Currently yes. Because the normal person is conditioned to only pay if he or she has to.
But imagine if there is sudddenly no more copyright and ... oh my god, no more episode of series xyz because of no money ... you really believe all those hardcore fans would not quickly adopt to pay freely if the result is more of the content they want, if the alternative is no more content?
However I actually would love to switch to a more kickstarter/etc like system where fans fund the creation of works they enjoy and then those works are just in the public domain / culture as a result. The creators and everyone else involved would be paid before, not after, making something.
More critical would be medical research, but I believe there is actually already lots of freely donated money for example in cancer research involved.
But surely much more is needed, so the change would be with friction ... but if suddenly all the medicine can be made freely, the benefit for the current world population which mostly cannot afford expensive medicine would outweight it, I believe. (anyway all hypothetically anyway)
But since we live in a world with it by default, it is hard to prove it right or wrong. And it is very hard to prove it small scale, since the big industry woukd just use the work of a small inventor without any compensation if they don't have to, just like with open source.
And to the point of the example of patents and secrecy I would add, that for example Elon Musk decided insome cases to not make a patent, because it is a blueprint for others. (don't have the link right now)
To expand on that, Kickstarter is a platform where you get people to give you money so you can make something in the future, which is... fine. But it's more of a bootstrapping platform than anything else, and it suffers from that. Kickstarter exploits people FOMO, but it's hampered by the inherent risk that the thing you're funding might never exist.
I'm working on independent games right now. I haven't chosen to Kickstart them, for a lot of reasons. What I would be curious to do is to pick maybe a smaller title, completely finish it, and then put it on Kickstarter for the full amount of money I wanted to get out of it -- not just to fund it, but including my target returns. The game would be done, it would be reviewable by press, once it got funded I would just immediately put it as a free download. But I wouldn't release it until people pledged enough money to make it worth my while -- meaning not just cost of production, but revenue. In theory, exploiting FOMO but with none of the risks that the game won't be finished or that it'll turn out terrible.
I've gone back and forth about the negatives there. It would be way more expensive than an average Kickstarter goal. You have to decide up-front how much money your game is going to make. And you're still fighting against the fact that fans can just say, "well, someone else should fund it." I'm not sure it's actually a feasible model in practice. But I'm really curious to see how the patron model could evolve; just not curious enough to experiment with bigger games where I need them to do well financially.
I am not a copyright abolitionist. I am really interested in seeing alternative models develop, even interested enough that I might experiment in those areas in the future, but I think that there needs to be more working examples of those models before I'm willing to jump ship on copyright.
I understand that. I am also not a fanatic in the sense, that I would fight towards a political change to abolish copyright (would be hopeless anyway with the current state of things). I just want to work and fight for more models of working alternatives.
The linux and blender foundations and wikipedia are the best examples I know of. And I want to add another working example soon.
It's an MMO which was shuttered in 2012 despite a very devoted fanbase. People had been clamoring for any chance to play the thing again for years. As an example of this devotion people were calling it a big deal when a program became available that does nothing but allow players to walk around the first hub world and chat together. It was all they could do.
Then word breaks that there had been a private server running in secret the whole time based on source code that had secretly traded hands a long time ago.
Then, regardless of the moral implications, someone went ahead and leaked the source code. Because of that the general public finally got to play the game for the first time in over six years. Apparently it has 100,000 registrants on the most popular server alone, which I find ridiculous for a game which has resurfaced out of nowhere with no real advertising and whose publisher never intended it to return. Imagine all the revenue they're missing out on.
(Of course, it's only popular today because it was popular in 2012 when it was subscription-based.)
From my limited understanding there doesn't seem to be massive feature updates like new maps or raids when Paragon was developing it. Instead there are minor quality of life perks like making the paid upgrades purchasable with in-game currency or tweaking formulas to align with the playerbase's wants. You don't even have pay for anything to keep playing individually; the server is funded by volunteers with donations. The monthly target seems to be about $5,000, most of which goes to hosting fees. Since enough interested people keep paying, the server stays up. And since the source code is now available there's nothing precluding another party from starting a different server if things go under. All to be able to keep playing the game.
It goes to show that people are happy just being able to play the thing at all. There's no need for large salaries to keep developing content and justify monitization. The code is worked on by a devoted team of people with a very big passion for the former-product, and the devs and users are part of the same community.
In a perfect world this is probably how an MMO could be sustained for years to come. And it's possible primarily because the source is available.
