The Shrine

http://gamepolitics.com/2007/12/31/riaa ... ard-drive/

All you fucking PSP/PS3/X-Box360 owners with music on your HD need to be arrested!

Everything's legal up here!

If the RIAA and MPAA had their way you wouldn't be allowed to do shit with your purchase. They wouldn't want you changing the format, making backups, giving it to a friend (the original), using it on multiple devices, etc.

Hell the RIAA thinks you should have to pay for a song 2x if you buy the CD and then want it on your iPod.

Heh, they are still winning on the hardware front. HDMI cables, for one.

On the flip side, I actually found the links in the comments more interesting: EMI looking to slash RIAA funding and Warner drops DRM

If you look at the copyright laws, it necessarily has to be very restricting or otherwise you'd get in a problem of 'if this is okay why isn't that okay?' You basically have no power to do anything with copyrighted materal, but Fair Use lets you do anything that'd make sense. I'd assume this exists so that you can't possibly have anything on your computer that's legal if you didn't buy it via DRM, because if you could it might have other complications elsewhere when it comes to filesharing.

Don Wang wrote:If you look at the copyright laws, it necessarily has to be very restricting or otherwise you'd get in a problem of 'if this is okay why isn't that okay?' You basically have no power to do anything with copyrighted materal, but Fair Use lets you do anything that'd make sense. I'd assume this exists so that you can't possibly have anything on your computer that's legal if you didn't buy it via DRM, because if you could it might have other complications elsewhere when it comes to filesharing.

Copyright laws are draconian and corrupt at this point thanks to the like of Disney and the RIAA to name a few.

As Zeus said-- Canada doesn't have this problem so your belief that they have to be written strict like that doesn't hold water; their copyright laws pander to the consumer rather than the seller which means they're actually pretty fair to both I think, or at least I don't hear complaints about copyright laws up north. The Canadian version of the RIAA isn't mass suing grandmothers and college students so they've got a leg up there.

It is also too late to change the laws in Canada, it would't fly.

Canada pays the equivalent of the piracy tax on all media that could be used for piracy. In return they have more lenient rules regarding filesharing. You get what you pay for.

It doesn't cover blank DVDs or memory cards, no proposals for levies on any sort of media has been successfully passed since the 90's. Sort of funny, because blank CDs here cost more than blank DVDs due to this.

Don Wang wrote:Canada pays the equivalent of the piracy tax on all media that could be used for piracy. In return they have more lenient rules regarding filesharing. You get what you pay for.

yeah, the ruling is we essentially pay for digital downloads from torrents for videos and mp3s 'cause we pay an excise tax on all digital media. That's why we're still allowed.

Mind you, I'm still getting DVD-Rs for 20 cents each and CD-Rs for 13 cents or so each, so it's not like they're prohibitavely expensive up here. Our RIAA and MPAA equivalents shot themselves in the foot by being greedy that way and they're paying for it

Well whether the piracy tax works or not is not my concern. My point is that you didn't have some lax copyright law because Canada likes lax copyright alws. They obviously are supposed to make the money back via the piracy tax in exchange for a leninent copyright law. Whether this works or not, I have no idea.

Don Wang wrote:Well whether the piracy tax works or not is not my concern. My point is that you didn't have some lax copyright law because Canada likes lax copyright alws. They obviously are supposed to make the money back via the piracy tax in exchange for a leninent copyright law. Whether this works or not, I have no idea.

Where do you draw this conclusion that the industry said "ok we'll allow lenient copyright laws if you pay a tax on digital media"? Sounds more to me that the government told them "no, you can't have draconic copyright laws-- not yours" and after some fighting they got the piracy tax instead, which sounds like it's barely worth collecting.

Don Wang wrote:Well whether the piracy tax works or not is not my concern. My point is that you didn't have some lax copyright law because Canada likes lax copyright alws. They obviously are supposed to make the money back via the piracy tax in exchange for a leninent copyright law. Whether this works or not, I have no idea.

No, no, no. I think you're missing the point here. This is something that backfired BIG TIME on the industries. They said "Canada has pussy-ass government that we can easily buy and stupid fucking voters who don't even know what's going on nonetheless make a stink about it, why don't we just stick it in the customers' ass by forcing them to pay a ridiculous 'excise tax' on digital media? It's like free money to us!". This was back during the Napster days and they figured they'd be smart and hit us without us really noticing under the guise of "being reimbursed" for downloads.

