Record Labels Sue Spanish P2P Pioneer For $20M 69
elguillelmo writes "Promusicae, the Spanish record industry association, has sued MP2P Technologies and its founder, P2P pioneer Pablo Soto, for $20 million, citing unfair competition. Soto is behind the recently launched Omemo, an open source social media storage platform that allows users to share files anonymously, and the MP2P protocol, among other developments. Soto announced the organization's intention to defend itself in a statement published on his blog (in Spanish, Google translation)."
TomTheGeek notes related news that Warner Brothers has admitted it employed one of the investigators in the case against the Pirate Bay founders. We discussed initial reports of this controversy last month.
Stupid legal system (Score:4, Insightful)
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Incidentally, John Walker pretty much foresaw this whole business in his 2003 document the digital imprimatur [fourmilab.ch].
It makes interesting reading to say the least and if his future view of the headwind for 'p2p' is correct this is really only just beginning.
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Re:Stupid legal system (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets say I'm on the right side of the case. Lets further say that I have a 90% chance to win. However, their legal fees total to 1 million dollars. That would bankrupt me. I won't fight the case, because even though the law and probability are on my side, I can't afford to lose that money. My upside is I win $0, my downside is -$1m, my average is -$100K.
Loser pays alone is not enough. You have to cap losses, or you have the situation where a little guy can never afford to pursue justice.
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The solution (Score:2)
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Unfair Competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that WE are controlling music distribution, (Score:3, Insightful)
There appears to be a great struggle going on between the four global music/film corporations and the thousands of technically advanced internet applications programmers over the ability to control (or to be more precise, the ability to remove controls) over the distribution of recordings of music and films.
Incredibly, the internet applications pro
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Royalty for mechanical licensing (Score:3, Insightful)
Intellectual property is fluid (Score:2)
The situation is fine as-is (Score:2)
The current situation is perfectly fine: people pay for experiences (e.g. movies, concerts) and physical copies (DVDs and CDs) whereas all shared digital information distributed over the internet or on disl or whatever is free. It's been this way for decades and has worked out just fine. Content producers just need to stop wasting their music fighting movie/music sharing and just accept it. There's nothing wrong with sharing.
The music, movie, video game, and book industries (to name a few) have not disa
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Basically what the technical elite want is to have free or nearly free access to all the media recorded products currently offered for sale by the big four.
That's not what I want at all. I want the music industry to keep operating, and I want it to be successful enough that the industry can take chances on indie artists and so there can be a wider variety of stuff available than there is now.
I want a return to the time when I could pay for a recording or for a movie and do whatever I want with it as long as I wasn't charging people to view it at my apartment or something like that. I want to be able to rip CDs and rip DVDs for personal use with no fear what
The real difference of digital property (Score:2)
The only way to control intellectual property in a digital format in the ways that you have described is to obtain it for free. The fact that this is illegal puts
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For the time being, the only way to control intellectual property in a digital format in the ways that you have described is to obtain it for free.
There. Fixed that for ya. We're winning, and we're gonna keep winning until the other side decides to abandon their antiquated business practices.
I'm not file sharing really, but I want those who are to not be prosecuted the way they are. I want the legal system to not be tampered with. I want the courts and the companies to both acknowledge that none of us are criminals.
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Do you have any facts to support this? I was under the impression that releases had been cut to a third of what they were in 2000.
give the P2P developers free access to media product in return for the P2P developers agreeing to limit the distribution of this product to only the people whom they consider to be 'cool'.
Uh, how about finding 'product' made by 'cool' people who won't sue you and not worrying ab
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Ok. When you've run empires in the past and fought wars with the British and the United States hundreds of years ago, you get the title of "developed" country no matter what your economy is like nowadays.
Re:Unfair Competition (Score:5, Informative)
When you buy recordable CDs you pay that 'canon' (which is more expensive than the CD). That way, you are free to have private copies of records.
The record industry associations have tested the legality of download music, and have lost. So they are testing new ways of being an asshole.
Re:Unfair Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because non-commercial copying is legal is Spain, so their media industry failed when they tried to claim it wasn't in court.
bucket full of crazy (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah sure (Score:1)
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Re:Yeah sure (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems pretty messed up that you can sue someone for being better than you.
Re:Yeah sure (Score:4, Informative)
The unfair competition from the Competition Law of the EU only applies to big companies and/or monopolistic companies. MP2P is neither. They don't even play in the market PROMUSICAE does.
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Um hypocritical much? (Score:2, Funny)
WHATDAFUX
What next? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Sorry little Timmy you ain't getting any Christmas presents
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The only person who benefits...the paper company who makes the darn check.
Bizaro World (Score:2, Redundant)
The opposite side of the "entitlement society"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Reaganites in the us (im sure every nation has their version of them in one extreme or another) wail on endlessly about the freeloaders who think they are "entitled" to welfare, while conveniently ignoring the elephant in the room.
