Slashdot Mirror
Aussie Students Face Jail Over Music Sharing Site
An anonymous reader writes "SMH this morning is reporting that three uni students may be jailed for their creation of a music sharing web site. Ok, piracy is not a good thing, but jail is just a tad extreme, don't you think? I hope ARIA (Australian version of RIAA) are pleased with themselves. What burns me about this article is the quote: 'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."'
Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
*not only* was the website camouflaged...*but also* the student was interested in so-called "open source" software.
Book 'em, Danno.
FFS...we're getting our asses kicked here.
On a final note, I don't think anything really needs to be said about how his paper on "open source software licensing" is somehow evidence of culpability. A hefty roll of the eyes goes out to the genius who thought that up.
For sure. Open source software licensing, music sharing for free - fricking communists! They should all be locked up.
Anyone ever seen "Born Yesterday"? Great line from that movie that applies here:
"I want EVERYONE to be smart. A world full of
ignorance is too dangerous to live in."
I hate stupid people.
------
"Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" --George W. Bush, in Jan. 2000
What burns me about this article is the quote: 'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
Obviously anyone that chooses to write an essay for an information technology law course on "open source software licensing" knows at least SOMETHING about copyright. Such as, for instance, the fact that there is a such a thing as copyright law and that freely trading copyrighted material might violate it.
That quote had nothing to do with insulting your precious open source sensitivities. It was about an information technology law student obviously knowing when he's breaking copyright laws on a computer.
> Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy.
If he knew anything at all about open source, and especially if he advocated it, that makes him an evil terrorist.
Look, for every other crime, you do time in jail. Why should copyright infringement be any different? This is nothing other than the willful violation of copyright laws. A service with no other reasonable purpose than breaking the law should be considered violation of the law, just as someone who had set up an on-line drug trading site would be in violation of drug laws even if they personally weren't selling the crack themselves.
Piracy advocates used to say that there is no alternative to piracy, that there is nowhere else to get music online. Thats not true now; with the success of anti-piracy enforcement, there is a flourishing legal online music marketplace, and everyone should realize that if this new business horizon is to be truly successful, the illegal alternative must be suppressed.
I do not think they should be going to jail. A fine at worst. I myself pirate software, music, and movies.
However sometimes I find myself feeling a little sympathy for the RIAA. I'm sure many Slashdot readers program or otherwise produce software for a living. Do you ever worry that widespread piracy hurts your salary and even your employability? When I talk to average joes who are getting a new computer I ask what software it comes with or what software they're getting and the usual answer is that they're getting someone they know to burn off all the software they need. Is this healthy for the many professional software developers? (Which I suspect a sizeable number of you are)
We need a new music distribution movement.
Open Source Music Licensing
1. Someone posts a blank [ insert fav music editor of choice ] file
2. everyone adds one note and then reposts it
3. After thousands of people have contributed, release it on CD and P2P.
4. Profi... I mean, uh, watch as it dominates the current 800 lb. gorillas of the music arena. No one could match the raw emotion, tonal diversity, and freedom from coherence such a piece would possess.
Except maybe John Cage.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Reminds me of what USA citizens might face if they were to (gasp) post a link to the Paris Hilton movie (Freenet: CHK@qGlSiCK3HPMx38fCuSPlo81ws2AMAwI,LRhfAE-DMDcsnr QhkXEiBw/parissexmovie_256k.wmv).
It may seem off-topic, but it isn't, really. A movie was filmed consensually. It's being distributed - with disregard to any possible copyright - by one of the involved parties. And the other party involved is threatening lawsuits six ways from Sunday. Pot, kettle, black... You performed a work, you knew it was being recorded, you're well aware of this whole new-fangled "internet" thing, why is it someone else's fault when things start getting distributed? To be honest, the parallel between the Hilton tape and every MP3 out there is quite clear.
I'm disappointed to see that yet more college kids are facing punishment for writing what amounts to essentially an indexing service, but here in the US, that seems to be the status quo. As in, he who has the status, has the quo.
