You are being harder on me than I deserve, and softer on the OP as he deserves. I admire your stance as "devil's advocate" and I admit that I am reacting poorer than I should. However, his post is simply asinine. I try my hardest to take the higher ground but sometimes I get pissed off at people and my human nature overrides by frontal lobe. Touche sir, and I think we would probably agree more than disagree if we were to discuss things outside of/. .
The Americans were British during the first two - just sayin... Feminist movement, deserters yeah you could be proud of that, but illegal file sharing? phew..
American's were not entirely British. There were Germans, Dutch, French, Mexican, ect. The portion that rebelled was a British Colony, but the people many times where fairly removed from their British roots and they rebelled because they didn't want British rule. For example, half my ancestry stretches back pre-Revolution and is composed of Scottish and French. Doesn't matter if illegal file sharing is right or not, its still done in protest of paying for media and of copyright law.
And it is confined to him and not you in any way, clearly..
It is confined to him. I didn't go out of my way to insult someones culture. As a matter of fact, I admire parts of British culture. I also admire UK government, such as the parliament being made up of representatives from a variety of parties by a percentage of votes. I wouldn't trade that for the Bill of Rights however. Its ok to be proud of your own culture, but when you blame your own nation's and cultural failings on another culture's influence its complete horse shit. Not to mention this individual has a gross misunderstanding of what American culture even is.
But expressing solidarity through protest, by repeating the same "crime" - admittedly with a very minor risk of prosecution? That nobility. That's the British spirit. There's a reason that the colloquial phrase for contravention of fair play is "not cricket". It isn't "not baseball", is it?
That is not unique to the British. Apparently you've never heard of the Boston tea party, the American revolution, the American feminist movement, the Hippy movement, the Vietnam war deserters, and illegal file sharing.
I view the whole sorry affair as the result of over-exposure to American culture, a culture of flying off the handle, an overinflated sense of entitlement, and above all, an almost complete lack of understanding of the concept of irony. We've lost our ability to cope with the ambiguity and the grey areas in life, instead taking the simpletons viewpoint that right and wrong are black and white, that there is a sharply defined line you must not cross. Deary me. Life is complicated. For those of us who can't cope without a truly rigid set of rules, might I suggest that you go back to kindergarten.
Sure thing. I view your whole post as a pompous diatribe of bull shit. You have an obvious superiority complex, and its completely unfounded in reality. In America, you could do exactly what this guy did and no one can do anything to you. Its called freedom of speech, and its guaranteed our government cannot interfere with this natural born right. I can call you Euro-trash and say you deserve to have your ass kicked without my government doing anything to me.
Stop being a partisan twat. Democrats did nothing to combat the deficit nor have they even succeeded in a decent health care bill. I don't think Americans had it in mind to be penalized with a fine if they choose not to have insurance. Universal health care is AOK in my book, but enforced health insurance to corrupt shithole corporations is ridiculous. Republicans haven't done shit either, and even started the deficit with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its time to stop swearing loyalty to either party, as they only have whats in their best interest in mind. Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans, they just represent a different set of rich assholes that lust for power. Idiot Americans voting along party lines is what is pissing away any liberty America has left.
Same thing. Its not unusual for a nonviolent person to say something like "Ugh! I will kill you" when they are frustrated. I have had foreigners I work with use that language with me. However, since I have common sense and the ability to rationalize, I realize that these people will not actually try to kill me. Its just a miscommunication or a joke. Unless someone reading that twitter post is a complete dullard, they would be able to deduce that he did not actually intend to incite violence against this woman. What it boils down to is the world is becoming a bunch of politically correct wimps that have to have their hand held through all of life and cannot be offended or else they will have a temper tantrum.
That is an extremely far stretch. Not to mention if you lose sleep over a comment like that you are an idiot anyway. Nowhere in life did someone say you have a right not to be offended. That lady in the parent article needs to drop it instead of using it for bullshit political posturing. She only comes across as a weakling.
I would argue that everyone is born with freedom of speech, along with a right to do just about anything. They give it up when they decide to continue being citizens.
