No worries. I wondered if the word "not" was missing somewhere in your previous post.
It's true that we have several levels of representation in the UK. Broadly speaking we have local government (various levels of council or other elected local authority depending on where you are), national government (the main executive and legislature) and EU government (where MEPs are directly elected, though the other parts of EU governance are not). Typically representatives are elected to represent a specific area and a citizen living in that area is entitled to vote for their representatives at each of the corresponding elections. There are also a small number of specific positions that are directly elected, for example the police commissioners, though most of our regulatory or oversight authorities are appointed rather than directly elected.
In practice, most local authorities have relatively little power and really do deal with local issues, though if you live somewhere like London then arguably that isn't quite as true. On most issues, the real power is in Westminster with the national government, and to some extent with the devolved equivalents in Scotland etc.
Parliament is now elected on a fixed five-year term with a single MP representing each electoral constituency and selected via first-past-the-post forming the legislature. In practice, the executive and government ministers are then determined by who can gather the support of a majority of those MPs, so in effect even our Prime Minister is only indirected elected. As you can imagine, this has been controversial at times, particularly when the PM has changed between elections without the general public getting any say on the matter.
Since the Lisbon Treaty the members of the European Parliament that we elect regionally do also have some real power in terms of EU directives, which are ultimately supposed to be translated into national law in each member state. However, the EU has two other parts of its government that are not directly elected in the same way, and there is a long-standing political trick where a national government encourages policies it couldn't sell back home via these indirect European mechanisms and then pleads with its own electorate that it had no choice but to implement the resulting legislation, thus covering itself while still passing unpopular laws. This kind of trickery can also lead to more popular laws passed by the national government then being cancelled in court.
Careful with those assumptions there, buddy. I'm a textbook floating voter -- I choose who to vote for at each election based on that election, not some preconceived notion of which party I should support and automatically voting for their candidate. I'm also politically active, and will engage with my representatives in substantial ways on issues I care about.
I'm also in the UK, and as you may be aware, not having more opportunities to vote or meaningfully express political views in other ways is a recurring problem here.
For example, we have numerous levels of indirection between who we vote for back home and what senior figures our government ultimately send to represent us and wield power at EU level or other international agreements, which is how you wind up with the legal technicalities that got the private copying exception overturned in the case mentioned in TFS. Today the MEPs we do elect at least somewhat directly have more power over such issues, but I think the technicalities being abused here predate that change, so there really was very little an average citizen could have done to significantly divert the storm in this particular case.
Oh, I agree that current electoral systems are very bad at representing what the people collectively want over time. The trouble is, as long as we choose our representatives one election and one relatively long term at a time, and as long as we have to vote for a single individual and not express distinct views on a range of issues, you can't fix that.
If you have a population split 60%/40% on party politics, when should the 40% get their turn? If that split truly reflected a 60%/40% on every issue affecting the population then arguably they shouldn't. Then you get into issues of whether some principles are important enough to need more than a simple majority to accept them, and thus constitutional law and supreme courts that can overrule the administration and other statute legislation of the day.
The trouble starts when everything isn't so uniform. You have a 60%/40% split on parties, but on one particular issue it's 40%/60% but the 40% win. With systems like first-past-the-post you have a further development of this idea, because you can have a party winning with only a relatively small share of the vote (or worse, some averaged version of that based on seats/districts) as long as it's larger than any other party's share. Then even if an issue is say 25%/75% because all of the other parties and their supporters oppose the government, the government can still have their way. That is what happens all too often today.
I'm not in any way trying to defend the copyright maximalism we see from some quarters today. For example, I think it's crazy that based on a legal technicality the UK government has lost the case mentioned in TFS and the reasonable and widely supported private copying exception introduced only recently has effectively been un-introduced again. And of course the push for ever-longer copyright durations and particularly for applying them retrospectively is also crazy (unless you recorded a few hit songs or own the rights to popular fictional rodents from many years ago and you want to profit off those things indefinitely instead of creating new work -- in other words, unless your goal is to avoid doing exactly what copyright is supposed to incentivise, creating and sharing new works).
I do think some form of restriction on not-for-profit copying may still be necessary. After all, sharing everything arbitrarily on the Internet could still hit the market for legitimate sales, and if you legalise this sort of sharing completely then you're saying to those who do follow the law at the moment -- who are the ones actually providing any revenue into the system -- that it's OK to stop doing that.
But I think the case should be made for how restrictive any such law needs to be and why, and I think there's a big difference between banning putting the latest blockbuster on BitTorrent for the whole world to see and banning things like format shifting to move an existing CD collection for which the rightsholders were already paid onto an MP3 player, or copying software for which the rightsholders were already paid from one PC to another because the hard drive in the first one failed.
My current thinking, for what it's worth, is that private copying exceptions based on the number of individuals rather than the number of copies are probably a sensible starting point. That basic principle could probably combined with some sort of household sharing provision, and maybe some provision for transferring the rights of permanent use from one individual to another in a reasonably permanent way, to codify what most people would consider reasonable sharing without legitimising multiplication and mass distribution contrary to the basic idea of copyright or legalising for-profit ripping.
I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important.
I tend to agree there as well. I looked up the figures for some other financial offences for another post here yesterday, and IIRC the most category that could attract a custodial sentence had a range of 4-7 years and only started to apply at something like £500,000 of damage. It seems to me that treating professional-level copyright infringement more like fraud than theft would be reasonable, and having penalties roughly in line with existing fraud or financial misreporting offences of the same scale would then be reasonable.
A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward.
There's an interesting ethical question here, because it's probably fair to say that the people who have benefited most financially from large-scale on-line copyright infringement aren't always the individual infringers. Sometimes it's the people operating services that facilitate the infringement but then profit in some way, for example through the advertising they carry, or through charging for ripped materials.
