Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If instead the "thief" breaks into my car and copies all of the music from my iPod (let's say that all of the songs are recordings of my band to make things simple) and posts it on several torrent trackers, that's piracy (copyright infringement). I still have the originals, so no harm, no foul. In fact, I might be glad that someone is doing some free marketing for my band (or I might choose to cry about the billions in lost sales).
I'd argue that piracy has done more to help the music industry than it has to hurt it. Back when people bought music on $17 CD's, they only bought a handful per year. And once you lost a CD or it got scratched, you stopped listening to it. You could also only carry 6 at a time in your CD changer. With illegal MP3 downloads (and later, legal ones), people could suddenly carry thousands of songs in their pockets, and they never get lost or scratched.
Back in college, since music was now "free", my friends and I expanded our musical tastes beyond gangsta rap to include rock, country, trance, techno, classical, and jazz. With a new world of music open to us, we started going to local jazz clubs, raves, and concerts (which put more money in the record labels' pockets than CD sales ever did). I went to 2 Rage Against the Machine concerts in one weekend, even though I've never paid for one of their albums.
Just the other day I listened to the first MP3 I ever downloaded (August, 1998, Eagle-Eye Cherry - Save Tonight). I backed up all of my old MP3's on CD-R back in the day, and they've been passed from desktop to laptop to XBox to iPod to phone ever since.
Since all of these songs are always instantly available to me, these artists are still within reach, even the one-hit-wonders from yesteryear. If I hadn't downloaded Fastball's "Outta My Head" back in 1998, I would never have gone to see them perform at the Viper Room in 2008 (it was the illegal download of a B-side that made me appreciate them more than hearing "The Way" on the radio).
Second. The reason the music industry is booming with the likes of iTunes is the convenient access to it. In the past, it was more convenient to pirate, now its more convenient to buy than it is to pirate.
I'll agree with you there, but I don't think legal music downloads could have succeeded if they hadn't been illegal first, in the same way that freemium services become so popular based on the free option, only later to make money with the paid plan. Take my generation, who went to college from 1998-2002...we got so used to downloading illegally (the scour.net guys were in the next building over from me), that we still download today, just on iTunes since we have money now.
I may be a pirate, but if US TV companies actually gave me a choice to buy their programmes with some degree of timeliness, perhaps I wouldn't need to be.
But I am genuinely amused that people expect political correctness from people whose livelihoods they are probably disrupting unlawfully. (I chose my words carefully there).
It is especially interesting to hear this from a Cocoa developer, by the way, considering the rate at which Cocoa apps are pirated. (I'm not calling you a hypocrite; no, quite the opposite. "Suicidal" might be a better epithet here.)
Anyway, I wrote a book. It ended up on Scribd, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay. I still made plenty of money. Could I have made more? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly don't know what percentage of the pirates would have bought it had it not been available on TPB. My estimate is zero, which means piracy cost me nothing.
Piracy, in my opinion, is just a scapegoat for "nobody wants my crap anymore". Yeah, piracy happens. But even in the absence of piracy, it's possible that nobody wanted to pay $50 for a season of a TV show anyway.
Yeah, I respectfully call bullshit on that.
There's a large group who consider paying for things to be a moral issue, paying even when they're not being monitored and the content is easily copied.
This popularity seems to have been the big catalyst for trolls trying to make a buck, which means the whole blasted thing is deeply mired in a lot of people's long-term interests.
To me, this means the whole thing is going to be completely lacking a sensible view for decades -- both POV's that support "in the public good" (e.g. being able to use excerpts of copyrighted material for publication/research/etc, make digital backups of your property) as well as being compensated for the service (e.g. selling copies of your music to pay the bills so you can write more songs).
There's nothing I can do about piracy. The options are to either (a) treat it as the enemy and fight it or (b) accept the benefits it brings and write off the losses.
Judging by the progress the RIAA and co are having with option (a), I think option (b) is a far more rational alternative.
(Actually, piracy directly benefits my line of work, and nets some interesting intellectual challenges for me and my field, since it's driving plenty of businesses into the arms of DRM-style schemes. It will not surprise you to learn that I also believe the pirates are going to lose the technical battle over DRM in the long term, too. So, in behalf of everyone who enjoys writing kernel debuggers and hypervisors: thanks for the extra billable hours!)
1. Legal: pursue copyright violators, possible DMCA claims against those who circumvent your protection scheme (if you have one)
2. Technical: build in DRM. If not, at least add forensic marking to allow you to track the source of your piracy to know if it's hurting actual sales or not
3. Social: stop propagating the meme that copying commercial data is ok because you are knowledgable enough to do so and it doesn't hurt anyone.
The RIAA has an uphill battle because of no option #2. (CDs have no DRM, despite efforts to retrofit it). They are trying #1 and #3.
