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PayPal Joins London Police Effort
derGoldstein writes this excerpt from Ars Technica: "PayPal has joined a music copyright association and the City of London police department's bid to financially starve websites deemed 'illegal.' When presented with sufficient evidence of unlicensed downloading from a site, the United Kingdom's PayPal branch 'will require the retailer to submit proof of licensing for the music offered by the retailer,' said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's latest press release." The press release can be found here.
The monopoly is the economic nature of copyright. And, like pringles, it is addictive. Once you pop, you can't stop.
There are people who actually pay for "pirated music" via paypal instead of, say, downloading it for free?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'd boycott PayPal, but sadly, I can't boycott them any more than I already do.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
We have seen numerous times in the past where the recording industry will seek to charge for works they have no power over. Specifically independent works. We have seen cases go to court where elements of the case were discarded because the plaintiffs didn't actually own the copyright over some of the material in question. So I am guessing, that under this arrangement, the big music publishers will not be required to show they have ownership or authority over any specific works at all and that a mere accusation will result in damaging actions against another party who may be operating in a completely legal manner.
The article only says "sufficient evidence" is needed to start the action and doesn't say what is required. I suspect it will only be their word that infringement is occurring and we already know that the view music publishers have of infringement does not match that of the rest of the world as "fair use" and other such things simply do not exist in their minds.
And just as in the case of the DMCA, we are seeing more and more skipping over the use of the courts system. We are seeing essentially police and others operating at the request of private industry. Only recently, we have seen the tragic result that come of that sort of situation where Cisco was involved in the arrest of a former executive who happened to be suing them at the time.
The influence of business over government is damaging to the rest of the world. And this only seems to be getting worse.
This is the force that harassed Ian Puddick http://www.ianpuddick.com/?p=492 and withheld evidence from IPCC over the death of Ian Tomlinson http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/09/ian-tomlinson-evidence-held-back
Having worked in the City Of London, I can tell you that all they are good for is helping drunk Bankers find the way back to Liverpool Street Station for the last train home.
"are deleting probably more files than they get uploads"
So, not only are they deleting every single file somebody uploads, they also delete a random system file once in a while?
Then what's the alternative to the online trading venue run by PayPal's parent company, famous for its auction-style listings? This venue banned Google Checkout last time I checked.
Not necessarily. For any given song by an independent songwriter, I suspect the incumbent music publishers will be able to dig up an older song that the songwriter is likely to have heard back in grade school. For example, after it was discovered that George Harrison had accidentally reused four measures from "He's So Fine" in his song "My Sweet Lord", Harrison lost a lawsuit for roughly a million dollars. Yet Lady Gaga gets away with reusing much more of that: four measures from "Waterfalls" and six from "Express Yourself" in "Born This Way".
There's no need to suspect, it's a dead cert.
I can't find the actual paper (I'm sure someone else will find it...), but someone's done the arithmetic based on the back catalogue of the major record labels, the number of different musical notes (and hence possible permutations of (IIRC) 7 notes, the minimum number held by many courts to constitute "infringement"), the various rules that must be applied so you wind up with something that sounds good and the upshot is it is mathematically impossible to create a wholly original piece of music. You're guaranteed to match something that already exists, the best you can hope for is it'll be sufficiently buried in the music that nobody will notice.
If you're doing such a large transaction volume that PayPal will start holding funds, you can probably afford a real Internet merchant account with a bank.
When dealing with a vendor I don't trust, I'd rather work through PayPal. PayPal offers a friendlier and easier-to-use dispute resolution system than my bank does, so if my goods don't turn up I'd rather be able to dispute the transaction with PayPal. Therefore, presented with two merchants, one of whom takes PayPal and the other doesn't, and little else to choose between them, I'll take PayPal every time.
So in my other hat as a not-very-well-known retailer, it's to my advantage to accept paypal, even if their terms of business are less friendly to vendors than, say, RBS WorldPay (to pick a merchant processor I've worked with before).
When dealing with a vendor I don't trust, I'd rather use the one with a real merchant account. My bank offers a bullet proof dispute resolution system compared to paypal.
Presented with the choice, I'll go with the site which has proper card processing setup. Paypal is just ghetto.
Yes, it is. The salty breeze, the port whores, the rum and the adrenaline, you won’t believe how good it feels, anonymous coward.
It's a good idea. It's much more sensible for London police officers to take their regular payments from tabloid journalists via PayPal. The alternative - frequently meeting up in a dodgy pub to hand over an envelope of used bank notes - is just an big inconvienence for everybody concerned.
Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations here... assuming that there are seven notes in a repeating theme, and that a theme may span one octave (On the grounds that anything shifted up or down an integral number of octaves would probably be considered identical for legal purposes), and twelve semitones per octave, that's 12^7 possible songs... 36 million. Now how many pieces of music have been written over the course of history? If you include all the amateurs, talentless wannabes, medieval minstrals, probably several million at least. So collisions are going to happen. Birthday thing. Exactly how may would take better math than my - I greatly simplified the concept of music to just determine, completly ignoring the issue of different genres, instruments, variable legal concepts of simularity and the relative size of the subset of that music which might actually be pleasant to listen to.