Sure thing. On the movie set when a bad guy threatens to kill the good guy it should be taken the same way. You cannot prove they weren't serious. What about when you get pissed off at someone and say "God, I want to kill you!". You cannot prove you weren't serious. Common sense would tell you this man didn't want to actually kill someone.
This is somewhat ridiculous. I know its not the US, so the laws are different, but who really cares if this man says something like that, as long as he doesn't follow through with it. If I were him I would not apologize.
Its ridiculous. One major hypocrisy here in the US is "We believe in capitalism, so long as it benefits us". They are complaining they aren't making money and want to restrict the market, all at the same time having the benefits of a capitalist society, i.e. the ability to innovate and try to out compete without being interfered with by the government. Maybe they should try including some service along with the game Steam does not supply, or maybe they should target the DRM nature of Steam and sell only Non-DRM software, or maybe they should give everyone that comes in the store a free hot dog and a coupon to save on gas. Its simply a case of eating your cake and expecting to have it afterwards.
The problem is that Linux is a pain in the ass at times to fix all the installation issues or hardware problems. Understandably I am not a pro user, but you shouldnt have to wade through command line to fix a Matlab installation when you follow on screen instructions and read everything given to you. It may not be the fault of linux, but its still a fault with the platform as a whole. I used Ubuntu and CentOS quite a bit before. For awhile I even switched to Ubuntu before it got bogged down by various problems. Frankly, if they want to take more of share of desktops they need to make it easier to use or at least developers for the platform need to have some stricter guidelines when they make their software. Maybe Google would have the vision and administrative control to release a competitive distribution that could compete, as they have with Android. Don't get me wrong, I hate Microsoft. They have way too much market share to be making the crappy OS's, office software, and Xbox software they do. I always have problems with my Xbox streaming video from my Windows 7 based machine, but the Xbox works streaming video from my Mac with literally no problems whatsoever. That is ridiculous. I just think that Linux is too fragmented to work for what people want.
The problem is that lawyers convince juries that it is possible to predict the damages and then the juries make ridiculous rulings such as the parent article shows. If you cannot measure the damage within reason, how can you actually extract damages from an individual? Its a little different if I am being sued for inadvertently chopping your arms and legs off and you are unable to work. Your hospital bills will probably be recorded, as will the cost for any prosthesis or equipment to regain mobility. It can also be estimated that you will probably live to be 75, and will be working till you are around 65. Each year you make X amount of money with Y inflation calculated in. You have Z money in benefits. You could even statistically find out how much more a person that is 50 makes over a person that is 25 in the same career path and factor this in. In this case I would wager you would deserve around 2-3 million, maybe more if you have an awesome job. In the case of the parent article, there is literally no way of knowing the damage, and as such one should default to a reasonable estimate such as 10-100 times the cost of each song to cover any possible lost sales. This would more than cover her share of the illegal sharing of these songs. After all, she originally download this material from the internet illegally in the first place so it was available ANYWAY, and could have just as easily been downloaded from the person she got it from rather than her. She should not be held liable for the actions of any person who illegally obtained it from her. For example, if you sell me an illegal firearm and I go off and shoot someone, you are not liable for me shooting the person, only for selling me the weapon.
2. Doesn't matter. The debate is not whether or not this person violated law, it is that the law allows statutory damages that are ridiculous for what should be petty crime.
3. If the special interests had their way, that would be considered copyright infringement.
Is it excessive (as is impossible to get out from under)?
Yes. It will take her 10-20 years to pay off for downloading 24 dollars worth of songs. Maybe you have a pot of gold sitting at home, or were raised with a silver spoon in your mouth so you have no concept of how much money that actually is. This significantly affects her life in a negative way for doing something that should be considered petty crime. Even if she shared these with 100 people, the infringement cost at most only 2400 dollars, and this is using fuzzy math that has limited basis in reality. Furthermore, when you are ordered to pay one excessive fine, and then you refuse and are hit with an even more batshit crazy fine just for protecting your 8th amendment rights that IS PRECISELY the fault of the law and to a lesser extent the jurors. The convention for statutory damages is calculated as a multiple of the price for the use of the infringed right. You are telling me that 24 songs cost 2833.00 a piece originally before this woman was subject to a cost of 62500.00 a piece. You are ridiculous. There is a reason this country has a huge disparity in wealth near 1920's levels and everyone is either poor or in debt. People like you.
