Slashdot Mirror
Music Industry 'trying to hijack EU data laws'
sebFlyte writes "The recording industry is trying to hijack the EU's data retention directive, which is being brought in to fight terrorism, to try and get their copyright battles fought for them. As previously reported, the EU may be making copyright infringement a criminal offence, and the Creative Media Business Alliance is lobbying hard to stop the European laws on data retention being restricted to cover terrorism and organized crime (as is currently proposed). In essence, they want to be able to get police to search through newly extended records from ISPs to look for evidence of illegal filesharing. In the words of the executive director of the Open Rights group, 'the music industry's attempt to hijack this legislation is a travesty and a gross affront to civil liberties and human rights.'"
For some reason neither zdnet nor the submitter give a link to the site and article they are talking about:
an openrights.org blog entry.
The page has a cool link to WriteToThem where UK readers at least can quickly find out who their MEP is and how to contact them.
...insofar as corporations don't *always* manage to bully or bribe their way to getting legislation passed in their interest and against those of consumers, or citizens in general.
:)
Here in Europe, the success rate for such capers is only about 50%
So let's see what happens this time. Remember, if the EU Parliament doesn't immediately give in, it's still a feasible tactic to target individual countries, bring about some division and then see if the Überparliament has meanwhile changed their tune.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
For Canadians who aren't sure if the new Wiretap legislation or Copyright Act amendment Bill C-60 are good bills, we'll end up with the same push from the CRIA to obtain ISP logs that are supposed to be only available to the police in criminal investigations where they've obtained a warrant.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/
'nuff said.
Havoc Video
"...the Army's attorney general, Joseph Welch, rebuked McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
"McCarthyism took place during a period of intense suspicion in the United States primarily from 1950 to 1954, when the U.S. government was actively countering American Communist Party subversion, its leadership, and others suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. During this period people from all walks of life became the subject of aggressive "witch-hunts," often based on inconclusive or questionable evidence. It grew out of the Second Red Scare that began in the late 1940s and is named after the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin."
It's ironic that, especially Hollywood, and, the recording industry, so much a target of Joe McCarthy should now be at the forefront of an hysterical witchhunt intent on making criminals of all and sundry.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
You call "reasonable" breaking customer's computers by stealthily installing crippling software?
You call "reasonable" (sic) levying a special tax on blank media, "just in case" the media is used to "pirate" music?
You call "reasonable" blackmailing people who MIGHT have shared music into paying multi-thousand dollars "settlements" without any proof of wrongdoing?
You call "reasonable" (I'm not making this up!) trying to force all society to use specially-designed hard-disks that will check whether the data they are writing is copyrighted?
You call "reasonable" treating your customers like criminals?
You call all the abovementionned **ARROGANCE** "reasonable"?
I'd hate to see what you call "unreasonable"...
So, in the spirit of the story topic, I'm gonna hijack this first post to make my point. Governments are concerned with politics and their constituents. The MP/RIAA are natural enemies to a lot of tax paying voters, plus they've made some major screw ups. For example, the recent Sony screw-up of course, and those false-positives in sending out mass subpoenas. I see governments, particularly on the local level (where there's less lobbying), siding with the people (IE the pirates) and legislating appropriately.
the industry bullies tech companies (who oddly enough make as much money in a day as the RIAA makes in a week) and keeps down and/or lockes any new tech innovations and somehoe gets to dictate exactly how they work.
The RIAA could litteraly stop all analog radio, CD sales, net streaming, napser, itunes and so on, and offer a propriatery DRM as the ONLY way to get music, and the consumers would just take it accept for the 2% that go rouge, one of which will get a 60 minutes interview from prison just to scare the rest.
We have NO power as long as consumers continue to suck the Industry conglomerates' collective tits, and as long as they are the only place to get the milk...
