So is that your thing? Do you make up things to criticize your opponents about? Why don't you stick to real issues?
From the April 29, 1996 Congressional Record:
Senator Rod Grams (R-Minnesota): Have you been to the White House lately, Mr. President? You'll see what fear looks like. With all the guards, the guns, the cement barriers, the police cruisers, Pennsylvania Avenue now looks like what some are calling a war zone. Or a bunker. This is not the White House of leaders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, who defined freedom's essence and took deep pride in being its stewards.
{snip}
In the year since the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue, the calls for its reopening have grown louder. There's a deep perception among many Americans that the closing was an emotional reaction--a judgment rendered too quickly, and initiated out of fear.
It's time for President Clinton to reconsider a decision made amidst such emotion, and replace it with one of reasoned courage.
So, are you a liar or just ignorant? Either way, you owe me an apology.
Are you so naive to think that the staffers weren't just counting for/against messages that they read and promply forgetting the text of the message (if they read all of it anyway)?
Some messages are not a simple for/against some small selected set of issues that Bush finds important.
You've got to be kidding. If you give money to a campaign it's public knowledge through the IRS, if you deduct your contribution (which any reasonable person would do).
From the IRS's web site (with highlighting by me):
You cannot deduct contributions made to a political candidate, a campaign committee, or a newsletter fund. Advertisements in convention bulletins and admissions to dinners or programs that benefit a political party or political candidate are not deductible.
So, what's your name, address, and Social Security number. I want to give a tip to the IRS about a good person to audit. By the way, just how stupid do you feel right now?
Really? Clinton paid attention to president@whitehouse.gov?
E-mail sent to president@whitehouse.gov was reviewed. It was not personally reviewed by Clinton, but it was reviewed by his staff and some pieces were brought to his attention.
Did you ever stop to think that nowdays, perhaps president@whitehouse.gov has a spam problem many orders of magnitude greater than your e-mail does?
Did you ever stop to think that it could be solved with a challenge-response reply? Or that Bush could recognize that spam is a major, multi-billion dollar problem and push for legislation to curb it?
Are you really so naive that you think that Bush is sitting there reading his own e-mail? He has a staff of people to read it for him. He doesn't see any spam. The for/against webform has little to do with spam. It's just an attempt to avoid reading messages. You can spend an hour composing a thoughtful message with the hopes that it will be shared with someone and the only thing that's happening is that they are looking at the for/against check box.
He was an accessible private citizen until he got shot. Then he wasnt quite asacessible as before, but could still ride about in the open, Until another one got shot.
The average Slashdot reader is too young to remember this, but Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn walked hand-in-hand from Capitol Hill to the White House on inauguration day. Right down the middle of the street.
I also remember all of the Republicans who called Clinton a coward and paranoid for blocking off Pennsylvania Avenue. You may notice that the only change since Bush has taken office is more armed guards and greater restrictions. Funny thing: I haven't heard any of those critics of Clinton's apolgizing...
The Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign has posted their donor list for the most recent quarter on the web. It not only includes the names of contributors but also the size of their donations. Interestingly, a large majority of the contributors to the Bush campaign contributed less than $200.
And this seems like a good idea to you? Can think of a way to violate a person's privacy that's much worse? Why not just have a big sign over the voting booth that lights up to show which candidate they voted for? It's crap like that making me proud to be a Democrat.
The Democrats also have the whole problem of Chinese-Americans and foreign companies funneling millions from the Chinese government into Bill Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996 (during the same time period Chinese received favored trade status and managed to pilfer nuclear used-to-be-secrets).
In sum, your statement could easily be: You want to talk to any elected official? It's easy -- just raise $100,000 for his/her re-election campaign and you'll get 10 minutes of face time! No problem.
Clinton isn't the one that killed president@whitehouse.gov. Bush is.
We are discussing law but in the context of a lay person. Lawyers use very specific language not non-lawyers.
