... if you beat up a video store clerk and steal some real, actual copies of a film on DVD or VHS.
I'm not standing up for the crime, but isn't the punishment supposed to match it?
Great analogy, except that you're comparing the ACTUAL time you would probably get for a crime to the MAXIMUM time you could get for another crime. The MAXIMUM punishment for felony aggravated assault and felony robbery would probably be about 30+ years, depending on the state. Why do people on slashdot have such trouble co
30+ years? Excellent. I'm glad punks that beat up on store clerks can potentially get that kind of punishment, but tell me how often that happens in practice.
Someone steals $500 from a convenience store, they're not going to go down for 30 years. They'll get a few months and then maybe 12 months of probation.
Sitting in a cinema with a camcorder should not be punishable by any prison time. It is not a violent act, it makes nobody rich, it isn't going to fund any drug cartel. It is a simple civil violat
It depends on which state. A lot of states now have on the 2nd or 3rd felony conviction you get life. That's one of the reasons they have built so many prisons the past decade or so, and why we have such a high inmate population as a percentage of the entire population
Laws and crimes and what gets emphasized are entirely random now. for instance, we have multi millions of illegal immigrants. People who jump the border have committed a felony, yet it is almost universally ignored, they are allowed to live freely almost anyplace inside the US. At best if they find a huge group of them near the border they'll just be shipped back over, they rarely serve any jail time. We also have laws that make hiring an illegal immigrant a federal crime, with a 10,000$ fine per incident, but you never hear much of any arrests in those cases, even though the practice is blatant.
There's more, that's just a blatant example. Law enforcement is political, it's not any sort of even or fair, it's whatever the elite class wants that season. They give the orders, their enforcers click heels and jump to it. If they are ordered to ignore certain crimes, they will do so, even if they are aware of them.
I am not pro criminal, I just think the laws are terribly skewed and not enforced fairly across the board, and we have a variety of laws on the books now that are just ridiculous and shouldn't even be there. The US has a growth industry of gradually adding to laws that make more of the lower and middle classes "criminals". I think it's planned that way, to make a two class society eventually, technofeudalism. They are also apparently destroying as much of the middle class job structure as they can. Any job they can find that is exportable they will, any job that they can't exported they will import millions of illegals or too many legals to take those jobs. It's so completely obvious I won't even debate it with any debunkers now, the stats and realities are all over. It's been slow but verifiably steady, and the numbers increase yearly. Part of the plan, command and control, the same old dodge the old aristocrats have always pulled down through the ages.
As to recording in the cinema? I could care less, I've been boycotting movies for awhile now, and paid for music, I just quit. If a movie is free to copy, I might buy it. I have two here I got that the producer lets people make copies of. Music, again, if it's free over the radio by putting up with ads I occassionaly listen, but besides that, don't buy any-new. Used I will buy, it's just recycled, and the producers don't make another penny on it, but some guy at a yard sale will so I don't care, but even then not too much, a few examples of each a year. I even quit buying from the new but marked down bins, stopped that last year.
I think if enough people will stop placing so much importance on "entertainmnerts" of that sort, we'll see more sane pricing and reduce any demand for copying for profit. it's all I can do, tell people to boycott movies and music and professional sports and television fiction. it's gotten so ridiculous expensive it's stupid, and the time wasting aspects of it are lost to the wasters, I think in a lot of cases they don't realise how absuerdly addicted they get to it to the detriment of other more important things our society ignores too much. When you can get several million people in one weekend to go drop tens of millions of dollars all over the country to watch some new movie, with thousands in any random city you pick, and the same city can't get two dozen people to a community meeting to discuss local judicial corruption or the next multi million dollar school budget, etc, well, there's something wrong there in *general terms*. IMO anyway.
Rome when it was collapsing had it's bread and circuses to keep the people amused and occupied so they wouldn't pay attention to the rot that was collapsing their society around them.. We have the same thing now but people don't like to think they are droned out barbarians addicted to bread and circuses amusements.
Videotaping a movie in the theater isn't an important crime. The real crime is in thinking that any random movie is worth copying at all in the first place, and the victims get self judged and self sentenced, even though most of them don't think of themselves as victims. It's the same with TV now. years ago I was a fiend for TV, but then I noticed I was watching crappier and crappier shows, and wasting more and more time with it. I stopped it almost entirely now and don't miss it a bit. I certainly am not going to blow thousands on setting up a home entertainment center just to watch mostly mind dulling "entertainment".
So people now who want to risk making a lame copy of an overly expensive lame movie will get huge fines and jail time. Solution should be obvious, put hollywood so out of business they radically restructure, and get dropped way down the que of what we as a society consider important enough to make those people multi millionaires, and to make that industry hundreds of billions a year when so many other important efforts have to go scrambling for interest, funds, support, etc.. We do it to ourselves, this latest law is just an extension of that from so many people thinking those sorts of products are truely valuable.
You'd get less time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not standing up for the crime, but isn't the punishment supposed to match it?
Sickening...
Re:You'd get less time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not standing up for the crime, but isn't the punishment supposed to match it?
Great analogy, except that you're comparing the ACTUAL time you would probably get for a crime to the MAXIMUM time you could get for another crime. The MAXIMUM punishment for felony aggravated assault and felony robbery would probably be about 30+ years, depending on the state. Why do people on slashdot have such trouble co
Re:You'd get less time... (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone steals $500 from a convenience store, they're not going to go down for 30 years. They'll get a few months and then maybe 12 months of probation.
Sitting in a cinema with a camcorder should not be punishable by any prison time. It is not a violent act, it makes nobody rich, it isn't going to fund any drug cartel. It is a simple civil violat
Rome (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws and crimes and what gets emphasized are entirely random now. for instance, we have multi millions of illegal immigrants. People who jump the border have committed a felony, yet it is almost universally ignored, they are allowed to live freely almost anyplace inside the US. At best if they find a huge group of them near the border they'll just be shipped back over, they rarely serve any jail time. We also have laws that make hiring an illegal immigrant a federal crime, with a 10,000$ fine per incident, but you never hear much of any arrests in those cases, even though the practice is blatant.
There's more, that's just a blatant example. Law enforcement is political, it's not any sort of even or fair, it's whatever the elite class wants that season. They give the orders, their enforcers click heels and jump to it. If they are ordered to ignore certain crimes, they will do so, even if they are aware of them.
I am not pro criminal, I just think the laws are terribly skewed and not enforced fairly across the board, and we have a variety of laws on the books now that are just ridiculous and shouldn't even be there. The US has a growth industry of gradually adding to laws that make more of the lower and middle classes "criminals". I think it's planned that way, to make a two class society eventually, technofeudalism. They are also apparently destroying as much of the middle class job structure as they can. Any job they can find that is exportable they will, any job that they can't exported they will import millions of illegals or too many legals to take those jobs. It's so completely obvious I won't even debate it with any debunkers now, the stats and realities are all over. It's been slow but verifiably steady, and the numbers increase yearly. Part of the plan, command and control, the same old dodge the old aristocrats have always pulled down through the ages.
As to recording in the cinema? I could care less, I've been boycotting movies for awhile now, and paid for music, I just quit. If a movie is free to copy, I might buy it. I have two here I got that the producer lets people make copies of. Music, again, if it's free over the radio by putting up with ads I occassionaly listen, but besides that, don't buy any-new. Used I will buy, it's just recycled, and the producers don't make another penny on it, but some guy at a yard sale will so I don't care, but even then not too much, a few examples of each a year. I even quit buying from the new but marked down bins, stopped that last year.
I think if enough people will stop placing so much importance on "entertainmnerts" of that sort, we'll see more sane pricing and reduce any demand for copying for profit. it's all I can do, tell people to boycott movies and music and professional sports and television fiction. it's gotten so ridiculous expensive it's stupid, and the time wasting aspects of it are lost to the wasters, I think in a lot of cases they don't realise how absuerdly addicted they get to it to the detriment of other more important things our society ignores too much. When you can get several million people in one weekend to go drop tens of millions of dollars all over the country to watch some new movie, with thousands in any random city you pick, and the same city can't get two dozen people to a community meeting to discuss local judicial corruption or the next multi million dollar school budget, etc, well, there's something wrong there in *general terms*. IMO anyway.
Rome when it was collapsing had it's bread and circuses to keep the people amused and occupied so they wouldn't pay attention to the rot that was collapsing their society around them.. We have the same thing now but people don't like to think they are droned out barbarians addicted to bread and circuses amusements.
Videotaping a movie in the theater isn't an important crime. The real crime is in thinking that any random movie is worth copying at all in the first place, and the victims get self judged and self sentenced, even though most of them don't think of themselves as victims. It's the same with TV now. years ago I was a fiend for TV, but then I noticed I was watching crappier and crappier shows, and wasting more and more time with it. I stopped it almost entirely now and don't miss it a bit. I certainly am not going to blow thousands on setting up a home entertainment center just to watch mostly mind dulling "entertainment".
So people now who want to risk making a lame copy of an overly expensive lame movie will get huge fines and jail time. Solution should be obvious, put hollywood so out of business they radically restructure, and get dropped way down the que of what we as a society consider important enough to make those people multi millionaires, and to make that industry hundreds of billions a year when so many other important efforts have to go scrambling for interest, funds, support, etc.. We do it to ourselves, this latest law is just an extension of that from so many people thinking those sorts of products are truely valuable.