So, why not let the people producing the movie take the risk? If you pay for something that sounds like it will be interesting, before it's even made, you have no ability to gauge (or influence!) the eventual quality or interest. Why not just pay for actual (existing! finished! reviewed by people who share your taste!) entertainment? How many thousands of movie pitches are you willing to sit through every year so that you can decide which deserve your pennies? How about: just go on with your life, doing what you specialize in, and let the people who invest in, and make movies, give it a go and try to get your attention with their finished products? That way, they have much more at stake, and more incentive to do it right.
Right and wrong? You're one to talk. So far, you have absolutely refused to acknowledge that a judge found your pet "victims" to be ripping off another artist, and issued a warrant to get to the bottom of it. You flail around trying to find some other very well known artist that's doing the same, and pick one that - given his deep pockets - would be an absolute magnet for lawsuits if it were actually true - all so that you can play race as a factor in an attempt to distract the conversation away from the underlying wrong: ripping people off.
support RIAA as it attacks people
The RIAA is a trade association formed by record labels and artists. There is no RIAA without its members. You cannot bring yourself to acknowledge the fact that it is creative artists that are defending against the massive piracy of their works. We can argue all day about how much or how little, or the effect on sales... but in this case, none of that matters. Because this is about other artists ripping them off and not licensing their works. Since you can't muster the intellectual honesty to actually admit that it's exactly that sort of thing that gives credibility to the RIAA's legal teams, you've lost all moral standing to whine about right and wrong. You can't lecture on that subject when you're a moral relativist.
So, nice attempt at sounding patronizing and scolding instead of actually addressing the points you keep ducking. Ad hominem attacks are the primary tool of the weak, and you're a case study in it.
I am fascinated by your correct usage of the word 'loose', it's a rarity on/. Are you new here?
Woops! Was I posting on slashdot? Sorry, it was a temporary lapse. Ahem:
I must have losed my mind. On a Friday, its easy to loose track of you're gramer because its so hard, and to complicaded. Two bad for me! I didn't mean to shock u with my righting 133tness. It was a looser thing to do.
Would you like this. Your neighbour in charge of the neighbourhood watch program say you copied his lawn hedge which is his lively hood and didn't pay him.
He can say it all he wants. He can't own copyrights on that, just like you can't have the copyright on a food recipe. A hedge in public view isn't any more copyrightable than the color of paint on the house. A written-down trade secret on the formula of the paint or on some technique involved in hedge-maintenance may, however, be intellectual property. Are you saying that the person who made another hedge in the style of his actually broke into his house or his private data and stole that IP? Otherwise, you're way off base.
The police come take you to jail
Why? Did the neighbor convince a judge that I was actually doing something criminal, and was a warrant written? On what grounds? Your analogy might almost make sense if it were actually in the realm of the possible.
wearing a crime scene jacket
Are you wearing your "crime scene" underwear right now? Just putting those words in front of another word doesn't make it any more real. Who, exactly, is it that you think is confusing a trade association's logo with a law enforcement uniform? You still haven't said who you think is that stupid and paranoid - you just keep repeating it like it means something other than what it is: a clear way for people on the scene to know who is NOT law enforcement. It's the same reason that people in the press wear jackets that say "Washington Post" or "CNN."
you now have to go to court with that neighbour a few months later
Why? You STILL can't get this straight: you go to court with your neighbor over a civil suit. Civil suits don't start with arrests or warrants. They start with one private person or entity suing another. Period. The first part of the fantasy scenario you described included an arrest and jail. That would be a criminal matter. If you go to court in a criminal matter, your opponent is the government agency pressing the charges (municipal, county, state, or federal, for example). Your neighbor can't "use the police" on you in a civil matter. Nor can your neighborhood watch. All they can do is ask the police to look into something, and the police can only do something if there is the reasonable understanding that a crime is taking place. Me copying your intellectual property without license is a civil matter - hence, a lawsuit. Me going out and making money on illegal copies can be a crime, and hence criminal proceedings. It is also possible for BOTH to be in play at the same time.
But Lomax, who is now 85 years old and disabled from strokes, has received no proceeds, his family said.
And you're telling me that despite that, they couldn't find a single lawyer willing to do a contingency suit (which usually nets the lawyer 30% of the take) against a blatantly infringing rich musician? BS. There's more to it. There is no secret cabal that decides who can sue who. As the saying goes, you can sue a ham sandwich. It's a better bet that they approached a lawyer who decided that he had no standing in a suit because he signed his rights over to someone else. Unfortunately, a lot of early-last-century musicians DID do exactly that with recordings of their work, in exchange for cash in pocket right then and there, which they found to be more useful than worrying about some compilation artist using sound bites sometime in the next century. So, show me where they brought a suit, in good standing, and lost for mystery reasons, and you'll have something to talk about. In the meantime, try to come to terms with the fact that there are entire organizations made up of and representing black artists, black culture, and black record labels, and they prevail on copyright issues all the time.
"Trade Association" as you called them
Oh, man. You DO know that the "IA" in RIAA stands for "industry associati
I guess aiding and abetting law breakers just isn't enough to get the typical US citizen's ire up....
Yes, well, that would also involve not eating hot dogs from meat packing plants that are blatantly breaking employment laws, and not fueling the problem by hiring curb-side landscape workers completely outside the law. People can't have it both ways, and... they want to.
But the whole credit-card-issuing thing brings a new, and especially noxious form of credibility into the illegal alien scenario. You can get a Visa/Debit card in Mexico, for example. So why not just bring your real account with you from home? Oh, right... because you're a criminal. The only plus side of this is that when an illegal is busted for one crime or another, and cut loose pending a trial date, there's a better chance of finding them by tracking their gas station purchases, etc. But... that's not worth the philosophical price paid for rewarding the initial law breaking in the first place. I would think that the legal immigrants would be up in arms over this dillution of what they work so hard to accomplish.
To loosely quote the comment my English teacher wrote on one of my papers: "In the USA, children have no rights."
Did your teacher also write down, "In the USA, children also don't have the same obligations or liability for their actions as an adult." ?
Children are presumed to be lacking the judgement and experience to understand the relationship between rights and accountability. That's what their parents or guardians are there to provide, and is one of the reasons that many jurisdictions find parents to be liable for some of what their kids do (or don't do!).
