Yes, and they certainly have their merits. But really, they're not even on the scale of what I'm envisaging here (which is closer to a package with WP ease of use, DTP levels of page layout and typography tools, LaTeX levels of support for templated content and document structure, and a plug-in model for incorporating non-textual content).
This is one of those really annoying things, where I've developed quite a detailed vision after many sessions of thinking about this subject, I have the technical ability to design and write the application, I've had interesting discussions with others who supported the main ideas so I know I'm not going mad, but short of winning a lottery I never enter, I'll probably never have the time and resources to dedicate to making it happen. Heh... Sucks to be me.:-)
How did you know what languages I had in mind? I was talking about Tamil or Devanagari. Current solutions don't handle ligatures very well, if at all.
Well, sorry, I'll call you on that one, then. A friend of mine typeset an entire Masters thesis with plentiful Hindi quotations using LaTeX, because none of the mainstream WP software was up to the job. We even designed a whole new font with METAFONT, containing most of the major Devanagari glyphs, and mapped to standard roman transliterations.
This obviously took a fair few hours, but on the scale of a Masters thesis it wasn't a large proportion of the overall time spent. Compared to the tools used in the rest of the university department for setting Indic scripts at the time - using drag and drop to place every glyph by hand! - our solution was simplicity itself.
That goes back a few years, and there are now much more powerful LaTeX packages available. Yet even today, there's not much in the word-processing and DTP world that does a better job than what we set up for LaTeX back then. Very little software is available that takes advantage of the theoretical opportunities offered by OpenType fonts, which would go a long way. Word, like all other major Windows-based word processors today, notably doesn't even do basic f-ligatures properly yet, never mind having good typography and page layout more generally.
Tell me, if you wanted to set a document using a combination of English and Hindi tomorrow, what software would you use?
That's a matter of perspective. Using Word, you couldn't produce the kind of LaTeX'd documents I've seen in fields from mathematics and software engineering to linguistics, no matter how long you tried. And for that matter, someone competent with a tool like LaTeX will generally be far more productive doing a task that suits it than someone competent using a tool like Word.
As I've commented here several times before, it's a mystery to me why no-one has got wise to this and filled the rather large gap between Word (pretty UI to some people, but seriously underpowered for non-trivial work) and LaTeX (seriously powerful if you know what you're doing, but some daft limitations and horrible usability). It's not like the basic concepts underlying both Word and LaTeX have been around for more than a decade or anything...
I think privacy has changed and evolved as a result of increased communications networks... Web 2.0 has little to do with that and is only a small part of it. As databases get larger, networks get faster, data-mining gets smarter, computer processors get faster, an end result is there is more data than ever about more people than ever in more places than ever.
Indeed. However, I think history may look back on the "knowledge revolution" as the greatest example in human history of "just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should". There seems little doubt that Web 2.0 will play a role in this, and it's particularly insidious because this is a genie-out-of-the-bottle situation, and a lot of kids are getting caught up in it. But you're right: in the monster we're creating, Web 2.0 is just one of a dozen tentacles.
The sole purpose of Yahoo's existence is to profit. They took on responsibility to do everything necessary to maximise profits when they started selling shares. If they don't do this, then they can be sued by their shareholders under USA law.
I'm pretty sure none of that is true, though it's a common misconception. See here, for example.
Ethically, this question really boils down to whether you accept the premise in TFA: do Yahoo! make a positive overall contribution to the people of China, or are isolated but rather dramatic cases like this too high a price?
If their contribution is a net plus, then this is the price of doing business in today's China, then there is nothing else they could have done here. We have to accept this, and hope for better things in the future as a result of that positive contribution and others like it.
If their contribution is a net minus to human rights and quality of life, then it is incumbent on countries that do believe in such things to penalise companies supporting oppressive regimes to a sufficient degree that remaining in those oppressed countries becomes financially untenable.
FWIW, I bought a Loewe Concept 32" box a few weeks ago. This is a very nice piece of kit, and is replacing the trusty 14" Panasonic CRT that has served me faithfully for many years but didn't even do widescreen.