Copyright infringement should be an offense punishable by law. Even Creative Commons relies on the basic idea of Copyright. Read this from the Collective Commons Legal Text:
"License THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS CREATIVE COMMONS PUBLIC LICENSE ("CCPL" OR "LICENSE"). THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT LAW IS PROHIBITED. BY EXERCISING ANY RIGHTS TO THE WORK PROVIDED HERE, YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. THE LICENSOR GRANTS YOU THE RIGHTS CONTAINED HERE IN CONSIDERATION OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF SUCH TERMS AND CONDITIONS. "
So even Creative Commons is bound by the idea of Copyright Law.
This is not a bad thing
What is the bad is abuse of Copyright law on both sides.
Either record labels are going to have to get a clue about the digital universe that is expanding and growing around us, or continue to persue Draconian methods of enforcement, and strict Copyright legalities on thier IP.
If they do so, i imagine that the online world will continue its move in another direction, that being more Creative Commons artists, and contributers across a wide spectrum.Releasing works under lisences with terms that we can sleep with at night.
So undermining Copyright law is not a good idea. What is is releasing works that don't punish the consumer/listener for wanting to share.
Thats the labels problem. Not ours.
IANAL,
D
Copying music is not always stealing. For instance, here in Canada it's perfectly legal. In many countries, it's perfectly legal to copy music for your own use, for the car, to a media server etc.
Copying music just to avoid paying for it, is illegal in many countries, however.
Whatever the rights and wrong of copying music, some of the "solutions" are worse crimes than the problem - ie, crippling people's computers and making them open to hackers, or taking away people's privacy.
Of course, piracy, is not schoolyard copying, but commercial copying of music, and of course, that is illegal everywhere, and could be stamped out as soon as enough effort is put into it. Commercial piracy needs pressing plants, needs sales outlets and you can track these places down and shut them down.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
If you disagree with this, e-mail the EU representatives (MEPs). Complaining at slashdot won't help. Here's a list of all the email addresses from http://www.europarl.eu.int/ .
List of emails
I have already e-mailed and called my countries. You should do the same.
Sounds odd but that's where I think they're headed.
The music industry needs new artists to keep making money but how to promote this new talent? Spitzer and other AGs are watching over their payola schemes making it harder to get radio airtime. Concerts are good, but getting to be very expensive undertakings. So how does the public get to hear the next great bands?
One way, even though they don't want to admit it, is by P2P networks. It is easy to listen to a song by some new artist you heard about. Very few people have enough money to just go out and buy CDs all the time and the risk of a lot of duds is too great, but downloading has much less adjusted risk, even with the much-publicized lawsuits.
There is a balance that must be achieved: all P2P downloading and no buying means no income for the publishers and artists, yet no downloading cuts off a very vital marketing channel.
With draconian copyright laws it is becomming a more serious offense to make a digital copy than to steal the CD from a store. Worse yet, governments seem all too willing to abdicate enforcement and police powers to these corporations. When the government and RIAA/MPAA have control of our computers and own all our data, it will be too late, the battle will have been lost, and we will enter a new historical period of information slavery.
All attempts to equate P2P with international terrorism must be soundly rebuffed. A threat to failing business models is *NOT* the same as the threat of killing innocent people. How bad to these proposals have to get before the RIAA/MPAA are kicked the hell out of these legal processes?
Ive said it before, but I sometimes think if "marxism" is ever going to make sense to anyone, it'll be the musicians.
We've long since cottoned on to the fact that the industry is definately not acting in musicians interests, because while the Music industry are busy criminalising and raping the musicans best friend, the kids, we still aint seeing a cent for our endevours.
Hows about the "bosses", get out the way and let us muso's do what we always did best; SELF promote. We have the net these days, our "means of production", as those whacky old russians used to call it. We can do it ourselves.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The totalitarian UK Government already has unlimited access to ISP records, courtesy of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
RIPA also can force ISPs to install mass surveillance equipment.
I mentioned some of the Govt's other totalitarian laws earlier today.
