Court affirms jail time for Pirate Bay founders
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The only way I can see this type of piracy being over in two years is if the media industries up and die so there's nothing left to steal.
I wonder how much this case actually cost the media industries to litigate. The actual fines involved are relatively small, so it would be interesting to know whether the record companies will be able to use the fines to cover their legal fees.
Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource, e.g. taking money or property, using your time without paying an agreed price.
Copyright infringement happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules. You aren't denied any resource you had before my infringement.
Please stop calling copyright infringement stealing. It is not. Doing so is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of guilt in people (due to western notions of Stealing is Wrong).
If you jump the fence at a concert, or sneak into a movie theater, you are guilty of "Theft of Services". Note that this type of theft does not deprive the original owner that resource.
If you want to pretend you are not stealing something when you infringe on copyright, that's up to you; I'd suggest that this is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of innocence
One last thing: since when is "Stealing is Wrong" a "western" notion? The Buddhist prohibition on stealing is even more extreme in its condemnation of the type of behavior you are defending.
Secondly, while I can't know for sure, I think the 'Stealing is Wrong' mentality is not a statement about whether stealing is good or bad, but how strongly it is stigmatized in the west. So, likening some other unrelated activity (such as copyright infringement) to theft has a powerful mental effect.
Finally, if you sneak into a movie theater or jump the fence at a concert, you are actually taking up a seat or space that could have been used by a paying customer. This isn't the same thing as downloading digital goods, in which your use of these goods has no impact on the producer unless it prevented you from purchasing something you otherwise might have.
Copyright infringement is not an innocent act, but all acts of infringement are not considered equal. Honestly, I feel like you're the one oversimplifying things.
Umm, no. Some modern Buddhist traditions may treat the precepts as "guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person", but that's a fairly recent innovation. The precepts (including the lay precepts) are described in painful detail in the Pali canon, the Agamas, and some Mahayana Sutras, and although the details of the prohibitions differ somewhat between various traditions, all of them go far beyond "guidelines". Trust me on this one.
Second: I ask again-- do you know a non-Western culture where theft is not stigmatized?
Finally: taking up space or a seat is not a factor in the legal definition of "theft of services"-- theft of Cable TV holds as well. The salient characteristc (which coincidentally agrees with the Buddhist precept) is "taking that which is not given."
I understand that you'd like to divorce copyright infringement from the notion of theft, based on the physical deprivation of goods, but the legal notion of theft is (and as far as I know, has always been) a great deal broader than that, however inconvenient this happens to be to your conscience.
Cable theft should probably not be called theft, because it is a combination of trespassing (to get the cable hooked up) and copyright infringement. Possibly, but I don't know the tech that well, it costs more to push the signal to more endpoints, which actually does work into theft of service then...
Okay, I trust you now. Congratulations, you've won an argument on the internet, and you didn't even need a citation.
Every retreat I've been on, and every book I've read has presented the precepts as a set of mindfulness trainings, and specifically distinguishes the concept of precept from the concept of 'commandment' or law.
We talked past each other, but to say that Buddhist ethics are stronger about things like 'not taking anything which is not freely given' is indeed correct. But equating that with theft is still not meant to be taken literally.
If we were to go down that road, much of what I've read about the precept not to commit murder also applies to speaking harshly to someone. I've always understood this as figurative, and valuable. But I am not going to call someone who harms someone through their words a murderer.
I feel like you are emphasizing too much on the words you are reading and not the intent or meaning behind them. That was the point I wanted to make, and hopefully I've done that now.
Let me guess: Thich Nhat Hanh?
Personally, I find the notion of "precepts as guidelines and not laws" to be attractive; I suppose a lot of Westerners do, too. Unfortunately, this is a very modern notion-- if you look at the (pre-20th-Century) literature, you'll find that the precepts are treated as laws, and that they go into explicit detail, and leave very little to personal judgment.
We talked past each other, but to say that Buddhist ethics are stronger about things like 'not taking anything which is not freely given' is indeed correct. But equating that with theft is still not meant to be taken literally.
I disagree (as you might guess.) I'd argue that "taking that which is not given" is, literally, theft, and vice versa.
If we were to go down that road, much of what I've read about the precept not to commit murder also applies to speaking harshly to someone. I've always understood this as figurative, and valuable. But I am not going to call someone who harms someone through their words a murderer.
I've never come across that reading of the precepts; usually, the prohibition on lying is taken to include non-skillful speech. That is quite a figurative reading, indeed.
I feel like you are emphasizing too much on the words you are reading and not the intent or meaning behind them. That was the point I wanted to make, and hopefully I've done that now.
I'd suggest that in your attempt to separate the words and the intent, you run the risk of redefining words to mean what you wish them to mean.
