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Alternatives to the CBDTPA?
badBillStomper asks: "In the next few days I will be meeting with my Congresswomen to discus the effects of a Sen. Hollings CBDTPA on your average customer/techie. I have read tens (if not hundreds) of comments on the various OSDN sites explaining the very obvious reasons why the CBDTPA would cause a great deal of harm to the technology sector as well as consumers. Unfortunately the only postings/articles I have seen which offer a resolution to online piracy have been limited to ways in which the entertainment industry needs to change its business model. While this may be a valid argument, it does not provide a legislative alternative (something which many on Capitol Hill are scratching for). Therefore my question to the slashdot community is what new legislation would you support which would make those who engage in online piracy easier to track? Most internet users are familiar with the fact that someone with an intermediate amount of network knowledge can tap into data which is sent from one location to another. Vice President Al Gore was the first to link the internet to the idea of the 'information superhighway.' Since Americans are already used to this term, what would the effects of the creation of a kind of 'net traffic cops;' i.e. a law enforcement type of agency which monitors web traffic and fines individuals which break laws, i.e. distribute copyrighted information?"
Why does there have to be any legislation involved at all? Piracy is something the commercial software industry has been dealing with for over 20 years. I don't understand why MPAA & RIAA need hardware changes legislated to solve a problem that is not new. Especially a law that won't even solve the problem (wrt overseas pirates whose governments look the other way).
Why should Congress be the ones playing traffic cop? The corporations have money. If online pirating is hitting their pocket books in a serious manner, they should do what any other group would do: bring the offenders to court.
Take gnutella for example. How hard would it be to write a client which trolls for people providing my copyrighted information? Log the top X number of abusers, and take them to court. Don't smash them like a bug, that is too expensive. Just hit them up enough that it is no longer worth it to them to distribute copyrighted materials. For every one of these guys slapped on the wrist, you will convince 10 people that it isn't worth the trouble.
Just my $0.02.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
No legislation will be acceptable. It isn't the federal government's place to enact any legislation above standard copyright protection. The RIAA and MIAA need to either "Come up with a new business Model" OR start enforcing their copyrights. It is up to the owner of the copyright to enforce and protect his/her copyright. This whining about "We need legislation because there are far too many people pirating..." just won't do. It is up to the copyright holders to protect their own copyright by prosecuting individuals who infringe and pirate, and sue for damages.
When you go to the grocery store, do you see a policeman walking around following you everywhere you go, each aisle you walk thru.... NO! This is because it is up to the grocery store to provide it's own security... and press charges upon anyone who shoplifts from the store. The government needs to stay out of this. This is between the RIAA/MIAA and consumers. PERIOD.
I question the very first propisition here. Where in the Constitution, Bill of Rights or even the Declaration of Independence does it say that business is protected against competition or themselves for that matter? The laws are already quite satisfactory if not overly draconian (read DMCA bad here) concerning copyright already. What the MPAA and RIAA want is the equivalent of patents AND the government to do their dirty work for them. Copyright was NEVER intended to serve this function. For that matter - what about the rediculous extention of the copyright period?????
They have MORE than enough protection already. Tell them to develop NEW business models that work in today's infrastructure -not go to congress and cry all the time!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
The argument should be that consumers and the electronics industry should not bear the cost of protecting the intellectual property of the RIAA and MPAA.
If you want alternative legislation, propose a consumer's bill of rights that guarantees consumers the right to copy multimedia files for their own use and that prohibits technology that would impinge on that ability.
Piracy is already illegal. How does adding a new law improve anything? If Congress really wants to look like they're doing something useful, they need to take a look at all the existing laws that are 1) stupid, 2) caused more harm than good, and 3) pork, and repeal them.
With each new law passed being hundreds or thousands of pages long, the complexity of law has gone to outrageous proportions. The last thing we need is more complexity. It would be best if we could simplify the law so that we can enforce the important ones.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I would favor no more legislation at all. My question is, why do they feel they MUST legislate? We have copyright laws. There are MANY problems with them, but none of them have anything to do with piracy. The only ones whining about piracy are shills like Rosen and Valenti.
Why are you letting THEM set the agenda? We should be passing laws that protect CITIZENS.
How about these alternatives: (a) no bill (b) a bill which is 180 degrees off from those currently pending: strong protection of fair use, prohibition of changing technology standards (HDTV) to benefit content providers at the cost of consumers, explicit acknowledgement that the Constitution does not guarantee any industry a certain rate of return no matter what their profit margin was in the past, etc.?
sPh
detect peopke who..." distribute copyrighted information? " - this is illegal already and needs no further legislation. The music companies have already resulted in the takedown of many sites already. What's needed is not better legislation but better detection. However this is difficult as sometimes copyrighted information is under permission to be used. Efforts seem to concentrate more on high profile things like software piracy and music piracy than things like websites copying bits of content from each other without permission.
Video Game cheats, hints a
That's the problem with congress these days, they only measure their progress against whether or not they're passing laws. Never mind the damage they cause.
This is a very dangerous situation. More laws = less freedom, plain and simple. If you need a law to defend you're freedom, its only because the idiots in congress are looking at taking that freedom away. Hell sometimes there are laws (constitutional amendments even) that should protect us, but they just IGNORE those.
The Supreme Court should start to exercise a policy of immediate judicial review of any bills that they think are unconstitutional, no waiting on a challenge. Congress is openly thumbing its nose at very many of our rights, the court should begin to smoke any of the unconstitutional crap they're coming up with before we the people even have to deal with it.
No law in this case would be a good law.
Commercial software makers have been dealing with "piracy" (unauthorized copying without conpensation to the copyright holders) since the dawn of the industry (see Bill Gate's letter to the members of the homebrew computer club about tape copies of his basic interpreter) yet Bill is the richest man in the world and his company is one of the largest and most profitable. I think that the copyright holders are overly paranoid and defensive, I think the level of honesty is not yet so low in this country (or the world in general) that anyone making a product of value has to be so worried about the casual copying of their works. If most people (or enough to make MS such huge profits) are willing to throw down hundreds of dollars for software why do the recording industries so fear that people will not pay the $10-20 for their products?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
i.e. a law enforcement type of agency which monitors web traffic and fines individuals which break laws, i.e. distribute copyrighted information?
And don't forget to tap everyones phone while you're at it!
This must be the most privacy infringing statement I have ever seen on the slashdot frontpage.
On the other hand, they already have a system that would/may be capable of somthing like monitoring a large portion of net communications. Echelon.
And they never bothered to tell anybody about that one in the first place...
Some people may be all to willing to put it in **AA's service...
I find this proposition just as frightening as any of Holling's half baked bills.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
The proposed solution is MUCH worse than the original law. A law that requires copy protection can be gotten around. It might make me a criminal to do so, but my chances of actually getting busted for it is quite slim.
On the other hand, a law which gives the government explicit permission to tap my net communications any time they like so they can check and see if I might be engaged in piracy is one of the most horrifying things I can imagine in terms of violations of civil liberties. It makes Carnivore insignificant. Christ! This idea makes Holling's proposed legislation look downright benevolent!
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Great, here come the thought police. For fsck's sake, when will politicians get something even close to resembling a clue? How the hell do they think they'll be able to monitor petabytes of information, in thousands of different encryption formats, being chaoticilly strewn about the world's networks? I think that such a thing is literally impossible. I for one will do everything I can to derail such notions. Dumbasses.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
It is about liberty. CBDTPA, SSSCA, and others are affronts to our freedom. There is no compromise that would make them any less palatable. Just say no!
sulli
RTFJ.
Start with: What is the problem you are trying to solve?
If your friends on Capitol Hill can't answer that question, they have already given you the appropriate answer.
Not aiming to flame/troll, but frankly I do not see why it should be the government's responsibility. If the RIAA/MPAA are so concerned about piracy, then shouldn't -they- be the ones to fund some 'superhighway cops' to keep an eye on things and find those who are breaking the law? It's obvious from some quotes in the past by people like Hillary Rosen that both these industries are of the mindset that EVERYONE sharing ANYTHING is pirating or doing something illegal. If that's the case then let THEM invest in the money and staff to track people down. If they are crying so hard about the loss of their IP, then shouldn't they put the money and people into protecting it without screaming for legislation that will also harm consumers who have done nothing wrong? Not only will they see that sharing can be done legally, but they will spare the taxpayers who just want to listen to their CDs, watch their DVDs, and have a computer that's not a set-top box some money and a heap of aggravation.
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
As far as 'the IP police', this may be actually more preferable to any legislation concerning copyrights/intellectual property piracy. I firmly believe that the government should not set standards for technology (should be resolved within the industry), nor should they legislate morality (what happened to parents/community and mores?). I am afraid that I would be opposed to any legislation that would restrict my fair usage of any piece of equipment or media.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Upon calling Paul Wellstone's local office, I told the person working the phone how i was opposed to any legislation mandating draconian DRM solutions and made several valid points. I made a point to inform that I was planning on voting in my first election in 2002 and that my opinions on these issues helped form many of my peer's opinions. Tell some high school kids that this will make burning CDs or making copies of free over-the-air TV programs and they'll get interested real fast.
They said they would have the Senator write me back with a response as soon as possible, but being a Senator, he was a very busy man. Ok, I thought, I'm a reasonable man, what's a few weeks. I don't mind waiting a month or two? I took the form letters from The EFF and tailored them to my needs. I sent compies of this e-mail to recently-elected Senator Dayton (D-MN), and my Congressman, Representative Martin Sabo (D-MN).
Well my e-mail and phone campaign was way back in September and just now have I received a response from one of my elected officials. What follows is an e-mail I just received on April 29th from Senator Wellstone, seven months after my inquiries:
I liked the part where I he didn't really answer my question... It seems you are correct in thinking Capitol Hill is hell bent on passing legislation. I don't think ANY legislation is a good thing, but I feel that they [capitol hill] see us [letter-writing geeks] as meddlers who refuse to offer a solution. Who says there needs to be a solution? Has anyone had any other luck with their representatives?
Easy. Just pass a law reqiring all software pirates to register with the government. Tell them they get a free speedboat for registering, but they must first prove they are pirates. When they do, arrest them.
After all, piracy is already illegal, isn't it?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"Unfortunately the only postings/articles I have seen which offer a resolution to online piracy have been limited to ways in which the entertainment industry needs to change its business model."
Change happens. The entertainment industry has to change to keep up with the rest of the world. What congress needs to understand is that the government does not exist to to protect business models from potential threats. It is one thing for the government to punsh those who redistribute someone else's intellectual property without permission, it is another thing entirely for the government to tie the hands of the people, restricting legitimate use of computers, in an attempt to preempt theft.
Does the government put antitheft systems into our cars to prevent people from from stealing them? No. Should the government put antitheft systems into digital devices to protect music? No.
Change happens. Old industries die, new ones are born. That is the nature of reality. The entertainment industry MUST change, and a democratic government has no choice but to sit back and watch.
The RIAA and their cronies have to get on board with the new technologies, and not fight against them as strongly as they do. Sure, there are always going to be some slashdotters and the like who insist on getting everything for free because of strongly-held beliefs that all data should be free (like beer) and that intellectual property is all a bunch of BS. However, 98% of America would prefer to use a legal, low-cost alternative to Grokster and Kazza than to have a bunch of illegal MP3's sitting on their hard drive.
If they'll help to create the mechanism by which I, for $1 each, can download tracks from any label from the Internet, I promise you, my copy of Kazaa Lite is going right in the virtual trash bin.
modern choral music...
They've consistently been rejected by the market, which should tell Congress something.
There are PLENTY of laws on the books that make it a crime to copy software (or any other copyrighted material for anything but fair use).
What the software and music industry seem to want is the Feds to establish "internet police" to relieve them of burden of prosecution. Perhaps this strikes some as sane, to me it just seems insane.
In an era when our legal and civil rights are being stomped on by business and government alike (for example Alcoa lawyers are attempting to seek that they have the right to enter the homes of folks who oppose an Alcoa stripmine) are we just to smile and say "please, limit my liberties a little more!".
This of course TOTALLY ignores the fact that unlike the U.S. superhighways, the information superhighway is international. Let's see how those "net cops" catch folks in Taiwan.
I do not condone stealing copyrighted material. But bad laws will not help the situation.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Current copyright law (flawed though it may be) gives copyright holders all the legislative muscle they need to bring suit against potential infringers. Anything above that gets into the realm of presumed guilt and having copyright holders in control of stuff they don't need to touch.
Tell your Congressfolk that there are already existing laws that need to be applied before adding new ones. I don't see the MPAA/RIAA/etc. actually attempting to go after violators with copyright law - the issue is one of control of content and technology, and the copyright issue is just the smokescreen.
Okay, you want something constructive they can do to look like they're taking action...I'll tell you what I think they should do...but they're not going to like it, since it's not new law:
Spend money on enforcement.
It's that simple. Software and media piracy is already illegal, we just can't/don't enforce the law. Making more law that we don't enforce (or selectively enforce, which is worse) is pointless.
...something along the lines of the Taliban Police for Virtue and Vice?
Scary, isn't it.
A police organization overlooking all net activities is just begging for government abuse.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Therefore my question to the slashdot community is what new legislation would you support which would make those who engage in online piracy easier to track?
Could it be that the reason it is so difficult to find a reasonable answer to this question is that there is no reasonable answer at all? The "piracy laws" already exist, and are applicaple to digital piracy. No new laws were needed to shut down Napster. No new laws will be needed to stop some bozo from from selling pirated DVDs on the net either.
By the way, if by "congresswomen" you mean Dianne Fienstein and Barbara Boxer, be sure to talk to them about some of the questionable "Sept 11 laws" they've been supporting.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Until then Pres. Clinton signed the "No Electronic Theft" act in 1997, modifying Titles 17 & 18 of the USC, copyright violation was strictly a civil matter. In my opinion, that is the way it should stay.
.
However, all that has changed and copyright violations are now criminal acts under U.S. law, punishable by fines and/or imprisonment.
The U.S. already has law enforcement bureaus on all levels: Federal, State and Municipal. We do NOT need YAPD -- Yet Another Police Dept.
Now, legislation providing funding for existing agencies to hire personnel, obtain equipment and training, is another matter.
The VERY big problem, is that data can easily cross State if not International boundaries. Jurisdictional disputes will tie up the courts for years.
If a legislator wants to actually do some good, they need to look into legislation modeled after various International Law, such as the Law of the Sea, etc.
They should also fight any half-baked, feel-good, unenforcable laws that some grandstanding legislators try and force thru Sen. Hollings
Finally, legislators need to educate themselves and their staffs (staves?) on the international, distributed, fault-tolerant realities of the Internet. And I don't mean learn how to send their own e-mail. The basics of routing, backbones, peering, P2P, client-server, etc. Networking 101
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Since when was Gore the first person to do anything? First he invented the internet, now he was the first to link 'internet' and 'information superhighway'? Ridiculous --politicians do not have original thoughts -- facts/statistics will bear me out on this....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
They want to squash our Fair Use, so as a "comprimise" include a rider bill that requires any producer of physical content that does not allow fair use to require a 100% replacement gaurentee within 7 days of notification for the length of the copyright on the content (100 years now??).
This would be fair since it puts as much burdon on the associations of "content providers" as it does to the whole technology sector. Maybe some will then see how obsurd the whole thing is since they already have a good amount of protection.
There is no need for DRM legislation; here's an analogy.
Jawalking is a crime, already punishable by a small fine, but thanks to a new type of nuclear-powered running shoes, it is a crime that has become more prevalent. Jaywalking hurts the companies that make the little pedestrian signals, and so they lobby to have a law put in place that will attach an explosive collar to the neck of anybody who uses sidewalks, such that only *legal* pedestrian crossings are used.
It's the same thing with the RIAA. They see their cash cow threatened (because MP3s and streaming radio give much more power to the musicians and the listeners than they do to the recording industry), and will lobby until the end of the earth to protect their business model. Sorry, but there is no "right to profitability", and if your customers are deserting you for an alternative, even a lower-quality one, you really should re-think your business model; not try and get the better one banned.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Quite the opposite. Those bozos in congress have done quite enough damage already. They need to undo the DMCA, for starters. And roll back micky mouse extensions to copyright term. And put a lid on the office of patents and trademarks.
Now, let's just assume for a minute that we can count on our representatives in congress to actually represent their constituents. If they truly have the best interests of the people in mind, perhaps they would consider passing legislation which eviscerates EULA's. Another way for them to put some time to good use would be to impose a tax on unsolicited bulk email.
