"The statutory damages provision of Title 17 is about as "unvague" as they come."
False.
"Why do you believe otherwise?"
As I explained, the difference of provable economic damages vs arbitrary statutory damages is the reason that the RIAA and groups such as Righthaven and USCG will always opt for the latter option.
"Is it because you simply disagree with the amount of the award?"
There are currently three cases that prove the inaccuracy of the law. Whitney Harper, JRT, and Tenenbaum. No economic damages were ever proven in any case.
" If the value of a song is truly as low as you seem to believe, then I do have to wonder why one who can easily afford to secure a copy by legal means chooses to engage in clearly illegal conduct."
Hello? Do you not recognize that it's been 5 years of the enforcement angle? Have you just now realized that iTunes was not around, and all substitutes were being sued by the RIAA for crazy amounts of money? That even Napster's filesharing helped to increase sales, by exposing more people to various music they couldn't find otherwise? That the RIAA's entire premise of stopping filesharing was to make people buy more CDs? Have you done any research into the industry?
"By the way, statutory damages have been a mainstay of US Copyright Law since the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1790"
And they were made obscene by the passage of the NET Act, which was used to go after commercial infringement, which is woefully inaccurate here. Also, before the Net Act passed, commercial infringement was a misdemeanor. The rules changed based on heavy lobbying from the MPAA and RIAA to control distribution. It worked, but the internet undermines that control. What exactly is your point about the statutory rights of copyright?
Luckily, this isn't a criminal copyright infringement trial, or the RIAA would have to prove his guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. Since they have not proven economic damages , the case would most likely falter. :)
While SCOTUS is the supreme law of the land, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that a lower court can't show, through careful analysis, the problem with a set of laws. There's nothing saying that remittur is required when we already know how that game ends.
What I'm noticing is more and more judges shirking Constitutional questions for mere procedure. After seeing quite a few stories in regards to the push for erasure of the 4th Amendment, I'm wondering why the Judicial Branch doesn't want to push that button.
I know there's a lot of flack for judicial activism when things don't go the way of the prosecution, but honestly, what point is there in remanding this case? More and more, you see the Judicial shirking their duties. The Supreme Court pushed the "very narrow ruling" button and that has done nothing in regards to fixing the patent issue.
Eldred v Ashcroft was given the green light when no one has seen the point of it.
Whitney Harper's case closed down on her when the Supreme Court said no.
Was there justice? Could a lower court have prevented this by enacting the Fair Use Doctrine and dismissing the case? Is there a way to interpret the language, the jobs of the court, so that these ridiculous amounts aren't what people face in these lawsuits?
That's why the constitutionality should be determined and brought up more. Nothing is wrong with following a procedure or remanding this, but it sure would be a lot faster if someone could show us these court rulings based on the Constitutionality of the law, as set by what the judges are supposed to uphold.
"Read Footnote 28 of the opinion and you will see what it is that will very likely be the focus of the case now that it has been reversed and remanded"
... Which says the exact same thing I'm questioning. We already know how this dance ends. The case has gone through two trials, and the amounts have been set for the jury. The amounts set are woefully out of touch with reality based on the vagueness of the statutory damages clause. The Jammie Thomas and Whitney Harper cases have proven that.
All this proves is that the value of a song can't be set by Congress, because they don't know what it is. This has served no purpose but to point out the problems with copyright law, in that it will not serve neither the public interest nor the plaintiffs.
In the Tenenbaum case, the RIAA opted out of settling for economic damages, opting for statutory damages. The statutory damages are based on him being a "willful" infringer, IIRC.
His testimony made him a douchebag, and people punished him for it pretty much. So if you really want to eliminate the out of control punishment, you should take away the statutory damages. By all means, if there are economic damages, let the RIAA prove it in the digital world.
But these outrageous amounts just makes people respect copyright that much less.
"Judges shouldn't be going out of the way to tackle constitutional issues. "
Again... Why? Why inundate the process with a byzantine list of rules and precedents when sometimes asking the constitutional question can really get to the bottom of this?
