Copyright Laws?
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We all know that downloading Jay-Z's new single off of Limewire is illegal. It's common sense. But I can legally listen to the song (and watch the video) on YouTube. What if I use a program to rip the music from the video? Have I illegally obtained the song? What if I use a tape recorder to record the song from the video? (I hold it up to the speakers while the video's playing.) Is that illegal?
Copyright laws should exist. Work should be protected, in some way. But the current laws don't specify what is and what isn't legal. i guess they never really did. If I recorded songs off of the radio and made a mixtape in 1995, was I breaking the law?
Another odd thing I came across - people selling mp3s that they had bought from iTunes or wherever. Pretty much, I buy a song for $0.99, and a month later, I sell it to you for $0.50. I give it to you on a USB drive, I suppose, or send it through email. That sounds fine, but it's easy to right-click a music file, select "Copy," and then "Paste" it in a different folder on your computer. You would be selling a song you bought while also keeping the song. Again, I suppose you could have done this in the past - ripping a CD then selling it to a store that sells used CDs. Is that illegal? Is that really any different from copying a CD and giving it to a friend, which is technically illegal? Oh yeah, there is one difference: When you do it for a friend, you don't get any money, but when you sell it to a store, you do. So it's not illegal when money's involved?
Anyways, getting back to the point, how should copyright laws work in this digital age? When we have programs that can easily rip sound from a video, or take video from a site and put it on your hard drive, how we do say what is and is not okay? When information, data, can easily be replicated and shared, where do we draw the line and say, "This is acceptable and that is not"?
Copyright laws should exist. Work should be protected, in some way. But the current laws don't specify what is and what isn't legal. i guess they never really did. If I recorded songs off of the radio and made a mixtape in 1995, was I breaking the law?
Another odd thing I came across - people selling mp3s that they had bought from iTunes or wherever. Pretty much, I buy a song for $0.99, and a month later, I sell it to you for $0.50. I give it to you on a USB drive, I suppose, or send it through email. That sounds fine, but it's easy to right-click a music file, select "Copy," and then "Paste" it in a different folder on your computer. You would be selling a song you bought while also keeping the song. Again, I suppose you could have done this in the past - ripping a CD then selling it to a store that sells used CDs. Is that illegal? Is that really any different from copying a CD and giving it to a friend, which is technically illegal? Oh yeah, there is one difference: When you do it for a friend, you don't get any money, but when you sell it to a store, you do. So it's not illegal when money's involved?
Anyways, getting back to the point, how should copyright laws work in this digital age? When we have programs that can easily rip sound from a video, or take video from a site and put it on your hard drive, how we do say what is and is not okay? When information, data, can easily be replicated and shared, where do we draw the line and say, "This is acceptable and that is not"?
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Copyright laws should exist. Work should be protected, in some way.
Only as far as commercial use goes. Any private use, including remixing, should be completely legal. The line for me is commercial use, i.e. using a piece of intellectual property as part of a derivative commercial product.
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Where indeed. For a start, I'd speculate that half of everyone downloading music is under 18. For the record company that's the biggest target, but in real terms they can rarely even pay for the amount of music that teens invariably want. Of course, no-one would dare to impose immunity on that basis, especially with governments siding with record companies, ISPs beginning to be pressured into cease-and-desists, and bounty hunters like MediaSentry on the case. You can also argue that you should be able to listen to a track or album to see if you like it, but then you have to impose timed DRM (say a week after downloading, you have to buy or delete), and DRM being universally despised, it would be insta-hacked; the same idea and counter-argument could be used for copying games or CDs.
Companies seem to want to stop people from sharing games and music so that they can pump out shit and force people to buy it; I really can't see the sense in this when piracy gains them a bigger audience, especially when they need to make inroads into a shit-clogged marketplace, and the consumer wants to know what to avoid. As is, we're going to reach a point either where illegal downloads have been all but halted, or where there is no market for illegal copies because the new generation can do it themselves. An easier option for these consortiums than to affect the second is to enact the first.
