Cite all the studies you want, but I can tell you for a fact that I can drive just fine while buzzing or high.
Of course you can.
And a lot of other folks can too.
Of course they can.
I'm a better driver while under the influence than most people are sober.
Of course you are.
Or it could be that, like most people, you significantly over-estimate your own competence. "90% of drivers think they are in the top 10% of drivers" and all that. Actually, some of the research has asked secondary questions about how drivers thought they performed, and it usually turns out that impaired drivers don't accurately assess their own limitations and recognise their own mistakes, even if they acknowledge them later when looking at the evidence while unimpaired.
Do you have any objective evidence to support your claims here? Have you, for example, been out in these impaired states with a competent, experienced and independent witness who can confirm that your opinion of yourself is correct? It doesn't matter that they haven't come onto Slashdot and told all of us, but have you at least had such objective feedback?
Or is your entire argument based purely on ego? If it is — and again, you don't have to try to sell us on it, but you know yourself whether you're being honest or not — then I encourage you to reevaluate your idea of how good you really are, and perhaps do some research for yourself. Right now, your attitude suggests that you are probably in the most dangerous group of drivers on the road and it's almost certain that you aren't as good as you think you are.
Be careful: what this study appears to be measuring is not the same as the ability to drive safely. As TFA itself notes:
Cell phone conversations require a driver's constant attention in order not to appear rude or insulting to an unseen partner. In contrast, a talking passenger can willingly cut off conversation upon spying an approaching ambulance or some other demand on a driver's attention.
In other words, this study does not conflict with previous evidence that suggests talking with a passenger (who can see to shut up when necessary) makes little difference, but talking to someone on a mobile phone is disastrous for driver performance.
I understand (and happen to agree with) the idea that it's preferable to legislate as little as possible, but that's clearly nonsense as an absolute or there would be no crimes.
People aren't interested in the facts. They want to talk and drive.
Are you sure all people are like that, or is just a minority who really don't care about the risk they pose to others' safety?
If it's just a minority, but your other claims are true, then legislation and enforcement is the right answer.
Unless you're going to outlaw talking while driving, you're never going to be able to outlaw headset-based phone conversations while driving.
Why? Talking to a passenger and talking to someone on a mobile phone are completely different experiences with completely different risks attached. Statistically, talking to a passenger makes little difference to how safely you drive, while talking to someone on a phone is like driving while seriously drunk in terms of the effect it has. A lot of people who like talking on their phone will argue that this is nonsense, but there's vast amounts of properly conducted scientific study that paints a very clear picture, and unless you really think it's more important to have a phone conversation about what's for dinner than to save someone's life, there is no problem whatsoever with banning one thing but not the other.
I'd recommend voting Lib Dem, if only because the introduction of proportional representation to Westminster is a condition for entering into a coalition with them (in the event of a hung parliament).
That's almost the only reason to vote Lib Dem these days, though, unless your local Lib Dem MP/candidate happens to be a good representative regardless of party affiliation. The problem is, the other parties with a credible chance of getting in aren't any better either. There just isn't a powerful party in the UK right now based on simple principles like fairness, freedom, responsibility, and balance, which means the entire political centre ground just votes for whichever of the big parties makes the most croud-pleasing sound-bites in the run up to election day and/or screwed fewest things up lately (or doesn't vote at all).
For what it's worth, I think Liberty do a good job of both drawing popular attention to the sorts of abuse we're discussing here and of providing practical support to those who wind up on the wrong side of it unjustly. They have quite a high profile, and it's pretty rare that I see one of their spokespeople saying something I don't strongly agree with. If you want to do a good deed for today, you could always send them some money. Actually, they have two parts, and if you give to the Civil Liberties Trust, you can even gift aid your donation, which has the amusing side effect that the government will give money back to Liberty and, if you are a higher-rate taxpayer, to you as well for supporting a cause they probably wouldn't like very much. The campaigners would probably prefer the money to be given to Liberty itself, though, since while that can't be gift-aided, it can be used to support things like political lobbying that the CLT can't because of the rules on charities. Anyway, there's a thought if, like me, you'd happily support opposition to the surveillance state but can't find a political party you actually want to vote for.
Banning regular cell-phone talk in cars is not going to do much to improve safety.
I'm blowing several moderations I've made to write this, but I think it has to be said: the research shows (beyond any reasonable doubt, and in plentiful quantities) that driving while using any mobile phone (hand-held or hands-free, the statistics are near-identical) is worse for safety than driving several times over the legal blood alcohol limit in most jurisdictions.
Now, you can act on this information in spectacularly the wrong way: the UK introduced a law to ban only hand-held phones, leading to the false impression that hands-free is safe and a rush of marketing implying that from hands-free vendors. The authorities then failed to enforce the new law anyway, to the extent that almost all drivers who admit to using a mobile illegally in studies also say it's because they don't think there's any serious risk of getting caught. That's hardly a deterrent, and in implicitly supporting the use of hands-free (which has near-identical danger stats, remember), if anything it has made things worse.
