There was a security guard AND the vault had a lock. Fuck em. If they can't trust their own customers not to steal, who can they trust? I mean, they make me use a fucking PIN code with my debit card like I'm some kind of hacker mastermind. Then I went to the mall. The expensive jackets had security tags on them. Fuck them! I will steal a jacket just to prove my point that security tags are VIOLATING MY RIGHTS and TREAT ME LIKE A CRIMINAL. No, but this is VERY DIFFERENT because this is DIGITAL MEDIA that we are talking about this and the marginal cost for an additional copy is zero plus it's COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT not piracy and did you hear they sent a subpoena to a 72 year old woman without a computer for downloading movies and the balance of rasonable security should be ONE MILISECOND OR ONE BYTE OF MY TIME is worth more than ANY right of the company to reasonably protect its product against infringement who the hell they think they are the COPS? OMG I can't believe they sent the COPS against some college kids who pirated 10,000 mp3s this should be a CIVIL MATTER. WTF they SUED individuals for copyright infringement who the FUCK made them POLICE JUDGE JURY AND EXECUTIONER?
/ same bullshit slashdot arguments, different thread.
Sorry, I'm going to have to disagree (though I kind of suspected somebody would try this argument). The last 5 even in draws can be horribly uncompetitive since one team may be playing for the draw and the other is pretty well tired by that point. This happens very often in football. Similarly, a 1-goal difference does not imply anywhere near the drama that a 1-run difference in baseball or 1-point (or even 3-point or 7 point) difference in american football implies. More often than not, one team has basically dominated the contest and are sitting up 1-0. Does all sport have its moments? Of course. Football has magical ones. But I think your "7 of 9" reasoning based purely on this sort of raw numbers is highly misleading. If it were any other way, "Match of the Day" would show the last 5 minutes of those matches more regularly. Instead, it's simply "and x scored in the 73rd minute and they managed to hold on the rest of the way."
American football players would be gasping for air because they are not accustomed to playing an aerobic sport. Rugby is an aerobic sport - NFL football is an anaerobic one. Entirely different types of conditioning and muscles are required. Not better or worse - just different.
I play one aerobic sport quite seriously (football aka soccer). I find that aerobic sports (and quasi-aerobic sports, such as volleyball) tend to be more fun to play. On the other hand, i find that they are generally rather dull to watch as the strategic intricacies are largely removed. You may talk about split-second strategic awareness that a rugby player might have and i could spill equivalent verbage about soccer. However, the reality is that while there is some sort of beauty about so many minds independently and in real time coming up with collective "brilliant" solutions to sports problems (such as scoring a goal or a try), such decisions are far less cerebral than those you get in american football and baseball.
Or, to put it another way, you typical rugby match on TV looks like a physical contest. The team that is fitter and more skillful usually wins. Or, rather, that's how it is for soccer and certainly that's how it looks on tv for ruggers. Real time "strategic" or tactical decisions in soccer are nearly nil. Who to substitute and what formation to play are mostly it. there are a few set pieces, but they are of secondary importance.
Baseball is a perfect strategic game. It's incredibly mathematical and lends itself to all sorts of analysis that is simply not possible in soccer. In soccer, "players working together" comes down i'd say 80% to personalities and at most 20% to complementary skills - such as having somebody with a good cross paired with somebody who is good in the air. In baseball, the situation is reversed. Sure, personality matters somewhat as it does in any sport, but players skills can be matched (both teammates and opponents) on far more levels. there are literally thousands of decisions that go into any baseball game that can be reviewed and discussed intelligently. In soccer there are maybe a handful.
So, I love soccer. I train 3 times per week on the pitch and gym most other days. But, other than picking up some ideas for my own game, I find it incredibly tedious to watch. Baseball and american football stimulate the intellect far more and builds far better dramatic finales because of this. Plus, the games are better structured. Maybe 3 televised soccer matches in 20 are still interesting and plausibly competitive in the last 5 minutes. I'd say at least 5-6 out of 20 baseball games and 13-14 american football games out of 20 could make similar claims.
This was, by my count, slashdot article #921431008 which slants positively for the "less power for rightsholders" side. I'm still waiting for slashdot article #1 where somebody presents a decent and fair plan that both acknowledges new technologies and the possibilities that they bring AND the rights of the rightsholders to be fairly compensated and to reasonably punish/recover from wrongdoers.
Of course, it would be so very socially awkward to point out that virtually all policies slashdot have supported so far amount to in effect a regressive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy, where the poor who are for whatever reason unable to use a p2p service and thus purchase CDs subsidize the entertainment of those who otherwise generally can afford it. Oh no. Pointing out such things is just not cool.
