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House Bill to Make File-Sharing an Automatic Felony
JAgostoni writes "Wired news has an article about a new bill that would make it a felony to upload a file to a P2P network." EFF has a copy of the bill online. Conyers and Berman both get over a quarter of their campaign funding from Hollywood, according to opensecrets.org. You may remember Berman from this bill and this one.
So if I want to share my own copyrighted works free of charge, would that make me a felon, or just anyone who downloads them and makes them available to others?
To understand recursion,
you must first understand recursion.
Please tell me again how many people in the US make use of p2p networks.
How many of those have voted for these politicians in the past and will be pissed off enough to vote for someone else?
How many that have not voted for these politicians and will vote for them now?
My guess is that the first number >>> second number. Exist Conyers and Berman
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
OpenSecrets is a great resource, and it's useful to not trust the article and actually look for yourself. The notion that Conyers gets 25% of his money from "Hollywood" struck me as odd, since he represents Detroit.
/. editors actually do any fact checking before they post???
In 2002 (last election), he got $49,859 from TV/Movies/Music, out of over $400,000 raised.
In 2003, he's gotten $2,860 out of $104,000.
Looks like he's gotten more like 10% of his money from the entertainment biz, not 25%. Do the
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Frequently, bills are introduced to Congress to test the waters, or distract attention from bills that are likely to passed to more outrageous bills, that will not be passed. While there is an outcry over the decoy bill, the actual bill, while not as bad, is still preposterous, is slid in quietly; on its own or as a rider. (Of course, in some instances the decoy bill actually does get passed, which is what appears to have happened with the PATRIOT Act; in part due to the name).
Quite frankly, I think this is a decoy bill. Where's the real one?
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
If you have a music (or other copyrighted work) file, and you didn't buy it, technically you stole it...
Completly wrong. All what you authored is your.
Mankind is not divided between Hollywood's accredited producers and the rest of the world's consumers.
I don't want to discuss the use of stole. I want to discuss the concept that creation is reserved to a very few.
Last year, some study by a French ministery revealled that about 1% of French people did author music using a computer. How are the digital rights of those 600000 peoples managed by all those schemes ?
Whatever. 10 years ago, if I copied a bunch of songs onto a tape and gave it to someone else, the RIAA would have given me a fricking medal. It's free advertising on non-durable media. They LOVE their shoddy ass media.
I've got 2 milk crates of tapes that I bought for around 10 dollars a piece, and only about 1 in 10 still plays worth a damn. I've got around 500 cd's that I've bought for between 12 and 18 dollars a piece. Couple of years ago I had almost 900, but some crackhead busted a window out of my car and swiped 2 cases from my backseat.
I don't see them falling over themselves to defend my property rights. As far as they're concerned, that money I spent got me nothing but a cheap piece of plastic, and when that's broken or gone, that's my problem. Well, I disagee.
Far as I'm concerned, I can fileshare for 10 more years at the rate I'm going and the RIAA is STILL going to owe me money. They want to kick down my door, charge me 150000 a song and slap a felony on my ass so I can't vote against their little butt boys, they can give it their best shot.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This is very interesting. Copyright and other intellectual property cases are to be prosecuted at the owner's level of effort in Civil Court. But when something becomes a criminal case, the government changes which court system you use, You go to the Criminal Courts. In criminal court, the government has to ensure certain things are available if needed such as a jury of your peers. Often times, the government has to offer legal council, and the government is always footing the bill for the prosecution in a criminal case as no other body has legitimacy in that role. This also creates a double standard in the world of intellectual property where copyrights are policed and defended by the government, while patents and trademarks are still owner policed and defended. With criminal cases, jail time, or publicly funded parole policing systems are almost always a result, while civil court simply determines awards that one party pays another in most cases. What we should do is explain to our governmental representation that this additional cost will severely cut into their pork projects, and constipate the judicial system with teenage felons whole swapped Britney Spears, while pissing off their now angry and voting parents. With this perspective in hand, a measure like this could be defeated.
Well, the problem is that "intellectual property" is not actual property, it's a colloquialism cooked up by people who wish it was actual property. You can buy and sell copyrights, and you can buy and sell copies. But making a copy of something isn't stealing, because it doesn't affect the copyright.
The only way to 'steal' a copyright would be to do something like hack falsely register someone else's work at the copyright office, or something like that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
One of the things that's always disturbed me the most about our legislation-for-the-highest-bidder system is how utterly cheap it is. I mean, think about it: A law that can increase your global corp's profits by $500 million annually can be purchased for a one-time fee of less than a tenth of that. The ROI on bribery is insane! Wouldn't you expect legislation to be priced more concurrently with other costs of doing business, such that said hypothetical law would cost you enough that it took two or three years to really pay off? Seriously, our politicians are just too damn cheap.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
House Representatives have a 98% reelection rate. Why? Well, because they enjoy a 5 to 1 advantage in campaign funding over their opponent(s), and Joe Sixpack trusts the candidate who can afford to be "As Seen On TV".
