OT: New bill makes it a felony to share files

[JohnL]

A new bill introduced by CA Rep. Howard Berman and another idiot would make sharing files a felony by assuming that files available online had been downloaded at least 10 time for a combined value of $2,500(???), which carries a possible 5 year jail sentence!

Bill Would Put Net Song Swappers in Jail

[spikesangel]

wow, this is the stupidest thing i've ever heard.
this goes in my "stupid" file, right along with the war on drugs.
anything to waste taxpayer money, right?

oh..and..hello again JohnL.



Post Edited (07-17-03 10:29)

[Grumpy Guy]

Please, please, please, let some Supreme Court judge declare this unconstitutional.  This would be prosecution without evendice of crime - I mean, WTF?

[spikesangel]

i came up with a doozy of an idea.
let's just fill the P2P networks with bogus files with real song and movie names.
de gubment will spend all their time wading through gigs and gigs of fake files, and they'll become laughingstocks.

i'm not waiting around to see the MP3 Czar!

[Vermin Boy]

That's actually a really cool idea! I just might record really dumb versions of pop songs (with the same length and file size, of course), and make that folder my only shared one. Not only would I be screwing with the government-- I'd be screwing with mainstream music fans!

[spikesangel]

exactly!
everyone do it!
we all should.
they'll drop this silliness when people who got tired of the wars on drugs and terrorism don't wanna deal with the War on Filesharing.

[SkullNinja]

The other "idiot" is John Conyers whom I consider an anti-American racist.

[Susan]

They won't have enough jail cells to put us all in.

I don't get it. I can record all the movies I love off of tv, or songs the radio (it doesn't prevent me from purchasing movies nor music)- are they going to try and pass a law against that? Honestly what's the difference

[JohnL]

>I don't get it. I can record all the movies I love off of tv, or songs the radio (it
>doesn't prevent me from purchasing movies nor music)- are they going to try
>and pass a law against that?

They're hoping they won't have to. The MPAA and other groups have been pushing hard for video to have some sort of copy protection built into the standard for digital TV. They want there to be a flag that can be turned on and then all recorders will refuse to record it. They also want analog recording devices to have the ability to recognize a digital ' watermark' in the video so for example, a camcorder would refuse to record when pointed at a movie screen. Jack Valenti refers to this as "Plugging the analog hole". I believe the music industry is pushing for the same kind of crippleware to be included in audio devices.

 They tried to do this through law a year or two ago with a bill that would require ALL devices capable of playing or recording audio/video to have built-in copy protection. I don't think that bill got very far, so the MPAA and others have been hard at work, holding closed, secret meetings to try and bully the electronics industry into making such things standard. :(

[spikesangel]

anypone heard of the Fritz Chip or DRM?  Palladium?
this sounds like some new stuff to make sure we get the message...

check it out here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

what's scary to me is the number of the times they used the word "remote."  that means more than zero times.  who the hell has the right to do anything on my PC from somewhere else?  

and the line here:
"Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists."

yeah, know what?  i don't think so.  the very idea of giving the government the power to take something off a worker's PC like THAT is terrifying to me.  that's just what needs to happen, some civil servant discovers something is amiss in his or her gubment agency.  then, as soon as they find out that s/he has knowledge of this and is prepared to go forward with it, the damn Fritz Chip kicks in and the evidence no longer exists.

would we have even HEARD of Erin Brockovich if her PC (if she had one) had a Fritz Chip in it?  there's plenty in this article about proprietary info.  so crummy companies can also get away with crummy antics.  there's got to be a better way.  at the moment this took is being marketed in 2 different directions, one as a "security measure" and the other as digital protection.  i don't like it.  who would have ever thought the RIAA's b***hing would lead to an eventual loss of our civil liberties.

i'm about to rise up like an old negro spiritual and get mad at de gubment.  for sure.  we can't let them do this to us!





p.s. in case anyone's offended, i am a negro so i use the "negro spiritual" phrase all the time.  i also happen to sing spirituals

[wuggles451]

From my understaning of this new bill it is only illegal to upload songs and share them i e pulling songs from a cd to share or if you are sharing massive amounts of files technically if you download a song and quit sharing it you wont be penalized

[JohnL]

>anypone heard of the Fritz Chip or DRM? Palladium?

Yup, in fact I've posted messages on these topics in the past.

I also had an opportunity to exchange email with someone who works for Micro$oft recently and when I asked him about Palladium, he pretty much dismissed all the concerns about it as being alarmist and not based on fact. He didn't seem to want to answer me when I asked if users would be able to turn these features off, or have the option to not install those components at all. When I pressed him, he said he didn't know for sure, but he said he'd guess that users would be able to turn them off.

His opinion was that while the 'trusted' computer would technically make all those things possible, users shouldn't worry about them because companies and the government would be too afraid of the public backlash to actually do any of them. Personally, I'm not convinced.

>From my understaning of this new bill it is only illegal to upload songs and share
>them i e pulling songs from a cd to share or if you are sharing massive amounts
>of files technically if you download a song and quit sharing it you wont be
>penalized

Yes, it sounds like it only affects those who put the files up for downloading, but the way I understand it, anyone who makes copyrighted files available for download would be at risk. True, they might not go after smaller collections, but who knows where the cutout point would be? 50 files? 30? 10?

[Ash]

Personally I think it's funny......

Remember on the other thread how so many of you were against this kind of thing? (piracy & downloaded files)

A lot of you remarked on how you support artists rights and such.

Now on this thread you are all for piracy!

Well which is it!?

[spikesangel]

umm, the files don't have to be available for upload, so to speak.
if you happen to be a computer newbie and rip a CD for backup or something, then get online with a broadband connection and your filesharing is open, you're guilty.
the files do NOT have to be uploaded to anything.  all they have to be is on your PC in a plce where someone can access them.  period.