You'd like to make a distinction between copyright infringement and theft, based on a physical analogy; but, as I've pointed out, the notion of theft has always been broader than that. The intent is clear: you're not permitted to take that which is not given-- whether it is a physical object, or a service, or a copyrighted work.
I've been reading from modern teachers, because Buddhism is a living religion, not something that was laid down in absolute terms centuries ago. But I have read a bit of the older texts through English translation and just have not seen the sort of strictness that you are implying.
Providing some specific excerpts would really help move this discussion forward.
In the mean-time, the Wikipedia page on the Patimokkha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patimokkha) lists the monastic precepts for the Theravada tradition; even in schematic form, you can see that they are quite detailed. When you add on Buddhaghosa's commentary in the Kankhavitarani, things get quite detailed indeed.
But this is a voluntary practice and has to do with amplifying some basic foundational ideas of non-harming and mindfulness so that you can see them in minute details. Nowhere have I ever seen Buddhist teachings that imply that it should be the goal of the laypeople to take on the monastic precepts. Even throughout history the vast majority of Buddhist practitioners were bound only by the 5 lay precepts.
Again, I think that if you're a non-practitioner, from the outside it might seem strange that such things are meant as 'trainings' and not 'rules'. That having been said, there are certainly cases where these rules are taken very seriously. You can read the book 'Turtle Feet' for a contemporary look into how political and bureaucratic the Tibetan monastics can be.
What I've been told is that the Buddha taught in many, many different ways depending on his intended audience. So when he was speaking to plain, common folks, he gave them simple instructions to follow. For some devotional types, he constructed elaborate and complex rituals to help with practice. I think that you may be studying the more complex end of things and missing some of the less academic teachings.
I think that there are two phenomena here that we should distinguish with modern Buddhism. One is the sort of new-age culture that has taken the words of Thich Nhat Hahn and the Dalai Lama and turned Buddhism into a sort of 'feel good' spirituality that isn't very deep. This isn't the fault of the teacher, but of a mass audience hungry for some good feelings.
But then there are also people like Jack Kornfield, Steve Armstrong, Larry Rosenberg, Henepola Gunaratana, Pema Chodron, and many others who have taken a more westernized, but still faithful way of representing Buddhism in the West. This is again speaking from the viewpoint of a non-academic, but I'm also not just a 'true believer', so I've done enough of my homework to feel like you're making too strong of a statement about what precepts are meant to express.
The legal definition is not the same as the literal or figurative meaning of a word, which also may differs from its connotation.
Edit: Also while it might be called "theft of service" and considered larceny in US, in Sweden the same act is called "fraudulent behavior" and is a lesser form of fraud.
Perhaps, but it unnecessarily introduces a host of vague, subjective issues (to the benefit of the lawyers involved). The actual crime was being on someone else's real property without their consent, as such the correct charge should be "trespassing."
Copyright and copyright infringement are defined in specific sections of law. Any comparison to another area of law (theft, theft of services, piracy, patent or trademark infringement, or homicide) will of necessity be inaccurate.
kb
Also: I never said it was a strictly western notion. I don't know enough about other cultures to make claims. So I qualified my statement to those places where I know it is correct. I appologize for offending you by not making overly broad statements.
>Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource
Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design? Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item?
Most of the people on HN sell/create digital goods and to say that we have no rights over the things we create is very insulting.
Yes.
> Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design?
Yes.
> Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item?
No.
For stealing to have occurred, the owner of the item must be deprived of ownership of the item. Pirating software or design is (probably) wrong, but that doesn't make it stealing.
Yes. And the law agrees with me. Copyright infringement != theft. You could, of course, say they're the same because they're both illegal, but by that logic parking on a double yellow line is the same as genocide.
I think the argument is used so often because proponents of intellectual property protection realize that constructing an appeal to more axiomatic laws/rights breaks down very quickly. Traditional property rights are very easy to formally argue for by appealing to scarcity of resources. That obviously doesn't work for intellectual property.
We can say we have rights, and the law supports us in that and in general we will use that to advance our goals, whatever they are.
But that does not mean that we can not have reservations about all this and that we think that there might be a better alternative (for instance, trade secrets).
I'm all for opening the floodgates and abolishing copyright, even if that will hurt me personally.
Ditto. I love writing, blogging, etc. Maybe I can make money by selling my writing at some point in my life, even. But you know what, I'm willing to forfeit that possibility if it means that copyrights are no longer in existence.
An even better solution would be one that returns copyrights to their original limits (14 years, renewable for another 14), but before that happens every member of the RIAA will magically turn into a flying saucer and explode into a burst of maple syrup, I imagine.
