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RIAA to Sue You Now
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC reports that apparently the music industry feels so satisfied with going after file swapping software makers that they want to sue the pants off the file swappers themselves. Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention." This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly
illegal.
the article says that they are going after "for profit" orginazations. What if the so-called orginazation doesn't ask for money, just a donation... wouldn't that put a crimp in their court case. After all, a big business charging for music they don't have a right to sell is just asking to be caught and have a big fine slapped on them...
Instead, the industry has focused on lawsuits against for-profit piracy outfits
I expect this from MSNBC, but this is a WSJ article.
Nope, no sig
Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention."
That's good news for all of us humans out here, but what about our aquatic File-swapping friends? Unite with our fishy friends and protect their rights to music!
One of the things people have been claiming to be a disadvantage to gnutella is now showing itself as an advantage. People cannot browse your file lists in gnutella and thus cannot see how many illegal files you are swapping. They only learn of what files you have when they do a specific search for them.
"Filing suits against individual users is complicated. Entertainment companies frequently hire services that specialize in tracking copyrighted material online. But to get the name of an individual user, they have to send a subpoena to that person's Internet-service provider. Even for the ISP, linking the Internet address to a name can be complex. Moreover, it's hard to verify which person was logged on to an Internet connection at a given time."
So in other words to find most individual users they will have to invest time+money, yeah this'll fly for an association thats primary concern is profit!!
crazy dynamite monkey
maybe they'll sue themselves out of business, lawyers ain't cheap and even if they bust half of the teens they prosecute they won't recoup their losses
going after users doesn't work, ask the DEA
stupid wars on freedom waste time and money, why not go the way of BMG and at least attempt to make a profit from it insted of trying to slow your demise.. death to teh riaa
This isn't about an industry that is feeling smug and self-assured...This is a LAST DITCH EFFORT to assert their right to exist. And in the long run, I don't think its going to work.
RIP RIAA -- 2006
their profits will be -$2,000,000,000 and they will claim it's "Due to piracy".
:-)
The funny thing is, they'll be more correct than any of the other times they have made that statement.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
"The United States versus KazaaLite User "SpankyPants27", AKA 64.123.25.14"
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
In the case of the RIAA vs the inhabitants of the planet earth.....
judge --> will the defendants please rise
(defendants) --> Everyone rises
judge --> HOLY SHIT RIAA ARE YOU INSANE?
Wow did someone hit RIAA with a Clue Stick? this is one of the first smart things they have done. This of course is assuming the following
If they find someone who is sharing music that could only be there if it was pirated.
That means you should only be under suspicion if you are sharing music that is not yet released (Eminem was a recent one that I heard of being out there well in advance). That's it. Otherwise who knows maybe some insane freak does buy every song on the top 100 list. There is no probable cause, no reason to sue.
Just my $16.99 (My thoughts might have become easier to produce but marketing and branding still cost money)
Say I own the "rights" to 500 songs. I bought the CD, tape, payed for an individual mp3 download, whatever.
/tunes shared out.
How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does? If user X downloads them, and keeps them permanently, or sells them, or otherwise violates HIS local copyright statutes, I don't see how that's my fault for simplying for having
The only problem that I can see is that a lot of independent musicians, artists, and whomever else use some of these file sharing programs purposely to get their music out and about in the market. They can't afford the gigantic charges of advertising and can't contend with the other paying bands who get their stuff on the air.
Theres a TON more out on these networks than just illegal files, but I do agree with you that the majority is such (and it's unfortunate).
Years from now, law students are going to have to remember the names of groundbreaking cases that formed the latest incarnation of IP law...
RIAA v. l33t d0Wn104d3r
RIAA v. i oWnz j00
RIAA v. cr4pfl00d3r
Can't wait to see how those textbooks handle it...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity. I think this is part of the reason P2P networking has not been used to come up with more innovative technologies. Also, independent artists -- who could benefit immensely from distributing their music through P2P instead of through recording companies -- have been reluctant to embrace P2P as a truly new way of doing business.
So this might be good. Granted, the RIAA won't _stop_ prosecuting P2P networks, but at least they'll be shifting some of the blame to the people who actually use these networks for illegal activity.
But it won't help them. People like free music, and they'll fight tooth and nail when you try to take it away from them. Imagine the public backlash they'll have when they trace some huge fileswapper, have the Feds bust down their doors, only to find that their suspect is a 15-year-old whose father works at a university and whose mother is a nurse. They'll have to arrest someone, and no matter who they do, they'll be setting themselves up for negative publicity. Online file-sharers will be galvanized to the "cause" of free music, and the RIAA's troubles will continue to pile up.
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
will they be scanning for files? I'll be sure to DENY their packets before they touch me.
--
grep "xercist"
Use of object has absolutely nothing to do with the legality of that object. If it did, scissors would be illegal because you could kill someone with 'em. Rather stupid, I know, but I'd rather not see P2P die out because it's being used for piracy NOW and the system itself is found illegal rather then down the road when networks like these might actually be productive.
Can they leagally go after the people with legitamate MP3s who happen to make them available on the internet or those who illegally download them?
To better explain: if I leave my doors unlocked and someone steals my CDs I may be a moron for not locking my doors, but I certainly didn't commit a crime (the thief did).
Also, if User A has a Old97s CD and legit MP3 copies of the disc on his machine and I also own the same Old97s CD and download his copies (instead of burning my own) did either of us break a law?
I am sorta hazy over both issues.
Your giving people credit for that 1% thing... well, okay, maybe porn.. but most of that sucks, as most are duplicates.. err, i've heard, at least.
on another topic.. The first two posts in this article have sigs that mention pee. im scared.
I know that this would be a quick way to get a short list.
I can also imagine them then trying to get the FBI to help them out tracking down which of these are actually music file trafficers, vs merely trafficing in other warez, although there might not be that much difference.
After all, this fits into the war on terrorism. These folks are terrorizing American Industry (tm).
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It looks like the RIAA has decided to attack innocent file swappers! If someone doesn't stop them, the lawyers will take over!
What should we do, Batman?
>If anyone can show me any hard evidence that suggests more than 1% of users of P2P software(s) use it for anything other than getting music/movies/software for free
:-)
And that's illegal now?
I'd better nuke all my Linux CDRs right away!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Yah, I'm sure the expense of filing suits against thousands of college kids is really going to help their bottom line.
Actually, since they'll never succeed in stopping P2P networks, i'd much rather have them trying to do that. If they actually stop the people distributing them, I won't be able to continue to steal their music.
I am SURE that there is a law regarding noise pollution... and I am positive most of you have heard the latest Booby Spears and N Stink songs at least in passing...
:)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
or you could move your server to Sealand
I want 2D games back.
It's funny because the suing will only happen in the US. Here is Canada the artists supposedly get money from CDR's and other recordable media meaning they still get rich from doing very little.
RIAA really can't pull that off because what do they do with Minors, sue the parents? What about other people who have their machines hacked? You could play stupid. It's worked with so many companes in the past (@home). Uh, I'm running a server thats doing something illegal, how do I fix it.
Isn't there something in our copyright laws up here that allow us to make personal copies of CDs, irrespective of whether we own the original or not? Besides, with the hefty increases in the blank media levies that the Copyright Board want to introduce, I feel that I have the right to do this. So, how are the RIAA going to stop Americans grabbing files from places outside their jurisdiction?
The owner of my ISP (small company in Ottawa) posted something to the Usenet last year or so. He'd received an email from some lawyers in the US about somebody sharing files on his service. I think the complaint was about a file sharing programme running, not the actual files. All he did was laugh.
I support going after the people breaking the laws rather than the P2P networks, definitely, however something just doesn't seem right to me about the way this is going. Sure, it can be just the big fishes now, but if they eventually start going after everyone with 10-20 gigs shared, well, that's a lot of people, and I'm one of them. It's not because I'm stealing music, I swear I'm not, it's just that I use mp3 to test out music I'm considering purchasing, or to discover bands I never would have dreamed of listening to otherwise. Seriously, with a 5 minute investment I can hear almost any band in the world by simply picking one I've never heard out of someone else's directory. I can't even begin to imagine how much music and music related merchandise (Tickets and such) that I've purchased over the years because of things I heard on mp3. Literally, probably at least 60-75% of my collection of nearly 400 CDs. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money that I didn't mind spending. Though, it's also a lot of money I'm not going to be spending anymore. I'm personally boycotting first run music stores if the album I want is on a label that is involved in supporting the RIAA. I just can't reconcile my love for music with my hatred of them blaming the fans, the customers, legitimate customers such as myself, for their slagging profits. Cut the prices, guys. Just slash them heavily. THEN think about going after people who still share 500 gigs, but damnit, please don't blame the customers for your losses due to greedy price fixing, and backwards attitudes towards fair use.
The trick is to get people to read the article. Making it sound like they're coming after -you- is a pretty decent way to do it, right? Slashdot uses the same technique..
Go ahead try it.
S
Scare tactics could be very effective. Just one random, not-for-profit, casual MP3 pirate being sued is enough incentive for me to stop using P2P programs.
They can pick random users from Gnutella, and do a little detective work to find out who they are based on your IP-address.
For those of you who aren't going to read the article, the RIAA is not going to try to sue everyone. They have 2 goals in mind, I suspect:
1) Find someone who is sharing 100,000 files with a T-3 connection and use this person to demonize everyone who shares music over p2p. The RIAA is suffering from a bit of an image problem, and I think they want to try to make it good guys vs. bad guys, so they have to find a bad enough guy.
2) Scare anyone who considers sharing files into wondering if they are above the magic threshold that will bring a suit.
I suppose the theory is that if you stop the people who are sharing the music, then there will be nothing for anyone to download. Kinda like the drug war -- bust all the dealers, then the users will have nowhere to go.
I don't think this will work, as my guess is that most people who download music also share it. It isn't centralized enough that you can take out a few super-sharers and suddenly everything dries up.
Ah! I'm in a far away country wich they have never heard of! No way they'll get me!
You can't take the sky from me...
go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
While it could be argued that RIAA is just taking an expedient course of action, this is the one thing that they should have done.
Go after the burglars - don't penalize the manufacturers of crowbars.
I'd just as soon live in a free society where I have my choice of combining Napster with crowbars as long as I don't infringe on someone else's rights.
However, I will admit that trading an MP3 from a CD of mine that I've ripped to someone I don't know for a song which I don't have constitutes a commercial transaction (albeit cashless) and, while copyright exists, the possessors of the it should have the exclusive right to charge for distribution. Exactly and only that.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
A college student sued? What is the RIAA going to win? Their college loans?
