Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share
copyheart.org
copyheart.org
I like the idea of sharing, but unless all the ducks are in a row someone is bound to get hurt, and it's not clear to me if the proposed legal statement is sound.
Honestly, I fail to see what this adds over a well chosen creative commons attribution.
How many pitchforks would red cross get in the scale of a 0-5? Would it be the same as Disney, or TPB, or that 8 year old girl in Finland? Would it even be meaningful to have all the ducks and their 8 year old girls on the same row?
Awesome quote from the article which I wholeheartedly agree with.
Just like music stars earn a lot of money from live shows. You may become a speaker, you may sell additional stuff derived from your book (as a freemium modelo for book market). You may sell this fame of yours to sign profitable contracts to future books with a publisher. You may create online courses to offer to those who read your book (if it is a technical one) or try to sell the rights to TV movies if it is literature.
Well, it is hard to create from an hypotetical situation, but I think you got the point.
If musicians aren't going to reward the people that advertise their work then they shouldn't release it in the first place.
Mince about ideology all you want, this is the market.
That's where you're wrong. An audience is value in and of itself. The trouble most authors have is with leveraging that value. Traditionally they'd handed the keys over to a big publisher and hoped for the best -- a sucker bet if I'd ever seen one. Now that the exclusive power of distribution has been stripped away from traditional publishers there's actually more opportunity than ever for an author to find and derive value from an audience; it just takes more savvy (and less luck).
An audience that does not pay for things is of limited value to someone who needs money to keep making things.
Also, why does the one who purchases it have to not spread the word and pirates do? Is that how this whole argument works? A paying customer is probably just as likely to inform other paying customers about this purchase he just made. More likely, in my experience.
Look, there is likely a critical mass of piracy that is concurrent to a rise in purchases as something grows in popularity and becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist. I remain unconvinced that the piracy causes it, and isn't just a sign that whatever is being pirated is good and would is gaining awareness and marketshare, but sure, I'll just go ahead and give up on that argument. But if you don't reach that critical mass, which by and large, most don't, then you are just gaining an audience that isn't helping you at all.
Also, just to be clear - I don't view all piracy equal. When I talk about it, I'm primarily talking about game piracy.
Ok, so what type of "value" are we talking about here and what determines this value? Is it economic value? The only reliable way to determine economic value is scarcity. If something is abundantly available (like oxygen or sunlight) its value in this regard is exactly zero. Anybody can obtain it and nobody can prevent it from being obtained. So in that regard I don't buy the argument that the artist has created economic value.
They have, however, created intrinsic cultural value. But cultural value is a completely subjective metric. How do we determine this value? Perhaps by counting the number of people who "appreciate" the art by obtaining it, legally or otherwise. But that would suggest that popular art is always more valuable than unpopular art, which we all can probably agree is false.
Starving artists are caught in a catch-22 situation. Until they become popular, their music is essentially worthless. Pirates, by copying and distributing their music for them, are actually adding value to their art. Most starving artists have a hard time giving their music away, let alone selling it, and I've yet to see one budding artist get upset about their music going viral. At what point does the artist stop encouraging the free and open spread of their art and start discouraging it by enforcing copyright law? And would they not be hypocritical by doing so?
Except where they don't add value by pirating something they otherwise would have paid for if it wasn't easily available to pirate with hardly any downside risk.
What if I don't want to do that? What if I just want to write books? I can't make a living from that unless I also become a showman or sell some kind of other crap?
"You may sell this fame of yours to sign profitable contracts to future books with a publisher"
But if the publishers can't make any profit because everyone is just love-copying books, they won't be able to offer me any money.
"online courses" "TV movies"
These sound like plausible ideas at first, but the courses and movies could be torrented as easily as the book, so this profit stream dries up as well.
"but I think you got the point."
I think I did, too.
Welcome to the creative industry. The previous copy-protected market guarantees your living in no way. The vast majority of talent is simply fighting obscurity. You're arguing about the results of fame, which is very rare.
If the only alternative is to destroy the free Internet and our computing freedom, then yes. I'm sorry.
It's always the same problem, how do you maximize the value for the society while still allowing the author to get a fair compensation for her work ?
Now we can have endless debates over how much we really care adding value to the society and how we actually define "fair"…
It's a spectrum of risk - from donations to Kickstarter - and nowhere in there is copyright - a restriction on other people's creative work (to the detriment of everyone, including yourself) - necessary.