Of course the "children have no rights" notion is BS. Trying to look at behavioral rules applied within a publicly funded school as if they are the same as when a kid is in his front yard or with his parents at the beach is nonsense.
And hence my link about the crows. They shop around for a twig of a particular type, and then modify it to make it a better grub-hooker. Pretty specific behavior.
Way to completely avoid responding to getting busting on BSing about Moby, race-baiting, STILL lying about the very article you're quoting from, and so on.
Despite hundreds of posts on slash dot of charges made by the RIAA and cases that were thrown out because the charges where false or inflated.
Who said anything about charges? When a record label sues someone over distributing their material online to ten thousand of their dearest 'friends,' it's a CIVIL matter. There are no charges. The fact that you can't even get the basic difference between criminal and civil proceedings straight illustrates what a blowhard you are on this topic. And... hundreds of posts? Would that be hundreds of posts from a demographic that widely embraces the notion that artists should have no copyrights in the first place? I could say that there are thousands of posts on slashdot that specifically claim that no artist should be allowed to make any money doing anything other than singing in bars, and that information Wants To Be Free, and therefore so should a movie that it just cost millions of dollars to produce. Pointing out when someone has filed against the wrong person out of the millions that are going to all sorts of trouble to avoid paying $1 for a song and "sharing" their ripped-off entertainment with any IP address that comes along... well, a frivalous (or just plain ill-conceived) law suit is just that. I have no problem with countersuing, and when a judge says to the plaintiff, "you just sued a dead person that doesn't own a computer," then whoever launched that suit should feel some significant punitive pain (just as should the people who launch the frivalous malpractice suites that drive up all of our medical bills). That being said...
Innocent until proven guilty
Who said anyone is guilty until proven innocent? If you sue ME over calling you a liar in a public venue, am I now guilty until proven innocent? No. That's a civil matter. Despite your lingering cognitive difficulty on the subject, it is possible to criminally violate copyright law (as in, running an ongoing business that makes money off of the deliberate act of violating someone else's copyright, should a judge be convinced the conduct has the appearance of having become criminal). And in the case in question, a judge authorized a search warrant because he was sufficiently convinced that's exactly what was going on. That's not a conviction, it's probable cause.
Law enforcement agencies (often in response to complaints filed by private sector people or organizations - everything from environmental groups and watchdog groups pointing out insider trading scams to little old ladies tired of some jerk in her neighborhood stealing her firewood every night) routinely go to a judge for a warrant and are turned down. Why is it you're not screaming about the judge, here, since you're so convinced that the copyrighted material this studio was using was being properly licensed and paid for? The judge seemed rather sure it was not, based on the evidence that had to be presented to him in order to authorize the warrant. Sure, the prosecutors could fail to deliver. But the case sounds utterly open-and-closed. Did the studio/label write a check, or NOT, to the people whose music they were using? How can it possibly be any more simple? You're positive they did, and the judge is reasonably certain they did not. Why are you so convinced? Post a link to the evidence you've already read, how about.
otally disregarding the sovereignty of your own countries laws.
Since you can't tell the difference between:
countries country's countries'
I won't expect you to understand the difference between countries that do, and do not, have extradition treaties with each other. If someone in the U.S. were shown to be indictable over some bit of fraud or similar activity victimizing someone in Australia, an Australian prosecutor could proceed with the same sort of approach going the other direction. Australia defends its sovereign rights by entering into those treaties that it finds useful to it. If, in its own interest, Australia wants to have the option of extradicting a criminal into Australia for trial there, they have to have it both ways. If they don't like the notion that one of their citizens breaking another country's laws might subject that person to extradition, then they also cannot expect the same ability when the tables are turned. It couldn't be simpler. Obviously, Australia chose to leave its options open, and after a lengthy proceeding there, came to the same conclusion: the guy should stand trial for he was doing to his U.S. targets.
Does the crow actually kill its future food with the stick or just use the stick to get access to it? Grubs are not the most agile/quick creatures (as opposed to mammals).
But grubs are delicate invertebrates. Rooting around in a crack, mushing at and hooking one with a twig-hook has to injure them at least some... just as the animals getting poked by the chimps' proto-spears are stunned/injured/slowed down. I'm a little perplexed, here... I sense people groping around for some sort of moral relevence and hairsplitting in all of this. There is none.
it's changing those TOOLS into WEAPONS that is only an ape/chimp(/human) trait
So, a chimp uses a slightly modified stick to get hold of, kill, and eat something that it otherwise would not be able to get. You're referring to this tool as a weapon. Fair enough.
Now, a crow finds a raw material, slightly modified it, and uses it to obtain, kill and eat something it otherwise would not be able to get. How is this different?
In the case of the crows, the crows are seen carefully looking around for just the right semi-fresh twig, and then bending it into a putter/hockey-stick shape so that they can use it to hook the grubs out of cracks. Pretty cool.
I agree though, that there's something more sophisticated about sharpening, vs. bending. At least a little, anyway.
Crows, it appears, will also use tools to get at grubs they otherwise wouldn't be able to kill and eat. Some critters are smart that way. There are also now observed cases of mother dolphins passing along tool-using culture in food-gathering.
So what do they do instead? Spend their money on hookers and crack?
If you penalize investment by several percent, that's several percent of the available investment capital that tends to sit on one place longer, and less fluidly find its way into better, growing investments. One of the primary things that makes the US economy grow more quickly, and show better productivity than its counterparts in places like Europe, is its embrace of small- and mid-size companies that are growing and creating jobs. A few percentage-points change in the investment in those areas makes a colossal difference in the overall health of the economy, and thus in the overall taxes raised. Tax less, collect MORE on the busier economy that results. There's a reason tax revenues have been up the past few years, even as the rates have been down. And more business activity (which requires investment) is central to that. People with money to invest don't just waste it if it costs a little more to invest it - but they do tend to move it around far less often if they are punished for doing so. And the market for growing businesses suffers as a result, along with the innovation, job growth, and everything else that derives from it.
You said it! Without capital gains tax cuts I wouldn't be investing! I would just keep all my money under my mattress.
Whatever floats your boat. I personally know plenty of people who would put money into more start-ups, emerging economic areas, and other fast-moving areas if they weren't actively penalized for helping other people make money with their own. It's absurd.
