I'm not familiar with American law, but surely the issue of copyright is that it is illegal only to DUPLICATE copyrighted work...?
The point of it is to grant exclusive right to copy.
Here's what I'm getting at. If the RIAA search through P2P networks and find you have copyrighted files available for download, they must still prove that you knowingly duplicated them illegally. Right?
Wrong. By making them available for download, you are illegally distributing them.
On the other hand, if someone downloads a copyright file from your computer, then the crime is theirs, not yours.
Wrong. For example, maybe the downloader already owns the software or CD or whatever and are making a backup copy.
Would it be a reasonable defence that you weren't aware the material was copyright?
No. All material is "copyright". Unless there is a notice that grants you the right to redistribute, you don't have that right.
Could you build a defence on grounds that, without the copyright warning, you assumed the material was public domain
Not unless it had a copyright notice asserting that the material was indeed public domain.
pushing blame back to the last guy who did the copying and who failed to attach the copyright warning.
If someone strips licensing or copyright information, that is usually illegal. But you are still to blame unless they replace the notice with a notice that appears to grant you permission to redistribute.
1: The creator works for a company, and gets nothing himself, and the company or company owner gets both the fame and the money (like Alexander G. Bell). This doesn't spur the creator to produce or disclose new creations.
Surely, the company pays him a salary, which they would not be able to do if they had no revenue. So it is incorrect to claim that he "gets nothing".
ecognition is a good incentive. Being able to freely discuss with peers is another important factor,
For the employee of a company, being able to keep food on the table and a roof over your head is also a factor.
Not being bound up in bureaucracy (like spending all your time with lawyers and courts) is also a plus.
Yes, that's another benefit of working for a company. You don't have to run a business. You also avoid a lot of the risks that you would undertake as an independent one-man business. You could go it alone and make a lot more money, or you could work for a company and make a steady salary and have a reasonably secure job.
Someone like W. A. Mozart created more than 70 symphonies, opera and concertos before he was 35. Without "IP protection".
If the technology for making illegal copies were as inaccesible today as it were in Mozart's day,
I'm sure the RIAA would be happy, even if they had
less "IP protection".
'm taking delivery of a recumbent cardio bike today and hopefully that will get me to around 5 or 6lbs a week.
Normal rate for weight loss is about 1lb/week, though you could probably expect to drop more rapidly than (maybe 2-3lb/week) that because you're very fat. I think you're going to find it hard to sustain a rate of 5-6lb/week though. Think long-term , be patient and persistent. Given your present state, it will probably take you a few years to get in good shape, but it will be well worth the effort, and those couple of years of hard work will make the remaining years of your life (which will be longer if you lose the weight)
much more enjoyable.
I also have no intention of finding out who they are.
Well, if your hard drive is full of their music, then I doubt a court of law would find this to be a plausible statement. BTW, music is copyrighted by default. The omission of a proper copyright notice does not grant you the right to copy it.
I would *really* liket to see kiosks like you describe. I just don't see it ever happening
Don't existing online music services already address this sort of thing ? I mean, you can download your choice of tracks from the legit online music serivces (itunes, rhapsody, buymusic, or whatever) and burn them, or download them to your MP3 player or whatever, right ?
How about people paying to not have to illegally download music? (or maybe they don't know how/where to look?)
IMO services like Rhapsody are a better model. You pay your regular service charge, and then you don't have to make a buying decision every time you listen to a track -- you can download away.
More generally, people are prepared to pay extra to get "unlimited X" simply to avoid the mental
effort of having to make purchasing decisions. I think this guy is onto something re micropayments, though I don't agree with his conclusions.
Not if they are clearly party to copyright violations. Simply put, I don't think that your usage as stated in your other posts (where you download from an authors website) is analogous to the usage of these other downloaders (who download from anonymous third parties)
See my followup to your other post. If the copyright holder posts material on a public website, they are redistributing their own material to you, so there is no copyright violation. In your example, where you download music from the bands own website, it is also clear that there is no intentional copyright violation.
As for slashdot, read more carefully -- the webpage does indeed have a copyright notice, and a hyperlink to a full legal notice.
I am pretty comfortable that many of them are not copyrighted at all as they are downloaded from home sites of school orchestras and small club bands. But formally I have no idea if it's public domain or not. There was no legal explanation on any of them.
I think if the author of the work in question makes
it available for download on their website, then they are indeed giving you permission to download.
Now as for copyright -- if a small club band puts their work up on their website without a legal notice, they still do have copyright (unless they signed it away to a record label, in which case the label would probably take action against them and not the downloaders). If they are distributing the material to you, there is no copyright violation, because the copyright holder is allowed to distribute their material to you.
On the other hand, you can't legally redistribute
their material (on the web or via p2p) without their permission. If you did want to redistribute their material, the best course of action would be
to contact them and request permission. I have done this before with free software authors who didn't attach copyright notices, and in such cases, they are often (but not always) happy to have the work redistributed. But you should ask anyway.
Oppositely, 90% of the internet content you can find using Google is LEGALLY free. Try again.
No it isn't. You can download it from the website that hosts the content without paying for it, but you can't redistribute it on Kazaa, napster, your own webpage, your own ftp server or whatever unless there is a copyright notice that gives you permission to do so.
OK, let's put it this way: you downloaded free software that had a clip illegally copied from some movies. At the moment of downloading you did not know about it. Are you nfringing on the copyright?
In this case, the person distributing the software is distributing it under a free license, and they are breaching copyright, because they are not authorised to license the copyrighted material to you. This is NOT the same as illegally downloading something that is stripped of copyright information. If the material does not come with a notice that explicitly authorises you to copy it, then you don't have the right to do so.
At the moment of downloading of the contenet I have no phisical way to learn what is the content and what is its copyrightness
Typical slashdot, always looking for the loophole.
Sorry, if you have a big fat collection of top 40 mp3z on your hard drive, it is obvious to anyone,
including yourself, that you are infringing.
You could make an educated guess based on the name of the file that you are downloading. You can whine all you like about how you had "no way to know" that
your top 40 collection was legally distributed, but the court are simply not going to believe you when you tell them that you thought that the file top_forty_hit_1.mp3 that you downloaded on Kazaa was actually a Redhat ISO.
??? Again ? I didn't write the post you responded to,
I am not playing with words at all. The fact is that the FSF are prepared to enforce the GPL whether it is a corporation, or a user, who violates it. Profit motive is irrelevant, whether the infringer is a coproratye entity or not is irrelevant. The FSF will go after infringers because they wish to control the terms of distribution of their product. Like the record companies.
Also, if you're charged criminally, you get access to a public defender if you can't afford a lawyer. No such luck if you're sued.
Fine, but good luck getting a job or travelling overseas if you're found guilty in a criminal court.
I've applied for a work permit, and one of the things my lawyers told me is that life becomes pretty inconvenient if you have a criminal record for property crimes worth over $400 or so.
It's only those who try to profit from re-sale who are restricted by the GPL. And few on Slashdot would argue that the real pirates, those who copy CD's for resale, shouldn't be pursued to the full extent of the law. It's also the original intent of copyright protection.
Sorry, this is a load of nonsense. The FSF don't care if someone sells their software on CD for profit. They do care if someone makes binary only versions of their software, in breach of the license, whether a profit is made or not. IOW, they enforce their license to the letter, much like the RIAA.
I only ask because it seems that they only have a case if you are sharing ILLEGAL copies of the titles. Is this correct?
No. They are suing because you are distributing it
to downloaders who aren't legally entitled to a copy. If a downloader makes an illegal copy of it,
you're responsible because a program running on your
computer served the file to them. That's probably the main reason for going after the uploads -- it doesn't matter whether or not you own the CDs,
they can still go after you because you don't own the right to distribute them. On the other hand, you couldn't go after a downloader who had the CDs
for the tracks they downloaded.
But, even with your leet 160kbps mp3, you don't have an exact duplicate in it's entirety - not by a long shot. Could you argue that your MP3 is just a summary of the original work? It's 1/10th the size, isn't it? To draw (hah!) a parallel in the art world, does my rough sketch of monet's sunflowers constitute copyright infringement? Hardly.
In both cases, you'd need to appeal to the "fair use" doctrine. In the case of the Sunflower, the appeal is more compelling, because you could argue that you're doing it for "educational purposes", and the extent of the copying is rather small.
A more analogous case to the sunflower example would be that you transcribed the song and made your own recording for your own personal use.
I think in your rough-recording example, the low quality of the recording could be part of a fair use argument, but you'd need to appeal to other
factors as well.
Clearly, a 4 MB mp3 only conveys a small portion of the data present in the original 60 MB audio CD track.
Apparently not that small, because the track has considerable commerical value, especially if the
track in question is what's driving sales of the
album.
which perfectly applies to digital audio being downloaded to computers.
This depends on what is meant by "public transmission". What if the work is being transmitted illegally ? It also does not permit uploading, only downloading. The intent of this law was to allow taping off the radio and videotaping TV shows -- legitimate broadcasts. It is
not.
Typical slashdot -- always looking for those loopholes (and then cying about it when they are closed)
I would further argue that a distributed network is making long term storage (archival) of works, again which is a guaranteed by the Law.
Would you argue it with conviction, or is this some sort of parody of the idiocy commonly seen on slashdot ?
1. If I don't have the right to hear the music, why can I legally listen to it when I go to a friend's house, or when I borrow their CD, etc.? How is hearing it on a friend's borrowed CD different from hearing it from my computer's speakers via mp3?
(1) When you listen to it at a friends house, or borrow the CD, you are not making a copy of the said work, and you are not using it for commericial purposes.
(2) Well, that's nice, and if the record companies believe it will help sales, maybe they should distribute some MP3s. It's up to them, not you.
something that has not yet been adeqautely described to me is the fact that radio gives away free music all the time, broadcast over the air, all you need is a radio to pick it up.
It's not free. The radio station pays for it (that is, they need to pay the record labels for the right to broadcast).
so, all that said, I still fail to see how, ultimately, mp3 is IMMORAL.
MP3 is not immoral. Redistributing music without permission and without paying for it is immoral. If the users of napster/Kazaa, etc worked out a licensing deal with the record labels and paid for the right to upload, they wouldn't be getting sued.
the record companies DO pay radio companies to play certain music, even though that is both illegal AND immoral.
I see, a bogus appeal to the "two wrongs make a right" argument, and an overgeneralisation about "the record companies" (which ones ? All of them ?)
Whether the probability of two different files accidentally having the same hash ist 1 in 2 or 1 in 2^127 is absolutely irrelevant here.
Standards for civil suits are "preponderance of evidence". Odds of 1 in 2^127, and additional evidence (e.g. name of the file) would probably pass the "beyond reasonable doubt test", and would certainly pass the "preponderance of evidence" required in a civil case.
By the way, if you found say 100 or so files, and they all had hashes that matched certain files (and the same titles), that would reduce the odds further.
I would expect that they would use this in addition to other methods (to pre-screen data, and as corroborating evidence), not in place of them.
How delightful! The length constraint means, from what I've seen at bookstores, that no book describing C++ itself can be part of the series.
This is inaccurate. It's more correct to say that a complete reference for C++ cannot be part of the series. Which implies that the series are supposed to be terse tutorial books, not references.
IMHO this says something about the language.
It says that the language has a lot of features and a large library. It also says that textbook authors often ramble a lot.
I think most C++ programmers tend to think more proceduraly.
Again, I point you to the KDE project, as a huge OO codebase. It's plausible that someone coming to
C++ from a background in C programming will think procedurally. But that's not the same as someone who learned C++ from the ground up.
Actually, real C++ programmers are more likely to make heavy use of generics.
They identify the top level objects they are dealing with and start coding them up. As the start on the methods, they revert to procedural techniques instead of identifying lower level objects. This is what they are use to doing, it is how everyone else programms, and it is what they did for most of the coding they did in school.
C++ allows, nay encourages this approch.
I don't see how it encourages that approach at all, and you haven't explained why. Sorry.
1) Neither classes nor functions are objects. C++ is at its heart an OO abstraction layer to a procedural language.
These are not major problems in practice. At worst, they make for a few extra lines of code.
Say there is a complex class A from which a set of classes B1,B2, etc. are derived. Class A needs to contain a method that modifies an object based on another object. E.g. b1.modify(b2) or b1.modify(b26) ( b1 is an object of class B1, etc).
Not many languages have built in support for double-dispatch (if that's what you're getting at). However, there are freely available libraries (e.g. Loki) that make this sort of thing reasonably straightforward.
The problem was that my coworker had initialy confussed OOP with C++ syntax. I have experienced simular things from other C++ programers.
That's hardly the fault of the C++ programming language. It has more to do with the fact that C++ is a mainstream language, so students who are too lazy to learn more than one thing most probably learn C++. However, it happens that nowadays, there are also people with similar myopia who specialise in other languages. For example, there are C programmers, java programmers, and perl/PHP programmers, who can't see outside the limitations of their own pet language. But that isn't the fault of those programming languages.
I think this examplifies an inadequacy of C++.
Nonsense. It's a limitation, which results from a design tradeoff. The reason it's done this way is to provide extra performance. Even java uses built in types that are not objects for the same reason.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of it is to grant exclusive right to copy.
Here's what I'm getting at. If the RIAA search through P2P networks and find you have copyrighted files available for download, they must still prove that you knowingly duplicated them illegally. Right?
Wrong. By making them available for download, you are illegally distributing them.
On the other hand, if someone downloads a copyright file from your computer, then the crime is theirs, not yours.
Wrong. For example, maybe the downloader already owns the software or CD or whatever and are making a backup copy.
Would it be a reasonable defence that you weren't aware the material was copyright?
No. All material is "copyright". Unless there is a notice that grants you the right to redistribute, you don't have that right.
Could you build a defence on grounds that, without the copyright warning, you assumed the material was public domain
Not unless it had a copyright notice asserting that the material was indeed public domain.
pushing blame back to the last guy who did the copying and who failed to attach the copyright warning.
If someone strips licensing or copyright information, that is usually illegal. But you are still to blame unless they replace the notice with a notice that appears to grant you permission to redistribute.
Surely, the company pays him a salary, which they would not be able to do if they had no revenue. So it is incorrect to claim that he "gets nothing".
ecognition is a good incentive. Being able to freely discuss with peers is another important factor,
For the employee of a company, being able to keep food on the table and a roof over your head is also a factor.
Not being bound up in bureaucracy (like spending all your time with lawyers and courts) is also a plus.
Yes, that's another benefit of working for a company. You don't have to run a business. You also avoid a lot of the risks that you would undertake as an independent one-man business. You could go it alone and make a lot more money, or you could work for a company and make a steady salary and have a reasonably secure job.
Someone like W. A. Mozart created more than 70 symphonies, opera and concertos before he was 35. Without "IP protection".
If the technology for making illegal copies were as inaccesible today as it were in Mozart's day, I'm sure the RIAA would be happy, even if they had less "IP protection".
Normal rate for weight loss is about 1lb/week, though you could probably expect to drop more rapidly than (maybe 2-3lb/week) that because you're very fat. I think you're going to find it hard to sustain a rate of 5-6lb/week though. Think long-term , be patient and persistent. Given your present state, it will probably take you a few years to get in good shape, but it will be well worth the effort, and those couple of years of hard work will make the remaining years of your life (which will be longer if you lose the weight) much more enjoyable.
Well, if your hard drive is full of their music, then I doubt a court of law would find this to be a plausible statement. BTW, music is copyrighted by default. The omission of a proper copyright notice does not grant you the right to copy it.
Don't existing online music services already address this sort of thing ? I mean, you can download your choice of tracks from the legit online music serivces (itunes, rhapsody, buymusic, or whatever) and burn them, or download them to your MP3 player or whatever, right ?
IMO services like Rhapsody are a better model. You pay your regular service charge, and then you don't have to make a buying decision every time you listen to a track -- you can download away. More generally, people are prepared to pay extra to get "unlimited X" simply to avoid the mental effort of having to make purchasing decisions. I think this guy is onto something re micropayments, though I don't agree with his conclusions.
Not if they are clearly party to copyright violations. Simply put, I don't think that your usage as stated in your other posts (where you download from an authors website) is analogous to the usage of these other downloaders (who download from anonymous third parties)
See my followup to your other post. If the copyright holder posts material on a public website, they are redistributing their own material to you, so there is no copyright violation. In your example, where you download music from the bands own website, it is also clear that there is no intentional copyright violation. As for slashdot, read more carefully -- the webpage does indeed have a copyright notice, and a hyperlink to a full legal notice.
I think if the author of the work in question makes it available for download on their website, then they are indeed giving you permission to download.
Now as for copyright -- if a small club band puts their work up on their website without a legal notice, they still do have copyright (unless they signed it away to a record label, in which case the label would probably take action against them and not the downloaders). If they are distributing the material to you, there is no copyright violation, because the copyright holder is allowed to distribute their material to you.
On the other hand, you can't legally redistribute their material (on the web or via p2p) without their permission. If you did want to redistribute their material, the best course of action would be to contact them and request permission. I have done this before with free software authors who didn't attach copyright notices, and in such cases, they are often (but not always) happy to have the work redistributed. But you should ask anyway.
No it isn't. You can download it from the website that hosts the content without paying for it, but you can't redistribute it on Kazaa, napster, your own webpage, your own ftp server or whatever unless there is a copyright notice that gives you permission to do so.
In this case, the person distributing the software is distributing it under a free license, and they are breaching copyright, because they are not authorised to license the copyrighted material to you. This is NOT the same as illegally downloading something that is stripped of copyright information. If the material does not come with a notice that explicitly authorises you to copy it, then you don't have the right to do so.
Typical slashdot, always looking for the loophole. Sorry, if you have a big fat collection of top 40 mp3z on your hard drive, it is obvious to anyone, including yourself, that you are infringing.
You could make an educated guess based on the name of the file that you are downloading. You can whine all you like about how you had "no way to know" that your top 40 collection was legally distributed, but the court are simply not going to believe you when you tell them that you thought that the file top_forty_hit_1.mp3 that you downloaded on Kazaa was actually a Redhat ISO.
??? Again ? I didn't write the post you responded to, I am not playing with words at all. The fact is that the FSF are prepared to enforce the GPL whether it is a corporation, or a user, who violates it. Profit motive is irrelevant, whether the infringer is a coproratye entity or not is irrelevant. The FSF will go after infringers because they wish to control the terms of distribution of their product. Like the record companies.
Fine, but good luck getting a job or travelling overseas if you're found guilty in a criminal court. I've applied for a work permit, and one of the things my lawyers told me is that life becomes pretty inconvenient if you have a criminal record for property crimes worth over $400 or so.
Sorry, this is a load of nonsense. The FSF don't care if someone sells their software on CD for profit. They do care if someone makes binary only versions of their software, in breach of the license, whether a profit is made or not. IOW, they enforce their license to the letter, much like the RIAA.
No. They are suing because you are distributing it to downloaders who aren't legally entitled to a copy. If a downloader makes an illegal copy of it, you're responsible because a program running on your computer served the file to them. That's probably the main reason for going after the uploads -- it doesn't matter whether or not you own the CDs, they can still go after you because you don't own the right to distribute them. On the other hand, you couldn't go after a downloader who had the CDs for the tracks they downloaded.
In both cases, you'd need to appeal to the "fair use" doctrine. In the case of the Sunflower, the appeal is more compelling, because you could argue that you're doing it for "educational purposes", and the extent of the copying is rather small.
A more analogous case to the sunflower example would be that you transcribed the song and made your own recording for your own personal use.
I think in your rough-recording example, the low quality of the recording could be part of a fair use argument, but you'd need to appeal to other factors as well.
Clearly, a 4 MB mp3 only conveys a small portion of the data present in the original 60 MB audio CD track.
Apparently not that small, because the track has considerable commerical value, especially if the track in question is what's driving sales of the album.
which perfectly applies to digital audio being downloaded to computers.
