While I applaud you for sticking to independent cinema, how will pirating the movie really help things? The idea is to stop people from watching pirated copies, so you will watch the pirated copies and make sure they continue to do this and even more strict things to try and keep the pirates away. If you want to take a stand, avoid the moviesall together. Stealing their content (which is what you would be doing) in no way helps anyone (except your cheap ass self).
Except he's selling an infinite number of copies of the BIOS, not the copy of the BIOS he purchased. In the case of the videos, they buy 1 copy of the movie, censor it, and then sell that single copy of the movie. If would be as if they bought 1 copy of the video, censored it, and then dubbed their censored copy and sold those. You have a case when you can claim you are modifying something you purchased legally (such as with the videos). But this guy purchased one copy and then is distributing multiple copies of his editted BIOS. The only way it could possibly fly is if he was buying an X-Box, swapping the chips, and then reselling the X-Box. Purchasing it once doesn;t give you the right to distribute the BIOS multiple times.
It would only apply if this guy was buying chips from Ms and then editting them and selling them. He is taking blank chips, adding his own editted BIOS, and then selling them, which is clearly different then buying a movie, editting it, and reselling it. And just for the record I don't think they should be allowed to edit and resell movies, because it then can reflect on the original work. If a person sees only the editted version, they may not know it has been editted and think it's a piece of crap (while the uneditted is good). You are forceably attaching someone's name to something they have no control over.
Actually your analogy also has serious flaws. The companies in the posted article weren't trying to terminate the contract, they were simply transferring it to new owners. In many cases it would be the same person using the computer, just under a different company name.
If John Smith changes his name to John Jones, does Sprint PCS force an "acceleration" of the original contract and then make John Jones sign a new contract? No, that would be absurd. However, if a computer that once was part of Company X is now part of Company Z, the contract must be paid in full, yet Company Z must now also purchase a new contract. Speaking of serious analogy flaws! Comparing a person changing their name to a company being purchased is about as bad as an analogy can get. In the case of the cell phone and the software license, the contract is non-transferable. I can't transfer my contract to my friend BoB. I can sell him the phone, pay out the rest of my contract, and he can get his own contract, but I can't just transfer the existing contract to him. Same thing with SA. It can't be transfered to another company. The original company must pay out the remainder of the contract, and the new company has to get their own contract.
This is plain stupid (at least from my European point of view) If the law wants to be consistent, then these [lockpicks.com] and these [colt.com] guys should also be arrested as they sell "protection circumventing devices". Selling a tool which allows to break the law should not be punished, only breaking the law should be.
Actually, selling lockpicks is illegal, unless you are selling them to a qualified individual. It is illegal to sell lockpicks to someone who is not a certified locksmith, a lock manufacturer, a lock distributor, repossessor, car dealer, or car manufacturer (and this site states this on their order form). I agree that a tool that has legitimate uses should very rarely be banned under the law because it has some illegal uses, lockpicks are a tool that mainly have illegal uses and very few legitimate uses.
Except he still has no right to sell the BIOS. It is illegal for me to copy a Windows XP Cd and sell them, even if I only sell them to people who already own Windows XP. I do not own the material on the CD, and I have no legal rights to redistribute it. This is true especially since he had changed the BIOS (since if he was selling an exact copy of the BIOS it would work exactly as the current X-Box chip and be useless as a mod chip). He took MS's intellectual property (the BIOS), modified it, and was selling his modified version. He had no redistribution rights to the BIOS, much less rights to modify and redistribute it.
6) You work for a nonprofit organization that must use Microsoft Access to work with some data (in other words, you can't just shout, "Switch to open source alternatives" and make the problem go away). You can't afford the 10 copies of Access you need, so you say that since only 1 person will probably use it at a time, you can install 1 copy on 10 different computers. Is this moral? It is illegal, but the class wasn't about legalities, it was about morality. This is akin to the steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family question. Well, what if your family don't like bread? What if they like cigarettes? And what if instead of stealing them, they were selling them at a price that was practically giving them away?
