Politician Violates His Own Two-Strikes Anti-Piracy Plan
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Mass surverillance, mass punishment, mass censorship. You have a vast amount of information that people are not allowed to communicate to each other, even inside their most private communication.
> By what logic is it considered a proportional or effective punishment?
Nobody claimed that it is considered proportional. We're dealing with a topic that key stakeholders like Mark Getty are describing as the "Oil of the 21'st century". Considering that all copyright matters are decided completely behind closed doors (ACTA for example has been even declared a "national security secret" by the Obama administration, to prevent information about upcomming laws to leak into the public, to decrease the amound of opposition before its too late) and that all copyright jurisdiction is basically routing around democracy and public participation since its emergence in monarchistic Europe, they simply dont see the need to present those measures as proportional because they know that (in the near future) no population will ever be allowed to vote on it.
Lucky for Kauder, as a politician he's immune to law, but its nevertheless absolutely embarrassing.
Edit: I do not mean that such will always exist, though I guess that's an interesting debate in its own right.
Much like sysadmins who make policy exceptions for their non-admin accounts!
Managers/CEOs dictating a 4 email per inbox policy and then getting it removed for them only when it causes them an inconvenience would be more like the above story.
The argument is the separation of powers: the judges shouldn't be able to interfere with the lawmakers.
You are free to find that argument convincing or not.
He isn't receiving special treatment by the authorities in this case; currently no one would have their page aggressively taken down for this.
Copied photo: (http://www.vogtsbauernhof.org/content/view/full/213)
Pretty clumsy move, especially for a lawyer, especially for a lawyer who claims to want to protect copyright. He's not jsut kept the image in his private collection, but is serving it to whoever many people visit his site. I have no idea about Germany, but in England it's the sharing with other people that becomes a problem.
Asking for his site to be taken down in accordance with his own misguided policy could give undue legitimacy to this policy.
It just goes to show how weak the defense is for this side of the argument. "See! It's so difficult. Let's just forget about the whole argument, but punish this idiot first."
Infringement is not stealing, or at least it wasn't before people started trying to abuse marketing to induce linguistic drift in order to promote their agenda.
I don't think "let's just punish this idiot first" is a reasonable can of paint to use. It's more likely to be taken as proof that the nominally legal or moral campaign of the copyright lobby is really just abusing the system for profit and power. Copyright lawyer or politician goes on about how horrible kids are for using Napster, is found committing plagiarism or lifting photos.
If anything, people want to punish them for abuse of power, not infringement. At most, it's "let's hang this guy with his own rope."
Further, what is "nominally legal or moral" about protecting the rights of artists to be paid for the use of their works? If you build software and decide to charge for it, and someone else makes a bunch of copies of it and makes it impossible for you to make money from it, do you not want the law protecting you to be enforced? Last I checked, programmers have a hard time making money from merch and touring.
> what is "nominally legal or moral" about protecting the rights of artists to be paid for the use of their works
"Nominally," as in, "in name." It is claimed to be done to "protect the artist" - while the same people making this plea are and have been shafting the content creators as hard as possible by any trickery and chicanery they can get away with. There is a moral argument to be made, but the parties who are usually first to go there are decidedly amoral.
What's abusive is the punishment. Would it be abusive if a first offense of jaywalking was given a warning and the second punished by permanently stripping you of a drivers license?
You may be taking the reaction literally, but it likely just means this: If we mock this politician by threatening to apply his policy to himself, it may begin to dawn on his supporters that he is wrong.
So folks are just making fun of him, and rightly so. I just think that this particular joke may backfire (see my other comment).
The politician in question obviously does not understand that. He's the player at the poker table who doesn't know who's the weakest player at the said table. Therefore, he is that weakest player. He is therefore an idiot, as you have stated.
But the problem is that he is a dangerous idiot, and people are generally happy when a dangerous idiot is crushed by his own stupidity. He was dangerous and we could not do anything; but too good, he took care of that himself.
Nobody realistically expects the said law to be applied to the said politician. But suggesting that increases the level of that politician's misery and perhaps would teach a lesson to other dangerous idiots.