Why I'm a Pirate
ploum.net
ploum.net
Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work. If I write something, I control what is done with it. No random person can just come along and appropriate it to that person's use or profit. I can say no to that or I can say yes, as I determine. If I say yes, I can require that person to compensate me for using my work or I can decide that I don't want compensation because I want others to freely benefit from my work. The point is that it is my decision. I have sole control over what is done with that which I create. Why? Because the law protects that right. And it does so, for the most part, through copyright.
When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it and that any random person can come along and freely enjoy the benefits of that work and also freely reproduce and distribute that work. Under that sort of legal system, I can attempt to sell my work, or license it, or perform it publicly, but anybody else can do the same. Why? Because it is no longer "my" work, at least not legally. It is not protected in any way from the efforts of others to exploit it commercially or to give it away as they like. It is anyone's right to do with it what he will. Now, of course, I may rejoice in this. I may desire to create something wonderful and see to it that it is freely distributed to the maximum degree possible because I feel it is important that people benefit from my creative output without any obligation to me. Under a society in which copyright is protected, I can freely choose to do that if I like. I can place my work in the public domain and relinquish any right to compensation for it. Or I can let others use it freely but only on if they meet some condition that I impose on it, such as giving me attribution. The point is that this is my decision. If copyright does not exist, though, I have no such rights and I have no such control. In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process. In such a system, anything created by anybody is simply common property. People can use it for good or for bad but I have no say in it. I may be the creator but that is beside the point. People like the author of this piece can simply saunter by and take it for whatever use the like.
When a society makes a decision to defend the right of a creative person to control his work, and to profit from it or give it away as he likes, it has to make all sorts of policy decisions. Should such control last indefinitely? Of course not. Why? Because the benefits that we all get from being able to control our creative work only last so long. After a time, and certainly after we die, we have presumably exhausted whatever benefit we get from such control. Then too, others also create and, in time, all sorts of people borrow from one another and build upon the efforts of others regardless of the degree of creativity that they add to the process. Given enough time, we get what is known as a "common heritage" - something that far transcends the creative work of any one person. And so we have what is known as a public domain - a rich collection of creative output that is freely available to all. Those who value copyright and its social benefits in protecting creative output also value the public domain because it is a natural concomitant to the protected core of works that fall under copyright in any given generation. Indeed, a key aspect of copyright is precisely to encourage people to create - to invest the very blood and sweat that it often takes to do something great - in order that society generally will be enhanced and improved as creative works are done, are made available to the world as the creator may decide, and eventually pass into the public domain. So a fundamental tenet of copyright is that it cannot be absolute. It needs to be strictly bounded to achieve its legitimate goals without being extended to a point where it defeats those goals and gives special privileges to persons for no good reason.
Today, copyright has been seriously abused in the U.S. and elsewhere and needs to be fixed. In particular, terms of copyright need to be brought back to sensible levels. The public domain as it exists needs to be preserved and a better system needs to be in place by which orphaned works can freely enter the public domain. Many other fixes are needed as well. What is most definitely not needed is a SOPA-style enforcement scheme that opens up legal channels to copyright holders that would permit all sorts of abusive actions against innocent parties in the name of copyright enforcement. This sort of thing merely perpetuates the abuse and does not fix anything. Those who have been paying attention strongly sense this, and it has been pretty amazing to watch people unite to oppose the back-room sleaziness that led to such legislative efforts in the first place.
To defeat SOPA, though, one must affirm copyright. Just as we recoil at legal abuse in a SOPA-style scheme, we equally recoil at self-righteous claims that people can freely take what others create with no consideration whatever given to those who create it. That sort of radical assertion will get us nowhere when it comes to shaping serious legal policy in the SOPA debate. It needs to be roundly rejected.
I could not disagree more. If someone creates a work of art, they only own the physical manifestation of that creation. They can guard that physical manifestation, thereby preventing its release into the public domain until such a time as it may profit them. What they do not own is other people's property, so to force other people to not do with their property what they please simply because someone else had a thought first is unethical. It's an understandable, knee-jerk, brute-force means of providing a business model to artists, but it is still unethical.
Find. Another. Way.
And in short you deny artists of ownership of anything else than the physical representation (unethical!) But in the next sentence you make the creation "other people's property". If I think of something you did not, this robs me of rights and automatically gives entitlement to you?
I'm trying very hard to avoid an ad-hominem, but I wonder how many people who espouse this "everything should be free" mindset actually create stuff and hurt themselves with this argument. Even software developers who strictly write software for other people benefit from copyright in a work-for-hire arrangement.
With Steam, you're still paying a one-time fee to purchase a license to use the software.
[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468027
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Work-for-hire is a concept that, sure, can work in some cases. It does not solve the problem of the development of significant, large-scale creative works--and making it economically viable to do so. As I've said elsewhere in this comment tree, I find it extremely unlikely that one will fund a Half-Life or a Skyrim through Kickstarter. Can you honestly and with good faith say that you consider it more reasonably feasible for projects to raise multiple millions of dollars on a Kickstarter-esque platform than for private investiture to take the risk of profitability on such a project?
You tell us to "use our imagination" to defend your argument for you. I reject this: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and while I don't expect that you have extraordinary evidence, more than handwaving would be nice. How are large-scale creative works made economically feasible to produce in this utopic world without copyright? To the best of my knowledge, even open-source game projects have never managed this. You can bring up a Wesnoth or something, but the coherence of the game experience is poor at best and for the most part these games simply fail to credibly measure up to the focused, designed experiences of the aforementioned commercial titles. The argument of "settle for Wesnoths" doesn't ring true to me.
Were I to assume bad faith, as you so regularly seem to do (really, you're among the more abusive regular posters here, I'm kind of surprised you get away with it), I would charge that you lack respect for creatives and seem content for them to subsist off the inconsistently extant angels of consumers' better natures. But instead I would rather assume good faith and expect you to have some sort of insight into this world that you imply would be superior. So, put up or shut up.
Similarly, dhimes claiming to not know how a work for hire business plan for a song writer could work strains credibility. Hence my snark.
If you honestly believe the answer is not trivial, then feel free to respond to fabjan above.
I have responded briefly to your Valve Software point here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481338
Or maybe someone wants to make a film, so she hires a music writer for the score.
I see the value of copyright (or other intellectual property protection, such as the "terms of use" I mentioned above) in this case, for two reasons.
First, the value for the creative doesn't scale. Suppose a conductor commissioned some music to be written for six summer evening performances. How should the music writer value the work to be written? The negotiations would probably consider how much revenue the performances will generate, and result in a (presumably) fair compensation for the writer.
But suppose the conductor, after the piece has been written, uses the it for eight performances? Or switches to a much larger venue that generates much more revenue? If you don't allow for a way for the writer to be fairly compensated you run the risk of not being able to attract good writers to the field. We could argue that geniuses and top talent would still be there, but it would be difficult for merely talented to make a living (or for the unknown to start out).
The second reason I see is to protect the reputation of the writer. John Williams is a brilliant composer who has written some of the best and most-recognizable movie themes. He wrote, for instance, the theme for the movie "Jaws."
Suppose someone took his music and used it as a soundtrack for a movie that he found very distasteful (a porno, or a movie advocating the rise of the Aryan Nation, for example). He would then be associated with these other ideas, even against his will. You could argue that his ability to use music to conjure emotions could be used to rally people for causes with which he vehemently disagrees. Copyright can help protect against that (but can't completely stop it, of course).
Write a song for Metallica? Sell it to them in exchange for some amount of cash up front, and partial ownership in the company that is selling that particular album/single/whatever.
Clumsy perhaps, but if big money is involved the overhead should be minimal.
Now I wouldn't cry if the era of multi-million-dollar entertainers is over, but I think that it would be a mistake to throw all copyright out. Rework it maybe, but keep the idea that mental creations are assets just like physical creations are. The concept of copyright arose because there appeared to be a need to protect those rights when that protection was absent, so I would be very hesitant to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes time to reexamine our IP laws.
For me, the SOPA/PIPA issue is about due process. Taking a site offline can be damaging in ways that may be hard to quantify, so the standard of proof should be pretty high IMO.
Copyright is one of the things that allows artists to get in a position to go on the road and do these shows.
However your creation manifests itself. A live performance or the physical media of a recording, for example.
> Because as soon as I make a record I have to "guard that physical manifestation" ... how?
The same way you guard your other possessions: with a lock and a door.
> you make the creation "other people's property"
The physical manifestation. The matter, as it were.
> If I think of something you did not this robs me of rights and automatically gives entitlement to you?
If you come up with an idea, it is yours to guard. If you communicate this idea, then you cannot ethically use force to prevent others from acting upon it. I do not believe I am robbing you of any right, because I do not believe that information can be property - only the physical manifestation of information (the media) can be property.
The fundamental point is that I don't think that you have a right to make a living as an artist. If you can find a way to get people to pay you for it, that's great. Just don't take away people's rights in the process.
It's the same in software. I'd love to be able to get paid for every little thing I ever wrote, but that's not reality. I only get paid for things that can be packaged into some kind of product, something with a business model where people feel like paying me.
These threshold pledge systems all have the weakness that the work must be paid for up front, after which (since one assumes a lack of copyright) the work is public domain. In some ways this may not actually be a weakness, though; it transforms users into investors, making them say, "I would like something that does / has X and Y, and I would be willing to pay $Z to get it." Of course, this system does not entail any per-copy price... however, nowadays the cost to create a copy of something is approaching zero anyway. Does it really make sense to continue to charge a per-copy fee? Charging a subscription fee, however, would still be possible in many circumstances, if a service was actually being offered.
What are your thoughts on such systems?
Today, I can self-bootstrap by making smaller games and building up cash reserves, if I want. Or I can put away some money in my day job, like I am now, to actually build what I want to build and what I think will be well-received and make more value back for me than the money and time I'll need to sink into it to create it. Why would I risk my own money, and that much time, in a system where I'll get nothing back for it? (Subscription services are not a solution; not every game is World of Warcraft, and I'd argue that none should be.)
"I'm going to need $100,000 (or, for something where you'd actually have to hire multiple people, $X,000,000) to make a video game."
"Yeah, right. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."
While I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, every rebuttal to this I've ever seen requires a lot of handwaving and an assumption of active and knowledgeable participation on the part of end consumers. To be honest, I don't expect investor-level behavior out of consumers; I expect a lot of yelling about how something is X when they "already paid for" something very slightly but to them critically different than X, but not much in the way of useful, constructive development-centric criticism. It's not their bag.
While I acknowledge that it doesn't seem to make economic sense, I have a great deal of respect for how people seem to be actually behaving. True nobodies can raise six figures on Kickstarter right now. I can only imagine what would happen if a somebody tried.
If Valve put HL3 on Kickstarter, might they raise the necessary funds? I kinda think they might.
Valve, with the original Half-Life didn't come completely out of nowhere, but it was pretty close. I am confident enough to say that it wouldn't have happened if they had to use a Kickstarter clone. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but I can't think of a case where a creative work running, say, $5,000,000 (which is a moderate movie budget, if you have examples from that medium) was pre-funded by a crowd of consumers (i.e., excluding patronage, which I think most would agree is not a desirable model to return to) as opposed to profit-seeking investors.
The recent success of numerous "indy" games, smartphone app games, and in particular Zynga indicate to me that success in the market with a low budget (read: not making 'AAA games') is still not only feasible, but common.
But the issue is how to do so without the ability to extract money from an "easily copied" work--that is, how to make it economically viable without copyright protections on the published end result. I find it unlikely that in this idealized no-copyright world, it is economically viable to devote a lot of time to building something that requires significant multidisciplinary effort (also read as "cash outlay for things you can't do yourself") with a relatively small investment up-front.
I find it likely that the Kickstarter/creatives-as-contractors model would end up not being worth my time, nor that of probably most people on HN; spending my time stumping for donations that barely cover production costs (else people ask why you aren't doing it for barely enough to cover production costs, why you're keeping "so much" in order to do those "eating" and "paying for gas" and "sleeping under a roof" things). Somebody else is more likely to pay me well enough to live--subsisting off the angels of consumers' better natures does not strike me as a winning proposition.
With copyright protections, it becomes economically plausible (not a guaranteed success, but plausible) for me to spend my time making something, even sinking my own money into it, because of the conviction that enough people will like it that I'll make back my nut and turn a profit as well. Y'know--capitalism.
And I find it extremely unlikely that those 'AAA titles'--which, as it happens, are often really really spectacularly good--would exist at all. Which would be a grievous, grievous shame. Skyrim is a beautiful game. Loads of fun, but more than that--just beautifully crafted.
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Alternatives such as Zynga are, to me, unpalatable, and are the "Facebook monstrosities" to which I referred elsewhere in this thread. Freemium games offer a terrible user experience and subscription games almost as bad. They may make a lot of money, but while I've talked a lot about economic viability in this thread, I do still have a vested interest in making great stuff. Making money and building great stuff are more at odds in the freemium and subscription models than in the more standard, "buy a license, play it" model.
It is my thought however that the harm done to society by these industries becoming diminished would be vastly outweighed by the positive aspects. We'll likely have to agree to disagree there.
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"Alternatives such as Zynga are, to me, unpalatable"
Oh trust me... I have no argument there.
It's serendipitous that you bring this up, as I am currently working on a startup that uses this very method!
Hit me back at the address in my profile, if you would.
Transaction costs include legal stuff, distribution, and advertising. The later is probably the largest block. There's only a very small minority who likes to engage in the creation of works. The majority just wants to be entertained. For this, they need signals of quality, and the perceivable amount of advertising is such a signal.
Actually, the US Constitution only allows for limited control, not unlimited control. The Constitution requires Fair Use exceptions to your control of your created works.
That is a less extreme change than that from Plessy vs Ferguson to Brown vs the Board of Education, for example. And a good case can be made for freedom of speech trumping copyright; the Constitutional argument for copyright is a practical one for "encouraging" the advance of arts and sciences; eternal copyright has already undercut that argument.
This is a very subtle distinction. We should do all we can to help creators, not publishers. Publishers have their place in the distribution chain, but they should not be allowed to act as if they were the creators.
If the publisher's business model is failing, so be it. Publishers and gatekeepers are not worth saving. Creators are. Support creators. Buy CDs directly from the artists. Buy them through the shortest distribution chain possible (even if that might be Amazon or Apple).
Create laws that make copyright an unalienable right, thus forcing publishers back to the publishing business that is rightly theirs.
Furthermore, if an artist wants to sell IP ownership of his work then there's no reason he shouldn't be free to do so.
Your main point, however, is a good one. Disruptive distribution channels should be able to fix this by allowing artists to make good money without selling out to big media companies.
I'm not sure.
A singer and songwriter aren't the only people involved in a music product. Likewise a song isn't the only thing involved in a music track. It involves production, for example, investment, the confluence of a variety of artistic, technical, management and manufacturing skills. Why shouldn't a music company have some claim over the copyright of the finished product?
Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?
> In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process.
This is a common approach, but it completely fails as a moral argument. You are saying it is right because it is good for creators. That is an argument of self-interest, and problem is it immediately justifies its opposite. A non-owner can simply say: disobeying the law serves my self-interest, therefore that is right for me.
But it is also short-sighted. You are not only a 'creator', you are a user too. One might well be the greatest writer of books, for example, and so benefit from increased copyright/IP rights. But one will probably not also be the greatest music composer, and the greatest film-maker, and software developer, and so on. We are net consumers, in a sense. To give producers more is to take more from ourselves.
Ultimately, we grant IP rights not because they are for producers, but because they are pragmatically supposed to be useful overall -- that is the only justification. There is no other, no sensible rational purely moral argument, for copyright/IP. That ought always to be remembered.
you could also ask
What if the instrument creators started to license the use of their guitars, drums and people had to pay royalties.
Because, the creative work would not exist if not for the creator. If you take away the creator's right (and I am not arguing that it should be infinite and indefinite), you take away the incentive to produce and expose creative work. In effect, everyone loses.
There ain't such thing as free art.
You can't deny however that any massive undertakings would be effectively killed. No one will invest millions of dollars to produce a video game, or hundreds of millions to produce a movie if it can be freely copied.
It's great that you can make a game or movie on a small budget, but isn't it better to live in a world where we can have both? Does the cost of copyright really outweigh the benefits of living in a society where creative people can devote all of their time producing content?
You see the problem is that you have to think about this in a much larger perpective to realize that things will even themselves out.
With regards to cost of copyright. Then yes when it makes people criminals to the extent it do today and fines them with amounts it do then it is way way way to high.
I'm not sure how 3d models would make a difference in movies? Many movies are already basically 3d renders.
That's only true currently for games that are only playable via a single central online service (e.g WoW etc) and that's sort of dictated by the game format itself.
What I mean is a world where all games are video streamed to you even if they are single player only.
You know times change.
Anyway. I made my point already.
Still, I'd rather not have to depend on charity-lumberjacking, you know? If someone wants to chop down trees for free, that's between him and his god (or dryad, as the case may be). If that's the only way trees ever get cut down? God help us all.
Above statement refers, for purposes of argument, to sustainable tree harvesting, so as to avoid irrelevant side tangents.
A lumberjack can't digitally mass produce cutting down trees. They have to actually be present at each tree.
What you cannot do, however, is find a difference that distinguishes them in a way that defends your argument that we shouldn't worry about a world where X is only produced by charity, since some people do X for free.
If you don't care that art would only be produced for free, neither should you care if lumberjacking only happened by charity. If you're not ready to go that far, you might not want to lean so heavily on the argument that "(some) artists create for free".
Don't blame me for you lack of imagination that would have allowed you to see a world where artist could create without making money on digitally mass produced songs.
It is possible plenty of people are doing it.
So please spare me the strawmen.
The guy that cracked your account and used it to make these comments:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480634 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480674 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480761
>Don't blame me for you lack of imagination that would have allowed you to see a world where artist could create without making money on digitally mass produced songs.
I'm sure, that, just as with making music, there are revenue models for lumberjacking that don't involve charging for lumberjacking services. For example, they could broadcast live video of themselves chopping down trees and charge for that. Or maybe trees should only be cut down by their owners so they're not technically earning money from chopping down a tree.
Or, you know, we could just bypass the whole charade and let people charge for the lumberjacking/artistic creations that they were responsible for (if they so wish) rather than stick to some ideological belief that it's somehow wrong to do so while hoping they come up with some convoluted way to accomplish the same thing with more restricted means.
It's great that there are ways to produce good X without invoking exclusivity rights in X; but for those (many) cases where X wouldn't otherwise be produced, I would like for that model to be an option.
That doesn't mean the current copyright regime is optimal; far from it. It just means that the mentality of "IP sucks and everyone will produce valuable stuff for free" is looney.
If you cant see the difference between a performance and copying the performance to re-sell it, then frankly there isn't much to discuss.
- offering an argument, - being shown how it is flawed, and then - ignoring the explanation you were just given, to fall back on a variant of "copying is free".
I think a lot of us readers would prefer it if you engage the arguments given to you.
What haven't I addressed? Your flawed premise that lumberjacking can be compared to selling CDs?
What you haven't addressed is your inability to consistently apply your claims about non-IP-reliant methods of art production. Here's what happened:
You post (the one right before my first reply), showing indifference to the prospect of it being impossible to make a monetary profit from production of intellctual works.
Paraphrasing your comment, you say,: Real artists don't work for profit, so it's actually a good thing if production of movies, books, etc cannot earn a monetary profit due to people not respecting IP claims.
Then, I come back, and ask if you are so indifferent to the unprofitability of production of something else people want being rendered unprofitable due to widespread refusal to recognize rights therein, using the example of lumberjacking.
Due to your apparent inability to follow chains of logic beyond a certain depth, you felt it was sufficient to cite one superficial difference betweeen lumberjacking and creation of intellectual works, and considered it "case closed" and duh why can't this idiot see that they're different.
What you don't understand (almost certainly due to an unwillingness to) is that this difference, while true, does not invalidate the analogy I was drawing, because they are not different in the relevant aspects. What aspects?
1) In both cases, there would be a bad incentive effect on the valuable activity: the lumberjacking and intellectual works that need a profit incentive to produce, won't be.
2) In both cases, you can find some circuitous, inefficient way to reproduce the profitability that would otherwise come from simply recognizing rights therein.
In response to both of these similarities, and due to your inability to consistently apply the principles you advocate, you simply fall back on, "art can be copied, cutting a tree down can't". And that's true. But it means precisely nothing in terms of the above similarities.
Quite frankly, it's frustrating when you keep falling back on your standard line that they're different (in a narrow way), completely obvlivious to how it contradicts what you just said ("who cares if socially-beneficial activity X can't turn a profit [except by circuitous routes]?"). I expect better from people I debate with, especially on HN.
At the moment we have many people making something equivalent to "folk art" and getting paid to do so. Folk art does not necessarily need support from a patron since it is typically fairly easy to make (i.e. it can be done in one's spare time). People will continue making folk art after they can no longer be ensured payment for their work, though to a lesser extent.
Then the alternative is that all creators keep their output to themselves and people with this entitled attitude never get to make use of their work. Or maybe they don't make something at all. Or maybe they don't even try to learn to make something and get a "real" job because anything they would create is no longer able to buy them lunch. There are people who want to give works away free and for them that's great but what gives any of us the rights to something someone else has made? It's one thing to come across a piece of work legitimately and then be able to do as you please with it.
The music industry is an easy target and even I have a hard time defending them. What about software though? A lot of us here make our living partly due to the protections of copyright. It's one thing to circumvent Apple or Microsoft and pirate some software but what about the indie developer? That guy can't make up the costs with live performances like other types of creators. You either pay for a copy or you don't. If one copy gets bought and 500 get pirated then that guy just got royally screwed. Not all software lends itself to free downloads with paid support. Not all software can be SaaS. So what then? Even open source developers have day jobs. You can't live on PayPal donations and Flattrs.
This whole anti-copyright argument sounds wonderful but the world isn't ready yet. Maybe in another 20 years. The answer isn't to get rid of copyright, the answer is to scale it back to a point where it's more sane.
So, the entire issue for indie developers (of whose ranks I count myself a member) can be solved by not making a product until you confirm that it is wanted (i.e., pay me while I develop it, then do whatever). Alternately, you leave the creation of games (which have little to no lasting value) to be works of art, and let the artists and hobbyists make them for whatever living they can eke out. Entertainment as an industry, much less a secure one, is a silly idea.
You can't live on PayPal donations
Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way.
This whole anti-copyright argument sounds wonderful but the world isn't ready yet. Maybe in another 20 years. The answer isn't to get rid of copyright, the answer is to scale it back to a point where it's more sane.
There is no magical time where the switch will be flipped and the world will embrace and move post copyright. Better we solve this--now--then wait until our infrastructure and freedoms are attacked. Before drastic measures such as breaking core parts of the interne--oh, huh, welp.
There is no sane part to copyright. None. It's madness. It is saying that we must artificially introduce scarcity onto things that can be duplicated freely--that's mad!
Your logic is faulty - just because some people will continue to create in spite of the system does not mean all can continue to. Yes, indie game developers can continue to make games, but what about larger undertakings? You can't spend millions of dollars and employ large teams to devote themselves fully to creating a game like, say, Diablo 3, without some way to support those deveopers, artists, etc. A world with only indie games is less rich than a world with both indie and commercial games.
> "Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way."
I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.
I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.
So, to a point, they are effectively living off "donations" until they ship 1.0, right? Preorders are effectively donations to continue development.
All you get for free is an older version where you cannot do multiplayer or save your game. Basically a demo.
Your solution for indie developers sounds extremely far fetched and idealistic. "I'm developing software that does X, Y, and Z. If you like how that sounds then pay me before it's finished and then if I ever do finish it you'd better hope it lives up to what I said it would do. It's okay if it turns out to be garbage because you get to do whatever you want with it once I give it to you"? That doesn't scale. You're paying for what the software does for you, not for the actual software itself. It's a form of paying for a service. Some of the cost is for development but the core of what you pay is for the value you derive from it. Ideally there's a free trial and you see if you like it. Then you decide whether the cost lines up with what you're willing to pay based on the value you derive from it. In the end you're free to go elsewhere if it doesn't line up. It's a great system for all parties. I don't play any games but I do enjoy music and movies. The idea that entertainment as an industry being silly isn't relevant. We're talking about opinions here so I don't want to totally discount yours but I think it makes perfect sense for entertainment to be an industry. That's the nature of capitalism. Anything can become an industry if you set it up right. You can say the same of any industry but if that became the norm than business as we know it would cease to exist and everything would be a hobby. That sounds like entitlement. Like saying "I should be able to see movies, plays, concerts, etc. free because that's just a hobby and they should go get real jobs".
Living off donations can work I'll admit but it doesn't scale. Creators should be able to set the price for their work just as consumers should not be forced to pay for anything. But if you're not paying the creator what he asks then you aren't entitled to set his price or take it free. The market does that.
I know there will never be a right time for this just like anything but realistically we're not even close to being set up for such a switch. While I disagree with you right now and I think your position is a little extreme I have to say that the work of people like you will get us to a point where that switch may become a real possibility. I'd argue instead for everyone to agree on some middle ground but whichever way things go I will abide.
There is a sanity to copyright. There are competing interests between creators and consumers. That's part of what makes the market. Frankly, I'm surprised that people are defending only one side of this since we are all both creators and consumers. We can't give consumers all the rights and leave creators with no control of their works but we also can't give creators so much control that they seriously impede on the rights of consumers.
A lot of the rhetoric surrounding this seems to be focused on copyright but what I see is an anti-business position. We can't let ourselves go to extremes in the name of freedom or in the name of business as either would be an unjust crusade. Instead of chopping off our heads to cure a headache lets try to deal with specific issues. Abolishing copyright hurts us as much as letting copyright extend beyond its current state. The biggest issue I see is the distribution issue. We need to come to some agreement on what is legal when it comes to "sharing" among other things.
I'm not in favor of SOPA or it's relatives. I think copyright has become a monster. But I still support the idea, not the implementation. For a community that benefits from copyright so much I don't understand why so many are taking such an extreme position. I'd rather see us be more moderate. It's more same to call for shorter copyright terms and such than to get rid of it. When people argue about middle men screwing over artists and consumers we should be finding a way to either get rid of middle men or curb their power without totally obliterating copyright. Copyright can serve to keep works free just as much as it can restrict freedoms and most people forget that. Artists should get together and unionize for a higher cut of profits.
I wonder what would happen if record labels were fair to their artists. Would all the people bragging that they're pirates because it's morally wrong for labels to pay such a pittance still use that argument or has it just been a petty excuse all along? I get the feeling that a lot (but not all) of these "freedom fighting pirates" are doing things for their own self interest and not for any moral reasons at all.
So I disagree still. I'm not one to stubbornly hold an opinion to be right. So I'm interested to learn more but i think this position isn't just one position but part of a package deal that comes with an entire worldview that I don't understand.
"There are competing interests between creators and consumers."
This part I don't quite get--what do consider the rights in conflict? Obviously there is the difference in what creators want to be paid and what consumers want to save, but is there something beyond this you intend...?
"When people argue about middle men screwing over artists and consumers we should be finding a way to either get rid of middle men or curb their power without totally obliterating copyright."
The problem I see is that copyright is primarily used these days to benefit the middlemen, right? Indeed, copyright (by its very nature) is aimed solely at benefiting whoever is in charge of distribution--it's about the right to copy.
As such, as technology attacks and removes middlemen, so too does it render obsolete the notion of copyright. If you empower consumers to handle their own distribution, the motivations for having copyright at all wither away and the legal machinery becomes vestigial.
"A lot of the rhetoric surrounding this seems to be focused on copyright but what I see is an anti-business position."
I am not qualified to speak on behalf of anyone claiming similar views. For my own part, though, it isn't about being anti-business--as Chesterson said: the problem isn't that there are too many capitalists; it's that there are too few.
I believe that copyright creates a barrier to entry in information economies that is vastly outweighed by the progress that comes from being able to openly improve and distribute works. Moreover, I believe that it allows business models that would not be practical in a free market.
I don't think we need to do away with business--I just believe that if you create IP you need to accept (as a given!) that you won't be able to control its dissemination, and model your business accordingly.
If you can provide support for it in the wild, better then the other guy, it's a viable business (see Red Hat, Ardor Labs, etc.)
If you can provide faster access and better UX for it, it's a viable business (see Steam, Netflix, etc.)
If you can't do any of that, but can offer a sense of engagement with the community while polishing the software and get paid by donations/preorders, it's a viable business (see Minecraft, Overgrowth, etc.)
Otherwise, you are literally building an entire business on scarcity the government provides and enforces. This doesn't strike me as sound.
While I disagree with you right now and I think your position is a little extreme I have to say that the work of people like you will get us to a point where that switch may become a real possibility.
I apologize that I'm so hardline on this, but I feel it the only rational position to take--tenable, perhaps not, but certainly the most rational.
"So I'm interested to learn more but i think this position isn't just one position but part of a package deal that comes with an entire worldview that I don't understand."
Thank you for keeping an open mind. :)
I've been wrestling with this for a few years now in one way or another.
My biggest suggestion is to start thinking about what is truly being sold, what value that truly has, and whether or not this system makes sense. Try to identify what makes that work, and who supports it, and how much excess exists along the way from the creator to the consumer.
Every hour an artist has to spend at a day job is an hour they can't spend creating. It's an hour they can't spend practicing. It's an hour they can't spend raising awareness of their work.
For example a lot of rock music comes from anger and frustration of having to work a shitty job, behave in a prescribed way and having little money.
As soon as you have released a few albums and have free reign to fill your nose with coke , cover yourself in tattoos and can afford to live wherever you like you may lose some of initial meaning behind the art and start to become pretentious and contrived.
1) Artists have memories. When I was much younger, I worked as a telemarketer. It was probably the worst job I ever held in my life. It was soul-crushing. Even though I am now a reasonably successful software engineer, I still remember how difficult it was to go to work knowing that unless I was lucky, I was going to be rejected all day long. Even though I've been with my partner for more than a decade, I remember how chaotic, foolish, and frustrating the dating scene was. Anyone with a few years under their belt knows that a bad memory can jump out at you and make you feel exactly the way you did when it happened.
2) An artists music evolves over time. Look at the Beatles. "With the Beatles" is an astonishingly different album from "Abbey Road." Just because you start out as one thing doesn't mean you have to be that thing for the rest of your career.
3) Look at artists like Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and even Billy Joel to some extent. No matter what your opinion of their music is, it's hard to argue that they are not iconic representations of the "everyman" in music. Most of their output was produced while they were some of the highest paid performers in the world. Even a guy like Jay-Z hasn't been poor or street for a very long time, but if he puts out another record, you can be damned sure that there will be millions of people who buy it because he knows how to write songs that relate to the kind of person he used to be.
Don't put too much stock in the idea that you have to be street level to write good music.
That is provably not the case: People still published written works, performed plays and music for thousands of years before copyright laws were introduced.
Even today, there are vast numbers of novels, movie clips, songs etc. being made available freely.
The alternative is that SOME creators keep their output to themselves. The vast majority of creators are not being paid to create their content.
Now, if you want to make a claim that the works created by the ones that would keep their output to themselves are more important to society, then that's a claim that is not as easily refutable, and it'd even be possible you're right, depending on how one measures importance of a work.
>> The point is that this is my decision.
>Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do?
http://thegatheringplacehome.myfastforum.org/archive/life-le...
"Granting the hen the right to distribute (or not) the bread takes that right away from everyone else. How is this justified?" asked the cow.
Um, because the hen made the fucking bread, and the cow didn't. I think that our copyright system is bad, and I personally take similar stance to OP vis-a-vis Big Media, but you'll notice that OPs arguments are pragmatic. "You don't provide a good product" "You hurt me with the fees I pay" "The UX of pirating is better." He's attacking the lazy industry for litigating rather than innovating, attacking the middlemen who are McDucking in swimming pools of cash, and attacking their specious arguments about how you're "hurting the artist" (Funny coming from them: record companies aren't generally known for their generous behavior towards artists). Nowhere does he say "no one should have control over their own works."
The artist didn't make the ability to produce in large numbers and distribute at zero cost, that is what technology did.
A technology that served the labels and musicians for one hundred years.
Now it is turning on them and they start to complain. Bo freaking ho.
People make music without making a single dime on it. Great music in fact fantastic music. The big artists are big because the record labels and IP laws make them big. Not because they through some fair game was the best of the crop.
The argument of "well you didn't invent TCP/IP so you can't expect to make money distributing digital copies of your music" is the slipperiest of slippery slopes, as none of us personally created all the technologies we use to make a living. I use a laptop, text editor, and web browser, none of which I created: have I forfeit my right to make a living as a web developer?
It seems that the simplest, most generic expression of your argument (correct me if I'm wrong) is "No one can reasonably expect to make money on anything which can be reproduced digitally, and this is more or less fair." I disagree.
If I take an microphone from you, you don't have an microphone. If I copy a song from you, you still have the song yourself.
It might be that you don't see the difference but I do and therein is our disagreement.
..and so I have to buy a new one if we both want to have one at the same time.
"If I copy a song from you, you still have the song yourself."
Awesome, we can just buy one then and split the cost! But why stop there? Let's also give a copy to Tom, Dick and Harry so that each pays 20%! Now, what if we could somehow share the song and the cost with a hundred million people across the world..
In fact I can chip in and share it with 200 friends if I want to.
You see the difference?
That is the difference.
In the absence of a contract (if I just decided to work for a day for you without your prior agreement to pay for the day of work), yes. Doing work does not automatically create an obligation of others to pay you for having done it.
There are two things that can create such an obligation:
* altering something you already had (such as an object or your body)
* a contract between you and another party
Let's turn it around.
Would you pay for someone who sent you a video of some work they did for someone else?
It's not how things work.
Generally the more niche something is the less fans it will have but the more those fans will love it.
A lot of pop music and modern moves + video games are designed specifically to appeal a bit to a large number of people. It's almost impossible to create something that appeals a lot to everyone.
So the other option is to find a small niche following and concentrate on extracting the most amount of money from them. I imagine that without some form of copyright most of the music produced would either be stuff produced by musicians for other musicians or for the upper classes who would fund it's continued development.
There would be a lot less "angry prole" music.
Every hour you have to spend working a day job is an hour you can't spend creating.
I am telling you that even with the music you like whatever that is there is plenty of great music that you never have heard of and never will. That's how it is in all genres of music.
There are of course good musicians who distribute their music monetarily free but how much of it is explicitly copyright free (i.e libre not gratis)?
I know a number of aspiring musicians who if a large media company took their music and redistributed it under a different name with different people lip syncing to their vocals then boy would they be pissed.
There were no cameras in those days if there was somebody would simply record the show and distribute it, I would imagine Shakespeare would want some of that action himself.
I'd like to charge everyone who sees me when I walk down the street - I'd make a bundle - but I'd think society would be pretty stupid if they indulged me.
We are talking about normal consumers.
From what I hear he started out covering pop songs on YouTube. Exactly the type of infringement that SOPA/PIPA is trying to kill off.
People love design, and do great design without making a single dime on it. The rich designers are rich because professional networking, big companies and IP laws make them big. Not because they were the best of the crop.
Boo Freaking Hoo. Real designers do it for love. Only phonies want to get paid.
I don't know why you guys keep arguing the same misguided argument.
Here is the difference.
When I design for a client I put in the work and design specifically to to them. I am in other words a performing artist.
I don't just send them a CD with the same design I did for all my other clients.
Are you really telling me that you can't see the difference here?
I am not saying artists shouldn't make money so there is no need to repeat the same tired claim.
This is about whether it's a right to make money on mass-producing CDs?
Let's assume that there is no copyright. You get a contract from a client to design them a logo , website and smartphone app to promote their business.
However your client knows that if a competitor wishes to copy their entire website including logo and app etc they can do so with impunity so all that they will get from whatever sum they invest in your work is a slight first mover advantage and probably the better the work you do the more likely someone else is to copy it.
How much do you think they are willing to pay you for your work now?
Do you know how many songs are stealing of each other?
Should we tell musicians to pay for the licks and riffs they takes from someone else music and incorporate into his how?
Of course you could argue how much imitation should be allowed before it is considered a copyright or patent violation.
So what is it? Is it taking something away from the original creator (and the creator before him/her) or is it not.
I would not equate copying necessarily with stealing but each copy that is made of your software/music whatever will dilute it's value to an extent unless there is some compensation. Commercial software hopes you will compensate by paying money, OSS hopes you will compensate by providing code or some other service.
