but they were ALREADY heard in court and judged, that's how they got a judge to make the ISP give out names.
The game is to sue "jon doe" at 192.168.0.1 for $250k infringement in civil court, and because they can't find all the names, it's just between the lawyers and the judge! Then they take the summary judgment (which legally is very, very bad) to debtor's court to get your name and address, then call you up to settle. If you don't settle, then they wave the full judgment in front of you. I
t's legally money you ALREAY OWE that's what makes the court cases so nasty, because they don't have to ever prove how they got the summary judgment (jon doe didn't show up, he can't contest later!), they only have to prove whether or not you're "jon doe" on that day of the week, it's a "new" case for debt against you, as the infringement case is already closed!
because the pirates are better armed! That's what happens with all the stray arms in war zones, even 1 or 2 small pieces of military grade guns is no match for the hulls of modern ships let alone the crew. Any weapon for a civilian that's legal to own isn't nearly big enough.
If you did find an effective gun to carry, then you'd be a target because some pirates would want to come and take it!
because many localities have service agreements with cable companies. That was all good and fine when each town had their OWN cable company. Now, they're all owned by one of the big 3-4 players that simply don't care about upgrades. The town gave themselves permission to lay their own lines (OK) but the problem is that they also ran Cable TV service (after granting monopoly to somebody else) which is probably causing the row. These things come up every 5-10 years for renegotiation, and TWC probably walked away from the table.
If it was a matter of contract law, like in the other town (Wisconsin?) then the court would shut the town's ISP down. The fact that they're trying to get the law changed pretty much means the town did it properly. That's the big push both telcos and cable companies are making for state-wide contracts. Living in Michigan, we still have cities that are outside the main AT&T grasp, and even though we have Comcast all over, the service agreements are by town and can be "revised"... this could happen all over.
But exactly, the point is to force all the towns to give up their local monopoly... not to mention the illegal grab to take away from the small third parties in little towns. Of course, the towns still won't get the services and won't be able to get them for ANY amount of money if corporate suits don't want. Obviously, the town managed to take care of it's needs on a town's budget. They probably issued bonds or something but they're making their money to pay the bills, and provide better service at a better price. The question is why TWC WON'T do that if private industry is so much better?
they way MySQL and stuff from the GNU/FSF is set up, they require contributors to sign the work over to them. Then the body in charge has ALL the rights and can do what they will. Like when the FSF moved everything to GPL 3, they could do that unilaterally because they had assignment.
Mozilla also has assignment and releases just what you say under a tri-license, the same code base published 3 times. Two are open source (MIT & LGPL) but the main Firefox branded binary is actually NOT open source. Anybody can fork the MIT or LGPL versions but has to strip all branding and can't call it "firefox" or "mozilla".
They can't UNLICENSE things already in the wild though. But much like Red Hat/CentOS, they could beat you up over every little point of branding (because they own the name) and keep suing you for every little code comment if they were that petty, leaving mountains of work for somebody to get "every reference" to the old name/logos out before distribution. Of course a fork is only useful if enough people follow you, and that's where nearly all the projects break down.... only the new parent company is big enough to provide new features and timely support.
On the other hand Linux is pure GPL 2. Because Linus has no "foundation" when he wrote it, contributions are still owned by the individual coders... moving off of GPL 2 is nearly impossible because many early contributors no longer work on Linux or are deceased. The copyright sticks, so the only way to change the license would be to rewrite the modules entirely.
OF course a dedicated T1 line (1.5 Mbps) costs upwards of $500 per month versus your 15 Mb for $50... but you have an SLA for 24/7 service with 5 9's of reliability and can sue them if they don't perform.
why not, all the cable lines from all the neighborhoods go to one colocation center that provisions the lines, just like the TV signal comes from one place. The "distribution" cost is part of the "cable" part of my bill. The internet part should be just for the equipment to connect to the internet! So yeah, serving 10,000 houses should be the same cost as a data center.
