10 years? I thought this whole story arose because there was a stealth update in August. That's closer to 10 weeks than 10 years. How much of that fixed old bugs, and how much of it is new code, introducing new ones?
The US should do better than it does, but it has the strongest respect for the rule of law of any country I've been to. I have a lot of respect for that.
Then why you do you post as an AC? Aren't you confident that the respect for the rule of law will protect you from any repercussions?
I'm sorry, but I think your argument doesn't hold up.
You don't get levied on non-recordable media. So if you're distributing software on CDROM's, you don't get charged a levy. So you must be talking about very small runs where it's not economical to press a CDROM.
But the levy is only $0.21 per CD-R. Are you in the business of selling small numbers of copies of software at a price where you can't absorb $0.21? I think that's your problem, the levy isn't your problem.
There used to be a legitimate complaint from people who use CD-R's for backup, because there's no question the levy makes CD-R's more expensive than they'd be otherwise. But nowadays just use DVD-R. There's no levy on them, because they're not mainly used for music.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say you "pirate" all the big label music. If you're copying for your own use, it's not piracy.
It's not to say that those who stick out can't be prosecuted, since copyright law supersedes this, however it does protect the average person from random litigation.
No, that's not right at all. Section 80 of the Copyright Act specifically legalizes copying for private use. Copyright law allows private copying.
The gist was 'we can't possibly sue everyone for copyright infringement, so we'll just levy the means by which to copy, and only pursue those that exceed the levy by a significant amount'
That might have been why the CRIA lobbyists originally supported this, but that's not part of the law. They got it legalized, so it's no longer copyright infringement. Read the law, or read the Copyright Board summary.
Well no, I think he got it absolutely correct. The Canadian government assumed everyone, or a large percentage of the population, was going to be doing it anyway and so authorized a charge on all media of a certain class.
I don't know the history, but I think that sounds close enough: they assumed lots of people would be doing it, so they legalized it. The levy was put in place as compensation to the artists.
But the OP wasn't right in saying that we're "all breaking the law anyway". If he'd said lots of people would be breaking the law if the private copying right hadn't been legislated, then he might have been right.
As for artists getting the money - I admit I haven't checked for a while but that doesn't seem to actually be happening, despite collecting the levy money for years.
According to the CPCC, they've paid out just over half of what they've collected so far, i.e. about $103 million. You can see their financial statement here. Their overhead is around 10%, so they've got about $75 million on hand that will eventually be distributed.
Are they going to expand this levy to cell phones as well? Mine has 2 gigs of memory and I use it all the time as a music player. There's also my hard drive and all the other components that store music information on my computer and play it back, will there be a levy on that as well. Then there's radio receivers and internet access itself...I think it's time that major record labels realize that they are no longer needed. Aside from the sparingly relevant music that they put out there, they only exist to exploit their artists and their customers. I have no pity for any hardship that they encounter.
You have to remember that there are multiple players here, and they don't all want the same thing. The CRIA represents multinational labels, and they now hate the levy because they hardly represent any Canadian artists, so they don't get much of the payout.
Then there's the CPCC and the other collectives, who actually collect the levy. They'd love to expand it to cover everything.
And there's the Copyright Board, the government body who gets to hold hearings and make decisions. They're actually pretty good at finding a balance. The rule they seem to follow is that if a medium is mainly used to hold recorded music, then it gets the levy, with the amount depending on exactly how often it's used for music, and how big it is. So generic hard drives are probably safe, but the ones in MP3 players probably aren't. (They were nearly taxed once before, but escaped on a technicality. If the levy survives the multinational lobby, I would guess they'll get hit.)
If your phone's memory is mainly used (i.e. by most people, not just mainly used by you) for downloaded recorded music, it might end up being levied.
Software and video DVDs aren't covered by the levy, so copying those does "steal" from the artists. But the artists are being paid (by the levy) for copies of music, so that's not theft any more than buying from HMV is theft from iTMS.
You've got it wrong: the government thinks that it is *not* illegal to copy music for personal use. The levy gives me the right to make copies of music for my use. Period. Nothing illegal about it. And why shouldn't it be legal? Why should the government support one or two particular delivery methods, rather than letting me get the music any way I like, as long as the artist gets paid?
Unlike the US version of the levy, I don't need to copy onto levied media. Copying anywhere is fine. The argument for this is that the levy can be expanded (and there's currently a motion to expand it to the iPod, which is what the CRIA is objecting to).
But do note that this applies only to music, not to movies or games. No levies paid to them.
I doubt there's any equipment sensitive enough to detect weight difference in an object that was moved several feet but there is a change.
According to the back of this envelope here, the weight change from raising a kilogram by one metre would be about equivalent to reducing its mass by about 3 parts in 10^7, i.e. 300 micrograms. The article says the measured loss was around 50 micrograms. So I guess there is equivalent sensitive enough to measure that.
