / movie industries. When people loudly defend their "right" to make free copies of CDs, movies, etc., the Big Boys know that it's an indicator of how badly the masses are hooked on their stuff, which people admit is often crap but go ahead and consume anyway. Piracy is a less frightening problem for them than if the demand for the content were to dry up! "Look, they think they need our stuff so much that they're willing to spend hours downloading it!"
As Precious Roy would say, "SUCKERS!!"
Why is an artists work for hire accorded such special persistant compensation status?
Really bad analogy. If you went to see a live concert, and the artist(s) expected to be paid repeatedly after you'd seen the concert just once, then yes, that would be indefensible. On the other hand, if the artist expected to be compensated each time you listened to a CD, that might be more like the plumber expecting to be paid each time your toilet broke -- is that unreasonable?
Now, I don't like having to pay each time I listen to a piece of music. I want to pay a flat charge for (my) unlimited listening. This would be the equivalent of paying the plumber a fixed fee that would cover any and all work he has to do on your toilet in the future.
As long as the per-listen fee is very small (say, 1-5 cents each time you listen to the CD), and the "buy-out" fee for unlimited personal consumption is reasonable (say $10), I don't have a problem with the basic idea. Just because the current "fee structure" is inflated doesn't mean that the very concept of paying to listen to something is bad. However, I would have a big problem with not being able to pay the "buy-out" to get infinite uses, but mainly because I'd be worried about the media provider going out of business and my then not being able to access the content without their approval / verification. There would also need to be some provision that the per-listen fee amount would be fixed at the time of purchase, so you wouldn't have to check the record company's web site to find out how much it's going to cost today to listen to a CD you got three years ago.
If the big media companies are going to do the equivalent of jacking the prices up (i.e. unlimited listens for a CD will now cost $50 instead of $12-17), then that's an issue of ripoff pricing -- it doesn't necessarily mean that the idea of charging money is wrong. I mean, if they say you have to pay $0.0001 every time you listen to a CD, and there's a way of insuring that media eventually somehow de-encrypts itself if the author goes out of business, just watch how fast all the whining about economic theory and the rights of the people stops. People can posture all they want, but this is mainly an economic issue for most people, not a philosophical one.
1. Stop buying and viewing / reading / using all copyrighted material (video, audio, software, text, etc.).
2. Develop non-copyrighted alternative media (video, audio, etc.) and publicly offer it for free, asking only that if people are happy with it that they make a donation to encourage you to produce more.
3. Generously send donations (that means money) to the creators of free stuff that you like.
To cut to the chase: People rarely have the self-discipline to do #1, are generally too lazy, selfish, or untalented to do #2, and are too cheap and selfish to do #3. Yes, there are some nice exceptions like some open-source software, but percentage-wise, the vast majority is freeloading, not contributing, unless contributing requires near-zero effort and cost (e.g. making files that you got for free available for P2P sharing).
So please don't preach about the glories of I Should Get All My Stuff For Free unless you are backing it up with #1,2, and 3. Otherwise you're only rationalizing your selfishness and cheapness, and using /. as an open-source project devoted to constructing the world's largest circle-jerk.
"hmm.. are they planning on suing Every isp? and every person on the face of the planet?" I didn't remember reading anything about lawsuits. Another thing everyone needs to keep in mind is that the isps might actually like this. Think about all the bandwidth that would be freed up if file sharing went away. I think big isps like excte@home would love it. Maybe that is why you don't hear them complaining.
Current Projects: -------------------------------------------------
UDP. It's connectionless, and the IP headers can be spoofed. If you send the indivudual block requests over the anonymous network, it'll be damn near impossible to trace.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
Like I said, you just broadcast the requests for blocks over the network. You request gets filtered through the nodes to the the sender and appropriate action is taken.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
With this I agree.
The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is wrong.
With this I do not.
There is a complete disconnect between ethicality (right / wrong )and legality (can I be punished).
- action that is unethical is not necessarily illegal
- action that is illegal is not necessarily unethical
It is clearly against the law to copy songs. This topic needs no further discussion.The short term question is, is it unethical to break a law that you don't agree with?
If so, and I think the answer on inspection will be yes, then everyone is not acting unethically. It is only unethical to be a hipocrite.
The long term question is should the government continue to create Intellectual Property through law?
The only socially useful end result of all the legal wrangling over Napster, DSS, etc. is a new debate on this question.
