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Induce Act Stalled For Now
Neil Wehneman writes "The AP is reporting, through Newsday, the great news that the Induce Act is not going anywhere this legislative term. Thanks to everyone who took action in various ways, although there's a strong chance we'll see this type of bill again soon. Additional thanks go to Copyfight for the initial heads-up."
Its commendable that Corporate America and its consumers worked hand in hand to push this bill back where it crawled out of. It was a fair fight and a dumb bill and it needed to be put to rest and now it has, albeit temporarily. I worry how the fight will go down when we are pitched against each other and the fight's fair on our end, but the cash pile is taller on their end? Also in today's world when corporate will can be swayed by a few choice words like "terrorism", "patriotism" lobbed at them by the Govt, do we think they will stand with us when we fight the beaureacracy? Everyone chooses their fight a lot more carefully these days, owing to their allegiances and their master's wishes..
Rapid Nirvana
Even if you must elect a senator who's to the right of Jesse Helms, could you please pick someone who's not in Hollywood's pocket next time?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://www.suprnova.org/
Why are there no acts under consideration that will "induce" the music industry to lower prices to reasonable levels?
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- ...aimed at manufacturers of file-sharing software commonly used to steal electronic copies of music, movies and computer programs...
Wasn't there a more, how shall I put this... unbiased way to word the intro to this article??I was never really worried about this bill.
Quite frankly, it's new media vs. old media, and each side has their pet legislators and lobbyists.
And, in the game of law-passing, it's easier to stall something to death than it is to pass it through. Do Nothings always beat Do Somethings.
Especially in government.
Well over 100 posts, including a copy of the final draft that torpedoed the negotiations: INDUCE Act Archives
Good. The induce act was unnecessary as the napster case already showed.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
We need a senator going off the geek vote to introduce a short bill that merely confirms that tbe Betamax Law applies to current technology. Who's our Senator? Who could be? Let's get to work now.
--
make install -not war
Look, folks, this bill isn't dead yet. It's true that its scheduled committee vote was canceled, but Congress will reconvene briefly in November to pass several appropriations bills. Watch for the bill's supporters to try to tack it onto one of these big bills. If they can do that, it can easily sail through Congress as the end of the legislative session draws near, and Congress rushes to get necessary budget bills passed. This is a common tactic, and it often works.
So don't even think of celebrating until Congress adjourns for the year.
On Sunday I went to a lil rally for Senator Tom Daschle, a supporter of this bill sadly.
I told him how concerned I was about Induce and asked why he was supporting it... he explained that some of his friends talked to him about their concerns regarding their losses due to piracy.
Thankfully, he did say that that he didn't think the current revision of the bill was very good and did believe that more work was needed.
We spoke for about 10 minutes on the issue (I think I miffed the national guardsman in line behind me).
One interesting note... I mentioned the savebetamax campaign and he knew nothing about it... his aid admitted that they had received 'a few calls' on the topic... either they were lying... or not enough calls were made it seems.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
not if THEY (iomedium.com) have anything to say about it!
And then there was E
He will retire soon and he is making sure that he will be able to get a high paying job after he does.
Loved the bit: "So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community," Bainwol said. Oh yes the big bad p2p companys are forcing there wares onto unsuspecting kids. Forcing them into a life time of slavery to downloading copyright software.
Whats is a asterisk asterisk supposed to mean?
From the Newsday Article:
"So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community," Bainwol said.
I know plenty of "grown-ups" (40 and 50 year olds) who ride the mule all the time.
Of course these young-uns don't know any better and don't know that "stealing" music and movies is wrong.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
it won't do me any good to write my congressman.
he's lamar smith, r-san antonio and he's in the pocket of the industry.
my attempts to contact him about recognizing and codifying fair use have been met with what i can anti-consumer rhetoric. but alas...i'll keep writing even though i think i know the outcome.
Is it 5:30 yet?
If recording devices can be outlawed because the can be used to infringe upon IP rights, surely guns should be outlawed because they can be used to kill people.
Perhaps the gun lobbyists could be gotten to do something useful on this basis?
You can't steal something intangible. Making copies of electrons does not count as stealing. The word just doesn't fit.
If I take physical CDs from you without paying, its stealing.
If I make a copy of a CD, that someone paid for, its copyright infringment, not stealing.
I love it, it allows me to be politically active and relatively lazy at the same time.
Can anyone say tactical retreat?
