Fans paying higher prices they'd otherwise pay (or not being able to afford seeing the concert).
How? Ticket prices from direct sales are lower because the venues regularly sell out. Without those initial sales, per-seat prices would necessarily have to be higher in order to generate the same revenue. That's even before you get into the primary source of scalped tickets: a secondary market for people who purchased tickets but became unavailable--which would otherwise be a total loss. By reselling either individually or through a "pro" scalper/service, they recoup some of their losses, allowing them to spend more on future events and keeping sales relatively high because of the reduced risk of total loss. Moreover, because ticket sales end well in advance of performance dates, this late supply of tickets improves availability for fans unable to purchase when the window was open.
Scalpers do nothing to drive the printed price up. At worst, they simply compete with fans for purchasing tickets, which is why ticket services do not permit the purchase of huge quantities of tickets in the general release. The blocks of tickets that fans have access to are not significantly affected by scalper competition.
Scalped tickets are almost all those purchased and then returned by parties unable to attend, or they are block-purchased from a promotional set, whose tickets aren't available to the general public anyway.
In what possible way does this behavior drive supply prices up? The only people who have to pay elevated prices are those taking advantage of a last-minute opportunity (at a significant premium, as engaged in by other industries like hotels, airlines, conference registrations, delivery services, financial services, and so on). For everyone else, price and financial risk is depressed.
Tickets potentially going unsold, due to people who can't bother with finding the scalpers.
You seem to be confused. Scalped tickets are already sold. The venue has been paid, whether or not someone shows up in the seat. For the performers and the venue, this is a win.
Due to less tickets getting sold (that could have been sold otherwise), the concert loses some of its awe, the band potentially gains less new fans
Dubious and far from concrete claims. (a) those tickets were sold, (b) "losing awe" is totally devoid of meaning (a 90% full venue is not "less awesome" than a 95% full one, and any losses from perceived "selling out" are tenuous at best, since there are always people trying to get in on the day of the concert, and always people who bought tickets who can no longer use them--I see no evidence of anything other than market equilibrium), and (c) people who are not fans do not buy tickets to sold-out concerts or bother to show up after the sales windows would close anyway--they were never part of the equation to begin with.
For services at the concert, the overall impact on sales is marginal at best. Concessions services would have to expect a greater turnout in order to experience a loss due to empty seats, and the industry has very good models about sales projections. Concessions booths are both staffed and stocked based on these models--if the few empty seats actually showed up, this would actually be a strain on their service, not a boon to profits.
This list of baseless "harmful effects" is exactly what I meant. You don't understand added value or harmful effects, let alone the network effects of complex systems. You also seem to think that ticket scalpers sit on a substantial percentage of seats; they don't--we're talking 10% or less. Stop trying to defend an idiotic analogy.
That's not really the whole story, though, and the article is misleading in parts.
The fundamental reason why
Authors of books write the books, and use publishers for marketing and printing. Publishers take a cut of sales to pay for their services.
Music, on the other hand, is more complex. You have a copyright on the composition, on the lyrics, and on the sound recording. In order to gain access to the professional recording services of the record label, you have to contract with them, and though you are performing the song, it is the studio and its employees providing the lion's share of the work--sound designers, studio staff, technical people, etc. The labels therefore traditionally owned the sound recording copyright, as the studios were the "authors" of the recording, and the artists merely "performers". (In the same way, a film screenplay copyright doesn't become the actors' when they perform it for money.) The minor amendment in 2000 did not change that.
Music artists who do, in fact, write their own music and lyrics also own the copyrights on the musical work (unless they've traded or sold them). The studio copyright on the back of the CD is for the sound recording, which is not a musical work. If you were to acquire the sheet music to the same songs, the copyright would likely be a different entity. Many popular acts, however, are totally studio creations--the label hires the composers, lyricists, and performers. The label owns just about all the copyrights in that situation.
The problem is that music studios are now becoming something more like book publishers--their services are really just mass production and marketing, and accordingly, with groups creating their own professional-grade recordings without the studios and thus keeping those copyrights as well, the studios are left with less actual power and will soon face the consequences of that. When they are no longer needed to make the sound recordings, they can't extort the artists quite as badly.
This post merely made a list of people to whom squatters are beneficial, and discounted all the harmful effects by saying he doesn't understand the hatred for them.
The harmful effects being? Personal dislike, though I share it, is not a "harmful effect". The truth is that scalpers make tickets available that otherwise would not be, for those who are willing to pay. Domain squatters register websites on a first-availability basis.
Neither of these situations explains or warrants an analogy to unlawful activities. Any action taken has to benefit someone, or it would not be done.
Clearly there are reasons to "hate" squatters and scalpers
Yes, but again, none of them have to do with car thieves either directly or by analogy, nor do any of them have to do with a rejection of the perfectly legal and economically fruitful methods of their operation. Your analogy does absolutely nothing to explain the nature of the "hatred" the other person does not understand.
You hate scalpers because they're stealing from you? No. That doesn't make sense. You hate scalpers because what they're doing is an illegal operation? No. That isn't true. You hate scalpers because a poorly-conceived straw man makes it so you can say "adding value isn't always good"? No. That's not an assertion made that needs to be contested.
Where is the link between the reason for hating a car thief and the reason for hating a scalper or domain squatter? Car thieves do not add value, so that theory is totally bust. Both being things that you don't like isn't an explanation or insightful in the least.
My point is that simply because you can find some way in which someone "adds value", that doesn't mean they're a good thing to have.
An irrelevant point, as there was never an assertion that anything that "adds value" is automatically good. It has to offer a net improvement in market efficiency, at a minimum, a standard that your analogy fails.
Moreover, your statement about thieves "adding value" is facially suspect to begin with. Thieves do not "add value" by disposing of unwanted cars--it's still legally your car and you are still liable for it. If you want to dispose of your car, there are a dozen different pain-free ways to do it. They do not add value to the market by reselling stolen goods, either, as stolen goods aren't part of the market in the first place. In fact, they only remove value from the equation, because losses and price increases due to theft outweigh any fringe benefit you might attempt to argue. Even if car theft were legal, it would not, in fact, add value to the market systems in operation.
The same cannot be said for e.g. ticket scalpers, who ensure use of what would otherwise be wasted supply. That their business practices are opportunistic and greedy seems to be your only point, which is not contested, not does it merit, justify, or otherwise explain the use of your analogy.
A bombastic reductio ad absurdum doesn't contribute to that discussion in any meaningful way.
No, the point is that "adding value" to the market via legal means is STILL DIFFERENT from "adding value" through illegal means. Being a dick with something you own is an entirely different matter from being a dick by stealing someone else's property.
The analogy is absurd, and the moderators are morons. You can take any argument and throw in a nonsense reduction to its principles. It's intellectually bankrupt and complete nonsense.
it's pretty widely recognized in political science that the way American democracy is set up leads necessarily to two-party stagnation and deadlock.
Widely recognized by political science wannabes, perhaps. SMDP voting systems do tend toward two-candidate final races in the end, but they don't start that way, nor does changing to a different scheme inherently fix anything.
The idea of the two-party system is a myth and a crutch for weak minds. It's not true that there are two parties. The modern American political party is actually more accurately described as a coalition. The faction in control guides the party, but the party decides what faction is in control. The presence of varied political viewpoints is not lacking in the US, whether there are two party names on the desk or twenty. At the end, there are only a certain number of chairs to fill.
Voters have several opportunities to make selections from broad lists of multiple candidates. Voters, as members of the party, should be more responsible in determining what faction controls their party, and should take primaries more seriously, where they have several candidates to choose from.
As for "deadlock"--it's intentionally designed that way to constrain the power of any single government actor. It too is a tradeoff.
While parliamentary systems have their flaws, I'd say the US is rather broken in comparison.
Ah, the fortune-cook reductio ab absurdum.
Moreover, you don't even mean "parliamentary systems". Parliamentary government is a structural arrangement--an executive drawn from the legislature. It has little to do with voters, except that a prime minister is not popularly elected. Several parliamentary governments use the same voting system as the United States.
Proportional representation is what you mean to talk about, and while it does allow for greater nominal participation, it has its own serious problems. Top on that list is the instability of coalition governments. There are dozens of different models in use, each optimized for different values and with different weaknesses. All of them are based on the notion of participation by engaged voters, and the failure of that is still the major failure mode of government. You need people to care and participate before any other issues can be fully addressed.
maybe they don't really want to, and that's okay too
Ding ding ding!
Apple wants to make good products that they're excited about, and they want to make money doing it. They do not seek, and never have sought, to supplant Dell or Microsoft.
