EMI Sues Beatles Usurper Off the Net 358
blackest_k sends along a Wired piece on EMI's successful suit to get Beatles music off the Net. Here is the judge's ruling (PDF). "A federal judge on Thursday ordered a Santa Cruz company to immediately quit selling Beatles and other music on its online site, setting aside a preposterous argument that it had copyrights on songs via a process called 'psycho-acoustic simulation.' A Los Angeles federal judge set aside arguments from Hank Risan, owner of BlueBeat and other companies named as defendants in the lawsuit EMI filed on Tuesday. His novel defense to allegations he was unlawfully selling the entire stereo Beatles catalog without permission was that he — and not EMI or the Beatles' Apple Corp — owns these sound recordings, because he re-recorded new versions of the songs using what he termed 'psycho-acoustic simulation.' Risan faces perhaps millions of dollars in damages under the Copyright Act. And copyright attorneys said his defense was laughable and carries no weight."
Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Funny)
also known as the World's Largest Open Air Mental Institution.
P.S. Sorry, but you'll probably only get this if you've actually visited the place.
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Or Berkeley, California. Or Glastonbury Somerset (festival or no.) Or Blackrock.
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Insightful)
The crazy people in Berkeley wander around pushing shopping carts; the crazy people in Glastonbury sit in fields smoking pot. What is distinctive about Santa Cruz is its peculiarly high-functioning crazy people, like this guy, who are entirely divorced from reality, yet somehow manage to, for instance, run a record label.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. I suppose you are right. I have spent too much time in all of these places. What Glastonbury lacks is a University, or it would take some of the California tinge.
I like your nick. I wore a Homburg for years, when I was too young to carry it of, really. Now I am ageing, I suppose I could go for it, again - but the wife would not approve...
Do you know the minor-hit by Procol Harum? Or is that too Glastonbury/Berkeley :-)
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Funny)
As a native of the People's Republic of Berkeley, I will be organizing a march to protest this obvious attempt at profiling and oppression. Meanwhile - dude, I've got the munchies...are you going to finish those fries?
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And this is different from other people who run record labels how?
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:4, Informative)
"What, you mean I'm not allowed to point a camera in a certain direction and push the button?" (just because it happens to be pointed at a copyright painting?) "You mean it's illegal to pluck magnetic waves from the atmosphere and visualize them?"
Those all are legal.
What you are not allowed to do is redistribute the result. Then you have violated copyright.
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> Those all are legal.
Except in galleries and museums, of course.
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I live in Newark, NJ. I got you all beat on crazies.
I actually had a guy attempt to attack me with a canteen. A frickin' canteen!
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I live in Newark, NJ. I got you all beat on crazies.
I actually had a guy attempt to attack me with a canteen. A frickin' canteen!
Could've been worse. Could've been so much worse. [youtube.com] (My favorite "holy sh--!" moment in anime.)
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Yes. The water. Flowing from the springs which feed the Chalice Well, where Joseph of Aramithea conceal'd the Holy Grail. Where, still submerged, lies the Lady of the Lake, holding aloft a shining, scabbardless sword, her arm clad in pure white Samite.
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That is no basis for a system of government.
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Isn't that "leylines"?
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... or Washington, DC.
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:4, Funny)
No, no. The Capitol is enclosed.
Re:Santa Cruz, California (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize that it's only one data point, but having a crack smoking mayor reelected is pretty crazy.
Re:Crackpots (Re:Santa Cruz, California) (Score:5, Informative)
The SCO that operated in Santa Cruz is not the same SCO that sued IBM. The Santa Cruz Operation company came out with Xenix, SCO UNIX (OpenServer) and Unixware. They purchased Tarantella earlier this decade, and then sold off their Unix-related business to Caldera. As their primary business was now Tarantella, they changed names. Caldera then took over the SCO moniker eventually becoming The SCO Group. It was that company, formerly Caldera, that took on Novell, IBM, et al.
I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:2, Insightful)
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they think.
As for this guy in the article, it's pretty clear he was just trying to make a buck by ripping off the Beatles' music. I'm surprised that the judge didn't hand down a larger fine, actually. His "psycho-acoustic simulation
Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
Generalize much?
Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Funny)
Generalize much?
never.
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The $2 million dollar fines that RIAA has imposed upon several college students == a life sentence. That's how long it would take to earn the money to pay it off. So no, the previous poster was neither generalizing or exaggerating.
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Yeah, except not all debts are dischargeable via bankruptcy.
Not sure about court-levied fines in relation to civil cases like the RIAA's, but IIRC court judgments are not dischargeable.
