Hollywood lawyers have another go at Aussie ISP Hollywood copyright lawyers are having another go at the Aussie ISP iiNet which recently won a case brought by the Australian Federation against Copyright Theft. At the start of February Judge J Cowroy rejected claims that iiNet had somehow authorised copyright of Hollywood films by BitTorrent users who also used iiNet's …
I'm impressed, Michael Malone actually knows what he's talking about!
People don't steal it because they want to steal it, it's because decent affordable access doesn't exist so the only option left is to steal it.
Come up with a decent online system and the freetards will become paytards overnight
"People don't steal it because they want to steal it, it's because decent affordable access doesn't exist so the only option left is to steal it."
becomes
"People don't rape because they want to rape, it's because decent affordable sex doesn't exist so the only option left is to rape."
Now obviously my modified sentence is a fallacy, as is yours and for exactly the same reason. Affordable movies DO exist. Try any decent high street store, 4 for £20 and some are from £3 or less. That is affordable in anyone's book. One line system? I think you'll find that these places all have websites. Want it more immediate? Well golly gosh, there are services for that as well.
You and I may not agree with the current implementation of copyright law, but that is no excuse for supporting criminal acts.
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And of course, the fact that rape and other sex crimes fall dramatically when pornography and other alternatives are easily available, and increase sharply when they are made illegal, only shows that while there are sick freaks who rape simply for the power of it, there are far more who rape because, as you so eloquently put it, "decent affordable sex doesn't exist so the only option left is to rape."
Few people commit crime out of pleasure; most do it out of necessity - or opportunity. If you reduce that opportunity and eliminate that necessity, then you're left with a minority of constant offenders that you CAN persecute to the full extent of the law, rather than a majority who outnumber you ten to one...
Decent affordable access IS readily available...It's called HMV or, for newer movies The Odeon. If you disagree with the price it does NOT give you any right to "steal" it. That's their point and I totally agree with it.
People DO steal because they want to, if they didn't want to then they simply wouldn't. They way up the pros and cons and then go for the easiest option to them...get the free one...I don't have a problem with anyone who does this (at least until they steal something of mine that is)...But stop trying to be a twat about it and just admit that what you are doing is dodgy and if you get caught you've got no one to blame but yourself.
If the studios push, then they may end up causing ripple effects in the next election that will not be good for them but when has hollywood ever thought more than 3 months in advance? The odd thing is that the **AA Ass. fear that that piracy will collapse the American media would be very good news for the Aussie media who make many of the very few profitable TV shows running in the US these days.
I know an appeals process can be a good thing (re. recent cases in the u.arse.of.hay where long-term convicts or death-row people have been found innocent) but why, when a judge has given his considered opinion, should a business be allowed to appeal? All these wankers do is constrict the already overburdened legal system and play for the "but it's the public good" bullshit.
Fuck 'em.
I do not go to cinemas (OK, I did for all three LoTR films) and I buy my DVD's when ASDA sell them for £2 or £3.
I don't care about the studio's - they make billions. Once again - fuck 'em.
Not only are the "bad guys" arseholes - aka Corporate Moron America from the US and A;
- They are greedy stupid arseholes...
e.g. Microsoft sold Win 7. Online and in box (pretend figure) it went for say $200.
They sold it in Australia for $400 - and they stopped people in Australia from buying from the US and A; by ----- get this:
1. Blocking their IP address; and
2. If they did things like use a proxy server, they blocked the sale via shipping address.
With the DRM and the Microsoft dirty antics and the rigging of the hardware etc., etc., etc....
Well I bought a laptop a few years back - fine; plays DVD's too.
But here is where I did all my research on this:
These pricks in AFACT and Co., use staged releases; First at the movies in the US and A, and then selectively into SOME of the other regions.
OK that means globally about 85% of what is released - is not released in Australia and does not make it to Australia.
After the cinemas, then come the DVD rentals, and then wayyyy down the track it comes on TV.
AFACT rigs the prices of DVD's and CD's etc., so that consumers in Australia pay substantially more for their media, that people do in the USA etc.,
AFACT and Co opposed the use of Parallel importing, where consumers could buy their own material oversease, at a substantial saving to buying the same media in the shops here.
Then we have the region encoding.
These pricks have it stitched up to only release the proprietary firmware that reads the disk content, to the manufactures who make things like DVD players etc...