Citizens rights to privacy and due consideration are being trammeled by a very powerful minority. Instead of inviting knuckleheads like Eisner for "hearings", they should be beating these petty tyrants upside the head.
The Corporate States of America is no joke.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
This is certainly the right answer, albeit not to the question posed. However, it probably implies the correct question, which is what can be done to deal with the morass that copyright has become? There are a couple of questions that Congress really should be addressing:
The key legislative need is clarification of the government's position, rather than relying upon the courts to thrash this out. CBDTPA's flaws are deeper than the content providers vs. computer industry conflict, and patching it will only slow the development of the clarity needed to go forward.
The fundamental problem is that Content companies want more control over how we use their products. They are not currently allowed to dictate to us how we use their product, short of using things like the DMCA to force limitations on manufacturers(e.g. region coding).
It's one part this and one part that.
They need to aggressively enforce their copyrights to protect their content. A simple search on Google is frequently capable of turning up multiple violations. I don't understand why they don't have enforcement teams on the payroll that work in conjunction with lawyers and the local law enforcement to use copyright law to prosecute. Sure, it will give you a bad image with consumers, but people may actually become scared enough to start obeying copyright law. They may also start lobbying to get laws changed, but hey. The problem is not protection of their content, that's impossible as Bruce Schneier likes to tell us, since every protection scheme can be broken, but of enforcement.
Read my lips, no new laws.
Next - what party is she?
If Republican - advocate a free-market solution, pointing out the revenues (and earnings, and by extension, taxes) from the technology industry far outweigh the income from the Content Cartel.
(If she's a Republican on the Religious Right, you may also want to point out that Hollywood hasn't been terribly friendly to her party in terms of donations, or her constituents' values, either. When was the last time Andy Grove of Intel decided to advocate sexual promiscuity and drug use? :)
Second - no matter what party she's from, avoid terms like "Content Cartel". Works great on Slashdot. Makes you sound like a tinfoil-hat-loon to a politician.
If Democrat - go for the "why subsidize Hollywood and 'big business' over the little guy selling hardware out of his storefront" angle.
Also, and most importantly, if she's a Democrat - point her to Rep. Boucher. A fellow Congressman from her side of the aisle who truly "gets it".
(For that matter, pointing a Republican Congressman to Rep. Boucher wouldn't hurt either. "Hey, man, even some of the Democrats realize that Fritz' bill is a Big Mistake, and they realize so for precisely the same reasons I do. When a Democratic Congressman can find common ground with Sen. Orrin Hatch (e.g. the DMCA has gone far beyond what its legislative proponents intended), there's probably some room for not just bipartisanship, but there's also something fundamentally wrong with the Hollings bill."
Finally - it's not just the Hollings bill. Rep. Boucher put it very well in the interview when he said there were two ways to look at it: Either all your base are belong to Hollywood, or not.
If you can educate your Congresswoman as regards to what to look for (and what to look out for - (including, but emphatically not limited to, Hollywood-mandated restrictions on hardware manufacturers and computer owners, backed up by force of criminal law) - you stand a reasonable chance of not just stopping the CBDTPA, but whatever successor bills Hollywood tries to put through if CBDTPA is defeated.
Finally-finally - and you probably shouldn't have to be told this, but just for the sake of completeness - be respectful and professional. Get a haircut. If you're male, wear a suit and tie. Dress like you're going to the most important job interview of your life.
Just 'cuz there are a lot of long-haired, wild-eyed geeky types on Slashdot, doesn't mean you have to fill the stereotype. The more they can see that opposition to CBDTPA isn't just a "long-haired freak" position, but a rational response on the part of consumers and businesses alike to a poor law, the better for our side.
Just because you've got an itch doesn't mean that you should scratch it.
There is no need for additional laws, and the idea of ``net cops'' is sheer lunacy compounded with totalitarinism. If a copyright owner doesn't like what somebody's doing with the copyrighted work, let that owner deal wiith it. The {RI,MP}AA can waste their own dollars chasing honest citizens who're acting in concert with the Constitution and ignoring unconsitutional laws.
If you really want to tell your representatives what law to pass, tell them to pass a law repealing the DMCA and the Bono act.
What happens on the file trading networks isn't a crime. What is a crime is that the Scottsdale Symphony can't afford to perform Maurice Ravel's Bolero (you know, the Bo Derek piece) because, thanks to Sonny Bono, it's back under copyright.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Thanks for asking. I'm not sure you'll like what I have to say, though.
/.
Therefore my question to the slashdot community is what new legislation would you support which would make those who engage in online piracy easier to track?
There can be none to support, I'm afraid. Any laws that attempt to track file sharing will be ineffectual. Cryptography and Steganography would have to be stamped out first, which just isn't going to happen. Sorry.
Most internet users are familiar with the fact that someone with an intermediate amount of network knowledge can tap into data which is sent from one location to another.
It's not just that, my friend. Within any device capable of playing back digitized content, at some point that digitized content will be in pristine format - un-encrypted and just as it was recorded. Some smart person, a "hacker" if you will, is going to figure out where in the device it's in said format and how to extract it. Then it's in a file, converted to MP3(or DiVX or whatever) and on Kazaa, or sent through PGP encrypted e-mail. Very hard to police that, without resorting to totally draconian measures.
Vice President Al Gore was the first to link the internet to the idea of the 'information superhighway.' Since Americans are already used to this term, what would the effects of the creation of a kind of 'net traffic cops;' i.e. a law enforcement type of agency which monitors web traffic and fines individuals which break laws, i.e. distribute copyrighted information?
No offence intended, but you must be a newbie to
First of all, Mr. Gore isn't the best name to use around here, since he has lost all credibility by speaking "authoritatively" about things he didn't understand. Internet Traffic Cops? See my arguments about Crypto and Data Extraction above. They will simply not be of any appreciative benefit to consumers - only to corporations that are trying to protect outmoded business models with flawed laws. Plus, authoritarian organizations aren't embraced with open arms, unless they're restoring authority to "the little guy". Your Traffic Cops are the antithesis of that.
For good or ill, the world of computers and the Internet is ultimately controlled by hackers. You have to be a hacker, and think like one, in order to get along.
Work with us, not against us - give some and then take some is the only way.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
They've already covered this legislation. It's called "The Digital Millenium Copyright Act", and it's already pretty broad. If we need more legislation every couple of years to avoid really bad copyright laws, we might as well just save ourselves a few years of trouble and let them pass the CBDTPA right now. If we need to go beyond the DMCA, then we'll eventually go beyond whatever is proposed.
What you should really be doing is pointing out that the current laws are already ridiculously broad and that you cannot change the basic functions of the internet in any way (aside from making certain functions illegal to USE) without seriously harming the technology industry, which pumps a lot more money into the economy than the copyright industry. You should also push the fact that this sort of legislation, i.e. any legislation that hinders the technology industry by forcing them to implement legal restrictions in hardware and software, will just hold the United States back in a technology market that is growing by the day.
Some times, more legislation just isn't the answer. At some point, they have to be satisfied with the legislation that they have and stop playing games with the rights of US citizens and the health of the US economy. The DMCA already does enough damage to our rights and the open nature of computer standards. Any further copyright bills will be a huge blow to not only our rights, but the economy and the companies and employees within it.
(IANAL or congressional expert and I don't seriously expect my ideas to be used, but I hope this post was more productive than the ones he's complaining about.)
If cars can run, they can break speed limits. If computers can run, they can copy data.
You can't legislate a technological enforcement of copyright laws any more than you can legislate a technological enforcement of traffic laws.
This is not a question of legislating crime and punishment, like Prohibition in the US in the 1920s, or the current War On Drugs, or compaign contributions, or bribery or cheating on taxes. The CBDTPA is an attempt at legislating a technological enforcement of a law. It is impossible. There is no compromise (Only be preggers on Thursday, ok?) and there is no alternative (How about being pregant in your neck instead of belly?).
If you can't understand that, how in the Sam Hill do you expect to get it across to your congresscritter?
Infuriate left and right
You ought to direct your Congresswomen to Congressman Rick Boucher's Office.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Unfortunately the only postings/articles I have seen which offer a resolution to online piracy have been limited to ways in which the entertainment industry needs to change its business model. While this may be a valid argument, it does not provide a legislative alternative (something which many on Capitol Hill are scratching for).
Yes, but changing their business model is the only thing that is going to solve the problem. We don't WANT nor NEED a legislative alternative. Invariably, any further legislation in this matter will only serve to harm consumers, invade their privacy, and strengthen an industry which needs to grow up and start figuring things out on it's own. No amount of legislation will stop or even hinder pirates without completely shafting the rest of us and it's high time our politicians learned this.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
The real solution, though few people will admit it, is to reform the copyright system. There is a desire to stamp out all piracy because money is made by exploiting an idea for all it is worth instead of creating new ideas, and there is a desire to pirate content because of a general lack of value in currently produced content. If copyright terms were reasonable, content providers would need to create new content with enough value to attract customers in order to stay in business. Combine this with a healthy public domain to satisfy people who do not want to pay for content, and the digital piracy problem should become much more manageable.
Of course, this means defining "reasonable" copyright terms. To do this, it is necessary to understand why copyright is needed in the first place. Despite what some corporate advocates might want you to think, copyright is intended to encourage the creation and distribution of information content for the public benefit. There must, therefore, be a balance between the incentive to the content creator and the benefit to the public. The immediately obvious first step in copyright reform is to retroactively repeal all retroactive copyright extensions - if the copyright terms were adequate to encourage creation, extending them does not benefit the public (at least as long as time travel is impossible or impractical).
Next, it is necessary to define an adequate copyright term for future use (not effective retroactively). Since copyright is supposed to cover a "limited time" and the content in question is used by humans, the obvious definition of a time limit to a human is the typical human lifespan. A factor of this number (recalculated regularly) would therefore make a reasonable copyright term. Something around .5 would give the content creator plenty of time to receive compensation (if not, the chances don't improve much with additional time) while giving the public access to the content before it is of no value (if it still has significant value at this point, it is of cultural significance, and therefore should be available for use by the general public). People would get their creative content, content creators would have incentive to create, and "pirates" would lose any moral high ground. What more could you want (aside from large corporate interests controlling access to the flow of creative content)?
A friend of mine once said that if we had the Congress 100 years ago that we do today, we'd have subsidies for buggy whips.
The way to fix the problem isn't surveillance or legislation; the real solution is to adapt the marketing model to price the music/movies whatever low enough that that the financial benefit of bootlegging doesn't exceed the moral benefit of legitimate copies. This is perfectly doable, given the exceedingly low cost of online distribution.
Two points - first, the music industry works by their oligopoly on the distribution of physical media and store shelf space. THAT is what they don't want to give up, because then their role as middleman becomes irrelevant.
Second, i'd feel a lot more moral inclination to avoid bootlegging if music artists saw even a dime for every dollar their label makes off their art.
The plain and simple truth is that the vast majority of working, professional musicians are NOT part of the major label system. In fact, it's very difficult to make a living at music once you're signed your soul over in blood to the labels. This legislation is NOT FOR THE ARTISTS. It is for the record distributors.
The movie industry is different, but only slightly. VCRs were supposed to destroy their industry, but instead it became a huge boon. Most people watch most movies only once or twice, so they need to keep the per-view cost down, period. They've already solved their distribution problem, unlike the RIAA.
Think about it... do you really believe this legislation is to protect ARTISTS? Or, gawd forbid, consumers? No, it's their to keep a couple of fat industry's reality checks from bouncing for a few more years.
I say we let the Invisible Hand of the market slap some sense into them.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Reading these posts, all I see are one-sided views. This being Slashdot, however, I'm not too surprised. The typical Slashdot reader has a very liberal view of intellectual property and ownership rights. However, what happens to the industry that creates these products if they're available for free everywhere? Yes, as it stands right now Universal, Sony, etc. aren't going bankrupt on DVD sales because people are pirating movies and transmitting them across the Internet. But, as broadband connections increase we will see an increase in the amount of people who get their movies this way.
Immediately, I'm going to see replies saying, "Change the business models. The companies can still make money in this environment by doing x, y, z." And, yes, perhaps there is a business model out there somewhere that would enable studios to develop content, distrubte it for free, and still make profits on it. However, no one has discovered that business model yet! Nor do I think they ever will.
All one has to do is look at Linux. Linux is a wonderful product, developed by volunteers, and given away free to anyone who wishes to download it. That said, there are a lot of companies out there who develop their own distributions of Linux and are trying to sell them. Has any of them made a profit? Nope. Red Hat? They were profitable for 1 quarter, and haven't been ever since. Caldera? Corel? None of them have made money by selling something available for free.
The entertainment industry can't exist in the way that Linux does. Content created by movie and television studios costs a LOT of money. If this content is then pirated by consumers and distributed for free the studios can't afford to create new content. End of story! Yes, it hasn't reached that extreme yet. Disney isn't going to have to close up shop because of the amount of piracy on the Internet right now. But, the problem can only get worse.
There needs to be some sort of compromise on the issue. Fair use can get along with DRM. THAT is the issue that needs to be resolved. As consumers, we shouldn't say, "Well, I bought this CD so I should be allowed to rip MP3's of it and distribute them to all of my friends and anyone who wants to download them off of Napster." That isn't what "fair use" is all about. It's about protecting the consumer's right to use a product they purchased. Should I be able to duplicate a CD so I can keep one copy in my car and another one at home? Yes. Should I be able to make copies for all of my coworkers? No.
I don't support the DMCA because it's poorly written legislature. However, I do feel that there needs to be some sort of control over intellectual property so that piracy doesn't detract from a studio's ability to make great content.
i liked the part where you didn't ask a question
If you allow me two fundamental freedoms:
1) The freedom to run any software on my PC that I want, and
2) The right to record my own content and distribute it how I like, including for free,
then piracy is a fact of life. Deny me those rights, and you deny me freedom of speech.
Our congresspeople may be searching for a way to make Pi equal to 3, or repeal the law of gravity, but it's doomed to fail.
We already have traditional copyright law which prohibits illegal distribution of copyrighted materials.
We already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows the content industry to devise any copy protection methods it wants and makes it a crime to circumvent them.
The industry already has all the legal tools it needs to fight genuine piracy. The only thing stopping it from doing so is the realization that going after end users would be a public relations disaster. Is Congress really that eager to bring the PR nightmare upon themselves with a new law that interferes with the actions and technical abilities of law-abiding citizens?
Any industry that treats all of its customers like criminals and treats its products as something to be protected from the customers is doomed to fail. The longer Congress and the industry avoid this realization, the more painful it will be for everyone.
Reminds me of a sig I've seen out here, one of my favorites: "I'm not merely a 'consumer' or a 'taxpayer.' I'm a citizen of the United States of America."
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The primary flaw of the CBDTPA - and much of the RIAA/MPAA intent - is that it starts with the assumption that everything (all aspects of any created thing) should be restricted unless specifically restricted. This underlying tenet is part and parcel of the DMCA, and of the "ability to track those who pirate the material" you mention. That mindset is what has to be battled, because as long as it exists it will continue to lead to more and more restrictions.
Re-read the pre-DMCA US copyright law and the applicable article of the US constitution. Note that these basically begin with the reverse tenet - that everything (all aspects of any creation) are freely available EXCEPT as restricted.
The owners of the creation - not the creators in most of these cases, but the owneres - are perfectly justified in trying to reduce theft of their property. But when any such action becomes such that the default exceeds their restrictive permissions, then they are at fault. To use a tangible analogy, a store is perfectly allowed to mount cameras and put 'tattletags' in their property and use private police to prevent shoplifting. BUT... the tattletags must be removed when sold, and the private police cannot arbitrarily check my car as I leave the parking lot (different from leaving the store), and the cameras can't be set to look upon me in my home. How many of you can prove that you purchased all the furniture - or all the books, or even all the electronics - in your house if a policeman were to arrive and demand such proof (or face charges of theft)? And yet, that's the essence of current thought on protection of intellectual property.
I think, really and truly, that there are enough laws on the books already to protect against property. The solution is no longer getting a law to mandate protection. The solution lies in effective techniques - social, technological, and operational practices - that minimize the theft. I find myself wondering just how much theft there really is - I have seen many exclamations of theft, but even at the height of the Napster excitement nobody was brought to civil or criminal court except the carrier of the product - who could not prove (or disprove) that the clients who'd submitted the disks were doing so without having paid for the property.
We don't need new and more restrictive laws. We might (maybe) need better enforcement of the ones we have. THAT is what I'd ask you to pass on to your legislator.