" Especially since there is another way, in this case, to reach the desired goal"But should this be the only way? Should it be that you only have a remittitur process to slash the amounts of juries? No questions were truly answered in this case and everyone already knows the details of what's going to happen.
Why should justice now be expensive because of the instructions, arbitrary damages, and a process that has NOTHING to do with the average citizen?
So... It's ok to have a man charged with a lien that is more than he'll ever be able to pay in a lifetime, so long as all of the procedures are followed.
I sometimes wonder if maximalists listen to themselves as they gloat over their stance of draconian copyright ruining people's lives.
Because I'm not a lawyer or attorney at law, I have no access to public records, no matter how little or how much it is. I can't look up and reference all of the articles and decisions made in the history of MY country of birth because I didn't pay a fee.
And for that small injustice, when I want to change my naive notion that more access to information allows me to make better decisions, you decide to try to dismiss it by saying "you're whining?"
"Class action lawsuits will not disappear completely if people would not agree to TOS contracts forbidding them. "
How can they when the TOS is specifically binding?
" Companies (smart companies, this may not include Sony) would catch on that including this bull was costing them money and customers and then they'd just concentrate on good service instead."
No, most companies go the arbitration route, which runs counter to being able to sue in open court by leagues.
1) Arbitration doesn't report the results of the mediation
2) There is huge incentive for judges to favor with the plaintiffs, who are usually businesses.
3)The arbitration judges are usually gone if they favor defendants.
So why not sue in open court with all of the precedents? Because the law allows this binding in arbitration.
The only thing I remember about arbitration is how Al Franken pushed for the denouncement of arbitration.
The move "Hot Coffee" also discusses this, but be aware, it's quite controversial. I'm sure an AC will come here to say the movie is bad, under the guise of working for the Chamber of Commerce (since they're portrayed quite badly in the move) so I'll leave off by saying, Your mileage may vary.
The price increase is certainly misguided. What happens if you're interested in a specific topic, such as copyright law, and looking for precedents set by it through a certain amount of cases? Looking up the Perfect 10 lawsuits, plus the Youtube v Viacom lawsuits and seeing their precedents runs counter to making quite a bit by charging for access.
Has anyone seen why they want to charge more? Is there a central trust fund that this goes to?
I have more stories about this ludicrous standard operating procedure. You ask me for cases? Here's just a few that would make great headlines (and did) for the reason NOT to like the TSA. Still want to go at this?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Common sense.... So damned rare, it's now a superhuman power
Also, that article is from 2008, when the RIAA was pushing this terrorist angle, and suing people for filesharing. The trade industries were still getting a sense of what was going on, and they were pushing pretty far on the drug policy.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Common sense.... So damned rare, it's now a superhuman power
"Here's one article proving Jay's assertion that "There are currently zero links in(sic) piracy and organized crime." is utter, self-serving bullshit."
AFACT is not a source on this first of all. AFACT is the MPAA in disguise in the Land Down Under. It's similar to taking the IFPI's numbers with a grain of salt.
But here's the text questioning "Does Crime Pay?:"
Claims of connections between media piracy and narcotrafficking, arms smuggling, and other
“hard” forms of organized crime have been part of enforcement discourse since the late 1990s,
when the IFPI began to raise concerns about the transborder smuggling of pirated CDs (IFPI
2001). Claimed connections between piracy and terrorism are a more recent addition.
... Commercial-scale piracy is illegal, and its clandestine production and supply chains
invariably require organization. It meets, in this respect, a minimal definition of organized crime.
Pirated CD and DVD vending, moreover, is often concentrated in poor neighborhoods and
informal markets where other types of illegal activity are common. Such contexts create points
of intersection between the pirate economy and wider illegal and quasi-legal arrangements of
the informal economy. It would be remarkable if they did not.
But we found no evidence of systematic links between media piracy and more serious forms of organized crime, much less
terrorism, in any of our country studies. What explains this result?