While your comment is sure to be modded up in slashdot, it is beyond naive in the extreme. "OLS compliance" has no value whatsoever as far as lego is concerned. Rather, lego has to do quite the opposite - they need to continue polishing their OWN band in other to be able to extract prices higher than the competitive equilibrium price. it would take about a microsecond of thought to realize that this is worth more than any royalties lego would receive for "OLS compliance" certification. I suspect the people who run lego actually have business degrees, and didn't graduate from the slashdot school of naive blather where "make sure everybody uses your idea" street cred is worth more than actual money.
And i'd refuse to hire somebody who wouldn't take a test. It's a buyer's market, and, yes, we are a software company. If you're such a primadonna, that you can't be asked to differentiate yourself from the myriads of charlatans and loafers out there, then piss off.
Put another way, frankly, having to pay somebody $20 - $60k extra per year for a 'better' technical workers is small change compared to the costs associated with having an albatross.
Lawyers have an exam - it's called the bar. It's far from perfect, but this at least covers the basics of the subject area. You and I have both seen prorgammers with "10 years experience" and an IT degree with overinflated CVs who may have some basic understanding of programming theory, but who are in practice completely unaquainted with modern technologies and systematic analysis of a problem.
If you think a coach company is not responsible because their driver has been drinking and is not properly trained to operate on british roads, then you are quite possibly the most brainwashed moron I have ever seen in my life. It's amazing how you can make juvenile anti-corporate rants and yet spout this 'stiff upper lip' nonsense when a true example of corporate dangerous incompetence rears its head. Furthermore, it might occur to you that not all cosmetic surgery is elective, and, again, you are an absolute moron if you think that simply getting one's money back is some sort of reasonable recompense for gross professional negligence.
you think lawyers have not helped you? good god man. look - i hate lawyers in a general sense, too, but I have some sense in me. have you ever been on an airplane or train or driven a car? why do you think such modes of transport are orders of magnitude safer than before. because of beaurocratic oversight? NONSENSE. It's due to the legal system of the USA, where the threat of lawsuits ensured that companies overdesigned and stayed on pace with technological developments in safety. All those european product safety standards - have you noticed that they are mostly based on US developments? This is because there are no legal drivers in europe to push such things organically.
This ruling exists because of a tax on CDs and other blank media in spain that was meant to compensate the authors. Once it became clear that this was becoming technologically obsolete (as people were not using CDs, etc any more) an anti-p2p law was passed. So, basically, you fail.
Ah yes, anecdotal evidence. Where would any standard slashdot piracy discussion be without anecdotal evidence? We've already covered the "I download linux isos on P2P" and "poor single mothers on welfare getting sued by evil lawyers" memes, so I guess a completion of the trifecta was inevitable.
Re:It's summer, and Slashdot is trolling
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
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· Score: 0, Troll
I'm sorry, but i could not get past your first bit of excrement.
If you don't know enough basic economics to realize that the cost of 10,000,000 people downloading a song on P2P doesn't have real costs to the producer in the form of decreased demand for their products, then you are, quite simply, undereducated in this matter.
To put it in terms that maybe even you can understand:
What do you call the guy who that has the cool new music track that none of his friends have? He's cool.
What do you call the guy who paid for the cool new music track that his friends downloaded for free? He's a sucker.
Economic reality happens in the aggregate. Until you understand this well understood basic principle of life, about as fundamental to economics as numbers are to math or atoms are to chemistry, you really have no business commenting are on anything.
So, mr slap on the wrist the first time and then increasingly stiffer penalties - ISNT THIS EXACTLY WHAT IS BEING PROPOSED HERE?
I also live in the UK. The irony is that many ocmpanies DO run roughshod over UK public, but NOT THE MEDIA COMPANIES WHICH ARE BEING SYSTEMATICALLY RIPPED OFF FROM.
Specifically, there are no class action lawsuits in the UK, nor, for the most part, are there punitive damages. When I got on a london-based Eurolines coach a few years ago where the french-african driver had been drinking (we found out later), drove on the wrong side of the road several times and ran out of gas, leaving us to wait by the side of the road for hours in the middle of the night until a replacement bus could be found we were told that we had no legal basis for complaint since the coach company had in the end delivered us to paris with no injuries in the very wide timeframe it had allowed in its schedule. As a result, NO punative action was taken agains the company, and people suffer.
