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Sony BMG Says Ripping CDs is Stealing
LKM writes "Sony seems to think we should not be allowed to rip CDs we own to our iPods. In fact, doing so is stealing, and we should all re-buy songs, preferably one copy for each device. Says Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG: 'When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. Making a copy of a purchased song is just a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.'
I guess somebody should tell Sony about all the devices Sony produces that allow this stealing to occur!"
I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
In Canada we've paid the copyright levy for years for the "right" to do exactly this. They can't have it both ways. Either take our money via the levy and permit it, or take the money via second purchases but not both.
...when they were making mix tapes back in the 80's? If copying is copying then I don't see the difference...
Clearly all the major record labels got together about 15 years ago and decided that they had already made entirely too much money, and wagered amongst themselves to see who could do the most to kill the music industry. It's been a fun ride guys, but you're just getting too blatant now, we're onto your little game.
.... I didn't even bought a license as you claimed before. I bought nothing at all. So what exactly did I buy from you?
"We market CDs to allow the customer to sample the music. Every additional time the customer listens to the CD translates to lost sales for us. We will make sure that legislation exists to charge the customer to prevent people from stealing and unfairly gaining from our copyrights."
Yours sincerely,
RIAA.
Then I might as well just skip buying the cd and go straight to downloading it from eDonkey. Seriously, if it's come to buying one copy for every device I want to listen on (including one cd for my car and one cd for my home stereo) then fuck it, I am just going to steal it from the get go. Suck on it, Sony.
the copyright act allows for format transfer. usual restrictions apply.
sony sucks.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Would it be immature for me to end this post by saying "Sheesh!"?
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Then quickly retracted when they realise how stupid it sounds out loud - repeated in hundreds of headlines, back through different departments. It's a vendor's dream to make someone buy the same thing several times for a single use but it's not going to happen.
That first US court trial happening right now for sharing must be either scaring them or making them more brazen. I can't quite tell.
"Record companies have never objected to someone making a copy of a CD for their own personal use." http://www.riaa.com/faq.php
But in this instance I can't. When confronted with such an asinine comment my gut reactions kick in and all I can think of is:
I want to throw a phonebook at her and knock her off the podium. Preferably mid-sentence with video footage. Big yellow book smacking her in the side of her head from out of nowhere. Sure, I'd go to jail for assault, but that video would be on the internet. Being shared (she would call it stolen) and laughed at by thousands of people. That would be my solace.
Sorry for my lapse of any real discussion, but some people just need a good old whack upside the head.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Not this time skippy. Chewbacca beat you.
A license for each audio track, that's the solution Sony.
Tell Jennifer what you think of her - (212) 833-7362
http://pview.findlaw.com/view/1755781_1
From what I understand, Federal copyright law allows copies to be made for "fair use". Basically, as long as you are not distributing the copies, you are allowed to do it. I can make all the archive copies I want, so long as I don't sell them...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
"I sell bottled water, so if you take water from a natural resource and use it, then I guess we could say you are stealing."
Please. Just because someone's business model revolves around offering something completely redundant, it doesn't mean you're stealing if you tell them to piss off.
but installing rootkits is okay
Hammers can be used to break into cars. I guess somebody should tell Home Depot that all their hammers allow this to occur!
I suppose I can say that woman is a terrorist and an enemy of the United States, and should be thrown into Gitmo forever.
Making a supposition, however, isn't the same thing as proving one, nor does it constitute a good prima face argument in its favor.
Sony is Eee-vil.
Film at 11:00.
...hot, from his replicator, he was stealing from Earl Gray. Same logic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act
Well I think Sony Electronics might have heard of this (betamax anyone?) but Sony BMG hasn't? Aren't they part of he same corporate entity, or at least owned by the same corporate entity? Are the board members suffering from multiple personality disorder or something?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What a change from the Sony vs. Universal Studios case, when Sony argued (and won) that copying television programs for time-shifting was a legitimate exercise of fair use.
That was back when Sony regarded themselves as a technology company rather than a content provider, of course.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
Who still buys CDs? They are just pissed because we don't shell out $18.00 for overpriced packaging.
On the other hand, I don't think Sony-BMG is the same corporate entity as Sony Electronics. But I could be wrong about that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTbX1aMajow
... starts off with a good laugh. Thank you, /. !
People who work at money grubbing labels are out of touch with reality. More at 11.
Sony BMG misses the days where they controlled all of the avenues, from start to finish, and could extort and force customer re-buys. This is the old, outdated mindset. With iTunes and digital distribution, we're finally starting to get some choice (iTunes Plus, not to mention non-legal sources)...
BMG needs to adapt or die. This laughably ignorant statement shows that it'll probably be (after many years) the latter. Piracy is easy and the music comes without restrictions (not to mention it's free. If the labels don't give consumers what they want (the music itself, how it can be obtained legally), they'll still get it. Not to mention that it completely ignores fair use.
...until Sony sues itself for contributing to piracy.
I think it would be nice to see the record cartel shrink even more as people spend more time listening to live music or playing it themselves instead of being passive consumers of recorded music. Folks might also consider patronizing independent artists.
the walkman is now in just about last place in the portable audio world. Even in their native Japan Sony portable music devices are losing tons of ground to Apple, an American company. Why? Well 2 reasons:
1) Sony's love of proprietary standards and only supporting them
2) Shit like this, Sony's recording division seems to have undue influence over its hardware divisions
That means that most Sony digital music players are incredibly frustrating/expensive to use. When the market was first starting to get big for these types of devices all of Sony's offerings seemed to make it hard/impossible to copy music you got outside of their store to your device. You either had to convert to their proprietary ATRAC which was annoying or you might not be able to play it at all. They may have made things a bit better by now, but thats like closing the barn after the cow is already out.....
Monstar L
Why would you put someone who lacks even a fundamental understanding of copyright law in charge of your litigation group?
Oh wait... is she hot?
It would be nice if Congress would clarify this issue.
I suspect if this went to court, that a jury would find for the plaintiff. Borland, in the early days of computing earned a lot of good will with it "No Hassle" copy policy. They said you could install as many copies of their software as you wanted, so long as you could not run more than one copy at a time. I don't think the record companies are really interested in goodwill, however.
which they've received for blank tapes and stop producing blank media suitable for copying music as a sign that they feel such actions are wrong.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
"I suppose we can say he stole a song..." (emphasis mine)
Um, Jennifer, if you're the HEAD of litigation for Sony, I think that your legal argument should be more than saying "Your Honor, I suppose we can say I win my case".
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I think since most people don't use Sony digital music devices they consider it stealing. I had a Sony Net MD player and that this had more DRM than anything I've seen. Would have been a great device if it wasn't for the f***ing DRM. Maybe if Sony sold as many MP3 player as apple they would say something different. Well I consider charging $15 for the excrement they call music stealing.
...as any other argument that copying can somehow be theft.
muahahahah... I love it!
"Lose music sales" due to illegal P2P sharing.
File lawsuits.
Profit.
File more lawsuits.
Profit.
Stop reasonable use such as putting purchased CD (with 13/15 songs being worthless) on mp3 player.
Profit.
Force people to repurchase songs.
PROFIT, BABY!!!
In other news, I'll never feel bad about downloading songs from major artists as long as MTV Cribs continues to demonstrate2 the poverty that those artists have to endure.
TODO - Insert Creative/Witty Signature
I wonder what is their business -- they have been bribing legislators into extending copyrights, engaging in egregious copyright abuse -- RIAA-style and otherwise, price fixing, racket, swindling artists of their money; likely more than once their agents have supplied those said artists with banned substances, resulting in, among other harm, loss of creative output from the said artists, to the detriment of us all. they fail to see that it is easy to fling shit, and their shit is likely stinkier than mere copying of a CD. what is amusing is how short-sighted the MAFIAA-like institutions are to continue their crusade against the public domain in the dumbest way possible -- by accusing larger and larger groups of the said society of doing the things it has always done. hey, MAFIAA guys, i have news for you. it may be called copyright, but it ain't a right -- it is a license to a monopoly. it may go as it has come -- if you press too much, the backlash against copyright-like monopoly may come sooner and with more power than you can possibly imagine ;)
the ps3 has a spiffy little feature that lets your rip music off CDs onto the PS3 harddrive. now what do you call that? (other then a nice feature)
If you're going to troll, you need to be more subtle.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
My fear is that the juror sieve removed all but the flippant idiots in the juror pool, and this generally leads to the setting of _very_ dangerous precedents.
If ripping a CD is somehow ruled as infringement, what's next? Will I have to buy a separate CD for different brand CD players I own? Also, what about the fact that itunes doesn't carry 100% of the titles available...am I just being outright denied the legal ability to use my ipod?
Screw the RIAA and protect yourself because idiot jurors sure won't. The RIAA isn't playing fair, so neither should you. I highly suggest encrypting and hiding your collection with truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org) to prevent your machine from being used as evidence against you. With truecrypt you can hide a volume within a volume while providing strong plausible deniability that the internal volume even exists. If slapped with a subpoena to decrypt the volume, just decrypt the outer volume, and do keep something in there as a totally empty volume may raise suspicion. There is no way of detecting if an inner volume even exists. Just don't be stupid and leave anything pointing to the inside volume.
What the hell is a "licensed device"? Are you actually saying I need to buy a license for a CD-ROM drive in my computer, and another for the DVD player that's plugged into my TV? (After all it can play audio CD's) And yet a third license for the CD player in my truck?
I've never heard of any licensing requirement for a device that can play an audio CD.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
If I'm walking down the street and I notice I have a particular tune in my head... my neural pathways have reconfigured to reproduce a copy of the music. Do I have to pay for this?
I gotta ask. I just gotta.
Who are the other two?
Living With a Nerd
when someone takes valuables out of their own home, we can say that is stealing. when someone takes a bite out of their own hamburger from McDondalds, they are stealing. When someone takes a song off a CD that THEY have purchased, they stole a song from themselves. Taking money out of the "Starving" mouths of the artists. Lets suppose that we have bought Britney Spears CD a few years back... (hypothetically speaking here)...We should continue to pay Britney Spears for that song even though she is not updating it at all or changing it at all. Where is the logic here? Once you Own a song, You should not own it just on the CD/Tape/Record... but also on your PC, on your iPod, and so on. Now I can see where there is an argument for if you want to download A single from Ms. Spears, it would only be linked to the Downloading software (iTunes, Nappster, etc.) But I see it as: if you are buying a Hard Copy of the product, you should atleast own it on your medium. Not having one for CD player, one for mp3 player, one for tape player, etc. If you can copy it to another format "FOR YOURSELF" only, you should be able to use it.
No, I've never bought into that argument either, but you cannot tell me that making copies of media I already own, for my own use, is stealing!
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Downloading a ripped mp3 from an unauthorized source is it stealing? You are gaining a product, which is being offered for price, without paying for it.
But the Audio Home Recording Act, which has been mentioned in numerous posts here, explicitly allows you to take something like an LP record and copy it to a cassette tape. What's the difference between that and ripping a CD to an iPod other than the technology involved?
