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.'"

Comments

Here is the original article

[warmcat]

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.

This illustrates for Canadians too...

[saskboy]

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.

Boycott

[JohnnyLocust]

http://www.boycott-riaa.com/

'nuff said.

Re:I guess it's important to talk about it

[Pig Hogger]

I honestly firmly don't care about music, songs, movies and enterntainment in general. But I do care about things like biological/technical/scientific advances. But for those advances I am against patents, not copyrights. In fact I am pro-copyrights because they let me control how my work is distributed. So for me what music industry is doing sounds reasonable.

Reasonable? Did I read properly? Reasonable? Reasonable?

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"...

CreativeCommons is based on Copyright Law!

[tetrahedrassface]

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

E-mail the parliament!

[Psionicist]

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.

Re:good news

[sg_oneill]

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.

UK Home Secretary already has unlimited access

[UpnAtom]

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.