The real problem comes into play when people start stealing products. In the traditional sense of the word we have to view downloading copywritten music off the web as stealing as you are receiving goods that you didn't pay for against the wishes of the person/company who owns those rights. I'm not talking about the moral issue of right or wrong here.
It is not stealing, it's copyright infringement. There is no loss of product. If someone copies a song illegally, they don't have to produce another one to replace it. It doesn't cost them anything. The only loss is a perceived lost sale which is only true if the receiver of the illegal copy would have bought a legal copy and now won't. Most people who download music don't fit this category. The software industry realized this years ago and now the recording industry needs to realize it.
It's no wonder the RIAA has trouble showing an accurate profit/loss report from the past few years with all this going on.
What the fuck are you talking about? P&L statements are very easy to calculate: $ earned - $ spent = profit. Copyright infringement doesn't affect their P&L. It affects what they think they're revenue should have been. When the RIAA talks about the money their losing to "piracy" they are talking about sales they think they are entitled to, not money they had to spend that they won't get back now.
We need some Internet auditing controls to be put into place before we villify the RIAA as being this evil entity.
This is exactly what the RIAA wants you to believe. They aren't worried about copyright infringement, they are worried about losing control. They've had a monopoly on the music distribution channel for years and now their business model is suddenly obsolete. They don't want you to even be able to buy music on the internet if you don't have to buy it from them. They want to be able to threaten file sharers with C&D letters without the slightest bit of evidence that they own the copyright in question. They want carte blanche to commit what would otherwise be computer crimes against people they "suspect" of violating copyright law. They want to stifle a $300 billion industry so they can maintain their $30 billion industry. They have villified themselves quite successfully without any help from us.
What makes spam so attractive as an advertising method is that it's dirt cheap. Response rates of 10000 to 1 are acceptable because of it. If spam gets expensive, and fining spammers is a good way to make it expensive, it gets expensive for the company hiring the spammer. Low response rates become less acceptable so companies will find a better way to advertise.
1. You're point being what? Because not enough people care about it to affect a change that there isn't a problem?
2. It deprives them of potential gain that wouldn't exist except for copyright laws. It does not deprive them of the use of the idea. And there is only an actual loss if the person receiving the copy would have purchased one if the copy were not given to him. So, not every illegal copy is a loss to the copyright holder.
3. First, there is no theft. It is impossible to steal an idea. You can only copy it. The law doesn't even call it theft. It's copyright infringement. Second, how long should they benefit? 95 years? 70 years after their death? Why should they have total and permanent control over an idea that is based on the efforts of others?
4. Read my comment. I never said they should be abandoned.
5. That's not what the original framers had in mind. The Constitution explicitly says "limited" and only to "advance science and the useful arts". Giving one person exclusive use of an idea forever does not advance science or art. The whole idea behind copyrights is to encourage people to publish their creative works thereby enriching society. It was never intended to make ideas property.
To change the behavior of the recording industry requires that consumers stop buying mainstream music and start buying from non-RIAA affiliated companies.
By the time the consumers realize what's going on, they won't have non-RIAA affiliated companies to choose from. That's what this whole fight is about: the RIAA maintaining dominance in an industry that doesn't need them anymore.
If they want to chase you for copying something under copyright, they'll do that regardless of the length of that copyright.
Well that's kind of the point, isn't it? To limit how long they can do that?
A CD or DVD is, as well, a physical thing.
The disk itself is just the medium and is not protected by copyright, the content is. Copying the content of that CD does not deprive anyone of the use of it.
That deprives people of revenue they would otherwise receive.
This assumes that they are entitled to it. And by "entitled" I'm not talking about legally, I'm talking about morally (and yes it does matter). All works are based on other works in one form or another. To say "I can build off your efforts but you can't build off mine" is ridiculous.
Consider someone who has developed an idea to improve auto gas mileage by 100 percent. He publishes that idea. However, because of a total lack of copyright protection, someone else picks up that publication, re-publishes it under his own name, and strikes a deal with the auto manufacturers that brings him millions of dollars in royalties and payments. The actual originator is left high and dry.