Invariably, the rationale offered for criminal-syndicate and terrorist involvement is
that piracy is a highly profitable business. The RAND report, for example, states (without
explanation) that “DVD piracy . . . has a higher profit margin than narcotics” (Treverton et al.
2009:xii)—an implausible claim that has circulated in industry literature since at least 2004.
...
But it is also clear that such networks are marginal to the larger pirate economy and rapidly waning—driven into
unprofitability by expanded local production and free digital distribution. We see no evidence
that piracy, outside a few niche markets, is still a high-margin business.
Now, this goes on to explain how the profit margins have waned by the fact that DVD burners and blank discs becoming a commodity item:
Pressure on profit margins has increased, too, due to the
rise of the massive non-commercial sphere of copying and distribution on the Internet, which
has all but eliminated commercial optical disc piracy in high-income countries and appears
poised to do so further down the GDP ladder. Increasingly, commercial pirates face the same
dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.
So you can't have it both ways. You can't say that copying promotes terrorism while also saying that noncommercial filesharing is continuing to hurt the industry as well.
So, your IFPI link? That's in the book. They talk to the MPAA, the RIAA, and quite a number of other people in industry. They talk about the 1:1 correlation of piracy losses, and how copyright enforcement is really bad through selective enforcement.
It's a REALLY good book to read, and the first part is only 70 pages. I second you looking into the book to better rethink what piracy supposedly is.
"For hundreds of years, content creators have been paid by their customers for the right to have a copy of their work."
~300 years to be exact. But who's counting. And now, you have other options you can make people pay for instead of just a copy.
"This seems a very well accepted and direct way of rewarding them in proportion to how many people value the work, and by how much. "
It was really great... Except for the fact that this spurred on the growth of middlemen such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, the MPAA and RIAA, who campaign for the people with the highest profit margins, not the ones who created content.
"However, the offering a copy of the work to World+Dog for free, against the wishes of the creator, is theft of the creator's ability to earn a living. '"
Yeah... In the last 20 years of living (no, I'm not 20) George Lucas is deprived of one sale of a very popular franchise because I saw the movie with a friend. Are you SURE you want to go with that argument?
"...if piracy/sharing is rife and accepted, then there is no alternative"
Kickstarter, Rockethubs, and the proliferation of Youtube disagrees with you.
"Alternative Business Models' may be possible for Rock Musicians, but what about Novelists, poets, artists, protographers, journalists...?"
We do. Take away copyright enforcement, learn to lower prices on digital goods, stop trying to impede on civil rights, understand that technology enables more content to be made, not less, learn to pay for access, learn to stop using bogus statistics for falsities, and lrn 2 crowdsource.
Ya know... After watching how much a Senator spends a day on these issues, I have an idea.
Imagine that someone presents their views on the economy, shows factual research into various parts of political intrigue, and actively works to show how much he cares for his state.
Imagine that s/he shows that he can put together a platform for her/his constituents without needing lobbyist money. Imagine that the PAC rules don't apply because he never takes that money. S/He asks the crowd to support his campaign.
This means a look into using Youtube to discuss views, why he feels the way s/he does. Twitter is used to answer a few questions. The website shows and tracks our public figure's expenditures from the fund used to represent his people. Donations are not given anonymously, they have a name labeled to them along with what they campaign for.
The election process is not locked into how much money it takes to put you on the ballot. You see a small summary of the people's position, make a choice, get a receipt. As a second way to verify your vote, a website is maintained that counts your ballot, then shows the progress of all other cities.
Since this data is very precious, it's sent to a third party like Wikileaks, who publishes it when all results are in. Each party constituent is given a copy for their records, as well as a public copy posted for all to see.
Finally, a review process for ALL members of our government. What's been needed is a way to redress all of the dark spots in our government. It's been a well known fact that getting information out of the dark pits of government has been stymied. It used to be that most media groups fought to get that story out.
So routinely, we need a way that the government is held accountable to actions instead of softballed questions in a Congressional review, or a complaint letter that gets ignored.
