"Also, whenever you can, please keep correcting people who regard this as "piracy", "stealing" or "theft". It is nothing of the sort. It is "copyright infringement", plain and simple. If I "steal" your bicycle, I have deprived you of something you previously owned, which I now posess. Making digitally-perfect copies of a work is not "stealing" or "theft", though it is very much illegal in most countries."
How do you explain the phrase "He stole my idea.", if your arguement is correct. It isn't. Copyright infringement is theft.
"You can't steal profits that weren't already earned. You can't steal "projected" profits. Keep up the pressure on these companies who continue to misunderstand the terms they're spewing in public. There's a certain Heinekin commercial that is grossly misrepresenting the nature of copyright infringement."
You don't understand economics. If I make available a movie for people to download, I am competing directly with the movie maker. My product reduces the value of the original product because I am offering it for free. There is such a thing as actions which cause lost revenue. Just look at the impact on Wendys of the lady who claimed to find a finger in a bowl of chili.
" Ethically wrong? Illegal, certainly. In many places. For the distributor usually, not the distributee.
But we're well beyond a universal system of ethics aren't we? I can imagine a number of arguments that could be used to by people who have no ethical problem with copyright infringement.
For one, copyright is a contract between the government and authors on their people's behalf. Since it's made without the individual's say-so, he might not consider himself bound by it."
I don't recall agreeing to any contract with the govt. not to shoot you, so I guess it's legal and ethical, and you certainly need to be shot for spewing such nonsense.
"an industry whose purpose is the distribution of media recordings has been obsolete since the late 1990's. it is now cheaper and easier for people to do it themselves. by sticking blindly to their business model, the MPAA is simply refusing to accept changes that they have no control over."
Of course, in your world, no one will actually make multimillion dollar films, because they are unable to make money off your legal and ethical distribution channels.
"No, wait, it didn't. The simple fact is, those who were going to see it in theatre did, and those who never were (or who were just going to borrow the DVD from a friend when it came out) didn't. Nothing new here."
Yes, of all the thousands of people who downloaded the movie, no one single one of them was planning on paying to see it now or at any time in the future.
"Theft' is used to dig at the fear that everyone has of having their material items stolen from their house. Yes, consciously, we know that a 13-year old 'pirate' is not a raping, murdering, theiving monster but the MPAA wants to generate fear, anger, and other emotions in the public. Using 'copyright infringement' -- the correct term -- just won't do that for them. So they continue to use incorrect terminology."
So how do you explain the phrase "He stole my idea". The person didn't actually steal my idea, he copied it. I don't think your explanaation is accurate.
"As customers we must demand that our ISPs no keep long term IP records. There are plenty of options to connect to the internet and we as consumers must tell our ISPs that we will make this an important part of our bandwidth purchasing decision."
So what's your opinion of Morgan Stanley being fined over 1 billion for not keeping email around? It seems like the same sort of case, yet the sentiment there was they were probably guilty, so it was ok. With copyright infringement, the sentiment is, the users are probably guilty, but they should be protected anyway.
The judge reckoned that given their stonewalling that they would lose the case, knew it, so therefore started hiding emails, then when that didn't work, deleted some.
Now, given that deleting information when under investigation is a serious criminal offense, that seems to have been reduced to "you fail it"."
How do I get to call you a moron? You think people should be convicted based on a judges hypothesis? What ever happened to evidence, and the burden of proof on the prosecutor.
Your anti-corporate bias has blinded you. If this was a person being sued by the RIAA, your opinion would be different, if you're like the average/.er
"If it can cost Morgan-Stanley $1.5 billion for not storing email. And 90% of email is SPAM. The risk of deleting/filtering SPAM and losing valid email is going to be too risky."
If you think big corporations can eliminate spam, you've been reading/. too often.
"I think the issue is "selective memory loss" - Microsoft plays this card all the time in court. Emails from a relevant time period are "deleted" when convenient, while older or newer or even contemporaneous mail is saved... the judge in this case was simply smart enough to call shenanigans. "
So I'm suppose to save every post-it note someone sticks on my monitor now too? Do we have to record every conversation at work now too? Just because email is easy to store doesn't mean it must be stored by law. This is a huge privacy issue, but it's a corporation, so the anti-corporate culture on/. make everyone think its ok to assume people are guilty because they can't prove they're innocent.
"With hard disks as cheap as they are, and the advanced archiving capabilities of todays' software, I wonder why they would delete these emails except for the purpose of destroying/frustrating investigations.