The more evil Berman gets, the more he's likely to be reelected. Apparently it doesn't pay to be an honest politician.
But Berman isn't the problem, he's just a particularly blatant symbol of it. Contributing to the EFF is just papering over the cracks. Campaign reform, or civil disobedience, or outright revolt is the only way to get these parasites off of us.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"Market forces should be deciding the fate of the music industry, not Congress"
Econ 101 doesn't apply here. Economics deals with the allocation of scarce resources. Information is a limitless resource; it can be transmitted and copied endlessly. Only the artificial construct of Copyright Law makes it scarce (not necessarily a bad thing if there is balance as the Founders intended). The means of reproduction, like printing presses, photocopiers, and computers, are a scarce resource, but they're getting cheaper all the time. Other things that go into an album like a musician's time and creativity are scarce, but that's a miniscule fraction of the price of a CD. A musician's time is more directly related to things like live concerts, and there you'll see market forces at work.
The Homeland Security system does seem to be heading toward the sort of exceedingly low-wage system of "employment" so desired by the folks who brought us H-1B -- and the felonization of P2P file systems is exactly in line with the rest of the war of terror on the population committed routinely by the folks who call the tunes.
Even slaves get food, shelter, clothing and medical care -- which is more than a lot of tech workers are getting these days.
Someone will figure out that slavery is a superior system to the current con-game and also figure out a way to use the military against their own populations to enforce it. I think its already started in privatized prisons and their prisoner-labor programs and the exploding rate of incarceration in the Unted States -- however they really do have to figure out what to do about the prisoner rape problem before they can be considered good massah's by computer nerds who will then work not for money but for privileges in the system.
Seastead this.
If only we didn't know that "bootlegging" in that last class has to do with alcohol, there'd at least be one example of a felony that sounded remotely like "letting someone copy a song for free." But... nope.
One of the qualities of a working justice system is that punishments are proportionate. This bill violates that in spades. Why not let them chop off our mouse hands, you know?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Here's the funny thing to me about this debate.
The first copyright law (in Occidental history anyways) was the Statute of Anne, passed in England in 1710. The law was passed because of another technological innovation (albeit, by that time, a 250 year old one): the printing press.
Prior to printing, "artists" (in this case, mostly writers) were generally supported by "patrons," wealthy individuals who supported the arts for prestige or out of sense of religious need (which is why so much pre-printing western culture is directly related to the mass).
The arrival of printing created a market for books. A market that didn't previously exist. Printing commoditized literacy and literature. At first, the vast collection of classical literature was the source. Printers like Aldus Manutius made personal fortunes by printing vast numbers of classical texts. This re-emergence of classical learning spurred the Renaissance, and literally transformed European culture.
The pressure for a copyright law didn't exist. All of the "artists" being plundered were centuries dead. Over time, however, the vast distribution of learning and classical knowledge led to the existence of a significant community of educated men, and to the vast expansion of that radical late medieval institution: the University.
As the community of learned people grew, the reverence for the classics began to wane as people began to observe things that were, well, WRONG in those classical texts. (Take a look at the history of the University of Paris to see what questioning classical authority could lead to).
Printing can be said to be a major factor in both the Renaissance and in the Reformation. The Reformation is the other important ingredient in how printing made copyright law happen. The Reformation broke the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic Church. It became much easier to be an original scholar.
An era of intellectual freedom (some would say chaos) began. And for the first time in a millenium, Europe began to produce culture instead of merely to echo classical or biblical culture.
Prior to printing, writing was not terribly distinct in its mode of production from, say, painting or sculpting. The production of a book was an intensive labor, and a book was as unique an artifact, or almost as unique, as a painting or a sculpture.
Printing changed that. Printing made a book a commodity. Writers came to be paid by publishers, rather than being church men, wealthy men, or employed by patrons. Writers came to depend on payment by publishers. And this led to the problem.
The problem was that there were no laws to protect ownership of literary works. It was common practice for a publisher to take a book published by someone else, set it himself, knock off a few hundred copies, and sell it himself. In fact, this was much more profitable than seeking out new work. New work was risky -- it might not sell. But find yourself a popular book and then print a few hundred knock-offs and you'd make money for sure! Especially since you didn't have to pay for the creative act itself.
This was the situation engendered by printing technology, the Renaissance and its spread of universal literacy (universal compared to pre-printing anyways), and the Reformation (itself fueled by printing) and the intellectual freedom that came with it. Writers were making deals with publishers and then those publishers were being undercut by "fly-by-night" printers who would take no risk, make no investment, encourage no cultural production, and make fortunes off those writers and printers who were contributing to the culture.
The situation became so bad in England that the Statute of Anne was passed.
Without some legal protection, a living could not be made by creators. Nor could the owners of the means of production be encouraged to take risks on new material. When there is no exclusivity of right