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RIAA, MPAA Ask High Court To Review P2P Decision
The Hobo writes "It's official: Hollywood studios and record companies on Friday asked the United States Supreme Court to overturn a controversial series of recent court decisions that have kept file-swapping software legal." (Previous /. coverage here.)
The INDUCE Act is related and should be a concern as well. Check out http://www.eff.org for more info on this bill making its way through the Senate.
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
Apple's iTunes is doing okay. It's not charging money that's the problem - it's enforcing inferior technology in order to protect a revenue stream with overinflated priofit margins that's the problem. These days it's just silly to get your music by buying it on a physical disk, and it's even sillier to be paying 10x markup for it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
In fact, as a percentage of total cases reviewed, the 5th circuit (Texas/Louisiana/Mississippi) is the most overturned circuit, not the 9th, coming in at about 60% of heard cases overturned.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Yeah, I knew the civil rights issue would come up. And yeah, it's a hell of a stretch... I'd wager that treating people like subhumans and copying the latest Backstreet Boys are not _quite_ analogous.
Also, it could be argued that the basic laws of the country (remember the 'all men are created equal' bit) were being violated by denying black folks civil rights.
It's called an implied social contract. You choose to live in a society, if you won't live by the rules, you need to leave or suffer the consequences of your actions. LOTS of people only follow the rules they want, yet expect full protection from the courts, military, fire/police, etc. Seems a pretty hypocritical approach to me, hence the 'cop out' comment.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
This is an example of the Republican party spreading dis-information and lies in an effort to discredit their opponents.
The statement made by Al Gore was that he helped with funding to support the Internet. The Republican lie machine quickly shortened this up to 'Al Gore claims to have invented the internet' and spread the quote all over the media. Informed parties saw exactly what was happening, but the average joe only sees the issue being muddied up by all the distortions.
I realize you are trying to make a joke, but I find it hard to make light of a situation where people are knowingly distorting the truth to gain power.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
2. A dollar not earned is still lost revenue. In the bookstore example, you forgot to mention that the bookstore owner bought the book from the publisher with the expectation of being able to sell it. If his stock does not sell because everyone has already illegally obtained a copy, that is a very real loss. You are just playing with words. A penny saved is a penny earned, after all.
Except in this specific example, the bookseller simply rips the cover off the book and returns the cover to the publisher for a full refund. Haven't you ever read the fine print inside that tells you that if you bought this book with no cover, then you've ripped off the publisher?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Project Gutenberg contributed an amici brief with Prelinger & the Internet Archive. We welcome the opportunity to show how the use of p2p for legitimate copyright-free works has grown since we wrote the brief (and it was large then, already).
With the help of Magnetlinks (an open standard), all of the Gutenberg content is now available for direct download to enabled p2p programs via the Gutenberg search page. This is very cool, and helps our free eBooks to get around. If you use p2p software, consider sharing Project Gutenberg content in your "shared items" location.
On a somewhat different note, to anticipate a frequent /. contribution: it is still quite unclear whether individual readers (or listeners) violate copyright when they view/read an item for personal non-commercial use in many situations. For example, if you own a print copy of Orwell's 1984 and are in the US (where it's still copyrighted), is it legal for you to view the online copy of 1984 from Project Gutenberg of Australia? Or, if you are in Holland, can you view James Joyce's Ulysses from Project Gutenberg even though it still has copyright protection in life+70 countries? What if you already own a copy of the book? The core issue, yet to be decided for any media I can think of, is what happens when you purchase an "item" - did you purchase a right to use the item in various forms, or some piece of plastic or dead tree? The MPAA/RIAA & like-minded companies want all the benefits, so that if you lose your dead tree you need to buy another one (because you don't have the rights to the intellectual creation, just the crud it was printed on), but if you want to put a CD on your MP3 player you can't (because you own the piece of plastic, not a license to the music). The intersection between fair use, licensing and Title 17 (particularly the DMCA extensions) has not been addressed fully, and overlaps with issues like the applicability of EULAs. There's lots of work yet to be done.
This isn't bad. If the Court refuses to hear the case then the current ruling will work its way through different federal courts until (1) there a consenus on the side of file swappers or (2) there is a disagreemnet where at least one court disagrees with a peer or lower court. At that point the Court will either hear the case, or decline.