Isn't it though? I thought a Private Copying Levy existed in the United States to cover those kinds of scenarios? Does anyone know of any legal precedent of the 'blank media tax' being used as a successful defense in a case in the United States?
I'd be interested in hearing about a case like that. I don't know the French rules, but that defence would certainly work in Canada: here we have a private copying right, regardless of whether we copy on to levied media. My reading says that the US law only applies to copies onto specific media, but I've no idea how common those media are.
I love how 90% of the arguments here are lying around the "it's my computer, my bandwidth too...I can block whatever I want". But no one gets it that a server should be able to block what they want too. All of a sudden it's a terrible thing!
I haven't seen a single post saying that the server has to serve. If a server doesn't want to give me a page, that's fine with me. I won't whine about it, and I won't come back.
I've seen a few posts like yours saying that the client has to download everything the web site owner wants them to download. That's not fine with me, that's "a feeling of entitlement". I'll download what I want. That doesn't include flash or popups, but it does normally include embedded ads (as long as they don't need Javascript running in order to load).
If you're putting expensive content online for free, make sure your ads aren't the kind that most people hate and find easy to block, or they will. Make sure your *whole page* is worth looking at, and people will do that.
so while it may not have been legal...it was clearly sanctioned by the bands and the labels involved.
If they were the copyright holders, they'd be able to give you permission to make copies, so that would be legal.
What would probably not be legal (then or now) would be for you to make a copy for your friend without obtaining permission first. For some time it was illegal even to make a copy for yourself, but that was eventually decided to be fair use. (This is based on my very limited knowledge of US law; in other countries the rules vary quite a bit on what non-commercial copying is legal.)
my question has always been, "why was it okay for my to make copies of my vinyl albums, put them on cassette, and give it to a friend but it's not okay for me to make a copy of a cd and give that cd copy to the same friend?"
What makes you think that was legal?
Re:another example
on
AMD NDA Scandal
·
· Score: 5, Informative
He refused to sign, AMD relented, and then on Day 2 of the visit he was asked again to sign, and refused. That's what TFA says.
Conclusion?
AMD sucks, the reporter is a hero, and you can't read (or spell).
The fact that most people selfishly pollute doesn't mean that pollution is good, or that it doesn't harm society. It just means that most people are selfish. I wouldn't argue with that.
In fact, I wouldn't even argue that selfishness is necessarily bad. But using the good effects of selfishness (encouraging production of new things that benefit everybody a bit, and that benefit you a lot) to justify the bad effects (the destruction of the commons) is just sloppy thinking. One does not imply the other.
Copyright and patents were designed to support the good effects of selfishness, and they sometimes do that. My guess would be that most software patents don't. I think the benefits of software copyright are mixed. I'm sure it doesn't need to be perpetual to achieve its aims.
I haven't looked at your web page, so I have no opinion about your personal contributions.
"At the expense of society" means acting in a way that may benefit you and a small number of others, but is a net cost to everyone else. For example, most polluters act at the expense of society. But how you could expect Mr. Turgid to explain your own examples of this without knowing the details of your life seems to be asking for generalizations, so here goes:
- You probably are a net polluter, without cleaning up after yourself. Most of us are.
- You have probably obtained government-sanctioned monopolies (patents or copyrights) for your computer work, which benefit you but cost the rest of us.
There are any number of other ways in which you could have acted selfishly, but it's hard to guess at them.
You get GPL/LGPL "EULA" because of brain-dead installers that assume there must be EULA, and/or people who write the install scripts. However, the license itself explicitly states that you do *not* need to accept it merely to use the software.
Yes, I understand that you are allowed to lie when using that GTK+ installer and click on the "Agree" button even if you don't agree, and you still won't violate the license. I am claiming that you are also allowed to lie when using the MS-PL: even if you don't agree with it, you can use it, and you are not doing anything that violates it.
Could you be successfully sued for using MS-PL software even if you disagree with something in the license? No, because the requirement to agree is empty. A contract would limit your actions in some way, not your thoughts. There is no contract to "agree to agree".
Don't blame the installer, blame the person who wrote the install script. The EULA is generally optional (e.g. with Inno Setup, you have a choice between doing nothing, using "InfoBeforeFile" to show something, or using "LicenseFile" to show something that requires agreement).
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10 years? I thought this whole story arose because there was a stealth update in August. That's closer to 10 weeks than 10 years. How much of that fixed old bugs, and how much of it is new code, introducing new ones?
Exactly! All they need are the private keys MS uses to sign the updates.. oh wait.
You've audited the source code, and you know that there aren't any bugs or backdoors?
The US should do better than it does, but it has the strongest respect for the rule of law of any country I've been to. I have a lot of respect for that.