I am not a lawyer and I strive to use the proper terminology. We owe it to ourselves to be well-enough versed in the laws that affect us to discuss those laws intelligently. Copyright infringement isn't theft any more than speeding is murder. If someone calls their Senator or Representative to oppose this bill, then we want them to do so in as intelligent, informed, and well-reasoned a manner as possible -- not call up and say "putting people in jail for for stealing stuff on the Internet would, like, really suck."
You and I know what they mean and the fact that they really are talking about copyright infringement is irrelevant. They got their point across and correcting them is, frankly, being pretentious.
There are about 1/4 million unique visitors to Slashdot every day (based on the last figures I saw). Slashdot is a news site of major proportion. If we perpetrate the myth that copyright infringement is "theft", then we play into the hands of those who are pushing for draconian punishments for downloading even a single MP3 file. The general public is far more likely to support the idea of jailing someone for "theft" than for downloading a song they just heard on the radio.
Look, as much as it pains me, I will apologize for dragging this out. Against my better judgement I kept hammering back when I should have just let the matter drop about 6 posts ago.
I'll reciprocate with an apology as I was equally at fault. I've got too much of a stubborn streak to just let things drop when they should.
I just hate being misrepresented more than I hate misinformation.
I may have misunderstood what you said, but please believe me when I say that I never intended to misrepresent what you said.
You and I both saw the same thing and both read it the same way. But it's useless to argue with someone like him. He will never admit that he's wrong. I'm not wasting any more time on it, but I wanted to say that I appreciated you speaking up.
But surely you'd agree that the victim of copyright infringement IS deprived of something?
Not necessarily. If you download a song that has been out of print for five years, no one is deprived of revenue. If I download a single song from a CD that there is no way that I would ever purchase, no one is deprived of any revenue.
If you're a musician, and you release a CD, and only a handful of CDs sell, but far more people seem to have an mp3 copy... would you say you have been deprived of something?
Let me ask you a question: If you released a CD with one good song and a sales price of $18.99, would you be surprised if far more people had an MP3 of the single than had a purchased copy of the album? Would you assume that all of those people with MP3s would have otherwise paid $18.99 for the whold CD?
I was saying that copyright infringement is a civil offense. It is. Get over it. There are rare exceptions unrelated to normal P2P filesharing which are also criminal offenses, but they are not germane to this discussion.
Hey Law-boy, do me a favor. Next time you put in a DVD, read the FBI notice. Pay attention to where it says that there are civil and criminal penalties for violating the copyright.
I read actual statutes, not notices on DVDs put up there to scare idiots. Making a copy of a DVD and putting it up on a P2P network is not a criminal offense (unless the DVD retails for more than $1000).
I'm sick of these lame ass semantic arguments. Who cares if it is legally considered theft? It is still illegal, and it is still morally wrong no matter what you call it.
Hey Illiterate-boy, I never said that MP3 trading was legal or moral. I just said that it was not theft. It's "illegal and morally wrong" to not come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Should you go to jail for five years and pay $250,000 every time you do it?
And if I said their are pigs and cows on a farm, you would assume there were pigcows?
Did I say "civilcriminal"? No.
Please explain to me how you parse this sentence to get an assumption that both civil and criminal liability would apply to the same acts?
If someone made copies of a Madonna CD and sold them, they would have have committed a criminal act of copyright infringement. Are you telling me that you believe that means they would be immune from civil prosecution? Thats how civil and criminal liability can apply to the same act. If you murder someone, you can be tried for a crime and then the victim's family can sue you in civil court.
Face it: If your writing had been clear, there would not have been numerous people all replying with the same points I made.
Sounds like the exact problem I tried to address with the initial post, doesn't it?
Good. At least we can agree that your post did little to clarify things.
The poster to whom I replied did not discuss the distinctions, he/she stated baldly that copyright infringement was a civil offense.
Nor did you discuss the distinctions. Your message could easily have been interpreted as saying that there was always both a criminal and a civil component to copyright infringement.
If anybody is owed an apology, it is me for your presumptuous lecturing on a topic I had already researched and cited.
