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Sharing 2,999 Songs, 199 Movies Is Safe In Germany
unassimilatible writes "Torrentfreak is reporting that German prosecutors will now only pursue larger-scale file sharers on the Internet, as they are tired of being the entertainment industry's profit collector. 'Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in [the] future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3,000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.' And the money quote: 'It seems that the legal system in Germany has had enough of this "abuse" of the criminal law system for "civil" monetary gain.' If only an American politician would make this point. Why should taxpayers underwrite their government becoming enforcers for the entertainment industry? Then again, when you see how much politicians are being paid, an answer suggests itself."
Bush should break off diplomatic relations with such an evil country. That will show them ...
The RIAA is using civil suits.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
welcome our German overlords.
Wait, what?
What on Earth do those mean? When I click on them, I still don't see any relationship between the articles that've been tagged with them.
They came first for those who downloaded 3000 songs,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't download any.
Then they came for those who downloaded 1000 songs,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't download any.
Then they came for those who downloaded 100 songs,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't download any.
Then they came for those who downloaded 1 song,
and I didn't speak up because I didn't download any.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Beginning next month, copyright holders can just ask ISPs directly for the address of filesharers, so they don't need the public prosecutor anymore. Until then, having the public prosecutor investigate copyright infringement was the only way to get the name and address of the filesharer. No case was actually pursued. It was always just a vehicle to get the necessary information for a civil suit (actually just a way to get people to sign cease-and-desist declarations and pay up: The civil suit also rarely goes to court).
In other news, German prosecutors annnounced today that they will only be prosecuting auto thefts when more than 200 are committed, and car break-ins when 3000 are committed. "Our goal is to prevent organized crime", said their spokesperson, "we don't care about the occasional junkie or joy-rider."
Ok, I admit that the above paragraph is a bit down the slippery slope, but the point is that the slope exists. This problem should be solved by the legislative branch, not the executive. If the law is faulty, it should be re-written by the legislature, not kluged by the prosecutors. Otherwise we have unelected officials effectively making the law.
[ Full disclosure: I've never, TTBOMK, either sent or deliberately aquired any copyrighted work without proper consent. On the one occasion in which my copyrighted work was posted without my consent the poster - who had received a version withgout copyright notice attached - happily complied upon the first request. ]
Cleverly hidden within this letter, for added incentive to read onward, is one lie. Not a lie of statistical or grammatical error but a ludicrous falsehood at once so absurd as to strike the reader as an insult to human intelligence and yet so mentally deficient as to convince the reader that I will let John McCain's record speak for itself. The points I plan to make in this letter will sound tediously familiar to everyone who wants to stop McCain's encroachments on our heritage. Nevertheless, his hypocrisy is transparent. Even the least discerning among us can see right through it.
By this, I mean that McCain ignores a breathtaking number of facts, most notably:
Fact: McCain's votaries must mend their ways.
Fact: What McCain considers a fair shake, the rest of us consider a repressive, humiliating, culture-stripping experience.
Fact: McCain's declamations have earned him opprobrium, suspicion, resentment, and hatred.
In addition, McCain has been deluding people into believing that he has achieved sainthood. Don't let him delude you, too. Do his loyalists halt the destructive process that is carrying our civilization toward extinction? No, that would be the correct and logical thing to do. Instead, they ransack people's homes.
Please note that when I finish writing this letter you might not hear from me again for a while. I simply don't have enough strength left to take the mechanisms, language, ideology, and phraseology for determining what is right and what is wrong out of the hands of McCain and his serfs and put them back in the hands of ordinary people. Nevertheless, we have a choice. Either we let ourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter by McCain and his satraps or we defend with dedication and ferocity the very rights that McCain so desperately wants to abolish. While I don't expect you to have much trouble making up your mind you should nevertheless consider that McCain's bloody-minded attempt to construct a creative response to my previous letter was absolutely pitiful. Really, McCain, stringing together a bunch of solecistic insults and seemingly random babble is hardly effective. It simply proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the last time I told his cohorts that I want to catalogue his swindles and perversions they declared in response, "But it is obdurate to question McCain's conjectures." Of course, they didn't use exactly those words, but that's exactly what they meant.
So what if McCain hates me for pointing out that his brain must work very different from mine? Let him hate me. I consider such hatred a mark of honor, a mark of distinction. He is an interesting character. On the one hand, McCain likes to marginalize and eventually even outlaw responsible critics of beer-guzzling Luddites. But on the other hand, I recently heard him tell a bunch of people that sectarianism is a be-all, end-all system that should be forcefully imposed upon us. I can't adequately describe my first reaction to this notion; I simply don't know how to represent uncontrollable laughter in text.