Trademarks are a bit of a snag for my philosophically. I have a big problem with intellectual property, but I can understand the problem that would arise if anyone could market their products with another company's name or logo. One option I've come up with is that stores themselves could enforce trademarks.
Plenty of so-called knock-offs are produced right alongside the 'genuine' article, the only difference is in who gets compensated. The whole reason this idiocy exists is because goods are often traded well above their intrinsic value.
I ran a business selling software to small business for years. When I was selling software I'd written, I never tried to restrict the rights of my customers to resell copies of what I sold them. To say that they didn't really own what they'd bought would have been very insulting.
If copying physical objects were as easy as copying software, the practice of renting a car wouldn't make a sustainable business, in exactly the same way. That doesn't mean we should restrict the production of automobiles by law; it just means another business model is required.
If you aren't particularly crazy about some band,and they release an overpriced album, you will not buy. You will borrow from your friend and listen a couple times.
Why is that so hard?
Most of those involved in the ACM and IEEE also sell/create digital goods for a living, and yet in their ethics literature they conclude or imply that treating intellectual property like actual property makes little sense logically or philosophically. Of course, they stay safe by admonitioning us to obey laws unless there's ethical compulsion otherwise.
The argument that if somebody takes the oil out of your ground you don't have the oil anymore is not important in a discussion of whether it's ethical to do so, because the effects are the same for copyright infringement. If you write a book and I put a copy of it online, then the net effect is that you can't sell your book effectively anymore. Just like the case where I take the oil that's easy to get out of the ground and you can't sell your oil effectively anymore.
So saying that copyright infringement is not stealing, while perhaps law technically true, is a dishonest presentation of the issue. The feelings of guilt are not unwarranted.
No. What makes it scarce is that it is some limited number of kilograms of oil. If two people want it, each can only have half. There is no limited number of copies for data. If two, or two million, people want a copy, they can all make one -- or they could if the law allowed them: which is the point: the scarcity is not imposed by physics but by legal choice.
Of course with a limited thing like oil there's also the fact that not only would you be unable to capitalise, you would be unable to even be the end-user of the resource, when people steal it. But that's just an extra dimension to consider, not relevant to the core ethical issue, as the grandparent poster was trying to say.
Again, No. Ultimately, access is limited by physical limits: not everyone can easily travel to the lake and not everyone can fit in or around it. These things do not apply to data: everyone can make a copy.
> and if you cannot maintain control then in many cases there is no benefit in possession/creation
And data/information (abstract goods) are exactly a case where this does not apply. Abstract goods are nonrivalrous: your use and benefit from them does not limit mine.
Of course, there are probably various ways to construe 'property' to accommodate abstract goods, and whatever else, and they may even be useful and practical. But with abstract goods there is something different in physical fact. Surely that is the most important thing to have in mind if you want to consider ways of handling it.
As to the ethics, the physical basis is critical, because it is where the buck stops. Since copying renders no direct physical harm to the copyright 'owner' it must make us think differently about it.
The physical basis is just an incidental detail. The ethical basis is that individuals must use their minds to survive, meaning they must have ownership over the produce of their minds to survive, meaning they must have property rights. To say that somebody who creates a work, whether intellectual or otherwise, should not have control over its access/distribution, is to argue against property rights and indeed the right to survive.
As the previous poster argued, pirating/stealing my intellectual property amounts to removing my ability to profit from my creation/property, which amounts to direct (physical) harm to me, the copyright owner. True, it doesn't stop me using my creation, but that's hardly the point. What if I invent a perpetual motion machine, should just anyone be able to then tap into my non-scarce energy source without permission? Besides, saying property should be granted on the basis of physical scarcity says nothing about why it should be granted to a particular person - it's a poor criterion all round.
(but it's not true that scarcity of oil is only imposed by physics, it's also decided artificially by OPEC)
Although copyright is one mechanism to create incentives for creative activity, it is far from the only mechanism.
kb
Copyright might assist production (though the evidence is shaky), but to say it is a sine qua non is flat out wrong.
Justice Breyer, back when he was a law professor, not a Supreme Court justice, wrote an interesting article about this, arguing that copyright throughout most of its history was in fact unnecessary because of the delay and costs of copying.
From the latter half of the 20th century onward, copying technology has gotten cheaper and faster. That has shifted the balance. The copier can now, especially with digital goods, get their copy out to the market fast enough to reduce or eliminate the sales of the original.
As a result many software companies are turning to server based applications, where they can physically enforce artificial scarcity. Now consumers are not only disallowed from copying and distributing the software, but (1) they are no longer even able to (2) they often lose control of their own data (3) they lose control over their usage of the software: the company can suspend their account at any time. Is this a good thing? In my opinion it is not.
These artificial scarcity rules help make creativity economically possible.
