But as the grandparent points out, the other charges are dependent on the alleged DMCA violations. If that's not a crime in New Zeeland, then the money they got from it are legal, and there's no money laundering.
Taxes tend to affect people less the richer they are. The rich use a smaller percentage of their income to buy goods affected by sales tax, or heavily taxed goods like alcohol and tobacco. They're less affected by income taxes since they can get their income as stock options, or keep the money in their privately owned company. They can afford to hire lawyers to find loopholes, and so on.
Property and inheritance taxes tend to punish the people who work hard and save their money and are moderately well off. The really rich can get around them.
Even when you aren't talking about copies, the content industry gets annoyed with sharing. Selling that book or CD you purchased to someone else? That should be made illegal because it costs them sales!
True. The content industry tried to sue the people who rented out video cassettes, then the people who sold used video games, claiming it violated their copyright.
They'll try anything that has a chance of earning them more revenue, no matter how dubious or short-sighted it is.
Paying for recordings is what allows (or unfortunately, increasingly what allowed) professional musicians to practice for 8 hours a day. Yes, some musicians can make a living from huge concerts; yes, musicians can reach a reasonable level practicing only weekends. But I like orchestras as well as rock bands, Elman as well as Eminem. If we have neither patronage nor music sales how do they survive?
In Sweden, the income per artist has increased by 30% during the last decade, and in Norway by over 60%, despite the number of artists also increasing. In the United States, the number of music albums produced has more than doubled in the last decade.
Classical orchestras already derive most of their income from sponsorships, subsidies and concerts, not from selling copies, so not much would change for them if copyright was abolished.
Paying for books is what allows professional authors and professional editors. Books that can be sold very cheaply (and survive piracy) are, by necessity, almost invariably short and with mass-market appeal. I like those but I also like long, challenging fiction and well-researched reference books. Quick thrillers can survive by selling thousands of copies for pennies each; can difficult works? Can specialist works of reference?
I'm all for making culture and education available to everyone, but if what that means is making available to everyone only what appeals to almost everyone, and losing the rest because it can't pay for itself that doesn't seem such a big step forward.
That will never happen, because people make, and have always made, art because of the need for self-expression. The vast majority of artists have never been able to life off their art. Money does not motivate people to create art; at best, it provides the artist a means to devote themselves to their art full-time, and at worst, it turns a good artist into a mass-producer.
Selling copies is just one of many ways to derive revenue from your art. Music artists derive revenue from concerts and merchandise. Authors derive revenue from things like lectures, writing courses, book signings and merchandise. Graphic artists derive revenue from doing commissions. Writers of educational material put advertisements in their book. And so on.
I'm an aspiring writer myself, but I have no illusion about the chances of deriving significant income from my writing. That's always been very rare.
I would love to live in a Utopia like Star Trek where technology has reached the point that all famine and disease has been cured and there is no need for war. A meritocracy where people don't expend effort for any material rewards, but to contribute back to all of society.
Yes, if only we had some kind of replicator technology in real life that instantly copied any goods, there'd never be any shortage and no need to charge for them.
People have to eat and support their families. Open source can work as long as it supported in some way financially. That is quite often a job separate from the work, corporations that are funding the project, or companies like RedHat that are selling support. It's also quite possible to build up such a reputation with an open source project that consulting contracts, book deals, lectures, etc. could provide a comfortable lifestyle.
It already works for music. Lots of bands put up their music on the Internet for free, and earn money from concerts and merchandise. Check out jamendo.com, for example.
In the entire United States, only around 200 authors can live on their writing alone; the rest earn money from things like lectures and teaching, or have a day job.
There are sites that give away university-level text books for free and put advertising in them.
If you think about it, it's nothing new. TV networks have given away their programming for free by stuffing it with advertising for more than half a century.
There have been cases where high-quality copies of movies have leaked out early, such as the screener of the first Spider-Man movie, but if the movie has been good, it has still done very well at the theatre. The presence of downloadable copies doesn't seem to noticeably affect people's willingness to go to the theatre.
Many customers prefer a printed manual, and shelling out a few dozen dollars for it is a small cost compared to what their employees' time is worth.
After all, there are still people who buy printed versions of books which have been in the public domain for decades, such as the works of Shakespeare, Homeros, Jane Eyre, Frank Baum, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, etc.
