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Senate Passes Scaled-Back Copyright Bill
Finalnight writes "The Senate has voted to outlaw several favorite techniques of people who illegally copy and distribute movies, but has dropped other measures that could have led to jail time for Internet song-swappers..."
Im not happy about this passing but at least most of the really stupid things were removed. Maybe my letters to good ol' Orrin helped.
That only some of these got through than all of them or is it worse that any got through at all.
I call it the "Be glad we only broke your kneecap. We were going break both your arms as well." approach.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
Glad to see that this part was left out of the final bill, as I'm a little uncomfortable for busting people for just making files available to download- and people not actually downloading. It's kind of like someone who makes lots of books they've purchased available to friends to borrow.
I'm a little worried that this might actually pop back in for the final version of the bill. The bills that passed the House and Senate are different, so negociators will smooth out differences. Sometimes nasty provisions like this can make it in, and everyone can say that they didn't vote for that provision.
People who secretly videotape movies when they are shown in theaters could go to prison for up to three years under the measure, which passed the Senate on Saturday.
Why do we send people to jail that are at most causing loss of revenues for a certain industry? It's not removing the right for people to go see the movie. Why not just fine him for every copy he sent out? $1000/upload sounds like it would be more fit for the crime.
Get paid to code OSS
"This bill strengthens the intellectual-property laws that are vital to the ongoing growth of our economy," Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch said.
Maybe it's the fact that they need to create a new business model. That and not use the political puppets to create legislation that goes against the PEOPLE and for the CORPORATIONS.
Get paid to code OSS
A section that would have made it illegal to edit out commercials was removed.
;-)
I feel like for once, contacting my congressman worked!
...Either that or they have TiVo's themselves
Get paid to code OSS
A section that would have made it illegal to edit out commercials was removed.
All that complaining and speculating for nothing. You may now return to your regularly broadcasted commercial-free PVR's now.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65796,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_7/: "A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?"
This is one of those cases, where the name says it all. What were they thinking?
The official name is: Family Entertainment and Copyright Act
How about if we add the fact that this is legislation:
Family Entertainment and Copyright Act Legislation
(FECAL). Guess that is fairly self-descriptive.
Now, if your car was a WunderCar 6000, with a innovative new design © 2004 by you, and I made a copy and sold it, then you could sue me for infringement, but that is NOT a criminal offense. The new law was threatening to make it so, and that is wrong.
Yeah, right.
But it doesn't!!! At least not in my case: I usually watch movies first at home, and then at the theather if I think the experience would be good. The films I can't download, I will not watch at all. I will buy a good DVD with a lot of extras instead of downloading the KVCD version of the movie. The cost (to me) would be the same (a good DVD with 1 disc here costs approx US$ 15 -- the same price of one hour of work + one day of processing I have in downloading/transcoding the same movie). I watch Enterprise, which is not broadcast to my country, and that I would watch for free OTA if I lived in the USofA anyway.
And I am certain that this is the majority of P2P user's cases here and in the US.
Now, the message to the *AA:
You are losing revenue because your products are getting crappier and crappier, not because of P2P.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
They introduce the bill, put draconian measures into it, and fight to pass draconian measures that would seriously impact the way Americans live their daily lives.
Then an outcry develops, they strip out the draconian measures and leave behind innocuous, small-step leftovers that they were hoping to pass in the first place, to make it look like they were being magnanimous by compromising.
The more they do this, the more they can get bills passed that erode the rights of US citizens and turn the US into a nation of good little worker bees making the elite upper class richer and richer.
I wonder what it'll look like in 15 years, when another five or six of these bills gets passed in succession?
You guys are so fucked.
The Senate has voted to outlaw several favorite techniques of people who illegally copy and distribute movies
Isn't illegally copying and distribution movies already... um... illegal? Why do we need even more laws? Is somebody threatening Mickey Mouse again?
Honest question:
Can someone explan to me why, whenever there's a slashdot posting about spammers, the bulk of the posts seem to suggest that many years in the slammer is appropriate (and, of course, there are the posts that go so far as to recommend genital removal :) but when there's a posting about copyright law and "piracy" of copywritten works, the general concensus seems to be that any additional penalties are way too severe?