This is only possible with intellectual property laws, otherwise, why would the auto-industry pay the second publisher?
In the end, all the analogies are moot, because no one has launched a court case to test the claim that large-scale filesharing of music is fair use.
I'm not even talking about file sharing. Personally, I don't download any music because I'm just not that interested, so whether or not file sharing is fair use doesn't concern me. My concern is the continual extensions Congress gives copyright terms as though the people who have taken from society and built on the efforts of others don't have to give anything back.
Extending copyright 20 years, especially retroactively, encouraged no creativity. Dead people aren't going to write any more no matter how much you extend them. Living people aren't saying, "You know, I've got this idea for a book, but copyright terms only protect it for 50 years after I'm dead, so it's not really worth it. What? It's seventy now? I'd better get started." It was not done to promote progress. It was done to reward a handful of corporations.
Writing the argument against extended copyright terms off as "you just want to steal music" is buying into the RIAA's propaganda. Comparing property theft with copyright infringement is just as bad.
Mind you, I have never once argued that copyrights should be abandoned. Copyrights are a compromise, a hack, a workaround. They give creators incentive to create in a capitalistic society while still giving the society as a whole the benefit of their creativity. If it's not going to benefit society, why should the creators benefit?
That seems to imply that, at the moment of authorship or invention, the created work or invention belongs to everyone, not just to the author or inventor.
No, it doesn't. What it does say is that an author or inventor can't build on the efforts of others and not allow others to build on his efforts. Ideas cannot exist in a vacuum. All works are arguably derivative of other existing works in one form or another. Most of Disney's movies are based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. But, as Lawrence Lessig says, "nobody can do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm".
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell? The 'public' had no telephone until Bell invented it. It cannot lease him those thoughts, or that creativity. He earned it on his own.
There would have been no telephone if the components and methods he used to create one were someone else's intellectual property and not available for use. He built on the efforts of others and others should be free to build on his efforts.
That was kind of the point. Extended copyright terms can't possibly encourage John Lennon and Janis Joplin to write more songs, so how does this promote science or usefull arts? It doesn't, it only lines the pocket of the entity holding the rights to the songs.
Last I looked, music isn't addictive. If this issue was a important to mainstream America as it is to you, they'd do something about it. However, it isn't that important to them, for good reason.
It isn't important to them because it hasn't affected them yet. They haven't been threatened with C&D's or put in jail or fined for something they thought was reasonable and should be legal. Just because they don't care doesn't make it right.
People have no more right to "free" music than they have a right to free books, free newspapers, free automobiles, or free whatever.
Bullshit. First of all, an automobile is a physical thing that you can be deprived of the use of by someone taking it from you. You can't deprive someone of the use of an idea, song, book or newspaper by copying it. Second, the whole idea of copyright was to promote the publication of ideas to further science and the arts, not to create an artifical market for economic gain.
Copyright and patents are a compromise to encourage publication of ideas in a capitalistic society.
Ideas are not property. You cannot be deprived of an idea by theft (without IP laws). But in a capitalistic society, there isn't much motivation for people to spend time creating things they won't profit from without copyright and patents.
The principle that the article is arguing against is the concept that people can own ideas.
The simple miracle here is that in the United States the people are empowered to change this system.
We are led to beleive that, yes. But the simple fact is the people in power are controlled by corporations who do not have our best interests at heart. The people who aren't controlled by corporations don't have the money to replace the people who do. And people aren't going to band together to vote on this one issue because nobody knows about it. The media, who can (and should be) informing the people about this issue are ignoring it for one simple reason: they are owned by corporations who will profit (or at least think they will) from extended copyright terms and DRM.
However, I do intend to suggest that we have the means to affect change.
IANAL, but they are not obligated to accept what you deem fit as payment for their goods. And I'm pretty sure a "good faith attempt" only applies to a mutually agreed upon debt (ie. both parties agreed to the transaction but one is having trouble meeting his end), and not to something you acquired illegally.