I have yet to see a discussion where people can seperate these two issues in a lgoical way.
First, quit watching movies or listening to music from the member studios. Period. This would be different from a boycott, in that a boycott implies that you would return to looking at their works, in any form. They aren't worth it, people.
The value a copy of a work is dependent on, if not derived from, the tech gap in reproduction technology between the producer of the copies and the intendend audience. That gap limits supply, in that the producer of the copies is the only party that has the means to produce said copies.
As the market gains means to replicate a work, supply approaches demand, and the market becomes self-fulfilling. The monetary value of copies of the work approaches zero. To use law as a tool to coerce self-fulfillers out of the market is to approach, if not meet, the definition of racketeering.
The current body of legislation, paid for or not, amounts to state sponsorship of this otherwise criminal activity. There is no other option at this point, than to refuse to view their works, under any condition. The recording and home movie industries are at this point, illegitimate, and deserve no respect or support.
The American Dream went to hell in a handbasket when someone decided that "The Customer" was King, and the customer beli
I gotta admit that the RIAA/MPAA are in their right to go after the individual. On the other hand they ought to respect the innocent until proven guilty principle. In a democracy only a judge and/or a jury is allowed to make this decision, and then only after hearing both parties. Withdrawing an essential service on grounds of suspicion is a violation of what should be a basic civil right.
If it so happens that this requirement makes it impossible to enforce copyright, then so be it. Civil Rights come first.
I find your selfish sttitude - 'I like it, fuck everybody else' - absolutely shocking, and it epitomises what is wrong with the modern world.
However, there is one small point missed here. That is hogwash.
The people most harmed are the musicians. When you pirate music, you are stealing from the artist who slaved to create it for you. Gnutella and Napster are theft on a huge and organised scale.
The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is wrong.
I have some friends in the recording industry here in Nova Scotia, who strive to make good folk music in the Scottish tradition. They sing in Gaelic. They are affected by napster, because it is a small market for such things. They can barely support themselves as it is, and are only kept afloat by sales of albums.
The final irony here is that the spread of napster and gnutella, and unauthorised piracy generally, would mean the collapse of such small outfits and an increase in musical homogenousness.
For the sake of variety and the small artist, I am on the side of the MPAA in this matter, for once.
If you think I am a troll, remember this:
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
-George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska.(1919)
Quick, everybody write their own distributed P2P file sharing client and everybody use everybody elses' to share copyrighted content. Eventually, the RIAA & MPAA will run out of money for their legal fund attacking everyone!
Why bother.
Does anyone have (or has anyone seen) a list of the files that @home got on users' cases for? If so, email the names (and the file sizes too, if you have them!) to me. Or reply here. Or just totally ignore me.
-- There are two kinds of motorcycles. 1: German. 2: Crap.
if you are going to take an arrogant, know-it-all attitude, and make an insulting comment that does not address the finer points of copyright ethics, then LEARN HOW TO FUCKING SPELL, you miserable little sack of shit. - the clueless h-o-r-d-e-s.
I agree that the MPAA have the right to go after people who steal their property but I think they shouldn't bother. Even if you can download movies for free, it's always easier to buy it. The image quality is better and it's agreeable to own the original box. Even if all their movies were available online, I think they'd still make tons of profit. Now, all they're doing is pissing people off including their customers. Its should remain illegal to trade copyrighted movies but I wouldn't bother with a few Gnutellian's, instead, they should go only after big league pirates who produce and sell a lot of bootlegs.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
A large problem with IP is that it is just that. Our normal economy for about 250 years depended on physical goods. Now, it doesn't.
However, I'm tempted to wonder, can I rob a bank through a modem / telnet connection and illegally transfer funds? After all, it's not money, it's zeros and ones. I should never be prosecuted for it. Oh wait, I will be. In fact, if I stole good ole u.s. greenbacks (the dollar), I'm not stealing physical property. It's actually a representation of what may exist in the U.S. Treasury. it's not really a property, but an abstraction of property. That's what software is, too. Just because I can easily duplicate software (or with a scanner and high speed color laser printer, ca$h) doesn't make it yours. Our whole economy is based on exchange of goods. Some people value abstract goods. Creators of abstractions have every right to charge for them.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Did the shoplifters copy the items they stole?
