The ultimate response to those who try to legislate against piracy for years has been to point out that there is no paid service which is as convenient as other unpaid, illegal ones (bittorrent or usenet, for instance). This is just one of the few unfortunate times where it makes fiscal sense for corporations to try to change the laws rather than innovate.
They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate.
I own Blu-rays that have anti-piracy ads that I can't skip through before I watch the movie. That alone shows how screwed up this situation is.
They might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate.
Heheh, and yet The Pirate Bay (and lots of others), have a single site with lots of things. It might be a nightmare, but not only can it exist, but it does exist.
I am always amazed that the pirate/P2P swarm essentially distributes thousands and thousands of films/tv shows/music for free. Distribution is now free! You don't need to pay to copy your bits! Your users will do it for you, for free!
The problem of music piracy is mostly solved, largely because of iPod/iTunes and Spotify and others. And it was, indeed, solved by making the legal services as good or better as the illegal ones. Sure there are some music piracy left, but only a fraction of the piracy during the Napster heydays.
The problem that does persist (if it's a problem at all) is that the perceived value of recorded music has dropped, other forms of entertainment has taken the crown. The nineties are over, and it's not coming back, sadly the record industry thinks it's still possible.
> The problem of music piracy is mostly solved, largely because of iPod/iTunes and Spotify and others.
You wish! Maybe for the US, UK and Germany, but I live in Slovenia, an EU, very highly developed (in terms of internet/mobile coverage and bandwidth) country, but since there's only 2 million of us, no one bothers to try to sell us things.
Thank god I have friends in the UK that can buy music for me. However, after reading this post, I think I won't buy it any more, until it becomes user friendly.
I feel for you. But when I described the problem as "solved", I meant that the solution to music piracy has been found, it's been tested, and it has prevailed where implemented. Unfortunately, it has yet to come to your country, probably due to your small population, as you said.
Yes, lots of piracy is due to a market failure. However for many countries (even highly developed, long time members of the EU, let alone the developing world), there is very few legal options.
Not to mention that Linux users still have a very poor legal selection even in big rich countries (like UK).
I'm pretty much down to the same conclusion, personally.
I'd happily pay a recurrent, if modest, sum of money for the ability to legally and easily download not only newer but, more importantly, older and more obscure movies and television series to my computer in the form of convenient unencumbered .avi|.mkv|.mp4 files, from a catalog whose selection and quality matches the level of service of the 2010's.
If MAFIAA offered that, with a credible promise that the material will be there ten years from now, I would not only pay for the content but not bother to stash a single file onto my external hard disk. Because of the high level of sophistication when it comes to the selection, quality, and availability of the content it would be far more convenient to just pay again to redownload what I want to see again.
Pay-per-view is exactly what the studios are dreaming of but it's not going to happen through restrictions, but through unrivalled convenience only.
I'm a pirate because my third world city doesn't have a single physical place I can buy or rent dvd's or cd's.
I have only two options... to buy bootleg copies off the street, or visit tpb/demonoid. Buying bootleg copies off the street is actually cheaper because of the very high cost of bandwidth/data here, but I pay an extra USD$50/mnth for a higher datacap for the convenience of downloading.
Also, iTunes/appstore doesn't support my country, so I can't buy from there either.
At some point, someone has to devise a purely-virtual solution: You should be able to buy 'virtual tickets' that give you the right to download a movie from anywhere you want. People making use of music in their videos would be required to have a link to buy the ticket. I think the idea of charging for "digital copies" doesn't make sense anymore, because it has zero scarcity, same goes with "digital performance"
I used to be this guy, i would pirate software, music, tv shows, films, games etc. I did it mainly because it was easy. Innovation has changed my ways, not completely, but mostly.
I no longer pirate music, ive paid for spotify for over 2 years now, i get music wherever i want on any device and its great, i wish they had metallica and acdc but theres youtube for that.
I no longer pirate software, linux got good at "just working" and i've been using ubuntu for years now. I use google docs and other SaaS apps and pay for really good apps like dropbox.
I no longer pirate games, mainly because i'm not much of a gamer, but i have paid for some indie games like SPAZ, Minecraft, QUBE, Darwinia etc because they're indie and the money goes to the developer and the price point is much more reasonable than the big games that come with heavily restrictive DRM.
I still download TV Shows, but not as much as i used to because of BBC iPlayer and similar initiatives, its mainly American TV i download, i've actually no idea if this is illegal or not, considering most of the shows are put on the american networks websites for streaming too.
For films there are LoveFilm, Netflix (now in the UK), iPlayer does some films now as does youtube, but i still think films are the category that is lacking the most, but also a really tough nut to crack, but hell, if it can be done with music, it can be done with films.
So, in my opinion, innovation and me feeling good about giving money to actual people rather than conglomerates is what has stopped me from pirating as much as i used to and thats the key.
I no longer pirate software because I can live with free software or if I really need/want something I guess I could just pay for it. I no longer pirate games because I don't play that much and if I do I mostly play games that are "free to play". Several times a year I buy a "serious" game on steam because it is so easy.
However I still do pirate movies because they are extremely expensive and I know of no way how to watch them online for smaller prices. I still pirate TV shows because there is no way I could watch them otherwise (that I know of at least). Music, well.. much less than I used to.
Luckily it is not illegal to download a movie or a song, but it is still not right. I guess.
Interestingly, I still pirate shows that are available on iPlayer. Simply because the iPlayer experience is inferior to pirating it. Why? Well, let's see...
* iPlayer runs through Flash, it has to because of DRM (the iPhone version gets around this I think). I use a relatively recent Macbook Pro and the playback performance is dreadful. Even on my beasty iMac the HD versions of shows were stuttery at best, so I was forced to use the SD version. Normally I'm quite happy downloading and watching an SD broadcast of a show in full-screen, but in iPlayer the quality of the upscaling is so bad that it's distracting.
* Shows are quite often available on torrent sites before they're available through iPlayer (discounting watching content as it airs), this is especially true of HD content.
* Despite living in London, my internet connection simply isn't reliable enough to handle streaming without occasional buffering, even with SD. So my preferred approach is to download a show rather than stream it. I've generally found that downloading into iPlayer Desktop is slower than using a torrent site. As well as the fact that VLC doesn't eat my CPU like Adobe Air does.
By comparison, I'm a happy customer of Spotify, and I'm more than happy to pay for a video equivalent. I've tried Netflix now that it's out here, but the Silverlight player is as bad as Flash when it comes to CPU usage. The quality of the Netflix streams is pretty poor too, I've yet to manage to get it enable streaming in HD.
The regional licensing is the biggest barrier in my opinion. Germany is even worse than the UK and access to English speaking media is very difficult here. There are no legal outlets.
Frustratingly I would happily pay to access US and UK TV shows in the same way that I pay for music via Spotify, but the media companies aren't interested in taking my money. They are too busy trying to sue us and censor the internet instead.
BBC iPlayer Global is a joke. I have to navigate the Germany Apple Store (in German), sign up for a German iTunes account and my UK issued credit card is refused, even though the billing address held with the credit card company is correctly registered to my German address.
US internet companies struggle with the concepts of locale, language and applicable regional law. The whole issue is complex and nobody gets it right. It is often forgotten that where someone lives is not directly related to the language they speak (or preferred language). I find legally binding terms and conditions hard enough to understand in English, let alone in German. Legally, that is still my problem. Should it be? Do I need to see ads in German Google? Accept Language anyone??? http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...
This is such bullshit, I really wish I could downvote this sort of post.
If you don't agree with the methods used by companies to sell their products DON'T then take it anyway, you're showing people WANT the product but aren't willing to pay, so what's the best solution? Make it harder to pirate / try to block pirating.
This guy and everyone else who refuses to just not consume media they can't get on terms they and the companies agree with are the reason we have all this SOPA crap.
If the latest Rihanna album is $10 and you're only willing to pay $1 instead of then pirating DON'T get it, just ignore it, if everyone did this we'd have no problems, then media companies would either adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong, they wouldn't then fight the internet.
This guy and everyone else who follows the same point of view is essentially trying to blackmail media companies, how about instead you just move on. You have no right to the media they produce and if you're unhappy with what they want for it MOVE ON. If Sony want to sell the latest album from band x for $1,000 that's their choice, you have no right to that album.
Some people would consider popular music to be part of their culture. It's much like asking if you have to buy Microsoft Office when it has such a hegemony. You can of course not buy it, but there is pressure to do so.
When I started making enough money to buy everything I was consuming, I put an end to my piracy habit for some time. I had Netflix, used Rhapsody (then Spotify), bought season passes on iTunes (I used iPlayer a couple times but being in the US I had to use Tor to get around the region filter to watch a Louis Theroux documentaries, I guess that's "piracy").
I stopped when I realized that while I could afford it, all of these services were inferior to the ones I was used to. I will gladly pay for a product that is better than its free counterpart. I will even pay for a product that I could pirate, but I will not pay more to watch ads and listen to music on only a limited number of DRM-supported devices.
Yup! And that's why comparing digital piracy with car theft is also equally silly.
Note, I don't have a hard stance on this. Counterfeiting drugs, etc. is wrong for obvious reasons. Coming up with a similar argument for entertainment media is a bit less tenable.
When the MPAA and RIAA cede the moral high ground by acting like idiots (suing 12-year olds, pushing for high criminal charges, SOPA/PIPA, etc.), it makes it more difficult to make a moral argument for the industry.
The everything free argument is crap. But given that I pay for songs on iTunes but pirate TV shows because Derp Studios refuses to put it anywhere online, the user case is valid.
I was comparing the laws of theft. It's just the law that a copyright owner can ask whatever for it. When you obtain a copy without flowing this rule it is called theft.
So I think the discussion should be about the copyright law. Not about "I think this service sucks so I will get an illegal copy".
Don't get me wrong. I think it's absurd that you can get a penalty of $10.000 for downloading a MP3. I think the copyright rules should change.
But I think it's silly to fight a law by disobeying it. It will give the MPAA good ground to say "see they are pirates".