But there is no doubt that viewing use of a mobile phone while driving in the same socially unacceptable light as driving while drunk or high should be a good thing for road safety in the long run. Whether the correct answer to this is to make new laws, or simply to run a public awareness campaign to tell people the facts (how many people have you seen on Slashdot claiming, probably quite sincerely, that they can drive just fine while using a phone?), is open to debate.
I'm not sure I follow your analogy. The people who work for the movie studios and record labels don't only make money because someone else is ripping off the copyright. On the contrary, they make money because people pay for the copyrighted products on which they work. Likewise, the local suppliers and service providers whose products and services are paid for by those who work at the studios and labels do not benefit only because someone ripped someone else off, they benefit because of the stronger local economy. I fail to see what the broken window fallacy has to do with any of this.
Who in the world would put their entire life's assets constantly at risk, especially in the Sue S.A., where misfortune is looked upon as a stroke of good luck.
One could, of course, ask whether the problem here is the risk of being sued and at least having to pay costs when there is no real case to answer. If the legal framework were such that only people who did very bad things paid very heavy prices and there were penalties for bringing malicious lawsuits against others without legitimate grounds, then I can't help wondering whether doing away with corporations in favour of some basic business insurance to deal with any minor liabilities wouldn't make the world a better place.
I'm not at liberty to discuss the specifics of my employer, but the acquisition was recent and it was a strategic move because of what we make. Our profits, as part of the larger group that bought us, probably aren't even worth the overhead of administering the subsidiary.
I'm sorry I mentioned it at all, since all that's happened is that two people have jumped on accurate statements, read into them a whole lot of stuff that isn't there, and then assumed that my earlier anecdotes are somehow less meaningful. So much for not assuming facts for which no evidence has been provided.:-(
If you stop and think for a moment, there is no incompatibility between those two statements. For example, my current employer started out as a small outfit, but several acquisitions later it's now part of a huge group.
OK, I think I see where you're coming from here. But the thing is, the facts are in evidence: millions of songs and videos are being traded on P2P and shared on hosting web sites, infringing the rights of the copyright holders. I don't know how you would choose to define a "major" violation quantitatively, but if making millions of infringing copies of a work doesn't count then I don't know what does.
I don't accept the argument that copyright holders should just do what they've been doing for decades, because decades ago minor infringement was just that: minor. Today, we have the Internet, which enables copies to be made and distributed with no loss of quality, very fast, and with negligible cost. It is now entirely possible for a work to reach a very substantial part of its target audience via illegal back channels. Claiming that this doesn't happen is about as credible as the RIAA claims that one person shared several hundred thousands copies in five minutes, or whatever it would take to generate the astronomical statutory damages they seek.
Again, I feel I have to remind you that this doesn't just affect mass-market pop music and Hollywood blockbusters: music for numerous niche markets and special interest DVDs for a zillion different hobbies gets shared as well. For example, I am a dancer, and I know for certain both that content from dance-related DVDs (either teaching or performances) with quite limited markets is distributed illegally by certain people, and that plenty of people who would otherwise buy the DVDs from a legitimate source just download it for free instead, often without really understanding that they are doing something wrong. I also know professional teachers who are directly losing a significant chunk of income because people rip off their DVDs, and as you may be aware, the average artist is not exactly the richest person on the planet to start with.
Again, I will reiterate for the avoidance of doubt that I don't think the current legal context is necessarily ideal. It may well be that the advertising effects of sharing material more widely in fact cancel out any losses here. It may well be that the copyright holders are naively failing to exploit a lucrative potential market. But as you say, we must not assume facts not in evidence, and in any case, right now copyright law does not provide a defence of "well, I was just doing them a favour, your honour". If these hypotheticals are true, surely the legally and ethically sensible thing to do is to change the copyright law to support them, not just to turn a blind eye to breaking the law. Any bad law brings all law into disrepute, and all that.
Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point, because if I haven't yet convinced you that there's more to copyright than (as you put it) the recording industry vs. the people, and that the legal framework for enforcing copyright isn't up to the job in the Internet age and real people are really losing out as a result, then I really don't know what else I can say. I've given you real examples, in multiple contexts with different kinds of material subject to copyright, where the system has not effectively protected the legal rights of everyday people just trying to make an honest living. These are not hypotheticals, or assuming anything: the facts very much are in evidence. Obviously you only know me as a user on Slashdot, and for all you know these examples are works of fiction from my confused mind, but I have no reason to lie to you. Hopefully I've also made it clear that I don't support the current legal shenanigans of the RIAA and their brethren, and I'm just looking for a fair alternative where any copyright holder can effectively defend their legitimate rights when they are genuinely infringed. But that's all I've got. If it's not a strong enough case to sway you from your belief that a system that worked a decade or two ago is still sufficient to protect the legitimate rights of copyright holders large or small in today's world, then I guess you win this one.
