No, it would solve one problem and exacerbate another. We solve lawsuits, but not the problem of the profitability of art. The situation is actually quite delicate, and clumsy solutions like that won't do any good in the long term. Like I was saying, punishing illegal activity would be a good first step. From there, it's about compromise.
They would, no doubt, be aware that Earth knew nothing about intergalactic law. Either they'd recognise that Earth is not a part of intergalactic society, and would therefore be excluded from both benefits and punishments, they'd destroy us, or they'd include us in whatever society they have. I'm leaning towards the first, because it would explain why the other two haven't happened yet.
If such a scheme were enacted, families that opted in would, almost certainly, be those which did not tend to produce criminals. Families more likely to include those with criminal tendencies almost certainly wouldn't be interested.
That's what I thought initially too, but I realised that it didn't matter so long as some of those families produced future criminals. Even if it was more likely, in the sample, that the children wouldn't become criminals, the behavioural patterns should still be testable, and they should be able to apply whatever test and determine which will become criminals, and the majority who won't.
Perhaps this would be a better idea if, instead of making it mandatory for all students, making it a study with parents opting in their children, or adults opting themselves in. Perhaps if they could show that their results were something above statistically erroneous, then we could talk about benefits vs privacy violations etc.
Among the key elements of Nazism were anti-parliamentarism, ethnic nationalism, racism, collectivism, eugenics, antisemitism, opposition to economic liberalism and political liberalism, a racially-defined and conspiratorial view of finance capitalism, anti-communism, and totalitarianism.
What about this proposition makes it synonymous with nazism? It's surveillance and a breach of privacy (assuming you have any over in the ol' UK). The worst part of nazism wasn't the "papers please" aspect of the Hitler regime, rather the racism, the oppression (not quite the same as surveillance), and the eventual genocide. The privacy breach is a footnote at best.
Notice the slant? They label Winny users as rights-violators. "Those people are rights-violators. They are bad people. If someone violated your rights, you would want something done about it, right?"
Well, perhaps you would want something done, had it been your rights being violated, and not the rights of some faceless corporation (or artist).
Yes, it CAN get worse. ( and will if we don't get this thing derailed in time )
A few things need to happen:
Firstly, the RIAA must be bitch-slapped. Hard. We need to show them what we do to groups who abuse the court system. No matter how much cause they have to be angry, we need to show them tough justice.
Secondly, all those pirates must also be bitch-slapped. Their contribution to this mess must not go unnoticed and unpunished. We need to make copyright infringement a criminal matter, and institute heavy penalties. They need to know that leaching off other people's work is not acceptable, no matter how much they hate their victims. It's simply not good enough that enforcement is left to a group of corporations like the RIAA. We've seen the consequences of this already.
Thirdly, copyright law must be fixed. There should be different penalties for sharing amongst friends and sharing amongst strangers, there should be significantly shorter copyright terms, and we should redact anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA.
If someone else makes money with your work, you can demand your fair share. Everything else should be allowed. A simple system like that will be good for everyone.
Copyright law doesn't (and isn't supposed to) directly prevent others from profiting from your work, it's make sure you're the only supplier of that work. Whether or not a person receives their copy from an illegitimate rival or a P2P network, that's still one less person in your potential market. In fact, P2P is considerably more damaging due to the correlation between the lack of price tag and the popularity of a product.
If there is going to be a distinction between types of copyright infringement beyond fair use, there should be a distinction between personal sharing and anonymous sharing. Personal sharing is restricted amongst friends, whereas anonymous sharing acts like a business, where anyone can copy from anyone else without having to know them. The former has very limited effects on sales.
Copyright violation by simply copying a CD and giving it to a friend via the internet is hardly illegal. Its a civil matter, but not a legal one.
Nice try, but you're referring to criminal versus civil. Both refer to illegal activity. Copyright infringement is illegal. There is a set of laws called copyright law, and breaking them is illegal. Implementing measures to combat illegal activity is hardly out of the jurisdiction of lawmakers, no matter whether the cases are criminal or civil.
If something is a copyright violation, the copyright holder can do the required steps to track down and sue said "criminal".
