Submitted by “Spain last night killed a controversial anti-P2P bill that would have made it easier to shut down websites that link to infringing content. The move was a blow to the ruling Socialist government, but it may be of even bigger concern to the US, which pushed, threatened, and cajoled Spain to clamp down on downloading. And Wikileaks can take a share of the credit for the defeat.”
Why does the US think it’s so important for their monopolic media companies like Disney or Warner to protect their IPs internationally so much, since that’s pretty much the only IP that gets exported?
It only benefits a few big companies and it’s not like most of the world consumes US-made content so much (well, maybe some countries do?). Many countries even have plenty of laws regarding the % of foreign movies, TV or music that can be shown/sold and the US lobbies do not even seem worried about that.
They do. The Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia included a clause stopping any increases in our television local content requirement.
It was a long time since I read Neuromancer, but as I recall he described a future where huge multinational corporations controlled the governments and the gap between the rich and the poor were enourmous. Who knew it would turn out to be true. Well, all the crappy stuff came true, we still don’t have that cool matrix thingy…
Indeed. Cyberpunk universes tend at least to include some nice tech/chemical stuff to help people forget about the horrible world they’re living in.
Some people were warning about this from 15-20 years at least, and some others saw it coming a long long time ago, i.e. Metropolis (1927!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)
So, there I am walking down the street to work with moving picture billboards on every available surface and what apears to be an open space dedicated to them; TO’s own little downtown Time’s Square as it where. I’m talking on a small slab of phone plastic or through a small chunk of headset plastic hidden in my ear. I have at least four devices that can capture still images, three of which do video. Much of what I do during the day could easily be done from home or the office. (this about six years ago)
I’ve been watching Mr Gibson’s future setting become reality for a while now. Technically, we’re living in the Silverlight erra (hm.. did MS borrow the name?) which comes just before the Cyberpunk setting we know so well.
Welcome to the Cyber-corporation, Cyberpunks.
Uhm…. If there are many large alternative sources of media, then Disney and Warner are not Monopolistic.
If there are large alternative media outlets which reduce Disney’s share of the market bellow 90% or so then Disney may not be a monopoly. They gotta be pretty close to legal monopoly status in kids entertainment at least. Outside of Diego/Dora.. it’s pretty much all Disney.
Alternatively, if it can be shown that Disney is not capable of manipulating the market or leveraging success in one market segment to drive competition out of another then they may not be a Monopoly. Not saying they don’t go out of there way to try and monopolize the market.
To complicate matters, it may very well be that Disney is in fact a Monopoly by legal definition. However, if they don’t use that position as a competitive strategy, they compete through products rather than market maneuvering, they may be a natural Monopoly. The only real issue with being in monopoly position in any market is when you use that influence for anti-competitive advantage. My uneducated examples would be jacking the price of product because you are the only vendor, bundling a smaller product in with your main product so that competitors of that smaller product can’t fairly compete (“fair” in legal not social sense) and similar.
Around these parts, we get a lot of US media and it really is staggering how much flows out of one or two parent companies. Companies like Disney and Viacom own absurd amounts of media production and display space.
Sadly, politics is like business.. it’s not about a fair price for your product but about the maximum price you can convince people to pay. It’s not about what legislation is fair for the citizens but what legislation can be snuck past to benefit the big businesses (ie. non-human legal entity campaign contributions).
I don’t know/care if they are or not. I just found the contradiction in the post funny.
You’ll find that often in conspiracies: the same group that is omnipotent is also found to leave “obvious” clues to the conspiracy.
I had the impression that the original commenter was not a US citizen. Speaking from foreign perspective and potentially in a foreign first language; I think the sentence works fine to express the idea and provide relevant examples. Disney and Warner are both huge corporations legally obligated to manufacturer money for shareholders; content being the tools used in money manufacturing is incidental. They are both heavy handed corporations striving for a monopoly on content production and consumption. Even if not a monopoly, a duopoly is not much better nor is an oligarchy (can corporations be oligarchs?).
In general, the concern seems to be about mega-corporations exerting power over foreign governments and local foreign policy purely for the benefit of the corporation’s bottom line regardless of how it affects consumers and/or foreign nations. I’d say that’s a fair concern given US history of foreign policy and a government appearing to be bought and implemented to support businesses not citizens.
I’d sure like it if the US gov was less successful at pushing it’s overbearing laws on us folk to the north.
LOL! This reminds me of another discussion earlier, why USA protects big media companies. It was a quite fun and hilarious discussion. I copy and paste from another thread:
”
It is true! I am not lying!