I'd think if they were discovered in the 20th century or later, that the person discovering them would hold the copyright of the images. That's where archeology gets a little crazy, particularly in Europe. Copyright on things like the Mona Lisa, or Eiffel Tower are "perpetually" held, even though they were created and "discovered" during "modern" copyright terms. Nations of Europe like to give their museums exclusive rights to things...Like the Crown of England still has copyright on the King James translation of the Bible.
the future in enterprise is blades. Oracle will now have an appliance strategy to put in place. They can make Sparc blades for all the other systems.. in fact there's a sparc blade for IBM Blade center. This will let them sell Oracle as a plug-in module pre-configured, and ready to go. The blade chassis will take care of all the storage and networking in a standard manner allowing Oracle to focus on a highly optimized OS + DB strategy. Compared to the cost of an Oracle license the blade hardware would be really cheap. What business wouldn't want a plug-n-play system and I'd think IT staff would love only having one support point for everything from hardware failures to SQL performance issues.
why do we need 300 video formats? Just about anybody using freely available software can create the iPod formats. I admit the Divx stuff on multiple vendor devices looks interesting. But it doesn't have good DRM, so big media will always ignore it for "real" sales.
The REAL problem is that iPods won't play the 200 crap formats people get from TPB. It seems like every leet kid is using their own stuff and tweaking settings to 20 different non-standard screen resolutions trying to one-up each other. Apple picked reasonable specs for iPod and has stuck with them, only adding 1 or 2 per year. Once you get set up properly to generate iPod formats from recorded TV it works quite nicely.
the point is that when a label calls up Jay Leno, a new artist gets on TV that nite. When a label calls up Ryan Seacrest, they get play on the top 40 show that week. When labels call up ClearChannel execs they get on 100+ local radio stations that week.
Try to submit YOUR work to a local radio station, or to MTV or to Jay Leno... no matter how many fans you have they're not even going to talk to you because YOU don't have any money, and YOU don't have all the legal clearances... nobody actually takes a chance on unknowns anymore.
The best you can do is get on someplace like emusic but then you're "just a name" in ten thousand others.
the argument many downloaders make is that they want to "discover" new artists. But that's really not the case. TPB is just about getting free stuff without paying... and it's the same stuff that's popular at the store.
This is also the reason labels are going after TPB and others. TPB is not building their markets either... TPB spends no marketing money of it's own (they don't make a profit, remember). Ultimately, it's just a bunch of moochers. I suppose what the article is seeing is the same as the "Windows Piracy effect" the fact that the mainstream stuff is "free" means everybody just gets that, rather than exploring new stuff... so it's just back to what company spends the most putting ads on TV and Radio for their stuff.
of course they also have 100% taxes because Federation citizens only have personal possessions of "emotional" value. Nobody likes a world where artists are valued the same as CEOs!
the game wasn't supposed to be for sale. The people connecting weren't Contractually supposed to have the game yet. By default that makes nearly all of the attempts pirates. It's the serial number server being hit so many times and they have logs showing how many passed the check and how many didn't. It's pretty clear cut.
it's more like breaking into your house while your gone with a few of my friends to watch your TV and use your internet. After all, you're downloading torrents all day, so my using your service isn't taking any bits away from you. And your TV uses mostly the same electricity turned off versus turned on. All I'm doing is borrowing some "intangible space" that your not using at the time, as long as I'm gone before you get home, you haven't "lost" anything, just like companies aren't victims of "piracy".
it's the same law that makes "unauthorized taking" of your car, or your wireless, or your social security number and bank information, or all the money in your bank... you mean that law? Whether you agree with the length or terms is irrelevant.. this is piracy before the company even officially offered the product for sale.
A better example for piracy might be trespassing on your fenced property, or breaking and entering in to your home. After all, it's just your "space" somebody in your house at 2am hasn't actually STOLEN anything yet, maybe they are just lost or sick and don't know better. but I'd bet you have a problem with that... or are you against people's right to go wherever they wish, whenever they wish if they "do no harm". How about when I take your place in line for food or when I lie to get a job before you do... after all you "wouldn't have got it anyway".
it's the publisher's government given RIGHT to release the game for sale when they damn well please! The fact that some store released some copies early without permission doesn't change that fact. Just because YOU couldn't get it when somebody else could (money, proximity to store, bandwidth, etc) is no reason to TAKE it without permission. In this case they wanted to release the game to all their SELLERS at the same time to be fair to their business partners helping them pay the bills. The game has a simple code key as the only "DRM" involved. There's 100,000 childish people out there.
Personally, I think a game publisher should do something like this on purpose. Change the URL at the last minute in the retail version to catch all the people with pirated copies... then post their IP addresses on your website!!
because the problem was caused by all the unauthorized versions trying to access stuff they wouldn't have permission for anyway. So yes, the problem is caused by the Warez crowd.. but was quickly fixed IN SPITE of all the people trying to go where they didn't have permission.
no, TPB just lets everybody hang big "signs" up telling where to get stuff.... and collects ad revenue from visitors.
