Slashdot Mirror
Aussies Face Jail Over MP3s
An anonymous reader writes "Two Australian students have been charged over music piracy offences, according to this story on Australian IT. It's short on details, but presumably they weren't running a P2P network. The maximum penalties for breaching copyright under Australian law is 5 years jail."
Let's hope they don't try for the maximum penalty. 5 years for mp3s? i cant even imagine what that would be like... but maybe that's what they want.
But people have to produce the songs that you're listening to for free.
Now I know that you might think that the companies involved are scummy or evil, but remember - if we didn't have the legal frameworks in place that we do, then the evil companies would do a lot more than overcharge you.
You'd be their slaves.
Perhaps I'm missing something here but how does this differ from a story with the headline:
Liquor Store Robbers Face Possible Jail Term
If these guys did actually break the law, and if the maximum penalty is jail, then this is no different to thousands of other cases before the courts -- except perhaps that the law involves the protection of intellectual property.
Move along people, there's nothing to see here.
What's the idea in this news item? That people can get jail time for breaking a law? As long as unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material over internet is illegal, this is a direct consequence. No news, really.
The important issues are when new laws are passed or when business wants to stretch the limits of existing laws. However I see nothing in the article that would suggest either.
Album covers? They should arrest the folks at amazon.com then.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Of course, it's not clear what side of the fence the accused stand on.
As an Australian, this is the first I've heard about police taking MP3 sharing seriously.
I truly doubt these guys will get more then a slap on the wrist, because here, you HAVE to prove damages. I can't see the ARIA (Australia's RIAA) getting away with a jail sentence. They'll try, but they will probably fail.
I'm not Seth.
The five-year sentence, I would hope, is for people running large-scale commercial knockoff operations.
The interesting question is whether they did anything to attract attention, or whether someone's just trying to find someone to make an example out of.
By downloading music you don't own you break the law. Just because people think they have the right to listen to music for free it doesn't mean it has to be that way. I don't understand what the fuck this has to do with "your rights online". Privacy, I understand. Spam, I understand. Spyware, I understand. But what right are we talking about? Kazaa leeching? Give me a fucking break.
Go on, mod me a troll. I don't give a shit, I've had it with listening to the constant whining of a handfull of people who cannot understand the basics of "stealing music".
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/24/10507773 42470.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-998132.html
If found guilty of breaching copyright under the Copyright Act 1968, they would face up to five years in jail or a $60,000 fine.
If this copyright law dates back to 1968 than there are bound to be some loop-holes that should get these guys off. They just need a decent lawyer.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
The way I'm looking at the article it seems they might be copying CD's and reselling them. The only difference between this and downloading is that they is some tangable physical media rather than it just being stored as 0/1's on your hard disk
Short answer is that if you download music or just copy a CD is stealing. Its just how you feel afterwards that makes the difference
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
All the slashbots constantly whinge about how copywrite is wrong, patents are obsolete. Let's imagine a world where there is *no* IP. Making a living as a programmer is no longer viable. The whole field of software development will grind to a standstill. Do you think patents stiffile inovation? Imagine a world where if you invent something really cool, all the major hardware companies will mass-produce cheap knockoffs within weeks. You have no incentive to design at all. Companies will grow ever larger. IP might be a bad thing, but it's the lesser of 2 evils.
I'm not Seth.
I was also considering they might have been selling copied CDs until I found other articles, explaining that they were running a MP3 and WMA website. In a way that probably made them easier to catch than if they'd been selling copied CDs. Clever.
DNA based encryption with software developed
Congratulations on the most obvious troll for the day!
I agree to some extent that it's not very ethical to be sharing mp3's on your fave p2p network. I'm the last one to scream "but it can be used for good, too!" We all know what the primary purpose is. Fact remains, times are changing.
P2p file sharing isn't going away. And I perceive that as a good thing.
Information availability has been upped a few notches and now I can quickly access music and movies that before I could only dream of. I'm talking non-commercially available stuff. Will I have to wait before someone decides to release a DVD box set (that is very much over-priced)? No, but will I buy it if I deem it a valuable addition to my collection? Yes! No one ever bought a movie to watch it once and let it collect dust afterwards.
