"So what you're saying is that it costs you $0.07AUS to masturbate, plus materials? You're losing $200 every night you have a full night's sleep? Your time isn't always worth money directly, no matter what your mommy says."
My leisure time is not worth money. Everything else is. Getting some OSS to do what I want, or tracking down and cajoling somebody else to do it, is not a leisure activity for me.
I'm guessing that for you and a lot of other people reading this, contributing to the OSS movement is a good idea of a leisure activity, so I can see how you were boggled by my statements -- it didn't even occur to you that it's not something I'd consider to be as rewarding as sleeping or masturbating. This is very telling, and it's why it's essential for OSS advocates to understand that there are many people out there who do not feel the same. When I code, I do it for money. And there are more people still who don't code at all.
"It works okay. It's at least 5 years out of date; the track changes feature in Word 2002 is vastly superior to OO.org's, and it's very possible that even earlier versions were the same. There is an open enhancement request [openoffice.org] for OO.org to support one of the main differences if you want to vote for it."
... and that's the problem with a lot of FOSS in a nutshell. Another option is to do the damn coding myself, but if I can't or won't contribute back to OSS, then I must wait, because the fellow responsible for such a feature has a day job of his own, and that's what I should expect for free.
If my time is worth $25AUS an hour, and it will take me three hours to modify OO to make it do what I want, or to spend time cajoling somebody in Finland to work on the feature that I need, then Office 07's $75 price starts looking good. I'll pick up and wave the holy sword of FOSS when it relates to something that's not so mission-critical.
Ray, can you please elaborate on this? Are you referring to people who've paid the settlements (which I believe to average around $3K), or to people who've actually been sued, gotten themselves lawyers, and racked up serious amounts of billable hours? When you use this phrase are you literally aware of anybody who's had their life seriously messed up as a result of these shakedowns and lawsuits, or do you mean this more colloquially, as in "my girlfriend dumped me, and man, was my life destroyed."
I ask because my take is that most of the people who've settled have been high school or college students (or the parents or guardians thereof). I think you've said earlier that you think the false-positive rate approaches 50%, but my guess is that most of the people who've settled at least have PCs with broadband, so they're at a certain standard of living. Many college students I know already have tuition payments, student loans and other debts which are considerably larger than a $3K settlement, and either way, paying off $3K could be accomplished by working part-time during the summer at a somewhat low-paying job. So $3K would not be a "life destroyer" to them, although it would certainly be a pain in the ass.
"For reasons of fairness, people also need to be taught that it's not a crime -- it is a tort (which has a victim by definition). Since it's a tort, it is up to the victim, not the police, to enforce this law."
In the United states, it's both. This is what the "severe civil and criminal penalties" phrase means on the FBI warnings on DVDs, but I'm guessing most people reading this get their movies via BT with the FBI warning redacted.
If anybody's interested, here's the relevant section of US copyright law that covers criminal infringement and penalties. With the bar being only $1K retail value, it's pretty easy for your average kid with a share directory to cross into criminal territory (that's only a thousand songs) but so far, copyright holders have limited themselves to civil suits in the case of garden variety file sharers.
The police can and do enforce S506, but it's typically for instances where the infringement is north of $50K or so. News of criminal convictions shows up on Slashdot from time to time.
"I really don't understand the RIAA's logic. Even if they do somehow succeed in preventing any sort of internet sharing of media, college students will just join together to form cd swapping groups and it will be just the same as it is now. Some colleges, such as mine, have slow internet outside of the intranet anyway, and so the way it works now is someone buys a cd, then rips it and puts it up for everyone to download. Speeds are fast locally so everyone gets the songs. There really is no way around this. Give up!"
The key here is the difference between "deter" and "prevent."
Retail stores can't prevent 100% of shoplifting; but they're not going to "give up." They will continue to take steps to deter it.
Auto manufacturers can't prevent 100% of auto theft, but they're not going to give up. They will continue to build theft deterrent mechanisms into their products.
I hope this helps you understand the logic a little better.
At any rate, if circumstance has driven you to copying your music for a small group of friends, vs. putting it in your share directory for your gazillion closest friends, it sounds like a win-win for both you and the RIAA.
"Except when they target students on financial aid, whose very education could be depending on the few thousands of dollars they're demanding! If anything, the RIAA is going to create a whole generation of people who could've afforded school, but thanks to those annoying bastards can't really finish their degree, are left with huge loans and don't have a degree allowing them to pay their debts. The RIAA is really pissing me off, they're not helping educate people, they're helping them drop out of school and get even further into debt!"
Personal responsibility and ownership of one's actions goes a long way here. Having that fast Internet connection sure makes it tempting to build your music library with P2P, but it's essential to understand the potential consequences and to also understand that you don't need to have that music -- and if you just can't do without music, there are plenty of free and legal sources. Trust me: I got through all seven years of college without once firing up a P2P app. Those kids could have, too.
It's like anything else: if you participate in any illegal activity, there's a chance that you will get caught. I hope that most people understand this before they get to college. In this case, if your financial situation is such that paying a ~ $3.5K settlement would force you to drop out of school, then think very, very carefully before deciding to get heavy into P2P. We can't directly control the RIAA's actions, but we sure can control our own.
"Threatening you with a civil suit for the commission of a tort is not a crime when all you demand is a cease and desist. Demanding monetary compensation I would think would be a different matter. If not extortion, how about blackmail?"
Listen to the AC; he's right on this one. Settling out of court happens all the time. Even "good" companies and people do it.
The trouble with calling this "blackmail" or "extortion" is there may be a day down the road when you think you've been wronged, or you know you've wronged another person, and settling out of court is the quickest and cheapest way for you to get things right.
""We know you've committed a crime. Pay us to keep quiet about it or we'll see to it that it goes on your criminal record, which you'll have to disclosed to any future employer preventing you from getting any well-paying job in the future."