Then why you do you post as an AC? Aren't you confident that the respect for the rule of law will protect you from any repercussions?
Actually, it's both the phrase and the image, and both claims are bogus. Won't stop the lawyers on both sides from making a living, though.
How do you get there? I only see the latest 24, without any obvious way to go to the next page, or to display all of them.
I wouldn't call him a Liberal: he helped a Liberal (Sarmite Bulte) to lose the last election.
I'm sorry, but I think your argument doesn't hold up.
You don't get levied on non-recordable media. So if you're distributing software on CDROM's, you don't get charged a levy. So you must be talking about very small runs where it's not economical to press a CDROM.
But the levy is only $0.21 per CD-R. Are you in the business of selling small numbers of copies of software at a price where you can't absorb $0.21? I think that's your problem, the levy isn't your problem.
There used to be a legitimate complaint from people who use CD-R's for backup, because there's no question the levy makes CD-R's more expensive than they'd be otherwise. But nowadays just use DVD-R. There's no levy on them, because they're not mainly used for music.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say you "pirate" all the big label music. If you're copying for your own use, it's not piracy.
It's not to say that those who stick out can't be prosecuted, since copyright law supersedes this, however it does protect the average person from random litigation.
No, that's not right at all. Section 80 of the Copyright Act specifically legalizes copying for private use. Copyright law allows private copying.
The gist was 'we can't possibly sue everyone for copyright infringement, so we'll just levy the means by which to copy, and only pursue those that exceed the levy by a significant amount'
That might have been why the CRIA lobbyists originally supported this, but that's not part of the law. They got it legalized, so it's no longer copyright infringement. Read the law, or read the Copyright Board summary.
Well no, I think he got it absolutely correct. The Canadian government assumed everyone, or a large percentage of the population, was going to be doing it anyway and so authorized a charge on all media of a certain class.
I don't know the history, but I think that sounds close enough: they assumed lots of people would be doing it, so they legalized it. The levy was put in place as compensation to the artists.
But the OP wasn't right in saying that we're "all breaking the law anyway". If he'd said lots of people would be breaking the law if the private copying right hadn't been legislated, then he might have been right.
As for artists getting the money - I admit I haven't checked for a while but that doesn't seem to actually be happening, despite collecting the levy money for years.
According to the CPCC, they've paid out just over half of what they've collected so far, i.e. about $103 million. You can see their financial statement here. Their overhead is around 10%, so they've got about $75 million on hand that will eventually be distributed.
Are they going to expand this levy to cell phones as well? Mine has 2 gigs of memory and I use it all the time as a music player. There's also my hard drive and all the other components that store music information on my computer and play it back, will there be a levy on that as well. Then there's radio receivers and internet access itself...I think it's time that major record labels realize that they are no longer needed. Aside from the sparingly relevant music that they put out there, they only exist to exploit their artists and their customers. I have no pity for any hardship that they encounter.
You have to remember that there are multiple players here, and they don't all want the same thing. The CRIA represents multinational labels, and they now hate the levy because they hardly represent any Canadian artists, so they don't get much of the payout.
Then there's the CPCC and the other collectives, who actually collect the levy. They'd love to expand it to cover everything.
And there's the Copyright Board, the government body who gets to hold hearings and make decisions. They're actually pretty good at finding a balance. The rule they seem to follow is that if a medium is mainly used to hold recorded music, then it gets the levy, with the amount depending on exactly how often it's used for music, and how big it is. So generic hard drives are probably safe, but the ones in MP3 players probably aren't. (They were nearly taxed once before, but escaped on a technicality. If the levy survives the multinational lobby, I would guess they'll get hit.)
If your phone's memory is mainly used (i.e. by most people, not just mainly used by you) for downloaded recorded music, it might end up being levied.
Software and video DVDs aren't covered by the levy, so copying those does "steal" from the artists. But the artists are being paid (by the levy) for copies of music, so that's not theft any more than buying from HMV is theft from iTMS.
You've got it wrong: the government thinks that it is *not* illegal to copy music for personal use. The levy gives me the right to make copies of music for my use. Period. Nothing illegal about it. And why shouldn't it be legal? Why should the government support one or two particular delivery methods, rather than letting me get the music any way I like, as long as the artist gets paid?
Unlike the US version of the levy, I don't need to copy onto levied media. Copying anywhere is fine. The argument for this is that the levy can be expanded (and there's currently a motion to expand it to the iPod, which is what the CRIA is objecting to).
But do note that this applies only to music, not to movies or games. No levies paid to them.
A nanogram is 10^(-9) grams. So 300 nanograms would be 3 parts in 10^7 of a gram, not of a kilogram.
I think I got the units right; I'm not so sure about the inverse square law.