Yes, copying is a good thing; it's how the human race makes progress. But life is a movie, not a snapshot; even in the not-so-long run, it would be counterproductive to elevate copying to the status of an absolute, preemptive Good Thing.
Consider:
1. Someone has to invest money in creating intellectual property. At a minimum, the actual creators have to come up with enough money to buy food, shelter, etc., for themselves and perhaps their families while they're doing their creative thing.
(I won't even get into whether the creators' investment of their time is deserving of compensation; I happen to think it is, but that's not important here.)
2. The harsh reality is that investors normally will not make such investments unless they have at least a reasonable expectation of getting their money back (purely-altruistic motives being rare).
3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money for the fruits of the creative process, they're highly likely to give a thumbs-down to that particular request for their money.
(As an analogy, imagine the effect that Hugo Chavez's 'nationalization' -- read: confiscation -- of foreign oil companies' interests in Venezuela has had on the willingness of those and other companies to risk any more money there.)
4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect.
5. That's why intellectual property law tries to strike a reasonable balance between the interests of creators and their backers and the interests of the public. EXAMPLE: The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights, but only for limited times. EXAMPLE: Copyright is limited by the fair-use doctrine.
6. There's often room for argument about whether any particular aspect of IP law is productive in supporting creativity. For example, it can be legitimately debated whether patents for business methods are a net positive or a net negative.
7. But a blanket statement, implying that egregious copyright infringement should never be punished as criminal behavior, is short-sighted.
Most intellectual property takes the form of time invested rather than a monetary investment, and plenty of 'art' as we know it today was just commissioned work ('work for hire') when it was first produced.
> At a minimum, the actual creators have to come up with enough money to buy food, shelter, etc., for themselves and perhaps their families while they're doing their creative thing.
This is true, but between the stereotypical 'starving artist' and the 'rockstar milionaire' there is a broad range of normalcy that plenty of artists can aspire to. Britney wouldn't be one of those though.
> (I won't even get into whether the creators' investment of their time is deserving of compensation; I happen to think it is, but that's not important here.)
I think it is, but only if they can sell their product the first time out. The ransom model is an interesting concept that has a direct measurement of perceived value to a group of fans or some other form of market or audience. Once released the product becomes part of the public domain.
> 2. The harsh reality is that investors normally will not make such investments unless they have at least a reasonable expectation of getting their money back (purely-altruistic motives being rare).
This is true. So the quantity of works will go down, hopefully the quality would go up. That remains to be seen of course, but I'm fairly sure that if it were not for subsidized art we'd see either a larger unemployment level or more people in the workforce (where I live).
> 3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money for the fruits of the creative process, they're highly likely to give a thumbs-down to that particular request for their money.
No, they may have to find a way to get their moneys worth at the moment of release knowing that if they don't do it then they will never do it. This will reduce the avenues available to them, and will likely result in a lower margin but that does not mean that it won't happen at all. It's a matter of degree, not an absolute.
> (As an analogy, imagine the effect that Hugo Chavez's 'nationalization' -- read: confiscation -- of foreign oil companies' interests in Venezuela has had on the willingness of those and other companies to risk any more money there.)
Contrary to your view on this in the longer term this may actually benefit Venezuela more than it may hurt it in the shorter term. Oil will likely get more valuable, if Chavez' antics cause Venezuela to be one of the last oil reserves on the American continent that might work out very well for them. I'm cynical enough to suspect that being the people in charge of a valuable resource is probably a health risk because a 'war of liberation' is a viable option when you're sitting on a resource that someone else wants badly.
> 4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect.
No, it does not have a similar economic effect. Copyright infringement in any particular case could only be shown to have an economic effect if you can actually prove that a sale would have been made and as far as I know that is not possible without visiting alternative universes. You can make a statement to that effect by observing aggregates but you'll never be sure of it.
> 5. That's why intellectual property law tries to strike a reasonable balance between the interests of creators and their backers and the interests of the public.
Right, which is why Mickey Mouse is still not in the public domain and singing 'happy birthday' is copyright infringement. The interests of the public went out the window as soon as the various organizations realized that copyrights (and patents) are licenses to print money in very large amounts.
> EXAMPLE: The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights, but only for limited times.
Which have since been extended multiple times, and which now can be assumed to be extended indefinitely until the opposite is proven.
> EXAMPLE: Copyright is limited by the fair-use doctrine.
Which is further and further eroded.
> 6. There's often room for argument about whether any particular aspect of IP law is productive in supporting creativity. For example, it can be legitimately debated whether patents for business methods are a net positive or a net negative.
Try to argue they're a net positive, I'm really interested in how that could ever be the case.
> 7. But a blanket statement, implying that egregious copyright infringement should never be punished as criminal behavior, is short-sighted.