My friend had a major bit of cosmetic surgery botched due to the blatant error of a technician at a very expensive london clinic. I don't mean "something doesn't look quite right" or "in any medical procedure there is a level of assumed risk" - I mean actual scarring and so forth due to the clinic having a new operator with an hour's training mis-set a machine with no oversight. We were told that as a result of this, basically no (or very little) economic recovery was possible as my friend does not actually work as a model.
In both of these cases, MORE, not less lawyers would help the situation greatly in london in keeping corporations from running roughshod over those guys.
but, just because bus companies and clinics can get away with things that are completely unacceptible in the USA does not mean that somehow people are entitled to the labour of those in the media or software industries, free.. doubly and triply so because such things are UNNECESSARY LUXURIES with many FREE ALTERNATIVES.
Your ranting about $300,000 lawyers is completely misplaced, juvenile, bullshit and reeks of the worst kind of jealousy.
Let me ask you this: what should be the penalty for a shoplifter who shoplifts, say, candy? The cost to all involved for one individual crime of some candy are essentially zero.
Please tell me more about this theoretical person on minimum wage who owns a computer and pays a sufficient bandwidth bill every month to support illegal downloading, eh? And, there's something to be said for the candy - it at least provides a poor person with calories, and in that sense can be broadly interpreted as a 'need.' A coldplay download is completely unnecessary.
Also, if you'll see on P2P, piracy is not limited to stuff of "big evil" companies who can "take it." You'll find software from the smallest of the small shareware companies being pirated regularly. clearly, piracy is an issue of greed, not some overblown nonsensical issues of 'social justice' like you pretend them to be.
But please, don't let my reality intrude on your comic book view of the world.
Please. These are no "wild shots in the dark". If they were, they wouldn't work and wouldn't hold up in courts. As we've seen from cases in the USA and elsewhere, this is done algorithmically first by analyzing the shape of traffic to see that it is indeed p2p (by which ports it uses,etc) and then it uses a hash lookup table to identify known infringing files. These files are the ones that by definition you actually MAKE PUBLIC by using the various p2p software out there and the hashes do uniquely identify known infringing files well beyond the point of reasonable doubt.
More to the point - you'd like your ISPs unmonitored? We all would. But, I also like to live in a society of law and economic progress, and, well, I believe that copyright laws, while clearly imperfect, in general do much much much much more good than harm. In fact, I'm sure of it. If i don't, I have a mechanism to change this, which is to elect people who will change laws in ways that are amenable to me.
While there's something to be said against people being sued for tens of thousands of dollars, what's the alternative? What's your solution to the piracy problem?
To me, tens of thousands of dollars does not seem unreasonable. It's not a crippling amount of money (but it will sting) to anybody who owns a computer, and at those rates it is unlikely that the companies are actually making any serious money, given their costs involved. to me, it's just about right.
let me ask you this question: let's say the subway (metro, tube) cost $20 per ride, but the ride wasn't to work or particurly necessary, it was just fun. What sort of punishment would be appropriate for somebody who was caught after jumping the turnstyle every day for 10 years? After all, the nominal "cost" to the metro company of another rider is effectively zero. Clearly $20 x (10 years) is not a reasonable punishment since there's no disincentive in this - we'd then ALL jump the turnstiles and just pay if we got caught, since we'd be no better off.
Jail is another option, but people would be screaming if, for example, the US actually followed its own copyright codes and put people in jail for more than i think it's $3000 of copyright infringement (a target that many p2pers easily meet).
Single multiples of the infringement amount are likewise unrealistic - there are huge costs involved in bringing somebody to trial and it seems that at least those at absolute minimum should be covered by the judgment against the infringer.
so, the sums i see bandied about in the USA are not that unreasonable, I think. they send a strong warning and will cause real financial pain, but only for a short while (a few months to a few years).
There are also some 'creative' solutions, such as 'if you pirate, that's fine, but then since you believe information wants to be free, we will put your medical records, etc etc on the web.' But, of course, this is not really a workable or reasonable solution.
You only need to read through some of the comments of many of the blatantly pirating idiots (pirating and unrepentant, thinking of themselves as gandhi-equivalents or whatever) here to see that it is a problem, especially now when they can no longer make claims like "well, there is no digital legal alternative" in the face of ituned and so forth, which was their long-time fall-back argument.
I'm so glad your "insightful" comment has been modded up, given that THE ARTICLE HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM.
But please, don't let this stop your plans for a generalized semi-conspiratorial anti-government, to say nothing of anti-USA rant. Becaause clearly this is what qualifies as "insightful" here.
It's summer, and Slashdot is trolling
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yet another slashdot troll headline. A not unreasonable cooperative attempt by private companies to cut piracy with no government intervention whatsoever is an "attack on civil liberties."
Let's see if I have the basic dance correct: if a GOVERNMENT program comes out that attempts to curb piracy, then you scream and yell that privacy is a private matter between individual and rightsholder. If a PRIVATE progam is developed to combat piracy, even one with quite mild constraints like this one, we get bitching and whining that corportations are acting in place of government.
Here are the golden oldies we expect to see in this thread:
I trade my linux binaries via P2P (fine - then you should have no problem of rightsholders doing file-hash-based enforcement)
I learned about band X from P2p (fine - in which case if it makese economic sense for a company or band to release thusly, they will.. it's their decision to make)
piracy involves guys with eye patches. this is copyright infringement. actually, it's both. get thee to a dictionary.
yes, but they can't tell with absolute certainty who is using a given PC. absolute certainty is not a condition of law - reasonableness is.
It's not illegal if it hasn't been released in my country (anime, etc). NONSENSE.
P2P is fair use. No, it isn't. Especially in Britain, where the concept of fair use is much more restricted than in the USA (which *IS* an actual problem with the british system). But, don't worry - your 1.5 tb of movies and music isn't fair use ANYWHERE.
Boeing can't compete with airbus? PUT DOWN THE CRACKPIPE.
To claim that boeing can't compete with airbus is just willful igorance of immature stupidity. boeing continues to be the world's most successful maker of large aircraft and its newest 787 series aircraft are seen to be a huge success while Airbus's A350 project flounders and the A380 seems set to be at best a modest financial success.
Umm, it would only take one to set a precedent. Since many people (numerically, not percentagewise) DO fight, your argument really doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.
Anita's ignorance of IP law and bittorrent is quite embarassing. I'm surprised you haven't been branded a "troll" or "flamebait" yet as my facturally correct posts have been.
Thank you for the additional info on bittorrent - i just note that in some P2P systems, such as emule, it is certainly possible to get provable small chunks from a user - even as small as a few bytes in theory - much smaller than the bittorrent effective minimum.
Except for the fact that clearly, you have never heard of file hashes, which blow your whole "provability" argument out of the water. Anita, I encourage you to read the slashdot article from yesterday as to how exactly the RIAA's identification and takedown system works.
But thanks for pointing out that copyright infringement is not actually stealing. It sounds like one of your crowning achievements from "law school" (though most people would have gotten this from high school freshman civics).
If you are indeed an attorney, you are a horrible one since you apparently lack any understanding whatsoever of legal principle. Though, I will give you some credit - you do show the "lawyer stereotype's" ability to twist arguments and flail and spin.
Sigh, ok, Mr/s "Lawyer."
Let's see what you're arguing this time. The previous time, you tried to twist it to claim that I was claiming that sharing one bit was unlawful. i called your lie on that, and now I will call your lie on your next little game. Now, you have dropped the pretense of claiming that it is not unlawful (since you have been shown to be oh so wrong on that - and I didn't even have to bring up Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films do do so), your new ploy is to claim that it's not determinable.
In other words, you are trying to argue not that it's not unlawful (which it is), but you're trying to argue that it's the perfect crime - that you can't get caught.
Here, again, you fail. Here you exit the land of "pretend lawyer" and join the fantasy world of "pretend technologist."
Fine, let's talk about bittorrent. Bittorrent works via what's known as file hasshes. In simple terms, you don't ask for "give me 10kb of some random file", since then you'd never end up with KasierChiefs-Ruby.mp3. Rather, you say "give me such and such 10kb of a file with hash XXX" which you just happen to know is KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3.
See, Mrs pretend lawyer, the very hashes that make bitTorrent work are the ones that make it traceable. It's very much like DNA in some sense - to make a crude but apt analogy - no jury in the world will believe "yes, your honor, but she didn't have so much of my (DNA) on her."
Now, there are games that bittorrent users can play to "anonymize" themselves - but these are basically IP games like using anonymizing networks which basically shift or distribute IP identities. These make things a bit harder to trace, but this technology is totally different from what you are talking about. what you have described betrays your COMPLETE AND TOTAL CLUELESNESS about how bittorrent works, to say nothing of IP law.
If you have indeed studied law, you really should be embarrassed.
You are not an attorney, and you do not concentrate on copyright law. I am calling absolute shenanigans, since you are flat out lying.
