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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."
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.
Except that the only way for anti-piracy to "win" is to take general purpose computers out of the public's hands and move everyone into walled garden ecosystems, which would kill open source software.
For as long as people can use computers to share files, they will. The only way around that is to replace the public's computers with devices that don't run unsigned software and don't play back unlicenced media.
Agreed, Restrictions against piracy will push this a bit further to the right direction but what is worrying is that privacy should still be an value. I believe that once privacy is broken, the trust that people have in IT will drop and eventually drive them out of the internet. So yes, it is a good initiative but it might really easily backfire and break the very industry that is lobbying it.
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.
If it can be read, it can be copied. There are means of distribution that cannot be stopped by conventional means.
At least everyone is switching to using mainly iPhones and iPads. Ohh Sh....
"people have to listen to our music"
Do you _really_ want that to be your business model? Successful not because of your ability but because someone has mandated it? I guess your artistic integrity is worth less than the bottom line. You'll fit in fine with the *IAA then.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I knew the first post was you, but posting an AC reply with "quite frankly" in it makes it even more obviously. You're basically a bit for the RIAA and/or companies that think exactly like them.
Are you trying to suggest that Mac users don't pirate, or that there aren't a lot of Mac users out there? You are insane.
which is totally what she said
Also, quite frankly, I'm sick of spending $1000s on professional apps and then pirate kiddies have the same shit but this is one of the joys of using a Mac. The pirate kiddies ask "where can i download a cracked copy of Logic Pro, bro?" and I have to say "Sorry, Logic Pro is Mac only, kid".
Too bad for you that "pirate kiddies" don't have to buy an expensive Apple personal computer and can run OS X inside a free emulator on an IBM compatible personal computer. Thus, they can in fact find a pirated copy of Logic Pro and run it for free. On the plus side, once the "pirate kiddies" become professionals and start making as much money as you, they will also pay thousands for software that they got used to while studying/growing up.
We need to keep separate antipiracy mechanics and antipiracy. Often the various antipiracy stuff is just badly disguised walled gardens not really there for fighting piracy but more about controlling content.
But overly i agree, the less piracy the more popular open source stuff.
HTTP/1.1 400
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 matter how much we try we won't able to wreck the lives of artists as much as the MAFIAA does.
How about we don't wreck anyone's lives?
On one hand, that sounds awful, and I want to mock the individual who wrote it, too.
On the other hand, they have a point. If copyright infringement could be eliminated then people who don't pay for music but want music would be exposed to different music.
On the gripping hand, you can't eliminate copyright infringement.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Indeed - and it's no secret that the anime industry (both the Japanese creators and Western distributors) has often used levels of overseas piracy to determine which titles are worth licensing for release in the US/Europe.
It's not a foolproof method - it backfired badly during the industry-crash in the middle of the last decade when a lot of companies found that there are certain titles that people are just not going to walk up to a shop-counter with in the US or London, even though they'll nab them happily enough from a torrent. However, it can generally be a good way of spotting whether a title and/or similar titles are worth a subtitled streaming release, a physical DVD/BD release or potentially a fancy special edition box.
But yes, there's the reverse importation problem - and this is as relevant to gaming as it is for anime. For whatever reason, Japanese buyers of anime and video games are content to get ripped off to an utterly eye-watering degree. The "old" system for anime releases in the West was to set a price point of $30/£20 per volume of 4-5 episodes. These days, US/EU distributors struggle to get away with that model for all but the very biggest of releases (Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the most recent example I can think of) - it's more normal to get volumes of 13 or so episodes, for not much more than $40/£25 per volume. Meanwhile in Japan, that $40 equivalent gets you a volume containing... two episodes. The situation is broadly similar on games, where prices for many titles (particularly Japanese-developed ones) are utterly eye-watering in Japan.