So it's not really any different, besides of course that transcribing someone's licks and incorporating it into your own style isn't going to get exposed.
Your argument seems to boil down to what the minimum unit of valid IP is. This is a complex issue and is often fought in courts.
Taking a riff from someone elses song and rebuilding a new song around it requires a lot more creativity time and money than simply copying and redistributing the song.
Copyright isn't so much for protecting an "idea" as such (that's what patents are for). It is to stop somebody reproducing a complete piece of work without prior agreement.
Let's say I build a new type of software and publish it, then somebody else thinks that is a good idea and builds their own version that is similar to mine (without re-using my source code). I would view that as flattery and competition. However I have a strong first mover advantage and whilst they may have learned from some of my mistakes they still have to actually do the work of creating their software which puts us economically on a relatively even footing.
Suppose instead they simply redistribute my software with their logo on it for half the price then they have a strong economical advantage because they didn't have to invest the initial development costs that I did.
Are musicians stealing from other musicians when they transcribe a song or a riff or a chord progression, or a signature sound?
If they are then all musicians are stealing all the time.
If it's not then copying music isn't stealing either.
I deliberately did not equate anything with stealing and you haven't responded to the overall point of my previous post.
Let me rephrase then.
Is it different from an ip point of view if you transcribes riff or a chord progression from other musicians?
In other words is it ok when the musicians do it?
Why would it be different for musicians?
Counterfeit goods to my knowledge fall under trademark laws.
Fashion is also a very visible way to display wealth whilst software is not, "aaah but was your copy of Office 2010 compiled by Steve Ballmer himself".. just doesn't happen.
If we got rid of software copyright what would actually happen would be that all commercial software would be moved into a SaaS model and companies would keep their servers and code under lock and key so that nobody could get physical access to it. This would probably give you less freedom rather than more.
Perhaps some movies would also be screened only at cinemas so that nobody ended up with a DVD that they could copy.
Software will turn into SaaS anyway or to onLive types of constructions.
If they release an update that I don't like for example then it will not be possible for me to retain the older version.
If they decide to discontinue the software or go bust etc then I will lose access to it, this would not happen if I had my own copy.
If I have all my data saved on their servers then I am at their whim as I don't have the files myself so that makes it harder to move to another piece of software should they change their ToS in a way I do not agree with.
If I have confidential data stored with them and their servers are broken into then this causes issues that could be avoided by holding it on my own computer firewalled away from the internet.
And crucially I will not be able to access it without a working internet connection.
This may be the way of the future whether I like it or not but I wouldn't hail it completely as a good thing in terms of freedom or digital rights etc.
I actually find it somewhat ironic that a lot of the best FOSS work (Linux , Apache , Python etc) that was intended to create a software freedom utopia is actually being used primarily to build walled gardens where you have no control over the software.
You very well know there are plenty of ways around this and it is being practiced today.
Spotify is one example.
You are creating pseudo problems that would not really exist.
If you have software without the cloud then you return to the same copyright problem repeated ad nauseum in this thread.
Ok, perhaps you could have applications in the cloud with locally stored data but I can't see this as being popular for 2 reasons.
1) Vendors would like the lock-in power that storing your data gives.
2) If I have a lot of data it may not be practical to upload it every time I use the cloud software on a slow uplink.
There are not really "plenty of free alternatives" to many types of software, at least alternatives that are as good as commercial offerings. Examples would include image editors and games.
Using Spotify as an example, all of the music is streamed from the internet so if they remove a track from their library then I lose my ability to stream it. Also to sign up for Spotify now you need a facebook account, I don't have one or want one. Luckily I got my account before this was a requirement but if they decide to apply this policy retroactively then I'm shit out of luck.
I just don't understand why you think losing all control over your software would be preferable to copyright?
There was a great article on this on the net, written by someone in the industry who fleshed it out with anecdotes which included a high level designer going into a budget store and looking at the design and products there, to copy.
Sadly I can't find that article, I offer a freaknomics article in its stead: http://www.freakonomics.com/2010/03/03/behind-the-scenes-of-...
Will you ask for donations? What happens if you announce you will work on something and take a bunch of donations in the first couple of months (enough to live off).
What happens if the donations then dry up and you run out of money so you can't continue to work on the program full time but it is not finished? Do you have to go into debt to repay the people who donated or do they have to take a gamble that your program will get finished and be good enough?
Or do you only start work when you have sufficient donations to finish development? What happens if you misjudge this?
I think "adapt or die" has the risk of killing a lot of good business models that have so far provided us with some great content/software etc.
I have yet to be provided with a good business model for content in a post copyright world that can be made to work for every type of content that we currently enjoy.
Slavery was abolished partly because there was enough technology to make it less necessary.
If we could automate human creativity then I suppose copyright would no longer be necessary.
Gosh I am behind the times.
My point isn't that this model can carry over unchanged to a different field; rather, all I maintain is that it is possible for a creative endeavor to be pushed largely by creators working for a salary rather than a royalty. I do not know enough about fields outside of programming to figure out exactly how it would work, but I see no reason it could not exist.
Open source dev tools are great because they are built by developers who understand what developers want and crucially they were built because they were needed i.e there was nothing commercial that did the job in the way they wanted.
How many developers know enough about developing image , video or audio editing software to do it well on their own? Most OSS solutions in this area are basically poor clones of commercial software. Also where will the money come from to fund them doing this full time?
I know as one example Ardour is developed full time and is quite a cool piece of OSS for sound editing but it's developed by one guy who can barely pay his bills from the donations, he probably makes what he would at burger king.
You would think that computer programmers would be able to design some awesome OSS games right? After all about 50% of my CS class joined the course because they wanted to make games and it's probably one of the most popular topics on any programming forum.
Well I can't really think of a single OSS game that has ever really impressed me and certainly none have become popular in the same way Half life or Skyrim has (by OSS game I mean a game that was developed under an OSS model, not something where the code was released by the developer 10 years later or something that is essentially an open source mod for a commercially developed game).
I've worked for very decent folks (google in Dublin to name one) and very undecent ones. When you are not a mainstream artist, when you are part of the profesional artists crowd (people who live from it but don't make millions) which is the overwhelming majority of artists, you don't give a damn about all this bullshit on piracy. But you do pay attention on the fact that anything that further strenghtens big corporations will in turn make your situation more fragile.
Art can be profitable for the artist, but whether it is or isn't, it's still happening. People will create sculptures to admire and music to dance to. The distribution stream was invented far, far later. Let's not conflate the creation of the art and the business of selling it.
Yes, we could say that work justifies payment (very simply and roughly). But that is not in dispute. It is that it does not justify payment by a particular means -- one that restricts the freedom (to copy etc.) of others. And -- you will forgive me if I am mistaken -- I am afraid inclusion of the word 'fucking' does not quite cover that.
Does payment depend, necessarily, on restriction of copying? No, it does not. It is possible to be paid in other ways -- that do not impose on other freedoms. Then in the most general sense, that sounds like what we ought to be doing (i.e. that is moral).
Again, in so far as it turns out most practical to pay by copyright, that is how far it is justified. Not in some other ethical way.
So treat Expressive works just like any other product, that can be bought, resold, copied, modifyed/hacked. Is that the logical conclusion of your position?
How do we (should we?) protect innovation? The patent system? the copyright system? Some other form of protection?
The only other way I can think of is patronage; I produce a work for a patron according to their wishes, and hand it over for a fee, at which point I relinquish any further control.
Are there other models?
I don't know that this continues to work for digital goods. Are there examples you're thinking of?
What ways? And if you say "selling t-shirts" then you lose.
Any argument about copyright cannot end up in "Well, I think the authors should have control of their own works." This is circular, and it boils down to assuming copyright as an axiom without justification. It also can't end up in an analogy to a case in the physical world - there are too many differences between physical goods and IP. For instance, in your example of the hen with bread, if this were a case of copyright, everyone _including the hen_ could end up eating bread, after the hen put in the work. Is this fair to the hen? Maybe not. On the other hand, though, there have to be ways to balance things just enough to reward the hen for her efforts without starving all the other animals. The conclusion we gained from the physical-world analogy in which _only one animal_ could eat the bread simply does not apply, as one of its fundamental assumptions has been violated.
In short, there are perfectly good arguments you can use (and which have been used, when copyright was invented) to argue why copyright is good and essential _for society as a whole_, and there are of course arguments against it as well, but too often these are not articulated _at all_. People argue from the end result "Artists should have control over their work!", which is essentially the _definition_ of copyright, and use it to argue for copyright. And all too often, the position of the rest of society - which, since they outnumber the artists, ought to be given more weight - is ignored.
> a big problem with these discussions is people seem to assume, as an axiom, that allowing authors to control downstream copying is natural. It isn't
But neither is physical ownership of things or land. We could well go back to letting the 'free market' sort it out, or conversely split everything evenly and legalize any maneuvers to do so. I'm not arguing that physical and digital goods are the same, but rather that both are arbitrary.
For a tiny example, German law downplays the usual importance of physical ownership if theft is about food for direct consumption. This decision is just as arbitrary as heightening the value of authorship.
All laws have to be analyzed as an arbitrary society-as-a-whole thing to make any sense. And that's why I think it's harmful that this discussion is always reduced to tiny examples with two people and a car, or in this case a hen and other animals, and a single transaction at one point in time only.
Not disagreeing with the core of your posting at all, but I think you got lost in the hen analogy too.
> And all too often, the position of the rest of society - which, since they outnumber the artists, ought to be given more weight - is ignored.
Not sure about the phrasing of that argument. If female nurses demanded more wages than male ones, should this opinion be given 95% of the weight?
Oh, indeed, we should apply the same rubric to physical property. But I've already analyzed a number of other cases in the post I linked, and didn't feel like bothering to analyze whether physical property is a good thing or not.
> Not sure about the phrasing of that argument. If female nurses demanded more wages than male ones, should this opinion be given 95% of the weight?
It's not about what people _demand_. Of _course_ they'll always demand something better for themselves. Here we need to weigh their demands not against the other male nurses, but rather against society as a whole, _including people other than nurses_. Does giving female nurses more pay harm the quality or cost of care for patients more than it improves it for said nurses, after weighting by population? Does it promulgate certain values that we have decided are undesirable in society as a whole (eg, gender inequality)? Does it, in the end, actually harm said nurses (perhaps their civil rights are eroded by the popular opinion shifting away from gender equality). These are the sort of questions you need to ask. It's not just, oh, within this arbitrary subpopulation, the subsubpopulation that has the greatest proportional share gets what they want.
Never mind, yes: It should be decided in exactly this democratic way. In both cases though, we should hope that the majority is well-informed enough to make a decision. (Oh BTW, democratic decisions are not an axiomatic 'right thing' either, you can have nice discussions about this in China :) )
There is a reason copyright law and property law are universally separate: One creates an artificial restriction on the public to prevent them from doing something which would not take away the freedom to act of the creator of the work, the other places restrictions on the public to prevent them from taking away the freedoms of the owner of something, who would be deprived of the use of what is stolen.
Pretty much every legal system on earth recognizes that these are fundamentally different, and pretty much every one of them recognize that copyright protection is a tool putatively intended for the benefit of society - not created to protect against injustice.
I do not want music I have composed to be used in risqué films; I do not want software that I released under the GPL to be assimilated into proprietary products; etc. If by releasing my work to the public I relinquish all control, then I can do nothing to enforce my wishes.
Is it better for the public that I do not release anything that I am not willing to let be used in any fashion whatsoever? Or is it better that I do release, but assert copyright restrictions on how the public may use my works (which they wouldn't have at all if I kept them to myself)?
The question is: To what extent? If we measure how much income a person have from intellectual property and how much money they spend on intellectual property (if they not steal) then you will see the following:
Most people are only consumers.
A fraction of people create things as a hobby, so their consumption is not much smaller than their production.
A tiny fraction of people produce intellectual property for a living: their consumption is tiny compared to their production.
If you are in the first camp then in short term no-copyright may be good for you. But if you are in the 3rd camp, it is bad for you, because in that case you are 99% producer and 1% consumer of these kind of goods.
That's why I think that the no-copyright movement is unfortunatelly partly an anti-intellectual, populist, 'anti-civilisational', (ok, maybe anti elitist too) movement: the less creative people's fight to take away rights from more creative people. (And creativity is only partly talent, it is also really hard work, so this movement is against hard intellectual work.)
When combined with a pro-capitalism platform, you might be right. If writers need copyright to be able to eat and pay rent, then you are right.
But anti-copyright, combined with an anti-property ("anarchist") platform isn't necessarily anti-civilisation, or anti-intellectual. Other structures, like syndicates, architecture, designed artifacts, and other forms of culture, can provide "civilisation".
In such a society, writers (and everyone else) would be born with the right to a fair share of the living space and food around them. They would be expected to contribute a fair share. As they got better at writing, people might start to agree that their time was better spent writing than in the fields, and would petition their work syndicate to post them as a writer.
(Of course, this is anarchism, so they could just go write the books anyway, they would just lose social standing if people felt they weren't contributing their fair share.)
You might say that creators wouldn't create if there wasn't a carrot of Wealth dangling out in front of them somewhere.
We can debate that point. I'm interested to hear your thoughts. But in my experience the great creators of culture who I know well do it despite the monetary consequences, not because of them. They write themselves into poverty... orchestrate music into the middle class... paint on a teacher's salary.
And yeah, some of them become insanely wealthy. But I don't think the majority of them do it for the wealth. If they do, that would be very stupid, no matter what system you're in.
Give everyone the basic necessities in fair trade for contributing to the syndicates that make their food, housing, and health possible, and I think you'd see an explosion in creativity, not the opposite.
I don't think that is ever true of anybody. A writer needs to read 10, 100, 1000 books before he can produce a book of similar quality. The same applies to musicians who learn from other people's music, painters who learn from other people's paintings, and scientists who build upon other people's work. Nobody creates IP out of a vacuum. If anything, creative people are even more indebted to other people's IP than simple consumers are.
Of course people who are anti-copyright will be quick to point out that a bunch of bits on a disk that can be infinitely duplicated is different from a physical car. And that's true. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the blood, sweat, and tears that the creator invests in the act of creation.
I could post more far fetched analogies. It's in a woman's interest to have self control over her body. It's in a rapists best interest to take control of her body. Does the argument that each individuals self-interest is reciprocal apply in this case? Is that the "sensible rational purely moral" conclusion? Of course not. There are a myriad of other factors that need to be taken into consideration.
Basically the great-grand-parent is saying that there's no rational or moral justification for someone profiting from innovation, because it's in someone else's self interest to take that innovation, and these two parties self interests cancel each other out to the exclusion of all other factors. I find that to be an extremely naive and simplistic argument.
Where does this argument end? Why can't I drive your car whenever I want? Is your "ownership" of your car really more valid than my ownership of something that I invested significant time and effort (maybe even money) to create, and if so, why?
But, let's look at it from another direction. Simplify the tax code enough and H&R block goes out of business. That does not mean society is worse off. Copyright enriches artists at the cost of society but the real question is society bettor off. There is a deluge of new content, but the overwhelming majority truly interesting works are not for profit. I honestly think we would be bettor off if Avatar had never been created an instead we what artists do when they are not pandering to the largest audience possible.
PS: I don't listen to music. I don't watch TV. I do occasionally see a movie, but it's been a while. I used to do a fair amount of reading but I literally only follow a single author who I would just as soon donate to to keep them writing as buy their books. I do play WoW, but that's a subscription game which would survive just fine without copyright.
I'm not sure about this. Copyright is aimed at enabling and encouraging creative works. It achieves this by giving the creator control. Here, the word giving is important; we only give the creator control because we think that will result in more high quality creative works (in theory).
>When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it.
Instead, they are saying that they no longer want to give away control to the creator, because copyright is not achieving the desired results.
>To defeat SOPA, though, one must affirm copyright.
Agreed. However, I think it's easier to discuss the goals, benefits, and extent of copyright law from the vantage point I've expressed above.
And a total mastery of the art of understatement, clearly. Thank you for your contributions to this community, I am humbled by your continued willingness to invest time to improve it and your success at doing so.
As you can do in a society without copyright--that is your personal decision. Copyright is not required for you to do what you will with your stuff.
Or I can let others use it freely but only on if they meet some condition that I impose on it, such as giving me attribution. The point is that this is my decision.
It isn't, though, as we've shown empirically by this point. You cannot stop--physically, legally, or morally--others from doing with your work as they will, provided it exists in a digital form. That genie, as they say, is long since out of the bottle.
If copyright does not exist, though, I have no such rights and I have no such control.
You already have next to no control! Your "rights" are anything but!
In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process.
Why do you need a say? If it's information, it can be duplicated on their dime, and that is their decision. Why need you be involved?
Moreover, why does it matter if it is claimed as their own? It will eventually be found out and publicized if it really matters--or maybe you and your work aren't important enough to merit society's collective memory.
In such a system, anything created by anybody is simply common property. People can use it for good or for bad but I have no say in it.
Yep, that's about the size of it.
I may be the creator but that is beside the point. People like the author of this piece can simply saunter by and take it for whatever use the like.
And isn't that a wonderful thing? That people can build on and reuse the work of those that came before them? That they can do so without fear of reprisal and instead devote that energy to innovation?
Why are you afraid of such a communal future?
Why are you afraid of the removing artificial scarcity?
EDIT: Removed potentially inflammatory leader.
Rights are a legal limitation on the actions of others, not a physical limitation. They exist to limit people from doing what they otherwise "can" do to you in the physical world.
You have physical property rights so people cannot enter your home when you are at work and take your television. That is enforced through the law not the Fort Knox security that you might have.
If you have travelled to countries without rule of law you will understand what it means in practice when this right is not strong. Fences, security guards, and metal cages inside your house in every middle class home.
The rights we're talking about here are not able to be compared to physical property rights because there is no mutual exclusion of access.
If somebody steals my physical property, I can't use it, therefore they've harmed me and limited my actions. For knowledge, IP, etc. they cannot limit my access or permission, so I do not need to be put up guards.
My core argument, I guess, is this: There is no reason to have copyright because it is effectively unenforcable and because it has no real-world grounding. Moreover, it props up an economic model that fails in exposure to modern distribution methods.
Another rough equivalent to criminally using without depleting physical goods is someone who breaks into your house to sleep in your bed while you are on vacation. Even if they are clean, and the bed remains the same afterwards for all reasonable inspection, they have trespassed on your property and guilty of a crime.
