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Music Industry Suits Could Bankrupt Pirate Party Members
An anonymous reader writes "Music industry group BPI has threatened legal action against six members of the UK Pirate Party, after the party refused to take its Pirate Bay proxy offline. BPI seems to want to hold the individual members of the party responsible for copyright infringements that may occur via the proxy, which puts them at risk of personal bankruptcy. Pirate Party leader Loz Kaye criticized the latest music industry threats and reiterated that blocking The Pirate Bay is a disproportionate measure."
...BPI wants to create some martyrs and boost the UK pirate party right to the parliament.
Right and wrong is an either/or thing, not a matter of degrees.
No, it's all a matter of degree.
We don't punish a murderer tthe same way we punish someone who is shoplifting. Both things are wrong/illegal and yet one comes with a harsher punishment than the other. A matter of degree. So some things are more wrong than others.
Hint: The music industry is tiny. The whole global revenue of the music industry (2011) is about as much as the profits of a single German construction company (Holzwinkel) were before they went bankrupt. It's insane. The whole German revenue of the music industry is as "big" as the revenue of the public transportation company (KVB) of one single 1 million people city (Cologne)!
That is nothing! If I were a big company, I would just buy the big three, fire them all, and be done with it. I could file the expenses under "bought new toilet brushes for the entire company", and nobody would even blink. I'm surprised Google and Apple haven't already done it. I mean the cartel watchdogs won't complain. It already is a cartel.
The whole global revenue of the music industry (2011) is about as much as the profits of a single German construction company (Holzwinkel) were before they went bankrupt.
Based on the numbers listed for tax purposes.
OK, so your comment is Funny...
...but here is how you can help
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
at $200,000 a song, and not being held to prove intent to distribute, the music industry could prosecute anyone into bankruptcy. fuck them. i paid piracy taxes on blank cd's and blank cassette tapes, taxes which go straight into the RIAA's coffers. yet i record my own music, and am blamed ahead of time for crimes i haven't committed. so yes, fuck the music industry, fuck them all the way.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
+1
Remember their imaginative lawyers are second only to their imaginative accountants - just ask the artists...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Purchasing music, movies, or paying for cable TV is immoral. Just don't do it, and try your best to stop your friends and family from doing it.
I disagree. The so called "rights holders" have twisted the law to their benefit, over the past several decades. People such as Walt Disney have wined and dined, and bribed the lawmakers to pass ridiculous laws, extending copyrights far beyond anything that is reasonable. Sonny Bonehead did the same.
The "rights holders" have even thrown a wet blanket over the use of "Happy Birthday" by little children at private parties.
I see the Pirate Party as a modern day Robin Hood, standing up to an unreasonable Sheriff of Nottanyfun.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Either murder is wrong, or it isn't.
Either abortion is wrong, or it isn't.
Either war is wrong, or it isn't.
Either depriving someone on their freedom is wrong, or it isn't.
etc.
In the real world, things are not always "black" or "white".
Well... to begin with, "copyright infringement" is not exactly the same as "murder", despite your silly fantasies.
Second, there ARE several degrees of "copyright infringement", from totally "fair use" cases, to "personal, non-commercial copyright infringement", to "large-scale, commercial copyright infringement". Also, most of these degrees of copyright infringement (apart from "commercial infringement") are NOT a crime in most places in the world.
Third, there ARE cases where a seemingly wrong thing (e.g. depriving someone of their freedom), might actually be the best thing to do (e.g. in the case that person is a psychopath murderer).
The pirates in this article have called themselves "the Pirate Party," while engaging in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement to take the rights of creators away from them.
What is this "contributory copyright infringement" concept you just made up? (Protip: US laws don't apply elsewhere. Kthnxbai.) Also, even the US, there is nothing codified in LAW regarding "contributory copyright infringement" (Protip: jurisprudence is not law). ALSO, you have yet to demonstrate that the people (not the legal entity, but the people) that are being threatened with a lawsuit have, in any way, knowingly contributed to copyright infringement.
One thing you have to take into account is that all metadata (including cryptographic hashes, checksums and torrent files) is, by definition, non-copyrighted information (even if they refer to copyrighted information), since it is mechanistic, non-creative information. Therefore, having and duplicating metadata CANNOT be considered copyright infringement, even if said metadata refers to an instance of a copyrighted work (otherwise, IMDB would be quite sparse, for instance).
Also, important to take into account that UK Pirate Party is not storing anything at all: not magnet links nor torrents nor anything. They are simply proxying a connection to some host (which apparently is allowed to still operate.... TPB) and, through that connection, information legally equivalent to consulting IMDB will be transmitted (not copyrighted information, but NON-copyrighted information). You cannot blame the UK Pirate Party if someone decides to take that (non-copyrighted) information and use it for "integrity checking" copyrighted files. AGAIN, it's important to note that the torrent file DOESN'T enable file sharing or trading, it only enables FILE INTEGRITY CHECK after file sharing or trading.
Selling knifes isn't a crime, killing people is. And the Pirate Party is not even selling knifes: they're just acting like UPS, transporting knifes from the knife shop (TPB) to the customer's home. If you want to prevent this all from happening, maybe you should either go to the knife shop itself (TPB) and close it, or go to the people actually doing the crimes (not TPB nor the UK Pirate Party). Because, otherwise, people just use something other than UPS to get their knifes (e.g. FedEx).
Even worse for you: nowadays, TPB is not even selling knifes (i.e. torrents), they just give you pictures of how a knife is supposed to look like (i.e. magnet-links) and you're just supposed to ask random people on the street until they hand you something which resembles what you have in the picture (i.e. the torrent you are looking for). This means that TPB nowadays actually transmits non-copyrighted metadata (i.e. magnet-link) regarding some other non-copyrighted piece of metadata (i.e. a torrent). Anything else that might actually involve transmitting copyrighted data between people NEVER involves TPB, by design.
They then they are complaining about first degree vs. second degree, when they should
The law itself is disproportionate...
Copyright in general has become corrupted totally corrupted such that it now exists solely to benefit big copyright holders to the detriment of everyone else. When first envisaged, it was an agreement between society and content creators to allow content creators to profit in the short term while providing their work to the public domain for the benefit of society as a whole long term.
A copyright term of 20 years made sense at the time, nowadays with modern distribution technology the copyright term should be shorter and yet it has been corrupted beyond belief - now it is extremely unlikely that anyone who was around when something was first released is going to still be alive when it falls into the public domain, and there might not even be any readable copies left by then either.
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