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$4 Million In Fines For Linking To Infringing Files
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun May 25, 2008 09:13 AM
from the even-the-fringe-infringers dept.
from the even-the-fringe-infringers dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The MPAA won judgments totaling $4M against two sites which merely link to infringing content. They're not arguing that it's an infringement of their distribution right, like the RIAA has with their 'making available' argument. Instead, they got the sites for 'contributory copyright infringement', just like RIAA v. LimeWire. To translate all that legalese into English, search engines which primarily index copyright-infringing material and the people who run them may not be safe in the US. That applies even if the sites in question do not host any infringing materials, participate in, or encourage the infringement done by their users. And, even honoring DMCA notices in order to take advantage of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions hasn't prevented the **AA from suing."
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Submission: $4M Judgment For Linking to Infringing Files by Anonymous Coward
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Copywrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
So now any service can be DoS'd by the RIAA and MPAA. You know they will stuff any independent index with their crappy content and so destroy all alternative distribution channels.
Re:Copywrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately for them, said independent distribution guys just happen to be inside U.S. jurisdiction. Bad day...
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Re:Copywrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone can be shut down with this, not just "thugs". Google's YouTube service has been in the crosshairs for a while now. All the legacy copyright owners have to do is stuff the channel to shut it down. Copyright must be changed to prevent that kind of denial of service. One of PJ's first entries was about P2P and industry's fear of a richer world [groklaw.net].
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Re:Freedom is more important than profit. (Score:5, Insightful)
And commercial copying should simply be taxed and the revenues handed to the creator of the copied work (to the extent with which such creative works need to be funded and monetized beyond other incentives). The whole monopoly aspect is what prevents and hampers the creation of wealth and flow of information. It needs to go.
It's annoying that many politicians in capitalistic countries can see the economic market damage created by state-run monopolies, but somehow fail to acknowledge the same damage caused when you hand out state-sponsored monopolies to private interests.
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Re:Freedom is more important than profit. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole monopoly aspect is what controls and channels wealth and information. This doesn't have anything to do with protecting the artists, it has everything to do with protecting the artist's overlords ability to control and profit from the artists in their stable.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The geek is libertarian only when it suits his convenience.
Taxation on distribution is the simplest way to control content and production.
The market doesn't set the price, the tax cod
Re:Freedom is more important than profit. (Score:4, Insightful)
its because your quote fails exactly at that point.
musicians and movie makers have never been compensated for the work they do. musicians have been given few cents over $20 worth single album sales by the distributors, and told to go on unending world tours in order to earn money for themselves. this has been going on for aeons.
same goes for movies. directors, actors get much more cut from movie sales, but then again the lion's cut goes to people who do nothing but monopolize the distribution effectively.
we are paying zillions of dollars to people that do not generate any added value into the music/movie.
i wouldnt give a damn, if they were not also harming, damaging the ability of the creative crowd to distribute their own stuff. but situation has been so that up to today, if you havent been able to sign your soul out to a big distributor, noone knew your music, your art, your small films. but then internet came and alternative distribution became possible. good. things were going to change. but then big buck distributors started to try attempts in hampering those distribution methods, because they pose a great danger to their own monopoly - people being able to do distribution independently - holy cow, what kind of heresy.
so, this point is the point where your argument breaks down. those people not only damaging a business sector, but in general damaging the creative development of human civilization, for they have a bigger power than they are worth.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Some people might be embarrassed to tell musicians and movie makers that they shouldn't be compensated for the work they do
musicians and movie makers have never been compensated for the work they do. musicians have been given few cents over $20 worth single album sales by the distributors, and told to go on unending world tours in order to earn money for themselves.
What's worse, the industry siphoning off 99% of their profit, or you stealing 100% of what's left? It seems to me that no-one is valuing the work of the musician here.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Freedom is more important than profit. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a software developer. I write thousands of lines of code every year. I've probably written well in excess of a million lines of code since I started doing this. And you know what? I was paid for writing each one of those, with no expectation of continuing profits until I die. I can point to lots and lots of places where the people that employed me made quite a bit of money from my code. I really don't have a problem with that, even though I'd say that the majority of programmers, tech writers, and other creative folks who produced copyrighted work for hire provide a lot more benefit to society that the majority of musicians and filmmakers. Why should some high-school dropout with no useful skills other than wailing (off-pitch, no less) into a microphone expect to be any different? Similarly, why should any corporation expect that?
