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Freenet Creator Debates RIAA
smd4985 writes "Over at CNET News.com, there's a good coverage of a debate between Ian Clarke of Freenet and Matt Oppenheim of the RIAA." In discussing whether it's "legal and moral to create and use Freenet", which is "a radically decentralized network of file-sharing nodes tied together with strong encryption", the RIAA's Oppenheim suggests: "Other than the fact that most infringers do not like to use Freenet because it is too clunky for them to get their quick hit of free music, it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services."
I think the RIAA is in over its head, again. "At the end of the day, we believe we can find infringers regardless of what network they use to try to cloak their illegal activity." HA HA HA HA HA.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
freenets don't trade music, people do.
Some interesting comments in here...
It seems that Mr. Oppenheim likes to contradict himself. Observe:
He says: "By the way, the term "file swapping" is inaccurate. Nobody is swapping, people are making copies.", but later in the same paragraph says "Just as we would never agree that it is right to steal someone's clothes or furniture, it is not right to steal music." I think his second assumption is safe to make, but if he worded it in a way that was consistent with his earlier comment, would it still be as universally accepted? Sure people would protest if you stole their furniture, but would anybody see it as wrong if you copied their furniture? He's right about people breaking the law, but he should at least get his story straight.
I also thought this was interesting:
"Why should copyright holders, who as owners of intellectual property, have fewer rights than somebody who owns televisions or clothing and attempts to sell them? Clearly everyone would agree that the television and clothing retailers should be able to investigate and prosecute shoplifters."
Sure, store owners should be allowed to prosecute shoplifters, but they have to catch them in the act. Nobody should be forced to produce a receipt for their stuff weeks later because the store thinks they're short an item and they have a security camera shot of you looking at it. The question really should be "Why should copyright holders have more rights than somebody who owns clothing or televisions and tries to sell them?"
It seems that even when the RIAA is right (people really are breaking the law and infringing the rights offered to their members by copyright) their propaganda is more important to them than their real and legally defensible position.
If a legal structure such as copyright isn't enforceable, it might as well not be part of our legal system, and indeed will be thrown out.
I think often people too often focus on law and morality in a vacuum and forget that, to a large degree, *might makes right* in our society. To some degree our legal system attempts to fairly distribute power in society (often with 'fairly' defined by those who already have power), but it operates under fairly tight constraints on what sort of distribution of power is enforceable. Freenet is huge for the long-term prospects of copyright laws; if Freenet survives they will be forced to radically change in the upcoming years.
Right here on Slashdot.
Clarke: Matt seems to misunderstand Judge Posner's quote. Posner was referring to those involved in the likely "shady dealings"--not the creators of the tools they are using. To use his own analogy, the manufacturers of a mask used in a bank robbery are certainly not responsible for the criminal behavior of the bank robbers. This notion was reaffirmed by Judge (Stephen) Wilson earlier this year in his ruling in the Grokster case as it pertains to P2P networks saying, "Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
Well that's still not a perfect analogy. For example, if the company added a feature to the ski mask that made it harder to pull off, and advertised this feature for use in bank robberies, they'd probably be held liable for its use in a robbery. Or if they didn't advertise it, but did know that the new feature's overwhelming use would be in bank robberies, then they might also be liable. You could make a similar statement for VCR and copy machine manufacturers.
I think Freenet's a really cool technical problem, and I'd get involved in it, except for these kinds of problems. Even with all its positive uses, the idea of working on what turns out to be an ideal tool for distributing kiddie-porn just gives me the willies. I personally don't feel comfortable in this gray area of providing complete anonymity. A system that had the same benefits of distributed publishing (to avoid the Slashdot effect) without the encryption, I'd be interested in contributing to.
I think Mr Oppenheim could surpass his previous accomplishments by making Freenet available to the Open Source developer. Their dedication and long-term would be vital for the growth of such a peer-to-peer network on a global scale within an extended period of time.
The RIAA obviously sees Freenet as dangerous threat bigger then when it encountered the file-attachment Network in Zambia or the "Open FTP" criminal ring in lower-Slovakia. The Open Source developer community would be an impartial moderator in this long-term battle while adding support for BSD and Ogg Vorbis.
Only when create a global database of international ID3 tags can we overcome the low quality musical output from BMG.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
When the RIAA feels threatened it just gets it's lawyers after people, with freenet who will they go after?
Not customers, infringers. Guess we lost the right to a name too...
So now people who download illegal MP3s are crack junkies?
"Man... I'm jonesin' for my latest fix of Metallica... gimme the good stuff!"
IAALS.
...as I use it to grab a lot of stuff. It would be a real pisser if they recognised what it could do to them and shut it down before it was (technically and mind share wise) ready to go underground.
Beep beep.
There are millions of driving related accidents and homicides that take place every year across the world. Bank robbers, car theives, and demolition derbies cause the cars to be used for reasons other than they were originally intended.
My question: Where are the lawsuits against GM and other car manufacturers for providing tools of crime? Why aren't we going after the root of all evil, the car manufacturers? Why is it that we still see cars all over the planet?
Just think about it ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I have to say, I don't really like freenet now, but there are still some very very cool ideas in it that I think we'll see evolving into something more practical over the next few years, maybe by the guys at freenet, but maybe not. Personally I have great respect for Ian Clarke for having the guts to start in on a project this large and also for the fact that it's resulted in a product which is right now useful in its own right even if it's not as good as it could(/will?) be.
So freenet is an ethical dilemma? Next thing you know, we won't have our right of free speech!
Oh wait, nevermind....
I thought Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf had gone to work with Al Jazeera. Have we been misled?
Why does 'Oberführer Von Oppenheim' keep popping into my head?
Beep beep.
"Just as we would never agree that it is right to steal someone's clothes or furniture, it is not right to steal music.""
It was impossible to steal anything with Napster. It is impossible to steal anything with Kazaa and Freenet. You'd think he'd know the definitions of words better.
Other than the fact that most infringers do not like to use Freenet because it is too clunky for them to get their quick hit of free music, it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services.
Really, Mr. Oppenheim? I don't think you understand exactly *how well* Freenet preserves anonymity. It is *impossible* to tell where any given file is coming from over Freenet, due to the fact that data is scattered and encyrpted across the network.
With Freenet, you *can't* go after filesharers, because you don't know who the filesharers are? What are you going to to do? Take every single freenet node to court?
You'd most certainly lose that battle, Mr. Oppenheim. Just like the courts ruled that Kazaa could not be taken down because it has legimitate, uses, so to does this apply to Freenet.
And if you succeed in scaring people off the gnutella and kazaa, this is just where the hard core will turn: Freenet and distributed systems like it.
Give it up, Mr. Oppenheim. Your days of controlling music distribution are numbered.
We, the citizens of the Internet, will prevail.
My journal has hot
"
"Why should copyright holders, who as owners of intellectual property, have fewer rights than somebody who owns televisions or clothing and attempts to sell them? Clearly everyone would agree that the television and clothing retailers should be able to investigate and prosecute shoplifters.""
Why should the owner of a TV have more rights than the owner of a CD?
Copyright owners shouldnt own the information, they should own the right to profit from it.
Just like the TV maker doesnt own the TV once they sell it to you, they own the rights to sell that TV and profit from it.
What I dont like is the fact that as we buy information we dont truely own it, yet when we buy physical objects we own them. This makes no sense to me, I say if we buy music we should be able to do whatever we want with it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
making Freenet available to the Open Source developer
e enet/freenet/
i know you are trolling but if you can't find the source its not for you
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/fr
"it (Freenet) is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services."
The tone of that statement seems to imply that P2P is not a threat to the RIAA... which seems contrary to their entire defense.
I have to say, the Freenet guy came across very well in that debate since he was able to flow between humor and fact. The RIAA really needs to hire some PR people that don't seem so angry all the time. As long as they keep up this approach to PR, the more the public is going to go against them.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
They do recognize it as a threat, but they can't say "Freenet is the most dangerous P2P app out there, because it protects the user's anonymity! If everyone used it, we'd be in even bigger trouble!" because then everybody would start using it, and they really would be in bigger trouble. The RIAA shill describe Freenet as "clunky" to the average user more than once in that interview. He's simply trying to keep any average Joe's reading that article from making the switch from KaZaa.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Why can we share physical objects, but when we treat information as physical objects suddenly we dont get to own the information we buy the right to use it in.
The RIAA wants absolute control over information and thats like TV and Car companies having absolute control over what you do with your car and TV after you buy it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I think Mr Oppenheim could surpass his previous accomplishments by making Freenet available to the Open Source developer
Oppenheim is the Sr. Vice President for the RIAA's Business and Legal Afairs.. how do you figure he could surpass his previous accomplishments by doing this?
Karma Horing while on crack?
---
If money can't buy happiness, I guess you'll just have to rent it.
I think Clarke really hits the nail on the head when he says:
"Just as the motor car replaced the horse and cart, so will the Internet replace most of the roles performed by today's recording industry."
The whole RIAA rant is useless because the RIAA is on its way to obsolesence. They can hip and holler all they want, but in 15 years they won't even exist. Even the legal system and/or Congress won't be able to protect them for long - we live in a capitalist society, and in the end efficiency rules.
smd4985
In the article he suggests that the term file swapping is an incorrect usage since "file-swappers" are actually copying files and not swapping them. But in his earlier response he deems the usage of P2P networks as "stealing" music. When are they going to get it through there heads and people who download music are NOT stealing anything??!?? They may be infrining on copyright, but there is no theft involved.
News.com: Is it moral to create a general-purpose, anonymity-preserving tool--a file-swapping system that can be used for good (publishing political tracts) and ill (trading copyrighted music)?
Clarke: If it is moral to make guns, knives or anything else that can be used for both good and ill, then it is certainly moral to create something which tries to guarantee a freedom that is essential to democracy.
Doesn't it seem a little silly to divide everything in the world into exactly 3 categories: those that can only be used for good, those that can only be used for bad, and those that could be used for either? Doesn't it make sense to say that there are some things that are much more often used for good than for bad (e.g. knives), so they're fine? And some, such as guns, where the trade-off is a lot more questionable? (So in most countries they are significantly regulated.)
Freenet may eventually contain a political treatise from the oppressed citizens of a dictatorship, but it will probably contain copyrighted songs, movies, porn, etc. by a factor of a hundred thousand to one. Supporting anonymous political speech is more good than illegal copying is bad, but by a factor of 100,000?
Let's show some humility here.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Nobody takes the copies of "Crossroads", though. :-(
Do car companies sue you when you share your car with other people by giving people a lift? Do car companies require each person you give a ride to, to pay a license fee?
I hate the fact that if we are going to treat information as physical property, that unlike real physical property, in which the person who buys it truely owns it, when it comes to information theres a double standard, the person who buys it actually is paying to listen to it, and its in a very strict fashion
In my opinion no company has a right to tell you how to use something you paid for.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Funniest Quote:
RIAA's Oppenheim: "How does this have anything to do with corporations? This has to do with artists and creators"
Yeah, Right... Last time I checked, the RIAA web site stated that it "is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry", not the artist community.
Why do I h8 apple?
Corporations are getting filthy rich from the artists' will to express themselves. Remember that Napster's website spewed random quotes from popular artists who not only thought that music file-sharing was a great idea, but it helped the artists, rather than hinder them.
OMG! Wau!
In the 80s Mobile phones were dismissed as 'too clunky'. Shut up, lie down and let the gentleman take the measurements for your coffin already you cretin.
(I've got a sneaking suspicion that this CD I've just bought has some sort of "protection" on it, seeing as I've spent the past few hours booting cdparanoia in the head. I'm a wee bit fucked off. Can you tell?)
discussing whether it's "legal [and moral] to create and use Freenet"
Of course it should be legal to use freenet.
There must be a distinction made between making acts illegal because they are bad and making things illegal because they can be used to do bad acts.
Driving very fast is dangerous and can kill. That does not mean we should make cars illegal. That would be ridiculous because cars are useful and can also be used for good/useful acts. It also does not mean that cars should be technically capped so that they can't go fast. The existance of laws against the act of fast/dangerous driving should be enough.
We get onto more morally interesting ground with this argument with guns. According to my argument, surely guns should not be banned because the existance of laws against shooting people should be enough? My argument to that would be simple - guns can't really do anything useful other than kill and main, so in the case of guns it is reasonable to ban the technology. Does that mean that it is reasonable to ban DeCSS, as that can only really usefully be used for illegal purposes?
Damn, now I've confused myself. I'm just going to lie down for a few minutes...
In the physical world, you buy the physical object and you own that object.
Why should music be any different? Why the hell should we buy licenses to use music in the way they tell us to, we dont really own shit do we? I think its wrong. I mean ok when people buy music on CD you can say you were selling the CD and not the music, fine.
But when music companies literally sell an Mp3, which is pure music in its digital form, what right do they have to tell us what we can and cannot do with that mp3? We paid for the mp3 right?