Add me to the list of people to whom you owe an apology. Had you written more clearly in the first place, I would nat have had to waste my time clarifying for all involved that the law criminalizes copyright infringement in a small minority of cases -- most of which are unrelated to filesharing.
The real problem with this law (and it's sponsors) is that they would like us to believe that it is OK to ruin someone's life over one music single.
And they would like us to believe that taxpayers should spend tens of thousands of dollars to house each of those people in jail. Once they have locked up everyone who has used illegal drugs and traded MP3s, how much money will have to be collected from the remaining one third of the population that is not in jail?
I don't want to spend millions of tax dollars to protect the financial interests of the RIAA, Time-Warner, and Madonna. We have teachers that are underpaid, a $455 billion dollar deficit estimated for this year, and state governments that can't afford basic services for residents. There are far more useful ways to spend that money.
I am so sick of this infinitely repeated bullshit claim.
The only "bullshit" is what you posted. Why don't you try reading the material at the links you provided:
(a) Criminal Infringement. -
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
As you should be able to see from the above, only some specific forms of copyright infringement are criminal offenses. Someone who Xerox's an article from a magazine for their personal use has not committed a criminal offense. Someone who downloads a song from Kazaa solely for the purposes of listening to it has not commited a criminal offense. What is criminalized is only willful copyright infringement for profit or when such willful infringement is of works with a retail value of more than $1,000 in a six month (180 day) period. Now please apologize to the original poster who you accused of posting "bullshit."
So, why cant we just admit that none of us are lawers in a courtroom, just people posting on a web site, and let normal useage of words go?
Because we are discussing laws and there has evolved very specific language that is key to understanding and discussing the law. If someone does not feel qualified to discuss the law in a meaningful way, then they should bow-out rather than misusing legal terminology and confusing important issues. Someone need not have a law degree to understand that theft and copyright infringement have wholly different legal meanings.
"Theft" is a crime. "Copyright infringement" is a civil offense. The people sponsoring this bill would like nothing more than to have the general public think of "copyright infringement" as "theft" -- because the average person is far more likely to believe that someone should go to jail for theft than for copyright infringement.
Theft and copyright infringement are different for a very important reason: In a theft, the victim is deprived of something that they previously had, whether it is money, jewelry, a car, or some other tangible thing. In copyright infringement, the victim has no less after the crime than before.
If you're downloading a program of which the express purpose is exchanging files it's not too much a reach to think that filesharing would be on by default. The problem would be if you can't disable it.
That's fine for a new installation and I'd have no complaint. But the program claims "You can just install this on top of a current Kazaa Lite installation. That way all your settings will be remembered." *IF* it is turning filesharing back on without warning the user, that's a major problem in my book. Suppose a user chose to put all of the downloaded files in the "My Documents" folder with every other document that he ever created. Because he has filesharing disabled, his personal files are not being shared. Now he installs a new version and now every file in there is available over Kazaa. That's my gripe in a nutshell.
I didn't take it personally. But I did think that your wisecracks were a bit flippant given that the software is choosing to share files from people's computers without the knowledge or permission of those people.
However, I feel the need to retort some of these things.
I just came back from fishing, but apparently the fish aren't the only ones taking the bait.
So you installed a P2P file sharing app, and it turned ON file sharing?!
Yes. After it specifically stated that it would retain the prior settings -- which had filesharing disabled. Many people choose to use P2P networks for download only.
Those BASTARDS! This is a conspiracy of machiavellian proportions!
I hope that you install a filesharing app and it decides, on its own, without informing you, to share a directory which contains your credit card number, your bank statements, nude pictures of your partner, and the letter complaining about the failure of Viagra to work for you.
I'm so glad someone's concerned about trying to obey the laws and legally binding contracts!
Did it ever occur to you that what many people are concerned about is being sued for tens of thousands of dollars by the RIAA and losing their broadband connections?
I'm sure you're just using it to put up scans of your art work you've put in the public domain, get the latest linux, and share open source PHP scripts.