This whole situation is called evolution. It happens and no one can do anything about it, no matter how hard they try. Some victims will fall, but in the end, the majority will benefit the most. No, I don't see mp3 file sharing as a severe crime punishable by jail time. That's just a shock-and-awe tactic that will get the music industry nowhere. They think "set an example!" and don't think in terms of human beings. What do they care? As long as they get out the message that they want. A person's life does not matter, nor does it matter that possibly this offender will fall victim to more severe crimes because of his social decline. If anything is criminal, this is it.
The people will continue buying. Maybe a little less than before, but that may be for the better. Too much of anything is simply too much. Step off your high horse and see things in perspective. This is just an over-reaction and it's painfully obvious.
From one article....[smh.com.au]
"Three students have been charged with copyright offences over an alleged $60 million music piracy operation. "
While another reports....[news.com.com]
"Australian police said on Thursday they had closed down an Internet music piracy site and arrested three students in an alleged copyright scam that cost the music industry at least $37 million."
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Sigh... Kids. Of course RIAA and their Australian equivalent would put an end to this.
Police said the alleged piracy concerned music, album covers and music videos from Universal Music, Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Festival Mushroom Records.
Unless they were selling pirate copies of this material then I think this is a huge waste of energy on behalf of the police. Lord knows there are more sinister things being downloaded than pirated music.
The Chewbacca Defense should do the trick...look at the silly monkey!
BTW - another article about this can be found here.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
and these MP3 problems get worse every week.
If anyone in public office reads this
and can advocate for better solutions,
send me email and I'll donate to you.
If you feel strongly like I do,
try donating to EFF
Cheers, Joel
You moderators are really missing the point I'm trying to make here. This is starting to look like a mass hysteria. Even Slashdot seems not to care anymore that a "crime" (read: offense) that is so easily commited can just as easily get you jail-time (possibly resulting in a very fucked-up life).
The piece of information I want the most at this point is the source of these numbers. Everytime I read these articles and come across figures such as these, I smell bullshit. Are they pulling these numbers out of their arses? Is it fuzzy math? (i.e. one download equals one lost album sale) If it's the latter, I say they need to start producing *real* numbers, and not these mystical figures. IMO, claiming one lost album sale for every download is like charging a retail burglar for the MSRP value of every single item in the store, regardless of whether or not it was actually stolen.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
I can't wait!
What the standard jail time in AU is for things like murder \ manslaughter, rape, child molestation, distribution of illegal narcotics, etc? Just wondering where this law fits in the grand scheme of things over there.
For an example of ridiculous overpunishment, in the USA, in Texas, possession of drug paraphernelia (a pipe with only the most minimal traces of pot, and nothing else) carries a fine only slightly less ($5-10 I think?) than assault and battery, or some similar crime. Wish I could remember, but someone I know had it happen to him. Pretty warped how justice systems work.
your mama has a VCR at home and she's taped at least one movie or TV show
Psh. Yo' mama such a pirate she wears an eyepatch and has *every single episode* of the Jerry Springer show on tape.
In the great state of New South Wales, yes, there are three signs, and it's pretty hard to miss them. Approx 1.5 metres accross. Heaps of people still get caught. In the rest of the country, especially here in Victoria, the bastards have got hidden speed cameras. Most aren't turned on - yet. In the tunnles under the city, the speed limit is 80 km/hour, and they'll fine you AUD$125 for going at 84 km/hr. What's more, the law was recently changed such that you can no longer know the "accuracy" of the device they used. Five years ago, the old radars had an accuracy of +/- 3km, so this amount was always taken from your recorded speed before getting fined. Now, with their bastard laser detectors, they don't tell you the accuracy of the recording. Speed cameras are fair enough but $125 for 4 k's over the limit is simply fund raising.
On the hand, we do have the same civil laws as other countries, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear of Sony or some other media company suing these three, but prison sentences for something which doesn't appear to involve circumvention devices seems much less likely.
