Another of those 'copywrite people are going too far' thingies.

Ok, I was just interested because I did not hear about the LTTE before, and someone else also asked, so...
Sorry for the derail!

 

First of all, apologies to Daynab for blatantly ignoring his comment to leave this mess out of the thread, but I cannot keep from saying the following.

If ever you have a war that lasts more than a few days, you will have each and every human rights violation mentioned in this thread. Period. No debates, no explanations. No "But they had to because... Bullshit." It happens every time. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either a complete fool, or that and lucky enough to have no real knowledge of how wars happen. War is *UGLY*. It brings out the wost in people. And drives even the best of people to do things they will literally cry about the rest of their lives. I hope each and every person reading this thinks I am exaggerating. I hope you have the peace of ignorance.

Now back to the real topic. Weather or not one crazy person made money via ads on his site is irrelevant. I will sign this because I think due process must not be abandoned. If copyright trolls are allowed to win every time one or more person(s) may have made money by allowing others to link content, then we all lose. I could link in more than a thousand examples of how they could lay the same BS claims against this very forum. None of it is reasonable or true, but the claim is exactly the same. People here have linked in images from programs on television or movies that are protected property of others.

We may see an animated GIF of The Lord Of The Rings made into a humorous parody as non-infringing, but copyright trolls do not. And if they could, they would take everything you own and probably have you skinned alive as an example to others who would have the audacity to not pay them for each and every person who could possibly have seen the parody image.

Extradition is a penalty in and of itself. It is a penalty applied before a trial can even begin. They then have to hire with their own monies competent legal defense regarding not only the laws they are accused of in their own country, but also legal defense specializing in the law of the land they are removed to and even international law, That is a hefty expense.

Darkmere, please stop telling us he may have made money via ads. We heard you the first time. And by the way, that statement is in dispute. No-one can say certainly if he actually made money off the ads. Nor can we say that he could not have made every last cent of ad money via content that has nothing to do with the claimed infringement. I note that he is *NOT* accused of infringement himself. I quote from the link to the petition:

"When operating his site, Richard O'Dwyer always did his best to play by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links, not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users."

'Nuff said.

 

Fair use laws e.g. parody. Bad example .

Also, this is why I tend to disagree with things like this:

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk_letter

It's very easy to stand up for the indie guy, but when it goes the other way around (i.e. copyright infringement vs a corporation) we're happy to support the other way around. If there were to be some funny and witty copyright lawyer who people got behind? We'd happily go the other way.

 

I am not exactly sure how to take your post mining. Are you saying my example is bad? I can link the actual image itself from these very forums where I posted it.

Fair use laws exist in *Most* parts of the world. There are exceptions though. And that is why extraditions must not be granted for actions like this. Otherwise a country like Iran or North Korea can demand that Americans are extradited for criminal actions we may not consider criminal at all. (I only list those two countries because they are apparently in a pissing contest against America for reasons I cannot fathom.)

China considers many things that are considered protected rights of American citizens not only offensive, but also criminal. For example, many if not most Americans believe that China is not a free nation. More to the point, if an American walked into China and said that China was a thuggish bully to the people of China, that American would probably be executed for this "Crime". I disagree. That is my right as an American. But in China I am not entitled to disagree.

International laws are mostly a joke. If you are in America, you can safely follow the laws of America and avoid harming anyone and be safe. Leave America and that is not true anymore. I do not know every law in America, much less all the nations of Earth. If we are to be held responsible for all the laws of this Earth then the only reasonable solution is for all the nations on Earth to get together and draft a Universal set of Laws for Humans to follow. Then they have to ratify, institute, and enforce those laws everywhere. We will sooner have flying cars and phasers and colonies on Mars than that.

In the most general and reasonable sense I can think of... "If there is no clear and demonstrable victim, there is no crime." When you claim that someone made money via a site that had ads, you have to be specific. Can anyone honestly demonstrate that *ANY* amount of money was derived from ads that were derived exclusively from the linked content? And if so, can anyone demonstrate that at least twenty-four hours *BEFORE* those ads were delivered and counted for him he was served a DMCA takedown notice for the content? If not, then there is no case against him.

 

By the way...
http://community.gaslampgames.com/t...pansion-pack-announced.3174/page-3#post-33397

 

http://thepiratebay.se/legal
The day I see this happening in response to copyright trolls everywhere, I'll die a happy and contented man.

 

Choosing to disregard documented events because they're inconvenient doesn't make them untrue. Nor does it make this acceptable because the guy was only stealing a little bit. Nor does citing slippery slope arguments about unrelated political situations change the scope of the case.

