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Penalties for File Sharing
Spoom182
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Registered User regular
What are they? My friend just told me about a woman who was charged 220,000 dollars for sharing 24 songs online, and that just seems insane to me. What are the rules for the punishments?
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Yes, if you download a song from someone, that is illegal (may not be if you own the recording already in another format.) The record companies go after people who share songs because they are much easier to catch - 1000 songs shared = more visible impact than getting a guy for downloading 1 song.
Easier to win and prosecute against in court, you mean. It's not that it isn't illegal, because it is, though there hasn't been anyone prosecuted for simply downloading to my knowledge.
I should probably mention that linking or discussing exact methods of illegal filesharing is against the rules on this forum though. Talking about repercussions and legal aspects like this thread is okay though.
I've heard of similar laws in Japan. Some media companies are trying to get this changed.
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Actually this is true. Now that people have actually been giving judges the opportunity to rule against the RIAA/MPAA they've been punching holes in the legal arguments put forth by those two left, right and center. The tide is slowly shifting towards personal freedoms again in the USA.
Of course in Canada we've still mostly got those so it's less of a concern.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Uh, they already lose money from all the litigation. Some RIAA legal people admitted as much during the summer. These people do not seem to operate under human or business logic. I guess having companies with $texas in their accounts backing you up throws such considerations out the window.
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You may want to re-phrase that. i don't think you have a personal freedom to take something you haven't paid for, unless somehow I missed the news and its legal to walk out of walmart without paying?
Yes the MPAA and RIAA are dicks, and some of the fines are high, but lets not kid ourselves the people in question were innocent either.
Yeah, I wouldn't count "getting something for free that you should have paid for" as a freedom. What the record companies need to realize is that the "filesharing" backlash has to do with the fact that people were sick of paying $20 for a CD when they only wanted the 1 to 3 good tracks on it. Hence why the iTunes store has taken off - they've shown that if you make it easy for people to get the music legally, they will.
Even iTunes is too crappy and too expensive. And it's not available in a hell lot of countries, too.
It's legal to rip tracks from a CD you've bought to your computer. At least, it will be unless the RIAA has their way. I'm of the opinion that it's better to avoid RIAA artists entirely, and stick with open services like Jamendo or Magnatune.
Radiohead would be laughing though.
You have to remember that the people they have representing the industry have also said that playing your music loud enough for other people to hear is a copyright violation. This may have been the England side of things. Their disconnect with reality and logic is, well, like an internet fanboy's.
Thankfully at least some companies are coming to grips with the need to adapt to the new environment instead of just scapegoating piracy for all their ills. Unfortunately, some other industries where people pirate stuff seem to be stepping up to the head up the ass plate.
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That all said, not like you're going to get caught ripping CD's at home.
Doesn't fighting out of spite mean anything to you?
Wouldn't you sacrifice your TV for the chance to go back in time and kick Hitler in the sack?
Go back to China with your mentality.
It's my personal freedom to make as many copies as I need for personal use of media that I've purchased legally. It's also my personal freedom to not self-incriminate, and I have a right to privacy. These three things add up to one hell of a defense against the media conglomerates when the courts of the land respect them as they ought to.
When I say we still have personal freedoms I mean we still have the right to make copies of things we've bought.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
And then they go and mix and compress CDs so much that the song is blaringly loud even with the dial at 2..
This is a relatively new idea but it's also one well founded in logic. The only reason to have a printing press, back in the day, was to print things, generally books, and unless you are writing all of them, they belong to someone. The only motivation to make multiple copies of someone else's book would be to sell them, and that would lessen (though not completely remove) the author's incentive to write more books.
However, in the current situation, almost every newish computer has the technology to copy a CD and convert that data into other, more portable formats. Also, there are real, practical, noncommercial applications that provide added value to the consumer at no cost to the producer (except possibly a lack of additional revenue from a wide reaching, invasive enforcement of per-device licensing). In fact, in the vast majority of cases, noncommercial copying of music tends to increase the value of the media copied (by making it more well-known), which is fairly ironic.
The entire situation has dramatically changed, and it will take decades for copyright law and fair use defenses to catch up with the technology.
