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Congress Pressures DoJ With PIRATE Part II
Anonymous Pirate writes "Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) have re-introduced the 'PIRATE Act' (pdf) to Congress. According to Ars Technica, the purpose of this act is to get the DoJ to go after individual copyright infringers. It would allow the Department of Justice to bring civil lawsuits instead of criminal ones so that they would be able to prosecute copyright infringers with only a minimal burden of proof, rather than the heavier burden required for criminal prosecution." Took a long time to do a sequel; we first talked about this proposal quite some time ago.
While IANAL, I've never heard of the state bringing a civil suit against an individual citizen. Does that ever even happen?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
So its all about the money now? What use is a civil GOVERNMENT prosecution besides to get money?
There Can Be Only One...
Oh, it looks like someone is tired of losing court cases due to the fact that they don't have ANY proof. It's a good thing they can afford their own senators.
I second guessed myself before I left-clicked into this page. *Scared of Amazon's Patent*
There's a reason civil lawsuits are separate from criminal trials.
Besides, why the hell should the DoJ, a government institution, police what happens between other people, shouldn't only the "victim" be allowed to file a lawsuit over this? Hell, how does the govt even knopw when the copyright hlder actually wants a lawsuit? Most holders like keeping fan projects in a legal grey zone of implicit permission which lets them C&D the project at will but doesn't require them to shut it down before they really want to.
Well, as long as the DoJ would pursue infringements of ANY copyrights, not just those held by a select group of large corporations... Yeah, like that'll happen.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
...having the *AAs' using questionably-legal tactics wasn't enough. Now we're gonna have the Feds sniffing around anyone using bandwidth or "teh 3v1lz" bittorrent? Prepare for more grannies, dead people and those with no computer to get dragged through the legal 7th level of Hades.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Sounds like a good time to make sure you've donated what you can to the EFF. The big fear, obviously, is that the RIAA will get to define what constitutes infringement, and suddenly you can't rip CD's to your MP3 player anymore.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
You can only claim that if the people in this case were going to buy the game/movie/music but decided not to because they recieved a copy through other means. To make that claim is a stretch by any measure.
CD sales are down because what is released on CD is crap. What record companies do not like about file sharing is not piracy at all, it's that they do not control what you can listen to. Like an independent band (I happen to have an Amy Martin CD right here, for instance) you can purchase it without the labels prohibiting it through their channel-lockups.
This measure has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with outdated business models being destroyed by new technologies, and companies unwilling to adapt. They loved the monopoly.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Well, this is a bad idea....
Mostly because, well, then we have the government pursuing civil litigation on behalf of corporations. Are we then going to have the copyright holders pay for the cost, or will this be another free federal benefit on behalf of lobbyists?
Moreover, is the DoJ going to do this fairly? Will they contact the copyright holder to make sure that there isn't a license and that there is a desire to go after the person? Moreover, if someone steals my work as an individual, will the DoJ treat it equal with Microsoft, the RIAA, or the MPAA?
If not, then, well, please vote Leahy, etc. out of office.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
This is the bottom of the pit. I was going to say that this could be a good thing to linux and all, but forget about it, this just goes to prove what a fascist country America is, when promoting laws that goes against its citizens and that discriminate among them. I see this America of today as writing the history of what no to do (much like Nazi Germany) for the future of humanity.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Senator Leahy, I used to respect you as a person and as a Senator, and value your dedicated service to the State of Vermont. Today, it is clear to me that you need to be put out to pasture.
Well, at least we know what employer Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cornyn really work for.
Upon this passage, it would mean that the government by the people and for the people had turned it's backs on the people.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
and you make a hawt new game and you offer it for sale. Yet it gets copied and shared the same week by thousands of people all over the net. You would be singing a different song then my friend. Name calling is easy.
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
What you say is somewhat true but let's step back and look at the other side of this for a minute. You seem to be saying that the creators are losing billions in dosh every year because of the mass amount of people who download their creations. I honestly don't know many folks who would pay $600+ for Photoshop yet Adobe continues to charge that amount. I know a hell of a lot of folks who have downloaded and use Photoshop but only 1 or 2 that are willing to pay for it and those people are artists and make money professionally from the product. My point is that you can't call the money a loss when it wasn't there to begin with.
We can also talk about music. The big record labels are losing money by the truckload to piracy are they? I don't think so. The 21st Century came and brought with it the digital age. The record industry has made money from a distribution model based on physical media sales for a long time now but that just isn't cutting it anymore. Apple came along with the fashionable media player that everyone loves and it understands the language of MP3 yet the labels had to have their DRM so they chose to buy into Apple's DRM encumbered format. Then they complain about how they lose tons of dosh to Apple when in fact they could easily sell the MP3s themselves without the DRM.
Radiohead isn't the only artist that is profiting from this either. Jonathan Coulton, who has been featured on slashdot a few times, has made enough money to support himself. The Grateful Dead allowed fans to record their shows and distribute bootlegs and those guys all made a lot of money. Rage Against The Machine has sold out almost every show since their reunion and have said they don't give a bloody rip about the fans swapping their music files.
