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Is copyright infringement progress? I'm sure the plurk.com folks would not agree. Long live double standards.

by sfk 17y ago

philk 17y ago
I'd call heavily reduced costs of distribution progress. Ultimately (when the dust settles) it will mean that a greater proportion of your music dollar can go to artists who create songs and less to the intermediaries. Really, the idea that someone can write, produce and perform a song, upload and market it themselves and then either sell it to people across the globe or make money off extras (ie concerts, merchandise, etc) is unbelievably cool compared with what had to happen in the past.
tsally 17y ago
Did plurk sue a poor PhD student who downloaded 30 songs and win a judgement against them for almost $700,000? There's a right way and a wrong way to handle copyright infringement. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/o-tenenbaum-riaa-wins-675000-or-22500-per-song.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/o-tenenbaum-...
- sfk 17y ago
  This is a straw man. I primarily objected to the use of the word "progress" as a euphemism for "copyright infringement". It is fundamentally wrong to support one kind of infringement while condemning another. The damages awarded in the U.S. are completely out of hand and this needs to be addressed immediately, but that is a separate issue.
  - gloob 17y ago
    It is fundamentally wrong to support one kind of infringement while condemning another. I would disagree, actually. By way of comparison, most countries have multiple distinct crimes or not-crimes that "killing someone" can fall into: killing an enemy soldier in wartime is generally okayed, offing a fetus is okayed in many countries, killing someone by accident is (broadly speaking) manslaughter, and doing it intentionally (if it doesn't fall into one of the above categories) is murder. I don't see any terribly compelling reason why similar divisions couldn't be worked out for the copyright issue.
    - roc 17y ago
      It already was worked out. It was formerly separated out into theft, piracy and infringement and commercial and non-commercial variants. But the entrenched interests have been busily working and spending away to knock down those distinctions, because it prohibited their ability to utterly financially destroy an accused file-sharer to make an example to the others. The distinctions also weakened their attempted argument of conflating the morality and legality of personal sharing, format shifting and time shifting with commercial infringement and outright theft.
      - roc 17y ago
        Why exactly did that get downvoted? Is the No Electronic Theft Act that criminalized some non-commercial re-distribution not part of the public record? Is the RIAAs attempt to get the justice department pursue file-sharers under the No Electronic Theft Act not a published fact? Did the "Pirate Act" not seek to criminalize a broader group of non-commercial infringement? Did the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 not shift the burden of policing copyright from the copyright holder to colleges and universities under threat of withholding federal financial assistance for non-compliance? Do the leaked ACTA documents not show yet-another attempted expansion for treating file-sharing as a criminal act? Is the RIAAs legal strategy against peer-to-peer users not commonly known? It's not like I'm spinning conspiracy theories here. There are stacks of information in the public record about the content industry's push to remove the distinctions between commercial and non-commercial and civil and criminal infringement.

Is copyright infringement progress? I'm sure the plurk.com folks would not agree. Long live double standards.

by sfk 17y ago

Is copyright infringement progress? I'm sure the plurk.com folks would not agree. Long live double standards.

philk 17y ago

I'd call heavily reduced costs of distribution progress. Ultimately (when the dust settles) it will mean that a greater proportion of your music dollar can go to artists who create songs and less to the intermediaries. Really, the idea that someone can write, produce and perform a song, upload and market it themselves and then either sell it to people across the globe or make money off extras (ie concerts, merchandise, etc) is unbelievably cool compared with what had to happen in the past.

tsally 17y ago

Did plurk sue a poor PhD student who downloaded 30 songs and win a judgement against them for almost $700,000? There's a right way and a wrong way to handle copyright infringement. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/o-tenenbaum-riaa-wins-675000-or-22500-per-song.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/o-tenenbaum-...

sfk 17y ago
This is a straw man. I primarily objected to the use of the word "progress" as a euphemism for "copyright infringement". It is fundamentally wrong to support one kind of infringement while condemning another. The damages awarded in the U.S. are completely out of hand and this needs to be addressed immediately, but that is a separate issue.
- gloob 17y ago
  It is fundamentally wrong to support one kind of infringement while condemning another. I would disagree, actually. By way of comparison, most countries have multiple distinct crimes or not-crimes that "killing someone" can fall into: killing an enemy soldier in wartime is generally okayed, offing a fetus is okayed in many countries, killing someone by accident is (broadly speaking) manslaughter, and doing it intentionally (if it doesn't fall into one of the above categories) is murder. I don't see any terribly compelling reason why similar divisions couldn't be worked out for the copyright issue.
  - roc 17y ago
    It already was worked out. It was formerly separated out into theft, piracy and infringement and commercial and non-commercial variants. But the entrenched interests have been busily working and spending away to knock down those distinctions, because it prohibited their ability to utterly financially destroy an accused file-sharer to make an example to the others. The distinctions also weakened their attempted argument of conflating the morality and legality of personal sharing, format shifting and time shifting with commercial infringement and outright theft.
    - roc 17y ago
      Why exactly did that get downvoted? Is the No Electronic Theft Act that criminalized some non-commercial re-distribution not part of the public record? Is the RIAAs attempt to get the justice department pursue file-sharers under the No Electronic Theft Act not a published fact? Did the "Pirate Act" not seek to criminalize a broader group of non-commercial infringement? Did the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 not shift the burden of policing copyright from the copyright holder to colleges and universities under threat of withholding federal financial assistance for non-compliance? Do the leaked ACTA documents not show yet-another attempted expansion for treating file-sharing as a criminal act? Is the RIAAs legal strategy against peer-to-peer users not commonly known? It's not like I'm spinning conspiracy theories here. There are stacks of information in the public record about the content industry's push to remove the distinctions between commercial and non-commercial and civil and criminal infringement.