Archive for: riaa
So I happened to stop off at TorrentFreak this morning in my normal trolling of the internets and read a story that made me laugh. I honestly had no idea this was actually a thing – people in Sweden are trying to get File-Sharing to be considered a religion!? WTF Sweden? Seriously? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like to accidentally stumble across a brand new X-Men R5 as much as the next guy, but I would never consider that a form of worship.
Since 2010 a group of self-confessed pirates have attempted to get their newly-founded religion accepted by the authorities. The Church of Kopimism, which currently has close to 1,000 members, hope that official recognition of their values would make them immune from prosecution. However, the Swedish authorities have denied the request for the second time in succession.
The only comparison to Religion is how internet pirates are oppressed, hunted and judged like those that are apart of many Religious groups. What History has taught us over the centuries is that the Human Race isn’t always as accepting as we’d like em to be. The same goes for the interweb pirates around the world. But that is where I think it ends. I just don’t see how anyone could compare the worship of something with stealing – I mean, isn’t the base of all religions about being kind to others? Would stealing the intellectual rights from another person be considered kind?
Continue on in for some more rambling.
All to often we woefully read articles about people or companies rolling over to this generations greatest annoyance and corporate disease — the RIAA. So entrenched in the U.S. government is the RIAA (and similar organizations) that any law they want passed can make it through political red tap thanks to back room dealings that are witheld from the public and continuous lobbying dollars. Part of this new age cancer’s “enforcement” is being increasingly handled by the department of Homeland Security.
Getting to today’s story, the department of Homeland Security has sent a letter to Mozilla asking demanding that the company remove a plugin called “MAFIAAfire” that automatically re-routes users who visit a website/domain that is currently seized by ICE to alternate domains. Naturally, ICE wants this plugin removed as they say it circumvents domain seizure controls. Mozilla, however, didn’t just rollover and say “OK”. Though they didn’t just say “No” either. They did even better — they sent a lengthy response with 11 questions asking for detailed reasons, court rulings, specific laws that are being broken by keeping MAFIAAfire up, etc. It’s Mozilla going above and beyond to protect basic human rights of consumers and not just letting the government walk all over them.
Expect such stories to increase in the coming years as cyber regulations get more strict, RIAA-like corporations increasingly guiding government policies and practices, and consumers start fighting back.
Full response after the break…
In stark contrast to the ridiculous fines doled upon Jamie Thomas, it appears that the German court system has both common sense and the ability to tell major labels/music industry lobbyists to go screw themselves. A man in Germany was accused of sharing two songs back in 2006 when he was just 16 years old. The songs in question — “Engel” and “Dreh’ dich nicht um” (whip out that German dictionary). In the U.S. under our “completely legal, reasonable, and fair” guidelines, such a punishment would equal out to roughly $120,000. In Germany however, the same penalty for sharing two songs is $42.
Assuming the price of a song at the a-la-carte price of $0.99, $42 for two is a solid 20x the normal price. That’s a far cry from the markup the music industry is getting from settlements and full blown lawsuits in the U.S. But of course, if file sharing fines were actually anything close to reasonable, the music industry wouldn’t make any money, and as such, wouldn’t use them to prop up their broken industry.
Hmm. Just think about that.
- November 3, 2010 10:46 pm
Jammie Thomas, the single mother of 4 who’s more or less become the poster child for filesharing in the 2000′s has lost yet another case. That makes (3) times now that a jury has stood with a straight face and awarded a broken, backwards thinking company ridiculously high damages.
Jammie Thomas’ latest bill for sharing a mere 24 songs comes in at $1.5 million. Her last case totaled $1.92 million and her first was the lowest of them all at $222,000. Honestly, in all three cases the punishment is so completely disproportionate to the crime it’s repulsive to think about. Yes, she stole music. But is it really worth $1 million+? Absolutely not. Continue on…
- October 26, 2010 10:14 pm
Back in my younger years, Limewire was my Napster. For by the time I was old enough to understand how it all worked, Napster had already walked the walk. Well, Limewire put up a much longer fight, but they too are succumbing to the same organizations as Napster — the recording industry — in response to a court ruling late last year.
