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$4 Million In Fines For Linking To Infringing Files
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The MPAA won judgments totaling $4M against two sites which merely link to infringing content. They're not arguing that it's an infringement of their distribution right, like the RIAA has with their 'making available' argument. Instead, they got the sites for 'contributory copyright infringement', just like RIAA v. LimeWire. To translate all that legalese into English, search engines which primarily index copyright-infringing material and the people who run them may not be safe in the US. That applies even if the sites in question do not host any infringing materials, participate in, or encourage the infringement done by their users. And, even honoring DMCA notices in order to take advantage of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions hasn't prevented the **AA from suing."
Google is likely to sued real soon as well as many other web sites.
This is actually something I hadn't considered before. Say some industry thugs go out and find some techno-thugs who just happen to operate in a jurisdiction outside the reach of U.S. law and monitoring. Said techno-thugs inherit big bags of money for all the infringing content they can get placed on competing independent distribution systems alongside "legitimate" tracks.
Unfortunately for them, said independent distribution guys just happen to be inside U.S. jurisdiction. Bad day...
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I see this as a very bad thing all around. Surely the point of search engines is that they provide access to all corners of teh interweb and can only do this by hitting every site and indexing it. If they become responsible for the content on those sites, or rather not providing links to "illegal" content, how do they continue to provide that access when they may potentially have to vet every link they index?
OK, so they can filter but surely that's as much of a minefield as indexing everything? Imagine the law suits when their filtering algorithms start excluding one company and include their opposition.
Not sure I like the sound of this.
Well, no. These sites' purpose and content consisted substantially of indexing and enabling the search for unlawful copies of copyrighted works. While Google certainly has some capability to do this as well, I don't think most people would see that as a substantial portion of their content or their purpose.
This case really isn't that surprising.
This will break the internet.
Don't think so. The ??AAs are much like school bullies. They prefer picking on the weaker kids, they rarely try it on the ones that can push back.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I mean, apart from these sites do you know any other site that so blatantly and directly markets themselves to people breaking the law? It'd be on the level of a water pipe store with a posted map to nearby pot salesmen. Aside from my feelings on copyright, if something first is illegal I think there should be limits to how far you can go assisting them, marketing to them, turning a blind eye to them and so on. Whether you call that "aiding and abetting", "conspiracy" or "contributory infringement" is more of a legal issue, but clearly some of these sites overstep what I'd consider natural. It's like seeing a gun marketed as "Cop killer*" and in 2pt font "*only applicable when said cop is on drugs, shooting wildly around him and shooting him would be in self-defense". Some of the piracy sites are equally blatant, like "Get the latest TV shows here*" and in 2pt font "*no responsibility for 3rd party content."
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
easy, find an XSS vulnerability in either the MPAA or the RIAA site and link it to copyrighted material, then also target government websites with the same XSS vulnerability and do the same, repeat over again until change.
Our copyright in the US works largely on the owners' good graces, apathy, and ignorance. Copyright infringement, in a technical sense, happens constantly. And not just from music and movie downloaders, but ordinary people. Tattoos of cartoon characters, playing some popular song on your guitar, hosting images someone else created on your own server.
This may, in fact, have appeared on Slashdot before, but John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, estimates that a typical person could easily rack up $12.45 million in copyright liability doing ordinary things like sending email, sketching on a notepad, the afore-mentioned cartoon tattoo, writing poetry, and singing "Happy Birthday." And then there's this:
You can find the entirety of Professor Tehranian's article in PDF here.
The entire structure of our copyright law in the US is based on what strikes me as being the courts' absolutely blind willingness to enforce laws, the language of which criminalizes the day-to-day acts of normal people, and therefore makes the system open to the sort of hyper-technical abuse characterized in the article.
Of course, our national legislators are to blame for the sloppy language, not the courts. But the courts are still the agents enforcing these laws that just fly in the face of any reasonable or well-considered social policy.
I agree.
Breaking the law and then complaining that the punishment is unfair because it leans too heavily in favor of corporate interests is not the right way to go about it. The right way is to refuse to purchase the *AA's products (thus depriving them of ammunition), and then becoming politically active about IP policy.
This isn't a situation where you need to break the law to make a living or to feed your kids. It's just music and movies. Learn to play the piano. Go see a play.
(And to strike pre-emptively, yes I know that the entire system is unfair and tilted against the little guy. But for all its warts this is the best system so far devised. And when enough people get angry the politicians will jump on the populist bandwagon, too.)
Personal and verbatim, non commercial copy should be allowed.
And commercial copying should simply be taxed and the revenues handed to the creator of the copied work (to the extent with which such creative works need to be funded and monetized beyond other incentives). The whole monopoly aspect is what prevents and hampers the creation of wealth and flow of information. It needs to go.
It's annoying that many politicians in capitalistic countries can see the economic market damage created by state-run monopolies, but somehow fail to acknowledge the same damage caused when you hand out state-sponsored monopolies to private interests.
Except that *linking* should NOT be considered a crime, regardless of how you view IP rights.
That is as bad as simply writing a book on how to make an explosive device and being sued into nonexistence.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The whole monopoly aspect is what prevents and hampers the creation of wealth and flow of information.
The whole monopoly aspect is what controls and channels wealth and information. This doesn't have anything to do with protecting the artists, it has everything to do with protecting the artist's overlords ability to control and profit from the artists in their stable.
We are all just people.
I have no embarassment whatsoever in telling musicians and moviemarkers that they've cultivated a disgusting and immoral entitlement mentality in expecting to get paid for the rest of their lives for each work they produce.
I'm a software developer. I write thousands of lines of code every year. I've probably written well in excess of a million lines of code since I started doing this. And you know what? I was paid for writing each one of those, with no expectation of continuing profits until I die. I can point to lots and lots of places where the people that employed me made quite a bit of money from my code. I really don't have a problem with that, even though I'd say that the majority of programmers, tech writers, and other creative folks who produced copyrighted work for hire provide a lot more benefit to society that the majority of musicians and filmmakers. Why should some high-school dropout with no useful skills other than wailing (off-pitch, no less) into a microphone expect to be any different? Similarly, why should any corporation expect that?
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