Is it really that bad if somebody who needs a bed uses mine without permission while it lies unused, provided it isn't harmed and is returned to its initial condition?
We're big about virtualization and the cloud and shared hosting, right?
Why not consider something similar for worldly goods? It seems awfully inefficient, with 7 billion people, for everyone to have a unique, untouchable copy of everything.
Exactly. It's YOUR choice to allow someone to let themselves in when you aren't home and take a nap. BTW, can you post your address and schedule? Just in case anyone reading this thread needs a place to crash for a few hours.
Giving me the right to not have strangers wander into my house while I'm gone does nothing to prevent you from letting strangers wander into your house. By making it ok for people to wander into my house without my permission, you obliterate my property rights.
I think parking is a similar problem at a similar societal cost. People need to park. If you provide no way to park legally, they will park illegally to get on with their business. And indeed, fines for piracy, like fines for parking infractions, and a better distribution model from the market, like enough parking lots, have been a winning solution.
You're a good writer, both in the technical and moral sense; and I respect your experience, ability, and goals. However, there is no creation ex nihilo. I can't remember who said this, so I use it without attribution: would the world of music be richer today if, in 1900, one could copyright a bassline?
I'm certain this is just wrong, at least from a USA perspective. The first copyright in England was to control, that is, copyright is censorship.
In the USA historically copyright was a way to induce people to enlarge the public domain.
Giving "creative" people control has never really entered into it, in the USA. I'm given to understand this is different in continental Europoean cultures, but SOPA and PIPA are American, and based out of an English-speaking culture.
If you propose to add some kind of "moral right of control" to a "creative" work, you first need to define "creative work" so that I can tell a creative work from an un-creative work without referring to some authority, a list or an oracle or a government agent. Then we can discuss what moral rights might pertain, and how long they should last, etc etc. I personally think that the prevalence of independent invention invalidates any such "moral right of control", but you clearly believe otherwise.
< When people propose that copyright be abolished...
This isn't what the linked piece is about. The author's arguments are mainstays like:
1) IP laws mostly protect big corporations, not creators, since these corporations effectively leverage their control of distribution against creators.
2) The measures these corporations take to protect their IP succeed only at annoying legitimate customers. Piracy has never been curbed by anti-piracy practices.
3) Et al.
Abolishing an exploitative industry that preys on copyright holders and abolishing copyright itself are two very different things.
1. Why is copyright so important if everyone can create well? Why scarcify something that without the protection would be worthless? If creation is humanity, why limit the act of creation to the first person to get there? We don't prevent people from climbing mountains just because someone else got there first. We don't stop runners from finishing races because someone else got first place. We don't stop fashion, because brands copy each other's styles all the time (trademark issues are related, but really different here... no one complains when Gap puts out a line similar to say Tommy Hilfiger, as long as they claim it is Gap). In fact a large number of creative works are merely derivative of other works, even "brilliant new" ones -- any limit on the creation process in this regard can be seen as artificially scarcifying something.
2. Why respond to an article about why the current copyright situation is broken and needs change with a long rant that defends the need for copyright, and uses language seemingly arguing against some strawman position of "abolish copyright" that is not present in the original article.
Two wrongs don't make a right; saying the service isn't good enough is a cheap excuse. Pirates should articulate what they do pay for, not what (they say) they would pay for. Talk is cheap, distribution and marketing do have costs associated with them.
Edit: my point is to defend the basic idea of copyright and content distribution as an economic good, rather to support any particular distribution model or SOPA itself. Coming from a film background, it costs a great deal of money to bring a high-quality film to the screen, and to reliably recoup that investment, distributors usually spend 50% of the film's budget on marketing. Films are sort of like startups insofar as each one is a little self-contained business, and the same is true of alnums, TV shows etc., but discussion of the economics from the content production side is often sorely lacking in debates about piracy.
To me, a reasonable system would be to authorize everything, provided you give proper attribution. You can copy, but name the author. You can parody or plagiarize, but you have to say so. That way, we keep a right to recognition, at nearly zero cost to society. I think this is both morally acceptable, and economically feasible.
If you don't agree with the methods used by companies to sell their products DON'T then take it anyway, you're showing people WANT the product but aren't willing to pay, so what's the best solution? Make it harder to pirate / try to block pirating.
This guy and everyone else who refuses to just not consume media they can't get on terms they and the companies agree with are the reason we have all this SOPA crap.
If the latest Rihanna album is $10 and you're only willing to pay $1 instead of then pirating DON'T get it, just ignore it, if everyone did this we'd have no problems, then media companies would either adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong, they wouldn't then fight the internet.
This guy and everyone else who follows the same point of view is essentially trying to blackmail media companies, how about instead you just move on. You have no right to the media they produce and if you're unhappy with what they want for it MOVE ON. If Sony want to sell the latest album from band x for $1,000 that's their choice, you have no right to that album.
They have no right to force everyone else to conform to absurd rules made to preserve their profits.
I stopped when I realized that while I could afford it, all of these services were inferior to the ones I was used to. I will gladly pay for a product that is better than its free counterpart. I will even pay for a product that I could pirate, but I will not pay more to watch ads and listen to music on only a limited number of DRM-supported devices.
See how silly this sounds?
The problem with digital media is that it's very easy to copy. You can't just copy a car.
There are tons of website offering free music. So just support those artists instead of the ones charging too much for an inferior service.
Yup! And that's why comparing digital piracy with car theft is also equally silly.
Note, I don't have a hard stance on this. Counterfeiting drugs, etc. is wrong for obvious reasons. Coming up with a similar argument for entertainment media is a bit less tenable.
When the MPAA and RIAA cede the moral high ground by acting like idiots (suing 12-year olds, pushing for high criminal charges, SOPA/PIPA, etc.), it makes it more difficult to make a moral argument for the industry.
The everything free argument is crap. But given that I pay for songs on iTunes but pirate TV shows because Derp Studios refuses to put it anywhere online, the user case is valid.
So I think the discussion should be about the copyright law. Not about "I think this service sucks so I will get an illegal copy".
Don't get me wrong. I think it's absurd that you can get a penalty of $10.000 for downloading a MP3. I think the copyright rules should change.
But I think it's silly to fight a law by disobeying it. It will give the MPAA good ground to say "see they are pirates".
"I think it's silly to fight a law by disobeying it"
I agree with the sentiment that this should not be a first response. But if the intent is to deprive the studios of revenue while sticking a finger to them with the intention of encouraging them to back down, then it is a valid strategy (with precedence). Given the radicalisation of the MPAA, however, I don't see that as being likely.
So I agree with you in practice, but diverge in principle.
http://donttradeourlivesaway.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/brazil...
Problem with counter-feit drugs is the usual quality checks aren't present. This can lead to ineffective or even harmful drugs that patients take while thinking they are getting the real thing.
Not yet, but the technology is rapidly improving. With the right equipment (3d scanner, 3d printer), you can copy basic items at home today. It is only a matter of time.
With the right technology, why wouldn't you copy a car? A car only has value because of its inherit scarcity. If you could copy a car, it wouldn't be worth anything (aside from the cost of materials required to perform the copy).
> See how silly this sounds?
Yes, that completely hyperbolic, not analogous example sure does sound silly!
That was a waste of 50+30 minutes of my time, which was more than half of the entire movie. And I even paid 10 freaking bucks for it.
This was the moment when I realized that I probably won't go to a movie theater more than once a year from now on.
This doesn't mean that I now will go on and pirate the movie. There's still iTunes and I don't need to see a movie on release day, but it was a great example for how companies mess up the user experience.
The irony is that some theaters show something like a self-commercial with the saying "Cinema - that's what movies are made for".
Disclaimer: This happened in Germany. The movie-watching experience in the US was way better to me. No commercials, only a few trailers.
So even if he ignores it, he is still paying them money because media companies can't adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong.
(Fiction, I know, but one can dream...)
At least that is what is supposed to do. In reality ... well you might want to learn German for that and read this interesting tidbit about the rights holder association of Germany (GEMA): hxxp://www.musiker-online.de/Newsdetails.newsdetails.0.html?&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=267&tx_ttnews[backPid]=10&cHash=226c5da554
No, it's not fiction. I live in Spain and we have a similar tax. It taxes private copys, which are defined as
1. The work must be publicly available.
2. It must be done by a physic person (as opposed to an organization)
3. For private use, i.e. not broadcasting to an open audience allowed (but I can play it in my house with my friends).
4. Access to the work must have been obtained legally. 5. Must be non-profit.
6. The receiver of the copy cannot be a collective. So I can buy a CD and make a copy to all of my friends. They can do the same, and so on (a copy of a legal bought CD is legal).
According to some experts, P2P falls into a gray area, or it used to before they changed the law. I'm sure they will refine it progressively, but I won't stop downloading while I pay my copy tax for USB STICKS, BLANK CDs & DVDs, MP3 PLAYERS, HDDs AND EVENT PRINTERS AND PAPER.
Anyway the general attorney throw a paper stating that downloaders shouldn't be prosecuted.
One time, years ago, some members of an internet freedom organization, got a laptop with WIFI and, after calling the police to inform them of the fact, they mounted a table in the street and downloaded copyrighted works, offering free copys to whomever passed near, to show that it's legal.
There is an exception, however: Software is not covered under the private copy, so it would be illegal to copy software (being myself a developer, I have never undertood the differentiation).
The funniest part is that this tax is directly collected by private entities (our *AA counterpart), which have in the higher seats crappy artists which decide how to share the collected money (i.e. between themselves and their dearest friends). Some of them, like Alejandro Sanz, are arguably very crappy, but at least they are artists (for some definition of the word). But some others, like Teddy Bautista (ex president, now convict for different forms of stealing) or Ramoncín, AFAIK haven't composed or sung a song in the last decades.
No. Upvote and explain why the author is wrong. We need to educate more people about piracy and intellectual property.
Will life stop if you don't watch the latest episode of Community? Probably. Give it a go. If you die I have dibs on your $2000 Macbook Pro, $800 iPhone, $250 Sennheiser headphones, etc. The very phrase 'Because you are messing with my life' in this context shows how much is wrong with the current culture.
These companies are destroying civilisation? I've asked this question before: If I create a piece of software and ask you to not use it without purchasing it, will you do that? Very few people seem to be able to answer yes. The people who can't answer yes are those who are ruining civilisation. There is so much hyperbole in this article ("Messing with my life was not enough. You are even trying to destroy one of the pillar of our society: education.") I'm not quite sure if it's satirical or not, hah.
Steve Jobs mentioned that in the end it comes down to the person knowing they've done something wrong after they've tried to rationalise their way out of it ("BUT IT'S NOT STEALING" or whatever the latest fad is).
During high school I pirated a hell of a lot of software, videogames, music, movies—everything. I still bought more video games than most people will in their life times but that in no way balances what I pirated. I've stopped (All I have left is to make a list of the music I have and listen to in order to delete it all and slowly purchase it, which I've started doing). I either pay for something, borrow it or go without.
The funny thing is, I don't like these big corporations either. I wish people would stop treating them as large, mythical and faceless entities but talk to the people behind the door. Until both sides come to understand each other and seek that communication they [we] will forever be at war.
I don't support SOPA nor do I support blatant pirates.
It shouldn't be required of just the RIAA to use technology properly but everyone. If someone makes music you like, and they're not attempting to rob, respect them. $1 is not much for a song you enjoy.
But the truth of course is that they saw huge benefits throughout the years as it became cheaper and cheaper for them to produce and distribute the music.
Where is your sympathy for all the truckers, records store people etc. that lost their jobs because of digitalization?
I personally have more sympathy for them, the musicians will always have the music. Whether they will be able to live from it is another thing.
The smart ones will.
>Where is your sympathy for all the truckers, records store people etc. that lost their jobs because of digitalization?
Of course I do have sympathy for them but humanity has to move forward. We are living in a disruptive age – much like those in the beginning of the Industrial Age. Humanity will need to adjust. This really is another subject for another story and doesn't hold relevance to the topic of piracy.
>I personally have more sympathy for them, the musicians will always have the music. Whether they will be able to live from it is another thing.
This makes no sense. You are condemning musicians to the same fate as those you mentioned. The only difference is that potential future truckers and HS/college students at record stores won't suffer because there will be new jobs created but the artist always will.
The world does not need more starving artists.
We live as you say in a disruptive age and this applies in no small part to artists.
As with regards to the starving artists.
Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
They are very different than those the labels push to become big stars today.
What i mean with they will alway have art is this.
The trucker will loose their job and that's pretty much it. The artists will always be able to do art whether they get paid for it or not.
You're playing a game that has nobody's interests at hand.
Yes I'm saying this because 'truckers' are going to get left behind. You still haven't answered the question of whether we should live in the digital age or not.
>Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
You're playing a game against my argument. All artists struggle but do you want them to become eternally poor?
>Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
Do you or many know the difference? Are most making the distinction and buying indie products? I can already tell that they are not.
Plus I have both a product out (cost money), a service out (free), have a design agency.
I don't say that artist shouldn't make money. I think they should when they work. But claiming that it's somehow a right for musicians to keep reaping the benefits of digital distribution but not those related to it, is in my mind wrong and not serving the anyone.
Truckers and musicians who don't conform to the new reality is going to be left behind.
It's really that simple. Of course they will try and get the government to protect their interest and it will have people helping them defend that.
But it's not a fair game.
And artist neither are nor will be eternally poor. It's a poor argument. There will always be people who make money on their creations, they will just have to do it differently than what we do today.
Technology is always a double edged sword. No one, not even artist can escape that.
Who gave it to them? I dont think that we ever, as a society, ever fundamentally _agreed_ to the existence of such exclusivity rights. Yes they are in the constitution, yes they are in the lawbooks, but the people at large never fundamentally agreed that such rights should be in there. The decision process was always top-down, never bottom-up. They are not a result of peoples morality, but of a interest-driven, behind-closed-doors development process. Those laws dont map the will of the people, of your fellow citizens, but of a few, but influential stake holders. Such rights are not democratically backed. If you would ever have a referendum on copyright policy, you would probably lose them.
You're ok with that, right?
If you really believe what you say, you'd delete all your pirated music right now. Either that, or you might modify your views a bit.
I don't understand how that fits with finishing making the list. If you can keep some pirated music around since high school, and now longer so that you can make a list, can't I download a little to see if I like it? If it's good, I'll pay to go to a concert or buy the tracks off Amazon. ":)"
Don't forget that people might upvote a post not because they agree, but because they're interested in the discussion that follows. At least, it's why I upvoted the post. I hadn't completely made up my mind and arguments like yours convinced me.
If Rihanna and others don't want their music to be pirated they shouldn't make it digital.
It is not a naturally given right you know to create an album once and then sell it in millions. It's an opportunity.
Rihanna could release her music on vinyl only but it would still be recorded and converted to an MP3 and up on torrents in a matter of hours, digital has nothing to do with it.
The business model they would probably switch to in the case of no copyright would be to distribute a small amount of the music for free but if you want to hear the rest you have to attend a live concert where you would be searched for recording devices on entry.
Would you prefer that model?
"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off."
It's fine to be angry about the approach large copyright holders take to piracy - suing consumers, encouraging the extradition of 23 year old UK citizens for linking, throwing cash at politicians to try to push through obscene laws like SOPA/PIPA. I'm angry about it. It's a horribly reactive, staid approach to a changing world that just isn't going to net them any long-term profitability.
What's not fine is in your mind elevating your piracy to the level of a significant political protest. It might make you feel better about it, but it really doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.
So while I personally would rather do without (similar to using Linux/Gimp vs pirating Windows/Photoshop etc.) and think that piracy in many ways strengthens the hand of the copyright owners by suffocating legitimate alternatives (again see Linux/Gimp vs pirated XP/Photoshop) I think that encouraging and legitimizing widespread piracy could well be the only "significant political protest" with any chance to succeed.
Riots and revolutions tend to happen in the summer, maybe copyright will only change if some people get to watch Transformers for free. I can live with that.
People's rights are man made, so they are debatable.
As you say, rights are often malleable - and reevaluating and redefining them (from both sides of this debate) should be an ongoing process.
You could of course make the case that our democracy is too imperfect to accept the letter of any particular law as a direct expression of the will of the people without applying your further judgement.
Laws can be inconsistent, unjust or inappropriately applied and that's why we have the courts to make those judgements. Unfortunately, access to the courts is very unequal, particularly in the case of civil law. It's always been like this, hence breaking the law has always been the poor man's expensive lawyer and lobbyist at the same time.
Of course this argument could be used as a blanket excuse for breaking any law. Personal judgement just can't be replaced by any system.
> It might make you feel better about it, but it really
> doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something
> of value
Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).
I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments:
If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get more widely known, more famous).
Some compare pirating a DVD with going to a masseuse/prostitute and not paying her/him afterwards. This analogy is not correct - the expectation/social contract is that I have to pay you after I receive a service, and if I don't pay you, you are worse-off because you don't have money that you would otherwise have. However, people that pirate movies/music are not automatically lost revenue - probably they would buy less than 10% (just a guess) of entertainment content that they download/consume through piracy.
A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her.
When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. (yes, you can say it does indirectly through some convoluted story, but that's always debatable)
The future economy will be more about directly personalized experiences and services that cannot be copied, or are much less interesting when copied, instead of trivial fan-outs of information. It is all about scarcity. Better to let that sink in than try to preserve what is already lost, at the cost of freedom.
(edit: why do I say future? It is already the present for many of us)
But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio.
> It is all about scarcity.
Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship.
Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.
Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.
Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case.
Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes.
Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.
Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways.
Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past.
Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince.
A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though.
Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough".
There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk.
Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense.
Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in.
These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities:
1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do).
2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough").
3. Fail.
None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.
I think that was a common sentiment at the end of each "age". How to go from here, all the alternatives suck from our point of view. I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
At a certain point, the ends don't justify the means anymore. DMCA was ok-ish, but I think we reached that point with SOPA and similar laws. Especially as those means are the same as can be used to censor other things, and will very likely be abused for that, with the militarization happening all over the world.
So that solution falls under (3) fail as well. Which leaves the other options, including those we haven't thought of yet. People are creative and will find ways to get by...
