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Controversial Section of PRO-IP Act Cut
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Rep. Berman (D-CA) has removed the controversial section 104 from his PRO-IP Act. That section would have multiplied the already excessive statutory damages for infringement in the case of compilations, making the damages for infringing upon the copyrights of a single average CD rise into the millions of dollars. This change came after proponents of the amendment were unable to cite even one case where the statutory damages recovered were insufficient. But don't let the article fool you into thinking that the PRO-IP Act is no longer controversial now that this one section is gone, the act still creates copyright cops who are authorized to seize people's computers."
Nothing Cryptonomicon-esque, just some s/w will do the trick. Sieze away, Mr. Gestapo. All sorts of nice 1s and 0s for you to look through.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This is a good example of the fact that both major parties play these games with our civil liberties. As much time as people spend bashing the Republican party over privacy invasion and big business backroom deals, it's good to remember that the Democrats play the same games every day. Perception is a funny thing.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
How could statutory damages ever be insufficient when the copyright owner has the option of proving actual damages?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
IANAL, but IMHO, and it may be soon to tell, given current circumstances, but notwithstanding alternate outcomes, that I have absolutely no idea how to respond to your question. But look at the silly monkey!
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Berman should be forcibly removed from office for the things he's already done. They can take Howard Coble and Orrin Hatch along with him. We the People have no use for them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think I'll just steal CD's the old fashioned way from my local wal mart and lower the risk.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
"Yes, Billy, it's true. The United States wasn't always a fascist dictatorship. Actually, the proper term is oligarchy, but I won't bore you with all that stuff now. Anyway, there was a time when the people in office actually cared, some more than others, about the ideals that made it a good place to live. And, no, there was no invasion. Our people just gave it all away, a little at a time, by always voting for politicians who promised to make the country a safe place for children and kittens. It's safe now, Billy...just as long as you do exactly as you're told."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You have a good point, but I assume the copyright crowd is going at this from a couple of angles:
A) Actual damages are quite hard to prove in court, which is the point of creating statutory damages. They might not even bother asking for them, lest they have to justify what actual damages they've suffered from infringement. Of course, they may not have suffered any actual damages, or may not be able to prove that they have.
B) While they're not punitive damages, they're high enough that they can be seen in that light. As such, they could be an insufficient penalty.
That said, $150,000 for infringing upon an average 10-song CD that goes for $20 retail and $10 on iTunes is already unconstitutionally excessive per a Supreme Court ruling (BMW v. Gore) that looked askance at some statutory damages that were merely a few times the actual damages. The PRO-IP Act here would raise that to $1,500,000 ($150,000 for each song on the CD), which is even more excessive than before.
After all, how many copyrighted works sell for $150,000 to begin with? And don't list long-dead painters. Their works hit the public domain long before copyrights got an extra hundred years or more of life with the life+70 term passed back in the 1970s.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
Translate this into a little better english... WTF did he say? she say?
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
The sad thing is, that 1% of the population is already in jail. The highest incarceration rate in the world. But we think were safer. Do you think a 10-fold increase in people in jail will lead to an overhaul of the system, or just become a nice way to ensure lots of jobs as Prison Guards for the local economies?
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
We the People keep reelecting them. Blame California, North Carolina, and Utah. (and blame Canada)
--Obyron
1% of adults, not of the general population. Not that it affect your point.
Oh dear, heaven forbid a few ultra rich individuals be deprived of a few cents per "stolen" song. The 4,000,000,000 people that go to bed hungry every night wouldn't need any of it anyhow. And as for the US becoming "fascist", give me a break. Go live in Cuba or Venezuela for the real deal. Although things can change, and they have, this is still a country with a constitution protecting more freedoms then most countries around the world.
Oh sure, that has nothing to do with this discussion, right? Time = money. Money makes the world tick. We are all wasting our personal time debating this, and the government we pay taxes to is wasting time and our hard earned money debating this. Now to protect ourselves from unrighteous evil discrimination of our privacy, we'll have to waste even more of our precious personal time. In the end, the cost to humanity is ridiculous. Screw the entertainment industry, who needs it anyway?
Music and entertainment has its place, but is it worth all of this? It most certainly isn't worth the loss of privacy we are all faced with. Anyhow, there are several ways around all of this mess. Problem is, most of us are just too damn lazy (and cheap) to do anything about it.
Lack of sleep is definitely taking its toll... my writing has been quite incoherent. To sum up:
(1) stop sharing someone else's hard work for free?! How would you like it if people could share your paycheck on line? (not that I agree with how much is charged for their "art", but it IS illegal)
(2) find a more economic way of legally acquiring the music you like (used cd shops, ppd, etc)
(3) go live in a country where you can acquire/provide pirated material without consequence
(4) get to bed, and stop wasting time on this issue!
So there you go. 4 steps to successfully avoiding incrimination. I'm going to apply step 4, ciao.
"...Teach a man to fish; you have fed him for a lifetime" -he has to want to fish, otherwise he won't learn!
They're beginning to make compromises. With this controversial section removed, it's just that much closer to becoming a law, which is bad for everyone.
From my understanding, the PRO-IP Act wants to not only create a whole arm of the government to do the RIAA/MPAA's dirty work, but they want to expand civil asset forfeiture to copyright enforcement as well.
