Well, that's simply because, and you know the truth, that statement would be a striking demonstration that you, yourself, had never learned anything resembling a code of ethics or morality yourself. Well, never learned them as anything more than words anyway. Words to be used simply when they serve you but to be discarded whenever something unpleasant entered your world view. I figured you were smart enough not to want to go there.

so you're advocating shooting the RIAA twice in the back of the head too right? I mean, they are stealing/extorting money from people.

To play devil's advocate here, and I don't know much about the case so please correct me if I am wrong, the posters here seem to put no credence in what Jon is saying but everything with the mom.

#1) You guys beleive the mom when she says it wasn't even her kid but her kid's friend. Funny I have never heard a parent use that excuse before. 100-1 odds it was her kid that downloaded the music.

#2) You act like this kid and mom are being sued because they downloaded a shitty copy of "Enter Sandman" and Metallica got mad and stuck the record company on them. Maybe the kid had the entire MCA music collection on his hard drive.

I think $150,000 sounds steep, but I think the mom sounds just as full of shit as the record company. If it is just 1 song, please correct me. I admit I haven't read up much on the case because like Jon I don't justify stealing via computer just because it easier than stealing from Best Buy or Walmart.

So you've broken a law. You deserve to spend at least 1 year in jail, plus community service. After all, what you did put more lives in danger than downloading songs.

Personal experience says the vast majority of speeders are driving luxury vehicles, so that would have a very interesting effect on this country. Let's try it! ;)

Then she got lucky. Why didn't you offer to bring your statistical expertise to the court to help the RIAA?


Maybe, but where is the evidence?


If the RIAA is a sleazebag, why is it wrong to act like one when they are coming after you?

Not totally. They are doing it under the guise of a legal organization. Of course, if their claims had merits, they should be winning these cases, right?

Yeah, I made this reply before I read yours JIMGA - thus the post. When I read your longer post, I did respond to the points in question once you clarified.

just so everyone has the proper perspective, JIMG is a die hard Republican. So I implore you to examine his views and file them properly into where those views line up...Left or Right? Just something to think about. :)

Everyone who tries to justify file sharing has completely missed the point of these cases. The case is not about whether or not the free-exchange of music is good for society or not. The RIAA represents those who own the music. The music companies can do whatever they want with the music and everyone has to play by whatever rules they set. If you don’t like the rules, you have the right to not listen to their music. You do not have the right to steal their music.

And lastly why do the music companies own the music - because the musicians VOLUNTARILY gave up their rights in exchange for money.

Well I am a die hard liberal, and I think the RIAA is well within their rights to sue people who steal music from them. Judging by the number of people who continue to steal music, the RIAA has not been strong enough in their pursuits.

HEY JIMG

I thought you said that you would agree to stop posting here if I did. I agreed to your terms - my last post was on 9/21! But we now can all see that you are full of HOT AIR and that your word means nothing. I guess for all of that jackbooted, kill 'em all, law-and-order crap that you spout, you won't even honor your word. How feeble is that?

Thank you for proving that you're a fraud.

Boy, you need a beat down. Fools dont get respect no matter how old they are. You think because you have a million posts that your better than someone? I've been a member just as long, I just haven't had as much bullshit to say. I'll tell YOU what, if I met you and you spewed your bullshit I think you'd get a backhand to the mouth.

my nipples are perking up at this latest display. this thread needs more cursing.

You posted essentially what I wanted to say...

This is all going to get muddled in the specific merits of this case and the debates going on with JiMG right now..

But.. anyone who tries to defend the right to d/l music for without compensating the appropriate people is way of base imo...

How they should be policed/punished can be up for debate, but try to argue that it is 'ok' is just absurd...

The only way I would be able to rationalise it would be if I want to download some items that the record company has made unavailable. If I contacted them and they refused to sell it to me, I would not feel bad about acquiring it any way I could. They get just as much, in terms of royalties, from me if I somehow get it for "free" or from someone else as a used copy.

So what do you guys think of the legality of sites like http://allofmp3.com which does pay royalties to artists but costs only 10 cents per song or so? For example, a cd costs about 1.50 or so. It's a russian site but I think the a high percentage of its users are americans.

It's legal there, due to a loophole in the Russian Law. Dunno (and no one really does) the legality here in the States.

Okay, so perhaps it wasn't a lack of reading comprehension combined with stupidity, but moreso laziness combined with stupidity.

