The point would be that in a situation where the hosting service had to take responsibility for the material they were serving, they'd presumably have to satisfy themselves of its legitimacy before serving it. That might make their business more expensive to run, and as a society we've decided for now not to impose that burden, so we created safe harbour arrangements.
Even so, the world doesn't owe the operators of major Internet hosting sites a living, any more than it owes one to the big record labels or movie studios or game developers or book publishers. Requiring someone who's redistributing copyrighted material, from their own extremely profitable website, to take some responsibility if that redistribution would normally be illegal isn't an absurd alternative model.
Youtube/google gets their cut either way, so they don't really seem to care. In fact its their algo's causing most of the problem in the first place.
But this is the problem, isn't it? The law didn't require anyone to take down your material under those conditions. It's Google/YouTube's arrangements with the big music labels that caused most of the problem here, and unfortunately as long as you choose to share your work on their service, you're always going to be subject to their whims and probably to them exploiting you for profit because of one-sided terms.
In most places that have safe-harbour style provisions, if you hosted the material on your own system, you would just have to provide contact details where the appropriate formal takedown notice could be sent, and when one of these abusive claims came in you could immediately make a counterclaim and leave your work untouched. Also, these laws typically require claims to be made under penalty of perjury (though sometimes with some weasel words about exactly what is claimed under that penalty that don't help the victims of abusive takedowns) so you might be able to chase after them for fun and/or profit if it's your system they're notifying and not some third party Google (who as you say might not care or want to get involved with that kind of dispute as long as their own legal backside is covered).
You think any government in the first world would cut Germany off the Internet because the German courts held someone in contempt for violating the spirit of a court ruling and comparing the courts with the Nazi party? I'd be surprised if you could find a single politician who wanted their name anywhere near that case.
If there are so many examples, it's odd that you only managed to cite one. But seriously, we've all heard of the **AA screwing up and suing grandmothers or two year olds or dead people. We know they make mistakes/act carelessly [delete as applicable], and once again, I have no problem with punishing them for any harm they do as a result.
But for every one of those, how many people escaped with some argument that an IP address didn't identify them specifically, even though it had been the fixed IP address of the broadband connection to the house in which only they lived for years, and 50 movies and 100 hit songs had been shared on BitTorrent over the past year from that IP address? Most of those people are guilty as sin.
The thing is, with the exponential distribution potential and the speed of the modern Internet, taking something down 24 hours after it goes up has little value if 90% of the people who wanted to rip it already did anyway. When the current copyright frameworks were established, that kind of near-instantaneous, near-effortless, widescale distribution of a work simply wasn't practical, and no-one designed the system to allow for it.
But now you've jumped to the fact that having copyrights at all is unethical, which is a position many people wouldn't necessarily agree with, even those who oppose the current extremes that the copyright debate has led us to.
Laws are essentially supposed to be a codified set of decisions about what is or isn't acceptable behaviour, hopefully reflecting the consensus of society as a whole, where these kinds of differences of opinion arise. Where this isn't the case, for example because laws have been distorted by media industry lobbying, the correct response is to force a change in the law itself so the media industry can't abuse it, not just to complain when they do.
Copyright isn't working, there's no quid pro quo, so why shouldn't the public just walk away and say "screw this"?
Because something about babies, bathwater, and no-one having an alternative plan yet that appears to be as effective at getting new works produced and distributed, I guess.
The main problem we have today is that we essentially have an adversarial system where everyone is pushing for the impractical, one-sided extremes. Basically the only people who are getting really screwed under the current system are the moderate, reasonable ones. The consumers who lose out are the ones who are happy to pay a fair price for something they enjoy, but don't want to then find they can't actually enjoy it because someone's DRM server is down. The creators who lose out are the ones who are willing to offer the product of their hard work for a fair price and without artificial restrictions, but who do need people to actually pay for it instead of assuming they're evil and ripping them off just because they can.
It's against the law almost everywhere to mock a court, in the sense of obviously not treating a court ruling with due respect. It's usually called contempt of court or something similar, and it's often a gaping loophole in due process that offers disturbingly little protection if you upset a judge and they decide to screw you.
The end result was a reduction in the revenue of the conventional music publishers! Facepalm!
Good. I'm not saying what they're doing is smart, just that they have the legal right to do it unless the law gets changed. If they choose to exercise their legal right to throw themselves off the side of a cliff, that's their problem, not yours or mine.
Good. If they implement naive, consumer-hostile policies and go bust as a result, I have absolutely no sympathy for them. For that matter, if they upset enough people and the law gets changed to remove their entire value proposition, I'd have no sympathy for them then, either. The only thing I'm saying is that as long as the law says what it says, suggesting that it's somehow unfair or unreasonable for people to enforce the rights that law gives them is not a useful argument.