Laws aren't absolute; they are, when properly written, the codification of social mores. Presently, copyright law conflates copying with theft, you are correct in this. But I think the meta-debate surrounding the issue is whether this assumption is correct; it is thus circular to cite the law as one's defence.
"I think it's silly to fight a law by disobeying it"
I agree with the sentiment that this should not be a first response. But if the intent is to deprive the studios of revenue while sticking a finger to them with the intention of encouraging them to back down, then it is a valid strategy (with precedence). Given the radicalisation of the MPAA, however, I don't see that as being likely.
So I agree with you in practice, but diverge in principle.
The article talks about generic drugs, which are off-patent drugs, and completely okay.
Problem with counter-feit drugs is the usual quality checks aren't present. This can lead to ineffective or even harmful drugs that patients take while thinking they are getting the real thing.
Not yet, but the technology is rapidly improving. With the right equipment (3d scanner, 3d printer), you can copy basic items at home today. It is only a matter of time.
With the right technology, why wouldn't you copy a car? A car only has value because of its inherit scarcity. If you could copy a car, it wouldn't be worth anything (aside from the cost of materials required to perform the copy).
I was in the movie theatre three weeks ago and paid almost 10€ for the ticket only to be forced to watch - I kid you not - 30 minutes of commercials + another 20 minutes of movie trailers before the movie even started. And when you reserve a ticket, you are forced to be there 30 minutes before the movie begins, otherwise they released the seats.
That was a waste of 50+30 minutes of my time, which was more than half of the entire movie. And I even paid 10 freaking bucks for it.
This was the moment when I realized that I probably won't go to a movie theater more than once a year from now on.
This doesn't mean that I now will go on and pirate the movie. There's still iTunes and I don't need to see a movie on release day, but it was a great example for how companies mess up the user experience.
The irony is that some theaters show something like a self-commercial with the saying "Cinema - that's what movies are made for".
Disclaimer: This happened in Germany. The movie-watching experience in the US was way better to me. No commercials, only a few trailers.
You should find a smaller cinema then. In my experience only huge ventures like Cinestar can afford to behave so badly to their customers, whereas independent cinemas have excellent service (and sometimes are even cheaper!).
Same thing here in Austria. They cancelled most of the 2D features, leaving only ~10€ 3D movies - which I don't like, because the screen seems to be too dark as to compensate for the polarization filter of the glasses. Also, a small bottle of soda costs 3,40€ at the vending machine.
I believe ploum still lives in France and in France when you buy a usb sticks, blank CDs and hard drives, you have to pay a "private copy tax" that can be in the tens of euros.
So even if he ignores it, he is still paying them money because media companies can't adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong.
The concept is a bit different, at the moment. Creating copies of copyrighted material _could_ be possible with scanners, printers, CD and DVD burners ... The fee you pay on those and other devices is rather to pay for illegal copies that are created of copyrighted material you own. Not for creating hardcopies of illegally acquired content.
At least that is what is supposed to do. In reality ... well you might want to learn German for that and read this interesting tidbit about the rights holder association of Germany (GEMA): hxxp://www.musiker-online.de/Newsdetails.newsdetails.0.html?&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=267&tx_ttnews[backPid]=10&cHash=226c5da554
Duplicating CDs (or DVDs or books) for private use is indeed legal in France (even if the original comes from a library). The "taxe sur la copie privée" is intended to compensate for the fact that fewer copies are sold because of such private copy. It has nothing to do with piracy.
No, it's not fiction. I live in Spain and we have a similar tax. It taxes private copys, which are defined as
1. The work must be publicly available.
2. It must be done by a physic person (as opposed to an organization)
3. For private use, i.e. not broadcasting to an open audience allowed (but I can play it in my house with my friends).
4. Access to the work must have been obtained legally.
5. Must be non-profit.
6. The receiver of the copy cannot be a collective.
So I can buy a CD and make a copy to all of my friends. They can do the same, and so on (a copy of a legal bought CD is legal).
According to some experts, P2P falls into a gray area, or it used to before they changed the law. I'm sure they will refine it progressively, but I won't stop downloading while I pay my copy tax for USB STICKS, BLANK CDs & DVDs, MP3 PLAYERS, HDDs AND EVENT PRINTERS AND PAPER.
Anyway the general attorney throw a paper stating that downloaders shouldn't be prosecuted.
One time, years ago, some members of an internet freedom organization, got a laptop with WIFI and, after calling the police to inform them of the fact, they mounted a table in the street and downloaded copyrighted works, offering free copys to whomever passed near, to show that it's legal.
There is an exception, however: Software is not covered under the private copy, so it would be illegal to copy software (being myself a developer, I have never undertood the differentiation).
The funniest part is that this tax is directly collected by private entities (our *AA counterpart), which have in the higher seats crappy artists which decide how to share the collected money (i.e. between themselves and their dearest friends). Some of them, like Alejandro Sanz, are arguably very crappy, but at least they are artists (for some definition of the word). But some others, like Teddy Bautista (ex president, now convict for different forms of stealing) or Ramoncín, AFAIK haven't composed or sung a song in the last decades.
On a tangent topic, I hate to buy videogames nowadays, with all the DRM crap and other nasties. But if I pirate them, everything works without effort, despite the industry marketing advertising the opposite (you know: beware! virus!, et cetera). I won't pay for losing my time with their nonsense. So a couple months ago I decided to only buy DRM-free games from Humble Bundle.
It was actually proposed at the French parliament to (basically) make "piracy" legal and subsidize the cultural industry via taxes. The name of that system was "Licence Glogale" (global licensing).
I feel that these taxes worsen the problem. If, every time I bought blank media, the record companies got a cut, then you bet I'd not buy any music, but copy it instead. I would see it as a right that I had paid for.
I agree with you so much. To this person and all the others you don't have some God given right to the content they produce/deliver. Instead of pirating go without.
Will life stop if you don't watch the latest episode of Community? Probably. Give it a go. If you die I have dibs on your $2000 Macbook Pro, $800 iPhone, $250 Sennheiser headphones, etc. The very phrase 'Because you are messing with my life' in this context shows how much is wrong with the current culture.
These companies are destroying civilisation? I've asked this question before: If I create a piece of software and ask you to not use it without purchasing it, will you do that? Very few people seem to be able to answer yes. The people who can't answer yes are those who are ruining civilisation. There is so much hyperbole in this article ("Messing with my life was not enough. You are even trying to destroy one of the pillar of our society: education.") I'm not quite sure if it's satirical or not, hah.
Steve Jobs mentioned that in the end it comes down to the person knowing they've done something wrong after they've tried to rationalise their way out of it ("BUT IT'S NOT STEALING" or whatever the latest fad is).
During high school I pirated a hell of a lot of software, videogames, music, movies—everything. I still bought more video games than most people will in their life times but that in no way balances what I pirated. I've stopped (All I have left is to make a list of the music I have and listen to in order to delete it all and slowly purchase it, which I've started doing). I either pay for something, borrow it or go without.
The funny thing is, I don't like these big corporations either. I wish people would stop treating them as large, mythical and faceless entities but talk to the people behind the door. Until both sides come to understand each other and seek that communication they [we] will forever be at war.
I don't support SOPA nor do I support blatant pirates.
You're right but do you really want to return to the 90s when CDs cost $20 each and you had to carry around a 100 CDs instead of an mp3 player? Or to the 80s when we used lo-fi tapes instead? The labels would love this.
It shouldn't be required of just the RIAA to use technology properly but everyone. If someone makes music you like, and they're not attempting to rob, respect them. $1 is not much for a song you enjoy.
I don't care what the labels do. If they fell they cant make money that way then they should probably stay out of the digital business model.
But the truth of course is that they saw huge benefits throughout the years as it became cheaper and cheaper for them to produce and distribute the music.
Where is your sympathy for all the truckers, records store people etc. that lost their jobs because of digitalization?
I personally have more sympathy for them, the musicians will always have the music. Whether they will be able to live from it is another thing.
I'm trying to understand your point. Are you for digital music being available or not?
>Where is your sympathy for all the truckers, records store people etc. that lost their jobs because of digitalization?
Of course I do have sympathy for them but humanity has to move forward. We are living in a disruptive age – much like those in the beginning of the Industrial Age. Humanity will need to adjust. This really is another subject for another story and doesn't hold relevance to the topic of piracy.
>I personally have more sympathy for them, the musicians will always have the music. Whether they will be able to live from it is another thing.
This makes no sense. You are condemning musicians to the same fate as those you mentioned. The only difference is that potential future truckers and HS/college students at record stores won't suffer because there will be new jobs created but the artist always will.
So basically what you are saying is that the truckers should get with the times but the artist shouldn't?
We live as you say in a disruptive age and this applies in no small part to artists.
As with regards to the starving artists.
Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
They are very different than those the labels push to become big stars today.
What i mean with they will alway have art is this.
The trucker will loose their job and that's pretty much it. The artists will always be able to do art whether they get paid for it or not.
>So basically what you are saying is that the truckers should get with the times but the artist shouldn't?
You're playing a game that has nobody's interests at hand.
Yes I'm saying this because 'truckers' are going to get left behind. You still haven't answered the question of whether we should live in the digital age or not.
>Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
You're playing a game against my argument.
All artists struggle but do you want them to become eternally poor?
>Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
Do you or many know the difference? Are most making the distinction and buying indie products? I can already tell that they are not.
I lived as a musician for some years. I think I have a pretty good understanding on how it works and I am playing no game at all.
Plus I have both a product out (cost money), a service out (free), have a design agency.
I don't say that artist shouldn't make money. I think they should when they work. But claiming that it's somehow a right for musicians to keep reaping the benefits of digital distribution but not those related to it, is in my mind wrong and not serving the anyone.
Truckers and musicians who don't conform to the new reality is going to be left behind.
It's really that simple. Of course they will try and get the government to protect their interest and it will have people helping them defend that.
But it's not a fair game.
And artist neither are nor will be eternally poor. It's a poor argument. There will always be people who make money on their creations, they will just have to do it differently than what we do today.