Sure, we could leave copyright holders to search out and find their own violators, but that doesn't seem to be accomplishing much, based on the rates of copyright infringement. Plus, if the copyright holder is a certain group of corporations we've all come to know and love, we find that they are reluctant to spend large amounts of time and money in gathering evidence that should be an absolute prerequisite for any such case. Bottom line: they lose, we lose, pirates mostly win, but will eventually lose in the long term.`Something's gotta give, and even though it's not acknowledged on/. very frequently, it must be a compromise. I have a feeling that we will lose some privacy, the **AA will lose some revenue, and some struggling indie artists may go broke, but it must be sorted out.
The difference here is that since you can't legitimately tell the difference from the ISP end, it's ridiculous to think that an ISP can regulate for the MPAA/RIAA.
No, that's true. It's currently not feasible to filter illicit copyrighted material at the ISP level, at least at an acceptable cost and false-positive/false-negative rate. It doesn't mean we should stop looking for a solution though.
There's certainly no possibility of law enforcement ever being able to catch them, practically speaking,... so it is basically a low-risk, high rewards way of leaching off of society.
Yeah, and then they come up with this "information wants to be free" crap and try to tell the people they're leaching off how to do their business.
Wait, we are talking about the same pirates here, right?
Is there ANY other utility industry where a third party can inflict rule over the utility for the good of the third party?
You seem to be forgetting that the activity that they're lobbying to prevent is illegal and not just for when it concerns them. They want it, but then again so do many other people. It's not a simple case of one industry annexing the other.
Everyone's guilty of that, and I don't see why the RIAA is especially guilty.
genetic modification
Let me guess, the exception, right?
carrying out experiments on humans
Other than studies and surveys (which are experiments on human behaviour), what exactly have they done?
causing social injustice
I'll give you that. They were certainly instrumental in unbalancing copyright law.
causing poverty
I don't think they've done much of that. If you're going to cite the artists as an example, I'd like to point out that every single one of those artists signed by their choice.
becoming obscenely wealthy
Typical. There's no mention on how they became extremely wealthy, or whether they've earned it. You can become obscenely wealthy by helping people, or by entertaining them, etc. That's not sinful, abusing that wealth is.
taking drugs
That's probably the epitome of here-say.
So, we've got definitely one, possibly one or two more. Sinful, but not that sinful.
Do the pirates make money from what they do, or are they just distributing copyrighted material for free?
Not necessarily.
And is the former considered morally (or legally) worse than the latter?
Certainly not legally, but morally, the consensus (a.k.a groupthink) here on Slashdot is that the former is considerably worse. I disagree however, because both commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement have roughly the same impact on the copyright holder.
But what the *AA and IFPI have done has been far worse than any Pirate.
A single pirate? No. Pirates as a group? That's debatable. They've done their half of the work to perpetuate this conflict, and the natural response to abuse of freedoms is to attempt to take them away. I'm not saying the **AA should be absolved of blame here, but neither should these pirates. They should've stopped when they were asked, especially since they were the ones who perpetrated illegal activity in the first place.
After reading the article and not the study, I'm a little confused about how they test these things. How can they tell if a file-sharer, never having access to such illegal applications of the technology, would not have bought more copyrighted material in its absence? The article said that the study simply followed their downloading habits for 17 weeks, but not how it ascertained whether or not they would've bought any or all the copyrighted material they were pirating. Surely they weren't just comparing download rates with sales, because that would just show a correlation between popularity in stores and popularity online. I hope they didn't know they were being watched, because that tends to swing behaviour to the legal side of things.
The reason why I ask is that the result rings resoundingly false to me. It's hard to imagine all the music/movie fans out there just doing without music or movies, had they no access to illegal measures.
Re:These people need to crawl in a hole somwhere.
on
IFPI Turning To Lawsuits
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Don't forget the pirates. They're just as responsible as the rest of them for this "petty squabble" (in fact, I would argue more responsible).
Read your own quote again. They said "all illicitly uploaded and downloaded copyrighted material", not "all copyrighted material". That argument was a petty nitpick at terminology in the first place, but here, it's even more useless.
Licensing enforces standards among the community in a far more efficient way than suing or prosecuting could. It forces businesses to know the requirements for their business, and often(mostly) to meet them at least initially. Now that they've met the standards once, there's no cost barrier, and they might as well keep meeting those standards, for fear of being shut down. Car licences ensure that practically everyone on the road knows the road rules, and that practically everyone on the road is accountable for their actions. Without licenses, you can't possibly revoke someone's driving privileges, which is a welcome result after repeat offences.
What percentage of their Windows machine lines have they cut? Compare with the percentage of their Linux machine lines they've cut (100%). There's the failure of Linux.