I think there's potential there, but there would need to be a dramatic cultural shift so it didn't just become a case of anything "good enough" was done, with no meaningful incentive to put the final polish to turn good works into great ones. Take a look at the Open Source software community today: it's full of "good enough" products, which do the basic jobs perfectly well for a lot of people, but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.
> But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
Unfortunately, that isn't really true. It would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology. It's just that I (and, I suspect, most other people here) would prefer not to accept the unfortunate side-effects that come with compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges.
Yes, the edge cases, the personalization, the polishing. There will always be work in that. Adapting systems to their specific surroundings. Every place, every person is unique, and has specific demands. That's what I meant with the cookie-cutter stuff going away.
it would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology
Sure, but is just as easy to avoid copyright enforcement with the current technology. And for those desperate there is always the analog hole. That kind of summarizes the DRM "war".
compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges
Because that'd effectively be an Orwellian world. So we'd need to go to a total surveillance state, centrally controlled world, just to make sure things keep working as they do now. Just to make some people happy at the expense of the rest. That's not only inhuman, but very unstable as well.
"Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways."
This is not a strong argument. I could equally look at the time of the enlightenment and say "if people weren't forced to give their money to the Catholic church, think of all the lovely buildings and choral music we'd be denied. Therefore - people should be forced to give money to the church!"
In the case of copyright, you need to consider this opportunity cost. i.e. things we don't have because copyright has made them impossible. As with the church example, there is also a significant cost of freedom.
There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.
Which you haven't cited, I notice.
If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards. Obviously you can give lots of examples where this has been done successfully to back up your case, then?
> Which you haven't cited, I notice.
I'll take another angle. Live-and-let live should be the default case. Copyright is an intrusion on this. If someone wants to drive a tank through freedom by introducing something like copyright, then the onus is on the tank drivers to make the case that the benefits justify the intrusion on freedom.
I've never seen a remotely reasonable attempt at putting that case. The best you get is claims that people wouldn't produce things unless they had vast legal protections and that's plainly false. Mendelssohn wrote symphonies. I write code, in a commercial setting, with copyright not being the justification for it.
Handel is an even better example, because it's well documented that he rearranged lots of previous stuff. We wouldn't have any record of some of those earlier tunes had he not repurposed them in his own works. Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ could not be performed or distributed under current western-world copyright law.
"If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards."
When you have copyright law it creates a powerful lobby group and any attempt at reform will come up against them. Much as with my discussion about the church above - an institution that impeded progress and freedom, but which fought ferociously to retain privilege at every step.
What could cause the dam to break would be a major economic slump and a desperate move to try something new to attract smart people. Or something like SOPA may be a step too far, and cause Sweden or New Zealand or Singapore or a special economic zone in China to make a play at being a free-state-style intellectual capital.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...
Sure, let's have a very pedentic notion of stealing and keeping framing the debate around 'stealing'.
OK... "taking something which isn't yours and/or you don't have permission to take". In most minds, that's the same as stealing, hence the standard use of the word 'stealing'. But substitute the phrase above for 'stealing' and, imo, it becomes harder to justify. Just because I an not doing an actual verifiable economic harm to someone doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but doesn't make it right either.
- Copyright Act of 1790 - established U.S. copyright
with term of 14 years with 14-year renewal
- Copyright Act of 1831 - extended the term to
28 years with 14-year renewal
- Copyright Act of 1909 - extended term to 28 years
with 28-year renewal
- Copyright Act of 1976 - extended term to either
75 years or life of author plus 50 years
- Copyright Renewal Act of 1992
removed the requirement for renewal
- Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994
restored U.S. copyright for certain foreign works
- Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended terms
to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
criminalized some cases of copyright infringement
So you can talk about right versus wrong, good versus evil and so on, but clearly something stinks about this picture, which is why I don't blame "pirates" for justifying their acts, as their acts are justified.
And, how fucked up is it that restaurants are afraid of singing "Happy Birthday to You"? Are those singing it thieves?
But copyright infringement is not stealing. You could make an argument about it if the period was still 14 years (i.e. the author has only 14 years to collect revenue from it, so if you want it either pay up or wait 14 years, which is doable). But that's not the case.
Also, discussing the morality of copyright infringement is also important, as copyright infringement does not rob the owner of the item itself. It only duplicates it.
It's not taking, either.
I'd argue that property exists because things (apples, cars, gym equipment) have limitations on their use. If I eat an apple, you can't. If you grow a crop on this property, you can't. While he uses this gym equipment, they can't.
Even in historical contexts where there has been no effective government (silk road, dark ages iceland), ideas of property have evolved that are strikingly consistent, because it extends from realities of the world.
As states developed, they came to give stronger definition to property law. But then people who were well-connected to government decided that it would be a good idea to extend these convenient powers to things which were not property, sometimes by falsely labeling them as property.
So it comes down to who has control over the language.
Is property a distinct idea, or is it just a bundle of whatever rights the government of the day declares it to be.
And if you choose the latter, if the government says that black is white, is it so?
I'd like to extend on this concept and add ownership into equation.
In the example with an apple. I own it, therefore only I can eat it. It is my property. Now what happens if I give the apple to somebody else? It's their property now, so you would naturally assume they own it? And therefore they can eat it.
Alas, it's not the case with music/etc. I bought a CD with music, but it appears that I don't own it. I cannot listen to it in public (Happy Birthday to You), nor I can give it to someone else (lend DVD to a friend for a pint).
So this doesn't work out very well, the CD is my property, but I don't own it? To me owning means having right to do whatever I please with it. Imagine if blending an iPhone would become a criminal offence...
I'll try to explain what I mean by anti-right though I'm unpracticed here.
(1) Society is oriented around a presumption of live-and-let-live. Most laws give rights that state the boundary of live-and-let live, and these are positive rights.
(2) In the case of copyright, only the creator has the ability to live-and-let-live in the context of the protected thing: everyone else is restricted from it. Hence, this is a negative right, or "anti-right".
When rights and anti-rights clash, you get nasty situations develop where they can't all be true at the same time.
i.e. in order to make IP anti-rights work, the laws need to inhibit 'real' property rights.
i.e. I am not allowed to do things with magnetic signals in the privacy of my own home because that impedes an anti-right that the government has granted to someone else.
If you build complex software with a permissions model that contains both positive and negative permissions (i.e. where a user has a permission that is "can't see" something rather than being a positive right), you'll find similar nasty situations develop.
Obviously this is a strange concept since the contents of the CD are a physical part of the CD itself.
If you ever have something stolen from you, you'll quickly realize the difference between theft and copyright infringement.
Debates such as these keep orbiting around the definition of stealing because the term keeps getting used for copyright infringement out of lazy thinking or in order to facilitate an agenda.
Stealing is intrinsically "wrong" from a societal perspective because it puts those who take by force into a better position than those who earn by earning it, which is not sustainable.
Whether anyone is put into a worse position by copyright infringement (e.g. in the form of illegal downloading of music) is up for debate. But any serious debate should avoid the term stealing to describe the issue at hand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good -- shut down today in SOPA protest
With a club good there is a tangible thing such as a running machine. By my use of it, you are unable to use it. But we judge the tradeoff to be worth it because we don't each want to go out and buy a gym.
That is unlike copyright where the cost of making a copy is nothing, and may even increase the value of the copied data through network effects.
> Examples of club goods include private golf courses, cinemas, cable television, access to copyrighted works, and the services provided by social or religious clubs to their members.
Also this definition on econport.org;
> Club Goods: Goods that are excludable but non-rival, or non-subtractable. This means that while certain people can be excluded from the consumption of a good, one person's consumption of it does not diminish another person's.
The point is; people say copyright violation is stealing, is isn't stealing, and arguments occur. To have a good conversation about it, it's useful to distinguish club good from private goods, because then we can talk about the difference between "unauthorised access to a club good" (piracy) and "unauthorised posession of a private good" (theft).
You're not using your flat, it's there anyway, you've not lost anything, nothing has been broken or damaged, he's gone before you're back so it's fine right?
Let's use another example. I order food, but don't eat all I get. If you will eat it, I would be very glad, as it wouldn't go to waste.
After all, at the time they created it the legal and commercial framework, as well as the social norms, said that they could expect payment from anyone who consumed their work.
Why are you allowed to override their expectations yet someone using your property without your permission isn't allowed to override yours?
Do you have any evidence that the costs outweigh the benefits?
And without exception, all of those "pirates" that I know have much larger legal bluray and record collections than I do.
In this case $0 or even a negative value amount is what you can plug into something. Why? Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.
However, what they pay with is with their time and attention.
I used to know someone who managed a movie theater. He would sneak us into movies quite often. Good and bad. And quite often after coming out of the movie I felt like wanting "my free back".
Let's say an artist is unknown and I am a customer that has quite a few connection ( a blog with a large following perhaps ). Then what would make sense is for me to pay a negative amount ( the artist would pay me to spend my time listening to his new cool record in the hopes that I might spread the news about it ).
FWIW, the only album I've paid for in years was a pay-what-you-want deal. I paid something like $3. Which was all that was left in my bank account after I paid my rent and bought groceries for that month - I'm a college student.
(Studies have shown that the sales-displacing effect of piracy in music ranges from 42% to no effect at all[1]. If all piracy could be prevented, that's an awfully large deadweight loss)
So then, what if I am willing to pay for it?
I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.
If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.
So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!
If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.
If it's not available I have no real issue with getting it illegally.
Frankly if the media companies adopted day and date releases worldwide for content and worked to make their back catalogues widely available through convenient means (by which iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on count) a lot of the best arguments in favour of piracy dry up.
You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:
"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."
Why do you seek out and watch the content made by people you violently despise?
When I explain that I don't really like piracy I get some very strange looks.
I think people often overestimate how many people are willing to consider ethics at all in purchasing decisions. I know plenty of otherwise nice and decent people who would happily purchase a product that they knew was made by child slavery, hell people even joke about it.
It seems that considering the consequences of your actions isn't hip anymore once consumerism is involved.
I would gladly pay double the price for Netflix Canada if the service was as good as it is in the states. I don't mind paying for something if it provides me a good service, but it doesn't. Netflix canada is a steaming pile.
So, "Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future." is impossible because if big companies like Netflix can't even do it, no amount of money is going to help the situation.
EDIT: Turns out it's canada's fault, not the us's when it comes to why we don't get hulu/netflix/etc.
Do you also apply this principle to sex?
What about borrowed books, good views, jokes, ideas, intelligent conversation, exercise?
Yes people can choose to make their work available for free, and that's great. But that choice again lies in the person who created the work, not the person who consumes it.
And to be perfectly clear, I have no delusion that piracy will ever go away. It's a fact of the digital world. My point is pirates should not delude themselves into thinking what they do is justified. It's not.
However, I don't think the rest of your points are strong. People might not want to pay for apples, but that doesn't give them the justification to steal them. That's not because they don't value them - clearly they do. Or else they wouldn't want them.
Copying is different to stealing because in copying you don't deprive the creating from anything apart from completely arbitrary rights that the law grants to them.
It may also be worth raising that there's room for a difference between protection of 1. privacy (this photo is of me and I don't want it released because that would be invasive to a reasonable definition of privacy); 2. first release (I created something but it's personal, I haven't released it to anyone, and don't want people redistributing it - this is an anti-right, but more reasonable than the next one); 3. Protection of publishers (I create something, and the government gives me a monopoly over all copies and derivatives of it to such an extent that government invades people's civil liberties to protect my business models).
Copying isn't stealing, so yea, it's different.
As for the final paragraph, all of those are rather easily solved by realizing that information will be copied whether you like it or not. If you don't want it out there, don't release it. Fake government monopolies on information copying is a dying model, the death throws of the old guard trying to cope with a world they don't understand. Information will be free, eventually.
You have a right to exercise. You don't have the right to walk into Gold's Gym and use their facilities without paying. I don't have the right to enter your home and use the equipment in the basement.
You have a right to have mutually consensual sex with someone else without paying. You don't have the right to rape a prostitute if they only offer sex for money because you didn't want to pay. I don't have the right to demand sex from your family.
You have the right to borrow a book from your friend if he's willing to lend it to you. You don't have the right to borrow your buddy's book without their permission just as you don't have the right to walk into a bookstore and borrow their books without permission. I don't have the right to take your books from you.
city41 wrote "If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it." in the context that "it" is copyrighted work that is offered for sale, not just anything. You know it as well as everyone here.
But I do believe that if somebody has something you want and they only offer to you for a price (be it money or otherwise), you don't have a right to it for free, pretty much whatever "it" is. (assuming they have the right to that control in the first place obviously) See biot's comment for eloquent point-by-point explanation.
Why? Where did that right comes from. Who legislates enjoyment? Or are you saying it is a moral law?
If you only have to pay the price of one day's lunch for access to a library of content, then downloading a title rather than watching it on its official outlet will reduce subscription fees and thus impact revenue sharing. So rather than buying less than 10%, there may in fact be no threshold at which pirating becomes more practical, once the initial monetary threshold (being able to afford the subscription fee) is met.
Therefore, copyright infringement can result in a much stronger loss in revenue than you presume, even though I personally agree that it doesn't constitute "stealing", as no physical good has been removed and appropriated illegally. However, what that copyright infringement can do is impede or obstruct certain consumer-favoring (IMO) business models from being viable.
It's possibly true, in my opinion, that sharing in a gray area of material whose market has not yet matured may increase visibility and have future benefits, but no company which deals with content producers and the platform to deliver content can afford to acknowledge this to the content producers or to the audience without risking legitimizing copyright infringement and therefore delegitimizing their own business (which is why I'm not disclaiming where I work, other than it is familiar with these issues).
Not that I'm arguing that there should be no such thing as sharing, but making the moral argument to justify it that stealing isn't putting the company in a worse position is a poor rationale. It's not true and it's not something that can be defended against in public.
Nor am I arguing that piracy will make or break a business. If it's big enough to be popular, it may be big enough to grow a legitimate market faster than the illegitimate alternative. However, this also relies on cooperative content producers and an audience willing to pay for the content. It's a tricky balance but the reality is that while violation of copyright may not produce economic devastation on its own, neither is it devoid of any impact.
tl;dr: Reasonable people should pay for content available to them that they enjoy, especially when affordable.
The challenges are about control of limited distribution and promotion channels. This is a vicious territory and a zero-sum game. This helps to explain why that space cultivates nasty people. The sort of person who would have no qualms about grinding an artist down as much as possible.
There's an endless supply of naive, highly skilled, high-ego artists who will do anything to get a 'contract' to get access to distribution. Money is not a key motivator to these people, but some might like the traditional media model if it gives their produce an advantage over equally skilled but less connected mindshare competitors. This is particularly true where the performing artist is just a front for a composition and marketing team.
Fasion is an industry with a similar dynamic to media, but even less emphasis on the quality of content. And - surprise surprise - it's famously dominated by a nasty kind of person.
What you're saying sounds to me like artists don't deserve to get a larger share because what they do simply isn't the most difficult part of actually making money.
At the end of the day it may just be a completely normal function of supply and demand. Many people can easily supply what mainstream radio stations play all day long.
> What are these "distribution and promotion channels" limited by?
If you want to create and sell CDs then you can do this now. I've got friends who self-publish "classical" music performances and make (not much) money from it by getting good reviews in trade magazines and selling CDs at concerts. Or you could give your music away and sell mugs and tshirts and tickets to performances.
Or there's the model that city-based orchestras do - make margin by selling tickets to concerts and having a distribution agreement with a local music shop or radio network for recordings. e.g. http://www.aso.com.au/recordings.html
No, it's more akin to various kinds of fraud. So that's OK then, I guess.
> Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).
That is simply nonsense. Even musicians signed to the big record labels or authors whose books are distributed by major publishers do a lot better than that if their work is a success. Artists using small-time/independent distributors can do better, and these days plenty of works are self-published and self-promoted, sending the lion's share of the profit back to the artist.
But artists do get just a tiny part of the money people pay. Take TLC as a well known example: they were a huge seller, yet they got bankrupt, largely because of how their record company treated them:
>CrazySexyCool eventually sold over 11 million copies in the US, and became one of the first albums to ever receive a diamond certification from the RIAA, and won a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Album and a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group for "Creep". However, in the midst of their apparent success, the members of TLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 3, 1995. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLC_%28band%29)
Take Courtney Love's rant about where the money goes as another (well known) example: http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
I agree with the OP: I'm sure that if they could get away with it, the record companies would most definitely prefer to pay the artist nothing at all.
If an artist is getting screwed by a label/studio is a problem between them and the label/studio. If, as a consumer, you feel bad for the artist, I don't think the solution is to pirate the work, but instead to let the artist and label/studio know you want to support the artist and not the label/studio and thus be a consumer for things that you feel are more fair to the artist. (e.g. concerts?)
The artist might have unfortunately sold some of their rights to the label/studio for exposure, promotion, etc. and in return don't get as much money as they (or the consumers) think they deserve. Next time, they'll probably deal with a different label/studio…
In fact, it's very similar to the situations between entrepreneurs and VCs… you take some money, sell some rights because that's your only way to make it big. Once you make it big, you might realize that you got screwed and think you deserved more. Next time, you'll either still have made enough money/fame to strike it on your own, or you'll work with better VCs.
With regard to your second point, I again argue that there needs to be a separation between the debate over how copyright holders operate and the legalities of piracy. Failure to do that means that the analysis breaks down when we're not talking about the big evil conglomerate music companies that screw artists over and everybody loves to hate. Do you feel comfortable with your assertions above if we're talking about an indie game developer, or TextMate author Allan Odgaard?
We need to emphasize that filesharing is a form of sampling for most people, and that they would never buy 99% of the content that they fileshare for free, and that they often do buy that 1%, and that even if the consumer doesn't buy your content/distribution, you're still better off for the potential word-of-mouth promotion and other exposure facilitated.
In reality, filesharing operates on the same principles as YouTube, which the studios and record companies also attempted to kill as just another pirate avenue before it was legitimized by Google and entered mainstream acceptance; they now (mostly) see YouTube as a promotional platform with the same understanding that it's about "sampling", that most people won't buy 99% of the stupid videos they watch on YouTube, but that some people will buy that 1%. The RIAA/MPAA members use YouTube in hopes that their content will be that 1% that provokes individuals to go purchase related merchandise.