It's pretty obvious what kind of signal you're looking at on the new box. Freeview (broadcast, digital, non-HD, compression varies with channel) and VHS are watchable for stuff that doesn't matter, but unsurprisingly DVD blows them away for anything serious. (It made little difference on the old TV, because the picture was so small and the resolution so low that it didn't matter...)
That said, I think the most relevant factoid here is that the upscaling in the TV is excellent for most images. Watching a DVD movie, it's quite hard to distinguish the picture from the quality of the HDTV samples that have been flying around unless you are literally watching them side-by-side. Naturally, there are some areas where upscaling can never beat real details: crowd scenes and panoramic shots, for example. But these are relatively rare.
I think this is what will make it difficult for the HD formats to take hold if they're DRM-encumbered and priced uncompetitively. The usual rule about not screwing the early adopters if you want your product to succeed applies. A lot of enthusiasts have spent silly money on HDTVs recently. One thing they often didn't have until quite recently was HDCP. One thing most of them always did have was good upscaling. After all, would you buy a stupidly expensive TV that looks worse displaying today's channels worse than what you've already got?
In other words, the likely early-adopter market for HD formats can already watch DVDs at enhanced resolutions, which makes any native HD format less appealing relative to status quo. If HD-DVD or BluRay (wish someone would decide how we're supposed to write that...) are going to take advantage of the benefits they do offer, that means they've got to have very little downside. And that means they have to be priced similarly to the DVDs they're replacing, and they have to be easier to use rather than more difficult.
What Google calls a Cache, and the prior usage of the term in the IT community that was ruled fair use by US courts, are entirely different things. Google's Cache isn't a technical necessity, or part of the way the Internet works. It's a direct but sometimes incomplete copy of others' material, made without permission, and redistributed on an independent web site, which happens to use the word "Cache" in the page title for marketing purposes.
Yep: the industry can sell its content in unhelpful forms if it wants, but it should be required to be up-front with the public about what they are (and aren't) buying.
This response was pretty much exactly what I proposed in my own submission to the Gowers Review, so it's nice to know that others thought it was reasonable too.
Google cache is really an archival snapshot of the web, much like the archive.org. It is fair use in that it reproduces what is publicly available in any case, but Google adds higher availability and searchability.
I'm not sure why you assume that just because they're Google, they're automatically in the right (and legally so).
Last time I checked, they didn't actually reproduce what is publicly available in any case. They reproduced the text, and committed a gross breach of netiquette in referring back to the original site for images rather than caching those as well. The higher availability thing is questionable; I'm not aware of any time since it was set up that the site I run has been off-line, for example, and I've received no reports of unreachability for particular visitors. I don't see why Google's cache offers any better searchability than the original site, either.
And this is still ducking the big, and as yet unresolved AFAIK, question of whether either Google Cache or the Wayback Machine are even close to legal, given that they duplicate entire works without permission, and it's certainly not a black-and-white case of fair use.
Anyway, I'm sure Google's lawyers understand the legal implications of their caching service far better than you and I, and yet they have not advised Google to take it down.
Who knows what they've advised Google and why? For all we know, they may have advised Google that the service is flagrantly violating copyright law, but that the likely costs of any court action are relatively small. Corporations push the boundaries of what's legal all the time if it will make them more money, until someone gets pissed off seriously enough to file a suit and stop them.
Most laws are formed as a result of an argument made by someone who feels damaged, not by a public outcry. When was the public outcry over complex tax evasion schemes? Over driving without insurance? For those who live in nations with written constitutions, how many of them were written by a committee drawn from among the general population, and how many were written by the leaders and lawyers as they thought best served the interests of the population?
If you removed copyright tomorrow, then no doubt there would be a huge cheer from much of the population, as they happily ripped films and music saving themselves a fortune. What the picture would look like in a few years' time, however, is the more important question. Those who oppose copyright and chant the "information wants to be free" mantra think it would make no difference or even be an improvement. Apparently, in their world there are arists who coul afford to continue to create and distribute the same depth, variety and quality of works we have today, without the guarantee of any compensation in return.