Printed manuals will probably not be the main source of income for most software firms, but it's one way to get revenue. My bet is that most free software firms will charge for customising their software for individual clients.
The way I look at it, once I paid the Beatles once for the full Album, I can download new copies as many times as I want. Burn as many copies as I want. Put it on flash drives, MP3 players, etc.
The legal entitlement sets you free. Physical mediums lock you down.
But that makes it your personal legal theory, not the one the legal system currently uses. The language of the copyright law makes it clear that it only regulates the creation of physical copies, public performance, and a few other related rights. It doesn't talk about "ownership" or "title" to a song or a film. It doesn't talk about licenses being awarded on-the-fly when you buy a physical copy.
Your legal theory is similar to the "bundle of rights" theory promoted by some libertarians, but that won't help you if you're prosecuted for downloading pirated versions of a game you already bought. Under the current legal system, that's illegal.
I think his point was that enforcing a "right to listen" is morally wrong, and that the recording companies only got away with having laws worded this way because previously there was always a physical attribute to the content you buy, [...]
But the law isn't, and has never been, worded that way. The law makes it very clear that copyright only grants the creator an exclusive right to do a certain, limited number of things, and private use is not one of them. The only confusion stems from the propaganda of the copyright lobby, not the language of the law.
Non-profit organisations are usually considered public. Even a private club, for example, a film club you can only join if you're specifically invited, is considered "public" for the purposes of copyright law.
If you just gathered a few friends in your home and kept any organisations outside it, you'd most likely be ok.
No, listening to something does not mean you enter into a contract, by the farthest stretch of the law. Copyright law doesn't work by automatically forming contracts between the creator and the people who use their creation. The person who listens to a song on the radio doesn't break copyright law, because listening to a work is not one of the exclusive rights granted to the creator. It's allowed by default. No contract is needed.
It's only if you wish to manufacture copies or perform a work publicly that you need to enter into a contract with the copyright holder.
4th and 5th lines is what is being granted as a legal entitlement to the consumer when they compensate, aka provide consideration in a contract to the copyright holder.
No, you do not gain the right to perform or display a work publicly (4th line) when you buy a copy. For example, you're not allowed to play a song on the radio or on a scout meeting just because you bought a copy.
You are allowed to perform and display the work privately, for example, to your family and close friends, but not because you provided compensation to the creator. It's because private use falls outside the scope of copyright, and is allowed by default.
Likewise, you do not gain the right "to sell or assign copyright" when you buy a copy. That would mean you could buy one copy of Harry Potter and then sell the rights to publish it to the nearest publisher.
When you buy a copy, you only gain the right to sell or assign that particular copy. Re-sale has been found by courts to fall outside the exclusive rights granted to the creator (the so-called "first sale doctrine").
In short: You ARE buying a physical object and nothing else, unless the product comes with a legally valid shrink-wrap license.
It's funny to me how, to people like my father, the justification for piracy has more to do with how difficult it is to do, or the quality of the copy, and not the act of pirating in itself, like it's okay as long as the copy is shitty and making it is time consuming.
I think they're simply concerned how artists will make their money. If the copies are good enough, they think nobody will pay the artists. Which isn't true.
Try to show him that the revenue of the music industry is as high as ever, and that there are more albums released today than ten years ago. Explain how the record companies have plunged, but this is compensated by increased sales of downloadable music. Explain that lots of artists sell their music directly to the consumers, or find it more profitable to give their music away and earn money on concerts and merchandise.
Since the first stone age woman made the first fire. If other people had been forced to acquire her permission before making fire using her method, the progress of society would have been seriously impaired.
But if one of the teams is so rich and influential, they can keep making the referees change the rules, then it may be more efficient to kick out that team than replacing the referee.
(In case anyone misses it, the rich and influential team = the copyright industry, and the referees = politicians).
You are more than welcome to make a version of the Little Mermaid to rival Disney's film.
But thanks to the lobbying of Disney and others, I'm not welcome to make an adaptation of, say, The Chronicles of Narnia, or any of the other books that would have fallen into the public domain without said lobbying.
In Europe, there are literally tens of millions of works hidden away in archives and libraries that have no commercial value, but still can't be made available to the public because of copyright extensions. They're locked away from the public for 95+ years, just so a few large corporations can continue to earn revenues on a few bestsellers they created more than half a century ago (such as Disney's films and Elvis Presley's and Beatles' music).
