Why must we come up with increasingly complicated ways to hide the fact unlimited copies are available? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright. It's time to stop pretending copyright makes sense in the 21st century.
Copying a video file is free too but I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it. People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for.
> I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it
I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately.
> People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.
That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it.
"Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people.
The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.
This is exactly how it works today, and then the investors (people who either gave money or time) hope to get their investment back plus some profit through distribution.
Just because you can do something does not give you the right or permission to do so. You can drive all over the road, or ride the train without a ticket, or walk out of the store without paying. But you wouldn't because it's against the law.
As far as crowdfunding, some projects have already taken that route but the results have shown that it doesn't really support the AAA content that consumers demand. If you think you can convince millions of people to pay upfront for content, and enough to outweigh all the free consumers, then I'm sure the industry would be very happy to hear from you.
Because the content wouldn't get created unless they do pay. That's why worthwhile Kickstarter projects tend to reach their funding threshold, even when they're to be released for no added cost.
I don't agree. People should be paid for the work they do, yes, but look at all the crap we've had to put up with for trying to restrict an infinite supply. The right model is to pay people to do work, not to pay them for having done work. Yes, it's hard to transition from one model to the other, but the inability to control copying in the Internet age is a simple fact. Gravity makes flying airplanes hard, too. Deal with it.
How do you pay people to "do work" instead of "done work"? What's that mean exactly?
Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free. That's the fundamental issue, and I don't agree. I doubt many creators and producers would either, not without some alternative answer to monetization. Do you have a solution for that?
Actually, most of the UX problems only show up if you did pay. The people who download the content for free get the better product: an unrestricted file that they can use pretty much anywhere. Subscribers taking the legal route are stuck dealing with a bunch of different services, each with its own special blend of UX issues on top of the poor UX from the fragmentation itself.
> Your arguments seem to be based on the assumption that content should be free.
Not content should be free per se but rather content should be freely redistributed. Many people producing new content will still want to be paid for their work, and that's fine. They just need to ensure that they get paid before the content is out in public where anyone can copy it, since they will no longer have a legal monopoly on distribution after that point.
Patreon, Kickstarter, and others offer one model for funding the production of creative works for public distribution. Others would include sponsorship and donations. Open source development is another option which can be applied to more than just software—just look at the various Blender open movie projects[1], all of which are distributed to the public for free and were funded with a combination of donations, sponsorship, and volunteer contributions.
It is like AAA vs indie games - Undertale is incredible (as many AAA games are).
I do not argue against ownership. Just of ability of big money to hide lack of story. It happens that books live in most open (paper) and most close (DRM hardware) variants. Somehow reminds Elsevier and arXiv. I'm glad I don't have to run DRM hardware for software development and this conversation.
I mean can it be that current system is not fair to the customer? We compare ownership with physical object. What if movie is not good? Can I get a refund? File is in perfect condition. Companies spent a lot on advertisement, some products I would consider fraud. Trailers usually the only good parts of the movie. Yet it is aired from every corner.
Part of book store experience is reading. I have a lot of child books, I like them all, we read again and again. When kid grown up he can present them, donate or sell.
In my mind Internet Archive made mistake. Not better than cracking Windows or jailbraking iPhone. These should become niche products, no need to advertise them, better help other communities.
Books should be in a digital format that has at least all of the the properties of a physical good. I agree that if one has a physical (or digital copy) of a work, that there is no-issue renting or temporarily transferring it for as many ownership tokens as you possess.
If the publishers want copy right protection from the government, they must use open formats, unencrypted, non-executable, bits I can copy/sell/rent/etc. If they want to use DRM, they get no copy right protection.
I've thought about this quite a bit in the past, and I don't think that would really make sense. A well designed digital library system operating under those restrictions would be nearly identical to one which didn't have to adhere to copyright at all. All you'd have to do is build a system which transparently "checks out" materials when the user accesses them and automatically "checks them in" after a minute or two of inactivity, and you'd be able to reduce the number of materials the digital library needs to purchase by a couple orders of magnitude over a traditional library. Add a few more orders of magnitude if they're allowed to tear individual pages out of books or split scenes out of movies and lend those out separately. You could probably put Netflix out of business with only about a hundred physical copies of every popular movie. (Which is practically nothing when you're operating on that scale.)
Publishers could, of course, increase the cost of physical copies of their works by several orders of magnitude to compensate (making them completely unaffordable for consumers in the process), but barring that I think the whole "you can only lend out one digital copy for every physical copy you own" thing would be more of a charade than an actual meaningful restriction over just abolishing copyright.
And it run on DRM hardware only...
oh my, we live in the future https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html