Original postition: copyright violation is not criminal (general case) Your response: yes it is, read the law (general case)
Leaving out the meaningful content of my post in favor of the collateral bitching does not make me wrong. I said "There are both civil and criminal offenses in U.S. Copyright law, and the bill under discussion ammends the criminal statute."
My complaint was with the oft-repeated claim that "copyright infringement is a civil offense", which tacitly suggests or, many times deliberately states, that it is not a criminal one.
The only person I owed an apology to is the original poster for having to absorb my punishment of every jerk whose made the same generalization in the past, and one has been offered.
Damn. I should have known when I resorted to using letters, some logician would chime in.;-)
I most definitely wanted A and B in the post where I said there are A and B in the statutes because true assignments for A and B are required to make my statement correct. Had I said A or B, it would have been contingently consistent with the original post's assumption that there were only A.
At any rate, in this case, by reducing the sentence to letters and inviting discussion on conjunctive and disjunctive logic, I definitely clouded rather than clarified the matter.
Please explain to me how you parse this sentence to get an assumption that both civil and criminal liability would apply to the same acts?
If someone made copies of a Madonna CD and sold them, they would have have committed a criminal act of copyright infringement. Are you telling me that you believe that means they would be immune from civil prosecution? Thats how civil and criminal liability can apply to the same act. If you murder someone, you can be tried for a crime and then the victim's family can sue you in civil court.
Nice diversion, but you didn't answer the question. All I said was that there were criminal classes of copyright infringement as well as civil ones. You said that claim could be read as any act of infringing had criminal and civil components.
Face it: If your writing had been clear, there would not have been numerous people all replying with the same points I made.
Your user ID is lower than mine, so I can only assume you've been here long enough to know that is nonsense. Redundant commentary from armchair attorneys, myself included, is de rigueur on/.
I really didn't expect to spend my afternoon on this.
The point being... for the vast majority of copyright infringements, it is not a criminal offense.
And had the poster who got my proxy wrath for all the other boneheads squealing "copyright infringwment is a cival offense, not a criminal one!" used that extremely important clause "for the vast majority of..." I would not have reacted as I did.
Nor did you discuss the distinctions. Your message could easily have been interpreted as saying that there was always both a criminal and a civil component to copyright infringement.
And if I said their are pigs and cows on a farm, you would assume there were pigcows? My exact words were "There are both civil and criminal offenses in U.S. Copyright law, and the bill under discussion ammends the criminal statute." Please explain to me how you parse this sentence to get an assumption that both civil and criminal liability would apply to the same acts?
Had you written more clearly in the first place, I would nat have had to waste my time clarifying for all involved that the law criminalizes copyright infringement in a small minority of cases -- most of which are unrelated to filesharing.
Sounds like the exact problem I tried to address with the initial post, doesn't it? Let's break it down one more time:
I read the law I cited, I understand the distinctions, and I have no intention of apologizing for countering misinformation with fact. That copyright infringement is a civil, not a criminal, offense has been posted more times than I care to recall on this board, and the statutes clearly define both classes of ingringement. The poster to whom I replied did not discuss the distinctions, he/she stated baldly that copyright infringement was a civil offense.
If anybody is owed an apology, it is me for your presumptuous lecturing on a topic I had already researched and cited.
Yes, and this is consistent with your assertion that copyright violation is a civil offense how?
I agree the statute has its problems, chief among them those you describe. The proposed ammendments stand to worsen it by substituting what I can only see as some vague notion of intent for any actual infringing activity. Nonetheless, you do not do anyone a service by perpetuating the popular myth that copyright law does not include a criminal component.
Theft is a criminal offence. Copyright violation is a civil offence.
I am so sick of this infinitely repeated bullshit claim. Please RTFL before you spout the/. folk wisdom. There are both civil and criminal offenses in U.S. Copyright law, and the bill under discussion ammends the criminal statute.
IANAL, but if I'm reading the bill correctly, I think what they're trying to do is ammend the law to the point where putting a file on a P2P network is equivalent to a level of traditional copying already defined as a felony. i.e. As it is already a felony to make >n copies, it is assumed that putting material on a P2P network permits that many copies to made.