Certainly these modern services and more efficient communications channels are the reason that copyright infringement has exploded from the days when a few kids might share mix tapes in the playgroun
That's not really true, though. Your vote will not make a difference if many more of your neighbours vote for another party than you do. That's because the collective weight of their votes is more than the weight of yours. You can argue that some alternative voting model would be a fairer system than the current first-past-the-post model we use, but given the model we have today, what you described is exactly how it's supposed to work.
If there were literally no possibility of those other people's votes changing at an election then the situation would be different. But no-one in this country is compelled to vote, nor to vote the same way as they did before. Like it or not, everyone gets to choose every time, and some of them are probably going to disagree with you.
Also, as someone who lives in a "marginal" constituency that has changed MP almost every election for my adult life and changed party several times and yet has seen majorities of many thousands at some of those elections, I don't really buy the theory of only marginals counting anyway.
So a single user "downloading" a single movie with bittorrent could fall under the 10-year rule. That they don't is your opinion at the moment. It isn't coded into law, or otherwise protected.
Well, that rule doesn't exist yet, so none of us know that.
However, assuming it is a direct extension of what currently attracts a maximum two-year sentence, that is still quite a stretch. The specific circumstances under which copyright becomes a criminal matter are in fact enumerated in statute law. Here they are.
Notice that the recurring theme in almost all of the specifics is something along the lines of knowing or having reason to believe that the copy is infringing. The CPS guidance specifically notes that this means a requirement for criminal intent must exist.
If you do knowingly choose to participate in a system that causes mass-distribution of a specific work and you know that work is infringing someone's copyright, then yes, your actions might be criminal infringement. But even then it appears unlikely based on cases tried so far that a court would hand down a significant custodial sentence on conviction in a case where there was no profit-making involved.
They pass a broad law, stating the goal of stopping screeners and pre-release leaks, but word them to cover everything, so there are no gaps or holes, then apply them to the targeted area, for a year or two, then target anyone using bittorrent.
Given that the maximum penalty for these offences is already two years, and it has been more than a decade since the relevant SI was introduced, can I assume you have a whole stack of citations waiting to show me how dangerous it is to run BitTorrent today as a result? Because I don't see a lot of people in the UK even getting prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement because they ran BT, never mind convicted or sentenced to jail time.
So "lost profit" is the same as robbery.
Taking money that someone else was entitled to by law is pretty much exactly the same as robbery, or at least fraud. And arguing that they weren't entitled to it even though there was demonstrably a customer willing to pay for the work because that customer paid a copycat for their copy instead of the legitimate rightsholder is another stretch.
I can just toss you in the "batshit insane" category and ignore you.
Of course you can. You're free to hold whatever opinion of me you like. But my post contains citations of real laws and official prosector's guidance, and yours contains a slippery slope argument about something that has demonstrably not actually happened in far longer than the timescales you claimed. Your opinion of me won't change those facts.
In this context, I'd settle for a pragmatic generic definition, say "work that produces information that was not previously available". Obviously creating physical products or providing other services can also be creative in the general sense of the word, but I think we're talking specifically about what are generically referred to as "creative industries" here.
If the law specifies a minimum offense at all, you can be sure that anyone reaching that minimum is at risk.
Perhaps, but the relevant statutes enumerate quite specifically when copyright infringement becomes a criminal matter. Moreover, whether to impose any custodial sentence at all would fall to the courts, which tend to take an extremely dim view of anyone trying to influence their judgements on such matters extra-judicially beyond the creation of the relevant statute law in the first place.
I'm pretty heavily pro-civil liberties and pro-copyright reform in these debates, but it doesn't really advance the debate in a useful way to argue an unrealistically pessimistic position without regard to the realities of how such a law would be interpreted in court even if a case were brought. The law has allowed for two-year sentences for this kind of on-line infringement for some time, and for the ten-year penalty for real world infringement of the same nature, but it's extremely rare for criminal copyright prosecutions to even happen in the first place, never mind for the maximum penalties to be handed down by a court.
There are all kinds of things about the City of London that should have had a light shined on them a long time ago so we can decide whether we still want to allow them in our society. If you think CoLP behaving dubiously in this context is scary, consider that to this day they retain a special position with regard to Parliament, which for reasons beyond my comprehension has not been terminated despite there being no law that requires it. Then again, we also still allow people to vote on our laws because of their religion or who their parents several generations removed once were, so apparently we have a long way to go.
Then why bother debating laws at all? If there is no point discussing the words on the page because anyone with enough power can just ignore them, and the checks and balances are inadequate to safeguarding us against that abuse, we might as well all go pick up out pitchforks and march on Downing Street tomorrow. Fortunately, we are a long way from reaching that stage. If we weren't, the government wouldn't have just lost the very case we're talking about because their position was defeated in court.
Real and personal property can exist in a fixed place and time.
No. A real, physical item can exist in a fixed place and time, but it is only the law that makes it any particular person's property.
It can only be owned, used, or possessed by one person at a time
No, no, and no. Shared ownership is possible. Many things can be used by multiple people at once. Many things are in the possession of multiple people at once.
and deprivation of it is a real rather than theoretical harm.
So if I went into your home while you were on holiday for two weeks, borrowed a book that belongs to you to read it for a week, returned it in its original condition, and then left again causing no damage, what real harm have you suffered exactly? You literally didn't even know I was there, and yet for a week that book was in no practical sense your property or in your possession, and of course if there were proof of my actions then the law would probably frown upon them.
As I said, if you stop and think about it, these concepts we take for granted are really all social conventions. A lot of these debates are just between people whose subjective personal preferences are for some conventions but not others.
So who is going to jail for "Hollywood accounting"? Nobody.
And that's a real problem, and something should be done about that as well.
For that matter, the continued dominance of middleman organisations like movie studios, book publishers and record labels is arguably the biggest problem with the creative industries right now. Modern technology should reduce that imbalance over time, but there is also an imbalance in knowledge and understanding that pushes strongly toward the status quo and that's harder to fix.
