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UK Police Busts Karaoke 'Gang' For Sharing Songs You Can't Buy (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The London Police have an Intellectual Property Crime Unit. They just issued a press release bragging about "dismantling" a "gang" running "commercial-scale copyright infringement." But if you look into the case, it turns out to just be three old guys who stream karaoke tracks that mostly aren't available from karaoke manufacturers. "This means that far from losing 'a significant amount of money,' music companies were actually deprived of little or nothing, since there were no legal copies that people could pay for." This "gang" didn't even sell any of the tracks they streamed — it seems to just be a hobby for some karaoke enthusiasts. "So why is Hodge calling what seems to be an extremely low-level operation 'commercial-scale?' It's probably because 'commercial scale' is a key legal concept that the recording industry has been trying to redefine to include activities that don't involve financial gain."
it turns out to just be three old guys
The oldest is 60. And what difference should their age make anyway?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"why is Hodge calling what seems to be an extremely low-level operation 'commercial-scale?'" Because Hodge has to justify the actions taken.
No more than that.
And saying "It was three guys only sharing among themselves copies that were not for sale and caused no loss whatsoever" really REALLY doesn't do it.
Just FYI, TFS saying "London Police" is misleading. This sham of a "bust" was undertaken by the City of London Police, which is 728 guys with a square mile jurisdiction, who serve as wink wink enforcement arm for Big Content.
The 31K police that actually police London are known as the Metropolitan Police Service.
Nothing posted to
I wonder how many the music industry has made to enforce their will?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I am all for this new sort of commerce that has no buying or selling of goods!
Wait until they figure out that Youtube is actually making real money off people's copyright infringing uploads. Sure, Youtube takes them down when told, or when their internal scanners tell them there's copyright infringement (they even scan private videos watched by nobody) - which takes a few months according to my single experience, but while they're up they're winning. But they can't take on Youtube for not having a strong gatekeeper team because that would just be unpopular.
Uh, WHAT? Those are the worst. Proper "pirates" at least have the decency to side advertise commercially available materials. But those guys hooked people on materials not for sale. They deprived music companies of people listening to commercially available tracks. The time those people were listening to these karaoke tracks could have been spent listening to commercially avaliable trash. And all the time the listeners try finding and acquiring copies of music no longer available could have been spent buying commercially available stuff.
They are filthy parasites on the total music mindshare, almost as bad as buskers playing their own compositions. Record companies invest billions of dollars in order to kill the interest in old artists and get people to buy new recordings to keep the dime rolling. Preserving interest in old recordings is like digging up the bones of one's parents and making love to them instead of the person herself.
This shows again how copyright laws are a nuisance to the spreading of culture. (Although I could hear the argument of those who claim that karaoke soundtracks are not the richest cultural expression.)
When I emigrated, I wanted to bring some DVDs from home (Europe) to my new land (America), but then I couldn't play them on local equipment because of region-DRM, once again meant to protect "copyrights" for products THAT WERE NOT AVAILABLE anyways in America!
These laws must be rebalanced in order to allow dissemination of culture across country borders. Diversity enriches the whole community, whereas those laws are made to enrich just a few.
Better: Or your tax pounds at work.
I agree with you. Though a quick legal solution would be to use a PC to play them back after a simple region change on a DVD-ROM drive.
So, what is old is new again.
Like video games for which the owners are hard to find or not interested in making available so anyone who tries is breaking the law.
It should be part of the law that if an organisation or owner is not being deprived of revenue then charges or financial damages are negated.
... Most DVD-Rom drives allow you to change the region DRM only 2-5 times. In other words, you must buy specific equipment by region. Most people will just give up and satisfy themselves with Disney crap, giving up on broadening their culture.
In the end, I did the illegal thing: bought a cheap DVD player with a region hack and... hacked it!
The funny part of this is that karaoke recordings are made of music other people wrote and made famous. In fact, I don't see how people who make karaoke recordings have any intellectual property in the game at all.
You are welcome on my lawn.
One word "libdvdcss".
But I do agree with you the region-locking crap needs to go. If enforcing your copyright means we must deny ourselves access to the content, because you refuse to sell it to us, then that copyright should be declared VOID.
Especially in the US given copyright's purpose is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." If we cannot use it, then it cannot help the progress of science and the useful arts in our country. That's a prohibition on culture, which given the current state of xenophobia in the US is not a good thing. We need works to see other cultures. (How many average Americans do you think leave the US in their lives? We need works to see and be influenced by other cultures.) Congress and the Courts should have struck down the idea of copyright being used to block access to a work entirely like this. It does not benefit us to uphold such a copyright, (if it does in someway it's probably money and we need the culture more especially right now), and the US should not prohibit it's own people from access to a work just because of some copyright holder saying "You can't touch this."
I know I feel much safer with these dangerous criminals off the streets. Whew, now I can sleep at night without fear of, uh, ummm, something.
Thank you, Intellectual Property Crime Unit of London, for fighting the Good Fight and keeping karaoke-related crimes from spiraling out of control and destroying our youth and the very fabric of society!
(And, of course, as if singing karaoke wasn't a crime in and of itself.)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Stop consuming media and go buy a damn guitar.
Karoke is a serious crime, and must be stopped by any means.
Everyone seems to be missing the point. Were the songs any good? If so, I hope someone sets up a torrent... Revenge is a dish best served... free.
Will they go after DDR games, pinballs, guitar hero arcade games in bar's / pubs that don't have a jukebox license?
They were written so that in return for a limited monopoly, the works would go to public domain. No longer limited, and no longer a public domain. So the owners of the rights no longer obey the copyright laws. So why should us geeks obey them?