Let's be clear, since you're trying to twist things around. The statement wasnt whether copying one bit or one note is on its own, copyright inringement. The question was whether, for example, if you placed a given file on a p2p network and, throug the distributed glories of the p2p system, you just happaned to distribute some tiny portion (let's call it one bit, even though of course actual p2p systems work on slightly larger granularities) of a copyrighted work. If this happened, then, yes, of course this could be seen as copyright infringement. It would be provable (through the hash of the file involved) that you were involved in the unlawful redistribution of copyrighted work - that you happened to have only distributed a tiny part of it is nothing more than a technological accident.
To put it another way, it's like you robbed a bank with a gun on a day that due to some weird scheduling and cash movement issue in the bank the bank only had $1. To make a de minimis claim that this is not armed robbery would be absurd.
Mr "attorney" who "concentrated" on IP law - actually do have a read of Title 17. I encourage you to consider the word "any" in 17.501.(a). Any means any.
Code 17, Section 1101 (a) (2) would tend to disagree with you. You do realize that actual law exists, right? It doesn't work that way that just whatever you want to be true is the law?
Of course, reasonable interpretation is necessary. If you put KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3 in your public folder of a limewire machine, is it reasonable to assume that you have put it there for your own use? Of course not. If you put it in a non-advertised publicly accessible folder that is password protected? then yes. Reasonableness matters. this is why, if you are caught in the bank with a gun in your hand, the "aliens just teleported me here and implanted false memories in the witnesses' brains to make them think that i robbed this bank" defense won't work, even if the existence of such a possibility means that your guilt is not "certain" in some mathematical sense.
Additionally, i find it very ironic that you are arguing that it's not the making available, but the downloading that's illegal, when we just had a whole different thread of idiots yesterday arguing exactly the opposite to justify their piracy.
You fail utterly in your understanding of copyright law in the USA.
Copyright "law" is not, for the most part, about whether a given specific action is illegal or illegal. Rather, every action must be considered in terms of a number of factors, including its nature, scope, intent, use, and so on. This means, for example, that doing a given action once may be legal in one context may be ok, but in another it would be ruled as infringment. It also means that doing one action may be ok, but doing it 100 times may be ruled as infringment.
No reasonable human being thinks that the mechanism of P2P of sharing chunks of files has anything to do with it whatsoever. So, yes, sharing even one bit may well REASONABLY be infringment if it the action can be viewed as infringing as viewed through a reasonable observation of nature, scope, intent, use, and so forth.
New to slashdot, are you? Things that you can learn from slashdot include:
you have a right to pirate something if it is not for sale in your area.
you have a right to pirate something if you want it in a format in which it is not possible to purchase
companies have an ethical duty to make GPL drivers,
if you have some grievance against a company where the question is about whether you get some good/value/service from the company by being in violation of some law, contract, agreement, statute, or convention, you are nevertheless justified in doing so since while you are small, the companies are big.
Slashdot Mirror
/ same bullshit slashdot arguments, different thread.
Sorry, I'm going to have to disagree (though I kind of suspected somebody would try this argument). The last 5 even in draws can be horribly uncompetitive since one team may be playing for the draw and the other is pretty well tired by that point. This happens very often in football. Similarly, a 1-goal difference does not imply anywhere near the drama that a 1-run difference in baseball or 1-point (or even 3-point or 7 point) difference in american football implies. More often than not, one team has basically dominated the contest and are sitting up 1-0. Does all sport have its moments? Of course. Football has magical ones. But I think your "7 of 9" reasoning based purely on this sort of raw numbers is highly misleading. If it were any other way, "Match of the Day" would show the last 5 minutes of those matches more regularly. Instead, it's simply "and x scored in the 73rd minute and they managed to hold on the rest of the way."
I play one aerobic sport quite seriously (football aka soccer). I find that aerobic sports (and quasi-aerobic sports, such as volleyball) tend to be more fun to play. On the other hand, i find that they are generally rather dull to watch as the strategic intricacies are largely removed. You may talk about split-second strategic awareness that a rugby player might have and i could spill equivalent verbage about soccer. However, the reality is that while there is some sort of beauty about so many minds independently and in real time coming up with collective "brilliant" solutions to sports problems (such as scoring a goal or a try), such decisions are far less cerebral than those you get in american football and baseball.
Or, to put it another way, you typical rugby match on TV looks like a physical contest. The team that is fitter and more skillful usually wins. Or, rather, that's how it is for soccer and certainly that's how it looks on tv for ruggers. Real time "strategic" or tactical decisions in soccer are nearly nil. Who to substitute and what formation to play are mostly it. there are a few set pieces, but they are of secondary importance.
