Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
have blog :: will travel
Hilarious as this is, and so true too, I don't think this is nearly why bootlegging works (to keep our terms straight) -- just as with its namesake in the booze world, bootlegging works mostly because the price is reasonable and the product is available, and I'll add a third in that the product actually fits what the consumer wants it to do. By comparison, what we get from the studios via the retail chain (yes, even from Amazon) is a clipped minority subset collection of overpriced goods that, when played on modest equipment, fails to play due to being optimized to the latest greatest most expensive HD gear.
The solution is, not surprisingly, staring them in the face on every bit-torrent site:
and there, done deal. Now what was so hard about that?
While the major record labels were dragging file-sharers and BitTorrent sites to court for copyright infringement, they were themselves being sued by a conglomerate of artists for exactly the same offenses. Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal face up to $60 billion in damages for pirating a massive 300,000 tracks. It is no secret that the major record labels have a double standard when it comes to copyright. On the one hand they try to put operators of BitTorrent sites in jail and ruin the lives of single mothers and students by demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and on the other they sell CDs containing music for which they haven’t obtained copyright permission.In the past we’ve covered many disputes between artists and labels, where the latter is being accused or even sued for using songs without permission. Just a few months ago Latin America’s biggest artist, Alejandro Fernández, sent the police to a Sony Music office to confiscate over 6,000 CDs that the label refused to return, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.The labels have made a habit of using songs from a wide variety of artists for compilation CDs without securing the rights. They simply use the recording and make note of it on “pending list” so they can deal with it later. This has been going on since the 1980s and since then the list of unpaid tracks (or copyright infringements) has grown to 300,000.Growing tired of the label’s piracy, a group of artists have filed a class-action lawsuit in Canada against four major labels connected to the CRIA, the local equivalent of the RIAA. In October last year Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music were sued for illegal use of thousands of tracks and at present the case is still underway. How and why this blatant copyright infringement could go on for years is a mystery, but the label’s double standard has been picked up by the plaintiffs as well. “The conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers,” the artists argue in their claim for damages. The suit is still ongoing but already the labels have admitted to owing at least $50 million for infringing the rights of artists, and this figure could grow as high as 60 billion. So who are the real pirates here?
(torrentfreak)
I mean, y'know, now and then, in moments of weakness, I do really try to see their point of view in these matters and show a little sympathy to their cause and all they've done to for us over the years, and then along comes something like this.
Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations. If STEAL THIS FILM II proves at all useful in bringing new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think 'after intellectual property', think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity, we have achieved our main goal.
This is the Future - And it has nothing to do with your bank balance.
"We wrote about Music-Rules! and similar industry propaganda efforts in May, outlining some of their falsehoods and biases. For instance, the RIAA tells kids, "Never copy someone else's creative work without permission from the copyright holder" — omitting the important right to make creative fair use of existing content. It also coins a misleading term, "songlifting," (which the curriculum says is "just as bad as shoplifting"). Perhaps most disturbing of all given that the curriculum is supposed to be adopted by schools, it teaches kids bad math as part of its lessons on peer to peer file-sharing."
The updated curriculum goes a step further and asks kids to contact their local media and act as the RIAA's own unpaid public relations staff:
Imagine that you are in the music industry... With your team of fellow music industry employees, plan an information campaign that lets others know why it’s important to get their music the right way... You'll want to convince your classmates that your teams' plan is the one that will become the class project!
Challenge: Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can submit an article or video about your campaign.
In other words, after spending countless dollars on failed advertising campaigns against peer-to-peer file-sharing, the RIAA has created a classroom activity to outsource the campaign to schoolchildren. Next up: A classroom activity where kids police peer-to-peer networks in search of potential infringers!
Oh goodie. First our kids became unpaid shills for the Reader's Digest family of uninformative magazines, and now the board thumbscrews are clamping down to enlist the children as myrmidons of music-machine marketing, likely yet another case where the teachers will tell us privately they think it bunk but, hey, you gotta keep your job, right? and in it goes, folded into the mountains of other gotta keep your job edujunkation. sigh.
For those few out there, you know who you are, the brave teachers, the ones the kids look back on later with awe and respect and thanks for their humanity and their integrity, even if they did get fired for their principles, for those few, here is the Teledyn Educational Strategy Alternative, brought to you by the ever vigilant folks at EFF.org:
Fortunately, teachers looking to educate their students about legal copyright have an alternative: Teaching Copyright, Electronic Freedom Foundation's unbiased, informative and fact-centered copyright curriculum.Rather than bombarding kids with the message that using new technology is illegal, Teaching Copyright helps kids to understand their digital rights, giving them the information they need to responsibly create, critique and participate in the Internet's participatory mash-up culture.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
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