Why on Earth do you think you have the inherent right to use stuff I spent time and money producing without paying me for it? If I weren't here, you wouldn't have it, so why shouldn't I get something in return?
You should. But that doesn't mean you need to make absolutely sure that not one person can ever listen to a bit of it without paying huge sums of money. As with patents, if you *really* don't want other people to listen to your music for free then just don't release it to the public. Because as soon as you do, it becomes data or information, and as such is copyable. I suppose you could only play at live concerts and have metal detectors at the door to search for recording devices.
In the end, people have to actually choose to pay you for your work and fining people hundreds of thousands of dollars or putting them in jail for 5 years for listening to it seems a bit counterproductive to me.
Many P2P apps are open source sourceforge style projects that *nobody* makes a cent off of. There are some unfortunate exceptions (yes, including Kazaa), but the best programs (IMHO) are the non spyware infested non-commercial ones.
As far as making songs available for download being illegal, you'll get no argument from me. I would only argue that it is morally OK. From my POV, half the laws currently on the books are unjust. So one more doesn't surprise me.
It is an interesting idea. Is it legal to sell half of your CD or only certain songs? What about "timesharing"? Could 20 people each invest $1.00 in a new CD with the agreement (perhaps even written) that each person is allowed two days per month with the CD? What about a thousand people? Would it matter if the CD cost $2000 instead of $20?
the copyright holder probably has a good claim that the whole system is designed to facilitate infringment.
And the same claim can be made against libraries. The RIAA is still working on that one I think. I love the "designed to facilitate" part. Lots of assumptions there. Profit is always more important than political freedom.
[quote]The point of copyright law is to ensure that, if you make money off copying a copyrighted work, the copyright owner gets paid.[/quote] Well said. This seems fair to me. Which is why P2P seems fair as well. As long as no one is making a profit off of someone else's work and everything stays completely non-commercial all is well.
The moment, however, some slimball tries to make a profit from someone else's creativity, that's where the law should get involved in the form of lawsuits.
But music is free. It's just a pattern of bits, data, information. It cannot be owned any more than an idea or mathematical formula or proof can be. Information doesn't just want to be free, it really is. And, yes, as in beer. The proliferation of P2P networks trading this data all over the planet is the best proof of this.
If musicians or record companies really want to "own" a particular pattern of pressure waves in the atmosphere, they should only play them at home and make certain that no one comes by with a tape recorder while they are playing. They are free to try to make money from their creation, but they are not guaranteed success. As soon as one copy has been made, the information is out there. I guess they will either have to rely on people paying them anyway or get a day job to pay for their hobby. P2P is free. Long live P2P. Down with the RIAA.
The entirely legal and ethical right to boycott (a form of passive resistance) does not include any justification to acquire that product/service through an illegal channel.
OTOH,nor does it preclude the entirely ethical but illegal acquisition of said pattern of bits allegedly "owned" by a certain Large Profitable Corporation.
All the RIAA is going to want is an IP address to sue. If they receive chunks from several IP addresses while downloading a single song, they will just subpoena all of those computer owners. Just the fact that they were running a freenet node will probably make them criminals in the eyes of most judges.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. How the lawmakers justified that one is hard to imagine though, considering the movie rental situation. I have little doubt that if video rental stores attempted to start up in the current legal environment they would be declared illegal in short order.
This could be an excellent idea, except that you would have to set up queues and only allow as many copies as you had the rights for to be loaned out at any given time. You would probably have to actually be able to show that the borrower sent the file back to you again and that you were in fact deleting that copy from your server after it was lent. It would be more like just moving your file to a different location for a while than copying it. It truly would be the digital version of a library. I wonder if you could patent this idea, since it is a "Library--on the internet". Needless to say, the RIAA would have online digital libraries declared illegal very soon though.
How do you diagnose a computer that is "behaving erratically"? If their symptoms are not a bit more specific than that what makes you think that disabling spyware is going to do anything at all? A better solution would be to uninstall Windows and install Linux or, better yet, FreeBSD. Now *that* would stop the irratic behavior.
Besides you could have just replaced Kazaa with Kazaa lite, diet Kazaa or some other spyware free version. I think, in the end, they would be happier about that than you disabling an app that they were probably using more than any other.
Aren't GNUtella and Freenet totally anonymous? Couldn't people still use those services and not get caught.