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
Man how do they know someone is trading movies or just some porn? Are they sniffing the networks? Sounds like privacy invasion to me. Remember you cant wiretap a phone line without a court order. I wonder if a point to point data transmission would fall under the same catorgory?
They're usually huge files. ;-) than you already have..
:P
You finally download one, and find out you need a newer version of DiVX
You have already moved mp3s off the hard drive to store this movie..
You fire it up, and it's blurry or is missing chunks of the audio track..
It's about that time where I say "Screw this" and go to my locally owned video store and pay $3 and just rent the damn thing.
Or to avoid being "just a consumer" I'll REALLY stick it to Da Man by making my roommate rent it.. using HIS video rental card. Yeah! Phuck da Man!
It's a hell of a lot quicker for me to walk to the video store to rent a movie than it is to download one. And besides, my TV has been feeling lonely. That's what I bought the damn thing for, to watch movies. The computers are for Quake.
1)2.3mbit SDSL line. Kid with DivX movie has ISDN. 2)DivX sucks on a slower machine. 3)Not everyone owns a CD burner. Even for the competent, it's still better to support your local video shop. (Not Blockbuster)
that would be fine and dandy if the deck were not stacked in favore of the Corperations.
the recent change in Copyright law has been driven by large corperations and industry organizations that represent those corperations.
original copyrights only lasted 20 years then they were public domain, now, thanks the the late sonny bono and sony the copy rights extend to the life span of the person who created the work plus 70 years.........
how is that fair?
add to that the latest attacks on time shifting technologies and the move to content control over the cable lines, it seems to me that the entertainment industry is setting up an infrastructure that will eventualy support their ultamate goal, pay-per-access of all content and copulsery licensing of multiple personal copies.
oh and before you say anything.....just because the suppream court ruled somthing doesn't mean they have to hear the case and it certainly doesn't mean congress can't pass an illegal law (ie DMCA)
-I thought I told you to shut-up before
I do not think ISPs will cave in to this demand unless a court order for that specific client who is offended has been issued. ISPs are NOT responsible for the content of the client's computers. Therefore, MPAA may try to go for the ISPs to get the client shut down, but most ISPs will ask for court orders before anything will be done.
In Canada, most ISPs have a rule that if the information does not reside on the ISPs servers, then anyone who wants to persue a client's network habits with information residing on the client's computer, then a court order must be served before any information is disclosed.
If you look at it, it is like telling the Bus driver to not allow a specific person on the bus cause he is has done something illegal and is not allowed to transport the illegal substance/items.
ISPs are not police. If the MPAA wants to persue someone who has offended them, they must get a court order against the person and not the carrier. The same goes for the Telcos. Before police can monitor the activity, they must get a court order to allow the monitoring activities and therefore must pay any fees that are involved.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
MPAA: using dynamic IP xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa, user Bob was sharing the movie "Leonard Part VI" on 3/17/2000, at 6pm.
Bob: No I wasn't.
MPAA: We have ISP logs to prove that you were. They show your IP.
Bob: But IP's can be spoofed. Meet my expert witness...
They really can only enforce this if they raid your facility. I run gnotella at random times and IPs, and the HD that contains the stuff I share has a big electromagnet under it with a panic button, and is stored behind a door with a magnetic field generator.
That said, this is exactly what the MPAA should be doing. Not attacking the enablers, but attacking the actual movie fans themselves.
USian Pie
A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How the trollers used to make me smile
And I knew if I had to boast
That I could try to get first post
And maybe I'd be happy for a while
But moderators made me shiver
With every minus they'd deliver
DoS scripts couldn't stop it
They scored them all "Offtopic"
I know that it's cheap crack they smoke
And meta-moderation's broke
At first I thought it was a joke
The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy
Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie
Wonder what became of girls petrified?
What became of girls petrified?
--
Did you write a bunch of Perl?
And did it make you want to hurl
Feces at the Wall?
Can you believe these lame-ass polls?
Do you post big stretched-out assholes?
Can you make the goatse.cx link not show?
Well I know you think that Siggy sucked
Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?
The bots don't have a clue.
Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe!
I was a rabid Free Speech advocate
With a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut
Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut
The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
It's been two years since the IPO
And LNUX sinks to all-time lows
But that's not how it used to be
When Spiral showed how it was done
Trolling as Jon Erikson
Who worked for NPO Technologies
Oh and while they tried to filter posts
Somebody rooted Slashdot's host
"Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!"