No, I think that's just fine. Criminal laws are supposed to be used to weed out the 'worst' people and to protect the 'good' people. We have civil laws for everything else and this should be a civil matter, after all, you don't have a time machine, you can't visit that other universe, any damage assessment is purely speculative, there is no victim, there are no bodies, there are no crimes.
Just some people that may have received less money than they assumed they were going to make. And most of those people are not the 'starving artists' who routinely get shafted by the exact same groups that pretend to have their best interests (and ours!) at heart.
Certainly that's true in the case of some Web-based businesses. It is assuredly not the case in medicine, energy, pharmaceuticals, etc.
And even if it were true in general, the people who are investing their time -- sometimes for months and even years -- have to put food on the table, pay the light bills, buy shoes for the kids, etc. Forcing everyone with an idea into the starving-artist mode is a good way to discourage people from pursuing their ideas.
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> Copyright infringement in any particular case could only be shown to have an economic effect if you can actually prove that a sale would have been made and as far as I know that is not possible without visiting alternative universes. You can make a statement to that effect by observing aggregates but you'll never be sure of it.
Society makes a lot of decisions by observing aggregates. We require kids to go to school through age 16, even though we'll never be sure that any given kid wouldn't do better by dropping out and going to work at age 14.
Scientific discovery was here long before intellectual property and scientists were not so much driven by profits as they were driven by curiosity. Nowadays in academia ego is also a big factor (it may have been in the past as well).
Why do you think that less investment will lead to higher quality? That seems like wishful thinking to me. Lower quantity does not imply higher quality.
Check out the latest top 100 and tell me that more money leads to higher quality with a straight face.
It's all about safe bets and marketing, not at all about quality.
True, lower quantity does not imply higher quality but it will put the focus on those that are driven to create, which tends to have a bias towards quality as compared to simply those that want to make lots of money.
This is the common utilitarian refrain, though utilitarian arguments usually include some cost-benefit analysis. In the IP debate, it is simply (and erroneously) assumed to be a net positive.
>3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money...
Then perhaps it's not a sustainable business model. Perhaps that's why they spend money on such things as DRM, or making online-only services. Perhaps, in the absence of state coercion, some other things will be invented to deal with the potential loss of profit.
>4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect.
What "effect" would that be, less profit? And thus activities of others which result in less profit for you should be illegal? I'm sure you don't think that, but it necessarily falls out of your utilitarian position.
The curious task of economics
is to demonstrate to men
how little they really know
about what they imagine they can design.- It doesn't cost zero dollars and almost zero effort to copy a piece of clothing.
- It's not even allowed to make a perfect copy of a piece of clothing, because of trademarks.
- People decide which clothes to buy primarily based on the brand. Much of the value to a lot of people of a piece of clothing is in the little brand name on it, which you are not allowed to replicate.
If everyone could copy and distribute her clothes verbatim including the brand name instantly and for free, and distribute them to millions of people, then I think her opinion might be just a tad different.
I disagree with your claim that intellectual property laws are a continuum and that a reasonable balance can to be found. When it comes to digital software/media, any intellectual property protection at all boils down to authorizing the ownership of an integer. I don't mean this metaphorically or rhetorically, I mean that a patent/copyright/etc. on a piece of software or a digital media file is quite literally a claim of ownership of a natural number.
If someone else wants simply to distribute a list of the natural numbers in order, they would legally have to omit the numbers which represented patented/copyrighted works. You might brush off this argument by saying "that's silly, since the numbers representing a song or operating system would be so large that it's highly unlikely for anyone to accidentally stumble on such a number." That's not good enough for me. People have constructed (discovered) proofs of concept of several illegal numbers.
Would you want to allow people to print their own money? After all that's just arranging a series of atoms in a particular way. You can't disallow arranging atoms, or the world will come to a halt. Yet in practice these arbitrary rules seem to work fine.
If we had the technology to make copies on an atomic level, I believe this would indeed pose a fundamental philosophical and legal debate, especially for patented things like manufacturing materials and drugs. With money, however, intellectual property has nothing to do with it, and (at least in the US) counterfeiting is a completely separate orthogonal crime.
That a law with a different name is protecting money is irrelevant. The point is disallowing manipulating atoms in a certain way. Another one: can you give a formal definition of what constitutes a $1 bill? Again, you cannot. Does that mean that we should allow copying money?
A formal definition is not necessary for something to be put in the law.
IP protection might not always be required for innovation, but if you compare countries that have "fair and balanced" IP protection -- really, property rights generally -- against those that don't, you find that the former seem to do better in fostering innovation.
Certainly there are people and companies who create things for the joy of it, for reputation, for the indirect benefits that come from the existence of a widely-adopted standard, for purely-altruistic reasons, etc. Good for them; the world needs more of them.
