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Illegal Downloading Now a Crime In Japan With Increased Penalties
eldavojohn writes "Although downloading songs without paying for them in Japan used to be a civil offense starting in 2010, it is now a crime with new penalties of up to two years in prison or fines of up to two million yen ($25,700). The lobbying group behind this push for more extreme penalties is none other than the RIAJ (the Japanese RIAA). The BBC notes this applies to both music and video downloads which may put anime studios in a particularly uncomfortable position."
I'm a struggling open source artist trying to make some cash, but as long as pirates are allowed to download what they want.. well, they will download the popular songs and not mine. By fighting against piracy, we open source artists win as people have to listen to our music instead.
This is not only true for music, but also software development and everything else FOSS. If anti-piracy would win, then so would open source software.
Isn't Japan the country whose P2P scene is dominated by darknet software like Winny and Share?
It is not worth wrecking the lives of the people involved just to boost sales of your crappy open source music.
The lobbying group behind this push for more extreme penalties is none other than the RIAJ (the Japanese RIAA).
What? Were you expecting piracy to suddenly be OK, just because it happens outside the US?
If you think the anime studios are in a particularly uncomfortable position, you should see what happens to their characters.
Hopefully a family member of someone from the RIAJ, or maybe a politician's kid will be the first one caught.
Most piracy comes from overseas where stupid regions and language-locks prevent people from accessing said media.
The only time it becomes a problem is when Funimation or some other company licence a local copy for whatever language / region and there is the subbed version still up.
Most subbing sites make it a point to ban Japanese IPs since they don't want piracy, they are just doing a job that often studios simply can't afford for those not in the direct target audience. (those who live in Japan)
It's the opposite of democracy that the ones with money get to decide about legislation.
as we now say in Japanese
I guess one is supposed to be pro-piracy around here, but I am OK with piracy being reduced. If the artist(s) want a monetary compensation for their works, it's a fair deal. Of course if they set a price too high or make a crappy product, it's also fair for me to not buy it. But it's not a excuse to download it for free... Unless the producers choose so. For example if the anime studios feel that piracy has helped them, then why not just put up some free clips online in the future, by your own.
boycott. don't buy any material falling under this law. When enough do this sales will drop and they will notice. Out of sight & sound out of mind and ear. It doesn't exist.
There is plenty available for free.
I would love to see (yeah it'll never happen) if nobody pirated _anything_ for a year. Would that kill the industry outright you think?
No shit.
How about something that every single person on earth doesn't already know.
No matter how much we try we won't able to wreck the lives of artists as much as the MAFIAA does.
Let me know when record company executives are jailed for fleecing the artists they con into signing slavery contracts. You can also let me know when any of the money that is collected by the RIA* ends up in the hands of the artists.
Sorry but when I hear "Japanese torrents" I think of something completely different.
How about we don't wreck anyone's lives?
What a ridiculously disproportionate penalty, I thought only the US was that screwed up.
I blame Sony.
I'm living in Japan, so lately I have been renting a "seedbox" in the Netherlands for $15/month.
I can download whatever I want to through the web interface, then copy it via sftp.
I'm sure solutions like this will start becoming a lot more common soon.
I love it that we live in such a world that ENTERTAINMENT industry takes over our lives thanks to whom we will be spied on, fined, prosecuted and taken away our rights because of mere suspicion we're about to do something (it will happen soon enough). There are lots of people who are victims of crime, who have their shops or pubs demolished, people that fear for they safety because there is no one to protect them or ones who lose all their money in some sort of a scam. But no one cares about their rights. It's all about people who are so obsessed with money that want more and more and more. Politicians go up their asses to please them while ignoring the people who enabled them to have this richness and power in the first place. Sometimes I'm sad that our world works like that, sometimes I don't give a damn. All that would take to fix it is for a nation not to buy certain things for certain time so everyone would come to minds and got their priorities straight, but I don't think it's possible. People rather have camera installed in every single of their room than not be able to watch their favorite soap opera or listen to some music they like.
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
To me it seems like the RIAA and the fim makers have opposing goals.
The RIAA seems to want people to pirate (proof: the unskippable "educational" messages and other bothers that don't appear in the pirated version) so they can sue them and get some money. Thus they lower the quality of the official versions with respect to the pirated versions. The film makers want to sell their films, and don't want the viewers to pirate. To lower the quality of the official versions with crap like unskippable messages is contraproductive to this. Somehow the RIAA has the film makers believing the nagscreens are good. Dunno how they did it.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Population of Japan: ~128 million
Estimated Illegal Downloads: 4.38 billion
That works out to be a 34 songs per person per year in Japan. Somehow the mathematics just aren't there ....
There is a big difference between wrecking someone's life by taking away their freedom and wrecking someone's life by ending a subsidy.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
... because it goes against the laws of nature. Lets face it. There is no way you're going to be able to take away all the computers now in existence for creating and copying content. Not only that anyone who makes war on general computing will eventually leave a giant market open to competitors who's machines are not locked down. This happened with DVD players, why wouldn't it happen with computers?