They can decide to only sell Britt N'Sync albums bundled together in box sets for $400 a pop and there's not much you can do about it. You can try to bargain with them to get the one album you want but they are in no way required to accept your offer. But then, you aren't required to buy it either.
The poster was refuting the "$3 billion loss due to piracy" claim in the article. It's the standard method of counting every illegal copy as a lost sale. The fact is the majority of illegal copies are purchased by people who a) wouldn't pay to see the movie even if the illegal copy wasn't available or b) will pay to see the movie even after getting the illegal copy. In both cases the studio loses nothing because it a) they weren't getting the money anyway and in b) they're still getting it. They are (way) overestimating their losses to make the problem look bigger than it is so they can get their laws passed.
When the artists question you about their low royalty payments, you complain about having to pay independent promoters (aka "payola workaround") to get the songs on the radio thus getting exposure.
Now, here comes a bunch of people who want to play your songs, giving them as much if not more exposure, and you're trying to charge them for it?
It's very simple really. All the media in the US is owned by corporations who will profit from the DMCA and other DRM laws. Why would they want anybody to know about it?
It's the same reason a Senator from South Carolina, a state with no movie or recording industry to speak of, is fighting so hard for DRM. Do you honestly think anyone in South Carolina gives a shit about DRM?
"One of the things we're discovering is that people are not aware that that they are engaging in conduct which is clearly illegal," said RIAA lawyer Cary Sherman.
"clearly illegal". This from an industry that says not watching commercials on television is stealing and that making a cassette copy of a CD (that I own) for my car is "tolerated but not legal" behavior.
"If you got a letter from the RIAA saying we know that you're doing this, I'd say there's a good chance that you would stop."
In other words, they want to be able to threaten people with C&D's regardless of whether they have any proof of wrong-doing.
Verizon says it would be unfair to cancel users accounts unless the music companies concerned filed formal legal proceedings that would give the users a chance to fight back.
But the music industry says that would take too long.
Tough shit. It's called due process and is guaranteed by the Constitution. Deal with it.
especially if Fritz Hollings gets his bills adopted.
In order for DRM to work, everyone (or a large majority) has to have it. Computers without solid DRM will be able to copy protected content. If not enough people have DRM enabled machines, the infrastructure (license servers etc) becomes unprofitable to support and the copying still goes on.
The government could mandate DRM enabled machines, but that will take years to have any effect as most people aren't going to buy new machines until their old ones are outdated. The government isn't going to mandate that everyone scrap their perfectly good computers for DRM enabled ones. Even the most apathetic citizen isn't going to sit still while the government requires him to buy a new computer.
So, what makes a computer outdated anyway? Availability of more processing power, more memory and storage make more resources available to applications (Andy giveth and Bill taketh away). So what happens when the resources stop coming? The applications stop using them. Nobody's going to buy a program that you can't buy a machine to run it on, right? So, if the programs aren't using more resources, when does a computer become outdated? When it stops working. I don't know about you, but most of the computers I've upgraded were perfectly functional, but short on resources. So, the upgrades to DRM enabled machines are going to take even longer. With nobody buying them, the computer manufacturers are either going to go out of business, or, more likely, make the government realize it ain't working.
The government could mandate that all new programs be written for DRM enabled machines. This won't fly because the software industry won't sit still while the government forces them to write programs for machines nobody has, but even if it did, so what? People generally have software that already does most of what they need it to. They just won't be buying any new software.
The *AA could entice people to buy the new machines to play their precious content, but the funny thing about the products the RIAA and the MPAA sell, even if they have forgotten, is that it is just entertainment. People will spend $200 on a DVD player. They won't spend $2000 on a new computer just to watch movies that they'd probably rather be watching on their $200 DVD player. So, they either don't sell any movies or they have to sell non-DRM protected versions, which defeats the purpose of having DRM.
