
Obama Supports $675,000 File Sharing Verdict - phsr
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/obama-supports-filesharing-verdict/
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mrcharles
These methods aren't going to make people share music less -- it will simply
make them find more secure ways of sharing. Lets all remember, that at the end
of the day, if I burn a few gigs of MP3s to a dvd and pass it to a friend hand
to hand, the music industry will never know.

Ultimately, sharing is something people want to do as a natural inclination. I
like this band, so I want you to like this band, so here's their music. I
personally have found the vast majority of the music I love in this fashion.

I love passing on my love of music to other people. I've run private MP3
servers before. It brings me much joy to share music and then talk about it.

I don't really know what these large verdicts do. They are still effectively
like being hit by lightning, it's so unlikely it will happen to you.

~~~
randombit
This made me think of a quote which turns out to be from a Clay Shirky essay
(<http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html>)

"It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is
succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. [...] Note
that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become
libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first
approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon."

~~~
RyanMcGreal
On the other side of the ledger we find this famous quote from Tim O'Reilly:

> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than
> piracy.

<http://openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html>

~~~
mrcharles
Yeah. I've never seen any solid stats, and I hate using my gut as an
information source, but my gut tells me that piracy has been a much larger
help to artists. I've seen a few news articles that imply it. Piracy is a
threat to labels, but really, when a musician can grab Garage Band and a few
thousand bucks of hardware and publish his own music... do we need labels?

~~~
jonny_noog
What I find amusing is this argument I've heard a few times coming from the
labels that goes along the lines of that we need their expertise in order to
produce and discern the "quality" music... Because they do such a good job of
that usually.

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rbranson
This makes me extremely angry. $675,000 verdict to the average person is
basically going to ruin their life. Per-capita income is still only about
$21,500 in the US, so you're asking for 30 years of their working life.

~~~
tptacek
A $675,000 tort judgment is going to send you into Chapter 13 bankruptcy,
which will take 3-5 years to resolve. It's bad, but it's not going to ruin
your life.

I think there's cognitive dissonance here between the ease of committing torts
on the Internet and the severity of the penalty.

If someone physically stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse over a long
period of time, the marginal cost of those CDs is so low that the damage would
be roughly equivalent to what a filesharer does. But nobody would be up in
arms about a six-figure judgement.

But on the Internet, we all know that the same tort is a couple clicks away,
and that it's widely practiced. So there's outrage and surprise when the law
works the same way against those filesharers.

I guess I see things a little differently because my career has been spent in
close contact with _other_ torts that, while far more damaging than file
sharing, are often just as simple to commit. Nothing stops you from sharing
files, and so you feel somewhat entitled to do so. But nothing stops you from
crashing any number of important web applications, either.

~~~
emmett
The fact that it is widely practiced _is_ a defense. For the same reason that
people would rightly object to a $675,000 tort judgment for speeding, or
jaywalking, or smoking marijuana.

Are they crimes? Certainly. But because they're widespread, generally
unenforced, mostly "victimless", people are outraged that they'd have such
high penalties. If you applied that judgment fairly you'd probably bankrupt
3/4s of America, if not more, which would be bad. Any law that you don't want
enforced in the general case is a bad law that's going to generate outrage
when it is enforced.

~~~
tptacek
Torts and crimes aren't the same thing. There is, for instance, no such thing
as a "victimless tort".

~~~
RyanMcGreal
A listener not paying for something they weren't going to pay for anyway _is_
a victimless tort when the record label doesn't actually lose any money.

Cory Doctorow puts it best in explaining why he Creative Commons licences his
books:

> Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn't
> have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've just won an
> audience.

[http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-
tec...](http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-
media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html)

Someone is harming the music industry, but it's not the listeners. It's the
RIAA.

~~~
tptacek
While we could argue the first sentence, it's not germane to the discussion.
People are getting sued for distribution, not for personal use.

~~~
rbanffy
But it's mostly about distributing it to people who wouldn't buy it anyway. If
they want to claim a file copied to 100 users prevented 100 sales, they must
have a reasonable evidence indicating those 100 downloaders are capable and
willing to buy every song they download, which is probably not the case.

Most downloaders I know of are more collectors and explorers than anything
else. By making numerous copies of artistic works, some of them very obscure,
they could as well be providing a valuable data preservation service for
future generations.

