Comment by mnemonicsloth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnemonicsloth | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest for a minute.

Copyright for music is already dead. Consumers like free music. Sometimes they'll pay for concerts, or merchandise, or convenience, or ignorance, but that's it. They might tell you it's wrong on an opinion survey, but they keep downloading.

The situation isn't going to change any time soon, either. Widespread use of DRM'd hardware might work, but the early adopters you'd need to get the new media formats off the ground already benefit the most from free downloads.

Books, movies, and TV shows haven't been devalued yet, but only because ripping and (especially) downloading them are still inconvenient to most people. Bandwidth can't stagnate forever, though. Like with music, when you can download a two-hour movie in ten minutes, and store them by the thousands on your hard drive without missing the space, the only way to prevent rampant piracy will be to stop selling media.

Regardless of the legal niceties, the marginal cost of digital media is zero plus some rounding error. Isn't that a radical enough departure for us to ask whether copyright itself, rather than just its expiration date, might have to change?

I kind of agree with you, except that last sentence.

I once worked for a client with no upfront contract and no initial fees, the agreement being that I had to get paid when the work was done. After the work was done (in an incremental agile process nonetheless) the client said that he's going to go to someone else ... and when that someone else finished his work, I discovered that he stole from me ideas from my design, articles blatantly copy/pasted and some implementation details.

Sorry, but even if the cost of reproducing digital media is zero, the cost of producing it is not. And if I'm producing something of value, it's only fair to get paid for my work.

And in the above case I only had the copyright law to defend myself.

What the media industry needs to realize is that people don't pay for crap. If you want to make money out of movies then stop producing crap like Jennifer's Body and stop promoting crap like Britney Spears.

The price of a movie/music album/newspaper subscription should also variate according to its quality / cost of production.

Personally I buy all the albums of my favorite bands (all 3 of them ... I like supporting them and I like discovering tracks for which there aren't mp3s available on torrents). I'm also going to the local cinema regularly but only to see those movies that are worth the price of a ticket.

So instead of learning to write a better contract, you want government bullies to enforce the contract you didn't write?

You like your physical properties to be protected right? If I stole something from you, would you consider it normal for me to get away with it because you haven't made me sign a contract? WTF dude ?!?

It's not a question of whether IP should be protected or not, it's only a question of where to draw the line. If I create something I want full rights on it, regardless of the ease with which it can be copied and my desire to be in control of the results of my work should supersede your desire to get free stuff ;)

If I own a chair and someone take it without me ok:ing it first, then it obviously isn't ok, since I wouldn't have any chair left.

If, on the other hand, I had made a chair and someone looked at it and made a similar chair, then I would think it ok. This since I would still have my chair.

See the difference?

If you steal a bike from me, I have lost a bike. If you "steal" a design from me, I am still free to write code from that design, but with the added benefit that if I don't want to bother, others can do so also. I don't want to have to sign a waiver every time I give some advice.

Yes it sucks that you got ripped off. But you should have had a contract before undertaking a paid project. There's a reason it's called contract work.

Yeah, but the work I did was useless to me, and I couldn't resell it.

So something was stole from me, and that's the precious time I invested in it.

And I totally understand their decision to go to someone else, but then that someone else ripped-off my work. Sorry, but that shouldn't be legal ... the world is full of jackasses that don't give a shit about your needs or about the endless hours of work you've put into it.

The alternative to having laws that protect your property is anarchy ... making your own justice ... here's your software, it's DRMed, it regularly phones back home with logs of your activity, and I can shut it down with the push of a button. Enjoy!

Don't get me wrong ... 100 years of copyright is a lot. 10 years of protection would be much more appropriate. I'm not advocating against changes for the good of the public ... but having a healthy copyright law also encourages content-authors. So IMHO, all I'm saying is that we need copyright, not that it doesn't need changing.

Suppose he had written a contract: would you support the use of "government bullies" to enforce it in that case? If not, and your tone suggests not, why do you suggest he learn how to write better contracts?

On the subject of copyright: I think the situation is a prisoner's dilemma, and one of the time-honored ways to bring such a dilemma to its Nash solution is indeed to shoot everyone who defects. Nash-equilibrium behavior when all constraints are removed is a mark of a prisoner's dilemma; for such behavior with copyright, look into what happened after the French Revolution overturned it, or at the quality of copies of _It's a Wonderful Life_ after it left copyright (in, IIRC, the early 1950s) and before a copyright was re-imposed. The second of these is sometimes used by the MPAA as an argument for the Mickey Mouse Protection Act; the first, not even they are familiar with yet.

(My position is that culturally significant works should be copyrightable in perpetuity, perhaps by an act of Congress in a perfect world in which lobbyists don't exist and Congress acts for the good of the nation; for all other works, have a 20-year copyright, renewable for 10 years up to 5 times by mailing the relevant government office a dollar.)

You seem to think I want to get rid of copyright. What gave you that idea?

I'm just saying that on this issue, the reality is very different than what people are allowed to acknowledge in public, and that's stupid.

> What the media industry needs to realize is that people don't pay for crap. If you want to make money > out of movies then stop producing crap like Jennifer's Body and stop promoting crap like Britney Spears.

Somehow I doubt that the mainstream agrees with you on what it constitutes crap. I don't think people are pirating pop because they don't like it. They do it simply because they can get away with it.

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