European Court of Justice To Outlaw Net Filtering

jrepin writes "Today, the European Court of Justice gave a preliminary opinion that will have far-reaching implications in the fight against overaggressive copyright monopoly abusers. It is not a final verdict, but the advocate general's position; the Court generally follows this. The Advocate Generals says that no ISP can be required to filter the Internet, and particularly not to enforce the copyright monopoly."

Comments

Copyright lobby won't let this stand.

[ilsaloving]

You can bet the Copywrite lobby will fight this tooth and nail. After all, their yacht payme^H^H^H^H^^H^H^H^H^H^H^H artists livelihoods are at stake!

Re:Copyright lobby won't let this stand.

[ElectricTurtle]

You're conflating a lot things here. Talent is the first and last key to art, and can overcome inferior tools and distribution. However talent is singular, and cannot be bought or taught. At a certain point the quality of tools reaches a sort of "Monster Cables" level of diminishing returns. Truly good music will sound amazing whether it is recorded and produced in a high budget studio with a stupidly huge team or if it is recorded with a few hundred bucks worth of mid-grade hobbyist equipment and the artists themselves. Really expensive tools and teams can make talentless douchebags sound good, that's the whole pop music industry in a nutshell, but people with talent remain so even with inferior equipment.

Re:Copyright lobby won't let this stand.

[NeutronCowboy]

I rarely pull out the corporate shill card, but I'm pretty sure you neatly fit the category: someone who supports a corporate benefit that directly conflicts with the benefit of society in general - bonus if the UID is near 2M. Let me explain to you why I think that, and it is primarily because you ask a lot of leading questions where your hoped for answer is in conflict with reality.

The engines that brought us basically all music from the 1950s until today are going away, and there isn't really any replacement.

Wrong. Those engines were radio and pressed media. They didn't go away, they were replaced by a better distribution medium: the Internet.

Your comments about publicly supported music ring true in the jazz and classical genres. I doubt if we're going to see subsidies to support music in other areas because there are no education bodies with an interest in that.

Wrong. The most common education bodies teach guitar (local music shops), and the big music departments cover everything from medieval string music to jazz to grunge rock to avant-guarde atonal music. The educational support is broad and deep, as is the demand for music. The only place where demand is narrow and shallow is in the big record labels. If it doesn't fit the Justin Bieber/Britney Spears template, it gets buried.

Another thing is, even if (according to another poster) I own a computer so I should be able to produce music at just as high quality as anyone has ever produced, if I'm burning CD-Rs and handing them out at shows for $5, what does that really do for music in our cultural consciousness?

And this is why they teach you to always answer your rhetorical questions, just in case someone doesn't follow your lead. I'll tell you what it does for our cultural consciousness: it enriches it. If the record is good, I'll pass it to my friends. Hey, listen to this! This guy/girl rocks. They'll pass it around. They'll buy the next record, evangelize it as well, go to shows - the whole nine yards. If they don't like it, it quietly dies. Will that person make billions from that one record? Probably not - and there is no reason that anyone should make billions from a one time activity.

Is an album great if no one ever hears it?

Let me turn the question around: in the age of instant world-wide distribution, is an album bad if no one wants to hear it or distribute it? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. Otherwise, it would get distributed.

Perhaps, but what has it done for us? What has it done for us versus what could have been done?

This means that your next questions have been answered already as well: it's completely irrelevant what could have happened, because a lot of people decided not to move the record into our general cultural consciousness. That's the definition of an item not being culturally relevant.

Music doesn't change the world by osmosis, it has to enter many millions of ears.

Correct. And the Internet makes sure that everyone can put music into many millions of ears. What has changed from the past 50 years - and where the past 50 years were a complete historical aberration - is that there aren't any more a few dozen people who control what music reaches the ears of millions of people. And it scares the living daylights out of these people, because their jobs have permanently disappeared. Instead, music is back where it should be: in the public consciousness, where it floats to the top based on how many people distribute it.

In short: your entire premise actually goes against the text that you're promoting. The last 50 years were a complete destruction of music as a cultural phenomenon, and were instead the age of music as an industry. The Internet is changing that, and I hope to God that you find a job that doesn't have "destroy culture to monetize it" in its job description.

Re:Copyright lobby won't let this stand.

[betterunixthanunix]

I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.

Nor would it be unfair to look at what has happened to the film camera industry in the last 15 years or so, and say that digital cameras have a negative effect on that industry. Likewise with the typewriter manufacturing industry.

The moral of the story is this: adapt or die. Adapt to new business challenges and conditions. This is what the music industry has had trouble with for over a hundred years now. Player pianos, phonograph records, AM radio, FM radio, tape recorders, MP3 and digital music formats, and the Internet have all been labelled as technologies that are killing the music industry. In each case, the music industry eventually relented, adapted, and saw higher profits than they had earlier.

Nobody feels any sympathy for businesses that fail to adapt to changes in the market and in technology. Especially not when those businesses have a history of abusing the legal system and trying to bankrupt college students.

Re:Copyright lobby won't let this stand.

[TubeSteak]

100% of $5-$10 is better than 3-20% of $20-$30*

As a lot of people selling games, e-books, music, and movies have found out,
100% of $1-$2 is better than 100% of $5-$10.
It turns out you really can make it up on volume.

Re:Copyright lobby won't let this stand.

[AmonTheMetalhead]

I hate the RIAA and their methods as much as anyone, but I don't think it is spurious to look at what's happened to the music industry in the last 15 years or so and say that the internet has not had a negative effect.

I don't know, i used to buy plenty of Cd's, and i still do buy Cd's, but the last 15 years has seen extremely crappy 'artists', there's hardly anything coming out (from the major labels) i even want to listen to. It's not the internet that's killing the industry, it's lack of good material.

Re:Copyright lobby won't let this stand.

[AmonTheMetalhead]

You know what's making the real music suffer? Not the internet, but large retail chains that only stock the popular shit and out compete the smaller record stores that actually have lesser known works. The whole industry was set to fail sooner or later, the internet did nothing to change that. If you are a budding artist, embrace things like last.fm, those are the future.

Re:This will never fly.

[WrongSizeGlass]

Corporations will win. Always.

FTFS:

no ISP can be required to filter the Internet

Well it does say can be required to, that doesn't mean they can't be convinced, paid, or otherwise motivated to filter the Internet.