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Nesson & Camara Increase Attack Against RIAA
eldavojohn writes "We talked about Charlie Nesson of Harvard Law School before, and it may not have been known to you, but he is backing former student and Jammie Thomas' new lawyer, K.A.D. Camara. Ars is reporting that Nesson is upping the charges against the RIAA. Not only is file-sharing fair use, but the $100,000,000 the RIAA has collected through fear is due back to those wrongly accused. He's also increasing the number of fronts he's fighting. On Camara's website, he indicates that in another case, Brittany English (pro bono), they 'are asking the courts to declare that statutory damages like these — 150,000:1 — are unconstitutional and that the RIAA's campaign to extract settlements from individuals by the threat of such unconstitutional damages is itself unlawful, enjoin the RIAA's unlawful campaign, and order the RIAA to return the $100M+ that it obtained as a result of its unlawful campaign.'"
skip the three steps, Vatican, and buy this man a gold chair and cape!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
After reading on Slashdot about this guy and reading more on the internet, I've become his fan. I wish him well.
When it comes to the courts, including the Supreme Court, it seems that corporations' power compared to people are allowed to be practically infinite so long as they're not literally listed as infinite. See: extensions of copyright, corporate personhood.
It's actually funny how all they are fighting for seems just like common sense. The RIAA is blackmailing all the people they can, under ridiculously claims... Man, 150000:1, who in their right mind could come up with something that stupid !!!???!!!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Make sure their lawyers are disbarred too.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
When seen in the context of an administration which is stuffing the Department of Justice with lawyers with strong ties to the entertainment industries, your post is even bleaker....
Oh dear god, kindly fuck off.
Copyright is an amoral law that concentrates power over culture into the hands of profiteering publishers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But lost behind it all is the primary problem — "Thou shalt not steal". Because, if the 10 Commandments were a "living and breathing document", the "Thou shalt not copy content without owner's permission" would've been found in it long ago.
The Ten Commandments != The Constitution
But lost behind it all is the primary problem — "Thou shalt not steal". Because, if the 10 Commandments were a "living and breathing document", the "Thou shalt not copy content without owner's permission" would've been found in it long ago.
It's not like they're set in stone.
You don't lose anything if I steal your credit card information either. The idea is that you'll lose money over it.
No, that's quite true. If you copy my credit card information and do nothing at all with it, I don't lose anything. If on the other hand you copy my credit card information, then impersonate me and start buying things with it, then it costs me money. COSTS me money. As in, I have to pay the bills for your spending.
The only sense in which the victims of copyright infringement lose money is that they don't get money they might otherwise have had. That's a very different thing from taking away money which they actually did have.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
But lost behind it all is the primary problem â" "Thou shalt not steal".
The primary problem is not that people are stealing, the primary problem is that people don't think they are stealing.
And the primary question is: is the problem a problem with the moral health of people, or is the problem a problem with the entertainment industry's business model?
Are people as a collective allowed to decide what is publicly transferable? I would say, yeah. That's a bummer for those who profit when copies of works are scarce in the economic sense but then again times change. And the Ten Commandments don't contain any guarantees from God about the minimum level of profitability of the music business.
Of course one should always obey the laws of the land. Except when one shouldn't. For example, civil disobedience in protest of the arbitrary and disproportionate victimization of ordinary people by powerful elites has always gotten sympathetic treatment in the history books.
On this one, I predict the history books will portray the industry as a callous group who tried to enforce their will on the populace by making people terrified of their wrath.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
"Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining personal profit without individual responsibility."
- Ambrose Bierce
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yes, because it's all about the publishers. No artist could possibly want to sell their work. They'd much rather pack your bags at the grocery store and then go home to make music, video games, movies and books for you in the evening because they like you so much.
Yes, because that's the only alternative. No artist could possibly make money from their work if they didn't have a government-granted license to restrict other people's speech. They'd rather give up and go work at grocery stores than adopt a sensible business model that isn't threatened by technology.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Hey wait.. that explains George W. Bush's entire presidency!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Do you turn your back on NYCL so quickly
Who says we have to have just one hero? All we've done here is to go from Superman to The Justice League.
