You seem to be saying making a distinction between sharing copytighted and non-copyrighted material. Fair enough, as far as that goes.
I've had more than one occasion to use lawyers about copyright issues (asking about potential liability involved in posting content/links to content on websites).
Nothing in those consultations and nothing in the language of the U.S. copyright law tells me that, for example, making digital copies of several thousand commercial CD tracks available on the Net constitutes fair use.
If that was fair use, then you could just as legally buy CD's, burn real copies on real blank plastic, and open up a shop to distribute them. Or, buy one Harry Potter book, make 10,000 copies, and start "sharing" them from your living room.
Yes, the Internet uses different technology, that is irrelevant a legal point of view. Pirating books didn't become legal when Xerox started selling copiers. Pirating music isn't legal just because the Internet makes it easy and popular.
As for p2p, I think the Internet, in its original form, was peer-to-peer in the social sense. I.e., everyone using USENET was a peer of everyone else using it.Content shared was personal content. P2P networks are something different, and bear a resemblance to old store-and-forward BBS systems like Fidonet.
I do agree that commercial interests have eliminated much of the joy of Internet use, but I'm not surprised to see it happen.
I'm not inclined to like the RIAA, nor do I like their efforts to mutate copyright law to their advantage. But, I'm not surprise about it, and see no reason to rage about it. People will use whatever means available to sustain an advantage. Why should we be surprised that the recording industry is doing exactly that?
Frankly, we don't need new legislation to criminalize large-scale filesharing. It is already illegal.
If you walked down to your local bookshop, bought 500 books, brought them home, made duplicates of each book and then started selling them or giving them away, you would be breaking the law. I've yet to see anyone explain why duplicating CD's and putting them on public servers is any different.
No, they're not. Thousands of bills are introduced in Congress every year. A few of them pass. Besides, the FBI is a big place. They can afford to hire a few network geeks to track down illegal filesharing. And, remember, if you think rapers and killers are really running "wild", the first place to start is with your local police and sheriff. It's not the FBI that isn't patrolling your streets.
Most people who post here know piracy is illegal, and they know that large-scale p2p filesharing isn't legitimate fair use. (Although some folks don't seem to realize "fair use" is a legal definition, but, instead, speak as if they, as individuals, get to decide what constitutes fair use.)
A lot of the noise surrounding this issue is generated by people attempting to pose as intellectual property revolutionaries, convinced that the Internet makes all previous human experience obsolete. This is bogus, of course. Most of these folks just want free music and free movies. And, I'm sure you've noticed that comments typically and quickly descend into namecalling and slander. (Apparently, not having much useful to sa y about the issue, a lot of posters can only stamp their feet, swear, wave the anti-corporate flag, and call people "evil".)
Meanwhile, SLashdot goes on posting these stories in an effort to drum up business.
Yeah, I know what copyright is for. How does knowing what it's for justify behavior that has more n common with selling counterfeit watches than honest sharing?
So, musicians are incapable of bribing people themselves?
Listen, if musicians just wanted to play music and didn't suffer from the universal desire for wealth and success, they cold avoid signing contracts with any company. But, musicians are just people who want to be paid as much as possible for what they do. My sympathy for them is very, very limited. My empathy for adolescents try to portray filesharing as anything besides copyright theft is nonexistent.
Gee, I thought the brave new world of the Internet was going to bring all kinds of new opportunities for new business models. Why haven't we seen some new business spring up that offer more advantageous terms to musicians? Could it be that most musicians don't make a profit, either for themselves ot the company that provides recording and marketing support?
>>....making your first conntact trough lawyers is a wrong thing...
Why?
Business is the real world. The emotions of the people making the knock-off don't play into it. The cease-and-desist order was issued because a legal case could be made. If the cease-and-desist order is ignored, that provides the basis for additional legal action.
Even if a simple request has been the first approach, lawyers would be needed to prepare binding documentation to outline and record the terms of the agreement.
