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RIAA Seeks Summary Judgement Against P2P Services
kanad writes: "RIAA seeks summary judgement against Musiccity , Kazaa and Grokster. In other words they want the above to be banned even before the trial. RIAA accuses them as Napster clones.
Read the
official statement here BTW does anybody knows of 'Leonard Kleinrock' described as "one of the original founders of the Internet" in the article and an expert witness ?" I wonder whether the mimeograph machine would survive if it was invented today.
I wonder if the mass distribution of music for a profit would survive if Napster, Kazaa and Grokster would have been around during the 1920s.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Here's his home page where he does claim to have invented the Internet.
Going further, what's to stop IRC and a number of FTP servers? I still host a ton of content on my FTP server, and it is NOT anonymous (yeah-yeah, insecure blahblah). Or, I could burn info to a CD and send it wherever to whomever, or even just email a MP3 if its small enough...
ineffective at best, i say.
----rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
it is rather unfortunate that the RIAA's product is less talented than it's lawyers :|
It is unfortunate, but a quality product is not what makes money in this day and age, it's having lawyers that can twist the crap out of your product to make it look good, and make everything else look evil (aka Microsoft), and marketing crap well (again, Microsoft)... All the RIAA needs to learn to do is market their crap WELL, and we're all doomed!
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
... and thier, um stuff, get's traded more heavily than the copywritten music on KaZaA.
The RIAA just doesn't have a clue what reality is.
TheftThe act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
In order for something to be stolen, it must be taken AWAY from the possession of the owner. You can argue copyrights and such, but it isn't theft.
Copying is not theft. you havent removed anything. It may not be ethical to copy, but it isn't theft.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
You create an arbitrarily sized table of randomly placed 1's and 0's... Then what you trade is files that reference where in the table the bytes for your file located in sequence... Would this still be considered piracy or intellectual property?
I get music cds, dvds, computer games, books from my local library all the time. Does this mean an end to this form of sharing?
What special deal does a video store have that they are allowed to share their videos? They seem to be the same as the ones I get from the library?
Digital rights could be fun. Make an online libary that allows downloading with auto expiring content, or just a policy that the user agrees to have deleted the file at the end of the checkout period so it automatically becomes available for download again. One would need to check the rules, but I do believe a libary is allowed to copy or backup their materials against damage or theft. As the user has agreed to destroy the checked out copy, the library would automatically use the backup. Of course, this would be a full featured service with holds and everything.
Using technology to enforce this shouldn't be needed. The patrons agree and policing them should be the duty of law enforcement. (Once there was a quote along the lines of you might legally be allowed to backup something, but they didn't have to make it easy. (Used a lock door analogy) Well, would the inverse be patrons are assumed to follow the legal agreement, it's the police, not us who enforce the law. We trust people.)
If done as a non-profit, one could even offer tax breaks for each donated item. And the number of copies the libary has could increase.
You left out the second part of the definition from Webster's definition, Sparky:
b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Embezzlement is a *lot* closer to copyright infringement than the other definition suggests.
However, note that this is from a dictionary from 1913, where there is still a noun 'theft' that means a stolen property. Note that the m-w.com site labels it obsolete. And there is also a definition as of stealing a base (in baseball).
This should show you that language is not static, it is fluid. The fact that you don't think it should be called theft is your problem. 'Theft' is now used to indicate copyright infringement. Cope.
Interesting point. The historical answer is quite revealing. The invention in question is not the memeograph, but the printing press. The printing press so threatened those in control of information at the time (the Catholic church), that the entire reformation resulted. Let's just hope this go-round is not as bloody.
By the same token, do music copyright holders have the copyright to any technique that could produce air vibrations similar to the air vibrations that happened when the artist performed the song? And another thing, do they actually own the original vibrations, by which I mean, I'm not allowed to measure those vibrations and report to anyone else the results of my measurements, even if I make the measurements from a distance? They actually own the rights to what the air is doing?
What if I had a method to describe the complete pattern space of waveforms that the original music was not? That is, I have some sort of mathematical description of every possible wave form except the original music, I can't tell anyone what that is either, I suppose because that would allow you to derive the original. Even though I'm explicitly and rigourously not giving you the original.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Here are a couple of interesting thoughts.... 1) In one example in the dedacted version from the RIAA website, the document actually mentionsWindows Media Player. So, since that is so obviously being used to infringe upon copyrights, why are they not named in the suit? 2) According to the press release on the RIAA site, it sounds like I would be infringing copyrights if I rented/bought a movie and thn invited all my friends over to watch it, or worse yet, loaned it out to them, or geve them the movie after I watched it... Whew!! Time for a reality break..... At the rate things are going, the RIAA apparently won't be happy until you have to pay them each and every time you listen to a song (I am refering to one you purchased).
I disagree. People want convenience and quality at a reasonable price. Downloading provides digital quality from a reasonably convenient source. If it was reasonably priced (around $0.25 per song or so) and more convenient (no failed searches and no partial downloads, no low-quality rips and no fake files etc.) I believe people would pay the price gladly. I know I would - especially to get good quality copies of obscure out of print stuff.
Actually, they don't. As a percentage of the profits, the artist gets almost nothing. In addition, the artist doesn't even get to keep the rights to his own art. The artist is getting screwed.
While this is technically true, the evidence seems to show that music sales grew as more people downloaded from Napster, and shrank when Napster was shut down. There are a multitude of articles available from artists and others verifying that downloads actually benefit the artists. (e.g. by Janis Ian) So my position is that while technically illegal, downloading music is an activity that does no real harm and actually benefits the so-called "victims." It should therefore be legalised in some form, perhaps as described by me above.
This is my .sig! Get your own!
Better question... What have they done?
(and yes, I've donated (far too much) money to them, and have seen absolutely no roi)
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
Can someone help me locate the testimony in which Kleinrock describes how they could easily control and prevent massive copyright infringement?
I mean, I'm dying of curiosity. Every solution I can think of is either trivial to circumvent, or non-trivial to implement. Nothing falls in the classification of "easy".
Then again, I'm not Dr. Internet with a PhD from MIT.