House Bill Could Shut Down File Sharing

Extremetech ^ | July 25, 2002 | By: Mark Hachman

[weikel]

You can't strike down an amendment except perhaps if it tries to deny states equal representation in the senate. I share your cynicism however.

[weikel]

I agree the hacker types are not sheep and this will piss them off bigtime. The Record and Movies companies will face the destruction of anything remotely connected to them on the internet if this passes. Id like to see how the Record Company execs react when there bank accounts are completely drained. Every hacker in the world will target them if this passes.

[weikel]

Exactly.

[eno_]

Piracy, by the usual definition, is copyright violation for profit. File sharing, if you do it only among your friends, is probably fair use under current law. So indiscriminate large-scale file sharing is almost certainly wrong, but is it "piracy?"

[Mixer]

what goes around comes around and this could end up backfiring on them in a huge way.

Ezactly....just like Napster

[Moonman62]

Berman's arguments are financial in nature. In 2001, the U.S. recording industry lost $4.2 billion to hard-goods piracy worldwide, the U.S. movie industry lost $3 billion to videocassette piracy, and the U.S. entertainment software industry lost $1.9 billion due to piracy in just fourteen countries, Berman said in a speech to Congress on June 25. In 2000, hard-goods piracy cost the U.S. business software industry $11.8 billion alone, he said.

I wonder how many tens of billions they lose because of their bad business models. And how much do they pay their lobbyists to get congress to crack down on the peasants?

[Nick Danger]

"Notwithstanding any State or Federal statute or other law, and subject to the limitations set forth in subsections (b) and (c), a citizen shall not be liable in any criminal or civil action for disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise impairing the use of the law or the courts to harrass any person, if such impairment does not, without authorization, incinerate, dismember, disembowel, or cause the death of, any lawyer."

[an amused spectator]

Stealing is stealing no matter what fancy philosophy you want to blame it on, no offense.

If you lose or accidently break a CD that you purchased from these humanitarian philanthropists at the companies represented by the RIAA, do they replace it for free?

**snort** I thought not. ;-)

They don't even want you copying your own CDs as backup, ID ten T. Stealing is selling you an LP, an eight track, a cassette, a CD and a DVD of the same album.

The original reason they didn't object to CDs was because they thought they were uncopyable!!!

[TommyDale]

The sinister motivation isn't to really protect the copyrighted materials. Your example shows how the system works, because you liked the sample, then bought it.
The REAL goal here is to completely stop free exchange of art, music and even the news. The goal is to shut down the extremely conservative internet.

[TommyDale]

When a blank CD costs less than 10 cents, and the jewel case about the same, and maybe even the 4-color art work another dime, and even yet another dime for promotion, the total cost for actually making a CD is 40 cents. Pay the performer his 10 cents, and the total is 50 cents. Yet these thieves in the RIAA are charging us $15 or more for a CD. WHO'S STEALING FROM WHOM?

[Truthsearcher]

The entire concept of the market and free enterprise is based on the idea of supply and demand. Price isn't determined by the cost of production, it's determined by supply and demand.

How much does it cost Van Gogh to produce a painting, a piece of paper, some paint, a brush, how dare he charge whatever he charges for it!!

The buying of a CD is a voluntary transaction, everyone is within their right to choose not to participate if they deem the price too high.

[TommyDale]

You are correct. However, it has become obvious to everyone in the industry that demand has dropped off. Most of the decline has been the lack of good artists and/or material. Quite frankly, no major record company is appealing to the baby boomers right now. The music industry basically sucks.

[Redcloak]

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Warner Bros.)

[Cooter]

Let's all become copyright holders and we too can have a license to hack!

[Lazamataz]

Let's all become copyright holders and we too can have a license to hack!

EXcellent point!

[SamBees]

Sitting by the tv waiting for the video! I can't even believe we have discussed allowing jerks in hollywood break into our machines and damage them. Why those LA riots from a few years ago would happen all over again, I bet.

[PropheticZero]

The entire concept of the market and free enterprise is based on the idea of supply and demand. Price isn't determined by the cost of production, it's determined by supply and demand. How much does it cost Van Gogh to produce a painting, a piece of paper, some paint, a brush, how dare he charge whatever he charges for it!! The buying of a CD is a voluntary transaction, everyone is within their right to choose not to participate if they deem the price too high.

Exactly the way I see it, though I'm not sure Van Gogh is in much of a position to supply or demand much at all. But as his work has some externalized value outside of its consituent elements the owner of a piece of his work can charge what he wishes. Its just the way it works.

The argument that the recording industries are trying to censor the flow over music and art falls apart. If the people that spent their days and nights slaving over code to "get back" at the record companies, and working to pay off their highspeed internet connection so that they can download everything they think belongs to them, if those people would spend their energy on developing more concepts like audiogalaxies "band pages" where you can download free music, which helps bands get their music out. The fact is, most people that download music for free right now, if they got a record deal, they'd take the cash and not worry about who the record companies were screwing unless it was them.

Now I'm not perfection incarnate either, and I don't presume to be any better than these other than the fact I don't B.S. myself or others on my state in the world. I use several programs with list prices above 200 bucks, which I simply cannot afford, but at the same time it makes my life immensly easier to have these programs. This is the best solution for me right now, hopefully when I make money later in my life I can go legit but right now its simply not feasible and frankly I don't wish to. This is probably the same boat a lot of people find themselves in, but that doesn't make it right. The right way would be to find freeware or cheaper shareware that did most of what needed and simply make do until I could afford a copy of the software I wanted. Or to go without if I thought it wasn't a good deal.

Communism is just a lot of people who get together that want everything they want for free and money for service they give, who end up giving up everything for nothing.

Thats the road this "no victim" philosophy on media "sharing" is going. You absolutely have no "right" to music and art especially that created and produced by others so that they can pay their employees and themselves. To put this supposed "right" up with the likes of the freedom of speech and right to own firearms and protect yourself is assanign and selfish. IMHO.

[PropheticZero]

A lot of that rant doesn't apply to your post, other than the I agree part :), its just that when I get typing I start to reply to all the others in one big blast instead of splitting it up