I would be very surprised if anywhere near 10% of the enquiries by these industry organisations were false positives for material they don't have the rights to. GEMA do seem to be worse than most and it seems the German system has a dubious burden of proof arrangement, but copyright infringement is still happening plenty in Germany, just like everywhere else.
OK, that was one case. You still have the other (many-1) to find.
Obviously the strategies used by the media umbrella groups have false positives. And I've said repeatedly in this discussion and elsewhere that they should be penalised if they go after people incorrectly. In this case, I find it as absurd as I imagine everyone else here does that the burden of proof should fall on the people organising the event.
Nevertheless, the existence of outliers doesn't mean most of the time the people these organisations go after aren't guilty as hell.
I didn't. Those were opposite sides of the argument. I'm suggesting that the overwhelming majority of people they go after probably are infringing and thus, legally speaking, legitimate targets. That contradicts the position that in many of those cases they don't have the rights they claim to have, unless you want to interpret "many" according to some absolute, small scale without reference to the overall situation.
If GEMA themselves uploaded the content with the intent that YouTube would redistribute it, then clearly they can't turn round and argue that YouTube was acting without consent when that redistribution happens.
GEMA need to get with the times and realise they can't staunchly deny the internet the right to use its clients' music.
Why not? The law seems to say they have every right to do that. There are plenty of reasonable arguments for changing laws, but unless and until that happens, "the Internet" doesn't have the automatic right to enjoy others' copyrighted works whenever it feels like it for free.
I actually believe copyright law is valuable and has a place, when appropriately balanced, but it's tilted so far in favor of content owners right now, and the record labels and their associations are so abusive, that my starting position is always to assume they're in the wrong.
I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. On the other hand, with on-line copyright infringement, we're also talking about an activity that is ripping off the legal rightsholders left and right, yet which isn't considered a criminal activity in the way that for example theft or fraud would be.
The barriers to cost-effective enforcement as the law was originally envisaged are often prohibitively high in the context of mass distribution over the Internet. Meanwhile, you only have to read Slashdot for five minutes to find plenty of people who will argue that copyright infringement is the equivalent of a victimless crime, followed by various dubious-at-best attempts to rationalise their illegal behaviour.
So, as long as you're going to have laws that say copyright is what it is and works how it works, I don't think it's entirely fair to criticise people in creative industries who try to actually enforce their legal rights in a practical way. They should be penalised in turn when they overstep those rights, of course.
and as a mark of our respect to the German legal system, we are only following orders when we show this message to you.
Yes, because when you're dealing with a court you definitely want to mock them, and when you're dealing with the German government you definitely want to bring up the Nazi history.
Oh, and by the way, your entire legal team and every executive who ever sets foot in a country with an extradition treaty gets 6 months in jail for contempt. Have a nice day.
So if someone in Germany uploads a video containing copyright material from GEMA, Youtube should pay a fee?
I don't know what the law says in Germany, but that's not entirely unreasonable as a premise. It's not a self-evident truth that sites hosting user-submitted content like YouTube should get a free pass for what would otherwise clearly be infringing redistribution under some sort of safe harbour rule, even if that's the way many western states have decided to handle the issue for now.
GEMA is, however, entirely responsible for claiming they own the music. In many cases, I bet they don't
If I were a betting man, I'd take that bet without hesitation.
Of course there are cases where industry bodies have been overly aggressive in going after people who they erroneously claimed were infringing their rights. And of course they've sometimes done that based on naive, automated detection systems. And of course they should be penalised appropriately and make good any harm done.
None of that means the overwhelming majority of people they go after aren't blatantly infringing their legal rights for real.
For everyday driving though, HUDs are not going to provide anywhere near as valuable navigation instruction as direct sight will any time soon under most driving conditions.
What about driving at night, or in poor weather, where visibility is significantly reduced and many drivers already travel too fast for the distance ahead they can see clearly? While the speeds and distances involved are obviously much lower, your reasoning about the fighter pilot applies almost verbatim.
That said, it can have its uses for reducing the amount of eye travel necessary to keep tabs on simple things that could otherwise become significant distractions such as next turn(s) from the GPS.
Sure. As a related feature, a HUD could track information that appears only temporarily on signage but has ongoing relevance, such as speed limits. And then what about more complex and contextual data like lane designations and turning restrictions at junctions? There are systems in development today that don't just have a standard "turn left" arrow connected to satnav, but overlay the path the driver needs to follow through a junction on top of their view of the road itself. Personally, I'd be happy if everyone had clear lane division markings visible when driving through roadworks when it's dark and wet, which we're already on the way to achieving with the lane change warnings in some cars you can buy today.
