Save, Create and Run Your Own Pirate Bay
openbay.isohunt.to
openbay.isohunt.to
The metadata is important. When you download a file, you want to see how popular it is. Popular files tend to be higher-quality, safer, and always download faster.
The community is central to the experience. The comments matter. They talk about a file being fake, or virus-infected, or poor quality. They give instructions for using the download properly. This is valuable information.
Moderation is critical. Who removes links to broken, fake, infected, or poor-quality files?
Download sites are more than collections of links. The Pirate Bay wasn't successful due to its volume of .torrent files. Anyone can host a bunch of little files up for download. Its infrastructure and community were key components of its success. The links alone aren't interesting at all.
Yeah, this is a WIP of how Mediagoblin is using pump.io to federate comments:
http://mediagoblin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html#part...
(Basically: I'm interested in the general topic, but I can't get a sense if it is actually going anywhere)
There's some stuff in its wiki, but not much more.
Once you get all that stuff functional you end up with a truly decentralized platform and there's no reason for anyone to "host" their own cordoned-off copy in the first place. It actually /solves/ the problem.
I miss it and I think there's a lot that can be learned from it.
1) I'd like to break your first world bubble and tell you about a little secret - Not all content is available all over the world. There are really some beautiful pieces of art (Movies, Music, etc) that are available (for purchase/viewing) to certain parts of the worlds (Eg. US) and not available to the rest (Eg. India). What makes you think that you deserve to have access to these content and the rest of them don't?
You can observe this even on iTunes - "Sorry the content you requested is not available in your country. Redirecting you to the <insert country here> store."
Sometimes, there isn't an option to purchase these content and the only way is to download them via torrents. You see information is like light - It's best when it's shared. People are afraid that the more you share it, the less they will be able to meter it. But they are so wrong[1].
2) I am a genuine customer of Adobe. I invested heavily into their software suite. I paid several thousand dollars to upgrade their softwares so that I can keep a copy of what I paid for. One fine day, infact, the very next day after I paid for the CS6 suite, they introduced the Creative Suite cloud and fucked up so many people dependent on their software - Basically, it's a model where you keep paying them till you die and if you don't pay, you lose access to the software. This is probably fine with me, since I'm a business guy and I can probably afford the money. But the people who were affected the most were students - Who paid for the student subscription, but were fucked to move to the cloud and pay again: https://www.facebook.com/adobesteals
Now, shortly after this happened, the piracy rates of their software suites simply skyrocketed on several torrent sites. Most of the consumers of these torrent sites are students who cannot simply afford to buy it. This in my opinion is good. Why? Because this is the only way of not supporting such companies - By using their products in a way that doesn't benefit them (Remember, I am a legit customer who has paid for their software). At the same time, the students who can't afford are also not at a disadvantage just because they couldn't access a particular software suite during their course of studies.
There are even more benefits of torrent sites, but one thing people must understand is that torrent sites are more than just for "Greedy parasites".
[1]https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sale...
Use case 2: Distributing ripped off copies of easily available, expensive to produce, copyrighted works, largely made in the last 5 years, that the purchase of would help feed the creators.
I really hope for the first, but I'm depressingly certain it'll be the second. Mass copyright infringement is not some "noble cause". It's parasitic, adolescent, greedy, "I want it, so I'm entitled to have it" behaviour that makes me despair of large portions of humanity.
Lets invert our perspective on that same concept. One copy of the movie (or TV show, or song) is purchased, lets say somehow its a blu-ray that costs $99.99. An inflated price to be certain, but it helps us illustrate our point as nearly all blu-rays cost less than this. Using the "costless copies" model you're suggesting that there is zero economic damage from this first purchaser posting copies online and all other content consumers instead drawing from these "costless copies". This is false. You may argue there is some middle ground but then this is a logarithmically decreasing cost or something of the like, not costless.
People's concept of what defines zero or nothing (in the case of cost here) continually astounds me. Anyone who argues this "costless copies" model is at best selfish and ignorant, at worst a thief. You may counter this argument and say that its not something you would have paid for -- well you wanted it on some level or you wouldn't have pirated it. These people continually want to have their cake and eat it too.
There is little difference, morally, between this and me coming to your house, kidnapping you and forcing you to work for me, maybe you're an accountant or a laborer or something I could use, but probably wouldn't just pay for. (If you're still a fan of extreme, over-simplified analogies like "costless copies" we can call this slavery -- something we've nearly universally agreed is wrong.) The difference of course being that you can disconnect yourself from it by doing it online. If you're about to make the counter argument that unlike the movie you downloaded and watched, I actually need an accountant, or labor, don't. You wanted the movie enough to pirate it, and spend two hours watching it.
Do yourself a favor and stop making yourself look like so foolish by citing this costless copies bull. Its infuriating to see otherwise very intelligent people make such a blind and over-simplified claim. You might have a hard time accepting this but both sides of the argument are "manipulating morality".
I guess (to follow in this long-held tradition of contriving emotional pleas in defense or against intellectual property) this isn't entirely unlike pulling out of a war. There's a deep repugnance to the notion that thousands of people have given their lives in vain, and that the hope which drove them was never fulfilled. Yet we would never mistake their sacrifice as slavery nor even tantamount to it, because of the chronology.