Its these double standards that piss users off.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Hmm... I think I should become a troll... ah yes, I am pretty good at coming up with random stupid trollposts, maybe. :)
I trolled steampowered.com before, it was great fun, everyone else though so too
I know this point comes up countless times, but just because something can send files doesn't make it illegal. If anything, Freenet is less of a threat than both FTP and HTTP for sending around MP3s/videos, as it was not particularly designed to send large files. FTP and HTTP aren't illegal, so why should Freenet be? There is no reason any file sharing system should be illegal unless it's intent is for piracy (which is why Napster got in trouble, due to the emails floating around about that fact. Why aimster got in trouble, I still don't understand and I hope they win on appeal).
Oppenheim seems to suggest that Freenet is just as much a threat as any file sharing tool, no matter the fact that it's "clunky". I've always thought that the best the RIAA can hope for is to make this kind of music piracy clunky, as there will always be some sort of file sending service and copy protection can always be broken (audio-in to audion out). The RIAA and the music industry need to come up with realistic view of the world, before they lose all their sales to services like Kazaa.
"Just as we would never agree that it is right to steal someone's clothes or furniture, it is not right to steal music."
"I choose to steal what you chose to show"
I'll steal your fire, too!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Suppose I have a friend over for dinner and I'm listening to a burned copy of a CD I legally own. It's playing over the stereo in the kitchen.
I get up and leave the room, needing to go check on the burgers on the grill. My friend is the only one listening to the music.
Is this copyright infringement, because my friend is listening to a copied CD that I'm willingly playing for him? I've made an authorized copy and I'm playing it for a friend - that's all I've done so far.
Suppose we take it a step farther. My friend really likes the band, and he swipes the CD while I'm not looking. I don't notice because I was too busy fiddling with the burgers, and he switches on the radio in it's place. Am I guilty of copyright infringement because my friend's taken my CD, or is he guilty of theft from me, for which I'm certainly not going to prosecute if I ever find out, or is my friend guilty of copyright infringement, taking a legal copy of a CD from me?
I'm lost on where the copyright infringement happens in this situation. If it happens while my friend is listening to my music, virtually every CD owner everywhere is guilty of copyright. If I'm guilty when my friend takes my CD, *I* become guilty of copyright infringement for the sins of my friend; and if my friend is guilty when he takes my CD, then he's going to be the most heavily prosecuted thief in the world: when's the last time a shoplifted was prosecuted for illegal possession of a copyrighted work?
If there's NO copyright infringement at all in this situation, then what happens if I set up my computer to transfer files, I've got legal copies on my computer, and someone else takes them without me having given explicit permission?
The RIAA representative feels very strongly that people should not steal anything, be it songs, movies, chairs, etc...
However, at one point in the debate, he mentions that some people distribute the Bible on Freenet and dismisses that saying, "we can all get that from the motel we most recently visited..."
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but those Gideons Bibles found in motels are supposed to stay in the motels, right? I always thought that you were not supposed to take them. Now I know that many people do take them, but isn't that considered stealing? So didn't the RIAA representative just suggest that we should all steal Bibles from our local motels rather than get them online from Freenet?
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
I feel roughly the same way about FreeNet as I do about Java itself. I really like the concept but hate the implementation. The one time I tried to get FreeNet up and running it was a painful, painful process, and then it munched up far too much memory.
Have these issues been addressed? Is it going to remain a Java-only effort or is the spec such that an implmentation in another language is do-able? What about the installation process. Is ease-of-install and/or configuration a priority?
Finally, what are the prospects for a firewall-friendly type of P2P application? Both at work and at home, I'm stuck behind NAT boxes. I'd like to be able to be part of a network like this, but FreeNet and other similar things seem designed for always-on, non-NAT boxes. In theory it should be possible to design a program so that it can both download and upload from behind a NAT, using some kind of polling-type mechanism for the upload-side. Has anybody put any effort into this? I'm sure the number of users would jump if something similar were made available.
From what I've seen, Freenet is not about "trading files". Oh, that's a part of it, to be sure, and perhaps what it's built around.
But Freenet is about freedom of information. How many times did Clarke have to repeat that? It's a way for a person in China to be able to say to someone else "Maybe it's just me, but our government is less a socialistic ideal and more a dictatorship." It's a way for a teenager to say "I think I'm pregnant, but where I live I'll be stigmatized if I have an abortion, or even look for one - what information is there for me?" It's even a way for a programmer to say "You know, I've got this idea for a cryptography system, but some people in certain businesses might sue me if I even talk about it (whether it's legal or not) - so here's a way to present the information without getting myself in trouble."
That is what Freenet is about - not trading music, or movies, or the like. Yes, it can be used like that - the same way a car can be used to run someone over. Last time I checked, though, most people are just using their cars to get stuff Point A to Point B.
I think the gentleman from the RIAA either didn't get the point - or didn't care (and I believe the latter). In his mind, privacy is not important - though I'd agree with Mr. Clarke. Anonymous exchange of information is important in a democracy. It allows people to speak without fear of reprisal. Without it, people would be terrified to vote for fear their enemies would hunt them down and chop off their limbs. (I had a roommate who was so irritated that Clinton the first time, he wanted to go down the street and beat up people he discovered had voted for him. I was grateful for "secret ballots" at this time.
Eh - but that's just my take. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
If I were a storeowner, I can keep an eye, literally, on all my merchandise
You must have some really messed up eyesight. How do you deal with all those eyes lying around?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The VCR Record button is illegal. "If you don't own a license... blah, blah, blah".
This is all about control. The RIAA's sponsors *control* over the market and the artist. Better jump on the iTunes bandwagon or face extinction.
Clarke clearly does not care about illegal use of his system due to an obvious religious zeal for free and anonymous speech (which, as an American it's hard to disagree with).
Oppenheim, on the other hand, completelely (and obviously willfully) ignores the idea that the debate is about anything other than the protection of IP rights; Corporate control of government and free speech aren't even issues worth discussing to the RIAA (gee, wonder why?).
Still, though I'd hardly call this a debate, it's nice that someone beside the directly involved parties still cares enough about these issues to present both sides.
Matt made a nice analogy early on (well, I thought it was nice even if I dont like the outcome) of how bank robbers cant scream about privacy when their masks came off as they understood (in theory) what they were getting into, and the same goes for p2p nodes who are sharing illegal material and have been notified via the TOA from their ISP that they will be ratted out if there is a request. I dont agree with it, but its an interesting analogy.
Now my question is, how can trading mp3s of R.Kelly and Britany Spears be considered free speach (which was the argument that Clarke used in the second question for freenet's existance)? Step aside from the mentality of "I want to get free music" and "the RIAA is full of $hit and we need to undermind them as much as possible" and consider how is this justified as free speach? If they are going to win, it has potential to be with that.
Last but not least, if freenet has a basis to stand on free speach being protectable over mp3 copyright infrengement (not theft Matt... the US Courts dont see it as theft), then the argument *could* turn towards Phil Zimmerman and how PGP came under fire in the mid 90s which I believe was for similar reasons.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
But. Not. All. Trolls. are stalled at the evangelistic phase of development. Some have been truly enlightened, but still choose to display the goat as a recognition of their faith. In such cases, it is not neccessary, nor desirable to disguise the link.
"News.com: Do corporations right now have too much power to investigate alleged copyright infringement online? Where should the line be drawn?"
"Oppenheim: How does this have anything to do with corporations? This has to do with artists and creators. Artists and creators, like anybody else who creates something, should have the right to sell what they create..."
Correct me if I am wrong, but the artists are not the ones running around suing people.
If you don't stop reading this right now you owe me $1,000. Send check or money order too...
This almost seems like a pointless debate. The RIAA will never hold any position other than "all P2P networks can be used for is to share copyright protected works." Debating them on the power of Freenet to allow disidents to speak freely is in pointless IMHO. The RIAA has absolutely no concern about this they are simply trying to maintain the money making ability of their member companies.
I would also argue that the RIAA has no interest in debating the ability of P2P networks to distribute uncopyrighted material as that dilutes the power of their current distribution models.
If you have doubt about Freenet license, in the readme (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/fr eenet/freenet/README?rev=1.47&content-type=text/vn d.viewcvs-markup) I read "1.2 Copyright-(c) Copyright 1999-2002 The Freenet Project Inc Released under the GNU Public License Version 2"
Say what?? Is this guy for real??? How in the hell does he figure that? Does that mean then if I do something that masks my I.P. that I would then have the same Constitutional rights that the bank robber with the gun has? And if I don't, that somehow I have fewer rights as an American?
well, you do bring up some good points.
there is definitely a decline in the trolling quality these days. the goatse ascii art and abovementioned 'gay nigger' stuff is truly boring.
however, i will stand up for the goatse link. and i'm not talking about the lame tinyurl redirect, i mean the good old-fashioned goatse link. a creative injection of this link still makes me smile. it's not that i believe that anyone will really click on it, but if the poster shows a novel way of using the goatse link, i feel some hope that trolling is still alive.
as for you, let's hear some constructive input. telling us what not to do is not the answer. lead by example. show us the light. i want to see an original troll. something that we trolls can be proud of. something that will get rated UP before it gets rated down*. something that will get a hundred hot-headed mac zealots to respond before they realize they have been trolled.
*for those of you lameass regurgitation trolls (like mao_che_minh), you are utterly uninteresting. please kill yourself.
Read the rest of this comment...
_
Not everyone likes to break out a dictionary and reveal every technical aspect of a word. When generalizing, it is easier to say "you are stealing music" then "you are infringing upon this record label's copyrights by downloading copied music". When most people think of stealing, they think of people taking stuff that isn't theirs. They don't worry about the technical aspects of actually depriving someone else of physical property. I.E. they aren't nerdy like you, and hence will not take the time to break out a dictionary to see if the use of the word "stealing" is absolutely the most correct word to be used when explaining music theft.
When music theieves try to attack the technicality of the RIAA's rhetoric, such as trying to say that the word "stealing" isn't correct, they end up looking like a kid that got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and is trying to manipulate words and circumstance to somehow make himself look either innocent or "less guilty". This behavior reveals to judges and intelligent people just what kind of a person they are dealing with.
You shouldn't steal music. It's illegal. It deprives the RIAA their rightful profits. It doesn't matter if "the RIAA sucks dude, and they made a lot of money of the artists, so what's a few MP3's to them!?!". I don't endorse Microsoft's tactics, so I don't buy their products. I don't pirate their software either, because I'm a law abiding person, and not a petty thief.
Second of all, if a clothing store wanted to, it could go to your house, and say "show us the receipt for the shirt you're wearing or we'll take you to court," and if you didn't show them the receipt, they could file a lawsuit.
I'd love to see a clothing store try to do that. Is there any particular relevant law that they would be using to prosecute you? (Note there's no law that I can think of that would allow the filing of a lawsuit [which is civil tort as opposed to a criminal case which is what shoplifting is].)
There is absolutely no parallel between the two as there is no "license" attached to a shirt. (This has to do with the fact that there is no "property" atached to the song.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
So what, sharing is still right.
When a speaker transmits sound to a group of people at a party, its illegal!
None of them own the CD and paid for these songs.
Is it right? Yes its right to share music. Its just illegal.
You share TV as well, and I dont hear anyone debating if thats right or wrong because the TV companies arent suing everyone left and right. If TV companies installed cameras in your home and fined you every time more than one person was in front of your TV, you'd think it was right because its the law. The law is always right to people like you.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
as you will see, buying a CD in the store is NOT a "licensing" purchase, you sign no license agreement. IT's not about a license.. it's about COPYRIGHT LAW.
Copyright law gives you some freedoms with the work you just purchased. You are not required to keep your proof of purchase around forever, sorry
we're not talking about corporate software licensing here, we're talking about buying cds and records in the store, which is a standard, normal sale...
I repeat, there is no license agreement... implied or otherwise. The only reason you cannot make copies of the product you bought and sell them to others is because copyright law says you can't, as you aren't the holder of the copyright.
Let me repeat that. I don't have to keep my receipts around. I can make a copy of a CD I bought, and throw the original in the garbage. I'm not breaking some law.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
The IRS asks you to provide receipts as proof of deductions or claims that you are making to change your tax liability.
They could care less what you are buying or if you bought it or not, they only care when you are claiming it towards your taxes.
They can use a visual inspection of your home as an attempt to prove that you may be underdeclaring your income (say you report an income of $25,000/year but have two Ferrari's in your front driveway that are registered in your name) but they can't simply order you to produce a receipt on any old purchase that you may have made.
DRM does NOT protect copyrights. DRM protects copy restrictions. Why? Well look at CSS as the case of DRM-light. It keeps the normal person from viewing out-of-region material or using non-approved viewers. It doesn't do a thing to stop the technically savvy copier/user.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Openheimer claims that P2P can't be used for political speech?
What about someone who types in Xenu? That sure as hell isn't available online (not without alot of hastle from clambake).
Not sure, but I believe that P2P networks could easily be configured to allow for searching the text of documents.
Oh yea, he claims that there is little potential for non-infringing use and that there is little non-infringing use, and most of it infringes music copyright? Bullshit. I had my entire hard-drive offering on Kazaa. Guess what the most common upload items were? Anything and everythingg rated triple-X.
Oh yea, there happens to be these guys called Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. Beethoven -- some 200 pieces. Mozart -- some 600. Bach -- some 1,200 pieces. That's a hell of alot of very popular non-infringing music (all of which is better than the best of the modern crap that you can get now).