What I can't believe (well, sadly, I can coming from this band of copyright thugs) is how they plan to redefine the law to make uploading, even if no downloading occurs, equivalent to making the physical copies for distribution. Looks an awfully lot like "pre-crime" to me, and I hope the sensible heads in Congress will give this piecve of crap the shredding it deserves.
Shit, everytime I hear about a law like this I get to urge to move to another country, and even then you're not always safe from this sort of stupidity.
Nah, but if you go to the Netherlands or, possibly soon, Canada, you can spend the money you saved not buying CDs on dope and then you wouldn't give a damn...
Relevant text with emphasis added by me. The congresspeople involved in this are reprobate sociopaths, not idiots...
Section 506(a) of title 17, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by striking ``, United States Code''; and (2) by adding at the end the following: ``For purposes of section 2319(b) of title 18, the placing of a copyrighted work, without the authorization of the copyright owner, on a computer network accessible to members of the public who are able to copy the work through such access shall be considered to be the distribution, during a 180-day period, of at least 10 copies of that work with a retail value of more than $2,500.''.
If I see "if(p == 0) return;" at the top of a function, I know that I don't have to worry about that case from then on.
You also don't have to worry about it if everything dependent on a non-zero value for p is contained in a block under the opposite test, as in "if (p != 0) {... }".
Write all the early returns you like. As long as I don't inherit your code, may they live forever...
Actually it was just around 1000 years ago that perspective was first formulated by al-Haytham, and a few hundred years later that people began to apply it to the arts.
Ultimately the degree of trust in the exchange is based on mutual protocol support. There can be no guarantee that the system on the client end is what it says it is. Given that "alternative" clients generally can spoof the browser credentials, there's no way the server would ever know that a submission didn't come from "MSIE 6 on Windows" or whatever.
Ergo, a voting system that actually trusted the client to identify itself correctly would be extremely weak system indeed. Ironically, I can see exactly this kind of thing being done by a voting system that claims to only support Windows.;-)
Thank you for posting useful information, as opposed to more hysterical ranting.
The posted requirements in this type of system are more often the words of the legal or marketing teams as any kind of true technical specification. Plenty of sites (I know because I've worked on them) specify requirements like these because:
They cannot officially support everything, and pick the most mainstream target to serve the largest number of users with minimal friction.
The suits force them to word it thusly because posting an actual accurate requirement like "an HTTP client with support for HTML 4 Strict and SSL 3.0" would cause 95% of their users to glaze over. Typically, it's assumed that the 5% can figure out what they really need.
I routinely use Mozilla or Opera on Linux to access sites that are labelled "Windows/IE only". Sure, there are some that don't work because of fancy plug-ins, extensions and such, but the vast majority pose no problems. I suspect this is all a tempest in a teapot...
Spam is definitely about morality and Free speech.
How do you justify this position?
Commercial speech has long been treated differently than personal/political speech, and using this distinction to regulate spam is not out of line as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps you disagree and think that commercial speech should be unregulated? Do I need to start listing the consequences of such a policy?
As for morality, spammers as an industry have demonstrated time and again that they are evil sons of bitches with no respect for the network or its users. They falsify headers, use misleading subject lines, and do everything they can to circumvent technological protections enacted by recipients -- i.e. to force their crap on people who are going out of their way to avoid it. It's a damn shame if "legitimate businesses" are caught up in an overly broad net to deal with these folks, but it's no worse than the collective punishment we netizens suffer because of the handful of idiots who purchase from spammers. I should not have to pay for the privilege of not receiving dozens of pornography, penis enlargement, and human growth hormone advertisements a day.
If I really wanted to, I could take any of those apart or mod them or whatever (with the exception of the few newest ones) because I OWNED them, there was no Nazi DRM to deal with, and that is what I take issue with.
There was DRM in the old consoles, too. They just didn't call it that at the time.
Sounds to me like your problem is with the law (DMCA) that prevents you modifying what you buy, not with the architecture of this device...
Despite popular opinion, a US law will only stop domestic spam
And once that's done, blocking network traffic from countries that refuse to get spammers under control will cojoin it as an effective solution.
Hiring someone to spam your competitors product.
I doubt you will see much of that. If the spammers can be located, and the entire premise of a law is that they can, it would be easy to demonstrate that this was what was happening, at which point we could slap the offenders with charges appropriate to corporate espionage or anticompetitive practices as well as spamming.
