White House Sides with RIAA in P2P Suit

...and here I thought AIG employees taking bonuses from taxpayer money were crooks.

I get it now! It's only against the law if you get caught... :rolleyes:
 
There's lots of misinformation about copyright violations. The $150k in damages doesn't come from downloading a $0.99 song; the $150k in damages comes for uploading (seeding, for you BitTorrent users) a song to networks.
On average, most users don't upload substantially more than they download (not 150,000 times more than they download certainly). As an example, I belong to one of the trackers that emerged from the rubble of OiNK. The current seeder/leecher ratio there is about 32/1 (which indicates that the tracker is being improperly managed, but that's for another debate). So, on average, users are uploading 32 megabytes for every one megabyte they download or 32 tracks for every one track they download. That's quite high, yes, but that's only 32 times the average track's price at leading digital retailers. Even when you factor in the RIAA's legal fees to obtain damages from these users, you're not looking at $150,000 per track.

As a deterrent, high fines are sometimes effective, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're reasonable. A $150,000 fine per infringement is purely obscene.

The Obama administration siding with the RIAA on this one is quite telling, not unlike Obama's recent comment about Special Olympiads.

Consider: someone downloads a song saying "It's only $0.99, and I'm not taking anything physical." They unwittingly seed to 10 others while downloading, those 10 others upload to 10 more, which those 100 upload to 10 others, which those 1,000 upload to 10 others, which those 10,000 upload to 10 more, and so on it goes...
If a user seeds to ten other users, that's the extent of his actions. What happens when he is no longer part of the swarm is meaningless. If one of the ten users he seeded a track to seeds that track to another ten users, that user is responsible for that action, not the original seeder. You can't attribute the actions of an entire swarm of users to the actions of a single user -- that doesn't make any sense at all.

I'm not defending our convoluted copyright laws, but a copyright infringement can spread like wildfire over the internet from one unwitting user, especially something as small a 3 megabyte MP3.
And it typically spreads by means of a large swarm of users, not a single, solitary user.

At the end of the day, people just need to stop the illegal sharing/downloading, etc of movies, music, games, that is copyrighted.
Not necessarily. There's use of copyrighted file downloading that's both illegal and damaging and there's use that's illegal but not necessarily damaging.

As a for instance, I download Blu-ray rips off Usenet for Blu-ray movies I own. Very, very illegal, but I only do it because I don't have the capacity to rip the discs myself (also illegal) and because it's generally faster for me to download a 10-12GB rip than it would be to rip and encode it as well as some of the prominent release groups do. By doing this, I'm both circumventing copy protection and violating the terms of the DMCA, breaking at least two laws, but I'm not damaging the copyright holder since I'm merely downloading the rip from a centralized server and using that rip for my own personal use. In effect, what I'm doing is approaching my Fair Use right (now trumped by the provisions in the DMCA) to possessing an archival copy of the copyrighted content in an atypical way.

There's no legally legitimate use for sharing/downloading copyrighted digital content, but there are at least uses that don't damage the copyright holders.
 
I remember when the original napster was sued. Using the $150K per, the initial lawsuit demanded over a trillion dollars. How could they possibly expect to get that much money out of anyone, anything or even a government, including ours.

Civil actions of the people and by the people are not working anymore. The only answer is a more radical brute force action to force them to follow demands of the people.
 
Consider: someone downloads a song saying "It's only $0.99, and I'm not taking anything physical." They unwittingly seed to 10 others while downloading, those 10 others upload to 10 more, which those 100 upload to 10 others, which those 1,000 upload to 10 others, which those 10,000 upload to 10 more, and so on it goes, and suddenly you have quickly surpassed a million lost sales of a $0.99 song that was unwittingly started by one person who thought "it's less than the cost of a Happy Meal." Even if only a quarter of those downloaders are truly a lost sale, that's still $250k.
BZZZZZZZZZZT
You fail at logic.

