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MPAA Blames BitTorrent for Star Wars Distribution
AI Playground writes "Slyck News reports on
the MPAA's press release (.doc) blaming the BitTorrent protocol for the leak of Episode III. MPAA President and CEO Dan Glickman: 'There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith. The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.'"
from making misleading claims like this. it's already been ruled that copyright infringement is NOT theft
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I could have swore it was leaked by there own employees. But it's BitTorrent's fault, you say?
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Yes it is, because commercial or not it's still unauthorized distribution of copyrighted work
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Yes, it is copyright infringment. The copyright owner has the exclusive rights to copy and distribute the work among others.
United States Code Title 17 Chapter 1 Section 106
From TFA:
and now, from a syndicated article in the Herald Sun (among MANY other papers): I guess the most revenue ever just isn't enough magic for Glickman.... he really does care about us after all!Usually that is the normal path.
This was a non-scene release.
The initial release was on Bittorrent this time around.
I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
The thing that helps avoid this is that IP was designed to be bulletproof, i.e. you could remove half the network and the system would function.
All it takes is one uncontrolled connection and the whole thing works again. This is possible through tunneling without major headaches, there will always be an underground.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Pirates are real!
GNU guru and mainframe hacker
I thought it was funny the MPAA still continues to only blame the end distribution for these problems, i.e. the p2p systems where it can take days to get these files. Forget the fact that someone on the inside ripped it 2 days prior to release, forget the fact that the only reason its on bit torrent or any P2P network is that it was on the newsgroups first.
Its funny... the fact that the newsgroups never make it on the news.
Back in 1985 a man named Dowling was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property for selling infringing copies of Elvis records. U.S. Supreme Court in DOWLING v. UNITED STATES, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?n avby=search&court=US&case=/us/473/207.html struck this down because copyright infringement is not theft.
You have to deprive your victim of the item in order to steal it from them. Making copies doesn't deprive anyone of what it being copied, therefore its not theft.
Yes I too want to go out and spend $15,000 or more on equipment so I can save the $10 or less for a ticket to the movie theater.
You are off by about an order of magnitude.
Cheapest highly-functional system:
$ 700 - 800x600, ~800 lumen projector
$ 200 - 92" wide da-lite high-power screen
$ 60 - Cheap phillips play-everything progressive DVD player
$ 500 - Any of 10 or so decent Home theater in a box combos.
--------
$1460 Total
Reasonably priced, "sweet-spot" priced system:
$1200 - 1024x768 ~2300 lumen projector (brighter than a plasma -)
$ 200 - 92" wide da-lite high-power screen (110 ft/lamberts)
$ 300 - Avel Linkplayer2 plays-everything plus high-def DVD player
$ 400 - Pioneer 49tx receiver
$ 800 - Any of 5 or so different, good-quality 5.1 speaker/sub sets
---------
$2900 Total
Those are the kind of price-points it takes to get a really big screen experience at home. Those numbers tend to look surprisingly low to people like yourself who have never seriously thought about getting a projection system.
More people ought to be looking, front-projectors beat out "regular" tv's at just about every price-point over ~$500. Once you've watched 8-foot-wide HDTV, you'll never be able to turn on a regular tv set again.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Your TV has Firewire?
Sony KD34XBR960. Yes. It has three firewire ports.
It can receive video directly from my Motorola DCT6412 HD DVR via firewire. People with Apples have been able to record a Transport Steram and play it back on the Sony HDTV and some Mitsubishi HDTVs. People in Windows have been able to just do that with the Mitsu HDTVs so far, but I am somewhat close to geting the Sony TVs to be recognized under Windows, but I need just a bit more help from someone who is good with Windows. It just looks like the proper driver is in the AVC class, but it sees the hardware as a 1391 device, so it never picks up a driver that'll work.
Was there ever a point where any of those powers would have been useful?
During episode 4, R2 didn't need to fly or fight in any of the scenes. In the begninning with the jawas, the restraining bolt kept him from using any of his cool abilities.
