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So in response I give you: Copyright Math® and the 8 Billion Dollar iPod
Albums are internally stolen and “leaked” to the internet before the album’s street date these days and I never hear of a half-million dollar fine against the corporate flunky or critic who undercut album sales before the album even reaches the market.
Why is that? Are some of the “leaks” coordinated by publicists to generate buzz?
Cruel and unusual punishment.
The fines are excessive, but I also find it hard to have sympathy for someone who was illegally distributing music. Fix the law to make the fines match the scope of the infractions.
I’m all for copyright protection, but this is simply ridiculous.
This is exactly the sort of thing that turns otherwise law abiding citizens into people who believe that the RIAA and the record companies deserve exactly what they’re getting from the torrent sites & P2P.
Also, there are unintended consequences.
One group of people making real profits off this are VPN providers. Basically you pay $10 a month and connect to the VPN network through your normal connection. All anyone looking at your traffic on the ISP level can see after you’ve done that are the encrypted packets flitting back and forth between your PC and the VPN provider.
They can tell how much bandwidth you’re using, but not where the data is coming from or going to.
Alot of ‘em openly advertise that they don’t keep logs, thus making it impossible to tell who was using a particular IP at a certain time even if they wanted to.
Its quite amusing to me that the main effect of the RIAA “crackdown” has been to drive innovations in privacy technology.
You just have to love some of these music groups, especially the gangsta rapers.... “Kill yo mama. F the police. Steal from da man. Break da white man’s laws (except for copyright laws which are good and fair laws and you should always obey these laws). Burn yo hood to da ground. Off the pigs. Toke dat joint and post yo bail.”
They have a “Pirate Party” in Europe that is actually running and winning Parliamentary seats on a platform of “people like the RIAA have gone too far in trying to protect their copyrights”.
Coming soon to an election near you...
You might not be able to motivate twenty-somethings to vote on the basis preserving the Constitution, but for preserving free downloading they’ll be there.
Its a civil lawsuit not a criminal lawsuit. Thus, it is completely dischargeable in bankruptcy, which is where this kid should be heading this morning.
Yeah, as the heavy intellects above assert, he stole!
The owners don’t have anymore what he stole. Gone!
The day that music was stolen.
I may be in the severe minority here, but I’m glad they threw the book at him.
Just wait until they start going after people who’ve been uploading music to YouTube.
The notion that downloading = stealing was invented by the RIAA,
and fools have bought it. If I download from an artist’s website, an MP3 that he’s offering, am I stealing? Or if I share this download, am I or my sharers stealing?
When my car was stolen (and it’s shameful to have to explain)
it was gone from my driveway, no car, absent, stolen.
No one is missing a downloaded MP3.
“Aww, c’mon man, music should be free, ya know?”
I don’t think that needs a sarcasm tag.
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