Okay, suppose for a second that everything goes the *AA's way and everybody has a DRM enabled machine. Don't think for a second that being illegal is going to stop the influx of non-DRM enabled chips on the black market. A $0.30 chip in China that will get $100 here is a big incective for somebody to find a way to get it in. The US government's war on drugs has already shown they can't stop everything from getting in. Being against the law and being enforceable are two different things. If enough people have the illegal chips, the courts won't be able to keep up. And it only requires a few people to have the illegal chips for the de-protected content to get loose.
Hollings bill needs to go down because it is broken and fundamentally wrong. But it's not going to do a damned thing for protecting copyrights. The only thing it's going to get us is behind the rest of the world in technology.
And, instead of one useful argument, we end up with two useless arguments that the judge and jury won't understand.
He's an expert. He's brought in to clarify points in a case that the average person (jury or judge) wouldn't understand. But he's biased. He's being paid by someone who has a vested interest in how the case turns out. He may be lying.
The solution to this is not to bring in someone else who might also be lying and let the judge and jury, who have no expertise in the area, decide who to believe.
If you don't believe me, get a friend to argue Emacs vs. vi with you to your grandmother and let her decide which is the better editor.
Expert witnesses are paid by whichever side hired them. They don't get any money for not making their clients argument for them. Therefore, it benefits the "expert" to offer the opinion that helps the person who hired him.
Spam costs the recipient money. It's not just an annoyance. In any other business it would be called theft of services.
When they are paying the total cost of delivery (instead of defraying the cost among the recipients) then you can argue about whether their rights are being violated. Until then, it's theft and should be treated as such.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem comes into play when people start stealing products. In the traditional sense of the word we have to view downloading copywritten music off the web as stealing as you are receiving goods that you didn't pay for against the wishes of the person/company who owns those rights. I'm not talking about the moral issue of right or wrong here.
It is not stealing, it's copyright infringement. There is no loss of product. If someone copies a song illegally, they don't have to produce another one to replace it. It doesn't cost them anything. The only loss is a perceived lost sale which is only true if the receiver of the illegal copy would have bought a legal copy and now won't. Most people who download music don't fit this category. The software industry realized this years ago and now the recording industry needs to realize it.
It's no wonder the RIAA has trouble showing an accurate profit/loss report from the past few years with all this going on.
What the fuck are you talking about? P&L statements are very easy to calculate: $ earned - $ spent = profit. Copyright infringement doesn't affect their P&L. It affects what they think they're revenue should have been. When the RIAA talks about the money their losing to "piracy" they are talking about sales they think they are entitled to, not money they had to spend that they won't get back now.
We need some Internet auditing controls to be put into place before we villify the RIAA as being this evil entity.
This is exactly what the RIAA wants you to believe. They aren't worried about copyright infringement, they are worried about losing control. They've had a monopoly on the music distribution channel for years and now their business model is suddenly obsolete. They don't want you to even be able to buy music on the internet if you don't have to buy it from them. They want to be able to threaten file sharers with C&D letters without the slightest bit of evidence that they own the copyright in question. They want carte blanche to commit what would otherwise be computer crimes against people they "suspect" of violating copyright law. They want to stifle a $300 billion industry so they can maintain their $30 billion industry. They have villified themselves quite successfully without any help from us.
$83,200 per year before expenses.
One wonders if the IRS knows about this....
What makes spam so attractive as an advertising method is that it's dirt cheap. Response rates of 10000 to 1 are acceptable because of it. If spam gets expensive, and fining spammers is a good way to make it expensive, it gets expensive for the company hiring the spammer. Low response rates become less acceptable so companies will find a better way to advertise.
"Insufficient Disk Space to perform this operation. Please delete some files and try again."
Received while deleting (not moving to the recycle bin) files from a nearly full drive.
But have they figured out how to get a floppy drive and a CD-Rom in the same computer at the same time?