I wish they'd sue me, so they can pay off my loans.
We've now reached the endgame... When the whole music industry comits mass suicide like Metallica did when filing suit against 300,000 of it's own fans.
I've been waiting for this to happen, as this will push things to a final resolution.
BTW, Why can I buy a movie that has been out for 3-4 months for $15-16 on DVD, with extra features, etc, but a 20 year old album costs more than that? I can buy DVD's of older movies for around $10.
Yet, DVD sales boom. The best anti-piracy protection is reasonable prices. So long as the RIAA engages in illegal, anti-competitive practices (the FTC found them guilty of CD price fixing again), I say they deserve whatever happens to them.
It's a Mexican standoff... Pirates will pirate from P2P networks, the RIAA won't obey the law.
If it can be heard, it can be ripped. If it can be ripped, it can be traded. No amount of lawyering can change this, and indeed, the music industry will only become an even greater villian to the average Joe by the attempt.
Sell CD's for $10. Watch the sales rise. Quit wasting $millions bribing stations to play songs they will play anyway. Watch profits rise...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
focus on individuals who supply the biggest amounts of music...
The suits could set the company against many users of its own America Online Internet service.
I don't think AOL users have the bandwidth to download MP3s let alone be the major uploaders!
I stole this Sig
They intend to go after high-volume sites with lots of files. Combine this with their plan to flood P2P networks with bogus files, and they'll probably wind up suing themselves! Only the lawyers will profit. Oh wait, that's how the game is played already...
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Here is a formula for determining damages.
Actual Damages
Actual Damages and Profits.-The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer's profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer's gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work.
Statutory damages
In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.
Oh yeah, they get to impound your computer, too.Copyright law on damages
Of course, they have to front the money for the lawyer to investigate and pursue you, so you better be worth some $$ to them. I somehow think that the RIAA will pursue statutory damages, as file sharers are not making any cash from the endeavor. It could end up costing the RIAA a lot more to pursue than they will recover from settlements. I guess they are betting their revenues will rise when they knock out the supernodes.
Somehow I think slashing their prices would be a better idea...
But many music executives, watching revenue sag as home compact-disc copying has soared, feel that they have little choice if they are to save their business. World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
/., but I have to say it again. If they would just realize that people WANT digital music that they can download and throw onto a custom CD/MP3 player/etc, then they could give this up now! Yes, there'd still be copying of CDs, and all that, but it would drop. If they have lost revenue because of filesharing, not their own lack of quality, then setting up a system where we can buy ONE song would do wonders for their revenues. They are, bluntly, idiots.
Or could it be because people are getting fed up with the latest crap from Britnay Spears and N'sync? I have bought 5 albums in as many years. They were all albums that I knew I would enjoy, start to finish (w/ maybe 1 or 2 songs as exceptions). I didn't buy the same album over, and over, and over again.
Hell, I download a few songs that I want to hear, but there's no way I'm paying for an album for one song. I know that argument has long been shouted loudly and proudly from our ranks here on
On a side note, RE: the article, I don't see how they can get someone beyond reasonable doubt. It's a simple matter to give the HD a complete wipe (7 times over, 1s and 0s) and users can just claim that they downloaded a song from Kazaa to hear it before they bought an album. The only way they could truly "get" someone is if the user had perpetually downloaded copies of the same song.
Anyway, that's my $.02
Later.
That suing your customers is NOT good marketing...
Anyone care to speculate how hard it'd be to graft some sort of encryption into Gnutella? Stuff that deliberately obfuscates IP addresses, etc, at least enough to make it hard to identify users?
BTW, wouldn't breaking such encryption be a DMCA violation?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
IANAL, but wouldn't a shared warning file protect you?
Have it say something like, "By downloading files from my computer, the recipient agrees not to press charges resulting from the contents of the file."
Hell, it's about as legal as a EULA.
This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
First you tell us to play nice with Microsoft, then you come out publically against copyright infringement. Taco, you rock (even if I don't agree with you).
Not wanting to get into a moral debate on this issue, I can say I do understand where the RIAA is coming from with this way of thinking. I recently read somewhere that it's believed that 90% of all files that flow through a p2p program come from the same 50 or so individuals. I wish I could remember the link but apparently they found some guy using kazaa that had roughly 600 gigs of divx quality bootleg movies on his computer.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
World-wide music sales dropped 5% last year, while global sales of compact-disc albums declined for the first time since CDs were launched in 1983. So far this year, U.S. music sales are down steeply from a sluggish 2001.
Name one GOOD album that was released this year (Mainstream please)! I cant think of ONE MP3 that I have downloaded that was released in the last two years...
put out a quality producat and people WILL buy it, music today is like the "K-car" or the 80s... no soul...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Amen to that.
Yes, RIAA sucks ass.
Yes, RIAA "exploits" its "artists".
Yes, the typical RIAA lawyer has the cold, dead eyes of a killer.
But if they have a problem with the actions of fileswappers, then go after the fileswappers. Do your best. But KEEP YOUR FILTHY FUCKING UNPRINCIPLED MITTS off my consumer electronics and P2P software.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
They sued Napster, it pushed people to true P2P networks like Gnutella. Now they go after the people on the networks, won't this just push people to something like Freenet? (Freenet masks users and files so it'd be more difficult to target specific people for trading specific things)
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I don't know about all of you, but all the lawsuits that the RIAA is waging is a clear indication to me that these people are loaded with too much money and not enough competition. Record labels are the only people that stand to lose profits from fileswapping; the arguements about the poor starving artists are essentially illegitimate. That being said, I think it's time to work on more shameless p2p protocols. ;)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
On the basis that the RIAA has been found guilty by the FTC of price fixing, AGAIN... It would at the very least make things a little less black and white...
And might sway a jury.
Remember, in the USA, jurors have the right of "jury nullification", to judge that the criminal is the LAW in question, not the accused...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
The RIAA and the authorities will spend exorbitant amounts of money just to find and prosecute one or two people. The hope is that after they make 'an example' out of one person, they can say, "See? We can find you and prosecute you." It's solely for deterrent value, because they're clutching at straws now. Leave the problem alone and it will only get worse. Try a solution, no matter how asinine, and it just may pay off. At least that's what I think. Someone enlighten me.
Guilty party? excuse me? havnt you ever heard of fair use? maybe these people actually own all the music. the guilty party would be those downloading from these innocent victims being sued.
It's a stupid idea, the second one big distributor gets busted, 3 more are going to pop up, it'll take an enourmous amount of resources to even make a dent in the supply of songs. In the meantime, they'll have to raise the prices of CDs, yet again, to finance this legal effort, and people will even buy less CDs and download more music.
They're just digging themselves deeper into their graves. They're approach should be through sound economics, not through evil lawyers (that's another issue all together!).
Give us an incentive to buy your CDs and we'll buy it. Stop blatently rip us off!
> How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does?
Here and there in the midst of all this discussion, I've occasionally run across an estimate from the publishing industry that each book sold is read on the average four times. One of their interests is cutting this number down and making people pay for the books they read.
Now, I have very few books that I've ever loaded out to anyone, and I doubt if any of my couple hundred books have been read by three other people. So where could all these extra readers be coming from?
Right. Libraries. The publishing industry doesn't make much of a public fuss of it, but one of the goals that they are starting to consider reachable is using the growing copyright restrictions to shut down public libraries. In the eyes of publishers, libraries are nothing but open copyright violations. All the arguments being made about "piracy" apply directly to libraries.
In the 1800's, the development of the public library system was one of the really significant advances in public education. We are seeing an attempt to end this social experiment, and to restrict education to those who can afford the publishers' price.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If all goes right, eventually the only way the RIAA can lose out is if a really large number of penniless students get the pants sued off of them, elect to defend themselves, stall in court for a really long time, and then when the judgement is passed, file for bankruptcy.
Even then, you're going to scare most of the friends of those penniless students, who don't want bankruptcy on their records for the next 7 (I think it's 7) years.
1. Notified of lawsuit against you
2. Drive to local music store
3. Buy CDs of songs downloaded
4. Show up to court
5. Laugh in face of RIAA as they accuse you of stealing what you already own
6. Yawn.
So what if everyone out there has an mp3 of random backround noise listed as a hit song? Or even better, what if we all have ten, twenty, or even 100 hit songs? If the RIAA wants to go after users, shut the RIAA down by making them find so many copies of barking dogs, farting babies, and happy birthday listed as Eminem and Moby that lawyers and staff get wasted working around the false hits and it costs too much to keep up. Someone could even create a program to create random tracks from libraries of samples.
The downside of course, is that filesharing users would get sick of downloading garbage files, but then again it also might push people to start using P2P for legit purposes...
what would YOU call Kazaa, then?
:P
A for-profit "sharing" outfit?
Somehow I don't think that the kind of "sharing" that goes on 90% of the time on p2p networks is the kind of "sharing" your mom taught you was good.
How about "for-profit copyright-violation outfit"?
The Free desktop that Just Works
I hope they try to sue me. I mean, my college will get me, because I'm technically breaking their rules by file sharing. But I really hope the RIAA sues me. It'll give me a chance to say all the crazy stuff I like to say in court. Also, if they order me to say, stop sharing, I'll do it anyway. It's really hard to win a fight against someone who brings companies to court. But as an individual I've got nothing to lose. I'll fight tooth and nail to the bitter end.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Dude...porn ALONE makes for well over half of the stuff on P2P. I don't have any idea of how much of it is "illegal", but you never hear the Porn Industry whining about how people are "getting off" scot free.
But seriously...look for any popular song by title out there with the filtering off...you're guaranteed to find porn in the search.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Whenever you purchase (legally) a CD, DVD, VHS, etc., you have a right to make one copy for backup purposes. What happens if your original gets stolen (as one of my CDs was) or gets destroyed in fire, etc.? The backup copy that you have is yours to own legally.
Now not too many people keep receipts for small purchases for long after the purchase. At that point, armed only with a copy of a music CD, DVD, etc. and your word, you'll have to battle a mega corporation which will insist that you are a thief and stole the music. Guess who will win?
How can the little person ever win? Anyone care to extrapolate on this a little.
I'm not quite sure who said it, but when the vast majority of people disobey specific laws, those laws become unenforceable due to the sheer amount of effort needed to curtail offenders.
