First Three-Strikes Copyright Court Case In NZ Falls Over 80
Bismillah writes "The 'Skynet' anti-filesharing law introduced last year in New Zealand is starting to bite, with people being hauled in front of the Copyright Tribunal by the music industry after receiving three notices. Of the three Copyright Tribunal cases to be heard currently, the first one's just been dropped. Why? Nobody knows. RIANZ isn't saying. Interesting things: the accused was the ISP account holder, a student sharing a place with others who also used the Internet connection. The cost of the five songs downloaded is NZ$11.95 but RIANZ wanted NZ$1,075.50 because it estimated the music was shared/downloaded 90 times in total. A high deterrent penalty of NZ$1,250 was also asked for."
"Making available" is faulty logic (Score:5, Insightful)
That line of reasoning only works if this one guy is the only person they're going to punish for the filesharing. i.e. Once he's fined, the other 90 people who downloaded songs are free and clear, since the punishment for sharing 90 songs has already been meted out.
If instead they're also planning to go after the 90 others who downloaded the song, and slap them with fines for it being downloaded 90 times, then they're effectively fining for 90*90 = 8100 songs being illegally downloaded. Clearly erroneous since it was only downloaded 90 times.
That's what this boils down to. Either fine each filesharer for a single download (the copy the downloaded for themselves). Or fine one filesharer for all the downloads, but in the process give up your rights to prosecute the other filesharers. The "making available" argument is so mathematically nonsensical it can fabricate fines for billions of downloads when there were in fact fewer than 100,000 downloads.
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YOu have exposed t heir desire to have their cake and eat it too.
They know damn well they'd be double dipping.
Re:"Making available" is faulty logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Double dipping is nothing.
This is exponential dipping.
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Shockingly low fine (Score:1)
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or fine everyone, even people who didn't download it and we're never run out of hookers and blow!
Re:"Making available" is faulty logic (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yar!
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With no media, where would you put it?
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Hard drives. Apparently that is not considered blank media yet.
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Depends where you live.
In my country hard drives fall under the same regulation as the blank CDs/DVDs/memory sticks and so on.
So there's no way that you can create something and not paying the "pirate" tax.
Re:"Making available" is faulty logic (Score:5, Interesting)
free license to pirate
For the record, you may refer to this as a "Letter of Marque" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque). Also, if you are pirating with the blessing of your Government (say, because you paid a tax to do so), you may officially refer to yourself as a "Privateer" (official pirate).
This posting removes a moderation, but education of slashdot on the subject of the patriotic/profitable practice of Officially-Sanctioned Vessels/Crews for Stealing is a worthy cause.
Re:"Making available" is faulty logic (Score:5, Funny)
I love the fact this education was brought to you by SunTzuWarmaster
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I only see a problem with this if you're *not* a rent seeking industry organization or an artist with an incredible sense of entitlement.
If you're not one of those, then your opinion doesn't really matter, does it?
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That's criminal liability, not civil. In civil court the objective is supposed to be making the defendant whole.
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You're applying logic to greed. Don't bother.
I blame all the greed in this case on RIANZ, what I don't understand, is how a court justifies using those logs as evidence. The technology simply doesn't exist to track things like that reliably. Especially when you're trying to legally cheat someone out of their life savings.
Even DNA based evidence isn't always accurate, and when it's used, it's for something like rape or murder.
I think these judges, should be rotated, once in a while to have all kinds of cases
Re:"Making available" is faulty logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if they were going to go after this one person, how many casual torrenters have a ratio of 90:1?
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That's assuming they were even going by a ratio.
What if they just went by the number of peers that connected and downloaded a part?
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That line of reasoning only works if this one guy is the only person they're going to punish for the filesharing. i.e. Once he's fined, the other 90 people who downloaded songs are free and clear, since the punishment for sharing 90 songs has already been meted out.
It doesn't work that way. They BOTH broke the law. Just because one person paid, doesn't been the ones who downloaded shouldn't be punished. Of course they should be punished, but not pay restitution, as that has already been paid.