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Re:Freedom is more important than profit. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The vast majority of professional musicians are paid a fixed hourly rate, and have to start looking for work again when a particular job is finished. People tend to use the term "musician" as a synonym for "artist signed to a record company" despite the fact that this is actually a very small proportion of musicians, just as a very small proportion of actors get to charge exorbitant fees for being in a movie.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This.
Whenever I did a pit orchestra or other contract gig, I negotiated a fee per-performance (not hourly, but it's basically the same thing) and I knew up front how many performances would be involved, and there were stipulations in the contract regarding the possibility of extra performances and that I was providing a service that I could subcontract o
Re:Copywrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, apart from these sites do you know any other site that so blatantly and directly markets themselves to people breaking the law? It'd be on the level of a water pipe store with a posted map to nearby pot salesmen. Aside from my feelings on copyright, if something first is illegal I think there should be limits to how far you can go assisting them, marketing to them, turning a blind eye to them and so on. Whether you call that "aiding and abetting", "conspiracy" or "contributory infringement" is more of a legal issue, but clearly some of these sites overstep what I'd consider natural. It's like seeing a gun marketed as "Cop killer*" and in 2pt font "*only applicable when said cop is on drugs, shooting wildly around him and shooting him would be in self-defense". Some of the piracy sites are equally blatant, like "Get the latest TV shows here*" and in 2pt font "*no responsibility for 3rd party content."
Parent
Re:Copywrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are stepping around the issue by claiming these companies "actively" indexed content owned by the MPAA. The issue is that any service can be stuffed by the MPAA. If you bother to index it and eliminate duplicates and noise files, you will get burnt. Indexing should be allowed and sharing should be allowed. You can't have those things and give copyright holders the ability to police things. What you are left with is a rather stark choice: freedom or copyright. There may be some middle ground, such a allowing personal copy, but it's hard to imagine a way to enforce copyright that won't sabotage everyone's network freedom, free press and free speech.
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Re:Copywrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Breaking the law and then complaining that the punishment is unfair because it leans too heavily in favor of corporate interests is not the right way to go about it. The right way is to refuse to purchase the *AA's products (thus depriving them of ammunition), and then becoming politically active about IP policy.
This isn't a situation where you need to break the law to make a living or to feed your kids. It's just music and movies. Learn to play the piano. Go see a play.
(And to strike pre-emptively, yes I know that the entire system is unfair and tilted against the little guy. But for all its warts this is the best system so far devised. And when enough people get angry the politicians will jump on the populist bandwagon, too.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I play this game because others tried to silence me. They modbombed my account so that I can only post once a day at -1. That's not good enough for me or you, so I have used some of the same tactics the trolls do.
Who is 'they'? Microsoft, you normally say. You waver between them and a shadowy organisation of 'trolls' who act to silence you. Of course, they don't bother with people like Bruce Perens and Miguel de Icaza, you're the one they're trying to keep down because you're so rational when you talk about Free Software.
When will you open your eyes and realise it was the constant lies, flaming and misrepresentation that got you into the karma hole you're in?
Ben Franklin had conversations with himself in his and other publications and it's a legitimate way to explore an issue
Ben Franklin never had those conversations in a public s
Google is likely to sued real soon as well as many (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, so they can filter but surely that's as much of a minefield as indexing everything? Imagine the law suits when their filtering algorithms start excluding one company and include their opposition.
Not sure I like the sound of this.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:5, Interesting)
Although not meeting the strict legal definition as such, search engine providers like Google could conceivably angle for the protections afforded common carriers [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:5, Insightful)
This case really isn't that surprising.
Parent
Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:5, Insightful)
Our copyright in the US works largely on the owners' good graces, apathy, and ignorance. Copyright infringement, in a technical sense, happens constantly. And not just from music and movie downloaders, but ordinary people. Tattoos of cartoon characters, playing some popular song on your guitar, hosting images someone else created on your own server.
This may, in fact, have appeared on Slashdot before, but John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, estimates that a typical person could easily rack up $12.45 million in copyright liability doing ordinary things like sending email, sketching on a notepad, the afore-mentioned cartoon tattoo, writing poetry, and singing "Happy Birthday." And then there's this:
You can find the entirety of Professor Tehranian's article in PDF here [turnergreen.com].
The entire structure of our copyright law in the US is based on what strikes me as being the courts' absolutely blind willingness to enforce laws, the language of which criminalizes the day-to-day acts of normal people, and therefore makes the system open to the sort of hyper-technical abuse characterized in the article.
Of course, our national legislators are to blame for the sloppy language, not the courts. But the courts are still the agents enforcing these laws that just fly in the face of any reasonable or well-considered social policy.
