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New Litigation Targets 20,000 BitTorrent-Using Downloaders
Hugh Pickens writes "The Hollywood Reporter reports that more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders have been sued in the past few weeks in Washington, DC, federal court for copyright infringement, and another lawsuit targeting 30,000 more torrent downloaders on five more films is forthcoming in what could be a test run that opens up the floodgates to massive litigation against the millions of individuals who use BitTorrent to download movies. The US Copyright Group, a company owned by intellectual property lawyers, is using a new proprietary technology by German-based Guardaley IT that allows for real-time monitoring of movie downloads on torrents. According to Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer at the firm, the program captures IP addresses based on the time stamp that a download has occurred and then checks against a spreadsheet to make sure the downloading content is the copyright protected film and not a misnamed film or trailer. 'We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel,' says Jeffrey Weaver, another lawyer at the firm."
"The difference between the MPAA's past approach and the new one being offered by the US Copyright Group is that the MPAA took a less targeted approach going after a smaller sampling of infringers in a single suit for multiple films, to send a message. In contrast, the US Copyright Group is using the new monitoring technology to go after tens of thousands of infringers at a time on a contingency basis in hopes of coming up with the right cost-benefit incentive to pursue individual pirates."
These types of lawyers give other types of lawyers an even worse name.
And before you sue me for that statement I'm sure that there is some sort of 'fair use' or 'truth' defense, so phfffft!
Also, please read the article for once:
the US Copyright Group, on behalf of an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance. So far, five lawsuits have been filed against tens of thousands of alleged infringers of the films "Steam Experiment," "Far Cry," "Uncross the Stars," "Gray Man" and "Call of the Wild 3D." Here's an example of one of the lawsuits -- over Uwe Boll's "Far Cry."
This is INDIE film makers suing. Not MPAA, not Hollywood. Indies.
"...and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel."
The equivalent of a distribution channel where tens of thousands get movies for free, but then a randomly selected group has to pay a hundred times the cost of the movie in litigation fees.
At least they're innovating...
I'm still unclear on the business benefit to the MPAA companies that comes from suing their customer base. This isn't going to win them any friends and is even less likely to increase their profits. It was stupid when they were suing dozens of people - but stepping this lunacy up to 50,000 lawsuits looks more like a death wish than "monetizing the alternate channel".
If the only way to keep a business model working is to "open up the floodgates to massive litigation" then we should take a close look at why our society keeps those businesses afloat.
Personally, I think the basic reason we built the amazing companies in the "entertainment industry" is that distribution used to be difficult, and it required a lot of capital to set up channels to get media to consumers. This is no longer true; & the other reason - funding the creation of great media - obviously does not create enough value to justify the business that many of these companies continue to sue to protect.
"We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent..." What a surprise. As opposed to pursuing the protection claimed, my brethren offer their true motivation.
> There are already good equivalents so you don't need to resolve to piracy.
Depends. For the indie studios in the article perhaps. But for mainstream stuff it's hard to find movies that ad-laden DRM-encumbered crap.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
It must be insult to injury to get sued over an Uwe Boll film. Not only did they watch it, but they got sued for doing so. Nobody needs that!
Checks against a spreadsheet! What kind of Mickey Mouse organization is this anyway? Don't they know they could haul in 10x more pirates with a proper database backend. Maybe it helps the lawyers boost their billable hours if they can have an intern do as much manual work as possible.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Shooting yourself in the foot, 20000 law suits at a time. Apparently the independents are not more down to earth than the MPAA, just less successful. Way to ruin a reputation.
Good thing enabling encryption only requires checking a single box.
Since when are lawsuits intended as a revenue stream? I thought they were supposed to be reparations for real damages incurred with a side of punitive hand slapping.
I'm all for shutting down pirates, and sending the message that expensive to produce media isn't free. But specifically "monetizing" the lawsuits, in the hope of getting rich off pirates? That just reeks of evil.
The ______ Agenda
What "good alternative" can I use to watch high-def movies stored on my home server via my networked media tank or laptop etc?
As long as the pirates provide a better product than the studios, the customers will turn to the pirates.
Bullshit.
Piracy costs nothing, the kids that do this were not going to buy those movies or games either way.
As for good equivalents please tell me where I can buy DRM free videos. Even DVDs are not DRM free.
I am not a pirate, I only break the law by using libdvdcss to watch my legally rented netflix dvds.
It must be insult to injury to get sued over an Uwe Boll film. Not only did they watch it, but they got sued for doing so. Nobody needs that!
It's like getting kicked in the balls after consuming a large meal consisting entirely of broken glass bottles.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Next logical step is for this to evolve into a sort of a speeding ticket system. You get caught - pay a nominal fee and get X points on your name. Get caught enough times and they sue big time, till then you just keep paying nominal fees.
Not sure how I feel about it, but it sure as hell sounds more reasonable than suing 8-5 $35k/year crowd, kids with $5/hr dish-washing jobs and stay-at-home moms for millions of dollars.
Too bad my university doesn't keep logs =]
Can we bill them for the court's time? If they are going to use the court system to "create an alternative revenue stream", they can damn sure pay for the costs of handling all that paperwork. If an average citizen decided to do this (by using the court system to send out tens of thousands of nastygrams and collecting on the handful that pay) they'd be facing serious-ass jail time.
A while back, a colleague and I had a discussion about unauthorized downloading, and I quipped something to the effect that I would avoid infringement penalties by buying the content and then ripping it. He, OTOH, asked why. Why would I pay for something I could legally record from broadcast for free.
There's an interesting double standard here:
In both cases you've acquired the same content, in the same form, for the same price. But now we're supposed to believe that because it happens via the internet, a crime has been committed? That their business is now suddenly failing because people are doing the same thing they've done for years with tape players and vcrs?
The VCR didn't kill tv and movies. Nor did the tape player kill rock and roll. If you can't make a living as an artist in the era of mp3's and youtube, well, you couldn't have made a living back then, either. Stop blaming the Internet for your own failure.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Yeah, so?
Just because they're 'INDIE' doesn't make their abuse of the legal system in a flawed attempt to 'monetize the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel' any less immorally reprehensible.
So I'll simply avoid giving them my money, as well.
So where's the free software DRM-free alternative to watch movies and which works outside the U.S.?
Piracy costs nothing, the kids that do this were not going to buy those movies or games either way.
Is this why many of my friends parents ask them to burn a movie or tv show for them? You think 40-50 year olds with a job wouldn't had bought them otherwise?
Litigation, even on this scale is unlikely to prevent piracy. As anti-piracy technology and techniques evolve, so will the technology and methods used in filesharing. How long until we have BitTorrent with TOR and encryption built in? The copyright juntas will always be chasing the pirates tails, and unfortunately they're likely to continue throwing money at hopeless schemes like this until they've bankrupted themselves, rather than develop a successful business model for the 21st century.
Also note that the .torrent file does not contain enough information to verify the legal status of the content. My guess is they download everything they suspect might be theirs.
If they do this, does that mean they're wide open for countersuits by anyone uploading their wedding movies? I'm guessing their death will be quick and painless, seeing how they must do willful copyright infringement on a massive scale.
The Devils advocate position is that by requiring customers to wait for arbitrary showtimes and having an arbitrary limited selection pretty significantly impedes the flow of copied materials.
If I want to watch "Uncross the Stars" tonight, I don't have any way of doing that other than paying the movie companies (or downloading it).
In fact, I would wager that said movie will never be aired on any sort of television station that many people have.
So, while the concept of suing customers is unpalatable to me, as well as you, I disagree that it's "exactly the same thing" as a VCR.
I think this is what most don't understand. I am the type of pirate that does it for convenience. There is no other method of accessing movies that is as convenient as piracy, and I don't see anything coming in the near future that can come even close to allowing me to easily watch movies in multiple places in my home or on the road. With a downloaded .mkv, I can watch any movie I have on any TV in my home or on any computer in the world at the press of a button. I would love to see a viable legal alternative to my current setup, but it will never exist due to the luddites in charge of the movie companies.
"Widespread piracy is causing problems."
Prove it. You may find this difficult to do, since movie studios routinely lie about operating at a loss:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Palm trees and 8
In addition, there are questions about IP addresses being an identifier of a pirate since users can steal or borrow another's IP address to commit file infringement.
Time to invest in proxies.
now suing everyone who they detect downloading a film can be beneficial, they're opening themselves up to a world of hurt.
.... tying up courts for small matters of downloading (compared to murder, fraud and assault), also considering proxies, TOR, encrypted traffic, peer blocking there are so many ways technology overcomes this "tracking" that if taken to court the burned of proof, potential for technical flaws and other aspects will make most cases moot.
Technology these days allows routing pretty much through a toaster, many courts have said (not US) that an IP address is NOT an identifiable piece of information, some other courts also have rules that IP and any personal information should remain private unless court ordered to do so. So in turn they would need to get 20,000 court orders for identifying names, and then 20,000 summons
I can see many judges just dismissing these cases just cause of the shear number of them. The industry may look at the numbers and think ok 20,000 people = $20 million in revenue, they dont think ahead and consider the social and legal implications.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
Want to put a stop to this - don't sue, just publish the names of people who spent time downloading and presumably *shudder* watching films by Uwe Boll.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Say your name is the one your Comcast account is under, but someone else such as a roommate is pirating movies. Who then is identified by the law firm as the pirate? I have always wondered this. I don't download pirated material due to it being a big hassle and worries about viruses, etc., but I have no control over what other people in my household do on their own machines.
Problems..........
Like um..... causing some rich people to not make quite as much money as they might have.... maybe...
Yeah... That's not a problem i can give a crap about really. Spin it all you want. It still comes down to greed. Ours and theirs.
All the MPAA has to do is get me a girlfriend and I'll gladly spend 10 to go out and see a movie. Until then its torrents from my parents basement using my neighbors wifi connection.
Each of those soon to be 50,000 people is entitled to a jury trial. That's a LOT of resources tied up on this and for a long time. The logistics could get ugly. And this is supposedly just the test run that could open the floodgate?
The courts will have a choice. Either shred any semblance of justice, reject this litigative spam, or devote itself exclusively to these suits and hope they get to the last of them before the revolution comes.
The shame involved must be incredible - public records proving that you downloaded a Uwe Boll movie. The only time I'd be willing to settle for whatever amount they wanted in an attempt to keep it from going to court.
"You think 40-50 year olds with a job wouldn't had bought them otherwise?"
Yes, if the movie is too cheap for them to have seen in the theaters. Let's see some proof that they would have purchased the movie -- that is the claim these companies are making, right? Prove that these companies are suffering. I have trouble believing that they could operate at a loss year after year and not go out of business.
Palm trees and 8
We aren't creating problems, we're creating solutions! By pirating, we are creating jobs for thousands of lawyers, paralegals and entrepreneurs who are seeking to end the very thing keeping them employed!
We are saving the economy and the american way. Join us.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Shouldn't it be enough for the defendant to deny the possession of the media in question? I hardly expect the police to execute tens of thousands of search warrants, therefore the most important part is missing: the evidence.
These discussions always devolve into pro- and anti-piracy rhetoric, but I have a question.
I actually agree in principle that piracy is wrong. But where I have a problem is with their method of determining guilt. I wish Ray Beckerman or one of the other attorneys here would explain to me how they can *prove* that I, and I alone, am the one responsible for an illegal download with an IP address???
Unless I'm the only one in the house and unless I have a static IP address, how can they *prove* that it's me? And even in that case, what if someone sneaks into my home during the day (maybe I gave the neighbor a key to watch my cats while I was on vacation one time). That's what worries me.
It would be the height of irony for ME to one day get thumped for this, when I AM opposed to piracy. But I could see it happening -- suppose I open a wireless access point at my house, taking reasonable care to secure it, but someone manages to hack in and download copyrighted material without my consent? Why am I liable for that? I'm a VICTIM, not a criminal!!!!
When someone is pulled for speeding, it's the *driver* who is ticketed, not the owner of the car. In fact, speeding tickets are routinely thrown out of court simply because the arresting officer couldn't prove that he/she had the vehicle under constant observation after clocking them at an illegal speed. There's always a chance that the car changed drivers while it was unobservable.
Why doesn't the same principle apply here?
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
What "good alternative" can I use to watch high-def movies stored on my home server via my networked media tank or laptop etc?
Why is the parent modded insightful? If you want high-def movies on your home server, buy the Blu-ray disc and a Blu-ray player, and rip the movie to your server. Most people will say that this is completely legal, and even if some companies say it isn't, it's still conscionable and untraceable.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I look forward to the day that people are forced to stop downloading/pirating music and videos. It would be awesome to see the look on legislators faces when they are told: look, no increase in profits. Told you so, there was no loss in profits to begin with. Now, undo all that crap that you did to protect a dying industry that doesn't even know it's own customer base well enough to stay in business. If you don't undo it, I'm going to get all my pirate friends to spend their efforts on getting you unelected rather than on worrying about downloading things. See, on the one hand you get a nice summer vacation from the entertainment industry and on the other hand, you lose your job. You pick.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This is INDIE film makers suing. Not MPAA, not Hollywood. Indies.
So it's OK to rip off Hollywood but not the independents?
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
They cross-check against a powerpoint presentation, of course.
Say your name is the one your Comcast account is under, but someone else such as a neighbor leeching on your wireless network ...
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Quoth the piracy apologist, "So I'll simply avoid giving them my money, as well."
Oh really? So right up until you heard about this you were paying for legal access to indie content, were you? Of course you were.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
You must not have watched it, then.
Now how are these first 2094 does even going to know they've been sued? Oh wait, they don't need to know; they are presumed guilty by the plaintiff.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Does someone have a list a of filmmakers that use the "U.S. Copyright Group"? I'd love to send out a few handwritten letters explaining why I'll never spend a dime on one of their products again.
Not to mention the spreadsheet abuse outlined in the summary. Won't somebody think of the databases?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This whole mess is just sad commentary on how incredibly poor the state of the indie film industry really is. Call it piracy or whatever, what you're seeing is market forces in play: Consumers are making a clear statement that they are not willing to pay for the current indie offerings. We've traveled a long, long way from the glory days of the early Sundance festivals.
"Why is the parent modded insightful?" I know I'm going off-topic here, but I thought I should point this out: Slashdot's moderation system stipulates that individuals cannot assign mod points and comment in the same thread (for good and obvious reasons). What this means is that questions like the one quoted above will NEVER RECEIVE A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Couldn't this proprietary software package being used to track downloads be construed as a wire tap ergo inadmissible in a court of law?
Or is this AC being a silly little AC again?
With love
The Anonymous Coward
This is INDIE film makers suing. Not MPAA, not Hollywood. Indies.
So it's OK to rip off Hollywood but not the independents?
Well the usual argument from pirates is that they don't want to support mainstream hollywood movies but indies. I guess this puts a new perspective to them.
Congress says it's illegal. The courts agree with them. What most people say is utterly immaterial.
Do you know the ins and outs of HDCP in this senario? I don't. How about circumventing AACS, BD+, and BD-Mark, whatever that is?! All problems I don't have to face if I choose not to be a customer.
But, even assuming I can circumvent all of the DRM, I can pay to get the movie to my hard drive. Or not. I break the law either way. There may be rational reasons to buy the disc, but the adversarial relationship the movie studios have cultivated with their customers (and potential customers, and ex-customers) doesn't seem to encourage people to do the "right" thing.
For the record, I own over 60 Blu-ray discs, because I enjoy the picture quality more than I enjoy having them on a hard drive.
-Peter
I am pretty sure they would not have. Clearly they only wanted them because they had 0 cost. Maybe if the films were available for $1 they would have.
If they were trying to impose a reasonable fine system (ie. maybe twice or three times the standard street price of the movie at the time of the infraction) then you might have a point.
But this is merely extortion and racketeering.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Also please answer do tell me where I can find these "good equivalents". Remember DRM free and cheap is what we are going for here.
