Posted on 05/21/2012 7:49:30 PM PDT by ETL
Excellent point. Plus, downloads don't directly correlate to sales, because the vast majority that would pirate the music would never buy a copy if that's they only way they could obtain it. They pirate it, because it's free. This student didn't cause $675,000 in actual damages. No way. They're making an example out of him by fining him into debt slavery for life. I don't care what the law says here. This is not justice.
Surveys of the real world often show that to be untrue, unless the bootlegs are sold to others as though they were official recordings when they are not -- that would definitely rob the artist of royalties on a sale. People who are pirates for private consumption now, if they could not pirate, would more than likely record the pieces they would have pirated off the radio instead (this is legal to do for free in the USA), or not bother with the music at all.
(That goes also in the software biz for pirates who pirate just for the sake of pirating. They'd never buy Autocad, etc. in a thousand years and have no use for what they pirated except to say aha we pirated it. To say that cost a sale is silly.)
This sounds like one of those questions on a super advanced college placement test. Quick, can you say what impact this has on satellite and terrestrial TV stations? In 500 words or less?
The law says it is not theft, but infringement. You can't steal something that doesn't exist physically. Stealing means you took something from someone and they no longer have it. Copying intellectual work isn't stealing as the owner still has the original. Courts have ruled this is not theft. At any rate the award, or fine, is way in excess of the so called "loss". I say so called because this kid would never have bought the 30 songs if he couldn't copy them and so they didn't really lose anything.
Courts have distinguished between copyright infringement and theft, holding, for instance, in the United States Supreme Court case Dowling v. United States (1985) that bootleg phonorecords did not constitute stolen property and that “interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud.
The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright... ‘an infringer of the copyright.’” In the case of copyright infringement the province guaranteed to the copyright holder by copyright law is invaded, i.e. exclusive rights, but no control, physical or otherwise, is taken over the copyright, nor is the copyright holder wholly deprived of using the copyrighted work or exercising the exclusive rights held.[1]”
I can't make money legit? Fine. Watch this.
Oh, and as an organized crime figure, my first few whacks would be at anyone that heads up RIAA.
Indeed. This is an unintended consequence of draconian laws.If you remove all hope from someone, yet they are 'free', they may well just figure they have nothing to lose, and take more drastic actions than they might otherwise have.
Karl Drega comes to mind.
Crappy sounding digital MP3s? You must be downloading music files from YouTube or some such place. Even there, crystal clear remastered tracks can be found.
I knew somebody who got caught for downloading music illegally, and all she got was a "cease and desist" letter. I guess they decided to make an example out of this guy.
In general I don’t think bankruptcy gets you out of court judgement.
The prevailing party simply become a creditor, and gets in line behold the others. (after the secured creditors take the assets pledged as security.)
****
Whether the judgment is dischargeable in bankruptcy depends upon the nature of the judgment, and whether the creditor objects to the discharge or dischargeability of the debt. Judgments for fraud are generally subject to non-disschargeability, while most other debts are dischargeable. Not sure about copyright infringement.
You're kidding right? Unless you're an extreme audiophile with really expensive hardware, there really isn't a heck of a lot of difference between a CrO2 or Metal tape, which is what I always used back in the day. While the tapes weren't free, they also weren't ridiculously expensive. I agree that digital distribution has made it easier to copy stuff, I don't really think the penalties assigned to this kind of thing have any relationship to any sense of justice or reality.
The ever expanding copyright term has made many people, myself included, not give a damn about copyright, especially for older works (those more than 30 years old) which should be in the public domain if only our congresscritters weren't so easily and cheaply bribed by media companies.
“I’ve ever heard of anybody going back to the Court for seconds,”
Even firsts is fairly rare. This one didn’t actually make into the court - they declined to review the circuit decision. That said, I’d say it’s likely that a percentage of the cases that eventually are heard by the court had at one time been turned away with the basic message “let the process run its course before we decide if we want to hear it.”
That might be the case here, although the constitutional issues they raised looked like major reaches to me.
http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=10-1883P.01A
Is it uploading that is the problem or downloading too? Most P2P sites operate by uploading parts of the file as you are downloading it. Is DVR making an illegal copy of a copyrighted program? If technically that is the case, then the same cable companies that are assisting in catching illegal downloaders, are also assisting in illegal copying by renting the DVR equipment.
I am just curious where the line is drawn.
“I am just curious where the line is drawn.”
The devil is in those sorts of details.
The question of DVR recording was settled long ago — when courts and regulators ruled that making VCR recordings of TV shows was legal. Here (in Canada) it is also legal to copy a CD to any other media (e.g. an iPod), for your personal use. Making a backup copy is also legal — you just have to retain possession of the original CD. Making copies for distribution to others (including by means of a pirate web site) remains illegal. I don’t know how U.S. law compares on that point.
AFAIK, both the downloading and uploading of pirated music is illegal — but, enforcement is concentrated on the uploading. The uploader enables all the downloaders.
As for the technical arguments about quality — I will concede most of your points. Tapes (whether reel-to-real, or Cassette) of studio masters could be as good or better than vinyl records. Most people couldn't distinguish between new vinyl records and tapes made from those records, using the best media, and high-end equipment. However, most home copies weren't on the best equipment, nor were they on the best tape media. Nor, would people make hundreds, or thousands of copies to give away to strangers. Inexpensive as the tapes were, they still cost too much for that. Home copying wasn't nearly the threat to the industry that digital piracy is today.
There was commercial piracy “back in the day” — but, those pirates had a much harder time than do today's. They needed to physically copy the records, print cover art, and (most difficult of all) establish distribution channels. They couldn't afford to give away their product — they had to find a profit somewhere between their fixed and variable costs, and the price of legitimate recordings. That put a lot of limits on the damage those pirates of yore could do to the industry. Today's pirates have world-wide distribution channels (the Internet), and near-zero variable costs. Piracy today is an existential threat to the music industry — and, more importantly, to musicians. (As I said in an earlier post, the middlemen of the music industry will be eliminated by legitimate means, through the process of disintermediation. That's not a loss — that's just progress.)
Legal judgments done before filing for bankruptcy are immune, I believe, from bankruptcy protections.
If it takes his whole life to pay this off....even after 3 bankruptcies....that’s what our excuse of a legal system will demand.
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