Your logic is faulty. The only thing an exchange of money shows is how much you could have made IF, and only IF, you were willing to sell under the same conditions. Therefore, selling at a discount, for instance, proves nothing.
No, it is not. By your argument, a copyright holder can claim no damage whatsoever, because there was never any damage provably done. Hence your original argument is null and void in a civil case, because damages are awarded punitively and/or compensatory. In that case, no compensatory judgement is justified in copyright cases. Punitive damages can be justified, since it can be proven an individual violated a copyright, however punitive damages by their nature are imposed by government, and our government is subject to obeying the provisions in the Bill of Rights. Regardless of the difference between civil and criminal law, since the Bill of Rights determines what the government can "enforce" upon an individual, it covers everything a judicial system does as a part of punishment. 8th amendment applies in this case. Now, back to the other argument. If a person sells a bootlegged product to another individual, this is literally the only measureable way to justify compensatory damages. Everything else false under non-mathematical nor probabilistic estimations based on what particles you can pull out of your own asshole.
i.e. 25000 USD, means she is paying between 1/8 and 9 times the yearly salary of 99 percent of the United States population
This is a mistake. 25000 USD is about 1/8th the salary of the least earning individuals in the top 1 percent of wage earners in the US. So she is paying between more than a years salary, to 1/8th of a years salary for the infringement in the BEST case. If it was 1.5 million, she may as well commit suicide.
Actually, money changing hands is the ONLY precise way of measuring a lost sale. You can quantitatively measure how much you "could" have made since an individual actually made a decision to make a purchase of the illicit material, either knowingly or not, and the individual selling it made a decision to sell it to them knowing that they did not create, nor own any rights to said material. What is happening in the case of the original article is a blatant violation of the 8th amendment, not to mention it is in violation of logical and probabilistic principals as well as common sense. You realize even in the best case for the plaintiff, the proposed settlement for this "infringement", i.e. 25000 USD, means she is paying between 1/8 and 9 times the yearly salary of 99 percent of the United States population. This being the case, 1.5 million is absolutely ridiculous, and should be laughed out of court out of the gross stupidity of the proposal, without even considering the absolute violation of the bill of rights.
You have failed to argue that "pirates" cost anyone money. You cannot prove that a person deprived a copyright holder of money for copying a digital file since the process of copying digital files is essentially without cost. You can only argue that a person deprived a copyright holder of money if you can prove that this act would have otherwise resulted in a sale. This is only possible when there is an exchange of money, i.e. in the case of bootleggers.
You failed to prove my thinking is backwards. Copying a digital file does absolutely no harm to anyone unless you are taking sales away from them. You cannot prove a sale would have ever taken place unless there was an exchange of money. This only occurs in bootlegged copies. Copying a file != Lost sale. You may be infringing on their "right" to copy but you have done no measureable damage to the copyright holder any more than a person did harm to a pedestrian that saw them get a speeding ticket from the side of the road.
I.e. it could have happened but it didn't.
how could any copyright system function that doesn't punish individual citizens equally with corporations when individual citizens possess the potential for near-zero cost duplication and worldwide distribution?
The amount of ass-hattery in that statement is astounding. Individual file sharers do not benefit from sharing their files. They do not get to access more files, and they do not get paid for their activities. Saying that this is equivalent to a professional bootlegger who sells illegal copies of DVD's for profit is absolutely ridiculous.
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You are being harder on me than I deserve, and softer on the OP as he deserves. I admire your stance as "devil's advocate" and I admit that I am reacting poorer than I should. However, his post is simply asinine. I try my hardest to take the higher ground but sometimes I get pissed off at people and my human nature overrides by frontal lobe. Touche sir, and I think we would probably agree more than disagree if we were to discuss things outside of /. .
