Write your Representative!

[Blood Angel]

This is turning into a conspiracy, maybe someone somewhere will conect this to the NWO LOL

[Anirbas]

Ah well - I do see your point sklara (nice avatar btw) so let's say I subscribed to an actual service that lets you download music and pay for it - is that legal to burn or not - because here is my train of thought i can go and buy a cd with songs i don't want on it or i can make my own and pay for each song on it - thats all i do is mix my own cd's i really don't think i should be charged an arm and a leg to do so - and i think as long as i am not selling it to other people which is the way i have interpreted the copyright law as long as i can remember knowing there was one it shoul dbe legal

[Space Moose]

im sorry, Spacemoose.  i cannot agree with you at all.  no one should have the right to sue someone based on profits that 'may' have been lost.

Oh goodness, here we go again...

The suit is not for profits that "may" have been lost, the suit is for profits that "were" lost. Let's go through this again in short. When a song is downloaded, there was clear intent to obtain that song. Legally, the regular method to obtain a song is to purchase it. Thus, when you download a song, you have essentially agreed to purchase it but have yet to pay. With file sharing, it goes one step farther since that file ends up shared time and time again, all of them willful acts of obtaing a song. The law is clear that you have no right to have this song if you have not paid for it. The law is also quite clear that you have no right to give away that song if it is not yours.

You yourself had someone attempt to steal your car quite recently. So, if songs should be free for the taking, why is your car not? Everything from song to automobiles is a part of our culture. If songs should be free because they are cultural, then surely you must agree that your car should be free for the taking as well.

If culture belongs to everyone, why did you even bother to call it your car in the first place? Is it because you think that such mundane objects are not really cultural? If so, you are quite worng as they are of greater cultural importance than any song.

Furthermore, your car is nothing more than a copy of something that someone else already has - and you paid for it yet. Why would you have bothered doing that?

Surely you must be able to see how your "Culture is Free" argumet is worthless. That which applies to the intangible must equally apply to the tangible, although we may call them different names. As such, "Culture is Free" creates a society without ownership of anything, a society well beyond even the proposals of communism. Even with its much lower reaching goals, communism has failed and so therefore will your "Culture is Free" society.

You won't give it up I'm sure, but as long as everyone else can be satisfied that you are unwilling to accept that you might possibly be completly in the wrong we can all get on with our lives.

let me give you an example: let's say i like looking at the Mona Lisa. its a beautiful little painting. i take a picture of it and it reproduces the exact quality of viewing the actual painting. did i steal the Mona Lisa from the frame? doesn't the Mona Lisa still exist? sure, i may not go to the museum to look at it as often because i have a good copy but i did not steal the Mona Lisa!

Oh good, another broken example that completly misses the point.

First off, the Mona Lisa is likley uncopyrighted at this point, so let's substitute in Painting X, a modern masterpiece by Artist Unknown. It is only imporant that it is under copyright right now.

So, you take a picture of Painting X. While it seems that there is no harm done with your simple photo, because you have been permitted to take this photo, so should everyone else. Now if everyone has a copy of Painting X what reason would there ever be to go and see it? No money would be made and Artist Unknown is left with the original of Painting X which now would have been more vaueable to him had he never painted it.

But we can adapt your example so I can show you how that doesn't work either. Let's say you take a picture of Mickey Mouse and hang it in your living room. Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse and they employ people to take pictures of Mickey Mouse, retouch pictures of Mickey Mouse, distribute pictures of Mickey Mouse, sell pictures of Mickey Mouse and a host of other things. Again, if you were permitted to take a picture, so would everyone else be permitted to. In the end, Walt Disney plus all of those employees are out of pocket because you took something that wasn't yours to begin with.

Might interest increase in such a scenario? Perhaps, perhaps not. If it does however, a realatively small portion will seek out to pay for something that they are accustomed to getting for free.

Now, don't go confusing the above with people taking pictures at Walt Disney World or some other such event. Walt Disney certianly wants you to take pictures, so they are permitted. Walt Disney does not have to do this, it was a choice made for a variety of reasons. You will also notice that Walt Disney will post areas or items that you can not take pictures of. Walt Disney has a right to preserve these things, typically the reasons that people would go to Walt Disney World in the first place.

if anything, you are not a capitalist because you are unable to comprehend this. you are more like a communist because you believe that laws can regulate the flow of information

Okay, so before I am clearly a capitalist but now I am surely not so I must be a comminsit. Stop hopping up and down on your Left Wing Nutcase Soap Box for a while and think before you start talking. Go read a book or something, learn what you are talking about before you start shooting your mouth off. Capitalists clearly believe that information can be regulated, they wrote the copyright laws. Is this some sort of sick plot to live up to the moniker or something? Get your head screwed on right.

laws cannot stop progress and file sharing will continue.

Since when is this progress? How warped does one need to be to think that taking money out of the pocktes of fellow humans is progress? How much shorter, nasty and brutish do you want our lives to be?

maybe you accept abuse of law but i refuse to accept it. you endorse punishments for people based on purely intellectual concepts and that is a slippery slope

All laws are intellectual concepts. You advocate here nothing more than a society without laws, where murder, robbery and rape could be commonplace since rules against them are nothing mroe than intellectual concepts. Surely you know well of this Slippery Slope having slid down it so quickly.

when you allow someone the right to punish someone else based on pure conjecture than we all become potential criminals

Certianly this is so. I don't think you understand at all what is going on with this lawsuit. The facts are cold and hard, people have been distributng music without authorization to do so. This is easily traceable and they give the information out freely. No underhanded tactics have been used, these are by in large clean cases.

There is no conjecture here, the accused have done all but submit a letter confessing to thier unlawful acts.