This time, I agree with the US justice system. They deserved it...I am sorry to say."
I guess I must be guilty of destroying/frustrating investigations as well, too then, since I have deleted quite a lot of e-mail over the last few years.
If this was the RIAA suing an ISP for customer info, everyone's opinion of this story would change 180 degrees. The anti-corporate attitudes here are irrational.
"The CRIA was told, if they wanted too, to come back "with stronger, and more current, evidence".
It might be interesting to see how they come back and how the Canadian courts view their new case.
Lets hope privacy wins the day!"
It looks like the judges want to see evidence of actual file transfers, not just people who have a lot of files their sharing. I'm not sure how they expect a private organization to collect such information without the help of law enforcement since it amounts to snooping packets on the internet. I assume Canadian laws will need to be adjusted to correct this problem, otherwise there's no enforceable copyright protection in Canada.
It seems the names were not revealed because, even though there were 1000s of shared files, there was no evidence anyone downloaded any of the files. So how does the music industry prove that piracy is being committed without getting a sort of "internet wiretap"? Private citizens certainly don't have this authority, so does law enforcement need to become involved. I fear that people abusing the internet and then cheering these rulings will result in laws that cause much more monitoring of internet traffic. For in the end, these people are criminals who are breaking the law.
" Have you ever BEEN to Cuba? Oh wait, you're American.. never mind... Cuba may be Communist, but did you ever stop to think that Castro and Gueverra (sp) freed the Cubans from a much worse dictator (Batista) I've spent some time in Cuba (Canadians are allowed to travel wherever we want, ahh freedom!) And the people there are doing quite well thank you very much."
That's why all those Floridians are trying to escape to Cuba, and why Cubans are allowed to emigrate is they don't like it there.
" For clarification: we're talking about copyright violations here. Downloading is receiving an already copied piece of work from the one doing the copying (uploading being making a copy of information you currently have)."
If you're receiving the copy, you can't claim you had nothing to do with the infringement. That's like buying property you know is stolen.
"But any good laywer could reduce the damages to sale price and a penalty fine."
So if you have downloaded say 500 songs, which puts you on the RIAA's radar screen, you pay the RIAA around $3 (price plus penalty). Therefore, you owe $1500. Not exactly cheap, and some people the RIAA goes after have much more than 500 songs. RIAA penalties are not unreasonable given sharing facilitates further copyright infringement, as well as getting your free copy.
"I thought subscription based services like Rhapsody and Yahoo were just streaming. If you want to acutally download the song and listen to it from somewhere else than your internet-connected computer, you had to pay an additional fee ($.79/song in Yahoo's case) I mean, if I could actually DOWNLOAD an unlimited amount of music and listen to it on all my PCs, on an mp3 player, and burn it to CD to listen in a car, for $5/month or even $20/month I'd jump at the chance. But I'm not going to pay $5/month for the privelege of listening to music and the ability to pay more to buy it."
You can do everything you mentioned, except burn it to a cd. Also, doesn't work with iPod, but only more recent mp3 players that support the WMA DRM standard. You don't get mp3 files, but that format instead.
"yes and no. allofmp3 is high quality files. And it's like buying prescription drugs in canada: it's illegal, but not unethical."
Your ethics are all screwed up. Canada regulating prices of American developed drugs in the first place for their citizens is legal but not ethical. Same thing for allofmp3.com. It may not be legal where your from, but it's certainly unethical.
" WMA is the lock-in(out), not the iPod. Afaik, Ipod will happily play MP3 (If not with the stock software, then certainly with alternate software), which is the only 'not locked in' format. "
What's so special about mp3? Anyone can license WMA, so there is no lock-in. Apple refuses to a) license fairplay. b) support any other DRM standard on iPod. It is clear that Apple is the one locking you in. Your post is pure spin.
"In short, feel free to do whatever you want with GPL'd code in house, just be sure you're ready to give all those changes back to the community if you decide to sell the product you made with it."
If members of a company use the modified GPLed software at work, are they required to have access to the source code? If so, can they take the code home and distribute it on the web against the wishes of the company? I think the answer to the 1st is yes, but not sure about the second.
Slashdot Mirror
"Also, whenever you can, please keep correcting people who regard this as "piracy", "stealing" or "theft". It is nothing of the sort. It is "copyright infringement", plain and simple. If I "steal" your bicycle, I have deprived you of something you previously owned, which I now posess. Making digitally-perfect copies of a work is not "stealing" or "theft", though it is very much illegal in most countries."
How do you explain the phrase "He stole my idea.", if your arguement is correct. It isn't. Copyright infringement is theft.