Of course, the only reason any of this is possible is because the parties involved blatantly violated copyright by posting the source code and using proprietary assets like textures and music - but this doesn't matter because, for some reason, nobody cares. Yet. Maybe it's because NCSoft figures they're not competing with anyone since they were the ones to shut it down years ago so there's no harm in letting it stay open. Maybe they just got lucky NCSoft wasn't disingenuous and that they weren't slapped with a draconian takedown demand for a very popular game that would otherwise never be playable by anyone until the end of time. But for some reason, the people with the most interest in where all the development capital went just let it slide - for now.
Also this differs from a lot of open source projects since it's technically illegitimate, none of the code is under an open source license, and the work being done is fairly minor. Basically everyone got a head-start by being able to reuse Paragon's code back when the people writing it were salaried and experts in this kind of thing so the complicated parts of the MMO architecture are already finished and everyone can focus on the small quality of life things.
And yes, this is what I mean. When there are enough people who want something to work, they make it work. And in your story despite copyright. So I believe in an ideal world, allmost everything could be organized that way.
Copyright should be looked at as a taxpayer funded limited time monopoly. Unfortunately that monopoly time limit has gone way past the 14 years originally intended. You could double that to 28 years with an extension. But now it's ridiculously long. Meaning the taxpayer never see a return on their monopoly investment in the form of public domain.
>The Congress first exercised its copyright powers with the Copyright Act of 1790. This act granted authors the exclusive right to publish and vend "maps, charts and books" for a term of 14 years. This 14-year term was renewable for one additional 14-year term, if the author was alive at the end of the first time. With exception of the provision on maps and charts the Copyright Act of 1790 is copied almost verbatim from the Statute of Anne.[3]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_...
What do you value more? Hollywood's shows or computing and internet freedom? That's what it comes down to. Because in order for copyright to be enforceable in the 21st century, we'd have to give up control of our computers to a higher authority. The ability to run any program we want is precisely what enables us to copy stuff without any restrictions. That's why they want to take it away. That's why they put DRM even in the hardware itself.
Copyright enforcement is actually just the beginning of the end for computer freedom. Governments would also enjoy having more control over the software their citizens run. Encryption can defeat courts, militaries... Like guns, many government officials think mere citizens shouldn't have access to these things.
These people don't care about computers the way we do. To them, it's just a tool to achieve their ends. When the power of the computer threatens them, they cripple the computer in order to protect themselves. I would rather see the computer's full potential realized even if it comes at the cost of these old businesses.
It wouldn't just be all of Hollywood, but even if it were, who are you to make that decision for the millions of people who enjoy the creative work Hollywood produces?
The rest of your argument is a straw man. It is illegal for me to drive my car at 100mph past a school, but my car doesn't have any physical means of stopping me. As a society we have agreed that this is a reasonable rule and codified it in law so everyone knows the consensus, and almost everyone complied voluntarily, and those who break the rule are penalised for it.
The strange thing about copyright is that it remains mostly a civil matter, which leaves the burden of enforcement on the victim of copyright infringement and so makes enforcement of small infringements prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, a police officer can and will arrest a 15-year-old who walks into a corner shop and gets caught stealing a chocolate bar. That anomaly in turn then leads to attempts to make enforcement of small infringements on a wide scale more viable, which gets you far from ideal solutions like the DMCA and its counterparts around the world.
https://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/06/over-criminalizing...
While I agree that software freedom is important, I would argue that freedom itself is important -- and that means being able to choose the license for a creative work.
That is unless you believe that everything should be locked in walled garden hell....
If you have laid claim to the number 010101 and on my device a chunk of memory is initialized to 000000 you are defining your freedom as the power to keep me from changing that memory to 010101 this only sounds sane when you use language that presupposed we accept this insanity.
Decisions such as that are made either by a substantial portion of the citizens by vote or by voting for elected reps who directly enact them. You knew that of course. We are speaking of what we respectively think OUGHT to be with no power to implement ourselves.
> The rest of your argument is a straw man. It is illegal for me to drive my car at 100mph past a school, but my car doesn't have any physical means of stopping me. As a society we have agreed that this is a reasonable rule and codified it in law so everyone knows the consensus, and almost everyone complied voluntarily, and those who break the rule are penalised for it.
Piracy is incredibly trivial by virtue of happening directly between distributing computer and receiving computer with indirection and encryption of communications trivially implementable. The present status quo is so lazy just because so little work is required to get around current levels of restrictions. Pay for a vpn which comes with a cute GUI app with a button that says "secure your connection" use a search engine to find things you would like to watch or read. The current balance of value and convenience is in fact directly related to the knowledge that if you make it too inconvenient or expensive people will literally just turn around and download it.
You propose enforcement to remedy this.
> Meanwhile, a police officer can and will arrest a 15-year-old who walks into a corner shop and gets caught stealing a chocolate bar.
