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Software Firms Lobby for Stronger Copyright Laws
Spy Handler writes "According to an article on CNN, the Business Software Alliance went before the Congress yesterday and lobbied for stronger copyright protection. Their key point: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be required to reveal the names of customers who may be distributing illegal wares on peer-to-peer networks. I guess they feel that the DMCA is too lax for them to be allowed to carry out RIAA-style raids on college students."
Guess the BSA and all concerned learned a lesson from the RIAA, go to the source and change the laws, if they do not work for you. Sounds like the NET Act all over again.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
Only on slashdot can Iranian censorship remind you of how evil the US is.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
In case you hadn't noticed, several ISPs have told them no, they can't have the names, and the courts have backed them up.
In the news.com.com.com.com article you read:
The white paper also suggests tightening the rules under which patents are issued to allow both proposed and issued patents to be challenged more easily.
This is very, very funny, indeed... emphasis mine.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
I'm thinking of moving towards a more Grizzly Adams kind of existence.
The US needs a Canadian style privacy commissioner who acts on the behalf of the people rather than a government that acts on behalf of big business.
Again.
Well, there are some differences between the two products: in the case of music files, they are passive chunks of data that can be recorded from radio too. In the other case, the software itself may be able to give information in a spyware-esque way to the vendor... wouldn't that make more sense (for them)?
see a Text Widget
The phone company should be liable for the crimes plotted over their wires, and the credit card fraud charged, too, along with the P2P copyright violations over their DSL. Why stop at the ISPs? Oh, because they're not in the room with the lobbyists to defend themselves.
--
make install -not war
If the giant corps can still afford large teams of high-priced lawyers to file thousands of lawsuits and high-power lobbyists to blow congress, then piracy is obviously doing little to hurt the bottom line.
Yes! Evil rules! Good can suck it! Suck it, good!
makes for an even more incentive to get people to use GNU/Linux :^P
Time to pull out the jack boots and learn to goose step.
Fear is the enemy; the one true enemy. {Sun Tzu-The Art of War}
Even if they do get it passed there will still be "sharers." They can be arrested but there will be more. eventuall there will be jails full of sharers whome people will notice. And of course all the poor people who get sued and get their life ruined because of it. They will have to become criminals to pay for living since they have no money left. In other words it will do nothing.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
The Business Software Alliance, a lobbying group whose members include Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc.
It would seem that judging by Apple Computer's recent lawsuit that the current laws are sufficient for them.
Jeebux, people! Can't we all just get along... Much of my interest in computers was sparked by Napster... then came Kazaa - which provided many learning tools to me (if you catch my drift). What harm does it do to have some highschool and college kids get ahold of Macromedia (or any other brand) software... in the long run, it's better for the company. I'm sure some of the people who get pirated software will pursue careers using it, and in turn create future business for the company (they will have their claws in the poor kids!). meh, whatever.
Ehta nyeh IBM, ehta Macintosh!
And what business would these people have distributing illegal wares on peer-to-peer networks in the first place?
If it's illegal, as the author readily admits, then why should not the law crack down on such activities?
The owls are not what they seem
If the BSA ever comes to my door, I will make soap with their bodies, and wash my balls with it.
Only the semi-useful people lobby for such stuff. The ones that CAN, they DO, the rest try to protect intellectual poverty! Theirs!
Your ip has been logged. A strike team is en route to youe location. Please move away from the computer, close your eyes and put your hands behind your head.
Yours sincerely,
Robert S. Mueller
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
yes >
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of copyright enforcement (as a GPL user). However, I'm also all in favor of equal rights and equal responsibilities. And it seems like the corporations are trying to gain "more-than-equal" rights here, without accepting the responsibilities. When was the last time you saw a CxO pay the same kind of penalties that a regular person would?
C|N>K
What the hell is it with slashdot and this complete disregard of authors' rights these days? Everything should be free, right? Did you ever grow adult? Nothing's free and that's the way it should be!
Profit and greed are the sole engines of progress.
It's not about "Stronger Copyright Laws" but in reducing the rights of the invidividual to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
and nobody hears him.
They always do thius before they give up.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
should be required to reveal the names of customers who may be distributing illegal wares so all the isp has to do is say that he believes that nobody is distributing illigal wares. So all you got to do is bribe the isp or something. Oh hell we could always go around through a different ip adress and avoid the problem altogether.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
...that the best way to protect your copyright is convenience, convenience, convenience. Make it easy to purchase, and have a _wide_ selection. That should do it...
--
That is beginning not to care?
Im about to the point that i really dont care what laws they buy.. Im going to do what ever i have been all along.