Now if you've got a market that's willing to play along with prices like that, you're going to do everything you can to protect it - and that means doing whatever you can to block reverse importation. So yes, most Western (legal) streaming sites block Japanese IP addresses.
In the gaming sphere, Nintendo insist on full region locking (probably due to their Apple-style paternalist, authoritarian culture). Sony make it very hard to release region locked games on their console - there's only been one region locked PS3 game to date (Persona 4: Arena - and a worthy target for a boycott if ever there was one). But the 360... the 360 is more interesting. Microsoft neither ban nor mandate region locking; they leave it up to the publisher to decide (and don't lock the games they publish themselves). If you look at the trend for region locking on 360 games, while you can always find a few exceptions, a large of US releases will work on European consoles and vice versa, but very, very few will work on Japanese consoles. This at least partly explains why so many of the smaller Japanese developers have been willing to go the 360-exclusivity route during this console generation, despite the 360's poor installed base in Japan.
But overly i agree, the less piracy the more popular open source stuff.
To be more precise, stuff that is free in cost would be more popular.
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.
So why is this insightful? You don't propose a solution. Just restate the obvious.
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.
... they will download the popular songs and not mine.
That's like saying I'm going to get a free lunch from the soup kitchen down the street instead of paying at your restaurant. The onus is on you, the artist, to prove to me why I should spend the time seeking you out and why I should spend money on you. This has been true since the dawn of time, and blaming your customers for downloading what they like will not help you one bit. Oh yeah, and pick your allies carefully - don't think for a second that the major labels won't go out of their way to marginalize you the moment your business model starts biting into their sales.
If it can be read, it can be copied. There are means of distribution that cannot be stopped by conventional means.
In theory, you're quite correct... but you totally fail to see the bigger picture:
Joe Schmoe: "The Government has just criminalized the possession of any knife, even table knives..."
Joe Complete-Fucking-Idiot: "Haw haw, we can still take a piece of scrap steel and give it a sharp edge with a grinding wheel..."
it was all fine and dandy until you went "Apple rocks, PCs are teh suck!!1!".
Oblivion Awaits
Yeah, but I've found most people who pirate have no bones about dropping serious bank on hardware.
That's probably because hardware isn't subject to a model of artificial scarcity. There are actual manufacturing and distribution costs involved in producing things like CPUs and hard drives.
If we ever have Star Trek-style replicators, you can expect that to change.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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 ....
Abolishing Copyright is my Anti-Piracy.
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?
Even then it still won't work.
Anytime you have a headphone jack I can just play the play and record it on a second computer.
Anytime you have a DVI/HDMI jack I can just play the video and re-encode it on a second computer.
Why YES we do.... File-Sharing For Personal Use Declared Legal In Portugal
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
I wouldn't be so happy about this if I were you. If this trend continues, it's only a matter of time until open source artists like you get branded as "just another bunch of pirates" by big media and subsequently the government.
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
One would hardly think that offering distribution via the Internet, to people one does not even actually know would still qualify as "personal use".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
blaming your customers for downloading what they like will not help you one bit
They don't even know what they like. They've been trained to accept the major label mass market music. Music labels get to use deceptive advertising practices that they have access to because they have the majority of the money in this market and because they operate as a cartel which punishes music stores for disobeying their collective will.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The XBox 360 was a closed system which refused to run unsigned code, until someone came up with the JTAG hack, and when that got patched, there was a reset glitch hack (CPU related) exploit.
locked down systems are far from as secure as they claim.
Studios didn't "lose" anything - they just didn't sell that much...
You're assuming, of course, that people would download and/or buy your material anyway.
No. I have not listened and/or used your material, but I can tell you based on your attitude right there I wouldn't do it even if it was the most remarkable piece of art in the world.
Anyone who uses an excuse of punishment to forward their own goals frankly doesn't deserve my business.
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.
No, but *downloading* for personal use does qualify as "personal use". In various parts of Europe (and elsewhere) downloading stuff is perfectly legal (sometimes 'subsidised' by media levies). It is the uploading that is illegal.