Somewhere down the line, I see a per-play fee replacing the per-track fee. Pretty soon we'll be tracked and billed at the end of the month for our music usage. Not to be paranoid about it, of course, but every time I think I've seen the most ridiculous behavior by the recording industry they do something a little more invasive and restrictive.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Like eminent domain. A legal defense for stealing doesn't make it not stealing, it just means you don't owe them anything when you do it.
I don't know quite how to read this statement, I hope your being sarcastic. If not however, there is this whole "fair use" thing that the record companies seem to forget about. As another further up had posted, when you buy a CD (or tape, record, digital track), you have the right to make a copy of the contents of the media for backup purposes. You don't have the right to distribute it (off topic: yes I think copyright is valid, no I don't think that 100 years of copyright is valid, and the way that media owners are acting about it all is just fskin ridiculous)
I got nuthin
If making a copy for personal use is illegal, and I don't use a CD player (haven't for at least five years), I guess all I can do is break the law. Demonoid (via proxy) here I come!
.sig
People in the general public are starting to get sick and tired of hearing what they can and can't do with music. No wonder the rate of piracy is growing on a daily basis. When you have the chest-beating RIAA and it's affiliates telling people they should pay more and more for music (which is substandard these days IMHO, but thats another topic), people are more likely to look for other resources to acquire the music they want. I believe it's starting to turn into the 'path of least resistance' theory, relative to spending money on music. If you keep jacking prices up, telling people they can't use their purchased item the way they want to and blame it on illegal file sharing software, people are going to start using the illegal file sharing software due to the fact they can't afford the product anymore.
Can you imagine if you were to use the metaphor of eating. If you hunger for food, and buy food to eat, you will eat it when you want. If you were suddenly told that you could only eat during certain hours and couldn't share your food with others who can't afford to eat, you wouldn't be to happy. Suddenly, there is a place where they stole the same seeds (metaphorically speaking) to make the same food but they gave it away for free. The people you used to buy the food off would go out of business right? So they try to bend the laws and make new ones to protect something that should be free (or at least paid back to the farmers) from the thieves.
Here is the problem with that analogy. The farmers work hard to make the food we eat, but they get paid tiny amounts of money for their goods. The store puts a huge markup on it and rips off the consumer.
Do you see the pattern?
If the RIAA, BMG, SONY, UMG, EMI, etc keep on proclaiming to the masses that they own the music, they will be killed off like the dinosaurs they are.
I certainly hope I stayed on topic for that.
Time for a lie down methinks.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
Sony should not really focus or speak up on copying. Copying is moot nowadays as the properties are not physical, but intellectual. A computer may copy a song as soon as you transfer something bought on iTunes to your iPod. Should that be an illegal action? Of course not! But still, you did, indeed, copy a file you had downloaded. Is there a difference here in what one might do with a CD? No, because in both cases, you make another copy of the product for playing in e.g. a mobile device.
The only straw that's left for Sony to grasp at is not about copying, but about breaching licenses. But that would seem to apply more to DRM'ed material to me, than physical CD's. You do click through a license agreement when installing iTunes and there is also the DMCA to disallow decrypting DRM protected media. But what about CD's? I don't enter even something as little as a click through contract, and neither do I need to (normally, thank god) decrypt a CD to rip its content.
This Sony rep may "suppose" whatever he wish, but that's to me merely his opinion, not law or anything. If it's considered fair use to play a single intellectual property for own use on your own devices (and I can't really see how it could possibly be anything but that), then this should be OK. Let's not involve the copying part so much, because a computer copies files a lot, even sometimes when you don't know it or it's not 100% apparent to the user, or not necessarily a user initiated action. It copies a lot of things to RAM too, which is quite literally transfering material from your hard drive to another hardware device.
Involving copying will just make matters more complex to sort out and understand for their customers and is, besides, quite irrelevant. Who cares how many copies you make and to where? IMHO, what only matters is whether you breach a contract. And in that case, I can only agree with them that the copyright infringement here is if it's causing a financial loss to the copyright holder.
But then -- that would mean that, in this case, Sony would need to honestly believe an artist lose money on someone who carries an owned CD to the car stereo, which is quite crazy. Since that also means a user isn't purchasing two copies for playing it on another device.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. Making a copy of a purchased song is just a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.
I generally pay for my music. I won't claim that I own a CD for every song in my collection, but easily over 99% of them. I buy most of them used for a pittance, and rip them to my file server. I do not use P2P programs, or download from any of the massive music archives, or USE the NET to easily find anything I might ever what to listen to, or even copy (and keep) tracks from friends. I do this because I, as do most people, prefer to stay legal. I consider myself reasonable on that... Sony provides something I want, I provide them with the only thing they want.
So when Sony comes out and makes statements like this, calling me a thief for using the music I buy in the way I prefer, it makes me unhappy. This leads to a certain level of cognitive dissonance on my part - I want to engage in a fair trade of goods for money, but the other party considers my terms a form of robbery.
As I will not change my current behavior for the sake of making Sony feel better, nor will I give up the pleasure of listening to music that happens to fall under their control, they have effectively removed my mental barrier to "stealing" their entire catalog.
Congrats, Sony, you have made it clear you consider the two actions - Buying and stealing - equivalent. Thus, I feel no moral dilemma in seeking out and downloading every song you've ever published. You consider that the same as my buying them, so why would I actually pay for them? By simply downloading them all, you view me the same, yet I save thousands of dollars. Thank you, Sony, for making this so much easier!
I guess somebody should tell Sony about all the devices Sony produces that allow this stealing to occur!
Ehhh maybe we shouldn't tell them.
I swear, things like this are posted just to get us all pissed-off first thing in the morning. It's like their business model changed from something good to:
1. Tell the masses that everything they know is wrong.
2. ????
3. PROFIT!
The game.
I don't know if they hooked up a fax machine because of the flood of calls, but please please, someone with a fax, send them something.
For extra points, tape several sheets together and write "We Will Not Purchase Music From Sony BMG Until You Change Your Position," feed it through the fax machine, tape the ends together so they receive never-ending protest message, take a picture of yourself doing it (not your face, of course), post it on imageshack.us, and share the joy with the rest of us.
You can do it. I know you can.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Boycott Sony
Everything they produce and/or market. Literally everything... don't give them one penny of your business.
No matter how cool that gadget is that they make, no matter how strongly it might appeal to you or whatever peer pressure you feel putting on you, don't buy one.
Not even a blank CD-R disk that bears the Sony brand on its label.
That movie produced by Sony Pictures? Don't watch it.
That song released under Sony BMG or any other Sony Music label? Don't listen to it.
No matter how badly you want to smoke that piece of Sony crack, just say no.
Sony is evil, people. They've demonstrated this over and over in the past few years.
Don't fall for their shenanigans anymore.
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of lawyers after all they have been through?
They get paid too little to lie. Sony threatened to fire. She had to cash a check in disguise.
Her husband divorced her for a piranha for a loving relationship. All you people care about is music and its quality.
It's a corporation! What you don't realize is that lawyers are keep these local CD stores in check.
I haven't bought anything really expensive in years. We're called lawyers for a reason because all you people want is YERS! YERS! YERS! taken off your sentence.
LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even allows products to circulate you bastards! LEAVE LAWYERS ALONE!
Please!
Slashdot talked about Sony and said if a business wasn't corrupt they wouldn't put root kits on your CDs.
Speaking of corrupt, when is it ethical to publicly bash a company who has so many root kits?
Leave lawyers alone, please.
LEAVE LAWYERS ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.
please direct me to the nearest .flac store.
.mp3 on a raid array or on a system with an automated backup/recovery system constitute a violation? there would be copies (somewhat) naturally occurring, right?
would storing a legally purchased
I "steal" music. I do it all the time. I have no justification for it except that I want it all but I can't afford to buy it all. I do it because I can get away with it. I am Anonymous. I never forgive. I never forget.
Well, if every user is a pirate, steals from Sony and can now steal from _themselves_...
I highly suggest that since Sony fucks over customers that little miss lawyer here go off somewhere and fuck herself.
Her attitude is why I buy used CDs where possible. It's cheaper for me, they've already gotten their royalty, and I have a hard copy to prove I didn't pirate / steal / borrow their crap.
bah.
It sounds an awful lot like you need a fucking life, and quickly.
I'm thinking that there is no music that is worth putting up with these terms. If these are the terms then I refuse to consume the product. There are plenty of good artists out there that understand the folly of such restrictive endeavors. I like being able to make mixes (I made a four hour DAT tape last night). Take away my ability to do that, or require me to purchase the material everytime I make a new mix and the product no longer has much value to me. I've also ripped everything I own including tapes and LPs to a hard drive that I take with me when I travel. I understand that giving away material hurts the artist and the industry, and I certainly don't agree with doing so, but what we're talking about here is the foundation of fair use. I've puchased the material, and they're going to tell me that I can only use it in a certain way? I don't think so. Lately I've been giving far more business to independents anyway, but it's because of nonsense like this that caused me to start looking more at the independents. Radiohead has an interesting idea. I'm not very fond of their music, but I hope it works out for them. The Dischord record label www.dischord.com sells their CDs online for $10. There are plenty more independents out there. Sony really didn't have much to offer me before, and now I'm seeing them as irrelevant. Way to go.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
...buying Sony products all together, a long time ago. I advise anyone else who thinks this is absolute foolishness, to stop as well.
They only have as much power / money as you give them.
This situation has gotten way way out of control.
See subject.
Ok, so let's pretend I'm a big Sony fanboi (do these even exist?) and I want to listen to my Sony produced music 'legally'. I have a Sony stereo system, Sony mp3 player and a Sony laptop. Oh, and I want to pop it on a memory stick and listen to it on my Sony PS3. Now, suppose I bought a whole CD but I really only like 5 songs on the CD. Suppose I paid $15 for it. That's $3 per song since I don't care about the other crappy filler songs.
/song, and to buy online let's say $1 per song times 3. That's $6 per song to listen to that song on all the devices I have. Oh, but I have 5 songs from that album I like so that's $30 of music for 5 songs.
I have 4 music playing devices (all Sony brand 'cause remember I'm pretending to be a big Sony fan), so I'll have to re-buy the songs online for each device.
So, the CD for my stereo is $3
Now, someone please name even ONE song that's worth that price? I can listen to the radio for FREE and hear most songs eventually.
This is a joke. Sony, please show me where the awesome musical masterpieces that are worth $6 per song are. I'm dying to know... cause what's out these days isn't worth a few quarters.
Idiots.
I will NEVER buy another product made by Sony.
I will NEVER buy any music or video from a company they own.
I hope BLUE RAY loses the format war I will NOT EVER buy a blue
ray player. (I might buy a combo player if they get cheap enough,
and consider it an HD-DVD player purchase and a RIP OFF of Blue ray.)
BOYCOTT SONY!
Stealing is depriving one person of something while giving it to another.
If I steal your bicycle, you no longer have the bicycle, and I now have the bicycle. I have deprived you of the ability to use your bicycle.