Let me clarify: Wouldn't it be even better to subsidise something that has more tangible inherent societal benefits? People could be paid to do that instead.
Why do people always seem to discuss these things as if they're mutually exclusive. But, out of curiosity, what inherent social benefits did you have in mind? Do you have some sense of where you can put my tax dollars that will actually cause parents to personally find joy in making sure their kids actually take pride in a thorough education? Were you thinking instead of finding ways to get investment to happen, so that more jobs are created, and the overall standard of living increases, and with it both the demand for and the money to pay for better health care, environmental stewardship, and so on? Oh, right - that's called "capital gains tax cuts."
We create the most tangible inherent social benefits by getting people to aspire to great careers and to invest in enterprises that provide a place for them to thrive. Unless you think you can spend your way into a culture that honors hard work, actually completing and using a free public education, and personal integrity - the very things that deliver tangible social benefits - then why fret? In the meantime, there's science to do.
if you're just going to blast all the money into space
Really? So, when the tens of thousands of people that would make this happen cash their paychecks, that money is launched into space? I'm betting that at least some of them actually buy houses, send their kids to college, invest in things, and maybe even start businesses. Or even if all they do is go home and play Halo and order pizza... that's still seeing the money pumped right into the good ol' terrestrial economy.
1) You say you know that Moby doesn't pay licensing fees for the work he uses from other artists. And you seem to imply that this is common knowledge. And yet, the record companies that represent the artists whose work you say he's ripping off - the ones with money at stake if he is in fact ripping them off - are not doing anything about protecting their own artists because (this is fabulous) the talent they work for is black, and he's white. Ever heard of Occam's Razor? Maybe it's just a little more likely that all of the lawyers that work for him and his own label are actually looking to avoid predictable trouble, and simply honor the copyrights in question, just like most artists do (but not, apparently, the ones that got raided in Atlanta). But if all you can do is play the race card, then your position here must indeed be as weak as it appears.
2) Even though a judge, having reviewed evidence that someone is in fact producing and selling material that's built on the unlicensed use of someone else's copyrighted work and been sufficiently convinced of probable cause, has issued a warrant - you consider the very people who are hurt by that (the artists and labels that do play by the rules) to be in a conflict of interest for digging into the issue. How can you not see that if they did not do so, they would be working against the interests of the people that pay them to work for them? The artists that sign up with recording labels that are RIAA members are the ones that drive this process. Certain music genres seem to rely much more heavily on lifting other people's work, and there are plenty of mechanisms in place to make sure that if you're going to do so, it works out for everyone. Do you think Best Buy really vets each of their CD purchases to see if the compilation or adaptation has been properly pushed through the legal filters separating fair use from something requiring license? No, and it's not their problem, if the distributor selling it to them asserts that they're doing so legally. The fact that the distributor is lying (or, according to the judge, convincingly appears to be) shifts the focus right back to the source, not the retailer.
Right now many of the large corporations have law suites against their competitors Apple vs Microsoft etc. Claiming copyright violation.
Gee, for someone who doesn't live in a trailer park, you sure don't seem to grasp the difference between civil proceedings and criminal ones. Just look it up, OK? The judge in a civil suit absolutely can compel the seizure of material that a lawsuit's opponents demonstrate to be relevent. The judge issuing a search warrant in a prospective criminal case is part of a completely different process. Actually, given your ranting, it's possible you really don't understand the difference. To wit:
Listen trailer park, if you start throwing insults at folks expect them back.
You mean like when I called you on a context-less, BS reference to an article that doesn't say what you said it does? That's not "low brow," it's the truth.
Its OK for a company who has a competitor to use the police to attack that competitor if that company is a small. The large company (or their proxy) must call them thieves in advance of the bust.
What part of "stealing something and selling it doesn't make you a competitor" don't you get? The record labels presenting the evidence to a judge aren't "using the police," they're doing exactly what everybody gets to do when they've got evidence of a crime. If you know who has ripped you off, and present that evidence, and a judge issues a search warrant in the case, are you "using the police" in some unfair way? Because if you are, the defense lawyers will be able to tear you apart. If the people who got raided have done nothing wrong, and the judge who saw the evidence and issued a warrant for the raid did so on false information from the RIAA, then there will and should be hell to pay. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Since you have evidence on the Moby side of things, perhaps you've also got inside info on this case.
Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.'s national headquarters in advance of the raid
Right, just like law enforcement people all over the country, throughout history, have consulted with all sorts of third parties who are more familiar with the subject at hand. Police departments have contacts with contractors, consultants, industry experts, insurance companies, other agencies, and (depending on the case in question) your average Joe Blow who just happens to be familiar with the people or circumstances involved in a given case. Gee, do you think that maybe when the issue in question happens to be people actively going about trying to make money off of other people's copyrighted works, that perhaps one of the people you'd want to talk to would a trade association that has invested a lot of time and money into defending those copyrights?
Let's say that you had evidence of (sticking with the local example) the local Atlanta office of the RIAA actually doing something illegal. And because you have a vested interest in the outcome, you've spent a lot of time gathering information, getting to know who all the people involved are, getting to know the circumstances. Now, you've convinced local law enforcement (just like in this case, the sherrif's office and local PD) that there's something worthy of a warrant and an investigation, and you're willing to risk a purgery conviction if it turns out you're BS-ing because you've got some axe to grinf. A judge has to issue the warrant (as happened in this case), and that judge would have to have decided whether or not the time (and taxpayer money) that the sherrif's department saved in not having to start all of that investigation effort from scratch, by having you provide what you know, does or does not pollute the possible criminal case that would come from the investigation. Wouldn't you rather your local PD saved its time and your money? Someone else has already done the ground work and knows the legal issues better than anyone that works in the sherrif's office. This isn't any different than when a volunteer group helps out with busting some stalker after kids, or when a Girl Scout troop video tapes people dumping trash on the side of a road they've volunteered to keep clean. Of course, I suppose you think that scout uniforms are also "police type" uniforms, right?
It seems to me law enforcement wear this type of jacket at crimes scenes so I would call the jackets police style uniforms.