See the problem Craig's List is having letting "anybody" post ads for "anything". There's a lot of criminal activity going on, people advertising breaking the law that on a street corner or sign post would be very illegal.
When infringing content is identified to Google, they follow the law and remove the content until it's pedigree is determined. As long as Google complies with the DMCA provisions they are not guilty of contributing. Sweden refuses to pass a similar law, partly because the copyright laws in Europe tend to be more absolute than in the US to begin with. And partly because all the laws presented are way over-reaching compared to our DMCA.
the courts ruled that "limited times" are anything defined by a number of years and that Congress gets to pick that number. Of course infinity minus one is "limited" but the courts don't really get that joke. The good news is that if we get control of congress to reduce copyright terms back to 20 years the courts have already ruled in favor of it!
the FACT is that it's the law you can't do that. We live in a society of LAWS and people need to learn to follow them.
We can argue about 20 years versus 95 but the stuff being released before the material is even shipped to stores is just wrong and deprives publishers of their legally-granted chance to make their investment back.
People on Pirate Bay are downloading stuff before the publishers can even get it to the stores or theaters to sell it. I'd venture a huge majority of stuff being downloaded is less than 5 years old... far less than the 20 your precious patents enjoy. There's just no way to justify what's going on, period.
Material released for download before it's sale dated is legally stolen trade secrets, a much more serious problem. Somewhere along the line the very people being paid to produce the works are the ones leaking the files.
not quite. You received a car somebody else stole and are shocked (absolutely taken by surprise!) that the thing they gave you didn't do just what they said it would and you got hooked.
That's silly, it can't "infect" your IP. It can however wreck your plans for distribution. You're ALWAYS free not to mix the code with yours and your free to unmix the code and not distribute binaries. Once the binaries are in the wild it gets sticky, but courts and arbitration has generally been OK with companies withdrawing offending distributions then releasing fixed ones with the GPL parts properly segregated. I don't think any OSS projects have gotten closed binaries actually opened up, and I don't think courts would force that.
bingo! GPL only works as long as the rules are the same for EVERYBODY. Courts have no less right to take copyright away from somebody who uses GPL than they do to take copyright away from Microsoft when they're a monopoly... and we haven't seen that happen, have we.
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but they were ALREADY heard in court and judged, that's how they got a judge to make the ISP give out names.
The game is to sue "jon doe" at 192.168.0.1 for $250k infringement in civil court, and because they can't find all the names, it's just between the lawyers and the judge! Then they take the summary judgment (which legally is very, very bad) to debtor's court to get your name and address, then call you up to settle. If you don't settle, then they wave the full judgment in front of you. I
t's legally money you ALREAY OWE that's what makes the court cases so nasty, because they don't have to ever prove how they got the summary judgment (jon doe didn't show up, he can't contest later!), they only have to prove whether or not you're "jon doe" on that day of the week, it's a "new" case for debt against you, as the infringement case is already closed!
because the pirates are better armed! That's what happens with all the stray arms in war zones, even 1 or 2 small pieces of military grade guns is no match for the hulls of modern ships let alone the crew. Any weapon for a civilian that's legal to own isn't nearly big enough.
If you did find an effective gun to carry, then you'd be a target because some pirates would want to come and take it!
because many localities have service agreements with cable companies. That was all good and fine when each town had their OWN cable company. Now, they're all owned by one of the big 3-4 players that simply don't care about upgrades. The town gave themselves permission to lay their own lines (OK) but the problem is that they also ran Cable TV service (after granting monopoly to somebody else) which is probably causing the row. These things come up every 5-10 years for renegotiation, and TWC probably walked away from the table.
If it was a matter of contract law, like in the other town (Wisconsin?) then the court would shut the town's ISP down. The fact that they're trying to get the law changed pretty much means the town did it properly. That's the big push both telcos and cable companies are making for state-wide contracts. Living in Michigan, we still have cities that are outside the main AT&T grasp, and even though we have Comcast all over, the service agreements are by town and can be "revised" ... this could happen all over.
But exactly, the point is to force all the towns to give up their local monopoly... not to mention the illegal grab to take away from the small third parties in little towns. Of course, the towns still won't get the services and won't be able to get them for ANY amount of money if corporate suits don't want. Obviously, the town managed to take care of it's needs on a town's budget. They probably issued bonds or something but they're making their money to pay the bills, and provide better service at a better price. The question is why TWC WON'T do that if private industry is so much better?
they way MySQL and stuff from the GNU/FSF is set up, they require contributors to sign the work over to them. Then the body in charge has ALL the rights and can do what they will. Like when the FSF moved everything to GPL 3, they could do that unilaterally because they had assignment.