Bullshit.
Piracy costs nothing, the kids that do this were not going to buy those movies or games either way.
But wait! If the kid found out the movie is crappy, it might prevent their moms, friends or relatives going to the cinema/buying DVD!
Anyone want to start a pool on how long it takes before this is revealed to be the legal equivalent of astro-turf (i.e., funded by a major studio or by the MPAA) ?
Isn't this sort of like putting a meter on a sewer pipe and counting the turds as they go by?
However, that could loosely be associated with Broken Window Fallacy.
Life is not for the lazy.
You pretty much can't in a digital format. maybe get movies on VHS and convert them to DVDs? Personally I do the following:
IMO, this is no different than if I use a DVR with a big hard drive to record every movie I like from HBO, Cinemax, etc. I can watch a DVR'd movie as many times as I like, and I can keep it until the HD crashes in the DVR. This speaks volumes to the ignorance of lawmakers on technical issues: recording digital content that comes down the wire = OK, but recording that same content off a plastic disc = BAD. WTF? So, if I bought the CD or DVD and it's sitting in in my closet while a digital copy resides on my network, according to the RIAA/MPAA that is not fair use. Really? Dan Glickman and Cary Sherman can kiss my pucker - Until and unless I upload the ripped copy to the internets I've done nothing wrong.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Well, my comment was primarily sarcasm. I pirate out of convenience. I pay for cable and DVR, but its easier for me to simply torrent the ~4 shows I follow than it is to fight with the family and watch them on the TV. I pay for an all-you-can-listen music service but the DRM required means I cant listen to the music (I pay extra to use it on a mobile device)on my phone, the only mp3 player I own.
I feel justified in this action because the content creators have already gotten their share from me. If they cant provide me with what I pay for, I will turn to whoever will.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Piracy costs nothing
That's not true. It certainly doesn't cost the studios anywhere near as much as they say it does but it does cost them millions in lost revenue from movie tickets or DVD/Blu-ray/download sales.
I'm not defending what they are doing (or their outdated business model) but this piracy does cost them money.
I wouldn't worry - these guys don't sound like they know much.
Hold on.
Let me get this straight ... they've found 20,000 people downloading Uwe Boll's film?
If I were a defense lawyer, all I would do is play the thing for the judge - nay, I would insist that he sees it from beginning to end - and then I would watch the lawsuit getting dismissed with prejudice .... and all the poor sods sued ordered compensation for the mental anguish caused by mere insinuation of having downloaded the thing, all the involved lawyers getting disbarred, charged with cruelty to judges and odious crimes against humanity, declared terrorists etc and so on...
Well, they have a great defense. Copyright only covers creative works. Uwe Boll is not creative. Therefore, Uwe Boll's works are not covered by copyright.
In order to convince the judge of this fact, they can get their lawyers to introduce an entire Boll film into evidence by playing it in the courtroom. That should settle the issue.
On the other hand, it will probably get them disbarred a la Jack Thompson's pornographic briefs.
It's all part of the problem with the economy of free. There is a near endless demand for anything that is free. Likely many people who would be otherwise willing to pay downloaded it instead. The whole system is messed up. Piracy is way too easy to stop, and most people don't care about any extras they might get buy buying or renting. And yet, the movie industry has not figured out a new way to exist to deal with this problem. Theater ticket prices are too high to encourage people to take a chance on a movie, and no one runs double features or does second theatrical releases of films anymore. In my mind, the movie industry can only survive this by returning to the theater. If I didn't have to pay $12 to see a mediocre movie, I would go a lot more often. Maybe something like $8 could get me going every other week if they just dedicated one screen to reshowing old classics.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Every time I hear good things about a movie or I really like a song on the radio, I consider breaking my 'don't give any money to the MPAA/RIAA' policy. Fortunately they keep doing shit like this and I'm recommited to only giving my entertainment dollars to independents.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
You think Congress doesn't know the truth? They might be crazy, but they're not stupid.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Looks to me like the proxy server business is about to get a big bump.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
pornographic briefs.
They make underwear specifically for filming pornography? Wow! They just think of everything, don't they?
Er, that's the kind of briefs you meant, right?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Is it me, or is everything getting shittier everyday. It feels like more and more, articles, columns, and information leaks point to the ever diminishing rights of citizens of the world. The United States is broke, and its overlords are continuing to spend more money. The rest of the world is either pussyfooting under political correctness, stripping their citizens of any rights they once had, while other countries continue to grow their nuclear arsenals and further fuel the idiotic self-destructive nature that humankind cannot seem to shake.
I am ranting, I know, but for mother fuck-fuckity-fucks sake how much longer are the rational, intelligent, and reasonable going to continue to stand for this? Are the aforementioned independent free-thinkers to disjointed, apathetic, and outnumbered to ever turn the tide? I feel this civilization is edging towards a serious crises, one much worse than we have ever seen. Be that crises a nuclear holocaust, or the silent denigration of of the common sense rights that a democratic mentality provides, the crises is coming, and we don't seem to be heading anywhere near the appropriate direction to turn the tides of destruction.
Perhaps my tinfoil hat is too tight, maybe I need to get some sunlight. I don't know. But it is hard as a relatively young individual to imagine a positive environment for future children. Each day that passes, more rights are stripped, more debt is incurred, more inflation rapes the dollar, more political seats are bargained, more people hate democracy, more people get lazy, more people become passive obedient workers, taking the big red, white, and blue dick right up the ass, while the bourgeoisie reap the benefits of a society that becomes more mentally jellified by mass-media induced mind-fucking every day.
Sorry about that. Your regularly scheduled broadcasting will now continue.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
In most locations, photo radar and red light camera tickets go to the owner of the vehicle. In order to lose your license they have to prove it was you, but for a fine all they have to prove is that you own the car.
You know, they probably wouldn't buy the stuff, either. It's like having a piece of cake... yeah, it would be nice to have right now, but not enough to actually pay money and go out and get it myself. If someone else gets it, well, that makes it a bit easier! Maybe at some point you can find a price/convenience model that will please them, but that's yet to be discovered, obviously.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
so how is it an "abuse of the legal system" for them to sue people who willfully violated their copyright? Last time I checked, there is neither a moral nor legal right to simply take what is not yours.
Much like software developers, filmmakers have a right to set the licensing terms for their work. If you don't want to pay to watch their movies... don't watch. Or wait until the copyright expires.
No doubt you'll continue to feel that way when you get sued and have the opportunity to personally pay all those talented individuals.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
You know, I'm getting sick of all the whiners too.
Someone makes a movie and *gasp* wants to make money from it. You have several choices:
Pay full price and watch it in the theatre soon after release
Wait for it to come to the cheaper screens
Wait a bit longer for it to come to DVD/Blu-ray
Wait still longer for it to come to TV
If you're not happy with any of the options, then do without. Find something else. There's more to life than movies and music, and you don't have an inherent right to just take stuff any more than I have an inherent right to "borrow" anything from you without asking first. If you stopped pirating crap tomorrow your world isn't going to end - you'll just have to find something constructive to fill your time with - like interacting with people.
Or wait until the copyright expires.
Not possible, copyrights will get longer again next time mickey mouse comes up.
I pay for my media, but the reality is copyright no longer serves society as it was supposed too.
Indie films are by and large not indie films anymore.
Every major studio now has an indie branch. Plus 90% of everything is and has always been crap.
No, he means this. It's no surprise Thompson got disbarred, the guy is crazy!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I really wish people would stop treating IP like actual property. It's not. Actual property has the problem of scarcity. You can't take IP. You can make copies of it, for sure. You can use it without an appropriate license. But the correlation drawn between stealing and copyright infringement is simply invalid.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
How would HDCP be involved?
Do you actually use an OS that would support such an attack on your freedoms?
The circumvention of those things is quite easy and getting easier each day.
I agree with you about the legal issues.
I own no blu-rays yet, but have helped others rip them and have all my legally owned DVDs ripped to my HTPC.
Either "whoosh", or I need to work on my static text sarcasm & joking.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Have you even seen "Going Postal"? AWE-FUCKING-SOME!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
yes, but a 100$ fine is fairly different than a 100K$ or more lawsuit -- from which you may get ruined. And which is more dangerous: downloading a movie or passing on a red light?
This comment was written using 100% reused electrons.
I know I should not reply to myself....
The way I watch DVDs is probably not legal either, I use libdvdcss. So maybe I would be better of pirating, but I am doing my best to meet them halfway.
massive unemployment and off shoring our entire manufacturing base, killing the dollar value, and refusing to do whats best for Americans... is what has been causing problems.
Look at china, they pirate because they're poor.
America is becoming poor.
Your analogy between "borrowing something without asking first" and copyright infringement doesn't hold water. There's a big difference between borrowing your Ferrari and making a molecule by molecule copy of it that doesn't deprive you of your car.
æeee!
You getting a lambo costs at least the materials of a lambo, you getting a movie you would not buy costs nothing.
IANAL, but there's 2 distinctions to be made:
1) in a civil proceeding ie. lawsuit, guilt must only be established on a reasonable belief/greater than 50% probability, unlike in a criminal proceeding where guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Ask O.J. Simpson for how that difference can cost you.
2) For better or for worse, crimes/infractions relating to motor vehicle usage are often legislated vastly different from many other charges. A car owner can be found criminally negligent if they knowingly, or with undue caution, give the keys to a bank robber who is about to rob a bank, but that is a harder case to prove than establishing in a civil proceeding that person X had a reasonable knowledge of computers but was willfully blind to the actions of their roomies. You could better protect your butt by telling your room mates they're not to download copyright-infringing material, and documenting that conversation, for example.
Ultimately, these cases often come down to money - it is likely that many of those 50,000 people will settle out of court to avoid a costly action to establish their innocence. That is unfortunately how the law tends to operate in many situations.
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
I would love to see a viable legal alternative to my current setup
It's more than that, though, because your current setup in many cases should be legal.
How many dollars have been stolen from consumers by way of the politicians that have been bought to extend copyright on works that should have entered the public domain decades ago (copyright is supposed to be for the public benefit, which is why their government enacted it), and how does this compare to the money the industry claims is being stolen now? I think they may owe us a perpetually growing chunk of change, in fact.
And as a preemptive strike against the pedantic counterpoint, let's assume for these purposes that yes, selling somebody the Brooklyn Bridge is stealing from them.
I am not an economist, but...
The fundamental problem with selling music or other media over the internet is that data is not a scarce commodity. Copying music does not deprive anyone else of access to that music. It's much like copying an entire book without buying it. The book is still available for buying, and the store still owns it, so who cares?
Of course, this is a harmful position to take. If everyone thought nothing of "pirating" music, then artists would receive no compensation for their efforts, which is wrong. (Of course, imagine for a second an ideal world where all music purchases went right to the artist. The RIAA/MPAA just muddies things a bit.) Artists deserve compensation, but it will never work to sell data, which is inherently non-scarce, for money, which is scarce. Why spend money on something that has no actual scarce value at all? At least, there will always be people who will say that.
(Yes, the creative work of the songs themselves would be a scarce work, but in the end you're paying for a copy of the work, not the idea of the work itself. More on that in a second.)
The best solution would be for us to pay for copies of music with some non-scarce currency, but that sort of system is hard to set up and harder to maintain inside a predominately scarcity-based economy, because people tend to attach no value to non-scarce goods when there are scarce goods around. The two economic systems don't mix well at all. I suggest that, instead, artists give music away for free (or for Whuffie, real or imaginary), and sell the primary scarce thing they have left to sell: performance. Get artists to make their money on tour! Give the music away for free to get fans, and the fans will come to the concerts!
...
For more fun, consider that numbers cannot be copyrighted, and that all data can be represented by one really long number. I'm not so much trying to say that data can't be copyrighted, as I am that copyright should be seriously looked at again.
Studios do exaggerate their losses. But that's beside the point.
Fundamentally you don't have the right to demand somebody else work for you for free. Which is what you're doing when you consume their hard work - a film - without following the (perfectly reasonable) license terms. In this case, parting with a few bucks to view the movie at a theater or on a rental.
If you choose to freeload, it's hardly any secret you can get sued for it. It's been happening for years. Anyone still doing it has accepted the risk they might be on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
I go to the cinema a couple times each month. I also have a fairly decent home theatre setup, and about half a wall of shelves holding legitimately purchased DVDs. I also have a media server with at least as many downloaded rips.
Why?
I happen to not live in DVD region 1. And some Hollywood studios think we're less deserving to buy movies in this country or somesuch. Or maybe they just think it's funny to make us wait. It doesn't really matter why, I guess. But it has ofttimes been months, even years after the region 1 release that they'll deign to take my money.
(That is to say nothing of the fact that they often make us wait until well after a movie is in the American cinema before allowing the local establishments to show it. An equally odious practice, in my opinion.)
Well, if they're going to be asses and engage in shenanigans; so will I. But when they offer me a way to legitimately be a customer; I will do that as well.
That was the first thing that I thought of when I read the summary (Uwe Boll?? People should be suing him for their lost time).
Not only that, is Uwe going to challenge everyone that disliked his movie to a fist fight?
~S
This is why I gave up downloading movies, I now resort to buying all of my movies on blu-ray.
Sure, most of them fell off the back of a truck, but the fines are much less harsh than getting sued by the movie industry...
Until and unless I upload the ripped copy to the internets I've done nothing wrong.
I agree 100%. And note, no matter what RIAA/MPAA may say, no one has ever been sued - successfully or unsuccessfully - for private duplication. All of the lawsuits, on all fronts, have been over distribution and "making available".
That said, geeks take note: Bittorrent is not a private protocol, and it does fall into the "distribution" category. When you torrent copyrighted material, you are broadcasting your act of piracy to the world.
-renard
They don't need to prove, beyond any doubt, that you were the person who downloaded it. That's not the burden of proof in a civil case. Hell, that's not even the burden of proof in a criminal case.
They only need to prove that you were the one who likely downloaded it. Civil cases in the US are based on a "preponderance of evidence". That simply means that they need to be more than 50% right.
Their reasoning is "We have these records that this IP address downloaded this movie at this time. We have a statement from the internet provider who owns that IP that this account was the one who used it at the time of the download. That account belongs to Mr. Smith."
If they go to court with that level of evidence, and you simply show up and say "Prove it" or "It might have been someone who stole my wifi signal" then you are going to lose. You also need to submit evidence that makes their evidence tell a different story, and show that it is likely to have happened.
Now, if you showed up with logs from your router that showed that this MAC address downloaded the movie, records from the MAC address database that shows that the MAC was assigned to a particular manufacturer, plus an expert technical witness to explain what all that is, and a signed affidavit that says that you don't own, have never owned, and was not using a device by that manufacturer at that time, then you have just likely made a sufficient defense.
Note: IANAL.
More like pirates are giving them a better deal by cheating and avoiding R&D/other capital costs.
I'm not in the US or a lawyer but I wonder, if you sue everybody who has infringed your copyright can you still get punitive damages from them?
I thought the way punitive damages worked was by saying there this case is one of x but is the only one that has been brought to court therefore your damages can be multiplied by x.
If you can still get x times your actual damages from each of x people then it would seem to be a very good revenue stream indeed.
But if you can only get your actual damages from each case then you are not going to be making any money from this.
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
Actually, if you live in the U.S., you've committed a felony. I'm not saying that's right, but that's what the law says.
I was.
My father buys quite a lot of dvds. A whole lot more than he should in my mom's eyes ;)
That said.... He absolutely HATES the forced anti-piracy clip at the front of every blasting dvd in sale now... He hates it enough that he has now started ripping his movies to ISO files and watch them using his win7 laptop connected to the TV. He usually watches the movies while on a fatburner-bike and the last thing he wants to do when he goes for a 30 min 'trip' is to spend the first few minutes watching a damn anti-piracy clip.