Huh? I've read TFA; the RIAA isn't threatening (either explicitly or implicitly) to ask the feds to press federal charges in these campus cases. While the amounts of the purported infringement may technically fall into criminal infringement territory, the feds have better things to do; they tend to go after cases where the amount of infringment is in the high five figures and beyond. You know this; I know this; the RIAA knows this and the kids doing the file sharing probably know this.
I think the Slashdot zeitgeist is that the appropriate tag for the students would be they-probably-already-had-the-CD-anyway-and-the-ar tists-have-enough-money-already-and-information-ju st-wants-to-be-free. Not sure if that would fit, though.
"Um, maybe its because most DRM works only by virtually destroying a user's PC?"
For what it's worth, I've bought a bunch of stuff from the iTunes store (which makes use of DRM) and I haven't had any problems. Oh, I do get the "beach ball" from time to time, but it's usually due to mail.app, the new version of Adium, or sometimes even Firefox. I've never had a system instability issue which I could trace to the fact that I have a bunch of Fairplay music in a directory somewhere.
I've seen some iTunes store users complain about the limitations of DRM, but they've largely been on the order of "I wasn't able to use a song I bought in Final Cut and then distribute the MPEG" or "I can't easily put my music on a player other than the iPod." In both instances that's the purpose of Fairplay, and not an unintended side effect.
"So those shelves filled with thousands upon thousands of fiction books are educational? If the test is "Is this materials educational" then almost every public library is committing copyright violations daily."
Not sure if I follow. If you're referring to the normal actions of a library -- that is, lending books -- it's not an infringing action regardless of the book's subject matter. Don't get caught up on the specious "my share directory is just like a library" argument, as using P2P requires making a copy, which is where the potential infringement occurs. The GGP was concerned that the act of lending a book is infringement; he has nothing to worry about. He might have gotten scared by the "no unauthorized lending" clause he's seen in some copyright statements, but if he wants to loan a book to his friend, he's in the clear -- even if the court finds against the defendant in the P2P lawsuit.
Not precisely -- lots of folks around here are concerned that if A happens (the judge finds for the plaintiff in the case of the P2P user), then B will happen (it will be illegal to lose your iPod, or libraries will be outlawed, or any number of other silly outcomes). B hasn't happened (and won't happen), so I think slippery slope is more appropriate than PHEPH.
"For that matter, if someone (perhaps a guest in my home or a burglar) takes a book without my permission, can I be prosecuted for copyright infringement? How about if they don't take the book, but just make copies of a few pages on the Xerox machine in the corner, and take those copies?"
I think you're being tripped up by the "unauthorized lending" you see on some copyright statements. I've never known it to apply to books. In other words, if you lend a book to a friend, or even if somebody takes one of your books, you're not liable.
In the second example, I think you're getting tripped up by stories you've heard about contributory copyright infringement. In the online world, there typically has to be intent to prosecute, and information providers are covered by the DMCA Safe Harbor -- that is, if the party that holds the copyrights jumps through a proscribed set of hoops to inform you of the violation and you take action, you're in the clear.
In the old-media world, I'd think the test would have to go way beyond this. Certainly, somebody breaking into your house and copying your stuff without your knowledge or authorization wouldn't come near that, so don't worry -- you're in the clear.
"I used to think that helping educate others by sharing information was a Good Thing..."
Oh, it is. Share the stuff that you have created all you want. Additionally, fair use doctrine has an "educational use" clause that covers a good bit of information sharing. Naturally, downloading Pirates of the Carribean and seeding it is not "helping educate others by sharing information." It's copyright infringement, plain and simple.
"Sounds exactly like a share folder to me. I wonder why nobody has used this as a defense before?"
I don't think it would pass the laugh test in a court. Using a P2P program requires duplication. Libraries do not -- they make copy machines available, but there's usually a sign warning you about copyright violation, and, of course, it's quite easy to use a copy machine for purposes that fall under fair use doctrine. Compare this to a P2P app -- if somebody else on the network has a share directory which includes material that's there without authorization. To get it, you must make a copy and most likely infringe upon the copyright.
"Yeah...and I haven't heard a specific definition of "making available" yet. Is an inadvertantly shared Windows folder making its contents available? Is leaving my iPod unattended making available the music on it? Is not patching the latest remote security hole in my system fast enough making available everything on my hard drive?"
This is slippery sloping, but it's understandable. If I were defending this case, I'd try the same approach. But, to answer your questions: no, no, and no. This case regards making MP3 files available on a P2P network without authorization from the copyright holder. Negligence and intent play a big part here, and I think it will come down to whether it's reasonable that the defendant should have known better when they installed and used their P2P software for its advertised purpose.
It's often called the slippery slope fallacy because there's often the incorrect inference that A will definitely lead to B. I don't personally think that if the judge rules for the defendant, it automatically means that somebody who misplaces their iPod will be liable... but as I mentioned, if I were defending this case, I'd try to draw that inference.
"A more interesting question is why the music industry thinks that DRM matters. Their logic violates a very simple law of computers: if one copy exists in an unprotected form, all copies exist in an unprotected form. If somebody says "Hey, check out this cool song," and somebody else asks, "Can I get a copy of that," and the answer is, "No, it has DRM, but you can download it from eMule," that's not an improvement over "Sure, here's a copy." Actually, it's worse than "Sure, here's a copy" because it is encouraging the second person to pirate the music, while giving someone a copy is encouraging that person to watch for other music by that band and maybe buy the CD."
This is a common Slashdot fallacy: that everybody is as smart as us, has the same time to tinker with computers that we do, and has a moral compass that is similar to ours. Or, if there are people out there who don't possess all those qualities, then they simply don't matter, from a market perspective.
9 out of 10 people reading this won't believe me, but there really are people out there who might want to copy their friends music, but who don't know how to, or simply don't want to install a P2P program to get it. Yes, yes, I know -- these people are obviously not people that you would associate with, but they're out there. And they have money.