Could there be more? I like to think so. There's plenty of ways to make our government a LOT better. I'd just like to think that some of the ideas around the world could be utilized a lot better than the US exporting their aggressive stance on copyrights.
"In none of the other cases (including the Browning-Ferris case that the other A.C. quoted) were the jury awards based on statutory damages. Since statutory damage amounts are set by Congress, and not entirely by the jury, there could be a good argument that the 8th Amendment applies."
I'm hesitant on this, having talked to the AC above on this same issue.
Most judges are err too much on the side of caution rather than look like they're "judicial activists". Usually, they don't want to rock the boat in regards to these cases. I have no idea if the Tenenbaum case will come with a further reduced look at this problem.
The text reads about excessive damages in regards to the 8th Amendment. The punitive damages here are priced exceedingly out of the defendant's ability to pay as well as the MSRP of the song. IANAL, but rather than the rebukes with the words, the spirit of the law should be that she is charged with provable economic damages instead of the higher statutory damages that are arbitrary.
On the post: Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 Jury Award Against Joel Tenenbaum On Procedural Grounds
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
False.
"Why do you believe otherwise?"
As I explained, the difference of provable economic damages vs arbitrary statutory damages is the reason that the RIAA and groups such as Righthaven and USCG will always opt for the latter option.
"Is it because you simply disagree with the amount of the award?"
There are currently three cases that prove the inaccuracy of the law. Whitney Harper, JRT, and Tenenbaum. No economic damages were ever proven in any case.
" If the value of a song is truly as low as you seem to believe, then I do have to wonder why one who can easily afford to secure a copy by legal means chooses to engage in clearly illegal conduct."
Hello? Do you not recognize that it's been 5 years of the enforcement angle? Have you just now realized that iTunes was not around, and all substitutes were being sued by the RIAA for crazy amounts of money? That even Napster's filesharing helped to increase sales, by exposing more people to various music they couldn't find otherwise? That the RIAA's entire premise of stopping filesharing was to make people buy more CDs? Have you done any research into the industry?
"By the way, statutory damages have been a mainstay of US Copyright Law since the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1790"
And they were made obscene by the passage of the NET Act, which was used to go after commercial infringement, which is woefully inaccurate here. Also, before the Net Act passed, commercial infringement was a misdemeanor. The rules changed based on heavy lobbying from the MPAA and RIAA to control distribution. It worked, but the internet undermines that control. What exactly is your point about the statutory rights of copyright?
On the post: Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 Jury Award Against Joel Tenenbaum On Procedural Grounds
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
While SCOTUS is the supreme law of the land, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that a lower court can't show, through careful analysis, the problem with a set of laws. There's nothing saying that remittur is required when we already know how that game ends.
What I'm noticing is more and more judges shirking Constitutional questions for mere procedure. After seeing quite a few stories in regards to the push for erasure of the 4th Amendment, I'm wondering why the Judicial Branch doesn't want to push that button.
I know there's a lot of flack for judicial activism when things don't go the way of the prosecution, but honestly, what point is there in remanding this case? More and more, you see the Judicial shirking their duties. The Supreme Court pushed the "very narrow ruling" button and that has done nothing in regards to fixing the patent issue.
Eldred v Ashcroft was given the green light when no one has seen the point of it.
Whitney Harper's case closed down on her when the Supreme Court said no.
Was there justice? Could a lower court have prevented this by enacting the Fair Use Doctrine and dismissing the case? Is there a way to interpret the language, the jobs of the court, so that these ridiculous amounts aren't what people face in these lawsuits?
That's why the constitutionality should be determined and brought up more. Nothing is wrong with following a procedure or remanding this, but it sure would be a lot faster if someone could show us these court rulings based on the Constitutionality of the law, as set by what the judges are supposed to uphold.
On the post: Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 Jury Award Against Joel Tenenbaum On Procedural Grounds
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
... Which says the exact same thing I'm questioning. We already know how this dance ends. The case has gone through two trials, and the amounts have been set for the jury. The amounts set are woefully out of touch with reality based on the vagueness of the statutory damages clause. The Jammie Thomas and Whitney Harper cases have proven that.
