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Alternatives To The INDUCE Act
Iphtashu Fitz writes "The 'Don't Induce Act' proposes that only someone who distributes a commercial computer program that is 'specifically designed' for wide-scale piracy on digital networks could be held liable for copyright violations. The proposal includes three requirements that must be met before a software distributor can be found liable: The 'predominant' use of the program must be the mass, indiscriminate infringing redistribution of copyrighted works; the 'commercial viability of the computer program' must depend on revenue derived from piracy; and the software distributor must have 'undertaken conscious, recurring, persistent and deliberate acts' to encourage copyright infringement. No surprise that the MPAA and RIAA are opposed to this 'watered down' bill. MPAA vice president Fritz Attaway showed his organizations true colors by stating that the Don't Induce Act was so narrowly drafted it would be impossible to use it to shutter even operators of peer-to-peer networks."
You oppose the Don't Induce Act, because it is "so narrowly drafted it would be impossible to use it to shutter even operators of peer-to-peer networks."
Now this may come as a surprise to you but this exactly is the purpose of this Act.
This may even further surprise you but there are other uses for modern means of communication (e.g. computers, internet) then sharing "pirated" software. That is why a lot of people don't want your concerns about software piracy to hinder the free flow of information more then necessary and the Don't Induce Act is addressing these concerns.
I hope this helped clear things up a little bit for you.
Thank you for your time.
Regards,
AC
Bah, If they are to sue Apple and other MP3 player manufacturers then why not sue everyone that makes CD players also since they could be playing illegally copied CD's. Not to mention manufacturers of CD/DVD writers. They are all pirates!!!
Piracy is okay as long as it's difficult? I mean nobody got too pissed about me using my VCR to copy the simpsons ten years ago, or record music from the radio back then.
But if it's easy, it's illegal? I guess I just don't keep up enough with the p2p legal stuff.
So. A court decides that software producers aren't responsible for the user's own actions with that software, and now these folks want to blame the software if a lot of the users abuse it?
How is that a serious argument? If it's right, it's right. If it's wrong, it's wrong. Number of abuses is irrelevant.
...there needs to be a way for everyday people to take away corporate charters & lobbying rights from vicious, narrowminded groups such as this.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Alright, one of the criteria that a piece of software needs to meet according to this is that the software needs to get most of its revenue from the piracy use of the software. What if this is FREE software and there is no commerical revenue, like bittorrent.
How about we take it a step further, and unlike bittorrent, we have a piece of free software whose authors made with the purpose of piracy, what is to be done about that?
The way I see it, this bill won't satisfy those in Hollywood for the above loopholes. So all the software used for de facto pirating will be non-commericial, how does Hollywood benefit much from this. Looks like they'll still want to draft some other legislation.
IANAA (I am not an American) but isn't the obvious answer to Hatch's problem: Yes we know Senator. That's the idea.
Or are you saying that you're happy to ban a technology which has many fundamentally excellent reasons to exist purely because it can be used to infringe copyright?
That being the case, do you possess a camera? A VCR? A tape deck? You won't mind disposing of them, then?
Oh, you say that the bill would never be enforced in that way?
WELL DON'T WRITE IT IN THAT WAY, STUPID!
Now we must start holding gun companies liable every time there is a shooting death, and beer companies will be held accountable for all drunk driving incidents. Why blame the wrongdoer anymore when we can make the silly attempt to eradicate all avenues for wrongdoing?
Rather than arguing about how copyrights are going to be enforced, we should be revisiting the whole idea of copyright itself.
It bothers me that the debate has been framed in terms "stealing stuff that you didn't pay for and how can we stop that" rather than the fact we have, for the first time in history, a culture whose important facets are all owned by corporations, and whether or not that's a very good idea.
- Spend lots of cash on creating music in expensive studios.
- Spend more cash distributing music to shops.
- Customers buy music.
- Music industry and Artists earns cash.
- Some customers copy music for friends
- Music industry and Artists loose "potential" cash.
- Music industry spends even more cash trying to stop people copying music
- Lots of unhappy customers.
Possible Solution- Artist create music using cheap digital tools - these are already available.
- Artist uploads digital music to web sites
- Lots of people download / copy music for free
- Artist gets well known by lots of people
- Artist does a gig - lots of people pay to come
- Artist gets paid further by selling special CDs,DVDs or other merchandise on web site.
- RIAA now totally redundant - I think they already know this.
- Do same thing with software (Already happening - OSS)
- Do same thing with movie industry
- Do same thing with all forms of information
- Human race leaps forward, as it tends to do when information is freely available
I know some people already planning some of this !!Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
Okay, I'm not with the MPAA or the RIAA but I am a professional screenwriter and director, and I've recorded a few CDs as a musician, too, so my entire livelihood relies on people paying for my shit. The problem is that both the music and movie industries have consistently focused on notional lost revenues instead of revenues gained. During the last 25 years the penetration of CD, DVD and MP3 players has massively increased but instead of using the net to leverage this opportunity, the industry has instead focused on the entirely bogus idea that people who pirate would otherwise have paid for what they pirated. Imagine if, five years ago, the movie studios and big music recording companies had aggressively pursued digital distribution via the internet for their content instead of leaving it to Napster and subsequently iTunes. iTunes in particular has shown that the public is totally willing to pay a dollar a song to download high quality music free of malware. I believe the same is going to be true of movies for those who have the bandwidth. By concentrating on the notional lost revenue and forming their wagons into a circle, the companies with most to gain from the net have instead consistently cast themselves as the bad guys. If they had instead embraced digital distribution and implemented a responsible, rational and reasonable DRM strategy they would have won the PR battle and made a lot of money into the process. The most ridiculous aspect of this is the idea that there was some 'golden age' before piracy. There never was. It was exactly the introduction of easily copiable media -- the audio cassette in fact -- that really opened up the way that the public consumed music (Walkman, anyone?). The MP3 (and MP4) format could, if handled properly, have enormously leveraged the business operations of the audio and movie companies, at the risk of a certain amount of leakage -- the digital equivalent of what happens at Walmart every day. It baffles me that it is STILL not straightforward to download a legal copy of a song or movie from the distributor's website. (Here in Canada, still no iTunes). The movie and music industries formula for business success in the internet age would appear to be: point gun at foot; shoot; repeat.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.