The world economy might be affected by sharing digital works but at the same time we can't turn the entire population into criminals and prosecute everyone. At some point the industry has to wake up and realize that the times have changed and they need to catch up with them.
The issue is simply not as black and white as a lot of politicians want it to be. Under the current copyright laws you can be held for infringement simply for singing the happy birthday song with a group of strangers. I don't think you can honestly tell me that the current system needs more laws to fix it. If anything it needs less and it needs to be more open to the ideas of fair use which the industry doesn't want to acknowledge.
What, we don't have enough crime for the feds to track and work on? Now we gotta make busy work up by letting them do "civil" suits for RIAA? How much to buy a seat in washington today? How about we work on our F#CKIN6 Boards and Drugs and REAL criminal cases, and THEN if we have time at the end of the year worry about "he said/she said" civil cases. This is SAD that our government is so blatently BOUGHT by the corporations today.
I used to consider myself a republican until I realized that BOTH sides are essentually the same and will abuse their power in an instant to take what is not theirs and line their own pockets to keep power. This is getting REAL OLD... I now consider myself a libritarian, but if it keeps going the way it is, I may have to consider myself a revolutionist and start dumping tea. I already gave up Music and movies because of the RIAA and the such... (Along with the fact that their hasn't been anything good to hear/see in a number of years.) I hoped they would get the message but they don't. They just keep shoveling more sh*t into our graves... Anyone for a CD Tea Party? Real Pirates can steal boxes of CD's and we pick a good harbor to dump them into.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
...a "NINJA Act" is on the way.
To find the culprit, they only need to look in a mirror.
But seriously, they do need a reform. First, it is illegal to take your CD, make a copy of it, and give it out on the web. However, the system is being abused. Its like kindergarten.
Billy joins your ball game
You don't want Billy in your game.
Billy steals your ball
You tell the teacher on billy, but don't have enough proof that he stole your ball
You beat billy up
You get in trouble for beating Billy
The next day, you put your name on the ball and tell the teacher its your ball
Billy steals the ball again
Teacher finally steps in
Life would have been so much better if you would have just let Billy play.
Mr RIAA, Can we play ball? On all of our devices? On every device in our home? If not, i might have to steal your ball...
The American Criminal Justice system is built upon the higher burden of proof for criminal acts for a reason. The government shouldn't be harassing people everyday for trivial things. You can file a civil action against a bologna sandwich. These options are still open to any and all copyright holders. It would be nice if American Citizens were smart enough to realize that this is so fundamental a sellout to some special interest lobby that could be qualified as treason. Unfortunately one of the by-products of knowing anything about the law or how things work is that you know the majority of Americans believe what someone is willing to tell you in a 15 second soundbyte. Those soundbytes are distributed by the major media outlets who are trying to pass this garbage. We are fucked. No lube.
This sort of dishonest rhetoric is hurting our cause. Ask people in file-sharing communities, and many of them will openly tell you that they stopped buying CDs not because CD releases are crap, but because you can get all that goodness for free online instead of paying money. I regularly frequent two chat rooms on one network for contemporary classical music and this often comes up. Let's start being honest here: we download music because culture should be free in all senses of the word.
If I was an artist of some kind today I'd be really worried about all the people making copies of my work and "sharing" them with their friends over the net.
Then you deserve to starve to death. There's no reason why any "artist" can't make MORE money than under a record label off the net. Change with the times, we are SICK AND TIRED of paying $15 to the fucking middleman just to keep him supplied with exotic cars, whores, and cocaine.
But then again, you're just an industry shill.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So let me get this straight: we can't even get a commitment from this DOJ to enforce to enforce things like the laws against torture or the constitutional authority of congress to conduct oversight into the actions of the executive branch, trust them not to use their power for partisan purposes, or even to hire qualified people who graduated from real law schools, but we're going to let them start filing civil suits on behalf of plaintiffs who (generally) could well afford to file for themselves, and would, if they had a shred of merit?
Great. That's just great.
--MarkusQ
I think that this will essentially fall upon deaf ears. It'll go on the books, and be used a couple times -- maybe.
The problem with distributed infringement is that it takes such a large amount of resources to prosecute a single person, with the prospect of retribution (after investigation, court, and accounting costs) of far less than a monetarily positive result. They might be gung-ho at first to set examples, but once they realize that they've already sucked every last dollar out of 95% of all citizens by way of taxes, they will quickly learn that there's no more money at the bottom of the money well (prosecute counterfeit distributors, not their consumers!). Seriously, does congress or the DoJ believe that we have bundles of cash ready to hand over like they do? (Forgive this digression, but that's actually one of the biggest problems in our society. The people with oodles of money make social policy, and they think that everyone else lives like them -- a suburban household income of $200,000 a year or more...but only in a situation like this would this legislation be tabled in the first place)
The end result isn't going to be deterrence. Everyone in the electronic community will do the equivalent of standing around the train wreck staring and gasping "Oh my god, is there no humanity", for five minutes and carry on as normal (downloading and buying $5 DVDs). The counterfeit vendors will continue to pander their crap, and people will continue to buy it. The government will (in the publics eye) be scrambling and grasping for every last possible stranglehold on its citizens they've be aiming for, for the last 7 years.