The only way this can be bad for fileswapping is if the Court hears the case and reverses the Betamax decision.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -Robert A. Heinlein "Life-Line"
They did however, make macrovision mandatory in every VHS and DVD player/recorder sold in the US.
Most all the rulings so far have been bad for fileswapping -- ie, they have all agreed that unauthorized copying is illegal -- this ruling just protects the software itself, and keeps the burden shifted over to fileswappers.
There has never been any legitimate legal question to whether unauthorized sharing of files is copyright infringement. It is.
The only question has been are the companies/individuals who write the software liable for any potential secondary infringement claims.
It's more properly called the Audio Home Recording Act. It is the giant upon whose shoulders the DMCA is perched. At the time it was passed, it did not get nearly the outrage and attention it should have (that does not imply that it didn't get tons of both - it did, but passed anyway). It was the mechanism by which the Rio got hassled (the Rio escaped by the skin of its parallel cable - the fact that it was a computer peripheral was all that spared it). The AHRA, I believe, is every bit as horrible as INDUCE threatens to be today.
The petition, which you can find via the article on Lawmeme, says there's some conflice with the Aimster ruling in the 7th Circuit.
Now, I don't know if they're blowing this out of proportion (they distort everything else, I'm not a lawyer to say if this is just a ploy to get the SCOTUS* to grant cert & overturn this), but if true, it would seem to compel them to hear the case (one of the principle duties of the SCOTUS is to harmonize the interpretation of federal laws, like copyright law). But it's true--they don't have to grant cert for much of *anything* unless it has "original jurisdiction" and goes to them first (read your constitution for what they have original jurisdiction over--not much save treaties & some misc. stuff).
Anyhow, since you're probably now wondering what it was in conflict with, read Lawmeme & click on the link to the Aimster decision. The judge there was *not* impressed with the 'cryptographic blindness' to infringement they had created, but he also gave a laundry list of things they *could have* (but didn't) argue to prevail... Things I'd hope these services have paid attention to.
Disclaimer: IANAL, this should not be taken as legal advice, but the people at Lawmeme are lawyers from Yale (though they probably also have disclaimers about what they say not being legal advice).
* It's only well-known in legal circles, but SCOTUS stands for Supreme Court of the United States.
Actually - you are totaly right!
They even tried to ban digital radio over the net although they were paying fees and their quality was worse the real radios.
Why?
Because they didn't have control of what gets aired on net radio sites.
This would mean that independant artists could win big without paying them...
With P2P services, those who produce the software are not able to effectively control the content upon the services. The original Napster service was in a position to exert control because all communications relied on its central location. A P2P service could have a license agreement prohibiting illegal uses, but there would be no way for the makers of the software to enforce that agreement except by tracking down individual users. Should they be required to do that? The P2P manufacturer could add copy protection technologies (which might become outdated quickly) but there would be the same problem with people defeating them. In any case, copy protection would likely not be compatible with FOSS P2P software. If there was a P2P feature with absolutely no significant non-infringing purpose, then liability just might be considered. However, it should be noted that the fact P2P is decentralized has legitimate reasons: privacy (consider leaked documents about wrongdoing), efficiency (sharing the load), and reliability (no central control that can fail or be attacked.)
Consider the Freenet service which is said to be difficult to use but extremely resistant to being censored. It is said the service cannot enforce copyright and protect free speech at the same time. The emphasis of the project is to protect free speech although the service is likely used for illegal activities by some (not all) as well. The issue of illegal P2P usage i.e. illegal porn is mentioned, but it is said that people should not be denied certain freedoms because a few individuals might misuse those freedoms. Incidentally, some of the uses of Freenet (and its likely goal) are much more serious than enjoying the latest music. It is said that the Freenet software is used in China to evade official censorship, for instance.
It is interesting that there was a case with the Madster (formerly called Aimster) service. That service appeared to be centralized, but encryption was used for the communications. This meant that the communications could not be monitored for wrongdoing. However, individuals using the service might well have wanted privacy when communicating. In the end, the service came under fire. There was no evidence of significant non-infringing use. Of course, with the communications encrypted, there was no way for the service to accurately determine how much use was or was not infringing.