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Sweden to Give Courts New Power to Hunt IP Infringers
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Swedish Culture & Justice ministers are preparing to give new power to Swedish courts to let them force ISPs to give up subscriber IPs. The end goal is trying subscribers in court for copyright infringement. As the one-time home of the Pirate Bay, which is now internationally distributed, they face both US pressure and push-back at home. The Swedish arm of the Pirate Party is calling this move a 'sanctioned blackmailing operation', but hopefully the Swedish courts won't allow the IFPI to use as many tricks as the RIAA has in US courts."
How can they call this a legitimate request, given the recent outrages by the companies involved?
Shame on Wired for repeating the propaganda phrases, "illegal file sharing" and "piracy". It's not against the law in many countries and sharing should not be considered damaging or wrong anywhere. Giving someone a copy of a book is not the same thing as feeding them to the fish. I'm used to better things from Wired than this.
No calls now, I'm
Pirate Bay will fade just as every other p2p system has before it... WinMX, Kazza, Limewire, Napster, FTP, IRC... Wait is IRC still going? It's been so long since I was on there downloading Dreamcast images...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
A "torrent" file does not a copyright infringement make.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
can hope they won't let them pull the BS the RIAA has, but now the RIAA's BS is startin to catch up with them and so is the judges gettin fed up with it.
You can sugar coat it all you want, if you are unauthorized to redistribute content, and you are doing it, what you are doing is Piracy. It also happens to be illegal in many countries, including the one we discuss here, where there are copyright laws that define the scope of what is legal and illegal distribution of said content. If you share a file for which you have received authorization to do so in the form of a license, you are in fact participating in illegal file sharing.
As much as you don't like it, it's the way it is. Not all file sharing is illegal, but not all of it is legal. Morals have nothing do to with lawfulness of it. Giving someone a copy of a book is not like giving 3,000,000 other people a copy of a book. If you wouldn't have paid for it anyway, why are you so desperate to have it ?
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Pirate bay doesn't disrespect any of Sweden's Copyright laws. In Sweden (unlike in the US) it is not forbidden to provide a link to a copyrighted material, even if this link connects you to a potential infringer (trackers have the same interpretation). Also, in order to be protected by copy right law in Sweden, works must have a certain level of artistry and/or technical merit. Simply the fact that you have written a piece of (crap) text doesn't entitle you to any copyrights over the text (say, like an email message), it's gotta be something really relevant, that you've put some effort in creating.
If you share a file for which you have NOT received authorization to do so in the form of a license, you are in fact participating in illegal file sharing.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Yes it brings to mind Saddam Hussein's mock trial. One judge was removed in response to his refusal to refer to 'the accused' or 'the defendant' as a tyrant. Whilst in a normal court if a judge called an insane serial killer anything other than the defendant the whole trial would be setback. There seems to be a tendency to label things black and white in recent times. That combined with the un-Americanism of questioning the rules builds quite an interesting layman's lexicon.
Mar 14, 12:33 PM EDT
...
Sweden Pursues Illegal File-Sharers
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., MGM Pictures Inc., Colombia Pictures Industries Inc., 20th Century Fox Films Co., Sony BMG, Universal and EMI have until Feb. 29 to file claims for damages in the case.
So, is that Feb 29 of this year, or in the next leap year, or is this article HOPELESSLY OUT OF DATE? Did they file it or not?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Of course, the article is about the government amending the law in order for the proper right holders to go after the sharers themselves. It is not about the Pirate Bay at all except for a brief mention that they were from Sweden.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
if you are unauthorized to redistribute content, and you are doing it, what you are doing is Piracy.
No, piracy also involves a certain degree of wooden legs and parrots and hoisting "Jolly Roger"'s and broadsides and cutlasses, etc.
How come if you come to my house and I put on a CD you're allowed to hear the music, but GOD FORBID you hear the music by any other means including internet radio which now has to pay god knows how many million dollars for "rights".
The RIAA is about GREED pure and simple. Please provide verifiable documents that prove that ONE SINGLE ARTIST has seen ONE PENNY from the RIAA, who apparently fight in their name. In fact many musical groups ENDORSE "piracy", even in their song lyrics (example Molotov:Yofo; Radiohead, etc), because they are fed up of being ripped off by studios.
Please stop bleating like a sheep and start using your brain. The "cost" of distributing "n" copies of music is now almost ZERO. Why do you insist people still have to pay $15-$20 for a "CD" or $.99 for a "song"? Middlemen add nothing to economies. They are parasites pure and simple.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
While Europeans are coming to view IP address as protected personally identifiable information, they are also inventing more and more legal justifications for collection and use of IP addresses.
Benjamin Wright, Dallas, Texas, benjaminwright.us
I have not authorized you to read this copyrighted post.
Police, please arrest RedK (112790). Thank you.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
... is that this opens up the possible risk of having the justice system completely soaked in IP-release-claims.
The ministers writes
"Today copyright holders are by and large bound to report internet copyright violations to the police. The Police and attorneys work has admittedly improved through enhanced education and specialisation but its not reasonable that this whole responsibility should be placed on police and attornies alone.
On the contrary it is in many cases more naturally and suitable that the copyrights holders themselves are given the ability to intervene against [copyright] intrusions. "
[Link to original article posted in Svenska Dagbladet http://www.svd.se/opinion/brannpunkt/artikel_972903.svd ]
Of course, it won't be the artists or filmmakers themselves who collects evidence, it will be the organisation backing them up. But, and here is the interesting part, it may very well backfire with thousands and thousands of demands being sent to the courts, from hundreds of known, not-so-known, and completely unheard of artists who's found their work on various sites. It can also lead up to a civil disobediance campaign where people start reporting en masse just to clog the system with demands.
I'm far from a fan of the current government but I must say they have an interesting take at the end of the article.
"To battle illegal filesharing it is required that affected branches takes their responsibility. If copyright is used to protect obsolete businessmodels then it will in the long run be impossible to defend it"
Piracy is acts of robbery on the seas. What you are doing when you share files is infringing on copyright. I don't know why the term piracy was co-opted in popular press for copyright infringement, but as far as I can tell, there's no basis in law. All the law I find relating to copyright infringement, that's what it is called. The reason that I press this issue is that piracy is still very much a real issue in the world. In the US people are very shielded from it because nobody fucks with the Coast Guard (to fire on a Coast Guard ship is an act of war), but in much of the world it is still a very real problem.
Also I would say the argument of "Morals have nothing to do with it," is pretty stupid. In the US at least, laws must be just. It isn't simply an abstract concept, it is actually codified in the Constitution. Lower laws must conform to higher level laws, and all laws must be just.
Well it can be quite fairly argued (and indeed is in some RIAA cases) that copyright law is unjust. It has two major constitutional problems:
1) The whole reason Congress is allowed to make copyright law is the Constitution grants it. One of the lines in Article I Section 8 reads "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" Ok, great, however like most of the powers granted in the Constitution to the government, there are limits. It doesn't say Congress has the right to do whatever they want with regards to IP. It says that they may secure an exclusive right for a LIMITED amount of time, and the reason they may do so is to promote the progress of science and art.
Ok well it seems current copyright law runs afoul of both. For one, I don't think that "Life plus 70 years," which is the current US copyright length, is what is meant by "limited time." It seems that is far too long. Then there is the fact that the whole reason is to promote science and art, where it seems that the currently lengthy copyrights are used to suppress it. Companies hold on to copyrights, refusing to release the work or allow derivatives. For example companies go after sites distributing copies of old console games, despite the fact that the companies themselves have long since stopped selling those games and indeed refuse to do so anymore. They just sit on the copyright, and stand in the way of using it for any progress.