They like their closed ecosystem. They're fully aware of the limitations it entails in terms of lineup gaps, careful control of user experience and product design, and zealous control of their brand. They're all deliberate choices to fit within a particular philosophy, made in full recognition of the obvious downsides. But every time there's an Apple story, someone has to whine about how it's not China Hardware Emporium running KDE with extra configuration panels. The same people will turn around the next day to defend common user complaints about Linux platforms by saying "you just don't get it".
Well, they just don't get Apple. You don't have to like Apple; you don't have to buy Apple. Running around and thinking that the ultimate goal of any given corporation is a monopoly is the kind of thinking that even a first semester economics student is forced to leave behind. What's optimal in the aggregate is not necessarily maximizing every single variable one at a time.
Why should they cut prices, and the resulting features and standards along with profits, to grow their market share? They have a giant pile of cash, and apart from being sued for unlawful trade practices, they could sell all of their machines at a loss and really blow their competitors away. But why would they? Price consumers aren't loyalty consumers. Why fight a war with 1000 strangers with clamped-shut wallets when you can get 100 people who will likely be repeat customers (while still making money, and more importantly, making the products you want to make)? I'm an investor in a local bakery--I'd rather them keep consistent quality, artisan craftsmanship, and prices relatively high (and catering to a smaller audience) than try to fight Safeway and its industrial-scale suppliers for supplying white bread and hamburger buns to the masses. Safeway has its place, and people who like getting white bread and hamburger buns as cheaply as possible can do that. Not everyone has to. Market share and price aren't the only two metrics for comparison, and yet everyone seems to insist on them to prolong a pointless flamewar, with "if Apple were Microsoft-sized, they wouldn't be able to get away with x". Yes, and if the atmosphere were methane, we'd all suffocate. Neglecting that condition x would have to be resolved in order to grow to Microsoft's size in the first place is usually the first flaw.
They don't compete in certain markets or at the bottom end of the price scale because they neither need to nor want to. That means there is an upper limit to their market share, and their strategy also turns off some people, but so be it. They were never the desirable kind of customer anyway for a company like Apple. They might be the target customer for a different kind of company. It all works out in the end.
for instance, most people consider copying mp3s to a portable player or a phone to be Fair Use, but nowhere in the codified law does it say this is Fair Use
The reason that copying to a media player is not Fair Use is because it isn't. Fair Use is not fair use. No one with a brain considers it to be Fair Use. They consider it to be a fair use of the material. The Fair Use Doctrine has to do with commentary and other public uses with tangential-at-best economic competition. Certain decisions have tortured Fair Use in order to reach the proper conclusion, but only as a last resort.
What you're thinking of is Personal Use. The conspicuous lack of such a doctrine is the result of all lobbying efforts for it being undermined by the crass and juvenile efforts of people on forums such as these. Between Slashdot greed and contempt and RIAA greed and contempt, there's no support for these measures and the proposed bills.
Another straw man - at least, if you mean "permissible" in a legal sense, it obviously isn't; in an ethical sense, that is what is under debate.
That statement, even if we were to accept it as true and valid, does not a straw man make.
The point is that those people commenting on the post have every right to express their ethical view,
The real point is that the ethical view is inconsequential. It's a juvenile attempt to reframe a question of social order, of competing interests, so that it is easier to make an argument that sounds good in a binary. It's the quintessential creation of a false dichotomy.
It's both childish and naive to reduce ethics to a binary, and to suggest that actions in society are based solely on individualized, subjective moral decisions--when ethics is a social construct. There are no doubt situations when it is ethical to destroy your neighbor's rose bushes. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good idea to do so, nor does it mean that there are no consequences for doing it.
Labeling an action "ethical" doesn't alone justify its performance or render it free of consequences, and that's precisely the fallacious view being set up.
I hope you don't own an mp3 player then, or maybe you are lucky to live in a better country than I.
Meaning what?
Another straw man. By "different version", you mean "different argument".
There's no argument in the section you quoted, and thus, again, no straw man. You don't score any points for nonsensical applications of the term, no matter how much you enjoy it. The story is the same--when offered an improvement that broadens personal use rights, it is jeopardized and rejected by fanatics, who then in the end get nothing. Copyright isn't going anywhere, and the kind of large-scale distribution schemes that result in wholesale acquisitions of hundreds or thousands of titles will simply not magically stop being illegal. People who continue to undermine that process are, in fact, just helping to preserve the status quo. We can't get serious about copyright, because Slashdot and its sensationalism is such a ripe source of ammo for the big labels. You're two vocal minorities, equally responsible for the ongoing lack of progress.
When you're offered something better, but not what you want, you lash out with sensationalist interpretations and absurdity, scoffing at it like a spoiled child, and the most vocal public commentary on it rejects it, and the RIAA obviously rejects it, and tada! No change for the better.
Nothing is more hilariously embodying of this phenomenon than the "copyright infringement is not stealing" crusade. It's wrong. Copyright infringement is not theft. They are not coterminous in the least, and they're not interchangeable. The only reason to continue such a ridiculous and inconsequential quibble is if the underlying premise is that if it isn't stealing, then it's not wrong. That premise is invalid from the outset and thus even winning the argument would accomplish nothing, but the amount of energy expended arguing it never ceases to amaze.
It's an unauthorized acquisition--it enriches the actor unfairly, as compared to his fellow citizens. That's really all there is to it. Take the colloquial "stealing a ride"--taking a train without paying the fare. The train's going anyway, whether you're on it or not, so under this most bizarre theory bandied about here, it's apparently okay to ride that train without paying your fair fare and there should be no consequences for that. It is a thoroughly stupid position to take.
There's no ethical violation, per se, in "unlawful taking"
Of course there is. It is a given in any situation that the rule of law is a social code whose contravention is ipso facto unethical. It is justified in some cases by competing ethical considerations to act contrary to it, but not in response to a thinly veiled justification lacking in compelling ethical grounding.
Ethics is a social code of behavior, and sitting at the very heart of this is the ordered function of society. To take without legal entitlement is by definition an affront to the social order.
Furthermore, there is no "taking" involved in copyright infringement.
Utterly false. To take is to acquire by action. To acquire a copy by a deliberate action is quite plainly taking. You are setting up a tired and legally inconsequential line of argument for no particular purpose.
You know, you like to use a lot of big words and pretend you're a professional in this area, but if you can't use "flout" and "flaunt" properly, you're pretty much giving away the game.
There's no pretending involved, and as for a rushed typo, it's pointedly humorous coming from you:
"The existence of a law forbidding something rarely makes an otherwise-ethical action ethical."
The only thing "actual reformers" have achieved is to make the law more and more lopsided in favor of the RIAA.
Which is the result of tools like yourself, and actually the precise point you're sailing past. The RIAA's already got a stronger position, but you're doing more to undermine progressive reform proposals (the Lofgren bill your ilk so helpfully torpedoed, for instance) than anything else...and then patting yourself on the back for it.
also consider that even though something is copyright infringement by law doesn't mean it is unethical
That something may be called ethical doesn't make it permissible, nor does it mean that another perspective on that same issue is unethical. Your response to the straw man begs the question and implies a binary where none exists.
Property law isn't entirely about ethics--in fact very little law is. Instead, it's simply about balancing competing interests. Ethical conduct is the domain of criminal law and certain areas of administrative law. Most transactions aren't questions of ethics, and any ethical justification you might rationalize about copyright infringement is mooted by the ethical violations conducted in the unlawful taking. As they say, two wrongs don't make a right.
Quirks in the law do need to be resolved, but it doesn't entitle a person to flaunt it simply because they feel like it. They were never entitled to possession of any of it, except in exchange for their legally binding commitment to abide by the terms under which it was provided. It does absolutely no good for anyone actually working on practical resolutions to have the efforts constantly undermined by a certain subset of the population. Don't like, don't buy, do without has always been the rule--until greed and false entitlement took over.
It's bad enough dealing with the recording industry on good days, but when they see the brazen disregard from the vocal minority, it not only ruins the sensible majority, but also stirs up a fresh round of crazy from the industry giants. The RIAA and the belligerent loonies can point fingers at each other for the rest of eternity, but they're both wrong and nothing resembling an appropriate personal use framework will ever come to pass until the gimme-gimme generation quits stealing (and pretending it's noble) and the recording industry stops having a shit-fit (and pretending they're not the ones killing themselves) long enough to get something done.
The rhetoric of "revolutionary reform" is nothing more than a pretense for selfish destruction. Actual reformers keep having years of hard lobbying and legal work torn apart by both sets of wankers, and the cold truth is that both groups are reviled and equally idiotic. This community just happens to be too one-sided to see it, lost in rants on how they don't have anyone on their side and don't have any lobbying power and so they MUST act out like petulant children, because they DESERVE to enjoy entertainment they never had any intention of paying for, because anyone who's ever dared to sell rights-limited copies earns TOO MUCH. They don't, on either count, and the reason they consistently lose is by destroying the work of allies thanks to ignorance, sensationalist trolling, and astroturfing.