What exactly is being "stolen" here? What have I deprived Sony BMG of, if I already compensated them by purchasing the original CD media?
That being said, I dislike Sony for violating the GPL with the Palm OS Emulator source code several years ago. Their products are sub-par, their external storage media (MemoryStick) only works on Sony devices, and their stance on working with the music, movie and media industry is frankly... a joke.
No thanks, nothing to see here. Moving along...
Says Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG: 'When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. So now we know where all the muddleheaded thinking at Sony BMG is coming from. When's the Revolution due? We need all these fatheaded lawyers up against a wall, any wall PDQ.
Hey Sony, I have one thing to say to you.... fuck off.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
Mod parent up! it's this kind of tactic that is killing the music industry. Why continue to make anything good when we can make people pay more for what they already own?
Simply no longer consume there "products". Be even a bigger pain in the arse and tell them you will no longer consume there products, encourage others to no longer consume there products...
I wish I was clever!
She's free to say anything she wants (well libel/slander/etc aside). Doesn't mean it's law.
So she could say you're stealing O2 from the atmosphere by living. So what? Doesn't mean it matters or it's law.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
> 1) Sony's love of proprietary standards and only supporting them
You mean, like Apple with I-pod and their propietary/nonlicensable DRM?
All companies in this space work the same way. Apple just got away with it.
She said the RIAA's litigation has caused the industry to lose millions of dollars.
That they demand the punitive damages according to law in those lawsuits, but they have no idea how much they lost in reality.
Other people have reminded her that we're talking about 20 000 lawsuits for mp3 sharing. Good chunk of them on innocent people, people without computers, even people who are *dead*.
She was forced to admit IP and screenshot can't identify a person behind the screen, as well as she has no direct evidence how much copies of the music were distributed to other parties.
In other news, people in the industry demanded law enforcement should stress on copyright crime more than bank burglary, robbery and other such crimes. Since all of those crimes "only" cost US 16 billion dollar a year, and the recording and movie industy has supposedly lost hundreds of billions of dollars.
They indirectly admitted for pulling this number out of their ass, as even studied RIAA has handpicked in the past show damages at *most* 6 billion dollars.
Sony BMG intends to launch a lawsuit against all independent artists selling their CDs at concerts and over the Internet. Sony claims that such actions are theft.
Said Sony, "All your songs are belong to us...."
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
These music industry people are out of their minds.
Geeks strike again 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I'm not sure which is worse: The fact that companies constantly make self-contradicting statements like this, or the fact that we all get riled-up over it. Novell, Sony, Microsoft, AT&T, even Apple (less so) - these companies, on a weekly basis, make press statements that conflict with something they said last week, or the position of an organization they support.
I've never worked for a company that had PR people like this, so I don't get it. I'd love to know what the average employee thinks of Sony. Do they roll their eyes at this stuff too? Do they show it to their coworkers and bosses and snicker over it during lunch? What do they executives think of this? Are they struggling to manage a company with conflicting goals and they just can't keep the departments on one track? Do they not even know? Are the instrumenting it for some purpose? Are they just dumb? I used to think that nobody could get to that kind of position and be stupid - but then the 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections proved me wrong. I think maybe becoming an executive is the kind of dumb luck and politics that it takes to become a politician.
ahhh well, from the rambling mind of a long-time Slashdotter...
Nah, it appears you let the Wookie win.
Remember, there is a difference between Sony's hardware division that makes stuff that plays music, and Sony's music division that signs artists, and distributes music.
The hardware people are reasonable, they want their stuff to be able to play everything, and record everything, and they want it to work 100% of the time.
The music people just want you to buy their stuff over and over and over. They don't care if you EVER listen to it.
It's a big corporation, and all the parts aren't always working in the same direction, so don't throw down on the people who make stereo equipment, and the DVD-W's you're using to flawlessly copy movies, just because the music people are douchebags.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Jennifer Pariser and Sony BMG can kiss my big black ass.
Subject says it all really!
Got a little rhythm, a rhythm, a rhythm
That pitter-pats in my brain,
So darn persistent, the day isn't distant
When it'll drive me insane.
It's only a matter of time before Sony asserts that if you listen to a song and are able to remember it hours later, your brain contains an illegal copy and you owe them royalties every time you think of it.
And only a matter of time before the MPAA wants you to pay double if you watch a movie with both of your eyes.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In addition, there's no way to listen to legally owned copyrighted MP3s you downloaded. That would mean making at least a partial copy in memory. That's stealing.
Backing up your hard drive is out.
Sorry guys. It's time we all got responsible and went back to legally purchased MiniDiscs.
How about I buy zero copies of your music? Then how many will I be stealing?
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
I remember when you sold me hardware and software to rip and copy CDs. That's how I got started.
Okay, I know it's a lame NRA joke, but I have to work with the available material. FWIW, Sony and the rest of the RIAA are missing a point: The fact that I have been able to buy LPs and CDs over the years and record them to cassette tapes for use in my car or Walkman fueled my purchases of these items. The fact that I can now rip them onto my MP3 player will fuel my future purchases. When I can't do that, I'll stop buying music.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
"I want to throw a phonebook at her and knock her off the podium."
No, a better way to deal with it would be to get her fired.
Two seconds is all it takes to compose an e-mail to Sony BMG, Bertelsmann, Sony Investment Relations, and parent company Sony. Call her out by name, make sure to list all the Sony products you own and how many you will own in the future (zero). Make it clear you don't like being treated like a criminal for something that is perfectly legal.
went home to relax. Popped the latest Bruce Springsteen CD in her RCD-W500C and proceeded to burn a copy for her mom - who happens to be a big fan. http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=11037552
I didn't want to leave this blank.
Is this only Sony's CD's? Does anyone actually own any Sony CDs? Has Sony actually sold any CD's that aren't CD-R in the past decade? Is the RIAA going to sue Sony for making CD-R's to "STEAL" copyrighted material?
Why do companies insist on applying this double-standard to the usage of technology? Consider the example of the book, something that has been around for the greater part of recorded history. Academics and researchers use books frequently, often making photocopies to extract passages of particular interest. The argument applied here would basically equate libraries with dens of piracy, mandating that a researcher by a new copy of a book every time they write a paper. Nevermind the fact that I might want to rip a whole CD to my iPod, maybe I only want to rip the one song I bought the CD for, and ditch the other eleven pieces of crap you tried to pass off as a full album.
The technological resistance to technology and information distribution that we face today seems unparalleled, with one exception - the printing press stirred the same issues, and brought radical change to a major social institution. When are the music industries going to realize that they WILL adapt, or die, and that maybe their strategies should reflect this fact?
Oh well, at least I can take comfort. The RIAA - the Real Impediment to Advancement Association - lost the battle before they even began to fight.
Honestly, I am considering boycotting Sony products b/c of this statement.
She's just made Sony look particularly stupid, and got herself publicity in the process. When the messenger becomes the story, she's doing it wrong.
Any suggestions as to what career she ought to follow next? Assuming, of course that her current one doesn't have much future. I'm sure that she'll be out of a job by Christmas.
Is this the same Sony/BMG Music that Rick Rubin became the co-president of?
The same multinational about which Rick said in a highly publicized NY Times article that (fair use quote):
"Columbia is stuck in the dark ages. I have great confidence that we will have the best record company in the industry,
but the reality is, in today's world, we might have the best dinosaur. Until a new model is agreed upon and rolling, we can be
the best at the existing paradigm, but until the paradigm shifts, it's going to be a declining business. This model is done."
as well as: "The Sony people thought I was insane. I'm also trying to get them to move out of their offices in New York.
That space is tainted with the old way."
Looks like a total lack of communication in the company's new priorities still remains between the top execs and their lawyer drones, it seems....
Mind you, when this lady lawyer is done there, she can probably look for employment at NTP for a few more years of successful ligitious lifestyle.
Z.
It's not even copyright infringement! When an evil entity" Whose President and CEO and board members should be in prison says something is "wrongdoing", you can be sure it's the RIGHT thing to do.
Sony, you lost my business when my daughter played a PURCHASED Sony-BMG CD and you rooted my box with it. You never had my respect to lose - you are evil. As the (fairly old) linked blog says, YOUR COMPANY SHOULD DIE HORRIBLY.
Funny, I recall hearing a lot of Lynard Skynard on the label-sanctioned Pirate radio station. Isn't Van Zandt one of the artists whose CDs you put rootkits on? Speaking of Skynard, my CD of Second Helping was sampled from my vinyl copy. Fuck you and the mangy horse you rode in on. Sony's executives are IMO all shiteating scum.
Did they repeal the Audio Home Recording Act of 1978? Didn't that specifically LEGALIZE taping my albums? Oh, but I forgot - copying is stealing, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and of course, ignorance is strength! .
I was going to say that Sony can go to hell, but I just remembered that they will - every one of the evil pigfucking bastards who run it.
-mcgrew
(capcha is fittingly "steams"
look at the monkey, the silly little monkey...
-- Sig under construction...
In all seriousness, Sony's board should take a long hard look at the legal advice the company is receiving.
From a legal standpoint, this an incorrect statement on a subject that not only has a Supreme-Court-level case precedent, but which was decided by an argument that Sony themselves advanced.
From a practical standpoint, Sony makes quite a bit of money from electronic devices that do the very things to which Jennifer is referring. It is not good business to level accusations against broad swaths of your own customers.
From an investing standpoint, her statement under oath, as head of litigation for the music unit, could easily be construed as a warning that in the future, Sony will consider litigating against their own customers for using Sony products in the way they were designed. She is in a position of management and her statement has forward-looking implications.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Let Sony think whatever they want. We already know they're tards, a little bit more isn't going to hurt.
Fact of the matter is, short of 100% surveillance, there's absolutely no way to stop people from "stealing" music in this way. If the rips aren't made available over the network, there's no way for anybody to even know it's even being done. If your house gets raided for some other crime, they might notice your music has been ripped and charge you for it, but the "stealing" itself is impossible to catch on its own.
Maybe not
nah, they just pulled a bait and switch where you can just use your own mp3s or swap across to their stuff for the convenience of the itunes store thing. i don't really think that's anywhere the same level.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Yeah, 'cause I like being called a thief by someone who takes money from me...
is German slang for condom.
Hello.
This is the Oxford English Dictionary speaking. We are writing here to tell you that we are not happy. Not happy at all. We go through all the trouble of cataloguing every single word in the English language (even aardvark) and release it in one handy publication and what do you people do with it?
YOU COPY THEM.
YOU USE THEM AS IF THEY WERE YOUR OWN.
YOU PASS THEM ONTO FRIENDS.
YOU MASH THEM TOGETHER WITHOUT CONSIDERATION FOR THE CONSEQUENCES e.g. "fuckmook"
Well we have had enough. Unless you start paying us for using these words we shall have the entire English language withdrawn from use. As far as we're concerned from now on you can just point at things.
Good day to you.