Once they manage to make it too difficult to function, then they loose another paying customer. Just as the RIAA and MPAA have done.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That concept died in the 80s...
Now everyone is assumed to be guilty of something.. So actions are being taken accordingly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Businesses lobbying Congress in their own interest isn't exactly news, is it? The Reuters piece at the link isn't useful: What specific legislation is involved, and how? My guess is that CNN chopped the story to fit.
In any case, the key word is "may". I'm a copyright supporter, but don't have much use either for the entertainment industry or folks who argue that copyright doesn't exist. Acquiring the name of someone who's illegally distributing copyrighted material -- on the net or elsewhere -- ought to require a subpoena issued only after presentation of convincing evidence linking a specific, but unidentified, person with specific copyrighted material.
No one should be able to go on a fishing expedition with ISP's, any more than they can go on a fishing expedition with printing press operators.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
All they need to do is make it legally required for any ISP which offers service to residential customers in the US to put all those customers behind a NAT with absolutely no port forwarding of any kind... only communication sessions that are initiated by the home PC will go through, meaning that regular web use can continue uninterrupted (for web sites that are not hosted on residential computers). Sessionless packets like UDP can also be rejected unless they are directed at a port from which the designated computer had recently sent an outgoing packet. This might kill certain services, but none that would be liable to adversely affect the typical residential customer.
Of course, this would mean that residential customers would be unable to use their home PC's as servers of any kind, which I'm sure would tick off more than a few people... people who are highly inconvenienced by the change would have to upgrade their ISP accounts to "corporate" levels, paying a higher fee.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've been waiting for just such an article as this to point out something that I've recently come to realize. Everytime there's a copyright article on Slashdot, there is the inevitable discussion on "piracy", "copyright infringement", and "stealing". In going over all of the arguments, I've come to realize that it is stealing, only everyone's got it backwards, the *AA, et al, are stealing from ME...
The U.S. constitution makes it clear that works protected by copyright belong to the public, and granting of copyright should apply only to authors and inventors to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Well, each time Congress extends the length of copyright or strengthens patent law, they're stealing from me, they're stealing from you, and they're stealing from each person in this country who could gain anything from that work, even if it's just 90 minutes of enjoyment from watching an old movie for free. I, for one, am outraged, and now that Congress has turned to looting from me for the benefit of the few who are wealthy and powerful, I will feel no remorse when I download music, or copy DVDs.
It's high time we started taking back our country, and if you think that control of information isn't the most important thing we have to fight for, then you've never studied oppressive regimes. So, copy a DVD for your family, download some MP3s, and help to start a revolution (in thought)...
The problem is that they want names of people that *MAY* be trading..
Presumed guilt.. That is a big problem.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"They can be arrested but there will be more. eventuall there will be jails full of sharers whome people will notice. "
They're known as identity thieves, and yes people are noticing.
So why don't we just encrypt everything (including filenames) so nobody can tell who is downloading what? It sounds like big business wants an ISP to track suspicious activity and report back if they see anybody transferring copyrighted materials. Well if everything was encrypted, only the people who are supposed to know what's being transferred will ever know that it is actually BEING transferred.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
"0" Copyright 2005 by Skraut
"1" Copyright 2005 by Skraut
So now I have copyrighted 0 and 1. Can I now legally sue the **AA for having billions of copies of my copyrighted work on their websites?
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
So, you must then be a well-off artist to be able make such a claim? Please post a link showing some of your art that you must sell to such extent that it maintains you.
No? I have artist friends and they, if someone, know the value and importance of being able to sell their work. I bet you're just a freeloading GNU-convert who thinks that everybody's time is just as worthless as yours.
With that defeatist attitude, we're hoping you're thinking along the Grizzly Adams existence too.
Using money to influence government in this way is, in its end result, bribery. But it is different than bribery in that it does not require corrupt politicians-- it requires only politicians who are not all knowing. Even intelligent, well-intentioned people can be convinced of something if only one side of an argument is heard. This is especially true for a topic as complex as government policy.
Professional lobbying, because it is effectively bribery, needs to be outlawed-- it should be illegal to pay someone to speak to a government representative on your behalf. Instead of hiring lobbyists, companies can ask their employees and shareholders to contact, in their spare time, their representatives. If that is not sufficient, companies can, through advertisement, raise public awareness of their concerns. In this way, the influence of money will move one more step away from government.
Public interests groups, such as groups opposed to overreaching copyright and patent laws, will have little problem recruiting volunteer lobbysists, as many of them already do. Such lobbyists, since they are unpaid, would be perfectly legal. Not only will public interest groups be able to lobby almost as effectively as before, but they will also no longer have to compete with highly paid professional lobbying firms.