The reality is that a little protection goes a long way. Auto security systems are an effective deterrent against the casual car thief, despite the fact that there's a certain subset of the population that has the means and the motive to help themselves to your car. Likewise, there's a certain subset of the population whose moral guidance and technical aptitude facilitate their acquisition of music via P2P, yet DRM is a deterrent to casual pirates.
"And I'll say it again: ignoring the one-hit-wonder teeny-pop crap, real musicians benefit overwhelmingly from music piracy. It increases exposure, which in the long term, increases sales. Therefore, all anti-piracy measures are, by definition, short-sighted foolishness by people who don't understand the basics of doing business in a modern economy."
I think it's one of the great tragedies of the 21st century that the people who could really run the music industry are, instead, busy posting to Slashdot. It will be a great day when a record company adopts the "encourage piracy" model and totally blows the doors off of the industry. With all this brain power here, why doesn't some enterprising Slashdotter do just that? It's one thing for us to fire up our BitTorrent client and laugh at the companies that still cling to the "produce an item and sell it" model... why doesn't someone -- anyone -- take a step and change some things?
This can lead to an interesting tautology, though: "real musicians" benefit from piracy. And those musicians who don't... who would really rather have the cash than the fame? They're businesspeople, and not real musicians!
"The music and movie industries are often required to pay out money if their product makes money. Singers, directors and writers may have contracts that gives them a share of the profits. The more losses a studio can put on the books - real or imagined - the more money they get to keep for themselves (by transferring to a subsidiary as an expense, or bury it somewhere it can't be tracked). It's more profitable for them to lose money on every product."
You're referring to accounting methods in which companies can make individual projects, products, or business units more profitable, or less profitable, than they are. This happens pretty often (even "good" and "non-greedy" companies do it) but, as I guess I didn't carefully explain above, there's no benefit to underreporting sales or profit margins to the street.
Not calling you out in particular, but this is an example of my statement that Slashdotters' perceptions aren't going to change here. If I understood you correctly, you're implying that Warner might be under-reporting their sales or margin to shareholders in an effort to avoid contractual obligations. At first glance this theory has an intriguing sort of tinfoil hat appeal, but ask around and it won't take you too long to find somebody who has enough financial background to confirm that you never under-report numbers to the street.
"I'm not sure where I've seen any evidence the music industry is running on razor-thin margins. This sounds like pure BS, and only hurts their credibility every time they try to state their "case"... So far, I'm not convinced."
Warner Music posted a 0.27% profit margin and a 6.29% operating margin last year. Their year over year earnings shrank by about 80%. Compare this to some "good" and "non-greedy" companies: Apple posted a profit margin of 11.75%, making them about 43 times more profitable than Warner Music. Red Hat -- about as cool and non-greedy a company as you can find -- had a profit margin of 18%, or 66 times more profitable than Warner. If music industry executives are lining their swimming pools with gold (as has been posited here in Slashdot), what are the Red Hat guys using? Platinum?
In case anybody thinks that perhaps Warner is under-reporting their numbers in an effort to convince Slashdotters that they are running on low margins, you should be aware that that is generally the last thing you want to do. Your posted numbers are where the rubber hits the road, and if you're going to fudge, you generally tend to fudge upward (see Enron and numerous other examples). You seldom see record companies with "buy" recommendations, or even on the Fortune 500.
As has been pointed out, the record industry is a hugely speculative one; the labels tend to make their money on the hits and lose money on everything else; that's why small artists are dropped so often and why record labels have a high failure rate. However, many Slashdotters just know deep down in their heart that running a record label is an easy way to make lots of cash, and that record label owners are, by extension, greedy. This perception isn't likely to change.
"And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore."
I'm not sure of your point. The population of the world isn't what's relevant here; it's your total market size. This is real-world economics, and people who sell things -- whether they're tangible or intangible goods -- must operate in the real world.
If it costs you, say, $10,000 to make something and you estimate that you can find 10,000 people willing to pay for it, your cost of sale will be $1 at the lowest. None of these actions will cause your total production cost or your cost per sale to go down:
Making more units than people are willing to buy
Letting people make their own copies
Giving a free copy to everybody in the world
Making a million extra copies and burying them in an Arizona desert, or shooting them into space
Your cost of sale goes down with the number of copies sold, not the number of copies produced. Producing more copies will allow you to amortize the production costs over more units, but these units must be sold -- not copied or destroyed -- in order for you to make back your production costs.
Making additional copies does not increase the market size. Nor is, surprisingly enough, lowering the purchase price often enough to increase the market size. It probably seems patently obvious to most people that if you cut the selling price to 1/10th, your sales will increase by 10x, but those people actually in the business of selling things have to deal with the realities of the supply-demand curve (and it's called a curve and not a line or slope for just this reason), elasticity, market size, and so on. If anybody's boggled by this, consider that "Cher's Greatest Hits" probably sells for $10.00 on the iTunes store, but I wouldn't buy it if it were $8.00 or $5.00 or even free. Cher has her finite market size, and I'm not in it. For Cher's record company to make their money, they need to understand the market, and price the product accordingly. And free might not be the best price.
Ye olde "marginal cost of production goes to zero as supply goes to infinity" chestnut is most useful, I think, as a rationalization for piracy. The thought process is:
I read that "the marginal cost of production goes to zero as supply goes to infinity."
Since that new Evinescence album is infinitely copyable, then it doesn't cost the record company anything to copy, and thus by selling it for $10.00 they are being greedy.
I will fight back against greed by pirating it. DIE GREEDY FUCKERS DIE DIE.
"Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense)."
