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No jail time for fantasy card creators!
Topic Started: Mar 1 2009, 01:58 PM (259 Views)
stubarnes
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Hi gang.

Just in case the false sense of danger still lingers in the air, our old pal chdb from Realms has confirmed the fact that we cannot go to jail for copyright infringement, since the lawsuits would be civil and not criminal. We could be shut down, obviously, but they will not take us from our homes.

The salient quote:

Quote:
 
There are plenty of reasons to excuse something that is, at its core, against the law. You can rationalize it all you want. You can explain good things that could come from it… [t]here’s always benefits to someone from theft. But theft remains theft, whether people try to enumerate the benefits or not. As a general rule of thumb, the way you tell the difference between right and wrong is that when it’s wrong, you have to make excuses for it.

This is a bunch of moralizing (remember that any penalties suffered for being found to infringe copyright will be civil ones, not criminal, a point that annoys me every time someone says the s_d folks were “breaking the law”) that overlooks the simple point that there is a proud history of creative types allowing fans to bootleg. The Grateful Dead did it all the time, and they were one of the most financially successful bands ever. Frank Zappa only got involved in “official” bootleg releases because he felt the bootleggers were profiting too greatly from fans’ desire to get copies of his boots. These artists and others like them understood that bootlegs only increased their fans’ loyalty and desire for their official product.

Now, of course you can say “well, the Dead and Zappa and all those others gave permission and that wasn’t the case here.” And that is totally reasonable, as any company whose job is essentially managing (and occasionally creating) valued intellectual properties would of course have no idea about the existence of a web community, reproducing portions of their intellectual property, with membership in the high four to low five figures and readership potentially even higher, that also had multiple working professionals counted as members of the community. As a matter of fact I am dead positive that Marvel and DC had no idea about the existence of scans_daily, a community widely known and occasionally mocked throughout the comics web for its particular peccadilloes, and that their noninterference with that community would of course be ignorance and not implied permission to exist at all.

Or, more succinctly, “yeesh.” Here is a far more likely scenario: Marvel and DC knew about s_d but preferred to turn a blind eye to it.


Here are the full goods, concerning a recent takedown by Marvel Comics:

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2009/03/01/and-i-shall-call-it-dumbassopalooza-scans_daily-and-peter-david/

You can exhale now.

[duh] [duh] [duh]

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michael.geier
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Was it the worry of an 8x8 that had eveyone scared, or the impact of fines in an economic downturn? Even if not one penny is made from the releasing of fan-based content, the copyright owners (UDE for Vs., Marvel, DC, etc. for the art) can sue (civilly) and win, if they choose.
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stubarnes
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ccgdb.com
Mar 1 2009, 02:22 PM
Was it the worry of an 8x8 that had everyone scared, or the impact of fines in an economic downturn? Even if not one penny is made from the releasing of fan-based content, the copyright owners (UDE for Vs., Marvel, DC, etc. for the art) can sue (civilly) and win, if they choose.
There were some threats of jail time, voiced here on the forums.

[bite] [bite] [bite]
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CaptainIreland
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ccgdb.com
Mar 1 2009, 02:22 PM
Was it the worry of an 8x8 that had eveyone scared, or the impact of fines in an economic downturn? Even if not one penny is made from the releasing of fan-based content, the copyright owners (UDE for Vs., Marvel, DC, etc. for the art) can sue (civilly) and win, if they choose.
As far as I know, tchalla was the only one who said something about jail time. He's one of the posters here I don't respond to, however, so I didn't correct him.
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CaptainIreland
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Just finished the article, everyone, and it's...well, what you can expect from chdb, if you remember him.

Note that his point is that scans_daily (the s_d mentioned) WAS in the wrong, but that Marvel and DC are "stupid" for considering the wrong. But chdb is full of spite for Marvel and DC anyway.

And don't let the opening quote mislead you, this is chdb's very next line:

"I don’t see the point in excusing the behaviour at s_d. It was technically illegal and they got pulled down, because Marvel (or DC) had the right at any point to do that. And that is perfectly proper in the legal sense."
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stubarnes
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CaptainIreland
Mar 1 2009, 03:24 PM
As far as I know, tchalla was the only one who said something about jail time.
That's true, and I applaud your self control.

[blind] [blind] [blind]
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HeroComplex
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Just for clarification, there are a few aspects of copyright law that can be enforced through criminal penalties---the Digital Millenium Copyright Act provides this for willful violation of a few of its provisions. The first has to do with circumventing technological copyright measures, and the second with removing or falsifying "copyright management information." It's a potentially controversial aspect of the Act.

I'm not a lawyer, and am definitely not giving anyone advice about what is or isn't legal. As with the earlier thread, just offering some information I've picked up here and there, as I remember it; I encourage everyone to look up the law and make your own conclusions. In that vein, I'd probably ask anyone talking about jail time to clarify why what's happening violates one of those particular provisions, or point to a different law that has similar penalties.

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