I and a large group of other people were stalked and harassed on Twitter by a user. This woman was clearly not all there mentally (claimed to be a prophet of God among other things). We complained to Twitter but were told there was nothing they could do. Her harassment, apparently, wasn't a TOS violation. So harass normal users: Fine. Use Twitter to complain about something the local government doesn't want you complaining about? Blocked! Twitter sure has their priorities in order. *rolling eyes*
(The stalker/harasser was eventually visited by her police department who told her to get offline and get help or else. She deleted her Twitter account... and is now active on Facebook where she thinks she can hide her harassment better.)
Exactly. In fact, it's not even about lost sales due to piracy. That's just the boogeyman they use with the politicians and the public. Their real concern is that the Internet removes control from their hands. Think about how you had access to music pre-Internet. You found out about music when a big label made you aware of it. Then, you purchased the music via a big-label approved store. The artists were kept in line via big-label-approved contracts and had no options. The big labels were the only way to sell music. Yes, there were non-big-record-label indie sources, but those were much, much smaller. You had a virtually zero chance of making it big without a big label.
Enter the Internet. Now artists can market and release music directly to their fans. The big labels have gone from THE SOURCE OF ALL MUSIC to Glorified Ad Agency. The big labels are (rightfully) concerned that they are going to go obsolete. So, they are changing with the times. Oh wait, no... That other thing... They are trying to turn the clock back and using all of their lobbying power to do it. It isn't that they don't care if the Internet breaks. They actively *WANT* it to break. That would get them back to the good old days when people just bought what they were told to buy and artists couldn't connect directly with fans.
One of the big ironies about this? The politicians try to protect Big Media, in part, to "save jobs." Meanwhile, the laws they make negatively impact the technology industry which provides far more jobs than Big Media does. This is even despite Big Media inflating their job numbers. (Did you provide catering for one movie shoot? Guess what? Your job is counted as being created by Big Media. As if you'd be completely out of work were it not for them!)
If we were really interested in creating jobs, shouldn't we protect the larger job creating industry over the smaller one? (Silly me. Applying logic and reason in a lobbying/bribery of politicians situation.)
Sadly, the "reasonable man test" fails when it is applied by some people. For example, if a group of people believed that whistling Dixie after 3PM on Sunday while wearing sneakers was an invitation for Satan to come and devour the souls of everyone in town, they'd ban the activity. To them, the ban was perfectly reasonable. To the rest of us, it's nuts.
It also fails in the grey areas of the law. Say, someone breaks into your house. You feel threatened, take out a gun, and wind up killing them. Are you guilty of murder? Probably not. What if the person was clearly fleeing your house at the time, though? What if the person was outside your house at the time you shot them? What if it was broad daylight and the person rang your doorbell? At some point, the "self defense/home invasion" rationale breaks down, but where it breaks down isn't always clear. Laws are broad generalities but real life is rarely as clean cut.
How similar do non-copied photos need to be to infringe on copyright. Let's say I take a photo of my family with a mountain range in the background. According to this ruling, gathering my family at that mountain range and taking a similar photo would infringe copyright. What if it was a different (but similar looking) mountain range? What if it wasn't my family, but people who looked like them? What if the people bore no real resemblance but wore the same kind of clothes my family was wearing? What if you took a group of look-a-likes of my family in similar clothes to the original photo and had them pose exactly like in the copyrighted photo, only in front of other objects? At what point does the copyright on the photo fail to be infringed.
In my opinion, this is a very dangerous ruling as it could be used to suppress photography. (Building owner: "We took a photo of our building and sell copies of it in the lobby gift shop. You taking a similar photo of it is copyright infringement and we'll sue you for $750,000 unless you delete that photo right now!")
While I appreciate any pro-space travel talk, I don't think he'd keep this campaign promise. Once elected, he'd probably take on the "important" issues (dismantling Obama's health care legislation, banning abortion, slashing taxes on the wealthy to "create jobs", etc). When he was up for re-election, he might trot out the Moon base as something to do when re-elected, but that would be the furthest it would go.