Technology is always a double edged sword. No one, not even artist can escape that.
Who gave it to them? I dont think that we ever, as a society, ever fundamentally _agreed_ to the existence of such exclusivity rights. Yes they are in the constitution, yes they are in the lawbooks, but the people at large never fundamentally agreed that such rights should be in there. The decision process was always top-down, never bottom-up. They are not a result of peoples morality, but of a interest-driven, behind-closed-doors development process. Those laws dont map the will of the people, of your fellow citizens, but of a few, but influential stake holders. Such rights are not democratically backed. If you would ever have a referendum on copyright policy, you would probably lose them.
I agree with your sentiment, but it seems you have a contradiction here: " (All I have left is to make a list of the music I have and listen to in order to delete it all and slowly purchase it, which I've started doing). I either pay for something, borrow it or go without."
If you really believe what you say, you'd delete all your pirated music right now. Either that, or you might modify your views a bit.
To quote you: "you don't have some God given right to the content they produce/deliver. Instead of pirating go without."
I don't understand how that fits with finishing making the list. If you can keep some pirated music around since high school, and now longer so that you can make a list, can't I download a little to see if I like it? If it's good, I'll pay to go to a concert or buy the tracks off Amazon. ":)"
> This is such bullshit, I really wish I could downvote this sort of post.
Don't forget that people might upvote a post not because they agree, but because they're interested in the discussion that follows. At least, it's why I upvoted the post. I hadn't completely made up my mind and arguments like yours convinced me.
It's not a right to make millions it's a right to make... whatever you make.
Rihanna could release her music on vinyl only but it would still be recorded and converted to an MP3 and up on torrents in a matter of hours, digital has nothing to do with it.
The business model they would probably switch to in the case of no copyright would be to distribute a small amount of the music for free but if you want to hear the rest you have to attend a live concert where you would be searched for recording devices on entry.
Good point. It is strange to read how people try to justify copying music/movies/... if they never had the intention to buy it in the first place. I do have sympathy for to circumvent DRM, ... e.g. to watch a DVD of region x (which I bought) on a player of region y. I don't have any sympathy for people who steal while I pay for the same thing.
Sharing an original work against the express wishes of the creator? Nope, you are dishonouring their hard work in creating the content and their intentions in making it available to the public.
I supposes breaching the terms of the GPL would be 'honourable' too.
How can sharing something be wrong? Especially when it is essentially a bunch of 0s and 1s that you could write down by hand if you had the patience to? Sharing a number is wrong?
I don't understand what that has to do with GPL at all.
Just like the GPL, copyright puts conditions on the disposal of a work. There are no physical restrictions in either case, just the idea that you honour these terms.
Would you feel comfortable walking past an artist trying to graft a living selling paintings/prints in a street stall, then against his wishes take a picture of them and tell him you're going to share these with your friends so they don't have to buy his work? Does that seem honourable to you?
Also consider a situation whereby two parties had a contract dictating the terms of how some artistic work could be used. There's obviously nothing wrong with this since both parties have agreed to the contract. Then say some third party illegally acquires the work and makes it available elsewhere. Seems fair that at this point we can rely upon copyright to protect the work of citizens. Just like you have privacy rights and defamation rights and so on.
> How can sharing something be wrong? Especially when it is essentially a bunch of 0s and 1s that you could write down by hand if you had the patience to?
Everything in the world is essentially just a bunch of atom, too. By this logic you can probably do anything you want and never be wrong, right?
GPL is about sharing the source code of the original or derivative work. Which is pretty honorable. Breaching the terms of GPL means refusing to share.
Regarding your first point, yes, since we're speaking about ethics here, it's morally acceptable to disregard wishes of authors to restrict your freedom of handling copies of their published work, as long as doing this is good for people and makes no harm to authors.
Seriously, what is wrong with people's moral compasses with regards to sharing? Is this the result of brainwashing by publishers? OK, laws are laws, but morals? They have nothing to do with laws. Oh the mighty author, should I apologize to you (or, perhaps, go to jail) for signing your songs before you died + century?
But the point, I believe, is that the concept of breaching the GPL is nonsensical if you do not respect the GPL or the copyright law on which it rests. Whether if you share something against its creator's will, or if you refuse to share something against its creator's will, in both cases you are ignoring the creator's wishes and violating copyright law.
Yes. But speaking in terms of morale, not laws, not sharing the source code for GPL software is morally wrong and dishonorable. Sharing it is morally right and honorable.
This is a series of pretty poor arguments. The author seems to be looking for reasons to justify their own piracy and conflates anger at the approach of the "copyright industry" with infringement upon peoples' rights. One of the final lines of the article, in particular, is jarring:
"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off."
It's fine to be angry about the approach large copyright holders take to piracy - suing consumers, encouraging the extradition of 23 year old UK citizens for linking, throwing cash at politicians to try to push through obscene laws like SOPA/PIPA. I'm angry about it. It's a horribly reactive, staid approach to a changing world that just isn't going to net them any long-term profitability.
What's not fine is in your mind elevating your piracy to the level of a significant political protest. It might make you feel better about it, but it really doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.
I wasn't particularly impressed with the quality of the arguments either. On the other hand I don't see much hope of change unless 'piracy' becomes even more commonplace than it already is.
So while I personally would rather do without (similar to using Linux/Gimp vs pirating Windows/Photoshop etc.) and think that piracy in many ways strengthens the hand of the copyright owners by suffocating legitimate alternatives (again see Linux/Gimp vs pirated XP/Photoshop) I think that encouraging and legitimizing widespread piracy could well be the only "significant political protest" with any chance to succeed.
Riots and revolutions tend to happen in the summer, maybe copyright will only change if some people get to watch Transformers for free. I can live with that.
That's one of my problems with his argument. The author seems to think he has a fundamental right to access the produce of media companies... but only on terms he finds reasonable, of course.
As you say, rights are often malleable - and reevaluating and redefining them (from both sides of this debate) should be an ongoing process.
The way I see it is that the author is using this blog post to fight for what he believes are his rights, and the businesses are fighting for what they believe are their rights. Philosophical/Moral arguments aside, this war will be won by whoever is louder/more influential.
Absolutely, but the counter argument is that the conclusion of that debate is expressed by the law, which is supposed to be the will of the people.
You could of course make the case that our democracy is too imperfect to accept the letter of any particular law as a direct expression of the will of the people without applying your further judgement.
Laws can be inconsistent, unjust or inappropriately applied and that's why we have the courts to make those judgements. Unfortunately, access to the courts is very unequal, particularly in the case of civil law. It's always been like this, hence breaking the law has always been the poor man's expensive lawyer and lobbyist at the same time.
Of course this argument could be used as a blanket excuse for breaking any law. Personal judgement just can't be replaced by any system.
> It might make you feel better about it, but it really
> doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something
> of value
Copyright infringement is not stealing.
Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).
I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments:
If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get more widely known, more famous).
Some compare pirating a DVD with going to a masseuse/prostitute and not paying her/him afterwards. This analogy is not correct - the expectation/social contract is that I have to pay you after I receive a service, and if I don't pay you, you are worse-off because you don't have money that you would otherwise have. However, people that pirate movies/music are not automatically lost revenue - probably they would buy less than 10% (just a guess) of entertainment content that they download/consume through piracy.
A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her.
When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. (yes, you can say it does indirectly through some convoluted story, but that's always debatable)
The future economy will be more about directly personalized experiences and services that cannot be copied, or are much less interesting when copied, instead of trivial fan-outs of information. It is all about scarcity. Better to let that sink in than try to preserve what is already lost, at the cost of freedom.
(edit: why do I say future? It is already the present for many of us)
> When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied.
But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio.
> It is all about scarcity.
Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship.
Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.
Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.
My point is that a work that is just information, no matter how high quality, will be copied. There is no scarcity.
Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case.
Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes.
Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.
OK, I think I understand where you're coming from now.
Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways.
Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past.
Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince.
A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though.
Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough".
There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk.
Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense.
Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in.
These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities:
1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do).
2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough").
3. Fail.
None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.
None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright
I think that was a common sentiment at the end of each "age". How to go from here, all the alternatives suck from our point of view. I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
At a certain point, the ends don't justify the means anymore. DMCA was ok-ish, but I think we reached that point with SOPA and similar laws. Especially as those means are the same as can be used to censor other things, and will very likely be abused for that, with the militarization happening all over the world.
So that solution falls under (3) fail as well. Which leaves the other options, including those we haven't thought of yet. People are creative and will find ways to get by...
> I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
I think there's potential there, but there would need to be a dramatic cultural shift so it didn't just become a case of anything "good enough" was done, with no meaningful incentive to put the final polish to turn good works into great ones. Take a look at the Open Source software community today: it's full of "good enough" products, which do the basic jobs perfectly well for a lot of people, but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.
> But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
Unfortunately, that isn't really true. It would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology. It's just that I (and, I suspect, most other people here) would prefer not to accept the unfortunate side-effects that come with compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges.
but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.
Yes, the edge cases, the personalization, the polishing. There will always be work in that. Adapting systems to their specific surroundings. Every place, every person is unique, and has specific demands. That's what I meant with the cookie-cutter stuff going away.
it would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology
Sure, but is just as easy to avoid copyright enforcement with the current technology. And for those desperate there is always the analog hole. That kind of summarizes the DRM "war".
compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges
Because that'd effectively be an Orwellian world. So we'd need to go to a total surveillance state, centrally controlled world, just to make sure things keep working as they do now. Just to make some people happy at the expense of the rest. That's not only inhuman, but very unstable as well.
"Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways."
This is not a strong argument. I could equally look at the time of the enlightenment and say "if people weren't forced to give their money to the Catholic church, think of all the lovely buildings and choral music we'd be denied. Therefore - people should be forced to give money to the church!"
In the case of copyright, you need to consider this opportunity cost. i.e. things we don't have because copyright has made them impossible. As with the church example, there is also a significant cost of freedom.
There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.
> There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.
Which you haven't cited, I notice.