If I own the CD, I can do with it whatever I damn well please, including copying it. I can copy anything to which I have ownership, after all. This is why record companies like to say you own the CD but you license the content. Well now, if I licensed the song, then I can copy it for my own (fair) use, because I already licensed it. By the way, I never copy CDs or DVDs, I just make 'back ups', of course ;)
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Sony manufactures devices and software for ripping CDs. If this is violating copyright, then isn't Sony potentially liable under the DMCA? Since this Sony representative has stated her opinion that such copying is illegal, then they would seem to be knowingly manufacturing devices and software whose purpose is to enable copyright infringement, and theft. Just a thought. IANAL and all that.
See DMCA [1201(b)].
From a Sony FAQ:"No sane man will dance." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. Making a copy of a purchased song is just a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.
Then what about browsing the web? Don't cache that webpage up or you'll be stealing!
I think buying a CD for use in your car and then playing it in a portable player, or in your office's computer or at home is stealing! You bought the CD for use in the car! You should buy another one for at home, another for in the office and another for your portable player. With the availability for consumers to buy multiple copies of the same thing, there's no need for "personal backups" or any other such nonsense.
Buy the same thing over and over and over. You don't buy just one loaf of bread do you? You don't buy just one shirt do you? Why can't they get it through your collective heads that you NEED to BUY and BUY and BUY! Stop thinking! Stop budgeting! BUY BUY BUY!!! Who cares if they don't come out with anything new! BUY!!!
this list is outdated by 2 years, but it's a start: http://www.oag.state.tx.us/newspubs/releases/2005/112105sony_list.pdf
The difference is Sony's music players orginally *only* supported their DRM format - they didn't even play a standard non-DRM MP3.
The ipod on the other hand has always supported a number of non-DRM formats - mp3, wav and flac at least (I believe).
Your beef with apple should be over iTunes, not the ipod. You don't have to use iTunes to use an iPod, but you do have to use an iPod to play the DRM tracks from iTunes. So it is iTunes that locks you in, not the iPod.
Disclaimer: I have no strong feelings about Apple in general and have none of their products.
I hope that everyone going to the mall this afternoon can shell out the $ for every song you hear over the PA while window shopping - oh, and that Sony executive might want to get her checkbook out too, what with hold music, evelvator music, I'm sure she listens to the radio occaisionally, and I bet she takes car rides with friends (ok, not FRIENDS) and they listen to the same CD (didn't they each pay for a copy?) She likely owns some sort of portable music player - I wonder how she got music onto that? Surely, she didn't copy it from her library...right?
Thats illegal, or well, it should be. And once it is, I hope she sets a stunning example by being the first one of us on trial!
P.S. When is Sony going to release a CD-to-Portable Media device? It would have to be able to take a CD and transfer (not copy) the tracks to a usb-connected device, probably using some kind of keyboard/mouse input interface and a screen of some sort. Any suggestions?
But,
What about the people that do get hurt by piracy? What about the people that make money from it?
No I am not talking about MP3 player manufactures or CDRW producers. There was a story on Slashdot about a site that was full of pirated eBooks. There received a take down notice that caused a lot of problems because.
1. It invoked the DMCA for no valid reason.
2. It included one work that was published under Creative Commons.
The up roar over those errors what loud and I feel justified. However no one pointed out that the site did have many ebooks that did violate the authors copyright. Also that site was in the process of raising venture capital and was selling ads. That site is in it for the money just like the publishers.
So we have several groups.
We have the media companies. They are big and vile. They want total control over all media and don't really care about the consumer or the artists rights.
We have the pirates. I will restrict this to the those that are into it for the profit. They are acting like fences. They don't actually break any
copyrights they just help those that do connect up with the people that want the material and make a profit doing it. Oh they will often wrap themselves with the freedom banner but the truth is they are in it for the money.
We have the artists and the authors. They are getting ripped off by both the media companies and the pirates.
You have the hackers and users. They want to use the media they buy any way they want to. It should be completely legal for iTunes or any other software to rip DVDs so people can play them on their computers and media players! Bit Torrent isn't a pirates tool anymore than a sheet of paper is a counterfeiters tool.
As the end user of media we are not hurt by the pirates but we are hurt by DRM and are offended by the erosion of our rights by the media companies. We tend to side with anyone that is against the media companies. But the truth is people do deserve to be paid for their work. It is just as wrong to violate the copyright on a book as it is to violate the GPL. Authors and Artists have the right to be paid for their work. Just as we have the right for fair use. And the DMCA, DRM, RIAA, and MPAA are NOT THE SOLUTION they are if anything a huge part of the problem. DRM makes pirated media easier to deal with than legal media.
If course I wonder when the video companies will realize that bit torent is a small leak in their dike, the flood is NetFlix.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So, if I rip a CD that I bought I've stolen it once. Transfer the song (actually copy the song) to my iPod, I've stolen it twice. My iPod loads the song into memory when it plays it. Have I stolen it three times? Each time I play the song on iTunes or my iPod and it's loaded into memory am I stealing it then too?
That is it exactly. Our technology has advanced to the point where we have almost completely free digital replicator copies. It's like the future really got here, amazingly enough. If we don't allow this now, then whenever we have true tangible goods star trek level replicators we won't be allowed to use them either, forced luddism to preserve business profits and models.
bad analogy time, and no cars!
On the ag side, we can see similar happening. For thousands of years, farmers saved their seed, even "shared" with others, so they could replicate food growing tech. Now we are seeing massive use of patented seed, where you can't save it legally, you must buy a new batch every year from the bigagco. Either that or the seed itself is DRMed, it will never breed true or will self destruct after one use-the "terminator technology" that they *really* want. What's next, the big companies will charge you per vegetable? Grow a tomato plant from their patented and DRMed seed, and you'll be required to send in a licensing fee per tomato produced? Only one tomato per seed is legal, the others are illegal copies?
I actually used to respect their company 10 years ago because they made quality electronics. Now they've turned into this evil entity that is trying to squeeze money out of their customers. First I noticed a significant decrease in the quality of their speaker components. Then I had issues with 2 DVD players that I bought from them. One would skip all the time and the other would just refuse to play certain disks (some out of the box). I searched online and found tons of similar complaints and Sony always seemed to deny that there was a problem. That led to a class action lawsuit against Sony for intentionally concealing that fact that there was a firmware problem (see link in my sig). Then the rootkit debacle. Now this. Congratulations, you actually managed to turn me from die-hard customers to someone who will *never* buy a Sony product ever again.
obviously this is stealing since i should only be allowed to enjoy said content once, and only from an approved device.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
We could also say that the user becomes an invisible pink unicorn. Neither would be true, but we could *say* these things.
First up: copyright violation is not stealing; stealing requires a victim who had something before and doesn't now, because it got stolen. Copyright violation is copyright violation, no more or less.
Second: making copies of something you own for your own use is not even copyright violation. You have the right to make as many copies as you want as long as you don't give them to anybody else.
Why do they keep on spewing out nonsense claims that have no legal bearing whatsoever? They are stealing my attention and wasting my productive time (at work). Get the freaking law passed already and let me know when it is actually illegal to copy my own CDs!
So someone should let her know of that:
Jennifer L. Pariser
Firm: Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. Law Dept.
Address: 550 Madison Ave 15th Fl New York, NY 10022-3211
Phone: (212) 833-7362
Email:
PS. In case you are wondering, or she is, her info is available on: http://pview.findlaw.com/view/1755781_1
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
I will comply with their policy and stop buying their products. That would set free more than $500 per year to spend on other things. No movie DVD for the kids anymore.
Ten years ago, Microsoft got on my nerves, asking me if I had stolen their legally purchased products, worth several hundred of dollars. When I got fed up, I did some tests with Linux and within three weeks I had no product of Microsoft installed anymore. I did never regret that decision, to the contrary. Our whole network, servers and clients, run on non-Microsoft software. I have a business providing services around free software.
If I think of it, Sony's products aren't worth the money anyway. Thank you, Sony, for opening my eyes.
cb
We read and copy the bits off the surface of the CD with our CD-ROM drive, copy those bits from the drive into the memory of the playback device or computer, decode the data, copy it into an audio output buffer of some kind, encode that data back into analog voltages, and then finally use an electro-magnetic/mechanical device (better known as a speaker) to copy that data into vibrations in the air.
Heck, I suppose it's also stealing when those air vibrations get copied into the neurons of our brain and remembered.
That would preclude Sony suing, say, NEC for producing CD burners that can be used by people at home. Nothing in that sentence says that home recording is legal. It might be inferred, but it isn't explicit.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"Citation, please?" is a lazy rhetorical technique which in online discussion forums like Slashdot has come to imply much more about the person asking the question than about anything else. It roughly translates from moronese to English as:
- I'm a moron,
- I disagree with you, but
- I'm too ill-informed to argue my side of the debate, and
- I'm too lazy to look up the resources which are freely available which would help me construct an argument, so
- I'm going to take the low road, and snidely suggest that you defend your argument, whereafter
- I'll assume that you are wrong and I am right because you didn't respond by falling all over yourself by quoting chapter and verse to me,
- but because I have this lingering sense that I might not know what the hell I'm talking about, I'll just post this retort as "Anonymous".
How about, instead of logged in Slashdot participants falling all over themselves to defend every other statement they make from Anonymous "show me a link" asshats, the asshats start reading a little more and learning about the world around them? Don't agree with what someone said? Look it up! You're using Slashdot, so you are already USING THE INTERNET. There are dictionaries and encyclopedias and actual laws, on the internet, mere seconds away from where you are now.Google (fucktard)
Wikipedia (fucktard)
Urban Dictionary (fucktard) (particularly useful when somebody calls you a name you haven't heard before)
Encyclopedia Dramatica (fucktard)
United States code (aka "the law" for U.S. residents)
If you care enough to post, then please devote the five or ten minutes that it might take to research the topic and post your own link refuting the statement that you don't agree with. I'll help you get started, here: U.S. Copyright Law. You don't need a degree in law to read and understand well written laws. If you can't read and understand a law, that's a pretty big hint that it might be broken in some way. Finding relevant sections of the code can be challenging, but Google can be quite helpful with that.
Look it up!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Worse, according to this theory, if I have ripped a CD I have bought to my own computer that's stealing once. If I then copy the song to my iPod nano I have stolen a second time. If I then copy the song to my iPhone I have stolen a third time.
The corollary of this is that the record companies want us to purchase music we already own again for each new device that we play it back on. That's what this is really all about, not the supposed billions of dollars in losses that the RIAA says they have suffered due to P2P file sharing.
Dear Sony BMG,
To fucking bad.
The Public
There is a war going on for your mind.
The iPod does support FLAC, but not with the firmware Apple provides. If you want to play FLAC, WV, Ogg Vorbis, and various other audio formats, you must install Rockbox.
Quick, somebody sue Sony for violating the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA!
I guess somebody should tell Sony about all the devices Sony produces that allow this stealing to occur!
Sony BMG is its own corporate entity that is half owned by Bertelsmann Music Group and Half owned by Sony Corporation of America.
It is two steps away from the Sony that produces all of the devices that can be used to rip cds.