Check out http://www.ipaction.org/ if you want to fight the power with the weapon of choice in this particular melee. Cold hard cash.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
By all means, keep writing to him, on paper (email is a waste of time), but don't stop there. Write letters to the editors of all the newspapers in his district, explaining briefly what he's doing to you all and why it's bad. If you can get a couple of column-inches on the letters-to-the-editor page, you can bet that his staffers will see it, and show him. All the money in the world doesn't do a congress-critter any good if it won't buy enough votes, and they will welch on a big contributor like the RIAA if that's what it takes to stay in office.
See what I've been reading.
Ahhh my faith in humanity is restored again!
*looks out window*
Never mind.
[posting anonlymously because I'm a senate staffer]
Something worth mentioning - Sen. Hatch is outgoing chair of the Senate Judiciary committee. GOP rules limit chairmanships to 6 years, and his time is up. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is likely to be chairman in the next congress.
There have been rumors that Hatch is pushing to reconstitute the intellectual property subcommittee, but even with a subcommittee chair he'll be alot less powerful next session than he is now. He could push bills out of his subcommittee and have them bottled in the full committee, or significantly modified during full committee markup.
Specter isn't known for being in touch with IT/IP issues. This is a double edged sword. As committee chair he's likely to give significant leeway to Hatch on IP issues in order to focus on investigations and other legislation. Conversely, without strongly stated public views on copyright/IP issues, Specter will probably be receptive to lobbying. If the EFF/OSDN/Sun/Others effectively represent their issues, they'll be much better off with Chairman Specter than Chairman Hatch. If they blow it --- 6 more years of the same.
A few wrinkles - Specter is up for election and may end up losing his seat. Also, Sen. Grassley is second in seniority on the Judiciary committee. Senators can only chair one committee at a time, and conventional beltway wisdom is that Sen. Grassley will not relinquish his current chairmanship (Finance) in order to take Judiciary, leaving it to Specter.
"So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community," Bainwol said.
before heading back into the studio to lay down a few more tracks, right?
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Its commendable that Corporate America and its consumers worked hand in hand to push this bill back where it crawled out of.
While some technology companies did oppose the Act, it is totally unreasonable to say that "Corporate America" opposed it. The INDUCE Act was lobbied for by the RIAA and MPAA and supported by Microsoft, among others. It is the ability of Corporate America to push bills into Congress with thick wads of bills in envelopes that resulted in the DMCA and the introduction of this Act.
I worry how the fight will go down when we are pitched against each other and the fight's fair on our end, but the cash pile is taller on their end?
i.e., now.
Also in today's world when corporate will can be swayed by a few choice words like "terrorism", "patriotism" lobbed at them by the Govt,
Businesses act in self-interest, so abstract, not-directly-profitable ideas like patriotism mean nothing. Meanwhile, terrorism means contracts from the U.S. goverment. These things are designed to scare the citizenry into line, not companies.
do we think they will stand with us when we fight the beaureacracy?
Okay, you are off the planet. Corporate America arm in arm with the Government has borne bureaucracy at its foulest. Corporate America does not fight democracy-choking bureaucracy. They fight for it. The more complex and indirect the Government's sovereignty it is, the less obvious and inescapable its accountability to its citizens. Bureaucracy affords corporate America far more ways to, for example, shove through acts like the DMCA or shoot down acts that would interfere with the pharmaceutical industry's profit margin, and importantly, keep the interests of the consumer and the people away from their government.
(This time, BSA (with its tech company members) opposed the INDUCE Act because it would hurt technology. Pure business pragmatism. Meanwhile, companies with an interest in maintaining control of digital content companies, lobbied for the Act. Again, pure business pragmatism.)
We never fought together; we never should. Our causes sometimes overlap. More often than not they don't. But this never changes: members of any "free market" should have no power in changing the rules of the market itself.
The Government should represent the people only, each person weighed equally, not proportionate to their access to capital. The government's power and authority is granted by every single person, from nowhere else, and it would do well to remember that if eventually we all grow sick enough of its corruption.
hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids</snip>
The kids...it's all about the kids...won't somebody please think about the kids!
Rick Boucher of Virginia. He's running for re-election this year, so send him a few bucks. I don't care if you are a R or a D, he's the only friend you've got up there. So contribute, and if you're in his district, go vote for him.