Herp.
1. Gather a list of hundreds of thousands of torrent downloader IPs.
2. Demand that these IPs be reversed to actual people and prosecuted at government cost.
3. Threaten that the RIAJ will start a public campaign accusing anyone who does not support the prosecution of everyone on the list of being "soft on crime".
4. Profit.
Socialize the costs, privatize the profits. This is a really big win for the recording industry.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That thinks that the best way to combat these stiff penalties is to *not steal* the software/music/movies?
For the love of all things good... what sort of lot will get all bent out of proportion because someone made a law with a stiff penalty to combat something that is morally and ethically wrong?
"They made the penalty for murder... DEATH.. WTF?"
Average kid downloads 1,000 songs that could have been purchased for $0.99 each, so studios lost $999 (artists even less). Average Chinese bootleg produces 100,000 CDs and studios lose $1.3M. Why not go after the real problem?
I'll just leave this here....
Dilbert RSS feed
This is really a sad day. Such a stupid way of dealing with things.
Time to get a VPN!
www.notgetcaughtdownloading.com
Studios didn't "lose" anything - they just didn't sell that much...
Two years for downloading a song? OK. Here's what I'd do. I'd take a baseball bat, beat the shit out of one of those RIAJ's exec, steal his wallet and buy all the songs I want with HIS money. If I get caught, I'd get what? 6 months? I think it's worth it.
What makes you think your average kid would have paid for those songs if he wasn't able to "pirate" them? What makes you think the people who buy bootlegs would have paid full price if the bootlegs weren't available?
The answer is that you have absolutely no clue, and therefore your monetary estimates are false.
The reason they don't go after the real problem is that the *are* the real problem. The don't fill a need anymore. Poor independent bands can buy or rent the equipment to record their gigs on the money they make from them, and distribute it for micropayments online, and market themselves through social media and viral youtube videos. The last claim they have is some sort of content filtering to get rid of all that terrible music you would have to listen to to find what you want. The epublishing business has shown that user reviews are sufficent to flag the low quality stuff, so even that claim is bogus. They are spending huge amounts of money, not finding the good stuff, but promoting what they found whether it is good or not (sometimes it is). They are also spending huge amounts of money legislating their own existance. I'm looking forward to the day when a large venue like Wembley stadium realizes some internet phenomenon can sell them out without going through a label, that would be a turning point I think.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
"Illegal" downloading is now a crime? So, "illegal" downloading wasn't a crime before? I really must re-visit my understanding of the work 'illegal'.
Of course, laws prohibiting speeding only tend to catch a few people too... so I would argue that the inability to enforce it universally should not be an excuse to not try. At the very least, perhaps, some may simply curtail the illegal behavior only because they do not wish to be caught.
(Disclaimer... since the last time I said something like this here, it evidently wasn't obvious): I realize, of course, that there are deeper reasons for laws prohibiting speeding which relate to issues of public safety, and I'm not comparing the act of copyright infringement to driving 80 miles per hour down a residential road... only comparing, perhaps superficially, the similarity in the attempts to prohibit them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Or you know, they could go and work for it like artists used to do. Where is it written that millions of dollars must be made off of music??
Those colors are really hard to match. Am I right in reading that recorded revenue is down for both labels and artist, but much more so for labels? And that artists get a heck of a lot more for live revenue than they get for recorded stuff?
And it will if they get the chance.
These cretins must not be given an inch. Destroy them and their business, because they are the self-declared enemy of culture.
This is not an issue of copyright and free culture coexisting; it is a battle for survival.
If you make a market unviable by doing nothing to prevent infringement, piracy, etc etc, you are in effect giving the finger to people in that market segment.
It would be sort of like if you refused to ever prosecute any store break-ins or shoplifting because "we dont want to ruin the kids' lives"; you are in effect ruining the livelyhood of storekeepers by making their business non-viable through not enforcing the law. (anyone who comments on theft vs infringement has utterly missed the point)
it is a fact that Executed Criminals do not commit further crimes (and may give pause to others considering Murder or anything else that would draw Capital Punishment).
i personally think that Big Content will be happy only when we have a Media Consumption Tax (everybody pays X dollars or Y% of income for Media every year). The real mindbender is if this replaced paying for Big Content Media folks might actually LIKE IT.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
(anyone who comments on theft vs infringement has utterly missed the point)
Translation: don't interject with facts, because we don't need them in this discussion.
...but in practice there is a large set of labor that humanity needs in order to survive, and that basically nobody wants to do. People with wrecked lives are far more willing to do it.
There is also the issue of most people basically having the same skills as everyone else, driving the wages down for huge categories of labor, confining most people to poverty. That problem is pretty hard to solve.
It would be sort of like if you refused to ever prosecute any store break-ins or shoplifting
No, it's nothing like that at all.
