Because Kim Dotcom is an innocent angel, right? When you upset people with guns and money, they will come after you. Its not uniquely American in any way.
America is supposed to be unique in being a country where that is not how things work.
Jailbreak and install whatever browser you want. Or better yet, stop shipping restricted computers that are dressed up to look like phones, and start shipping computers that respect user freedom and which happen to come in phone-form-factor with a cell phone module. Why is this so hard?
When the first amendment was written, anonymous speech was as easy as sneaking into the town square in the middle of the night and attaching your note to a prominent wooden object. Anonymity is harder in an age of surveillance, not easier.
People will start using more encryption and private filesharing networks to get their media. I already see it happening at universities, where students who are accused of downloading can face punishments without any sort of a trial. Eventually you will see people moving to things like Freenet.
There are two interpretations:
Old businesses die in the face of new technology -- and good riddance to bad rubbish.
The MPAA continues to profit, because downloaders are also their best customers.
He broke the law. Other people who break the law end up in jail for a long time.
Not all laws are created equal. People do not go to prison for parking violations.
Laws are not handed down by God. We have a constitution that is supposed to protect us from laws that would violate our rights, and there are amendments that protect us from excessive fines, cruel punishments, and slavery.
Where do you draw the line?
At regulations on industry being applied to people using common household appliances. That is what this is really about, after all; copyrights were a regulation on industry, something that ordinary people never had to worry about, until common household appliances became capable of copying sounds, videos, and digital data. Huge fines make sense when applied to businesses; a business can go bankrupt without being a life sentence to its owners, especially under our system of corporations and limited liability.
Of course, we have been here before. David Lamacchia managed to avoid criminal prosecution for copyright infringement (let's just take a moment to think about how absurd that is as a concept) because he did not sell anything, so what did the government do? Pass a law that allows them to file criminal charges even when no money changes hands, as long as the organizations that hold the copyright claim large damages. That is how ridiculous copyrights are in this century. We crossed any sensible line a long time ago.
At the very least, one could make the argument that he is paying for his wife's offspring. Nobody is compelled to marry, and nobody should marry someone who already has children without being prepared to take on an active role in the lives of those children, which may include spending their own money to support those children. It is not perfect, but it is better than requiring men who are no longer married to continue to pay even after their ex-wives have moved on and found new husbands and financial stability. It is made worse when men are denied access to children by the court, but still required to pay child support.
This is not a simple issue; I do not think any one solution can cover all cases. What should be established is a system where people can challenge their child support payments periodically -- with a long enough period to combat abuses but a short enough period to allow payments to end or to be appropriately modified if it makes sense to do so.
...you expect us to feel bad for Sony, the company that knowingly sent malware to its customers? You expect us to feel bad for any of the recording industry companies, who do everything they can to deny payment to the artists whose music they distribute?
Maybe you have not noticed, but he was a college student who downloaded some music. You expect us not to have sympathy for him? He is starting out in life with as much debt as someone who bought three houses, and that is for sharing just a few hours of music. He is an indentured servant, he will be forced to work for decades to pay the RIAA, even though the RIAA has since come to admit that these tactics do absolutely nothing to help their business or to stop people from downloading music.
Then again, you are posting anonymously and in support of the attack on Tenanbaum's life. The RIAA is not above hiring shills...
Sure you can: if Tenenbaum is unable to escape this through bankruptcy, he will basically become an indentured servant, forced to work for decades to repay this debt. That is excessive -- it is decades of his life where his ability to be self directed will be negatively impacted, where he may have trouble affording food because he must make payments, where he may be forced to choose between feeding his children and paying the RIAA (and perhaps even forced to choose between having children or paying the RIAA), etc.
Thus explaining why they sometimes pay even when the child's mother has remarried and has no financial difficulty in raising the child. Alimony and child support laws need to be revised to take into account the circumstances of the men who are left paying for children that in some cases are not even related to them:
Child support is supposed to help women are stuck with children whose fathers are not voluntarily helping to raise. This assumes that...
Women with children cannot find a husband; after all, what sort of a man wants to marry a woman who is not a virgin?
Men can simply find the money that these women cannot find -- it's not like men have been hardest hit by the recent recession, right?
Women never hide the fact that they have been promiscuous and that their children are not related to the man they say is the father -- which we now have good tests to help settle, although the courts seem not to care about that.
Sure, you can argue that DNA is irrelevant compared to the emotional bond between men and their children, but this is not about emotions. Child support is a compulsory form of parenting; it is supposed to exist for men who will not play an active role in the lives of their children; the money is a cold, numeric form of compensation, and so there should be no problem with using cold, numeric evidence of paternity. If emotional bonds cannot compare to DNA, then emotional bonds cannot compare to money either, and should be considered irrelevant to the issue of child support.