The only difference is that YouTube makes the "filesharing" piece invisible and people feel that they are sharing videos instead of files, and this makes YouTube tenable for mainstream use. BitTorrent and other filesharing networks operate on the same set of principles, but they are harder to use and control, so they remain targeted when there is essentially no difference from a consumer standpoint other than barrier to entry.
Of course this leaves out the production costs entirely and probably a whole lot more. I'm not an economist, but I think this is a fatal flaw in the business model of most entertainment companies.
I left the costs etc out of the equation, which is obviously a wrong thing to do.
From Wikipedia: . . . supply is determined by marginal cost. Firms will produce additional output as long as the cost of producing an extra unit of output is less than the price they will receive.
. . . demand curves are determined by marginal utility curves. Consumers will be willing to buy a given quantity of a good, at a given price, if the marginal utility of additional consumption is equal to the opportunity cost determined by the price, that is, the marginal utility of alternative consumption choices. The demand schedule is defined as the willingness and ability of a consumer to purchase a given product in a given frame of time.
In my experience, the pro-piracy argument from economics is at best an imperfect understanding of supply and demand and at worst, the person making the argument just heard the words "supply and demand" and filled in the rest from his own imagination. The "Law of Supply and Demand" is not an actual thing. It's the juxtaposition of "Law of Supply" and the "Law of Demand"
Supply (as opposed to the supply curve) is dictated by demand, not the other way around. If the demand for a good rises, then supply will be increased to meet the demand. If demand for a good drops, supply will be decreased to the level of demand.
To your question, the entertainment companies are under no illusions that the demand curve for any particular product is going to stay the same. They expect that over time, the demand for any given thing will decrease. They know that Britney Spears new album will sell a shit-ton of copies for the first week after it drops and by the same time the following year, everyone who wanted it will have it and sales will be virtually non-existant. Their business model is geared toward a limited lifecycle for any given product, which is why they make continual investments in new products.
When you steal a car, that one car is stolen. No big deal. If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down. This is because most people will quickly and easily be able to get it for free. Revenue will go down as a result of this and instead of having the loss of an individual copy of that product, the entire product line loses money. Something that just doesn't happen with physical products.
The same principal can be applied to the news: Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.
Do you have any evidence to support this? Both the movie [0] and gaming [1] industries are making record profits.
>Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.
Well, not exactly. I assume you're referring to consuming news online, which is supported by advertising -- it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution.
[0] -- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...
[1] -- http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/06/gaming-expected-t...
Being involved in multiple small companies. When we allowed cracks to work, sales slowly went down to nothing. When the cracks were stopped, low-and-behold, sales went back up because people weren't able to get it for free. I've seen it too many times to think it's a coincidence. Huge companies like Microsoft and Adobe can take the hit, but a small company will be destroyed.
"it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution."
So you are telling me that the fact that I can get pretty much all my news for free (from hundreds of sources) has no effect on a company that tries to sell me the same thing for a few dollars?
I never said it was piracy. I was saying that it's an example of the same effect: When something is easily available for free, less people will end up purchasing it.
In addition to this, when piracy goes unchecked it creates a culture of acceptance (IE: it's not a bad thing) and less people will end up buying.
Everyone loves to defend piracy and yet many of those same people hate big corporations. It's a funny thing because eventually, that's all that will be left.
I no longer get involved with apps. I only do web services. It's better for me because I now get monthly reoccurring income. Eventually, I think most companies will go this route and piracy will be a non-issue.
What exactly is stolen? Certainly not the piece of music, film, or knowledge: unlike spaghetti, those are abundant, non-conflicting goods. Nor the exclusivity, for it is only destroyed. Nor secrecy or privacy, for the piece of knowledge or art is public already.
This is not theft. This is infringing a state granted monopoly. It doesn't make it a good idea, mind you. Upholding the law is generally a good idea. But unlike plain theft, it's not obviously wrong either.
grellas made an excellent post the other day about the nature of physical property rights vs intangible property rights [1]. The general gist is that declaring one "fundamental" and the other "not-fundametal" is sophistry; both are considered important to society and both are and will continue to be protected by law.
In my opinion, the existence of both physical and IP property rights is a social good - it's defining the boundaries of those rights that becomes the tricky part. I don't think we're hitting the right balance worldwide at the moment, but I also don't think we should be swinging violently towards SOPA or conversely anarchy.
Grellas is right to point out that current laws turn a range of intellectual goods into property. We shouldn't forget however how they do this: by enforcing scarcity when the default was abundance. By the way, you can get abundance back by breaking the law.
I reject the terms "property" and "theft" when talking about ideas and recordings because they are abundant by default. By using those words, they make you think in terms of scarcity. They skew your perception of the issues, then exploit that bias. This is why I insist that others do not use the word, "it's GNU/Linux" style. Even if you know what you meant, many people don't, and it has consequences. (In the same vein, I remind people not to say "internet" when talking about the world wide web alone. If you believe you "have the internet" as long as you can run a web browser, you won't notice nor protest when your ISP starts blocking TCP ports.)
I also reject copyright and patents altogether. Not because they are not property by default, and therefore illegitimate (I find this argument very weak). I reject them because I believe they do more evil than good. Most probably, they are more a hindrance than a help for our economy and our technological development. Not to mention the inevitable loss of individual liberties, which humans tend to value by themselves.
Overall, I believe scarcity should be abolished whenever possible. If we get to the point where there is so much abundance that life is not fun any more, then we'd have a good reason for scarcity. (Video games provide an example: god mode, unlimited ammo, and free experience points tend to spoil the game. I'm still tempted by the cheat codes, but I think twice before I type them.) But right now scarcity is a problem to be solved. Copyright and patents are part of that problem (or at least a symptom).
I understand your point about artificial scarcity and appreciate that you find copyrights and patents a net detriment rather than a net benefit. In the current scheme of things, I would have to agree with you on that point in some instances (especially with respect to software patents, many pharmaceutical patents, and the length of copyright). Overall, however, I believe that the idea of intellectual property is a sound one that's been distorted over the course of legal history thanks to the influence of powerful rights holders and a lack of ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.
So given that, you are right, he doesn't refute (1.) (2.) or (3.) at all!
And yes, property is a right, one of far greater importance to political liberty than is generally allowed. And intellectual property is property. The placement of economic activity _outside_ the direct control of the state prevents the state from entirely dominating the society.
Now, SOPA is a really bad bill, because DNS filtering is a free speech nightmare. If you make me choose between speech rights and property rights, I'm taking the speech right, it's the foundation of everything else. The willingness of show biz and its lackeys to mess with speech rights demonstrates a disturbing greed and / or ignorance.
But that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's a complicated world, and technology is revising the everyday realization of our rights and responsibilities. We aren't going to work our way through that with a black-and-white simplification of the debates.
I downloaded a lot when I was a student, when I began to work I decided I did not have the "I'm poor" excuse any more and I began buying CDs of bands I like. I stopped buying CDs after I got my first DRMed one. I thought "ok, this is stupid, I don't want to be part of this any more".
Only recently I have discovered the real harm that copyright laws and lobbyists are doing to the society. They are criminalising sharing. Think a bit about it. We have to stand against them. Now there are copyright restrictions on SCIENCE papers. It is effectively a danger to our society.
Here in France a law was proposed to display on CDs price tag how much the artist receives when you buy a CD. It was voted down by lobbyists' minions. That alone says a lot.
Once you realize this line exists, paying for music is no longer "the right thing to do" but an evil act, at least as evil as supporting sweat shops and Amazon deforestation.
Whether you continue to pirate music or simply stop listening to it is one's personal choice, but buying already ceased being the moral choice.
I'm willing to guarantee that most don't know the labels that most artists belong to. Some are indie and are not involved with the RIAA. Should they be punished as well?
You're not any different from from those you preach against.
Pirating only gives those on the other side the impression and ammunition to say 'we are creating great things that people steal we just need to force them pay.' Not using their works at all is the only way to win.
How is it stealing if they can still have that something?
You compose a song. I copy that song. You still have that song. If I'd taken away a recorder with your only master copy of it, then I would have stolen it.
Because that's not a decision you should get to make. The cost associated with creating most things isn't in raw materials alone but man hours that went in to produce it, and the author is entitled to ask for whatever they think their hard work and their end product are worth. Is the benefit of getting that product not worth the price they're asking? Here's a novel idea; you don't buy the product and don't get the benefit. It is worth the price? Then vote with your wallet and buy away. Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.
So who gets to make it. I guess that means you'd agree with MPAA claims some 16 year old kid out there can be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they downloaded a couple of songs. What if they sue them for $100M, is that valid? If the defendant gets to unilaterally re-define and attribute semantics to words and decide what the punishment is do you think that makes sense?
> Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.
Why doesn't it. It makes a pretty big difference. Not at the point of transaction but during a dispute. If someone steals your song does it mean you can ask for $100M from them claiming you lost potential profit because it was going to be a hit song. How do you decide what one copy is worth? That is the key question. Sorry, but "it is worth whatever the seller says is worth, is bullshit". If that hypothetical teenager didn't copy the song, do you think the record company would be $100M richer. How do you prove that?
If we invent a technology that allows us to read thoughts, should you be allowed to read them without the thinkers permission? The thinker still has their thoughts. What about disseminate them via torrents? Would that be "fair"? Is that the society we want?
What about monitoring conversations via surveillance means? The speakers still have their conversation. Should we be allowed to a) surveil anyone and b) distribute that surveillance digitally as the surveilled still have their conversation?
The time is close approaching where such questions will need to be asked and I see little difference between piracy of songs, movies or other artistic expression and the extraction and distribution of thoughts against the owners wishes. The only real difference is that the artists chose to let it out into the world in a way the pirate didn't like. One way was via concert/itunes/cd/dvd, another way could be a conversation with a friend. Both ways the pirate says they have the right to use it how they want - original thinker be damned.
In my view it comes down to respect. While technically it's not stealing, you're still an asshole for using others thoughts without their blessing.
I can imagine the day where someone hacks into your laptop, records you in a compromising position, shares it with the world and shrugs and says "how is it stealing if you still have that something"? I just copied your dignity.
Not all that can be stolen is a thing.
Good example and I agree. But I think it should be called something else rather than theft. Because one issue with this is how much have you lost after something was copied. That's the law suit side of this. Grandmas are being asked to pay hundreds of thousands of $ because their grand-kids downloaded Lady Gaga songs. By calling it "stealing" they are able to convince juries and judges that this is the equivalent of grandma breaking into a bank and taking $100k worth of gold and then speeding away. You see the problem?
Certainly relaying those thoughts for free can possibly limit potential opportunities to futher sell the right to 'listen to those thoughts' (assuming that anyone of those listening in for free would be prepared to pay for it). But this 'intellectual rape' thing you are trying to paint here just doesn't hold water since they are already granting permission to 'read their thoughts' for money.
These files containing ip that are being illegally copied all across the web are things which were already being distributed in various forms, albeit with artificial scarcity mechanisms in place to force payment per copy.
Just because they are already granting permission to "read their thoughts" for money doesn't give anyone license to just do what they want does it?
I fail to see how the users choice on how to distribute files grants pirates license to go against the thought originators wishes.
Note I'm not saying I agree with this - but I find it interesting to think about the opposite viewpoint to my own as it helps me rationalise my position.
If someone argues against copyright, you cannot defend it by invoking 'stealing'. The 'stealing' here is not removing of anything in any normal sense. It is infringement of, or disobedience of, copyright -- which of course would not exist if there were no copyright. There is no basic harm.
You might say it would be difficult to pay for production with other economic arrangements. But that is a matter of comparing economic efficiency; it has nothing to do with stealing.
I no longer pirate music, ive paid for spotify for over 2 years now, i get music wherever i want on any device and its great, i wish they had metallica and acdc but theres youtube for that.
I no longer pirate software, linux got good at "just working" and i've been using ubuntu for years now. I use google docs and other SaaS apps and pay for really good apps like dropbox.
I no longer pirate games, mainly because i'm not much of a gamer, but i have paid for some indie games like SPAZ, Minecraft, QUBE, Darwinia etc because they're indie and the money goes to the developer and the price point is much more reasonable than the big games that come with heavily restrictive DRM.
I still download TV Shows, but not as much as i used to because of BBC iPlayer and similar initiatives, its mainly American TV i download, i've actually no idea if this is illegal or not, considering most of the shows are put on the american networks websites for streaming too.
For films there are LoveFilm, Netflix (now in the UK), iPlayer does some films now as does youtube, but i still think films are the category that is lacking the most, but also a really tough nut to crack, but hell, if it can be done with music, it can be done with films.
So, in my opinion, innovation and me feeling good about giving money to actual people rather than conglomerates is what has stopped me from pirating as much as i used to and thats the key.
However I still do pirate movies because they are extremely expensive and I know of no way how to watch them online for smaller prices. I still pirate TV shows because there is no way I could watch them otherwise (that I know of at least). Music, well.. much less than I used to.
Luckily it is not illegal to download a movie or a song, but it is still not right. I guess.
* iPlayer runs through Flash, it has to because of DRM (the iPhone version gets around this I think). I use a relatively recent Macbook Pro and the playback performance is dreadful. Even on my beasty iMac the HD versions of shows were stuttery at best, so I was forced to use the SD version. Normally I'm quite happy downloading and watching an SD broadcast of a show in full-screen, but in iPlayer the quality of the upscaling is so bad that it's distracting.
* Shows are quite often available on torrent sites before they're available through iPlayer (discounting watching content as it airs), this is especially true of HD content.
* Despite living in London, my internet connection simply isn't reliable enough to handle streaming without occasional buffering, even with SD. So my preferred approach is to download a show rather than stream it. I've generally found that downloading into iPlayer Desktop is slower than using a torrent site. As well as the fact that VLC doesn't eat my CPU like Adobe Air does.
By comparison, I'm a happy customer of Spotify, and I'm more than happy to pay for a video equivalent. I've tried Netflix now that it's out here, but the Silverlight player is as bad as Flash when it comes to CPU usage. The quality of the Netflix streams is pretty poor too, I've yet to manage to get it enable streaming in HD.
Frustratingly I would happily pay to access US and UK TV shows in the same way that I pay for music via Spotify, but the media companies aren't interested in taking my money. They are too busy trying to sue us and censor the internet instead.
BBC iPlayer Global is a joke. I have to navigate the Germany Apple Store (in German), sign up for a German iTunes account and my UK issued credit card is refused, even though the billing address held with the credit card company is correctly registered to my German address.
US internet companies struggle with the concepts of locale, language and applicable regional law. The whole issue is complex and nobody gets it right. It is often forgotten that where someone lives is not directly related to the language they speak (or preferred language). I find legally binding terms and conditions hard enough to understand in English, let alone in German. Legally, that is still my problem. Should it be? Do I need to see ads in German Google? Accept Language anyone??? http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...
I'd happily pay a recurrent, if modest, sum of money for the ability to legally and easily download not only newer but, more importantly, older and more obscure movies and television series to my computer in the form of convenient unencumbered .avi|.mkv|.mp4 files, from a catalog whose selection and quality matches the level of service of the 2010's.
If MAFIAA offered that, with a credible promise that the material will be there ten years from now, I would not only pay for the content but not bother to stash a single file onto my external hard disk. Because of the high level of sophistication when it comes to the selection, quality, and availability of the content it would be far more convenient to just pay again to redownload what I want to see again.
Pay-per-view is exactly what the studios are dreaming of but it's not going to happen through restrictions, but through unrivalled convenience only.
They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate.
I own Blu-rays that have anti-piracy ads that I can't skip through before I watch the movie. That alone shows how screwed up this situation is.
Heheh, and yet The Pirate Bay (and lots of others), have a single site with lots of things. It might be a nightmare, but not only can it exist, but it does exist.
I am always amazed that the pirate/P2P swarm essentially distributes thousands and thousands of films/tv shows/music for free. Distribution is now free! You don't need to pay to copy your bits! Your users will do it for you, for free!
The problem that does persist (if it's a problem at all) is that the perceived value of recorded music has dropped, other forms of entertainment has taken the crown. The nineties are over, and it's not coming back, sadly the record industry thinks it's still possible.
You wish! Maybe for the US, UK and Germany, but I live in Slovenia, an EU, very highly developed (in terms of internet/mobile coverage and bandwidth) country, but since there's only 2 million of us, no one bothers to try to sell us things.
Thank god I have friends in the UK that can buy music for me. However, after reading this post, I think I won't buy it any more, until it becomes user friendly.
Not to mention that Linux users still have a very poor legal selection even in big rich countries (like UK).
They don't need users, they need customers. Without customers you go out of business, even if you have a zillion users.
Even alcohol seems questionable often times. I am fairly confident I have yet to buy a bottle of gin/vodka/whiskey that hasn't been somehow meddled with. After all, if I put it in the freezer it always freezes.
After writing this I guess I realize it is somewhat OT but it does signify that you have a major problem when the fake is nearly indistinguishable from the real.
Countries like china often start copying everthing an then start to innovate themselfs skip a century (or half) and its the other way around.
Having said that I think it is also quite difficult for the "greedy" companies to sell in these countries at the price points that would have suitable returns. This is because of the fact that the masses in these countries simply cannot afford to pay that much. This does not necessarily mean they should suffer for it.
So, pirates are actually heroes in these regions no matter what anybody says because a genuine audience/market for them exists in poor/sanctioned countries around the world. SOPA or whatever other concoction they have in the rabbit hat, would do very little to affect the usual business of the day.
I envy you Americans for Netflix, we have nothing like that here.
There are some strict rules around in Germany that defined at what time a movie may be released on DVD after it has hit cinemas. I think it is 6 months. Renting the movie might in some occasions be possible a couple of weeks earlier. Though, that has never mattered to me. Waiting on the DVD release or for it's TV premiere are pretty much the same for me. Although, I guess there is also a minimum period for DVD sales before it is shown on TV.
The only option to get the content I am looking for is through megavideo/piratebay.
With the films, happen the same. If I use my iTunes spanish account, the content is delayed 6 months, no tv shows and all of them in spanish. If I use a German account, I only get German content.
I pay spotify premium since two years ago. But for tv shows and films. The only content i can get is from sites like megavideo/piratebay, etc.
This industry is the only one that doesn't offer to the client what the client wants. Easy.
I pity the 14 million "edge case" Catalan speakers in Spain.
Accordingo to this:
http://www.caib.es/conselleries/educacio/dgpoling/user/catal... (sorry, spanish) there are around 7 million Catalan speakers in all europe (including Spain, Andorra, France and Italy).