This is kind of like hearing that someone has been imprisoned for slandering something. It's just not the way to treat citizens in a free society.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I'll sketch a quick picture for you:
1. Massive global corporations refuse
repeated requests by their own customers
for convenient ways to download and pay.
2. Instead, these corps collude to fix prices,
impede unsigned artists from radio airplay,
bury studies showing that MP3 helps artists,
and sue alternative distributors into oblivion.
3. These corps lobby for draconian DMCA laws,
push for spyware and denial-of-service attacks,
force police and DAs to criminalize MP3 trades,
use subpoenas and search warrant techniques,
and seek terrible shock-and-awe punishments.
4. Many governments call this monopoly abuse,
for a wide range of probable legal reasons.
5. P2P overcomes this monopoly abuse,
even as it enables copyright violations.
So I think the answers are less obvious
than "don't do the crime" like you said.
There are legal twists and turns to this.
Cheers, Joel
This is a misnomer. The DVD medium lends itself to kneejerk buying : it's a movie your friends may have raved about, it has special features. You buy it because it's about 10-15 bucks, and then you watch it once, don't enjoy it, and indeed it does gather dust. Or, you're a business traveller and you want something to watch on the plane, you impulse buy a DVD that looks OK at the airport in 5 minutes as you rush to get to the gate, to watch on your laptop. You never watch it again.
I have done all of this. Half my DVD collection is unlikely to be watched again. Indeed, I would never have bought VHS tapes the same way, because I never had a portable VCR... but I have a laptop with DVD, a PC with DVD, and a home DVD player. Add to that quality, nicer form factor, special features that may make the DVD as a whole more valuable than just as a movie. And of course let us not forget that we can watch a particular scene and freeze it really well, just to see if there was indeed a hint of beaver in that sex scene ;-)
Add in special features and extra content, and you have DVDs that you might buy (especially if you have a reasonable income) on a whim.
Now, the scary thing with mp3 / DivX (why have I seen no articles about DivX and mpeg traders?) is that there are students being taken to court, fined and jailed. Students don't have much of a disposable income, and are bound to be ahead on the technology curve. I don't understand why they're being persecuted, because they are the ULTIMATE consumers of the future. Sure, I've downloaded the odd movie, but I'm in an income bracket now where a couple of DVDs per month is going to be par for the course for a long time. A lot of my friends, graduated say over 5 years ago, also have big DVD collections.
Banks, restaurants, brandnames for clothes, dead tree publishers... these have all been known to give students breaks in order to keep them when their income starts coming in. This is the mistake the record industry is making, because they are missing the whole point. Students have always bootlegged, borrowed and stolen music. I can't quite understand it. The regular consumers are NOT doing this. It really screws with my mind to see this kind of intellectual property fascism. Consumerism is not the be all and end all of the whole world economy, let's hope that sooner or later a bit of clemency starts to happen especially, I have to say, in the US (by virtue of its being the biggest, most hardcore consumer economy in the whole world).
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
How do they come up with the figure of 37m anyway? It's not like all downloaded mp3's would be bought if there wouldn't be something like the internet.. Old discussion, I know, but isn't it obvious to think the justice department (or industry) just adds up all retail prices of downloaded mp3's? It wouldn't surprise me if the total sum of missed income is in the thousands instead of millions.
You do not exist. Go away.
Imagine if the headline read "Aussies Face Jail Over Slander". It really is a scary prospect! Slander is a civil matter and cannot result in criminal action being taken against the defendant. Copyright infringement is also a civil matter, but recent changes in law have criminalised certain acts which facilitate copyright infringement (such as the creation of circumvention devices) and it is probably this that the three in question have been charged with. This is "news" in that it is unprecidented for someone to face jail time for simple copyright infringement in Australia, but its probably just bad reporting.
How we know is more important than what we know.
As long as unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material over internet is illegal, this is a direct consequence. No news, really.
Well that's the point. Here in Australia it is not illegal, but as we have no idea what laws these three are being charged under we can't make an informed protest.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ok, so whom is going to be the first to volunteer to put up their bail?