I've never understood the reasoning here. If you want multiple people to use it, the easiest, legalest (not that that is a word), and probably most moral thing to do is install it on 1 computer and then have multiple people use it on that computer.
Thething is, it would be incredibly easy to do. You could work it exactly like the phone cards you buy at the store. You pay $25 for a "E-Card". It is only good after the store activates it (with a little less than you paid for it of course). It then works exactly like a Visa card. It can be used anywhere Visa can be used. The bank pays the merchant for the transaction since you already paid for the card. The only snag I can see is Visa/MasteRcard not liking it so they wouldn't let the cards bear their symbols (which would hurt where they were accepted).
The PHB syndrome can't be avoided. There will always be people who prefer one type or brand of software over another and will slant things in it's favor. It happens with OSS as well as MS and other closed source. If the person making the decision likes RedHat more than MS, there is a greater chance that RedHat will get picked. No law will change that.
It seems the root of what you are worried about is that there should be a fair process for determining the purchases, but this bill doesn't really do that. It makes it so MS and OSS will be considered and nothing else. If you wanted a fair system, OSS shouldn't be singled out, all software should be considered by having an open bidding process or something along those lines. This is a bill to push OSS over closed source, when it should be a bill to pus the best software for the job. If Joe's Software Shack has the best program for what is needed, and it's closed source, it should have to be considered along with BoB's Open Source App.
Once again I have to ask why we need a law to have OSS considered. Is there something in the law saying only closed source software can be considered? IF it is like most software purchases, they have a set of requirements and they are required to get software that fills those requirements. There is nothing stopping OSS from being considered, so why would it have to be mandated that it be considered? No one would like a law mandating that closed source software be considered, because there is nothing from stopping it. The same holds true for OSS. The difference is the people making the decisions have been choosing closed source (for a variety of reasons) and the OSS people are insistent that OSS is the better choice, so they want to force the issue. As long as there is no law making it an unfair playing field between OSS and closed source software, this law is unnecessary and just plain prejudicial.
Except that in software there are features that you are looking for/need. The only feature of a plane flight that matters is that it gets you from point A to point B when you want. Everything else is just gravy. Same thing with a rental car. But with software the requirements are much more stringent and important. Cost is a factor, but so are the options and features the software provides. If you're requirements are a word processing programs with features X, Y, and Z that can easily be used to transfer documents with complex formatting to all people, OpenOffice may be cheaper, but may not have all the features that MS Office has. Features are much more important in software than costs are.
With some form of this same bill being considered in several states, I have to wonder what the current policy is? Is there something in the current policy that would prevent open source from being considered? Or is it that this is just a way to ensure it is considered in every situation? If it is the latter, I'm not sure it's such a good thing. If there is nothing stopping it from being considered already, why do we need something to push for it to be used, as it would be on a level playing field with other software. I don't thing OSS should receive any more "special" consideration than any other product. After all, we would rail against a bill requiring MS products to be considered.
I feel like I'm probably wasting my breath, but these things only apply if what he is ACCUSED of is true. He has been ACCUSED of renouncing his citizenship and taking up arms against america. He has not admitted this. It has not proven that this is the case. Therefore, he still should have all rights as a US citizen. Otherwise, there is nothing from stopping the government from asserting that any random person has renounced their citizenship and taken up arms against the US, whether true or untrue. They point most everyone is trying to make, and you seem to be continually glancing over, is that this man is not guilty of anything. He has been ACCUSED of things. Being accused is completely different than being guilty. Until he is guilty (or at the least admits to these things) he should have all the rights afforded to him as a US citizen.
And thus was born roleplaying with crayons. To think that D&D could have been a complex, complete role-playing system if not for this article. Instead it became the dice-rolling combat system it is today.
I give credit to D&D for starting the genre, but the genre moved past D&D long ago.