I think the difficulty of gaining money from copyright for small artists who actually need it - as opposed to the large ones who can get the lawyers - renders the entire system pretty much void anyway, but I don't know how it could really be changed; the inability to create derivative works, interpretations and references in books etc is deplorable, but how can you judge to what extent someone has copied something and prosecute on that? Anyway, the vague possibility of protection that the law presents, and whatever fear factor it has, ultimately need to be accompanied by a change of approach and opinion by both companies and government; this may well come with a new generation of politicians, but realistically, nothing will be happening for a long time.
Companies seem to want to stop people from sharing games and music so that they can pump out shit and force people to buy it; I really can't see the sense in this when piracy gains them a bigger audience, especially when they need to make inroads into a shit-clogged marketplace, and the consumer wants to know what to avoid. As is, we're going to reach a point either where illegal downloads have been all but halted, or where there is no market for illegal copies because the new generation can do it themselves. An easier option for these consortiums than to affect the second is to enact the first.
I think the difficulty of gaining money from copyright for small artists who actually need it - as opposed to the large ones who can get the lawyers - renders the entire system pretty much void anyway, but I don't know how it could really be changed; the inability to create derivative works, interpretations and references in books etc is deplorable, but how can you judge to what extent someone has copied something and prosecute on that? Anyway, the vague possibility of protection that the law presents, and whatever fear factor it has, ultimately need to be accompanied by a change of approach and opinion by both companies and government; this may well come with a new generation of politicians, but realistically, nothing will be happening for a long time.
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Wait, so if I have a personal site(not commercial in nature/for profit), then I can upload my mp3 there and share it with the rest of the world (to listen to supposedly)? And thats legal?
Seriously Ive been worried about these bloody copyright laws and cant/dont upload anything
Seriously Ive been worried about these bloody copyright laws and cant/dont upload anything
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I think the law should only apply when money is involved. once i pay for it it becomes my property and i am free to do what i want with it as long as i don't make money from it. file sharing over the interwebs is the same as if i let my friend make a dub of my original.
personaly i think southpark nailed it.
personaly i think southpark nailed it.
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When does it become copyright infringement, like let's say plagiarism? I've seen many people doing parodies or homages but you don't often see that in America because everyone is a sue happy fucktard.
Also, it's legal if you sell the song and delete it but the problem with this whole internet pirating is that who the hell is going to catch you? Unless they set up trap sites and catch people on the act but that would be seizing illegal evidence.
Also, it's legal if you sell the song and delete it but the problem with this whole internet pirating is that who the hell is going to catch you? Unless they set up trap sites and catch people on the act but that would be seizing illegal evidence.
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I think they should compromise, creative some pretty bad punishment for breaking copyright laws, but make copyright laws less retarded. And then depending on the product, copyright should only last 1-5 years.
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Koyori wrote...
I think they should compromise, creative some pretty bad punishment for breaking copyright laws, but make copyright laws less retarded. And then depending on the product, copyright should only last 1-5 years.Yes, i agree that a lower time before the copyright expires would make sense.
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ShaggyJebus wrote...
We all know that downloading Jay-Z's new single off of Limewire is illegal. It's common sense. But I can legally listen to the song (and watch the video) on YouTube. What if I use a program to rip the music from the video? Have I illegally obtained the song? What if I use a tape recorder to record the song from the video? (I hold it up to the speakers while the video's playing.) Is that illegal?yes
Copyright laws should exist. Work should be protected, in some way. But the current laws don't specify what is and what isn't legal. i guess they never really did. If I recorded songs off of the radio and made a mixtape in 1995, was I breaking the law?
Yes.
The spirit of copyright law is "like a book."
Basically, a book can be read out loud. You can memorize it. But you cannot put it down on a physical medium. You cannot photocopy it. You cannot memorize it then write it down. Once you do, that physical medium can exist in a seperate area from the original book. Obviously, a single book cannot exist at 2 places at the same time, and so copyright is violated.