What I've never understood about that vision is why, if there are so many generous and capable artists in the world, we don't already see them giving away all these high quality works for free today, killing off the commercial industry in the process. What we do see is that a lot of people volunteer a part of their time. That means you get a lot of small works, of varying quality but some no doubt very good. You can also get major works in the mainstream, as some of the popular open source applications have demonstrated, again of very variable quality but some very good. But I'll believe in the whole dream when I see the same number of freely available alternatives for all of the commercial software products I've ever worked on in my career, not just office applications and OS/comms tools that have a potential market of millions of people, and when bookshops start closing down because there's so much equally good material available freely on-line that no-one buys from the big publishers any more.
I don't know whether TPB has been operating legally or illegally, given the laws of Sweden, since I'm unfamiliar with those laws. I bet you're unfamiliar with those laws too. I wouldn't rely on TPB as a source of accurate information about those laws, as they are far from disinterested in this. What we really need is a Swedish copyright lawyer to discuss the subject.
That would be interesting.
However, I think a lot of the other posters here have missed the point of my original "international agreements" post anyway. I wasn't commenting on either the legality of the actions in Sweden, nor the appropriateness of the response. My real point was that if the laws in Sweden don't reflect the general international concensus, and Sweden is allowing people to take advantage of those laws in ways that other countries perceive as damaging, then it would not be surprising if the international community started imposing some sort of counter-effect at some stage. This would be damaging to Sweden, and therefore it is not surprising that the Swedish authorities want to be seen to be at least reasonably cooperative, which may be the reasoning behind this action.
It will presumably be unfortunate for the Swedish authorities if they are trapped between the rock of international pressure and the hard place of their own legislation here. I would not be surprised to find that far from being a victory for TPB and its supporters, the fall-out from this affair actually results in some sort of devious introduction of more restrictive laws for everyone, on the back of some argument about international pressure. As the Slashbots are keen to point out whenever it suits their argument, legality and morality are not the same thing, but laws can be changed much more easily...
I'm not sure the library uses you mention are a suitable analogy for Google Cache. (The Google search engine itself is a different matter.)
For a start, libraries are public facilities (at least in my country; perhaps others differ) and subject to specific exemptions in some cases (same caveat applies). Google, OTOH, is a commercial organisation.
Moreover, Google Cache directly reproduces the original content (aside from the bandwidth theft for images thing). I don't think the library equivalent is setting up microfiche copies for archival; it's more like setting up a printing press and printing duplicates of all books in the library that are then given away for free to all comers.
I agree with your point about discrimination as well, FWIW. IMHO, you can either be a common carrier (or whatever the local equivalent is) providing a completely impartial service, or be a publisher/editor/other discriminatory body with some level of responsibility for the content you approve, but the law should not allow you the reasonable protections afforded to common carriers if you don't act like one.
There is an exception - granted, a very ill-defined, not well understood exception - in ALL United States copyright law for something called 'Fair Use'.
Thank you. I'm also aware that 2+2=4 and that water is wet.
All of these things are explicitly allowed in the U.S. because of the Fair Use doctrine, even though in each instance it is very much "copying material that is subject to copyright without permission" as you so blithely put it.
They aren't explicitly allowed, they're implicitly allowed because they've been held to meet the four criteria for fair use. There has been, to my knowledge, no similarly broad ruling on the subject of caching as Google applies it. The only case so far seems to be Field, and you can read the commentary on why any precedents that set are very limited.
And I don't recall the public outcry over 'illegal' copying that led to the DMCA, somehow it seems like a lot of laws just come out special interests with money over the will of the people...
I think you're missing the point here. The wholesale infringement of copyright law by a minority of people was always illegal. New technology made it easier and more damaging for those people to break the law. A new law was passed that was a rather draconian response to this. The underlying principles didn't change, and frankly, I have little sympathy with those who break the law as it used to be and then bitch about newer, "nastier" laws being introduced to penalise them more for doing it.
Funnily enough, YOU are missing the even bigger picture.