>>... fair use says that I have a right to make as many copies for personal use as I want.
I've had recourse to copyright lawyers over fiar use issues on more than one occasion and not one of them has ever indicated that fair use encompasses unlimited copies made available for global access. Copies for personal use is one thing; serving those copies up to the world is another thing altogeter.
>> Copyright is a two-way street...
No, it isn't. It's a right that the Constitution guarantees to the creators of a work. You aren't part of the "deal". There is no deal. There is no agreement. Anyone -- individual or business -- who creates something owns it and controls its use until they decide to sell/license/give away all or some of their rights to it. The only possible way for you to come into the picture is to acquire some of those rights.
Fair use is a legal concept that has well-defined parameters. Do a little Googling on "copyright" and "Fair Use" and you'll quickly find what you need to know.
What you may or may not think fair use "ought" to be is irrelevant. In most cases, duplicating the entirety of a work and distributing it is not considered fair use. Nor does the alw apply different standards depending on the techology in question. In other words, using p2p to distribute your CD's is the equivalent to making copies of every book you own and then trying to sell them.
Bogus and lame. Broadcasters pay royalties on the music they play. (And they broadcast it. They don't put copies on a server and invite the world to make as many copies as it wants.) Fair use doesn't come into it.
If "cartel middle men" are getting rich, it's because musicians sign over their rights because they, too, want to be rich. If greed and ambition mean they don't bother to read contracts before they sign them, blame that on their stupidity, not on copyright.
No, they won't necessarily fail. The weakness of copy protection schems of the past was the need to make them work on a solo, un-networked machine. Today's networked environments mean it is possible to keep would-be copiers at bay. For example, by coding into an original file the intelligence to remember the identity of the machine onto which it was first copied. If an attempt is subsequently made to duplicate that original copy onto another networked machine, the file sends an alert to the copyright holder and then deletes itself. Code that performs these tasks code be embedded with the data that comprised the music in such a fashion that any attempt to disassemble or remove it would result in damage to the music.
Wholesale copying of the entirety of hundred or thousands of titles and making those copies available to an audience of strangers across the entire globe is not, and never has been, considered fair use.
If you copy your entire CD collection and serve it up to the world, that's infringement, not fair use.
The only thing that the great crowd of filesharing whiners is going to get for the rest of us is a bunch of costly and annoying technical copy prohibition schemes.
Yes, 1991 was an eventful year for Latvia and many other countries. I was living in London at the time and happened to have some Lithuanian firends who worked as linguists for BBC. I've lost touch with them but still remember the night we learned the Soviets were shooting up the Vilnius television center.
It's easy to assume that all businesses and politicians here in the U.S. are crooked, and that everyone is either rich or dirt poor. After all, that's the image we keep pumping out in the movies and music we make. And, that assumption is often buttressed by media outlets like Slashdot, where content is intentionally filtered, slanted and packaged to appeal to the sentiments of the outlet's core audience. Slashdot, for example, always portrays the open source community as innocent rebels bravely opposing the vast forces of the evil corporate wprld. It isn't a coincidence that Slashdot's core audience is comprised of people who like to think of themselves as precisely those innocent rebels.
But, in truth, much of the animosity and emotion that people express here is generated out of a conviction that they have made the right moral decision and that only corruption and venality can prevent their wishes -- which are, they believe, morally pure and superior -- from becoming reality.
At best, this is simple naivete. At worst, it is intentional manipulation.
Almost everyone in the U.S. is neither poor not rich. Most of us lead comfortable lives on moderate incomes; and most of us spend almost all of our income to pay our bills. Most of us, and therefore most of our politicians, judges, and business people, are honest (as is true in Latvia, I'm sure). We are also very competitive and quite willing to fight long and hard to keep what is ours. That's why no one should be surprised to see a corporation take legal action against an organziation that has usurped its brand, reputation and image.