When McCain says that he has his moral compass in tact, he's just plain wrong -- not "partially wrong" but "entirely and absolutely wrong". And let me tell you, he asserts that principles don't matter. Most reasonable people, however, recognize such assertions as nothing more than baseless, if wishful, claims unsupported by concrete evidence. He accuses me of being a liar. The only proven liar around here, however, is McCain. Only a die-hard liar like McCain could claim that all any child needs is a big dose of television every day. The truth, in case you haven't already figured it out, is that to say that censorship could benefit us is appalling nonsense and untrue to boot.
I am reminded of the quote, "His principles have clearly been demonstrated to be coterminous with those of directionless, dodgy devil-worshippers." This comment is not as tyrannical as it seems because McCain is a man utterly without honor, without principles, without a shred of genuine patriotism. That's
Why should taxpayers underwrite their government becoming enforcers for the entertainment industry? Then again, when you see how much politicians are being paid, an answer suggests itself.
Because the entertainment industry claims that laws are broken. Having said that, it's more of a question about what's fair use and what's not.
Full Tilt
Germany is a federal state, comprised of multiple independent states with their own governments. According to TFA, this only counts for prosecutors from the Nort-Rhine Westphalia.
Come on. Learn a little something about the rest of the world.
71 thumper forgets that
a) telling people they are using GPL code has so far been the way to fix its use in CSS
b) people are SELLING applications FOR MONEY that include GPL code, NOT SHARING for FREE.
come on people, its about distributing, not obtaining, it's ALWAYS about sharing, NEVER about downloading.
If you're going to rant at least make it technically accurate. With torrent clients, almost always when downloading you are also sharing. They are in fact realistically equivalent for 99% of file sharers.
There's enough other FUD you don't have to be inaccurate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're comparing theft of actual property with making duplicates of intellectual property.
In the former case, you deprive the owner use of said property. In the latter, the owner still has the property.
The slippery slope is actually people like you making stupid analogies about this kind of thing, prompting ever more draconian laws and malicious prosecution.
I've already seen it:
This is akin to the local sheriff saying he will no longer prosecute muggings where the victim did not go to the hospital.
This equivocations seem to say that these people want *all* the laws enforced without any regard to a prioritizing by benefit to society.
The key they mentioned was "criminal law for monetary GAIN."
They are right in refusing to criminally prosecute citizens where no appreciable harm was incurred for the monetary enrichment of a single party. Its like watching a car speeding a little but otherwise safely and *NOT* pulling them over and giving them a ticket.
There isn't a single country in the world in which you would want all the laws enforced consistently.
part 1 and part 2. Beware, google translation ahead.
sweet he supports DRM as well
I suppose next you're going to tell me that Hitler lives?
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Its good to not be the errand boy of thr RIAA and others but 3K songs seems a might high..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
the pirates will just have a bunch of folks doing the infringements, each staying below the thresholds and thereby not having to worry about prosecution in Germany? That's assuming it would be worth it to break up the 'transactions' that way.
Yeah, when we shot or hanged all of the leaders, took all of the money from the banks, looted the museums and split the entire country in half for almost 50 years it was just a slap on the wrist.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Pretty bad comparison and I suspect that you got that +3, Insightful only because some moderators wanted to convince themselves that they're not biased and in the process forgot common sense.
Now, if the FSF filed tens of thousands of such lawsuits without any merit at all, it would be quite different but I think we can be fairly sure that every such lawsuit has been posted (along with a dupe) here so it's safe to say that there hasn't been that many of them.
N.B. My reply is to what I believe you tried to say here:
...as they have decided they don't with to be the F/OSS's enforcers of the GPL.
Ich bin ein Berliner. Or, at least my IP is.
My hard disk doesn't hold that much....!
No sig today...
How long before we see net communities where everyone shares 2,999 songs and 199 movies? 10 people in the community can cover 29,990 distinct songs and 1,990 distinct movies. That is quite a huge library. If the number of members is large enough, they may even have enough people to build redundancy in their collective library to protect against potential problems like HD crash.
and you can pay $500 + for a low end intel cpu with AMD dead as amd makes a lot of chips there.
Also BMW will not take that sitting down.
Yes, they do (and also their German version), but they need to get the names behind the IP addresses. So they start a criminal trial, ask the police for the IP data, then start their civil law suit and let the criminal case go to hell. That is exactly what this stuff is about. You should have RTFA.
