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RIAA chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 12

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TaoPhoenix:
Cueing the Not-A-Lawyer acronym, I respectfully believe your post is wrong.

Starting from the common sense side, let's take that picture as an example. RightClick ... wait for it ... *Copy* Image. Right Click your desktop. Paste Image. Boom - a new ... uh... something has appeared.

So I believe downloading is absolutely distribution - you become your own distributor to yourself.

They currently let a lot of downloading slide because it's bigger dollars of gain on the upload side, but given a big enough product under discussion, they'd go after that too.

As for the Stream part, that's where they are playing fast and loose - yes "technically" it's a copy created, but they're treating it like a "one-time performance" and not a copy. They're wink&nodding people's lack of computer skills to extract the streamed copy from its obfuscated temporary folder.

app103:
So I believe downloading is absolutely distribution - you become your own distributor to yourself.
-TaoPhoenix (March 16, 2012, 12:21 PM)
--- End quote ---

Nope, the one that offers it to you is distributing. Whether that person is authorized to offer it to you is the issue, not whether or not you have the right to accept the offer. Nothing in copyright law that prevents you from accepting it or requiring you to check if they have the legal right to offer it before doing so.

If that were the case, everyone that bought that copy of Orwell's 1984 that Amazon deleted from Kindle devices would be guilty of infringement.

How could you ever know for sure if everything you buy or acquire is authorized to be sold or given away to you? How can you ever be sure that none of it is counterfeit or unauthorized?

You have to take the word of the merchant. There is no other way. You'd starve to death tracking down and waiting to hear back from all the copyright holders to find out if the images on the food packaging were not infringing on someone's copyrights.

And you can't just assume that everything free is infringement, because it's not. The RIAA labels themselves give away plenty of free stuff and have been for many years. I have stacks of CD's I have collected over the years that were given away for free at music stores, to promote lesser known artists, that were authorized by their labels.

And you can't just assume that all free digital files are infringement. What about sites like Last.fm that allow artists to upload their works and offer them to the public for download, free of charge?

Oh, that's different?

Well what if someone pretending to be the artist uploads it, unauthorized, and you download it? What if the artist sold the copyrights to it and then uploaded it? He would no longer be legally allowed to offer it to you. But how could you ever know that?

This is why the consumer is never punished for someone else's distribution. This is why there is nothing in the US copyright laws that allows punishing the consumer or end user.

There has never been a single case filed against a downloader in the entire history of copyright. They have only been sued for distribution, uploading, making it available to others.

You know whether or not you have the right to distribute something. Nobody else that accepts it from you really ever does.

And yes, you can legally save a copy of every copyrighted work you view online to your hard drive, as long as you don't distribute it to others without the permission of the copyright holder.

Renegade:
Starting from the common sense side, let's take that picture as an example. RightClick ... wait for it ... *Copy* Image. Right Click your desktop. Paste Image. Boom - a new ... uh... something has appeared.
-TaoPhoenix (March 16, 2012, 12:21 PM)
--- End quote ---

That's not quite accurate. Here's what happens...

Make HTTP request to URL
Fetch the HTML
Fetch assets like JS, CSS, PNG, JPG, and other embedded files
Render page
Right-click, etc.

(Fetch here means download and save in a cache as a local copy.)

The files are all already saved on your computer in a cache. Going from "right-click copy" to "right-click paste" is copying data from your local computer (assuming that we're being efficient and not making extra work for ourselves), and not from the Internet or web site. Well, that is if under the hood the picture is actually copied (i.e. put on the clipboard as image data from the local cached file)... But that's where we're splitting hairs -- does what's happening under the hood matter?

The point is, the data is already on your computer. Whether you know it or not. Copying from the browser to your desktop is merely a convenience. You can dig through the cache to find the same file.


So, having the file in your cache or on the desktop... It's really only about convenience, and actually knowing how the technology works. So claiming that right-clicking to copy an image is copyright infringement is really just nonsense. The file has already been downloaded. It's done. Game over. The debate after the page renders is only one of how to conveniently view/consume the downloaded content.

You cannot sanely dictate terms at a website that would let you control how people consume the content. There are simply too many possibilities. Nobody would read past page 233,465,456,567,724,923, even if they glanced at the first page.

So, you either put up the content and let people consume it however they want, or you keep it and never distribute it.

I was in a restaurant the other day, and saw some people eating in a quite bizarre way. Like, abnormal. Everyone at the table was eating the same way. It was rather amusing to watch. But the waitress didn't chastise them for "eating the wrong way". Why would she? They can eat however they want.

The Internet and restaurants are the same way. You either serve stuff up, or you don't. But you don't get in people's faces when they're consuming.

TaoPhoenix:
I remember the Cache cases, there's been rumblings about those being required to view a page. However somewhere between you two, and indeed with some illogic, they are indeed trying to make it illegal to create permanent copies of transitory stuff.

We have specialized lawyers winning these kinds of cases in places like East Texas, and the new generation of copyright laws like the now famous SOPA/PIPA/PCFIPA/"Canadian DMCA", ACTA, and your choice of a few more, ARE making/trying to make what are indeed supposed to be common sense actions, illegal.

app103:
they are indeed trying to make it illegal to create permanent copies of transitory stuff.
-TaoPhoenix (March 17, 2012, 05:49 AM)
--- End quote ---

ARE making/trying to make what are indeed supposed to be common sense actions, illegal.
-TaoPhoenix (March 17, 2012, 05:49 AM)
--- End quote ---

Laws that don't exist yet, don't exist. Only the law that currently exists, applies.

The RIAA, MPAA, and ISPs should not get to act like laws they wish existed actually exist, and the ones they don't like, don't exist. It doesn't work like that, or at least it shouldn't.

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