I doubt there's any equipment sensitive enough to detect weight difference in an object that was moved several feet but there is a change.
According to the back of this envelope here, the weight change from raising a kilogram by one metre would be
about equivalent to reducing its mass by about 3 parts in 10^7, i.e. 300 micrograms. The article says the measured loss was around 50 micrograms. So I guess there is equivalent sensitive enough to measure that.
Unless I was off by a few orders of magnitude...
Isn't it though? I thought a Private Copying Levy existed in the United States to cover those kinds of scenarios? Does anyone know of any legal precedent of the 'blank media tax' being used as a successful defense in a case in the United States?
I'd be interested in hearing about a case like that. I don't know the French rules, but that defence would certainly work in Canada: here we have a private copying right, regardless of whether we copy on to levied media. My reading says that the US law only applies to copies onto specific media, but I've no idea how common those media are.
I love how 90% of the arguments here are lying around the "it's my computer, my bandwidth too...I can block whatever I want". But no one gets it that a server should be able to block what they want too. All of a sudden it's a terrible thing!
I haven't seen a single post saying that the server has to serve. If a server doesn't want to give me a page, that's fine with me. I won't whine about it, and I won't come back.
I've seen a few posts like yours saying that the client has to download everything the web site owner wants them to download. That's not fine with me, that's "a feeling of entitlement". I'll download what I want. That doesn't include flash or popups, but it does normally include embedded ads (as long as they don't need Javascript running in order to load).
If you're putting expensive content online for free, make sure your ads aren't the kind that most people hate and find easy to block, or they will. Make sure your *whole page* is worth looking at, and people will do that.
It's not really very complicated.
so while it may not have been legal...it was clearly sanctioned by the bands and the labels involved.
If they were the copyright holders, they'd be able to give you permission to make copies, so that would be legal.
What would probably not be legal (then or now) would be for you to make a copy for your friend without obtaining permission first. For some time it was illegal even to make a copy for yourself, but that was eventually decided to be fair use. (This is based on my very limited knowledge of US law; in other countries the rules vary quite a bit on what non-commercial copying is legal.)
my question has always been, "why was it okay for my to make copies of my vinyl albums, put them on cassette, and give it to a friend but it's not okay for me to make a copy of a cd and give that cd copy to the same friend?"
What makes you think that was legal?
He refused to sign, AMD relented, and then on Day 2 of the visit he was asked again to sign, and refused. That's what TFA says.
Conclusion?
AMD sucks, the reporter is a hero, and you can't read (or spell).
It's not 64k, but their fr-041: debris is amazing. I wouldn't really call 180k bloated when it does as much as that one.
The fact that most people selfishly pollute doesn't mean that pollution is good, or that it doesn't harm society. It just means that most people are selfish. I wouldn't argue with that.
In fact, I wouldn't even argue that selfishness is necessarily bad. But using the good effects of selfishness (encouraging production of new things that benefit everybody a bit, and that benefit you a lot) to justify the bad effects (the destruction of the commons) is just sloppy thinking. One does not imply the other.
Copyright and patents were designed to support the good effects of selfishness, and they sometimes do that. My guess would be that most software patents don't. I think the benefits of software copyright are mixed. I'm sure it doesn't need to be perpetual to achieve its aims.
I haven't looked at your web page, so I have no opinion about your personal contributions.
"At the expense of society" means acting in a way that may benefit you and a small number of others, but is a net cost to everyone else. For example, most polluters act at the expense of society. But how you could expect Mr. Turgid to explain your own examples of this without knowing the details of your life seems to be asking for generalizations, so here goes:
- You probably are a net polluter, without cleaning up after yourself. Most of us are.
- You have probably obtained government-sanctioned monopolies (patents or copyrights) for your computer work, which benefit you but cost the rest of us.
There are any number of other ways in which you could have acted selfishly, but it's hard to guess at them.
Or just use a different installer. There's more than one out there.
You get GPL/LGPL "EULA" because of brain-dead installers that assume there must be EULA, and/or people who write the install scripts. However, the license itself explicitly states that you do *not* need to accept it merely to use the software.
Yes, I understand that you are allowed to lie when using that GTK+ installer and click on the "Agree" button even if you don't agree, and you still won't violate the license. I am claiming that you are also allowed to lie when using the MS-PL: even if you don't agree with it, you can use it, and you are not doing anything that violates it.
Could you be successfully sued for using MS-PL software even if you disagree with something in the license? No, because the requirement to agree is empty. A contract would limit your actions in some way, not your thoughts. There is no contract to "agree to agree".
Don't blame the installer, blame the person who wrote the install script. The EULA is generally optional (e.g. with Inno Setup, you have a choice between doing nothing, using "InfoBeforeFile" to show something, or using "LicenseFile" to show something that requires agreement).