Sharing 2,999 Songs, 199 Movies Is Safe In Germany 212
unassimilatible writes "Torrentfreak is reporting that German prosecutors will now only pursue larger-scale file sharers on the Internet, as they are tired of being the entertainment industry's profit collector. 'Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in [the] future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3,000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.' And the money quote: 'It seems that the legal system in Germany has had enough of this "abuse" of the criminal law system for "civil" monetary gain.' If only an American politician would make this point. Why should taxpayers underwrite their government becoming enforcers for the entertainment industry? Then again, when you see how much politicians are being paid, an answer suggests itself."
Signed/Unsigned tags (Score:5, Interesting)
John McCain: Warmonger +1, Informative (Score:0, Interesting)
Cleverly hidden within this letter, for added incentive to read onward, is one lie. Not a lie of statistical or grammatical error but a ludicrous falsehood at once so absurd as to strike the reader as an insult to human intelligence and yet so mentally deficient as to convince the reader that I will let John McCain's record speak for itself. The points I plan to make in this letter will sound tediously familiar to everyone who wants to stop McCain's encroachments on our heritage. Nevertheless, his hypocrisy is transparent. Even the least discerning among us can see right through it.
By this, I mean that McCain ignores a breathtaking number of facts, most notably:
Fact: McCain's votaries must mend their ways.
Fact: What McCain considers a fair shake, the rest of us consider a repressive, humiliating, culture-stripping experience.
Fact: McCain's declamations have earned him opprobrium, suspicion, resentment, and hatred.
In addition, McCain has been deluding people into believing that he has achieved sainthood. Don't let him delude you, too. Do his loyalists halt the destructive process that is carrying our civilization toward extinction? No, that would be the correct and logical thing to do. Instead, they ransack people's homes.
Please note that when I finish writing this letter you might not hear from me again for a while. I simply don't have enough strength left to take the mechanisms, language, ideology, and phraseology for determining what is right and what is wrong out of the hands of McCain and his serfs and put them back in the hands of ordinary people. Nevertheless, we have a choice. Either we let ourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter by McCain and his satraps or we defend with dedication and ferocity the very rights that McCain so desperately wants to abolish. While I don't expect you to have much trouble making up your mind you should nevertheless consider that McCain's bloody-minded attempt to construct a creative response to my previous letter was absolutely pitiful. Really, McCain, stringing together a bunch of solecistic insults and seemingly random babble is hardly effective. It simply proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the last time I told his cohorts that I want to catalogue his swindles and perversions they declared in response, "But it is obdurate to question McCain's conjectures." Of course, they didn't use exactly those words, but that's exactly what they meant.
So what if McCain hates me for pointing out that his brain must work very different from mine? Let him hate me. I consider such hatred a mark of honor, a mark of distinction. He is an interesting character. On the one hand, McCain likes to marginalize and eventually even outlaw responsible critics of beer-guzzling Luddites. But on the other hand, I recently heard him tell a bunch of people that sectarianism is a be-all, end-all system that should be forcefully imposed upon us. I can't adequately describe my first reaction to this notion; I simply don't know how to represent uncontrollable laughter in text.
When McCain says that he has his moral compass in tact, he's just plain wrong -- not "partially wrong" but "entirely and absolutely wrong". And let me tell you, he asserts that principles don't matter. Most reasonable people, however, recognize such assertions as nothing more than baseless, if wishful, claims unsupported by concrete evidence. He accuses me of being a liar. The only proven liar around here, however, is McCain. Only a die-hard liar like McCain could claim that all any child needs is a big dose of television every day. The truth, in case you haven't already figured it out, is that to say that censorship could benefit us is appalling nonsense and untrue to boot.
I am reminded of the quote, "His principles have clearly been demonstrated to be coterminous with those of directionless, dodgy devil-worshippers." This comment is not as tyrannical as it seems because McCain is a man utterly without honor, without principles, without a shred of genuine patriotism. That's
Re:logic error (Score:3, Interesting)
The criminal sanctions are the wrong instrument. Copyright infringement is a matter of civil enforcement, not criminal enforcement. You cannot spam the Staatsanwaltschaften with copyright infringement.
