"Probable Cause" Hearing Against MediaSentry 124
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "RIAA sidekick MediaSentry's 'illegal investigation' problem, which surfaced the other day when it got caught in a lie in Michigan (or got caught telling the truth after having told 2 years worth of lies in Brooklyn), has taken another turn for the worse. We learned today from court papers filed in North Carolina, in one of the cases targeting NC State students in Raleigh, that the North Carolina Private Protective Services Board has scheduled a Grievance Committee hearing to determine whether there is probable cause to investigate an alleged violation of the law by SafeNet (formerly known as MediaSentry). Fortunately for MediaSentry, they won't have to testify under oath, according to the notice (PDF)."
Lincoln must be spinning.... (Score:2, Insightful)
"...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I guess it's perishing. It's now becoming:
"government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation"
Corporation: "they", not "it" (Score:5, Insightful)
Legally speaking, corporations are considered to be individual entities. But this causes all sorts of problems with understanding what's really happening under the cover of darkness under which corporate management operates too frequently.
Every corporation is run by a group of ordinary people, making decisions for themselves, the stockholders and (on occasion) their employees and customers.
It is this impedance mismatch between the legal interpretation and reality that causes such difficulty: The people whose decisions determine the corporation's behavior in society are insulated from responsibility by the "corporate veil". This insulation of personal responsibility from corporate authority is the cause of great difficulty.
Someday, I hope our use of language will be altered to reflect reality. A corporation is run by a group of people which is best understood conceptually as they, not a singular entity which is incorrectly referred to as an it. And it stands to reason that they need to be held to account for their decisions.
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Not all corporations have stock holders.. If I have a ton of money, and want to start a business, I would incorporate to protect my stash that is not invested in the business. Obviously as owner I could hire and fire and direct behind the scenes, but if my company say.. killed somebody, they can only go after my companies assets. that's why most businesses are incorporated in the first place.
Many owners (same with shareholders) have no (or very little) idea of the day to day operations of a company they ow
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Mostly agreed on essentially all points. If I had mod privileges for this, I would mod your comment up.
A nit to pick: When your company builds a product that despite making every reasonable effort to be reliable fails catastrophically, then only the company's financial assets are at stake. Wh
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A nit to pick: When your company builds a product that despite making every reasonable effort to be reliable fails catastrophically, then only the company's financial assets are at stake. When someone makes a decision which can be proved (in court, etc.) to be willfully negligent, the decisionmaker(s) must be held to account for that decision.
I don't disagree.. but it is very easy for the actual owner of a company to be insulated.. unless he personally makes a disastrous decision such as "make it out of
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The government is the people. If the people let it happen then they want it to happen and deserver to be raped without fancy lubricants.
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Corporations are legal entities too!
There, fixed that for you.
--The FNP
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People are legal entities too !
Therefore , corporations are people , or at least run by people ( the term people here defines the actual being , and does not refer to the set of morals required to be considered a human being)
Re:Lincoln must be spinning.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Corporations are Soylent Green!
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Only for the purposes of taxation. With the 16th amendment Lincoln paved the way for a corporation as a whole to be known as a single person instead of as individuals, which sadly creates a whole legal mess of who's to blame?
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Corporations:
They destroy like an angry mob, taking innocent people and property down with their fits.
They have the intelligence and moral values of an angry mob, lynching and burning anyone or anything in the way of their goal.
I know you're joking, but I'm getting rather annoyed with the government seeming like they're doing something smart, then turning around and taking a big cra
Money Machine (Score:4, Interesting)
It appears that, finally, the tables are turning against the RIAA and their counsel. Now, if the counsel are disciplined I'll believe that the system might just work.
Re:Money Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
I'm not saying all downloaders should be criminalised, that's a batshit insane approach.
I'm thinking a parking ticket type system, so if you get caught, you pay a small fine, and move on without your life being poured down the crapper.
A parking ticket type system would acknowledge that not everyone plays nice, but there is a possible consequence if you choose to grab something of TPB rather than buy it. I'd say a ten, or even 100 buck fine every time your caught (not per file or anything like that) would be suitable. It would be enough to discourage some people, and if you did get caught? Pay up and move along, no big deal.