Not relevant.
All I want to do is DreeeaaAaeeem. Dream Dream Dreeeam DreeeaaAaeeem. Dream Dream Dreeeam DreeeaaAaeeem.
The Americans were British during the first two - just sayin... Feminist movement, deserters yeah you could be proud of that, but illegal file sharing? phew..
American's were not entirely British. There were Germans, Dutch, French, Mexican, ect. The portion that rebelled was a British Colony, but the people many times where fairly removed from their British roots and they rebelled because they didn't want British rule. For example, half my ancestry stretches back pre-Revolution and is composed of Scottish and French. Doesn't matter if illegal file sharing is right or not, its still done in protest of paying for media and of copyright law.
And it is confined to him and not you in any way, clearly..
It is confined to him. I didn't go out of my way to insult someones culture. As a matter of fact, I admire parts of British culture. I also admire UK government, such as the parliament being made up of representatives from a variety of parties by a percentage of votes. I wouldn't trade that for the Bill of Rights however. Its ok to be proud of your own culture, but when you blame your own nation's and cultural failings on another culture's influence its complete horse shit. Not to mention this individual has a gross misunderstanding of what American culture even is.
But expressing solidarity through protest, by repeating the same "crime" - admittedly with a very minor risk of prosecution? That nobility. That's the British spirit. There's a reason that the colloquial phrase for contravention of fair play is "not cricket". It isn't "not baseball", is it?
That is not unique to the British. Apparently you've never heard of the Boston tea party, the American revolution, the American feminist movement, the Hippy movement, the Vietnam war deserters, and illegal file sharing.
I view the whole sorry affair as the result of over-exposure to American culture, a culture of flying off the handle, an overinflated sense of entitlement, and above all, an almost complete lack of understanding of the concept of irony. We've lost our ability to cope with the ambiguity and the grey areas in life, instead taking the simpletons viewpoint that right and wrong are black and white, that there is a sharply defined line you must not cross. Deary me. Life is complicated. For those of us who can't cope without a truly rigid set of rules, might I suggest that you go back to kindergarten.
Sure thing. I view your whole post as a pompous diatribe of bull shit. You have an obvious superiority complex, and its completely unfounded in reality. In America, you could do exactly what this guy did and no one can do anything to you. Its called freedom of speech, and its guaranteed our government cannot interfere with this natural born right. I can call you Euro-trash and say you deserve to have your ass kicked without my government doing anything to me.
I wouldn't call it flagrant violation. I would call it negligent violation. There is a difference.
Stop being a partisan twat. Democrats did nothing to combat the deficit nor have they even succeeded in a decent health care bill. I don't think Americans had it in mind to be penalized with a fine if they choose not to have insurance. Universal health care is AOK in my book, but enforced health insurance to corrupt shithole corporations is ridiculous. Republicans haven't done shit either, and even started the deficit with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its time to stop swearing loyalty to either party, as they only have whats in their best interest in mind. Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans, they just represent a different set of rich assholes that lust for power. Idiot Americans voting along party lines is what is pissing away any liberty America has left.
Same thing. Its not unusual for a nonviolent person to say something like "Ugh! I will kill you" when they are frustrated. I have had foreigners I work with use that language with me. However, since I have common sense and the ability to rationalize, I realize that these people will not actually try to kill me. Its just a miscommunication or a joke. Unless someone reading that twitter post is a complete dullard, they would be able to deduce that he did not actually intend to incite violence against this woman. What it boils down to is the world is becoming a bunch of politically correct wimps that have to have their hand held through all of life and cannot be offended or else they will have a temper tantrum.
Its not a death threat. Stop being a pussy.
That is an extremely far stretch. Not to mention if you lose sleep over a comment like that you are an idiot anyway. Nowhere in life did someone say you have a right not to be offended. That lady in the parent article needs to drop it instead of using it for bullshit political posturing. She only comes across as a weakling.