Aside from that, Openheimer continued to fail to meet on the playing field. He always tried to make this interview about P2P apps like Kazaa. It was about FreeNode, not Kazaa. FreeNode is particularly designed for anonymous communication, not file-sharing...until it gets a search engine that's relatively fast, it will be poor for file-sharing.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
They wouldnt try to have complete and absolute control over us and over musicians. You cant buy any music, you just buy a license.
Musicians get to sell their rights away, and the RIAA gets to own all the music and issue out licenses.
I think thats bullshit, either the consumers or the artists should own the music. And no one should own the distribution rights. Everyone should be a distirbutor.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Legality and morality are similar and thus easy to confuse. Both are concepts that exist solely through collective agreement. Unfortunately they are not the same thing. Legality is the set of rules that the state defines to control its citizen's behavior, morality is the set of rules that citizens define themselves.
In an ideal world, the same thing, perhaps. In reality, often quite different. It is legal for a crook to pay expensive lawyers to try to keep him out of jail, but immoral. It is moral for a citizen to refuse to pay taxes to a government whose policies he disagrees with, but illegal.
And then, of course, legality depends on context, since laws are made and applied at many levels, from city to UN. Morality also applies at many levels, from the individual to the global community.
Very, very often these frameworks are incoherent and contradictory, and this is probably inevitable and even necessary if they are to accomodate the richness between and within societies.
The moral frameworks of the young, and old, for instance are quite often very different, and reflect the different viewpoints of the individuals within their societies. These differences are often striking. The young often rebel, the old often control. When many young people choose a certain behavior that goes against existing trends defined and enforced by old people, it is almost always illegal, by definition. That does not make it immoral.
Debating these is like debating one's favourite color. Blue! No, Red! BLUE!! RED, DAMN YOU ALL!!! Only there is often money and power at stake, as is the case with digital media and illegal (or immoral) copying and distribution.
What it comes down to is this: can the existing moral and legal systems accomodate and/or suppress the changes demanded of them by a discontended youth? Yes, no, maybe. If yes, how? If no, what will happen? Revolution, suppression, or disassociation (i.e. 'forking')? That should be the real debate.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Ok so, we all know that the artists make their money from shirt, shows, all that stuff, its only the record companies making money on CDs (and tapes)
So why not develop some sort of GPL for mp3's so that radio stations dont have to worry about playing the songs and legal entanglements, and artists can work on their own, sending music directly to the stations and end users, via p2p and web sites. Then use the same sources to promote their tours and shirts and hats and all that crap. We do away with the record companies all together, and the bands make the same amount of money they always have.
Since the record companies wont realize that lowering CD prices are a way to greatly slow piracy (i know if i could go buy the music i wanted for very cheap, even $8 a CD id do that rather than p2p)
The record companies are dieing, they are just to stupid to realize it and go get real jobs.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
This doesn't apply to material that requires a license. If you have the material, and you don't have a license, you have broken the fucking law. In the case of music, if you have the mp3's, and you don't have the CD or tape or whatever media you bought it on, chances are you pirated it. Yes, your original CD might have been consumed in a fire or stepped upon, but that is very unlikely all things considered, so if you want to run a discussion about how better to prove licenses, fine, but your argument lacks any thought or depth.
The problem here is that you are working from the opposite end of the fallacy. The RIAA presumes that because there is music available, it must be pirated. If I do have the CD and I have the MP3, I am still REQUIRED to defend myself against a charge of piracy.
The RIAA is acting on a presumption of guilt, not a presumption of innocence.
This is the fundamental reason that the proposed legislation last year allowing "copyright holders" (read that: RIAA/MPAA) to be held exempt from retribution for acts of vigilantism failed.
"Oops, this one doesn't have any copyright violations. Oh, well! We can plant evidence or just continue on. What are they going to do about it..."
As a last thought, let's apply your reasoning to other crimes. Ex: A man is found with a gun in his pocket. Another man is found shot dead near the first man. Using your reasoning, we can lock the first man up for murder, as, chances are, he committed the murder.
-------------------------
As easy as herding cats!
Show me the law, post a few links. I dont believe you.
If this law is true, we should have the right to use waste and share all our music and movies, because its a private performance.
If this is true, how can the RIAA be suing users of direct connect and other private networks?
"or inviting friends over to watch a new DVD."
Actually no you dont, I heard that alot of clubs have to pay the RIAA a decent sum of money to play music for crowds.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Something like "He who steals a Bible likely needs it more anyway"?
(I've got some Gideons as friends... maybe I should see if they'll send a carton to the RIAA for their leisure reading... perhaps with a little note in the front cover explaining that "God" is not an anagram of "RIAA", even in Hebrew, Greek, or what-have-you.)
I have been saying this for years now, The music industry had its wake up call years ago that people WANT digital delivery of music. They have failed and failed repeatedly to bring such a system. Finally, Apple has taken a step in the right direction. It has been shown that people will sacrifice quality for convenience (witness the unbounded success of lossy algorithms such as mp3 and ogg).
.flac file than download a crap ass mp3.
I may be alone, but i believe that people would spend considerable money to download music. First, the price must be right. 99 cents for a song sounds pretty damn good to me. 50 cents sounds even better.
As a lifelong music collector with over 50 crates of vinyl albums (no idea how many that is) and at least 100 gigabytes of mp3's, I can say that If such a system was in place, I would gladly pay to purchase digital music. I am not trying to cheat the system when I download music, I am trying to avoid ripping the vinyl that I have purchased. Vinyl must be ripped in real time. I could never rip my whole collection. It is just impossible.
My parents would pay for downloaded music. My sister would pay for downloaded music. My friends would.....
RIAA why are you wasting time going after these people. Present the world with a legitimate alternative and draw the line between criminals and law abiding downloaders.
Piracy hasn't hurt microsoft one bit. There will always be pirates and theives. You are not trying to sell product to them. The lord knows that I would rather pay for a
Yet here we are, 5 years down the road from napster, and a computer company has taken the initiative that the music industry is frighened to death of.
This is just further evidence that no matter how great the art form is, the BUSINESS of music SUCKS!
In the immortal words of Q-Tip
Industry Rule #5080 : Record company people are shady.
music lover since 1969
I don't want to be a spelling nazi, I just thought it was funny that you spelled "penetrated" as peneTRADED.
Freudian slip?
I disagree, the funniest quote is clearly:
And, just as the bank robber cannot be heard to complain when the guard pulls off his mask
I wondered first whether Mr. Oppenheim had ever been present in such circumstances, but then I thought more about his word choice: "heard to complain." Right, the complaints would be drowned out by the sound of gunfire from the now-unmasked robber.
How does this have anything to do with corporations? This has to do with artists and creators. Artists and creators, like anybody else who creates something, should have the right to sell what they create... Nice thought, except that the RIAA is mostly recording industry executives, not artists. The Board of Directors, if we are to believe http://slashdot.org/comments.plsid=68504&cid=62688 97, the BOD does not contain any artists.... Nice try guys, but dont claim to be the voice for fair rights of something you exploit..
Oh... and as far as the quote "If an individual subscriber opens his computer to permit others, through peer-to-peer file-sharing, to download materials from that computer, it is hard to understand just what privacy expectation he or she has after essentially opening the computer to the world." all i have to say is what individuals who set their uploads to 0 and do not wish to participate as hosts...
P2P piracy depends heavily on users who share a lot of stuff. They get a lot of cachet from doing so. Being identified with a huge collection of 0day material is a large part of their raison d'etre, and status in the scene comes and goes very easily, relationships are often shallow. As I understand it, Freenet means making part of your disk available, but never knowing what's on it. So what would be the motivation for the leet crew? They would have nothing to brag about, and no way to exert power by restricting access to their horde.
As for political speech, it also makes no sense. How would anyone search for political speech on a P2P network? Would you look for "democratic ideals as they pertained to the Bush tax cut"? For people that want to distribute political speech online, there are plenty of Usenet groups and chat rooms for them to use. The facts here simply do not support the theory that these networks are being used for "general purposes."
Ah I can tell someone has never used Freenet. The majority of content in Freenet is not really searchable, it's more of a blog-based environment. Freenet won't even release a tool to search it. A 3rd party had to. I think Matt has been using a bit too much KazAa if he thinks every P2P network has a little search bar on the side, with options for Audio and Video...
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Or do those motel Bibles really say you can take them home if you want? "Or, I have heard that the Bible gets distributed on these networks. Apart from the fact that we can all get that from the motel we most recently visited[...]"
Instead of focusing on the fact that 99.9% of Freenet's traffic is illegal music and porn, look at it from the other direction. Is there any other system out there that allows people to anonymously communicate with millions of people worldwide. If the answer is no, then it is unjustifiable to take away a system that has such obviously huge potential benifets for freedom of speech without providing an alternative.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
you are a fucker, and are about to be modded as such, biatch.
Oh, Anonymous Coward, it's all about the GOAT , with you, isn't it?
I'm having problems articulating what is wrong with creating a tools to break some other's country's laws (What if Columbia created a tool to ensure that all drug shipments were successfully smuggled into the States) but I would think respect of other country's laws/culture etc would be part of it.
I have a problem trying to push my views on others (and one of these views is that entertaining change is good) or make tools that help it along.
folks remember the detials about technology..
right now slashdot.rog is sharing a copyrighted html file with all the people who are using a browser to view it..
Have they broken the law? According to RIAA they have..we do not want to go down this error prone roda that RIAA wants to force upon us..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Question 1
Freenet: Thoughtful, valid answer
RIAA: It helps people steal music
Question 2
Freenet: Thoughtful, valid answer
RIAA: It helps people steal music, won't someone please think of the poor starving artists.
Question 3
Freenet: Thoughtful, valid answer
RIAA: It helps people steal music, but the term fileswapping is incorrect because they aren't swapping, they're in fact COPYING the music, and of course copying=stealing.
Question 4
Freenet: Thoughtful, valid answer amounting to "The RIAA's business model is fuxx0red and they will go away soon enough."
RIAA: He's STEALING OUR POOR ARTISTS' MUSIC, QUICK, ARREST HIM!!! WHY IS NOBODY LISTENING?!?!?!?!
Yes, I may have taken the liberty of condensing it down quite a bit......but its still dead on.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
There are holes in both sides' arguments.
If Freenet thinks its main role is going to be making nice things happen in China, and saving pregnant teens, he's either the most naive technologist who ever stepped into the sun, or he wins the Eddie Haskell award.
If the RIAA thinks they can find everyone, they're just as naive. They do have the law on their side on the face of it - and I would rather they find a way to pay-and-get in a modern fashion than bullying the world out of bad habits.
The videotape/VCR analogy loses here because you have to ship tapes around and make them in real time - it is economically obnoxious to do so, so everyone has a vcr, everyone tapes off the air / time shift views and virtually nobody ships tapes around to from their homes to anyone who wants it. The rental system does what we need in that regard.
So far, Apple's got it about as right as anyone has - we'll see if people actually will support it though - in this way the whole how-do-i-get-digital-music thing is rather like 'the prisoners' dilemma' - cooperate/gain a little and everyone gets someting - default, steal, cheat, or get greedy, and everyon gets screwed.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
How rehashed is this battleground? I've heard it all before, but until now it has been point by point. These guys have all their weapons memorized and can spout their propaganda in their sleep! Setting aside your own beliefs on this subject, (do you think /. means viewing the world from only your point of view?) take a look at what these polar opposites are saying and how they are saying it.
Does it sound like Oppenhiemer is cut and pasting corporate memos on how to talk to the public? Does it sound like Clarke is some hippie trying to spread free speech (flowers) to every corner of the mother goddess? Does it sound like two trolls flamebaiting each other until they're ready to take it outside?
These two guys are the archetypes of the two points of view on this subject. By siding with one or the other, can you see how you are painted with their brush? Do you want to be like either of them? Can you be different? Doesn't it make you want to be different? What a great article! I'm going back to read it again!!
One more reason to keep an eye on your money.
The RIAA is like the IRS they just collect the money. The IRS for the gov'mint.
The RIAA for the artist and record companies. The RIAA will go away when there are no artist or record companies to collect royalties for. And even if no new songs are recorded they will collect for all of the existing ones. They will be around longer than you. If you do not like their tactics I suggest you talk to their boss.
Any links to one thats written in EnGrish?
Of course, I realize there are a bunch of libertarians around here who want their guns and file-sharing. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
By any factor you'd like to define!
Essentially what your saying is that there is a cost associated with free speech, and that at some point, the cost of all those pirated materials will outweight the benefit of free speech for people who have none.
It's very easy to decide that you don't care about freedom because you can't put dollar values on it. However there is no more valuable "commodity" then freedom. Freedom of speech outweighs any amount of illegal filesharing. Copyright infringement cuts into the sales of business (both large and small), and that can be a very serious problem. But regardless of how bad this problem might become it is unacceptable to restrict free speech.
McCullagh invites Clarke, who hacks software that lets you network anonymously -- if for example you live in China and may be subject to persecution for authoring unacceptable political ideas -- to face off with... Oppenheim -- who tries to protect investments in the recording industry from kids listening to more music than they can pay for.
