You! Pirate! Stop pirating, or we shall admonish you politely. Repeatedly, if necessary A UK government-backed scheme to curtail the widespread use of pirated copies of music, television and film has officially been launched and - as expected - comes without any harsh penalties being threatened against persistent offenders. Instead, millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been chucked at an education programme …
So how exactly did these copyright holders get hold of £3.5M of taxpayer money then? Copying intellectual property (neither piracy nor theft, by the way) is a civil matter, and should be paid for by the injured party and maybe the defendant if the rights-holders win in court.
As ways of attempting to stuff the genie back in the bottle go, I suppose education isn't he worst thing that could happen; but it does seem pretty pointless. And expensive.
I believe the copyright holders have paid for this service.
They donate to the political party, political party pays them back with tax-payers money.
Indirect funding of political parties using tax payers money.
However, since I don't have the resources available to, say, GCHQ or NSA, I don't have any proof so this is purely a hypothetical scenario you understand.
An SSH connection? A VPN?
Or just the common or garden variety of unobscured Torrent traffic. It also implies they're guessing as to what's happening content-wise on your connection, too, though presumably they're not allowed to packet-inspect to see if you're downloading Ubuntu or Transformers (so you can delete it without watching it, natch)
A feature of some torrent trackers is that they include not only the actual people sharing a file, but also a random selection of pseudorandomly chosen IPs as well. As all these random IPs ever see is torrent clients politely asking if they'd like to share, then ignoring them when nothing happens, the actual IPs thus used don't know what's happening.
If they do get warnings sent, then we can merely assume that this is down to reading info off torrent sites. The probable backlash from this ought to be educational.
Wrong copyright violation is theft, as a large number of judges and courts. But here is a recent case where a person convicted under anti-piracy laws was deported because they were convicted of a “theft offense (including receipt of stolen property)". The appeals court ruled "It is not unreasonable to deem piracy closely related to both counterfeiting and theft. See, e.g., World Copyright Law 2.29 (3d ed. 2007) (identifying piracy as a form of theft)"
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7434762040949534857
The case you quote is in the US.
In the UK it is not theft to download copyrighted material, it is a civil offence.
It can become a criminal one if you upload though so don't use torrents, use newsgroups and your legal.
"The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended by the Copyright and Trade Marks (Offences and Enforcement) Act 2002, currently protects copyrighted materials. People who download copyrighted recordings without permission face civil actions. Downloading can also constitute a criminal offence if the downloader distributes the material."
Firstly bullshit copy IP is a crime. From the UK government who know about the laws they pass
[
Unauthorised use of someone's IP can be classed as IP crime and may lead to prosecution.
]
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipenforce/ipenforce-crime.htm
[Deliberate infringement of copyright on a commercial scale may be a criminal offence.]
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-manage/c-useenforce/c-infringe.htm
Being closely related to is not the same as being the same.
The Theft Act 1968 s1(1) makes it clear that, in order to constitute theft, an act needs to deprive the rightful owner of the thing stolen. In the case of copyrighted material, this is not the case.
You are wrong - copyright violations do not constitute theft as defined in English law.
Firstly the Theft Act 1968 s1(1) is NOT teh be all and end all of the Theft act it is simply s1(1). Secondly you have misquoted it as it also says 'with the intention of permanently depriving '. Thirdly you need to account for "taking a motor vehicle without the owners consent - TWOC" is covered by section 12 of Theft Act 1968, even though there might be no intent to "permanently deprive"
Copyright infringement is an act of dishonesty that in the past was carried out by Publishers, people that weren't usually associated with the criminal classes. However, the law has no problems seeing it as theft when it wants to sanction the hoi polloi rather than the MacMillians and the HarperCollins of the world.
These IP mongers should just frig off! Shame on those complicit ISPs for what could become a slippery slope and greater losses for them. 'Education' (propaganda) won't work, only cost and convenience will. The internet is built on routing around damage and scarcity is damage, duh!
Copyright == legal fiction, anti-property *, corrupt privilege from government; the same applies to all types of the Intellectual Property, all retarded waste of taxes legal fictions.
* All IP is anti-property rights because it attempts to stop people using /their property/ in a ways which don't hurt anyone; that is an unlawful contradiction.