So, if a drunk driver crashes into the front of a grocery store, and the store's lot attendants (wearing the jackets with the store logo on the back) were helping to clean up the mess and telling the police what they saw, would you consider them to be wearing "police style" uniforms? Any entity that finds itself periodically dealing with law enforcement on the scene (medical types, clean-up types, insurance investigators) make the cops happy by wearing something that helps everyone involved know who is who in a busy setting. You obviously haven't dealt with that sort of situation before, not that that's any excuse for thinking that a windbreaker with your organization's name on it is the same as identifying yourself as law enforcement.
Since the RIAA is handling the evidence that they will use later to charge these DJs in court
How do you know this? You don't. The large team of people from the sherrif's office and the PD would have taken pictures, and tagged and seized that which (or enough of which) they consider important to a prosecution. I've helped police clean up around a criminal vandalism scene that impacted people I know - would you consider that a conflict of interest?
attacking the competition
Competition? What competition? That's like saying that when someone steals stuff from your store, and then sells it on the sidewalk outside your store, they're "competition." A record label's competition is another record label that is competing to work with the artist they represent, or another
fact. The RIAA showed up at a record label with police dressed in police style uniforms. Not to many disorganized trade association have that kind of power.
You are lying, here (but you knew that, of course). The article (which YOU say is carefully researched) expressly says that the raid was conducted by personnel from the local Sherrif's office and police department. The article says that, later ("after" the raid), people wearing RIAA jackets (that's what you consider "police style uniforms"?) helped box up material. They also helped with some surveilance before hand. Just like the residents in my neighborhood help out if we've got a problem.
The RIAA also participates in the collection, administration and distribution of music licenses and royalties. They have a mission and are guided by the major record labels that make up 90% of US sales. They are not just the trade association of small music label who need a helping hand.
Right. Dealing with administrative issues across a large market is exactly the sort of thing that record labels (small and large) are very happy to pool resources and avoid doing with hundreds or thousands of separate systems. Just like organized labor in a factory spares thousands of people from having to negotiate individually and allows them to share lawyers and lobbying power. And who said they are "just the trade association of small music label who need a helping hand?" I did not. You are deceitfully putting words in my mouth so that you have a straw man argument to fight. That particular kind of deceit doesn't help your credibility, especially since you lied on your first "fact."
Was there a opinion pole I missed. Next time you have the urge to tell a whole group of people, what they think. Think again.
Do have any idea how ironic it is to tell me how to think in the same breath that you're telling me it's not cool to say what other people think? I'm telling you what I see in the form of thousands of posts on this subject. "The RIAA" is referred to over and over again as if it was the record label, or as if there were no record labels that aren't members. It's not a monopoly (there is no barrier to entry in forming your own label, striking deals with artists, and selling those works however you see fit). I have no urge to "tell a whole group of people" what they think. They are exhibiting what they think, in large numbers, every day. Right here.
Its like the US selling arms to Iraq and then attacking Iraq becasue they are armed and dangerous.
Huh! I wonder if "being armed and dangerous," in your mind, is the same as "invading neighboring countries" and "shooting at airplanes patrolling no-fly zones every week for years after you signed a cease-fire after having your invasion stopped by force" and "kicking out UN inspectors trying to find your WMDs, lying about where you put thousands of tons of them, and then raking billions of dollars out of the UN oil-for-food program while continuing to import missile parts, send $50k payments to suicide bomber families" and so on. Being armed and dangerous is a lot different than using it, for years on end, the way that Saddam did. Have a Kurd or a Kuwaiti over for dinner sometime.
The record industry has made millions of dollars of DJs who often just remix old songs
How? Because those DJ's all pay what the original artists expect? You're saying that DJ's DO pay the asked-for licensing when they make remixes? The issue here is how often that does not happen.
Now that these independ studios are now distributing through there own channels the major labels are not seeing any money. Its time to send in the dogs an shut them down.
Right. Because the people who created the music are being ripped off. Their "own channels" is your friendly way of saying "a channel that doesn't include paying the person who created the music in the first place."
I mean, everyone knows he's Indo-Afro-Latino-Cau-freakin'-castic. The only thing he's not is Laplander. What we need are more Laplander game designers. Then we'd be playing some reindeer games, man.
Unfortunately, no such astronomical phenomena exist. There are no far-infrared galaxies. There are voids, but they show no gravitational or infrared signs of containing encapsulated galaxies.
That statement:
1) Assumes that you've actually looked everywhere within the visible universe (visible to US), and that you've done so with adequate sensitivity. And that such spot is not, by bad coincidence, on the other side of some galaxy or other obscuring structure.
2) Assumes that your premise is even correct. Do you really think that an advanced civilization would trap all/i of that energy, or just much as would be useful - which would probably be a very small percentage of the star's overall output.
We weren't too small minded to risk lives hiking over mountain ranges or floating in very-likely-to-sink boats across open ocean to other continents, remember? Primitive Asians floating across the Pacific to populate South America or hoofing it in across the northern straights were taking on something at least as dicey as we currently see activities in space. Villages wiped each other out, disease killed off whole tribes - all of the stuff that people say would keep us from colonizing elsewhere. Sure, some of those efforts would fail - just as they have for tens of thousands of years. But some will succeed, too.
we use our resources to make trivial things that amuse us for a short period of time (ipod, iphone, etc)
That's because we evolved from, and still are short-lived primates. Our brains were wired to deal with much more short-term issues. Planning through the coming weather change is about as far as we ever needed to go, mentally. Only some people have the wiring to do big picture stuff... and guess what: they tend to get jobs doing big picture stuff. As for trivial things like iPods: you'd rather have a society with somewhat better antibiotics, but completely absent all of the things that make life a pleasure? The iPod is just a newer take on cave painting and tribal dancing. The fact that we evolved into creatures that put handprints on walls and invent group songs to sing doesn't mean we can't also do things like invent solar cells, fly transplant organs through the air to another city where they're needed, or manage to live past 25. Being productive, inventive, and joyous are not mutually exclusive - they're interdependent.
rather than doing useful things (cure diseases, etc).
I'm sorry to hear that you died of Polio. Or was it Smallpox? Or maybe spoiled food because we haven't invented refridgeration yet. Anyway, sorry you died.