What's it worth to put your money where your music library is?
I think it should be Don Henley.... seriously.
Not sure about other states, but in WA they stick a sign on the roadside AFTER the camera which indicates you've passed thru a radar check. Sort of like giving you the finger :p. I've NEVER seen a sign before a camera.
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
Did anyone of you actually LISTEN to the music they're producing the last years? I love P2P because it allowes me to get only the good stuff. After I got that I burn it (the GOOD stuff) to a CD-R where I paid taxes for. That is the new business model here and nobody/nothing can/will change this evolution.
Whoever says that this isn't newsworthy, just remember that the philosophy being employed in the arrest of these teenagers is spreading to other parts of the world.
It would set a very bad precedent if these kids were jailed.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Let's say there is no IP, but there is no program that satisfies my needs. There is however a website that says I can put down $100 and either get a program with specified feature list within 6 months or get $110 back. If the price and "interest" are chosen correctly, I will be motivated to invest if and only if I need the software. Freeloaders will be able to use the software, but they will not get any customer support unless they buy it, and they will not be compensated for waiting. In the same spirit, manufacturers of "cheap knockoffs" will chip in to produce innovations. Or, fans of an artist will pay him/her to record a song.
Sure, this system has it's own problems. For example, some independent expert will be needed to verify that the new program fulfills the promise made to investors. Or, companies would have to establish their reputation. But the current patent/copyright system has problems as well.
Basically, without IP rights, inventors or engineers will still be compensated for their innovation, but the amount will drop off over time and nobody will be able to live off 20 year old inventions. They would have to keep innovating. The result could well be better for an average user/listener/consumer.
Living in Australia, I wonder how long it will be before the partially Government owned Telstra discovers that I've been downloading DeCSS (for playing DVDs I actually owned) and send police to lock me up in jail for 5 years.
Makes me sick when there are people who are actually comitting crimes that harm people and society aren't even getting jail terms.
The problem is that most MP3 downloaders also buy a great deal of legitimate music - and most credit their downloading as the proximate cause of their increased music purchases.
And then when the record companies come along and try to stop the "evil" downloaders, it is a little galling when you know full well that without MP3 downloads you wouldn't buy one tenth as much as you do.
Personally, I sort of hope the record companies do manage to stop all downloading - then they will go into the toilet that much sooner.
What exactly is the difference between the Aussie's crime and lending an (honestly purchased) record to a friend? Selling it second-hand? Taping the record before you sell it?
Clearly the artists must own the rights to their creations - but that does not guarantee they make money from it. When I buy a record I have bought the right to play it as often as I like, and for who I like. How could it be any other way?
fart/faart/(coarse) (v.intr.): emit intestinal gas from the anus. (n.): emission of intestinal gas from the anus.
For the curious, you can download (.pdf, .rtf):
the original act plus revisions
the copyright act amendment, known as the Digital Agenda
The reader will note that for the purpose of copyright infringement, actions that are not specifically allowed are considered to be infringing. Making .mp3's out of legally purchased CDs is technically an infringement, as it is not listed in the permissives, and not explicitly endorsed by (most) content producers.
More specifically, you can check another government site to learn what they interpret copyright infringement as.
I quote from the above: "Infringement of copyright can happen when works - such as paintings, books, computer software, films and music - are reproduced without permission from the copyright owners."
Ignorance of the law is no excuse..
you do well describing your OWN experience...which may or may not be similar to others.
i have bought quite a few DVDs. But a quick mental note of friends and famil (say around 30 households)...and almost to the last, very few are buying DVDs.
the ones that did buy, bought exactly for the reason you discounted.
to collect it.
lots of disney/pixar stuff, that will be played over and over and over.
one guy had all deniro films.
my aunt has 20 john wayne dvds.
another loves the imax dvds.
i agree with the rest of your post though.
"Ladies and Gentlemen,
"This is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wooky from the planet Kishic, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it. That does not make sense.
"Why would a Wooky, an eight-foot-tall Wooky, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks. That does not make sense. But more important, you have to ask yourself what does this have to do with this case.