It is common practice in germany not to persecute almost every petty crime like, let's say, shoplifting or the possesion of minor amounts of narcotics if it is a first-time offense. Depending on the scale of the offense either nothing will happen (you will receive a note the case was dropped cause of insignificane) or you will be slapped with a fine and a warning - the case will only go to court if you don't accept the fine and warning.
This a) keeps the number of people with a criminal record low and b) takes workload off the courts.
If you don't follow the GVU's (german RIAA) calculations, but keep in mind how much of a DVD's price actually is a copyright holder's profit, downloading a movie is more in the league of stealing a candy bar than a car, and that's even ignoring evidence that downloaders are more likely to go to the movies or buy CDs than non-downloading Joe Does, so treating a downloader like a shoplifter makes sense to me.
Additionally, the headline is misleading: The reported is only true for one state of germany - saying "sharing... is safe in germany" is like saying whatever Texan legislation would be valid in the whole U.S.
In the U.S., copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one, although I think that may be different in Europe...? But what really doesn't make sense to me is the reference to "prosecutors" vis a vis "lawsuits." In a lawsuit, there isn't any prosecutor, is there?
My guess is that it is criminal in Germany rather than civil, and that the word "lawsuits" is incorrect. If that's the case, then where's the news here? Of course police and prosecutors aren't going to spend time going after small-time file sharers. Same deal in the US with small-time white-collar crime. Hell, cops in the US typically won't even do much about the theft of a laptop or a ten-speed bike, even if it's theoretically grand larceny. It's just a matter of resources. They're more concerned with violent crime.
Find free books.
Amazing that the RIAA/MPAA don't "own" more of the laws in the US with their contribution record. Democrats: $11,163,030 Republicans: $2,104,737 I had always assumed the "Law and Order" party (Republicans) would be the major force and benefactor of the industry. I'm going to have to re-think my support based on these numbers. Five to one contribution rate over the GOP is a pretty telling statistic against the Democrats..
Organization? You must be joking..
Suprisingly informative for a German translation.
my mom posts on slashdot.
"most" german attorneys came to the "understanding" that they would follow those guidelines, because they want to stop
being abused.
No attorney is bound to this understanding, so there is no safe haven.
Some attorneys in germany are/were very vivid on supporting the entertainment industry. Most attorneys got tired of being abused as simple information providers, because the attorneys mostly setteled the criminal cases with a fine and no judgement or really no judgement.
This was because there was nearly no public interest in pursuing the cases, they just made it for their personal fun and not
within a gang, or simply that prosecutors would have needed to gather more information by raiding the peoples homes, and in germany a judge issues a search warrant mostly because of hard evidence - which a log isn't really.
Lately there was a case linked to "child porn thumbnails within a number of normal porn thumbs" one person who was searched
because of log entries. This guy attacked the search warrant later and the other judge decided that the search warrant was unlawfull the judge ordered that the police had to give the computer back - unsearched.
"gang - organized crime"
I must also issue a warning because if this filesharing is combined with an organization than most prosecutors will
investigate the case further, for example a piratebay.org can be seen as a criminal organization, because in germany
a link to copyrighted material is seen as copyright infrigenment.
"What happens in germany ?"
In germany when the entertainment industry got to know the identity of the filesharer, the industrys lawyer would issue a notice
to them, a bill and an aggreement.
the notice & the bill:
- you pay the lawyer (~500 €)
- you pay restitution ( just restitute the real value)
the aggreement:
- you aggree to stop distributing the copyright holders material
- in case of a breach you aggree to pay a fine round about 25.000 €
If you not accept this, the case can/will get to civil court, most people in germany as in the US pay
so this won't happend.
But the key point is that in a civil case guilt must be proven too, and the provableness of an IP + Identity must be questioned.
At the moment I don't know any case where this was tried, nor any civil case except those
based on commerical scale cases(further evidence through a raid etc.. ).
So if someone were to start a file sharing site, it could still be popular, but only have a retention of 2999 audio and 299 video files. This would be much like most usenet services, instead of days it is number of files. Where's the problem? Would number of users or traffic be considered?
Read here:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/news/EkEVVpuFlApoyDjYJv.html
New law proposal - 3 strikes and you're out... nice.
Fuck off from our national laws!
used to be called bribery and used to be illegal.
You are so proud of your right to have guns, now fucking use them since that was the whole point of that right to begin with.
