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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."
Of course, it's not clear what side of the fence the accused stand on.
It's funny how officials think they should give a few people the maximum sentence to 'act as a deterrent'. That's like saying we should kill 10 jaywalkers a year randomly, and when we do we'll paste their pictures all over the TV, with remorseful family shots, etc. Jaywalking? This is what it gets you!
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/24/10507773 42470.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-998132.html
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.
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.
I guess I'll play devil's advocate ...
... no one has been deprived of anything if I never intended to buy the CD anyway.
... who wants to pay $17 for 3 good songs and an hour of crap you'll never listen to? Not every good song becomes a single, after all. Maybe the industry should look into letting people download legal tracks and make their own CDs without filler crap that they'll never listen to and don't want to pay for ... and make the price reasonable. Sounded good up until that last part, huh?
... well, I doubt it would stop piracy, but it certainly couldn't hurt.
Consider the following two items:
1) I am not a customer of the music industry. Even if I'd never heard of an mp3 I would not buy music. Period.
2) Stealing, by definition, means taking something from another without permission. The core idea is that by taking this item, you deprive the rightful owner of the item of its use and value.
Now, assuming point one is true -- that I'd never buy music -- then my downloading mp3s is taking nothing from anyone. In that case I'm not downloading music INSTEAD of buying it, I'm downloading it just because it's there. If it wasn't there and "free" I'd just do without.
So we get to point two. Let's say I come to your house and you have your dead mother's Harvard degree hanging on the wall. I take it. You'd be justifiably angry. But what if I just took a picture of it? Then we both have a copy. What if I stole your car? That'd suck. What if I somehow duplicated it without inconveniencing you in any way? I doubt you'd care unless you're just a big meanie.
It's not as if I download an mp3 and it's MINE MINE MINE and only mine
My roommate downloads songs all the time. Then he buys the CD if he likes the music and there's not too much crappy filler material
And what if he buys a CD and HATES it? Can't take it back after it's been opened, that's a no-no. So he downloads the stuff, listens, and decides based on that whether to get the CD (he was way over a hundred, compared to my zero -- I'm just not a music person).
I bet there are a lot more people like him (and like me) than there are people who "steal" just for the fun of it. The music industry MAKES money because he "steals" music. If the music industry would get with the times and stop waging war against its customers
Perhaps I'm missing something here but how does this differ from a story with the headline:
Liquor Store Robbers Face Possible Jail Term
Yes you are missing something.
It is common place for robbers to be sent to jail. However, this is new. Australian teens facing jail for mp3s related crimes is ground breaking.
Your missing something else. You fail to take into account the spirit of the law. In most countries, when a law is applied, not only is the letter of the law considered but the spirit as well. Was it this law's intention to target and prosecute small infractions (such as teens trading mp3s or people recording radio shows and sharing them with friends)?
Additionally, there is the matter of public policy. In many cases public policy out weighs the techinical implications of the law. Generally it is against public policy to enforce a law that would deem a large percentage of the population criminals.
You must realise that the law is not a set of rules that can be executed like a computer program. The law is open to interpertation by reasonable minds. Simply applied to the letter, the law (in any country), would land most of us in jail.
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
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.