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BitTorrent: Sysadmins to face the music
An anonymous reader writes "Two sysadmins in Australia are set to get sued by the music industry after the federal court ruled that Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs did ignore calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright. All major music labels in the country have banded together to take action against the duo's employer Swiftel, an ISP which allegedly hosted BitTorrent file-sharing hubs (which contained pirated music etc)."
Because for most people, Windows XP is what they're use to. They've used it at work and/or school, so to migrate to OpenBSD would present a fairly big learning curve.
Because, like Windows, people tend to think of big label music as better than free (indie) music, whether it's better or not. So Windows and "professional" music are more attractive to them plus they're better known and more advertised. Sure the better known stuff costs more, but then again, that's the reason for piracy (their term, not mine).
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
I find the concept of 'free' music quite interesting; I mean most music available at record shops is popular mainly due to marketing. Very few people will buy a cd for $20+ of a band they've never heard; even if it's for one song they've only sorta heard. But it get's a bit of press or marketing hype and there sold.
There are 100's to 1000's of great bands out there but the majority that i've worked with (Which is quite a few) really only care about 2 thing's getting laid and making money.
Until these act's start relizing that money's not everything then we could see a huge industry change.
Why does every single 'small/unknown' band with anyform of a recording want to charge for it? Covering costs? I hardly think so. $10 (AUD) for some local bands EP's is kind of rediculous. If they really wanted to be heard they would either sell it at cost or make it freely available.
But until musician's stop caring about the bottom line free music will probably never become a reality. I hope it does. But we've all got to eat. And unlike the open source world of computers most musicians' would be quite angered if you hacked up one there songs and re-released it on the net.
(Sorry that doesn't make but you get my point even if it is kina offtopic)
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As we become simpler; so do our tastes.
Art is not a commodity, not if you're not Andy Warhol.
Music cannot simply be substituted for other music. A piece means something.
If we stop listening to certain music simply because of the economic situation, then we lose more than just our freedom to share music. We lose the music itself.
Promoting people who happen to make good free music is a good thing. Ignoring good label music is a bad thing.
The inevitable response to this post will mention Britney Spears. If Britney Spears is the only thing you know of that's been released on a label lately, or even if you think similar things make up the majority of what labels release, you're just not keeping an open ear.
Labels release an absolute ton of stuff of all kinds. They generally *promote* crap, but that doesn't mean they don't have their hooks in a lot of wonderful work. What you hear on Clearchannel isn't a thousandth of what the record companies have purchased lately.
Young artists have dreams of grandeur. They think signing with a label is a stroke of luck. Maybe they're wrong, but they do it. Letting that destroy what they've produced is a crime.
Nothing to do but break the law and watch the economy shift in response.
Here's how this will pan out:
They will get sued and ordered to pay 50 gadzillion dollars, AND court costs.
The court will look at their income, and the lack of prior convictions, and order them to pay 20 bucks a week for the next 100 gadzillion years.
In the meantime, at least 42 new torrent sites will open to replace each one that has been shut down, and these will be progressively harder to shut down due to being physically hosted in
(a) Russia
(b) China
(c) An Oil platform, and finally,
(d) The moon.
Meanwhile our sysdamins have paid off the 20% of the court costs of the guy that brings in the suitcases for the lawyers. They are now old, but venerated figures in the piracy underground.
Who wins? No-one.
The Records companies have lost heaps of money, our sysadmins have also lost heaps of money, the effect on global piracy was imperceptibly small, and the legal teams of both parties are sitting together on their company yacht, toasting their victory with pina coladas under the stars.
who ignore email infringement notices are hardly uncommon.
We throw them away too. Because YOU writing ME that some customer of mine violates your copyright doesn't imply that he really is, you could be lying. Only a judge can rule that something really is an infringement and order us to take action. WE ARE NOT JUDGES, we therefore ARE NOT ALLOWED to make a legal decision whether something is illegal or not. This is the law, and we citizens are not allowed to take it into our own hands and decide that our customer is "guilty".
And in fact, this false allegiations of copyright infringement already happend. Some wanted to have removed works which really were in public domain, others sent complaints according to laws that do not exist in our country, and still others sent complaints because of similar filenames (in one case, some open source package was confused with a movie, just because of the same name).
So we simply don't act on them. You have to write us a letter, on paper, and then we'll forward this to the respective customer alleged of infringing, for him to do what he sees fit. If our customer does not do what the sender wants, he may involve a judge to order us to put the material down, or to disclose the identity of the alleged infringer.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
This is the second case I've heard of where an organization sent legal notices through e-mail and took legal action as a result of a failure to respond.
This might have been a reasonable thing to do in 1990, but since then the flood of spam and viruses has increased to the point where it's effectively impossible to accept and read all email that arrives at a well-known address. Assuming that a message has been recieved because you don't receive a bounce message is completely unreasonable.
The labels allege Swiftel's senior systems administrators Melissa Ong and Ryan Briggs ignored calls to remove Web sites that were in breach of copyright, and instead "treated the infringement notices like spam."
Given the way facts get twisted even when all parties are trying to communicate accurately, this quote could well be a distorted version of something like "a spam filter at the ISP inadvertently lost the messages".
You want the benefit of something that isn't yours without paying for it, until you decide that it's worth paying for... by which point you've already derived the benefit of it, regardless of whether you think it's worth anything or not.
What's the difference between this and borrowing a friend's CD and listening to it a bunch of times before buying it? I used to do that all the time before the advent of p2p. Furthermore, should I feel guilty for listening to a song on the radio without buying the single? Or does that also count as having "derived the benefit of it" without paying? (Of course we do pay by listening to advertising).
You even acknowledged that your analogy isn't accurate - stealing a shirt, a physical object, is not the same as downloading music - especially if it's later deleted. Neither the artist nor the label has actually lost anything. That's not stealing.
Most new music sucks; why should I buy a whole CD for one or two good songs? CDs are overpriced. People can get the music cheaper by downloading it. It may be illegal, but when a large portion of the population is breaking the law, maybe the law needs to be examined.
For the record, I, like the grandparent poster, also spend a good deal on music. I don't bother downloading anymore because I got sick of dealing with spyware and the possibility of RIAA action. Unfortunately for the RIAA and its artists, this also means I haven't listened to as much new music lately as I used to, and I haven't bought as many CDs either. If I'm going to spend $15 on an album, it better have more than one good song on it. The only CDs I've bought lately are ones I already heard because friends had them (I'm now back again to the days before MP3s). I don't see how limiting my selection to what my friends own is helping the RIAA any.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."