EFF to court: The Supreme Court must rein in secondary copyright liability
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I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.
Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.
It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
If you're using Tor, take it as a base assumption that the exit node is logging your traffic, or even modifying your http traffic.
Tor's value is in concealing the association between your visible access of an entry node, with visible activity on an exit node.
The list of exit nodes are public, it’s not a difficult exercise for Five Eye to intercept like >90% of its traffic through the ISP or backbone level.
I dunno, I have similar feelings about license plate cameras and CCTV. I don't think there's any big mysterious reasons why I can, in five minutes, imagine a system that's actively protected from abuse, but somehow it's never what's proposed, I think it's because privacy advocates tend to be opposed to the people giving cops new toys so all the proposals for giving cops new toys have minimal input from privacy advocates. It's a bummer.
Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases.
Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over.
I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.
Are they likely taking excessive percentages of an artists sales? Yes. But- artists are also more able than ever to wing it themselves. AAA level recording studios may still be huge money- but Good Enough (equipment) can be had for less than a used Car.
I will agree that its better than the old days where just the tapes to hold an album's tracks cost more than a car.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Sabbath
This is far from the weirdest band these days touring. I love it.
However, by far the largest change has been the removing three or four zeros from the capital costs of recording and small scale distribution. These days you can record and do $whatever for sub-$50 (sub-$100 at worst). It used to cost a few hundred dollars just for one 60 minutes track of studio/master grade tape (aka mono)- now the storage is so cheap its de minimus. And, its hard to find something incapable of playing it back (ESPs can push mono 16bit 44.1kHz out after reading it from USB mass storage or SDIO/SPI), distributing 700meg of PCM audio via AWS might be on par with producing stamped audio CD's- but it scales from $0 to infinity. And, good news: we don't distribute PCM anymore- at worst it's half that size, at best <8%.
I can go on.
What hasn't changed are venue fees, heck, ticket fees are worse than ever. Paid advertising has gotten worse over the past 20 years for audio artists (and probably others). And I've typed too much so I'm sure theres more.
Recording used to require very expensive equipment to do things that can now be done with free software. Medium-quality microphones etc. are now a dime a dozen and reasonably high quality ones are well within the reach of any artist who would be making enough money to pay rent.
Distribution of music over the internet is, as close as makes no difference, free. A music track in lossless quality is on the order of megabytes. That amount of storage is completely negligible and transferring it would be fractions of a penny even at the extortionate bandwidth prices charged by EC2 et al. If you're charging $1/song that's a rounding error and if you're distributing music for free in order to sell concert tickets you can use P2P and the users will handle the distribution themselves. This used to be something that required pressing LPs or CDs and physically transporting them on a truck to thousands of records stores.
The "other costs" are mostly the problems the industry creates themselves in order to sell the solution. Monopolizing distribution channels so that only signed artists can get featured, payola, etc. The world would be better off if they would dry up and blow away.
I.e. consider the recording as advertising for the band. Then, charge for live performances.
Digital Content Creators: Produce and publish on digital platforms original entertainment or personality-driven content, such as live streams, short-form videos, or podcasts. For example: Streamer, online video creator, social media influencer, podcaster.Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!
And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process?
I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.
So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that.
A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.
The freeloaders also include the copyright holders. Copyright was originally 28 years, but now it's life of the author plus 70 years, which from a consumer's perspective is effectively indefinite.
The purpose of copyright was to secure a limited monopoly so creators can profit off their works and be incentivized to create more. Nowadays, the copyright is no longer limited, and the copyright holders are most often not those creating the works. The social contract with copyright has long since been broken.
I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.
Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes.
(* Check out the official guide on what services have the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...)
But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
Beg pardon, but society doesn't suffer from freeloaders of media. The flame of inspiration is passed from each, never diminishing it's brightness. Media though wants to control it's propagation into society such that it remains monetizable in spite of the fact we have a medium that sets cost of distribution/reproduction to 0.
The problem, it seems to me, is there's an awful lot of publishers/studios etc... who haven't/don't want to imagine a solution in which their control over media is diminished.
I'm a atheist and moral nihilist. "morals" literally don't play a role in that decision for me.
> Do you ever compensate creators for their work? > Do you only pirate recordings but still pay for original work like live performance?
Yeah, all the time. I go to the cinema as often as i can find time, I go to concerts whenever i can, i tend to buy games on steam all the time, because i'm a linux gamer and pirating games is really annoying to do. I even have a Spotify premium account (though that will go away soon due to pricing increases). It's genuinely a matter of pricing and convenience.
I have the technical capabilities to enjoy whatever media I want whenever I want on devices without limitations for free. If some service believes that they can make me pay to make it less convenient for me than my private tracker does, they are mistaken. If a service offers value to me at a reasonable price and without massive restrictions, I'm open to pay for the convenience and Premium experience.
> Do you believe anyone deserves to be compensated for their creative effort?
Sure, I even paid on kickstarter for movies to be made and tipped smaller movie creators that released movies as torrents because I enjoyed them so much. Just recently I watched "Tim Travers and the Time Travel Paradox" and was trying to find a way to pay for it because I liked it so much but it was unavailable in Europe. But this is mostly because I want that creator to make more content from that.
But let's be real, once a digital work has been created, the cost to make a copy is practically 0 or very close to it. Just this week I seeded roughly 800GB on a residential line. Cost me effectively nothing. That's the reality, any law or service that tries to artificially fight that reality is unjust and should be ignored. Let me give you an example to proof that this true. Here's a digital picture of the Mona Lisa[0]. Acquiring that cost literally nothing. Ordering a high quality poster print of it and getting a frame for it that mimics the original frame is propably less than 50 bucks these days. The copy is worth almost nothing, yet the original is invaluable. Digital works are just the extreme version of this, copies of it are perfect yet worthless.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mo...
There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
I'd say piracy is best fought with better service but draconian laws and enforcement would also work.
> There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
The fact that copying data is so easy means that any law trying to criminalize it is unjust by nature, that's my most important argument.
Yeah, why don't FM radio listeners or OTA programming watchers pay up!!!!
FM broadcasters only became liable for royalties to artists this decade. Big bunch of freeloaders; but not as bad as the listeners. :p
Back in the 70s and 80s, I would look for the "promotional copy" of music to buy. These were specially pressed records that were free of bubbles and other defects sold to consumers. They were given away to radio DJs in the hopes that they'd get played on the radio and listeners would then buy the records.
This was viewed as an advertising expense by the record producers, not a ripoff.
Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves.
The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.