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European Human Rights Court Rejects Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal
A bit over a year since having their case rejected by the Swedish Supreme Court and appealing to the European Human Rights Court, it looks like basically all legal options have been exhausted for the Pirate Bay Founders: their case has been rejected. From the article: "The EHCR recognizes that the Swedish verdict interferes with the right to freedom of expression, but ruled that this was necessary to protect the rights of copyright holders. In its decision the Court also considered the fact that The Pirate Bay did not remove torrents linking to copyrighted material when they were asked to. 'The Court held that sharing, or allowing others to share files of this kind on the Internet, even copyright-protected material and for profit-making purposes, was covered by the right to "receive and impart information" under Article 10 ... However, the Court considered that the domestic courts had rightly balanced the competing interests at stake – i.e. the right of the applicants to receive and impart information and the necessity to protect copyright – when convicting the applicants and therefore rejected their application as manifestly ill-founded.'"
the french constitutional concil justified Hadopi by the balance between freedom of expression and property rights.
If freedom of expression (which doesn't really legaly exist in Europe as strongly as in the US) must always be balanced with property rights, only money can really speaks its mind.
And when you say general principle, you mean because you're too cheap to pay the person for the work they did creating the product.
Yup, keep justifying stealing someone elses works. It's really just semantics, right?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The question is at which point it interfers enough. Lots of things are rightfully illegal even when they interfer with freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is not an out-of-jail card that justifies anything.
That's just the thing, they were not counterfeiting, they were linking to people who were. This puts Google in the same camp. You know, if they didn't have well funded corporate owned politicians.
Jokes aside, the linking is what worries me the most. Do you really think that the freedom of speech should be limited to such extent, that you're not even allowed to tell someone "there are people selling drugs in the XYZ street"? Because that's what linking is all about. Telling people where they can find stuff.
Human Rights may include the right to freedom of expression. It does not follow that human rights include the freedom to copy someone else's entertainment work.
There would be a much stronger case if we were talking, for example, about protest videos or the like. And a significantly stronger case if we were talking about art making a political statement. But mostly we're talking about people who can't afford to or don't want to pay (high) market rates for entertainment. It is bad that we criminalize it, and insane that we make it a felony, but it's not a human right to get the entertainment of your choice cheaply.
The problem isn't that it's wrong to criminalize copyright theft to a small degree--it's that our criminal systems are designed so badly that small degrees of criminality can have extreme consequences.
TPB scored a win for transparency. They lost their case, but forced EHCR to publicly make that bizarre statement to justify it.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Actually, there are cases where there is no way to obtain the information even if one was willing to pay.. have a look at movie release schedules, or out of print books, or how tv programs can be delayed for months before being released in another country. It's not nearly as black and white as you'd like to put it.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
At most, linking to illegal material should be an "accessory to the crime" situation with penalties much less than the person who actually committed the crime. If linking to illegal content is legally/penalty-wise the same as hosting illegal content, then where does it end? I link to a page which links to a page which hosts illegal content. The link to the illegal content is itself illegal so obviously my link to that link should be illegal as well. At the same rate as the illegal content, to boot. What if we put another link or two in between my link and the "points to illegal content link"? At what level would my link become non-infringing? Or maybe that's the plan. Every page that links to another page on the Internet could potentially be linking to illegal content and so is, itself, illegal.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
What's so bizarre about it?
They basically said "corporate profits trump human rights." Not exactly Lewis Carol there.
At least it gives us Americans something to return fire with when Europeans start getting all smug about our thriving proto-fascism.
Classical music is a bad example to use in chastising people for filesharing.
The major labels long had to subsidize most of their classical music recordings from the profits they made in popular music, just to maintain a culturally prestigious image. If you paid for recordings, great, but your consumer goodwill alone did not sustain the industry. In the 1990s, that system broke down as labels lost interest even in profitable classical music recordings, preferring to abandon the classical canon for crossover gimmickry. Remember Peter Gelb's comment when he was head of Sony? "I'd rather lose a million on a movie score than make $10,000 on small shit." Deutsche Grammophon, Sony and Warner are pretty much dead now, and it is not filesharing that killed them.