Baseball is a perfect strategic game. It's incredibly mathematical and lends itself to all sorts of analysis that is simply not possible in soccer. In soccer, "players working together" comes down i'd say 80% to personalities and at most 20% to complementary skills - such as having somebody with a good cross paired with somebody who is good in the air. In baseball, the situation is reversed. Sure, personality matters somewhat as it does in any sport, but players skills can be matched (both teammates and opponents) on far more levels. there are literally thousands of decisions that go into any baseball game that can be reviewed and discussed intelligently. In soccer there are maybe a handful.
So, I love soccer. I train 3 times per week on the pitch and gym most other days. But, other than picking up some ideas for my own game, I find it incredibly tedious to watch. Baseball and american football stimulate the intellect far more and builds far better dramatic finales because of this. Plus, the games are better structured. Maybe 3 televised soccer matches in 20 are still interesting and plausibly competitive in the last 5 minutes. I'd say at least 5-6 out of 20 baseball games and 13-14 american football games out of 20 could make similar claims.
Of course, it would be so very socially awkward to point out that virtually all policies slashdot have supported so far amount to in effect a regressive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy, where the poor who are for whatever reason unable to use a p2p service and thus purchase CDs subsidize the entertainment of those who otherwise generally can afford it. Oh no. Pointing out such things is just not cool.
While your comment is sure to be modded up in slashdot, it is beyond naive in the extreme. "OLS compliance" has no value whatsoever as far as lego is concerned. Rather, lego has to do quite the opposite - they need to continue polishing their OWN band in other to be able to extract prices higher than the competitive equilibrium price. it would take about a microsecond of thought to realize that this is worth more than any royalties lego would receive for "OLS compliance" certification. I suspect the people who run lego actually have business degrees, and didn't graduate from the slashdot school of naive blather where "make sure everybody uses your idea" street cred is worth more than actual money.
Put another way, frankly, having to pay somebody $20 - $60k extra per year for a 'better' technical workers is small change compared to the costs associated with having an albatross.
Lawyers have an exam - it's called the bar. It's far from perfect, but this at least covers the basics of the subject area. You and I have both seen prorgammers with "10 years experience" and an IT degree with overinflated CVs who may have some basic understanding of programming theory, but who are in practice completely unaquainted with modern technologies and systematic analysis of a problem.
you think lawyers have not helped you? good god man. look - i hate lawyers in a general sense, too, but I have some sense in me. have you ever been on an airplane or train or driven a car? why do you think such modes of transport are orders of magnitude safer than before. because of beaurocratic oversight? NONSENSE. It's due to the legal system of the USA, where the threat of lawsuits ensured that companies overdesigned and stayed on pace with technological developments in safety. All those european product safety standards - have you noticed that they are mostly based on US developments? This is because there are no legal drivers in europe to push such things organically.
This ruling exists because of a tax on CDs and other blank media in spain that was meant to compensate the authors. Once it became clear that this was becoming technologically obsolete (as people were not using CDs, etc any more) an anti-p2p law was passed. So, basically, you fail.
Ah yes, anecdotal evidence. Where would any standard slashdot piracy discussion be without anecdotal evidence? We've already covered the "I download linux isos on P2P" and "poor single mothers on welfare getting sued by evil lawyers" memes, so I guess a completion of the trifecta was inevitable.
If you don't know enough basic economics to realize that the cost of 10,000,000 people downloading a song on P2P doesn't have real costs to the producer in the form of decreased demand for their products, then you are, quite simply, undereducated in this matter.
To put it in terms that maybe even you can understand:
What do you call the guy who that has the cool new music track that none of his friends have? He's cool.
What do you call the guy who paid for the cool new music track that his friends downloaded for free? He's a sucker.
Economic reality happens in the aggregate. Until you understand this well understood basic principle of life, about as fundamental to economics as numbers are to math or atoms are to chemistry, you really have no business commenting are on anything.
I also live in the UK. The irony is that many ocmpanies DO run roughshod over UK public, but NOT THE MEDIA COMPANIES WHICH ARE BEING SYSTEMATICALLY RIPPED OFF FROM.
Specifically, there are no class action lawsuits in the UK, nor, for the most part, are there punitive damages. When I got on a london-based Eurolines coach a few years ago where the french-african driver had been drinking (we found out later), drove on the wrong side of the road several times and ran out of gas, leaving us to wait by the side of the road for hours in the middle of the night until a replacement bus could be found we were told that we had no legal basis for complaint since the coach company had in the end delivered us to paris with no injuries in the very wide timeframe it had allowed in its schedule. As a result, NO punative action was taken agains the company, and people suffer.