I would argue that everyone is born with freedom of speech, along with a right to do just about anything. They give it up when they decide to continue being citizens.
Sure thing. On the movie set when a bad guy threatens to kill the good guy it should be taken the same way. You cannot prove they weren't serious. What about when you get pissed off at someone and say "God, I want to kill you!". You cannot prove you weren't serious. Common sense would tell you this man didn't want to actually kill someone.
This is somewhat ridiculous. I know its not the US, so the laws are different, but who really cares if this man says something like that, as long as he doesn't follow through with it. If I were him I would not apologize.
Yes. It doesn't make sense in modern English the other way.
Its ridiculous. One major hypocrisy here in the US is "We believe in capitalism, so long as it benefits us". They are complaining they aren't making money and want to restrict the market, all at the same time having the benefits of a capitalist society, i.e. the ability to innovate and try to out compete without being interfered with by the government. Maybe they should try including some service along with the game Steam does not supply, or maybe they should target the DRM nature of Steam and sell only Non-DRM software, or maybe they should give everyone that comes in the store a free hot dog and a coupon to save on gas. Its simply a case of eating your cake and expecting to have it afterwards.
The problem is that Linux is a pain in the ass at times to fix all the installation issues or hardware problems. Understandably I am not a pro user, but you shouldnt have to wade through command line to fix a Matlab installation when you follow on screen instructions and read everything given to you. It may not be the fault of linux, but its still a fault with the platform as a whole. I used Ubuntu and CentOS quite a bit before. For awhile I even switched to Ubuntu before it got bogged down by various problems. Frankly, if they want to take more of share of desktops they need to make it easier to use or at least developers for the platform need to have some stricter guidelines when they make their software. Maybe Google would have the vision and administrative control to release a competitive distribution that could compete, as they have with Android. Don't get me wrong, I hate Microsoft. They have way too much market share to be making the crappy OS's, office software, and Xbox software they do. I always have problems with my Xbox streaming video from my Windows 7 based machine, but the Xbox works streaming video from my Mac with literally no problems whatsoever. That is ridiculous. I just think that Linux is too fragmented to work for what people want.
The problem is that lawyers convince juries that it is possible to predict the damages and then the juries make ridiculous rulings such as the parent article shows. If you cannot measure the damage within reason, how can you actually extract damages from an individual? Its a little different if I am being sued for inadvertently chopping your arms and legs off and you are unable to work. Your hospital bills will probably be recorded, as will the cost for any prosthesis or equipment to regain mobility. It can also be estimated that you will probably live to be 75, and will be working till you are around 65. Each year you make X amount of money with Y inflation calculated in. You have Z money in benefits. You could even statistically find out how much more a person that is 50 makes over a person that is 25 in the same career path and factor this in. In this case I would wager you would deserve around 2-3 million, maybe more if you have an awesome job. In the case of the parent article, there is literally no way of knowing the damage, and as such one should default to a reasonable estimate such as 10-100 times the cost of each song to cover any possible lost sales. This would more than cover her share of the illegal sharing of these songs. After all, she originally download this material from the internet illegally in the first place so it was available ANYWAY, and could have just as easily been downloaded from the person she got it from rather than her. She should not be held liable for the actions of any person who illegally obtained it from her. For example, if you sell me an illegal firearm and I go off and shoot someone, you are not liable for me shooting the person, only for selling me the weapon.
1. Yes.
2. Doesn't matter. The debate is not whether or not this person violated law, it is that the law allows statutory damages that are ridiculous for what should be petty crime.
3. If the special interests had their way, that would be considered copyright infringement.
Is it excessive (as is impossible to get out from under)?