But neither of these things is the problem we are talking about today, and neither of them makes the problem we are talking about today any less significant for those affected by it.
Nice strawman, but this is not a situation with vague wording that is amenable to creative interpretation later on. The distinction between civil and criminal copyright infringement is relatively clear and unambiguous in the UK, and nothing I've seen anyone say or propose in relation to this discussion suggests that this will change.
Yes. Ownership of anything -- a physical object, a certain exclusive right, a theoretical amount of money that lives as bits and bytes in a database somewhere -- is just a concept we have invented to help society function, like any other legal or financial instrument. We might all agree (or at least most of us would, I hope) that physical ownership is a useful concept and we should respect it and not commit theft, but ultimately that is just a social norm, enforced through other social norms such as laws and courts.
So those that sell copies can go to jail for fraud, and those that copy with no financial motive could be fined for more than any "loss" they caused the copyright holder.
Right, and that is broadly what the UK legal framework does. Non-commercial infringement is basically a civil offence, punishable in a civil court through damages, and under UK law those would normally be actual damages, not the dramatically overstated hypothetical or punitive sort. But professional copyright infringement, where you're actively ripping off works for substantial profit, can be a criminal matter, punishable in criminal courts with fines and jail time. And that's what we're talking about here.
So taking $1 from someone and giving them back $0.50 doesn't harm them in any way?
It harms them to about the same extent as ripping a copyright work with a market of two paying customers so that you sell one copy to a paying customer for your own profit and the legitimate rightsholder then sells only one copy to the second paying customer.
Copyright is a reasonable economic instrument, in my opinion, at least until we find a better model for incentivising creative work that does at least as good a job. Likewise, infrigement of copyright causes economic damage, more like fraud or misleading advertising than theft of some physical item. But the claim that professional-scale copyright infringement causes no actual damage at all is about as likely as the claim by the other side that every illegal copy represents a lost sale. Those professional infringers are sure making a lot of money doing something that supposedly doesn't cost the legitimate rightsholder anything.
But this problem is largely self inflicted, charging insane prices (compared to actual cost), imposing unreasonable restrictions on products.
It's fascinating that someone can write the above and then advocate free markets in the very next sentence. Do you understand that what you're arguing for is economically equivalent to having a free market, except that any time someone wants to back out of a deal they just keep what they received but don't bother giving what they promised in return?
Imaginary property does not deserve this level of protection.
All property is imaginary. The natural state of things is that if you have something I want, it is mine if I have a more powerful weapon or a bigger gang.
The idea of having a civilised society with laws and recognised rights and due process is to try to avoid descending to the ethical level of a caveman.
10 years for 'stealing' essentially THOUGHTS is insane.
The people these laws are aimed at aren't "stealing thoughts". They are directly defrauding the rightsholders, and ultimately everyone who works in creative industries and earns their living contributing to these works, of staggering amounts of money. We are talking about organised crime here, not little Suzy sharing her latest Taylor Swift MP3 with her friend from school.
Throwing people in jail over it is absolutely repugnant.
I wonder if you'd feel the same way if, say, the person responsible for managing your pension fund took risks they weren't supposed to, lost, and left you with no savings. It's only financial crime and no-one got hurt (directly). Should we just fine them the money they will never have to pay back everyone's pension fund?
You can't make some things good after the fact, particularly things where the actual damage is likely to be substantial but is hard to measure objectively, so all you can do is try to create a legal framework that discourages the behaviour in other ways.
I'm sure we can all agree that these are comparable to someone sharing a song.
You make a good emotional appeal, but the reality is that someone just casually sharing a song isn't likely to be subject to these penalties at all. Even TFA mentions this, and this is only an early stage proposal, far from becoming an actual law.
What we're really talking about here is something like an organised criminal gang that systematically identifies people who might be coerced into giving up pre-release copies of major movies, then distributes those pre-release movies for substantial profit at the expense of the studio (and, indirectly, everyone who gets paid to work on movies).
Leaving aside existing penalties for other types of copyright infringement, a reasonable comparison might be large-scale, systematic professional fraud or false accounting, where CPS guidelines indicate 4-7 years for a custodial sentence. So while a 10 year maximum as reportedly proposed here seems on the high side, it's not a vast discrepancy from existing financial offences of a similar magnitude.
Taking away some of the copyright protection from the copyright owners of existing works was obviously not legally possible without compensation.
There's nothing obvious about that at all.
For one thing, a significant amount of the copyrights those owners enjoy today were only granted retrospectively, and so demonstrably did not act as the economic incentive that copyright is supposed to be when the works were actually created. Moreover, the retrospective grant of exclusive rights removed freedoms that everyone else had to use those works in other ways without any form of compensation. So any argument on general principles about how laws with retrospective effects are a bad idea is already flawed in this context.
For another thing, this sort of case is basically only possible because of some very shady international agreements, and it's putting national democratic government up against those less than democratic alternatives to see who wins. This isn't some fundamental issue of abusing human rights, at least not against the copyright holders. It's an economic question, where those with more economic power have been taking advantage of their influence to distort the effects of laws far beyond their original significance. The whole point of having a legislature is to adjust the laws when this sort of thing happens, in order to keep them reasonable and fair and in the general interests of society.
The problem with your argument is that in systems where you get an election every few years and in that election you get one vote, there aren't even enough votes in an individual's entire lifetime to express a real view on all the issues that will affect them. Elections for national governments are typically won and lost based on a very small number of key issues at the time, maybe even just one.
Something like copyright infringement is never going to be that issue, unless they actually do start fining everyone who ever downloads something illegally or throwing large numbers of people in jail for sharing their mash-ups on YouTube. So any argument that an election result somehow gave the government a mandate for whatever policy it has in every last area is flawed at best.
