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Kazaa And Exportation of U.S. Copyright Laws
Mr. Vidster writes "Interesting article in the NYTimes about the potential issues the U.S. justice system must face when dealing with Sharman Networks and KaZaA. Apparently Sharman and KaZaA have servers in Denmark, source code in Estonia, and the developers live in the Netherlands. How far does the long arm of US copyright law reach?"
... stops at the doorsteps of the US elite.
Look a monkey!
Most of the countries in the world will accept our food and our military power, but none will be bought to change their laws. We can feed and protect a country till the end of time, but once we're paying them to punish their people to our wishes, we own them, and not a country on earth would allow that.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
At some point, a court somewhere is going to have to determine whether or not manufacturing software that allows the trade of copyrighted materials is legal. If they decide it's illegal, God help them to enforce it. The CDBTPA (or whatever..you know what I mean) is trying really hard to push this through, but it's impossible. As someone's
Let me halt my rant and play devil's advocate for a moment...restricting speech? This is something that is hurting the anti-DRM movement more than it's helping. A neutral person may likely be swayed over to our side until they hear everything referred to as a freedom of speech restriction. Most people don't consider source code a work of speech, just as they don't consider a music file or other audio source one either. Unless it's spoken (a speech) or written word (book), John Doe isn't going to consider the violation breaking the 1st amendment.
--trb
The US may indeed have a lot of implied power but don't mistake that for the ability to indoctrinate other countries with US law. They enjoy their freedom to have their own laws just as we do here in the US.
:-)
File sharing is not going anywhere folks.. Not with programs out there like Direct Connect, FileShare, Kazaa and need I mention the millions of ftp sites out there?
These arguments are SO old. I download movies and games.... if they are worth keeping, I buy them and if they are garbage I delete them and never bother again. If not for this process I would not bother to buy anything(as I have done for years because frankly I dont like blowing money on a game and or movie and then hating it).
What I also find hilarious about the copyright argument... The RIAA says music sales are down due to d/l's of mp3's and the various other formats of music; however, I guess our current state of the economy would have nothing to do with the decrease in sales? I wonder if they compared other times of poor economy with their sales trends if they would be comparable to the downside trend they have been noticing.
Just a thought.
Actually there's nothing in the law that says you have to buy a gun. If guns are given away, no problem, as long as the potential owners are filling out forms and waiting per the Brady Bill. If everything checks out, no problem.
Free guns argument= irrelevant.
Tools are tools. Don't think that Adobe gets sued because some kid Photoshops pictures of something he's auctioning on Ebay to get a better price. Don't think that Stanley tools get sued if someone gets bludgeoned to death with a Stanley hammer. Tools that can have multiple purposes are usually not privy to scrutiny. Password-cracking programs and network scanners aren't really considered illegal tools either, because they can be used for checking security leaks/holes.
You may not be able to punish the guy running the foreign server, but you can limit access to it from within our borders, thereby removing it as an offender.
In other words, we should implement our own version of "The Great Firewall of China." Except in America, it will "protect" the citizens from illegal IP rather than, say, Falun Gong websites.
Who gets to decide what makes it through the "Freedom Shield" or whatever newspeak you'd like to call it? Ashcroft? He won't even dance with his wife because he thinks dancing is immoral! The Copyright Holders of IP? They won't allow anything; the firewall will scan the page for "Ford" or "Friends" or "Star Wars" and deny access, just like BESS does at my girlfriend's school. The web will become useless. Utterly fucking useless.
Great plan, dipshit.
Remind me: Why is the government spending my money to protect Sony's IP again? Doesn't Sony have their own lawyers?
I wish you Europeans would gird up your loins and tell our president to go fuck himself.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Reading stories like this must make the last few europeans that still generally have sympathetic feelings towards the US 'defect'.
I recon myself to be one of those. And yes I do know that not every american is to blame for such arrogant and stupid behaviour, but still, I begin to understand why the USA are so much hated in many parts of the world.
The arrogance and one sidedness (unilateralism) is getting to the point that it is simply unacceptable, also to people who always felt that the US are our allies such as myself.
The US may think they don't need anyones sympathy, that they can 'rule the world' on their own. That laws of others don't apply to the US, but that US laws are somehow more just and apply anywhere in the world (and if not, such countries must be pressured into modifying their laws under threat of trade boycotts etc). I however think this is a big mistake and gets the US into deeper trouble.
I know some 'patriotic' people will qualify this as flamebait, but remember whether you agree or not, whether you like it or not, what I write still in very mild terms (coming from a european with over-average sympathetic feelings towards the US) what more than 90% of europeans are feeling by actions like this.
Criticising other peoples for such 'infidelity' (i.e. being arrogant in the eyes of people with constructive criticism) won't cause such feelings to go away, on the contrary. I don't think it is helpful for the US to loose its last remaining allies in the world.
im a candian and i feel it's high time YOU (the american people) told YOUR OWN president to go fuck himself.
> Jursidiction is really not that complicated
> here. If you avail yourself of the benefits of
> doing business in America, then you are subject
> to the laws of America.
But this isn't quite the case. If I'm running a firm in the UK (for example), then I'm subject to the taxes and business laws of the UK. If I get orders from the US, it's harder - not easier - for me to ship them. Do I then have to be considered subject to US law simply because people from the US choose to use my product?
Or does the fact that I have an Internet presence automatically mean I just want to sell to the US? Ah yes, of course, they're the biggest Internet users so I must have an interest in them if I use the net. (Never mind that there are still more non-Americans using the Net than Americans - they just aren't all in the same country.)
Hey, how about some ISPs set up a ".nonus" domain which has no routers or hosts in the states?
The other problem is it's an aberration from standard law. In every other country, and for every other type of illegal material, there's a simple argument: if you import a product from a country where it's legal, but it's illegal in YOUR country, then customs swipe it and kick YOUR ass. That's reasonably fair.
The precedent followed by this law would imply further things - like, for example, many other countries suing US gun manufacture firms because the guns they make are being exported to countries where they're illegal.
If Americans don't know about their own DMCA and don't know that they can't legally download or use Kazaa, why should Dutch people be punished for giving them the option, when doing so isn't locally illegal for them?