You took at face value the journalistic writeup without reading the available and linked court transcript from a followup post.

And, of course, your quoted statement refers to the finding of the court, not the argued position of the mother.

Fuck this fucking shit. Cocksuckers need to shit on the fucking assholes who fuck the cunt downloaders. Goddam pussy ball-lickers can fucking fist the fuck out of the twat-sweating record companies. Motherfucking dickless shit-smelling fucks can also stop blowing their jizz on their titties for all I care.

This thread is funny in a sad way. Reminds of the Family Guy eposide where the Fox execs break into Peter's house and shoot apart his VCR because he didn't have the written consent of FOX, but did have the NFL consent.

i just ejaculated in my pants. well done soldier.

And I think it'd be the last mistake you ever made.

It would have to be a mistake before it could be the last one, Jon.

Oooh death threats from an old man. Doesn't really scare me. However, I don't think Skydog allows death threats on his board does he?

Big talk from a little man who own words mean nothing. Gutless punk.

Wow. There is nothing more exciting than tough keyboard talk.

Coming way too late on this one, but I think this is the bed the RIAA got themselves into. They themselves promoted the idea of the music being cheap with their wholesale agreements with Columbia House and BMG. When music is promoted as "12 albums for a penny", it put the psychological seed that says it is basically free anyway.

As Abraham Lincoln once said "the best way to get a bad law overturned is to start the rigorous enforcement of it" (paraphrased). The backlash against the RIAA has been great, due to their overzealous pursuit.

Yeah.. this thread ran downhill right off the cliff into the ol catcus plants, didn't it?

Word.

THAT WAS FUCKING HILARIOUS!!!!!!!!!! I JUST LAUGHED SO DAMN HARD!!

After reading part of this, I really can't believe y'all are still bothering conversing with Jga. I mean really. With the things coming off his keyboard, you would think he was a talk radio guy going for ratings, or something.

I stopped awhile back.

Fair enough but I havnt seen you be so violent in your statements or threatening, some would say even scary. Ill take a you over a JIMG any day based on psychology alone.

What he said. Sometimes I think he pictures himself as sort of an internet Rush, only harsher and without all the meds.

This thread is now about funny pwn3d pictures.

Actually, the real issue is that intellectual property is owned by the creator of that property and the owner of that property has the sole right to decide who can be granted residual (i.e. copy) ownership. IP creators lease that right to publishers and recording companies with the contracted understanding that the distributor will abide by their wishes (the IP creator's wishes being reflected in the publishing/recording contract). Unless the IP creator says that downloading is okay, then it isn't. It is stealing rights from that IP creator.

Downloading free shit may be good for society, but it isn't good for the IP creator unless the IP creator agrees to give their shit away for free. Arguably, downloading shit for free is actually good for the IP creator in the long run, but bottom line, the IP creator is the one who has the *right* to decide how they're going to manage their property (intellectual or otherwise).

Check out Cory Doctorow for someone who is having smashing success giving his shit away for free (www.craphound.com). Which is to say that as an IP creator, I don't mind giving away free shit at all. I think giving away free shit is an outstanding business model for long term success, but I don't have the right to deprive other IP creators of that right if they don't want to give it up.

dola...

It occurs to me that if downloading music IP for free is okay, then it would also be okay for someone to post a link or set up a website to distribute hacked executables of FOF so those who might want it but don't have the money or just don't want to part with the money could get it for free. I mean, if free IP is good for society and downloading IP isn't theft, no one is actually getting hurt -- certainly not Solecismic, who would benefit from the increased exposure of his product to folks who might not otherwise have been aware of it.

Right?

You are missing a very crucial point. If all computer programs were suddenly made free to trade at will over the Internet, most computer programs would fail to get written in the first place. That would be bad not only for the bottom line of the programmers, but also for the consumer. There would still be good programs out there (OpenOffice comes to mind), but it would be an overall negative effect. Big motion pictures are the same way. If they were allowed to be freely traded on the Internet, the movies wouldn't make any money, and they wouldn't be made, because nobody is going to spend $50 million and a year of their time making something to give out for free.

But what about music? If music were made to be free all of a sudden, would music stop being produced? Of course not! Music is so easy and cheap to make, especially with today's technology, that there would still be a huge amount of music out there. People are creative, and just as they create art and write blogs, they will produce music. In fact, you can argue that without the huge marketing machines that are driven by profit, that there would be a GREATER diversity of music. You see that already with tiny bands getting their music out over P2P programs.