A store owner has a store full of stuff. If the government disappeared, he'd still have a store full of stuff. He might have to protect the stuff himself, or he may have to pay someone to protect it - but nevertheless, he has stuff. If someone shoplifts, he loses some finite amount of that stuff, and he no longer sells it.
A songwriter has a pretty tune. If the government disappeared, he'd still have a pretty tune. There is no way to protect this pretty tune - but it doesn't really matter because even if someone "steals" it, he can still hum the pretty tune. If he's lucky, his pretty tunes will turn the head of a patron of some sort and he might actually make some money. He could also make some money by performing the pretty song.
Short of a patron or a performance, the only reason a songwriter holds anything of value at all is because of a government subsidy. Taking away the subsidy has no moral hazard at all. If the system isn't working to the benefit of society in aggregate, then the system should be changed.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
fines of up to two million yen ($25,700)
And this is still far less than the $150,000 maximum for the civil penalty in the US. Joel Tenenbaum owes the RIAA $675,000. He might prefer two years in jail compared to a lifetime of indentured servitude trying to pay them off.
Yes. And the total for artists (recorded + live) is growing.
Dilbert RSS feed
Now YakuRIAJ?
This doesn't make any sense to me...
Are they even aware that the internet and "piracy" is their biggest ally in promoting and bringing their media and artists overseas?
I have been involved in Japanese pop culture events and I know this for a fact.
This is a huge shot in the foot for Japan.
They are already loosing exposure with the fall of Megaupload and the fast takedown of similar sites, this will make things even worse.
And for the record, I haven't met a single japanese person that had the slightest idea on how to get the w4r3z and evil illegal downloads and it would be to much of a hassle really. They have easy and convenient 24/7 access to all kinds of legal media, digital or physical, brand new, rental or 2nd hand.
showing you the source.....
We have one country declaring filesharing legal and free for personal use, another declaring life ruining prison sentences. Shit is getting out of hand.
Quoting parent:
(anyone who comments on theft vs infringement has utterly missed the point)
Just because piracy is not exactly like stealing doesn't mean it's legal. Murder, fraud and speeding are other examples of things which are not exactly like stealing, yet illegal.
You have gone and smoked yourself retarded..
If you make a market unviable by doing nothing to prevent infringement, piracy, etc etc, you are in effect giving the finger to people in that market segment.
The people in that market segment can always get a different career - any career. Markets die off all the time anyway due to evolution of markets as a whole - just ask the TV/radio repair industry.
Some poor slob who is locked-up in prison for downloading a song doesn't have any options for a couple of years, and all of his future options narrow down to menial/low-end labor after that.
So, maybe you can point out where the justice is in such a scenario?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
They're talking about whether or not something *should be* legal, and you're talking about whether or not it *is* legal.
No, a songwriter does have something of value, it's just that, without copyright, he has something of low **MARKET** value. There's a huge difference between the two. Copyright allows the *market* value to be somewhere in the ballpark of the *actual* value of his work. Without copyright, it is the equivalent of a store owner trying to sell *valuable* products, but where all the customers find it so easy to steal stuff from the store that everything has a *market* value of zero. Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value. I think you could - just as legitimately - argue that shoplifting laws are a "government subsidy" for businesses.
Nothing is legal or illegal without a government. Once you have a government, you can make any rules that you want to. At some point, the people let our government make it illegal not to pay artists for the use of their work. Fair enough - but don't pretend that it is the natural state of things. Music predates US copyright law.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm confused. That's the total revenue to artists? So, if the number of musicians doubled, then each artist (individually) is getting less money? Do you have a link to the actual information to make sure this chart isn't pulled out of thin air? Also, I've seen charts of much deeper cuts to music-industry revenue. To quote a recent Wired article: "from 2001 to 2011, [US music] sales dropped from $13.7 billion to $3.4 billion". It's hard for me to believe that artists are getting a bigger and bigger cut of music-sales money (in actual dollars) when 75% of the revenue has evaporated in ten years.
The analogy is more like, if hammers were falling from the sky, and infinite number of them (aside from the obvious physical danger) the hammer market would fundamentally change. Unless the government stepped in and said that if you touch one of the infinite hammers, you receive two years in prison and a $25,000 fine. The only hammers you are allowed to use are the ones purchased at licensed hardware stores. This kind of law might claim to protect the everyday contractor, but it would really be meant to maintain the now out-of-date hardware store. If the hardware store market collapses, it is not the governments job to maintain it through violence.
The people in that market segment can always get a different career - any career.
So when the shopkeeper complains to the police that they have done nothing to curb the spat of burglaries and shopliftings over the course of a year, they can tell him "tough luck buster, go find another job?" Because thats kind of what youre saying.
I honestly don't remember the last piece of media I've purchased aside from my Netflix subscription. The RIAA/MPAA has long since soured me on ever contributing to their current business model of overpriced plastic discs containing some files. They may kick, scream and claw on their way down, but its inevitable where they are heading.