If I hack into someone's network and don't even do anything but look around, I'm charged with causing losses of millions. I'm charged with stealing any sensitive content I gained access to whether or not I even looked at it. Not to mention they'll slap all the cybercrime and terrorism laws they can find down on me too. It has nothing to do with the severity of the laws, just that you get pinned with so many of them.
The difference is that if you break into something phyical and take something physical, people can tell exactly what happened. If someone breaks into your house, you can take inventory and see exactly what is there and what is gone. If someone hacks your computer system, they can make copies of files and possibly even leave backdoors for future hacks without people knowing. You can't tell if the hacker just opened the file and looked at it, or opened it and printer it off or made a copy.
When your system is hacked, you have to take the entire system down and scrub it clean. You simply can't assume all the hacker did was look at things, so you have to check ever file for viruses, check for backdoors, check for corrupt files, etc. It all boils down to what could have happened. In a physical breakin, it is easy to seee exactly what damage was done and what was take. In a computer breakin, it is hard to determine what damage was done and nearly impossibly to see what files were taken/copied.
This technology should never be called anti-piracy technology; it's very strange to see Slashdot use such a deceptive term. This is anti-copy technology. It prevents fair use as well as piracy. It prevents users from doing things with the music they buy that the Supreme Court has already declaired as totally legal. There is no technology that just prevents piracy but allows legitimate use by users, just the opposite, many of these technologies hardly slow pirates at all, but present serious problems for legitimate users.
While it does stop some fair use (depending on the technology), I think calling it "anti-piracy technology" is completely appropriate. That is what it is designed for, and the major task it accomplishes. Saying it isn't descriptive enough is like saying the alarm system on a car shouldn't be called an "anti-theft device" because it also stops the rightful owner of breaking in when he loses his keys. Nit-picking at terminology isn't going to help the actual battle.
But doesn't this go against the mantra that people will pay for the CD even if they can download the songs because they want the extras like liner notes? If this would take off, what incentive would people have to buy a CD if they just got the exact same thing that they could make themselves from downloaded MP3s?
What I don't understand is the whole innocent until proven guilty thing. Just because they have a log saying an IP from a company was downloading illegalsong.mp3 doesn't mean that the person doesn't actually own that on cd. Why are they guilty until proven innocent. I see how an individual couldn't fight them, or a small business because of the legal costs involved, but a fortune 1000 company should be able to. At least, I'd hope they could fight them, and I'm sure they'd be able to recover legal fees in court.
Well, it has been decided that even if you own the CD, you still can't download the songs. You can rip your CD and use those MP3s, but you can't dl the songs, that is still illegal. Whether you agree with this or not, it is stil the law. So if that person did download the song, then they are guilty.
But more importantly, why should a company fight the RIAA for you to have the right to download songs you may or may not own? They could care less if you really like the newest Britney CD, you're at work and should be doing work, not downloading MP3s. Even if it is legal for you to be downloading the song, the company still probably believes you shouldn't be doing it at work (because you should be working), so why should they spend their money to defend your silly, work-avoiding ass?
Bands like The Grateful Dead [dead.net] and Phish [phish.com] have realized the ridiculous marketing power giving away free music has. Both bands were/are extremely successful (in terms of the amount of concert tickets sold) and this can be directly linked to the free exchange of audience recordings made by fans. I still find out about new bands largely based on this technique. A band allows taping at their shows and people do it. They then offer the shows for free download. People like me listen and then go to the shows, paying the artists. Everyone, except the RIAA, wins. I'd be scared and panicking too if I was the RIAA.
While this method does work good for some bands, it will not work for others. The bands it works for are bands with a smaller, extremely dedicated following. It works well if people are willing to go see you every night for a week in concert. But for the average band (ie most bands) that doesn't inspire this type of fanatical devotion, giving away free music usually means people take their free music and leave. Most people are not fanatical about their music. They can be inspired to go and spend $15 on a CD to hear the band, but they would be much happier if they could get online and hear the band for free.
