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After Megaupload, MPAA Targets Other File Sharing Services
An anonymous reader writes "It is no secret that the MPAA was a main facilitator of the criminal investigation against Megaupload. While the movie studios have praised the actions of the U.S. Government, they are not satisfied yet. Paramount Pictures' vice president for worldwide content protection identified Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles as prime targets that should be shuttered next."
I guess the pirate bay is still flying under the radar. Hopefully that one never goes mainstream.
That Paramount actually has a "vice president for worldwide content protection" says plenty.
When do the various file-sharing services get together and collectively countersue the MPAA for obstruction of commerce, racketeering, and whatever else comes to mind when one industry gets together to choke another?
For that matter, when does the internet start to crowdfund a bounty in the form of attorneys' fees to go after these guys? Perhaps we were waiting until the ISPs implement "6 Strikes", at which point all the open public WiFi hotspots will necessarily be taken offline or passworded outside common public use.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Yeah, that's what musicians do. Start businesses.
Ozzy Osborne soda is the best.
The Affordable Care Act failing to pass muster in the Supreme Court would imperil the planned 2013 Legislative Lobby agenda by the RIAA and MPAA to introduce that Affordable Media Act (AMA) which would provide Government Subsidies to help keep Blu-Ray and Access to Media Streaming Services at existing Prices in exchange for the requirement for all American Tax Payers to show proof of the purchase of at least $500 per year in Digital Media from any one of a number of participants in a Government run Media Marketplace (member including Walmart, iTunes Music Store, Amazon and others) or pay a tax penalty of $100,000.00 or 10 years imprisonment since it can be assumed that by not buying media from an authorized Marketplace Member, you are engaged in Copyright Infringement.
American's want online media -- let's provide it to them in a lawful and controlled manner.
I don't know all of these services, but doesn't the DMCA's safe harbor provision exempt them from this sort of witch hunt prosecution, as long as DMCA reports are handled in a timely manner ? You could receive a thousand such reports a day, as long as you promptly take down the content (or challenge false claims), you're supposed to be in the clear, as far as the law is concerned.
I've received such complaints in the past, when one of my hosting clients had their site compromised and was used as a warez drop. I fixed the problem, nuked the offending files and never heard of it again. Given that I'm currently in the process of setting up such a file host (no payments though), I'm a bit concerned about this legal abuse. Youtube allows user uploads, and honors DMCA takedowns, and they seem to be doing just fine. Both sites are hosting user-created content. Both have the potential to carry copyrighted material. Both generate ad revenue from their traffic. What makes a filehost any different ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Infringing copyright to consume and enjoy material someone else has produced is equivalent to "saving jews"? Dude.. you are fucked up in the head.
The statement being replied to did not express the wrongness of copyright infringement, but of breaking the law. If the law is the basis on which you decide morality then it would seem you would have to conclude that saving Jews from Nazi persecution when they were in government was an immoral action since it was illegal. If you can't abide by that conclusion then you need a more thorough justification to claim that copyright infringement is wrong.
An average high school student could be expected to understand that point without having it explained. I pity you, since either your intellect is insufficient to understand the point or your character is insufficient to require you to make an honest argument. Both are serious deficiencies.
Why don't you hire an artist to produce content for you? Then you own it, you can do whatever with it, including sharing it with others for free.
My wife is a musician and we are quite ok without locking the internet down. Recording artists from major labels now put their songs on youtube for free and still sell copies. Why they are still getting bent out of shape over file sharing is beyond me.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
MegaUpload can't provide me that, but that's fine when Google does it
Speaking as a casual infringer...I don't infringe by habit. But living in a third world country, sometimes I literally cannot pay for the content I want. So in those cases, I will infringe...
Anyhow, I don't count myself as a diehard pirate, but I didn't even know about 4/5 sites listed, so I thank the MPAA for improving my options.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
Breaking the law is breaking the law.. I can't wait for the coming DNS blocks. Finally a software developer or musician wont have to worry about starting a business and getting ripped off by people who want to enjoy his work for free.
MPAA may be full of shit, but at the same time it's annoying how anti-piracy comments always get robotically modded down in Slashdot. I just think it's good to look objectively at both sides of the coin.
I need non-DRM'd MP3, FLAC or OGG format
iTunes Store sells non-DRM'd MP4, which plays on far more than just iDevices. I'm unfamiliar with Nokia phones because Nokia has failed in North America, but I'm under the impression that newer smartphones that play MP3 will also play MP4, and so can the PlayStation 3 console. If it's a problem, you can always transcode. (Transcoding to a lower bitrate, such as 192 to 128 kbps, generally doesn't add noticeably more artifacts than transcoding from lossless.)
There is plenty of radio channels to choose from even just from FM
In your country, does FM have indie artists, or is it just the major labels?
Recording artists from major labels now put their songs on youtube for free and still sell copies. Why they are still getting bent out of shape over file sharing is beyond me.
They're not. The middle-men, i.e., the RIAA, is the one getting bent out of shape.
