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Journal the_mad_poster's Journal: Responses To the Last JE's Comments 35

Journal by the_mad_poster

...since I'm still banned on this subnet.

piracy (n. pl.): 1: An act of robbery on the high seas: also an act resembling such robbery 2: robbery on the high seas. 3: the unauthorized use of another's productions, invention, or conception esp. in infringement of a copyright.

The dictionary I pulled that from was printed when the closest thing that existed to a World Wide Web was Prodigy. People who illegally download media are pirates.

In addition, it is not "free advertising". Advertising does not create an incentive NOT to buy a product or service. By illegally providing a pay product or service for free to another individual, you are not advertising because you are actively removing the need to purchase the product.

Next point - the argument as to whether or not a person was going to buy a piece of media before they pirated it is irrelevant. If they pirate a copy, the assumption is made the desire was there for that copy, and therefore, it's safest to assume that this would have been a possible sale that will not be made now. If you really weren't going to buy it anyway, you wouldn't have downloaded and kept it. If you argue that the reason you weren't going to buy it anyway was price or quality, then you just dug your hole even deeper because now you're confirming that you DO have a desire for the product, but simply didn't want to pay for it.

Next point - what the MPAA and RIAA threaten to sue people for is also irrelevant. Ironically, slashbots whine all the time about the "exhoribitant" amounts that they use to threaten people. It's ironic because these are CAPS that don't exist for many, many other types of lawsuit. There is, technically, no cap on how much you can sue your neighbor for if they run over your dog with a lawnmower. Amusingly, the slashbots, led by Comrade Michael "Braindead" Sims are complaining about a CAP on the lawsuits. Perhaps they would like copyright suts to be handled like other lawsuits where the person suing can claim however much damage they think they can get away with without hurting their case by looking like a golddigger?

As if that weren't bad enough, the damages they claim are largely meaningless. Based on the case they present, the judge will decide what damages they're actually owed. They could sue for three million dollars if they want, but if the judge only sees $10,000 worth of damages, that's all they're going to get no matter what they do.

Next point - like it or not, the person who owns the media gets to decide what happens to it. If I write a brilliant piece of code tomorrow that could be used to run three trillion perfectly accurate, secure bank transactions a day on a 486sx chip over POTS and I decide I don't ever want to release it to anyone anywhere in the world, there's nothing you can legally do about that. Tough luck. I'm under no obligation to give anybody anything I ever make or think of. You can complain about arts and all sorts of other vague ideals all you like, but if someone wants to be an asshole, they can be an asshole.

Finally... hey. If you're pirating media, and you're ready to take the responsibility for it, fine. Just don't whine if you find yourself on the ugly end of a $300m lawsuit against you. People who bitch and moan after they spend three years online trading 50,000 copies of illegal media are just as bad as those idiots that bitch about cops who "just want to give people a hard time" after they get caught doing 55 in a 15 mph school zone at three in the afternoon.

If you want to break the law, go nuts. Just don't whine like a little bitch when it comes time to pay the piper.

This discussion was created by the_mad_poster (640772) for no Foes, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Responses To the Last JE's Comments More

Responses To the Last JE's Comments

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  • By illegally providing a pay product or service for free to another individual, you are not advertising because you are actively removing the need to purchase the product.

    Bullshit. If *all* I want from the product is the bits that make the music, you're right. But anyone who REALLY REALLY likes music will generally want the whole package. They'll want the booklet. They'll want any "goodies" that get squirrelled away in data sections of the CD. More to the point, they'll want ... TO SEE THE ARTIST LIVE


    • Good points. You can still get free music from record labels as 'samplers', though its not as easy to get them as it used to be. I think you are arguing from the stand point of where things should be and Chris is arguing from where things are. It might help explain things that Chris (MP) works for a book-of-the-month club. He's one of the many that makes their living wage from copyrights. So to him where things should be and where they are might be the same.
      • Compact Discs and tapes are cash cows for the distributors, who have managed to insert themselves into the process, rather than the bands who make most of their money in live performance. While there are analogies with the book business, I think books are fundamentally enough different (not least of which is that the book itself is generally the livelihood of the author, rather than performance of the book) that they deserve a more strict accounting. I don't really see that position as being in any partic

        • Re:someday you'll get it (Score:3, Interesting)

          by On Lawn ( 1073 )

          Good point. Its almost the opposite, you attend a book reading by the author to promote a book and in the recording industry the printed material is the hook.