Perhaps I am. I'm not arrogant enough to presume my opinion is the only valid one, nor is that opinion set in stone such that no amount of evidence will change my mind. But let's look at the specifics you mentioned, and I'll try to explain why after a lot of thought I've come to my current position on this subject.
People don't care about this crime. There is a vast discrepancy between copyright law and the general opinion about it in the entire western world.
I'm really not sure that's true. There's a vast discrepancy between copyright law and the general opinion about it in posts on Slashdot, but Slashdot is not representative of the population at large. If you look at, for example, the changes to the Australian copyright system announced by their Attorney-General last month, I suspect most of us would consider them to be at least a step in the right direction. More significantly, the AG's office also published on their web site a large number of responses to their earlier inquiry that led to these changes. If you look at the comments by members of the public, and indeed the survey results about public and industry views on fair use in the submission by the Australian Consumers' Association, then the overwhelming majority in both groups believed that reasonable personal uses should be legal, and believed that distribution to others without permission should not be legal. As far as I'm aware, this is the largest recent enquiry on the subject, at least until the British Gowers Review publishes the submissions it received and its own recommendations this autumn. The methodology was also not entirely scientific, but the results are surely more indicative than random conjecture based on Slashdot comments.
The reason copyright law looks the way it does is because of the effort of a very small copyright lobby. Their propositions go unopposed because people don't care. 90 years? Fine, whatever.
I think this is getting into straw man territory. We're talking about P2P, and specifically BitTorrent. The stuff that gets ripped widely on P2P isn't stuff that would have entered the public domain but for recent copyright extensions, but rather a lot of recent music, movies, games and the like. This would have been illegal in most places long before the DMCA and friends came along.
Copyright infringement is not an important crime in the people's opinion, and it's definitely not something you would impose trade sanctions for.
Be careful here. I'm all for giving the people the vote and running a country in a suitably democratic fashion, but democracy only works in the presence of an informed and rational population, and as the saying goes, a person is smart, but people are stupid. There are countless examples where naive and/or selfish thinking makes the population favour one approach, yet clear evidence on which experts pretty much universally agree favours another. There are also countless examples where public perception differs widely from reality: look at how many people in the US currently think Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11, or how many people in the UK think that certain types of crime are rising when in fact they are falling or vice versa.
Economics is one area with abundant examples of this, and copyright is basically an economic principle: it creates an artificial market
I am Spanish, and my country is no doubt part of de western world. Here in Spain copying movies, music, etc for private purposes is perfectly lawful (software is excepted). We pay an special tax for it (the money from this tax goes to authors). AFAIK law is similar in most European Union countries.
Copying for personal use is legal in many places, but distribution usually is not. Is that different in Spain?
Get the big picture: copyright, as any other rigth, has limits.
Of course copyright has limits. But those limits generally do not extend to rendering it useless by permitting arbitrarily wide distribution without any form of compensation.
You should check your facts about the court cases, BTW. A court in France, for example, did rule that P2P was legal. That was almost immediately overturned by a higher court and by legislative intervention, since it's questionable whether any state that is a signatory to WIPO treaties can actually do that. (Under the main relevant treaty, any exemptions to copyright must meet three criteria. It's just about arguable that the US fair use provisions do meet them, but pretty clear that a blanket, open-ended right to distribute via P2P would not.)
Sorry, but that's the best way of representing the will of the people we've got. Moreover, at the last count, a lot more people didn't rip content illegally than did, despite the illusions around these parts to the contrary. If I were wrong about this and you were right, then this issue would at least register at election time, yet as far as I'm aware, it hasn't even had a passing mention in any political manfiesto, at least in my country. I'm sorry if that reality is upsetting to you, but that's simply the way things are.
I think you're thinking of some small cartels, not the vast majority of the international community in the western world.
The relevant laws are guided by WIPO treaties, to which those countries I mentioned are all signatories, and the relevant agreements here have been in place and implemented as laws since a long time before the whole **AA/P2P thing kicked off.
There are at least two key differences. One is conjecture (and conjecture that's been made before and found completely incorrect at that) while the other is an obvious and ongoing concern. One is potentially a cause of future damage while the other is causing damage right now.
