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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.'"
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
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.
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.
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
They are as nuanced as my statement would indicate. If the defamation is an untruth or a willful alteration of context meant(as in, literally "meant" as in the presence of mens rea) to cause literal, quantifiable harm to someone otherwise innocent of the accusation(s), I believe in the curbing of that instance of the defamer's freedom of expression in that case for the purpose of defending that person against that slander.
Again, this is my personal opinion on the matter.
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.
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.