What I use it for is none of your business and it is totally irrelevent. The writers of Kazaa-Lite have no right to put anyone at legal and financial risk based on your assumptions about what the software is used for. They claimed that installing over older versions maintains the settings when, apparently, it does not.
Slashdot Mirror
From the April 29, 1996 Congressional Record:So, are you a liar or just ignorant? Either way, you owe me an apology.
Are you so naive to think that the staffers weren't just counting for/against messages that they read and promply forgetting the text of the message (if they read all of it anyway)?
Some messages are not a simple for/against some small selected set of issues that Bush finds important.
From the IRS's web site (with highlighting by me):So, what's your name, address, and Social Security number. I want to give a tip to the IRS about a good person to audit. By the way, just how stupid do you feel right now?
Really? Clinton paid attention to president@whitehouse.gov?
E-mail sent to president@whitehouse.gov was reviewed. It was not personally reviewed by Clinton, but it was reviewed by his staff and some pieces were brought to his attention.
Did you ever stop to think that nowdays, perhaps president@whitehouse.gov has a spam problem many orders of magnitude greater than your e-mail does?
Did you ever stop to think that it could be solved with a challenge-response reply? Or that Bush could recognize that spam is a major, multi-billion dollar problem and push for legislation to curb it?
Are you really so naive that you think that Bush is sitting there reading his own e-mail? He has a staff of people to read it for him. He doesn't see any spam. The for/against webform has little to do with spam. It's just an attempt to avoid reading messages. You can spend an hour composing a thoughtful message with the hopes that it will be shared with someone and the only thing that's happening is that they are looking at the for/against check box.
He was an accessible private citizen until he got shot. Then he wasnt quite asacessible as before, but could still ride about in the open, Until another one got shot.
The average Slashdot reader is too young to remember this, but Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn walked hand-in-hand from Capitol Hill to the White House on inauguration day. Right down the middle of the street.
I also remember all of the Republicans who called Clinton a coward and paranoid for blocking off Pennsylvania Avenue. You may notice that the only change since Bush has taken office is more armed guards and greater restrictions. Funny thing: I haven't heard any of those critics of Clinton's apolgizing...
The Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign has posted their donor list for the most recent quarter on the web. It not only includes the names of contributors but also the size of their donations. Interestingly, a large majority of the contributors to the Bush campaign contributed less than $200.
And this seems like a good idea to you? Can think of a way to violate a person's privacy that's much worse? Why not just have a big sign over the voting booth that lights up to show which candidate they voted for? It's crap like that making me proud to be a Democrat.
The Democrats also have the whole problem of Chinese-Americans and foreign companies funneling millions from the Chinese government into Bill Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996 (during the same time period Chinese received favored trade status and managed to pilfer nuclear used-to-be-secrets).
That's better than the Republican Attorneys General calling corporations and trade groups subject to lawsuits or regulations by their state governments to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions for the GOP.
In sum, your statement could easily be:
You want to talk to any elected official? It's easy -- just raise $100,000 for his/her re-election campaign and you'll get 10 minutes of face time! No problem.
Clinton isn't the one that killed president@whitehouse.gov. Bush is.
We are discussing law but in the context of a lay person. Lawyers use very specific language not non-lawyers.
I am not a lawyer and I strive to use the proper terminology. We owe it to ourselves to be well-enough versed in the laws that affect us to discuss those laws intelligently. Copyright infringement isn't theft any more than speeding is murder. If someone calls their Senator or Representative to oppose this bill, then we want them to do so in as intelligent, informed, and well-reasoned a manner as possible -- not call up and say "putting people in jail for for stealing stuff on the Internet would, like, really suck."
You and I know what they mean and the fact that they really are talking about copyright infringement is irrelevant. They got their point across and correcting them is, frankly, being pretentious.
There are about 1/4 million unique visitors to Slashdot every day (based on the last figures I saw). Slashdot is a news site of major proportion. If we perpetrate the myth that copyright infringement is "theft", then we play into the hands of those who are pushing for draconian punishments for downloading even a single MP3 file. The general public is far more likely to support the idea of jailing someone for "theft" than for downloading a song they just heard on the radio.