The fact that for the 20th century, the economy of movies and the tastes of the consumer were so consistently aligned that tinseltown could churn dozens of hundred-million dollar artistic edifices on a regular basis is remarkable and profound. And indeed, it'd be tragic if the advent of the digital age meant that cinema were done for—and all we had in its place was a hundred million amateur Vines and YouTube videos.
A slave is made to work with no promise of recompense, and is denied their autonomy. It is a state defined by dehumanization and coercion. Slaves have a very small decision tree, ("do as they are told" OR ("be beaten" AND ("Do as they are told" OR "Be killed for insubordination") OR "Try and escape and hope you're not killed for it")
When they worked, someone took the RISK, that they could somehow make a profit selling copies of the work to the public. They paid the employees, either in cash, or as an agreed upon share of any profits. It is no different than a VC taking a risk, that I will like Vine enough to buy whatever their in-app purchase is. The fact that a "costless copy" exists does not introduce an element of coercion to the risk the producer is taking, all it does is increase the risk.
Pretending that copying is the same as theft was already ridiculous, doing so with slavery borders on the offensive.
Years ago copies required infrastructure to make them and they were almost only means of distribution of information and you could hide the fraction of the cost of creation of this information in the price of a copy. That's no longer viable strategy. Sooner people get that, sooner we'll get more honest future.
Clean copy costs nothing. If a copy costs you then it's the cost of material waste plus cost of intellectual waste (DRM) plus fraction of the cost of the creation of this information plus healthy share for guys who set up all this chain to profit from it while creating nothing apart from this business model.
If you wan't to be moral just download the torrent, track down guys who actually created the art and send them some cash.
The cost of duplication was never a large part of the equation. If you could get theaters to book the picture then the additional 35mm prints were paid for. You could open a film across 3000 screens for $5 million. Likewise duplication on DVD or Blu-ray disc is a tiny part of video distributors' outlay. It's the first print/disc master that costs money to produce. Duplication expenses are like 5% of the overhead, unless someone has horrendously miscalculated.
If you wan't to be moral just download the torrent, track down guys who actually created the art and send them some cash.
Protip: this never happens. Look at the credits of a movie, see that long list of names at the end; the vast majority of those people put in a fair amount of work to get the picture made. Nobody wants to write out 150 checks to different people who helped along the way, that's part of the producers' job. Even the shittiest no-budget straight-to-video film shot with a prosumer camera represents 2-3 man-years of work.
So it's better to pay some other guy that set up whole unnecessary and obsolete delivery chain instead of picking one of those 150 guys at random?
And you're not just paying 'some other guy' - as i pointed out, when you purchase a ticket or buy a DVD it goes to someone who is contractually obliged to pay either day rates or residuals or some combination of the two to the people who work on the film. That's why you see accountants and legal people listed in the movie credits, a significant part of their job is making sure that people are paid in a timely fashion.
If you don't want to pay the distributor, then the distributor can't pay the producer, and if you the producer doesn't get his/her share of your money then there's nothing to pass on to anyone else. Your individual purchase is a tiny amount but in the aggregate those purchases pay people's wages and residual income and allows them to make a living. Stop with the Robin Hood arguments, they're bullshit.
What's that have to do with copyright? Are the theaters subsidized by copyright? They surely have advertisements subsidized by copyright. Advertisements, that convince a lot of people, that don't actually care that much about 60 ft screen, that they do.
Most of the people who do stuff for the movie don't wait for the income from tickets dvd-s and whatevers. They get pay for the job they do when the do it and as little and as late as possible. They are paid with the money of some people who don't have a better idea what to do with their money than to invest in a movie. They pay up front and they trust that they'll get more back thanks to the whole byzantine system that has its foundation shaken by the advancement in technology. Same kind of advancement that allowed this behemoth to be created in the first place.
Propping up those foundations in manufactured morality is not healthy.
Not sure what's the parallel between my arguments and Robin Hood. Care to elaborate?
The thing that I've been continually amazed by is the industry's fascination on eliminating or limiting people viewing their content without paying. This is a meaningless metric and one that puts them at odds with their customers. If they had, instead, focused on increasing the average amount that each person spends on content, they'd not only make more money, but they'd be in the business of giving customers what they want and they'd truly be taking advantage of the zero marginal cost of their product. As long as I'm spending as much as I'm willing to spend on entertainment, the industry should want me watching everything they produce. The per-view or per-piece-of-content profit is only meaningful in a world where each copy they sell costs them money. When me viewing a piece of content costs them nothing, they should only be concerned that I'm paying for content, not that I'm paying for each piece of content.
Congratulations. It's so much more exciting to produce or work on films without any sort of credible revenue model.
If you can't figure out business model and don't like to create for free than stop doing it and write some code instead. People are paying handsomely for that right now.
Lot's of people are making indie films which they put up on youtube getting revenue from ads. It's healthier model than the traditional one because when the movie is bad the sucker who watched it loses just a few minutes of his time instead of DVD or a ticket price.