Marlon Brando says “Jews run Hollywood, they own it” look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlon_brando#Comments_on_Jews.2C_Holl…
And read this, this is the most important text you can ever read! It will change your life forever!!
http://www.natvan.com/who-rules-america
Yes, many Jews have German sounding names: Spielberg, Beckham, Portman, Goldman, Lehman, Hilton, Silverstein, Sandler, Stiller, etc just read about them on wikipedia in the section: “Early life”!
And the Israeli lobby AIPAC rules the white house! That is the reason USA blocks every UN resolution against Israel! Look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aipac#Steiner_resignation
So, White House is run by Israel. And Israelis own Hollywood and big media companies. That is the reason the White House protects Hollywood’s interests!
Google on “AIPAC” and read more! I am not lying on this!
“
Last time we had a wikileaks cable story, some where arguing that it was nothing more than idle gossip and didn’t air anything worthwhile. If this can’t be seen as a worthwhile outcome of those leaked cables, i.e. a sovereign state retaking control of it’s legislature, then I don’t know what is.
I’m spaniard and I’ve been following this issue with great fear. Do you remember this Simpsons gag when they use a paper clip to join a law to another to get it passed? This is what happened here. They joined the law to a kind of economy adjustment law. Who can be against tweaking the government expending in this crisis times?
Besides, P2P is legal here. They taxed CDR, CD recorders, CD players, HDD, computers, MP3 players, anything that can be used to play, record or copy any multimedia content. With the law in the hand, you have to get rich AND provide the content to be doing something illegal. A torrent site? Perfectly legal. Using torrent, emule, amule, whatever? Perfectly legal also. So each time they get a torrent site admin to the judges, they found them not guilty and let them go.
Well, guess what… they tried doing a bypass. And a big one, too: the “antiP2P law” was so lax, so unexpecific, even a common blog on politics could get closed with it and they could do it withought asking a judge. This goes against constitution, against law, against common sense, and would put it at the same level of Iran in terms of censorship and citizen rights.
Big THANK YOU to Madding and Wikileaks for blowing the wistle and helping us against this madness.
Yes, that’s true! ( for more details see http://www.filmica.com/david_bravo/ ) The new law was to allow the government to act without trials! To avoid that people have legal defenses!
The weird thing is that just the day before yesterday, a security-oriented law has been voted in France. That law covers of bunch of security-related things but it also proposed setting up an administrative body that will mandate (I hesitated in using “foist”) that ISPs block certain websites. In the name of what? you ask and I answer “in the name of child protection”. No legal system involved, no judges involved, no discussions or warnings sent to the website, they would just decide that a site should be banned and, which is brilliant of them, additions to the list remain undisclosed for years (yes, years!). For those who read French, google “loi loppsi filtrage”.
Essentially, the law is about filtering the web… Some MPs with a brain contended that despite them being with the current ruling party. When I heard about this on the radio, I wondered how the same government that wants to impose a “taxe Google” upon bandwith-heavy sites can even consider monitoring the web traffic for child porn. I mean, they’re wailing because of the cost overhead of sites such as Youtube and now they want to filter/monitor/whatever-other-stupid-action the web traffic in France based on child protection? What is the probable proportion of child porn in the total web traffic? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was below 0.0001%, which makes it obvious to me that there’s a hidden agenda.
I’m dismayed by politicians. Are they ever going to do something good for the people?
Anyway, kudos to Wikileaks. As long as they don’t mess with admitted-as-confidential things and don’t jeopardize people’s lives, I’ll be fine with what they do.
Well, if we consider the case of France, they have proven that they can if there’s or has been recently…
-> A large part of the population taking arms and going for the head of the power in place (1789, 1830)
-> A massive, well-organized, state-wide strike, paralyzing the whole economy (1936)
-> A traumatizing world-wide war (It’d be hard to enumerate the number of nice things which were voted after WWII)
In short, it sounds like we need chaos and destruction on a large scale before something good (or bad) rises from the ashes. I like the irony behind this.
The problem is that current governments and big companies have a “divide and conquer” strategy to avoid massive riots which has proven to work pretty well.
Edited 2010-12-23 11:24 UTC
Yes. True. I should have been more articulate and made my thoughts clearer: when writing that sentence you quoted, I was thinking of their decisions, with respect to pressures from companies (and specifically “big content providers” as Thom calls them) and with respect to what is the best in this digital age for consumers.
Putting things differently, I am astonished as to how ineffective the recent “digital laws” seem to me.
From a link (on http://www.linformaticien.com) after googling the keywords I gave earlier:
Do these people have some reasoning capacity? Why vote for a law if you are opposed to its contents and deem it ineffective?