If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards. Obviously you can give lots of examples where this has been done successfully to back up your case, then?
I'll take another angle. Live-and-let live should be the default case. Copyright is an intrusion on this. If someone wants to drive a tank through freedom by introducing something like copyright, then the onus is on the tank drivers to make the case that the benefits justify the intrusion on freedom.
I've never seen a remotely reasonable attempt at putting that case. The best you get is claims that people wouldn't produce things unless they had vast legal protections and that's plainly false. Mendelssohn wrote symphonies. I write code, in a commercial setting, with copyright not being the justification for it.
Handel is an even better example, because it's well documented that he rearranged lots of previous stuff. We wouldn't have any record of some of those earlier tunes had he not repurposed them in his own works. Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ could not be performed or distributed under current western-world copyright law.
"If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards."
When you have copyright law it creates a powerful lobby group and any attempt at reform will come up against them. Much as with my discussion about the church above - an institution that impeded progress and freedom, but which fought ferociously to retain privilege at every step.
What could cause the dam to break would be a major economic slump and a desperate move to try something new to attract smart people. Or something like SOPA may be a step too far, and cause Sweden or New Zealand or Singapore or a special economic zone in China to make a play at being a free-state-style intellectual capital.
There is compelling evidence that Prussia's explosive progress in the 19th century was due to the lack of copyrights. At the same time, England's progress was smothered under strong copyrights. The historian Eckhard Höffner has done a lot of research in this area. Here's a taste:
There surely are a lot of people who obtain quality content through TPB without paying for it. However, from what I could observe, attempts at making this group of people pay anyway have been largely fruitless so far, while at the same time they often appear to inconvenience paying customers, e.g. through intrusive "copy protection" schemes. So as a content producer, I tend to think of what I might "loose" through TPB as "promotion expenses".
Sure, let's have a very pedentic notion of stealing and keeping framing the debate around 'stealing'.
OK... "taking something which isn't yours and/or you don't have permission to take". In most minds, that's the same as stealing, hence the standard use of the word 'stealing'. But substitute the phrase above for 'stealing' and, imo, it becomes harder to justify. Just because I an not doing an actual verifiable economic harm to someone doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but doesn't make it right either.
- Copyright Act of 1790 - established U.S. copyright
with term of 14 years with 14-year renewal
- Copyright Act of 1831 - extended the term to
28 years with 14-year renewal
- Copyright Act of 1909 - extended term to 28 years
with 28-year renewal
- Copyright Act of 1976 - extended term to either
75 years or life of author plus 50 years
- Copyright Renewal Act of 1992
removed the requirement for renewal
- Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994
restored U.S. copyright for certain foreign works
- Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended terms
to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years
- Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
criminalized some cases of copyright infringement
So let's get this straight, from 14 years the copyright period was extended to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years. And there's reason to believe that as long as Disney (and the like) exists, the concept of public domain is obsolete.
So you can talk about right versus wrong, good versus evil and so on, but clearly something stinks about this picture, which is why I don't blame "pirates" for justifying their acts, as their acts are justified.
And, how fucked up is it that restaurants are afraid of singing "Happy Birthday to You"? Are those singing it thieves?
Again, not really saying anything about the "right" or "wrong" aspects, but continually using the word "stealing" in the debate, then debunking it by comparing it to a car, is, at best, a strawman argument. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a better/easier one word description people can use (for soundbiteness) that adequately gets the point across that the major industries are trying to get across.
The point that the major industries are trying to get across is that copyright infringement is just like stealing. They're saying so quite explicitly whenever I go to the movie theater or rent a DVD.
But copyright infringement is not stealing. You could make an argument about it if the period was still 14 years (i.e. the author has only 14 years to collect revenue from it, so if you want it either pay up or wait 14 years, which is doable). But that's not the case.
Because copyright is not the same as stealing a physical item, so if you want to discuss the morality of it, then length does play a role, as it should since all works should enter public domain at some point, therefore ALL discussions about copyright should address the ever-extending length.
Also, discussing the morality of copyright infringement is also important, as copyright infringement does not rob the owner of the item itself. It only duplicates it.
Because a copyrighted work is not actual property, even if they call it "intellectual property" today, but that's mostly a misnomer. A copyrighted work was supposed to return to the public domain and benefit the whole society, not just the creator, by using it and improving it.
I recommend you think about this: where does property come from? Is something ours because the government says it's ours or does it have a deeper meaning that transcends government?
I'd argue that property exists because things (apples, cars, gym equipment) have limitations on their use. If I eat an apple, you can't. If you grow a crop on this property, you can't. While he uses this gym equipment, they can't.
Even in historical contexts where there has been no effective government (silk road, dark ages iceland), ideas of property have evolved that are strikingly consistent, because it extends from realities of the world.
As states developed, they came to give stronger definition to property law. But then people who were well-connected to government decided that it would be a good idea to extend these convenient powers to things which were not property, sometimes by falsely labeling them as property.
So it comes down to who has control over the language.
Is property a distinct idea, or is it just a bundle of whatever rights the government of the day declares it to be.
And if you choose the latter, if the government says that black is white, is it so?
You raise a good point here about what property actually is.
I'd like to extend on this concept and add ownership into equation.
In the example with an apple. I own it, therefore only I can eat it. It is my property. Now what happens if I give the apple to somebody else? It's their property now, so you would naturally assume they own it? And therefore they can eat it.
Alas, it's not the case with music/etc. I bought a CD with music, but it appears that I don't own it. I cannot listen to it in public (Happy Birthday to You), nor I can give it to someone else (lend DVD to a friend for a pint).
So this doesn't work out very well, the CD is my property, but I don't own it? To me owning means having right to do whatever I please with it. Imagine if blending an iPhone would become a criminal offence...
Yes. I think the key point here is that property is treated in law as a right, but copyright functions as an anti-right.
I'll try to explain what I mean by anti-right though I'm unpracticed here.
(1) Society is oriented around a presumption of live-and-let-live. Most laws give rights that state the boundary of live-and-let live, and these are positive rights.
(2) In the case of copyright, only the creator has the ability to live-and-let-live in the context of the protected thing: everyone else is restricted from it. Hence, this is a negative right, or "anti-right".
When rights and anti-rights clash, you get nasty situations develop where they can't all be true at the same time.
i.e. in order to make IP anti-rights work, the laws need to inhibit 'real' property rights.
i.e. I am not allowed to do things with magnetic signals in the privacy of my own home because that impedes an anti-right that the government has granted to someone else.
If you build complex software with a permissions model that contains both positive and negative permissions (i.e. where a user has a permission that is "can't see" something rather than being a positive right), you'll find similar nasty situations develop.
It's not pedantic to differentiate between two completely different things.
If you ever have something stolen from you, you'll quickly realize the difference between theft and copyright infringement.
Debates such as these keep orbiting around the definition of stealing because the term keeps getting used for copyright infringement out of lazy thinking or in order to facilitate an agenda.
Stealing is intrinsically "wrong" from a societal perspective because it puts those who take by force into a better position than those who earn by earning it, which is not sustainable.
Whether anyone is put into a worse position by copyright infringement (e.g. in the form of illegal downloading of music) is up for debate. But any serious debate should avoid the term stealing to describe the issue at hand.
There's an economic concept called 'club goods', which describe the way copyrighted materials are supposed to work -- you pay for access and get the same rights that everyone else who pays gets.
With a club good there is a tangible thing such as a running machine. By my use of it, you are unable to use it. But we judge the tradeoff to be worth it because we don't each want to go out and buy a gym.
That is unlike copyright where the cost of making a copy is nothing, and may even increase the value of the copied data through network effects.
I was using the definition on wikipedia. Quoting from that page;
> Examples of club goods include private golf courses, cinemas, cable television, access to copyrighted works, and the services provided by social or religious clubs to their members.
Also this definition on econport.org;
> Club Goods: Goods that are excludable but non-rival, or non-subtractable. This means that while certain people can be excluded from the consumption of a good, one person's consumption of it does not diminish another person's.
The point is; people say copyright violation is stealing, is isn't stealing, and arguments occur. To have a good conversation about it, it's useful to distinguish club good from private goods, because then we can talk about the difference between "unauthorised access to a club good" (piracy) and "unauthorised posession of a private good" (theft).
By "access to copyrighted works" they may be talking about going to the club's library and reading the copy they already have (which may occasionally conflict with other members' use) rather than making more copies.
OK, how would you feel if the person who owned your apartment before you came in with a key he still had while you were out and sat in your bedroom in the dark (not using power) playing with himself?
You're not using your flat, it's there anyway, you've not lost anything, nothing has been broken or damaged, he's gone before you're back so it's fine right?
This is more a question of privacy than of "stealing"/"not paying". In a world where privacy didn't exist (i.e. there would be no "reasonable expectations of privacy", I wouldn't mind.
Let's use another example. I order food, but don't eat all I get. If you will eat it, I would be very glad, as it wouldn't go to waste.
Why is your expectation of a right to privacy an issue but not the creators expectation of payment for their work?
After all, at the time they created it the legal and commercial framework, as well as the social norms, said that they could expect payment from anyone who consumed their work.
Why are you allowed to override their expectations yet someone using your property without your permission isn't allowed to override yours?
If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it. In the end, it always boils down to pirates being spoiled. People never pirate to make ends meet. There is no digital content that is essential to anyone's life. People pirate because they want to be entertained but they don't want to pay for it.
There is an economic cost. If even one person pirates a digital work who WOULD have paid for it had pirating not been an option, it causes a cost to the producer of the media. So there is a real cost.
If the pirate is enjoying the music, then clearly the pirate would be willing to pay something more than nothing to hear the music, if piracy were not easily avaliable.
Of course, but that implies that it is possible to pay for it. The copyright holders must adapt business models so potential customers can pay for a product they want, not some inferior DRM that hurts the customer. As long as piracy gives potential customers the best product, the incentive to pay is lost.
> be willing to pay something more than nothing to hear the music.
In this case $0 or even a negative value amount is what you can plug into something. Why? Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.
However, what they pay with is with their time and attention.