The internet has basically eroded their hold on distribution and they're fucking pissed off about it. The whole "stealing from artists" line is just propaganda, the RIAA has been fucking stealing from artists since it's inception. Here's a suit from just a few years ago that, using their own calculations when going after individual copyright-infringers, found $6 BILLION in damages due to piracy by the CRIA (the Canadian wing of the RIAA). They later settled for $45 million, less than 1% of the original damages.
And then there's their latest legal arguments. In their case against Redigi, the RIAA argued that an MP3 downloaded from the internet was not owned, it was licensed, and therefore First Sale Doctrine did not apply. That's nothing new; we've heard that argument a billion times. The funny part is, while that case with Redigi was being argued, the RIAA was being sued for not paying disco group Sister Sledge their contracted royalties. See, they were contracted to receive a small percentage of "sales" revenue, and a higher percentage of "licensing" revenue. The RIAA, in a fit of irony it seems, argued that the music they sell online isn't licensed, it's sold, and thus, the group was not due the higher percentage of royalties for their online music 'sales'.
So, according to the RIAA, music sold online is both licensed and sold, depending on whichever argument justifies their thievery in open court.
Anyone defending these fucking assholes should have their head examined.
MPAA may be full of shit, but at the same time it's annoying how anti-piracy comments always get robotically modded down in Slashdot. I just think it's good to look objectively at both sides of the coin.
To reiterate what the previous response has already pointed out, the comments that get modded down are not flagged as trolls because they're anti-piracy, it's because they are actually trolls. The arguments they put forth almost invariably consist entirely of some combination of rhetorical exaggeration, false analogies, tautological question begging and unjustified moral indignation. They provide no reasoning, they're just pure flame bait.
The main problem with the "anti-piracy" position is that there is almost nothing legitimate they can ask for that they do not already have. The existing laws go so far above and beyond what is reasonable to "fight piracy" that anyone arguing in favor of further extensions is inherently a dangerous extremist seemingly incapable of articulating a justifiable position. They advance an unsustainable framework of debate over which the only possible subject of compromise is the magnitude and timing of further increases in enforcement powers, rather than facilitating necessary and productive efforts to mitigate the outrageous damage already being caused by the legislation that their previous efforts have pushed through against all reason and justice.
OK, this is a great example of this so let's go through it and I'll explain:
We already share ideas. We publish them in these things called scientific journals. You can even purchase books which explain these ideas in a clear and lucid style. But even otherwise forcing someone to share something is also what a sane society does not do.
Copyright is a prohibition on sharing. You are now claiming that its absence would be to force people to share. This is obviously a lie; something is not mandatory just because it isn't prohibited.
Trying to spin downloading an episode of The Office as "sharing ideas" is ridiculous. Though entitled people such as yourself already assume that you are free to enjoy other peoples hard work by breaking copyright law. I don't get why people are opposed to enforcing laws.
An unsupported conclusory statement, then an ad hominem attack followed by appeal to authority and a non-sequitur. You're really racking up the points there -- and the first three are pretty obvious, so let me just point out the last one in case anyone is wondering: There is a difference between "knowingly and willfully distributing The Office should be copyright infringement" and "all websites that host user generated content should be shut down, including the ones that process DMCA take downs, because users post a lot of infringing material."
The thing people object to is not "enforcing the laws" it is "enforcing the laws in a way that causes massive collateral damage to innocent third parties and reinforces the RIAA and MPAA distribution cartels by destroying new distribution channels that allow independent artists to get free exposure." Find an enforcement method with a sufficiently low false positive rate that it doesn't significantly impede fair use or innocent people and you won't hear the same objections.
If you don't like the laws get them changed. Ah.. but that is too hard, because that would actually require some amount of self-sacrifice. I suppose you want others to do that for you too.
Condescension combined with incompetence. A new low!
Hint: The way laws get changed starts with people communicating the problems with existing laws to other people, until enough of them understand and are vocal about the issue that Congress feels enough pressure to actually do something about it. That does eventually require people to put in some effort, but your sarcastic bloviating has provided no evidence that people are unwilling to actually do that.
So stick it to the man, and get the makup woman or the spot boy or the lighting technician fired. We already know who gets fired when the revenue stops. It ain't the CEO.
This is so flagrantly incorrect that it makes me suspect that I'm being trolled. You can't make a movie without a support crew, and the CEO has no job if he isn't making movies. Moreover, they're more likely to fire the CEO for missing earnings estimates than they are likely to stop making movies -- and let's not forget for a second that Hollywood continues to set revenue records almost every year.
Which isn't at all to say that the lighting tech doesn't have his job on the chopping block -- it's just not at all due to piracy. Rather, it's due to the studios being so consolidated that it's more profitable to make fewer movies that each have a higher gross than it is to make more movies which compete with the studio's own competing films for the same entertainment dollars. You want more lighting tech jobs, break out the antitrust laws and bust up the studios so that you have more studios to make more movies.