With Civil Asset Forfeiture, your property, NOT YOU, is accused of a crime. Since your property is not a person, it has no rights. Thus you have to prove your property's innocence. It can be a very long, drawn out, and expensive process, and even if you win, you probably still won't get your property back. Civil Asset Forfeiture is currently used to take property in "drug" cases. (Or when the drug enforcement agencies need more money. You see, they are funded by what they take.) If you want something to make your blood boil, just google Civil Asset Forfeiture for all the details. You can read about case after case of abuse of these laws. Basically it boils down to this: You have property, cash, a ranch, a nice car, whatever. The police arrest you on a bogus charge and let you go 24-48 hours later. They keep your property. It just must have been involved with drugs.
Now, they want to take our computers, and expand this system to copyright infringement. My guess is that somewhere between 95% - 99% of computers have at least one copyright infringing file on them. This means that they can be seized. Translation: If this passes, the copyright cops can take any computer, anywhere, anytime. One might not have an infringing video or music file on the system, but what about an email? a screen background? etc. The owner might not face any convictions, or even have charges brought against them, but they sure won't be getting their computer back. This could also be expanded to just about any storage medium -- a usb flash drive, an iPod, a hard drive, a cd, anything. It would be a great way for law enforcement to search electronic media, or computer systems. Instead of searching someone's computer, just accuse it of a copyright violation, and seize it. Then they can search it all they want, and when they're done, sell it off to make a little cash.
Now consider what data even simple, non computer savvy people have on their computers. What does that say about their lives? Could it cost them their job or their livelihood? For example, an author is working on his next book. His computer is seized on some bullshit copyright charge, and he never gets it back. Like many people, he did not back up the system, or the cops took his backups too. No more book.
We all know what a success the War On Drugs has been, so expanding it to the War on Copyright Infringement must be a great idea.
You can use the favourite trick of the Bush crew and "not be able to recall" the password. I'm going to bet this would be fine. After all, people forget their passwords all the time (all the damn time, I would know, I do tech support for a living) and you can't be forced to give up what you don't know. If you do soom looking through cases, you'll see that the whole "I don't recall," type of thing is not that uncommon. You get the feeling at times that the person is lying, but, well, you can't prove that. It isn't as if the prosecution can say "Yes he does recall, judge, tell him he has to remember!"
I believe the legalese term is "fishing expedition".
Sounds like a great idea, but until they come out with 128-gigabyte miniSD cards I'm going to need that goatse guy for a roommate. :(
Amen brother. It's hard to believe they keep electing him, although the nuts and bolts politics involved probably make it impossible for the local party to field any other candidate. He gets oodles of money funneled to his causes through various third parties (the big media corporations), neatly bypassing campaign funding laws.
If it's a district in which electing a republican candidate is basically impossible then we do indeed have only ourselves to blame. Or the pavlov-trained monkeys living in his district.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Hi AC, this is the IRS.
did you pay your taxes on this $100,000,000 per distrobution of your likness?
you, sir, deserve more karma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. There's a whole load of rulings which can be added in support, starting with excessive punitive damages more than three times actual damages being unconstitutional. $150,000 for a $0.99 is clearly an unconstitutional excessive fine. QED.
Net effect: there is no copyright law. The effective copyright protection is zero. Simply because the copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional on multiple fronts.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Geek Solution:
Write a program to fight gerrymandering by randomly drawing district lines based on population dispersion. Statistician + Programmer = Solution. Let's see the results, what maps would look like, then we can force all politicians running to support it with a national marketing campaign called The Contract Against Incumbent GErrymandering (C.A.I.G.E.)
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
He gets oodles of money funneled to his causes through various third parties (the big media corporations), neatly bypassing campaign funding laws.
The (D) next to his name pretty much stands for "Disney", not Democrat.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Am I the only one who snickers a bit when I see the word 'proip'?
For some reason, it just sounds like something you might do to/on someone you like or hate a lot.
Or maybe something you would do to the constituency as a whole: proip all over the people!
Time to encrypt.
What ever happened to that case that was to claim that the 5th amendment also covers your digital data?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't blame *me* for Hatch -- I vote against that fucker every election he's on the ballot. I'm one of maybe a dozen blue pixels on one of the reddest states of the map. Sometimes I wonder if I should sign up with one of those vote trading sites, as my votes here are pretty much spitting in the ocean.
Method of processing duck feet
In a civil case, don't they usually subpoena records? They don't come into your house and search for them, you are simply expected to hand them over. Say for instance that they subpoenaed letters I had received over a certain period. I would check my files and turn over any letters that met the criteria, along with a declaration I sign under penalty of perjury that I've turned over all relevant documents. In the RIAA case they get to mirror an entire hard drive and search through all contents. There was indication in the testimony of the 'expert' in the Lindor case that he had gone through emails and documents, he even referenced a resume he found on the hard drive. All they were looking for supposedly was evidence of infringement and use of Kazaa, which they did NOT find.
Computers are used for everything nowadays. Allowing unfettered access to a computer's hard drive would be like allowing them into your home to look around for whatever they want. Nowadays you can watch movies and listen to music on your computer, make phone calls, purchase almost anything on line, reserve movie tickets, and communicate with email and IM. Allowing access to this information if little different than searching a house. You can find what clothes they wear by looking at online purchase history or receipts stored on the computer. You can possibly find their bank records showing ATM withdrawals from a casino for instance or a sex shop. Going through their email is akin to looking over personal letters and birthday cards. Allowing access to a hard drive in my opinion is not narrow enough of a discovery request.
Thank you, you are correct. I imagine things would drastically change if a large percentage of children got locked up!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?