Note that the actual copyright term can be much longer than 95 years, since the clock doesn't start ticking until after the author's death.
I would suggest a progressive tax, i.e, taking out a higher percentage the more you inherited, but the rich people would probably find a way around it anyway.
The fault for the demise of copyright as a cultural imperative lies not with the pirates, but with Sonny Bono and Disney.
Why "fault"? Maybe the world will be better off without copyright. So far, artists are better off than they've ever been after a decade of filesharing.
Norwegian artists earn over 60% more per artist than ten years ago, and Swedish artists 30% more, despite the number of artists having increased in both countries. The number of music albums released has more than doubled in the United States during the last decade.
Ony the traditional record companies have suffered, not because of pirates, but because they've been superceded by online music catalogs and artists who release their own music directly to the public.
Now even American citizens think that software should be taken for free by whoever wants it. Only hardware (made in China) and infrastructure (overpriced and sold with shitty service and fees from robber barons descended mostly from the old AT&T) are considered worth paying for.
90% of software engineers work with customising software for their clients, not selling general-purpose products, so they're not hit by pirating. Even if all the money went out of selling general-purpose software (the only kind it makes sense to pirate), it wouldn't make much difference for the industry.
It does mean that those stupid "household" analogies don't apply, though. The laws of economics are vastly different for governments than they are for households.
The laws of economics are vastly different for *countries* vs. households, but less so for governments vs. households. For example, a country doesn't have a budget, and doesn't improve it's economy by cutting expenses or trying to work longer hours; it needs to invest in facilities that produce goods and services people are willing to pay for. The government of that country, however, does have a budget, and can balance it by cutting expenses or raising taxes.
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But as the grandparent points out, the other charges are dependent on the alleged DMCA violations. If that's not a crime in New Zeeland, then the money they got from it are legal, and there's no money laundering.
The grandparent is right in that extradition is normally not granted if the alleged act is not a crime in the country extradition is requested from.
I.e: If what they did is not illegal in New Zeeland, it's unlikely New Zeeland can extra dite them.
Taxes tend to affect people less the richer they are. The rich use a smaller percentage of their income to buy goods affected by sales tax, or heavily taxed goods like alcohol and tobacco. They're less affected by income taxes since they can get their income as stock options, or keep the money in their privately owned company. They can afford to hire lawyers to find loopholes, and so on.
Property and inheritance taxes tend to punish the people who work hard and save their money and are moderately well off. The really rich can get around them.
Even when you aren't talking about copies, the content industry gets annoyed with sharing. Selling that book or CD you purchased to someone else? That should be made illegal because it costs them sales!
True. The content industry tried to sue the people who rented out video cassettes, then the people who sold used video games, claiming it violated their copyright.
They'll try anything that has a chance of earning them more revenue, no matter how dubious or short-sighted it is.
Paying for recordings is what allows (or unfortunately, increasingly what allowed) professional musicians to practice for 8 hours a day. Yes, some musicians can make a living from huge concerts; yes, musicians can reach a reasonable level practicing only weekends. But I like orchestras as well as rock bands, Elman as well as Eminem. If we have neither patronage nor music sales how do they survive?
In Sweden, the income per artist has increased by 30% during the last decade, and in Norway by over 60%, despite the number of artists also increasing. In the United States, the number of music albums produced has more than doubled in the last decade.
Classical orchestras already derive most of their income from sponsorships, subsidies and concerts, not from selling copies, so not much would change for them if copyright was abolished.
Paying for books is what allows professional authors and professional editors. Books that can be sold very cheaply (and survive piracy) are, by necessity, almost invariably short and with mass-market appeal. I like those but I also like long, challenging fiction and well-researched reference books. Quick thrillers can survive by selling thousands of copies for pennies each; can difficult works? Can specialist works of reference?
I'm all for making culture and education available to everyone, but if what that means is making available to everyone only what appeals to almost everyone, and losing the rest because it can't pay for itself that doesn't seem such a big step forward.
That will never happen, because people make, and have always made, art because of the need for self-expression. The vast majority of artists have never been able to life off their art. Money does not motivate people to create art; at best, it provides the artist a means to devote themselves to their art full-time, and at worst, it turns a good artist into a mass-producer.
