Slashdot Mirror
Feds Demand Prison For Guns N' Roses Uploader
Defeat Globalism writes with this excerpt from Wired:
"Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are pursuing a 6-month prison term for a Los Angeles man who pleaded guilty in December to one misdemeanor count of uploading pre-release Guns N' Roses tracks, according to court documents. Kevin Cogill was arrested last summer at gunpoint and charged with uploading nine tracks of the Chinese Democracy album to his music site — antiquiet.com. The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts. The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material."
Don't put him in prison for stealing the album. Shoot him for promoting it. 17 years and GNR gives us, what, a big pile of overrated crap.
This is my sig.
Now tax dollars will be used to keep them in business instead of producing decent products. Federal criminal agents will be involved in what is a civil court issue.
Tho many will say 'good, jail him he's a bad person', few will understand what is really going on here.
Freedom takes another hit.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! This has got to be one of the most excessive police actions ever. Sending a man to jail for a non-violent offense. I hate this country's legal system.
That took 17 years to release, millions to produce, especially something that a nut case like Axel Rose, can't be worth a plug nickel.
then organize a nation-wide boycott of music sales.
Whiners.
Mind you, I think the police are becoming an occupying force in this country, an arm of the Dept. of Commerce. But Slashdot makes nothing happen, so log the hell out and go organize.
The title of the album says it all. Only - I always thought they were criticizing the Chinese Democracy.
Underholdning.info
>>>We release all of our material--audio, video and written--under a Creative Commons license
How much money do you make doing that? Enough to support yourself without resorting to a second job? And how do you deal with those who taken your creations without compensating you for your labor?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
an administration that is walking us down the path of socialism
No, you have an administration that is walking you down the path of corporatism. The difference is that in socialism, the government takes your tax money and spends it on things that everyone needs, like schools, medical facilities and infrastructure, but in corporatism, the government takes your tax money and gives it to people who already have more money than you can possibly imagine.
The clever bit comes when they tell you that giving money to *everyone* is communism and is bad, but giving money only to people who are already rich is good. That way they can train you to bark like a good little Pavlovian doggie at the eeevil socialists that try to steal money from your corporate masters. Work hard and bark, little doggie, and maybe they'll let you have some scraps.
It's worth giving your life for a worthy cause, like protecting you & your neighbors' freedoms from a tyrannical non-representative British government, as the man who uttered that quote was doing.
Otherwise, no.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Changing laws to convert a civil corporate issue into a criminal issue also fall within my statement.
Its still industries buying laws. Its still misuse of public funds/resources.
And i don't care what the purchased laws say, its still not a 'crime against society'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Or there's this quote:
"The DVDs grossed roughly half a BILLION
dollars (and that was just after they put out S5, without all of the S5
sales in).
So what does my last profit statement say? We're $80 million in the
red.
Basically, by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns
down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits."
Is it really pirates who are harming actors, writers and directors, or is it the studios?
Question: If the plan to bailout/assist people with upside-down mortgages goes through, it will cost about $1000 per taxpaying home. Why should I spend $1000 to pay somebody else's mortgage? And would this be considered corporatism, socialism, or communism?
IMHO whatever it's called, it's a human rights violation.
Taking my money to pay somebody else's housing bill is theft of labor. It's no different than if my neighbor bought a Lexus, and then demanded everyone in the area throw-in money to pay the bill. Nobody has a right to demand I help buy them a car. Or pay their mortgage.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If they even put a quater as much effort into fixing the economy and punishing the people who caused this fuck up, we'd be a super power in a week, and the prisons would be bursting at the seams.
Your not paying $1000 for someone else's mortgage. You're paying $1000 so the criminals who put people up to their eyeballs in debt so they could enrich themselves won't have to five up their bonuses and Manhattan penthouses. They could care less about peoples mortgages as they have amply demonstrated these past few years.
The problem is finding a way to rescue the working class without putting money in the pockets of the parasites.
Because it's not like we have enough people in prison now.
Our corporate run detention facilities will start losing money is we don't find new reasons to fill them up with relatively minor offenses.
Half of people in prison are there for violent offenses. That half stays. The other half we need to take a good hard look at just why we're so gung ho remove people from their ability to make a living and pay to warehouse them.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Taking my money to pay somebody else's housing bill is theft of labor.
I think a financial sector that systematically deregulated any oversight and pisses away over one third of our GDP on derivatives, where nobody knows who owes what to who, is theft of labor. Up another notch if they keep on demanding their executive bonus money from taxpayers, "or else the economy will collapse".
and I fully expect to be modded down for this reply... The Obama administration is HARDLY pursuing a socialist agenda. Political Science 101 would teach you that this is not socialism in any way shape or form... Even if it was, whats the big deal? Social Democratic programs can be implemented in ways that create jobs and reduce the cost of doing business. For example; a universal, single-payer health *insurance* system would reduce redundancy, increase the number of potential patients that doctors could see, improve productivity by reducing lost labor hours due to treatable illnesses and eliminate one of the single largest expenses per-employee that businesses currently have. Despite what the generally libertarian-leaning Slashdot crowd thinks, I would prefer a government funded not-for-profit model over the current for-profit system which costs us all more in the end.
Less risk. Is WalMart going to claim each track on that CD you stole is worth $750?
Steal a CD, you're guilty of a $20 crime. But if you do it with a computer somehow you're liable for (14*$750=$10,500) dollars worth of damage.
Or in this poor sap's case, 6 months in a federal lockup for daring to offend his corporate masters.
Amazing, isn't it? That the feds and corporate America are actually making the case that it's better to physically rob a store rather than simply downloading an mp3? It's unreal.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Obviously you know nothing at all about the mortgage assistance programs that are being approved. I can't say I whole heartedly agree with them, as I am getting screwed on both ends, but they are not hand outs to "pay somebody else's mortgages." What they are is financial payouts to corporations in exchange for those corporations to offer lower interest loans to people severely hurt by an unregulated financial industry. Not a single person is getting out of paying for their homes, and keeping them that is, it's only changing loan conditions.
No one is demanding anything more than has been demanded for the life of this country, as well as others, and that is that the people pay for the benefits of the government. In this case we also pay for the faults of that government, one which we chose I might add. This is the government of the US paying for it's past mistakes of unregulated distribution of resources, thank you Reagan and Greenspan (who at least admitted his mistake and apologized, unlike the rest of the free market economists of the world).
Oh and since you consider debt relief to be a human rights violation I can't wait to hear what you call forced homelessness and starvation.
... is work. You get paid for working. Historically for hundreds of years, people paid to see performing arts. Now, we have a problem.
Then, we had radio and advertisers who played the performances in public, for everyone to watch.
Now, it would seem, unless your shafted by paying for a piece of plastic, your a criminal because you did not buy the plastic the performance is on.
My problem is that it would seem greed has continued to encroach upon our rights because the middle man people here refuse to acknowledge how they have turned business models that made millions for them and they refuse to use anymore because they do not want a limit to how much money they can make.
So they came up with download a single for $4 dollars and then complain when people will not download it and pay for it, calling them criminals.
In fact, this corporatism that is dictating business models to its citizens, even when they do not work, then turn consumers into criminals when they feel the old models of advertising and performances is how people get paid for music, I think THEY are the criminals.
People with music talent should perform and hit the stage to get paid.
Same thing with people who write books, and print media. You get paid, and you put it on the web. People who download it pay through advertising.
It works.
As far as I am concerned people are going to jail because we are being ORDERED TO CONSUME by corporations and the penalty for not consuming is prison.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts. The sentence being sought -- including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it -- underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.
Are they trying to insinuate that because this album cost millions of dollars more to develop than most albums should, that pirating it is in some way worse because it will take even longer for them to recuperate such losses?
News flash big business: if you spend 10x as long, and 10x as much money as anyone else in that industry would on creating a product, it is not society's responsibility to compensate you. You deserve to lose money, and probably deserve to go out of business over the project.
Besides the ridiculous cost and timeline for developing the album, it seems the primary stakeholders were determined to tank this project regardless (see: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/axl-rose-blamed-for-band-missing-no-1-album_100126311.html/). Blaming piracy for any financial difficulties this album has suffered is more ridiculous than usual.
Apparently this guy doesn't get what the problem is. Much of the illegal downloading be it music or TV shows occurrs because there are too many hurdles for consumers to jump in order to legally purchase the content. I'm from Europe, I have NOT ONE valid method of buying episode based TV subscriptions (iTunes is out of the question on Linux systems, even if it ran I would refuse to use it). There is no way for me to get movies in their original language or music to the date it is released or in fromats that are useful to me.
... they chose to segment the market into individual regional chunks that they can exploit more thoroughly. Either global OR local ... cherry picking from both will lead to people like me. I buy tons of stuff, just not from those assholes that don't take my market segment seriously.
I will have to keep contributing to that problem if the people that want my money to put food on their tables don't start working out ways to give me a chance to pay them. Simple enough I'm not buying a DVD box for most shows since I watch the episodes once. Then what? I have useless discs sitting around that I wasted money on. No thank you. There are little to no English cinemas where I live and I won't wait to see movies until they release DVDs (the basic purpose of movie going nowadays is to talk about it to people that have also just seen them, a 6+ delay is not very helpful).
When it comes to profit the makers, producers and rights holders seem to fully understand how to exploit outsourced production, cheap prop making and other effects of globalization. But then, when it comes to treat the market as it is, an interconnected global real-time market