Berman Retreats, But Only To Regroup 231
thefinite writes "It looks like the P2P vigilante bill sponsored by Berman is going to have to be rewritten even just to be considered. A ZDNet story talks about the likelihood that the bill will get anywhere as currently written. Hopefully, the second time around will make it clear that the idea is flawed, not just the text."
This is a good thing for everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
* Note the good and bad hacker referance are in the eyes of the bill writers.
Re:Regroup to fight terrorists.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just slap the word terrorist on anytyhing you want to want to keep down....terrorism is the new red scare of the 60's-70's
Stupid question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now I understand .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which of course isn't so much Hollywood as it is porn .... he's not really worried so much about the Lord of the Rings 4" as he is "Debbie does Dallas #76" ... which is probabloy much more likely to be on some p2p network anyway ....
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Out of touch... (Score:5, Insightful)
In one sense, every communication between two systems is peer-to-peer, including everything from getting email to browsing the web. Unless you want to call one of the systems a "server", and then I guess it's okay.
It seems to me that a peer-to-peer network exists whenever one system talks to another. Are VOIP telephones part of a p2p net? Do I own a peer-to-peer network when I print to my printer? What if I print to the parallel port?
So, when my computer sync's my calendar with my PDA, I guess I'm doing something bad?
Re:This is like... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a big difference, both in reality and in the eyes of the law. Overwrought analogies do nothing to help anyones cause.
It is, however, like exchanging books in libraries for "fake" books that only contain random letters, because some kids are hiding exam-answers encoded in the words.
Be Very Afraid... (Score:5, Insightful)
NO fair use is piracy, that's why it's called FAIR use! The two are mutually exclusive...either you're breaking the law, or you aren't. This is not a good sign. If assistant Secretary of Commerce doesn't understand this, what hope do we have for the general public?
falling behind.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Constitution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, right... (Score:0, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if it's a bad idea... What matters is that the congressman gets his way or not. There's ego, money, and power involved and the responsibilites to the citizens. (Guess which of the three is most important to the congressman!)...
Re:Regroup to fight terrorists.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It is dead. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not nearly as huge as the tech and telecom industries.
Who does the government want to help out, given a choice between Metallica and Intel, or Britney Spears and Verizon, etc?
Ultimately, the elected politicians need votes. They're just starting to realize that these types of laws may just not be the way to get 'em.
Re:Be Very Afraid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Has Anyone Ever Noticed.... (Score:4, Insightful)
No one. I can't find it, unless they are modded down to oblivion.
Maybe no one really likes it and the big corporate types don't visit Slashdot.
(ponder)
Re:Stupid question... (Score:4, Insightful)
And Berman's district is essentially Hollywood.
Re:Stupid question... (Score:2, Insightful)
It wouldn't do any good. Say we wanted to vote him out so bad that we would vote for his opponent even though his opponent was an idiot too... or say his opponent died in a horrible accident. We still vote for his opponent. Berman looses the election. What happens in a democracy? The people win. America is a Republic, however. The loosing candidate in this case is appointed to an even more powerful office (Attorney General for example).
Re:I'm getting cynical. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well, what exactly is flawed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly.
And a novel is just a bunch of letters in a particular order.
And a movie is just a bunch of images displayed in a particular sequence. The images, of course, are just a bunch of beams of colored light that are in a particular order.
And a song is just a bunch of circles and sticks drawn on a handful of parallel lines.
Hell, any product you can name is just a bunch of elemental atoms arranged in a particular formation.
Reasoning like this is why the pro-IP lobby has gotten so out-of-hand.
Re:How do they figure this stuff out? (Score:5, Insightful)
A while back I worked for a software company that specialized in data-gathering tools. The issue of copyright infringement came up alot. Our lawyers explained that the test was whether the system in question had "substantial non-infringing uses". Since a lot of post-Napster P2P networks allow generic sharing (news, chat, media of all types) one could argue that many of them meet that test.
This completely ignores the argument that specific tools don't perform illegal acts, people do. But I guess it's oh so much harder to actually prosecute people according to real laws, when we can just make up a law du jour to go after the hardware and infrastructure. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but if their claim is accepted, and since P2P networks operate over TCP/IP, therefore TCP/IP should be illegal as well, and all DDOS attacks are hereby rendered legal and in support of the legal disruption of P2P traffic!
