Eh, artists have bills to pay. I try to buy e-books to support my favorite sci-fi authors, but it feels a bit silly that downloading the epub from libgen is literally less hassle than buying it on Google Play.
The fact that it's so much hassle to buy something just goes to show that Google has no incentive to compete on product, where the product is the marketplace itself. Piracy is an indication that the market has failed to produce a satisfactory distribution mechanism, and allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses.
"Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell
Yes, in a pre-computer and pre-internet society. It has no place in the 21st century.
> allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses
You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright.
Every day I log into Netflix and search for something I want to watch, Netflix autocompletes the movie's name and yet it doesn't actually show up in the results. It's there, just not available to me. I lost count of the number of lesser known works I wanted to view but couldn't because they aren't popular and therefore not profitable. I don't even try to find them anymore.
Somehow, copyright stops the service from offering the content to me. I suppose I'm part of some irrelevant market segment they don't care about. So it's not just a service problem.
That is exactly what a service problem looks like. The service problem is caused by having strong copyright available to large corporations that can use it as a profit optimization tool. The role of copyright should be to protect small content creators, but that is not how it is implemented.
This seems to me to be a very strange mindset. Someone else has created content you want, is not offered for sale to you, so you it is in your right to seal it? What makes this OK and where does it end?
What makes it okay is that intellectual property can be copied infinitely without depriving the original owner of it, and the fact that they refuse to sell it to you means you're not even depriving them of potential income, so there's no way of claiming there was any damage done.
It ends when you start talking about actual property that has limited physical supply. Intellectual property isn't real. It naturally has infinite supply, so its market value should be zero.
There are lots of things that have artificial scarcity through the simple act of ownership and this is one of them.
The same goes for the "it won't deprive you of anything" argument. There are plenty of things we all own that if someone borrowed it wouldn't necessarily negatively affect us, but that doesn't mean that we should lend them while we're not using them, especially not for free simply because it would satisfy someone else's desires and pocket if it were free.
There should be better delivery of items given the tech we have (it's better than it was but could be much better); there should be copyright laws that benefit the actual creator more, not just huge corporations (these appear to be getting worse); the price of media is often too high (though again, it's a lot better than it was); none of these are solved by pretending we could or should live in a communist utopia.
If you don't believe that intellectual property is legitimate, why isnt it OK to deprive someone of potential income from it in the cases where it is monetized? Does the attempt to monetize it grant some sort of exclusivity?
Yup. I'd been a relatively happy HBO Now user for years, but just canceled because they recently inexplicably broke playback on Linux browsers (which had worked properly for years). I had a useless back-and-forth with a customer service rep about how increasing friction like this -- especially with someone who is perfectly willing and able to pay for the service -- just drives people to piracy.
Indeed, and we should support those who create the works we enjoy, but consider that the model of buying individual works from a publisher is rooted in the obsolete requirement to create a physical good upon which the work is distributed.
Given that we now live in an age where the cost of distribution is effectively $0, perhaps we need to find a new model for compensating creative works.
Personally, I'm a big fan of things like Patreon, which let me support people who's work I enjoy more-or-less directly and allows creators to keep their creations free for all to enjoy.
Also, in the case of literature I'm not paying just the author. Editors and proofreaders make all the difference:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/why-i-do...
So? That doesn't change anything. The needs of creators cannot override our need for computing freedom. Enabling creators to pay their bills by charging money for data will have serious consequences for society in the long term. If they have bills to pay, they can find something else to do. Ideally, they should get paid for the act of creating rather than the final result.
> it feels a bit silly that downloading the epub from libgen is literally less hassle than buying it on Google Play.
"Piracy" is actually the superior service. It's how everything should work. The copyright industry simply cannot compete and will never be able to compete. The only way they can win is by making the competition illegal.