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Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
The media companies make most of the profits from anything created these days. Maybe we should start by cutting out the unnecessary middlemen (like the RIAA) and get the media companies to reward their artists & creators accordingly.
Re:Money Machine (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
Such as concerts? Today the RIAA basically gets most of the profits from CDs/iTunes downloads for any signed band. Now when you buy those burnt CDs from a local indie band, most, if not all of it goes to the band, but as for signed bands, they make money from concerts. If we take out the RIAA, we have a nice stream of income from CDs and because it is the bands and not some media overlord, downloading will be tolerated, if not legal.
Re:Money Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
this poster has it right.
think back to a few hundred years ago. the king had a court jester. he was there to entertain the king. when the jester performed, he got to eat dinner with the rest. if he 'called in sick' he would not get paid.
if you perform, you get paid.
do you think the king would continue to bankroll a jester whose last performance was a few years ago?
so why does the concept of 'perform once; get paid many' work? THAT seems highly unfair. I don't get paid again and again when I wrote code. why should 'entertainers' have a different standard?
do football players get paid each time someone watches their past performance?
here's a hint: performing artists (note the magic word there) should get paid when they PERFORM.
kids today see thru this; that's one reason why they are rebelling. the system is unfair and so 'we' fight back to holding onto our cash and not giving it time and time again to the same old non-performing sitting-on-your-laurels artists.
if the entertainment industry wants to 'fix' the payment model, lets REALLY revamp it. small tweaks are bullshit; it needs a total re-do if its going to be at all acceptable to the kids (buying public) today.
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> I don't get paid again and again when I wrote code.
Really? I thought that was called selling software? Maybe everyone should just code until a project is done then give it away! Surely the big gains from giving years of effort away will cover the expense of paying for an engineering team. Otherwise, what are we supposed to do? Code nights & weekends for free while working at a gas station during the day?
Record companies essentially do the same thing everyone else does. They produce a product (music
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually that should be all of the music from the '50s and '60s. Including the great, the not so great and
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Re:Money Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
So, just stealing it and later saying "the system is broken" is some pretty strange logic. Ford makes cars. Should we just steal those too?
No. But if someone burned me a copy of their Mustang I would probably take it.
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I'd gladly have given you my burned Chevy [kuro5hin.org].
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That would be all fine and dandy, except they want you to pay once for the CD, once for your iPod, once for your cellphone, once for your car stereo, once for your home computer, once for your work computer, once for... you get the drift.
If they could they'd make us pay once everytime we hear it, whether intentionally or not, even if it's just in the radio of our mind.
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I had one of those 'radio of the mime' things, and that guy trapped in a box routine was HISTERICAL!
I also liked that I could listen at full volume in church and in a library, 'cause there was not sound. Of course, that made it hard to know what was going on 'cause it was radio, ya know.
I always wanted to have them do those 'guy walking into a strong wind' and 'guy pulling a rope' things, but never ...
What's that?
Radio of the MIND?
Oh.
Nevermind.
Bitch.
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Maybe everyone should just code until a project is done then give it away!
How can you be posting at slashdot and never have heard of FOSS? People DO give code away, and they make a lot of money doing so.
Ford makes cars. Should we just steal those too?
If I could make a copy of a Ford for free I would. Would I be stealing a Ford? If I make biodeisel out of used corn oil am I stealing from the oil companies?
If I steal a CD the store has lost somenthing. If I download a song the publisher has lost nothing, and
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...
do football players get paid each time someone watches their past performance?
...
No, they don't. But the body that owns their work does... does this sound familiar: "Any rebroadcast, retransmission or other use of this telecast without the written consent of the National Football League is prohibited"
AC from beyond the dead? (Score:1)
Jack, Jack [wikipedia.org], is that you?
I didn't realize that there was an Internet connection down there!