Also, I have a counter-example to Felten's claims that DRM never prevented piracy. With BD+ (Blu-ray), we have had some discs survive 60 days before they were cracked. In that time period, there were no high-def rips available on Bittorrent of those movies.
While there are still no large studies showing how many potential pirates purchased a disc due to the delay in availability, I wholeheartedly disagree with "There's nothing I can do about piracy".
I'm not saying I've never pirated anything, but I find the sense of entitlement some people have about it makes honest discussion difficult.
Sort of like how anything that is actually a science doesn't need to include the word in its name.
Squatters also deprive landowners of the potential use of their property, may cause damage or other economic harm, but unless they're taking items from the land and not giving them back, we don't call that theft. We call it trespassing, maybe vandalism. If my neighbor opens a sewage plant in his backyard, it certainly would deprive me of potential sales or rentals of my property, but we still don't call it theft. In fact, we have to make up special zoning laws that restrict what people can do with their property to address just this case, because no preexisting concept works. (Sound familiar?)
These distinctions matter. If they didn't, we wouldn't be arguing about it, would we?
Just be happy they haven't wised up and started calling pirates "content rapists"; rape is also pretty hard to quantify in dollar terms.
We have distinctions between different crimes for good reason. Death penalty for speeding? I'm sure some who have lost their loved ones to reckless drivers might agree. But we as a society have pretty much decided that while there should be a punishment, it should not be that harsh.
These things can be considered, in some cases, to be even more severe than theft. "Theft" is a highly charged word even though copying source code from a nuclear missile silo would be punished more severely than the theft of a chocolate bar from a 7 Eleven.
It depends whether you're referring to your own personal definition of "theft" or a legal or common definition (of which there are many). If the former, no-one can quarrel with you, of course ;-)
If the latter, in some jurisdictions, permanent deprivation of property is required for "theft", so copying files would not count. Where permanent deprivation is not required and non-tangible property counts, then sure, it'd be theft.
Even forgetting the definition of theft, sure, no-one should be able to obtain and use your code without permission, but if they were to do so, it doesn't necessarily mean they have committed the legal offence of "theft." You are free to consider it such but legally it may not be such.
What is significant, I believe, is the moral weight of categorizing it as theft, rather than specific technical definitions and jurisdictions. I believe the same context is meant by the Obama administration's choice of words. We are at a time in history for which there is no precedent for all the things we are able to do. It's for this reason I bring up these arguments with an audience which seems to largely favor making free use of any product deemed fair game by their own justification.
As far as how I'd view it if people "pirated" software that I'd worked on? Well... I'd view it about the same as I did when I last found a copy of said software being shared: it's copyright infringement, not theft.
One way or another, somebody took the time to learn to play some instrument, write a song, record that song, then get it distributed in some manner. All of that costs both time and money, just like designing and building a car or a laptop or any other physical good. If depriving someone of compensation for something they worked to create and distribute isn't theft, I don't know what is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Comparis...
I hope you take the opportunity at some point in your life to revisit your opinion on this issue.
"Depriving" is a somewhat loaded term that implies a "take" behaviour to you, but it's just not strictly true.
While that may be true that the piracy had an unintended benefit for the band. I think you're making an appeal to the fallacy "the ends justify the means".
In this case, the record label and by extension the employees of the record label lost out on their share of the $1 you should arguably have spent on the track. (assuming an itunes download at approximately market price).
So that works out to say $0.80 cents not paid to the workers at the store, the marketing department etc...
In the end, the band might have benefitted on balance, but in an alternative scenario, you PAID for that song, liked it and still went to see the band at the Viper room.
I'm fully aware that there are a number of people who violently disagree with me on this. In my own opinion, the question of whether it's "better for the music industry overall" or not is irrelevant. The people who own the rights to the music, own the right to decide whether it's OK to get the song for free or not. If that costs them a customer at the viper room in 2008, it's their choice.
"Theft plain and simple" is probably an overstatement - but (again, in my opinion) - there is definitely some moral ambiguity to this.
Let's imagine that for some reason at YC11 a band shows up. In their pitch meeting PG and team feel suitably Rocked and Rolled so he decides to throw in the seed money for their studio time. The terms are that YC gets to keep 80% of the money from record sales (come to think of it, this happened on an episode of Dragon's Den UK).
You download the song. Go to the concert. What happens to the share owned by YC? Do they make money? Do they deserve money?
I do understand where you're coming from... but I also disagree.
To wit: What share does YC get if I never become a fan of the band at all?
You're addressing a whole other issue here. First off, there is a movement among record labels to grab a portion of revenues beyond record sales (the 360-deal [1]).
Second, you raise the question of whether record labels are needed at all in the first place. Similar to bootstrapping a startup, a musician can take a very DIY approach to their careers. In fact, one could argue that a musician is virtually identical to an entrepreneur. They build their band/company by creating music/a product that fans/people want.