2) All punishments must be fair, as per Amendment 8 which reads "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." In the case of copyright infringement, the part we are interested is "nor excessive fines imposed." The statutory damages seem to run afoul of that. $150,000 per incident of statutory damages? Are you kidding me? It is quite literally more than you'd get had you physically stolen media containing a copy of the work.
So it seems that the current situation may well be unjust, immoral, and thus it certainly DOES matter. I hate this idea of "The law is the law." Ya well, guess what? The law can and should be changed. It was the law at one time that you could own slaves, certain humans were seen as worth less. That was actually right in the Constitution. That doesn't mean it was right. It is silly to simply point to a bad law and say "Well that's the law so there."
One reason to have something you haven't paid for is to find out whether it's good. I often borrow books from friends and if the book is good enough I buy it myself, so I can reread it later. I do the same thing with games, I will download them and if I consider them worth the price I will buy the game. Many games, such as WoW, Oblivion, F.E.A.R., The Orange Box, I could keep on listing the games I've bought which I felt deserved my money AFTER I played them, some games offer trials and sometimes that is enough, but other times I want to get the feel of the whole game. On the other hand why does someone have the right to tell me how I can use something I have purchased. I purchased a CD from the store, it is my property, as long as I am not making money from it, which is what I consider real piracy, then what is wrong with doing whatever I want with what belongs to me.
Convenient how you failed to mention that it *WOULD* be illegal if you burned a copy of the CD for your friend.
The record companies can sell their products for whatever price they want to. Just like any other company. They make outrageous profit selling CDs for $15 each, but that's not illegal, and as long as people keep buying them for that price, they'll keep doing it.
Maybe not
Laws should follow morals not the other way around but both seem to be against the requested change here. Try reading the EU directives and tell me why ISPs should be forced to violate their customers privacy because some MediaSentry group suspects the customer of making an unauthorized copy. In this case both laws and morals are against the change.
No calls now, I'm
The record companies can sell their products for whatever price they want to. Just like any other company.
However, the market is being distorted by the copyright monopolies. For most kinds of product, a competing vendor could sell cheaper product that is adequately substitutable - due to copyright monopoly law, doing that is classed as "piracy" for some types of information pattern expressed in a physical substrate.
That is _why_ the companies can get away with charging so much money and still stay in business - they've got the government giving them monopolies, usually under some socialistic "help the starving artists" lie.
Personally, I support the abolition of copyright law. They (the copyrightists) have apparently decided to make it a stark choice between communications liberty and enforcement of copyright. If they say "well, we won't release anything if we don't get our copyright monopolies", I say "Fine by me!". Everyone's freedom of communication is simply more important than their monopolies or their ability to make a profit. It's not even all artists that would be hurt - it's that subset of people that are only happy if they get a distribution monopoly. We can simply do without their "art".
Remember, the term "intellectual property" is a debate-framing tactic designed to make you think that copyrights and patents and such are "like" physical property and therefore similarly worthy of protection.
What will happen when all IP infringers are hunted down and eliminated? It seems to me that open source, and all things that distribute IP for free would be the next target.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Exactly. No one should be out to make art for a profit, and that's precisely what these middlemen want to do. They've brought up generations on the dreams of "making it big" being a rock n roll star or an A list actor, only to exploit those who actually do make it to the top of their game. So copyright can go straight to hell, and I don't care if I loose Heroes, Batman movies, and whatever bands that can't survive after it's dead. Theatre, live music performances, paintings, books, they'll survive. They've survived this long without life+70 haven't they?
Police, please arrest RedK (112790). Thank you. Fucking NARC, man; jeez..
;)
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
The record of dissaster you quote is also endless resurgence. The 4 big music companies on the other hand have been crapping out 15% every year. File sharing and the rise of independent music producers are linked by more than temporal coincidence.
Wired magazine is interesting, but they are also the MTV of the tech reporting world.
"Convenient how you failed to mention that it *WOULD* be illegal if you burned a copy of the CD for your friend"
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I were to burn you a CD, it's perfectly LEGAL here in Canada.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Care to give an example? Even in countries being famous for copyright infringement it's forbidden by law (China comes to mind).
Of course there is the right for private copies in some countries, but as some poor RIAA representative put it during Napster's peak: "Ok, it makes a difference wether you share some music with your close friends or thousands of 'friends' over the net."
Just a little sidenote: Many countries have a problem with the sheer flood of indictions coming from *AA lawyers*. I see this as the true reason for legislation to change the rules by either: Giving the copyright holders direct access to the names of those pirating (making it an issue for civil-law), or by introducing a minimum level of damage before the jurisdiction is allowed to act. Of course I prefer the latter, but AFAIK no country had the guts to go this way yet. The UK and France are pretty close with the idea of simply blocking access for those infringing, but I somehow doubt that this will get popular.
*Just a little example from Germany: Over here content creators can't get the name behind an ip-address. So they indict, which leads to the following actions: The state's prosecutor knows it's not worth the hassle, but he has to investigate the identity of the other party - the file will usually be closed after this. The lawyer requests access of records and sends a monition to the person behind the ip-address. In this document he/she offers to drop all civil charges in exchange for a sum which is at a price point significantly lower than anything you would spend in court. For this reason 99% are settled this way, but it's still not a cheap deal for those affected. The problem with this system is that some lawyers send thousands of such requests automatically to one single prosecutor, thereby bringing the legal system to a grinding halt. Therefore legislation has seriously considered to introduce an exemption, below which prosecutors don't act.
I don't read replies by ACs.
Quote me one nations laws that back up what you just said. You can't, because that is not what ANY nations piracy laws state. Also no nations copyright laws will mention the word piracy.
Sugar coat it all you want, but you are just spreading lies and more lies
The only document I can even find that links copyright and piracy is the Cathach of St. Columba, a seventh century book of psalms. No nation abides by this document as law anymore.
In case you didn't notice, we are in the 21st century. You have a lot of legal catching up to do my friend.
Parent is insightful and informative.
"Intellectual Property" is a Propaganda term (oh wait, they get offended if you call them propagandists-- they want to be called Public Relations.)
The term "Piracy" is ALSO a manipulative tactic on the act of non-profit copyright infringement. Its such a minor infringement, where as the profit without permission on copy written work is a major infringement and is a core principle for the existence of copyright. Sadly, the "pirates" have embraced the term as part of their identity which HURTS their image to the outside world.
Large cartels that unfairly exploit creators for profit; while legal, are the antithesis of the this fundamental reason for copyright.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Because it's NOT YOUR SONG. Why do you get the right to decide what someone else should charge for their works? Do I get to decide how much you can charge for your labor?
Don't buy it if you don't like the price. But you have ZERO RIGHT to tell the owners of the copyright how much to charge for the use of the copyrighted work.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I say we can the copyright laws look at all the trouble people like the RIAA, MPAA cause if we simply canned copyright it would save us all this trouble and we could move on.
All our problems would be resolved.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Seems the premise of the content "industry" is security by obscurity. We all know how well that works out...
Corporations are not citizens and they are not human. Allowing them citizen status (which they have) lets them have many of our rights but without the draw backs of being human. It leads to many problems.