So, more heroes please! Keep 'em coming!
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
This entire fiasco is full of horrible legal arguments. John Doe bulk filesuits, extortion, racketeering, the notion that you are your IP, settlement letters before suit is filed...you name it.
Having it close on a horrible argument would be poetic at this point.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Remember that Slashdot is very pro-Linux and pro-GPL, so there's an attitude of providing things for free. The thing is, the GPL relies on copyright to exist. It's actually a copyright and usage license, even though Slashdot often posts stories about how evil copyright laws and EULAs are.
The primary benefit of the GPL, according to many of us, is that it turns copyright against itself, restoring the freedoms that copyright took away in the first place.
In a world with no copyright, there wouldn't be nearly as much need for the GPL: we'd all be free to distribute software, patches, and reverse engineered source code. If you release a proprietary fork of Linux and refuse to give out the source code, that's OK, we'll just disassemble it and incorporate your changes into our open-source branch.
And, of course, there are the stories of "stolen" GPL code, even though we constantly hear that "piracy isn't theft."
I agree that it's a poor choice of words, but "stealing" GPL code is actually closer to theft than copying commercial works is. It deprives end users of the source code and the distribution rights that they rightfully should have.
It's pointless to point out these kinds of hypocrisies, because the mod system is so easily gamed to drown those kinds of criticisms out.
You mean, the people who point out flaws in your arguments get modded up, while your flawed arguments get modded down? Gee, what a terribly broken system.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
a legitimate reason why bootlegging on the internet is A-OK while bootlegging on a street corner is not and never has been.
The fact that one is for-profit and the other is not seems like a legitimate reason to me.
Make it free.
Sure, sell hard copies, merchandise, etc. to profit from your creativity, but you can benefit mankind much more by releasing your art to the public domain.
Oh, wait, sorry, did someone forget to inform you that copyright law is more than just making money? It also entails plagiarism and similar concepts.
You know what else also "entails" plagiarism and similar concepts? Anti-fraud laws. Lying about something in order to sell it is already illegal.
You don't need copyright in order to outlaw plagiarism. Even if you find that existing anti-fraud laws aren't enough, then you can pass a new law that specifically forbids passing someone else's work off as your own, and you still won't need copyright.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I think it can be best summed up as "I want." Yes, I want to download movies and music for free. Anything that gets in the way of that is obviously oppressive and damages my fragile psyche. There should be laws against things like that.
true, and for a limited time, that's a good thing.
More then 14 years is too much.
14 years is less then a generation; which is what it takes for something to really penetrate as part of the culture, and it's a little after the point wen most people are really getting any money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oh dear god, kindly fuck off. Copyright is an amoral law that concentrates power over culture into the hands of profiteering publishers.
Copyright is based on precedent, one that originally promoted original art. Once upon a time, anyone with a printing press could take someone's work and make a book. Authors were getting screwed, particularly overseas authors: American publishers were printing Dickens without paying royalties and British houses were doing likewise to Melville (one reason he died a pauper - he was vastly more popular in Britain, but never saw a cent for his books printed there). Establishing Copyright and an international treaty made it possible for artists to make a buck. Like any law, it needs retooling, but to dismiss the concept of copyright as amoral is puerile.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Why would you need to pass it off as your own? WalMart sells stuff every day that they didn't make. So they could just as easily sell artists work without compensating them. No copyright law means there would be nothing to prevent this from happening.
Trust me, WalMart and Sony have already figured this part out and know exactly what to do should something like the elimination of copyright law. They will make more money than ever before.
Filesharing is partially PROVEN legal in holland. Downloading is 100% absolutly legal and judges have ruled on this multiple times.
So, it is only a horrible legal argument in countries where the law is owned by the copyright industry.
And please note, human civilization has DEPENDED on copyright "violations" for millenia. Rossetta stone anyone? Copied all over. How did you think books were made before the printing press? Hand copied over the centuries without any notion of paying the author. Modern copyright as the RIAA and the likes want it is a very recent invention and can easily be argued counter-productive.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.