Not quite -
This is the I am not making much doing it defense …
Ignoring your (illegal) action would set a very bad precedent for CBS. If you’d quietly taken the material down, CBS just might conceivably not have proceeded against you. Hate to say this, but I think you’re in trouble deep.
PS: Nearly any librarian has copyright law essentially memorized, or if not, has a NOLO or similar book close to hand. She can’t give legal advice, but she could have kept you out of this mess.
I never understood the logic of the argument that it’s okay as long as it’s free.
Let’s say I write a book and I’m making money by selling copies of it. Who’s doing me more harm: a guy who copies my book and gives away copies for free or a guy who copies my book and charges a hundred dollars per copy? Cheap (or free) copies do a lot more harm to the legitimate seller than expensive copies do.
I’ve been posting on SD for quite a while (check out my Join Date), but I usually hang out in General Questions, and I rarely come to the other areas except when a thread gets moved, like this one did. So this question is addressed to the posters who frequent GD and IMHO and such:
Have you ever seen a discussion as lopsided as this one? We’re now on the third page and I don’t think I’ve seen even one single post that sides with the OP. Several posters feel that copyright law ought to be changed, but it seems that every single poster agrees that the OP has absolutely no legal grounds to stand on, and that his best bet is to hope (or pray, as one poster wrote) that he stays off of CBS’s radar, now that he’s taken the dvd off of his website.
Don’t get me wrong. I too agree that selling the DVDs was illegal and that the wise-ass tone of his response was dumb. Like a few other posters, I also feel that it is smart to be suspicious of emails, because they often come from someone other than the place they purport to come from – but as Occam would have noted, that’s unlikely to be the case when the email didn’t ask for any money. In fact, that email didn’t even ask for a response by email, only that the OP should make changes to his website and to his business/hobby.
Has any other OP suffered such an overwhelming lack of support?
If you had a patch of ground and grew your own vegetables on it, having bought the seed legally, and then sold your produce, absolutely nothing wrong.
But that’s not what you were doing.
You were breaking into the warehouse, stealing the property of other farmers, and selling it for your own profit.
[QUOTE=Kamakiri ]
But when companies/corporations/conglomerates stubbornly refuse to issue something – be it a book, DVD or anything else – one has two choices. One either buys it on the black market and hopes for the best in terms of quality – or one just does it oneself
[/QUOTE]
You’re forgetting the third choice: obey the law and not steal their property.
It’s happened, but I can’t remember examples.
Shat On Cookie comes to mind.
Why were you under the impression that William Shatner has or had the authority to grant you any permission?
CBS won’t sell the product; someone else comes along and offers to merchandise it, but CBS won’t let that happen.
The Dog in the Manger comes to mind:
I don’t blame CBS as much as I do the copyright laws which allow this to happen. No one benefits; not CBS and not the public.
I agree and this is one of the areas that needs to be reformed. I wouldn’t go as far as a “use it or lose it” policy but I would like to see a policy of “use it or after ten years it becomes available for anyone who wants to pay a fixed licensing fee to use”.
Under 17 U.S.C. §506, a charge of criminal copyright infringement requires:
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Willful infringement — Seems pretty clear that the infringement was willful in the OP’s case.
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“for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain” — Ehhhhh, doubtful, if the OP’s assertion is true that he wasn’t charging enough to make a profit.
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Retail value of $1,000 in copies sold within a six-month period — I’m guessing this didn’t happen in the OP’s case, but only he knows.
No, this was never true in the United States. Duplication (copying) and distribution (selling, giving away, or otherwise transferring copies) have always been within the exclusive rights of the copyright holder.
This sentence incorporates several errors, misconceptions, and (probably) intentional misrepresentations (on the part of the source of Usedtobe’s information).
- Copyright law was not “rewritten” in the 1990s. It was rewritten in 1976.
Copyright law was amended several times in the 1990s, but, from a bird’s eye point of view, enactment of copyright legislation is relatively rare. The major amendments to the Copyright Act of 1976 during the 1990s were these (very roughly summarized):
— a. The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 gave the creators of visual works the right of attribution and the right to prevent alteration of their works by purchasers or owners of works.
— b. The Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act of 1990 extended copyright protection to architectural works.
— c. The Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990 made it legal for software to be rented out.
— d. The Semiconductor International Protection Extension Act of 1991 extended sui generis rights in mask works (semiconductor designs) to foreign parties.
— e. In 1990, fair use rights were extended to unpublished works.
— f. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 required digital audio recording devices to incorporate copyright management technology.
— g. The Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 created a statutory license for digital performances of sound recordings.
— h. The No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 extended criminal copyright liability in situation in which the infringer made no profit.
— i. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended the basic copyright term from life-plus-50 to life-plus-70.
— j. The Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1998 gave small bars and restaurants (less than 2,000 square feet and up to six speakers) an exemption to have music and television without having to obtain licenses.
— k. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 made it illegal to circumvent copyright protection systems, remove copyright management information, and circumvent access and use controls. The DMCA has a lot of provisions, some of which did things like create exemptions from liability for distance education and archiving.
— l. The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act of 1998 protected online service providers from liability for infringement committed by its users.
— m. The Computer Maintenance Competition Assurance Act of 1998 made it legal to make temporary unauthorized copies of software in order to maintain or repair computers.
— n. The Vessel Hull Design Protection Act of 1998 created limited, sui generis protection for vessel hull designs.
— o. The Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 increased statutory damages for digital infringement.
- Now, the reference to Mickey Mouse generally refers to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, referenced above. It is patently untrue that this amendment was passed in order to protect Disney’s “control over Mickey Mouse” or some other glib formulation.
The law was passed in order to comply with the U.S.'s treaty obligations to harmonize its copyright term with the European Union. It was also done because under the reciprocity rules of international copyright law, U.S. creators were being denied full protection of European copyright law until the U.S. matched those protections.
Furthermore, the idea that Disney somehow needed the CTEA in order to maintain control over Mickey Mouse is false. The only thing that would have happened in the absence of the CTEA is that a few of the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons would have gone into the public domain. These are cartoons that Disney makes little revenue from these days.
Had those few films gone into the public domain, Disney would still hold full trademark rights over Mickey Mouse the character and his image.
Disney did not have to lobby for copyright term extension because there were plenty of other forces behind it, especially, as I said, the U.S.'s international obligations. And no policymaker supported the CTEA in order to protect Mickey Mouse, specifically.
A step in the right direction could have been taken if it wasn’t for Sonny Bono and the inability of Lawrence Lessig to convince SCOTUS of the wisdom of a statement much like yours.
The Sonny Bono extension question is due to come up again soon – I’m not sure exactly when – and a legal eagle expert has told me that it will probably pass, making copyrights even longer than now. The Mouse[sup]*[/sup] has a lot of friends in Washington.
- It’s just a metaphor,** Acsenray.**
If you do end up retaining a lawyer, he is going to shit a lung when he finds out that you are announcing on an open internet forum that you were perfectly well aware that it was stealing but did it anyway because unfairness and reasons. If CBS do go after you and they find these posts, their lawyers will have your testicles for cufflinks: your best bet is to stop digging yourself in deeper by posting adolescent manifestos about copyright, plead ignorance - lots and lots of ignorance - and make your apologies to them as craven as you can.
Seems to happen a good bit in the pit. BigT had a thread complaining about cheese that wasn’t gluten free (?). Something along those lines. New posters were signing up just to hop on the anti-T bandwagon.
Lawrence Lessig had no chance before the Supreme Court, because the constitutional law is clear: Congress gets to set the copyright term and can choose any number of years that it believes is appropriate unless it is literally unlimited.
If you want to make an argument about copyright term, it is Congress and the president that you must persuade of the wisdom of your views.
Again, the whole “Mouse” issue is a red herring. Politically speaking, it is going to be very difficult for Congress to make copyright extension any longer than it is now, and speaking as someone whose job it is to monitor this issue, there is currently zero interest among legislators to even try doing so.
Ever since the whole Stop Online Piracy Act fiasco in 2011, copyright legislation of many kinds had become kind of a third rail, and term extension is definitely one of those third-rail issues.
Furthermore, the whole point of the CTEA was harmonization with Europe. Unless there is some reason to believe that Europe or other Berne Convention countries are pushing for further extension, there’s really no reason to believe it will happen. And all those other countries are facing the same public opinion backlash against life-plus-70 that is going on in the United States.
It’s a metaphor that actively deceives people and creates enormous misunderstandings about how things went down and how things are likely to go down in the future.
Wow.
I’m truly sorry. I thought this was a place where I could post stuff about exploding galaxies.
Assuming we’re not all being wooshed here, I suggest that the OP utilize the same network of people that were clamoring for these movies to contribute the necessary funds to his/her legal defense after CBS inevitably sues him/her. Maybe a kickstarter campaign?
Also, maybe he/she can make his/her own movie about this experience.
You can…but you already knew that.