Copyright is not a restriction on anyone's "creative" work. It restricts the right to copy things. (Not that I'm happy with all the details of current copyright law.)
The novelist wishing to earn a living is also taking a risk being a novelist, just as I take a risk in paying for an education that may not land me a job. I still charge for my time. The novelist can still charge for his or hers. We both must do something useful. If his or her novel is useful "enough" to live on alone - wonderful - but we shouldn't take it for granted that that is necessarily going to be the case, or that something like copyright will help it to be, or that that would even be a good thing (that people can make a living doing something that society wouldn't even naturally value enough to remunerate).
At the same time as all of that is going on, people are going to continue trying to make the best of what's around - and that includes copying.
People who have no idea how to develop a photograph can send copies to their entire family at near-zero cost. Researchers have presented systems that can create accurate 3D maps of cities using photographs published on the Internet.
I would not throw any of the above away just to preserve the ability of a tiny minority of authors, musicians, actors, etc. to live on their royalty payments. I want to be able to read scientific papers without having to spend hours searching bound journals at some library. Creative workers can and will find ways to monetize their abilities in a post-copyright world, and they will have to do so without relying on DRM and without trying to destroy the Internet.
I have seen no evidence of this. In fact, the Internet boom has been one of the most empowering and prosperous times for creators (distinguished from mere distributors) in my memory. (In fact, I don't recall nearly as much quality music 10 years ago.) Furthermore, the alternative model you seek is simply that of time-tested patronage, which has been the default for anything worth doing since the beginning of history. Today we have the possibility of crowd-funding. I have not been given any reasons to expect less art, only more. Netflix, for example (arguably still a mere distributor), is even producing original series for it's own subscription audience. Copyright is part of the present economy, but Netflix would still want new content for it's channel were it not. Subscriptions are just another form of patronage.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cashing-gangnam-styles-youtub...
You don't seem to have grasped the point: You brought up Psy, but then proceeded to leave out all the evidence contrary to your agenda. The polite word for that is bullshit.
In terms of semantics: "Say I write a book but nobody purchases a copy."
In more meaningful terms: If people do not value your book highly enough to pay you for it, then without the thousands of unauthorized copies, you are an unknown writer languishing in obscurity. With the copies, you have at least started to publicise your name and your message.
But the crux of the matter is that people will, in overwhelming numbers, choose not to pay if they are not compelled to pay, even if they value the content. If you eliminate the thousands of unauthorized copies, it is not true that I still haven't sold any copies. I would perhaps have several hundred sales. I might prefer the several thousand free downloads, but I should have that choice.
Look at the "Pioneer One" example brought up in another comment. Four million downloads and a mere $20,000 raised. People feel entitled to free stuff; no matter how great they think it is, if they can get away with letting others pay, they will. All the "fans", and they refused to kick in one dollar for the content that they value so highly.
more generally, your argument seems to hinge on the idea that they would make more money if they could. but it's not clear to me that is the case.
"your argument seems to hinge on the idea that they would make more money if they could."
My argument is just that they absolutely need to make much more money if they are to make a living making TV shows, as other people do, and that voluntary donations aren't cutting it, because people don't pay when they are not compelled to. So this case, which was adduced as a counterexample, helps to prove my point.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4054634/musics-pay-what-you...
Denying people access to knowledge, culture and useful information on the single basis of money is in my view wrong. Why should we let poor farmers die of famine by denying them access to knowledge that cost us nothing to give? Why should only children from rich families be able to access culture and become great artists?
To quote professor Eben Moglen: The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?
I think that's totally awesome in theory. In practice, I can give away all of the software, music, and artwork that I create, because we have "replicators" for it, but it seems that Honda can't replicate me a car and the local contracting company can't replicate me a house.
Don't misunderstand me. I really want to give away everything I create for free. I think that would be wonderful. But until and unless the parties that create what I want and need are willing and able to do the same, it kind of puts me in an awkward position.
I guess one solution is to work for pay only on things that aren't copyable yet, and consider all things that are copyable to be, by default, of zero monetary value, and if made at all, then made as a charitable gift to society. Is that a good path? (Really asking, not a trick question.)
This is a really good question and it's been in the back of my head for years. I think reality might force it to be the only tenable position, although one important piece you're missing is the willingness for people to pay you even if they don't have to. I think people recognize that there is value in your product, even if they aren't required to pay for your product to receive it. Many won't, but some will voluntarily pay you to compensate you for the value they received.
