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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
...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.
"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
Tell Jennifer what you think of her - (212) 833-7362
http://pview.findlaw.com/view/1755781_1
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.
...until Sony sues itself for contributing to piracy.
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?
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 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 ;)
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 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.
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.
Sony probably thinks that is stealing too. They are contacting the politicians they own right now to create a law making it illegal not to buy their products.
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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!!!
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.
"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.
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.
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".
Dude, South Park never makes fun of people based on their race, ethnicity, social status, or sexuality. Please, let's not sling mud.
Oh, and wooooooo, season premiere tonight!
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!
Now i finally understand how they calculate the amount lost to piracy!