Australian Copyright Troll Rumored To Have Shut Down 67
An anonymous reader writes "Remember how a shadowy group arose a few months back with the promise of suing thousands of Australians for allegedly pirating movies? ... Well, it looks like the effort has bit the dust as quickly as it was kicked off, with the organization's vice president of sales and marketing leaving and its website shut down. Sounds like that bright future of mega-lawsuits for Internet piracy wasn't so bright after all."
Probably didn't help... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that lots of other jurisdictions around the planet have handed copyright and patent trolls their posteriors when they couldn't show actual proof they owned what they were suing over. SCO with their issues with Novell took the last vestiges of both the memory of the original SCO and of Caldera and ground them into a bloody pulp, and Righthaven recently hasn't done so well either.
I've maintained for a long time that if businesses that supply ideas want to get paid for their ideas, they need to charge the correct amount for them. As much as I dislike the movie industry for their incessant push for longer and longer copyrights, they do make it inexpensive to have movies in the home. New DVDs for $5.00 and new Blu-Ray for $10 are a no-brainer. The music industry still hasn't got it though, charging a lot more for CDs well past their release dates than they're worth. In the case of movies, they're still somewhat difficult to pirate given the size of files and the lossy formats, but the recording industry should have learned that pirating music for a megabyte a minute is a no-brainer for a lot of people, even if the formats are slightly lossy. They're probably still better than recording FM radio at 22KHz broadcast quality...
Unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
As I understand it, this organisation's purported plan was to attempt to sue copyright infringers by the innovative idea of actually following due process as required by Australian law - getting a court order to force ISPs to hand over the details of infringing customers and then attempt to extract money.
This is basically the same spectacularly unsuccessful [blogspot.com] process that the RIAA has been following in the USA.
iiNet, a major ISP over here that has been in the news a lot in copyright battles after getting taken to court by the media industry for bullshit like aiding and abetting copyright infringement (and winning) stated they were completely happy for this group to exist if that was their process, I assume because they knew it would be too expensive to be productive if they weren't able to get ISPs to just hand over customer details.
The whole thing seemed to be a lot of noise about nothing to me. Things like SOPA are much, much scarier to me as an Australian because it sounds like that will short-circuit the entire legal process - and given that we seem to inherit a lot of American IP laws, there's a real chance we'll cop it here.
Overpaid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably didn't help... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Overpaid (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses are in it to make money, and they will do their best to make as much money as possible. So they will charge a price as high as possible. If you think that movie is too expensive, don't go watch it, and the movie maker doesn't get anything. If you think that concert ticket costs too much, don't go watch it, and the concert organiser doesn't get anything.
Well maybe someone else thinks it's worth it, and will pay for it. And the concert organiser and movie theatre will charge a price where there are enough someones other than you that think it's worth the price to fill up the seats.
That you think it's overpriced doesn't mean it is overpriced, nor that they should lower prices.
Re:There's a time for silence (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it weird that if you steal a DVD from a store (get a physical disk, packaging, high quality) you get something like a $100 fine; yet when you download a film even if it was on TV the night before it apparently cost the movie industry tens of thousands.
Not suprised (Score:5, Insightful)
To keep the law is amazingly hard if people don't want to. It is rarely touched upon but the police heavily relies on the good will of the people its patrols else it will soon become clear how you can keep 99% down with far less then 1%. See Libya. Khadaffi and his sons looked more suprised then anything else at the end. WTF happened. And then he died at the hand of a pauper he didn't even know existed.
In Holland there was a recent story about the police not knowing what to do with the person who has been drink driving for 30 years. In Holland we have no 3 strike rule OR consecutive sentences. This means the entire punishment system is basically, don't do it again or we will have to ask you again.
This works... for those people that want to obey the laws (drink driving is dangerous for yourself and most people don't want to hurt other people) but not for those who don't. It doesn't really matter whether YOU consider a law just or unjust, if you don't feel like obeying it, you won't.
Try this, for the essential Godwin. Say you could travel back in time and kill Hitler. Would you? It is murder and you WILL die for it. Will you do it? Maybe you wouldn't but say your grandfather who did live through it, would he? Would he commit murder for say a pair of sneakers?
People have come to accept downloading content without paying for it as acceptable. Just as people wanting to travel back in time to kill X see it as acceptable to kill someone for a crime not yet committed. Because many of us have told ourselves that content creators are basically screwing us up the ass and the only way to get them back is to screw them back. By not paying. Voting with your dollars. It is hard to argue with this when for instance game companies seem so deaf to their customers.
Simple example. RPG type games and the invisible helmet option. It is a trivial thing to implement. A checkbox on the config screen that does or does not render the helmet so you can have the stats but also can see the face of the character you spent ages creating. Believe it or not but it matters to same sad people like me.
Any game coder who can confirm this? Oh hell, it ain't hard, kiddies on the net have implemented it within a few days of release with no toolkit. Skyrim is just the latest offender. And it is not as if they didn't have a warning. Dragon Age had the same problem AND again, it was users that had to fix it.
Hell Bethseda doesn't even SELL the collectors edition in my region. Just buying the regular edition instead will not send a signal to them. Neither will downloading the game but at least it saves me 40 bucks. They upset about me downloading. Me upset about NOT being able to spend a 140 bucks AND getting a buggy game with missing basic options that by now the industry should have figured out.
What all this ranting is supposed to lead to is that it is very hard to change peoples mind once they are made up. How many of you think it is okay to litter? Okay, most probably said no. How many of those smoke and do NOT throw their cigarette away whereever it damn well pleases them? Now, to clean up this pollution, each cigarette will have a 1 dollar charge added to it to clean up after your filthy addict ass. Agree?
No? But that is what the copyright charge on blank media is.
The only thing that charge did and a litter charge on cigarettes will do, is convince people they are now entitled to commit the offence they paid a fine for.
The cat is out of the bag and as any cat owner knows, it is impossible to put the cat back in.