Take away corporate ownership of "IP" rights. At least then they can't lay off influential creators/inventors before retirement to save money -- with that line "What have you done for us lately?" How about (80 - Current Age) years? I think 30 years is plenty.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The best solution to the problem of increasing and unbalanced government and law enforcement power over the lives of everyday citizens is to educate the public as much as possible about the problem. Although the perpetually increasing powers of governments over our lives are being perpetrated in the name of protecting intellectual property today, they have nothing to do with the intellect or with anyone's property. Rather this is a ploy to gain control. Today it's IP. Yesterday it was the idea that everybody should be equal (Communism), tomorrow it'll be some other lame excuse.
If the media companies really wanted to put an end to piracy, they'd lower the prices of music recordings, movies, and other media, so that people would purchase legitimate originals, since they're superior to pirated materials and since the cost is reasonable anyway.
The only reason, and I do mean the ONLY reason, that people waste their time to pirate this crap, is because they perceive its value to be much less than its cost. Take a newspaper dispenser for example. You can put in your 25 cents or whatever a newspaper costs nowadays, open the door, and jack all the papers inside the machine. How many times in the history of the world has this happened? NONE! You know why? Because the cost of a newspaper is sufficiently low (i.e., reasonable) that nobody would bother. I believe that the added sales of music and movies due to lower prices would more than compensate for the lower per-unit revenue, not because piracy would end, but because people would simply buy more music and movies given that they're much more affordable.
canada, they tax blank cd sales for it. it's also worth noting many other countries also tax blank cd's.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Do I get to decide how much you can charge for your labor?
The labor goes into creating the first copy of the song. Subsequent copies are not made by your labor, and N.B. only copies exist. I say you are free to charge anything you want for copies of the song you have made. But only copies exist. "the song" does not exist.
Remember, the labor theory of value has long been discredited. Things simply aren't worth the amount of work put into them. I didn't ask you to make a song, I didn't ask you to release the song, I say you're free to charge what you want for release of your copy of the song, but if you won't release the song absent a copyright monopoly, that's fine by me too.
There also lots of other issues to consider (and you apparently are not mentally adept enough to realize they even exist). Why is US copyright life+90 years? More people would respect copyright if the terms were reasonable. As it is, by the time something that comes out today becomes public domain, my grandchildren will be looking for a nursing home (and this is assuming the cartels don't go after even *more* extensions). Star Wars is 31 years old. It should be in the public domain now. George Lucas got his protection and got a chance to make a ton of money off of it. We should now have it in the public domain, which was the original give-and-take idea of copyright. Star Trek TOS is even older and it should be in the public domain. Hell, even "Laugh, Clown, Laugh" isn't in the frigging public domain and my *grandparents* are too young to have seen it when it came out!
Do you begin to see why people have no respect for copyright? If there were a reasonable time period for copyrights and the MAFIAA instead used legitimate means to catch infringers, I would be all for them and say screw the freeloaders. But, with what we have now, the MAFIAA can rot in the tenth circle of hell.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
"Unauthorized" as in "forbidden by some authority". There is no such authority over imaginary property. Ideas cannot be owned.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, so here is a question for you....
If you go to a book store, purchase a copy of "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", then go to Kinko's ( or whatever your local equivalent is ) copy every page including the front and back covers, get all neatly collated and stapled then go give it to a friend are you doing something illegal?
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
For an example, see Blunt v. Patten, 2 Paine 397, 3 F.Cas. 763 (1828): In answer to a question from the court, whether the defendant had pirated from the drawings and papers, or from the engravings, he answered, from the engravings.
. . .
The act that secures copyright to authors, guards against the piracy of the words and sentiments; but it does not prohibit writing on the same subject. As in the case of histories and dictionaries.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Whether they tax blank CDs or not has no bearing on whether or not distributing copyrighted content without the copyright holder's consent is legal.
In Canada, for example, it's not: http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/03/08/22/1655233.shtml
When was the RIAA convicted of "price fixing"? I know that 5 labels were found guilty of colluding with three store chains to set a MAP, but that's not the RIAA.
You don't think copyright should be as long as it is; others think otherwise. In your oh-so-enlightened mind, that makes you God almighty correct and the rest of us simply simpletons who go along with the sheep. And if we don't agree with you we MUST be shills or trolls! Heaven forbid anyone disagree with such a towering intellect as yourself!
So, other than your PERSONAL feelings that copyright should be considerably shortened, what exactly is wrong with Sweden enforcing IP rights? What is wrong with the owners of the copyright enforcing their LEGAL rights?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Exactly! What is so wrong with slave-owners enforcing THEIR legal rights too?
You've entirely missed the point. The law is wrong. Enforcement of unjust law is wrong. That is what is wrong with Sweden enforcing intellectual monopoly (I"P" is a propaganda term) rights - Sweden should be abolishing copyright, not enforcing it.
It is about threatening and intimidating the public via civil suits where it is cheaper to surrender and pay thousands of dollars to defend against false accusation that would even see the light of day in a criminal court but can be used in corrupted civil courts that are biased towards those with large amounts of money. It is about settling out of court when the RIAA/MPAA take on some by accident who can afford a proper legal defence and basically shoots down the false accusations.
What is really becoming really apparent, is that the copyright laws need to be completely reviewed in a public forum. What should or shouldn't be copyrighted. How long copyright should last and obviously whether it is still needed or would sufficient content be created with out it. Is copyright becoming an excessive burden upon society? Is copyright bleeding off too many resources that could be more successfully deployed else where in society. Is the greed that motivates a lot of copyrighted content producing a excess of antisocial destructive content and would reduced copyright protection actual result in an improvement in the social quality of the content ie. less profit more value to society. Of course the really big issue, with cheap publishing via the internet and P2P, should the parasitic publishers actually be targeted for elimination as they no longer add any value to the content and are certainly no longer required for it's distribution?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I understand the law as written as well. You are a simpleton because you do not ask the rather obvious questions "Why is the law written this way?" and "Is this law right and just?"
Here. That took all of two seconds on an internet search. You could simply have searched for the terms "RIAA price fixing" and you would have received numerous hits, but I guess you were too busy having your apoplectic fit.
If you will actually bother to read what I wrote, I called you a shill or a troll because of the terminology you were using. You were talking about rights holders rather than artists. Also, the "others [who] think otherwise" are generally members of groups like the RIAA and others who stand to profit from eternal copyright. Copyright is a fiction, albeit a useful one if done properly. The purpose of copyright is to give a person legal rights for a limited time in exchange for the product of their creativity becoming publicly available after the time has passed. Or, to put it another way, instead of having artistic and inventive works be kept secret, the government grants legal rights so as to foster the developments of the creative arts. Again, the reason I called you a simpleton is because, while you may understand the law as written, you do not seem to begin to grasp *why* the law is there in the first place.
Again, if you will actually bother to read what I wrote, I did not say that there is something inherently wrong with copyright itself. The problems are (at least with the RIAA and possibly will be with its Swedish counterpart) (1) how long should those rights last? and (2) how should one be allowed to prosecute infringers? If I think you stole something of mine, I am well within my rights to persue legal action against you. I am not within my rights to hack your computer to try to find emails of you bragging about it, nor am I within my rights to kick in your door, hold you at gunpoint, and search your house for it. Do you even begin to see the problem here?And, by the way, your feet stink and your mother dresses you funny.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
It would be illegal to burn a copy for your friend depending on what the content was. not all content is under such terms. It wouldn't be illegal to lend your friend the CD or sell it to him either.
