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Comment by freshhawk | Hacker News Reader

The middle ground is imaginary.

For the types of copyright infringement everyone is probably thinking of (music, audiobooks, music videos, tv shows, movies, books) that are easy to turn into bits there is only one possible way to enforce copyright and that is large scale surveillance of the internet in order to police the content.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see much middle ground. Not when you think it all the way through to taking actual action to protect copyrighted works.

Besides SOPA style surveillance systems how do you enforce the notion of copyright that you support? It's too late to try and use social norms and make it uncool or embarrassing to have downloaded something without paying the creator. People will share things if they can unless someone stops them.

No one who isn't a strawman supports "unlimited copyright infringement" or doesn't want the artists we love to get paid, they just understand the tradeoffs that would have to be made to keep enforcing our current (historically recent) copyright system in the modern age and don't feel that abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy in order to temporarily protect the business models of those who currently pay artists is a worthwhile tradeoff.

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The middle ground is certainly not imaginary. Life is not black or white. The people I associate with don't share things, because they almost universally recognize that if people don't financially support movie studios/music studios/authors - that this incredible flow of high quality content we all enjoy will disappear, almost overnight.

The right approach to managing copyright infringement is to continue to pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) while continuing to make that same content available through non-drm, inexpensive sources.

I applaud google's approach - which is to make it increasingly difficult to find these sites which persistently make copyright-infringing material available. Hopefully the other major search engines will do so as well; though, last time I checked, DuckDuckGo got a significant portion of it's content through Yahoo BOSS, and Yahoo get's it's content through Bing - so, in theory, if Bing adopts the same copyright friendly search indicators, then 90%+ of the search engines will now be obscuring this material)

Everyone is a publisher. You're in favor of lawsuits against people who run bittorrent clients in a swarm, then, for $22k a song, or even $1000 per song? Any amount enough to be worthwhile as a deterrent is punitive and has the potential to wreck someone's life.

Or what about blogs or forums with posted links to copyrighted material on filehosting sites?

The challenge here is to recognize there is a happy medium. " pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) "

There is a difference between someone who sells indexed warez/books/movies/music on a retail site, and someone running a bit torrent client. Aggressively pursue the first, and educate the second. Simply having the ISP send a warning notice of copyright infringement to the account holder of an IP address, without in any way communicating back to the rightsholder _who_ that IP Address holder was, is a nice medium. Note - just because it's easy to run a bit-torrent client sharing the latest GameOfThrones Books (all available via Kindle, or the library) doesn't mean it's legal (or even ethical).

Re: Posted Links to copyrighted material - depends on how organized / indexed those links are. If it's a casual site with a few links pointing out, clearly that falls under fair use. If it has carefully indexed/searchable database of 750,000 songs, and 35,000 movies,, and 250,000 books in such a way that you just have to visit that site, click a link, and download the content - well, perhaps there needs to be a conversation.

But reasonable people can come up with reasonable solutions. It doesn't have to be "All Sharing, All the Time" - nor does it have to be "Idiotic Draconian RIAA $22K/Song to some random bit torrent user"

It's easy to sit on the fence until you have to get specific. Everything you've said here is reasonable. Politician style reasonable. All the hard decisions that would need to be made to do anything in practice are covered by "educate the second" and "perhaps there needs to be a conversation".

In my opinion, you are wrong in expecting that these few large index/hosting sites or "worst offenders" will continue to be the bulk of the infringing traffic. We are moving away from that very quickly already.

There is, as you seem to realise to some extent, exactly one logical conclusion to the everyone-does-it, distributed-everything world you describe: prohibit the very act of conveying digital information in encrypted form, and require the infrastructure providers to help with identifying and prosecuting those who break the law.

Personally, I don't think that would be a very nice world to live in. That means effort has to be put into promoting legitimate alternatives and educating people about why these issues matter.

This has been done before, many times, with driving offences for example. Not so long ago, you could go past a pub at lunchtime and find plenty of obviously impaired people cheerfully getting into their cars to drive back to the office. Today, drunk-driving is socially unacceptable, licensed establishments run promotions for designated drivers, and police action is relatively rare because it is mostly unnecessary. This was achieved almost entirely through education, and in particular demonstrating the real consequences of the illegal act that do affect real people rather than allowing the perceptions of a "victimless crime" or "fighting the system" to continue unchallenged.

I see no reason a serious, credible campaign could not successfully explain that copyright is there to support the artists who create the works we want to enjoy and isn't just about lining the pockets of big businesses who have been price gouging since forever. If the laws were also changed to bring copyright terms back to sanity and those big businesses suffered a few high profile legal defeats over their track record of anti-competitive behaviour at the same time, a lot of good might result.

[Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that this would completely eliminate all illegal copying. However, as I've just posted separately, I think it leads to a reasonable compromise that gives sensible options to people who just want to enjoy creative works and allows rightsholders to chase down large-scale infringement effectively without having to prohibit personal encrypted communications.]

> exactly one logical conclusion to the everyone-does-it, distributed-everything world you describe: prohibit the very act of conveying digital information in encrypted form, and require the infrastructure providers to help with identifying and prosecuting those who break the law

There is another logical conclusion: accept that since information is now easily shared that those who made their living by controlling the act of copying will be out of business soon.

Just like the canonical example of horse breeders and buggy makers being put out of business by the automobile. Like when the guild system collapsed and you could decide to try to earn a living as a blacksmith or carpenter without having to pay and get permission from the local guild.

These transitions aren't pretty, jobs are lost, industries collapse, but historically it has always turned out to be a necessary growing pain while something better has emerged. I certainly have a "the internet is one of great things humanity has done" bias but I still don't believe that this is an unrealistic vision.

I actually find it much more likely that artists will find a way to be paid and will adapt to a free exchange of bits than that we will find some good way to protect speech and freedom while still policing copyright. In that case you will always have powerful copyright interests with financial interests aligned against the advancement of an open internet. Combine that with needing to run a large scale education campaign the likes of anti-smoking or anti-drunk driving (that, because of the reputation of the copyright holders and a generation who things music is free, is getting harder every day).

I see the sense in your version, and it's not crazy. I just don't think we can pull it off. What we can do, since it's been done many times before, is let artists adapt to new technology and find a new business model.

And as 3D printers get better and better this is certainly a problem that's going to keep expanding.

There is another logical conclusion: accept that since information is now easily shared that those who made their living by controlling the act of copying will be out of business soon.

The trouble is that the people who make their living that way aren't just working for the big guys any more. There are little guys out there, whose work can be ripped off just as easily and who suffer public prejudice that was earned by the abusive policies of the big guys over the years, yet who have none of the advantages of the big guys to make up for it. When you put these people out of business, the works you value don't get made any more, because they get other jobs so they can have food to eat and put a roof over their family's heads.

Like when the guild system collapsed and you could decide to try to earn a living as a blacksmith or carpenter without having to pay and get permission from the local guild.

The difference in this case is that you're not just bringing down the guild, you're bringing down the blacksmith and the carpenter as well.

Perhaps you're right, and I'll be the first to support abolishing copyright if it turns out that there are better ways to incentivise artists without the same social cost. But the fact is that nothing is stopping people from using alternative business models today if they provide a better incentive than copyright, and almost no-one does.

There have been a few experiments with things like choose-your-own pricing, but they have had highly variable success rates. Almost all of the really successful projects were made by artists whose reputation was already built the old-fashioned way.

There are a few experiments with things like Kickstarter today, and I wish them luck too. However, for now they consider a $1,000,000 project a huge success, and it remains to be seen how many of these projects actually produce the kind of results that the "investors" expect and how sustainable the model might become.

Meanwhile, to put that in perspective, the budget for Batman: The Dark Knight Rises is reported to have been $250,000,000, and Star Wars: The Old Republic allegedly comes in around $200,000,000. No small, independent studio can build projects on that scale anyway, and while a MMORPG like SW:TOR has a certain natural barrier to being ripped off, the same can't be said for other genres of big budget game.

The trouble is, if we don't pull it off, those new business models are going to be things like always-online DRM schemes and locked-down hardware and walled garden app stores. Exactly none of these things ultimately results in better experiences for the public. They just happen to have defensible bottom lines for the businesses.

> The difference in this case is that you're not just bringing down the guild, you're bringing down the blacksmith and the carpenter as well.

I'm fairly sure that when these kinds of transitions happen the associated guild blacksmiths and carpenters, or artists thriving under royal patronage, or live musicians who did not adapt well to recording in the studio, are the ones who get the brunt of the pain. Although, as a group they always survive, while the hangers on and various big guys sometimes don't.

That's nitpicky though, I didn't mean to imply that there isn't/won't be significant damage to artists livelihoods, just that the damage to society and everyone else is greater if we continue down the road to the panopticon society necessary to continue to enforce our current copyright system.

