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Crookes, RIAA, MPAA, ICE — 'Linking Is Publishing'
newtley writes "What do Canada's Wayne Crookes, the Big 4's RIAA, Hollywood's MPAA and brand new ICE agent Andrew Reynolds have in common? They all claim linking is the same as publishing. Crookes is using it to demand Canada's Supreme Court effectively shut down the net in Canada. With the RIAA and MPAA providing the 'initiative,' the Obama government is using Andrews [read ICE — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to try to shut down innocent sites for, and on behalf of, Hollywood and Big Music. The sites are 'accused of contributing to online piracy, and it was essential for the domain names to be seized without a trial and without giving the sites a chance to respond. Why? Such sites are 'destroying the US economy.' Forget about legally appointed courts, proof or due process. Hollywood and Big Music rule."
Every time measures to stop piracy are stepped up to an even more draconian extent, the pirates feel a little bit less guilty.
I know a lot of pirates. Some of them have now moved on from "I want free stuff" to "I want to collapse the media empire before it enslaves mankind."
Also, First!
Companies which at least attempt to adapt to the changing market seem to be doing ok...
Sorry, but linking is not the same is publishing.
Linking is the equivalent to pointing and shouting "Oh look, a deer!" in the real world.
Now, if I were to do that, I am not putting the deer there. I am simply mentioning that I see one and pointing it out to people. Now, if you mis-use the information if you happen to be within earshot and hear me and you poach that deer, it's not my fault nor my responsibility you did so - even if you are holding a shotgun when I point it out.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
If a link is publishing, then is a link to a link publishing the link which published the original? Does any website that link to google, or to a website that links to google, in effect publish the entire internet?
Interesting.
I guess that means that every single time the US Government has mentioned Wikileaks at press conferences they have themselves published all the documents available at Wikileaks?
I mean - mentioning the name of a website while talking, that's pretty much the same as linking in writing.
I guess Wikileaks is off the hook for publishing the documents then ...
Linking can't be publishing. If linking is publishing, then Google, Bing, and Yahoo are breaking the law, right now. Guess we'll have to to shut them down.
My blog
What does it take to get a government of the people, for the people, and by the people in today's world?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Anytime you want, just make sure you have the RIAA's and MPAA's lawyers backing you up.
"all i wanted was a pepsi..."
I'm all for laws which ban deceptive linking.
There are all kinds of web sites out there whose operators scrape content, and steal bandwidth, creating the appearance that they created the content and are hosting all the images and other download materials themselves.
This is usually done to try to boost search engine rankings, to bring traffic to other content.
Such practices should be illegal.
It should only be fair use to make this kind of link:
<a href="target site">honest text</a>
It should be obvious to the end user that this is a hyperlink, and the text should make it clear that the user is navigating to someone else's site. An optional nofollow would be allowed, but no other attributes.
Any other form of linking (such as targetting a page into a frame or iframe, or using tags sourced from another site) should require the permission of the target site in order to be legal.
The difference between linking and embedding can't be defined by the underlying technology, but by how it looks. Is there an intent to deceive? If it looks like copying is going on then it must be considered that way.
Canadians pay a levy on blank media so the labels would still get enough money to buy more laws.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
dont be mistaken - these wordage only give the impression that there are a lot of people involved in these occurrences. there arent. there are a few influential shareholders among the 10-20 biggest shareholders of these companies. and they think that it should be that way. and, they put people who will do their bidding at the helm of the corporations.
and these use the vast resources of those corporations to place who support them in power, or pressurize those who are already in power.
and you end up with this situation.
had those shareholders died out, as they should have, of old age, and different people came in place of them, everything would change. at the whim of a dozen individuals. best you would expect them would be to die out fast, just like how the people in middle ages hoped for their oppressive kings or lords to die. there is nothing democratic about a corporation. its private aristocracy. aristocracy privatized. however you put it.
this is the eventual result of capitalism. the one with the gold makes the rule. you are politically free. but because exercise of any freedom is tied to money privately, those who have the money have all the freedoms, and even can restrict the freedoms of those who dont have as much money as them.
economy and politics cannot be separate from each other. never. you cant expect to make one democratic and the other undemocratic and expect it to work. one will affect the other, eventually.
there you have it. 10-20 individuals are set on limiting freedoms of people, even at the cost of hampering a MAJOR new technology that is making the civilization to have a great step forward, and there is nothing you can do about it. the appalling part is, all what is happening are acceptable and legal, in terms of capitalism and its illusion storefront of political freedom.