Youtube is played from their servers. The copy exists in their servers. In fact, Youtube makes it deliberately hard to make copies of their files so that people can't claim "well its on my pc's temp folder, so that already violates copyright!" The only time you can actually watch a youtube video without being hooked to their servers is if you take deliberate steps to copy the video and save it on your hard disk.
Another odd thing I came across - people selling mp3s that they had bought from iTunes or wherever. Pretty much, I buy a song for $0.99, and a month later, I sell it to you for $0.50. I give it to you on a USB drive, I suppose, or send it through email. That sounds fine, but it's easy to right-click a music file, select "Copy," and then "Paste" it in a different folder on your computer. You would be selling a song you bought while also keeping the song. Again, I suppose you could have done this in the past - ripping a CD then selling it to a store that sells used CDs. Is that illegal?
Yes, and how. Unless the person was a licensed distributor, in which case they paid the licensing fee (which is a hell of a lot more than what normal people would pay for a song).
Is that really any different from copying a CD and giving it to a friend, which is technically illegal? Oh yeah, there is one difference: When you do it for a friend, you don't get any money, but when you sell it to a store, you do. So it's not illegal when money's involved?
It's worse. Some violations of copyright can be avoided by claiming fair use (for example, using songs for educational purposes;' this also adresses Trily's question above -- parody falls under fair use). However, it's very hard to get way with fair use if you're making money off of it.
Note that RIAA is retarded and has gone after kids using kids songs for school.
Anyways, getting back to the point, how should copyright laws work in this digital age?
See my discussion above. A song cannot exist in a seperate physical medium.
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Tribly wrote...
When does it become copyright infringement, like let's say plagiarism? I've seen many people doing parodies or homages but you don't often see that in America because everyone is a sue happy fucktard.i think if it's of a satirical nature, it falls under free speach, and you can't be sued. i've seen a bunch of pornos that are direct parodies of TV shows. the titles were altered slightly, but all the character names were the same.
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fatman wrote...
The spirit of copyright law is "like a book."
Basically, a book can be read out loud. You can memorize it. But you cannot put it down on a physical medium. You cannot photocopy it. You cannot memorize it then write it down. Once you do, that physical medium can exist in a seperate area from the original book. Obviously, a single book cannot exist at 2 places at the same time, and so copyright is violated.
The question for me would be, why we would want a copyright law at all? Simple answer: To protect authors of copyrighted material. But for which purpose?
I like Richarch Stallman's explanation on the origins of Copyright law (though I don't agree with his software-must-be-distributable statements):
http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/copyright.html
http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/copyright.html wrote...
Shakespeare, whose works are so well known, yet whose texts exist in so many versions, furnishes an instructive example of the perils of authorship before copyright. Under the laws of his day, once his company had performed one of his plays, Shakespeare lost the legal ability to prevent further performance by anyone else. All he could do to control performance rights, as it were, was to keep the acting script, or prompt book, under lock and key. Since his plays were popular, a brisk business sprang up in counterfeit manuscripts, produced by actors from memory, or by scribes in the audience who took notes, that were sold to rival companies and performed as plays by—who else?—William Shakespeare. As a result, after 400 years of Shakespeare scholarship, we still don't know for sure which of the many variant texts of Hamlet represents Shakespeare's own authorized version, and we probably never will. In my opinion, copyright law should protect copyrighted content for the author to make money, so that author can take said money to produce more content.
Short summarization of this post: I just wanted to post that Stallman video.
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Copyright Laws can suck my cock. If its for private use like amv making and shit LEMME DO THAT. Just a no-no on commercial use.
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cpoyright laws are far too estrictive and for a way too long duration
70 years after author's death in some cases? wtf! that should be reduced to something like 2 years after 1st distribution :D
70 years after author's death in some cases? wtf! that should be reduced to something like 2 years after 1st distribution :D
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Flaser
OCD Hentai Collector
Current copyright laws are really awkward and off the kilter as they're no longer in contact with reality...
