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Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday
Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."
how complete and obvious bullshit can be earnestly believed
Rather like how otherwise intelligent people actually appear to believe copyright was ever about paying creators and artists, eh?
Not exactly clear on what you mean by property rights here.
Property rights like all other property rights. I buy something it's mine to do with as I wish.
Intellectual monopoly law, from the perspective of property, is fundamentally a restriction of property rights. The owner of the property is prevented from exercising the rights he has with any other property until the expiration of whatever monopoly rights governs certain aspects of his property.
no movies can be made with any expectation of profit, which means that almost no movies will be made anymore
Funny then how pretty much no movies every show any profit, yet they still get made, eh? Oh, right, that's about corporations screwing artists and creators, so that's ok.
Perhaps we'd lose big-budget productions, but between the remake-of-the decade genre and formulaic productions, I can live without them. Movies would still get made (I mean, have you looked at the amount of film that gets produced on minimal budgets?), and with the rate technology improves, you hardly need a big studio to create rather amazing footage anymore.
The fact is copyright is a very inefficient way of directing money to where you want it to go. Most of it gets squandered on monopoly expenses, advertising, channel control, etc, far worse than even any government program. Restructuring intellectual incentives as actual monetary incentives, like direct revenue sharing from end-point sales or ads, would direct far more of the revenue directly to the productive parties, allowing far more art to be funded with incentives.
But like I said, it's never been about creators and artists, so I doubt we'll get a complete fundamental restructuring of incentives before the MAFIAA corps are wiped out.
It has nothing to do with IMO,
but google is not "equally culpable" of "...[making] millions off porn advertising and it's primary product was providing links to copyright infringement."
I simply wanted to point out the comparison to google was a stupid and pointless one (in the context provided).
What you just said above is not stupid and would not have gotten a response from me.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Probably around a hundred, not counting ones that I previously owned but later donated to my local charity shop. In what way does my having purchased DVD's contradict a friend having downloaded a movie rather than bought it?
My anecdotal evidence is perfectly valid. It was put that people aren't pirating media instead of purchasing it and I know plenty of people who do exactly that. Bam! Statement disproved.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but there's nothing illegal about the prices media is sold on. Price-fixing pertains to competitors selling the same product. But the latest Basement Jaxx album is not the same product as the latest Britney album. So unless you are proposing that everybody purchases music based on cost, rather than their taste in music, what you're saying doesn't make sense.
Firstly, you've just made up an arbitrary example to support your argument. If it takes me a year to make an album I'm happy to release, am I entitled to charge more? Without respect to whether people like the music or not, it's just about how quickly someone works? And if people are willing to pay for a weekend of the artists work, as they have been before, who are you to tell the artist they should charge less? What industry do you work in? Have you had to study to get a degree to perform your job? If you were a highly skilled sysadmin who specialised in security, could I say it was unfair of you to charge more for a weekends analysis of a corporation's infrastructure than for a shelf-stacker to charge for a weekend's work in a supermarket? Because you've just stated that talent and skill and learning aren't relevant to how much someone can charge. A weekend's work is worth a set amount according to you. But Paul McCartney said he wrote "Yesterday" in less than a morning, a song that has been covered more times than any other and is playing somewhere in the world near constantly at any given moment. How much would those couple of hours of Paul's be worth? According to you, the supreme arbiter of value, enough to keep him going for a few weeks. But you are not the supreme arbiter of value. People in general are and they determine how much they think something is worth by how much they are willing to pay for it.
I have friends who work very hard to publish small fiction who would take exception to that. They are hit quite hard by piracy of their work and would be much better rewarded if people didn't do it.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.