Hatch was the guy who wanted to remotely destroy people's computers if they were found to contain items that infringed on copyright. Yes, you read that right. Remotely destroy people's computers.
I'm all for destroying their machines, Hatch said during a Committee hearing Tuesday. "'If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize' the seriousness of their actions," the wire service quotes him as saying. (source)
Senator, those friends "losses" are based on two peculiar propositions; the first is that nobody has ever bought music after hearing it for free; the second is that everybody who downloaded a song would have bought it if it weren't available on the net. I think you will agree that both of these propositions are laughable...
That's the whole debunking in 15 seconds.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
...I think we have records as far back as ancient Greece saying how the "wild young ones" are destroying society.
1) Grown-ups typically have more money, less spare time. That makes you more willing to pay as opposed to more time "working" downloading stuff.
2) As a grown-up, you have a much better appriciation of the time value of money. I know myself that as a student, I spent hours saving pennies (to exaggerate a bit), while today I know what one hour of my time is worth.
3) Grown-ups on average aren't as technicly inclined as young people. I know several that turned into hardcore pirates once they just figured out how.
The real test of ethics is what you would do if you could get away with it. Look at riots, anarchy, civil unrest and civil war and all the foul things that happen when law and order is missing. And to think people won't commit a little piracy if they can get away with it?`Hell, we used to do real piracy, arr, matey!
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Who stands to benifit? (If passed into law)
Network TV won't
RIAA won't
Public won't
Hollywood won't
Etc...
So who will? The political forces that are pretending to support this outrageous and hokey cause?
Am I insane, or am I so sane I just blew your mind?
I've been reading Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, and found it very insightful.
Point out all the times that corporations supporting old technologies have lobbied congress against new technologies citing piracy, property rights, and labeling their competitors as criminals. Congress has never given in to illegalizing newer, superior technologies in favor of old technologies controlled by a handful of massive corporations, until recently.
The constitution gave Congress the power to grant copyrights for only a limited term and for the sole purpose of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. This is still what it says today, and I (and many others) believe that Congress has violated the constitution in over-extending the reach of copyrights and increasing their lifetime indefinitely. The current trend is that copyrights will never expire, and the information is simply lost to the world because they're out of print and copies are discarded when they get too old. This nonesense going in Congress is not only destroying our future but our past as well.
You know what radio stations have to pay recording artists and major labels? Nothing. They pay directly to the composers and song writers a small, fixed amount defined by Congress (back when it understood the purpose of copyright) because letting the recording industry set the price threatened the new distribution technology in favor of old physical media. Now the recording industry is after P2P, seeking to destroy the superior competing technology rather than finding a balance.
The battle fought by the RIAA isn't about copyrights or piracy, it's about control of the media, and how media is created and distributed.
Meanwhile, Norway's government just made it's budget proposal where the music and film industry will be compensated by government funds for their losses due to private/personal copying.
In the proposal, all forms of personal/private copying of copyrighted will be legalized, including P2P. Also, no further fees on recordable media (such as CD-R and DVD-R) will be introduced.
If you understand Norwegian or have an excellent fish, you can read the article here: http://www.nrk.no/musikk/4149551.html.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
"So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community," Bainwol said.
I don't understand what he is talking about. What does it mean "to offload legal liability to kids"??? I don't get it. Could someone explain it to me?
I'm not kidding or ironizing here, I really don't understand RIAA's point.
Is there anyone those in america can vote for who DONT support these stupid lame pro-big-corperation IP laws?
And I mean someone who actually stands a remote chance of winning...
Hopefully us aussies can kick howard out on saturday and get a government who is NOT pro-big-business on IP laws (although I dont see any specific statement one way or the other on this issue on the ALP website)
He had his CONGRESSIONAL WEBSITE linked to a hardcore pornographic webpage for god's sake! But, of course, he is from Utah. . .
/Friggin' Mormons. Remove yourselves, your senator and your 7 missing gold tablets from this country as soon as humanly possible.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
In a similar topic, Congress will soon vote that possession of aluminum tubes created to exacting tolerances will be illegal and result in prison time under the Patriot Act.
The wording will be such that anyone obtaining a soda can from a vending machine will be deemed to have paid for, and aquired, for the potentially illicit purpose of nuclear WMD research, a banned item and will be imprisoned without charges and without a trial for an indefinite period of time.
The bill also increases the nation debt by $4Trillion for the construction of 20million new prison beds.
