12 year old girl getting sued

[jarhead]

BigD

Is it possible that the RIAA considers that the downloaders will never buy the CDs to start with? How can you "P.O." a market that never buys your products in the first place? "Inquiring minds want to know"

 

[ibaflyer]

I guess that this raises an age old question. What laws do we enforce and what laws do we ignore?

There may be valid arguements for both sides. Do we as a society get to pick what laws we have to obey and which ones are for all of the other people? NO!

The law does exist and is applicable to everyone. I, as a pilot, would not fly passangers on my plane without being current. Not because I am not able to fly, not because I have forgotten how to take-off and land. I do this because it is the law. If I would elect to not follow the FAR's and I get ramp checked, is it the FAA's fault? My Instructors? Nope... it is mine! and it is because of a choice that I had made. Sure, there may be others that do this and never get caught. It still is against the law.

I guess that what I am trying to say is......we all need to be held responsible for the laws that we break. The legal system may not be perfect but it is the only one we have.

Just remember, when you want to make a point, you have to start somewhere. I think that this is what this company is doing. Starting somewhere.

Just my .02

 

[Sctt@NJA]

I heard this interesting bit on NPR.

The way these non-centralized sharing schemes work you have no way of knowing the quality of what you are about to download and sometimes the files are corrupt.

So.. some technological academic types did a little psychological statistical type study to see what % of corrupt files would be necessary to deterr a large % of downloaders.

The record companies could fight the illegal downloading of songs by flooding a crap load of corrupt files into the system and turning people off with always getting crappy corrupt files.

Seems the smarter way to me - fight technology with technology.

 

[Styles]

They did do this.. And failed... P2P developers then started to implement md5 hashes to files these hashes were then used to give each file it's own fingerprint. The server then counted the total amount of people who had the song with the same md5 hash. The more people who had the same md5 hash the high ranked that file was, the lower the number of people who had the file the lower the rank was. All you would have to do is look for a file who had the most people, and you could avoid corrupted files and or altered files all together.

 

[Tailwind]

Be specific...Not emotional

The law is not clear on copying music.

My girlfriend makes mix tapes for me and now she makes mix CDs
from music that she either bought or borrowed.
The law did not have a problem with that because:

MONEY WAS NOT EXCHANGED FOR THE MUSIC

That is a BIG point that many of you on BOTH sides are missing.
If I own a CD, I can copy it a 1000 times. Make one for my brother or a friend AS LONG AS I don't receive money for the copies.

If I copy a T.V. show and then let my friend borrow the tape (for any length of time) it's legal. Go ahead ask a lawyer (a competent lawyer) and he'll tell you the same.

That doen't mean that the RIAA can't sue you, they can. And that's usually enough to scare people to stop.

I know what you're thinking..."Napster didn't charge for the music!"
That's correct...however, the RIAA's lawyers used a scalpel to carve out a niche that said because Napster was a central server locale it was acting in the capasity of a distributer not a friend letting another borrow a CD or tape.
Napster also was accepting money for pop up ads and the lawyers deduced that it was receiving money for the song trading in a round-about fashion.

Another thing, downloading a file is not the same as stealing a CD from the store. The CD in the store has the artwork, lyrics, jewlbox, pictures- the whole package. Besides, people STILL record music from the radio all the time.

It's the same thing people cried about when VCR's came out.
They all cried..."Nobody will ever go to the movies anymore!
The'll just watch old movies/shows in their homes!"
They also said that certain people would be recording a show and then distributing it to everyone else and the Movie companies' profits would die out. In fact, the opposite happened.

And another BIG point to remember:
The RIAA is complaing that profits are down(which the are) but they are saying that it's ALL because of people downloading.
Such B.S.--Oh sure! It can't possibly be because the RIAA hasn't put out any good music in many many years!

C'mon, you all know it to be true...the music scene today is pure garbage.

What the RIAA should have done was prepare for the internet and offer good service and fair prices for down loading directly from them. But they chose to ignore this new medum and have lost some where they could have gained.

O.K. I off the soap box, your turn...

Wait... I thought this site was supposed to be related to aviation?
My bad.

 

[A Squared]

well, that's an interesting angle, 402.