Why not invite somebody from the Ministry of Public Security to face off with Clarke instead? Perhaps CNet sponsors and investors worry more about people ripping off MP3s than they do about political prisoners. Perhaps investment-security-before-freedom thinking is why when Clarke writes, "Free communication is essential to free thought, which is essential to democracy," Oppenheim responds, "An individual who illegally distributes music on a peer-to-peer network..."
Consider for a minute the *real* effect of doing away with copyright *for personal use*. Ok, I'll grant that there would be less incentive for authors, composers, and the like to spend countless hours creating original work. But, there would be incentive. People would freely share the texts, music, movies but would still go to the cinema, go to concerts, buy books (just like they do now even when the same content is available for free). Keep restrictions for corporate/profitable use of the content.
Think about it...because whether we legislate it or not, this is where we're heading. I like it.
We all have seen the stereotypical musician on the street playing for donations. In times past, that was the norm; an entertainer would entertain and people would compensate them for it out of the goodness of their hearts (and maybe a bit of social/peer pressure). Have entertainers nowadays gotten so powerful and so full of themselves that they believe that everyone should be *required* to compensate them? If so, why should anyone be required to compensate them? If I'm not entertained, I don't want to pay money.
What artists and companies need to realize is that people *do* compensate them out of the goodness of their hearts. I buy CD's from bands I've known and liked even if I've never heard the CD yet... I do that to support the band. I go to their overpriced concerts where I'm a mile away to stand around and watch them play crappy versions of their CD's (no, not every musician is like that, but a vast majority are). If someone offered me a videotape of their concert, I wouldn't take it over going to see them, even though it would be just about the same thing. That's because I feel like I'm getting something and giving something when I go to a concert.
Basically what I'm getting at is that people would buy CD's to compensate artists if the RIAA and the more vocal artists would lay off. Peer/social pressure can work wonders.
Because both Waste and Direct Connect would be considered private performances.
So if people were to use these services, such as Waste, it would be impossible to sue them right? Its a private performance.
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RIAA's Oppenheim suggests: "Other than the fact that most infringers do not like to use Freenet because it is too clunky for them to get their quick hit of free music, it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services."
GOOD.
I hope FreeNet does more than just threaten, but that this putative threat actualises---the RIAA is a crime of lesa humanitas. The world will be a better place when the RIAA is gone, gone.
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Ah finally seeing the light?
Even here you struggle to convince yourself guns are evil because their only (in your mind) use it to kill and maim.
However, you do not seem to be able to rationalize why p2p, which (to copyright holders) is only used to spread copyrighted work, should not be illegal.
Guns can be used for sport. P2p can be used for sharing iso's. Both do have valid uses.
So, now we are down to a few options. We outlaw guns and p2p because both can be used for evil. Or we allow both p2p because though guns and p2p can be used for evil, they are not inherently evil, the users can be. Or we live with our dualism, the fact that we are a "me me me" (think seagulls in Finding Nemo "mine mine mine") society.
Personally I opt for option two.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
What I don't like about this article: its really just about two people who, for probably legal reasons, won't admit to whats actually happening or could possibly happen.
Every statement by both sides is partially true.
Every statement by both sides is partially false.
This article is boring and insulting to people who aren't polarized by this debate.
This article is boring and insulting to anyone who isn't an altruistic p2p software developer or capitalistic intellectual property owner.
The impression the words give is as important as the words themselves...
Methinks downloaders don't see P2P any different, other than it's more convenient to them.
"I think often people too often focus on law and morality in a vacuum and forget that, to a large degree, *might makes right* in our society."
Might does not make right in our society, the current presidential administration not withstanding.
It is much more accurate to say that "Possession in 9/10s of the law," which is what has the RIAA concerned -- once people actually possess something (like a CD), there's not much you can readily do to them without causing a lot of problems for yourself. The only real possessions that the RIAA and MPAA have that they don't want to be relieved of are well-known distribution channels and a sizeable income/profit-margin; the actual products have to go out to the consumers in order to ensure that the income continues to come in and that the distribution channels continue to have value.
Suffice to say, the RIAA is concerned that if they lose possession of their distribution channel, then they can kiss their profit-margins goodbye and be left possessing nothing. Hence, they cling to the concept of copyright violation, hoping to distract people from the simple fact that they could have been developing and improving and adding value to their distribution channel for years now (but haven't been).
Insight into this "9/10s" quirk is probably why the software business is all about the selling of nigh-intangible licenses that nobody can quite possess, regardless of how adept they are at using the software they've paid to use...
When I invite a group of people over and share my TV I still have possession of my TV.
When I share music via radio, I still own my radio.
When I share music via the computer, I still own the CD and computer.
When you play a DVD on your TV and you and your 100 friends watch it, hows it any different than sending that DVD to your 100 friends via the net?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
By Oppenheim (The RIAA guy).
Most of the noninfringing justifications for these networks that I have heard of are totally unrealistic and virtually nonexistent. For example, in Kazaa, they claimed that the system was used to trade jokes. Think about that. How would that work? Would people search for the punch line? Or, I have heard that it is used for posting real estate sales listings. Again, think about it. Would people search for "Main Street in Kansas?" Or, I have heard that the Bible gets distributed on these networks. Apart from the fact that we can all get that from the motel we most recently visited, there are plenty of legitimate sites that distribute the Bible online.
Does anyone else think it's strange that Oppenheim steals bibles?
"Or, I have heard that the Bible gets distributed on these networks. Apart from the fact that we can all get that from the motel we most recently visited,"
Stealing the bible from a motel... tsk tsk.
actually concerned with the facts, striving to support their viewpoints on a platform of reality.
This will be more like a monologue from the creators of FreeNet with a Diatribe by the stooge of the week from the RIAA. Their facts have been dis-credited, their illegal activities exposed and yet they continue to march along as if anyone believes the RIAA is anything but the "Good Fella's" of the record industry. Why anyone bothers is beyond me....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Why does the RIAA limit our ability to distribute? Because they know they wont be needed if we become the distributor.
This isnt about Artists or Consumers, its about the RIAA protecting their business. P2P is distribution, free distribubtion. The RIAA however wants control over distribution.
I'm not saying we should have a right to sell mp3s we didnt make, I'm saying we the people should distribute music, and musicians can profit from this in a number of ways.
Why do we need the RIAA to buy copyrights from musicians, distribute musicians music, and then make all the money from CD sales, when we can distribute the music, the musicians can keep the profits, and we can gain enhanced fair use rights.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
And taking a Bible from the motel would be called .....
Beginning to think the copyright trolls had taken over. We need another civil war! Down with IP!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
What, you say? I can't?
Nope. Printed Circuit Board artwork is copyrighted material. I might be able to mangle or modify the TV, but the minute I copy it, it's illegal.
Of course, if I lifted the schematic diagram from the PCB and made my own layout, it would again be legal. What a weird world.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Copyright law already prevents such uses.
Just as with a CD you buy at the store.
Then, I look at a successful online music sales like Apples iTunes Store... okay
You grab a track. It's not CD quality, but it's good, akin to a well encoded 160kbps mp3 or therabouts from what I've seen/heard. It does use a proprietary apple codec. Okay.
There is some DRM. So.. what does Apple say (granted, they are not the copyright holder).
iTunes lets you transfer it ot other computers a few times before it forbids it. It lets you burn a CD from teh same playlist 5 times before refusing again... and hey, you can always burn a CD from the music you grabbed, and just make copies all you want.
The point is.. it has casual DRM, and it's purpose is to bring the music they sell down to the same level as a CD in terms of piracy.. sure you can pirate it. They aren't making it easier for you to pirate music, tha'ts all... they also aren't really making it hard. They are just making it so that joe average who doesn't really care sees a few restirctions that probably keep honest people honest.
This is the kind of drm I don't mind... they aren't trying to re-invent the world, they are just taking some good-faith measures with regards to how they handle content.. and they are very up-front about what you can and cannot do. For some reason, I don' find it offensive at all. What bugs me more is the idea of paying a whopping $1 per song. Knock that back to 50c or gimme some special deals, and we're in business.
Make it easy... like this. Offer deals... after all, your incremental costs are small. Make it cheap enough, and we won't even be whining about our "rights" so much.. after all, us consumers only whine when things get inconvenient. We get pissed becuase they are trying to sell us broken CDs with DRM and other shit on them for $20, and then call us thieves for doing a little swapping... not just because DRM is there at all. If my choice is pay full price for a CD, or pay much less for online mp3-quality tracks with some restrictions that aren't too draconian, i'll probably spend way more online.
Ah finally seeing the light?
Even here you struggle to convince yourself guns are evil because their only (in your mind) use it to kill and maim.
Damn it no! My confusion was over DeCSS, not guns!
I live in Europe. In many countries in Europe guns are banned and/or are extremely difficult to get hold of. That is a good thing. I have never seen anyone carrying a gun that wasn't a police officer, nor do I know anyone that owns a gun. And before you start saying, yes but the criminals have guns, no they don't. Gun crime is extremely rare here.
So no, I have no moral and/or logical struggle when it comes to the fact that guns should be banned. And you will be really hard pressed to find anyone in most of Europe that wants guns to be legalised.
Rant over.
News.com: Is it moral to create a general-purpose, anonymity-preserving tool--a file-swapping system that can be used for good (publishing political tracts) and ill (trading copyrighted music)?
Oppenheim didn't really answer this question, nor has anyone else from the RIAA or any similar organization. Instead they put forward the assumption that all anonymous file-swapping systems are inherently designed for the sole purpose of copyright infringement.
If anonymity is truly necessary for free speech (as the courts have upheld), then isn't the anonymous trading of files an obvious side effect? Oppenheim also decided to completely ignore the fact that Freenet is being used in places such as China, where anonymity really IS necessary, and not "necessary" in some legalese definition, "necessary" as in "if the government finds you they will kill you". Does the RIAA honestly believe that pro-democratic Chinese dissidents should be denied an anonymous file-sharing technology simply because it can also be used to circumvent copyright? I'd love to hear them actually answer this question.
I know this is a little off-topic, but I thought the quote from Judge (Richard) Posner was interesting: "Willful blindness is knowledge, in copyright law...One who, knowing or strongly suspecting that he is involved in shady dealings, takes steps to make sure that he does not acquire full or exact knowledge of the nature and extent of those dealings is held to have criminal intent."
How is this different in copyright law than in criminal law? If this standard were applied to any number of high-level politicians, heads (of state) would roll!
Actually dude, you are wrong. I happened to be at a church one day to see a presentation by one of their representatives, and the Gideons very much encourage you to take Bibles from hotels if you're so inclined. They consider that spreading the word. Oh wait, it's probably the Word, no? In any event, while it doesn't specifically say that you're free to take them, that is the intent of the Gideons if you are so moved by the Word. ShaunDon
don't you know?
by the time CD's can be played remotely, the devices that play them will only run under Win200X (which will prevent sharing). And linux will be illegal (attrition to the war on terror).
Impeach Cheney!
i hear it is usually called "grand theft auto"
i think someone even made a computer game(training simulator?) based around that concept
Whilst most of the comments thus far have lambasted Matt Oppenheim and/or the RIAA the best bit of the article was what Ian Clarke had to say... and the fact that he is talking in the present tense. Freenet is here: it works today. It will probably (IMHO) be the "next big thing in P2P" if and when the RIAA finally gets rid of KaZaa et al. This is no big surprise: we've all gotten used to the idea that shutting down P2P services is like playing whack a mole. Peer to peer file sharing - whether you consider it "free speach" or "theft" is here and it's not going anywhere. Either the RIAA (and other copyright owners) learn to work within this reality or somebody else will. Remember that we're all descended from small funny looking furrballs that displaced a whole bunch of big lizards.
/t
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
- Mahatma Ghandi, In Philosophy
#!/usr/bin/english
Just a bit of a differnet look.
The problem with this whole file sharing music p2p blah blah fiasco is that, well, the logistics surrounding "copying" were very different when copyright law was drafted. This here is a whole other situation.
I think we can all agree, more or less on a few things.
1) You can't just look at the act of copying anymore, to determine if something is morally correct or not. My web browser caching stuff, or my making a backup of my own stuff and putting it in a safe place, nobody with any common sense would tell me that it should be illegal, or that I'm harmful to society for doing it.
2) I should be able to let my buddy listen to my music, regardless of whether that mechanism involves a "copy" or not.
3) I should NOT be allowed to give away or sell copies of my music so that others don't have to purchase music, ever.
So.. the problem is we have no way to really define what's allowed and what's not.. digital makes it so easy to move music around, that we can't just look at 'copies' or 'streaming -vs- non streaming' or whatever.. we have to look at someone's overall actions. Perhaps, like some, sorry to say, drug laws, it should depend on the amount of copyrighted material you are trafficking in. Personal use woudl be a valid defence. Perhaps we should ban IP altogether, and go for purely technical solutions. I'm for the other.. having strong laws, and open technology.
The same way Kazaa, Grokster, Napster and others make money off consumers distribution. Advertisements and other little things.
Do the calculations, artists would actually make more money off this system than the current system because they'd still own their copyrights and would take in 100% of the profits made.