Anyone?
People who secretly videotape movies when they are shown in theaters could go to prison for up to three years
Hackers and industry insiders who distribute music, movies or other copyrighted works before their official release date also face stiffened penalties under the bill.
Well, I hope the industry insiders face a stiffer penalty than three years in prison -- they make much better, more watch-able copies, so the damage is much worse.
But, somehow, I don't think the industry will want such stiff penalties for their own people. And, if so, why the long sentence for taping in a theater? Hopefully someone will eventually realize that jail time is not appropriate & copyright should be kept a civil matter.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
three years in prison for secretly videotaping a movie? Sure, it should be illegal and there should be penalties for it. This country is an absolutely horrible place. And I said "absolutely", so any disagreement should be done without comparing it to anything else.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Whoa, there....them there's criminal charges, partner! This bill doesn't do squat about the existing provisions of the beloved DMCA which provide for draconian CIVIL penalties for persons sued and found guilty of distributing even ONE copyrighted file.
This is actually the more frightening part to me...the standard of proof in civil cases is NOT "beyond reasonable doubt", but based on the preponderance of the evidence. Couple this with penalties starting at $15,000 and you could financially ruin a family who has a teen who even attempts (successful or not) to download the latest Hollywood offering.
This leads to the carpet bombing approach taken by the 1) Direct TV, 2) RIAA, and now 3) MPAA: sue everyone, and settle 99.9% of the cases --- that's a business case that's sure to work, brought to you, in part, by our own government.
The market value of the material being pirated is no more than the typical movie rental (new release), between three and five dollars, tops. Even if the piracy is wide-spread, the financial impact is not nearly as great as the industry would have you believe.
Are the RIAA and MPAA ever going to realize that technology is here to stay, and that they are not going to make it go away by sending people to jail, or suing them, or by any other means? Millions of people use filesharing, and like it or not, it's here to stay. You cannot legislate out of existence something that this many people do. Just look at the shining success of the United States' "War on Drugs."
The "IP" industries have fought everything from the radio to the Betamax. In every case, when they have been slapped on the hand by the courts and told to play nicely, they have ended up making a killing off of these technologies. No one, anymore, would seriously argue that radio is the imminent death of the music industry, or that VCR's will kill moviemaking, yet that is precisely what they argued at the time.
In twenty years' time, we will be looking back and chuckling at the fact that at one point, the IP industries thought the Internet was the death of all of them. Let's just make sure that we don't still have people finishing up prison sentences left over from the hysteria.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
When estimating the effect on revenues of copyright owners, be sure to keep in mind that having unauthorized copies and not buying the royalty-bearing version is still harmless if you were not going to buy the royalty-bearing version anyhow. So, for example, the revenue of effect of ubiquitous copying in a poor country if confined to that country is probably no more than theatre sales were previously in that country, which was probably pretty close to zero.
Finally, and most importantly, we should realize that maximizing copyright owner's revenue is not directly the purpose of copyright and might not even be a definite side-effect of maximizing the public benefit of copyright. The public benefit of copyright is basically the "leakage" in the difference between the benefits that the public receives minus the prices the public pays, all multiplied by the amount of material available, that is (for each category of stuff): (value - price) * amount_of_stuff (actually, this is an upper bound, because maybe the public doesn't think having twice as many movies of the same quality is twice as valuable, but they won't think that it's more than twice as valuable at the same quality level).
So, in a sense, the MPAA and RIAA want to reduce the leakage per copy while it is the purpose of copyright to maximize the total leakage, which is not the same as maximizing total leakage per copy, but since having zero leakage per copy (where each viewing would be negotiated to exactly the highest price you'd be willing to pay before deciding not to view) would result in zero total leakage, it is clear that that such a policy would not serve copyright's purpose in maximizing the total leakage, so the correct policy is either 100% leakage (no copyright) or some middle ground, depending on the effect on production of the copyright incentives.
Exactly when the story is meant to be set is an open question. However in the original (Channel 4) "pilot" we are told that Bryce is 18 years old, and his records indicate that he was born in 1987, meaning the story is taking place in 2004.