Also.... He bought a blu-ray movie as his new spiffy laptop had a bluray drive. What happened? His sony hdcp-capable tv went blank when he tried watching it. It came with blu-ray capable software and was advertised as working "out of the box". He was quite annoyed that it didnt work. He spent a little time trying to get it to work, as he is quite computer literate but gave up with the feeling that it was just not worth it.
So he has written off the whole bluray format as "not worth it"... This is the kind of person who fits right in the 40-50 year old demographic who spend a lot of money on movies....
When he asks for movies for christmas or birthdays he asks to get them in pre-ripped ISO so he doesnt have to deal with the crap. That alone is more than enough of an indication of the failings of the movie industry than anything else. When you piss of the regular uses enough that they seek out ways to avoid it.... you have -failed-.
Give me a legal way to get the files in a decent format that I can play on any device (win7, winxp, linux, portable) which is priced at a point where a DVD doesnt look cheap in comparison then MAYBE they can salvage the failing industry.
Will PeerBlock/PeerGuardian still work? If not, what counter measures does one take? Also, does this apply to the USA only?
If you live in the house, and you're paying the ISP bill, then they will argue that you should be able to say who you think might have pirated the movie if it wasn't you. You could argue that because you had an open WiFi, you have no way of knowing, but that hasn't been a winning strategy so far. Furthermore, civil suits don't require proof beyond a shadow of doubt - they just require a preponderance of evidence. So if they can say that it looks pretty clearly like it was you, and you can't really refute that, you're at the mercy of the jury. And juries in these cases haven't been merciful.
Entrepeneurial law firms in Germany seem to have perfected this business model over several years. More background here from the good people at Heise: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct-tv%2Fartikel%2FHintergrund-Abmahnen-statt-verkaufen-901244.html&sl=de&tl=en
I'm going to "me too" this. I would love there to be a legal alternative to buy non-drm files instead of purchasing the bloody physical media. I'd pay a decent amount to download a high quality torrent. The value to me is having a trusted source with a beautiful 10GB encode from the original. I'd easily pay $5 per movie, perhaps $10 for that. As far as I'm concerened the MPAA should set this up and watch their distribution cost plummet. Heck they could stick to torrents and have the customers help distribute. For TV the same thing goes. I'd download ones with commercials even if they posted them at the same time as they go to air. I'd probably even pay a modest subscription. Basically until they offer something like this they have no business going after "pirates" since their other option are so crappy. Once they do, all the power to them.
So then you are an idiot. Identity Theft is just a way for a bank who was scammed to make it your problem.
The fact that people are ok with this I cannot understand.
They should sue everybody for a fair market value (just download anything using bittorrent and get billed later).
I thought the way punitive damages worked was by saying there this case is one of x but is the only one that has been brought to court therefore your damages can be multiplied by x.
That's not how punitive damages work. Punitive damages, as the name would suggest, are intended as punishment.
"take what is not yours."
Good thing I'm not taking anything.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
"What this means is that questions like the one quoted above will NEVER RECEIVE A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
"Why is the parent modded informative?" - The parent poster is obviously unaware of what constitutes a rhetorical question and why people use them.
Hint: Rhetorical questions are not supposed to be answered they are used by the speaker to make a point.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So the industry shouldn't adapt to the changing face of technology? If they wanted, they could release movies for high quality streaming for a few bucks two or three days after a movie comes out and get rid of the reason many people torrent new movies.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I wouldnt stand on that soap box in this economy buddy... Maybe if the movie industry didnt spend so much on special effects which jack up the price of movies... I mean come on! Yeah I like the transformers, but GD Micheal Bay! You can make great movies without a crazy budget!! I miss Stanley Kubrick, I was happy to pay for his movies! But if you want me to keep paying $12 every time an excuse for a director spends hundreds of thousands on yet another explosion/bullet time sequence... You can go f*ck yourself. Im voting Pirate.
on that note... I'm sleepy.
> I actually agree in principle that piracy is wrong. But where I have a problem is with their method of determining guilt. I wish Ray Beckerman or one of the other attorneys here would explain to me how they can *prove* that I, and I alone, am the one responsible for an illegal download with an IP address???
They don't have to, not the way you mean. There are a few things that complicate matters. Don't depend on any of this in court and IANAL, but:
First, it's a civil case, which means they only have to prove it by a preponderance of the evidence.
Second, even proof beyond a reasonable doubt isn't a very rigorous standard of proof in scientific terms, and this is much easier to show.
Third, juries are generally allowed to make reasonable inferences.
If someone uses your internet connection to download a movie, most of the time that someone is you (or perhaps a minor residing in your home). Basically, the plaintiff says "It was you because X" and you say "no it wasn't because Y" or else you say "X doesn't show anything" or else you say "not X." The jury then decides (1) if X or Y are disputed, whether they occurred, and (2) whether it was probably you.
Also, I think providers keep records of IP leases, so the static IP doesn't matter much. Proxies might. (Can someone who works for a provider confirm this?)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Hey, I'm not going to give my money to any company that does this and I just bought that new breakout clone game thingy earlier today. It's great.
Particularly since by suing dead people and old grandmothers, and even scoring a default judgement against someone while they were in the hospital, they prove they don't really care if they get it right or not.
ripping Blu-Rays is a fairly big PITA. Regular DVDs are simple but 1080p takes forever to convert to high-quality x264 (and most people don't want 30 gig direct rips)
Unfortunately, as lawyers often do, the plaintiff's counsel factually misrepresent BitTorrent technology and process in their claims to their favor. Any decent lawyer would get these suits thrown out on its face. In their pre-amble, they claim that due to the nature of BitTorrent, anyone who is a member of a swarm after the monitoring agent has accessed the swarm is necessarily distributing some part of the file, and therefore guilty of distribution of a copyrighted work. However, this is not how the technology works. To participate in a swarm, you do not actually have to have the file available, nor must you have downloaded it from someone else in an illegal fashion. You do not HAVE to upload anything, or even download anything infringing to participate in a swarm. As always, unless a 3rd party specifically downloads data from you that is copyrighted material one cannot demonstrate copyright infringement. Additionally, without some form of physically captured copyrighted materially downloaded from a peer, I would love to see them prove jurisdiction. Them requesting a list of seeds from a tracker, does not constitute your IP committing an act of copyright infringement in the District of Columbia, and I would like to see them demonstrate the routing information showing that whatever you did, necessarily passed through their, particularly if you are in the North East or Northern California. They may succeed in monetizing this flow, but only because most lawyers would be too clueless to defend themselves properly — it bothers me that one can get away with making such materially false representations about the way that a technology works to a court, in order to get judgements on one's side. They either don't understand, or are lying, and given the amount of technology used by the monitoring service, I'm betting someone somewhere has advised them more accurately how the technology works.
Why doesn't the same principle apply here?
The only principal that ever applies is that rich, litigious people and institutions get whatever they want.
In a democratic society, they couch their whims into bite sized "causes" with simple-seeming resolutions that the populace can get behind to reduce the effort the upper class has to put into getting their way, such as "copyright infringement starving all the poor artists" or "carbon emissions destroying the environment" or "Lack of Christian Values (and influence) in our schools leading to bedlam". Then they just sit back, nudge where they feel they need to, and drive popular opinion towards their destinations.
This is why when the rich are hoist by their own petard: be it homophobic GOP senators and leaders of the church buying meth from their male prostitutes, or music studios caught mass-infringing their own artists' copyright, or (alleged) copyright holders perjuring DMCA provisions by issuing fraudulent takedown notices (be it for IP address confusion, or just as often for scattershot pissing in the pool) you never hear more than a "gotcha" headline about the matter, and then nothing after that ever changes. The power of these "causes" are always directly proportional to wealthy, influential people orchestrating them to suit their particular needs.
IP's being poor relation to individuals (or IP's listed at tracker being poor relation to actually participating clients) mean nothing to the powers that seek to waylay citizens with the cultural blunt trauma of Intellectual Property. They don't have to explain themselves, they don't have to make sense, they just have to have more resources than you and occasionally convince a cadre of crazies Glenn Beck style that they are in the right in order to keep their own hands clean while you are beaten.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
So, using the legal system to go after people who are misusing their copyrighted works is abusing the legal system? What are they supposed to do? Give up making money at something they enjoy? I never had a problem with the **AA suing people in court over their IP being misappropriated. My contention was with their "accounting" practices in estimating piracy and it's effects, and the monetary "damages" they were claiming.
IANAL... But I play one on
I copied this directly from the U.S. Copyright Group web site (http://www.savecinema.org):
"Solution: at no cost to our clients, the Us Copyright Group will:
Identify illegal donwloaders by ISP address
Subpoena identifying contact information
Send a cease & desist letter to demand payment of damages
Obtain settlement of approximately $500 - $1,000 per infringer & promise to cease future illegal downloading
Process settlements & provide records to the client
Disburse client’s portion of the damages"
----
Hmmmm....
- "donwloaders": they either can't spell, don't use a spellchecker or more likely, this site was put very hastily, just in time for the news cycle. Many of the links are dead.
- They are pursuing damages on a "per infringer" basis. This is dramatically different from the RIAA's tactic of going after a small number of cases and seeking huge damages based on each pirated song. And it explains why they are suing so many people.
While it might be fun to think about clogging the courts with thousands of jury trials, the most likely outcome is that unless they are convinced that they have a very good chance of prevailing, the vast majority of plaintiffs will choose to settle, esp. if it's close to $500, rather than face the time, stress & expense of going through a trial that may wind up causing them a LOT more if they lose.
Don't get me wrong, I detest what these sad excuses for human beings are doing but if their evidence is very detailed and tight, they have a very good chance of accomplishing their goals of making a lot of money for themselves and the assholes they represent. And don't hope for any common sense or relief from the present administration. Obama is 100% behind ACTA and you can be sure that he'll support this.
Fundamentally, I have the right to do anything I am physically capable of. If you can't stop me, that is your problem.
Now, if you want to talk about morality, right, wrong, ethics and culture, then we can. However, fundamentally, you have only the rights you can take, just like everyone else. This is why the bigger rock/bow/gun/cannon/bomb has always won out.
Is it ethically wrong to take something from an artisan for no payment? Yes, in most cases. Tell me, what did a pirate take exactly? A minimal quality digital replica with NO material cost what so ever. While that doesn't make it "right" it sure as hell mitigates things.
I want to know how they can get a users name when they only have the IP address. I was assuming that ISPs don't just hand over that info. Am I missing something?
Not only is there a problem with a causal chain of action (all they can do is probably hold the ISP account holder responsible, but I am not sure that is law or precedent), but they misrepresent what BitTorrent does.
They claim that if you are a member of a swarm which is tied to a copyrighted work, then you must be distributing a portion of this copyrighted work, which is not true. Unless they download a piece from you, they have no way of verifying that you "made available" a copyrighted work for download, or that you in fact committed the crime of distributing a portion of a copyrighted work. As far as I can tell, they do not attempt to download a piece from each individual they are suing; if they do, then it gets interesting, but the way the law suit is worded, it looks like they are doing some pretty serious hand waiving at establishing the basics; all they seem to really do, is establish that X IP address was a member of Y swarm at Z time, and then claim that is prima facie evidence of copyright infringement, which is not the case...
Identity theft has been going on for centuries.It's even mentioned in the Old Testament.
The equivalent of a distribution channel where tens of thousands get movies for free, but then a randomly selected group has to pay a hundred times the cost of the movie in litigation fees. At least they're innovating...
Not really; sounds exactly like "speed enforcement." Most everyone drives over the limit, because they're so ridiculously artificially low (they were designed for cars with 1950's-era radial tires, drum brakes, etc), but the police 'randomly' pull people over and ticket them, supposedly because it'll discourage the population as a whole and "make the roads safer".
Then, the people caught speeding pay much higher insurance rates for the rest of their lives (like in Massachusetts, for example), which pays for all the idiots crashing their cars into things because they were yakking on their cell phone while balancing a cup of coffee on their lap.
Please help metamoderate.
Someone really thinks this is flamebait??
What about the costs of producing the movie? Actors, writers, directors? And even if you think those people are overpaid, what about cameramen, editors, set designers, etc?
It's up to them - not you or me. Their property - their decision. Streaming the video makes it impossible NOT to be copied, or to be seen by 10 people for the price of 1, so I don't blame them for saying a big F.U. to that.
Could you share your explanations on why you'll, "never spend a dime on one of their products again"?
I agree. Equilibrium was awesome. Some people thought it was a Matrix rip-off, but I thought it was much better than the Matrix because it had better actors and better fight scenes. I'll admit that the story was a bit flimsy, but so was the story in the Matrix.
right up until you heard about this you were paying for legal access to indie content, were you?
I frequently do, when I can get it -- and particularly when I can get it in a relatively unencumbered form, ideally digital download. I did buy Sanctuary, for example.
However, I also tend to boycott companies which do things I don't like. Right now, that's mostly Sony and Best Buy.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Oddly enough, he never mentions who they actually are: he just swings away to claiming that his company wins back the rights of copyright stuff to the actual owners and not the producers. Cute.
I did some sniffing on their site, but short of infiltrating their company or calling them, I didn't see a list anywhere. Considering their tactics are probably about as kindly as the Mafia, I don't dare use my phone to call them. Mebbe if I can find a public phone to call them from I'll see if I can get a list from them.
Either way, you should probably just avoid all movies. As a general rule, the MPAA has a hand in just about all of them, and if these guys are taking stock in the Indie world...well, movies were starting to recycle old stuff years ago anyway, I'm content with just watching local stuff and listening to local bands.
Probably want to know if they actually spent a dime on their products in the first place too.
I think this is what most don't understand. I am the type of pirate that does it for convenience. There is no other method of accessing movies that is as convenient as piracy, and I don't see anything coming in the near future that can come even close to allowing me to easily watch movies in multiple places in my home or on the road. With a downloaded .mkv, I can watch any movie I have on any TV in my home or on any computer in the world at the press of a button. I would love to see a viable legal alternative to my current setup, but it will never exist due to the luddites in charge of the movie companies.
I really, really, really hate the itunes interface in general but the online version of the store for the ipod touch is actually a good thing. The only two shows I watch on the pod are olbermann and maddow and the feeds are almost automatic. They only post the last aired episode but with a click I can download them to the pod. No fees, possibly one commercial, very sweet. I assume the for-pay stuff like Daily Show and Colbert would be just as slick but they're usually charging too much for this. Movie rentals are $4 and many movies are listed for "purchase" at DVD prices. I'm sorry, if you're not giving me physical media then why should I pay physical media prices? If DVD kiosks in the supermarket rent movies for $1, why should the electronic version that's even cheaper cost as much as renting from blockbuster?
The tech is already here to make buying more convenient than piracy. The issue is that they're charging too much and doing too many dickish things.
I actually like the idea of being able to vote with my dollars. Direct measurement of consumption is far more accurate than Neilsen's. Treat a season like shareware, Doom I'm thinking. The first third is free. You pay for access to the second third. If it's a good show, you'll want to pay. But make the price reasonable. I see DVD's of full seasons going for $20 some places. Keep the price down low enough so that it's an impulse purchase and we'll do it. Just look at the app store. Dollar apps? shit, that's cheaper than an appetizer. Yeah, I'll try it. If it sucks, no big deal. Price it at $10, now I'm skeptical and likely won't give it a spin.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It must be insult to injury to get sued over an Uwe Boll film. Not only did they watch it, but they got sued for doing so. Nobody needs that!
It's like getting kicked in the balls after consuming a large meal consisting entirely of broken glass bottles.
That would describe watching a Uwe Boll film only.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Let's all tell them where to stick it by voting Pirate Party for all our elections. 50,000 people is a lot to piss off. If each had a couple friends that felt sympathetic or likewise threatened and all would vote Pirate then we could possibly at least show up on the charts. THAT should make the MPAA/RIAA crap their pants if the public could get mobilized to fight back.