Today's corporate controllers feel their companies not only have the right to exist, and therefore receive massive tax-payer bailouts the magnitude of entire state budgets, but think they have the right to profit. This is particularly blatant with the music and film industries world wide, who count a person's refusal to buy as "stealing" and characterize emerging business models as murderous.
oh snap! that home depot across the street just stole the revenue lowes was entitled from everyone who turns left off the exit instead of coming down the oncoming lane from the opposite side of the bridge!
A more convenient location for northbound and westbound travelers is an unfair competitive advantage! where is my anti-trust council!
Re:The opposite side of the "entitlement society". (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just the right to make a profit, but the right to ever-increasing profits. Used to be if a company's profit dropped, there would be soul-searching to see how they could change and adapt their methods and products to better suit the current economic situation, to more accurately meet consumers' needs, or to effectively compete against other companies. That has changed -- now, if the bottom line starts dropping, it's never the company's problem, it's all those outside forces that must be bullied, threatened, lobbied, bribed, or regulated into submission. "We've been doing it this way for X number of years, and we want to make sure that we can still do everything the same way, only keep making more and more money."
It's not just the record and film industries that see the Internet as a threat. Newspapers, magazines and other traditional media are running scared. Governments fear the notion of people actually forming and sharing their own opinions instead of being told what to believe, and corrupt governments and politicians fear their carefully obfuscated dirty laundry being hung out on the Net for all to see. As the Net grew in popularity, the initial corporate attitude was, "aw...how cute." Then it became, "hmmm.....how can we make a profit off this thing?" If they failed to do so, it then became "the Internet is evil and must be killed, or at least molded and shaped to serve OUR needs."
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The copyright system as I understand it is that, in exchange for publishing media into the public domain, you receive an exclusive right to distribute what you publish, protected under copyright law.
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Sonny Bono owns you (Score:3, Insightful)
The copyright system as I understand it is that, in exchange for publishing media into the public domain, you receive an exclusive right to distribute what you publish, protected under copyright law.
"Public domain"? It appears you misunderstand it. Nothing first published after the mid-1920s (US) or whose last surviving author died after the mid-1950s (Europe, Japan, Australia, and many other developed countries) will ever enter the public domain through expiration of copyright. The reason for this is successive legislative extensions of copyright, such as the Copyright Act of 1976 followed by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 and the Chastity Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 201
Double attack on P2P by the Spanish RIAA (Score:5, Informative)
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I dunno what definition of capitalism you have been given, but draconian copyright laws, government sponsored monopolies and harsh penalties for copying mus
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In Spain, SGAE, Promusicae and others (spanish RIAAs) are paid a percentage ('canon') of the price of storage devices: CDs, DVDs, printers, hard drives, cameras... in compensation for their hypothetical losses because of P2P.
Are cameras and printers commonly used for copyright violation? That to me says much: that they're really trying to prevent anyone who's not already in the content-creation industry from being able to enter.
Up next for taxation: paintbrushes and guitar strings.
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And for the cameras
Living in Spain myself, (Score:4, Interesting)
The prosecution is nonsense and will result in a null case, but their intention is to stop actions not by legal reason, but by legal intimidation (in Spain there is *fear* about speaking against the SGAE in public media, because of you can be sued easily). Many people do google bombing refering "http://www.sgae.es/?ladrones" [www.sgae.es] as a measure to protest against these "kind and polite organizations", so when you look for "ladrones" [google.com], they appear in the first place.
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Big hard drives = Piracy War Over! (Score:5, Insightful)
Check it out:
Assuming 1 aXXo movie = 700 MB, the average MP3 = 5 MB, and a $200 hard drive increases in capacity every 1.5 years (not unreasonable), then:
-5 years (2012) - Weâ(TM)ll have 7 Terabyte hard drives costing $200, capable of storing 9,643 Movies or 1.3 Million songs!!
-10 years (2017) - Weâ(TM)ll have 51 Terabyte hard drives costing $200, capable of storing 73,225 movies or 10.3 MILLION songs
-15 years (2022) - Weâ(TM)ll have a 389 Terabyte hard drive costing $200, that can store 556,000 Movies!!! or 77.8 Million songs (Is there even that many songs in the history of the world?!?!?)
-20 years (2027) - Weâ(TM)ll have a 2956 TERABYTE hard drive, costing $200, that can store 4.2 MILLION MOVIES or 590 MILLION MP3s!
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GAME *UCKING OVER!
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By 2030, we will have every movie and song in the world stored on our freaking wrist watches.
Re:Big hard drives = Piracy War Over! (Score:5, Insightful)
20 songs an hour
480 songs per day
175.200 songs per year
17.520.000 songs per century.
That is assuming you don't sleep, that you never listen to the same song twice, and that you never do anything but listen to songs. For music it has been game over for a long time... Movies probably have a decade or so left, but then they are fucked too.
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(and you don't even have to wait 15 years)
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But yeah, you're right.
On the Warner/TPB side note (Score:2, Interesting)
Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan on the matter:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsydsvenskan.se%2Fnojen%2Farticle331913.ece&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=sv&tl=en [google.com]
fat chance (Score:2)