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Prince, Village People to Sue The Pirate Bay
castrox writes to tell us that The Pirate Bay's legal concerns are continuing to grow. Prince and the Village People are planning to sue the popular torrent site with the help of the Web Sheriff law firm. John Giacobbi of Web Sheriff has also asked Swedish band ABBA to join the cause. The suit is seeking "millions of dollars" in damages, although it's still uncertain to whom the charges will be directed. The likely targets are the four Pirate Bay founders who were indicted a few weeks ago on charges of breaking copyright law. Prince has taken investigative action against The Pirate Bay in the past.
Suing a torrent site for copyright infringement is something akin to suing a map-maker because a thief used the information to find a bank that was robbed (and yes, I know that with copyright infringement nothing is physically stolen), or suing a telephone company because two criminals used the network to plan a heist.
If all someone is doing is using information from a torrent site to find another party, and is not actively connecting the two copyright infringers Napster-style, then surely they can defend the accusations.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Sounds exactly like the old Napster. The RIAA struck it down, and it has returned as BitTorrent, more powerful than the RIAA could possibly imagine.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Prince, the Village People, and ABBA are not the most torrented artists on TPB right now. They're old and the people who know enough about computers to torrent don't care enough about them to download. This is more of a "I'M STILL AROUND PAY ATTENTION TO ME" move, just like Janet Jackson's wardrobe "malfunction."
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I beg to differ. The attitude of "what have you done for me lately" isn't bullshit.
In most lines of work, you do your work that you're paid to do, get your paycheck and that's all the compensation you'll ever get or should get. You don't expect to be paid throughout the endurance of said work. Imagine turning up at a former place of work in say 10 years and telling them, "hey, I see you're still using that data center I designed for you 10 years ago, give me more money", you'd be laughed out of there.
Now, the current model of selling music recordings doesn't quite work like that. You record your music, then you sell it hoping to get some or all of that money back. Even make a profit if you're lucky.
Finally, just because there's a market for nostalgia doesn't mean that copyrights should automatically span so that artists can cash in on it. What you'd call nostalgia, I'd call history, or cultural heritage, and should not be locked up to be only sold on the whim of the copyright holder.
I guess the difference between us is not one of principle, but of degree. You want something like 25 years. I want something closer to 5 years, and to make clear that copyright protection preventing duplication should only cover *commercial* duplication of said work. Older works are valuable, yes. That's precisely why commercial distribution of such works shouldn't be bottled up longer than neccessary. 5 years is plenty of time to have a monopoly on a work, to have an opportunity to turn a profit on it.