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White House Lauds MN RIAA Win, Analysis of Victory
cnet-declan writes "The Bush administration's copyright czar says the RIAA's $222,000 recent jury verdict against a Minnesota woman shows copyright law is 'effective' and working as planned. C|Net's coverage has comments from Chris Israel, the U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement. Israel is formerly a senior Commerce Department official appointed by President Bush in July 2005 who previously worked for Time Warner's public policy arm (Warner Bros. Records is one of the plaintiffs in the RIAA case). The site also features an interview with Rep. Rick Boucher, no fan of the RIAA, on whether Congress will change the law, an analysis of why U.S. copyright law is broken, and four reasons why the RIAA won."
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:) that is put out there for your consumption. I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back hard. It's already showing some resistance (file sharing and what-not) to being in favor of one side heavily over the other with respect to the original idea of copyright. Some term extensions are fine with me. But the current system of life of the author + 70 years AND digital rights management is obscene and a kick to the crotch of the idea of copyright.
At this point, I kind of get a kick of seeing how the copyright system is thrown in favor of those who are responsible for most of the "content" (not worthy of the term "music" eh?
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
If a law is deemed working properly when it can destroy someones life for the sake of a few MP3's, I would say that what we have here is fascism.
Well, neoconservatism, which as far as I can tell is the same thing, only with better suits.
Yep sounds like this White House. Corporations 1 Billion, Consumers/Citizens Who?
Since when do they comment on this stuff? I'm surprised they didn't comment on the Vonage loss against that bullshit patent. Or everytime a bullshit patent is enforced. On second thought maybe they try to stay neutral in Corporation vs Corporation matters.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I will be amazed if history does not label him the worst President we have ever had, along with the worst Presidential crew (cabinet and appointees) we have ever had.
The guy and his friends, as a group, have been almost unbelievable. What is even worse, is that on the rebound, a lot of people might actually think that voting for Hillary is a good idea. (shudder)
If you do not know who Ron Paul is, do yourself and others a favor and look him up. But if you really do not think honesty is important, go ahead and vote for any of the others.
Fascism had waaaaay better uniforms and regalia.
Here's a simple argument that her punishment was unjust - because it is being used as a stick to scare to the rest of society rather than an as an actual punishment, and is therefore out of proportion. How do we know that it is being used to scare society rather than as a fair punishment? Because millions of people do exactly the same as them and if everyone were prosecuted to such a degree, US civilisation would go bankrupt en masse. The penalty is inherently selective in targeting only example cases, because any consistent application of it would devastate the country. Punishments designed to scare people are not in proportion to the crime, because that is not their purpose. The interest is in creating the very greatest degree of punishment that is achievable.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
What you have here is a fundamentally malfunctioning legal system. A punishment should fit the crime committed, not the collective crimes of everyone else who breaks the same law. Being punished to "serve as an example to others" is a concept which should have been left behind in the middle ages.
Magna Carta, the first Constitution in the history of the common law on which our great Republic is built, stated that "every freeman shall be fined in proportion to his fault; and no fine shall be levied on him to his utter ruin." Sad to see that in Bush's America this apparently only applies to freemen, not single moms.
RIAA wants to get $150,000 per infringement. If they nailed only 1/10th of the users on just the eMule network right now, each for a single infringement, they would net far more money than they normally make in a year. How can you seek damages so far removed from reality? RIAA wants us to believe that the $40 billion dollar music industry is the being victimized by eMule users to the tune of $600 billion worth of copyright infringement at any given moment.
+0 Meh
> Breaking copyright is wrong,
It isn't.
> whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law.
If the law is unjust, it's not only wrong, but your obligation to break it. If the world worked by your logic, the civilisation would have never developed past the slavery, monarchies, colonialism, and so on, because every of those steps required breaking some kind of then effective, but unjust law. If you didnt ignore, fight and break unjust laws, you wouldnt even live in the US but would be a massively exploited british colony. If you happen to be black, you would still be prohibited from learning something and would have the lagal status of a "thing", could be sold, bought and auctioned, and if youre a woman, youd be prohibited from voting, studying, appearing on streets without a burqa and so on.
