Hard News: Get yer avatars out
195 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 2 3 4 5 … 8 Newer→ Last
-
What I was trying to get to - we are now at the point where a fair number of people know that S92a etc. is a bad idea /
what I don't get ( and I've been looking for some time.) is some form of useful alternative to the wider issue.
Or is that still too hard for everyone.
-
the TCF are now arguing from a point of strength - time to pull back to the point where RIANZ baulks and wont sign - then the whole thing gets suspended
Maybe now's also the time for some more grass-roots rights holder's organisations to spring up and join the negotiations
-
Indeed. I do like to think I'm a reasonable sort of pig-fucker.
The man has a way with words.
And with pigs apparently.
-
Or is that still too hard for everyone.
It is hard. Witness the back and forth on the current copyright thread, which is up to 40 pages, some of which has even been amicable. There are some entrenched positions and some very different understandings and that's without any of the RIANZ or other acronym type groups involved.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though. Come on over and join the fun ;-)
-
Let me add belated and surprised cheers. I think this is the first time I've *ever* seen public protest accomplish something, legislature wise. Long may it continue.
-
APRA don't have any corporate masters just to be clear. AMCOS on the other hand does.
Just so everyone's clear on AMCOS... From the APRA site:
"While APRA and AMCOS are independent companies, since 1 July 1997, APRA has managed the affairs of AMCOS and the organisations staff and offices have been amalgamated." -
It's just a pity that at this late stage TV3 News' Hillary Barry still managed to refer to the section as "twenty-nine A".
-
* Gah... "Hilary" - I knew I'd screw up my first post :(
-
After going to the protest and seeing this whole thing unfold on twitter - it's good to have a win, or at least a stay of execution.
This stupid, stupid law would have meant the end of public internet, or at least prevented it from being free. I was concerned at the effects on internet cafe sites and coffee shop hotspots.
-
the technology doesn't replace the artists, it replaces the middle men
Mr C, nicely put. This is what my less than coherent rants are about... my metaphor is Old White Men. Over the years I've watched what are almost invariably wealthy, anonymous OWM hold back the progress of society, not in nice simple innocuous ways (which I'm afraid Copyright probably is in the grand scheme of things) but in some very serious areas that actually hurt people.
Tobacco, the motor car (my class designed a hybrid for a school project in 1983 - we 14 year olds could work out it is more efficient for town driving), the electricity generation / distribution industry, big pharma, food... in all these areas are versions of the classic conservative / liberal fight.
Personally the thing I find most offensive about the copyright / IP stuff is that it is a classic example of a big economy bullying a small one. Which is how it is, but I don't have to like it.
I think this is the first time I've *ever* seen public protest accomplish something
I was lucky enough (in a strange way) to experience this... disposed of a Prime Minister and got rid of a tax. Not bad eh?
-
I do wonder if the larger media companies had been willing to re-examine their business model earlier
But they almost never do. They get "advice" from a bunch of suits who have a vested interest in the fight... as Andrew said the other night, the only people making money in the music industries are the lawyers...
Whether you're a copper looking at drug policy, a traditional union leader watching the British coal industry in the eighties or a music executive today, you have way to much at risk from a change in the underlying status quo.
Your power comes from your understanding of the model - drugs as crime = more coppers = power: conflict = strikes = power: copyright = control = money = power
-
I found this story in Computerworld very illuminating.
RIANZ says its evidence is “highly reliable, well-tested and accepted worldwide”. The evidence is synched to a trusted atomic time source, and based on ICANN (APNIC) information on the allocation of IP address spaces, RIANZ continues.
Folks, it's pretty hard to actually identify someone who is sharing a file through something like Bittorrent. The best attempts overseas have involved hiring 3rd party investigation services to go undercover, sign up, and then record the IP numbers of users. No doubt such a service is what RIANZ has in mind. That's what the talk of IP address violation and timestamps suggests.Now, some organisations, including commercial ISPs, do log who has what IP number when, but usually not in a very accessible form. And they don't usually keep such logs for very long, because obviously they are huge. So it's expensive and annoying to say which person had which IP number at what time, if you even logged it. And of course just because you can say that user stephenj was using IP number X.X.X.X two months ago on a Friday night, it doesn't follow that I was actually the person committing the copyright infringement - it might be someone else using my home network, or it might be someone else in another location who stole my password.