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I'd be willing to pay my share
So, why not let the people producing the movie take the risk? If you pay for something that sounds like it will be interesting, before it's even made, you have no ability to gauge (or influence!) the eventual quality or interest. Why not just pay for actual (existing! finished! reviewed by people who share your taste!) entertainment? How many thousands of movie pitches are you willing to sit through every year so that you can decide which deserve your pennies? How about: just go on with your life, doing what you specialize in, and let the people who invest in, and make movies, give it a go and try to get your attention with their finished products? That way, they have much more at stake, and more incentive to do it right.
Right and wrong? You're one to talk. So far, you have absolutely refused to acknowledge that a judge found your pet "victims" to be ripping off another artist, and issued a warrant to get to the bottom of it. You flail around trying to find some other very well known artist that's doing the same, and pick one that - given his deep pockets - would be an absolute magnet for lawsuits if it were actually true - all so that you can play race as a factor in an attempt to distract the conversation away from the underlying wrong: ripping people off.
... but in this case, none of that matters. Because this is about other artists ripping them off and not licensing their works. Since you can't muster the intellectual honesty to actually admit that it's exactly that sort of thing that gives credibility to the RIAA's legal teams, you've lost all moral standing to whine about right and wrong. You can't lecture on that subject when you're a moral relativist.
support RIAA as it attacks people
The RIAA is a trade association formed by record labels and artists. There is no RIAA without its members. You cannot bring yourself to acknowledge the fact that it is creative artists that are defending against the massive piracy of their works. We can argue all day about how much or how little, or the effect on sales
So, nice attempt at sounding patronizing and scolding instead of actually addressing the points you keep ducking. Ad hominem attacks are the primary tool of the weak, and you're a case study in it.
I am fascinated by your correct usage of the word 'loose', it's a rarity on /. Are you new here?
Woops! Was I posting on slashdot? Sorry, it was a temporary lapse. Ahem:
I must have losed my mind. On a Friday, its easy to loose track of you're gramer because its so hard, and to complicaded. Two bad for me! I didn't mean to shock u with my righting 133tness. It was a looser thing to do.
Is that betterer?
Would you like this. Your neighbour in charge of the neighbourhood watch program say you copied his lawn hedge which is his lively hood and didn't pay him.
He can say it all he wants. He can't own copyrights on that, just like you can't have the copyright on a food recipe. A hedge in public view isn't any more copyrightable than the color of paint on the house. A written-down trade secret on the formula of the paint or on some technique involved in hedge-maintenance may, however, be intellectual property. Are you saying that the person who made another hedge in the style of his actually broke into his house or his private data and stole that IP? Otherwise, you're way off base.
The police come take you to jail
Why? Did the neighbor convince a judge that I was actually doing something criminal, and was a warrant written? On what grounds? Your analogy might almost make sense if it were actually in the realm of the possible.
wearing a crime scene jacket
Are you wearing your "crime scene" underwear right now? Just putting those words in front of another word doesn't make it any more real. Who, exactly, is it that you think is confusing a trade association's logo with a law enforcement uniform? You still haven't said who you think is that stupid and paranoid - you just keep repeating it like it means something other than what it is: a clear way for people on the scene to know who is NOT law enforcement. It's the same reason that people in the press wear jackets that say "Washington Post" or "CNN."
you now have to go to court with that neighbour a few months later
Why? You STILL can't get this straight: you go to court with your neighbor over a civil suit. Civil suits don't start with arrests or warrants. They start with one private person or entity suing another. Period. The first part of the fantasy scenario you described included an arrest and jail. That would be a criminal matter. If you go to court in a criminal matter, your opponent is the government agency pressing the charges (municipal, county, state, or federal, for example). Your neighbor can't "use the police" on you in a civil matter. Nor can your neighborhood watch. All they can do is ask the police to look into something, and the police can only do something if there is the reasonable understanding that a crime is taking place. Me copying your intellectual property without license is a civil matter - hence, a lawsuit. Me going out and making money on illegal copies can be a crime, and hence criminal proceedings. It is also possible for BOTH to be in play at the same time.
But Lomax, who is now 85 years old and disabled from strokes, has received no proceeds, his family said.
And you're telling me that despite that, they couldn't find a single lawyer willing to do a contingency suit (which usually nets the lawyer 30% of the take) against a blatantly infringing rich musician? BS. There's more to it. There is no secret cabal that decides who can sue who. As the saying goes, you can sue a ham sandwich. It's a better bet that they approached a lawyer who decided that he had no standing in a suit because he signed his rights over to someone else. Unfortunately, a lot of early-last-century musicians DID do exactly that with recordings of their work, in exchange for cash in pocket right then and there, which they found to be more useful than worrying about some compilation artist using sound bites sometime in the next century. So, show me where they brought a suit, in good standing, and lost for mystery reasons, and you'll have something to talk about. In the meantime, try to come to terms with the fact that there are entire organizations made up of and representing black artists, black culture, and black record labels, and they prevail on copyright issues all the time.
"Trade Association" as you called them
Oh, man. You DO know that the "IA" in RIAA stands for "industry associati
I guess aiding and abetting law breakers just isn't enough to get the typical US citizen's ire up....
Yes, well, that would also involve not eating hot dogs from meat packing plants that are blatantly breaking employment laws, and not fueling the problem by hiring curb-side landscape workers completely outside the law. People can't have it both ways, and... they want to.
But the whole credit-card-issuing thing brings a new, and especially noxious form of credibility into the illegal alien scenario. You can get a Visa/Debit card in Mexico, for example. So why not just bring your real account with you from home? Oh, right... because you're a criminal. The only plus side of this is that when an illegal is busted for one crime or another, and cut loose pending a trial date, there's a better chance of finding them by tracking their gas station purchases, etc. But... that's not worth the philosophical price paid for rewarding the initial law breaking in the first place. I would think that the legal immigrants would be up in arms over this dillution of what they work so hard to accomplish.
To loosely quote the comment my English teacher wrote on one of my papers: "In the USA, children have no rights."
Did your teacher also write down, "In the USA, children also don't have the same obligations or liability for their actions as an adult." ?
Children are presumed to be lacking the judgement and experience to understand the relationship between rights and accountability. That's what their parents or guardians are there to provide, and is one of the reasons that many jurisdictions find parents to be liable for some of what their kids do (or don't do!).
Of course the "children have no rights" notion is BS. Trying to look at behavioral rules applied within a publicly funded school as if they are the same as when a kid is in his front yard or with his parents at the beach is nonsense.
actually fashioning a tool for a specific purpose
And hence my link about the crows. They shop around for a twig of a particular type, and then modify it to make it a better grub-hooker. Pretty specific behavior.
Way to completely avoid responding to getting busting on BSing about Moby, race-baiting, STILL lying about the very article you're quoting from, and so on.
... well, a frivalous (or just plain ill-conceived) law suit is just that. I have no problem with countersuing, and when a judge says to the plaintiff, "you just sued a dead person that doesn't own a computer," then whoever launched that suit should feel some significant punitive pain (just as should the people who launch the frivalous malpractice suites that drive up all of our medical bills). That being said...
Despite hundreds of posts on slash dot of charges made by the RIAA and cases that were thrown out because the charges where false or inflated.
Who said anything about charges? When a record label sues someone over distributing their material online to ten thousand of their dearest 'friends,' it's a CIVIL matter. There are no charges. The fact that you can't even get the basic difference between criminal and civil proceedings straight illustrates what a blowhard you are on this topic. And... hundreds of posts? Would that be hundreds of posts from a demographic that widely embraces the notion that artists should have no copyrights in the first place? I could say that there are thousands of posts on slashdot that specifically claim that no artist should be allowed to make any money doing anything other than singing in bars, and that information Wants To Be Free, and therefore so should a movie that it just cost millions of dollars to produce. Pointing out when someone has filed against the wrong person out of the millions that are going to all sorts of trouble to avoid paying $1 for a song and "sharing" their ripped-off entertainment with any IP address that comes along
Innocent until proven guilty
Who said anyone is guilty until proven innocent? If you sue ME over calling you a liar in a public venue, am I now guilty until proven innocent? No. That's a civil matter. Despite your lingering cognitive difficulty on the subject, it is possible to criminally violate copyright law (as in, running an ongoing business that makes money off of the deliberate act of violating someone else's copyright, should a judge be convinced the conduct has the appearance of having become criminal). And in the case in question, a judge authorized a search warrant because he was sufficiently convinced that's exactly what was going on. That's not a conviction, it's probable cause.
Law enforcement agencies (often in response to complaints filed by private sector people or organizations - everything from environmental groups and watchdog groups pointing out insider trading scams to little old ladies tired of some jerk in her neighborhood stealing her firewood every night) routinely go to a judge for a warrant and are turned down. Why is it you're not screaming about the judge, here, since you're so convinced that the copyrighted material this studio was using was being properly licensed and paid for? The judge seemed rather sure it was not, based on the evidence that had to be presented to him in order to authorize the warrant. Sure, the prosecutors could fail to deliver. But the case sounds utterly open-and-closed. Did the studio/label write a check, or NOT, to the people whose music they were using? How can it possibly be any more simple? You're positive they did, and the judge is reasonably certain they did not. Why are you so convinced? Post a link to the evidence you've already read, how about.
otally disregarding the sovereignty of your own countries laws.
Since you can't tell the difference between:
countries
country's
countries'
I won't expect you to understand the difference between countries that do, and do not, have extradition treaties with each other. If someone in the U.S. were shown to be indictable over some bit of fraud or similar activity victimizing someone in Australia, an Australian prosecutor could proceed with the same sort of approach going the other direction. Australia defends its sovereign rights by entering into those treaties that it finds useful to it. If, in its own interest, Australia wants to have the option of extradicting a criminal into Australia for trial there, they have to have it both ways. If they don't like the notion that one of their citizens breaking another country's laws might subject that person to extradition, then they also cannot expect the same ability when the tables are turned. It couldn't be simpler. Obviously, Australia chose to leave its options open, and after a lengthy proceeding there, came to the same conclusion: the guy should stand trial for he was doing to his U.S. targets.
Does the crow actually kill its future food with the stick or just use the stick to get access to it? Grubs are not the most agile/quick creatures (as opposed to mammals).
But grubs are delicate invertebrates. Rooting around in a crack, mushing at and hooking one with a twig-hook has to injure them at least some... just as the animals getting poked by the chimps' proto-spears are stunned/injured/slowed down. I'm a little perplexed, here... I sense people groping around for some sort of moral relevence and hairsplitting in all of this. There is none.
it's changing those TOOLS into WEAPONS that is only an ape/chimp(/human) trait
So, a chimp uses a slightly modified stick to get hold of, kill, and eat something that it otherwise would not be able to get. You're referring to this tool as a weapon. Fair enough.
Now, a crow finds a raw material, slightly modified it, and uses it to obtain, kill and eat something it otherwise would not be able to get. How is this different?
In the case of the crows, the crows are seen carefully looking around for just the right semi-fresh twig, and then bending it into a putter/hockey-stick shape so that they can use it to hook the grubs out of cracks. Pretty cool.
I agree though, that there's something more sophisticated about sharpening, vs. bending. At least a little, anyway.
Crows, it appears , will also use tools to get at grubs they otherwise wouldn't be able to kill and eat. Some critters are smart that way. There are also now observed cases of mother dolphins passing along tool-using culture in food-gathering.
So what do they do instead? Spend their money on hookers and crack?
If you penalize investment by several percent, that's several percent of the available investment capital that tends to sit on one place longer, and less fluidly find its way into better, growing investments. One of the primary things that makes the US economy grow more quickly, and show better productivity than its counterparts in places like Europe, is its embrace of small- and mid-size companies that are growing and creating jobs. A few percentage-points change in the investment in those areas makes a colossal difference in the overall health of the economy, and thus in the overall taxes raised. Tax less, collect MORE on the busier economy that results. There's a reason tax revenues have been up the past few years, even as the rates have been down. And more business activity (which requires investment) is central to that. People with money to invest don't just waste it if it costs a little more to invest it - but they do tend to move it around far less often if they are punished for doing so. And the market for growing businesses suffers as a result, along with the innovation, job growth, and everything else that derives from it.
You said it! Without capital gains tax cuts I wouldn't be investing! I would just keep all my money under my mattress.
Whatever floats your boat. I personally know plenty of people who would put money into more start-ups, emerging economic areas, and other fast-moving areas if they weren't actively penalized for helping other people make money with their own. It's absurd.
Let me clarify: Wouldn't it be even better to subsidise something that has more tangible inherent societal benefits? People could be paid to do that instead.
