Did you read the bill? It doesn't outlaw P2P. It doesn't outlaw uploading legitimate files. It makes copyright infringement of just a single file a felony, instead of the current limit of ten. The decoy is slashdot's explanation of the bill. The actual bill, while not as bad, is still preposterous.
Criminal copyright infringement should require a profit motive. That's the way it was before 1997, and that's the way it should still be today.
If you have a file stored on your computer and your computer is connected to a publicly available network, you may not even know that you are committing a felony, but this law could put you in jail...
The article is wrong. Criminal copyright infringement requires "willful" infringement.
I think this bill has a very good chance of getting passed. It's not very much different than the No Electronic Theft Act, which passed easily and was signed by Bill Clinton. Most P2P users are already felons, it's just hard to prove it. All this law does is close up a loophole in the NET Act.
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.
This is correct, as long as you realize that the "traditional" level was set in just 1997
Also, the act doesn't even use the term "P2P network." Any network accessible to the public qualifies.
Suppose I have a Linux ISO shared on a P2P system. The copyright is owned by another party; of course, that party encourages the sharing of the file. Can I be prosecuted under this law, even if the copyright holder permits free sharing of the work?
If you distribute the Linux ISO without distributing the source, you could be prosecuted under this law. But chances are you would be found not guilty since your infringement would not be "willful."
Sharing usually involves taking something that belongs to you, and depriving yourself of it to allow others to use it as well, thus improving things for everyone.
I'm not going to argue over whether or not the word "usually" applies, but it's sufficient to say that there are many situations where that is not the case. Sharing does not always involve depriving yourself of the thing being shared. Open source authors share their source code, but they aren't deprived of their source code.
You're taking content produced by others and offering it to others with no sacrifice on your part, but with a potential sacrifice to the people who made the content - that of being unable to earn revenue from people who use that product.
There are sacrifices on your part. You're sacrificing bandwidth, you're sacrificing time, you're sacrificing potential revenue, etc. It may be illegal for you to get that potential revenue, but that doesn't mean you're not sacrificing it.
It now becomes impossible to make money through the production and sales of these works, because once one instance is created, it is copied and distributed for free to everyone else on the planet. So now we're kissing all of these industries goodbye. Think about what this would do to jobs and the economy.
It would make them unnecessary. This is a good thing.
My point is that claiming the benefits of unconstrained sharing outweigh the detriments is naive. No one can predict what the real impact will be.
But that's exactly what copyright law is doing. It's predicting that the detriments of unconstrained sharing outweigh the benefits.
What you're saying is almost the same as going into a shop, picking up a chocolate bar, walking out (without paying) and then sharing it with your friend.
One difference being that stealing a chocolate bar is a misdemeaner, while this law makes uploading an mp3 on kazaa a felony.
Of course, the big difference is that when you copy an mp3, no one is deprived of an mp3.
You don't think SuSe, a German company, was awarded a contract by the City of Munich, a German city, by the Mayor of Munich, a German Politician, because maybe they're all German, the economy in Germany is currently weak, and the Politician might have wanted to be seen to be doing their bit for support of German business?
I'm sure that ethonocentrism has something to do with it. But I bet there were kickbacks involved too.
I did read the damn article. I was talking about the payoffs to people who were involved in making the decision. You don't actually think it was made solely because it was in the best interests of Munich, do you?
Why would slashdotters stop their file sharing? They were only sharing files from independent artists who had given permission.
On a serious note, I stopped years ago. All the new stuff coming from the RIAA-affiliated artists is crap, and I have no problem buying CDs from non-RIAA affiliated artists. And I still have my huge collection from my downloading days with hits from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. And since the statute of limitations has run out, there's nothing the RIAA can do about it, either.
How can they claim losses of $150,000 per violation?
These are punitive damages, and have very little to do with actual losses.
So you're saying if I download 10 songs from an album, I can be sued for 1.5 mil, but if I steal the album from a record store, I get what, a small fine and some community service?
If you don't know, yes I would expect you to say I don't know, then if you wanted to make a guess, clearly label it as such.
I figured the fact that I was talking about something in the future made it obvious that I was speculating as to the answer.