Re:AC from beyond the dead? (Score:4, Insightful)
AC has it right. Also, the NFL has no rights over what happens to anything transmitted over the airwaves once it reaches my property, it is mine to do with as I please, including recording it, encrypting/decrypting it. I may not rebroadcast (but that's purely due to FCC rules and regulations) but the FCC ruled specifically about OTA broadcasting and things like the use of police scanners for citizens - once that signal hits your property, it's yours to do with as you please.
Of course, the media corporation's response is to try to force everyone to Digital *COUGHMODIFIEDANALOG* broadcasting and encrypting the media OTA so it would be a violation of the DMCA to record it successfully.
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I don't get paid again and again when I wrote code. why should 'entertainers' have a different standard?
Um, yes, you do. Or at least you can. There's a couple of ways to do this:
1: If you work as a freelancer, you can re-use old code with client after client, and bill for the full time it took to create the code originally with each successive client. Not the most ethical action, but it is physically possible to do it.
2: If you own and sell the code yourself as your own publisher, you get paid every time someone buys it.
3: If your employer pays their star developers royalties. I don't know of any who do, but
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So what if they are not "performing" artists, but purely "recording" artists such as the Beatles (after, I think, Revolver they stopped performing live until the Get Back session)? Many good artists don't perform much live. I hear the "pay to perform" meme repeated over and over, but it seems a little short-sighted to me.
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So what if they are not "performing" artists, but purely "recording" artists such as the Beatles (after, I think, Revolver they stopped performing live until the Get Back session)?
Half the Beatles are dead. What have their heirs done to deserve an income stream from a recording session that took place nearly half a century ago?
I bought the White Album on cassette in 1984. Then I bought the White Album on CD in 1987. After my CD collection was stolen in 1991, I bought it again. (I didn't have a CD burner at the time, so I didn't have a backup.) I can only listen to one copy of it at a time, so why should I buy it again when I want to listen to it on my computer, or my MP3 player?
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That's a common view from a non-musician. If musicians made money solely from performances, it wouldn't be long before there were no more professional musicians left. None would be able to afford it. Touring and putting on shows and concerts costs money. It's that simple. Whether the costs are for gas, plane tickets, food, music equipment, or roadies, not to mention the cuts of ticket sales that go to the venues. Every band/artist has to start out at the bottom, and many bands that haven't yet "made i
Re:Money Machine (Score:4, Insightful)
This would be bad because?
Touring and putting on shows and concerts costs money. It's that simple. Whether the costs are for gas, plane tickets, food, music equipment, or roadies, not to mention the cuts of ticket sales that go to the venues.
It's not unknown for venues to pay bands (and PA companies) to play there.
Every band/artist has to start out at the bottom, and many bands that haven't yet "made it big" often come back from a tour with not that much more than they left with. Expecting people to live on just that income would mean the eventual death of your PERFORMING artist.
You are missing that plenty of people want to see live music and they are prepared to pay to do so. They might not always be prepared to pay what "artists" think they are worth and be fickle when it comes to tastes, but that's just human nature.
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sure, we coming to town to perform our film for you next week, see you there!
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There are more media than just music. Looking at the fools of the music industry and using that to conclude all copyrights are bogus is silly. Do you look at people who go bankrupt to determine if loans are a good thing?
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In order to get caught, someone has to violate the law and snoop, which is what the first link in the post is about [slashdot.org]. The v. doe cases in these situations are just tools to extract information to be used in the civil suit.
what you're discussing would involve an internet police, which would have
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Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
So how was it before copyright was invented? There the artists did for a good part commission work and had no claims to any further pay after delivering the work. And, surprise over surprise they could also make a living.
I gotta rolls royce, cause its good for my voice, [...]
-- T. Rex
So what will happen in case that whole media business collapses and artists can't get any money at all from that evil internet for their hard work?
First, it'll affect only the very few acts that make it into the charts of any kind. Most musicians across the world don't live off their royalt
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Artists who make a living from their work are few and far between. When an artist does manage to find an audience the income is siphoned off by (now, entirely ancillary) distributors.
I buy all of my music - either as CD / DVD and I still have 5000 vinyl records.
I also use an iPod in the car - radio being in the terrible state that it is.