For most of my career, I've worked for small, privately owned software companies (not in the US) that make original, useful products, which in turn have brought in enough to pay the staff a decent wage but little more than that. And yes, there have been instances of copyright infringement that were obviously harmful to the company's bottom line, and yes, there have been redundancies where the companies couldn't keep paying everyone who worked on that software. I have never been one of the unlucky ones myself, so I have no personal axe to grind here, but I do think it's sad that good, hard-working people literally lost their jobs when the law says the system that paid their wages should have been protected. At least in this context, there is usually action the companies can take against the infringers, sometimes too late to save all the jobs but still enough to save the companies and everyone who is left.
To me, this demonstrates the importance of having an effective copyright framework where legitimate rights can be enforced in practice. There was no rich megacorp at work in these cases, it was just people looking for an honest return on a bit of honest hard work, being undermined by greedy people who broke the law. Which brings me back to the question I keep asking but no-one seems willing to answer: how are the theoretical protections afforded by US copyright law are worth anything in practice, if we accept that the current dubious legal manoeuvring shouldn't be allowed to continue but don't offer any alternative?
I confess, Ray, that I'm surprised by that post. While I don't always agree with you, I normally respect the arguments you make and the way you make them, but that post just sounds like a bit of letting off steam without any real substance.
US copyright law is in no way the most protective in the world; in fact, US fair use provisions are probably the most liberal in the world. And the other jurisdictions have rubbish like the EUCD that is just as silly as the DMCA when it comes to circumvention, "blank media taxes", and other such consumer-hostile measures.
My heart doesn't bleed for the megacorps, but I do feel sorry for the numerous small-time copyright holders who have to rely on the same legal foundations to protect their interests. You seem to be falling into a trap more commonly associated with slashbots, where you equate copyright holder with megacorp. Clearly the little guys can't rely on the dubious legal tactics of the megacorps to enforce their rights, so if the current copyright framework is adequate, what are these little guys to do when their genuine hard work is being ripped off on-line? Should the law only protect those rich enough to have a retained legal team?
Finally, the "along with almost everyone else in the world" is a pretty careless thing for a lawyer to say. For one thing, how can they be protected when no-one here is offering any practical means of enforcing their theoretical rights? Your idea of "more than adequately protected" seems to be that they're big enough to just put up with being ripped off on a massive scale and take the hit, and we can just turn a blind eye to breaking the law. Again, that's a curious position for a lawyer to take.
Yes, everything you describe there is a real problem. I'm not arguing with that. I'm just saying it's not the same problem, because almost everything that gets traded over the P2P systems relevant to this debate is nearly new and almost every case or threat of a case brought in connection with the material is for infringement of copyrights that would not have expired even without the extensions. They are separate problems (though no less valid or worthy of fixing because of that).
The problem with your argument is that it confuses two pretty much unrelated phenomena: widespread infringement of copyright, and buying laws to extend the copyright term and make its enforcement more draconian. Both of these suck, depending on who you are. However, since most of the infringement taking place over P2P is of relatively new material that certainly would fall within a reasonable period of copyright rather than older works that would have become public domain by now without the extensions, there's not much practical connection between them.
I think that would be "fair", "reasonable", and "practical". Why don't you?
Because you still haven't identified any effective means to protect the legitimate interests of copyright holders. You can argue — and I'm not saying you're wrong to do so — that some of the current practices are legally unsound. But you can't credibly claim that the situation won't become heavily one-sided if we stop those dubious practices but don't provide any more reasonable alternative.
If the current legal framework, followed to the letter, does not protect someone's legal rights, then by definition the current legal framework is inadequate. Do you really want some half-baked, draconian change in that legal framework to be the response? Because that seems entirely plausible to me if the current RIAA tactics are starting to fail and there are major elections coming up. Did we learn nothing from the DRM/DMCA fiasco?
I'm well aware of the problems of making assumptions, from both a legal and an ethical perspective. What I'm asking is what people propose as a (fair, reasonable, practical) alternative.
Let me put it this way. You wrote this:
Look, you can't just assume. You have to prove damages. Simply saying "everyone knows he let a lot of people copy it" is not adequate. You have to document those infringements if you want to reasonably claim damages. The fact that doing so is becoming more and more difficult doesn't earn you a free pass in collecting evidence.
See, this is what we call sticking your head in the sand. It's easy to do:
Look, you can't just hide behind legal technicalities. You have to obey the law. Simply saying "you can only protect your legal rights by doing the near-impossible" is not adequate. You have to provide a credible mechanism through which the law can be enforced. The fact that technology makes this less and less likely in the current legal framework is not a free pass in breaking the law.
It's all very well saying you can't just assume, but when it's a damn good bet that the assumption would be correct most of the time and the activity in question is clearly illegal, that's a cop-out. What we need is a constructive way forward.
Consider this: we could remove all assumption and act in the spirit of supporting copyright law by, for example, criminalising all use of P2P software and imposing substantial statutory damages for possession. This would be easy to prove, easy to enforce, and yet I think we'd probably agree that it is completely missing the point and not good law. So before someone comes along and pushes that through, what better ideas do we have?