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Parent post provides BAD bankruptcy information.
Judgments are not discharged. They still exist. However, the bankruptcy discharge enjoins the judgment holder from collecting on the judgment. The DEBT is discharged, not the judgment.
If the bankruptcy court finds that the conduct at issue was fraudulent or willful (or a few other things), then that debt won't be discharged.
Judgment liens are another story.
Another reason to ignore legal conclusions on /.----including this one. :)
Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:4, Interesting)
Aren't college students stereotypically poor already? Don't they have bad credit histories already? I don't see the point.
This might hold true for "poor" college students, but not college students in general. I went to college in my mid-to-late twenties, and had pretty good credit, a lot of my friends back then were also older than normal, and had decent pre-established credit (a lot of them being ex-military/GI Bill students). A lot of the younger college kids didn't qualify as poor either, the ones who were poor, were poor by bad spending and budgeting ("I need $x in loans because I can't eat, but I just went to see Radiohead on tour in London (from Arizona)")
Now, if they can't just erase the fines with a bankruptcy, that gives them less incentive than ever to stop file sharing. If they already have a life sentence, what more do they have to lose?
This isn't about the file sharers who get caught, this is about deterring the file sharers who didn't get caught. I doubt that the **AA really cares about the damages they receive from the people who are caught, they just want ALL file sharers to know "we will destroy you".
Think about it, if your a normal middle class American, and get stuck with a million dollar fine, how long would it take for you to realistically even pay off a fraction of it? I know people in their 40s (solidly middle class) who are still paying off student loans from the 70s, and these loans were vastly less than what the **AA is demanding.
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The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they think.
As for this guy in the article, it's pretty clear he was just trying to make a buck by ripping off the Beatles' music. I'm surprised that the judge didn't hand down a larger fine, actually. His "psycho-acoustic simulation" argument was laughable at best. Facepalm worthy, at least.
So, in your expert opinion, everyone involved is wrong?
Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? I know the dumbing-down of the modern media urges us to think in terms of black and white concepts, but there should be room for this. EMI are obviously evil copyright trolls, and this Hank Risan is equally obviously selling copyrighted material. Shakespeare (as always) has a good line for this:
"A plague on both your houses."
Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
Ray Beckerman (/.'s NYCL) is a copyright lawyer, and he doesn't think file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads. In fact he fights them tooth and nail.
But I would bet he would agree that this guy's defense is laughable.
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fixed that for you.
Re:I wouldn't listen to the naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they think.
What is legal or not, and what is right or not are often completely different. These lawyers may have some rather screwy ideas about the latter, but it's their job to have a very good understanding of the former. So when the former is what's under discussion, what they think probably should carry a bit of weight.
Worst headline EVAR (Score:5, Insightful)
The blame falls on the lurid headline over at Wired, which completely mischaracterizes the actual article. But it's Slashdot's fault for repeating it both in the headline here and in the summary.
For shame.
Re:Worst headline EVAR (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah call it "worst evar", "lurid", and "mischaracterizing", but do not try to explain *why* it is wrong, it's much more dramatic that way.
What kind of idiotic title is that anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me, or is EMI not suing the Beatles (half of which aren't even going to show up in court), but really some fuckwad that sold illegal copies of their songs?
np: Burial - Distant Lights (Various - 5 Years Of Hyperdub (Disc 2))
Re:What kind of idiotic title is that anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
The story is tagged badtitle when in fact it should be wrongtitle, or even better toostupidtomakeagoodtitle.
Re:What kind of idiotic title is that anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
that wasn't my title, actually its been completely rewritten by K Dawson, editors do a lot more than people think on here.
The site is still up and offers 160kb streaming of a good quantity of music for free and you can buy tracks at 25 cents each I believe and some remarkably high quality original recordings of some familiar tracks.
http://www.bluebeat.com/ [bluebeat.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Don't look at me like that - I already tagged it "stupidtitle" when it still was "in the mysterious future"...
np: Kode9 - 9 Samurai (Quarta330 Remix) (Various - 5 Years Of Hyperdub (Disc 2))
I'm sure in Santa Cruz, Ca it makes perfect sense (Score:3, Informative)
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Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also the sort of situation where having an ISP
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Re:Piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Ironically, those Bluebeat guys are the ones arguing for mandatory DRM [arstechnica.com] and suing all the music stores for using "inadequate DRM". A judge finds a company trying to promote their "unbreakable" DRM for copyright infringement.
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THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes.