I used to know someone who managed a movie theater. He would sneak us into movies quite often. Good and bad. And quite often after coming out of the movie I felt like wanting "my free back".
Let's say an artist is unknown and I am a customer that has quite a few connection ( a blog with a large following perhaps ). Then what would make sense is for me to pay a negative amount ( the artist would pay me to spend my time listening to his new cool record in the hopes that I might spread the news about it ).
> Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.
FWIW, the only album I've paid for in years was a pay-what-you-want deal. I paid something like $3. Which was all that was left in my bank account after I paid my rent and bought groceries for that month - I'm a college student.
If the pirate derives benefit from it but less benefit than the price and thus does not consume, then there is a deadweight loss. In this case, piracy provides a net benefit to society.
(Studies have shown that the sales-displacing effect of piracy in music ranges from 42% to no effect at all[1]. If all piracy could be prevented, that's an awfully large deadweight loss)
I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.
If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.
So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!
To me this - the market is not meeting the demand - is the single best argument.
If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.
If it's not available I have no real issue with getting it illegally.
Frankly if the media companies adopted day and date releases worldwide for content and worked to make their back catalogues widely available through convenient means (by which iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on count) a lot of the best arguments in favour of piracy dry up.
> If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.
You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:
"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."
I'm not necessarily suggesting that it's workable as a solution for the whole industry, more that for those who wish to "combat piracy", if you strip away the objections that honest people have, you have a better chance of making your case.
Content creators have rights around their content. One of those rights is how it is distributed, and who gets to use it. Pirating a TV show because you feel it should be available in your country is no different from say violating the GPL. Often GPL'ed software is misguided and would serve everyone better under a different license, but it still remains the author's right to choose the GPL.
Why do you seek out and watch the content made by people you violently despise?
I think part of the reason people pirate foreign TV shows is because all their friends are doing it.
People are always telling me "OMG, You have to watch this new US TV show".
When I explain that I don't really like piracy I get some very strange looks.
I think people often overestimate how many people are willing to consider ethics at all in purchasing decisions. I know plenty of otherwise nice and decent people who would happily purchase a product that they knew was made by child slavery, hell people even joke about it.
It seems that considering the consequences of your actions isn't hip anymore once consumerism is involved.
Why do you feel entitled to it in the first place? It isn't your god given right to watch community in hd at the drop of a hat. If the old gaurd isn't providing what you want then don't buy their stuff. Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future. If the profit margins on the industry are as large as people say, it should be a race to the bottom, just like you see with artists self distributing these days.
I may be wrong, but most of the reasons that I can't watch community in HD At the drop of a hat is because our gov. can't figure out a deal with the US gov. on rights.
I would gladly pay double the price for Netflix Canada if the service was as good as it is in the states. I don't mind paying for something if it provides me a good service, but it doesn't. Netflix canada is a steaming pile.
So, "Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future." is impossible because if big companies like Netflix can't even do it, no amount of money is going to help the situation.
EDIT: Turns out it's canada's fault, not the us's when it comes to why we don't get hulu/netflix/etc.
I'm feel the same as you. I pay 30 a month for espnplayer.com to watch NCAA football games for my college. I mean my wife thinks I'm nuts but there is a legal way to watch these games so I pay for it. Now I can't seem to find something like this for a lot of other things I enjoy. My wife has to resort to going around the web to get access to shows she enjoyed in the US. Now I understand that some channels in Canada both the rights to most of those things (As for the NCAA games they don't seem to broadcast them here at all) and are not implementing web streaming services for them which is dumb.
Do you work for free? It's pretty essential to all of society that work and/or value is generally paid for. You demanding that content be available for free simply because you want it is no different from your boss deciding to not pay you because he doesn't want to.
Yes people can choose to make their work available for free, and that's great. But that choice again lies in the person who created the work, not the person who consumes it.
And to be perfectly clear, I have no delusion that piracy will ever go away. It's a fact of the digital world. My point is pirates should not delude themselves into thinking what they do is justified. It's not.
The value of said work lies in the consumer, not the producer. If consumers by in large don't want to pay for something, then it simply isn't valuable and producing something in that segment and then complaining about piracy is rather pointless. You know going in consumers don't value that because they're accustomed to getting it for free. You had better expect piracy.
Your point about value lying in the consumer is a good response to the parent. The parent implies that society should invent business models to protect people who do things (but then even fails to make the point through use of word "generally").
However, I don't think the rest of your points are strong. People might not want to pay for apples, but that doesn't give them the justification to steal them. That's not because they don't value them - clearly they do. Or else they wouldn't want them.
Copying is different to stealing because in copying you don't deprive the creating from anything apart from completely arbitrary rights that the law grants to them.
It may also be worth raising that there's room for a difference between protection of 1. privacy (this photo is of me and I don't want it released because that would be invasive to a reasonable definition of privacy); 2. first release (I created something but it's personal, I haven't released it to anyone, and don't want people redistributing it - this is an anti-right, but more reasonable than the next one); 3. Protection of publishers (I create something, and the government gives me a monopoly over all copies and derivatives of it to such an extent that government invades people's civil liberties to protect my business models).
The apple comparison isn't apt; apples are physical products, I'm talking about intellectual products.
Copying isn't stealing, so yea, it's different.
As for the final paragraph, all of those are rather easily solved by realizing that information will be copied whether you like it or not. If you don't want it out there, don't release it. Fake government monopolies on information copying is a dying model, the death throws of the old guard trying to cope with a world they don't understand. Information will be free, eventually.
You have a right to eat food. You don't have a right to walk into a restaurant and eat without paying. I don't have the right to take your food.
You have a right to exercise. You don't have the right to walk into Gold's Gym and use their facilities without paying. I don't have the right to enter your home and use the equipment in the basement.
You have a right to have mutually consensual sex with someone else without paying. You don't have the right to rape a prostitute if they only offer sex for money because you didn't want to pay. I don't have the right to demand sex from your family.
You have the right to borrow a book from your friend if he's willing to lend it to you. You don't have the right to borrow your buddy's book without their permission just as you don't have the right to walk into a bookstore and borrow their books without permission. I don't have the right to take your books from you.
You've confused physical property with intellectual property. Depriving someone of the physical immediately victimizes them, copying their intellectual property doesn't, it's not the same thing.
city41 wrote "If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it." in the context that "it" is copyrighted work that is offered for sale, not just anything. You know it as well as everyone here.
But I do believe that if somebody has something you want and they only offer to you for a price (be it money or otherwise), you don't have a right to it for free, pretty much whatever "it" is. (assuming they have the right to that control in the first place obviously) See biot's comment for eloquent point-by-point explanation.
Consider this: You commision a composer to write a personal song to celebrate you at your anniverseray. You use the song, but decline to pay because the composer can keep a copy of the song, and therefore you are not really taking anything from him. But clearly you have put him in a worse position by using his work without pay - after all he could have done something else with his time and talent.
Interesting hypothetical, but I think there is a difference between specifically asking for a service (and possibly creating a contract) and not paying vs sharing a copy of a work already produced. Otherwise, there are loads of services you can argue against paying for in that way.
Perhaps it was a bad example, but my point was that the argument that "piracy is not taking anyting away" assumes that IP is created in a vaccuum without consideration of the potential audience. This is rarely the case. Production of movies, music etc. is a risky investment with the expectation that if people enjoy the product they will pay. If nobody enjoys it, fair enough, bad investment. But if people do enjoy it, but still don't pay, clearly this is harming the creators.
This argument evaporates when you consider services that offer all-you-can-eat for a flat monthly fee.
If you only have to pay the price of one day's lunch for access to a library of content, then downloading a title rather than watching it on its official outlet will reduce subscription fees and thus impact revenue sharing. So rather than buying less than 10%, there may in fact be no threshold at which pirating becomes more practical, once the initial monetary threshold (being able to afford the subscription fee) is met.
Therefore, copyright infringement can result in a much stronger loss in revenue than you presume, even though I personally agree that it doesn't constitute "stealing", as no physical good has been removed and appropriated illegally. However, what that copyright infringement can do is impede or obstruct certain consumer-favoring (IMO) business models from being viable.
It's possibly true, in my opinion, that sharing in a gray area of material whose market has not yet matured may increase visibility and have future benefits, but no company which deals with content producers and the platform to deliver content can afford to acknowledge this to the content producers or to the audience without risking legitimizing copyright infringement and therefore delegitimizing their own business (which is why I'm not disclaiming where I work, other than it is familiar with these issues).
Not that I'm arguing that there should be no such thing as sharing, but making the moral argument to justify it that stealing isn't putting the company in a worse position is a poor rationale. It's not true and it's not something that can be defended against in public.
Nor am I arguing that piracy will make or break a business. If it's big enough to be popular, it may be big enough to grow a legitimate market faster than the illegitimate alternative. However, this also relies on cooperative content producers and an audience willing to pay for the content. It's a tricky balance but the reality is that while violation of copyright may not produce economic devastation on its own, neither is it devoid of any impact.
tl;dr: Reasonable people should pay for content available to them that they enjoy, especially when affordable.
If authors aren't getting their fair share of the proceeds, wouldn't that be a perfect opportunity for a competing media company to enter the market and crush all existing publishers?
Getting access to good content producers is the easy part of running a traditional media company.
The challenges are about control of limited distribution and promotion channels. This is a vicious territory and a zero-sum game. This helps to explain why that space cultivates nasty people. The sort of person who would have no qualms about grinding an artist down as much as possible.
There's an endless supply of naive, highly skilled, high-ego artists who will do anything to get a 'contract' to get access to distribution. Money is not a key motivator to these people, but some might like the traditional media model if it gives their produce an advantage over equally skilled but less connected mindshare competitors. This is particularly true where the performing artist is just a front for a composition and marketing team.
Fasion is an industry with a similar dynamic to media, but even less emphasis on the quality of content. And - surprise surprise - it's famously dominated by a nasty kind of person.
What are these "distribution and promotion channels" limited by?
What you're saying sounds to me like artists don't deserve to get a larger share because what they do simply isn't the most difficult part of actually making money.