I can just hear the rubberkneckers who have followed this thread to the end gagging.
;-)
Then our work here is done...
Look, as much as it pains me, I will apologize for dragging this out. Against my better judgement I kept hammering back when I should have just let the matter drop about 6 posts ago.
/. friend list.
I'll reciprocate with an apology as I was equally at fault. I've got too much of a stubborn streak to just let things drop when they should.
I just hate being misrepresented more than I hate misinformation.
I may have misunderstood what you said, but please believe me when I say that I never intended to misrepresent what you said.
Peace?
Of course, and you're now on my
Let this be a lesson to you: Never start a flame war with a guy on vacation...
You don't even want to go there. I'm currently jobless -- but fortunately for you, it's sunny outside and I have a boat to prep.
You and I both saw the same thing and both read it the same way. But it's useless to argue with someone like him. He will never admit that he's wrong. I'm not wasting any more time on it, but I wanted to say that I appreciated you speaking up.
Okay. You are 100% correct. I am, and have from the beginning of this, been completely wrong. Happy? I don't have time for this stupidity.
But surely you'd agree that the victim of copyright infringement IS deprived of something?
Not necessarily. If you download a song that has been out of print for five years, no one is deprived of revenue. If I download a single song from a CD that there is no way that I would ever purchase, no one is deprived of any revenue.
If you're a musician, and you release a CD, and only a handful of CDs sell, but far more people seem to have an mp3 copy... would you say you have been deprived of something?
Let me ask you a question: If you released a CD with one good song and a sales price of $18.99, would you be surprised if far more people had an MP3 of the single than had a purchased copy of the album? Would you assume that all of those people with MP3s would have otherwise paid $18.99 for the whold CD?
you were saying?
I was saying that copyright infringement is a civil offense. It is. Get over it. There are rare exceptions unrelated to normal P2P filesharing which are also criminal offenses, but they are not germane to this discussion.
Hey Law-boy, do me a favor. Next time you put in a DVD, read the FBI notice. Pay attention to where it says that there are civil and criminal penalties for violating the copyright.
I read actual statutes, not notices on DVDs put up there to scare idiots. Making a copy of a DVD and putting it up on a P2P network is not a criminal offense (unless the DVD retails for more than $1000).
I'm sick of these lame ass semantic arguments. Who cares if it is legally considered theft? It is still illegal, and it is still morally wrong no matter what you call it.
Hey Illiterate-boy, I never said that MP3 trading was legal or moral. I just said that it was not theft. It's "illegal and morally wrong" to not come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Should you go to jail for five years and pay $250,000 every time you do it?
And if I said their are pigs and cows on a farm, you would assume there were pigcows?
Did I say "civilcriminal"? No.
Please explain to me how you parse this sentence to get an assumption that both civil and criminal liability would apply to the same acts?
If someone made copies of a Madonna CD and sold them, they would have have committed a criminal act of copyright infringement. Are you telling me that you believe that means they would be immune from civil prosecution? Thats how civil and criminal liability can apply to the same act. If you murder someone, you can be tried for a crime and then the victim's family can sue you in civil court.
Face it: If your writing had been clear, there would not have been numerous people all replying with the same points I made.
Sounds like the exact problem I tried to address with the initial post, doesn't it?
Good. At least we can agree that your post did little to clarify things.
I think you mean 'after the infringement than before.'
OUCH! I really walked right into that one, didn't I. Oh well, no sense in trying to make excuses. Good catch.
The poster to whom I replied did not discuss the distinctions, he/she stated baldly that copyright infringement was a civil offense.
Nor did you discuss the distinctions. Your message could easily have been interpreted as saying that there was always both a criminal and a civil component to copyright infringement.
If anybody is owed an apology, it is me for your presumptuous lecturing on a topic I had already researched and cited.
Add me to the list of people to whom you owe an apology. Had you written more clearly in the first place, I would nat have had to waste my time clarifying for all involved that the law criminalizes copyright infringement in a small minority of cases -- most of which are unrelated to filesharing.