Advertising is another option.
The end result I see is we give up the massive budget productions (AAA movies), and instead receive creative works created by passionate individuals who want to spend their free time (youtube). If I had to choose between that result and destroying Internet and computing freedom, I think I would pick giving up massive productions.
I don't know. It's an interesting question, thanks for bringing it up.
Personally, I think there are many ways as a creative person can do to lower or even remove potential harm from copyright. For example, if I were to ask what part of my projects would be potential important for a kid trying to learn, I should be able to identify where copyright might be better removed than enforced. Until society figures out a way to not prevent children and starving people access to knowledge, all I can do is to realize when my work might prevent rather enable and then act. Depending on what ones work is, that can either be very easy thing to follow, or very hard. I hope its not hard, but if it is, I wish you luck :).
I'm not condoning piracy, but the effects of it are complex. I'd rather replace it with a friendlier approach, like Bandcamp's pay-what-you-want options.
I supposed some fraction of pirates would have instead paid for the media had they not been able to pirate it, but there would also be a fraction of paying customers who would not have heard about the media had their peers not pirated it. It's hard to tell if these two populations are roughly equal in size, but I have a hunch that the second group is larger. This is based on our sales data following our involvement in the Humble Bundle: http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures
If you look at the third chart, you can see that after the Humble Bundle spikes, the blue line starts to have an upward slope, whereas it was almost flat before. This indicates that sales on Steam increased after the Bundle finished, due to the huge influx of new players (many who only paid a penny). It seems that the more people playing the game, the more copies you will sell, because more awareness is raised. There are a lot of factors involved in that that don't let me conclusively say that this effect extends to pirates too, but it seems reasonable. Since I can't do anything about piracy, I don't let it bother me too much and just focus on making things worth buying. It's just a part of the business, so it's factored into it all.
Seriously, though, this isn't about an appeal to emotion, it's about facing the realities of today's connected world. Information can now be replicated at zero cost. Therefore, it has zero monetary value. If you want to feed yourself, perhaps you should either come up with clever new ways of monetizing your artistic talents, or make physical widgets that do have scarcity (and hope to God 3D printers don't become more sophisticated).
This is not as obvious to me as it seems to be to you. Some things have monetary value because of convention. For example, money. These days money is just information, although there is still a little cash in circulation. What if I figure out a way, at "zero cost", to move information around such that your bank thinks that the money in your account is now in my account? The only things stopping me are laws, technical barriers involving cryptographic safeguards, and not being a thief. Why can't society decide, in the interests of fostering creativity, to erect these mechanisms for music, novels, and movies?
Anyways, perhaps you're inadvertently arguing in favor of a gold backed dollar?
I don't see why that's necessarily so.
"Protecting money, even if only represented as information, does not require we lock down the internet."
I'm not sure I'm following you. Having rules and conventions about how information is treated on the internet doesn't mean that the internet is destroyed. We have rules of the road, but we still have roads.
"perhaps you're inadvertently arguing in favor of a gold backed dollar?"
How do you get here?
Then tell me how you stop piracy without reducing the openness of the internet.
> I'm not interested in destroying or even significantly hampering the internet. But I also don't want the internet to destroy the ability of people to make a living from their creative work.
You do realize that it has always been very difficult for artists to make a living off their work. So difficult, in fact, that the vast majority do their art in their spare time and work other jobs to stay afloat, and that has been the case long before piracy existed.
I would argue that with the advent of the internet, and yes, file sharing (illegal or otherwise) has actually made it possible for more people to make a living off their art than could before these systems were in place. What you seem to be in favor of is protecting a very small number of people - namely signed, popular artists - while hurting the majority of other artists, people who share art, and the internet itself.
I would like to live in a world where people can support themselves through creative work. And online culture has failed to come up with a replacement for strictly enforced copyright that doesn't involve de-facto monopolies, rampant advertising, and spying on people through their computers. Jaron Lanier goes into these issues in insightful depth in his book You Are Not a Gadget.
With automation increasingly replacing many jobs, creativity remains the last area left where mankind can be successful in capitalism.
If creativity has no worth as well then we are descending into a reality where nothing has value – including individuality itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One
You do not need copyrights if you are willing to say, "Pay us for the next installment, or else we will not make it." No spying, no advertising, no monopolies.