Only a moron would use Iran's severe shittiness to excuse America's moderate shittiness.
who does one have to sleep with to get legislation passed round here?
I bet the RIAA/MPAA/BSA knows.
. welcome our new bsa overlords... would like to remind them that I can be useful in rounding up others to further the cause of FOSS s/w by making the general public eventually realise that the s/w they're running/distributing IS NOT licenced to them and that what they're doing IS immo^H^H^H^H uneth^H^H^H^H not cool. Was I the only one here that read who read that newsforge article today? Stop complaining about your rights getting trampled, feds can get a warrant to search your house, read you post etc. Nothing new here, nothing unconsitutional either.
The fact is - it will never stop. You either have to play the game or lose.
Hey! There's plenty of you. Just set up an organization and start lobbying! How hard is that?
Sheryl Crow - confronted by Ambrose Kappos
Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis - confronted
Gwyneth Paltrow - confronted by Ron Galella
Rebecca Schaeffer - MURDERED by Robert Bardo
Barbara Mandrell - confronted by Edwin John Carlson
Madonna - confronted by Robert Hoskins who was ultimately shot (not killed by one of her bodyguards.
Olivia Newton John - confronted by Michael Perry who was found camping behind her house. He wasn't charged though and was sent home to his family, which he ultimately MURDERED.
Jodie Foster and Ronald Reagan - John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan to impress Jodi Fostter, whom he was stalking.
This doesn't only happen to female celebs. It happens to male ones too:
John Lennon - MURDERED by Mark David Chapman
Michael J. Fox - confronted by Tina Ledbetter
Scott Bakula - confronted by Tina Ledbetter
Steven Spielberg - confronted by Jonathan Norman
David Letterman
Rebecca Schaeffer, Theresa Saldana, Cher, Olivia Newton-John, Sheena Easton, Barbara Mandrell, Maddona, Michael Jackson, Michael J. Fox, Justine Bateman, Sarah McGlocklin, Belinda Carlisle, David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Vanessa Williams, Sharon Gless, Brad Pitt, Monica Sales, Nicole Kidman. Jeri Ryan, Meg Ryan, Mel Gibson, Anne Murray, Sonny Bono and even Steven Spielberg are just a few of the celebrities who have been stalked.
A law change to allow anyone to allege copyright infringement to gain personal data is absurd and will be a boon to stalkers everywhere.
It takes money to get laws passed. Lobby groups have tons of money and they can easily get laws passed in their favor. When it's business vs. business, it's still ~somewhat fair because their respective lobbying groups counteract each other.
But when it's lobby groups backed by the industry as a whole that lobby for laws that go against everyday people, how can we compete? How are we going to stop the billions of dollars of lobbying money that the industry has? This is a very lopsided match here. The companies can get laws passed almost unimpeded while the average citizen just has to sit there and live under those new laws. Some of these new laws, such as ones that favor patents and IP have the effect of stomping out anything open source or free (since it takes loads of money to get your ideas patented and if you're not working for profit, you won't have the money to get your ideas patented).
I'll use an example just to give you an idea of what I mean. Let's say there was an "open source" pharmaceutical effort that came out with a drug to cure xxxx disease. That drug would never be allowed to be sold. Being open source, you wouldn't have the money to "convince" the FDA to approve your drug, and you wouldn't have the money to defend yourself against the bully lawsuits that the big rich established pharm companies would surely throw at you. Even though your product would help mankind, it wouldn't generate the money needed to defend itself. Instead, a company which generates lots of money by selling a product to *treat* the disease instead of curing it would have the money (and therefore political power) to stifle you.
Big Money rules the government in the US. Non-profit can no longer compete with for-profit, and that's a bad thing when the point of the organization was to donate their time and skill to give to the community. When you look at the net effect of all these laws as a whole, they basically amount to you *having* to give companies your money.
I'm sorry for the long post but I see where things are going and this is getting out of hand.
where's your compound? i could be of use to you. i'm a chemist, i can cook up bombs and i know how to handle a gun. i want to be a part of the war against the jesusland freaks.
This is exactly the case with modern copyright law. Corporations are paying lobbyists to make it legal to steal from the people. They are stealing our culture!
I would prefer that society deal with and answer that general question, rather than just make a special case or limit the decision to just situations where copyright infringement is suspected.
My opinion is that pseudo-anonymity just isn't worth much, and that we should go one of two ways:
- Anonymity is guaranteed: ISPs are required to maintain customer anonymity, not keeps logs except for billing purposes, and this information should not be available to third parties by any means, including court orders.
- Accountability is guaranteed: ISPs should be required to maintain logs for a reasonable period, and automatically furnish information about who was responsible for an IP address as of a given time (within a reasonable window into the past).
