[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/kiss-frontman-we...
Found it: https://youtu.be/Yy45qY9c49k
Additionally, looking at Google Trends[0], it seems they peaked in 21st-century online popularity in 2008 and had another notable uptick in 2017.
I think a lot of us want the assholes to have suffered real consequences for their behavior, but want is different from did.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
Which is really just a roundabout way of saying I think Apocalyptica did a lot to help refresh them in the modern zeitgeist (Yes I know it was older, but I remember youtube videos causing it to enter at least my and other's conscious space...)
Normal people don't care- they just enjoy a ballad or two.
I've long since learnt to separate an artist from their art- a fair share of the musicians, actors, directors etc aren't really a decent bunch
However it's important to note that "woke" at least has legitimate (if politically contentious) meaning outside of its broad misuse as a sort of slur. The other two terms don't have that AFAIK.
The case of "maga" specifically strikes me as a spiteful attempt to misappropriate the descriptor (vaguely similar to winnie the pooh) whereas the rise of the other two seems organic.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo
If you're just some nobody representing yourself instead of an expensive lawyer acting on behalf of a large company, maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.
The thing everybody ignores about this is context.
Suppose you upload a copy of a work to someone else over the internet for <specific reason>. Is it fair use? That has to depend on the reason, doesn't it? Aren't there going to be some reasons for which the answer is yes?
The "problem" here is that the reason typically belongs to the person downloading it. Suppose you're willing to upload a copy to anyone who has a bona fide legitimate fair use reason. Someone comes along, tells you that they have such a reason and you upload a copy to them. If they actually did, did you do anything wrong? What did you do that you shouldn't have done? How is this legitimate fair use copy supposed to be made if not like this?
But then suppose that they lied to you and had some different purpose that wasn't fair use. Is it you or them who has done something wrong? From your perspective the two cases are indistinguishable, so then doesn't it have to be them? On top of that, they're the one actually making the copy -- it gets written to persistent storage on their device, not yours.
It seems like the only reason people want to argue that it's the uploader and not the non-fair-use downloader who is doing something wrong is some combination of "downloading is harder to detect" and that then the downloader who actually had a fair use purpose would be able to present it and the plaintiffs don't like that because it's not compatible with their scattershot enforcement methods.
Well there's also the issue of enablement. If you're overly enthusiastic to turn a blind eye to illegal conduct you end up being labeled an accomplice. But of course that would seem to apply to Facebook here in equal measure.
[0] I don't like to say "represent yourself." I once angered a judge by pointing out that you can't "represent yourself, you are yourself."
With a guilty plea. They don’t walk away without a conviction.
Property law is mostly concerned with protecting the rich from the poor, so when a rich person violates the property of a poor person, the courts can't allow the inversion of purpose and will create something called a "legal fiction," which is basically the kind of bending-over-backwards that my children do to try to claim that they didn't break the rules, actually, and if you look at it in a certain way they were actually following the rules, actually.
Value is not set by what you put into it, it is set by what people are willing to pay for it.
Browsing in a thrift store can be very enlightening!
Is a human life literally worthless, because they never pay to be born?
The map is not the territory, the price is not the value.
Less facetiously, you're committing a semantic error.
What value something has is totally dependent on who is valuing it.
More formally, it's the Law of Supply and Demand.
What do you base that belief upon?
Many judges take a dim view of expensive lawyers trying to pull the wool over their eyes with sophisticated but fallacious arguments. You have to deal with a lot of BS to be a long-standing judge, so it seems like resistance to BS may be selected for among judges.
Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the corner. Now look at copyright, the law about the restriction of the right to copy to a select group. It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.
This might be relief, we might hopefully get past copyright and patents and just have innovation free for all.
Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public?
Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?
Stupid kids
Linear arithmetic is one hell of a drug.
Here is how their enforcement actions generally went.
1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range.
2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1].
NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.
3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed.
Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees.
4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k.
[1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.
But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Consider how a P2P network operates. There are N users with a copy of the song. From this we know that there have been at most N uploads, for N users, so the average user has uploaded 1 copy. Really slightly less than 1, since at least one of them had the original so there are N-1 uploads and N users and the average is (N-1)/N.
There could be some users who upload more copies than others, but that only makes it worse. If one user in three uploads three copies and the others upload none, the average is still one but now the median is zero -- pick a user at random and they more likely than not haven't actually distributed it at all.
Meanwhile the low end of the statutory damages amount is 750X the average, which is why the outcome feels absurd -- because it is.
Consider what happens if 750 users each upload one copy of a $1 song. The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them, i.e. the total actual damages across all users from each user. The law sometimes does things like that where you can go after any of the parties who participated in something and try to extract the entire amount, but it's not that common for obvious reasons and the way that usually works is that you can only do it once -- if you got the $750 from one user you can't then go to the next user and get another $750, all you should be able to do is make them split the bill. But copyright law is bananas.
Because they're statutory damages, because the actual point of the exercise is to make an example of the person breaking the law. Obviously in scenarios where it's feasible to reliably prosecute a significant fraction of offenders then making an example of people isn't justifiable.
They were not all the same, some were fairly complicated cases, and one was undoubtedly for distribution.
`The court’s instructions defined “reproduction” to include “[t]he act of downloading copyrighted sound recordings on a peer-to-peer network.”'
From:
https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/11-282...
The only case that comes to mind as far as trying to threaten just for downloading, blew up in the law firm's faces... among other shenanigans, it came out their own machines were seeding files as an attempt to honeypot.
However other countries may have different laws as far as possession vs distribution and related penalties.
It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.
> I should trot out all of the justifications here.
I'll start: personal use instead of profit. Certainly a difference, not convinced justification is required or even advisable.
So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.
^ sociopathic legalists really do think this way.
By no means were they suing for downloading alone. They were suing for sharing while downloading, and seeding after, and as "early seeders" they helped thousands obtain copies.
Right or wrong, it was absolutely not about just downloading. It wasn't about taking one copy.
In their eyes, it was about copyng then handing out tens of thousands of copies for free.
Again, not saying it was right. However, please don't provide an abridged account, slanted to create a conclusion in the reader.