While it might make for nice theatrics, advocating murder because you disagree with the outcome of a court case is not right.
The power of the courts is not handed down by God. If the courts are turning people into indentured servants because they downloaded music, something is already not right.
However, countries like that also have strong extradition treaties with the USA, and you can't flee to them to avoid paying court judgments or outstanding debts (they'll extradite you if you don't pay).
He could try to claim asylum from a country that is imposing cruel and unusual punishments -- effectively a violation of his rights. He is being order to pay as much money in damages as his total income for 10 years, which will take decades to pay off should he decide to eat and have a roof over his head (forget owning a home -- he will have to rent an apartment with a debt like that hanging over his head). I would call him an indentured servant, forced to work for years because he downloaded some music.
There is no constitutional mandate for a copyright system. The constitution expressly allows such a system, but there is no requirement that congress create such a thing, nor is there any requirement that it look like our copyright system.
It is not a defense of their approach to women to point out that they do sit down and logically debate how to adapt their rules to the modern world. Gender equality never caught on within the ultra-orthodox community, but it is not as if they did not take the time to discuss the issue, and in fact there is no single agreement among the ultra-orthodox about the issue. Some sects are so extreme that they will not permit a photograph of a woman to be published; others are less extreme, but still maintain that men and women serve different purposes within the community.
I do not personally agree with their view, but they did actually sit down and discuss these issues. It is also worth mentioning that significant numbers of Jewish women voluntarily join ultra-orthodox communities, even after growing up in non-orthodox or even not-religious-at-all environments. They were not forced to join at gunpoint, and they are free to leave if they want to (since their families remain outside the community and whatnot -- I know of someone who did this). Some women just like that lifestyle and are just not feminists.
So you are passing the guilt on to the community around them now? I hate to break it to you, but child molesters exist in equal proportions outside of the ultra-orthodox community. The only problem within that community is that people are afraid to speak up about it, because of the fear that it might be used against the community.
Which is why the child molesters should be removed without fanfare, to reassure everyone that nobody is going to use child molestation as an antisemitic propaganda tool.
I have spent plenty of time around the orthodox too, and I got a somewhat different impression: they are more concerned about keeping up appearances. The most pious rabbi in a room with naked women would be expected to shield his eyes to reassure himself and everyone around him that he is pious. The worst thing he could do is to close the door to that room, even if all he did was sit there while the women were dancing around him, because then people outside the room might wonder what he is actually doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Kim Dotcom is an innocent angel, right? When you upset people with guns and money, they will come after you. Its not uniquely American in any way.
America is supposed to be unique in being a country where that is not how things work.
We need to settle this issue, so that people at least know where they stand when it comes to key disclosure in the United States.
Actually, IQ is multiplicative, not additive.
With more and better trained policemen, detectives, and judges spending on intelligence services and civil rights violations could be cut.
This is a false dichotomy...
I would be more worried if they found the phone quickly.
Jailbreak and install whatever browser you want. Or better yet, stop shipping restricted computers that are dressed up to look like phones, and start shipping computers that respect user freedom and which happen to come in phone-form-factor with a cell phone module. Why is this so hard?
Except that the general public thinks that anonymity is only something that criminals are interested in...
When the first amendment was written, anonymous speech was as easy as sneaking into the town square in the middle of the night and attaching your note to a prominent wooden object. Anonymity is harder in an age of surveillance, not easier.
This is why we drink our coffee before we post to /.
There are two interpretations:
Unlimited (adv): Useful up to some predefined cap.
He broke the law. Other people who break the law end up in jail for a long time.
Where do you draw the line?
At regulations on industry being applied to people using common household appliances. That is what this is really about, after all; copyrights were a regulation on industry, something that ordinary people never had to worry about, until common household appliances became capable of copying sounds, videos, and digital data. Huge fines make sense when applied to businesses; a business can go bankrupt without being a life sentence to its owners, especially under our system of corporations and limited liability.
Of course, we have been here before. David Lamacchia managed to avoid criminal prosecution for copyright infringement (let's just take a moment to think about how absurd that is as a concept) because he did not sell anything, so what did the government do? Pass a law that allows them to file criminal charges even when no money changes hands, as long as the organizations that hold the copyright claim large damages. That is how ridiculous copyrights are in this century. We crossed any sensible line a long time ago.
I thought the second biggest challenge is ensuring that the Empire does not raid the hosting company and render all your files inaccessible...
At the very least, one could make the argument that he is paying for his wife's offspring. Nobody is compelled to marry, and nobody should marry someone who already has children without being prepared to take on an active role in the lives of those children, which may include spending their own money to support those children. It is not perfect, but it is better than requiring men who are no longer married to continue to pay even after their ex-wives have moved on and found new husbands and financial stability. It is made worse when men are denied access to children by the court, but still required to pay child support.