Right now, we're sort of in between those two situations, where the ISP has discretion. This makes everyone a loser. Nobody can count on anonymity, so perceived anonymity is of dubious value (e.g. you can't really spread samizdat against your own government, if they can just order that you be exposed). Nobody can count on accountability, because there may be prohibitively expensive legal requirements to getting desired information, and even then, you don't have a guarantee that the ISP ever maintained a log (e.g. Joe-open-wireless-access-point didn't even know he was an ISP until he got a letter from a lawyer).Going either way would be fine with me. Each has problems, but also, each is better than an in-between situation.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Our elected representatives already know what public opinion is on this subject. THey already know that most citizens do not approve of the BSA et al, buying laws from congress. But our elected representatives go ahead and do it anyway. They know that we have no real power. If we throw the bums out of office, they just go to their corporate masters to get a fat payback for doing their bidding. So, if they already KNOW that we do not like what they are doing, and if we vote them out of office, they can then REALLY cash in, why would it matter if we write them and let them know what we think? THat is useless to us.
The only thing that will stop our politicians from selling out is negative consequences. Why don't you run all the traffic lights on the way home from work tonight? You would get home faster! But there would be negative consequences for you if you did that, right? Like getting killed by cross traffic! That would be a Very Bad Thing, and so you would NOT run all those traffic lights.
We need to make sure our elected representatives do our bidding and not that of corporations. We can do that by making sure that extreme bad things happen to them if they do such a thing.
But how do we do that?
Here is a suggestion: kill them if they sell out. Now, I am not suggesting any sort of illegal activity, but instead we should implements a legal infrastructure and laws that subject ALL elected representatives to periodic and intense scrutiny. In other words, subject them all the a quasi-prosecution on a regular basis. Try them, and if found guilty, hang them publicly. After that happens a couple of times, no politician would want to bring on such shame and humiliation on his/her family, which could last for generations.
Oh, but you will now say that then all those wonderful and talented politicians would never bother to run for office. Gee, what a loss...I mean, they have done so much for us....
Oh, but you will now say that why should public servants be subjected to possible death? Well, they ARE public servants, after all. It is supopsed to be a "special calling" right? A honor to serve, and all that. What about all the soldiers who gave their innocent lives just for a measly little paycheck?
THe main thing is that we need to turn the tables on the top end of the social hierarchy. Make THEM the focus of a criminal justice system built especially for them. If they are good and honest, they have nothing to fear.....
Just an idea.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Open source projects would find it easier to supoena source code of companies suspected of infringing on the GPL? Becuase there's an awful lot of source code just sitting around, and I suspect that a lot of corporate programmers find it tempting to "borrow" some of that code. I wonder how many of the BSA's clients are committing copyright infringement of their own...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Exactly. And the same logic can be used by those who wish to track down kids who go to a "candy shop" website. I can just see a market forming for the information here.
The point is that there MUST be reasonable limits put on the requests for infomation. Our current judicial system allows such reasonable limits.
Given free reign to the access of sensitive information at any time WILL lead to abuses. It always has, and always will. Even if it's limited to select organizations; for someone within that organization will always find the power too easy to ignore. And will make it available to others.
This is happening even today with supposedly restricted databases. And it will happen again. That's why we need the courts here.
Why in the world does the RIAA/BSA think they are above the law? Just because they think they own Congress, I suppose.
There may be some truth to this. A good example is that of H Pylori, a bacterium discovered back in the 80's that is a major factor in peptic ulcers. There should be a Nobel prize for this since it was against the wisdom of the time which held that excess acid production caused ulcers and the biggest money makers were acid reducers like Zantac and Tagumet. It wasn't until the mid 90's that the obvious antibiotic therapy was easily available in Canada - (my father had an ulcer around '95 and he was given antibiotics - a friend had it the year earlier and had no idea that bacteria were involved...). A lot of this probably had to do with the way the medical community is entrenched in its thinking esp in Canada (lumpectomies are *still* frowned upon by some idiot surgeons...).
In the end, however antibiotic treatment, in conjunction with newer proton pump inhibitors has been adopted, Zantac (which went off-patent in '97) has been relegated to an OTC role so the "open source" treatment did win out. Yet I have always wondered how much more quickly the new therapy would have been introduced had it involved something other than cheap antibiotics and whether these guys would have won the Nobel by now as they deserve.
Others have a somewhat stronger viewpoint...http://www.orc.ru/~yur77/pylori.pdf
Well, look at the bright side. This will drive more and more people to open source software, as the terms and legal liabilities of using the proprietary stuff become more and more onerous. E.g., vendors will be demanding access to your machine to verify that their licensing terms aren't being violated, you'll be required to upgrade at their whim, etc. etc.
