Slashdot Mirror
Sweden's File Sharing Debate Becomes Mass Brawl
praps writes "When Sweden's Data board gave the film and games industry organisation Antipiratbyrån an exemption from data protection laws last week it seemed that file sharers were on the ropes. Then the music industry joined in with some punches of its own, saying it too will hunt those who share songs online. Suddenly, file sharers have the support of their ISPs, who are refusing to cooperate with the big industries - and it's game on." From the article: "Only the file sharer's ISP can link the IP address to the person. If the ISP receives a request for such information from the police, they cannot refuse it, but a few calls from TT revealed that requests from APB would be ignored." We've previously reported on Swedish anti-downloading laws before.
Antipiratbyrån: (panting...) Ain't gonna be no rematch
ISP's: Don't want one. (we won't need one!)
ISP's: Adrian!
file sharers: Rocky!
ISP's: Adrian!
file sharers: Rocky!
ISP's: Adrian!
file sharers: Rocky!
Every lawsuit against people not judged to be criminals by their friends and family is just another mark against the recording and film industries. You know what they say about business: anger one customer and they tell 10 friends.
These lawsuits go beyond anger, they financially hurt customers. For every $10,000 they receive in settlements, they could be losing multiples of in lost future business.
My luddite parents discovered P2P because of some news article about these suits in the U.S. They were blind to Napster since its inception.
I wasn't surprised to see Limewire on my dad's PC a few months ago. This is a guy who never touched a mouse until 2003.
You can stop a river with a boulder when it is still a 6" trickle. Yet the boulder does not one bit when the river is a torrent.
In the long run, ISPs who share privilege information will go out of business. I hereby amend my previous position: "Information that hurts no innocents wants to be freely accessible."
Those su*** shouldn't have that much power in their hands! They don't know how to use it so... Go ISP go! Anyways, cusotmers ARE giving them money... aren't they? Music, information, entertainment should be free!
So the European equivalent of the MPAA/RIAA will have succeeded in shutting down file sharing of copyrighted material in Sweden only to see it pop up elsewhere in the world. This game will continue because, like all forms of covert smuggling operations, the excise tax charged by these organizations are viewed by the consumer as onerous and overpriced. If the music and film industry were to reduce their taxes, just as England did in the mid-18th Century, they will find that compliance increases and smuggling declines to nominal levels.
You can say the same thing about prohibition. Once you create a black market for a product through legislation or exorbitant pricing, it is impossible to put smuggling down permanently.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Call me a bleeding heart, but aren't there more important problems than file sharing in the world, such as starvation, aids, poverty, political repression, terrorism? It amazes me how many resources are wasted on this file sharing crap, and I'd never vote for a legislator who spent more time on file sharing than real problems.
$8.95/mo web hosting
That seems like exactly the right thing to do to me, actually. Not that I think that copyright infringement is something that necessarily should be allowed, mind you, but if somebody's done something wrong, then it's the job of the police to investigate - not private companies'. And the fact that Antipiratbyrån seems to have planted evidence in the past (search for it, I'm too lazy to look up the story; Slashdot covered it) just shows again why this is important.
What's more, it's not immediately clear to me why it would even be legal for an ISP to give out data about customers to a private company that asks for it, without (I presume) the customer's knowledge or consent. Not that I know a thing about Swedish law, of course, but that sounds like exactly the kind of thing that could result in class action lawsuits and the like, so if I was an ISP, I'd definitely err on the safe side here and only hand over customer data to the police, not private companies, and only when ordered to do so by a court of law.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I hope, that in true pirate fashion, they sail their ship to safer waters.
How about these concepts as a starting point; These are simply ideas that in my opinion are not too controversial.
We want to ensure its's possible to make a profit from creative works.
People will copy data.
Sharing between friends is not going to bring down the music/movie/software industry.
Online file sharing should probably be discouraged, or at least not strongly encouraged.
Awarding disproportionately huge damages against file sharers is not a just solution.
A distinction should be made between small scale copying for free, and large scale copying for financial gain.
When we have the government siding strongly with the media cartels, and disproportionate penalties for file sharers, as well as the invasion of privacy by a private organisation means that people loserespect for the law. This is generally speaking a bad thing. m'kay.
Most people agree that copyright is largely a good thing. Most people also have no qualms about using pirated software. I'm sure we can find a compromise.
Listening to music in Sweden got a whole lot harder a while ago. A law was passed that essentially banned anyone from even making backups of CDs for personal use. If we buy a CD, break it, we aren't allowed to use our backup to make a new CD. In fact, we aren't even allowed to MAKE a backup. How's this for the digital age?
Blog -
The law will run its course and will negatively affect all individuals who are engaged in any form of resistance to the law. In other words, resistance is futile.
.. . . we have mass civil disobedience on the scale of the Million Man March. But I don't see it happening unless enough 14-year-old baby-faced kids get arrested and put in jail for "piracy", "theft", "stealing", and other misnomers associated with copyright infringement, as promulgated by the RIAA/MPAA and their worldwide sister organizations.
