species8472

Well, after having the somewhat discomforting feeling of being the one starting this particular "thread of doom" subside a little, I just want to send out my congrats on the moderators and to Nite for keeping it together (mostly anyway ;)) and keeping the boards online. I have been coming to the site and reading for over a year, and usually had Azeureus pumping until I uploaded at least twice what I took, but haven't found too much to post about before. I am saddened to see the big guys win this particular fight, but applaud your wisdom in choosing your battles. Like others, I have a new respect and appreciation for the community in this, and will be coming now to the board instead of just looking to see what's new to grab. Riker quoted it best in the Last Outpost -- "He will triumph, who knows when to fight..."

To answer your question, thoumsin, as I understand it there is more than one copyright for any work. I am a songwriter and have a copyright registered with SOCAN (the canadian ASCAP) which takes care of the authors rights. But there is also a copyright on the publishing rights of an artist's work - which is where the MPAA and RIAA and organizations like that come in. They own the licensing on the recordings of the artists' work, but not the author's copyright. There is a great article on snopes.com which explains this well by citing the case of the copyrights for the Beatles' songs currently held by Michael Jackson. It's not specifically on the laws regarding the difference, but who wants to read boring legalese? Check it out.

Maybe some of we users of this site can help make sure the torrents stay out there... I had just finshed downloading the collection of all the Star Trek movies for example. I'm going to creat a new torrent file and associate it with the Pirate Bay tracker as well as any other free trackers I can find. Then at least the torrents will still be availble through another tracker. My burning question is should the "Niteshdw" tag still stay on the torrent filename? If it stays on it'll be a lot easier for other Netizens to find these great-quality encodes, but could bring further heat to Nite. If I remove the "Niteshdw" tag from the torrent filenames, it'll be harder to find but nothing can come back to Nite. Any suggestions? This is scary now - it's Friday and I don't know where my next ep of Battlestar is going to come from... :stare:

It's only stealing if the country you live in makes the laws work that way. In Canada, aside from our "free" healthcare which includes no prescriptions, glasses, or dentists as StichInTime pointed out, we have already paid for the right to download music in the way of a flat tax incorporated in the price of MP3 players up here. If the US government weren't such morons, they could figure out a way for Hollywood to get its damned pound of flesh and not make criminals out of most of the population of the country.

Now there is a very good chance I could be wrong about this, but as far as I understand, the MPAA only has jurisdiction in the United States. As far as the UK, Canada, and other countries, I believe they essentially ask you to present yourself to the US court system. They just don't tell you that you can refuse. Then they can try to pursue you through your own country's legal system (and here in Canada they would have a very hard time) or request you extradited. Now, extradition is usually a big process involving diplomats and paperwork and attaché cases and I'd doubt they'd go through that ordeal even if no greater power than themselves stopped it. So, if my understanding is correct, the MPAA, RIAA and the like only have power over US citizens. An additional note - digital music players (iPods, mp3 players) sold in Canada have a flat tax incorporated in the price that goes specifically to the artist (which takes care of the artists' rights) and transferring music from one medium to another is considered legal fair use in our copyright code (which takes care of the publishers' copyrights). So downloading music in Canada is legal. Nothing is said regarding uploading or video files transfer.

Did some more hunting and found the press release from the MPAA website here (pdf). Very sad indeed - and as far as I understand hosting .torrent files is not illegal, but it seems the MPAA disagree. If you scroll down to the bottom of the .pdf, you see exactly who the MPAA are as well. I guess they can't afford a pay cut of the few thousand dollars they actually loose to downloads. Hell, I don't think Battlestar Galactica would have half the fans it does today if not for us getting the sneak peek over here via P2P from our British friends at the beginning. Instead, the MPAA would rather us buy a DRM'd-to-death DVD. And another copy for our PSPs or video iPods. And if you loose it, so sorry, backups were a thing only grandfathers could make back in the day when equipment was actually allowed to use its full potential. Good luck, Nite. I think I speak for all of us when I say may the gods be on the side of justice in this. So say we all.

Can anybody confirm or deny this? Boing Boing just posted about a new MPAA attach on websites and newsgroups, including this one! Please say it isn't so!

I'm not 100% this will be right along this same topic, but a couple of points that I'd like to raise seem to be along these lines... I do not, nor do I wish to, pay for cable television. Except for some sci-fi, I don't like 95% of what is on TV. Leaving aside the logic of putting advertisements on a medium that I need to pay for in the first place, I only watch airwave television. I have the added disadvantage of being in Montreal, QC, Canada, where most of the local programming is in French, and of the little there is left a Star Trek show is not among the offerings. My own view is that I should not need to pay for shows that I would have diligently recorded on my VCR when aired on regular airwaves had my locality not prevented my receiving them in the first place. And I also very much agree that most of Hollywood (and most corporations in general) pay their higher ranks way too much, but this Canadian boy will leave the planting the seeds of a socialist revolution in the US for another day on another forum... B)