If your response is to call the crowd “parasitic, adolescent, [and] greedy”, then I suggest you are starting off your relationship with your audience on the wrong foot. You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay.
What you cannot do is declare that anyone looking at your statue is a thief, and lobby to abolish the public right to look at things, merely because it upsets your old, now-obsolete, dependent-on-no-longer-existing-conditions, business model.
The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
That said: I agree with the theme of consternation over outmoded content distribution methods, not adapting with changing demand in the market place is a good way to becoming outmoded yourself.
Or are you implying that the developers of digital technology did so merely to copy cheaply those things which were previously hard and lossy to copy? (I doubt it.)
I.e. what is your actual criticism of my argument?
Oh come on, you're displacing the moral agency for willful infringement of copyright via new technology onto nature - an elaboration of 'everyone else is doing it so why shouldn't I?' The freak storm in your metaphor is actually the aggregated behavior of individuals. You might as well ascribe it to destiny, divine will, the inexorable forward motion of the proletariat, etc. You're essentially invoking a religious entity as the external embodiment of your own consumer desire...
You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay.
...and then adopting a hectoring moral tone to berate the producers of statues - the people who make the very thing you like to stare at - as if not one, but all previously obscure statues had suddenly been exposed by this 'freak storm'. You want someone who has invested considerable time, skill, and material in creating a durable commodity to switch their efforts to also supplying you with a perishable one (which is a reflection of your consumer relationship with the film, as a temporary entertainment) in order to recoup their initial investment. Then you suggest they could try begging for money - which is workable in some contexts, but definitely not for anyone producing something new or for the first time; crowdfunding essentially surfs on someone else's prior marketing investment but that's hardly a viable strategy for the first time statue sculptor who's trying to raise revenue without any sort of functioning residual model.
Then you conclude by suggesting that maybe the era of large statues is over, and they have no value. this is obviously false, because your metaphor depends upon people voluntarily investing their time in looking at said statues. Given the opportunity cost of that time at minimum wage, it's clear that the aggregate value of the time spent on statue-gazing adds up to a significant sum; for each of the many viewers - and you're the one who posited a large crowd of them - the utility of gazing upon the artwork clearly exceeds the marginal utility of more economically productive activity for the gazer. So you're saying that producers of these highly attractive statues are entitled to the attention of the viewers (insofar as they are willing to spend time gazing upon the artwork) but not one cent of positive expenditure over and above that.
The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
But ideas are not copyrightable; expressions of them are. And by focusing on the extremely low marginal cost of copying, you are completely ignoring the enormous fixed cost of production. Films are a particular pain point because while they are quickly consumed (in the space of a few hours) they require enormous amount of time to produce (often measured in years) and a great deal of money.
So if we're talking about, say, The Matrix, we can share the idea cheaply enough: 'hey, have you ever considered that our actions, social roles, and our very identities are actually illusions fed to us by an inhuman mechanism which perpetuates itself by extraction of energy from our physical bodies? That our lives are actually no more meaningful than those of fish in an aquarium or battery hens in an egg farm, notwithstanding the apparent uniqueness of our subjective experience? Here, check out authors like Marx and Baudrillard and imagine what they would have made of the computer age.' Certainly, sharing of intellectual ideas has been a foundation of progress since ancient times.
But actual movie known as The Matrix took about 5 years and $60 million to produce. Now of course everyone who invested in the film has made their money back in that case, but that's not relevant unless you adhere to an economic philosophy of price control and a planned distribution of wealth. Why should the people who invested the substantial labor and capital required to create such an elaborate work not enjoy a property interest in it? If you do think it's because they have already recovered their investment and then some, doesn't that mean that Mark Zuckerberg and everyone else with a significant stake in Facebook should have their holdings liquidated up to some substantial cash amount, and the firm and its codebase should all be open-sourced.
And what of films that have not yet become profitable, notwithstanding their significant cultural quality? Just the other day we had a longish thread about The Shawshank Redemption, based on an article that observed it did quite poorly at release and only found an ensuring audience after it entered the secondary and tertiary distribution markets (home video and TV, in a nutshell). If that film were released today, it might still find an audience via file-sharing, but not the revenue to recoup its production and launch costs, meaning no residual income for the actors, director, or producers. Nor would it serve its ongoing function of cross-subsidizing other films of limited commercial success during their releases, some of which in turn may not yet have found their own audience.
No, the freak storm is supposed to represent the development of digital copying technology. (The aggregated behavior of individuals is instead represented by the crowd of onlookers.)
> ...and then adopting a hectoring moral tone
I was actually trying to discourage such a “hectoring moral tone” by discouraging such name-calling as “parasitic, adolescent, [and] greedy”, as displayed by the post I was replying to. Instead, I suggested trying more constructive approaches to recover some profit in the unfortunate situation.
> Then you conclude by suggesting that maybe the era of large statues is over, and they have no value.
I did not mean to suggest they have no value, I merely suggested the possibility that it may no longer be possible to get paid for making them. (At least, not in the same way as before.) There are a great many things which would be of great benefit and value to large masses of people, but for which it is nevertheless not possible to get paid. These things have value, but you can’t get paid for doing them.