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Have another read of the comment you replied to.
If they all broke the law, then they should all be penalised, true - but they should only be penalised for what they actually did. Charging one person for the crime that 90 other people did is not fair - they should all be charged equally since he and all the 90 others effectively committed the same crime.
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You're missing the point.
The point is that either everyone should be penalized for ONLY what they did, or the crime should be penalized only once, for all.
It is merely an argument against double-dipping, not saying that criminals shouldn't be punished at all.
Re:"Making available" is faulty logic (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about New Zealand, but generally speaking, it is uploading that is illegal, not downloading.
In the offline world, if someone is selling dodgy CDs at a car boot sale, it is the person selling them that gets prosecuted, not the customers.
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The offline world is irrelevant. This is p2p. How many different people uploaded parts of the file to the same person? There is double dipping going on here even if you just take into account the uploading, and it's quite difficult to prove a single thing.
Why they allow copyright holders to 'estimate' is beyond me.
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As someone in New Zealand, my understanding of the law is that it can only be used against someone who is downloading copyrighted material for the purpose of making it available to others. In other words, if we watch something on YouTube we're not going to get snapped, but instead the law is going after P2P specifically. I would hazard a guess that if you're not uploading (or you're avoiding popular songs/movies that are more likely to be tracked), you probably won't show up on their radar. But, IANAL. :
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Estimated? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, yeah we only caught him stealing one apple, but we estimate he took a bag of gold - that we can't proof ever existed.
aws n ew ealand! (Score:1)
lashdot eeds ew ditors!
nomenclature error (Score:2)
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You're showing a lack of knowledge of crumpets.
A wide is where the bowler screws up and, if the fielders screw up too (or the bowler really screwed up), the runners might run anyway. There are three ways to get out in cricket: the ball is caught off the bat, the ball hits the stumps (either because the batsman failed to block the ball as thrown by the bowler, or thrown/touched by any other fielder while the batsman is outside the wicket), or the ball (when thrown by the bowler) hits the batsman's leg, but o
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Methods of getting out in Cricket: Laws 30 to 39
Bowled
Timed out
Caught
Handling the ball
Hitting the ball twice
Hit wicket
Leg before wicket
Obstructing a fielder
Run out
Stumped
A "wide" in simplest terms is when the ball is bowled so far to the side or above the wicket that batsman is denied a reasonable opportunity to score.
In other use: "The Slashdot Editor's life looks like being called a wide".
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You're showing a lack of knowledge of crumpets.
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Calvinball is even stranger than I remember.
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That makes perfect sense. Just a few things....
What's a bowler, stumps, batsman, or a fielder?
What game are you even talking about?
Not in the US, at least. (Score:2)
In the US, this wouldn't be a risk, because all of your strikes will be taken care of by your ISP. Who also just happens to probably be one of the major copyright holders and proponents, themselves. And your accusation, guilt, and penalty will all be taken care of conveniently and easily by your ISP. No need to involve those pesky legal systems, beginning with re-educating you with copyright propaganda classes and ending with restricted or no internet access.
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Which is nice because as a private business your ISP already reserves the right to refuse service for any or no reason.
Even if you're completely innocent, the ISP's legal department will put pressure on customer service to let your strikes stick anyway simply to save themselves paperwork dealing with copyright interests.
Key point: Your ISP is a private business and is not obligated to be fair.
They won't bother standing up for your rights. It's much more convenient for them to take the path of least resist
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In theory, yes.
In practice, they will cut off your internet access for even THREATENING to sue them (standard all your base tos clauses), and their pockets are so deep that you'd have an uphill battle and probably go bankrupt first.
The US legal system is rigged to give lawyers preferential access to piggy backing on mankind's natural tendency to be greedy. By forcing you to pay for your own lawyers, they make it lucrative for people to steal from you as long as it's less than the cost of going to court ove
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Problem with this logic is that it assumes that piracy is only practiced by a small percentage of customers.
