Slashdot Mirror
US Government Targets Pirate Bay and Other 'Piracy Havens' (torrentfreak.com)
The US Government has listed some of the largest piracy websites and other copyright-infringing venues. The USTR calls on foreign countries to take action against popular piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, which has important "symbolic value," according to the authorities. In addition, stream-ripping is mentioned as an emerging threat. TorrentFreak adds: The overview is largely based on input from industry groups including the RIAA and MPAA, who submitted their recommendations a few weeks ago. While the USTR admits that the list is not meant to reflect legal violations, the goal of the review is to motivate owners and foreign Governments to take appropriate action and reduce piracy. "The United States encourages all responsible authorities to intensify efforts to combat piracy and counterfeiting, and to use the information contained in the Notorious Markets List to pursue legal actions where appropriate," the USTR announced.
Michael Froman, don't let the door hit your ass on your way out.
And look who's talking.No conservative rally, meeting or speech this year has been without a violation of some artist's rights, because they just played whatever song they like, without prior giving a crap about the copyright owners' consent,
It's also a trademark issue, since artists usually don't want people to think that they endorse the moron who uses it without consent.
http://www.thelegalartist.com/...
The US should learn what that symbol means and have constructive discussions about what role intellectual property should play.
Stream ripping is huge already.
It's absolutely not a copyright issue, but not for the reason mentioned in the article you cite. So long as the venue in which a rally is held holds a license from the publisher through the appropriate licensing agency, a rally's organizer can perform a musical work publicly. In the USA, this is either BMI or ASCAP depending on the song in question.
But this article is right about trademarks. An owner of a mark can use one of two legal theories: infringement or dilution. Infringement happens only within a field of use. Dilution applies to particularly famous trademarks and can cross fields of use, but it's quite a bit harder for a mark owner to prove fame.
And throw that temper-tantrum so the world really knows just what the law in the US means. Let them see how our leaders grovel at the feet of the moneyed class for crumbs to run their campaigns with. Let them see you toadying like the good little servants you are.
Meanwhile we'll be over here, ignoring you. Going to concerts, buying merch, and finding ways to pay the artists directly without going through your precious machines that do little more than siphon off "value". The game's changed and you could have changed with it, made it a place where you could have made a profit (albeit smaller) but smarter people beat you to the punch. Now you all bleed at the altar of Apple, Amazon, and Google while we go around the corner and get what we want for nearly free.
Burn in hell you corporate, backward assholes. You could have made the world a better place but chose money over humanity once again.
Yarrr I say to these fucking scalawags.
Silence is a state of mime.
The final purpose of all law is to create a 'better' society, where better is the usually the hotly disputed point.
So one of the 'unbalances' of current especially United States copy write laws is between what is commonly considered 'fair use' and what actually and legally is 'fair use'. Digital technology only adds a layer of complication to that.
Since action begins with citizens thinking and understanding I'd like to encourage everyone here to think about some questions. I will try not to be too leading or interject my own opinions too heavily in doing so, forgive me if I fail.
Given that : The reason copy write law exists at all is to provide income for the generators of content that they would not have without such laws.
There seems to be a general consensus that without such laws the quality and availability of useful works will suffer. ( How true is that? for which types of works?)
What is the proper balance between product and income?
How much income per hour/ per work is fair?
Should copy writes be transferable to family after the death of the creator?
What if the creator is a corporation?
How does that server the purpose of the society and the law.
How do you mitigate the ability to control society through media by maintaining copy write on the songs, phrases, memes etc that become part of the daily culture by the nature of popular art?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
don't worry they're working on changing your laws to reflect corporate profit motives just like ours.
Good to see the US government trying to inspire terror by lashing out at things with "symbolic value", even in their online expeditions.
Please add me to the list!
Me too!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"In addition, stream-ripping is mentioned as an emerging threat."
Yeah, well good luck with stopping that. There's no practical way to prevent stream ripping unless (until) they put DRM in your eardrums.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
... are going to be spent doing the entertainment business' work?
The RIAA and MPAA can get off their asses and spend their own goddam money protecting their shit.
When digitization hit, all was lost for them.
That's the way it is.
Private property is not a goddam taxpayer issue.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Memo to RIAA and MPAA: You can't stop the signal.
Fight the Corps; fight the monetization of everything. They're time is over, they just haven't accepted it yet. Make them accept it!
Download the video, do it from official channels to get the best quality. If you are just looking for songs simply extract the audio using ffmpeg.