Selling copies is just one of many ways to derive revenue from your art. Music artists derive revenue from concerts and merchandise. Authors derive revenue from things like lectures, writing courses, book signings and merchandise. Graphic artists derive revenue from doing commissions. Writers of educational material put advertisements in their book. And so on.
I'm an aspiring writer myself, but I have no illusion about the chances of deriving significant income from my writing. That's always been very rare.
I would love to live in a Utopia like Star Trek where technology has reached the point that all famine and disease has been cured and there is no need for war. A meritocracy where people don't expend effort for any material rewards, but to contribute back to all of society.
Yes, if only we had some kind of replicator technology in real life that instantly copied any goods, there'd never be any shortage and no need to charge for them.
People have to eat and support their families. Open source can work as long as it supported in some way financially. That is quite often a job separate from the work, corporations that are funding the project, or companies like RedHat that are selling support. It's also quite possible to build up such a reputation with an open source project that consulting contracts, book deals, lectures, etc. could provide a comfortable lifestyle.
It already works for music. Lots of bands put up their music on the Internet for free, and earn money from concerts and merchandise. Check out jamendo.com, for example.
In the entire United States, only around 200 authors can live on their writing alone; the rest earn money from things like lectures and teaching, or have a day job.
There are sites that give away university-level text books for free and put advertising in them.
If you think about it, it's nothing new. TV networks have given away their programming for free by stuffing it with advertising for more than half a century.
There have been cases where high-quality copies of movies have leaked out early, such as the screener of the first Spider-Man movie, but if the movie has been good, it has still done very well at the theatre. The presence of downloadable copies doesn't seem to noticeably affect people's willingness to go to the theatre.
Many customers prefer a printed manual, and shelling out a few dozen dollars for it is a small cost compared to what their employees' time is worth.
After all, there are still people who buy printed versions of books which have been in the public domain for decades, such as the works of Shakespeare, Homeros, Jane Eyre, Frank Baum, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, etc.
Printed manuals will probably not be the main source of income for most software firms, but it's one way to get revenue. My bet is that most free software firms will charge for customising their software for individual clients.
The way I look at it, once I paid the Beatles once for the full Album, I can download new copies as many times as I want. Burn as many copies as I want. Put it on flash drives, MP3 players, etc.
The legal entitlement sets you free. Physical mediums lock you down.
But that makes it your personal legal theory, not the one the legal system currently uses. The language of the copyright law makes it clear that it only regulates the creation of physical copies, public performance, and a few other related rights. It doesn't talk about "ownership" or "title" to a song or a film. It doesn't talk about licenses being awarded on-the-fly when you buy a physical copy.
Your legal theory is similar to the "bundle of rights" theory promoted by some libertarians, but that won't help you if you're prosecuted for downloading pirated versions of a game you already bought. Under the current legal system, that's illegal.
I think his point was that enforcing a "right to listen" is morally wrong, and that the recording companies only got away with having laws worded this way because previously there was always a physical attribute to the content you buy, [...]
But the law isn't, and has never been, worded that way. The law makes it very clear that copyright only grants the creator an exclusive right to do a certain, limited number of things, and private use is not one of them. The only confusion stems from the propaganda of the copyright lobby, not the language of the law.
Non-profit organisations are usually considered public. Even a private club, for example, a film club you can only join if you're specifically invited, is considered "public" for the purposes of copyright law.
If you just gathered a few friends in your home and kept any organisations outside it, you'd most likely be ok.
No, listening to something does not mean you enter into a contract, by the farthest stretch of the law. Copyright law doesn't work by automatically forming contracts between the creator and the people who use their creation. The person who listens to a song on the radio doesn't break copyright law, because listening to a work is not one of the exclusive rights granted to the creator. It's allowed by default. No contract is needed.
It's only if you wish to manufacture copies or perform a work publicly that you need to enter into a contract with the copyright holder.
4th and 5th lines is what is being granted as a legal entitlement to the consumer when they compensate, aka provide consideration in a contract to the copyright holder.
No, you do not gain the right to perform or display a work publicly (4th line) when you buy a copy. For example, you're not allowed to play a song on the radio or on a scout meeting just because you bought a copy.