I agree wholeheartedly. The great thing about copyright is that it's entirely opt-in. If there's the incentive to release one's work via Creative Commons, the GPL, or even into the public domain, they will do so. If Evenescence doesn't want to, then it's also their right to go with a record company who will sell their stuff with DRM attached to it. They're smart people; they own their lives and that's the choice they've made. If I don't want to pay or deal with DRM to enjoy their latest work, I can do one of two things:
Shriek "Bad greedy Evenescence! I will show them by pirating their music! Die Evenescence die!"
Go listen to some music that's been released via Creative Commons, the GPL, or the public domain.
I'll choose #1, but I acknowledge that I might be in the minority.
"And if a person can pay, by whatever means, the damages the courts say he caused, then why shouldn't he be let off? Isn't that the point of damages? To compensate the plantiff for the damages he or she suffered?"
You're half right. There's the compensatory damaged that you've mentioned, and then there's punitive.
A compensatory, zero-sum system would have its benefits. For example, if you wanted a candy bar from a store and didn't have the money, then it would be an easy choice to just take it, since if you were caught, all you would owe is the cost of the candy bar. Same thing with a coffee maker or a car -- if you're caught, you just owe the cost of the product. Or, if you were a little more enterprising, you might try a little bank account phishing or a Nigerian-style scam operation. The upside is that you might be able to fleece tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if you were caught, all you'd have to do is pay it back, and you'd be back where you started, having lost only a little time.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the law also has an allowance for what's known as punitive damages. They are often awarded if there's malicious or deliberate intent, and its purpose is to punish the defendant and discourage the defendant from doing it again. For example, if I borrowed your bike and accidentally crashed it into a tree and you took me to court, the court might find for the cost of the bike, plus possibly a little extra as compensation for your lost use of the bike. But if I stole your bike and threw it off a cliff because I don't like you, and you took me to court, the court might make me pay some extra money as punishment. Going to court over a stolen bike is a somewhat silly example, but I hope you get the idea.
Another good reason why defendants shouldn't simply be "let off" is because it's often difficult to get the damages back to the injured parties. Let's take the example of the Nigerian scamster again... there's no doubt that he probably still has most of that $1MM left, and if he's already spent some of it, he can earn it back by just going back and scamming some more people. But if he got that $1MM by scamming 10,000 people, it might be difficult or impossible to find those people and ensure that they get back what they lost. That's why there would be punitive damages, or even jail time -- to encourage that particular scammer to not do it again, so a bunch of people's time isn't wasted again trying to apportion another $1MM back to another 10K victims.
"Do you have a source for this? If it's true, it sounds like good evidence that people would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for access to an all-you-can-eat DRM-free media download service."
It was the most recent torrent site to go down for a few days... it was covered on Slashdot maybe a month or two ago, and the $1.6K is from a post that one of the operators made bragging about said fact.
Since that was just a burst over a few days, a better data point would be to try to estimate how much people donate to TPB or BitTorrent each year. I have no doubt that people would pay for such a service (people pay for DRMed versions, like Napster, Yahoo! Music and the other various all-you-can-eat services), but the question is whether you'd find enough people to license their content to such a service (I assume you were talking in terms of a legal service in which the content providers were compensated). I don't think many people reading this would be interested in paying for such a service, since the content released on such (being DRM-free, of course) would also become instantly available on the free trackers.
"would just love to see a program that I wrote appear on warez sites. Means that people actually find it usefull. Besides, there is usually only a black market for an item that is popular in the first place. Having my sofware released in the warez scene would be a compliment to me..."
You've encapsulated the reason why many people (particularly young people) don't see the harm in piracy... the thought process is "If I had created something that was in high demand, I would give it away for free."
If you're genuine, I suggest that you look into donating time into helping develop open source software. The FOSS industry needs more people like you who are willing to invest significant effort into creating work that's highly useful for many people, and who only want the "compliment" of seeing their work distributed, rather than financial compensation.
I should point out that several OSS luminaries (Larry Wall comes to mind) have asked that the motivations behind FOSS not be used to justify piracy... ie. that we don't use the thought process that just because our financial situation and free time allow us to work for free, we have the moral right to acquire others' work for free.
"You're absolutely right. If somebody committed a crime which wasn't violent, why the heck should we put him in a prison? Give him a fine so big he will never even think about doing anything stupid. Never."
This would work out well for the defendant. If the fine were just $500K, all he'd need to do is put the word out, and so many people who appreciate DrinkOrDie's work would donate $5 or $10 via PayPal that the $500K fine would vanish within a couple of days, and he'd be back in business right quick.
I recall a few months ago that when one of the bigger torrent sites was shut down for a few days, they put a PayPal link on their site and got donations that averaged $1.6K per day... a lot more than the net profits of many software companies and even many indie record labels. Apparently fans of pirated stuff don't mind shelling out a little cash if it's for an important cause, like keeping the distribution points in business. If copyright infringement were just a civil matter, I'm sure the scene would take care of its own, so fines would not be much of a bother.
"Considering that these people are really no threat to society at all why waste their time and taxpayers money (in two countries in this case) locking them up in the first place?"
As a deterrent. You put it very well: prison will waste his time, and that's something that he has a finite amount of, no matter how much money he makes. And, it's a reality check for others in the scene: if you pirate enough software, you will. go. to. prison.
"It really should be a civil matter - fines would still hurt even if you have no money and get it garnished out of future earnings."
I can see your point from the POV of somebody who'd consider getting into the piracy scene. You put it well... with fines, the worse that can happen is that you'll declare bankruptcy and they'll garnish your wages. That's not so bad a punishment, so it would certainly be less risky to get into large-scale copyright infringement... I might even try it myself, if my set of moral values were a bit different. Reducing it to a civil matter might also have fringe benefits for all the people who benefit from the work of groups like DrinkOrDie... without the threat of prison scaring some people into getting into the business, there might be more warez faster for the rest of us.
But as you know, Title 17 is there to protect the rights of the people who write the software. The government wants to discourage, rather than encourage piracy, regardless of whatever fringe benefits there might be, or how sympathetic we are toward DrinkOrDie and other groups.