How can they believe that persecuting their citizens is a good idea?
If we go a little deeper into the problem, you might agree with me that it's sociological in nature and fairly inevitable and inexorable. Can I get a comment from any sociologists?
You can only claim that if the people in this case were going to buy the game/movie/music but decided not to because they recieved a copy through other means. To make that claim is a stretch by any measure.
You are correct. There's no way to know. Still, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to believe that many people aren't going to bother to buy something when they can get it for free. (Numerous studies have been done to see what the effects are filesharing are, but all the results seem to tell you is who funded the study, and what their agenda is).
CD sales are down because what is released on CD is crap.
Perhaps true, but I think CD sales are down for a number of reasons...
1 - filesharing
We can debate this one, but I do think it has an effect.
2 - sale of singles
For those who don't wish to fileshare, you can now buy singles on-line. The record company has long had a disconnect between what they market (singles on the radio) and what they sell (CD albums). They got away with this because you couldn't buy singles. Now you can, so many people are going to save their money and only buy the one or two songs they really want.
3 - crappy music
I think music has been crappy in the past more than people realize, and people still bought music. Still, it does seem to be at a pretty low point now.
4- people are done replacing their vinyl/tapes
I suspect that most people have been done for a while now, but as time goes on fewer and fewer are still doing this.
(Also, I really wish the moderators wouldn't list anything as troll just because it goes against conventional Slashdot wisdom. Whether you agree or not, the GP has a point).
I KNOW, Radiohead is offering their new album online for as much as you want to pay, but they can afford to.
Bull. Sorry, but that's just completely bass-ackwards. I *am* in an indie band, and these days people can now get a chance to hear our material that never would have before, because of the music cartels' history of locking up radio/TV/CD sales to exclude anyone not owned by them. We've done the same thing as Radiohead has now for a good while. It's been an overall win for us.
We *want* people to copy and share our music! That's free exposure, and the kind of word-of-mouth promotion that can't be bought. We will continue to encourage people to share our music, even if we were to get as famous as U2 or Radiohead or Led Zeppelin.
We sell physical CDs and video DVDs and other merchandise at shows. We state right on the media that it's fine to share, and if they feel what we've created is worth it to them, send a little money our way to help us keep creating. We receive enough to let us keep going.
CD sales aren't the end game, they're a means. They get us fans. They are a promotion tool, nothing more.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
This is because companies don't want to foot the bill for lawsuits, they'd rather have it funded by taxpayers. Of course, the DOJ eats this up, because then they get to demand more money to hire more people for all the investigations and prosecutions they'd be doing, and claim to be "tough on crime". People wouldn't be able to point out the RIAA's actions, because it would be the government going after them.
I don't like the idea of the government getting involved in civil suits on behalf of a third party. What's next, investigating people for adulterous behavior, and then filing divorce proceedings on the spouse's behalf?
Here (Tha'ts Costa Rica) I thought for a long time there were no or few copyright laws... as most rental DVDs seem to be copies, and all the video-game stores in the malls sell pirated games and chipped consoles. It's great as a consumer... but I wondered why. It's not a lawless country, after all.
The real issue appears to be that the authorities simply don't have time to go chasing copyright laws.
If you, as a copyright holder, want to come down here and file some court papers.... you can take peopel to court, and win... but you can't just expect the public authorities to crack down on this for you, unless you come here personally and make a big stink about it.
In other words, if you don't care enough to come here and complain, they really don't care enough to chase people down.
Because I've said it before and I'll say it again: we have the best governmnet money can buy.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If I have $20 to spend.
And I spend all of it.
Then what is the impact on the world economy for any additional copies of goods I receive?
The fact is that entertainment is overpriced. In reality, entertainment is at the highest supply level it has ever been. It is now impossible to ever catch up with all the entertainment that exists. Why are prices going up then?
Normally when something is in oversupply, the prices go down.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The world economy IS severally affected by all the illegal sharing.
lol. Somehow the ridicule of that claim proves the opposite of your point.
You just got troll'd!
I disagree there. I think people are ready to move on to other media. Try as I might, my CD's won't slide comfortably into my iPod but mp3's fit nicely. As for culture being free what exactly are you saying? Performers should perform for the benefit of mankind? They shouldn't be paid? Or should they be paid by the collective? Hate to break it to you but socialist ideals like this fly in the face of human tendencies. We want to compete and excel based on our performance.
That said, there is an argument for free distribution and pay per performance. This is essentially what The Dead opted into. They didn't care about bootlegs because ultimately it fueled concert revenue which they kept the lion's share of.
If I was an artist of some kind today I'd be really worried about all the people making copies of my work and "sharing" them with their friends over the net.
I'm not going to buy your stupid CD if I've never heard any of the songs. Someone once said (I wish I could find the exact quote) that far more authors have starved from obscurity than from copyright infringement. Actually the number that have starved from copyright infringement may in fact be zero, can you name one?
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
So it is up to citizens to stop the corporations before they undermine society. Every useless pice of shit you buy from Wallmart, Disney and Sony is just feeding the beast, stop doing it NOW, you are part of the problem.
