"Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."
This is a debatable proposition.
This is a debatable proposition.
Make it available, and we'll buy it. Don't, and it'll be pirated. That's just how things work.
I'm going to go 100% torrent sites.
I am willing to pay for exactly one streaming service. The idea that streaming services will become the "pay only for the channels you watch" is second to the fact that all but a few streaming sites will wind up being complete shit.
So far only YouTube and Netflix have passable interfaces, cross platform support, and a half-decent discovery algorithm.
This has happened on maybe 6 or 7 movies in the last year and I'm starting to get annoyed enough to consider cancelling my subscription.
The pickings are not very good anymore and new stuff seems so sparse and infrequent.
I'm spending money each month on something i use maybe one or two nights a month.
Why even pretend you are willing to pay, you clearly aren't.
SPOUSE: We have this movie on DVD.
SPOUSE: You could watch it without commercials.
KID: Okay. Where is it?
SPOUSE: Somewhere in the DVD cabinet.
KID: Ummmm.... that's okay.
KID: I'll just watch it on TV.
The lack of searchable indexes is a huge obstacle in every form of media. Imagine if you went to the library, and rather than a central index, you had to check each floor in the stacks separately to see if a book was available.
Likewise I used to grab a cd or tape for my walkman before leaving the house. Now it takes at least 5 minutes (probably more) to transfer files to an mp3 player though admitedly they can hold way more.
The only place I see this as a win is with the kindle where book sizes are so small, I can store way more than I am likely to read.
Also I simply cannot get them to watch a movie on a DVD somehow 'missing out' on what is on TV.
In fact I recently had to use Amazon video instead of torrent because amazon had what I was looking for and torrents didn't.
If the parents position is that he literally needs everything in one or he'll never leave, it's an unreasonable demand. No business or service will ever have 100%. Not even torrents.
Let's assume that we're talking about a show which is an hour long. Which means we're paying $2 per hour.
Netflix charges $8/month with the average usage of 2.4 hours a day in the US which comes out to $0.11/hour. More aggressive users looking to completely replace TV can average 4/5 hours a day knocking the price down $0.05/hour. And a household of three with different preferences can effectively triple that getting us down to $0.04/hour if they're casual users or $0.02/hour if they're aggressive.
Torrenting costs more in time than $0.05/hour so it's no surprise that people are willing to pay for it.
If torrenting is to be defeated it will require cooperation and a realistic view of what content is actually worth to people.
And of course there are many people for whom the money does matter, which makes the gap even wider.
I understand many people prefer to torrent, but a lot of the rationalization doesn't make much sense to me.
I am subscribed to several services, but often, usually for the newest and coolest, it is simply not possible for me to stream a movie legally. If they would only focus on solving that instead of raging against their customers, they could maybe _then_ start to complain about piracy.
Seriously, I would like to support the creation of the content I like to consume. If nobody supports it, nothing will be made.
I, too, understand that we're still far from such a situation, but I would rather not get there before someone make changes to this idiocy.
Paying customers, not pirates, are the problem.
This is often mentioned, but it's just not true. Humans produced creative work long before there was copyright or even money, and they will continue doing so long after our civilization has crumbled. People are hard-wired to create. The social status associated with creative output is the main incentive - money is just icing on the cake.
You might argue that if we don't pay theater admission for bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels, then those specific genres might not be produced, and would be replaced by lower-budget plot/character driven cinema. But that's at least arguably a feature, not a bug.
It could also be argued that bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels are necessary for the industry to have enough money, experience, talent and infrastructure to be able to produce the occasional good movie.
Most of us haven't even read the world's top 100 books or watched the top 100 movies. If production were to completely cease, how long would we have until we run out of high quality media?
Did you miss the whole open source software movement? Music other content was made well before copyright was invented.
But I'm willing to moderate my statement to "no AAA blockbusters will be made" or "no really high budget movies will be made", or something like that. It will have an impact on the budget of movies. Some may argue that is a good thing, but I enjoy my Matrix, LoTR, Hobbit, Cloud Atlas, Marvels, etc. and don't really want that to go away.
[0] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-epix-deal-expir...
I vaguely recall having heard that movies are actually not the main interest of their viewers but that might have been some PR ;)
(There are plenty of nuances of people's opposition, for example people who think arbitrary copyright licenses should still be enforceable but that it's mean to use a proprietary one.)
I'd take that regardless of whether it comes with free access to movies, music and TV shows.
edit: I think it's debatable how much impact it would have of software developer salaries. The only way I see it causing a drop in salaries is if it causes a reduced demand for developers by increasing software development efficiency.