I mean THIS by and of it's self is a HUGE long running sore to the consumer - remember Sony installing root kits on ones hard drive? etc., etc., etc...
So with the region encoding, these pricks make it so that one I install a region encoded disk, the unit "locks" to that region. When I insert a disk from the US and A, it registers that the disk is from a different region. As soon as I say stick in another Aussi disk, that registers as the THIRD change, and then when I insert a disk from the UK, the drive region LOCKS it's self to only playing disks from the UK.
No more Aussi disks, no more USA disks etc.....
So that is only ONE small example of how these pricks meddle with everything.
The issue goes on that in Australia we only get about 15% of the global media content. What is not is neither released here nor distributed here.
As far as how these organisations control what is shown here.....
Australian media such as the TV stations and the radio stations and the press, are some of the shittiest in the world. And they are controlled for the most part by the members of AFACT.
We suffer enormous advertisment loading - and after 11 pm - we have the equivalent of porn spam adds, in 5 minute blocks, for five minutes, every five minutes half the night - dumping crap which is basically "go masturbate over videos of strippers and lesbian sex on your mobile phone" - at only $5.99 a minute.
I mean I love women!!!! but these adds are too much - because it's the same adds over and over and over - night after night after night... and they have long since ceased to be tittilating and are now purely annoying.
We get "fans of assorted series" and the series have random and unannounced schedule changes, we get stuff that is mostly 2 or so years after the current stuff is screening in the USA, and frequently the series are taken off air mid season and replaced with other programs or old episodes etc....
Most of the Free to Air TV in Australia is basically shit.
And I do digress about the issue of free to air. Assume that one watches 20 hours per week - that is about 10 hours of "show" and 10 hours of adds - if I was earning a wage for those 10 hours of adds, vs. watching adds on TV., then I would be way in front.
TV and the adds, actually cost me enormous amounts of loss through the unproductive and wasteful use of my time.
Could I go hire a movie if I was inclined.... yeah - with the "new releases" still being classified as "new releases" 2 years after it was seen at the cinema at $5 a night, vs the not new releases that are of movies like "The Terminator" that came out 20 years ago for $2 weekly.
As far as music goes - I am not into the latest flavour of the month, being shoved down my neck., and I also kind of like much of all that has been produced - spanning the last 100 years or so.
Even if we limit the material to say the last 30 years - almost NONE of it is available in the record shops, very little of it is available online - but people do share it via P2P...
Again being musically inclined - when buying "proper" sheet music - most of it is very poorly written - probably by dope smoking jerks on minimum wages., and for the larger part no one from their managers to the musicians ever checks the quality or the accuracy of the work.
So we get wrong wording, bar chords to fill in for 2 guitars playing complex note sequences and riffs... and the copyright nazis went after sites who hosted people's interpretations of the music, in tab notation... with them listening to the recording and writing down in "guitar code" (tabs) how they thought the actual riff went, where guitar 1 and guitar 2 cut in and out, and each guitars chord and fingering sequence and techniques.
I thought that was getting to the point of beating up people and arresting them for whistling tunes when walking the dog.
Again AFACT and it's greedy, lazy and stupid "corporate moron" constituents, do everything they can to obstruct, control and gouge the consumer with every device and means possible., but they deliberately do nothing to make the content affordable or available.
Do I like them or respect them? No.
Will I ever buy from them again or support them?
Not when they are rigging their own copyright laws to suit themselves - so they can keep on plastering licensed versions of Mickey Mouse on every school bag, lunch box and pencil case for the next 500 years...
These companies are rotten and corrupt.
And now they have consolidated themselves into about 4 or 5 global multinationals who own and control the movie and music studios, the TV stations and the print media.
In Australia - the news is almost identical on all networks.... and it's stupid corporate moron based news.... except for the haircuts of the news readers., it would be hard to tell them apart.
Things of relevance like this; such as the oil states in the middle east are investing heavily in solar and renewables.... well that has never been reported by the stupids in Australia - what makes our news is pointless and irrelevant shit like, "A man caught fucking his dog was sentenced today" or some other bullshit - while real matters of great import go ignored and disregarded.
Or the idiot political sensationalising and point scoring etc...
The media in Australia is run by idiots.