It's really quite tiring. It's just a different version of the 15 year-old brat complaining that the car she's being offered to replace her Toyota is a $40,000 Lexus instead of the $77,000 E-Class she demanded.
You're missing the parent's essential point, though:
There will always be the 'high-cost, low-volume' sales simply to help hide this all-to-common production issue.
This works only as long as there are people willing to purchase cutting-edge products from new and questionable production runs.
When the market shifts to doing more of what the grandparent post suggests--buying year-old products at a fraction of the price, that market loses that price inertia. Making it an option for people to buy last year's products at a 50-75% discount only works so long as there are still other customers paying 100% for this year's products.
If sales drop below the sustainable threshold, the discounts stop being so attractive, because products will need to be sold at a higher price for longer periods of time in order to recoup those costs. So while people criticize the early adopters for "paying too much", it would behoove them to remember that the premiums those brave customers pay are what enables the cheaper flow in the first place. You can't have one without the other. It's a complex system that must maintain some form of equilibrium to function.
Photos of uncopyrighted human works are themselves not copyrighted unless the photographer adds his own artistic expression through the angle, composition, lightning, scribbling or whatever the fuck else
Yes, but the bar for such application of creativity is extremely low. Courts don't answer the question of "what is art?"--they simply pose it.
It all comes down to the labor, couched in your country's copyright framework. It is expensive, time-consuming, and requires considerable skill to prepare these digitizations. Whether your country recognizes the natural right of the parties undertaking that effort or whether you have to couch the analysis in an economic incentive rationale, copyright is the mechanism that allows museums some way to cover the costs and continue to provide this service for other works.
It is true that a pretty standard photograph of an item (for example, a scanned page from a book) doesn't grant a powerful or useful copyright--you can't stop others from taking their own photograph. But you can stop others from simply taking your image itself and reproducing or distributing it.
The scope of copyright protection would be extremely narrow for archival preservation like this, but certainly not nonexistent.
If you get a copyright on a scan/photo of a document, wouldn't you get copyright on a print as well?
They're one and the same. Printing copies is called reproduction, and copyright extends to all copies, including the original.
That would mean that when you print 5000 copies of a book, each one is a separate derivative work with it's own copyright, set from the year of printing.
No, it would mean that each copy is a copy of a copyrighted work, the effective date of which is defined by the laws of your country.
If you scanned each copy in an iterative process, then you could secure a copyright in each copy assuming originality and creativity could be established. With mechanical reproduction (or digital copies), you can't satisfy those requirements and therefore can't get a new copyright on each one. But consider a sculpture. If you recreate the originals one at a time, by hand, without the use of a complete mold, each sculpture will have its own copyright.
Again, the scope will be narrow and probably extend no further than literal or near-literal copying, but still a copyright. Not all copyrights are created equal.
Any time. It's refreshing to see someone on Slashdot who can read past the word 'RIAA' without his brain boiling over into frothy, rage-y goo or a court case without some insipid rant about corruption and their revolutionary cure to make trials 'fair' again (ignoring that they're claiming a rule system implement for procedural fairness is what they're calling "corrupt" to begin with).
Rental simply can not work for soft copies, because rental requires a scarcity that is not applicable.
Rental doesn't require scarcity; it only requires integrity.
If you make the decision to pay $1 for a one-time viewing, or to pay some other amount for a subscription, it doesn't matter whether you're using the only copy in the world or whether there are 7-billion-plus copies. All that matters is that you have arranged for a one-time viewing and nothing more. Whether you would have paid more under other circumstances is not relevant.
Museums that charge admission don't do it because visitors can exhaust the exhibits; they do it for remuneration for costs and sometimes for profit.
It does work if people exercise some self-control and move beyond the brainwashing of the entitlement generation. That people can't do that speaks more to the people than to the business model.
Here we have on display a prime example of a fatuous gasbag. There's nothing not open about it. Can't physically go to the trial? Get a transcript, available to 99.9% of those who would otherwise lie through their teeth and claim they'd listen to 150+ hours of trial audio.
A public trial doesn't mean you get to be tried by the public in place of the court, and that's the only thing you're asserting.
The courts can and should make the trial record available, as it is in nearly all cases. It'd be a great idea to start putting transcripts online as regular practice by the courts--there are plenty of people working to get those practices into local rules in jurisdictions around the country. None of that has anything to do with trying to mastermind some way to assert demagoguery into the process.
Or perhaps the official record, edited at the court's direction
As the audio stream would be frequently muted.
and lacking vocal tone, timing, postures and facial expressions
...which has no value beyond trying the case, but if you really want an audio or video record, so be it, but be prepared to pay for it. It does not change the essential question of whether it should be available during the trial (it shouldn't).
The sheer amount of ignorance, melodrama, and yarn-spinning here alone shows how horribly disruptive the results would be to anything resembling a fair trial. You're quite simply off the reservation if you think there is any compelling need for immediacy that trumps preserving some measure of sanity and integrity in the process. You talk falsely about fairness without understanding, simply because it's fun to trash cynically what you do not understand. It's sad, really, and just goes to show why the actual pressing problems that need to be addressed are drowned out by lunatics like yourself.
QED. You're so absolutely deluded that you simply can't confront the question. Anything involving the RIAA gets your pants so positively wet that you can't help but go on a witch hunt. You're the only one shilling. The RIAA are a bunch of asshats, which I have consistently said in posts on the subject for years, but this isn't about them, and you don't get to make up rules for unpopular parties just to spite them.
I know what the terms mean and used them correctly
Not by a wide margin. You made the giant leap from an orderly courtroom to proceedings occurring entirely outside the jury's presence, and further ignored 150 years of case law on the requirements, definition, and function of public trials.
Your use of scare quotes around "fair" is also revealing of your attitude toward justice and equity.
On the contrary, it's revealing of your desperation to create a toehold. It fails. Broadcasting the trial as it occurs does absolutely nothing to improve actual fairness, hence the sarcasm quotes.
There is absolutely no reason for public disclosure of the record as it is recorded beyond use to interfere in the procedures of the trial. The public has no right to such interference, and the parties to any action have the right to be free from outside influence to the fullest extent possible. There is no harm, no closure, no abridgment of rights arising from having to wait a few weeks. None.
I was pushing your argument: "nothing about having more people watching makes anything more 'fair'" out to the point that its absurdity becomes evident.
A vain effort, since you can add any number of people to the courtroom without having any further effect on fairness. You misunderstand the impact of your own "pushing".
So, you tacitly admit that at some point at or before the proceedings are closed entirely, allowing fewer spectators could compromise the rights of at least one of the parties, the right to a fair trial
No, I do not. Also, the final comma is ungrammatical. The only compromise occurs when the public is completely denied access, and in balance this is occasionally necessary without falling foul of the Constitution. There is no such thing as an absolute right in ordered society.
How then can you assert that your bugbears "media meddling", "jury contamination", and "witness tampering", which could be prevented entirely by proceeding in camera, are not present whenever a trial is public?
No such assertion was made, and you know it. Intellectual dishonesty will not duct-tape your flimsy rant together. The question is one of regulation of the courtroom and maintaining a balance between the necessary procedures for integrity of the trial (to conduct a fair trial) and giving the public access to its results.
You repeat ad nauseum the same complaints as other equally ignorant posters without even understanding what you're saying half the time, and without actually bothering to consider the implications the other half. There can't be an audio stream before the jury is impaneled, for starters. Your claim that anyone is arguing that the stream itself is dangerous to the public is equally asinine, and raised solely so you can pretend to argue while not actually addressing any of the real points.
These phantasms of potential corruption are just a cover for your fear of public exposure of the real and customary corruption of these proceedings.
Yeah, because an audio stream is going to be that much more illuminating than the transcript in that regard. You haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about.
Again, your focus is way to narrow. Exactly what I was trying to highlight.
All you're highlighting is the problem of "lay justice"--a total lack of causal relevance.
In the context of the larger picture, the judge, I believe, was trying to use a court rule in such a way as to serve the greater public interest by exposing their (RIAA) cross jurisdiction abusive machinations.
Again, that's not the judge's job. That very well may be what happened, and doing so is an abuse of discretion and a huge disservice to that audience and to the defendants in the case, because it is reversible error to unfairly prejudice a party at trial.
So, yes you are correct that my question makes no sense when you willfully choose to ignore the issue in any larger context.