Of course there is a huge difference between the training someone like an air force fighter pilot or the captain of a passenger airliner has had and the training an average car driver has had. There's also a huge difference between the complexity of the instruments and HUDs used on those kinds of planes and the baby steps into the field taken by the first HUDs in high-end cars today. The point wasn't to equate the two, it was to show that a blanket ban on new kinds of instrumentation when clearly at some point that sort of instrumentation can be helpful is short-sighted.
Don't get me wrong, having a HUD in front of your eyeballs while driving is a terrible idea
That kind of claim is why we have to be really careful about banning technologies prematurely.
If using HUDs or other kinds of electronic instruments were inherently dangerous, they wouldn't routinely be used by aircraft pilots.
The interesting questions are about what kinds of information are useful to help people drive better, and what conditions (such as a certain level of training) are necessary to enjoy those benefits.
What study has shown that it is safe to drive while eating a Big Mac?
I'm pretty sure I've seen stories about people eating apples while driving being pulled over and prosecuted in my country (the UK), and our general laws against poor driving certainly cover that kind of case if the standard of driving is unacceptable as a result.
I'm in two minds about technology-specific laws. On the one hand, we introduced legislation here a few years ago against driving while using a hand-held mobile phone, which promptly led to aggressive marketing about how using a hands-free kit keeps you safe. (It doesn't; the exact same research used to justify the ban on hand-held devices showed that hands-free was almost as dangerous. It was left out of the law because of concerns over unrealistic enforcement, not because it was safe.)
On the other hand, the motivation for introducing the phone-specific law was that too many people are deluded enough to believe they can drive at their normal standard while on the phone, so they didn't think the regular laws against driving without due care and attention would apply. Every time that discussion comes up on Slashdot, plenty of people will turn up and exhibit the exact same arrogance and/or ignorance, thus proving the original motivation sound in that case. If the same is true of Google Glass or similar headsets, specific laws might be warranted in those cases as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The point would be that in a situation where the hosting service had to take responsibility for the material they were serving, they'd presumably have to satisfy themselves of its legitimacy before serving it. That might make their business more expensive to run, and as a society we've decided for now not to impose that burden, so we created safe harbour arrangements.
Even so, the world doesn't owe the operators of major Internet hosting sites a living, any more than it owes one to the big record labels or movie studios or game developers or book publishers. Requiring someone who's redistributing copyrighted material, from their own extremely profitable website, to take some responsibility if that redistribution would normally be illegal isn't an absurd alternative model.
Youtube/google gets their cut either way, so they don't really seem to care. In fact its their algo's causing most of the problem in the first place.
But this is the problem, isn't it? The law didn't require anyone to take down your material under those conditions. It's Google/YouTube's arrangements with the big music labels that caused most of the problem here, and unfortunately as long as you choose to share your work on their service, you're always going to be subject to their whims and probably to them exploiting you for profit because of one-sided terms.
In most places that have safe-harbour style provisions, if you hosted the material on your own system, you would just have to provide contact details where the appropriate formal takedown notice could be sent, and when one of these abusive claims came in you could immediately make a counterclaim and leave your work untouched. Also, these laws typically require claims to be made under penalty of perjury (though sometimes with some weasel words about exactly what is claimed under that penalty that don't help the victims of abusive takedowns) so you might be able to chase after them for fun and/or profit if it's your system they're notifying and not some third party Google (who as you say might not care or want to get involved with that kind of dispute as long as their own legal backside is covered).
Well, there you go. At least they've done something positive for the world. ;-)
You think any government in the first world would cut Germany off the Internet because the German courts held someone in contempt for violating the spirit of a court ruling and comparing the courts with the Nazi party? I'd be surprised if you could find a single politician who wanted their name anywhere near that case.
If there are so many examples, it's odd that you only managed to cite one. But seriously, we've all heard of the **AA screwing up and suing grandmothers or two year olds or dead people. We know they make mistakes/act carelessly [delete as applicable], and once again, I have no problem with punishing them for any harm they do as a result.
But for every one of those, how many people escaped with some argument that an IP address didn't identify them specifically, even though it had been the fixed IP address of the broadband connection to the house in which only they lived for years, and 50 movies and 100 hit songs had been shared on BitTorrent over the past year from that IP address? Most of those people are guilty as sin.