But this is not an either-or dichotomy; if we offer the option of 'no law necessary' often enough, we may get through to these eejits...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Apart from the issue of whether any legislation whatsoever would be reasonable, I would be strongly opposed to the suggested law for a more practical reason:
There is no way to search for copyrighted material without examining the content of all traffic going across networks. Such a law would require the police to continually monitor large amounts of all network conversation, with active attention to their content, in direct contravention of all established law and precedent regarding wiretaps and other surveillance techniques. It essentially amounts to a call for blanket surveillance of the population in order to protect the copyrights of certain business interests.
Given that I have opposed such expansions of federal authority in the past, when the excuse was the (arguably much better one) of capturing terrorists, I cannot imagine countenancing such a law when the only incentive is to help some groups make a buck.
Yonatan
Rofl, you are so clueless. You're advocating giving the government and big business veto power over what information I can send and receive? This will apply to all communications networks since they're all about moving bits. Are you nuts? Traffic cops? Monitoring? This is of course an obvious part of the plan for total control over everything, but shit you don't have to go advocating it.
What about encryption? Will I have the right to encryption like the big boys will have? No, probably not under this idea or else the idea is useless. So I get fucked over and different rules are applied to me because I'm not rich.
How will this "traffic cop" thing work? Think for a minute about what happens when the government and companies have the ability to check and approve of everything you send or receive. What makes you think that they will use this power wisely? Why would they allow dissenting views to get out? How would anyone know about the censorship? Maybe they will track all files with the word "censorship" in them and stop them so noone will ever know who's being censored. That's a fucking great idea. Any sort of mandated filtering and interception of data is a BAD idea. You are advocating the destruction of the Internet (and of all other forms of digital private communication). There is no way to use technology to effectively stop the flow of bits without destroying freedom.
You are talking about destroying freedom and privacy to preserve copyright. This is a simple quiz and this is how you should present it to the congresswoman.
Freedom
Copyright
Pick One.
The thing is that the people who support the CBPDTA are actually correct. The only way they can continue to protect copyright is to do the very things that they want done in the bill. It probably doesn't go far enough because it doesn't advocate a house-to-house search for all old unprotected equipment, and it probably still allows people to make personal backup copies in certain circumstances. The only way to protect copyright is to destroy freedom. I challenge you to give the Congresswoman the short quiz I presented above, ask her if she had to choose between freedom and copyright, which would she pick. If she can't answer that, then she isn't willing or able to deal with this yet. Then, ask her to find out more about it until she understands that the choice between freedom and copyright is the correct choice. You can only protect one strongly. If you don't get it, then you need to go learn more about what computers can do, until you realize that unless computers are destroyed or turned into toasters with screens, copyright can't be protected.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Exactly that. The forgone conclusion of this submission seems to be that a powerful minority needs congressional protection from the unwashed citizens. The very terminology - "pirate" - belies a concern for the public interest, when in fact it's that very public that's being branded criminal.
Not to worry. Read a few history books. When a minority, no matter how powerful, attempts to brand a majority of the populace 'criminal', their heads get handed to them on platters. Unfortunately, there's usually a lot of ugliness in between.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
How about a law that explicity affirms fair use, legalizes non-commercial sharing, legalizes reverse engineering, legalizes bypassing of "effective access controls", rolls back the DCMA completely, and denounces any such legislation such as SSSCA or CDBPTA as unconstitutional.
This will do wonders for the "content industry", even if they dont like the taste of the medicine. It will also do wonders for the quality of content.
Disclaimer, this may not be what your congresscritter wants to hear...
I think there is flawed thinking at work here. Every industry that produces something is subject to theft. There are laws against it but no other industry demands that legal steps be taken to make it impossible. This is akin to grocery stores (who take heavy losses to shrinkage) lobbying for tracking devices in all food packages so that they can monitor their locations at all times, in order to deter theft. Congress would find such a suggestion ludicrous, and well they should. The media and computer industries are welcome to pursue their own means to deter theft, but it is not a government matter.
Eric Christian Berg
The copyright holders need to start suing people who are using P2P programs to distribute copyrighted materials without permission. Once that happens the use of P2P software will stop really quickly.
Step 1: Dismantle the Internet
Step 2: Create new Internet at the mandate of the state with completely different social constructs, the ability to police the virtual citizenry, and the ability to stringently control virtual borders so as to restrict enforcement to a geographic/national area.
Step 3: Make sure it has eBay.
I have been sitting here struggling to come up with a way that law enforcement and copyright enforcement could occur on the net without violating privacy. I tried to come up with something analogous to highway patrols, but highway patrols pull you over for physical violations of laws, not ideological.
And that, really, is the issue - what is the best way to police ideas - because that's what net based copyright infringement really is: the transference of ideas owned by a private party to someone who has not paid for access to said ideas.
So we look a little deeper and find that what people pay for when they buy ideas contained within a physical medium is 25% idea and 75% medium - people are willing to pay for ownership of a physical object more than they are willing to pay for the ideas contained therein. This is why eBooks are languishing right now - people don't want to pay physical book prices for something that lacks the benefits of ownership and portability found in the physical form.
What this leads to, then, is the big ticket item. If people can not separate the value of an idea from the delivery method, how can Congress legislate this separation? How can government convince people in the monetary value of ideas in a form where those ideas are not bound to tangible forms of ownership? How can government most easily legislate a largely societal view?
What you're asking for here isn't really a solution to the larger problem. You're looking for the adhesive strip that covers the larger wound just long enough to keep Congress from getting itchy and scrathing at it until it becomes infected and requires amputation.
But, since that's what you're asking for, here it is: to combat software piracy, Congress must legislate that it is wrong to pirate copyrighted works (already done). Then, they must watch every citizen and presume their guilt by watching every idea exchange they engage in, and only after the exchange occurs can they determine whether or not it was an infraction of law. That's it. That's the only way. And that's exactly the type of thing that's being proposed.
Well, there is another way, but it requires far greater resources. Small-time piracy stings. Get the FBI hanging out on Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus. Have them send undercover agents to LAN parties. Make them hang out on AOL asking if "Anybuddy has da phat noo Britney Spears song??????" and arrest anyone who sends it to them. In other words, have them handle piracy the way they handle child pornography and drug busts - force them to engage in transactions with those breaking the law in order to gather evidence, get a proper warrant, and make the arrest.
Of course, that only works if they can effectively trace an IP address back to an offender, which isn't always a possibility. However, there are plenty of muderers still on the Most Wanted list who have never been found, so a few people copying, "American Pie 2" shouldn't be *that* big of a concern.
So you need to have everybody on a network where IPs are static and able to be traced. No more private networks behind firewalls. See Step 1.
Main problem here? People have come to expect a level of privacy in the electronic world that they could never be afforded in the physical world. Is it too late to change that? Do we want to change that? If we are to move into being a capitalist society that makes its money trading pure ideas, we might have to give up anonymity. The alternatives seem to either be that we make sure ideas are chained to a physical medium or make sure nobody tries to profit from ideas.
Or make everybody respect copyrights. See entirety of message above.
The core of this "problem" (and I use quotes as it is an imaginary problem) is the fact that the general public DOES NOT CARE ABOUT OBEYING LAWS. There, I said it loudly and with caps.. They dont obey traffic safety laws, they gladly break any law they can get away with and copyright infringement is an easy law to break and never get caught doing... secondly, the general public doesnt care about copyright laws.. if you tell them that the backstreet boys are losing money because of that mp3 they downloaded and listened to, their first reaction is "GOOD!" as all musical artists and movie stars are overpaid, spoiled brats that deserve to be smacked like that.
Finally the consumer is getting sick of being gouged. $20.00 for a cd is price gouging, plain and simple, games that cost $75-$100 is proce gouging, and a word processing suite that costs $499.95 is asking to be copied over and over and over. Do I condone the copying and virtual theft? NO. Will new draconian laws stop it? NO. is there a way to stop it? MAYBE. No law will stop it.. this is a fact that anyone that has driven in traffic knows, laws dont matter.
we are at the dawn of a new era in media,technology and arts.. our leaders can either stomp it out of existance by favoring already rich companies trying to expand their profits, or they can pass laws that will make sense and improve the life of every man,woman and child in this country..
looking at the track record of congress and the house over the past 5 years... I'm ready to become a criminal because I own a computer and equipment that isn't politically and corperate approved...
and any law that creates a criminal underground from regular citizens is wrong to begin with.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's very simple. Introduce some sort of Draconian legislation, not because you expect it to be passed, but to soften the electorate for a "compromise," which is what you really wanted in the first place.
We don't need legislation. Neither the motion picture industry nor the record industry needs protection. They're doing just fine, and if they started being smarter, they'd do even better. When they say that profits are being sucked out of their businesses by hordes of evil pirates, they are lying and they know it. What they want is very simple; they want more control over the market so that they can bring back the halcyon days of poorly paid "studio talent" and ring in the new days of corporate-controlled boy bands and Britney Spears clones. The motion picture industry tried this before with chains of theaters and this practice was declared illegal. They want legislative imprimateur not only to own the theaters this time but to own the idea of a theater. It is the exact same deal.
What is this, annual Falling for the Bloody Obvious month?
Imagine if, a hundred years ago, the buggy whip manufacturing association and foreseen this day, and managed to convince the Congress that it must preserve their industry by law. That Henry Ford! He must be imprisoned for ruining our industry!
The major record companies (and less so, the major motion picture studios) are the buggy whip manufacturers of our day. At one time, record production was expensive. Large, expensive equipment was needed to mass produce musical recordings. An artist really had no choice but to sign up with a major label. A lot of maney was spent to manufacture and distribute music.
Today, the manufacture and distribution of music costs next to nothing. Yet the major record labels are charging more money than ever for their services.
The major record labels have had their day, just as the buggy whip manufacturers had their day. No one mourns the loss of the horse and buggy -- or almost no one. The major record labels' fate is the same.
They might try to legislate their place in the market, but even if they do, artists will eventually realize that the major record labels offer them nothing anymore.
Yep. To the author of that .sig,
I shamelessly borrowed that quote in my comments to the Judiciary Committee.
If you wish, I will compensate you for it, somehow...
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
"When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
Congress has the ability to pass laws. Therefore, every "problem" must have a solution found by passing a new law.
If the solution does not include passing a new law, then you must have the wrong solution.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
It is already illegal to copy and redistribute a copyrighted work (in general). There are civil and criminal penalties in place to punish those who do. The government's obligation to copyright holders ends there. No further measures are necessary or proper.
LAMP hosting on Debian, SSH, no bandwidth cap, PayPal accepted - http://secondbrainhosting.com/
In Britain, shortly after the automobile was invented, a law was passed that stated that any automobile could not be driven over 4Mph, and must be led by a man carrying a red flag. The law was requested by the horse carriage industry.
The effects of the law were quite profound - nobody wanted to buy a car if they couldn't drive it faster than they could walk, so while Henry Ford created the assembly-line, and created one of the strongest automotive industries in the world, Britain's car industry lagged sorely behind the rest of the world. The "red flag" law (as it came to be known) was repealed 10 years later, but the damage it did to Britain's automotive industry has never been undone (disclaimer: I am British.)
Senator Hollings is doing the exact same thing to American computer industry with this bill - to satisfy a vocal minority, he is sacrificing an emerging industry, and it will set back the American economy.
I won't bother to repeat the hundred or so prior "No legislation is good legislation" arguments. They're right, by the way. Legislating in someone's business model is bad for law and (in the long run) bad for the economy.
I do, however, have something original to add. If you want to go with the information superhighway as your dominant metaphor, creating a highway patroll wouldn't be such a bad thing. It would be a hassle, but it might make the content providers happy.
The iHP (internet highway patrol) could look for documentable instances of piracy (though avoiding entrapment might be hard) and issue notices and penalties on par with traffic offenses. A $15 ticket for downloading an MP3, a $100 ticket for pirating M$ office. The penalty would be in proportion to the value of the IP stolen. Repeat offenders could face harsher penalties.
Of course, this would require a huge nationwide beuraucracy and investment in tracking technology and personnel, so it's something I as a taxpayer would be loath to shell out for, but it's an alternative. But the Real Truth is that there's no evidence that piracy of music, software or movies hurts anyone's bottom line. The only emperical evidence I'm aware of points to the opposite conclusion.
This, however, doesn't seem to sway the content-owning agencies as what they are really afraid of is loosing their control over content, not loosing a few copies to piracy. They want to create barriers so that artists and other content-creators cannot distribute outside their system, just like every other distributor has done in response to the internet.
Howard Dean for president
We need a pro digital consumer bill that protects already established rights. Its up to the companies to develop a bussiniss model that they can profit from. We need to make bills like the CDBTA(?) illegal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
After you're done speaking with your Congresscritter, give them your phone number and tell them to feel free to call you with questions about this matter.
ALSO!!! Tell them that if they need a Congressional POV on this, they should talk to Congressman Rick Boucher! We have a friend in Congress, USE HIM!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
The problem is that the boundary between legal fair use and illegal bootlegging is too fuzzy. The solution is to clarify the boundary somewhat (it's probably impossible to make it totally clear, but there's plenty of room for improvement) by clearly listing some areas which are definitely within the scope of fair use. If this seems too unbalanced, it's easy enough to create a corresponding list of areas which are definitely within the scope of bootlegging (e.g. making copies of an entire copyrighted work or large fraction thereof available to the general public without permission).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
It needs to be emphesized that the 'problem' Hollywood is confronted with has already been confronted, and solved, by the software industry.
No legislation of any kind is necessary, except the repeal of the DMCA of course.
Software is even more prone to illegal copying and distribution than video or music, yet the software manufactuerers gave up on 'copy protection' schemes years ago as unworkable, ineffective, and harmful to their legitimate customers' need to back up their software and data.
The solution instead is to serialize each instance of the software sold and cross-reference that serial number with the credit card or other identification of the purchaser, such that if 10,000 copies of program A, serial number #12345, appear on the web the copyright holder can go after the original purchaser as a first step.
This doesn't stop all copyright violations, but it does make most people very, very reluctant to share copies of their software, and, as a result, the software industry is flourishing.
There is absolutely no reason Hollywood couldn't attach a serial number to every digital movie or braodcast sold and downloaded on the web. Sure, some would crack the serial number and remove it, but the vast majority of people are not inclined to give away things they themselves had to pay for, especially if there is some risk (however remote) of their name staying attached to the illegal copies.
I say it again, Hollywood doesn't need this law any more than software manufactuerers needed it 15 years ago. The problem has already been solved without legislation, by the marketplace, and if Hollywood weren't so rigidly stuck in the 20th century they would have long since figured that out by now.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Did you know that it's also illegal for the public at large to shoot somebody, but that law enforcement personnel do it anyway?
Not all laws apply to all situations. You can't sue the FBI for reverse-engineering your code if they're doing it as part of an investigation. Sorry.
Congress shall make no law protecting a particular business model of method, especially one that inflicts grief on another business or consumer. In addition, crimes committed using technology should be treated as the crimes they are - stealing is stealing, defacement is defacement. The introduction of technology to a crime does not alter the underlying crime. Copyright violations shall be dealt with via the existing extensive copyright legislation.
The problem I have with the media companies is that they're trying to construct electronic delivery systems that have two characteristics.
The first is that piracy would be difficult, although not impossible. In my view, this is pretty hard goal to argue against.
The second goal is the one I have trouble with. They're trying very hard to avoid electronic distribution systems that would mitigate their existing advantages.
Right now the big media companies are the gatekeepers of the existing distribution system. If you want to get a record into the stores, or if you want to get a movie into the multiplex, you need a big company's help, and in practice, that means you have to give them more than half of the money.
There has always been piracy -- I'm 40, and I used to make extensive use of my cassette deck, as did everyone else I knew. Piracy is nothing new. What's new is the potential for media distribution systems that give individuals and small independent companies the same sorts of access to the public that the big companies have.
The media companies want to prevent piracy. But I think that we have to do what we can to shift the emphasis away from piracy, and towards the creation of open distribution systems.
Now one problem with open systems is that people will buy something and resell it or give it away. My argument is that this inevitable fact doesn't outweigh the overwhelming public interest that would be served by open distribution systems.
Let the media companies go after pirates after the fact. Give them stiff peanalties, something that will defer people from sharing songs for free on the net. Why give something away when there's a real downside, and no upside?
Let the media companies choose the formats they use for their products -- if MS wants to make a player that will try to validate the user as an authorized owner, and they want to use that, that's great. Let them come out with new electronic audio players that will police their media rights.
