That's all fine and good. But don't believe for a second that it's file sharing that's making fair use go away.
First, the RIAA knows they're not losing as much as they say they are, but even if they are, it doesn't matter. They are more worried about losing business legitimately to people distributing music over the internet instead of through them.
Second, copy protection with the support of the DMCA means they don't have to worry about copyright terms anymore because the content is essentially locked up forever. 95 years from now (barring any further extensions by Congress), the content of a CD produced today will technically enter the public domain, but the former copyright holder will still have control over it because it's still copy protected. The DMCA makes it illegal to produce a tool to defeat the copy protection regardless of whether it's used for piracy or fair use.
The RIAA is going to fight for this copy protection any way they can and they're using file sharers as the leverage to get Congress to back them (well, that and big bags of money). If file sharers went away tomorrow, they'd find another way.
Well, firstly, the overwhelming majority of "hate crimes" I have heard about had little to do with intimidating a group of people and more to do with the fact that one person was not the same race/religion/sexual orientation as the other. It is possible to commit violence against a person who is not the same as you without hating the entire group of people. Secondly, it is also possible to commit violence against one person with the intent of intimidating a group of people who happen to be like you but different in a way that isn't covered by hate crime laws. In fact, without stretching too far, I believe anti-terrorism laws would cover this quite well in either case.
The problem with hate crime laws is that prosecutors tend to charge crimes with the most severe penalties that they can get a conviction with. If he is procecuting a white man charged with killing a black man, he may decide to charge the hate crime version to get the stiffer penalty without regard to whether the crime was actually racially motivated.
The better solution is to teach tolerance before they can learn hate.
Should we outlaw fear or ignorance?
Of course not. That's little better than outlawing hate. You can fight it without it being illegal.
In most cases legally the person who instructs or commands you to do something illegal is considered at least partially culpable, depending on the circumstances.
I wasn't speaking legally, I was speaking morally. People are responsible for making their own decisions.
Not according to the law it can't. Theft is depriving someone of property they legally own. Copyright is not property. There's a big difference between making a copy of a CD and stealing a watch from a store. Napster got shut down for copyright infringement, not theft. You can argue it's only a semantic difference but there is a disturbing trend to treat copyrighted content as physical property and it isn't. The word "property" doesn't appear once in the Copyright Clause or in the CTEA.
It's still wrong. I just don't get HOW this can ever be percieved as legal.
I'm not questioning the legality of it. It's clearly illegal. The question is whether or not it should be. My argument is that the RIAA isn't losing as much from piracy as they claim. And just because it's illegal doesn't make it wrong. The simple fact is the RIAA has much more to fear from legal file sharing (that is, artists allowing their music to be distributed P2P) than from illegal file sharing.
Also where are your figures about people and whether they are pirating or not?
They are estimates based on personal experience. Take them for what you will.
Show me REAL figures of the amount of piracy that occurs and I will believe you. You can't by the way because the only thing you can tell is what a person downloaded and you can't tell if that person is going to by a cd or whether they already have it.
Yet you will accept the figures the RIAA publishes without question even though they a) have a vested interest in these numbers being very high and b) can't possibly count how many CD's were pirated for the same reasons you say I can't.
Not quite. First and second degree murder is premeditated, meaning it was planned out ahead of time. Manslaughter is not. The main difference being whether or not the perpetrator considered the consequences of his actions, not why he was committing the crime.
Hate crimes make a distinction on why the crime was committed rather than on how. The analogy to first degree murder would be having separate penalties for different motives. It's like saying somebody should be punished more severely because he killed for money instead of love. In most crimes, except in the case of mitigating circumstances, what matters is what actions were taken, not why they were taken.
It doesn't work that way. Protecting the freedom of speech that we like is easy. Protecting the freedom of speech we don't like is what the First Amendment is all about. Otherwise, what happens when people don't like what you have to say?
There is no positive aspect to hate speech, and many of its defenders are closet racists themselves.
Nice try, but no. Defending free speech does not make me racist any more than defending gay rights makes me gay, or defending Disabled rights makes me disabled. I defend the rights of those who say things I don't like so that I have the right to say things they don't like.