Parent
Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:4, Informative)
Try looking for Transformers on Google. That fan site with the picture of Optimus Prime? That's infringement; it's unlawful. The wiki hosting a sound clip of some exchange between Star Scream and Megatron? That's infringment. The fanfic? Infringement. Google's linking to it all. They're even hosting thumbnails of some of it.
The distinction between linking to lawful and unlawful copyright works is something that can't be sustained in the face of a modern search engine. It would be asinine to tell Google that it couldn't link to anything without first ascertaining that the site has a clear and lawful copyright on the substance. A search engine just couldn't work in such a case. Likewise, saying a search engine is guilty of contributory copyright infringement when it does link to infringing material is no more sustainable, because the internet is a minefield. The liability imposed would be so monstrous as to either destroy the entire industry or create such legal liability that we're left with the last situation: search engines only able to link to things after they verify the owner's valid copyright claims.
For this to be good precedent, there needs to be a distinction made by the courts as to what makes these sites different from Google, Yahoo, and the like, and it can't be based on a post hoc determination of the host site's copyright validity.
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Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Google is likely to sued real soon as well as m (Score:4, Insightful)
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If I am reading this correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If I am reading this correctly (Score:4, Insightful)
No, this will just damage the "business" plans for those that set out, specifically, to direct people to content that the search engine and the people using it all know are pirated resources. When these sites promote themselves as ways to find ripped-off DVD images, have an entire atmosphere that revolves around perpetuating that notion, and show search results that are loaded with (rather than links to RottenTomatos.com or IMDB) bootleg copies of commercial material when you search by, for example, movie title... that's what this is all about. Running a web site that bumps into and indexes such content while also returning lots of legit links is very different than building a web site expressly to draw in people looking to rip off movies so that they can generate a few cents worth of click-through revenue by running "Hook Up With A Hottie" banner ads throughout the list of places you can get hold of a leaked Indiana Jones review DVD ISO or Season Two of Deadwood. When you run a web site that says or implies, "come here for help with ripping off the entertainment you want," then you shouldn't be surprised when the people who invest the money to make that entertainment go to some trouble to stop you when you deliberately, publicly, state that you'll help people (people too cheap to spend $3 so that they and their friends/family can watch a movie) rip them off.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that whole "not stealing people's work" way of looking at things is so quaint, isn't it? When you really respect an artist, and are glad they've managed to spend a couple of years and tons of money laboring over something that will be available for you to pay a latte's worth of cash to enjoy, the REAL way to show your respect for that artist is to rip off their work. Ideally, as a real monument to that artist, nobody would ever pay them, and they can just be your
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And you're saying that the only thing that stops you from not being even more active in depriving them of the choices that musicians make, is being afraid of getting caught. (emphasis mine)
It seems you've bought in to the RIAA's claim, among others, that it's wrong to buy used CDs. To legally transfer between two parties the music of an artist so that the receiving party can be exposed to it. Few artists, I'm sure, would say that's a bad thing.
And by the way, I am not a fan of pop music (i.e. the only ones who actually benefit from modern record deals), and let me state that from personal experience I know record deals do just about didly-squat for the rest, and the artists are fully aware
Stardock and Starforce (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love to see a company that is part of the problem get snared by the laws that they were pushing for themselves.
digital TV... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since I'm no longer going to support the broadcast markets, including PBS, its advertisers and won't buy new media, there is one obvious things that is going to happen.
The MPAA is going to really get spoiled baby scream noisy and make all sorts of claims about piracy destroying their business when this digital only broadcast TV switch happens. From this they will pursue any and all non-authorized outlets, further isolating the property of their scope, away from me.
But the fact of the matter is, it is the entertainment industry attacking consumers, that is the biggest turn off, where the digital TV switchover will be turning off the set for the consumer, whom will not turn it back on so quickly...
Out of sight, out of mind.
Re:digital TV... (Score:4, Interesting)
Having not really thought about it much, is there a similar situation occurring with the **AA?
Parent
Re:digital TV... (Score:4, Insightful)
lol, there is a difference between a broadcasters POV in effort to obtain advertising dollars and the consumers POV in whether or not they actually watch the advertisements.
In verification, an advertiser does not get my number, name or person by my just watching a commercial. But I get the advertiser number if I chose to watch and write it down and I get the product or service if I chose to by it. Advertisers are being delivered to me, the consumer, via commercials. It is this delivery media which the broadcasters are selling to the advertisers and nothing more than abstract an sales pitch that makes it sound like its the other way around.