"the relaxation of copyright and especially patent laws in the software industry"
What about all the things that still would exist? Would all those things be worse? What about if we had strong data protection laws? Maybe all those celebrities wouldn't have been violated. On the other hand maybe Google wouldn't have existed at all or maybe that is if copyright had actually been enforced. Hm.
The point being that the only thing we can be certain about is that things have changed and are going to change. When do we reach a point were copyright has to be reformed and at which point of that reform doesn't Zac Efon get to make his movie?
I'm personally not sure that the entitlement of Zac Efron is a huge factor in my views on copyright.
But why do you make assumptions about the income of HN users? I’m sure the crowd here is quite diverse.
It seems to me that software markets are already moving in the direction of assuming that creators don't have control over distribution of digital goods.
Many (frankly most) programmers are employed in positions where the revenue supporting their salary is not the sales of licenses to potentially copyable IP. I work for a hardware vendor. Web developers sell services and data access, etc...
I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent's position on copyright, but the content utopia those folks envision isn't actually implausible.
To claim that content IP licensing pays for some programmers salaries is straightforward. To extend that to argue that salaries of all programmers are significantly higher needs numbers; it's not at all an obvious corrollary.
Even as a fairly radical pirate I know that most people don't care about copyright, for or against. To the extent that people are against copyright it's mainly about absurd copyright terms, harsh punishment and general industry dysfunction. There's no basis for the idea to abolish copyright, essentially no one thinks that nor will it ever happen. It's scare tactics.
Also the scenario where authors can't control distribution has already happened and has been going on for years and years. From poems to professional software.
True enough. Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."
Edit: Actually, krapht's response led me to see that this is completely wrong. "Creators and makers" have robust (though not totally unlimited) legal rights to determine the conditions under which their works are copied, but do not have an all encompassing and well established legal right to determine how their works are distributed after the first sale.
Of course, the easy confusion (that I fell prey to) is that distribution often, but not always, entails copying. When it does, creators have strong legal rights. But when it does not, their rights are considerably more limited.
The example of libraries brings this distinction out nicely.
It can't just be that a copyright is intangible, because there are a lot of intangible things one can one: money, shares of stock, debt...
The difference between copyrights and property is that the scarcity is entirely artificial. If I have your sandwich, you can't eat it. If I steal your money, you can't spend it. (There exists the possibility of copying your money, that's counterfeiting and it's a distinct issue. Not all monetary systems are vulnerable to it. But whichever way, copying your money is never seen as a crime against you. You can still spend yours.)
Copyrights and patents are properly understood as granted monopolies. In the same category as having "a monopoly on the sale of salt". Basically, a way of governments playing favourites by making someone a needless but coercively enforced toll-booth owner.
And what about things that are made scarce by the prevailing legal framework? Surely this is the case for copyrighted works and patented methods (etc.)--I take it that this is the root of your criticism--but it is also true of pretty much any other intangible thing that we think of as being property and, therefore, subject to ownership, such as stock, money, and debt. Is there any principled reason for requiring that things be naturally scarce in order to be subject to ownership?
Finally, I don't think one can simply ignore the policy reasons for the existence of the intellectual property laws that make intellectual property scarce. Maybe you don't think they are good reasons anymore, but simply ignoring the very copious literature on this subject doesn't seem like a good way to persuade anyone.
On the patent front, for example, the usual arguments are that patents 1) encourage people to make more patentable methods than they otherwise would, 2) encourage people to make greater use of the patented methods then they otherwise would (the so-called "extractive" theory), and 3) encourage people to make discoveries public (in exchange for legally enforced exclusivity) instead of protecting them by keeping them secret.
Maybe these arguments don't persuade you (some of them persuade me more than others), but I don't think they are so weak that they can simply be ignored in favor of purely metaphysical arguments about the definition of "property" and "ownership."
If you write/compose a song, and/or record a song for the public in the United States you do not have complete control over it anymore.
(When you play a DVD, you copy it into memory. But at that moment you give it to someone else, it's the physical thing.)
This all means that the spirit and the mechanical effect of the laws are different, now that we use the internet for everything.
This is very very debatable. Do you enjoy jumping into arguments where the salient points of debate have been decided before the discussion has even begun?
And in this particular case, I am not sure Games of Thrones qualifies as "education and culture".
I am not too worried that literature and art will go away. Literature and art existed before we had avenues for mass audience to buy or rent personal copies and they will continue to exist after we dismantle copyright.
I'd like to note that I support trademarks. I do not condone people selling modified versions of Microsoft Windows including keyloggers that call home to the seller and claiminf it is official, unmodified Windows. One shouldn't sell malware with someone else's trademark on it. The problem as fsf explains well is that we have grouped disparate things together under vague intellectual property when the entire exercise is anything but intellectual.