What Japan seems to have done (I haven't RTFA) is not only make downloading for personal use illegal, but also criminal. Off the top of my head I'm not aware of any other jurisdictions in which this is the case (although the UK law enforcement groups have been suggesting that it could be for a while now).
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.
It's not a foolproof method - it backfired badly during the industry-crash in the middle of the last decade when a lot of companies found that there are certain titles that people are just not going to walk up to a shop-counter with in the US or London, even though they'll nab them happily enough from a torrent.
But that's really about... oh er, you mentioned it here:
Japanese buyers of anime and video games are content to get ripped off to an utterly eye-watering degree. The "old" system for anime releases in the West was to set a price point of $30/ã20 per volume of 4-5 episodes
Yes, and when I has more money than sense I bought a bunch of stuff at that kind of pricing. Now I have more sense than money and fuck that. That's way too much to pay, especially for something that's already been paid for. And I don't even want their shitty subtitles, I want fansubs, so the value of their subbing, dubbing or whatever is $0 to me, whatever they might think it's worth.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Very well said. I'm pretty sick of people going "I AM SO TALENTED BUT PIRACY DOES NOT ALLOW ME TO LIVE OFF MY ART". Open Source "Art" sounds like a good idea if you do it for free, a buzzword if you don't.
Oblivion Awaits
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'
Well it's sure heartening to know arrogance doesn't just apply to signed Artists that deal with the MAFIAA.
You have no idea where the road you are going down will lead, do you? You really think putting people in jail for copying files where there is no loss of physical product, only duplication, will lead to some sort of success for yourself and those like you? You want to benefit from the suppression/repression of others? Think bigger picture.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And don't forget the fallacy that he is positing: ERven if people couldn't pirate, doesn't mean they even want to listen to his "free music"...
Seriously? You people modded this shill up, when he's using such an obvious tactic designed for slashdot? "Oh noes, think of the OSS!"
Gimme a break.
I'm not clear what an "open source artist" is: For artistic creations, there is no 'source code' to be open, only whatever sensory experience the artist has declared to be a work of art. Do you mean that you're an independent unsigned musician? Do you mean that you release your stuff under a Creative Commons license?
Here's the basic path to success for independent musicians:
1. Perform at any venue that will give you a chance to do so, so you can create some fans. If you don't get fans, then sorry mate, but you probably just aren't that good, keep your day job and enjoy making music as an amateur.
2. Start getting paid gigs. These will likely start out in venues you will hate, for not-very-large crowds and not a lot of money. You're trying to continue building your fan base, and also to create a good reputation among those who are responsible for booking musicians to play at venues in the area.
3. Make an album of your music and bring it to the paid gigs. Sell them for $10 a pop.
4. Any online presence is about building a fan base who will come to your live gigs. The goal is to be enough of a draw that you can start demanding higher prices and better working conditions from people who want to pay you to perform.
If you don't have at least a few people actively cheering you on, expressing interest in hiring you, or wanting to pay you for recordings, you just aren't professional grade. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not the fault of music piracy.
And I say this as somebody who's good enough to earn a very low 4 figures for my musical work.
I am officially gone from
No, not trolling, perhaps I could have put "insert crime and harsh punishment here".
That for now. The next step of RIAAs: Declare that any audovisual content is now owned by them.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
It says that your stuff is of less value than something other that is free.
You could start try to compete on merit
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?
Assuming you can smuggle a second computer into the country after the border patrol verifies all digital equipment to match the signatures.
Not 100% sure that people's willingness to pay for music and their godawful tastes in the same are related. To use an analogy from the literary world, there are literally thousands of nasty, badly written slashfics on the internet that anyone can read for free, yet Fifty Shades of Shite is the best selling book of all time
No, really - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18618648.
It makes you weep, really it does.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
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)
you do realize that even if piracy was impossible the pirates are not going to buy anything, right?