But sometimes creators need to get actual money, from others who don't necessarily share the joy, to buy equipment, travel, hired help, and other things. And that usually entails a legal system that helps innovation investors recoup the 'capital' they put at risk.
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> ... a patent/copyright/etc. on a piece of software or a digital media file is quite literally a claim of ownership of a natural number.
Does that mean that JK Rowling is claiming ownership of the letters A, B, etc.?
I don't think that, in a world without IP protection, people would only create things for joy, reputation, standard adoption, or altruism. Companies would still want software, and would be willing to pay people to develop it.
Lack of IP protection isn't the same thing as the Free Software Movement. In a world with IP protection, you could still sell proprietary software without disclosing source code. There would still be an incentive for competing companies to constantly improve their software to outdo each other.
I don't understand your Rowling analogy. What I'm saying is that Rowling's copyright of one of her books is equivalent to ownership of, for example, the natural number equal to the ASCII encoding of the text of the book.
That is not correct. A list of natural numbers in order would not infringe any copyrights. If, by coincidence, one of the numbers on that (very large, completely impractical) list happened to match what you get when you take some copyrighted work and encode it as a number under some particular reversible encoding, it would not be an infringement, because it would not be a copy of the copyrighted work.
Copyright does not protect against independent creation. As a practical matter, of course, if a latter work B is similar to a prior work A, most courts will believe that B'a author had access to A and copied (perhaps subconsciously). However, if B's author could show that he really never had access to A, never had anyone describe A to him, and so on, so could not possibly have been influenced by it, then B would not be an infringement of A.
Does anyone actually care about this oh-so-important issue other than people who are regularly committing the crime?
For instance, when a baseball team positions someone so that he can see the signals that the opposing catcher is sending to the opposing pitcher, we say he is "stealing their signals". You generally don't see people jump in to correct that and argue we should be saying he is invading their privacy or some such.
Or when your best friend makes a move on your girlfriend, no one generally nitpicks if you say "He tried to steal my girl!" and argues that since slavery was abolished in this country around 150 years ago, he cannot steal a girl--all he was doing was betraying your friendship (unless he physically tried to take her away, in which case he was trying to kidnap her, not steal her).
There are many more possible examples of common usage of "steal", but I think the above make the point.
Of course, there's also the argument that piracy increases music discovery and perhaps is a form of fair use (as a backup, alternative to a streaming service you purchase, etc), which might drive revenue in other ways. I have yet to find or hear of any substantial empirical evidence for this, though.
EDIT: by the way, I think the best way to argue this is that you are never actually given ownership of any IP, only a LICENSE to use it, therefore you are simply violating the license agreement.
I don't agree with the behaviour of the recording industry or with criminalizing the general public but simply taking something that's not yours is not the right solution, in my opinion.
Would you respect intellectual property on the wheel or the hand axe in a stone age setting ? I know that sounds ridiculous, but intellectual property has its basis in 'information can be property' and that's so fraught with error that we would still be living in the stone age if it were true.
If you want to keep your stuff to yourself: don't publish. Have it die with you, please do not make your thoughts/writings/music/movie/whatever available to the public in order to then turn around and claim it as your own again.
In such a setting there was no notion of "property" at all beyond brute force. Eventually it was discovered that greater things can be accomplished when people adopt the polite fiction that taking something doesn't always make it yours.
If you don't believe that then try to declare independence over your garden and claim that since you are now a sovereign state you no longer need to pay tribute to the country that now surrounds yours.
Though it feels like I'm bringing a pen to a flamethrower fight, I'll attempt to clarify.
In describing property as a "polite fiction" I am acknowledging that it is not real. Brute force is as real as it ever was, but in practice the abstraction of property means it is usually the option of last resort. We've all benefited from that. To wit, I consider the present notion by contrast a few degrees beyond (more advanced than) brute force, though you are right to say that it is not beyond (free of) brute force.
So, to venture back to the original context from which we've so far strayed: although you try to cast the concept of intellectual property in an absurd light by putting it into an era of development in which it did not and could not exist, it remains true that the more fundamental concept of property was crucial to the same development beyond that era you claim intellectual property would have prevented. We grew by adopting a fiction, and now have an abundance of recorded history indicating that being a "figment of our collective imagination" is not a bad thing when it reflects the human perception of value better than reality. I trust you can see the parallel in the three centuries that ownership of a book has been distinct from the ownership of a copy of the book, or that at the very least you would not regard our intellectual development in that time as having languished.
We would not have culture or have achieved the level of society that we have if 'intellectual property' were the normal mode and could be deduced from first principles.
Copyright and patents are supposed to foster creation and innovation but it seems they are hindering rather than helping our development in these areas.
