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UK Court: MPAA Not Entitled To Profits From Piracy
jfruh writes "The MPAA and other entertainment industry groups have been locked for years in a legal struggle against Newzbin2, a Usenet-indexing site. Since Newzbin2 profited from making it easier for users to find pirated movies online, the MPAA contends they can sue to take those profits on behalf of members who produced that content in the first place. But a British court has rejected that argument."
Fuck You. Parasitic Bastards.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I assume that would be a McLaren F1, cost 0.5M pounds when new, now worth significantly more.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Wouldn't collecting the profits from pirate copies translates into making those copies legit?
Since Newzbin2 profited from making it easier for users to find pirated movies online, the MPAA contends they can sue to take those profits on behalf of members who produced that content in the first place.
This is a bit like saying that asphalt manufacturers profit from making it easier for getaway drivers to whisk bank robbers away from the scene of the crime.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
..with the view to giving those profits *to* those members?
I've been comparing so-called piracy to historic real estate squatting, rather than comparing it to stealing or thievery as has become the propaganda of Big Content. When a court compares it to real estate trespass, it's recognizing the same disingenuous manipulation of Big Content's propaganda.
Since you don't know what profits were from piracy and what was actually legit use of the service can't be determined.
Could be an MP4-12C. Still the F1 is nice and all, but for half a million pounds, you don't even get passenger seats. Obviously my beat up '97 SHO is much better and just as exclusive, being the only Taurus variant to have a V8.
The world is finally getting sick and tired of hearing stupid shit from the MPAA/RIAA media mafia.
I know i sure am...
On another silly note. I deserve profits for life because i worked on construction of all MPAA buildings. I'll be waiting for my royalty check you deadbeat fucks.
Sounds pretty stupid. But hey. That's what you're arguing on some non physical property. So pay me now. Or forever shut the fuck up.
I also paid taxes that built the roads that the mpaa uses every day. I'll need a kickback on that too. For life.
I also had children. Future mpaa customers. You need to pay me for providing those. If it wasn't for me you'd have less customers in the future.
An exponential number of future customers all because of me... Pay up now.
What? That's all stupid as fuck? Go fuck myself? Well now you know how the world feels about you mpaa assholes....
From TFA:
[High court judge] Newey ruled that a copyright infringer cannot be compared to a thief who steals a bag of coins, as submitted by the studios' lawyer. "A copyright infringer is more akin to a trespasser" than to a coin thief, Newey said.
Originally, I thought the judge lost his marbles. Of course it's more akin to stealing something rather than just trespass, they are part of stealing/redistributing a product!
But then I realized how the media conglomerates played the whole DRM thing as effectively leasing you (and only you) the rights to listen to the music you purchased (and only in the media format they presented it!). That sure sounds a bit like charging an admission's fee to experience some wonderful scenery to me (a scenery experience that you obviously can't share with anyone else!). In that respect, it really does seem like NZB(2) did was criminally trespass over this entity of music or what-have-you that we are allowed to take part in (but not take a part of).
Seems like the MPAA screwed their own pooch on this one. I hope this sets a precedence (even if Bri'ish) and people can start owning their music again.
You may not be allowed to profit from your own criminal behavior, but the 'criminal' is the person making the copy of the copyrighted material (once upon a time this was a tort, i.e. a wrong against someone that one could be sued for, not a crime against the state or general public; that's what these guys are always trying to do: turn torts into crimes so they can sic the government on you), not the specialized search engine or directory of links. The Usenet-indexers are profiting in the same way that Truman Capote profited when he wrote a book about a notorious murder.
udin
I stopped reading at "the supreme court has emphatically said otherwise"...we are talkung about the US supreme court right?
yep - right and left of the driver
Where we're going, we don't need roads!
The MPAA once again sued on irrational claims and their claim got rejected, of course.
We shouldn't talk about it or make articles about it on Slashdot. It should have been rejected silently. The more we talk about it, the more their claim becomes normal. The MPAA is taken more and more seriously, which is scary. It doesn't deserve all that publicity. Their plea should be ignored like the random pleas from mad people that happen all the time.