Now lets pretend we all stay completely within the law, how does a band get exposure radio
well here is the playlist for radio1 a national station http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/playlist/ its a total of 58 tracks. to be played over the course of a week. not much exposure for bands not on the playlist. By restricting our exposure to legal sources we don't get to hear even 1% of the music available. On the other hand, the way the world really works is that people do share their musical tastes with their friends. Realistically most of us get introduced to a particular artists music through our friends and if we like it we tend to buy at least a percentage of it. A well put together mix Cd could contain many different artists and tracks. (rarely do record labels do a good job of this, they always add filler). Your illegal Cd can be key to many legal sales, due to the exposure of the artists on the mix cd.
So while illegal copying can be seen as a negative, it largely isn't. It's building a fan base. The actions of the RIAA far from raising legal sales, positively discourages the dissemination of an artists music , limiting an artists exposure and reducing the potential fan base of an artist.
"The record companies can sell their products for whatever price they want to. Just like any other company. They make outrageous profit selling CDs for $15 each, but that's not illegal, and as long as people keep buying them for that price, they'll keep doing it."
Isn't the RIAA saying that people are not buying CD's at $15 at least not enough of them, hence the crack down on individual piracy. The real damage to music sales is counterfeit CD's and I have never seen any argument posted here that counterfeiters deserve any sympathy.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
We shall!
I understand the law as written as well. You are a simpleton because you do not ask the rather obvious questions "Why is the law written this way?" and "Is this law right and just?"
I see. So in this case you are agitating to break the law because you disagree with it. In this story, the government of Sweden is acting to uphold the law, and we were discussing the legal rights of copyright holders. The "morality" of the law is obviously open to interpretation as you'll find people on both sides of the issue. But the actual existence - and concrete language - of the law should not be in doubt.
You could simply have searched for the terms "RIAA price fixing" and you would have received numerous hits, but I guess you were too busy having your apoplectic fit.
See, if you actually could follow your OWN LINKS to their parents, and look up the original lawsuit you would find that the RIAA is not named as a defendant. It's not the RIAA. Your original statement is provably false. Maybe being able to read and follow the links Google provides would do better than just throwing three words into Google? Maybe you don't understand the legal system of the US, but if the RIAA was found guilty, then they had to be named. Not named, not guilty.
If you will actually bother to read what I wrote, I called you a shill or a troll because of the terminology you were using. You were talking about rights holders rather than artists. Also, the "others [who] think otherwise" are generally members of groups like the RIAA and others who stand to profit from eternal copyright.
Many artists are copyright holders. Many artists sell their copyrights for cash, to other companies who manage the copyrights. Others turn their copyrights over to the public domain. Talking of the copyright holder is the correct statement as it encompasses all these people - whoever holds the copyright has the legal right to pursue violations of the copyright. Artist, label, museum, collector.
Copyright is a fiction, albeit a useful one if done properly. The purpose of copyright is to give a person legal rights for a limited time in exchange for the product of their creativity becoming publicly available after the time has passed. Or, to put it another way, instead of having artistic and inventive works be kept secret, the government grants legal rights so as to foster the developments of the creative arts. Again, the reason I called you a simpleton is because, while you may understand the law as written, you do not seem to begin to grasp *why* the law is there in the first place.
Oh, I fully understand the law! I hold several registered copyrights trademarks, as well as patents. And I also understand that currently the government has decided that - in exchange for releasing your works to the public - you get the right to exclude others from copying it for a given duration. And that duration changes depending upon the status of the work, when it was first created/claimed/published, and/or the death of the original author. Apparently you do not like the duration; that's fine. But I guess you're OK with the fundamental principle of copyrights? If so, then you simply disagree on a fine point of duration, not the right.
Again, if you will actually bother to read what I wrote, I did not say that there is something inherently wrong with copyright itself. The problems are (at least with the RIAA and possibly will be with its Swedish counterpart) (1) how long should those rights last? and (2) how should one be allowed to prosecute infringers?
So your problem - as you believe - is that the term is too long, and that the copyright holder can legally sue you for violating th
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Well, don't nitpick the word, TPB also picked it up.
Wouldn't it sound worse if they are called The Intellectual Property Infringers' Bay?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Damn right. And while we're at it, we should abolish those pesky laws against stealing. I know a Ferrari isn't exactly like music, but god damn it, I really want one. And since we're randomly changing laws for our own benefit, why not?.
Maybe not
Secondly, as no man at first could possess any other public honours than were bestowed upon him, so the givers of those honours could have no power to give away the right of posterity. And though they might say, "We chooses you for OUR head," they could not, without manifest injustice to their children, say, "that your children and your children's children shall reign over OURS for ever." Because such an unwise, unjust, unnatural compact might (perhaps) in the next succession put them under the government of a rogue or a fool. Most wise men, in their private sentiments, have ever treated hereditary right with contempt; yet it is one of those evils, which when once established is not easily removed; many submit from fear, others from superstition, and the more powerful part shares with the king the plunder of the rest. Thoms Paine
While it is not speaking to this particular subject,he words still ring true.By giving such outrageous copyright extensions our rulers have colluded to give the *.AA the power to say that our children and our children's children shall reign over YOURS for ever".It was also made VERY clear during the founding of this country (and which our current congress critters would most likely hope that we would forget) that unjust laws and unjust leaders should be fought with every breath and deed.If we do not fight with everything we have against these unjust laws then nothing will every change.Simply because they will buy the votes of whomever we elect-PERIOD.Anything that deprives such of that which he covets most (wealth and the power that comes with it) CAN and SHOULD be done by those that still believe in fighting for a just system of government.
So in conclusion,while you might think it is just fine to pass laws that will lock our children's children into tithing just to view and listen to artists long passed, it really doesn't matter WHAT you think.It Matters what WE,THE PEOPLE think,which is why that is on top of the constitution.And unless you are willing to throw an ever increasing amount of the populace into your already overcrowded and decaying legal system,you WILL lose.Because the people will break unjust laws,no matter how you try to pretty them up with words like I.P.As Paine said all those years ago,it is simply Common Sense.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I thought the adjective "illegal" was to differentiate it from legal file sharing. Propaganda to me would be using the term "file sharing" to mean "illegal file sharing", thus making it easy for someone to think that all file sharing is illegal.
Parent is obivous troll. Why is there always one like this in every argument? Is it even worth parroting that copying something leaves the original in the hands of the original owner with nothing lost?
These kinds of actions will only boost projects like Freenet, GNUnet, OFF and I2P. None of them aren't really useful for the big masses yet but that's only a question of time. Maybe the amount of copyright infringing filesharing will go down for a short while, but it will still increase over time and move to completely anonymous darknets where nobody can identify anyone and nothing can ever be removed once put there, no matter how illegal or unethical the files are. In the current file sharing networks there is at least a possibility to remove for example child porn (because most file sharers agree that it shouldn't be spread). That possibility will go away in the upcoming anonymous networks.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
No, people do NOT have the right to download all the digital media they want for free. They are also NOT pirates, and file sharing NOT illegal. At least where I live it's not. Show me a law that says if you share music, you're a criminal. The only sugar coating I see is from this shill that somehow got modded up to +5.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Personally, I support the abolition of copyright law. They (the copyrightists) have apparently decided to make it a stark choice between communications liberty and enforcement of copyright.
If musicians were the only people making copyrighted works, then your position might be reasonable. Not all musicians care about copyright, and we can do without the "art" from those who do. But copyright also provides the only way to fund things that are extremely expensive, but also necessary.
