Obama Administration Announces Massive Piracy Crackdown
dailytech.com
dailytech.com
What the politicians don't seem to acknowledge is that the products of this process are not scarce (although the inputs to the process are). Enforcing the illusion of scarcity (particularly with all the great privacy/crypto we have) must be extremely heavy-handed. We'll have to choose between severe restrictions in our communication (which should bother everyone) and less production of the software and movies that we desire (which would be unfortunate).
Every piece of intellectual output takes as input many, many pieces that have come before.
Still, many of the other inputs: the time of lots of people (many of them very talented) and the money of investors are definitely scarce. I think it's a tricky balancing act. However, I'm not sure the status quo is so terrible. By getting permission or paying, many copyrighted works can be used in new works. In cases where they can't some works may not be created. Along the way, creators can be compensated.
Do you think if the internet was 100% government regulated or by a company (e.g. AOL) from day one, that is would have grown and developed as quickly and as well as it has? Or that the many opportunities for creating a web-based business would exist? Of course they wouldn't, because they would have been stifled by well-meaning legislation. The cost and bureaucracy to startups would increase massively. Piracy isn't nice, but it is the price to pay for an open and independent global network. (/rant)
He obviously never read this quote from the world's richest man (talking about piracy in China):
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropir...
If the Obama started listening to smart people in the tech and music industry, not to mention the young people who voted him into power, then he would make far more informed decisions.
I find this difficult to believe.
Making the thought that leads to something criminal criminal, how does that prove you did do something criminal? or is the thought criminal? Searching for something illegal is criminal? I'm confused by this and I hope more details emerge.
In the DRM case. If by-passing DRM because criminal, well... I'll be in for some long time in jail. Using Linux to watch DVDs. This is by far the best example of victimless crime I know. Who did this cost any money too? Was the hack of subverting my computer illegal? That could lead to some interesting new ways to prosecute a person whenever needed.
As for copying, I don't condone it but whats a legal alternative that offers at least the minimum amount of freedom offered by the pirate option?
iTunes and Amazon MP3 proved that DRM wasn't required for good sales. They truly offer the freedom to use the media as you want. There not a lot of reasons to be pirating music anymore. Movies, that's another story.
Either this thing's being massively exaggerated, the people who wrote the law have absolutely no understanding of communications technology, or (more likely) something in between.
> The bill would make P2P or BitTorrent client
> development a criminal offense if the distributed
> software was used for infringement.
This is also why my local ISP claims to have a "Three Strikes" policy regarding infringement complaints. Through scientific experimentation I've discovered they don't enforce this policy. The point of the little performance is to try to avoid having the law interpreted in a court, where evidence trumps accusation.
The idea is that the accusation alone will be a deterrent. It's bad leadership and it's out-side of the letter and spirit of the law.
(1) I quit my day job and decide to launch a web-based startup.
(2) I base my business plan on a monthly subscription model.
(3) I achieve product/market fit and revenue starts coming in.
(4) A technology emerges that magically makes it easy to copy my SaaS app and use it in its entirety without paying the monthly subscription.
(5) My revenue plummets and I have to completely revamp my business model or go out of business.
This is not a rhetorical question. I honestly want to know what is the difference. Thanks!
Other providers offer quick development of new feature which a copied service can't easily replicate. This is the key, replicability (that's not a word ;p ) or lack of is your protection.
In the end, you can't sit and wait. Even if they don't copy your app, others will offer similar products ( I think this is fair and square) and you will die if you don't continue to provide more to the user.
Ubuntu One is a open source version of dropbox. I don't think dropbox will die because of it. Dropbox hosts the service and offers good support and feature development. Ubuntu's offering might not be as good. Even if it is, Competition is everywhere.
I don't necessarily disagree with your larger point, but It's worth noting that copyright was created for exactly this purpose (limit distribution of something that would be easy for copiers to distribute, but hard for them to originate).
I suspect copyright is one of the driving forces in the existence of lots of the information and entertainment I enjoy consuming on a day-to-day basis, so I'm skeptical of tossing it out completely.