The RIAA is winning because they have money. The ARIA will win for the same reasons. It sucks, really.
Nevermind that said movements survive on the concept of copyright and respecting the creator's wishes. Standard copyright doesn't even do that anymore, considering most creators of original content hand it over as a work-for-hire and aren't even able to assert moral rights (most copyrighted work being produced in the U.S. or for U.S. companies). So it's possible the prosecutor is attempting to trace the connection between open source and piracy that simply doesn't exist.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
magnatune.com
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
While the article was poorly phrased, I seriously doubt that it was an attack against the Open Source community. The author was implying that Ng was somewhat about copyright law, and that he probablly knew well that the site was illegal. It was trying to make his infraction seem more blatent, because he allegedly knew he was doing something wrong and still did it. Although, I would see little connection between software licensing and music copyright law, I guess it helps paint him as a bad guy. Bad journalism, definitely; but an attack on the Open Source community, highly unlikely.
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
I apologise for my horrible spelling, it's 2 AM
2 AM? For most true geeks, that's like mid-afternoon.
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
*Sung to 'Down Under' Men At Work'
... men at work were are they now
Travelling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She was using a sniffer and watching my serivce
And she said...
"Did you use a pro-gram called Napster?
Where students thieve and swap music faster?
Can't you swap, can't you swap a bit faster?
You better run, you better take cover"
Trading songs with a man in Brussels
On a T3 his network had muscles
I said, "Do you use KazAa or Napster?"
He just smiled and called me a hackster
And he said...
"I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover"
Yeah
Trading warez in a chan on the efnet
feds are sniffin my whole damn co-nnect
I said in the chan, "MP3's I got plenty
Because I come from the land of plenty?"
And he said...
"Oh! "I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover"
Yeah
MoFscker
Ok, piracy is not a good thing, but jail is just a tad extreme, don't you think?
...?
Recall that Australia was Great Britain's prison state, during the heydey of the Empire.
What's next -- condemning hardcore Ausssie offenders to Tasmania
-kgj
-kgj
given the effort that is going into anonymous (sp?) trading P2P systems, it seems amazing that there are still sites out there that host MP3s that are not squeaky clean.
/.er when it comes to the RIAA / ARIA / "assorted recording acronym", but these guys were painting a large target on their foreheads and saying "come and get us".
I have as big a chip on my shoulder as the next
Jail is over the top, but if you wanted to get away with doing dodgy things, these guys failed miserably.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy.
They are both hated by people with copyright-based monopolies.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
We have a free will.
This means nobody is making you buy things at gunpoint.
This also means, that if you stop buying music, stop "consuming" music and overall just don't touch anything provided by these *AA people, two things will happen:
1. You will always be safe from litigation
2. They will be hurt due to lost sales
And there is not a goddamn thing they can do if you choose to take this strategy!
Read a book instead. Or listen to the existing records you might have. Or get an instrument like guitar and learn to play.
He is a theif. He deserves to be in jail.
Hello? - He's charged with breach of copyright, not theft. One is a civil offence, the other a criminal offence. They are not the same.
Get your facts straight, coward. Thank you.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
People also missed the fact that they have not been given a jail sentence yet, they may get community service etc. or the chance to appeal. They knew it was illegal, do the crime, do the time!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Bloody Aussies think they have it bad because your Charles Ng (allegedly) violated copyright laws. Why don't you come to the U.S., and see what OUR Charles Ng was like! You'll see just how easy you've got it down there!
> the music industry alleges the pirated music cost
... - if so, that's hardly the fault of Mr Ng and his cohorts.
> it at least $60 million
That's one f*ck of a lot of Kylie!
Let's do a bit of maths on this. A CD in Australia costs around $20-25. Let's round this up to $30, to give ARIA the benefit of the doubt.
An average CD contains about 10 tracks.
I'm going to assume that ARIA used something resembling base-10 mathematics... $60 mill equates to 2 million CDs, or 20 million tracks worth of downloads.