Well. hotshot, I don't know about wherever it is you live, but around here you don't need to be rich to pay a lawyer. However, you do have to be smart enough to use one if you're starting up a business, especially if you plan to "borrow" from the name of an established company.
The people who own, operate and work for any business have the same rights as the people that set about making imitation knock-offs. I'm guessing these coders think they have the moral high-ground and presume that means they should win against the "evil" corporation. Well, they don't hold the moral high ground. What they hold is, at best, the high ground for naivete. If you try to market imitations of someone else's products under a name that plausibly conveys the impression that your products are made by that competitor, you're just asking for trouble. And there's nothin "evil" or "unfree" about that.
>>...the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share...
Well, yeah, if you can't put up a fight, you aren't much of a competitor.
It is rather utopian and naive in the extreme to imagine that any business wouldn't come after any organization perceived as threatening their sales. Open source has a habit of cloning and mimicing commercial products and tagging them with names that are intentionally reminiscent of the orignal commercial product. A business has every reason to see these efforts as a direct threat to their bottom line. A cease-and-desist order is an obvious approach. The other side can get their own lawyers if they want to contest it. (Can;t afford lawyers? Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you started.)
OF course the RIAA will use this to score points. That's what good lobbies do. But, a number of other things are going on that preclude attributing the bad times at speciality shops solely to p2p downloads.
First, the population is getting older. Buying music is, for most people, an activity that decreases as they get older.
Second, in addition to downloading, music is offered for sale in many venues that weren't available a decade ago. As the article notes, why make a special trip to a speciality shop when you can buy it from Amazon, at Walmart, or on your next stop at the bookstore.
Third, I'm skeptical about the 40 million Americans download music claim, or the common assertion that filesharing prompts purchases that wouldn't happen otherwise. But, if/when it does, it seems likely that the purchaser will be inclined to order it online using the same computer used for the download, rather than going tothe trouble of traveling to any store -- big box or speciality shop -- to make the purchase.
Fourth, this is very speculative, but the music industry has, for a number of years, lacked the one or two overwhelmingly popular acts that can spike sales across the industry. (Think Beatles in the 1960's.) People who would not otherwise ever buy music do buy the music of these acts.
Rather than calling the FBI and reporting your individual problem, perhaps it would have been better to focus on Charter's failure to respond to a reported compromise of their network. The FBI certainly wouldn't take immediate action based solely on assertions made in a single phone call. But, they could easily obtain evidence of a much wider and ongoing crime by contacting Charter and asking questions about their potential negligence.
It's being a bit optimistic to expect the guy answering the FBI phone after hours to know anything about network security issues, much less to roust someone at home on the basis of a single call. However, telling the FBI that you'd had evidence that a major ISP had been compromised and describing the impact may have provoked a response.
I suspect most people who file "share" would agree that someone who walks into a store, pockets a CD, walks out without paying for it, takes it home and makes thousands of copies of it that he gives away free to strangers has committed more than one crime.
Yet, file "sharing" differs only in that the bits that represent music are stored on hard drives, not CD's, and distribution takes place over the Internet, not via a bricks-and-mortar operation.
People who buy a CD own that little piece of plastic, they don't own the music.
"Deterrent" doesn't equal "eliminate". There's a lot more to the law than just the criminal statutes. Most of it has to do with enforcing the behavior that society, as expressed through its elected representatives, wishes to encourage.
This filesharing this sharing gambit, I'm convinced, gets all this attention here because most/. readers seem to like the idea of free music, and have migrated, rather clumsily, the notion of free and open software to the entire entertainment industry. I.e., they've decided that copyright is "evil" and posit some kind of nascent information utopia that awaits only the elimination of a creator's rights in the work he creates. In other words, what's mine is mine and what's your's is mine, too.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be saying making a distinction between sharing copytighted and non-copyrighted material. Fair enough, as far as that goes.
I've had more than one occasion to use lawyers about copyright issues (asking about potential liability involved in posting content/links to content on websites).
