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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
*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?"
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.
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.
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".
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?
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!"
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*.
This is, of course, why people should download data with an anonymous system, so they can't be tracked. So go use freenet
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.
Your bank account can be represented by a bitstream.
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.
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.
http://freenet.sourceforge.net
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
[
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?
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.
That doesn't change the fact that it is theft. Taking something without permission is still illegal.\ =\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
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"?
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.
--
share and enjoy
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!
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.
"
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.
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.
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
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
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"
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
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.
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
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?
Anyone know what the IPs of these Ranger clowns are? We can just block their IPs at the firewall. No more searches...
Viv
-----------
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.
'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
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)
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.
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
- 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!
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!
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
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
It kind of depends on how you define the owner's "ability to use their property," an issue flamingcow ignores. In the case of intellectual property, I think the creator or owner expects, I think rightly, that part of the ability to use that property is the ability to control it's duplication and transfer so as to generate an income from their work/ownership. I see and sympathize with the fact that it's easier to care less about this when the owner is not the creator but rather some nasty giant corporation. But that does not make it right to render intellectual property valueless by taking the power of duplication and distribution away from the copyright owner.
Noone is trying to enforce the laws "of physical theft" on intellectual property. They are sucessfully enforcing copyright laws which are designed for ephemeral property like bitstreams (and the more traditional letterstream, for that matter). "Destined to fail"? Tell that to Napster.
One could argue, with just as much validity, that the copy machine would destroy the publishing industry. The reason it didn't is that it is easier to conduct legitimate business than illegitimate business. The FM band isn't packed with pirate signals because it is simply impossible to broadcast a strong signal from a stable location at a regular time without getting busted. Intellectual property laws will withstand the challenge of computers and the internet for the same reason. To get big enough to make a real impact, ordinary people will have to be able to find what they want easily from a central location. And if they can find it so can the authorities.
And though I'm not too crazy about some of the legal and technological trends happening in service of enforcing copyright in the digital age, I generally think this is a good thing, because just like the printing press and the mimeograph and the copy machine and the printer and the computer and the CD burner, the internet is putting a little more of the power of mass production into the hands of the individual creator. If that creator has the power to protect their right to self-distribute, well... you just might have something REALLY meaningful.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Granted.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It'll be easy to shut down Freenet.
The publishers can hire a few college students in each locality. Their job is to pump Freenet full of so much mislabeled shit that nobody can make sense out of anything in the pipe. Unless the anonymnity is done away with it'll be impossible to tell who's doing it.
The consensus model doesn't scale well to the entire world. You'd better get used to the fact that you'll be sharing with the people you know, and not the whole world. It's really not that horrible a fate. And local communities are good.
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 --
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!
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-