Mozilla also has assignment and releases just what you say under a tri-license, the same code base published 3 times. Two are open source (MIT & LGPL) but the main Firefox branded binary is actually NOT open source. Anybody can fork the MIT or LGPL versions but has to strip all branding and can't call it "firefox" or "mozilla".
They can't UNLICENSE things already in the wild though. But much like Red Hat/CentOS, they could beat you up over every little point of branding (because they own the name) and keep suing you for every little code comment if they were that petty, leaving mountains of work for somebody to get "every reference" to the old name/logos out before distribution. Of course a fork is only useful if enough people follow you, and that's where nearly all the projects break down.... only the new parent company is big enough to provide new features and timely support.
On the other hand Linux is pure GPL 2. Because Linus has no "foundation" when he wrote it, contributions are still owned by the individual coders... moving off of GPL 2 is nearly impossible because many early contributors no longer work on Linux or are deceased. The copyright sticks, so the only way to change the license would be to rewrite the modules entirely.
OF course a dedicated T1 line (1.5 Mbps) costs upwards of $500 per month versus your 15 Mb for $50... but you have an SLA for 24/7 service with 5 9's of reliability and can sue them if they don't perform.
why not, all the cable lines from all the neighborhoods go to one colocation center that provisions the lines, just like the TV signal comes from one place. The "distribution" cost is part of the "cable" part of my bill. The internet part should be just for the equipment to connect to the internet! So yeah, serving 10,000 houses should be the same cost as a data center.
I'd think if they were discovered in the 20th century or later, that the person discovering them would hold the copyright of the images. That's where archeology gets a little crazy, particularly in Europe. Copyright on things like the Mona Lisa, or Eiffel Tower are "perpetually" held, even though they were created and "discovered" during "modern" copyright terms. Nations of Europe like to give their museums exclusive rights to things...Like the Crown of England still has copyright on the King James translation of the Bible.
the future in enterprise is blades. Oracle will now have an appliance strategy to put in place. They can make Sparc blades for all the other systems.. in fact there's a sparc blade for IBM Blade center. This will let them sell Oracle as a plug-in module pre-configured, and ready to go. The blade chassis will take care of all the storage and networking in a standard manner allowing Oracle to focus on a highly optimized OS + DB strategy. Compared to the cost of an Oracle license the blade hardware would be really cheap. What business wouldn't want a plug-n-play system and I'd think IT staff would love only having one support point for everything from hardware failures to SQL performance issues.
why do we need 300 video formats? Just about anybody using freely available software can create the iPod formats. I admit the Divx stuff on multiple vendor devices looks interesting. But it doesn't have good DRM, so big media will always ignore it for "real" sales.
The REAL problem is that iPods won't play the 200 crap formats people get from TPB. It seems like every leet kid is using their own stuff and tweaking settings to 20 different non-standard screen resolutions trying to one-up each other. Apple picked reasonable specs for iPod and has stuck with them, only adding 1 or 2 per year. Once you get set up properly to generate iPod formats from recorded TV it works quite nicely.
the point is that when a label calls up Jay Leno, a new artist gets on TV that nite. When a label calls up Ryan Seacrest, they get play on the top 40 show that week. When labels call up ClearChannel execs they get on 100+ local radio stations that week.
Try to submit YOUR work to a local radio station, or to MTV or to Jay Leno... no matter how many fans you have they're not even going to talk to you because YOU don't have any money, and YOU don't have all the legal clearances... nobody actually takes a chance on unknowns anymore.
The best you can do is get on someplace like emusic but then you're "just a name" in ten thousand others.
the argument many downloaders make is that they want to "discover" new artists. But that's really not the case. TPB is just about getting free stuff without paying... and it's the same stuff that's popular at the store.