 

[poker face]
Piracy never made any 'lost' sales to the extent that people are complaining about right now. A lot of people who pirate things don't have the money to buy something (and with a bunch of games costing 30-50$ now, and good software bundles much, much more, that's a load of dosh for some), or simply don't want some other things like DRM on their games. Piracy is sometimes the only way of obtaining things which you can't legally buy anymore. Lots of old games and useful old tools and software which aren't abandonware live on through piracy. And I doubt most people will willingly shell out $20 for something made in the 1990s now.

At most, you might lose about 10-50,000 copies in sales per region, maybe more or less, because the people who want to support the gaming developers will plunk down their 10 bux quite willingly for any game. Others are simply too honest to try pirating games. Software is more iffy but much of it has a niche market which will usually pay up anyway for the legit copy. I think you get in trouble for having illegal copies of software as a legitimate business, though I might be getting it wrong.

The main problem here is that a lot of software is staggeringly overpriced (at least in the public eye.) And prices for essentials also happen to be going anywhere but down. People still want their fix. They can, and unashamedly will, use alternate methods of getting a piece of software. Here, piracy can even result in the lost sale being recovered if the utility/fun factor is good enough to make people plunk down the contents of their purse once they have enough.

Most of software's current costs is through DRM anyway, that is to say the modern DRM methods. DRM of those days was a special case since the manuals were the DRM in the day. But piracy wasn't that prevalent until the Net boom either. Pirates would just ensure, also, that a photocopied/printed manual would also make its way to the prospective downloader via another source if need be.

Your honesty is commendable. But people can't be expected to keep to similar standards. Some will just not be willing to pay for things. Ignoring the events happening does not also make them untrue. But everyone has a habit of ignoring the strange, the plain weird, the unpleasant, or the bitter truth. All of us have done this at one time or the other. I pay for everything I own since I have MONEY in my pocket. If I didn't, I'd still remain honest, yes, and make do with a bit less, but money doesn't grow on trees and neither do jobs. One hour's work mowing the lawn in a third world country adds up to a lot less overall than if you sold lemonade for 15 cents a glass in the USA, or for that matter, did the same there. I support good indie game devs, like Gaslamp, for the same reason that they do it right, unlike the profit-minded corporations. I pay their reasonable fees and am willing to pay more for content that's good and keeps bringing me back. I've plunked hundreds of dollars into indie games over 6-7 years and will plunk some more when CoTW is out.

TL;DR: People pirate, and it's human nature to want free stuff. If the copyright trolls want to make the entire world mad at them, fine by me. I'm not giving you more money just because you want three Ferraris and two private jets in the garage of your obscenely huge mansions. Trickle down the profits to the programmers and coders, and then let's talk.

 

To whom and what specifically are you referring? And presuming you are addressing myself, do you have a mirror on hand?

BTW, What exactly *IS* the case? This whole damned thread is getting more slippery by the post. I do not believe anyone in this thread ever said theft is acceptable. And again, presuming you are addressing myself, please do us the courtesy of posting a link to the documentation you claim is being ignored.

(If my presumptions are incorrect, then first of all, I apologize. Second, I humbly request a clarification.)

*Edit* Warlock edited his post, So if my post seems off, it is for a reason. Sneaky Warlock.

 

I have said before in these forums at least a dozen times that I do not support piracy. Yet there are times that I have stolen content. For a while....

I do not always have the money. And even if I do, idiotic restrictions sometimes make it impossible to buy the content we desire. My solution in one such case was to pirate the audio I was after and write the artist that actually made the music. I asked if there was a way I could buy it. But his reply was interesting. He said that due to contractual limitations, he could not sell any more copies of it. But even if he could, he would get less than one dollar out of the sale after the fiscal rape that he was dumb enough to agree to. He told me to keep my pirate copy and send him a dollar if I felt I needed to. I sent him a fresh twenty in an unsigned letter that said:

"Thank you for the offer of a discount. But I support those who make what I love."

I could name the artist in question, but that could get him in trouble with the "publisher" that was responsible for the fiscal rape and the limitation of sales. So no comment on that part. Here is a note that may tell the tale for whom it was: He started his own "Record Label" after that.