In episode 5, on Degoba, there were a few times where he could have used some powers. As for popping out of ships, I think that was a function of the ship, and not one of R2's abilities. So that's why he popped out of republic starfighters, and had a slow ascent out of X-wing fighters. Then, when he fell into the swamp, he couldn't ignight his rockets underwater. When he was swallowed by the swamp moster, he probably zapped it so that the monster would spit him out. Then, when getting the light back from Yoda, he probably could have done more than just pulling on it, but he didn't want to hurt Yoda (He probably recognized him too maybe). Then at the end, he managed to reassemble C3PO's legs and fix the Falcon's hyperdrive, indicating a fair degree of ability to manipulate himself and other large objects.
In ROTJ, R2 couldn't use most of his powers on Jabba's palace probably because he had a restraining bolt applied to him, which is why he couldn't fly out of the sand when they fell of Jabba's Sail Barge. On the moon of endor, he showed ingeniuity in getting out of the Ewok's nets. When captured by the Ewoks, he probably could have escaped again, but Luke said to go along with it, so R2 didn't try any fancy tricks. And then during the forest battle, R2 didn't need to do anything until he was called to open the door, then he got blasted, and then he was out of comission until the end of the movie.
Thus, the fact that R2 isn't flying around and kicking ass in episodes 4-6 isn't really indicative of his lack of ability.
Bittorrent is used to allow large files to be shared without having to have a heavy-duty server. This is good for free software developers and GNU and the GPL and open source and to prevent the slashdot effect.
Waffles rock.
And then you watch either a shaky-cam version of it or a pre-release version with timecodes on it. Wow, yeah, that's gonna make me want to spend all that money on a great system, and not go see it in the theater!
They're getting all sorts of ridiculous mechanisms in place to try to ensure that the sacred "digital stream" can't be intercepted, and justify this to Congress and the FCC because "digital is so much better, we need stronger laws to protect it", then also get upset over crappy low quality versions. Which is it, guys? How did this being released on the Internet in ANY WAY "dim the magic" for me? Do they seriously think that someone who would have gone to see this in the theater is going to think "wow, that was such a great quality experience, now I don't have to go to the theater to see it"?
Crack down on the real "piracy", with people selling counterfeit DVDs on the street - those are at least people who probably would have bought the real thing and just want to save a few bucks.
There's no license required to use/enjoy/read/view/etc. anyone's work that's publically available. Have you borrowed a CD from a friend? Bought a book from a used book store? Did you have to obtain a separate "license" from the associated publishers to use or enjoy the content? No, because there is no license required to use copyrighted works as long as you don't violate the copyright law.
There's no such privilege associated with copyright law. Copyright law applies to copying and redistribution, not to "enjoyment" as you are using the term. In other words, you don't need an "enjoyment license" from the publisher to read their books.
Sure, you could define the word "stealing" as "copyright infringement" and then turn around and offer your definition as a proof that copyright infringement is indeed stealing. But that's not what the law says because the underlying concepts for those 2 terms are significantly different, and you haven't even considered differences between the associated laws, cases of violations both criminal and civil, consequences and punishments, etc..
There is allready one good reply to this, just want to add a few things.
>When you buy a book, you're not buying the
>author's conceptual work.
You are buying a copy of it.
>Rather, you're buying
>the medium made available by the publisher, as
>well as a publisher's license to use that medium
>to enjoy the author's conceptual work.
Why are people tossing out this rubish all the time? There is no need for licenses at all. Here is a link to the US copyright law:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/
Go read it. Find the "rights" of the copyright holder, reading and other normal uses is NOT among them. There are basically just a few rights, listed in chapter 1, 106. That is all, there is nothing else. None of the things you liste in your first numbered list is among that. There is no right to enjoy and no right for compensation,
From your second list, the first point is true. The seoncd is not covered. The copyright holder can only control the first distribution, not any redistribution after that. This typically goes under various names in different countries. In US I believe it is the first sale doctrine. Finally, the last two about revenue streams, is not in the copyright law at all, try to find them if you want.
Also read chapter 1, 101 and go to "copies"
> You are
>not purchasing the ability to redistribute or rebroadcast the author's conceptual work.
Who has ever claimed that. This IS one of the cases of copyright infringement. Nothing is "stealing" anything when distibuting new copies though.