Why do people always seem to discuss these things as if they're mutually exclusive. But, out of curiosity, what inherent social benefits did you have in mind? Do you have some sense of where you can put my tax dollars that will actually cause parents to personally find joy in making sure their kids actually take pride in a thorough education? Were you thinking instead of finding ways to get investment to happen, so that more jobs are created, and the overall standard of living increases, and with it both the demand for and the money to pay for better health care, environmental stewardship, and so on? Oh, right - that's called "capital gains tax cuts."
We create the most tangible inherent social benefits by getting people to aspire to great careers and to invest in enterprises that provide a place for them to thrive. Unless you think you can spend your way into a culture that honors hard work, actually completing and using a free public education, and personal integrity - the very things that deliver tangible social benefits - then why fret? In the meantime, there's science to do.
if you're just going to blast all the money into space
Really? So, when the tens of thousands of people that would make this happen cash their paychecks, that money is launched into space? I'm betting that at least some of them actually buy houses, send their kids to college, invest in things, and maybe even start businesses. Or even if all they do is go home and play Halo and order pizza... that's still seeing the money pumped right into the good ol' terrestrial economy.
Let's see if we can boil this down:
1) You say you know that Moby doesn't pay licensing fees for the work he uses from other artists. And you seem to imply that this is common knowledge. And yet, the record companies that represent the artists whose work you say he's ripping off - the ones with money at stake if he is in fact ripping them off - are not doing anything about protecting their own artists because (this is fabulous) the talent they work for is black, and he's white. Ever heard of Occam's Razor? Maybe it's just a little more likely that all of the lawyers that work for him and his own label are actually looking to avoid predictable trouble, and simply honor the copyrights in question, just like most artists do (but not, apparently, the ones that got raided in Atlanta). But if all you can do is play the race card, then your position here must indeed be as weak as it appears.
2) Even though a judge, having reviewed evidence that someone is in fact producing and selling material that's built on the unlicensed use of someone else's copyrighted work and been sufficiently convinced of probable cause, has issued a warrant - you consider the very people who are hurt by that (the artists and labels that do play by the rules) to be in a conflict of interest for digging into the issue. How can you not see that if they did not do so, they would be working against the interests of the people that pay them to work for them? The artists that sign up with recording labels that are RIAA members are the ones that drive this process. Certain music genres seem to rely much more heavily on lifting other people's work, and there are plenty of mechanisms in place to make sure that if you're going to do so, it works out for everyone. Do you think Best Buy really vets each of their CD purchases to see if the compilation or adaptation has been properly pushed through the legal filters separating fair use from something requiring license? No, and it's not their problem, if the distributor selling it to them asserts that they're doing so legally. The fact that the distributor is lying (or, according to the judge, convincingly appears to be) shifts the focus right back to the source, not the retailer.
Right now many of the large corporations have law suites against their competitors Apple vs Microsoft etc. Claiming copyright violation.
Gee, for someone who doesn't live in a trailer park, you sure don't seem to grasp the difference between civil proceedings and criminal ones. Just look it up, OK? The judge in a civil suit absolutely can compel the seizure of material that a lawsuit's opponents demonstrate to be relevent. The judge issuing a search warrant in a prospective criminal case is part of a completely different process. Actually, given your ranting, it's possible you really don't understand the difference. To wit:
Listen trailer park, if you start throwing insults at folks expect them back.
You mean like when I called you on a context-less, BS reference to an article that doesn't say what you said it does? That's not "low brow," it's the truth.
Its OK for a company who has a competitor to use the police to attack that competitor if that company is a small. The large company (or their proxy) must call them thieves in advance of the bust.
What part of "stealing something and selling it doesn't make you a competitor" don't you get? The record labels presenting the evidence to a judge aren't "using the police," they're doing exactly what everybody gets to do when they've got evidence of a crime. If you know who has ripped you off, and present that evidence, and a judge issues a search warrant in the case, are you "using the police" in some unfair way? Because if you are, the defense lawyers will be able to tear you apart. If the people who got raided have done nothing wrong, and the judge who saw the evidence and issued a warrant for the raid did so on false information from the RIAA, then there will and should be hell to pay. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Since you have evidence on the Moby side of things, perhaps you've also got inside info on this case.
Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.'s national headquarters in advance of the raid
Right, just like law enforcement people all over the country, throughout history, have consulted with all sorts of third parties who are more familiar with the subject at hand. Police departments have contacts with contractors, consultants, industry experts, insurance companies, other agencies, and (depending on the case in question) your average Joe Blow who just happens to be familiar with the people or circumstances involved in a given case. Gee, do you think that maybe when the issue in question happens to be people actively going about trying to make money off of other people's copyrighted works, that perhaps one of the people you'd want to talk to would a trade association that has invested a lot of time and money into defending those copyrights?
Let's say that you had evidence of (sticking with the local example) the local Atlanta office of the RIAA actually doing something illegal. And because you have a vested interest in the outcome, you've spent a lot of time gathering information, getting to know who all the people involved are, getting to know the circumstances. Now, you've convinced local law enforcement (just like in this case, the sherrif's office and local PD) that there's something worthy of a warrant and an investigation, and you're willing to risk a purgery conviction if it turns out you're BS-ing because you've got some axe to grinf. A judge has to issue the warrant (as happened in this case), and that judge would have to have decided whether or not the time (and taxpayer money) that the sherrif's department saved in not having to start all of that investigation effort from scratch, by having you provide what you know, does or does not pollute the possible criminal case that would come from the investigation. Wouldn't you rather your local PD saved its time and your money? Someone else has already done the ground work and knows the legal issues better than anyone that works in the sherrif's office. This isn't any different than when a volunteer group helps out with busting some stalker after kids, or when a Girl Scout troop video tapes people dumping trash on the side of a road they've volunteered to keep clean. Of course, I suppose you think that scout uniforms are also "police type" uniforms, right?
It seems to me law enforcement wear this type of jacket at crimes scenes so I would call the jackets police style uniforms.