Better go change your password
While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book
By using posts he simply took
And we flamed him till he was cooked
The day that trolltalk died
And we were singin....
-- Chorus --
10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out. Goddamn
The mods will find the sid real soon, man
You can't hide if you aren't AC
Your bud (George here) tried BSD
A dead Streetlawyer's tips were free
And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi
70 made his percents up
While 80md warned "liberals suck"
The moon does not exist
It's just a liberal myth
Oh and as Taco tried to take a nap
We forced him to invoke bitchslaps
Do you recall the flood of crap
The day that trolltalk died?
We started singin....
-- Chorus --
Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base"
And started posting monospace
The better for our penis birds
So come on, be a zealot, be a dick
You don't think Anne Marie's a chick?
Because lying's all we do about HURD
So go and push for BSD
And say GPL isn't free
Slow down, cowboy! The limit
Is one post every minute
Now tell the right wing facist slime
Infringing on Your Rights Online
That they can't censor all the time
The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
I met a troll they called The Rev
And asked him if CD BREAK HEAD
He said, "That's old. Get over it."
And with all the courage I could muster
"Imagine what a Beowulf cluster...."
But it wasn't worth the trouble to submit
The karma caps are just plain jive
And everyone's moved to K5
The steelcage has grown rusted
And Geekizoid is busted
The three sites I don't see for weeks
Segfault, kernel, Comp-u-geek
Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat
The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
that the MPAA will now also start sending lists of people who go to the XINE website of linuxvideo.org? I know xine doesn't actually post the plugins neede to play DVDs but they could still say "What other reason would you go there?"
"Sometimes nothin' is a pretty cool hand." - Cool Hand Luke
We are the ones that have been screwed here. When copyright was set up it was an agreement between the people
and the artist. It was done to promote the availability of works to the public. The agreement was that the author
would release the work to the public, In return for which the government would guarantee the authors right to profit
from the work for a LIMITED time by giving the author the sole rights to publish the work. By releasing there work
to the public there were fair uses which anyone could exercise on the work.
We are now being told that due to a change in the media and distribution of a work that the original author now has
more rights.
For example, I own a copy of "The Beach Boys Greatest Hits Vol. 1" Now I can make a copy of this CD on tape,
MP3, DVD, or wire recording by fair use, BUT I can not download a copy in mp3 format because that is WRONG!
But wait it gets worse with the advent of SDMI and CSS they are now taking the fair use away from us! They are now
giving them self the right to tell us (The Public) How, When, and Where we can enjoy there work! As well as
removing our right to use portions of the work in a derivative work and to make backup copies of the work for
personal use!
Oh ya we are the bad guys here because we want to exercise out fair use rights! I am sorry but if the RIAA, MPAA,
etc continue to break the social copyright agreement then I will continue to break my side of it as well.
Remember, Copyright was to be for a LIMITED time. There are works that were made before I was borne that will
still be copyrighted long after I am dead. To me this is not a LIMITED time!
This is the same guy by the way (rigged).
"they love to get rid of thier customers"
Why would that get rid of their customers? If the mpaa/riaa rid the earth of file sharing, I really doubt that anyone would take it out on the isps?
I understand the bandwidth is there to be used, and and I understand that they are laying new fiberoptics all the time. The point is, that they wouldn't have to lay so much fiber optics if people weren't clogging it all up with file sharing.
The only way your comment even makes sense is if the only reason for getting bandwidth is to share files. That is just not the case. I do use file sharing apps, but if they went away, I wouldn't cancel my dsl line. Would some people? probably.
I was just giving some insight as to why the isps might be willing to go along with this. You want another? Maybe the RIAA lined excite@home's pockets. I don't see why you would get all worked up over my comment. I probably agree with you on the whole file sharing business. I think this is a big mess, and we really need to start fighting back. How? Better technology.
"But, I don't guess your in the telcom industry are you?"
I don't see why I would have to be in the telcom industry to make a comment on the ethics of isps and the riaa. There was really nothing technical about my post.
daniel
s.e.c.r.e.t.m.e.d.i.a.g.r.o.u.p - secretmedia.org
ok... I guess there was just a misunderstanding... I agree with you that if the isp looks like the bad guy, then yes, they will be pushing away business. cool...
daniel
s.e.c.r.e.t.m.e.d.i.a.g.r.o.u.p - secretmedia.org
With what right do you claim it to be immoral, or ethically wrong of The People to stand strongly behind the notion that it is absolutely unacceptable that ideas can only be taken advantage of on a first-come first-serve basis?