Well sort of. You can still get the IP of the computer sending you the song. The only difference is it is quite likely that the person sending you the song had no idea that it was on their computer. The RIAA might still sue you and they might still win, since the file *was* on your computer even if you didn't know it, but your chances of winning the expensive lawsuit are much better due to "plausible deniability". And indeed, with Freenet or GNUnet it is highly unlikely (nearly impossible in fact) that the owner of the computer had any knowledge of the file you downloaded, whether it be an MP3, child porn, instructions for building a nuclear bomb, or just a copy of a slashdot article.
You seem to be missing the point that not all file sharers believe that what they are doing is wrong. In fact, the ones who share, as opposed to the leechers who just download, are quite likely to disagree with your premise that the RIAA somehow "owns" the bits they are downloading. Not everyone agrees that current copyright law is fair. As far as the RIAA caring about the actual guilt or innocence of those they sue, don't make me laugh.
It doesn't even matter if the prosecutor has shown guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It's still the jury's decision to convict or not. And that descision can be based upon whether a law is just or not.
Actually I was under the impression that most judges council exactly the opposite. They specifically warn the jury not to deliberate on the justness of the law itself, only whether the defendant is guilty of breaking it. I would suspect that in cases with sympathetic defendants and laws that are morally questionable, they would be even more severe with their warnings to the jury not to be swayed be their sense of right and wrong.
Actually, I think Libertarians might be quite divided on this issue. They would all agree about the wrongness of the potential criminal penalties (and thus the DMCA), and perhaps about the invasion of privacy in giving away personal information at the mere request of any "copyright holder", but I think many of them may support the right of the RIAA to sue.
Personally, I am an Anarcho-Libertarian who believes copyrights should only be applied to commercial uses, not personal ones. It seems wrong to me to sell the writing or music of someone else without their permission, but individual use (reading or listening)of the material seems ok to me. If the artist, writer etc is uncomfortable with that possibility then they should not release it to the public.
This is true. I highly doubt any judge will force the RIAA to confiscate computers for evidence etc. This is truly a situation where merely being accused is the same as guilt. This is why even Freenet may not be effective against them. They will simply note the IP address of whichever node sent them the file. They don't need to prove anything. All they need is the IP address of the computer you are using. It's only a matter of time before public proxies start getting sued.
You're forgetting about the "it won't happen to me" mindset that most of us tend to have. Getting speeding tickets and parking tickets by simply not speeding or parking illegally is also a good way of avoiding the legal system. It is also easy to stop. Most of us continue to get such tickets due to the fact that enforcement is not 100%. I don't think even the death penalty for file sharing would be enough to stop it unless they prosecuted a significant percentage. Less than a thousand lawsuits may deter some, but not the majority who will continue to take the risk. It's the herd mentality.
Only buy used CDs. It's true that you are in some way helping those evil RIAA customers, but OTOH you haven't increased RIAA sales any. And don't forget to burn the used CD and resell it again to make sure that plenty of used CDs are always available for purchase. Someone needs to start a CD rental store. That would be cool. You pay like $1.00 to rent the CD just long enough to burn it.
The recording industry said Pate's daughter was offering songs by Billy Idol, Missy Elliot, Duran Duran, Def Leppard
This changed my mind. Toss her in jail for 5 years or so. Maybe that will change her repulsive musical taste. This is probably part of the RIAA plan: only sue defendants with bad musical taste. They will get a lot less sympathy from the revolted public at large. They have the same PR problem as people who download genuine child porn.
There are lots of reasons the RIAA would subpoena the "wrong" person here. All they have is information indicating that a particular Internet account was used to share files. In many cases, the owner of the account is not only person using it. The subpoena will go to the "wrong" person.
Ok. Following you so far. Needless to say this should be valid with criminal trials as well. Just accuse anyone without sufficient evidence and let them do the rest of the work for you in finding the true guilty party.
That person would presumably point them to the right person.
You lost me here. I don't quite follow your logic.
Socorro, New Mexico. Check out those dishes. Say hello to the radio astronomers. Cool place for a geek. Death Valley is ok. OTOH, living in Australia, maybe you've had enough deserts. Other than that, there is not much of interest however. I suspect you'll have an exceedingly dull trip. Remember that American girls will dig your accent, people in general will be more interested in talking to you because of it, and that Montreal has the largest number of attractive females per capita in North America.
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Why on Earth do you think you have the inherent right to use stuff I spent time and money producing without paying me for it? If I weren't here, you wouldn't have it, so why shouldn't I get something in return?
You should. But that doesn't mean you need to make absolutely sure that not one person can ever listen to a bit of it without paying huge sums of money. As with patents, if you *really* don't want other people to listen to your music for free then just don't release it to the public. Because as soon as you do, it becomes data or information, and as such is copyable. I suppose you could only play at live concerts and have metal detectors at the door to search for recording devices.
In the end, people have to actually choose to pay you for your work and fining people hundreds of thousands of dollars or putting them in jail for 5 years for listening to it seems a bit counterproductive to me.
Many P2P apps are open source sourceforge style projects that *nobody* makes a cent off of. There are some unfortunate exceptions (yes, including Kazaa), but the best programs (IMHO) are the non spyware infested non-commercial ones.
As far as making songs available for download being illegal, you'll get no argument from me. I would only argue that it is morally OK. From my POV, half the laws currently on the books are unjust. So one more doesn't surprise me.
It is an interesting idea. Is it legal to sell half of your CD or only certain songs? What about "timesharing"? Could 20 people each invest $1.00 in a new CD with the agreement (perhaps even written) that each person is allowed two days per month with the CD? What about a thousand people? Would it matter if the CD cost $2000 instead of $20?
the copyright holder probably has a good claim that the whole system is designed to facilitate infringment.
And the same claim can be made against libraries. The RIAA is still working on that one I think. I love the "designed to facilitate" part. Lots of assumptions there. Profit is always more important than political freedom.
So, could you set up a nonprofit corporation to do this? I guess so
This seems like a great idea.
[quote]The point of copyright law is to ensure that, if you make money off copying a copyrighted work, the copyright owner gets paid.[/quote]
Well said. This seems fair to me. Which is why P2P seems fair as well. As long as no one is making a profit off of someone else's work and everything stays completely non-commercial all is well.
The moment, however, some slimball tries to make a profit from someone else's creativity, that's where the law should get involved in the form of lawsuits.
But music is free. It's just a pattern of bits, data, information. It cannot be owned any more than an idea or mathematical formula or proof can be. Information doesn't just want to be free, it really is. And, yes, as in beer. The proliferation of P2P networks trading this data all over the planet is the best proof of this.
If musicians or record companies really want to "own" a particular pattern of pressure waves in the atmosphere, they should only play them at home and make certain that no one comes by with a tape recorder while they are playing. They are free to try to make money from their creation, but they are not guaranteed success. As soon as one copy has been made, the information is out there. I guess they will either have to rely on people paying them anyway or get a day job to pay for their hobby. P2P is free. Long live P2P. Down with the RIAA.
The entirely legal and ethical right to boycott (a form of passive resistance) does not include any justification to acquire that product/service through an illegal channel.
OTOH,nor does it preclude the entirely ethical but illegal acquisition of said pattern of bits allegedly "owned" by a certain Large Profitable Corporation.
All the RIAA is going to want is an IP address to sue. If they receive chunks from several IP addresses while downloading a single song, they will just subpoena all of those computer owners. Just the fact that they were running a freenet node will probably make them criminals in the eyes of most judges.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. How the lawmakers justified that one is hard to imagine though, considering the movie rental situation. I have little doubt that if video rental stores attempted to start up in the current legal environment they would be declared illegal in short order.
This could be an excellent idea, except that you would have to set up queues and only allow as many copies as you had the rights for to be loaned out at any given time. You would probably have to actually be able to show that the borrower sent the file back to you again and that you were in fact deleting that copy from your server after it was lent. It would be more like just moving your file to a different location for a while than copying it. It truly would be the digital version of a library. I wonder if you could patent this idea, since it is a "Library--on the internet". Needless to say, the RIAA would have online digital libraries declared illegal very soon though.
How do you diagnose a computer that is "behaving erratically"? If their symptoms are not a bit more specific than that what makes you think that disabling spyware is going to do anything at all? A better solution would be to uninstall Windows and install Linux or, better yet, FreeBSD. Now *that* would stop the irratic behavior.
Besides you could have just replaced Kazaa with Kazaa lite, diet Kazaa or some other spyware free version. I think, in the end, they would be happier about that than you disabling an app that they were probably using more than any other.
Aren't GNUtella and Freenet totally anonymous? Couldn't people still use those services and not get caught.