Unless.
What's more, it's not immediately clear to me why it would even be legal for an ISP to give out data about customers to a private company that asks for it, without (I presume) the customer's knowledge or consent.
RTFS. The story mentions that an exception was granted for data protection laws.
Where do we draw the line? Are those 5gigs quotas gonna be enough in 2010? :(
I work for a webhosting firm and almost monthly we get calls from old dudes with fishing websites asking why they used 500 Gigs of transfer and got an insane bill last month. Invariably it's because their ftp password was "cat" or some nonsense and somebody dumped a copy of dreamweaver, or a ton of MP3s, etc. on their account and linked it to a pirate site. But the first time I saw this happen, it made me think: piracy in general can have more economic impact that you realize at first.
For example, when the above happens, we usually do a one-time refund of the bandwidth charge, which is often considerable, and I'm sure we're not the exception. That means we eat the bandwidth bill for that person. Now, consider that all webhosts are likely to do the same and I wonder what the economic impact is across the board?
Interesting how there are facets you don't even realize exist.
Sony ha
Whoever has the most money to buy legislation protecting themselves. My bet is the music/film industry will purchase the right to sue.
Lakes yeah, but there are no fjords in Sweden. You're thinking of Norway.
PB, based in Sweden, has some fun to read legal threats from Microsoft, Dreamworks, EA, White Stripes, etc. along with PB's responses.
[alk]
Then the music industry joined in with some punches of its own, saying it too will hunt those who share songs online.
It's time that the powers that be recognized that the current IP laws are not only stupid but have become obsolete in the internet age. Certainly, artists and inventors must be compensated for their work and creativity but the IP laws are not the way to do it. The IP laws are being unfairly used by a few to oppress the many, all in the name of greed. The nations of the world should form a fact-finding commission to come up with a different way of compensating IP creators. I think all information should be released freely on the internet (unless the inventor has a way to keep it a secret). A fully funded international body should then determine what sum of money should be allotted to whom based on utility to the public, download data or some other poll mechanism. All nations that use the internet should participate. Inventors and artists would simply publish their stuff on the net, file a claim application with the IP Authority and wait for their checks in the mail. If necessary, as we get more confident in the use of the system, allotments should be made retroactive. Otherwise, I see nations going to war over IP or worse. One man's opinion.
In the US, many ISPs are a division of a larger media corporation. Therefore, their finances come from hawking such media (See AOL etc.). The obvious connection to this is that the ISP will not stop their parents from impeding their customers. In Sweeden, however, this appears to not be the case. The ISPs make money from their ability to move data. They don't care what kind of data that they are moving, if they did, they would lose money. If a customer gets sued, they are out that customer, and the people that downgrade their internet packages because they stopped using so much bandwidth for fear of a lawsuit. The media corporations are not equipped to make use of the ISPs bandwidth, so banding together with them would hurt the ISPs bottom line. Media company's solution: Try to buy them out and stop competition. To stop competition, they either have to get laws passed, or advertise more about how great their music videos are.
This brings us to the future problem. A newcomer ISP can always offer cheaper service if they only provide bandwidth and not media. To combat this the MediaISPs will make more complicated rate structures which obfuscate the fact that the customers are paying more, in hopes of staying around longer. This will be alongside their legal fight to gain more powers associated with IP. The newcomer ISP competes only if there is sufficient free content on the internet to justify the bandwidth.
2*31*37*263
Of course, the ISP:s aren't refusing to identify customers because they're a bunch of swell guys. They make a bunch of money selling fast broadband connections, where the faster ones are primarily used by file sharers. Forwarding warning letters would also be a bunch of extra work, and they have nothing to gain - they'll just lose customers.
The only solution is legal download services. TV shows, which make up a large part of the traffic, are distributed in an antiquated fashion, and the technology is here to change that.
Imagine if music was distributed the same way that TV shows are. The new song of your favourite artist would only play on radio stations in the US, where it's interrupted by commercials halfway through. After a couple of months it'd start to play on radio stations in the rest of the world. Only after a year would you be able to buy the CD in a store, but it would be protected by DRM so you couldn't pick it up a few months early on your visit abroad. Bizarre, isn't it?
Let's hope iTunes TV download service turns out well, so we can finally get fast, legal downloads at a decent price.
READY.
#
To think that Society must bend-over for their desires. This only proves even more that they should be totally destroyed by eliminating their source of revenue, accomplished by "pirating" their wares.
In Ireland both Eircom (www.eircomsucks.com) and BT Ireland (www.btirelandsucks.com) have agreed in court that if any Music or Movie company asks them for customer information that they'll give it to them.
:(
All in all a crap situation compared to Sweden
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
You have been sacked!
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
It's called multitasking.
The Swedish Data Inspection Board gave the APB a green-light to collect IP adresses.