I was referring to research on that particular report, which is the only research that is relevant to the topic of whether or not that report is FUD. You don't *know* it's FUD, you haven't even read it!!! You *guess* it's FUD.
I know the number that they quoted. That's all the research into that report that I have to do to know that it's FUD.
What can I say, I feel strongly enough about this issue to discuss it, to the point of being trolled. But you still raise your first good point of this entire thread -- why bother with you? Touche. Good bye.
And yet you keep on posting...
I'm glad you can quote dictionary.com. Now try reading the definitions and applying it to actual situations as they arise. Maybe next time you won't go on accusing people of making poor analogies when they are not making an analogy at all.
What can't be faked is the money trail. A company appeared to spam? Check their finances, see if they paid a spammer.
You can't make it illegal simply to pay a spammer. There has to be some mens rea. It's far too easy for a company paying a spammer to set up plausible deniability.
And once it becomes illegal to misuse an open proxy, all you do is, instead of shutting them down, get ISPs to watch connections to them, and trace those back to the source, and arrest those people, regardless of whether or not they spammed yet.
Actually that's a good point. Make it illegal to use an open proxy without permission. That would probably work.
It's trivially easy to determine a message is spam, and it's trivially easy to determine what reseller ID is sent with each message. Any accounts that get complaints about spam should be immediately suspended. (With, yes, appeals for the completely hypothetical case of spammers sending malicious reseller IDs of others.)
That's fine as a policy, but the law requires due process.
No it does, not to require a company to suspend an account. I point to the DMCA as an example. I submit a complaint that something is a copyright violation of my copyright, and the site gets suspended.
But the DMCA doesn't require an ISP to suspend the site. What it does is make it clear that copyright infringement is a strict liability statute, and then the DMCA offers immunity from prosecution to an ISP which suspends the account. You can't do that with a reseller, because if you make the law against spamming strict liability that only affects the ISP. It doesn't affect every single person who happens to enter into a business transaction with the spammer.
This idea could work if you modify it to make spamming a strict liability on the ISP. You'd be able to force ISPs to shut down the accounts of potential spammers. Of course at the same time you'd let in all the problems which are caused by the DMCA. You'd effectively shut down anonymous remailers as well as spammers.
And, of course, if people are lying about the site spamming, you go after them. If someone else is framing the person by spamming their ID, you go after them. Etc.
It's going to be extremely hard to do that when the emails are coming from other countries, from open proxies, or from hijacked machines.
I already mentioned misusing open proxies, which isn't, at this point, technically illegal, but it should be.
You didn't mention that until this post. By misusing I assume you mean using without explicit permission?
Right now, someone can set up a hotmail 'opt-out' address (That of course doesn't work past twenty messages, and hotmail shuts it down before that anyway.), send spam though open proxies, and be in perfect complience with the law. Until that is illegal, pretending we have any laws against spamming is just stupid.
I don't pretend we have any laws against spamming. We don't. We have laws against harassment, and we have laws against trespass to chattel, but we don't really have any laws against spamming. Maybe some state laws, but those are probably unconstitutional unless the spammer has a nexus to the state. So no, I don't pretend we have any laws against spamming. I just see that as a good thing.
The trick is figuring out how to convince the courts that eight million people talking in at normal volume right outside your lawn is much more annoying than one guy with a bullhorn. And, yes, you've invited five of those guys to be there, but not everyone else, and there's a legal difference.
That is the trick. There's really else quite like spam, and that's why the laws are taking so long. It's easy for a guy with a bullhorn to get caught, and guys with bullhorns can only reach a few hundred people at the very most, so if you're going to have a law you have to scare people away with absurdly high penalties and you're going to have to spend a lot
You said that it wasn't illegal to send postage due junk mail (a way of sending mail that is free to the sender).
No I didn't.
Receiving e-mail is not free. Even if the user does not pay for it, which is usually not true, the ISP does.
So? What does that have to do with anything? Lots of things cost money to receive.
Where did you purchase your crystal ball? I checked fortune-tellers-online and they didn't have any. Perhaps a spammer sent you a crystal ball ad? I haven't seen that one yet.