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
It makes you weep, really it does.
Not me. I already accepted that the masses are unwashed long ago. And worse, they're covering it up with products which wound up at the dollar store after being banned in the EU.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(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.
You'd think we already do, with all the hype about 3D printers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>people have to listen to our
No, no law will make me listen to your shitfest.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
...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.
I hate to point it out to you guys, but legally importing media is considered piracy by most large media companies. The old "If you are playing this game outside of Japan, you are committing a crime" on Japanese arcade cabinets comes to mind. The obtuseness of messages like that are the reasons I don't view much media anymore.
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
We have one country declaring filesharing legal and free for personal use, another declaring life ruining prison sentences. Shit is getting out of hand.
You'd think we already do, with all the hype about 3D printers.
Of course Star Trek replicators (as with most of ST tech) has made the built-in assumption that energy is free. When energy is free many other things become free with the right (entropy modifying) tech...
I still occasionally use Logic Audio, (Platinum 4.8.2) but in Win XP, and I admit it is a cracked copy. I only use a cracked copy because the serial dongle for my copy of Gold 4.8.2 has not worked for years. And while it matters little in the eyes of the lawyers or marketers, I do not use any of the features of Platinum, or Gold for that matter and would have been entirely happy using Silver, except that my floppy disc with authorization keys got mangled. I upgraded to gold to avoid having to deal with that issue again, only to have to deal with a failed dongle later on. I've given two opportunities and $400, only to be screwed. It may be a 'sense of entitlement' to feel that I should have the right to use Logic Audio, but I feel justified as I paid for it.
When Apple bought Emagic and announced that Windows would no longer be supported, rather than migrate to a Mac, I froze my audio environment. I'm a hobbyist afterall, and am not bothered by not having the latest and greatest even if there are true benefits.
You have gone and smoked yourself retarded..
Who knew Samuel Jackson read ./ ?
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Sure, because the music industry have never attacked independent artists or the digital distribution they use. If you think they will just let you ruin their business you are very naive.
Tell me, what exactly is wrong with labels hosting parts of the file for a torrent and then watching who downloads it?
Apart from it being entrapment? Not much, except that it won't work and people will just pirate differently if bittorrent is seen to be unsafe.
Also, impractical, given the hundreds of millions of people sharing files.
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?
Now that there is Crunchyroll which attempts to license all new anime and legally stream it subbed the same day it airs in Japan, that whole "we're just doing what the companies won't, we'll drop it when it gets picked up in the US" thing doesn't fly anymore. Japanese companies want overseas internet watchers watching it through crunchyroll, where they're getting a cut. And when they don't license it to crunchyroll, they've usually got a reason, usually a license that they haven't announced yet.
Also there's plenty of domestic problem with piracy nowadays. The piracy of anime in Japan is often driven more than it is overseas due to the fact that in Japan, most anime never reruns; if you miss an episode or want to watch something again, a lot of the time your only legal option is buying the DVD. Since overseas there is now a legal, replayable option that is easier than piracy and even works on cellphones, which can be watched for free if you're willing to watch some commercials and wait a couple days for new episodes (which you were going to do anyway for a fansub) the tables have turned.
Most subbing sites ban Japanese IPs because they think it covers their asses, not as some good-will gesture. I use to be involved with several fansub groups. And there was a time when they were doing it for the right reasons. But the world has changed now.
Crime (felony in the US) vs Civil Offense, I guess?
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
Well, there is the niggling fact that if the label is distributing it, then it cannot then sue folks for receiving the thing.
Same reason I can't toss my car keys at some shady-looking guy and then have him charged with auto theft.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
True... but personal use or not, in cases where the uploader has not received any permission to be making copies that they intend to distribute to others, then the uploader is committing copyright infringement, and the downloader might still need to be responsible for their own contribution to being an accessory of that fact by willingly participating with the uploader.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
I think that this argument only works because you it's not the soup kitchen who is giving away free food but rather the best restaurant in town. When you can get Photoshop, MS Office, or Final Cut Pro for free there's very little reason to seek out alternatives, because the one that you already know about from the big name vendor does everything you need. If it was indeed impossible to pirate photoshop, or the risk was so high (chance of getting caught and punishment resulting) that it wasn't worth it, then a lot of people who just use it to do minor editing of photos would probably seek out alternative such as GIMP However, once you start looking at music, things get a little trickier. People like whichever music they like, and you can't hand someone an album by a different artist and say it "has all the same features" so you can just go and use the free one instead. It's simply a different album by a different artist and they can't even really be compared. Anyway this whole thing doesn't make sense because there's no way to stop piracy, and even if it was stopped, I think that most people would just go out and buy whatever is most advertised rather than spend hours or their life hunting down music from obscure artists even if that music is free.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's probably because hardware isn't subject to a model of artificial scarcity. There are actual manufacturing and distribution costs involved in producing things like CPUs and hard drives.
There are costs associated with creating things besides their per-unit cost. There are design costs. People who think they should only have to pay the per-unit cost are saying that they should only have to pay for one category of production costs (the marginal cost), but believe they should be allowed to not pay for another category of production costs (all the overhead costs, which can quite extensive).
Well that's too bad I was already up in arms to fight a human cause about the death penalty but you don't seem to be up to it...
...
Well I still feel the heat, I 'll go seek some apple flamebait story, I'm sur I will find some good use for all this energy !
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 more or less what the English+Welsh law enforcement have been going with; using an antiquated (and evil) conspiracy law (i.e. the downloader is conspiring with the uploader, therefore both are guilty of a crime even though the acts of downloading or uploading are, on their own, not criminal). However, I'm not aware of any case successfully applying that in this context. I don't know how that would extend to other jurisdictions, but to use accessories/aiding and abetting etc., you'd need still need a primary criminal offence, which normal uploading isn't usually. I'm not sure what the Civil Law equivalent would be (both Portugal and Japan have Civil Law legal systems, rather than Common Law ones).
For non-criminal liability, at common law you'd be looking at joint tortfeasance (but that's not particularly relevant as I think most common law jurisdictions have downloading as illegal as well) - again I'm not sure if there is a civil law equivalent.
[Apologies for possibly butchering legal terminology.]
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.
Police officers can commit entrapment. Private entities cannot.
Not much, except that it won't work
Except that it HAS worked when the label's agents havent falsified evidence.
Also, impractical, given the hundreds of millions of people sharing files.
If you catch some legally, and they are legally prosecuted, it is a good way to reduce the incidence of infringement. Youre not going to convince me that not enforcing our laws is a good idea.
There was an other explanation for the very high price of recorded media in Japan. From what I understood, it was impossible to sell recorded media with rental restrictions, which meant that the price of a VHS/Laserdisc (at that time) was set to what rental shops could afford. As a result, the price was set much higher than in western countries, where you have different markets for rental and home video.
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.
Check out http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50-Shades-of-Grey-is-best-selling-book-of-all-time.html for a fuller version of the story. They're you'll find that it's the "best selling book of all time" if you take that as "in Britain, since the organization that proclaimed it such began keeping records... which is in 1998".
So, really, "best-selling book in Britain in the last 14 years". And note that that's including e-books, which records haven't been kept for for that whole time.
The actual number of copies sold to get that 'record'? 5.3 million. I can't find worldwide sales figures for it, but the article above mentions that the sequels sold 3.6 and 3.2 million copies in Britain, and the series as a whole has sold "over 40 million copies". Let's take 45 million for the sake of argument, and assume that proportional sales of the sequels are about the same everywhere. If we do this, we get 19.7 million copies sold. Call it 20 million.