So would you agree that if I (as a copyright holder) download a copy of my work from someone distributing it without permission, that is sufficient evidence to require disclosure of their identity and then to rule against them in court? That seems like a reasonable start to me, FWIW, but others with (I assume) better knowledge of the US legal system have suggested in the past that it wouldn't work there.
If we agree on that, there is still the question of how to calculate fair damages. It's clearly not fair to the distributor to institute astronomical statutory damages for any infringement, but it's also not fair to the copyright holder to pretend that someone who is now known to be willing to distribute material illegally to anyone who drops by isn't guilty of any more than sharing the one copy the copyright holder downloaded themselves. How could we address this question in a way that is both realistic and fair to both parties?
Which is, of course, an absurd contradiction in a legal system that provides for copyright and a clear violation of international agreements to which Canada is a party.
Seriously, all I have to do to break a computer law in Canada is decide to use some third party software that combines a legal function with whatever illegal function I want to get away with? What kind of daft precedent is that?!
OK, but when that idea has been suggested before, it usually met with accusations of entrapment or claims that the download isn't infringing if it's authorised by the copyright holder...
What I'd really like to know is what a rational, intelligent person who is interested primarily in courts giving fair verdicts that reflect the spirit of the law would want here.
I can understand the reservations about allowing a "making available" argument: if you can't prove that a specific illegal act has been committed, the idea of bringing a case based only on hypotheticals seems a bit dubious.
On the other hand, copyright is widely infringed on the Internet, contrary to the law, and the law in many jurisdictions and contexts does recognise concepts like inciting, soliciting or otherwise supporting illegal behaviour as illegal in their own right.
Using common sense, it's hard to see how a person with a hard drive full of ripped material subject to copyright, who is offering to share it over a P2P network where large amounts of copyright infringement take place, is innocent of all wrong-doing. If you don't accept the argument about making available, what is a fair and reasonable way for copyright holders whose material is being illegally shared to enforce their legal rights in this situation?
(If you want to rant about how all of copyright is broken and should be abolished, please do so in another thread and leave this one for discussing how to uphold the spirit of today's law fairly. Thanks.)
If they are such astute strategists, why are they losing?
You have an interesting definition of "losing", I fear. After several years of obvious abuse of the legal system, it seems like a small number of court cases might finally put an end to a tactic that has been pretty much unethical from the start. However, I'll wager that there are still plenty of people who have settled in the last month, presumably paying out silly sums of money, as a result of the RIAA's legal tactics. How much has the RIAA paid to anyone in return, apart from its own lawyers? If the answer isn't greater, it's hard to see how the RIAA are "losing". It's more than they're winning by slightly less now.
I've always suspected that the senior RIAA lawyers have a sneaking admiration for Sun Tzu. Several of the most significant quotations from The Art of War boil down to saying you should only fight the fights you can win, and you should rely on deception to reduce your opponent's resistance.
It's a good thing that we have sceptics, on climate change, copyright, or any other debate that isn't about absolute facts for that matter. If we ever reach the point where some prevailing consensus is considered the gospel truth because it suddenly became trendy/lobbyist fodder/a source of research funding, then we're in a lot of trouble. One of my favourite quotations comes from the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, who said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
In this case, I have little doubt now that the effects described by the pro-climate change scientists are real. However, I also have little doubt that some of the arguments made in An Inconvenient Truth were naive at best, as evidenced by the rush to invent credible explanations after criticism in the "inconvenient documentary" that followed, nor that concerns about imminent catastrophic results have been overstated in the rush to be seen to be doing something. There's some truth in there somewhere, and it's for the best that we have at least some people advocating both sides of the debate to help us find it.
Getting back on topic, I think much the same is true of an ethical/political/economic issue like copyright. It's easy on Slashdot, ancestral home of "information wants to be free" groupthink and student economics, to find ways to criticise copyright and claim it reaches too far. It's just as easy, if you work as a professional recording artist, to find an ethical argument that the world doesn't need your particular interpretation of a work for free and that copyright in that recording should last for your entire lifetime. Again, a balance needs to be struck, starting with deciding what copyright is really for (which has multiple sensible answers, not all of which are based on some vague wording in the constitution of one nation, and which are sometimes incompatible).
This is why it is a shame that we are reading this story today. It's not even necessary that the person who's been removed might have argued the way many on Slashdot would like to see the debate go. It is a shame merely because the debate will now be less balanced than it otherwise would have been.
And who enforces this all-powerful data retention policy?
I work for one of the largest businesses in the world, with more layers of corporate management this, division that, and subsidiary the other than I can count even for the tiny part I work in. We have so many corporate rules and regs that I don't even know what we have them for, never mind what they say. I suspect we have such a policy on data retention as well, but I bet if you asked around my office, no more than two people would actually know where to find it or what it said. For everyone else, their e-mail is just sitting on a server indefinitely until they delete it, and who goes through their e-mail every day checking every message older than x years in case it's no longer needed and should be obliterated per the data retention policy? Any business that really did things like that would never get any work done.
Slashdot Mirror
Cite all the studies you want, but I can tell you for a fact that I can drive just fine while buzzing or high.
