officially launched at midnight
What body makes it official?
Shouldn't the statemanet just say 'launched at midnight'?
Spain's copyright society (SGAE) came under attack by hacktivists from Anonymous on Thursday as part of the latest phase of a high-profile campaign against organisations that hassle file-sharers. A distributed denial of service attack, officially launched at midnight (Central European Time) on 7 October , crashed the …
Spain's position on copyright infringement and the existence of a copyright tax without corresponding wider privileges under copyright law is a bit crap.
I don't think Operation: Botnet For Great Justice is going to do much to change that, which is a shame. Especially considering that there are some great Spanish musicians and film-makers who tend to be forgotten by the rest of the world, who think that Spanish entertainment is either flamenco or Las Ketchup...
sorry but you know that by law Spaniards pay a tax money for any digital recording/storage system EVEN if you don't going use it for illegal downloads?
and that money going to the Spanish Ass.?
and after all you still can be prosecute for file-sharing?
there is not the facto freetard in Spain. every hard drive or blank CD/DVD bough has already paid something to the Ass.
Not entirely true.
The two biggest factors (IMHO) have been been the releasing of back catalogue (film and music especially) in 'new' formats, at full retail prices. All the production costs were paid back in spades on the original material release. Quite often the royalty rates are disadvantageous for the artists, sometimes the artists don't even own the copyright anymore... (having sold it to the Companies in order to eat...).
Think about it. First vinyl - multimillion sellers; then cassette - ('Home Taping is Killing Music' - Ha!) which was sooo bad but was successful because of the Walkman, generating more profits; then CD - oh yes. The 'remastering' bollocks. Ever stopped to wonder how they manage to make 'listening to old favourites, hear new sounds' work? Because they didn't. The only way you can achieve that is to re-record entlrely.
"Region coding" has been one of the biggest bugbears. You can go to the supermarket and buy a £20 DVD region-free player. But your £1500 laptop, that you carry round the world, is restricted to a single region. Why do you think that is? Surely not because the content may be cheaper/available elsewhere?
So yes there's the obvious freetard element but I can tell you that a lot of that has come from people who were prepared to pay a fair price for content, but were shafted royally by the music and film industries.
They do do something ( I wrote do do! he he! ) , they up the sodding bass and volume and compress the sound flatter than a wotnot on pancake day! You pay extra for that faffing about!
What a racket, eh? We take music releases on CD pre-1995, then simply increase the bass and volume, then release it again! People will hear that's more in line with what they are now used to and buy it all over again!!!
"We're in the money! We're in the money!"
... and I'm saying it again - most copyrighted stuff is too expensive. I do buy new media, but only when it has come down to the shelves in my local supermarket at £3-£5, or on Amazon at the same price. If it doesn't come down to a price I regard as fair, I don't buy it - I don't "pirate", don't have any torrent software at all, but refuse to pay the ridiculous amounts of money that the media companies (note - not the artists) demand, to keep their execs in the comfort that Croesus would have been astonished at.
The current business model is unsustainable, and it is beyond belief that the media companies should have persuaded governments to maintain their cartel. I, therefore, as a non-freetard, support anything that stuffs it to the greedy dinosaurs that will not move with the times.
Yet another pointless strike in Anonymous' ongoing war against the music industry. Far from the first and, if past activities by the group are any indication, far from the last. So you knock their websites off the net. Whoop de doo. How about doing something USEFUL with all that power, like, I dunno, convincing lawmakers not to allow themselves to be bought by the music industry or that downloading a song shouldn't carry a heavier penalty than stealing a car.