caitsith01 writes "ITNews reports that Australia's ever-unpopular Minister for Communications, Senator Stephen Conroy, has foreshadowed new action by the Australian Government to crack down on illegal file sharing under the guise of promoting the digital economy. Options apparently being considered include the controversial and previously reported French three-strikes approach and an approach which sounds suspiciously like New Zealand's even more dubious guilty-upon-accusation approach to filesharing. Needless to say, although the Government is consulting with 'representatives of both copyright owners and the Internet industry in an effort to reach an industry-led consensus on an effective solution,' arguably the most significant group — ordinary Internet users — are not being consulted. Senator Conroy is the man behind the crusade to 'protect' Australians from the horrors of the Internet with a mandatory, government-run blacklist, an effort which recently earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year for 2009."
There I said it. Those with money and power control all governments, even democratically elected ones. Sure you could vote out the bad politicians, but democracies are notorious for having apathetic voters. Tax dollars being given to billion dollar corporations and withheld from the poorest of communities. Criminalization of copyrights to protect billion dollar corporations, when all along civil courts could have served the needs of everyone easily.
It currently is. "Illegal" does not necessarily mean "criminal". A very large amount of p2p filesharing is copyright infringement, which in Australia at least is illegal.
Yes, illegal file sharing is illegal in Australia (fair suck of the savaloy guys!)... But lobbying obnoxious MP's is not. I say good luck trying to pass a three strikes law, it would probably be enough to end Stephen Conroy's career. Getting to much attention is not good for any politician. Having a "tent embassy" parked outside your electoral offices might not be as exciting as some might think!
Well, come on, since Australians come from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, this law makes perfect sense!
Ahhh yes, but you can personally thank Mr. Stephen "Dickwad" Conroy for providing the necessary incentives for getting the Pirate Party of Australia up and running ASAP.
Sorry, you are bringing up David Hicks? A man who was fighting AGAINST Australia? A treasonous piece of gutter filth? As far as I'm concerned he should still be detained, and that is only because we do not have capital punishment, otherwise I'd be pushing for the death penalty. The man is GUILTY of TREASON, you cannot deny that fact.
As for the Greens, they come across as being just a little bit too socialist (or perhaps "social idealist") for my liking. A lot of their policies have very little to do with th
How about governments tackle the more important crime of the film and music industries running a cartel? It is things like region encoding which allows the media companies to run protected cartels in the various ways they've carved up the plant and where people can buy DVD's etc. from - this screws over consumers. Or is that the media companies give very generous amounts of campaign money to the politicians in different countries, and the politicians actually don't care and turn a blind eye about consumers?
How about governments tackle the more important crime of the film and music industries running a cartel?
Great idea but there is nothing the Australian government can do when the biscuit industry can tell them to take a hike when they implement crappy laws. Bad laws like this and the internet filter that require the ISP to enforce them will simply not be enforced because no ISP actually wants to.
The Australian government did that already. Region encoding was deemed 'anti-competitive', against consumer interests, and therefore illegal. If you buy a DVD player in Australia you will find that it will play any DVD regardless of its region code =)
Sometimes, just sometimes... governments get it right, too.
Really? Are you sure? Because I live in Australia... I visit electronics stores, and I see a LOT (read that as 98.394%) of DVD players which have the "Region 4" logo on them. LG, Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sharp, you name it. Having said that, most of the time it is a pretty simple thing to region unlock them, but they are still shipped, and sold, as region 4. Most of the DVD players that you see around that are sold region unlocked are the no brand generic DVD players.
... because then the amount of money I spend on DVD's will drop to almost nothing.
I don't watch broadcast TV and so the only way I find out about good shows is by P2Ping them. Oh well other companies want my money if the TV/movie industry doesn't.
I RTFA, and it says that some copyright owners have suggested a three strikes law, but that this is unpopular. The government is interested in an "appropriate solution" to the issue of copyright infringement via the Internet. The language in the quoted passages is quite neutral and correct -- speaking of unauthorised copies, rather than theft.