It's not quite a big deal, since the anti-pirate folks already can do that legally in a number of countries (such as the US) which don't have strict data-protection laws.
And the ISPs are not only doing the right thing but probably the only legal thing, since it'd quite likely violate the very same data-protection laws if they gave information about their customers to a private third party without permission from either the government or their customers.
The "Anti-Pirate Bureau" isn't a government agency after all. And while the USA seems to have happily handed over law-enforcement to the copyright holders, Europe has not. So far.
it's too bad we don't have a march like that, because it would likely be more in the range of MANY million people.
-- lol pwned
In polls in swedens biggest newspaper, with 80000 respondants, on this question: "Is it morally right to download movies and music illegaly?"
> 85% answered yes.
The pirates and antipirates has debated in newspaper, television and the "piratbyrån" (pro piracy organization) has even published a book which has recieved good critics. The sum of all this is that the pirates is seen as normal humans that download stuff on internet and the antipirates are greedy corporate a**es. Its not hard do figure out which side will win the hearts of the population.
This has even gone so far as the minister of justice has stated in media that "with the new anti-piracy laws the police should not go hunt for teenagers downloading music, but for big scale for-profit copying"
Since we have a democracy the only outcome I can see in the long run is that not-for-profit private piracy will become legal, even two parties in our parliament has expressed support for piracy.
Also, the results of a lawsuit will be released next week which will determine wether it will even be possible for police to request information on IPs from ISPs when they suspect piracy. One pirate has ben sued because he shared a movie on the internet, if he gets anything below prison swedish privacy laws will make it impossible for the police to request identy of IPs in the future. (which says that for the identity to be reviled for the police it is required that the crime commited has prison as one possible punishment).
(* with piracy I mean copying of music/movies over the internet without any money going to the owner of the work).
How many jet city bands will crash and burn because of
people stealing IP. Can you make a link between the two?
Enough to drive the loop for ever and ever and ever!
Warning the MASONIC ORDER IS A SATANIC CULT and they
are stealing business IP using the LOOP!!!
Musicians don't make music to just give it away (some do) but they also need to eat. I have no problems handing over some cash for a CD I like.
.50 to a another schmuck, and then .50 to the musician.
What I don't like doing is handing over 25.99 for a cd, and having 23.99 go to a label,
Exactly! The music industry has obviously skipped the class on economics about pricing.
People are fed up of paying that kind of money for the product they receive. This is evident with the iTunes revolution. Had they just priced a CD accordingly, sales would be just as strong since demand is always there for good stuff. It's too bad they can't look beyond their dreams of printing money to realize that.
Live forever, or die trying.
In Europe a lot of countries have stricter privacy laws then elswhere. If anybody except law askes for information with my provider and they give it, I have won my case, because the evidence was not recieved in a lawfull way.
I could even sue my provider.
Now if they just forward the mail, I can just ignore it and wait for a lawsuit, wich brings me back to step one above.
In Belgium, if you just fileshare and not sell, there is a pretty big chance that they will put your case at the bottom of the pile. The law in Belgium already once told them they would not go after each and every file-sharer. They will spend their time with people who try to make money with it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Don't you know that no one is innocent?
From Pat Bennatar's Invincible:
We can't afford to be innocent.
Recently APB got a permit to stor IP adresses ( since it is personal data they need a permit).
This came after it was brougth to light that APB did break the "personal information law", they therefore sought and recived a permit to store certain information.
As a of this ISP also need a permit to handle the data and are not allowed to just hand it over, also it means that the ips in the register needs to be handled according to the law and that anyone may request all and any information about themselves from the register.
Details in swedish http://www.nyteknik.se/art/42730
It's not so strange that people download the music for free. Since usually if you purchase a CD nowadays. not only is it pricey compared to what it used to be. but usually only 1-2 tracks are actually good. the rest is just pure shit. :|
htop(top on stereoids): http://htop.sf.net
This idea that ISPs are being noble here is silly. They're doing what they do for the money as much as anyone.
Fact is, many people that pay for an Internet connection do so in part so they can swap music. Getting free
music is part of the value of that connection for them.
Now put yourself in the place of the ISP. You have customers paying you so they can have access to this free music.
Why would you want to stop this? You don't have to pay for the music yourself, but you get a financial benefit from it.
So I don't see anything heroic about these ISPs. Helping to make sure their customers can get free music helps
their bottom line.
Oh No! What are we going to do without swedish music?
Granted, the laws associated with intellectual property are rather skewed in favor of the large companies.
However, we do have a choice.
People act as though big record labels are the only ones who have music, and we have to go through them to get it. This couldn't be further from true.
If you want to be an arena-filling multimillionare musician, you have to pimp yourself to record companies. They sign up for it. However, we as consumers don't have to support them.
The record companies do provide a service. We would never have heard of their artists if they didn't exist. The millions of dollars of professional studio work would never have happened. There wouldn't have been major motion pictures and product tie-ins.