Actually you could probably meet your caloric needs for the next month off stolen chocolate bars and have very little chance of being apprehended and literally zero chance of being prosecuted. In theory if a cop happened by during a theft they might arrest someone stealing hundreds to thousands of dollars in goods after which the courts would be extremely apt to drop the ball. In most cases people stealing goods in a non violent fashion is too low a priority to allocate resources to even when the thieves are stealing thousands in public and prosecution and incarceration would be straightforward if not cheap.
Compare the ease of catching a shoplifter acting illicitly in a controlled space to catching people downloading movies and books on their computers! With half a whit of effort inspired by actual enforcement it would be incredibly trivial to make catching downloading as hard as catching terrorists except for the minor matter than 230 billion acts of terrorism aren't happening annually. Worse great sophistication isn't required by all users just the tiny number that produce tools to allow others to benefit. This can be bundled into an easy to install piece of software to run on your own machine or on a cheap 25 dollar single board computer.
What other poster gets that you do not is that without access to people's computers that supersedes their own you can't with any reasonable or affordable degree of effort keep them from downloading numbers you think you own. It's an arms race you literally can't possibly win. Even communist China can't 100% control the media their people view and they can disappear citizens in the night. This is the end game of drm and trusted computing to develop a controllable platform which can be made to serve the interests of government and industry. This is now many devices in fact already work now. The cure is most assuredly worse than the disease.
> That anomaly in turn then leads to attempts to make enforcement of small infringements on a wide scale more viable, which gets you far from ideal solutions like the DMCA and its counterparts around the world.
It's not anomalous that something that has never been a criminal act isn't treated as such. It's not shocking that the state wont take up an impossible burden in behalf of a small number of private benefactors to the detriment of society. Making it slightly harder to pirate and very easy to stream is a smart compromise that has been mostly working to generate billions of dollars.
It's politically impossible to implement 1984 to maximize the revenue of game of thrones and lesser measures are doomed to failure. In fact if you start pulling that thread and throwing Suzy homemaker in jail because little Tommy downloaded movies or stealing her grocery money to pay fines as you become increasingly effective you are apt to become increasingly likely to push for copyright reform that is likely to harm future revenue in a way that little Tommy can't possibly do.
If I was the copyright industry I would enjoy what I have.
A relevant analogy might be using mobile phones while driving. Here in the UK, using a handheld phone while driving became illegal quite some time ago. And so it should; the evidence that driving while distracted by a phone makes you much more dangerous is beyond dispute. Most people accepted this, perhaps because there was also a decent public information campaign about the risks, and many did stop using their phones on the move even if they used to before. A few persist, and you can usually spot them from the way they're swerving at random intervals, unable to maintain a consistent speed, running lights, and otherwise making the same sorts of basic mistakes that a drunk driver would, and although we have a problem with a lack of policing resources to catch them, those who do get caught are punished.
Now, here's the catch. The evidence used to support the ban on using a handheld phone while driving also shows very clearly that the main problem isn't the physical part of holding the device, it's the distraction from using it. That means hands-free calling is almost as dangerous as using a handheld phone while driving. However, our government did not see fit to make using a hands-free call illegal at the same time, arguing that enforcement would be impractical.
The day after the ban came in, there were huge displays of hands-free kits in the front of every supermarket and phone shop in the land, with banners saying things like "Stay safe -- use a hands-free kit". Not stay legal. Stay safe. And to this day, people are dying unnecessarily on our roads, because the government gave a free endorsement to an incredibly dangerous practice by implicitly condoning it.
This is very nearly impossible
> But making it explicitly legal to rip things sends a very different message to normal people about what society considers ethical behaviour.
Virtually no normal people feel bad about downloading things. If that was the battle its long ago been lost. The people that think there still is a battle to be won are a tiny minority of the richest in the world.
Good luck convincing people who make a fraction of what people in the US make that they ought to pay as much for entertainment as they do for food.
Many people work on projects like the Linux kernel and git without any compensation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky
Maybe not to everyones taste, but it shows what is possible. Technically it is better than much of the trash Hollywood is regurgitating, though no real 'blockbuster' either.
Anyways, can't wait for 'Blaxxund Nazombitchez from Vriler Haze!'
How should the many millions of people around the world who contribute to creative content enjoyed by many millions more every day then put food on their tables, in your version of the future?
Arguments about the ease of copying information in the Internet age are easy to make, but that's just the marginal cost of distribution. These arguments almost invariably ignore the issue of creating that content in the first place, and that the main economic role of copyright is to amortise that cost over many people who ultimately benefit from the work rather than just relying on some extremely wealthy patron or the equivalent to fund it philanthropically.
So far, other business models that have been tried have rarely come even close to supporting the same quantity and quality of creative work that our current copyright-based regime does. Until someone proposing to revoke copyright and allow everything to be copied freely comes up with a viable alternative model, most people are going to continue not to take them seriously.
Imagine I write something entertaining on my personal blog.
Is it okay for somebody or some company to copy that content to their own website without my permission?
If it is, is isn’t, why or why not?
There only relevant problem I see here would be if they attributed the text to themselves, which is an entirely separate issue.
In the same fashion if I write your words on my paper with my pen the common sense ownership of pen and paper doesn't change.
Copyright is an invented right drawn from nothing that derived its legitimacy solely from utility derived from paying for creativity.
Turns out that we are already rich enough as a society to pay for a decent life for everyone and most of the money sticks to the hands of greedy people with lumps of coal for souls and zero creativity.
The kind of morons who would try to take down a dictionary.
So are all property rights. The "common sense" ownership of pen and paper that you mentioned is that if I'm bigger than you, or I have a better weapon, or I have more friends, then your pen and paper are now mine. Fortunately for almost everyone, as a society we have learned to cooperate better than that.
Access to the internet comes at a comparatively princely $60 a month. In a lot of first world nations education and health are gratis. Donations can be solicited to fund the creation of desirable works. I wonder if copyright went away people would still write books?
I respectfully suggest that you're asking the wrong question. Obviously some books would still be written.
More insightful questions might be whether people would still write as many books, whether the books written would be as good, and whether books would reach as large an audience as happens under copyright.
I contend that it is utterly implausible that an entirely voluntary or even patronage-based system would come anywhere close to our current situation by any of those metrics. The vast majority of the cost of making a book has nothing to do with buying a laptop or paying for an Internet connection. It comes from the time and skill and creativity and understanding of the author. Depending on the nature of the book, it also comes from the time and skill and creativity and understanding of proofreaders, editors, illustrators, graphic designers, researchers...
All property rights are invented rights drawn from nothing justified (if at all) solely by the resulting utility of providing the exclusivity they grant.
As is the rivalrous nature of all subjects of non-physical property. Otherwise, there'd be no advantage to exclusive privileges. Exclusive access being more valuable to the exclusive holder than shared access would be is exactly rivalry.
But the rivalrous nature of the subject of property doesn't make property rights natural, it just provides the basis by which such rights create incentives which drive behavior which may or may not produce social utility.
You aren't the red queen and words don't mean what you want them to mean.
It makes property rights a reasonable answer to a question that had to be resolved one way or another because we can't all eat the same sandwich. Because we can all ready the same epub or build the same machine intellectual property rights are an answer to a much higher level question of how do we as a society achieve success.
Conflating this higher level abstract question with a low level physical question confuses the issue and makes it impossible to arrive at some potential solutions because of the baggage provided by the lower level question.
Because we already know we can't all eat the same sandwich we refuse to ask if the world is better off if we make information free of constraints. We act as if we were ripping a sandwich out of somebodies mouth instead of asking if that particular sandwich actually ought to exist in the first place.
Sure. Why not? It's just data and it doesn't actually belong to anyone. By reproducing your work and making it more widely available, I'd even say they're helping you by propagating your ideas.
The most common problems with this is the subversion of the creator's business model and reputation. If people get your content via someone else's website, they won't look at your ads and might think someone else wrote it. We need alternative business models that don't depend on artificial scarcity. Advertising is becoming more and more unacceptable so we'll have to come up with something better one way or another. As for reputation, I think the way academia handles plagiarism is much more sane: misrepresenting authorship causes damage to one's own reputation.
Even if the work did belong to you and someone did copy it without permission, would you sue them? Would you spend thousands of dollars and years of your life fighting against them in court? Most people wouldn't. This intellectual property stuff disproportionally benefits rich corporations with lots of expensive lawyers at their disposal.
Does he/she have right to tell it to others?
This is how we, humans, functioned for ages, you are basing your opinion on already artificial constructs.
We as humanity, achieved most thanks to copying information and constantly improving and building on top of it.
Copyright was meant to provide short time for the authors to make money, before releasing it to pubic domain.
Initially copyright, protected the work only for 14 years, now it is 100 years after the death of the author and it is extended perpetually, because our constitution says that copyright needs to expire, it doesn't specify when, which is being exploited.
Company like Disney, built their empire on public domain works, but fiercely fights to prevent them to become public domain. Every time copyright for Mickey Mouse is about to expire, our Congress extends it.
We need to get back to sensible time frame. 14 years was more than enough to make profit from your works.
The copyright industry isn't really keeping up their end of the deal. People should respond by voiding the social contract. There is no reason to recognize copyright as a legitimate concept much less lose any sleep over any infringement.