If by "professional artist" you mean someone like Britney Spears, I say good riddance. There was good music before copyright, and there will be good music after.
So when do you draw the line? What if your company was making dangerous chemicals and not disposing of them properly? What if they were making chemical weapons? What if they were selling chemical weapons to terrorists?
Ethics that only come into play when it's convenient to use them aren't really ethics.
chrisd's company evidently has a higher standard of ethics for its employees than you have for yourself. Most of the world would probably side with you on this one too, but if they want to miss out on potentially great talent because of this, that's the sacrifice they're making.
Comparing one company screening people based on their having worked for an unethical company, and a country assisting the blacklisting of people who belonged to a political organization is unfair.
While it's a pain to do this to those who work at SCO and have no say in their company's major decisions, life is full of tough choices. If you choose to work for an unethical company, be it SCO, Monsanto, Philip Morris, or whatever, you have to know there will be consequences.
If companies knew that their peons would walk out when they started doing unethical things then there might be some incentive for them not to do it. Afterall, recent times have shown that we can't count on the justice system to fix things.
"I was just following orders" may work in the military, but us civies have choices, and we should be held accountable for them.
If someone misconfigures their web server so it points at "C:\My Finances" and you surf to their site, are you breaking into their system? What if they configure it so it points to "C:\" and you click on the "My Finances" link? What if they have a default "Welcome to XXX" page but you type in the url: "http://www.icantconfigureiis.com/My%20Finances/"? What if you do a portscan on them and try to connect to a nonstandard port? What if you run a rootkit on them?
Obviously the latter examples are reasonably defined as "breaking in", and the former ones are not, but where do you draw the line? Is it a judgement call about what someone reasonably expects you to be able to see?
From what I have read, it is pretty obvious that this guy saw some things that he reasonably couldn't believe he was supposed to see. On the other hand, he did it all through a web browser. It's not like he was running rootkits. He was simply poking around and being nosy. The onus should be on the NY Times to have some reasonable standard of security in place that can't be compromised by Mozilla.
Read the subject. The problem is the damage figures.
I haven't been following the story closely, but nothing I've seen has suggested that he attacked them in any way, DoS or other.
How did it cost the NY Times to have someone find a security flaw in their system? How much did it save them that the guy who found it didn't exploit it?
If someone tells me my shoe is untied, I can't sue them for the time it takes me to tie the shoe. Whether I was told or not, the shoe would have been untied. At least I now know the lace is loose and I can fix it before I trip and hurt myself.
Am I nuts, or should the Lexis-Nexis damages be related to their loss of business because of the resources he was using? Damages should not be the same as "not realized profits", actually in this case it sounds like they're talking about revenues, not profits. In fact, if you took the typical profit they make on $300k worth of services and subtract it from $300k that should be the damages.
If I sneak into a movie and the theater is empty, I'm not costing the theater anything. Even if I sneak in with food and leave some wrappers behind, their cleanup people would still have had to clean up, it will simply take them slightly longer. If you want to put a price on this you couldn't possibly justify more than 25 cents. The only way in which my sneaking into the theater costs them money is if my presence keeps other people from paying for seats, and that's not likely unless the room is almost completely full. If they sue me for damages, the damage I caused them is not the price of a full-price ticket. That would be ridiculous.
That would mean the domain exists and the webserver it points to exists, but that the page can't be found on the web server. What you should get is a DNS error.
You're right. I was trying to draw a distinction between civil law and criminal law. Most people who seem to think the RIAA is in the right are saying the people are criminals, which they're not.
17 USC Sec. 1101 - Unauthorized fixation and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos
...
(b) Definition. - As used in this section, the term ''traffic in'' means transport, transfer, or otherwise dispose of, to another, as consideration for anything of value, or make or obtain control of with intent to transport, transfer, or dispose of.
So according to my (admittedly limited) understanding of this section, unless you're exchanging the infringing material for something of value, then you're not doing anything wrong. Placing MP3s in a shared directory doesn't get you anything of value. You don't get faster downloads if you share, in fact they're slightly slower. Actively sharing files actually costs you, rather than helping you.
17 USC Sec. 512 - Limitations on liability relating to material online
(c) Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users. -
In general. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider
(A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;
(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware offacts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
(B) does not receive a financial benefit directly
attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and
(C) upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
A clever lawyer would have said that the girl's mom is a service provider. She pays for the service, right? And unless she was notified by the RIAA of her daughter's infringment she wasn't obligated to do anything.
What's also interesting is further down:
To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following:
(i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
(iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
It's probably part of the settlement deal. We don't sue you for millions, in exchange you confess in public about how wrong you are, and let our PR dept. put words in your mouth.