Well. Some of these follow when you accept certain axioms and work from there. Not everyone accepts those axioms (at at least the same ones), if the vast variance in "human rights" across the globe is any indication.
Now of course it can be argued that only a few countries in the "civilized western world" understand logic and can come up with the proper first principles. (People have told me that)
In a good system you don't care on which side of the ledger you're on, which is something that that same logic would allow you to deduce.
I think that was his point - you're not taking something that's not yours.
Say I take a photo of your cup, then feed the 3d image into a 3d printer, so that I have an exact replica of your cup, I haven't stolen your cup have I.
I don't think we should use 'stealing' to apply to 'design' or any type of non-concrete property.
But the whole notion of 'right to determine how IP is distributed' is an artificial, and very recent creation. Why should people have such rights? Why do we need them when we functioned fine as a society for so many millennia without them.
In actual fact, there's more 'slaves' today than at any time in history.
For one, legalized slavery in the US - prisoners are forced to manufacture household appliances, number plates, military uniforms etc. If they refuse, they get solitary confinement and other punishments.
Perhaps the concept of 'freedom' is a good one, but it doesn't map in any way to the real world.
It's not like they created the concept of 'freedom' and then slavery ended.
What's your definition of a design? If I simply think of "the first prime number with 500 billion decimal digits," do I instantly command the right to control the distribution of that number?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689527 (Focused on UK and European laws) http://www.publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-do... (Focused on US IP laws)
I do not believe there is a counter-argument to the "treating data as large numbers makes it ridiculous to assert control over it". I agree with you on this point. Unfortunately, the law will need to be modernized to take that into account, and that has not yet happened.
In that case, if you distribute say, a movie, for free without permission from the publisher, you're effectively "taking" his "money" that he would've earned from the display of his material in a controlled environment. Wouldn't that be stealing?
In the case of the pirate bay the quantity is so large that some aggregate effect can be postulated without stretching credulity, and I think that is the major reason why this judgment sticks even if there is not a single item of hard proof of any lost sale directly caused by the pirate bay.
</sarcasm>
Would you agree that an artificially scarce intellectual product is better than nothing?
Hint, it won't. And at this point we might want to ask ourself if it isn't worth taking the hit that will result from removing copyright on already existing goods, since there is a limit to how much media we can consume, and we already have plenty.
But assuming you don't want to read an actual book... basically, the original reason that copyright was created was to encourage contributions to the public domain. By giving incentives to creators, we'd enrich the commons. However, the system does nothing of the sort today. This indicates to me that at the very least, we need to re-think the way we handle intellectual property. Even if you disagree, there are still many flaws in the implementation of intellectual property laws. Mostly, there are large questions as to who 'wins' if two people invent something simultaneously in different parts of the world (this happens quite a bit), the assumption that we can have a single repository of all useful knowledge that's been created, and that we can have skilled enough individuals working in said office to determine if something is novel.
In addition to reform, I'd actually go a bit farther and say it's not necessary at all. There are a few different arguments, actually, depending on which angle you'd like to pursue. For those on the far, far left, IP seems to have the same accumulation and exploitation problems that private property has, but worse. Big companies have entire divisions that are basically IP farms, then abuse those portfolios to keep new, innovative companies out. Then, there's the leaky abstraction argument: IP law is trying to shoehorn existing property laws onto the concept of knowledge, but I'd argue that this abstraction is exceptionally leaky, to the point of not making sense. There are also the examples made in Against Intellectual Monopoly, showing many instances where IP was actually harmful for society, and where people actually made more money by disregarding their abilities to enforce infringement.
Anyway, I'm almost to the point of rambling. My point is that this is a complicated and nuanced topic, and one can be opposed to IP without simply yelling "LOLOL I WANT MOVIES 4 FREE!!!111"
False dichotomy, people will continue to create whether they are paid to or not. Creativity doesn't come from money.
In two years time Voddler (or something like it) will be big for movies, Spotify will be big for music and people will stop purchasing things entirely.
The "Pirate movement" will see this as progress and smart people going around the old geezers in charge, because we don't have to pay outrageous amounts of money for a piece of plastic we don't even want.
The media industry will call it a success in their anti-piracy harshness and will cite cases like this as the reason for the new ways to crop up.
Both parties will think they're right, and in the end the only thing that has changed is the distribution-system.
The 2 year timescale is probably off, but i'm pretty sure everything will end with those idiots saying "It's a good thing we put kids in jail because otherwise we wouldn't live in the wonderful world we do today."
Not quite sure what you mean by this, but once the collector comes, he'll just take whatever you have. I don't know about Swedish personal bankruptcy law but even in the best case if debts like this can be discharged by bankruptcy, going to jail for half a year, being flat-out broke for something like 5 years after that, having all your wages and possessions confiscated, and then having to re-build your life at 40 doesn't seem like a sacrifice the 'intellectual property is evil' cause is worth.