Take software engineering for example. There are specialist software programs that are the product of many thousands of man years of engineering. These have been very costly to develop, but with the "no copyrights" model, they are worth no more than the cost of reproduction. The Linux-style "give it away for free" approach simply doesn't work for programs that are (a) very complex and (b) not widely used. I'm thinking of music composing, CAD, EDA and 3D design tools here; no doubt there are many other examples of very complex programs that are only required by a small number of people. In a world without IP, who will pay for the R&D cost of these programs? Is it reasonable to expect them to be written for free, by free software guys, when there is so little demand for them? Conversely, is it reasonable to expect anyone pay for them if they can be legally pirated? Would your business pay $10k for an essential program if the Pirate Bay would legally give it to you for $0?
There are other sorts of IP. Chip designs, for example. If there is no copyright, an unscrupulous fab owner can steal a design from Intel or AMD and start making identical chips. The chips will be cheaper because Intel and AMD won't see any profit from them, and the costs won't include the substantial R&D cost of designing the chips in the first place. Intel and AMD would go out of business if this type of piracy was legal. And yet that is exactly the model advocated by the "imaginary property" crowd today: if it's information, then it can't be property.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property. It is not just the MPAA and RIAA who are affected by theft of information; it is every software engineer and everyone else who is trying to make a living by selling information. Even free software programmers are affected, since IP law also protects their work from being stolen (GPL violations, etc.). The "sell concert tickets", "sell ads", "make it into a service" and "ask for donations" business models just don't apply to every case. Make no mistake, we all need some form of IP law.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
At least you are doing something very expensive... :)
Reproduction of electronic content has near-zero cost, though, so there is far more of that.
3 million to 1 is a pretty impressive share ratio - most "pirates" upload roughly as much as they download, meaning they give away one copy in return for the copy they receive.
Your main point is correct - file sharing is illegal in many jurisdictions - but please don't try to dress it up with dramatic numbers.
Oh yes, because the English language absolutely forbids a word having two different meanings...
I can't believe this was modded insightful. Did you actually read the post you're responding to, or did the red mist come down after you saw the word "copyright"? The GP wasn't "bleating" or "insisting people still have to pay $15-$20", he/she was just pointing out that regardless of what the law should be, file sharing currently is illegal in most places, so Wired is correct to describe it as such.
Okay, "piracy" is a stupid term, but not as stupid as failing to recognise the difference between is and ought.
Kids these days...
Convenient how you failed to mention that it *WOULD* be illegal if you burned a copy of the CD for your friend.
Um, that's because it wouldn't be?
stop listening and watching illegal content. It's not like there isn't anything else out there. Use the market to starve the copyright holders into submission.
Just remember to make the copy of the original CD as making copy of the copy is illegal according to Finnish law.
- Raynet --> .
What you are talking about, redistribution of content, is completely absurd! If you DO have authorization to, say download and use a file, and your are getting said file from a computer network that you are not directly an IP address of - then more than likely chances are said file will be cached at a lot of places before it gets to you. These caches are NOT AUTHORISED to redistribute content to you!! In other words walk down to a "real" shop, who have gained AUTHORIZATION at every step in the distribution chain and then wait for it there... In the world of 1's and 0's your argument is entirely one sided and erroneous. Let these "copyright holders" pay for the distribution through the web of their content (ISPs, TELCOs, exchanges, taxes, etc, etc) then what you say may, just may, be valid. Until then why should they be able to illegaly distribute content and not me!
The Linux-style "give it away for free" approach simply doesn't work for programs that are (a) very complex and (b) not widely used. I'm thinking of music composing, CAD, EDA and 3D design tools here.
You are wrong. Take Ardour or gEDA for example. I'm sure you will point out how unsophisticated these are compared to their commercial counterparts, but these programs are quite functional and suitable for 75% of what people need to do. If there were no commercial software counterparts to these, you'd better believe the companies that needed the software would contribute resources to seeing that the free versions did what they needed them to do.
In fact, I'd argue that it is because of commercial software that the free versions lag behind. If a company can buy a program for $10k, they have no motivation to see that the free version is improved. They might not even want to see the free version improved because the high cost serves as an entry barrier into the field to help keep out competitors.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property.
Unsubstantiated bullshit.
Even free software programmers are affected, since IP law also protects their work from being stolen (GPL violations, etc.).
I loathe people who make this specious argument. If there were no copyrights, there would never have been a need for the GPL in the first place. There's a reason it's referred to as "copyleft" license; it's a direct attack on the evils of copyright.
Funny... Audio Home Recording Act made making copies of CDs legal.
And oh yes...it CAN be illegal for them to sell for $15 each. It is called price fixing and they have been found guilty of it already. Their punishment was to give thousands of copies of CDs that noone was purchasing to libraries. I can't imagine that the wouldn't keep that up...offloading crap to clean their stock out AND having it count against a settlement, shit that is almost win win for them. There is no defense for these pieces of shit, please stop trying to defend them.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The problem is that people are arguing 2 completley seperate things. What is right, and what is legal. (It's funny how often these things end up on opposite ends of the Ven diagram)
Is file sharing illegal? Not always. But lets not play stupid, myself and most likely every person defending it here have used it illegally, and these companies know this.
However the twist is that from an ethical standpoint the pirates are right. The RIAA (and similar organizations) are indeed greedy middlemen who serve no real purpose in today's economy. With today's technology artists have the means to create and distribute music without them, and as Dunbal stated, many bands are starting to pick up on this. It won't be long before these organizations cease to exist, or are forced to adapt.
So this comments section is unfolding as every other article on this topic has. With people who assert that file sharing is being used to violate copyright laws and is indeed therefore illegal; and the people who believe the current legality of file sharing to be irrelevant and argue from a more philosophical standpoint as to how things "should be".
The bottom line is that regardless of your opinions on the issue it is, in most places, illegal. However, just because the law is on the side of these organizations, does not mean that they are right in either their methods, or their goals.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
Do I get to decide how much you can charge for your labor?
Yes actually, you do. I charge $150 US per consult. If you don't like it, find a cheaper doctor.
Don't buy it if you don't like the price.
Exactly. I don't like the price. But I will download it for free. Because that's what I think it's worth. I promise not to jump the fence at the concert. If I don't like the band that much or I think the tickets are too pricey I might just listen to it from the parking lot though.
But you have ZERO RIGHT to tell the owners of the copyright how much to charge
Please make up your mind. The market decides the price, when there's something approaching a free market. You don't want to pay my bill then find a cheaper doctor, like I said. How come you get that right, but OH MY GOD suddenly when it's MUSIC everything is different!!!!!!111!!
The music industry is a racketeering outfit, complete with price fixing, extortion, and exploitation of the artists. Before they could make the system work because they "owned" the distribution chain. The artist had no choice if they wanted a shot at the mass market. That has now changed. So IN SOME COUNTRIES (and I'm glad I don't live in the US) the racketeers have managed to beg/bribe politicians to turn a breach of the CIVIL code into a CRIMINAL OFFENSE, complete with jail time and huge fines, etc. Now, because the internet is a GLOBAL phenomenon, they are using their influence to try and get laws changed ALL OVER THE WORLD. To protect their racket. Imagine how profitable it must be - that's coming right out of your pocket and mine. All the Ferrari's, the cocaine, the call girls. Oh and the shitty music too, the band gets a (small) cut.
No, welcome to the internet. The market determines the price, and the price is my 1 minute to download the song. If certain bands (like Radiohead, who made more money launching their own album on the net than they ever would have normally) give me the option to donate, I will if I think it's worth it. Or I'll go to a concert.