I would say as a former france resident that, the government is sending mixed messages to french people since years.
First the “private copy” tax, which is nonsense as it also cover media that could be used for something more personal like personal backup, or Even information storage. And I would say following from afar that the tax “upgrade” to personal media player shouldn’t be targeted by this tax as it is not a mean of doing private copy. As the money the distribution scheme is so obscure that I still think that most of it is going into lobbying rather than to the artists.
And culturally speaking, there sure is a 2 sided attack on culture consumption:
1- the decline of content offered by the media, as it is the entry point for artist discover ability. Radio and television (even globally), offers fews novelty in artists and variety, plus they are more focused in selling ads than actual content (I think I can see more and more reality show on MTV than video clips). Movie theater offers a less satisfying experience than it was 5 years ago ( ok I’m not currently in France but my guess would be that it hasn’t improved ), compared to say watching DVD at home on your home theater. And music really feels like rehashing the same stuff.
2-Failure to adapt to current most consumed media: internet. Most of the artists who are complaining about the P2P have little or not presence on internet and therefore are feeling a decline compared to rising artist which have a decent presence (I hear more about Justin Bieber than Bono for example, even if I don’t listen to Bieber yet, his coverage seems greater to me than U2 or Metallica ).
And most of all we are currently feeling a sensory overload, between advertising, news (TV, radio, net), games, movies, art, music. Where content producer are overwhelming us with more and more expecting they would earn more, the result being less than satisfactory experience ( cramming mediocre tracks into an album to fill it, and selling it at an outrageous price ) and a large amount of unconsumed media (which cost money I guess).
Of course ITunes offers a very compelling change to all of this, with a preview experience similar to what we could have in store, and price that are also reasonnable, Amazon is catching on but lack the Apple mind share. But in these digital distribution methods artist got to make themselves more noticeable by driving a stronger digital image.
Fortunately, I was already out of France when the loppsi law was introduced, but I believe that they are removing the “innocent until proven guilty” stance on this activity by cutting connections and censoring
websites.
What’s next, forcing people to buy a quota of music per year or Making an altogether tax for people having at least one functioning ear ?
On Another hand people lack education about digital prices, as they do not perceive the price of any digital medias at all, People think that website consumption is free for everybody (they ignore hosting cost ), or that an image/video seen on the internet can be used at no cost at all, because they don’t know the price it cost people to produce it, so how would people understand that music they downloaded have any cost ?
Well, my mother works at my town’s municipal council, and she could have given me the explanation of this mystery… To some extent.
At the first municipal council after the municipal elections, one of the member of the electoral majority stood and claimed that she couldn’t stay there and had to leave. She explained that after the elections, her political party (which happened to be the UMP) briefed her, telling her that she had to approve anything the mayor proposes. She said that doing this was against her vision of democracy, and that she was afraid she had to leave because of that.
Obviously, we don’t know the whole story, because if it was only that, she could have stayed, do what she thinks is right, and ignore this anti-democratic order. After all, they have trusted her enough to give her this place, so they have to face the consequences. Either she was particularly obedient by nature or there are some things happening behind the scene which we don’t know, to make sure that people in a party follow their leader or leave.
This might explain why people like this deputy let laws which they know will be ineffective pass : they just blindly follow their leader, as they have been told to.
Edited 2010-12-23 17:47 UTC
I live in Spain too(I don’t consider myself spanish, that’s another story though
) and I would like to comment some things:
P2P is legal almost everywhere. What is not legal in many places is the sharing of copyrighted material without consent.
Next: file sharing is not “perfectly legal” in Spain. It is something called, in the law world, “alegal” which means something is not regulated nor prohibited. To give a weird example: it is legal to say something because you have the right to free speech but… would it be legal to kill an e.t.? Right now, with the law in hands, that would be “alegal”.
Now, the tax thing. This is what troubles me more. What is know here as “canon” IS NOT A TAX!!! it is not for the government nor for the cities or any public organization you may think of: it’s for a private organization known as SGAE(kind of RIAA in Spain)!!! This is the key to the whole problem: the cannon is applied everywhere and to everyone and it is all in benefit of a private organization and not us as people/country.
Wanna know a funny thing? 80% of the money the canon gets comes from *the Spanish legal system*. Yes, you read it right. The court recordings, the backups… everything which is obviously not copyrighted material is what gives SGAE almost all it’s money and we are paying it all with our real taxes!!!
What has worried me the most is that the political parties that brought this bill down changed their mind because it was exposed by wikileaks (I know, strictly speaking I’m guessing) and not because it was *WRONG*. As wrong as when they got the canon in the first time (although I must admit the canon is something that comes from the cassette times…).