Of course you can.
And a lot of other folks can too.Of course they can.
I'm a better driver while under the influence than most people are sober.Of course you are.
Or it could be that, like most people, you significantly over-estimate your own competence. "90% of drivers think they are in the top 10% of drivers" and all that. Actually, some of the research has asked secondary questions about how drivers thought they performed, and it usually turns out that impaired drivers don't accurately assess their own limitations and recognise their own mistakes, even if they acknowledge them later when looking at the evidence while unimpaired.
Do you have any objective evidence to support your claims here? Have you, for example, been out in these impaired states with a competent, experienced and independent witness who can confirm that your opinion of yourself is correct? It doesn't matter that they haven't come onto Slashdot and told all of us, but have you at least had such objective feedback?
Or is your entire argument based purely on ego? If it is — and again, you don't have to try to sell us on it, but you know yourself whether you're being honest or not — then I encourage you to reevaluate your idea of how good you really are, and perhaps do some research for yourself. Right now, your attitude suggests that you are probably in the most dangerous group of drivers on the road and it's almost certain that you aren't as good as you think you are.
Be careful: what this study appears to be measuring is not the same as the ability to drive safely. As TFA itself notes:
Cell phone conversations require a driver's constant attention in order not to appear rude or insulting to an unseen partner. In contrast, a talking passenger can willingly cut off conversation upon spying an approaching ambulance or some other demand on a driver's attention.
In other words, this study does not conflict with previous evidence that suggests talking with a passenger (who can see to shut up when necessary) makes little difference, but talking to someone on a mobile phone is disastrous for driver performance.
The government governs best which governs least.
I understand (and happen to agree with) the idea that it's preferable to legislate as little as possible, but that's clearly nonsense as an absolute or there would be no crimes.
People aren't interested in the facts. They want to talk and drive.
Are you sure all people are like that, or is just a minority who really don't care about the risk they pose to others' safety?
If it's just a minority, but your other claims are true, then legislation and enforcement is the right answer.
Unless you're going to outlaw talking while driving, you're never going to be able to outlaw headset-based phone conversations while driving.
Why? Talking to a passenger and talking to someone on a mobile phone are completely different experiences with completely different risks attached. Statistically, talking to a passenger makes little difference to how safely you drive, while talking to someone on a phone is like driving while seriously drunk in terms of the effect it has. A lot of people who like talking on their phone will argue that this is nonsense, but there's vast amounts of properly conducted scientific study that paints a very clear picture, and unless you really think it's more important to have a phone conversation about what's for dinner than to save someone's life, there is no problem whatsoever with banning one thing but not the other.
I'd recommend voting Lib Dem, if only because the introduction of proportional representation to Westminster is a condition for entering into a coalition with them (in the event of a hung parliament).
That's almost the only reason to vote Lib Dem these days, though, unless your local Lib Dem MP/candidate happens to be a good representative regardless of party affiliation. The problem is, the other parties with a credible chance of getting in aren't any better either. There just isn't a powerful party in the UK right now based on simple principles like fairness, freedom, responsibility, and balance, which means the entire political centre ground just votes for whichever of the big parties makes the most croud-pleasing sound-bites in the run up to election day and/or screwed fewest things up lately (or doesn't vote at all).
For what it's worth, I think Liberty do a good job of both drawing popular attention to the sorts of abuse we're discussing here and of providing practical support to those who wind up on the wrong side of it unjustly. They have quite a high profile, and it's pretty rare that I see one of their spokespeople saying something I don't strongly agree with. If you want to do a good deed for today, you could always send them some money. Actually, they have two parts, and if you give to the Civil Liberties Trust, you can even gift aid your donation, which has the amusing side effect that the government will give money back to Liberty and, if you are a higher-rate taxpayer, to you as well for supporting a cause they probably wouldn't like very much. The campaigners would probably prefer the money to be given to Liberty itself, though, since while that can't be gift-aided, it can be used to support things like political lobbying that the CLT can't because of the rules on charities. Anyway, there's a thought if, like me, you'd happily support opposition to the surveillance state but can't find a political party you actually want to vote for.
Banning regular cell-phone talk in cars is not going to do much to improve safety.
I'm blowing several moderations I've made to write this, but I think it has to be said: the research shows (beyond any reasonable doubt, and in plentiful quantities) that driving while using any mobile phone (hand-held or hands-free, the statistics are near-identical) is worse for safety than driving several times over the legal blood alcohol limit in most jurisdictions.
Now, you can act on this information in spectacularly the wrong way: the UK introduced a law to ban only hand-held phones, leading to the false impression that hands-free is safe and a rush of marketing implying that from hands-free vendors. The authorities then failed to enforce the new law anyway, to the extent that almost all drivers who admit to using a mobile illegally in studies also say it's because they don't think there's any serious risk of getting caught. That's hardly a deterrent, and in implicitly supporting the use of hands-free (which has near-identical danger stats, remember), if anything it has made things worse.