Never mind that there are a bunch of companies, in particular in the embedded market, that violate it left and right.
If we can find a way to ensure we can get those without copyleft, alright, but so far copyright is the only legal tool we have.
What do you make? What do you make to pay the bills; what do you make for passion? How would you feel about people pirating what you make to pay the bills?
Even if you are 100% open source everything for free forever, do you acknowledge that other people may be looking to their creative work as a source of income, and may want a more restrictive license on their work? Do you feel they are morally wrong to ever want to be paid for all the time and labor that goes into performing their craft, and probably into paying off their absurd student loans as well?
Student loans, and obligations in general that people have contracted with certain expectations, only justify that we take a "softer" approach, it doesn't change the argument.
It's then easy to see that the above does not hold true in all cases, many examples of public greater good can be provided but the case of generic drugs is perhaps the most well-known: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694898.
While the English copyright only dealt with, well, copying, the French system dealt with things like how and when a play or musical piece could be performed.
This because they cared not just about the monetary angle, but about the reputation of the creator (like say if a politician the creator didn't support wanted to use a song or similar).
The reason we see this pop up is that copyright was standardized across Europe with the Bern Convention. Later this was extended across the world (USA didn't sign on until the 1980s, btw).
The french is also to thank for the whole "life+X" copyright duration...
When copyright first came to be, it was a negotiating leverage between the singular author and the owners of printing presses (very mechanical and labor intensive to operate, and therefore it was rarely done without sales in mind) for a share of the profits.
Without it, it was not uncommon for a printer to buy a text for pennies and then resell copies for pounds.
Then again, it also introduced the title page holding the name of author and printer. Thus the government had names to lean on if the content was not acceptable...
As best i recall, Germany was a latecomer to the whole copyright thing. As such, they had wide and cheap access to all kinds of texts. Both informative and entertaining.
This in turn supposedly helped them bootstrap their industrial base.
While I'm not a fan of the entitlement-culture that's a massive feature of large parts of the popular internet, there's more to this than simple entitlement. Demanding content for free is entitlement. Being happy to pay for content, but being denied access based on your geographical location isn't entitlement - at least to me, and I think to a lot of people both on and off the internet.
What content owners have seemed to fail to grasp, repeatedly, is that governments operate at least partly by consent[0]. No matter how successful you are at convincing the government of a country to pass the law you want, if it's a law that's very difficult to enforce and is generally perceived as being unfair/unreasonable, it will often get ignored entirely.
The problem in this particular case is that in much of the world, the content owners have taken an incredibly aggressive stance, making it extremely difficult or impossible to access lots of content legally. This is often regarded as unfair by the general population of that country - "Why can't I listen to this song/watch this film? It's been available in <other country> for months/years".
From a legal standpoint, the content owner is within their rights to say: "Actually, I don't really care about country Y. I'll not bother releasing my content there."[1] However, in practice, it's unlikely their wishes will be respected.
No matter how you or they might feel about it, in the real world, content owners have two options:
1) Make it legally available under reasonable terms.
2) Accept that it will be available illegally.
There is no third option.
0: Yes, there's debate as to what degree this applies, but for the purposes of my point that shouldn't matter, as long as you accept that there's at least some degree of consent required.
1: In theoretical discussions of this topic, it's often presumed that market forces will counteract this, and incentivise the owner to make their content widely available in most markets - this is demonstrably not the case in practice however.
It's like saying "I am willing to pay for a car" and then complaining that nobody will sell you an Audi S6 for five thousand dollars.
Good/services are ultimately priced by the people willing to purchase. The producer can charge more than what people are asking - but can only go so high. The higher the producer charges, the less people buy their good/product. Sometimes this trade off is worth it (ie. luxury brands).
If nobody was willing to pay so much as a penny over $5,000 for an Audi S6 you can bet one of two things happening:
a) An Audi S6 would be sold for $5,000 (and never see production again)
b) No Audi S6 would ever be sold (and never see production again) a) Some people would pay $100,000 and get the painting.
b) Some people would think $100,000 is ridiculous, not pay, and not get the painting.
c) Some people would copy/steal/whatever the painting, and get the painting for $0.
Option "D" (offering to pay, taking for free) comes with knowing that the artist might not be able to support themselves to make more. I've always supported artists/studios I want to see create more art and I think any adult pirating understands the economy enough to know this - and most teenagers understand it on some level (but also understandbly aren't usually made of money).
One could also argue that increased exposure is a form of indirect profit. If 3,000,000 people steal a copy of the painting someone might be willing to buy that painting for $100,000 for bragging rights. Hey guys, I own the original painting! This exposure could increase their potential sales.