Example1
Example2
Currently artists dont profit at all off distirbution and record sales unless they sell 500,000 records, in the new system even if you sell 1000 records you'd get something because you'd still own the copyright.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I think what Oppenheimer insinuates is that Freenet is no more of a threat to them than Kazaa is, as in they are all a threat, but Freenet is not moreso a threat than the others. Many research papers have been written about Freenet. If a few of these modifications were implemented, Freenet would not only be significantly faster, but the encryption would make it far harder to stop. When will the RIAA ever understand? By constantly attacking the problem, they only make it worse!
Why does anyone expect the situation to change in their favor thanks to yet one more discussion of the legality and morality of filesharing.?
Morality is a moot point, since it is relative and varies from person to person. Changing someone's behavior by changing their morality is a very difficult thing to do, if at all.
Legality, frankly, seems to favor the RIAA. Someone might make a convincing case that sharing a handful of files on a home netowrk is fair use, but not that sharing thousands of files with unknown people all over the globe constitutes fair use. Any such ruling in a lower court would be immediately appealed and joined by the rest of the media and publishing industries, plus any other organziation that has a vested interest in protecting copyright. (Note that this fuss would be about fair use, not copyright duration. They're two different concepts.)
In the end, if there is more money to be made marketing product online than on CD's, one or more companies will fo that, probably reducing their CD catalog in proportion.
And, sooner or later, CD's will be sold that won't allow themselves to be copied.(Or, consider this scenario: Microsoft strikes a deal with XYZ company to allow Windows users to copy a certain number of CD files per month for a fee. Windows, and the CD's, are tweaked to count the copies made on your machine. CD's from companies not in on the deal won't copy in Windows. Plus, there';s code on the CD's that recognize the OS and block the copy of it isn't Windows.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I think the RIAA is in over its head, again. "At the end of the day, we believe we can find infringers regardless of what network they use to try to cloak their illegal activity." HA HA HA HA HA.
The infringers are the ones who are smiling. Everyone else gets stale old crap music from advert filled broadcast channels.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'd have a bit more respect for the RIAA's claims that their sales are doing horribly because of P2P if they compared their decline of sales with other similar indusries that aren't affected by piracy.
But yeah, the economy is crap. Sure, P2P could be hurting the RIAA, but in the end, a company doesn't blame the guy who steals printer paper and other office supplies from the office for the stock going down, just look at the competition and put it into perspective.
Thing is most of the people who I know pirate stuff either A: never bought CDs anyways, or B: download the music, and if it's any good, buy the cd. The thing with music these days is most people listen to music while staring at a computer monitor. CDs are clunky and messy, whereas .mp3s are invisible.
And itunes is only for macs.
So, what do you do? To get some of those nice .mp3s you decide to risk getting sued by a corporation that pretty much is the abnoxious middle man between you and the artist... The artists who don't see a cent of royalties per CD, just contract money.
I think the days of the RIAA are numbered, really. They're putting up a good fight, but in the end I hope and believe that people, espeically artists, will realize that it is a lot easier just to cut out the middle man and work directly with the fans. It'd be better that way.
But then again, if the RIAA fell, what demon could rise up in it's place? I mean, literally... If it fell, they could somehow end up summoning an ancient lovecraftian demon or something as a last resort.
Wait, I forgot. Hilary Rosen. Right...
If you think about it, the possibility of accessing nearly any cultural product, be it music, video or software nearly instantly, in a few minutes or hours, is major achievement for human kind. If someone with a time mahcine had gone back in time to tell about it to great minds of the past, they would be appalled by the fact that someone is trying to torpedo such an amazing feat!
Another good point to consider, when technology advances, people or companies lose their income when the products they make become obsolete. Does anyone cry over horse carriage makers? What about when workers lose their jobs when factories robotize? Most of the time such workers are kicked out and nobody gives a damn.
So why should anyone take the record companies seriously. Theyre dead meat. They ought to be thinking up new business ideas instead of fighting the tide. Its no use. Give up!
Wot!!!! Flaimbait!!!!??? HOw can this be!? I only spoke the truth. WE know who they are RIAA/MPAA and we are ready to kill them at a moment's notice. THeir lives are in danger if they threaten to take away what is rightfully ours.
That's a great solution for industry. Keep it quiet. Someone may be reading
Vote for Pedro
Excuse me, but...hypothetically (don't try this at home kids) I go to a CD store and buy the top CD for cash. Then I come home, rip it using (take your pick) direct digital rip, analogue hole, special software to bypass copy-protection, take your pick, and place the results out on all 57 or so P2P networks. You can't miss that it's out there and rapidly proliferating faster than you can trace.
How does any watermark in existance trace that mass produced piece of silver plastic back to me?
I didn't even mention that I cut this baby lose using the local WiFi hotspot while enjoying an extra large cup of coffee with endless free refills.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
the An individual who illegally distributes music... part even though you copied it in your post.
And if they gather proof in advance (say, a few independant eye witnesses), that they hold the copyright, and that X is "illegally publishing" said material on the Web, then fine - more power to them, and I nope they nail X to the wall.
But they aren't. They are going after Y for running/creating a P2P service which X uses. Or they are trying to get laws passed allowing them to go after the many Z's who downloaded from X, which is hard to find, and impossible to prove, and might even be legal, if Z owns a legal copy and the courts agree that this is fair use.
I particularly like the way the RIAA guy says that this is about fair recompense for the creators and artists, neither of which he represents (the RIAA are basically music industry venture capitalists - they loan the money to the artists who then pay for everything). He switches to use "copyright owners" in the next sentence.
Honest question on the RIAA's position here. Similarly to another post here, but with a different spin. If I leave my CD case in my car and all of my original cds are stolen; do I have the right to make a CD copy from the MP3's of the songs that I have on my hard drive? Or do I lose my rights because of the illeagal acts of another person? This question is not for opinions of the slashdot crowd, I know how most of you feel about the issue , this is an honest question of the position of the RIAA. Thank you, C K
He said "Other than the fact that most infringers do not like to use Freenet because it is too clunky for them to get their quick hit of free music, it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services."
Given the context, he had to have meant "Freenet is no less of a threat than any of the other P2P services." It makes no sense to say "Aside from the fact that X is unreliable sometimes, it's not very good." You'd be implying that X's unreliability is a good thing.
... Where it's cool to be an Anonymous Coward.
Ah, but if someone stole your CD, technically it's still yours (even though you don't have possesion of it - it will be returned to you if the police find it, and are able to verify ownership). So you wouldn't be able to prove that the mp3 was yours by showing physical ownership of the CD, but you could have the police report of the theft entered into evidence. I suppose you should have the right to use the mp3, until you receive the insurance money to replace the stolen items. After that, you might be on shakey ground.
The freenet idea is greath, but a quick search on SourceForge or Freshmeat shows only a handfull of projects; From those only two decent frontends (Phyton and Java exist) and both projects seems to be dead for at least two years...
Anyone has an idea what is the status of these projects? (i don't have much experience with these projects).
Thanks in advance,
JV.
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
Most people are completely missing the copyright point. The music companies have the sole right to duplicate the CDs. You have the right to play it. Playback used to be an instantaneous analogue process, but since the advent of radio and public address systems allowed playback over multiple speakers in real-time.
Now, with digital media, there can be a considerable delay between reading the media and reproducing the sound. An MP3/Ogg file can be seen as a temporary buffered image for later playback. Also note that by making a MP3/Ogg, you did not copy the CD, you still have only one CD, so you have not contravened the copyright act.
The law does not describe the modern situation.
Mr. Oppenheimer says that, in essence, the only purpose of a P2P system is to copy copyrighted materials. I say the only reason the predominant activity on the P2P networks is music sharing because there are no equivalent legal means to obtain music.
I have downloaded aproximately 100 singles over the last two years. Of those 100, I have gone on to purchase the CDs they came from, for about 40 of those singles. Since the Apple iTunes music service was launched, I check there, and buy there, if they have it there. Only after that would I consider LimeWire. As the number of songs and albums on iTMS approaches the size of the current and back catalog of available music, I can see my participation in music theft approaching zero.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
What the...where is this proof? Yes, Napster was "shut down," but I don't think the RIAA has officially proven any of their figures.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
Regardless of the injustice in overpriced CDs, the restrictive album format, and the challenge of actually hearing a song BEFORE you buy it, copyright law is still fairly clear. You may be able to make a backup copy, you can give your hardcopy to a friend as a loan. You can't however, take what isn't yours, even if there doesn't appear to be any deprivation on the part of the artist or RIAA for doing so.
I say this as a person who willfully participates in the moral morass of filesharing and has acted immorally. I think it's an important distinction to make, though, since trying to claim the high ground of civil disobedience risks cheapening things like the civil rights movement by making the "theft" of some Smashmouth akin to Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. I may agree with everything said about the RIAA and the disgrace they bring to the music industry, but it doesn't make my pirated copy of "Allstar" any more morally legit.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Even then, they have no right to break into your house and check your computer. If someone from the **AA hacked into my box, I'd sue their asses for breaking and entering. If the **AA catch you downloading files, they have the right to call the police and leave the investigation up to legal authorities. If they want to call it "stealing," then they'd better start abiding by standard legal procedure for trying a defendant in a criminal case. The problem for them is that this procedure leaves the defendant innocent until proven guilty, instead of the moronic notion of a preponderance of evidence that is used in a civil court. So, the **AA is trying to maliciously combine criminal punishments (jail time) with civil crimes (copyright infringement) by equating copyright infringement to stealing, which is patently absurd.
Think about it. The dumbshit judge in the Verizon case actually ruled that Verizon were obliged to turn over the names and addresses of their users the RIAA. In other words, the **AA now has the legal power to force companies to give them information if they want it, a power that until now, has been exclusively the power of law enforcement. This is basically legally-sanctioned vigilantism. If I think that someone has violated one of my copyrights, I can break into his computer now and destroy it? That's ludicrous.
is that if Beethoven had been alive today, he probably still would have been only middle or upper middle class, while Eminem is richer than rich.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Google news found me an article that discusses this whole issue.
The article seems to say that Linkin Park did not pull their music from the Apple store completely, but just removed the option of being able to buy single tracks. A quick jump over the Apple Music store, however, shows almost nothing available from them.
One quote that I found interesting in the article:The article implies that this is a bad thing. I disagree. Economics argues that CDs should not be priced at $12-$18 per disk. A cartel of music distribution companies is driving up the price to levels above that which people would pay in a competitive market.
The Apple store, as a new distribution mechanism, means that the market can be more efficient. I claim that single track downloads only help this efficiency, providing consumers exactly what they're interested in listening to, rather than having to purchase product that they care little about. This type of efficiency will reward artists that consistently produce quality music and will penalize those that do not. This is the way the music industry should work.
Maybe it's the vodka shots and margueritas coursing through my system, but these are some of the most convoluted posts I have read yet on Slashdot. I'm not sure I follow any of the arguments these posters are making.
A person with intellectual property rights does not have more/less rights than a person with physical property rights. Copying furniture and clothes???? Cheap knock-offs have long existed in the marketplace. Ask any woman on a budget. What makes digital music different from tangible physical products is that music can be distributed electronically far more easily and cheaply than clothes or television sets. Therefore, copyright violations for music tend to be far more pervasive.
Let's not wax poetic about how the musicians own their music. This is not generally true unless that musician is a powerhouse who wrote, produced, financed, and distributed the album independently of a third-party. Let us not forget, even Paul McCartney had to pay royalties to Michael Jackson in order to perform Beatles songs Paul himself wrote.
If the RIAA or a member company owns the music, it does have a right to say "screw you." You broke your CD, buy a new one. Sony won't give you a new TV just because you threw your scratched up the screen or broke the tuner.
Anyone who things he has a write to own, copy, and distribute someone else's work product without compensating them in a way they agree to is a fool. And a fool can argue all day long about legitimate uses of file-sharing, but the fact is, he himself won't likely buy anything he can't steal online.
That being said, this doesn't make the RIAA 100% right. Most people on both sides of the issue are misunderstanding the issue, the agenda, and what's at stake. This include the idiots over at EFF who recently put a hack of a lawyer on talking heads new program to defend file-sharing with a foolish arrogant, "it's here to stay, just accept it."
The real issue isn't copyrights, it's consumption rights; specifically, the effect of consumption rights on revenue streams from consumption licensing. The RIAA's agenda is to control the method by which you, the possessor of a legally purchased CD, consumes the product. This is how RIAA can ensure it makes a profit each time the music is consumed. The RIAA wants you only to play your CD on a *licensed* CD playback device (DVD player, Walkman, stereo, car stereo) so only you and a few others can consume it at any given time. Remember, the RIAA doesn't want you playing those CDs in public forums without first obtaining a license and paying royalties. The RIAA does not want you to consume your CD vitually, using MP3.com's murdered streaming music service or by using MP3/WMA backups. The RIAA doesn't want you using your CDROM and PC as a stereo. They want you to buy the stereo. The RIAA doesn't want you to make digital copies of your CDs for any purpose unless you first buy a *licensed* expensive Philips CD burner stereo component. This is one reason why the RIAA supports a CD format that can't be copied. If the use of technologies like file-sharing and lossless file-encoding formats reaches critical mass, there might be less need to purchase all those extra hardware components. The RIAA as a result losses revenues.