> Why should the people who invested the substantial labor and capital required to create such an elaborate work not enjoy a property interest in it?
Because merely expending effort does not warrant payment. This is a classic “sweat of the brow” argument, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter that you work hard – what matters is what you can get people to pay you for.
> And what of films that have not yet become profitable, notwithstanding their significant cultural quality?
What of them? You seem to presuppose that movies should continue to be made in the same manner as always, and therefore, their creators should be compensated in the same manner as have been done. I suppose no such thing. If a business model can no longer be made for them, then movies may be a thing of the past.
I am not ready to create a perfect surveillance state in order to preserve the old business models, now obsolete due to technological developments. Yes, a perfect surveillance state is, in fact, what would have to be developed to prevent people from “looking at the statue”, so to speak. Witness first the new role of copyright – initially only applicable to those who owned printing presses, in effect an industrial regulation – which now regulates almost everything a person in their home can do on a computer. Witness secondly the rise of DRM, and the creation of legislation which makes it illegal to circumvent it, and even to talk about how to circumvent it. Witness further the creation of closed platforms; computers which you supposedly own, but do not actually control and which you cannot actually control.
One cannot be said to be able to live in such a society, but one can live without movies. The choice is obvious.
Now go back to the days before Entertainment Technology (i.e.: the microphone, the camera, tape recorder, video recorder etc.). The only money to be made was to charge admission to the theatre. Then along came entertainment technology and the entertainment industry used the technology to make money by selling copies of the artists performance on records LP’s CD, s Videos DVD, s etc. Then along came the Internet and copies of artists performance can be obtained at a minimal cost.
But an artist can still make money by performing in a theatre or a field were the tress have been felled.
It's quite simple for most things physical. They wont give me the object unless I pay their agreed price. Digital has a little wrinkle in that for most things, I can buy it then give it away to a friend (or millions of strangers) for free.
This means the "payment" part has to be different for digital goods. To me, it looks like the best way is getting paid up front, like Kickstarter. Or maybe subscriptions to a movie studio or something (Netflix). Time will tell.
Your aunt's pine cone example is stupid because that's a trivial task. Making a movie or an album is not a trivial task, so you can't really compare.
If you aunt built homes, and then people just moved into them without paying for them, I'm no sure you'd be telling the same story.
No one is asking to be paid simply for creating something, they are asking to be paid when people consume that creation, when they benefit/enjoy/use it.
I'm not sure you get that.
Completely ignoring the legal aspect for a moment, the thing about respect for rights is a two way street. Most of the media companies out there have literally none for their audience. DRM rootkits, draconian terms, absurd prices, the lot. Why should I have the slightest bit of respect for someone that has no respect for me?
90% of what publishers do is services and brokerage. Your imagination is not at all anchored in reality.
To summarize my thoughts from other comments here, I'm unconvinced that creators have a moral right to control the ways people use something that they've put out there, and I have a pretty strong idea(which given this comment and a few more of yours elsewhere I seem to need to review), that Publishers(which includes Studios, Labels, Producers & so on), add very little value, which I agree is in marketing and other services.
My impression was that what a Publisher does is largely extract rent from various investments they have made in various kinds of connections, or physical facilities, and that they maintain this position by excluding people who don't buy into their particular way of doing things. While this isn't "bad" or "wrong", that impression makes it pretty difficult to sympathize with what I perceive to be a sudden increase of market discipline and pressure for them.
Here's a few book links that would give you a good overview: http://www.amazon.com/Open-Wide-Hollywood-National-Obsession... << for a lookat the work of marketing big blockbuster films
http://www.amazon.com/Feature-Film-Distribution-Deal-Importa... << very dated in respects of technical factors, but a good guide to the hard-nosed world of distribution negotiations
http://www.amazon.com/The-Producers-Business-Handbook-Balanc... << anything from Focal press is pretty good quality-wise
In a nutshell, it works like this: producer commissions or finds a great script, makes a lot of phone calls, tries to get talented actors/directors involved by signing loose contractual obligations ('letters of intent' to participate if production elements and finace meet certain targets by certain dates), then tries to raise money by pitching the 'package' of great script + bankable talent. Producers partner with production companies who partner with studios; the production company typically finances the creation of the film and the studio typically finances commercial launch (as well as some internally produced projects). Less popular fare is often sold in advance to international distributors on the strength of the package in order to underwrite the production finance, more popular stuff is sold as a function of its box-office performance.
Studios quapublishers do extract rents, but the packaging, production, and launch of a film is a combination of very high-risk financing, very aggressive contractual negotations, and huge logistical problems, and it's hyper-meritocratic for all but the very top executives (ie the heads of the studio conglomerates, who are running multibillion corporations doing everything from films to theme parks to action figures to...).
what I perceive to be a sudden increase of market discipline and pressure for them
Well let's face it, producers of other goods and services don't have to deal with zero marginal cost piracy - of course they have a lot of competition but manufacturing or delivering a good or service in most fields has a bunch of minimal physical costs, compared to a perfect digital copy that can be produced for essentially $0.
Besides that, they're already subject to a great deal of market discipline - the film market is massively, massively competitive. think about it, there are hundreds of new products launched every year and they're largely judged on the first few weeks of their sales performance. Take a look at this: http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?page=1&view=releaseda...
Out of 665 films released in 2012 you'll recognize most of the top 100 from seeing them advertised, maybe 10 or 20 of the second 200, and virtually none of the other 465. A few make megabucks, the top 100 all make at least $25 million (so more likely than not they broke even or better), but outside the top 200 very few make even $1 million (that's revenue, not profit). I mention this price point because $1m is about the minimum production budget to get a theatrical release in the first place. If your film cost less than that then it's not happening without very hefty amounts of both talent and luck. About half of films don't even break $100,000 in revenue; the theatrical release is to make them eligible for award nominations and establish a minimum quality threshold to attract the attention of a secondary (video, streaming, maybe TV) market distributor.
Most films, like 80% or more, lose money. It's not necessarily because they're crap (although many of them are), but often they have limited or specialist appeal. Most distribution deals are for packages of films, in which the revenue from a marketable film outweighs the inevitable losses made by other films in the package, but helps to recoup their production costs. Yes, this is a drag on the economic performance of the more marketable films, but everyone accepts it because if every film had to be sold on its individual merits most would never succeed and fr fewer films would get made, which would significantly raise the barriers to entry (already quite high) and significantly reduce the stream of incoming new talent.
It's a much more complex ecosystem than it might appear from the outside, and much more driven by love of the product that might at first be apparent. To characterize the industry by the negative aspects of big players like Disney, sony etc. is like saying retail is bad because you dislike Walmart or Amazon, or software is bad because you don't like Microsoft or Electronic Arts.
To characterize the industry by the negative aspects of big players like Disney, sony etc. is like saying retail is bad because you dislike Walmart or Amazon, or software is bad because you don't like Microsoft or Electronic Arts.
I try hard not to do this.My impressions were formed from film class I took in high school. It was a really nice film class funded by Spielberg, who sent an employee out monthly to teach us things and help us problem solve issues on our films. There was lots of Q & A, and several frank discussions about funding and what it would require to make our films eligible for sundance or other festivals. I was assuming that gave me more insight into the middle of the pack than I actually have, and it was probably before the impact of illegal sharing had fully shaken out.
If my aunt builds a home, she can lock that shit down and not give the keys until you pay. Heck in some states she can kill you if you break in. And yes, same story. She can charge 50 milliion for a 10x10 foot box. Doesn't mean she deserves it does it? Also, even if price is "reasonable", my point does not change.
I totally understand wanting to be paid, I really do. I want to be paid for everything I do too. Not likely though.
The market is trying to figure out the value of movies/music/digital goods. Piracy is part of that. Maybe one day it will stop (figure out how to lock that down so can't be shared). Maybe it's here forever (cat-and-mouse continues, lawyers continue to sue individuals). In either case, the market rate is what people are willing to pay in the aggregate.
I have yet to hear an explanation or argument that suggests an inherent moral right for a creator to control their work once it has been shared, and I have heard several very good ones that "Copying is not Stealing" and that we have a right to share, consume, and remix ideas and media that have come into our possession.
Ideas are not material, and equating theft, which deprives the rightful owner of all use of their property, and copying, which violates a state granted monopoly, is an egregious false equivalence. When someone moves into the home of our hypothetical aunt has built she can no longer live there, lease the property, or sell it, she is deprived of the use of a specific physical thing.
I am very sympathetic to the need for creators to make a living, and I am aware that there is probably some level of injustice in copying and enjoying their work without paying them. It seems to me that the loudest complainers have been producers and studios. The middle men extracting rent from the copy machines artists needed to be able to sell their work. Those who make media and sell it directly to the public, or sell tickets to live performances still seem to make a decent living, and absent those gatekeepers I can enjoy a much wider variety of music than my parents did at my age.
Yes there is a small harm when artists are not paid, but it is much less than the continual erosion of our right to own things we have bought, and to participate in our own culture
You can consume as much media as you want for free: you can rent music, books, movies, and games at the library. But if you love it so much that want your own copy of it, shouldn't you show your appreciation to the artist by just buying it?
> Are you saying that because it's digital, it not longer has any value?
Well one might not go that far, but the marginal cost is zero.
digital copying is a perfectly competitive zero marginal cost game.
only immoral thieves IMHO are the monopolists who want to make society worse off by trying to enforce artificial and pointless barriers to that market.
It's insane how people somehow arrive at that point in their thinking.
This is a common misunderstanding of the payment dynamic. The reality is it is actually a power dynamic. I make something that you want and I can keep it from you until you pay me.. is more approximate to the truth.
there is no inherent value in work, but only in supply and demand. Digital goods have demand, but no natural limitations in supply. Un-natural limitations (social acceptability, guilt, lawsuits, criminalising, etc) are being attempted but it seems likely they will all fail eventually.
"You can consume as much media as you want for free"
The corollary to this of course is, artists can make as make media as they like, but to make a decent living from it they need to show appreciation and respect to their patrons. If, on the other hand, they want to be stinking rich, or they want to bet big and spend hundreds of millions of hollywood dollars on expectation of a payout, they have to understand and manipulate that power dynamic. Just don't try and make out there is any kind of moral right to get paid.