RIANZ' overseas counterparts have had to get really heavy to extract this information from network operators, and some, notably big universities, have told them to get bent. And when they have obtained log information, the record companies often screwed it up and made mistakes so that they identified the wrong actual person and couldn't meet the standard of evidence for a court. And when they have won, judges have not generally agreed with their estimates of the loss they have suffered.
With this in mind you can see why RIANZ are so keen to try to avoid due process. They obviously don't have a highly reliable solution, and so due process would be onerous and expensive, often unsuccessful, lead to bad publicity, and not pay for itself.
You can also see why any organisation that operates a network would fight tooth and nail to retain the status quo, because any sort of logging that was actually fair to end users and reliable enough to be evidence in court would be a giant pain in the arse.
Personally, I think music rights holders should be lobbying for the same approach they take to getting monies from broadcasters and venue owners - charge everyone according to a fixed scale and allocate to artists based on statistical sampling. A small charge on broadband data would more than cover any realistic estimate of lost sales due to sharing. However this would require them to acknowledge that the war against copying has been lost.
-
"ip address violation" should read "ip address allocation" above.
I CAN HAZ EDIT BUTTON PLZ.
-
PS: a thing called Network Address Translation also makes identifying computers by IP number very problematic. NAT allows a network operator to "share" one IP number across many computers, and lots of organisations use it for various valid technical reasons. Any system that relies on IP numbers to identify file sharers will fail if the end user is behind a NATed network. Eg, a computer in a lab at your kids' secondary school.
-
Hm, but normally a NATed network will have internal IP address allocations (192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x), and some kind of proxy that will allow the administrators to determine which IP downloaded what content at a specific time.
In addition, any network that requires you to logon to the workstation will have a record of who was using that IP at that time (not to mention proxies that you also logon to, whether transparently or not).
-
There's still an IP trail to devices behind NAT devices. But the IPs on the other side are not public. So it's down to the cooperation of the owner of the device to find the actual machine. If they have dynamic IPs and no logging of what IPs were shared or who logged in when, then it's very problematic indeed.
That doesn't mean that the ISP couldn't insist that such logging be turned on, otherwise they will terminate the whole connection. Then they can insist on some kind of proof that the user has been sufficiently punished to get them not to terminate.
But seriously, for copyright violation, would they bother? It's not even their copyright. I seriously think that if this bill had passed into law in the proposed format, the biggest obstacle to anything actually changing would be the ISPs themselves. They would have responded to every single accusation of copyright violation with a mountain of stonewalling red tape to the accuser. It would be in their interests to make it as expensive and difficult as possible for anyone to be able to insist that they lose customers, who would simply leap to the next ISP in a moment.
But the fact that practically it would not have worked doesn't mean it was an OK proposal, or that it isn't a big win that it's canned. It's just a fairly typical incarnation of the fact that the law lags behind technology so badly that it's ridiculous.
-
Well in terms of public protest having the desired effect:
Marched against nuclear armed ships in '83.
Refused on a number of occasions to sign the petition against the Hmosexuality law reform in iirc, 85. Sort of an anti protest, but still. I got abuse for it so it felt like a protest.
Voted for MMP in BOTH referendums despite being mightily pissed at the non necessity of the second poll.
Got to vote in the first Scottish Parliamentary election for 250years, our eldest was one of the schoolchildren lining the Royal Mile as the dignitaries processed to it. She waved to Donald Dewar who waved back. I regret that at the time of the vote to establish the parliament we were still in London and so were not eligible.
-
Not arguing, Stephen Judd but:
And when they have won, judges have not generally agreed with their estimates of the loss they have suffered.
One. One is the number of cases the RIAA have actually won and that has been declared a mistrial (Jammie Thomas) because the judge decided he'd misinformed the jury as to how "making available" should be interpreted. All the other cases the RIAA are claiming as "wins" were settled out of court, mainly by people who could not afford to fight.
The RIAA has never taken on a university with a solid law school, like Harvard, but now Harvard have taken them on, in the Joel Tennenbaum case
-
A proud history.
Christ, that was a Wendy Petrie moment. Is it just me or are tv1's newsreaders getting even more prone to telling us how we should feel/think after stories?
-
Bugger. Peter's post, not Mark's.
-
Mark's post regarding the law schools, reminds me about the law libraries calling for open access to legal journals.
-
Here's a link to Andrew Dubber (of Great Blend fame) on RadioNZ talking about his views on how to make money from music, copyright and the need to make content for the internet, rather than using it as second-thought receptacle & archive.
It's worth a listen, if you can get throught the first few minutes of scene setting/salad.
