You seem to understand that it's ridiculous to assume that the privacy afforded by the comment system here doesn't mean that everyone is hiding something, although some of them could be, yet you don't see how that's exactly the kind of assertion you're making about BitTorrent. You're saying that its decentralization and privacy features exist specifically to insulate people who are using the system for illegal activity. And further, you essentially argue that the only reason people would choose to use a distributed system is because they're up to no good, and no one should use such systems because they're relatively inefficient, at least from the peer's perspective.
Distributed CDNs, whether P2P-based or not, aren't designed to be efficient overall; they're designed to spread the bandwidth consumption around, making peers do a little extra work in an attempt to avoid bottlenecks and single points of failure—the inherent flaws of centralized distribution. That's why it is the way it is, not because people wanted to hide their asses. And yes, decentralization is relatively inefficient for the peers, but not by much, and the source has much less burden than it would otherwise; it doesn't even need to stay connected.
You seem to think you've made some kind of point here. Are you trying to say it's hypocritical to oppose unjust laws when supporting just ones? Is that really how you feel—Techdirt (or anyone else) must either love all laws, or hat all laws, no picking and choosing? Really??
Getting strikes 2-6 simply puts you on ever more focused short list of easy defendants for civil suits.
When they sue, at least they'll have to reveal their actual evidence. Oh wait, never mind—the Memorandum of Understanding calls for the CCI to seek a protective order to prevent disclosure of all information that gets subpoenaed from them.
Any network/software engineer worth their salt can see the technical advantages of magnet links—advantages that have nothing to do with privacy. Same goes for P2P content distribution in general. Yet you assert that the modicum of privacy offered by these technologies means they were designed to cover illegal activity "and everybody knows it."
Tell me, is every technological feature which increases privacy designed to cover illegal activity, o Anonymous Coward? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, so why take advantage of these features at all? It costs you nothing to post under your real name, yet for some reason you choose to take advantage of a feature of this forum that certainly was designed for privacy...why do you do that, if not to cover your illegal activity?
Let me get this straight. You say Mike is a copyright infringer because he is a "piracy apologist". And you say that he is the one here who is "intellectually dishonest".
I don't see how anyone can watch any of CNBC's "investigative" programming without realizing the last thing they would ever do is air a piece which frames an issue like this in a way that makes major corporations look bad, or even in a way that says "it's complicated". You might as well be looking for peer-reviewed critiques in in PR Newswire, or watching [i]Cops[/i] for footage of police corruption and incompetence.
I'm glad you're calling out Crime Inc. on their bias, but they're not going to be embarrassed by something like this even if it runs in the New York Times.
If you want to get your message and rebuttals to industry talking points out there, you're going to have to pick a better venue, and you're going to have to be proactive about it. Sitting back and hoping a neutral journalist is going to come along (from an infotainment network, no less) and help you blow the whistle is naïve and unproductive.
The rights holder who sues over fair use always pretends they would've licensed it for cheap if they had been asked, but since they weren't asked, they need to send a message by suing for millions. You seem to be saying it's better to ask, for this reason.
A friend of a friend is an author who recently ran into this with a major book publisher. She had a very clear-cut case of fair use of quotes, all four prongs easily met, but out of paranoia, she asked for permission anyway. Do you think the answer was "oh, that's fair use, you don't need our permission"? I'll give you a hint: after hearing the answer, she abandoned the project.
The statutory damages were put there at the behest of huge corporate pressure in the days of the railways in the USA. It has nothing to do with the current scenarios.
Initially, yes, but Congress looked at this part of the law in 1999 and increased the damage range to adjust for inflation and to be a deterrent specifically in response to widespread online infringement.
A-yup. I was just in Italy and dropped about €500 as a tourist...maybe it's not Italian money they're after. :)
I think it's hilarious that the entertainment industry has to plead poverty whenever they talk about piracy, but then they have to wave their money around when it's time to show the investors how healthy the companies actually are.