Of course, this is all rather academic in this case, because the government did actually make a sensible change in the law, and this case was the government losing a case against that change in court.
this victimless crime attracts a potentially higher prison sentence than many violent crimes
These penalties are the ones aimed at criminal copyright infringement. That typically means large-scale, commercial activity where someone really is completely ripping off all the people who actually worked to produce the movie or game or album just to make a quick buck for themselves.
If you think that is a victimless crime, I invite you to carry on working at your normal job for the next year, but sign all the pay cheques over to some random criminal who did literally nothing to deserve that money. Oh, and sign over those of all your colleagues as well.
Of course copyright laws are widely abused. Of course it's absurd that there are legal technicalities squeezed in through shady EU level shenanigans that mean the UK government lost the case over compensation in exchange for the private copying exception. But it's important to separate advocating reasonable usage rights for normal people from advocating lenient penalties for organised criminals who make large amounts of money at the direct expense of the people who actually did the work. Don't compare large-scale commercial copyright infringement with a crime of violence against an individual, compare it with something like large-scale commercial fraud that costs thousands of people their pensions.
True, but (a) that's probably the most annoying thing about trying to run servers on Linux, because (b) upgrading to the next distro version is a high-risk activity that will often break things, but at least (c) the support duration for something like Debian stable is way longer than 8 months.
The Home version being forced to take updates was already known, but TFS is the first time I saw this little gem:
Windows 10 Pro users will be able to delay updates for some period of time
If this reporting is accurate and the claim that users of the Pro version will also be forced to apply updates within a few months or lose security updates is correct, I can count the number of my businesses that will be moving to Windows 10 on the fingers of no hands. TBH, it wasn't looking great anyway -- I've seen no obvious benefits relative to our current standard of Windows 7, and I know few people who are keen on the new UI style -- but losing control of the OS would be a complete deal-breaker no matter how good anything else was. The figure of 8 months mentioned for the Current Branch for Business is about as useful as Firefox long term support for software you actually rely on to earn your living, i.e., hardly at all.
And still more deadly, despite the lack of software flaws.
That is true, but a lot of the safety benefits in modern cars come from primarily mechanical systems like seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, and designing the outer areas to be less damaging to others in the event of a collision.
Some of the other big improvements in recent years might involve some software but it can still operate independent of the main control systems, for example rear-view cameras, and better exterior lighting. Even if you have sensor integration for things like blind spot warnings or the high-end headlights that run on semi-permanent high beam at high speeds but adapt to avoid dazzling other road users, the system as a whole doesn't need to be integrated into the basic control systems for, say, the engine, brakes, or power steering.
The trouble really starts when instead of operating a set of properly independent systems, the lines get blurred. Someone thinks it's a great idea to have the car automatically call for help if it's in a collision and the occupants are unable to do so themselves -- and that person is right, it is a significant benefit if the worst happens -- but then the easiest route to implement that feature winds up hooking the remote communications system into the same sensors as the airbags or the fuel injector control systems or the ABS so it can trigger at the right time.
Unfortunately, most vehicles have traditionally operated on relatively open architectures internally. Each part of the system assumes each other part is trustworthy and will co-operate properly when sharing resources like communications channels within the vehicle. But with so much dependency on software and so much complexity in each part of that software now, those old assumptions are not doing well. Throw in external interactions, from the emergency call feature to the anti-theft tracker to the car radio and on-board entertainment systems to the remote keyless entry system to the integral garage door zapper, and you have real potential for very bad things happening.
Dealer: Don't worry, sir, you can fix the windscreen wipers automatically turning off if the rain gets too heavy by upgrading to CarOS 2016, which also features a range of other enhancements we believe may interest you.
Customer: But CarOS 2016 is widely reported to need more processing power than my Car 2012 came with. Do I need to upgrade my hardware as well?
Dealer: Sorry, sir, but for safety reasons there are no user-serviceable parts in your Car 2012. We recommend upgrading to Car 2016, which is fully capable of running CarOS 2016 this week.
Customer: So by "upgrading", you mean "buying a new car", right? Well, I guess I have no choice. What was it I heard about the steering feature being updated in the new software as well?
Dealer: Actually it's been removed, sir. It's a safety issue. The manufacturer had reports that a couple of people fell asleep after 18 hours of driving without a break on long-distance straight roads, and scientific research shows that the risk of accidents is lower if the steering wheel is tied to hold it in place. Removing the steering feature will do that for everyone, automatically, making them safer any time they go for an 18 hour drive on a long-distance straight road.
Customer: Gee, that sounds a bit extreme. What if I want to turn a corner while I'm driving on a road with bends and junctions?
Dealer: Don't worry, sir. That issue has been logged in the tracker, and a workaround has been scheduled for the winter 2016 update to CarOS for those who still want to use the steering feature. I hear it involves adding a joystick, some sticky tape and a new subroutine written by the CEO's neighbour's daughter in JavaScript, so it will surely be very reliable and deal with the issue once and for all. As long as the release is out by the end of 2016, and you buy your car 2016 with a long-term support plan for the software, that update will be free. And it'll hurt my margins but I can do you a special deal on the long-term support plan as long as you buy it today: yours for only nine nine nine five.
Dealer: [Aside to audience] And if that update gets postponed into 2017, the out-of-contract support will cost them [pinky gesture] one million dollars! [Riotous evil laughter]
Me too, for both reliability and security/privacy reasons. Car security hasn't really advanced all that much since the invention of immobilisers (which effectively ended car theft as a serious risk) and alarms (which significantly reduce the risk of theft of what's inside the car). Arguably trackers help with back-of-lorry issues, but you're already into creepy remote-monitoring territory there. And the new ideas where software will track every little thing almost like a black box... except that instead of just being used for analysis after an accident, it will be uploaded in real time or at regular service intervals to the mothership? No thanks. And you can keep your remote-accessible in-car entertainment systems that also interact with actual control systems too.