AFACT are the front face of the global conglomerates, trying to lock everyone via vertical integration - into their product lines.
They want power and control over everyone using everything.
And they don't like it when people say "I am not a commodity on a balance sheet - designed to sit here and make revenue for you".
The more I see just how corrupt these buiness's are - are what cheek they have to try it on, the more I am inclined to have subversive inclinations.....
Like "Turn off, Don't Watch and Don't Buy" and support free press and unsigned artists and the local productions by real people - in community cinemas and halls.....
Learn to read, write and play your own music..
And dump the spoon fed nazi bullshit from AFACT and it's constituent members.
The court gave the AFACTS wankers a 200+ page spanking judgement and told them to rack off with costs........
why is it that these wankers can have a dummy spit, stomp their little feet up and down, and pretend they are hard done by.........
any other petulant infant would be solidly spanked on the arse ( or belted across the ears ) and locked in their room.
Gutless braindead wankers wouldn't take on Telstra or Optus because they know these 2 have deeper pockets than iinet.
Few things piss me off more than geolocation. That, more than anything else, has destroyed the globalism of the Internet. My response, however, is simple.
The moment I go to buy a movie online only to be told it isn't available in my country, I bookmark and save the refusal page for my records, then go straight to Demonoid and download it over BitTorrent. If ever I am caught, my defence in court will be that the copyright owner actively refuses to sell it in Australia and therefore has no basis to claim lost sales from my downloading, as I can show from my records that I made a genuine effort to purchase the movie and was told I could not.
Yes, I know I'll probably still lose against the might of the MAFIAA lawyers, but the fact that I part-own a publishing company with ties to current-affairs TV shows will mean that I'll turn the whole fucking geolocation debacle into a media circus before I go down.
...I wish them good luck in these legal battles!
Poor little iinet having to do all this fighting in the first place. It's a shame those cowardly Hollywood lawyers didn't go after one of the bigger ISPs... either US-owned Optus or partially Government owned Telstra.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9162979/Sony_LG_Samsung_Hitachi_Toshiba_accused_of_price_fixing
A home electronics retail store has filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Toshiba Corp., LG Electronics Inc., Hitachi Ltd. and several subsidiaries, accusing the electronics manufacturers of colluding to fix prices in the U.S. optical disc drive (ODD) market.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/33826
MDL Docket No. 1361 read:
“The Plaintiffs have alleged in two separate amended complaints that the Defendants conspired to illegally fix and control the pricing of Music Products sold to consumers through Defendant Distributors’ adoption and utilization of Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) programs in violation of the Sherman Act, state antitrust and unfair competition and/or consumer protection laws. The Plaintiffs have further alleged that as a result of the conspiracy residents of the Plaintiff States and members of the Plaintiff Settlement Class have been injured by paying more for Music Products than they would have paid in the absence of the illegal conduct. The Defendants have denied and continue to deny each and all of the claims and contentions alleged by the Plaintiffs and any violation of law. The Court has not made any determination as to the merits of any of the claims or defenses of the parties to this Litigation.”
In the hot seat were:
* LABELS: Capitol Records, Inc d/b/a EMI Music Distribution, Virgin Records America, Inc, and Priority Records LLC; Time Warner, Inc, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corp, WEA, Inc, Warner Music Group, Inc, Warner Bros Records, Inc, Atlantic Recording Corporation, Elektra Entertainment Group, Inc, and Rhino Entertainment Company; Universal Music & Video Distribution Corporation, Universal Music Group, Inc, and UMG Recordings, Inc; Bertelsmann Music Group, Inc and BMG Music; and, Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
* RETAILERS: MTS, Inc d/b/a Tower Records, Musicland Stores Corp, and Trans World Entertainment Corp.
Steve, don't forget to also have a record showing the flick isn't available from a major retailer within your country.
While callmeshane's long and dismal assessment is right on the mark, one thing to remember is that watching a movie is not a basic human right.
If some suit at sony decides that terminator will never be shown or sold in OZ, it is their right, like some camera or car models are not imported, and claiming injustice or even unfairness is a bit of a stretch: you are entitled to exactly nothing.
On the other hand, your right is not to buy from companies you don't approve of, and stop watching crappy, restricted, expensive, violent movies, and play cards with your friends instead. There is nothing these companies understand more than customers' wallets staying closed.
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