We pay them to help market their music, to tell us what we should like.
If instead, we as consumers decided to get music based on live shows and our
own preferences, we wouldn't have to be funding these companies so they can keep
suing relatively innocent people.
It is interesting that the entertainment industry thinks that by removing file sharing software and sharing, they will wipe out piracy.
What about those who maintain personal FTP sites where access is via invitation only?
You'll never wipe out piracy, that is like saying you'll wipe out greed.
In Europe a lot of countries have stricter privacy laws then elswhere. If anybody except law askes for information with my provider and they give it, I have won my case, because the evidence was not recieved in a lawfull way.
In the EU there's no way to make any evidence invalid even if it's illegally obtained. If the police e.g. obtain evidence by searching a house without having a search warrant the evidence is till perfectly valid in court no matter what BUT the consequences for the officers are that they will get charged with misconduct (and face very severe penalties). IANAL but a well-informed EU citizen and even though this makes our criminal justice system in this specific sense harsher than the American one (which we criticise so much) I honestly nevertheless actually agree with this since I don't want to see obviously guilty criminals set free if the police make a mistake. Haven't you noticed tha our law practice or police TV series are more boring because there are never episodes where scumbags get off the hook due to technicalities?
The fight for freedom has many fronts. This front's name is freedom of speech (for music writers, that is - if a record label won't publish some singers' song because it doesn't benefit them or because of government crap, how effective his message will be? In this case, "Art wants to be free" (free as in freedom, not as in beer).
First: I'd gladly buy a CD if it's cheap enough and it's worth it. I don't want to spend my money in a giant marketing apparatus promoting tours. People who go to the tours ARE ALREADY paying. If I'm not going, why should my money go to them? I don't want to spend twice on a product. On the other hand, if a musician puts up his website and has a "donate" button for some tour, i'd gladly click if I consider the artist good enough.
Second, if you had to choose between spending $100 on the poor, and giving them to record companies, which one would you choose? You kill no one by downloading a file. And I'd rather download a song from the internet than financing kidnapper bands or druglords who sell pirated goods on the street.
Third, you can't force a teenager to give away his money to the poor. But in the same way, you can't force him to feed the RIAA monster companies who are already obsolete anyway. Why invest money in something that has no reason to exist?
Fourth, The only reason people have to pay for music is because the RIAA has twisted the law in their favor, lobbing them with the money the customers have paid. If I'm spending money on a music as a government tax (in the form of lobbying), I have the right to decide what should be done with my money, don't I? I'd rather download a song and donate a dollar to the group, than paying $20 to the RIAA, who will only give about 50 cents (or less) to the group in question.
Finally, The RIAA has stolen a lot of money from customers. Is it wrong to want to take that money back?
These are some of the reasons file sharers believe it's not only "not wrong", but a just cause, to share files. One thing can be wrong and legal, or viceversa. The laws supporting evil monopolies like the RIAA can, and must go away.
(You can quote, copy and link to this as the "File Sharer's manifesto". This is free speech and belongs to the public domain - permission to correct spelling / grammar is granted)
Dude, rock on.
"Music, information, entertainment should be free! ... If the owner of said item wants it to be."
We, the public, are the owners. It is just on loan to the so called creators for a limited period of time, the period being copyright length.
I think it's time to severely reduce that copyright length. It may have made sense before but not when when costs, and thus the risks, of publishing is reduced due to online avenues for distribution.
RIAA/MPAA to consumers: Resistance is futile
Consumers to RIAA/MPAA: Your existance is futile.
Uh, the Million Man March had nothing to do with civil disobedience....what are you talking about?
Civil disobedience in this case just means smuggling. Just as smoking a joint when its against the law is civil disobedience, downloading from file shares when its against the law is civil disobedience. When it comes to file sharing, there is allready civil disobedience by far more than just a million people.
Civil disobedience is just ignoring a law as if it doesnt exist. Sure, you can hold hands in a crowd in front of the white house and yell at the top of your lungs that you arent going to obey a law; that is civil disobedience too, its just stupid civil disobedience.
Go ahead and reveal yourself to those who want to imprison you, make it easy for them...me, Ill just sit here and dowload music while smoking a joint.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a little slow today... so does all of this mean "thepiratebay.org" is going to have trouble?
Civil disobedience is breaking the law publicly and demanding to be punished to the full extent of the law in order to demonstrate the wrongness of the law. It is similar to matyrdom, but is a deliberate act. it isn't something done in secret.