The thing is, with the exponential distribution potential and the speed of the modern Internet, taking something down 24 hours after it goes up has little value if 90% of the people who wanted to rip it already did anyway. When the current copyright frameworks were established, that kind of near-instantaneous, near-effortless, widescale distribution of a work simply wasn't practical, and no-one designed the system to allow for it.
But now you've jumped to the fact that having copyrights at all is unethical, which is a position many people wouldn't necessarily agree with, even those who oppose the current extremes that the copyright debate has led us to.
Laws are essentially supposed to be a codified set of decisions about what is or isn't acceptable behaviour, hopefully reflecting the consensus of society as a whole, where these kinds of differences of opinion arise. Where this isn't the case, for example because laws have been distorted by media industry lobbying, the correct response is to force a change in the law itself so the media industry can't abuse it, not just to complain when they do.
Copyright isn't working, there's no quid pro quo, so why shouldn't the public just walk away and say "screw this"?
Because something about babies, bathwater, and no-one having an alternative plan yet that appears to be as effective at getting new works produced and distributed, I guess.
The main problem we have today is that we essentially have an adversarial system where everyone is pushing for the impractical, one-sided extremes. Basically the only people who are getting really screwed under the current system are the moderate, reasonable ones. The consumers who lose out are the ones who are happy to pay a fair price for something they enjoy, but don't want to then find they can't actually enjoy it because someone's DRM server is down. The creators who lose out are the ones who are willing to offer the product of their hard work for a fair price and without artificial restrictions, but who do need people to actually pay for it instead of assuming they're evil and ripping them off just because they can.
It's against the law almost everywhere to mock a court, in the sense of obviously not treating a court ruling with due respect. It's usually called contempt of court or something similar, and it's often a gaping loophole in due process that offers disturbingly little protection if you upset a judge and they decide to screw you.
The end result was a reduction in the revenue of the conventional music publishers! Facepalm!
Good. I'm not saying what they're doing is smart, just that they have the legal right to do it unless the law gets changed. If they choose to exercise their legal right to throw themselves off the side of a cliff, that's their problem, not yours or mine.
Good. If they implement naive, consumer-hostile policies and go bust as a result, I have absolutely no sympathy for them. For that matter, if they upset enough people and the law gets changed to remove their entire value proposition, I'd have no sympathy for them then, either. The only thing I'm saying is that as long as the law says what it says, suggesting that it's somehow unfair or unreasonable for people to enforce the rights that law gives them is not a useful argument.
I would be very surprised if anywhere near 10% of the enquiries by these industry organisations were false positives for material they don't have the rights to. GEMA do seem to be worse than most and it seems the German system has a dubious burden of proof arrangement, but copyright infringement is still happening plenty in Germany, just like everywhere else.
OK, that was one case. You still have the other (many-1) to find.
Obviously the strategies used by the media umbrella groups have false positives. And I've said repeatedly in this discussion and elsewhere that they should be penalised if they go after people incorrectly. In this case, I find it as absurd as I imagine everyone else here does that the burden of proof should fall on the people organising the event.
Nevertheless, the existence of outliers doesn't mean most of the time the people these organisations go after aren't guilty as hell.
I didn't. Those were opposite sides of the argument. I'm suggesting that the overwhelming majority of people they go after probably are infringing and thus, legally speaking, legitimate targets. That contradicts the position that in many of those cases they don't have the rights they claim to have, unless you want to interpret "many" according to some absolute, small scale without reference to the overall situation.
If GEMA themselves uploaded the content with the intent that YouTube would redistribute it, then clearly they can't turn round and argue that YouTube was acting without consent when that redistribution happens.
GEMA need to get with the times and realise they can't staunchly deny the internet the right to use its clients' music.
Why not? The law seems to say they have every right to do that. There are plenty of reasonable arguments for changing laws, but unless and until that happens, "the Internet" doesn't have the automatic right to enjoy others' copyrighted works whenever it feels like it for free.
I actually believe copyright law is valuable and has a place, when appropriately balanced, but it's tilted so far in favor of content owners right now, and the record labels and their associations are so abusive, that my starting position is always to assume they're in the wrong.
I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. On the other hand, with on-line copyright infringement, we're also talking about an activity that is ripping off the legal rightsholders left and right, yet which isn't considered a criminal activity in the way that for example theft or fraud would be.
The barriers to cost-effective enforcement as the law was originally envisaged are often prohibitively high in the context of mass distribution over the Internet. Meanwhile, you only have to read Slashdot for five minutes to find plenty of people who will argue that copyright infringement is the equivalent of a victimless crime, followed by various dubious-at-best attempts to rationalise their illegal behaviour.