At the end of the day it may just be a completely normal function of supply and demand. Many people can easily supply what mainstream radio stations play all day long.
OK, but a new media company wouldn't face any hurdles that established ones don't. It's not like, say, the market of PC operating systems or social networks where you need network effects. What you describe is simply a limited pool of customers.
OK, well if you want to crush the existing guys, I think you'd need to compete in their space, and that means vying for control of channels (while they're still relevant).
If you want to create and sell CDs then you can do this now. I've got friends who self-publish "classical" music performances and make (not much) money from it by getting good reviews in trade magazines and selling CDs at concerts. Or you could give your music away and sell mugs and tshirts and tickets to performances.
Or there's the model that city-based orchestras do - make margin by selling tickets to concerts and having a distribution agreement with a local music shop or radio network for recordings. e.g. http://www.aso.com.au/recordings.html
No, it's more akin to various kinds of fraud. So that's OK then, I guess.
> Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).
That is simply nonsense. Even musicians signed to the big record labels or authors whose books are distributed by major publishers do a lot better than that if their work is a success. Artists using small-time/independent distributors can do better, and these days plenty of works are self-published and self-promoted, sending the lion's share of the profit back to the artist.
If an author doesn't earn out their advance, they are almost certainly making a lot more than "a fraction of a percentage point" of the revenue.
A few new music artists do sign contracts so one-sided it's absurd, I agree, and they wind up never making any money at all or even paying some of the costs themselves. But that's usually because they let a big record label screw them, which would have happened regardless of the cut they thought they were going to get.
Those same big record labels are still paying several percent to any successful artists who have a half-decent agent/lawyer. More importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, small/indie record labels don't have the power to play those kinds of legal games even if they want to. Again, anyone signed to one is probably getting a lot more than that "fraction of a percentage point".
So, while I agree with you that the major distributors often offer little value today while taking far more of a cut than they deserve, I stand by my original point that it's silly to attack copyright because the original artists only get <1% as a cut. That just isn't true for anyone successful who doesn't let themselves get played.
I agree that the separation of stealing vs. copyright infringement is an unimportant distinction.
But artists do get just a tiny part of the money people pay. Take TLC as a well known example: they were a huge seller, yet they got bankrupt, largely because of how their record company treated them:
>CrazySexyCool eventually sold over 11 million copies in the US, and became one of the first albums to ever receive a diamond certification from the RIAA, and won a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Album and a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group for "Creep". However, in the midst of their apparent success, the members of TLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 3, 1995. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLC_%28band%29)
On the second point, besides the fact that successful artists get a decent share of revenues or not, I just think that it's irrelevant to the question of pirating a piece of work.
If an artist is getting screwed by a label/studio is a problem between them and the label/studio. If, as a consumer, you feel bad for the artist, I don't think the solution is to pirate the work, but instead to let the artist and label/studio know you want to support the artist and not the label/studio and thus be a consumer for things that you feel are more fair to the artist. (e.g. concerts?)
The artist might have unfortunately sold some of their rights to the label/studio for exposure, promotion, etc. and in return don't get as much money as they (or the consumers) think they deserve. Next time, they'll probably deal with a different label/studio…
In fact, it's very similar to the situations between entrepreneurs and VCs… you take some money, sell some rights because that's your only way to make it big. Once you make it big, you might realize that you got screwed and think you deserved more. Next time, you'll either still have made enough money/fame to strike it on your own, or you'll work with better VCs.
I agree with mgkimsal's comments above/below. Let's not muddy the debate with pedantic discussions over the definition of "stealing". You knew what I meant when I used the word.
With regard to your second point, I again argue that there needs to be a separation between the debate over how copyright holders operate and the legalities of piracy. Failure to do that means that the analysis breaks down when we're not talking about the big evil conglomerate music companies that screw artists over and everybody loves to hate. Do you feel comfortable with your assertions above if we're talking about an indie game developer, or TextMate author Allan Odgaard?
I don't really see it as pedantic. It's important to oppose persons who characterize copyright infringement (at least as it relates to filesharing) as "stealing" because that misinformation is the argument that the pushers of SOPA/PIPA and other bad things hide behind. We cannot tolerate the analog because when it promulgates across techie lines into the mass of "normal people", they don't have the context necessary to consider the implications and judge independently whether the event constitutes a legitimate theft or not.
We need to emphasize that filesharing is a form of sampling for most people, and that they would never buy 99% of the content that they fileshare for free, and that they often do buy that 1%, and that even if the consumer doesn't buy your content/distribution, you're still better off for the potential word-of-mouth promotion and other exposure facilitated.
In reality, filesharing operates on the same principles as YouTube, which the studios and record companies also attempted to kill as just another pirate avenue before it was legitimized by Google and entered mainstream acceptance; they now (mostly) see YouTube as a promotional platform with the same understanding that it's about "sampling", that most people won't buy 99% of the stupid videos they watch on YouTube, but that some people will buy that 1%. The RIAA/MPAA members use YouTube in hopes that their content will be that 1% that provokes individuals to go purchase related merchandise.
The only difference is that YouTube makes the "filesharing" piece invisible and people feel that they are sharing videos instead of files, and this makes YouTube tenable for mainstream use. BitTorrent and other filesharing networks operate on the same set of principles, but they are harder to use and control, so they remain targeted when there is essentially no difference from a consumer standpoint other than barrier to entry.
This is something everyone that talks about this topic needs to understand. Basic economics teach us that an infinite supply comes at the price of (near) zero. The amount of music, movies, software (products) that can be distributed is only limited by technical issues, such as the amount of bandwidth and hard drive space. So naturally distributors should expect their product to have a lower price than it once had, especially when selling online.
Of course this leaves out the production costs entirely and probably a whole lot more. I'm not an economist, but I think this is a fatal flaw in the business model of most entertainment companies.
Can you elaborate on that? If there's an infinite supply of something and say, a demand for that product with 20% of the people, wouldn't the situation be worse for the entertainment companies?
I left the costs etc out of the equation, which is obviously a wrong thing to do.
The supply and demand curves are independent variables derived from distinct data sets.
From Wikipedia:
. . . supply is determined by marginal cost. Firms will produce additional output as long as the cost of producing an extra unit of output is less than the price they will receive.
. . . demand curves are determined by marginal utility curves. Consumers will be willing to buy a given quantity of a good, at a given price, if the marginal utility of additional consumption is equal to the opportunity cost determined by the price, that is, the marginal utility of alternative consumption choices. The demand schedule is defined as the willingness and ability of a consumer to purchase a given product in a given frame of time.
In my experience, the pro-piracy argument from economics is at best an imperfect understanding of supply and demand and at worst, the person making the argument just heard the words "supply and demand" and filled in the rest from his own imagination. The "Law of Supply and Demand" is not an actual thing. It's the juxtaposition of "Law of Supply" and the "Law of Demand"
Supply (as opposed to the supply curve) is dictated by demand, not the other way around. If the demand for a good rises, then supply will be increased to meet the demand. If demand for a good drops, supply will be decreased to the level of demand.
To your question, the entertainment companies are under no illusions that the demand curve for any particular product is going to stay the same. They expect that over time, the demand for any given thing will decrease. They know that Britney Spears new album will sell a shit-ton of copies for the first week after it drops and by the same time the following year, everyone who wanted it will have it and sales will be virtually non-existant. Their business model is geared toward a limited lifecycle for any given product, which is why they make continual investments in new products.
It's not stealing, it's counterfeiting, which is much worse. Here is why:
When you steal a car, that one car is stolen. No big deal. If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down. This is because most people will quickly and easily be able to get it for free. Revenue will go down as a result of this and instead of having the loss of an individual copy of that product, the entire product line loses money. Something that just doesn't happen with physical products.
The same principal can be applied to the news: Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.
>If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down
Do you have any evidence to support this? Both the movie [0] and gaming [1] industries are making record profits.
>Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.
Well, not exactly. I assume you're referring to consuming news online, which is supported by advertising -- it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution.
"If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down"
Being involved in multiple small companies. When we allowed cracks to work, sales slowly went down to nothing. When the cracks were stopped, low-and-behold, sales went back up because people weren't able to get it for free. I've seen it too many times to think it's a coincidence. Huge companies like Microsoft and Adobe can take the hit, but a small company will be destroyed.
"it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution."
So you are telling me that the fact that I can get pretty much all my news for free (from hundreds of sources) has no effect on a company that tries to sell me the same thing for a few dollars?
I never said it was piracy. I was saying that it's an example of the same effect: When something is easily available for free, less people will end up purchasing it.
In addition to this, when piracy goes unchecked it creates a culture of acceptance (IE: it's not a bad thing) and less people will end up buying.
Everyone loves to defend piracy and yet many of those same people hate big corporations. It's a funny thing because eventually, that's all that will be left.
I no longer get involved with apps. I only do web services. It's better for me because I now get monthly reoccurring income. Eventually, I think most companies will go this route and piracy will be a non-issue.
I don't buy this argument. Instead of buying a piece of music or a movie, you download it without paying, then you are in some small or large way, you are stealing it.
> you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.
What exactly is stolen? Certainly not the piece of music, film, or knowledge: unlike spaghetti, those are abundant, non-conflicting goods. Nor the exclusivity, for it is only destroyed. Nor secrecy or privacy, for the piece of knowledge or art is public already.
This is not theft. This is infringing a state granted monopoly. It doesn't make it a good idea, mind you. Upholding the law is generally a good idea. But unlike plain theft, it's not obviously wrong either.
See my comment above re: pedantic arguments about the definition of "stealing".
grellas made an excellent post the other day about the nature of physical property rights vs intangible property rights [1]. The general gist is that declaring one "fundamental" and the other "not-fundametal" is sophistry; both are considered important to society and both are and will continue to be protected by law.
In my opinion, the existence of both physical and IP property rights is a social good - it's defining the boundaries of those rights that becomes the tricky part. I don't think we're hitting the right balance worldwide at the moment, but I also don't think we should be swinging violently towards SOPA or conversely anarchy.