This is about international trade and protectionism—basic macroeconomics. Every country says, through tariffs and trade agreements, "if you want to sell more of your stuff here, we need to be able to sell more of our stuff there." The US, with these lists, is making a specific suggestion as to how, according to certain US industries, certain countries can make their markets friendlier to those industries' exports. Presumably, if those countries comply, they'll get something in return, like reduced tariffs on the products they really want to sell more of in the US. This kind of bargaining/bullying is something every country does. It's unrealistic to suggest that any country stop seeking to export any of its product, as long as there is a potential foreign market.
The problem is that the US industries behind these lists are overstating the harm done to the market by Switzerland and Italy's failure to crack down on piracy. They're doing fine, and they would do fine in Switzerland and Italy even if those countries do nothing more than they're doing today. They're just trying to get more because they can...and because they really, really do not like the precedent set by governments who don't roll right over.
The CMU paper, which notes and draws inferences from a trend in the conclusions of a particular sample of academic literature on this topic, is what Richard said is biased, not the critiques mentioned therein.
Despite the CMU paper's bluster about methodology and its highlighting of certain critiques, its own conclusions seem to be based on a biased sample, selected through undisclosed means (aside from a preference for academic papers based on empiricism).
The authors also acknowledged the outset that every paper they looked at is hard to compare because they all have such different focuses, data sets and methods. They further acknowledged that it's really difficult for any study of piracy's effect on sales to be methodologically sound, as there are so many unknown and uncontrollable variables. This is basically announcing that the whole exercise is unscientific, and you shouldn't draw conclusions from it. But then (no big surprise given their "generous" MPAA funding), they proceed under the assumption that the critiques and harm-concluding studies they chose to look at are unassailable, and that it's perfectly fine to make inferences based on a simple tally of harm-concluding and no-harm-concluding studies.
Shall we tally studies that conclude that God does or does not exist, and decide this issue once and for all?
• "Love" to perform, but never enough to do it for free when asked by someone who might be able to afford to pay.
• Emphasize the title artist, as they feel they're not just a mere musician or performer, no matter how limited their role in a particular session.
• Avoid the word volunteer; prefer to say work for free or not get paid for work.
• Consider volunteerism (and other forms of generosity and charity) to be moral only to the extent they feel the recipient is deserving.
• Consider asking for volunteers to be moral only to the extent the recipient is unable to afford professionals.
The RIAA is a PR, lobbying, and litigation organization funded and run by label executives and lawyers. A more realistic timeline would not cast it as a cadre of technology innovators or as some kind of centralized megalabel, but rather as a forum of market-responsive cheerleaders and venture capitalists—an organization with the power to embrace changing trends in how people consume music, and to invest in the externally-developed mix of both centralized and decentralized technology relating to distribution, consumption, and re-use of the labels' IP assets.
Imagine if the labels had backed things like these as they came along: MP3.com's locker/streaming tech; all the P2P innovations before and including BitTorrent; SHOUTcast and other streaming radio; deep-catalog vendors like iTunes/Amazon/etc.; crowdsourced metadata like CDDB/Gracenote, MusicBrainz, Discogs, etc.; content review, rating, filtering, and tastemaker outlets like DJ mixes and music blogs; online content aggregators and search engines; YouTube... It still astonishes me that they consider companies who develop and find markets for this tech the enemy. They will say a video-embedding content aggregator or the operator of a torrent tracker and forum are villains raking in an illegal fortune, yet it has always been within the power of the RIAA to make it legal and get a hefty cut of those profits with the mere stroke of a pen on a percentage-of-revenue-based licensing agreement.
The labels barely even have a grip on their own assets, and it was even worse in 1999. Someone from one of the major labels in 2006(!) asked me where they could find a complete discography of their releases, because they didn't even know what all they had put out! You'd think they'd know their own catalog and have it all organized nicely internally, with every master tape all perfectly preserved, but they were never in the library business; they only kept what they believed there would be a market for, and they weren't about to consider the possibility that technology was very quickly going to fuel interest in preserving everything they had ever done.