Limewire:
While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward. We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future.
I doubt the people behind Limewire are “looking forward to working with the recording industry”. Because they know just as much as you and I that once Limewire flips the switch on download/upload/searches, their traffic is going to tank. The final blow to Limewire will take place after the recording industry relaunches a few months to years down the road with some copycat, no-one-is-going-to-remember music store front with crappy prices and poor selection. Aw well. It was great while it lasted. Then again, Limewire and similar services are for kids. Torrents are where the adults play, right?
On the flipside, Limewire’s parent company, “Lime Group” has stated that they have a new music service in the works, and that we can expect to see it within the next month. Optimistic? Limewire CEO official statement after the jump…
Just when you think the RIAA and friends couldn’t become any more idiotic, incompetent, downright retarded, they go and out do themselves. The latest mad grab for money (and attempt to prop up their dying business model) is to use the US government to mandate that all cellphones be legally required to contain FM radio transmitters. At first, the idea seems somewhat novel and perhaps even useful in a few rare circumstances. That is, until reality sets in. There are already plenty of radios and antennas running amuck inside of your standard cell/smartphone, eating batteries and fighting against each others’ wireless waves to boot. Jamming in another — yeah, no thanks. Not to mention, if it comes down to having to fit in an FM transmitter or 4G radio, guess which one I and pretty much ever other consumer is going to vote for. Sorry radio.
First off — Eat a dick RIAA. You are the cancer of this planet. With that off our chests, let’s continue.
Over the last several months, Viacom and YouTube have been at each others’ throats in court over the basic principle of copyright infringement and liable YouTube is for 3rd party/users’ uploaded content. If Viacom would have won and had their way, YouTube would be front and center of the firing squad for something they literally have no control over — users’ uploaded content.
Thankfully, the judge overseeing the trial looked at the bigger picture, which, included such statistics as YouTube proactively removing up to 10,000 claimed “infringing” videos in a single day. That sounds out right amazing.
But given the RIAA’s insatiable appetite for stupidity and public malice, they’ve gone on the record, “enraged” and upset over the ruling, stating that YouTube doesn’t do anywhere near enough to combat piracy. Excuse me, but 10,000 videos per day is a huge amount of material to sift through, even with thousands of employees at your disposal. Furthermore, anyone who believes that a company or person should be held responsible for a third parties’ actions is a fucking idiot plane and simple. That “fucking idiot” in this case would be the RIAA.
The reality of the situation is that the outcome of the Viacom-YouTube trial was a huge success for consumers’ rights and common sense worldwide. It was one of the bigger victories over stupidity, namely RIAA-backed polices. Companies and people shouldn’t be held responsible for a third parties’ foils provided that the company/person in question follows the timely and necessary steps to correct the claimed “problem”
What we have is the RIAA yet again reaffirming what we all already know — they’re useless. They have nothing but their own interests and monetary values on their minds. And finally, “fair rights/consumers’ rights” mean absolutely nothing to them. Oh yeah, they are also void of any single shred of common sense.
Case closed.
So true…so very true. Larger than life version right inside…
You want justice? You want someone cutting through the B.S. and calling it like it really is? Of all people, ThePirateBay ISP is publicly criticizing those pointing fingers at the PirateBay and bittorent overall. The ISP in the spotlight, CB3ROB, has a vocal employee CEO by the name of Sven Olaf Kamphuis who goes on to call Disney among others in the industry “clueless idiots” (or so true). Sven also questions the legality of the so called court order the MPAA has pushed the German gov’t to slap down on CB3ROB.
All of the above will likely play out over the next couple of years in some locked up court room far from the public eye. But the basis behind the lawsuit will be as stupid as ever. Really, when will these clueless idiots realize that suing and shutting down torrent search engines does nothing and is the most bass akwards approach ever? If only they would embrace technology…
Ars Technica