That sort of presupposes that your wants should be satisfied as a matter of course, no? I have to agree with some of the posters above about the immaturity of this attitude. In the natural world, you get some things for free and you have to work for other things; eg you might find a coconut on the ground, but that's not guaranteed - chances are that you'll need to forage or hunt for your food most of the time. You can want the coconuts at the top of the tree to any degree imaginable, but your basic choices are to stay hungry or climb the tree. Is the tree exercising power over you by withholding the coconuts? Of course not. In the natural world, when you want something you frequently have to put your money where your mouth is - that is, expend some effort to get hold of it.
The actual power dynamic in the case of piracy is that any attempt at establishing a contractual relationship between producer and consumer can be easily undermined by a small number of people who are willing to break that contract by giving away copies for nothing while painting producers as morally deficient and undeserving of compensation.
Digital goods have demand, but no natural limitations in supply.
This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply. Just because the marginal cost of supply is zero does not mean there are no constraints on supply. You're equating non-substitutable creative goods with quite high costs of supply from the producer standpoint with fungible commodities in a marketplace of perfect competition.
The corollary to this of course is, artists can make as make media as they like, but to make a decent living from it they need to show appreciation and respect to their patrons.
So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked - you wish your consumption to be reflected back to you in heroic terms, because you place such a currency value upon your attention. Put another way, you consider the time invested in consumption of entertainment as a form of economic labor which is traded for the aesthetic pleasure (qua economic utility( that you hope to extract from the art work.
your example of the coconut is perfect in fact, it dehumanises or de-moralises the idea. the coconut evolved with its fruit/seed high up, hard to crack, heavy and slow germinating. however it came to be, it is resistant to birds eating it and germinates near the shoreline dispersed by the tides. other fruit evolved to be eaten and dispersed by birds. no morals, just different distribution methods. different power differential.
"This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply." no, there is a fixed cost of creation. supply is unlimited (virtually). the media industry got rich precisely due to the fact that a fixed cost of creation could scale up to massive increase in distribution virtually for free (at scale). and here we are only talking about that small percentage of artists who seek to leverage their fix cost of creation to make the same money time and time over. it is arbitrage on an artificially limited supply. now the industry is feeling the flipside of this 'free' distribution.
"So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked" no. but reading back, i see how you thought that. what i mean is that artists have to respect what consumers pressure points, and their understanding of value is and respond to that rather than to keep pushing shit uphill, so to speak. understand that perhaps the time is gone when an artist can receive 10x value from 1x work. because now to put that 1x work out to a market where the market decides whether it will pay or not completely changes the power dynamic. it forces the artist to foster a relationship with their patrons.
also, as an aside, i put forward a point of view about power dynamics in trade and about the non-existence of morality in this issue. i get the feeling that you are trying to moralise not only about the existence of piracy (which imho is in itself a profound misreading of reality) but about me, about which you know nothing. i find this vaguely offensive.
if you care to know, the existence of piracy, abundance of content, and the leverage of being one of thousands of eyeballs has allowed me to shift from being a powerless consumer to being a producer, and a patron, as i please. which is awesome.
This is a bit rich coming from someone dictating what artists need to do to please you as a consumer.
the power dynamic exists purely because 'want' is your weak point in a trading situation, and my ability to keep that from you is my strong point (my weak point is my need to eat).
The need to and the costs of production still exist even when the ability to recoup investment by controlling distribution does not.
"This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply." no, there is a fixed cost of creation. supply is unlimited (virtually).
In economics there is supply and demand, and fixed costs and marginal costs (ie the cost to produce one more unit of a given product). Creation is not treated as a separate thing from supply, since it is a necessary precursor. Some goods are supplied in single quantities. Please don't lecture me about economics if you are not familiar with the basic terminology of the field.
i get the feeling that you are trying to moralise not only about the existence of piracy (which imho is in itself a profound misreading of reality) but about me, about which you know nothing. i find this vaguely offensive.
Well, now you know how I feel about being told that because artists and publishers of the past have made lots of money from industrialized distribution, artists of today should not expect to get paid for supplying a product the market wants, which is a rather annoying fallacy of composition. Just because the industry has done well overall does not mean that everyone has been receiving '10x value from 1x work,' as you put it. The majority of people in the film industry work on fixed pay scales and see little or no residual income.
if you care to know, the existence of piracy, abundance of content, and the leverage of being one of thousands of eyeballs has allowed me to shift from being a powerless consumer to being a producer, and a patron, as i please. which is awesome.
In what sense do you consider yourself a producer?
"This is a bit rich" but it is still not what i am saying. its amoral, not moral/immoral!
"The need to and the costs of production.." but that is the thing, if there is no market for it then you can't do shit. if the market is not willing to pay for the costs of production, you push the cost of production down, find another way to push costs up, or you just starve. this is not me telling you this. this is just how it is for everyone.
"In economics there is supply and demand.." fair enough, i see we are saying the same thing here. tbh i just read your sentence as gibberish to impress how much you knew about economics. i understand the meaning if not the terminology, no need to be an arse.
