Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're basically saying that you support hosting/distributing of files on behalf of end users, but you that you disapprove of RS because "you don't like them" and/or you assume you know what their "intent" is?
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I will. As you so happily repeat over and over again, you seem to be misrepresenting my point of view. As stated before, and I thought fairly clearly, my issue with RS is that they're making money off the distribution of IP content that isn't theirs. And furthermore, that I am too obtuse to recognize the difference between "selling non-horribly-hamstrung access to files" and "selling files". For any file larger than the file limit (say, a DVD image split into 90MB parts) downloading it without first buying a subscription takes a non-trivial amount of time longer than downloading it through their free service. Sure, you can argue that you can download the file either way, so you're not forced to buy that subscription, and that this applies equally to IP and free content, but, as I said in a part of a post that you must have missed, making something available on a commercial scale and making a profit off that is not covered by "copyright infringement" laws, but by different ones, ones that carry criminal conviction possibilities. Sony vs. UStudios only applies to "home copying"; I doubt you could easily extrapolate that ruling to, to make an analogy with what RS does, making those home copies for private citizens. (The comparison is very awkward because the only analogy I can come up with is sending the original to a tape copying facility which does the copying for you, and then sends back copies to
you at another location. I doubt that would be covered/allowed in the offline scenario, so I'm having some trouble convincing myself this ruling should really apply to the RS case.) [esp given "for example, in
A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. 239 F.3d (
9th Cir. 2001), the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a fair use "space shifting" argument raised as an analogy to the time-shifting argument that prevailed in Sony.", which seems rather more relevant to the Rapidshare scenario.]