Which state has the lowest population? Everyone move there and let's make a data haven. Only half kidding.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Once a studio commits to DRM, it is a part of the package. What they are doing (the studios) is taking a candy (game) and wrapping it up with a layer of used toilet paper (obtrusive DRM). Word gets out about the used toilet paper packaging, and the studio heads are wondering why fewer people are buying their candy. "The candy is great!" they scream. (It probably is. But, it doesn't matter, because YOU WRAPPED IT UP IN USED TOILET PAPER.) The studios are free to "protect" their investments as they see fit -- however, at the same time, we are free to "NOT BUY IT" if we don't like the product, including the packaging/(non)delivery method. That being said, there is an entire generation which has effectively ignored the DMCA, and the companies think that people will suddenly change their behavior to be more "moral" now that they've driven their desires into legislation. We already went through this many years ago. It was called prohibition back then. Millions of people ignored it and alcohol still abounded. Now, millions of people ignore the DMCA, and pirated software still abounds. Not content, they are now working on ACTA, as well. We already know how the story ends, but we unfortunately have to live through it until those in charge realise they've made a mistake.
no, people pirate because they think they are poor. i think americans have started thinking like poor people. that would explain all the nasa shit and social healthcare and much else.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
That is why I go into stores and steal the actual DVD's. Much less punishment if I get caught and it is actual theft.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
They're only targeting those that are best, most efficient, hardest working at what they do-- share movies.
Socialism in action. Cut off the productive top while the rest get everything for free.
I wouldn't buy a Lamborghini "anyway" but I shouldn't get one for free.
Why not?
See, car analogies fail hard here. Remember those "You wouldn't steal a..." scare ads that ran in movie previews and on DVDs -- in other words, in places where someone pirating that film would never actually see them? My favorite response was someone who, on hearing "You wouldn't steal a car!" stood up and shouted "I would if I could fucking download it!"
Let's put this in even simpler terms -- let's pretend fabricators get to the point where they can create food out of thin air. Anything you want to eat, you can download from the Internet. Now, that's certainly not going to sit well with the master chefs, who want to force you to go to their restaurants and pay through the nose if you want something gourmet, but it would pretty much end starvation overnight.
So tell me again -- why shouldn't I get a car for free, if it were possible to duplicate them for free?
Your answer is inevitably going to involve something about the cost of designing said car, testing it, etc -- all of which is very nice, but also the kind of argument that doesn't really apply to cars. You wouldn't steal a car, because cars can't easily be duplicated, and stealing one deprives the owner of said car.
Even if you bring it back to the discussion about movies, why is it "a farce"? Please explain, without using the fatally-flawed car analogy.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The US Copyright Group, a company owned by intellectual property lawyers, is using a new proprietary technology by German-based Guardaley IT that allows for real-time monitoring of movie downloads on torrents.
You got to praise German engineering...
In theory.. The only way bittorrent knows you're uploading is if you tell the cloud you are, or someone reports you are. Both of which could be fake.
The only way someone knows if you downloaded something _for sure_ is if you downloaded it directly from them.
I'm sure the subtlety of this technical aspect will be completely lost during any litigation.. but it's a fact.
COLD HARD DELICIOUS FACTS.
I'm not a lawyer, but this "monetizing" sounds like bullshit to me. If they are aware of infringement happening, and do nothing to stop it, or mitigate their damages, they lose rights to claims.
Those 40-50 year olds recorded music from their LP and shared them with their friends. Since then the music industry clearly died. And then came the VHS where people copied movies for each other and now the movie industry died, because of it. So no, most likely they would not have bought it.
And be realistic. How much money would you need to spend to fill a 160GB iPod? Say 3MB per song, that is 15.000 songs or say some 1.500 albums at 10USD/EUR per piece is 15.000USD/EUR. I have rounded it down a bit, because it will be more.
There will be people who have enough money and are willing to pay such an amount for their music, but it will be the mimority. And that is why people won't buy it. Because they are not willing to give that amount towards it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Anyone else think the US Copyright site is not legit? as in, someone is trying to bait Slashdot? Lots of fake links, stock worker photos, spelling error "oyu" on http://www.savecinema.org/index-4.html smells fishy to me.
I don't see how the companies could possibly prove this by any imaginative way whatsoever, but then why is the burden of proof on them? Why is it not on ones breaking the law as it stands?
Especially so as that latter category can trivially prove that they don't really value all those movies (and other content) so much - just completely boycott them, in all forms, legal or not, for a certain period of time. Say, a year.
What do you think? How many of those sued would take up that challenge to prove that point, if, once they did so, they could download the same kind of stuff for free for the rest of their life?
There is none.
Then again, if an ice-cream vendor doesn't sell ice-cream without chocolate icing - which is the one you demand from him - it's no excuse for stealing one of those he sells off him, and scraping the chocolate off.
Content producers are not obligated to sell you content in a format that you want, or supported by a particular application that you have, or conformant to a particular philosophical view that you hold. If you want to uphold your Free Software ideals, do what Stallman does - just altogether ignore the content (and the producers) that can't be watched using Free Software.
Tough? Sure is, but, well, no-one said that actually standing up for your principles is easy. However nutty and unpleasant as a person I think RMS is, one thing that goes for him for sure is that he truly believes in and stands for what he says. Unlike those people who go "FSF rules! Oh, by the way, dude, can you send me that torrent for the new Photoshop?" - and of whom there are altogether too many.
Maybe he's trying to get the ones who modded it that way to respond, and therefore wipe out the moderation? ^__^
And what happens if every one of this first group heads off to court?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They don't need to prove, beyond any doubt, that you were the person who downloaded it. That's not the burden of proof in a civil case. Hell, that's not even the burden of proof in a criminal case.
IMO, that's where the fault lies. When we're talking of multi-million fines, which are applied to an individual who can never realistically pay them off (i.e., a guilty verdict effectively means a ruined life), it really should be "beyond a reasonable doubt". Anything less is practically inviting abuse.
Alternatively - and preferably - why not just bring fines down to a reasonable level? Enough so to bite - say, a few hundred bucks; at most a few thousand for long seeding, perhaps; but definitely not any higher than that, unless we're talking about tens of thousands of copies (proven), or commercial infringement.
Are they really independents or are they MPAA's "indie" studios? You know, to prevent legitimate competition and keep their stranglehold tight.
Sort of like how MS has proxies that they use to achieve their goals without showing that they're involved?
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I hope this is just the beginning. May they flood the courts with tens of millions of lawsuits. That's the only thing that will finally get the law changed.
I know that I download plenty of games, but never ones that I haven't bought. I tend to lose or scratch my CD's, making them unusable, so I have to download working versions of my games.
I'd be happy to pay $20-$30 for that. The issue for me is DRM. Will I be able to play the movie in a year? 5 years? 10 years? Without esoteric, old hardware/software? That's a big deal to me.
It's perfectly possible to both think that copyright, as it stands, is out of whack and not pirate...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The point is, someone pretending to be you may or may not be harming you. If someone gave your name after pulling a little child from the path of a runaway bus, have they hurt you? Someone who defrauds a bank harms the bank. If they did that fraud by pretending to be you they still harm the bank, but the bank passes the costs on to you, calls it identity theft instead of fraud, and doesn't have to deal with the consequences of being tricked by a fraudster themselves (or at least, doesn't have to deal with as many of them.). Being able to label some acts of fraud as identity theft and pass the consequences on, even when the bank makes basic mistakes that make fraud easy, means the bank doesn't have to exercise normal caution or train their employees to reasonable standards.
It's a phrase like 'age discrimination'. Many people still discriminate against some race or other, or against some other groups, but there really are not a lot of people who hate middle aged or older people. There are very, very few who think the average 40 year old is senile, feeble, or likely to die before the get trained enough to work. People in hiring discriminate against older employees frequently, but it's mostly because of insurance cost issues, not because there's the sort of widespread hate for older people that there was for, say Blacks in Selma Alabama, the first day one tried to sit at a lunch counter. 'Age discrimination' is a lie, a phrase designed to cloak that the real problem is essentially entirely fixed around current insurance company practices and not because of stereotyping or other normal causes of prejudice. 'Identity theft' is a lie in much the same way.
Who is John Cabal?
Or wait until the copyright expires.
At the rate copyright extensions are happening, that probably won't be until my grandchildren are dead. If ever.
Given current production and distribution methods compared to what was available at the inception of copyright, the maximum duration should probably be about 5-10 years now, instead of 28. Everyone knows the majority of sales happen in the first year anyway. Anything after that is just gravy. Even so, I'd still be willing to concede them 28 years. But if the current trend of maximum copyright duration extension continues, copyright will never end.
So, once they're willing to hold up their end of the bargain, I'll hold up mine. Until then, I'll pay the ones I feel deserve it, and the rest can go fuck themselves.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Demanding work for free would be slavery. A copy of the end result of some work is not the work itself, but please go on ignoring this "purely semantic" difference...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The fact that you'd even consider comparing identity theft with copyright infringement shows how out-of-touch you are with reality. On the one hand, we have someone getting their whole life fucked over, possibly to the point that it may be impossible for them to ever get a decent job again. (Do you know how fucked you can be if someone messes with your medical history via identity theft? You should read up on it. It's very enlightening.) On the other hand, we have someone maybe possibly losing as much as a whopping 1-5% of profit on some idea they put down on paper (or whatever) and tried to sell.
Gee, I wonder which situation I'd rather be in.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Not to mention the spreadsheet abuse outlined in the summary. Won't somebody think of the databases?
The bane of business IT people everywhere...spreadsheet = database.
It is incredibly depressing that even without further copyright extensions, movies being released today will very likely never be out of copyright within our lifetimes.
eclecti.cc
We hope they suffer for what they have given us in the name of "Love ,Greed and Sloth". We don't want their filthy souls. We want their lifeblood.
AC! Kiss me! Kiss me... once...
Seriously though, will you marry me?
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
No. It isn't piracy as much as cost of production for a major feature film or video game.
The piracy DOES add to the equation however, but it is not the root cause. Take the piracy away and you'd still have very high cost games with extremely conservative development oversight going for what has been proven before.
Fundamentally you don't have the right to demand somebody else work for you for free. Which is what you're doing when you consume their hard work - a film - without following the (perfectly reasonable) license terms.
I don't think the word "consume" means what you've been told to think it means. I won't even touch your concept of "reasonable".
You can "consume" a burger. After that last swallow, no one else can consume it. You alone get the calories and the flab around your middle, and only you. You could consume someone else's burger when they weren't looking, and that would be theft, because then they would have to purchase another burger.
You can't "consume" a movie unless you somehow manage to steal the first master from the production floor before duplication begins, quickly film a "Will It Blend?" episode, and shovel the result into your gaping maw.
Is reading a sign on the street "consuming" the sign? Of course not. When you're done, other people can still read the sign. You have not consumed it.
How about taking a photo of the sign with your phone, then going home and reading it? Is that "consuming" the sign? No?
What if you took a photo of a sign on the street which had a footnote saying "FBI WARNING, SERIOUS CRIMINAL PENALTIES FOR PHOTOGRAPHING THIS SIGN TO READ LATER", then went home and read it? Has the sign been consumed?
Stories, ideas, music and movies are not consumables. Time to stop trying to monetize them as such. The only thing that matters is that I can get the content I want by paying for a method of delivery. Right now, my ISP connection and a torrent client seem to do it.
So there ARE losses, we just can't determine what the amount is.
Whatever the loss is, I'd be willing to stake everything I own that it's not enough to be worth the effort they put into fighting piracy.
Of course, that's assuming there even is a net loss. The free advertising from piracy most likely makes it a net gain, but let's not get too concerned about reality. It's overrated anyway, right?
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
but if you'll actually read copyright law, it's not about downloading or copying it yourself, copyright is all about distribution. Which is the only thing they can really get you for. You can copy anything to your heart's content (with exceptions as per the DMCA) you just can not distribute.
Copyright was horribly misnamed, it should have been named DistributionRight.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Oh, I think it will eventually exist. See how the RIAA has basically given up on DRM schemes for music. They figured out it cost them more to build and implement those schemes than they'd ever make up in revenue from the few nimmers who couldn't find DRM-broken content.
The movie industry is farther behind because video piracy took longer to get started (what with the vastly larger amount of data needed per second of video compared to audio; the average mp3 back in the day was a few megabytes, but the average pirated video these days is a few hundred to several thousand megabytes), but eventually they too will figure out that there's just no profit in it, and will give up, and provide inexpensive high-quality video downloads that don't require bizarre DRM schemes or custom software.
At least, it seems a likely path.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
It's up to them - not you or me. Their property - their decision. Streaming the video makes it impossible NOT to be copied, or to be seen by 10 people for the price of 1, so I don't blame them for saying a big F.U. to that.
Actually, it is entirely up to me. You may choose to abstain, but that is your choice, not the copyright holder's. The film is already copied. There are copies available of every major film before it reaches the theaters. It doesn't matter if the studios say "a big F.U. to that". It's totally moot.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, and I respect your ethical stance on this. The problem is with your assertion that control belongs to copyright holders. It does not. Filesharing is rampant, and attempts to curb it thus far have been wildly unsuccessful.
I'm not saying right, wrong, good, bad - but this is the reality of today. The business model of the 20th century is coming to an end, and it's going to take as many of us with it as it can.
Of course I don't know, but I think it'll get darker before it gets lighter.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
If it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, and your hand passes right through it, it's probably an imaginary duck.
Protip: Real ducks don't talk
They can go suck an egg. Our culture, our copyright privileges to take away.
Come back when it's $6-7. If they're going to cram me into those airline seats to watch ads for 30 minutes before getting to see a lukewarm piece of shit and then charge me $10 for the privilege...
Come to think of it, between the pre-movie ads and the product placements, they should already be letting people in for free. I'm no teabagger, but there has to be a point when society says, "Just stop it, you have all the toys, you all win - stop it now." Unfortunately, those things usually turn out a little more messy than that.
Let them listen to Cake.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
IANAL, but I believe that in a U.S. civil case, they only need to "prove" it beyond reasonable doubt. So they don't have to prove that you were the only one who could possibly have used that network connection, but that you were the only one likely to have done so.
In your example: dynamic IP, well, the ISP has logs. Someone sneaking into your house? Not if the download was happening for a full 24 hours. Wireless AP: someone taking the effort to hack your WAP just to download films doesn't seem likely, does it?
Oh, and leave us not forget the forensic evidence when they subpoena your PC.
My overall point is that the Internet didn't change the copy prevention game.
It shouldn't be about copy prevention. It should be about compensating the artist according to the merit of their works. This notion of copyright, patents, and IP is holding back the progress of technology and support for the arts.
More to the point, think about it this way: Suppose you are totally legal with respect to copyright. You buy your favorite artist's CD. You listen to it everyday for the rest of your life, you like it so much.
The artist will never see another dime from you for the rest of his life. Is that fair?
OTOH, why should he get paid when you pay for the equipment and electricity to play his music? Why should an artist get paid *per copy* when he only sang the song once, and is now free to pursue other labors? Should he get paid an essentially unlimited number of times for a finite amount of work?
Copyright is a kludge. Enforcement is arbitrary and capricious. And it doesn't prevent corporate greed from oppressing the artists, doesn't adequately compensate those who make indelible marks on our culture, and indeed, deprives us of a common culture by making our culture a pay-to-experience kind of thing.
This notion that a copy of something is illegal because *someone else* doesn't want you to have it has to go. While it may be immoral for pirates to enjoy the fruit of someone else's labor without compensating them, it is just as immoral for the content cartels to compel monetary restitution for a loss that never *actually* happened.
Or think of it this way: by not buying media, I've had the same economic impact that a pirate would have. The difference, though, is that I simply choose to do without. But neither I nor the pirate have actually committed theft against the content cartels, a distinction I think the cartels would like to blur. The only thing we both have done is refrain from contributing to the bottom line of a corporation, and this, I believe, is what the likes of the MPAA and RIAA find so appalling. In their eyes, there is no sin greater than freedom from corporate bondage.