Why not continue working on more effective spam traps and stop legislating morality
Because we cannot afford to tie the entire industry and every system administrator up in an spam vs anti-spam arms race. The fundamental problem that makes spam such an issue (cost-shifting to the receiver) is just exacerbated in this model. Not only do networks have to waste resources processing the spam, they have to purchase additional tools to defeat it? Uh-uh...
I generally agree that morality should not be legislated, but I don't think that's what's going on here. Spam is an economic problem, not a moral one.
... and other trash who just don't realize what a bad thing RFID can be for privacy.
No, but they might listen to a few million fundamentalist Christians concerned about the mark of the beast.
Geeks don't have a monopoly on privacy concerns. Perhaps if you'd not decided that the rest of society was "trash" and paid some attention, you'd know this...
Slashdot Mirror
Let this be a lesson to you: Never start a flame war with a guy on vacation...
Leaving out the meaningful content of my post in favor of the collateral bitching does not make me wrong. I said "There are both civil and criminal offenses in U.S. Copyright law, and the bill under discussion ammends the criminal statute."
My complaint was with the oft-repeated claim that "copyright infringement is a civil offense", which tacitly suggests or, many times deliberately states, that it is not a criminal one.
The only person I owed an apology to is the original poster for having to absorb my punishment of every jerk whose made the same generalization in the past, and one has been offered.
Damn. I should have known when I resorted to using letters, some logician would chime in. ;-)
I most definitely wanted A and B in the post where I said there are A and B in the statutes because true assignments for A and B are required to make my statement correct. Had I said A or B, it would have been contingently consistent with the original post's assumption that there were only A.
At any rate, in this case, by reducing the sentence to letters and inviting discussion on conjunctive and disjunctive logic, I definitely clouded rather than clarified the matter.
Messed up ain't it? Their assumption is that one publicly accessible copy is equivalent to 10 actual copies, which is pretty creepy.
Nice diversion, but you didn't answer the question. All I said was that there were criminal classes of copyright infringement as well as civil ones. You said that claim could be read as any act of infringing had criminal and civil components.
Your user ID is lower than mine, so I can only assume you've been here long enough to know that is nonsense. Redundant commentary from armchair attorneys, myself included, is de rigueur on
And had the poster who got my proxy wrath for all the other boneheads squealing "copyright infringwment is a cival offense, not a criminal one!" used that extremely important clause "for the vast majority of..." I would not have reacted as I did.
And if I said their are pigs and cows on a farm, you would assume there were pigcows? My exact words were "There are both civil and criminal offenses in U.S. Copyright law, and the bill under discussion ammends the criminal statute." Please explain to me how you parse this sentence to get an assumption that both civil and criminal liability would apply to the same acts?
Sounds like the exact problem I tried to address with the initial post, doesn't it? Let's break it down one more time:
1. There are A
2. There are both A and B
Again, where is the lack of clarity?
No harm, no foul. Sorry for venting on you for the dozens of other misinformed posts I've gritted my teeth through.
I read the law I cited, I understand the distinctions, and I have no intention of apologizing for countering misinformation with fact. That copyright infringement is a civil, not a criminal, offense has been posted more times than I care to recall on this board, and the statutes clearly define both classes of ingringement. The poster to whom I replied did not discuss the distinctions, he/she stated baldly that copyright infringement was a civil offense.
If anybody is owed an apology, it is me for your presumptuous lecturing on a topic I had already researched and cited.
Yes, and this is consistent with your assertion that copyright violation is a civil offense how?
I agree the statute has its problems, chief among them those you describe. The proposed ammendments stand to worsen it by substituting what I can only see as some vague notion of intent for any actual infringing activity. Nonetheless, you do not do anyone a service by perpetuating the popular myth that copyright law does not include a criminal component.
I am so sick of this infinitely repeated bullshit claim. Please RTFL before you spout the
See U.S. Code Title 17, Chapter 5, Sec. 506 for the offenses and Title 18, Chapter 113, Sec 2319 for the penalties.
No, unfortunately it is very real...
IANAL, but if I'm reading the bill correctly, I think what they're trying to do is ammend the law to the point where putting a file on a P2P network is equivalent to a level of traditional copying already defined as a felony. i.e. As it is already a felony to make >n copies, it is assumed that putting material on a P2P network permits that many copies to made.