"It does not make sense. Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and Gentlemen I'm am not making any sense. None of this makes sense. And so you have to remember when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No. Ladies and Gentlemen of this deposed jury it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit. The defense rests."
it's sure to work!
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
Please don't give me stupid arguments about civil disobedience to stupid laws. This is not civil disobedience. It is plain and simple copyright violation. You do have an alternative - RAISE YOUR VOICE. Write letters to the companies you consider to be perpetuating the situation saying "oh well, you know, IF you had a service that allowed me to download unrestricted music for a reasonable price, I'd go there". But no! You go on with the same stupid argument that "there is no place I can legally download music" to justify something that is not only ILLEGAL, but it is also WRONG.
To sum it up, go to listen.com, see the list. I mean, 10000 ALBUMS ON LINE NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU?
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
I'm in Cairns and I can tell you there is always only 1 sign approximately 3 feet from the camera van....always on the Southern Access Road.. :)
(how far offtopic can we get:)
Oh, we need to tell the music distribution industry we want their products delivered in another way and at a lower price. Why didn't anybody think of that? I am going to inform the conglomerates of this right away; I am sure they will be delighted to listen to my input. I am sure their current mode of operation is only due to the fact that nobody told them their business model is outdated, so how could they know?
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
Thanks for the reply.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Students don't have much of a disposable income, and are bound to be ahead on the technology curve. I don't understand why they're being persecuted, because they are the ULTIMATE consumers of the future.
Easy. The industry has always been short-sighted about this. All they know is that they've picked a target with little resources to fight back.
Don't like it? Don't buy their music. That's what I do, actually. If you care about changing the world, do it properly. Don't kid yourself that you are part of a revolution, you are definitely not.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Well, the page tells me I have to use a Windows computer so can take this service and shove it.
The first question this raises in my mind concerns whether or not the law that imposes such a penalty on copyright infringement is new. Was existing copyright law amended to allow for stiffer penalties, since the possible magnitude of copyright infringement only becomes greater with so much information available digitally? Even if the law is new, is it merely an extension of existing copyright law, but applicable to all copyrights? Does it affect only copyright law and not other aspects which may affect copyright infringement?
If the answer to an/all of the above questions is yes, then I think this is a good thing! It means that the large-scale infractions of copyright law are still capable of being dealt with by simple applications of current laws or laws that deal specifically with copyrights. It demonstrates that one does not need a law like the DMCA (or the so-called super-DMCA's) to protect the rights of the music industry (as much as we like to whine, they do have rights).
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Not that it means anything I suppose, but it's amusing how blatantly obvious it is that it's not the entertainers (singers, etc) but rather the **AA who are out for blood.
I wonder what would happen if one of their own were found to have a collection of unlicenced music. Any bets on if it would even see the light of day?
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
Is this the service where your music files will disappear from your computer when you stop paying? Or the one where you have to pay extra to burn songs to CD?
Thanks, but no thanks. I use Emusic.com - I get all MP3 I want for $10 bucks a month - no strings attached.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Agreed. The thing that gets to me is that I can get at more stuff, and I do, but I still buy DVD's on a whim and will go out to buy this and that DVD if I think it is really worth it. I simply don't see my use of file sharing as a crime severe enough to warrant a jail sentence. It's like jailing pot smokers. Over here, we have public coffee shops in which we do that undisturbed by the law.
No material is gone missing and I do not think I would buy less products if I didn't have file sharing. I'm not going to say 'on the contrary,' because I also don't believe that to be true. It just allows me to see more of what's out there and that makes me happy. I would never buy all that stuff.
It doesn't make it alright, but I sure benefit from it and I don't see anyone getting worse from it.
It's only availble to US citizens. What do you propose the rest of us do?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The article points out that a number of individuals were involved and that the copyright offences album covers. If they were copying covers as well as the music doesn't that tend to indicate that they may have had a fully fledged commercial pirate CD manufacture operation going? Not the same thing as a kid innocently downloading MP3s onto the PC in their bedroom.