Grellas is right to point out that current laws turn a range of intellectual goods into property. We shouldn't forget however how they do this: by enforcing scarcity when the default was abundance. By the way, you can get abundance back by breaking the law.
I reject the terms "property" and "theft" when talking about ideas and recordings because they are abundant by default. By using those words, they make you think in terms of scarcity. They skew your perception of the issues, then exploit that bias. This is why I insist that others do not use the word, "it's GNU/Linux" style. Even if you know what you meant, many people don't, and it has consequences. (In the same vein, I remind people not to say "internet" when talking about the world wide web alone. If you believe you "have the internet" as long as you can run a web browser, you won't notice nor protest when your ISP starts blocking TCP ports.)
I also reject copyright and patents altogether. Not because they are not property by default, and therefore illegitimate (I find this argument very weak). I reject them because I believe they do more evil than good. Most probably, they are more a hindrance than a help for our economy and our technological development. Not to mention the inevitable loss of individual liberties, which humans tend to value by themselves.
Overall, I believe scarcity should be abolished whenever possible. If we get to the point where there is so much abundance that life is not fun any more, then we'd have a good reason for scarcity. (Video games provide an example: god mode, unlimited ammo, and free experience points tend to spoil the game. I'm still tempted by the cheat codes, but I think twice before I type them.) But right now scarcity is a problem to be solved. Copyright and patents are part of that problem (or at least a symptom).
On further reflection, I think you're right that I was wrong to use the word "stealing". It does frame and bias the discussion. I don't think I'll be able to shake the habit of using the word "property" to refer to copyrights, patents, trademarks and designs (perhaps as a habit of specialising in IP during university) - I think that the point grellas makes is such to sufficiently argue that all property is essentially a legal construct and we can mould and shape its boundaries as we see fit.
I understand your point about artificial scarcity and appreciate that you find copyrights and patents a net detriment rather than a net benefit. In the current scheme of things, I would have to agree with you on that point in some instances (especially with respect to software patents, many pharmaceutical patents, and the length of copyright). Overall, however, I believe that the idea of intellectual property is a sound one that's been distorted over the course of legal history thanks to the influence of powerful rights holders and a lack of ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.
That is the textbook definition of anything related to Intellectual Property. The State is supposed to grant a time limited monopoly and in exchange the protected item will return to the public once it is finished.
Of course you're right. We should always, as proud citizens of the USA strictly adhere to the ethics our founding fathers set forth: 1. A citizen may not injure a corporation, or through inaction, cause a corporation to come to harm. 2. A citizen must obey orders given to them by a Corporation except where such orders would conflict with (1.) 3. A citizen must protect his/her own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with (1.) and (2.)
So given that, you are right, he doesn't refute (1.) (2.) or (3.) at all!
+1. Show biz may be stupid, they may offer a lousy service and an irrational business model. But it's in the nature of a right that the holder has liberty to exercise it as they choose, no matter how stupid or irresponsible that exercise may seem to others. A respect for copyright revocable at the user's convenience is no respect at all.
And yes, property is a right, one of far greater importance to political liberty than is generally allowed. And intellectual property is property. The placement of economic activity _outside_ the direct control of the state prevents the state from entirely dominating the society.
Now, SOPA is a really bad bill, because DNS filtering is a free speech nightmare. If you make me choose between speech rights and property rights, I'm taking the speech right, it's the foundation of everything else. The willingness of show biz and its lackeys to mess with speech rights demonstrates a disturbing greed and / or ignorance.
But that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's a complicated world, and technology is revising the everyday realization of our rights and responsibilities. We aren't going to work our way through that with a black-and-white simplification of the debates.
I am exactly in line with what the article says, except that I don't buy, neither do I downloaded music these last few years. In my case it is therefore not a rationalization for having free stuff.
I downloaded a lot when I was a student, when I began to work I decided I did not have the "I'm poor" excuse any more and I began buying CDs of bands I like. I stopped buying CDs after I got my first DRMed one. I thought "ok, this is stupid, I don't want to be part of this any more".
Only recently I have discovered the real harm that copyright laws and lobbyists are doing to the society. They are criminalising sharing. Think a bit about it. We have to stand against them. Now there are copyright restrictions on SCIENCE papers. It is effectively a danger to our society.
Here in France a law was proposed to display on CDs price tag how much the artist receives when you buy a CD. It was voted down by lobbyists' minions. That alone says a lot.
I admit it's stealing, but I don't care. I also break the speed limit - constantly. I also smoke pot from time to time. Music is so abundant and readily accessible it no longer makes sense to charge $20 per CD, let alone anything for songs that take two seconds to download. There is no way to stop pirating without either crippling or sensoring the Internet. Technology advances and industries die as a result. Instead of accepting the cold hard reality of the Internet and the ease of pirating and adjusting their business models, the major media companies are trying to reverse the wheel of time. They probably want us all using records again.
There's a subtle line this post is drawing: from the plain guilt of not paying the artists who created the art, to horror at realizing that if you pay them, you also give several times as much money to interest groups that go head on with your morals.
Once you realize this line exists, paying for music is no longer "the right thing to do" but an evil act, at least as evil as supporting sweat shops and Amazon deforestation.
Whether you continue to pirate music or simply stop listening to it is one's personal choice, but buying already ceased being the moral choice.
So it is moral to rob artists of royalties of songs they made which you enjoy?
I'm willing to guarantee that most don't know the labels that most artists belong to. Some are indie and are not involved with the RIAA. Should they be punished as well?
You're not any different from from those you preach against.
I agree with you. If you want to stick it to copyright holders and the industry then don't use those materials. Don't watch movies that are produced by the MPAA and don't listen to music that's produced by the RIAA.
Pirating only gives those on the other side the impression and ammunition to say 'we are creating great things that people steal we just need to force them pay.' Not using their works at all is the only way to win.
> you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.
How is it stealing if they can still have that something?
You compose a song. I copy that song. You still have that song. If I'd taken away a recorder with your only master copy of it, then I would have stolen it.
>How is it stealing if they can still have that something?
Because that's not a decision you should get to make. The cost associated with creating most things isn't in raw materials alone but man hours that went in to produce it, and the author is entitled to ask for whatever they think their hard work and their end product are worth. Is the benefit of getting that product not worth the price they're asking? Here's a novel idea; you don't buy the product and don't get the benefit. It is worth the price? Then vote with your wallet and buy away. Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.
> Because that's not a decision you should get to make.
So who gets to make it. I guess that means you'd agree with MPAA claims some 16 year old kid out there can be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they downloaded a couple of songs. What if they sue them for $100M, is that valid? If the defendant gets to unilaterally re-define and attribute semantics to words and decide what the punishment is do you think that makes sense?
> Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.
Why doesn't it. It makes a pretty big difference. Not at the point of transaction but during a dispute. If someone steals your song does it mean you can ask for $100M from them claiming you lost potential profit because it was going to be a hit song. How do you decide what one copy is worth? That is the key question. Sorry, but "it is worth whatever the seller says is worth, is bullshit". If that hypothetical teenager didn't copy the song, do you think the record company would be $100M richer. How do you prove that?
You're extrapolating what I was talking about, namely the immorality of piracy, to something that I wasn't. Punishment of offenses is another issue entirely, and one that I didn't get into at all.
If we invent a technology that allows us to read thoughts, should you be allowed to read them without the thinkers permission? The thinker still has their thoughts. What about disseminate them via torrents? Would that be "fair"? Is that the society we want?
What about monitoring conversations via surveillance means? The speakers still have their conversation. Should we be allowed to a) surveil anyone and b) distribute that surveillance digitally as the surveilled still have their conversation?
The time is close approaching where such questions will need to be asked and I see little difference between piracy of songs, movies or other artistic expression and the extraction and distribution of thoughts against the owners wishes. The only real difference is that the artists chose to let it out into the world in a way the pirate didn't like. One way was via concert/itunes/cd/dvd, another way could be a conversation with a friend. Both ways the pirate says they have the right to use it how they want - original thinker be damned.
In my view it comes down to respect. While technically it's not stealing, you're still an asshole for using others thoughts without their blessing.
I can imagine the day where someone hacks into your laptop, records you in a compromising position, shares it with the world and shrugs and says "how is it stealing if you still have that something"? I just copied your dignity.
Good example and I agree. But I think it should be called something else rather than theft. Because one issue with this is how much have you lost after something was copied. That's the law suit side of this. Grandmas are being asked to pay hundreds of thousands of $ because their grand-kids downloaded Lady Gaga songs. By calling it "stealing" they are able to convince juries and judges that this is the equivalent of grandma breaking into a bank and taking $100k worth of gold and then speeding away. You see the problem?
Truly broken analogy. If you want to go with the 'reading thoughts' (whats wrong with cars!?) then with copyright infringement (which is what we are discussing here) it would be like someone selling the right to listen to their thoughts, and someone who paid for it choosing to relay those thoughts to others for free.
Certainly relaying those thoughts for free can possibly limit potential opportunities to futher sell the right to 'listen to those thoughts' (assuming that anyone of those listening in for free would be prepared to pay for it). But this 'intellectual rape' thing you are trying to paint here just doesn't hold water since they are already granting permission to 'read their thoughts' for money.
These files containing ip that are being illegally copied all across the web are things which were already being distributed in various forms, albeit with artificial scarcity mechanisms in place to force payment per copy.
The point is that it shouldn't matter how the person chooses to put their thoughts into the world, they are their thoughts not yours. If they choose to do a private performance (a concert) and it gets pirated, that's not much different then if they are having a conversation and it gets pirated. The distinction isn't theirs it's the pirates.
Just because they are already granting permission to "read their thoughts" for money doesn't give anyone license to just do what they want does it?
I fail to see how the users choice on how to distribute files grants pirates license to go against the thought originators wishes.
Note I'm not saying I agree with this - but I find it interesting to think about the opposite viewpoint to my own as it helps me rationalise my position.
If one rejects copyright, there is no 'stealing' of things of value, there is only copying -- since the work to produce things would be paid for through other means than restrictions.
