Italy May Censor Torrent Sites 194
An anonymous reader writes "Following a Pirate Bay block more than a year ago, Italy continues its attempts to censor torrent sites. The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that copyright holders can now force ISPs to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are hosted outside Italy. The torrent sites which 'hold' copyrighted materials are accused of taking part in criminal activity. It seems someone should enlighten Italian jurists about technology."
Enlighten about technology? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a technological matter. If a country wants to censor a communication medium, it can certainly do so. It will never be 100 percent effective, but censorship does restrict availability of information. We should not fall back to a "we can get around it" position. While that is true, most people will not get around it and controlling their access to information is an undue power.
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It's not even about censorship. What The Pirate Bay and others supporting "swedish piracy" fail to see is that your purpose will count in court. No matter the stupid .torrent 'indirect' linking, hash linking, whatever, the judge will look at what your purpose is. This is why the pirate bay failed in court. It is perfectly clear what they are doing. On another note, sweds do have a nice culture, as seen in this tv advertisement [youtube.com].
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I see.
So what the Pirate Bay should have done was set as its purpose to be a site that told stories about how pirates commit piracy?
Seeing as how authors and filmmakers very often depend on depicting the details of how criminals commit crimes to sell their wares they should have no problems with sites dedicated to the same.
One such story might begin thus:
"Alvin, feeling downtrodden by the corporate masters ruling society, created a .torrent file that contained the following data...(insert link to data here)
Put that strawman away (Score:2)
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It's not so terrible as censorship, in a sense. As the current copyright law stands, sharing copyrighted material is illegal. The court stated that to prevent illegal behaviour it is legitimate that lower courts order ISPs to block sites that are created to break the law. The same would happen with libel, for example. At least in the highest court of the country we can ask that if something is illegal it should not be allowed. It's a nice principle...
OTOH we can push for copyright law to be changed, but
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Unlike the US, this decision DOES NOT GENERATE A PRECEDENT. this means that applies just to this case, according to italian regulations.
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Are the Italians that desperate to stop the video of Berlusconi being thumped being available around the world? :)
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Yes, the problem here is the legal and political clout wielded by the old media industry, combined with the fact that their business model is so out of tune with the realities of the internet. When your cost structure doesn't allow you to be profitable selling electronic copies at $1.00 instead of disks at $20, you have to resort to other means to stay in business. Hence the heavy-handed attempts to stifle competition.
Mind you, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the full-blown pirates either. Maybe if you c
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In some ways it's like the software engineers in the US and Europe who still expect to make $80k-$120k when companies can get multiple engineers and programmers in China and India for the same cost. The internet has changed our competitive landscape, but many of us still haven't adjusted. Even the authors of open source software typically have to keep their day jobs to pay the bills. The problems related to funding software developers in the future landscape are remarkably similar to the issues facing musicians and artists.
Hold on... you're mixing things. It's not about decadent, spoilt EUsians having to strip themselves of hardly fought for rights to compete with emerging market salaries; that would be like behaving like Renzo's Chickens (a metaphor in Alessandro Manzoni's "Promessi Sposi").
What next, should we screw environmental regulations (done in certain parts of Italy... illegally but boy, what a bang for the buck!) or abandon safety standards in the name of profitability?
To be honest your example makes the opposite po
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Not the point ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Italy has plenty of laws that would totally paralyze every aspect of public and private life, were they to be rigorously enforced. Such laws look terrific on paper but don't have any practical effect except in lawsuits where they can be (and are) routinely used to club people over the head with. Anyone who has ever driven a car in an Italian city South of Rome (Naples for example, or tried to cross the street in the same city at a pedestrian crossing that's showing a green light for pedestrians) knows all about the practical value of laws in Italy.
This little decision will satisfy officials who can now tout it as a bold step towards curbing piracy. This is important. Just remember that their prime minister, Berlusconi, owns a whole chain of content-creating enterprises. He can't afford to look "soft on piracy" and retain his credibility in business circles.