Checking Wikipedia's list of best-selling books of all time, that puts it about #65 on their list. That's pretty far from #1. Especially when you realize that the top category is books that have sold over 200 million copies... and that the list doesn't include books for which there are no reliable sales figures. Like, say, the Bible and the Koran. Heck, even Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is listed as not having reliable sales figures.
And that is when the hardware store should start selling screwdrivers.
Communication > Art
Good-bye
I would not personally want to use the word "conspiracy", since it has connotations which aren't exactly applicable, even though it might still be a technically accurate term.
I would tend to prefer the term "willing accessory".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
No, it's a futile endeavor that leads to censorship. Here they are wasting unimaginably large amounts of money trying to stop copyright infringement, and it simply never works. It very likely never will work.
Stop wasting your time.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
but since people can just steal any album
I believe the word you're looking for is "rape," not "steal."
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I'm not sure what you're talking about, 'waiting a couple days for episodes'. Maybe that was true TEN YEARS AGO, but nowadays, there's these things called softsubs that don't have to be encoded into the file, removing the requirement of a messy, long, recode.
So basically, a group can get a raw, have it translated, and upload it in under an hour (depending on how organized they are).
Yes, there are some translation issues sometimes, but that's the price we pay for immediate access.
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.
So apparently people don't get when people are actually being serious.
I don't see how I'm baiting flame here, I am speaking my O P I N I O N - which is D O N O T S T E A L S T U F F.
Kids with the mod points go back to your torrents... nothing to see here, you wouldn't listen anyway.
That does not make any sense whatsoever.
expandfairuse.org
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.
The recording industry will never receive one more dollar from me. The artist may receive some money from me if they happen to be coming to my city and I go to their show. If music becomes unavailable for free, I will simply use a streaming service.
Amen. It is asinine to think that even purely recording musicians need any copyright protection to make money. All they really need is promotion. Once known, they can offer reasonably-priced downloads on their Web site. Every fan who can actually afford their files will be more than willing to pay, as they would (1) get authentic, properly labeled albums, art, and merchandise (2) put 100% of their dollar toward supporting the artist, instead of 10% which is typical for all but superstars today (3) obtain bragging rights.
The only thing to brag about after buying from a RIAA label is how you helped to finance a 1M lawsuit against some single mother or a piss-broke college student. IMHO, buying from them is scummier than nicking a CD from Walmart.
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.
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.
Let me take a guess.
You make music, you try to sell it. You don't do any advertising and want to blame you lack of success on pirates.
Here's a better idea. Give your music away for free online. Get it out to as many ears as you can. Do shows. Sell CD's, shirts, whatever you want at the shows.
You looking to be rich? It's going to take a lot of work, because you need to advertise.
Like right now, you can have a link to your website or something, but do you? No.
I have no idea what sort of music you play, if it's good, or what not. What i do know is you are whining like a bitch about piracy when the problem is yourself.
Be seeing you...
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.
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.
Except that the only way for anti-piracy to "win" is to take general purpose computers out of the public's hands and move everyone into walled garden ecosystems
Precisely. I see you've caught up with the industry's move to Tablet and Cloud.
We're busily swapping the Cluetrain for the Zittrain.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Because the penalty is absolutely not proportional to the crime. If you make every crime punishable by death then every criminal will try to kill any witness. And if you face a very stiff penalty for "stealing" a pair of songs, you could equally end stealing a shop or a bank since the penalties are similar. In Japan's case, the price of music, DVD's and Bluray disks are insane even for the high purchasing power of the japanese. Also, the big labels face stiff competition from the doujinshi circles -small teams of musicians, fans, semi and professionals- that do better music than the ones at big labels and sell their stuff at much better prices.