Similarly, the MPAA only wants you to consume your DVD using licensed DVD hardware. If Linux developers aren't willing to pay licensing fees (which would be prohibitively astronomical if you refuse to pass the cost down to your customers), there won't be legal DVD support on Linux with MPAA's backing. DVD burners cost a lot because of licensing fees and liability issues, not because the technology is exceptionally whiz-bang.
From what I understand, communism failed because you can't economically duplicate food, a car, or a TV in a cost effective manner. For those instances where you can make copies in a cost effective manner, communism appears pretty neat.
Right now freenetproject.org points at something else which also means that their client installer doesn't work since it tries to download something from that url...
Why is the MPAA not as viscous as the RIAA. Is it bandwidth limiting people from stealing movies. Ummm, doubtful. Most people share as many movies as music (bandwidth wise). It's that the MPAA is still needed. You can't make a movie like Hulk without help from the MPAA. You need actors, you need special effects, you need hollywood.
However, anyone with talent and an imac can make a CD, distribute it world wide, market it world wide, without ever having to go through the RIAA cartel.
Just like Bartleby, the RIAA is obsolete. Imagine if the Scriveners put up the fight the RIAA is doing now, we'd still be paying people to hand-copy documents! NO carbon paper, no xerox, no desktop publishing, hell, probably no electronic storage or display of documents either, as that allows instant copies to be made rather than paying for a scrivener. The RIAA can't stop progress, and in trying to outlaw it they are hurting our society. The sooner your mom understand this isn't about piracy, it's about control of the business model in the music industry, we'll get back on the right track.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
YOU won't be caught, but all they need to do is catch a few to make the point to a LOT of folks, and staunch the bleeding.
There will, of course, be other ways. Poisoning clients, suing on the basis that x% of what can be downloaded is infringing, and you're running a major client/server, which therefore contributes, etc.
if it saves a billion lives is it worth it?
how many people have pirated mp3's killed?
now how many people have totalitarian dictatorships killed under the guise of democracy/communism/facism/out right contempt for everyone but the monarch?
now you tell me which one holds more weight
in my opinion, one human life is worth an infinite amount of pirated mp3's/books/porn/media
but the ultimate solution is political.
Ian Clarke is an articulate technologist, and Freenet is a cool project. But if Slashdotters and all computer users everywhere don't put their money where their mouth is, then all the clever software in the world won't win this fight.
The RIAA and its employees in Congress will pass more draconian laws because they have power and we don't. They will outlaw computers if they have to, because computers have rendered them irrelevant.
They will only stop, or rather will only be stopped, if all of us choose to exercise our power as consumers and voters. What are those things?
1. As a consumer, stop buying CDs. Stop buying band merchandise. Stop buying concert tickets. CDs and merchandise feed the RIAA. Concert tickets feed ClearChannel. Send them the message that you want out of this abusive relationship. Deprive them of the dollars they pay their lawyers and Congressmen with.
2. Discourage your friends, family, and coworkers from buying CDs and tickets. Offer to burn them copies of the music they want instead. If the 50 million people using P2P in America did that for just 5 other people not online, then that's the entire population of the country that has no more use or dollars for the RIAA.
3. Call your representatives and ask them if they support you or the RIAA. If you don't like what you hear, then don't vote for them. Tell others not to vote for them. Use florid language if you must, because you can be sure that the RIAA won't be afraid to.
Yes, these are little things. Yes, if you're the only one doing them, then how can they possibly make a difference? But a wise man once said, "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can." Besides, you're not alone; you're a member of an army of 50 million people. If each does a little, it amounts to a heck of a lot.
At the very least, the very, very least, stop using the RIAA's language and terms to talk about this issue! Copying files is exchanging information, and exchanging information is NOT stealing. Neither is it piracy. So stop calling it that. You can't convince even the most sympathetic politician that stealing is OK. But you probably could persuade them that file sharing is a good thing. Think about it. Then do it.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
the fact that you used ALL CAPS doesnt make you right.
"Making a copy of something copyrighted or protected intellectually and giving it away for free is ILLEGAL."
the courts have upheld your right to make copies of tv shows and audio tapes for friends for non comercial purpose.
further, fair use photocopying of texts is perfectly legal.
dont be so ignorant.
I've had an idea for a while, but don't have the means to implement it. The problem for many people is that artists don't get their fair share from album sales. The solution is to send your money to the individual artists themselves, not the label or even the band.
Imagine what would happen if all of a sudden artists starting getting large checks in the mail directly from fans. I think it would totally change the system. My idea would be to have a website set up where you could "donate" any amount you wished to any band/artist you wished. The website would take the donations and cut a check to the artist on a regular basis.
The check could not state anything about the music or the band name or the artists work - doing so would put the labels in a position to sue the artists and claim the money. If that's still legally vulnerable, the site could simply list a PO Box for individual artists and fans could mail their checks directly.
If...it were established, and if...people actually dontated money when they download songs from P2Ps...it would eventually undermine the entire system. Artists would no longer re-sign with their label if it became apparent they could handle everything themselves.
Following were questions posed by another member of the board:
By leaving their labels, aren't the bands leaving a lot of the perks behind?
Yes and no. My novice understanding is that many artists have been led to believe that being signed with a label is the only way to "make it big." If (and it's a big if) it could be demonstrated to an artist that the money could still be made without the bureaucracy of the label, I think many would opt to leave.
Labels typically charge the artists super-inflated rates for studio time, production, videos, etc. As some artists are beginning to figure out, it doesn't have to be that fancy. Some artists are beginning to build their own studios, or use much "cheaper" facilities to record albums.
As for distribution...artists could still sell their own CDs. By selling them directly, however, the CDs would be much cheaper for the consumer, and the artists would claim much more of the profit from the sale. Artists could include DVDs with "the making of album X", interviews, etc. Simultaneously, they could sell the album or individual songs on their website (or a centralized music website) for a nominal fee.
If Kazaa started putting a "Donate to Artist" button beside every file that was available for download and the money actually went to the author, do you think many people would donate? If they do donate, do you think it would be very much? Would it be more than what they make with their recording label?
I think the donation thing is just a way to demonstrate to artists that they can make money outside the major labels. If some kind of donation system were to be put in place, and given substantial publicity, I think a surprising amount of money would be donated. Once some of the artists stop renewing their contracts and marketing themselves, they can charge for their music, and reap the profits directly. In other words, the donation system would become obsolete once the labels and the RIAA were out of the way; artists would sell their own stuff, for prices that most fans would find reasonable, in distribution methods that would satisfy todays mobile technology.
If your accepting money to give to an artist, do you instantly send out a check to the artist as soon as you receive the money? If not, would you have to store the money in an FDIC insured bank? Could you hold the donations for a period of time so that you could get some of the interest on it? If you can't keep any interest made on the donations, how do you make any money to keep it going?
I w
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
Suppose that you walk into the kitchen, and your friend, unhappy with the current CD, removes it, puts it back on your shelf, and puts in some other CD and begins playing it.
No problem.
Suppose that you duplicate the output signal and have one set of speakers in the kitchen, and one set of set of speakers in the stereo room.
No problem.
Suppose that you take the speakers from the kitchen, add a bit more speaker wire, and run the speakers outside facing your friend's house next door, and you give him a remote.
No problem.
Suppose that you extend the speaker wires further, and run them inside of your friend's house, and run another wire for the remote.
No problem.
Suppose that you replace the speaker wire with cat5, and use your computer to serve the purpose of the speakers. Suppose that you embed the signal for the remote into the data stream going over the cat5.
No problem.
Suppose that instead of a stereo in your stereo room, you have a computer serving the same purpose.
No problem.
Now, while your friend can indeed record the audio signal sent to his computer if he made the effort to do so, this setup has a legitimate non-infringing use.
You are simply allowing your friend to use your stereo system remotely as an audio playback device.
This is a perfectly legitimate use. No infringement takes place unless your friend records what is sent to him.
If he wishes to do so, there is nothing you can do to stop him, but that is not your conocern, because the setup has a legitimate non-infringing use.
Right, so they'll do it the same way they do now, which has absolutely nothing to do with watermarks.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
YOU shouldn't go around prosletyzing. You can take your self riteous act and dance right off a cliff with it. See you in hell. (from heaven)
All of the major translations done in the past 50 years are copyrighted.
While many are somewhat lenient in use, the copying policies are still very restrictive.
You can not, for example, make a duplicate copy of (to name a few) a NIV, RSV, NRSV, NKJ, or NASB translation.
While you csn copy older versions such as the King James 1611, or ASV (not in the UK though), the latter of which is from 1901, these translations are considered to be quite lacking in correctness of translation, and use archaic language and sentence structures.
Also copyrighted under draconian terms are the modern compiled Greek manuscripts. These are documents which are the result of applying textual criticism to various ancient manuscripts (which themselves came before copyright).
One modern translation unrestricted by copyright is the WEB (World English Bible) translation. While it is primarily an update of the previously mentioned ASV (1901), and is therefore not considered sufficiently accurate for a serious Bible scholar, it is more than sufficient for the personal study and reading.
Any serious disputes over translation must be taken up with what we can reconstruct of the original Greek manuscripts, anyhow, and so small inconsistencies or potentially less than ideal translation decisions are not really an issue for the WEB.
WEB (World English Bible) translation.
It's sufficient for personal reading and study.
Any serious disputes must be taken up in the Greek manuscripts anyhow, something which the average person will read about rather than do themselves, seeing as the average person can not read ancient Greek.
Freenet has legitimate (I'd say "essential") non-infrining uses.
As Clarke says, you can not adequately allow for anonymous speech over the internet without having constructed a system that can be used in ways which infringe on others' copyright.
Anonymous speech is essential to freedom in this present world.
To understand this, think of why it is important that ballots be anonymous.
If copyright infringement is a civil matter, is downloading/sharing/copying/stealing music considered civil disobedience?
For some cases of (2), (3) contradicts (2).
Why do you suggest (3) is true? I believe you suggest (3) is true becauase (3) seems to involve lessening the demand for or market value of the music in question.
However, (2) potentially lessens the demand for or market value of the music in question. It does so in several cases:
a) the music is worth hearing once, but is perhaps forgettable or is primarily a 'curiousity', and won't be played often.
b) the hype surrounding the music -- whether from marketing or from the differing tastes of others -- causes your friend to believe that were he to purchase a copy of the music, he would consider the purchase to have been worthwhile, when in fact he would not.
Potentially both (a) and (b) are acceptable uses. This, I believe, indicates that you should add to your list, (4):
4) Some acceptable uses may potentially lessen the demand for or market value of the music in question, and nonetheless are acceptable uses.
I believe that (4) should open the door to consideration of more expansive acceptable uses.
And before you start saying, yes but the criminals have guns, no they don't. Gun crime is extremely rare here.
1 9, 00.html
.
You're either ignorant, a liar or both. A quick Google on "gun crime in europe" reveals the truth on the matter. Case in point:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gun/Story/0,2763,8718
Germany
Armed hostage-takings and robberies are relatively commonplace. In 2001, there were 11,270 gun-related offences. But gun crime is coming down sharply. The 2001 figure was a fall of almost 10% on the previous year.
France
Violent crimes, particularly armed robbery, increased by 9.8% in 2001, the last year for which figures are available, writes Jon Henley in Paris. Violence and insecurity became by far the most important issue in last year's tumultuous elections.
Spain
Gun crime has been relatively infrequent in Spain, writes Giles Tremlett in Madrid
However, alliances between Colombian cocaine cartels and the traditional smuggling fraternity of Galicia, north-west Spain, have brought a big increase in shootings.
Italy
The anxiety caused by violent crime was one of the factors that contributed to the election of Silvio Berlusconi's centre right government in 2001, writes Philip Willan in Rome.
I'm sorry to shock you out of your bullshit "gun control works" life. Large numbers of criminals most certainly have guns in Europe, and your citizens are unable to legally defend themselves.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Assume you mean the reception, that's okay because you 'pay' for it by watching ads.. Everyone who's watching the tv with you is paying by watching the ads as well.
P2P has Ads also (or in theory it could have them at least)
So whats profit have to do with this? Nothing.
What I'm saying is the business model needs to adapt so people can share music and musicians can get paid.
The RIAA doesnt want us to be distributor because then they lose control over the musician.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
..but you don't share it. Sharing implies you put the music on and both of you listen to it at the same time. What you're doing is letting them copy it, and I guess you could even say you're selling it at a price point of an ego boost or some such.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
ianal, just using logic here.
"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.[from dictionary.com]"
When someone shares a copyrighted file:
1. An illegal copy of the file is made (copying to give away is not fair use). It seems to me that this copy is a separate entity from the original.
2. No matter what temporary file rigamarole is used to get the copy to the other person's computer, at some point an illegal copy is completely brought from the sharer's computer to the sharee's computer.
It seems to me that this should be considered cold blooded theft. A copy of the file is taken in its entirety, and the sellers of the music are deprived of its use (they can no longer sell that copy, because it has been unlawfully taken).
..than monetary gain.
Obviously you gain something from allowing other people to copy an artist's music from you, whether that's just an ego boost or a sense of self-worth and doing good for the community.
In this case, you are profiting in a non-monetary way from someone else's hard work and creativity without that person's permission.