I don't think there would necessarily be the same 'tear it all down' mentality around (for example) copyright if it wasn't: 1) overly abused and 2) a ridiculous length of time. It also doesn't help that a lot of people feel entitled to copyright, when in reality it is a monopoly granted by the people, not some sort of 'God-given' right.
I make something, I determine the price and distribution. You have the right not to buy it.
Also, please don't try to frame this argument as, "If you are against copyright then you must be a pirate!" Please let McCarthy-ism stay dead.
Since you've consistently posted in favour of copyright recently:
* Do you feel the *need* to have copyright 90 years
after you are dead? Is that your only incentive to
create?
* What about retroactive copyright extensions? Are you
planning on 'un-creating' things that you created in
the past because you weren't retroactively granted a
copyright extension so you now have no incentive to
create something that you already created?
> Also, please don't try to frame this argument as, "If you are against copyright then you must be a pirate!"
I'm not - the article isn't about copyright reform, it's about stopping piracy. This post is filled with n-2 people who apparently don't want piracy stopped, and 2 people who've actually had experience with having their works ripped off and oddly enough aren't so keen. If you made something, then someone distributed the source code for that against your wishes, you'd join us.
> While we're at it, do you feel the need to have copyright 90 years after you are dead? Is that your only incentive to create? What about retroactive copyright extensions? Are you planning on 'un-creating' things that you created in the past because you weren't retroactively granted a copyright extension so you now have no incentive to create something that you already created?
1. I'm quite fine with my work going PD after I die. I support copyright reform too - people that support piracy at the same time harm the cause. Saying 'hooray, taking things without permission is awesome' isn't the best way to have a debate about copyright length and PD.
2. No, my incentive to create is that I enjoy it. Money is what I exchange for goods and services in return for my work. Do you make something and get paid for it?
3. Er, no. I just don't like people stealing my work. Do you work on an app? Would you like it if someone ripped off the source code and uploaded it to TPB?
That may be incorrect - if you don't support piracy, I apologize if I've mischaracterised you. There's a lot of people on HN that don't seem to realize that piracy affects small people too and it's sometimes a little frustrating when they themselves, as makers of apps and games, benefit from it.
How are you going to do that, though? It just so happens that the natural world does not provide you with an obvious way to do that. If you physically occupy a house, someone has to violently eject you to take it. But if you voluntarily put your software out into the public sphere, someone can copy it entirely in the privacy of their own home, using 100% materials they own! Now it's you who'd have to engage in the violence to stop them: you, or a state acting on your behalf, would have to intrude into their private house, and tell them they can't use the materials they physically own in the way they're doing. That, to me, seems a much worse intrusion on actual property rights than any "intellectual property" defense could justify.
This bill is a good start.
> That, to me, seems a much worse intrusion on actual property rights than any "intellectual property" defense could justify.
We already raid houses in relation to fraud, embezzlement, and other crimes based around intellectual values.
Would I support raiding a house for piracy? I don't think anyone's proposing raiding houses for casual downloaders. If they were an organized piracy network ALA TPB, who have inflicted massive amounts of damage on authors, artists, game makers, and app developers, big and small, then as a writer, a software maker, and an ethical human being I'd certainly support that.
Edit: But yeah, I'd like to live in a stable utopian anarchy as well.
If technology progresses to a level where an individual is independent of society (to the point of one planet per person maybe), your ideas would work. Right now society has the upper hand over the individual.
I don't understand how people needing others (which is true, no man is an island) justifies people taking things from others.
Another example, what price do you put on having your neighbors being educated or non-violent enough to not kill you the next time they see you and take your family and belongings? In an anarchy, the cost of your own weapons cache maybe, but in current society it's hard to determine. But it's still a benefit to not be living in the stone age or next door to the Huns.
The price I pay of my neighbour not killing me if he feels like it is not killing them should I feel like it - that's the nature of society. We also both fund a police force that will attempt to prevent and punish crime. It doesn't seem hard to determine at all.