Well sort of. You can still get the IP of the computer sending you the song. The only difference is it is quite likely that the person sending you the song had no idea that it was on their computer. The RIAA might still sue you and they might still win, since the file *was* on your computer even if you didn't know it, but your chances of winning the expensive lawsuit are much better due to "plausible deniability". And indeed, with Freenet or GNUnet it is highly unlikely (nearly impossible in fact) that the owner of the computer had any knowledge of the file you downloaded, whether it be an MP3, child porn, instructions for building a nuclear bomb, or just a copy of a slashdot article.
Or better yet:
(e)Copyright is meaningless, period.
You seem to be missing the point that not all file sharers believe that what they are doing is wrong. In fact, the ones who share, as opposed to the leechers who just download, are quite likely to disagree with your premise that the RIAA somehow "owns" the bits they are downloading. Not everyone agrees that current copyright law is fair. As far as the RIAA caring about the actual guilt or innocence of those they sue, don't make me laugh.
He was quoting. And now you are quoting his quote.
It doesn't even matter if the prosecutor has shown guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It's still the jury's decision to convict or not. And that descision can be based upon whether a law is just or not.
Actually I was under the impression that most judges council exactly the opposite. They specifically warn the jury not to deliberate on the justness of the law itself, only whether the defendant is guilty of breaking it. I would suspect that in cases with sympathetic defendants and laws that are morally questionable, they would be even more severe with their warnings to the jury not to be swayed be their sense of right and wrong.
Actually, I think Libertarians might be quite divided on this issue. They would all agree about the wrongness of the potential criminal penalties (and thus the DMCA), and perhaps about the invasion of privacy in giving away personal information at the mere request of any "copyright holder", but I think many of them may support the right of the RIAA to sue.
Personally, I am an Anarcho-Libertarian who believes copyrights should only be applied to commercial uses, not personal ones. It seems wrong to me to sell the writing or music of someone else without their permission, but individual use (reading or listening)of the material seems ok to me. If the artist, writer etc is uncomfortable with that possibility then they should not release it to the public.
This is true. I highly doubt any judge will force the RIAA to confiscate computers for evidence etc. This is truly a situation where merely being accused is the same as guilt. This is why even Freenet may not be effective against them. They will simply note the IP address of whichever node sent them the file. They don't need to prove anything. All they need is the IP address of the computer you are using. It's only a matter of time before public proxies start getting sued.
You're forgetting about the "it won't happen to me" mindset that most of us tend to have. Getting speeding tickets and parking tickets by simply not speeding or parking illegally is also a good way of avoiding the legal system. It is also easy to stop. Most of us continue to get such tickets due to the fact that enforcement is not 100%. I don't think even the death penalty for file sharing would be enough to stop it unless they prosecuted a significant percentage. Less than a thousand lawsuits may deter some, but not the majority who will continue to take the risk. It's the herd mentality.
Only buy used CDs. It's true that you are in some way helping those evil RIAA customers, but OTOH you haven't increased RIAA sales any. And don't forget to burn the used CD and resell it again to make sure that plenty of used CDs are always available for purchase. Someone needs to start a CD rental store. That would be cool. You pay like $1.00 to rent the CD just long enough to burn it.
The recording industry said Pate's daughter was offering songs by Billy Idol, Missy Elliot, Duran Duran, Def Leppard
This changed my mind. Toss her in jail for 5 years or so. Maybe that will change her repulsive musical taste. This is probably part of the RIAA plan: only sue defendants with bad musical taste. They will get a lot less sympathy from the revolted public at large. They have the same PR problem as people who download genuine child porn.
There are lots of reasons the RIAA would subpoena the "wrong" person here. All they have is information indicating that a particular Internet account was used to share files. In many cases, the owner of the account is not only person using it. The subpoena will go to the "wrong" person.
Ok. Following you so far. Needless to say this should be valid with criminal trials as well. Just accuse anyone without sufficient evidence and let them do the rest of the work for you in finding the true guilty party.
That person would presumably point them to the right person.
You lost me here. I don't quite follow your logic.
Or some books and a photocopier?
Socorro, New Mexico. Check out those dishes. Say hello to the radio astronomers. Cool place for a geek. Death Valley is ok. OTOH, living in Australia, maybe you've had enough deserts. Other than that, there is not much of interest however. I suspect you'll have an exceedingly dull trip. Remember that American girls will dig your accent, people in general will be more interested in talking to you because of it, and that Montreal has the largest number of attractive females per capita in North America.