My friend had a major bit of cosmetic surgery botched due to the blatant error of a technician at a very expensive london clinic. I don't mean "something doesn't look quite right" or "in any medical procedure there is a level of assumed risk" - I mean actual scarring and so forth due to the clinic having a new operator with an hour's training mis-set a machine with no oversight. We were told that as a result of this, basically no (or very little) economic recovery was possible as my friend does not actually work as a model.
In both of these cases, MORE, not less lawyers would help the situation greatly in london in keeping corporations from running roughshod over those guys.
but, just because bus companies and clinics can get away with things that are completely unacceptible in the USA does not mean that somehow people are entitled to the labour of those in the media or software industries, free.. doubly and triply so because such things are UNNECESSARY LUXURIES with many FREE ALTERNATIVES.
Your ranting about $300,000 lawyers is completely misplaced, juvenile, bullshit and reeks of the worst kind of jealousy.
Please tell me more about this theoretical person on minimum wage who owns a computer and pays a sufficient bandwidth bill every month to support illegal downloading, eh? And, there's something to be said for the candy - it at least provides a poor person with calories, and in that sense can be broadly interpreted as a 'need.' A coldplay download is completely unnecessary.
Also, if you'll see on P2P, piracy is not limited to stuff of "big evil" companies who can "take it." You'll find software from the smallest of the small shareware companies being pirated regularly. clearly, piracy is an issue of greed, not some overblown nonsensical issues of 'social justice' like you pretend them to be.
But please, don't let my reality intrude on your comic book view of the world.
More to the point - you'd like your ISPs unmonitored? We all would. But, I also like to live in a society of law and economic progress, and, well, I believe that copyright laws, while clearly imperfect, in general do much much much much more good than harm. In fact, I'm sure of it. If i don't, I have a mechanism to change this, which is to elect people who will change laws in ways that are amenable to me.
To me, tens of thousands of dollars does not seem unreasonable. It's not a crippling amount of money (but it will sting) to anybody who owns a computer, and at those rates it is unlikely that the companies are actually making any serious money, given their costs involved. to me, it's just about right.
let me ask you this question: let's say the subway (metro, tube) cost $20 per ride, but the ride wasn't to work or particurly necessary, it was just fun. What sort of punishment would be appropriate for somebody who was caught after jumping the turnstyle every day for 10 years? After all, the nominal "cost" to the metro company of another rider is effectively zero. Clearly $20 x (10 years) is not a reasonable punishment since there's no disincentive in this - we'd then ALL jump the turnstiles and just pay if we got caught, since we'd be no better off.
Jail is another option, but people would be screaming if, for example, the US actually followed its own copyright codes and put people in jail for more than i think it's $3000 of copyright infringement (a target that many p2pers easily meet).
Single multiples of the infringement amount are likewise unrealistic - there are huge costs involved in bringing somebody to trial and it seems that at least those at absolute minimum should be covered by the judgment against the infringer.
so, the sums i see bandied about in the USA are not that unreasonable, I think. they send a strong warning and will cause real financial pain, but only for a short while (a few months to a few years).
There are also some 'creative' solutions, such as 'if you pirate, that's fine, but then since you believe information wants to be free, we will put your medical records, etc etc on the web.' But, of course, this is not really a workable or reasonable solution.
You only need to read through some of the comments of many of the blatantly pirating idiots (pirating and unrepentant, thinking of themselves as gandhi-equivalents or whatever) here to see that it is a problem, especially now when they can no longer make claims like "well, there is no digital legal alternative" in the face of ituned and so forth, which was their long-time fall-back argument.
But please, don't let this stop your plans for a generalized semi-conspiratorial anti-government, to say nothing of anti-USA rant. Becaause clearly this is what qualifies as "insightful" here.
Let's see if I have the basic dance correct: if a GOVERNMENT program comes out that attempts to curb piracy, then you scream and yell that privacy is a private matter between individual and rightsholder. If a PRIVATE progam is developed to combat piracy, even one with quite mild constraints like this one, we get bitching and whining that corportations are acting in place of government.
Here are the golden oldies we expect to see in this thread:
have i gotten the more obvious ones sorted?
To claim that boeing can't compete with airbus is just willful igorance of immature stupidity. boeing continues to be the world's most successful maker of large aircraft and its newest 787 series aircraft are seen to be a huge success while Airbus's A350 project flounders and the A380 seems set to be at best a modest financial success.
Umm, it would only take one to set a precedent. Since many people (numerically, not percentagewise) DO fight, your argument really doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.
Thank you for the additional info on bittorrent - i just note that in some P2P systems, such as emule, it is certainly possible to get provable small chunks from a user - even as small as a few bytes in theory - much smaller than the bittorrent effective minimum.