Except for those of us who think that songs over 30 years old have already been STOLEN from the public domain. Or are you talking about the post-'79 Beatles?
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
but I can't imagine forcing things into the public domain for living authors.
Why not? That's the way it originally worked.
If we went back to the original system, if the authors want to earn more money after their copyrights expire, they would have to get up off of their asses and work some more, just like the rest of us have to. If they don't want to have to work later in life, they should put some of their current earnings into a 401k, like the rest of us have to.
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Why not? The original copyright terms in the U.S.did this. And since the purpose of copyright (at least in the U.S.) is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", it could be argued that lifetime copyrights are less useful in that promotion. If someone has the creativity, you don't want to give them incentives to create once and then sit on their laurels. You want to give them incentives to continue creating. Short c
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Yes, stolen by living authors! (Note the lack of ironic quotation - I mean stolen, quite literally).
What's been stolen are the extensions, not the original ownership.
The public had a deal, under the Constitution itself. We protect the person's copyright for X years. Not just by not violating it, but by paying costs to enforce protection as part of our taxes. After that, the work goes public, to benefit us, or at least our children, and their children and so on. Every time congress exte
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So you won't mind if your SSN, bank account number, or secret 'sheep sex' photos are taken?
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The first two - password type information, are not effectively culture - they occupy none of the same mental space that culture has traditionally been in society.
As for the last, if I shared it with one person, it would just be a breach of trust if they shared it further - I don't think I should be able to demand such things be stopped once they get out, any more than I could stop a rumour/gossip.
Re:Piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
GP says shouldn't, but equally important these days is the greater realization that it's "can't": See Streisand Effect [wikipedia.org]
And this is a key point: The internet is a giant copying and storage machine. Where the old systems may have made sense due to the difficulty and expense of publishing and disseminating information, the internet has in fact cleared the way for knowledge to be fairly universal. Where we had technological and financial barriers to which copyright may have been a viable solution we now only have an artificial barrier holding progress back.
I'm not sure I understand your assertion.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we won't have any ideas? That's a non-starter that ends the conversation.
Are you suggesting that without copyright we will have less ideas? There I'll challenge you for proof of your assertion.
Of course, maybe I've really not understood what conclusion you were working towards.
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Nope. Culture, information, we should never approve of shackles on these things. We should reject claims of ownership of ideas or data.
Overgeneralization maybe. Your words got carried away I presume. But I guess we can't hold you responsible for it since you should reject claim of ownership on your own words.
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No, they didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually RTFA, and Beatles music is still available in internet jukeboxes. What happened is some guy tried to twist copyright law in a foolish and illogical way, saying that resampled Beatles songs are his, and he actually registered copyrights of them. The judge PREDICTABLY and logically ruled against him. I'd have laughed him out of court.
EMI holds the real copyrights, sued, and won. The guy posting Beatles songs was clearly in the wrong. As is the summary.
The true evil here is that the Beatles' music should be in the public domain by now; they broke up in 1971, almost forty years ago. You should be able to reuse their art in your own art by now; that was, in fact, the whole purpose of giving Congress the power to write copyright law in the first place.
MRT's History (Score:4, Interesting)
The guy posting Beatles songs was clearly in the wrong.
I just wrote about this in my journal last night [slashdot.org] and would like to point out that Media Rights Technology (MRT, owners of BlueBeat.com) has a long history of neurosis when it comes to the legal system. Although not cross referenced above, you may recognize MRT as the very same people who sued everyone in 2007 for not implementing DRM [slashdot.org]. If you're Hank Risan, you've probably been asking yourself "How can I twist the law in a bizarre way to get rich quick?" And here we are.
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100% agree - This music was created before I was born and it won't be till after I'm gone that the copyright will expire.
THIS SERIOUSLY HAMPERS CREATIVITY AND MUSIC IN GENERAL. That's why people disrespect the music industry so much - they are too greedy.
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>> The true evil here is that the Beatles' music should be in the public domain by now; they broke up in 1971, almost forty years ago. You should be able to reuse their art in your own art by now; that was, in fact, the whole purpose of giving Congress the power to write copyright law in the first place.
yes, the moral defense is better than the technical one.
is anyone currently using the moral defense for work where copyright should have expired by now?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Surely Paul McCartney needs the continued royalties from the Beatles music so he can continue to finance large divorce settlements!
Re:No, they didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
If falls in the PD, then no one should be allowed to profit
That's possibly the dumbest interpretation of "public domain" I've seen here, and that's saying a lot. Here's a biscuit!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why should the US recognise British copyright? In fact, at first they didn't. But American publishers weren't publishing any American writers, since they could publish British writers without paying royalties. So they amended it to recognize foreign copyrights, but only to the extent they were protected by American copyright.