Markets work differently from societies - the price consumers pay in a market is the price the provider asks for, for the product the consumer has chosen. The provider could set an unreasonable price if he wishes, but the consumer could always decided that the value provided isn't sufficient and not buy the product.
Haha. Exactly. I think you don't really believe what you read about other societies where this is/was common. And the police are a component of society, but is just having some policemen around enough to prevent crime? If so, I'd be selling you a great Russia investment story.
I'm not sure how society being beneficial makes it wrong profit from making something (if that's what you're saying - to be honest, I'm not suite sure).
Also see how electricity is commonly stolen in developing nations, anti-prohibition activities etc. For examples of societies trying to act through government to regulate payments to people, look at the UK bank bonus tax or the Autralian attempt at a mining super profits tax, and in the other direction blank media taxes, farm subsidies etc.
I'll let you draw your own analogies to the creative industries.
If something can be copied, it will be, that's the law of nature. Your business plan should take this into account.
By offering commercial support and custom instalations, see for example http://blog.gitorious.org/2009/05/11/welcome-qt/
Before such technology existed it would make sense to pursue such a business plan.
But suppose such technology already exists, and you know it. It would be sort of foolish to plan a business that assumed such technology would not be used.
Now suppose that this magic technology was not invented for the purpose of copying SaaS apps, but was an inevitable side-effect of other good, useful, desirable technologies.
A side-effect of the technology that allowed you to build your SaaS app in the first place. Oh, and your app helped shut down other existing businesses that were not using this new technology.
That it can copy your site is simply one of a million things it can do.
Do you fight this technology? Freeze it? Criminalize it?
One of my gripes with the IP industrial complex is that there are companies that lucked out on a transitory scarcity because of a particular stage of technological evolution.
Tools existed for mass-producing physical copies and transmitting virtual copies across large distances (i.e tape and CD production, and radio/TV), but there were still sufficient financial and technical barriers to constrain its application.
These businesses were based on the assumption that cheap reproduction and mass data transfer would never become so cheap or so easy that just about anyone could do it with the push of a button.
Bad assumption. And now the cat's out of the bag.
I often wonder why the movie and music industries don't embrace torrent technology. I would definitely pay a reasonable monthly fee to access legitimate and legal trackers that they manage. It's really win-win as far as I can see. Watch what you want when you wants, and the distributions costs drop to next to nothing.
This is not a joke, it's the reality. If you managed to scrape enough money together to have power in the world, you could start playing power games too.
We need to address this with a decentralized system they can't crack down on.
Users used to pirate the software my first startup made, and that was not fun.
There are a lot of things that aren't fun, and I certainly agree that people pirating your software can be a problem, but there is a distinct difference between theft and illicit downloading.
My big complaint with these analogies, though, isn't with their accuracy or lack therof. It's that they shed absolutely no light on whether copyright laws are good, bad or indifferent. They imply a moral imperative for copyright laws. This is, to put it mildly, controversial.
The theft analogy has no bearing on the question of whether the bad effects of copyright laws outweigh the good. I'd rather see the copyright lobby concentrate on that question (other than by quoting implausible estimates of the cost of "piracy"). That, at least, is a defensible position that can be debated constructively.
edit: spelling, punctuation.
Just because users were doing something that negatively affected your business doesn't mean that you can redefine the English language just to make the general population more sympathetic to your complaints. e.g.:
My employer is *extorting* me by requiring that I work
for my pay cheque! I should be able to charge my employer
with extortion!This reminds me of an awesome article that discusses the debate about whether or not "obsesity is a disease" http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...
One interesting point that was made was that if people keep calling it theft attitudes may change - or maybe it would simply pave the way to making it a criminal offence.
Ultimately how I always feel is this; if someone is pirating your work then I don't mind if you call them a thief (in anger or whatever). But if you're not one of those people then it's a weasel word to be using.
Disappointing on so many levels.
I doubt he's getting full and accurate data and I doubt he's really had time to spend on the issue that this needs given the other major issues that need to be dealt with.