As one or two nerdish forum members may already have figured out, blocking a torrent site or two won't necessarily stop people from finding or downloading torrents. To put it mildly.
The only thing it *will* do is to slowly erode yet another form of legal freedom in Italy and afterwards in the rest of Europe.
That's all folks.
Re:Not the point ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just don't get me started on what will happen if Brussels gets hold of it....
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As soon as this happens, I'll stop paying for the Internet, it's free in a lot of places already so there isn't any real need on my part to have it in the house.
Don't let it get that far. The bill is not law. It is going to enter committee stage in about a week - this is our best chance to get it changed to be fair for consumers before it gets to the House of Commons and gets even more politicised than it is now. Write to your MP, write to a Lord and explain to them why this is a terrible and unfair bill. Information on the disconnection clauses in the bill and some Lords to write to are available at http://www.digitalwrong.org/?page_id=28 [digitalwrong.org] - I've taken over the sit
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I wrote to my MP, but sadly he's an absolute twat at times (e.g. when breathing).
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No obligation, but if you could forward me a copy of the letter and his reply (if he replied) then I can at least put it online for other people to see - and if his reply is as bad as you make out, get a few hundred letters to him and make this embarrassing.
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This ruling is just the confirmation of an original one enacted last summer (and promptly suspended) which imposed all major ISPs to block traffic at DNS level.
Any user using OpenDNS or his own DNS (or GDNS today) wouldn't be affected.
This is nothing more than the perfect italian way to make politics: life goes on just like before, but the big guys can say that something has beeen done.
(Yes, i live in italy and feel ashamed of that)
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The president is also the head of many large corporations? That itself should be bolded in 72-point font, to truly show the kind of corruption in Italy.
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Italian culture will suffer from stupid laws like this.
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The only thing it *will* do is to slowly erode yet another form of legal freedom in Italy and afterwards in the rest of Europe.
Do we really need to have the legal freedom to download any digital work without paying the creator of said work? I know whenever I post this I get moderated as a troll but it is a legitimate question. Should we really do away with all IP laws and let people copy and distribute as they see fit?
Unfortunately we do all need money to live in this world so what is the big problem with trying to make it via selling digital works that can be duplicated endlessly. You still had to put time and effort into creating
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While I have great love for the large media conglomerates that hold the copyright on much of what is illegally distributed, I also do not exactly like the idea of starting a business based on taking something else that you had no part in creating, and profiting from it.
Aww crap, should have used preview. I meant no great love. Guess that might have been a Freudian slip :)
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Downloads is far from the only target here.
How do you ensure the creator gets money for their work? When I enter a record store and buy a CD, I pay the store. Has the store already paid the artist? Will it pay the artist? Are there a load of other intermediaries that want their cut before any money trickle down to the creator?There is no way for me to know. I can just ASSUME that the store has the right to sell me the CD, and whomever it bought them from has the right to sell them to the store and so on.
(Th
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Solution: Go to concerts, or download then pay the artists directly.
Why should concerts be any different? Most concerts pay the artist a pittance compared to the venue, promoter and everyone else higher up the food chain. Tours by most bands are actually something the record company force them to do in order to sell more records.
I am all for artists selling there wares directly on websites but very few are able to do this until they have a core of followers who will seek out there music. Up and coming artists have to sign to a label to have any hope of exposing their produc
Does this mean (Score:2, Interesting)
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Copyright Holders Are Winning Control of Our Govts (Score:5, Informative)
This is extremely worrying.
Let me get this straight. In previous rulings copyright holders were denied the blocking of sites on the grounds of free speech and censorship.
The Supreme court gets involved and blocking P2P sites suddenly becomes a good idea?
We have a Supreme court in the UK and something similar happened recently with "Unfair" bank charges.
Two (maybe one was an appeal?) court cases were held to decide whether bank charges fell under UK consumer law and thus can be challenged that bank charges were excessive. Both times the courts agreed this was the case.