People whine about the new celine dion cd coming out in copy protected format, but that's the right of everyone involved. Celine Dion doesn't owe me free music, and neither does her record company.
But it's fundamentally unfair for the government to get between you and I, and say that we can't exchange a song that one of us created over a network in a specific format, because that format doesn't provide the media companies with assurances that the song wasn't pirated. That's an unreasonable burden to put on us, and it will, to use a MS phrase, "stifle innovation."
It seems to me that the core problem here is that the media companies take a big bite out of the transaction because they control access to the distribution system. Without that gatekeeping role, they don't produce enough value to justify their cut.
Unfortunately for them, computer networks are going to wipe out that gatekeeping role unless people like your Representative vote for laws that provide artificial support for it.
It sucks for them, just like automobiles sucked for buggy whip manufacturers. But it's good for the world.
Let them build whatever system they want (crippled cd's and authenticating players and all), but don't force everyone to use it.
Make sure that we preserve the ability to build alternative systems.
They can develop a copy-identification system along these lines with three separate elements, and then announce that it has four.
They'll even be telling the truth -- FUD (I've filed off three serial numbers... were they bluffing about the fourth one?) becomes an additional element.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The analogy of the internet to an "information superhighway" is flawed, as should have been evidenced by the fact that that's what Gore calls it.
A highway is something that allows people to get from point A to point B, hopefully faster than they would by walking, running or hang gliding (LA residents excepted).
The internet on the other hand doesn't allow people to go anywhere, yet is a vast resource of information and activity. A better name for the internet would have been the Information Superlibrary, although even that is flawed as the content in a library is fairly static in comparison and in most libraries you can't frag other people (legally).
Do libraries require "cops"? What about video games (tickets for spawn camping)? Trying to govern the internet removes the inherent benefits of it. If you have to get an OK to post an audio file, who's to say you'll go to the trouble of doing so. If you've got to get 32 character keys (per family member for 1 viewing) to post pictures of your 3 year old for your family wouldn't it be easier to just snail mail them a copy? The internet is *dynamic*. As such, it has a multitude of content that is constantly changing and that uses multiple formats to do so.
Even that aside, there's no proof that piracy even causes a loss of revenue. In order for that to occur you'd have to prove that people who pirate would actually make purchases if piracy was not an option. You'd also have to prove that piracy doesn't lead to an eventual sale of the pirated material.
There is in fact fairly significant evidence to the contrary. While napster was fully operational and free, record sales increased significantly. As per a recent slashdot post, Eric Flint has posted hard numbers showing that giving away his books on the Baen Free Library drastically increases his sales for those books (and his other books too).
Finally, you'd have to determine if any sort of regulatory oversight of the internet would actually be effective. What you have are millions of people trying to get content with a necessarily few people trying to stop them. No matter what method you use, unless you go extremely draconian (aka violating the rights of your constituents) there will be no way to possibly prevent content distrubution.
There is a need to be filled here. If Hollywood and the MPAA were smart, instead of fighting the net, they'd start using it. Instead of spending millions on people trying to find and promote (aka flood the airwaves) the next Britney Spears and Backstreet boys, they could be using sites like MP3.com to find out what people actually like and try selling that to people instead of the crap they do sell.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Congress ALREADY gave them the ability to implement DRM (Copy protection) technology and convict anybody who breaks that DRM technology.
This industry hasn't even done a decent job taking advantage of the DMCA, which is PLENTY sufficient and then some.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Because politicians must do something about this problem that bothers their owne^H^H^H^Hlocal industry.
Is there any compromise between doing nothing and Disney's Law?
If they must pass a law... how about something along the lines of... If the owner of digital content places a unique serial number on a given bit of digital content it is illegal to remove or modify that serial number, and doing so has penalty X....
Sure, modifiying someone else's copyrighted works is already illegal, but this would allow people to modify their own works in a very specific way and still keep their copyright... it would also spell out a specific penalty for removing such a serial number.
With legal protection of serial numbers on digital content, lawsuits against the people who illegally release pirated content are possible. It's hard to sue every kid who has a pirated Brittney Spears CD, but this would help you sue the kid who made the original illegal copy.
The entertainment folks can then negotiate with the hardware manufacturers to get some sort of serial number scheme thet would be difficult to bypass... and the law would help stop the few people with the ability to bypass the technology.
Personally, I'd rather not have any more laws... I just tried to think of a way to let the entertainment industry save face, but avoid too many negative consequences... so please don't mod me as a troll just because I actually tried to answer the question... however, please do flame my idea all you want..
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
There is quite simply nothing to compromise on here. Fritz Hollings can take his bill, turn it sideways, and stick it up Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti's asses.
The CBDTPA is on its face value a load of bunk! It is intended to violate the rights of every single human being on this planet because they are capable of infringing on copyrights.
The only reason Hollywood still exists is because of the technology industry that it attempts to rape a sodomize a few times every decade. They are making more money than ever, and have never in the past been sucessful in there absurd raids on freedom. If we allow them now, it just confirms they were right all along and should remaim persistant for future even more invasive legislation.
You do realize this isn't the ending, but the very beginning of what they want, right?
P.S. You should mention to your Congressman that if he is against gun control then he's blatantly hypocritical to support this bill.
When audio tape decks became popular, VCR's, the **AA claimed that it would destroy their business. In fact, the RIAA was successful in making sure that the DAT (Digital Audio Tape) standard never made it to the consumer level.
While the argument here is the same as DAT, "but people can now make 'perfect' copies..." I think it still falls through overall. Why? Because there just isn't enough time!
It's obvious, to me anyway, that the Recording Industry targets the exact same market segment that has the most time & energy to spend making copies in the first place. (14-24 yr olds) Once you've passed the target demographic, the recording industry could just about care less what type of music you're interested in. Yet they want laws passed that will affect everyone!
From the perspective of someone who is past the "target demographic" I see this attempt at curtailing the habits of one group of people by passing laws that affect ALL people as unconscionable.
Most people over 24 or so will go buy music/dvd's rather than rip/burn them simply because there isn't enough time! Yet these same people are virtually ignored by the recording industry.
I don't think legislation is the answer. I don't see any reason for an industry who has a narrowly targeted demographic to get legislation passed to help it remain focused on that narrowly targeted demographic while the rest of the world/economy changes around it.
I don't see why people outside the recording industries narrowly targeted demographic should have to suffer at the result of sweeping legislation.
More and more, it seems to me that the **AA is crying for the tech sector to "Do something so we don't have to change our business model!"
Why should they?
There are (supposedly) thousands of out-of-work techs from the dotcom demise. There is NOTHING that prevents the recording companies from hiring some of these people to develop technology for them.
So what does it come down to? Here are my thoughts:
One solution I've been playing with is the idea of a "Don't Pay" button. Instead of a Pay Lars button (micropayments), change things so that the default is to pay but you can not pay if you wish to.
I call this microrefunds, a reversal of micropayments.
I have put an essay on microrefunds on my web site to explain this.
It's just a draft idea at present, not endorsed byt the rest of the folks at the EFF yet.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
And change their damn business model.
Its that simple, change business model or go out of business.
Im fucking sick of this corperate bailouts, its far worse than welfare for the commons who may actually need it, corperate welfare is to help some rich billionare monopoly corperation stay on top.
If we pass this into law, we are fucking morons, they already bailed out airports i mean damn
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There are plenty of examples where trying to make new laws to deal with things that are already covered perfectly well by existing laws have really screwed things up. They are usually pushed by someone or some company/industry who stands to make a lot of money and gain a lot of power at the expense of others. The DMCA is a good example of legislation made for a good intent that really tipped the balance of power between consumer and business unfairly in favor of business at the expense of the consumer.
There are plenty of laws against piracy. Enforce those before making new laws that will majorly disrupt the entire computer industry. Legislation should be the last resort. It should be well thought out and be fair, just and reasonable. This is one case where less is more.
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Where in the Constitution, Bill of Rights or even the Declaration of Independence does it say that business is protected against competition or themselves for that matter?
I think you have it backwards, where in the Constitution does it say that congress can't pass laws to protect a business?
Don't delude yourself, The Constitution only protects a handful of rights, the rest are free game for congress to take away.
You *never* had the rights you thought you did...
...and never forget it.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Make the wording more specific:
Any producer of digital content that is technologically protected in such a manner that does not allow license holders to exercise fair use rights must issue replacement or duplicate copies within 7 days of request by the license holder. Replacement or extra copies may not be witheld for any reason, and license holders may request up to 6 copies per year for the duration of the original owner's copyright. Users may request copies of the media in ANY format that the copyrighted material has been published in that is of equal or lesser quality to the format the content was licensed under.
In addition, all copyrighted material will, at the time of application for copyright, be placed in escrow in a high-quality unencrypted and unencumbered digital format (equivalent in quality to the highest-quality protected format the copyrighted material is released under) with the Library of Congress for immediate public domain release at the expiration of copyright. In the event that the original copyright holder ceases publication of the material prior to the expiration of the copyright, license holders may request up to 6 copies per year of the material from the Library of Congress' escrow copy.
I have some thoughts on this, thanks for prompting me!
I am unable to accept legislation with regards to DRM, IP, etc. Most of the companies that are spearheading this have more influence on our daily lives as it is. In the case of Disney, these people have leveraged Mickey and a dead man's legacy for Billion, possibly trillions of dollars. To think these people approach congress, and in light of their successes, they refer to us as a thieving public destroying their profitability. It is shameful to think that these people are approaching the government designed to protect, the people are the venue by which the companies make money, and are getting somewhere with this.
The entertainment moguls are doing what is natural, what is charged by them and fiduciary responsibility. They are, in the interest of the shareholders, trying to setup a monopoly. This is the goal for big business, and big business has done a lot for the World to date. But there is a limit. The government is supposed to counter balance. These companies don't need the government's help for Christ's sake; the PEOPLE need the government's help! These companies have formed mega mergers and huge OmniMediaPlexes that are rackets which amalgamate into the GIGANTIC monopoly.
This, of course, always overshadows standard copyright laws, fair use and the notion that information wants to be free. I have seen really interesting things in training as a chemist at a university. I have seen and heard of things have copyrights and patents as a symbol. The truly novel and unique and worthy ideas are usually so complicated, intelligent that protecting the "IP" is a moot point, most people can't comprehend what trying to be protected if it novel. This isn't to say that there is no caused for protection, but limits are a good thing. This allows other scientists and innovators too quickly build on the successes of others. Think of this way, if you myriad of patents and copyrighted works didn't make you rich, you probably didn't come up with something very unique. If you leverage the governments of the world to force people to pay for mendacity in order to make money, you are in essence screwing the shareholder in the long run, you need to innovate is diminished and the ability to survive hinges on legislation and not R&D.
In the case with music, these people are the worst anti-competitive types out there. A CD costs almost nothing to produce even with all costs factored in. These companies, unlike, say a University, create racket for which there I no escape, and force the artists to sell their intellectual souls to the company. Eh artists resent it. I f*cking refuse to pay $16 dollars for a CD worth not more than $2-$3. Things like E-music prove that only one song off a CD is generally worth keeping anyways, and the heavyweights of music prove this. People need to realize these people are able to create artificial markets, they call them regions [outwardly, blatantly, and cockily], they are able to prevent capitalism by leveraging their monopolies and rackets and creating markets for themselves. DVD is $6 in certain regions. In the US, its $16-$24. In EU I hear it is even more. This is disgusting.
Another thing that crops ups, and especially pisses off the likes of the extra greedy types like Lucas - stuff appearing and being released before its time, illegal releases. Look, I don't know when this happened. But when the movie is finished, just start playing it. Don't set a date. When the move comes in, just play the damn thing. Jesus Christ. I never thought that people would care when you start selling something. If it's good, it sells it self. [people no longer understand word of mouth]. The media moguls are so disenfranchised with their purchasing public they no longer understand what we want - AT ALL. Believe me, it's not a long extended wait.
The internet has made me impatient. I hate traveling now. I want things now, right away, without delay. In an age without magic, getting things faster make things more interesting. I want it now. Like Veruka Salt. Not having it isn't enough; I don't want to wait, ever. I'll even pay more not to wait. People don't understand this. I love camping kernel.org for the latest release. I love the fact there is no latency. A kernel that was released 10 minutes ago can be ALL MINE! The marketing detritus infecting these mega companies does not know what I want. I don't want to wait in line for a film; I'll use some online service to reserve tickets. My time is valuable, I will never have enough, and these corporate slime want to think of ways to take up more of it, to make me wait. For example, I wanted there to be a Service Pack 7 for NT 4.0. After a promise and a long wait, it never came; Microsoft has no idea how much that did to disenfranchise me. Meanwhile there are others who give you access to daily build and CVS in the OSS world, and my needs can be addressed by a simple email.
Big companies need to be re-edified. They are behemoths destined for doom if the government doesn't force them to be competitive again - including with each other. It's a constant struggle, a supply demand issue, consumer versus company. Neither is good or evil, but people don't buy, don't build it. They don't get this they fabricate losses to insinuate that they are losing money. This is a flaming crock. All losses due to IP and piracy are perceived. It is a result of being disconnected with those who use it, its is a result of poor pricing models. Trust me. They want to arbitrarily set a price and force people to pay it. They don't want to find sweet spots, and stratify their pricing. Its not my fault the most I would pay for an office suite is $75. Anything more, and its either pirated or I'll get it for free. Microsoft doesn't want to know this information, apparently, they have never asked me. So they lose $75 bucks, in essence.
The CDPTA, DMCA, and all other legislation hurts the betterment of the internet intelligence cache. It forces people to make changed that are undesired. It causes obfuscation and the legalization of non disclosure for large companies. It basically promotes the flat out lying to the paying consumer. It exposes people to higher risks - what you don't know can hurt you.
People and companies also have to realize that software is no longer interesting for the most part, the usability of it is. We don't license software in our car's computer. We don't upgrade it. It's a functional unit, and the less we know it the better its working. How we USE software is far more important. The car company bought and SDK and probably got a few software engineers to make this software. The professional SERVICE is worth the money, not the software. The integration is the value add, not the software. This has become my attitude, because using software is really a liability. It's like owning a high powered rifle. It can kill, in terms of downtime. The rifle instructor is able to teach the rifleman how to hit targets and not people or other things inadvertently. The point is the instructor makes the rifle worth something. This analogy could be applied to most anything. It's the truth.
Capitol Hill ©(TM)®, both side alike, are listening to where their money comes from. Big companies, especially Disney, Macrovision, Microsoft, and other lobby the hell out of these people and coerce them into suppressing you; and the rest of the world to some degree via trickle down. These mongoloids in Washington have to get with the program, and start reading the law. There is precedent to handle this stuff; usually most of it can be found pre 1850. There is no need to suppress the people.
Laws are broken every day here now. The US has started to make a hypocrisy of the constitution. Here criminal gets far more due process than those seeking to protect their rights. I want a Heckler and Koch G36C. I like that automatic rifle. The more primary form of law, The Constitution, says I can have it. But I can't. Sates violate my rights. But Charles Manson just got his tenth chance at parole. Due process is for criminals here now. Like Microsoft. They have dragged this out ad infinitum, and now there are dead bodies (figuratively), and the innocent's due process was violated in favor of Goliath.
I hate the government now. I want a vote of no confidence. Both parties now piss on the constitution for fun. Big government has destroyed the essence. If you ever heard the George Carlin skit on Turning the 10 commandments into two it proves ONE THING. MORE "laws" means things are far more complicated then they really are. The crux of a concept does not lie in complexity, its utter simplicity. The miasma of complicated laws are designed to created grey areas and subterfuge by which people and the buying public can be exploited, and this door tends not to swing both ways, trust me.
And to close with my thoughts on Copyright.
I feel it is important to this case, especially from the American prospective, to point out that one of the most ingenious, prolific and outspoken forefathers of the USA, where the DMCA and other vile laws live, believe firmly that the bill of rights should have included and explicit reference to freedom from burdensome and unfair copyrights and legislation thereof.
Thomas Jefferson was concerned about you and me. The people that read periodicals. Everyone as a singular entity. You yourself may not know what's best for you if you belong to something bigger. Our, the USA, laws are supposed to protect the little people.
While I'm not suggesting an armed standoff against federal agents necessary in this case, something must be done. We are railroading an expatriate to whom are laws do not bind. Furthermore, our own forefathers, particularly Jefferson, BELIEVE me he is YOUR friend (not the big monopolies like Electric Companies, Microsoft, Petroleum Companies, etc.)
I'm going to except his beliefs below. Realize that even 200 years ago, the pitfalls of burdensome copyright and the legislation that ensues would erode our freedoms.
......
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in his correspondence with James Madison (1751-1836) was initially hostile to the provision for copyright and patent law in the United States Constitution. On
Dec. 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to Madison from France concerning the recently-drafted Constitution:
I do not like... the omission of a bill of rights
providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms
for freedom of religion, freedom of the press,
protection against standing armies, restriction
against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting
force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by
jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of
the land...
Note, here IMHO, TJ wants to along with our other inalienable rights, establish a freedom from Monopoly. These rights, not excluding freedom from monopoly, were to him as core as the rest of our bill of rights. He repeated this view in his letter to Madison dated July 31, 1788:
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our
new constitution by nine states. It is a good
canvas, on which some strokes only want
re-touching. What these are, I think are sufficiently
manifested by the general voice from North to South,
which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty
generally understood that this should go to juries,
habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion
and monopolies. I conceive there may be difficulty
in finding general modification of these suited to
the habits of all the states. But if such cannot
be found then it is better to establish trials by jury,
the right of Habeas corpus, freedom of the press
and freedom of religion in all cases, and to abolish
standing armies in time of peace, and monopolies, in
all cases, than not to do it in any... The saying
there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements
to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a
monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the
benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to
be opposed to that of their general suppression.
Madison, in a letter dated October 17, 1788, responded,
With regard to monopolies they are justly
classed among the greatest nuisances in government.
But is it clear that as encouragements to literary
works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too
valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not
suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public
to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified
in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely
less danger of this abuse in our governments than in
most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many
to the few. Where the power is in the few it is
natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own
partialities and corruptions. Where the power, as
with us, is in the many not in the few, the danger
can not be very great that the few will be thus
favored. It is much more to be dreaded that the
few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.
I hold the recent copyright extension as an example of what Madison though there was little danger of. There it was said, even by Madison, the proponent of the said directives, that there would likely be no "a sacrifice of the many to the "partialities and corruptions" of a powerful few."
I firmly believe the DMCA is both a corruption and a partiality. Anyone with Macrovision stock will try and convince you otherwise.
Jefferson probably saw that there is some purpose in having intellectual property be protected in some fashion or more likely, IMHO, probably decided that he would rather be a part of creating the ground rules for this countries operations and decided to cut bait at this point. He subsequently said to Madison in a letter on August 28, 1789
I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes,
but I should have been for going further. For
instance, the following alterations and additions would
have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be
allowed to persons for their own productions in literature,
and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not
exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no
other purpose.
The blank was to be filled in at some future date, obviously. The law is written with the sense that this right would be the right of the people to protect themselves against intellectual fraudulence by companies, e.g., the theft of the 'little man's' ideas. In addition to which, there is always the stance that the people of the fledgling USA would be safeguarded in the Bill of Rights against unduly long copyrights.
Jefferson's preference for the term of copyright was submitted to Madison a few days afterward, in a letter of September 6, 1789. The proposed term was that of 19 years, based on actuarial calculations:
The question Whether one generation of men has
a right to bind another seems never to have
been started on this [i.e., the European side --
Jefferson was writing from France] or our [American]
side of the water... that no such obligation can
be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. --
I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be
self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct
to the living; that the dead have neither powers
nor rights over it... A generation coming in and
going out entire... would have a right on the first
year of their self-dominion to contract a debt
for 33 years, in the 10th for 24, in the 20th for
14, in the 30th for 4, whereas generations, changing
daily by daily deaths and births, have one constant
term, beginning at the date of their contract, and
ending when a majority of those of full age at that
date shall be dead. The length of that term may
be estimated from the tables of mortality. Take,
for instance, the tables of M. de Buffon...
[according to which] half of those of 21 years [of
age] and upwards living at any one instant of time will
be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the
nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term
beyond which neither the representatives of a nation,
nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly
extend a debt... This principle that the earth belongs
to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive
application... Turn this subject in your mind, my
dear Sir... Your station in the councils of our country
gives you an opportunity for producing it to public
consideration... Establish the principle... in the
new law to be passed for protecting copyrights and new
inventions, by securing the exclusive right for 19
instead of 14 years.
A Jeffersonian computation using life tables from 1992 gives a Jeffersonian copyright term of 30-35 years. (Vital Statistics of the United States 1992, Volume II--Mortality, Part A, Public Health Service, Hyattsville, 1996, Section 6, Table 6-1.) Note, however, that at least one edition of Jefferson's works has a much abridged version of this letter, in which the 19-year computation and the proposal for the term of copyright do not occur.
One of Jefferson's most famous statements on patent law was in his often-quoted letter of August 13, 1813 to Isaac McPherson, in which he wrote that, since there is no natural right to property in land, how much less is there a natural right to a property in ideas. I think Jefferson's words apply equally well to copyrights as to patents; to "expression" as well as to "ideas": "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
"The scary thing about the DMCA is that it affects everyone, but only a subset of the country realizes it exists, of which a subset understands what it means, of which a subset understands why its so wrong. " quote, kstumpf (ken@stumpf.com).
"Is there a "voice" amongst this subset that has any power to inflict any change here? Kind of spooky. It makes you wonder where things are headed." quote, kstumpf (ken@stumpf.com).
As someone pointed out in a discussion thread previous to this, be sure to realize that copyright is referred to at this point as monopoly in Jefferson's letters.
Its fairly clear that Jefferson uses Monopoly in reference to copyright, which is what it is, you can monopolize on your intellectual property for a set period of time. He was willing to give IP of the day 19 years, but he was very much verbal about fair use, and that public fair use was of the utmost importance.
Even cursory inspection of Jefferson's views shows his distrust of allowing monopolies run rampant.
Even Madison has said:
"With regard to monopolies they are justly classed among the greatest nuisances in government. "
They both realized that in order for Monopolies of any sort to be protected by the government, that undue amounts of arbitration would be necessary.
Jefferson also affords a Monopoly to the Individual, not a corporate entity:
"Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose."
Surely he isn't suggesting that one person could create a monopoly on, lets say, corn. He was referring to copyright. He certainly isn't suggesting that corn could only be sold by one person for 19 years.
Another thing, imagine if the copyrights were in fact awarded to the people who invented them, not he companies who subsidized them. It would be interesting to see a world where companies like DuPont and Merck (and every other chemical and drug exploitation companies, because that's what they are, the money is in the treatments, not the cure) are made to treat their patent holding scientists with the utmost respect and regard, even more so than the shareholders, because if they left for another company, so leaves their patents!
The most important of all the Jefferson arguments is this: If IP is so unique, so wonderful and so great, why does it need protection? I don't believe I had quoted this particular argument above, I will work to find it, but the statement is true. If something is obvious, then it really isn't IP. Would you like Bob Metcalfe, the Linux is a piece of crap Windows 2000 rules moron who founded 3COM to still hold the patent on ethernet?
Don't you think its nice that other companies compete with 3COM for the ethernet space, such as Intel, CISCO, et al? Doesn't the standard referred to as "ethernet" get better and better because these companies compete for your business in the same segment?
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.
The message in this passage is clear: an idea is not matter but energy; it cannot be owned, and it isn't diminished by being shared. In any discussion of copyright, it is useful to begin by reminding ourselves that ideas can't be copyrighted and can't be owned--only expression can. Furthermore, even when expression is copyrighted, academics ought to bear in mind their right to Fair Use, a crucial exception to copyright that exists in order to enable teaching, research, and news reporting.
*** This article is a conglomeration of thoughts that I have previously expressed on another discussion thread. If you have seen these before, please note that the ideas were expressed elsewhere as well. ***
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Have you purchased any content, say some popular music, that was readily available for bootleg online? If you're still purchasing and online bootlegging gets even easier, would you stop purchasing and start bootlegging?
Now, do you think the vast, vast majority of consumers would steal their content rather than pay for it, assuming the content they wanted was readily available at a reasonable price? Or do you share Hilary Rosen's view that most consumers are thieves who will steal anything that isn't nailed down? (takes one to know one, i say)
If, like me, you believe that most people would prefer legitimately purchased content *if it is readily available, reasonably priced, and allows fair use*, then your whole argument falls apart. Consumers WILL pay for online content. The problem is that the industry currently refuses to allow them to buy online content in a real way.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
For the first time in history, scarcity is about to vanish. There is no scarcity in copies of many works of art. It is now possible for the first time in history for everybody to share works of art, for enjoyment and advancement of humanity at just about no cost at all.
How can this be bad? It is something that mankind should have been striving for, yet, it just happened. It is still the best thing that has happened to mankind in a very long time.
Yet, the entertainment industry is trying to destroy that monumental achievement. Why? Because they have yet to come up with a business model that takes this into account. We, mankind, has yet to understand how creators can be awarded securely, so that they can make a living from providing the works that we enjoy so much.
We should be the first to acknowledge that this is not an easy problem to solve. After all, getting the funds to keep /. running has proven to be non-trivial.
However, in this situation, the proposed legislation threatens to destroy all that we have built up.
It must not happen. It would be a great step backwards for mankind.
What must happen now, is that all the great minds of this planet must come together and think, and experiment, to solve one of the most fundamental problems of our time: How do you reward people in a post-scarcity society?
Finally, to all those who say that "Congress should not pass laws", well, perhaps it is a solution for the US, but let me offer a perspective from my norwegian viewpoint: Politics is about the people influencing the society they live in, making priorities, and changing things that doesn't work. Politics is about the balances that the market can't provide. Politics is providing copyright laws in the first place, if you really want to be consistent about the "hands off" attitude, you should reject copyright alltogether. However, through politics, you should be able to create the laws that are good for society. Copyrights is meant to balance the rights of creators and people, for the benefit of everyone. When the entertainment industry is creating DRM tech, they are clearly violating their part of the deal. Clearly, what should happen then is that DRM should be banned. Using politics.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Forgive me if my language gets a little stronger than I usually use here, but I get SO damned tired of hearing special interest groups (ESPECIALLY wealthy trade organizations) yammering "There oughta be a law!"
The truth of the matter is that the content industries want to criminalize exercise of fair-use rights by law-abiding citizens so they can palm off the cost of investigating infringement of their (IMHO) unconstitutionally extended copyrights onto the very people whose long-standing rights they have just trampled.
If the RIAA and MPAA want to protect their intellectual property, including that portion of it that they stole back from the grasp of the public domain by the Sonny Bono Ex Post Facto Copyright Extension Act, let them get off their dead asses and defend their property in the civil courts. There are already PLENTY of laws on the books that empower them to do that.
I object strenuously to the use of MY taxes to pay for prosecution of copyright violators because doing so is the purest form of corporate welfare. Make Valenti and Rosen pay for their OWN damned legal bills.
I would LOVE to see a DMCA prosecution for circumvention of "technical measures" applied to prevent copying of a work on which the copyright would have otherwise (absent the SBCEA) expired. Ex post facto criminalization of otherwise lawful conduct is facially unconstitutional, don't ya know? One, or the other, or both, of these "Media Welfare" laws would HAVE to be struck down because acting together they result in a situation that is blatantly unconstitutional.
utter rubbish
I agree with you that the CBDTPA is terrible but I think that the nature of your question is the wrong one. The fundamental problem here is that we do not need any news laws. I realize, of course, that it isn't legislatively sexy, or politically gainful for a budding Senator to say that but it's the truth.
The proponents of the bill claim that the current anti-piracy measures are insufficient, and unless "something" is done the "Content Production Industry" will collapse. And, they claim that if this industry collapses nothing new will ever be created. As proof of the damage they cite the lack of Consumer Broadband and Digital Television, as well as declining CD Sales.
As Carnivore and magic-lantern demonstrate governments can track user behavior online. And, they are exploiting those abilities to the utmost. They have been focusing on terrorism lately, but they can always turn their eyes to copyright infringement if they wish. I believe that those tracking powers are too great and need to be reigned in not expanded, but that is a discussion for another time.
Therefore, despite what the "Content Production Industry" claims, the existing laws can be enforced. We do not need to change the underlying code in order to make it more difficult to trade files, nor do we need to make otherwise legal activities (such as fair use) illegal for fear of theft. Such bills only punish the vast majority in order to catch the few, and in so doing, go against the whole point of criminal justice; to defend the majority, not persecute them.
Digital Television and Broadband have been held up by competing standards, low demand, unfair competition, and the last-mile problem. Despite what the bill "finds" the lack of demand is the fault of a number of factors not potential piracy. Even if it was, that lack of demand is not a social problem requiring government efforts. The rpbolem is one for the marketing departments not public servants.
When you consider CD-Sales the same problem of proof exists. When Napster was at its zenith (at the height of the tech boom), CD Sales were up. Now, in the midst of a U.S. recession, they are down. Doubtless copying is part of this but, how much? And, does that impact justify increasing the prices on most consumer electronic products, and making life more difficult for consumers, electronics producers, and even copyright holders? Again the proponents of the bill have not offered any hard proof. The same goes for Movies, books and other cultural works.
Lastly and most importantly, the whole point of copyright law is to encourage the production of "science and useful arts..." It is not intended to create or sustain a publishing industry. Despite what Jack Valenti says they have not proven that the current state of affairs will reduce the number of authors, musicians and filmmakers out there. All that they have shown is that it may reduce the number of publishers out there.
The bottom line is; there is no proven compelling public need for this kind of legislation. If anything the need is to examine the charges of price-fixing and stifling competition that have been leveled at the industry and to examine the digital tracking of the Justice Department.
The clear avenue here is not to do nothing but to prevent harm from being caused.
If you make no money at all from the transaction, your infringement is clearly civil.
That's not true. If you distribute copyrighted materials worth more than a certain amount of money, you can be prosecuted criminally.
I am held accountable and under civil copyright penalties must pay the copyright holder damages. Let's see, average CD: $17, average # songs: 12 = $1.41 per song.
That's just the actual damages. Civil copyright penalties include punitive damages ("in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just"), court costs, and attorney's fees.
I wrote to my Senator, Senator Hollings himself, in October about the SSSCA nonsense. I just received a reply approximately 10 days ago. Here's the letter, if anyone's interested.
April 22, 2002
Dear Mr. *********:
Thank you for contacting me regarding the problem of digital piracy and consumer fair use of electronic devices. I recently introduced S. 2048, "The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act," which in draft form was titled the "Systems Security Standards and Certification Act." The purpose of this legislation is to increase the level of quality content on the Internet and other digital media by calling upon representatives of the content, consumer electronics and information technology industries to agree upon a standard technology solutions to the problem of digital piracy. I view government involvement as a last resort.
Every week a major magazine or newspaper reports on the thousands of illegal pirated works that are available for copying and redistribution online. Piracy is growing exponentially on college campuses and among tech savvy consumers. Such lawlessness contributes to the studios and record labels' reluctance to place their digital content on the Internet or over the airwaves. While industries are at odds as to how to solve these critical content protection problems, this bill will facilitate the means to finding a solution.
Specifically, this legislation requires the content, consumer electronics, and information technology industries to come together with representatives of consumer groups to develop standards, technologies, and encoding rules to safeguard digital content so that it will be made more readily available to consumers without being subject to piracy. The affected parties would have one year to reach an agreement. The technologies would then be incorporated into all digital media devices to ensure universal protection for digital content and universal access to such content for consumers. The deadline imposed on the industry would work in the following fashion: if they come together to solve these problems in private sector talks, we will empower government enforcement so that all consumer devices comply. If they don't, the government, in consultation with the private sector, will have to step in.
Finally, S. 2048 specifically requires that any standards agreed upon respect consumer's fair use of legally obtained merchandise such as videos and CDs. We live in an exciting technological age and I support and encourage people to utilize new innovative products to their fullest extent as they become available.
Again, thank you for sharing your views and concerns with me on this very important piece of legislation. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future with any questions you might have.
With kindest regards, I am
Sincerely,
Ernest F. Hollings
United States Senator
Will everyone please stop referring to themselves and others as consumers. We are implicitly helping the case of the corporations when we do. We are citizens of [[INSERT STATE HERE]] and the U.S.A. through social contracts embodied by state & federal constitutions. We are not subjects of the corporations.
When those two simple words are changed it affects the whole frame of reference of the arguments. When we use "consumer" it is tilted in favor of corporate policy. When we use "citizen" the corporate stance is weakened.
Let's not play the role (consumer) that the corporations are trying to force on us! Stand up, be a citizen! [Cue patriotic music]
Sorry for the rant...
The solution instead is to serialize each instance of the software sold and cross-reference that serial number with the credit card or other identification of the purchaser, such that if 10,000 copies of program A, serial number #12345, appear on the web the copyright holder can go after the original purchaser as a first step.
I pay cash. And I'm not showing my ID to buy a CD or a movie or a software game. If I have to do that, I won't buy.
I know you're right in a "back of my mind" kind of way, but a list of examples to provide the Congresswoman would be nice.
Nope, no sig
I think any legislation to attempt to include copy protection in all hardware is doomed. Mainly because computers are advancing so quickly that by the time you had figured out a standard for encrypting content, the typical high-end computer would be able to brute-force break it in a few hours.
One piece of legislation I think is REALLY needed though, would be to actually give a clear definition of what "fair use" actually is. I've read some of the copyright law and lots of opinions on what various people think it means and all it's done is convince me that nobody, lawyer or layperson really understands what constitutes fair use.
Some sort of plain-and-simple law that spells it out would solve a multitude of problems currently in the legal system. People can't obey a law if they don't understand what is and isn't legal.
Milo from Kangaroo Koncepts
How about asking them to pass this:
1. Users have the right to "time-shift" content that they have legally acquired.
This gives you the right to record video or audio for later viewing or listening. For example, you can use a VCR to record a TV show and play it back later.
2. Users have the right to "space-shift" content that they have legally acquired.
This gives you the right to use your content in different places (as long as each use is personal and non-commercial). For example, you can copy a CD to a portable music player so that you can listen to the songs while you're jogging.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
This gives you the right to make archival copies to be used in the event that your original copies are destroyed.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
This gives you the right to listen to music on your Rio, to watch TV on your iMac, and to view DVDs on your Linux computer.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
This gives you the right to modify content in order to make it more usable. For example, a blind person can modify an electronic book so that the content can be read out loud.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.
This last right guarantees your ability to exercise your other rights. Certain recent copyright laws have paradoxical loopholes that claim to grant certain rights but then criminalize all technologies that could allow you to exercise those rights. In contrast, this Bill of Rights states that no technological barriers can deprive you of your other fair use rights.
jello.
aka aron.
I don't think there should be any legislation - period.
I am unable to accept legislation with regards to DRM, IP, etc. Most of the companies that are spearheading this have more influence on our daily lives as it is. In the case of Disney, these people have leveraged Mickey and a dead man's legacy for Billion, possibly trillions of dollars. To think these people approach congress, and in light of their successes, they refer to us as a thieving public destroying their profitability. It is shameful to think that these people are approaching the government designed to protect, the people are the venue by which the companies make money, and are getting somewhere with this.
The entertainment moguls are doing what is natural, what is charged by them and fiduciary responsibility. They are, in the interest of the shareholders, trying to setup a monopoly. This is the goal for big business, and big business has done a lot for the World to date. But there is a limit. The government is supposed to counter balance. These companies don't need the government's help for Christ's sake; the PEOPLE need the government's help! These companies have formed mega mergers and huge OmniMediaPlexes that are rackets which amalgamate into the GIGANTIC monopoly.
This, of course, always overshadows standard copyright laws, fair use and the notion that information wants to be free. I have seen really interesting things in training as a chemist at a university. I have seen and heard of things have copyrights and patents as a symbol. The truly novel and unique and worthy ideas are usually so complicated, intelligent that protecting the "IP" is a moot point, most people can't comprehend what trying to be protected if it novel. This isn't to say that there is no caused for protection, but limits are a good thing. This allows other scientists and innovators too quickly build on the successes of others. Think of this way, if you myriad of patents and copyrighted works didn't make you rich, you probably didn't come up with something very unique. If you leverage the governments of the world to force people to pay for mendacity in order to make money, you are in essence screwing the shareholder in the long run, you need to innovate is diminished and the ability to survive hinges on legislation and not R&D.
In the case with music, these people are the worst anti-competitive types out there. A CD costs almost nothing to produce even with all costs factored in. These companies, unlike, say a University, create racket for which there I no escape, and force the artists to sell their intellectual souls to the company. Eh artists resent it. I f*cking refuse to pay $16 dollars for a CD worth not more than $2-$3. Things like E-music prove that only one song off a CD is generally worth keeping anyways, and the heavyweights of music prove this. People need to realize these people are able to create artificial markets, they call them regions [outwardly, blatantly, and cockily], they are able to prevent capitalism by leveraging their monopolies and rackets and creating markets for themselves. DVD is $6 in certain regions. In the US, its $16-$24. In EU I hear it is even more. This is disgusting.
Another thing that crops ups, and especially pisses off the likes of the extra greedy types like Lucas - stuff appearing and being released before its time, illegal releases. Look, I don't know when this happened. But when the movie is finished, just start playing it. Don't set a date. When the move comes in, just play the damn thing. Jesus Christ. I never thought that people would care when you start selling something. If it's good, it sells it self. [people no longer understand word of mouth]. The media moguls are so disenfranchised with their purchasing public they no longer understand what we want - AT ALL. Believe me, it's not a long extended wait.
The internet has made me impatient. I hate traveling now. I want things now, right away, without delay. In an age without magic, getting things faster make things more interesting. I want it now. Like Veruka Salt. Not having it isn't enough; I don't want to wait, ever. I'll even pay more not to wait. People don't understand this. I love camping kernel.org for the latest release. I love the fact there is no latency. A kernel that was released 10 minutes ago can be ALL MINE! The marketing detritus infecting these mega companies does not know what I want. I don't want to wait in line for a film; I'll use some online service to reserve tickets. My time is valuable, I will never have enough, and these corporate slime want to think of ways to take up more of it, to make me wait. For example, I wanted there to be a Service Pack 7 for NT 4.0. After a promise and a long wait, it never came; Microsoft has no idea how much that did to disenfranchise me. Meanwhile there are others who give you access to daily build and CVS in the OSS world, and my needs can be addressed by a simple email.
Big companies need to be re-edified. They are behemoths destined for doom if the government doesn't force them to be competitive again - including with each other. It's a constant struggle, a supply demand issue, consumer versus company. Neither is good or evil, but people don't buy, don't build it. They don't get this they fabricate losses to insinuate that they are losing money. This is a flaming crock. All losses due to IP and piracy are perceived. It is a result of being disconnected with those who use it, its is a result of poor pricing models. Trust me. They want to arbitrarily set a price and force people to pay it. They don't want to find sweet spots, and stratify their pricing. Its not my fault the most I would pay for an office suite is $75. Anything more, and its either pirated or I'll get it for free. Microsoft doesn't want to know this information, apparently, they have never asked me. So they lose $75 bucks, in essence.
The CDPTA, DMCA, and all other legislation hurts the betterment of the internet intelligence cache. It forces people to make changed that are undesired. It causes obfuscation and the legalization of non disclosure for large companies. It basically promotes the flat out lying to the paying consumer. It exposes people to higher risks - what you don't know can hurt you.
People and companies also have to realize that software is no longer interesting for the most part, the usability of it is. We don't license software in our car's computer. We don't upgrade it. It's a functional unit, and the less we know it the better its working. How we USE software is far more important. The car company bought and SDK and probably got a few software engineers to make this software. The professional SERVICE is worth the money, not the software. The integration is the value add, not the software. This has become my attitude, because using software is really a liability. It's like owning a high powered rifle. It can kill, in terms of downtime. The rifle instructor is able to teach the rifleman how to hit targets and not people or other things inadvertently. The point is the instructor makes the rifle worth something. This analogy could be applied to most anything. It's the truth.
Capitol Hill ©(TM)®, both side alike, are listening to where their money comes from. Big companies, especially Disney, Macrovision, Microsoft, and other lobby the hell out of these people and coerce them into suppressing you; and the rest of the world to some degree via trickle down. These mongoloids in Washington have to get with the program, and start reading the law. There is precedent to handle this stuff; usually most of it can be found pre 1850. There is no need to suppress the people.
Laws are broken every day here now. The US has started to make a hypocrisy of the constitution. Here criminal gets far more due process than those seeking to protect their rights. I want a Heckler and Koch G36C. I like that automatic rifle. The more primary form of law, The Constitution, says I can have it. But I can't. Sates violate my rights. But Charles Manson just got his tenth chance at parole. Due process is for criminals here now. Like Microsoft. They have dragged this out ad infinitum, and now there are dead bodies (figuratively), and the innocent's due process was violated in favor of Goliath.
I hate the government now. I want a vote of no confidence. Both parties now piss on the constitution for fun. Big government has destroyed the essence. If you ever heard the George Carlin skit on Turning the 10 commandments into two it proves ONE THING. MORE "laws" means things are far more complicated then they really are. The crux of a concept does not lie in complexity, its utter simplicity. The miasma of complicated laws are designed to created grey areas and subterfuge by which people and the buying public can be exploited, and this door tends not to swing both ways, trust me.
And to close with my thoughts on Copyright.
I feel it is important to this case, especially from the American prospective, to point out that one of the most ingenious, prolific and outspoken forefathers of the USA, where the DMCA and other vile laws live, believe firmly that the bill of rights should have included and explicit reference to freedom from burdensome and unfair copyrights and legislation thereof.
Thomas Jefferson was concerned about you and me. The people that read periodicals. Everyone as a singular entity. You yourself may not know what's best for you if you belong to something bigger. Our, the USA, laws are supposed to protect the little people.
While I'm not suggesting an armed standoff against federal agents necessary in this case, something must be done. We are railroading an expatriate to whom are laws do not bind. Furthermore, our own forefathers, particularly Jefferson, BELIEVE me he is YOUR friend (not the big monopolies like Electric Companies, Microsoft, Petroleum Companies, etc.)
I'm going to except his beliefs below. Realize that even 200 years ago, the pitfalls of burdensome copyright and the legislation that ensues would erode our freedoms.
......
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in his correspondence with James Madison (1751-1836) was initially hostile to the provision for copyright and patent law in the United States Constitution. On
Dec. 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to Madison from France concerning the recently-drafted Constitution:
I do not like... the omission of a bill of rights
providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms
for freedom of religion, freedom of the press,
protection against standing armies, restriction
against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting
force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by
jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of
the land...
Note, here IMHO, TJ wants to along with our other inalienable rights, establish a freedom from Monopoly. These rights, not excluding freedom from monopoly, were to him as core as the rest of our bill of rights. He repeated this view in his letter to Madison dated July 31, 1788:
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our
new constitution by nine states. It is a good
canvas, on which some strokes only want
re-touching. What these are, I think are sufficiently
manifested by the general voice from North to South,
which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty
generally understood that this should go to juries,
habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion
and monopolies. I conceive there may be difficulty
in finding general modification of these suited to
the habits of all the states. But if such cannot
be found then it is better to establish trials by jury,
the right of Habeas corpus, freedom of the press
and freedom of religion in all cases, and to abolish
standing armies in time of peace, and monopolies, in
all cases, than not to do it in any... The saying
there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements
to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a
monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the
benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to
be opposed to that of their general suppression.
Madison, in a letter dated October 17, 1788, responded,
With regard to monopolies they are justly
classed among the greatest nuisances in government.
But is it clear that as encouragements to literary
works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too
valuable to be wholly renounced? Would it not
suffice to reserve in all cases a right to the public
to abolish the privilege at a price to be specified
in the grant of it? Is there not also infinitely
less danger of this abuse in our governments than in
most others? Monopolies are sacrifices of the many
to the few. Where the power is in the few it is
natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own
partialities and corruptions. Where the power, as
with us, is in the many not in the few, the danger
can not be very great that the few will be thus
favored. It is much more to be dreaded that the
few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.
I hold the recent copyright extension as an example of what Madison though there was little danger of. There it was said, even by Madison, the proponent of the said directives, that there would likely be no "a sacrifice of the many to the "partialities and corruptions" of a powerful few."
I firmly believe the DMCA is both a corruption and a partiality. Anyone with Macrovision stock will try and convince you otherwise.
Jefferson probably saw that there is some purpose in having intellectual property be protected in some fashion or more likely, IMHO, probably decided that he would rather be a part of creating the ground rules for this countries operations and decided to cut bait at this point. He subsequently said to Madison in a letter on August 28, 1789
I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes,
but I should have been for going further. For
instance, the following alterations and additions would
have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be
allowed to persons for their own productions in literature,
and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not
exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no
other purpose.
The blank was to be filled in at some future date, obviously. The law is written with the sense that this right would be the right of the people to protect themselves against intellectual fraudulence by companies, e.g., the theft of the 'little man's' ideas. In addition to which, there is always the stance that the people of the fledgling USA would be safeguarded in the Bill of Rights against unduly long copyrights.
Jefferson's preference for the term of copyright was submitted to Madison a few days afterward, in a letter of September 6, 1789. The proposed term was that of 19 years, based on actuarial calculations:
The question Whether one generation of men has
a right to bind another seems never to have
been started on this [i.e., the European side --
Jefferson was writing from France] or our [American]
side of the water... that no such obligation can
be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. --
I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be
self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct
to the living; that the dead have neither powers
nor rights over it... A generation coming in and
going out entire... would have a right on the first
year of their self-dominion to contract a debt
for 33 years, in the 10th for 24, in the 20th for
14, in the 30th for 4, whereas generations, changing
daily by daily deaths and births, have one constant
term, beginning at the date of their contract, and
ending when a majority of those of full age at that
date shall be dead. The length of that term may
be estimated from the tables of mortality. Take,
for instance, the tables of M. de Buffon...
[according to which] half of those of 21 years [of
age] and upwards living at any one instant of time will
be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the
nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term
beyond which neither the representatives of a nation,
nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly
extend a debt... This principle that the earth belongs
to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive
application... Turn this subject in your mind, my
dear Sir... Your station in the councils of our country
gives you an opportunity for producing it to public
consideration... Establish the principle... in the
new law to be passed for protecting copyrights and new
inventions, by securing the exclusive right for 19
instead of 14 years.
A Jeffersonian computation using life tables from 1992 gives a Jeffersonian copyright term of 30-35 years. (Vital Statistics of the United States 1992, Volume II--Mortality, Part A, Public Health Service, Hyattsville, 1996, Section 6, Table 6-1.) Note, however, that at least one edition of Jefferson's works has a much abridged version of this letter, in which the 19-year computation and the proposal for the term of copyright do not occur.
One of Jefferson's most famous statements on patent law was in his often-quoted letter of August 13, 1813 to Isaac McPherson, in which he wrote that, since there is no natural right to property in land, how much less is there a natural right to a property in ideas. I think Jefferson's words apply equally well to copyrights as to patents; to "expression" as well as to "ideas": "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
"The scary thing about the DMCA is that it affects everyone, but only a subset of the country realizes it exists, of which a subset understands what it means, of which a subset understands why its so wrong. " quote, kstumpf (ken@stumpf.com).
"Is there a "voice" amongst this subset that has any power to inflict any change here? Kind of spooky. It makes you wonder where things are headed." quote, kstumpf (ken@stumpf.com).
As someone pointed out in a discussion thread previous to this, be sure to realize that copyright is referred to at this point as monopoly in Jefferson's letters.
Its fairly clear that Jefferson uses Monopoly in reference to copyright, which is what it is, you can monopolize on your intellectual property for a set period of time. He was willing to give IP of the day 19 years, but he was very much verbal about fair use, and that public fair use was of the utmost importance.
Even cursory inspection of Jefferson's views shows his distrust of allowing monopolies run rampant.
Even Madison has said:
"With regard to monopolies they are justly classed among the greatest nuisances in government. "
They both realized that in order for Monopolies of any sort to be protected by the government, that undue amounts of arbitration would be necessary.
Jefferson also affords a Monopoly to the Individual, not a corporate entity:
"Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose."
Surely he isn't suggesting that one person could create a monopoly on, lets say, corn. He was referring to copyright. He certainly isn't suggesting that corn could only be sold by one person for 19 years.
Another thing, imagine if the copyrights were in fact awarded to the people who invented them, not he companies who subsidized them. It would be interesting to see a world where companies like DuPont and Merck (and every other chemical and drug exploitation companies, because that's what they are, the money is in the treatments, not the cure) are made to treat their patent holding scientists with the utmost respect and regard, even more so than the shareholders, because if they left for another company, so leaves their patents!
The most important of all the Jefferson arguments is this: If IP is so unique, so wonderful and so great, why does it need protection? I don't believe I had quoted this particular argument above, I will work to find it, but the statement is true. If something is obvious, then it really isn't IP. Would you like Bob Metcalfe, the Linux is a piece of crap Windows 2000 rules moron who founded 3COM to still hold the patent on ethernet?
Don't you think its nice that other companies compete with 3COM for the ethernet space, such as Intel, CISCO, et al? Doesn't the standard referred to as "ethernet" get better and better because these companies compete for your business in the same segment?
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.
The message in this passage is clear: an idea is not matter but energy; it cannot be owned, and it isn't diminished by being shared. In any discussion of copyright, it is useful to begin by reminding ourselves that ideas can't be copyrighted and can't be owned--only expression can. Furthermore, even when expression is copyrighted, academics ought to bear in mind their right to Fair Use, a crucial exception to copyright that exists in order to enable teaching, research, and news reporting.
*** This article is a conglomeration of thoughts that I have previously expressed on another discussion thread. If you have seen these before, please note that the ideas were expressed elsewhere as well. ***
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
It seems to me that, really, the "problem" is that "Copyright" implies that "making copies" is the important part of the exclusive rights for "content owners", when really, the important part is "Distributionright" instead.
The "common sense" understanding of "Fair Use" seems to boil down to "if I paid for it, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, including make copies in different formats for interoperability, archiving, and so on", so every time some wealthy **AA Organization pressures the legislature to "protect COPYright", anything that results will necessarily trample all over "Fair Use".
If, instead, we can get the legislature to focus on DISTRIBUTIONright, Fair use should be protected - at least, more so than it would be if the efforts were to prevent "Copying" rather than "unauthorized Distribution".
(After all, If I 'rip' a DVD that I've purchased to a DivX 5/Vorbis .ogg file for my own use, I don't think any even-remotely-rational person would call that "piracy". It doesn't become "piracy" until I start giving out those files to people who don't have a legal right to the material encoded in it.)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Dude, you blew it! Now they're gonna have to add a serial number and say there are 5! What is your problem???
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
Why doesn't Hollywood just add a serialnumber (in the shape of watermarkings(*)) into every content they wish to "protect"?
Find a protected content floating freely around the net? Get the serialnumber and find out who's the owner of the debited creditcard. Go after the violater, not Joe User.
The upside, the users gets to keep their fair use rights *and* wont be "forced" into the underground networks to find a playable copy of the unplayable medium he have bought. And Hollywood would loose less virtual money to "casual piracy", because, do *you* trust your friends enough not to share your copy with all his friends and in the end letting Hollywood get a copy and sue ass to hell?
The downside, Hollywood don't get to control the users life.
(*) Yeah, I know, watermarkings can be removed. And DRM's can be circumvented. And those who'll engage in either are likely to be the same people, so it's just status quo.
The goal of such a policy would not be to prevent all uncompensated use, nor would it attempt to punish each and every infraction. Rather, the purpose would be to define norms of lawful, honest behavior that allow for the full use and enjoyment of works in digital form, with compensation to rightsholders. Flaunting of these norms would not result in guaranteed penalty, but habitual, intentional violators would be at significant risk. Determined pirates could still evade the law, just as determined shoplifters, drug users, and tax evaders do today. But most Americans do pay their taxes, voluntarily, similarly encouraged by the carrot of doing the right thing and the stick of potential legal consequence. If the Federal government can raise more than a trillion dollars a year this way, is it that naive to imagine that we can actually get authors and other rightsholders compensated using the same approach?
"new legislation would you support which would make those who engage in online piracy easier to track?"
None. First I want legislation to protect me before I vote for any legislation to stop piracy. (And whan I say piracy, I mean true piracy, the kind that causes harm, not the definition that the RIAA has bastardized in order to explain their lousy sales.)
The reason that the CTPBASPAFP is so awful is that there is all this 'protection' for the handful of corporations trying to get it passed, and none for anybody else. I want legislation that protects my rights so that a corporation cannot impede them. DigitalConsumer.org has the right idea. Establish our rights first. This is absolutely necessary to enact before you can go legislating anti-piracy measures.
Why? Because, for one thing, the MPAA and the RIAA have some extremely broad defintions of what piracy is. They think that burning a song from an MP3 is piracy. It's not. They measure any time they don't force a customer to give them money is piracy. By their defintion of the word, a huge portion of the internet population would have to be punished.
So let's say, hypothetically, that our rights are established exactly as DigitalConsumer stipulates. Now we can start talking about legislation because we know what they law cannot say. It's easier to define what Piracy is at this point and determine a suspect's guilt. Once they do that, then they can investigate individuals or groups who are seeking to distribute their content in a way that causes harm to the normal distribution channel.
Let's say that somebody records an episode of That 70's show, which is available on public broadcast (no cable or satellite required...) and makes it available on the web. Is it piracy? By DigitalConsumer's bill of rights, no. It's space shifting. You can't go after people sharing that show. Does it do harm to the industry? That's debatable. If somebody doesn't watch the show on TV they're missing the commercials that make it money. But wait a minute, that's not piracy. If I missed That 70's Show and f'd up the taping of it, the only other choice I have to watch it is to download it. The studios have a real easy way to get me to watch the commercials for it. Provide it, with commercials, for me to download. Simple. That's why it's not piracy. I'm not relieving their ability to make money off it.
The people's rights are far more important than the corporations'. Protect our rights, and then we'll work with corps in order to keep piracy down. Don't keep piracy down at the expense of our rights.
"Derp de derp."
"Unfortunately the only postings/articles I have seen which offer a resolution to online piracy have been limited to ways in which the entertainment industry needs to change its business model."
Personally, I'd take that as a clue that the entertainment industries seeking to push this legislation have a business model that doesn't work anymore. You can't have a market seeking legal action every time their business model no longer works. We'd all still be using typewriters and payphones if it worked that way.
"Derp de derp."
That's my basic alternative. Repeal of the DMCA would also be necessary. Basically just roll things back to where they were before Disney got involved.
... whatever Holling is calling his bill now. Lets just say the latest Disney bill.
... it is immoral to patronize Disney products.
And Sonny Bono, if you want to be particular. During the 1950's copyright was about where it should have been, except that we were a bit careless about respecting the copyrights of publications from other countries. Since then...
These days I feel that we'd be better off if the copyright laws were just totally revokes. Period. But that's because of the unreasonable extensions and because of ***** like the DMCA and the
Remember
I don't care if the GPL is reduced to the BSD. Revoking copyright would be an improvement anyway.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How do you expect this to work?America's legal system has gone a bit downhill, but still i somehow just can't see that happening.
And even if no one but the judge was allowed to see the evidence of how they caught the defendant, every judge who is presented with this evidence is just one more person who knows The Horrible Secret of the Fifth RIAA Serial Number Hiding Method. Eventually, someone is going to quietly leak any and all secret methods the RIAA has from the bench to the press.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
if anything like the infamous bill will be passed, tell her that the US may suffer of a great loss in selling of technology oversea.
I suppose that any kind of technology which includes copy prevention systems will cost MORE - and therefore sell LESS in places where such technology is not requested.
Go on from there.. and have fun.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
It is *mathematically impossible* to have any sort of "secure" media format. Attempting to legislate it into existance is tantamount to legislating gravity away. IT CANNOT BE DONE. What you NEED to do is make certian that she understands this simple fact of nature. There is no possible legislation that will work. None at all. The reason why people advocate the changing of business models by those that sell content is simply becuase that is the only possible alternative.
Imagine, if you will, the analogy of power companies wanting to base thier industry on oil, which for the moment is a in abundant supply. Imagine if over the years, they completely run out of oil, and I mean COMPLETELY run out. Now, in order to keep thier business going, they come up with the idea of using an over-unity (free-energy, perpetual motion, etc.) machine to supply them power. Since such a machine does not exist, and CAN NOT exist, which option seems more logical to you (and to your congresswoman): A) Legislate that a perpetual motion machine must be created by the year 2006, or B) Tell the power companies they they will simply have to think up a new business model and explore alternate means of power.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Therefore, allow me to present three proposals that will not prevent copying, but will make it difficult:
Hope the above list of suggestions helps.
[Insert pithy quote here]
One problem. When half-life came out it was one of the first games to have the cd-key stored server side, so that you couldn't play online if someone else had your key (ie, no wide-spread keys for all the pirates to use).
Well, some enterprising people would go to the store (or they worked there), open the box, get the legit key, then return the game. Now they had a working cd-key. Then someone comes and buys that same box. They try to play, and their key comes up as pirated. They didn't do anything wrong but still got screwed.
Server side checking only works when you're forced to connect to their servers to verify the key, so in your example of serialized movies, you would have to dial in to the MPAA's servers before you could watch anything, and if they decided to revoke you key then you're outta luck.
So, good ideas, and I totally agree that legistlation won't do anything but fill up more of our prisons with non-violent offenders.
Travis
This has a big pile of problems.
First, those serial numbers can always be removed. It's not always easy, but only one person has to do it for an unnumbered copy to "escape" onto the web.
Second, if the serial number is used to trigger million-dollar court cases, then someone who steals a DVD from your briefcase is causing you a million-dollar problem (he can distribute it and get you sued) instead of a $20 problem (replacing the DVD).
Third, mass-market digital media formats (DVDs, CDs, etc) are stamped from a master, which leaves them not well suited to serialization. Software serialization only works because you type in the number yourself.
And last, tying serial numbers to identification is heavy-handed. It pretty much eliminates the possibility of cash purchases, movie rental, or resale. The market simply won't bear it.
Frankly, I doubt that even in the software world, where serialization roughly works, that it would be sufficient evidence to convict someone of piracy in a court of law.
It's unclear to me how anyone could confuse serial numbers with a placenta. I think the word you're looking for is "panacea".
...is sufficient already, it's just its enforcement is lacking, being replaced by racketeering-style "audits" by shady organizations dressing up as a law enforcement. If some bootleggers indeed are causing problem, go after them. If some noncommercial redistribution indeed is a worthy target, sue _someone_ who does it, and try to scare others by doing so, however won't be surprised if "billions of lost revenue" will happen to be total 1000 DVDs per year for the whole country that someone might buy because he can't find a shitty DIVX copy, with the total amount of revenue insufficient to justify a single clerk writing cease and desist orders.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
As others have noted, laws to shut down file sharing can't work without destroying the usefulness of computers. This is an enormous cost to society.
If the concern is that copyright holders aren't making money when their goods are pirated, and that becomes a real economic issue, then it needs to be solved in those terms. Piracy can't be stopped. But copyright owners can still be paid.
The solution is that the government would have to take over paying the copyright owners. It would be a giant, ongoing, permanent bailout of the music industry and other affected businesses. This would be costly, but the costs would be visible. Everyone would see how much the government was paying, every year. This is unlike regulations and anti-piracy measures, which have huge costs but they are hidden because each person is silently harmed. It is best for costs to be visible so society can judge whether the rewards are worth it.
There would have to be some way of monitoring how much each song is pirated. This would depend on the nature of song distribution in the future. Maybe some kind of monitoring programs could sit on the gnutella network and count requests. Or maybe people could vote for their favorite artists and the funds could be dispersed that way. Whatever method was found would have to be immunized against technological trickery, e.g. download daemons to drive up the "score" of a particular artist.
In the long run we may need something like this if piracy starts really cutting into the revenues of the content companies. It is a way for people to get paid even when their work is available for free. Perhaps it is not too early for the government to begin studying this kind of technology. They could set up some committees and study groups. That would be a step towards a long term solution.
Another point -- require them to keep copies of any hardware needed to play the media, and require them to provide hardware to law enforcement, government archives, or the copyright office at any time. This would last for the lifetime of the copyright. As a hedge against them going out of business, the hardware (and all specifications needed to rebuild it if necessary) should be escrowed somehow.
This is a serious problem already -- according to a friend at the US National Archives, they're already having problems getting players for seven inch open-reel audio tapes.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
What I meant is that if you maliciously fail to give credit then the government could define that as a crime or make you civily liable. For example, if a member of academia plagarizes someone else's work and makes money off of that the government could give the original creator a choice: sue the person or send him to prison.
They are not entitled to any further legal protection as this time. With the infinite copyright protection laws (we all know that if we made it to the point that a copyright would expire Disney, etc would get copyrights extended again) they have the legal power to control copying of their material for plenty of time.
I might be a little more accepting of DRM ideas for recent performances if copyrights were limited to 20 years.
That way I could get unencumbered digital copies of works such as Star Wars: A New Hope, Saturday Night Fever, Emergency (the TV show), CHiPs, I Love Lucy, etc.
There is the another side to the issue though. Electronic media works by copying the data from one place to the other. It is not feasible to allow only the copying you approve of and deny all the rest of the copying.
Additionally legislative copy protection puts barriers in the way of amateur and/or poor (in money, not quality) content producers because software cannot distinguish between an independent film and an unauthorized copy of a copyright protected work.
I have enchanged some messages with my congressman about it and contemplated the ideas myself and I keep coming back to the idea that any laws requiring digital rights management and the like can only do harm and impede progress and creativity.
As both an amateur film-maker and a professional programmer, if a digital rights bill passes I will only be harmed and in no way will I benefit from it.
The MPAA/RIAA people need to look at their priorities. Microsoft is a nice example of what can happen when your "intellectual property" is copied and transferred willy-nilly all over the internet. Microsoft has still managed to turn a profit in spite of being a huge victim of software piracy. (One list I saw placed Microsoft at #1 and Disney at #37.)
They already managed to make digital audio tape (DAT) virtually useless. Now they want to make our computers and televisions useless as well. I'm sorry but they're not entitled to it.
Coding Blog
What you are describing is technology helping the police enforce traffic laws, but it does not in itself enforce traffic laws. You still have control of your car, you can still break the speed limit when you want. The CBDTPA wants to making it *impossible* to break the copyright, not merely report to the authorities. The equivalent traffic enforcer would be a black box controlling the car directly, with radios by the roadside directing what those local laws are. That is what cannot be done, and what the CBDTPA attempts to do.
:-) shut to prevent tampering. You would have to go to a licensed garage just to check the oil and change the air filter.
Furthermore, your example has the black box in a rental car, which very few people are interested in maintaining by themselves. How likely is it that this kind of control will be added to private cars? You would have to lock the hood (bonnet
And even if such a situation actually existed, how long would it be before someone stole a roadside transmitter from a fast highway and kept it in near his antenna, so he could always go highway speeds? You know there would also be transmitters available, just as radar detectors are still available even in states where they are illegal.
The CBDTPA is unenforceable.
Infuriate left and right
SSSSHHHHHH! We don't want speed limiters, 6-foot fences lining roads, or ammonia sensors every five feet! Don't bring these issues to their attention!
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
What if my workstation doesnt have an internet connection. So now i am required to have the internet to use photoshop 7, (as an example)
Could be an interesting virus also here. "Please insert the cdrom for xyz"
the virus/tojan craps that one file that has the serial info on it and uploads it somewhere
The truth about online piracy is that if your sending your MP3s to everyone and their brother it's easy to find out about... ...this happened with Napster. MP3s were not that popular until Napster got going. Before then for those of us who really wanted to find free music we found MP3 search sites and so forth. It is easy to track and it's ease is in direct relation to how much piracy is going on.
I'd concentrate on the findings of congress, which are important to the law being upheld and why they are just plain wrong.
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
The only legislation that will help at this point would be legislation that defines IP piracy narrowly enough that there are a manageable number of pirates.
According to the conglomorates, piracy is doing anything with an IP that they havn't explicitly conceived of and allowed. This definition is so broad and so overbearing that its useless.
Consider a speeding ticket. They came up with a new class of law for a speeding ticket. Its an "infraction," not a crime or a civil offense. The standard of proof is whether the defendant showed some reasonable evidence that it didn't happen. And the penalties are tiny: fines less than a couple hundred dollars leading up to the eventual loss of your drivers' license.
Why did they need to come up with a trivialized form of law for speeding? Because virtually everybody speeds at least some of the time.
The lesson: you can't criminalize something that everybody does at least some of the time. You can either have an "IP court" next door to the traffic court (an abomination if I do say so myself) or you can take a smarter approach:
Define some core consumer rights:
1) The right to _own_ a purchased copy of an IP, even if the license purports to make it a rental.
The constitution talks about offerning authors an inventors the opportunity to profit from their works... Not the opportunity to control them. And with good reason - control is the opposite of freedom.
Ownership might complicate things a little at Blockbuster: A return would have to be architected as a repurchase of the IP instead of merely returning a rental. But so what? College book stores do it all the time: you buy the book with some confidence of being able to sell it back at the end of the semester.