I'm not saying it's necessarily true, but it sounds a little funny to say "yeah he's either stupid or ignorant" about someone who is very likely neither. It's possible he just disagrees with you, despite being smart and knowledgeable.
a) Stupid b) Ignorant c) Wrong
It is most likely that Obama has different motivations then we do so his "right" is different than ours.
I merely stated my own personal doubt that inside the echo chamber he was seeing the same things we see and that alone could explain the decision.
I didn't say that was the only possibility. I just mentioned it was the one I thought most likely.
I think it's always important to remember smart people can make stupid decisions based on flawed data. I was reminding the poster I was replying to about this possibility.
I did not actually say that Obama necessarily did this here. Though I do think it likely actually... but it's hard to tell, I don't have lunch with the guy.
He's probably only getting one side of the story, as the anti-piracy lobby has the money, power and influence to be able to bend the ear of those high up enough to make a difference. Spend enough time listening to one side of the debate, and you have the VP eventually making dumb comments like the Tiffany's quote.
Richard Stallman probably would probably not clear White House security checks (joke)
Plus, letting the Music/Movie industry keep things as they are is slowing progression. If the government is going to get involved in this they need to also insure that new (i.e. online) competition is allowed in on media distribution. The existing players have a monopoly on it, and a monopoly is something that provably hurts the economy.
The law isn't proposing to destroy lives of casual downloaders. They'll get a fine at most - which is what all legislation I've ever seen does. Jail is inevitably reserved for more organized networks.
> Plus, letting the Music/Movie industry keep things going as they are
Piracy also affects the software industry and independent artists. Like me, like the other guy in this link that had his worked nicked, like our Bingo Card Guy. Piracy doesn't distinguish between good people and bad people. It's about getting things you want without paying for them.
There is no pirate site that refuses to steal from indie artists, ethical companies, or OSS contributors.
New online competition is media distribution is allowed! My company sells it works directly, so do heaps of independent artists. Nobody from other companies or the government can stop us selling work online.
If the government is going to step in and try to stop piracy, fine. I want to live in a world where I can write an application and become financially independent from it (and without having to give it away and get paid for support, yuck!). But they also have to address this issue that these old, but rich companies are hurting the economy by insisting on being inefficient middle men that customers don't care about and probably not creators of the content either.
Re: control of distribution, for large budget films, unfortunately, the people who fund them want to limit the 0-day release to cinemas - as they find it's more profitable, which probably helps pay for all those special effects. Personally I don't mind - it's their movie.
I can understand wanting to limit early releases while the film is still in the cinema. Fair enough, but personally I think after a suitable amount of time has passed the producers should release the films to digital channels (e.g. iTunes) themselves. I don't think the money distributors cream off the top makes anything better. In my ideal world distributors would be producing the DVD/CD/BlueRay disks for the very small (eventually) group of people who still want to consume that way. In other words, they would be by far the smallest group in the picture, not the biggest.
My main beef is that the RIAA and MPAA have a defunct business model and they are wielding the U.S. legal system as a tool to punish non-violent criminals severely.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-high-...
Thankfully, the article does point out the discrepancies in Biden's claims:
Interestingly, the statements seem to fly in the face of a
recent Government Accountability Office study released to
U.S. Congress earlier this year, which concluded that there
is virtually no evidence for the claimed million dollar
losses by the entertainment industry. That study suggested
that piracy could even benefit the economy.
Ars Technica did a great job thoroughly debunking the claims of the RIAA and MPAA:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits...
And here's their take on the referenced government study:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-governmen...
But in this country, facts don't really have much weight when it comes to policy making.
The irony of all of this is that like the War on Drugs, instead of keeping people safe and happy, this coming War on Piracy will only serve as a drain on America's economy and morale, and yes, could even result in the creation of a dangerous black market. Tax dollars flushed down the toilet for the purpose of spreading misery and soothing the irrational fears of an aging and nervous minority of rich people.
"Negative effects on U.S. industry may include lost sales, lost brand value, and reduced incentives to innovate", "The U.S. economy as a whole may grow more slowly because of reduced innovation and loss of trade revenue", "research in specific industries suggest that the problem is sizeable"
Basically, the report says that piracy has some bad and some good effects, but these effects are extremely difficult to quantify due to the illicit nature of piracy. Nonetheless, piracy is probably a significant problem.