And that's the answer to the likes of the RIAA. Laws are supposed to reflect the beliefs of society in general, not special interest groups. If society believes that the present copyright laws are a mistake, people must not behave like sheep.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
America is not the only country that has dollars you know...
This is unreal. I'm thinking it's about time we took to the streets.
BC
"Copyright infringements cause considerable financial loss to the music industry and the AFP are pleased to cooperate with industry bodies to investigate cases such as this which can amount to a serious breach of the law," Mr Negus said.
This just never made since to me. If the music industry is losing so much money how can they afford to be spending so much in searching out all of these people. Am I supposed to feel sorry for these companies who, though losing massive amounts of money still have enough to finance very powerful lobbyist and investigative groups? I would also like to know how they can assume what their "losses" are because of these activities. I personally do not keep a large stash of MP3s of CDs I do not own. There have been times that I have downloaded an MP3 of a song or 2 and that encouraged me to buy the groups CD. How do they figure that into their losses. MP3s are NOT CD quality and if you want CD quality you will buy the CD. I believe that a good quantity of people who file share download things they normally wouldn't buy to listen to a few times and or they just do not have the money to spend on the CDs. If this is the case they music industry isn't losing much at all. I could be wrong about this however, I just can not see it being as big of a problem for the music industry as they say. I think greed and power is occupying the minds of those music companies. If this is the case the only way to get them to stop is to damage their corporate pocketbook.Think about it...someone (not me) should write a new P2P file sharing system with really basic encryption (i.e., shift all characters one to the right) and then sue the RIAA into the stone age when they "crack" the encryption in order to go after pirates.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
I tend to get a lot of good stuff from IUMA. They have a way to buy the CDs from artists you like as well. Do folks know of many other sites like this (aside from mp3.com I guess)?
pvc
If it is short on details, who is Slashdot to make these presumptions? This is a little bit like unabashed Slashdot-style Microsoft-bashing, when not enough is known and the editors take their potshots at Microsoft anyway, driven by personal biases.
Then killing a large number of boneheaded politicians would make a dent in the weird laws that cropped up each year. This might be true, but if the French and American revolution are any guides then I doubt it. ON the other hand, for short term effect I suppose the Nuremberg trials and WW2 worked ok if you discount the staggering amount of power those politicians that were left had.
Lesson? Kill off the criminals and you just get fewer, more powerful criminals.
Along time ago RMS decided to fight proprietary software by introducing the GPL and free software and the Free Software Foundation. The FSF provided a great service, it was one-stop-shopping for GPL'd software. Anything you downloaded from the FSF is safe, free of imperial entanglements.
What we need is an new music format with several parts to it; the first part specifies the license for the file (in particular the creative commons license number), the second part is a digtal signature of some authoratative source, perhaps the CreativeCommons can do this, and the third part is the music itself.
If the CreativeCommons or some other authority could start digitally signing content which is 'free' then we will be well on our way to eliminating the RIAA and providing a justification for peer-to-peer browsers.
There are various laws, and various degrees of penalty - generally based on the criminal action. How you can in any way compare sticking a gun/knife/etc in somebody's face and physically removing a product - to downloading an Mp3 file (no physical product loss, no mental trauma) is beyond me.
Yes, a fine should probably be in order. Piracy really isn't the best solution, but jailing somebody for mp3's when there are real thieves (piracy != theft), rapists, murderers out there is ludicrous.
Now really... a headline comparable to yours would be if somebody walked into a music store and held them up for CD's, or perhaps - to a lesser extend - bought music online with a stolen CC
Can any reader from down under enlighten me as to the recent change in directions Australia has taken in the past 2-3 years? Everything from new export restrictions, DRM crackdowns like this, and immigrant internment camps are uncharacterisitic for what I thought was a liberal democracy. For someone that has never been there but listens to the news, this and many other recent changes amount to what seem like pretty drastic policy changes. What's going on?
Now morally speaking, of course, MP3 thieves deserve the death penalty, but that seems a little inefficient when a lesser deterrent will work just as well. Why don't they pass a three strikes MP3 law? Or mandatory *minimums* instead of maximums. It's worked with the crack cocaine problem - crack has been pretty much disappeared from our inner-city streets since we declared our war on drugs.