Nice try. By default, copying material that is subject to copyright without permission is explicitly illegal. Care to duck the question on a technicality again?
OK guys, if you're going to comment on legal things, at least read the small print, and the informed commentary on the Field case. Hint: read the bit about being well aware of the mechasisms to opt out, the deliberate settings that didn't do this, the court's view on the significance of this, and the effect this has on any precedent that was set.
Leaving aside the legality of the police actions, which sound dubious under Swedish law from everything I've read...
I think a lot of people here aren't looking at the bigger picture. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority of the international community in the western world does agree on some basic legal principles:
Works are protected by copyright.
Copyright infringement is illegal.
Mass distribution without permission of copyrighted works is infringing.
Helping someone to break a law is in itself illegal.
Now, Sweden may choose to disagree, and within its own borders, that's its prerogative. The problem is that in this case, the damage is not contained within its own borders. By dissenting from the general concensus, Sweden is providing a safe haven that allows people to break the law in other countries with apparently impunity.
You can't really expect the rest of the world to stand by and let this happen. If Sweden doesn't play ball, at least to some reasonable extent, then it's likely to face serious consequences on the international stage. Do you really want to see Sweden facing formal reprimands and trade sanctions in five years?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and they certainly have their merits. But really, they're not even on the scale of what I'm envisaging here (which is closer to a package with WP ease of use, DTP levels of page layout and typography tools, LaTeX levels of support for templated content and document structure, and a plug-in model for incorporating non-textual content).
This is one of those really annoying things, where I've developed quite a detailed vision after many sessions of thinking about this subject, I have the technical ability to design and write the application, I've had interesting discussions with others who supported the main ideas so I know I'm not going mad, but short of winning a lottery I never enter, I'll probably never have the time and resources to dedicate to making it happen. Heh... Sucks to be me. :-)
Well, sorry, I'll call you on that one, then. A friend of mine typeset an entire Masters thesis with plentiful Hindi quotations using LaTeX, because none of the mainstream WP software was up to the job. We even designed a whole new font with METAFONT, containing most of the major Devanagari glyphs, and mapped to standard roman transliterations.
This obviously took a fair few hours, but on the scale of a Masters thesis it wasn't a large proportion of the overall time spent. Compared to the tools used in the rest of the university department for setting Indic scripts at the time - using drag and drop to place every glyph by hand! - our solution was simplicity itself.
That goes back a few years, and there are now much more powerful LaTeX packages available. Yet even today, there's not much in the word-processing and DTP world that does a better job than what we set up for LaTeX back then. Very little software is available that takes advantage of the theoretical opportunities offered by OpenType fonts, which would go a long way. Word, like all other major Windows-based word processors today, notably doesn't even do basic f-ligatures properly yet, never mind having good typography and page layout more generally.
Tell me, if you wanted to set a document using a combination of English and Hindi tomorrow, what software would you use?
That's a matter of perspective. Using Word, you couldn't produce the kind of LaTeX'd documents I've seen in fields from mathematics and software engineering to linguistics, no matter how long you tried. And for that matter, someone competent with a tool like LaTeX will generally be far more productive doing a task that suits it than someone competent using a tool like Word.
As I've commented here several times before, it's a mystery to me why no-one has got wise to this and filled the rather large gap between Word (pretty UI to some people, but seriously underpowered for non-trivial work) and LaTeX (seriously powerful if you know what you're doing, but some daft limitations and horrible usability). It's not like the basic concepts underlying both Word and LaTeX have been around for more than a decade or anything...
Indeed. However, I think history may look back on the "knowledge revolution" as the greatest example in human history of "just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should". There seems little doubt that Web 2.0 will play a role in this, and it's particularly insidious because this is a genie-out-of-the-bottle situation, and a lot of kids are getting caught up in it. But you're right: in the monster we're creating, Web 2.0 is just one of a dozen tentacles.
I'm pretty sure none of that is true, though it's a common misconception. See here, for example.
Ethically, this question really boils down to whether you accept the premise in TFA: do Yahoo! make a positive overall contribution to the people of China, or are isolated but rather dramatic cases like this too high a price?