But there is no doubt that viewing use of a mobile phone while driving in the same socially unacceptable light as driving while drunk or high should be a good thing for road safety in the long run. Whether the correct answer to this is to make new laws, or simply to run a public awareness campaign to tell people the facts (how many people have you seen on Slashdot claiming, probably quite sincerely, that they can drive just fine while using a phone?), is open to debate.
finding out I downed a cammed movie is indeed detrimental to my health
Consider it a small dose of karmic revenge for trying to rip someone off instead of paying for the real thing like the rest of us.
I'm not sure I follow your analogy. The people who work for the movie studios and record labels don't only make money because someone else is ripping off the copyright. On the contrary, they make money because people pay for the copyrighted products on which they work. Likewise, the local suppliers and service providers whose products and services are paid for by those who work at the studios and labels do not benefit only because someone ripped someone else off, they benefit because of the stronger local economy. I fail to see what the broken window fallacy has to do with any of this.
Who in the world would put their entire life's assets constantly at risk, especially in the Sue S.A., where misfortune is looked upon as a stroke of good luck.
One could, of course, ask whether the problem here is the risk of being sued and at least having to pay costs when there is no real case to answer. If the legal framework were such that only people who did very bad things paid very heavy prices and there were penalties for bringing malicious lawsuits against others without legitimate grounds, then I can't help wondering whether doing away with corporations in favour of some basic business insurance to deal with any minor liabilities wouldn't make the world a better place.
I'm not at liberty to discuss the specifics of my employer, but the acquisition was recent and it was a strategic move because of what we make. Our profits, as part of the larger group that bought us, probably aren't even worth the overhead of administering the subsidiary.
I'm sorry I mentioned it at all, since all that's happened is that two people have jumped on accurate statements, read into them a whole lot of stuff that isn't there, and then assumed that my earlier anecdotes are somehow less meaningful. So much for not assuming facts for which no evidence has been provided. :-(
If you stop and think for a moment, there is no incompatibility between those two statements. For example, my current employer started out as a small outfit, but several acquisitions later it's now part of a huge group.
OK, I think I see where you're coming from here. But the thing is, the facts are in evidence: millions of songs and videos are being traded on P2P and shared on hosting web sites, infringing the rights of the copyright holders. I don't know how you would choose to define a "major" violation quantitatively, but if making millions of infringing copies of a work doesn't count then I don't know what does.
I don't accept the argument that copyright holders should just do what they've been doing for decades, because decades ago minor infringement was just that: minor. Today, we have the Internet, which enables copies to be made and distributed with no loss of quality, very fast, and with negligible cost. It is now entirely possible for a work to reach a very substantial part of its target audience via illegal back channels. Claiming that this doesn't happen is about as credible as the RIAA claims that one person shared several hundred thousands copies in five minutes, or whatever it would take to generate the astronomical statutory damages they seek.
Again, I feel I have to remind you that this doesn't just affect mass-market pop music and Hollywood blockbusters: music for numerous niche markets and special interest DVDs for a zillion different hobbies gets shared as well. For example, I am a dancer, and I know for certain both that content from dance-related DVDs (either teaching or performances) with quite limited markets is distributed illegally by certain people, and that plenty of people who would otherwise buy the DVDs from a legitimate source just download it for free instead, often without really understanding that they are doing something wrong. I also know professional teachers who are directly losing a significant chunk of income because people rip off their DVDs, and as you may be aware, the average artist is not exactly the richest person on the planet to start with.
Again, I will reiterate for the avoidance of doubt that I don't think the current legal context is necessarily ideal. It may well be that the advertising effects of sharing material more widely in fact cancel out any losses here. It may well be that the copyright holders are naively failing to exploit a lucrative potential market. But as you say, we must not assume facts not in evidence, and in any case, right now copyright law does not provide a defence of "well, I was just doing them a favour, your honour". If these hypotheticals are true, surely the legally and ethically sensible thing to do is to change the copyright law to support them, not just to turn a blind eye to breaking the law. Any bad law brings all law into disrepute, and all that.
Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point, because if I haven't yet convinced you that there's more to copyright than (as you put it) the recording industry vs. the people, and that the legal framework for enforcing copyright isn't up to the job in the Internet age and real people are really losing out as a result, then I really don't know what else I can say. I've given you real examples, in multiple contexts with different kinds of material subject to copyright, where the system has not effectively protected the legal rights of everyday people just trying to make an honest living. These are not hypotheticals, or assuming anything: the facts very much are in evidence. Obviously you only know me as a user on Slashdot, and for all you know these examples are works of fiction from my confused mind, but I have no reason to lie to you. Hopefully I've also made it clear that I don't support the current legal shenanigans of the RIAA and their brethren, and I'm just looking for a fair alternative where any copyright holder can effectively defend their legitimate rights when they are genuinely infringed. But that's all I've got. If it's not a strong enough case to sway you from your belief that a system that worked a decade or two ago is still sufficient to protect the legitimate rights of copyright holders large or small in today's world, then I guess you win this one.