> if they provide a better incentive than copyright, and almost no-one does

It's hard to beat a large scale monopoly distribution scheme. It's entirely possible that artists won't be able to make as much money under any new system as they did in the current one. Maybe there will be lowers highs and higher lows as the business moves away from being so hit-oriented. The one thing that's almost certain is that the distribution of music revenue among artists will be different, I find it more likely that the new technologies influence will be to flatten that distribution. Like you said, Kickstarter is a good example of an experiment that would do this if it does succeed.

I also agree that no one has figured out how to make blockbuster movies without a distribution monopoly to fund it, and they might never figure it out. Our generation's era of movies would probably be considered a bit of a golden age for high cost spectacle, like the old studio system was for serials and creating hollywood royalty.

> The trouble is, if we don't pull it off, those new business models are going to be things like always-online DRM schemes and locked-down hardware and walled garden app stores. Exactly none of these things ultimately results in better experiences for the public. They just happen to have defensible bottom lines for the businesses.

This is a good point, taking the path to locked-down hardware and DRM is an escape route that the existing industry can take/is taking. On reflection I agree, anti-SOPA/anti-surveillance sentiment pushes the industry to ramp up what Doctorow called the coming war on general purpose computation. Depressing thought, but at least some of the ideals that would motivate people to stop one will also motivate them to stop the other. And open hardware will still exist, and have benefits that consumers will like so that's winnable as well.

I also think it's good to point out that this is exactly what we mean when startup culture talks about "disrupting" an industry. That means putting the people who work in it out of a job. Robbing them of their livelihood.

We understand that this is true, but that it's still the right thing to do.

Why do artists get such special treatment? Is it because we all like some of them? Is it the huge PR campaign they've been running since cassette tapes and VCRs?

Who defines large-scale infringement? Is several hundred torrents in violation of copyright (only a few active at a time) on someone's personal machine large-scale infringement? Several thousands torrents? A blog dedicated to linking to a handful of files on file download services each week in a very specific content domain? Hundreds per week?

What about private torrent trackers? What about file download sites like megaupload? What about forums? You expect them to police other people's content?

Strict copyright enforcement advocates love to talk about the cost of illegal sharing. What worthwhile software, movies, music, or books, in your opinion, have failed due to illegal filesharing, or would fail if copyright enforcement were limited to people directly selling copied content without permission?

Who defines large-scale infringement?

Why does it need anyone to define it?

There's a clear practical demarcation here, in that clearly artists can still make a living in the face of low-level background infringement between friends, but some projects are not commercially viable in the face of mass infringement.

What worthwhile software, movies, music, or books, in your opinion, have failed due to illegal filesharing, or would fail if copyright enforcement were limited to people directly selling copied content without permission?

Well, for one thing, there are small studios and independent artists giving up all the time because people rip them off and they don't have the resources to do anything about it or the scale to absorb the losses as a cost of doing business.

But that's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the works that never get made in the first place.

Obviously you can never prove that something that doesn't exist would have done, but it doesn't take a genius to look at, say, the computer games industry and see that the modern PC gaming landscape is dominated by episode 17 of FPS clone #6 and sports game #24 2012 season, often complete with console-induced limitations on gameplay and audio/video standards.

Today, hardly any studio with the resources to make an innovative game with both novel gameplay and excellent production values is willing to risk it. When only 1 in 10 copies of your game gets paid for if you're lucky, it's not hard to see why. It's not that many people wouldn't enjoy and pay for such a game. It's not that such games don't have the potential to make huge amounts of money. It's just that everyone is so risk-averse that they'll choose the relatively safe bet every time, because the big hits don't bring enough profit to prop up a huge bust with the kinds of budget that AAA games command today.

Consequently, what innovation there is tends to come from games with relatively low production values or simple concepts that can scale programmatically without requiring a lot of expensive human creativity. Where is the next Baldur's Gate or Deus Ex? There is actually a team remaking the original BG series right now, and the next DE was... Deus Ex: Human Revolution last year.

It shouldn't be this way. With modern technology, independent artists or small groups can create work with better production values than ever. With the rise of the Internet, they have the ability to distribute those new works cheaper, faster and easier than at any time in the history of humanity. The world should be full of new titles. Web forums should be packed with success stories about how the creative people behind those new titles have finally been able to write the book or make the game or record the music they always had inside, and share it for the benefit of everyone. This should be possible because markets big enough to make it financially reasonable to develop those titles while still paying the rent should be enabled by things like social networking and search tools.