If their contribution is a net plus, then this is the price of doing business in today's China, then there is nothing else they could have done here. We have to accept this, and hope for better things in the future as a result of that positive contribution and others like it.
If their contribution is a net minus to human rights and quality of life, then it is incumbent on countries that do believe in such things to penalise companies supporting oppressive regimes to a sufficient degree that remaining in those oppressed countries becomes financially untenable.
FWIW, I bought a Loewe Concept 32" box a few weeks ago. This is a very nice piece of kit, and is replacing the trusty 14" Panasonic CRT that has served me faithfully for many years but didn't even do widescreen.
It's pretty obvious what kind of signal you're looking at on the new box. Freeview (broadcast, digital, non-HD, compression varies with channel) and VHS are watchable for stuff that doesn't matter, but unsurprisingly DVD blows them away for anything serious. (It made little difference on the old TV, because the picture was so small and the resolution so low that it didn't matter...)
That said, I think the most relevant factoid here is that the upscaling in the TV is excellent for most images. Watching a DVD movie, it's quite hard to distinguish the picture from the quality of the HDTV samples that have been flying around unless you are literally watching them side-by-side. Naturally, there are some areas where upscaling can never beat real details: crowd scenes and panoramic shots, for example. But these are relatively rare.
I think this is what will make it difficult for the HD formats to take hold if they're DRM-encumbered and priced uncompetitively. The usual rule about not screwing the early adopters if you want your product to succeed applies. A lot of enthusiasts have spent silly money on HDTVs recently. One thing they often didn't have until quite recently was HDCP. One thing most of them always did have was good upscaling. After all, would you buy a stupidly expensive TV that looks worse displaying today's channels worse than what you've already got?
In other words, the likely early-adopter market for HD formats can already watch DVDs at enhanced resolutions, which makes any native HD format less appealing relative to status quo. If HD-DVD or BluRay (wish someone would decide how we're supposed to write that...) are going to take advantage of the benefits they do offer, that means they've got to have very little downside. And that means they have to be priced similarly to the DVDs they're replacing, and they have to be easier to use rather than more difficult.
What Google calls a Cache, and the prior usage of the term in the IT community that was ruled fair use by US courts, are entirely different things. Google's Cache isn't a technical necessity, or part of the way the Internet works. It's a direct but sometimes incomplete copy of others' material, made without permission, and redistributed on an independent web site, which happens to use the word "Cache" in the page title for marketing purposes.
Yep: the industry can sell its content in unhelpful forms if it wants, but it should be required to be up-front with the public about what they are (and aren't) buying.
This response was pretty much exactly what I proposed in my own submission to the Gowers Review, so it's nice to know that others thought it was reasonable too.
I'm not sure why you assume that just because they're Google, they're automatically in the right (and legally so).
Last time I checked, they didn't actually reproduce what is publicly available in any case. They reproduced the text, and committed a gross breach of netiquette in referring back to the original site for images rather than caching those as well. The higher availability thing is questionable; I'm not aware of any time since it was set up that the site I run has been off-line, for example, and I've received no reports of unreachability for particular visitors. I don't see why Google's cache offers any better searchability than the original site, either.
And this is still ducking the big, and as yet unresolved AFAIK, question of whether either Google Cache or the Wayback Machine are even close to legal, given that they duplicate entire works without permission, and it's certainly not a black-and-white case of fair use.
Who knows what they've advised Google and why? For all we know, they may have advised Google that the service is flagrantly violating copyright law, but that the likely costs of any court action are relatively small. Corporations push the boundaries of what's legal all the time if it will make them more money, until someone gets pissed off seriously enough to file a suit and stop them.
Google for WIPO, and in particular the three criteria that any local exemption to copyright must meet to comply with the major treaties.
Most laws are formed as a result of an argument made by someone who feels damaged, not by a public outcry. When was the public outcry over complex tax evasion schemes? Over driving without insurance? For those who live in nations with written constitutions, how many of them were written by a committee drawn from among the general population, and how many were written by the leaders and lawyers as they thought best served the interests of the population?