I call it "bit flipping", the act of taking something and making it sound to be just the opposite of what it really is. As its all advertisement/promotion, be it a commercial I might see or a sales pitch the broadcaster pitches to the advertisers to "buy" air time.
But lets ignore facts and assume you are correct. Come February 2009, broadcasters inventory of consumers get reduced by the federal government. So how many broadcasters think they own me or more specifically, my attention? And how much of it does each own? I bet it adds up to much more than 24hrs of my attention a day. Doesn't that sound rather silly? Do not get so caught up in sales rhetoric that you lose sight of reality.
Come February 2009, I won't be watching broadcast TV. And I will have lost sight of whatever "Reality TV" is broadcast.
Listening to the radio this morning (I suppose radio will be the next thing to go totally digital) and there was a talk on how this Y generation is really DUMB, as in stupid, as in uneducated, as a result of computer technology. Even here in Gerogia the school test scores are so bad they actually through out all history tests with the conclusion that it can't be that bad, over 80% failed...
I suppose with the drive to use internet connection to broadcast TV shows and movies.... their will be a further contributing to the educational downfall. Another thing to add to teh list of student with pocket sized entertainment distractions.
And of course it all comes back to blaming piracy and suing the consumer.... Gotta teach them consumers not to watch.
Parent
oblig (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it. If a site links to a site which links to illegal content?
This nonsense needs to be stopped real soon now. (OR inject "offending" links into **AA company members websites and let them sue each other to death).
Same principle should work for most programs if done carefully. (consider the code from the C etc. run time library).
On a large enough scale the resultant false accusations and legal actions from the **AA could get them into serious trouble.
Andy
wait for the appeal (Score:3, Informative)
If there is an appeal, then it will be a bigger deal on this one.
Welcome to Canada (Score:3, Insightful)
Short memories (Score:4, Informative)
Why base your service in the US? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, get ready for it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad laws are bad laws, the community will 'route around them' and that will be that. Also get ready for the court cases that the **AA will lose because the content was not infringing etc.
It's not possible to continue their berserk legal campaign and not injure some parties. I believe that the blowback will always be expensive for them, and continued elucidation of their antics to the public will be harmful to their standard revenue streams. There will be NO new CD's or DVD's in my house from now on. I can live without them. period. it's not so difficult.
In the USA in particular, any effort to educate the populace should be squarely aimed at government legislators. That is to say: When you publish, publish in the form of:
Look what we sent to Senator XYZ? All this information about IP and how the law is not good, and why it's not good. Senator XYZ doesn't care about your rights, here is how s/he voted on issues relating to your rights.
If 800 legislators have to be swift boated, meh, who fscking cares. That's what happens when you volunteer for public service.
Once the issues become election issues, it will get sorted out because they cannot begin to help the lobbyists if they are serving biggie sized burgers in their home city after the election. They have to get elected, and if doing so means forsaking their **AA lobbyist friends, believe me, they will.
That is how the people shut down a bad law campaign. Elect only people that do not support those laws.
Step Away From the Slippery Slope (Score:3, Insightful)
Please put down the mallet and quit sounding the deathknell for personal freedom. I still have mine. You still have yours. Try to stay within the law, and you'll probably keep it. If you don't like parts of US law, then vote and lobby to change it. Research the issues and write your congressmen real paper letters with convincing arguments and evidence. Post cogent, pertinent comments on their web sites. If you don't like paying for movies and music, you certainly are welcome to make your own [subject to copyright and pornography laws, of course]. Contrary to some opinions, the US is still a free country. As evidenced by this rant here today.
[Flame Off]In 4 easy steps... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Translate name of movie into Chinese
2) tudou.com / 56.com / youku.com / any chinese video site
3) ???
4) PROFIT
Good luck getting Chinese sites shut down. Even if you get rid of the indexing sites, mildly creative people will be able to just search foreign video sites.
I picture places like tv-links.co.uk (Oh, how I miss thee) reemerging, perhaps as some sort of decentralized P2P darknet. There's no host to take down, and you couldn't possibly target all of the members. A good use for Freenet, I think, that doesn't involve pedophilia (unless they index Alice In Wonderland).
Don't report infringement or risk being sued (Score:3, Insightful)
Fall out (Score:3, Interesting)
When does Borders get told to remove books off the shelf as they have 'improper information' in them, and be fined afterwards for having them searchable in their database?
Libraries.. same thing.. They have a 'card catalog' that links...
This has so many long term ramifications that it should scare the piss out of you if you value your freedom to speak.
Re:If you can't do the time... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is as bad as simply writing a book on how to make an explosive device and being sued into nonexistence.
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