Shouldn't that also be illegal?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Even if that were so, it would defeat the whole point. If the owner can use a filtering system to selectively remove copyrighted content, then what's to prevent the government from using the very same system to filter out political speech and anything else they'd like to keep under wraps?
In other words, once you start attacking one type of speech, all of the others are fair game.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
it is no more of a threat than any of the popular P2P services.
"The Americans are not in Bagdad"
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
We need another civil war! Down with IP!
But then what would we run TCP over?
WOW! Would anyone with mod points please mod the parent up as it is one of the most appropriate and concise analogies for the legality of P2P networks I have read/heard.
Way to go Cyclometh.
Maybe if the RIAA stopped trying to squeeze every last penny that they can out of both the musicians and the consumers, there wouldn't be such a piracy problem. Let's face it: the reason that nobody buys music is for two blatant reasons:
1) CDs are too expensive. I mean, come the hell on! It costs less than $1 to actually stamp the CD! We all know that! There are additional costs (recording studios, licensing, etc) but if you drop the price on CDs, I'm sure that there would be more purchses, resulting in the same amount, if not a greater amount, of profit. I refuse to buy any CD that costs more than $11 before shipping, flat out.
2) Convinience. I live in not quite the most backwater city in what is probably the most remote state (Montata) at least as far as local vedors goes. It's not worth my time to go check out the CD shops around town, simply because I rarely buy mainstream music and I can't rely on anyone locally to have what I'm looking for. I'm sure that I'm not the only persone to have this problem.
The solution: start selling MP3s and licenses for said MP3s online. If you sold at the rate of something like 30 cents a song, I'm sure that at least 70% of P2P swappers would start buying songs online, and there's massive profits to be made that way!
Once it's made common for online music vendors to sell licenses for MP3s online, I'll start paying for music 100%. In fact, I'll even go a step farther. So long as the price is reasonable I'll go back and purchase every song that I've got on my HDD that didn't come from a retail CD. You hear that, RIAA? I will go through my music collection and either delete or register every song that I have. I've got at least a few hundred songs, so the RIAA stands to gain a couple hundred bucks that, otherwise, they would never see! And I'm sure that I'm not the only one who would jump on the bandwagon.
I can't see the logic in NOT doing it that way.
Come on, you capitalistic bastards. Make the first gesture of goodwill, and I'll follow suit.
- - - - - - - - - -
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
"Why should copyright holders, who as owners of intellectual property, have fewer rights than somebody who owns televisions or clothing and attempts to sell them? Clearly everyone would agree that the television and clothing retailers should be able to investigate and prosecute shoplifters."
Excuse me, but please feel free to steal a *COPY* of my TV any time. In fact, steal a copy of my car too, heck it's a geo metro, there a million coppies. Some-how I don't feel violated of my rights.
Yes there is a reason communism fell, and the RIAA wants to recreate it in the US. When there is a guard posted by every copy machine, the communists will have won!
Then think of it as an ideal tool to prevent the next SARS outbreak.
So you're saying any documents criticizing governments or warning friends about a deadly new disease are copyrighted by the RIAA? You are much more likely to find those things on Freenet than mp3s.
Your question is throwing out a red herring. Yes, it is possible to use Freenet for copyright infringment of music, but not very well. Why don't you try using it yourself? If you did, you'd know why it's such a stupid arguement that Freenet will be used for "mass piracy." The thing has enough trouble with html documents!
The free speech Clarke was talking about is obviously speech produced by the person publishing on Freenet, not some other person's song.
Good point.
... You can't however, take what isn't yours"
... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
I would respond, however, that
"[There is] injustice
Misses the fact that ownership is a social construction, and perhaps p2p file sharing is reconstructing the ownership of music and culture into a more communal nature, just as it was reconstructed in the beginning and middle of the century to be very private and corporate*.
In short, I do think people are 'taking what isn't theirs'; yet I also think that the large-scale phenomenon of p2p and people 'taking what isn't theirs' is redefining what is theirs.
I'd add that it's for the good as well in that, though it's not a perfect solution in that it might hinder artists' ability to make a living on their work, it prevents an equally bad malaise spread by top-down, corporate surface culture production overly concerned with profit, control, and legal remedies for economic/business model problems.
Some see file sharing as evil; some see it as good; I see it as a tradeoff that I'm satisfied with given the current state of things and the alternatives.
Mike
*We certainly haven't viewed copyright the way we view it now; the constitution, for instance, states:
Article I, Section 8. The Congress shall have power
In others words, to quote a previous slashdot poster,
"Something you have copyright on isn't yours. It's something you have been granted a temporary monopoly on the commercial exploitation on as an incentive from the government for commercial support to advance science, art and culture and to foster innovation."
Nowhere is there a right to profit from one's inventions.
Now, with the way our current economy is set up, one may choose to throw out the constitution's take on copyright, but I would say that 1. Throwing out the constitution and the ideals contained within may be dangerous, and 2. We could have a perfectly fine modern economy without these crazy copyright laws- things work out in unexpected ways and society adapts.
up with ipv6!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
The RIAA represents a group of distributors. The product is music. Someone or something else is taking their distribution business away, and they are upset.
It is a waste of my time to look for music at any of the local music stores. They don't have what I want, I have given up even checking. The distribution system has failed, they have lost a sale. A friend asked a music store to get in an album for him. It took 2 or 3 weeks. My daughter downloaded the whole album in a few hours. The distribution system has failed.
I was recently in a large city, and stopped at an electronics retailer to check stuff out, and look for an album I wanted to listen to in the truck on the way home. They didn't have it.
Mr Oppenheim, give me a good reason why you should get any of my money? You don't stock what I want. I can get it much easier from some other distributor.
Don't give me lawyer talk. I am a consumer, with a very large collection of music, and willing to spend money on more. Sell me. Please.
If you come checking whether I have copyright to what I have, you won't get another penny from me.
If you sell me stuff I can't listen to the way I want, in my vehicle, at my computer ( I don't have time to listen anywhere else ), I won't buy it. Why should I? I can't listen to it.
You're all talking lawyer talk. How about selling me a product I want to buy?
Derek
Listening to you claim that digital music sharing has killed the RIAA's business model reminds me of earlier claims about how the dot-coms would crush all traditional business models, which in turn reminds me of even earlier claims about how computers would reduce paper use.
Yeah and it will, just not overnight like people thought.
I never said the RIAA will be killed overnight, but its clear to just about everyone that the RIAA's model is outdated.
The RIAA is a powerful political lobby as well as a business association, and it represents big music distributors and producers. It's really unlikely that they will go the way of the dinosaur or that they will lose all influence.
They have enough money to survive, but considering their current approach which is to sue everyone including their supporters, I dont see them lasting another 5 years.
People shouldn't get lost in the rhetoric. Sure the RIAA regularly screws consumers and musicians, but its member companies are the ones responsible for album production, marketing, distribution, merchandising, etc. Yes, we can find an online alternative for each of these things, but will it be as pervasive? None of the independent bands or labels relying solely on the Internet have reached the critical mass of Britney Spears... and little Britney would still be living in a trailer if it were up to her to finance an album and tour by herself.
Why do we need fake musicians like britney spears? You are right no real musician has reached the level of britney spears, but thats because the RIAA has a monopoly on marketing, britney spears is not a musician, that chick doesnt even write her own songs. Britney should be living in a trailer, she doesnt have any talent, and if you support an industry which hires people based on looks instead of their artistic talent, you dont understandthe music industry.
Britney would never be able to finance and tour by herself because she has no talent, Someone like Michael Jackson however would be able to tour and finance himself because he does have talent, Michael Jackson was making music even before all of these marketing features existed, he was a star even as a kid, he had talent, and even if no one signed him and no one marketed him everyone would have known who he was.
Online music sharing would make a great complement to existing distribution and marketing channels, but as a complete and total replacement, it won't happen until every last music consumer decides they don't want to go to a physical store to buy a physical CD.
60 million is a big number, I'd say the majority of consumers have already decided. Sure theres still older people, and maybe a few million young people who prefer CDs, but the majority of people dont.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I live in Australia, where the film "Ken Park" has recently been banned even from being screened at a film festival.
. ht m
It is causing a furore here because of the censorship issues, and Larry Clark (the director) has been interviewed by several media channels on the issue.
When asked what he thought of people "illegally" downloading his film off the internet, his reply basically condoned the practice:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2003/s896904
In this instance, because the director cannot profit from his work in this country, I don't see how it can really fall under copyright infringement. Mind you, the free PR and overseas sales he gains from our nation's stupid censors will far outweigh any potential sales he may have had if the film had not caused controversy.
So in this instance P2P provided the freedom for me to make my OWN choice to watch the film, despite our government censors saying I can't. I'd consider that a fairly good use for P2P, and Freenet is a natural extension of this principle of freedom to choose without being persecuted or arrested for it.
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
You have a good point there... when it comes to the actual legalese, you need to spell out some situations where you can see it being misapplied and say that things are specifically okay.
The freenet was started in 1984 by Dr. Tom Grunder:
freenet
Ok, I know it's a different freenet, but it was around almost two decades before this one, and it's still what many people think of when they hear the word "freenet".
I think this new freenet should have chosen a different name.
The US congress is not entirely stupid. Congress realized that theft is not equal to copyright infringement and crafted a body of laws to deal with that difference. Congress realizes that in order to consider something "stolen" it must not be available to be rightfully sold. When a car is stolen, the car is no longer available for sale by the legal owner. When music is copied, the music is still available for sale. No matter how many copies you and I make of a CD or DVD, they are still available for Walmart to sell. Congress realizes this difference. The problem is the RIAA does not like that difference.
The RIAA assumes that everyone that pirates music would have otherwise purchased the music legally. That is a flawed assumption. Do you honestly think a car thief that steals BMWs would go out and buy them legally if he/she could no longer steal them?
Jack Valenti recently stated "I don't think any of these students would go into a Blockbuster-type store and furtively put a DVD under their jacket and walk out."
Jack is right, they wouldn't...because that is stealing physical property, and that is a crime; fair-use copying is not.
Theft is not copyright infringement and the two should not be treated as equal.
-ted
This means that you can very legally draw a netlist from someone's board, and make a new PC-board layout that's electrically identical, but you can't verbatim copy it.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Oppenheim: Look at what Judge John Bates said in the Verizon case: "If an individual subscriber opens his computer to permit others, through peer-to-peer file-sharing, to download materials from that computer, it is hard to understand just what privacy expectation he or she has after essentially opening the computer to the world."
sounds like we cannot have privacy at our homes next; my living room is open to most people who care to drop by, so its hard to understand what privacy expectation I have, and let people roam the entire house. people can walk into my bedroom or anywhere else.
been to a shopping mall lately? don't mind entering the "Authorized Personnel Only"; coz after the mall authorities have opened up the building to essentially the whole world what privacy can they expect? dammit, why stop at malls, go ahead and do that at every public building.
why can't he understand that i _can_ allow access to specific files/folders in most P2P apps.
Being aware of her surroundings and knowning how to not get into a bad situation is the best way for a woman to avoid getting raped.
Carrying a gun may not even be the second best way. When my aunt was a teenager delivering pizzas, she carried a gun. Because of her unwillingness to use it, her attacker took it and used it on her. Non-fatal wound (fun fact: knife wounds are twice as deadly as gun wounds), but not helpful.
Guns are not magical. If a person attacks with a blade from several feet away and you have to draw your gun, their momentum may kill you even if you shoot them. Learning how to be aware of your surroundings and avoid bad situations is the best defense. Personally, I rank practical martial arts as the next best defense. You will always have them, and with the good ones, you can change the severity of your response to fit the situation. You don't want to kill or seriously injure your drunken friend.
As for protecting one's family, my father keeps a baseball bat by the side of his bed. His theory is that he could surprise and knock out an attacker with it, but it would be far less likely to kill one of us. (No, he doesn't have any training).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
You're assuming they'll still let you buy the CD for cash. Who knows to what extremes of inconvenience they will drive the customer in their paranoid crusade against piracy?
:)
They already sell CDs that don't play. If customers will put up with that, what's wrong with a little background check, licensing contract, and registration before you can get your hands on a CD that still won't play? People will put up with all sorts of lame tricks if you put a positive spin on them. And for the ones that don't, you can blame the lost sales on piracy!
"I'm sorry, but you have to be a member of the Giant Corporate Record Store Club before you can purchase the latest hits at our deep-discount prices."
"Now available exclusively with your GCRSC card, the latest album at 60% off the arbitrary list price! Bring a copy of this ad and you get a $2 rebate!"
Honestly, they could burn you a custom-watermarked CD with your ID number ("personalized service!") and still make a ridiculous profit. Actually, it doesn't even matter if they make a profit, since they can complain the extra costs were caused by piracy and lobby the government to subsidize them (with actual cash or just more protectionist legislation like the DMCA).
Now, if only we could subsidize the big record companies not to produce, like we do with the farmers, that would be something.
are you talking about artists, or salesmen? while i know only too well the plight of the starving musician, why are you thinking profit as anything remotely important when music itself is at stake? if the free distrobution of music is prevented by large buisiness, or anything else, no one wins but those with the most invested in the right things: the musicians will be burned out, in prison, or under contract, the listeners will continue to be forcefed mass-distrobution little-choice Formatted content clearchannel style and honestly if money is all thats important, dont waste time in the music industry : the financial industry is your true calling.
dont profit from your music. go non-profit, or whatever other flavor of free-knowledge you feel works for you instead.
until music is unchained from buisiness, we will never know which is truly great music, and which is purely a commercial, wrapped up to look like truly great music. and i hate commercials.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Why do we need fake musicians like britney spears?