The Supreme court got involved and funnily enough ruled that this was not the case which now means banks can charge what they like.
Since Lord Mandy went on holiday and "bumped into" into Mr Geffen - the recommendations of the digital communications report and the concerns of ISPs were completely ignored. It appears the "3-stikes" legislation is to go ahead after all.
The EU took a dim view of this policy and warned the UK it was illegal and against the EU principles of free speech and human rights.
I'm pretty sure the EU slapped-down France the first time France tried to implement this policy too.
However, recently:
1)France recently tried a second time and no comment from the EU has been heard.
2)Lord Mandy's propsed legislation appears to be going ahead.
3)Italy are ready to censor the internet.
What happened to suddenly make all these points "agreeable" and not challenged by the EU ?
There must have been intense lobbying and money used by copyright holders to silence the many critics of these proposals.
It appears our "democracy" is firmly under the control of commercial entities.
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No, they can charge the customer agreed to when they opened the account. What the Supreme Court said was "If you don't like the charges, don't open the account. Don't expect the courts to bail you out on something you agreed to."
And this is good for two reasons:
i) Personal responsibility is a good thing.
ii) My banking is free, because people who pay unauthorised-overdraft fe
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If someone is overdrawn by £2 and then the bank charges a £35 unauthorised-overdraft is "fair"
If someone is in financial difficulty and the bank keeps charging £35 unauthorised-overdraft fees every month thus compounding the problem. That person could have lost thier job.
These are not hyperthetical scenarios - this has happened to people I know and to a certain degree myself too.
I'm all for personal responsibility and "free" banking is nice.
"..they can charge the customer agreed to.. " - Y
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Right!
(1) "I'm tempted to say your post is troll-like but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and put it down to retarded-like ignorance."
OK - I did not say the post was a troll and reading the above line what I posted was maybe a bit harsh.
(2) Please do not attack my friends and call them "idiots".
(3) "incapable of doing simple arithmetic and understand that more going out than is coming in" - This is fine if your financial situation is straightforward. If you have a family of 2 kids, both parents are w
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It seems to me like the dog-eat-dog mentality. While I can respect such principles if genuine, I have to suspect that they only take that position when they are the bigger dog or when it's not their puppy being eaten.
As someone who helps people who get into financial trouble I would also point out that the majority of them are in difficulty through an unexpected change in circumstances, for which the ability to do simple budgeting is no prevention or cure.
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they only take that position when they are the bigger dog or when it's not their puppy being eaten.
That is why I hate banks. I, for one, do not partake in the massive ponzi scheme that is the lending industry. I once did, got burned badly, and now I live on cash. I have a chequing account, but no loans nor revolving credit cards. My life is so much better, I know exactly what I can afford, and I'm not siphoning 10-15% of my already-tight income to a small family of profiteering gluttons.
The fact that a $0.01 overdraft can cost a person between $30 and $75 in overlimit fees, to me that's patently ridi
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And yet going overdrawn means you've used money you don't own to pay for something. Why should the bank be liable for your irresponsible behaviour?
If people only spent the money in their account, and no more, then they wouldn't get hit by those charges.
As for removing profit from banking, I've only paid fees to a bank once in the last decade, and that was for a high value CHAPS payment. My bank does make a profit out of me, but it also provides a large number of very useful services to me without charging m
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If you have a change in circumstances that cause financial trouble, going overdrawn without first negotiating with your bank is frankly the most stupid thing you can do.
Overdrafts are one of the worse sources of credit available; unauthorised ones even worse.
Why should a bank take on significant business risk funding an overdrawn customer that's not only spending beyond their means (for whatever reason; that the spending is on rent and food doesn't alter the fact that they can't afford it and are thus unlik
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Errr yeah, £20 is "so much better" than £35!
What would be better is that the bank notified you and gave you 5 working days to clear it or a chance to avoid the charge. They used to many, many years ago but not now.