It's not about the artists. It's not about the music, or the movies. It's about this odd notion that people don't like - in the words of Tom Petty - "paying for what you used to get for free".*
* - The Last DJ.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Shooting yourself in the foot, 20000 law suits at a time
Actually, it's 5 lawsuits, not 20000. It's 20000 defendants.
If they do this, does that mean they're wide open for countersuits by anyone uploading their wedding movies?
No. Hint: people who upload their wedding movies are implicitly giving downloaders permission to download.
What about the costs of producing the movie? Actors, writers, directors? And even if you think those people are overpaid, what about cameramen, editors, set designers, etc?
Those costs are incurred for the first copy. The rest are trivially cheap.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
It's like paying for an all you can eat buffet, then taking wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of food out to your car so you can "enjoy it whenever you feel like it". Well done.
I'm sure that somewhere there's an award for Stupidest Analogy Ever.
completely boycott them, in all forms, legal or not, for a certain period of time. Say, a year.
Okay, I can see that being an interesting challenge. Now one for you (and anyone else that cares to try). Try avoiding TV/film advertising for one month. No ads. No muted TV, no channel surfing. If you watch Hulu, block the ads. If it's not on Hulu torrent it. Put your TV in the corner and use it for CSPAN and PBS.
After you get over the withdrawal (I mean - literally. Try it.) you will look back and wonder how you lived with all that noise. It's like Harrison Bergeron.
I'm not saying people should be pirating, but I am saying that consuming media "as is" causes us direct harm in measurable ways.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
So... You'll kill someone in order to pilfer garbage.
There are losses and there are gains, both have been demonstrated, and no one knows which outweighs the other. There are absolutely losses, as you suggest. But there may or may not be net losses.
Also, my hat is a crab, your argument is invalid.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
People would still torrent. Unless the business model is free (maybe with ads) and full quality, people will torrent. Even if it was ad supported people would find ways to block them. People are cheap and when stealing is easy and pseudo-anonymous people will steal.
Come on. Who the hell would torrent the movies in TFA anyways?
My guess, this is one REALLY elaborate April Fool's joke.
The "pirates wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is a farce. I wouldn't buy a Lamborghini "anyway" but I shouldn't get one for free.
Why? That makes no sense.
Why shouldn't you? Or I?
If I could have a free Lamborghini, while satisfying both ...
a) I am not depriving anyone who has a Lamborghini of their Lamborghini
b) I am not decreasing the number of Lamborghini (Lamborghinii ?) available in the world
Then why not? If somehow a Lamborghini could, for free, materialize in front of my house and the above two conditions are actually met, then why CAN'T I have that free Lamborghini?
Who should get it if not me?
Why should you get my Lamborghini, when you can have your own Lamborghini appear in front of your home the same way mine did.
That situation is the only way you can compare a Lamborghini to a digital download.
And sorry, I just REALLY love saying Lamborghini
Tough? Sure is, but, well, no-one said that actually standing up for your principles is easy.
Avoiding offending content is not standing up for the principles in question. Standing up would be getting large numbers of people to widely advertise their intention to infringe, then to do it and choke the prisons. It will come to this, but we aren't there yet. Everyone's preoccupied with religious extremists and the financial crisis, and sausage-making on Capitol Hill.
I think it's very sad. By the time enough people know what they're losing, there will be very little they can do about it.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Amen to that. We have changed from laborer society to a creative society. You job pays you because you do creative work (intelligent adaptation of previous knowledge). If there isn't any way to protect creative work from being ripped off the value of creative work goes way down and you will be without a job. There is no incentive to invest up-front because someone else can steal and ruin your ability to make back money. I really get annoyed with people saying that business are not adapting to the new environment and technology. It is those people who can't adapt to the environment but must consume as much as possible without contributing anything back.
The power of anonymous on 4chan would definitely cause a ruckus with that!
oh and i highly doubt 20,000 people have been sued in the last week in a DC court. courts take months to process even a single straight forward claim.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Yes, you are. You are taking away the right of the copyright holder to distribute their material as they see fit.
How long until we have BitTorrent with TOR and encryption built in?
TOR wasn't designed to handle large P2P transfers. The only anonymous network I've seen that is robustly handling torrent traffic is I2P. One you install it and set the proxy on your browser, just go to tracker2.postman.i2p to see what is on the most popular tracker.
The I2P software is open source and comes with anonymized email, bittorrent and http software built in. Other programs either written for or adapted to I2P are available, such as Tahoe-LAFS file system and iMule. I2P just recently got a new plugin architecture to make it easy to distribute new apps to interested users, and they could use some coding talent on the many ideas bouncing around on the main forum site.
It seems that I2P aims to be very TOR-like in terms of internal routing and anonymizing capability (they call it "garlic routing"), but in a mostly darknet fashion. This means that the trackers, torrents and web sites you visit through I2P will be 'inside' the anon network. However, there are 'gift' gateways to regular www as well as to freenet and TOR. Another difference with TOR is that all running I2P 'clients' are also routers and route at least a minimal amount of traffic for the network (this increases anonymity because there is no built-in "exit node" capability). Yet another difference is that the I2P network is supposed to be less centralized, though I'm not intimate with the code and can't say for sure.
That was meant for WhatAmIDoingHere (742870) sexwithanimals
It makes me cry a little whenever I see a post like yours. All of the copyright holders could make so much more money if, instead of scrabbling for a fist-full of dollars from a few hundred to a thousand piraters, they setup a service to make getting it easy for millions of users to get legitimate access to new movies movies. I mean, look at how well ipod and steam are doing for fucks sake. If they spent less money on lawsuits and more on software developers and network engineers, they could probably make this happen, and cheaper too. Lawyer: 100$+ an hour, engineer 30-50$+ an hour. I would love to watch new movies from my home setup, but nooo they have to go after that one guy torrenting a crappy screener of Avatar. Ugh, excuse me while I go sulk in a corner now.
Why don't they just bill every infringer for the actual current cost of the item in question? Rather than all the expense (not to mention bad publicity) of suing hundreds of thousands of people. And if they don't pay, send them to collections.
I bet a lot of those people would probably just pay the $20 and be done with it, especially after hearing about all the lawsuits. How many of those people probably actually don't know they shouldn't be downloading movies? How many are kids and their parents would gladly pay the money and then ground their kids for a week.
Seriously, nobody is thinking about this in a reasonable, practical way. Both sides are wrong. The content owners are being dicks for suing everyone in sight, but the people downloading stuff are also being dicks because they don't have the right to just take stuff.
Everybody needs to stop being a dick and just settle this reasonably.
Yeah, right..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
You'd think INDIE film makers like the mastermind Uwe Boll would be delighted to have someone watching their shit, not suing for it — they sure as hell are not selling their products [to me] either nor can I rent them anywhere.
How good business model it is to produce something, only sell/make it available to very limited crowd and then start suing when someone is interested enough in your production to hunt it down online? I'd set up a "support us by buying a license for your downloaded film," for any sum. I'd at least would like to see a film maker do this once and publish the results.
I bet in EU you could even get some public funds for trial like the one described above. Or more specifically, even more public funding.
Unfortunately, not everywhere. I have business users screaming to be allowed to use databases. However, IT insists they use Excel.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
And the flip side of this?
I don't pirate movies but a friend gave me a pirated copy of "Saw" a few years ago. I would never have bought it as it isn't my kind of thing. To my surprise I liked it and my friend then gave me a pirated copy of "Saw II".
Since then I have bought all six of the "Saw" movies including the two that I had a pirated copy of.
While individual stories such as yours and mine don't indicate much at all they do suggest that the figures for the amount of money lost by the industry are probably completely made up.
Local municipalities have been playing a similar scam for awhile.
1. Create a local municipal police force
2. Post artificially low speed limit signs and irrational parking meter zones and enforce it vigorously
3. ???
4. Profit
5. Become addicted on the enforcement revenues, and do more of #2
there is neither a moral nor legal right to simply take what is not yours
This is precisely what copyright does - it violates normal property rights. Now, you could try to argue that the utility that people get out of the copyright system trumps the harm to the property rights that it causes... But the exact argument you have chosen works against you.
On the opposite hand, I would rather spend $10 to watch a movie in my living room than in a theater. My living room has pause/rewind, more comfortable seating, and most importantly, NONE OF THE FUCKING ANNOYING PEOPLE. Seriously, is it so hard to be silent for two hours?
That looks awesome. For $10 I'm gonna buy it. Also, fuck any person or business or business consortium who engages in frivolous lawsuits.
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
"Identity Theft" is to Fraud what "Stealing" is to Copyright Infringement. There is no such thing as "Intellectual Property".
Its not about the profit made in the first year. Its about controlling culture.
If there was a massive public domain filled with all the cool movies made in the 80's, would we really bother to watch new ones as much?
Shorter copyright periods lead to less profit for these companies regardless.
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
In related news: The UK government is rushing through a law on filesharing in the last week of parliamentary business before the general election. It's bypassing the normal line by line debate in committees etc and will become law shortly after next Tuesday April 6th on current plans.
The proposed law will essentially enable the copyright holder to get warning letters sent to those who are believed to be illegally sharing files - these go to the broadband account holder, and if the incidents continue, they can be disconnected (or other unspecified "technical measures" may be taken). It doesn't matter if a family member or guest did the file sharing, or someone freeloading on your WiFi.
See http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care for more details and what to do about this. There are only a few days left to try to stop or at least delay this.
If you live in the UK, write to your MP now - it only takes a few minutes via the link above, just put in your postcode.
If you have mod points, please consider modding this up so that more people will write to their MP (member of parliament), and if you agree, then blog/twitter/Facebook/etc about this issue. Similar laws are being passed or planned in many other countries.
Pleas forgive spelling errors I just woke up from a coma
I agree, I live in France and I can watch Movies over the Internet via Orange, and I do. I pay 2.99, or 3.99 for the abiitity to watch ONE time. However I only get 24 hours. My partner usually falls asleep at the halfway point so she never usually get the times to watch the rest.
I don't want HD, or blueray or other crap definitions. I use piratebay because I can download a film in 40 minutes and watch it that night in bed, and my partner can rewatch it some other time.
I would pay 5 Euros a download for a 1 gig sized version. But no one wants to sell to me, because copyright is A MONOPOLY in distribution. There is no incentive for the distributers to reacts to changing market conditions.
I WILL NOT BUY DVD's anymore. I do not buy CD's anymore.
Cinema? Yes I reluctantly go. I saw Avatar in non 3D. 10 Euros a ticket, 40 euros for the family.
People defending copyright have no idea on the intention of copyright. They have no idea the abusive monopolistic position of copyrights holders.
Their distribution model sucks and is overpriced.
In my view this is an action of few unscrupulous lawyers abusing broken legal system. I do not mind paying a fee for a movie I watch (albeit in this case I see no way I would be willing to pay for the crap they are suing for) but let it be a just fee reflecting the actual cost and spreading the proceedings to the guys that actually made the movie. This shit (I mean the stated method to abuse of legal system) is spreading like a wild fire giving joys to no one but involved lawyers - I suppose it is time to introduce some sort of solution that can stop the nonsense.
That is why I go into stores and steal the actual DVD's. Much less punishment if I get caught and it is actual theft.
That's fucking funny. Sad but true.
What about those of us who don't use Bit Torrent? Say, a different way of pirating that does not involve uploading/sharing/distributing? Are we still ok?
A common usage of the word "take" is "to acquire". Implying that the only definition of "take" is "to remove a physical copy of" is archaic. The post you replied to did not mention "stealing", so the use of "take" is open for interpretation.
Now if the trolls would take a hike, I need to take a dump right after I take my temperature (it only takes a minute) in case I've taken ill and need to take care of myself.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Just like people who leave their car unlocked are implicitly giving people permission to take it.
"so how is it an "abuse of the legal system" for them to sue people who willfully violated their copyright?"
If there are tens of thousands of people breaking it (and the numbers are tens of millions, not thousands) it is the law which is unjust, not those violating it.
That said, if tens of thousands of people are downloading this material rather than buying it then that is always going to be the fault of the copyright holder those were potential sales they failed to realize. Clogging the courts with your attempt to force those people to pay rather than adjusting your business process is clearly an abuse of the system.
Whether you have filed a thousand lawsuits or one lawsuit with a thousand defendants you are abusing the system. One person or entity is not entitled to that much public time.
Why not place an upper limit on the overall fine for multiple counts of infringement, say something like $7500?
It would only take 10 violations to reach this (at $750 per movie) so most seeders are likely going to be liable for the full $7500 but at least the figure is reasonable. The risk of a $7500 fine is probably large enough to deter casual pirates (the bulk of bittorrent users) but avoids utterly ruining the lives of those who continue to share and get caught i.e. the fine is proportionate to the crime.
Of course all of the above assumes one is not financially gaining from piracy i.e. selling copies on the black market. For people that are making a living from piracy, I have no problem at all with them receiving very harsh fines.
Usually with copyrighted content like books, music, software, etc, the storeowners just report it unsold. They only pay for the copies they sell, the rest are destroyed and tossed in the bin at some point.
And that's called fraud, the is no offence of "identity theft" its another colloquial term that has no baring on the actual offence
Loop, twist and loop again.
Yeah, the last time I was in Hollywood, I saw actors, producers, and various support people panhandling on the corners, because their revenues were drying up. Damned pirates, don't care if actors can afford another Jacuzzi in their back yards or not! Make 'em walk the plank!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That is why I go into stores and steal the actual DVD's. Much less punishment if I get caught and it is actual theft.
plus after you rip it, you can go sell it.
Be seeing you...
I think we're witnessing something similar to transition off the gold standard.
With tangible properties, one can have only limited amount of them. (In the gold standard, money had value of gold state was putting behind them.)
With intangible properties, all limits are out. (Just look at Wall Street for the examples of hyper-inflating amount of money using nothing else but money themselves.)
States would love that to happen. Think about it: then they can also tax imaginary property (*) too!!
(*) btw, also abbreviates to IP :D
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Identity theft isn't theft either. When i was a kid we had an unlimited summer pass for the local pool. Give them your name and they let you in.
At least five of my friends used my name to get in on a regular basis. That is identity "theft" and they certainly weren't stealing from me.
"And the fact is that it *does* deprive them of some future revenue"
Only if I would have paid for their content and supported them in the first place. The future revenue argument is bogus. It is no more valid than claiming radio plays or bootleg tapes rob artists of future revenue. Filesharing and radio play are free advertising.
Lawsuits like this are just a way to vent your frustration that you aren't making the profits you'd like from your content. They are also a way to grab free headlines, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
really, what does hollywood have to bitch about? They are one of the few industries still showing growth in profits with the american economy in the shitter, they are making more last year than the year before, and that trend CONTINUES. In fact, since the advent of easily accessible internet sources for copies of media, the film and music industries have never done better. But my main complaint is that the quality of films latley vs the number in theaters is ridiculous. The quality of films up until around the mid 90's to early 2000's really were leaps and strides above previous films in terms of cinematic technology, but the fact is that a large portion of films seeing theater time today are utter shit compared to titles produced 15, 20, or even 30 or more years ago. Look at how rare it is to see a film hailed as a true gem of a film, we have the occasional one, but look at the kind of ratings vs number of films coming out today compares to film history taken on a whole, how many films like Seven Samurai, the Godfather, Star wars, Schindlers list, Shawshank Redemption, Lord of the rings, casablanca, Cross of Iron, Snow White, Toy Story, The nightmare before Christmas, Monty Python, Animal house, Die Hard, Wizard of Oz, the Exorcist, Haloween, Jaws, Psycho, the Matrix, 6th sense, Forrest gump, Jurrasic Park, singing in the rain, Apocalypse Now, and Harry Potter. Now how many of these were made recently? Maybe we would come see your movies in the theater if they were bloody worth watching. You know what we have had lately? I can name very few off the top of my head. The dark Knight, Serenity, Sin City, Murderball (all films that were made to please the kind of people who pirate allot of movies, the overlap of net savvy individuals and comic book nerds is high) and you know what? A massive number of people went and saw them in the theater, even if they pirated it, I know I did, because if its a good film, you WANT to see it on the big screen, and you WANT to own a copy of the DVD and buy merchandise related to it. The damn Harry Pottter films are on the top 100 highest grossing films list, so is Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, you know why? because they were GOOD films, and yet those were also on the top 100 most downloaded movies list of all times for places the pirate bay, demonoid, isohunt, and a dozen other torrent sites. Guess what, a couple of them are still on the top 100 most popluar torrents (most seeds/downloaders active), and DVD sales are still higher than average on all of those based on how long they have been available. So the most pirated films of all time are making the most money and have the longest curve on dvd sales. Well film industry, you just keep alienating your core group of supporters and see what happens to your profit margin.