Startups are incredibly cheap to do today because of changes in technology--open source, cloud computing, etc etc. In that same regard, starting out as a musician does not require the millions of dollars from Warner Bros. execs that it once did either. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) can produce quality recordings, social networks allow for cheap marketing, CD pressing isn't required for distribution, and on and on and on.
As "founders", musicians deserve to be rewarded for their work. Not to be screwed over by record labels ("VCs")[2]#.
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# I am in no way suggesting that VCs regularly screw over startup founders
The year was 1998, and there was no iTunes. My only other alternative was to buy the full CD at $12-17. As a poor college student, I could only afford to buy maybe 3 CD's a year, and Fastball's album would not have been one of them. I would therefore never have heard the song (or paid for it) and never would have gone to the Viper room.
You're using a post-hoc justification of the end result to claim that the piracy was acceptable.
It wasn't.
Theft covers more than just the taking of physical property. You can steal an idea, for example.
Once someone has made it possible for the idea to be shared -- even if they wrote it down and locked it in their safe -- then the information is already potentially accessible!
Breaking-in to someone's home to steal the paper you wrote your idea on is explicitly the theft, and getting the idea written on it is a side-effect.
first example:
> dishonestly pass off (another person‘s ideas) as one’s own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying
How so? I can't even really write about it without getting mired in semantics, but here goes...
Suppose, one icy winter, I see you scraping your car's windows with an inverted plastic coffee mug. I'm having a lot of trouble with my store-bought flat, shovel-shaped scraper. I copy your idea: I bring a plastic mug out to my car, and use that mug to scrape frost off my car's windows the next day.
Did I "steal" your idea? How did I do that? You still have use of your plastic coffee mug. What's missing?
And then there's the issue of independent invention which happens a lot more than "copying == theft" folks ever admit. I invented the round windsheild frost scraper in the mid-80s. Unfortunately, someone else did, too: I found a round scraper in a K-Mart once, with a patent number on it.
Did I steal his/her idea? On my mother's grave, I did not. I invented it independently.
Similarly, I invented the same propulsion system that Freeman Dyson did in the 60s for "Project Orion". My sister claims to have invented "curtain walls" in high school, a long time before she went to college for an architecture degree.
Describe how I can "steal" an idea.
How can you tell if I invented the circular ice scraper, or the folks who hold a patent on it invented it? If they invented it, why do I still scrape frost and ice off my car's windshield with a yellow plastic coffee mug, manufactured by "Tupperware"?
Actually, now that I think about it, there were once services like this... anyone know what happened to them? The closest thing I can think of is Pandora, but having to be at the mercy of the site's RNG only suits certain listening patterns.
Anecdotally, it appears to vary widely from person-to-person, year, type of content, etc. But I find it interesting that technology-minded people tend to emphasize the positive aspects without any real evidence that on the whole they outweigh the negative. You've never bought $1 DVDs on the corner, but it's very common for others.
I don't believe the assumption that every download is a lost sale is remotely true. It's also possible that many downloads led to increased sales or that the downloader already owned a copy of or access to the media and was just getting it in digital form for convenience.
If I download the mp3 copy of a CD I own a physical copy of, am I a criminal? Did I steal from the artist?
They don't either.
To the first question, I would say that you are guilty of copyright infringement. Compare it to buying a bootleg DVD of a DVD that you already own that was scratched and is now unplayable, or sneaking in to watch the re-release of Avatar now that you own it on Blu-Ray.
To the second, no you haven't stolen anything from the artist, since the artist (well, really the record label) still has the original item.
I'm sorry, but that viewpoint is ludicrous, but I'm sure the RIAA loves that they've wired people to feel that way. Makes their extortion much easier.
(And, yes, I do believe in paying for the music I listen to.)
I'm not sure if this exact issue has been litigated, probably because the copyright holders would really rather not even discuss the issue, and it isn't the problem anyhow. A strict reading of the laws involved definitely show it's copyright infringement, but one could reasonably argue the appropriate damages for the act should be a flat $0. One can reasonably counterargue too, though. Something along the line of "Well, then they should have bought a second copy", though the problem with that is then you have to defend how when it is disadvantageous to the customer for it to be considered a strictly physical product, we consider it that way, but when it is disadvantageous to the customer to treat it as an abstract intellectual good, we treat it that way too. However, that's only a logical contradiction, not a legal one. This is probably why this has (to the best of my knowledge) never been litigated, even a victory of the case could set a precedent they wouldn't want. Best for them to just keep this out of court.
I was referring to the act of downloading the mp3 from a website vs ripping the cd directly to your computer. Similar to the situation of growing your own pot for personal use vs buying it from a drug dealer.
See http://www.betanews.com/article/Where-does-Joe-Biden-stand-o... for a quick overview of Biden's background on copyright issues.