There are many ways this issue could be resolved. It could be through complete copyright reform, however that is unlikely. It could be through criminalization and tough statutory penalties, which would be very unpopular. It could be by declaring the Internet and P2P as a type of broadcast system, with mandatory licensing of copyright and statutory royalties (like radio).
This is not an excuse to panic and engage in public Conroy-bashing. Join an appropriate lobby group, engage in public discussion of solutions fair to all parties, do something constructive. If you let a politician believe that he is hated beyond redemption, or a political party believe that they've already lost the next election, then they have absolutely no incentive to do what you want between now and when they leave office.
"It could be through complete copyright reform..."
Doesn't matter. Even if they backed off copyright to, say, 14 years, people would just find some other rationalization for stealing.
The real problems is that can get valuable stuff FOR FREE, and NOT get caught or punished. Fixing things will require either that: a) it's no longer free; or b) doing so leads to a probable chance of getting caught and punished.
"It could be through complete copyright reform..."
Doesn't matter. Even if they backed off copyright to, say, 14 years, people would just find some other rationalization for stealing.
By "complete copyright reform" I wasn't talking about reducing the term. I was thinking about something more radical, like finding another way to promote the creation of creative works without legislating an artificial scarcity.
The real problems is that can get valuable stuff FOR FREE, and NOT get caught or punished.
Every day I get a whole bunch of oxygen for free, and that's extremely valuable in the sense that I'd be dead without it. The reason I can do this is because the supply is, for practical purposes, unlimited. Copies of digital media are also unlimited for practical purposes. The reaso
The downloading is rarely the issue. The issue is the liberties and justices sacrificed by lobbied and next-to-corrupt politicians in the name of saving the record industry. The consequences of this will not stop at pirates, it spans over the entire society, effectively undermining the freedom and security enjoyed by all of us. Is it really worth it? Some people seem to think so. I don't and I don't give a shit about filesharing.
Certainly not, because as soon as it becomes the issue, it becomes painfully apparent exactly what "freedoms" are being defended by 90% of anti-copyright statements.
This uproar among Slashdotters is not heard only when politicians trade the democratic freedoms and rights we all have come to take for granted in order to please the media lobby. It is also heard when US customs claim the right to go through all the data on your laptop when you cross the border or when voting machines are closed source. Or when the Swedish government and parliament passes a law enabling a civilian authority to scan _all_ communication passing the
Is it important which came first ? The whole thing is screwed. Let's fix it instead of trying to blame someone. And the proposed laws don't go in the direction of fixing it. That is all we are saying.
You know, sometimes people give the impression of doing group-think when they independently come to the same conclusion. We don't try to be right just by opposing the "Big Guys", we try to be right by actually seeking the truth. Sometimes we yay at the Powers That Be (suddenoutbreakofcommonsense expresses tha
Well, Disney [wikipedia.org] pushed through ridiculous copyright extensions a long time before Bittorrent hit the tubes, and by the date (1998) would have been lobbying for it before Napster came to be.
Few people say it is okay. A lot of people however say that you won't manage to prevent people from file sharing unless you control Internet and personal computers completely and that would have a huge cost to society. Therefore, if filesharing becomes such a serious problem that it prevents artists from getting a decent pay (this has still to be proved though), the remuneration of artists has to go through a different system.
It looks like people are wanting to just get free stuff, but the claim is different : they say that trying to protect a revenue stream based on the control and production of copies, in a world where making copies is basically free, is nonsensical and counter-productive.
On slashdot? It's the guilty-upon-accusation bit that bothers people here more. It's the "Every kind of P2P is people violating copyrights" idea that idiot politicians have that bothers people here on slashdot.
I don't care if 90% of the people using a certain protocol are using it to swap the latest transformers movie because I'm part of the 10% using it for legitimate purposes. Should I be denied my right to disseminate information because of that 90%?
If 90% of the people in your apartment complex are growing their own pot and you're part of the 10% that is not should you lose your right to not have the police kick down your door without a warrant?
I wonder how gung-ho politicians would be about this law if people started parking outside their houses and using their wireless to download illegal content? Because at least some of them have to have poorly configured or otherwise insecure WAPs.