I'll bite; I might be sympathetic if it were some product which was essential to our existence, like electricity, or wheat, or water. The thing is, people aren't going to die, or even be seriously inconvenienced if they don't have the latest Brittany Spears release. If you don't like the industry, avoid those products. The newest Brittany Spears release is not a necessity by any stretch, it's a minor luxury. It is well within the financial grasp of most teenagers and all employed adults to plunk down the price of a CD without undue financial hardship, although, perhaps not as often as they'd like. Now, I like beer, but it's not a necessity. If the beer industry priced beer out of my grasp, I'd stop drinking it. It wouldn't justify me holding up liquor stores. It would be a different story if a corrupt food industry made it impossible to feed myself and I was dying of malnutrition. In that case, you might find me sneaking into the fields of the evil corporate farms and stealing corn, but that ain't what we're talking about here.

Much noise is made about the evil, corrupt recording industry. I doubt that they are any more evil or corrupt than any other industry. Let's be honest, it's just a bunch of morally bereft delinquents trying to justify in thier own minds their stealing. Maybe the recording industry takes too big a bite of the profits, maybe it doesn't, we can argue that all day, but one thing is for d@mn sure, when you steal music, you may be stealing the music company's unfair profits, but you also steal what little slice of the pie the musician would get, however small it may be. So how do you justify stealing from the artist, the guy who made the music, the guy you say is getting screwed by the record company? Please, please explain to me; if the poor artist is getting screwed by the record label, how does that justify you stealing from him too?

His share is too small so it's allright for you to steal that from him?


Now, if some artist, or some technological wiz comes up with some way that the music can be distributed directly to you, and you can pay him directly for making a copy, and the recording industry collapses, because it no longer gets a slice of the pie, well great, I'm all for it. Too bad for the recording industry, they are now out of the loop. But, each one of you who are trying to claim the moral high ground by copying music are going to turn on the artist and try to cheat him out of his due also. Please, let's be honest, it's not about you fighting the good fight against an evil industry, it's about you wanting to steal music so you don't have to pay for it, and every one of you knows in your heart that you'll steal from the artist (you already do), just as fast as you steal from the recording company.

 

[cherokee]

Gotta agree with A-squared and IPFreeley on this one. Unfortunatley we have too many people in this society that refuse to accept responsibility for their actions and instead try to blame others. Unfortunately a large increase of this during the 90s.

'It's not my fault I'm fat, Mc Donalds forced me to stuff 4 Big Macs into my pie-hole everyday.'

'It's not my fault I spilled coffee in my lap, Mc Donalds made the coffee too hot'

'Its' not my fault I illegally stole songs off the internet, the big mean record companies deserve it'

If you want to bring down prices on music, don't buy it. Companies will be forced to reduce prices. But to rationalize stealing music because it's too expensive is a lame excuse. I guess since the pants at the store are more than I want to pay I can just steal them because Levi's make enough money.

 

[labbats]

RIAA dug its own grave when they greedily RAISED prices when CDs came out. It actually cost them considerably less to print them in comparison to records and tapes, but they found they could charge more for them anyway, and did. Had they not done so, I don't believe file sharing would be what it is today.

 

[Styles]

guess since the pants at the store are more than I want to pay I can just steal....

No I would go to K-Mart, Wal-Mart etc.... This is were a monopoly comes into play and price fixing! which the RIAA has done and have been caught doing.....

 

[A Squared]

"If I own a CD, I can copy it a 1000 times. Make one for my brother or a friend AS LONG AS I don't receive money for the copies."


I don't think so. As soon as you start handing out copies of that CD to others, I believe that you're violating copyright laws. You may wish to believe that it's ok because that's emotionally convenient for you, but I think that if you bothered to actually look into it, you'll find the reality is different. I'd be willing to revise my opinion if you can document that claim, but I seriously doubt you can.

Copyright laws are intended to prevent depriving the owner of intellectual property of royalties. If you make a copy of a CD you bought and put the original on the shelf for safe keeping and listen to hte copy, you haven't deprived anyone of royalties. That is legal. As soon as you make multiple copies and start distributing them to others, you're in violation of the same laws as Napster.

"What the RIAA should have done was prepare for the internet and offer good service and fair prices for down loading directly from them."

Oh, Horse$hit, every one of us here knows that the punks stealing music are going to steal it regardless of how cheaply it can be purchased. That's the whole point, why pay the artist for writing and performing the music and the publishing company for producing the music when I can steal it for the cost of a blank CD?.

Sorry, that's just another lame attempt to blame the companies for your theft.