-
Enjoyed that Tennenbaum link Mark, good stuff, like news from the front lines.
Congratulations people the good work with 92a. Proud of you all. Not least the pig-fucker. First time in a while that I can recall seeing some real democracy in action in New Zealand.
-
Happened to see a repeat of UK Parliament TV's show, simply and so informatively entitled "United States of America" (& from the little I saw, seemed to focus on ensuring the UK & US acting as a bloc)
One of the great democratic impacts of information sharing was demonstrated in the comments from the Shadow Foreign Secretary regarding the inauguration events of January.
Out of curiosity, I looked on the internet to see how al-Jazeera was covering the events. It was covering the inauguration live. I could not help but wonder what impression would be gained by the millions of viewers living in countries where people cannot choose their own Government or rid themselves of leaders in whom they have lost confidence when that spectacle of American democracy in action was displayed in front of them.
When I consider ideas being shared, I'm thinking much more about a level playing field for news & ideologies, rather than creative outputs.
-
What I was trying to get to - we are now at the point where a fair number of people know that S92a etc. is a bad idea /
what I don't get ( and I've been looking for some time.) is some form of useful alternative to the wider issue.
Or is that still too hard for everyone.
Same thought is on my mind Jason. I find it very foreign, and quite otherworldly. My thoughts are these:
The western music industry is riddled with bureaucracy, Contrast the breadth and width of the industry at inception and now. At the time of the gramophone when material couldn't be copied, there was very little in it for anyone, except the stakeholders.
now we face a myriad of playback devices available to format to, unsurpassed copy-ability. It seems people are being made to suffer for being fortunate enough to live in an age where technology puts everyone beyond the long reach of a law. The populace is scapegoated. encouraged to protest. to speak up, to stand up against being criminalized for using technology they have legally bought in the way it was designed to be used.
While in the east, the markets driven by natural forms obediently follow the temperament of the masses, and the entertainment companies have seemingly long accepted the whims of the massive; the stars up to their elbows in various endorsements and other pies. While the offensives of western showbiz legal council, compensating for their formatting wing's ineffectiveness (whose only real weakness has been lack of ingenuity), whir onwards. The truth seems to be that the legal fraternity are the single most creative force in US showbiz right now.
"(CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. Since the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years"
Seemingly arbitrary numbers.
Why so uncommunicatively long? Why not in some way incremented? Why a blanket legislation for 50 years of a creations life? I don't know the details, But it seems that at some point the bounds of human expressive form and language, hit this legislation and are running through it like toilet paper. And we as 'consumers' have tribally got into the spirit of things. And these laws don't begin to measure up to the tools we have at our disposal, much less the potential of our scion, Notwithstanding these constructs of ownerships being imposed on us by faceless cream-skimming suits.The chart music industry has never been so homogenized.the groove is red. Samplers, Djs, tape loops, cassettes. In the interests of New Zealand, why is the government clamping down on this at the behest of private enterprise while other governments do not? Does the movie industry make as big a deal as the music, Aren't they focusing on creating a better cinematic experience: Avatar! Box offices takings worldwide seem to be keeping them afloat.
but greed.
and the recording industry,could perhaps use their collective brain and start releasing everything on 5.1 dolby or some other techy format,.. in the name of staying exclusive. People shouldn't be made to suffer because an arm of industry can't keep its end up. mp3's sound more like wav's than cassettes did vinyl, and we're able to share more, but People will never stop buying music, it seems on the whole, the populace is just waiting for the big 4 to fire all those stumped, cokeheads they have working in the marketing department.
2. the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy.
Essentially there's use and then there's appreciation. I don't agree that appreciation constitutes use. Especially in association with the implied malevolence of the term 'piracy', with it's connotations of swordsmanship and one eyed parrot shepherding. The average Rata is just checking it out.
Faced with the rather unenviable choice of either pirated movies or torrented movies, I chose the soft copy. It's better for the environment and I'm not supporting piracy. It's piracy industry that uses. It's a fundamental distinction.
I feel, letting the people enjoy what is there, and encouraging sectors to mold to the skin of the population rather than stuffing people into arguments via legislation, would glean a tad finer, less imperialist cut. Basically audio and video make people happy and the
primary social role of a good government is to keep people happy.The recording industry will inspire this kind of discontent in their best markets, while offering product at as much as an 80% markup on the prices they're selling the same stuff at in developing countries, which are....riddled with 'copyright violation'.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.