The minor labels that are now going strong while the majors have collapsed are often funded by state arts ministries or, more rarely, corporate foundations, not sales of recordings. Even if sales of recordings are low, the bills are already paid. And being familiar with the internal workings of one European national label, I've been told that filesharing is tacitly tolerated since it can build a following and raise interest levels and concert and festival attendence, therefore keeping the cultural funding rolling in even if the recordings don't sell so much. For certain labels, an attempt to disrupt the free FLAC-trading scene would be problematic for their business.
Don't police webpages containing names and photos of wanted criminals tell you which local hoodlums you should approach if you need a particular crime comitted - some windows smashed, or some fingers broken? Or even if you want to know where to score some weed? There's no point approaching the ones only wanted for vandalism or battery, much better to approach the ones wanted for dealing - thanks cops for making it easier to find the right guy for the job, and for being accessories to it to!
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Your argument is invalid.
It assumes that everyone who downloaded the files without paying the original artist would have paid the original artist if they did not download *a copy* of the performance. Without knowing that for certain you cannot make the argument that the original artist has been deprived of anything. Only if you got downloaders to admit their intent, or otherwise discover it, that they would have paid money to the original artist if they could not download it, would terming it theft be appropriate. Downloading in and of itself is not an indication of such intent. Many may have decided to spend their limited income on other things and forgo attempting to acquire that recording entirely, OR possibly have bought it cheaper from a second hand source.
Artists want to create, the parasitic industry that surrounds them need copyright to survive without working. I am all for buying an album or a painting from the artist directly. Fuck everybody else.
Tomorrow is another day...
No, but maybe my basic human right to speak and assemble (including by proxy using electronic means such as the Internet) should not be trumped by
- artists thinking that they deserve a royalty check every time someone in public experiences someone playing their work
- artists trying to tell me what I can do with personal property I own after I've bought it
- artists trying to turn one-time transactions into eternal sources of rent (you can work like the rest of us)
- such a system necessary to make any of that happen to any degree, including the use of corporations, industry associations, laws, and government agencies.
It really would not be a big deal if copyright infringement penalties were reasonable and copyright terms were also reasonable.
But it is. As long as there are human beings there will be art. Money or no money. It had been like so long before copyright came to be and will be like so long after.
I think there is quite a bit of a difference between the idea of protecting copyright on one hand, and some manner of 'guaranteed right to profit' in the way that you seem to phrase it; i.e. that the copyright holder of a work has a guarantee to see a profit on that work. That would require something like a tax, so that creators of works that see no sale at all will still be recompensed for the creation of that work, at the expense of the taxpayer.
( In fact, such constructions do exist, to an extent; all sorts of tax breaks, subsidies, etc. in various countries on cultural works, which can be as simple as a crappy movie but done in that country's own language )
Copyright infringement could be seen as an aspect in potential failure to turn a profit, but I don't think it and a 'right to try to turn a profit' are ideologically entangled so much as that they potentially conflict.
While there shouldn't be a guarantee that a creator of a work turns a profit on that work, I think exonerating 'pirates' entirely is another absolute.
