I started commenting but realised it was too long and so I’ve moved my response here.
Let’s start by saying that these fines are supposed to be representative of lost sales.
Forget the fact that many people who download music tracks wouldn’t buy them anyway (and – shockingly – might even delete the crap ones).
What I think the lawmakers have glossed over is the fact that if you fine one person for *every* *lost* *sale*, then there should be no-one left to pursue for the downloading of those tracks she shared. Ie. if I had downloaded those 24 tracks from Jamie Thomas, it’s OK because she is already paying for *my* lost sale – as well as – literally – millions of others.
I’m pro-filesharing and I file-share.
I look forward to the day that these media companies grovel in the dirt – I’ll make no bones about that fact. Increasingly I’m ‘coming out’ to many friends and people I wouldn’t have before, because I see it as a revolution, a cold war, where as many people need to be recruited as possible.
I look forward to the day that we look back on these events in history and marvel at the ignorance of the politicians and industry that supported this 21st Century ‘House of Un-American Activities’.
I see filesharing as the future – setting knowledge, information and arts free – like they used to be before the 20th Century. Perhaps it’s not ‘the future’, perhaps it’s simply restoring values of the past.
Did any of those black slaves or their families who worked in the cotton fields see a ‘dime’ for their musical contribution to the blues? Intellectual Property is about as anti-creativity as I can imagine.
How do you prevent new ideas and human progress? Introduce ownership of ideas by long lasting corporate bodies to buy up and own *ideas*, then sue anyone who independently thinks up, tries to share or improve that idea for an arm and a leg.
Well, the putsch has come off well, and the British Nazi Party have taken two seats in the European Parliament. As an extremist party, they won the votes because they appeared untainted by the uproar over expenses and the following witch hunt. Most people, of course vote irrationally – it seems to have been easy for some 0.7% of the population to overlook the racist fearmongering because of their concerns about immigration, and a general dissatisfaction with mainstream parties. Irrationality, of course, is at the heart of the BNP’s strength.
Nick Griffin, a man for whom I have many words and little time, is always denying his party’s racist ideals whilst endorsing Party style manuals with phrases such as ‘you should not refer to British Asians or British Muslims, for the simple reason that such people do not exist.’ Like all abhorrent groups, they thrive on oppression, which gives them a chance to whine about their freedom of speech and cast themselves as defenders of democracy. Now, I have very little sympathy for Griffin, and was even slightly pleased by the disressed look on his normally smug face as he fled the mob outside Parliament. That said, throwing eggs is yet to effect any substantial political change.
In this case, it has just let him say that they prevented him from bearing the scutiny of the media. Public scrutiny is what this party needs most. Protests are very well, but a few well placed questions in public would serve better to show just how racist they are.
Times is ‘ard, and people are angry. This produces the ‘perfect storm’ Griffin had been waiting for to give him a foothold in government. Perhaps it is the supposed detrimental effects of immigration (my view on immigrants is extremely simple, and rather unpopular these days, but that’s another post), or the fear of a loss of sovereignty, or anger at the mainstream parties, but suddenly the BNP seemed somewhat more palatable to the voters. An increasingly popular lie: ‘I know they used to be Nazi knuckle-draggers, but they’ve changed – they’re just like us, even if some of the Nazi knuckle-draggers are in the shadows.’ The truth – the Nazi knuckle-draggers are running the show. The BNP will never be civilised or worthy of a vote.
PS. Sorry for my long absence. This is really just an opinion article that seemed worthwhile regarding the recent EP elections. Now I’ve got more time, I might be able to come up with a couple of posts on political theory.
In a few weeks, we’ll likely know the Obama administration’s position on whether it supports hefty monetary awards in file sharing litigation brought by the Recording Industry Association of America.
The Bush administration’s position was clear. It supported the Copyright Act‘s penalties of up to $150,000 per infringed song.
“Congress acted reasonably in crafting the current incarnation by ensuring that it serves both a compensatory and deterrent purpose. Congress established a damages range that provides compensation for copyright owners in a regime in which actual damages are hard to quantify,” the Bush administration wrote in 2007.
Now it’s President Barack Obama’s turn, and we’ll see how tight he is with Hollywood.
One thing I’ve thought about that I don’t see mentioned anywhere by bloggers and media, is a challenge to how the MAFIAA justify their 9-to-1 ratio cost of a single music track.
No, I don’t mean how constitutional or fair it is, I mean challenging it on the basis of lost profits. Surely, after winning* their lawsuit against Jammie Thomas, all lawsuits should have stopped right there. You see they didn’t just sue Jammie Thomas for the tracks that she had downloaded or owned (worth approximately $1 a piece) they sued her for all the other people who otherwise would have bought the shared track too**.