This "War on File-Sharing" is going to go the way of the "War on Drugs"... And we see how well that's going at the moment don't we?
Problem is, you too-easily confuse copying with theft. Whether your doing that is out of ignorance or malicious design? I will leave to you and/or the reader.
Downloading, in the music industry's case, is when I make an exact duplicate of everything in that shopkeeper's store for my own use. Doing so in the real world means that the shopkeeper can't do jack about it. He has lost nothing, as all of his goods are still in the store, untouched and unchanged. So if he bitches and whines to the cops that the value of the goods in his store is essentially zero because everyone else is busy making perfect copies of the store's contents w/o removing anything from his store, then yeah, that is just his tough luck.
Personal Opinion? As long as no hardware is touched and no rights are abridged, I would love (no, seriously, love) to see the MPAA/RIAA get stupid and lock down every movie, song, and show with unbreakable DRM. Then maybe folks would get a hint, dump the cartels, and find other ways to get entertained. Then the RIAA/MPAA can die a slow and much-deserved death.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That's not at all what's happening.
It's not a direct subsidy, but it is a subsidy. Artists could not make money selling content if it were not for the government. The same effect could be achieved by taxing everyone who buys a music player and then redistributing the money according to popularity. This is how ASCAP works, for instance. That is more or less a direct subsidy - the government allows a private entitiy to levy a "tax" and then redistribute it to the songwriters. If you object to my use of the word subsidy, I'll refrain from using it and use a word you would prefer - it is immaterial to the discussion.
No, a songwriter does have something of value, it's just that, without copyright, he has something of low **MARKET** value.
I'm not really interested in getting THAT philosophical. Music is obviously important to humans in some non-financial way. Hell, we value it enough to have this crazy copyright system in place. But you can't eat music, you can't gas your car with it, and the only way to get people to pay for it directly (in certain formats) is to have the government enforce the "value" in monetary terms. Of course, it has always had financial value in non-subsidized formats. People paid to see Mozart live. People paid him substantial amounts to teach them how to play. He made a living. But he made very little on CDs :)
equivalent of a store owner trying to sell *valuable* products, but where all the customers find it so easy to steal stuff from the store that everything has a *market* value of zero
That would be a very short-term situation. Once the shop is emptied, the goods would be worth what they were (or even more) than when the looting started. An MP3 has very little, if any, intrinsic value - though again, in certain circumstances, people will pay for music naturally. A jukebox is a good example. People who steal music rather than pay $1 on iTunes will feed a dollar into a jukebox to hear a song once without even blinking.
Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value.
You have it backwards. Laws keep prices low, because the shop owner doesn't need to hire people to protect his goods. Can you imagine what it would cost to keep a store like Walmart protected in total anarchy? It wouldn't even be feasible. The cost of simple goods would skyrocket, if you could get them at all.
I think you could - just as legitimately - argue that shoplifting laws are a "government subsidy" for businesses.
I think it is commonly considered a basic function of government to keep the peace. If the government put a cop in stores to prevent shoplifting, I'd agree - but having a law on the books that makes it illegal to steal is pretty basic stuff, and it helps everyone who owns anything. The reason you need laws specific to shoplifting is to handle the special case of this public/private space. Anyway, it is hard to generalize since the laws are different everywhere; I'm sure there are jurisdictions where the laws do act as a subsidy.
You seem to have a negative connotation associated with "subsidy". I do not. I like it when a community revitalizes the downtown by dressing it up and lowering taxes and such - an obvious subsidy. I even like the basic premise of copyright law - though I think it should involve much shorter time periods and probably only involve commercial use.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah they're so bad. That's why Trent Reznor has gone back to using a label. Obviously freeloaders aren't as willing to pay as much as they claim. What a surprise.
And that is when the hardware store should start selling screwdrivers.
The folks over at QuestionCopyright.org have posted an informative talk on the roots and history of copyright laws: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI
The key point was surprising to me: copyright was designed to subsidize distribution, not creation.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Im not talking about theft vs infringement. Again, you utterly miss the point, which is that failing to protect those invested in a market is the same as giving them the finger.
Your intended point is invalid as well - the market holds no guarantees or protections for the investor, nor should it, unless fraud is involved, or other obvious bits that have bugger-all to do with copyright. Don't like it? Take it to civil court, where such matters belong.
Caveat Investor, home-boy. If you invest in the wrong market and the market in particular loses profit (not due to theft or fraud, mind), then that's your problem, and you shouldn't rely on the government to help idiot-proof things for you, or kiss your boo-boo and make you feel better by locking up some random schmuck. If you lose profit because Joe Cheeto-Shirt can make perfect copies of your goods in his basement, then take him to civil court and try your luck there.
You do not get to lock him up in prison, as he has not deprived you of your goods.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
failing to protect those invested in a market is the same as giving them the finger.