Alternatively, he might decide to move ahead with it and kill every other program NASA is working on to free up money (either for NASA or, more likely, for private companies) for a Moon base. Thus, a Moon base may get made, but it would come at the expense of some very valuable scientific research.
That's the weird thing about this. (Ok, *one* of the weird things.) The entertainment companies are saying we need SOPA/PIPA to save the job-creating entertainment industry*. However, the tech industry is much bigger than the entertainment industry and creates many more jobs. So we want to kill a big job-creating industry for the sake of a smaller job-creating industry? Sorry, MPAA/RIAA, but that doesn't make good economic sense.
*Never mind the fact that the entertainment industry inflates their figures. Do you run a catering business and provided food for a movie shoot? Congrats, Your job is now one "made possible" by the entertainment industry. By that logic, the tech industry can claim employing all of Dunkin' Donuts because they got some donuts for the weekly staff meeting.
Well, MPAA head (and former Senator) Chris Dodd has said that the reason SOPA failed was because people were able to speak their mind and the MPAA didn't have any outlet for "correcting" us. (No outlets at all... Ignore the fact that they own all of those TV stations.) We need to get rid of that pesky freedom of speech for the common folk (aka Consumers). Our only right should be the right to purchase the MPAA/RIAA-approved entertainment materials that the MPAA/RIAA tell us to purchase.
That's a similar situation to what's going on in the US. Most homes can get Internet access via their cable company or their phone company. Failing that, there are no other broadband options. Personally, my options are Time Warner Cable's service or Verizon's DSL service. (FIOS isn't available to my house.) Since Verizon's DSL service is much slower and much less likely to be supported (too many news reports of them ignoring it), I'm pretty much trapped on TWC's service.
I could have sworn that, in previous cases (not involving a US Senator), people were told that, if the scan found something odd, you could either accept the pat-down or be arrested.
In fact, here's an article that makes it clear what the TSA plans on doing to you if you refuse the pat down: http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/11/23/those-who-refuse-tsa-patdown-will-be-denied-airport-entry/
Granted, that's over a year old so the policy may have changed. However, under that policy, Rand Paul should have been escorted out of the airport by police officers. Then, if he tried to get back through security (via rebooking on another flight), the entire checkpoint would be shutdown and the terminal possibly evacuated.
I wonder what would happen if a non-Congressfolk tried doing exactly what Rand Paul did. Would they be arrested for refusing the pat down? Would they be kicked out of the airport with a police escort? Would their rebooking and attempting to go through security again require a shutdown of the security checkpoint?
There are ways of dealing with piracy that hurt pirates without hurting normal people. You just need specifically targeted laws with plenty of oversight in place to prevent abuse. We don't get that, though, because the MPAA/RIAA/etc aren't really interested in combating piracy. The Internet removed their complete control over the pipeline between creator and consumer and they want that control back. Destroying the Internet to get it is acceptable losses in their book. (Perhaps even a perk.)
I don't see how supporting sane copyright law (and opposing insane bills like SOPA/PIPA) is intellectual dishonesty. As frank_adrian314159 said, there are shades of gray. To give another example, if you are stranded in a blizzard and come upon an unoccupied house, you are allowed to break in to survive. You need to pay for anything you use/break, of course, but your survival trumps any breaking and entering charge. Supporting this, however, doesn't mean that I support people breaking into my house because they don't have any TV to watch the big game. You can't take a view to the extreme and then claim that not supporting the extreme means that you can't support the non-extreme view.
If I could change copyright law, I'd do three things:
1) Copyright would be dialed back to 14 years with an optional one-time (paid) 14 year extension. Everything else would become public domain. 2) There would be two classes of copyright infringement: Commercial (CD/DVD pressing operations) and Casual. Commercial would be punishable with the fines we have today and Casual would be punishable by some small multiplier of the value of the work. Say, 10 times. (A multiplier would be used for deterrent so people don't just copy and say "If I get caught, I'll just pay what I would have paid to buy it.") Also, you wouldn't be able to simply up the charge to Commercial infringement just because the person's site ran some ads. You'd need to prove that the ads took in a significant amount of money over cost. 3) Any copyright infringement case would need to be proven before a judge in open court before sites are taken down or fines are issued.