True fidelity only comes from uncompressed files or original sources and a fairly expensive home reproduction system. I have over $15k invested in my preamp/amp & spea
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The artist and the quality of the sound are what make me buy music. It is the same as it ever was and when lossless digital files start becoming the primary material "pirated" I'll be shocked and appalled - but, you see - those of us who love music won't steal from our artists.
The labels take care of that for you.
Really, unless you are walking into Steven Tyler's house and lifting a twenty from his wallet you aren't stealing either - no matter what the labels want to call it. The law does not call it theft, it's copyright infringement.
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SOME companies care about the quality of the sound. DMP is a fine company. Sony-Bertelsmann put rootkits on their CDs.
Fuck Steven Tyler with a chainsaw. What he produces, along with the idiots at Metallica is not music. BUT, they have found an audience.
As for you mentioning infringement - it is a term of art and it is not necessary to convey the information that I posted. I know Title XVII of the US Code and I'm licensed to use it against you.
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Fuck Steven Tyler with a chainsaw. What he produces, along with the idiots at Metallica is not music. BUT, they have found an audience.
Sorry, didn't realize we had to run things by you to figure out if it's music or not. Thanks for clarifying!
Re:Money Machine (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but we still need a (fair) way of helping media creators to make a living from their work.
Why? They chose to invest in a market with no intrinsic value that depended on an artificial scarcity.
I wish someone would find a (fair) way of helping me to make a living from sleeping all day, but that's not a reasonable expectation - and neither is yours.
Except that it's not at all unreasonable... (Score:3, Insightful)
"I wish someone would find a (fair) way of helping me to make a living from sleeping all day"
1. Get hunderds, thousands, perhaps millions to see value in your sleeping all day.
2. Let that value be enough to make a living
3. done
"but that's not a reasonable expectation"
I don't see why not.
Let's say I make a movie - let's say it costs me a mere $1,000 to make. That $1,000 has to come from somewhere.
Now a hundred thousand people watch that movie and are entertained, the value they found in it being said entert
Re:Except that it's not at all unreasonable... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say that $0.25 for a full length movie is not just *reasonable*, it's ludicrously cheap..
But here's the thing: consumers decide how much goods are worth. Always. That's how markets work. It's incumbent upon those who want to cater to a market to decide how to deliver a product at a price that their potential customers are willing to pay.
If consumers have collectively decided that music and movies are worth $0.00, then producers have three options:
Seriously, it's out of their hands. Again, producers don't decide what a reasonable price is for their products - consumers do. The best producers can do is figure out how much people are willing to pay and try to make a profit at that level.
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If a media company created a third choise, easy, quick, drm-free downloads at a reasonable price, don't you think that would be a hit?
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If a media company created a third choise, easy, quick, drm-free downloads at a reasonable price, don't you think that would be a hit?
Very possibly. Another possibility is that people are already spoiled on the idea of free downloads. Either way, the market gets to decide if your proposal is a fair trade, and it's impossible to dictate the answer.
Would I buy what you described? Probably! But you and I are just two people, and two people don't (usually) a market make.
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The latter isn't free, time being money.
If a media company created a third choise, easy, quick, drm-free downloads at a reasonable price, don't you think that would be a hit?
Any "window of opportunity" is likely to be closing rapidly. In order to be sucessful such a system would have to be better than "pirate".
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Oh I'm not disagreeing with consumers deciding how much goods are worth (although they seem to be doing a shoddy job in everything else that they find 'expensive'. That whole 'tangible vs intangible' thing again.
I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it is unreasonable to expect that entertainment is worth some actual cold hard cash - even at $0.25!
As for your specific points...
1. Except that most people don't care about that.
2. That's an idea, but then what was it again about adblock and the like? If I
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I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it is unreasonable to expect that entertainment is worth some actual cold hard cash - even at $0.25!
It is always unreasonable to expect that something has a certain value. You can hope it does, you can think that it probably does, you can run market studies to show that it likely does, but you can't say "it should be so" and expect it to happen.
My financing ideas weren't so much direct suggestions as examples of ideas the industry might use to pay for itself. Finding something that actually works is their job. :-).
And by coke-and-hookers, I definitely meant the MPAA-boss types. I really feel sorry for
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There are a few points that I think you're missing or intentionally glossing over, so let's get to them:
Yes, but they do so by choosing whether or not to patronize a particular business, on the assumption that the business will either go under or find an equilibrium point with its consumers. They don't do it by taking somebody's product, thumbing their nose and saying "neener neener! Thanks for your work, it's worth nothing to me!"
At $0.25 / movie, no one would bother to pirate it (Score:1)
At $0.25 / movie, no one would bother to pirate it --- or practically no one, anyway.
I can't talk for the mindset of the masses, not really being part of them, but as for myself, if a content provider would sell content for very low prices, I wouldn't bother to try to pirate it. $0 isn't a reasonable price for most content with value, but neither is the official price, either, in a lot of cases.
I would go out of my way to pirate content if I had the idea that otherwise I would finance imbalanced lawsuits ag
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So long as that price was available to everyone who might want to watch it. One of the things driving "piracy" of both movies and TV is availability. We have the strange situation of multinational movie distributors and broadcasters taking literally years to show their products around the planet (if they ever do). If your 0.25 USD movie is only available in the USA then you have just excluded most of your potential audien
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Yeah, I understand that, there are two things I'd pirate if I had the opportunity because there is no other way to obtain them: the original version of the first Star Wars movie, and "Between Time and Timbuktu" (which Vonnegut refused to allow to be redistributed after 1973, I understand).
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"I wish someone would find a (fair) way of helping me to make a living from sleeping all day, but that's not a reasonable expectation - and neither is yours."
Guess you haven't been to many art expos, have you? Everything from living people in a glass cage asleep to people engaged in sex are featured in art museums, and they get paid for it.
Your assumption is not reasonable.
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Such as concerts? Today the RIAA basically gets most of the profits from CDs/iTunes downloads for any signed band. Now when you buy those burnt CDs from a local indie band, most, if not all of it goes to the band, but as for signed bands, they make money from concerts.
Having been heavily exposed to the music business, I can speak from experience. ASCAP and BMI do not receive most of the profits from CDs/iTunes downloads for signed bands. They receive a modicum percentage that adds up quite significantly. When you buy a burned CD from an Indie band, much of the money does go directly to the band... and right back to paying for the CDs burned. Working for a label, I've seen how much decent CD burning costs -- roughly 85% of the cost of the CD once you include printing
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Working for a label, I've seen how much decent CD burning costs -- roughly 85% of the cost of the CD once you include printing and distribution.
You will never, ever get me to believe that a $15.00 CD costs $12.75 to burn and ship, particularly not when its the soundtrack to a movie that only costs $10.00 on DVD (including printing and distribution). No way. Uh-uh.
Concerts, the NFL, etc.
You're replying to someone else.
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Even cops, who have the luxury of actually seeing a citizen commit a crime, often get it wrong. Worse yet, what you're proposing would be wid
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Presumably there would be no court time involved, so we would end up with an automated MediaSentry-like system spitting out demands for cash. No thanks.
Just wait for it:
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That would only work if there were an infallible (or near infallible) method of determining when copyright infringement occurred.
A law doesn't have to be infallible to work. If that were the case, our prisons wouldn't be full of so many innocent people.
Oh, wait...
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And it has to start by having a reasonable copyright law. Things have to come into the public domain *much* more quickly. If holding a copyright became increasingly costly as it ages, most items would naturally fall into the public domain, and yet Disney could still keep Mickey. But a free, nearly perpetual monopoly is absurd.
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That's what I want to do. Pay a fine because I shared my own file, or prove to some minimum-wage clerk of the court that the file was created by me and freely shared by me.
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I'd say a ten, or even 100 buck fine every time your caught (not per file or anything like that) would be suitable.
Some things, especially software, tend to cost more at retail than those fines, add the fact that you just won't be caught every time you download something and it becomes cheaper than buying. Getting caught using a tram without a ticket is a 40 Euro fine here IIRC, a regular ticket is on the order of 3-5 Euros. A fine has to cost several times what buying legally would and should be high enoug
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No we don't. If people want to earn a living from being a "media creator" then that's their problem, so long as they obey the law, only then does it become a problem for everyone else.
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If the rights are exclusive you cant legally alter that. The duration or "limited times" is where the discussion needs to move.
Altering the punishment for violating those rights is also possible. And it is possible to alter the Constitution, even if it is difficult.
Re:Money Machine (Score:4, Insightful)
This is also the kind of signs us wags here on /. have been prophesizing (and wishing for) since this campaign of terror started. It has taken a while for the momentum to be slowed, such as we have seen with the small gains made monthly, but if the courts and the accompanying PI licensing boards go after the methodology of the RIAA, then it becomes much easier to finally stop the cases on multiple grounds. We have already seen the multiple cases summarily decided(or abandoned) in the People's favor, including with awarded attorney's fees. Now, we get to see every link in the chain as vulnerable, and a good lawyer(i.e. one on the People's side) should be able to attack every aspect of their pre-litigation discovery including their methods for discovering the IPs, the Does, the ISP's Customer, the ISP's Customer's friends and family, etc.
Thanks, NYCL, let's keep the ball rolling and see if the court system can finally stop these suits completely. Maybe the day will come when the RIAA will drop the case automatically if you refuse to pay their Settlement center.
--The FNP
Re:Money Machine (Score:4, Insightful)
This is also the kind of signs us wags here on /. have been prophesizing (and wishing for) since this campaign of terror started. It has taken a while for the momentum to be slowed, such as we have seen with the small gains made monthly, but if the courts and the accompanying PI licensing boards go after the methodology of the RIAA, then it becomes much easier to finally stop the cases on multiple grounds. We have already seen the multiple cases summarily decided(or abandoned) in the People's favor, including with awarded attorney's fees. Now, we get to see every link in the chain as vulnerable, and a good lawyer(i.e. one on the People's side) should be able to attack every aspect of their pre-litigation discovery including their methods for discovering the IPs, the Does, the ISP's Customer, the ISP's Customer's friends and family, etc.
Thanks, NYCL, let's keep the ball rolling and see if the court system can finally stop these suits completely. Maybe the day will come when the RIAA will drop the case automatically if you refuse to pay their Settlement center.
To quote Longfellow:
"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small."
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"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small."
I'm hungry for dinner and you're talking to me about grinding cornmeal??
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"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small."
I'm hungry for dinner and you're talking to me about grinding cornmeal??
It's 10:03 AM and you're hungry for dinner?
When did you have breakfast? Last night?
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When did you have breakfast? Last night?
I guess I gotta come clean, now.
while I was patching my kernel (trying a new method that seemingly allows division by zero) - something happened to space-time that I could not explain. the more watchpoints I set in my code, the faster things ran! at some point, I must have added too many and my machine melted down.
after that, well, things got REALLY weird.
fortunately, I was able to find a block of RET instructions still on a shred of disk drive, and that saved me.
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When did you have breakfast? Last night?
I guess I gotta come clean, now. while I was patching my kernel (trying a new method that seemingly allows division by zero) - something happened to space-time that I could not explain. the more watchpoints I set in my code, the faster things ran! at some point, I must have added too many and my machine melted down. after that, well, things got REALLY weird. fortunately, I was able to find a block of RET instructions still on a shred of disk drive, and that saved me.
Well go get yourself some breakfast. It'll make you feel better.
Then come back tomorrow and we can talk about God making cornmeal out of the RIAA and its lackeys.
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Then come back tomorrow and we can talk about God making cornmeal out of the RIAA and its lackeys.
you mean yest-
ah, right. sorry. still having sync issues.
(btw, I have a recipe for cornmeal lackeys. the secret is to use cold water.)
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Not all of us follow the standard diurnal schedule. I work nights (and have for most of the last eight years), and I eat my dinner around noon. Speaking of which....
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It appears that, finally, the tables are turning against the RIAA and their counsel. Now, if the counsel are disciplined I'll believe that the system might just work.