As it becomes easier for people to get stuff without paying for it, production of said stuff will drop. It's common sense, people.
And so what? The "said stuff" is mainly quality-inversely-proportional-to-budget music and movies. We needn't them anyway.
I'd bet the black market values blockbusters pretty highly too. However the easier it gets to pirate, the more people will do so and the incentive to create these movies will evaporate.
* indie game developers
* Unsigned bands
* authors and book publishers
* OSS companies that sell their compiled binaries training material while giving away their source.
People who create things deserve to be compensated if they wish to. Taking something that doesn't belong to you is stealing.
I'd like to rephrase your statement to:
People who create things should be compensated if we can figure out a system to do so that's not too costly to the general public. "Intellectual property" is a contradictory concept. Claiming that ideas, thoughts, and other non-physical entities "belong" to someone is contradicting the very nature of the universe.
Note: I am an independent content creator (though I don't live from my content at the moment).
No, that's not the basis of capitalism in the slightest!
The point is to work out the price someone will pay and maximise your returns by offering it to them at that price.
It is up to content distributors to set the price they want; and it is up to the public to refuse to purchase if they feel it is too high.
You also seem to be claiming that piracy is purely due to high prices; and that if prices come down piracy will end. This seems unlikely. I am certain we would see less piracy - but much less? Free is always better than any price after all :)
"Intellectual property" is a contradictory concept. Claiming that ideas, thoughts, and other non-physical entities "belong" to someone is contradicting the very nature of the universe.
This is pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo. In a wider sense it is certainly correct but, realistically, the idea of intellectual property is used (call it a hack) to simply identify those who contributed to creating something and therefore can (in the eyes of society) ask for renumeration in return for it.
Intellectual property is fucked up (for example; it shouldn't be an easily transferable right, grandchildren - maybe even children - shouldn't get it etc., it is too easy to protect generalities rather than the specific thing you created) but I think the general point has merit.
I worked in the games industry for a short while (for an indie developer) and it is pretty disheartening to see your hard work handed out for free without your consent. It feels like someone is sticking their middle finger up at you. :) And that is what is at issue; we are potentially building a culture where people expect stuff for free and businesses are expected to earn revenue in other ways - to the point that people will take it anyway and to hell with what you think. That's an extremely complex model in my mind and possibly counter productive to innovation.
I'm familiar with this feeling too (as is one other poster). It's not great.
I get the feeling that if someone posted 'someone ripped off my app!' on HN everyone would instantly upmod it. Post that somebody's doing something about TPB and suddenly piracy is assumed to only affect large, evil corporations.
I never understood that point. That's like saying preventing murder is contradictory to the nature of humanity.
The point of societies is to make laws and enforce them, in a way that leads to everyone being better off. As far as I'm concerned, the argument against copyright should only be about whether it makes society better or not; it has nothing to do with morality, and definitely nothing to do with the nature of the universe.
I agree that the argument about copyright should be practical, not moral - which is why I'm opposed to starting the discussion from the point of view that authors have a moral right to preventing people from copying their creations. They don't.
Sorry, what's wrong with being entitled to the benefit of my own work? What right does anyone else have over something I made, with my work, taking hundreds of hours of my time?
I can't believe such a shitty personal attack on someone for daring to say they're entitled to what they create is sitting on HN with +3.
How would you feel if someone uploaded all the source for Woobius to TPB?
Then how will you make money from Woobius? How will any of us on HN make money from our work? Not everything can be ad-supported.
> You're arguing for some sort of positive freedom to profit from labor, which unsurprisingly no libertarian-leaning person would really endorse.
What? Freedom to profit from their own labor is very much something Libertarians hold dear.
> Not only that, you're arguing that state power should be used to create artificial scarcity
Libertarians want the government to stop interfering in markets. Piracy isn't a market, it's a crime - piracy hurts markets.
Libertarians want the government to stop interfering in markets.