All this proves is that the value of a song can't be set by Congress, because they don't know what it is. This has served no purpose but to point out the problems with copyright law, in that it will not serve neither the public interest nor the plaintiffs.
On the post: Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 Jury Award Against Joel Tenenbaum On Procedural Grounds
Re: Cruel Juries
In the Tenenbaum case, the RIAA opted out of settling for economic damages, opting for statutory damages. The statutory damages are based on him being a "willful" infringer, IIRC.
His testimony made him a douchebag, and people punished him for it pretty much. So if you really want to eliminate the out of control punishment, you should take away the statutory damages. By all means, if there are economic damages, let the RIAA prove it in the digital world.
But these outrageous amounts just makes people respect copyright that much less.
On the post: Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 Jury Award Against Joel Tenenbaum On Procedural Grounds
Re: Re: Re:
Again... Why? Why inundate the process with a byzantine list of rules and precedents when sometimes asking the constitutional question can really get to the bottom of this?
" Especially since there is another way, in this case, to reach the desired goal"But should this be the only way? Should it be that you only have a remittitur process to slash the amounts of juries? No questions were truly answered in this case and everyone already knows the details of what's going to happen.
Why should justice now be expensive because of the instructions, arbitrary damages, and a process that has NOTHING to do with the average citizen?
On the post: How Payola Works Today... Or Why You Only Hear Major Label Songs On The Radio
Re:
True, but the artists are doing that anyway, whether it's music, movies, or actual artistry.
"The quality of the music has nothing to do with the corporate corruption of our public airwaves"
But the quality of the music is directly influenced by how the money changes hands and influences the playlist algorithm. That's the main problem.
On the post: Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 Jury Award Against Joel Tenenbaum On Procedural Grounds
Re:
I sometimes wonder if maximalists listen to themselves as they gloat over their stance of draconian copyright ruining people's lives.
On the post: Appeals Court Reinstates $675,000 Jury Award Against Joel Tenenbaum On Procedural Grounds
Odd...
On the post: Federal Courts Making It More Expensive To Access Records, Even As They're Swimming In Cash
Re: Re:
Because I'm not a lawyer or attorney at law, I have no access to public records, no matter how little or how much it is. I can't look up and reference all of the articles and decisions made in the history of MY country of birth because I didn't pay a fee.
And for that small injustice, when I want to change my naive notion that more access to information allows me to make better decisions, you decide to try to dismiss it by saying "you're whining?"
Are you sure that's what you want to say?
On the post: Thou Shalt Not Sue Sony
Re: The sad truth
How can they when the TOS is specifically binding?
" Companies (smart companies, this may not include Sony) would catch on that including this bull was costing them money and customers and then they'd just concentrate on good service instead."
No, most companies go the arbitration route, which runs counter to being able to sue in open court by leagues.
1) Arbitration doesn't report the results of the mediation
2) There is huge incentive for judges to favor with the plaintiffs, who are usually businesses.
3)The arbitration judges are usually gone if they favor defendants.
So why not sue in open court with all of the precedents? Because the law allows this binding in arbitration.
The only thing I remember about arbitration is how Al Franken pushed for the denouncement of arbitration.
The move "Hot Coffee" also discusses this, but be aware, it's quite controversial. I'm sure an AC will come here to say the movie is bad, under the guise of working for the Chamber of Commerce (since they're portrayed quite badly in the move) so I'll leave off by saying, Your mileage may vary.
On the post: Federal Courts Making It More Expensive To Access Records, Even As They're Swimming In Cash
Has anyone seen why they want to charge more? Is there a central trust fund that this goes to?
On the post: Guy Who Created The TSA Says It's Failed, And It's Time To Dismantle It
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Link. You should know she outed the agent that touched her. She's not the only one.
Here's a woman that touched the TSA's breast - Link. She got aggressive
A woman was arrested for not allowing her daughter to be groped because of their STO - Link
Woman removed adult diaper because of TSA - Link. Oh, she has cancer.
Finally here is Susie Castillo talking about that patdown.
I have more stories about this ludicrous standard operating procedure. You ask me for cases? Here's just a few that would make great headlines (and did) for the reason NOT to like the TSA. Still want to go at this?
On the post: Shouldn't Unilateral Retroactive Copyright Extension Mean Copyright Is Void?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Me and everybody else ..
The artists are moving on, the middlemen rely on copyright and artists and the public got screwed in the deal.
On the post: Do The Statutory Damages Rates For Copyright Infringement Violate The Eighth Amendment?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Common sense.... So damned rare, it's now a superhuman power
BTW, did you also know that the US drug policy has failed?
Do you recognize that LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) has recognized this through their own discussions, which Google has on Youtube?
Just sayin, it's good to read up on these issues.
On the post: Do The Statutory Damages Rates For Copyright Infringement Violate The Eighth Amendment?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Common sense.... So damned rare, it's now a superhuman power
AFACT is not a source on this first of all. AFACT is the MPAA in disguise in the Land Down Under. It's similar to taking the IFPI's numbers with a grain of salt.
Rethinking Piracy
But here's the text questioning "Does Crime Pay?:"
Claims of connections between media piracy and narcotrafficking, arms smuggling, and other
“hard” forms of organized crime have been part of enforcement discourse since the late 1990s,
when the IFPI began to raise concerns about the transborder smuggling of pirated CDs (IFPI
2001). Claimed connections between piracy and terrorism are a more recent addition.
... Commercial-scale piracy is illegal, and its clandestine production and supply chains
invariably require organization. It meets, in this respect, a minimal definition of organized crime.
Pirated CD and DVD vending, moreover, is often concentrated in poor neighborhoods and
informal markets where other types of illegal activity are common. Such contexts create points
of intersection between the pirate economy and wider illegal and quasi-legal arrangements of
the informal economy. It would be remarkable if they did not.
But we found no evidence of systematic links between media piracy and more serious forms of organized crime, much less
terrorism, in any of our country studies. What explains this result?
Invariably, the rationale offered for criminal-syndicate and terrorist involvement is
that piracy is a highly profitable business. The RAND report, for example, states (without
explanation) that “DVD piracy . . . has a higher profit margin than narcotics” (Treverton et al.
2009:xii)—an implausible claim that has circulated in industry literature since at least 2004.
...
But it is also clear that such networks are marginal to the larger pirate economy and rapidly waning—driven into
unprofitability by expanded local production and free digital distribution. We see no evidence
that piracy, outside a few niche markets, is still a high-margin business.
Now, this goes on to explain how the profit margins have waned by the fact that DVD burners and blank discs becoming a commodity item:
Pressure on profit margins has increased, too, due to the
rise of the massive non-commercial sphere of copying and distribution on the Internet, which
has all but eliminated commercial optical disc piracy in high-income countries and appears
poised to do so further down the GDP ladder. Increasingly, commercial pirates face the same
dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.
So you can't have it both ways. You can't say that copying promotes terrorism while also saying that noncommercial filesharing is continuing to hurt the industry as well.
So, your IFPI link? That's in the book. They talk to the MPAA, the RIAA, and quite a number of other people in industry. They talk about the 1:1 correlation of piracy losses, and how copyright enforcement is really bad through selective enforcement.
It's a REALLY good book to read, and the first part is only 70 pages. I second you looking into the book to better rethink what piracy supposedly is.
On the post: Shouldn't Unilateral Retroactive Copyright Extension Mean Copyright Is Void?
Re: Re: Re: Where do you stand?
~300 years to be exact. But who's counting. And now, you have other options you can make people pay for instead of just a copy.
"This seems a very well accepted and direct way of rewarding them in proportion to how many people value the work, and by how much. "
It was really great... Except for the fact that this spurred on the growth of middlemen such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, the MPAA and RIAA, who campaign for the people with the highest profit margins, not the ones who created content.
"However, the offering a copy of the work to World+Dog for free, against the wishes of the creator, is theft of the creator's ability to earn a living. '"
Yeah... In the last 20 years of living (no, I'm not 20) George Lucas is deprived of one sale of a very popular franchise because I saw the movie with a friend. Are you SURE you want to go with that argument?
"...if piracy/sharing is rife and accepted, then there is no alternative"
Kickstarter, Rockethubs, and the proliferation of Youtube disagrees with you.
"Alternative Business Models' may be possible for Rock Musicians, but what about Novelists, poets, artists, protographers, journalists...?"
And on that note, Neil Gaiman , Joe Konrath, Mickey Mouse on Deviant Art, Flickr, and this very blog disagree with you.
"why not have some constructive suggestions?"
We do. Take away copyright enforcement, learn to lower prices on digital goods, stop trying to impede on civil rights, understand that technology enables more content to be made, not less, learn to pay for access, learn to stop using bogus statistics for falsities, and lrn 2 crowdsource.
Is that so hard?
On the post: Shouldn't Unilateral Retroactive Copyright Extension Mean Copyright Is Void?
Re: Re: Re: Me and everybody else ..
On the post: Shouldn't Unilateral Retroactive Copyright Extension Mean Copyright Is Void?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Me and everybody else ..
Glad you realize the difference between a copyright holder and the original artist. But let's continue.
"But they don't want to accept their side of the deal to get it."
I bet you, right here in this thread, I can name more people that don't use copyright enforcement to make a buck, than you can the ones that use it.
"Try to live without it. Anyone who wants to opt out are more than welcome to do it. Good luck with it."
Anyone can. It's called "alternative choices of entertainment".
You should really look that up.
On the post: Shouldn't Unilateral Retroactive Copyright Extension Mean Copyright Is Void?
Just a thought
Imagine that someone presents their views on the economy, shows factual research into various parts of political intrigue, and actively works to show how much he cares for his state.
Imagine that s/he shows that he can put together a platform for her/his constituents without needing lobbyist money. Imagine that the PAC rules don't apply because he never takes that money. S/He asks the crowd to support his campaign.
This means a look into using Youtube to discuss views, why he feels the way s/he does. Twitter is used to answer a few questions. The website shows and tracks our public figure's expenditures from the fund used to represent his people. Donations are not given anonymously, they have a name labeled to them along with what they campaign for.
The election process is not locked into how much money it takes to put you on the ballot. You see a small summary of the people's position, make a choice, get a receipt. As a second way to verify your vote, a website is maintained that counts your ballot, then shows the progress of all other cities.
Since this data is very precious, it's sent to a third party like Wikileaks, who publishes it when all results are in. Each party constituent is given a copy for their records, as well as a public copy posted for all to see.
Finally, a review process for ALL members of our government. What's been needed is a way to redress all of the dark spots in our government. It's been a well known fact that getting information out of the dark pits of government has been stymied. It used to be that most media groups fought to get that story out.
So routinely, we need a way that the government is held accountable to actions instead of softballed questions in a Congressional review, or a complaint letter that gets ignored.
Could there be more? I like to think so. There's plenty of ways to make our government a LOT better. I'd just like to think that some of the ideas around the world could be utilized a lot better than the US exporting their aggressive stance on copyrights.
On the post: Do The Statutory Damages Rates For Copyright Infringement Violate The Eighth Amendment?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm hesitant on this, having talked to the AC above on this same issue.
Most judges are err too much on the side of caution rather than look like they're "judicial activists". Usually, they don't want to rock the boat in regards to these cases. I have no idea if the Tenenbaum case will come with a further reduced look at this problem.
The text reads about excessive damages in regards to the 8th Amendment. The punitive damages here are priced exceedingly out of the defendant's ability to pay as well as the MSRP of the song. IANAL, but rather than the rebukes with the words, the spirit of the law should be that she is charged with provable economic damages instead of the higher statutory damages that are arbitrary.
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