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Lawyer Banned for Threatening File-Sharers
S. Hare brings us a report from TorrentFreak about a lawyer working for a Swiss anti-piracy group who was recently given a 6-month ban for her attempts to intimidate file-sharers though letters threatening fines and court fees. Elizabeth Martin demanded 400 Euros each from "hundreds of thousands of file-sharers," and suggested that they would have to face large settlements if they did not comply. The Paris Bar Council took exception to this and instituted the ban. Martin worked for Logistep, a company who has had trouble following laws in the past.
"The disciplinary board decided that 'By choosing to reproduce aggressive foreign methods, intended to force payments, the interested party also violated [the code] which specifies that the lawyer cannot unfairly represent a situation or seriousness of threat.' In addition, the lawyer also violated the code by cashing payments into a private account, not the usual dedicated litigation account, known as a 'Carpa'. Martin also refused to reveal how many payments had been received from file-sharers."
Ever heard of Linux? Jackass. Go back under your bridge.
How does the RIAA know that it's theft? That's the issue many take with them. It's the way they go after people through their ISP's. Which they SHOULDN'T have access to in the first place. But silly me, I always assumed "Innocent until PROVEN guilty" meant just that. My mistake.
Should not such an act as this hold a penalty of disbarment?
This is only another situation that shows there is no position a human can hold that prevents him from committing some deception against others.
It is because of such evidence that some positions of power should be eliminated or have built-in checks that would at least require wide scope and unlikely collusion to perform.
Especially those positions of initiating war.
Yeah, and some of us can keep producing value, not like other people who _apparently_ can only produce value once in their lifetime and so require copyright terms of > 100 years to support them (or long patent terms).
To the latter bunch I say, go find something you are better at and stop wasting time and resources.
If the speed of communications has got faster, and people want a faster pace of progress, then the length of all these monopolies should be getting shorter and shorter, not longer and longer. In the old days it takes a long time for a book (or other work) to get from an author to people (takes time for people to get to know about the book, and for payment to reach the author etc). Now I believe it should be much faster if you are doing things right.
Should be permanent, and charged with extortion or at the least fraud.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is how the swiss go to the supermarket:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Caroline-Migros-p1000507.jpg
In much writing things are still going to take a while. Peer review takes time, because peer reviewers have busy lives. Doing fine typesetting is still a laborious task (yes, computers help, but you still have to painstakingly tweak their output).
Still, for some forms of entertainment, things do move fast, and once things are out they can be quickly duplicated. But in fact, they have always moved fast and copyright was an unnatural innovation forced into the the market only a few hundred years ago. In Ancient Rome, for instance, people would transcribe poetry recitals, have copies mass-produced by a team of amanuenses, and then sell it in the marketplace. No one seems to have had a problem with this lightning-speed duplication and sale of material. In his Epigrams , the poet Martial complains only that someone else was putting his own name on his poems, but he had no problem with people profiting from the poetry itself, even if he didn't see a dime. The arts flourished even without copyright.
The digital era has brought nothing new in many respects. Art just fine existed before copyright, and we should dismantle it now because it will exist after copyright.
> If they had any real ballz they would have permanently dis-barred her, especially given her past abuses.... oh wait the law really doesn't apply to those who are supposed to enforce it...
Lawyers are not charged with enforcing the law. They are charged with bending it to their own purposes, should that be getting an innocent man out of jail or extorting money from large amounts of people.
And besides, this is a suspended sentence, ie she will not be banned for 6 months this time, but would in the future if she commits more ethics violations.
A friend of mine had a kid sister who got in with some bad friends, and was involved in some apparent shop lifting shenanigans at the local mall. She never stole anything, but her friends did, and this was made pretty clear with store management, so nothing ever came of it.
A few months later they get a letter from a law firm in Tennessee (they live in Canada), threatening to sue unless they turned over $500. My friend's family was quite intimidated, and was even ready to fork over the cash until I wrote them a letter for them in response. I basically told them to fuck off, and that if they wanted to pursue charges we would see them in court.
The knew full well that there isn't a lick of evidence that my friend's sister ever stole anything, they also know that there's no fricking way they're going to go through all the trouble of getting a local (Canadian) law firm to sue. It was all one big scare tactic.
And people wonder why lawyers are so hated.
I've done professional typesetting with LaTeX. Yes, the TeX world is a wonderful, but you still have to laborious tweak the output. LaTeX will, for example, put a single word on a line at the end of a paragraph, a taboo. You also have to remove overfull \hboxes, ensure that hyphenation of proper names is correct, and work out any issues with non-Latin characters (UTF-8 is only partially supported in the TeX world, even with xetex).
Fine!
Whats your account number, social security, and birth date? I'll transfer it into your account.
"In much writing things are still going to take a while"
;). If you're good or entertainingly crap you can get $$$.
AFAIK the copyright term stuff is _after_ publication. So if you're not done yet, don't publish.
My point was nowadays, after you publish, you should be able to get word out really quickly. Just some emails to your friends linking to your "teaser material" and word will soon get around, especially if you didn't actually produce crap. Or your crap is so crap that it "wrapped round to great" - just look at some of the "internet phenoms"
If the teaser material is all you've managed to produce, perhaps you should just do it as a hobby and get different job.
Wouldn't it be great if my employer paid me for the next 100 years just because I created one piece of work? It might be cushy for me, but I doubt this sort of thing benefits society, especially if it means nobody else can use that piece of work or a close derivative without my permission for the next 100 years. I think that's very wrong.
Lastly, someone else putting name on your work = plagiarism, which is something different from copying since it involves lying.
A copyright term of even just 7 years should be ok. Microsoft will still get money from XP, but they'd then have to make something much better than Vista, since people could use Win2K instead.
If they don't like it, I'm sure Apple or IBM will happily step up to take their place.
In much writing things are still going to take a while. Peer review takes time, because peer reviewers have busy lives. Doing fine typesetting is still a laborious task (yes, computers help, but you still have to painstakingly tweak their output).
All of that is absolutely NOTHING compared to the days when goods were carried by horse, typesetting involved blocks of metal, strips of lead, and a hammer, and a printing press' speed was measurable in seconds per page.
At that time, marketing was primarily word of mouth and equally slow to produce print ads in entirely local papers (no such thing as buying a national ad). The time between an author completing a work and having it ready for printing was measured in years. Still more years would pass between publishing and mots potentially interested buyers hearing of a work's existance.
At that time, in spite of the long lead time to market, 28 years was considered adequate time on a copyright.
By contrast, these days, the time between an author completing a work and it being bulk printed and marketed to all potential buyers is measurable in months. In spite of that, we seem to think a copyright measured in lifetimes is needed.
It's especially a travesty in software where a 28 year old program is of historical interest at best (more likely forgotten entirely).
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
"Switzerland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world."
... i guess we'll have to shoot twice."
i'm reminded of a joke i was once told. during WW2, hitler spoke to a swiss national saying, "y'know, there are only 500,000 people in your entire country. i've got a million people in my army. what do you think will happen if i just decide to walk right in?" to which the swiss person replied, "well
It should be, um, large numbers of people.