river-wind
Valued Senior Member
Avatar: that is exactly my understanding as well. The example given of shoplifting a pair of jeans certainly seemed more like attempted robbery rather than a issue of conversion.
woman fined 200,000$ for 24 songs
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Learned Hand
Registered Senior Member
Your welcome. And because I'm such a good guy, here is a portion of the theft statute in the state in which I reside (see subsection b(8)):
35-43-4-1
Definitions
Sec. 1. (a) As used in this chapter, "exert control over property" means to obtain, take, carry, drive, lead away, conceal, abandon, sell, convey, encumber, or possess property, or to secure, transfer, or extend a right to property.
(b) Under this chapter, a person's control over property of another person is "unauthorized" if it is exerted:
(1) without the other person's consent;
(2) in a manner or to an extent other than that to which the other person has consented;
(3) by transferring or encumbering other property while failing to disclose a lien, adverse claim, or other legal impediment to the enjoyment of that other property;
(4) by creating or confirming a false impression in the other person;
(5) by failing to correct a false impression that the person knows is influencing the other person, if the person stands in a relationship of special trust to the other person;
(6) by promising performance that the person knows will not be performed;
(7) by expressing an intention to damage the property or impair the rights of any other person; or
(8) by transferring or reproducing:
(A) recorded sounds; or
(B) a live performance;
without consent of the owner of the master recording or the live performance, with intent to distribute the reproductions for a profit.
(c) As used in this chapter, "receiving" means acquiring possession or control of or title to property, or lending on the security of property.
35-43-4-2
Theft; receiving stolen property
Sec. 2. (a) A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person, with intent to deprive the other person of any part of its value or use, commits theft, a Class D felony. However, the offense is a Class C felony if the fair market value of the property is at least one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000).
So, to paraphrase and to put it all to rest, copying a copyrighted work for profit is a theft. I didn't bother to check, but I'm sure many states follow suit.
(Sorry riverwind, but theft of craftmanship by copying the crafter is still a theft. In high school they called it cheating . . . Ah, a rose by any other name still smells so sweet . . . )
PS That last bit was from Shakespeare, which is public domain.
river-wind
Valued Senior Member
Thank you very much for this state statute! Very interesting.
So, then P2P file sharing, what Ms. Thomas was accused of, and what this entire thread is about, was NOT theft in your state either? Since she wasn't distributing for profit or anything.
Your state places copyright infringement with commercial intent as theft, and I would not be surprised if other states were the same, as you suggest. The street-corner bootleg DVD sellers usually get some pretty stiff punishment whenever they are arrested. I apologize for allowing myself to talk about copyright violation not being theft - I should have specified that I was not talking about for-profit piracy. That was my error.
Also, I should apologize for the level of venom in some of my posts thusfar. After having gone over this topic 100 times in the past year, it's become a bit frustrating, but I still should not have gotten to the 'shouting' level like I did. I can always learn, and venting frustration is not a good way to allow for that.
This certainly does say that copyright infringement of recorded music is theft. However, the second part of the subsection says:
"with the intent to distribute the reproductions for a profit."
So, then P2P file sharing, what Ms. Thomas was accused of, and what this entire thread is about, was NOT theft in your state either? Since she wasn't distributing for profit or anything.
Your state places copyright infringement with commercial intent as theft, and I would not be surprised if other states were the same, as you suggest. The street-corner bootleg DVD sellers usually get some pretty stiff punishment whenever they are arrested. I apologize for allowing myself to talk about copyright violation not being theft - I should have specified that I was not talking about for-profit piracy. That was my error.
Also, I should apologize for the level of venom in some of my posts thusfar. After having gone over this topic 100 times in the past year, it's become a bit frustrating, but I still should not have gotten to the 'shouting' level like I did. I can always learn, and venting frustration is not a good way to allow for that.
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Learned Hand
Registered Senior Member
Partially correct. She was not the thief. However, she could have received stolen property by someone who was profiting off a bootleg, and be charged with receiving stolen property (which is a subset of theft). Here's the entire theft statute:
35-43-4-2
Theft; receiving stolen property
Sec. 2. (a) A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person, with intent to deprive the other person of any part of its value or use, commits theft, a Class D felony. However, the offense is a Class C felony if the fair market value of the property is at least one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000).