The government is always willing to listen when the people loudly protest a bill. And by "listen", I mean kill the bill, wait a bit for the complaints to subside, and then hide small pieces of the killed bill into other bills. The more "must pass" the bill it is hidden in, the better. This way, the government gets credit for having listened to the people and they still get to pass the bill right under everyone's noses.
So while the death of SOPA is something to celebrate, it doesn't mean it's time to declare "Mission Accomplished" and head home. We need to be constantly vigilant to ensure that mini-SOPAs don't sneak into our lawbooks. (And, yes, I am making a sort of terrorist-SOPA analogy.)
I don't think we could go back to non-automatic copyright. If I make a blog post and attach a few photos I took, would I need to register each photo and the text of the blog post with the US Copyright Office? What about if I make posts like that every day? How much additional paperwork would this add to blogging or any other online activity?
I think that the better solution would be to limit copyright terms to 14 years with an optional (paid) 14 year extension. Add in a method like Marillion states for notifying people of copyright infringement and the problem would be largely solved. In fact, we pretty much have a system like that with the DMCA. (One of the only good provisions in that.) If I post something online that you believe is copyrighted by you, you send a DMCA take down request. I can then take it down or reply with my reason why I think I'm allowed to keep it online. If you still disagree, you can take me to court to solve the matter. Is it abused at times? Definitely. Might it need some tweaking? Perhaps. But we don't need a whole new law (especially something like SOPA/PIPA) to solve the problem!
... The MPAA and RIAA have sued world governments for not requiring anti-piracy shock collars on all citizens. They claim that, were anti-piracy shock collars in place, piracy would disappear and people would go back to their rightful activities - buying music and movies. Critics charge that the shock collars inhibit freedom of speech... or at least they used to until they had shock collars put on them. Now they're all for the idea. Personally, I think that anti-piracy shock collars are horrib... *BBZZZZZTTT* WONDERFUL idea!
Ironically, I think you could have made a better case for longer copyrights back then (when getting the word out about a work too a lot of time) then today. I definitely think copyright should be scaled back. I'd be very happy if it went back to 14 years plus a one time optional renewal of 14 years. I'd even accept having anything 5 or more years old automatically renewed for the full 28 years and items older than 28 years old phased into the public domain over a few years (starting with the older content).
Fair enough. But people have also been sharing seeds (as in crop seeds) for tens of thousands of years. And those reproduce indefinitely, and for practical purposes the copies are exact.
Not only that, but nature has a way of "sharing" seeds between farmers without the farmers even putting in any effort. In fact, if you wanted to specifically *NOT* share any seeds (say, due to Monstato threatening lawsuits), you'd have to take extreme measures to prevent natural sharing from happening.
Even when you aren't talking about copies, the content industry gets annoyed with sharing. Selling that book or CD you purchased to someone else? That should be made illegal because it costs them sales! Libraries lending books to people for free? How awful! More lost sales!!!
If John Deere acted like the RIAA/MPAA/Publishing Companies, they'd tell you that you're just buying a license to use their tractor and you can't loan it or sell it to anyone for any reason. (Of course, if it breaks, you can't just retain the license and get one that works.... You need to buy a license to a new one.)
The studios claim they need these long copyright terms to safe-guard their profits with the reasoning that hurting their profits will stop them from making more content. Putting aside the notion, for a second, that letting them earn $2 billion instead of $3 billion will result in a massive drop in content creation, I've got to wonder how much this older content is earning them. Yes, Lady and the Tramp gets released from the Disney Vault every so often (are they up to the Super Extreme Platinum edition now?), but how much does it bring in? What about The Seven Year Itch? The End of Eternity? Blue Suede Shoes?
