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MPAA Cracking Down on TV Torrent Sites
sallgeud writes "It appears the other shoe has dropped and the MPAA is now going after sites which link to torrents of TV shows. The beef with redistributing copyrighted material seems to make sense... but I'm wondering if it makes a difference in the world of DVR. The vast majority of downloads appeared to be of content that is broadcast free over the airwaves. I'm wondering how much different this is than going after Tivo? Would these sites have been hit with lawsuits if they had stuck to purely over-the-air broadcasts?"
Since there is nothing new to read, here's a story about cats.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you cat fanatics? I've been sitting here on my sofa in front of a cat (a sealpoint siamese) for about 20 minutes now while attempting to get it's attention away from a bug on the floor. 20 minutes. At home, with my labrador cross, which by all standards should be a lot dumber than this cat, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this attention seeking attempt, my children's attention is also held by the cat. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even trying to get the remote from my partner fails.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while dealing with other cats, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a cat that fetches as much as it's canine counterpart, despite the cat's faster ambulatory system. My terrier with one ingrown toenail runs consistently faster than this siamese at times, as the cat is often completely asleep. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the cat is a superior animal.
It's a dupe.
In the near future, we'll all be paying a monthly fee for having a memory, too!
Tivo allows personal time-shifting of a broadcast program so you can watch it at a more convenient time. BitTorrent allows distribution of programs to others.
IANAL, but I suspect that fair use allows for the former but not the latter. In either case, the difference should be clear, in both intent and in practice.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I don't expect to give up downloading TV shows anytime soon. The real kicker is that if the broadcasters would instead offer bittorents of the shows (with a few commercials to pay for them) at the same time they are broadcast, they would beat the groups that are ripping them soley for "respect" from peers. AND they would have the control they are so desperately seeking.
TV shows are about the only thing I download via bittorrent (and a few books), mainly because I can't watch when shows are on, and it is more convenient than my DVR. The shows I watch already have logos from TV stations, etc., why not run a "drink coke" banner at the bottom from time to time instead?
If they were really smart, they would also provide their own bittorrent tracker server (complete with Google/Overture ads), making it unnecessary for me to go to other sites and be "tempted" to download music and movies as well.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
So how about the new series of Doctor Who, aired on the BBC (so no advertisements)?
Can I, as a license paying Brit, download episodes which have already been broadcast without fear of legal action?
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Stories aren't reposted because they're "important". They're reposted because the editors are careless and didn;t notice. If I can't read Slashdot for a few days, I just browse through the "Older Stuff" stories linked conveniently on the right side of the front page.
I get annoyed at this because Slashdot regularly asks me to moderate posts, to improve the quality of the site, but provides no usable mechanism to moderate the editors. Even the email address on is encouraged to send warnings of dupes and errors is rarely answered, sometimes bounces, and is ignored in almost all cases. So now I rarely boither to mod at all; why should I care about the quality of the site when the editors obviously don't? In work I've found it similarly disheartening to be concerned with quality when the managemnent doesn't give more than lip service to the concept.
I would see it differently. Extending copyright encourages creativity because it shows that if you can come up with good original concept that catches the popular imagination you can make an absolute mint off it. If that does not encourage people to create, or investors to back creative people nothing will.
Well, Disney began at a time when terms, among other things, were much less than they were now. Clearly he didn't need additional encouragement later, so why should there be a retroactive copyright for his work, especially long after he's dead?
But this really ignores the main issue: we don't want to encourage creativity too much. What we want is to best serve the public interest. But the public has several, equal interests. First, they want original works created. Second, they want derivative works created. Third, they want works to be unencumbered -- this means free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
Without copyright, we have fully satisfied the third, somewhat satisfied the second, and slightly satisfied the first. We can sum this up and determine the net satisfaction of the public interest.
If we then offered a copyright of, say, 5 years, we'd reduce the immediate satisfaction of the third and second, but hopefully increase satisfaction of the first by a greater amount, and also some satisfaction of the second. We can sum these up too, and see if the net satisfaction is greater or lower than in other scenarios.
What we want is to find the scenario that involves the least restrictive laws and the greatest satisfaction of public interest. This will almost certainly not be the point at which we maximize the first interest -- which is what you were talking about -- because there are other interests at issue as well. (And plus copyright holders don't like competition, so they're known to use their rights as a sword, rather than a shield, and claim infringement to keep up-and-coming artists out of the marketplace; maximum creation of original works is thus probably impossible)
Given that most artists will never see economic value from their copyrights at all, and yet are encouraged to create, and given that in the rare cases that they do, this is almost always realized immediately (the vast majority of revenue for any medium is made when a work is first released in that medium, and dies off days-months afterwards), I think that we could still get the vast majority of creation we see now -- maybe more -- even if copyright terms were extremely short. And we'd all be better off too, since this would encourage more work in derivatives, and more freedom with regards to created works.
Preventing people from rehashing old ideas from the 30's and 40's is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is actually, all else being equal. A lot of the best work is derivative, where people spend more time on polish than the underlying concept. For example Shakespeare's plays were virtually all either based on history, or earlier plays and stories which he made new versions of. He was not a big original thinker. That shouldn't be held against him -- he was good.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I think perhaps one of the larger issues here is that the vast majority of people who download TV shows have already paid in order to see them, because they subscribe to dish or cable. Other stations - the local ones - are free anyways: most people can pick them up on antenna.
I don't understand how the MPAA could sue someone who has paid for their right to view the program. Arguably, the MPAA and its cohorts would prefer to peddle the DVD sets rather than have people simply download every episode for free. If people have already paid for the right to view the program by paying a dish/cable subscription fee, shouldn't they be allowed to view any network programming for which they have paid at any time?
As previously mentioned in other posts, how is this different from simply using a VCR or DVR? It's a more permanent medium, they might say. Well, so is DVR. Cassettes can copied with no more of an investment than an additional VCR. Thus, they could be considered permanent. How is this different?
I could still see lawsuits out of this. If someone downloads a show, gets caught, and doesn't pay for service, sue them until their arses bleed green. Conversely, for someone such as myself who pays US$45/month for cable, I should be able to download shows from the channels for which I pay all I want.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Many many moons ago, I lost my mod privs for modding up the "post of death". I did it because I got a hackerly thrill out of adding my mod points to a post with literally thousands expended on it.
It actually made Slashdot more fun; I am the honorable type and felt compelled to use the mod points responsibly (when not enjoying multi-K pileons), so I browsed at -1, etc. Since "the community" told me to screw off, I'm relieved of that responsibility.
Just chill and enjoy the ride. Barring a major change, Slashdot ought to be superceded or unrecognizable in two years. The owners are making a lot of very classic mistakes, and they refuse to recognize them as such because they result in this slow, long term degradation of respect, not the instantaneous loss of revenue. By the time they understand, it will be too late, Slashdot will already have passed the inflection point. Slashdot may never "die", but I'm sure it will make a hell of a lot less money.