I have EVERY right to tell people how much to charge. So do you. You just think it's the other way around.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Copyright isn't evil, immoral or anything. It has been a part of the United States of America since they were founded. They still aren't evil today, but the people in congress who have granted almost unlimited longevity to them might have been misguided in doing so.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Because, in my opinion, it demeans your art. Let me clarify. To set out, before sketch/word/stroke one, to make something that expresses yourself for the sole purpose of making money hand over fist is , again IMO, actively signing up to be a whore. In that case, while you still may garner some respect from me because you have a talent that I don't and can use it to whatever end, I will still treat you like a simple dime a dozen street corner slut. Making art and profiting as a result of that art, with out the intention of "selling out"(I guess, it sounds like it fits) is much more respectable to me. It makes me care more about the artist, and inversely less likely to "pirate" their works. I guess buying art is like giving to charity to me, the more aggressive and obnoxious you are about getting what's in my wallet the less I want to give it to you.
Convenient that the same song on a different medium requires additional cash outlay. How many times do we need to purchase the same music license? If my friend has an lp and I have a CD. He has paid his rights and I have paid mine. It hurts no one for the copy.
This discussion is not about protecting the artist. It is about GREED.
If the record companies wish to sell their product at $15 then their is no Copyright infringement because I bought a product not a license. It's either a license or a product. This little game of bait and switch is what is getting them into trouble and as more people realize this the more trouble they will be in.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Who gets to define what "selling out" is?
Should we apply your standards for art to other fields of human endeavor? If you're not working your shitty, low-level, $6-an-hour job out of sheer love and passion for customer service / burger flipping / telemarketing, are you also a "street corner slut"? Should the way people put food on the table be subjected to arbitrary "acceptability" judgments, once we're past the boundaries of safety and health regulations?
Or do you just object to people making "too much" money (however much you define "too much" to be)? If a minor comic book artist manages to supplement his income by doing $100 commission pieces, is he a whore? What about someone like Bryan Hitch, who gets $4k and up for his commissioned pieces? Hell, is the idea of illustrating someone else's stories at all selling out, too?
I don't think people who rail against copyright law should be so judgmental about such things. If you're against artificial restrictions on the distribution of creative works, why have these mental barriers regarding the act of artistic creation itself? I'll let you in a little secret: No starving artist ever set out to be one.
How about Bill Hicks?
"You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call for ever, end of story. You're another corporate f***ing shill, another whore at the capitalist gang-bang, if you do a commercial everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink."
Once you let someone pay you to say something, people will always wonder who paid you to say what you're saying now!
Bill Hicks made a living from his writing, and his performances of it. Perhaps commercials were beneath him, but selling show tickets and albums certainly wasn't. Do you trust that his words were not tailored to his audience's expectations?
Hicks was a great performer, and I enjoy a lot of his work, but let's not make him into the fucking messiah, alright? He was a talented guy who died way too young, and the world is poorer for it, but he was not the last word on anything.
Um, I don't think I said anything to give the impression that I deify Bill Hicks.
I just think he had a lot of penetrating insight, which makes his work - bitter as it is - very potent, and even more relevant today.
And as far as I can see, he had a spotless record regarding artistic integrity. Yes, he sold recordings and writings, but it was his own words he was selling. He was occasionally forced to cut material by his corporate masters, but AFAIK they never were able to make him change any of his material.
Ah, 'misguided.' So bribery and corruption aren't evil anymore..? Good to know!
Using the term "piracy" to refer to copy right infringement, is at best a bastardization of the word. Which im willing to bet was coined to pass all the connotation of real piracy aka Rape pillage and plundering (specifically w/out a Nations permission because otherwise its just privateering) onto violation of governmental protection of my/my companies idea. Or at least an idea i "obtained" one way or the other.
A governmental protection which has also been bastardized and abused to the point it doesn't even pretend to have any logical reasoning. The reason i say this is because if you write a piece of software and copyright it (yes they're controversial but that's beyond the point for right now) that's meant to operate a patented device, assuming the patent and copyright are granted at roughly the same time, the software will be protected for a century longer than the device it operates on. I've never heard a justification for such an extreme disparity between patents and copyrights
I will admit that ideas and information does have a longer useful and valuable life than most actual physical products but the entire lifetime of the creator +50-70 years? I know the duration is required by the Berne Convention, but that doesn't help it make any more sense.
I and probably alot of other people would be much more likely to respect copyrights if you could tell me why Hit Me Baby One More Time should be protected till my son is old and gray. And if it can be explained logically the huge legal team fees could be greatly reduced
I'm just going to ignore your first two paragraphs. You troll poorly. If you're against artificial restrictions on the distribution of creative works, why have these mental barriers regarding the act of artistic creation itself? I'll let you in a little secret: No starving artist ever set out to be one. These mental barriers, as I stated, are mine and mine alone. Copyright restrictions are made up by content producers and enforced by the government. I see a slight difference there. No starving artist may have ever set out to be one, but setting out with greed in your heart and a pencil in your hands is not a fast way to endear yourself to me. An example: J.K.Rowling. Her books are far from brilliant, but I found them entertaining and had no qualms about paying for the hardcovers. Then came the lego sets, and then crappy plastic toys with little "goop" containers, and so on and so forth until every ounce of respect I had was whittled away. Just wave a few bucks in front of her face and you could damn near have your very own Harry Potter licensed porn! Yes I realize that is a hyperbole that's why I wrote it, but it doesn't change the fact. That is the prime example of selling out. Not doing commissions on the side, not working to pay your fucking rent, using something you created to fuel a rampage of greed.
> Bill Hicks made a living from his writing ... Do you trust that his words were not tailored to his audience's expectations?
"I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. 'Oh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart.' Oh, man... I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags!"
"'Oh, you know what Bill's doing now? He's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. Lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research. Huge market. He's doing a good thing.' God damn it, I'm not doing that, you scumbags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!"
"'Oh, the anger dollar - huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that.' God! I'm just caught in a fucking web!"
If there were no copyrights at all, anyone could pick up any GPL project, modify it with some uber-cool new feature that everyone just has to have, then redistribute it without ever showing the source code to their modification, essentially turning it in a closed source project.
You have blinders on. What good would it do to close the source if people could copy freely copy the software? End users don't care if the source is available or not. If someone did decide to close source a modification to software, it would be relatively trivial to decompile and duplicate it if that were important. Copyright is the only thing preventing this.
And the hypothetical celebrity-sellout-street-corner-slut-scumbag could just easily as say that to defend his/her sellout-slutty ass.
Try to see my point: I don't particularly think Bill Hicks was playing to the crowd. But he was an artist who charged money for his art. Preaching about the corruption of art while charging people to hear you kinda takes the edge off it.
Whether they tax blank CDs or not has no bearing on whether or not distributing copyrighted content without the copyright holder's consent is legal.
In Canada, for example, it's not: http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/03/08/22/1655233.shtml
Though Canada does require a higher standard of evidence than "here's some plain text log files showing that this IP was making available a file named usher.mp3. We don't have any evidence that this file was by the musician Usher or that this file was uploaded to anyone or that it resided on the computer of the person who's name is on the account (not that we have that name since there are privacy laws requiring us to get a court order by providing actual evidence before the ISP will reveal it). But make them give us money anyway."
I think your perspective on this matter is interesting, but I am not convinced that there is something special about information that means it can't be property. It is easy to copy, yes, but it is not easy to create, and I think that is why copyright law is justified. We must distinguish between the principles of copyright law and their actual implementation, which is flawed in many ways.