You asked me a question. What did you want me to do, say "I don't know," or answer it to the best of my ability?
So, you admit that you have no idea and have done no research, but you still know its FUD.
I have an idea, and I have done research. I just haven't read that particular report. And yes, I know it's FUD.
This will probably be my last reply, as you are obviously trolling.
Why bother with this one unless you yourself are trolling?
And another BS analogy.
OK, you don't seem to understand the difference between an analogy and an example. Have a nice day.
I don't see the difference between passing a specific law or regulation to prevent an action, and saying that an action is already forbidden by laws or regulations, as is the case with this. How is one a "technical solution" while the other is "legal"?
It's simple. The post office makes you pay to send mail. If you don't pay, it's theft, plain and simple. ISPs, on the other hand, want to make it free to send mail, and free to receive mail, and then bitch when people actually take advantage of that.
Tracking people down costs far too much money to bother, even if it is possible.
More than the 10 billion dollars a year estimated lost revenue to spamming?
Yes, much much more.
And this isn't just some up in the air FUD figure, this is the Department of Commerce estimating the costs of spam using a method they explain.
They explain their methods to come up with the brilliant statement that smoking pot causes terrorism too. The 10 billion dollar figure is FUD. Show me where they explain the methodology of this figure and I'll be more specific. Lost revenue is a bullshit figure to begin with. I could probably conjure up some numbers which show that Slashdot causes 10 billion dollars in lost revenue. Should we ban that? Television commercials during CNBC probably cost trillions of dollars in lost revenue. Let's make them illegal too.
6 minutes a day deleting spam + every office worker with an e-mail account in America is a lot of lettuce.
It's also incidental damages. If I shoot a coworker every time I receive a spam, does that mean that spammers are to blame for the murder of my coworkers?
The bandwidth costs for spam on service providers are also enormous.
I'd say they're closer to zero. Most emails are tiny compared to porn and mp3s. I guess we should make porn illegal while we're at it. Mp3s already are thanks in part to quoting such stupid figures as "lost potential revenue," right?
Assuming a law was passed that required law enforcement officers to act, I wouldn't say its too expensive.
That's precisely why I'm opposed to passing such a law in the first place.
Besides, would you accept "it is too expensive to stop murderers so why bother" as an argument?
Of course not, because murder is (get this) worse than spam!
Criminals should be pursued, regardless of the monetary cost.
I have to believe I'm misreading you. You are saying that every single incidence of crime should be pursued regardless of the monetary cost? Every single time someone fails to pay use tax on a pack of gum which he bought through mail order we should have a police investigation? Please, explain to me how I misread what you said because you can't honestly believe that.
Or are you going to make some law a la the Patriot act forcing paypal to name names without a warrant?
I think you mean a Subpoena, and let me just say how hilarious it is that you accuse me of engaging in FUD by quoting a DoC figure, and in the same breath, brining up the Patriot Act as a way of arguing against an anti-spam law.
You're the one comparing spam to murder. So what's your answer? Take out the Patriot Act part, if you want.
And wouldn't the constant stream of spam seem to indicate to any logical person that there's money to be had in spam, since nobody seems to be giving it up?
No. Does the constant stream of slot machine players indicate to any logical person that there's money to be had in playing slot machines, since nobody seems to be giving it up?
Show me where I claim this.
Maybe I mixed you up with someone else.
If we make spam a crime, as we are discussing, and that crime takes place across state borders, its FBI jurisdiction. Your argument that only certain laws are important enough to warrant enforcement needs no rebuttle, if laws aren't important enough to be enforced they shou
Those particular ones only apply in the US, and only for digital audio transmissions made under statutory license. I don't know if the UK has similar laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite frankly, I think this is a decoy bill.
Did you read the bill? It doesn't outlaw P2P. It doesn't outlaw uploading legitimate files. It makes copyright infringement of just a single file a felony, instead of the current limit of ten. The decoy is slashdot's explanation of the bill. The actual bill, while not as bad, is still preposterous.
Criminal copyright infringement should require a profit motive. That's the way it was before 1997, and that's the way it should still be today.
From the article:
The article is wrong. Criminal copyright infringement requires "willful" infringement.