 

what the christ...... contractually obligated to sell less, rather than more? That's so dumb I want to go and break something with a heavy blunt object. See? this is why I say piracy is a lot more harmless than people make it out to be. Supporting good stuff comes from the heart. Something like World of Failcraft, for instance.......... [/negative]

People should be free to do what they want with their products. The contractors are the ones crushing creativity these days to begin with. This is also why the likes of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, not to mention Rebecca Black, are permitted to make more than a few abominations. It's popular because of advertising. Back in the days, you had to sell yourself. Now, to survive, even indie devs must needs bow to the whims of THE MAN at times.

 

It's slightly different, actually. Their contracts state there a certain number of copies will be made, and more will only be made if certain conditions are met (the conditions themselves vary and are always known to the artists); in exchange, they are shielded from costs if the copies do not sell, which is a possible, even if unlikely, scenario. So even if it is still bad for them, it's not all that unreasonable.

Though I do agree that I find their income relative to the price to be rather puny. And that piracy is morally grey, whatever people think about it, because there are situations when it is effectively no more than stealing, and there are situations where it can't really be likened to it.

 

*DISCLAIMER* - I like to debate a lot. Text isn't conducive to portraying emotional tone, so I'm saying now that I treat this as an intellectual exercise with other like-minded people, and it should not be construed as anything other than such.

@Omni: I was referring mostly to your posts but not entirely. I didn't intend that as confrontational, more of an attempt to nudge the thread a bit more on track.

Sources I've drawn from:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O'Dwyer... which has cited:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...ODwyer-can-be-extradited-over-TV-website.html

that's the main one, but the other cited articles vary and (surprise!) tend to tow the line of the OP's linked article by wikipedia's founder. What does come through, especially the telegraph article, is that the UK's legal system upheld that O'Dwyer exercised enough control of his site to be held accountable for its contents. But the skew on the story plays it off as the big mean corporations trying to oppress media's Robin Hood, instead of a kid who reportedly made more than a quarter of a million dollars (the amount is irrelevant, he was charged and held accountable for profiting off of the distribution of unlicensed content, which, as they say, is a big no-no), and willfully ignored previous legal action to prevent him from doing so. By posting F- the Police on the front page.

This isn't about an American national being executed in China, and does not relate to posting a LotR .gif. It's also not a case of software piracy, or the music industry's abusive practices.

I also never said the extradition should or shouldn't happen. My point is, it is legal and has been sanctioned by the UK under existing legal precedents. If the matter is to be resolved, the burden lies with UK citizens and their government, NOT a write-in petition by citizens of another country.

 

Thank you for the clarification. No offense taken.

As an American citizen, my nation is directly involved in this. I am not only capable, but expected to voice my opinion on the matter by the customs of this nation. Since he is being extradited here to my nation, I cannot agree that I am not entitled to speak up. As my countrymen have said for generations, "Expletive Deleted the UK." We do things a bit different here.

(I have no malice for the UK. But that is the common prospective here nonetheless.)

While I must agree this is not about music or China, I am struck by the evidence that you are trying to deny the ramifications of this thing. When someone proposes a law that says that it is criminal to carry a knife in my home, I see that naturally extending to forbidding firearms too. And that is a constitutionally protected right in America. I would object to a UK citizen being extradited to America for owning an illegal weapon in the UK as well. If the UK cannot enforce adequate controls over their laws without America doing it for them, then frankly... Too bad.

I do not understand your position on this. You sound like you think I do not have the right to hold an opinion about this because he is being extradited under existing UK provisions. If UK provisions brought Americans to your home, I would expect you to hold a strong opinion about it.

Can you explain to me how me signing a petition that the UK is free to ignore will harm anyone? If not then please again clarify what I am missing about your post.

 

First of all, let me say that we have a situation here that could never have happened a half-century ago. Before the internet, if you wanted to pirate stuff, you had to deal with physical media. You would have to make physical copies of media using magnetic tapes (VHS, cassette, or whatever) and sell them either through the mail or face-to-face. I used to live across the street from a small Indian grocery store that would sell obviously home-made VHS tapes of movies, clearly hand-labeled, almost assuredly pirated. Certainly, it was a very small-scale operation as I never saw more than a dozen tapes total (probably a lot fewer). Also, some neighborhoods in NYC, you'd see street vendors with a fold-out table selling bootleg VHS tapes, paperback books that were SUPPOSED to be destroyed (half the cover would be torn off and sent to publisher -- it was traditional that when a bookstore had to clear the shelves for new stock, instead of sending the unsold books back to the publisher, they'd only send a part or all of the front cover, so anything you bought that was missing the top-half of the cover was probably sold illegally). And that's not even counting the knock-off name-brand electronics, clothing, and accessories. Even today, there's a HUGE industry in selling knock-off drugs (that, if you are lucky, will simply not work, if you are unlucky, will actually kill you). The profits from these kinds of businesses ranged from petty as in the case of the Indian grocery store, who's owner, undoubtedly thought of himself as performing a community service), to HUGE (in the case of the illegal pharmaceuticals).