Abolishing copyright might lead to a better world, but I am unconvinced. I think it would be better to change the law to more accurately reflect reality. Historically, abolishing property rights has led to less freedom, not more, and I think it would be best to continue to allow everyone the choice between whether they want to give their work away (like BSD), use a permissive license (like the GPL), or sell for profit (like Microsoft). In this world, free software can (and does) replace commercial software, but nothing compels you to make one or the other.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
I don't know what the legal situation in Canada is like, but it's entirely possible that a reasonable standard of evidence will end up being required in the U.S., too. While I know we have tons of settled suits and paid-off threats, there is but one actual case that's gone to trial. My rough review of the evidence in that case is that it was circumstantial, but fairly good -- that is, it seemed highly probable she actually downloaded and made available copyrighted music. (I'm sure there's no evidence indicating that someone else actually downloaded them from her, and "making available" is on shaky ground.) However, a single case doesn't define a policy -- only rulings by appellate courts count for that, and the trial is currently under appeal.
We'll hope for the best. Everyone's favourite video-game-hating lawyer can tell you what can happen if you keep filing junk lawsuits in the U.S.
Historically, abolishing property rights has led to less freedom, not more
Okay. No. Just no. The single biggest property-right abolition was abolition of "human property" i.e. slavery. You may be thinking of the american misunderstanding of soviet communism, but that didn't abolish property rights, it transferred them to "the people", in practice meaning "the state".
I am not convinced that there is something special about information that means it can't be property.
Information doesn't exist, only copies of information do. Physical property rights are entirely sufficient for justice.
So that's what it comes down to, you object to people making "too much" money, as I guessed earlier. I'm glad you accept it's your own personal bias and nothing more, though.
I'm not disagreeing with that. But the key term there is "illegal". People who make illegal copies are criminals, so why all the surprise when they get treated like it?
The "solution" isn't copying music with reckless abandon, it's getting the law changed.
Maybe not
"Ok, it makes a difference wether you share some music with your close friends or thousands of 'friends' over the net."
Why ?
I am completely serious here, and asking from both a legal and moral perspective. Why should the volume of copyright infringement matter ?
*Just a little example from Germany: [...] Therefore legislation has seriously considered to introduce an exemption, below which prosecutors don't act.
Goodness. The Law and Common Sense hand in hand. Who woulda thunk it. Next thing they'll be "exempting" anyone who is participating in non-profit copyright infringement.
You can't easily "decompile" software. Without the source code, even if you can freely distribute it, you lose the freedom of then making your own modification or re-merging said modifications into your own fork, which might happen to be the main project. Essentially, any entity could hijack your software and make it their own. As a developper, that's the last thing you'd want to happen.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Take software engineering for example. There are specialist software programs that are the product of many thousands of man years of engineering. These have been very costly to develop, but with the "no copyrights" model, they are worth no more than the cost of reproduction.
Then they will be tied to a hardware dongle, like they are now. (Apple, for example, understand this.)
There are other sorts of IP. Chip designs, for example. If there is no copyright, an unscrupulous fab owner can steal a design from Intel or AMD and start making identical chips.
You say this like every neighbourhood's "slippery Jim" has a chip fab.
Not to mention, why should the design of a chip be different from, say, the Chief Sales Manager ? If they can't keep ji, onboard, they deserve to lose him.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property.
Information is not property, and any laws (or business models) that treat it as such are doomed to failure. It's simply a matter of time (and Copyright had a pretty good run - 400-odd years before the Internet clearly exposed its brokenness).
In fact, I'd argue that it is because of commercial software that the free versions lag behind. If a company can buy a program for $10k, they have no motivation to see that the free version is improved. They might not even want to see the free version improved because the high cost serves as an entry barrier into the field to help keep out competitors.
Correct. In particuar, the idea that one company would *help* a competitor by improving one of their tools is the kind of thing that gets you laughed out of the boardroom (and fired).
I loathe people who make this specious argument. If there were no copyrights, there would never have been a need for the GPL in the first place. There's a reason it's referred to as "copyleft" license; it's a direct attack on the evils of copyright.
No. Make no mistake. Without copyright, the goals of the GPL would be unattainable short of individual contractual agreements between developers.
If the objectives of the GPL are of significant importance to you, then you need to be a Copyright supporter.
You can't easily "decompile" software.
That is complete rubbish. Of course you can. It can be illegal in the USA under anti-reverse-engineering provisions of the DMCA, but e.g. the European Amiga community had a 20-year history of widespread binary patching and public domain binary-only software and was vibrant and active, working much like open source only with the assumption that the binaries were adequate source, even long after the publishers of the OS and makers of the computers disappeared. Now, it helped that 68k assembly was easier to read than x86, but x86-64 brings sanity in that department.
Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable, it would also be unnecessary. Binary only software competing in a free market (free: no copyright or patent monopolies) would rapidly lose out to open source software anyway, which has the advantage of source availablity.
Essentially, any entity could hijack your software and make it their own. As a developper, that's the last thing you'd want to happen.
No, because YOUR software is the tree YOU publish. Don't confuse attribution right (right to be recognised as an author) and copyright (right to restrict redistribution). Plagiarism is still fraud in the complete absence of copyright law.
>> You can't easily "decompile" software.
> That is complete rubbish. Of course you can
You can?? That's awesome! What kind of tools do you need?
I knew you could decompile binaries, but I didn't know you could do it easily. Most of the 'decompiled' code I've seen is about as easy to understand as raw assembly anyway.
Can you reconstruct variable names, function names, and high-level structures and algorithms?
Agreed, so far. But, by the same token, the 'the market' is also free to set its end of the 'price point.' But in the current (possibly outdated) model of this market if seller-A wants 10 bucks, the market only has a buy or not buy choice. No actual freedom, no determination of price point as function of supply and demand.
Potential buyers, are prevented from participating, AT ALL, in this type of closed market unless they meet an arbitrarily set price. So, what to do? If there is no 'auction' available, no supply/demand rationality, then anyone who wants to participate is screwed unless they acquiesce.
If my choice is limited, by the business model being enforced in this artificial 'market', to either paying ransom, or paying nothing except access to a common carrier, I'd be stupid to give in to ransom. It only encourages the dead model. Much like 'negotiating' with terrorists, or kidnappers, no?
One doesn't have to fall back to 'information wants to be free' mode, in order to understand that the market, one way or the other, will set the 'price' based on supply and demand.
It's a simple case of the monopolists versus classical free market forces. This is not new, at all. It's a war. And it revolves around the poles of Greed and Desire. Many artists know that when their fans download bootlegs of shows, or 'snipe' a few tracks from a weak album, the same desire is going to express itself in financially rewarding terms, from the artists' point of view, when conditions/products/perceived values alter. That's how free markets function.
As for so-called 'legality'... laws are mutable. And economics shows that when artificial methods are employed in the defense of 'sick', or 'failing' businesses, industries, or models, they can postpone, but not prevent, the inevitable. And usually the backlash, that Newtonian economic action/reaction outcome, is far more unsettling for the proponents and temporary beneficiaries of the artificial 'preventive' mechanisms, than letting the market (and, specifically, price points) evolve naturally.
But these guys are so short-sighted (in terms of investment, risk/reward, etc), and stupid, in terms of the history of their own market, that they are doomed to having a rough ride (which will get uglier for all of us) and a rude awakening, when the new model finally becomes conventional. The 'auction' model is ancient, and sound, for a reason, and history is littered with once-big names and movements that thought they could legislate or 'enforce/coerce' their away around immutable laws.
So, hey, go ahead, make bread $40 a loaf, and kill the rioters, but eventually it'll be the King's head laying in the guillotine.
Wow, you fail economics, hard.