Why deal with crap like that any more than you absolutely have to (which is not at all)?
No, you're not the only one.
Let us remember that the concept of copyright is a new and arbitrary concept, in terms of human history. It was seriously debated whether it should be allowed when this Country was formed. A compromise was established to allow what was thought to be reasonable limits to copyrights.
This compromise has been completely thrown out. There is no "fair use" according to some. And copyrights are now effectively infinite (for example, the Mickey Mouse copyright). Never mind that most of these companies have been built using works which had entered the Public Domain previously (Disney is a superb example).
So I have abandoned the concept of copyrights. Everything I want can be found on the various networks, for free. And it is simple to get. If I login offshore, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, anyone can do to stop it. And little onshore in fact.
The heck with buying CD's/DVDs anymore. Call me a pirate if you want. I could care less, as I consider those comments coming from a brainwashed sheep.
Don't you think one of the reasons why Windows is so popular is that many people can get a free illegal copy of it without any consequences ?
If Windows users really had to pay for Windows, maybe more people would think more about real free solutions for home computing.
You could still bypass this with https. Yes, it would be a pain. But it's still doable. And don't forget DNS.
You'd also have to shut off complete access to the USENET.
In short, while one could as you suggest, it would a lot of pain, for no gain. It would be far better to just cut off access to the Internet completely, which really is the only solution.
While this would make the RIAA/BSA happy, it would also delight the Taliban. It's sadly amusing to think of all them together on this.
Ok. Maybe that's it. I, for one, haven't seen much legal P2P file sharing. In fact, I don't believe that such thing exists to a significant extent.
The owls are not what they seem
You have something big corporations do not have: votes. All that money they give goes to buy YOUR vote. So when you go to the polls as an informed voter (as opposed to all the people who vote for the better looking candidate, or the one who sounds better) you negate all the money advantage.
Start talking to your friends and neighbors. Believe me, politics is a hot topic year round, not just before an election. I'm sure there is a talk radio station in your area that talks politics, call them up once in a while and talk. (most have a policy to let those who disagree automatically get on and talk as long as they want - make sure you are have something intelligent to say) Next time your at the grocery store start talking to the person behind you, and mention that laws like this are harmful...
Vote, vote, vote. If this passes, and next election every politician who voted for it is voted out (democrat and republican) it says something. If you want to really make a statement, vote for a guy you disagree with 100% simply because he is non-incumbent in the major parties. Or vote for a third party no matter what. Either vote gets noticed. (the major parties want to know what happened to their base either way) There are many voting strategies, make it a point to never vote for someone who betrayed you! (this means you can NEVER vote for the incumbent)
Your assertion that it's our fault for voting the scum in fails to account for the influence of Large Sums Of Cash in the political process. Corporations can't vote, that's true. That's why corporations purchase legislators to cast votes for them. And those votes (the ones cast by members of Congress, not for them) are the only votes that count. We, The People don't get line-item veto power over bad laws, only Hobson's choice among self-interested legislators.
So, while "[c]opyright is available to everyone", not everyone is in a position to consolidate copyright control so as to forever extinguish the public domain in favor of a pay-per-view control over artistic expression designed to further enrich the already rich and powerful. Some believe this will promote the stagnation of the arts into an easily marketable commodity.
Others believe this has already happened.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
hell, verizon can just send the RIAA a phonebook from every region and say- they may be..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
anyone willing to create distributed virtual networks?
i'm fed up with this law-buying rubbish.
by creating a distributed virtual private network, running over the internet, we get to "escape".
get attacked? do it again. level 2.
and again.
and again.
just like in "the diamond age"...
In 10 years we will have death squads from RIAA/MPAA/BSA patroling through our streets, performing house raids at will and burning people who possess open source software or unprotected audi files and movies at the stake. History is repetitive - prepare for the witchhunt to come to your village soon!
Taken by itself, the request for additional copyright protection may seem like a reasonable request. However, when you consider that the copyright period has been extended to life+infinity, this is clearly an attempt to enhance the strangle hold that's already being imposed. This has nothing to do with "enforcing copyright." It's about "enforcing consumer behavior." When they start forcing content down your throat, you won't like the term "consumer."
The BSA is one of the worst offenders where "presumption of guilt" exists. If you start a new business, as soon as you get your state license you can expect a postcard from the BSA offering to "help" you make sure there's no improperly licensed software on your corporate lan. They'll even install software to periodically check. The BSA may lick my left nut. The sheriff doesn't come in without a warrant. Why would I let these self-appointed asshats in?
Exactly.