For most of my career, I've worked for small, privately owned software companies (not in the US) that make original, useful products, which in turn have brought in enough to pay the staff a decent wage but little more than that. And yes, there have been instances of copyright infringement that were obviously harmful to the company's bottom line, and yes, there have been redundancies where the companies couldn't keep paying everyone who worked on that software. I have never been one of the unlucky ones myself, so I have no personal axe to grind here, but I do think it's sad that good, hard-working people literally lost their jobs when the law says the system that paid their wages should have been protected. At least in this context, there is usually action the companies can take against the infringers, sometimes too late to save all the jobs but still enough to save the companies and everyone who is left.
To me, this demonstrates the importance of having an effective copyright framework where legitimate rights can be enforced in practice. There was no rich megacorp at work in these cases, it was just people looking for an honest return on a bit of honest hard work, being undermined by greedy people who broke the law. Which brings me back to the question I keep asking but no-one seems willing to answer: how are the theoretical protections afforded by US copyright law are worth anything in practice, if we accept that the current dubious legal manoeuvring shouldn't be allowed to continue but don't offer any alternative?
I confess, Ray, that I'm surprised by that post. While I don't always agree with you, I normally respect the arguments you make and the way you make them, but that post just sounds like a bit of letting off steam without any real substance.
US copyright law is in no way the most protective in the world; in fact, US fair use provisions are probably the most liberal in the world. And the other jurisdictions have rubbish like the EUCD that is just as silly as the DMCA when it comes to circumvention, "blank media taxes", and other such consumer-hostile measures.
My heart doesn't bleed for the megacorps, but I do feel sorry for the numerous small-time copyright holders who have to rely on the same legal foundations to protect their interests. You seem to be falling into a trap more commonly associated with slashbots, where you equate copyright holder with megacorp. Clearly the little guys can't rely on the dubious legal tactics of the megacorps to enforce their rights, so if the current copyright framework is adequate, what are these little guys to do when their genuine hard work is being ripped off on-line? Should the law only protect those rich enough to have a retained legal team?
Finally, the "along with almost everyone else in the world" is a pretty careless thing for a lawyer to say. For one thing, how can they be protected when no-one here is offering any practical means of enforcing their theoretical rights? Your idea of "more than adequately protected" seems to be that they're big enough to just put up with being ripped off on a massive scale and take the hit, and we can just turn a blind eye to breaking the law. Again, that's a curious position for a lawyer to take.
Yes, everything you describe there is a real problem. I'm not arguing with that. I'm just saying it's not the same problem, because almost everything that gets traded over the P2P systems relevant to this debate is nearly new and almost every case or threat of a case brought in connection with the material is for infringement of copyrights that would not have expired even without the extensions. They are separate problems (though no less valid or worthy of fixing because of that).
The problem with your argument is that it confuses two pretty much unrelated phenomena: widespread infringement of copyright, and buying laws to extend the copyright term and make its enforcement more draconian. Both of these suck, depending on who you are. However, since most of the infringement taking place over P2P is of relatively new material that certainly would fall within a reasonable period of copyright rather than older works that would have become public domain by now without the extensions, there's not much practical connection between them.
I think that would be "fair", "reasonable", and "practical". Why don't you?
Because you still haven't identified any effective means to protect the legitimate interests of copyright holders. You can argue — and I'm not saying you're wrong to do so — that some of the current practices are legally unsound. But you can't credibly claim that the situation won't become heavily one-sided if we stop those dubious practices but don't provide any more reasonable alternative.
If the current legal framework, followed to the letter, does not protect someone's legal rights, then by definition the current legal framework is inadequate. Do you really want some half-baked, draconian change in that legal framework to be the response? Because that seems entirely plausible to me if the current RIAA tactics are starting to fail and there are major elections coming up. Did we learn nothing from the DRM/DMCA fiasco?
I'm well aware of the problems of making assumptions, from both a legal and an ethical perspective. What I'm asking is what people propose as a (fair, reasonable, practical) alternative.
Let me put it this way. You wrote this:
Look, you can't just assume. You have to prove damages. Simply saying "everyone knows he let a lot of people copy it" is not adequate. You have to document those infringements if you want to reasonably claim damages. The fact that doing so is becoming more and more difficult doesn't earn you a free pass in collecting evidence.
See, this is what we call sticking your head in the sand. It's easy to do:
Look, you can't just hide behind legal technicalities. You have to obey the law. Simply saying "you can only protect your legal rights by doing the near-impossible" is not adequate. You have to provide a credible mechanism through which the law can be enforced. The fact that technology makes this less and less likely in the current legal framework is not a free pass in breaking the law.
It's all very well saying you can't just assume, but when it's a damn good bet that the assumption would be correct most of the time and the activity in question is clearly illegal, that's a cop-out. What we need is a constructive way forward.
Consider this: we could remove all assumption and act in the spirit of supporting copyright law by, for example, criminalising all use of P2P software and imposing substantial statutory damages for possession. This would be easy to prove, easy to enforce, and yet I think we'd probably agree that it is completely missing the point and not good law. So before someone comes along and pushes that through, what better ideas do we have?