Donald Braman
I can't agree more. However, you look at the article, and it suggests that these kids were doing more than just freeing information: they may have been profiting from it:
" Police said the alleged piracy concerned music, album covers and music videos from Universal Music, Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Festival Mushroom Records."
The inclusion of covers on that list gives me the impression they were repackaging the cds, possibly to resell them.
It's hard to wave the "Information Wants To Be Free!" banner when you are profiting from cd sales yourself.
Whatever the case, though, 5 years is an absurd amount of jail time.
------ What's sadder than realizing you've filtered out your own comments?
jail time for students swaping mp3 files while Corporate CEOs and other top suits escape the law and get even higher paying jobs for stealing Billions for stock holders. Go figure.
-z(p)
Isn't that place already a penal colony, anyways? Where have I been?
So, take productive, tax paying, probably highly trained (computer geeks tend to be the biggest mp3 collectors) members out of your society, along with whatever money and goods they would be contributing back to the economy, and spend lots of additional money to store them in prision. Don't forget the fact that they will have a hell of a time finding work once they get out, couple that with the intensive criminal training they will receive by associating with known felons, and the end result is that you not only decimate your economy, but you breed a clan of highly intelligent uber criminals who would like nothing better but to run the state even further into the ground. Yeah, sounds like a plan. At least the RIAA will have enough money to hire 24/7 body guards to protect them when the world decends into anarchy... Well, at least until one of those newly trained bad guys gets his home made rail gun up and running...
Dude, you need help :).
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I'm sorry, but people with that kind of attitude shit me: what would he have done if one of those drivers decided not to be a sheep and ran him down?
Some rules and laws exist to keep people safe. DMCA? Go for your life. Don't be a sheep in that respect. But if you think that by not walking out into the middle of the road in traffic you're being a sheep, and that that's a bad thing, then you're a moron.
Show some respect for your fellow man. Be a sheep, but in the good sense of wanting to help others out.
Just remember: if you do walk out into that road because you're not a sheep then you better watch out, as I might just drive into you, with thanks to your "vision".
However, if you decide you're not going to be a sheep and allow blacks onto your bus, then you may still need to watch out, because you're bound to piss someone off, but I might just be there to look out with you, with thanks to your "vision".
That's actually exactly what I do. I haven't bought a CD since I received one as a gift that wouldn't play on my computer's CD-RW drive - both the CD and the drive (which was the only player I had) carried the CD logo, but the CD had been broken by IFPI (I have since come across another such disc (how about that, they can't even spell disk properly), borrowed from a friend. Of course, the loss in sales is just more fuel for the distribution industry's crusade, so I think us `revolutionaries' are a bit fsck'd anyway.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
I always found down shifting and reving the engine a better deterent to jaywalkers. If you kill them then they won't learn nothing. Even if they don't change their ways, at the very least they tend to pick up the pace and dive for the sidewalk as I swerve in their direction.
Of course it's illegal here. We're part of the Berne Convention. In fact some of our copyright laws are even stricter than in other countries eg. no fair use exceptions for time or medium shifting. In the letter of the law, it's illegal for me to rip my CDs to my iPod, although of course this is never enforced, and can't be anyway.
Info about AU copyright laws here: http://www.copyright.org.au/
I think it's pretty obvious that this is a troll...
It is unlawful for you to violate copyright. It is not illegal. The two are very different things. However, in Australia it is illegal for you to sell unauthorised reproductions. The difference between unlawful and illegal is easy: unlawful is where someone can sue you, illegal is where the police can arrest you and you can be fined or go to jail.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The troll mod was for blatant generalisation (My tax dollars should be supporting my family and friends and countrymen, not some "refugees" who didn't bother applying for visas and can't back up their claims of discrimination in their own country.) not political opinion. Posting as an AC doesn't really help your cause either.
Well - the US legal system is pretty bad too.
:-)
We are just dealing with the criminalization of the computer industry that is all
Ignorant people are doing ignorant things.