"I am no lawyer either but I believe in most cases ignorance is not a viable defense. I.e. the person who actively engaged in installation of the sharing/distribution software like KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. is ultimately responsible for damages caused to copyright owners by distributing copyrighted content that that person does not have the right to distribute."
I've heard that said, with respect to law, but in this case I have trouble believing it. Were any people who were attacked by the recent MS worm sued for hosting the worm? I doubt it. What if you install a program that contains a trojan or spyware? I don't think that's generally seen as your fault. So why are you responsible if the default settings for a program are insecure? Isn't that what it is, if the default settings for a given application tries to share your music files?
We're talking about infringing copyrights, not stealing.
The justification for why infringing on copyrights is not bad has nothing to do with the bigness or badness of the company, it has to do with the right to own ideas, something I don't believe in.
Good gawd, are you really that much of a lapdog to anybody who declares themselves part of "the authories"? If someone declared breathing illegal would you keel over and die? I obey laws I think are reasonable, and disregard ones I don't. That's what I like to call "sanity".
"The RIAA needs to sack the lawyers and send their marketing people back to school for the fundamentals."
The RIAA is a cartel for the recording industry. All they do is litigate and market. If they sacked the marketing people and the lawyers the only people left would be Juan the janitor and Annie the receptionist. Not that I'm disagreeing with your plan, I'm just saying it's not like they have a useful side we rarely see.
I hope you manage to find a way. Teaching your kid that just because something is illegal doesn't mean it is morally wrong is a very important lesson. If people hadn't realized that we'd still have slavery, women wouldn't be allowed to vote, etc.
If you're still having trouble explaining it to the kid, maybe use this as an example: "Jimmy, you know how it's bad to push someone, most of the time? Well, if you see that somebody is about to be run over it is a good idea to push them out of the way. Laws are like that too. Most of the time they're good, but sometimes they're bad. Until you know the difference, it's probably better to think of them all as being good, but when you grow up you'll realize that sometimes they're bad."
Naah, it's like this. Say you buy a bunch of CDs, burn them to CD-Rs, and take them to work, leaving the originals at home. Then you pile them on your desk and don't pay much attention to them. Every once in a while someone takes one.
How, exactly, are you doing anything wrong? Is it your duty to lock up the CDs so nobody steals them? No? So how is it your duty to make sure that everybody who downloads the MP3s from your computer has a legal right to them?
What if you, as a user of a P2P system, put up a notice on your computer saying: "These files are provided for the RIAA companies only. If you ever need a copy of a song you have released please feel free to download it from me. If you do not have the rights to download these MP3s don't do so. If I happen to notice you doing that and can be sure you don't have the right to download them, I'll tell the police."
if you have ripped your CD collection to your PC, you probably don't have rights to distribute that content
That's the crux of the argument right there. If you rip files to a directory that happens to be shared under a file sharing program, can you be charged with distributing them? You're not advertising them, someone has to come to you to find them. You're probably not monitoring them either. Say you buy a bunch of CDs then copy them onto CD-Rs for ease of use. If you have them somewhere where people can easily take them, does that count as distributing them? Say they're sitting in a pile on your desk at work, is it your fault if a co-worker takes them?
I'm no lawyer, but I would guess the argument boils down to whether or not the person using the filesharing program put the files in a place where they're shared for the purposes of sharing them. But what if they simply had a directory called "C:\music", and they used that directory for their CD-ripping software, their upload directory and their download directory. You could accuse them of being sloppy, but can you convict them of distributing?
Another convincing argument the defence lawyers should use is that most filesharing programs don't close when you close their main window. A person might have shared files because their roommate wanted to borrow them, then closed down the window after the roommate was done, not knowing that the program hadn't truly shut down. Those of us who are technical might know that there are better ways to share files on a LAN than using a P2P app, but a lot of less sophistimicated users might not.
I think those of us who hate the RIAA, MPAA and other cartels should help the defence lawyers out. We should come up with enough justification why someone might be sharing files that the cartels can't prove that someone was knowingly infringing on their copyright. I've come up with two reasons: sloppiness when it comes to organising their directories and not knowing the program was still running. Who can do better?
Except that games have never been known to kill anybody. Except for that, you're right. But then again, there's that minor bit about guns killing and games entertaining.
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I'll do that when people stop using the "music only exists because of copyright" strawman.
If by "professional artist" you mean someone like Britney Spears, I say good riddance. There was good music before copyright, and there will be good music after.
So when do you draw the line? What if your company was making dangerous chemicals and not disposing of them properly? What if they were making chemical weapons? What if they were selling chemical weapons to terrorists?