Still, the corporations are going about this the wrong way. It's impossible to quantify how much revenue is gained or lost by the existance of x amount of piracy. Many downloaders wouldn't bother trying to acquire a copy were it not free, and as others have pointed out, piracy leads to more exposure which may lead to more legitimate sales in the future. On the other hand, there are certainly some percentage of pirated copies that are just lost sales. The point is instead of going after the consumer directly in court as part of a campaign to bring your average customer in line through fear (much like the IRS--what are people's opinions of them these days?) the companies should simply make it more cost effective or attractive for a person to purchase the music legally rather than pirate it. Part of that is basic copy protection that won't interfere with legitimate users. I'm not an industry analyst, but the bigger part would seem to be simply lowering the price, especially to those most likely to be pirating music. I'm thinking of like a military/student discount at the movies, or the apple store, but for itunes.
Then, market the legal stuff as somehow intrinsically better--more secure, faster, higher quality (even if it's usually not) instead of spending marketing money trying to make people feel guilty about stealing (if they don't already, they're probably not going to start because of your cheapo ads). Reward your customers for being loyal through giving discounts or free songs for every x number of purchases, instead of punishing them with lawsuits for file sharing.
Realistic pricing + good will of the consumer + new marketing approach = win.
High prices + alienating the consumer + "don't copy that floppy" marketing = lose.
You can argue that, but from the POV of someone making music or games, its the same thing. The end result is that someone who liked the product and wanted the product ended up being satisfied without paying the creator of it any money.
When you make something, you guess the size of the potential market, your likelihood of selling, the estimated total revenue, and you will invest less than that in order to leave some room for profit, assuming your market predictions are roughly ok. If you make a crap product, you wont sell enough, and that fine, its how capitalism works. but if you make a good product and yet half the potential market take it for free, the system falls to bits.
We are already seeing this in games, battlefield 3 will be ad supported dumbed down crap, because they have given up trying to combat piracy of it. the COD series is now primarily a console game.
Every time you purchase a song, movie or game, you send an invisible signal to the content creator that "we like this...make more" and every time you pirate it, that message is lost. Whether or not the end user feeld guilty or not is irrelevant, sheer economics dictates that piracy directly taregts and hurts the exact set of content creators that the pirates like, because they are the ones whose market gets shrunk, and who end up back in walmart with day jobs, producing less content
So the message I'm trying to get across, is that even if you don't give a fck about anyone but yourself, it's in your very best interests to pay for content you like, because that encourages more works to be made that cater to your own tastes. Even if (due to drm concerns) you buy it, then play the hacked copy, it still makes sense to do that.
Take microsoft for example. If they really wanted to, they could end piracy of windows, but they don't--they just make it difficult. Why? It's advantageous for them to have people using windows who wouldn't if it wasn't free. These people will be much more likely in the future, when their economic situation is better, to buy a legitmate copy of windows (since they are accustomed to using it) as opposed to someone who didn't pirate windows when they were broke and became a linux user or whatever.
It's a bit different for the music and movie industry, the advantage is less concrete there...but still, if you are able to download a Killers album for free now, and you like it, maybe in a year you purchase the new one because you know you liked their stuff. I agree though that if you do pirate something and you like it, you should pay for it if at all possible, otherwise you're just screwing yourself in the long run by breaking the system. What I'm saying is that you're absolutely right about the negative impact of piracy on the industry, but I'm pointing out the other side of the double-edge sword, and that if these people are smart, they know a little piracy is good for them.
Oh, and you referenced games a lot in your post, and they do have a serious problem there. It stems from being a niche market in which the majority of your customer base is both very technically oriented, at least compared to the population at large, and also lower income. So the traditional method of "make it hard, but not impossible to pirate" doesn't work because copy protection can't make the cost in time of piracy more detrimental to the typical consumer than the real money cost of the product. See Bioshock for the latest example of a publisher trying to raise the piracy barrier so high that it ends up alienating legitimate users. Copy protection can't go any farther, the industry has to adapt now. There are a couple bright spots though where it is happening, namely Steam and the mainstream success of subscription-based games like WoW. That is the future of pc gaming, and I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. Consoles have become just as powerful, if not more so, than the average pc, and I see nothing wrong with the move of certain developers to the console. PC gaming still has an opprotunity to be its own unique experience, but developers and companies are actually going to have to be creative about it.