Problem is, $750 (minimum) for one movie or song is reasonable. 750x1000 songs (or $750,000) is not reasonable. Can you think of a better idea? I'd love to hear it, personally.
Here's a good formula for a fine structure for copyright infringement without monetary gain:
$750 * (1 + ln(x)^2)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot%5B750+*+(1+%2B+Log%5Bx%5D^2%29%2C+{x%2C+1%2C+100}]
Making one copy is $750, making 10 copies is about $4700, and making 100 copies is about $16,000. The per-copy fine goes down as the volume goes up.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I want to know how they can get a users name when they only have the IP address. I was assuming that ISPs don't just hand over that info. Am I missing something?
Lawyer appears before the court saying to judge: "We have evidence to believe an individual at this IP address, owned by this ISP, has committed a criminal act. We request that you issue a court order demanding the ISP reveal the individual using that IP address at the time the offence was committed."
Judge: "Looks reasonable enough to me, here you go."
Lawyer then takes the court order to the ISP.
ISP: "Well, looks like we're being ordered to do this and failure to comply with this court order would be contempt of court, so here you go Mr. Lawyer."
Now, some ISPs have no backbone and will provide a subscriber's name without a court order, but the above is generally how it's done.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"We have changed from laborer society to a creative society."
Last I checked my desk is still made of wood and steel. Those things had to be produced. My floors need cleaned, my food prepared.
You are touting the reasons we are in an economic sinkhole as if they are 'embracing the future'.
Trading actual tangible production of real property with actual scarcity for imaginary property with artificial government enforced scarcity is fscking stupid to the power of 10.
There is a reason China produces and exports real goods to us and smiles and nods to our face while ignoring our IP to our half turned backs.
And don't even bother with statements about our currency not being fixed value. I understand perfectly well how a Harvard MBA wants to pretend our economy works. At the end of the day there are only so many cows to go around and our dollar and our economy can only obfuscate that fact for so long.
I wouldn't pay that much. That's how much it costs when you take into account packaging, pressing, promoting, and shipping a physical product.
The trouble is that these are the only ways the RIAA / MPAA represented companies make money. If they are gone, all they are is middle men skimming their xx% for no benefit whatsoever. They won't do that.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
"So, using the legal system to go after people who are misusing their copyrighted works is abusing the legal system? What are they supposed to do? Give up making money at something they enjoy?"
Abusing your copyright in such a way as to cause tens of thousands of people (or tens of millions if we are talking about filesharing in general in the US) to invalidate your privilege of control could you don't have the right to turn around and argue with the people in their courts.
That is right, the filesharers ARE The People. As in, We the People. More people have voted against copyright as we know it than have voted for any political candidate in history.
The solution is not to sue tens of thousands of people if you want to reclaim any revenue you imagine might have been there but to change your business practice to reclaim these valuable potential customers. The other option is to write them off as the valuable advertising resource they are.
On a side note. Indies aren't even indies anymore, the money is going in the same Hollywood pockets at the end of the day.
Same thing here. I downloaded libdvdcss2 to play encrypted DVDs through VLC Media Player on Ubuntu. Technically, I've breached UK copyright law by bypassing copy protection mechanisms, but I have No. Other. Way. of watching these Legally. Purchased. Licensed. DVDs on my PC.
I have a TV with a DVD player, but my g/f watches programs I don't like. She can't watch them on the computer, so I watch DVDs while she watches TV. For that, I must break the law, or pay Microsoft for an OS.
No. I won't do that.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Really, which movie are you watching on netflix that just hit torrent for the first time and was produced by a major theatre?
Exactly, there is nothing but old crap on Netflix. I supported them as long as I could stand it but after a couple years without finding anything new that I wanted to watch...
Blame the studios, blame Netflix, whatever, but Netflix has no selection, none of the new releases, gets what it does get after video stores, and is DRM laden.
A netflix type service, with no DRM, cross platform, and got all major studio content in HD 1 week after it hits the first theatres... I'd pay $20/month for unlimited play on that.
You can keep your physical disc trade service.
Indies are not like hollywood studios: they do not have any singular facade representing them.
There are indies who remain indies to be able freely express whatever they want to express without the confines of mainstream standards.
And there are indies who are wannabe big studios. I have seen several examples in past and at times they are notably worse than the big studios at dealing with. Key difference: studios are driven by profits while the indies are also driven by ego.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I second this. Add the condition that it should come out 1-2 (it can vary with box office numbers) weeks after the film hits the first theaters so it matches availability with torrent sites.
I would gladly pay $5 per movie (even $10 for something like Avatar) and stop pirating movie content altogether.
The same for music, post complete discographies for old artists with eac/flac for $5-10 each and I'd be all over it. I'm not a big music listener but this weekend I downloaded about a dozen complete discographies in lossless flac encodings. I did this so I could set up a mega playlist and randomize. Basically a personal radio commercial free radio station that only plays stuff I like. That is $60-$120 from a guy who will never buy a CD.
No kidding and that bar gets higher every day. I went and saw Avatar 3D in the theater the other day and tickets ran about $20 each.
For that kind of money I expect an entire day at a full scale theme park with puke rides.
Leave your door open, have everyone steal your stuff, empty your bank account etc. Nothing to pay the fines. Do they imprison you?
In the UK, that's like being given free room and board with satellite TV and three hot meals a day, access to free gym equipment, and free educational materials.
The only problem is that you have to keep infringing to live the high life of jail. Hilarious!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I agree that pirating won't stop, but I don't actually think that the real objective is to stop pirating or drug use.
I strongly suspect that this is only what they tell the enforcement people on the front lines and the various others who are not on board with the true agenda.
This is about control. When 1% of the population holds 99% of the wealth, a high level of fear must also exist that the 99% will catch on and cut off their heads. This is a recognized problem and the vast resources of the 1% have been used to sculpt solutions which are being exploited all around us right now.
(And if anybody manages to croak out the words, "conspiracy theorist" through the various knots of their mind-programming, well, guess what? Everybody I've ever met who remains paralyzed by such thinking has also been without fail riddled with a fabulous array of psychological fault lines and blind spots and the inevitably resulting broken/incomplete reasoning, all of which quickly becomes apparent even through the most fortified personality facades. To those people, I would ask in the interest of saving time and energy that before taking a swing at me, you spend a few moments to ask yourself if your criticisms will actually be able to hold up under rudimentary examination or if you are just throwing them out due to some emotionally driven impulse you think originates in your mind but which probably is just the remnants of some TV show you watched combined with the worry-lines etched into your brain through years of torment in junior high school. Thank you.)
And so. . .
One way to manage the 99% is through drugs, (either with chemicals or electronic media), and the second way, through the same vector, is to make sure that everybody is culpable for a crime. -This way, if anybody gets out of line, by say, talking back to the plantation master, (blogging?), there will always exist ample reason to throw that person in jail.
This isn't about protecting copyright or the minds and health of our youth. This is about ensuring a state of slavery without having to call it slavery. Everybody is in debt, and everybody is a criminal.
So, no, they are never going to decriminalize drugs and they are never going to adopt rational strategies for copyright. They are going to make sure everybody is addicted and that addiction is both expensive and illegal. It is simply another ploy among many which allow the 1% to remain the 1%.
-FL
"How much money would you need to spend to fill a 160GB iPod? Say 3MB per song, that is 15.000 songs or say some 1.500 albums at 10USD/EUR per piece is 15.000USD/EUR"
Something is screwy with this math. Lets see, 160GB ipod, 3MB songs, so 160000MB/3MB = 53,333 songs not 15. I'm really not sure how you determined that 15 songs was 1 1/2 albums but lets run with it. That is 5333 Albums (a few must have had extra songs) * $10 is $53,333. Quite a bit off from the $15 conclusion you came to!
"and it does fall into the "distribution" category."
Not if you leech
"I'm not defending what they are doing (or their outdated business model) but this piracy does cost them money."
And you base this on what? Which of those downloaders would have bought that movie if they hadn't pirated it?
How much did the studios gain in sales due to showings and word of mouth advertising from those downloads?
I'd be willing to bet the first of those numbers is a pretty tiny one and the second dramatically larger.
The first third is free.
And this is why studios would never do it. Very few shows are good enough for people to consider paying for them after tasting them. (N.B. It's a story similar to the albums vs. songs iTunes Store debacle, where people buy only few songs from the album completely ignoring the fillers.)
On another side, when buying a full season DVD, many would watch it all simply because they have already paid for it. And studios can charge more for the more content, despite the fact that lion share of it might be the fillers.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
...that the "revenue stream" is actually just lawyer-speak for "we are pissing in the wind and hoping that we hit something."
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
The legality of which is really questionable in my mind. They do this by calling it a 'civil' offense and as such they bypass normal criminal due process.
A traffic law is a law, and a fine is a punishment for breaking the law. That is a criminal not civil offense. I should be entitled to a real trial before a real judge and jury with an innocent until proven guilty and the burden should remain on the prosecution that I have commited said crime.
Thwarting due process because you want to make systematically ass raping the population en mass and use fines for trivial arbitrary offenses as a revenue stream is bogus.
"Problem is, $750 (minimum) for one movie or song is reasonable"
No, $20 (max) for one movie or $5 (max) for a song is reasonable for a civil case. Civil awards are supposed to be based on the damage, not fines to punish.
Or rather, it would be reasonable if The People hadn't already made clear that they don't support these copyright monopolies.
There are easy ways to rip BR movies these days.
Yes there are.
The point of the poster is that they shouldn't need to.
Nothing of what the father is doing (watching legally bought movies discs) is illegal or morally wrong.
But in order to achieve that, the father shouldn't need to break a Blueray's DRM.
(Which itself could be illegal in some jurisdiction like USA or Germany)
If he does need, it's a proof that something is broken in the system.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm curious - what (other than the DMCA) prevents you from buying the film on DVD and ripping it yourself? Technically illegal, but you're orders of magnitude less likely to get caught and you have the moral high ground of actually having paid for the film you're watching. (Which in turn is likely to sway the court in your favour, should it get to that stage)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Yep. The story was a copypasted mess of classic dystopia novels but the fight scenes were fun.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Are you sure we have a "no circumventing DRM" provision in UK copyright law? I've searched the Wikipedia page on our copyright law, and while I concede it may not be authoritative I'd be surprised if such a provision existed and wasn't mentioned.
Or am I misinterpreting your post, and you're ripping the DVDs to your hard drive and playing them from there? (Which is infringing of course)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I browsed the "U.S. Copyright Group's" website. To me, it screams sleazy lawyer. They claim to "obtain the ISP addresses of the infringers" as if that's a surefire way of establishing identity.
Then there is this: "The person who unlawfully downloads a movie cannot afford to pay a $10,000 settlement to avoid legal trouble. BUT, they can and will pay $500-$1,000 to avoid civil legal prosecution for copyright infringement. Multiply these settlement amounts by 10,000, 30,000 or 50,000 infringers, and we have created a tremendous solution to stop film piracy and recover the copyright owner’s losses."
My response: I'm sorry that new technology has rendered the movie industry's business/delivery model obsolete. I'm not sorry that they're choosing to litigate instead of innovate.
I will not support the efforts of any group that uses the U.S. legal system as a crowbar to pry money out of the general public.
I was of the (maybe mistaken) that the law did not distinguish between the two.
Law makers are hardly IT literate, after all.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
"I pay for my media, but the reality is copyright no longer serves society as it was supposed too."
Ok, let's tackle this argument since it seems to be a common justification. What aspect of copyright is no longer serving society and how does mass copyright infringement reflect that? Term limits? Would society be served better by no limits at all? Fair use? How is society bettered by mass consumption of content in it's entirety, some even before released in general to the public? "No longer"? How does that time period correspond with the general availability of technology that makes perfect copies on a global scale? And really while we're on the subject how is copyright preventing pirates from getting their seeding content to begin with? In a perverse way it seems that copyright is indeed "serving" society the way pirates want it to serve. The open question is will that serve society overall for the best?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
a city trying to increase their tax pool by setting up cameras to catch people j-walking then mailing them tickets on mass. I don't think the citizens of that city would be happy, yet somehow I think were just gonna take it :S
Is this a joke? If so, it failed miserably. Clearly the GP uses a decimal instead of a comma so that would be 15,000 songs for those of us who use commas. Still not the same as 53,333 but not 15.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
"I really wish people would stop treating IP like actual property. It's not. Actual property has the problem of scarcity."
I addressed this in a non-Slashdot forum. The original is scarce. This forum is open to debating that fact. The question that needs to be addressed regardless of if one believes IP to be property or not is how to take that unique original and distribute it to the most while propagating the conditions that allowed the original to be created in the first place? Right now mass piracy only addresses the copying and distribution and leaves the rest at best to vague hand-waving and empty promises.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"On the other hand, we have someone maybe possibly losing as much as a whopping 1-5% of profit on some idea they put down on paper (or whatever) and tried to sell."
Well I suppose in the land of trivialization it would be too much to ask you to actually back that up with something more substantial? And even if it was a trivial loss, are most working citizens of all stripes willing to tolerate a "trivial loss" in their earnings just so someone whom they have no connection with can pocket that "trivial" amount for themselves with little perceived effort? Please feel free to address this double standard and lets leave "because I hate them" at the door.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
If movie companies offered a one-time stream for $3 or something, I'd pay to see a lot more movies. Hell, I'd probably end up seeing ones I liked in theaters, too.
A movie is going to be leaked. There's no way around it. They can do whatever they want, but it's going to get online. Why not cut that off at the head and offer a clear picture at a low price? The reason I don't go to the theater to see movies is a combination of time driving, cost of driving and seeing the movie (in both time and money), and mostly the hatred I have to jackasses who won't shut the fuck up during a movie.
I'd pay $3-5 to stream a legit movie a few days after it's in theaters, even if it was loaded up with DRM.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Let's see some proof that they would have purchased the movie -- that is the claim these companies are making, right? Prove that these companies are suffering.
Actually, under the statutory damages provisions of the copyright act, that's the defendant's job: prove that the companies aren't suffering. Because neither Tenenbaum nor Thomas could do that, they couldn't mitigate the damages.
Almost the exact same thing happened to me about a year and a half ago. My projector claimed to be HDCP compliant. I bought a Blu-Ray player. It did not work (blank screen after a few seconds of successful video). I took it back to the store and I'm still buying DVDs.
They aren't getting the money from me buying the player. They aren't getting more money from me buying the blu-ray discs. A year and a half worth of me buying discs.
It is crazy. My mind cannot wrap around the fact that I WANT to give them money and they won't accept it.
Lets take a look at the #1 torrent on TPB right now.
Video > Movies Shutter Island (2010) R5 DVDRip XviD-MAX 03-16 19:01 Seeds: 20996 Leaches: 14796
That's just right now, and it's a public site so a ton of people just hit and run. So we've got 35,000 people on this torrent right now. Why? Maybe they torrent everything they see. Maybe they want to see the movie but there's no theater near them. I torrented it because I wanted to see the movie without having to drive a 90 minute round trip, spending $30 on tickets snacks and gas. I didn't want to deal with the assholes who can't shut up during a movie. The guy snoring (in every movie I've seen in the past 18 months one guy sitting within 20 seats of me is always loudly snoring). I'd pay $5 to stream the movie. I guarantee that there's a percentage of torrenters who are like me and only do it because it's easier.