If you removed copyright tomorrow, then no doubt there would be a huge cheer from much of the population, as they happily ripped films and music saving themselves a fortune. What the picture would look like in a few years' time, however, is the more important question. Those who oppose copyright and chant the "information wants to be free" mantra think it would make no difference or even be an improvement. Apparently, in their world there are arists who coul afford to continue to create and distribute the same depth, variety and quality of works we have today, without the guarantee of any compensation in return.
What I've never understood about that vision is why, if there are so many generous and capable artists in the world, we don't already see them giving away all these high quality works for free today, killing off the commercial industry in the process. What we do see is that a lot of people volunteer a part of their time. That means you get a lot of small works, of varying quality but some no doubt very good. You can also get major works in the mainstream, as some of the popular open source applications have demonstrated, again of very variable quality but some very good. But I'll believe in the whole dream when I see the same number of freely available alternatives for all of the commercial software products I've ever worked on in my career, not just office applications and OS/comms tools that have a potential market of millions of people, and when bookshops start closing down because there's so much equally good material available freely on-line that no-one buys from the big publishers any more.
That would be interesting.
However, I think a lot of the other posters here have missed the point of my original "international agreements" post anyway. I wasn't commenting on either the legality of the actions in Sweden, nor the appropriateness of the response. My real point was that if the laws in Sweden don't reflect the general international concensus, and Sweden is allowing people to take advantage of those laws in ways that other countries perceive as damaging, then it would not be surprising if the international community started imposing some sort of counter-effect at some stage. This would be damaging to Sweden, and therefore it is not surprising that the Swedish authorities want to be seen to be at least reasonably cooperative, which may be the reasoning behind this action.
It will presumably be unfortunate for the Swedish authorities if they are trapped between the rock of international pressure and the hard place of their own legislation here. I would not be surprised to find that far from being a victory for TPB and its supporters, the fall-out from this affair actually results in some sort of devious introduction of more restrictive laws for everyone, on the back of some argument about international pressure. As the Slashbots are keen to point out whenever it suits their argument, legality and morality are not the same thing, but laws can be changed much more easily...
BTW, since when was copying a song for a friend fair use?
I'm not sure the library uses you mention are a suitable analogy for Google Cache. (The Google search engine itself is a different matter.)
For a start, libraries are public facilities (at least in my country; perhaps others differ) and subject to specific exemptions in some cases (same caveat applies). Google, OTOH, is a commercial organisation.
Moreover, Google Cache directly reproduces the original content (aside from the bandwidth theft for images thing). I don't think the library equivalent is setting up microfiche copies for archival; it's more like setting up a printing press and printing duplicates of all books in the library that are then given away for free to all comers.
I agree with your point about discrimination as well, FWIW. IMHO, you can either be a common carrier (or whatever the local equivalent is) providing a completely impartial service, or be a publisher/editor/other discriminatory body with some level of responsibility for the content you approve, but the law should not allow you the reasonable protections afforded to common carriers if you don't act like one.
Thank you. I'm also aware that 2+2=4 and that water is wet.
They aren't explicitly allowed, they're implicitly allowed because they've been held to meet the four criteria for fair use. There has been, to my knowledge, no similarly broad ruling on the subject of caching as Google applies it. The only case so far seems to be Field, and you can read the commentary on why any precedents that set are very limited.
I think you're missing the point here. The wholesale infringement of copyright law by a minority of people was always illegal. New technology made it easier and more damaging for those people to break the law. A new law was passed that was a rather draconian response to this. The underlying principles didn't change, and frankly, I have little sympathy with those who break the law as it used to be and then bitch about newer, "nastier" laws being introduced to penalise them more for doing it.
Perhaps I am. I'm not arrogant enough to presume my opinion is the only valid one, nor is that opinion set in stone such that no amount of evidence will change my mind. But let's look at the specifics you mentioned, and I'll try to explain why after a lot of thought I've come to my current position on this subject.