The price for a new single in Japan is around 1,200 yens at least. an album from big labels can be anywhere from 2,500 to 12,000 yens. A new release DVD? From 3,000 yens upward. Double that for the Bluray version. That, versus a set of 3 CD's from a famous circle like IOSYS that provides a wide range of music genres for 2,200 yens at Toranohana or Animate. Similar or lower prices for small studio videogames or animations. Which ones do you think that young consumers with diminishing wages will try to buy? Actually, the prices of label music have plummeted, they used to be 3 times more expensive, but still, Japan have a very good market for used cd's and movies; piracy is by far the least important problem that japanese society faces, I'm not japanese but for what I saw there piracy is still at a very low level. The best recipe against piracy and crime are living wages.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
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?
Philosophers?
There's probably an argument to be made that piracy is morally wrong but ethically right.
Beats me what the difference is between those two words, but I guess there must be one or they wouldn't both exist, eh?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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.
There is indeed an economic incentive, but it's very long-term - it needs extremely large initial investments that will not be quickly recouped. You might as well wonder why private businesses don't invest into fusion power (which is a similar case - insane ROI, but very much down the line).
And yes, I agree with the rest of your analysis - as we automate more jobs, the model where you must work to earn a living is inevitably going to break down - indeed, it is already crumbling. However, currently, it is actually cheaper to use wage slaves in third world country rather than robots - they do the job just as well for practically no initial investment, and they do it right now, so the profits are "right now" as well - which slows down the process of universal automation.
Yes, I'm demanding that a musician who wants to be a professional be able to stand on a stage and do their thing. There's no genre in existence where this is impossible - for instance, Kraftwerk regularly performs their electronica live. Ditto for DJ's like Jazzy Jeff.
I am officially gone from
Still I can go, buy the HK release for half the price of the japanese one and it will work.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
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.
Mr Hotline was my friend when doing Mac tech support in the 90's. 90% of people who brought their computers in to be rebuilt (usually after a HDA failure or virus) had 'lost' their discs but would scream blue murder if you couldn't restore the machine to it's previous working condition with all the previous apps.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
The fact that it even got a publishing contract made me weep. If I want to read psuedo-BDSM soft pron, I'll read Anne Rice's Beauty series again.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Translation takes time. Crunchyroll can do it fast because they get the scripts ahead of time and have fluent people paid to translate. The fansubs you're downloading a couple of hours after airing are (take it from someone that actually knows Japanese) either inaccurate or, what is common nowadays, taking Crunchyroll's subs and formatting them to look a little prettier, maybe retiming them a little bit. Even 10 years ago it was not the encoding that took the most time, it's always has been and still is translation.
You'd think we already do, with all the hype about 3D printers.
Of course Star Trek replicators (as with most of ST tech) has made the built-in assumption that energy is free. When energy is free many other things become free with the right (entropy modifying) tech...
Well we receive 1000 watts per square meter right now, no charge at all. We just need to find better ways of collecting and storing it. Then there's geothermal, nuclear reactors, maybe even at some future date we'll have fusion or some other not-yet-imagined method that will be even better.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
More like they don't have the balls to steal hardware.
More like, it would have to be stolen because you cannot make an infinite number of perfect copies at negligible cost.
This is the reason that even the law recognizes the difference between the civil tort of copyright infringement and the crime of actual larceny.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Tell me, what exactly is wrong with labels hosting parts of the file for a torrent and then watching who downloads it? No privacy lost, no shady ISP wiretapping business.... Is it just that, in the end, people really just want to be able to pirate and get away with it? Cause thats really what it seems like from over here.
It kind of seems like speed cameras-- you could get rid of every other objection, and people would STILL object because in the end they just dont want to get caught.
I'm not a lawyer or anything, but if the copyright holder is offering up their content as a bittorrent peer (even part of it, even through a third party), surely that is knowingly and willingly allowing you to have that content? I can't see how they could possibly then argue in court that they in fact didn't want you to have said content if they willingly helped you to download it, it sounds preposterous to me.
Asking another member of the bittorrent swarm to upload the offending content to you is a different story of course, but can be mitigated by being antisocial when torrenting.