Amen to that, bro.
And quit feeding China too. Buy products made in your own country or if you really don't absolutely need that item, use the money to pay some extra against your debts or put it into savings.
Funny thing... the captcha I have to enter to post this as AC is "anarchy". How long will it be until the evil corporations try to get laws passed that basically say if the consumers (not citizens anymore), don't buy enough useless crap to satisfy their corporate profit margins enough then the consumers are guilty of criminal anarchy charges.
Most recordings of contemporary classical music are already subsidized by state arts ministries and have been for, well, almost forever. In fact, even if the record label sold every single CD they pressed, they usually wouldn't make a profit anyway without those subsidies. Patronage and subsidizing are a traditional model for the production of high culture--besides classical music, most of the auteur films now recognized as classics were produced that way instead of for profit.
Radiohead isn't the only artist that is profiting from this either
Indeed, Roger McGuinn has said that the old, outlaw Napster revitalized his career, bringing his music to a whole new generation.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
CD sales numbers are pretty indifferent towards the amount of illegal copying. From what I've seen they're constant and only vary with the number of CDs released in a given timeframe.
If the corporations don't want us to think of music as a free thing maybe they should stop letting radio and TV stations play it, that would reduce the sense of "I can get it for free anyway".
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The RIAA has found its own team of lawyers is no match for individual citizens with no legal resources whatsoever, and it therefore needs to bring in the terrible (as in "Ivan the") power of the state to defeat them. If that doesn't work, what is the poor RIAA going to do then?
Oh goody!! That way we'd only get the kind of art that the government wants us to have! That would be neato, considering the wonderful taste and broad-mindedness of the government.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
If you bothered learning something about how the state subsidizes the arts in the EU, they often give out funds without any specific stipulations on how it is spent. IRCAM, for example, produces plenty of music that government officials wouldn't get into. The programmes of orchestral concerts are determined by the orchestra's music director, not by anyone in the government holding the purse strings.
When Congressmembers (like Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee) tell you they're too busy "working on the people's business" to impeach guilty officials, they're talking about creating, promoting and passing laws like PIRATE II.
Priorities.
--
make install -not war
this is complete horse shit. she purpose of civil law is so that individual citizens can resolve issues amongst themselves, not so the government can go after people w/minimal proof...i think its about time for a mutiny.
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter^wband.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Not only do they have outrageous penalties written into civil law, but now they want to get the taxpayer to pay for their larcenous lawsuits? I think we need to recognise that the closest thing to real piracy in this situation is what the RIAA is doing. Not only have they been granted letters of marque by the US government to exact punishment in civil suits, but now they're getting the government to pay for it. All that remains would be for George II to start handing out knighthoods (after all, it worked for Francis Drake).
I wish I had mod points.
What is it with Americans and Acronyms? Is it absolutely necessary for nigh every single act, invention, process or term to have an acronym, and furthermore, for that acronym to become its de facto name?
Sometimes, it's not so bad, e.g. RADAR, HTML. But making, PATRIOT or PIRATE or INDUCE the actual name of your legal bills makes a joke out of the entire legislative process. Must everything become a marketing ploy?
May the Maths Be with you!
I just wrote both of my Senators urging them to vote against this if and when it comes time for a senate vote. I urge everyone else to do the same.
The system can't work without feedback from citizens.
Making a joke of the legislative process, that is. :(
Let's hope the EFF is prepared to go after one of the "good guys". They've got a relationship with Leahy, and they've lionized him in the past, but now it's time to call in their markers.
Performers should expect to get paid when they perform or when they compose.
No one else expects residuals. Why should writers be any different?
In that last (successful) RIAA case, they decided to drive their point
home by playing a 25 year old audio recording. No one should be getting
bent out of shape regarding the "piracy" of 25 year old recordings. They
should be PD by now (or nearly so).
Although in the end the distributors are much better at victimizing the artists than the customers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter^wband.
Oh, you don't have to limit yourself to just lil' ol' me. There's a few of us here:
http://www.indie911.com/
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
It's no wonder that law enforcement agencies are all jumping at the chance to investigate myspace and facebook "criminal activity". It's a lot easier to sit at your desk and surf the web all day instead of being out on the street and arresting people who are actually harming others (violent acts, robbery, rape, etc.).
Your answer is approximately US$ 0.00.
...
Every single one of the 200-300 people I know that downloads music:
* Buys the CD or re-downloads the music from Amazon, Terra, UOL, iTMS or something if the music is good, and they have available cash.
* Wouldn't buy the CD if the music is crap. Sometimes they still keep them in their HD/portable player/cell phone[1], but they would not buy the CD at all.
* Wouldn't buy the CD if they didn't have the available cash at that moment.
And that's it. There are absolute no lost sales. Au contraire, there are gained sales for good music because good tracks usually don't play on the radio, and the only way the music gets out is via downloads.
And Radiohead is winning a lot of money by letting people download their music.
