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Heavyweights Clash Over Policing Repeat Copyright Infringers
SolKeshNaranek tips a story at TorrentFreak about an ongoing copyright case that revolves around how much effort websites need to expend to block repeat infringers after responding to DMCA requests. In 2011, a judge ruled that a website embedding videos from third parties had correctly removed links to infringing videos after receiving a DMCA request, but failed to do anything to police users who had created these links multiple times. For this, the judge said, the website would be required to adopt a number of measures to prevent repeat infringement. Google and Facebook wrote an amicus brief opposing the ruling, as did Public Knowledge and the EFF. Now the MPAA has, unsurprisingly, come out in favor. They wrote, "Contrary to the assertions of myVidster and amici Google and Facebook, search engines and social networking sites are not the only businesses that desire certainty in a challenging online marketplace. MPAA member companies and other producers of creative works also need a predictable legal landscape in which to operate. ... Given the massive and often anonymous infringement on the internet, the ability of copyright holders to hold gateways like myVidster liable for secondary infringement is crucial in preventing piracy."
Nothing in copyright law or the DMCA suggests that anyone should suffer any sort of penalties for obeying DMCA notices. There is no limit on the number of DMCA notices you are allowed to obey in the DMCA. Where did this judge get the idea that the law requires this?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's a clueless dinosaur grumbling about the lack of large quantities of green matter freely available for it's consumption. Sorry charlie, we've left the freecashtacean period, it's time to adapt or die.
I look forward to the day subhuman's like Chris Dodd, and his pack of thugs are hunted down like the vermin they are.
I don't hate them for supporting their (dying) industry, I hate them for their lack of ethics.
Edit: Captcha is "Burglars".
It just happens to be illegal, per the DMCA. The MPAA is no stranger to flaunting laws it helped to create whenever it fancies, though.
Right now more than 4/5 of all software in China is copyrighted by someone else that wasn't paid for it.
Just ask IBM who goes along with this.
Copyright should only be 17 years, renewable only by the Person (not Corporation) that created it, during their lifetime and in the year of their death by their heirs.
Period.
Go back. Go back. Go back to where you once belonged, America.
P.S.: Business processes aren't copyrightable no matter how much you pretend they are.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think the appropriate action is to kick a user after three verified copyright violations. Also, the site should kick a copyright holder after three verified false copyright claims.
Cause what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Can we just kick the MPAA et al off our internet and be done with it. Who invited them anyway.
IF the copyright holders could guarantee that "fair use" would not be trampled, I would agree with them on the secondary infringement. But in the real world where most anonymous users use copyrighted works as background music for their kids birthday party and it STILL gets taken down, then no one should be REQUIRED to take anything down until it is proven that real infringement has actually taken place. There needs to be real oversight to copyright infringement claims.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Seems pretty simple. The DCMA has a clause in it regarding repeat offenders. Nothing new, it's always been there. Hosts have to do something to block repeat offenders or they lose safe harbor. Google knows about it too - they booted a bunch of music blogs for this very reason.
The problem is how the heck are they going to do that? The vernacular of the web is such that people can just establish a new account if the one they have is blocked.
It's just one of the many problems with the DCMA - a law that seemingly is quite outdated and needs a lot of rethinking.
I don't like the way the world is going.
I say we nuke it from orbit. Only way to be sure.
Can we end this madness where a hyperlink is now infringement even if you're not hosting the content?
99% of piracy is caused by a failure to A) produce high quality content that "sattisfies" in the first place B) identify the correct "asking price" for the content and C) distribute it in a way that your target audience actually wants it to be distributed. You may think that your latest 200+ million dollar "John Carter Screws some Four-Armed Martians" is worth "at least" 12 - 15 Dollars per person viewing. The very people who would watch such CG- and action-heavy teenboy-fantasy-dreck in the first place, however, may value watching that film at only 10 Dollars, or 7 Dollars, or perhaps even 3 Dollars and 50 Cents. A Typical Situation Develops: A) your content quality doesn't sattisfy the viewer B) its priced at 2x or 3x what your typical viewer wants to pay for it C) the only way to watch the blody movie is a 4 hour trip to the cinema, or a 2 - 3 month wait for it to hit DVD/BluRay. The whole "product chain" is set up wrong. You can't produce something that sattisfies (= incompetence), you overcharge for it (= also incompetence), and there is no option to watch it from home for a few bucks when it come out (= also incompetence). Remember your basic MBA training, Hollywood "moveeemaking" folks: The Right Product, released at the Right Time, aimed at the Right Audience, at the Right Price, paired with High Product Quality, and distributed/delivered to the customer in the Right Way. You fail to follow this basic "Product Success Advice" at EACH AND EVERY STEP, then wonder why people are sitting at home, downloading your movie for free from Internet Torrents instead. Then you fail to LEARN from your business model's innate problems (the worst of which, currently, is poor quality films couple with overpricing and a dated distribution model), and then try to make the NEGATIVE RESULTS you yourself have engineered, by sending lawyers and law enforcement folks to clobber downloaders flat. This is a piss poor business model, and the only reason that it doesn't roll over and die completely (people walking away to consume a substitute-product) is that A) CG-effects and B) A-list actors are, at this point in time, far too expensive for the Europeans and Asians and others to put much of either in their films. That picture will look different in a decade or so, when high quality CG effects will cost perhaps 1/5th or even 1/10th of what they cost today, and American A-list actors make a habit out of working with talented European or Asian "Auteur" filmmakers again (like used to be the case with the old French "New Wave" and Italian "CinneCitta" films).
