Posted on 07/04/2006 7:00:49 AM PDT by Fawn
Some FReepers like to make things up as they go along...it's akin to lying one's ass off.
I'm not interested in addressing points without basis in reality. I'll just tell you that the act you mention extends copyright protections by 20 years. It doesn't "basically guarantee nothing will ever be placed in the public domain again."
Please don't waste my time with false arguments.
Since they make the product they are free to charge whatever they think they can get people to pay for it. Simple economics. If you don't like that price, don't buy the CD. Anyway, the same argument you would use to justify illegal file downloads can be used to justify shoplifting. However I don't think you would have too much sympathy for the person who tries to sneak a CD out of the store while claiming that he was just "trying to stick it to the man."
FWIW I have more than a passinig interest in this issue. I make my bread off of royalties (I'm a writer of college textbooks on mathematics and computer science.) If anyone had an illegal copy of one my works, I sure would take legal action against them.
The only way they can see what you have on your hard drive is to copy the list of songs and other files that you have stored in your "share" file that you offer to others.
Either that or they installed and/or used a hacker's program on your 'puter, which is illegal.
Explain to me how they do that?
Oh and by the way, you'll find that the people most vociferously opposed to The RIAA and any rational discussion regarding it's primary support functions, are the worst offenders, if you will, of music file swapping, often going to great lengths to change the subject in order to make them into villains for trying to uphold copyrights and maintain profitability.
"I fail to see any real difference between loading files from the internet and copying them off the air from your radio. I mean, a hundred dollar radio. a patch cable and a copy of cooledit or something and you can make your own mp3 files off the fricking air. They gonna start charging us for owning radios?"
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It's OK to copy a song off the radio via air. What the RIAA is bitching about is that private citizens don't have the rights to distribute the music.
It is not the copying that they are going after, it's the people involved in the distribution.
I am wholeheartedly against the US copyright laws that allow an effectively infinite timespan to own a work. Patents only allow 17 or 20 years, which should also be enough time for a song to sell a bundle for their creator. This would drive the really talented people to work harder instead of sitting on a song's royalties forever.
If the recording industry would embrace legally selling music online at 99 cents a song there would be little incentive to pirate music. Using programs file sharing programs like Kazaa fill your computer with spyware, browser hijackers and worse and the audio quality of some of these downloads is questionable. Instead of going to a record store and spending nearly $20 for a CD that is mostly shlock if people could go to a music store step up to a computer Kiosk and pick the songs they want from 100,000 titles for under a buck and load them directly to their I-pod or MP3 player, more outlets would sell music and sales would increase. The recording industry, particularly Sony, is shooting themselves in the foot.
"The only reason kids download music is because the $h!+ just isn't worth buying."
-Bruce Dickinson, Iron Maiden
Thanks
Another Word: BOYCOTT
File-sharing should be done the American way: ripping friends' disks!
Well, my hard drive crashed Sunday so I lost my 2000+ songs that I had downloaded from Limewire. I was going to dump them anyway because Limewire was giving my system a lot of trouble.
Problem is - STUPID ME I hadn't backed up the stuff I really needed like resumes and cross stitch patterns.
A very interesting concept and I wonder if it has been used as a defense. In reality, you would have to ensure that the aired song is the exact same recording as that downloaded, otherwise you are taking from one set of musicians, recording staff, etc., over another. It would truly have to be apples-to-apples.
At the same time, I pay monthly for dozens of music channels as part of my base "cable" package (DirecTV, actually) and therefore have the personal use rights to those songs, do I not? All it would take is the technology to capture them in a usable format (separated by song, an indexing system). The RIAA has its tax on us through the products we buy and while it might be pennies individually, I'm sure the aggregate amounts are significant.
We also know the recording industry has lost class action suits but in a reverse flow of the pennies analogy, pennies are all we got back while trial lawyers and professional plaintiffs reap the benefits. I hope the next class-action settlement has as a condition the unconditional clearing of all the music on the original WKRP episodes and we get to see them again!
"The RIAA is going after people who obtain or copy music illegally."
They are only going after people who are distributing music and/or making it available for copying.
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"Nobody has an automatic right to own copies of copyrighted music for which they haven't paid."
Yes you do. If you copy a song off commercial radio, no problem.
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"Artists have a right to control the licensing of their copyrighted material."
...which should be limited to 17 years before it becomes public domain, just like US Patents.
If the lawyers are going to go after music copyright laws then they also need to go after thrift stores, used book stores, garage sales, etc. because copyrighted material is resold in all.
Gee... we could even call this the iTunes Music Store.
True, it extended the copyright of an item until 75 years after the authors death. This prohibits any new items from falling into the public domain until 2019. Can you please explain how this is in the original spirit of copyright laws? Can you also explain the gutting of fair-use?
I loved it when Cheap Trick, the Beatles, etc. sued their labels for failure to pay royalties on iTunes et al. Apparently, the record industry withheld monies due to the idea that "they had to pay for marketing the music sold in stores, etc.."
IRC a famous rock star stated, "You must hire a law firm to watch the law firm that is watching the record label's law firm. And you must hire an accounting firm to watch the accounting firm that is watching the record label's accounting firm."
I was wondering. How are they getting the info. Are they using a mining program or are they copying hard drives then exploring the files and reading the deleted files. Or are they reading all file that are on a shared computer. If one writes over the deleted files say 7 times. Its extremely difficult to recover the files written over. Use a scrubber program and write over deleted files and white space 10 times. Then write over the space with zero and one alternating PI$$ them off. Run the scrubber program while you sleep. As 7 to 10 times can take awhile to complete. If they are using mining programs then they are breaking the law. But from what you posted it sounds like they monitor share file program sites and using software to recover deleted files. Also just because a song is on the computer does not mean that it was downloaded using a computer. As is state in other posting to this post. Taping a radio broadcast, then converting the taped items to MP3. Having them on the computer does it mean that they where or illegal.. I thought that if I did this and it was for my own personal use it was legal. So I see that because it is on the computer and the computer is connected to the Internet. The music companies can easy track for illegal use of their songs. Where if they are on tapes they have a hell of a harder time proving copyright fragment. So BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING US. Just some of my thoughts.
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