Piracy == violent theft of physical property at sea, so associating it with disrespect for bogus Intellectual Property concepts is perverse fraud and should be regarded as libel and/or slander.
The estates, corporations, states and legal IP trolls have got to be delusional if they can't accept that Intellectual Property is now seen as an "Emperors New Clothes"; there is now a growing intellectual base which is demolishing all the sophist arguments for IP and demonstrating how retarded, wasteful and pointless it is.
US courts only have jurisdiction in the US, and even then only for limited legal or law jurisdiction, so the link is garbage for a declining world-power.
"Piracy" has been used to mean "unauthorised use or reproduction of another's work" for approximately 200 years now. Check out what Charles Dickens had to say on the subject.
Your complaint makes considerably less sense than claiming that you're abusing the term "troll", which is really a mythological spirit that lives under a bridge/in a cave. At least someone who argues that - would have had a case, within living memory.
You could use the Old English word "sæsceaða" instead. I gather (from t'internet) it means "one who takes another's work without permission", and was used pre 1300ad before Latin came in. So the concept of it being wrong to take another's work is a very old one.
Presumably, the use of "piracy" in this context is from "pirate radio station", many of which were on ships in international waters.
Of course having pinched sæsceaða for the internet, I may just have committed sæsceaða...
"These IP mongers should just frig off!"
I just wanted to repeat that, so I can bathe in your erudite phrasing. A new Byron was born 15 years ago, it seems.
If it costs £100,000 to create a good work of literature, art, music, etc the the creator needs to recoup that expense or they won't do it again. That means if it is charged at £10 then you need 10,000 people to pay that amount. If 5,000 do and 50,000 receive it for free, the person doing the creating won't do it any more. In time, you'll just get things that cost less and less to produce. While some of those might still be good, you'll have lost a lot of artists. So you'll be able to really cheaply listen to a bunch of stuff that has a lower average quality. And those who are willing to pay £10 for the good stuff won't be able to, because the artist couldn't make a living.
Provide me with a single portal (a la Netflix), where I can get *all* my video, audio, film, TV show, etc media, for one reasonable monthly rate (e.g.: $20), and I will abandon The Pirate Bay.
Otherwise, consider *why* I'm using Pirate Bay for my media needs. Hint: it isn't price, it's availability.
I have a paid up subscription to Netflix. While the UK offering is a little pathetic compared to the cheaper and vastly more comprehensive US offering, it is nice to watch things on demand for a reasonable fee and know the content creators are compensated.
On a completely different matter, I'd whole heartedly recommend using a free service like "hola" to view the the BBC News service website as if you were in the US. It's fascinating to see how the home page differs in stories because it believes you're in a different geographical location.
As much as I normally would love to grumble about Sky http://www.nowtv.com/, is pretty impressive (if all you really want is Sky Atlantic, for whatever HBO stuff is knocking about) for a very reasonable fiver a month.
Pretty much the the only thing I'd want from Sky - but without having to join, and costing less that it would if I had.
For me it's a single portal, offering brand new content, as well as an archive of previous stuff (music, film and TV shows), including old and obscure, possibly never released on DVD stuff (cartoons etc), with the ability to take an offline copy.
At the moment, torrents offer basically this for free so I guess I'd pay maybe £5 - £10 a month for it. Maybe they could have an ad supported version too. As you say though - it's about availability, not price.
I can understand people wanting to view/listen to content that hasn't been made available by the relevant author/distributor/copyright owner, but I don't agree with this entitlement mentality that seems to say "I demand this content, and if you're not prepared to sell it to me at the price I'm willing to pay then I'm just going to take it anyway". Sometimes you just can't have what you want.
Making content is a costly commercial enterprise, and the content creators have the right to determine and control how they recoup their costs, just like any other manufacturer.
I sense downvotes coming...
Clearly society values creative works, hence the urge for some people to obtain them through whatever channel they choose, illicit or otherwise. But as Bunbury pointed out above, if the professional creators are not adequately compensated for creating then they will stop doing it, and then only those who dabble will be left to produce inferior stuff just for the 'fun' of producing it. That's a race to the bottom, and everyone loses in the end.
As I see it, the purpose of copyright law should be to allow a creator to be able to claim enough reward for creating so that (s)he will go on to produce more works for everyone's benefit and enjoyment.
I think the 'lifetime plus <n> years' thing is unreasonably greedy and provides a kind of self-justification for people who rip stuff off - but I also think the people who insist that all copyright should simply be ignored are just as greedy, wanting to obtain for nothing the results of someone else's efforts.
Copyright is indeed a kind of state-granted monopoly, but if we as a society want to enjoy creative works, how else can we ensure that it's worth the creators' while to spend their time and money producing these things for us?
Making content is a costly commercial enterprise, and the content creators have the right to determine and control how they recoup their costs, just like any other manufacturer.
But once the content has been created, artificially limiting sales to particular regions would result in lower revenue.
But once the content has been created, artificially limiting sales to particular regions would result in lower revenue.
Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't - I'd be surprised if the businesses involved were not maximising their revenue over the longer term. Maybe they see things from a different perspective from the consumer.
Whatever their reasons, if they own the copyright then it's up to them to market it as they see fit. It is not anyone else's right to distribute or take copies for free, no matter how frustrating it may be that it's unavailable to them through legitimate channels.
"But I really, really, really want it!" isn't a valid excuse to take something that isn't on offer to you.
I hope they are going to be able to distinguish between legit torrent files.... that lastest Centos is quite heavy.... not that I'm hugely worried as only the NSA/GCHQ (and I assume the Chinese) (and the Tooting Revolutionary Front) (and People's Front of Judea) are able to read my encrypted stream and they don't seem that interested as long as I don't put 'Let's bomb USA/Peking/Chicken Cottage/Judea" in my code)
> the nagging system will only be used to advise account holders that unlawful file-sharing may be taking place on their network connection
Byline coming to an ISP near you in 2015: Following no apparent drop in file sharing statistics in the UK, the CCUK awareness campaign will be upping its efforts this year and its warning emails will now include a link to purchase a copy of the illegally downloaded content.
And a year after that: Following no apparent increase in revenue from its online or brick'n'mortar storefronts from links posted to subscribers thought to be downloading copyrighted material illegally, CCUK has stepped up its warnings with a footnote that the crime of piracy is punishable by lifetime imprisonment.
And finally: Owing to continual rampant piracy, the latest iteration of the CCUK Piracy Dis-Incentive Scheme will automatically deduct either the retail value of the illegal download, or £0.01 per MB, whichever is higher, from the balance of the account holder. If the subscriber does not have the requisite funds and are unable to complete the transaction, they will be prosecuted for shoplifting.
Surely there's no way that ISP's would ever allow copyright holders to damage their customers ability to use the internet otherwise there wouldn't be a lot of customers left and as Pirate bay has shown, it's useless to try and block sites individually as they will just pop up somewhere else.
If only these companies would put the money they spent on chasing down piracy into developing something people would be happy to pay for, by actually making their content easily available for everyone and thinking of their market on a global scale rather than regional ones.
Obviously they have something that people want, they just need to put their minds to finding a way to sell it to them!
I say this as someone who has NEVER downloaded music or movies illegally.
Evidently it's still more financially attractive not to do that, despite their whinging about how they're only able to afford the one Bentley this year...
Proof, in of itself, that they're not skint else you can bet there'd be an epic digital dissemination system in place already if it were worth five dollah.
If Destiny PS4 preorders are running at nearly 1/2 million (maybe just USA alone - http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/) and say half those people (conservative) downloaded beta last weekend but shared one code with a pal then that's 500,000 x 13GB downloads (about 6.5 PB off the top of my head). If a gaming co can handle that - and there was very little outage in EU Beta here - then the MAFIAA have no excuse.
> Surely there's no way that ISP's would ever allow copyright holders to damage their customers ability to use the internet
In an ideal world, yes. But these "big three"...
> BT, Virgin Media and BSkyB
...are all content providers, selling/renting copyrighted material to their subscribers and that generates a conflict of interest where it actually might be in their interests to hamper their customers' internet connections to make their own products appear better, at least for the forms of media that they do provide themselves.
Case in point - as a BeThere refugee that was moved to sky, as soon as the transition happened YouTube went down the toilet and I was told I was going to be charged an extra £5 a month for not having sky TV. My ADSL still worked at its allocated bandwidth (so network capacity was obviously still there) and my DNS setup hadn't changed, so it's not out of the realms of possibility for sky to be intentionally sabotaging competing and/or high bandwidth applications for the sake of more money. And if one is to put ones cynical hat on, it's not out of the realms of possibility to think this might become more of a problem as time progresses.
Likewise, I do wish there was a nice, easy way to purchase stuff, but there's plenty of things that never get a release (lots of BBC documentaries for example), lots of stuff that's out of print or otherwise unavailable (tried for ages to find DVD's of McKellen's "Richard III" and BBC's "The Great War" and a bunch of other stuff... all either impossible to buy or £100's for a might-be-legit copy).
But that's not going to change, so persuasion it is. Until it turns into intimidation at least.
"I say this as someone who has NEVER downloaded music or movies illegally.
Why, because you're a Goody Two-Shoes or the stuff you want is always available wherever and whenever you want it?
There's little doubt there's a major problem in sourcing much of the content (for whatever reason), thus many resort to piracy out of desperation. Until content providers stop this 'supply' nonsense there'll be little incentive for the 'pirates' to change.
BTW, I never download movies, I very rarely watch them, even on free-to-air TV.
As KjetilS correctly says "They could perhaps try to give customers what the want." and there's precious little that I wish to see.
"..its warning emails will now include a link to purchase a copy of the illegally downloaded content."
This could be handy. So if I download a bit of Game of Thrones, will the link let me buy a legal DVD/Blu-ray now-ish? Like not having to wait until Feb 2015?
They could perhaps try to give customers what the want.
No, I don't mean that the media industries have to give it all away, but after Spotify was launched in the nordics, music piracy dropped to almost zero, since the legal alternative was easier than pirating.
This seems to be the experience if people try to go the legal route with movies and TV shows.
I pay for both music and movie library access.
The music library is more extensive and consistent than the movie library - hence I still use other mechanisms to access video content which isn't available on the subscription model.
If the video library was as good as the music library (in terms of depth and, more importantly, stability of content*).
* As in not have things that disappear from the library - just put them in there and keep them available.
There you have it. With storage so incredibly cheap these days (I remember when it cost several thousand for a 10Mb Winchester HDD about the size of a domestic washing machine - back when the Internet was all fields), there's no reason not to have *everything* stored and available to subscribers.
Instead we have the latest 'teeny sensation', this year's X Factor winners, a bunch of wrinkled old rock dinosaurs who might have been relevant 40 years ago, the usual mass market tosh.
I you're looking for something less than commercial, anything that wasn't in the Hot 100 Chart, experimental, dangerous (you remember - the stuff the record companies used to release back in the days of Manticore, Island and Virgin - then you won't find much of it in a music store.
The new, exciting, but quite possible commercially failing music that record companies used to seek out in the late 60s/early 70s (admittedly because record execs were mainly old and out of touch and had no idea what 'the kids' would be listening to next) are no longer an expensive option. hell, most of these guys absorb their own production costs - all Sony BMG has to do is store the audio file somewhere.
Some of it's very very good, some very very bad. Some of it is too strange to easily form an opinion of. But I always thought that the major selling point of online music was to be presented with things you wouldn't normally hear at your local HMV (if anyone still has a local HMV).
In the old days, you had to go digging around to find unusual or different music. Some people did, and new genres arose. But to go hunting for something you need to know it exists, and as long as online music stores continue to offer just more of what sold well last week, new music will continue to be the province of diehard P2P music fans, asking each other in the forums 'Hey, did you hear this? See what you think'.
Sorry, meandered a bit. If there's a point in there I'd like to claim it.
Correct.
I'm trying to work out whose fault this is. Is it the broadcasters, who for arcane reasons of their own, don't want to put it out within a day or so of its first appearance elsewhere?
Or is it the publishers, who want to stagger its release in different markets so that ... I dunno, they can tie in marketing events or something? Dang, if only there were some way of marketing a show in many different markets at once!
Seriously, does anyone know why we have to put up with this nonsense?
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