The issue of pirates is never black and white. Frankly, the music industry would never see $0.01 from me if I couldn't pirate/listen to free on YT and decide "I wish to support this artist and hopefully hear a new album from them in the future."
I know I'm not the only person who would never spend a single penny otherwise.
This is not a priori true. There are agreements that prevent release in certain areas unless done through a specific middleman.
So, as an individual, you would NOT be able to get all rights.
Blanket statements are very likely to be untrue when dealing with this industry.
Though i guess it helped that they had the big scary communist block to be compared to if they had tried.
This because they also ended up allowing imported CB radios to be operated, even though the band was originally allocated for a different use.
Is there room to debate the notion of artificial scarcity and copyright limits? Sure. Does a creator of a work sacrifice all rights to distribution simply by the act of creation? Nope.
Or, in a more real-world example, if I found out a religious organization was using one of my original works as a soundtrack to a commercial - without my consent or receiving compensation - I'm going to fight to keep my rights to tell them to shut it down. The implication of your statement is much more problematic.
You do not get to be a copyright abolitionist and a supporter of mandatory source code distribution at the same time.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between these communities, and the cognitive dissonance is just stunning.
The GPL, like the Discordian Kopyleft, is a legal exploit, or a hack if you prefer, that uses a silly IP law to nullify itself.
If some people are using IP law to restrict the freedom of users and makers of software, why can't they use the law to defend themselves? It's like complaining that anarchists are hypocrites for calling the police when they are victims of crime.
Much like a significant minority of Free Software advocates (notably not Stallman) believe that the ideal is to have no IP at all, but that since we have them whether we want them or not, Free Software and Kopyleft are a valid defense mechanism.
The Anarchist claim is nonsense. They want no government, because it would be better. Yet when they get a free chance to act out that scenario (taking care of things on their own) still they call on the man. In what way would it hurt them to NOT call the cops after they've been mugged? They've already paid the taxes, so no marginal cost. It would let them enjoy the experience of their utopian society with no further cost to them.
I call that hypocrisy to the max.
Or perhaps they are trained in the use of deadly firearms and believe they can protect themselves from crime using that but they live in a country that prohibits firearm use.
The point is, sometimes we can't act as if we already live in utopia. To reach utopia we have to get there from a place that exists in reality, not from a fantasy ideal world.
[Edit: incidentally, I have called the cops three times in my life. The first two times I was told "it's not my problem". The third time they just hadn't showed up in 15 minutes, so I got bored and left.]
How about we start with, do your own investigating, hire a private investigator, put up security cameras etc. You know, the things you'd be forced to do if Anarchy was actually in operation. Too much trouble? Exactly why we have civil societies.
In a world where selling software is less relevant than selling network access to software or devices with software on them, this places companies at a huge advantage (since they don't really need copyrights on binaries) but the Free Software community can no longer forcibly extract the source code of derivatives.
The only one at a potential loss here would be something like IKEA, because you didn't buy the chair from them.
And that is the kind of insane territory the likes of TPP and TTIP are heading into with their clauses whereby companies can sue nations for loss of potential profits (due to new legislations or whatsnot).
For most of human history if you, say, heard a poem someone else wrote you were absolutely free to copy it, reproduce it, even sell it! Even if you didn't do the work of actually writing it. And this was the norm, and no one thought the author should have the right to stop you. So saying that it's not debatable whether this is still the case from a moral standpoint (hence the "should" in the debated statement) seems to me shortsighted.
What's more, even today there are countless ways in which content is distributed without permission from it's makers that we don't deem wrongs. Libraries were named in this thread, and we have all kinds of lendings, readings, quotes and all use that is allowed by fair use. Where the rights of the makers should end (and those of the consumer start) is very much debatable.
The invention of IP is one possible explanation of why we have so much content nowadays. Other possible contributing factors include the population explosion of the previous century, the fundamental improvement of communication technologies, and the overall increase in the material conditions of the majority of the population.
I'm inclined to believe you but I wonder how we can possibly know that. Before modern communication and distribution technologies, lots of content was simply lost and forgotten.
There are those of us who do not agree with Copyright and would gladly suffer the negatives to be rid of it.
I'm curious how you think the cost of IP generation should be distributed across an economy, because it sounds like you want content-creators to "suffer the negatives" for your own personal gain.
And most of these people are not people who are trying to earn a living from their works.
I do not think that people should be able to own ideas and information.
> And most of these people are not people who are trying to earn a living from their works.
You could make the same argument to a person who wanted to abolish slavery. Just because someone is earning a living by doing something doesn't mean it's right.
And it's time the music/movie industry understands that they need to upgrade their business models to the internet age. Maybe they should charge for fresh music, acknowledging that after 6 months everyone can have a copy of the music, pirated if necessary.