The laws were written to recompense for lost revenue in a scenario where determining the losses were not possible, but this case the losses ARE possible to determine, and those losses pan out to PRECISELY zero. But the laws are applied with a lie that this was "commercial", when it clearly never was, and damages that never existed were magicked out of thin hope.
What, exactly, do you idiots not get about the problems of the copyright laws in general, and this case specifically?
The City of London police are a private police force for the square mile. They're constantly looking for pies they can stick their fingers into.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel a lot safer knowing there is one less gang of vicious karaoke gang violating basic decency by using unlicensed music.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The whole "anti-piracy" movement isn't about recouping their claimed lost revenue, it's about controlling the production, distribution, and any other form of access to content (as is outlined in Lessig's Free Culture).
Possibly. I can't find a link to the British case where playing a radio outside was considered a public performance, so here's some us centric advice supporting your ad absurdum.
https://www.paaba.org/2011/10/...
And this law is supposed to be used against commercial infringers, which these people weren't. So the law wasn't applied, so not good.
That turns people to terrorist.
The posters, and probably the /. crowd, too, should finally grasp: copy right infringement is copy right infringement, regardless if the infringer has commercial goals with his deeds.
However it is a shame in this case that some owner is upset that his IP is distributed while he himself has obviously no interest in distributing it, for a commercial gain, himself.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Society enabled the musician to create the music, not the record companies. It therefor belongs to society, and we should be paying ourselves and supporting our musicians, not suing everyone who listens to music.
Copyright has never been some absolute to be blindly obeyed. It has numerous exceptions, and the legal definition has changed in dramatic ways over the last few decades.
If regular people insisted on it enough, we could easily alter the law to permit non-commercial use to be permissible. Many nations already permit educational use to have fewer restrictions when it comes to copyright. And state run libraries are often allowed to print their own copies of material. (all depends on jurisdiction, which just goes to show you that the definition is not universal or absolute)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
(How many average Americans do you think leave the US in their lives?
Answer: To many
With the UK and its 20 year jail for copyright infringements, people should consider themselves lucky they aren't going to jail for celebrating a birthday and posting to Facebook.
The recording industry has a keen interest in preventing file sharing of music that is no longer available. Their interest is simple: they don't want old music competing against new music.
They deliberately pull old music off the shelves in order to better pitch their new music to audiences. If the old music is still available *by any means*, then people listening to that instead will buy less new music. They don't want people buying less new music, so they aggressively prosecute the illegal distribution of old music.
It is in their financial interest that they maintain complete control of music distribution, including the ability to completely destroy old music so nobody can get it anymore. You can bet your bottom dollar they are going to fight tooth and nail to protect this ability.
You realize that you should consider 'promotion of arts and sciences' as just one of the possible purposes, right? And should probably be read as more of an explanation for why the power was being explicitly granted than some hard limit on what could be done with that power.
If that clause were absent, do you think Congress would be unable to pass a patent or copyright law? There's a ton of legislation less related to interstate commerce than our IP laws.
...but the cost of lockup isn't borne by the coopyright nazis.
Thsi day we celebrate a big victory over the organized crime and the terrorists.
You know, since in a time when risks of human trafficking and organized prostitution of minors, and islamist terrorism in the UK seem not too far fetched, the absolutely best use of police units is to look for the terrorists of the karaoke-mafia.
I'm *sure* they'll fix that in TTIP.
Quite a lot really since it keeps changing. The examples below may not even apply in your area since it varies by location as well.
Let's take telephone on-hold music - something a geek in an office can be expected to deal with.
A few years ago just sticking a CD into a player did the job since it was not a public performance. A bunch of mp3 files was the same deal later on. It was legally just like having music at a party, if you owned the CD it was perfectly fine to play it.
Then for some reason on-hold music WAS classed as a public performance and vultures started circling demanding money. No problem then - plug a radio in to relay something where performance fees had already been paid. After a few years the vultures started circling again wanting a second lot of performance fees and expensive paperwork hassles for anyone that complied.
No problem then - move back to CD or mp3 of performances by people that died in 1945 or before - but now the TPP is going to change that too.
The alternative of tracking copyright and keeping up the paperwork is the sort of thing radio stations employ people full time to do and is non-trivial even if you have a single track going in a loop. Normally the regulatory bodies absorb all of the fees and nothing gets to the artists so it's all a very pointless waste of time in a lot of cases.
So even without illegal downloads it's a bit of a quagmire.
I don't think it makes a difference. Generally, most people singing any karaoke songs, properly licensed or not, violates basic decency.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
It's a pity the police can't spend their time catching real criminals, like burglars or motorcycle thieves. Here in the uk the police have dismantled the unit dealing with motorcycle theft and. Ow we have an epidemic of thefts to order. The stolen vehicles disappear abroad.
Remember this is the British police we're talking about here, logic and humanity and common sense have nothing to do with it.
1 2 3 The humans must not be allowed to rise up and question or threaten the system.
As the bureaucracy and rules replace their humanity are the British police gradually evolving into Darleks ?
Rules become ever more draconian as the ever present fear of terrorism grows stronger and stronger.
Their armour will get thicker and thicker.
Next they will be fitted with guns. (EXTERMINATE!, EXTERMINATE!)
Then they will start banning stairs.
Then they will ban hats..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Remember that this is British Justice we're talking about here, logic and humanity and common sense have nothing to do with it.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
These laws must be rebalanced in order to allow dissemination of culture across country borders. Diversity enriches the whole community, whereas those laws are made to enrich just a few.
You have McDonald's and Wendy's what more do you want?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
>UK Police Busts Karaoke 'Gang' For Sharing Songs You Can't Buy
Well, what can you expect from a country full of fucking morons?