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RIAA and BSA's Lawyers Taking Top Justice Posts
An anonymous reader writes "Following the appointment of RIAA's champion Donald Verrilli as associate deputy attorney general, here's a complete roundup of all the RIAA and BSA-linked lawyers comfortably seated at top posts at the Department of Justice by the new government. Not strange, since US VP Joe Biden is well known for pushing the copyright warmongers' agenda in Washington. Just in case you don't know, Verrilli is the nice man who sued the pants off Jammie Thomas."
http://i40.tinypic.com/11tqy52.jpg
Found on this thread
Well, at least this is change I can believe in. As in, it's certainly not hard to believe.
Damn.
So the lawyers brought these lawsuits not the RIAA. I didn't realize Donald Verrilli brought these lawsuits to protect his copyrights. I don't blame the lawyers for this anymore than I would blame the soldiers for fighting Bush's war.
"The ignorant fight to win, the wise win before they fight." -Sun Tzu
I suppose putting the attack dogs for anti-competitive businesses in the DOJ is better than putting tax evaders in charge of the IRS...
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
as President and Vice President, what do you expect? Perhaps all of that Hollywood support from actors and musicians bought something from Obama and Biden.....
This guy is way out there
Yes and make all media belong to the glorious state!!!
And make it high treason to use any state owned media unless you get permission from the commissar and pay a usage fee to the state.
YAY!!!!! Where do I sign up!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Cheney|Halliburton = Biden|RIAA
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
With those who've sold their souls in those positions, maybe they'll make things so bad that the public sits up and takes notice and demands reform to our seriously dysfunctional copyright laws.
So I, for one, welcome our new plutocratic overlords. At least, I think I do...
Free Martian Whores!
If our Dear Leader likes these picks, then I like them too.
From all of the negative comments I read, I can only conclude that pirates are racist.
People can dress it up all they want to, but when you pick up a gun and follow orders it doesn't absolve you of responsibility for what you do. I know the majority of the people in the world just plain worship violentism, but that doesn't change a thing. There is no glory in fighting and killing is wrong, period.
And even the law isn't so blind as to be able to be otherwise. Invading Iraq was immoral and illegal and ALL of the people who participated in it, from top to bottom, committed a crime. Pure and simple.
Some things may be understandable, even forgivable, but that does NOT make them right.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I'm currently more interested in this as a real test of the Obama administration's sincerity:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7870049.stm
If Obama can't come forward and say to us "Yes, your courts can now open that evidence" then it is evidence of one important fact. Obama is a fraud.
He cannot possibly on one hand talk of bringing those guilty of torture to justice and then prevent us doing so on the other.
I think that it's actually our government that's playing up here because they do not want it coming out in the open that our security services were equally guilty of assisting in torture, but all Obama needs to do to make that clear is come forward. By the sounds of it our foreign secretary hasn't even approached the Obama administration yet and if that's true then it's a local issue, if that's not true then the world has bigger problems.
If he can't then yeah, I think he's a fraud and yeah, I think these RIAA appointments possibly are more than just a case of hiring experienced lawyers (i.e. did they work for the RIAA because they believed the cause, or for the money?).
I truly hope it's not too much to ask to at last have an important world leader that can walk the walk not just talk the talk.
All art, as all science and engineering, is built on the achievements of those who came before. Engineers have it easy, as patents only last 20 years and I'm told are often easy to get around.
Copyrights are forever when compared to an artist's life. I cannot legally build on any work produced in the last hundred years.
This AP story illustrates the folly of our system.
There is a comparison of the two works, and it's obvious (to me as a content creator anyway) that the Fairey image is fair use.
As to your incredibly ignorant remark, it is exactly like the guy who said "Looks like the days of drunken bums is over" when they passed prohibition. Copyright law is getting worse and worse, and people are responding by ignoring it, just as they ignored laws against alcohol. It WILL reach a breaking point.
I should not have to pay for a digital copy of Jimi hendrix' work. The man is dead and has been for decades. It should be in the public domain as the Founding Fathers wished and as is written in the US Constitution.