That's one track for every person in Australia.
Let's further assume that each track was a 3Mb MP3 file, which is probably a bit on the low side. The 20 million tracks that were downloaded works out to about 60Tb of data.
Are we supposed to believe that these guys, using a site running from a suburban bedroom, managed to share 60Tb of data? **Maybe** ARIA's lawyer is assuming that each track that was downloaded from this site was copied to another 10 sites, and from each of these to another 10,
Does anyone have any more info on this case? Preferably, something a bit more credible?
I've actually run into a number of "Ng's" here in Oz. Reminds me of an outburst from one of my slightly-aggressive teachers in school:
"Ng? What kind of name is Ng? I can't even shout it!"
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Maybe Ana could loan him an a.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
That depends where you are in Texas.
In my county, you might be the only inmate.
A friend of mine spent 30 days in jail once back in the late 70s.
When his father needed him to drive a tractor, the sheriff would turn him loose for the day in the custody of his father. At the end of the day, his father would take him back.
They'd also let him out to rake the leaves of the courthouse lawn or to run down to the drugstore for a hamburger or a book to read.
One Saturday night, someone booked for drinking and driving, public intoxication, or something like that broke his tv set. He was a bit ticked off that the sheriff wouldn't let him out for a little while on Monday to go buy another tv set.
Mandarin/Cantonese/Hokkien speakers may, of course, correct me on this.
More than mere navel gazing.
What the lawyer did not say:
The lawyer was making an insidious attempt to vilify Free Software with his questionably legal attack on information sharing. That would be an added benefit for an industry that wishes to eliminate OSs that have the ability to disable DRM.
The record industry is steady on course to destroy all freedom on the Net for a few quarters of profit. This is the essence of greed.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
"Stealing" implies that I have deprived you of something. if I steal your car, I have deprived you of your car.
However, computers and the internet have rendered this unnecessary. I can make an exact copy of your car, and you were deprived of nothing. For the most part, I *choose* to have a merely reasonably accurate replica for the sake of bandwidth which can then be further duplicated.
Because there is no scarcity (Even though the RIAA is doing it's best to force artificial scarcity upon us), there is no value. You will have to produce a good enough product that people wish to pay you to make more, because with no scarcity you cannot force people to pay you.
If I might continue with the car analogy, my decision to drive a Toyta Camry instead of a Porche or Corvette is due to scarcity: It takes far more labor to produce a Porche or 'Vette, so they cost far more than I can afford. Therefore, others make cars which use cheaper, lower-performing parts which fit my budget.
Enter the duplicator. It can promptly make an exact copy of anything you feed into it, down to the subatomic level if you want to wait a bit longer. There is no longer any scarcity of cars; I can simply borrow my neighbor's luxury vehicle and copy it. As the price for all cars is now effectively zero, the only ones who can continue making cars are those who can produce a product of the quality that will convince you to willingly pay for it.
Similarly, the advent of music sharing means that there is no scarcity, so the only ones who should make music are those who can produce music of such quality that you want to pay them to continue making it. Unfortunately, this direct relationship between the band and their audience leaves no space for the pinheads running the RIAA corporate members to take a share and the buggy makers will be damned if they give up without a fight.
Section 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A [setting forth copyright owners' exclusive rights and visual artists' artistic rights], the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
This is what I use for my legal disclaimer and you could check out some of the spoofs I've done in the past on CNN, ABCNews, Republicans, etc. (antioffline.com), as well as daily copying copyrighted news. It's public domain. Which from what you state, I gather you're implying that if you photocopy a newspaper you could be sued... You could if you sold it as your own for profit, but not by using it. BTW, my legal mumbo jumbo was written for me by someone in the law field considering the shit I had/have to deal with.
Am I breaking the law copying news?, if you think so, then you are too since you copy it to your machine without permission when it gets cached.