I want politicians that have *integrity*. Politicians that are capable of standing up against external pressures (be it the USA or whoever) and do what is right.
I know I’m dreaming, still, a good dream
Walking on the street isn’t regulated nor prohibited, and doesn’t make it alegal either. Besides, there IS a law that regulates sharing of copyright material, by the way. It’s NOT legal UNLESS the material is copied from a legal source, there’s no “animo de lucro” (intention of getting rich), and it’s for personal use. This is clear as water for the judges, that have been issuing not guilty to every file sharing case here in Spain.
Yes, I forgot to mention this detail. This is totally true. It’s kind of a private company tax. Think of it as if Disney would get money from the TV set builders, just in case you use their TV sets to watch one of their movies. Guess who is paying it at the end…
You are wrong. In both things.
Walking on the streets is indeed regulated:
“ArtÃculo 19.
Los españoles tienen derecho a elegir libremente su residencia y a circular por el territorio nacional.
Asimismo, tienen derecho a entrar y salir libremente de España en los términos que la Ley establezca. Este derecho no podrá ser limitado por motivos polÃticos o ideológicos.”
From the Spanish Constitution. I translate for the non spanish speakers:
“The Spanish have the right to chose their residence and to move around the national territory.” (the second part is not relevant here)
About that law: You may refer to the LPI (Ley de Propiedad Intelectual) [ http://www.mcu.es/propiedadInt/docs/RDLegislativo_1_1996.pdf].
You should check the article 31:
“2. No necesita autorización del autor la reproducción, en cualquier soporte, de obras ya
divulgadas cuando se lleve a cabo por una persona fÃsica para su uso privado a partir de obras
a las que haya accedido legalmente y la copia obtenida no sea objeto de una utilización
colectiva ni lucrativa, sin perjuicio de la compensación equitativa prevista en el artÃculo 25, que
deberá tener en cuenta si se aplican a tales obras las medidas a las que se refiere el artÃculo
161. Quedan excluidas de lo dispuesto en este apartado las bases de datos electrónicas y, en
aplicación del artÃculo 99.a, los programas de ordenador.”
I will explain, not translate: this article says that is legal to copy from a legal source for your *own personal usage*. This regulates nothing about you *sharing* your copy. We come again to the “alegal” term
Regards
Regards
Touché on the first part, I forgot about the constitution. Maybe trecking or swiming on a beach whould have been a better example, but I bet there’s more of that basic laws in there so I give the point for lost.
But the second part, that piece of the law is the key for what I’m saying. This law’s article means…
You don’t need the author’s authorization (for doing a legal copy) in any kind of support, of creations already distributed…
…when it’s a person who is it doing it (not a company)…
…for their private use (not to be used on a public proyection, for example a school’s proyection…
…from a legally obtained copy, AND here’s the trick: once you make a copy from any content, the copy itself become a legally obtained copy and you can make a copy from it again, that will be legal. Further down there’s more conditions:
…again, no public (collective) use and no money asked for it…
…that means even if it’s a legal copy, you have to pay the “canon”. The rest of the article says databases and software is excluded, what means software piracy it’s illegal, but music and video is legal the same second the movie is played in a cinema or the song is in a cd for sale.
You should check the Wikipedia article: ( http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada ). There are references to a judge stating that P2P it’s legal ( http://www.elmundo.es/navegante/2006/11/01/tecnologia/1162383709.ht… ) and more information on the issue.
“…from a legally obtained copy, AND here’s the trick: once you make a copy from any content…”
Here is where we do not agree. To me, the copy where you are copying is an “alegal” copy. Not illegal doesn’t make it legal
Regards
from the linked article: -“”sales by local artists in the top 50 have fallen by an estimated 65 percent between 2004 and 2009.”.
Something read from almost everywhere !
Some facts to take into considerations:
– How many “so called artists” are local ones (Spanish, etc) ?
– How many are coming from the US ?
– From 2004 to 2010, there is a very wide choice of songs/singers. So, What the proportion of newcomers artists in this period ?
– From 2004 to 2010… How evolve the incomes of the indirect (agents, producers, etc) against the ones of the artists ?
Now my point of view:
Top 50 has became like junk food:
– “Sale a lot of hamburgers, cheap to produce, make a lot of money with it, and too bad if consumers have a heart attack with them.”
… and that “sales by local artists in the top 50 have fallen by an estimated 65 percent between 2004 and 2009.”
The number of home backed cookies has dropped by 80% in the last 20 years, so a supermarket levy on cookie sheets and chocolate chips is needed to compensate the cookie factories for their loss in sales. Something like that?