Slashdot Mirror
No worries. I wondered if the word "not" was missing somewhere in your previous post.
It's true that we have several levels of representation in the UK. Broadly speaking we have local government (various levels of council or other elected local authority depending on where you are), national government (the main executive and legislature) and EU government (where MEPs are directly elected, though the other parts of EU governance are not). Typically representatives are elected to represent a specific area and a citizen living in that area is entitled to vote for their representatives at each of the corresponding elections. There are also a small number of specific positions that are directly elected, for example the police commissioners, though most of our regulatory or oversight authorities are appointed rather than directly elected.
In practice, most local authorities have relatively little power and really do deal with local issues, though if you live somewhere like London then arguably that isn't quite as true. On most issues, the real power is in Westminster with the national government, and to some extent with the devolved equivalents in Scotland etc.
Parliament is now elected on a fixed five-year term with a single MP representing each electoral constituency and selected via first-past-the-post forming the legislature. In practice, the executive and government ministers are then determined by who can gather the support of a majority of those MPs, so in effect even our Prime Minister is only indirected elected. As you can imagine, this has been controversial at times, particularly when the PM has changed between elections without the general public getting any say on the matter.
Since the Lisbon Treaty the members of the European Parliament that we elect regionally do also have some real power in terms of EU directives, which are ultimately supposed to be translated into national law in each member state. However, the EU has two other parts of its government that are not directly elected in the same way, and there is a long-standing political trick where a national government encourages policies it couldn't sell back home via these indirect European mechanisms and then pleads with its own electorate that it had no choice but to implement the resulting legislation, thus covering itself while still passing unpopular laws. This kind of trickery can also lead to more popular laws passed by the national government then being cancelled in court.
Careful with those assumptions there, buddy. I'm a textbook floating voter -- I choose who to vote for at each election based on that election, not some preconceived notion of which party I should support and automatically voting for their candidate. I'm also politically active, and will engage with my representatives in substantial ways on issues I care about.
I'm also in the UK, and as you may be aware, not having more opportunities to vote or meaningfully express political views in other ways is a recurring problem here.
For example, we have numerous levels of indirection between who we vote for back home and what senior figures our government ultimately send to represent us and wield power at EU level or other international agreements, which is how you wind up with the legal technicalities that got the private copying exception overturned in the case mentioned in TFS. Today the MEPs we do elect at least somewhat directly have more power over such issues, but I think the technicalities being abused here predate that change, so there really was very little an average citizen could have done to significantly divert the storm in this particular case.
Oh, I agree that current electoral systems are very bad at representing what the people collectively want over time. The trouble is, as long as we choose our representatives one election and one relatively long term at a time, and as long as we have to vote for a single individual and not express distinct views on a range of issues, you can't fix that.
If you have a population split 60%/40% on party politics, when should the 40% get their turn? If that split truly reflected a 60%/40% on every issue affecting the population then arguably they shouldn't. Then you get into issues of whether some principles are important enough to need more than a simple majority to accept them, and thus constitutional law and supreme courts that can overrule the administration and other statute legislation of the day.
The trouble starts when everything isn't so uniform. You have a 60%/40% split on parties, but on one particular issue it's 40%/60% but the 40% win. With systems like first-past-the-post you have a further development of this idea, because you can have a party winning with only a relatively small share of the vote (or worse, some averaged version of that based on seats/districts) as long as it's larger than any other party's share. Then even if an issue is say 25%/75% because all of the other parties and their supporters oppose the government, the government can still have their way. That is what happens all too often today.
I agree with just about everything there.
I'm not in any way trying to defend the copyright maximalism we see from some quarters today. For example, I think it's crazy that based on a legal technicality the UK government has lost the case mentioned in TFS and the reasonable and widely supported private copying exception introduced only recently has effectively been un-introduced again. And of course the push for ever-longer copyright durations and particularly for applying them retrospectively is also crazy (unless you recorded a few hit songs or own the rights to popular fictional rodents from many years ago and you want to profit off those things indefinitely instead of creating new work -- in other words, unless your goal is to avoid doing exactly what copyright is supposed to incentivise, creating and sharing new works).
I do think some form of restriction on not-for-profit copying may still be necessary. After all, sharing everything arbitrarily on the Internet could still hit the market for legitimate sales, and if you legalise this sort of sharing completely then you're saying to those who do follow the law at the moment -- who are the ones actually providing any revenue into the system -- that it's OK to stop doing that.
But I think the case should be made for how restrictive any such law needs to be and why, and I think there's a big difference between banning putting the latest blockbuster on BitTorrent for the whole world to see and banning things like format shifting to move an existing CD collection for which the rightsholders were already paid onto an MP3 player, or copying software for which the rightsholders were already paid from one PC to another because the hard drive in the first one failed.
My current thinking, for what it's worth, is that private copying exceptions based on the number of individuals rather than the number of copies are probably a sensible starting point. That basic principle could probably combined with some sort of household sharing provision, and maybe some provision for transferring the rights of permanent use from one individual to another in a reasonably permanent way, to codify what most people would consider reasonable sharing without legitimising multiplication and mass distribution contrary to the basic idea of copyright or legalising for-profit ripping.
I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important.
I tend to agree there as well. I looked up the figures for some other financial offences for another post here yesterday, and IIRC the most category that could attract a custodial sentence had a range of 4-7 years and only started to apply at something like £500,000 of damage. It seems to me that treating professional-level copyright infringement more like fraud than theft would be reasonable, and having penalties roughly in line with existing fraud or financial misreporting offences of the same scale would then be reasonable.
A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward.
There's an interesting ethical question here, because it's probably fair to say that the people who have benefited most financially from large-scale on-line copyright infringement aren't always the individual infringers. Sometimes it's the people operating services that facilitate the infringement but then profit in some way, for example through the advertising they carry, or through charging for ripped materials.