Read Thoreau.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
music is easy to copy, live performances are not. it used to be that musicians made a living by performing (many still do). but to some there seems to be this sense that musicians have a right to earn money from copies of a single recording - 2hrs for a million dollars. certainly, the world is better due to the existence of music. but changing the rules is unlikely to eliminate music, just lengthen the tail.
artists give away copies to increase attendence at live performances. songwriters get paid when musicians perform their music. musicians get paid when they perform. nobody gets rich for selling a bunch of copies of something that is easy to copy. a copy of a song has become a commodity with a cost approaching 0, yet there is no way I can go down the street and play a show like (insert favorite band here)...
large numbers of musicians who love to perform get by with a decent living (maybe with a second job). really amazing musicians make some money. industry created pop-superstars fade away.
I was expecting pictures of music industry suits and pimply-faced nerds throwing punches at each other. Oh, what could have been...
"You need to point out however that the real problem here is a theft and bandwidth (which unlike copying, is a limited resource)."
No The REAL problem is that people are greedy and selfish, and want something for nothing.
"I'd have to point out the similarities to prohibition. Yes, selling alchohol was illegal. However, stealing and killing over it was wrong."
Let's also point out that alcohol kills more people than all other drugs combined. A win for legality.
"Alchohol (or filesharing) isn't the problem... it's prohibition that convinces people to do things they wouldn't usually do."
"Thou shall not murder"...oops. Guess the big guy better ease up, before we all start shooting each other.
Ignoring a law may technically be a civil disobedience, but the concept of "civil disobedience" as a political tool and means for change depends on the visibility and public nature of the disobedience.
Lighting up a joint in your garage doesn't count, but 100,000 people lighting up joints in Times Square simultaneously would.
Fortunately, peer-to-peer filesharing is highly public and visible, even if a subsegment of the filesharers are making it difficult to determine their specific identity. Therefore, peer-to-peer filesharing is civil disobedience, no matter how severely you've obscured your identity.
No realli! She was Karving her initals on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist, and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink".
...
Mynd you, møøse bites kan be pretty nasti
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
"We've previously reported on Swedish anti-downloading laws before." From Missouri? :)
Enlightenment is a pipe dream. So where's the pipe?
organization that planted "evidence" on computers in order to make the case for widespread "piracy"?
yeah, i trust them.
indeed i do.
why plant evidence when there's millions upon millions of people commiting "piracy"?
sort of like why forge evidence of iraq importing yellowcake from niger if they had WMDs.
they have delegitimized themselves. their word means nothing.
hope sweden's population kicks their lying asses and gets those thieving copyright cartels off their backs.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Are they really making such a fuss over these bands?
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I think you should mind your P's and Q's!
"The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny"-Twain
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Your posts are seeming always modded 5 but never with a qualifier. To the best of my knowledge your posts are the only posts modded without a qualifier. Why is that?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
If you think you need a million dollar studio to make music then why are people perfectly satisfied with 192 to 256kbs mp3s? The truth is that you don't, anybody with interesting ideas and a regular consumer electronics budget can put together some jams and publish them for almost nothing.
"...but a few calls from TT revealed that requests from APB would be ignored."
Praps continued:
"The CJD of the AFT is really gonna WEX, HH, GRE, or even UBN."
Come on guys. I read this site for news. Let's try and use words. If a commenter says AFAIK or IMHO, that's one thing, but the basics of the story need to be in the post.
The problem is, your data pipeline always ends with wherever you are. And your ISP knows where that end is, and who it belongs to.
Yes, you can obfuscate your dataline by going through various means to make it difficult to follow, but it is not impossible to follow, or else the data you are downloading could not find you either.
I suspect that this is going to be the second edge to a very sharp double edged sword.
The first edge was this: If data exists, it can be copied. This edge is what has doomed and will doom efforts at DRM through encryption.
But the second edge will be this: If data can be copied, the destination can be found.
Just as any DRM scheme can be defeated, I strongly suspect that any anonymizing routine can be defeated.
Sure it's difficult. And today, perhaps it is difficult enough that you can be pretty sure no one is going to take the effort to hunt you down.
But if they pass laws that make it so that the corporations moving and handling the data - the ISPs and Telecoms, have to provide tools and means to see where data is flowing to and from, this could get very easy very fast.
maillemaker
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"Music, information, entertainment should be free! ... If the owner of said item wants it to be."
You misunderstand this statement. What "information wants to be free" is refering to is that it takes a lot more work to keep information proprietary then it does to let it be free. Therefore the natural state of information is to be free. Anything else is against Nature and makes baby Jesus cry. It has nothing to do with what the "owner" wants.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
"So wait, you say entertainment should be free, but then say that you should get entertainment after paying for it, then say that you actually do pay for it? Make up your mind. "
No, read it again. And again. Its obvious what he's saying.
He's saying "I've paid for it once. I won't pay for it again, but I do expect to listen to it again, since I've paid for it already".
Think about what that means. If I paid $15 for a CD, do I own the song? What am I getting rights to? Anticipating your answer, if I'm buying the right to listen to that song, then I shouldn't be charged for it again.
That's a perfectly logical and rational argument. Its even reasonable. Best of all, its consistent.