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I was in a car collision a few years back. Does this mean that I can sue Ford for manufacturing the car that hit me?
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
So let me get this straight, the judge sees that the DCMA doesn't fix this grievance, so he decides to add a fundamentally new requirement to the law and enforce it?
The judge is right to point out the DCMA doesn't address the (perhaps legitimate) grievances brought to the court. That's exactly why the website should have won the case with no strings attached--from the sound of it, they comply with the requirements of the law. A judge has no more authority to 'fix' bad legislation than I do.
The prosecuting party should be trying to push congress to action, not judges. I hope the SCOTUS picks it up and throws the case out to make the point.
If the mpaa wants to be a horse and buggy maker in a car world instead of offering what people want in a digital world with steep discount to reflect the internet ease of reaching people and the almost no distribution costs then they should continue to have to chase these "infringers" themselves. It is not a government problem.
what about offering 2-3 weak old movies on VOD? for like $7-$10 for a 48 hour rent?
crucial in preventing piracy
You don't prevent piracy. There's no law supporting that position at all. Copyright law is to punish people after the fact and provide monetary compensation for damages done.
The reason for this should be obvious: you CAN'T prevent piracy.
Piracy is not the problem. Their mentality about how to deal with it is the problem.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
That is the only thing these bastards will be happy with..
Until they find out that everyone is gone and they wont have an income, even by stealing it from us via redirection of taxes.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There's no practical way they can stop repeat infringers. It's not content that's infringing, it's use. With what automated method can you determine that two uses are the same for infringement purposes? For example, a person could upload the same video file twice to Megaupload, once to view it and once to use as a decryption key for a file he previously encrypted with that video file as the one-time pad. One use is legal, the other is illegal. How does Megaupload know which is which?
You need a DMCA notice because that certifies that someone has determined that the *use* is infringing, not just the content.
People downloading or the MPAA & RIAA?
If people can't use it, they won't pay for it and the cable companies will quickly go broke since they are all heavily leveraged.
It seems that a new business had emerged that uses the new copyright hell to their advantage.
I had a few videos on YouTube with video I had shot myself and audio from iMovie, which I am allowed to use.
I got a message that I was using copyrighted material and my videos now will have an ad attached to them.
The way they work their scheme are that they create similar music that triggers the scanning algorithm so they can get their ads on all footage edited with popular editing software that has sound libraries that people are free to use. Clever.
So I guess YouTube get a lot of extra work from that and the scammers get a lot of free ad space.
talking about pay VOD and PPV good price + easy = more people willing to buy vs downloading for free.
In regard to certain provisions of the DMCA and other measures, someone please explain to me where they can find some long-standing legal principle that allows one interest group to make other parties separately responsible and liable for protecting the first group's interests? Because that's what they are doing here. Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe any such legal right or principle exists. Which makes much, if not all, of the DMCA and certain other recent laws extremely questionable on the grounds of simple long-established legal principle.
Where else in law does anything like it exist? Are telephone companies liable if people play "illegally" copied tunes for their on-hold music? Of course not. For that matter, if someone is using a telephone modem or other direct means of communication, is the telephone company liable if the users transmit copyright-infringed material? Again, of course not.
Why? Because it is not reasonable. The telephone company is nothing but a "common carrier". They deliver data from one place to another; nothing more. Not only are they not responsible for the content of that data, they are specifically exempt from any responsibility, because end-users are solely responsible for what they send and receive.
Not only that, but it is illegal for telephone companies to use means to determine the contents of such transmissions, without a legal warrant. While other recent laws, themselves at least as questionable about the DMCA, pretend to authorize Federal authorities to intercept that information, it is still illegal for the telephone carrier itself to do so.
Why should ISPs be any different? Rationally, they fulfill the same "ecological niche" as a telephone company. They provide a service to carry data packets from one end user to another. And data repositories, if they are on the up-and-up, are also pretty much in the same boat; they act merely as storage places for private data that is uploaded and stored. There is no rational reason they should be responsible for any content, UNLESS they are knowingly and actively aiding and abetting crimes committed by someone else. Just as, for example, the owner of physical storage rental units is not responsible for the actual contents of said units (they make you sign a paper to that effect)... UNLESS they are knowingly aiding in the commission of crimes.
So the whole concept is bullshit from the start. ISPs and data repositories owe the RIAA and MPAA nothing, either ethically or in legal principle. There is not a single rational reason behind holding them responsible for user-generated content, EXCEPT the rational argument that it is the easiest place to stop it. But ease is not a binding legal principle. The US Supreme Court more than once has ruled that difficulty of enforcing a law is not an excuse to bypass long-standing legal precedent.
The only explanation for this kind of plan is under-the-table cronyism between big businesses and government, which has no place in justice. There is nothing in here for the consumer at all. No protection, no improvement of any market (on the contrary), and no recourse.
It's just bad.
I guess some people are more worthy of protection against this sort of thing than others. The internet needs its own version of the NRA
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”