It's nothing like stealing something. It's like walking into an art gallery which is open to the public and making a perfect replica of an exhibit for yourself. (If there were DRM, it would be a locked gallery instead of an open one.)
Before there was one piece, and now there are two. The gallery is still in possession of its exhibit, so this is nothing like stealing an exhibit from them. It's more akin to creating new exhibits.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I refer the MPAA to the response given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.
I'm quite happy that this Judge thinks it's also a perfectly reasonable statement too.
"After a long battle with the international arm of the MPAA, Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has called it quits. The site had been operating under adverse conditions, not least almost total censorship by a court-ordered ISP blockade in the UK."
"Add to this a climate of fear driving individuals providing vital services away from the site, plus legal action against PayPal aimed at Newzbin2's UK-based payment provider, and the site's operators have decided to shut down."
AccountKiller
Yep, one for the wife and one for the mistress.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
All the court has decided, it appears, is that the copyright owners don't have a "proprietary" right to the proceeds of infringement. That's a specific form of legal shortcut to seizing assets. The issue of whether there is a valid claim is still proceeding, just not using that specific legal mechanism. No decision has been made on anyone's entitlement to anything, except the entitlement of a copyright owner to make a particular form of legal submission.
If you can afford the F1, you can afford the women that will fit into the "seats."
I'm tempted to provide a list, but also conflicted, given the first rule of usenet. On an completely unrelated note, reddit sure seems to have subreddits for absolutely everything these days, don't they?
Metaphors can be a tool for avoiding deep thought. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; I'm not saying don't use metaphors or use any other heuristics in order to avoid doing work! Sometimes that's a wise approach, especially if you're trying to do something quickly. Sometimes, though, you want people to think harder, and then you want to discourage metaphors. Perhaps you're not in a hurry. Or you want people to not think, so you encourage a default position which works to your own advantage.
If copyright infringement is theft, then instead of wasting time thinking about how you might deal with copyright infringement, you can instead think about how you have in the past dealt with theft. (For the most part, people think theft has been covered fairly well, as societies have had millennia to work on it.) Then, if you implement similar policies with regard to copyright infringement, this is simple conservativism rather than radical new-fangled unproven speculation. It's common sense. It's tried and true strategy. Not thinking can be smart! (?!)
If copyright infringement is not theft, then it's probably dumb to use policies derived from theft. It's going to fail to address the badness in copyright infringement, and it's going to result in collateral damage against innocent non-infringers (i.e. the policy will cause badness of some kind).
In USA, we currently all vote unanimously for politicians who treat copyright infringement as theft; we've either completely bought into the metaphor, or we act like we have. These lawmakers then pass laws which are based on that idea, so, for example, you get a situation where DRM is seen as being much like a "lock" on someone else's property. Of course you don't break someone else's lock, unless you intend to steal their stuff. From this premise, DMCA isn't absurd.
On the other hand...
If you have used a computer for more than a couple weeks, or if you have ever purchased DRMed media and then tried to make use of it, then you start to realize that the "lock" is on something you bought, and keeps you from conveniently making non-infringing use of it. So right off, the metaphor is letting you down, and laws based on it (DMCA) are a kind of injustice. But it gets even worse. You go pirate the thing you already bought, in order to get a DRM-free copy which you're able to play (if the DRM is non-trivial; if the DRM is trivial then you might simply use an illegal player, limiting your "black market" exposure to a single non-recurring instance). Go through this a few times, and you soon get habituated to using the piracy sources routinely, and ..
.. (huh, that's weird, who could have predicted this?) ..
.. eventually you stop seeing any advantage to ever bothering with the initial purchasing step. You never get anything useful out of it except a warm'n'fuzzy feeling, and you always have to pirate anyway, so pretty soon the piracy sources become the primary source ("I'll get around to buying the BluRay that the file was derived from, some day.... even though it'll stay shrink-wrapped since staying up-to-date with the keys and the BD+ scheme du jour is so tedious..")..
.. somehow the lawmakers' metaphor that copyright infringement is theft, not only fails to make a dent in the theft, but is causing creators to get less financial reward. Oops. Instead of the law being a force for justice, it has created an "Everyone loses" situation.
That is the power of a metaphor, when the metaphor has been d
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump