FBI Cracks Down on Piracy of Obsolete Game 191
Alien54 wrote to mention a story detailing an FBI crackdown on pirated...NES games. From the article: "More than 60,000 pirated copies of Nintendo game consoles were seized Wednesday during raids in New York and New Jersey, prosecutors announced. Four people were arrested in the crackdown on the theft of popular games such as "Donkey Kong," "Mario Brothers," "Duck Hunt," "Baseball" and others, according to a release by federal authorities and papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Nintendo told the FBI that individuals and companies copy the video games and sell the pirated versions throughout the world, costing the company millions of dollars in lost revenue annually, according to the complaint."
Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
Official theft vs copyright infringement thread (Score:4, Informative)
Four people were arrested in the crackdown on the theft of popular games
How many times does it have to be explained that copyright infringement is a different offence to theft?
If somebody put a game up on the Internet where it was downloaded thousands of times, that can cause far more harm than if somebody went into a shop and stole something.
If somebody copied games that you can no longer buy, it can cause less harm than if somebody went into a shop and stole something.
Copyright infringement and theft are fundamentally different actions, with different consequences, governed by different laws. Even the Supreme Court has ruled that copyright infringement is not theft (Dowling vs US, 1985).
There is a perfectly good term to use when somebody copies something illegally. It's "copyright infringement". People who insist upon misusing the term "theft" are only seeking to cause yet more pointless arguments. There is a word for these people too. It's "troll".
Re:Uhhh... The FBI? (Score:3, Informative)
Still, it is stupid that it is, and I do support making it exclusively civil.
Re:Not obsolete... (Score:3, Informative)
Right. I used to be in the abandonware-should-be-public-domain camp until I saw Nintendo rerelease old games, e.g., the SNES Zelda for Game Boy Advance, and many NES games for the E-Reader. Granted, we can talk about the incentive for innovation of a long copyright period, but these works are firmly within their copyright (they're only about 15 years old) and Nintendo has shown that they're definitely not abandoned.
If anything, we should shorten copyright. Abandonware and other arguments don't apply here.
Oh, and "lost revenue" can also mean "they misappropriated our IP, started a company, and consumers who would have bought our modern products bought their console running our games." That's as valid as "they didn't buy our games because someone was selling the exact same stuff". You can't legally compete with someone by pirating their software.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
False:
The US Constitution specifically states that copyrights are to promote progress; it does not mention any protecting any rights of individuals. In fact, it is explaining why it is allowing congress to take away rights that individuals would otherwise have over their own physical property just because it happens to have information fixed on it that came from somewhere else.Any rights that copyright gives to the creator at the expense of others is a windfall side-effect for the creator. The primary goal as stated in the clause is basically economic stimulus. These rights are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
Just because you state something does not make it true or even a valid argument.
True, as you've just demonstrated.
Re:Wtf? It's supposed to be legal... (Score:1, Informative)
That's 8*8px and 4 colors (Score:2, Informative)
I wrote a program that extracts the tile tables from NES roms and thus had to do a bit of reverse engeneering. It seems the tiles are 8*8px and 2 bitplans, which means 4 colors. One of the colors is transparent though, so 3 is sort of correct. A tile only requires 16 bytes of memory (8*8 bits * 2 bitplans).
The tiles are arranged in 16*16 blocks or banks, and two of those can be kept in memory at the same time, which means that 256x2 tiles can be kept in memory at the same time.
When you get to a new area, the game will swich banks, and you get new enemies or whatever. The game can also switch palettes so the enemies come in different colors. To further save memory, the tiles can be flipped and stuff, so less angles will have to be drawn. The octorocs on Zelda 1 are just two tiles that are mirrored to make a fully symetrical creature, then there's two different palettes (red & blue).
This guy knows more than me: NES Architecture - by Marat Fayzullin [komkon.org]
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc., 510 U.S. 517 (1994)
We have often recognized the monopoly privileges [of copyright] that Congress has authorized, while 'intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors by the provision of a special reward,' are limited in nature and must ultimately serve the public good.
Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975)
The limited scope of the copyright holder's statutory monopoly . . . reflects a balance of competing claims upon the public interest: Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an 'author's' creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.
Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but '[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.' To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work.
Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, 286 U.S. 123, 127
The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly,' this Court has said, `lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.'
and I really like this item...
H. R. Rep. No. 2222, 60th Cong., 2d Sess., 7 (1909)
The enactment of copyright legislation by Congress under the terms of the Constitution is not based upon any natural right that the author has in his writings, . . . but upon the ground that the welfare of the public will be served and progress of science and useful arts will be promoted by securing to authors for limited periods the exclusive rights to their writings. . .
In enacting a copyright law Congress must consider . . . two questions: First, how much will the legislation stimulate the producer and so benefit the public; and, second, how much will the monopoly granted be detrimental to the public? The granting of such exclusive rights, under the proper terms and conditions, confers a benefit upon the public that outweighs the evils of the temporary monopoly.
All putting copyright on a proper legal footing and thoroughly smashing the flawed 'natural property' model.
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Re:Official theft vs copyright infringement thread (Score:3, Informative)
In case anyone's interested here are the relevant paragraphs, Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985):
the Government's theory here would make theft, conversion, or fraud equivalent to wrongful appropriation of statutorily protected rights in copyright. The copyright owner, however, holds no ordinary chattel. A copyright, like other intellectual property, comprises a series of carefully defined and carefully delimited interests to which the law affords correspondingly exact protections. "Section 106 of the Copyright Act confers a bundle of exclusive rights [473 U.S. 207, 217] to the owner of the copyright," which include the rights "to publish, copy, and distribute the author's work." Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 546 -547 (1985). See 17 U.S.C. 106. However, "[t]his protection has never accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible uses of his work." Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 432 (1984); id., at 462-463 (dissenting opinion). For example, 107 of the Copyright Act "codifies the traditional privilege of other authors to make `fair use' of an earlier writer's work." Harper & Row, supra, at 547. Likewise, 115 grants compulsory licenses in nondramatic musical works. Thus, the property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," for the copyright holder's dominion is subjected to precisely defined limits.
It follows that interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: "`Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner,' that is, anyone who trespasses into his exclusive domain by using or authorizing the use of the copyrighted work in one of the five ways set forth in the statute, `is an infringer of the copyright.' [17 U.S.C.] 501(a)." Sony Corp., supra, at 433. There is no dispute in this case that Dowling's unauthorized inclusion on his bootleg albums of performances of copyrighted compositions constituted infringement of those copyrights. It is less clear, however, that the taking that occurs when an infringer arrogates the use of another's protected work comfortably fits the terms associated with physical removal employed by 2314. The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful [473 U.S. 207, 218] appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
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