So does this mean we are returning to the days where my Radio Shack TRS80 booted into basic? Maybe we can find a great way to store data on audio tapes next.
I'd agree with you if you mean that "distributing" is actually "pushing" copyrighted material (illegally - meaning the receiver has no right to the copyrighted material) to another's hard drive. When one pulls an mp3 (as in current P2P networks) then the uploader is merely a passive party to the transaction - the software makes it possible for the uploader to be unaware that a transaction is even taking place.
Either way you are distributing it. You have no right to make it available to people at all. If I have a prescription for Prozac, it is illegal for me to set them on my front lawn with a sign saying (feel free to take one). Even if the people who take them also have a prescription for prozac, it is still illegal for me to distribute them, which is what I am doing by making them availble for anyone to take. The same applies to MP3s on P2P. I am making the MP3s I have (and may or may not have the right to legall own/use) available for anyone to take. I am distributing them, by making them available for people. Just because I am not actively giving the MP3s to people doesn;t mean I am not distributing. CNet distriubtes shareware, even though you have to go there and download it yourself. If I make counterfeit money and just leave a pile of it sitting somewhere, I will still be charged with distributing it.
technically, when one participates in a P2P network such as FastTrack, they're still not violating copyright law. Here's the point I want to make in a nutshell, and argue about it as you will:
nobody is violating copyright laws by simply "sharing" files. The only copyright infringers are the ones who download shared files without owning a license to those copyrighted works.
In other words, in order to break the law, one must download a copyrighted, non-free file that you don't have the rights to use. When the RIAA or MPAA claims you are breaking the law, they are bluffing - they have no way to ascertain whether you've actually got a license to use the files you share, and they have no idea whether you're downloading files which you don't have rights to.
The only way this could possibly be true is if you have the right to distribute the material, which you don't. Owning an MP3 can be perfectly legal, provided you own the CD and ripped it yourself. But that in no way implies you have the right to distribute that MP3 to anyone else. It is legal for you to have an play, but illegal for you to distribute to other people, even if you believe they own the CD, since it was determine all MP3s aren;t equal, you only legally are entitled to the MP3s ripped directly from your CD. So in essense, the law is being broken twice. Once by the person downloading the material, but also by the person distributing material they have no right to distribute.
That's because they can offer something no one else can, support. There is nothing like this for most products, especially drugs. Also, you have to consider the money RH puts into Linux is nothing compared to what MS puts into Windows. Linux is mostly free, and they sell support for it. If a drug company develops a drug, you are selling the drug, there is no other "offshoot" product such as support that they can make money from. If they sell drug X at $5 and another company can sell drug X at $1 because they don;t have any costs to recoop, people will buy the drug from the other company. These wouldn;t be similar products, or competing products, these would be the exact same product, which means the cheaper product wins.
If you were to give them the ingrediants, there would be no problem. If you bought the drug and then gave the drug to peopl ein Africa, there would be no problem. But you are proposing taking the information that cost a drug company millions (if not billions) of dollars to develop and giving that away, so the drug company will no long make money. Just because you don't make any money on the deal doesn't change anything. If I steal a car, I'm wrong. It doesn't matter if I give the car to a homeless person or not.
You are suggesting taking the recipe for a drug, that the company paid millions of dollars to develop, and making it available so that any company can make the drug. This means these later companies can sell the drug at a much cheaper price, since they don't have any up-front money invested in the drug. If a company is not guaranteed at least a chance to make it's money back before another company starts making an exact copy of their drug, they will not expend millions of dollars to develop new drugs, because they know there is no way to make money doing it. Owning the drug does not mean you own the rights to make the drug and distribute it (either for money or for free). You can do what you want with what you own, the actual tablet that is the drug. Buying a copy of Linux doesn't give me the right to use the source code however I want (such as in closed source apps), even though the source is part of what I actually paid for.
