The RIAA and MPAA make deals with artists to distribute their music, and you want to interfere and just steal it instead. It's dishonest, it's juvenile, and it's eroding at the basis of society (equality under the law, property rights, basic respect and goodwill towards others, etc.).
These are not the same. Most people do not support the concept of "intellectual property". But for a property to exist in practice, you need majority support, otherwise your property is either just imaginary or you need a totalitarian police state to enforce it.
> the basis of society
The concept of imaginary property is neither supported by a majority of population not in any other way democratically backed. Nobody on this planet has ever voted on it. From its early beginnings, it has been enforced from the top down, decided in shady deals behind closed doors between corrupt officials and industry stake holders and then enforced against the majority.
> steal it
To steal it, you must first reckognize that it is somebody else's property first. But what if you dont consider it property in the first place?
I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
Please don't take the sarcasm personally; it was just the best way to illustrate my point.
Understanding the Native Americans from an anthropological point of view indicated the Land owned them. The Land provided food, water, shelter, warmth, entertainment, animals, and other things.
The trade of Manhattan for wampum beads is a perfect example: The European thought he got a killer deal because an island was worth far more than those beads. The Native thought, 'the land will be here after he dies, as he belongs to the land'. The native got a better deal because it wasn't a trade.
Native Americans of all the tribes had a very strong sense of ownership. If that was not the case, the Natives would have not signed treaties indicating that this is "X's territory".
I agree that 5-10 years is probably too short of a period for intellectual property to be protected. Honestly, putting an arbitrary span of time on the duration is a suboptimal way of accomplishing the goals of copyright law. Why not protect an artist’s creation as long as he or she is alive, and then release it into the public domain upon his or her death? One of the main problems with the current system is that corporations (e.g. Disney) can monopolize culturally-significant works for decades after their creator’s death.
So? How is it a problem that Disney has a monopoly on Pocahontas or Aladdin?
Because both of those already existed long before Disney 'reinvented' them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas
and
You can't tell a story about Disney's Pocahontas or Aladdin, true. But you can about your own version of those characters.
Because if you try to tell any of those stories today, you'll have Disney's lawyers knocking on your door (if not the FBI knocking down your door). And don't forget those stories were already old when Walt Disney was a little boy.
I'm not sure why there's such a disparity between patents (which cost thousands of dollars and expire after 20 years), trademarks (which cost thousands of dollars, and have to be actively defended), and copyright (which costs nothing, is automatic, and expires after your grandchildren are dead).
Patents are applications of scientific discoveries. Other people are likely to make the same discoveries and want to apply them in a similar way, and that's legitimate.
Copyright covers things that are purely creations of the author. The author holding a copyright on something doesn't prevent or restrict anyone, except people who want to directly use the copyrighted work, which they wouldn't have come up with anyway (e.g. even if I write a novel about wizards, it would not be Harry Potter).
This isn't about listening to something or reading something. It's about the ability to remix and build upon it.
> I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
It doesn't matter, because most people don't profit from their works after 5 years, if they ever profit from it at all. The current law helps the Disneys and bestselling authors and has little to no effect on small, independent creators. I don't think we should optimize for corporations, I think we should optimize for everyone being able to reproduce, distribute and build upon their culture - with a period of potential financial motivation to kickstart the creation of new cultural artifacts. If you're still living off your work 5 years on, you're probably already rich.
Girl Talk's music is literally illegal because his instrument comes with a license agreement. What if Stratocasters had come with one?
> Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
This makes no sense. At all. Physical property and my culture are not comparable.
Yes, those pirate bay users are all about remixing and building upon stuff... /s
How about inventing something new?
Nonsense. It's still not possible to copyright the idea of a "love story involving two feuding families," or something. You can't copyright ideas.
How many hollywood movies feature extremely similar plots?
IANAL, but I personally have no doubt that Shakespeare would have been sued if today's copyright culture had existed then. He even copied the characters' names (and yes, characters can be covered by copyright), not to mention most of the major plot elements. It wasn't just "Oh, this general idea is kinda similar to that one."
It's the skill of Shakespeare's story telling that made him so great, not the stories themselves. But the stories are protected by copyright, not the skill.
Well, kind of. But when I suggest creating something "new", I'm not saying don't remix/use old ideas, I say don't remix/use actual previous existing artifacts.
And let's be clear here, the Pirate Bay is not about creating, it's about consuming.
And you don't make a remix with an mp3. Seriously, that's just silly. If you're looking to remix music, which is what I'm mostly talking about, you need to separate tracks to manipulate them and it's damn near impossible to separate out the drums from the vocals from the keys, etc. if you're working from any listening format like mp3 and the like. Remix culture my foot.
This kind of statement does not help your case at all.
Pirate Bay is not about remix culture. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Saying that it is just makes every single thing you say on the topic suspect.