Once you hit 10% of your customers being 86'd (by SOC#, credit card num, etc.) it will start to affect the bottom line far more than the copyright interests would.
Put it this way... once 50% of your society is in prison, do you really have a society left?
How About (Score:2, Interesting)
What about a P2P system that allows (not requires) the user to keep a log of successful downloads of a song or movie, and his/her share of it? For example, if I run a Bitorrent client and someone downloads ten chunks out of 100 of a Michael Jackson song, my client would log 10% distribution of that song. At the end of the month I could make a donation to the artist in the amount equal to the price of their song on iTunes/whatever multiplied by the number of downloads and the fraction thereof. If a user coul
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You are crazy if you think artists get even 10% of the revenue of the labels...
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isn't the upload ratio 1 (Score:2)
Sorry at the end of the day isn't the upload ratio 1
Missing the point(s) (Score:5, Insightful)
why does this conversation look like a bunch of chickens discussing the finer points on the morality of being fricasseed?
Let's get this straight. The recording industry is interested in the executives of the recording industry. All others can snack on feces and die.
They will make money in the process if they can, but that's not important and its not the point.
The point is to make huge public example of a few people who will be so horribly mauled by the corporation that nobody will ever think of making that mistake.
The intention is to create a system that allows a vanishing few to own and control most or all IP to the point that you will have no freedom to hum to yourself without an executive somewhere getting paid.
This is about control, and ultimately the control of thought. This is about an entitled few who believe its their birthright to milk the entire human race dry.
Are we now clear about what is actually happening?
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I don't see what's so funny about this.. It's so blatantly true.
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Yes, and the public is far too accepting of their high handedness, and too credulous of their propaganda. It's amazing what the public takes lying down: speed traps, parking meters, red light cameras, outrageous bank fees, obnoxious high pressure debt collection practices, reversed or ignored cancellations of monthly services and subscriptions (AOL did a lot of that), slamming, cramming, pages and pages of fine print, purposely confusing terms and fees, surveillance, and more.
Many local businesses are m
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Oh they're lions all right. Per the National Geographic discovery a couple of decades ago. Statistically, lions eat carrion more frequently than jackals do, and consequently hunt much less. It took a lot of night camera work to find out, but it's true.
The analogy is more than apropos.
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Good thing then that's it's not what is 'actually happening'. Most certainly it is what they are trying to do but they are saturninely getting their ass kicked by the internet. Not that we can sit back and relax but those arse holes will never ever stop trying until they are all finally locked up for being the corrupt douches they are. There is a legislation and political war going on and on one side is the end of freedom of speech and civil liberties and the other side is the fight to retain these most im
Recording Industry - Stop stealing from everyone! (Score:5, Interesting)
Greetings and Salutations;
I have to say that I am glad that the case failed, and, with luck many more will too. The only people that will get nailed by these enforcement measures are, I fear, the naive and (mostly) innocent youth who are not the soulless thieves engaging in the wholesale business of selling copies of the music without passing royalties along to the artists (and, yes, I do include the recording industry in general in that latter category). IN America, the RIAA did, at one time, provide a useful service at a reasonable price to an artist. However, like many organizations, it has evolved to being in the business of getting as much money as possible from the consumer, and, giving as little of it as possible to the artists that provide its life-blood. Speaking of which...thanks to the creative accounting practices of the RIAA, a given artist might expect a royalty rate of 10% to 20% on an album, but, the actual rate never climbs over 2.75%. A quick search turns up a number of detailed articles about how this works....
But, I digress - so back to copyright infringement... If the recording industry had not spent the past several decades inhaling stupid gas by keeping its head firmly planted in its ass, it would realize that there are some simple steps that it could take to make everyone in the process richer and happier. I would propose these changes:
1) drop all chasing after individuals, and, go after the companies that do wholesale duplication and flood the market. Frankly, the recording industry's record of suing college students, grandmothers, and, 6 year old girls for mountains of money is not doing anything positive for them. It is not making the purchasing public think "wow...they are really standing up for the artists! I WILL buy that new album for full retail!", nor, is it actually causing a drop in copyright violations or filesharing.