So would you agree that if I (as a copyright holder) download a copy of my work from someone distributing it without permission, that is sufficient evidence to require disclosure of their identity and then to rule against them in court? That seems like a reasonable start to me, FWIW, but others with (I assume) better knowledge of the US legal system have suggested in the past that it wouldn't work there.
If we agree on that, there is still the question of how to calculate fair damages. It's clearly not fair to the distributor to institute astronomical statutory damages for any infringement, but it's also not fair to the copyright holder to pretend that someone who is now known to be willing to distribute material illegally to anyone who drops by isn't guilty of any more than sharing the one copy the copyright holder downloaded themselves. How could we address this question in a way that is both realistic and fair to both parties?
Which is, of course, an absurd contradiction in a legal system that provides for copyright and a clear violation of international agreements to which Canada is a party.
Seriously, all I have to do to break a computer law in Canada is decide to use some third party software that combines a legal function with whatever illegal function I want to get away with? What kind of daft precedent is that?!
OK, but when that idea has been suggested before, it usually met with accusations of entrapment or claims that the download isn't infringing if it's authorised by the copyright holder...
What I'd really like to know is what a rational, intelligent person who is interested primarily in courts giving fair verdicts that reflect the spirit of the law would want here.
I can understand the reservations about allowing a "making available" argument: if you can't prove that a specific illegal act has been committed, the idea of bringing a case based only on hypotheticals seems a bit dubious.
On the other hand, copyright is widely infringed on the Internet, contrary to the law, and the law in many jurisdictions and contexts does recognise concepts like inciting, soliciting or otherwise supporting illegal behaviour as illegal in their own right.
Using common sense, it's hard to see how a person with a hard drive full of ripped material subject to copyright, who is offering to share it over a P2P network where large amounts of copyright infringement take place, is innocent of all wrong-doing. If you don't accept the argument about making available, what is a fair and reasonable way for copyright holders whose material is being illegally shared to enforce their legal rights in this situation?
(If you want to rant about how all of copyright is broken and should be abolished, please do so in another thread and leave this one for discussing how to uphold the spirit of today's law fairly. Thanks.)
If they are such astute strategists, why are they losing?
You have an interesting definition of "losing", I fear. After several years of obvious abuse of the legal system, it seems like a small number of court cases might finally put an end to a tactic that has been pretty much unethical from the start. However, I'll wager that there are still plenty of people who have settled in the last month, presumably paying out silly sums of money, as a result of the RIAA's legal tactics. How much has the RIAA paid to anyone in return, apart from its own lawyers? If the answer isn't greater, it's hard to see how the RIAA are "losing". It's more than they're winning by slightly less now.
I've always suspected that the senior RIAA lawyers have a sneaking admiration for Sun Tzu. Several of the most significant quotations from The Art of War boil down to saying you should only fight the fights you can win, and you should rely on deception to reduce your opponent's resistance.
It's a good thing that we have sceptics, on climate change, copyright, or any other debate that isn't about absolute facts for that matter. If we ever reach the point where some prevailing consensus is considered the gospel truth because it suddenly became trendy/lobbyist fodder/a source of research funding, then we're in a lot of trouble. One of my favourite quotations comes from the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, who said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
In this case, I have little doubt now that the effects described by the pro-climate change scientists are real. However, I also have little doubt that some of the arguments made in An Inconvenient Truth were naive at best, as evidenced by the rush to invent credible explanations after criticism in the "inconvenient documentary" that followed, nor that concerns about imminent catastrophic results have been overstated in the rush to be seen to be doing something. There's some truth in there somewhere, and it's for the best that we have at least some people advocating both sides of the debate to help us find it.
Getting back on topic, I think much the same is true of an ethical/political/economic issue like copyright. It's easy on Slashdot, ancestral home of "information wants to be free" groupthink and student economics, to find ways to criticise copyright and claim it reaches too far. It's just as easy, if you work as a professional recording artist, to find an ethical argument that the world doesn't need your particular interpretation of a work for free and that copyright in that recording should last for your entire lifetime. Again, a balance needs to be struck, starting with deciding what copyright is really for (which has multiple sensible answers, not all of which are based on some vague wording in the constitution of one nation, and which are sometimes incompatible).
This is why it is a shame that we are reading this story today. It's not even necessary that the person who's been removed might have argued the way many on Slashdot would like to see the debate go. It is a shame merely because the debate will now be less balanced than it otherwise would have been.
And who enforces this all-powerful data retention policy?
I work for one of the largest businesses in the world, with more layers of corporate management this, division that, and subsidiary the other than I can count even for the tiny part I work in. We have so many corporate rules and regs that I don't even know what we have them for, never mind what they say. I suspect we have such a policy on data retention as well, but I bet if you asked around my office, no more than two people would actually know where to find it or what it said. For everyone else, their e-mail is just sitting on a server indefinitely until they delete it, and who goes through their e-mail every day checking every message older than x years in case it's no longer needed and should be obliterated per the data retention policy? Any business that really did things like that would never get any work done.