1. You're point being what? Because not enough people care about it to affect a change that there isn't a problem?
2. It deprives them of potential gain that wouldn't exist except for copyright laws. It does not deprive them of the use of the idea. And there is only an actual loss if the person receiving the copy would have purchased one if the copy were not given to him. So, not every illegal copy is a loss to the copyright holder.
3. First, there is no theft. It is impossible to steal an idea. You can only copy it. The law doesn't even call it theft. It's copyright infringement. Second, how long should they benefit? 95 years? 70 years after their death? Why should they have total and permanent control over an idea that is based on the efforts of others?
4. Read my comment. I never said they should be abandoned.
5. That's not what the original framers had in mind. The Constitution explicitly says "limited" and only to "advance science and the useful arts". Giving one person exclusive use of an idea forever does not advance science or art. The whole idea behind copyrights is to encourage people to publish their creative works thereby enriching society. It was never intended to make ideas property.
To change the behavior of the recording industry requires that consumers stop buying mainstream music and start buying from non-RIAA affiliated companies.
By the time the consumers realize what's going on, they won't have non-RIAA affiliated companies to choose from. That's what this whole fight is about: the RIAA maintaining dominance in an industry that doesn't need them anymore.
If they want to chase you for copying something under copyright, they'll do that regardless of the length of that copyright.
Well that's kind of the point, isn't it? To limit how long they can do that?
A CD or DVD is, as well, a physical thing.
The disk itself is just the medium and is not protected by copyright, the content is. Copying the content of that CD does not deprive anyone of the use of it.
That deprives people of revenue they would otherwise receive.
This assumes that they are entitled to it. And by "entitled" I'm not talking about legally, I'm talking about morally (and yes it does matter). All works are based on other works in one form or another. To say "I can build off your efforts but you can't build off mine" is ridiculous.
Consider someone who has developed an idea to improve auto gas mileage by 100 percent. He publishes that idea. However, because of a total lack of copyright protection, someone else picks up that publication, re-publishes it under his own name, and strikes a deal with the auto manufacturers that brings him millions of dollars in royalties and payments. The actual originator is left high and dry.
This is only possible with intellectual property laws, otherwise, why would the auto-industry pay the second publisher?
In the end, all the analogies are moot, because no one has launched a court case to test the claim that large-scale filesharing of music is fair use.
I'm not even talking about file sharing. Personally, I don't download any music because I'm just not that interested, so whether or not file sharing is fair use doesn't concern me. My concern is the continual extensions Congress gives copyright terms as though the people who have taken from society and built on the efforts of others don't have to give anything back.
Extending copyright 20 years, especially retroactively, encouraged no creativity. Dead people aren't going to write any more no matter how much you extend them. Living people aren't saying, "You know, I've got this idea for a book, but copyright terms only protect it for 50 years after I'm dead, so it's not really worth it. What? It's seventy now? I'd better get started." It was not done to promote progress. It was done to reward a handful of corporations.
Writing the argument against extended copyright terms off as "you just want to steal music" is buying into the RIAA's propaganda. Comparing property theft with copyright infringement is just as bad.
Mind you, I have never once argued that copyrights should be abandoned. Copyrights are a compromise, a hack, a workaround. They give creators incentive to create in a capitalistic society while still giving the society as a whole the benefit of their creativity. If it's not going to benefit society, why should the creators benefit?
That seems to imply that, at the moment of authorship or invention, the created work or invention belongs to everyone, not just to the author or inventor.
No, it doesn't. What it does say is that an author or inventor can't build on the efforts of others and not allow others to build on his efforts. Ideas cannot exist in a vacuum. All works are arguably derivative of other existing works in one form or another. Most of Disney's movies are based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. But, as Lawrence Lessig says, "nobody can do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm".
Here's a clue for you technologists and wannabes: technology doesn't affect law. Technology can affect culture, which then affects prevailing laws.
Technology can and does affect law. Read Lawrence Lessig's _Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace_ for a bunch of good reasons why.
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell? The 'public' had no telephone until Bell invented it. It cannot lease him those thoughts, or that creativity. He earned it on his own.