You can phrase it like that if you want to, but there's nothing sacred about protecting someone's investment in a market; the government should protect things that are good for the whole society. Copyright exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and this is done by giving an exclusive right to authors and inventors. This exclusive right is not the reason why we have copyright, it's just the means to a goal.
Just because someone worked hard or invested in something, it doesn't mean they should be protected by the government.
But you can't eat music, you can't gas your car with it, and the only way to get people to pay for it directly (in certain formats) is to have the government enforce the "value" in monetary terms.
I'm unclear on the point of your argument. I often hear pirates try to denigrate digital-media because "You can't eat it. It doesn't provide shelter." - as if nothing is important unless it provides one of a handful of very basic human needs. I reject that viewpoint, of course. If it were true, we might as well say that people should be able to break into music concerts because "concerts don't feed people - they do not cover any basic human needs". It's funny, because I once heard an anti-copyright activist talk-up the importance of our "culture" and how culture is everything and, so, music and movies and all that stuff *needed* to be free because otherwise it's allowing corporations to lock-up the most important thing of all - since "our culture makes us who we are!" It's so ridiculous when I hear pirates using completely opposite points of view (music is nothing because it doesn't provide for basic human needs / music is everything because it's our culture - it's who we are - we can't allow it to be locked up).
Of course, it has always had financial value in non-subsidized formats. People paid to see Mozart live. People paid him substantial amounts to teach them how to play. He made a living. But he made very little on CDs :)
No, the "non-subsidized formats" are valuable because of bouncers. Besides, I work in software. I'm not going to be doing software concerts anytime soon. My products are inherently digital.
That would be a very short-term situation. Once the shop is emptied, the goods would be worth what they were (or even more) than when the looting started.
More importantly, you'd teach shopkeepers to stop selling things.
An MP3 has very little, if any, intrinsic value - though again, in certain circumstances, people will pay for music naturally.
No, an MP3 does have value. It just has no market value in an environment where it's passed around prolifically.
A jukebox is a good example. People who steal music rather than pay $1 on iTunes will feed a dollar into a jukebox to hear a song once without even blinking.
That's a different situation. For one thing: people don't control the music playing in bars unless they pay the jukebox.
Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value.
You have it backwards. Laws keep prices low, because the shop owner doesn't need to hire people to protect his goods. Can you imagine what it would cost to keep a store like Walmart protected in total anarchy? It wouldn't even be feasible. The cost of simple goods would skyrocket, if you could get them at all.
You're confusing "cost" and "value". Actual value is how much it's worth to a person. Market value is how much it can be bought/sold on the market. Cost (or "price") is how much they're going to charge you for it. In the shopkeeper example, the costs increase in an environment of rampant theft because shopkeepers respond by hiring lots of security. In the digital-media sector, there is no security that can be purchased (unless we're talking about DRM). The analogy would be good if there was some expensive, unbreakable DRM that could be purchased - thus driving up the cost of digital-media due to the increased cost of buying the DRM. Conversely, if there was store security was constantly being broken, so that shopkeepers eventually decided it was futile to hire any security, it would lead to rampant theft, eventually all stores would go out of business - if not directly from theft of their own stores, then from trying to compete by selling items for their proper price (based on
There is no obligation on the part of the government to make all market segments and business models viable. For example, selling bottled air would be a lucrative market segment with the right kind of laws, but it's not the one that government makes viable, and for good reason.
The Subject "Illegal Downloading now a Crime", says it all, and what it says is that the corporations have won. If it was illegal downloading then it would have already been a crime, or it would not have been illegal downloading. "Illegal Downloading", has traditionally not been an actual thing but instead is a term used as a scare tactic. Similarly there is no such thing as an illegal copy. Traditionally, it has been the distribution or copying itself that is illegal, unlike stolen goods which remain tainted, Copies made without authorization have no lasting taint to them. So traditionally it has been the case that if someone serves you a song, they are the ones that are liable. If you serve it back out because you're on P2P, then and only they are you also liable. But the PR war was so effectively won, that this major change, is mis-reported.
It's so ridiculous when I hear pirates using completely opposite points of view (music is nothing because it doesn't provide for basic human needs / music is everything because it's our culture - it's who we are - we can't allow it to be locked up).
I don't think that's ridiculous. I think it's eye opening that a wide spectrum of people all believe in the same thing: that copyright is bullshit.
It's like seeing how die hard atheists and die hard theists agreeing on the same thing. When so many people agree on something, maybe they're on to something...
I'm fine with shorter copyrights. I am not fine with "only involve commercial use". A lot of us write software for consumers. If copyright only covers "commercial use" then we might as well go get other jobs right now. The entire games industry is for consumers, and letting the one and only customer have everything for free seems like a quick way to bankruptcy.
The world didn't stop for the old Luddites. It didn't stop for film photography, typewriter repairmen, hand wash laundromats, etc.
The world didn't stop for any of those jobs. It's not going to stop for software writers. It's just part of real life that we all have to deal with.