          My main problem with both is that as distributors they own the copyright, with the authors seldom retaining any copyright while musicians almost always do. At least the musicians can keep re-printing a song by performing it over and over, but a author only gets one shot.
      • BOMC doesn't exist anymore as it's own self-contained entity. It's now a single club underneath Bookspan's umbrella with a few other former standalones like Doubleday, Mystery Book Club, and Literary Guild.

        And, actually, it wouldn't be our responsibility to sue pirates for illegal copies of books, it would fall back to the authors and their agents. We could, I suppose, sue such people on behalf of the authors as we do publish our own copies of their books, but I doubt we'd do it, and I doubt piracy would a

        • Interesting. Now that you mention it, I suppose that in some ways a book-of-the-month club could be considered a sampler, somewhere between Reader's Digest and Barnes and Noble.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Perhaps you're unaware of a law, passed once upon a time when consumers and general citizenry weren't just there to provide companies money. That law makes it legal to make full copies of anything on the radio for permanent storage and personal use. P2P makes this much more convenient, to the point where it's less of a hobby and much less legal. However, to argue you can't get free, legal copies of songs is rediculous though, as we've had the ability to dub from the radio for a long time. If you don't think
        • And that is also the reason they talk over the beginning / end of songs so often. In the simplest interpretation of the rules, you are actually allowed to copy things however much you want as long as they're not original quality duplicates. It's also why a lot of bands release full songs in mp3 but at a low bitrate.

          This is a legitimate form of distribution, because it's what the owners chose to do. Having people download complete copies of full CD quality songs is not something they've chosen to do, so it'
          • Yes, the stations practically owned by the recording industry have their DJs destroy the integrity of as many songs as possible. And while mp3 of any bitrate and CD quality being the same is pretty funny, I'll grant your premise. Many people are happy with it being "close enough", and technically some (very few) people who actually care trade flac or wav. mp3 is the crappy analog tape of today, but oh well. There are, no doubt, many people who've stopped buying music because they can get the songs they want

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • To answer the point though, it may have been technically possible to dub from the radio, but few people built music libraries that way.

            I thought that TMP's point was that piracy was piracy, and you should be prepared to pay the piper, not "this is easier so it's worse".

          • Practicality is a limiter, but it was never difficult to get worthwhile music in quantity. Hit record for an hour, listen in the background and you know whether there's something worthwhile or to record over it again. Getting something specific was more difficult, but hearing something once more or less ensured it'd get played again sometime. Eventually it'd get taped. Anyway, adding a couple songs a week on average wasn't difficult for me through high school. The collection perhaps wasn't "kickass", but it
      • Yes, I'm aware of the seven Slashdot users who will buy the music they download, like, and decide to keep.

        And this kind of arrogant derision that nobody actually wants to support artists they like is what makes your position just as bloody ludicrous as that of the "information MUST BE FREE" sorts.

        Guess what? Even if I just downloaded the music and kept it, I'd spend money to go see the bands I like live. LOTS of people do! Even the college kids who actually are not buying the CDs. And that's the money

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • I mean, everyone knows that only music capable of being performed live is worth supporting.

            I have yet to find a "type of music" that is incapable of being performed live. Go talk to the industrial bands and DJ's about what it takes to do electronically enhanced/complex music in a live setting. Been there, seen that, can and will do it again for the bands that are doing interesting things.

    • First point: YOU are a consumer. You do not get to directly decide how the artists should distribute their music/movies/whatever. You couldn't just walk into an art show, make 3000 reproductions of an expensive painting and then hand them out on the street for free, what makes you think you have any right to do the same for music and movies? Because it's EASIER? Nonsense.

      The cap, my friend, is there for all potential infringers. In fact, you're continued complaint about it is even weirder because part of t
      • You do not get to directly decide how the artists should distribute their music/movies/whatever.

        You keep going on about this as if the artists get to decide this. Clue: they don't [wired.com].

        • If the artist signs away their rights that's their choice. Are you suggesting that artists shouldn't be held to contract obligations they agree to?
          • Certainly not (though you might want to converse with Squiggle about that :-)

            However, you should stop bleating about "The Artists, The Artists" because it's not them who has any significant stake in this game. They'll make money on tours (or not) regardless of who copies their CDs around.

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion
              • My "problem" is that on one hand you argue that Valve's EULA is immoral and shouldn't be allowed, and on the other hand you argue that copyright law ought be enforced to the letter. I say "you shoulda checked about the EULA before you bought Valve's game, it's hardly surprising or unavailable in wide discussions" and you get bent all out of shape that it's unfair. I say "current copyright law is in no way protecting The Artists, but rather the distributors" and your response seems to indicate that it's ju
                • I don't understand what EULAs have to do with copyright law beyond the typical warnings not to violate copyright law? EULAs are questionably binding "contracts" that you agree to with the software producers from whom you purchase a product. They have nothing to do with copyright law beyond invoking warnings about it in some parts.
                • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                  • Personally, I'd like to see EULAs outlawed, especially as they exist, primarily in my view, to circumvent fair dealing laws.

                    And I think the similarly of Copyright law, for the most part. Whether you've studied the byzantine corridors of that mass of special interest protection enough to understand why or not, I think that there are strong parallels between the two. The whole point of both is to control distribution.

  • Definiton 3. was added when the invention of the 'audio cassete recorder' was made. there were several onerous lawsuits etc. and the result of the litigation was the passing of new 'copyright' laws. These laws allow unlimited non-infringing copying of copyrighted works, and defines the threshold at which piracy becomes a 'criminal offense'. Yes virginia, you can 'swap' $1,000 USD worth of infringed copyrighted material each year without facing any time in jail. This doesn't defend you from civil litig
  • One person makes copies of a CD, liner notes, etc. and then sells that to a second person as if it were the real thing.

    Another person listens to music that he has not paid for the right to hear.

    Those are the same thing. True or false?
    • That's not a legitimate analogy. You're assuming that the only way you can legally obtain music is by purchasing a complete CD. I can buy individual, CD-rate tracks off MusicMatch.

      Therefore, freely OFFERING individual songs without the right to do so is, in fact, piracy of a saleable good.

      If you'll note, please, the RIAA is suing people who distribute the music illegally, not the people who download it.

      • Therefore, freely OFFERING individual songs without the right to do so is, in fact, piracy of a saleable good.

        No, it's not. By that reasoning, I'd be wrong to give you a CD that I didn't want anymore, as it could potentially deprive the recording industry of a sale. Sharing copyrighted music without written permission of Major League Baseball is copyright infringement, nothing more or less. I guess it's just a difference of opinion, as neither of us are lawyers, but I simply don't agree.

        If you'll note,

  • If I've never heard of a band and download their music to see what they sound like, this is a form of advertising, albeit unsanctioned by the band and their representatives. If I could stream easily, without having to subscribe to some shitty pesterad site, I would do that instead. I am stealing but I fail to see who is being disadvantaged by this arrangement. I prefer having a physical copy of the music I like and I don't keep stuff I don't like.

  • If any of the advertisement bit was aimed at me, I merely stated that it could be argued to be the best advertisement, not that it was, in fact, sanctioned advertisement. Regardless, it does work to that effect in many cases, like reading a book at a library hasn't destroyed the desire of many to own a book, despite the fact they may read it again maybe once or twice and could easily go back to the library to get it. In that vein, I've bought many books that I read first from a library, like I've bought CDs

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