Those who would claim the supremeacy of "free speech" obviously believe that James Byrd or Matthew Shepard deserve no legal protection against racists and homophobes, and such vile hatemongers should be tolerated.
Um, no. What happened to James Byrd and Matthew Shepard is illegal without hate speech laws and you'd be hard pressed to prove it wouldn't happen if there were hate speech laws.
Hate speech acts in the same way - by trying to make certain kinds of people seem less than human and by glorifying violent acts against them
Hate speech can only cause people to hate another group of people if they are uninformed and uneducated. Rascism (and other discrimination) comes from fear of the unknown. Remove that fear and the racism dies, no matter what anybody else has to say about that group of people.
it's just a matter of time before a follower or supporter of a hate group puts words into action.
Bullshit. The guy that pulls the trigger or swings the bat is 100% responsible for his actions, regardless of who told him to do it, and those actions are illegal without hate speech laws.
Do I think people should say racist things? No. Absolutely not. Do I think they should be allowed to? Yes, absolutely.
I didn't say it doesn't happen. In fact, I specifically said it did happen. My point was the exposure the bands get from having their music shared far outweighs any actual piracy that's going on.
but P2P services like Napster was, Kazaa and others promote stealing essentially.
First of all, it's not theft. Copyright is not property and the only loss is a perceived lost sale when someone who would have bought a legal copy gets an illegal copy instead. But the RIAA is counting every copy that wasn't paid for as piracy including the copies where the receiver wouldn't have purchased a legal copy even if the illegal copy were not available, and the copies where the receiver did purchase a legal copy. They are also not counting the number of sales they wouldn't have normally gotten because people heard about the band through file sharing.
That's the problem. You "Music Sharing" people think your doing the world a favor. I don't care how you state it....sharing music online via Kazaaa or whatever is wrong if it's copyrighted music. You have no principles.
This is utter crap. The RIAA is constantly complaining about how much they have to pay independent promoters to get their songs on the radio and at the same time trying to stop webcasters and fans from doing it for free. Well "Music Sharers" are doing the exact same thing in a different format. It's called exposure and it's what sells albums. For every person who downloaded a song instead of buying the album there are probably 3 or 4 more who bought the album because they downloaded the song. Are people more or less likely to buy an album from a band they've never heard of? If sharing music increases a band's exposure, will that hurt or help their record sales?
It's not about copyright infringement, it's about control. The RIAA is faced with a technology that makes them obsolete and they're using copyright infringement as an excuse to prop up their business model with legislation.
but is anyone else getting the feeling that the whole project is based on poor planning?
The article mentions four or five better ways to generate power but this is how they're going to do it dammit!
Look, I'm all for green power. I like the idea, but it seems to me that the whole thing is in the shitter to start with. The conditions that make it good for power generation make it bad for maintenance. It's possibly the most expensive to implement with little to no extra gain over wind or solar. Where's the payoff?
In short, how is this better than umpteen other green power generation implementations with less start up costs, lower maintenance costs and fewer headaches?
Most bands are commercial failures, too, so the few successful acts have to be priced high enough to cover the money lost on the others. It's like the oil business where you have to drill 20 dry holes for every one that hits the black gold.
So don't sign so many bands. Or don't spend so much trying to make every one of them a superstar. Or find a better means of distribution *cough* INTERNET *cough* *cough*. This is all under their control.
I don't see anyone, not indy labels, not bands selling their own music, who sells CDs for a few bucks each.
At most of the shows I go to, the bands sell their CD's for $10 in a market where retail stores are in the $18-$20 range. And it's usually only that much so they don't have to make change.
It may eventually be good enough, but it won't be perfect.
"Good enough" is usually all that's required. We could spend a ton of money and a bunch of time coming up with the perfect solution (maybe) to a problem that, for most people, is largely just a nuisance. Or we can go with a much cheaper, easier to implement, "good enough" solution that will bring the problem down to manageable levels.