Therefore if the MAFIAA recovered all that lost profit from Jammie Thomas (and someone can’t own one downloaded file twice over), then the score is even and there are no further profit losses i.e. no further lawsuits needed!
Am I just stating the obvious that no-one has thought up yet, or am I missing something?
*I say ‘won’, but it’s been public knowledge for a while now that the original judge has dismissed the original trial as a mistrial and it will be heard again. **I’m obviously ignoring the fact that ( a ) many filesharers will buy an album anyway and ( b ) many other fileshares would not even buy if it was not available for download – so no profit to be had in the first place.
I’m having a state-the-obvious day, because (for want of another reason), not many people seem to be seeing things as they are.
I hold these points to be self evident:
The UK has a constitution.
The constitution is uncodified but partially written.
One of the sources of the constitution is the rule of law.
Hence, the government is bound by the laws of the land.
These are pretty simple, fundamental points. The thing is, the rule of law would not allow the wilful suppression of evidence relating to a torture case. So why does Miliband continue to pass off the UK’s spineless response to the USA’s strongarm tactics in the name of ‘national security’? Suppressing evidence is against the rule of law. The relationship between America and Britain enforces the suppression of evidence. Hence, the alliance is (on this front) unconstitutional.
As Crispin Black comments in the Independent on Sunday, the problem stems from the USA’s unilateral foreign policy. We can have a ‘special relationship’ with their government, as long as we don’t step out of line. “There is little cost/benefit analysis of our relationship with the Americans. And absolutely none about the intelligence relationship… We persist in an ‘intelligence cringe’ – the Americans know more, the Americans know better. Well, they did not know what was going on in Iraq… Quite why we should think they understand what is going on any else better than we do remains a mystery.”
In the words of Shami Chakrabarti, “Despite best efforts to shine a light on the grubbiest aspects of the ‘war on terror’, the Foreign Office has claimed that the Obama administration maintained a previous US threat to reconsider intelligence sharing unless our judges kept this shameful skeleton in the closet. We find this Foreign Office allegation … surprising.”
The bottom line is that by withholding evidence, both sides are implicit in torture, regardless of whether they were before (and I’m pretty sure they were). Yet another nail in the coffin of the War of on Terror that will no doubt have no effect.
Royal Bank of Scotland – 68% nationalised
Lawrence Fish, non-executive chairman – paid £6.6m in 2006, receiving a £1m pension from April.
Fred Goodwin, former chief exec. – paid £4.2m in 2007, due for a pension of £8.37m
HBOS – 40% nationalised
Peter Cummings, former head of corporate lending – paid £2.6m in 2007
Michael Geoghegan, chief exec. – paid £2.955m in 2007
Bearing in mind that their companies are now owned by the taxpayers, one would have thought that they could show some restraint in pouring out bonuses. Nonetheless, RBS alone seems to think it’s a good idea to pay out a billion pounds of money to their fat cats as reward for nearly killing the economy.
I hold these points to be self evident:
1.Wages are a reward for the individual’s input of the factors of production.
2.Banking is a service industry, hence the factors offered by the executives are labour and entrepreneurship.
3.Most executives seem to do very little work. Hence, their input of labour is little.
4.Good entrepreneurship does not result in almost going bust. Hence, their input of entrepreneurship is very little.
5.Hence, they are due little compensation for their efforts.
6.Bonuses are a reward for extraordinary success.
7.Ending up mostly owned by the government is not an extraordinary success. Hence, they are due no bonuses.
Anything there sound ridiculous? To be honest, they ought to pay back all their bonuses for the years of unwise lending that got us in this state in the first place. Now the government has bailed out the bankers and decided to nationalise them, they ought to take a stand to stop such ludicrous profiteering, rather than trying to ‘coax’ them into playing ball. If America, France and Germany can do it perfectly easily…
Rather than answer the question, Dawkins makes the presumption that the young lady in question is “brought up” in a Christian home and then turns the question back on her.
I’d love to see how Dawkins addresses someone like me who was brought up without beliefs, dabbled in the occult, rejecting the faith of Jehova’s Witnesses, going from atheist to agnostic and opened myself up to whatever kind of higher power or beings were out there before becoming a Christian.
I don’t know why supposed intellectual people cheer for someone who so obviously doesn’t want to accept the possibility of being wrong.
However it appears that Dawkins has softened his stance on the existence of a higher power himself more recently, as Mattghg writes.
It seems Dawkins, though tirelessly never to admit he is wrong, considers there may be something “grander and more mysterious” than God out there after all. Of course by suggesting this we get in to all sort of ad infinitum arguments, and I’m surprised he would take it upon himself to answer the the old atheist chesnut “Who created God?”.
Maybe if Dawkins’ only personal objection to God is that the idea of ‘God’ for him is… boring.