Certainly these modern services and more efficient communications channels are the reason that copyright infringement has exploded from the days when a few kids might share mix tapes in the playgroun
That's not really true, though. Your vote will not make a difference if many more of your neighbours vote for another party than you do. That's because the collective weight of their votes is more than the weight of yours. You can argue that some alternative voting model would be a fairer system than the current first-past-the-post model we use, but given the model we have today, what you described is exactly how it's supposed to work.
If there were literally no possibility of those other people's votes changing at an election then the situation would be different. But no-one in this country is compelled to vote, nor to vote the same way as they did before. Like it or not, everyone gets to choose every time, and some of them are probably going to disagree with you.
Also, as someone who lives in a "marginal" constituency that has changed MP almost every election for my adult life and changed party several times and yet has seen majorities of many thousands at some of those elections, I don't really buy the theory of only marginals counting anyway.
So a single user "downloading" a single movie with bittorrent could fall under the 10-year rule. That they don't is your opinion at the moment. It isn't coded into law, or otherwise protected.
Well, that rule doesn't exist yet, so none of us know that.
However, assuming it is a direct extension of what currently attracts a maximum two-year sentence, that is still quite a stretch. The specific circumstances under which copyright becomes a criminal matter are in fact enumerated in statute law. Here they are.
Notice that the recurring theme in almost all of the specifics is something along the lines of knowing or having reason to believe that the copy is infringing. The CPS guidance specifically notes that this means a requirement for criminal intent must exist.
If you do knowingly choose to participate in a system that causes mass-distribution of a specific work and you know that work is infringing someone's copyright, then yes, your actions might be criminal infringement. But even then it appears unlikely based on cases tried so far that a court would hand down a significant custodial sentence on conviction in a case where there was no profit-making involved.
They pass a broad law, stating the goal of stopping screeners and pre-release leaks, but word them to cover everything, so there are no gaps or holes, then apply them to the targeted area, for a year or two, then target anyone using bittorrent.
Given that the maximum penalty for these offences is already two years, and it has been more than a decade since the relevant SI was introduced, can I assume you have a whole stack of citations waiting to show me how dangerous it is to run BitTorrent today as a result? Because I don't see a lot of people in the UK even getting prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement because they ran BT, never mind convicted or sentenced to jail time.
So "lost profit" is the same as robbery.
Taking money that someone else was entitled to by law is pretty much exactly the same as robbery, or at least fraud. And arguing that they weren't entitled to it even though there was demonstrably a customer willing to pay for the work because that customer paid a copycat for their copy instead of the legitimate rightsholder is another stretch.
I can just toss you in the "batshit insane" category and ignore you.
Of course you can. You're free to hold whatever opinion of me you like. But my post contains citations of real laws and official prosector's guidance, and yours contains a slippery slope argument about something that has demonstrably not actually happened in far longer than the timescales you claimed. Your opinion of me won't change those facts.
In this context, I'd settle for a pragmatic generic definition, say "work that produces information that was not previously available". Obviously creating physical products or providing other services can also be creative in the general sense of the word, but I think we're talking specifically about what are generically referred to as "creative industries" here.
If the law specifies a minimum offense at all, you can be sure that anyone reaching that minimum is at risk.
Perhaps, but the relevant statutes enumerate quite specifically when copyright infringement becomes a criminal matter. Moreover, whether to impose any custodial sentence at all would fall to the courts, which tend to take an extremely dim view of anyone trying to influence their judgements on such matters extra-judicially beyond the creation of the relevant statute law in the first place.
I'm pretty heavily pro-civil liberties and pro-copyright reform in these debates, but it doesn't really advance the debate in a useful way to argue an unrealistically pessimistic position without regard to the realities of how such a law would be interpreted in court even if a case were brought. The law has allowed for two-year sentences for this kind of on-line infringement for some time, and for the ten-year penalty for real world infringement of the same nature, but it's extremely rare for criminal copyright prosecutions to even happen in the first place, never mind for the maximum penalties to be handed down by a court.
There are all kinds of things about the City of London that should have had a light shined on them a long time ago so we can decide whether we still want to allow them in our society. If you think CoLP behaving dubiously in this context is scary, consider that to this day they retain a special position with regard to Parliament, which for reasons beyond my comprehension has not been terminated despite there being no law that requires it. Then again, we also still allow people to vote on our laws because of their religion or who their parents several generations removed once were, so apparently we have a long way to go.
Then why bother debating laws at all? If there is no point discussing the words on the page because anyone with enough power can just ignore them, and the checks and balances are inadequate to safeguarding us against that abuse, we might as well all go pick up out pitchforks and march on Downing Street tomorrow. Fortunately, we are a long way from reaching that stage. If we weren't, the government wouldn't have just lost the very case we're talking about because their position was defeated in court.
Real and personal property can exist in a fixed place and time.
No. A real, physical item can exist in a fixed place and time, but it is only the law that makes it any particular person's property.
It can only be owned, used, or possessed by one person at a time
No, no, and no. Shared ownership is possible. Many things can be used by multiple people at once. Many things are in the possession of multiple people at once.
and deprivation of it is a real rather than theoretical harm.
So if I went into your home while you were on holiday for two weeks, borrowed a book that belongs to you to read it for a week, returned it in its original condition, and then left again causing no damage, what real harm have you suffered exactly? You literally didn't even know I was there, and yet for a week that book was in no practical sense your property or in your possession, and of course if there were proof of my actions then the law would probably frown upon them.
As I said, if you stop and think about it, these concepts we take for granted are really all social conventions. A lot of these debates are just between people whose subjective personal preferences are for some conventions but not others.
So who is going to jail for "Hollywood accounting"? Nobody.
And that's a real problem, and something should be done about that as well.
For that matter, the continued dominance of middleman organisations like movie studios, book publishers and record labels is arguably the biggest problem with the creative industries right now. Modern technology should reduce that imbalance over time, but there is also an imbalance in knowledge and understanding that pushes strongly toward the status quo and that's harder to fix.
