Demonoid Busted As A Gift To The United States Government

If technology renders something unnecessary, we should let the firms making the unnecessary product(s) disappear, rather than totally distorting markets, changing existing laws and reducing civil liberties to keep the markets-as-they-currently-exist around.

The only answer to that is to claim something more than "just a business" about making music or movies (or whatever "Intellectual Property" notion you want to push). At that point, you've departed from treating things legalistically. You have to start allowing for philosophical considerations.

That's the problem. You're stuck thinking that a download == a lost sale, which is probably what supports the figures you gave. I'm pretty sure if I go download a thousand songs off of what.cd right now, I'm not draining a thousand dollars out of the music industry. In fact, I'm not draining a cent out of it.

A huge percentage of pirates not only had no intention on purchasing, but no money to purchase with. Not that they're necessarily entitled to the music, but the money you want to pretend is being lost just doesn't exist. What use is telling these people not to be so "selfish"? How is that a solution?

Piracy is a systemic problem due to copyright's flaws, not the other way around. You didn't provide a useful solution for any of this.

> No, downloading a song that is priced at $3,000,000 isn't worse than downloading a song priced at $1, but that doesn't make either of them right? I'm not sure I entirely understand the point you're trying to make here.

I was making the point that the author of some creative content should not be able to set all of the terms of their creation, including what they perceive as damages. (This is exactly what "fair use" is.)

Respect is a two way street. I think the lack of respect you are noticing is a reactive response to infinite copyright and other heavy handed tactics.

Informational goods are nonrival. The right and wrong of their use is fundamentally different from that of rival goods. One does not 'take' informational goods, one copies them. Normal property is, as a first simplification/approximation, justified by the loss of taking. And that because moral rules in general are, roughly speaking, justified by how they affect other people. Since copying lacks that effect of loss it obviously cannot reasonably be treated in the same way.

I respect the people that create content I consume. That does neither imply that I am forced to pay for the distribution of their works nor that my right to share information of whatever kind should be limited.

>If someone prices something at $100,000 either you pay for it or you don't get it.

Of course I cannot force someone to give me something. However, someone who has acquired something cannot be forbidden from sharing it. In other words: your rights end where mine begin, and it is my good right to share what I have.

So, in your hypothetic scenario, a wealthy supporter or a bunch of fans pooling money could pay the $100k, then share the work with the world. I see no problem with this.

The GNU is exactly the opposite of normal copyright. The fact that it is based on copyright law is just an implementation detail because the FSF does not have enough clout to pass actual laws. It's a clever hack of the legal system, not an ideological reaffirmation of copyright.

The idea behind normal copyright--what some people here do not like--is to limit others' access to information. The whole point is that you cannot copy something without the right-owner's permission.

The GPL is the opposite. The core idea there is that you are not only allowed to make a copy of something, but you are also allowed to access the source code. In practical terms, this is just as important as being able to copy a program because the only meaningful way to make modifications is with access to the source code. Moreover, the license ensures that anybody using the licensed program keeps it free in the same way.

Essentially, where normal copyright keeps you from using the information, the GPL keeps you from using copyright law to keep others from using the information. In a very practical sense, something under the GPL is more free than something in the public domain--I could ship you something containing public domain code and not give you the source code or even let you modify it. I could not do that with the GPL.

Another way to look at it is that normal copyright gives rights to the "rights-holder" over the consumer. The GPL gives rights to the consumer (like access to source code) rather than to the rights-holder. The "restrictions" it places are the sort of restrictions any system based around rights has to have--you have the right to do almost anything as long as you do not infringe others' rights. In this context it means you can do anything you want (including selling the software) as long as you do not stop others from modifying and redistributing it.

In short: the GPL is the opposite of copyright and it gives the consumer more freedom. The only thing it stops you from doing is taking away others' freedom. The only reason it uses copyright is because copyright effectively allows you to write your own laws (but limited to whatever works you've copyrighted) without going through the legislature. In a perfect world, it would be unnecessary--all software would just be free as in freedom.

"Freedom to be shot", and "freedom to not be shot" is not the same thing. Yes, both include the world "freedom", but its not the same kind of freedom. Same goes for rights, laws, and in this discussion even software licenses. What count is the Intent and what real world effects it has.

People instinctively feel paying for property and services is justified, but not for information and intellectual property is just a way of trying to make people think information is property. If I steal something from you, I must have deprived you of it; copying is not stealing.

I never felt that an organization had the right to prevent me from accessing a piece of our culture because they have a piece of paper.

Copyright as it exists today transfers ownership of culture from artists to corporation; subsequent bartering of ownership means that the price _you_ want to pay goes nowhere near those what made it.

It is a travesty that Apple was _bragging_ that the Beatles music was in the iTunes store, as if that was some accomplishment of openness instead of lawyerly bickering.