British copyright law holds no weight in the US, and US copyright law holds no weight in Britain. If you sell a Beatles song in the US, EMI isn't going to sue you in a British court und
What is PAS? (Score:2)
Seriously, the article uses the term several times, the summary uses the term...googling "psycho acoustic simulation" just brings up various regurgitations of the same article.
I realize that it's just some term the guy made up. But if he's going to use it as a defense, and people are going to talk about it, it seems *someone* should define it. Neither of the documents in the linked article have the text "psycho" in them, either, so that's a no go.
I just wanted to find out exactly how crazy the guy is, that'
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Since psychoacoustic is explicitly mentioned in regard to audio compression tech (like MP3) I think he just invented a term for "I ripped it to MP3"
Re:What is PAS? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the Bluebeat guys did something a bit more tricky. They compressed the music as MP3 (whch I guess is psychoacoustic simulation - after all, the MP3 was compressed by using psychoacoustic principles to reduce the data contained, producing a simulation of the original). But the trick they're using to get around copyright law was to embed images into it [arstechnica.com], turning it into an "audio-visual" work. There is a separation, because AV works (think movies) are one entity - you cannot copyright the sound part of a movie separately from the moving images part.
Of course, that defense must fail, otherwise Hollywood would be using music with aplomb instead of having to get licenses to it when they incorporate it into a movie or TV show. Many older programs are tied up from home viewing because licenses don't allow home video distribution, and are often edited to replace licensed works.
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I would guess that what was done was one of two things:
Mechanical production of a cover through some device that, on "hearing" a tune, would attempt to duplicate it in some analogue way, thus producing what would be, under some definitional frameworks, a cover rather than a reproduction.
Computer-driven replication of a file through means that are not exactly copying, e.g. churning over random generation of bits of data and comparison with the original (either direct or medium-specific, e.g. audio). Done wit
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Seriously, the article uses the term several times, the summary uses the term...googling "psycho acoustic simulation" just brings up various regurgitations of the same article.
I realize that it's just some term the guy made up.
Why do you think he was laughed out of court?
For Profit? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Yes.
Copyright has nothing to do with any "moral line", its a big goddamn scam to help people with lots of money keep their lots of money.
Cheers.
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This guy obviously knew he was doing something wrong and was trying to circumvent copyright law by claiming he held the copyright on Beatles song.
That is completely different from sharin' some songs with your friends.
See the difference?
Debugging (Score:3, Funny)
Publicity stunt? (Score:2)
I find it hard to believe that these guys actually thought they would get away with this in the long term. Claiming that their psycho-acoustic simulations are anything other than copies seems incredibly unlikely to fly. They may have thought it was sufficiently legally muddy that they could get away with it for long enough to make a bunch of cash before a judge stomped on them, but I'm thinking the whole thing might have been to generate publicity for the company. If so, they've certainly succeeded, made th
Procrastinating much? (Score:2)
Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lucy in the Sky with Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
If Timothy Leary was born a few decades later, he'd patent psychedelic trips. Then we'd be stuck in the bland 50's forever singing doo-wap tunes.
Sounds familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
A federal judge on Thursday ordered a Santa Cruz company to immediately quit selling Beatles and other music on its online site, setting aside a preposterous argument that it had copyrights on songs via a process called 'psycho-acoustic simulation.'
Who'd have thought it? Preposterous arguments from a Santa Cruz Organisation.
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
Psycho-acoustic simulation sounds like a real good pseudo-science.
It's what most of us call mp3 or m4a.
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:4, Insightful)
But EMI don't own the particular soundwaves which comprise the Beatles' songs. Instead they own the very idea of these songs. EMI has sole and total ownership over the platonic ideals of which any particular instance of a Beatles song is merely a shadow. This ideal encompases any sound resembling the songs, any text resembling their lyrics, any album cover resembling theirs, any musical notes close enough to a Beatles tune.
In a very real sense, EMIs ownership of this music is analogous to them owning the number 537. A platonic ideal. No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it. They own it now, and will probably own it in perpetuity, for the rest of eternity.
So which is crazier; this guys argument or the concept of copyrighted music itself?
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it.