"You can't steal profits that weren't already earned. You can't steal "projected" profits. Keep up the pressure on these companies who continue to misunderstand the terms they're spewing in public. There's a certain Heinekin commercial that is grossly misrepresenting the nature of copyright infringement."
You don't understand economics. If I make available a movie for people to download, I am competing directly with the movie maker. My product reduces the value of the original product because I am offering it for free. There is such a thing as actions which cause lost revenue. Just look at the impact on Wendys of the lady who claimed to find a finger in a bowl of chili.
" Ethically wrong? Illegal, certainly. In many places. For the distributor usually, not the distributee.
But we're well beyond a universal system of ethics aren't we? I can imagine a number of arguments that could be used to by people who have no ethical problem with copyright infringement.
For one, copyright is a contract between the government and authors on their people's behalf. Since it's made without the individual's say-so, he might not consider himself bound by it."
I don't recall agreeing to any contract with the govt. not to shoot you, so I guess it's legal and ethical, and you certainly need to be shot for spewing such nonsense.
"an industry whose purpose is the distribution of media recordings has been obsolete since the late 1990's. it is now cheaper and easier for people to do it themselves. by sticking blindly to their business model, the MPAA is simply refusing to accept changes that they have no control over."
Of course, in your world, no one will actually make multimillion dollar films, because they are unable to make money off your legal and ethical distribution channels.
"No, wait, it didn't. The simple fact is, those who were going to see it in theatre did, and those who never were (or who were just going to borrow the DVD from a friend when it came out) didn't. Nothing new here."
Yes, of all the thousands of people who downloaded the movie, no one single one of them was planning on paying to see it now or at any time in the future.
" I'd start taking him seriously if they used proper terminology. It is copyright infringment, not theft."
Copyright infringement is theft. Why do you think the phrase "He stole my idea" is in common usage?
"Theft' is used to dig at the fear that everyone has of having their material items stolen from their house. Yes, consciously, we know that a 13-year old 'pirate' is not a raping, murdering, theiving monster but the MPAA wants to generate fear, anger, and other emotions in the public. Using 'copyright infringement' -- the correct term -- just won't do that for them. So they continue to use incorrect terminology."
So how do you explain the phrase "He stole my idea". The person didn't actually steal my idea, he copied it. I don't think your explanaation is accurate.
"As customers we must demand that our ISPs no keep long term IP records. There are plenty of options to connect to the internet and we as consumers must tell our ISPs that we will make this an important part of our bandwidth purchasing decision."
So what's your opinion of Morgan Stanley being fined over 1 billion for not keeping email around? It seems like the same sort of case, yet the sentiment there was they were probably guilty, so it was ok. With copyright infringement, the sentiment is, the users are probably guilty, but they should be protected anyway.
" How do I get to call you a moron?
/.er
The judge reckoned that given their stonewalling that they would lose the case, knew it, so therefore started hiding emails, then when that didn't work, deleted some.
Now, given that deleting information when under investigation is a serious criminal offense, that seems to have been reduced to "you fail it"."
How do I get to call you a moron? You think people should be convicted based on a judges hypothesis? What ever happened to evidence, and the burden of proof on the prosecutor.
Your anti-corporate bias has blinded you. If this was a person being sued by the RIAA, your opinion would be different, if you're like the average
"If it can cost Morgan-Stanley $1.5 billion for not storing email. And 90% of email is SPAM. The risk of deleting/filtering SPAM and losing valid email is going to be too risky."
/. too often.
If you think big corporations can eliminate spam, you've been reading
"I think the issue is "selective memory loss" - Microsoft plays this card all the time in court. Emails from a relevant time period are "deleted" when convenient, while older or newer or even contemporaneous mail is saved... the judge in this case was simply smart enough to call shenanigans.
/. make everyone think its ok to assume people are guilty because they can't prove they're innocent.
"
So I'm suppose to save every post-it note someone sticks on my monitor now too? Do we have to record every conversation at work now too? Just because email is easy to store doesn't mean it must be stored by law. This is a huge privacy issue, but it's a corporation, so the anti-corporate culture on
"With hard disks as cheap as they are, and the advanced archiving capabilities of todays' software, I wonder why they would delete these emails except for the purpose of destroying/frustrating investigations.
This time, I agree with the US justice system. They deserved it...I am sorry to say."
I guess I must be guilty of destroying/frustrating investigations as well, too then, since I have deleted quite a lot of e-mail over the last few years.
If this was the RIAA suing an ISP for customer info, everyone's opinion of this story would change 180 degrees. The anti-corporate attitudes here are irrational.
from slashdot, in the form of a front page story.
"The CRIA was told, if they wanted too, to come back "with stronger, and more current, evidence".
It might be interesting to see how they come back and how the Canadian courts view their new case.
Lets hope privacy wins the day!"
It looks like the judges want to see evidence of actual file transfers, not just people who have a lot of files their sharing. I'm not sure how they expect a private organization to collect such information without the help of law enforcement since it amounts to snooping packets on the internet. I assume Canadian laws will need to be adjusted to correct this problem, otherwise there's no enforceable copyright protection in
Canada.
It seems the names were not revealed because, even though there were 1000s of shared files, there was no evidence anyone downloaded any of the files. So how does the music industry prove that piracy is being committed without getting a sort of "internet wiretap"? Private citizens certainly don't have this authority, so does law enforcement need to become involved. I fear that people abusing the internet and then cheering these rulings will result in laws that cause much more monitoring of internet traffic. For in the end, these people are criminals who are breaking the law.
" Fortunately the asshat conservatives and the even more selfish Bloc were defeated by a single vote."
Liberals are more selfish than conservatives. Conservatives want to keep their own money while liberals want to keep money earned by conservatives.
" Have you ever BEEN to Cuba? Oh wait, you're American.. never mind... Cuba may be Communist, but did you ever stop to think that Castro and Gueverra (sp) freed the Cubans from a much worse dictator (Batista) I've spent some time in Cuba (Canadians are allowed to travel wherever we want, ahh freedom!) And the people there are doing quite well thank you very much."
That's why all those Floridians are trying to escape to Cuba, and why Cubans are allowed to emigrate is they don't like it there.
"and is currently forcing the general populace to live below the poverty line by punitive trade embargoes all based on misplaced ideology"
Yeah right, it's the US's fault that communism in Cuba is a failure. You should work for Michael Moore. That's his kind of spin.
" For clarification: we're talking about copyright violations here. Downloading is receiving an already copied piece of work from the one doing the copying (uploading being making a copy of information you currently have)."
If you're receiving the copy, you can't claim you had nothing to do with the infringement. That's like buying property you know is stolen.
"But any good laywer could reduce the damages to sale price and a penalty fine."
So if you have downloaded say 500 songs, which puts you on the RIAA's radar screen, you pay the RIAA around $3 (price plus penalty). Therefore, you owe $1500. Not exactly cheap, and some people the RIAA goes after have much more than 500 songs. RIAA penalties are not unreasonable given sharing facilitates further copyright infringement, as well as getting your free copy.
"I thought subscription based services like Rhapsody and Yahoo were just streaming. If you want to acutally download the song and listen to it from somewhere else than your internet-connected computer, you had to pay an additional fee ($.79/song in Yahoo's case) I mean, if I could actually DOWNLOAD an unlimited amount of music and listen to it on all my PCs, on an mp3 player, and burn it to CD to listen in a car, for $5/month or even $20/month I'd jump at the chance. But I'm not going to pay $5/month for the privelege of listening to music and the ability to pay more to buy it."
You can do everything you mentioned, except burn it to a cd. Also, doesn't work with iPod, but only more recent mp3 players that support the WMA DRM standard. You don't get mp3 files, but that format instead.
"yes and no. allofmp3 is high quality files. And it's like buying prescription drugs in canada: it's illegal, but not unethical."
Your ethics are all screwed up. Canada regulating prices of American developed drugs in the first place for their citizens is legal but not ethical. Same thing for allofmp3.com. It may not be legal where your from, but it's certainly unethical.
the fine should be greater than $5 times X number of people I allowed to download songs. The RIAA sues uploaders
" WMA is the lock-in(out), not the iPod. Afaik, Ipod will happily play MP3 (If not with the stock software, then certainly with alternate software), which is the only 'not locked in' format.
"
What's so special about mp3? Anyone can license WMA, so there is no lock-in. Apple refuses to a) license fairplay. b) support any other DRM standard on iPod. It is clear that Apple is the one locking you in. Your post is pure spin.
The the 1GB non-Apple player has an LCD screen
"In short, feel free to do whatever you want with GPL'd code in house, just be sure you're ready to give all those changes back to the community if you decide to sell the product you made with it."
If members of a company use the modified GPLed software at work, are they required to have access to the source code? If so, can they take the code home and distribute it on the web against the wishes of the company? I think the answer to the 1st is yes, but not sure about the second.