Nothing in those consultations and nothing in the language of the U.S. copyright law tells me that, for example, making digital copies of several thousand commercial CD tracks available on the Net constitutes fair use.
If that was fair use, then you could just as legally buy CD's, burn real copies on real blank plastic, and open up a shop to distribute them. Or, buy one Harry Potter book, make 10,000 copies, and start "sharing" them from your living room.
Yes, the Internet uses different technology, that is irrelevant a legal point of view. Pirating books didn't become legal when Xerox started selling copiers. Pirating music isn't legal just because the Internet makes it easy and popular.
As for p2p, I think the Internet, in its original form, was peer-to-peer in the social sense. I.e., everyone using USENET was a peer of everyone else using it.Content shared was personal content. P2P networks are something different, and bear a resemblance to old store-and-forward BBS systems like Fidonet.
I do agree that commercial interests have eliminated much of the joy of Internet use, but I'm not surprised to see it happen.
I'm not inclined to like the RIAA, nor do I like their efforts to mutate copyright law to their advantage. But, I'm not surprise about it, and see no reason to rage about it. People will use whatever means available to sustain an advantage. Why should we be surprised that the recording industry is doing exactly that?
Frankly, we don't need new legislation to criminalize large-scale filesharing. It is already illegal.
If you walked down to your local bookshop, bought 500 books, brought them home, made duplicates of each book and then started selling them or giving them away, you would be breaking the law. I've yet to see anyone explain why duplicating CD's and putting them on public servers is any different.
No, they're not. Thousands of bills are introduced in Congress every year. A few of them pass. Besides, the FBI is a big place. They can afford to hire a few network geeks to track down illegal filesharing. And, remember, if you think rapers and killers are really running "wild", the first place to start is with your local police and sheriff. It's not the FBI that isn't patrolling your streets.
See, what'd I tell you? Another lamester heard from.
Most people who post here know piracy is illegal, and they know that large-scale p2p filesharing isn't legitimate fair use. (Although some folks don't seem to realize "fair use" is a legal definition, but, instead, speak as if they, as individuals, get to decide what constitutes fair use.)
A lot of the noise surrounding this issue is generated by people attempting to pose as intellectual property revolutionaries, convinced that the Internet makes all previous human experience obsolete. This is bogus, of course. Most of these folks just want free music and free movies. And, I'm sure you've noticed that comments typically and quickly descend into namecalling and slander. (Apparently, not having much useful to sa y about the issue, a lot of posters can only stamp their feet, swear, wave the anti-corporate flag, and call people "evil".)
Meanwhile, SLashdot goes on posting these stories in an effort to drum up business.
Yeah, I know what copyright is for. How does knowing what it's for justify behavior that has more n common with selling counterfeit watches than honest sharing?
So, musicians are incapable of bribing people themselves?
Listen, if musicians just wanted to play music and didn't suffer from the universal desire for wealth and success, they cold avoid signing contracts with any company. But, musicians are just people who want to be paid as much as possible for what they do. My sympathy for them is very, very limited. My empathy for adolescents try to portray filesharing as anything besides copyright theft is nonexistent.
Gee, I thought the brave new world of the Internet was going to bring all kinds of new opportunities for new business models. Why haven't we seen some new business spring up that offer more advantageous terms to musicians? Could it be that most musicians don't make a profit, either for themselves ot the company that provides recording and marketing support?
If this is all so terribly unfair to "artists", why do they keep on signing those contracts?
>> ....making your first conntact trough lawyers is a wrong thing...
Why?
Business is the real world. The emotions of the people making the knock-off don't play into it. The cease-and-desist order was issued because a legal case could be made. If the cease-and-desist order is ignored, that provides the basis for additional legal action.
Even if a simple request has been the first approach, lawyers would be needed to prepare binding documentation to outline and record the terms of the agreement.
>> ... fair use says that I have a right to make as many copies for personal use as I want.
I've had recourse to copyright lawyers over fiar use issues on more than one occasion and not one of them has ever indicated that fair use encompasses unlimited copies made available for global access. Copies for personal use is one thing; serving those copies up to the world is another thing altogeter.
>> Copyright is a two-way street...
No, it isn't. It's a right that the Constitution guarantees to the creators of a work. You aren't part of the "deal". There is no deal. There is no agreement. Anyone -- individual or business -- who creates something owns it and controls its use until they decide to sell/license/give away all or some of their rights to it. The only possible way for you to come into the picture is to acquire some of those rights.
Fair use is a legal concept that has well-defined parameters. Do a little Googling on "copyright" and "Fair Use" and you'll quickly find what you need to know.
What you may or may not think fair use "ought" to be is irrelevant. In most cases, duplicating the entirety of a work and distributing it is not considered fair use. Nor does the alw apply different standards depending on the techology in question. In other words, using p2p to distribute your CD's is the equivalent to making copies of every book you own and then trying to sell them.
Bogus and lame. Broadcasters pay royalties on the music they play. (And they broadcast it. They don't put copies on a server and invite the world to make as many copies as it wants.) Fair use doesn't come into it.
If "cartel middle men" are getting rich, it's because musicians sign over their rights because they, too, want to be rich. If greed and ambition mean they don't bother to read contracts before they sign them, blame that on their stupidity, not on copyright.
No, they won't necessarily fail. The weakness of copy protection schems of the past was the need to make them work on a solo, un-networked machine. Today's networked environments mean it is possible to keep would-be copiers at bay. For example, by coding into an original file the intelligence to remember the identity of the machine onto which it was first copied. If an attempt is subsequently made to duplicate that original copy onto another networked machine, the file sends an alert to the copyright holder and then deletes itself. Code that performs these tasks code be embedded with the data that comprised the music in such a fashion that any attempt to disassemble or remove it would result in damage to the music.
Wholesale copying of the entirety of hundred or thousands of titles and making those copies available to an audience of strangers across the entire globe is not, and never has been, considered fair use.
If you copy your entire CD collection and serve it up to the world, that's infringement, not fair use.
The only thing that the great crowd of filesharing whiners is going to get for the rest of us is a bunch of costly and annoying technical copy prohibition schemes.
Yes, 1991 was an eventful year for Latvia and many other countries. I was living in London at the time and happened to have some Lithuanian firends who worked as linguists for BBC. I've lost touch with them but still remember the night we learned the Soviets were shooting up the Vilnius television center.
It's easy to assume that all businesses and politicians here in the U.S. are crooked, and that everyone is either rich or dirt poor. After all, that's the image we keep pumping out in the movies and music we make. And, that assumption is often buttressed by media outlets like Slashdot, where content is intentionally filtered, slanted and packaged to appeal to the sentiments of the outlet's core audience. Slashdot, for example, always portrays the open source community as innocent rebels bravely opposing the vast forces of the evil corporate wprld. It isn't a coincidence that Slashdot's core audience is comprised of people who like to think of themselves as precisely those innocent rebels.
But, in truth, much of the animosity and emotion that people express here is generated out of a conviction that they have made the right moral decision and that only corruption and venality can prevent their wishes -- which are, they believe, morally pure and superior -- from becoming reality.
At best, this is simple naivete. At worst, it is intentional manipulation.
Almost everyone in the U.S. is neither poor not rich. Most of us lead comfortable lives on moderate incomes; and most of us spend almost all of our income to pay our bills. Most of us, and therefore most of our politicians, judges, and business people, are honest (as is true in Latvia, I'm sure). We are also very competitive and quite willing to fight long and hard to keep what is ours. That's why no one should be surprised to see a corporation take legal action against an organziation that has usurped its brand, reputation and image.
Well. hotshot, I don't know about wherever it is you live, but around here you don't need to be rich to pay a lawyer. However, you do have to be smart enough to use one if you're starting up a business, especially if you plan to "borrow" from the name of an established company.