People who can sing or play an instrument are a dime a dozen. There are gobs of competent session musicians, orchestras, career artists who have thousands of hours, many years of experience under their belts. They are well-paid working musicians with technical skill who can play as well as any big-name performer. They make a living from their art, yet they remain in obscurity. Why is that? By your logic, they should be awash in creativity, churning out the greatest works our culture has ever produced.
You seem to think you've served up some kind of rebuttal, here. Yet no one is arguing that certain types of creative acts don't require resources beyond what even a day job can provide. Instead, the argument is about whether commercial art must be commercially self-sustaining, and to what degree, by what means. To what, exactly, are artists and those who enable, exploit, or otherwise depend on them entitled? To what extent must consumers be required to subsidize the production of (for example) films with massive budgets, or music and home video formats and delivery methods fraught with unnecessary encumbrances?
Every time there's skepticism about your entitlement to be paid, in perpetuity, any ransom you demand for every steaming pile you crap out, or skepticism about the ever-greater legal protections you want for your industries, you trot out the moral hyperbole. Well, it's b.s., and we're calling you out on it. As consumers, and as pragmatic artists, we are unmoved by your Chicken Little routine; we will continue to loudly bristle at legislation, litigation, and campaigns which tell us that art will die, artists will starve, unemployment will rise, and economies will crumble if we don't cough up enough cash for the eighth Police Academy movie* every time it rapes our eyeballs.
I explained this above in response to someone else, but you are incorrect. There was never any evidence presented that she gave copies of the songs to anyone, so that's not what the "fine" (damages award) was for. The award was for copyright infringement, period. She was found liable for infringing either the reproduction right (by downloading) or the distribution right (by making copies available to others [1st trial] or unspecified means [2nd trial]), or both. There was only a liability checkbox, not separate checkboxes for downloading and distributing.
Re: Re: Using her numbers, at one time I would have been subject
No, Thomas-Rasset was sued for copyright infringement by 1. copying (by downloading) and 2. distributing (by making available), both without license. The trials were set up such that the jury was not given the option to say whether she copied or distributed or both; they only had to say whether she infringed, and whether it was willful.
Specifically, in the first trial, the jury instructions were such that she was to be found liable for infringement if the jury believed that she had infringed the reproduction right (by downloading) or the distribution right (by making available). Evidence was presented in favor of both. The jury found that she infringed, period. In the second trial, the erroneous "by making available" was removed from the definition of distribution, but the instructions and result were otherwise pretty much the same. In the third trial, whether she had infringed was not at issue, so it's irrelevant. And in the appeal, the court made very clear that it was not going to weigh in on whether making available is really an infringement of the distribution right.
So to me, regardless of whether making-available is distribution, it seems pretty evident that she was on the hook, and got pounded for the downloading just as much as the distributing.
On the post: The Government Can Be Transparent About International Negotiations... If It's Unhappy With Them
On the post: Yes, There Are Many, Many, Many, Many Legal Uses Of BitTorrent
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Distributed CDNs, whether P2P-based or not, aren't designed to be efficient overall; they're designed to spread the bandwidth consumption around, making peers do a little extra work in an attempt to avoid bottlenecks and single points of failure—the inherent flaws of centralized distribution. That's why it is the way it is, not because people wanted to hide their asses. And yes, decentralization is relatively inefficient for the peers, but not by much, and the source has much less burden than it would otherwise; it doesn't even need to stay connected.
On the post: California Governor Vetoes Bill Barring Gov't From Turning Off Mobile Phone Service
Re: Re:
On the post: California Governor Vetoes Bill Barring Gov't From Turning Off Mobile Phone Service
Re:
On the post: Why The Six Strikes Plan Doesn't Mesh With US Law Or Social Norms
Re:
When they sue, at least they'll have to reveal their actual evidence. Oh wait, never mind—the Memorandum of Understanding calls for the CCI to seek a protective order to prevent disclosure of all information that gets subpoenaed from them.