The price is determined when nobody buys the product for $10, and the seller lowers the price or goes out of business. The choice to buy or not buy is your freedom.
So, you're saying people who haven't earned anything should be given stuff "just because"? There's a word for that...
You're horribly confused. In one paragraph you're advocating extreme communism, and in the next you're saying you support supply and demand. They're more or less mutually exclusive positions.
lolwut?
Maybe not
Essentially, any entity could hijack your software and make it their own.
Nobody would do this to any substantial degree. Without copyright, the incentive to dump resources into writing closed-source software disappears. There is nothing to gain by "hijacking" the software in this way, because there is no way to profit through the sales of the software itself.
The only people who would be remotely interested in the underlying code would be other developers, and if they really wanted it that badly, then they could simply duplicate it. A decompiler does not output beautiful code, but for the purpose of figuring out how somebody did something tricky, it's good enough. A decent programmer can fill in the rest of the details.
You seem to be imagining a situation where a team of programmers takes something the Linux kernel and makes huge changes to it that results in a noticeably distinct piece of software, and keeps it closed source in order to make a profit. You might get some rogue group trying this from time to time, but there's no business model here. It takes a lot of resources to do something like this, and without copyright there just isn't any way to make money off of it. End users don't care, and it's not like you are going to hold the rest of the kernel team hostage over the code. They'd just take whatever bits they liked, reverse-engineer them, and incorporate them into the mainline kernel.
If the objectives of the GPL are of significant importance to you, then you need to be a Copyright supporter.
You don't seem to get it. The objectives of the GPL will be fulfilled the day copyrights are abolished.
You don't seem to get it. The objectives of the GPL will be fulfilled the day copyrights are abolished.
No, you don't seem to get it. Without copyright, the GPL essentially becomes equivalent to the BSDL. Ie: incapable of ensuring further modifications are GPLed.
Nobody would do this to any substantial degree. Without copyright, the incentive to dump resources into writing closed-source software disappears. There is nothing to gain by "hijacking" the software in this way, because there is no way to profit through the sales of the software itself.
Uh, of course there is. The incentive would be basically the same as it is today.
All that would happen is that software would become harder to pirate. Hardware dongles and "phoning home" would become a standard part of any piece of non-trivial software.
No, because people who care don't want their practices whitewashed from civil to criminal liability by a ponce with a penchant for suborning the usage of words. For example, the suborning of the word "hacker" toward having a nefarious meaning until it was almost a synonym of "cracker".
For the author's views on the relationship between the concepts of plagiarism and piracy, you'll have to read the following, more extensive quote from pp. 383: Piracy Defined and Distinguished from Plagiarism -- In the law of copyright, piracy is the use of literary property in violation of the legal rights of the owner. The meaning of infringement is the same. Neither word is properly used where no legal rights are invaded. Hence, strictly speaking, it is not piracy to take without authority either a part or the whole of what another has written, if neither a statute nor the common law is thereby violated. Such act may be plagiarism, which is a moral but not necessarily a legal wrong; but to constitute piracy, there must be an act against the law. Plagiarism further differs from piracy in that the plagiarist falsely offers as his own what he has taken from the writings of another. The pirate may or may not do this. Hence, there may be an unauthorized appropriation of literary property which is neither piracy nor plagiarism, as the republication in the United States of the work of a foreign author. This is not piracy, because no law is violated; and without misrepresentation as to authorship, it is not plagiarism. So, also, the same act may be at once plagiarism and piracy.
The word piracy is applied to the unlawful taking of any kind of intellectual property, whether literary, dramatic, or art. Nor is its use restricted to productions published and protected by statute. The violation of common law rights by publicly reading a literary composition, representing a manuscript drama, making or exhibiting copies of a work of art, may properly be called piracy. A Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions in Great Britain and the United States Embracing Copyright in Works of Literature and Art, and Playright in Dramatic and Musical Compositions By Eaton Sylvester Drone
So... You were saying something?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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Hmm... I think you're confusing copyright with patents. Or perhaps we are confusing the difference. I see the original intent of copyright as a means for the original author to benefit from and be recognized for his creative content. Likewise for patents, to allow the Davids of inventing to slay the Goliaths of the market.
At some point the problem becomes one like the US Military's: you will pay whatever price so long as it works. If copies become free then yes, Dassault and company will go out of business without a major business model change. However, with a few improvements in their licensing scheme and some server upgrades you've got a viable system again and people we be paying 10k per seat again. Why? Because Dassault and MS have the money to make the licensing work. Security is the natural answer to the problem. And everyone knows that no lock is impenetrable, so it is effectively the complexity of the lock that determines the length of protection for your IP. Why waste the time and money of our government with what we can do on our own for less cost and better results?
IANAL. IANS. IANAPA. (I am not Swedish. I am not a pirate, arrr!)
If you have admissible evidence that someone is committing a crime, such as copyright infringement, I see no reason you cannot go to a judge, get a warrant, and get the IP address of the culprits. I see no reason that you cannot take the evidence for any number of such crimes, and go to a judge, and get a warrant to get the IP addresses of all of the culprits. The problem with the RIAA is that they really don't do that. They taken blanket unsubstatiated information and then go directly to the ISP/school/whatever. However, given a reasonable due process, this is quite reasonable.
And this really doesn't impact The Pirate Bay. If The Pirate Bay hosts torrents, and those torrents lead to people who are illegally copying files, then I see no reason that the copyright holder's ability to get that IP address has anything to do with the person hosting the files or the torrents. Either way, they are not liable any more than a bank is liable if someone puts drugs into their safe deposit box. No more than if someone agrees to a drug deal while drinking coffee at your restaurant.
a competing vendor could sell cheaper product that is adequately substitutable
They can always record their own songs that are "adequately substitutable" to providing musical enjoyment.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
For most kinds of product, a competing vendor could sell cheaper product that is adequately substitutable - due to copyright monopoly law, doing that is classed as "piracy" for some types of information pattern expressed in a physical substrate.
Whoah, whoah, whoah. You can sell a "competing product" all you want - go make your own band, record your own songs, and burn your own CDs, and put them on your own store shelves.
What? You were talking about buying one disc, and burning a thousand "competing" copies to re-sell? Then and only then is "copyright monopoly law" involved. The only "monopoly" involved is the right for the artist, or a label if the artist chooses to deal with them, to hold on to their own work.
Besides, I don't think "substrate" means what you think it means. Lern2chemistry.
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I'd say more correctly; "No one should be out to EXPLOIT art for a profit"
Again, why not? Far as I know, "exploting art for a profit" is just a negative, misleading, sophist way of saying "making art for a profit."
We wouldn't have many artists if art wasn't profitable.
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I guess the surprise is due to a change in attitude, most of us between say 40 to 55 now had fairly extensive collections of c90's often we would buy an album along with a blank c90 with the intention of recording the album on the very first play. Go to someone older and they had reel to reel tapes.
no one got bankrupted for taping albums. As a further point whilst you say people making illegal copies are criminals, largely they sre not tried in criminal court and basically its a case of breach of contract(that wasn't signed read or agreed to by the purchaser).
At present the act of copying is more visible due to the internet, however consider most people have at least a few friends, and these friends will have further friends, this makes it trivial to share many thousands of songs without touching the internet. Good ole sneaker.net will replace the internet file sharing if the riaa continues to crack down.
In fact i can envisage an application to create an adhoc wireless network and automatically exchange songs without ever knowing who you share with and without touching the internet. can you imagine how popular that would be on college campus's
It's a futile fight the record companies are fighting, and its victims are probably it biggest customers.
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