However, we aren't talking about that because we are not talking about physical media (at least in most cases). In fact, we are not even talking about sales, or at least, not illegal profits. The problem isn't that the kid in question was selling bootleg copies of movies. What he did was create a forum where OTHER people would post links to copyrighted materials. I'm not familiar with the website, so i don't know if the kid actually promoted the exchange of links, or if he simply created a forum and that's what happened. If the former, then clearly the kid was aiding in illegal activity, the latter, and the kid was simply caught in the middle.

IF the kid WAS doing something illegal by either British or International law, then he should pay IN SOME WAY. I have no idea what would be fair, but in the very least, he needs to stop what he's doing. But either way, extradition is simply ludicrous. If he broke British law, then let the Brits deal with him. If he broke International law, then... I don't know how that would work, exactly. Otherwise I'm not sure what should be done with him.

If he did promote the linking to copyrighted materials but did NOT break International law then the law really needs to catch up with technology and that's not going to happen with this particular case, simply because you cannot create a law simply to retroactively charge someone with a crime. But it would be a GROSS miscarriage of justice to allow the kid to be extradited.

 

Fair enough.

I suppose what bothers me more than anything is what I perceive as an undercurrent of "this is happening because Americans put pressure on the UK system to do the extradition.... so other Americans should put pressure on the UK system to disallow the extradition." As I see it, the US requested these actions with a proper legal grievance in such a way that UK authorities can legally comply, and they are doing so. It isn't my place as an American to take a political stance on UK law that deals with UK citizens, as that law doesn't affect me. On the other hand, I'd have a great deal to say if it were an American being extradited elsewhere (however clear the particulars of this case seem to me, I will also admit that I don't believe the public on either side has full details of the issue at hand. My opinion is he's guilty of thumbing his nose at authority, which made him a target, and now he's paying the price).

To put it another way, I don't pay UK taxes or vote in UK elections, so I don't expect to have a say in UK governance.

Trade law is necessarily different, and I'm assuming since O'Dwyer was found to be responsible for the content of his site, and the extradition is a thing that's taking place, there is some provision of trade law that was violated. The particulars of that I'm not clear on, though what I have read seems to indicate that UK authority agrees he was in violation of something worth standing trial for.

EDIT: Bah, Haldurson ninja'd me.

Re: the site. I did see a screencap of what it looked like. There was a searchable list of free content and a "Link finder of the day" bit that named individuals who found the most content lately. I strongly got the impression that this endorsed collecting illegally-hosted copyrighted material. Everything else aside, this issue has been hashed out before (see Napster, et al.) and it did not end well for those knowingly facilitating said services.

 

I wonder what backroom politics are really behind this. From the sound of the article you linked in, the UK tried and failed to convict him because the courts would view his site as a "Conduit" and therefore not responsible for the content linked in. But someone disliked that quite a bit and strings were pulled and a request to extradite was made from America to the UK. The UK, wanting to have him convicted, but lacking a means within their own laws, sought to accept the request to extradite.

I think it is wrong to do this. Not because I believe he is innocent. But rather because I do not think America has any right to be the judicial process for the UK when their own judicial process fails to convict those the UK wants convicted. From the tone of your post above, I presume you agree with this prospective.

Just for the record, I have no idea if he is guilty or innocent. I do not care. He was tried in the UK and they failed to convict. In America, if you are tried and found "Not Guilty" you cannot ever be tried for the same specific infractions again. I take some comfort in that, but recognize the judicial process is imperfect and sometimes a criminal may be freed by this. If this were allowed to happen without us throwing a fit about it, there is a greater chance of the reverse being used against Americans in the future when an American Courtroom fails to convict.

Ultimately I doubt all the whining I or any of us could manage would effect any of this one bit. But I cling to my rights and never hold back my opinions.

 

On the actual subject on hand, I don't think we'll ever figure out what is really going on here.
If he truly did break the law, he does deserve to be punished.

I have an optimistic look at things, and I don't think he's being crucified on the court of public opinions.

What happens happens.

 

Man, I don't give a damn if he was encouraging it or not. If I owned a forum and permitted people to buy and sell illegal drugs, or weapons, or, I don't know, plan out burglaries and included access to tools to make it easier? And then didn't shut it down? I would expect to be prosecuted.