The “so called music” lately is nothing but a peace of trash. No wonder sales dropped.
FYI:
In USA from amazon.com MICHAEL (Michael Jackson) cost 11.88$
In Spain same CD costs 13.95€ ==> 18$
Going to see a movie: 8€ ==> 10.4$ (in USA???)
Minimum wages in USA ==> 7,25$
Minimum wages in Spain ==> 6$ (here, now, over 20% of the people does not have a job!)
We are charge a levy on ALL CD, mobiles, hds (does not matter what you use it for:
*) MP3 player: 3.15€
*) DVD writer: 3.40€
*) DVD blank: 0,4€ per disk
*) Hard Disk: 12€
The current is indebted to the national artists who supported them in the past. The minister is from the filmographic industry.
The lawÅ› failure is because itÅ› a piece of garbage with lots of things unrelated, and in part because it wasnt convenient for the opposition parties to support it.
And the minister said they will try again to pass it.
We recently have lived 36 years of dictatorship, enough to realize how important is our privacy right and the right of share infomation even if these information have copyright or not. P2P is a constitucional right in my Country.
I’m reading a lot of spanish in OSNEWs… COOL!.
Siempre bromeo que la manera que la ex URSS de destruir al “Imperio” Americano era con la inserción de latinos para socavar su infraestructura. Y parece que tratamos de hacer algo similar con OSNEWS.
(i always joke that the former USSR try to destroy the American “Empire” insertin latin american people to undermine their infraesture. Looks like we are trying to do something simillar in OSNEWS).
Bueno, si no querian latinos en su casa, podian haber empezado por no quedarse Mexico…
( “well, if they didn’t wanted latins in their home, they could have not get Mexico for themselfs for a start” …I know, is a bad joke. Remember that Absolut Vodka “in an absolute world” ad with the old mexican frontier map?
)
[edited]
Edited 2010-12-27 19:58 UTC
Spain is full of crooks so the right to steal may be preserved. My concern is that osnews used to be about OS’s and now just a bashing board for promoting theft and bashing the US.
Maybe people don’t see the difference between their tv or car being stolen or data. It is the same. It is theft.
That comment is willfully ignorant at best. What a horrible thing to say about another nation!
If you don’t like the content then go somewhere else is all I can say to that over-simplistic statement.
No, it’s not theft. No matter how many times either I or other people on this forum try to explain this point, you still get people like you who either don’t understand the concept or worse, willfully ignore the reality of the situation.
Somebody else before me has put all this in better terms so I’ll just post his argument here:
“Don Munsil — February 3, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Copyright violation is not theft, neither morally or legally. Most copyright violation isn’t even a crime – it’s a civil issue, providing a justification for a lawsuit.
This whole “piracy is theft†crap is a framing device created by content industries to try to paint their opponents as crime-loving communists.
I, personally, do want to make sure artists and creators have a robust market for their work so they can get compensation for their creations, but I recognize that the reason we as a society provide them with the limited copyright is so that that market will exist and thrive. It’s not because of some moral commitment. It’s entirely about incentives to produce.
Right now, I am in complete agreement that it’s so easy to copy content that there is a risk of the market for content becoming either non-viable or at least less attractive, reducing considerably the incentives for production, and I’m actually very interesting in trying to fix that situation. I’m just realistic enough to see that ratcheting up the restrictions on copying is going to be ineffective, and possibly counterproductive, in achieving that goal.
Something similar happened with songwriting back in the early 20th century, and many people proposed fixes that included stronger laws and more criminal penalties for unauthorized song performance. Luckily for all concerned, people realized that was going to be unwieldy and ineffective and a system of compulsory payments was implemented instead, leading to the formation of ASCAP. And now (with limits) anyone can perform any song they like without having to get permission first as long as they pay the statutory royalty.
The result: the songwriting market still exists, there are still plenty of songs written, and songwriters get paid whenever their songs are performed or reproduced. The level of un-paid commercial performance is relatively small, because it’s easier to police commercial usage.
The point is that there are lots of ways of incentivizing production of works. Strong monopoly copyright is one. A less strong copyright with a compulsory payment system is another. There are other ideas that are interesting, and at bottom I just want us to pick a workable, efficient system with minimum government intervention.
And there’s always a possibility that non-commercial file sharing isn’t really what’s hurting the content industries. Every content industry is hurting, largely because there’s so much legitimate free stuff to see/read/hear on the internet. If we could somehow stamp out the filesharers, it’s not obvious that this would result in a significantly more robust market for content. And a robust market for content is the goal, not some kind of moral purity of artist’s rights.”
Now do you get it? With comments like those above, somehow I doubt it.