Yes, but profiting from your labour is typically handled by an exchange of goods, and once the exchange is done, each party has no say over the goods they traded.
Not so with copyright, it limits what people can do with goods after they have been exchanged, and it does so through a state-enforced artificial monopoly. It is definitely government interference in the market. If it was completely free, you would lose control over your creations the second you sell them.
Piracy isn't a market, it's a crime - piracy hurts markets.
It is a market, and it works exactly like any other market. Piracy appears when a large amount of consumers disagree on the pricing of artificially scarce goods, and instead acquire the goods illicitly, by circumventing the artificial scarcity.
The easiest way to combat piracy is through the market, simply provide a better product than the pirated product, and provide it at a price most consumers are willing to pay. Most people pirate not because they want everything for free, but because there is a huge discrepancy between the price of something and what they percieve it to be worth.
There is a reason that, for example, the Apple Music Store is so incredibly successful even though anyone can pirate music easily. They provide a better product (legal DRM-free files conveniently and quickly delivered is better than illegal DRM-free files that are inconvenient to get) at a better price (1$ per song instead of ~15$ for a bundle you didn't want just to get the song you actually wanted).
It is perfectly possible to compete with the pirate market, and doing so can be more profitable than trying the heavy-handed approach and strengthening the monopoly.
Fair use is awesome. Copyrights shouldn't last forever. Unfortunately, a lot of people have been conned by places like TPB - which punish everyone, including those who make OSS, and people who give away some of their works for free but charge for others - into thinking copyright reform requires advocating piracy.
There are many people who believe authors deserve to be paid, but fair use has a place. In fact, I think most human being fit into that category. Advocating for fair use while advocating stealing alienates everyone from the cause.
And, to return to the original article, I'm convinced that dealing with it in this heavy-handed way, by adding more legislation, more law enforcement, isn't the right way. And I don't think it helps you or me as creators.
(I also wish people would stop downvoting you just because they disagree, that's really not the HN way. :-/ )
It really is if you've had your work stolen. There are 3 people, last time I checked, in this thread who have. They're all pretty strongly against piracy.
> (I also wish people would stop downvoting you just because they disagree, that's really not the HN way. :-/ )
Hehe, thanks. It's been quite odd to watch - +2, -1, +1 etc as different groups for and against moderate reddit style.
Similarly no one particularly has the right to obtain someone else's work for free. Which is why this argument is a bit silly/flawed because human society doesn't work with such moral absolutes :)
I would feel pretty stupid for having allowed someone untrustworthy access to the non-public source code of Woobius. Then I would move on and continue adding features for our registered users, who like to deal with a company like us rather than "someone on the internet who stole the source of one of the up-and-coming construction web 2.0 companies on the web". It would make very little difference to our business model.
However, if someone copied the app, interface, functionality, etc, and made more money than us by doing so, well, I would have to take my hat off, because building a good app is hard, but selling it effectively is harder. If such a person existed, I think we'd be talking to them and trying to hire them or join forces somehow.
The value of an SaaS business is not in its source code (though keeping it private is generally a good idea), but in its existing customer, users, reputation, business connections, etc. Which is why it is an inherently stronger business model than selling bits and bytes (like the record companies do). If recording artists switched to a similar business model (which is perfectly plausible) they wouldn't care about piracy either.
It used to be that the only way to fame was through the distribution channels that was owned by a few large corps.
That's not how it is today and that's a good thing not a bad thing.
* Digital distribution is good for artists, as they can reach their fans without needing a record company to physically shift media. Digital distribution is not piracy. Nobody is disputing digital distribution being anything but good.
* Piracy is bad, as people taking things without paying the people that made them.
Look at Trent Reznor. He's not signed anymore, and gives away Ghosts I as a way of connecting directly with his fans, and making money off Ghosts II - IV, which he charges for.
TPB distribute torrents for Ghosts I which is great, but they also help people steal Ghosts II - IV.
No different that HN's friend, the Bingo Card Creator guy, when he made the desktop version of BGC and had his app ripped off left right and center.
I'm not sure he feels the same about the works he's selling directly himself.