"Well, now you know how I feel.." to be fair, i knew how you felt. i was just trying to disabuse you of the notion that there is anything fair about work and pay. it is power pure and simple. that is, in fact, why some people get the 10x income, and some do the 1x work.
"In what sense do you consider yourself a producer?" i am sorry, but i cannot help but read that as being a bit fucking condescending. so finding it difficult, but giving you the benefit of doubt, perhaps you are asking if i am a big p Producer? no. i am a designer. 1 x work for slightly less than 1x pay.. as it happens.
But the thing is, they're not. Distributors provide a lot of liquidity and a lot of their bets don't pay off. Even the big studios only make profit margins on the order of 5-7%. Besides liquidity, the distribution process itself involves significant logistical complexity; it essentially involves doing multiple product launches on different scales almost every week of the year.
"In what sense do you consider yourself a producer?" i am sorry, but i cannot help but read that as being a bit fucking condescending.
It's just a straight question, because I don't understand what your relationship to the industry is, if any. I do work in film productionand post-production, usually recording sound on sets or editing and supervising other editors in post production.
With crappy services, regional lockouts, DRM, and other horrors, this is actually rarely the case. Especially if you're not the small percentage of customers in the States.
> expensive to produce
That's not the customer's problem to care about. That's the industry's problem to solve.
> copyrighted works, largely made in the last 5 years
Why should it matter that a work was created in the last 5 years?
> that the purchase of would help feed the creators.
You'll find that very often the creators don't actually make squat. The gatekeepers who enforce terrible services, DRM, lose customer data to hackers, and assault customers with lawsuits absorb most of the cash.
Just about all of us can easily get what's primarily being distributed on sites like Pirate Bay. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Cable Company X On-Demand streams, HBO Go, Spotify, etc. it's all out there and far easier to access than hopefully getting a high quality rip off a torrent site. Okay, maybe some things aren't available in all countries and maybe the business model makes it next to impossible to buy a copy of a movie or song once and have it on all your devices in some cases. But really, is that really the primary use case for the Pirate Bay? Someone is going to say it is for them but if you believe that that's the primary use case across the board then you've got to be an apologist or just lying to yourself. Have I pirated movies, music, and software? Absolutely. Because I couldn't afford or just didn't want to pay for it. But I sure as hell am not telling myself that it was okay because copyright is evil and because "business models" and people who pirate wouldn't pay anyway so no one loses money. I live in the real world, not the ideal world.
Its about freedom of information. The internet makes that possible. Information should be accessible to anyone, for free.
Copyright breaks that. It breaks the internet, and it causes a lot more problems than the one that was meant to fix.
With respect to copyright holders, if you dont want your work shared, internet is not a full proof solution, and (hopefully) will never be. It was designed for sharing.
How dare we! It's not like we have living expenses or aspire to any sort of financial stability.
Information should be accessible to anyone, for free.
I love how you assert that without any supporting arguments. Please send me the information on how to help myself to a portion of whatever is in your bank account. I know that anything you have accumulated there is the result of your skill and labor, but I appreciate your generosity and determination to make this accessible to me and will limit my consumption of your bank balance to an amount I consider reasonable.
The threat we're currently facing from associations like MPAA is a lot bigger than any of us. Today we talk about artistic content, tomorrow it's science and cure for cancer (and that might be already happening - recently a doctor told me how he was trying to re-gain access to the university's private for students only library). That's the kind of information I was talking about, obviously not personal ones. That's what the internet made a reality and copyright breaks it.
You argue that your work has value and really, I agree with you. But we're using the world's first medium to gain popularity or whatever, and IMO we just have to accept its drawbacks, that our work (if it's good) will be shared. Many programmers for instance, they publish for free, and some may accept donations (others live by them).
I'm not saying that you should publish for free, but many individuals make this choice daily for their own reasons. I'm only hoping that as internet mentality matures, better and fairer means to compensate for intellectual work will be invented, but for now the way you're advocating copyright you're only helping the ones that already made millions off of it. If it wasn't for them, your work would probably be a lot more valuable and we would be enjoying better, genuine content.
Just not your information, of course.
content creator slightly worse off
How did you decide this?
Good, because this has actual value, unlike copies of digital data.
There is simply no way to sell on the free market objects with an almost infinite supply without appealing to outside forces like state regulators.
How would you feel about companies using GPL licensed code in close source products?
In what context? A laissez-faire economy without patents and copyright? You'd have to also eliminate law enforcement when it comes to licenses to render GPL useless, but I don't see how is this relevant to the discussion about the intrinsic economical value of digital data that can be copied at an almost zero cost.
The point I'm trying to make is, that the protection offered by copyright extends beyond monetytization as it's often reduced to. (understandable in a capitalist econonmy, where Almosen everything has a price) Instead it allows the right holder to limit how it's distributed or attach conditions to the distribution. The GPL with its limitations on how I may use a piece of software licensed under it is one outgrowth of that. If you reject copyright, especially for digital goods, you should be fine with the GPL becoming useless.