But thanks for pointing out that copyright infringement is not actually stealing. It sounds like one of your crowning achievements from "law school" (though most people would have gotten this from high school freshman civics).
Sigh, ok, Mr/s "Lawyer."
Let's see what you're arguing this time. The previous time, you tried to twist it to claim that I was claiming that sharing one bit was unlawful. i called your lie on that, and now I will call your lie on your next little game. Now, you have dropped the pretense of claiming that it is not unlawful (since you have been shown to be oh so wrong on that - and I didn't even have to bring up Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films do do so), your new ploy is to claim that it's not determinable.
In other words, you are trying to argue not that it's not unlawful (which it is), but you're trying to argue that it's the perfect crime - that you can't get caught.
Here, again, you fail. Here you exit the land of "pretend lawyer" and join the fantasy world of "pretend technologist."
Fine, let's talk about bittorrent. Bittorrent works via what's known as file hasshes. In simple terms, you don't ask for "give me 10kb of some random file", since then you'd never end up with KasierChiefs-Ruby.mp3. Rather, you say "give me such and such 10kb of a file with hash XXX" which you just happen to know is KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3.
See, Mrs pretend lawyer, the very hashes that make bitTorrent work are the ones that make it traceable. It's very much like DNA in some sense - to make a crude but apt analogy - no jury in the world will believe "yes, your honor, but she didn't have so much of my (DNA) on her."
Now, there are games that bittorrent users can play to "anonymize" themselves - but these are basically IP games like using anonymizing networks which basically shift or distribute IP identities. These make things a bit harder to trace, but this technology is totally different from what you are talking about. what you have described betrays your COMPLETE AND TOTAL CLUELESNESS about how bittorrent works, to say nothing of IP law.
If you have indeed studied law, you really should be embarrassed.
Let's be clear, since you're trying to twist things around. The statement wasnt whether copying one bit or one note is on its own, copyright inringement. The question was whether, for example, if you placed a given file on a p2p network and, throug the distributed glories of the p2p system, you just happaned to distribute some tiny portion (let's call it one bit, even though of course actual p2p systems work on slightly larger granularities) of a copyrighted work. If this happened, then, yes, of course this could be seen as copyright infringement. It would be provable (through the hash of the file involved) that you were involved in the unlawful redistribution of copyrighted work - that you happened to have only distributed a tiny part of it is nothing more than a technological accident.
To put it another way, it's like you robbed a bank with a gun on a day that due to some weird scheduling and cash movement issue in the bank the bank only had $1. To make a de minimis claim that this is not armed robbery would be absurd.
Mr "attorney" who "concentrated" on IP law - actually do have a read of Title 17. I encourage you to consider the word "any" in 17.501.(a). Any means any.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap11.html#1101
Of course, reasonable interpretation is necessary. If you put KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3 in your public folder of a limewire machine, is it reasonable to assume that you have put it there for your own use? Of course not. If you put it in a non-advertised publicly accessible folder that is password protected? then yes. Reasonableness matters. this is why, if you are caught in the bank with a gun in your hand, the "aliens just teleported me here and implanted false memories in the witnesses' brains to make them think that i robbed this bank" defense won't work, even if the existence of such a possibility means that your guilt is not "certain" in some mathematical sense.
Additionally, i find it very ironic that you are arguing that it's not the making available, but the downloading that's illegal, when we just had a whole different thread of idiots yesterday arguing exactly the opposite to justify their piracy.
Copyright "law" is not, for the most part, about whether a given specific action is illegal or illegal. Rather, every action must be considered in terms of a number of factors, including its nature, scope, intent, use, and so on. This means, for example, that doing a given action once may be legal in one context may be ok, but in another it would be ruled as infringment. It also means that doing one action may be ok, but doing it 100 times may be ruled as infringment.
No reasonable human being thinks that the mechanism of P2P of sharing chunks of files has anything to do with it whatsoever. So, yes, sharing even one bit may well REASONABLY be infringment if it the action can be viewed as infringing as viewed through a reasonable observation of nature, scope, intent, use, and so forth.
Seriously. Do some reading.
start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
and then, if you have the ability, continue here: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/
seriously, read it.
- you have a right to pirate something if it is not for sale in your area.
- you have a right to pirate something if you want it in a format in which it is not possible to purchase
- companies have an ethical duty to make GPL drivers,
- if you have some grievance against a company where the question is about whether you get some good/value/service from the company by being in violation of some law, contract, agreement, statute, or convention, you are nevertheless justified in doing so since while you are small, the companies are big.
- and on and on.
welcome to the home of situational ethics!