What is actually happening is that a few people are trying, every now and then there's a Minecraft-scale individual title or a PopCap-scale success story for a small studio made good, and most of the time the potential just dies, because a couple of days after launching a new work, someone has already ripped it off and put it up on a Warez site or torrent or whatever and that's where a lot of the attention is going.

It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them?

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry#History_of...

You do not get to define market demand for particular types of games. People are willing to spend money on games.

The music industry is figuring out that, unlike the 90's, they can't put out a cd with 1 or 2 hits and expect people to buy the whole thing. So yes, sales are down. How much are they saving by shipping fewer CDs?

Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs?

How will any position on copyright enforcement cause people to forego watching the latest Twilight movie, or buying Harry Potter books, and instead buy the sort of high art or higher art that you seem to think they should be buying?

There is no shortage of people willing to buy the FPS clones, pulp fiction books, and popular music that you would decry. Your complaint lies with those people, not pirates.

It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them?

Given that the titles I mentioned were so popular that they spawned entire series, highly rated by fans and critics alike, and as I mention they are still being emulated today... No, I don't your theory there is even slightly plausible.

And of course there have been other games in similar genres since then, some of which have been very commercially successful. But they've tended to come with obnoxious DRM, DLC and other silliness in an attempt to keep them that way despite the pirates.

My question isn't really about those specific titles, it's about innovation. The games I mentioned either defined or greatly advanced their respective genres for a generation of gamers. Where is the next Doom, the game whose basic concept has just never been done before on that kind of level?

Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs?

Part of the trouble with this argument is that you seem to be assuming that most of the cost of creating and distributing good music and good books came from the physical distribution cost, which obviously doesn't apply in the same way for digital distribution. But that's not really the case.

For good music and good books -- and to be very clear, I am not talking about "high art" or any such nonsense, I'm just talking about work that is well made -- a large amount of the overall cost is up-front and doesn't change much just because of modern technologies. It's the human factor: having the right team and a well-equipped studio to handle the recording and production for your song, having a skilled editor and qualified proofreaders for a textbook, and so on.

Several of my close friends have worked in these industries in various capacities, and they paint a bleak picture of cut corners and cost savings in their industries today. Certainly the books I've bought in recent years myself have been sadly lacking compared to both the editorial quality and production values of a few years ago, and knowing what is going on behind the scenes it's all too clear how that is happening.

Sure, there's no excuse for bundling music into "albums" any more. Digitial distribution of individual pieces of music and automatic playlists in every media player application make the whole concept of an album nothing but an artificial marketing tool. Likewise the old fixed page sizes and tight page limits for books have little relevance in a digital world.

But the content is what's hard. Writing/performing good material, and elevating the results to the level of professional quality, is hard work and requires real skill. This isn't going to change. No computer AI algorithm is going to spot the way a paragraph is phrased awkwardly because it relies on an idea that isn't introduced definitely until three pages later, at least not any time soon.

There's a popular anti-copyright cliche that musical performers should just give their work away as advertising and hope to make a living playing live gigs. Maybe that works for those people, but how does a composer or a lyricist give a live performance? How do editors and researchers make a living when everything they do is about information? How does a level designer or the guy who sketches out the concept art for that great end of level boss that comes to symbolise the entire game?

The creative industries are vast machines today, and someone has to pay all these people during the creation/production stage of a work if that work is going to benefit from their skills and expertise. If the realisable profits become so small on a work that it's going to be commercially risky to make it at all, what actually happens is often that either it doesn't get made or it gets made without the help of these skilled people behind the scenes and winds up a worse product for it. And as I keep trying to point out, that doesn't help anyone, including the people who enjoy the work (or would have enjoyed it, if it had been better made).

I'll stipulate that some money is lost due to piracy, rather than get into a debate over how much.

What I don't agree with is that much good quality content is lost. If people aren't taking risks to make good quality content today, what changes if there's less piracy? Consumers still have a limited budget to spend on games, and a lot of people do still buy games, music, movies, books, just not the books you think they should buy. Those game sales figures, and lesser but still in the billions figures for books, music, and movies, show that people pay for entertainment. If they can't illegally copy things, maybe they buy x% more stuff, or maybe they're used to a lower budget for entertainment and so they don't spend any more, but rather they consume less. And why would they buy your good content rather than the arguably lower "quality" mass entertainment that you or I might not like, of which there is certainly plenty?

How do you intend to prevent non-commercial filesharing, or file sharing sites (forums, file hosting sites, torrent trackers), without destroying people's lives and having a chilling effect on filesharing in general?

That's an awfully fuzzy definition of what's acceptable and what's not for something being dealt with at a political level.