Read radical news here
It may be the governments that Barak Obama and Steven Harper lead, but is it fair to say that the "X administration" or the "Y government" is party to this scheme?
The RIAA has been trying to change Canadian law since long before Steven Harper was even in parliament, and has worked with all the intervening governments to try to push their position.
If I were to say the "Harper administration" was part of this policy effort, it would suggest that they dreamed up the policy, and were themselves evil. That's not just an insult, it's unfair.
I'd rather insult Mr Harper fairly, by calling him "Steve" and his party the "Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance" party, or CCRAP*.
--dave
* Yes, that was the party's name at one point. They changed it.
davecb@spamcop.net
Very difficult my friend, for the people that are the loudest are right...kindergarten logic.
The real question is, when will be the tipping point in America? At some point there will need to be a march on Washington not for piracy, but privacy on multiple fronts. When these issues start affecting even more of the masses in a daily fashion, this may happen. Everything from airport scanners, to cell phone tracking, to packet inspection, to... I just wonder what will be the metaphorical straw to break the camel's back.
Personally, I'll gladly pay for my gas and beer costs to march on Washington, as soon as a big enough march is organized. For now our job is getting the next door neighbor concerned, bringing this to "main street". Make it applicable to them, in a subtle non-trollish manner (haha). The one thing that can save America, or any other nation who is driven by the will of it's citizens, is to educate and make the issues tangible, clear-cut.
I refuse to believe there is nothing that can be done. To have a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, well...you have to start with informing the people.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
The fact that these corporations just don't want to accept is that their business model is crumbling before their very eyes. No matter what your opinion on pirating is, it is nearly impossible to stop it. The world is changing and the big record labels and movie studios are becoming obsolete very very quickly. There is no turning back. The corporate fat cats either need to find a way to adapt to the changing environment of digital distribution (although I honestly don't have a good idea of how) or they will fall. In my opinion, the money they have been squandering on pointless lawsuits and proverbial dead horse beating would be much better spent on gathering those that a much more intelligent than they are and having them come up with a new model that might work in todays society. This is more than a few bad apples stealing, there are housewives and grandmothers hitting the pirate bay. It isn't going to change, so the industry is going to have to.
I wonder if this is a traditional quorum-sensing problem?
None of us can be bothered to march on Washington to demonstrate because each of us feels only a handful of others would show up. When in fact, none of us really knows for sure how many like-minded citizens would join us.
I can't wait for Obama to be inaugurated!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
All newspapers are guilty of robbery, murder, rape or any other of the crimes they report in their pages, at least according to this logic.
According to the RIAA:
That gives us a 2008 estimate of 12 billion dollars in revenue for retail sale of music. Presumably for the RIAA, who "create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States". So a total of about $14.2 billion in revenue.
Now, obviously we also need to take the MPAA into consideration. Again, using 2008 numbers:
Ticket sales grossed about $10 billion. And since quite a lot of people seem to claim (and no, I have no source handy) that home video sales is about the same as ticket sales, then we're looking at around $20 billion in 2008.
Apple's revenue for 2008 in the Americas was $14.5 billion. Granted, that's a larger geographical area than RIAA's numbers, but then again Apple is a relatively small company in the IT landscape.
How about some of the bigger fish?
IBM reported revenue of $103.6 billion, and pre-tax profit of $16.7 billion.
So, the movie and music industry combined gets up to around $35 billion in 2008 in the US.
IBM (world wide) - $103 billion
Apple (Americas) - $14.5 billion
Google (world wide) - $21.8 billion
Microsoft (world wide?) - $60.4 billion
Oracle (world wide?) - 22.4 billion
Dell (world wide?) - 61 billion
Seriously - why the fuck are the IT giants just turning their back on the complete and utter gang rape on things like the Internet, when most of their products would die off the moment it stops working the way it should.
Just buy out the fuckers, boot the executives, lawyers, assistants etc. from their penthouse offices (literally boot them out over the balcony) and just kill off these massively debilitating parasites.
Corporations are the sum of their people. People like you and me, unless you're a trust fund kid who has no idea what it's like to work for someone else to make a living. I don't feel bad for people who abuse capitalism, but I do feel bad for people who work really hard on something only to have it stolen by people with zero ethics and an entitlement complex. I write mobile apps and for every paid download I get there are 1000 illegal downloads. I charge no more than 99c for my apps. What kind of loser does one have to be to steal a 99c item from an indie content provider??? The people sharing and downloading are just as much crooks as corp execs.