Look at prohibition as an example. The government tried to make alcohol illegal, but due to the overwhelming amount of people who simply ignored those laws and continued to consume it anyhow, it was eventually repealed when they discovered just how much effort would have to be put into stopping offenders. Similarly, music trading will never be stopped, simply because people will move between media as necessary, even going so far as to design an anonymous program which does not allow the tracking of IPs or other identifying sources.
Oh, and don't forget the good old days of searching through websites for mp3's.
I just graduated from college with a liberal arts degree. If they want massive amounts of money from me, they're just going to have to get in line and wait their turn.
Compare this to leaving a book in a public library. Someone borrows it and makes a cover to cover copy. Who commits the crime? The library or the copier.
Lets get closer to home, what happens with a record library?
See my journal, I write things there
I also wonder, how hard would it be for someone to make a few dozen MP3 files of them plinking around on a keyboard, replicate them enough to generate a few hundred thousand songs, use a random name generator to rename the files to things right out of CDDB, and then share all those files on Kazaa.
Now, it would suck for the people downloading those files, but the RIAA is going to see a few hundred thousand supposedly copyrighted files, and haul that person into court with all the assorted media coverage. Then, it can be revealed that not one of the tracks was copyrighted at all, and they've arrested an innocent man. Not only does this do irreparable PR harm, it probably opens them up to some really nice civil lawsuits.
-------------------------------------------------
Yes and the war of drugs is ending shortly.
The jails are filling, and support is dropping but they keep fighting.
The RIAA is targetting a subset, one that people won't identify with so there is less public support. They don't care what happens to the "thief", cause it won't happen to them. As long as they only target small groups rather then the public at large they'll be okay.
...then you're going to be really surprised.
This is one branch of a multi-pronged attack that will send your "fair use" rights the way of the Dodo.
Congress will be lobbied that ISPs must be responsible for the traffic that passes across their switches. The proof that this is needed is that even though music is available in a format the public demands (MP3 on the Internet), for a price of almost half the cost of a store purchase, stealing still continues.
The fact that the world economy sucks will help bolster the above as anything that helps the big companies continue their revenue stream will be seen as "good for the country".
Your "secure" operating system is just around the corner and it's possible that by 2006 you wont have the RIAA anymore because you won't be able to do anything that they wouldn't like!
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity.
Whether you like the RIAA or not, this is a pretty acurate description of what most P2P networks are. Log onto Kazaa or Gnutella and see what is there. It seems like a bunch of pirated MP3, some pirated movies, some pirated software, and lots and lots of porn (some of which is priated, the rest is wholesale stolen from porn sites). There is very little "legal" content on P2P networks. Even the few independant artists who have released their work on P2P networks get very little traffic, because P2P is set up mainly to be used by searching, and it's hard to search for new material since you don't know what it is your looking for (yes, you can find some stuff based on looking at a users files, but even then, you need to find the user somehow). The P2P networks are painted as havens for piracy because that is how they are used, and mostly what they were designed for.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I don't care! They must find me first, and sue me for sharing less then 100 musics through gnutella, musics which I have downloaded through gnutella too.
I bet much more then my own pants on this: "They will NEVER reach me, or whoever has no more then 10GB of shared mp3.
Even if they find me, and sues me, how much should I have to pay? $100? $200? They don't even know what they are talking about!
I'll ask once more: Where are the f****** advisors? Don't they have lawyers to ask what is possible and what is not?
Let's see who will be the first!
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Show me proof that more than 1% of assault rifles are used for something other than harming/killing people.
That argument doesn't fly with our government when peoples LIVES are at stake, why the hell should it when only some sleazy corps profits are?
jello.
aka aron.
That's what they should have done in the first place.
Sue those actually breaking the law by distruting copyrighted material in violation of existing copyright laws....
"Of course, you'll need to be a big fish with lots of illegal music to get their attention."
Gee, I dunno where the RIAA would get any ideas about how much disk space that we use to store our MP3's.
Note to RIAA: "If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
When they spit out those stupid numbers ($XX billion lost to music pirates), they now have even more lawyer fees to include in that number (very little of which will they be able to re-coop from teenage defendants)
Well, not the lawsuits, but the lawsuit threats, which are just as effective. See this link to a Gnucleus Forum post regarding an incident of this taking place over a month ago. Just to clarify how it works (straight from the DMCA rules), the copyright holder hires a company like Ranger which has custom-made software that spiders all the major P2P networks. They will index the copyrighted work to a list of IPs, then generate form letters which are sent to the ISP threatening a lawsuit. The ISP then forwards the letter to the user, who has the opportunity to dispute the claim or comply with the 'request' to remove the copyrighted material from the network. Needless to say, if you want to keep your internet access, you must comply. The latest version of Gnucleus already comes with a list of known spidering site IPs blocked, but this is clearly not a solution. IMO, nothing short of the capabilities of Freenet will succeed against this.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
<SARCASM>
This isn't a problem. It's a great idea. Now they can stop piracy and get rid of those pesky bandwidth hogs at the same time.
</SARCASM>
If I recall, about a year ago Hilary Rosen came out and clearly said that the RIAA woud NEVER do this.
What a lying sack of shit she turned out to be, Hmmm?
With all due respect, you're an idiot. The second a few big distributers get busted, the majority of distributers will cower under their beds. Would you be willing to share GBs of MP3s on your broadband connection if the other big guys around you were getting their systems confiscated and facing major fines they could lose their homes over? History has shown intimidation works well, and it will continue to work well. People just want their music; they don't care about fighting the man.
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity.
Log on to one of them and do a search for something random. Count the number of legitimate files you see-- meaning files that can be shared without breaking any contracts, rules, or laws-- and compare to the number of illegitimate files you see-- meaning files that shouldn't be shared. That ratio makes it pretty tough to call P2P networks anything other than festering cesspools of piracy.
Have you ever stopped to consider, through all of your knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions, that the RIAA and the MPAA might actually have a point?
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
Then you'd better hang on tight to your favorite music and movies. Because there won't be much more of 'em. Music and movies aren't cheap to produce. Somebody has to put up the cash to get 'em made. Even though the artists themselves may not care about getting rich-- I'm sure some of them don't-- they're going to have to get funded somehow. If nobody believes they can make a profit by investing in a new movie, then nobody will do it, and the movie won't get made. No more 2001s. No more Citizen Kanes. No more.
Of course, I think your line of argument is full of shit, so I'm really not all that nervous.
So let's say they go total nazi all over the US and achieve a complete cease of all file uploading from the US to Kazaa. As improbable as that would be, it would still only take out half --at most-- of the overall Kazaa traffic. Assuming that nobody in Europe, Asia, or South America uses an insanely popular P2P app is a bit ridiculous. In fact, if you look at apps like Donkey which could eventually become even more troublesome for the RIAA than Kazaa, you find the servers are predominantly in Europe, Asia and South America. What is the RIAA going to do about that?
Nah, it aint gonna fly. But what is cool is that once the Dow gets back down to 5000 for a few years we'll probably see the end of prohibition in the US because any small time business like selling weed to your neighbors will be essential to getting the economy started again. 1932, part deux.
These copyright and patent motherfucking RauGun revolution asshole sons of bitches caused these problems by restructuring the courts to create these corrupt mega-monopolies and playing their conservative image shell game while they drained the blood of America. Now we're seeing "best defence is offense" crap. Going after first amendment rights isn't going to cover their asses. The American people are not cowards. These fucks are gonna pay for their crimes and the harder they push the harder they're gonna get hit.
And yet almost every movie released this year has made incredible amounts of money for everyone involved, even many of the movies that sucked hard. I don't think there's any danger of people not being able to make money creating music and movies any time soon, but the method of distributing the content is going to have to change. I'd rather just listen to the radio or a bunch of free techno stuff than pay 20$ for a cd with no more than 15 songs on it, 10 of which are total crap and 2 of the remainder that have been played to death on radio.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
No, it's a representative republic. Unfortunately, the people against MP3s are the ones who can afford the most representation (aka lobbying congressmen)... And that's the part that causes the most trouble in cases like this.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
SeeUsueMe
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Give us an incentive to buy your CDs and we'll buy it. Stop blatently rip us off!
Let me get this straight. You think that CDs are too expensive, therefore the RIAA is ripping you off. So you take music from the publishers (and, indirectly, from the RIAA) without paying for it, and this is okay.
Wait. I must have missed something.
And everyone who has ever downloaded an mp3 you've put in to a file-sharing system has been your personal friend? Someone you have met/spoken with frequently/some other activity generally shared among friends? Or are they strangers from around the world and you have no idea who they really are?
You are stretching the definition of "friend" just a bit.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
They probably would be illegal, if 99% of them were used to kill someone.
It hurts when I pee.
I don't care who RIAA is suing now. I will not be a party to it. The RIAA can't sue me as I have no d/l-ed MP3s and do not partake in the sharing of them.
/.-ers are trading illegal MP3s.
So, Fsck you, CmdrTaco for the subject "RIAA to Sue You Now", assuming all us
And as long as the MPAA doesn't get the same idea, I'll be just fine...
Really, please. Mod this guy up. I'd love to download a daily blacklist of IP's to block from RIAA and their allies.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Honestly, I don't think that everybody has a God-given right to free music off of the internet, but the reason I personally have not bought many CDs lately is simply that they are so stinkin' expensive, and in most cases, there are only a couple of songs on each CD that I really want. I wuold love to see these $0.99/ea. downloadable music schemes take off. These guys would get lots more of my money if I could selectively download the few songs I want for cheap and then burn a mix CD that I could pop in. Surely that would be better for them than $0, which is what they get from me now -- and I am not a P2P user. Their precious lost revenue is a direct result of their price gouging. If they offer an inexpensive, reliable means of obtaining high-quality legally licensed music on the internet, I think they would see the popularity of P2P decline rapidly. Sure, it wouldn't disappear completely, but true music lovers will stick with the legitimate copies, especially if there is some added value like complete metadata tags or something.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Unlike prohibition, these people are easy to catch. Programs which do not allow the tracking of IPs are impossible to make, because IP does not allow it.
Sure, you won't get everyone, but it will be possible to set pirates back to the days of trading files over usenet, and even that can be stopped to a large extent by DMCA takedown notices.
freenetproject.org can help you out. It was designed from the ground up with plauable deniability in mind. It's really really hard to track down, much less prove in a court of law, who is putting what on freenet.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
You are correct but unfortunately the statute was amended by the DMCA. Now the definition of "financial gain" includes the "receipt or expectation of receipt of copyrighted works." In other words, they amended the law to forbid "trading." It's going to be difficult to assert that you setup a file-sharing client with no intent to download anything else (assuming file sharing on computers is even protected by AHRA, which it probably isn't.)