Yes. It will take her 10-20 years to pay off for downloading 24 dollars worth of songs. Maybe you have a pot of gold sitting at home, or were raised with a silver spoon in your mouth so you have no concept of how much money that actually is. This significantly affects her life in a negative way for doing something that should be considered petty crime. Even if she shared these with 100 people, the infringement cost at most only 2400 dollars, and this is using fuzzy math that has limited basis in reality. Furthermore, when you are ordered to pay one excessive fine, and then you refuse and are hit with an even more batshit crazy fine just for protecting your 8th amendment rights that IS PRECISELY the fault of the law and to a lesser extent the jurors. The convention for statutory damages is calculated as a multiple of the price for the use of the infringed right. You are telling me that 24 songs cost 2833.00 a piece originally before this woman was subject to a cost of 62500.00 a piece. You are ridiculous. There is a reason this country has a huge disparity in wealth near 1920's levels and everyone is either poor or in debt. People like you.
Your logic is faulty. The only thing an exchange of money shows is how much you could have made IF, and only IF, you were willing to sell under the same conditions. Therefore, selling at a discount, for instance, proves nothing.
No, it is not. By your argument, a copyright holder can claim no damage whatsoever, because there was never any damage provably done. Hence your original argument is null and void in a civil case, because damages are awarded punitively and/or compensatory. In that case, no compensatory judgement is justified in copyright cases. Punitive damages can be justified, since it can be proven an individual violated a copyright, however punitive damages by their nature are imposed by government, and our government is subject to obeying the provisions in the Bill of Rights. Regardless of the difference between civil and criminal law, since the Bill of Rights determines what the government can "enforce" upon an individual, it covers everything a judicial system does as a part of punishment. 8th amendment applies in this case. Now, back to the other argument. If a person sells a bootlegged product to another individual, this is literally the only measureable way to justify compensatory damages. Everything else false under non-mathematical nor probabilistic estimations based on what particles you can pull out of your own asshole.
i.e. 25000 USD, means she is paying between 1/8 and 9 times the yearly salary of 99 percent of the United States population
This is a mistake. 25000 USD is about 1/8th the salary of the least earning individuals in the top 1 percent of wage earners in the US. So she is paying between more than a years salary, to 1/8th of a years salary for the infringement in the BEST case. If it was 1.5 million, she may as well commit suicide.
Actually, money changing hands is the ONLY precise way of measuring a lost sale. You can quantitatively measure how much you "could" have made since an individual actually made a decision to make a purchase of the illicit material, either knowingly or not, and the individual selling it made a decision to sell it to them knowing that they did not create, nor own any rights to said material. What is happening in the case of the original article is a blatant violation of the 8th amendment, not to mention it is in violation of logical and probabilistic principals as well as common sense. You realize even in the best case for the plaintiff, the proposed settlement for this "infringement", i.e. 25000 USD, means she is paying between 1/8 and 9 times the yearly salary of 99 percent of the United States population. This being the case, 1.5 million is absolutely ridiculous, and should be laughed out of court out of the gross stupidity of the proposal, without even considering the absolute violation of the bill of rights.
You have failed to argue that "pirates" cost anyone money. You cannot prove that a person deprived a copyright holder of money for copying a digital file since the process of copying digital files is essentially without cost. You can only argue that a person deprived a copyright holder of money if you can prove that this act would have otherwise resulted in a sale. This is only possible when there is an exchange of money, i.e. in the case of bootleggers.
You failed to prove my thinking is backwards. Copying a digital file does absolutely no harm to anyone unless you are taking sales away from them. You cannot prove a sale would have ever taken place unless there was an exchange of money. This only occurs in bootlegged copies. Copying a file != Lost sale. You may be infringing on their "right" to copy but you have done no measureable damage to the copyright holder any more than a person did harm to a pedestrian that saw them get a speeding ticket from the side of the road. I.e. it could have happened but it didn't.
how could any copyright system function that doesn't punish individual citizens equally with corporations when individual citizens possess the potential for near-zero cost duplication and worldwide distribution?
The amount of ass-hattery in that statement is astounding. Individual file sharers do not benefit from sharing their files. They do not get to access more files, and they do not get paid for their activities. Saying that this is equivalent to a professional bootlegger who sells illegal copies of DVD's for profit is absolutely ridiculous.