What I can't believe (well, sadly, I can coming from this band of copyright thugs) is how they plan to redefine the law to make uploading, even if no downloading occurs, equivalent to making the physical copies for distribution. Looks an awfully lot like "pre-crime" to me, and I hope the sensible heads in Congress will give this piecve of crap the shredding it deserves.
Nah, but if you go to the Netherlands or, possibly soon, Canada, you can spend the money you saved not buying CDs on dope and then you wouldn't give a damn...
Relevant text with emphasis added by me. The congresspeople involved in this are reprobate sociopaths, not idiots...
Section 506(a) of title 17, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by striking ``, United States Code''; and
(2) by adding at the end the following: ``For
purposes of section 2319(b) of title 18, the placing of a copyrighted work, without the authorization of the copyright owner, on a computer network accessible to members of the public who are able to copy the work through such access shall be considered to be the distribution, during a 180-day period, of at least 10 copies of that work with a retail value of more than $2,500.''.
You are entitled to.
You also don't have to worry about it if everything dependent on a non-zero value for p is contained in a block under the opposite test, as in "if (p != 0) {
Write all the early returns you like. As long as I don't inherit your code, may they live forever...
Agreed. I also like the midieval works where children are anotomically identical to adults, only smaller. :-)
Actually it was just around 1000 years ago that perspective was first formulated by al-Haytham, and a few hundred years later that people began to apply it to the arts.
Ultimately the degree of trust in the exchange is based on mutual protocol support. There can be no guarantee that the system on the client end is what it says it is. Given that "alternative" clients generally can spoof the browser credentials, there's no way the server would ever know that a submission didn't come from "MSIE 6 on Windows" or whatever.
;-)
Ergo, a voting system that actually trusted the client to identify itself correctly would be extremely weak system indeed. Ironically, I can see exactly this kind of thing being done by a voting system that claims to only support Windows.
The posted requirements in this type of system are more often the words of the legal or marketing teams as any kind of true technical specification. Plenty of sites (I know because I've worked on them) specify requirements like these because:
I routinely use Mozilla or Opera on Linux to access sites that are labelled "Windows/IE only". Sure, there are some that don't work because of fancy plug-ins, extensions and such, but the vast majority pose no problems. I suspect this is all a tempest in a teapot...
How do you justify this position?
Commercial speech has long been treated differently than personal/political speech, and using this distinction to regulate spam is not out of line as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps you disagree and think that commercial speech should be unregulated? Do I need to start listing the consequences of such a policy?
As for morality, spammers as an industry have demonstrated time and again that they are evil sons of bitches with no respect for the network or its users. They falsify headers, use misleading subject lines, and do everything they can to circumvent technological protections enacted by recipients -- i.e. to force their crap on people who are going out of their way to avoid it. It's a damn shame if "legitimate businesses" are caught up in an overly broad net to deal with these folks, but it's no worse than the collective punishment we netizens suffer because of the handful of idiots who purchase from spammers. I should not have to pay for the privilege of not receiving dozens of pornography, penis enlargement, and human growth hormone advertisements a day.
A long-range Cue Cat!
There was DRM in the old consoles, too. They just didn't call it that at the time.
Sounds to me like your problem is with the law (DMCA) that prevents you modifying what you buy, not with the architecture of this device...
And once that's done, blocking network traffic from countries that refuse to get spammers under control will cojoin it as an effective solution.
I doubt you will see much of that. If the spammers can be located, and the entire premise of a law is that they can, it would be easy to demonstrate that this was what was happening, at which point we could slap the offenders with charges appropriate to corporate espionage or anticompetitive practices as well as spamming.
Because we cannot afford to tie the entire industry and every system administrator up in an spam vs anti-spam arms race. The fundamental problem that makes spam such an issue (cost-shifting to the receiver) is just exacerbated in this model. Not only do networks have to waste resources processing the spam, they have to purchase additional tools to defeat it? Uh-uh...
I generally agree that morality should not be legislated, but I don't think that's what's going on here. Spam is an economic problem, not a moral one.
No, but they might listen to a few million fundamentalist Christians concerned about the mark of the beast.
Geeks don't have a monopoly on privacy concerns. Perhaps if you'd not decided that the rest of society was "trash" and paid some attention, you'd know this...