Ethics that only come into play when it's convenient to use them aren't really ethics.
chrisd's company evidently has a higher standard of ethics for its employees than you have for yourself. Most of the world would probably side with you on this one too, but if they want to miss out on potentially great talent because of this, that's the sacrifice they're making.
"And that's why I killed the man, your honour. He had money, I needed it, I was bigger and so I took it."
C'mon, along with paying bills and feeding children, a parent also has the duty to teach his children ethics.
Comparing one company screening people based on their having worked for an unethical company, and a country assisting the blacklisting of people who belonged to a political organization is unfair.
While it's a pain to do this to those who work at SCO and have no say in their company's major decisions, life is full of tough choices. If you choose to work for an unethical company, be it SCO, Monsanto, Philip Morris, or whatever, you have to know there will be consequences.
If companies knew that their peons would walk out when they started doing unethical things then there might be some incentive for them not to do it. Afterall, recent times have shown that we can't count on the justice system to fix things.
"I was just following orders" may work in the military, but us civies have choices, and we should be held accountable for them.
What's funny though, is that the Indians are probably constantly groaning at how the locals are mispronouncing the local rivers/landmarks.
Who defines "breaking into"?
If someone misconfigures their web server so it points at "C:\My Finances" and you surf to their site, are you breaking into their system? What if they configure it so it points to "C:\" and you click on the "My Finances" link? What if they have a default "Welcome to XXX" page but you type in the url: "http://www.icantconfigureiis.com/My%20Finances/"? What if you do a portscan on them and try to connect to a nonstandard port? What if you run a rootkit on them?
Obviously the latter examples are reasonably defined as "breaking in", and the former ones are not, but where do you draw the line? Is it a judgement call about what someone reasonably expects you to be able to see?
From what I have read, it is pretty obvious that this guy saw some things that he reasonably couldn't believe he was supposed to see. On the other hand, he did it all through a web browser. It's not like he was running rootkits. He was simply poking around and being nosy. The onus should be on the NY Times to have some reasonable standard of security in place that can't be compromised by Mozilla.
Read the subject. The problem is the damage figures.
I haven't been following the story closely, but nothing I've seen has suggested that he attacked them in any way, DoS or other.
How did it cost the NY Times to have someone find a security flaw in their system? How much did it save them that the guy who found it didn't exploit it?
If someone tells me my shoe is untied, I can't sue them for the time it takes me to tie the shoe. Whether I was told or not, the shoe would have been untied. At least I now know the lace is loose and I can fix it before I trip and hurt myself.
Am I nuts, or should the Lexis-Nexis damages be related to their loss of business because of the resources he was using? Damages should not be the same as "not realized profits", actually in this case it sounds like they're talking about revenues, not profits. In fact, if you took the typical profit they make on $300k worth of services and subtract it from $300k that should be the damages.
If I sneak into a movie and the theater is empty, I'm not costing the theater anything. Even if I sneak in with food and leave some wrappers behind, their cleanup people would still have had to clean up, it will simply take them slightly longer. If you want to put a price on this you couldn't possibly justify more than 25 cents. The only way in which my sneaking into the theater costs them money is if my presence keeps other people from paying for seats, and that's not likely unless the room is almost completely full. If they sue me for damages, the damage I caused them is not the price of a full-price ticket. That would be ridiculous.
So basically the NY court system is like starbucks. You go from Supreme to Apellate to Appeals. Isn't there such a thing as a regular court?
That would mean the domain exists and the webserver it points to exists, but that the page can't be found on the web server. What you should get is a DNS error.
You're right. I was trying to draw a distinction between civil law and criminal law. Most people who seem to think the RIAA is in the right are saying the people are criminals, which they're not.
17 USC Sec. 1101 - Unauthorized fixation and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos
(b) Definition. - As used in this section, the term ''traffic in'' means transport, transfer, or otherwise dispose of, to another, as consideration for anything of value, or make or obtain control of with intent to transport, transfer, or dispose of.
So according to my (admittedly limited) understanding of this section, unless you're exchanging the infringing material for something of value, then you're not doing anything wrong. Placing MP3s in a shared directory doesn't get you anything of value. You don't get faster downloads if you share, in fact they're slightly slower. Actively sharing files actually costs you, rather than helping you.
17 USC Sec. 512 - Limitations on liability relating to material online
(c) Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users. -
(A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;
(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware offacts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
(B) does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and
(C) upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
A clever lawyer would have said that the girl's mom is a service provider. She pays for the service, right? And unless she was notified by the RIAA of her daughter's infringment she wasn't obligated to do anything.
What's also interesting is further down:
To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following:
(i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii) Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
(iv) Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v) A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
So unless there is a signature, th
It's probably part of the settlement deal. We don't sue you for millions, in exchange you confess in public about how wrong you are, and let our PR dept. put words in your mouth.
If it was illegal then how come she wasn't arrested? Do you not understand the difference between a lawsuit and an arrest?
"I am no lawyer either but I believe in most cases ignorance is not a viable defense. I.e. the person who actively engaged in installation of the sharing/distribution software like KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. is ultimately responsible for damages caused to copyright owners by distributing copyrighted content that that person does not have the right to distribute."
I've heard that said, with respect to law, but in this case I have trouble believing it. Were any people who were attacked by the recent MS worm sued for hosting the worm? I doubt it. What if you install a program that contains a trojan or spyware? I don't think that's generally seen as your fault. So why are you responsible if the default settings for a program are insecure? Isn't that what it is, if the default settings for a given application tries to share your music files?
We're talking about infringing copyrights, not stealing.
The justification for why infringing on copyrights is not bad has nothing to do with the bigness or badness of the company, it has to do with the right to own ideas, something I don't believe in.
Good gawd, are you really that much of a lapdog to anybody who declares themselves part of "the authories"? If someone declared breathing illegal would you keel over and die? I obey laws I think are reasonable, and disregard ones I don't. That's what I like to call "sanity".
"The RIAA needs to sack the lawyers and send their marketing people back to school for the fundamentals."
The RIAA is a cartel for the recording industry. All they do is litigate and market. If they sacked the marketing people and the lawyers the only people left would be Juan the janitor and Annie the receptionist. Not that I'm disagreeing with your plan, I'm just saying it's not like they have a useful side we rarely see.
I hope you manage to find a way. Teaching your kid that just because something is illegal doesn't mean it is morally wrong is a very important lesson. If people hadn't realized that we'd still have slavery, women wouldn't be allowed to vote, etc.
If you're still having trouble explaining it to the kid, maybe use this as an example: "Jimmy, you know how it's bad to push someone, most of the time? Well, if you see that somebody is about to be run over it is a good idea to push them out of the way. Laws are like that too. Most of the time they're good, but sometimes they're bad. Until you know the difference, it's probably better to think of them all as being good, but when you grow up you'll realize that sometimes they're bad."
Naah, it's like this. Say you buy a bunch of CDs, burn them to CD-Rs, and take them to work, leaving the originals at home. Then you pile them on your desk and don't pay much attention to them. Every once in a while someone takes one.
How, exactly, are you doing anything wrong? Is it your duty to lock up the CDs so nobody steals them? No? So how is it your duty to make sure that everybody who downloads the MP3s from your computer has a legal right to them?
What if you, as a user of a P2P system, put up a notice on your computer saying: "These files are provided for the RIAA companies only. If you ever need a copy of a song you have released please feel free to download it from me. If you do not have the rights to download these MP3s don't do so. If I happen to notice you doing that and can be sure you don't have the right to download them, I'll tell the police."
Who says the filesharing is illegal? If it is, how come the people are being sued instead of arrested?
if you have ripped your CD collection to your PC, you probably don't have rights to distribute that content
That's the crux of the argument right there. If you rip files to a directory that happens to be shared under a file sharing program, can you be charged with distributing them? You're not advertising them, someone has to come to you to find them. You're probably not monitoring them either. Say you buy a bunch of CDs then copy them onto CD-Rs for ease of use. If you have them somewhere where people can easily take them, does that count as distributing them? Say they're sitting in a pile on your desk at work, is it your fault if a co-worker takes them?
I'm no lawyer, but I would guess the argument boils down to whether or not the person using the filesharing program put the files in a place where they're shared for the purposes of sharing them. But what if they simply had a directory called "C:\music", and they used that directory for their CD-ripping software, their upload directory and their download directory. You could accuse them of being sloppy, but can you convict them of distributing?
Another convincing argument the defence lawyers should use is that most filesharing programs don't close when you close their main window. A person might have shared files because their roommate wanted to borrow them, then closed down the window after the roommate was done, not knowing that the program hadn't truly shut down. Those of us who are technical might know that there are better ways to share files on a LAN than using a P2P app, but a lot of less sophistimicated users might not.
I think those of us who hate the RIAA, MPAA and other cartels should help the defence lawyers out. We should come up with enough justification why someone might be sharing files that the cartels can't prove that someone was knowingly infringing on their copyright. I've come up with two reasons: sloppiness when it comes to organising their directories and not knowing the program was still running. Who can do better?
Except that games have never been known to kill anybody. Except for that, you're right. But then again, there's that minor bit about guns killing and games entertaining.
The other real question is, what country was dumb enough to make getting guns easy, either for the kids or the ones who the kids got them from.