Slashdot Mirror
"So what you're saying is that it costs you $0.07AUS to masturbate, plus materials? You're losing $200 every night you have a full night's sleep? Your time isn't always worth money directly, no matter what your mommy says."
My leisure time is not worth money. Everything else is. Getting some OSS to do what I want, or tracking down and cajoling somebody else to do it, is not a leisure activity for me.
I'm guessing that for you and a lot of other people reading this, contributing to the OSS movement is a good idea of a leisure activity, so I can see how you were boggled by my statements -- it didn't even occur to you that it's not something I'd consider to be as rewarding as sleeping or masturbating. This is very telling, and it's why it's essential for OSS advocates to understand that there are many people out there who do not feel the same. When I code, I do it for money. And there are more people still who don't code at all.
"It works okay. It's at least 5 years out of date; the track changes feature in Word 2002 is vastly superior to OO.org's, and it's very possible that even earlier versions were the same. There is an open enhancement request [openoffice.org] for OO.org to support one of the main differences if you want to vote for it."
... and that's the problem with a lot of FOSS in a nutshell. Another option is to do the damn coding myself, but if I can't or won't contribute back to OSS, then I must wait, because the fellow responsible for such a feature has a day job of his own, and that's what I should expect for free.
If my time is worth $25AUS an hour, and it will take me three hours to modify OO to make it do what I want, or to spend time cajoling somebody in Finland to work on the feature that I need, then Office 07's $75 price starts looking good. I'll pick up and wave the holy sword of FOSS when it relates to something that's not so mission-critical.
"As you say, lives are destroyed."
Ray, can you please elaborate on this? Are you referring to people who've paid the settlements (which I believe to average around $3K), or to people who've actually been sued, gotten themselves lawyers, and racked up serious amounts of billable hours? When you use this phrase are you literally aware of anybody who's had their life seriously messed up as a result of these shakedowns and lawsuits, or do you mean this more colloquially, as in "my girlfriend dumped me, and man, was my life destroyed."
I ask because my take is that most of the people who've settled have been high school or college students (or the parents or guardians thereof). I think you've said earlier that you think the false-positive rate approaches 50%, but my guess is that most of the people who've settled at least have PCs with broadband, so they're at a certain standard of living. Many college students I know already have tuition payments, student loans and other debts which are considerably larger than a $3K settlement, and either way, paying off $3K could be accomplished by working part-time during the summer at a somewhat low-paying job. So $3K would not be a "life destroyer" to them, although it would certainly be a pain in the ass.
If my numbers are off, let me know.
"For reasons of fairness, people also need to be taught that it's not a crime -- it is a tort (which has a victim by definition). Since it's a tort, it is up to the victim, not the police, to enforce this law."
In the United states, it's both. This is what the "severe civil and criminal penalties" phrase means on the FBI warnings on DVDs, but I'm guessing most people reading this get their movies via BT with the FBI warning redacted.
If anybody's interested, here's the relevant section of US copyright law that covers criminal infringement and penalties. With the bar being only $1K retail value, it's pretty easy for your average kid with a share directory to cross into criminal territory (that's only a thousand songs) but so far, copyright holders have limited themselves to civil suits in the case of garden variety file sharers.
The police can and do enforce S506, but it's typically for instances where the infringement is north of $50K or so. News of criminal convictions shows up on Slashdot from time to time.
"I really don't understand the RIAA's logic. Even if they do somehow succeed in preventing any sort of internet sharing of media, college students will just join together to form cd swapping groups and it will be just the same as it is now. Some colleges, such as mine, have slow internet outside of the intranet anyway, and so the way it works now is someone buys a cd, then rips it and puts it up for everyone to download. Speeds are fast locally so everyone gets the songs. There really is no way around this. Give up!"
The key here is the difference between "deter" and "prevent."
Retail stores can't prevent 100% of shoplifting; but they're not going to "give up." They will continue to take steps to deter it.
Auto manufacturers can't prevent 100% of auto theft, but they're not going to give up. They will continue to build theft deterrent mechanisms into their products.
I hope this helps you understand the logic a little better.
At any rate, if circumstance has driven you to copying your music for a small group of friends, vs. putting it in your share directory for your gazillion closest friends, it sounds like a win-win for both you and the RIAA.
"OK. No one got my South Park reference. I apologize. I would remove the comment if I could :("
That whooshing sound is making it hard to concentrate. Welcome to Slashdot; to catch up with the rest of us, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#Culture and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underpants_Gnomes#The _gnomes. HTH.
"Except when they target students on financial aid, whose very education could be depending on the few thousands of dollars they're demanding! If anything, the RIAA is going to create a whole generation of people who could've afforded school, but thanks to those annoying bastards can't really finish their degree, are left with huge loans and don't have a degree allowing them to pay their debts. The RIAA is really pissing me off, they're not helping educate people, they're helping them drop out of school and get even further into debt!"
Personal responsibility and ownership of one's actions goes a long way here. Having that fast Internet connection sure makes it tempting to build your music library with P2P, but it's essential to understand the potential consequences and to also understand that you don't need to have that music -- and if you just can't do without music, there are plenty of free and legal sources. Trust me: I got through all seven years of college without once firing up a P2P app. Those kids could have, too.
It's like anything else: if you participate in any illegal activity, there's a chance that you will get caught. I hope that most people understand this before they get to college. In this case, if your financial situation is such that paying a ~ $3.5K settlement would force you to drop out of school, then think very, very carefully before deciding to get heavy into P2P. We can't directly control the RIAA's actions, but we sure can control our own.
"Threatening you with a civil suit for the commission of a tort is not a crime when all you demand is a cease and desist. Demanding monetary compensation I would think would be a different matter. If not extortion, how about blackmail?"
Listen to the AC; he's right on this one. Settling out of court happens all the time. Even "good" companies and people do it.