Which is all to say: it isn't the paying for it that makes people oppose copyright. It's who we'd have to pay.

That's not the question. The question is whether you're entitled to prohibit people from sharing media with each other.

If you don't feel entitled to the media, nobody is saying you must get it. You're free to remain media-less.

The current view from the entitled that since it is easy to get for free, then there isn't any reason why it shouldn't legally be free otherwise. No amount of grand vision writeups on how information wants to be free will say anything different than this basic point.

Everything should be free, except of course whatever the entitled do for work, that obviously should be paid for, because hey that actually affects their income, not someone elses.

The key difference between physical property and intellectual property is the ease of rights enforcement. It's easy to detect when someone has infringed your rights on your own physical property. The progress of the internet, on the other hand, makes it constantly harder to detect and punish infringement of intellectual property rights. It is still unknown whether reversing this trend will retard the potential of the Internet, but certain recent legislative attempts lead me to believe so.

I think that the debate will ultimately turn on the question of ease of enforcement. All the philosophical trappings of whether certain rights should be granted is irrelevant if they can't be granted.

Informational goods are nonrival: any number of people can use them without obstructing anyone else's use.

So normal property laws are not 'just as arbitrary and artificial' as intellectual monopoly laws: they are grounded in actual physical limitations.

Even this is far from universal. In many countries (Norway and Sweden for example), there are strict rules on what you can and cannot restrict people from doing on your land. You cannot stop me from walking across your land, camping on your land or foraging for food on your land (assuming of course I do these things in a reasonable and sensible manner, ie do my best to remain out of sight, don't camp too close to buildings, don't cut down trees or damage crops, don't stay in one place for too long etc, etc. ). Basically my right to free access to nature supersedes your right to do what you want with your land. The same sort of conceptual argument could be made about the "rights" to media.

I think you may be overstating the degree to which my optimism in our ability to advance the technology is harmful, or a disservice.

I look at technologies like TOR, and FreeNET and I think to myself "Wow. Human ingenuity is such a beautiful thing. We are rapidly approaching the day when we can freely speak and say and share whatever we want. We are building a world where every voice has an equal right to speak and cannot be silenced, but only amplified by curation and consensus. We are approaching a truly digital democracy, and its effect will reverberate across the world. Old authoritarian regimes will collapse - and have already begun to do so, thanks in part to these new technologies."

I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that we can achieve whatever we set our minds to, and perhaps it is premature to say these technologies are 'available', but the pieces are mostly there, and roads have a funny way of being formed without a roadmap. Sometimes they start as a path, with footprints that wear the ground.

Sometimes you need to believe you can do something in order for you to work up the energy and motivation to make the attempt.

I don't think betrayal is an appropriate word here. And I don't think it's necessary to solve every problem or point of attack to make major progress.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

You have to remove "by illegal means" from your statement, because you're claiming how copyright infringment is theft, and being illegal doesn't make it theft. It's illegal because it's claimed to be theft.

So your statement becomes "getting something you would normally have to pay for for free." Is this theft? If you could get something for free that you would normally have to pay for, wouldn't most people do it? What is the compelling reason not to?

When someone says theft in relation to digital music, movies, etc they mean copyright infringement. Do we really need to have these repetitive and anal retentive trips down the rabbit hole every time this topic comes up?

For some customers it is absolutely too high so they resort to piracy. For others, it is the correct price or even too low. In a perfect world, the seller could use your income to determine price (or some other even better metric for what you are willing to pay) and charge everyone differnet amounts. Very wealthy people would pay huge amounts, impoverished people would pay very low amounts, maybe even nothing.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.

I imagine it pushes the price down slightly, but who knows if the record companies are acting rationally (pricewise) or could even predict the correct price they should charge to max profit. (I imagine they have some very smart people modeling pricing, but models can only get you so close).

Maybe they are't as pissed off at the labels as you think?

The ironic thing is that all the defenders of "free culture" piracy do is drive creators into the arms of Orwellian walled gardens like iTunes and empower legislators to write dumb laws like SOPA.

I was just throwing it out there as a hypothetical situation where someone could have a subscription service and also be able to use their songs as they want to use them. I subscribe to the Zune Pass and I know I have this capability, but I've never actually felt the need to exercise that power.

Remind me what Demonoid did.

Laws can be changed. The copyright cartels have the money and political connections to change the law in their favour. We have seen them do it before and they're going to do it again.

Torrent sites (like The Pirate Bay) are essentially just that (sites cataloguing metadata about files). They have not be immune to legal troubles, and they are certainly not "beneficial to copyright holders".

You're essentially describing current torrent sites. We have them, they are very valuable and useful. They work well enough. However they can (and are) shutdown. We need better.