All right, I'm exaggerating a bit, but I've thought about this a bit as I'm self-producing my own cd. I feel like doing something like this would set up something of an adversarial relationship with my fans.
I've seen a couple of "Donate" buttons attempt to solve monetization for content creators that don't sell ads. I think there's room for a standard like this, something that could be easily attached to a byline that could travel with copied work.
If you "love" content enough to copy it, maybe you'll also copy a byline with a built-in donation link. If the content gets copied enough, and people get accustomed to easy and small donations just like Facebook Likes and Twitter Retweets, then perhaps the culture of sharing content can financially displace the monopolies imposed by copyright.
Non-lawyer perspective: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
The source is available if anyone wants to improve it:
My guess is this has as much legal meaning as putting "this is in the public domain" in a readme. (I.e. none)
The reason to do that is not for your benefit so much as it is for the work's benefit and that of the recipient. A vague, hand-wavy statement like the Copyheart message can expose people who copy, share, and possibly modify your works to legal difficulties down the road. Consider, for example, what happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow and a week later your heirs start sending DMCA takedown notices to people circulating remixes or modifications of your work, even if those remixes are respectful, adhere to the spirit of your efforts, and give all due credit to you as the creator. Chances are very good that any attempts to fight such takedowns would not stand up well in court if the Copyheart message is all that you offered as "protection" for the people spreading your work to new fans.
Please, do the responsible thing. Use a simple license that is very clear and complete in its intent, such as the COIL, Open Works License, or WTFPL -- or pick anything from the list of Copyfree Initiative certified licenses that suits your fancy, I suppose: http://copyfree.org/licenses
[1] http://www.kopimi.com/kopimi/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyr%C3%A5n#Kopimi
However, I've never seen cognitive dissonance on such as scale as when people discuss copying and copyright, which makes most discussions useless. Rarely are arguments supported by scholarly evidence or appeals to utilitarianism, and the political statements on the above site are no exception.
Fundamentally, people like copying things, and some forms of copying are restricted by law. So either the law is bad, or they are a bad person. Nobody thinks they are a bad person (an pillar of ego which will never be shaken), and people hate being lectured, so it's the law that breaks, often with the flimsiest of excuses and fallacies ranging from the moral to the theoretical.
- In some cases, copying is beneficial to the copyright holder (usually through advertising, network effects, or market segmentation), ergo, all copying must be beneficial
- Some authors are against copyright, ergo all authors are against copyright
- It's copying is okay if one's motives are pure (end justifies the means)
- If something is easy to do, and preventing it hard, then it must be right (naturalistic fallacy)
- Copying is the natural state of the universe, so it must be right (moralistic fallacy)
- A copyright holder doesn't deserve protection because they're evil ("behaved in a selfish way") stupid ("doesn't understand technology") or stubborn ("won't change business models")
- Copyrights restrict personal freedom, which is a natural and inalienable right of man, even though personal freedoms are always restricted at conflict points to ensure societal harmony ("thou shall not kill")
- Copyrights are based on property rights, but information is not property for reason "x", ergo copyrights are invalid on a technicality. In reality, many laws are enacted because of utilitarian value and need only require group consensus ("always stop at a stop sign; person on right goes first.")
- I paid money in return for "x", therefore I can do whatever I want with "x" (refusal to honor contractual agreements and/or acknowledge exceptions to property rights, which are ubiquitous)
- Copying is good for society because information sharing has no marginal cost (sophomoric application of economics)
- Because some people create without expectation of monetary reward, all people or corporations will still invest in creative works even when the return on investment decreases, or is non-existent
- Some people or corporations could, and thus all should, make money in secondary markets (personal appearances, product endorsements) rather than by selling copyrighted works directly
I would give my right arm for a rational discussion on this topic.
that's a static analysis. isn't it more likely that society is changing in various ways, that law naturally lags the changes, and that the result is a mess as society negotiates with itself to find an appropriate adjustment?
In some respects, I think that some copyright denialists behave similarly to those who try to argue that the U.S. has no power to tax incomes because of various technicalities in the ratification of the appropriate constitutional amendment [1]. These people do not hold their to their positions because they are lawyers. They hold to them because they don't want to pay income tax.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_Sixteenth_Amendme...
Empirically, copyright law is not effective. That is to say, copyright is massively violated for non-commercial use.