Free Martian Whores!
Not only is the RIAA now apparently synonymous with the Justice Department, but we STILL have renditions and we still have a President that believes he has the authority to spy on us (and by extension of the same logic essentially ignore any law or any provision of the Constitution by the same argument).
It was unacceptable when GWB did it, and it is STILL unacceptable and it is still the responsibility of the citizens of the US to put a stop to it.
But hey, Barak Obama is a great guy, we don't need civil liberties.
Fools.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
When grasping the fact that the copyright barons are taking over the Justice Dept, remember that there is fundamental shift happening in the media industry.
The media industry is basically a 20th-century phenomenon. The technology of the 20th-century created a structure where the best musicians of the world sold their musical in the format of fixed recordings through a centralized company. The recordings are the product. Under this structure, the musicians (and actors) become stars or mini-deities.
The main idea here is that the recordings (of music or filmed performance) are the product that is sold on concept of a fixed price regardless of the 'artist' or the quality of the performance. The unnoticed aspect of this model is that there is NO interactivity between the recordings and the people who buy the recordings.
The 21st-century entertainment media model is one of increasing interactivity between the recording and the person buying the recording. Starting with crude television-based video games in the 1980s, there has been a strong increase in the amount of interaction between the person 'consuming' the entertainment product and the entertainment product itself. The RIAA/MPAA can't reproduce this interactivity, neither can the companies who create fixed product (audio CDs, films). But this interactivity is becoming the key aspect of the entertainment experience that people (especially young people in their teens and twenties) are willing to pay for.
The more that the RIAA/MPAA are successful at forcing people away from obtaining low-cost fixed recordings, the more that they drive their core consumer base into interactive entertainment products that they don't control. They don't seem to realize this, primarily because the RIAA/MPAA companies are stuck in the 20th-century. The Slashdaughters generally grasp this concept, but they are mostly young and technologically oriented. They are the demographic most likely to copy RIAA/MPAA product, this is true, but they are also the first people to move beyond RIAA/MPAA product to meet their entertainment needs.
As the economic structure of the 20th-century fades, then so will the influence (and bullying ability) of the global media companies. As long as the RIAA/MPAA lawyers don't understand or control the emerging fields of interactive entertainment, it doesn't matter if the control the US Justice Department. They will remain 20th-century wolves chasing 20th-century sheep.
I should not have to pay for a digital copy of Jimi hendrix' work. The man is dead and has been for decades. It should be in the public domain as the Founding Fathers wished and as is written in the US Constitution.
While I agreed with everything else you said, I don't think this argument is correct.
Copyright should be based on a fixed duration, such as 25 years, perhaps with a registration or notice requirement for it to take effect, and perhaps with a low-cost renewal option (for perhaps another 25 years).
Copyright should not be based on the author's life, because that A) drastically lowers the value of late-life art compared to early-life art, and B) makes it economically viable to murder artists whose works you would like to misappropriate.
We can solve this problem with significantly shorter fixed durations, requirements that works must contain a copyright notice to have initial coverage, and a fee to extend copyright to weed out the thousands of copyrighted works that lose all value after a very short time (while making it possible for works that still have value to keep making value for their owners for a slightly longer time).
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
...I didn't vote for him.
I guess the 'Change' Obama promised is either only 'change' left in my pocket after paying for all that crap San Fran Nan and the looney left are pushing or the 'change' from a Republic to a Socialist dictatorship.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
The scary part is that we have more to lose from the government then we do from the BSA and RIAA. This is sort of scary when you consider the type of firepower the government is stocking up on. I mean people who have taken single mothers and blind grandmas to court and dragged them around quite capably. Now we can rest assured that knowing that the government now has people skilled in this area. It sort of balances the power out that has been lopsided towards the people for the last 230 plus years.
Now that's change we can believe in. HOPE and all that shit.
Patently false, you cannot legally build on someones work without paying for the privilege.