If it flunks, there's always spammotel
I found this in their FAQ: "there is nothing to install on your computer. When you download the SpamMotel User Interface and place it on your desktop, it is ready to go."
It's another tool to use. Just because it doesn't solve the entire spam problem doesn't make it useless.
The main issue of spam for most end users is that they have to waste time wading through the spam to get to their real email. This filter does most of that for them.
There isn't going to be one solution to end spam completely. It's going to take a lot of people nibbling away at the problem until it becomes more bother to send spam than it's worth. My father always said, "Do you know how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time." This is another bite out of the elephant.
A store can easily be protected by purchasing video cameras. That doesn't make it legal to burglarize a store that just uses lock-and-key.
Don't compare this to theft of merchandise because it isn't the same. This is a privacy issue, not a property issue. An unpublished URL has all the expected security of an unlisted phone number. With no authentication on the other end, the user entering the URL (or dialing the phone number) has no idea that this information is supposed to be private.
Just because their attempt at security left a lot to be desired doesn't mean they have no case. Any website could "easily" be protected by some level of security, but having a lesser level of security doesn't absolve attackers.
They had no security. They didn't even bother to tell anybody they shouldn't be there. There was nothing to indicate that the data they were retrieving was not public.
Note that I am not arguing that Intentia has any legal ground. I'm just noting that your argument has nothing to do with the true legality of Reuters' actions.
Actually, it does. The fact that Intentia didn't take even the easiest steps to prevent unauthorized access, or even inform "intruders" that they weren't welcome reduces the amount of privacy they can expect.
They are only entitled to as much privacy as they can reasonably expect. Their only steps to ensure their privacy was a poor attempt at hiding the information. One of the characteristics of the web, however, is that once you stumble on someone's hiding place, it isn't at all obvious it was being hidden unless there are some other security measures in place. There were none so they can't reasonably expect any more privacy than they got.
Someone got lazy and is now trying to cover his ass by blaming someone else.
...while some people continue to confuse property with copyright.
Not once, in the Copyright Clause of the Constitution or the Copyright Term Extension Act, does the word "property" appear. Not even "intellectual property".
That's no excuse. If I'm willing to sell you something I created only under certain terms, and I make it impossible for you to install my product without telling me that you agree to those terms, you can't afterward claim that you shouldn't be bound by the terms because you were ignorant of them.
No, but if you're writing completely outrageous terms based on the knowledge that most people won't read them, what's that make you?
Your example is analagous to making the EULA accessible only by going to Help->EULA after the program is installed or something.
Yes it is. It was an attempt to be funny but it was more to point out that this particular EULA was written to take advantage of the fact that most people don't read them.
Not reading the EULA is ignorance. I'm not suggesting they should be excused for their actions because of their ignorance. However, the people writing the EULA shouldn't be excused either simply because the people who agreed to it didn't know any better. They were, in fact, counting on them not knowing any better.
Whether it's legal or not is not the point. There is a huge difference between having the legal right to do something and being right in doing it.
Re:The First Worm Written By a Microsoft Lawyer...
on
First Worm with a EULA?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ignorance is not an excuse for stupidity.
No, but taking advantage of others' ignorance isn't the height of morality either.
There's a current practice in Hollywood to write script contracts containing some really egregious clauses that automatically get thrown out if the writer has a lawyer. They are there solely to see if they can get away with them. Essentially, if you don't know any better, you get screwed.
Yes, people should take steps to protect themselves and they should read the fine print, but writing clauses in specifically to take advantage of those who don't isn't ethical. It's the difference between ignorance and malice. Ignorance just doesn't know any better. Malice is intentional.
I'm not holding the people who blindly agreed to the EULA blameless, but you have to place a large part of the blame on the people who wrote the thing in the first place. You can castigate the person who forgot to lock his door but the person responsible for the theft is still the thief.
Simply because some people allow themselves to be taken advantage of doesn't mean they should be.
Re:The First Worm Written By a Microsoft Lawyer...
on
First Worm with a EULA?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Warning someone that you're going to do something sleezy doesn't excuse you for doing it.