But instead you prefer to get financially-raped instead.
That's like saying "OK - you can F*** me up the arse but could you use a little more lube instead?"
Sir, I believe it is you who should "Seek professional advice".
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The main issue wasn't really the cost of the charges (even though that's what everyone focuses on), but the inconsistency with which they're applied even within the same bank on the same account. Sometimes it's £10, sometimes it's £25, sometimes it's £40, sometimes it's immediate, sometimes it's after a 7 day warning period, etc. for the same penalty.
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There is a wider issue over the imbalance in the contracts between banks and customers. When a customer makes a mistake the bank has it in their contract that they get penalised, they do this in a way that is not technically a penalty (which is disallowed by contract law) but walks and quacks like one. The customer has no such opportunity to insert unfair clauses into the contract or even negotiate on the existing ones, the contracts are considered set products and the customer is expected to go elsewhere i
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No, they can charge the customer agreed to when they opened the account.
I presume the same goes for loan sharks? You may not agree with laws against unfair contracts but they do exist. I too agree that personal responsibility is a good thing but so is corporate responsibility. Here are some example scenarios to consider:
i) A customer misses a payment on a loan with their bank, the bank automatically takes the money out of their account anyway causing them to go overdrawn. This eventuality isn't in their contract and does not occur to them because had they a loan with a differen
Re:Copyright Holders Are Winning Control of Our Go (Score:4, Informative)
Since Lord Mandy went on holiday and "bumped into" into Mr Geffen - the recommendations of the digital communications report and the concerns of ISPs were completely ignored. It appears the "3-stikes" legislation is to go ahead after all.
I think you're absolutely right to be worried. I'm going to talk about the UK situation since that's what I know about, but the situation EU-wide is largely as you describe: governments are caving to copyright owners.
Before saying anything else, it's worth making clear that the "3 strikes" legislation contains nothing to do with three strikes [digitalwrong.org]. It is totally silent on the specifics of the chances that have to be given to internet users before they can be cut off and leaves the question entirely to a "code" that has not yet been written and so cannot be reviewed before the bill becomes law. You can read more about this at the link I gave above. The "new" bill pays lip-service to the Government's "commitment to human rights", and seems to be relying on this "code" to avoid the criticism of the EU. However, as the link above makes clear, it gives the Secretary of State a get-out clause to get past the code if he wants to, with little to no oversight or controls.
There's a lot of confusion, even on Slashdot, about the content of the bill. To break down the sections on Copyright infringement (taken from http://www.digitalwrong.org/?page_id=6 [digitalwrong.org]), the new process in case of alleged infringement is:
This goes absolutely against the presumption of innocence that is such an important part of a modern democracy.
If this all sounds a bit worrying, there is some good news. The bill is entering its committee stage on the 6th of January, and this is the best chance to change it before it reaches the House of Commons, at which point its progress will be faster and more subject to the party whip. So please, write to a Lord [digitalwrong.org] and explain to them why the measure is bad, either morally or because - as has even been admitted by the impact assessment - network security means the wrong people will be punished, and what they can do to change it - i.e. go to the open committee session starting on the 6th and change the bill.
Things are advancing very quickly, and I appreciate that not everyone has time to read the 300+ pages of the bill, the debates, the notes and the impact assessment, so if anyone has any questions on their contents please ask and I will answer them. Otherwise, please write in before it's too late, and spread the word - either online or offline - about the travesty that is the Digital Economy Bill.
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Sadly. And the fact that the content industry generates taxes that are badly needed by our nearly-broke governments won't help improve the situation. In an economy that is so reliant on commercializing (and taxing!) imaginary "goods", I have no hope to see those copyright excesses be repelled anytime soon.
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Sadly. And the fact that the content industry generates taxes that are badly needed by our nearly-broke governments won't help improve the situation. In an economy that is so reliant on commercializing (and taxing!) imaginary "goods", I have no hope to see those copyright excesses be repelled anytime soon.
