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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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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.)
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
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.
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?
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
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.
I lost some respect for JMS when he wrote that. The thread was in connection with some scripts that he had written for Crusade episodes, which had not been produced. He was complaining about people distributing them online, even though the only studio that had the rights to produce them, wouldn't. His email basically said to me 'I have no more creative output to contribute. Don't advertise my talents as a writer and demand more shows written by me, because I can't create anything new anymore.'
Babylon 5 was created by someone with a story to tell, who was willing to work hard and struggle to tell that story. Crusade was created by someone who wanted to make money from a franchise. That the two were the same person is a tragedy.
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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.