So, if a drunk driver crashes into the front of a grocery store, and the store's lot attendants (wearing the jackets with the store logo on the back) were helping to clean up the mess and telling the police what they saw, would you consider them to be wearing "police style" uniforms? Any entity that finds itself periodically dealing with law enforcement on the scene (medical types, clean-up types, insurance investigators) make the cops happy by wearing something that helps everyone involved know who is who in a busy setting. You obviously haven't dealt with that sort of situation before, not that that's any excuse for thinking that a windbreaker with your organization's name on it is the same as identifying yourself as law enforcement.
Since the RIAA is handling the evidence that they will use later to charge these DJs in court
How do you know this? You don't. The large team of people from the sherrif's office and the PD would have taken pictures, and tagged and seized that which (or enough of which) they consider important to a prosecution. I've helped police clean up around a criminal vandalism scene that impacted people I know - would you consider that a conflict of interest?
attacking the competition
Competition? What competition? That's like saying that when someone steals stuff from your store, and then sells it on the sidewalk outside your store, they're "competition." A record label's competition is another record label that is competing to work with the artist they represent, or another
fact. The RIAA showed up at a record label with police dressed in police style uniforms. Not to many disorganized trade association have that kind of power.
You are lying, here (but you knew that, of course). The article (which YOU say is carefully researched) expressly says that the raid was conducted by personnel from the local Sherrif's office and police department. The article says that, later ("after" the raid), people wearing RIAA jackets (that's what you consider "police style uniforms"?) helped box up material. They also helped with some surveilance before hand. Just like the residents in my neighborhood help out if we've got a problem.
The RIAA also participates in the collection, administration and distribution of music licenses and royalties. They have a mission and are guided by the major record labels that make up 90% of US sales. They are not just the trade association of small music label who need a helping hand.
Right. Dealing with administrative issues across a large market is exactly the sort of thing that record labels (small and large) are very happy to pool resources and avoid doing with hundreds or thousands of separate systems. Just like organized labor in a factory spares thousands of people from having to negotiate individually and allows them to share lawyers and lobbying power. And who said they are "just the trade association of small music label who need a helping hand?" I did not. You are deceitfully putting words in my mouth so that you have a straw man argument to fight. That particular kind of deceit doesn't help your credibility, especially since you lied on your first "fact."
Was there a opinion pole I missed. Next time you have the urge to tell a whole group of people, what they think. Think again.
Do have any idea how ironic it is to tell me how to think in the same breath that you're telling me it's not cool to say what other people think? I'm telling you what I see in the form of thousands of posts on this subject. "The RIAA" is referred to over and over again as if it was the record label, or as if there were no record labels that aren't members. It's not a monopoly (there is no barrier to entry in forming your own label, striking deals with artists, and selling those works however you see fit). I have no urge to "tell a whole group of people" what they think. They are exhibiting what they think, in large numbers, every day. Right here.
Its like the US selling arms to Iraq and then attacking Iraq becasue they are armed and dangerous.
Huh! I wonder if "being armed and dangerous," in your mind, is the same as "invading neighboring countries" and "shooting at airplanes patrolling no-fly zones every week for years after you signed a cease-fire after having your invasion stopped by force" and "kicking out UN inspectors trying to find your WMDs, lying about where you put thousands of tons of them, and then raking billions of dollars out of the UN oil-for-food program while continuing to import missile parts, send $50k payments to suicide bomber families" and so on. Being armed and dangerous is a lot different than using it, for years on end, the way that Saddam did. Have a Kurd or a Kuwaiti over for dinner sometime. The record industry has made millions of dollars of DJs who often just remix old songs
How? Because those DJ's all pay what the original artists expect? You're saying that DJ's DO pay the asked-for licensing when they make remixes? The issue here is how often that does not happen.
Now that these independ studios are now distributing through there own channels the major labels are not seeing any money. Its time to send in the dogs an shut them down.
Right. Because the people who created the music are being ripped off. Their "own channels" is your friendly way of saying "a channel that doesn't include paying the person who created the music in the first place."
You're a real piece of work.
He's fantastically semi-caucasionistic!
I mean, everyone knows he's Indo-Afro-Latino-Cau-freakin'-castic. The only thing he's not is Laplander. What we need are more Laplander game designers. Then we'd be playing some reindeer games, man.
Unfortunately, no such astronomical phenomena exist. There are no far-infrared galaxies. There are voids, but they show no gravitational or infrared signs of containing encapsulated galaxies.
That statement:
1) Assumes that you've actually looked everywhere within the visible universe (visible to US), and that you've done so with adequate sensitivity. And that such spot is not, by bad coincidence, on the other side of some galaxy or other obscuring structure.
2) Assumes that your premise is even correct. Do you really think that an advanced civilization would trap all/i of that energy, or just much as would be useful - which would probably be a very small percentage of the star's overall output.
we're too small minded to colonise the galaxy
We weren't too small minded to risk lives hiking over mountain ranges or floating in very-likely-to-sink boats across open ocean to other continents, remember? Primitive Asians floating across the Pacific to populate South America or hoofing it in across the northern straights were taking on something at least as dicey as we currently see activities in space. Villages wiped each other out, disease killed off whole tribes - all of the stuff that people say would keep us from colonizing elsewhere. Sure, some of those efforts would fail - just as they have for tens of thousands of years. But some will succeed, too.
we use our resources to make trivial things that amuse us for a short period of time (ipod, iphone, etc)
That's because we evolved from, and still are short-lived primates. Our brains were wired to deal with much more short-term issues. Planning through the coming weather change is about as far as we ever needed to go, mentally. Only some people have the wiring to do big picture stuff... and guess what: they tend to get jobs doing big picture stuff. As for trivial things like iPods: you'd rather have a society with somewhat better antibiotics, but completely absent all of the things that make life a pleasure? The iPod is just a newer take on cave painting and tribal dancing. The fact that we evolved into creatures that put handprints on walls and invent group songs to sing doesn't mean we can't also do things like invent solar cells, fly transplant organs through the air to another city where they're needed, or manage to live past 25. Being productive, inventive, and joyous are not mutually exclusive - they're interdependent.
rather than doing useful things (cure diseases, etc).
I'm sorry to hear that you died of Polio. Or was it Smallpox? Or maybe spoiled food because we haven't invented refridgeration yet. Anyway, sorry you died.
Earth hasn't colonized the galaxy by now. Ergo, Earth doesn't exist.
Excellent. That means I don't have to sweat the deadline on that network redesign thing I've been fighting with. Thanks!