MoFscker
I think it is past time that the community had some input into sentencing guidelines for cases of computer crime. Two university students with a history of being of good character, and very likely to go on to be law abiding, productive members of society face up to five years (per offence) in jail for giving away music.
Using the 99 US cents that Apple's iTunes service charges for songs, the 1000 songs on the computer had a commercial value of around $990. If the students had stolen a car worth $990 would the DPP be recommending jail time? If they had stolen $990 worth of CDs during a house burglary is there a realistic chance that they would face jail for their first offence? Either of these non-computer crimes would have a more traumatic effect on the victim.
A crime committed using a computer deserves a sentence in line with a non-computer crime involving similar levels of victim impact, financial loss and inherent malice.
Thanks for clearing that up.
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
17 USC 107
Australian fair use is much more narrow than American fair use. Australian copyright law does not grant a broad exception for private copying of audio or time-shifting of television programs the way USA copyright law does (section 1008 for private copying of audio; Sony v. Universal for time-shifting of TV). While the "such as" in the first sentence of 17 USC 107 is interpreted to be illustrative and not limitative, Australian fair use's corresponding language is limitative.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, the legal definition of a 'thief' and 'stealing' requires 'the taking of property with intention to permenantly deprive its owner of the its use', not 'keeping it.' You are still a thief if you steal something and sell it (i.e. not keeping it). You are NOT a thief if you COPY something as you have not deprived the owner of the use of it by taking it.
Read Pynchon.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Don't let the Aussies get all of the credit!
Title 18, Section 2319 of the US Code:
"Any person who commits an offense under section 506(a)(1) of title 17 -
(1) shall be imprisoned not more than 5 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists of the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $2,500;"
You can search the US code here.
The same language is going into The FTAA Treaty, meaning all of North and South America would face prison for the same crime:
"[4.1. Each Party shall provide criminal procedures and penalties to be
applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or infringement
of copyrights or neighboring rights on a commercial scale. Each Party shall
provide that significant willful infringements of copyrights or neighboring
rights that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be
considered willful infringement on a commercial scale.
In criminal procedures, remedies available shall include imprisonment and/or
monetary fines sufficiently high to deter future acts of infringement and
with a policy to remove the monetary incentive to the infringer. Each Party
shall further ensure that such fines are imposed by judicial authorities at
levels that actually deter future infringements.]"
'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy." Anyone who understands OSS licencing has a pretty good grasp of copyright law, especially as OSS is specifically designed to present an alternative to traditional copyright law. It would be impossible that this person didn't know he was breaking the law. His crime is made doubly worse by the fact that instead of simply trying to build an alternative to copyright law as with OSS, he decided to go out and break the law instead.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Someone buy this dude a drink! Amen to critical thinking!
/. people try to defend them because they're like most trolls on the net and they will say anything to get attention.
....
Anyone who's taken a semester of police foundations [or listened to their brother rant about it] knows that there are several techniques people use to evade prosecution.
The first is minimalization. That is "I broke the law but only a bit". e.g. speeders do this all the time. "I was only 20 over the limit". Or they try to rationalize it. E.g. "Marajuanna never killed anyone" or "the CD doesn't cost 32$ so it's ok to steal it, they still make a profit on the few sales they do make".
I think mostly on
Furthermore Linux sucks and BSD is dead..... oh and I think I'm forgetting something
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That would be a paper by the Australian Copyright Council, a body formed of people who are interested in strong copyright protection. They are not an official body, and you can assume that that paper is a biased interpretation.
The official body in Australia that handles intellectual property issues is IP Australia, although realistically, copyright is a matter for the courts to decide.
AFAIK, time-shifting and format-shifting have NEVER BEEN TESTED in Australian courts. The legislation is just not that specific, and there's a lot of common law to be considered, which can over-ride legislation in Australia.
I strongly suspect that if anyone was brought to court in Australia for ripping their CDs to MP3s, or for taping things from the telly, that the court would find it to be fair use, as long as it is clearly being done for personal use.
Politas