It's also common knowledge that EULA's aren't read (by gurus and newbies alike). They might as well put the warning in a locked filing cabinet stored in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door that says "beware of the leopard".
E-bay is not being consistent by allowing some CD-R's to remain while not allowing others. They are also not allowing the person they've essentially accused of copyright infringement to defend himself or clear the matter up.
They may not be under any obligation but it's not exactly good business practice.
This is exactly the kind of thing the RIAA wants to stop. Here's a guy trying to sell his own album without going through the RIAA and he's prevented from doing so because of pressure from content producers over copyright infringement. Don't think for a second that this guy just got caught in the crossfire. He and musicians like him are the main target.
The record companies don't care about "free downloading" per se. They care about free downloading of content owned by their members. BIG difference.
No, they care about downloading content, period. If it were only about copyright infringement, they wouldn't be charging webcasters insane royalties and then bitching about having to pay independent promoters to get exposure on the radio. They're entire modus operandi has been threaten first and find out if they actually own the copyright later.
As for whether or not record companies serve a function, bands have been putting out their music for sale and download on the Net for years now, and there have been but a handful of modest success stories.
One has to wonder if there wouldn't be more if the RIAA wasn't fighting it tooth and nail. They have spent all their energy fighting any technology that makes it easy to distribute music without them being involved.
I am certain that if you were to survey the MP3 collections ("legal" and "shared" alike) of all Slashdot users (not just a perverse few), we would discover that the vast majority of MP3s are of artists signed to RIAA member companies. And I would bet you that these infinitely self-motivated musicians and bands will continue to be signed to said companies, because they serve thema function, just like these musicians and bands will continue to pay for artists.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all fine and good. But don't believe for a second that it's file sharing that's making fair use go away.
First, the RIAA knows they're not losing as much as they say they are, but even if they are, it doesn't matter. They are more worried about losing business legitimately to people distributing music over the internet instead of through them.
Second, copy protection with the support of the DMCA means they don't have to worry about copyright terms anymore because the content is essentially locked up forever. 95 years from now (barring any further extensions by Congress), the content of a CD produced today will technically enter the public domain, but the former copyright holder will still have control over it because it's still copy protected. The DMCA makes it illegal to produce a tool to defeat the copy protection regardless of whether it's used for piracy or fair use.
The RIAA is going to fight for this copy protection any way they can and they're using file sharers as the leverage to get Congress to back them (well, that and big bags of money). If file sharers went away tomorrow, they'd find another way.
Well, firstly, the overwhelming majority of "hate crimes" I have heard about had little to do with intimidating a group of people and more to do with the fact that one person was not the same race/religion/sexual orientation as the other. It is possible to commit violence against a person who is not the same as you without hating the entire group of people. Secondly, it is also possible to commit violence against one person with the intent of intimidating a group of people who happen to be like you but different in a way that isn't covered by hate crime laws. In fact, without stretching too far, I believe anti-terrorism laws would cover this quite well in either case.
The problem with hate crime laws is that prosecutors tend to charge crimes with the most severe penalties that they can get a conviction with. If he is procecuting a white man charged with killing a black man, he may decide to charge the hate crime version to get the stiffer penalty without regard to whether the crime was actually racially motivated.
Your answer doesn't imply a better solution.
The better solution is to teach tolerance before they can learn hate.
Should we outlaw fear or ignorance?
Of course not. That's little better than outlawing hate. You can fight it without it being illegal.
In most cases legally the person who instructs or commands you to do something illegal is considered at least partially culpable, depending on the circumstances.
I wasn't speaking legally, I was speaking morally. People are responsible for making their own decisions.
this can be percieved as theft.
Not according to the law it can't. Theft is depriving someone of property they legally own. Copyright is not property. There's a big difference between making a copy of a CD and stealing a watch from a store. Napster got shut down for copyright infringement, not theft. You can argue it's only a semantic difference but there is a disturbing trend to treat copyrighted content as physical property and it isn't. The word "property" doesn't appear once in the Copyright Clause or in the CTEA.
It's still wrong. I just don't get HOW this can ever be percieved as legal.
