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from the Have-you-ever-read-a-book,-magazine,-or-newspaper?-Which-ones? dept.
Music-industry lawyers plan to ask potential jurors in a piracy case whether they read Ars Technica.
"Have you ever read or visited Ars Technica or TorrentFreak?" is one of 40 voir dire questions that plaintiffs propose to ask prospective jurors in their case against Grande Communications, an Internet service provider accused of aiding its customers' piracy, according to a court filing on Friday.
[...] Record-label attorneys also want to ask potential jurors if they "know what a peer-to-peer network is," have "ever downloaded content from any BitTorrent website" such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, obtained music or video from "any stream-ripping service," been "accused of infringing a copyright," or "ever been a member, contributor or supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
The full list of questions by each party were made available by TorrentFreak as pdfs:
Have you now, or ever been, a member of the Pirate Party?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday February 04 2020, @03:41PM (7 children)
I've always wondered about this. Isn't that the equivalent of VCRing something ("timeshifting" don't they call it?)? Is the act of using a VCR illegal?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday February 04 2020, @05:41PM (4 children)
The Supreme Court of the United States narrowly considered time shifting to be fair use because at the time, video programming was primarily broadcast on a linear schedule. The logic doesn't apply quite so well to subscription video on demand services, be they included with a traditional cable television service or sold separately.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Thursday February 06 2020, @05:43PM (3 children)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday February 07 2020, @12:30AM (2 children)
When you signed up for a subscription video on demand service, you agreed to an express written restriction on playback devices. Courts in SoylentNews PBC's home country have uniformly upheld such restrictions in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes, 321 Studios v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Inc., RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Ass'n, Inc., and DVD Copy Control Ass'n, Inc. v. Kaleidescape, Inc.
By contrast, free-to-air broadcasts are not subject to such a restriction.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Sunday February 09 2020, @01:25AM (1 child)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday February 09 2020, @03:41AM
How often do private antitrust suits actually succeed?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @09:32PM (1 child)
It's legal in Australia and enshrined to the point that PVRs still legally support it on new TVs.
However,they also ruled that region locking is illegal yet DVDs and BR still have it. Go figure.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Wednesday February 05 2020, @03:43AM
It wasn't quite that simple. They ruled that it was legal to sell unlocked players and disks. It is also legal to unlock region-locked players. I think they are also required to label anything that is region locked as being so.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.