There would have been no telephone if the components and methods he used to create one were someone else's intellectual property and not available for use. He built on the efforts of others and others should be free to build on his efforts.
That was kind of the point. Extended copyright terms can't possibly encourage John Lennon and Janis Joplin to write more songs, so how does this promote science or usefull arts? It doesn't, it only lines the pocket of the entity holding the rights to the songs.
Last I looked, music isn't addictive. If this issue was a important to mainstream America as it is to you, they'd do something about it. However, it isn't that important to them, for good reason.
It isn't important to them because it hasn't affected them yet. They haven't been threatened with C&D's or put in jail or fined for something they thought was reasonable and should be legal. Just because they don't care doesn't make it right.
People have no more right to "free" music than they have a right to free books, free newspapers, free automobiles, or free whatever.
Bullshit. First of all, an automobile is a physical thing that you can be deprived of the use of by someone taking it from you. You can't deprive someone of the use of an idea, song, book or newspaper by copying it. Second, the whole idea of copyright was to promote the publication of ideas to further science and the arts, not to create an artifical market for economic gain.
Copyright and patents are a compromise to encourage publication of ideas in a capitalistic society.
Ideas are not property. You cannot be deprived of an idea by theft (without IP laws). But in a capitalistic society, there isn't much motivation for people to spend time creating things they won't profit from without copyright and patents.
The principle that the article is arguing against is the concept that people can own ideas.
The simple miracle here is that in the United States the people are empowered to change this system.
We are led to beleive that, yes. But the simple fact is the people in power are controlled by corporations who do not have our best interests at heart. The people who aren't controlled by corporations don't have the money to replace the people who do. And people aren't going to band together to vote on this one issue because nobody knows about it. The media, who can (and should be) informing the people about this issue are ignoring it for one simple reason: they are owned by corporations who will profit (or at least think they will) from extended copyright terms and DRM.
However, I do intend to suggest that we have the means to affect change.
By voting in a different coporate-owned lackey?
IANAL, but they are not obligated to accept what you deem fit as payment for their goods. And I'm pretty sure a "good faith attempt" only applies to a mutually agreed upon debt (ie. both parties agreed to the transaction but one is having trouble meeting his end), and not to something you acquired illegally.
They can decide to only sell Britt N'Sync albums bundled together in box sets for $400 a pop and there's not much you can do about it. You can try to bargain with them to get the one album you want but they are in no way required to accept your offer. But then, you aren't required to buy it either.
The poster was refuting the "$3 billion loss due to piracy" claim in the article. It's the standard method of counting every illegal copy as a lost sale. The fact is the majority of illegal copies are purchased by people who a) wouldn't pay to see the movie even if the illegal copy wasn't available or b) will pay to see the movie even after getting the illegal copy. In both cases the studio loses nothing because it a) they weren't getting the money anyway and in b) they're still getting it. They are (way) overestimating their losses to make the problem look bigger than it is so they can get their laws passed.
When the artists question you about their low royalty payments, you complain about having to pay independent promoters (aka "payola workaround") to get the songs on the radio thus getting exposure.
Now, here comes a bunch of people who want to play your songs, giving them as much if not more exposure, and you're trying to charge them for it?
Well, which is it?
I would much rather see the court hire experts when they were needed.
It's very simple really. All the media in the US is owned by corporations who will profit from the DMCA and other DRM laws. Why would they want anybody to know about it?
It's the same reason a Senator from South Carolina, a state with no movie or recording industry to speak of, is fighting so hard for DRM. Do you honestly think anyone in South Carolina gives a shit about DRM?
It's how they get paid.
"One of the things we're discovering is that people are not aware that that they are engaging in conduct which is clearly illegal," said RIAA lawyer Cary Sherman.
"clearly illegal". This from an industry that says not watching commercials on television is stealing and that making a cassette copy of a CD (that I own) for my car is "tolerated but not legal" behavior.