Burris
Ok, let me fill you in on the part you're missing.
John makes music for a living. His record company rips him off with a crappy contract, but it's better than starving or having to work at a regular job full time so he couldn't focus on his music.
But Bob down the street doesn't care to pay for John's music, even though he enjoys it, so he downloads it off a p2p network. Then he "shares" it with everyone else on p2p networks, so they can do likewise.
Except that it's JOHN'S music being "shared" and John never said it was ok to just give away is music against his will, and doesn't see a fucking CENT from the exchange of that music.
Yes, p2p, and the entire digital realm for that matter, is great for avoiding the zero-sum problem of most markets. However, this doesn't mean it's alright to take other peoples work and do what you will with it. (with respects to Fair Use, of course.)
Finally, YES, a handful of artists use p2p to give out their music, but go browse a Kazaa users' shares sometime... tell me how many of those songs you REALLY think were put there by the artist/publisher for legal distribution.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Just because I can't afford all those CDs, should I not be allowed to listent to music? [...] And don't tell me to listen to the radio, because radio sucks ass.
Well... um... yes. If you don't want to listen to free music, and you don't want to (or can't) pay for music, then you don't get any music. That how a capitalist market economy works.
I guess you could make the case that being deprived of music is a moral wrong, and try to get somebody with money to back a charity for people who can't afford music. A church would probably be willing to help you out, but I'm not sure you'd care for their selection.
Your other option is to hum.
They're mostly used as collector's items and for target shooting, fool. In case you haven't noticed, they appear in a TINY amount of crime compared to semiautomatic handguns and revolvers -- partly due to cost and rarity, partly because rifles _get attention_ which isn't usually in the interests of a thug. You can't walk around with a rifle, lurking and hoping to rob people, nearly as easily; and for that sort of crime, a knife or small handgun is harder to parry, far easier to conceal, and just as intimidating.
Oh, and few people are allowed to have them, anyway -- using the traditional definition of an automatic rifle, and not just semi-automatic lookalikes like AR15s (and even semis are restricted wrt magazine size, et al).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
...except that when you purchased the CD, you're required to also abide by the copyright, which means that you've agreed NOT to "share" (unless the copyright owner has explicitly granted such permission). It's the default arrangement, so it's part of the deal unless the copyright owner says otherwise. So, basically, you're breaking your word.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
What the hell are you mad about? You say you do not swap music files, and all your music is legally obtained. The RIAA is after those that steal music, and you proudly brag that you are NOT a crook. I always thought that Napster was as crooked as the CEO and board of directors at Enron. They claimed their service was not about stealing music, yet their logo was a cat with earphones! Right! Napster was about only one thing, they should have put the jolly roger on their logo as well.
The ONLY area where I disageee with the RIAA (and MPAA) is where my rights to store and use legally purchased music software are trampled on. I should have every right to rip my CD's to make MP3's FOR MY OWN EXCLUSIVE USE. Also to make custom compilations of music on a single CD from others I have purchased. In other words every thing I used to do with LP's and cassette tapes.
(except swapping tapes with friends, just another form of crime).
The people who actually care about about art for art's sake won't stop creating.
You can't make The Godfather without money, and lots of it. That money has to come from somewhere. While it's possible that people might give the next Coppola enough cash to make his masterpiece out of the goodness of their hearts, common sense and history tell us that it's pretty damn unlikely.
Let's take a small-scale example. Nobody is making 3D movies any more. Why? Because it's too expensive, and you can't recoup your investment with ticket sales. This wasn't caused by piracy or anything like it, but simply by audience disinterest. The result, though, is the same. No more 3D movies.
The same thing will happen if it becomes impossible for movie studios to recoup their investments due to piracy. They'll stop making movies. If you think it won't happen, I believe you've being naive.
"...go after the people who are actually doing it"...
But instead they will go after anyone running P2P regardless of whether they are infringing any copyrights.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Tough.
You know, there's a common refrain in the pro-GPL part of the open source community that if you don't like the license, you're free to not use a component and instead write your own -- but don't infringe on the GPL, whatever you do.
You're free to beg for money, you're free to cut back on other expenses, you're free to make your own music or even form a band. Hell, you're allowed to form a band and distribute your music under the BSD license if you choose. But "I just wanna" is never moral justification for ANYTHING, except possibly to 4-year-olds who don't know the difference between right and want.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Freenet also anonymizes uploads. That's its true reason for existence. Freenet is not intended to facilitate mp3 trading. Its purpose is to circumvent censorship by repressive governments. Freenet would be useless for that if it led goon squads to dissidents.
I have little doubt it will be pressed into service as an mp3 repository though. It will be interesting to what what that does to the network.
And on "military-style sem-autos", militaries generally use full-autos (or burst-capable weapons, if not full-autos), not semi-automatics that LOOK like full-autos.
/looks/ like an M-16, that means it's just as deadly, right? Sheesh. Clueless legislators and so-called journalists.
'course, I've seen "journalists" mumble on about semis while in the background there are people shooting fully-autos, so never ever count on the media to get it right...
*style* my ass. Oooh, it
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Finally, in neither case, is the person downloading the file, mp3 or html, going to be committing a crime, because how the hell do they know if the file is illegal or not? We *might* be able to argue that they had a reasonable suspicion that the files were illegal copies, but the primary guilt is still with the person offering them up for download.
True enough. There are many times when I do a P2P search for "amateur" and just download every result and sort them out as I get them. I end up having to delete a lot of copyrighted non-amateur porn because people mislabel files all the time.
Zoot!
Publicity and fear.
'sides, the college might expel the student -- it's usually within their rights to do so if a student breaks their agreement, which usually mentions crime, and it's probably bad publicity for a college to be known as a haven for this sort of thing.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
You're wrong. KaZaa does searches through the server, but actual transfers are done through HTTP port 80 which doesn't set off any firewall alarms.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Somehow I don't think that the kind of "sharing" that goes on 90% of the time on p2p networks is the kind of "sharing" your mom taught you was good.
There is no way to deny that MOST of the files getting shared on KaZaA are being spread illegaly. The thing that most people seem to miss is that that fact doesn't make KaZaA itself illeagal! There is absolutly nothing illeagal, moraly wrong, or negitive about software that lets people share files with each other. That is all that KaZaA is (and all the other ones too). It is true that many many people are using it in an illeagal way, which is why I think that it is good for the companies to go for the real criminals: the people actualy distributing copyrighted material. Have you ever heard the record store annalogy? A teenager listens to a whole bunch of violent/sexual/gang-bang/etc music and goes out and commits a related crime. Who is to blame? Do you toss the teen in jail or do you sue the pants of the record company? It is not the record company's fault that the teen did somthing illeagal. Strangly enough, Sony music and the rest seem to like that anaglogy just fine until the tables are turned. You don't shut down an ISP because a user commits a crime, you don't outlaw guns because a someone gets shot, you don't outlaw beer because someone drives drunk and YOU DONT OUTLAW P2P BECAUSE SOMEONE SHARES MP3's!!!!
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
If they had started by sueing the "illegal" copiers, I would have said "Go to it."
Now, however, they've spent all the credibility that I have given them. I don't believe anything they say. I doubt that they are doing what they report. And if somebody does something that injures them, I say "good".
It's really hard to support people who violate copyright, even when the copyright isn't owned by the creator. But I cannot support the MPAA. I suppose that my feelings are "a plague on both their houses", and when saying this I remember that during the plague the streets were filled with dead bodies (it's not true, but that's what I remember).
I suppose that I might favor the MPAA if they were sueing Anderson for sleazy accounting. Perhaps. Otherwise they had better just ensure that I'm not on the jury.
Clearly it is illegal to copy works without the copyright owner's permission while those works are under copyright. But the MPAA has been so blatant in attacking my rights, and an uninvolved party, that I find it next to impossible to care about theirs.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The best thing that could happen would be for the RIAA to pursue this new scheme. Here's why.
1. This action could bring potentially turn the a current ally, the PC industry, against them. Look at it this way. Before, they'd targeted the P2P networks. Once word of the first lawsuits against individuals starts hitting the news, many other individuals who may be considering getting a new, faster PC so they can have access to "free" music, etc. will be discouraged from buying that PC. Simply, the idea of getting "free stuff" on the internet is a very big reason many people get a PC, these days. Many friends of my mother and even my grandparents have asked how they can get things, such as music, if they were to purchase a PC. The RIAA's action against individuals will certainly discourage a portion of new PC sales in an already slumping market.
HP-Compaq, Dell and even Microsoft will not be very forgiving or encouraging once they begin to feel this impact.
2. Washington and certainly the Bush administration will be forced into some action once word of "those West Coast fat cats suing the average American" goes mainstream. Bush's approval ratings have already taken a big dent because of the public's perception of his being is bed with big business (Enron, WorldCom, et. al.) Something like the RIAA admitting to trying to "sue the pants off" of Joe Public would be a very good way for him to get back into the public's good graces by thwarting the RIAA's meglomaniacal view of itself. Besides, his conservative supporters would fall all over themselves to send truckload's of cash his way to fight "those pink-o, liberal California record weirdos." I bet Limbaugh is drooling over the possibility even now!
3. It takes something substantial to get the American public's attention. And what the RIAA is proposing is very substantial indeed. It's the kind of action that'll cause the average American to take notice, and once more and more people begin taking notice of the RIAA, who they are, what they do, etc., the more the RIAA is going to be in trouble. Most Americans don't like institutions that which operate with the smug, authoritarian abandon of the RIAA, and will happily go out of their way to spit on them given the chance. Well, my friends, the action that the RIAA is proposing is the definitely going to be the chance for more and more Americans to hawk up a big one and spit it right in the face of the RIAA.
It does not legitimize the distribution because the distributor in general makes absolutely no effort to limit the downloading to those who do have rights -- and a click-the-button self-endorsement doesn't count because it's hardly reliable.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I got $20.
I can buy 1 CD
or 2 DVDs....hmmm
tough times call for tough decisions, but sometimes the decisions are pretty simple.
Lately I've been buying my CD's at concerts I go to. Not really a statement, just how I've been doing it.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I am not taking anything from anyone.
Ah, but you are. But that's another conversation.
Better watch with the Christian insults, they can be surprisingly vicious.
I didn't say ``Christian'' at any point, and also there was no insult intended; I meant it literally. You may not like the kind of music that you can get for free, from a church or anywhere else. You can either listen for free and take what you can get, or you can pay to get exactly what you want. No middle ground, I'm afraid.