The trouble with calling this "blackmail" or "extortion" is there may be a day down the road when you think you've been wronged, or you know you've wronged another person, and settling out of court is the quickest and cheapest way for you to get things right.
""We know you've committed a crime. Pay us to keep quiet about it or we'll see to it that it goes on your criminal record, which you'll have to disclosed to any future employer preventing you from getting any well-paying job in the future."
Huh? I've read TFA; the RIAA isn't threatening (either explicitly or implicitly) to ask the feds to press federal charges in these campus cases. While the amounts of the purported infringement may technically fall into criminal infringement territory, the feds have better things to do; they tend to go after cases where the amount of infringment is in the high five figures and beyond. You know this; I know this; the RIAA knows this and the kids doing the file sharing probably know this.
"Do you mean the students, or the RIAA?"
I think the Slashdot zeitgeist is that the appropriate tag for the students would be they-probably-already-had-the-CD-anyway-and-the-ar tists-have-enough-money-already-and-information-ju st-wants-to-be-free. Not sure if that would fit, though.
"Um, maybe its because most DRM works only by virtually destroying a user's PC?"
For what it's worth, I've bought a bunch of stuff from the iTunes store (which makes use of DRM) and I haven't had any problems. Oh, I do get the "beach ball" from time to time, but it's usually due to mail.app, the new version of Adium, or sometimes even Firefox. I've never had a system instability issue which I could trace to the fact that I have a bunch of Fairplay music in a directory somewhere.
I've seen some iTunes store users complain about the limitations of DRM, but they've largely been on the order of "I wasn't able to use a song I bought in Final Cut and then distribute the MPEG" or "I can't easily put my music on a player other than the iPod." In both instances that's the purpose of Fairplay, and not an unintended side effect.
YMMV, of course.
"So those shelves filled with thousands upon thousands of fiction books are educational? If the test is "Is this materials educational" then almost every public library is committing copyright violations daily."
Not sure if I follow. If you're referring to the normal actions of a library -- that is, lending books -- it's not an infringing action regardless of the book's subject matter. Don't get caught up on the specious "my share directory is just like a library" argument, as using P2P requires making a copy, which is where the potential infringement occurs. The GGP was concerned that the act of lending a book is infringement; he has nothing to worry about. He might have gotten scared by the "no unauthorized lending" clause he's seen in some copyright statements, but if he wants to loan a book to his friend, he's in the clear -- even if the court finds against the defendant in the P2P lawsuit.
When in doubt, use common sense.
Not precisely -- lots of folks around here are concerned that if A happens (the judge finds for the plaintiff in the case of the P2P user), then B will happen (it will be illegal to lose your iPod, or libraries will be outlawed, or any number of other silly outcomes). B hasn't happened (and won't happen), so I think slippery slope is more appropriate than PHEPH.
"For that matter, if someone (perhaps a guest in my home or a burglar) takes a book without my permission, can I be prosecuted for copyright infringement? How about if they don't take the book, but just make copies of a few pages on the Xerox machine in the corner, and take those copies?"
I think you're being tripped up by the "unauthorized lending" you see on some copyright statements. I've never known it to apply to books. In other words, if you lend a book to a friend, or even if somebody takes one of your books, you're not liable.
In the second example, I think you're getting tripped up by stories you've heard about contributory copyright infringement. In the online world, there typically has to be intent to prosecute, and information providers are covered by the DMCA Safe Harbor -- that is, if the party that holds the copyrights jumps through a proscribed set of hoops to inform you of the violation and you take action, you're in the clear.
In the old-media world, I'd think the test would have to go way beyond this. Certainly, somebody breaking into your house and copying your stuff without your knowledge or authorization wouldn't come near that, so don't worry -- you're in the clear.
"I used to think that helping educate others by sharing information was a Good Thing ..."
Oh, it is. Share the stuff that you have created all you want. Additionally, fair use doctrine has an "educational use" clause that covers a good bit of information sharing. Naturally, downloading Pirates of the Carribean and seeding it is not "helping educate others by sharing information." It's copyright infringement, plain and simple.
"Sounds exactly like a share folder to me. I wonder why nobody has used this as a defense before?"
I don't think it would pass the laugh test in a court. Using a P2P program requires duplication. Libraries do not -- they make copy machines available, but there's usually a sign warning you about copyright violation, and, of course, it's quite easy to use a copy machine for purposes that fall under fair use doctrine. Compare this to a P2P app -- if somebody else on the network has a share directory which includes material that's there without authorization. To get it, you must make a copy and most likely infringe upon the copyright.
"Yeah...and I haven't heard a specific definition of "making available" yet. Is an inadvertantly shared Windows folder making its contents available? Is leaving my iPod unattended making available the music on it? Is not patching the latest remote security hole in my system fast enough making available everything on my hard drive?"
This is slippery sloping, but it's understandable. If I were defending this case, I'd try the same approach. But, to answer your questions: no, no, and no. This case regards making MP3 files available on a P2P network without authorization from the copyright holder. Negligence and intent play a big part here, and I think it will come down to whether it's reasonable that the defendant should have known better when they installed and used their P2P software for its advertised purpose.
It's often called the slippery slope fallacy because there's often the incorrect inference that A will definitely lead to B. I don't personally think that if the judge rules for the defendant, it automatically means that somebody who misplaces their iPod will be liable... but as I mentioned, if I were defending this case, I'd try to draw that inference.
"A more interesting question is why the music industry thinks that DRM matters. Their logic violates a very simple law of computers: if one copy exists in an unprotected form, all copies exist in an unprotected form. If somebody says "Hey, check out this cool song," and somebody else asks, "Can I get a copy of that," and the answer is, "No, it has DRM, but you can download it from eMule," that's not an improvement over "Sure, here's a copy." Actually, it's worse than "Sure, here's a copy" because it is encouraging the second person to pirate the music, while giving someone a copy is encouraging that person to watch for other music by that band and maybe buy the CD."