If you dont' under stand that argument, that speaks more to your reading comprehension than any inherent flaw in his argument.
First we state that girls require Time as well as Money:And as we all know Time is Money:Therefore:And because "money is the root of all evil":Therefore:And we are forced to conclude that:The only catch in this explanation is that "as well as" is not definately the same as "times"
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
Indeed, day in and day out Sweden proves to be the world's true bastion of freedom. When nonsense like this arises, the right of the individual are made most important.
We often hear about how America is such a great supporter of liberty, but then you realize that most of these copyright-related trouble originated in America, and involve American companies. But perhaps that's just because America today is where Sweden was 900 years ago; financially pillaging other nations. Today it's American and American-corporation-dictated WIPO copyright law ruining the freedoms of the rest of the world, rather than Viking warships. At least Sweden showed that with some time, even the most ruthless of nations can become the leaders in peace, freedom and liberty. Unfortunately, we might have to wait a thousand years for that to happen with the United States.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
So basically you're condemming the principle of IP just because a few are abusing it. Well I guess you will not mind the outlawing of alcohol just because of a few drunk drivers.
"A fully funded international body should then determine what sum of money should be allotted to whom based on utility to the public, download data or some other poll mechanism."
Basically you are subjecting creativity to majority rule (governmental no less. funny how they become part of any solution). While ignoring the suystem we already have in place that provides a proportional link between production-reward.
"Inventors and artists would simply publish their stuff on the net, file a claim application with the IP Authority and wait for their checks in the mail."
Of course lets ignore the fact that your "mechanisms" are not going to be more efficient than the simple "free market" we already have. Maybe if more people actually used it instead of trying to find ways around it through technological, or simple willful disobediance. We wouldn't be having this discussion.
"Certainly, artists and inventors must be compensated for their work and creativity but the IP laws are not the way to do it."
Has human nature changed since you were born? If you're capable of recognizing greed? Then you're also capable of recognizing the fact that greed isn't the exclusive domain of companies, or government. It lies at the heart of every person. The question is; who's in charge? The greed, or the will to say no to that greed?
>Those what? I've spent some time looking at it and I'm stumped. Based on the surrounding grammar, it should be plural, so I've got su**s. Sucks? Sunks?
This is talk of a battle with "The Man", so the obvious epithet is "Suits".
Peace and groovines, maaaaan.
And I always thought Courtney Love was a brain-dead, no talent media whore. I was wrong about brain-dead, maybe I should download some of her music and give it a listen...
Thanks for the link, a really good read.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Lets summarise:
>The **AA sucks. (+5, Insightful)
>>Yes they should all die and their pets should be raped. (+4, Interesting)
>Won't someone think of the artists! (+4, Interesting)
>> Yes, stealing songs is wrong. (-1, Troll)
>>> *five million posts on the correctness of calling it stealing*
>>>> Information wants to be free! (+4, Funny)
>>>>> *several thousand government/big business conspiracy posts*
And now my ten cents. Music is over priced, yes. And yes, the labels churn out crap, because largely that is what the average person wants, remember, we are not the average consumer. The artists do deserve to make money from their music. The **aa practice sleazy tactics at best. Downloaders often abuse the fair use rights.
So, really, the **aa fuck us over in terms of taking the public domain, and limiting our fair use rights. We fuck them over by sharing what we have with others. Both are wrong. I'd argue that theirs is typically more wrong (don't try and argue that sharing 10,000 mp3s with random people is fair, please) but the real point for me is that they have the power/money to make theirs *legally* right...
I always do the exact same thing.
Point one, no what they are doing is not in anyway unexpected.
Point two, it is perfectly legal and within their rights the same way if you found a tax loophole and exploited it or something similar is perfectly legal and within your rights.
Point three, corporations don't give a fuck about ethics so stop trying to convince them they need to because they never will.
Point four, if you honestly are opposed to this then grow a spine and oppose capitalism and copyrights completely.
Point five, why should we be having (slashdotters of course not the mystified quote... "masses") any issues in this regard anyway? Apparently geeks/hackers/nerds have horrible taste in music.
Here is the offer I always make. You like a specific genre or a couple different ones, message me, e-mail me, use a pigeon with a note and I'll try and give you as much decent independent music that borders on or is within that genre so you can stop listening to the beasts tunes and start listening to real human beings who don't want to charge $40 to sit three kilometers away from them and be turned deaf.
./revolution
There is no magic bullet. What I think is going to happen is the following evolution of events....
For a variety of political and economic reasons open source will continue to make huge inroads in nations outside the US. This will put competitive pressures on certain US software companies (MS) to slowly lower their prices until their profit models have effectively changed. (probably to something like Redhat or Google)
MPAA/RIAA will hound the public with lawsuits for the indefinite future. This will push encyption and proxy technologies. This will lead to pressure by AAs on US government action to ban certain technology. This will create a counter reaction to further obfuscate filesharing apps to allow for "pausable deniability" (in more advanced ways than say Freenet). This cat and mouse game will continue for the next few decades and will cost the taxpayer tens of billions annually to fund the AA's "war or piracy".