Well, I've been observing piracy for a long time now, and my take on it is this: In the earlier days, piracy tended to be more private, more underground. There were private BBSes where you had to have referals to be able to get an account (after all, the sysop was risking his ass). Some people I know were also part of clubs that would get together and trade disks full of software. Computer software piracy was the most widespread. Console piracy was a bit of a niche, and you didn't see it everywhere, this was partly because Nintendo and Sega were very serious about going after console pirates.
Then piracy started moving over to the Internet. There were probably many private FTP's like the private BBSes, where people put up files on there own space at risk. But something else happened - there were pirate FTP sites placed in locations that were not connected to the person who set up the site. This was done by exploiting misconfigured FTP sites that for example had an incoming directory that could be wrote to and then read from (as well as FTP servers that were just cracked). Thus, the risk became smaller for maintaining pirate sites, and it became more public. You started seeing warez web sites that just linked to the warez.
With things like Hotline and ICQ (as well as IRC file trading), the innevitable happened - file sharing networks were born with the creation of Napster (and the others that followed). Piracy was no longer underground, it was public, out in the open. You can search for something, download it, and log the person's IP address while you're at it. Civil disobedience right out in the open.
And its very easy to get caught. You expose your IP address to everyone, including the ones who want to bust you. If people start getting busted left and right, do you think people are going to sit around sharing their files waitng around to get busted? No. Their going to go back underground. They'll have to use means which don't display their IP address for the world to see, or at least are well hidden and not in the public's eye. For music, people will go back to copying music among friends like its always been done.
Of course I'm thinking of more than music here. But in any case, piracy is a risk, it's always been. If you're going to do it, you have to be careful and take the necessary precautions. Don't do it out in the open. Otherwise, you will get busted.
Zoot!
He then went on to describe how he used tools like Lightwave3D on a bunch of PCs to produce the special effects for Babylon 5, and that by using PC technology he was able to produce the show for less per episode than the networks paid....
But this isn't new at all. You can always get it done more cheaply (down to a certain minimum cost, of course) if you're willing to cut corners in the production process. Stracican'tspellit's choice was to sacrifice quality for cost. The show may have had tons of quality in other areas-- I never saw more than about four episodes, so I have no opinion-- but the special effects looked like ass. Thus was money saved.
But not every movie or TV show is a special effects vehicle. Sometimes it's a lot harder to cut costs without really eating into the quality of your project. Can you get away with using a less expensive (and probably less experienced) actor? How about filming on a soundstage instead of on location? What if the soundstage itself is too expensive? Can you shoot the whole thing in your house?
My point is that quality work costs money, even if you're economical. Hell, The Blair Witch Project was just a couple of kids running around in the woods with video cameras, and it still cost $35,000 to make. Can't cut your budget much more closely than that.
Okay, so we're basically talking about quality. Music recorded in a studio with decent gear sounds better than the same music recorded in Phil's garage with a couple of $40 mics and a four-track mixer. Sure, you can go overboard, spending hundreds of thousands on take after take and track upon track. But sometimes the results of that work pay off and you get something really terrific. Would you want to live in a world where no music like that ever gets made because nobody can afford to make it?
On the other side of the spectrum, we've got orchestral music. That stuff is pretty slim as audio engineering goes, but you've still gotta get a hundred musicians or more together in an acoustically neutral room for several hours. There's no way to do that for pocket change, period.
Music is expensive to make. Good music-- by which I mean music of high production quality that's a real pleasure to listen to-- even more so. All the PCs in the world will do nothing to change that.
You're totally correct. People will probably stop sharing if they just got a warning. I certainly would, because I don't wanna pay a lawyer so that RIAA can sue me.
But as soon as a medium, Kazaa for example, becomes unfeasible to trade files (maybe because it's too much of a risk of getting caught), there will be another medium. Probably more local and underground, but it'll still be there. Like wireless networks. There are projects on the way right now to get entire cities wireless access. People there will be able to share files over the wireless network. There's no way piracy can be stopped. And the RIAA and the record companies are taking the totally wrong approach to this problem. And they will be punished for it, with lower profits.
That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion. I'm talking simple economics; you can't make money selling a product when just one copy of the product can be duplicated and redistributed at virtually no cost. But first:
Then you'd better hang on tight to your favorite music and movies. Because there won't be much more of 'em.
I'm aware of this, and it does worry me. Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders. So I do worry about where music and video will be in thirty years.
Of course, I think your line of argument is full of shit, so I'm really not all that nervous.
You should be. Like I said before, there are many freeloaders in the world. Even if the American government starts policing copyright laws the same way they hunt drug trafficking, there are still hundreds of millions of people in the rest of the world's nations who would just as soon pirate their music. Why pay to buy music from a foreign corporation when you can just download everything from the Internet?
Now, if you can actually provide an argument to the contrary, by all means, enlighten me. Otherwise, save the dirty talk for your blow-up doll.
I'm certainly not an NRA member, but even I would admit that only a small fraction of guns are used to harm/kill (or even threaten) people.
The real problem is that fair use is a gray area. It does not have an ironclad legal definition. There have been cases where one thing or another has been ruled fair use, but whether file trading is fair use will have to be decided by the courts. Many of us firmly believe that file trading is fair use, and hope the courts will agree. An idea, once expressed, naturally belongs to the public domain, but is loaned to copyright and patent holders to encourage innovation and creativity. To read more on this subject, I suggest following the linkslisted on dontbuycds.org
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
If we're lucky, it will morph into an industry that takes into account the new technology.
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
Or you could look at it from another viewpoint, that of the record industry. See, the record industry has been bitching and moaning about this big problem that they created due to their own greed. It's called payola. They have to pay so that the music they sell gets exposure to listeners around the country and around the world. They have been doing this forever. First they were paying radio stations to play their songs. Then when that was outlawed, they started paying some middleman to pay radio stations to play their songs. Now they're complaining that it's just too expensive and that the government should put a stop to it, boo hoo hoo. Oh yeah, and in the meantime, they are going to shut down napster and kazaa and anyone else that gets their music out to listeners around the world. Can't have that happening, can we.
Now you might say that people who download songs will just listen to them on their computer and never pay for the CD, but I don't think there's any evidence that that happens on a wide enough scale to really have that much of an impact, and there is a decent amount of evidence that seems to say that Napster and others have had a positive impact on CD sales. I think that what the record industry should really do is work on their public relations problem. Get rid of Rosen and put an artist or several artists in her spot. They don't even have to be Britney-class superstars, and in fact, they shouldn't be. They should represent the vast majority of artists that make something around minimum wage or a little better. Kind of like the artistic middle class. They could help to persuade people that artists really need their support in order to continue to make the music that the fans love. That could probably make a huge impact on people. But if they really want to make it work, then they should knock off all the damn price-fixing crap and lower the price of CDs. They should probably stick an MSRP price on each CD too, so that stores couldn't just double the price without facing some serious questions. I think that the statement to fans would be that the record industry wants to do good by them and help them find the music they like and help artists to make a good living. Oh, and they would save all those millions that they've been flushing down the payola toilet too. Now most of us can't imagine this happening in a million years, but if anyone has the muscle to get a message out to fans, it's the record industry.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
...so, with all this stuff going on, how come Americans aren't questioning why copyright expiration takes over 100 years?
In fact, I can't help but wonder why the publishing industry has the nerve to target public libraries, even though the publishers already have the national legislature in their pockets. Already, they make scads of money on garbage paperbacks, magazines, and other landfill that never even makes it into public libraries, oftentimes, and now they want to outlaw used book and CD sales as well?
So, when do we, the people, get our part of that deal; i.e., a 25-year copyright period, non-renewable, after which the work goes into the public domain?
--------------Rev. C.C.Chips---------------- For the real truth, visit
Instead, the industry has focused on lawsuits against for-profit piracy outfits. Just who are these outfits? They certainly don't mean the booths at flea markets. Those are there week after week. Not all of them sell pirates, but you can always spot some who do. The RIAA doesn't even consider them competion. P2P is really a treat to their power over artists. The old system gave the the ability to arrrogantly tell artists, "I made you a star, and I can break you, so you better do it my way!" P2P has made it abundantly clear that fans decide who is a star, and this scares the recording racket's power brokers. To read more about that, check out an article entitled What Is Piracy?
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Searches, sure. But what about the actual file transfers themselves? Wouldn't each party have to know how to contact the other? I suppose those could be routed through supernodes as well, but that seems unlikely.
Dyolf Knip
So in other words to find most individual users they will have to invest time+money, yeah this'll fly for an association thats primary concern is profit!!
If they carry out this plan, they'll find it incredibly not worth their time. The people I know who are storing cash houses of MP3s are your 18-26 year old male who has a crappy job and spends most of their time at home in front of the computer. They own very little property.
I would presume that the RIAA would try to plaster some kind of $10 million lawsuit. So, let's figure out all that they need to do to do so. Subpoena the ISP, watch the data traffic on the individual's computer, get the feds involved, confiscate the computer equipment, and spend hours digging through the thousands of files on the computer. So, not only does the RIAA have to spend a ton of time and money doing things by the book, but they also will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. All to make some college kid go bankrupt and fork over all his assets, somewhere in the realm of $2,000 - $8,000 in property and computer equipment.
Go ahead, RIAA. Sue away. If you think you're losing enough money by lowered sales, just wait until you go on this legal binge!
Tell me, who gets hurt when I download that new Britney Spears song?
You do. Ugh.
All kidding aside, you're just wrong, for reasons that I guess I won't be able to explain to you. Taking something without paying for it is wrong. In this case, it also happens to be illegal. If you would acknowledge that it's wrong, and that you shouldn't do it, but that you do it anyway, then you and I could see eye-to-eye. I have no problem at all with hypocrites. I'm a huge hypocrite myself in a lot of ways.* But I do have a problem with people who can't seem to understand basic issues of right and wrong. That saddens and disturbs me.
* Not with respect to downloading MP3s, though. I was on an MP3 kick for a while about three years ago, but I quickly got bored with it. The music was all of absurdly low quality, and it was more trouble than it was worth to find and download stuff I liked. So I ditched all of the pirated stuff and ripped my collection of 300+ CDs at high bit rate instead, and ran cables to wire my server (upstairs) into my stereo (downstairs). It's about nine days of music on continuous random shuffle. Much better than the crap I got off of Napster. Ugh.
It's my culture, so naturally I use it..."
*sound of plug being pulled*
*sound of jump into future to 2069*
Culture? What's a 'culture'? Oh, you mean those things people used to have back when they had the amazing and unthinkable technology to *gasp* play one tape and record it onto another, thereby making what's called a 'copy'.