No matter how long you prattle on that Until it Sleeps belongs equally to you as it does to Lars Ulrich, you will continue to be wrong. Give it up. You have made your point known and no one really cares to see us row over this again and again. Having said that, should you continue to pour out drivel such as this, I will continue to refute it. I would hope that it is clear by now that this will continue to no end, but should you see fit to go at it again, be my guest.

[FreyKade]

stop arguning, meet up and have an old fasioned duel......use any weapons from axes to hammers and swords and daggers. mmmmm lets see, you get a swing at the oponet if you can say a valid argument....let the duel comence

[TheOracle]

In Australia it is actually illegal to make a copy (Back-up or otherwise) of any cd, dvd, video, whatever that you own.

Just thought you guy's might like to know that.

[Kira]

TO it's the same here too, although I know many people do it......

[Bizarro]

Spacemoose, i have no problem with arguing a point with you but apparently youve reached the point where you cannot continue this as a civil discussion. despite that, i will answer your points:

its funny that you bring up Disney because did you know they can sue you for drawing Mickey Mouse? you are allowed to draw anything in the world except for something that is a corporation's intellectual property. its like you said, they employ people to draw Mickey. if i drew Mickey they could sue me for millions and id be helpless because i don't have laws built to protect me from congregates of people working under the auspices of a corporation.... im just a citizen. the laws of this nation are totally in favor of the corporations. they have all kinds of protections from the people, in the form of laws made through powerful lobbying. where is the protection for the people from the corporations? hmm? do you like Andy Warhol's art? if someone tried to do that type of art today, they would be sued for copyright violation.

that whole car argument of your's... a car is a physical object. did i say going into a record store and stealing a cd was acceptable? no. a digital copy is not stealing any of their physical property, its a copy that exists on its own.

i am not wrong about culture being free. youre wrong because you believe only things with value are worthy of human pursuit. culture is a problem for a capitalist society because things of no instrumental value are rare. music has an intrinsic value that is difficult to deny. our society has tried to adapt it into a product but music is not a product by its nature. it is something that we value in a totally different way than we value physical things. its a huge stretch to jump from saying you own a physical production of a song (ie. a CD) to saying you own the song. songs cannot be owned. they can be written by someone, but that is the extent of their ownership. songs are modified and changed through the human experience. look at songs we consider classics: the Star Spangled Banner. maybe you don't consider it a classic but its a classic here. the Star Spangled Banner is sung over the music to another song (god save the queen?, i dont know it). did anyone sue Francis Key for copyright violation? that kind of thing was common in his day and it should be common in ours. music is something that is modified and changed and made better. when you say you own an idea (music) that is wrong. ideas change and you cannot own another person's mind. you cannot limit their right to think as they choose.

the artist X thing. im an artist. ive had my images taken by others and modified slightly. that is art. artists are inspired by each other and take ideas from each other. whole movements start when a group of artists take up the same idea and work it from their own perspective. i have my images copyrighted only because it would be wrong for someone to take them from my website and claim they created them. i created them. i don't care if people take my images to share with each other digitally. i am a digital artist- that kind of thing is implied in what i do. i am the only one who has the right to print them and sell them. i get more attention when people reproduce my images and transfer them. they may just end up in the hands of someone who is interested in buying a print from me or allowing me to display in their gallery. the goal of art is not to make money(although its nice) but to get your work in front of an audience. when you find that audience, you are a successful artist.

the communist thing. yes, i see you as being more communist for believing that laws can protect a corporation's intellectual property rights. i think capitalism is a bizarro communist system. capitalism protects corporations with communistic laws. communists tell you what to think, what is acceptable thought and what is not. i can walk outside and scream "i hate Bush" without going to jail but i couldn't walk out and paint Mickey Mouse on the side of my barn. hmm. now, why is China such a bad place again? in China you go to jail for criticizing the system, and here you go to jail for messing with the real government... the corporations.

money in pockets = less brutish and nasty lives? boy, you must worship at the big dollar sign idol. i could argue that money makes brutish and nasty lives but its pointless.

you seem totally unable to grasp that profit is never guaranteed. what if a machine existed that could replicate objects? it could replicate food, toys, gadgets and other small objects. would this be a good thing? i think it would be great. imagine all the good it could do, save all that time and effort to produce those things... but it would also put people out of business. could food growers sue the inventor of this object? or the owners of the replicators who used them to make food or gadgets? would using it to make a copy of a digital camera invented by Sony be stealing or would the value of replication outweigh the rights of Sony? this is the situation we are in with MP3s and music. we have that technology available now and it can give us all the power to replicate with perfect precision music that is available. its not going to stop. people will use this power, just as they would replicate other things if the technology existed. sure, profits will die but the good outweighs the bad. access to all that music is a good thing and something most people want. its the companies trying to stop it who are holding our progress back. if a machine that could replicate food existed today, someone would try to destroy it! it would be horrible for the profits of all those food growers. what is wrong with this sort of thinking, Spacemoose? it holds humanity back at the expense of playing some money making game. humanity deserves to come first. profits are never worth more than a person. they never should be worth more than a person. music has been liberated from being expensive to produce and distribute. these music companies have to adapt to the change and accept it, just as food growers should do if we could ever replicate food. its called progress.

[FreyKade]

can you get sued by disney if you buy one of their programs whaich sks you to draw over their previous dawing

[FreyKade]

im not livivg in australia then!

and anirbas, im not sure if its legal that way, you may want to ask them

[Bizarro]

got the first letter back from my representative. seems he was a co-sponser of a bill to crack down on copyright infringement. he wasn't very pleased with my position. funny, i didn't vote for him