Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
You're right. I guess we shouldn't go after people who may have commited a murder either. Presumption of innocence doesn't apply here, this is about getting you into a court where you are presumed innocent. Noone along the way is expected, or required to believe you are innocent. Otherwise noone could be charged with any crime because it would accuse them of being guilty.
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)...
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.
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.
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.
That's right, we shouldn't.
I think the fourth amendment says it best;
Getting a warrent isn't that tough - all you need to do is convince a judge that you've got good reason to believe a crime has been commited.
Getting a warrent may seem like a pointless formality, but it's not.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
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.
No what I am pointing out, is that this is a moot point, because it is a tainted process. It is just a matter of time, before every aspect of our lives a controlled, or legislated in one form or fashion. I am not arguing for sake of justifying piracy, or infringment. I am stating that the erosion of personal freedom has already begun, and this is, simply an extension of that erosion. Also on the face of your statement that Corps' cannot vote is true, in that they have to pay the leslator, or represenative to do the actual voting, so I might be proper in saying Corporations vote via Proxy. Copyright is a measure of temporary safety, it is a measure of safety afford to the originator, for a limited period of time, and is supposed to revert to the public domain.Now on my point of Copyright bias..."In addition to Disney (whose extensive efforts in lobbying for passage of this lent it its darkly humorous nickname of "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act"), Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor) and the estate of George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, noted that "Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever", but that since she was "informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution", Congress might consider Jack Valenti's proposal of a copyright term of "forever less one day". http://tinyurl.com/37qz8
Sonnys' wife was his successor, this implies bias.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
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?
What I don't understand is why any software corporation would even want to consider doing this.
For an example, let's take one of these file sharing college students and look at what they've been up to. These kids pirate software and learn to use it while they're in college, then they graduate and move on to the corporate world. Several possibilities arise:
(1) The student goes into business for themselves and begins to use software they already know how to. In order to avoid problems within their business they buy the software they need, most likely sticking with brands they know (i.e. the pirated brands they picked up off the internet in college).
(2) The student enters into the workforce at a large corporation. There it's possible they may be trained on certain products as needed, but it's also possible they may say they understand Windows/Apple/Linux already (i.e. again the pirated software they learned in college). The choice then goes between training them on something new or simply getting the employee what they already know.
In both of these cases if it's cheaper to get someone what they know and understand than it is to teach them something new, then the pirated software they learned off of will be picked up. The companies could benefit in the long run from such activity, but yes in the short term it may be less profitable to allow students to do this.
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?
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?
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.