What copyright holders don't get about consumers and BitTorrent | Hacker News Reader

What copyright holders don't get about consumers and BitTorrent

nrkbeta.no

21 pointshenriklied9 comments

"The copyright holders seem to think that we still travel the Atlantic in a ocean liners run on coal. So they operate with licences that ignore the fact that people don’t care about countries and borders anymore."

I like to watch TV shows. I also like to discuss episodes with other people. Unfortunately most TV shows I watch are either months behind or don't air at all where I live. So I read about these shows, but by the time I can participate in the conversation the discussion has moved on. That's why I torrent shows. Not because I'm not willing to pay for them (I own most of the DVD sets) but because otherwise I wouldn't get the chance to participate in one of the most gratifying aspects of following these series.

More extreme examples are series like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both never aired here and likely never will. I'm not willing to spend 45 euros on DVDs based on Internet word of mouth alone, but in both cases I got hooked after torrenting a few episodes and payed afterwards.

I believe laziness generally wins over economy, and I include "impulse buys" as such. If it's easier to pay than to pirate (and knowing/trusting what you're getting), won't you? Sure there's a price point to consider ($2 an episode is a bit much considering free streaming and cheaper DVDs), but I just see copyright holders leaving money on the table and burning funds to fight a losing battle whilst alienating the populace.

I would like to tell the Pirate Bay the same thing everybody has told us for the past 10 years. They should go out and find a new business model, one that doesn’t involve profiting from stolen property…What everybody who steals music should realize is that e-looting is not a victimless crime. Everyone who does it is hurting themselves. They are killing the music.

I wish the author of the article had addressed this quote more directly. "E-looting" is in no way "killing the music". It's not a crime, anymore than singing a familiar melody (that's under copyright) is an e-looting crime.

At least in the US, copyright law is unconstitutional. Read the copyright clause: there's no mention of treating the intangible as "property", nor is there granted the right to transfer "ownership". Far from it. Read Jefferson's letters on the subject, and you'd find he was very much on the side of the "pirates".

Just because you wrote a song doesn't mean I can't sing it. I can't imagine who died and told these guys that they deserved big cash for songs, but it's not true.

110 Supreme Court Justices seated since the Copyright Clause was enacted along with the Constitution in 1787, versus Kubrick from Hacker News. I wonder who's right about whether copyright law is constitutional.

This is a completely bald-faced appeal to authority, and it's not even a very good authority: it costs much less for Big Media to keep 110 decision-making people quiet over the years (through downward pressure from the other parts of government lobbied into agreement with them) than the amount they make while doing so; however, it costs much too much to convince the entire public of their side. In a democracy, if the public disagrees with a law, it's not really a law, no matter what the legislators say.

Appeal to authority is not always wrong. In terms of "Is it Constitutional?", the Constitution itself says the Supreme Court decides. Citing the Supreme Court on the question of whether something is constitutional isn't an "appeal to authority fallacy", it's just plain correct, whether or not it is also an "appeal to authority".

And as near as I can see, tptacek is correct in the citation. It may be vague but it is substantially correct; if it were unconstitutional to treat copyright as a property right, it would have been ruled so sometime in the last 200 years, instead of becoming the foundation of the system.

It's an appeal to authority in an argument about authority. The question kubrick set up wasn't "is copyright law right" or "sensible" or "practicable"; it's "is it constitutional". The answer: yes.

So the law is within the bounds of common sense when it defines the copyright period as the life of the author plus 99 years? The constitution says a copyright is granted for a limited time to encourage artists to create. How is Walt Disney going to be encouraged to create another Mickey Mouse when he's been dead for 40 years?

What unbelievable blabla.

The Pirate Bay dudes are going to burn money if they had it? If the courts say "money goes there", it goes there. That cannot be stopped unless a massive people's uprising comes into play.

As for the HN title. We're all copyright holders. You're referring to the big brands, not all copyright holders.

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