It's not my fault your business model sucks.
sob.apotheon.org
sob.apotheon.org
Are people really so unconcerned about the livelihood of others? Each of us is already free to give away the fruits of our own labors -- but why insist that others must do the same?
"If you are able to compete in the market, good for you. If you couldn't compete, so what?"
It does not however, mean that they support government granted monopolies, subsidy, or other form of crony capitalism.
To some libertarians, copyright and patent are a form of crony capitalism.
My comment were mostly in the context of a competition, not customers.
Now . . . let's see if we can avoid legislating politeness.
Copyright is an agreement between society and creators of art, literature, music, etc. It says that if they will share their creations with society, then society will allow them to profit from that for a time. After that time is up, everybody gets to share the works freely. Society has been granting the artists the monopoly on distribution, but we haven't been getting the ability to share them after a period of time. It's this imbalance that causes people to lose respect for the law. I don't think copyright should be abolished, but I do think it needs to return to its original term, and I believe that retroactive extensions are an abomination against what copyright is supposed to create.
I'm not terribly eloquent, but Thomas McCauley was. His words are at http://baens-universe.com/articles/McCauley_copyright .
The movie industry in particular would be perfectly happy --- overjoyed, in fact --- if they could just get movies locked down within a new release window measured in weeks.
Besides that, what is lost when a penniless student downloads a song? A sale? From a student who has no money? The losses are from people who can afford to make purchases. Those people must be convinced to follow the law, and the essential first step is to make the law something that people can respect.
Your analogy sucks.
Cory Doctorow may care a lot about Steamboat Willie, but the overwhelming majority of copyright scofflaws do not; they're downloading new release movies and music. What evidence can you present that they're doing this as a statement against the Sonny Bono act? Because you're making an extraordinary claim: that people who are picking up movie torrents from torrent search engines are doing so as a political statement.
Your second argument is just as specious. What is lost when a penniless student downloads a song? Not much. What is lost when every penniless student downloads a song? Tens of millions of dollars. Moreover, you have no evidence to present that most downloaders "can't afford" what they're taking, and are thus creating some kind of media social safety net on the P2P networks.
People download because technology has, for the time being, made it easier to download than to buy. That simple fact has no bearing on whether it's right to download without buying.
A lot of things that clearly need to be illegal (for instance: credit card fraud) have also been made vastly easier by technology.
I don't think you're reading very carefully, then.
> What is lost when a penniless student downloads a song? Not much. What is lost when every penniless student downloads a song? Tens of millions of dollars.
You're assuming they'd all spend money on the song -- which, if they're penniless, they wouldn't. The only difference for most of them is whether they hear the song -- and tell their friends (who have more money to spend) about how highly they esteem the song. Whoops, now you're talking about free advertising.
It's worth considering not only how much money each song is supposedly worth per customer, but how many people would actually get the song if the only way they could get it was by paying for it. The real question for a business would not be "How many people are listening without paying?" but, instead, should be "Would we get more money if we punish people for listening without paying, or for encouraging them to share with others who might then spend money to get more songs because they liked what they heard?"
Conflating punishment for not paying with actual potential profits isn't really very useful as an economic metric.
> People download because technology has, for the time being, made it easier to download than to buy. That simple fact has no bearing on whether it's right to download without buying.
True. The same is true of the law. We need to look elsewhere than what laws are on the books and how many people are downloading illegally to find a basis for the ethics of the situation.
If that's your argument, why are you tilting at windmills? Why aren't you instead writing a blog post advocating that musicians ditch the recording industry? I think I know the answer: because that would be boring.
Is it unethical to disobey the law? We could waste lots of time on that question. I personally don't think it's black-or-white. But who cares? That's not the argument I was responding to.
The argument I responded to, which you've now jumped into the middle of, is the idea that because copyvio is rampant, the law must be wrong. That logic doesn't hold. Something like 15% of all transactions in Brazil in the mid-2000's were fraudulent because of bank and credit card theft. The laws weren't the problem.
We dictate business models in much the same way in other cases where a particular business model explicitly relies upon violations of individual rights -- such as telling people they shouldn't pursue a business model of armed robbery.
> If that's your argument, why are you tilting at windmills? Why aren't you instead writing a blog post advocating that musicians ditch the recording industry?
I've done that too. I like to write something new, and non-repetitive, from time to time. Do you just regurgitate saved copies of your old material all the time? You're right -- that would be boring.
> Is it unethical to disobey the law?
All else being equal, there's nothing about the law itself that makes it unethical to disobey. There are some laws it's unethical to disobey; there are others it is not. There are cases where disobeying a law would be unethical even if the law itself is unethical, but those cases are not defined merely by the fact it's a law. Feel free to dispute that, but you should do something more impressive than offer a circular argument (which is the form most "but it's the law!" arguments take).
> The argument I responded to, which you've now jumped into the middle of
Jesus fucking Christ. This is a public discussion venue. I am sick and tired of people coming up with the "Why are you interrupting my discussion?" excuse to dismiss comments in public discussion venues. Try actually addressing points made rather than inventing spurious excuses to shut people up when you disagree with them.
> the idea that because copyvio is rampant, the law must be wrong
That's not the argument that was advanced. The argument is that a bad law predisposes people to disregard even the good purpose of the law (assuming it has any good purposes), and may even predispose them to disregard other laws in general. There's nothing in that argument that reverses the causal relationship between behavior and the ethicality of a law the way you just did.