At one time, people actually did this! That was before the zero copying initiative, and of course before the move to SDs (Sayonara Discs) with their shelf life of two years or 300 plays, whichever comes first.
Which is why there are still recordings from 100 years ago, 1969, but there is no record of any visual or musical performance from ten years ago, 2059.
If it wasn't illegal to express such doubts, a person might well wonder whether we as a society really made the right decision in outlawing all forms of sound and video archiving...
*POW!*
*sound of doubt-expresser falling dead*
Another intellectual terrorist made safe for society by the copyright industry ;)
That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion.
Of course, you're right. I was annoyed at what I'd been reading, and I reacted rudely. I apologize.
Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders.
Then is it safe to assume that you support copy protection technologies like JVC's D-Theater? In my opinion, building strong encryption into digital media storage formats is the only way we're ever going to be able to sustain a healthy entertainment economy. And, as we've discussed, a healthy entertainment economy is the only way we'll continue to enjoy the quality and quantity of loud noises and bright lights that we all love so much.
Gosh, I feel like going home and giving my TV a great big hug.
And as for my ``your argument is full of shit'' comment, I was really referring to the part where you said that the RIAA and MPAA are going to go out of business because you can't make money in entertainment any more. That's specifically what I disagree with. If the current state of affairs were to continue, then the entertainment economy probably would collapse, just as you say. But I don't think this state of affairs will continue. The recent, rampant anarchy will be replaced by secure but fair copy protection technologies like D-Theater. Your DVD player won't be obsolete exactly, because it'll still play all the DVDs you ever bought. But the studios will only release new movies in copy protected formats.
That's what I'm expecting.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. A strong but fair copy protection scheme would put this whole argument to rest. Let the movie studios release their films (and the record companies their CDs) in a secure format that can be played as often as you want, but that cannot be copied under any circumstances. I'm sure the Slashdot Masses will rise up in anger at this idea, but the truth is that it'd be a pretty sweet state of affairs.
Nobody ever said morality was easy, except the extreme moral relativists who claim that everything is moral because there are no possible standards.
And no, we haven't all downloaded MP3s.
Go read a book on ethics and philosophy. Nozick's works would probably be a good start, considering that he a) admits that he doesn't have a COMPLETE codification of ideal society, b) is concerned primarily with justice and freedom instead of micromanaging some economic distribution judged, a priori, to be the only fair one, and c) asks extremely insightful questions regarding both morality and practicality.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
If they are sharing their whole drive unkowingly, who's fault is that?
I doubt many people do it unkowingly. Maybe when they first get into it.. but come on. Are you trying to say that people sharing music online don't know they are doing it? Bollocks.
Overstepping? Fair use? I'm sorry. This is the one thing that makes SENSE to me. Rather than going after facilitators like napster, who aren't really doing anything, or rather than making new law, just go after those who are breaking the existing laws.
... at least they do in europe - is it different over there? :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Umm.. okay. how about this.
They see you on a p2p network, and have reasonable proof that your IP address is sharing 100 gigs of their material. Now, of course, that's not proof, that's just evidence.
So they contact a judge, and your ISP, and find out who you are. Still no proof. But it's enough evidence to waltz into your house and sieze whatever is hooked up to the cable modem as evidence. Oh look, your computer is running kazaa, and sharing 100 gigs of files.
THAT is evidence.
Now, you are probably going to say they can't prove how many violations you did.. that may be true, but they can certainly show intent.
That is indeed how our capitalist market economy currently works. A large part of it is predicated on the idea of intellectual property: patents, copyrights, and (to a much lesser extent) trademarks. There is no particular reason why the economy must work this way.
However, as Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and many others pointed out, ideas and information are not even remotely similar to physical property like cars, food, clothing, etc. Information can be replicated infinitely at minimal cost, whereas cars, food, and clothing cannot. (Not yet, anyway.) The obvious question arises: should ideas, then, be treated the same as regular property? More and more people are coming to believe that the answer is "no".
If I physically steal a CD, I have the CD and the original owner no longer has the CD. If I copy the CD but leave it with the original owner, they still have everything they had before, and I had more than I have. There is a significant difference.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Get naked and start the revolution !!!
Yeah, what kind of fool would support other people's rights?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
There is no particular reason why the economy must work this way.
First of all, economics isn't always a zero-sum game. The fact that person X still has his CD after person Y copied it doesn't change the fact that a transaction has taken place. Value-- in the form of the digital music stored on person X's CD-- has been received by person Y. In person X's case, he paid to receive that value. Person Y didn't. Person Y committed an act that is economically equivalent to walking out of a Tower Records with the CD under his coat. It's theft of value, whether or not that value has a material component.
Furthermore, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the creation of intellectual property is very much governed by economic forces. If the profit motive can't offer a sufficient reward for efforts, people will stop creating works like movies and such. A starving artist may write poetry, but he'll never make The Magnificent Ambersons. If you take away a person's ability to make money from his art-- by reducing the economic value of an electronic copy of that art to zero-- you're removing one of the key motives to make that sort of art in the first place. That would be bad.
If I copy the CD but leave it with the original owner, they still have everything they had before, and I had more than I have. There is a significant difference.
The difference isn't as important as the similarity, and the similarity is a moral issue. You're still getting something for nothing, and that's not right. Whenever you receive something from somebody-- except in the case of gifts, of course-- you should give something in return. That's not a law, but it's a moral compulsion. Stealing music by downloading it without paying for it-- for that's what it is, stealing-- is just plain wrong, and it should feel wrong to you.
Arguments about whether it should be legal or illegal should not lose sight of the fact that it's wrong.
This is what they should have done in the first place- go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
WARNING: Opinions Ahead. (-:
What a clueless statement. First off, P2P itself has never been and will never be "seemingly illegal". Second, Mr.Taco, this whole issue is not about reasonable respect for the RIAA as long as they "behave." This is about a grassroots movement to eliminate a long-standing cartel that has been found guilty on multiple occasions of price-fixing (which hurts consumers) and has been screwing over musicians for decades with bad contracts. It's about digital technology bridging a divide and eliminating obsolete middlemen. It's about the people of the free world asserting that their personal freedom is infinitely more important than the profits of mega-corporations. (And do you want DRM all through your hardware? eh? Didn't think so.) I'm a big supporter of the musical profession. But I do it in a way that only helps those who deserve compensation for their work--the artists themselves. That to me means a complete boycott of all RIAA member music. Anytime you buy an album produced by an RIAA member, you are voting with your dollars that the RIAA is the way to go. You are encouraging artists to keep selling their careers to greedy middlemen and you are discouraging folks from going independent because they're afraid of being ignored otherwise.
Then there are the people who keep saying stuff like "hey, I buy more music now because P2P lets me preview it." This is precisely what NOT to do because guess what kinda music dominates the P2P scene? RIAA member music!!! Do you want to empower people who are striving to take away your rights? It's so ironic it's sick. Don't even download the crap!
Support live music. Support smaller bands. Boycott RIAA member music. Learn to play an instrument yourself. Lets take back our culture.
I've grown tired of responding to incessant peer-to-peer/music industry/IP/Congress (they all seem to revolve around the same issue) stories, so I will simply state my position on the whole matter once and for all.
1. Filesharing networks are a tool, as is a car or a firearm or an aircraft. There are legal and illegal uses for all of them. The fact that a majority of users misuse filesharing networks is no more relevant than the fact that a majority of American motorists break the speed limit. Period. End of story.
2. Certain songs are copyright their respective copyright holders, in this case the Recording Industry Association of America. Those songs are their intellectual property. This is not a gray area. Now, should it be demonstrated and upheld in a court of law that they, the RIAA, have abused this copyright, this may change. Hasn't happened yet.
3. End users that have not paid for said music or otherwise acquired a LEGAL license to said music do not have the legal right to possess their own distinct digital copy of said music for any purpose other than parody. In English: If you didn't buy it you don't own it.
4. End users who download music that they do not otherwise own are committing theft, recognized as a crime in most countries. End users who back up their music are not, so long as they have purchased said music.
5. End users who make available copyrighted material that they have paid for but others may not are abetting theft. Analogy: You set up a card table outside a record store. You offer CD's burned with music. You put up a notice stating that you may only take the CD if you already have bought the music legally. You do not attempt to verify whether or not anyone has done so. Right. Sure.
6. Suing someone for engaging in the above practice is indeed legal. That person is willfully distributing something that is not theirs to distribute. This is illegal.
7. To copy-protect a CD to prevent ripping is a violation of fair-use. However, fair-use is not defined in stone. Moreover, to circumvent the copy-protection is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998). Like the law or not (I don't), it is law. It conflicts with fair use, therefore the courts must decide boundaries.
I could go on, but that about sums it up. I dislike the RIAA intensly for the way they treat artists, end-users, et al., but they do have legal standing here. As for CD-ripping, I can only hope they get knocked ass-over-teakettle.
This is not a troll, but what I hope is a clear stating of the matter as I see it.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
I have heard (with my own ears) two well-known authors decry libraries as "theft", because they feel that one book should mean one reader (ie. one sale per reader). So it's not just publishers who are so misguided and shortsighted.
(Point of irony: both are SF/F writers.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
They don't have a true monopoly at the moment. Not every label is an RIAA member, and there is a pretty low barrier to entry. People who have gotten sick of $20 CDs have some choices:
1. Whine about $20 CDs.
2. Download MP3s made from $20 CDs instead.
3. Both 1 and 2
4. Discover labels that charge half that for CDs which aren't one or two "hits" with a bunch of filler.
If anyone would care to reply with their musical preferences, I'll even recommend some artists (as best I can for some genres).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
In some quarters, yes, the above is true. (Harlan Ellison, ^h^h^h.) However, the publishing industry is much more divided on the question of "piracy." The audio industry (the corporations, that is) all agree that song swapping is inherently bad for their business. But in the publishing industry you find people who actually encourage book swapping -- and not just some authors. Check out the Baen Free Library, an archive of freely available books. There are some non-trivial names on the author list there (Jerry Pournelle, Lois McMaster Bujold, Mercedes Lackey) and it has official sponsorship from Baen Books, which is one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy.
The introductory page by Eric Flint, "Introducing the Baen Free Library" is an eloquent argument for the share-and-share-alike crowd. Anyone who is interested in this debate, regardless of which camp you prefer, would be well advised to read that essay. (It's fairly lengthy, but worth the effort.)
This was, by the way, discussed multiple times on Slashdot.