Funny how they leave Google and its businesses alone when Google supplies the biggest amount of copyright infringement on the internet.
captcha: vulture
Now you understand, why (((RIAA))) and (((MPAA))) get the full protection of US terror machine.
You know, like the USA, who ignore the WTO agreements and don't give a shit. Maybe we need to get this rogue country targeted by the international community until they start obeying international law and the laws they themselves agreed to and implemented.
The overview is largely based on input from industry groups including the RIAA and MPAA, who submitted their recommendations a few weeks ago. While the USTR admits that the list is not meant to reflect legal violations, the goal of the review is to motivate owners and foreign Governments to take appropriate action and reduce piracy.
In other words this is just an RIAA/MPAA hit list of sites they want punished even though they are not in violation of any actual laws.
What technology bringth.. ..can technology taketh.
Stop wasting money on broken business models and hindering progress.
That list has some sites I was unaware of, I'll now have to go check them out as I'm always looking for new streaming sources to get my free tv, movies and music from, cheers.
The final purpose of all law is to create a 'better' society, where better is the usually the hotly disputed point.
So one of the 'unbalances' of current especially United States copy write laws is between what is commonly considered 'fair use' and what actually and legally is 'fair use'. Digital technology only adds a layer of complication to that.
Since action begins with citizens thinking and understanding I'd like to encourage everyone here to think about some questions. I will try not to be too leading or interject my own opinions too heavily in doing so, forgive me if I fail.
Given that : The reason copy write law exists at all is to provide income for the generators of content that they would not have without such laws.
There seems to be a general consensus that without such laws the quality and availability of useful works will suffer. ( How true is that? for which types of works?)
What is the proper balance between product and income?
How much income per hour/ per work is fair?
Should copy writes be transferable to family after the death of the creator?
What if the creator is a corporation?
How does that server the purpose of the society and the law.
How do you mitigate the ability to control society through media by maintaining copy write on the songs, phrases, memes etc that become part of the daily culture by the nature of popular art?
Sorry for repeating this I replied to something by accident but really did want to garner opinions , not just make a response.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
If you don't like Copyright Abuse:
1) Never refer to copyright infringement as piracy.
2) Boycott Rogue 1 and other content from Disney (ABC, ESPN, etc.).
3) Make sure that Universal Studios knows that they are next.
Content providers only respond to $$$, so vote with your dollars.
Thousands of small businesses destroyed by Walmart over the past two decades. Local towns organized and objected and voiced their concerns. Yet there was little to no federal interjection. 100 year old family businesses lost forever. Yet when Hollywood makes a movie and doesn't make the profit they were expecting in their business model, we should halt technological progress and redesign technology so they can continue to make money. Technology always changes society and if you get left behind it's not everyone elses fault or problem, unfortunate as that is. It has always been this way through history, and frankly it's ungrateful for someone who goes on screen to sing and dance to not to appreciate that they are compensated more than anyone in history holding this occupation.
When Napster was at its height so we're music industry profits. They destroyed Napster and their profits fell.
When Napster was at its height so were music industry profits. They destroyed Napster and their profits fell.
Why don't the US mind their own business? They have plenty of problems of their own to solve and they have caused more than enough problems in the rest of the world as it is. No need to cause more of them.
In other stories on this /. - the Chinesehakced into the FDIC for years and the Russian hacking may have disrupted the US election ... Yet, the most important thing for law enforcement is to ensure a couple of kids don't illegally download music thereby potentially shorting the entertainment cartel out of a couple of dollars. Clear proof the virtually unlimited strength and might of Federal Law enforcement is at the beckon call of a few rich. This ensures the systems put in place by the oligarchy and their bought and paid for political puppets continue wealth extraction from working people. Welcome to 'Merica 2.0.
They keep pushing so hard against all these piracy havens and streaming sites that they know they can't really do anything about long term.
But if they took a fraction of the resources and dealt with TAX havens had loopholes, they would get a much better return on investment and generally improve the nation as a whole.
saying that VK.com is a pirate site is the equivalent of accusing the whole of Russia for being a country of online pirates. It's clearly another step in the US' way of provoking Russia, because there is literally no sense in adding a large social site like that to a piracy list.
Copyright not 'copy write'.
Also your typography is off.
tl;dr: UBI solves the problem for single-author works, while commissions are a much better way to produce collaborative works.
I personally feel the best type of content is the type that will be created even if the creator knows their only reward is to have others consume it. The best books I've read are written by people who simply wanted to say something. The best music came from people who wanted to exhibit their musical ability. They may or may not be paid. It doesn't matter. As long as they have enough to live on, they will create those works. Because to not do so would be suffering.