I'm not questioning the legality of it. It's clearly illegal. The question is whether or not it should be. My argument is that the RIAA isn't losing as much from piracy as they claim. And just because it's illegal doesn't make it wrong. The simple fact is the RIAA has much more to fear from legal file sharing (that is, artists allowing their music to be distributed P2P) than from illegal file sharing.
Also where are your figures about people and whether they are pirating or not?
They are estimates based on personal experience. Take them for what you will.
Show me REAL figures of the amount of piracy that occurs and I will believe you. You can't by the way because the only thing you can tell is what a person downloaded and you can't tell if that person is going to by a cd or whether they already have it.
Yet you will accept the figures the RIAA publishes without question even though they a) have a vested interest in these numbers being very high and b) can't possibly count how many CD's were pirated for the same reasons you say I can't.
Maybe so, but it still needed to be said.
Not quite. First and second degree murder is premeditated, meaning it was planned out ahead of time. Manslaughter is not. The main difference being whether or not the perpetrator considered the consequences of his actions, not why he was committing the crime.
Hate crimes make a distinction on why the crime was committed rather than on how. The analogy to first degree murder would be having separate penalties for different motives. It's like saying somebody should be punished more severely because he killed for money instead of love. In most crimes, except in the case of mitigating circumstances, what matters is what actions were taken, not why they were taken.
they have forfeited their rights to free speech.
It doesn't work that way. Protecting the freedom of speech that we like is easy. Protecting the freedom of speech we don't like is what the First Amendment is all about. Otherwise, what happens when people don't like what you have to say?
There is no positive aspect to hate speech, and many of its defenders are closet racists themselves.
Nice try, but no. Defending free speech does not make me racist any more than defending gay rights makes me gay, or defending Disabled rights makes me disabled. I defend the rights of those who say things I don't like so that I have the right to say things they don't like.
Those who would claim the supremeacy of "free speech" obviously believe that James Byrd or Matthew Shepard deserve no legal protection against racists and homophobes, and such vile hatemongers should be tolerated.
Um, no. What happened to James Byrd and Matthew Shepard is illegal without hate speech laws and you'd be hard pressed to prove it wouldn't happen if there were hate speech laws.
Hate speech acts in the same way - by trying to make certain kinds of people seem less than human and by glorifying violent acts against them
Hate speech can only cause people to hate another group of people if they are uninformed and uneducated. Rascism (and other discrimination) comes from fear of the unknown. Remove that fear and the racism dies, no matter what anybody else has to say about that group of people.
it's just a matter of time before a follower or supporter of a hate group puts words into action.
Bullshit. The guy that pulls the trigger or swings the bat is 100% responsible for his actions, regardless of who told him to do it, and those actions are illegal without hate speech laws.
Do I think people should say racist things? No. Absolutely not. Do I think they should be allowed to? Yes, absolutely.
You say that doesn't happen...
I didn't say it doesn't happen. In fact, I specifically said it did happen. My point was the exposure the bands get from having their music shared far outweighs any actual piracy that's going on.
but P2P services like Napster was, Kazaa and others promote stealing essentially.
First of all, it's not theft. Copyright is not property and the only loss is a perceived lost sale when someone who would have bought a legal copy gets an illegal copy instead. But the RIAA is counting every copy that wasn't paid for as piracy including the copies where the receiver wouldn't have purchased a legal copy even if the illegal copy were not available, and the copies where the receiver did purchase a legal copy. They are also not counting the number of sales they wouldn't have normally gotten because people heard about the band through file sharing.
That's the problem. You "Music Sharing" people think your doing the world a favor. I don't care how you state it....sharing music online via Kazaaa or whatever is wrong if it's copyrighted music. You have no principles.
This is utter crap. The RIAA is constantly complaining about how much they have to pay independent promoters to get their songs on the radio and at the same time trying to stop webcasters and fans from doing it for free. Well "Music Sharers" are doing the exact same thing in a different format. It's called exposure and it's what sells albums. For every person who downloaded a song instead of buying the album there are probably 3 or 4 more who bought the album because they downloaded the song. Are people more or less likely to buy an album from a band they've never heard of? If sharing music increases a band's exposure, will that hurt or help their record sales?