It will finally end once a critical mass of angry citizens and savey businessmen have created enough viable free alternatives to effectively end the monsterous litigation funding the MPAA/RIAA/BSA currently receive (from the general public literaly "hooked" on their products). AA's will be forced to change business models inch by inch (already happening with decreased DVD and movie ticket prices). Community based information pools will be the norm (probably maintaining by large corporations that make money off secondary sources (e.g. ads, bandwidth, membership fees, hardware)
Once this occurs--- the prohibition on information will end and (now meaningless) laws will change. Movies, music, software and art will continue to happily exist under the new hyper-competive business climate. However we may exchange one type of oligopoly for another.
If the AA's were really smart they would take their lumps quickly now and see a huge payoff in the future by establishing beachheads in the new "free" business model (before the up and comers do). Unlikely to happen though since they tend to view things just a few quarters at a time.
People don't like paying for things. They like things for free. This will put competitive pressure to lower prices on information till it reaches ZERO. At that point their will be no need for draconian intrusions on privacy and rights for "stolen" information.
Future men will say how primitive and short sighted some of us were.
In light of all this downloading of media, and the already accumulated billions of dollars the media companies have, why not invest in manufacturing blank CD's to recover "lost" revene? They are already accelerating the loss of revenue by spending so much on these lawsuits, if they show intrest in manufacturing recordable media, they could actually make money off of the `evil` downloaders. (lost revene == no new leir jet for the CEO of BMG)
(bla bla bla IANAL but living in
Oh, and as a side note: Antipiratbyrån (the BSA/IFPI/$local_equivalent in
Geek rants since like... 2000 or something.
Well if their root pass is 3 characters, they definitely aren't responsible enough to have that much power.
"That seems like exactly the right thing to do to me, actually. Not that I think that copyright infringement is something that necessarily should be allowed, mind you, but if somebody's done something wrong, then it's the job of the police to investigate - not private companies'. And the fact that Antipiratbyrån seems to have planted evidence in the past (search for it, I'm too lazy to look up the story; Slashdot covered it) just shows again why this is important.
"
So you think ISPs should protect spammers as well, I guess, based on your arguement.
Vote for Pedro
The only effective counterpunch to American greed and legal warfare.
Keep it real.
Youre describing just so much adolescent posturing; just as stupid as martydom. You wish to empirically demonstrate to whatever govt that they chose the correct strategy to flush out the ones they seek. Youre just saving them money on having to go out and find you. How noble.
Yes, stand up, paint a target on your back; go to prison. Boy, youll sure show them huh? Thatll teach the govt....how dare they pass unjust laws. Yeah, teach them a lesson and rot in prison; they sure wont do that again. Im sure your family will be able to pay the bills while youre in jail with the noble feeling they get knowing you were In The Right; Im sure your kids wont mind being hungry cause Dads a Noble Fellow.
Ive read Thoreau, but I fail to see how the definition of a term as it was 150 odd years ago has anything to do with how a term is defined now. Words do not have static unshifting meaning, they change with time. Thats why we have dictionaries for words but not for numbers.
Parent poster makes a very good (and oft-overlooked point).
I'll go with the guy who invented the term for what it means over some Yahoo on slashdot.
Civil disobedience is about changing things. Thoreau, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, etc. You call the media, break the law and get arrested.
Civil disobedience means making the gamble that you are right with your liberty as the stake, since liberty is your goal, you gamble the liberty you have against the liberty you believe has been taken by an unjust law.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
The Anti-piracy Bureau are also forced to inform everyone they register the IP address of in their databases, otherwise they aren't allowed to store the IP address according to Swedish computer privacy laws.
So... The APB then have problems with following this practice since the ISP's won't give them personal data (necessary to contact the user they log) without a police order, and it all turns into a kind of circular legal problem that benefits the file sharer, and makes the APB databases illegal if they'd keep registering IP's and bypassing the police. (in Sweden, an IP address is definitely considered private information you can't just register however you like; much like a social security number)
Personally, I believe this is more proof that our privacy safety nets are working as intended than that they're broken. If the APB find an IP address and want to register this one, they should really need to contact the police, and if they decide it's worth tracking up, let them proceed, and if not, force them to delete the IP address from their databases. That way, it's in the end the police that enforce our laws and not a private organization.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
For example, there is Dynekilen. A small fjord in Bohuslän, a little north of Strømstad. Dynekilen is known for a naval battle in 1716.
Where did you pluck that "THE JURY ABUSING ITS POWER" I've never seen any trial where the Judge overturned a "not guilty" trial verdict, perhaps "guilty" verdicts but never not guilty ones, either come up with cases or I declare you full of crap.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
"Ive [sic] read Thoreau, but I fail to see how the definition of a term as it was 150 odd years ago has anything to do with how a term is defined now. Words do not have static unshifting meaning, they change with time."
