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Finland: Open WiFi Access Point Owner Not Liable For Infringement
New submitter mjrauhal writes "In Finland, the operator of an open WiFi access point was found not guilty for copyright infringement allegedly committed over said access point. The operation of such access points would have become legally risky were this decided otherwise. Appeal by the Finnish Anti-Piracy Center is still possible for this district court ruling."
I'm surprised by the ruling because it removes the teeth of most copyright law. Now anybody can upload anything safely at airports, cafés, hotel lobbies. Hell, do it from your home WiFi router only make sure you don't use encryption for plausible deniability.
What I'm waiting for is a ruling on an upload from the wired LAN of a largish corporation where they can tie the infringement to the company but not to an individual MAC address. Will employers be forced to do ISP-type logging of all employee network access with 6-month retention?
I'm surprised by the ruling because it removes the teeth of most copyright law.
I'm surprised too, but I think this ruling is satisfying. After all, just because it's hard/impossible to find the people who actually committed the crime (or perhaps it's just a civil suit), that doesn't mean they should be able to successfully punish/sue the wrong people.
> "I wish that the media corporations stopped trolling and started creating some business models which actually make sense in this day and age. All others have already moved forward."
...", but doing it is harder than saying it. I'm skeptical that there are any business models that can undercut piracy which don't also involve a large cut in revenues.
I was on reddit the other day and the creator of Isohunt mentioned several times that making money from piracy was the holy grail and he had no idea how to do it. (Yeah, Kim Dotcom got money off of piracy, though I'm sure he was earning far less than market value, which makes sense since he didn't have the burden of any costs of production.) So, here's your chance to give suggestions. Preferably ones that don't end up making a *lot* less money than the current system. For example, I recently read a suggestion that companies should put all their movies on something like Hulu for free (but ad supported). The problem is that ads aren't close to paying the bills once you include the cost of making movies and the bandwidth of sending them to you. The only reason ad-supported movies are even available on Hulu is because they're long past their prime, so they're being used to make a few extra bucks. Maybe the solution is to only create movies that cost less than $10 million to make - then, even if piracy grows and takes 90% of your profits, you could still get by. In many ways, I think that's a sad outcome for the movie industry. Even more worryingly, I've noticed a lot of articles talking about new ad-skipping technologies (http://www.dishtvblog.com/dish-news/the-dish-hopper-adds-all-new-feature-auto-hop-that-will-allow-for-a-commercial-skipping-option/) and several people I know have been talking about how they always skip the ads. Which makes me think: gee, people don't want to pay for their entertainment and they're becoming more empowered and pushy about being able to skip the ads, too. I wonder how anyone is supposed to pay for the costs of creating stuff?
So, I just thought I'd put that question there. It's easy to say "hey, you guys should figure out a way to
This is really easy. Just sell the darned DRM free video file. The pirates already have it anyway, so they may as well get the money of the people who want to pay.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Preferably ones that don't end up making a *lot* less money than the current system.
Why?
What data did you use to reach the conclusion that our current level of spending on copyrighted works is the right amount?
We have a finite amount of money to spend on things (U.S. GDP, if the "we" we are talking about is the United States). Over the past 100 years, we have continually strengthened copyright. This has the effect of increasing the portion of GDP that is flowing to copyrighted works. Over the past 15 years, we have seen an escalating war between piracy and increased enforcement, and the data on whether this conflict has increased or decreased net proceeds to artists is *extremely* unclear and wildly misrepresented by all sides of the debate.
Seems to me in a data storm like that, it's pretty important to find some solid ground on which to stand. It behooves us to have some way of measuring whether the current approach to funding the production of copyrighted works is consuming too much or too little of our GDP. If we don't know whether we are spending too much or too little, we can't really say whether an alternative solution would do best to result in more or less funding.
Here's one example for spot-checking the situation: Are we more like the decadent side of Rome during the run-up to the decline, awash in circuses of spectacle, or are we more like Sparta in its prime, potent but lacking in culture? If the former, we may be spending too much on copyrighted works. If the latter, it would suggest we are spending too little.
There are other ways to hold a finger up to the wind, and still more to dig into harder data. Do you think we are under-spending or over-spending on the production of copyrighted works, and why?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
That's the thing, though: the "rights-owners" act as if the people who want to pay are pirates themselves, or potential pirates. DRM doesn't convince people to pay for a product; rather, it's more likely to convince people that it's not worth the hassle of trying to be good, and end up pirating anyway. DRM is targeted at the people who are paying for the product, rather than the pirates who are going to hack the product anyway and never would have bought it in the first place.
Life, ultimately, boils down to the Four Fs: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and Mating.
In other words, people should not have anonymous Internet access least they commit a crime. Nice.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.