Your gas comparison doesn't work, due to the whole physical vs virtual thing, but I understand the point you were trying to make. Perhaps a better example is this.. assume a bakery throws out the leftover bread at the end of the day because they can't sell it the next day, they can no longer give it to the homeless/etc. due to regulations, and feeding it to the ducks is bad for the ducks. It is, essentially, waste. Assume you know, for a fact, that every single day there's at least 1 loaf of bread that gets tossed (you'd think the baker would bake 1 less loaf after a while, but that as an aside). If you take it during business hours, is that still theft, considering they were just going to toss it anyway? If you wait for closing hours and for them to toss it, and then immediately move in and take it from the trash, is that still theft? ( the latter question depends on jurisdiction - I wouldn't even know the situation where I live, though I seem to recall that trash is essentially not the person/business's property anymore.. but going through trash can still be considered an invasion of privacy )
I do think that producing someTHING gives you all natural rights to its existence. Note that I explicitly say someTHING because creating 'someone' ends up with the eventual person having their own set of rights which, even further down the road, cause a rift with your rights to that person). However, you give up some of those rights when you release that something well outside of the private sphere. That's when copyrights with their limited span (even though it's ridiculously long right now, not that that matters in practice - see other old, old comments on why) kicks in and whether or not your children would see any benefit from this would depend on the applicable laws. Personally I'd suggest that such benefit should come from inheritance of actual wealth, rather than IP - but I can understand there being some objection to this for practical reasons.
In terms of corporations, it's not really that difficult - it depends on your contract. You can sign away your rights to works you produce, and very often in today's corporate contracts, you do. There's been a few "Ask Slashdot" stories about this which can explain a lot better.
I do believe the concept is broken (I make a distinction between downloaders vs uploaders and, equivalently, believe copyright should be abolished, while distribution rights be bolstered and, yes, more strongly enforced). That's not a complete redesign, though. I don't think a complete redesign that would appease both sides of the aisle (insofar as there being only 2 extreme sides) can really be made either. I think it more likely that things will come to an uneasy understanding; kind of like the current trend, really. I.e. there will be more services like iTunes, Netflix, etc. with better and broader offerings, potentially at higher prices, that a majority of consumers are fine with because of, say, ease of use.. while studios/record labels/etc. tacitly accept that piracy is still going to happen but fighting it would prove to be a net loss operation.
Well, if we're talking about the stealing of bits and bytes that are that are structured in certain ways that they are somehow people's property then Google just got away with it: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/13/1621200/googles-punishment-lecture-those-they-snooped-on
As far as stealing things that are a mix of private and public property (as the intention of copyright is to give temporary private rights to the arts which are by default (under natural law) public property) then GM got a huge infusion of cash from the public to keep them afloat and had squandered it only to get another infusion of cash, this time as a free 'loan'. BP spilled a huge amount of oil in public property by being reckless and deprived large numbers of people from both their income and the enjoyment of said property and I could go on and on.
Copyright infringement is not theft, it is sending and receiving bits and bytes (energy - a public property) at no cost to the original author and disseminating them across public lightwaves on public radio frequencies. It is the same thing Google did, they received bits and bytes in public spaces across public radio frequencies and got a really light punishment for it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
In a rational and just society of rational and just laws, book, movie, and other media abandonware is fair game for copying. Given the technical state and essentially zero investment requirement of print-on-demand and CD-R/DVD-R burn-on-demand publishing, there is no excuse for EVER withholding availability.
For one, owning an idea is in direct contradiction with owning property. If you "own" the BLT sandwich, what you essentially own is the right to deny everyone else to make a BLT sandwich even though they have their own bacon, lettuce, tomato and bread. Some would say, no you don't have the right to deny me that because that'd be in violation of my right to do what I want with my property. And that even though I might decide to flip the bits on my HDD according to a template I found on the Internet those bits remain mine, not yours. That even though you might want for and wish for and probably on some moral level should be compensated for your efforts, surely credited and indeed it'd be in my interest that you took interest in producing more you still don't own the right to deny me the use of my own property.
In short, I don't have a major problem with a society that doesn't honor the owning of ideas. Even less so when one in desperation to fight for those alleged rights start attacking the infrastructure, service providers, search engines, file hosts and so on that make up the Internet and starts playing fast and loose with due process and the principle that you're innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps that is unfair to the producers who act decently and try to provide the services that their consumers want, but like in the discussion of ad blockers if some misbehave it's easier to just cease all of it. I'm sure the good authors, artists and so on will find a way to make a living even in a post-copyright world. We're certainly not going to run short on entertainment...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And I AM the owner of a LOT of collectors editions of games, a LOT of anime inspired statues which all are basically about paying a 50 bucks premium price at least for bits of plastic costing at most a few dollars to produce.