Clearly their head of litigation is insane, but she works for a company that is half owned by a company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony. She doesn't work for Sony.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
See, it's this. Your subconscious recognizes that the joke contains inherent racism or sexism or classism... or the underling meta-discriminatory-ism. The authors of the joke know that nobody would get the joke if they used "Han Solo" or "Luke Skywalker" or "Princess Leah". Chewie is the victim of *ism. He's covered in fur. He's different. Ewoks are covered in fur. Chewie must live on Endor. Nobody *else* would ever think to live on Endor. Maybe the Princess has a secret thing for fur, eh?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Sony/BMG just signed a deal with imeem.com which gives them a share of imeem's advertising in exchange for streaming rights to sony's records. No I'll bet that none of you have used imeem so I'll explain why this no-rip statement conflicts with the deal. Imeem is basicly 'youtube for music' users upload music from thei favourite artists and anyone on imeem can listen to them - providing the music is something that imeem has the rights to stream. But wait, where would users get mp3s (or oggs) from Sony to make this work? Maybe they'd prefer users download from p2p networks instead of ripping?
Up for it.
Horseshit. When I hit reply I was the first.
Slashdong has ripped me off yet again, thankless fuckers
Hey, Sony Right Hand, your Left Hand is making an ass out of you again.
FYI.
Anything is possible given time and money.
It's a copy, heck every time you press play on a CD walkman it copies the data from the CD into a memory buffer before sending a copy to the D to A converters, which make an analog copy with no DRM, then an amplifier makes a bigger copy and sends it to the speakers to make an acoustic copy..
Even air molecules make a copy of what the molecules right beside them are shaking to..
Sony's gonna be RICH!
Perhaps a flat license fee where you get a tatoo on each ear so the RIAA agents know not to hit you with billyclubs when someone turns on the radio nearby. (One license per ear, thats two copies!)
And they wonder why they aren't selling PS3's to the geek crowd...
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
I guess recording that Album to Tape, so I could play it on my walkman.... oh sorry, I couldn't afford that... on my Samsung My-My was breaking the law. And yet almost every hi-fi set up had explicit instructions on how to record from Album to Tape. So all those Sony boom-boxes from the 80's that had dual cassette decks with 2X and 4X copying were designed to break the law as well?!?! I guess Mix-Tapes are now the new crack... don't have one, you will get 20 years to life. When I play a music clip from the web I am downloading the clip from the website to my computer.... I guess I'm breaking the law when I surf because I am illegally copying music. At least there will be a whole new class of people to sue: web sites for providing the content.... yea!
When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.
Say it all you want, it doesn't make it true.
Be aware that if something like this comes along, they will start to prosecute even the most insignificant form of copyright violation (up to and including whistling a tune in a public place), since one day it MIGHT be important.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To paraphase the "Princess Bride". "Stealing. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
sonyBMG is hemorrhaging capital faster than SCEA. They screw up their business and expect to have governments legislate them a safety net.
They're all subject to market forces. at least, in our market economy, they should be.
Fair Use is not so clear in current legislation. One thing that is perfectly clear is the ripping of CDs you own for your own personal use.
It's legal.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Let's bring this one home...
Last week my wife and I flew one-way to my hometown, 600+ miles away. We elected to drive the rental car back. When you're short-booking an airline, even the one-way fees on a car rental leave it substantially cheaper.
We had no music along, and facing a long drive, decided to buy a few CDs. We were in the vicinity of a Borders for other reasons, so we went in there to buy. After gagging at the $18+ list price of CDs, I found a few oldies that were "only" $12, and thought we'd like. One was Linda Rondstat's greatest hits, though how they can put that out without including "Heart Like a Wheel" I don't understand. The other CD is the issue.
It was a Cat Stevens live concert CD from back in the late 70's, before he became Yousef Islam. But of course some of the royalties, if indeed the RIAA is paying any royalties on this one, go to Yousef Islam. I seem to remember sometime in the past year that he was trying to travel to the US, and encountering troubles getting a visa because of his religion and relative (former?) prominence. I don't know how it resolved, but let's just say for the moment that the person formerly named "Cat Stevens" is the same person now named "Yousef Islam", who has been at least investigated for terrorism-related issues.
I may well have "contributed materially" to Yousef Islam by purchasing his CD, causing a transfer of royalties. Last I knew making a "material contribution" to terrorism could be construed by the Executive Branch as a really naughty thing, possibly involving a vacation to Cuba. In this odd case, perhaps the RIAA is my friend, because as long as they "forget" to pay Yousef Islam the royalties due for Cat Stevens music, any of us who buy that music are making no "material contribution". But then again, consider the situation Borders is in. They are an intermediary in this entire transaction, so they may well be a business trafficking in "material contributions" to "terrorists," and at that point, any of their customers become suspect. One could of course consider the entire catalog of artists whose works they sell, and the political and religious leanings of all of those artists, their "charitable contributions," etc.
This is all hypothetical, absurd, and the like. It's also a rebuttal to those who look at draconian anti-terror laws and say, "I commit none of these crimes, I have nothing to fear from these laws." Sometimes the definition of "crime" can change, be vague, or cast a wider net than you ever thought possible. Remember, Al Capone was arrested and sent to jail using tax laws, not for bootlegging or racketeering.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I once worked (note that past tense) for a large mobile phone company. At the time they were pushing two devices, one division was trying to sell the blackberry, the other a branded PDA/Phone, both of them to the same coorperate business customer. So I dared to ask, isn't there a conflict? I asked this during a large meeting/brain storming session and quickly learned why I should not work in these kind of enviroments. The room literally went quiet. It was not because I had pointed out the fatal flaw nobody else had spotted, it was because everyone else knew this and also knew that this stuff is just the way things are and you don't bring attention to it. You don't bring attention to ANYTHING because doing ANYTHING might get you noticed.
I got noticed alright and didn't last long, especially since I didn't learn my lesson and kept pointing out these stupid conflicts, for instance if we were to sell lots of data why did we limit the mobile web to just our own pathetic sites and not the web as a whole?
You get ahead in business by supporting the bosses decision, that includes NOT making a decision that goes against his previous decision not matter how wrong, after all if you improve the situation, you just shown that YOUR boss is an idiot.
The bigger the company/organization and the older it gets, the worse this becomes. It is even true in your own live. Take a challenge and change your job completly and then try to notice how quickly your world changes, go from IT to say construction and you will move from a world where the internet is a primary necessity to a world where many of the people you know only have it for the kids.
This woman is a lawyer working for the music division of Sony, I am willing to bet a fair amount of money that in her professional and social live she doesn't hang out with many geeks/engineers/students etc etc. She hangs out with other lawyers working for the music industry. That is what shapes her vision and it better do because how long do you think she would last at Sony-BMG if she started to listen to other opinions on copyright?
She ain't stupid, she is doing exactly what she has to do to get paid and keep her job and her boss will tell her good job, and all her underlings will tell her she did great and that is how things are done in any organisation.
It ain't about stupid, it is about social climbing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... hits the Sony rep in the head with a fish that says "FAIR USE" on the side.
How they keep the "FAIR USE" sign on a cold, wet, fish I don't know -- now move along nothing to see here
So, I guess the next step is to call me a criminal because I replay the songs in my head. Sony, as I have stated before, what part of FUCK OFF are you having difficulty understanding? I have long since committed myself to NOT buying any of your consumer electronics, guess I'll have to extend that to your CD's as well.
Weather you like it or not, I'm going to exercise my FAIR USE RIGHTS.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
The people who don't vote cannot save your democracy. Talk to some of them. They are mostly un-informed. They don't vote because they don't care enough to learn what to vote for. We need to look for another solution. Educating these people might be a start. If they knew more, they would start voting on their own, you wouldn't need to convince them.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
In soviet Russia, Music rips you!
-Rush?
Dear Sony's legal department:
Fuck off.
Love,
Everyone in the Whole Wide World
P.S.
Fuck off
Gotta do it;
Who are the first two?
In reference to the recent comment by your head of ligitation that ripping CDs you own is not just copyright infringement but "theft", I would like to ask the following:
Explain to me how you can possibly justify this statement in light of the fair use doctrine and Sony v. Universal (a.k.a. the Betamax decision). (Because I suspect you can't, at least not without contradicting yourself.)
Bite me,
--/me
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Airwaves can be captured by passer by ears, thus providing unapproved access to the song to public. Thus, playing a song on a device is illegal too. ( That includes your stupid ipod shuffle that you use while running on a treadmill ).
Sony is so nice that they don't consider playing a song on a device is illegal - you guys are so lucky they are even allowing you to buy their CDs - you should be thankful. Go back and buy the same CD you bought 25 more times - thats how many people might have heard the song when you played it on your system. Remember, playing a song is stealing - so if you care about ethics, your only job in life should be to keep buying the music CDs.
Does this mean that if I rip my old CD player out of my car and give it to a friend, I'm both stealing from Toyota AND fencing stolen goods?
No, they want 1 sale per LISTEN.. this is just a step in that direction.
Ripping for personal use is just as much stealing as skipping commercials on tv is stealing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This isn't about actually making a sensible statement. I'd say, rather this is another attempt at creating some FUD, spinning a story and fabricating "truth".
For years, the content industry has been engaged in misinformation, claiming something as illegal that wasn't. Making private copies of your content, or even downloading content, is not illegal contrary to their claims, at least in many countries.
Why do you think they wouldn't start a spin about media shifting and fabricating something about it being illegal?
People are generally not lawyers. Instead, they tend to believe it if a lawyer claims something as being illegal. They hear something, hear it again (from a "different" source, like another media lawyer) and presto, instant truth. I'd guess this wasn't the last time we've heard that spin.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
- It's okay to copy music onto an analog cassette, but not for commercial purposes.
- It's also okay to copy music onto special Audio CD-R's, mini-discs, and digital tapes (because royalties have been paid on them) - but, again, not for commercial purposes.
- Beyond that, there's no legal "right" to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won't usually raise concerns so long as:
- The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own
- The copy is just for your personal use. It's not a personal use - in fact, it's illegal - to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.
I enjoy that they felt the need to put "right" in quotes, perhaps as a safety precaution in case any lawyer pointed out to them that, in fact, they have no idea what our actual rights are.Aren't Sony irrelevant yet?
(waving hand at judge)
You don't need to see my evidence. I can go about my business.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is why I refuse to buy new music. I don't recall the last time I bought new music. I won't even ask my family for new CDs or concert videos for presents. I'll buy used, but that's it.
If everyone would boycott (I know, never happen), the retailers would gang up on these morons real fast.
Sony should publicly flog this woman, or whoever put her up to it, and put them in public stocks for a few years. But then, that would require the management to have a clue.
The law has long said I can make all the copies I want so long as they're for my personal use, and not more than one is in use at a time. And that's reasonable. Her comments are so far below unreasonable it's ridiculous.
Sony really pisses me off, which is why I have been boycotting anything Sony First it's all of their proprietary format bullshit Then it was the rootkit quagmire a few months back Now it's this. If you don't buy any Sony products now, is it possible to buy any less?
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
That really is scary. I could have sworn the federal code determined what was authorized as fair use, not the copyright holder.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
"I guess somebody should tell Sony about all the devices Sony produces that allow this stealing to occur!"