Your argument holds, still. Indeed, I'm pretty sure most content is available in Catalan here in Spain. I would be more worried about the italian ones, or even the french.
I'm sure there are other examples, but the general rule should be that language is a preference and not geographically forced.
(Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.)
This is also the very reason that that drove me (and thousands of others too, I'm sure) to piracy and the one reason why I still do it. Even if I really wanted to support that TV show, sometimes it's just not possible (Case in point: The comedy show "The Class", it's simply nowhere available on DVD or similar, yet all episodes are on The Bay. How am I supposed to not torrent that stuff if I wanted to watch it?).
Modern popular music is properly considered the product of both the artists and the industry. Someone mentioned Rihanna. Do you think you would have any idea who Rihanna is without the music industry? Would her music sound at all the same with the music industry's backing (funds to pay for studio use and hire studio musicians)? If you don't like modern popular music fine, but if you don't like it, why are you pirating it?
Given that perspective, when you download music, you are enjoying both the labor of the artist and the record company. If you don't like the price they're charging to enjoy their services, that does not give you the right to simply not pay. (We can debate elsewhere whether you already have the right to not pay, but you certainly don't get that right simply because you don't like the price.)
Someone asked for a better analogy. Sneaking into a movie theater and standing (so you aren't taking up a seat) in the back is an analogous situation. You are enjoying the services of the movie theater (which you consider worth breaking the law to get access to) without paying their asking price.
Someone reminded us that copying isn't stealing. Well it isn't sharing either. Two children playing with two toys isn't sharing. Two children taking turns with one toy is sharing.
To return to the most important point, the author's argument can be summed up and generalized as, "If you don't like the cost/benefit ratio of a service, you have the right to take it for free as long as no one is directly hurt in the process."
Frankly, I think people like that should be stopped, which as Ed pointed out, almost makes me feel like a SOPA supporter.
He's not breaking "the law". His breaking some law. You surely broke some law in your life? You can't be sure that you didn't. You just try not to inflict harm on other people and get by.
"Their products" spam everything everywhere. Their billboards litter public space. Their music litters radio waves. Their silly cliches litter minds.
If you dangle a carrot in front of peoples faces you shouldn't complain that someone will eventually eat it without paying you a goddamn thing. Especially if he can do that without you even noticing.
I think if piracy stops Hollywood from shoving their crap in everyone's faces it will be a good thing.
In the past I bought a MC and then I bought a CD. I paid twice for the same work. Did the shop offer me a discount? No.
Do I get a discount when I watch the same movie twice in a cinema or if I buy a DVD after I have seen the movie in the cinema? No.
Do I get easy access to mp3 if I buy a CD? No.
The movie/music industry simply sends the wrong signals...
It is akin to borrowing a book and then scanning it and using OCR to make an ebook before it is returned to the owner. Or ripping a friend's CD. I don't think a reasonable person would describe this as stealing. This is exactly what file sharing is, except that the scanning/ripping has already been done.
By insisting that this is "stealing" you will alienate some people who might be open to persuasion and to changing their behaviour. They know that they have not deprived the owner of it's use and that they have not stolen anything.
Stop talking about stealing, it's lazy
When I hear about stuff like this, along with people's multi-terabyte arrays of content, I wonder if they actually listen/watch much of it. Movie/Record companies are worrying that this all got "stolen" but if it was never viewed was it actually "stolen"?
Almost purely philosophical as answering in the negative would inherently cripple the enforceability of copyright laws. But interesting nevertheless given the party line is the IP grants a purchaser a licence to consume the content.
By pirating this content you are the same as a child stealing candy. The analogy is obviously imperfect because a shop owner is directly damaged by the physical theft but my point is that a child does not need sweets. And 'pirates' do not need bland tv shows distracting them from so many other things in this world that are more deserving of time.
'Pirates' just seem to be sadder version of consumers who don't even help the economy. Little black holes taking and giving nothing back.
I feel sadness that these people try to justify their activities and ally themselves with the SOPA protests.
I would pay 50~100 euro per month for a all you can eat package providing that episodes are available with in a week of first broadcast (not in my country but global) and movies are available with in a month after showing in the theater. I asked around (yes very scientific) and most people would to that to.
So I have this money to give to the industry (max 1200 euro per year) but there is no service to give the money to. You could say go rend a movie (if you still can find such a place) but I refuse to pay 5 euro for a sloppy movie (the best movies I see in the theater any ways). You could say buy the movie but I'm not willing to pay 20 euro for a single Blu-ray. If tomorrow I could not download movies and TV-series any more I still wouldn't do that). In almost every other industry products follow demand but apparently the entertainment industry thinks they are above basic free market economics.
Sharing, lending, and broadcasting have been a core part of the dissemination of creative works for centuries. Libraries. Personal borrowing. Museums. Broadcast TV and radio. For the entirety of the modern age it has been the norm for the average individual "consuming" a creative work to do so without directly purchasing a licensed copy. Somehow creative industries survived.
Today the limits to copying are very different and thus unfamiliar if not frightening for some. Yet creative industries have not died and are not dying, despite persistent attempts to fight against modern technology at every stage (resisting digital distribution, creating experiences that are typically wholly inferior to the "piracy" experience). Imagine if literature, music, etc. never embraced libraries, radio, or television. Imagine if book lending was made illegal.
There are ways to embrace sharing and dissemination of IP without direct payment for every consumed copy while still maintaining profitability. The old limits are dead. Portraying all manner of sharing of creative works as "intellectual property theft" is frankly ridiculous. The idea that the line between borrowing a book from a library (or reading a book within the library) and borrowing a digital copy of a movie from a friend (or even a stranger) is a line between acceptable behavior and theft is an idea born of prejudice and provincialism. We need to get over such old prejudices and begin to form new models and new boundaries.
I can understand those who claim that what they are doing isn't thievery.
I can understand those that don't accept the idea of intellectual property in general.
But for you to both buy into the philosophy that what you are taking is valuable, and ought to be protected---then still steal it proudly..... that is one thing I can't understand.
Aren't people supposed to want to be good?
Many people believe that punishing people whom in their eyes are doing wrong is a good and righteous act, irregardless of any local law. In the legend of Robin Hood, Robin is generally seen as a "good person" and the hero in most tellings, despite being a thief and a criminal.
Most music startups that stream music do not bother with canada, and that's sad.
Read the article why pandora decided to quit the Canadian market, sad true story
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JgGeRC_...
But if it's an attempt to make something happen (stop SOPA), then it's not working and is in fact counterproductive, so please just STFU. You are offsetting the good hard work of so many others trying to make the right things happen.
Make no mistake about it, we have reached the point where the best course of action is probably to simply appeal to the common people's innate sense of "fairness".
Copyright is not fair. We get that.
Pirating is not right. Most people would agree with that, too.
Multiple wrongs do not make a right; most people's reptilian brains sense that, too.
Long ago, before the Code of Hammurabi, the common code of law was often unfair. If, for example, I accidently killed your daughter, the penalty was to put my daughter to death. Such logic today is laughable and modern people would never put up with it. Except that's exactly what SOPA is, penalizing Party B for Party A's transgression. We don't do that anymore.
There are other good arguments against SOPA, but yours is not one of them. Instead of influencing those who need to be influenced, you are just fanning the flames of SOPA proponents. Hell, after reading your article, I almost understand their reasoning...they need to do something to stop your wrong to stop someone else's wrong to stop someone else's wrong, etc.
It's time to stop the cycle of doing wrong to combat other wrong, and just start doing right. It works better anyway. It would be nice to have you on board for that.
I have more to say, but unfortunately, someone in another thread did something wrong, so a moderator has turned off the rest of my comment...
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For example, radio stations pay more. They may have the physical CD in their grasp, but they have to pay to play it on air. DVD shops get charged more per video because they rent it out repeatedly - they don't just use the same home version as you do and pocket the difference. Changing the distribution mechanism to radio stations and DVD shops to digital doesn't change the concept of copyright owners being able to set the terms of use for their content.
Now, would I like a whole new approach? Sure. I long for ways to reinvent the industry, like crowdsourcing aspects of music production, marketing etc. There will be many ways to make a living from music in the future. But that doesn't mean I think it's ok to just make up the rules as I go along and copy anything that I fancy.
That is exactly where it went wrong.
The biggest problem I see today is that there are so many people who aren't even bothering to justify pirating, and instead insist that it is natural, good and just -- not just as a means to get access to content they otherwise wouldn't be able to, but for everything.
To draw my line in the sand, I have no problems with people pirating works they simply don't have any other access to. American shows that aren't broadcast overseas, for example; pirate away.
I don't personally do it, but I don't have any problems with those that do. Others, however, simply incur piracy as a matter of course. Looking for a new album to listen to? Limewire. Looking for a movie? Pirate Bay.
While I don't mind downvotes, that I repeatedly get voted down while suggesting that yes, even though copyright is wrong, it is the law, and people should either respect it or engage in civil disobedience (which is a public affair) instead of just casually pirating every piece of content they consume, it is telling of the more and more common mentality (or at least is becoming more common on HN.)
Really? The problem I have with this argument is that you remove control of the creation from the creator. What if they are in the process of trying to make a distribution deal while people cut off demand at the knees by stealing the product instead?
Much like the linked article, that position takes that control away. YES the industry sucks at distribution and their offerings are terrible and expensive, but I don't think that's an acceptable or legitimate reason to pirate things instead.
The legitimate option is GO WITHOUT IT. You have no RIGHT to anything here...
If the food is too expensive at your favourite restaurant, you don't pull a runner after the meal, you simply don't eat there, and you hope that in time the owners will realize and make adjustments. But if they choose not to, then that is their right.
Admittedly, I don't know how or why that particular justification is okay with me, except that I know a number of expats who simply don't have access to American television in any other way.
I understand and agree that I'm being hypocritical, and I agree that piracy is "not okay", which is why I don't do it. However, I simply can't judge the piraters who do so out of lack of availability with the same stance that I judge those who do so casually, or as a matter of course, or because they don't agree with DRM, or because they don't like the record producer, or whatever.
Unavailability just seems like a less shallow justification to me to an act that it still equally wrong.
Stuff like this really hurts your argument, IMO. When you eat at a restaurant and then don't pay, that restaurant loses a substantial amount of money. When you pirate something, the creator loses zero money.
If we're going to discuss piracy, let's discuss piracy, not other crimes which may appear to be somewhat related. Otherwise you get completely bizarre arguments like this: http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l605vu5xV11qcw66ho1_500.jp...
I'm not even speaking about the concept of sells they may have had in place of theft - that is simple conjecture. There is no doubt that less money flowing in to the industry, as a direct result of piracy, means less money for creators. Is anyone honestly suggesting media sales haven't declined due to pirating?
I'm not a proponent of the industry as it currently functions, but I dislike the offhand spread of disinformation - less money spent on purchases will indirectly, and sometimes directly, result in less money for creators.
By all means, let's talk about the effects of piracy on creators' profits. But let's not pretend that a pirated copy costs the creator anything.
The action and consequences of stealing versus pirating are different. They deserve to be discussed differently. Linking them together is clumsy and doesn't further the discourse.
For a restaurant, we get: A) restaurant benefits B) restaurant loses C) restaurant suffers no effect either way.
For piracy, we get: A) creator benefits B) creator suffers no effect either way C) creator suffers no effect either way.
Consider what happens if I organize a thousand people to carry out (B) on something. If it's a restaurant, this could easily drive them out of business. If it's a creator of copyrighted content, they continue with their business as usual.
Note: I'm not saying that (B) is good, or acceptable, or justified, or should be legal, or anything like that, when it comes to copyright infringement. I'm just saying that the two scenarios entail significantly different consequences, and should not be treated as the same thing. Treating them as the same doesn't help the discussion at all: it simply causes people who agree with you to nod their heads, and people who disagree to think you're being disingenuous.
It deprives them of any income, and removes the incentive and ability for them to produce further content as a means of living in the future.
That deprives all of their future contributions and damages the commons. In summation, at scale, the outcome for both B) scenarios IS the same, and if it is at scale, then there must be an effect not at scale, whether or not you refuse to accept it.
In short, the effect of piracy depends entirely on whether the pirates are potential customers. The effect of dine-and-dash does not depend on that. This is, I believe, an extremely significant difference.
i) Would have paid if it were the only option, but would rather get
something for nothing
ii) Would not have paid under any circumstances
You actually missed my point though (but I concede I used a rather simplified argument).
I was actually taking the "it's not available in my area" or "it's to expensive" argument of the OP to justify piracy to its logical conclusion.
I was pointing out that you can't circumvent the creator/owner's choices or restrictions on distribution, availability and pricing (i.e. "the food is too expensive here") just because you don't agree with them. It's not a level playing field.
If you don't like the creator's choices, don't participate in his creation. There really is no other choice.
While digital media creates the illusion of the "victimless crime" because you aren't taking something physical, it doesn't remove the fact that you are benefiting from someone else's hard work without agreeing to their terms of use, whatever those may be.
I wouldn't say that I missed your point, merely that I objected to a particular argument you used it making it. I realize this is a lower level of discourse than addressing your main point entirely, but I'm hoping that it would raise the level of discourse overall.
For reasons I've never understood, copyright advocates love comparing copyright infringement with physical theft. If copyright infringement is bad then it should be possible, nay preferable, to argue this on its own merits, not through bad analogies.
You might notice in "useful arts" that an argument could be made right now, that fiction, music, movies, and video games never should have been covered. And, in fact, music wasn't covered for decades afterward.
Maybe I'm making assumptions that you don't agree with--perhaps you think that a thriving video games industry could exist as strongly in the absence of copyright, or that the video games industry hasn't encouraged advances in computers--but both my claims seem fairly uncontroversial to me.
This is more-or-less an impossible problem to solve technologically at the moment: MMO servers are (by definition) too contended to do more than act as more than glorified packet switches for authoritative clients. The only lever to pull is to put more functionality on the server and off the client, but for a variety of reasons this leads to a less satisfactory user experience.
[0] http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/06/07/the-lawbringer-the-history... -- a quick history of the action by Blizzard against the maker of an in-game bot, legally identical to running a private server. Note the claims were all either copyright-related, won by the bot-maker, or involved "tortious interference"--i.e. incentivizing the buyer of Glider to break their EULA with Blizzard, which would no longer exist.
One is hurting a business by creating direct loss, the other one creates no direct loss (and it is not clear it is hurting anyone...)
So according to you, us customers, should shut up and let them dictate how we spend our money? You should come back to reality, customers have the money, and if we say "There is a problem with the way the entertainment industry works", then there is a problem.
And the lack of offering is a legitimate reason to "pirate", I have tons of hands on examples where piracy does not hurt in any way the industry:
I lived 5years in North America, got used to certain shows, enjoy some of those shows, and have no way of seeing them from my current country, so because the entertainment industry fails to realize that we live in a global world, I should just shut up and take it? I don't think so, so i occasionally download, i download something that i had no access to, something that was not and would have never been available in my country.
The internet and file sharing offers a channel that otherwise would not be available to a lot of people, and the entertainment industry (as well as you) are still living decades in the past. We live in a globalized world, we expect everything to be globalized and we are right to expect so.
And please could we stop with the "creators", "artist", it is not about them and as never been. Piracy does not hurt them in any way, it never has. The entertainment industry does, by taking ridiculous amounts of money out of every sale, deal, show, leaving most of the bands in "debt" when they decide to drop them because they didn't "reach targets" (which is another layer of bullshit right there).
It is time for some people here on HN, to stop make this issue about the artist and creators, because it is not about them, it is about a system that is profoundly broken, and that the internet finished.
It is time for a change in the way the entertainment industry works, the way copyright works, the way artists/creators are remunerated, not a time to point fingers at each others and play on semantics or other fallacies.
Actually, you do. That is precisely the point of copyright - all creative works are (well, were, before the advent of the major content companies in the US) implicitly understood as the property of the people. Thus, in order to promote continued creative works, an artificial incentive has to be created to encourage additional creation, e.g. copyright. Copyright doesn't create rights, it postpones them.
This is what few people understand anymore about copyright and the original view of the creative process. Enlightenment ideals held that all creative processes were the right of the people as an extension of the mere fact of being an intelligent being - creative activity is required for effective participation in any human society. It is an inborn part of being human.
I'm not saying this to justify the OP's comment about pirating something not available in your country, although that would be a reasonably valid interpretation of a human's right to the product of other human's creative endeavors. If you had 100% certainty that the producer had no intention of distributing that content in your country, you are entirely within your right to find it another way.
The problem is that the content producers these days would claim the opposite - and they do the entirety of the human species, and the whole history and future of human civilization, a disservice by claiming so. I am not engaging in hyperbole here. Even today, we continue to benefit from the knowledge and creations of those thousands of years ago who gave us amazing works. All creative works today are possible due to the works that came before them. The fallout of the infinite lockdown on content ownership that occurs today will not be known for hundreds of years.
Legally? Indeed. Ethically? I disagree. I have the RIGHT to partake in what is part of my culture. Whether I like it or no, series, games and movies changed my worldview and made me the person with a extensive cultural knowledge I am today. Of course, I can do with what I can see legally, and I do, but although the TV series here in Flanders are very, very good, there's just not that much of them. And I can go to the theatre, but when was the last time a cinema in Belgium showed "2001"? And does any big company really deserve to make anymore money of that?
Or consider this. I'm a huge fan of "My Little Pony". The series and the community around it have enriched my life enormously. What are the odds that without the internet and without piracy I would have ever seen it?
Without piracy, I would have been a much less interesting person and I believe I have the right to be the person I am today.
I agree, and I'm surprised so many people miss this. If everyone simply refused to use content that was not distributed under acceptable terms the content creators would change the terms.
But you're right. It seems like a lot of this bragging about piracy is a thinly veiled excuse and a thinly veiled justification of what they're doing. This a new phenomenon that I think people my age (20's) and younger are part of where we feel entitled to just get whatever via free downloads. It's so weird that a community all about business would have such an anti business view on this. It's one thing to be against SOPA-like laws and the growing power of copyright but why are we for totally abolishing it? It makes more sense to simply try to stop the overreach of power and scale back copyright.