To support these people as they create their first works, and for many other reasons which I won't go into, we should have UBI. After they earn some recognition, they can either take commissions from people who like their work or just continue living off of UBI and create what they want to create rather than what other people want.
So the question of economics really only matters when it's in a medium that requires collaboration by many people, such as a movie, because it's nearly impossible to get hundreds of people to all buy in on an idea and then spend months working on it. Plus, not all of them are in critical roles where passion is necessary. The guy that holds the microphone over the actors' heads for example.
This is where money comes in. The most important role of money in society is to organize and distribute scarce resources. It tells individuals how important something is. When the microphone guy asks, should I work on movie A or movie B, the answer is simple: the one that will pay him more money.
But then, how does a movie producer decide how much to pay everyone working on the movie? Well, that's a complicated question. But the practical answer is: he makes a guess. If he guesses wrong, he loses money. Over time, the worst-guessing producers goes bankrupt and stops making movies, and the quality of movies goes up.
All well and good right? Not at all!
You see, artistic works are very hit and miss. As investments, they're very risky. To pour half a billion into a movie, then hoping that it's not one of the 10% of movies that only makes a quarter of it back, is going to give any investor a heart attack. To mitigate the risk, producers do many things that are at best unhelpful to the artistic quality of the work, and at worst, stifles any creativity and novelty. They are: marketing and advertising, targeting certain viewership groups, removing potentially difficult or contentious themes, breaking a long work out into several parts, making unnecessary sequels and prequels that dilute the impact of a story, avoiding tragedies, and the worst of all, doing what was profitable last time.
This is how we end up with so many "flicks". Action flicks, romance flicks, comedy flicks... Now the theme seems to be superheroes, because everybody loves superheroes right? Plus, several superhero movies made a lot of money. "There can't possibly be too many superhero movies!" says the producer.
They know these types of movies won't make it huge, but they also don't lose much either. They are safe investments, which in turn, means they're safe artistically. But for artistic works, safe just means unremarkable, uninteresting, and of little value. It's like scientific research. You're only a genius if you're the first to discover it.
So how do we get away from making tons and tons of movies that are all basically the same? Well, the problem stems from risk. Investors don't like risk, so they avoid novel things, and therefore stifles creativity. But really, the risky part is the producers guessing what people would like to see. So the better option is to simply ask people what they like.
And the way to do that is with commissions. The creator first comes up with some ideas. Then people decide whether they really want to see that idea as a movie. They pool their money together, and viola, the movie has a budget.
With the tech
Why would the government explicitly target symbolism? The pirate party is a political movement and party. It is a controversial and minority party, but to explicitly ask for symbolic victories instead of pragmatic ones is pretty creepy. That's some seriously odd reasoning.
The final purpose of all law is to create a 'better' society
There are two kinds of people in society, the relationship between which created the purpose and justification for copyright.
The people writing the book, and the people with the means to cheaply mass-disseminate, and charge for, the book.
The reason the author needed protection is he "merely" did all of the work creating the book, and the guy with the printing press was right there ready and able to take that work, and make all the money from it, giving nothing back to the guy who created it.
Society decided that the guy writing the book actually did add value to this process, and the guy merely distributing it did not do all the work and thus should not reap all the financial rewards, though in "laissez-faire" business the certainly would. On the production level, he instantly destroys the actual author competitively by distribution capacity far beyond the author's.
Now, perversely, we have copyright protecting the -distributors- primarily, and the -creators- only as an afterthought, if at all. To address this properly as a social/legal act that would match the intent of copyright law, something like a mandatory level of royalties to the creator would need to be established, rather than whatever is "negotiated" by an oligarchy of those same distributors.
These are the websites from the article. For research purposes. Obviously.
– 4shared.com
– Beevideo.tv
– Bookfi and Libgen
– ExtraTorrent
– Gongchang.com
– Movshare group (allegedly operating Nowvideo.sx, Watchseriesfree.to, Videoweed.es, Novamov.com and others)
– MP3va.com
– Muaban.net
– Myegy.to
– Nanjing Imperiosus (domainerschoice.com)
– Pobieramy24.pl, Darkwarez.pl, Catshare.net and Fileshark.pl
– Private Layer hosted sites (including the-watch-series.to and projectfree-tv.to)
– Putlocker
– RARBG.to
– Rutracker.org and Rapidgator.org
– Taobao.com
– The Pirate Bay
– Uploaded.net
– Vibbo.com
– VK.com
– Youtube-MP3.org
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)