That's not entirely true. US Copyright law carves out some "compulsory licensing" exceptions that copyright holders are obligated to accept particular amounts of payment on and cannot deny permission. Web radio, for example. Mechanical reproduction for another (cover bands, etc). Which I believe may have been the exception this guy was going for, by trying to ride the fine line of what constitutes a new recording of the work. Even the makers of Guitar Hero did this (albeit in a much more legal way, by actually playing and rerecording the songs), and resulted with what sounded to the amateur as identical to the originals.
So this guy's idea wasn't necessarily *crazy*, just too close to literal duplication for this judge's taste (seems even the legal system applies some common sense now and then).
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Considering the old copyright case where you had "Achy Breaky Heart" and "Achy Breakin Heart" many, many years ago...
If you added backmasking, or subliminal messages to an audio recording, does that count as altering the work significantly enough to make it your own? If that's what psycho-acoustic stimulation is, he might have more of a case than we thought.
Or that could be what the Abby Road album told me when I played it backwards...
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
Why, why, why must people who might otherwise help argue the case that today's copyright is broken spoil their credibility with exageration and mis-statement of facts?
1 - Not every person on Earth benefits from public domain music. Some are too damned busy trying to remain alive.
2 - The Beatle's copyrights do not funnel every penny made off of sale of their music to the surviving band members.
Yes, their music should be out of copyright by now. You'd be a greater help to the cause of copyright reform that would make that happen by sticking to reality and sounding like you've thought the issue through, than by spouting off feel-good numbers that make it sound like you're wearing blinders so you can reach the conclusion you want.
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:4, Funny)
P.S.
>>>1 - Not every person on Earth benefits from public domain music.
Strawman argument. I didn't say "every person". I said 6 billion, but the actual population is much higher than that, so I did not include "every" person in my first statement.
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for supporting my viewpoint that copyright has been hijacked. It's meant to benefit the originators of the idea, not suits that were not even born when the songs were first created.
Actually, that's incorrect. Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection". The people pushing copyright were the publishers [wikipedia.org], who wanted copyright to benefit themselves (which is exactly what we have right now.) The whole "think of the artists" stuff is propaganda invented to create support for copyright from artists and "average" people.
Before copyright, artists considered it a complement that their work was replayed and enjoyed by others.
This, of course, doesn't make the hoarding of our cultural works and the impingement on free expression right, but I just wanted to point out that it was never meant to protect artists, only publishers.
Absoute Nonsense, Modded Up To +5 (Score:3, Informative)
Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection"
Too often and too easily the geek rewrites history to serve his own needs:
In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers--but only if their countries reciprocated.
T
Re:Maybes its a good time for them to get on iTune (Score:5, Informative)
It was not, giving 28 year terms of copyright to a populace that would live only 35 on average.
Statistics. You fail it.
If you have 1000 people, 500 of which died before they reached one year, and 500 of which die when they're 70, what is the average life expectancy?
In that time period, most adults lived into their 60's, not mid-thirties. The "35 year lifespan" is a garbage statistic spouted by people who don't understand math.
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>>>So listen up: don't proclaim the 1790 act was "sane"
Last time I checked I'm neither a slave nor a serf, which means my mouth is not your property. And I'm not obligated to follow your orders, creamwobbly. I can say whatever I want, thank you very much, and in MY opinion the original 28 year span was a reasonable length of time. Furthermore...
None of us engineers, programmers, or other laborers get a multi-decade monopoly over our creations.... we get paid an hourly rate, then we get la
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I agree that copyright should be reduced, but you lost me when you said:
If you are a programmer, you have the choice to write code, copyright it, and make money on it for as long as it is relevant.. mind you that's probably not decades, but it's also not an hourly rate then "No more money."
Just because you choose "work for hire" doesn't mean that's the only choice out there.
Re:Heh Heh (Score:4, Funny)
It's pretty yellow of EMI to submarine this guy out of the blue like that. It's going to be a hard days night for this guy in the future. Ask me why! Because! He told EMI to come and get it.
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It would have been better if EMI had said we can work it out. I'm sure he wouldn't mind being a day tripper or working 8 days a week. But now since that ruling yesterday, he may be thinking that happiness is a warm gun. Personally I know that money can't buy me love, but he may still need some help!
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Bad boy.
Perhaps they'll take the long and winding road (Score:2)
down to Penny Lane and see Elanor Rigby.
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Soon they will patent greed.
What !!!! It's not patented yet !??!
Off I go...
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Bad news for you: Prior Art.
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Slashdot editors,
please slow down with the new topics, poor Anonymous Coward keeps missing his shot at first post.
Signed,
Nobody really cares about first post.
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I just insert random pauses in recordings and call them "RealNetworks Remix".