This is also the reason labels are going after TPB and others. TPB is not building their markets either... TPB spends no marketing money of it's own (they don't make a profit, remember). Ultimately, it's just a bunch of moochers. I suppose what the article is seeing is the same as the "Windows Piracy effect" the fact that the mainstream stuff is "free" means everybody just gets that, rather than exploring new stuff... so it's just back to what company spends the most putting ads on TV and Radio for their stuff.
of course they also have 100% taxes because Federation citizens only have personal possessions of "emotional" value. Nobody likes a world where artists are valued the same as CEOs!
the game wasn't supposed to be for sale. The people connecting weren't Contractually supposed to have the game yet. By default that makes nearly all of the attempts pirates. It's the serial number server being hit so many times and they have logs showing how many passed the check and how many didn't. It's pretty clear cut.
it's more like breaking into your house while your gone with a few of my friends to watch your TV and use your internet. After all, you're downloading torrents all day, so my using your service isn't taking any bits away from you. And your TV uses mostly the same electricity turned off versus turned on. All I'm doing is borrowing some "intangible space" that your not using at the time, as long as I'm gone before you get home, you haven't "lost" anything, just like companies aren't victims of "piracy".
it's the same law that makes "unauthorized taking" of your car, or your wireless, or your social security number and bank information, or all the money in your bank... you mean that law? Whether you agree with the length or terms is irrelevant.. this is piracy before the company even officially offered the product for sale.
A better example for piracy might be trespassing on your fenced property, or breaking and entering in to your home. After all, it's just your "space" somebody in your house at 2am hasn't actually STOLEN anything yet, maybe they are just lost or sick and don't know better. but I'd bet you have a problem with that... or are you against people's right to go wherever they wish, whenever they wish if they "do no harm". How about when I take your place in line for food or when I lie to get a job before you do... after all you "wouldn't have got it anyway".
it's the publisher's government given RIGHT to release the game for sale when they damn well please! The fact that some store released some copies early without permission doesn't change that fact. Just because YOU couldn't get it when somebody else could (money, proximity to store, bandwidth, etc) is no reason to TAKE it without permission. In this case they wanted to release the game to all their SELLERS at the same time to be fair to their business partners helping them pay the bills. The game has a simple code key as the only "DRM" involved. There's 100,000 childish people out there.
Personally, I think a game publisher should do something like this on purpose. Change the URL at the last minute in the retail version to catch all the people with pirated copies... then post their IP addresses on your website!!
because the problem was caused by all the unauthorized versions trying to access stuff they wouldn't have permission for anyway. So yes, the problem is caused by the Warez crowd.. but was quickly fixed IN SPITE of all the people trying to go where they didn't have permission.
no, TPB just lets everybody hang big "signs" up telling where to get stuff.... and collects ad revenue from visitors.
See the problem Craig's List is having letting "anybody" post ads for "anything". There's a lot of criminal activity going on, people advertising breaking the law that on a street corner or sign post would be very illegal.
DMCA.
When infringing content is identified to Google, they follow the law and remove the content until it's pedigree is determined. As long as Google complies with the DMCA provisions they are not guilty of contributing. Sweden refuses to pass a similar law, partly because the copyright laws in Europe tend to be more absolute than in the US to begin with. And partly because all the laws presented are way over-reaching compared to our DMCA.
the courts ruled that "limited times" are anything defined by a number of years and that Congress gets to pick that number. Of course infinity minus one is "limited" but the courts don't really get that joke. The good news is that if we get control of congress to reduce copyright terms back to 20 years the courts have already ruled in favor of it!
the FACT is that it's the law you can't do that. We live in a society of LAWS and people need to learn to follow them.
We can argue about 20 years versus 95 but the stuff being released before the material is even shipped to stores is just wrong and deprives publishers of their legally-granted chance to make their investment back.
People on Pirate Bay are downloading stuff before the publishers can even get it to the stores or theaters to sell it. I'd venture a huge majority of stuff being downloaded is less than 5 years old... far less than the 20 your precious patents enjoy. There's just no way to justify what's going on, period.
Material released for download before it's sale dated is legally stolen trade secrets, a much more serious problem. Somewhere along the line the very people being paid to produce the works are the ones leaking the files.
not quite. You received a car somebody else stole and are shocked (absolutely taken by surprise!) that the thing they gave you didn't do just what they said it would and you got hooked.
That's silly, it can't "infect" your IP. It can however wreck your plans for distribution. You're ALWAYS free not to mix the code with yours and your free to unmix the code and not distribute binaries. Once the binaries are in the wild it gets sticky, but courts and arbitration has generally been OK with companies withdrawing offending distributions then releasing fixed ones with the GPL parts properly segregated. I don't think any OSS projects have gotten closed binaries actually opened up, and I don't think courts would force that.
bingo! GPL only works as long as the rules are the same for EVERYBODY. Courts have no less right to take copyright away from somebody who uses GPL than they do to take copyright away from Microsoft when they're a monopoly... and we haven't seen that happen, have we.