No, it makes no sense because "larger context" drawn from the clear blue sky is not larger context. You cannot ignore and flaunt the procedural mechanisms designed to ensure fair trials simply to punish a party you do not like. That is the very definition of an unfair trial and a horrifying example of demagoguery. You punish parties you don't like by rigidly following procedure and allowing the other party to build an unblemished case.
I fail to see how this is fundamentally worse than having reporters in a courtroom.
Volume. Reporters come and go and news stories are written. With a constant and complete source, they no longer have to send reporters and can simply scrape together sensationalist trash remotely, 24 hours a day, every day.
without it, the media has total control over what is and is not disseminated prior to a ruling.
The media has effective control either way. People might listen to a few minutes of the stream out of curiosity, but no one is going to sit through weeks of trial proceedings. They're excruciatingly boring. Only the highly motivated will endure any real amount of it, and they're the ones most likely to stir the pot.
The broadcast in question only involved oral legal argument, tho' - nothing the jury wouldn't see.
You make the same fundamental error as the more antagonistic poster--it's not the broadcast itself that leads to undue influence, it's the media and public access to it, and the commentary it produces. Also, I have to point out that trial proceedings are not technically oral arguments. Oral arguments are before appellate bodies.
Again, a reasonable point made moot by the fact that we're only talking about oral legal arguments.
Again, we're actually talking about media and public commentary, coverage, and disruption through the spotlight effect.
In a broader sense, it makes legal proceedings more accessible to a wide audience, familiarizing them somewhat with the court system.
Not really, it doesn't. They're extremely long, make no explanatory exposition for the laity, and includes tons of idle time. It's not at all an educational experience for the uninitiated.
I'm unconvinced of a disadvantage.
There's only disadvantage. There is no justifiable reason to make such information immediately available as opposed to waiting a few weeks. It isn't a time-sensitive matter for the public unless they intend to exert influence to impact the ongoing proceedings, which is exactly what is not supposed to happen in a courtroom. If you want wider scope of access, online posting of transcripts is a good idea, not streaming weeks of testimony, motions, and evidence presentation.
From where I'm sitting, the manner of interpretation of a court rule in which the interpretation is harmless
And that would indeed be the case if either of those statements were true. You have to have a sense about how these things are written to read the undertones, and the question isn't about harmless misreading. It makes more sense if you review the original decision that sparked this petition, which more or less discards the exception framework written directly into the rule. The interpretation is also far from harmless; reading it the way the trial judge did eviscerates the entire rule because it imposes no actual standards for exceptions. It's a huge deal administratively.
Well, there's those horrid small-claims television shows, and there was the O.J. trial back when.
The TV shows aren't "real" trials (they are essentially a contrived form of ADR mixed with "law theater") and they have prior consent from both parties. The OJ trial was not broadcast in its entirety.
In real civil matters, no, although I'm certain I've seen portions of oral arguments broadcast. In fact, there's the oral arguments of this hearing regarding the writ.
Yes, you have. Oral arguments, that is to say appellate proceedings, are often streamed and/or broadcast. They're an entirely different beast--the factual dispute is settled, there is no jury to prejudice, no witnesses to undermine, and the entire proceedings are handled by specialists, focused on the questions of law. There is no real r
1. In camera doesn't mean what you think it means, and no, that is wholly incorrect, regardless of your definition. 2. Public trial doesn't mean what you think it means. 3. This case is neither in camera nor a secret (i.e. not public) trial.
Your question makes no sense. What RIAA tactics are being disseminated? There is nothing to this issue but court procedure, despite Slashdot's (and your) best attempts to make it something else.
This ruling has zero impact on the RIAA's legal theories, evidence, argument, or substantive claim in any way, shape, or form.
All it says is that there is a rule prohibiting recording and broadcast of active court procedures, except in certain special circumstances. The judge tried to replace the certain special circumstances with "when the judge feels like it's a good idea". This was frowned upon and rejected. End of story. The parties could have been anyone: the RIAA, Banana Republic, a 76 year-old retiree, or the owner of a bakery down the street.
To take an example of a flaw from Mr. Matticus himself:
CognitiveResonance foot in mouth, take four.
When W2 hears W1's testimony, maybe it will trigger more accurate testimony on his part.
No. The reliability of the witness' testimony must be based on his own memory and perception; the means for establishing accuracy are encapsulated in the rules of evidence. There is no way to add impermissible hearsay into the mix and still sort those things out. It's no long that witness testifying on his knowledge and memory. It's a weird pastiche that lacks all the indicia of reliability that ensure a fair trial (remember that thing you pretend to care about?) Moreover, it is sometimes strategically important to put a witness on the stand because their testimony is inaccurate.
W1 and W2 are to testify on the same day.
One witness may well take several days to complete his or her testimony. There goes that idea. Thanks for playing.
W1 and W2 are sequestered at The Ritz, and paid handsomely for the inconvenience
There's no money for that (but let me guess, you're going to continue to complain about the costs of court systems either way), and short of tossing them in jail, there's no guarantee of successful isolation. Thanks for playing.
W1 and W2 submit written testimony in advance; query them in open court only if necessary (this is essentially what happens today)
That's not how it works, sparky. If they're being called as witnesses, it's because they're needed to testify directly. Thanks for playing. Strike three, you're out.
They do not address the far deeper problem: that the current justice system places far too much weight on eye witness testimony.
Who said anything about eyewitness testimony? 'Witness' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
if mere public exposure can work to make such evidence worthless -- "case is blown" -- well, just how good is that evidence in the first place?
Oh, the intellectual dishonesty! Public exposure doesn't make the evidence worthless. Public exposure of witness testimony to future witnesses makes the future testimony suspect. The evidence in isolation is perfectly fine, with all the normal indicia of reliability and all the normal caveats. It's the breakdown of the isolation that is the problem and that directly interferes with the fairness of the trial. But obviously that's not something that's in fact relevant to you, because you can't come up with a single plausible reason why broadcasting live proceedings would actually make anything more "fair".
The "legal system" has pooled together to ban broadcasts to cover up "serious flaws"...for a few weeks? Please.
There are already members of the public in the courtroom, sitting quietly in the back. There's already a publicly accessible record of the proceedings. The public, by design, has no role to play in an active trial. There's no attack on the integrity or fairness of the trial you can make and support that would be solved by broadcasting it.
Basically, Mr. Matticus, you need to begin questioning the basis of your beloved legal system.
Basically, you need to learn about the legal system before issuing your ignorant and fallacious proclamations. Blind questioning of the "basis" with no knowledge is not a fruitful exercise. There are very real problems that need to be addressed, but as someone who clearly doesn't know a thing about the reality of the legal system, you've shown zero ability to identify them.
I believe that this is part of the problem with the legal system in general, and it is part of the problem with copyright law specifically.
On the contrary, it is the function of the legal system. Individual parties in individual actions are not referenda on the laws. It is the function of the legislature to promulgate and maintain the laws. Courts are merely empowered to apply them, consistent with the recognized hierarchy of laws that sometimes results in judicial modifications and strikings.
It's a no-win situation. When the courts judicially modify the laws in an unpopular way, it's "judicial activism", and the people beg Congress to rewrite the laws and tie the hands of the court. A few years later, the courts' refusal to make judicial modifications is criticized as a narrow application ignorant of the "big picture" (where 'big picture' means "the losing argument that I support").
then RIAA and company turn around and apply that narrow parameter to anything and everything that remotely resembles the original case.
Yes. That is what is intended. The other side of the coin is that the other party calls them on it, while simultaneously trying to apply another narrow parameter to anything and everything that remotely resembles what their client is doing. The end decision lands in the middle.
Government does us no favors when they look at one small aspect of a set of laws, and makes decisions in which they are blind to the broader implications.
Agreed, except that we have specifically designed the courts to examine only the issues that are brought before the courts by the parties. There is nothing that can be done about that. Courts issue decisions on individual situations; those decisions are applied consistently in the future to those same situations until overruled. That's it. If there's something wrong with the "big picture", go to Congress and have it fixed. The courts will thank you for it.
If you want to talk about copyright law specifically, there are only two truly major problem with it. (1) is that the damages provisions were written in contemplation of a more centralized kind of piracy, and require a new section that deals with the kinds of infringement engaged in by more casual p2p users. (2) is that the United States has never adopted an actual personal use framework needed to ensure consumer rights and certain legitimate uses are protected by statute. The few personal use rights we have are either read through imaginative contortionism or wedged under the label "fair use" (where, unlike the actual fair use rights, they do not belong, do not fit, and cannot be squared away in a satisfactory manner). Not all filesharing should be infringement, but the honest truth is that popular belief around here about what "should be" allowed cannot be justified. As always, the right balance is somewhere in the middle.
Slashdot Mirror
Fans paying higher prices they'd otherwise pay (or not being able to afford seeing the concert).
