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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!"
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...when they were making mix tapes back in the 80's? If copying is copying then I don't see the difference...
.... 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.
but installing rootkits is okay
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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.
No, better yet, the previous post's message, but written in white on black rather than vice-versa. Then you get the best of both worlds!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"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.
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.
We can laugh about this, but isn't that really what a media tax is? A fine for NOT buying the copyright material through normal channels? (Additional burden - assumption of guilt: you pay the fine on media that MIGHT be used to hold a copy of copyrighted material. If you use the media for data, or even as a coaster, you still pay that "fine".
Now i finally understand how they calculate the amount lost to piracy!
If the fear of goatse stops me from clicking on links, the terrorists have won.