[1] and in this case, sometimes some friend of this person finds the supposedly crappy music ok, and buys the disk, etc, etc,
Repeating: loss of revenue from illegal downloading and/or sharing is a myth.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
For those who don't wish to fileshare, you can now buy singles on-line. The record company has long had a disconnect between what they market (singles on the radio) and what they sell (CD albums). They got away with this because you couldn't buy singles. Now you can, so many people are going to save their money and only buy the one or two songs they really want.
The record companies have been selling singles for many years, originally on 45 RPM records with one song per side. The second side song wasn't always released on a full album or to the radio. Then when cassette tape came out they started selling cassette singles with one song per side. Just because they haven't been easy to find doesn't mean they didn't exist.
Americans, I admire your will to sacrifice well-being of entire national economy just to make one industry's executives even richer.
Lest just stop all this silly incremental nonsence and jump to the 'end game': Make everyone in the country a criminal, convict them via proxy of something, then strip whatever rights they had as a citizen away since they are now convicted felons and dont get any rights.
Then we can go ahead and have the 2nd revolution and get this segment of the 'civilization cycle' over with.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"CD sales are down because what is released on CD is crap."
Most music released has always been crap. 90% of what's released today is crap, but most of the stuff released in the 90's was crap, too. As was the stuff in the 80's, and the 70's, and so on.
It's easy to remember decades past as having better music than what's being released today; this is due to our propensity to remember the good and discard the bad. There's even a common word for this phenomenon: "nostalgia."
Ask many people and they'll swear up and down that there was a magical time in history when the crap level dropped below 90%. For instance, a 50-year-old living in 1926 might have told you that the era of good music ended in the 1890s. Everybody's right, but everybody's also wrong.
At any rate, while I agree with you that most music is crap, pirates love it just the same. The top music traded this week has remarkable parity with the top-selling music. This is why "music is crap" is a great rationalization for piracy, but not the cause of piracy. Piracy is caused by people's natural desire for music, and the natural desire to save money.
"This measure has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with outdated business models being destroyed by new technologies, and companies unwilling to adapt. They loved the monopoly."
There's widespread confusion over what the word "monopoly" means. There are literally thousands of indie music labels whose products are readily available at plenty of retailers, both online and off, and there's absolutely nothing preventing anybody from starting their own label, or even selling their music without working with a label. Sure, going the indie route is hard. So's starting your own independent ice cream shop in this market dominated by the Ben and Jerry's and Baskin-Robbins of the world. You won't have their brand recognition or their marketing budget. But no Slashdotter in their right mind would call the ice cream business a monopoly. So why the disconnect when it comes to the music biz? I suspect that many Slashdotters incorrectly throw around the term "monopoly" not because of a genuine misunderstanding, but because, like the "we pirate music because it's crappy" argument, because it shifts the moral burden off of us, and onto somebody else.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
(ooooh, nifty movie title)
Having lowered the bar in evidentiary burdens against copyright infringers by shifting prosecution into the civil court system, I think the obvious next logical step is to declare content piracy* as a terrorist act, eliminating the requirement for evidence entirely!
*not my phrase, not my idea, I'm just sayin' it like the pigopolists would.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"No one else expects residuals. Why should writers be any different?"
That one's answered in the U.S. Constitution: to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
I know it's easy to imagine that people who write poetry, novels, screenplays, songs, and so on must have it so good -- just write a little something and you're set for life. But the reality is quite different: these creative arts often have a 99% unemployment rate. It may be hard to believe, but you and I actually have it easier in a lot of ways: if you have a job, you can keep going to work each day and there's a reasonable chance you'll get paid. Your employer pays for your health insurance and probably kicks in to your retirement plans. Writers typically have no such cushion.
Was this the right thing for the framers of the constitution to do? Who knows. But consider this: take a look at your music collection, or your collection of books. What percentage of them would still be there if the writer were perfectly content without earning money on the sale? While there are those brave souls who write or perform or code sheer for the unbridled joy of it, the sad fact is that many of them wouldn't do it without the money, as they need the money to survive. Or, think of it this way: would you keep doing what you're doing if the collective Slashdotters waved a magic wand and you no longer had the right to be paid for it? There's a good chance that you really enjoy your job (otherwise you probably wouldn't be doing it), but is it a true labor of love that transcends the chance of making money? If not... then it's not fair to expect many artists to adopt such an outlook.
"In that last (successful) RIAA case, they decided to drive their point home by playing a 25 year old audio recording. No one should be getting bent out of shape regarding the "piracy" of 25 year old recordings. They should be PD by now (or nearly so)."
Straw man. The bulk of the stuff that's pirated is recent software, music, and movies. Just take a look at the top lists of your favorite BT tracker. While stuff from the 80's is still pirated, it's not at nearly the volume of the stuff that's popular now.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
They should be public domain within a reasonable amount of time -- say ten years -- of course, thanks to this however, they remain copyrighted for the life of the author plus 70 years.
How exactly this advances the progress of "science and the useful arts" is beyond me, but there you go :(
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I don't think the framers of the constitution imagined copyright lasting for seventy years after the death of the author. How exactly does that help your poor staving creative artist?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
so we have the *best* of the stuff from the 80's, 90's, etc to pick from. Oh, they aren't selling them. guess we'll have to find someone who does have it and get a copy.