How? Ticket prices from direct sales are lower because the venues regularly sell out. Without those initial sales, per-seat prices would necessarily have to be higher in order to generate the same revenue. That's even before you get into the primary source of scalped tickets: a secondary market for people who purchased tickets but became unavailable--which would otherwise be a total loss. By reselling either individually or through a "pro" scalper/service, they recoup some of their losses, allowing them to spend more on future events and keeping sales relatively high because of the reduced risk of total loss. Moreover, because ticket sales end well in advance of performance dates, this late supply of tickets improves availability for fans unable to purchase when the window was open.
Scalpers do nothing to drive the printed price up. At worst, they simply compete with fans for purchasing tickets, which is why ticket services do not permit the purchase of huge quantities of tickets in the general release. The blocks of tickets that fans have access to are not significantly affected by scalper competition.
Scalped tickets are almost all those purchased and then returned by parties unable to attend, or they are block-purchased from a promotional set, whose tickets aren't available to the general public anyway.
In what possible way does this behavior drive supply prices up? The only people who have to pay elevated prices are those taking advantage of a last-minute opportunity (at a significant premium, as engaged in by other industries like hotels, airlines, conference registrations, delivery services, financial services, and so on). For everyone else, price and financial risk is depressed.
Tickets potentially going unsold, due to people who can't bother with finding the scalpers.
You seem to be confused. Scalped tickets are already sold. The venue has been paid, whether or not someone shows up in the seat. For the performers and the venue, this is a win.
Due to less tickets getting sold (that could have been sold otherwise), the concert loses some of its awe, the band potentially gains less new fans
Dubious and far from concrete claims. (a) those tickets were sold, (b) "losing awe" is totally devoid of meaning (a 90% full venue is not "less awesome" than a 95% full one, and any losses from perceived "selling out" are tenuous at best, since there are always people trying to get in on the day of the concert, and always people who bought tickets who can no longer use them--I see no evidence of anything other than market equilibrium), and (c) people who are not fans do not buy tickets to sold-out concerts or bother to show up after the sales windows would close anyway--they were never part of the equation to begin with.
For services at the concert, the overall impact on sales is marginal at best. Concessions services would have to expect a greater turnout in order to experience a loss due to empty seats, and the industry has very good models about sales projections. Concessions booths are both staffed and stocked based on these models--if the few empty seats actually showed up, this would actually be a strain on their service, not a boon to profits.
This list of baseless "harmful effects" is exactly what I meant. You don't understand added value or harmful effects, let alone the network effects of complex systems. You also seem to think that ticket scalpers sit on a substantial percentage of seats; they don't--we're talking 10% or less. Stop trying to defend an idiotic analogy.
That's not really the whole story, though, and the article is misleading in parts.
The fundamental reason why
Authors of books write the books, and use publishers for marketing and printing. Publishers take a cut of sales to pay for their services.
Music, on the other hand, is more complex. You have a copyright on the composition, on the lyrics, and on the sound recording. In order to gain access to the professional recording services of the record label, you have to contract with them, and though you are performing the song, it is the studio and its employees providing the lion's share of the work--sound designers, studio staff, technical people, etc. The labels therefore traditionally owned the sound recording copyright, as the studios were the "authors" of the recording, and the artists merely "performers". (In the same way, a film screenplay copyright doesn't become the actors' when they perform it for money.) The minor amendment in 2000 did not change that.
Music artists who do, in fact, write their own music and lyrics also own the copyrights on the musical work (unless they've traded or sold them). The studio copyright on the back of the CD is for the sound recording, which is not a musical work. If you were to acquire the sheet music to the same songs, the copyright would likely be a different entity. Many popular acts, however, are totally studio creations--the label hires the composers, lyricists, and performers. The label owns just about all the copyrights in that situation.
The problem is that music studios are now becoming something more like book publishers--their services are really just mass production and marketing, and accordingly, with groups creating their own professional-grade recordings without the studios and thus keeping those copyrights as well, the studios are left with less actual power and will soon face the consequences of that. When they are no longer needed to make the sound recordings, they can't extort the artists quite as badly.
This post merely made a list of people to whom squatters are beneficial, and discounted all the harmful effects by saying he doesn't understand the hatred for them.
The harmful effects being? Personal dislike, though I share it, is not a "harmful effect". The truth is that scalpers make tickets available that otherwise would not be, for those who are willing to pay. Domain squatters register websites on a first-availability basis.
Neither of these situations explains or warrants an analogy to unlawful activities. Any action taken has to benefit someone, or it would not be done.
Clearly there are reasons to "hate" squatters and scalpers
Yes, but again, none of them have to do with car thieves either directly or by analogy, nor do any of them have to do with a rejection of the perfectly legal and economically fruitful methods of their operation. Your analogy does absolutely nothing to explain the nature of the "hatred" the other person does not understand.
You hate scalpers because they're stealing from you? No. That doesn't make sense. You hate scalpers because what they're doing is an illegal operation? No. That isn't true. You hate scalpers because a poorly-conceived straw man makes it so you can say "adding value isn't always good"? No. That's not an assertion made that needs to be contested.
Where is the link between the reason for hating a car thief and the reason for hating a scalper or domain squatter? Car thieves do not add value, so that theory is totally bust. Both being things that you don't like isn't an explanation or insightful in the least.
My point is that simply because you can find some way in which someone "adds value", that doesn't mean they're a good thing to have.
An irrelevant point, as there was never an assertion that anything that "adds value" is automatically good. It has to offer a net improvement in market efficiency, at a minimum, a standard that your analogy fails.
Moreover, your statement about thieves "adding value" is facially suspect to begin with. Thieves do not "add value" by disposing of unwanted cars--it's still legally your car and you are still liable for it. If you want to dispose of your car, there are a dozen different pain-free ways to do it. They do not add value to the market by reselling stolen goods, either, as stolen goods aren't part of the market in the first place. In fact, they only remove value from the equation, because losses and price increases due to theft outweigh any fringe benefit you might attempt to argue. Even if car theft were legal, it would not, in fact, add value to the market systems in operation.
The same cannot be said for e.g. ticket scalpers, who ensure use of what would otherwise be wasted supply. That their business practices are opportunistic and greedy seems to be your only point, which is not contested, not does it merit, justify, or otherwise explain the use of your analogy.
A bombastic reductio ad absurdum doesn't contribute to that discussion in any meaningful way.
No, the point is that "adding value" to the market via legal means is STILL DIFFERENT from "adding value" through illegal means. Being a dick with something you own is an entirely different matter from being a dick by stealing someone else's property.
The analogy is absurd, and the moderators are morons. You can take any argument and throw in a nonsense reduction to its principles. It's intellectually bankrupt and complete nonsense.
it's pretty widely recognized in political science that the way American democracy is set up leads necessarily to two-party stagnation and deadlock.
Widely recognized by political science wannabes, perhaps. SMDP voting systems do tend toward two-candidate final races in the end, but they don't start that way, nor does changing to a different scheme inherently fix anything.
The idea of the two-party system is a myth and a crutch for weak minds. It's not true that there are two parties. The modern American political party is actually more accurately described as a coalition. The faction in control guides the party, but the party decides what faction is in control. The presence of varied political viewpoints is not lacking in the US, whether there are two party names on the desk or twenty. At the end, there are only a certain number of chairs to fill.
Voters have several opportunities to make selections from broad lists of multiple candidates. Voters, as members of the party, should be more responsible in determining what faction controls their party, and should take primaries more seriously, where they have several candidates to choose from.
As for "deadlock"--it's intentionally designed that way to constrain the power of any single government actor. It too is a tradeoff.
While parliamentary systems have their flaws, I'd say the US is rather broken in comparison.
Ah, the fortune-cook reductio ab absurdum.
Moreover, you don't even mean "parliamentary systems". Parliamentary government is a structural arrangement--an executive drawn from the legislature. It has little to do with voters, except that a prime minister is not popularly elected. Several parliamentary governments use the same voting system as the United States.
Proportional representation is what you mean to talk about, and while it does allow for greater nominal participation, it has its own serious problems. Top on that list is the instability of coalition governments. There are dozens of different models in use, each optimized for different values and with different weaknesses. All of them are based on the notion of participation by engaged voters, and the failure of that is still the major failure mode of government. You need people to care and participate before any other issues can be fully addressed.
maybe they don't really want to, and that's okay too
Ding ding ding!
Apple wants to make good products that they're excited about, and they want to make money doing it. They do not seek, and never have sought, to supplant Dell or Microsoft.