"Copyleft licenses exist within the legal structure of copyrights. Despite what the name implies, copyleft isn't about abolishing copyrights. Rather, copyleft licenses are a subset of copyright licenses, and the goal is to restore freedom to users."
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copyleft-copyright-key-concept...
I asked that question as the GP made the case that breaking GPL is equivalent to pirating (breaking any other copyright). But GPL ensures a resource is always shareable and anyone who tries to break it would be limiting shareability of the resource, essentially it would be opposite of piracy.
I've been programming since I was about 13 years old. I am no longer a professional software developer though. I've released some works on my GitHub. My most recent contributions to free software: binary QR decoding for ZBar and a small program for configuring my laptop's backlit keyboard. I also reported a GPG bug and sent in a fix some time ago.
> How do you feel about people breaking the GPL?
It's pointless. People can use your software despite any terms and your only recourse is legal action. Seriously doubt individual developers will waste their time and money pursuing violators in court. Even the organizations dedicated to GPL violations won't take all cases. Violators in foreign countries might as well be untouchable, especially developing countries which have better things to do than police the use of imaginary property. The GPL is most useful to projects like the Linux kernel which have massive amounts of leverage over the companies that want to violate the license.
Like copyright, I don't think licenses in general should exist. The GPL was itself created in reaction to copyright protection being extended towards software. It depends on copyright in order to work.
The real value of the GPL is the hacker spirit it represents. I give you the source code and you send back any improvements you make. This core virtue is widely shared and respected by the developer community.
I just saw a video the other day about storing video games in QR codes where the poster submitted a patch for ZBar. Was that you?
https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/commit/5bc323849569a629aa0d1...
If so, then the patch he submitted builds upon my work! He fixed a line feed conversion bug that was present in Windows. I use Linux so I did not experience this issue.
I remember seeing that patch get merged but I didn't know about the whole video game context. This is amazing. I wrote the patch because I was trying to print a 4096 bit RSA secret key as a QR code. Awesome to see it getting used for something even more awesome.
Here are the links to my contributions and related pages:
https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/64
https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/55
https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/82
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=703234
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=710009
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Paperkey#Restore_the_se...
https://stackoverflow.com/a/60518608/512904
ZBar used to automatically convert binary data to text when decoding 8 bit QR codes, mangling the data in the process. My patch adds the option to disable that, enabling the data to be extracted without corruption.
I also added the one shot feature to the ZBar tools to make it easier to use in automated scripts that expect exactly one output:
https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/60
Looks like we have a real world application for tiny ELFs now!
https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...
Storing secret keys as QR codes is an interesting application as well. I remember reading on here about a CEO who printed out a database encryption key as a base64 string and then couldn't type it in correctly when it was needed to restore backups. A machine-readable format definitely seems the way to go.
> > That's kind of the whole point of the GPL, to ensure that that stays true [even of future uses of that code].
Distributing a copyrighted work in a mangled, unreadable format to impede and discourage people from exercising their rights (to share or modify it) is basically DRM, and the GPL is right to prohibit that.
(And yes, this would apply to, eg, Photoshop project files, although even more so than video game source code, I don't consider prefered editing forms for primarily artistic works to be a particularly high priority.)
Grr, the idea of a society where creators get paid a fair amount for their content just makes me so mad. Won't anyone think of the pirates?!
In order for creators to get paid via the copyright system, artificial scarcity of data is needed. In order to create artificial scarcity, people's computers must be compromised with DRM so that they won't be able to make and distribute unauthorized copies of works. Allowing anyone to compromise and own our computers by design and for any reason is a really bad idea and will probably lead to total worldwide surveillance.
I could, physically, go drive my car at 100mph past a school, and nothing about the vehicle would prevent it. Everyone would rightly think me a dangerous idiot for doing it, and the police would probably arrest me, and I'd likely go to jail after being found guilty of motoring offences, but none of that requires the car itself to physically intervene. The likelihood of being observed, investigated, convicted and sentenced is, for most people, a sufficient deterrent even if they might otherwise be so cavalier.