This depends on what is meant by "public transmission". What if the work is being transmitted illegally ? It also does not permit uploading, only downloading. The intent of this law was to allow taping off the radio and videotaping TV shows -- legitimate broadcasts. It is not.
Typical slashdot -- always looking for those loopholes (and then cying about it when they are closed)
I would further argue that a distributed network is making long term storage (archival) of works, again which is a guaranteed by the Law.
Would you argue it with conviction, or is this some sort of parody of the idiocy commonly seen on slashdot ?
(1) When you listen to it at a friends house, or borrow the CD, you are not making a copy of the said work, and you are not using it for commericial purposes.
(2) Well, that's nice, and if the record companies believe it will help sales, maybe they should distribute some MP3s. It's up to them, not you.
It's not free. The radio station pays for it (that is, they need to pay the record labels for the right to broadcast).
so, all that said, I still fail to see how, ultimately, mp3 is IMMORAL.
MP3 is not immoral. Redistributing music without permission and without paying for it is immoral. If the users of napster/Kazaa, etc worked out a licensing deal with the record labels and paid for the right to upload, they wouldn't be getting sued.
the record companies DO pay radio companies to play certain music, even though that is both illegal AND immoral.
I see, a bogus appeal to the "two wrongs make a right" argument, and an overgeneralisation about "the record companies" (which ones ? All of them ?)
No they're not. It's per song uploaded.
How can they possibly, morally and legally, justify this?
It's based on the expectation that the song will be downloaded several times.
And, more importantly, would that actually hold up in court? Why not just let the defendants buy the music, instead?
Because they are redistributing to others, not just themselves.
Standards for civil suits are "preponderance of evidence". Odds of 1 in 2^127, and additional evidence (e.g. name of the file) would probably pass the "beyond reasonable doubt test", and would certainly pass the "preponderance of evidence" required in a civil case.
By the way, if you found say 100 or so files, and they all had hashes that matched certain files (and the same titles), that would reduce the odds further.
I would expect that they would use this in addition to other methods (to pre-screen data, and as corroborating evidence), not in place of them.
This is inaccurate. It's more correct to say that a complete reference for C++ cannot be part of the series. Which implies that the series are supposed to be terse tutorial books, not references.
IMHO this says something about the language.
It says that the language has a lot of features and a large library. It also says that textbook authors often ramble a lot.
Again, I point you to the KDE project, as a huge OO codebase. It's plausible that someone coming to C++ from a background in C programming will think procedurally. But that's not the same as someone who learned C++ from the ground up.
Actually, real C++ programmers are more likely to make heavy use of generics.
They identify the top level objects they are dealing with and start coding them up. As the start on the methods, they revert to procedural techniques instead of identifying lower level objects. This is what they are use to doing, it is how everyone else programms, and it is what they did for most of the coding they did in school. C++ allows, nay encourages this approch.
I don't see how it encourages that approach at all, and you haven't explained why. Sorry.
1) Neither classes nor functions are objects. C++ is at its heart an OO abstraction layer to a procedural language.
These are not major problems in practice. At worst, they make for a few extra lines of code.
Say there is a complex class A from which a set of classes B1,B2, etc. are derived. Class A needs to contain a method that modifies an object based on another object. E.g. b1.modify(b2) or b1.modify(b26) ( b1 is an object of class B1, etc).
Not many languages have built in support for double-dispatch (if that's what you're getting at). However, there are freely available libraries (e.g. Loki) that make this sort of thing reasonably straightforward.
The problem was that my coworker had initialy confussed OOP with C++ syntax. I have experienced simular things from other C++ programers.
That's hardly the fault of the C++ programming language. It has more to do with the fact that C++ is a mainstream language, so students who are too lazy to learn more than one thing most probably learn C++. However, it happens that nowadays, there are also people with similar myopia who specialise in other languages. For example, there are C programmers, java programmers, and perl/PHP programmers, who can't see outside the limitations of their own pet language. But that isn't the fault of those programming languages.
I think this examplifies an inadequacy of C++.
Nonsense. It's a limitation, which results from a design tradeoff. The reason it's done this way is to provide extra performance. Even java uses built in types that are not objects for the same reason.