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Congress Declares War on File Leakers
An anonymous reader submits "Bush is expected to sign a law that essentially makes it a crime punishable by up to three years in jail for a user to put a single 'copy of a film, software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released.' Whichever side you're on in the copyright debate, you have to agree this legislation is draconian and excessive, to say the least."
I'm against file sharing and am LOVING this.. of course I'm also for G.W. :) WOOHOO GO G.W.!
I don't know how this qualifies as a troll.
Kenneth Lay stole US$7 trillion from Enron and he gets off scott free
1. It was not $7 trillion.
2. He has yet to go to trial but will.
3. Shut up.
Broken or lax existing laws is no excuse for lawlessness under new ones. Furthermore, you imply that fraud to a cooperation does not hurt people, while failing to realize what damages an employer has a direct impact on the employees. Sure the MPAA and RIAA overstate their losses as do the video game publishers, there's no doubt however that bootlegging does cause a fair amount of financial damage. These fiscal damages do hurt their bottom line and eventually trickles down to the employee (read: people). Can someone please tell me what's the problem with a maximum sentence of 3 years for someone actively sharing a copyrighted work prior to its public release? In all honestly, I'd push for 5 years.
Yes, I immediately see how not giving you the free music you want is equivilent to refusing cancer treatment.
And even the cancer treatment has limits : If its going to cost a a few hundred thousand (or a million is not unheard of) to fix you up, think of all the starving kids in africa we could feed.
Yes, but you have to compare three years to the seriousness of the offence
No I don't.
"Eye for an eye" is an obsolete, punishment-based concept of law enforcement.
The point of penalties for crime is deterrence, and the factor you are leaving out when evaluating the level of deterrence is the difficulty of arresting those who break that specific law.
Shoplifters are easy to catch. Anybody who shoplists often enough will eventually get arrested.
Those who host torrents of DVD rips are considerably more difficult and expensive to catch. Even if you can track down who put the file out there, there's no guarantee they will even be located in the US.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
That's why you rape them with broom handles, like NYC cops do to their prisoners.
I am a liberal too, but I think that you are wrong to want federal funding for anything. In that way lay massive waste and corruption.
You're not much of a liberal if you believe that. Government involvement in research for the betterment of society is a core belief of true liberals.
Without federal funding, we wouldn't have a lot of things, such as the space program, immunizations, public health clinics, the CDC, and lots of new technologies. Basically, if we hadn't had federal funding for research for the past 100 years, we'd be a crappy third-world country with a totally collapsed economy by now. The level of technological change we have now attributable to the space program alone is staggering. And without immunizations and the CDC, we'd probably have had most of our population wiped out by a pandemic by now.
Government funding is easily prone to waste, but it's a lot better than not getting any research done at all, which is what would happen if we relied on companies and individuals for it, since they either can't afford anything extremely large, or aren't interested if it doesn't generate profits in less than 3 years.
Part of what makes government useful to society is its ability to gather and organize large amounts of resources (especially money) in order to pursue projects greater than the people would normally do on their own.
I'm all for increasing the autonomy of the states in some ways, and even reorganizing the way states relate to each other and the Fed, but there's many things that only the Federal government is well-suited for, simply because of its sheer size and influence. This is a large part of the reason the US has been dominating the world economically for so long. Why was the US the country to first land on the moon? Why not Norway or France or Italy? Because none of those countries could undertake such a large and expensive project on their own. The US is as large as all of Europe, and is one single country instead of a bunch of small countries that can't agree on anything. As Europe consolidates its power in the form of the EU, this situation is going to change; a consolidated Europe could compete with the US in many ways. Removing all power from the Federal government would remove the power that unity gives us.