You are allowed to perform and display the work privately, for example, to your family and close friends, but not because you provided compensation to the creator. It's because private use falls outside the scope of copyright, and is allowed by default.
Likewise, you do not gain the right "to sell or assign copyright" when you buy a copy. That would mean you could buy one copy of Harry Potter and then sell the rights to publish it to the nearest publisher.
When you buy a copy, you only gain the right to sell or assign that particular copy. Re-sale has been found by courts to fall outside the exclusive rights granted to the creator (the so-called "first sale doctrine").
In short: You ARE buying a physical object and nothing else, unless the product comes with a legally valid shrink-wrap license.
It's funny to me how, to people like my father, the justification for piracy has more to do with how difficult it is to do, or the quality of the copy, and not the act of pirating in itself, like it's okay as long as the copy is shitty and making it is time consuming.
I think they're simply concerned how artists will make their money. If the copies are good enough, they think nobody will pay the artists. Which isn't true.
Try to show him that the revenue of the music industry is as high as ever, and that there are more albums released today than ten years ago. Explain how the record companies have plunged, but this is compensated by increased sales of downloadable music. Explain that lots of artists sell their music directly to the consumers, or find it more profitable to give their music away and earn money on concerts and merchandise.
And if we're only talking about copyright: "Since the first tale was told from mouth to mouth."
Since when are the works of other people "ours"?
Since the first stone age woman made the first fire. If other people had been forced to acquire her permission before making fire using her method, the progress of society would have been seriously impaired.
I agree, most of the blame lies with the referee.
But if one of the teams is so rich and influential, they can keep making the referees change the rules, then it may be more efficient to kick out that team than replacing the referee.
(In case anyone misses it, the rich and influential team = the copyright industry, and the referees = politicians).
Sorry, I meant 70+ years (life of the author + 70 years, or in the case of work-for-hire, 120 years after creation).
You are more than welcome to make a version of the Little Mermaid to rival Disney's film.
But thanks to the lobbying of Disney and others, I'm not welcome to make an adaptation of, say, The Chronicles of Narnia, or any of the other books that would have fallen into the public domain without said lobbying.
In Europe, there are literally tens of millions of works hidden away in archives and libraries that have no commercial value, but still can't be made available to the public because of copyright extensions. They're locked away from the public for 95+ years, just so a few large corporations can continue to earn revenues on a few bestsellers they created more than half a century ago (such as Disney's films and Elvis Presley's and Beatles' music).
Note that the actual copyright term can be much longer than 95 years, since the clock doesn't start ticking until after the author's death.
I would suggest a progressive tax, i.e, taking out a higher percentage the more you inherited, but the rich people would probably find a way around it anyway.
The fault for the demise of copyright as a cultural imperative lies not with the pirates, but with Sonny Bono and Disney.
Why "fault"? Maybe the world will be better off without copyright. So far, artists are better off than they've ever been after a decade of filesharing.
Norwegian artists earn over 60% more per artist than ten years ago, and Swedish artists 30% more, despite the number of artists having increased in both countries. The number of music albums released has more than doubled in the United States during the last decade.
Ony the traditional record companies have suffered, not because of pirates, but because they've been superceded by online music catalogs and artists who release their own music directly to the public.
Now even American citizens think that software should be taken for free by whoever wants it. Only hardware (made in China) and infrastructure (overpriced and sold with shitty service and fees from robber barons descended mostly from the old AT&T) are considered worth paying for.
90% of software engineers work with customising software for their clients, not selling general-purpose products, so they're not hit by pirating. Even if all the money went out of selling general-purpose software (the only kind it makes sense to pirate), it wouldn't make much difference for the industry.
Nice, that's a lot further than we've come here in Sweden.
I agree, you can't just cut expenses without considering the consequences.
It does mean that those stupid "household" analogies don't apply, though. The laws of economics are vastly different for governments than they are for households.
The laws of economics are vastly different for *countries* vs. households, but less so for governments vs. households. For example, a country doesn't have a budget, and doesn't improve it's economy by cutting expenses or trying to work longer hours; it needs to invest in facilities that produce goods and services people are willing to pay for. The government of that country, however, does have a budget, and can balance it by cutting expenses or raising taxes.
Also, where does Ron Paul think he'll find a person who wants to be in sole control of the government, and pay for it by his own vast wealth?
Oh. Forget I asked.