So what's the URL, dammit? :-)
I prefer to pay for something (official) rather than getting it for free (piracy) but there are a few caveats.
When I was a poor college student I couldn't afford to pay for very much software. So in these cases I did pirate a lot of stuff. But it allowed me to enjoy several things in entertainment and also helped me in preparing for a job in the computer field.
Now that I make a good wage, I can afford to pay for my entertainment but there are several things that I insist on:
- Good price (I'm not paying $20 for some album)
- No DRM (I do make a few exceptions here as long as it can be circumvented easily, like by downloading a no-cd crack for a game)
- Reasonable method of getting the entertainment (e.g. DRM free music by going to a site and doing a quick search and downloading it immediately)
If companies aren't willing to provide me with my entertainment under those simple conditions then I'm left with two options: don't consume the media, which is often what happens, or pirate it.
Companies need to understand that in general, people are willing to pay for their entertainment but if they try to force feed the consumer something that they don't want then don't be surprised when you have massive piracy. But just because something does get pirated, it doesn't necessarily mean it would have been purchased had it not been available via piracy. When I was a poor college student I would have had to just do without.
In the case of persons ordered by law courts to pay damages to recording-industry firms, I propose that these fines be delineated into "recompensatory" and "punitive" portions. The "recompensatory" portion goes to the firms in question, naturally. The "punitive" portion goes to the government for generically 'socially beneficial' uses.
This is proposed as a more impartial settlement than what is currently being practised.
Perhaps a better acronym is: EXpected Termination Of Recording Technology Impedes Our Nation. I'm sure the *AA special interest groups would love to see the technology that facilitates this alleged illegal activity require a license to own and operate.
"Copyright infringement silently drains America's economy and undermines the talent, creativity and initiative that are a great source of strength to our nation," said Leahy. I thought that was what the government did.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
Yes we can turn everyone into criminals. The current government doesn't care. It'll be another fun war on citizens(drugs, terror) that they can get tax money for. Who was the immoral jerk who got rid of alcohol Prohibition?
Why not just dump the politicians into the harbor?
Uhm - people can't even agree that the right to bear arms is unalienable and attributed to the people where the 3 entities the Constitution speak of are the people, states, and Federal Government so you expect them to be able to agree on what is or is not reasonable?
You demand that all kids pay their lunch money to play your game.
Billy starts his own game.
You tell the teacher Billy stole your ball, while you are still holding your ball in your hand
The teacher starts playing Billy's game too.
You go to the superintendent to try to get a new school policy that all games belong to you.
The superintendent starts playing Billy's game too.
You go to the ball manufacturers and demand they install a remote device in all balls allowing you to deflate them at will
The ball manufacturers start playing Billy's game too.
You take your ball and go home
5- People despise the content companies now, and are refusing to buy as long as they act like vicious life-destroying bastards. No one ever loved the labels, and that was BEFORE they decided to "educate" the population into believing that copying and listening to music was criminal. They've made enemies of their talent and their customers. Please, sue some more. I stopped buying music in 1999 and stopped listening to radio music about the same time. I've a lot of company. Next up: DVD's and TV programs. Want to sue us? Please, commit financial suicide. Go ahead. It'll work, really.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
The two SCOTUS decisions that destroyed the democratic United States government:
1. Decision that corporations were individuals, same as we meat puppets, endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty, and the freedom of speech. A decision, BTW, that never happened, as it was an interpretation by a SC clerk, not a Justice, that was seized on by the Guilded Age corporations as the institutionalization of their organizations as immortal citizens.
2. 1990s: decision by SCOTUS that political donations were protected speech, same as spoken words or writings.
These idiot ideas lead to the present day: corporations as legal individuals, spending as much as they like to influence government. After the 1990's, they simply bought the government, floor to ceiling.
To stop this horror, we have to kill those two SC decisions. Corporations go back to being government-licensed TEMPORARY legal shelters -- not people, not individuals, NO rights to buy government. And money is not speech. End of discussion. Remove money from the political campaigns. NO paid media time, none, end of insanity. Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine on government licensed media for unpaid shilling for candidates in media as well. Separate Commerce and State, as some earlier poster beautifully called it.
A technology shift happened - the Internet.
The new model allowed for a more free exchange of information.
The media industry never adjusted to the new model.
Often not-quite-legitimate-downloads occur when the media is not easily available.
Imagine the choice between these:
- Go to store, buy CD, bring home, rip, add songs to portable music player.
- Sit at home, spend time finding song on questionable sites, download lossy quality MP3, upload to portable music player.
- Sit at home, log into drm-tunes.com, pay for and download legitimate lossy copy of song. Upload to music player. Perhaps it works. It may not work next time.
- NOT-YET: Sit at home, log into bmg.com or directly to nin.com, pay for song, download lossless, high quality, drm-free song. Upload to player.
Of course, the NOT-YET choice does not really exists, but there is a demand for it.
Alright fellow slashdotters, I am a constituent of John Cornyn's, I have called the office and voiced my complaint. I have stated that this is blatent corruption and he is obviously ignoring the well-being of the people who voted him in. I also said that I will do everything in my power to ensure that his political career comes to an end at the next possible moment.