They like their closed ecosystem. They're fully aware of the limitations it entails in terms of lineup gaps, careful control of user experience and product design, and zealous control of their brand. They're all deliberate choices to fit within a particular philosophy, made in full recognition of the obvious downsides. But every time there's an Apple story, someone has to whine about how it's not China Hardware Emporium running KDE with extra configuration panels. The same people will turn around the next day to defend common user complaints about Linux platforms by saying "you just don't get it".
Well, they just don't get Apple. You don't have to like Apple; you don't have to buy Apple. Running around and thinking that the ultimate goal of any given corporation is a monopoly is the kind of thinking that even a first semester economics student is forced to leave behind. What's optimal in the aggregate is not necessarily maximizing every single variable one at a time.
Why should they cut prices, and the resulting features and standards along with profits, to grow their market share? They have a giant pile of cash, and apart from being sued for unlawful trade practices, they could sell all of their machines at a loss and really blow their competitors away. But why would they? Price consumers aren't loyalty consumers. Why fight a war with 1000 strangers with clamped-shut wallets when you can get 100 people who will likely be repeat customers (while still making money, and more importantly, making the products you want to make)? I'm an investor in a local bakery--I'd rather them keep consistent quality, artisan craftsmanship, and prices relatively high (and catering to a smaller audience) than try to fight Safeway and its industrial-scale suppliers for supplying white bread and hamburger buns to the masses. Safeway has its place, and people who like getting white bread and hamburger buns as cheaply as possible can do that. Not everyone has to. Market share and price aren't the only two metrics for comparison, and yet everyone seems to insist on them to prolong a pointless flamewar, with "if Apple were Microsoft-sized, they wouldn't be able to get away with x". Yes, and if the atmosphere were methane, we'd all suffocate. Neglecting that condition x would have to be resolved in order to grow to Microsoft's size in the first place is usually the first flaw.
They don't compete in certain markets or at the bottom end of the price scale because they neither need to nor want to. That means there is an upper limit to their market share, and their strategy also turns off some people, but so be it. They were never the desirable kind of customer anyway for a company like Apple. They might be the target customer for a different kind of company. It all works out in the end.
for instance, most people consider copying mp3s to a portable player or a phone to be Fair Use, but nowhere in the codified law does it say this is Fair Use
The reason that copying to a media player is not Fair Use is because it isn't. Fair Use is not fair use. No one with a brain considers it to be Fair Use. They consider it to be a fair use of the material. The Fair Use Doctrine has to do with commentary and other public uses with tangential-at-best economic competition. Certain decisions have tortured Fair Use in order to reach the proper conclusion, but only as a last resort.
What you're thinking of is Personal Use. The conspicuous lack of such a doctrine is the result of all lobbying efforts for it being undermined by the crass and juvenile efforts of people on forums such as these. Between Slashdot greed and contempt and RIAA greed and contempt, there's no support for these measures and the proposed bills.
Another straw man - at least, if you mean "permissible" in a legal sense, it obviously isn't; in an ethical sense, that is what is under debate.
That statement, even if we were to accept it as true and valid, does not a straw man make.
The point is that those people commenting on the post have every right to express their ethical view,
The real point is that the ethical view is inconsequential. It's a juvenile attempt to reframe a question of social order, of competing interests, so that it is easier to make an argument that sounds good in a binary. It's the quintessential creation of a false dichotomy.
It's both childish and naive to reduce ethics to a binary, and to suggest that actions in society are based solely on individualized, subjective moral decisions--when ethics is a social construct. There are no doubt situations when it is ethical to destroy your neighbor's rose bushes. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good idea to do so, nor does it mean that there are no consequences for doing it.
Labeling an action "ethical" doesn't alone justify its performance or render it free of consequences, and that's precisely the fallacious view being set up.
I hope you don't own an mp3 player then, or maybe you are lucky to live in a better country than I.
Meaning what?
Another straw man. By "different version", you mean "different argument".
There's no argument in the section you quoted, and thus, again, no straw man. You don't score any points for nonsensical applications of the term, no matter how much you enjoy it. The story is the same--when offered an improvement that broadens personal use rights, it is jeopardized and rejected by fanatics, who then in the end get nothing. Copyright isn't going anywhere, and the kind of large-scale distribution schemes that result in wholesale acquisitions of hundreds or thousands of titles will simply not magically stop being illegal. People who continue to undermine that process are, in fact, just helping to preserve the status quo. We can't get serious about copyright, because Slashdot and its sensationalism is such a ripe source of ammo for the big labels. You're two vocal minorities, equally responsible for the ongoing lack of progress.
When you're offered something better, but not what you want, you lash out with sensationalist interpretations and absurdity, scoffing at it like a spoiled child, and the most vocal public commentary on it rejects it, and the RIAA obviously rejects it, and tada! No change for the better.
Nothing is more hilariously embodying of this phenomenon than the "copyright infringement is not stealing" crusade. It's wrong. Copyright infringement is not theft. They are not coterminous in the least, and they're not interchangeable. The only reason to continue such a ridiculous and inconsequential quibble is if the underlying premise is that if it isn't stealing, then it's not wrong. That premise is invalid from the outset and thus even winning the argument would accomplish nothing, but the amount of energy expended arguing it never ceases to amaze.
It's an unauthorized acquisition--it enriches the actor unfairly, as compared to his fellow citizens. That's really all there is to it. Take the colloquial "stealing a ride"--taking a train without paying the fare. The train's going anyway, whether you're on it or not, so under this most bizarre theory bandied about here, it's apparently okay to ride that train without paying your fair fare and there should be no consequences for that. It is a thoroughly stupid position to take.
There's no ethical violation, per se, in "unlawful taking"
Of course there is. It is a given in any situation that the rule of law is a social code whose contravention is ipso facto unethical. It is justified in some cases by competing ethical considerations to act contrary to it, but not in response to a thinly veiled justification lacking in compelling ethical grounding.
Ethics is a social code of behavior, and sitting at the very heart of this is the ordered function of society. To take without legal entitlement is by definition an affront to the social order.
Furthermore, there is no "taking" involved in copyright infringement.
Utterly false. To take is to acquire by action. To acquire a copy by a deliberate action is quite plainly taking. You are setting up a tired and legally inconsequential line of argument for no particular purpose.
You know, you like to use a lot of big words and pretend you're a professional in this area, but if you can't use "flout" and "flaunt" properly, you're pretty much giving away the game.
There's no pretending involved, and as for a rushed typo, it's pointedly humorous coming from you:
"The existence of a law forbidding something rarely makes an otherwise-ethical action ethical."
The only thing "actual reformers" have achieved is to make the law more and more lopsided in favor of the RIAA.
Which is the result of tools like yourself, and actually the precise point you're sailing past. The RIAA's already got a stronger position, but you're doing more to undermine progressive reform proposals (the Lofgren bill your ilk so helpfully torpedoed, for instance) than anything else...and then patting yourself on the back for it.
also consider that even though something is copyright infringement by law doesn't mean it is unethical
That something may be called ethical doesn't make it permissible, nor does it mean that another perspective on that same issue is unethical. Your response to the straw man begs the question and implies a binary where none exists.
Property law isn't entirely about ethics--in fact very little law is. Instead, it's simply about balancing competing interests. Ethical conduct is the domain of criminal law and certain areas of administrative law. Most transactions aren't questions of ethics, and any ethical justification you might rationalize about copyright infringement is mooted by the ethical violations conducted in the unlawful taking. As they say, two wrongs don't make a right.
Quirks in the law do need to be resolved, but it doesn't entitle a person to flaunt it simply because they feel like it. They were never entitled to possession of any of it, except in exchange for their legally binding commitment to abide by the terms under which it was provided. It does absolutely no good for anyone actually working on practical resolutions to have the efforts constantly undermined by a certain subset of the population. Don't like, don't buy, do without has always been the rule--until greed and false entitlement took over.
It's bad enough dealing with the recording industry on good days, but when they see the brazen disregard from the vocal minority, it not only ruins the sensible majority, but also stirs up a fresh round of crazy from the industry giants. The RIAA and the belligerent loonies can point fingers at each other for the rest of eternity, but they're both wrong and nothing resembling an appropriate personal use framework will ever come to pass until the gimme-gimme generation quits stealing (and pretending it's noble) and the recording industry stops having a shit-fit (and pretending they're not the ones killing themselves) long enough to get something done.
The rhetoric of "revolutionary reform" is nothing more than a pretense for selfish destruction. Actual reformers keep having years of hard lobbying and legal work torn apart by both sets of wankers, and the cold truth is that both groups are reviled and equally idiotic. This community just happens to be too one-sided to see it, lost in rants on how they don't have anyone on their side and don't have any lobbying power and so they MUST act out like petulant children, because they DESERVE to enjoy entertainment they never had any intention of paying for, because anyone who's ever dared to sell rights-limited copies earns TOO MUCH. They don't, on either count, and the reason they consistently lose is by destroying the work of allies thanks to ignorance, sensationalist trolling, and astroturfing.
