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Korean Brothers Arrested For File-Sharing Site
HarlanC writes: "This story discusses the arrest of two Korean brothers who run a website [warning, page requires Korean language support] that allows peer-to-peer file sharing. Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999."
Is this because of the pirates?
:)
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Just because sales went up does not mean that sales would not have gone up *more* without this "interference." Of course not a popular thing to say here.
/. posters who justify their theft with "Well I wouldn't have bought it anyway."
You're absolutely right, but just because 300 CDs worth of songs were downloaded doesn't mean that sales would have gone up by the total sales price of that 300 CDs.
The record industry's absurd claims about how much money is being lost to piracy is just as ridiculous as
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I "steal" music to evaluate it. If you don't let me "steal" the music first, I will not buy it.
Don't like it? Tough. I can live without your music WAY longer than you can live without my money.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Well, technically, I think it would go something like this:
Let's say they sell 2 million CDs, at $15 a piece.
Now let's say there's 10 million copies of the CDs floating around in Korean cyberspace.
Ergo, to the marketdroids, those 10 million copies at $15 each equal $150 million in CDs they should've sold.
Not that they would ever sell that quantity of CDs in the first place, but then marketing and logic don't always go hand in hand these days.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
What possible connection could there be between the Mahatma and a bunch of kids downloading free music?
One was willing to fight, suffer, starve, and die for his beliefs. The others are just opportunists.
Find a better metaphor, eh?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Even so, the Recording Industry Association of Korea has no right to publish patently false damage claims. I don't think any person in their right mind can possibly believe that national record sales would have been 535% higher without this web site.
Media and software companies have been publishing ridiculously implausible damage figures for years, and it's time they put a stop to it. The reality of copyright infringement is bad enough; there is no need to falsely inflate the damage.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
My provider, http://www.giganews.com, already has a "Click here to submit DMCA removal requests" button.
(Besides, I hate the thought of using Usenet to distribute large binary files. Physically copying huge blocks of data all over the planet is just not the right way to do it. Sure, it works, but it's still a ridiculous waste of bandwidth and storage.)
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
God damn it. Yet another Korea-centric article. When are the Slashdot editors going to realize there's more to the world than just Korea?
One time while portscanning for port 80 (out of boredom, not for any malicious purpose) on my former dorm's subnet I came across a directory that the individual probably didn't want to have shared: the one containing the history file for his browser.
His webpage portrayed him as a nice, churchgoing young man. But some of those URLs would suggest otherwise...
"But I was sure www.girlongirl was a scripture quote site!"
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
And people HAVE been arguing that one is less morally offensive than the other for as long as copyright laws have existed in this country. You clearly read
Information has the unique property that you *can* copy it without "destroying" the original. Why not harness this property, rather than make it look like a limited good?
The purpose of an economy is to distribute a limited good fairly and equitably as possible. Information is NOT a limited material resource. At worst, it is a common good (in the economic infrastructure sense), and at best it is a completely unlimited resource. In both cases, it has zero mariginal cost.
In short, the following is a valid *opinion*: "Copying information is not as morally offensive than stealing my physical property, or depriving me of my freedoms."
You may argue that this opinion is false, but you certainly can't tell me it is NOT a topic for debate.
Are you unaware that our founding fathers debated this topic as well?
I still have a problem when people try to cite facts like these as being evidence that pirated music improves sales. Now, throw out of your mmind all of teh number fudging and erroneously reported numerical values. The fact is that their sales increased from 1999-2000. But did this happen despite the piracy, or in spite of? In other words, who here can say how much their sals should have changed without the piracy? Would the lack of piracy have meant more sales jthus increasing their improvement? Or would the lack of piracy have meant less exposure so people would buy less new music thus having a neagtive impact on their potential sales growth.
You can't simply look at one tiny piece of data and say "uh yup, folks, lookie thar... that thar proves I should steal music."
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of sharing music (especially from the standpoint that current copyright terms are unconstitutional and harming the public domain). But if you're going to complain about it, don't use fuzzy math. Leave that to the politicians.
I sometimes wonder why moderators like comments like this one.
This is not a matter of opinion; it is a simple fact that the injustices the parent comment is referring to is not
"making copied cd's illegal"
it's "arresting people for writing software".