Anyone else who has these people as their reps do the same yet?
What a tremendous fucking waste of our country's resources. How about we go after actual CRIMINALS, rather than copyright violators? You know... stuff that actually MATTERS?
> CD sales are down because what is released on CD is crap.
Actually, I think it's obvious that CD sales are down partly because the huge sales of CDs from a decade ago was an unsustainable once-in-a-lifetime windfall for the recording industry, driven mostly by people buying CDs to replace records they already had, used to have, or "kind of/sort of" wanted to have, but were never sufficiently motivated to buy as LPs or cassettes. CDs were a major improvement over LPs and cassettes, and properly remastered CDs a decade later were a major improvement over the first re-released content.
That can't be said for new formats. Any halfwit can create better-sounding MP3 files from a CD than he could possibly buy in MP3 form to begin with. DVD audio is an incremental improvement over CD audio... but thanks to the DRM, is almost impossible to rip to MP3 for portable use, which pretty much renders it irrelevant to the popular music market. If DVD Audio were as easy to rip as CD audio, sounded at least a little better, and used some of its storage space to make it almost completely immune to even MAJOR scratches (by redundantly encoding high-bitrate compressed copies in multiple places on the disc, with players able to automatically fall back to the redundant compressed copies wherever the uncompressed content were significantly degraded by damange), CDDA would be ancient history by now. But because the industry couldn't get past its control fetish, CDDA will likely remain the preferred source format for purchased music for a few more decades by virtue of being the most flexible source format available to the general public.
And corporate lobbyist are no longer writing legislation /sarc
We are not the revolutionary generation. We are their forerunners, their heralds. We were not raised by our complacent parents to be revolutionary, and thus we will not be. At best, we will make a lot of noise.
It will be our children, in ten, twenty years time, who're growing up with us as their guardians, who will be the revolutionaries. Unfortunately, that's exactly what the government and corporations are trying to prevent through social legislation and engineering. They're putting in the measures now to subvert our behavior so that it will not be transmitted, so that the revolutionary generation will never materialize.
I read the headline as, "Congress Pleasures DoJ With PRIVATE Part II."
Thought I was on the wrong website for a second.
include $sig;
1;
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
It's most likely better to call their offices in their home states, but here are their numbers in Washington:
Leahy: (202) 224-4242, DC - (802)863-2525, Burlington, (802)229-0569, Montpellier
Cornyn: (202) 224-2934, DC - SE Texas: 713-572-3337, Central Texas: 512-469-6034
Be polite and respectful, but bring up the points:
* Introducing legislation to reduce the legal expenses of multi-billion dollar entities is one of the reason that people are losing faith in the democratic process.
* There are grave flaws in some of the civil suits the RIAA have brought and innocent people are often being caught in the net; bringing the full power of the US Government against people in a civil suit is tremendously unfair.
* Why is the DOJ focusing on this instead of terrorism?
* Civil suits have a much lower burden of proof than criminal cases and there is no constitutional requirement for the government to provide lawyers; this will ruin lives.
* The RIAA has a documented history of trying to bribe congressman and sneak inherently unfair legislation into bills; this also explains why people have lost faith in Congress.
* Our copyright system is fundamentally broken, copyright terms are ridiculously long. We should not be spending government funds to reinforce a deeply flawed system.
* The RIAA is getting more resistance from judges who can see the unfair nature of their cases and this is an effort to get free legal help for a corrupt industry at taxpayer expense.
* The recording industry has been exploiting artists and consumers for decades and now they're trying to use legal force to preserve a dying business model; if the manufacturers of buggy whips had the legislative clout back in the early 1900's that the RIAA a buggy whip would be required equipment in each automobile.
* Finally, you will occasionally get a staffer who will attempt to defend the bill. If they are wired in to the lobbying machine, you can scare the hell out of them with this phrase: "Well, since the recording industry believes that copyright should last forever, like land and real estate, would the Senator support a yearly tax on the possession of copyrights, much like land is subject to annual property taxes?" This is an extremely dangerous idea for the recording industry.
Call 'em. Be polite but firm. If you are a member of their party, mention that, too and let them know if you think are representing their party poorly.
They do track how many calls they get on an issue. It does make a difference.
Strange that it's Pat Leahy doing this. He usually has more sense in such matters.
I covered the PATRIOT Act hearings, and he was one of the only voices against it (mind you, he didn't actually have the nerve to VOTE against it, which everyone on the Hill considered political suicide at the time) - but he was one of the few to say it was wretched overkill and was being rushed through too quickly.
Not-SO-Trivial Trivia: Every time the bill came up for consideration, the terror alert level (Homeland Security Advisory System "current threat level") shot shot up to red ("severe"). Or at least mauve.
I can see it now:
"I have proof that prove to the court, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my client is innocent."
"Bah! Don't burden us with your 'proof'!"
Idiocracy anyone?
Although not a Supreme Court decision, the Federal Reserve Act took the power to create money out of the hands of our elected leaders and put it into the hands of a private banking cartel. This was the beginning of the end for the Republic as it allowed a small group of people who were never elected to manipulate the financial system (see also: the great depression, the housing and tech bubbles, and the ongoing manipulated "boom-bust" cycle.)