You're right that violation of a law doesn't make it a bad law in an ethical sense (though it might make it "bad" in an enforceability sense, depending on how it gets violated). That's not the obvious interpretation of preceding statements on the subject, though -- at least as far as I've been able to determine.
No, it has nothing to do with often violated laws being wrong. It has to do with broken social contracts. As I said in my original posting, copyright was formulated as a contract between society and an artist. The deal is that if an artist shares his work with society, then society will allow the artist to have a limited time monopoly on the work. In return, society gets ownership of that work once the monopoly's time period has expired. That is a social contract that isn't terribly hard to justify.
Our new contract, apparently, is that an artist can create a work, share it with the world, and profit from every time the work is shared. Not only that, but when the artist dies, his next of kin get to keep that deal going. For all of eternity, given the trends of the last several decades. That's a deal that is repugnant to me, and to nearly everybody that I've met. It's not something that I can find any way to defend, so convincing people that copyright is a just institution is quite difficult.
I want copyright to be just and defensible; I write software for a living, and I like being able to profit from its sale. However, I can't explain that copyright has any moral basis when it clearly doesn't. The only reasons that I see not to violate copyright today are fear of legal reprisal and personal feelings of loyalty towards individual content producers. Loyalty is good, and fear of punishment can be effective, but I'd love to have a law that's founded in some sort of morality.
You've made three separate statements here, and linked them together:
1. I want copyright to be just and defensible.
2. I write software for a living.
3. I like being able to profit from its sale.
These three statements are not necessarily related. Since I assume you know your own mind reasonably well, I'll assume that 2 and 3 are related in this case: you write software for a living, and (in part because of that) you like being able to profit from its sale. This does not, however, necessitate that copyright must be just and defensible (as you seem to admit, at least tentatively, in following sentences). Since that connection is not necessary, it is not really the case that the cause you identify for wanting it to be just and defensible is the real reason for that desire. Perhaps the actual desire is that you do not at this time see a way to make a living at it that is as easy to get started -- especially since it has already been started, and all you have to do is maintain it.
Of course, as time passes and copyright violation becomes more prevalent, it may become the case that maintaining the already established business model becomes more expensive than establishing a new one that will be easier to maintain.
> However, I can't explain that copyright has any moral basis when it clearly doesn't. The only reasons that I see not to violate copyright today are fear of legal reprisal and personal feelings of loyalty towards individual content producers. Loyalty is good, and fear of punishment can be effective, but I'd love to have a law that's founded in some sort of morality.
I love it when someone can see my side of the argument, even when having just stated a desire for the other side of the argument to "win".
Copyright is a violation of property rights because it offer authors control over a consumer's property via restriction of the consumers or recipient's ability to reproduce and build on the work, which the recipient and consumers presumely legitimately purchased from some other sources.
Therefore, it is absolutely irrevelant what economic meteric that are used to justify copyright until you resolve the issue of ownership.
Apparently, you too did not read the article, nor most of my comment -- or maybe you ignored the beginning of wwalker3's comment, where (s)he said:
> It's a reiteration of a sentiment I've seen a lot recently: "My livelihood doesn't depend on copyright, so I'll feel free to violate yours."
Compare that with the meat of my own comment. Notice the relevance, and the fact that the opening to wwalker3's comment is completely off-base.
Incorrect. Try following links once in a while.
Do you expect me to say everything in one place? My god, all my opinions and explanations relevant to them in one place -- it would be a document fit to fill the Library of Congress.
> Instead, he's set up a passive-aggressive straw man argument.
The fact you are incapable of recognizing the implicit message in advocating for strict enforcement of copyright law is your failing -- not mine.
It seems arguable that this is a moral obligation. Going out of your way to comply with laws you disapprove of strengthens those laws you disapprove of -- it's self-contradictory. If you, in the course of going about your normal life, happen to comply because it's what you would do anyway, I don't think this means you have an obligation to break those laws, but ignoring them is probably best, unless it has other consequences you can't afford.
Not as such. More to the point, I'm advocating phasing out those laws, regardless of whether anyone follows them while they're still on the books. People are already simply ignoring those laws, in ever-increasing numbers; nobody has to advocate for it.
> You are free to avoid the RIAA: don't use their offerings.
I don't.
If you think that's the argument you are making, then where do business models come into the picture?
I do advocate that other people do likewise. The fact that I don't do so with every breath -- including the virtual "breaths" used to say what's in a particular piece of writing you happened to stumble across -- doesn't mean that I don't do so in general.
> If you think that's the argument you are making, then where do business models come into the picture?
Why are you trying to tell me I'm not allowed to have more than one argument?
1. roughly inevitable, given continued support and enforcement of copyright
2. inevitably going to result in behavior like suing teenagers
Actually, I'm not even writing as if that's the case. You're just correctly guessing that the RIAA suing teenagers is a bad result of copyright law, and assigning that to me as some kind of guess at the original purpose of the law. I'm really writing as if it's the case that copyright law is a violation of individual rights, thus placing the burden of someone else's poor business model on people who have no ethical imperative to bear that burden.
Perhaps you want to start reading Against Intellectual Monopoly in which you read lawsuits by James Watt against his also somewhat innovative competitors, the lucrative bargain between British authors and American publishers in the era of no foreign copyrights, the extremely innovative porn industry, the patenting of plants toward the end of explosive productivity growth in the agriculture industry and even more.