Everyone is both a creator and a consumer. Those are two competing interests and business is all about competing interests and it makes the market go round. Swinging the power away from creators and giving it all to consumers is just as bad as doing the opposite. We should be fighting for the balance of rights and not trying to give it to any one group. Just because there are more of us than of them (in a sense) doesn't mean it's right. It's one thing to want to distribute income from the few to the many, to fight for the rights of minorities, etc. but this whole getting rid of copyright thing is strange. There's a part of me that sees it as a childish attempt to cry to get whatever you want for free.
Under no circumstances ever should people actively sabotaging the freedom of expression of the entire world ever be supported by any payments from anyone, ever. Especially not the people whose world they're trying to destroy. When it comes to organisations that have lobbied for or support SOPA, piracy of their works is to me the second best step on a ladder of approaches.
1) Boycott them, there is nothing wrong with this plan, you shoot yourself in the foot a little if they made something you want and you refuse to purchase it due to principles, but it's probably the most noble of all approaches.
2) Pirate anything they produce that you wish to consume. You may be making an impolite move and breaking a law that if it were used to protect other organisations that weren't such poisonous vile scum it would be immoral to break, but at least you're not feeding the beast.
3) Actually pay them for their content, at this stage you are not breaking any laws but you are effectively contributing to their continued existence and their lobbying to destroy the world as we know it.
If absolutely NOONE picks door number three, the problem will finally be solved. And this entire debacle is all the evidence anyone should ever need that they so desperately deserve destruction.
For the past year I've been paying for Netflix, and while the selection isn't always the greatest, the sheer thought of pirating has gone down considerably.
Do I want to pay $8/mo or do I want to spend time finding, downloading, dealing with codecs, categorization and management of movies that I will probably delete later?
If Netflix could offer every movie, every tv show and/or a music subscription that worked on any device, would I ever want to pirate? Even if it was $20/mo?
As producers of creative works, we need to understand the psychology of our audience, more than we need to understand the economy of the industry.
Don't End "Piracy" or Liberty:
I believe that when you buy your hard drive, you own it. I believe that the bits on your hard drive are yours to set however you please. I believe that if someone else tells you how to set those bits so that you can run them through a video decoder to watch the latest Batman movie that neither they nor you have done anything that can be responded to with force, because your actions (communication and altering your own property) have been nonviolent. I believe that if someone tries to throw you in jail for setting those bits or telling someone else about the bits, they are the ones that are being unethical, because they are using aggressive force.
It's probably true that the jobs and/or income of people in the entertainment industry may be at risk because of this. The problem, in my opinion, does not stem from the act of copying, but rather from a business model that depends on aggressive force. It strikes me as incredibly narrow-minded to stick to this foundering and unethical business model when there are an infinite number of ethical business models to try. They can do literally anything (anything!) that does not involve violence.
Radiohead is an AMAZING band that has offered their album up for free on the internet and they are still hugely successful. Take a clue from them.
CHANGE and sharing IS A GOOD THING.
- It is unreasonable on the whole to expect people to refrain from piracy when it's just so easy. It's kind of like putting candy in front of a child and not expecting him to eat it, compounded by the fact that there is at least the illusion of anonymity on the internet. - It is unreasonable to expect artists to use the internet by themselves to distribute their content, although some do. Most of them are probably not that technically inclined. There needs to be someone there to take that pain away from them. - It is just that people who create content get paid for doing so.
So it's really a market problem. We need a system that allows people to just download as easily as pirating, but allows the content creators to live off their creation. If the traditional content distributors (who are not the creators) cannot supply a service which does this, then I cannot see why they should be pitied.
I think something along the lines of Deezer et al is ok : a service that would allow you to consume music, no questions asked. The problem is that deezer is getting all its content from the distributors, so in effect there is a double middle man. But a subscription-based "deezer" which paid artists directly according to how much their tracks were listened to would work, IMHO. I believe such services already exist, in fact.
Also, you'd only need the big distributors to realize this, and build their own versions, and suddenly there's a proper market for tunes, films, etc. These new distributors would each have a catalogue of films and music on download, but they could also open the catalogue to cinemas, tv channels and so on. The only thing they couldn't do is restrict access, under pain of piracy.
I'm just hypothesising here, but as far as I can see the content distributors are being the artisans of their own downfall by not doing this themselves.
1. The prices are all wrong. If they want me to buy something I should be able to buy it. I am not saying that since I am a student I don't have the money to buy it. But spending 400 Bucks of my native currency for 12 songs is just ridiculous. I don't want to do that.
2. This is even more sillier, I pirate because I can. Maybe this is a usability problem, but I don't want to seem like I am on some kind of a high horse. But still, if you are willing to give me individual songs (I rarely want the whole album or OST) for cheap I will consider buying it. Payment is not that much of a problem, you can have a wallet like system.
There is always going to be a music and or movie business, as human beings since the dawn of time have fawned over larger then life figures. THere is a business around this (Justin Bieber) and there always will be.
Where I converge is on the fury and destructiveness inherent in SOPA/PIPA. This rather-burn-Berlin-than-see-her-fall attack on America's (and through legislative export, the world's) creative and innovative centres is selfish and un-forgivable.
I also cannot help but notice the parallels in social malignancy between the banks Dodd used to regulate and the MPAA he commands today.
There are a lot of variables that come into play for a generic copyright or IP law that encompasses all creative works. The first of which should probably be scope.
Physical and non-physical creations; a painting or a jpg; a photo of a painting in jpg format; a photo of a photo of a painting in jpg format.
The digital work - the internet - has changed the world forever and we're not going back. Some form of "SOPA" or "PIPA" is inevitable.
The question is simple: what are you going to do about it?
Does that count as piracy?
Furthermore, the title and the picture frame this as "cool" or "fun" or "free". It's more like leeching off of another's work, and disregarding their right to do with it what they please.
You can always choose not to buy it or watch it if you dislike it. Is it something like air that you really can't live without? People tend to be greedy. No matter the big guys or the little guys. Just the same. People sucks.
I don't know if this article touched on the entire "we'll pay for cheap streaming thing", but I've heard it enough times and think it's relevant enough to discuss in this topic.
I'm curious to how much time people are really spending thinking about things from the perspective of the movie studios. For users, it's easy to say "charge me $10/month and I'll gladly pay". From the movie studio's perspective, that probably sounds AWFUL. Does the music industry really like paying fractions of a penny per play on Pandora, Spotify, etc.? Absolutely not. For them, however, it's better than the alternative. For the movie studios, it's not. At least not yet.
The movie business model is designed to price discriminate. They charge consumers on a sliding scale. When a movie first comes out, it's only available in theaters at the cost of, let's say, $10 per person. Then it moves to the second-run theaters at $5 per person. Then it goes to video for $20 to own, or $5 / household to rent. Then it goes to on-demand/redbox/itunes/etc. for $5/6 to rent. Then it goes to premium cable, where money is distributed via pre-arranged agreements. Then it becomes an "archival" video and can be rented for $2/3 at a store or on-demand.
The movie studios are going for maximum profits by attempting to charge people the exact price they're willing to pay, when they're willing to pay it. Of course, they have to settle for inefficiencies because they cannot create a perfect discrimination model.
Regarding the pedants of the "stealing" thing, what you're stealing when you pirate something is missed revenues. Just because you're taking a digital good instead of a physical one should have no effect on the outcome of your actions. If you steal a physical CD that normally costs $12.99, you're not stealing $12.99 worth of stock from the music industry. The margins are purposefully high on CD's, and you're stealing those margins, not $12.99 worth of a physical product.
Let me tell you why Piracy, it works most people who sell stuff them self want piracy to work.
To start with this let me tell you something. I didn't have genuine exposure to computers until I was 17, The first time I really worked with a computer seriously was in First semester engineering. Here in India it was not very easy to afford computers for guys like me. In the first semester I went to a friends home who had a PC. And he had Windows installed. I guess it was XP. Another friend said he is soon buying a PC and wanted the Win XP CD. I was flabbergasted to know how easy it was to just copy the CD and install the OS on an machine.
Only many days later did I learn, If Microsoft wanted they could stop piracy easily. But they don't! Why? Because they want people to be trained in it, right from college. So that when they get jobs their employers are forced to buy the OS they are trained to work in. Most of my friends also bought endless pirated game CD's. Here in Gandhinagar, Bangalore you can buy pirated CD's like peanuts on the footpath. Again, why don't they stop it? They can if they want! But why the hell don't they do it?
Now coming to Music and art piracy. Even here, upcoming musicians can't really expect people to shell out money for their work. Piracy acts as an easy distribution medium. Trust me piracy is a blessing in disguise for them.
Sorry to say, but you have all the power to stop this thing without stealing our liberties. But you don't.
Also expecting people to be morally upright and not get into Piracy is big BS according to me. Its like parking your Ferrari in a lonely street in the middle of the night, with the fuel tank full and keys inside. Its bound to be stolen, don't blame the world for it. You are to be blamed for not taking the right precautions when you actually could have!
If Microsoft bans Piracy in India. I assure you they will have to beg and plead with people to even make a single sale. People will be happy to buy a non OS installed computer and install Linux on it. They don't want that to happen, they know it, we know it.
This is why you can't end piracy.
Microsoft spends millions fighting piracy. What is this magical way that Microsoft could "easily" stop piracy?
The guy who wrote that is receiving, at best, nominal returns from criminality along with the satisfaction of making the, "Fuck you, that's why," argument. Crime isn't paying well at all for him, because he's committing a potentially life-altering crime in increments of $0.99 in music. So let's just set all those people aside for a moment, because on an individual basis, that's just a wreck to explain. Would take interpretive dance. These sorts of people only matter economically in the aggregate (think: Bittorrent), but "people-in-the-aggregate" isn't in charge, doesn't steer anything. Real individual human beings are.
So how about some individual human beings who are benefitting mightily from piracy? Somebody must be making out big time. They must have a lot of power and a strong justification for having the system be just so.
And if you took a moment to ask, say, the former CTO of any political campaign, they'd tell you who those people are. But since you didn't ask, I'll just tell you: it's politicians. Heard it here first people: political campaigns PIRATE THEIR ASSES OFF. I know with 100% certainty that one of the sponsoring senators for PIPA won big riding on top of a sea of pirated software in their campaign office. You betcha. One of the sponsors.
In the last decade, when money into campaigns has increased by orders of magnitude, piracy has actually increased on campaigns, many of which can now afford to pay. Why? Laptops. Back when desktops were still king, odds were good that you'd have one or two legal copies of, say, Office that you were installing across all the machines in your phone banks, another couple copies for your volunteer centers, maybe one for your staff offices... all those places where fixed machines were. So at least you were installing at like 5:1. Not legal, but not crazy.
But that's not how it works anymore. Now everybody plays BYOL. Need Office? Sure, there's a copy on Bob's shared drive. Need MapInfo? That's on a fileserver. And everybody at a machine (and I mean everybody) needs basic commercial software to work. Some need even more - the Adobe Suite or Visio or MapInfo or... it just goes on and on. Copies of SPSS floating around. If it's a campaign for an incumbent, you need, at minimum, everything on your desktop in the campaign that the staff on the Hill have, because you're going to be passing lots of files. So incumbents' campaigns tend to get right into piracy real fast, because they need application parity with their official staff.
Multiply that by every staffer and every intern and every volunteer who brings in their laptop and that's a huge number of copies. A successful presidential campaign is probably pirating on the order of at least 3,000+ copies of just Office alone. Seriously. Go audit Romney. They're there.
Funny thing is, it was the artists(!) who ultimately cracked down on the rights management firms that made campaigns stop pirating music. Possibly the one time ASCAP and BMI actually did anything for the artists, and it was against politicians. The deal was, artists were tired of politicians they didn't agree with playing uncleared, public performances of their music. If they hated the guy, they sure didn't want him to also get the music for free. So the rights firms cracked down. Odds are, big campaigns now have a CD of cleared music with usually BMI. They don't do it till they think they're likely to get caught, so they STILL PIRATE THE DAMN MUSIC. But eventually they make good. Want to check that one out? Call the compliance desk at the folding Cain campaign and ask if you can see their BMI clearances. Bet they don't have any - they bowed out too soon to get caught.
Oh, oh! Don't forget TV. A good rapid response operation is capturing all the news in areas in play and all the advertising for themselves and their opponents. Nowadays, there are firms that suck it down, and then they take the files and share them around the office. Much like Pirate Bay in the TV section. "Hey, did you see yesterday's AC360 on the other guy? Here's a copy!" Back when I was doing this crap, TiVo was still pretty much the best you could do on short notice, so I had a shelf of hacked TiVos. Ah, how life has gotten easier.
One more thing. Lists. Copyrighted lists. Mailing lists. Demo data. All the information detritus from campaigning. Stealing lists is a serious no-no. Reason being, the way politicians get rich (if they don't start rich, of course) is their list: because your campaign is not a shareholder-based corporation, the candidate ends up owning the assets. The key asset that gets created is the supporter list. A good list from a very successful national single run can bring in millions. Even for the loser.
So lists are precious. You'd think that somehow there would be an honor code around this, at least. "Thou shalt not screw thy coworkers out of their primary asset." That would, unfortunately, be untrue. Go ask any campaign data manager how they've "salted" their list. They'll tell you. They hide tripwire data in the list - emails that go to warning scripts or phone numbers that forward to their own cell. Because pirating each other's data in politics is also a national tradition.
A few things, some of them quite complex, are at the root of all this. A good example is campaign finance reform where there are matching funds spending caps and such. Piracy is a really good way to keep from moving spent money into, say, Iowa and incrementally lay waste to the cap before you've decided if you're going to get matched. It's a complex set of considerations and public perceptions. There are a lot of little dances that campaigns do, and piracy is a really good way to disappear major expenses in a very cash-constrained environment.
But a very senior Democratic political operative sat me down once when I was trying to convince him to buy legal licenses for an Iowa office. He said, "Dave, here's the deal: if we lose, there's nothing to go after. We'll leave the stage with negative money and nobody to pin it on. If we win, we are the Executive Office of the President, and we've got the Antitrust Division. Do you really think Microsoft, of all companies, is looking to pick that fight?"
tl;dr: Politicians operate vast organizations with questionable legal practices called campaigns. These campaigns get them elected to power and make them rich. Once elected, they legislate against the citizenry doing the things they did to gain power and wealth. This is not a conspiracy. Turns out they're just assholes.
Take this ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xj4jS8cho
This the truth...
You spent an hour to go to the shop's and buy it / waited a day for delivery He spent 15 minutes downloading it.
You have to sit though ad's you cannot skip. You have to watch a 39 second anti-piracy ad on a legitimate DVD. You have to wait 30 seconds for the title menu to load because some moron decided to show clips of the film you want to fecking play before it appears!
He is already 5 minutes into the film.
------------------
Its horrible.
As for the rest of the arguments I disagree.
1) Because you don't use my money well
It doesn't matter how they spend there money. They are provided a product that you want. If they didn't exist the product wouldn't exist.
"Everything else was probably diluted in stuffs I don't need: packaging, distribution, transport, marketing,"
If they didn't market you wouldn't have heard about it. If they didn't pay for distribution you wouldn't be able to get it. If they didn't pay for packaging you would receive a scratched, perhaps broken CD...
2) Because you are messing with my life
"Worst, you will use my money to sue me in court because I would have downloaded something that I didn't want to buy anyway!"
Yeah.. your like stealing their stuff? Why shouldn't they come after you? If you don't want it don't download. If you download it.. don't pretend you didn't want it.
"With the change left, you will pay lobbyists to ensure the governments make stupid and dangerous laws."
The politicians pass the law's. I see nothing wrong with the music / film industry lobbying to protect their interest's. Where it gets scary is when politicians act on the side of lobbyists without considering the wider picture.
3) Because you are destroying the whole society
I agree there are problems but I completely disagree that these problems are all caused by the film and music industry. I didn't know EMI signed teachers for their lectures?
Finally...
"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off. In your arrogance, you are hurting the fundamental value of freedom only to save your little petty interests."
I guess big hollywood movies and the majority of career musicians can fuck off as well aye?
This post hurts the pro-copyright people, anti-copyright people, and all people with brains.
Edit: I think I was too harsh with that last line. But my point still stands that this article is doing more harm than good. There are a lot of people who write these rants but do it for the wrong reasons and try to play it off like they're some sort of freedom fighter.
i'd like to add one more thing, in regards of music:
why should i pay for digital music reproduction?
1., radio is free
2., internet radio covers so much, i can listen to anything, for free (more channels than ever)
3., on demand is solved by youtube, which is already the biggest music platform bar none. some music video have 100+ million playcounts!
4., a lot of those youtube videos are legal by now, put up there by the industry themselves. they price their own content as ZERO.
and then there are the specialty sites, like soundcloud, 8tracks, wearehunted,... all that music, on demand, for free. mainstream stuff, not some basement bands.
the industry is pricing their content as free in a lot of channels already. so, sorry, hard to see that saving a youtube vid as an mp3 is actual piracy.
There are nowadays plenty of ways to get music with much less hassle than TPB, at reasonable prices, with good audio quality and no DRM, often even directly from minor labels’ websites.
If you don't use any them it's because you don't want to pay and just that.
(Movies are still a problem, but the author is focusing on music here, which is largely resolved)
"It's more convenient and less expensive to pirate!"
I supposes breaching the terms of the GPL would be 'honourable' too.
I don't understand what that has to do with GPL at all.
Would you feel comfortable walking past an artist trying to graft a living selling paintings/prints in a street stall, then against his wishes take a picture of them and tell him you're going to share these with your friends so they don't have to buy his work? Does that seem honourable to you?
Also consider a situation whereby two parties had a contract dictating the terms of how some artistic work could be used. There's obviously nothing wrong with this since both parties have agreed to the contract. Then say some third party illegally acquires the work and makes it available elsewhere. Seems fair that at this point we can rely upon copyright to protect the work of citizens. Just like you have privacy rights and defamation rights and so on.
Everything in the world is essentially just a bunch of atom, too. By this logic you can probably do anything you want and never be wrong, right?
Regarding your first point, yes, since we're speaking about ethics here, it's morally acceptable to disregard wishes of authors to restrict your freedom of handling copies of their published work, as long as doing this is good for people and makes no harm to authors.
Seriously, what is wrong with people's moral compasses with regards to sharing? Is this the result of brainwashing by publishers? OK, laws are laws, but morals? They have nothing to do with laws. Oh the mighty author, should I apologize to you (or, perhaps, go to jail) for signing your songs before you died + century?