Err... my assault rifles have never been used for harming people. I am sure you will get a number of replies like this.
Sigh... I just realized I am responding to an idiotic troll.
Mod the asshole down for bringing up the gun issue.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Now, the argument could be made that the value of the music that X possesses is less now that Y also has it, on the grounds that there is value in having something that someone else does not, or the grounds that as more people have it, its value is inherently lesser. However, economically, neither of these can be particularly well-quantified. Effectively, the argument is null.
What of artists who existed before modern copyright law. They did not operate under the assumption that their ideas would be protected from use by others. They did not operate under the idea that they could do a small amount of work a single time, and reap profits from that work for extended periods. If Mozart wanted money, he had to go out and perform, to keep earning it. The idea that you can work for a few weeks, and from that effort earn enough money to live on for several years, is a very recent one. Is it good for the economy? I don't think so. Content producers should be encouraged to keep producing, not to hit it big and live off the royalties.I also agree that the amount of content would be lesser without IP law; but how much lesser? That is not so easy to assume. Nor is it easy to assume which segment of produced content would disappear. For all we know, if a lack of IP laws reduced the content output to 10% of what it is now, the missing 90% might have been the crappiest 90%. Or, for all we know, all the great works would vanish and we'd be left with nothing BUT crap. We don't know, and the only way to find out is to try it.
Large-scale productions that require multiple peoples' effort would probably be harmed. When your investment is that big, more people aren't willing to take the risk that it's going to get copied without compensation. On the other hand, we're used to the idea of copyright law. What if we were used to the idea of supporting our favorite artists because we wanted to encourage them to produce more?
First things first. I don't take kindly to being told how I should feel about anything, or what my morals should be.Also, what's with, "for that's what it is, stealing"? Last I checked, stealing means the victim no longer has the item in question. Just because you call it "stealing" doesn't magically make "stealing" music the same as stealing a car.
The issue that I see is that taking without giving something in return is self-defeating. If your favorite artist produces something you like, and you get a copy, but you never contribute anything back (namely, money), then the artist is less likely to keep producing. It is in your own interest to support artists whose work you like (giving more to artists you like more, and less to artists you like less), and to not support artists whom you dislike. Unfortunately, the copyright cartels have made it difficult to support an artist without supporting the numerous middlemen who add little value to the content. Mostly I'm thinking of the music and book industries here; movies are different because a film typically has so many people working on it, so who do you give your money to? Five cents to each of the crew, a quarter for the minor actors, a buck to the major actors, director, and screenwriter? Movies work well, actually, because you're paying for the cinema's service -- you're paying for space and time, not for information. (Movies on DVD, however, are functionally identical to CDs or books in a copyright context.)
My wife proposed an idea which would probably be hell to implement, but at least gets you thinking. The idea is that copyright (or patent) lasts until you make a certain amount of money, or a certain amount of time, whichever came first. The amount would be based on the expenditure to create the content. If you spent $100 million to make a movie, then your copyright would expire as soon as you made $500 million back (including box office, DVD rentals/sales, TV licensing fees, etc.). If your movie sucks and never makes $500 million, then the copyright expires in 20 years. (There might be a minimum time period, as well, say 5 years -- that way if you have something that's wildly and unexpectedly successful, the public has time to digest it in its original form before mutations appear.) The exact numbers and details would vary, but the idea is that once you get a certain amount out of that work, it becomes part of the public domain and you are encouraged to make more. The potential still exists to make lots of money.
Personally, I think that copyrights should be 20 years to start (I'm flexible on the exact number). Individuals could apply for a single extension on a copyright, but only the original owner could do so, and only if they were alive at the time of copyright expiration -- their heirs, or anyone who may have bought the copyright from them, would not be allowed to extend the copyright, as THEY did not create anything and don't deserve anything. Corporations could own a copyright only if they created the content to begin with (either by contracting to an outside individual or corporation, or by officers of the corporation creating something themselves); they could not purchase already-created copyrights from individuals (but could from other corporations), and could not extend the term on ANY copyright. Twenty years is plenty of time to reap the benefits of a work. One downside, of course, is work produced before its time; someone who writes a brilliant novel that isn't appreciated because it'll be 25 years before society is ready for it, isn't going to get a lot out of it when the 25 years have passed. On the other hand, that person is going to have to keep working in the intervening 25 years, and no doubt their current works will benefit from the public's knowledge that they wrote this brilliant thing 25 years ago, even if they don't derive much direct compensation from it.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
You seem to be missing the most absurd point about their claims that copyright infringement is causing sluggish sales in 2001/2002: the economy has been in the toilet that entire time! Yeah, what you said may have something to do with it, but I think the economy is the biggest factor.
Not quite as absurd as the doublethink they were pulling in 2000. They said they were losing profits to "piracy", and yet I heard 2000 was one of the best years they had profitwise.
I think this is not the case. I think most of them are using untraceable, high-bandwidth locations like PCs in university labs. This is mostly because broadband upstream is inefficient, and also because these people have been around since the days of sticking FTP servers on PCs in labs, and that's what they're used to doing. Burn a few CDs, walk into a university lab, copy the files, put Kazaa/whatever in the machine's startup, and go to. Believe me, it's not hard.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
That's not true at all; it depends on the law actually being enforced. It is nice when people agree not to break the law, but if they won't agree to, they are forced to; either way the law works. In theory anyway :)
"That's right, your Honor, according to the data we have researched, the biggest collection of illegal mp3's on the internet belongs to this character named "CowboyNeal." We'd like to formally request a warrant to search his hard drive."
I can imagine a rewrite of Joe's garage. Joe's just been released from prison and starts to play a guitar riff in his head because music is illegal. But then the thought police come take him back to jail because the guitar riff he was playing wasn't his, he didn't pay a royalty, and a telepath nearby could have read his mind.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
With all due respect, you're an idiot. The second a few big distributers get busted, the majority of distributers will cower under their beds. Would you be willing to share GBs of MP3s on your broadband connection if the other big guys around you were getting their systems confiscated and facing major fines they could lose their homes over? History has shown intimidation works well, and it will continue to work well. People just want their music; they don't care about fighting the man.
The second a regular individual goes to jail that will be the instant I BOYCOTT ALL RIAA MEDIA and that will be it. If they want to imprison their customers then they will not have any money in the future from me until I am happy that the RIAA is rotting in their own graves.
The main reason sales are down right now to near zero levels is the busting of Napster and other file-sharing sources. The RIAA method is going to have to end with the elimination of all television and radio - so there is no reason not to give them a taste of what happens when they bite Mommy America's Teat. Go ahead, RIAA and intimidate me and I will make it a cause to crap in your hand every chance I get.
To sum it up - BUST YOUR CUSTOMERS and we customers BOYCOTT YOU FOR LIFE. These are your rules RIAA, live with them at your own peril.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
The FCC is very similar in function to your local Department of Motor Vehicles.
You don't need a licence to walk down the road, but you do for a car. There aren't many rules for what you do when walking around, but there are plenty of laws and rules for driving.
The difference is a matter of risk, organization, and benefit.
People generally don't collide into each other when walking around. If they do, it generally isn't fatal.
However, without motor vehicle laws, the roads would be basically useless, because there's nothing to regulate traffic at an intersection, there would be far more auto accidents, and far more auto-related fatalities. And I hate to imagine the traffic jams.
Since driving requires much more responsibility (from both a 'society' standpoint, and a personal standpoint) than walking does, we require a licence to drive.
Radio is not much different. Without the FCC's rules and regulations, the entire radio spectrum would essentially be a giant traffic jam.
What many people either do not know, or willfully ignore, is that there is a very finite radio spectrum. The entire radio spectrum can only handle transferring a relatively small amount of information. (Compared to, say, a fiber optic cable). And even the latest technologies can only compensate for so much interference. Even spread-spectrum technology fails when too many devices are using the same frequency range.
The FCC does a few things that are absolutely necessary to keep wireless technologies going smoothly. The FCC does a few things:
* They control how the spectrum is divided up, and enforces the separations. This way you don't end up listening to your next-door neighbor's cell phone call while you're trying to watch the super bowl, etc, etc. Basically, they create the "standards" for which frequencies are used for specific purposes. Somewhat similar to saying you drive on the right side of the road (in the US at least).
* They put limits onto how much power can be used to transmit a signal. These limits are to actually keep things local. Otherwise, big rich group X can just transmit with so much power that nobody else can use the frequency. Another good example is a cordless phone. Sure, it would be nice if your cordless phone worked for miles around... But it would limit the number of cordless telephones that could be used at any given time, as they would start interfering with each other. So, the FCC limits the amount of power a cordless phone can transmit with-- which limits its range, but allows for thousands of phones to be in a small area without interfering. Similar to saying a car can only be "this big" and drive on the roads.
* They certify electronic devices; that they don't emit any spurious RF signals. (Meaning, they don't make "background noise" Kinda like emissions testing.
* They have authority to enforce their rules. (Like your average traffic cop)
Radio stations (and TV stations, telecom companies, Ham Radio enthusiasts) all have to pay to recieve a licence to transmit (once a certain amount of power is used)-- and even then they must do so on specific frequencies.
You don't need a licence to use a cell phone, wireless LAN, etc. because they're actually very limited devices. They have short range, so there isn't as much of a problem with interference from other people.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
fuck recording labels, they're nothing more than a bunch of gang rapists.
You know, hyperbole is really not a very good way to make your argument. Even if you're right, you end up sounding wrong.
Hmm, maybe it's just pedantry, but what if person X didn't pay for it either? Let's say he really DID steal a CD from Tower Records, or got a free promotional copy from the artist. Is it different?
I don't think so. If you take it all the way back up the chain, you either find that somebody (a) paid for a CD, or (b) was given a CD by the owner of the music in question, or (c) stole the music in question directly from the owner. How person X got his CD is irrelevant. What's relevant is that person Y made a copy when he had no right to do so.
The problem I have with the statement, "It's a theft of value" is that "theft" implies that the original possessor of the value no longer has it, which is clearly not true
This is our fundamental disagreement, then. The words ``stealing'' or ``theft'' do not imply that the original possessor no longer has something. Whether the original possessor has it or not never comes into it. The act of theft occurs when you acquire something that you have no right to acquire. The means by which you acquire it don't (or is it ``doesn't?'') matter.
If you walked into a store and shoplifted a CD, you'd be stealing two things: the CD itself-- the atoms, basically-- and the music on it-- the bits. Copying the CD and returning it to your friend means that you're only stealing the bits, but not the atoms. That's admittedly less wrong than stealing both, but it's still stealing.