2) The right convert an IP from one physical media to another (copy a CD to a cassette tape for the car), or to undertake or enable reasonable steps which accomplish the same result (download an mp3 of the exact song you own on CD, rather than having to rip and convert it yourself).
Is it reasonable that someone who wants to listen to a song at work, in his car, and at home should have to buy it three times? Or that someone who bought the IP 10 years ago should have to buy it again just because LP records have gone out of style? Of course not! Make that sort of activity not just reasonable, but in fact the law.
3) The right to modify any copies of an IP that you own in any way desired, and the right to create and distribute tools which perform such modifications.
Perhaps even go so far as to state that the owner of an IP forfeits the right to punative damages if he publishes the IP using a manner in which he intends to deprive the purchaser of these rights. No punative damages allowed if the DVD was published with CSS!
I'm allowed to write notes in the margin of a book, rip out pages, doodle on it, etc. I can sell the book to someone else later. I can even rip it in half and sell one half to one person and one half to someone else! Why should my rights with other types of IP be any less? They shouldn't!
4) Apply the legal standard of intent - that someone pirating an IP or enabling the piracy of an IP either intended to acquire an IP to which they did not own any rights or that they had demonstrated negligence in taking no reasonable steps to avoid enabling such piracy. (after all, a file on an open server is a little like a swimming pool: an attractive nuisance. No fence = no defense in court.)
With those rights firmly established, how many pirates will be left? Only the modern Robin Hoods who who set up download servers with no attempt to validate a recipient's ownership of the IP. You can deal with them either in the form of criminal theft or as civil cases. Either way, there are few enough that they can be dealt with effectively.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Hollywood wants to create another revenue stream. This copyright stuff is just a convenient vessel to do so.
.com's are not wasting millions on TV ads like they did in the 1990's.
If you account for inflation, the music, movie and tv industries are making less money (profits) than they were before.
Think of it, what were the gross ticket sales for E.T. and Star Wars versus Titanic and the other newer "blockbuster" movies? The list is here. The newer movies just are not making the same money that the old ones did. Very much a "good ol' days" analogy.
It is the same for the music industry. The marketing required to get the big album sales is tremendous. MTV, VH1, and the 3 or 4 companies that own most of the radio stations (Viacom etc.) in the US only play what pays.
TV has lost potential revenues from advertisers over the years due to restrictions on what types of companies are allowed to advertise on TV. There are no more hard liquor or cigarette ads, both industries that having massive cash reserves. That is why the TV industry pushed so hard to be able to get back prescription medication ads. And that is why you see so many Viagra, Prilosec and others ads on the TV now. They can afford it, and the
Despite all of this, I think it is ludicrous that Hollywood (the entertainment industry as a whole really) is pushing so hard for the DMCA or whatever.
Business' must adapt, or face the consequences. Look at IBM, Apple, and Microsoft. Who adapted the best to the situation around them? Microsoft did. Who should have the monopoly? IBM. Who should have a much more significant share of the market? Apple.
Different companies, different business models, different results.
The defense have to have the opportunity to challenge the evidence, to argue that the serial number isn't unique after all, to show how it could have been changed at some point etc. The defense have to know how the system works if there's going to be any pretence of a fair trial.
While I agree that it's not fair, such things already happen. Remember the trial of that Mob guy about 6 months or a year ago? They put a keylogger on his computer (there was a Slashdot story on this). They would not, however, reveal to the defense how the keylogger worked, so the defense couldn't determine the validity of the evidence gathered that way. The judge let them get away with refusing this information to the defense too. I wonder how often this kind of stuff happens now.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The IP mafia already has more than it should have with the DMCA. If you actually think the slashdot crowd (including me) would tolerate (not to mention support) legislation supposed to keep peoples activities on the internet under constant surveillance you should stop smoking whatever you smoke real soon.
Ther invention of railroads changed the world dramatically. suddenly it was possible to travel fast and far without paying unreasonable amounts to get a passage via horsecart and risk being robbed on the way. The owner of horsecarts weren't too happy about that, but noone would've thought of demanding that trains travel no faster than a horse. The same goes for telegraphs obsoleting messengers, phones obsoleting telegraphs, automobiles making railroads second choice, TVs taking a bite out of the revenuestream of cinemas (noone demaded a TV-fee for not going to the cinema), fridges putting the iceman out of business, ...
So what is fundamentally different here? Computers and the internet change our world, but so did other things before. Looking back we can see now how futile it would have been to stand in the way of those past developments, and how anyone who did stand in the way didn't win anything by that. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and even the RIAA and the MPAA know that. If they want to survive they will have to adapt, and all the bickering about pirating serves just to buy them time. Why didn't they offer music over the net under acceptable conditions? And sorry, paying as much as for a CD for worse quality, major usage restriction and an expiration date on the content doesn't sound like a good deal.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Now, the problem is that the "exclusive rights" copyright uses -- such as the right to control reproduction -- are very problematic on the internet for two reasons:
That wouldn't be such a problem, except the massive costs of this extremely poor security model will be passed on to the public.
Now, as for alternatives, they come in two flavours -- there are the bottom-up, decentralised ones, such as the Street Performer Protocol (a variant of which Stephen King used very succesfully, even if it wasn't always reported correctly). Other bottom-up models include Ian Clarke's "fairshare", gift economies, or tipping systems. None of these alternatives require government support, and have been slow to take off (many people blame the lack of safe, easy micropayment facilities), but no doubt there's a lot government could do to encourage them.
There are also government-supported alternatives, in which funds are raised through voluntary tax credits, or taxation (which could be levies on hardware or internet usage, or general revenue) and allocated to artists in a decentralised fashion, by the public. An example of this kind of model is described in Steven Shavell and Tanguy van Ypersele, Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights, Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
I'm just finishing a paper on applying publicly funded reward models to copyright on the net -- it's not quite ready for public release yet, but email me if you'd like a copy.
Also, you can find more interesting sources at this wiki, and I'm just in the process of setting up these mailing lists for discussion of these models.
Fixing copyright
When did you stop beating your wife ? Now either answer precisely, or don'ts qay anything, thus admitting "never"!
None. What part of this don't you understand ?
Or better "Congress hereby abolished copyright and terminates the United States of America's mebership in the Berne Convention.".
Coke snorting music execs are today's equivalent of heaters on electric locomotives.
Because the issue won't go away until it is. This has nothing to do with logic, it's just reality.
If you like, think of it as hacking the political process. What we really need to do is to hold off bad legislation until digital fair use rights are so taken for granted, that the public won't stand for the big corporations trampling on them.
At the moment, the copyright industry is telling governments that legislation is needed. Telling them that legislation is not needed will not hold off the copyright industry for long enough, because it will just be your (i.e. small person) word against theirs (i.e. big business). Suggesting good legislation, and getting it passed, may do the trick.
So what would good legislation look like? If you don't think legislation is needed, it follows that good legislation should be redundant. Making explicitly illegal things which are already illegal. Making explicitly legal things which are already legal. Introducing new or different penalties for already illegal things.
Does that answer your question?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Just let the market sort it out. I'm sure multibillion dollar corporations can figure out some sort of copy protection. I'm even sure that several of them can band together and agree on a DRM system if need be.
The fact that this has not happened yet speaks volumes as to their expectations of how the market would react to such restrictions. They don't appear intelligent enough to realize that what would be unpopular in the market and get no sales will be unpopular in law and get repealed or overturned.
three separate elements, and then announce that it has four.... I've filed off three serial numbers... were they bluffing about the fourth one?
You're obviously not a programmer.
Any file is nothing but a sequence of zeros and ones, and you can examine them precisely. If you "file the serial numbers" off of Alice's, Bob's, Chuck's, and Dave's legal versions and get the exact same sequence of zeros and ones in every case, then there is no hidden information left. FUD all you like, you can't hid anything in identical data.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
What is happening is this: the site is going from a five-cent download royalty to the artist for full downloads by registered users (NOT charged to the user) to a double-option scenario:
There was immediate talk of trying to offer a sliding scale, to allow downloads for less than a dollar- the trouble is, you can't really go less than the credit card processing. At fifty cents a download, Ampcast and the artist split seventeen cents and the credit card company of course still takes its full share...
I haven't been on Ampcast long enough to get serious money out of the nickel-a-download thing, and I'd been trying to persuade the site to simply drop it, because I didn't think there was a future in it. Right now, the main idealistic rah-for-the-artists guy at Ampcast, Jim Waskovich, is trying to sell artists on the dollar-download option on the grounds that artists are worth something. I admire his gumption- but we aren't talking about artists. We're talking about downloads- and I don't think digital files are intrinsically worth anything.
I'd love to sit in on some of your discussions as it's a subject that fascinates me, but the solution may have to involve accepting the ground rules of a new situation. Information is no longer a physical good, in practice. You used to have to truck goods around in order to get records, CDs etc in people's hands. That's no longer true- and it's only going to get worse as communications technology improves. In 2020, your spam will contain small feature films by way of 'multimedia'... and you'll gripe because it takes several seconds to download. How many complete books can you download per minute now? How many two-hour feature films at DVD resolution will you be able to download per minute in 2020?
It may never again be possible to strictly couple the distribution of information with compensation for artists.
The area to watch is the post-apocalyptic area. Assume that because of digital copying, both the RIAA and the MPAA go belly-up. They collapse- already they can't budget for serious artworks and have to hit lowest common denominator, let's assume even that doesn't help.
In this post-mainstream era, everything is out there as data. The entire history of the entertainment industry, tons of 'fan-films' and filks, and various independent contributions. Nothing new is being produced in a mainstream sense.
Now what?
What entreprenurial opportunities are there? If large-scale high-budget works cannot survive, does this produce a demand for them in their absence? It's rather like asking what the demand would be for saxophones in the Middle Ages: impossible to predict Coltrane or Ian Underwood from the idea of a brass thing with a reed on it. In a sense, we don't know what's ahead at all.
One thing I can predict with great authority, though- by 2010, the biggest mainstream pop star will be virtual. This solves the 'artist compensating' problem by inventing a kind of artist that is a fiction and can't be compensated except with other fiction ('Cribs' visits the artist's CGI mansion. Posh!).
By 2020, home computer users will have the capacity to do the same degree of synthesis and animation on their desktops, though...
When the 19th amendment was created the nation was plunged into several of the darkest years of it's history. Men like Al Capone and others of his ilk ran the US. People flocked to speak easy's in droves and NY actually had more "bars" than ever before. We are seeing the same reaction here. If you want legislation then here is what is needed.
1. Reasonable copyright laws.
2. Makeing Illegal EULA's that go against copyright and other civil laws.
3. Putting an end to the price fixing of Audio and Video CD's so that the market can set the price.
4. Making Illegal the sale of CD's designed to break individuals computers.
Now for the bad news you can't create a DVD or a CD that I can't record..... And I won't write a single line of code or reverse engineer anything. In order to prevent the pirating of these mediums the only method is to prohibit the sale of them. Sorry but Thats just the way it goes. If I'm supposed to listen to or view something... I can copy it. Good old fashioned analog methods are 100% effective. These arguments are as old as the hills. They said the same things about cassettes and the VCR (VTR for non American readers) What happened there? The industry embraced rather than fought the technology and in the end found a whole new line of business THAT ACTUALLY INCREASED THEIR REVINUES. Sorry for the shout but the point is important. What would have happened to the industry if the record companies had said to napster "Hey this tech is pretty good, can we buy you and the tech out?" Then re-introduced napster selling studio grade MP3's for say 50 cents US a song using the same network. What would have happened is that they would have sent song sales through the roof! People have shown time and again that they will:
1. Pay a resonable and fair price. For quality goods.
2. If given a choice between pirated and legit versions they usually chose legit.
3. Obey reasonable laws.
They have also shown that when push comes to shove, they will:
1. Steal from people they consider to be thieves.
2. Work to destroy people and organizations that call them thieves or liars without pravocation.
3. Vote with their wallets.
To the recording industry the vote is in. Your sales are down because your product sucks and the people don't want it. No business or industry has ever had the right to remain in business. What would have happened if the Pony express had sought to outlaw trains because it infringed upon there business model? Yes the analogy is accurate. A new model of recording and distribution of first music and maybe later movies is fast aproaching. These business need to stop trying to use Washington to legislate their lack of business ability and get back to doing what a business must do. Either change or fail. Ask anyone who worked at Wang Computers or Commodore. Bad business practices lead to bad business. Lee Iacoca set two business precidents.
1. The government can bail out a business.
2. The business must pay back it's creditors.
Too many of these businesses remember the first and forget the second. Disney et al think they have the right to be in business. Fact is they don't. They only have the right to try. Success comes from work not from the purchase of Senators. Oh and remind your congressman about Nov 2nd. That day will show a lot.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
In the 1960's the Bill of Rights was taken to Washington DC and as Senators and Congressmen entered they were asked if they would sign such legislation. Most didn't even recognize what it was, some claimed it was a communist plot, and only one, Senator Goldwater, recognized what it was..... *sigh*
It's probably time for a new revolution.... this time on Nov 2nd.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Yes, and the worst part of it is that these are the same people who control the news--what we know. They control what we know, and therefore control what we think.
Besides a handful of people on Slashdot, not many average Americans realize this. Average America is stupid, and wants to be led around by corporations, because that is easier than caring.
They are holding us (the people of the future, the embracers of new technology) BACK.
I'm still thinking about what we can do about this, but the fact is that it's US versus the corporations and because of their control over information, average America also.
Fuck congress, we can write them all we want, it's not going to change anything. We need to start a new country, with only people who are forward looking. We can trade with America, sell them new cool stuff.
We won't fight any wars.
And we'll put men on Mars 20 years before the U.S.
I'm tired of this shit. I'm bored. AMERICA is BORING. Television is BORING. Movies are BORING. I haven't been truely excited about anything in a long time. And I know a lot of others who feel exactly the same way as I do.
Yes, the internet has made us impatient. Because we know what IS possible, the way the world could be. A beautiful place. Yet all we get is held back by Average America, and corporations who are run by old men as a sort of game amongst themselves.
We could all be in space right now. We have the technology. I would love to see the Earth from space. That would be truely exciting and interesting. Where is the public space travel? WHY THE FUCK ARE WE STILL LIVING IN THE 50's?!
Because the same people who were in power then are in power now. Fuck this country. I want a new one that's based on technology. That new country is the Internet. So, while they can make their laws and whatever in the REAL world, I will always be free here.
If they ever try to take that away from me forcably, there's going to be a fight.
Still have much to think about, but I'm getting there. More later.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Yeah, maybe turn the "information economy" into a real FREE MARKET (like it's supposed to be)! Great idea!
Print up some posters. It's gurrilla marketing time.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Instead of the serial number being in plaintext, and checked for validity, it should be a watermark entirely invisible for the end-user. Neither the hardware nor user would know the watermark was there.
If the "watermark" is invisible then it might easily completly disappear from a copy, especially one converted to a different format... Anyway simple comparison of multiple copies of the same work will indicate where the serial number is. With something like a CD you could probably use completly optical methods to do this.
To remove it properly they'd need two legit copies. Who could be stuffed doing that? And the fear factor of being identified as having removed the known serial number would stop a lot of people.
This is only to be an issue for casual copying. A commercial pirate organisation isn't going to stopped by needing to get a few legit copies...
This is only to be an issue for casual copying. A commercial pirate organisation isn't going to stopped by needing to get a few legit copies...
Commercial pirate orginazations aren't going to be stopped by any of the proposals presented, even the most draconian ones. The thing the Media Cartels claim to be worried about is casual sharing via the internet, which serialization in the same manner that software has been doing for over a decade does reduce very dramatically.
For commercial piracy a whole slew of laws already exist, and no amount of crippling of consumer hardware or software is going to do anything to improve that problem. Indeed, the copy of Lord of the Rings that has been circulating was clearly an inside job, probably copied from an Academy screening tape, sold to a commercial copyright violator in Asia somehwere, pressed onto DVD, and later converted by one of the purchasers into DivX for distribution on the net. At no point in that entire stream was any copy protection in place, so things like the SSSCA (or whatever we're calling it today) would have done absolutely nothing to prevent it. This is a social problem, primarily within the ranks of the film industry itself, and is addressable by enforcing existing laws and regulations.
Even the most draconian society in the world, one which would make the former Eastern Block seem like a liberal democracy in comparison, will not be able to stop this entirely. What is truly appalling is that the Media Cartels are willing to give it a try anyone, our consitution, our freedoms, our very society be damned in the process if need be. And even if they get what they want, the problem will still exist, regardless of how many lives the cartels destroy with their newfound legislative weapons.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy