In English, "to create" is a verb, not a noun: an action, not a thing. Paying someone to create an image editor is paying for a service, not a product
If you pay someone to create a chair, what you get is a creation, a noun, a thing. You get the chair at the end, a product. The labor is incidental to what you've contracted for.
I don't think I'm out of line here: you've made far less attempt to educate yourself on the details of programming than I have on law, for instance, but that certainly never stopped you from speaking about it.
An immaterial distraction, since there are no salient details of programming that are in dispute. You haven't made an attempt to educate yourself. You've made an attempt to be contrary, argumentative from ignorance, and petty.
As long as we agree that some arrangement exists whereby one million people can contract to pay me $40 million total to perform a service, and whereby I'll have legal recourse if they don't come through, I don't really care what you call it.
Which is quite plainly the point that the previous discussion would have stood for--without your ludicrous distortions and attempt to engage in a personal smear.
You were mistaken in the way you made your claim, offering it as a counterpoint. You were equally mistaken to resurrect it in an unrelated discussion two years later out of a sad, personal grudge, especially when after all of that effort and your constant annoyance, you have accomplished exactly nothing.
The fact remains that you could not individually obligate those million people for $40 each in an enforceable contract. You mistakenly insisted on doing so then, and you thought you were being clever to bring it back up. That colossal failure is plainly evident.
I sue, and the particulars of that lawsuit are something for my lawyer to worry about.
Then in the future, don't present an argument as fact when you haven't the slightest clue what you're saying.
I expressed no opinion whatsoever on the number of checks it should be spread across.
Uh-huh. We can pretend that you never tried to collect $40 from one million individuals. That's fine by me.
Actually, as you may recall, it was an attempt to demonstrate that you're in no position to call out anyone else's "comic level of ignorance". That's all.
A failed attempt, given that all it did was point out that your ignorance extends not only to copyright, but to contracts as well.
Luckily for you, I have no problem showing respect or courtesy even to someone who lacks any shred of credibility.
So that's what you call your lying and trolling and digging up two-year old discussions that (a) you plainly still don't understand, (b) have no relevance to the present discussion, except further demonstrating your lack of knowledge and disingenuous tactics, and (c) were introduced solely in a painfully misguided attempt to smear because yet again, you could not handle having your utter ignorance laid out.
My goal is merely to put your present statements in context so that others may evaluate them more critically, not to insult or humiliate you.
And that context merely highlights the fact that previous dealings with you have met with the same level of ignorance or willful distortion. Job well done, there. You came in here, antagonistic to a fault, and lost every substantive point, so you resorted to ad hominems and distractions and your personal grudge.
Unfortunately, they did not work.
I'm finished if you are.
I'll believe it when I see it. You haven't shown the ability to stop yet, so we'll see.
When you wrote "I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends", you were speaking as an individual, not as a class of one million people.
I was also speaking about paying for a product, which is what you've been whining about until you found yourself cornered. Now it suits you to ignore that as well. Nice try indeed.
For the record, I would be happy to accept a $40 million check funded by one million people each contributing $40. That's not what I was rejecting, which is clear from context.
Sorry, but it isn't. What's clear is that you expected to individually collect $40 from each user, as you've said several times not only then, but now.
I'll quote again: ""What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each."
In your hypothetical, the $40 obligation isn't to you as you insist time after time. The $40 obligation is to each other. Your contract is one, $40 million contract, liable to the Offeree, whether that party is an individual or a group of individuals. They are joint and severally liable (or, depending on the contract, some other style of collective liability) for the whole $40M.
They're not agreeing to pay you $40, they are agreeing to be one of one million people paying you $40M. You are not providing $40 of labor and services to them individually; you are providing $40M of labor and services to them and a million of their peers collectively as a single entity. They are not individually obligated to you for $40, because you can't create divided shares in an entity that cannot exist.
Funny how my meaning is so obvious now, even though you couldn't grasp it at the time.
I did grasp it at the time. It originated from me, with the implication that that model is untenable in most cases.
Before that discussion was likewise derailed with your clever distractions, is that people are hesitant to enter into such arrangements, which is why that development model isn't widely used today, even though it could and does exist without the abolition of copyright. Most open source business models don't and would not elect to use it, either, preferring to use the copyright on the entirety of the work to create "shareholders" in the product and thus individually obligate them in a fashion that would not be possible absent copyright.
n your hypothetical, the $40 obligation isn't to you as you insist time after time. The $40 obligation is to each other. Your contract is one, $40 million contract, liable to the Offeree, whether that party is an individual or a group of individuals. They are joint and severally liable (or, depending on the contract, some other style of collective liability) for the whole $40M.
They're not agreeing to pay you $40, they are agreeing to be one of one million people paying you $40M. You are not providing $40 of labor and services to them individually; you are providing $40M of labor and services to them and a million of their peers collectively as a single entity. They are not individually obligated to you for $40, because you can't create divided shares in an entity that cannot exist.
You can't pretend your context was anything other than individual obligation and a rejection of a lump sum payment. It is absolutely true that I offered it in that scenario as myself individually refusing to pay $40M for a product, but it is also true that the conversation moved away from that point before you even began to grasp that it doesn't matter whether the "I" in that context was individual or collective--private citizens, whether individually or in groups, are generally unwilling to take on that sort of obligation.
You wrote, "I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends", I responded, "it isn't necessary to charge individuals the full price. I don't need $40 million from you, it'll work just as well to collect $40 from you and a million other people", and the discussion of contracting for programming labor proceeded from there. What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each.
You still remain ignorant of the issue.
What you rejected was an argument no one was making. Whether one person or one million people is the entity signing the contract, it is ONE CONTRACT. If one million people are entering into $40 contracts with you, you don't have a recovery action against them in your hypothetical world, because what you are selling is illegal. The concept is joint and several liability. You would need that $40M check from me--whether it was me as a wealthy individual or me as a class of one million investors. You could not as you suggested then and idiotically maintain now, individually obligate one million people in $40 contracts.
What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each.
AND THAT IS UNENFORCEABLE AND NONSENSICAL. You're pretending that it makes perfect sense, but it does not. If you are charging one million people $40 each, you are obligated to produce for them either $40 of labor (nonsensical; no one is interested in contracting for $40 of labor toward a $40M project) or a $40 product (nonsensical by internal conceit: you banned ownership of intellectual products in the hypothetical).
There simply is no way to reconcile the fact that in neither case are you accomplishing what you thought you were accomplishing. The mistake was unfortunate enough then, but your ignorance and blind rage is so debilitating now that you felt the need to try it again on a completely unrelated discussion in which you pretend to seek enlightenment, but instead simply hope to smear.
You didn't have the requisite knowledge to do so then, and you don't now.
Nope. This isn't just a strawman, it's an outright lie: you're not merely arguing against points I never raised, hoping that readers won't notice the switch; you're explicitly attributing statements to me that I never made
And I quote, from your very same post: "What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each."
That, whether you are too stupid or too dishonest to recognize, is one million, $40 contracts. You can't charge "each" person without a separate contract. There is no other interpretation. That you did not then or now know what you were saying is not my mistake, but your ongoing ignorance. No, the proposal you meant to advance was ONE $40M contract with ONE party, a collective party of one million. But in order to make that proposal, you would have to drop your asinine counterargument posture, which you are unwilling to do because you're just that rabid.
It's not dishonesty. It's just more of your ignorance of the substance and mechanics of the law. There isn't a choice between a sensical and a nonsensical interpretation. You only presented a nonsensical interpretation. Whether you intended it to make sense or not is irrelevant to whether it was legally, logically, and semantically valid.
You could not, in your hypothetical, individually obligate one million people to pay one-millionth of your labor costs. And yet here you are, continuing to insist on it, without purpose or topical relevance. The only way out for you is to admit that either you were wrong to propose that nonsensical counterargument then, or you're intentionally distorting it now because of your sad and personal vendetta.
For the love of Aisha, shut up. You could scarcely dig your hole any deeper.
But that's the point - who has the money to take ASCAP to court?
That presumes ASCAP would actually follow through, which it never has in cases where the exception clearly applies. It goes for maximum PR value and a non-zero chance of victory. Threats of legal action are not legal action.
It is disingenuous to argue that there has been no legal test of the ASCAP claims
That is incorrect. There has been a test, and they've lost. There's 30 years of case law for it.
There's a reason why they demand $400, and it's because they know people are likely to cave if they don't know what they're doing. The price is set like any other business--high enough to generate revenue and low enough to be less costly than potential alternatives. It's why printer ink costs just about as much as a new printer and why electric razor heads cost about half to one-third as much as a new razor body. It's called free market capitalism, and these are the consequences, good and bad.
If you're playing the radio on one stereo you bought at Best Buy in your restaurant, ASCAP (a) probably wouldn't even demand a license of you and (b) you could tell them to buzz off.
Karaoke isn't the radio, though, and unless you're using Comcast's karaoke channel, it's not a broadcast, so the exemption does not apply. The source of your karaoke recordings should be properly licensed for public performance if you're using it to draw business, but that's a wholly different can of worms and has little to do with the homestyle and small business exemptions being discussed here.
Again, the original text is right there for everyone to see.
Yes, it is. You rejected the $40M contract in favor of one million $40 contracts. If that was for labor, as you suggest, the legal meaning of that would obligate you to perform $40 of labor for each individual person. As with copyright, your level of ignorance simply blinds you to that.
And if some of those million people refused to pay? They'd be in violation of the contract, yes?
If you hadn't mis-corrected and created one million separate contracts, yes. But since you claim to have one million separate contracts, no. Those contracts would be unenforceable.
BTW, you misspelled "ONE complete service".
The difference between a service and a product is that a product is a creation that stands alone. A book is a product; writing the book is a service.
Actually, I didn't. What I wrote was "as long as I have a binding agreement with everyone who promises to pay". If there's one interpretation that makes sense, and another that does not, it's hardly my fault when you choose the one that doesn't make sense.
But the point, then as now, is that you can't have one million binding agreements for one-millionth of an image editor. It's the fact that you explicitly rejected the overall service contract (the interpretation that makes sense) in order to pose a nonsensical one that is at issue.
One cannot simply ignore your counterargument because it makes no sense, unless you're admitting that you had no clue what you were talking about and were flat-out wrong.
In fact, you didn't even mention this supposed fault at the time, you just steamed ahead with that "you can't sue someone for depriving you of your time" load.
That would qualify as "mentioning" it. You could not, in that scenario, sue someone for depriving you of your time.
1. Their signature is on a contract for me to perform the labor. 2. I performed the labor.
Their signature is on a contract for you to provide a $40 share of a $40M project. You can't own the project. The contract is enforceable. You can sign whatever you want, but you can't have an enforceable contract for something that is illegal.
Again, you insisted on having one million contracts. You're the one that introduced the nonsensical interpretation, and now you're insisting that I should have ignored it because CLEARLY you weren't really disagreeing with me if your interpretation made no sense.
Sooner or later, you will have to move on with your sad life. Your loss is compounded at each turn, and it's obvious that you have absolutely nothing to gain by returning here time after time to troll.
So you now assert that, in that hypothetical, you would enter into one million contracts, agreeing to provide $40 worth of labor to each Offeree? That's your retcon? I don't think you're being honest with yourself, let alone the rest of the world. It's quite plain what you said, and it had nothing to do with contracting for labor. You simply didn't understand the implications of your own statements. You were attempting, through either intellectual dishonesty or ignorance, to "correct" an assertion that you'd need to raise $40M in private money to pay for a $40M project--a serious problem, because of the substantial financial and legal risk that any entity, whether a wealthy individual or a group of investors, would assume. If you truly believed you'd be contracting for the project in that scenario, you wouldn't have needed to correct anything, but you rejected the $40M labor and services contract and said you could "obligate" one million people to pay $40 each for the image editor.
Nobody would enter into an agreement for $40 of labor toward a $40M product. All that consideration would support would be a snippet of code (that again, your hypothetical also denies proprietary interest in, and thus would not be enforceable). They'd enter into a $40 agreement for access to the product, though.
The point you failed to grasp two years ago is that you can't enter into one million, $40 contracts unless you are providing one million discrete things, be they products or services, chairs or mowed lawns. What you'd actually be doing in that situation is not entering into one million, $40 contracts, but rather ONE $40 million contract to provide ONE complete product to one million users, and the Offeree would comprise a class party comprised of those one million people. But then as now, you were too busy being contrary and dishonest to think. You thought you were offering a clever counterargument to the need to execute a $40M contract to pay for a $40M project, but instead you just failed to understand how contracts work. There is no theory of obligation to selling a divided whole without first owning the whole. You can't contract with individuals for undefined sums of money and undefined returns. You can contract with a collective entity of individuals, who are all taking a share in the total cost--but you rejected the latter approach in favor of the fallacious former.You didn't frame your hypothetical correctly. You didn't understand the consequences of your error. You came back two years later on an unrelated matter and distorted the exchange in a sad attempt at an ad hominem because you couldn't deal with yet another defeat on your showing of copyright ignorance. You can't bring yourself to stop whining and move on because it's personal for you. Get over it.
One could certainly offer your services as a programmer outside of a product offer, such as agreeing to clean up clutter, doing some updates or bug fixing, or even just being placed on retainer for odd jobs. That's not at all the same scenario, though, as trying to get a court to grant a remedy on a contract to provide a new, finished product in a fictionalized world where proprietary interests in intellectual works is actively banned. Moreover, how would you even prove your performance of $40 of labor for that person? As soon as the project were completed, everyone in the world would have the right of access, whether they contributed or not. You'd have no power to demand payment; you can't contract to sell what isn't legal to sell. If on the other hand you were permitted in such a world to contractually limit access rights just to those who have contributed (or to grant them more rights based on that fact), what you'd have just done is recreate copyright, except without the limitations of statutory copyright you'd abolished. An Offeror's power is significantly broader without
So you've come around? When I said previously that a contract for programming labor could be enforced against someone who refused to pay for the labor, you said the person who performed the labor would have "nothing to latch onto in a dispute". Glad to see you've realized the error in that.
No. Just no.
You said that you could contractually obligate a million individuals to pay $40 for an image editor, a product. But if you could not own the product, as you also proposed, you could not make such a contractual obligation. You did not offer a situation in which you were being hired for your services; you offered a scenario in which you promised to deliver a product. In said hypothetical, if you could not own the product, you could not enforce that contract, just as someone who doesn't own rights in the land can't enforce an action for trespass.
How you jump from there to the grossly moronic "you said you can't ever contract for labor only" straw man is quite the contortionist mystery.
I suppose you think mowing lawns isn't labor without production either because it results in a "mown lawn product"?
More intellectual dishonesty, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. It's either that or you really are that stupid. Providing programming services is certainly possible, just as contracting for lawncare labor is possible. That's not the scenario you established, and it's not the case now.
You can continue to distort and lie and grind your ax, but now I'm just bored with you.
Actually, all that extra context does is further illustrate your ignorance. Employers already look to hire the cheapest programmers they can, often from overseas. Copyright has nothing to do with outsourcing: a lack of copyright wouldn't make it any easier to hire cheap overseas programming labor
Wow. You're still not even reading. Copyright has a great deal to do with outsourcing; the question isn't whether it's easy to hire cheap overseas labor, but whether or not revenue can justify not doing so. But please don't let reality get in your way.
"Time itself isn't worth anything; you can't sue someone for being deprived of time" -- that, of course, would mean that a contract for labor is invalid. Which it isn't.
Time is not labor. Lost time has no value.
A contract for labor is breached when the labor goes without reimbursement, not when the clock ticks by. Don't let that stop you.
Actually, no, it didn't. It involved a contract for labor, specifically for writing software.
You're correct, it was for the product of an image editor, not a motion picture. My mistake. It was, after all, two years ago. But by all means, keep going.
It was a discussion about a specific kind of labor without production.
A software product is a product. It was not labor without production. Oh, those pesky facts again.
Well, one thing the readers will definitely never forget is how you've repeatedly embarrassed yourself.
Notice how you still can't return to the topic? I still encourage people to read your invariable resort to trolling and distortion. Embarrassing, indeed.
"Without IP, your company [...] would pay smarter and cheaper programmers in places with lower standards of living to do that work for it. They would have no obligation to you as an employee if they had no IP interests to protect. [...] What would you do if the companies, realizing that programmers still wanted to be paid for the time it took for them to write software, decided to develop software that wrote other software?"
Taken from a section about the pervasive foundational structure of IP in the export market and the reliance on US IP to minimize the trade deficit. It was a rhetorical question, and one that certainly does not stand for the proposition that the elimination of IPR necessarily leads to the elimination of programmers. The context is clear in your omissions:
"Without IP, your company would not generate as much money, would not have as many employees, and would not pay those employees anywhere near what it does now. It would pay smarter and cheaper programmers in places with lower standards of living to do that work for it. They would have no obligation to you as an employee if they had no IP interests to protect. You'd also not have even gotten off the ground. How would you finance your education, and could you afford to work for next to nothing (and be paid after the fact) long enough to make a reputation where you might be lucky enough for someone to seek you out for a project every once in a while? Your only hope to have gainful employment would be if you could somehow prevent people from becoming as skilled as you. Those 6 billion people you currently don't compete with, thanks to your privileged status as an American with particular training? They'd be happy to do your job for half the price. Outsourcing is a great thing for consumers, but it's terrible for employees, so it has to be conducted in a balanced way."
"You stipulate that you want to be paid for your time--but you see, your time is only worthwhile if a controllable product is produced. If you can't control the product, you've got nothing to latch onto in a dispute."
And where does that say that no contract in no circumstance could ever exist for labor as a service? It doesn't. The discussion there posed a question involving a contract for a product, viz. a motion picture. It was not a general discussion about the law of contracts or labor without production. The intellectual dishonesty is plainly evident.
You just can't have a discussion without resorting to trolling. Ever. I knew I recognized your UID from somewhere. It's just remarkable the lengths you'll go to when you can't win on substance. I'm truly tickled that you are so desperate as to resort to flamboyant context games and misstatements to distort and distract from the topic you've all but forgotten. The readers haven't.
You can find the house reports just by Googling for them, but any good statutory supplement intended for practitioners will have them compiled.
If you want to understand copyright law, first be prepared for the fact that you can dig deeper into complexities than any sane person ever world. Second, I'd recommend picking up a used, older edition copyright casebook used in introductory law school courses (these can be found on Amazon for about $20). Copyright is an advanced elective in most law schools, so the editing will leave out a lot of the legal basics, but it's a valuable resource for a curious lay person. The fact that the cases and statutes are edited and presented in thematic units is much more helpful than anyone attempting to read past about section 108 of Title 17. Just beware throughout that you're probably making assumptions as you go along that may or may not be correct, since it won't be readily apparent to you which terms are legal terms of art, and it takes a good deal of practice in the field to get a real grasp on it. Most attorneys don't even know much about it--it's not tested on the Bar at all.
"Journalistic" reports of copyright history are also a poor source of information, since they tend to be modern arguments advanced through the search for appropriate historical support, rather than an honest historical overview of copyright.
You want to talk about comic ignorance, well, now yours is on display.
All that's on display is your foolish and juvenile personal ax to grind and a pervasive lack of knowledge and insight.
I invite people to read those threads and see for themselves how your distortion and ignorance permeates through it all. Embarrassing facts? Hardly.
Programmers wouldn't exist without copyright? "Impossible" to contract for labor without a salable product? Nonsense and fine examples of your intellectual dishonesty.
All circumstances falling outside the scope of the exemption discussed here.
Your first link cites no source, and is actually just marketing an alternative service, and your subsequent links deal with ASCAP overstatements dealing with circumstances outside the "radio on the beach" question originally posed.
Find one in that pile that was using a single receiving apparatus, who was actually found to be legally obligated to pay ASCAP, and we'll talk.
Yes, that's what I said: businesses are, in some cases, required to pay for a license to play music for their customers, even when they're only playing the radio. Thanks for confirming it.
A fact never disputed. What's your point?
That's quite a statement, coming from someone who thinks the existence of copyright is the only reason software companies haven't developed "software that wrote other software" and made human programmers obsolete, and that it's impossible to contract someone to perform labor unless that labor results in a salable product.
Ah, so in surrender you turn to straw men and fallacious ad hominems. It's disappointing, if not surprising, to see your ignorance spread to reading comprehension in general.
Neither of your propositions are supported by the content of those links. Sensationalism, distortion, and distraction are just not viable responses. Sorry.
Perhaps I was mistaken and should've referred to recordings instead of the radio.
Yes, you were. There are different rules for prerecorded sources.
How about not lying by omission by ignoring the licensing requirements for music recordings and the size- and speaker-count-based exceptions to the radio and TV exemptions?
And there you go again!
The square footage and equipment limitations are not for 110(5)(A). The requirements for 110(5)(A), the radio on the beach, are, as listed, a single receiving apparatus of the kind commonly used in private homes. The limitation is the number of receiving apparatuses: one. There is no square footage requirement at all. It is neither a lie nor an omission.
The square footage requirements are for 110(5)(B) use, which are entities not using a single receiving apparatus of the kind commonly used in private homes. These are bars, restaurants, gas stations, etc. with multi-room, multi-speaker setups, walls of televisions and so on. They are subject to size and equipment limitations if they are claiming the free exemption. If they have more speakers, more displays, or larger displays, then they have to arrange for an express license.
At this point, your displays of ignorance have reached comic levels. You didn't even bother to read, let alone think, before you came back, once again, with your baseless, argumentative, ignorant assertions. It's astounding.
All right, then why are businesses hounded for playing the radio for their customers?
Which businesses? "Hounded" in what way? By whom? Where have they been denied their exemption under the law?
This kind of synthesized proposition is meaningless because the question and the response will inevitably be about different things. You're referring, I assume, to anecdotal reports of over-aggressive conduct by collection societies. That's par for the course in the business world, end to end, whether copyright is involved or not.
If we're ignorant, then how about enlightening us instead of just calling names?
How about not making statements you have no authority to make, and presenting them as fact? How about not asserting challenges alleging an "inconsistency" without possession of the requisite knowledge to establish it? Pose responses in the form of a question if you don't know what you're talking about.
Making it look like your arguments are factual and supported by reality when they are not is simply ignorant.
The assertion that a loudspeaker is a transmitter is expressly rejected by law and practice. Moreover, it would give the entire statutory section a scope of exactly zero. There is no other word than "ignorant" to describe a person making such a flatly fallacious assertion. Stumbling over oneself to issue a correction or an argumentative challenge, when the information they pose is both incorrect and nonsensical, is a disservice to knowledge. You want enlightenment? Learn to seek it constructively.
If you consider being called ignorant when you make such a grand display of it to be "being called a name", that's your issue, but coming from someone whose discourse regularly includes the word 'fucking', I place little weight on comments of tone and etiquette. Ignorance is the lack of knowledge. It can only be an insult to someone who purports to have that knowledge in the first place, when it is clear s/he does not.
Offtopic and a little trollish: This lack of distinction at the low end actually got the U.S. in a bit of trouble at the WTO
No, not strictly true. If you read the WTO decision, 110(5)(A), the section I quoted, was upheld as a valid exception to the Berne/TRIPS Art. 11 rights.
110(5)(B), which is the more complex exception passed by the small business lobby and the expanded codification of the Aiken rule, was the portion that the US lost. This is all found in the WTO Panel Report, DS/160/R.
Rather than changing the law (which Congress doesn't want to do), the United States agreed to make a lump-sum payment
No, the terms of the settlement do indeed require the United States to change its domestic law to comply with its international obligations. The US to date has not done so.
Maybe it is because the small business owners ask more nicely.
It's because the small business lobby isn't deluded and scattered into shooting themselves in the foot left and right. The progressive copyright lobby groups exist, but they do not support complete abolition, and Slashdot's membership does its very best to torpedo every proposed change and submitted bill for reform, including proposals for personal use exemptions, revised statutory damages for P2P infringements, and statutory codification of LOC exemptions. In that respect, the RIAA/MPAA and Slashdot are a united front.
In the hypothetical boom-box situation then the music is being further transmitted (as sounds waves in the air) to the public. Ergo,
No. Further transmission is retransmission, as defined in section 101 and clarified in the committee notes. "Sound waves" in the air are not transmissions; a loudspeaker is not a transmitter.
This is further clarified by Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists, 392 U.S. 390, and Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151.
Please stop with the outlandish displays of ignorance.
From 17 USC 110(5): [The following is not an infringement:] except as provided in subparagraph (B), communication of a transmission embodying a performance or display of a work by the public reception of the transmission on a single receiving apparatus of a kind commonly used in private homes, unless-- (i) a direct charge is made to see or hear the transmission; or (ii) the transmission thus received is further transmitted to the public;
Their situation is no different. The law doesn't distinguish between a business playing the radio and any other person playing the radio
Sure it does, beyond a certain point. At the low end of the spectrum, there's no need to make such a distinction, because all parties are exempt who follow the rules.
Once again, faulty and idiotic legal interpretations from the ignorant.
ASCAP just wants money from the carrier's commercial ringtone sales. It's got nothing to do with anything else.
If a lossy encode, via the same codec with the same settings, does not come out the same way every single time then there is an input that you do not know about.
Correct, with the minor qualification being an input that is not being considered, unless those other posters truly don't know or are totally discounting the information in the file other than the encoded sounds.
The only issue is that bit-for-bit identical copies found on filesharing networks are almost always from the same source. They will have identical MD5 sums, and thus identical metadata, and algorithm choice in encoding and compression will offer slight differences. This effect is amplified by the lack of need for multiple sources of the same data. Even FLAC files may be slightly different, given metadata, timestamps, and so on.
The only point is that bit-for-bit identical files as those on P2P networks are indeed evidence of P2P acquisition. What it's not is proof of P2P acquisition. That should be fairly obvious to all involved, except that most people can't seem to understand even basic legal concepts.
the jury was envisioned as having much greater strength than afforded today
Envisioned by whom? Greater strength than what? This is both ignorant and baseless.
The Anglo-Saxon jury has always been a finder of fact, not of law. The law came either from the sovereign or, later, from Parliament. Juries have never been involved in that process.
They did indeed have greater strength in the past, when the jurors were also the witnesses testifying. That practice was terminated for obvious reasons.
That's only necessary because the system has been gamed for a few centuries by those jurists
Oh, another ignorant and unsubstantiated claim. Jurists aren't the active participants. If anyone is gaming anything, it's the litigators, and by design.
making work for themselves by making it too complex for us proles.
Any attorney would gladly thank you for inventing a simplified system of codification or for reigning in the legislature's schizoid drafting. The idea that there is an all-encompassing "lawyer conspiracy" to make things harder for themselves is patently absurd to anyone who even begins to know what they're talking about.
There are so many competing groups that such an apparatus could never accomplish that. Complexity of laws is a natural result of caselaw-based jurisprudence and simple human nature. You can pretend otherwise if you like. It's not like this place is known for being in touch with reality.
Have done. They turn out identical. If yours aren't, you're using archaic software.
No, they don't. Lossy rips are simply not bit-for-bit identical, and you're being completely disingenuous (no shock, based on the remainder of your reply) if you claim that they are. We're not talking FLAC here.
Hm. As opposed to an entire chapter of a book... hey, wait, if you distribute a chapter of a book
If the chapter is independently registered as a copyrighted work, then yes. Individual songs are copyrighted works, and not just the entire album. The songwriter of track 3 isn't necessarily the songwriter of track 7; the sound recording of each individual song is typically registered separately as a consequence of radio release--they don't play the whole album on the radio, they play a song. It has a set of copyrights that stand alone.
Clueless indeed.
The job of a jury is to determine (in criminal court) "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" and in a civil case, "liability based on a preponderance of evidence."
No, the job of a jury is to answer questions of fact. Questions of law are resolved by the judge during the trial process, through the process of oral arguments and testimony.
If I'm tasked with finding someone guilt/liable under law X, then as a reasonable, honest, and fair citizen I ought to be able to get and read a copy of law X,
You're not. You're tasked with finding whether specific acts or circumstances are true or false. If you find the prerequisites to be true, then guilt or liability is established. There are tidy little forms to help you with this process.
o verify that one of the parties in the courtroom (yes, entirely likely including a paid-off judge) hasn't just lied to me about what it says.
Incorrect statements of the law are resolved on appeal or on objection of counsel, not by the jury. Your fantasy-land reality notwithstanding, the role of the jury is not the role of the judge, nor is the role of counselor, litigator, or legislator. The legal system has a separation of powers just like the government. These procedural rules exist for a reason, and that reason is due process.
Again, if you have a problem with the law, talk to the legislature. If you have a problem with a judge, vote them out when they come up for reelection.
Yes. Not once, but twice. The first result saw the jury react in a punitive way with the $200,000 award. It was atypical then, and it was based on her lying to the jury and basically the Slashdot legal effect: treat the jury as simpletons and morons and try to pull a "clever" fast one based on a ficitionalized fantasy version of the legal system. It didn't work then, and it certainly didn't work the second time.
Not only was there the knowledge that the first jury found her dishonest, but she continued with the same basic tactics this time. The jury reacted very much in the same way, and frankly, this case was a terrible test balloon with an unsurprising result. The only thing notable about the outcome here was the scale of the jury's contempt for the defendant. It was always apparent to everyone actually involved in the real world issues of this case that NYCL's analysis was deeply flawed and biased. It doesn't matter, though, given the massive echo chamber here.
What this case calls into question is not the concept of copyright or even the mechanics of its operation. It highlights the ongoing and deeply problematic lack of a second set of statutory damages keyed more to the P2P-style infringement that has become an issue in the past decade. The statutory damages are perfectly fine the way they are for the kinds of infringement they were written to stop. They're not fine for more casual users. The damages are intentionally not tied to the retail cost of a single copy, which makes the nonsense $24 claim just as egregious as the RIAA's "lost sales" figures. They are meant to be harsh and punitive, because enforcement is so spotty. The double standard here is irrelevant though when it's the popular side.
But Slashdot is full of petulant children and the same set of people who actively unravel every proposed change to copyright law that isn't a purely fantastical complete abolition. The US economy could not handle such a thing. IP is by far our most valuable export, and the only thing supporting our international trading. We don't manufacture anything of particular noteworthiness, and a service economy is dependent on non-tangible goods and attendant legal protection. Copyright is not going anywhere.
Digital technology is digital technology. Rip the same track, compress with the same software algorithm and bitrate, and you will get the same output every time. If there's one thing digital tech is good at, it's being consistent.
Try it yourself. Rip a song several times. You will see that in fact, the copies will not be bit-for-bit identical. Consistently very close, but not identical.
If the "single" even still existed, I'd be tempted to give you benefit of the doubt. The MafiAA has been doing their best to sell "album only" setups for over three decades now.
He actually overstated the support the other way. No one who actually litigates in this area would be so downright dishonest as to claim that an individual song does not constitute a work. It's not an either/or situation. Both the individual tracks and the album are creative works. Even if you were to consider the record label copyright solely on the album, in this context, taking of complete songs would have a fair probability of being considered substantially more than de minimus use.
One of the crappiest thing about the modern legal system is that if you have any clue about the law
One of the crappiest things about Slashdot is the popular misconception that you know more about the law than you do, or that "the system" is the fictionalized construction you've built in your head to berate.
Show any indication that you are capable of understanding the law independently. People have actually been kicked off of juries for requesting a written copy of the relevant law in the jury room.
The jury isn't there to deliberate the law. They're there to establish factual findings as requested by the court. That's all. You're neither counselors nor judges; neither litigators nor legislators. Your role in the process isn't as grand editor; jury nullification (a) rarely works and (b) has never changed the law. It's a fast way to a mistrial, though. The fact that you don't understand what the jury is there for is proof enough that you're not qualified to make the legal judgments you want to make in the first place. Notice that judges, attorneys, and paralegals almost never serve on juries, either.
If you want to deal with the substantive law in question, take it to the legislature that has the power to do something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
In English, "to create" is a verb, not a noun: an action, not a thing. Paying someone to create an image editor is paying for a service, not a product
If you pay someone to create a chair, what you get is a creation, a noun, a thing. You get the chair at the end, a product. The labor is incidental to what you've contracted for.
I don't think I'm out of line here: you've made far less attempt to educate yourself on the details of programming than I have on law, for instance, but that certainly never stopped you from speaking about it.
An immaterial distraction, since there are no salient details of programming that are in dispute. You haven't made an attempt to educate yourself. You've made an attempt to be contrary, argumentative from ignorance, and petty.
As long as we agree that some arrangement exists whereby one million people can contract to pay me $40 million total to perform a service, and whereby I'll have legal recourse if they don't come through, I don't really care what you call it.
Which is quite plainly the point that the previous discussion would have stood for--without your ludicrous distortions and attempt to engage in a personal smear.
You were mistaken in the way you made your claim, offering it as a counterpoint. You were equally mistaken to resurrect it in an unrelated discussion two years later out of a sad, personal grudge, especially when after all of that effort and your constant annoyance, you have accomplished exactly nothing.
The fact remains that you could not individually obligate those million people for $40 each in an enforceable contract. You mistakenly insisted on doing so then, and you thought you were being clever to bring it back up. That colossal failure is plainly evident.
I sue, and the particulars of that lawsuit are something for my lawyer to worry about.
Then in the future, don't present an argument as fact when you haven't the slightest clue what you're saying.
I expressed no opinion whatsoever on the number of checks it should be spread across.
Uh-huh. We can pretend that you never tried to collect $40 from one million individuals. That's fine by me.
Actually, as you may recall, it was an attempt to demonstrate that you're in no position to call out anyone else's "comic level of ignorance". That's all.
A failed attempt, given that all it did was point out that your ignorance extends not only to copyright, but to contracts as well.
Luckily for you, I have no problem showing respect or courtesy even to someone who lacks any shred of credibility.
So that's what you call your lying and trolling and digging up two-year old discussions that (a) you plainly still don't understand, (b) have no relevance to the present discussion, except further demonstrating your lack of knowledge and disingenuous tactics, and (c) were introduced solely in a painfully misguided attempt to smear because yet again, you could not handle having your utter ignorance laid out.
My goal is merely to put your present statements in context so that others may evaluate them more critically, not to insult or humiliate you.
And that context merely highlights the fact that previous dealings with you have met with the same level of ignorance or willful distortion. Job well done, there. You came in here, antagonistic to a fault, and lost every substantive point, so you resorted to ad hominems and distractions and your personal grudge.
Unfortunately, they did not work.
I'm finished if you are.
I'll believe it when I see it. You haven't shown the ability to stop yet, so we'll see.
When you wrote "I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends", you were speaking as an individual, not as a class of one million people.
I was also speaking about paying for a product, which is what you've been whining about until you found yourself cornered. Now it suits you to ignore that as well. Nice try indeed.
For the record, I would be happy to accept a $40 million check funded by one million people each contributing $40. That's not what I was rejecting, which is clear from context.
Sorry, but it isn't. What's clear is that you expected to individually collect $40 from each user, as you've said several times not only then, but now.
I'll quote again: ""What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each."
In your hypothetical, the $40 obligation isn't to you as you insist time after time. The $40 obligation is to each other. Your contract is one, $40 million contract, liable to the Offeree, whether that party is an individual or a group of individuals. They are joint and severally liable (or, depending on the contract, some other style of collective liability) for the whole $40M.
They're not agreeing to pay you $40, they are agreeing to be one of one million people paying you $40M. You are not providing $40 of labor and services to them individually; you are providing $40M of labor and services to them and a million of their peers collectively as a single entity. They are not individually obligated to you for $40, because you can't create divided shares in an entity that cannot exist.
Funny how my meaning is so obvious now, even though you couldn't grasp it at the time.
I did grasp it at the time. It originated from me, with the implication that that model is untenable in most cases.
Before that discussion was likewise derailed with your clever distractions, is that people are hesitant to enter into such arrangements, which is why that development model isn't widely used today, even though it could and does exist without the abolition of copyright. Most open source business models don't and would not elect to use it, either, preferring to use the copyright on the entirety of the work to create "shareholders" in the product and thus individually obligate them in a fashion that would not be possible absent copyright.
n your hypothetical, the $40 obligation isn't to you as you insist time after time. The $40 obligation is to each other. Your contract is one, $40 million contract, liable to the Offeree, whether that party is an individual or a group of individuals. They are joint and severally liable (or, depending on the contract, some other style of collective liability) for the whole $40M.
They're not agreeing to pay you $40, they are agreeing to be one of one million people paying you $40M. You are not providing $40 of labor and services to them individually; you are providing $40M of labor and services to them and a million of their peers collectively as a single entity. They are not individually obligated to you for $40, because you can't create divided shares in an entity that cannot exist.
You can't pretend your context was anything other than individual obligation and a rejection of a lump sum payment. It is absolutely true that I offered it in that scenario as myself individually refusing to pay $40M for a product, but it is also true that the conversation moved away from that point before you even began to grasp that it doesn't matter whether the "I" in that context was individual or collective--private citizens, whether individually or in groups, are generally unwilling to take on that sort of obligation.
Honestly, t
You wrote, "I'm not going to write anyone a check for $40 million to create an image editor for my PC. I'll pay $40, though, and so will a million of my friends", I responded, "it isn't necessary to charge individuals the full price. I don't need $40 million from you, it'll work just as well to collect $40 from you and a million other people", and the discussion of contracting for programming labor proceeded from there. What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each.
You still remain ignorant of the issue.
What you rejected was an argument no one was making. Whether one person or one million people is the entity signing the contract, it is ONE CONTRACT. If one million people are entering into $40 contracts with you, you don't have a recovery action against them in your hypothetical world, because what you are selling is illegal. The concept is joint and several liability. You would need that $40M check from me--whether it was me as a wealthy individual or me as a class of one million investors. You could not as you suggested then and idiotically maintain now, individually obligate one million people in $40 contracts.
What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each.
AND THAT IS UNENFORCEABLE AND NONSENSICAL. You're pretending that it makes perfect sense, but it does not. If you are charging one million people $40 each, you are obligated to produce for them either $40 of labor (nonsensical; no one is interested in contracting for $40 of labor toward a $40M project) or a $40 product (nonsensical by internal conceit: you banned ownership of intellectual products in the hypothetical).
There simply is no way to reconcile the fact that in neither case are you accomplishing what you thought you were accomplishing. The mistake was unfortunate enough then, but your ignorance and blind rage is so debilitating now that you felt the need to try it again on a completely unrelated discussion in which you pretend to seek enlightenment, but instead simply hope to smear.
You didn't have the requisite knowledge to do so then, and you don't now.
Nope. This isn't just a strawman, it's an outright lie: you're not merely arguing against points I never raised, hoping that readers won't notice the switch; you're explicitly attributing statements to me that I never made
And I quote, from your very same post: "What I rejected was the prospect of charging one person $40 million, in favor of charging one million people $40 each."
That, whether you are too stupid or too dishonest to recognize, is one million, $40 contracts. You can't charge "each" person without a separate contract. There is no other interpretation. That you did not then or now know what you were saying is not my mistake, but your ongoing ignorance. No, the proposal you meant to advance was ONE $40M contract with ONE party, a collective party of one million. But in order to make that proposal, you would have to drop your asinine counterargument posture, which you are unwilling to do because you're just that rabid.
It's not dishonesty. It's just more of your ignorance of the substance and mechanics of the law. There isn't a choice between a sensical and a nonsensical interpretation. You only presented a nonsensical interpretation. Whether you intended it to make sense or not is irrelevant to whether it was legally, logically, and semantically valid.
You could not, in your hypothetical, individually obligate one million people to pay one-millionth of your labor costs. And yet here you are, continuing to insist on it, without purpose or topical relevance. The only way out for you is to admit that either you were wrong to propose that nonsensical counterargument then, or you're intentionally distorting it now because of your sad and personal vendetta.
For the love of Aisha, shut up. You could scarcely dig your hole any deeper.
But that's the point - who has the money to take ASCAP to court?
That presumes ASCAP would actually follow through, which it never has in cases where the exception clearly applies. It goes for maximum PR value and a non-zero chance of victory. Threats of legal action are not legal action.
It is disingenuous to argue that there has been no legal test of the ASCAP claims
That is incorrect. There has been a test, and they've lost. There's 30 years of case law for it.
There's a reason why they demand $400, and it's because they know people are likely to cave if they don't know what they're doing. The price is set like any other business--high enough to generate revenue and low enough to be less costly than potential alternatives. It's why printer ink costs just about as much as a new printer and why electric razor heads cost about half to one-third as much as a new razor body. It's called free market capitalism, and these are the consequences, good and bad.
If you're playing the radio on one stereo you bought at Best Buy in your restaurant, ASCAP (a) probably wouldn't even demand a license of you and (b) you could tell them to buzz off.
Karaoke isn't the radio, though, and unless you're using Comcast's karaoke channel, it's not a broadcast, so the exemption does not apply. The source of your karaoke recordings should be properly licensed for public performance if you're using it to draw business, but that's a wholly different can of worms and has little to do with the homestyle and small business exemptions being discussed here.
Again, the original text is right there for everyone to see.
Yes, it is. You rejected the $40M contract in favor of one million $40 contracts. If that was for labor, as you suggest, the legal meaning of that would obligate you to perform $40 of labor for each individual person. As with copyright, your level of ignorance simply blinds you to that.
And if some of those million people refused to pay? They'd be in violation of the contract, yes?
If you hadn't mis-corrected and created one million separate contracts, yes. But since you claim to have one million separate contracts, no. Those contracts would be unenforceable.
BTW, you misspelled "ONE complete service".
The difference between a service and a product is that a product is a creation that stands alone. A book is a product; writing the book is a service.
Actually, I didn't. What I wrote was "as long as I have a binding agreement with everyone who promises to pay". If there's one interpretation that makes sense, and another that does not, it's hardly my fault when you choose the one that doesn't make sense.
But the point, then as now, is that you can't have one million binding agreements for one-millionth of an image editor. It's the fact that you explicitly rejected the overall service contract (the interpretation that makes sense) in order to pose a nonsensical one that is at issue.
One cannot simply ignore your counterargument because it makes no sense, unless you're admitting that you had no clue what you were talking about and were flat-out wrong.
In fact, you didn't even mention this supposed fault at the time, you just steamed ahead with that "you can't sue someone for depriving you of your time" load.
That would qualify as "mentioning" it. You could not, in that scenario, sue someone for depriving you of your time.
1. Their signature is on a contract for me to perform the labor.
2. I performed the labor.
Their signature is on a contract for you to provide a $40 share of a $40M project. You can't own the project. The contract is enforceable. You can sign whatever you want, but you can't have an enforceable contract for something that is illegal.
Again, you insisted on having one million contracts. You're the one that introduced the nonsensical interpretation, and now you're insisting that I should have ignored it because CLEARLY you weren't really disagreeing with me if your interpretation made no sense.
Sooner or later, you will have to move on with your sad life. Your loss is compounded at each turn, and it's obvious that you have absolutely nothing to gain by returning here time after time to troll.
So you now assert that, in that hypothetical, you would enter into one million contracts, agreeing to provide $40 worth of labor to each Offeree? That's your retcon? I don't think you're being honest with yourself, let alone the rest of the world. It's quite plain what you said, and it had nothing to do with contracting for labor. You simply didn't understand the implications of your own statements. You were attempting, through either intellectual dishonesty or ignorance, to "correct" an assertion that you'd need to raise $40M in private money to pay for a $40M project--a serious problem, because of the substantial financial and legal risk that any entity, whether a wealthy individual or a group of investors, would assume. If you truly believed you'd be contracting for the project in that scenario, you wouldn't have needed to correct anything, but you rejected the $40M labor and services contract and said you could "obligate" one million people to pay $40 each for the image editor.
Nobody would enter into an agreement for $40 of labor toward a $40M product. All that consideration would support would be a snippet of code (that again, your hypothetical also denies proprietary interest in, and thus would not be enforceable). They'd enter into a $40 agreement for access to the product, though.
The point you failed to grasp two years ago is that you can't enter into one million, $40 contracts unless you are providing one million discrete things, be they products or services, chairs or mowed lawns. What you'd actually be doing in that situation is not entering into one million, $40 contracts, but rather ONE $40 million contract to provide ONE complete product to one million users, and the Offeree would comprise a class party comprised of those one million people. But then as now, you were too busy being contrary and dishonest to think. You thought you were offering a clever counterargument to the need to execute a $40M contract to pay for a $40M project, but instead you just failed to understand how contracts work. There is no theory of obligation to selling a divided whole without first owning the whole. You can't contract with individuals for undefined sums of money and undefined returns. You can contract with a collective entity of individuals, who are all taking a share in the total cost--but you rejected the latter approach in favor of the fallacious former.You didn't frame your hypothetical correctly. You didn't understand the consequences of your error. You came back two years later on an unrelated matter and distorted the exchange in a sad attempt at an ad hominem because you couldn't deal with yet another defeat on your showing of copyright ignorance. You can't bring yourself to stop whining and move on because it's personal for you. Get over it.
One could certainly offer your services as a programmer outside of a product offer, such as agreeing to clean up clutter, doing some updates or bug fixing, or even just being placed on retainer for odd jobs. That's not at all the same scenario, though, as trying to get a court to grant a remedy on a contract to provide a new, finished product in a fictionalized world where proprietary interests in intellectual works is actively banned. Moreover, how would you even prove your performance of $40 of labor for that person? As soon as the project were completed, everyone in the world would have the right of access, whether they contributed or not. You'd have no power to demand payment; you can't contract to sell what isn't legal to sell. If on the other hand you were permitted in such a world to contractually limit access rights just to those who have contributed (or to grant them more rights based on that fact), what you'd have just done is recreate copyright, except without the limitations of statutory copyright you'd abolished. An Offeror's power is significantly broader without
So you've come around? When I said previously that a contract for programming labor could be enforced against someone who refused to pay for the labor, you said the person who performed the labor would have "nothing to latch onto in a dispute". Glad to see you've realized the error in that.
No. Just no.
You said that you could contractually obligate a million individuals to pay $40 for an image editor, a product. But if you could not own the product, as you also proposed, you could not make such a contractual obligation. You did not offer a situation in which you were being hired for your services; you offered a scenario in which you promised to deliver a product. In said hypothetical, if you could not own the product, you could not enforce that contract, just as someone who doesn't own rights in the land can't enforce an action for trespass.
How you jump from there to the grossly moronic "you said you can't ever contract for labor only" straw man is quite the contortionist mystery.
I suppose you think mowing lawns isn't labor without production either because it results in a "mown lawn product"?
More intellectual dishonesty, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. It's either that or you really are that stupid. Providing programming services is certainly possible, just as contracting for lawncare labor is possible. That's not the scenario you established, and it's not the case now.
You can continue to distort and lie and grind your ax, but now I'm just bored with you.
Actually, all that extra context does is further illustrate your ignorance. Employers already look to hire the cheapest programmers they can, often from overseas. Copyright has nothing to do with outsourcing: a lack of copyright wouldn't make it any easier to hire cheap overseas programming labor
Wow. You're still not even reading. Copyright has a great deal to do with outsourcing; the question isn't whether it's easy to hire cheap overseas labor, but whether or not revenue can justify not doing so. But please don't let reality get in your way.
"Time itself isn't worth anything; you can't sue someone for being deprived of time" -- that, of course, would mean that a contract for labor is invalid. Which it isn't.
Time is not labor. Lost time has no value.
A contract for labor is breached when the labor goes without reimbursement, not when the clock ticks by. Don't let that stop you.
Actually, no, it didn't. It involved a contract for labor, specifically for writing software.
You're correct, it was for the product of an image editor, not a motion picture. My mistake. It was, after all, two years ago. But by all means, keep going.
It was a discussion about a specific kind of labor without production.
A software product is a product. It was not labor without production. Oh, those pesky facts again.
Well, one thing the readers will definitely never forget is how you've repeatedly embarrassed yourself.
Notice how you still can't return to the topic? I still encourage people to read your invariable resort to trolling and distortion. Embarrassing, indeed.
"Without IP, your company [...] would pay smarter and cheaper programmers in places with lower standards of living to do that work for it. They would have no obligation to you as an employee if they had no IP interests to protect. [...] What would you do if the companies, realizing that programmers still wanted to be paid for the time it took for them to write software, decided to develop software that wrote other software?"
Taken from a section about the pervasive foundational structure of IP in the export market and the reliance on US IP to minimize the trade deficit. It was a rhetorical question, and one that certainly does not stand for the proposition that the elimination of IPR necessarily leads to the elimination of programmers. The context is clear in your omissions:
"Without IP, your company would not generate as much money, would not have as many employees, and would not pay those employees anywhere near what it does now. It would pay smarter and cheaper programmers in places with lower standards of living to do that work for it. They would have no obligation to you as an employee if they had no IP interests to protect. You'd also not have even gotten off the ground. How would you finance your education, and could you afford to work for next to nothing (and be paid after the fact) long enough to make a reputation where you might be lucky enough for someone to seek you out for a project every once in a while? Your only hope to have gainful employment would be if you could somehow prevent people from becoming as skilled as you. Those 6 billion people you currently don't compete with, thanks to your privileged status as an American with particular training? They'd be happy to do your job for half the price. Outsourcing is a great thing for consumers, but it's terrible for employees, so it has to be conducted in a balanced way."
"You stipulate that you want to be paid for your time--but you see, your time is only worthwhile if a controllable product is produced. If you can't control the product, you've got nothing to latch onto in a dispute."
And where does that say that no contract in no circumstance could ever exist for labor as a service? It doesn't. The discussion there posed a question involving a contract for a product, viz. a motion picture. It was not a general discussion about the law of contracts or labor without production. The intellectual dishonesty is plainly evident.
You just can't have a discussion without resorting to trolling. Ever. I knew I recognized your UID from somewhere. It's just remarkable the lengths you'll go to when you can't win on substance. I'm truly tickled that you are so desperate as to resort to flamboyant context games and misstatements to distort and distract from the topic you've all but forgotten. The readers haven't.
You can find the house reports just by Googling for them, but any good statutory supplement intended for practitioners will have them compiled.
If you want to understand copyright law, first be prepared for the fact that you can dig deeper into complexities than any sane person ever world. Second, I'd recommend picking up a used, older edition copyright casebook used in introductory law school courses (these can be found on Amazon for about $20). Copyright is an advanced elective in most law schools, so the editing will leave out a lot of the legal basics, but it's a valuable resource for a curious lay person. The fact that the cases and statutes are edited and presented in thematic units is much more helpful than anyone attempting to read past about section 108 of Title 17. Just beware throughout that you're probably making assumptions as you go along that may or may not be correct, since it won't be readily apparent to you which terms are legal terms of art, and it takes a good deal of practice in the field to get a real grasp on it. Most attorneys don't even know much about it--it's not tested on the Bar at all.
"Journalistic" reports of copyright history are also a poor source of information, since they tend to be modern arguments advanced through the search for appropriate historical support, rather than an honest historical overview of copyright.
You want to talk about comic ignorance, well, now yours is on display.
All that's on display is your foolish and juvenile personal ax to grind and a pervasive lack of knowledge and insight.
I invite people to read those threads and see for themselves how your distortion and ignorance permeates through it all. Embarrassing facts? Hardly.
Programmers wouldn't exist without copyright? "Impossible" to contract for labor without a salable product? Nonsense and fine examples of your intellectual dishonesty.
All circumstances falling outside the scope of the exemption discussed here.
Your first link cites no source, and is actually just marketing an alternative service, and your subsequent links deal with ASCAP overstatements dealing with circumstances outside the "radio on the beach" question originally posed.
Find one in that pile that was using a single receiving apparatus, who was actually found to be legally obligated to pay ASCAP, and we'll talk.
Yes, that's what I said: businesses are, in some cases, required to pay for a license to play music for their customers, even when they're only playing the radio. Thanks for confirming it.
A fact never disputed. What's your point?
That's quite a statement, coming from someone who thinks the existence of copyright is the only reason software companies haven't developed "software that wrote other software" and made human programmers obsolete, and that it's impossible to contract someone to perform labor unless that labor results in a salable product.
Ah, so in surrender you turn to straw men and fallacious ad hominems. It's disappointing, if not surprising, to see your ignorance spread to reading comprehension in general.
Neither of your propositions are supported by the content of those links. Sensationalism, distortion, and distraction are just not viable responses. Sorry.
Perhaps I was mistaken and should've referred to recordings instead of the radio.
Yes, you were. There are different rules for prerecorded sources.
How about not lying by omission by ignoring the licensing requirements for music recordings and the size- and speaker-count-based exceptions to the radio and TV exemptions?
And there you go again!
The square footage and equipment limitations are not for 110(5)(A). The requirements for 110(5)(A), the radio on the beach, are, as listed, a single receiving apparatus of the kind commonly used in private homes. The limitation is the number of receiving apparatuses: one. There is no square footage requirement at all. It is neither a lie nor an omission.
The square footage requirements are for 110(5)(B) use, which are entities not using a single receiving apparatus of the kind commonly used in private homes. These are bars, restaurants, gas stations, etc. with multi-room, multi-speaker setups, walls of televisions and so on. They are subject to size and equipment limitations if they are claiming the free exemption. If they have more speakers, more displays, or larger displays, then they have to arrange for an express license.
At this point, your displays of ignorance have reached comic levels. You didn't even bother to read, let alone think, before you came back, once again, with your baseless, argumentative, ignorant assertions. It's astounding.
All right, then why are businesses hounded for playing the radio for their customers?
Which businesses? "Hounded" in what way? By whom? Where have they been denied their exemption under the law?
This kind of synthesized proposition is meaningless because the question and the response will inevitably be about different things. You're referring, I assume, to anecdotal reports of over-aggressive conduct by collection societies. That's par for the course in the business world, end to end, whether copyright is involved or not.
If we're ignorant, then how about enlightening us instead of just calling names?
How about not making statements you have no authority to make, and presenting them as fact? How about not asserting challenges alleging an "inconsistency" without possession of the requisite knowledge to establish it? Pose responses in the form of a question if you don't know what you're talking about.
Making it look like your arguments are factual and supported by reality when they are not is simply ignorant.
The assertion that a loudspeaker is a transmitter is expressly rejected by law and practice. Moreover, it would give the entire statutory section a scope of exactly zero. There is no other word than "ignorant" to describe a person making such a flatly fallacious assertion. Stumbling over oneself to issue a correction or an argumentative challenge, when the information they pose is both incorrect and nonsensical, is a disservice to knowledge. You want enlightenment? Learn to seek it constructively.
If you consider being called ignorant when you make such a grand display of it to be "being called a name", that's your issue, but coming from someone whose discourse regularly includes the word 'fucking', I place little weight on comments of tone and etiquette. Ignorance is the lack of knowledge. It can only be an insult to someone who purports to have that knowledge in the first place, when it is clear s/he does not.
Offtopic and a little trollish: This lack of distinction at the low end actually got the U.S. in a bit of trouble at the WTO
No, not strictly true. If you read the WTO decision, 110(5)(A), the section I quoted, was upheld as a valid exception to the Berne/TRIPS Art. 11 rights.
110(5)(B), which is the more complex exception passed by the small business lobby and the expanded codification of the Aiken rule, was the portion that the US lost. This is all found in the WTO Panel Report, DS/160/R.
Rather than changing the law (which Congress doesn't want to do), the United States agreed to make a lump-sum payment
No, the terms of the settlement do indeed require the United States to change its domestic law to comply with its international obligations. The US to date has not done so.
Maybe it is because the small business owners ask more nicely.
It's because the small business lobby isn't deluded and scattered into shooting themselves in the foot left and right. The progressive copyright lobby groups exist, but they do not support complete abolition, and Slashdot's membership does its very best to torpedo every proposed change and submitted bill for reform, including proposals for personal use exemptions, revised statutory damages for P2P infringements, and statutory codification of LOC exemptions. In that respect, the RIAA/MPAA and Slashdot are a united front.
In the hypothetical boom-box situation then the music is being further transmitted (as sounds waves in the air) to the public. Ergo,
No. Further transmission is retransmission, as defined in section 101 and clarified in the committee notes. "Sound waves" in the air are not transmissions; a loudspeaker is not a transmitter.