:)
At least we agree that Britney Spears isn't a real musician. But that is beside the point. If young teenage girls and young college-age boys want to listen to Britney Spears on MP3, CD, or on some brand new delivery method, it's there right. The RIAA doesn't like this, because they like controlling the method of delivery. As I said before, licensing revenues... it's all about that. But, we probably shouldn't expect the RIAA to embrace new technologies, given that the MPAA took years to realize it could make a killing on home video. Remember Justice Scalia ranting and raving about the VCR would destroy the industry?
60 million is a big number, I'd say the majority of consumers have already decided. 60 million isn't a big enough number to cause all the retailers to close shop and take music sales online. Besides, there's nothing really wrong with the current distribution method to cause this. I just don't see a majority of people giving up CDs for MP3s or DVDs for DivXs. A majority of consumers aren't so puritian that they will only decide to use one method over another. I leave it to zealots to argue that you should listen to music ONLY as MP3s (or as CDs for that matter). See, I'm flexible
Seems if people could rent cd's for 3 or 5 dollars a piece this whole argument would be over. There's thousands of movie's for rent why no music? It seems that something is not capitalist about the current music industry structure and that industry is just going to have to adjust to reality. There's only so much gas, water, food, electricity, etc. in the world and it seems at times some societies fail to even provide those basic life necessities. Arguing about failed profits is like arguing about why there's a hole in a sinking ship. It's simply failing to recognize the new reality that has unfolded before our eyes and ears. Just maybe the recording industry as it has existed in the past 50 years will cease to exist. It wouldn't be the first time that evolution brought extinction to something on this planet and most certainly won't be the last. All i want to know is when do we get hydrogen flying cars, implantable computing systems and cloned bodies of our selves for life extension!
Sweet Mary, mother of God, where do these monkeys come from? As soon as I find out, I'm going to patent the "infinite source of energy by harnessing infinite supply of people who don't understand copyright."
Assuming you're buying a CD (or a record or tape, assuming you can find one), you are purchasing... a CD. Nothing more, nothing less. Certainly not a license. You'll notice that if you walk into your local Music and Other Stuff Store, that a CD and speaker cable is rung up exactly the same. After the purchase, you own that one particular copy of the CD. That sales transaction is exactly the same as, say, when you purchase a chair. You own that CD, and you own that chair. You can sell the CD, loan it out, give it away, play it, incorporate it into some abstract sculpture, use it as a coaster, or microwave it. You don't get any license because you don't need any license!
Now, that CD is marked "Copyright 2003, Some Big Company, All Rights Reserved." What's that mean? In a technical, legal sense, it means absolutely nothing. Thanks to the Berne Convention, in most countries (including the United States) you don't need to put any sort of copyright label on your work. You get copyright protection, free of charge, even if you don't label it. The label is just a warning. That way if you make a copyright infringing copy, you can't claim to the judge "but your honor, I didn't know it was protected by copyright," because the Expense Music Industry Lawyer will respond, "It's clearly labelled."
So, what does your free-of-charge, automatic copyright protection grant you? A number of things, but most of them can be summed up in the key protection: the copyright holder has the exclusive right to distribute copies. That's just about it. (You're also notably forbidden from public performance. If you squint a bit, public performance looks like distributing copies.) So, while you own that one specific CD, copyright law specifically withholds the right to distribute copies. This has nothing to do with a license. You don't need a license to cross the street, no, you're free to cross the street, but disallowed from jaywalking. Similarlly you're free to use and own that particular CD, but your disallowed from distributing copies.
This whole "license" concept is bullshit that the copyright based industries are trying to confuse people with. The software industry has been particularlly successful in convincing people that they can change a sale into a license after the fact. That this idea does not have any sort of strong court support yet doesn't bother them. Don't be confused by this deception!
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You know, "theft" is more identifiable, more accurate in my mind, and does sound worse. I shall immediately begin referring to Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act as theft from the public domain.
Hmmm, of course "murder" is more identifiable, more accurate in many people's minds, and sounds worse, so effective immediately the United States has murdered many Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
Using a word because people think it's more accurate, and because it sounds worse is exactly the wrong reason to use a word. It encourages people to manipulate language to deceive.
Of course, the RIAA's use of the word probably wouldn't be so silly if not for quotes like this (from the article):
And yet, it's more identifable, more accurate in many people's minds, and sounds better (if "sounds worse" is some sort of argument, so is "sounds better").
Of course they also regularlly trot out comparisions to stealing a CD from a store. Your average chimpanzee can tell the difference between downloading something off the internet and physically taking a CD. To imply that they do identical damage (And thus should share the same term) is as silly as lumping manslaughter and premeditated murder into the same crime. It blurs important distinctions that most people are perfectly capable of reasoning about.
And industries based on copyright (and their defenders) shouldn't be afraid to use accurate words. You don't try to discourage sexual harassment by calling it rape! Be honest, call it copyright infringement, and spend the time to convince citizens that infringing copyright morally wrong! Unless of course you don't think people are willing to accept your reasoned arguments. Then I suggest continuing the campaign of lies, smears, and deception.
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Use Freenet at sourceforge instead of the currently not working http://www.freenetproject.org.
The reason handguns are legal is because our founding fathers recognized LONG AGO that governments have the tendency to infringe on the rights of the public over time. Always. The second amendment: So the primary purpose of the LEGALITY of guns is to secure the freedom and rights of individuals, though often they are USED for revenge/murder/intimidation/hunting etc.
The primary purpose of the LEGALITY of P2P networks can be framed similarly: to support the free sharing of information to facilitate freedom of ideas and preservation of a democratic republic. But, like guns, the P2P networks are often used for other more harmful purposes (such as copyright infringement).
In conclusion, I would say that in order to maintain the security of a free State, maintaining the ability for a people to communicate among itself is almost as significant as the people's right to defend itself. I hereby propose an amendment to the constitution declaring as much (details to be worked out).
Once you rip and distribute, you create a trail, and all the RIAA needs is a few high-profile cases that take Freenet users and run them through the wash for distributing songs.
While RIAA possibly can find the guy who ripped the disk (with watermarks or whatever), they can't identify the Freenet users that host and download the tracks. Freenet coneals the idenitites of people that download, upload or host the content; or, rather, there is no way to tell the difference between them for outside spy/observer. This was one of the initial Freenet design goals, so Freenet is quite good at it.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Haha. An amendable constitution. What an oxymoron.
'It's OK, my constitution PROTECTS this! Now let me just go ahead and amend it...'
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I'm curious how argument would go for countries which have banned guns, as in, most countries on this globe :)
Should we ban P2P, or does the context-free analogy only work where guns are legal?
> no.
> so why should we get rid of on-line privacy just because the real world is reflected on line.
Hey, the on-line world isn't being singled out; I know it sounds trite, alarmist, and jingoistic, but the (U.S.) government is getting more repressive every day. For example, since the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act (a.k.a. the RAVE Act) was passed 3 months ago, Bars (and all other event organizers, including rave organizers, who were the nominal target) ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DRUG USE AT THEIR EVENTS if one could reasonably assume that drugs would be done at said event, even if the organizer and/or property owner made a good-faith effort to keep their event drug-free.
The IDAP/RAVE act was introduced in Congress in 2002. A coalition of anti-drug-war activists and entertainment businesses rallied against it, and it never got to the floor for a vote, and even lost two of its original co-sponsors in the process.
This spring, however, Senator Biden (D-DE) snuck it into the conference-commitee version of the popular Amber Alert law. It was thus passed without any congress-wide debate, and with many who voted for it ignorant that it had even been included.
Biden claimed that the the critics were misreading the bill and exagerating its dangers as expressed above. Even those who would have given him the benefit of the doubt may have second thoughts, because the law has already been used for blatant political repression. In May, the DEA told the owners of a Billings, Montana, venue that they could face a fine of $250,000 if illicit drugs were found in their premises during a fund-raising concert for 2 drug-law-reform groups. The bands were given a similar threat, and the benefit was cancelled.
Sorry to go off-topic, but I think it's usefull to try to see the big picture.
aren't strangers just friends that you haven't met yet ?
Ug. They're all thugs.
That's lovely.
Now tell me what that has to do with what I said. It doesn't matter what the dictionary says, it only matters what the law says. The law is on the RIAA's side. (I get the impression you think I'm saying otherwise.) The law treats copyright infringement differently than physical theft, and for good reason. My point is simply that the RIAA clearly doesn't care about the laws that are on their side. They care more about their propaganda. Current copyright law really doesn't benifit them anymore because they are obsolete. They are no longer required for the distribution of music, and they understand that since copyright law is designed to protect creators instead of distributors. If they don't push the 'infringement == physical theft' propaganda they may not show up on congress' radar enough to get a law passed that will keep them in business.
In short: stealing music is illegal, however it appears that the RIAA doesn't care because they have bigger problems, and this propaganda war is a means to a different end.
Since 99% of the work is public domain. The vast majority of performances add nothing in particular to the work, and are simply copy-cat repeats of performances that have been being performed for the past hundred years (stuff conducted by Bernstein is an exception).
In any event, they don't particularly care. Conductors and instrumentalists make their money from live performances.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The whole point of copyright FOR A LIMITED TIME
is that works fall into the public domain after
that.
That was the deal set out in our Constitution for
the advancement of all.
7, 14, 100+ years. Seems to me that "limited" might
be **less** now than it was 200+ years ago.
"Apart from the fact that we can all get that from the motel we most recently visited, there are plenty of legitimate sites that distribute the Bible online."
is the RIAA guy saying that its all right to steal motel bibles?
Would be a pretty expensive operation now, but not something I can't see happening in the next 25 years. (and that's being optimistic)
Step away from the computer and wrap your head in aluminum foil because the aliens are fucking with your mind. Just because it was on Star Trek does not make it plausible.
If the ships have inertial dampeners to prevent themselves from going SPLAT! everytime they accelerated, then why do they always bounce around when the ship is hit by a phaser?
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
Well I'm saying people are moving on, they dont want or need discs anymore.
Kinda like people dont use floppys anymore now.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Theoretically, a watermark could survive even analog copying. It is part of the music.
The missing step here is the step of watermarking the music with random codes (think one-time pad) correlating the song with the purchaser in the record company database.
This could conceivably make the watermark almost indetectable, and allow the company to trace the song back to you.
Like hardly. Take two copies of the song with different watermarks, XOR together to locate a likely 50% of the watermark bits, inverse, and AND out so much of the watermark that it no longer identifies either of the uniquely tagged sources. While difficult to do with analog becuse of noise, not at all difficult with digital. Now you have a recording that does not relate to either original, and unless highly unlucky, no third person either.
And your method would have only worked provided that each user gives full and complete personal information at the time of purchase, which is not how we buy music today.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
to tell the truth, I'll have to apologize right now... I wasn't really replying to anything in your post, I just made the connection in my brain about what I posted, and looked for a good place to put it to see what people thought. *looks sheepish* I'll try to post earlier in the conversation next time and on a more relevant place
A word-of-mouth "buzz" or "pan" is far more powerful than a government proclaimation.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I have 3 points:
FIRST
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't their plan to (1) get on a P2P, (2) download "a" song from someone, (3) then sue them?
There seems to be a very easy escape from that trap. All you have to argue is that once you realized that someone accidentally downloaded a song off you (you thought you weren't sharing copyrighted materials...oops!), you immediately erased it from your hard drive and permanently got rid of ownership youself as well. In effect, you "gave" it to that person. Among the rights of a an owner of copyrighted works is the right to give it away. In effect that's what happens in my scenario. Someone took your copy and you permenently relinquished ownership of it. Unless they can prove you still have it I don't see how they can win.
I mean, I can buy a cd and give it to a friend as a birthday gift without getting sued. I just gave this song to our friendly RIAA spy instead!
Let me know what you guys think about that. I mean, if I was the RIAA I would certainly download more than one song from a suspected distributor.
SECOND
I don't consider simply having songs on your hard drive and being connected to a network as fulfilling the definition of "distributing." You aren't taking any affirmative steps to send anything. People reach in and take it. You aren't making a profit, so there's no pecuniary element to it... I guess I need to brush up on my DMCA reading, but to me it sounds pretty easy to defend.
THIRD
When the RIAA downloads a song from your hard drive in order to prove that you committed copyright infringement, they are doing the EXACT same thing. They relinquished owndership rights to that song that you possess when you bought. So as they download it they are in effect stealing it from *you.* They are just as guilty as you are. Last I checked Lard didn't have the right to walk into my house and reclaim his cd just because he made it.
It's the same with art. Once you bought it you can destroy it however you wish to, even over the artist's objections. So the RIAA would like you to think it can d/l your song and escape suit themselves, but they can't. They aren't a governmental entity with police powers. This is the equivalent of an undercover cop buying drugs to catch a drug-dealer.
Just some thoughts...