I couldn't help thinking how easy it would be for someone to have simply issued a DMCA takedown notice and had Bush's and/or Kerry's website yanked mere days before the election. It would have been an excellent demonstration of just how BROKEN the legislated DMCA process is for entirely bypassing the courts.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"I guess they feel that the DMCA is too lax for them to be allowed to carry out RIAA-style raids on college students."
I'm not a college student and I don't engage in mainstream music/video swapping, I go for the indie stuff, BUT, if some yahoo decides they want to raid me, it WILL be the last raid that group ever conducts because they WILL meet up with the fangs of a very large and overly protective German Shepherd and massively overwhelming firepower.
RIAA, say hello to Mr. 12 guage...
This is ultimately what is wrong with copyright law. There are large, monied interests with large, monied incentives to see law swing against public domain, but the public domain has no one to defend it.
Contrast this state of affairs with patent law, where the public domain has generic drug makers fighting for it, and note the difference in term limits. (copyrights last 70+ years today; patents last twenty-something.)
I don't know what is to be done about it, but that is the problem.
All major Linux distributions are now published as bittorrent streams, as are many smaller software distributions.
I have no interest what so ever in any of the RIAA or MPAA products, and have never downloaded or uploaded one in my life. My average monthly download is somewhere between six and eight gigabyte, last time I bothered to look.
So strange as it may seem there is indeed legitimate P2P traffic out there. In fact bitorrent was specifically designed to support it, amd makes no specific attempts to preserve user anonymity, since it was not designed with warez kiddies as its primary objective.
And I would take a very dim view of my ISP passing out my address details casually to any Tom Dick or Harry that thinks they have a right to poke their nose into my business.
Due process in another matter, especially since it provides for me to bite back if proceeded with without due cause.
And not being able to account for the traffic volume that comes and goes from my private network is not reasonable cause for action.
Has anyone considered the possibility that businesses going too far with laws like these might actually be a good thing? I mean, in the short run it will suck but perhaps the public will backlash against them and we will finally have a reasonable copyright/patent system.
I'm sure that if anyone who downloaded illegal music/games/porn/whatever on the internet got smacked with a $100 fine today, those laws would be fixed so fast you'd swear we had a functional government.
Right now the corporations are getting their way - but they are also quite greedy. Perhaps that is their weakness?
"All your bytes are belong to us!"
LOL!!! omg that was fucking funny,.
Cher [and] Sonny Bono [are among] just a few of the celebrities who have been stalked.
Except it might have been justified, as they were plotting a copyright term extension, the first ever to extend U.S. copyright terms that had already been extended. Let's just hope the Chastity Bono Act of 2018 gets overturned on a three-strikes rule, as the Supreme Court seemed to hint in its Eldred v. Ashcroft opinion.
We are moving toward an ownership society, just like in the good old days.
Imagine slave owners lobbying the constitution writers !! They could get each slave counted as three fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation !!
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons,
including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE COST OF LIBERTY
Yes, the xbox does set up as a server if it is hosting the game.
As well as any online game that has a host/server will be screwed over by this.
And that makes you a disgusting pedophile.
Nobody but you wants to read your "trolling".
I make video [games] for a living. If people like you go around copying the products I make and giving them to your friends for free, I sell a LOT less copies. Likely result is that people who would have bought from me don't, and I go out of business.
So why do you feel that your video games still deserve copyright for 70 years after you're dead and buried?
So when you go to the polls as an informed voter (as opposed to all the people who vote for the better looking candidate, or the one who sounds better) you negate all the money advantage. Start talking to your friends and neighbors.
I vote Libertarian wherever possible, but how should I present myself to friends and neighbors so as not to sound like a solicitor?
I think the battle is going to be lost , due to how our system here works now ( he with the most $ wins ).
.. or caring about the daily 'digital rights' war.
Instead of continuing to fight, I just wont participate in the commercial entertainment market, or the commercial software market.
If I'm stuck with the movies/cds/software I own now.. then thats the way it goes.. Its entertainment, its not a requirment of life..
When 'free' software is banned, then i sell my pc.. Again its not a requrement..
Ill spend my time/effort on other battles that have a chance of winning and that are more fundamental to life...... Tired of fighting
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem there is that in this case, you're effectively talking about removing copyright in its entirety, at least in the markets we're discussing. Anything significantly weaker would still leave the sort of copying that goes on illegal.
Now, my problem with that is I believe, aside from the idiocy associated with Disney et al. extending the term indefinitely in the US recently, that copyright is basically a sound concept. It does its job: it does protect many groups of people both big (corps) and small (solo indie artists/authors/developers/etc.), and it does promote the creation and publication of new content.