I stopped pirating PC games. Want to know why? Steam. I stopped pirating music. Want to know why? iTunes. Make it easy for me to pay to access your content at a price that's not insane and I will pay for it, and I'm not alone.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Of course, the process in most cases is to inventory what's left in the store and deduct that from the amount purchased to get the net quantity sold, in which case the store does pay for any pilferage.
The whole point of copyright is to facilitate piracy.
What the corporatists have redefined as piracy is specifically what copyright is for.
Old works are meant to be fodder to help create new ones.
Consumer copying is just a red herring.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm pretty certain that "take" means to "possess" and that "possession" can only occur with tangible property. One must always possess a medium on which their pattern is configured. Therefore, in order to take, one must take something tangible. The analogy simply breaks down.
When you're taking, you're always taking a medium. You are never taking from the Internet, you are copying. Or initiating what ultimately becomes a series of processes that end up copying stuff, if you want to be a bit more specific.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Actually, the originals are pretty commonplace.
That's that real problem here. All of these "entertainment" industries have entirely too much competition. The newer ones are less used to having a favored position in society so they don't moan and bitch and whine like a dying dinosaur. The younger parts of the industry try to adapt as the dinosoaurs flail around with lobbyists and lawyers.
Media moguls have more to fear from their own back catalogs than "pirates".
Even if everyone only "buys", the market will eventually get saturated and there will be no more market for crap.
If changes to the law hadn't been bought and paid for by the Media Moguls, the Torrents would already be full of legal content. Most of it would be better than the new drek the moguls are trying to push on us now.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Are you kidding? I don't know anyone who's gone to the movies after watching something at home.
When you have a 50" or greater plasma tv at full hi-def, a nice surround-sound system, the fridge, friends, air conditioning set exactly right, your favourite couch, the best seat in the house, AND the ability to hit "pause", why would you want to go to the movies?
Oh, right - the "movie experience "...
I haven't been to the movies in years, and I doubt if I will ever go again. Movie theatres are so last century.
This won’t go forward, and here’s why: filing fees. I am a law clerk to a judge in another district, and we used to get a ton of cases where Cablevision would sue individuals for using illegal cable boxes. Essentially, the police would raid an illegal cable box manufacturer. Cablevision would subpoena all the sales info from the manufacturer, and then use the credit card payment info to track down and sue anyone who bought a cable box (who wasn’t smart enough to use a prepaid credit card). There would be hundreds of defendants all brought under a single case, many of whom defaulted or settled for a couple grand. Given the amount of court resources used, and the fact that the liability of each defendant was unrelated (the evidence proving the actions of one defendant have nothing to do with any others), the court ordered that the cases were unrelated and had to be filed separately, meaning one defendant per case. The effect of this ruling was that Cablevision had to pay the $350 filing fee for each defendant. Given the collection rate, it wasn’t worth it, and the suits stopped. I imagine the same thing will happen here. There is no way the plaintiff is paying $7M in filing fees. As I haven’t read the complaint, so I don’t know for certain, but I am willing to bet these suits were brought as one (or a few). I doubt the judge or judges handling this case will just sit and let this proceed as one action. They’ll want their filing fees, all $7M worth.
Unless I'm the seed and there is only one peer, I do not give the entire file to anyone in the swarm. I only give a piece that they request; in and of itself, the piece I have given them is a meaningless, useless set of 1s and 0s. I give an IP address 1/10000th of a file, and somehow I've shared the file with them?
Bittorrent is inherently different from other P2P networks. I don't give a file in it's entirety, or even majority, to anyone. It's like a scavenger hunt, or a distributed jigsaw puzzle. If I give someone a trigger and they use it to build a gun, did I give them a gun?
The bittorrent protocol itself should be sufficient means to protect anyone against litigation.
good god, it is a sad day when something like this is rightfully considered insightfull...
People, what a bunch of bastards
You can buy a multi-region/multi-format dvd player. I paid $60 for one almost a decade ago. Plays NTSC, PAL, VCD, SVCD, MPG, etc. Don't be stupid and buy a Sony.
Also, if you wait long enough, everything makes its way onto dvd/blu-ray. Don't be so impatient ... waiting 5 years won't kill you.
And if you didn't have access to illegal downloads? Guess what - you'd have to either pay for SOME of it or do entirely without.
If it's good enough for you to watch, then it's good enough for you to pay for.
> So, using the legal system to go after people who are misusing their copyrighted works is abusing the legal system?
When it is dependent on an obvious abuse of torts, then yes.
If this were a crippled individual against a corporation, no one would hesitate to eviscerate the relevant parties.
All of these suits are dependent on abusing the process and obscuring the fact that there are no real demonstrated damages. The relevant awards are completely divorced from any sort of justice. Standing up and declaring actual damages would simply make the relevant parties look crass and stupid.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Taking something that doesn't belong to you without permission is stealing. Get over it. Stop trying to justify your selfish anti-social behavior.
Why should they let you pay $3 for, say, 5 people (after all, it's not just you that will be watching it), when they can get $50 for the same 5 people? So 4 out of 5 decide to skip it - they're still ahead by 334%
Streaming to the home would have to be at least twice the cost of a movie ticket for current releases. Same as pay-per-view events.
My first reaction when I learned of this last night was that it must be a twisted April Fools joke. But I went on PACER & actually found the documents in one of the suits. Here 's my blog post, which links to the complaint, ex parte discovery order, and ex parte declaration.
Incredibly, the Court's order:
-makes no provision for the customers to be notified;
-relies on a representation that the plaintiff has "proprietary" evidence which shows the infringement;
-required no evidence or detailed allegation as to why jurisdiction and venue could be placed in that district; and
-allows 2094 defendants to be joined in 1 case, although there is no basis for doing so under the federal rules.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
'We're creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel,' says Jeffrey Weaver, another lawyer at the firm."
This seems pretty different. I wonder if somehow someone will find a way of suing drug users, dealers, hookers, drunks, corrupt administrators, and on-the-job slackers to convert them all into a revenue stream. Perhaps it's time to get a job in law firms, salaries are about to go up.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Ok Mr Physic. Since you seem to claim to know the future, specifically what people are and aren't going to buy:
What movies am I going to buy over the next week?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Shooting yourself in the foot, 20000 law suits at a time. Apparently the independents are not more down to earth than the MPAA, just less successful. Way to ruin a reputation.
Making money off anything you've done is apparently eroding as a basic american value these days. Which I actually agree with, making money should be linked to doing something which contributes to advance society, but currently there's no real concrete measurement methods for who does how much of that.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Please explain this hurts a company.
At best it's no effect on the company.
The idea that someone who chooses to abstain from buying a company's product is directly hurting them is ludicrous. What's next government mandated purchases? Oh wait the yanks and canuks are already doing that. Does Europe have a blank CD tariff going to the music industry at all?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Then why don't they use theft laws?
Copyright and stealing have been separate legal ideas since at least the Licensing Order of 1643.
To assume they are the same is pure ignorance.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Yeah, just like how the RIAA turned lawsuits into a way to make profit (oh wait no).
You clearly don't understand torrenting. If 5% of the people who torrent new movies switched to a legal early streaming system, that's money that the studios wouldn't have seen without it. It doesn't matter if they could get $10/ea, those people wouldn't see the goddamned movie in a theater anyway.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Judge Judy, Joe Brown, and the rest just got their seasons all extended by 5 years!
Seriously though, put enough of this in the public face, and not behind closed doors, and we shall see how long thing travesty goes on for.
Think it's time for organized protests at their building. 1200 G St, NW, Suite 800, Washington DC, 20005. Grab a mask, stay anonymous and go go go.
If your hand passes right through it, it's probably a holo-duck on some holo-deck.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I know this was just a joke, but I should point out that the punishment from downloading is generally just a monetary fine in a civil lawsuit, where as the punishment of the physical theft carries a criminal conviction that goes on your record. The up front monetary fine may be smaller for the physical theft, but the criminal record aspect has a cost of its own.
To publicly publish names of people who watched Uwe Boll movies? Aren't there laws against cruel and unusual punishment?
I humbly disagree, and offer these profitable movies in evidence:
Sherlock Holmes
Frankenstein
Snow White
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night's Tale
Alice in Wonderland (including the not-Alice sequel just produced, without needing so much as a by-your-leave from the author's estate)
If you haven't made enough money in 14 years, get a better agent.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Bittorrent clients could implement a "poison the well" feature where occasionally they privately request a random .torrent file from a single peer. The peer that receives this request will randomly either pass on a torrent from its own collection or perform a recursive operation and get a random torrent from any one of its peers - this way it won't be possible to remotely build an inventory of a peer's collection.
Once the original requester receives the torrent, it then downloads a few megabytes of that file from different peers to /dev/null. That would give plausible deniability to all bittorrent users, which I'd say would be worth the relatively slight increase in bandwidth overhead.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Funny you mention this. The anti-piracy intro has also started getting to me recently. I paid for the movie so I shouldn't have to spend an hour or two of my life total during a year watching them. It is always the real paying customers that get the short end of the stick. Pirates just rip that portion out.
How about this? Instead of the original phrase:
Last time I checked, there is neither a moral nor legal right to simply take what is not yours.
How about this:
"Last time I checked, there is neither a moral nor legal right to simply take a picture of someone without their permission."
That's just my take on it. And I could be wrong... if so, I take that back.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Well, as someone who goes to second run theaters and only buys CD's and DVD's used simply because I dislike being treated as a criminal I can guarantee you that anti-piracy has cost the music and movie industry thousands to tens of thousands of dollars *from me alone*. One movie a week, cable subscription, and one CD a month not purchased that I used to adds up to a lot when taken over decades (OK, only 5 years cable-free, but that's around $4K all by itself).
I know, Anectode != Data, take it how you will.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Taking something that doesn't belong to you without permission is stealing. Get over it. Stop trying to justify your selfish anti-social behavior.
Yes, but COPYING something that doesn't belong to you without permission is NOT stealing. Get over it. Stop trying to justify your ignorance of the facts.
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20000 defendants for 5 suits? I'd love to see this go to court with 4000 defendants in the one courtroom :)
Yep, it is beyond stupid.
Well I suppose in the land of trivialization it would be too much to ask you to actually back that up with something more substantial?
Yes it would, because no one knows exactly how big the losses are. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that piracy causes a net gain for the copyright holder rather than a net loss, due to free advertising.
Please feel free to address this double standard and lets leave "because I hate them" at the door.
The only double standard here is that some people have to work for a living, while others get to sit back and collect indefinitely for work they already did.
Make copyright fair, and have it do what it was intended to do. Until then, us average working-class people honestly couldn't care less about all the sob stories or who's losing how much money. The simple fact that we're still paying good money for shit that should have been in the public domain decades ago means we're giving up far more of our income than the content providers ever would to piracy in the worst possible scenario you can realistically come up with.
Also, for those of you who actually are content creators, if you want to determine how long the copyright should be for whatever it was you came up with there's only one real question you have to answer: what is the shortest possible duration the copyright could be while still making you feel like it's going to last long enough to make it worth your while to create said content?
After all, that is the only purpose for copyright: to give content creators the incentive to create the content. Anything more than the minimum duration required to provide that incentive is counterproductive in every possible way.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Did you know that the Spanish Inquisition at one time had a group examining galley slaves for heresy?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
1. I should be able to get my money back if a movie sucks if they want to go this route. 2. If they magically did stop all file sharing, they wouldn't make a single extra dime. Then what would they say? As a side note, I quit buying music a long, long time ago. Way before torrents. Why? Because the music industry got greedy and whole albums sucked. So F them.
How many dollars have been stolen from consumers by way of the politicians that have been bought to extend copyright on works that should have entered the public domain decades ago (copyright is supposed to be for the public benefit, which is why their government enacted it), and how does this compare to the money the industry claims is being stolen now?
Points for awesome.
"The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 has cost American consumers over $50 Billion in the last 12 years. By forcing average Americans to continue paying for CDs and DVDs that should have been public domain, this one misguided bill has robbed our country of a rich trove of shared cultural heritage, and set back popular culture education in schools by an average of 2.7 grade points."
It's pretty easy to make this shit up when you have the moral high ground, as the RIAA has repeated demonstrated. Who's with me?
That's why you attact a copyright notice allowing everyone but them to download it.
Plus 90% of everything is and has always been crap.
That's probably the real motivation for piracy right there. If the industry stopped flooding the market with more shite that any human can dig through in a lifetime in order to find the real gems, then all that would be left would be quality music and films that you dont mind paying for!
Those costs have nothing to do with you making a copy of a file. Those costs are already paid.
You can't take IP
Sure you can. Make a copy to a removable medium, delete the original. And backups. And backups of backups.
For example, I could actually steal a recorded song by breaking into the studio, taking the master tape and leaving a reel of identical, but blank tape in its place. The artist will need to record that song again. For best effect, do that before any copies of that tape are made (for example, a CD master).
you don't have an inherent right to just take stuff any more than I have an inherent right to "borrow" anything from you without asking first.
Compare:
"Oh crap, someone stole my car. The police probably won't find it and I didn't have insurance against theft. Now I'll need to buy another car"
"Oh crap, someone downloaded my movie. All of my copies are gone, even the backups. The police probably won't find who did it, so now I need to hire the actors again and make the movie again from scratch"
You're right, downloading a movie is like stealing a car, that's why all of the movie makers keep making the same movies over and over again. Once someone downloads, the creators need to make the movie yet again.
How can more than one people download the same movie in unknown. It is probably some super secret technology that lets them make two movies from one cheaper than it would be to film that movie again. At least car thieves are not as lucky - two people can't steal the same car and each have a car. They can cooperate and steal that car more efficiently, but still the car won't be able to be in two separate locations at once. Movies somehow can, strange...
Someone must really like that movie.
I would do the same as I did before I had high speed internet connection (and before stuff like divx and mp3 was created allowing me to download on a dial up connection) - record from radio. I now have a VCR too and I have recorded a lot of TV shows that are not available for download. Oh, and I still record from radio. When I listen to radio at home, I have a blank or partially recorded cassette in my tape deck that is set to record-pause mode. If I hear a good song I record it.
Oh, by the way, I still buy records and tapes with music on them, even though I could download most of them.
Why should they let you pay $3 for, say, 5 people (after all, it's not just you that will be watching it), when they can get $50 for the same 5 people? So 4 out of 5 decide to skip it - they're still ahead by 334%
Because otherwise those 5 people will go to torrent sites and get that movie for $0.
Yes, I would pay for a legal download if it was high quality and without DRM. Now you'll say that it would be risky for the company etc. No. I can download that movie now and without paying a cent, it won't be worse if they allowed cheap legal high quality downloads.
However, if they allowed such paid downloads, I could expect high quality on the first try (not really a problem on good torrent sites), high download speeds (sometimes a problem on torrent sites) and it would be legal and support the creators.
Hell, to reduce distribution costs and make it convenient - make a torrent tracker that requires users to pay some money each month (I can't say how much) or (maybe) less if the user uploads a lot (thus reducing the load on the company run seeders). The money is distributed to movie companies depending on how many copies of their movies were downloaded that month.
It's not the act of copying - it's the later act of using it that results in the theft. The mens rea and the actus reus are then "perfected".
Their product, their say as to whether they want to stream it or not. They've decided that the current system:
Hmm, I wonder if they track ipv6 IPs?
My email addy? should be easy enough.
Your response didn't make a lot of sense in places, so I'll just reply to the one part that did. Yes, we are the people, but so are they. Just because you feel like copyrights get in the way of you being able to do what you want doesn't mean that copyrights are wrong, and doesn't give you the right to simply ignore them. You do not have the right to say that they can't try to make a profit off their creative work. There is no right to free entertainment.