If they want to stop looking like a bunch of greedy fools once in a while they might try donating some of their excess cash to a "good cause" in the last month cnn.com has had: " EBay founder gives $100 million to university" and " Gates loses 'top philanthropist' title" On the list of the top 50 people who have donated the most, not one is connected to the MPAA or RIAA, either they don't have that much donatable cash laying around or they really are that greedy. Now they're even lazier, first they wanted the government to pick up the tab for their "people(RIAA) v possibly suspected music pirate" lawsuits, now they want governments to spend the money, time and effort investigating, prosecuting and imprisoning/executing people who they don't like. That's hundreds to thousands in legal fees a day for the trial and a few hundred for the prison, the governments probably prefer fines so they can get some money out of it, but the industry likes the sound of up to 5 years in federal prison. Even when they were forced to "donate" CDs to public libraries they sent dozens to hundreds of copies of the same unpopular disk.
Here's another one against "Intelligent Design" if the word was intellegently designed the RIAA wouldn't exist or wouldn't be as greedy.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
As far as I know, the RIAA and other music cartels around the world have not yet made it illegal for independent artists to do it themselves.
It might as well be illegal. So many indie artists would use filesharing ("legally") to spread their stuff to the world. The RIAA wants to bring all file-sharing down because it is "illegal" or "unethical". It's a load of cold, hard crap. Consider this: indie artists get very little (if any at all) air-time on radio. Even the artists who do get air-time are made to pay for it (the studios subtract the fees against the artists' profits). Now let's say someone wants to create an indie radio station. Too bad, gotta go through the FCC, pay fees, and yada yada. And what about playing indie music on regular radio stations? Not gonna happen. The radio stations are put under the fingers of each studio. The (RI/MP)AA have this sick, twisted, and tyrannical view of art, science, and media. They infest the masses with this idea that an abstract idea or representation can be copyrighted. They have this idea that "to benefit artists" the exclusive right to copy, play, or use the song/art/media is given to the "artists" ::cough cough::ahem, studios::cough cough::. Anyone with good experience with the Constitution should cringe at this. For those blessed souls who do not have a baboon as president, the US Constitution provides that copyright exists a) for limited periods of time and b) exists only to be used for the progress of art or science. NOT for the benefit of just the "artists"...er...studios. Since the Constitution supercedes all US Law, much (if not all) of the US Copyright Law is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.
These facts haven't stopped the (MP/RI)AA from spreading their propaganda and their lies. The Media is allied with these cartels, and the sad state of American media has a) led to indoctrination and b) led to crackpot journalism. "News" with little analysis, incorrect analysis, or the complete lack thereof is rampant in American mass media. The news networks present these stories about "illegal file-swapping" or "filesharing bandits" which are completely one-sided. When I was younger and had no idea about the truth, I believed what they said about Napster. It sounded like some sort of evil plot. Until I learned the truth. I learned that the truth truly does set one free. I learned that the Media (as any group with power) only wants more power. They think the world would be a better place if everyone just did everything the way the media wanted. Most likely, this would only benefit the media. That is the state of things now. The Media is on this self-appointed crusade. Yet now they have experienced the bulk of their power. The news relics of the cold-war are no longer adequate. People are actually becoming disgusted with the media. Movie viewership is far below projected estimates this year. The MP/RIAA claims that this is the underhanded dealing of filesharing "pirates". Since these cartels have so much influence, they dance about unchecked, weilding lawsuits, subpoenas, and red tape. I hold the opinion that the MP/RIAA hold much less wealth than we are led to believe, and that is why they have begun these attacks. They are desperate, and they know that copyright provides enough leverage for the MP/RIAA to become some state-sponsored thing. They'll get their money (somehow they'd get it; energy research is willingly cut out of the budget, but the MP/RIAA must get their new subsidy) and they'll be happy...at individuals' expense. Their rights end where ours begin.
To those filthy corporate bastards: Sorry, we left our eyepatches at home. Cartels are much more piratical than we. We the consumers are being alienated. Why not make something that we like? Capitalism is founded on the principle that competition forces innovation. Capitalism does not induce bitching about consumers. F^** you!