Having solved all crime in London, TorrentFreak reports that the Met are now going to go after people who make poor quality cammed movies to sell to people who are too stupid to realise that good quality movies are freely available online.
Perhaps the only consolation here is that politicians and Brazilian plumbers can now safely go about their day to day business whilst the pirates eat lawful lead.
One problem I can already foresee, what does a pirate look like, and how can one avoid being mistaken for a pirate? Is there anything we can do to aid Met police in order to avoid an embarrassing accident involving several bullets and an innocent civilian who looked nothing like a terrorist?
Since I don’t contribute enough to my own blog, I sometimes take the liberty of reproducing stealing a comment I leave on someone elses blog, the following is what I just left over at The Osterley Times:
It’s about time the truth started to get out. I never believed the official police or media account when certain witnesses were coming forward to say he had a heavy brown winter jacket on and “wires sticking out”.
The Met police have shamefully and barefaced tried to obfuscate and bury this incident from day 1.
Mr De Menzes reputation has been dragged through various incarnations of a rapist, drug user, illegal immigrant (overstayed visa) and such with the complicit help of evil publications like The Sun.
We have had dark days in the last 5 years with the political and authoritarian spin machine and though I may sound like a conspiraloon there are far too many questions and nefarious subplots going on around our government and that of the US.
Someone should lose their job- possibly go to prison over De Menezes, unfortunately I think all that will come out of this inquiry is a fine at the most.
Lastly, I hope the worst for Cressida Prick.
She has openly admitted that this could happen again, and with the same forked tongue has the gall to defend their actions and say that there was no way it could be prevented, no lessons learned, no changes to policy.
And it requires a change of government policy that’s for sure. The announcement of a shoot-to-kill policy came in the form of a bullet through one of our own heads (‘one of our own’ as in ‘innocent civilian’).
Policies like this should not be made in secret and I find it shocking that Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone and Ian Blair are not all sitting in jail now awaiting sentencing. Gordon Brown of course may not have been the man to order this policy but he is also complicit in that he allows it to now continue.. just as he allows the Iraq war to continue.
And watch for the announcement of troop withdrawal from someone with balls like Obama, will Brown then follow and withdraw our own?
Someone in the Met needs to lose their head for this, otherwise it could be any one of us travelling the tube one day.. best not to go on any foreign holidays and risk getting a tan!
[/rant]
Sorry but De Menezes the whole thing just makes my blood boil- I’m so angry with the people who did this and have got away with it.
Anyone following the events surrounding Jean Charles De Menezes murder unfortunate identity crisis, the media spin, government and police spin and inquiry would be well aware of the gross amount of lies misunderestimations about what happened that day.
Many of us who didn’t swallow the media and Met police official pill have now had our suspicions confirmed by at least 2 witnesses that this was a cold execution of an innocent man who was given no warning.
Next time you board a tube, you may want to make sure that you (a) don’t have a tan, (b) aren’t foreign, (c) don’t have a heavy rucksack (though this seems to make no difference) and (d) better warn your family in advance there is a slight chance you may not survive the journey.
Also, you may want to prepare your family that if you are ever killed by anti-terrorists whilst travelling on the tube or generally minding your own business, that you are in no way a sex offender, rapist, peadophile, drug dealer, illegal immigrant, know a muslim who knows a muslim or anything else which may slightly damage a reputation because, garaunteed, this is what you will become as the anti-terrorists attempt to clear themselves of all wrongdoing in the eyes of the Daily Mail.
God Bless you all, as I frequently travel the tube, and have just written a peice of anti-government hate speech, I cannot garuantee I will survive my next tube journey to blog again.. however please be assured I’ve never raped, sexed a minor, dealt in drugs, illegally entered the UK… but I did overstay a visa in Switzerland! – oh shit that’s it then.
Looks like another fool got into a legal letter flame war with The Pirate Bay… and lost… spectacularly.
I’ve never heard of Indiana Gregg, but I sure as hell won’t be buying or downloading any music after reading her and her representatives ridiculous and embarrassing name-dropping bombing in their email.