It's probably not possible, but I'd love to see a breakdown of the earnings of the MPAA/RIAA by year of release. I'd be willing to bet that most of their earnings come from works released in the past 20 years. Content 21 years or older probably doesn't constitute much of their earnings. In fact, I think that either way, they lose the argument. If older content isn't earning them much, then why keep it locked under copyright? If it is earning them most of their money, then obviously their copyright control isn't getting them to create new content like they claimed they needed.
...I've got to remember to re-read instead of just hitting Preview and then Submit. I was going to say that this whole situation reminds me of what happened with TheBloggess. Clueless company official, highly influential community member, giant social media tidal wave in response. I think the lesson for companies is you should treat all of your customers nicely because you never know when a mistreated customer will be able to bring a flood of bad PR against you.
A few months back, TheBloggess got a generic PR Pitch, completely disconnected from what she blogs about. She responded in her usual fashion, by directing them to a page that, in part, had a photo of Wil Wheaton collating papers. (See: http://thebloggess.com/heres-a-picture-of-wil-wheaton-collating-papers/ ) Usually, the PR companies that get this response don't reply or send back a polite response. A VP at this PR firm decided to reply to call her a "bitch". Did I say Reply? I meant Reply All. Including TheBloggess. An e-mail tiff ensued with VP claiming that the TheBloggess should be grateful that they sent her the pitch as their sending pitches to her was what gave her relevancy. She ended the exchange with "Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy." Then, she blogged and tweeted about it.
Now, if you don't know, TheBloggess is big in the blogging world. She has almost 200,000 followers on Twitter and has a HUGE blog following. Her followers went berserk and inundated the company's Twitter account. Wil Wheaton who had posed for that photo on TheBloggess' site and who has almost 2 million Twitter followers tweeted about it. The PR company was forced to backpedal big time.
Slashdot Mirror
I and a large group of other people were stalked and harassed on Twitter by a user. This woman was clearly not all there mentally (claimed to be a prophet of God among other things). We complained to Twitter but were told there was nothing they could do. Her harassment, apparently, wasn't a TOS violation. So harass normal users: Fine. Use Twitter to complain about something the local government doesn't want you complaining about? Blocked! Twitter sure has their priorities in order. *rolling eyes*
(The stalker/harasser was eventually visited by her police department who told her to get offline and get help or else. She deleted her Twitter account... and is now active on Facebook where she thinks she can hide her harassment better.)
Exactly. In fact, it's not even about lost sales due to piracy. That's just the boogeyman they use with the politicians and the public. Their real concern is that the Internet removes control from their hands. Think about how you had access to music pre-Internet. You found out about music when a big label made you aware of it. Then, you purchased the music via a big-label approved store. The artists were kept in line via big-label-approved contracts and had no options. The big labels were the only way to sell music. Yes, there were non-big-record-label indie sources, but those were much, much smaller. You had a virtually zero chance of making it big without a big label.
Enter the Internet. Now artists can market and release music directly to their fans. The big labels have gone from THE SOURCE OF ALL MUSIC to Glorified Ad Agency. The big labels are (rightfully) concerned that they are going to go obsolete. So, they are changing with the times. Oh wait, no... That other thing... They are trying to turn the clock back and using all of their lobbying power to do it. It isn't that they don't care if the Internet breaks. They actively *WANT* it to break. That would get them back to the good old days when people just bought what they were told to buy and artists couldn't connect directly with fans.
One of the big ironies about this? The politicians try to protect Big Media, in part, to "save jobs." Meanwhile, the laws they make negatively impact the technology industry which provides far more jobs than Big Media does. This is even despite Big Media inflating their job numbers. (Did you provide catering for one movie shoot? Guess what? Your job is counted as being created by Big Media. As if you'd be completely out of work were it not for them!)
If we were really interested in creating jobs, shouldn't we protect the larger job creating industry over the smaller one? (Silly me. Applying logic and reason in a lobbying/bribery of politicians situation.)
