Second U-E cease and desist letter (new topic)

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Yagan Kiely
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Post by Yagan Kiely »

Doesn't really show the Public Domain advocates in a very good light to the rest of the world, seems to me.
Because we are prepared and ready to fight for freedom of information it shows us in bad like to the world? Not quite. As mentioned above corporations would not like such activities. Watch the movie the corporation. Being pretty blunt, but they are psychopaths.
This was not the purpose of copyright when it was introduced in the first place.
Corporations control the world, only inevitable that such things would happen really.
unprepared to admit to simple lack of experience in general
If you are referring to the addition of legal works in their respectively hosted countries is lack of experience, you are mistaken, again. Naive at most in regard to the approach corporations take on everything.
jhellingman
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Post by jhellingman »

Richard Black wrote:Whatever you say. But I _have_ got some experience of working in businesses, over the years, and I just think you guys are being unnecessarily paranoid, and unprepared to admit to simple lack of experience in general. Doesn't really show the Public Domain advocates in a very good light to the rest of the world, seems to me.
This is outright insulting.

It is true that advocates of the public domain have been loosing terrain to the greed of corporations, who have invested in buying copyright extensions. I believe Disney invested a million or so in getting the Sonny Bono act past congress, but has a return of several billions in additional revenues. A factor 1000 returns... From a business sense not a bad investment, from a social point of few, it is legalized piracy of the PD.

The problem here is that this additional income comes at an insane cost to society -- another factor 1000 maybe -- in lost opportunities, in access to cultural heritage and so on, but, whereas the profits are collected by a few rent-seeking corporations, the costs are carried by every member society, who often isn't even aware -- as you cannot see the works suppressed by this legislation, and the additional costs of Disney's cut of a mickey mouse t-shirt is just a fraction of its price.

I hope this point will start to drive home with the public and responsible politicians, and will result in a global revision of copyright laws, such that the balance is restored, and the original purpose of copyright, that is, to have more works available to the public (not less) is achieved.

In the mean time, anybody promoting this point of view should do anything to abide to the letter of copyright law (but nothing more), grudgingly and protesting, and making clear that we do this only to avoid prosecution.
Yagan Kiely
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Post by Yagan Kiely »

Who wants Mickey. :P
The problem here is that this additional income comes at an insane cost to society -- another factor 1000 maybe -- in lost opportunities, in access to cultural heritage and so on, but, whereas the profits are collected by a few rent-seeking corporations, the costs are carried by every member society, who often isn't even aware -- as you cannot see the works suppressed by this legislation, and the additional costs of Disney's cut of a mickey mouse t-shirt is just a fraction of its price.
Mickey Mouse shirts would remain property of Disney regardless of new legislation for it is used as a Trade Mark (which they pay for). However it is the early cartoons of Mickey Mouse which were becoming PD.

I agree completely apart from that.
wngr1993
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confusion

Post by wngr1993 »

Wait a second.
I don't get this at all. If only certain songs break the copyright laws, then why not just remove those select songs instead of shutting down the entire website?
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Post by Yagan Kiely »

Because they are legal in some countries and not legal in some. It would limit countries like Canada and Australia too much.
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Post by neilthecellist »

Because the guy running the site has other reasons too. Read the full letter?
Yagan Kiely
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Post by Yagan Kiely »

I'm going to make a template for people to copy and paste generic answers to questions.:P
jhellingman
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Post by jhellingman »

ArcticWind7 wrote:Mickey Mouse shirts would remain property of Disney regardless of new legislation for it is used as a Trade Mark (which they pay for). However it is the early cartoons of Mickey Mouse which were becoming PD.
Trademark control goes much less far than copyright, as the law regulates a trademarks used as a mark to distinguish products. You can print a T-shirt with a non-copyrighted trademark on it, and need not pay in many cases -- note that also trademark law has been eroded in that sense by lobbyists, making this less convenient. Note that most Mickey Mouse drawings would remain under copyright, as they were substantially redrawn after 1922.
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Request to host 50+ content

Post by greyphi »

I have a few servers that are available to host Canadian public content.

It would be very easy to setup the hosts.deny file to ban nations that submit a 'Cease and Desist' letter.
The best distribution model would be a torrent system. Any incoming request for copyright-protected content would be blocked as per the nations laws.

No copyright laws broken, no problem.
I don't get much mail anyways and have spare time to burn.
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Post by Yagan Kiely »

It would be very easy to setup the hosts.deny file to ban nations that submit a 'Cease and Desist' letter.
We can't just block nations from using IMSLP we have to block nations from downloading a few IMSLP files which makes it difficult.
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Not that hard

Post by greyphi »

Let's say files x,y and z are hosted in accordance with Public Domain rules.

1st) We receive a Cease and Desist letter from 'Australia' listing the offending file "x" as infringing.
2nd) File "x" is moved onto a separate machine, or virtual server with links back to the main site so that the content is still available locally.
3rd) The virtual server is told to ban all incoming requests from the IP ranges of "Australia". When the main page attempts to link, instead of the usual 404 page there is a listing of the reason why the content isn't available and who they can contact about it.

That's it. And should appease all parties with not much work.
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Post by neilthecellist »

You know what would happen? Modern works would be blocked in the USA.

What does this mean for us? It means, (and I'll tell you) : People in the USA will be upset. Trust me, a lot of students here just at my high school used IMSLP, and even more in the nearby colleges here in California.


And not to mention, other countries, and even regional blocs like the European Union would have most of the works blocked.

And of course, other nations that I haven't mentioned would be severely impacted as well.
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Post by horndude77 »

1st) We receive a Cease and Desist letter from 'Australia' listing the offending file "x" as infringing.
2nd) File "x" is moved onto a separate machine, or virtual server with links back to the main site so that the content is still available locally.
3rd) The virtual server is told to ban all incoming requests from the IP ranges of "Australia". When the main page attempts to link, instead of the usual 404 page there is a listing of the reason why the content isn't available and who they can contact about it.
Interesting idea technically. I see that you've joined recently (like many people in the forums now) so you might have never seen what IMSLP was actually like. IMSLP was based on MediaWiki. I'd be interested to know how this would work in that type of environment.

This made me think of a cool idea: a distributed wiki (like distributed version control). This could help take the load off one server and possibly move all page rendering to the clients themselves. I'm fairly sure someone out there is doing this, but it would be neat to be able to tag items with a legal status. So when a server pulls for updates from another server it can only pull those which are legal in its country. I can't think of other applications at the moment for this. And creating such a crippling 'feature' with all the problems involved probably isn't worth it. Also it offers no extra 'protection', just convenience to the maintainers in subjecting themselves to the whims of some corporations (only applying a tag would be required to allow or disallow access). Fun to think about though.

Other than that there is the legal question of 'does someone in country A have to follow the laws of country B?' It's a little more nuanced than that, but it has been discussed ad nauseum here so I don't think we need to go into it further. The scheme you suggest might work, but why should it be needed is an important question. It puts quite a bit of work on the site maintainers and not all C&D letters should be taken seriously.
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Post by greyphi »

You are right, I've only become aware of this site after the takedown. I read about it on Slashdot and had to take a look.

I have toyed a bit with the joomla content manager on a LAMP stack and have seen a friends page pull a rather useful trick. http://www.2ndculture.com/
If you view the page source you will notice the use of (http://site/file) web paths instead of (/dir/file) local paths which allows the page to be pre-generated and migrated offsite without losing content.
Since the PHP code has to be resolved and handed to the client as an html page, if the link to the actual copyright file could be rendered as a web path to a server which has been configured to deny the country in question. Then that should fix the issue with little more work than having a separate ip address for each banned country's files.

Please ignore my poor grammar, it's late ;)
But without a working page to view, I can't offer much help. Is there another site with a similar layout that I could disassemble?
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Post by imslp »

greyphi wrote:But without a working page to view, I can't offer much help. Is there another site with a similar layout that I could disassemble?
Wikipedia :)

My reason for refusing to account for the copyright laws of other countries, and IP banning, is very simple. Many lawyers have made livings off the interpretation of the copyright law of one single country. The complexity of copyright law in every country around the world is enormous.

This is a road we must absolutely not go down to any extent. To offer any concession in this regard is to admit that you need to do something as superhuman as to know the laws of every country in the world. Because you know that's what it is going to end up like.
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