FUCKING NOBODY who is not profiting from artificial, enforced scarcity, perceives either this judgement or the underlying copyright fascism as "just" or democratically approved, and without massive civil movements, there seems just to be no way to change the laws, because the persons in power simply "dont allow" the people to do it bacause they know that copyright, as we know it now, wouldnt survive a single night if people _really_ decided democratically about it.
Give it a few years and movies are where songs are today.
About 20 years ago, making and recording a song was expensive. You needed some studio, good (==expensive) equipment, some way to market and distribute it, in short, you needed the aid of a studio. Today, this all vanished. You can create great music "at home", with rather low cost, your average monthly income will buy you whatever you need.
Let technology grow a little and we got the same with movies. We are already today at the point where great FX are no longer a matter of multi million dollar hardware but rather one of skill and a decent but affordable FX program. Video cams getting better and cheaper every month. Professional editing software also dropped from many thousands to a few hundred bucks. In no more than 10 years, the movie studios will face the same problem the music studios have today: They become obsolete for the ambitioned creator.
They don't "feel" the pressure yet from both sides, only from the customer side where movies are now being shared like songs have been for over 10 years now. Only recently (i.e. about 5 years now) bandwidth has been large enough that it becomes an issue. Now they react. Now it's too late.
We'll see more laws about this. In 100 years, we'll look at those laws with the same chuckle we now feel when we see laws for the protection of horse drawn cabs, about a man waving a red flag in front of a car or similar crap, lobbied in by a dying business.
Unlike them, the **AAs have a choice, though. They can turn from the middleman that tries to hold artists and customers in a stranglehold to a valuable marketing and PR tool for the former. They have all the necessary tools, knowledge and people to push your songs into the charts and make it a seller. They are, if anything, great at creating a hype. If they can change to this model and become an "advertising agency", they can survive.
If they instead try to cling to a dead business model, they will perish.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>200,000 is not to ruin. Sorry. It's huge, but she can certainly pay it in a decade or two.
I guess you make a lot more than the average American to have that view.
Poverty level is generally accepted in the USA to be anything below $10,210. This is assumed to be the minimum required to survive without incurring further debt (students, as many might point out as making far less and surviving, are often incurring future debt in the USA). Obviously, no lender will lend to a woman in $200,000 debt.
So, to pay the $200,000 in debt, plus statutory interest in MN (6% yearly), over one decade, she will need to make $271,735.90, to be repaid in yearly amounts of $27,173.59.
The average wage in MN is $41,326 per year (2006 figure). Subtracting from this that she is a woman, and therefore earns a lower average wage (about 15% less, now only $35,127.10) and subtracting taxes (7.05% MN tax equalling $2,476.46, $4,220 base federal tax + $1,119.28 additional) leaving $27,311.36 remaining income. Subtracting the poverty line from this, this leaves $17,101.36 in disposable income.
Assuming all disposable income is funneled to repaying her debt to society, on average, a woman in her situation will remain in absolute poverty for 21 years repaying the debt. She will repay a total sum of $357,019.11.
So, in retrospect, you're right. It's only fair someone remain in conditions only marginally better than prison for about 1 year per song copied. Right? And you're also right, she will, on average, be able to repay it in two decades.
Hopefully, though, she is also of average age for a Minnesotan (36). This will permit her, when she has repaid her debt (at age 57), to save for retirement (at age 65) for 8 years. This should mean she will die absolutely penniless and homeless, but able to not end up on any form of social assistance. Dying penniless is absolutely the right punishment for having "stolen" so much music.
Of course, that's all assuming everything is average. Should she have children, she will need to go bankrupt, as at this point the poverty line increase is about $3,400 for each dependent, which, if she had an average amount of children (2) would cause the load to be unrepayable at statutory interest rates (calculate it yourself, if you like) as the payments would not cover interest on the loan itself. But, again, it's only fair FCS takes the children away from such an unfit mother that stole so much music. No woman deserves to have children if they pirate music. Ever.