More importantly, someone should remind Sony that when you have a CD you can play it on probably thousands of different brands of CD players. Is that stealing too in their eyes? Based on the logic they set forth it seems like it would be. Anything for a buck I guess.
http://www.denialofreality.com/
but in the end you got something without paying the price at which it was being offered.
So, I'm stealing from F.Y.E. when I purchase a CD from Amazon at $9.99 by not paying the $19.99 price that was being offered at F.Y.E. Nice logic.
Further to that.
I buy a lot of blanks but I never use them to copy music. I'd like my levy back please.
How about some RIAA-style calculations. Is it still $75,000 per track? I have purchased about 150 blank cd's this year, and if we say a conservative average of 5MB per track, it looks like about (150x700MB)=105,000MB / 5 = 21,000 tracks "not stolen". That means I'm due a refund of $1,575,000,000.
Did anyone else notice that she says "I suppose we can say he stole a song"? It seems a little non-committal to express it as a personal view, rather than as a representative of a Sony. Was it meant as a personal response, or as hypothetical posturing, or was it just cautiously delivering the opinion held by Sony itself?
One thing's for sure: if we play by those rules, Sony music will become WAAAAAAAAAY overpriced.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Copyright holding corporations are greedy. If they had the option, they'd charge you every time you sang a song in the shower. It's time for we the people to assert our rights, and to fight for the ones we've lost due to complacency.
Since any copying is stealing, you're not even allowed to buy one copy for every device you want to listen on, because you'd necessarily have to copy it from your computer to the device -- perhaps from a CD to your computer to a device.
Yes, according to this bitch, iPods are illegal, unless filled entirely with free/open music -- if she even knows such things exist.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There is no specific clause in the Copyright Act that would allow purchasers of a CD to make a copy for anything but backup purposes. In case law it's much more questionable, but what you should be hating here is the law itself. Copyright is a ridiculous concept. It is nothing but market interference by the government, creating scarcity where none naturally exists.
What possible reason could a frigging lawyer have for saying "It's my personal belief that" in testimony except to avoid perjury? The cynical amongst you might think that she was trying to create a false impression.
It's a breach of fair use (which allows for this from what I remember) - and this kind of copying is explicitly allowed in Canada by our copyright laws.
Sony's being a bunch of thieves - stealing from our rights to line their pockets. Good thing I don't buy anything from them anymore....
Fuck and Them.
Seriously though, I think Sony has the worst marketing and PR department in the entire music and/or video game industry. I own a PS3, and it's things like this that just make me cringe...
I own an ipod and there's no way in hell any corporation is going to stop me from ripping legally purchased CDs to mp3 and putting them on my ipod. Ah... who am I kidding, I don't buy CDs anyways. I refuse to support the music cartel. Independent artists is the only thing I will spend my money on.
On a side note, I got 6 EBGamesMusic cards for free last night with my purchase of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass for my DS. After I got home, I decided to check out the EBGamesMusic site and use those 6 cards (5 free songs per card, so 30 songs in total). What a joke... First of all their selection was pathetic, I don't want to listen to that mainstream crap, luckily they did have some techno and drum & bass that somewhat interested me. Second, they make you download the tracks in WMA format which is completely crippled by DRM. After downloading all the tracks, I tried to rip them to mp3 for my ipod, but of course it wouldn't work. I then tried to play them in WMP9 and I got a popup window saying I needed to connect to Microsoft and update the DRM on my system... I immediately hit cancel and deleted those WMA-DRM tracks.
What a horrible music service...Why the hell is EB Games running a Music service anyway? I can see why they're giving away those music cards, there's no way in hell I'd actually spend money on that site.
What a bunch of douchebags...makes me want to make copies of the latest chart-toppers and distribute them for free to the neighborhood kids.
Blar.
more
She acts as a witness as well.
listening to a song more than once is basically stealing, unless you pay for it each time you listen to it. The music industry fucked itself when they agreed to let radio stations play their music with no charge to the end-user. People expect music to be free because it has always been free. They can't change that now, at least not quickly.
What about all the CDs which are out of print, that the record companies will not sell any longer? How do you buy a copy of a CD that is not for sale? I thought that was the whole point of fair use, to have a way to preserve media that isn't being sold anymore.
Whenever the megacorps lobby for increasingly radical legislation, this person should be quoted to remind our representatives (and the public) just how radical their campaign is.
Their goals and just about anyone's concept of copyright, have nothing in common. It's not about promoting the arts, and it's not about ethics and fairness. Pariser has let the cat out of the bag. I'm not sure even Jack Valenti ever said anything that makes it so clear.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So... how should I feel about the Blu ray format going forward? Do I side with Microsoft and HD-DVD or Sony and Blu-Ray. Sort of like surrending to Darth Vader or the Emporer? Either way you are on the dark side.
I'm not clever enough for a sig...
The record companies lobbied here in Canada for a levy on blank media for years. They got it in 1999, and in return, consumers got the right of Private Copying. Actually, this deal favors most consumers, because we are permitted to copy music from any source for our own use; I can take CDs out of the library or borrow them from you and make my own copies, and it's entirely legal up here. The record companies would like you to think that you can only copy on to media subject to the levy, but a close reading of the Copyright Act disproves this view.
A couple of years ago, though, I saw a Norah Jones CD at POS in a Chapters store, and it looked interesting until I saw on the back that it was encumbered with anti-copying technology. I wrote the record company (BMI IIRC) and asked how it is, on the one hand, that they are happy to take my levy money in return for private copying, and on the other hand, that they're attempting to block my copying? The letter challenged them to either give up their portion of levy revenue or drop copy protection. Their response was that the levy "does not begin" to offset losses due to private copying and therefore they had the right to copy-protect. (This whole discussion didn't even touch on whether such copy protection had any chance of working).
There are few industries that think they should get money (levy revenue) in return for something (private copying rights), and then not deliver (copy-protect the media). These companies have successfully exploited both consumers and artists for far too long, and deserve to be totally cut out of the producer-consumer transaction.
i've looked for the original source in this case but i've not seen anything but a series of Blogs all quoting each other.
Are we sure that this is real?
Are they going to sue themselves? the labels say to put videos and music on those CDs and DVDs.
Believe it or not - the NY Times business section last Sunday had a puff piece writeup where a music executive SAID HE GOT STARTED MAKING MIX TAPES AND --PLAYING THEM FOR HIS FRIENDS-- this is in print, get the business section. My copy is already recycled. Someone find this. I didn't see it online. It ought to be an exhibit in this trial -- a music executive said publicly that copying and DISSEMINATING MUSIC IN PUBLIC was OK.
Come and get me, motherfucker.
Bad enough with code, imagine once they set their hooks in so deep there's not much alternative. Food is one of those "necessary" things, you can't just "opt out", and yes, there's some credible risk with the way they are doing seed now. some of the tech seems useful to me, some seems outright e-vile. bottom line is, I don't trust them at all. They want global monopolies and cartels on food and are half way there now. And also with fresh water, but that's another discussion worthy of an entire thread..
You can still get open pollinated, unencumbered "heirloom" seed now, so I suggest you get it. That's what we use here, and I have two stashes of them, the stuff I reuse every year and save the best examples from, and some others I got a long time ago carefully packed in sealed cans so as to last a long time, years or decades. That's my personal "doomsday vault" collection.
I'll also say this for anyone interested, the fix is in on food prices for next year, they are going up dramatically, they are going full bore ahead to shift production outside the US (granted, it will take awhile but that is the trend and also the intent with fertilizer and ag chemical production now) and also "legally" do what they did in the last great depression, make it so still independent farmers go bankrupt so their property can be picked up for a dime on the dollar or whatever at auction. Serf employees of giant corporate farms is what they want, no free independents. Just another example of what I call this global shift to a two class society, technofeudalism.
I'm telling everyone I know that if you don't have a garden, get one, just do it, and use free "open source" seeds. Even if you only have an apartment, you can still look around for gardening space outside of town, I did that for several seasons when all I had was an apartment. If you can't even do that, try to find a direct supplier, a lot of smaller farmers (especially the organic and sustainable farming types) are looking to direct market their stuff, but they have to know they have a willing market,makes it a lot easier to plan for your season.
Celine Dion and Jack Thompson.
So she wasn't saying what you all seem to want her to have been saying.
If I buy an Ipod, am I only paying for the privilege of using it? Not really, if I do something that is not in the EULA, it voids the warranty but it's still my Ipod.
If I buy a Television, I'm not only paying for the privilege of watching channels on it. It's my TV and I can modify it as much as I want.
If I buy a Pizza...I'm not only paying for the right to eat it...I can damn well put extra stuff from home if I want...
Why Should CDs be any different? I am paying for a copy of the media with the information on it...it's now MY CD. I've bought the rights to this specific copy of it.
So Jesus, Mohammed and Abraham walk into a Bar....
We've all wondered about how they could justify high prices for CD's. You are in fact, already paying for multiple copies of the song. Now you've explained it so clearly that the meanest, dumbest recording company executive or lawyer can figure it out.
Nice work, bozo.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Sony has long been in the business of selling devices that "enable" piracy on one hand and are now threatening to sue those that buy and use their devices as intended on the other. How convenient. I wonder if the registration cards go straight to legal to expedite this process....
1. Sell enabling devices
2. Sue purchasers
3. No need for a 3 this time
4. Profit
The record companies don't want any competition in the Stealing business.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
LP/analog -> Tape/analog. CD/digital -> iPod/digital. Yeah, there's the side issue of lossy compression, but... eh... I don't care enough to think about it.
Most of the laws were written when people still actually bought cassettes. So, yeah... the laws need updating.
I am sure someone can point to the court ruling that said that personal copies (for the owner's sole use) are covered by the fair use exemption. I find it impossible that she does not know that. I can only assume that she is trying to influence lawmakers by saying something that she must know is wrong.
I wonder what she would say about the opposite process: what happens if you buy an album from iTunes, then burn it to a CD... The DRM has specific provisions for burning CDs from albums & playlists, so doesn't that mean that it's permitted and allowed by the labels? But if copying a song from a CD is stealing, I'm sure she'd say that copy a song to a CD is also stealing.
Personally, I think she's just way behind the times, and doesn't understand the digital age in which she lives. Or she doesn't want to face the irrelevance of her own company and her own job.
There are laws against what you are proposing to do... So ... as much as it would please me, don't do it.
Wonder if anybody from Sony has ever made a copy of their car keys. If so, Ford, GM, etc. should sue their ass under the Sony logic that they have stolen from the automakers.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
The hardware people are reasonable, they want their stuff to be able to play everything, and record everything, and they want it to work 100% of the time.
Umm, correct me if I'm wrong (I haven't bought Sony hardware since the decline of bleem! and Lik-Sang), but aren't you forced to transcode your music to Atrac with Sony's software in order to "play" MP3s and other formats on their players? That hardly sounds reasonable to me.
Scorta futuere amo!
I thought there was a tax on CD-R and such thing to 'compensate' for the loss of revenue of copying and distributing music that way. I guess it's not enough for them anymore?
I am sorry, but this is all getting so ridiculous that I am scared to use my peanut butter...
I came in a jar, so I don't know if I am allowed to spread it on bread, a bagel, or muffin...I don't know if I can legally mix it with jam, honey, or pickles...
What are we to do?
--E--
Interesting that in grokster, http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/04/03/2012239.shtml?tid=95&tid=141&tid=126&tid=17">MGM admitted ripping CDs is fair use, even while they were denying ripping DVDs was fair use. Now Sony/BMG is obviously not MGM (Sony owns Universal iirc) but it speaks to the scruples of these companies that are willing to bend the law any way they can to get what they want.
"Unfortunately there is that standard problem with any slashdotter boycott. We are not a big enough percentage of the whole population to cause sony any grief."
/.er who thinks this is an outrage would take the time to send an e-mail, make a phone call, or send a letter/postcard to Sony explaining their anger and letting the company know(or think that) a boycott was in progress. Tell Sony you're going to trash their products in word-of-mouth advertising as well. If you're really pissed, threaten to write a bunch of bad reviews of their products on consumer electronics web sites. I'm not sure it would cause them any real "grief", but they'd definitely notice that more than they'd notice any revenue hit from a silent /. boycott.
True enough. I think it would be better if every single
I'm in the market for a new TV, and Sony just excluded themselves from my research and decision making process. I'll make sure they hear about it later today.
Ewoks look like Wookie children. Chewbacca is a perv.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I suspect they're working under the old, "If you say something enough times it becomes true" assumption. There's no other explanation; they have to know that they're absolutely wrong.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Yep, that statement is dodgy as hell, yet allows her a nice get-out clause if she's asked to justify her belief.
It's my personal belief that you are Larry Hagman. It's also my person belief that homeopathy is scientifically proven and a great replacement for boring conventional medicine.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Sony announced today that songs purchased on CDs and through online music stores are not the property of the purchaser. The purchase only grants the purchasee the right to license the music for a period of one year, at which time the license needs to be renewed at the original purchase price. Listening to songs after the license has expired, constitutes theft and will be prosecuted by the RIAA to the maximum allowed by law. A spokesperson for Sony was quoted as saying "The artists devote their lives to the creation of this music and we are only doing this to protect their rights and livelyhoods".
I used to be a paranoid, now, I'm just a noid.
This is why you shouldn't buy any VAIO computer with a CD/DVD/Whatever drive, as they are tools for evil doers. Punish those sneaky pirates where it hurts them most!!
After reading this article the following is noted: - Cocacola considered moving her coke from their original containers to your cup as illegal. - 2 farmers in central africa were put in Afghanistan for cultivating potato: police said that cultivating potatoes or other goods is like having the intention to steal your potato supplier. - Pizza Hut / Mac Donalds / Roadster Diner claimed their right to sue people who share that meal with other people. They said that by doing this you are reducing their benifits, thus you are stealing them. Thank you SONY for that bright idea of you.
mmmmm.....
Pariser's definition of theft in the context of ripping CDs was actually quite confined. One could argue that just the act of playing a track from a CD over speakers or headphones amounts to the act of copying the particular performance that was recorded on that track. By playing a CD track, you are simply changing the medium of the audio performance from a set of digital bits encoded on an optical disk to a set of sound waves that are emanating from a set of acoustical transducer devices. In this context, each an every time a customer plays a song from a CD, they are effectively making a copy of it.
Therefore, government should come up with new legislation that should require manufacturers of audio playback equipment (including computers equipped with CD/DVD drives) to track the number of times each song is played so that Sony/BMG and other record labels can bill each customer individually for each instance they have played a particular song on a CD. For the benefit of the consumers, if the track was not played in its entirety, the billing amount could be pro-rated based on the percentage of the total playing of the track that was actually played.
It is possible that an alien civilization (or the Chinese) may have already developed advanced technology to detect the particular atmospheric disturbances that result from an individual auido performance of a CD track on a set of audio transceiver output devices and reassemble the resulting waveforms back to a copy of the original form, so one could argue that the simple act of playing a CD on your stereo may actual amounts to not only making a copy of the song but also broadcasting to the universe. Further data on the estimate of total number of alien civilizations in the universe and the average population of each alien civilization is needed to calculate the total amount of revenue Sony/BMG is losing in this manner.
shut fuck the up, already!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
is STEALING! You must all nuke your cd's and buy new ones after each use. You are not entitled to listen to the same crappy song more then once!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I would have to say this qualifies as the most insane interpretation of copyright I have ever heard.
I had been holding out for a PS3 with its Blu-ray player because of the superior technology. Now I'm thinking that XBox and HD-DVD isn't looking so bad. How would anyone ever support or buy services whne their representatives makes statements like this?
Yup - I'm thinking my PSP may be the last Sony product I'll be buying.
Don't worry RIAA! I am not hurting your business or stealing from you, unlike your customers.
You see, about the time you started suing your customers, I decided to take the high road and stop listening to the radio, buying or downloading your products altogether. It turns out there's a whole world of independent artists a google search away who are happy to provide me with all of the music I ever wanted at a fraction of the amount I once paid for your products. Shoot, they're so helpful that even if I paid nothing at all I could still have enough. I steal from them all the time though: once I found a song I really liked, then decided to make a set of dance moves to it and put it on my university's "ITG" machine. Wouldn't you know that weeks later that particular artist was a bit of a phenomenon here? I don't think he minds the stealing much as you seem to though. When I sent him the YouTube clip of someone dancing to his song, he responded, "This makes me happy."
Best Regards,
~Your Best Customer
Is there any precedent for slashdotting a phone number? I think this may be a revolutionary step forward.
You're half right. I'm actually Larry Page.
No
what kind of 'life' ?
Read radical news here
Now i finally understand how they calculate the amount lost to piracy!
... and stole my cds is a thief and the fucker needs to be kicked repeatedly in the nuts for every dollar that it cost me the loyal consumer. the thing that really pisses me off is now since I didn't rip my songs from all of the CDs is that now I will have to pay again for the songs I already bought before.
The second my government says personal copies are not fair use, then I'll take notice. Until then Sony can say anything they want.
I have spoken'eth.
Sony is the same company responsible for the court case that defined video-taping a broadcast as legitimate fair use. This precedent has been used to justify making tapes of music legitimately owned on other media to use in cars and portable players like say Walkmans... Someone at Sony hardware needs to walk over to their music division and have a stern talking to with them... That or remove the monitor and record loops from all the ampliphiers and kill the dual tape deck boxen, and the DVRs with built in DVD recorders, and ...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Two points: First, the obvious. It cannot be stealing if the stealee did not lose anything. It might be illegal, but theft, by definition, leaves the victim without her property.
Second, it is not currently illegal to convert a file from one format to another, which is what happens when you rip a CD. But if the recording industry condinues to make payoffs (i.e. contributions) to politicians at the current level, I can foresee legislation to make it illegal to convert files without the originator's permission. Heck, those dummies are liable to label it terrorism or child porn and ban music altogether!
http://torrentfreak.com/george-bush-vs-the-riaa/
We're already fed up with the handling of the war... and now BMG blows the whistle on the Bush administration's blatant violation of copyright law. I hope BMG takes care of this and faithfully executes their right, as copyright holder, to bring this man to justice!
...because if you play a CD in a CD player (even one of Sony's own offerings) you're not actually listening to the disc, you're listening to the decrypted data playing from the RAM buffer of the device that the CD is being read by. Ergo, the CD playback device is ripping the CD on-the-fly to it's RAM buffer to enable inline error correction prior to you hearing the final audio output so this should be equally illegal!!! Come on Sony - define what constitues 'ripping' and then tell us howw we can listen to our CD's.
Sony says that rootkits deliver value to the customer...
So, this means that in the pre-digital era, I was supposed to have purchased an LP, cassette, 8-track, and reel-to-reel of each album, just to cover all my bases? Gosh and golly darn, I had no idea that copying my LPs to cassettes back then to listen to in the car was stealing! I'll be happy to hand over all those illegal copies to ya, just as soon as I can figure out which landfill they went into years ago....
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
"It's my personal belief that Sony BMG is half the size now as it was in 2000," she said, thanks to piracy. In Pariser's view, "when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed.""
WOOT!!! we're half way there people.. now is the time to focus and drive these people completely out of business!!
Gentleman start your engines! (p2p engines that is).
No, you're the one with the problem. You don't even need to RTFA. Just read the summary where she says "when an individual makes a copy FOR HIMSELF." That's fair use. If you want to interpret what she said any other way, you're giving her waaay too much credit.
Yea! And another thing, think of all the tax money the government is letting slip through their fingers with loose copywrite laws that allow you to only have to buy things once...
Sony whines on and on about piracy, when their own trojan (the rootkit-dropping "media player") was full of pirated code!
IMHO, taking someone else's work and calling it your own is a LOT closer to "theft" than just giving away a copy (let alone making a perfectly-legit copy for yourself).
I've been boycotting (I guess it's like "abstaining from" when it's just me) Sony products for years. At least retail. I'd buy used Sony stuff because they don't get a cut.
If everyone else joined me, Sony and their insanity would soon become an interesting footnote in history rather than a corporate juggernaut.
Question everything
Ripping a CD by playing it through speakers and copying it into your brain is also stealing. It's just a matter of time before Sony, the RIAA, and others with Intellectual Property to protect are chasing down those criminals among us that rip off the starving artists by wantonly copying purchased CDs not just to their computers or their iPods, but also into their brains.
The iPod is really just an enabling device. The real crime is that final copy, which isn't authorized in writing by any license that I've ever read.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I (and most of /.) find that rootkits are malware. So if they can try to sue us why can't we sue them for their many many rootkits
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/20/084233&tid=141
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/27/1334210
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/24/213256
All are slashdotted stories about (3!!) different Sony rootkits
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
No every time a device plays a recorded song it makes multiple copy's of the media. As the bits pass through the electronic innards each of electronic innards makes a copy. And there's also the copy converted into sound waves (which get bigger and bigger further from the source) and the ear drums and the nerves. And how many brain cells have a copy, huh huh. You should have to buy a couple hundred licenses maybe thousands (our research into this isn't complete yet) just to listen once.
Who is John Galt?
OK, then installing a rootkit is breaking and entering, and Sony BMG is an admitted party to criminal conspiracy on a very large scale. Criminal, not equitable. All parties involved should be charges separately for each offense, i.e., for each person whose computer was thus broken into as a result of their conspiracy.
I think that's a much closer fit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Here is a very interesting analogy. OJ Simpson claimed that in Las Vegas that when he went to the hotel to "take back what he owned". Under most state laws that you can't be charged for "stealing" back your own stuff if it was taken from you illegally. The usage of a weapon to do this is another issue beyond the scope of this forum. Sony/BMG says if you rip your paid for CD so you can put in you media device (ie iPod) and they claim this is illegal is completely insane. Fair Use provision in DMCA allows people to copy files, music, etc for personal backup and as long this backup copy is not being shared with other people. I think Sony/BMG wants to charge you for each type of media form that you use for same thing to get a better revenue stream.