Really, if you're in the tech business, then you should be used to adapting and learning new technologies as time goes on, or are you still writing punch cards?
the market holds no guarantees or protections for the investor, nor should i
What do you think laws are? Theyre society guaranteeing that certain things will be prevented.
So the store owner can have a gun to shoot shoplifters, but a musician can't have a gun to shoot pirates? That is, of course, the dichotomy you're hanging your hat on.
Artists could not make money selling content if it were not for the government.
Shopkeepers could not make money selling things if we didnt have laws preventing theft. Banks couldnt make money off of loans if we didnt have laws making those loans enforceable. Im not clear where the difference here is, copyright laws make it possible to profit off of a creative work, which is the intent.
These two corrupt organizations have nothing to do with this in Japan, really.
That aside, anime prices are way too expensive in Japan. Esp. since they only release two/three episodes a BD disk every two months or so. (And in rare cases, one.)
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/search3.html?q=Hyouka&media=blu-ray&r=any&step=20&order=score [cdjapan.co.jp]
11 Volumes (22 episodes + 1 OVA) at a price of $88.66 per volume.
Would you pay nearly $1,000 for one series?
"Music sales" presumably being of physical media, which is a low or no income source for most artists. The ones hurting from that are the record companies. Live performances and merchandise sale at shows are what brings in the money for most artists, and the record companies don't see a cent of it. Now, unlicensed distribution of recordings - "piracy", youtube, etc - increases the visibility of an artist at no expense to them, and makes their shows more popular but does not necessarily sell more cd's (which are losing popularity regardless). That's why the record companies get their panties in a bunch; they're being cut out.
Artists that want to make a living playing live can do so today, without the aid of a record company, and still be successfull. Promotion on youtube is free, websites are cheap, and all they need is to hire one guy good at promoting them, and a guy or two for the website if they make it big. Add up cd and merch. sales at shows and on their site, direct or indirect digital music sales online and many bands can do okay, instead of just a few making it big.
Shopkeepers could not make money selling things if we didnt have laws preventing theft.
Of course they could - they could defend the store themselves or hire someone to do it for them. This is what happens when there is a "failed state". You pay the warlord to protect you.
Banks couldnt make money off of loans if we didnt have laws making those loans enforceable.
That's half-true. Loans predate the government. I'll take your goat as collateral. But the modern US banking system is heavily dependent on government, with instruments that are arguably even more abstract than IP.
Im not clear where the difference here is, copyright laws make it possible to profit off of a creative work, which is the intent.
I'm not arguing about their intent.
Shall we not reform tax law because accountants and tax lawyers might lose their jobs?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The comment quality always seems way lower on copyright articles. For every 10 decent comments, you have 90 apparent propaganda posts. Regular slashdot articles have much better quality comments from a wide variety of posters. These fake comments tend to go over the top and double down on RIAA philosophy. They push horrible ideas the MAFIAA would never dare say publicly.
These muppet comments also quote the supposed pro-piracy bias. If this article was any indication, the Slashdot community are 90% MAFIAA muppets. I know that's not the real story. If you counted only posts from real posters, that would tell a different story. Among American adults, about 50% are pro piracy. 70% of the younger generation is pro piracy. The slashdot community is bound to be higher.
I can't answer every inane argument I saw here without an essay, so I'm gonna pick a common one. Anti piracy activists love to argue from free enterprise. It goes something like this: "Thou shalt be free to buy or sell music at a mutually agreed price. Thou shalt not download anything if there is no transaction." This argument assumes intellectual property should be respected and protected. Sorry to break it to you, but I'm not interested in preserving a privileged class of entertainers, especially not on the backs of the shrinking middle class and growing lower class. I can obtain my music with free enterprise, for free. After my friend Charlie pays for an album, I engage in a free enterprise transaction with him. I do not require the services or consent of the original merchant for this transaction. I am not bound by the terms Charlie agreed to. If Charlie breaks some agreement between himself and the merchant, that is not my problem. If this ruins the merchants business model, also not my problem.
In short, I have the natural right to download whatever I want, whenever I want. My natural rights overrule the current corrupt legal system. You will get my "illegal files" when you pry them from my cold, dead hard drive.
The good news is that if MAFIAA feel the need to disrupt our public forum with their drivel, they must be scared. In fact, all of the 1% is scared of "one man, one vote" for different reasons. This greedy, petulant, aristocratic concept of 'intellectual property' is on its way to history's dustbin.
So the store owner can have a gun to shoot shoplifters, but a musician can't have a gun to shoot pirates?
I imagine that prior to the invention of copyright law, a musician could have gone down to the next venue and shot up a rival performing his music, but I'm unaware that this ever happened. If it did happen, I'm pretty sure you will find that musician in question was jailed or executed.
On the other hand, I can show you numerous examples of people defending their real property with firearms. And in many cases, they had broad support from society at-large.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
For each famous artist who gets the spotlight for some time there are thousands others who can barely live. That is what the current model promotes. Record Labels are reasonably good to very few artists and horribly bad for most of them.