It's really quite tiring. It's just a different version of the 15 year-old brat complaining that the car she's being offered to replace her Toyota is a $40,000 Lexus instead of the $77,000 E-Class she demanded.
You're missing the parent's essential point, though:
There will always be the 'high-cost, low-volume' sales simply to help hide this all-to-common production issue.
This works only as long as there are people willing to purchase cutting-edge products from new and questionable production runs.
When the market shifts to doing more of what the grandparent post suggests--buying year-old products at a fraction of the price, that market loses that price inertia. Making it an option for people to buy last year's products at a 50-75% discount only works so long as there are still other customers paying 100% for this year's products.
If sales drop below the sustainable threshold, the discounts stop being so attractive, because products will need to be sold at a higher price for longer periods of time in order to recoup those costs. So while people criticize the early adopters for "paying too much", it would behoove them to remember that the premiums those brave customers pay are what enables the cheaper flow in the first place. You can't have one without the other. It's a complex system that must maintain some form of equilibrium to function.
2) It's private property, they can request that you don't take photographs
It's not copyright stopping you.
They can do more than request it; they can require it.
Photos of uncopyrighted human works are themselves not copyrighted unless the photographer adds his own artistic expression through the angle, composition, lightning, scribbling or whatever the fuck else
Yes, but the bar for such application of creativity is extremely low. Courts don't answer the question of "what is art?"--they simply pose it.
It all comes down to the labor, couched in your country's copyright framework. It is expensive, time-consuming, and requires considerable skill to prepare these digitizations. Whether your country recognizes the natural right of the parties undertaking that effort or whether you have to couch the analysis in an economic incentive rationale, copyright is the mechanism that allows museums some way to cover the costs and continue to provide this service for other works.
It is true that a pretty standard photograph of an item (for example, a scanned page from a book) doesn't grant a powerful or useful copyright--you can't stop others from taking their own photograph. But you can stop others from simply taking your image itself and reproducing or distributing it.
The scope of copyright protection would be extremely narrow for archival preservation like this, but certainly not nonexistent.
If you get a copyright on a scan/photo of a document, wouldn't you get copyright on a print as well?
They're one and the same. Printing copies is called reproduction, and copyright extends to all copies, including the original.
That would mean that when you print 5000 copies of a book, each one is a separate derivative work with it's own copyright, set from the year of printing.
No, it would mean that each copy is a copy of a copyrighted work, the effective date of which is defined by the laws of your country.
If you scanned each copy in an iterative process, then you could secure a copyright in each copy assuming originality and creativity could be established. With mechanical reproduction (or digital copies), you can't satisfy those requirements and therefore can't get a new copyright on each one. But consider a sculpture. If you recreate the originals one at a time, by hand, without the use of a complete mold, each sculpture will have its own copyright.
Again, the scope will be narrow and probably extend no further than literal or near-literal copying, but still a copyright. Not all copyrights are created equal.
Any time. It's refreshing to see someone on Slashdot who can read past the word 'RIAA' without his brain boiling over into frothy, rage-y goo or a court case without some insipid rant about corruption and their revolutionary cure to make trials 'fair' again (ignoring that they're claiming a rule system implement for procedural fairness is what they're calling "corrupt" to begin with).
Rental simply can not work for soft copies, because rental requires a scarcity that is not applicable.
Rental doesn't require scarcity; it only requires integrity.
If you make the decision to pay $1 for a one-time viewing, or to pay some other amount for a subscription, it doesn't matter whether you're using the only copy in the world or whether there are 7-billion-plus copies. All that matters is that you have arranged for a one-time viewing and nothing more. Whether you would have paid more under other circumstances is not relevant.
Museums that charge admission don't do it because visitors can exhaust the exhibits; they do it for remuneration for costs and sometimes for profit.
It does work if people exercise some self-control and move beyond the brainwashing of the entitlement generation. That people can't do that speaks more to the people than to the business model.
Here we have on display a prime example of a fatuous gasbag. There's nothing not open about it. Can't physically go to the trial? Get a transcript, available to 99.9% of those who would otherwise lie through their teeth and claim they'd listen to 150+ hours of trial audio.
A public trial doesn't mean you get to be tried by the public in place of the court, and that's the only thing you're asserting.
The courts can and should make the trial record available, as it is in nearly all cases. It'd be a great idea to start putting transcripts online as regular practice by the courts--there are plenty of people working to get those practices into local rules in jurisdictions around the country. None of that has anything to do with trying to mastermind some way to assert demagoguery into the process.
Or perhaps the official record, edited at the court's direction
As the audio stream would be frequently muted.
and lacking vocal tone, timing, postures and facial expressions
...which has no value beyond trying the case, but if you really want an audio or video record, so be it, but be prepared to pay for it. It does not change the essential question of whether it should be available during the trial (it shouldn't).
The sheer amount of ignorance, melodrama, and yarn-spinning here alone shows how horribly disruptive the results would be to anything resembling a fair trial. You're quite simply off the reservation if you think there is any compelling need for immediacy that trumps preserving some measure of sanity and integrity in the process. You talk falsely about fairness without understanding, simply because it's fun to trash cynically what you do not understand. It's sad, really, and just goes to show why the actual pressing problems that need to be addressed are drowned out by lunatics like yourself.
Your world, RIAA shill.
QED. You're so absolutely deluded that you simply can't confront the question. Anything involving the RIAA gets your pants so positively wet that you can't help but go on a witch hunt. You're the only one shilling. The RIAA are a bunch of asshats, which I have consistently said in posts on the subject for years, but this isn't about them, and you don't get to make up rules for unpopular parties just to spite them.
I'm done with the thread.
And the universe thanks you for it.
I know what the terms mean and used them correctly
Not by a wide margin. You made the giant leap from an orderly courtroom to proceedings occurring entirely outside the jury's presence, and further ignored 150 years of case law on the requirements, definition, and function of public trials.
Your use of scare quotes around "fair" is also revealing of your attitude toward justice and equity.
On the contrary, it's revealing of your desperation to create a toehold. It fails. Broadcasting the trial as it occurs does absolutely nothing to improve actual fairness, hence the sarcasm quotes.
There is absolutely no reason for public disclosure of the record as it is recorded beyond use to interfere in the procedures of the trial. The public has no right to such interference, and the parties to any action have the right to be free from outside influence to the fullest extent possible. There is no harm, no closure, no abridgment of rights arising from having to wait a few weeks. None.
I was pushing your argument: "nothing about having more people watching makes anything more 'fair'" out to the point that its absurdity becomes evident.
A vain effort, since you can add any number of people to the courtroom without having any further effect on fairness. You misunderstand the impact of your own "pushing".
So, you tacitly admit that at some point at or before the proceedings are closed entirely, allowing fewer spectators could compromise the rights of at least one of the parties, the right to a fair trial
No, I do not. Also, the final comma is ungrammatical. The only compromise occurs when the public is completely denied access, and in balance this is occasionally necessary without falling foul of the Constitution. There is no such thing as an absolute right in ordered society.
How then can you assert that your bugbears "media meddling", "jury contamination", and "witness tampering", which could be prevented entirely by proceeding in camera, are not present whenever a trial is public?
No such assertion was made, and you know it. Intellectual dishonesty will not duct-tape your flimsy rant together. The question is one of regulation of the courtroom and maintaining a balance between the necessary procedures for integrity of the trial (to conduct a fair trial) and giving the public access to its results.
You repeat ad nauseum the same complaints as other equally ignorant posters without even understanding what you're saying half the time, and without actually bothering to consider the implications the other half. There can't be an audio stream before the jury is impaneled, for starters. Your claim that anyone is arguing that the stream itself is dangerous to the public is equally asinine, and raised solely so you can pretend to argue while not actually addressing any of the real points.
These phantasms of potential corruption are just a cover for your fear of public exposure of the real and customary corruption of these proceedings.
Yeah, because an audio stream is going to be that much more illuminating than the transcript in that regard. You haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about.
Again, your focus is way to narrow. Exactly what I was trying to highlight.
All you're highlighting is the problem of "lay justice"--a total lack of causal relevance.
In the context of the larger picture, the judge, I believe, was trying to use a court rule in such a way as to serve the greater public interest by exposing their (RIAA) cross jurisdiction abusive machinations.
Again, that's not the judge's job. That very well may be what happened, and doing so is an abuse of discretion and a huge disservice to that audience and to the defendants in the case, because it is reversible error to unfairly prejudice a party at trial.
So, yes you are correct that my question makes no sense when you willfully choose to ignore the issue in any larger context.