But what happened is they got burned big time when they found out that because they decided to fleece us that they technically were already getting reimbursed for downloads so they had no legal recourse in this country. Considering how much more prevalent downloading is now in all forms of media than it was the 12 or so years ago they fought for this tax, they're all pissed off and are acting like the spoiled brats that they are, using idle threats (like NBC sending an email through my ISP threatening legal action; that was great for a laugh) and trying to throw their money around (through adverts and paying politicians to come out against it) to get what they want without having a leg to stand on.

They're essentially the Daniel Alfuckssens of the business world, it's quite entertaining. But make no mistake about it, this was a HUGE oversight by the short-sighted industries from over a decade ago, not a calculated manner of reimbursement.

Tessian wrote:

Don Wang wrote:Well whether the piracy tax works or not is not my concern. My point is that you didn't have some lax copyright law because Canada likes lax copyright alws. They obviously are supposed to make the money back via the piracy tax in exchange for a leninent copyright law. Whether this works or not, I have no idea.

Where do you draw this conclusion that the industry said "ok we'll allow lenient copyright laws if you pay a tax on digital media"? Sounds more to me that the government told them "no, you can't have draconic copyright laws-- not yours" and after some fighting they got the piracy tax instead, which sounds like it's barely worth collecting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_co ... evy#Canada

They actually collected a lot of money out of this, but probably not as much as they'd have liked.

Zeus wrote:

Don Wang wrote:Well whether the piracy tax works or not is not my concern. My point is that you didn't have some lax copyright law because Canada likes lax copyright alws. They obviously are supposed to make the money back via the piracy tax in exchange for a leninent copyright law. Whether this works or not, I have no idea.

No, no, no. I think you're missing the point here. This is something that backfired BIG TIME on the industries. They said "Canada has pussy-ass government that we can easily buy and stupid fucking voters who don't even know what's going on nonetheless make a stink about it, why don't we just stick it in the customers' ass by forcing them to pay a ridiculous 'excise tax' on digital media? It's like free money to us!". This was back during the Napster days and they figured they'd be smart and hit us without us really noticing under the guise of "being reimbursed" for downloads.

But what happened is they got burned big time when they found out that because they decided to fleece us that they technically were already getting reimbursed for downloads so they had no legal recourse in this country. Considering how much more prevalent downloading is now in all forms of media than it was the 12 or so years ago they fought for this tax, they're all pissed off and are acting like the spoiled brats that they are, using idle threats (like NBC sending an email through my ISP threatening legal action; that was great for a laugh) and trying to throw their money around (through adverts and paying politicians to come out against it) to get what they want without having a leg to stand on.

They're essentially the Daniel Alfuckssens of the business world, it's quite entertaining. But make no mistake about it, this was a HUGE oversight by the short-sighted industries from over a decade ago, not a calculated manner of reimbursement.

Your country's law do not allow you to distribute anything, so you might want to check the validity of your stance again if you're the provider of Zeus's torrent of whatever. Now if you're just using up a lot of their bandwidth but you're not the source of these stuff the best they can do is shut down your access for using too much bandwidth and they have no recourse against people who are downloading because it is legal. But someone has to be the primary distributor even in a P2P network. The first upload has to come from one person. Of course finding the source is rather difficult, and it's not anything that'd bother 99.9% of the people because you're not the one out there coming up with the initial torrent of Naruto or whatever.

Zeus wrote:

Don Wang wrote:Canada pays the equivalent of the piracy tax on all media that could be used for piracy. In return they have more lenient rules regarding filesharing. You get what you pay for.

Mind you, I'm still getting DVD-Rs for 20 cents each and CD-Rs for 13 cents or so each, so it's not like they're prohibitavely expensive up here. Our RIAA and MPAA equivalents shot themselves in the foot by being greedy that way and they're paying for it

The levy is 21 cents per CD unless that has changed in the past two years.

Dutch wrote:

Zeus wrote:

Don Wang wrote:Canada pays the equivalent of the piracy tax on all media that could be used for piracy. In return they have more lenient rules regarding filesharing. You get what you pay for.

Mind you, I'm still getting DVD-Rs for 20 cents each and CD-Rs for 13 cents or so each, so it's not like they're prohibitavely expensive up here. Our RIAA and MPAA equivalents shot themselves in the foot by being greedy that way and they're paying for it

The levy is 21 cents per CD unless that has changed in the past two years.

I bought 50 CDs for $8 a year ago so I highly doubt that

Don Wang wrote:

Zeus wrote:

Don Wang wrote:Well whether the piracy tax works or not is not my concern. My point is that you didn't have some lax copyright law because Canada likes lax copyright alws. They obviously are supposed to make the money back via the piracy tax in exchange for a leninent copyright law. Whether this works or not, I have no idea.

No, no, no. I think you're missing the point here. This is something that backfired BIG TIME on the industries. They said "Canada has pussy-ass government that we can easily buy and stupid fucking voters who don't even know what's going on nonetheless make a stink about it, why don't we just stick it in the customers' ass by forcing them to pay a ridiculous 'excise tax' on digital media? It's like free money to us!". This was back during the Napster days and they figured they'd be smart and hit us without us really noticing under the guise of "being reimbursed" for downloads.

But what happened is they got burned big time when they found out that because they decided to fleece us that they technically were already getting reimbursed for downloads so they had no legal recourse in this country. Considering how much more prevalent downloading is now in all forms of media than it was the 12 or so years ago they fought for this tax, they're all pissed off and are acting like the spoiled brats that they are, using idle threats (like NBC sending an email through my ISP threatening legal action; that was great for a laugh) and trying to throw their money around (through adverts and paying politicians to come out against it) to get what they want without having a leg to stand on.

They're essentially the Daniel Alfuckssens of the business world, it's quite entertaining. But make no mistake about it, this was a HUGE oversight by the short-sighted industries from over a decade ago, not a calculated manner of reimbursement.

Your country's law do not allow you to distribute anything, so you might want to check the validity of your stance again if you're the provider of Zeus's torrent of whatever. Now if you're just using up a lot of their bandwidth but you're not the source of these stuff the best they can do is shut down your access for using too much bandwidth and they have no recourse against people who are downloading because it is legal. But someone has to be the primary distributor even in a P2P network. The first upload has to come from one person. Of course finding the source is rather difficult, and it's not anything that'd bother 99.9% of the people because you're not the one out there coming up with the initial torrent of Naruto or whatever.

That's why Demonoid got shut down. They were based in Canada which is the SOLE reason the Canadian gov't forced them to shut down.

The industries have been trying to use the whole "seeding a torrent is uploading" argument for a while but it ain't workin'. That's why they went after Demonoid so hard, they gots nothing against the individual up here. And the ISPs are starting to realize that they can't severely restrict the downloading otherwise people will just jump ship to another one (the fact that Bell and Rogers can't stand each other really helps).

So, I get a 7MB download connection (I regularly download steady at 500-800k a second on Torrentbytes) and as long as I keep my uploading contained (I have a global limit of 35k/sec on my utorrent), I'm OK. Mind you, it took me calling up my ISP and putting them in their place (you threaten to leave after being with them for a while and they fold faster than an accordian at a barmitsfa), but I haven't had any issues in a year. And I musta downloaded 80GB in December when Torrentbytes had their free leech month. So the ISPs aren't really a source of stopping us either (considering they're charging double for half of the service we really should be getting).

There's essentially nothing to stop us from grabbing whatever whenever right now.

Well the ISP side of the issue is absolutely unrelated to the copyright and has everything to do with the fact that they don't really plan on you using an unlimited amount of bandwidth even if it says you have unlimited bandwidth.

So far as the distributor goes, one can argue whether seeding is same as distributing but the fact remains your torrent of whatever did not happen without a distributor. The data did not get disseminated on the Internet without someone distributing it. You certainly don't want to say everyone is a distributor because then it's likely they'll just say then we can just bust everyone in a P2P system (I don't think RIAA would miss P2P too much). From what I've observe either they try to figure out who was the first guy that uploaded this stuff, or they try to find someone who is uploading a stupidly huge amount of data. If you're just maintaining your ratio of 1 or even 10 I don't think anyone actually cares what you're doing because they got more important people to go after.

For what it's worth, getting the first guy actually works if you can figure out who the first guy was. The entire manga piracy operation in China pretty much got set back because the guy with the inside source got arrested in Japan. Instead of getting manga translation 2 days before the serial comes out in Japan, now it comes out 2 days after it came out in Japan. And 4 days is a lot of time to be trying to sell stuff to people who can't get their latest fix of Naruto or whatever.

The whole point is they will never stop the distribution. They're realizing that which is why they sued a grandmother in the US for $22k. They're trying to put the fear of God into people to destroy the demand 'cause the supply is infinite. Why would they spend insane millions on changing laws if they could just hit the main distributors? They can't, that's why.

And they're losing, huge. They know it that's why they've gotten to the point of attacking their customers. They're trying to break the "habit" of downloading (mothers are balking at buy CDs or DVDs - or even games - for their kids and asking them if they can just download it; I've seen it happen) by getting it out of the conscious of the public. It's so widespread it's ridiculous.

For most people like myself, it makes zero difference whether or not I get it two days before release or a week after. I still get it. You're just talking about a timing difference that's easily adjusted to. Sure I was happy as fuck watching the last ep of Season 2 of Dexter nearly two weeks before it aired but would I have insisted on paying for TV to get it? No chance, I would just wait a half hour after it airs, download it in 15 minutes, and watch it then. It's as good as TiVO for cryin' out loud. Only the super-impatient ridiculous nerds will have an issue of waiting a couple of days and they comprise a fraction of the downloading population now that jocks are seasoned downloaders.

They can't do jack about it and they know it. They're just trying to minimize the effect, not eliminate it. That will never happen.

Zeus wrote:Why would they spend insane millions on changing laws if they could just hit the main distributors? They can't, that's why.

Works for Disney. Every time Mickey Mouse (the old form of him, mind you) is nearing the copyright expiration, they petition some greedy senator to extend the copyright some more. (Sonny Bono got what he fucking deserved!)

Now, copyright is so far in the future that it's having a serious impact on society's public domain. You can't legally copy Pong, you can't legally copy old Jimmy Stewart movies, and you can't legally copy old songs of Led Zeppelin or even Fats Domino. That's really fucking sad!

SineSwiper wrote:

Zeus wrote:Why would they spend insane millions on changing laws if they could just hit the main distributors? They can't, that's why.

Works for Disney. Every time Mickey Mouse (the old form of him, mind you) is nearing the copyright expiration, they petition some greedy senator to extend the copyright some more. (Sonny Bono got what he fucking deserved!)

Now, copyright is so far in the future that it's having a serious impact on society's public domain. You can't legally copy Pong, you can't legally copy old Jimmy Stewart movies, and you can't legally copy old songs of Led Zeppelin or even Fats Domino. That's really fucking sad!

Hold on, you can retain the copyright as long as you keep renewing it, no? Is there some statute of limitations that I don't know about?

Zeus wrote:Hold on, you can retain the copyright as long as you keep renewing it, no? Is there some statute of limitations that I don't know about?

Yes, copyrights do expire, and you can't just keep renewing them. The old law was author's death + 50 years. They extended it to +20 years with the new law. Corporate authorship is even higher. Frankly, I think it should be somewhere around 25 years from the date of its creation (author living or not) and 10 years for software.

More here: Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act

Isn't it life of creator + 80 years at this point? It's fucking ridiculous. I heard somewhere recently they may be considering reducing the expiration because of the shit RIAA is pulling. I mean seriously, copyright and patents are there to encourage people to create and produce stuff that will benefit society in some way and ensure the creator gets compensated for it. This goes way beyond that... now we're talking about making sure the creator's grandkids get royalties still; it's sick.

Life of creator + 15 years, and that's generous. Patent laws are much more realistic; copyright laws need to be rewritten badly.

Zeus wrote:

Dutch wrote:

Zeus wrote: Mind you, I'm still getting DVD-Rs for 20 cents each and CD-Rs for 13 cents or so each, so it's not like they're prohibitavely expensive up here. Our RIAA and MPAA equivalents shot themselves in the foot by being greedy that way and they're paying for it

The levy is 21 cents per CD unless that has changed in the past two years.

I bought 50 CDs for $8 a year ago so I highly doubt that

It still seems to be 21 cents. So I am not sure how you managed to get blank CDs that cheap legally.

http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml

http://www.digitalhome.ca/index.php?opt ... &Itemid=51

Dutch wrote:

Zeus wrote:

Dutch wrote: The levy is 21 cents per CD unless that has changed in the past two years.

I bought 50 CDs for $8 a year ago so I highly doubt that

It still seems to be 21 cents. So I am not sure how you managed to get blank CDs that cheap legally.

http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml

http://www.digitalhome.ca/index.php?opt ... &Itemid=51

Arrrrr! Zeus be a bootleggin' pirate-- One of us!