"If you got a letter from the RIAA saying we know that you're doing this, I'd say there's a good chance that you would stop."
In other words, they want to be able to threaten people with C&D's regardless of whether they have any proof of wrong-doing.
Verizon says it would be unfair to cancel users accounts unless the music companies concerned filed formal legal proceedings that would give the users a chance to fight back.
But the music industry says that would take too long.
Tough shit. It's called due process and is guaranteed by the Constitution. Deal with it.
especially if Fritz Hollings gets his bills adopted.
In order for DRM to work, everyone (or a large majority) has to have it. Computers without solid DRM will be able to copy protected content. If not enough people have DRM enabled machines, the infrastructure (license servers etc) becomes unprofitable to support and the copying still goes on.
The government could mandate DRM enabled machines, but that will take years to have any effect as most people aren't going to buy new machines until their old ones are outdated. The government isn't going to mandate that everyone scrap their perfectly good computers for DRM enabled ones. Even the most apathetic citizen isn't going to sit still while the government requires him to buy a new computer.
So, what makes a computer outdated anyway? Availability of more processing power, more memory and storage make more resources available to applications (Andy giveth and Bill taketh away). So what happens when the resources stop coming? The applications stop using them. Nobody's going to buy a program that you can't buy a machine to run it on, right? So, if the programs aren't using more resources, when does a computer become outdated? When it stops working. I don't know about you, but most of the computers I've upgraded were perfectly functional, but short on resources. So, the upgrades to DRM enabled machines are going to take even longer. With nobody buying them, the computer manufacturers are either going to go out of business, or, more likely, make the government realize it ain't working.
The government could mandate that all new programs be written for DRM enabled machines. This won't fly because the software industry won't sit still while the government forces them to write programs for machines nobody has, but even if it did, so what? People generally have software that already does most of what they need it to. They just won't be buying any new software.
The *AA could entice people to buy the new machines to play their precious content, but the funny thing about the products the RIAA and the MPAA sell, even if they have forgotten, is that it is just entertainment. People will spend $200 on a DVD player. They won't spend $2000 on a new computer just to watch movies that they'd probably rather be watching on their $200 DVD player. So, they either don't sell any movies or they have to sell non-DRM protected versions, which defeats the purpose of having DRM.
Okay, suppose for a second that everything goes the *AA's way and everybody has a DRM enabled machine. Don't think for a second that being illegal is going to stop the influx of non-DRM enabled chips on the black market. A $0.30 chip in China that will get $100 here is a big incective for somebody to find a way to get it in. The US government's war on drugs has already shown they can't stop everything from getting in. Being against the law and being enforceable are two different things. If enough people have the illegal chips, the courts won't be able to keep up. And it only requires a few people to have the illegal chips for the de-protected content to get loose.
Hollings bill needs to go down because it is broken and fundamentally wrong. But it's not going to do a damned thing for protecting copyrights. The only thing it's going to get us is behind the rest of the world in technology.
Just do it twice, or three times. Or take photographs of the screen.
And, instead of one useful argument, we end up with two useless arguments that the judge and jury won't understand.
He's an expert. He's brought in to clarify points in a case that the average person (jury or judge) wouldn't understand. But he's biased. He's being paid by someone who has a vested interest in how the case turns out. He may be lying.
The solution to this is not to bring in someone else who might also be lying and let the judge and jury, who have no expertise in the area, decide who to believe.
If you don't believe me, get a friend to argue Emacs vs. vi with you to your grandmother and let her decide which is the better editor.
that's why you have experts' testimony
Expert witnesses are paid by whichever side hired them. They don't get any money for not making their clients argument for them. Therefore, it benefits the "expert" to offer the opinion that helps the person who hired him.
You can't always trust the expert.
In a word, horseshit.
Spam costs the recipient money. It's not just an annoyance. In any other business it would be called theft of services.
When they are paying the total cost of delivery (instead of defraying the cost among the recipients) then you can argue about whether their rights are being violated. Until then, it's theft and should be treated as such.