"people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both" -- Benjamin Franklin
Sadly, most people's response to any problem these days is "the government should do something!" This unfortunately tends to cause many problems to get worse, while racking up an enormous bill. Not to say that everything the government does is useless (highways are nice), but many things they touch do go down the drain. Good example, Social Security started with the best of intentions. Th
ever heard the phrase "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"? Its part of the foundation of at least the American legal system.
I can give you several reasons why people think it's fine to do! Firstly we're geeks here, denying that 80% of us download TV and movies would be stupidity, I'm sure we've all been to astalavista for a crack now and then too.
As I get older I do less of the dodgy stuff but for example, I 'steal' TV shows from the US all the time, because they don't air here at all, or at sensible times or within months of them airing in the US. Now sure, that's a grey area to some you might say but the question then becomes, w
Yes, there should be legal remedies for copyright violation. They should be reasonable, and they should be properly targetted.
I am against excessively high statutory damages, any form of punishment that does not result from a courtroom trial, and any form of penalty or excessive inconvenience for legal downloading, and these sort of things are often proposed or even enacted.
For your question, people think it's okay to download stuff without paying for it because they aren't directly hurting anybody. I
I seriously don't get that. Why do people think it's okay to download stuff without paying for it?
The thing is, that's only a tiny part of the real issue, and only acts to camouflage the real threat.
The real threat is that the government will lose its initial sense of trepidation over filtering content it doesn't like and start applying it wherever it finds an advantage to do so. It only takes a little bit of time for a bureaucrat to become comfortable with previously unpalatable acts.
Laws like the Three Strikes rules can be used to enforce an autocracy. If you can keep any particular group of people
Downloading music or other files illegally should be punished.
Well, the law as currently written means that the creation of such unauthorised copies is something for which the copyright holder can claim compensation and damages. Certain types of commercial infringement are also criminal acts, but that's not the issue under discussion here. The core issue is whether the Government has a mandate to create statutory penalties for non-criminal acts. There is also an issue of matching the severity of punishment to the gravity of the misdeed.
"We are sharing temporal garbage as far as either of us knows."
If all you want are packets full of static and garbage then download them. Unfortunately, you don't, and instead download packets containing the lastest song by the Black Eye Peas, The Dark Knight, and the current copy of Photoshop.
None of which sprang into being without someone (or a lot of someones) spending a significant amount of time, money, energy, and other resources to create them.
So in my book, the "per copy cost" is irrelevant. Spend $
Illegal file sharing is wrong and there should be consequences for it. It is however not theft. Theft involves taking something away from another. With filesharing, ownership and possession remain with the originator.
What is theft is the extension of copyright, erosion of fair use and bypassing of the courts that media companies are bribing governments around the world to achieve. And its not theft from an individual, it is theft from the public domain, it is theft from us all.
These 3 strikes laws are intended to circumvent the courts and allow media companies to extort real people into paying them with no burden of proof or legal recourse.
Companies are stealing our culture. Perpetual extension of copyright is theft from society.
Compared to the artists of the days when copyright was 20-something years, today's artists don't contribute more to society, yet they demand many times the protection. They want to get this for free -- they've never offered any form of payment, no return on investment for society.
When my grandmother was a child, she heard a song. If I were to listen to her sing me that song, she'd be breaking the letter of the law. Compared to a few brittany spears songs, the theft of every copyrighted work for 50 years is a much greater crime.
That's not payment. Society at large doesn't gain anything from being able to have 150 year copyrights. It's only freeloaders who want to sell dead people's works as their own who are crying that copyright needs to be longer.
The "Happy Birthday" song first appeared in print in 1912. In other words, before nearly every defining moment of the 20th century. Despite that, it is a copyrighted song -- The Time-Warner Corporation owns the rights and charges $10,000 per performance in royalties.
So you're a filthy disgusting criminal. YOU. I know you sang the song publicly and didn't pay Time-Warner their due. Why are you such a filthy disgusting criminal? Why don't the long long long dead writers of "Happy Birthday" deserve compensation for their work?