People say it's different to material property, that there's no inherent ownership of information, but they miss the point: there's no inherent ownership of anything. After all, the natural state of material goods is that if I'm bigger/better armed than you, I get it. We as a society accept the convention of ownership because we believe that it makes life better for everyone. There is absolutely no difference in principle between intellectual property and physical property. Both are societal norms, and one is simply deeper entrenched in our collective psyche.
I understand your point, but I've always found that a rather weak argument. You are effectively saying that whenever a large enough minority want to ignore a law, that law should be removed. That might be a valid last resort in the most severe cases -- something where a genuine revolution and installing a fundamentally different government really is in the best interests of the people -- but I hardly think a bit of incest amongst corporate lawyers and government cronies qualifies for that level of response.
I think you missed the biggest risk, and sadly something that is already becoming apparent: by effectively condoning this sort of abuse of the law in a relatively harmless case, society is raising a whole generation who have no respect for the law and the legal rights of others. This is sadly apparent in the UK as well, in this and other areas: teachers basically aren't allowed to touch kids in their class no matter how bad their behaviour, yet a wrongful accusation of physical abuse by a child can end an excellent teacher's career almost overnight. When you remove the discipline that keeps immature children in line, piecemeal or en masse, the abuse levels rise. There's so much of this going on now that it's one of the most scary things in today's society as far as I'm concerned.
So, in answer to your main comment:
I would point out that while many would indeed disagree -- though I'd wager that most of those people are criminalised by the existing law -- the last real stats I saw (IIRC they were linked from the last /. discussion on this subject if you want to try and find them) had the general population of the US agreeing
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I resent the characterisation of the BSA as a software firm, it's a (probably) legal extortion operation. The only thing that makes it's tactics legal is that they, being representatives of large corporation(S?) are able to get the local police (and courts?) to go along with their demands for breaking and entering. (I'd suggest suing the local police for malfeasance but, 1, it's not a good idea for a business to get on the wrong side of the police, and 2, I think only a DA can bring charges of malfeasance [or even misfeasance, but this would clearly be malfeasance].)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I've got my little home server that provides wired ethernet access to three others in our house. Am I an ISP? After all, I do provide internet service to those computers.
Now suppose I were to run cat5 to my neighbors (some of whom have DSL too), and specify their IPs as alternate routing addresses to my own gateway. Using IP6, we all give ourselves internal static addresses and have servers that act as external gateways. Are we all now ISP's? Suppose our little private network continues to expand, with people on the periphery plugging in and adding new external links, more bandwidth, etc. Eventually, we end up with an actual mesh network like the internet was meant to be!
(Also suppose, out of curiosity, that no unneeded ports are opened, that all known RIAA/MPAA/BSA IPs are blacklisted, and that the servers don't keep logs of any kind. If they want info, they can't get here and there's nothing to get ANYWAY)
> Instead, they just rant about it here,
Silly me, I forgot its easier to shoot the messenger then to listen to the message...
Look, there is more at stake then just simply "leeching."
Copyright is an barbiac holdover from the 18th Century. That fact that more and more people "pirate" information in a digital form (video, sound, apps, etc) shows that they reject this notion of "informational ownership." The progress of civiliation is based on free exchange of ideas. There is more to life then just money.
Maybe you aren't aware that Copyright was invented by the PUBLISHERS, to control access of information. (Namely to keep OTHER publishers from ripping them off.) What the 20th century taught us, is that all information can be reduced to mathematics; viz a viz Physical Reality can be simulated and stored digitally. i.e. Audio can be represented as Light, which is stored digitally on a CD / DVD. What "a" series of numbers represents is open to interpretation. Whether it is the latest pop song, or not, is irrelevent. To legislate that a certain large integer can not be exchanged is ridiculous.
The idea of "Intellectual Property Rights" is about as absurd as someone claiming that they "own" the right to the use of "2." What about mathematical formulas? Can Drug formulas be owned? (The "Right to Profit" is red-herring to the REAL issue, namely control, and maximizing profit. If you invent the drug to "cure" Cancer do you have the "Right to Profit" from it?? What about OTHERS Right to Live?? I have friends in exactly this dilema. The "Food and Drug Admistration" is a great example of profitting on people's sickness. You think this is OK?!) Once someone starts the slippery slope of "ownership" of ideas, the border keeps getting pushed. Where does it end? THAT is what most people are afraid of. If you indepently think of a "orginal" idea (that others have thought of too), who the hell has the right to tell you that you are violating someone's "patent" for implementing it? Do you really want to live in a world where almost every idea you think is violating someone else's right to limit that information?
Does that mean that ALL information should be freely shared?