Your local library card index just became a massive piracy enterprise. Best shut down libraries because they are collapsing the economy.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
I think I figured out how to retire early. Make video or some other form of media and copyright it. Let all kinds of people know about it. Then do a google/bing/yahoo search and if they've linked to my media, sue the pants off of them.
If the RIAA thinks that a small website linking is violating copyright, then why don't they go after the big players, too (other than they know that google and the like have the money to fight such an absurd notion).
I used to wonder if something would ever bind people of the world together. It sounds idealistic but I think I've found it. My friends here in the states, my colleagues in England, Turkey, and Canada, and my family in Spain and Mexico all rightfully complain about being taken advantage of by the media cartels. I'd like to thank them for finding a way to pull the various nationalities of the world together, and as an American citizen feel that I should apologize on behalf of my compatriots for letting this get so out of hand with our voter apathy and general disregard for y'know ethics and stuff.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
There were around $15.8 billion in sales in "premium content" in 2010. No economist would consider this industry economically significant, but we have intellectual monopolists shrieking that piracy is shutting down the economy.
But stifling natural markets is destroying the economy: the intellectual monopolists demand control over all copies (of a piece of music, movie, article, etc). This limits your ability to sell or give away the copy you purchased. The downstream control of all copies of a copyrighted work is completely unlike physical property, so the analogy between intellectual property and physical property breaks down.
The phrase "linking is publishing" is misleading. Copyright protects specific forms of expression; unless the link occurs within the copyrighted page (and even in that case), it is a new form of expression. A link is a citation. The claim that citations violate the intellectual property of the owner of some cited work is worse than copyright violation: it is plagiarism. In this case, the intellectual monopolist is claiming that a work he did not produce, the citation, is his own. This is plagiarism, which involves identity theft--a social evil.
If "linking is publishing" then "citation is publishing" and we are all guilty by transitivity.
It is because intellectual monopolists like the music and movie industry want to make their plagiarism your copyright problem that I avoid listening to their music and watching their movies. Thanks to their efforts to limit competition, it's rubbish anyway.
They "fix" this by linking intent to it. This way they can enforce it completely arbitrary.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
How many companies from the NASDAQ 100 of 50 years ago still exist?
Zero...considering NASDAQ is 39 yrs old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASDAQ
Just another day in Paradise
I know it gets brought up often, but since these 'rules' are so nebulous, when do the giants like Google have to pay out protection money to the 'family'? Tthey wont get shut down of course, but they will get sued ( or just threatened ) and settle out of court, using our tax dollars to fund their attorneys on what should be a civil matter.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I want free stuff so I take free stuff. I walk next door to the library with my laptop. I plug it in at the wired table (they're all wired for 120V). I go to the shelf and pick up an interesting looking DVD or CD. I plug it into my laptop's DVD-RW and just make a copy of it right there. I read magazines and newspapers while the disk is being copied. Or write some code. Then I go home. Or if it is seriously cold weather, I linger in the heated public library and copy another DVD. Instead of rushing home to my barely-heated cold apartment.
The RIAA/MPAA/CIA doesn't fuck with me. They don't even see me. I don't announce that I'm putting "their" stuff on the web for download. I don't make a big deal about the fact that the RIAA/MPAA stole the public domain and that we are quietly stealing it back from them. I don't give a fuck about whatever they claim the law is. The so-called copyright law only exists because they paid off politicians to pass the so-called law exactly as they wrote it. I ignore it, so do you. Neither of us pay for anything, nor is it likely that we ever will again. They know this. They don't care. They realize that there isn't anything that they can do to get any money whatsoever from me and people like me. Like you. All they are interested in is making product, selling product (to people who are still willing and able to actually give them money for the product), driving beamers, shorting coke, escorting prime T&A to the A-list Hollywood parties, and stick their dicks into this prime T&A afterwards. People like you and me are not on the list of things that they are interested in.
There was a time around 2001 when the RIAA/MPAA/CIA thought that they were going to take on the librarians. They were misinformed. We set them straight. Now they don't care about us. We have a simple deal with them: each major city and suburban library buys one to ten copies of every piece of shit product that they produce. People (smart people that is, who actually use public libraries) get to take the product home for free if they agree to bring it back in a week or two.
Whether they read it, copy it, or ignore it is no one's concern. It's the same basic deal that has been in place since Ben Franklin put it in place 250 years ago.
It works, and you should work with it. Forget about web distribution and so-called piracy or even freedom of information. It just provokes them to be stupid. And with all that coke floating around in their heads, they can be really mean and stupid. You join the civilized world when you realized that, individually, you have transcended the assholes.