Why is one industry's problem another's? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the aticle:
'Striking a middle-of-the-road tone, Mehlman urged Hollywood and Silicon Valley "to cooperate" over finding technological solutions to protect copyrighted content without additional government intervention. "All fair use is not piracy, but neither is all piracy fair use," Mehlman said.'
This hints at a threat, however small. DRM or else.
How did one industry's problem become the other? CDs are inherently hackable. They are released by the copyright/media trade associations. Some of them are protected under trade secrets or licensed. DVDs were released with flaws that were cracked by teenagers (not that teenagers are not brilliant, just that they were not privy to industry secrets when they did this).
Normally, if you put out a flawed product, that's the originator's problem and liability to handle.
The technology companies did not release these flaws products. So why is it their responsibility to bear the weight, both financial and legal, to fix the flaws or find solutions to get around flaws that another group introduced (some knowingly)?
While I understand laws like these is the nature of politics, but this is utterly fucked up. If the law passes, marketplace accountability goes out the door (again). One industry gets hammered by another bigger industry.
ERISA was to protect employee benefits yet yielded a nasty turn with HMOs. Luxury taxes wanted to stick it to the rich yet destroyed the yachting industry, which the US has never recovered. Isn't this another law of unintended consequences which is going to really benefit no one? (even the RIAA, because people just won't want music anymore if they can't play it on what they want to; I don't use P2P networks, but I haven't bought a CD for like nearly 2 years because I'm watching them fight over this crap)
Witch Hunt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How do they figure this stuff out? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, get real. You can claim that P2P networks have legitimate uses all you want, but trying to flat-out deny that they are used for piracy is stupid.
Bug report for US government version 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
The Constitution of the United States of America is, by its own declaration, the supreme law of the land. It defines, among other things, the Supreme Court to be the highest court in the land. So one would suspect that if a person were to be found by the highest court in the land to have violated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, with willful premeditation, that supreme law of the land, that the punishment they would be sentenced to would be severe in the extreme.
One would be wrong.
Take, as an excellent example, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, often referred to as the Bill of Rights. They are powerfully and clearly worded. They say such things as "Congress shall make no law which..." and "The Right of the People [...] shall not be infringed." But what if congress does make such a law? What if the rights of the people are infringed? It happens all too often. There are laws passed by congress that clearly and blatantly ignore these amendments. In many ways, it's much like civil disobedience, but somewhat different. I shall call it federal disobedience. Sometimes these violations are so obvious that they are seen to be so not only by me and every other citizen, but by the Supreme Court itself. And the people who originally perpetrated this crime, the senators and congressmen who proposed, supported, amended, and ultimately voted to accept these laws are not held accountable. They are not fined. They are not imprisoned. They are not prevented in any way from committing the same crime again. They are left in the position that they started in, with the full means, motive, and opportunity to become repeat offenders. If I were to break a local parking ordinance, I might have to pay $50 or so. If, on the other hand, I get myself elected to public office, and once in that public office, if I blatantly disobey the supreme law of the land, the fine that I face is exactly nothing. That is horribly, horribly wrong.
It's just a job... (Score:5, Insightful)
His job is to push custom-designed legislation, as designated by his employer. He may realize it's dead-on-arrival. He scores brownie points for making the sales pitch, even if he can't "close the deal".
Think of your job. Haven't we all been involved in some sort of management-led initiative that we were less-than-thrilled about? I can think of a handful of instances, and I shed no tears when such things crash and burn.
Berman, Fritz, and others are paid to push these "suicide bomber" initiatives, in search of a "compromise" that is pretty much the real target to begin with.
Personally, I can't wait for the first wave of P2P vigilantes. The reprisals ought to be spectacular. The whole concept of a technologically-challenged industry battling against the world's top hackers is like Saddam Hussein sending the Iraqi navy to invade New York City. The RIAA battleship will be on the ocean floor, US law regarding the Internet will be as meaningless as a UN resolution, the net result being freedom through anarchy.
Re:Be Very Afraid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Be Very Afraid... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is exactly the sort of definition meddling that propagandists have used for as long as propaganda has existed. The word "hacker" has been effectively redefined to include a connotation of devious intentions. The word "gay" has been redefined to refer to homosexualality. "Peer-to-peer filesharing" has been redefined by the IP industry as thievery and piracy. Now it appears that they would like to redefine "fair use" and "piracy" as a sort of overlapping venn diagram, with a middle ground which is actually both piracy and fair use. Then they can say, "If fair use includes piracy, then it must be bad." And the uninformed will say, "Hey, that makes sense. Down with Fair Use!" L. Lessig will then have to add another 10 min to his presentations explaining why the intersection of fair use and piracy = 0.
Let's hope it was merely a thoughtless wording...
Re:Constitution? (Score:2, Insightful)
The analogy would be selling/buying heroin in an open air drug market, out on the street. If a cop happens to be standing there watching you, the information he gathers is perfectly legitimate, even though he is not involved in the transaction.
If the sale goes down in your living room, and the cop is peeking through the window - then it's thrown out in court.
Of course the 4rth amendment protects you from the state, not from private interests.
Re:That's just standard negotiation (Score:5, Insightful)
The technique of introducing "straw man" legislation to see how it plays is not a bug, it's a feature. It's how the system is designed to operate, in a dialog of discovering what's important to each of the constituencies involved. At best, creative win-win solutions emerge. At worst, watered down compromises. In the middle, no action is taken and we try again next year.
Politics isn't evil, it's life.
Unfortunately, it's only taken me 40 years or so to figure this out...
Re:Be Very Afraid... (Score:3, Insightful)
I was not at this event, but I was told that he made the case that the content folks are going way overboard, specifically bringing up the example of amazing DVD sales for Monster's Inc when this movie has been floating on the Internet since its theatrical release. These are the types of comments we need from our government officials. So if he said that, I assume it is as a rhetorical device and not a legal construction (keep in mind, an action can be fair use or piracy depending on the context). That Monsters Inc. example is great, very similar to the Dear Colleague Letter (letters members of Congress send around to all other offices) deploring the record piracy of spider man before the theatrical release, and leaving out the crucial fact of how it broke ALL box office records.
The pro-consumer community can rattle this off all day long, but when we start hearing it from our government, it lets the RIAA/MPAA know that they do not have a free pass to spread their rhetorical nonsense (or if you prefer...bald faced lies).
Damn, now by commenting, I forfeit all rights to mod this discussion, what a stupid policy!
You've stolen my TV, so I'll burn your house! (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I allowed to burn your house if you've stolen something from me?
Even if you kill my wife & kids & parents I'm not allowed to do anything against you!
I thought that the great justice system exist exactly for that.
So some peoples are stealing their property? Sue them! Bring them to court! But please don't start shooting at them!
If they can have the right to make their own justice, I want that right too!
Re:Has Anyone Ever Noticed.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who thinks it isn't OK to record a CD you own onto a cassette so you can listen to it in your car? Or onto an MP3 player so you can listen on the bus?
Who thinks they shouldn't be able to make a backup copy? That it would be better if you had to buy a new copy if you lose the original?
I find it hard to believe that anyone would think that they would be better off giving up their rights so that a big company can make more profits at their expense.
Now, there are those that argue that PIRACY is bad, or even that piracy is so bad that eliminating fair use is a reasonable solution. I think the reason you don't see more people arguing these points is that there is no evidence that they are true -- quite the contrary.
It's standard, but not just. (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that the DMCA is a watered-down version of what the media and technology companies really wanted, right? That the PATRIOT act is a watered-down version of what the Executive branch actually wanted, right? Are these your "watered down compromises"? This is the results of this "feature"?
It is in fact a standard practice to ask for more than you want. Each time you come back with a slightly modified proposal, the more pressure you put on your opponent to accept it. It doesn't matter if each revision does nothing to make it more palatable -- eventually the politics mandate capitulation.
And yes, that's life. But that doesn't mean it's good.
Here on the left coast (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's just standard negotiation (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly, this is the state of current politics: that the outrageous claims are considered right alongside the fair-spirited ones.
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