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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.
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 disagree. I am very sure that whenever the MPAA wins a lawsuit (and unfortunately that happens too), they will publish the result in order to inform/intimidate the public as to the validity of their claims. If the times when the MPAA loses are not published, people might get the perception that the MPAA always wins. Which would be bad.
Yep, one for the wife and one for the mistress.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
absolutely correct. The case was not about whether MPAA could sue Newzbin for damages - it is clear that under English law it can. But to do so, the MPAA would need to show its members suffered loss, and the MPAA could then only recover for their loss. The members' loss has no direct relationship with Newzbin's profits - it could be more than Newzbin's profits; it could be less than Newzbin's profits.
In fact pretty hard to show what the MPAA members' loss is - and this case was about a crafty attempt by the MPAA to avoid that difficulty.
The argument was that Newzbin's profits actually belonged to the MPAA members (in the same way that if you steal my bike, the bike still belongs to me, and if you steal my cash, I can have a proprietary right in your bank account of the same amount). Would be a great result for the MPAA, as they would then simply take the all profit and not need to show any loss. The slight problem was that there was no legal authority for such a claim, and so they lost
Bob
If you can afford the F1, you can afford the women that will fit into the "seats."
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