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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 ----
it only took two hundred years to go from "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country," to, "eat my asshole." :(
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You will get a taste of Chinese Democracy.
And you will not be hungry for it an hour later.
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.
I'm confused: all the merits of the case are civil in nature. How in hell do they justify prosecuting this man in criminal court? I don't understand: can someone please explain (and prove I'm just dumb)?
(My logic is that he made no money off his actions, and they were of absolutly no benefit to him.)
And you think the first is, or ever has been, a healthy kind of relationship between a citizen and their country?
That 17 years can be broken down as follows for Axl:
16 years, 10 months: lying around drugged out of his mind
2 months: working on music
-Dave
Like J.Michael Straczynski said:
First, having talked to distributors, I can tell you straight up that
if a show [or music album] has had too much online exposure and too many downloads, if it's too much out there, they won't distribute it because the market that would want to see it already has. Second, when you download a show, it's not just that you're denying the producers/distributors of that movie or TV show the "price" of the DVD... you're also having a direct impact on the creative people who made that show, and taking from them as well. Actors, writers and directors get paid a fee to make a project, and then they get residuals, which are not a bonus, they are deferred compensation.
Free downloading ultimately destroys the financial structure for artists of all kinds, and will, if left unchecked, eventually make it impossible for any artist to make a living doing what they do. Downloaders think there's no difference between data and entertainment, that everything should be free. Great, it's free to YOU. Now, how do you propose paying the people who need to put food on the plate when they are getting nothing in return?
jms [/quote] From: "jmsatb5@aol.com"
Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:36:27 -0700 (PDT)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The title of the album says it all. Only - I always thought they were criticizing the Chinese Democracy.
Underholdning.info
That's exactly why he's being prosecuted. The corporation's constitutional right to sell expensive crap is being trampled!
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
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
To paraphrase: No one ever won a war by dying for his country. They won the war by making the other poor sap die for his.
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
Its still industries buying laws. Its still misuse of public funds/resources.
You know, I'm pretty strong anti-current copyright, I think the copyright lengths are way out of whack; DRM circumvention laws are wrong; fair use should allow more sharing than the industry wants, etc.
But I also think that (were everything to reach a reasonable compromise one day) that uploading an unreleased album to wide availability (where even its sale hasn't yet been permitted by the rightsholder) could reasonably be called a misdemeanor theft on the level of shoplifting, and that (minor, short-term) incarceration rates could be reasonable as a maximum penalty. Whether or not a judge should grant the maximum sentence on first offense is another matter.
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.
exact quote: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
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.
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.
If YANAF, you might not understand the Italian fashion term prima fascia, which means "the belt is the best," a motto used by designers who favor sashes, cummerbunds, and other such accessories.
However, such obscure phrases are subject to much misunderstanding and misuse, which constitute prima facie ("on its face") evidence that such linguistic frippery is better left unused when possible.