I'm not in favor of the kind of restriction we see dicussed in this article. I'm against sopa/pipa/acta style approaches. But I also know that copying music and movies is 99.99% about getting something for free, not about remixing. So please. Be honest here.
Otherwise you just make the other side's arguments more powerful.
It is a fact of reality that it is morally right to give people ownership rights for things they produce (besides, again, being the basis of society). And why not? Paying for something rather than stealing it (or changing the law so it's not officially "stealing" anymore), just isn't that big of a deal.
I can't justify that claim on HN, for the same reason I can't prove the contents of Physics 101 on HN. If you're curious about my claims, you'll have to go investigate more on your own.
> precisely, like physics.
There is no place in the universe where the laws of physics do not apply, however there were and are societies without a notion of property, much less the moral right to property, thus property rights are nothing like the laws of physics. They are a product of your provincial worldview. Of course, property is a useful human invention, but it's nothing more than that.
You may not be able to prove Physics 101 on HN, but you could link you to Feynman's lectures on Physics which would get the interested layman started. That's the sort of thing I'm asking for, for this pro-IP viewpoint.
Honestly, IP rights aren't a special case (setting aside patents, which isn't the topic of this thread); they're straightforward if you understand AR's theory of rights and property.
Another good reference is [2], but since AR's claims are hierarchial, you can't get the "whole story" very well from just looking up some specific topic.
[1] http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_...
[2] http://aynrandlexicon.com/
Feel free to get in touch if you want to follow up.
Yes, precisely, like physics."
But you are.
No, I suspect it has not.
Now I cannot link to those albums in Microsoft software because they censor all links?
That my friend is as anti free speech as it gets, and this censorship really erodes society not the sharing and copying of files.
That my friend is as anti free speech as it gets, and this censorship really erodes
Actually, by flinging about these terms in an incorrect manner, you are damaging the ability of real defenders of free speech to actually defend free speech. You see, MS is just a company; they can make their software work as they want; that is their right to free speech being excercised. If you don't like it, use different software. Only the government (or, indirectly, entities that have achieved governmental capture) can actually infringe on free speech.
No company should be allowed to hinder my free speech.
And no worries, I do not use any Microsoft products, but I can IM people who do use live messenger from Linux IM apps. I am guessing I will be censored anyway, which is just horrible and outrageous.
We've already established why your use of the words "free speech" is invalid, and rather than addressing that, you're just making arbitrary assertions (which, because they are arbitrary, should be ignored).
Until someone can prove a negative impact of piracy on the copyright holders
It's been proven, and is also quite obvious, but again, you're just going on emotion and arbitrary assertion.
I'm responding to gitarr here, not the link itself.
Both are disturbing examples of legally infringing on free speech.
Stop being so pedantic about language.
Though at least Microsoft has the courtesy to tell people when something is banned.
People who attack free speech, as you are, don't deserve it.
It's not a destruction of property rights. It's the beginning of something new for people that make a living creating things people like to hear and watch.
Speaking as a musician who has had dealings with the RIAA, I won't miss them even one little bit.
I would not be so sure about that. As computer people, we rely on governmental freedom to do what we do, and the politicians and the guys with guns can and will take that away if we stop defending freedom. Which we aren't doing very effectively lately.
Most HNers probably believe some sort of property rights for software (or even blog designs). May here would argue that the GPL is a great license and violators should be punished.
You can also often read that Hollywood and the Music Industry are producing worthless crap, but yet The Pirate Bay is dominated by commercial entertainment, not by Creative Commons content.
Much of it is certainly an emotional reaction to the aggressive behavior of RIAA/MPAA, but it really is sad to see so little capacity to see things from a different perspective.
There are legitimate reasons to be concerned by these constant attempts to attack certain technology or websites. Personally, I think that having a society that thinks that censorship is a good way to deal with ideas you dislike, which is where we're heading if this keeps up, is a lot more dangerous than intellectual property theft.
Hell, it has been known for years that certain ISPs even go as far as to throttle ALL bittorrent traffic and despite what the MPAA would like people to believe some of the bittorrent use is perfectly legal. World of Warcraft actually uses bittorrent for their patches.
As well, there are the facts that: -Laws have been passed that are so excessive in punishment that judges are actually slashing the penalties, and there are even stronger laws that lobbyists are trying to get passed. -This idea of protecting intellectual property at all costs has led to modern electronics devices being very rigidly controlled to the point that if you try to modify YOUR device to just install linux or something, you might be a criminal. -Copyright lasts a ridiculously long time. There should definitely be some rights so that the creator can benefit, but almost a century is too long.
This is clearly fallacious, I don't know why people keep using this technique, and we really should give it a name so that it can be referred to by shorthand. (Any suggestions?)
If you happen to find a person in the set A intersect B, then you've got a case against that individual. But nobody seems to go to that much effort.