No, it makes no sense because "larger context" drawn from the clear blue sky is not larger context. You cannot ignore and flaunt the procedural mechanisms designed to ensure fair trials simply to punish a party you do not like. That is the very definition of an unfair trial and a horrifying example of demagoguery. You punish parties you don't like by rigidly following procedure and allowing the other party to build an unblemished case.
I fail to see how this is fundamentally worse than having reporters in a courtroom.
Volume. Reporters come and go and news stories are written. With a constant and complete source, they no longer have to send reporters and can simply scrape together sensationalist trash remotely, 24 hours a day, every day.
without it, the media has total control over what is and is not disseminated prior to a ruling.
The media has effective control either way. People might listen to a few minutes of the stream out of curiosity, but no one is going to sit through weeks of trial proceedings. They're excruciatingly boring. Only the highly motivated will endure any real amount of it, and they're the ones most likely to stir the pot.
The broadcast in question only involved oral legal argument, tho' - nothing the jury wouldn't see.
You make the same fundamental error as the more antagonistic poster--it's not the broadcast itself that leads to undue influence, it's the media and public access to it, and the commentary it produces. Also, I have to point out that trial proceedings are not technically oral arguments. Oral arguments are before appellate bodies.
Again, a reasonable point made moot by the fact that we're only talking about oral legal arguments.
Again, we're actually talking about media and public commentary, coverage, and disruption through the spotlight effect.
In a broader sense, it makes legal proceedings more accessible to a wide audience, familiarizing them somewhat with the court system.
Not really, it doesn't. They're extremely long, make no explanatory exposition for the laity, and includes tons of idle time. It's not at all an educational experience for the uninitiated.
I'm unconvinced of a disadvantage.
There's only disadvantage. There is no justifiable reason to make such information immediately available as opposed to waiting a few weeks. It isn't a time-sensitive matter for the public unless they intend to exert influence to impact the ongoing proceedings, which is exactly what is not supposed to happen in a courtroom. If you want wider scope of access, online posting of transcripts is a good idea, not streaming weeks of testimony, motions, and evidence presentation.
From where I'm sitting, the manner of interpretation of a court rule in which the interpretation is harmless
And that would indeed be the case if either of those statements were true. You have to have a sense about how these things are written to read the undertones, and the question isn't about harmless misreading. It makes more sense if you review the original decision that sparked this petition, which more or less discards the exception framework written directly into the rule. The interpretation is also far from harmless; reading it the way the trial judge did eviscerates the entire rule because it imposes no actual standards for exceptions. It's a huge deal administratively.
Well, there's those horrid small-claims television shows, and there was the O.J. trial back when.
The TV shows aren't "real" trials (they are essentially a contrived form of ADR mixed with "law theater") and they have prior consent from both parties. The OJ trial was not broadcast in its entirety.
In real civil matters, no, although I'm certain I've seen portions of oral arguments broadcast. In fact, there's the oral arguments of this hearing regarding the writ.
Yes, you have. Oral arguments, that is to say appellate proceedings, are often streamed and/or broadcast. They're an entirely different beast--the factual dispute is settled, there is no jury to prejudice, no witnesses to undermine, and the entire proceedings are handled by specialists, focused on the questions of law. There is no real r
1. In camera doesn't mean what you think it means, and no, that is wholly incorrect, regardless of your definition.
2. Public trial doesn't mean what you think it means.
3. This case is neither in camera nor a secret (i.e. not public) trial.
Your question makes no sense. What RIAA tactics are being disseminated? There is nothing to this issue but court procedure, despite Slashdot's (and your) best attempts to make it something else.
This ruling has zero impact on the RIAA's legal theories, evidence, argument, or substantive claim in any way, shape, or form.
All it says is that there is a rule prohibiting recording and broadcast of active court procedures, except in certain special circumstances. The judge tried to replace the certain special circumstances with "when the judge feels like it's a good idea". This was frowned upon and rejected. End of story. The parties could have been anyone: the RIAA, Banana Republic, a 76 year-old retiree, or the owner of a bakery down the street.
To take an example of a flaw from Mr. Matticus himself:
CognitiveResonance foot in mouth, take four.
When W2 hears W1's testimony, maybe it will trigger more accurate testimony on his part.
No. The reliability of the witness' testimony must be based on his own memory and perception; the means for establishing accuracy are encapsulated in the rules of evidence. There is no way to add impermissible hearsay into the mix and still sort those things out. It's no long that witness testifying on his knowledge and memory. It's a weird pastiche that lacks all the indicia of reliability that ensure a fair trial (remember that thing you pretend to care about?) Moreover, it is sometimes strategically important to put a witness on the stand because their testimony is inaccurate.
W1 and W2 are to testify on the same day.
One witness may well take several days to complete his or her testimony. There goes that idea. Thanks for playing.
W1 and W2 are sequestered at The Ritz, and paid handsomely for the inconvenience
There's no money for that (but let me guess, you're going to continue to complain about the costs of court systems either way), and short of tossing them in jail, there's no guarantee of successful isolation. Thanks for playing.
W1 and W2 submit written testimony in advance; query them in open court only if necessary (this is essentially what happens today)
That's not how it works, sparky. If they're being called as witnesses, it's because they're needed to testify directly. Thanks for playing. Strike three, you're out.
They do not address the far deeper problem: that the current justice system places far too much weight on eye witness testimony.
Who said anything about eyewitness testimony? 'Witness' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
if mere public exposure can work to make such evidence worthless -- "case is blown" -- well, just how good is that evidence in the first place?
Oh, the intellectual dishonesty! Public exposure doesn't make the evidence worthless. Public exposure of witness testimony to future witnesses makes the future testimony suspect. The evidence in isolation is perfectly fine, with all the normal indicia of reliability and all the normal caveats. It's the breakdown of the isolation that is the problem and that directly interferes with the fairness of the trial. But obviously that's not something that's in fact relevant to you, because you can't come up with a single plausible reason why broadcasting live proceedings would actually make anything more "fair".
The "legal system" has pooled together to ban broadcasts to cover up "serious flaws"...for a few weeks? Please.
There are already members of the public in the courtroom, sitting quietly in the back. There's already a publicly accessible record of the proceedings. The public, by design, has no role to play in an active trial. There's no attack on the integrity or fairness of the trial you can make and support that would be solved by broadcasting it.
Basically, Mr. Matticus, you need to begin questioning the basis of your beloved legal system.
Basically, you need to learn about the legal system before issuing your ignorant and fallacious proclamations. Blind questioning of the "basis" with no knowledge is not a fruitful exercise. There are very real problems that need to be addressed, but as someone who clearly doesn't know a thing about the reality of the legal system, you've shown zero ability to identify them.
I believe that this is part of the problem with the legal system in general, and it is part of the problem with copyright law specifically.
On the contrary, it is the function of the legal system. Individual parties in individual actions are not referenda on the laws. It is the function of the legislature to promulgate and maintain the laws. Courts are merely empowered to apply them, consistent with the recognized hierarchy of laws that sometimes results in judicial modifications and strikings.
It's a no-win situation. When the courts judicially modify the laws in an unpopular way, it's "judicial activism", and the people beg Congress to rewrite the laws and tie the hands of the court. A few years later, the courts' refusal to make judicial modifications is criticized as a narrow application ignorant of the "big picture" (where 'big picture' means "the losing argument that I support").
then RIAA and company turn around and apply that narrow parameter to anything and everything that remotely resembles the original case.
Yes. That is what is intended. The other side of the coin is that the other party calls them on it, while simultaneously trying to apply another narrow parameter to anything and everything that remotely resembles what their client is doing. The end decision lands in the middle.
Government does us no favors when they look at one small aspect of a set of laws, and makes decisions in which they are blind to the broader implications.
Agreed, except that we have specifically designed the courts to examine only the issues that are brought before the courts by the parties. There is nothing that can be done about that. Courts issue decisions on individual situations; those decisions are applied consistently in the future to those same situations until overruled. That's it. If there's something wrong with the "big picture", go to Congress and have it fixed. The courts will thank you for it.
If you want to talk about copyright law specifically, there are only two truly major problem with it. (1) is that the damages provisions were written in contemplation of a more centralized kind of piracy, and require a new section that deals with the kinds of infringement engaged in by more casual p2p users. (2) is that the United States has never adopted an actual personal use framework needed to ensure consumer rights and certain legitimate uses are protected by statute. The few personal use rights we have are either read through imaginative contortionism or wedged under the label "fair use" (where, unlike the actual fair use rights, they do not belong, do not fit, and cannot be squared away in a satisfactory manner). Not all filesharing should be infringement, but the honest truth is that popular belief around here about what "should be" allowed cannot be justified. As always, the right balance is somewhere in the middle.