Sadly, the "reasonable man test" fails when it is applied by some people. For example, if a group of people believed that whistling Dixie after 3PM on Sunday while wearing sneakers was an invitation for Satan to come and devour the souls of everyone in town, they'd ban the activity. To them, the ban was perfectly reasonable. To the rest of us, it's nuts.
It also fails in the grey areas of the law. Say, someone breaks into your house. You feel threatened, take out a gun, and wind up killing them. Are you guilty of murder? Probably not. What if the person was clearly fleeing your house at the time, though? What if the person was outside your house at the time you shot them? What if it was broad daylight and the person rang your doorbell? At some point, the "self defense/home invasion" rationale breaks down, but where it breaks down isn't always clear. Laws are broad generalities but real life is rarely as clean cut.
How similar do non-copied photos need to be to infringe on copyright. Let's say I take a photo of my family with a mountain range in the background. According to this ruling, gathering my family at that mountain range and taking a similar photo would infringe copyright. What if it was a different (but similar looking) mountain range? What if it wasn't my family, but people who looked like them? What if the people bore no real resemblance but wore the same kind of clothes my family was wearing? What if you took a group of look-a-likes of my family in similar clothes to the original photo and had them pose exactly like in the copyrighted photo, only in front of other objects? At what point does the copyright on the photo fail to be infringed.
In my opinion, this is a very dangerous ruling as it could be used to suppress photography. (Building owner: "We took a photo of our building and sell copies of it in the lobby gift shop. You taking a similar photo of it is copyright infringement and we'll sue you for $750,000 unless you delete that photo right now!")
While I appreciate any pro-space travel talk, I don't think he'd keep this campaign promise. Once elected, he'd probably take on the "important" issues (dismantling Obama's health care legislation, banning abortion, slashing taxes on the wealthy to "create jobs", etc). When he was up for re-election, he might trot out the Moon base as something to do when re-elected, but that would be the furthest it would go.
Alternatively, he might decide to move ahead with it and kill every other program NASA is working on to free up money (either for NASA or, more likely, for private companies) for a Moon base. Thus, a Moon base may get made, but it would come at the expense of some very valuable scientific research.
That's the weird thing about this. (Ok, *one* of the weird things.) The entertainment companies are saying we need SOPA/PIPA to save the job-creating entertainment industry*. However, the tech industry is much bigger than the entertainment industry and creates many more jobs. So we want to kill a big job-creating industry for the sake of a smaller job-creating industry? Sorry, MPAA/RIAA, but that doesn't make good economic sense.
*Never mind the fact that the entertainment industry inflates their figures. Do you run a catering business and provided food for a movie shoot? Congrats, Your job is now one "made possible" by the entertainment industry. By that logic, the tech industry can claim employing all of Dunkin' Donuts because they got some donuts for the weekly staff meeting.
Well, MPAA head (and former Senator) Chris Dodd has said that the reason SOPA failed was because people were able to speak their mind and the MPAA didn't have any outlet for "correcting" us. (No outlets at all... Ignore the fact that they own all of those TV stations.) We need to get rid of that pesky freedom of speech for the common folk (aka Consumers). Our only right should be the right to purchase the MPAA/RIAA-approved entertainment materials that the MPAA/RIAA tell us to purchase.
That's a similar situation to what's going on in the US. Most homes can get Internet access via their cable company or their phone company. Failing that, there are no other broadband options. Personally, my options are Time Warner Cable's service or Verizon's DSL service. (FIOS isn't available to my house.) Since Verizon's DSL service is much slower and much less likely to be supported (too many news reports of them ignoring it), I'm pretty much trapped on TWC's service.
I could have sworn that, in previous cases (not involving a US Senator), people were told that, if the scan found something odd, you could either accept the pat-down or be arrested.