The melody of "Happy Birthday to You" comes from the song "Good Morning to All", which was written and composed by American sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill in 1893.[3] They were both kindergarten school teachers in Louisville, Kentucky, developing various teaching methods at what is now the Little Loomhouse.[4][5] The sisters created "Good Morning to All" as a song that would be easy to sing by young children[6]. The combination of melody and lyrics in "Happy Birthday to You" first
Hate to break it to you. Most people won't create great culture. If everyone could paint like a renaissance master, then that would by definition be average. What makes actual works of art (paintings, photos, movies, books, music, plays, etc.) culture, is the fact that they're shared. Sometimes the creator needs some money back, which is fine. You buy books, and music, and you pay to see movies and plays. But once the artist has received their due (usually in less than 10 years, if I recall correctly), it
Exactly how many ISPs are available where you live? Many people only have two- the phone company (DSL) and the cable company.
Telstra, Optus, iinet, Westnet, TPG, Iprimus, Internode and Amnet for DSL. Three, Vodafone, Telstra and Optus for mobile (HSPA). This is in Perth, get to the eastern states and the increases, Australia has a well regulated telecoms industry. Phone companies aren't permitted to monopolise area's and if they have an infrastructure monopoly then the government sets a wholesale price fo
Hmm.... So now I won't be criminally prosecuted or even sued for infringing copyright, I'll just be disconnected from my ISP? What's stopping me from signing up with a new one? Hell, maybe I'll sign up with a different provider just for committing copyright infringement. And there's no risk at all. Good one Conroy, that makes as much sense as trying to filter the internet.
And it will never happen for the same reason as internet filtering. This requires too much co-operation from ISP's and ISP's dont want
Government is a tool of the most wealthy (Score:2, Insightful)
There I said it. Those with money and power control all governments, even democratically elected ones. Sure you could vote out the bad politicians, but democracies are notorious for having apathetic voters. Tax dollars being given to billion dollar corporations and withheld from the poorest of communities. Criminalization of copyrights to protect billion dollar corporations, when all along civil courts could have served the needs of everyone easily.
the language is all wrong (Score:3, Funny)
Every article I see about this always uses the scary language. "ILLEGAL FILE SHARING" This is quite frankly disturbing to me.
I can't help but think of Darth Sidious telling Knute Gunray, "I will make it legal!"
Except in our case, the evildoers who sit in our houses of legislation will make it illegal!
It currently is not.
Re: (Score:2)
It currently is. "Illegal" does not necessarily mean "criminal". A very large amount of p2p filesharing is copyright infringement, which in Australia at least is illegal.
Re: (Score:2)
Ya, the legal definition disagrees with you.. and I kinda think its about the only definition that counts.
If you want to overgeneralize the word don't be surprised when people look at you funny.
Re: (Score:2)
hmmm, conroy (Score:3, Funny)
Pirate Party of Australia (Score:5, Informative)
Lets hope The Pirate Party of Australia [ppau.info] comes to the rescue here.
Welcome Vizzini! (Score:2)
Well, come on, since Australians come from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, this law makes perfect sense!
Re: (Score:2)
Ahhh yes, but you can personally thank Mr. Stephen "Dickwad" Conroy for providing the necessary incentives for getting the Pirate Party of Australia up and running ASAP.
Butbutbut (Score:2)
I thought everything was going to change with John Howard out and Rudd in. Kinda like Obama (PBUH)........so what happened?
Re: (Score:2)
No its the same story, Obama got in for the same reason as Rudd, because the alternative was a fascist with a retard as an understudy.
I agree with the three strikes system (Score:4, Insightful)
I am forced to somehow like the idea of a three strikes system. We really should ban ISPs when they interfere with P2P traffic for three times.
Oh noes! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Only MC Double Def DP can save us now from those downloading with Hitler!
"Hah!" (pulls "Godwin Safe" card from hand, lays on table with a flourish) "Let the discussion continue!"
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, you are bringing up David Hicks? A man who was fighting AGAINST Australia? A treasonous piece of gutter filth? As far as I'm concerned he should still be detained, and that is only because we do not have capital punishment, otherwise I'd be pushing for the death penalty. The man is GUILTY of TREASON, you cannot deny that fact.
As for the Greens, they come across as being just a little bit too socialist (or perhaps "social idealist") for my liking. A lot of their policies have very little to do with th
Cartel (Score:4, Insightful)
How about governments tackle the more important crime of the film and music industries running a cartel? It is things like region encoding which allows the media companies to run protected cartels in the various ways they've carved up the plant and where people can buy DVD's etc. from - this screws over consumers. Or is that the media companies give very generous amounts of campaign money to the politicians in different countries, and the politicians actually don't care and turn a blind eye about consumers?
Re: (Score:2)
Great idea but there is nothing the Australian government can do when the biscuit industry can tell them to take a hike when they implement crappy laws. Bad laws like this and the internet filter that require the ISP to enforce them will simply not be enforced because no ISP actually wants to.
Re: (Score:2)
The Australian government did that already. Region encoding was deemed 'anti-competitive', against consumer interests, and therefore illegal.
If you buy a DVD player in Australia you will find that it will play any DVD regardless of its region code =)
Sometimes, just sometimes... governments get it right, too.
Really? Are you sure? Because I live in Australia... I visit electronics stores, and I see a LOT (read that as 98.394%) of DVD players which have the "Region 4" logo on them. LG, Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sharp, you name it. Having said that, most of the time it is a pretty simple thing to region unlock them, but they are still shipped, and sold, as region 4. Most of the DVD players that you see around that are sold region unlocked are the no brand generic DVD players.
From Wikipedia (yes, I know it i
I hope they do it... (Score:2)
... because then the amount of money I spend on DVD's will drop to almost nothing.
I don't watch broadcast TV and so the only way I find out about good shows is by P2Ping them. Oh well other companies want my money if the TV/movie industry doesn't.
Are they really considering it? (Score:3, Informative)
I RTFA, and it says that some copyright owners have suggested a three strikes law, but that this is unpopular. The government is interested in an "appropriate solution" to the issue of copyright infringement via the Internet. The language in the quoted passages is quite neutral and correct -- speaking of unauthorised copies, rather than theft.
There are many ways this issue could be resolved. It could be through complete copyright reform, however that is unlikely. It could be through criminalization and tough statutory penalties, which would be very unpopular. It could be by declaring the Internet and P2P as a type of broadcast system, with mandatory licensing of copyright and statutory royalties (like radio).
This is not an excuse to panic and engage in public Conroy-bashing. Join an appropriate lobby group, engage in public discussion of solutions fair to all parties, do something constructive. If you let a politician believe that he is hated beyond redemption, or a political party believe that they've already lost the next election, then they have absolutely no incentive to do what you want between now and when they leave office.
Re: (Score:2)
"It could be through complete copyright reform..."
Doesn't matter. Even if they backed off copyright to, say, 14 years, people would just find some other rationalization for stealing.
The real problems is that can get valuable stuff FOR FREE, and NOT get caught or punished. Fixing things will require either that: a) it's no longer free; or b) doing so leads to a probable chance of getting caught and punished.
Just like shoplifting in a store.
Re: (Score:2)
"It could be through complete copyright reform..."
Doesn't matter. Even if they backed off copyright to, say, 14 years, people would just find some other rationalization for stealing.
By "complete copyright reform" I wasn't talking about reducing the term. I was thinking about something more radical, like finding another way to promote the creation of creative works without legislating an artificial scarcity.
The real problems is that can get valuable stuff FOR FREE, and NOT get caught or punished.
Every day I get a whole bunch of oxygen for free, and that's extremely valuable in the sense that I'd be dead without it. The reason I can do this is because the supply is, for practical purposes, unlimited. Copies of digital media are also unlimited for practical purposes. The reaso
Re:Gentlemen! (Score:5, Insightful)
The downloading is rarely the issue. The issue is the liberties and justices sacrificed by lobbied and next-to-corrupt politicians in the name of saving the record industry. The consequences of this will not stop at pirates, it spans over the entire society, effectively undermining the freedom and security enjoyed by all of us. Is it really worth it? Some people seem to think so. I don't and I don't give a shit about filesharing.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Certainly not, because as soon as it becomes the issue, it becomes painfully apparent exactly what "freedoms" are being defended by 90% of anti-copyright statements.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A valid point to some extent, but still no.
This uproar among Slashdotters is not heard only when politicians trade the democratic freedoms and rights we all have come to take for granted in order to please the media lobby. It is also heard when US customs claim the right to go through all the data on your laptop when you cross the border or when voting machines are closed source. Or when the Swedish government and parliament passes a law enabling a civilian authority to scan _all_ communication passing the
Re: (Score:2)
You know, sometimes people give the impression of doing group-think when they independently come to the same conclusion. We don't try to be right just by opposing the "Big Guys", we try to be right by actually seeking the truth. Sometimes we yay at the Powers That Be (suddenoutbreakofcommonsense expresses tha
Re: (Score:2)
Well, Disney [wikipedia.org] pushed through ridiculous copyright extensions a long time before Bittorrent hit the tubes, and by the date (1998) would have been lobbying for it before Napster came to be.
Re:Gentlemen! (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like people are wanting to just get free stuff, but the claim is different : they say that trying to protect a revenue stream based on the control and production of copies, in a world where making copies is basically free, is nonsensical and counter-productive.
Parent
Re:Gentlemen! (Score:5, Insightful)
On slashdot? It's the guilty-upon-accusation bit that bothers people here more.
It's the "Every kind of P2P is people violating copyrights" idea that idiot politicians have that bothers people here on slashdot.
I don't care if 90% of the people using a certain protocol are using it to swap the latest transformers movie because I'm part of the 10% using it for legitimate purposes.
Should I be denied my right to disseminate information because of that 90%?
If 90% of the people in your apartment complex are growing their own pot and you're part of the 10% that is not should you lose your right to not have the police kick down your door without a warrant?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
...guilty-upon-accusation...
I wonder how gung-ho politicians would be about this law if people started parking outside their houses and using their wireless to download illegal content? Because at least some of them have to have poorly configured or otherwise insecure WAPs.
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, most people's response to any problem these days is "the government should do something!" This unfortunately tends to cause many problems to get worse, while racking up an enormous bill. Not to say that everything the government does is useless (highways are nice), but many things they touch do go down the drain. Good example, Social Security started with the best of intentions. Th
Re: (Score:2)
ever heard the phrase "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"? Its part of the foundation of at least the American legal system.
Re: (Score:2)
I can give you several reasons why people think it's fine to do!
Firstly we're geeks here, denying that 80% of us download TV and movies would be stupidity, I'm sure we've all been to astalavista for a crack now and then too.
As I get older I do less of the dodgy stuff but for example, I 'steal' TV shows from the US all the time, because they don't air here at all, or at sensible times or within months of them airing in the US.
Now sure, that's a grey area to some you might say but the question then becomes, w
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, there should be legal remedies for copyright violation. They should be reasonable, and they should be properly targetted. I am against excessively high statutory damages, any form of punishment that does not result from a courtroom trial, and any form of penalty or excessive inconvenience for legal downloading, and these sort of things are often proposed or even enacted.
For your question, people think it's okay to download stuff without paying for it because they aren't directly hurting anybody. I
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I seriously don't get that. Why do people think it's okay to download stuff without paying for it?
The thing is, that's only a tiny part of the real issue, and only acts to camouflage the real threat.
The real threat is that the government will lose its initial sense of trepidation over filtering content it doesn't like and start applying it wherever it finds an advantage to do so. It only takes a little bit of time for a bureaucrat to become comfortable with previously unpalatable acts.
Laws like the Three Strikes rules can be used to enforce an autocracy. If you can keep any particular group of people
Re: (Score:2)
Downloading music or other files illegally should be punished.
Well, the law as currently written means that the creation of such unauthorised copies is something for which the copyright holder can claim compensation and damages. Certain types of commercial infringement are also criminal acts, but that's not the issue under discussion here. The core issue is whether the Government has a mandate to create statutory penalties for non-criminal acts. There is also an issue of matching the severity of punishment to the gravity of the misdeed.
Let's take the tort of defamatio
Re: (Score:2)
"We are sharing temporal garbage as far as either of us knows."
If all you want are packets full of static and garbage then download them. Unfortunately, you don't, and instead download packets containing the lastest song by the Black Eye Peas, The Dark Knight, and the current copy of Photoshop.
None of which sprang into being without someone (or a lot of someones) spending a significant amount of time, money, energy, and other resources to create them.
So in my book, the "per copy cost" is irrelevant. Spend $
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
if I somehow sent you the source code to Windows, you would just say that it was only a stream of "garbage packets"?
You wouldn't?
Re:entitlement (Score:4, Interesting)
I feel exactly the same way.
Illegal file sharing is wrong and there should be consequences for it. It is however not theft. Theft involves taking something away from another. With filesharing, ownership and possession remain with the originator.
What is theft is the extension of copyright, erosion of fair use and bypassing of the courts that media companies are bribing governments around the world to achieve. And its not theft from an individual, it is theft from the public domain, it is theft from us all.
These 3 strikes laws are intended to circumvent the courts and allow media companies to extort real people into paying them with no burden of proof or legal recourse.
Parent
Re:They really should punish illegal filesharers (Score:5, Insightful)
They shot first.
How long is copyright today? 70 years? 90? 150?
Companies are stealing our culture. Perpetual extension of copyright is theft from society.
Compared to the artists of the days when copyright was 20-something years, today's artists don't contribute more to society, yet they demand many times the protection. They want to get this for free -- they've never offered any form of payment, no return on investment for society.
When my grandmother was a child, she heard a song. If I were to listen to her sing me that song, she'd be breaking the letter of the law. Compared to a few brittany spears songs, the theft of every copyrighted work for 50 years is a much greater crime.
Parent
Re:They really should punish illegal filesharers (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not payment. Society at large doesn't gain anything from being able to have 150 year copyrights. It's only freeloaders who want to sell dead people's works as their own who are crying that copyright needs to be longer.
The "Happy Birthday" song first appeared in print in 1912. In other words, before nearly every defining moment of the 20th century. Despite that, it is a copyrighted song -- The Time-Warner Corporation owns the rights and charges $10,000 per performance in royalties.
So you're a filthy disgusting criminal. YOU. I know you sang the song publicly and didn't pay Time-Warner their due. Why are you such a filthy disgusting criminal? Why don't the long long long dead writers of "Happy Birthday" deserve compensation for their work?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Care of Wikipedia:
The melody of "Happy Birthday to You" comes from the song "Good Morning to All", which was written and composed by American sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill in 1893.[3] They were both kindergarten school teachers in Louisville, Kentucky, developing various teaching methods at what is now the Little Loomhouse.[4][5] The sisters created "Good Morning to All" as a song that would be easy to sing by young children[6]. The combination of melody and lyrics in "Happy Birthday to You" first
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Digital mediums have very low upkeep cost (virtually non-existent on a per file basis)..."
Perhaps on a "per file basis", but in aggregate all of those little "upkeep costs" add up. Quickly.
Servers. Software. Maintenance. Hard drives. Switches. Routers. Power. Bandwidth. Lots and lots and lots of bandwidth.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
LIES
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Despite the Sturm und Drang about copyright and filesharing here on Slashdot, most people really don't care one way or the other
[Citation needed]
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hmmm.. or maybe ship them back to the UK?
NOOOO!!! Then we won't be any good at sport anymore
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What's stopping me from signing up with a new one?
Exactly how many ISPs are available where you live? Many people only have two- the phone company (DSL) and the cable company.
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Telstra, Optus, iinet, Westnet, TPG, Iprimus, Internode and Amnet for DSL. Three, Vodafone, Telstra and Optus for mobile (HSPA).
This is in Perth, get to the eastern states and the increases, Australia has a well regulated telecoms industry. Phone companies aren't permitted to monopolise area's and if they have an infrastructure monopoly then the government sets a wholesale price fo
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And it will never happen for the same reason as internet filtering. This requires too much co-operation from ISP's and ISP's dont want