You have a point. Yes, the loss of enforceable licenses would be acceptable in a system without artificial means to stop the flow of data. It's not like most of us have the means to go to court over GPL infringements anyway.
More concerts is a good thing, direct sales to the customer, direct profit for the venue and artist, more exposure.
Relying on one channel for revenue is a disastrous rolling of the dice. I'm not here to apologize for people who willfully engage in subverting the purchasing process to get music they want, but I'm also not going to show sympathy for an industry that wants to remain rigid and inflexible with a changing marketplace either.
Really, even the industry cartels can't prove it. (And their attempts are laughably bad and transparent)
Can you?
But lack of sales, okay. The music industry reports record profits year over year, so those artists you speak of don't represent the larger trend in any case.
Let's pretend that it did for a moment - is that drop in sales due to:
* A minority of consumers downloading, rather than buying
* More choice in the marketplace (more stuff for people to buy meaning the existing players get a smaller slice of the pie)
* Less quality in the marketplace (pandering to the lowest common denominator resulting in flagging sales due to a percieved less quality product)
* The economic downturn meaning less got spent on entertainment anyways
* or something else?I don't want to name-drop, but I could point you to a film with multiple award (including Oscar) nominations that failed to break even and which led to investors dropping out from future projects - but which are hugely popular on file-sharing sites, with many thousands of seeders & leechers over a year after release despite the availability of the film on Netflix.
And please don't bring up 'Hollywood accounting.' This is based on personal acquaintance with executive producers at a large production company who personally lost millions of dollars, not some dentist in Pomona who wasn't able to buy a new Mercedes. That made it a lot more difficult for the director to place the next project - which I also anticipate will be Oscar-nominated - and required working with a much lower budget. That film is dying even more horribly at the box office (because there was no marketing budget worth speaking of) but it's one of the hottest torrents. Explain that to me, how a film can't get a wide release and therefore deserves to fail even though there are over 4000 people downloading it according to a popular tracker.
So while people at the top end of Hollywood obviously have things way better than people making no-budget films (sub $1 million) and don't have to worry about day-to-day costs of living, yes, there are people losing really substantial amounts of money and extremely high-quality directors that are having trouble raising money to make films despite their work being among the most popular movie torrents.
I don't feel comfortable discussing how that played out from the producers' standpoint (I'm not one of the producers, so I'll limit myself to saying it has lost money overall), but I hope you can see the incongruity of a highly acclaimed director making serious artistic work seeing ever-widening box office losses while simultaneously enjoying enormous-but-unpaid popularity via file-sharing. The Master has been available on Netflix streaming for months (at least in the US) and yet there are, um, over 9000 seeders for just the most popular torrent on oldpiratebay.org, closer to 35,000 if you add up all the active torrents for different formats, foreign language versions and so on, plus 35-40,000 leechers.
Regardless of how ones feels about it aesthetically, I think it's fair to say that the film is quite popular (measured against a random basket of 2012 films with better box office performance). But because it didn't do well in its initial release window, the longer-term popularity isn't reflected by its financial performance. Piracy is a real problem for films that depend on long-tail revenue, which is one reason you see so many franchise films and aesthetically conservative genre pics - they're an easier sell even though they don't necessarily age well.
When I pay $4.99 to "rent" a movie or $13.99 for a season of TV, I am saying to the motion picture making world, "make more like this and I will pay".
People who don't pay for things give up that voice.
So if, as a creator, you are concerned with financial profit, it would behoove you to make things that are attractive to people like me who pay for things or figure out some other way to make money like embedding advertising in your content.
In the long run I don't know if this will be good for art and creativity and it furthers the recent increasing prevalence of people with money having a louder voice than others, but maybe this is the market based solution to this problem.
I'm just suggesting a sort of market based incentive to pay for things that one could easily get for free.
Over time, those who pay may end up getting some additional non "feel good" or convenience benefits in that they will be a preferred class of customers.
Your overdramatisation isn't helping anyone. You hurt your position more then you help because with all that piracy going on in "large portions of humanity", the whole market looks pretty good. There was even more piracy going on in several sectors (music for example) and guess what, there is still music being made today! In fact, they never stopped. There is still Microsoft out there! Popular Games, Movies and so on. There are even musicians who share their products on torrents for free and don't end up broken in the end. There are so many examples why your overdramatisation is wrong and all those hurt the discussion. That makes me despair of a certain portion of the startup scene that seems to be stuck in some long past vision of "how it should be".
I think copyright should only last 10 to 15 years, but that's a battle that is never going to be won. If anything it will likely be extended indefinitely to protect Disney™ Corporation.
But I do agree with the general idea - torrents site should stay in the legal area (but actually is not site owners who are responsible, it's the users. The site just provides a means to an end, just like a showel could be used in your garden or to smash somebody's head. It would be stupid to sue the hardware store that provided the showel).
Copyright ought to be shorter - several years would be enough, and I guess another rule would help: corporations should be banned from owning the so called "intelectual rights", or copyrights of any kind - those corporations tend to grow into monsters, and however much they would make, only very few of the creative talent behind the work would benefit.
Then, you go to your torrent site, click on what you want, and wait. Nowadays, it's no harder than downloading any other random file from any other random site.