In fact, here's an article that makes it clear what the TSA plans on doing to you if you refuse the pat down: http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/11/23/those-who-refuse-tsa-patdown-will-be-denied-airport-entry/
Granted, that's over a year old so the policy may have changed. However, under that policy, Rand Paul should have been escorted out of the airport by police officers. Then, if he tried to get back through security (via rebooking on another flight), the entire checkpoint would be shutdown and the terminal possibly evacuated.
I wonder what would happen if a non-Congressfolk tried doing exactly what Rand Paul did. Would they be arrested for refusing the pat down? Would they be kicked out of the airport with a police escort? Would their rebooking and attempting to go through security again require a shutdown of the security checkpoint?
There are ways of dealing with piracy that hurt pirates without hurting normal people. You just need specifically targeted laws with plenty of oversight in place to prevent abuse. We don't get that, though, because the MPAA/RIAA/etc aren't really interested in combating piracy. The Internet removed their complete control over the pipeline between creator and consumer and they want that control back. Destroying the Internet to get it is acceptable losses in their book. (Perhaps even a perk.)
I don't see how supporting sane copyright law (and opposing insane bills like SOPA/PIPA) is intellectual dishonesty. As frank_adrian314159 said, there are shades of gray. To give another example, if you are stranded in a blizzard and come upon an unoccupied house, you are allowed to break in to survive. You need to pay for anything you use/break, of course, but your survival trumps any breaking and entering charge. Supporting this, however, doesn't mean that I support people breaking into my house because they don't have any TV to watch the big game. You can't take a view to the extreme and then claim that not supporting the extreme means that you can't support the non-extreme view.
If I could change copyright law, I'd do three things:
1) Copyright would be dialed back to 14 years with an optional one-time (paid) 14 year extension. Everything else would become public domain.
2) There would be two classes of copyright infringement: Commercial (CD/DVD pressing operations) and Casual. Commercial would be punishable with the fines we have today and Casual would be punishable by some small multiplier of the value of the work. Say, 10 times. (A multiplier would be used for deterrent so people don't just copy and say "If I get caught, I'll just pay what I would have paid to buy it.") Also, you wouldn't be able to simply up the charge to Commercial infringement just because the person's site ran some ads. You'd need to prove that the ads took in a significant amount of money over cost.
3) Any copyright infringement case would need to be proven before a judge in open court before sites are taken down or fines are issued.
The government is always willing to listen when the people loudly protest a bill. And by "listen", I mean kill the bill, wait a bit for the complaints to subside, and then hide small pieces of the killed bill into other bills. The more "must pass" the bill it is hidden in, the better. This way, the government gets credit for having listened to the people and they still get to pass the bill right under everyone's noses.
So while the death of SOPA is something to celebrate, it doesn't mean it's time to declare "Mission Accomplished" and head home. We need to be constantly vigilant to ensure that mini-SOPAs don't sneak into our lawbooks. (And, yes, I am making a sort of terrorist-SOPA analogy.)
I don't think we could go back to non-automatic copyright. If I make a blog post and attach a few photos I took, would I need to register each photo and the text of the blog post with the US Copyright Office? What about if I make posts like that every day? How much additional paperwork would this add to blogging or any other online activity?
I think that the better solution would be to limit copyright terms to 14 years with an optional (paid) 14 year extension. Add in a method like Marillion states for notifying people of copyright infringement and the problem would be largely solved. In fact, we pretty much have a system like that with the DMCA. (One of the only good provisions in that.) If I post something online that you believe is copyrighted by you, you send a DMCA take down request. I can then take it down or reply with my reason why I think I'm allowed to keep it online. If you still disagree, you can take me to court to solve the matter. Is it abused at times? Definitely. Might it need some tweaking? Perhaps. But we don't need a whole new law (especially something like SOPA/PIPA) to solve the problem!
... The MPAA and RIAA have sued world governments for not requiring anti-piracy shock collars on all citizens. They claim that, were anti-piracy shock collars in place, piracy would disappear and people would go back to their rightful activities - buying music and movies. Critics charge that the shock collars inhibit freedom of speech... or at least they used to until they had shock collars put on them. Now they're all for the idea. Personally, I think that anti-piracy shock collars are horrib... *BBZZZZZTTT* WONDERFUL idea!