So, as long as you're going to have laws that say copyright is what it is and works how it works, I don't think it's entirely fair to criticise people in creative industries who try to actually enforce their legal rights in a practical way. They should be penalised in turn when they overstep those rights, of course.
It is their website, and they have the free speech rights to portray GEMA however they like, in their publications.
Not if it's defamatory, they don't.
(I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, just that your blanket statement is obviously untrue.)
and as a mark of our respect to the German legal system, we are only following orders when we show this message to you.
Yes, because when you're dealing with a court you definitely want to mock them, and when you're dealing with the German government you definitely want to bring up the Nazi history.
Oh, and by the way, your entire legal team and every executive who ever sets foot in a country with an extradition treaty gets 6 months in jail for contempt. Have a nice day.
Lots of love,
The German courts.
So if someone in Germany uploads a video containing copyright material from GEMA, Youtube should pay a fee?
I don't know what the law says in Germany, but that's not entirely unreasonable as a premise. It's not a self-evident truth that sites hosting user-submitted content like YouTube should get a free pass for what would otherwise clearly be infringing redistribution under some sort of safe harbour rule, even if that's the way many western states have decided to handle the issue for now.
GEMA is, however, entirely responsible for claiming they own the music. In many cases, I bet they don't
If I were a betting man, I'd take that bet without hesitation.
Of course there are cases where industry bodies have been overly aggressive in going after people who they erroneously claimed were infringing their rights. And of course they've sometimes done that based on naive, automated detection systems. And of course they should be penalised appropriately and make good any harm done.
None of that means the overwhelming majority of people they go after aren't blatantly infringing their legal rights for real.
For everyday driving though, HUDs are not going to provide anywhere near as valuable navigation instruction as direct sight will any time soon under most driving conditions.
What about driving at night, or in poor weather, where visibility is significantly reduced and many drivers already travel too fast for the distance ahead they can see clearly? While the speeds and distances involved are obviously much lower, your reasoning about the fighter pilot applies almost verbatim.
That said, it can have its uses for reducing the amount of eye travel necessary to keep tabs on simple things that could otherwise become significant distractions such as next turn(s) from the GPS.
Sure. As a related feature, a HUD could track information that appears only temporarily on signage but has ongoing relevance, such as speed limits. And then what about more complex and contextual data like lane designations and turning restrictions at junctions? There are systems in development today that don't just have a standard "turn left" arrow connected to satnav, but overlay the path the driver needs to follow through a junction on top of their view of the road itself. Personally, I'd be happy if everyone had clear lane division markings visible when driving through roadworks when it's dark and wet, which we're already on the way to achieving with the lane change warnings in some cars you can buy today.
Of course there is a huge difference between the training someone like an air force fighter pilot or the captain of a passenger airliner has had and the training an average car driver has had. There's also a huge difference between the complexity of the instruments and HUDs used on those kinds of planes and the baby steps into the field taken by the first HUDs in high-end cars today. The point wasn't to equate the two, it was to show that a blanket ban on new kinds of instrumentation when clearly at some point that sort of instrumentation can be helpful is short-sighted.
Don't get me wrong, having a HUD in front of your eyeballs while driving is a terrible idea
That kind of claim is why we have to be really careful about banning technologies prematurely.
If using HUDs or other kinds of electronic instruments were inherently dangerous, they wouldn't routinely be used by aircraft pilots.
The interesting questions are about what kinds of information are useful to help people drive better, and what conditions (such as a certain level of training) are necessary to enjoy those benefits.
What study has shown that it is safe to drive while eating a Big Mac?
I'm pretty sure I've seen stories about people eating apples while driving being pulled over and prosecuted in my country (the UK), and our general laws against poor driving certainly cover that kind of case if the standard of driving is unacceptable as a result.
I'm in two minds about technology-specific laws. On the one hand, we introduced legislation here a few years ago against driving while using a hand-held mobile phone, which promptly led to aggressive marketing about how using a hands-free kit keeps you safe. (It doesn't; the exact same research used to justify the ban on hand-held devices showed that hands-free was almost as dangerous. It was left out of the law because of concerns over unrealistic enforcement, not because it was safe.)
On the other hand, the motivation for introducing the phone-specific law was that too many people are deluded enough to believe they can drive at their normal standard while on the phone, so they didn't think the regular laws against driving without due care and attention would apply. Every time that discussion comes up on Slashdot, plenty of people will turn up and exhibit the exact same arrogance and/or ignorance, thus proving the original motivation sound in that case. If the same is true of Google Glass or similar headsets, specific laws might be warranted in those cases as well.