If the internet wasn’t around people would still be copying VHSs and DVDs. Just because the internet makes it easier to copy doesn’t mean you get a special pass.
I did it for the same reason the Iraqis do it, it’s cheaper, easier, and at times unavailable otherwise.
Copyright law isn't about your special rights to someone else's unique combination of bits. It's about what rights they have the legal ability to deny you to those bits. There are plenty of situations where copyright law in one country differs from that of another country; and neither of them are "right".
- An work that is still under copyright in one country at 50 years, but lost copyright in another when it hit 40.
- A videogame that requires a server to run, but the company running it abandoned it.
- A picture of a public place, like the Eiffel tower at night, which runs afoul of copyright law in one country, but not another.
- Software that is abandonware, legal to copy/use in some countries but not others.
Not following the copyright laws of the US (or, for instance, France when it comes to the Eiffel tower and it's lights) does not automatically mean you think you have "special rights to someone else's bits". It means you don't recognize the authority by which they claim they have special rights over your actions; at least as it pertains to the current situation.
Traditionally, citizens & non-citizens have the ability to ignore & shirk copyright to a high degree. It's a new infernal shit show that now it's no longer just a legal protection that loosely defends corporate rights to media, but technological protection too.
It's as if France can go make photos of the Eiffel tower self destruct, and it's incredibly fallen. Often what we can do isn't regulated under copyright at all- under DRM, every useless cad company gets to make up its own new rights regime, fast worse than any copyright system, where invariably they have all rights & own everything & can change the agreement whenever & however they like in any way that suits them.
Conflating the DRM technological dominionizing with copyright- as you do again and again- ascribes & conflates a despicable monstrous abyssal major horror to a merely somewhat damned existing minor infernalism.
Come again?
- The first one is flat out copyright
- The second one is debatable, because it depends on the how.. but I'll give you that one
- The third one is, I thought, copyright... you're not allowed to take pictures of the Eiffel tower at night because the lighting for it is copyrighted.
- The third one is copyright (copying a piece of software that can no longer be purchased)
To be fair to Iraqis, since Americans and others decided to illegaly invade and occupy their country for a decade, they are entitled to ignore US (UK, AU, SP, IT, etc) intellectual property rights in perpetuity. It seems reasonable to me as a 3rd party observer.
Further, it’s a bit rich for the US to burn down the Iraqi economy and then expect them to start paying royalties to American Fortune 100 conglomerates. Frankly, if they announced they were giving away free movies to Iraq as reparations it would be an insult, but they even have the gall to shame their people for not paying.
> someone else’s unique combinations of bits
If you take a piece of paper from a pack you purchased and you take a pen filled with ink you have likewise purchased and you right the entire contents of this post on a piece of paper what makes your paper, decorated with your ink, by the sweat of your brow MY combination of bits.
Nobody needs a special right the ordinary property rights we have understood to exist for thousands of years are sufficient for us to agree on whose paper it is. I would need a special right to imagine that the words you chose to inscribe transformed it into MY paper.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/08/01/l...
>The Spanish-American War, what boosters called a “splendid little war,” began in 1898. … President McKinley sent a warship to Cuba as a precaution, but in February 1898 that ship, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana, killing 250 U.S. sailors. The cause of the explosion was unknown — and it would later be revealed to have been an accident — but both Hearst and Pulitzer published a cable from the captain of the battleship to the assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, informing him that the disaster was no accident. (The cable was later revealed to be a fake.)
Jill Lepore, September 2018. These Truths: A History of the United States.
Can I get a pointer to this?
https://prospect.org/politics/congress-proposes-500-million-...
I only found articles on this from when the act was still moving through congress. But the act was passed, so I assume this part did as well.
It feels nefarious to me how acts and budgets in the US can bundle things like this.