Thank god you can still sniff little girls' underwear .
So the solution is not to pay the artist at all and steal the music?
But likewise, what should a artist, who makes music that not many people like, earn?
The artist did perform the song and might have wrote it but if he uses a studio, they have employees and the record label has marketing employees, manufacturing employees, distribution employees and then the shop has employees too. All these people help that artist get his music to the listener and you don't think they deserve something? There is nothing stopping people from doing it all on their own now. Except for the fact that actually that's really hard and most people don't have the talent to do all of it. That's fine but the most help you require the less you should expect to get all the profit.
So despite the fact it's easier than ever to do it all yourself, many musicians don't. So whether people like it or not, the record labels are clearly offering something worthy of paying for. Perhaps the problem is a lot of artists shouldn't really be in the trade. But if that is the case then you can't really complain their earning are small.
In an interview, one of his team member explained that he was sent to a motion picture "Le Roi et l'Oiseau" to take high-speed pictures of some sequences to understand how the animation could work the way it worked.
When they later said that to the animation studio. They were incredibely flattered. Good to know that now he would be considered a criminal.
When Edison made himself an asshole by enforing heavy IP rights on every movie producers, they fled east coast into Hollywood and spurred creativity. But now the planet is running out of places to run to...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Firstly you can't steal music. It is impossible. At most you can engage in an activity illegal in some countries called "copyright violation" which is not even remotely like stealing.
Secondly most of human art was developed before copyright existed, and art didn't get either better or more prolific since then because of copyright. Copyright is absurd. To compose and create any person uses thousands of years of public domain works and add a little bit of their "original" work, and then feel in the right to appropriate the result giving nothing back to the public domain for more than a hundred years.
And last, even in today's word, with copyright, far more musicians live from performing than from recording labels. There is no motive to protect the "rights" of those who decide to sell what should be free like those rights were born with Mankind. Copyright is an outdated model that has no reason to continue existing.
But likewise, what should a artist, who makes music that not many people like, earn?
$1
copyright laws make it possible to profit off of a creative work, which is the intent.
No. Absolutely not. The intent of copyright laws is to encourage the production of creative works. The fact that the dissemination of those works is restricted, to the profit of the authors, is an undesirable (but possibly unavoidable) side-effect.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...
The robots are cheaper. Or rather, there is significant economic incentive to make the robots cheaper, because once they are cheaper than the human labor, the maker of said robots makes a fortune.
Of course the robots create jobs too....but they put more people out of work than into work (they must, otherwise the total cost of ownership would not be cheaper than human labor).
So, over time, the need for labor shrinks even as the population grows. Capitalism doesn't work well in such a situation, because it produces widespread poverty in a social class that is unable to find work. Our government has already intervened somewhat in response to this: it pays farmers to NOT grow food.
We can expect to see more of this weird business of paying people to abstain from work....or of continually increasing crime and ever-more jails (where those who have jobs pay to feed and clothe the criminals). Either way the system is not sustainable indefinitely.
Eventually we will establish new values in response to our new tech...or we will bomb ourselves back to barbarism.
An idea I have.
20 years for commercial use with renewals possible. The renewal period would be perhaps 14 years. The rights holder would have to prove they are still making substantial money off of it. For example, old Disney cartoons which are never really shown any more would be a hard argument for Disney. But the cartoons Nickelodeon is showing on Teen Nick would be justifiable. Well, I think the Nick's case it's less than 20 years.
10 years for personal. Once 10 years is up, personal infringement wouldn't be punishable provided no revenue is being generated. So while someone seeding songs on a site and generated revenue perhaps by advertisements would be in trouble, the downloaders wouldn't be committing any such crime whatsoever after the 10 year mark. How it is obtained by the downloaders would be immaterial.
Japan has always been very kind to the jewry. Even when they were in the Axis, the little jewry who lived there were not hurt in Japan and more were invited to immigrate by the Tokyo government, even though jewry did not heed that advice.
Japan now realizes the antisemitic act of P2P downloading and sharing of unpaid Broadway music and Hollywood movies cannot continue. Hollywood and Broadway was founded by jewish investors and still to this day are owned and run by them. It is abysmal that goyim people can steal from jews, unpunished, that is a virtual Crystal Nacht!
Japan is now righteous among the world and hopefully this move is sign of a moral reform in the island, that will see tentacular perversion and loli-pedo disappear for ever. One can only hope the japanese, who are indeed the lost tribe, will one day return to Abraham's bosom if they can continue following this righteous path.
I think that is much more reasonable than the current system, though I don't know if we need to bother with the revenue proof part... after all, we don't really care if money is being made or not, and it adds a layer of complexity to the system.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And think.. although *most* people on /. clearly get it, there's still a few shills out there. so LOOK.. Musicians except for the top 5 percent don't now, and NEVER HAVE made money from records, except for a few hundred bucks per.. I started playing in the music biz *40 years ago* so i think I have seen enough examples, thank you.. The problem is those people who put out tracks that are incapable of repeating these live.. such as tone deaf teenybopper "chanteuses" that can't actually sing without digital correction, or one finger keyboardists that record one bar per hour. on some digital program..