I am willing to spend. What I am NOT willing to do is to be dollared to death. I know the usual phrase is "nicke and dimed" but it AIN'T knickles and dimes. My new ISP give me a media box with the option to record 4 streams and to use an on demand service. I explored it briefly. But 120 channels and NOTHING ON is all to true and the on demand stuff starts at 6 euro 49. I might be willing to pay for a single viewing of a movie that I cannot pause and watch another day. I might. BUT NOT AT WHAT USED TO BE FULL TICKET PRICES!
It is the horse armour problem. Betheseda ruined it with me forever by just charging to much. Had they charge half a dollar for it, everyone would have loved them. I use to pay 20 guilders, half the price of a full game for an X-Wing expansion and loved Lucasarts for taking my money. But that was a LOT of content. Horse armor was NOT a lot of content. Modders had done similar stuff, completely for FREE.
The internet and individual programs like napster changed the world, as much as the bicycle and the mailbox did. What did they change? With the bicycle poor people could extend their range for finding work considerably at little expensive. Charities used to donate them to women so they could find better paying jobs. Long before the car, and far cheaper then a horse, the bicycle allowed people to break themselves out of poverty and change the way they lived. No longer did you have to take any job you could find, you could look further.
The mail box freed women because now they could send letters without a chaperone, without asking a male to take them to the post office. It sounds silly in our days but it was a real liberator AND it was NOT intended to be so.
Does napster compare? Yes, I think so. It BROKE the music industries control over how we consume content. With Napster, bootleg tape sharing became trivial, getting just the one good song on an album became the norm. And with downloads, sales inflation to top the charts became a less useful because now people listened to their OWN music collections and those of others so they only listened to the songs they liked, not to the songs some DJ is payed to play.
I am not one of those persons who claims not to like the mindless drivel that is 99% of content these days. I like mindless drivel. I used to buy the TV-guide and circle the programs I wanted to watch and then plan my day around it. Lots of people did, popular show on, deserted streets. I USED to also listen to HALF of one LP, then half of the next because I had one of those LP stackers and that was the way things were and we humans wrapped our lifes around the limits of tech.
And then the Internet, digital content and piracy changed EVERYTHING.
I remember one friday evening at the office where we used napster to download old dutch songs and sing along with them. Songs that weren't on the radio anymore but we all remembered and could sing at the top of our voice. Had iTunes existed back then AND been usable in Holland (payment options still suck in iTunes even in 2013) it would have cost us 50 bucks or so... except I checked, the songs ARE NOT AVAILABLE ON ITUNES. Peter Blanker "Egeltje". Go ahead find it. eMule has it, usenet has it. Now take my money and get me a digital version of a tape MY MOTHER GOT FROM THE ARTIST HIMSELF FOR FREE BECAUSE I LIKED HIS SONGS! Still got the tape.
By now, there are services which indeed do offer some of the more obscure music. And that is great but... I have gotten so used to having to find stuff for free that going back to buying stuff with all the DRM, accounts and god knows what other hassles is like going back to using a horse for the daily commute. And I actually do ride a horse on occasion. It is lovely... but not practical.
Recently the BBC has started re-airing
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Only you aren't really paying the person who created the product. You are paying to the company that usurped the right to distribute that content, taking that right away FROM THE AUTHOR himself.
And please don't give me the bullshit that the author had a choice, willfully signed the contract yada yada. I know it he did. This does not change the fact that you are not paying to the author in any way.
The main reason there is an outrage about copyright laws is not the money. It is that people enforcing it appeal to moral principles, while at the same time acting like a total scumbags.
The artists need to be compensated. The current model we have is not the one I would have called fair, is what I'm saying.
May Peace Prevail On Earth