This is a common Slashdot fallacy: that everybody is as smart as us, has the same time to tinker with computers that we do, and has a moral compass that is similar to ours. Or, if there are people out there who don't possess all those qualities, then they simply don't matter, from a market perspective.
9 out of 10 people reading this won't believe me, but there really are people out there who might want to copy their friends music, but who don't know how to, or simply don't want to install a P2P program to get it. Yes, yes, I know -- these people are obviously not people that you would associate with, but they're out there. And they have money.
The reality is that a little protection goes a long way. Auto security systems are an effective deterrent against the casual car thief, despite the fact that there's a certain subset of the population that has the means and the motive to help themselves to your car. Likewise, there's a certain subset of the population whose moral guidance and technical aptitude facilitate their acquisition of music via P2P, yet DRM is a deterrent to casual pirates.
"And I'll say it again: ignoring the one-hit-wonder teeny-pop crap, real musicians benefit overwhelmingly from music piracy. It increases exposure, which in the long term, increases sales. Therefore, all anti-piracy measures are, by definition, short-sighted foolishness by people who don't understand the basics of doing business in a modern economy."
I think it's one of the great tragedies of the 21st century that the people who could really run the music industry are, instead, busy posting to Slashdot. It will be a great day when a record company adopts the "encourage piracy" model and totally blows the doors off of the industry. With all this brain power here, why doesn't some enterprising Slashdotter do just that? It's one thing for us to fire up our BitTorrent client and laugh at the companies that still cling to the "produce an item and sell it" model... why doesn't someone -- anyone -- take a step and change some things?
This can lead to an interesting tautology, though: "real musicians" benefit from piracy. And those musicians who don't... who would really rather have the cash than the fame? They're businesspeople, and not real musicians!
"The music and movie industries are often required to pay out money if their product makes money. Singers, directors and writers may have contracts that gives them a share of the profits. The more losses a studio can put on the books - real or imagined - the more money they get to keep for themselves (by transferring to a subsidiary as an expense, or bury it somewhere it can't be tracked). It's more profitable for them to lose money on every product."
You're referring to accounting methods in which companies can make individual projects, products, or business units more profitable, or less profitable, than they are. This happens pretty often (even "good" and "non-greedy" companies do it) but, as I guess I didn't carefully explain above, there's no benefit to underreporting sales or profit margins to the street.
Not calling you out in particular, but this is an example of my statement that Slashdotters' perceptions aren't going to change here. If I understood you correctly, you're implying that Warner might be under-reporting their sales or margin to shareholders in an effort to avoid contractual obligations. At first glance this theory has an intriguing sort of tinfoil hat appeal, but ask around and it won't take you too long to find somebody who has enough financial background to confirm that you never under-report numbers to the street.
"I'm not sure where I've seen any evidence the music industry is running on razor-thin margins. This sounds like pure BS, and only hurts their credibility every time they try to state their "case"... So far, I'm not convinced."
Warner Music posted a 0.27% profit margin and a 6.29% operating margin last year. Their year over year earnings shrank by about 80%. Compare this to some "good" and "non-greedy" companies: Apple posted a profit margin of 11.75%, making them about 43 times more profitable than Warner Music. Red Hat -- about as cool and non-greedy a company as you can find -- had a profit margin of 18%, or 66 times more profitable than Warner. If music industry executives are lining their swimming pools with gold (as has been posited here in Slashdot), what are the Red Hat guys using? Platinum?
In case anybody thinks that perhaps Warner is under-reporting their numbers in an effort to convince Slashdotters that they are running on low margins, you should be aware that that is generally the last thing you want to do. Your posted numbers are where the rubber hits the road, and if you're going to fudge, you generally tend to fudge upward (see Enron and numerous other examples). You seldom see record companies with "buy" recommendations, or even on the Fortune 500.
As has been pointed out, the record industry is a hugely speculative one; the labels tend to make their money on the hits and lose money on everything else; that's why small artists are dropped so often and why record labels have a high failure rate. However, many Slashdotters just know deep down in their heart that running a record label is an easy way to make lots of cash, and that record label owners are, by extension, greedy. This perception isn't likely to change.
"And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore."
I'm not sure of your point. The population of the world isn't what's relevant here; it's your total market size. This is real-world economics, and people who sell things -- whether they're tangible or intangible goods -- must operate in the real world.
If it costs you, say, $10,000 to make something and you estimate that you can find 10,000 people willing to pay for it, your cost of sale will be $1 at the lowest. None of these actions will cause your total production cost or your cost per sale to go down:
Your cost of sale goes down with the number of copies sold, not the number of copies produced. Producing more copies will allow you to amortize the production costs over more units, but these units must be sold -- not copied or destroyed -- in order for you to make back your production costs.
Making additional copies does not increase the market size. Nor is, surprisingly enough, lowering the purchase price often enough to increase the market size. It probably seems patently obvious to most people that if you cut the selling price to 1/10th, your sales will increase by 10x, but those people actually in the business of selling things have to deal with the realities of the supply-demand curve (and it's called a curve and not a line or slope for just this reason), elasticity, market size, and so on. If anybody's boggled by this, consider that "Cher's Greatest Hits" probably sells for $10.00 on the iTunes store, but I wouldn't buy it if it were $8.00 or $5.00 or even free. Cher has her finite market size, and I'm not in it. For Cher's record company to make their money, they need to understand the market, and price the product accordingly. And free might not be the best price.
Ye olde "marginal cost of production goes to zero as supply goes to infinity" chestnut is most useful, I think, as a rationalization for piracy. The thought process is:
"Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense)."
I agree wholeheartedly. The great thing about copyright is that it's entirely opt-in. If there's the incentive to release one's work via Creative Commons, the GPL, or even into the public domain, they will do so. If Evenescence doesn't want to, then it's also their right to go with a record company who will sell their stuff with DRM attached to it. They're smart people; they own their lives and that's the choice they've made. If I don't want to pay or deal with DRM to enjoy their latest work, I can do one of two things:
I'll choose #1, but I acknowledge that I might be in the minority.
