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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."
"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.
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I wonder how many the music industry has made to enforce their will?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
The oldest is 60. And what difference should their age make anyway?
The implication when your press release uses the term "gang" is young males with violent tendencies involved in criminal enterprise.
Revealing that this "gang" is in fact three karaoke-enthusiast grandfathers who derive no financial benefit from their activities is, I think, a reasonable rebuttal.
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... 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!
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...
Yes, but you realize karaoke tracks are recorded to sound as much as possible like a recording someone else made famous, and the person who made it famous doesn't get a penny in royalties or license fees from a karaoke track. For example, I see that one of the karaoke tracks is of George Michael singing "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" People who would buy that karaoke track want to sound like George Michael singing the song, so they record the track to sound just like the accompaniment that's on George Michael's record.
The problem is, George Michael doesn't receive a penny. The company that made the George Michael recording doesn't receive a penny. And, the song was written in 1930 by lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg and composer Jay Gorney who are both long dead. In summary, nobody who was involved at any level in creating the intellectual property for a song that's 75 years old or the intellectual property of the 1999 recording by George Michael see a red cent.
Ignoring intellectual property laws that are this broken is absolutely reasonable. In fact, I would say that ignoring the intellectual property laws is an act of political courage until they decide to fix them.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Stop consuming media and go buy a damn guitar.
Yes, but you realize karaoke tracks are recorded to sound as much as possible like a recording someone else made famous, and the person who made it famous doesn't get a penny in royalties or license fees from a karaoke track.
Unless they also wrote the song.
The problem is, George Michael doesn't receive a penny. The company that made the George Michael recording doesn't receive a penny. And, the song was written in 1930 by lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg and composer Jay Gorney who are both long dead.
I am failing to see how it's a problem that George Michael doesn't receive a penny. He traded on someone else's effort. Sometimes, he will get money for it, sometimes not. He will get money when his performance is used, but not when the lyrics are used. This is how it should work.
Ignoring intellectual property laws that are this broken is absolutely reasonable.
The only way it's broken is that someone is getting paid for it, not that George Michael isn't. But it shouldn't come as a surprise; someone clearly holds the copyright.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Someone must think that older middle age folks and young seniors are incapable of comprehending intellectual law and using technology.
No, they must think that older middle-age folks and young seniors violating IP laws for no commercial gain and with no violent crime indicated should not be called a "gang." Gang means street thugs (or organized crime with a network of street thugs) when you are talking about criminals.
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!
They could have been a gang of mimes.
At least we could expect them to come quietly
Many countries, including the US, make a differentiation between copyright infringement as a civil offense and copyright infringement as a criminal offense. In the US, commercial use is considered worse than personal use (as long as you don't torrent it - for reasons I disagree with torrents are considered commercial distribution). If you make money off it, you're commercial. It doesn't matter how much fun, spiritual enlightenment, or hair regrowth you get from copyright violation, because that's personal, not commercial use.
I don't know what the law in the UK is, but I'd suspect the copyright owners would have a lot of trouble in showing real damages.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes