In my opinion, nobody at the crucial decision vectors of this issue is
learning to discuss it accurately. There are unhelpful mental blocks at
work here.
Electronic looters: They got a lot of stuff and didn't pay for it AND they
didn't remove anything from the store in doing so! Lights don't have much
to do with it as I belive this was happening in broad daylight too. Since
these new kinds of digitized units can be acquired without being removed,
we might do better to start considering the perveyors of these items to now
be in a NEW kind of business that's all about SPREADING these copied units
which never need to be replenished, in fact never need to be manufactured
(!) rather than impossibly trying to sell your master over and over, one at
a time, the charge for which is no longer justified by either logistics or
expenses and only encourages looters who apparently understand this better
than you do. In this town, the stores are all unlocked and no inventory is
"lost" and it will be this way at least until 1984, so it might be more
helpful if you just started charging looters to get into town or something
like that...and for God's sake stop trying to follow everyone who's leaving
town!
Otherwise, you are just inviting 1984 to hurry up and get here, and killing
interest in your music master in the process.
DJ
Negativland
>One of the more, um, interesting analogies this week...
>
>"Ian C. Ballon, an expert in Internet law and a partner at Manatt, Phelps &
>Phillips, a California law firm, likens the decision to the lights coming
>back on after a prolonged blackout. 'Sometimes when there's a power failure
>in a city, and the lights go out, someone might throw a rock through a
>window and people may begin taking things out of stores,' Mr. Ballon said.
>'The fact that hundreds of people carry off televisions and stereos and do
>it for free doesn't mean it's legal,' he added. People loot because the
>lights are out and the alarms are off. But sooner or later the lights go
>back on, the strange interlude ends and 'the law is re-imposed,' he said."
>
>-----------------------------
>February 16, 2001
>Legal Expert Sees Light Focused on Napster Users
>By CARL S. KAPLAN
>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/16/technology/16CYBERLAW.html
>
>It's no secret that Napster suffered a major and perhaps fatal blow Monday
>when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San
>Francisco, issued its long-awaited decision. Boiled down, the federal
>appeals court found it likely that the popular online music-swapping service
>illegally aided others in violating copyright law.
>
>But who are the others? That's the second major issue resolved by the Ninth
>Circuit's decision -- a point overlooked by a lot of press accounts.
>
>Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Robert R. Beezer indicated that
>Napster's 50 million users have engaged in a kind of mass looting by
>downloading and copying music files from the system without permission from
>the record companies. The users are the primary infringers of copyright, the
>court said. Napster is the contributory infringer. The first conclusion is a
>necessary ingredient of the second.
>
>Of course, it's not likely that the record industry will go after millions
>of music-swapping addicts for copyright infringement. That would be
>impractical as well as bad for public relations. Still, it's not every day
>that an august panel of appellate judges declares that millions of software
>users are breaking the law.
>
>Ian C. Ballon, an expert in Internet law and a partner at Manatt, Phelps &
>Phillips, a California law firm, likens the decision to the lights coming
>back on after a prolonged blackout. "Sometimes when there's a power failure
>in a city, and the lights go out, someone might throw a rock through a
>window and people may begin taking things out of stores," Mr. Ballon said.
>"The fact that hundreds of people carry off televisions and stereos and do
>it for free doesn't mean it's legal," he added. People loot because the
>lights are out and the alarms are off. But sooner or later the lights go
>back on, the strange interlude ends and "the law is re-imposed," he said.
>
>The appeals court addressed the question of infringement at some length.
>Napster argued that many of its users do not directly infringe on the record
>industry's copyrights because they are engaged in a "fair use" of the
>material. Among other things, Napster asserted that many consumers used its
>system merely to access music they already owned in CD format.
>
>There was rationale behind the argument. Suppose a high school student from
>Los Angeles owns 200 CD's. Suppose, too, that the student just got accepted
>at Yale. Why should the kid carry all his CD's to New Haven? Isn't it just a
>matter of convenience for him to upload his CD's to Napster, so that he may
>access them from his new dorm room at his leisure?
>
>The defense is a variation on a winning point in Sony v. Universal City
>Studios, Inc., a leading Supreme Court case on copyright infringement that
>was decided in 1984. In the Sony "Betamax" case, the Supreme Court found
>that most VCR owners use their machines to tape a copyrighted television
>show for later personal viewing. The court said this practice,
>"time-shifting," was a fair use.
>
>A later case, RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., decided by the
>United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1999, extended the
>concept. The appeals court said it was a fair use for consumers to use the
>Rio, a portable MP3 player, to make copies in order to "space-shift," or
>render portable, those music files that already resided on their hard
>drives.
>
>In its Napster decision, however, the appeals court panel said that the
>prior arguments about time- and space-shifting were "inapposite," or
>irrelevant.
>
>In the Sony case, the court observed, the vast majority of VCR users did not
>distribute the television broadcasts they taped to the general public.
>Rather, they enjoyed them privately at home at a later time. Similarly, a
>Rio user transferred copyrighted music he already owned from a hard drive to
>a portable MP3 player. In both situations, the copied material was exposed
>only to the original user.
>
>"Conversely," the appeals court wrote ominously in its Napster decision, "it
>is obvious that once a user lists a copy of music he already owns on the
>Napster system in order to access the music from another location, the song
>becomes available to millions of other individuals, not just the original CD
>owner." Because the Napster user willy-nilly shares his music with countless
>millions of other Napster users, there can be no fair use, the court said.
>
>Now that a federal appeals court has written in lawyerly prose that
>countless Napster users are engaged in copyright infringement, will it make
>any difference to the individuals who copy music? Some might think not. But
>Mr. Ballon is optimistic.
>
>"Now that the lights are on," he said, those who use Napster might try a
>lawful system of downloading music. One result of the appeals court's
>decision, which ultimately modified a broad injunction issued by a lower
>court, is that Napster and the music industry have more time to create a
>legitimate system for distributing MP3 music files. A cheap and lawful
>system would not be such a bad outcome, Mr. Ballon said.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>This is the pho mailing list, managed by Majordomo 1.94.4.
>
>To send a message to the list, email phoATonehouse.com.
>To send a request to majordomo, email majordomoATonehouse.com and put your
>request in the body of the message (use request "help" for help).
>To unsubscribe from the list, email majordomoATonehouse.com and put
>"unsubscribe pho" in the body of the message.
----------------------------------------------------
Rumori, the Detritus.net Discussion List
to unsubscribe, send mail to majordomoATdetritus.net
with "unsubscribe rumori" in the message body.
----------------------------------------------------
Rumori list archives & other information are at
http://detritus.net/contact/rumori
----------------------------------------------------
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
N© Detritus.net. Sharerights extended to all.