The whole point of recording USED to be as publicity for performances.. until , basically, Elvis and his 50 million records, where suddenly even at, say, a penny each.. he done good.. We don't all sell 50 million records, but the few ones that do have plenty funds for lobbying.. y'think?
Big name artists are the only ones who make real money via incumbent publishers because of leverage. The smaller artists tend to only break-even, even when they gross millions as a whole. RIAA affiliates have something like an 90%+ overhead and the artists have to pay for their own travel/etc. Artists literally make pennies on the dollar, which mostly goes back to the publisher.
How about we don't wreck anyone's lives?
Nobody is getting their lives wrecked.
Nobody that matters, that is.
copyright infringement and theft are basically the same to an artist when all of his fans participate in the activity and yes art did indeed exist before copyright. You also more easily charge for your music because it wasn't recorded and even when it began being recorded it was still sometime before it was easy and even then you didn't have access to basically all music ever made for free at a few clicks of a button.
I don't have a problem with genuinely poor people downloading music. I do have a problem with people from rich nations who think it's better not to pay for it just because they can.
And in many cases the artist's contribution in getting the music to customers is quite small. It's just that their contribution is the most noticed portion and the bit everyone actually wants. But that's fine, you can do it all on your own if you want to and have the ability but that's pretty hard for many people.
I don't think it's unacceptable to expect everyone that has input in the process to get paid and if the artist actually doesn't contribute that much then why should they get the bulk of the money? And I'm not going to say the RIAA does give everyone a good deal but obviously a lot of artists think it's better than the alternative. So labels must provide some value. That's my point. Not that their way is the best way possible. Just that this idea that it's acceptable to download music because the labels add nothing but take all the money is wrong.
(anyone who comments on theft vs infringement has utterly missed the point)
Let me translate that.
Scratching your skin is the same as murder. Skin cells have human DNA. (Anyone who comments on scratching vs murder has utterly missed the point)
No, they are not, my friend. Copyright and theft are not even remotely the same thing and they will never be. They aren't the same thing even by the most absurd stretch of logic. If all of an artists fans refuse to pay to him it is because he has no value and doesn't deserve to earn anything . People do pay when they perceive value that is why Mozart, Beethoven and so many other artists lived very comfortable lives much before copyright existed.
An artist shouldn't have the right to control that which he created with the help of all mankind just because he contributed to it. It is good to give him adequate compensation, but copyright isn't the way to do it. For musicians the compensation is found in the form of paying public in their performances. It is much more honest to earn money performing and working, as everybody else does, than doing something once and reaping the fruits from it forever.
I don't think it's unacceptable to expect everyone that has input in the process to get paid
Labels get paid through CD sales. The labels can decide how to split that money amongst everyone involved.
But everything that happens after wards (the ripping the song off the CD, uploading, downloading, etc) was done without involvement of the label. So why should the labels get paid?
"Oh but that means only 1 person will ever buy the CD, and labels won't survive?" Ok... don't survive. Nobody's entitled to a surviving business. Close down and let new markets with new business models replace you. If no new business can open up with current prices then supply will decrease, prices will increase, and then somebody will be able to make money (maybe a CD will cost thousands of dollars, with the expectation that it will be shared)
Yea, I just said music prices may increase, but that's part of life. Sometimes the market needs to readjust.
I'm a struggling open source artist trying to make some cash, but as long as pirates are allowed to download what they want.. well, they will download the popular songs and not mine.
Your argument rules out that people are not downloading your work because they can access "popular" media. Perhaps you should consider your media isn't popular for other reasons, ie: it's not very good.
But yes yes, blame the pirates, it's all their fault your "art" is unappreciated.
I live in Japan for about 8 years now. What makes me sick is this: you can walk into any porn store in Japan and you can *legally buy child porn*, but you can face jail if you make a backup copy of it. At shops like Lamtarra they selll hundreds of "gravure" porn videos of girls as young as 12 (yes, twelve). This is perfectly legal with the japanese government. Try to copy that and you are doing something illegal.
How is this possible? It's simple: 12-year old girls don't have a lobby and they don't bribe the japanese government. The music industry does, though.
What the original story here on Slashdot does not mention is that not only the downloading is a criminal act under the new law, but even making a backing-up copy of any DVD or CD you *own*. Even if the backup copy is only for your private purposes. Among other things implied by this law is: buying a CD, converting it to MP3 and listening to that music on your ipod or whatever is illegal. Buying a DVD, making an ISO image and watching from the ISO via DAEMON tools or whatever is illegal, too. Converting the DVD to a format so that you can watch it on your PSP or whatever is illegal, too.