"The fact of the matter is that patents and copyrights are a relatively new concept that have only been around 200-250 years."
FWIW, modern copyright law celebrates its 300th anniversary in a couple of years.
"And if a person can pay, by whatever means, the damages the courts say he caused, then why shouldn't he be let off? Isn't that the point of damages? To compensate the plantiff for the damages he or she suffered?"
You're half right. There's the compensatory damaged that you've mentioned, and then there's punitive.
A compensatory, zero-sum system would have its benefits. For example, if you wanted a candy bar from a store and didn't have the money, then it would be an easy choice to just take it, since if you were caught, all you would owe is the cost of the candy bar. Same thing with a coffee maker or a car -- if you're caught, you just owe the cost of the product. Or, if you were a little more enterprising, you might try a little bank account phishing or a Nigerian-style scam operation. The upside is that you might be able to fleece tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if you were caught, all you'd have to do is pay it back, and you'd be back where you started, having lost only a little time.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the law also has an allowance for what's known as punitive damages. They are often awarded if there's malicious or deliberate intent, and its purpose is to punish the defendant and discourage the defendant from doing it again. For example, if I borrowed your bike and accidentally crashed it into a tree and you took me to court, the court might find for the cost of the bike, plus possibly a little extra as compensation for your lost use of the bike. But if I stole your bike and threw it off a cliff because I don't like you, and you took me to court, the court might make me pay some extra money as punishment. Going to court over a stolen bike is a somewhat silly example, but I hope you get the idea.
Another good reason why defendants shouldn't simply be "let off" is because it's often difficult to get the damages back to the injured parties. Let's take the example of the Nigerian scamster again... there's no doubt that he probably still has most of that $1MM left, and if he's already spent some of it, he can earn it back by just going back and scamming some more people. But if he got that $1MM by scamming 10,000 people, it might be difficult or impossible to find those people and ensure that they get back what they lost. That's why there would be punitive damages, or even jail time -- to encourage that particular scammer to not do it again, so a bunch of people's time isn't wasted again trying to apportion another $1MM back to another 10K victims.
I hope this helps.
"Do you have a source for this? If it's true, it sounds like good evidence that people would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for access to an all-you-can-eat DRM-free media download service."
It was the most recent torrent site to go down for a few days... it was covered on Slashdot maybe a month or two ago, and the $1.6K is from a post that one of the operators made bragging about said fact.
Since that was just a burst over a few days, a better data point would be to try to estimate how much people donate to TPB or BitTorrent each year. I have no doubt that people would pay for such a service (people pay for DRMed versions, like Napster, Yahoo! Music and the other various all-you-can-eat services), but the question is whether you'd find enough people to license their content to such a service (I assume you were talking in terms of a legal service in which the content providers were compensated). I don't think many people reading this would be interested in paying for such a service, since the content released on such (being DRM-free, of course) would also become instantly available on the free trackers.
"would just love to see a program that I wrote appear on warez sites. Means that people actually find it usefull. Besides, there is usually only a black market for an item that is popular in the first place. Having my sofware released in the warez scene would be a compliment to me..."
You've encapsulated the reason why many people (particularly young people) don't see the harm in piracy... the thought process is "If I had created something that was in high demand, I would give it away for free."
If you're genuine, I suggest that you look into donating time into helping develop open source software. The FOSS industry needs more people like you who are willing to invest significant effort into creating work that's highly useful for many people, and who only want the "compliment" of seeing their work distributed, rather than financial compensation.
I should point out that several OSS luminaries (Larry Wall comes to mind) have asked that the motivations behind FOSS not be used to justify piracy... ie. that we don't use the thought process that just because our financial situation and free time allow us to work for free, we have the moral right to acquire others' work for free.
"You're absolutely right. If somebody committed a crime which wasn't violent, why the heck should we put him in a prison? Give him a fine so big he will never even think about doing anything stupid. Never."
This would work out well for the defendant. If the fine were just $500K, all he'd need to do is put the word out, and so many people who appreciate DrinkOrDie's work would donate $5 or $10 via PayPal that the $500K fine would vanish within a couple of days, and he'd be back in business right quick.
I recall a few months ago that when one of the bigger torrent sites was shut down for a few days, they put a PayPal link on their site and got donations that averaged $1.6K per day... a lot more than the net profits of many software companies and even many indie record labels. Apparently fans of pirated stuff don't mind shelling out a little cash if it's for an important cause, like keeping the distribution points in business. If copyright infringement were just a civil matter, I'm sure the scene would take care of its own, so fines would not be much of a bother.
"Considering that these people are really no threat to society at all why waste their time and taxpayers money (in two countries in this case) locking them up in the first place?"
As a deterrent. You put it very well: prison will waste his time, and that's something that he has a finite amount of, no matter how much money he makes. And, it's a reality check for others in the scene: if you pirate enough software, you will. go. to. prison.
"It really should be a civil matter - fines would still hurt even if you have no money and get it garnished out of future earnings."
I can see your point from the POV of somebody who'd consider getting into the piracy scene. You put it well... with fines, the worse that can happen is that you'll declare bankruptcy and they'll garnish your wages. That's not so bad a punishment, so it would certainly be less risky to get into large-scale copyright infringement... I might even try it myself, if my set of moral values were a bit different. Reducing it to a civil matter might also have fringe benefits for all the people who benefit from the work of groups like DrinkOrDie... without the threat of prison scaring some people into getting into the business, there might be more warez faster for the rest of us.
But as you know, Title 17 is there to protect the rights of the people who write the software. The government wants to discourage, rather than encourage piracy, regardless of whatever fringe benefits there might be, or how sympathetic we are toward DrinkOrDie and other groups.