The strange thing about copyright is that unlike other "minor" crimes, copyright infringement is primarily treated as a civil matter in law. The state typically will not invest significant resources in investigating minor infringements or punishing those who break the law. It is left instead to the rightsholder to protect themselves, yet the legal system typically provides no cost-effective means of doing so, nor does it provide access to the investigative powers that police officers or other government officials would have in connection with many other types of illegal behaviour.
The creative industries have fought back with technological measures like DRM and the related laws because, even though we all agree they are deeply flawed, they are also among the few somewhat effective tools that have been left to the legal rightsholders to protect themselves.
I'm not comparing copyright and DRM. I'm saying DRM is a consequence of copyright.
As you noted, technology is the only way rightsholders can effectively protect their property. Since the copyright industry is worth many billions of dollars, they have more than enough money and influence to make their DRM technology a reality. The computer industry is going to back them up. The result will be computers that obey them, not us. Computers that only run the software that they approve, software that does their bidding.
The source of this evil is copyright. There should be no imaginary property to protect in the first place.
1.) If it can be pirated, it should be pirate-able.
Taken to the extreme, does this extend to the realm of people's appearance? With deepfakes I can 'pirate' someone's face and voice to be used for things they would never agree to.
2.) All distribution mediums are middle-men between a creator and a consumer. Whoever is making money as a middle-man is in the wrong. The person making the least money as a middle-man is the least-wrong.
Piracy services only make money on selling ads and file-download/storage subscriptions, and not on a per-consumption basis. They make the least profit from the middle-manning, so pirating services are the least wrong middle-men.
3.) Creators don't need monetary/financial/fame incentives, they should only create for the act of creation-itself.
Consumers will naturally request and "commission" more work from the creator if their work is good.
I know I'm taking it a bit far on the first one, but I can't help but think that you might agree based on reading your comments.
If it's data, it can be freely copied and processed. There's little anyone can do in order to stop it even if it's not supposed to be happening.
> Taken to the extreme, does this extend to the realm of people's appearance? With deepfakes I can 'pirate' someone's face and voice to be used for things they would never agree to.
I'm not sure about this. I feel that the real damage is the defamation of a real person's character by the fabrication, not the act of modifying an image or video of the person.
2.) All distribution mediums are middle-men between a creator and a consumer. Whoever is making money as a middle-man is in the wrong. The person making the least money as a middle-man is the least-wrong.
I generally agree with this. For example, when people buy music CDs most of the money goes to the record company while relatively little goes to the actual musicians. I think that's screwed up.
I also think it's extremely offensive when "pirate" sites try to monetize their sites in any way.
> Piracy services only make money on selling ads and file-download/storage subscriptions, and not on a per-consumption basis. They make the least profit from the middle-manning, so pirating services are the least wrong middle-men.
None of this is necessary. There is absolutely no need for centralized and costly streaming platforms or hidden "pirate" servers. All of these are solutions to problems created by copyright.
Were it not for copyright, we'd be able to share all kinds of data over peer-to-peer technologies like napster, torrents, IPFS. It's a solved problem. The solutions are so good they'd kill the content distribution industry were they legal.
> 3.) Creators don't need monetary/financial/fame incentives, they should only create for the act of creation-itself.
I have no problem with creators getting paid. I just think they shouldn't be able to get paid by exploiting the copyright system. They could create a Patreon and get paid for the act of creating instead. That'd enable them to release their works into the public domain.
> Consumers will naturally request and "commission" more work from the creator if their work is good.
Yes.
Property laws exist to stop the strong from just taking what they want from the weak. Effectively, someone can point to something and say "this is mine, you cannot have it", and either society backs them up on this or it does not. The only thing preventing someone from stealing your car, house, money, etc are laws.