It's not about copyright infringement, it's about control. The RIAA is faced with a technology that makes them obsolete and they're using copyright infringement as an excuse to prop up their business model with legislation.
but is anyone else getting the feeling that the whole project is based on poor planning?
The article mentions four or five better ways to generate power but this is how they're going to do it dammit!
Look, I'm all for green power. I like the idea, but it seems to me that the whole thing is in the shitter to start with. The conditions that make it good for power generation make it bad for maintenance. It's possibly the most expensive to implement with little to no extra gain over wind or solar. Where's the payoff?
In short, how is this better than umpteen other green power generation implementations with less start up costs, lower maintenance costs and fewer headaches?
Most bands are commercial failures, too, so the few successful acts have to be priced high enough to cover the money lost on the others. It's like the oil business where you have to drill 20 dry holes for every one that hits the black gold.
So don't sign so many bands. Or don't spend so much trying to make every one of them a superstar. Or find a better means of distribution *cough* INTERNET *cough* *cough*. This is all under their control.
I don't see anyone, not indy labels, not bands selling their own music, who sells CDs for a few bucks each.
At most of the shows I go to, the bands sell their CD's for $10 in a market where retail stores are in the $18-$20 range. And it's usually only that much so they don't have to make change.
No they wouldn't.
The fallacy in your argument is that the RIAA uses logic and reason to convince Congress instead of big bags of money.
They have been lying from the start about how much copyright infringement has been hurting them. What makes you think they're going to stop now?
It may eventually be good enough, but it won't be perfect.
"Good enough" is usually all that's required. We could spend a ton of money and a bunch of time coming up with the perfect solution (maybe) to a problem that, for most people, is largely just a nuisance. Or we can go with a much cheaper, easier to implement, "good enough" solution that will bring the problem down to manageable levels.
If it flunks, there's always spammotel
I found this in their FAQ: "there is nothing to install on your computer. When you download the SpamMotel User Interface and place it on your desktop, it is ready to go."
OK, so which is it?
It's another tool to use. Just because it doesn't solve the entire spam problem doesn't make it useless.
The main issue of spam for most end users is that they have to waste time wading through the spam to get to their real email. This filter does most of that for them.
There isn't going to be one solution to end spam completely. It's going to take a lot of people nibbling away at the problem until it becomes more bother to send spam than it's worth. My father always said, "Do you know how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time." This is another bite out of the elephant.
Any solution that requires spammers to be more clever is going to reduce the number of spammers. And that is the end goal.
Copyright infringment is entirely different from property theft. Don't compare the two.
Nowhere in copyright law does it refer to content as property.
A store can easily be protected by purchasing video cameras. That doesn't make it legal to burglarize a store that just uses lock-and-key.
Don't compare this to theft of merchandise because it isn't the same. This is a privacy issue, not a property issue. An unpublished URL has all the expected security of an unlisted phone number. With no authentication on the other end, the user entering the URL (or dialing the phone number) has no idea that this information is supposed to be private.
Just because their attempt at security left a lot to be desired doesn't mean they have no case. Any website could "easily" be protected by some level of security, but having a lesser level of security doesn't absolve attackers.
They had no security. They didn't even bother to tell anybody they shouldn't be there. There was nothing to indicate that the data they were retrieving was not public.
Note that I am not arguing that Intentia has any legal ground. I'm just noting that your argument has nothing to do with the true legality of Reuters' actions.
Actually, it does. The fact that Intentia didn't take even the easiest steps to prevent unauthorized access, or even inform "intruders" that they weren't welcome reduces the amount of privacy they can expect.
They are only entitled to as much privacy as they can reasonably expect. Their only steps to ensure their privacy was a poor attempt at hiding the information. One of the characteristics of the web, however, is that once you stumble on someone's hiding place, it isn't at all obvious it was being hidden unless there are some other security measures in place. There were none so they can't reasonably expect any more privacy than they got.