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While I applaud you for sticking to independent cinema, how will pirating the movie really help things? The idea is to stop people from watching pirated copies, so you will watch the pirated copies and make sure they continue to do this and even more strict things to try and keep the pirates away. If you want to take a stand, avoid the moviesall together. Stealing their content (which is what you would be doing) in no way helps anyone (except your cheap ass self).
Except he's selling an infinite number of copies of the BIOS, not the copy of the BIOS he purchased. In the case of the videos, they buy 1 copy of the movie, censor it, and then sell that single copy of the movie. If would be as if they bought 1 copy of the video, censored it, and then dubbed their censored copy and sold those. You have a case when you can claim you are modifying something you purchased legally (such as with the videos). But this guy purchased one copy and then is distributing multiple copies of his editted BIOS. The only way it could possibly fly is if he was buying an X-Box, swapping the chips, and then reselling the X-Box. Purchasing it once doesn;t give you the right to distribute the BIOS multiple times.
It would only apply if this guy was buying chips from Ms and then editting them and selling them. He is taking blank chips, adding his own editted BIOS, and then selling them, which is clearly different then buying a movie, editting it, and reselling it. And just for the record I don't think they should be allowed to edit and resell movies, because it then can reflect on the original work. If a person sees only the editted version, they may not know it has been editted and think it's a piece of crap (while the uneditted is good). You are forceably attaching someone's name to something they have no control over.
Actually your analogy also has serious flaws. The companies in the posted article weren't trying to terminate the contract, they were simply transferring it to new owners. In many cases it would be the same person using the computer, just under a different company name.
If John Smith changes his name to John Jones, does Sprint PCS force an "acceleration" of the original contract and then make John Jones sign a new contract? No, that would be absurd. However, if a computer that once was part of Company X is now part of Company Z, the contract must be paid in full, yet Company Z must now also purchase a new contract.
Speaking of serious analogy flaws! Comparing a person changing their name to a company being purchased is about as bad as an analogy can get. In the case of the cell phone and the software license, the contract is non-transferable. I can't transfer my contract to my friend BoB. I can sell him the phone, pay out the rest of my contract, and he can get his own contract, but I can't just transfer the existing contract to him. Same thing with SA. It can't be transfered to another company. The original company must pay out the remainder of the contract, and the new company has to get their own contract.
This is plain stupid (at least from my European point of view)
If the law wants to be consistent, then these [lockpicks.com] and these [colt.com] guys should also be arrested as they sell "protection circumventing devices".
Selling a tool which allows to break the law should not be punished, only breaking the law should be.
Actually, selling lockpicks is illegal, unless you are selling them to a qualified individual. It is illegal to sell lockpicks to someone who is not a certified locksmith, a lock manufacturer, a lock distributor, repossessor, car dealer, or car manufacturer (and this site states this on their order form). I agree that a tool that has legitimate uses should very rarely be banned under the law because it has some illegal uses, lockpicks are a tool that mainly have illegal uses and very few legitimate uses.
Except he still has no right to sell the BIOS. It is illegal for me to copy a Windows XP Cd and sell them, even if I only sell them to people who already own Windows XP. I do not own the material on the CD, and I have no legal rights to redistribute it. This is true especially since he had changed the BIOS (since if he was selling an exact copy of the BIOS it would work exactly as the current X-Box chip and be useless as a mod chip). He took MS's intellectual property (the BIOS), modified it, and was selling his modified version. He had no redistribution rights to the BIOS, much less rights to modify and redistribute it.
6) You work for a nonprofit organization that must use Microsoft Access to work with some data (in other words, you can't just shout, "Switch to open source alternatives" and make the problem go away). You can't afford the 10 copies of Access you need, so you say that since only 1 person will probably use it at a time, you can install 1 copy on 10 different computers. Is this moral? It is illegal, but the class wasn't about legalities, it was about morality. This is akin to the steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family question. Well, what if your family don't like bread? What if they like cigarettes? And what if instead of stealing them, they were selling them at a price that was practically giving them away?
I've never understood the reasoning here. If you want multiple people to use it, the easiest, legalest (not that that is a word), and probably most moral thing to do is install it on 1 computer and then have multiple people use it on that computer.
Thething is, it would be incredibly easy to do. You could work it exactly like the phone cards you buy at the store. You pay $25 for a "E-Card". It is only good after the store activates it (with a little less than you paid for it of course). It then works exactly like a Visa card. It can be used anywhere Visa can be used. The bank pays the merchant for the transaction since you already paid for the card. The only snag I can see is Visa/MasteRcard not liking it so they wouldn't let the cards bear their symbols (which would hurt where they were accepted).
The PHB syndrome can't be avoided. There will always be people who prefer one type or brand of software over another and will slant things in it's favor. It happens with OSS as well as MS and other closed source. If the person making the decision likes RedHat more than MS, there is a greater chance that RedHat will get picked. No law will change that.
It seems the root of what you are worried about is that there should be a fair process for determining the purchases, but this bill doesn't really do that. It makes it so MS and OSS will be considered and nothing else. If you wanted a fair system, OSS shouldn't be singled out, all software should be considered by having an open bidding process or something along those lines. This is a bill to push OSS over closed source, when it should be a bill to pus the best software for the job. If Joe's Software Shack has the best program for what is needed, and it's closed source, it should have to be considered along with BoB's Open Source App.
Once again I have to ask why we need a law to have OSS considered. Is there something in the law saying only closed source software can be considered? IF it is like most software purchases, they have a set of requirements and they are required to get software that fills those requirements. There is nothing stopping OSS from being considered, so why would it have to be mandated that it be considered? No one would like a law mandating that closed source software be considered, because there is nothing from stopping it. The same holds true for OSS. The difference is the people making the decisions have been choosing closed source (for a variety of reasons) and the OSS people are insistent that OSS is the better choice, so they want to force the issue. As long as there is no law making it an unfair playing field between OSS and closed source software, this law is unnecessary and just plain prejudicial.
Except that in software there are features that you are looking for/need. The only feature of a plane flight that matters is that it gets you from point A to point B when you want. Everything else is just gravy. Same thing with a rental car. But with software the requirements are much more stringent and important. Cost is a factor, but so are the options and features the software provides. If you're requirements are a word processing programs with features X, Y, and Z that can easily be used to transfer documents with complex formatting to all people, OpenOffice may be cheaper, but may not have all the features that MS Office has. Features are much more important in software than costs are.
With some form of this same bill being considered in several states, I have to wonder what the current policy is? Is there something in the current policy that would prevent open source from being considered? Or is it that this is just a way to ensure it is considered in every situation? If it is the latter, I'm not sure it's such a good thing. If there is nothing stopping it from being considered already, why do we need something to push for it to be used, as it would be on a level playing field with other software. I don't thing OSS should receive any more "special" consideration than any other product. After all, we would rail against a bill requiring MS products to be considered.
I feel like I'm probably wasting my breath, but these things only apply if what he is ACCUSED of is true. He has been ACCUSED of renouncing his citizenship and taking up arms against america. He has not admitted this. It has not proven that this is the case. Therefore, he still should have all rights as a US citizen. Otherwise, there is nothing from stopping the government from asserting that any random person has renounced their citizenship and taken up arms against the US, whether true or untrue. They point most everyone is trying to make, and you seem to be continually glancing over, is that this man is not guilty of anything. He has been ACCUSED of things. Being accused is completely different than being guilty. Until he is guilty (or at the least admits to these things) he should have all the rights afforded to him as a US citizen.
And thus was born roleplaying with crayons. To think that D&D could have been a complex, complete role-playing system if not for this article. Instead it became the dice-rolling combat system it is today.
I give credit to D&D for starting the genre, but the genre moved past D&D long ago.
If I hack into someone's network and don't even do anything but look around, I'm charged with causing losses of millions. I'm charged with stealing any sensitive content I gained access to whether or not I even looked at it. Not to mention they'll slap all the cybercrime and terrorism laws they can find down on me too. It has nothing to do with the severity of the laws, just that you get pinned with so many of them.
The difference is that if you break into something phyical and take something physical, people can tell exactly what happened. If someone breaks into your house, you can take inventory and see exactly what is there and what is gone. If someone hacks your computer system, they can make copies of files and possibly even leave backdoors for future hacks without people knowing. You can't tell if the hacker just opened the file and looked at it, or opened it and printer it off or made a copy.
When your system is hacked, you have to take the entire system down and scrub it clean. You simply can't assume all the hacker did was look at things, so you have to check ever file for viruses, check for backdoors, check for corrupt files, etc. It all boils down to what could have happened. In a physical breakin, it is easy to seee exactly what damage was done and what was take. In a computer breakin, it is hard to determine what damage was done and nearly impossibly to see what files were taken/copied.
This technology should never be called anti-piracy technology; it's very strange to see Slashdot use such a deceptive term. This is anti-copy technology. It prevents fair use as well as piracy. It prevents users from doing things with the music they buy that the Supreme Court has already declaired as totally legal. There is no technology that just prevents piracy but allows legitimate use by users, just the opposite, many of these technologies hardly slow pirates at all, but present serious problems for legitimate users.
While it does stop some fair use (depending on the technology), I think calling it "anti-piracy technology" is completely appropriate. That is what it is designed for, and the major task it accomplishes. Saying it isn't descriptive enough is like saying the alarm system on a car shouldn't be called an "anti-theft device" because it also stops the rightful owner of breaking in when he loses his keys. Nit-picking at terminology isn't going to help the actual battle.
But doesn't this go against the mantra that people will pay for the CD even if they can download the songs because they want the extras like liner notes? If this would take off, what incentive would people have to buy a CD if they just got the exact same thing that they could make themselves from downloaded MP3s?
What I don't understand is the whole innocent until proven guilty thing. Just because they have a log saying an IP from a company was downloading illegalsong.mp3 doesn't mean that the person doesn't actually own that on cd. Why are they guilty until proven innocent. I see how an individual couldn't fight them, or a small business because of the legal costs involved, but a fortune 1000 company should be able to. At least, I'd hope they could fight them, and I'm sure they'd be able to recover legal fees in court.
Well, it has been decided that even if you own the CD, you still can't download the songs. You can rip your CD and use those MP3s, but you can't dl the songs, that is still illegal. Whether you agree with this or not, it is stil the law. So if that person did download the song, then they are guilty.
But more importantly, why should a company fight the RIAA for you to have the right to download songs you may or may not own? They could care less if you really like the newest Britney CD, you're at work and should be doing work, not downloading MP3s. Even if it is legal for you to be downloading the song, the company still probably believes you shouldn't be doing it at work (because you should be working), so why should they spend their money to defend your silly, work-avoiding ass?
Bands like The Grateful Dead [dead.net] and Phish [phish.com] have realized the ridiculous marketing power giving away free music has. Both bands were/are extremely successful (in terms of the amount of concert tickets sold) and this can be directly linked to the free exchange of audience recordings made by fans. I still find out about new bands largely based on this technique. A band allows taping at their shows and people do it. They then offer the shows for free download. People like me listen and then go to the shows, paying the artists. Everyone, except the RIAA, wins. I'd be scared and panicking too if I was the RIAA.
While this method does work good for some bands, it will not work for others. The bands it works for are bands with a smaller, extremely dedicated following. It works well if people are willing to go see you every night for a week in concert. But for the average band (ie most bands) that doesn't inspire this type of fanatical devotion, giving away free music usually means people take their free music and leave. Most people are not fanatical about their music. They can be inspired to go and spend $15 on a CD to hear the band, but they would be much happier if they could get online and hear the band for free.
I think this completely validates the time I yell "oh shit!" when I fell skiing.
So does this mean we are returning to the days where my Radio Shack TRS80 booted into basic? Maybe we can find a great way to store data on audio tapes next.
I'd agree with you if you mean that "distributing" is actually "pushing" copyrighted material (illegally - meaning the receiver has no right to the copyrighted material) to another's hard drive. When one pulls an mp3 (as in current P2P networks) then the uploader is merely a passive party to the transaction - the software makes it possible for the uploader to be unaware that a transaction is even taking place.
Either way you are distributing it. You have no right to make it available to people at all. If I have a prescription for Prozac, it is illegal for me to set them on my front lawn with a sign saying (feel free to take one). Even if the people who take them also have a prescription for prozac, it is still illegal for me to distribute them, which is what I am doing by making them availble for anyone to take. The same applies to MP3s on P2P. I am making the MP3s I have (and may or may not have the right to legall own/use) available for anyone to take. I am distributing them, by making them available for people. Just because I am not actively giving the MP3s to people doesn;t mean I am not distributing. CNet distriubtes shareware, even though you have to go there and download it yourself. If I make counterfeit money and just leave a pile of it sitting somewhere, I will still be charged with distributing it.
technically, when one participates in a P2P network such as FastTrack, they're still not violating copyright law.
Here's the point I want to make in a nutshell, and argue about it as you will:
nobody is violating copyright laws by simply "sharing" files. The only copyright infringers are the ones who download shared files without owning a license to those copyrighted works.
In other words, in order to break the law, one must download a copyrighted, non-free file that you don't have the rights to use. When the RIAA or MPAA claims you are breaking the law, they are bluffing - they have no way to ascertain whether you've actually got a license to use the files you share, and they have no idea whether you're downloading files which you don't have rights to.
The only way this could possibly be true is if you have the right to distribute the material, which you don't. Owning an MP3 can be perfectly legal, provided you own the CD and ripped it yourself. But that in no way implies you have the right to distribute that MP3 to anyone else. It is legal for you to have an play, but illegal for you to distribute to other people, even if you believe they own the CD, since it was determine all MP3s aren;t equal, you only legally are entitled to the MP3s ripped directly from your CD. So in essense, the law is being broken twice. Once by the person downloading the material, but also by the person distributing material they have no right to distribute.
That's because they can offer something no one else can, support. There is nothing like this for most products, especially drugs. Also, you have to consider the money RH puts into Linux is nothing compared to what MS puts into Windows. Linux is mostly free, and they sell support for it. If a drug company develops a drug, you are selling the drug, there is no other "offshoot" product such as support that they can make money from. If they sell drug X at $5 and another company can sell drug X at $1 because they don;t have any costs to recoop, people will buy the drug from the other company. These wouldn;t be similar products, or competing products, these would be the exact same product, which means the cheaper product wins.
If you were to give them the ingrediants, there would be no problem. If you bought the drug and then gave the drug to peopl ein Africa, there would be no problem. But you are proposing taking the information that cost a drug company millions (if not billions) of dollars to develop and giving that away, so the drug company will no long make money. Just because you don't make any money on the deal doesn't change anything. If I steal a car, I'm wrong. It doesn't matter if I give the car to a homeless person or not.
You are suggesting taking the recipe for a drug, that the company paid millions of dollars to develop, and making it available so that any company can make the drug. This means these later companies can sell the drug at a much cheaper price, since they don't have any up-front money invested in the drug. If a company is not guaranteed at least a chance to make it's money back before another company starts making an exact copy of their drug, they will not expend millions of dollars to develop new drugs, because they know there is no way to make money doing it. Owning the drug does not mean you own the rights to make the drug and distribute it (either for money or for free). You can do what you want with what you own, the actual tablet that is the drug. Buying a copy of Linux doesn't give me the right to use the source code however I want (such as in closed source apps), even though the source is part of what I actually paid for.