Of course I understand the appeal of pirated content, sometimes it's the only usable way to get something, especially for some old movies/series. And it put pressure on large media companies for content delivery technologies etc. But it's not all fun and giggles, it's a complex issues requiring global discussion and compromises.
If it's free + ads I could agree, but most content sellers are just trying to get paid twice
US Cable television already fits that description. Almost 100 million Americans pay a monthly subscription for television content which still includes ads. For that matter, HBO itself is already an extra additional fee on top of that prior subscription.
Your restaurant comparison seems particularly disingenuous considering commercials are a pretty normal aspect of television consumption.
If we take your argument as well, then piracy is perfectly fine because people have been doing it for a long time and it's become a normal aspect of the consumption.
I once had to pay 500€ for torrenting an episode of The Americans that I had no way of buying legally, at least in my country at that time.
The only thing I regret? Using torrent and not some alternative where they can't get you for "illegal distribution".
TPB and digital piracy in general functions as a library of Alexandria. Nobody in our society gives a shit about keeping things available. It's all about NOW and MONEY. So much entertainment would be lost without the internet.
When discussing the validity of copyright laws, using legal entitlement as an argument is pretty circular, don't you think?
Under a circular legal moral system, moral progress would hinge on new understanding of old laws or else nominally morally neutral changes to the law. The other systems more easily promote moral progress via new understanding. Utilitarians can have new insights into utility functions. Religious based morality can have life experience and new cultural understandings influence their understanding and consequences of their basic commands.
Do you give proper credit to the creator/author/inventor/discoverer of that knowledge, or refrain from using it?
The question isn't whether this happens to be legal or not, the question is whether it should be, and to what extent.
Do you have any example which you were wanting to compare to, or was the question deliberately open-ended?
And yes. Every photocopy a text book? Ever trace out a comic book panel or other image? Ever make copies of a photo (obviously more common digitally, but could be done in the film age too) that you didn't take originally? I've done all of them, they're all things I'm not legally entitled to do.
But, to the OP's point, I totally agree digital changes the equation. But it should also change the law. Theoretically having an img tag that references someone else's site could be thought of as illegal, after all. I'm reproducing the work without authorization, and even making money from it (ad impressions on my site rather than the hosting site), -while costing the original site money- (since they still pay the hosting and bandwidth costs). Digital changed -everything-, because the cost to copy went to 0. The laws have not kept up.
Also I think this is a European law.
Edit: actually it's ~$200 per household (depends on the value of the property)
But the problem, just like with patents, is that there a many kinds of actors in our modern world, including large companies who couldn't really care less. A company like Disney would, I think, be more motivated by a 5 or 10 year copyright period, as it would require them to keep on producing and innovating.
If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system anyway.
This is a really stunning claim and one that needs a lot more defense than you're giving it. I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old. I'd be happy to furnish a list if such a thing is necessary, but as it is your statement seems absurd on the face of it.
maldusiecle: I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old
I'd love to see more support for both sides of this argument. My guess would be that olau and maldusiecle may not have much overlap in the list of artists that they consider innovative. I'm probably closer to olau's position: while there are artists who benefit from copyright, they tend to be the ones who have chosen to concentrate on the commercial potential of their work rather than innovation. And I'd guess that most of those who are "doing art for art's sake" would do as well or better under a much less restrictive copyright regime.
Lets face it: if you haven't made your profit in 5 years you never will and the loss will have been written of.
As a budding musician. I am mentally prepare for my art to be a financial failure/setback. It comes with the territory.
Some do, some don't.
I don't doubt your anecdotes, but I doubt it's true as a pattern.
Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.
The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?
If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge). For two reasons: He wouldn't have read as much as he did, and he couldn't have borrowed as much as he did for his works.
We want some kind of middleground. Creators should be compensated, but complete all-encompassing DRM means only a fraction of people would've watched Game of Thrones to discuss it at the water cooler, Kanye West (regardless of what you think of his music) wouldn't be able to release most of his music, etc.
I've never seen a torrent site which wouldn't let torrents because "oh, it's individual developer's program, we don't allow those". I would say that overwhelming majority of people who created pirate sites (or created/sold illegal compact discs before that) didn't care about who to pirate from. And practically all shareware developers felt it.
> Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.
I've never said it did, and of course it doesn't. And I think pretty much everyone here understands it. I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.
> The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?
I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy... And there's a lot of areas where it's hard to pin point the exact place for some dividing line, but everyone can see the difference between entities: like where you put exact line between colors on a rainbow? But you know that green isn't yellow and red isn't blue, you don't need to know where that line is exactly.
> If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge)
I don't how that would make Shakespeare read less, since he couldn't download a book on his phone anyway, and he probably read many books which weren't owned by him, since they were pricey and that price was mostly behind materials of the book and work to create this physical object. But he might or he might not exist, it's hard to say. It's not certain that writing would be less developed, if there were more effects of copyright. Being able to benefit from writing more could motivate more people to write, so it's hard to say what would have happen. Would we will be on the same level of technical progress if there were not patents (yes, there's a lot of ridiculous and bogus things about it now, but I'm talking about history) in previous 200-300 years, when inventors were motivated to create new things by legal protection of the right to benefit from it? Hard to say with certainty (though I incline to the "less advanced" answer).
No it's not. Mp3s are compressed, x264 rips are compressed, digital texts are not the same as books.
Do you mean that they are "almost a perfect representation of the original work"? Because that is closer to reality, and also telling.
Someone over a 100 years ago thought that a black and white movie sped up with just a few frames per second was a convincing representation of a train running towards you in a crowded cinema.
Some people think that bad covers of songs are good enough of a substitute over the real thing.
Stories told before writing was invented was basically transcoded and compressed and corrupted, and humanity would be immensely more stupid if we had not "allowed" that.
Please pay creative people and content creators, but locking down content to people who would otherwise not pay for it regardless is just regressive, on top of never actually working.
> I've never said it did
You didn't provide any specific numbers, but seemed to be arguing with your two anecdotes that piracy (as opposed to simply natural market/product factors) caused so many lost sales it put people out of business.
> I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.
Perhaps for the same reason you replied to a post about copyright hoarders using stringent legal methods and talked about something else entirely; because, to quote you, things are "not all black and white".
This is quite a bit larger than copyright, but obviously media is the first place where it became very obvious that distribution is no longer a worthwhile problem to solve as it has been commoditized by computers and the Internet.
The Internet makes it possible for creators to have a decent standard of living. A tremendous number of them can have that decent standard of living. As opposed to a handful of owners of distribution companies living in opulence. An entirely capitalist redistribution of wealth on a large scale. That is viscerally disgusting to many who see those very large companies as the pillars holding our society aloft. To them it looks like rats chewing through the pillars.