2) Seriously reconsider the cost of a CD. One of the major reasons that filesharing happens is that few people are interested in paying $25+ for a recording that might have one or two good tracks on it.
3) Continuing that thought...stop producing mindless, shallow and mind-numbingly boring albums. I, over the years, have bought quite a few albums. One of the criteria I use to decide if I am going to spend my hard-earned money on the recording is the question - can I tell what track is being played? If I have an album where there are a dozen tracks, all of which sound identical to each other...I probably will pass on that recording. Now, here, part of the problem does lay at the feet of the artists. I think that they have realized that it is all about money, and that the music means nothing. This has depressed their creativity so much that they are phoning in the performances. However, I also believe that if given positive feedback, in the form of fan appreciation, and cash, they might well get that spark back.
4) realize and accept the fact that file sharing, rather than depriving the company of profit, is the best and cheapest advertising that they could get. The best salesman in the world is the person who has personal experience with the music, and, is pushing it to their friends. When Napster was new, and still legal, the recording industry pushed to kill it by claiming it was the reason that CD sales were down by 15-20%. Well, independent polls showed that people were using it to sample a new artist's music, and, more often than not would go out and purchase that artist's CDs if they liked it. At the time, I was in a fair number of chat rooms, and, I always made it a point to ask how folks were using Napster. About 1 person out of 100 said they were using it to get as much music for free and they had no intention of buying any more CDs. The remaining 99% were using it as a s
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...Continuing that thought...stop producing mindless, shallow and mind-numbingly boring albums. I, over the years, have bought quite a few albums. One of the criteria I use to decide if I am going to spend my hard-earned money on the recording is the question - can I tell what track is being played? If I have an album where there are a dozen tracks, all of which sound identical to each other...I probably will pass on that recording. Now, here, part of the problem does lay at the feet of the artists. I think that they have realized that it is all about money, and that the music means nothing. This has depressed their creativity so much that they are phoning in the performances. However, I also believe that if given positive feedback, in the form of fan appreciation, and cash, they might well get that spark back.
While I appreciate and agree with your feedback here, let me expound a bit on this particular problem. The music industry does not go after "artists" anymore. They go after brand names. Pretty boy toys and pedo-riffic little girls that they can dress up and whore out and slap their face on every piece of product they can, which most products have absolutely nothing to do with music. Oh and speaking of music, let's touch briefly back on that. You want to save music? Start by making autotune illegal, an
And pay the artists! (Score:1)
One of the main reasons I refuse to buy new albums is that in most cases, I know only a few pennies of my money goes to the artist; I attend live shows & buy t-shirts at them instead. This article [negativland.com] is the best I've seen for detailing the matter.
In fact, tonight I'm seeing an older artist called Les Chambers in concert that, despite being the lead singer for a couple of hits that have been used all over the friggin' place since the 60s, was never paid any royalties [facebook.com], even ended up homeless for a while (I
easy solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't buy and don't copy/share/p2p/whatever major label music. There are a lot of musicians that distribute their music outside those channels - on jamendo for example. Look for what you like, get a legal, drm-free download and please: donate where you know the money actually ends up with the musicians. Just let the major labels die. Don't give them money or even attention (e.g. by sharing songs by artists in their thrall).
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Karma is irrevelant and pointless.
It's not worth the potential problems of having yet another account on yet another site.
If the statement or opinion is good. It will stand on it's own. Logged in or not.
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However suit yourself, a person's identity is their own resource.
This is the result of the paper for oil economy (Score:2)
Getting Off Easy (Score:2)
If they're only asking for a total of ~2400$NZ it would probably be less to just settle the case than to go through the whole trial and legal nonsense of it. Compared to the ~7,000,000$US that some cases over here have demanded of people for the same offense, it's a pretty good deal for getting busted when you pirate music.