Why? Bush should say something about how terrible it is, and do absolutely nothing. Let's face it - the entertainment industry is not exactly packed with Republicans these days. Republicans need to be about as friendly to the entertainment business as the entertainment business is to coal and nuclear. If the whole world and all of your allies want you to let your political enemies be driven out of business by too much copying, why should you really stop them? Come on liberals, copy away. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but its still a weakling compared to the greenback
This is my sig.
Then again, when you see how much politicians are being paid, an answer suggests itself.
The sad thing is how LITTLE it costs to buy a Senator or Congressman.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This is a great move. Hopefully the EU will keep out.
Not sure what's offtopic about responding to an inaccurate post...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoXgRtDysLY
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
You see, the topic is file sharing. You were talking about post-WWII Germany. That would be off topic. The fact that the message you responded to was also off topic doesn't make your message on topic. It's not like multiplying two negatives. Event if it was, your response to your response would have made it off topic again.
The RIAA is using civil suits.
In germany, the RIAA abuses the criminal courts to get the ID of file sharers. They file a criminal report on which the authorities have to act. Then they demand access to the records in order to obtain the identity of the "terrorist". Criminal charges are dropped in 99.9% of all cases, but the RIAA has the identity and files a civil suit.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
True, but if mods were fair they would give the original off-topic post an off-topic moderation before giving one to a response to the original off-topic post.
The RIAA is using civil suits.
Have you not familiarized yourself with the current criminal IP laws in the USA? The criminalization of intellectual property law - something heretofore dealt with in civil courts except in the most extreme circumstances - is a disturbing trend in the US in the last 10-12 years. And it's getting worse. Now there are bills in Congress to create IP police, akin to the DEA, whose sole job it is to enforce criminal IP laws at taxpayer expense. This is the role of law enforcement? To protect a single industry, merely because it throws money at Congress?
There's a helluva lot more than lawsuits going on, brother.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Damn. forgot the ;D
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
They should be going after and nailing to the wall anybody who makes copyrighted material available FOR PROFIT, regardless of the number of files. They should leave people who are just to stupid to configure their file sharing software properly alone. My local library makes thousands of CDs and DVDs available for copying (physical media, not over the 'net)... shouldn't they be prosecuted under German law?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
and I didn't speak up because I didn't download any.
.
In eight photographs the photographer Nancy Royal distills the true meaning of the poem New England Holocaust Memorial
It is rather a pity that Bertolt Brecht passed on before encountering the geek in full rhetorical flight.
It takes a profound sense of the absurd to respond adequately to the geek's appropriation of Niemoeller and Gandhi.
never fails. neither they have become the bitch of the industry like the ones in u.s., nor they have gone stupid while trying to lick the boots of the music cartels, but just went simple and efficient.
Read radical news here
I know it is not a pissing contest, but I am sure I am not the one who immediately checked out how many song sou have on your playlist/itunes/music drive/music folder/you name it. That is what is left after giving away 300 casettes, and losing my complete music collection once 7 years ago (moved to an other Country, and the trusted ones kinda screwed it up and gave all my cds away thinging they were just old crap ... crap )
I am not sharing these and of course I own them on CD/tape/vinyl/vhs/blueray/dvd, nintendo cartridges or zx 81 format C60 audio cassettes..... yeah ...
Civil suits, cant put a civil suit on a bunch of stuffed shirts like RIAA!
What's really funny is my complaint about getting modded as offtopic got modded informative.
You are correct that you were modded inappropriately, but I think the reason is that there's no "-1 clearly has no sense of humor" mod.
Pointing out inaccuracies (especially ones that depend largely on perspective) in jokes just makes you look like a douche.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
It's "Führer"
One man's sense of humor is another man's propaganda.
Seems a little ironic to me. English police confiscate a game that satirizes the so-called "War On Terror" while German officials hoist a middle finger at efforts of the recording industry to throw basic human rights away merely to forbid copying of largely-worthless material.
My English father fought against German fascism during WWII. Now it looks like fascists are running the show in England, while German prosecutors are hoisting the middle finger at those who unblushingly lobby to trade freedom for profit.
Times have sure changed.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Actually you see you repeat an old canard yourself, in that you assume that the owners of a business are Republican. Quite often the contrary is true. After all, Obama is getting all that fundraising money from -somewhere-.
See, Republicans, with their free trade and previously open immigration policies, tend to invite competition and change and so many businesses actually would be opposed to change as they would prefer to be locked in.
That's why you see Democrats tending to lead the charge on IP legislation, although Republicans naturally go on board because the picture was dumbed down for us as a law and order thing although of course we know that's not true at all.
This is my sig.
I find this post deliciously ironic
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!