Here's more on the history of Biden's pro-copyright campaign.
It's a lot better than if we elected McCain/Palin, yes.
I imagine that, by now, you've read The Onion's absurdly prescient "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'" from January 17, 2001 -- http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nigh...
Maybe I have different ideals than the original poster that I replied to, but I feel confident in saying that yes, we are better off not having elected McCain/Palin.
Remember how awesome the Clinton years were? Clinton and Biden tried to push their own Patriot act [1], and Congress hated them so much that they shot it down.
[1] Biden has described the Patriot act as being basically a copy of his "Omnibus Counterterrorism Act" from 1995.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9702/mccain_no_netneutrality_ne...
I'm an author myself,and I see that as "the Prohibition in the United States". Exaggeration to this problem could backfire.
Copyright has been extended so much that is a flagrant abuse +70years from authors dead when it was 25 years from creation like a invention patent means a lot of people could seriously object to it, and win.
Is drawing Mickie Mouse a crime just because the corporations lobbied for it?
95% of the US population do and will pirate in their lives. Criminalization of piracy and sex means anybody could go to jail(it is so easy to put pirate cds in your enemy home and call police).
This population vote Obama and they could make him jobless on the blink of an eye. No matter what Obama says, if 90% of the people think something should be permitted(like drawing Mickie or copying a Beatles song they have payed four times) in a democracy, that is Law. If the president oppose, he can go home.
I also view the ability to sell the copyrights themselves (patents, etc, etc) to a third-party as very distasteful -- as opposed to allowing someone to use your copyrighted item(s) for compensation -- as it seems very against the spirit of the law to give up your original right as the author.
Calling piracy "theft" doesn't require considering whether piracy results in lost sales. Instead, does piracy involve dishonest appropriation of someone else's property (virtual or otherwise)? Yes, usually. But, importantly, does piracy involve permanently depriving that person of that same property? If merely taking a photo, recording sound, or copying some files, clearly not.
To me it seems that if theft were legally defined as merely the dishonest appropriation of someone else's property without their consent, piracy is theft. If as is typical, though, theft requires depriving the owner of that same property, piracy is clearly not theft.
I'm no lawyer, so what's the legal definition of theft in the US? In the UK, "permanent deprivation" is required and so piracy is certainly not "theft."
Penalties are higher because piracy is easier to get away with?
It seems to me non-"internet" piracy cases are largely based on hard evidence, and when they try to include evidence for "potential to do" it's also based on some other hard-evidence, e.g. a large-scale CD-copying machine, a pallet of 100,000 blanks.
If you'd been convicted before for the same offence, then you're more likely to get more jail-time for repeat offending, i.e. a predilection for continuing that proven behaviour, but the punishment meted-out for copyright offences seems massively, unbelievably out-of-scale. Probably because they're often compensation paid to the copyright owner, rather than punishment for breaking the law.
"Piracy is bad."
OK, good luck shutting down that warez server in North Korea.
The "Pirates of the Caribbean" type of pirates did loot ships, but what they stole where often goods produced by slavery and itself stolen from the colonies.
Piracy or as I prefer to call it – copying is the result of a disconnect between price and cost.
When you steal you take something away from others so it's not there anymore, but copying isn't stealing it's copying by using an internet connection you pay for yourself, onto a computer you have paid for yourself. In other words the only one who have any real cost is the one who copies.
There is absolutely nothing that states that it's fair for musicians or other artist to make millions by mass producing and distributing at almost zero cost.
And now that we are on the subject of newspeak anyway. If you produce an album with the purpose of selling it, you aren't really an artist anymore, you are a businessman and your product is a commodity.
Deal!
Is it fair for software developers to make money by mass producing and distributing at almost zero cost?
My point is simply that it's not a right, it's a possibility.
Well, what about simple Econ 101? In a competitive market, prices tend towards the marginal cost of production. Wow! Someone just invented a technology that allows the duplication and distribution of recorded music to happen at almost zero cost!
Is it fair for the people whose livelihoods are changed by this new tech to lobby/pay for laws to maintain the price of their good at pre-new-tech levels? Is if fair for that new technology to be legally limited by highly unpopular, and un-democratically-created laws? Is it fair for me to be deprived of the use of that new technology for un-infringing uses?
And yes, I've taken advantage of the new technology to mass produce and distribute some of my own software are near zero-cost: http://www.stratigery.com/acl.html Have a copy, for free!
The Bush Administration, before Obama was elected.
</spoiler>
(Cheet sheet: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c...)
Anyways, score 1 point for you, you can take that one right on to Fox News.
If they want that lead balloon to be a golden parachute, they can make it, just rising the percentage of the royalties they pay to the artist.
Users pirated software at my first startup company. It wasn't cool.
Home taping is killing music!