I think this bill has a very good chance of getting passed. It's not very much different than the No Electronic Theft Act, which passed easily and was signed by Bill Clinton. Most P2P users are already felons, it's just hard to prove it. All this law does is close up a loophole in the NET Act.
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.
This is correct, as long as you realize that the "traditional" level was set in just 1997
Also, the act doesn't even use the term "P2P network." Any network accessible to the public qualifies.
Suppose I have a Linux ISO shared on a P2P system. The copyright is owned by another party; of course, that party encourages the sharing of the file. Can I be prosecuted under this law, even if the copyright holder permits free sharing of the work?
If you distribute the Linux ISO without distributing the source, you could be prosecuted under this law. But chances are you would be found not guilty since your infringement would not be "willful."
Sharing usually involves taking something that belongs to you, and depriving yourself of it to allow others to use it as well, thus improving things for everyone.
I'm not going to argue over whether or not the word "usually" applies, but it's sufficient to say that there are many situations where that is not the case. Sharing does not always involve depriving yourself of the thing being shared. Open source authors share their source code, but they aren't deprived of their source code.
You're taking content produced by others and offering it to others with no sacrifice on your part, but with a potential sacrifice to the people who made the content - that of being unable to earn revenue from people who use that product.
There are sacrifices on your part. You're sacrificing bandwidth, you're sacrificing time, you're sacrificing potential revenue, etc. It may be illegal for you to get that potential revenue, but that doesn't mean you're not sacrificing it.
It now becomes impossible to make money through the production and sales of these works, because once one instance is created, it is copied and distributed for free to everyone else on the planet. So now we're kissing all of these industries goodbye. Think about what this would do to jobs and the economy.
It would make them unnecessary. This is a good thing.
My point is that claiming the benefits of unconstrained sharing outweigh the detriments is naive. No one can predict what the real impact will be.
But that's exactly what copyright law is doing. It's predicting that the detriments of unconstrained sharing outweigh the benefits.
What you're saying is almost the same as going into a shop, picking up a chocolate bar, walking out (without paying) and then sharing it with your friend.
One difference being that stealing a chocolate bar is a misdemeaner, while this law makes uploading an mp3 on kazaa a felony.
Of course, the big difference is that when you copy an mp3, no one is deprived of an mp3.
Copyright violation is quite commonly a criminal offense. That's what that word "felony" is being used.
You don't think SuSe, a German company, was awarded a contract by the City of Munich, a German city, by the Mayor of Munich, a German Politician, because maybe they're all German, the economy in Germany is currently weak, and the Politician might have wanted to be seen to be doing their bit for support of German business?
I'm sure that ethonocentrism has something to do with it. But I bet there were kickbacks involved too.
I am pretty sure that if there were kick-backs and payoffs involved to a decisive degree, Microsoft would've won this one.
You keep on thinking that.
Yeah, most are even more highly corrupt.
You think SuSE Linux and IBM have more money to pay of politicians than Microsoft?
No, I just think the finances of Microsoft are much more highly scrutinized.
I did read the damn article. I was talking about the payoffs to people who were involved in making the decision. You don't actually think it was made solely because it was in the best interests of Munich, do you?
It is really impressive to see that Munich went with Linux even though the price tag was higher than Microsoft's.
Also makes you wonder what kind of payoffs and kickbacks were involved in that deal.
As filesharing traffic fell 15%, sales by the RIAA's members likewise rose 15%....
No no no. As filesharing traffic fell 15%, sales also fell by 15%. After all, people are only using napster to sample music before they buy it. Right?
Why would slashdotters stop their file sharing? They were only sharing files from independent artists who had given permission.
On a serious note, I stopped years ago. All the new stuff coming from the RIAA-affiliated artists is crap, and I have no problem buying CDs from non-RIAA affiliated artists. And I still have my huge collection from my downloading days with hits from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. And since the statute of limitations has run out, there's nothing the RIAA can do about it, either.
How can they claim losses of $150,000 per violation?
These are punitive damages, and have very little to do with actual losses.
So you're saying if I download 10 songs from an album, I can be sued for 1.5 mil, but if I steal the album from a record store, I get what, a small fine and some community service?
No, no one said that.
If you don't know, yes I would expect you to say I don't know, then if you wanted to make a guess, clearly label it as such.
I figured the fact that I was talking about something in the future made it obvious that I was speculating as to the answer.
I was referring to research on that particular report, which is the only research that is relevant to the topic of whether or not that report is FUD. You don't *know* it's FUD, you haven't even read it!!! You *guess* it's FUD.
I know the number that they quoted. That's all the research into that report that I have to do to know that it's FUD.
What can I say, I feel strongly enough about this issue to discuss it, to the point of being trolled. But you still raise your first good point of this entire thread -- why bother with you? Touche. Good bye.
And yet you keep on posting...
I'm glad you can quote dictionary.com. Now try reading the definitions and applying it to actual situations as they arise. Maybe next time you won't go on accusing people of making poor analogies when they are not making an analogy at all.
What can't be faked is the money trail. A company appeared to spam? Check their finances, see if they paid a spammer.
You can't make it illegal simply to pay a spammer. There has to be some mens rea. It's far too easy for a company paying a spammer to set up plausible deniability.
And once it becomes illegal to misuse an open proxy, all you do is, instead of shutting them down, get ISPs to watch connections to them, and trace those back to the source, and arrest those people, regardless of whether or not they spammed yet.
Actually that's a good point. Make it illegal to use an open proxy without permission. That would probably work.
It's trivially easy to determine a message is spam, and it's trivially easy to determine what reseller ID is sent with each message. Any accounts that get complaints about spam should be immediately suspended. (With, yes, appeals for the completely hypothetical case of spammers sending malicious reseller IDs of others.)
That's fine as a policy, but the law requires due process.
No it does, not to require a company to suspend an account. I point to the DMCA as an example. I submit a complaint that something is a copyright violation of my copyright, and the site gets suspended.
But the DMCA doesn't require an ISP to suspend the site. What it does is make it clear that copyright infringement is a strict liability statute, and then the DMCA offers immunity from prosecution to an ISP which suspends the account. You can't do that with a reseller, because if you make the law against spamming strict liability that only affects the ISP. It doesn't affect every single person who happens to enter into a business transaction with the spammer.
This idea could work if you modify it to make spamming a strict liability on the ISP. You'd be able to force ISPs to shut down the accounts of potential spammers. Of course at the same time you'd let in all the problems which are caused by the DMCA. You'd effectively shut down anonymous remailers as well as spammers.
And, of course, if people are lying about the site spamming, you go after them. If someone else is framing the person by spamming their ID, you go after them. Etc.
It's going to be extremely hard to do that when the emails are coming from other countries, from open proxies, or from hijacked machines.
I already mentioned misusing open proxies, which isn't, at this point, technically illegal, but it should be.
You didn't mention that until this post. By misusing I assume you mean using without explicit permission?
Right now, someone can set up a hotmail 'opt-out' address (That of course doesn't work past twenty messages, and hotmail shuts it down before that anyway.), send spam though open proxies, and be in perfect complience with the law. Until that is illegal, pretending we have any laws against spamming is just stupid.
I don't pretend we have any laws against spamming. We don't. We have laws against harassment, and we have laws against trespass to chattel, but we don't really have any laws against spamming. Maybe some state laws, but those are probably unconstitutional unless the spammer has a nexus to the state. So no, I don't pretend we have any laws against spamming. I just see that as a good thing.
The trick is figuring out how to convince the courts that eight million people talking in at normal volume right outside your lawn is much more annoying than one guy with a bullhorn. And, yes, you've invited five of those guys to be there, but not everyone else, and there's a legal difference.
That is the trick. There's really else quite like spam, and that's why the laws are taking so long. It's easy for a guy with a bullhorn to get caught, and guys with bullhorns can only reach a few hundred people at the very most, so if you're going to have a law you have to scare people away with absurdly high penalties and you're going to have to spend a lot
That was insightful. Thanks for your useful input.
You said that it wasn't illegal to send postage due junk mail (a way of sending mail that is free to the sender).
No I didn't.
Receiving e-mail is not free. Even if the user does not pay for it, which is usually not true, the ISP does.
So? What does that have to do with anything? Lots of things cost money to receive.
Where did you purchase your crystal ball? I checked fortune-tellers-online and they didn't have any. Perhaps a spammer sent you a crystal ball ad? I haven't seen that one yet.
You asked me a question. What did you want me to do, say "I don't know," or answer it to the best of my ability?
So, you admit that you have no idea and have done no research, but you still know its FUD.
I have an idea, and I have done research. I just haven't read that particular report. And yes, I know it's FUD.
This will probably be my last reply, as you are obviously trolling.
Why bother with this one unless you yourself are trolling?
And another BS analogy.
OK, you don't seem to understand the difference between an analogy and an example. Have a nice day.
I don't see the difference between passing a specific law or regulation to prevent an action, and saying that an action is already forbidden by laws or regulations, as is the case with this. How is one a "technical solution" while the other is "legal"?
It's simple. The post office makes you pay to send mail. If you don't pay, it's theft, plain and simple. ISPs, on the other hand, want to make it free to send mail, and free to receive mail, and then bitch when people actually take advantage of that.
Tracking people down costs far too much money to bother, even if it is possible.
More than the 10 billion dollars a year estimated lost revenue to spamming?
Yes, much much more.
And this isn't just some up in the air FUD figure, this is the Department of Commerce estimating the costs of spam using a method they explain.
They explain their methods to come up with the brilliant statement that smoking pot causes terrorism too. The 10 billion dollar figure is FUD. Show me where they explain the methodology of this figure and I'll be more specific. Lost revenue is a bullshit figure to begin with. I could probably conjure up some numbers which show that Slashdot causes 10 billion dollars in lost revenue. Should we ban that? Television commercials during CNBC probably cost trillions of dollars in lost revenue. Let's make them illegal too.
6 minutes a day deleting spam + every office worker with an e-mail account in America is a lot of lettuce.
It's also incidental damages. If I shoot a coworker every time I receive a spam, does that mean that spammers are to blame for the murder of my coworkers?
The bandwidth costs for spam on service providers are also enormous.
I'd say they're closer to zero. Most emails are tiny compared to porn and mp3s. I guess we should make porn illegal while we're at it. Mp3s already are thanks in part to quoting such stupid figures as "lost potential revenue," right?
Assuming a law was passed that required law enforcement officers to act, I wouldn't say its too expensive.
That's precisely why I'm opposed to passing such a law in the first place.
Besides, would you accept "it is too expensive to stop murderers so why bother" as an argument?
Of course not, because murder is (get this) worse than spam!
Criminals should be pursued, regardless of the monetary cost.
I have to believe I'm misreading you. You are saying that every single incidence of crime should be pursued regardless of the monetary cost? Every single time someone fails to pay use tax on a pack of gum which he bought through mail order we should have a police investigation? Please, explain to me how I misread what you said because you can't honestly believe that.
Or are you going to make some law a la the Patriot act forcing paypal to name names without a warrant?
I think you mean a Subpoena, and let me just say how hilarious it is that you accuse me of engaging in FUD by quoting a DoC figure, and in the same breath, brining up the Patriot Act as a way of arguing against an anti-spam law.
You're the one comparing spam to murder. So what's your answer? Take out the Patriot Act part, if you want.
And wouldn't the constant stream of spam seem to indicate to any logical person that there's money to be had in spam, since nobody seems to be giving it up?
No. Does the constant stream of slot machine players indicate to any logical person that there's money to be had in playing slot machines, since nobody seems to be giving it up?
Show me where I claim this.
Maybe I mixed you up with someone else.
If we make spam a crime, as we are discussing, and that crime takes place across state borders, its FBI jurisdiction. Your argument that only certain laws are important enough to warrant enforcement needs no rebuttle, if laws aren't important enough to be enforced they shou
Though I thought that every streaming media player did at least a little caching to ensure smooth playback.
Sure, but ensuring smooth playback is fair use. Setting up an elaborate system so that you don't have to pay for CDs isn't.
Those particular ones only apply in the US, and only for digital audio transmissions made under statutory license. I don't know if the UK has similar laws.