Just imagine if a generation manages to completely DRM works of art just to
discover they lost their keys and the programs required to reconstruct those
works... Without proper context, they will look like random noise to future
archeologists.

I agree artists deserve adequate rewards for their works. Perhaps a compromise
should be reached. It seems copyright has been abused and extended far too
much, to a point where it creates more harm than good.

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dusklight
I find the headline very disturbing.

It says "Obama" supports the verdict, when really it is Obama's
administration. I am not a Washington insider but something tells me more
likely than not, Mr Obama was not personally involved in this decision at all.
He has more important things on his mind right now, and other fires to put
out.

I worry a lot about how so many people think "I voted for Obama, ok he's in
office, my job is done!" and then they sit there and do nothing and wait for
Obama to pull off some magic and make the world good again. In the meantime
the other side has a whole army of crazies pushing their agenda.

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tptacek
Bait-y title. I read the article, perhaps a bit casually, and I'm left with
doubts that Obama even knows about this verdict.

~~~
ErrantX
Yes I was a bit confused on that too.

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nfnaaron
"The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former
RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement 'creates a public harm that
Congress determined must be deterred.'"

I wonder how much campaign contribution money the RIAA had to spend to get
those five lawyers (or lawyers with that resume) into those five positions?

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ratsbane
This judgement is a travesty.

\- Justice is only just if it is handed out evenly and in proportion to the
crime. If ten million people share an mp3 and only one person is convicted for
it, should that person have to pay for the alleged damages caused by the ten
million? That's contrary to my sense of justice and to hundreds of years
anglo-saxon jurisprudence.

\- Stealing one CD from a store is clearly a more tortuous act than making one
copy of the songs on a CD. If you steal a CD then the owner doesn't have it
any more. If you make a copy of a CD then the copyright owner's potential
sales may be diminished by some theoretical fraction of the original value of
the CD.

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robryan
Does anyone else have the same problem as me in this area? I am more than
happy to pay for things, I just find it very hard to justify paying for some
things that don't give any benefit over a one that I can get for free. So if
they were to find a way to totally stamp out piracy or make it as likely to
get punished for as taking goods from a store I'd be happy to pay for
everything.

A good example is things like the WSJ, sure I probably don't read them enough
to pay anyway, but the fact that you can just Google search things to not pay
means that I would never see the value in paying.

I think when you feel that you are paying to support the content producer
rather than to acquire the content something is wrong.

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ximeng
This is a list of some of the songs Joel is accused of sharing:

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.p...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/files/2008/11/j-01-2.pdf)

Funny thing is if I type the names (e.g. Nirvana "Come as you are") into
Google in a couple of seconds I can listen to all the songs on YouTube. I
would have thought Google would be a better target than Joel. If the music
industry are justified in their cause they could do at the very least do a
better job of communicating why.

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Luyt
What kind of public image is the RIAA seeking for itself? Can't they see
they're committing imago suicide? Maybe these lawsuits were meant to show
unequivocally to the public that file sharing is not permissible and will be
prosecuted, but these figures are getting ridiculous. They lost their sense of
proportionality.

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Retric
Please change title to Obama [administration] Supports $675,000 File Sharing
Verdict

It’s what the article actually says and is far less link bait. _The Obama
administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay
the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs._

~~~
dschobel
How is he not directly responsible for _his_ administration's statements and
positions?

~~~
roc
Indeed, we held Bush responsible for things that we _know_ his administration
was deliberately keeping out of his immediate purview for deniability reasons.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
Whatever this supposed "we" collectively did, it's still a linkbait title.
Sure the buck stops at the president's office, but you can't say that person X
supports some very specific activity unless they come right out and say it.
However it is certainly fair comment to say that Obama, by appointing industry
lawyers, has given tacit endorsement to the industry stance of harsh
penalties.

~~~
roc
So you're arguing that maybe he _just doesn't care_ about the issue or the
case?

That's the defense? "No no, he doesn't _support_ it. He's merely so
disinterested in the situation that he doesn't have any idea, or interest in,
the position his administration is taking on his behalf."

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
The administration does not take positions "on behalf" of the president. Obama
is not the administration nor is the administration some kind of perfect
reflection in every detail of Obama's innermost thoughts and desires. And
verily it is possible that a sparrow falls from heaven without Obama knowing
about it.