This is not a simple issue; I do not think any one solution can cover all cases. What should be established is a system where people can challenge their child support payments periodically -- with a long enough period to combat abuses but a short enough period to allow payments to end or to be appropriately modified if it makes sense to do so.
...you expect us to feel bad for Sony, the company that knowingly sent malware to its customers? You expect us to feel bad for any of the recording industry companies, who do everything they can to deny payment to the artists whose music they distribute?
Maybe you have not noticed, but he was a college student who downloaded some music. You expect us not to have sympathy for him? He is starting out in life with as much debt as someone who bought three houses, and that is for sharing just a few hours of music. He is an indentured servant, he will be forced to work for decades to pay the RIAA, even though the RIAA has since come to admit that these tactics do absolutely nothing to help their business or to stop people from downloading music.
Then again, you are posting anonymously and in support of the attack on Tenanbaum's life. The RIAA is not above hiring shills...
you can't argue that the award was excessive.
Sure you can: if Tenenbaum is unable to escape this through bankruptcy, he will basically become an indentured servant, forced to work for decades to repay this debt. That is excessive -- it is decades of his life where his ability to be self directed will be negatively impacted, where he may have trouble affording food because he must make payments, where he may be forced to choose between feeding his children and paying the RIAA (and perhaps even forced to choose between having children or paying the RIAA), etc.
Also that money pays for their children needs
Thus explaining why they sometimes pay even when the child's mother has remarried and has no financial difficulty in raising the child. Alimony and child support laws need to be revised to take into account the circumstances of the men who are left paying for children that in some cases are not even related to them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22Paternity-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Child support is supposed to help women are stuck with children whose fathers are not voluntarily helping to raise. This assumes that...
Sure, you can argue that DNA is irrelevant compared to the emotional bond between men and their children, but this is not about emotions. Child support is a compulsory form of parenting; it is supposed to exist for men who will not play an active role in the lives of their children; the money is a cold, numeric form of compensation, and so there should be no problem with using cold, numeric evidence of paternity. If emotional bonds cannot compare to DNA, then emotional bonds cannot compare to money either, and should be considered irrelevant to the issue of child support.
While it might make for nice theatrics, advocating murder because you disagree with the outcome of a court case is not right.
The power of the courts is not handed down by God. If the courts are turning people into indentured servants because they downloaded music, something is already not right.
However, countries like that also have strong extradition treaties with the USA, and you can't flee to them to avoid paying court judgments or outstanding debts (they'll extradite you if you don't pay).
He could try to claim asylum from a country that is imposing cruel and unusual punishments -- effectively a violation of his rights. He is being order to pay as much money in damages as his total income for 10 years, which will take decades to pay off should he decide to eat and have a roof over his head (forget owning a home -- he will have to rent an apartment with a debt like that hanging over his head). I would call him an indentured servant, forced to work for years because he downloaded some music.
He should do whatever it takes to free himself.
constitutional mandate
There is no constitutional mandate for a copyright system. The constitution expressly allows such a system, but there is no requirement that congress create such a thing, nor is there any requirement that it look like our copyright system.
Burn the same thing on both sides. Or rely on the fact that a sticker feels different from the plastic on the side with the data.
It is not a defense of their approach to women to point out that they do sit down and logically debate how to adapt their rules to the modern world. Gender equality never caught on within the ultra-orthodox community, but it is not as if they did not take the time to discuss the issue, and in fact there is no single agreement among the ultra-orthodox about the issue. Some sects are so extreme that they will not permit a photograph of a woman to be published; others are less extreme, but still maintain that men and women serve different purposes within the community.
I do not personally agree with their view, but they did actually sit down and discuss these issues. It is also worth mentioning that significant numbers of Jewish women voluntarily join ultra-orthodox communities, even after growing up in non-orthodox or even not-religious-at-all environments. They were not forced to join at gunpoint, and they are free to leave if they want to (since their families remain outside the community and whatnot -- I know of someone who did this). Some women just like that lifestyle and are just not feminists.
they're enabling the molestors.
So you are passing the guilt on to the community around them now? I hate to break it to you, but child molesters exist in equal proportions outside of the ultra-orthodox community. The only problem within that community is that people are afraid to speak up about it, because of the fear that it might be used against the community.
Which is why the child molesters should be removed without fanfare, to reassure everyone that nobody is going to use child molestation as an antisemitic propaganda tool.
Which is why I said, "generally," and why I said, "non-Jews" as opposed to "non-Haredi-Jews."
I have spent plenty of time around the orthodox too, and I got a somewhat different impression: they are more concerned about keeping up appearances. The most pious rabbi in a room with naked women would be expected to shield his eyes to reassure himself and everyone around him that he is pious. The worst thing he could do is to close the door to that room, even if all he did was sit there while the women were dancing around him, because then people outside the room might wonder what he is actually doing.