Sigh,
Look kid (I have to assume you are since no adult would make such a stupid statement) it takes a lot of cash to fend off a crew of lawyers. Unless you have a high priced crack lawyer retained, you aren't really going to win. It will also cost more for the lawyer to win then the fine, possibly more then even the 220,000 fee that one lady got slapped with.
So unless you feel like financially ruining your family, yes your ass best settle. Now if you're going to sacrifice your family and ruin them, have at. But that's what a child does.
If somebody tries to rob you, just give them your wallet and keys because they might have a small tank hidden on their person.
There are lawyers who will take cases for much less than the RIAA's lawyers charge, or sometimes even pro-bono. There are organizations who will assist the defendant with legal costs and advice. Some people even keep a stash of money squared away in case something unexpected happens, such as a flooded house or being sued by the mafiaa. "You might lose" is not a good enough reason to settle with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially when judges and juries have been taking an increasingly dim view of the RIAA's lawsuits.
I think a lot of media companies are stuck in a mindset of a decade or more ago still where other forms of media weren't so mainstream and competing for the same entertainment budget. DVDs are more accessible pricewise compared to VHS tapes, games and anime used to only appeal to kids and basement dwelling mouth breathers, some genres of music were much harder to get ahold of, etc.
While part of me feels the desire to punch anyone who feels that they're automatically entitled to entertainment, from a business point of view it's far more important to keep making money. Moral victories against piracy mean little if your products are stagnating in the interim. If a pirate wasn't going to shell out money if there was no free alternative, you don't really win any money from dealing with them but bad business decisions because you're too focused on piracy to see the other problems in your industry most assuredly costs money.
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Not to mention, $220k gets you more lawyer than you could use.
I mean, complimentary rides to and from court in a stretch hummer are nice and everything, but this is a hypothetical person so miserly as to have offended the RIAA in the first place, so...
Edit: And Echo, I feel the same way. So often I find myself thinking, "Why can't I download a sandwich right now?"
I roll my eyes so hard at that "You wouldn't steal a car!" crap on DVDs (which I've paid for) that I have to feel around for them under the couch.
No, I wouldn't steal a car, but I'd totally make an exact copy down to the atomic level if ctrl-c and ctrl-v only worked IRL.
Thats the whole problem.
I'm not so fussed by people copying my games if they are some poor kid in uzbekistan with no money, who may buy my next game one day. What winds me up are the ones with a $3,000 PC in the USA who pirate the games anyway, and especially the ones who actively upload (and in some cases re-upload daily) new cracked copies of the games, to do as much as they can to try and put me out of business. When people like that get prosecuted, I have zero sympathy for them. they are basically doing what they can to kill off gaming, they are repeatedly and knowingly breaking the law out of spite, and frankly, need to be caught and have the book thrown at them.
While a lawsuit might cost more than the RIAA makes from the suit itself, I would assume their overall goal from the lawsuits is to increase music sales to make more money.
Who the hell works 12 years at writing an operating system if they're giving it away for free?
But then, that's for a different thread.
Screw that. I prefer having an actual physical copy that I can re-rip as many times as I want. $10 for the original master copy on Amazon isn't that bad really. Don't buy your CDs from FYE, etc (I don't even remember the other stores. I was going to put Coconuts, but I remembered they went out of business. That's how long it's been since I've gone to an actual "Record store").
Eeek, you really want to apply that to games?
Personally I enjoy Call Of Duty 4, Sim City, Company of heroes etc etc. How many games of that quality are freeware?
The thing is, if people prefer free, or even open source games, I think that's fine, I even open sourced one or two of my older ones, but if that's what they want, that doesn't vaguely justify them pirating closed source commercial games. In fact, doing so totally undermines their position.
I'm sorry, but I'm just guessing the majority of the time people wouldn't care enough to buy the product anyway. You can whine about a lost sale, but if there were no pirated copy floating around I'm willing to bet the person that would have pirated it will simply sit at home and twiddle their thumbs and mess around with something they already have. They'll listen to a CD they already have, watch a movie they've got waiting in their DVD player, etc. And least because of the pirating you get some kind of exposure.
You should be more worried about phony or imitation (depending to the degree) products, generally sold for profit. Things that are just generally bad for your brand are the things that should be squashed.
Or it would be a huge boost for each and every industry imaginable since anyone with a vision can now mass-produce a car without the massive investment required to put it on an assembly line.
Can't the Star Trek future where nobody is concerned with money arrive already?