> while continuing to make that same content available through non-drm, inexpensive sources

And who's going to force the rights-holders to do this?

> that this incredible flow of high quality content we all enjoy will disappear, almost overnight

Funny, art has survived quite a few shakeups in distribution and access throughout history and so far has kept getting better.

Don't get me wrong, this is a huge problem right now. Artists deserve to, and society needs them to, get paid. But people will share bits with each other in ways that are indistinguishable from free speech.

Going after the worst offenders works now, but those offenders are getting smaller and more distributed all the time. Even if they never go away, that group will soon be the biggest offenders. Trackerless torrents and distributed torrent search is here, and gaining in popularity. A lot of people in the HN community are working on new, easier ways to share bits with friends right now.

Can you define a middle ground that can identify and stop (or at least slow) the p2p distribution of copyrighted material that does not involve monitoring that p2p traffic to scan it for infringing content? That seems like a paradox.

>> Not when you think it all the way through to taking actual action to protect copyrighted works.

I think copyright protection is very possible without "abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy."

I suppose if I didn't then I would agree with you. I'm not so concerned with some individuals obtaining digital content without paying for it (I agree this would be basically impossible to enforce without trampling on civil liberties), as I am with companies systematically ripping off copyrighted work and re-selling it as their own. In the latter case, I would argue that copyright can quite easily be enforced by litigation within the existing system, without any threat to individual freedom.

I agree, but as things continue to change?

(will link to comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368387 rather than typing it again)

The middle ground is supporting copyright law, but not expecting to have 100% enforcement of it. This is exactly what we have right now.

And as the infringement moves to a more distributed network? When there aren't Kim Dotcoms to take down? That's where things are going right now, because of technological improvement and the current selective law enforcement we have right now.

That's what this conversation is about I thought, what we have right now is a system in transition.

The big problem for rightsholders with copyright infringement on the Internet is scale. In the anonymised but highly connected world of today's Internet, one site hosting infringing content can easily supply it to thousands of people within a matter of hours, and one P2P network can involve numerous people each helping the others to share infringing copies without even knowing who those others are.

The thing you keep ignoring is that this only works because of the public but anonymous nature of sharing material using these tools. You can't cause damage on that kind of scale if you're only sharing between a few friends that you can immediately identify, and the low level of infringement that such an arrangement might support is little different from the old days of trading music tapes in the school playground.

In practice, the realisable value of a major copyright-protected work, the kind of thing that costs millions to make and sells very many tickets/copies/whatever, is mostly collected within the first few days anyway. If a DRM system on a game holds off mass infringement for even a few weeks before the cracks come out, it's probably achieved 90+% of its potential. If a movie studio can keep a decent copy of a new blockbuster off the torrents even past the opening weekend, that's a huge benefit. Similarly, if rightsholders could reduce copyright infringement to something that really was a social activity rather than a massive industrial exercise, the benefits would be enormous even if that low level of illegal copying was still going on in the background.

So, all they have to do to defeat all these hypothetical future scenarios of yours is sign up for the same public but anonymous networks, record who is providing and/or downloading infringing material via their node, and then bring legal action against them both to reclaim their costs and actual damages and to identify the next links in the chain. Given that at this point we are talking about people who are known to have been breaking the law, I don't have a problem with the legal system providing for modest and realistic assumptions about actual damages but also awarding substantial costs to make these kinds of investigations and legitimate legal actions financially viable. Given reasonable safeguards to protect genuinely accidental/occasional indiscretions, I also don't have a problem with somewhat heavyweight actions like enlisting the help of ISPs to trace content that is now known to have been infringing back to its earlier sources, or imposing penalties on services that are known to be used for say anonymising transmissions but refuse to co-operate when an illegal action has been identified.

It will be harder to do this than just cutting off a handful of obvious, high-profile targets today, of course, but just as no DRM system can completely protect a movie that you can actually watch, so no distributed P2P system can completely anonymise where traffic came from. Just make sure any costs associated with these additional burdens are borne only by those who are found in court to have broken the law, and you probably have an effective deterrent that really is based on actual damages and measurable costs rather than absurd artificial estimates.

People still pay for movies, music, and SW today, so our current balance still creates economic rewards for production, despite piracy. Would you call our society today a "SOPA-style surveillance system" ?

Not at all, although I would argue that our current system today is in serious transition. Sharing is getting easier and more distributed, that's what's prompting the SOPA style solutions. Staying where we are now isn't an option thanks to the HN crowd continuously working on new ways to connect and share bits with their social circles.

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