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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!
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".
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.
Given Google's recent actions, and YouTube, we'd more likely see Google become a trusted RIAA member.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
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.
Why does copyright need to renewable at all? If you can't make a profit off something in 17 years, you need to consider going into another business. Also, I would argue 10 years would be a more appropriate copyright length.
Well, it used to be 13, so 10 years is a good negotiation point.
Regardless, only a Person who is a Human should be able to hold Copyright.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Bingo. Money, money, money. If we can't rape the uploaders, we'll rape the gate keepers. Money, money, money.
Meanwhile, RIAA and the MPAA aren't giving a goddamned thing to the artists. Nothing. Not one settlement has ever netted an artist a single dollar. Raping the artists is so much FUN, but they get bored, and they want someone else to rape.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I can see that some things should be renewable. I loathe Disney for advocating all these crazy laws that we have today. But - they do have something of a point with renewable copyrights. Mickey Mouse would have gone out of copyright well before I graduated high school. Probably before I graduated elementary school - he's been around that long. But, Mickey Mouse has been a money generator all these decades.
Let them have renewable copyrights. First renewal, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second renewal, millions of dollars. Third renewal, tens of millions. Fourth renewal, hundreds of millions. Just keep upping the ante by an order of magnitude. If they want to pay, the government benefits. If they don't want to pay, the people benefit. At some stage, even Mickey Mouse will be retired. I don't think they would renew even Mickey for a billion dollars!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
Market cap doesn't matter so much; it's just the sum market value of all of the outstanding public shares. It's a convenient heuristic but estimating the actual price is much more complicated.
For example, Sony owns controlling interests in Sony Pictures and Sony Music. Owning both of these businesses means they can control the direction of the industry, so their stake is much more valuable to Sony than the market value.
Market cap matters more when you're talking about a hostile takeover, because it can be used to directly estimate the amount of money you would need to spend. Hostile takeovers aren't normally possible, though. Corporations are allowed to issue classes of shares with different rights, and the publicly-traded class normally has fewer (or no) voting rights. Normally, if the company has a remotely competent board and CFO, a single person could buy every single public share and still not control the company.
Here's what the MPAA is really after:
FTFY
Asimov's Foundation was written in 1945, the last of the trilogy in 1952 (the year I was born). It was published by Gnome Press, a tiny publisher without the clout to properly market it, and it languished until the '60s with Asimov not earning a dime from it until Doubleday bought the publication rights from Gnome. It was a Hugo award winner and a big moneymaker after Doubldeday bought it.
That's why.
As to your "ten years", iirc I started on my Paxil Diaries book almost ten years ago. I still need to design its dust jacket. BTW It's on TPB, I put it there myself.
Seventeen years may seem like a lifetime to someone in college, but it really isn't that long a time at all. You'll find that out if you live long enough. I wouldn't want copyright, even after a renewal, to last any longer than 30 years, though.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Primary infringement: Joe Schmuck buys a DVD and procedes to rip it down to his computer. It's a 'violation' of the DCMA because the video is 'encrypted' and needs something like libdvd2 to decrypt the 'key'. And there's the standard 'FBI Warning' notice on the DVD when you play it. Thus, *AA argues the content is 'licensed' not sold.
Secondary infringement: The company who sold Joe Schmuck his hard drive. Without that hard drive, Joe Schmuck wouldn't have anything to store his 'infringing' copy upon. Thus, argues the *AA, said company 'facilitated' the 'infringement'. Doesn't matter that they do not have physical access to the drive anymore, they 'facilitated'.
Tertiary infringement: The company who manufactured the hard drive. By manufacturing the hard drive, they have created a 'criminal tool', defined as any non-living object essential to and used in 'the commission of a crime'. By wholesaling the hard drive to the company who sold it to Joe Schmuck, they are now the 'tertiary infringers', even though they lost physical control of the drive.
We can take this tree of 'infringement' back at least 2 or 3 more generations, to the people who mined and refined the materials to build the hard drive, as well as the designers. How much stupidity are we looking for here?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
We are no longer living with 18th century production and distribution technology.Copyright and patent lengths were originally implemented when it could take months to distribute a work across a country and years to distribute it across the world. We also have tools that cut the time of artistic production e.g. books don't have to be written in longhand, presses no longer need to be set and cranked by hand, Now with modern tools, artistic production is quicker, and distribution is virtually instantaneous. The extension of copyright past the original duration makes no sense from this perspective.
Further, the original justification for copyright - that it promotes innovation in science and the arts is not served by extending copyright length. The fact is that extended copyright length impedes creativity by limiting what we can be creative about.
So I may only choose between a prison for my body and a prison for my mind? Decisions, decisions...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Asimov's _Foundation_ stories started to be published in 1942 (they were not written in 1945). They were originally sold to Street & Smith which owned publication rights (and the works were published in _Astounding Science Fiction_). Asimov was paid for his work and apparently satisfied with payment (or he wouldn't have sold the stories -- hell he wrote the stories for Astounding which was the most lucrative and prestigious market for SF at the time ).
Asimov was paid for his work at least three times. He won the lottery. Most of us, no matter how creative we are at work, only get paid once. And, actually, Asimov would only have been paid once without the generosity of John W Campbell (editor of Astounding) who gave the rights back to the authors after first publication.
And as far as Gnome press goes, it was essentially a fan publishing house. It published Asimov's work in hardback, which was an enormous prestige thing of the day. Nor do I think that marketing was the issue that kept the work languishing, There was a fanzine that won a Hugo in 1961 called "Who Killed Science Fiction?" And it was a real question, because SF wasn't selling at the time and the market dwindled to a handful of magazines, a few paperbacks and hardbacks only surviving because of library sales (and most of those were juveniles). Asimov, himself, abandoned writing SF for around a dozen years and concentrated on the more immediately lucrative science popularization market .
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.