In fact, the mere fact that there are far more Windows machines than Linux machines shows that Linux is failing (as a mainstream desktop OS), but this is another nail in its coffin.
Instead of filtering for trivial information, perhaps a ratings system would be better? You could search above a certain threshold, and reveal only the more commonly interesting articles (and perhaps even the better maintained articles), or you could search the repository of human knowledge and possibly trawl through lots of useless junk if you so wished. The rating system could be based on number of hits on individual pages, plus recommendations by the Wikipedia editors.
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No, it would solve one problem and exacerbate another. We solve lawsuits, but not the problem of the profitability of art. The situation is actually quite delicate, and clumsy solutions like that won't do any good in the long term. Like I was saying, punishing illegal activity would be a good first step. From there, it's about compromise.
They would, no doubt, be aware that Earth knew nothing about intergalactic law. Either they'd recognise that Earth is not a part of intergalactic society, and would therefore be excluded from both benefits and punishments, they'd destroy us, or they'd include us in whatever society they have. I'm leaning towards the first, because it would explain why the other two haven't happened yet.
Perhaps this would be a better idea if, instead of making it mandatory for all students, making it a study with parents opting in their children, or adults opting themselves in. Perhaps if they could show that their results were something above statistically erroneous, then we could talk about benefits vs privacy violations etc.
Would you consider it moral to pay for something at a retail outlet (exactly what you described)? No, you are an ass.
Firstly, the RIAA must be bitch-slapped. Hard. We need to show them what we do to groups who abuse the court system. No matter how much cause they have to be angry, we need to show them tough justice.
Secondly, all those pirates must also be bitch-slapped. Their contribution to this mess must not go unnoticed and unpunished. We need to make copyright infringement a criminal matter, and institute heavy penalties. They need to know that leaching off other people's work is not acceptable, no matter how much they hate their victims. It's simply not good enough that enforcement is left to a group of corporations like the RIAA. We've seen the consequences of this already.
Thirdly, copyright law must be fixed. There should be different penalties for sharing amongst friends and sharing amongst strangers, there should be significantly shorter copyright terms, and we should redact anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA.
Would you consider it moral for someone to tell you "Don't pay for something that someone has worked hard to create"? No, the AC is right.
If there is going to be a distinction between types of copyright infringement beyond fair use, there should be a distinction between personal sharing and anonymous sharing. Personal sharing is restricted amongst friends, whereas anonymous sharing acts like a business, where anyone can copy from anyone else without having to know them. The former has very limited effects on sales.
Wait, we are talking about the same pirates here, right?
So, we've got definitely one, possibly one or two more. Sinful, but not that sinful.
After reading the article and not the study, I'm a little confused about how they test these things. How can they tell if a file-sharer, never having access to such illegal applications of the technology, would not have bought more copyrighted material in its absence? The article said that the study simply followed their downloading habits for 17 weeks, but not how it ascertained whether or not they would've bought any or all the copyrighted material they were pirating. Surely they weren't just comparing download rates with sales, because that would just show a correlation between popularity in stores and popularity online. I hope they didn't know they were being watched, because that tends to swing behaviour to the legal side of things.
The reason why I ask is that the result rings resoundingly false to me. It's hard to imagine all the music/movie fans out there just doing without music or movies, had they no access to illegal measures.
Don't forget the pirates. They're just as responsible as the rest of them for this "petty squabble" (in fact, I would argue more responsible).
Read your own quote again. They said "all illicitly uploaded and downloaded copyrighted material", not "all copyrighted material". That argument was a petty nitpick at terminology in the first place, but here, it's even more useless.
What percentage of their Windows machine lines have they cut? Compare with the percentage of their Linux machine lines they've cut (100%). There's the failure of Linux.
In fact, the mere fact that there are far more Windows machines than Linux machines shows that Linux is failing (as a mainstream desktop OS), but this is another nail in its coffin.
Probably marketing. What kind of right-minded person wouldn't want to take their shiny new MacBook Air(R) through airport security now?
Instead of filtering for trivial information, perhaps a ratings system would be better? You could search above a certain threshold, and reveal only the more commonly interesting articles (and perhaps even the better maintained articles), or you could search the repository of human knowledge and possibly trawl through lots of useless junk if you so wished. The rating system could be based on number of hits on individual pages, plus recommendations by the Wikipedia editors.