I think we might be coming at this from different points of view. I don't see anything wrong with an economy that is reliant on commercializing "imaginary 'goods'" - in fact I don't really see how we could have anything else. Aside from the content industries, the insurance industry, the stock market, futures trading and any number of other sectors work by commercialising something other than physical goods. And while it may not strictly speaking be stealing, making use of these services without paying does
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For what it's worth, I wish I had mod points today. It is nice to see posts that don't reduce the whole copyright debate to some sort of all-or-nothing dichotomy, and which acknowledge the idea that you can have a reasonable idea but a flawed implementation. This seems far more constructive than just painting a crude picture of selfish pirates fighting greedy megacorporations, where everyone has extreme views and there is little scope for compromise and finding some middle ground.
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Thank you!
The internet tends to encourage knee-jerk, poorly thought-out responses, and that makes it much easier for politicians to dismiss the objections to their copyright bills as the delusions of immature online pirates. The discussion of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords over here has been dominated by reference to the "online reaction" - specifically the 23 pages of comments on the original BBC report, characterised by the idea that all media should be free to download and the media compa
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Indeed - my letter to my MP focussed on the lack of legal rigour required to 'punish' someone for alleged illegal downloading and the obvious impact on other innocent household members.
I did mention that I dislike current copyright laws, but also stated that I do support copyright as a concept, but with far lower timeframes than at present.
Sadly my MP hasn't responded to me, and based on past evidence is unlikely to vote against the bill in its current incarnation.
Worse still he's a member of the shadow cab
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ACTA negotiations with the US? With everything under the covers, all sides have plausible deniability about who is pushing for the most draconian copyright measures.
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According to this article it has now been passed
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2249617/french-pass-revised-three/ [v3.co.uk]
(article dated 16 sep)
Distributed hash tables and magnet URIs (Score:2)
Italian law does not follow precedents (Score:5, Informative)
This is for US/UK people, to clarify things: the Corte di Cassazione (aka the Italian Supreme Court) is indeed the maximum level of interpretation of the law, but its decisions do *not* set precedents. They are mostly used as a guidance, but judges/prosecutors aren't forced to follow such an interpretation (i.e., there is some kind of discretionality).
It is worth to know here that the same court rejected an accusation on the grounds of copyright infringement because there was no profit involved.
And no, this has nothing to do with the government. The judicial system is definitely of different views with regards to the government.
Err... (Score:2)
... It seems someone should enlighten Italian jurists about technology.
Err... Italy has worse problems to deal with than petty piracy:
I don't really give a rat's ass for Torrents of craptacular films that just watching them is a waste of lifetime anyway...
Saluti & Baci
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Internet is one of the biggest invention of humankind, censoring it so wrong on many levels.
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Hold on... ... it's not about diffusion of culture. Have a look at the entries of major torrent indexes: it's difficult to find healthy seeds for decent stuff, 99.9% it's rips of rubbish flicks and tv series.
Preserving and nurturing culture is about shoving our heritage out of forgotten archives on ITMS (or whatever you fancy) and provide easy, cheap access to it. It's a hell of a job and I wouldn't mind dropping 5€ a pop or even paying taxes for this to happen.
What needs to be done is to take back our
Re:"Supreme courts" (Score:4, Insightful)
Jurists != Jurors.
A jurist usually means anyone with a law degree, although in some countries it is generally reserved to refer to judges.
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Judgement by "normal" people is something that was feared a lot in writing the Italian Consitution, because we had seen how it worked with fascism. The principle that people support is enough to justify everything is the essence of fascism and one of the scary mantras of Mr. Berlusconi.
Yeah, that's working out so well for amanda knox, isn't it?
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Judges can think rationally and apply the letter of the law. Jurists, without that to keep them in check, can say "that's immoral, 5 year prison sentence" even if it's not technically illegal. A precise legal framework is needed because you can conform to one, but you can't conform to someone's morality which you don't even know of until the trial.