...the one you and I live in. The one where thanks to the wonders of digital technology works can be reproduced without loss and disseminated with an ease that would have meed Gutenberg giddy with glee.
Where the copyright lives is the world of trade laws and arcane legal practices that tries to keep a ship afloat by bailing water out...
...it works. As long as the ladle is big and the hole small. Thing is there are about a million holes which are only going to get bigger. Eventually no matter how big a ladle they use the ship is going to sink.
What's this ship? The classical copyright that provided exclusive benefits to the holder. When distribution needed a massive infrastructure and therefore a massive investment, it made sense that some guarantees had to be given to the investor.
Today that's no longer the case, as the studios have become an impediment rather than a means of culture. How many novels or songs never saw the day of light since the producer didn't like them? (Regardless that there were fans already out there?) How many books or songs didn't you ever read or listen to since they're long out of print?
The Internet could change all of that if only we, the people realized what's at stake and demanded the legislature to rectify the situation.
...the one you and I live in. The one where thanks to the wonders of digital technology works can be reproduced without loss and disseminated with an ease that would have meed Gutenberg giddy with glee.
Where the copyright lives is the world of trade laws and arcane legal practices that tries to keep a ship afloat by bailing water out...
...it works. As long as the ladle is big and the hole small. Thing is there are about a million holes which are only going to get bigger. Eventually no matter how big a ladle they use the ship is going to sink.
What's this ship? The classical copyright that provided exclusive benefits to the holder. When distribution needed a massive infrastructure and therefore a massive investment, it made sense that some guarantees had to be given to the investor.
Today that's no longer the case, as the studios have become an impediment rather than a means of culture. How many novels or songs never saw the day of light since the producer didn't like them? (Regardless that there were fans already out there?) How many books or songs didn't you ever read or listen to since they're long out of print?
The Internet could change all of that if only we, the people realized what's at stake and demanded the legislature to rectify the situation.
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I think they should make an exeption if it's not available in your country to buy.
I don't feel the punishment for having a copy of some thing should be that harsh at the most some thing like comunity service.
The first time I ever downloaded a tv show or some music I first checked to see if I could buy it from a shop & I couldn't.
I don't feel the punishment for having a copy of some thing should be that harsh at the most some thing like comunity service.
The first time I ever downloaded a tv show or some music I first checked to see if I could buy it from a shop & I couldn't.
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I respect Copyright Laws a much as the next guy, but there's this one issue that's been bothering me for a couple of months now. Im sure that some users here who frequent the Games Forums of Fakku are familiar with the Monster Hunter series. But recently, China has released a game that is A SPITTING IMAGE of Monster Hunter with barely any effort to conceal its being a patheitc immitation, which has been an often habit of Chinese manufacturers and merchants (no offence, I have a couple of Chinese friends myself). And what's worse, CAPCOM isn't even doing anything about it. Dont believe me? Then watch the video below:
See that? Bam! Right off the bat! They were'nt even trying to conceal their ripping off, at least with pathetic reskins. International lawsuits tend to get tied up very easily in courts, especially when dealing with china, because china *incredibly* loathes to prosecute one of its own, there's also no way to extradite an entire *company* and their assets from china to be prosecuted in another one.
I've recently read about some law in china that requires any foreign company to surrender their source code for anything being encoded on chinese soil, leaving china open to blatantly rip off any of those products.
Spoiler:
See that? Bam! Right off the bat! They were'nt even trying to conceal their ripping off, at least with pathetic reskins. International lawsuits tend to get tied up very easily in courts, especially when dealing with china, because china *incredibly* loathes to prosecute one of its own, there's also no way to extradite an entire *company* and their assets from china to be prosecuted in another one.
I've recently read about some law in china that requires any foreign company to surrender their source code for anything being encoded on chinese soil, leaving china open to blatantly rip off any of those products.