Think of the effort needed to produce Madden 2006, or Jurassic Park, and then compare it to the effort needed to produce the latest Kelly Clarkson song. It's not even comparable.

But I'm not talking about Madden 2006. I'm talking about FOF -- a one man product. I spent a year writing my last novel in my spare time. Jim could just have easily spent a year coding the latest iteration of FOF in his spare time while working full time elsewhere. By that logic, small fish developers/writers/musicians shouldn't be able to squawk when someone else decides to give their IP away for free, because they're benefitting in the long run.

Again, this isn't to say that think the Free Shit Distribution Model (FSDM from here on out) is a bad choice -- it's worked for Cory Doctorow and it seems to be working for Shaun Sullivan and Puresim -- I'm just saying that it should be the IP creator's choice and not the choice of some dickwad kid abusing mom and dad's broadband connection.

You have got to be kidding me.

Who are you to judge what is difficult to produce and what isn't? Or why that even matters. Who are you to decide what is best for someone else's intellectual property?

One's perception (real or imagined or yanked out of their ass) about how "difficult" it is to produce intellectual property has absolutely no bearing on the creator's right to control how said IP is disseminated.

^^ What Subby said ^^

SI

Actually, I don't have any problem at all with what the judge said here. It isn't quite as much of an endorsement or condemnation as Fozzie may think it is either. Simply put, if you are sued, or sue someone else, the court dictates how those issues are to be resolved. If there is to be arbitration/mediation, as is now often required by some courts, then it has to be done by court appointed or sanctioned parties. You can't sue someone, and then think the court is going to allow you to resolve the matter through your very own arbitration system.

I'm all in with the mother and 13 year old though.

I've read maybe three posts in this thread, so I hope I haven't missed too much before I responded.

You are both drawing the wrong conclusions from what I said, only Subby does it in a more spectacular, more rude way. The point isn't to decide what is difficult to produce or not, the point is to decide what would be made anyway. The difficulty of producing it is merely a facet of what determines what would be made. So it isn't a matter of determining the cut-off for difficulty level, it is a matter of weighing the benefits of everyone having access to something compared to the costs of some things not being produced. In the case of computer programs, I don't think there is any argument that negative costs outweigh the positive benefits. FOF probably could have been produced for the love of it, but it isn't likely. And there is no doubt that programs like Photoshop, Madden, etc, would never be produced.

IP laws were put into effect to benefit the consumers, not to protect anyone's profits. IP laws are in place because without them, nobody would develop content, which would be bad for the consumer. Twenty years ago, music had to be protected because of the large cost involved with recording the music, etching it onto records, shipping it out to stores, etc. Now a song can be recorded directly onto a computer, uploaded to a server, and copied a million times at a bare minimum of expense. The landscape of the industry has changed. And let's also not forget that musicians can still make a great deal of money by playing live events, it isn't like their talent wouldn't be worth anything. It is the music executives and distribution network that loses out.

Wow, this thread actually got back on track.

(And Drake is 100% correct, of course. The people who create something should get to decide how much if anything to charge for it. The rest of us don't get to take it for free and then shrug our shoulders and mutter about how the landscape has changed. We get to decide if the product is worth enough for us to pay the asking price, but we don't get to just take it if we decide we want it free.)

Uniformed schmoe question:

Can't the parties concerned with "stealing" create a medium that prevents it?

Probably impossible.

I think we disagree fundamentally, MrB. I'm still of the opinion that IP laws were put into effect to protect the right of production and distribution, not those of the consumer. Thus "copy" "right" is a statement of who has been granted the right to copy a piece of IP (or who has the right to lend those distribution & production rights to others) and who hasn't.

I enjoy this discussion every time we have it, but I don't think we're ever going to be able to do anything but agree to disagree. I suppose the oddest part is that I personally tend to agree with you in theory about the wisdom of FSDM (both culturally and financially), but in my eyes, the IP creator's rights always trump the rights of the consumer (especially one who isn't paying).

I think I understand what you want to say here -- but I disagree with it. Patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other protections for inventors or creators are clearly designed to protect profits. Yes, it may be argued that the ultimate goal is (or may have been) to encourage said invention and production, but you can't dismiss the profit motive from being central to all of this -- it's a system of incentives, and the incentive is profit. You can't just remove that essential link in the chain and suggest that it doesn't mater because the real goal was continued supply.

Not even level 164 bit super high def major badass encrytion? Or something?