But neither of these things is the problem we are talking about today, and neither of them makes the problem we are talking about today any less significant for those affected by it.
Nice strawman, but this is not a situation with vague wording that is amenable to creative interpretation later on. The distinction between civil and criminal copyright infringement is relatively clear and unambiguous in the UK, and nothing I've seen anyone say or propose in relation to this discussion suggests that this will change.
Or are you saying that ownership is imaginary?
Yes. Ownership of anything -- a physical object, a certain exclusive right, a theoretical amount of money that lives as bits and bytes in a database somewhere -- is just a concept we have invented to help society function, like any other legal or financial instrument. We might all agree (or at least most of us would, I hope) that physical ownership is a useful concept and we should respect it and not commit theft, but ultimately that is just a social norm, enforced through other social norms such as laws and courts.
So those that sell copies can go to jail for fraud, and those that copy with no financial motive could be fined for more than any "loss" they caused the copyright holder.
Right, and that is broadly what the UK legal framework does. Non-commercial infringement is basically a civil offence, punishable in a civil court through damages, and under UK law those would normally be actual damages, not the dramatically overstated hypothetical or punitive sort. But professional copyright infringement, where you're actively ripping off works for substantial profit, can be a criminal matter, punishable in criminal courts with fines and jail time. And that's what we're talking about here.
So taking $1 from someone and giving them back $0.50 doesn't harm them in any way?
It harms them to about the same extent as ripping a copyright work with a market of two paying customers so that you sell one copy to a paying customer for your own profit and the legitimate rightsholder then sells only one copy to the second paying customer.
Copyright is a reasonable economic instrument, in my opinion, at least until we find a better model for incentivising creative work that does at least as good a job. Likewise, infrigement of copyright causes economic damage, more like fraud or misleading advertising than theft of some physical item. But the claim that professional-scale copyright infringement causes no actual damage at all is about as likely as the claim by the other side that every illegal copy represents a lost sale. Those professional infringers are sure making a lot of money doing something that supposedly doesn't cost the legitimate rightsholder anything.
But this problem is largely self inflicted, charging insane prices (compared to actual cost), imposing unreasonable restrictions on products.
It's fascinating that someone can write the above and then advocate free markets in the very next sentence. Do you understand that what you're arguing for is economically equivalent to having a free market, except that any time someone wants to back out of a deal they just keep what they received but don't bother giving what they promised in return?
Imaginary property does not deserve this level of protection.
All property is imaginary. The natural state of things is that if you have something I want, it is mine if I have a more powerful weapon or a bigger gang.
The idea of having a civilised society with laws and recognised rights and due process is to try to avoid descending to the ethical level of a caveman.
10 years for 'stealing' essentially THOUGHTS is insane.
The people these laws are aimed at aren't "stealing thoughts". They are directly defrauding the rightsholders, and ultimately everyone who works in creative industries and earns their living contributing to these works, of staggering amounts of money. We are talking about organised crime here, not little Suzy sharing her latest Taylor Swift MP3 with her friend from school.
Throwing people in jail over it is absolutely repugnant.
I wonder if you'd feel the same way if, say, the person responsible for managing your pension fund took risks they weren't supposed to, lost, and left you with no savings. It's only financial crime and no-one got hurt (directly). Should we just fine them the money they will never have to pay back everyone's pension fund?
You can't make some things good after the fact, particularly things where the actual damage is likely to be substantial but is hard to measure objectively, so all you can do is try to create a legal framework that discourages the behaviour in other ways.
I'm sure we can all agree that these are comparable to someone sharing a song.
You make a good emotional appeal, but the reality is that someone just casually sharing a song isn't likely to be subject to these penalties at all. Even TFA mentions this, and this is only an early stage proposal, far from becoming an actual law.
What we're really talking about here is something like an organised criminal gang that systematically identifies people who might be coerced into giving up pre-release copies of major movies, then distributes those pre-release movies for substantial profit at the expense of the studio (and, indirectly, everyone who gets paid to work on movies).
Leaving aside existing penalties for other types of copyright infringement, a reasonable comparison might be large-scale, systematic professional fraud or false accounting, where CPS guidelines indicate 4-7 years for a custodial sentence. So while a 10 year maximum as reportedly proposed here seems on the high side, it's not a vast discrepancy from existing financial offences of a similar magnitude.
Taking away some of the copyright protection from the copyright owners of existing works was obviously not legally possible without compensation.
There's nothing obvious about that at all.
For one thing, a significant amount of the copyrights those owners enjoy today were only granted retrospectively, and so demonstrably did not act as the economic incentive that copyright is supposed to be when the works were actually created. Moreover, the retrospective grant of exclusive rights removed freedoms that everyone else had to use those works in other ways without any form of compensation. So any argument on general principles about how laws with retrospective effects are a bad idea is already flawed in this context.
For another thing, this sort of case is basically only possible because of some very shady international agreements, and it's putting national democratic government up against those less than democratic alternatives to see who wins. This isn't some fundamental issue of abusing human rights, at least not against the copyright holders. It's an economic question, where those with more economic power have been taking advantage of their influence to distort the effects of laws far beyond their original significance. The whole point of having a legislature is to adjust the laws when this sort of thing happens, in order to keep them reasonable and fair and in the general interests of society.
The problem with your argument is that in systems where you get an election every few years and in that election you get one vote, there aren't even enough votes in an individual's entire lifetime to express a real view on all the issues that will affect them. Elections for national governments are typically won and lost based on a very small number of key issues at the time, maybe even just one.
Something like copyright infringement is never going to be that issue, unless they actually do start fining everyone who ever downloads something illegally or throwing large numbers of people in jail for sharing their mash-ups on YouTube. So any argument that an election result somehow gave the government a mandate for whatever policy it has in every last area is flawed at best.
Of course, this is all rather academic in this case, because the government did actually make a sensible change in the law, and this case was the government losing a case against that change in court.
this victimless crime attracts a potentially higher prison sentence than many violent crimes
These penalties are the ones aimed at criminal copyright infringement. That typically means large-scale, commercial activity where someone really is completely ripping off all the people who actually worked to produce the movie or game or album just to make a quick buck for themselves.
If you think that is a victimless crime, I invite you to carry on working at your normal job for the next year, but sign all the pay cheques over to some random criminal who did literally nothing to deserve that money. Oh, and sign over those of all your colleagues as well.
Of course copyright laws are widely abused. Of course it's absurd that there are legal technicalities squeezed in through shady EU level shenanigans that mean the UK government lost the case over compensation in exchange for the private copying exception. But it's important to separate advocating reasonable usage rights for normal people from advocating lenient penalties for organised criminals who make large amounts of money at the direct expense of the people who actually did the work. Don't compare large-scale commercial copyright infringement with a crime of violence against an individual, compare it with something like large-scale commercial fraud that costs thousands of people their pensions.
True, but (a) that's probably the most annoying thing about trying to run servers on Linux, because (b) upgrading to the next distro version is a high-risk activity that will often break things, but at least (c) the support duration for something like Debian stable is way longer than 8 months.
The Home version being forced to take updates was already known, but TFS is the first time I saw this little gem:
Windows 10 Pro users will be able to delay updates for some period of time
If this reporting is accurate and the claim that users of the Pro version will also be forced to apply updates within a few months or lose security updates is correct, I can count the number of my businesses that will be moving to Windows 10 on the fingers of no hands. TBH, it wasn't looking great anyway -- I've seen no obvious benefits relative to our current standard of Windows 7, and I know few people who are keen on the new UI style -- but losing control of the OS would be a complete deal-breaker no matter how good anything else was. The figure of 8 months mentioned for the Current Branch for Business is about as useful as Firefox long term support for software you actually rely on to earn your living, i.e., hardly at all.
And still more deadly, despite the lack of software flaws.
That is true, but a lot of the safety benefits in modern cars come from primarily mechanical systems like seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, and designing the outer areas to be less damaging to others in the event of a collision.
Some of the other big improvements in recent years might involve some software but it can still operate independent of the main control systems, for example rear-view cameras, and better exterior lighting. Even if you have sensor integration for things like blind spot warnings or the high-end headlights that run on semi-permanent high beam at high speeds but adapt to avoid dazzling other road users, the system as a whole doesn't need to be integrated into the basic control systems for, say, the engine, brakes, or power steering.
The trouble really starts when instead of operating a set of properly independent systems, the lines get blurred. Someone thinks it's a great idea to have the car automatically call for help if it's in a collision and the occupants are unable to do so themselves -- and that person is right, it is a significant benefit if the worst happens -- but then the easiest route to implement that feature winds up hooking the remote communications system into the same sensors as the airbags or the fuel injector control systems or the ABS so it can trigger at the right time.
Unfortunately, most vehicles have traditionally operated on relatively open architectures internally. Each part of the system assumes each other part is trustworthy and will co-operate properly when sharing resources like communications channels within the vehicle. But with so much dependency on software and so much complexity in each part of that software now, those old assumptions are not doing well. Throw in external interactions, from the emergency call feature to the anti-theft tracker to the car radio and on-board entertainment systems to the remote keyless entry system to the integral garage door zapper, and you have real potential for very bad things happening.
Dealer: Don't worry, sir, you can fix the windscreen wipers automatically turning off if the rain gets too heavy by upgrading to CarOS 2016, which also features a range of other enhancements we believe may interest you.
Customer: But CarOS 2016 is widely reported to need more processing power than my Car 2012 came with. Do I need to upgrade my hardware as well?
Dealer: Sorry, sir, but for safety reasons there are no user-serviceable parts in your Car 2012. We recommend upgrading to Car 2016, which is fully capable of running CarOS 2016 this week.
Customer: So by "upgrading", you mean "buying a new car", right? Well, I guess I have no choice. What was it I heard about the steering feature being updated in the new software as well?
Dealer: Actually it's been removed, sir. It's a safety issue. The manufacturer had reports that a couple of people fell asleep after 18 hours of driving without a break on long-distance straight roads, and scientific research shows that the risk of accidents is lower if the steering wheel is tied to hold it in place. Removing the steering feature will do that for everyone, automatically, making them safer any time they go for an 18 hour drive on a long-distance straight road.
Customer: Gee, that sounds a bit extreme. What if I want to turn a corner while I'm driving on a road with bends and junctions?
Dealer: Don't worry, sir. That issue has been logged in the tracker, and a workaround has been scheduled for the winter 2016 update to CarOS for those who still want to use the steering feature. I hear it involves adding a joystick, some sticky tape and a new subroutine written by the CEO's neighbour's daughter in JavaScript, so it will surely be very reliable and deal with the issue once and for all. As long as the release is out by the end of 2016, and you buy your car 2016 with a long-term support plan for the software, that update will be free. And it'll hurt my margins but I can do you a special deal on the long-term support plan as long as you buy it today: yours for only nine nine nine five.
Dealer: [Aside to audience] And if that update gets postponed into 2017, the out-of-contract support will cost them [pinky gesture] one million dollars! [Riotous evil laughter]
Me too, for both reliability and security/privacy reasons. Car security hasn't really advanced all that much since the invention of immobilisers (which effectively ended car theft as a serious risk) and alarms (which significantly reduce the risk of theft of what's inside the car). Arguably trackers help with back-of-lorry issues, but you're already into creepy remote-monitoring territory there. And the new ideas where software will track every little thing almost like a black box... except that instead of just being used for analysis after an accident, it will be uploaded in real time or at regular service intervals to the mothership? No thanks. And you can keep your remote-accessible in-car entertainment systems that also interact with actual control systems too.