Securing private CD-burning
You may now freely copy your own CDs. Through the national budget the government proposes securing the private right to copy, and is allocating 32,5 MNOK (about 4,8M$) to rights holders.
The proposal is appearing ahead of the departments own evaluation of a new copyright law by proposing a new compensation arrangement which will secure compensation to copyright holders for private copying.
The iundustry overrun
The government has thus chosen to not listen to the music industry, who was seeking to criminalize the private copying of music. The government has also chosen to not follow the industry's proposal of introducing a levy on different storage media, such as unrecorded CD and DVD records.
When the department of culture in the spring of 2003 sent out a hearing with regards to new copyright law NRK.no/musikk wrote about a democratic deficit in the process. Of 126 hearing instances invited to have an opinion on the draft, only one represents the consumer; the small, idealistic organization Elektronisk Forpost Norge (EFF in Norway).
Small voice heard
Now David has won over Goliath. EFN has been heard on all their ideas of securing the consumers' rights.
- This shows that it is not the number of arguments but the strength of the arguments that is decisive, says Bjørn Ramseth, VP of EFN.
- The problems surrounding copyright is not simply a question of market- and technologyadoption.
- It is first and foremost cultural policy. The decision belongs in parlament and not in the court room, something I'm happy that the goverment has realized, says Ramseth.
More court cases
- TONO, IPFI and several other rights holder organizations has chosen to sue individuals that have broken copyright law. Do you believe there will be an end to such suits and threats of lawsuits now?
- No, I don't think so. The industry will all the time try to find new ways to sue people, because they seek to criminalize everything that has to do with file sharing.
- But this will at least make it much harder for the industry to do so. At least in Norway.
Great importance
Copyright law is complex. This is not a case that has engaged the masses. Bjørn Ramseth think it'll take time before people realize how important this is.
- File sharing is becoming more and more an integral part of our culture. We consider this as natural, despite great pressure from the music industry to make us percieve it as illegal and immoral. Now it is clearly decided that this is legal and okay.
Complementary arrangements
The department of culture writes that the new compensation arrangement must be seen in context with the grant of 19,5 MNOK to the "Fund for sound and images". The funds will be granted collectively by application, while the compensation will be individual.
It is still unclear how one is to calculate the share of each composer, text writer and artist should be granted for private copying. Because how do you measure private copying? Should record sales decide? Or perhaps net based music sales? Or what about radio air time?
The government will probably not use the download statistics from the still illegal peer-to-peer servers on the Internet.
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End article, begin personal comment
WTF? Private copying is ok, but Internet is not? And while I do appriciate the deal, it seems like local musicians will be funded, while Britney et al get the shaft. Ah well another wierdo suggestion from the goverment. That's not new at least.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Darn I was really hoping that this would pass. It opens up so many more doors for us. I for one think that I should be able to sue GM, Chryslar-Daimler, BMW and the rest for producing cars that go more then 65mph thus inducing me to speed. Those speeding tickets weren't y fault sir I was induced to speed. Let's not forget to sue fast food for inducing us to splurge and fatten ourselves due to their biggy size's. Gone is the age of individual responsibility /cheer. Let's not hold users accountable for their actions no no it is the saftware writers fault damn you naughty naughty geeks.
This type of bill is why we get Redhat linux distro's unable to play mp3's and why SuSE pro 9.1 will not play a DVD right out of the box. This alone and well maybe the DMCA will do more to stifle innovation then any band of world war 2 germans.
In Soviet Russia, Induce Act...
Oh. Wait.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The USA has ceased to be a democracy in all
ways, excepting name. One of the first orders
of business for King George II's second term
should be a Constitutional Amendment to change
the name to the "Peoples Democratic Republic
of the United States of North America".
A government for corporations, by corporations,
and of corporations. The only time the politcos
pay any attention to the voters is at elections,
and Diebold (et.al.) will put an end to that
with their audit-proof E-Voting machines.
I'm just waiting for step 3 when more of my few remaining rights have been taken away.
If you're right about steps 1 and 2, then this *was* step 3.
First off, they need to reword in that it allows legal P2P. Whats wrong with my sharing a MP3 Recording of my Churches Worship Team playing? Nothing.
;)
Second, just because everyone does something, does not make it right. Being able to make MP3's off oc CD's you own should be legal. Giving your friend a copy for free should also be legal. Giving it to your 5 million closest friends online is one step too far!
Gorkman