Enforcing laws which are empirically not obeyed is a bad idea, regardless of the philosophical merits of pro-copyright or anti-copyright arguments.
The most popular P2P protocols will advance to the point where enforcing copyright law means enforcing an absurd policy: if your computer shares copyrighted information even without your knowledge, you're guilty of infringement. The only way to avoid it is not to participate in such advanced P2P swarms (where nodes cache content for delivery to other nodes), since nobody knows the copyright status of a particular hash-addressable piece of content.
Enforcing laws in a way that bans a neutral computer technology (P2P sharing of arbitrary content) is untenable [1], regardless of the ethical, moral, and economic arguments surrounding copyright violation.
I see those arguments often. If you agree that those are not fallacies, I don't understand why you think copyright discussions degenerate into fallacies.
[1] What Colour are your bits? http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
Oh it isn't? So then why is the MPAA and RIAA suing the parents of Timmy's all over the country?
In all of those cases, people routinely flout the law. It's not just that it's hard to enforce the law; it's that people routinely violate it.
The ineffectiveness of laws is not a logical argument that the goals of those laws are bad. It's an argument either that the laws haven't been tuned properly, or that our enforcement priorities need to be changed --- in the case of copyright, probably in a direction you're not happy with.
Long story short: if you believe that this is a powerful argument against copyright, you forfeit a pretty big chunk of any of your arguments against Wall Street.
Building the kind of surveillance that ensures individuals will observe all terms of service they unknowingly agreed to and can bring felony charges and large statutory damages against them reliably and efficiently does violate all kinds of individual privacy. It also institutionalizes a privileged place for publishers in the legal system, and brings Big Brother into our homes. None or that can be said for financial regulation.
We don't owe banks or publishers or buggy-whip vendors the ability to continue to do business in any particular way. We do owe people their privacy. There is a fundamental difference here you no doubt see, but ignore.
This is possibly the least nuanced way to express this.
Good law isn't good if it isn't understood or if it's misunderstood. It may be either or both if people don't learn its history, purpose, and meaning. That isn't the law's fault; it's the people's. But it doesn't make the people bad, either.
Accusing people of moral failings is not how you start a rational discussion.
This is of course not always the case. Different business models have different economic trade-offs. The ethical and even practical arguments against our strict system of copyrights are many and varied, however, and many of them are quite compelling, including arguments related to artist obscurity vs. profits (see any number of authors and recording artists who point out that the major threat to an artist's livelihood is obscurity, not copyright infringement), imperialistic dominance of international markets (Information Feudalism is a well-researched book by academic experts spanning close to two decades' worth of intensive work), and even the overall benefit to humanity of free reuse of works (see Advancement Through License Simplicity -- http://univacc.net/?page=license_simplicity_1 -- for one such argument).
I don't want to waste too much of my time on an Internet Argument, but I figured I'd throw this stuff out there. Rational and compelling arguments against copyright, or at least against strict copyright with any resemblance to what currently applies, do exist.
Just get involved in one of the many CopyrightX discussion groups that are all based on Harvard Law School's CopyrightX course at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Homep...
Last night there was a live webcast of a superb rational discussion on copyright involving several experts. Recording will be up soon, and I'll post it when available.
Perhaps also consider following the StackExchange.com community proposal for same at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51342/copyrightx?r...
Also, in case anyone here is not yet aware of this, the US Register of Copyrights testified before congress last month about how desperately US copyright legislation needs radical reform: "...if one needs an army of lawyers to understand the basic precepts of the law, then it is time for a new law. " and other very strong statements.
http://www.copyright.gov/regstat/2013/regstat03202013.html
For more details, see http://copyrightx.org/ and https://copyrightactof1790.wordpress.com/about/
It's an appealing notion, copying sounds fine when you phrase it as an act of love, and within certain limits; fan works and the like; it is. However, if you have unrestrained copying then people will copy in a predatory manner as well. For instance, by aggregating your work and others work through a portal so that you never see any advantage from it - or by putting your work into something that has a much greater cultural presence and effectively taking ownership of it.
This way attribution is trivial, and people will be much more willing to give their works away, while others would feel better about copying and modifying it. It would also render watermarks redundant.
Tin Eye, Google Image search, and Google's own algorithmic preference for original content probably get you half-way there, but it's easy to imagine how great it would be to have a full-featured "attribution discoverer" (or whatever).