The RIAA works hard to get the IPRED2 directive adopted which would make criminal sanctions more widely available [ipred.org], effectively messing up the criminal penalty system for the sake of a dying Hollywood movie industry that already lost the war.
It is like the SS who hanged ordinary citizens on the fly who didn't want to defend their Fuhrer until the Endsieg and combat Russian tanks. We are close to that Endsieg of the movie industry. It is about to destroy the foundations of the internet and rule of law just to prevent creative destruction that is about to happen anyhow.
Re:logic error (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, given that the RIAA have attempted to sue people who don't own a computer, I'd be inclined to disagree...
Germans doing Republicans a favor. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? Bush should say something about how terrible it is, and do absolutely nothing. Let's face it - the entertainment industry is not exactly packed with Republicans these days. Republicans need to be about as friendly to the entertainment business as the entertainment business is to coal and nuclear. If the whole world and all of your allies want you to let your political enemies be driven out of business by too much copying, why should you really stop them? Come on liberals, copy away. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but its still a weakling compared to the greenback
Re:logic error (Score:3, Interesting)
There is an enormous population of people using p2p software to copy movies, music and software with no plans to ever pay the producers for what they use. This should at least be acknowledged.
An enormous population? No. That cannot be acknowledged until it has been proven. The RIAA, for example, claimed that billions of songs were being illegally downloaded a month. Billions, with a B. A couple of months later, they reported that their profits grew a few percent from the previous year.
I can easily picture there are people out there downloading stuff and never paying for it. But lots of people? No, I can't. If all the P2P traffic out there was really about avoiding paying money to producers, you'd think it'd correlate to some actual measurable numbers somewhere. Until that happens, it's just a baseless accusation.
Re:logic error (Score:5, Interesting)
For a civil suit, you need to know who to sue. An IP address only won't fly for that in germany - you need identities. But the ISPs are not giving out customer details to private companies. So what the industry does is filing a criminal suit first, so the police has to investigate, subpoenaing the infringers identity from the ISP. Then, the criminal suit is retracted - as there has been no commercial infringment, so there's no success to be found there - but because of court documentation, the infringers name, address etc. are still known to the RIAAish organization. They then use this information for filing a civil suit. The new policy closes this loophole. You could still be prosecuted for downloading even one song, but there is now pretty much no way to get your IP unless you're _probably_ guilty commercial copyright infringment. Where the line is to be drawn is upon the courts to decide. FYI, downloading an only very recently or not yet released movie _does_ probably count as commercial - as it probably hurts the commercial interested of the rightsholder.
It's overally a quite sane way to go about, given how things are(tm).
Re:logic error (Score:3, Interesting)
The anecdotal rate at which I was finding Kazaa (and thereby spyware) on customer computers a few years ago indicates there was a better than 50% chance that a home computer with a broadband connection was being used to get copyrighted media via P2P.
Okay. Correlate that with actual money not being spent.
Since we're using anecdotal evidence here, I'll throw some in on my own. I know lots of dudes that are fully capable of downloading movies, games, music, you name it. They know how. They have the means. Some of them even have a theater system set up so they can enjoy that content rather luxuriously. Of all those dudes, and I'm talking 20'ish here, only one of them actually avoids spending money on those things because he can get them on the net. The rest? They don't care. They run out and get the DVD or run to iTunes or whatever. Why? Heck, I dunno. They each probably have their own reasons. It doesn't matter. They're spending their money.
I'll tell you this much, though: The big fear is that getting this stuff for free will mean nobody pays for content. Okay, understandable, right? Then I have to ask this: If coffee, for example, is so easy and cheap to get, why are chains that sell coffee for $3 a cup so popular? Heck, why are juice places that sell 32oz carrot juices for $5 so popular? The United States, at least, cannot easily be generalized as being populated by 300 million tightwads.