Does anyone know something about these guys? Do they have families, companies, jobs? Eventually something like this had to happen of course, but still, I'm sure these guys were 100% convinced they were the Good Guys and Good Guys Prevail In The End, so this must be devastating...
Their involvement with the pirate bay were well known, and I suspect known by their respective employers. They are also rather well-known within the Swedish Pirate movement.
I suspect the people who won't hire them after the verdict wouldn't have hired them even before it since their involvement with the pirate bay was no secret.
The pirate movement in Sweden is one of the most vocal movements about civil rights and against host of laws that are considered to be in dispute with civil rights, so for this movement they're more or less martyrs rather than just some nerds who built a tracker and a trademark.
Recent laws (mass-surveillance, corporations being given more investigative rights than the police, etc) and events in Sweden have in a way bridged current civil rights and rule-of-law issues with the pirate movement.
It'll be interesting to see wheter this connection remains now that Sweden has a new liberal party which tackle many of the same issues the pirate party does, or wheter they'll become more separated with time.
[Edit: Rephrased section into 'considered to be in dispute with civil rights']
I think they were all aware (except Carl Lundström) that luck would run out sooner or later, and from what I've seen, they had the plans all laid out on how to skip jail and fine.
I would be surprised if any one of them except Lundström would serve any of their prison times, or pay any sum of money to pay for their fines.
Furthermore, any social security or pension entitlements they may have had will automatically be confiscated so they will have to provide for themselves, in fore-mentioned third-world country, presumably without a sizable starting capital, and without being able to take on any consulting jobs that require them to travel to Europe, and potentially other Western countries (I'm not familiar with international agreements on this matter, but most countries have no problems extraditing foreign nationals, especially not when they're convicted in criminal cases).
Sounds like a great "plan to skip jail and fine".
This ain't Prison Break. There's no way to escape from convictions that don't require profound sacrifices for the rest of your life. I can't understand why everybody is so dismissive - "oh they'll be fine". No they won't, they're fucked for the rest of their lives.
Well, I didn't say it was a good plan. ;) I was merely pointing out that I thought they were anticipating that this was how things would turn out.
I would like to add: The statute of limitations here in Sweden for a jail time of <1 year is max 10 years or so (according to Swedish Wikipedia it's 2 years, but I'm not sure if the fines complicate the matter).
That's still a fairly hefty penalty. Even if I chose to live elsewhere the idea of never being able to return home without a fairly major sanction would be a bummer.
But whomever things good guys always win are just fucking naive.
May be, but these guys paid a big price for their part in it, if there is one at all, and I don't see anyone picking up the bill for them...
The prison-sentences are short, and will only get them even more respect and higher-social standing within their peer group, broadly defined. Since girls tend to like such people, they can expect to be able to get young and pretty girlfriends and will have no problem becoming writers for various blogs/magazines.
The reality distortion field is strong on this one. Just going to jail doesn't make one a 'bad boy'. I happen to remotely know a couple of people who did jail time over fraud charges (which is the 'crime class' there guys fall in, and the group they'll hang out with inside), and let me tell you, they really haven't turned into women magnets all of a sudden just because they've been in jail.
I think the prosecutor even admitted in an interview that they don't expect to ever see any money.
I lost track of the story shortly after they were found guilty. Did they get scooped up by the police or are they in refuge somewhere?
I applaud these gents for standing so tall against their attackers, even against the threat of a judgment like this.
It's just a shame that the music industry is still wasting time on issues like these. Thank god I wasn't arrested for sharing cassette tapes in my early teens.
There's still one more instance (and possibly EU court after that one) to appeal through.
The more they fight piracy in this way, the further they push file trading into completely untrackable recesses of the internet.
It's actually a good thing in the long run, I suppose. Between this and the Homeland DNS grab, soon we'll have an alternative internet where everything is encrypted, routed through ZKS systems, untrackable, and completely outside of government control.
Either that, or simply install something at the client's place that bypasses the whole system. Works, but somehow I doubt DNS is so easy to replicate.
And don't even get me started with the whole "A torrent tracker is copyright infringement" argument. Jeez!
If you read Swedish, this conclusion is on the top of page 47 in the verdict @ http://fildelning.se/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TPB.pdf
I'd guess it is similar to the US: if you aren't doing it commercially, you can't get prison--it is purely a civil matter. If you are doing it commercially, then it can be a crime punishable by prison.
TPB was/is commercial, making millions a year monetizing copyright infringement via advertising.
It's a bizarre world, and I think stuff like this is a direct consequence of subscribing to legal fictions.