This is further clarified by Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists, 392 U.S. 390, and Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151.
Please stop with the outlandish displays of ignorance.
Time's up. The US Congress currently has 188 lawyers, or 35%. Thanks for playing.
The world awaits your trivially easy solutions.
Yes, it does.
No, it doesn't.
From 17 USC 110(5):
[The following is not an infringement:] except as provided in subparagraph (B), communication of a transmission embodying a performance or display of a work by the public reception of the transmission on a single receiving apparatus of a kind commonly used in private homes, unless--
(i) a direct charge is made to see or hear the transmission; or
(ii) the transmission thus received is further transmitted to the public;
Their situation is no different. The law doesn't distinguish between a business playing the radio and any other person playing the radio
Sure it does, beyond a certain point. At the low end of the spectrum, there's no need to make such a distinction, because all parties are exempt who follow the rules.
Once again, faulty and idiotic legal interpretations from the ignorant.
ASCAP just wants money from the carrier's commercial ringtone sales. It's got nothing to do with anything else.
If a lossy encode, via the same codec with the same settings, does not come out the same way every single time then there is an input that you do not know about.
Correct, with the minor qualification being an input that is not being considered, unless those other posters truly don't know or are totally discounting the information in the file other than the encoded sounds.
The only issue is that bit-for-bit identical copies found on filesharing networks are almost always from the same source. They will have identical MD5 sums, and thus identical metadata, and algorithm choice in encoding and compression will offer slight differences. This effect is amplified by the lack of need for multiple sources of the same data. Even FLAC files may be slightly different, given metadata, timestamps, and so on.
The only point is that bit-for-bit identical files as those on P2P networks are indeed evidence of P2P acquisition. What it's not is proof of P2P acquisition. That should be fairly obvious to all involved, except that most people can't seem to understand even basic legal concepts.
the jury was envisioned as having much greater strength than afforded today
Envisioned by whom? Greater strength than what? This is both ignorant and baseless.
The Anglo-Saxon jury has always been a finder of fact, not of law. The law came either from the sovereign or, later, from Parliament. Juries have never been involved in that process.
They did indeed have greater strength in the past, when the jurors were also the witnesses testifying. That practice was terminated for obvious reasons.
That's only necessary because the system has been gamed for a few centuries by those jurists
Oh, another ignorant and unsubstantiated claim. Jurists aren't the active participants. If anyone is gaming anything, it's the litigators, and by design.
making work for themselves by making it too complex for us proles.
Any attorney would gladly thank you for inventing a simplified system of codification or for reigning in the legislature's schizoid drafting. The idea that there is an all-encompassing "lawyer conspiracy" to make things harder for themselves is patently absurd to anyone who even begins to know what they're talking about.
There are so many competing groups that such an apparatus could never accomplish that. Complexity of laws is a natural result of caselaw-based jurisprudence and simple human nature. You can pretend otherwise if you like. It's not like this place is known for being in touch with reality.
Have done. They turn out identical. If yours aren't, you're using archaic software.
No, they don't. Lossy rips are simply not bit-for-bit identical, and you're being completely disingenuous (no shock, based on the remainder of your reply) if you claim that they are. We're not talking FLAC here.
Hm. As opposed to an entire chapter of a book... hey, wait, if you distribute a chapter of a book
If the chapter is independently registered as a copyrighted work, then yes. Individual songs are copyrighted works, and not just the entire album. The songwriter of track 3 isn't necessarily the songwriter of track 7; the sound recording of each individual song is typically registered separately as a consequence of radio release--they don't play the whole album on the radio, they play a song. It has a set of copyrights that stand alone.
Clueless indeed.
The job of a jury is to determine (in criminal court) "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" and in a civil case, "liability based on a preponderance of evidence."
No, the job of a jury is to answer questions of fact. Questions of law are resolved by the judge during the trial process, through the process of oral arguments and testimony.
If I'm tasked with finding someone guilt/liable under law X, then as a reasonable, honest, and fair citizen I ought to be able to get and read a copy of law X,
You're not. You're tasked with finding whether specific acts or circumstances are true or false. If you find the prerequisites to be true, then guilt or liability is established. There are tidy little forms to help you with this process.
o verify that one of the parties in the courtroom (yes, entirely likely including a paid-off judge) hasn't just lied to me about what it says.
Incorrect statements of the law are resolved on appeal or on objection of counsel, not by the jury. Your fantasy-land reality notwithstanding, the role of the jury is not the role of the judge, nor is the role of counselor, litigator, or legislator. The legal system has a separation of powers just like the government. These procedural rules exist for a reason, and that reason is due process.
Again, if you have a problem with the law, talk to the legislature. If you have a problem with a judge, vote them out when they come up for reelection.
No text.
Yes. Not once, but twice. The first result saw the jury react in a punitive way with the $200,000 award. It was atypical then, and it was based on her lying to the jury and basically the Slashdot legal effect: treat the jury as simpletons and morons and try to pull a "clever" fast one based on a ficitionalized fantasy version of the legal system. It didn't work then, and it certainly didn't work the second time.
Not only was there the knowledge that the first jury found her dishonest, but she continued with the same basic tactics this time. The jury reacted very much in the same way, and frankly, this case was a terrible test balloon with an unsurprising result. The only thing notable about the outcome here was the scale of the jury's contempt for the defendant. It was always apparent to everyone actually involved in the real world issues of this case that NYCL's analysis was deeply flawed and biased. It doesn't matter, though, given the massive echo chamber here.
What this case calls into question is not the concept of copyright or even the mechanics of its operation. It highlights the ongoing and deeply problematic lack of a second set of statutory damages keyed more to the P2P-style infringement that has become an issue in the past decade. The statutory damages are perfectly fine the way they are for the kinds of infringement they were written to stop. They're not fine for more casual users. The damages are intentionally not tied to the retail cost of a single copy, which makes the nonsense $24 claim just as egregious as the RIAA's "lost sales" figures. They are meant to be harsh and punitive, because enforcement is so spotty. The double standard here is irrelevant though when it's the popular side.
But Slashdot is full of petulant children and the same set of people who actively unravel every proposed change to copyright law that isn't a purely fantastical complete abolition. The US economy could not handle such a thing. IP is by far our most valuable export, and the only thing supporting our international trading. We don't manufacture anything of particular noteworthiness, and a service economy is dependent on non-tangible goods and attendant legal protection. Copyright is not going anywhere.
Bullshit.
Reactionist.
Digital technology is digital technology. Rip the same track, compress with the same software algorithm and bitrate, and you will get the same output every time. If there's one thing digital tech is good at, it's being consistent.
Try it yourself. Rip a song several times. You will see that in fact, the copies will not be bit-for-bit identical. Consistently very close, but not identical.
If the "single" even still existed, I'd be tempted to give you benefit of the doubt. The MafiAA has been doing their best to sell "album only" setups for over three decades now.
He actually overstated the support the other way. No one who actually litigates in this area would be so downright dishonest as to claim that an individual song does not constitute a work. It's not an either/or situation. Both the individual tracks and the album are creative works. Even if you were to consider the record label copyright solely on the album, in this context, taking of complete songs would have a fair probability of being considered substantially more than de minimus use.
One of the crappiest thing about the modern legal system is that if you have any clue about the law
One of the crappiest things about Slashdot is the popular misconception that you know more about the law than you do, or that "the system" is the fictionalized construction you've built in your head to berate.
Show any indication that you are capable of understanding the law independently. People have actually been kicked off of juries for requesting a written copy of the relevant law in the jury room.
The jury isn't there to deliberate the law. They're there to establish factual findings as requested by the court. That's all. You're neither counselors nor judges; neither litigators nor legislators. Your role in the process isn't as grand editor; jury nullification (a) rarely works and (b) has never changed the law. It's a fast way to a mistrial, though. The fact that you don't understand what the jury is there for is proof enough that you're not qualified to make the legal judgments you want to make in the first place. Notice that judges, attorneys, and paralegals almost never serve on juries, either.
If you want to deal with the substantive law in question, take it to the legislature that has the power to do something about it.