Furthermore, you state that "More people have voted against copyright as we know it than have voted for any political candidate in history." When did these votes take place? I wasn't aware that copyright has been put before the voting public in recent history. I'd love to see a reference that backs up your statement.
Finally, I'm inclined to side with you, that these people could be considered to be an advertising resource. However, the copyright owner is not obliged to view them that way. I can't fault them for trying to get money from those who have illegally copied their work, and actually, I think that suites of this scale might encourage copyright owners to use more realistic values for damages.
IANAL... But I play one on
This makes me mad. I have already purchased a movie and now i want it on my ipod to watch at work. So i just download from torrents to import into my ipod. Why would i go and buy it again from itunes when i already own it. this doesn't make any since. I now they are starting to make digital copies on some movies you buy but not all. This is just one of those case's where the Rich want to me Richer and they want to take from the poor man is all.
I'm sorry that new technology has rendered the movie industry's business/delivery model obsolete. I'm not sorry that they're choosing to litigate instead of innovate.
Back in 2005 maybe, do you really mean that today? You can watch movies online via Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and many other legal methods. It's far from 100%, but it's probably 75% or more of what people want to watch.
Presuming the content they're suing over is available from these other online stores, what's the justification for pirating them? Do you think paying for content whatsoever is an obsolete business model?
Legal methods of consuming content will never take off if people are free to copy it illegally from easily available torrent sites. The damages for infringement are absurd, but I don't think the concept of suing for infringement is inherently wrong.
In fact, sending out $100 settlement lawsuits to discourage illegal infringement sounds a hell of a lot for prodding people into obeying copyright law than publicly destroying a few individuals' financial lives as the RIAA has set out to do. (Or offering settlements in the tens of thousands of dollars)
Would they not be considered materials for creating the original copy?
Let's say I walk into the local store, stuff two dozen DVDs down my pants, and get arrested as I waddle out of the store. Since the total value of the merchandise is less than $750, it's a gross misdemeanor and I'm facing no more than a year in prison and a fine of no more than $5000, plus whatever consequences a record for third-degree theft carries.
Let's say I download two dozen DVDs from a P2P service. I'm sued, the case goes to trial, and the plaintiff is awarded damages. The minimum is $750 x 24 = $18000, the maximum is $7,200,000, and historical record shows that the likely award is $1,920,000. I don't know about you, but two million dollars is more after-tax money than I'm likely to see in the rest of my life. I don't know what the dollar cost of a criminal record is, but it can't be more than my total potential future income.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I pay for cable and DVR, but its easier for me...
same here. they let me tape & archive the shows on my vcr, yet how many dvrs are crippled so you can't just copy the stuff to your computer and make your own blu-rays/dvds/etc? quality and 1:1 shouldn't factor in. just because they found a new revenue streams (tv on home media) that is profitable enough (why most shows weren't ever released on vhs) is no reason to deny me what you've let me do for 20ish years. its sad enough we let them use our airwaves, but then get called criminals because we don't like getting raped by their double-dipping. of course, there is my Subscriber-Capture Paradox, which states that if something is illegally downloaded, it becomes legal once it is played on a channel i subscribe to and therefore can be captured.
...
So even you would agree that pirating new and relatively recent stuff shold be illegal.
So, roll back copyright to the same as patents - 21 years. NOTHING CHANGES.
What percentage of "screeners" being downloaded are more than 21 years old? "Wahh but I don't want to wait 21 years for my free crap!!!" is not an excuse.
It's because copyrights have been abused to such absurd extremes that the general public just doesn't give a shit any more. I mean honestly, how the fuck do you go from a maximum of 28 years to life +75? And you seriously wonder why people don't care anymore? Really? I sincerely hope you're not that stupid.
Copyright is supposed to last just long enough to provide an incentive to create works, and not one day more. They're supposed to end when the copyrighted work is still of some relevance and use. People would be far, far less likely to pirate movies if they knew they were going to hit public domain in 5 years.
But of course, none of that touches on how stupid the **AAs etc. have been by not capitalizing on the new distribution methods available, when it was obvious already over 10 years ago that those distribution methods would be used, whether they authorized them or not, and there would ultimately be nothing they could do to stop them.
Give the public a fairly-priced, unencumbered digital version to download and reduce the copyright durations to sane levels, and I'd be willing to bet piracy would all but vanish overnight.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I'm not sure I understand you post.
You've listed a set of classic public domain texts that have had non-public domain movies made out of them at various points. What are they evidence of?
I agree with the 14 years though. All for copyright reform.
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
But they'll still pirate them knowing that they can buy them on DVD/Blu-ray in less than 5 years. Cheap leaching SOBs. Which totally contradicts your next point ...
Your sense of entitlement doesn't give you the right to rip someone else off of the fruits of their labour. How would you like it if linux code were all public domain in 5 years? No obligation to donate improvements back to the community.
While that doesn't make it "right" it sure as hell mitigates things.
Agreed. The current penalties are grossly out of proportion to the offense.
That's only if it goes that far. I'm not sure if they are still doing it, but before you could usually settle out of the matter for a few grand.
Also, I'm unclear on whether this sort of debt can be discharged in bankruptcy. I know restitution and fines in criminal cases often aren't dischargable, but I'm not clear on this since it's a civil matter.
Finally, if you decided to leave the country (for good), I wonder which would have more effect on you.
I won't even touch your concept of "reasonable".
By reasonable I mean the concept that if you would like to view a recent movie, it's reasonable to pay a small sum in exchange rather than freeload.
I did not mean to endorse the various licensing shenanigans that various IP holders have pursued.
Stories, ideas, music and movies are not consumables. Time to stop trying to monetize them as such. The only thing that matters is that I can get the content I want by paying for a method of delivery. Right now, my ISP connection and a torrent client seem to do it.
I understand that the marginal cost of an additional copy of these products is extremely low.
Nonetheless, there is a sizable initial development cost. Thus there needs to be a system by which the creators can be fairly paid for that work.
We have developed such a system. It's called copyright law. It's not perfect, but it's what our society has enshrined in the law as our solution. And that system says if you want to watch the movie before its copyright expires, you have to pay the price the movie maker asks. If you don't want to pay, you don't have to watch.
I can understand calling for reform. I can understand deciding a given movie isn't worth the price and not watching it.
What I don't understand is where this entitlement mentality comes from that says just because you can get a copy without paying for it, that it's OK to do.
You contradict yourself. You use Netflix, Hulu, iTunes as examples of successful alternatives. Then you claim that they'll never take off if piracy is allowed.
Up 'til now, I haven't heard of many preventions in place to stop people from downloading torrents (other than suing The Pirate Bay, etc).
Don't get me wrong... I'm not trying to defend piracy. I love my Netflix subscription, and it's a lot easier paying ~$15 a month than having to download torrent after torrent looking for a good quality rip, not to mention the time spent downloading. I'd rather wait for the DVD to come in the mail. Hulu's pretty sweet, too.
Suing the pirates smacks of corporate greed, in my opinion... they want every last dime they can grab, and someone's convinced them that squeezing the pirates out will gain them some extra cash. I don't like their "Anybody innocent that gets caught in the crossfire be damned" attitude, too. They're not talking about a $100 settlement... more like $500-$1000. That's not chump change, at least to me.
Suing on the basis of an IP address is just not enough. I'd hate for my ISP to make a mistake in their logs and misidentify me as a pirate. I won't be caving in for a settlement if I'm innocent, even if it's cheaper. Proving I'm innocent is going to be a pain in the arse. The likelihood of being found guilty regardless is scary.
I'd also feel a lot more reasonable about them chasing down pirates if the copyright extensions hadn't been put in place. Extending them every so often just reeks of corporate greed, too.
follow the example of Spain , where downloading is not considered illegal as long as the download isn't used for profit
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
How do you know this is true? How do you know that everyone who downloaded the movie or game wouldn't have purchased it? If some would have purchased it - how many is too many? Who decides how much is too much? You? Have you ever done or seen any research on this? I have -- and there are plenty of people who will pay for software when there's not an easier or more convenient way *for them* of getting it for free. But if getting a pirated copy is easier then that's what they'll do. What right does anyone have other than the right-holder to determine if infringing the copyright is ok?
The public domain can still be profitable, even if it is only a couple decades past.
Primarily in response to:
Styles change, techniques change, it doesn't take that long for even a great film to start looking dated.
There will always be a market for new productions, even (or especially) of past works.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
"When did these votes take place?"
Each time a citizen violates a law they are voting. Each time someone downloads a movie from a torrent they are giving their real opinion on filesharing.
Back in the days of Napster it was estimated that over 20 million Americans downloaded music. There is little doubt the number of filesharers have only increased since then.
"Real damages over punishment is a fine concept, but would not bode well for digital property rights."
I'm pretty sure there is no such thing.
"Copyright infringement would explode over night, because literally everyone can do it -- and would no longer think twice about doing it."
Where have you been? It already exploded, everybody already does it, and nobody thinks twice about it. At least non-commercial infringment.
Guess I was wrong. You *are* that stupid.
But they'll still pirate them knowing that they can buy them on DVD/Blu-ray in less than 5 years. Cheap leaching SOBs. Which totally contradicts your next point ...
Which is absolutely completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Honestly, do you even know what it was about?
Oh, and I didn't contradict myself at all. You just think so because apparently you were too stupid to understand my relatively simple points.
Your sense of entitlement doesn't give you the right to rip someone else off of the fruits of their labour. How would you like it if linux code were all public domain in 5 years? No obligation to donate improvements back to the community.
Actually, it does. The public is entitled to having whatever information, idea or creative work they want that's publicly available, for free. Copyright is a short-term agreement that postpones that right (or entitlement) to allow the copyright holder a short time to profit from the item. They're not holding up their end of the agreement, so I'll be damned if I give a shit about what they think I should or should not do. And I really couldn't care less what goody-two-shoes idiots like you think either.
And you clearly haven't had anything relevant to add to this discussion since before the first time you posted, anywhere in this entire story topic, so consider this one-sided "discussion" over.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
That's a pretty silly attempt at an analogy. Try harder.
"And if you didn't have access to illegal downloads? Guess what - you'd have to either pay for SOME of it or do entirely without."
Yeah and your point? Downloaders pay for SOME of their content now. It is perfectly feasible that the portion downloaded is the portion they would do without otherwise.
Regardless, you ignored the bigger point that an increase in sales to downloaders doesn't automatically equate to an increase in NET revenue.
Any use of Bittorrent or any other P2P pretty much by definition "includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works". It is also quite easy for offline non-commercial infringement to fall under that definition.
I am not as knowledgeable like you, but judging by what you said the use of the internet itself falls under the same category like P2P. So using the internet is a felony or something? Because every time I use the internet I expect to "receive anything of value" and sometimes this might include copyrighted work as well. Can you please help me understand this? thanks, Val
Just be glad you don't live in Texas: Death Penalty Sought In Texas File-Sharing Case>Death Penalty Sought In Texas File-Sharing Case
"Does digital [intellectual] property rights make that easier to understand?"
There is still no such thing. No matter how many times you rename it intellectual and property don't mix.
"You also failed to address the problems with your infringement fine overhaul. It either seems you spent two minutes thinking about it, or you are naive enough to assume an assorted list of digital content types with associated infringement penalties would ever make it into copyright law."
There were no problems with the fine overhaul and therefore nothing to address. Assessing value is easy, if the material in question is a not yet released album you simply look to the average value of similar albums that have been released. Judges do this in civil cases on a daily basis. You chop up the table I built for firewood and I sue you, the judge must assess a value and that is going to be typical value plus (if the judge sees fit) a little for the time I invested in piece.
There is no need for any hard coded penalties or media types. The judge assesses damages, just the same as any other civil suit. Watch Judge Judy sometime and you can see how it works. Setting some sort of predetermined fine might even give the media companies the idea that it is okay to routinely bring suit against the masses as a revenue stream.
"You think people aren't influenced by the "$150,000 fine for copyright infringement" notice at the start of DVD/Bluray movies? You can't even find someone in the real world who has downloaded movies, unlike music (some because it is more complicated)."
So now we aren't talking about music anymore? ok. Well no, I've never met anyone influenced by message. Not that I care, I see no valid justification for people to pay penalties out of proportion to the damage just so content creation can theoretically be a more fruitful business method. What next, mandatory $200 million dollar fines for breach of contract?
Additionally, as you said yourself '(some because it is more complicated)' which is not at all the same as fearing penalties. That notice was there in the VHS days as well and there was certainly no small portion of the population with two VCRs. The number dropped significantly when coding schemes were introduced but that only proves the point. The only reason people don't copy movies is the time required and/or lack of knowledge. Nobody actually respects the copyright claim or the penalties. I've never known someone who had the time, materials, and know how who didn't copy rentals for instance.
Assuming content producers need to eat, can anyone come up with a better one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
By reasonable I mean the concept that if you would like to view a recent movie, it's reasonable to pay a small sum in exchange rather than freeload.
I agree that content creators who wish to charge for access to their content should be paid. Content creators have the right to decide how to sell their work.
The problem is, if you want to sell "access to content", you need to control that access. That's impossible to do by technical means as long as movies are sold in stores on physical media.
And yet, content producers keep trying to sell access to stuff that's already out there, opening the doors to ripping and file sharing. Why? Because they make a lot more money selling copies on physical media than they do on broadcast or theater runs, regardless of piracy.
Piracy and duplication go hand in hand with physical media sales. That's the reality of the business model, no matter what the law says. If the associated risk/reward ratio is unacceptable, a reasonable company should FIND A NEW BUSINESS MODEL.
There really should be a legal test that weighs realities in society against a company's business model before a case is accepted. If a case is substantially tilted towards defending a business model against societal reality, it should be thrown out.
For all the bitching and whining coming out of Hollywood about so-called "lost sales" due to piracy, they keep on rolling out the films and making truckloads of money. They aren't hurting. Their business model is working just fine.
Thus there needs to be a system by which the creators can be fairly paid for that work. We have developed such a system. It's called copyright law. It's not perfect, but it's what our society has enshrined in the law as our solution. And that system says if you want to watch the movie before its copyright expires, you have to pay the price the movie maker asks.
When "not perfect" means destroy family finances and threaten the population with obscene penalties for the minor misdemeanor of watching a 90-minute sci-fi for free, that makes copyright law unworthy of respect, thank you very much.
The more people that break the law in this case, the better. These companies can't sue everyone, and the legal system is supposed to be about balancing common rights among all parties, not bludgeoning the poor into compliance with arbitrary rules designed to make the rich richer.
For your reference, I bought the Battlestar Galactica DVD set because it was awesome, and I downloaded Stargate Universe Season 1 because I couldn't find someone to pay for it (and it's offered for free anyway on the TV network's site).
Should I now be summarily hauled into court for the Finest Verdict Money Can Buy for my non-criminal audacity? All because of this "not-perfect-but-hey-it's-the-best-we-have" copyright law?
What I don't understand is where this entitlement mentality comes from that says just because you can get a copy without paying for it, that it's OK to do.
Big entertainment gets plenty of my money every year. They've even convinced my government to tax blank media and devices containing flash memory just in case they might be used for piracy. They sue fellow citizens into oblivion for non-criminal acts.
Fuck them, and fuck the sheep that defend them on legal technicalities. "Right" and "wrong" don't have anything to do with "legality", until the day comes that we replace the "legal system" with a "justice system".
Perhaps it's not so much an "entitlement" mentality as a "we don't care that you don't like the consequences of your business model, and we don't like being bullied" mentality.
Perhaps that is more understandable for you?
They claim to "obtain the ISP addresses of the infringers" as if that's a surefire way of establishing identity.
Not to mention it is a list of IP addresses obtained by them. Let me go in a USA chat room and get you a good list of IPs. Proof of you downloading is not required, since I mocked up my own data saying you did.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.