The same is true of digital goods. Someone can point at them and say "this is mine" and the either society backs them up or it doesn't. You can argue that you're not depriving the creator of anything by taking a copy of a digital good, but you are; you're taking away from their ability to support themselves.
> 1.) If it can be pirated, it should be pirate-able.
> Taken to the extreme, does this extend to the realm of people's appearance?
Kickstarter makes it too easy to fail without consequence. Even big names like Neil Stephenson did so (with his swordfighting game, turned out the money ran out and the game wasn't much fun so they just gave up). I don't doubt his sincerity but this model is not ready for the masses. The masses want to buy products, not promises.
Patreon on the other hand, makes it too easy to stay forever in alpha, the money will keep coming in while there's interest and eventually it wanes and the author moves on to something else. But the product never actually gets finished. In the mean time over the many months more money will get spent on it by each 'customer' than on an actual finished product.
Another big name that's currently in this situation is Star Citizen (which was a bit of combo of both models, with continual crowdfunding). Who knows when that'll ever be finished. They certainly have more than enough money but what's lacking is the role of the publisher in the traditional model, who keeps the project on track because they want to see RoI eventually.
The crowdfunding models are great sometimes but they're seriously lacking on this point.
Special circumstances applied in the Jacobsen v. Katzer and Artifex v. Hancom cases. The rulings in those cases do not generalize to open source licenses in general.
Even without that unfortunate legal wrinkle, the response by the industry has been to close down hardware platforms and transform their existing software into SaaS. In a few years, for instance, Macs will run only macOS -- enforced by hardware and the DMCA. I have no reason to believe PCs won't follow suit shortly thereafter.
> Even without that unfortunate legal wrinkle, the response by the industry has been to close down hardware platforms and transform their existing software into SaaS. In a few years, for instance, Macs will run only macOS -- enforced by hardware and the DMCA. I have no reason to believe PCs won't follow suit shortly thereafter.
That's exactly what I mean. I don't want such a future. I want open platforms that aren't owned by the manufacturer. We have free software because programming is an accessible activity: all we really need is git, a text editor and a compiler. Hardware is different: we can't fabricate our own computers and factories cost billions of dollars.
Free software is meaningless if the hardware doesn't allow us to run it.
When I was a teen and wanted pirated games I had to put a lot of time into it (downloading/getting the CD's) then hunt for working cracks and then later deal with the consequences of installing cracks. My time was free but as an adult now I could never justify spending evenings to make pirated games work.
Today's piracy is way more easier than piracy 15 or 25 years ago.
The key selling point of piracy is that it's free.
Side note: I agree entirely but I do miss those evenings! Even legit games were such a chore to install that when they finally worked, you were swept by a wave of pure joy. Looking at you, Little Big Adventure 2!
Not exactly... you still need specialist equipment to do it ... even something like the analogue hole is too inconvenient for the typical user. Even for me it’s just not worth the hassle. Downloading is easy enough for video and music but you still have to find the dodgy sites (in my jurisdiction thus requires some ducking and diving).
In some way it’s easier in some ways it’s harder. It’s an arms race and has been ever thus.
Cracking games from a user standpoint is usually a process of downloading a torrent, waiting a bit, then replacing a handful of files in the install directory the first time, and then you're usually not bothered again. Some include an installer that handles this for you.
It became slightly harder for a period of time when CD sized games became common, and Internet speeds have not yet caught up.
Today's piracy is way more easier than any method of acquiring such games 15 or 25 years ago.
Physically transporting the CD's from the game shop (which was an hour errand to me) doesn't compare to downloading for days or hunting that guy whose brother maybe had it on a random CD in his room.
Did you enjoy the process? A lot of people do it for fun.
Of course if I were willing to torrent it I'd have a perfect copy that I could read anywhere in less than 5 minutes.
Hey everyone, I would like to have the government enforce my idea of ownership, and come after them for copying something. Because without owning everhthing why would scientists, open source developers and wikipedians and creative commons people and folk musicians ever produce anything?