I'm really not sure that's true. There's a vast discrepancy between copyright law and the general opinion about it in posts on Slashdot, but Slashdot is not representative of the population at large. If you look at, for example, the changes to the Australian copyright system announced by their Attorney-General last month, I suspect most of us would consider them to be at least a step in the right direction. More significantly, the AG's office also published on their web site a large number of responses to their earlier inquiry that led to these changes. If you look at the comments by members of the public, and indeed the survey results about public and industry views on fair use in the submission by the Australian Consumers' Association, then the overwhelming majority in both groups believed that reasonable personal uses should be legal, and believed that distribution to others without permission should not be legal. As far as I'm aware, this is the largest recent enquiry on the subject, at least until the British Gowers Review publishes the submissions it received and its own recommendations this autumn. The methodology was also not entirely scientific, but the results are surely more indicative than random conjecture based on Slashdot comments.
I think this is getting into straw man territory. We're talking about P2P, and specifically BitTorrent. The stuff that gets ripped widely on P2P isn't stuff that would have entered the public domain but for recent copyright extensions, but rather a lot of recent music, movies, games and the like. This would have been illegal in most places long before the DMCA and friends came along.
Be careful here. I'm all for giving the people the vote and running a country in a suitably democratic fashion, but democracy only works in the presence of an informed and rational population, and as the saying goes, a person is smart, but people are stupid. There are countless examples where naive and/or selfish thinking makes the population favour one approach, yet clear evidence on which experts pretty much universally agree favours another. There are also countless examples where public perception differs widely from reality: look at how many people in the US currently think Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11, or how many people in the UK think that certain types of crime are rising when in fact they are falling or vice versa.
Economics is one area with abundant examples of this, and copyright is basically an economic principle: it creates an artificial market
Blockquoth the AC:
Copying for personal use is legal in many places, but distribution usually is not. Is that different in Spain?
Of course copyright has limits. But those limits generally do not extend to rendering it useless by permitting arbitrarily wide distribution without any form of compensation.
You should check your facts about the court cases, BTW. A court in France, for example, did rule that P2P was legal. That was almost immediately overturned by a higher court and by legislative intervention, since it's questionable whether any state that is a signatory to WIPO treaties can actually do that. (Under the main relevant treaty, any exemptions to copyright must meet three criteria. It's just about arguable that the US fair use provisions do meet them, but pretty clear that a blanket, open-ended right to distribute via P2P would not.)
Sorry, but that's the best way of representing the will of the people we've got. Moreover, at the last count, a lot more people didn't rip content illegally than did, despite the illusions around these parts to the contrary. If I were wrong about this and you were right, then this issue would at least register at election time, yet as far as I'm aware, it hasn't even had a passing mention in any political manfiesto, at least in my country. I'm sorry if that reality is upsetting to you, but that's simply the way things are.
The relevant laws are guided by WIPO treaties, to which those countries I mentioned are all signatories, and the relevant agreements here have been in place and implemented as laws since a long time before the whole **AA/P2P thing kicked off.
There are at least two key differences. One is conjecture (and conjecture that's been made before and found completely incorrect at that) while the other is an obvious and ongoing concern. One is potentially a cause of future damage while the other is causing damage right now.
Nice try. By default, copying material that is subject to copyright without permission is explicitly illegal. Care to duck the question on a technicality again?
OK guys, if you're going to comment on legal things, at least read the small print, and the informed commentary on the Field case. Hint: read the bit about being well aware of the mechasisms to opt out, the deliberate settings that didn't do this, the court's view on the significance of this, and the effect this has on any precedent that was set.
Leaving aside the legality of the police actions, which sound dubious under Swedish law from everything I've read...
I think a lot of people here aren't looking at the bigger picture. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority of the international community in the western world does agree on some basic legal principles:
Now, Sweden may choose to disagree, and within its own borders, that's its prerogative. The problem is that in this case, the damage is not contained within its own borders. By dissenting from the general concensus, Sweden is providing a safe haven that allows people to break the law in other countries with apparently impunity.
You can't really expect the rest of the world to stand by and let this happen. If Sweden doesn't play ball, at least to some reasonable extent, then it's likely to face serious consequences on the international stage. Do you really want to see Sweden facing formal reprimands and trade sanctions in five years?