Someone got lazy and is now trying to cover his ass by blaming someone else.
Okay, who on Earth thinks that they should "backup audio cds"?
Just because you choose not to doesn't mean you shouldn't have the choice to.
...while some people continue to confuse property with copyright.
Not once, in the Copyright Clause of the Constitution or the Copyright Term Extension Act, does the word "property" appear. Not even "intellectual property".
Copyright != property.
Your confusing the issue. I'm saying they shouldn't do this, not that they shouldn't be allowed to.
Simply because their actions are legal doesn't make them not scumbags. It also doesn't relieve them of having to take responsibility for them.
That's no excuse. If I'm willing to sell you something I created only under certain terms, and I make it impossible for you to install my product without telling me that you agree to those terms, you can't afterward claim that you shouldn't be bound by the terms because you were ignorant of them.
No, but if you're writing completely outrageous terms based on the knowledge that most people won't read them, what's that make you?
Your example is analagous to making the EULA accessible only by going to Help->EULA after the program is installed or something.
Yes it is. It was an attempt to be funny but it was more to point out that this particular EULA was written to take advantage of the fact that most people don't read them.
Not reading the EULA is ignorance. I'm not suggesting they should be excused for their actions because of their ignorance. However, the people writing the EULA shouldn't be excused either simply because the people who agreed to it didn't know any better. They were, in fact, counting on them not knowing any better.
Whether it's legal or not is not the point. There is a huge difference between having the legal right to do something and being right in doing it.
Ignorance is not an excuse for stupidity.
No, but taking advantage of others' ignorance isn't the height of morality either.
There's a current practice in Hollywood to write script contracts containing some really egregious clauses that automatically get thrown out if the writer has a lawyer. They are there solely to see if they can get away with them. Essentially, if you don't know any better, you get screwed.
Yes, people should take steps to protect themselves and they should read the fine print, but writing clauses in specifically to take advantage of those who don't isn't ethical. It's the difference between ignorance and malice. Ignorance just doesn't know any better. Malice is intentional.
I'm not holding the people who blindly agreed to the EULA blameless, but you have to place a large part of the blame on the people who wrote the thing in the first place. You can castigate the person who forgot to lock his door but the person responsible for the theft is still the thief.
Simply because some people allow themselves to be taken advantage of doesn't mean they should be.
Warning someone that you're going to do something sleezy doesn't excuse you for doing it.
It's also common knowledge that EULA's aren't read (by gurus and newbies alike). They might as well put the warning in a locked filing cabinet stored in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door that says "beware of the leopard".
E-bay is not being consistent by allowing some CD-R's to remain while not allowing others. They are also not allowing the person they've essentially accused of copyright infringement to defend himself or clear the matter up.
They may not be under any obligation but it's not exactly good business practice.
This is exactly the kind of thing the RIAA wants to stop. Here's a guy trying to sell his own album without going through the RIAA and he's prevented from doing so because of pressure from content producers over copyright infringement. Don't think for a second that this guy just got caught in the crossfire. He and musicians like him are the main target.
The record companies don't care about "free downloading" per se. They care about free downloading of content owned by their members. BIG difference.
No, they care about downloading content, period. If it were only about copyright infringement, they wouldn't be charging webcasters insane royalties and then bitching about having to pay independent promoters to get exposure on the radio. They're entire modus operandi has been threaten first and find out if they actually own the copyright later.
As for whether or not record companies serve a function, bands have been putting out their music for sale and download on the Net for years now, and there have been but a handful of modest success stories.
One has to wonder if there wouldn't be more if the RIAA wasn't fighting it tooth and nail. They have spent all their energy fighting any technology that makes it easy to distribute music without them being involved.
I am certain that if you were to survey the MP3 collections ("legal" and "shared" alike) of all Slashdot users (not just a perverse few), we would discover that the vast majority of MP3s are of artists signed to RIAA member companies. And I would bet you that these infinitely self-motivated musicians and bands will continue to be signed to said companies, because they serve thema function, just like these musicians and bands will continue to pay for artists.
Yeah, and Microsoft makes the best software.