“Having sat on cross parliamentary committees, resolved to regenerating music and culture in my country, i’m afraid you may just have picked the wrong person to cross swords with on this occasion.” Ian Morrow (courtesy of TPB)
Very stupid. Here’s the list of emails of the elites that Ian invokes to show how powerful and connected he is:
Ian Morrow <ian@gr8pop.net> Alex.Salmond.msp@scottish.parliament.uk Pauline McNeill <pauline.mcneill.msp@scottish.parliament.uk> Barbara Orbison <BOrbison@orbison.com> eugene.duffy@mirror.co.uk Kenny.MacAskill.msp@scottish.parliament.uk john dingwall <j.dingwall@dailyrecord.co.uk> Jack.Mcconnell.msp@scottish.parliament.uk Margo.MacDonald.msp@scottish.parliament.uk Duncan McCrone <duncan.mccrone@mcps.co.uk> Mick Blacklock <mick.blacklock@ppluk.com> Robbie Miller <robbie.miller@jacobsonmiller.com> alan.boyd@bbc.co.uk phil <phil@gr8pop.net> graham@gr8pop.net Andy Harrower <andy.harrower@mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk> Mark Taylor <mark.taylor@mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk> Stanley Banks <stanley@wardlawbanks.com> Paul Bedford <Paul.Bedford@ingeniousmedia.co.uk> Veronica Tyrrell <Veronica.Tyrrell@scotent.co.uk> George Falconer <george.falconer@scotent.co.uk> Connie Howard <CHowardMus@aol.com> thom hardwell <thomsongs1@yahoo.com> jimdaddario@hotmail.com Magnus Martinsson <martinsson@playgroundmusic.com> <torgny@playgroundmusic.com> David Philpott <davidphilpott@philpottreed.co.uk> Christian Ulf Hansen <christian.ulf@virgin.net> douglasmcfarlane@btinternet.com
Normally I’ll just read the legal threats, laugh and forget about it but this one is the most asinine and presumptious yet. Just for curiousity, I’ll be watching out for copywrong discussion by the Scottish Parliament and press articles from The Mirror, The Daily Record and The BBC on copywrong.
It will be interesting to see how much influence the small label, bankrupt millionaire, Indiana Gregg has over these groups, if any. I’m aslo interested in seeing if the Scottish Parliament works for the people or the corporates.
Oh and BTW: Ian, copyright kills culture, it kills creativity. Would we have heard of Shakespeare if media companies had existed in the 17th Century to make sure that none of his plays were reproduced?
How much exposure has Indiana Gregg actually had as a result of sharing of her music between friends? (a: probably not much TPB can do for her – click on the link for irony-goodness)
As far as anyone who has an ounce of intellect is concerned, Bittorrent is the new radio. But then is that really free?
It wasn’t video that killed the radio star, it was his own record label.
Is it just me or was anyone else blown away by the fact Adolf had a Knighthood?
“Mr Mugabe, condemned over violence ahead of a presidential run-off election, was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1994.
The Queen has approved a recommendation from Foreign Secretary David Miliband to strip him of the honour.”- BBC News Online (where else?)
Ok there is multiple fail here, so where do we begin?
The fact that Sir Robert Mugabe even had a knighthood suggest the whole system of knighthoods is a farce and clearly broken.
Sure the Queen has taken the knighthood away now… Well done M’am, but to have to be advised by the critter, rather than being one’s own decision, shows a disconnect with the real world.
But stripping Sir Robert Mugabe of his Knighthood now is probably the worst mistake of all! Not only is it like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted, all this will do is feed his egomania and rhetoric.
I mean, what does Sir Robert Mugabe keep telling his people?
“The Commonwealth is a mere club, but it has become like an “Animal Farm” where some members are more equal than others. How can Blair claim to regulate and direct events and still say all of us are equals?” May 2000
“We have not stopped singing to the theme of unity and the theme of love. Even the whites are free to live here. But they must change. Your kind – the British kind – are very difficult to change. We rate them as the most conceited, the most arrogant, the most selfish and the most racist in our situation.” – June 2000 BBC Interview
“We are in a war to defend our rights and the interests of our people. The British have decided to take us on through the MDC.” – February 2002 Elections
“We belong to this continent. We do not mind having and bearing sanctions banning us from Europe. We are not Europeans. We have not asked for any inch of Europe or any square inch of that territory. Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe.” – 2002 Earth Summit
“We cannot discuss with allies of the West. The devil is the devil and we have no idea of supping with the devil.” – February 2004
“He is arrogant – he thinks by virtue of his being white, by virtue of his being the prime minister of Great Britain, he can dictate to us.” – February 2008
I mean, does this sound like a man who sees a Knighthood as some kind of honour? Isn’t a Knighthood just a symbol of the very Western power, superiority and elitism that Sir Robert Mugabe rallies against?!
What Her Majesty has really done is relieve Sir Robert Mugabe of the burden of hypocrisy.
How would Sir Robert Mugabe gone about spewing so much rhetoric and trash-talk if our leaders and the MSM had referred to him respectfully by his proper title all along?
Would Sir Robert Mugabe have found it as easy rale against the West if we all kept referring to him as Sir Robert?
That is why, I, for one, will refer to him from now on as SIR ROBERT MUGABE, and demand as of publishing this blog post that the President of Zimbabwe has his Knighthood immediately reinstated!
Is it just me or was anyone else blown away by the fact 
Abandon All Fear 