(b) A person who knowingly or intentionally receives, retains, or disposes of the property of another person that has been the subject of theft commits receiving stolen property, a Class D felony. However, the offense is a Class C felony if the fair market value of the property is at least one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000).
Learned
Learned Hand
Registered Senior Member
No problem. And hopefully some of my posts helped to clear the confusion generated by those 100 or so regurgitations of copyright and intellectual theft.
river-wind
Valued Senior Member
One of the bits of the trial that was well handled by the defense was that by checking the creation dates of the files, it was more likely that the 24 songs in question were ripped from her thousand-strong CD collection.
Each song creation date was in track order, a few seconds apart, with a minute or so between CDs. Files downloaded from P2P would not have shown that pattern, but a random pattern based on which files happened to download first. A bootleg CD would show the same pattern (a Cd is a Cd is a CD (unless you're a Sony CD
)), but such a contention was never raised by the plaintiffs.There *were* some files on her computer that contained fingerprints showing that they were P2P-downloaded files (including comments like "uploaded by geekuser4"), but none of the 24 files fell into that group.
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Grantywanty
Registered Senior Member
It's not a matter of deciding to steal or not. It's noticing who gets to steal and who does not. Who gets fined and never pays the fines and whose credit is destroyed and pays the rest of their lives.
It is noticing whose interests are served by the 'justice' system and whose are not.
I did not notice anyone advocating the theft of anything. I noticed someone upset about the punishment dished out to a person.
Ask some bands about corporate theft. a look at African American Music history would also show some interesting theft that never resulted in fines.
A little person gets crushed like a bug. A powerful organization that can pay whole law firms and support candidates gets the treatment in the system it expects.
Getting upset about that is not a call to theft. Jumping the argument to make this getting upset equal to a call to theft is a distraction. Was it too hard to deal with the actual issue?
Wow, long thread.
I thought that the judgement was excessive. Note though that RIAA made it a point to publically state that this was a show of force...they pointedly crushed this woman as a scare tactic.
Not that this is going to stop piracy. Personally I was always a strong contender of adopting the digital distribution model...Amazon has, you can purchase one MP3 for a buck. It appears to me RIAA is merely concerned about maximization of profit.
I thought that the judgement was excessive. Note though that RIAA made it a point to publically state that this was a show of force...they pointedly crushed this woman as a scare tactic.
Not that this is going to stop piracy. Personally I was always a strong contender of adopting the digital distribution model...Amazon has, you can purchase one MP3 for a buck. It appears to me RIAA is merely concerned about maximization of profit.
You know what? (Not just you
but everyone who's participated in this thread.)All the legal/schmegal definitions aside and the size of the award, every single person beyond the age of five who has a half-functioning brain KNOWS that making unauthorized copies of someone else's work is just plain wrong.
Software companies have been fighting that battle every since the first commercial program was released for sale. I see no logical reason why music producers should be any different.
The majority of this thread has been nothing more than some low-lifers trying to justify their immoral behavior - plain and simple. Just like it was in the "looting" thread a while back. Wrong is wrong and they are old enough smart enough to tell the difference between right and wrong. So they are nothing more than scum, period!
Careful with that low lifer.
Not everywhere the moral and social norms are as in your ubercapitalist country. American capitalism is a plague to the world and a damnation to the world culture, and I hope it meets its rotting, soulless end.
By the way I buy cds of artists I want to support, I've also sent money directly and donated it to local bands, but none of the cds that I've bought are made by RIAA.
Not everywhere the moral and social norms are as in your ubercapitalist country. American capitalism is a plague to the world and a damnation to the world culture, and I hope it meets its rotting, soulless end.
By the way I buy cds of artists I want to support, I've also sent money directly and donated it to local bands, but none of the cds that I've bought are made by RIAA.
Right. Just more anti-capitalistic nonsense. Yet none of your ilk has ever produced a system that works better. Care to explain why that is?
Neither! For the general population at large.
river-wind
Valued Senior Member
Read-only: you should look at the statistics for :
1) mortality rates of pregnant women
2) levels of violent crime
3) levels of poverty
4) overall heath
5) quality of overall health care
6) quality of education
7) national debt
If you're going to claim that the US has the best system for the general population at large, you better be ready to back it up with numbers and facts, and not just philosophical opinion.
also, RE: this thread and Avatar's post, the artists who made those problem 24 tracks? They don't get a dime of that $220k. It's the RIAA money now, even though they purport to "represent" the artists.