Two interesting videos about this topic on Google video: "Money as Debt" and "The Money Masters"
We really need to spend money on this. There is no way that improving our deficit or infrastructure would be a smarter move. I mean, a couple of ignorant kids from redneck/inner city USA downloading some of the absolute crap that passes for music these days is clearly our priority number one. Let's not worry about going after the corporate monopolies that are never going to give us solid, reliable electric cars. Let's skip the illegally wire tapping and bandwidth throttling telcos. Let's not get to the bottom of the JFK thing, or how the twin towers fell, or back to the moon. Let's spend all of our money on locking up teenagers with no taste in music. BRILLIANT!
Is there no American willing to beat these idiots with the clue stick? I've got a good right arm, I'll take a couple of swings, get me a ticket to Washington....
Attached is a photo of my proposed "Clue Stick":
http://img.alibaba.com/photo/11509025/Sledge_Hammer_With_Wooden_Handle.jpg
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Moderators are abusing mod points to forward their point of view. It's not like there aren't clearly two arguments on the piracy issue. Expressing an opinion that does not fall on the side most /.ers happen to agree with does not deserve punishment.
This continued even well into the CD era. Yellow Ledbetter was a "b-side" (is there such a thing on CD, I guess not) to the single Jeremy.
> Because piracy begets piracy. It devalues things. If half the people on your block got their homes for free, how could you convince somebody to pay you $250k for YOURS?
That's supply and demand you're talking about there. If there's a free supply, of course demand will slack off at high prices. So does this mean that you're suggesting that people shouldn't be able to give away copyrighted things for free, even if they "own" them? Because that's what you're doing. Mind you, neither of our posts are that great, but they are copyrighted, and we both gave them up for free.
If you're going to give analogies, why don't you give one that at least involves non-rivalrous goods? You know, things you can make copies of. I'm pretty sure no one has invented a house-copier, let alone a land-copier, so they're rivalrous goods. Copyrighted things aren't: the supply is arbitrary and the producers all want government protection from competition (i.e. copyrights).
The senate just confirmed Mukasey who said, in his confirmation hearings, that the president gets to determine the laws. Since that means that the Senate won't have any meaningful work, I think we should cut their salaries back accordingly. To about $1/year.
I guess you must have finally caught that Osama Bin Laden! Hooray, congratulations, good work, fellas. ...Errrr, although somehow, I seemed to have missed the stories of his capture in the news...
But, that's got to have been the case, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't have any time to be wasting on nonsense crap like this bill, right?
Would you?
*sigh* The companies are not LOSING anything, their INCOME is reduced from a potential represented by the people who obtain the unlicensed copies. There is a very significant difference.
A numbers game: Say, a record is printed in 200,000 copies and sold in stores. These somehow manage to sell out, but in addition we assume 10,000 or so illegal downloaders obtain copies without paying for them (in this case they could not have anyway). Did the record company lose anything? No, they sold what they expected.
Now, if the company grossly overestimated sales and only 50k of those 200k copies sold, then the 10k illegal downloaders come inside the "range" of the 150k unsold records. However, instead of admitting their estimates were utter crap, executives now grab onto these downloaders as a decoy to remove the attention from their incompetence.
Getting the State to use the tax payer's money to aid in securing revenue to an industry comes very close to an indirect subsidy, if you ask me.
(Also: Pirates are evil people who raid ships in the China Sea and off the African coast. Abusing the term by applying it to people who leech off the industrial products of megacorporations is an insult to piracy victims.)
That may be true for many people, but it is not the only reason. One reason is, of course, because what they sell is mostly crap. But that reason has been around for a long time and while I believe it is a big reason for not having the level of sales they could have, it is not a reason for their sales level to decline in the past decade.
However, there is one reason I do know to be true for not only myself, but for a few other people I know. Long ago when I bought music, I had little or no way to preview what it was I was buying. Radio played almost as much crap back then as they do today, without covering any of the alternatives. So I ended up buying albums (before CDs) and CDs on speculation based on the cover material, or other factors that never really was accurate about what music I'd be getting. Buying things this way did get some great gems. But it also got a lot of crap (to me ... it was still alternative that maybe someone else would have loved). I was buying more music than what I ended up liking.
Today, I can sample it. I can sample just about everything. I can figure out what I like and what I dislike ahead of time, without wasteful buying. The level of purchasing I do is now less than what I used to do. A lot less. I only buy about 40% as much. But now I know that 100% of what I buy I like, even before I buy it, whereas before I was only liking about 40% of what I bought.
Some component of the decline in CD sales is from people not specifically buying less ... but buying smarter. But my guess is the RIAA members can't even grasp that concept.
That's not to say there isn't a whole lot of people who download and keep at least some of what they download (or all to trade for more), and just don't buy any CDs at all and just accept the lesser quality of the MP3 encodings they get online. I'm just saying that such theft is not the entire cause of the decline in legal purchasing.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yeah, seriously, that would NOT fly here. For many, many reasons.