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Minor correction: I meant jurors, not jurists [google.ca]
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Arn't they run by judges who are also lawyers? It would be neat if normal people AKA jurists were in charge but I don't think that is/ever will be the case.
When the geek faces the "normal people," the judge and jury in an American court, how often does he come out a winner?
Re:Someone needs to enlighten certain geeks... (Score:5, Insightful)
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From another POV, you can see that Goverments everywhere welcome any possiblity of increasing their power, and censorship/media control is quite powerhouse.
The fact that someone else (entertainment industry) will take all the blame for it is icing on cake, especially as entertainment industry can run its own propaganda campaign to justify it.
Is it goverment allowing themseles to be maneuvred or media moguls being played to be white horses?
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So you end up with censorship infrastructure for your use and with
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Is it goverment allowing themseles to be maneuvred or media moguls being played to be white horses?
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So you end up with censorship infrastructure for your use and with someone else taking blame for all of it happening. Its quite a victory!
True, never attribute to incompetence that which could be malice!
Governments trying to grab more power!? The Hell You Say! Oh ... yes ... OK ... yer, that might be happening too. Certainly having an infrastructure that gives power to the Gov isn't going to be something they fight against too hard - Lord Voldeson-er-Mandlemort's new digital bill amendment for example, that allows new powers to be drawn up without recourse to any discussions or voting on the matter in Parliament!
See also all this climate
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but copyright isn't all bad! If you create something it isn't unfair to expect people to pay for it!
It is, however, unfair to expect that other people should lose their freedom of expression in order to encourage people to pay for it.
Copyright isn't the only means of compensating people for creative work, In the grand scheme of things it is really quite new and is used to compensate those who do the non-creative work of distribution far more than it is used to compensate the actual creator.
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If you create something it isn't unfair to expect people to pay for it!
If I create something and sell it to someone I expect them to pay for it. If they create a copy of what I sold them and they sell that further, I certainly have no right to expect them to pay me for that. They created the copy, I didn't, so why should I get paid for their work?
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You're repeating the debate the 10001st time already, and the rebuttals are well ironed out:
1) Some people actually want to support the artists.
2) Artists make most of their money from concerts and merchandising anyway.
3) Your song being on www.downloadznork.com increases your popularity and people will be more likely to go to your website, giving you ad revenue.
4) We can't stop copyrighted content from appearing on the public P2P networks days or even hours after it is officially released, and copyright la
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1) Some people actually want to support the artists.
So buy stuff from independent sites or the artists themselves. You don't have to buy everything through Big Media middlemen, and in the age of the Internet, artists are getting wise to the new possibilities of not signing away all their rights, too.
2) Artists make most of their money from concerts and merchandising anyway.
Performers such as musicians might (though I don't think I have ever seen any verifiable source to support this oft-repeated claim).
But copyright also protects authors, illustrators, software developers... It also supports the numerous valuable secondary roles th
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But copyright also protects authors, illustrators, software developers...
Donations still work in all these cases.
editors, research assistants, printers, services providing hosting and downloading bandwidth, and so on.
Don't most of these make money by charging for their services directly? They could all easily switch to work for non-copyright-based industries like open source stuff, academic research, etc.
Does Slashdot of all places really believe that having eyes on a web site == profit?
There are lots of ways to capitalize on popularity, website ads are among the less significant.
.You can't realistically stop me getting into my car and driving it at your kid at 100mph either.
I don't think you understand the difference here. A guy stealing the car steals on car, he might get away and make $5000 or he might get caught. A single uploader makes the work availab
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Donations still work in all these cases.
Do they? How many world class software products are funded only (or even primarily) by donations?
Don't most of these make money by charging for their services directly?
Sure, but those costs are then passed on to the artist or organisation that will (in the current system) be selling the work. In a system where those sales are not a reliable source of income, you need another way to guarantee funding the supporting cast.
There are lots of ways to capitalize on popularity, website ads are among the less significant.
Well, maybe there are, but you haven't said what any of them are, and it's not as if the world is full of examples of other people doing it. You asserted that g
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Like most people (here at least!) I'm not happy about the way the big media companies are rail-roading governments around the world to shore up their failing businesses
The geek wants his free movie fix.
The politician wants to see $200 million dollar productions with significant potential for a return in both domestic and foreign markets. These translate instantly into jobs and taxable income. Numbers he can take to the voters.
He wants to be remembered as the man who landed Pixar for his home district. The
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MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2, Insightful)
Parent is absolutely correct. Please mod it up, and go ahead and mod me flaimbait or troll I know it's an unpopular position on here, but than again most people that stand up for fairness get shot at.
And don't tell me well the lawsuits the MPAFIAA and RIAFFIA aren't fair because I agree they are extreme, but than again so is the brazen attitude that piracy is OK. It's like Neocons vs Anarchists
both are extremes and both are stupid.
First off people on here need to stop hiding behind the veil of "Oh they are
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I can't go into a restaurant and preview an entire meal and then decide if I want to pay for it. You order you consume you pay for it. And don't say "well I can send it back.. at the theaters I can't send back a movie!"... actually you can.... within 30 minutes of a film's start time you can tell the box office that you didn't like it and they will give you back your money or venue credit. Got another excuse captain cheapo?
This shows that you don't see the difference between copyright infringement and theft. I could make another post explaining the difference, but I'm sure you could have read thousands of them here on /. if you cared.
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Re:MOD PARENT UP! (Score:5, Informative)
If you leave out the pay step in a restaurant, the restaurant loses money. If you leave out the pay step in a software purchase, the software company stays the same, as if you never touched the software at all.
??? Re:MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
Well, except that if enough people leave out the pay step in the software purchase, the software company loses money there too. Or conversely, why should the paying customers of the software company subsidize the non-paying users? If it costs $1 M to develop and market a particular program and only 10% of the users actually pay for it, either the software company loses money or the program will cost 4x as much as if 40% of the users pay for it. Not saying every pirate would be a customer here, but if you m
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the software company loses money there too
Lose money vs. lose out on money. Big difference there.
Where would Redhat be if most of their paying customers suddenly decided to download their own source and maintain Linux in-house?
Dead, just like any company would die if people stopped using their services. This statement is meaningless. For now, Red Hat provides a valuable service and they make money. They have a business model that bypasses the problems with the normal one.
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The cost of software does not increase with the number of users. The cost of physical items does.
Stealing is NOT taking without permission. Stealing is deprivation. This is not my opinion, this is ingrained into many different criminal codes. Stealing from a restaurant deprives them of the food, "stealing" software just doesn't gain them anything.
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So, zero arguments left?
Perhaps you can point to AT LEAST ONE court case where the creators or their representatives charged someone producing illegal copies with theft instead of the different legal concept of unauthorized copying?
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I have to assume you're the troll since you called me an idiot without any actual arguments to rebutt me with.
Someone needs to think before they post ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Downloading copyrighted material never was a "crime". At most it's an actionable infringement of someone's copyright. Actionable by the copyright holder that is, not the State. It's not even a misdemeanor.
Besides, torrent sites in and by themselves were never "criminal", as they only facilitate an exchange of information which, among many other things, allows people to inf
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What is facilitating a crime and what is not still comes under question. The pirate bay did not facilitate crime, they simply kept an open record of torrents available with controlling what was available, it was fully automated. No different they rendering anyone assistance with a problem not directly associated with a crime. For example a criminal has a flat and no spare, you see the problem and stop and assist him, once mobile they immediately commit a robbery, which with out your assistance they would n
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But if you go that way then they should also block search engines as they after all facilitate the search for illegal material. ...
OK, let's take a few steps back from the precipice and discuss where we actually want to draw the line, indeed, where is it sensible to draw the line. Yahoo? Google? Well, obviously not, we're still firmly on terra-absurdum there. But The Pirate Bay? Come on ... it even has "Pirate" in the damn name! That's like a shop called "Burglars-R-Us" selling lock-picks, cr
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where we actually want to draw the line, indeed, where is it sensible to draw the line.
Complete repeal of all copyright. Ultimately, that's where we're going anyway, the attacks on information flow and social sharing has merely resulted in technological shifts towards less open forms, and the next stage is pretty much the end game; f2f darknets re-form the whole fabric of communications into untraceable undetectable anonymous networks.
You end up with a situation where you have no scale on which to draw the
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where we actually want to draw the line, indeed, where is it sensible to draw the line.
Complete repeal of all copyright.
If that's your "sensible" approach, then I have to ask the same question no-one has ever managed to answer reasonably yet: what system do you propose instead, which continues to motivate the production and distribution of at least the same quantity and quality of works? It is implausible to claim that this will happen by magic, with everyone who makes a living producing material today (much of it being valuable but not particularly fun to make) continuing to do so without compensation or suddenly being repl
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Works were created before copyright, and will continue to be created after it goes away. The creative will want to create, the audience will want to consume.
What will not continue is a third party - the industries which live off pretending to add value/services for the actual creators but in effect inserting themselves as middlemen siphoning off what the customer pays before a fraction ends up in the artist's hands.
Open-source software is a good example. Everyone gets the source, and you make money from usi
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no-one has ever managed to answer reasonably
I've seen more suggestions for workable systems than I can count on my digits.
what system do you propose instead,
Personally I doubt there is any extra incentive needed at all. But I'll indulge you; if we want extra benefits for creators, personally I'm leaning towards 'creative incentive tax' structured as a VAT on any works or services derived from a specific content, payable directly to the creator. Not wholly different from how radio broadcast payments work tod
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OK, so how does the creator of the content make a living from it if it is otherwise freely available on the internet? I guess the first few copies will likely be sold as the creator will be the only person who has them, but at some point some like minded light fingered sole puts a copy up on Copyright.Infringement.Bay and that's all she wrote for the creator, possibly in both senses of the phrase!
State support of the content industries? Why not state support of the car ind
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Someone needs to enlighten the companies who make this software. I think that I should pay for everything I own but I also don't think I should pay for 5 copies because I have 5 computers. Anti-virus folks are getting on the right train with this. Pay a little bit more and get 3, or even 5, license's for a product and use it that many times.
I've got a Ford Focus, but I need another one, so presumably I can just pop into the nearest Ford dealer and pick one up - hey I already bought the first one? OK, perhaps not a valid analogy, but the only reason you think it's OK to buy one and copy it four times is because it is easy to copy it! If software wasn't easily copyable you wouldn't think it odd to have to buy all the copies you need.
Where I'm going with this is the terms and conditions are (and should be) set by the seller. If some software ve
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If you somehow manage to create an exact copy of the Ford Focus at negligible cost, feel free.
You are right it is not a valid analogy. Car analogies are never valid, it is a law of nature.
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I've got a Ford Focus, but I need another one
No, you need a decent car.
However, if you had bought the plans for a Ford Focus, then built your own based on those plans, yeah, I think that's fair.
Someone needs to be recompensed for their work, but not to the extent of charging someone 5 times for the same thing. That's exploitation and the market reacts badly to it.
The success of online music stores demonstrates that people are prepared to pay for goods with a marginal cost of production; the success of torrent sites shows that people are also keen to o
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The Chinese legal system said Akmal Shaikh should be killed for drug smuggling. Despite this use of the legal system there, Britain found it necessary to protest.
So why should others not protest if we consider a law to be wrongly applied?
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Strange, many foreigners say the same about USians, glass houses and all that.
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I've known a few Italians. They've ranged from the compassionate, passionate, intelligent type to the oafish, selfish type.
Not particularly different to many other peoples.
There's a surprise.