1) 1/4 would have been real sales? 2+ billion songs are pirated per day. That's more in a year then the record industry has sold in the last 100. Try 1/100,000.

2) There are, by your example, 100,000 people who each caused $150,000 in damage by uploading a song. Therefor the total "damage" claimed is $15 billion on 1 million songs, and less then $100,000 in lost profit.

3) Your logic only works with an infinite number of downloaders. The imaginary losses themselves tend to look a little off when the total loss claims for a day (2B songs @ $150,000 = $300,000,000,000,000) exceed the world YEARLY GDP by a factor of four.

Even if each song was only valued as one one-hundredth of a cent the yearly "losses" would be in the $10B range.

So in reality, this $150,000 for copying a song is roughly 150,000,000,000% of the actual cost.

Yah, that's reasonable. If you'll excuse me, someone just nabbed the recycling bin off my front lawn and I need to go collect my $30,000,000 in damages.
 
FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU

This is like, strike #192839012783019238123 for Obama in my book.

Democrats are the same thing as Republicans so it doesn't matter. They both cater to special interest groups, flip flop on issues, etc...
 
Democrats are the same thing as Republicans so it doesn't matter. They both cater to special interest groups, flip flop on issues, etc...

Exactly. LMAO at Minority Leader saying "we're watching out for the taxpayers." Gee, where was that goal in the last two Administrations? Rubber stamp + deficit inducing spending, and then 8 years later claiming the opposite? They think we're fools, but it's not fooling anyone.
 
Democrats are the same thing as Republicans so it doesn't matter. They both cater to special interest groups, flip flop on issues, etc...

You may be right, but then again, the spread of that kind of cynicism is going to continuously lead us down the same path.

Personally, I think Obama being elected is a step in the right direction, I do believe he is trying to change some of the ways things work in Washington, but it's going to take a lot more than a single President to change things.. We need to find people who aren't going to be shills for special interest to fill seats in Congress also. The way campaigns are run also needs to change. But even then, the well-funded special interests and corporate lobbyists have a lot of financial muscle, and you know they're going to fight it with all of their might. We've already let them become way too entrenched.

Time might just start becoming ripe for a third political party to start breaking through all of this kind of stuff soon. Preferably one that is socially liberal and economically centrist. :D
 
Time might just start becoming ripe for a third political party to start breaking through all of this kind of stuff soon. Preferably one that is socially liberal and economically centrist. :D

I prefer a party that makes government adhere strictly to our Constitution.....then again, politicians don't seem to give a damn that our Constitution does not give them the power to do things like 90% taxation on bonuses, or throwing the treasury at failing banks.
 
#1 rule in politics, keep your lobbyists happy. BO has that one down to an art. Between the RIAA and JDs he's just doubled his revenue.

By the time any politician makes it to the level or Congressman, Senator or President, they have so many people to pay back that got them there that they are all crooked. A government of politicians that acutally represent the people is long gone. Now, they represent the people who got them there and it doesn't matter which side of the isle you stand on. I say this as a Repulican who hates that BO got elected, but understands it doesn't matter who won.
 
but the inherent flaw in the car vs music case is simple........Once upon a time you purchased something you owned it......

As is the inherent flaw in your argument.
What you fail to include in that scenario: Once you gave it away, you no longer possessed it.
Therein lies the problem.

Remember that this argument has been going on since the 70's.
Philips introduced the cassette tape format in the mid 60's.
For the first time in history, you had a easily portable mechanism for recording and playing back audio.
Not too long afterward, better tape formulas and electronics extended that capability to high quality audio.
Then Sony really ramped up the portability factor with the Walkman in the late 70's-early 80's.
Record companies and industry groups like the RIAA realized the impact of the home-recorded cassette to their record sales.

Obviously the internet and mp3/wma file formats created tremendous increase in the perfusion of music sharing.

The fact that one may have the technical capabilities to duplicate an artist's property without consuming anything but bandwidth and storage space does not make that process free; the cost is to the artist.
There are plenty of artists that intentionally give their music away; more power to them.

There are also plenty of artists that were so eager for a recording contract/fame/fortune that they agreed to whatever lousy terms were offered to them; if you are in that group, it sucks to be you, but you *did* agree to the company's terms, now didn't you?

Any artist/group that has signed a recording contract in the last 60 years have been aware of the fact that record companies are not charities.

For those artists willing to invest time and effort into learning one of the myriad of recording applications available to computers, a quality recording can be made without taking the traditional record company/distribution route.

It doesn't matter whether or not you think the RIAA are predatory in their practices or not.
It doesn't matter if you think the record companies are gouging their artists.
It doesn't matter whether it's a single song or an entire artists' catalog.
It doesn't matter if you think the music is worth buying or not.
It doesn't matter how or where you got it.
It doesn't matter if you've done it once or a million times.

At the end of the day, the basic question remains:
If I did not pay the creator of this item I have, do they (the creator or the company that holds their contract) consider it theft?

All other issues are red herrings and are not germane to that basic question.
 
The lost sales argument is completely invalid. An illegal download is not necessarily a lost sale. That's assuming that the person would, in fact, buy the song or album had it not been available to download. I bet most people would simply choose to live without it or wait for it to be available.

What is valid is that file sharing helps introduce music to people, or helps them taste it first. Most people probably won't buy it if they like it, but some of them will. These would be gained sales because they come from a group of people who would otherwise not even know about the music.

What if instead they created a time/number of plays based file for BT?
 
There's lots of misinformation about copyright violations. The $150k in damages doesn't come from downloading a $0.99 song; the $150k in damages comes for uploading (seeding, for you BitTorrent users)

So if i decide to just go into my prefs and set my max upload to 0 then i should only be guilty of stealing? like if i went in a store and walked out with the cd? somehow i doubt they would treat it like that.
 
...and here I thought AIG employees taking bonuses from taxpayer money were crooks.

I get it now! It's only against the law if you get caught... :rolleyes:
AIG execs Crooks for taking bonuses? No. Unethical douche-nozzles? Absolutely, but certainly not crooks.

The real crooks here are the ones in DC balling up the constitution and wiping their collective asses with it by thinking they have the right to circumvent contract law which is one of the principles this country was founded on. Even if those contractually guaranteed bonuses can be legally invalidated, Congress has no fucking business having anything to do with that. We have a judicial branch for a reason.

If they get away with this, it will be one of the most disturbing precidents I have ever seen
set in this country. We have three branches of government to protect the rights guaranteed us by the constitution. The framers made it that way so that populist, knee-jerk reactions wouldn't be able to erode our rights and freedoms.

In the end, if you want to blame someone for these bonuses being paid out, blame the people in washington that failed to put stipulations in the bill to cover things like this.
 
In the end, if you want to blame someone for these bonuses being paid out, blame the people in washington that failed to put stipulations in the bill to cover things like this.

Actually there were until some dipshit Senator from Connecticut added a clause in the bill basically saying "go ahead and get your bonuses".

Oh and incidentally, 90% of AIG's bosses live in Connecticut. Coincidence, wot?
 
If I did not pay the creator of this item I have, do they (the creator or the company that holds their contract) consider it theft?

No, and neither does US law. It considers it copyright infringement - completely separate from (in definition and outcome) theft.
 
Did anyone catch the news that never made the "mainstream" media about Obama moving the power to regulate and shutdown internet networks under the executive branch? You no longer are represented with a vote for those decisions. Separation of powers is turning to combination of powers.
 
Did anyone catch the news that never made the "mainstream" media about Obama moving the power to regulate and shutdown internet networks under the executive branch? You no longer are represented with a vote for those decisions. Separation of powers is turning to combination of powers.

Link? I won't be surprised if it's from a mainstream Murdoch media source...
 
Actually, I don't even need to link you to a "news" website for it. Just look at his newly revised cyber security policy, and see who the "cyber security czar" directly reports to.
 
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