The real problem with this law (and it's sponsors) is that they would like us to believe that it is OK to ruin someone's life over one music single.
And they would like us to believe that taxpayers should spend tens of thousands of dollars to house each of those people in jail. Once they have locked up everyone who has used illegal drugs and traded MP3s, how much money will have to be collected from the remaining one third of the population that is not in jail?
I don't want to spend millions of tax dollars to protect the financial interests of the RIAA, Time-Warner, and Madonna. We have teachers that are underpaid, a $455 billion dollar deficit estimated for this year, and state governments that can't afford basic services for residents. There are far more useful ways to spend that money.
The only "bullshit" is what you posted. Why don't you try reading the material at the links you provided:As you should be able to see from the above, only some specific forms of copyright infringement are criminal offenses. Someone who Xerox's an article from a magazine for their personal use has not committed a criminal offense. Someone who downloads a song from Kazaa solely for the purposes of listening to it has not commited a criminal offense. What is criminalized is only willful copyright infringement for profit or when such willful infringement is of works with a retail value of more than $1,000 in a six month (180 day) period. Now please apologize to the original poster who you accused of posting "bullshit."
So, why cant we just admit that none of us are lawers in a courtroom, just people posting on a web site, and let normal useage of words go?
Because we are discussing laws and there has evolved very specific language that is key to understanding and discussing the law. If someone does not feel qualified to discuss the law in a meaningful way, then they should bow-out rather than misusing legal terminology and confusing important issues. Someone need not have a law degree to understand that theft and copyright infringement have wholly different legal meanings.
"Theft" is a crime. "Copyright infringement" is a civil offense. The people sponsoring this bill would like nothing more than to have the general public think of "copyright infringement" as "theft" -- because the average person is far more likely to believe that someone should go to jail for theft than for copyright infringement.
Theft and copyright infringement are different for a very important reason: In a theft, the victim is deprived of something that they previously had, whether it is money, jewelry, a car, or some other tangible thing. In copyright infringement, the victim has no less after the crime than before.
Are you ... trolling?
No. Read on...
If you're downloading a program of which the express purpose is exchanging files it's not too much a reach to think that filesharing would be on by default. The problem would be if you can't disable it.
That's fine for a new installation and I'd have no complaint. But the program claims "You can just install this on top of a current Kazaa Lite installation. That way all your settings will be remembered." *IF* it is turning filesharing back on without warning the user, that's a major problem in my book. Suppose a user chose to put all of the downloaded files in the "My Documents" folder with every other document that he ever created. Because he has filesharing disabled, his personal files are not being shared. Now he installs a new version and now every file in there is available over Kazaa. That's my gripe in a nutshell.
Wow... someone took this a little personally
I didn't take it personally. But I did think that your wisecracks were a bit flippant given that the software is choosing to share files from people's computers without the knowledge or permission of those people.
However, I feel the need to retort some of these things.
I just came back from fishing, but apparently the fish aren't the only ones taking the bait.
So you installed a P2P file sharing app, and it turned ON file sharing?!
Yes. After it specifically stated that it would retain the prior settings -- which had filesharing disabled. Many people choose to use P2P networks for download only.
Those BASTARDS! This is a conspiracy of machiavellian proportions!
I hope that you install a filesharing app and it decides, on its own, without informing you, to share a directory which contains your credit card number, your bank statements, nude pictures of your partner, and the letter complaining about the failure of Viagra to work for you.
I'm so glad someone's concerned about trying to obey the laws and legally binding contracts!
Did it ever occur to you that what many people are concerned about is being sued for tens of thousands of dollars by the RIAA and losing their broadband connections?
I'm sure you're just using it to put up scans of your art work you've put in the public domain, get the latest linux, and share open source PHP scripts.
What I use it for is none of your business and it is totally irrelevent. The writers of Kazaa-Lite have no right to put anyone at legal and financial risk based on your assumptions about what the software is used for. They claimed that installing over older versions maintains the settings when, apparently, it does not.
Take your morality play elsewhere.