5 D:
How profound! Good point! Let's look up civil disobedience and see what it means right now, shall we?
From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience%
"Protesters practice this non-violent form of civil disorder with the expectation that they will be arrested, or even attacked or beaten by the authorities. Protesters often undergo training in advance on how to react to arrest or to attack, so that they will do so in a manner that quietly or limply resists without threatening the authorities."
You lose. Badly.
You can argue Wikipedia as a source if you feel pedantic now that you have lost, and I'll admit that words mean whatever the listener wants them to mean. I have a different definition of civil disobedience than you do, but you're free to define the word however you want. Unless you define it sufficiently similar to the rest of us, though, you won't be able to communicate with anyone on the topic very well. You have demonstrated this quite clearly.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Is a symptom of a larger disease. It involves political corruption, and the ability for corporations to bribe politicians in order to buy new laws, and then throw frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt those who can't afford them.
Filesharing isn't just about music or movies, it's about the ability for large enterprises to enforce their values over a population that in majority doesn't support those values...something laws are support to also support.
I think the problem is that 'The Artist' probably isn't.... The writer of the song is an artist, the write of the music is an artist, the choreographer is an artist, the makeup guy is an artist, the puppet that bounces about on stage miming the lyrics should defiantly not be called an artist, not by any stretch of the imagination and calling them artists only undermines the people that do all the creating, original work.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The Swedish Antipiratbyrån enforced their ISP control rights today, not going to the police but instead contacting the Swedish news show 'Rapport' disclosing that they'd found a major hub on top of the piracy chain. The gist was that the server running the hub was placed at SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, renown research institute partially funded by the Swedish state.
Actually, I heard an interview with one of the persons who had drafted this law, and she said that it was specifically intended to 1) comply with EU regulations and 2) still allow people to make copies for their own personal use.
... The legal system in Sweden tends to be more flexible and common-sensical than the American system. I very very much doubt that any Swedish court would convict you of any crime in the situation described above. Unless, of course, you didn't actually break the original CD, but rather sold it... But that's a different story.
Plus
"Another mark" against the copyright cartels? No, you're the mark, for
believing the public has any memory for that sort of thing. It's not like
this is a new gambit; in North America alone, it happened with the advent of the
tape recorder, the VCR and the DAT. And the CD-R. Laws were passed every time
diminishing the scope of fair use and user rights, and after the furor of protest
died down, people learned to live with it.
If you think that a few black deeds are going to mar the image of the
industry that controls mainstream image, you need to check history.
The cartels will win. They're already winning, despite the last 5 years
of mealy-mouthed protests from the unshaven geeks that inhabit this hive
of scum and villainy. Come 5 years, you will not be able to purchase
PC equipment from OEMs which is not DRM-interlaced at the hardware level;
come 10, you won't be able to buy any equipment that works without
hardcoded use restriction. There will be hackers for sure - but give it
5 more years, and most people will just settle in and accept it. Hell,
search for "trusted computing" or "DRM" in your favorite engine and you'll
already find waiting apologists.
If you fight the copy cartels, you are the one who becomes marginalized.
They control the horizontal. They control the vertical.
Wanna set up your friends ? Just enter their name, IP and name of a copyright-protected file here and you'll get a nice screenshot prooving their guilt...
http://www.piratbyran.org/bevismaskinen/
This page was set up to proove how easy it is to forge evidence...
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
There is a company called Roche that makes Tamiflu, main drug to fight bird flu. They hold a patent on this and their drug is in great demand. However, instead of ramping up production, they are increasing it only a little and ramping up the price instead. Sometimes they have been accused of working through third parties to profiteer even more. They have also hired squadrons of lawyers to fight rear guard legal actions against all who would complain or attempt to go around their patent, and, did I say copyright and trademarks as well. The whold intellectual property issue is right here and in the middle of this bird flu drug. It is said that someday soon the disease will mutate to be able to infect from person to person. It is airborne, so just washing your hands will not stop it. No area is able to really stockpile enough to protect its population. Even if one place had enough for its own people it would soon be inundated by others coming there from places that did not in case of an epidemic. They continue to sit on their intellectual property rights in the face of worldwide disaster and care nothing about the human suffering this policy will insure to bring about. It would be one thing if we were only talking about music that the world can live without, and believe it, the world could really live without much of the trash coming out of the RIAA artists these days. But we are not talking about fluff. We are talking about possibly billions of dead all because of greed and criminal conspiracy to profiteer in the face of a deadly plague. This will not go unpunished, and the survivors will seek out and find those who murdured their families and friends in cold blood, and others among them will destroy the so called intellectual property laws for good and punish by the death penalty all those who ever propose or even discuss bringing them back after the tragedy. These intellectual property fools are sowing the wind, and the first puff of wind from the gathering storm is on the horizon!