On the post: Yes, There Are Many, Many, Many, Many Legal Uses Of BitTorrent
Re: Re: Re:
Tell me, is every technological feature which increases privacy designed to cover illegal activity, o Anonymous Coward? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, so why take advantage of these features at all? It costs you nothing to post under your real name, yet for some reason you choose to take advantage of a feature of this forum that certainly was designed for privacy...why do you do that, if not to cover your illegal activity?
On the post: Why The Six Strikes Plan Doesn't Mesh With US Law Or Social Norms
Re: Re: Re: Really?
Just making sure this is the situation.
On the post: Why It's Tempting, But Troubling, To Use Copyright As A Stand In For Moral Rights
Re: Re: Once again proof that copyright is for the average Joe
On the post: Crime Inc. Inc., The Business Of Hyping The Piracy Threat
Stop waiting for real journalists; seek them out
I'm glad you're calling out Crime Inc. on their bias, but they're not going to be embarrassed by something like this even if it runs in the New York Times.
If you want to get your message and rebuttals to industry talking points out there, you're going to have to pick a better venue, and you're going to have to be proactive about it. Sitting back and hoping a neutral journalist is going to come along (from an infotainment network, no less) and help you blow the whistle is naïve and unproductive.
On the post: All Fair Use And No License Fees Makes Room 237 An Interesting Test Case
Re: Re: :(
A friend of a friend is an author who recently ran into this with a major book publisher. She had a very clear-cut case of fair use of quotes, all four prongs easily met, but out of paranoia, she asked for permission anyway. Do you think the answer was "oh, that's fair use, you don't need our permission"? I'll give you a hint: after hearing the answer, she abandoned the project.
How is this good for anyone?
On the post: Another Judge Blasts Copyright Trolls
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Initially, yes, but Congress looked at this part of the law in 1999 and increased the damage range to adjust for inflation and to be a deterrent specifically in response to widespread online infringement.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-106hrpt216/pdf/CRPT-106hrpt216.pdf
http://frwebg ate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=1999_record&position=all&page=H6798
So an argument that the statutory damages aren't meant to apply to Internet activity is incorrect. However, this doesn't undermine your other points.
On the post: Switzerland Questions Crazy Hollywood Claims About File Sharing... Ends Up On Congressional Watchlist
Re: Re: Re:
I think it's hilarious that the entertainment industry has to plead poverty whenever they talk about piracy, but then they have to wave their money around when it's time to show the investors how healthy the companies actually are.
On the post: Switzerland Questions Crazy Hollywood Claims About File Sharing... Ends Up On Congressional Watchlist
Re:
The problem is that the US industries behind these lists are overstating the harm done to the market by Switzerland and Italy's failure to crack down on piracy. They're doing fine, and they would do fine in Switzerland and Italy even if those countries do nothing more than they're doing today. They're just trying to get more because they can...and because they really, really do not like the precedent set by governments who don't roll right over.
On the post: Switzerland Questions Crazy Hollywood Claims About File Sharing... Ends Up On Congressional Watchlist
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Despite the CMU paper's bluster about methodology and its highlighting of certain critiques, its own conclusions seem to be based on a biased sample, selected through undisclosed means (aside from a preference for academic papers based on empiricism).
The authors also acknowledged the outset that every paper they looked at is hard to compare because they all have such different focuses, data sets and methods. They further acknowledged that it's really difficult for any study of piracy's effect on sales to be methodologically sound, as there are so many unknown and uncontrollable variables. This is basically announcing that the whole exercise is unscientific, and you shouldn't draw conclusions from it. But then (no big surprise given their "generous" MPAA funding), they proceed under the assumption that the critiques and harm-concluding studies they chose to look at are unassailable, and that it's perfectly fine to make inferences based on a simple tally of harm-concluding and no-harm-concluding studies.
Shall we tally studies that conclude that God does or does not exist, and decide this issue once and for all?
On the post: Amanda Palmer Destroys/Saves Musicians; Chances Of 'Hitting It Big' As An Artist Remain Unchanged
• "Love" to perform, but never enough to do it for free when asked by someone who might be able to afford to pay.
• Emphasize the title artist, as they feel they're not just a mere musician or performer, no matter how limited their role in a particular session.
• Avoid the word volunteer; prefer to say work for free or not get paid for work.
• Consider volunteerism (and other forms of generosity and charity) to be moral only to the extent they feel the recipient is deserving.
• Consider asking for volunteers to be moral only to the extent the recipient is unable to afford professionals.
These people must be great at dinner parties.
On the post: If The RIAA Was Innovative: An Alternate Universe Timeline
Imagine if the labels had backed things like these as they came along: MP3.com's locker/streaming tech; all the P2P innovations before and including BitTorrent; SHOUTcast and other streaming radio; deep-catalog vendors like iTunes/Amazon/etc.; crowdsourced metadata like CDDB/Gracenote, MusicBrainz, Discogs, etc.; content review, rating, filtering, and tastemaker outlets like DJ mixes and music blogs; online content aggregators and search engines; YouTube... It still astonishes me that they consider companies who develop and find markets for this tech the enemy. They will say a video-embedding content aggregator or the operator of a torrent tracker and forum are villains raking in an illegal fortune, yet it has always been within the power of the RIAA to make it legal and get a hefty cut of those profits with the mere stroke of a pen on a percentage-of-revenue-based licensing agreement.
The labels barely even have a grip on their own assets, and it was even worse in 1999. Someone from one of the major labels in 2006(!) asked me where they could find a complete discography of their releases, because they didn't even know what all they had put out! You'd think they'd know their own catalog and have it all organized nicely internally, with every master tape all perfectly preserved, but they were never in the library business; they only kept what they believed there would be a market for, and they weren't about to consider the possibility that technology was very quickly going to fuel interest in preserving everything they had ever done.
On the post: Don't Quit Your Day Job: Creativity Is About Passion, Not Paychecks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Don't Quit Your Day Job: Creativity Is About Passion, Not Paychecks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Every time there's skepticism about your entitlement to be paid, in perpetuity, any ransom you demand for every steaming pile you crap out, or skepticism about the ever-greater legal protections you want for your industries, you trot out the moral hyperbole. Well, it's b.s., and we're calling you out on it. As consumers, and as pragmatic artists, we are unmoved by your Chicken Little routine; we will continue to loudly bristle at legislation, litigation, and campaigns which tell us that art will die, artists will starve, unemployment will rise, and economies will crumble if we don't cough up enough cash for the eighth Police Academy movie* every time it rapes our eyeballs.
* oh yes, it's coming
On the post: Court: Fining Jammie Thomas $9,250 Per Song Infringed Motivates Creative Activity
Re: Re:
On the post: Court: Fining Jammie Thomas $9,250 Per Song Infringed Motivates Creative Activity
Re: Re: Using her numbers, at one time I would have been subject
Specifically, in the first trial, the jury instructions were such that she was to be found liable for infringement if the jury believed that she had infringed the reproduction right (by downloading) or the distribution right (by making available). Evidence was presented in favor of both. The jury found that she infringed, period. In the second trial, the erroneous "by making available" was removed from the definition of distribution, but the instructions and result were otherwise pretty much the same. In the third trial, whether she had infringed was not at issue, so it's irrelevant. And in the appeal, the court made very clear that it was not going to weigh in on whether making available is really an infringement of the distribution right.
So to me, regardless of whether making-available is distribution, it seems pretty evident that she was on the hook, and got pounded for the downloading just as much as the distributing.
Next >>