Government Seizes 9 Domains for Copyright InfringementFollow

I'm trying to come up with a way to imply that you support terrorists by speaking out against the DHS but...yeah this is a bit of idiocy.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=civil+forfeiture+and+due+process&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=Cjoz02PIsTPHCFaCYNOXTzbsIAAAAqgQFT9B775c&fp=355c0c6008861bf6

This has been an issue for a long time. Back when it was just drug dealers and petty criminals, nobody seemed to care. The fact that this overreaching power has bled into the realm of digital entertainment might just be enough to increase public awareness to the point of actually getting something done to fix it.

Yeah, I'm still WTFing over this myself. The government doesn't exist to do the bidding of corporate America.

Now, if these groups were actually fronts for kiddie **** operations, then yeah, I wouldn't be upset. As it is, I can't help but think, "Don't you guys have anything better to do?"

Such as the claimed value of damages for these being available probably being greater than the entire world's GDP? :-)

Moviefather.com lives!

Seven years at no charge, option to renew for another seven for 5% of the revenues from the prior seven-year term, and each subsequent renewal costs an additional 5% (so 10% for the 2nd, 15% for the 3rd, &c.), or 5% of revenues since the property was copyrighted, owner's choice.

It's still possible (though not anywhere near as profitable) to maintain a copyright for as long as you can under the current system; things are more likely to work out somewhat more normally, though.

(Handling DRM could be rolled into this. Your option there becomes "either you pay triple for your renewals, or you hand over an unlocking mechanism to the Copyright Office which is used when your term runs out and your term is automatically terminated upon an extended failure to support the licenses".)

Edited, Jul 1st 2010 11:35pm by MDenham

Speaking from personal experience?

Edited, Jul 2nd 2010 3:07am by Eske

If you ever pay those copyright fines, you are even more of a chump.

At my other job, I work for an IT department for a state government entity. For my past sins, amongst other duties I am for lack of a better candidate, "THE" software licensing expert in the agency. We just got hit by our first major software audit. Luckily, our records were pretty good, 8,000 computers and associated software, and in the end we only ended up paying statewide about $12k (edit: that was due to a small group of trainers who had been inadvertantly given keys to a $1,000 software suite and had admin rights to install it... they don't anymore), which was down from the million and change they were saying we actually owed. We were actually able to show major errors in the companies own audit methodology they were using to try and charge us, due to some very similar file names between certain of their free and paid products, etc, that they had apperently been charging other entities for free software prior to us. Long story short, I personally saved my particualr area of the government about 1 million dollars, got a certificate and a special coin for it, and a bit of a promotion out of it. Was about the most screwed up 3 months of my life, 16 hour days there and then working here, not a whole lot of sleep heh, but we were able to coordinate and make it work. But even with the amount of records we have, our system frankly sucks and needs to be scrapped because our installation detection software doesn't talk to our resources available software, for stupid reasons. So instead of a nice quick resolution, I got to do it manually for the whole state agency.

It is a really nice coin though!

Edit edit: Certain large software vendors have a nice little clause in their end user license agreements that states they may audit your organization at all sites worldwide at any time for license compliance, at your expense. Simply by installing the software, you (being the generic, anyone who has installation rights you) enter into a legally binding contract that allows them to act upon that clause. It really, really sucks when they do so.



Edited, Jul 2nd 2010 11:23pm by Kaolian

I would, but it kinda has the logo of the particular state agency I work for on it. I'm sure someone could easily figure out which one it is if they looked, but I do try and keep that seperate from here a bit.

I wonder if they put his face on it.

Since when did Chuck E. Cheese become a government agency?

Some of us know the mild alter ego of the Superhero Kaolian, but are too smart to reveal it.