That must mean that Sony is the biggest thief of all. How did they manage to create all the CD's that you can buy everywhere without copying/stealing? I don't belief each and every CD is hand-crafted by the artist.
Open Source Alternatives
They dropped because the new music got poorer in quality and because we the consumer got tired of paying $15 for a CD containing one decent song with the other 19 being garbage filler.
Poor product plus poor value equals low sales. Every economy major learns that in their first year. Sony doesn't want to acknowledge the elephant in the courtroom.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
It seems like a lot of comments don't understand the contradictory moves of Sony the technology company and Sony/BMG. This is because they are not the same entity. Sony/BMG is 50/50 owned by Sony and Bertelsmann, with the top executives mostly being from the BMG side. They are to blame for the rootkit, and it looks like they still haven't learned anything. C'est la vie.
Is it illegal to have the song in your head?
It's a catchy tune... Weeks after listening to the song, you find your self enjoying the song again, in your head, purely from your own memory...
Surely, that is a COPY of the song, created simply by the act of hearing the original.
However absurd it is, someone out there thinks it should be illegal to do so.
Publishing scribed-by-ear guitar tabs is out now, apparently.
If you plunk a few notes by ear on the piano in your own home, is that illegal?... Or sing it in the shower? (Horrible singing voices notwithstanding).
"We hereby charge Bob with the heinous crime of remembering a copyrighted work in the privacy of his own mind..."
Absurd?! Perhaps to some.
But seriously, I recall hearing that dance choreography is a protected form of "intellectual property", but I can't for the life of me find anything on the internet about what laws specifically regulate it. Neither copyrights, nor patents, nor trademarks seem applicable. Can anyone shed some light on what the law says about obtaining exclusive monopolies on moving your body in a certain way?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
So, if you're going to listen to a CD on your iPod, I suppose you really shouldn't buy that CD.
You know you are really only hurting the office slaves, right? This made me think of a great quote by Zefrank (you can watch it here: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/062106.html) (after deriding a random Delta airlines employee for not giving him a refund) ...Oh, right. Maybe I should send a note to their complaints department.
No, that just means interfacing with a group of employees that have been psychologically trained to placate you while minimizing the cost to their company.
Oh. Maybe I could fart in the seats while pretending to adjust that little air nipple.
Or fill out all the cross word puzzles and sudukos in the in flight magazine with letters that form "Screw you Delta".
Or sprinkle all over their toilet seats.
No, that just screws low paid employees and besides, then you'd be acting like a terrorist.
A terrorist?!
Yeah, terrorists are desperate assholes who see no institutionalized recourse to address their grievances so they resort to random acts of violence in order to instill fear into the general population.
That's messed up, I don't wanna be a part of that, so what do I do?
Hmmm. Bend over and take it.
I guess one of the issues here is that Sony BMG is assuming that if we are willing to convert our media for free, and then they make converting media imossible, then we will pay for them to convert the media for us. What they should do is accept that consumers don't want to buy a song more than once, no matter how much they want us to. That is, of course, unless there are clear upgrades in the experience. Surrond sound, HD audio, ect. So the basic formula here is, New songs = more money Old songs + improvments = more money New songs + improvments = more money but never Old songs = more money
I suppose they'd use the DMCA to argue that their customers can't remove rootkits installed on their computers due to some related argument.
This is the latest load of bullshit I seen from sony BMG if I own the CD I can legally rip it into my mp3 player it's called fair use this was decided in the courts. I say fuck Sony BMG and boycott them as they are assholes.
I'm tired of this. Lets all just stop. I'll stop copying my CDs and why don't you stop publishing them. Who needs it. Lets have more music by more musicians.
Over the years I bought thousands of LPs and thousands of CDs. I've even spent thousands on cabinets to store them. But, thats over. I'm done.
I've all ready taken the first step. I've stopped buying music. I stopped buying new CDs years ago, and seem to have stopped used ones, too.
And, no more super groups in super stadiums at super prices, either. I'm back to live shows by unsigned artists in tiny venues.
>> Says Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG: 'When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.
Trying to convince me to steal?
So, it's OK for Sony to put a root kit on my PC, but it's stealing if I take a CD that I paid for and make a backup copy of the data (music) on my computer. Hmmm...
If I can't "rip" it to my iPod, then I don't need the CD. Problem solved for both of us, and I'll just keep my money. If I wanted to "steal", I wouldn't bother giving them any money in the first place.
I look forward to Sony Management describing this new "plan" to the shareholders.
Place nail here >+
...they can *THINK* its stealing all they like.
:)
Push comes to shove it is at WORST, copyright infringement. This is not now nor will it ever be stealing.
The fact that any right thinking person can see that ripping CDs for personal use is clearly fair use is besides the point
err!
jak.
On his website, if you click on his audio links, the first thing you here is, "So, what do you think of downloading mp3's" "I don't care, I'm rich."
Well articulated, a point that needs to be stressed more.
Walk with Music;
Clearly, after you listen to a tune, you should legally forget you've heard it, or pay an additional fee.
Violators will have to have their memories erased. Until they perfect that-there memory erasing drug currently being tested on mice, lobotomies will have to do.
There will be booths for this purpose at concert exits.
Ron
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Allowing owners to duplicate copyright material that they own is a relatively new phenomenon. And is still illegal in many countries, for example, here in Australia the law was updated less then 12 months ago (December 2006) - http://www.copyright.org.au/pdf/acc/infosheets_pdf/G070.pdf. Before these recent updates (I believe similar changes have occurred in the UK, Canada and the US, not sure about other countries) this argument fell into the illegal but moral category which tends to outrage fair-use proponents.
Old laws:
moral & legal: Use of purchased material
moral & illegal: Copying material for own use
immoral & illegal: Copying material for someone else
New laws:
moral & legal: Use of purchased material & copying for own use
moral & illegal: Copying material with copy protection for own use
immoral & illegal: Copying material for someone else
immoral & legal: Applying DRM which actually makes copying for own use illegal because of DMCA like laws
So new copyright laws are better, but still crud.
You don't own the music. You never did. You own the physical disk. That's it.
Sony is in a real fix in terms of copyright issues. They have their fingers in both the content and player parts of the pie, and are hopelessly twisted up. they can't really produce fully DRM locked devices, because consumers would get fed up and just stop buying, but as a media producer they can't bring themselves to abandon DRM and take the "we just make the device" high road they took with the VCR. So they are always trying these abortive efforts to lock their content up. It's kind of sad to watch them squirm.
The Australian federal government passed laws earlier in the year that made it perfectly legal to make as many copies of a CD for personal use as you have devices that can play it in whatever format they choose. That means that I can make a legal copy of my Sony-BMG CD here in Australia for my computer, my iPod, my DVD player, my car stereo, probably even my crappy 30-year-old clock radio with built-in tape player.
So going off your statement, I guess you'll be pulling out of the Australian market altogether then, seeing as you failed to successfully lobby the Australian government to consider this theft?
10+ years and going strong of not buying anything sony! Play the fools, the fools will play.
That's spooky. By accident, I become far more accurate than Sylvia Browne has ever been.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
I suppose taking a cup full of sugar from your sugar bag in the kitchen and then bring it into the living room is kind of stealing too. I mean sugar belongs to the sugar bag, which has its place in the kitchen. Period. The big recording companies had their "time" in the last century. Isn't it time they come to terms with that?
Buying music is stealing other people's right to listen to the music. Each time you buy a CD you give the copyright industry the very money they need to make false claims in the media and bribe the lawmakers to retroactively justify their claims. Do you really want to wake up in this world: http://www.rettet-das-internet.de/besucher/besucher_misatire.htm
I think that you are wrong.
Purchase of a physical media containing intellectual property has always granted the purchaser certain rights with regard to that IP. Whether you want to call it a license or not, that is, effectively, what it is. This is most obvious in the case of software, where they make you actually agree to an actual license, but all the little government warnings on CDs and DVDs that spell out your rights? That's effectively a license.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
By this logic I would need to purchase one copy of every album I own for each CD player where the music may conceivably be used.
So, let's see...
Car, check
Living Room, check
Bedroom, check
Den, check
Other car, check
Workroom, check
Oh, wait, they're not all Sony's. Does that mean I need to purchase new CD players as well?
And what happens if I take an album I've purchased to a party at someone else's house?
As the guys from that Irish Ale TV commercial would say: Brilliant!
Q: How do you know if a Sony BMG employee is lying?
A: His lips are moving
*shrug*
It's Sony. The last time I bought anything from these morons, it was a navigator for my car. Which told me to do a U-turn on the highway at 180 km/h. Asked me to turn right NOW inside a tunnel. Crashed three (three!) times on a distance of 250 km.
Pfff. They used to be good, but today? I am not prepared to buy *anything* from these weirdos. And certainly not CDs (some of which try to install crap on my PC if I play them there, thanks).
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
So if I make a copy of a song, then I'm stealing the song?
First, WTF?
Second, so that would be like if someone came into my house and stole the CD, right? But in this case that someone is me. So then I'm stealing from myself, right?
In that case, I've decided not to press charges. Case dismissed.
Given that it's only Sony who voices this opinion (the same Sony who didn't see an ethical problem with breaking the Computer Misuse Act by surreptitiously installing a rootkit on end user's systems) I think it's probably best that we agree and simply no longer buy media that have been in any way, shape or form even *near* Sony.
Mastered on Sony? No sale. Under Sony label? Avoid like the plague. Artist uses Sony kit in the graphics? Nope, it'll stay in the shop.
I mean, in general we want to stay legal, and given that these days we have to prove our innocence to that stooge of theirs called the RIAA I think it's best to be risk averse. After all, we have to assume she has a clue and isn't just suffering from a bad case of cranial invasion of the rectal cavity (I have my own opinion of that, of course).
In my opinion she's just done a Ratners. Sony make some quite good kit, shame that some divisions have got staff that doesn't know their body parts from another. That's the disadvantage of one brand - one idiot screws up, the whole brand suffers, and there's been quite a lot of that lately.
Okay, I wrote the submission. I guess if you're not familiar with Sony's product line, you could misunderstand my comment, and I will admit that it was perhaps not strong enough. Here's an example: Sony sells Minidisc players. For a long time, they have not sold any pre-recorded Minidiscs (at least where I live). The only way to listen to music on Sony's own Minidisc players is by copying music on them. Are you telling me Sony does not intend these players to be used for music bought on CDs?
So no, the "hammers" comparison does not apply, at all, unless Home Depot was publicly telling people that nailing hammers into walls is theft.
No, not like Apple at all. Apple always supported MP3. Sony's early "MP3 players" actually did not support MP3, instead supporting a proprietary Sony format (ATRAC).
Good point. As you pointed out in your other post, I'm not familiar as I could be with Sony's products. Though one could argue (with difficulty) about the minidisc players, the CD ripping software for MP3 players really stretches credibility, like a VCR that's intended only for recording home videos.
Out of curiosity, what software do they use?