In order to see this from my point of view, you're going to have to let go of your assumption that the act of theft requires an act of deprivation. That's not necessarily true.
And, for the record, economics is not a zero-sum game. Just ask your lawyer if he's ever billed two clients simultaneously while doing research on a matter of law to see what I mean.
First things first. I don't take kindly to being told how I should feel about anything, or what my morals should be.
I don't mean to be insulting, but that's what morality is. It's a set of rules that tell you how you should feel under various circumstances. If you don't feel that stealing music is wrong, then either (a) your moral sense is flawed, or (b) your beliefs are fundamentally different from mine. As I've explained at length elsewhere, I think the idea that stealing is wrong is so fundamental to every culture that your belief on that matter shouldn't be different from mine. It's a normative value judgment on my part, and I stand by it. It's nothing personal, though.
Also, what's with, "for that's what it is, stealing"? Last I checked, stealing means the victim no longer has the item in question.
Again, this is the crux of our disagreement. Stealing has nothing to do-- in the deep, cultural, moral sense-- with depriving anybody of anything. It has to do with taking something for nothing, regardless of the circumstances. The law may use the idea of deprivation to define theft, but we're no longer talking about legal versus illegal. We're talking about right versus wrong, so the broad definition of stealing applies.
My wife proposed an idea which would probably be hell to implement, but at least gets you thinking. The idea is that copyright (or patent) lasts until you make a certain amount of money, or a certain amount of time, whichever came first.
But copyright isn't about money. It's about control. I, as the author of this comment, have certain inherent rights regarding this comment. I can say how it should be used, and by whom, and in what context. You can't use this comment without my permission, except in certain strictly limited and carefully defined ways. My right to control this comment lasts until I die, or until I transfer it to somebody else.
Notice I didn't say anything about money there. Making money off of this comment-- say, publishing it and selling copies-- is only tangentially related to my copyright over this comment. If you copy my comment without my permission, you're both wrong in a moral sense and also breaking the law, whether or not I'm handing out copies of this comment for sale. Heck, I could put a copy of this comment under every windshield wiper at the grocery store and still sue you for copyright infringement if you use it without my permission.
So it's about control of the use and distribution of one's work or ideas. When you put it in those terms, suddenly it makes complete sense that copyright should work exactly the way it does now: you retain your copyright for as long as you live, plus a little more, unless you voluntarily give it up. This is only appropriate. It's your work or ideas, so you have the right to say who can use it and how.
(Of course, the idea gets complex when you talk about copyrights held by companies, which have no natural lifespan. I won't pretend to have all the answers on that subject. But it seems reasonable to me that a corporation-- say, Disney-- should have the right to control its creations-- say, Mickey Mouse-- for a reasonable amount of time-- say, the lifetime of the corporation. But the devil is in the details, alas.)
face it, you're never going to not be able to download music. There's always some IRC channel or some FTP or some whatever
Which is exactly why I'm very much in favor of strong crypto. The music (and other media) piracy problem goes away if we use strong crypto. Weak crypto solutions like CSS are clearly insufficient, and cause more problems than they solve.
What we really need is an open-source collaborative project to build a strong media encryption system. It's a great technical challenge, difficult and fun, and it would solve a significant problem in the world if done right. Who's going to open the Sourceforge account for us?
John makes music for a living. His record company rips him off with a crappy contract, but it's better than starving or having to work at a regular job full time so he couldn't focus on his music.
But Bob down the street doesn't care to pay for John's music, even though he enjoys it, so he downloads it off a p2p network. Then he "shares" it with everyone else on p2p networks, so they can do likewise.
I wonder if the people who write this stuff ever use P2P?
To continue: Then Hank, Mary, Jane, and a few hundred others download the song, enjoy John's music , and then buy his CD. This is the only way, of course, that they'd ever hear John -- They'd never even see his name otherwise, they wouldn't pay $15 for a CD from someone they never heard or heard of, and John is very unlikely to get radio play
Now, if John performs music outside the mainstream -- say, free jazz -- this is pretty much his only hope to get his name out.
It's a free distribution system -- it should put music distribution companies out of business; that's how the economy works: Computers put typewriter manufacturers out of business. They have no special right to make money or maintain the industry in the state to which they're accustomed.
They do have a right to their copyrights. But they need to specifically identify who has done them what amount of harm, not just attack p2p in general. I'd guess Britney Spears has lost some sales; I very much doubt 'John' has.
Are you breathing right now? How much did you pay for all this air?
If the air I'm breathing were rightfully the property of another, then your questions might make a kind of sense. As it is, I'm not sure I see your point.
There is also something else I want to know : is making profit equivalent to stealing?
Nope. Behold this fantastic bauble. I will sell it to you for $10. Here is your bauble, and I take my $10. We just conducted a transaction. I got $10, and you got your bauble. Neither of us took anything from another without permission.
The fact that I bought that same bauble two stalls over for $3 is not relevant. I conducted one transaction (a bauble for $3), and then I conducted another transaction ($10 for a bauble). Neither of those transactions was stealing, because both of them involved getting something in exchange for something else with the consent of both parties.
Taking a proft is not stealing.
This mean that, yes, downloading MP3 is stealing. It is stealing the control someone has over you.
Um... no. Downloading is stealing music. Don't confuse the music itself with either (a) the bits or the media that instantiate it, or (b) the rights of the owner over it. You copied the file (the bits or the media) in violation of copyright (the rights of the owner). But what you actually stole was the music itself.
I understand that everyone should be rewarded for having an idea but I'm really against the concept of owning an idea.
There's a difference between an idea like ``E = mc^2'' or ``oil can be refined from rocks'' and an idea like ``Ice Ice Baby'' or ``The Bridges of Madison County.'' The first two are abstract ideas, or inventions. The last two are creative efforts. Creative efforts have creators, and therefore they have owners. Inventions have inventors or discoverers, who have an entirely different relationship with their ideas than creators have.
In fact, if I'm stronger than you, it means that my morality is the right one.
Your ideas about morality are pretty strange. I'm not sure you understand what the word actually means. At the very least, we're talking about two different and incompatible concepts. I'm not sure further discussion of this topic would be useful for us unless we can come to an understanding of the subject matter first.
I am, however, having fascinating discussions with Sobrique and moongha. May I suggest that you try reading this thread, or this one?
My point, though, is that two wrongs don't make a right.
:)
You're correct, though, in that the *true* model here needs to be a more direct-sale model. If we can fend off the copyright cartels long enough (another year or two, I think... perhaps I'm too optimistic in this estimate?), a good music business model will emerge, in the form of something like Emusic, only artist-owned, not Vivendi-Universal owned. (And using Ogg instead of MP3.
The Free desktop that Just Works
I wonder if the people who write this stuff ever use P2P?
/. and even some quasi-major media outlets are telling them that record companies are evil (true, IMO) and that the best way to "get back at them" is to break the law via p2p networks. (false, IMO)
WEll, this person has. I don't anymore, as I began to notice that I DIDN'T always buy what I liked - if I could find a song/album encoded well (ogg or >160kbps MP3) on a p2p system, what's my incentive to buy the album? Doing the right thing? That might work for a handful of people, but not the majority of the population. If they can get songs of nearly equal sound quality to a CD, why buy the CD? It certainly doesn't help the that
Your example about free distribution is good, but it's only a paritial answer. Again, if ALL of an artist's music is p2p-available, why buy anything? Distribution of singles via p2p is a great idea, but whole albums? I'm not so sure.
Finally, and this is the most important part, it is the ARTIST that must allow or disallow their work to be distributed in a certain manner. Record companies violate this through coersion, and p2p users violate it through outright violation of the law. It is no one else's place to tell an individual how they should have their music distributed, and this is the most fundamental question in the whole equation. Yeah, record companies suck ass, but that doesn't make stripping artists of their rights via unauthorized p2p distribution acceptable, either. They're both wrong. As I said in another reply, the future of music (I hope!) lies in the 'Net, with artist-owned distribution houses, and high quality, open standards like Vorbis.
The Free desktop that Just Works
If they can get songs of nearly equal sound quality to a CD, why buy the CD?
I'm not sure I have a great answer to that question, but here's a thought: How long would it take to duplicate a CD?
* Find out the song list of the CD
* Download good quality copies via p2p of every song (many p2p files are incomplete or poorly recorded. You'd need an hour+ to verify the quality of all the songs).
* Burn the CD
* Find the lyrics
* Find some 'artwork'
* Layout the packaging
* Print the packaging
Not everyone will care enough to follow all those steps, or pay $15 for the convenience of having someone else do it, but you get the idea.
this is the most important part, it is the ARTIST that must allow or disallow their work to be distributed in a certain manner.
I'm not sure I agree. Most important is, how much harm is being done (if any), by who and to whom?. I don't see good answers to any of these questions.
* If no significant harm is done, it's a problem of principle (yes, the owners of the music probably deserve some control), but not a big deal. I've seen nothing reliably connected CD sales to p2p.
* If you can't say who is harming them, demonizing and punishing all of p2p technology and its users is not an acceptable alternative. I buy CDs; why should I suffer?
* If you can't say who is hurt by p2p, then you can't just assume it's everyone who ever cut a song. As I said, Britney Spears probably suffers; artists not on the radio (small or non-pop genres) probably benefit.
Finally, the marketplace is sending a clear signal to the CD industry: Your product is obsolete; we don't want it anymore; we want p2p. The industry is trying to legislate away this reality, but it's almost ridiculous to watch American courts and Congress forcing consumers to use inferior products, all to subsidize a dead industry. Any economist can tell you what the outcome will be. Figuring out how to make a profit isn't my problem, it's the music industry's.
You have a source on this little factoid, or are you making it up as you go. Why can't they run over to Waldenbooks and buy it at 10% off... or surf over to Amazon and buy it at 30% off.
Hell, I can donate books to my local library. Tell you guys what... gimme your book budget (at 80$/book) and your shopping list, I'll have Amazon ship 'em to you and I'll keep the change.
Here's why I think stealing should require deprivation. Society exists because humans have an ingrained sense of self-preservation. Long ago, we recognized that banding together was to our mutual benefit. Societies, as a result, give themselves rules to keep individuals from disrupting the cohesion of the society. Rules that do not have any effect on the cohesion of society are irrelevant. Making a copy of something for personal use does not, in general, affect the cohesion of society. As a result, it should not be illegal.
I agree that stealing is wrong. However I define stealing differently than you, which is why we are still talking."Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased