Supreme Court legalizes downloading music

Reuters, AFP, RT.com, Wisdom Quarterly

The United State Supreme Court has refused an appeal that would have made downloading music an infringement of Federal copyright law. Take that, Metallica (AFP/Andre Durao).

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, or ASCAP, had been attempting to appeal to the Supreme Court an earlier ruling by an appeals court in New York that said a downloaded song constituted a public performance of the song under federal copyright law.

Attorneys for ASCAP were fighting to reverse that decision in hopes that they’d be able to collect additional royalties off of songs downloaded from the Web.

ASCAP had insisted that digital downloads were on par with public performances, which would thus allow copyright owners to receive compensation for each download. A federal judge and an appeals court had rejected that argument, however, and now the Supreme Court is also refusing to hear it.

According to the appeals court, “Music is neither recited, rendered, nor played when a recording (electronic or otherwise) is simply delivered to a potential listener.”

US Solicitor General Donald Verrilli agreed with the appeals ruling and that just because a song was transferred over the Internet did not mean that it was being performed, reports Reuters. More

"Actually, Butthead, I'm not into Metallica anymore. They suck ever since that Napster thing!" "Huh huh huh, you said 'suck,' Beavis." "Oh yeah, huh huh huh, huh huh huh, huh huh huh."

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Dr. Gabor Mate @ Occupy Wall Street (video)

Democracy Now!, Occupy Wall Street
LINK (Bigsteelguy3, Oct. 11, 2011)

On a trip from Vancouver, Dr. Gabor Maté stopped by Occupy Wall Street. He talked to "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman and observed:

"50 percent of American adults have a chronic medical illness. And much of that has to do with stress. And if you look at the literature of what causes stress, it's uncertainty and lack of information and loss of control, and lack of expression of self.

"And the uncertainty that has been forced upon the American population by the recent economic crisis -- the loss of control as power has flown into the hands of very, very few people, and the absolute powerlessness of the many in the face of all that, and the lack of expression through the ordinary political process -- people are totally disempowered and deprived of their voice.

"This protest addresses all those issues. So I can only say that this is an extraordinarily healthy thing to happen. People who participate here will be healthier as a result. And maybe society in general as well."

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How Corporations Became People (video)

(Bozasonic) "The Corporation," full movie. Corporations are people? Corporations are not people. "They have no 'soul' to save, no body to incarcerate." They do have a profit motive.

"The Corporation" is a classic Canadian documentary exploring how we ended up with business entities that are legally bound to place "profits before people." How are we to assess a corporation's "personality"?

The documentary concentrates on North American corporations, particularly those from the United States.

The film was written by Joel Bakan and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. It is critical look at the modern-day "limited liability" corporation, considering its legal status as a class of PERSON. And it evaluates its behavior towards our society and the world at large the way a psychiatrist examines a patient.

The exploration goes through specific examples. It has been shown worldwide -- on TV, DVD, file sharing, and free downloading. Bakan wrote a book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of this documentary.

Showing the development of the contemporary business corporation, the movie follows the definition in court. Corporations went from legal entities that originated as government-chartered institutions engaged in public functions to commercial institutions entitled to most of the legal rights of a human being, US citizen, and now multinational body with no allegiance to the US.

They gained personhood as a result of an 1886 case in the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite referred to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings based on the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. The film's assessment is effected via the diagnostic criteria in psychology's Bible (DSM-IV).

FBI consultant and professor of psychology Robert Hare, Univ. of British Columbia, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically-diagnosed PSYCHOPATH.

The film is in vignettes examining and criticizing corporate business practices. It establishes parallels between the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave and the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.

(otherwords.org)

The topics covered include:

• the Business Plot in 1933 where the popular Gen. Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against US Pres. Franklin Roosevelt
• the tragedy of the commons
• Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising "military-industrial complex"
• economic externalities
• suppression of an investigative news story about bovine growth hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate TV station
• the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany
• the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust)
• the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia's municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation
• general themes of corporate social responsibility
• the notion of "limited liability"
• the corporation as a psychopath
• and the corporation as a person.
  

(H5N1XD) "The Corporation," short form