It isn't a privelege, it is a RIGHT spelled out in Article 2 Section 8. Copyrights are only there to "promote the useful arts". What I write or paint or record does NOT belong to me, it belongs to humanity. It is supposed to go into the public domain after a "limited time". All I own is a "limited time" monopoly on its distribution, nothing more.
Besides the longer I can keep some hip hop freakin' idiot from corrupting my work the better as far as I'm concerned..
An archetect might say the same thing, but I have the right to do anything I want to a property I own. And we ALL own ALL intelectual "property". If you don't want some "hip hop freakin' idiot from corrupting" your work, don't do it to begin with.
Art isn't really where the innovations come from anyway
Despite the fact that your statement there has no bearing on the argument, I should remind you that archetecture IS art. You could not build a skyscraper in 1800.
if you think that copyright is stopping progress you are in the wrong business
Copyright itself is a very useful structure when properly implimented, and does indeed promote the arts. When it is poorly implimented, as it is now, it is a hindrance to progress.
Free Martian Whores!
See, the way I see it, your response is perfectly understandable, but it fails to make sense when you take a more holistic view of things.
One cannot effectively defend oneself unless one is PREPARED to defend oneself. That might at first glance seem to be merely a sensible thing to do, be prepared (hey I was even a Boy Scout once, lol).
The problem is that being prepared consists of being armed. Once you arm yourself, you ARE by definition now a threat to everyone else. Thus they must arm themselves. Thus even the mildest form of defensive thinking leads directly to an arms race or the conditions for an arms race.
More than that, it leads to a kind of thinking which inevitably involves the logic of power, and the rule of power is the rule of force. Inter armis legis non. No law can exist between armed parties willing to defend their interests by force except force. Either the force of the other party, or the force of some third party.
So peace fails, even amongst well meaning peoples, because first they subscribe to the doctrine of self defense. Second they must arm themselves, 3rd their armed state precipitates a need for all other parties to be armed, and then no authority can exist which is not armed force. Finally that armed force will sooner or later be used. Thus the doctrine of self defense, innocent as it seems on the surface, is the seed which ultimately leads to war and violence.
Even when violence does not proceed directly from the logic of power, it creates a corrupting effect on the thinking of the armed individuals. First they reason that collective security is better than individual security and the full panoply of the armed state comes into existence. People in large numbers acting in a mass in the armed state do not subscribe to any of the recognized moral principles of normal society to any high degree. This is a situation always extremely hazardous to peace.
Finally the corruption goes even deeper in the sense that to arm oneself is in essence a threat, and thus each person in this armed society is essentially at a fundamental level saying to all of the others "I reserve the option to get my way by force." Granted that most people will not want to exercise that option, but it always exists and it has an inhibiting effect on people's willingness to reach a real and genuine accommodation with one another based on mutual agreement and shared benefit.
Thus my position is that the doctrine of self defense is actually antithetical to the best interests of all individuals in the real world. Not in some moralistic philosophical sense, but actually in the real world as it is.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
It's perfect.
Prior to him getting into office, Slashdot was full of Obama worshippers. They really thought he was going to be a president for nerds. Suckers!
BTW, since this post surely hits too close to home for many, please keep an eye on the moderation.
I don't think the artist's lifespan should have anything to do with it. All music, movies, books, etc that were created when I was young and Hendrix was alive should be in the public domain by now whether their artists are dead or not.
Patents only last 20 years, why should copyright be any different? I think 20 years is a perfectly reasonable time frame. With a few exceptions (Asimov's Foundation being the most notable I can think of), if you haven't made a profit off it in 20 years you're not likely to in the future. Hasn't Blade Runner made its costs back by now.
Free Martian Whores!
At a shooting range or gun-related event, people are really nice to each other. They don't get in fights.
At the international level, notice how there has never been war between a pair of countries with nuclear weapons.
Gee what a surprise. Huge support from the entertainment industry to get Obama into office. Did everyone think there wasn't going to be a cost to this? What a refreshing CHANGE.