Obviously, NO. Your Credit Card # is not copyrighted, yet MOST people respect that "that info" should not be shared. Whether the number is copyrighted or not is completely irrelevent, as the people following the [legal] Law didn't need the [legal] Law to do "The Right Thing", and those who don't follow the [legal] law, well, it doesn't matter if the [legal] law says they can't use it. Trying to legislate morality is always a bad idea. That worked REALLY well for "Prohibition", and the "Drug War" right?
The solution is education.
The Golden Rule is "Treat others how you want to be treated" modified in case to be:
"Treat other's information the same way you want your information to be treated."
I'm a software developer. Does it matter that people pirate my software? The answer is irrelevent for 2 reasons:
- It is more important that people exchange information, then to worry about every little penny. Love is more important then Greed. If you want to base your life on greed, you'll find yourself being taught the ultimate lesson in it: When you die, you can't take ANY of it with you. GET OVER IT. Is your life really that petty that you need to focus on the symptom instead of the cause?
- The Law of Karma dictates that all people get what they deserve. This is Divine Justice.
Modern Copyright didn't exist until recently. Humans and Civilization survived just fine for millions of years WITHOUT it. So yes, trashdot is a good place to discuss the irrationallity of Copyright, Patents, and Trademarks.
To "hand wave" the discussion as just "rants" shows your ignorance.
You know, it's one thing to berate a guy for something he did in the course of his career (one of them). It's an entirely different thing to terrorize him and his family. I forget the specifics of Bono's stalking case but that's always the result (or one of them). There's never a justification for that. I don't care how much he sold out his constituency. Even he didn't deserve that.
That is: "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you." I would like others to respect my property rights, so I respect those of others.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
As an example of how privacy laws can effect the real world this is a good example. Rather over-emphasised for effect:- MURDERED seems a little bit like sensationalism to me but it draws attention to it in the way it should, possibly overdone but the facts are there.
The way that the current climate in the US and elsewhere is eroding freedoms to "protect" us and ultimatly to control us. (control is often seen as justified by someone in a position of power, and don't forget that they may not feel they are wrong in this - more that those in control may often feel they are in a position of responsibility, and that they would feel they HAD to control to keep the staus quo going no matter if a few get hurt, the thing that matters is that the majority are safe.)
But an example like this shows how reactionary polices to erode freedom can harm.
No doubt the people who pushed for this law didn't invisige that a law to help them prosecute those it felt were going against their wishes with regard to file shareing could enable those with bad motives to hurt others - but how many laws have been passed that have had unforseen consequences?
Privacy can be a double-edged sword to people with control. Too much and it becomes too hard to identify those who are anti-social and a harm to society. Too little, and people who deserve privacy or need to keep secrets (as in the case above where keeping your location a secret as disclosing it would pose a very real danger) are under unwarrented threat.
This is a thorny issue but the above example shows how the rights of privacy SHOULD NOT be eroded without clear recognition of the effects.
"Loser pays" isn't normally meant literally. It just means that the court can award costs as part of the judgement. For example, after an obviously harrassing suit brought by a major corp against an individual who successfully defended themselves, the courts might award legal costs to the individual. I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where they're actually obligated to do so, however, and a reasonable amount to be awarded is normally decided by the judge, not the invoices received by MegaCorp, Inc. from its legal team.
Personally, I suspect the optimum system given a judiciary with integrity is "loser pays" + the ability to award punitive damages in certain cases. I would imagine a frivolous suit brought by the BSA against someone hosting what is obviously OpenOffice on P2P that resulted in a judgement against the BSA of 2,000 costs and 15,000,000 for wasting the court's time and barratry would bring a fairly swift end to obvious abuse of the system for intimidatory purposes...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If you did it to Bush's website, you'd probably end up disappeared to guantanamo or something, though.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
I disagree. You reap what you sow. Bono's acts were a blow to the collective creativity of US citizens. Lo and behold his family is stalked. Karma is a bitch.
Well that's certainly a statement. Hopefully you don't run into someone who shares a similar philospophy when you make a mistake. Perhaps you forgot to signal and cut someone off. Maybe, if you're lucky, they'll honk and flip you off instead of running your ass off the road. You would be, after all, reaping what you sowed. Since you're condoning stalking, what would someone have to do for you to condone rape, or murder? You have some serious issues to deal with.
Just wondering.
Changa hates change.
Hopefully you don't run into someone who shares a similar philospophy when you make a mistake.
And what is my philosophy? Karma or vigilante justice?
You know, I don't like your post. Should I be allowed to hunt you down and kill you?
Did my post offend your sensibilities? Is that all?
Or did it steal from you what what was promised, only to further line the pockets of a vanishingly small number of wealthy individuals and corporations?
Just wondering.
Hope this clears things up.