The system almost always works, it just works incredibly slowly. If your life happens to get caught in the mill wheels of the legal system in between, tough tofu.
Unfortunately whilst the sensible course of action might be to refrain from downloading music illegally until everything sorts itself out in a decade or two, that's generally impractical, the RIAA might sue you anyway, and lets not forget the big one: pushing at the boundaries of a bad law is what helps to get that law changed.
Re:Money Machine (Score:4, Informative)
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Although the RIAA likes to tell judges and the press that these cases are about downloading, in all the cases I've seen I've yet to see one where the case was about downloading.
But surely we're talking about p2p technologies whereby downloading comes hand-in-hand with uploading?
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It might go hand in hand, but downloading isn't the same as "making available" which is the angle they seem to be going for.
You are leaving out some words that are important. Copyright law makes it illegal to make a copyrighted work "available for distribution". But "making available for distribution" and "making available for download" are two completely different things: "Making available for distribution" means offering the work to a _distributor_ (like a wholesaler, a chain of record stores, Apple's iTunes Music Store etc. ) It is very, very unlikely that any file sharer is making anything "available for distribution".
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But surely we're talking about p2p technologies whereby downloading comes hand-in-hand with uploading?
Not all p2p technologies work like BitTorrent. Gnutella (LimeWire, Bearshare, etc) has no inherent "to download you must upload" requirement. Having a large amount of shared material may improve you connectivity (some Gnutella "ultras" will disconnect those with little or no shared stuff as they near capacity), but it's easy enough to load up a shared directory with stuff you won't get sued over, but download infringing content.
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You can't make such a sweeping statement. If you're using something like the Gnutella protocol, you don't have to upload at all. You can simply leech. Consequently you are performing no distribution at all.
Protocols like Bit Torrent, on the other hand, generally don't permit leeching
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From a technical perspective, that's because proving distribution is much more easily done than proving receipt. From the legal standpoint, though, if they could easily show that someone downloaded a copyrighted work, what would be the significance of it?
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The "system" is as flawed as everything is. I can name hundreds of wrong decisions.
My lie is caught in the mill wheels of the legal system - I'm an attorney.
Don't sue Media Sentry! (Score:2)
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Secretaries of state have corporate registers. You can look it up yourself. You may find several layers of corporations and LLC entities, but eventually you will find the officers and directors or members or partners.
And let me say a resounding (Score:4, Insightful)
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What?! Only in a country where a democratically controlled congress passes a bill giving a free pass, sorry for using pass so much, to the telecoms for violating the law would the courts allow a company that illegally collects data to testify in a case without being under oath. Now how about the defendants, they get this free pass too, right?
If you had actually read the summary, you would see that it is not the courts that are asking MediaSentry to testify, it is the North Carolina Private Protective Services Board. This is no more the "courts" than the FCC is on the federal level.
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It is however reassuring that the courts may have remained sane, with respect to the branches of government, at this point in time.
Honesty (Score:2)
It would be so much easier if we all decided to simply TELL THE TRUTH!
Not just here, but in every area of our lives... politically, economically, socially, personally, even to ourselves...
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Perhaps a certain amount of ignorance is pleasant for you, but I would prefer to know and understand the truth around me. Events, the true intentions of the people around me, etc.
We could finally have prove that the sociopath in the cube across the hall is actively trying to screw us.
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It would be so much easier if we all decided to simply TELL THE TRUTH!
You first. What's your full name, date of birth, and Social Security Number?
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And it would be perfectly truthful to say I'm not going to give that info out to random people on the Internet. Being truthful doesn't mean you can't have secrets, just that you don't lie.
Excuse me if I feel pessimistic. (Score:1)
At this point, when it involves the RIAA I believe that the problems with them can't be solved by anything other than fire.
Which means I'll be pleasantly surprised when justice is done in a legal fashion. ;)
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Donno about that, looked like a standard Slashdot post to me?
I would have thought a Redundant mod was more in line than a Troll, tho...
And to continue that thought, this post is Offtopic.