To what higher authority do you make your appeals? What is acceptable and what is NOT will be determined BY The People, FOR The People. Law should NOT be held as holy. NO law that is not acceptable to The People, will be obeyed by the people. I TELL YOU THAT =WE= ARE THE PEOPLE, AND THIS IS NOT OUR LAW.
Those who have wealth have it for ONE reason alone: because THE PEOPLE CHOOSE to ALLOW them to keep it, AND FOR NO OTHER REASON.
I TELL YOU SURELY: WEALTH ALLOWED BY THE PURE GRACE OF THE PEOPLE CAN BE TAKEN BACK BY THE PEOPLE SHOULD THOSE THAT HAVE SWINDLED IT FROM US BEGIN TO =ABUSE US=.
Thank ALL that in this country we need NOT resort to violence as a first option, but if this continues, if the people become further opressed into the state of being allowed but one purpose to live: to serve YOU, that the steam must escape at some point, that you can only push us so far. PLEASE, DO NOT TAKE US FOR GRANTED.
That which we grant, is that which we can take away. Remember that, and peace will be with you my friends.
I believe if you like the music enough to remove it from your hard drive (either by CD or otherwise), then you have an obligation to send some money to the artist.
c om.mp3
Send the artist a couple of bucks. This is typically more than they would make from the sale of a commercial CD. Screw the recording industry, but don't harm the artist.
On our site for The Donation Project (www.donationproject.com) which will be launching later this week (so don't go there yet), we have proposed an MP3 naming convention that includes the artist's website if they accept tips. Something like this:
performer-album-track#-trackname-tips-artistsite-
User A and B are buddies from the same area and as such, A maintains a database of files on B and B returns the favor. When A gets a search request, it responds on B's behalf and if the searcher requests the file, then A requests it from B and then sends packets as they are received to the user that requested the file. If this is all done by the software then users remain anonymous without any extra work. If the users actually are close together, then I believe the amount of traffic would not increase greatly. What do you think?
according to ARIN whois the MPAA uses: 64.166.187.144 -> 64.166.187.151 63.199.57.120 -> 63.199.57.120 198.70.114.0 -> 198.70.114.255 Just filter those addresses (and the address of companies that do their dirty work) at your firewall, router, or on you're pc and viola! Don't allow them the PRIVILAGE of using you're network applications.
Ranger Online has the following netblock: 204.92.244.208 - 204.92.244.223 feel free to route that to lo0 :)
People are starting to wonder if they can use P2P over zero knowledge networks. This is bad as it confines the P2P traffic to their servers and can be controlled by shutting down zero knowledge. As a result, P2P users would have to go back to the regular, unprotected net. The solution cannot be found by protecting those smart enough to want to be protected. Those few that try to protect themselves will bow to preasue from large corps in the end. The only proper resolution to this is to pass laws protecting users privicy regardless of the negative ramifications. I wish people would wake up and start demanding privacy as the number one feature in their online interactions. What right do companies have to monitor my activities online just because they fear everybody?
That doesn't mean that they have less value in our society. In fact, it's a bit hard to get by without a telephone, car, or even a place to call home. It's hard to do much of anything as a member of a Westernized society without any of these "necessities", period. The issue becomes one of determining what is and isn't a "necessity". Internet access is not currently a "necessity" to be a "functional citizen", but as the rate of adoption of internet services increases, we'll see the same effect in this area. Granted, trading copyrighted material is illegal, and closing an account is a method used to block this activity. But one still needs to be concerned about the potential abuse by institutions and corporate entities, which have in the past and present demonstrated a complete lack of respect to the general public and consumer.
The sad truth is that the ISP is caught in the crossfire. The action is roughly akin to prosecuting the telephone company because a payphone was used to commit a crime. While the poster had the right topic, I'm not sure if they had the right intention. ISPs should be left out of this - because their use amounts to a public utility, and they should be treated as such. Saying that they are not is like saying that a telephone is not a public utility.
The MPAA shouldn't be attacking the ISP, they should be attacking the person who is making the sawp of copyrighted material. Instead of suing the ISP, they should be serving a subpeona to them to obtain access logs, login times, etc. as part of evidence. This fits within the currect American legal system, and probably would fit with several others around the globe as well.