I try to avoid their interface any time I can. I use Seesmic Desktop to manage my Tweets.
The irony of this is, when Twitter was included on Google's Realtime Search, I preferred Google's search over Twitter's.
Ironically, I think you could have made a better case for longer copyrights back then (when getting the word out about a work too a lot of time) then today. I definitely think copyright should be scaled back. I'd be very happy if it went back to 14 years plus a one time optional renewal of 14 years. I'd even accept having anything 5 or more years old automatically renewed for the full 28 years and items older than 28 years old phased into the public domain over a few years (starting with the older content).
Do I get extra geek points for reading that as: Two girls and The One Ring? (My preciousssss.)
Not only that, but nature has a way of "sharing" seeds between farmers without the farmers even putting in any effort. In fact, if you wanted to specifically *NOT* share any seeds (say, due to Monstato threatening lawsuits), you'd have to take extreme measures to prevent natural sharing from happening.
Even when you aren't talking about copies, the content industry gets annoyed with sharing. Selling that book or CD you purchased to someone else? That should be made illegal because it costs them sales! Libraries lending books to people for free? How awful! More lost sales!!!
If John Deere acted like the RIAA/MPAA/Publishing Companies, they'd tell you that you're just buying a license to use their tractor and you can't loan it or sell it to anyone for any reason. (Of course, if it breaks, you can't just retain the license and get one that works.... You need to buy a license to a new one.)
The studios claim they need these long copyright terms to safe-guard their profits with the reasoning that hurting their profits will stop them from making more content. Putting aside the notion, for a second, that letting them earn $2 billion instead of $3 billion will result in a massive drop in content creation, I've got to wonder how much this older content is earning them. Yes, Lady and the Tramp gets released from the Disney Vault every so often (are they up to the Super Extreme Platinum edition now?), but how much does it bring in? What about The Seven Year Itch? The End of Eternity? Blue Suede Shoes?
It's probably not possible, but I'd love to see a breakdown of the earnings of the MPAA/RIAA by year of release. I'd be willing to bet that most of their earnings come from works released in the past 20 years. Content 21 years or older probably doesn't constitute much of their earnings. In fact, I think that either way, they lose the argument. If older content isn't earning them much, then why keep it locked under copyright? If it is earning them most of their money, then obviously their copyright control isn't getting them to create new content like they claimed they needed.
...Orangutans have better tech than I do!
...I've got to remember to re-read instead of just hitting Preview and then Submit. I was going to say that this whole situation reminds me of what happened with TheBloggess. Clueless company official, highly influential community member, giant social media tidal wave in response. I think the lesson for companies is you should treat all of your customers nicely because you never know when a mistreated customer will be able to bring a flood of bad PR against you.
A few months back, TheBloggess got a generic PR Pitch, completely disconnected from what she blogs about. She responded in her usual fashion, by directing them to a page that, in part, had a photo of Wil Wheaton collating papers. (See: http://thebloggess.com/heres-a-picture-of-wil-wheaton-collating-papers/ ) Usually, the PR companies that get this response don't reply or send back a polite response. A VP at this PR firm decided to reply to call her a "bitch". Did I say Reply? I meant Reply All. Including TheBloggess. An e-mail tiff ensued with VP claiming that the TheBloggess should be grateful that they sent her the pitch as their sending pitches to her was what gave her relevancy. She ended the exchange with "Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy." Then, she blogged and tweeted about it.
Now, if you don't know, TheBloggess is big in the blogging world. She has almost 200,000 followers on Twitter and has a HUGE blog following. Her followers went berserk and inundated the company's Twitter account. Wil Wheaton who had posed for that photo on TheBloggess' site and who has almost 2 million Twitter followers tweeted about it. The PR company was forced to backpedal big time.