When musicians see a dollar from the sale of a disk full of their music, when we were all told for years that CD's would drop in price compared to tapes because of their low production costs but that reduction never materializes, when content producers and content distributors are the same company, and all of the "competing" companies have agreed to set prices according to the best deal reached for all the others, I call that a problem market.
I don't recommend downloading music illegally. However, I also don't recommend supporting the major labels and their colluding practices.
1) mortality rates of pregnant women
2) levels of violent crime
3) levels of poverty
4) overall heath
5) quality of overall health care
6) quality of education
7) national debt
If you're going to claim that the US has the best system for the general population at large, you better be ready to back it up with numbers and facts, and not just philosophical opinion.
also, RE: this thread and Avatar's post, the artists who made those problem 24 tracks? They don't get a dime of that $220k. It's the RIAA money now, even though they purport to "represent" the artists.
When musicians see a dollar from the sale of a disk full of their music, when we were all told for years that CD's would drop in price compared to tapes because of their low production costs but that reduction never materializes, when content producers and content distributors are the same company, and all of the "competing" companies have agreed to set prices according to the best deal reached for all the others, I call that a problem market.
I don't recommend downloading music illegally. However, I also don't recommend supporting the major labels and their colluding practices.
Phooey! Statistics can mean anything you want them to. For me (and most reasonable people) the US ranks better than some other countries in each of those categories. That works both ways, of course - in each of those categories you can find a country somewhere that ranks better than America. So I consider all of those things to be pretty much of a wash except for the following: the bottom line is the fact that most Americans own or are buying their own home, have reasonably decent jobs, own two or more vehicles per household and have a respectable standard of living.
So show me a country with a DIFFERENT economic model that surpasses the US - or admit that your "idealist" version of things is very wrong.:bugeye:
river-wind
Valued Senior Member
What a great way to support your nation! Ignore its weaknesses and any possible ways to improve it in the name of patriotism! Wooo!
Just because America is pretty damn GOOD doesn't mean it can't be BETTER.
It has absolutely nothing to do with patriotism. And please show me where I said even ONCE that it could not be better!:bugeye: I'm very much aware that it has several serious faults/flaws that need to be corrected.
My whole point, though, is in no way related to any of the above - it's simply that I want him (or anyone else) to name a country that does NOT operate on capitalism that outshines the US.
river-wind
Valued Senior Member
If you looked at the numbers for the items I listed above, you'd have a whole host to choose from.
Currently, no single nation could seriously claim to be "better" than the USA. There are a ton of nations who can claim to be better than America in certain areas. That pregnant US women are more than 3 times as likely to die than their European counterparts is not statistical gaming, it's an area where the US is currently lacking.
The US can only ride the wave of its prior successes for so long. There are many ways in which we are today loosing our edge, or even dropping to 41st place out of 170 nations (as with the pregnant female mortality rates). Few nations in this world are as capitalistically based, so any area of weakness we show in a comprehensive comparative is most likely tied in some way to that system.
If you ignore other, possibly better methods of doing things because you think that our success in one area balances out the weakness in another, then you're going to miss out on learning some valuable lessons.
Currently, no single nation could seriously claim to be "better" than the USA. There are a ton of nations who can claim to be better than America in certain areas. That pregnant US women are more than 3 times as likely to die than their European counterparts is not statistical gaming, it's an area where the US is currently lacking.
The US can only ride the wave of its prior successes for so long. There are many ways in which we are today loosing our edge, or even dropping to 41st place out of 170 nations (as with the pregnant female mortality rates). Few nations in this world are as capitalistically based, so any area of weakness we show in a comprehensive comparative is most likely tied in some way to that system.
If you ignore other, possibly better methods of doing things because you think that our success in one area balances out the weakness in another, then you're going to miss out on learning some valuable lessons.
You are just rambling aimlessly here. I clearly asked you to provide the name of ONE nation that outdoes the US that does NOT have a capitalistic economy.
Can't do it, can you????:bugeye:
define capitalist.
otherwise, North Korea, Cuba, [ENC]East Korea[/ENC].
otherwise, North Korea, Cuba, [ENC]East Korea[/ENC].
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