The fact is that these guys were not arrested for copying cd's illegally. They were arrested for writing a program that people CAN use to pirate music. I can use FTP, IRC, or even Apache and a web browser to do this.
The exploding point for the issue is when people who write web servers and ftp servers are legally responsible for what people use them for - and the authors of Apache are arrested for "sharing illegal content".
Try http://www.soribada.com if you want to see the site mentioned int he article.
I'm not disagreeing that there's a chance this program hurt record sales to some degree. However, I see no reason to believe that sales would have been quintupled without the presence of this program. At the very least, this would likely have been accompanied with a corresponding increase in CD player sales, for instance...
Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999.
So they're claiming that they were expecting $185.5 million in sales in 2000? A 535% increase over the previous year? And I thought the RIAA was stupid...
Stop this already! File sharing should not be illegal! At least not the technology allowing it! File sharing is SO MUCH MORE than just porn and copyrighted mp3s!
Find nice cocktail recipes @ www.spitzy.net
"Soribada is probably affecting our business, but there is no concrete evidence," said Cho Jin-bae, who handles online marketing at the Seoul office of the EMI record label. For an industry that claims to be losing to piracy 5 times more money than it takes in, all from one source, the lack of concrete evidence suprises me. Or maybe the South Korean RIAA wannabees are even more mathematically challenged than their American counterparts. Frankly, I'm suprised they can crank in $30 million or so a year, what with 2 college kids in their way.
Quoting from reply:
i had 183 confirmed kills in korea and i'm proud of every one of themOh, you're running the script which shuts down Code Red / IIS-infected machines, huh? Sounds like fun. Judging from my log files, the Koreans don't seem to be really keen on patching their servers.
Quoting from article:
Note that the Recording Industry Association of Korea reports local companies lost $154 million in sales in 2000 due to use of the program, even though sales increased to $31.5 million in total sales in 2000 from $29.2 million in 1999.To paraphrase the ever-illustrious American National Drinkin' Buddy, George Dubya Bush, that sounds like some fuzzy math.
Ever have someone give you a CD that you'd have never bought, and you threw out or gave away because you didn't want it occupying the real estate on your CD rack?
Then, there's music that you keep for the sole purpose of mockery. Emimem. Madonna singing American Pie. Name your boy-band or rap "artist" du jour.
Why can't the RIAA, etc. understand that the MP3 simply liberates music that they'd have *never* sold anyway? Of course, they'll count every file transferred as another dollar/yen/peso/lira/mark/franc/whatever lost, even when it probably falls into either one of the above categories or is a duplicate download to find a specific version of a song.
I've boycotted all forms of purchased music until the recording industries start to recognize that this isn't the end, it's the beginning. And that Napster was only the first.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You're forgetting the movies.
;)
And the occasional app or game.
And sometimes people's cookies.txt. (I found one with Amazon one-click shopping once!
Hey, I think we might be able to make a case for the legality of downloading someone else's cookies.txt! Score one for p2p!
War? Is that what capitalists that behave this way want? I mean, goddamnit. I'm a pacifist, but I'm also a realist. How many people can you harrass, deceive, and imprison before someone blows their fucking lid and torches a corporate office? In some countries, there are already riots inspired by this sort of abuse. I remember reading about a McDonald's being vandalized, and the golden arches becoming a hood ornament on someone's car. THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR WAS STARTED OVER LESS. Jesus Christ. This bulllshit is never going to end. The only solution is to make money obsolete.
I fail to understand what is it that they are guilty of. They just wrote and hosted a file sharing service. Like, you know, millions of FTP sites out there, and newsgroups and whatnot. How are they guilty if people using their service decide to use it for some illegal purpose? Is Smith & Wesson guilty because I decided to kill someone using a weapon manufactured by them?
But if our IQs were higher, would Slashdot exist?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
today is korean liberation day
cognitivedissonance = on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I suggest reading the article located here which contains the more believable numbers
the industry says album sales in South Korea totaled $315 million in 2000, up from $292 million the previous year. .
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
There is another way to change the law: Mass Disobedience. Gandhi led India to freedom from British rule using this tactic. Marijuana use was decriminalized in many states in the 1970s because of mass disobedience to the laws. When the legal system is corrupt, using legal means to change the system may not be sufficient. We need to call on all of our resources, the whole repertoire from lobbying to political organizing to protesting to encouraging mass disobedience. Any other response is self-crippling.