The people who own, operate and work for any business have the same rights as the people that set about making imitation knock-offs. I'm guessing these coders think they have the moral high-ground and presume that means they should win against the "evil" corporation. Well, they don't hold the moral high ground. What they hold is, at best, the high ground for naivete. If you try to market imitations of someone else's products under a name that plausibly conveys the impression that your products are made by that competitor, you're just asking for trouble. And there's nothin "evil" or "unfree" about that.
>> ...the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share...
Well, yeah, if you can't put up a fight, you aren't much of a competitor.
It is rather utopian and naive in the extreme to imagine that any business wouldn't come after any organization perceived as threatening their sales. Open source has a habit of cloning and mimicing commercial products and tagging them with names that are intentionally reminiscent of the orignal commercial product. A business has every reason to see these efforts as a direct threat to their bottom line. A cease-and-desist order is an obvious approach. The other side can get their own lawyers if they want to contest it. (Can;t afford lawyers? Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you started.)
OF course the RIAA will use this to score points. That's what good lobbies do. But, a number of other things are going on that preclude attributing the bad times at speciality shops solely to p2p downloads.
First, the population is getting older. Buying music is, for most people, an activity that decreases as they get older.
Second, in addition to downloading, music is offered for sale in many venues that weren't available a decade ago. As the article notes, why make a special trip to a speciality shop when you can buy it from Amazon, at Walmart, or on your next stop at the bookstore.
Third, I'm skeptical about the 40 million Americans download music claim, or the common assertion that filesharing prompts purchases that wouldn't happen otherwise. But, if/when it does, it seems likely that the purchaser will be inclined to order it online using the same computer used for the download, rather than going tothe trouble of traveling to any store -- big box or speciality shop -- to make the purchase.
Fourth, this is very speculative, but the music industry has, for a number of years, lacked the one or two overwhelmingly popular acts that can spike sales across the industry. (Think Beatles in the 1960's.) People who would not otherwise ever buy music do buy the music of these acts.
Rather than calling the FBI and reporting your individual problem, perhaps it would have been better to focus on Charter's failure to respond to a reported compromise of their network. The FBI certainly wouldn't take immediate action based solely on assertions made in a single phone call. But, they could easily obtain evidence of a much wider and ongoing crime by contacting Charter and asking questions about their potential negligence.
It's being a bit optimistic to expect the guy answering the FBI phone after hours to know anything about network security issues, much less to roust someone at home on the basis of a single call. However, telling the FBI that you'd had evidence that a major ISP had been compromised and describing the impact may have provoked a response.
I suspect most people who file "share" would agree that someone who walks into a store, pockets a CD, walks out without paying for it, takes it home and makes thousands of copies of it that he gives away free to strangers has committed more than one crime.
Yet, file "sharing" differs only in that the bits that represent music are stored on hard drives, not CD's, and distribution takes place over the Internet, not via a bricks-and-mortar operation.
People who buy a CD own that little piece of plastic, they don't own the music.
You know, the Internet isn't there just to allow annoying kids to get free music.
"Deterrent" doesn't equal "eliminate". There's a lot more to the law than just the criminal statutes. Most of it has to do with enforcing the behavior that society, as expressed through its elected representatives, wishes to encourage.
/. readers seem to like the idea of free music, and have migrated, rather clumsily, the notion of free and open software to the entire entertainment industry. I.e., they've decided that copyright is "evil" and posit some kind of nascent information utopia that awaits only the elimination of a creator's rights in the work he creates. In other words, what's mine is mine and what's your's is mine, too.
This filesharing this sharing gambit, I'm convinced, gets all this attention here because most
So you'd agree that filesharing violates copyright protection?
>> he issue of copyrights will become an election-decider within two to four years.
Phooey. Two reasons why this is wrong:
1. Copyright law is dry and obtuse; politicians talking about it will put voters to sleep.
2. Too many industries and the people they employ have a vested interest in copyright. It's not for nothing this is called an "information society".