If someone argues against copyright, you cannot defend it by invoking 'stealing'. The 'stealing' here is not removing of anything in any normal sense. It is infringement of, or disobedience of, copyright -- which of course would not exist if there were no copyright. There is no basic harm.
You might say it would be difficult to pay for production with other economic arrangements. But that is a matter of comparing economic efficiency; it has nothing to do with stealing.
When I was living in the United states I was able to use services like Netflix and spotify and get the content I wanted whenever I wanted where ever I wanted. Now, I that live in India, I cannot get that content legally. I cannot watch the TV shows I want to watch as they are aired (I have to wait 2-3 years for stuff to come on TV). The ONLY option I have is to download tv shows via torrents / find some online stream and discover new music via grooveshark. Its not that I can't pay for the content, or don't want to, its that I quite literally cant!
China is equally fun. Piracy is simply a fact. Universities use pirated windows XP. Street vendors sell every sort of game in plastic sleeves for a few kuai (approx 0.50 USD). Computer shops and tech markets do the same. I suppose I could set out to buy the "real thing" but I honestly wouldn't know where to start. I could go by price but even then...
Even alcohol seems questionable often times. I am fairly confident I have yet to buy a bottle of gin/vodka/whiskey that hasn't been somehow meddled with. After all, if I put it in the freezer it always freezes.
After writing this I guess I realize it is somewhat OT but it does signify that you have a major problem when the fake is nearly indistinguishable from the real.
zalthor: You've highlighted a very important point here. One which a lot of people overlook and that is the unavailability of the content in most south-east-asian countries. Piracy, I believe, is the norm there and if it were not for piracy most of the countries over there would be severely lacking in terms of knowledge and awareness of a specific domain (for e.g: cultural awareness in terms of movies and music piracy).
Having said that I think it is also quite difficult for the "greedy" companies to sell in these countries at the price points that would have suitable returns. This is because of the fact that the masses in these countries simply cannot afford to pay that much. This does not necessarily mean they should suffer for it.
So, pirates are actually heroes in these regions no matter what anybody says because a genuine audience/market for them exists in poor/sanctioned countries around the world. SOPA or whatever other concoction they have in the rabbit hat, would do very little to affect the usual business of the day.
No just in Asian countries. In Germany we have to hope something is successful enough to be shown on TV and then with a horrible German translation. The only way to watch this in original would be waiting 3 Years for a DVD version.
I envy you Americans for Netflix, we have nothing like that here.
I do not know Netflix but have you heard of Videoload? Havn't used it either but my guess is that there are no current movies out soon after their cinematic release on that platform, as well. ITunes Germany had some TV shows one day after their broadcast in the US. I don't know if that is still happening.
There are some strict rules around in Germany that defined at what time a movie may be released on DVD after it has hit cinemas. I think it is 6 months. Renting the movie might in some occasions be possible a couple of weeks earlier. Though, that has never mattered to me. Waiting on the DVD release or for it's TV premiere are pretty much the same for me. Although, I guess there is also a minimum period for DVD sales before it is shown on TV.
Europe is the same, indeed.
I wish general and regional distribution issues received more attention when discussing piracy, the latter point standing despite (this) web being US-centric. Publishers deliberately introduce artificious policies, while outdated and unsynchronized legislations contribute to hinder positive efforts. The eventual result for the end-user who is not living the God-Blessed American Way is an imperscrutable buffer of tedious, incoherent obstacles – all of which are easily overcame with piracy, which plainly offers a better experience. This is particularly true for the movie and TV industry, while music and software seem to be gradually improving.
This particular issue, however, stems from deeper localist inadequacies that, I suspect, might start to influence things more significant than our entertainment, such as upcoming payment services (e.g. Stripe, which is currently locked-in the US); they are already proving troublesome for financial and fiscal activities.
Briefly said: while the Internet is a naturally global technology, middle-men are mostly attempting to costrain it to fit their previous business models. This is, I reckon, both terrible for service quality – and, more theatrically, a wasted chance for progressing part of our cultures past petty nationalisms.
When they aren't accepting payment, not getting paid is no opportunity cost to them. An act which slightly increases my happiness and wealth, without imposing harm or costs on anyone, is its own justification. How would you advocate deprivation which doesn't even benefit anyone?
A lot of his arguments are centered around the music industry, but guess what: You can get a high quality, DRM free song with just one click for about $1 today. This makes his whole blog post sound like an uninformed, whiny rant.
I wan't to buy "How I Meet your Mother" on English with spanish subtitles. I am from Spain and live on Germany.
The only option to get the content I am looking for is through megavideo/piratebay.
With the films, happen the same. If I use my iTunes spanish account, the content is delayed 6 months, no tv shows and all of them in spanish. If I use a German account, I only get German content.
I pay spotify premium since two years ago. But for tv shows and films. The only content i can get is from sites like megavideo/piratebay, etc.
This industry is the only one that doesn't offer to the client what the client wants. Easy.
Your argument holds, still. Indeed, I'm pretty sure most content is available in Catalan here in Spain. I would be more worried about the italian ones, or even the french.
The only thing I agree with in this article is that film / music industry products often do not provide a good service. They are riddled with copy protection and unskippable ad's which punish people who actually buy the damn things.
You spent an hour to go to the shop's and buy it / waited a day for delivery
He spent 15 minutes downloading it.
You have to sit though ad's you cannot skip.
You have to watch a 39 second anti-piracy ad on a legitimate DVD.
You have to wait 30 seconds for the title menu to load because some moron decided to show clips of the film you want to fecking play before it appears!
He is already 5 minutes into the film.
------------------
Its horrible.
As for the rest of the arguments I disagree.
1) Because you don't use my money well
It doesn't matter how they spend there money. They are provided a product that you want. If they didn't exist the product wouldn't exist.
"Everything else was probably diluted in stuffs I don't need: packaging, distribution, transport, marketing,"
If they didn't market you wouldn't have heard about it. If they didn't pay for distribution you wouldn't be able to get it. If they didn't pay for packaging you would receive a scratched, perhaps broken CD...
2) Because you are messing with my life
"Worst, you will use my money to sue me in court because I would have downloaded something that I didn't want to buy anyway!"
Yeah.. your like stealing their stuff? Why shouldn't they come after you? If you don't want it don't download. If you download it.. don't pretend you didn't want it.
"With the change left, you will pay lobbyists to ensure the governments make stupid and dangerous laws."
The politicians pass the law's. I see nothing wrong with the music / film industry lobbying to protect their interest's. Where it gets scary is when politicians act on the side of lobbyists without considering the wider picture.
3) Because you are destroying the whole society
I agree there are problems but I completely disagree that these problems are all caused by the film and music industry. I didn't know EMI signed teachers for their lectures?
Finally...
"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off. In your arrogance, you are hurting the fundamental value of freedom only to save your little petty interests."
I guess big hollywood movies and the majority of career musicians can fuck off as well aye?
I've always wondered what odd confusion of emotions could make someone say they are a thief and proud of it.
I can understand those who claim that what they are doing isn't thievery.
I can understand those that don't accept the idea of intellectual property in general.
But for you to both buy into the philosophy that what you are taking is valuable, and ought to be protected---then still steal it proudly..... that is one thing I can't understand.
Many people believe that punishing people whom in their eyes are doing wrong is a good and righteous act, irregardless of any local law. In the legend of Robin Hood, Robin is generally seen as a "good person" and the hero in most tellings, despite being a thief and a criminal.
One more point worth considering. We were conditioned to associate the music with the medium, because it was more profitable. Now it is not anymore and there lies the problem.
In the past I bought a MC and then I bought a CD. I paid twice for the same work. Did the shop offer me a discount? No.
Do I get a discount when I watch the same movie twice in a cinema or if I buy a DVD after I have seen the movie in the cinema? No.
Do I get easy access to mp3 if I buy a CD? No.
The movie/music industry simply sends the wrong signals...
I bought all the albums of my favourite performer and don't want to scratch the CDs or waste my time to rip the music from CDs, hence I download them from the web.
the key word here is "Media": The licensing terms for every medium that you purchase are different. You may own the CD and not have "download rights". In any case, this is the line from the RIAA. They don't want you to copy, download or do anything that causes them a perceived loss of a sale.
If I buy a movie ticket, that doesn't give me a right to download the movie, or get a discount on the DVD, even though I "paid for a license" to that content. (to view it once, in a movie theater). Likewise when buying a CD, you are purchasing a license to experience that content in exactly the way the seller intended. Again I emphasise, this is not necessarily the law, this is just how the MPAA/RIAA seem to view the situation.
"I launch a search and I click. In less than 10 minutes, I've a full movie on my disk. In 20, I've the complete discography of an artist."
When I hear about stuff like this, along with people's multi-terabyte arrays of content, I wonder if they actually listen/watch much of it. Movie/Record companies are worrying that this all got "stolen" but if it was never viewed was it actually "stolen"?
That's interesting - if I pirate a song but never hear it, did I violate the gestalt of IP protection?
Almost purely philosophical as answering in the negative would inherently cripple the enforceability of copyright laws. But interesting nevertheless given the party line is the IP grants a purchaser a licence to consume the content.
Thanks for that quote license to consume... No problem.. am already cutting down my consumption and will just not consume.. bye..corporations with big IP portfolio.....
That's akin to the philosophical "tree falling in a forest, without anyone hearing" it question.. Unfortunately, i haven't come across any approach to the answers i find interesting..:-(
The OP's last sentence saying goodbye your demise is soon or something to that extent is funny.
There is always going to be a music and or movie business, as human beings since the dawn of time have fawned over larger then life figures. THere is a business around this (Justin Bieber) and there always will be.
I think he was saying good-bye to the distributors, i.e. record labels, whom he sees as superfluous given digital distribution and marketing platforms.
How about those of us who live where getting certain products legally is essentially impossible? In my case, these are anime-series and documentaries, neither which can be bought where I live. What should I do, if I really want to watch these, and have no way of getting them except for P2P?
(Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.)
> (Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.)
This is also the very reason that that drove me (and thousands of others too, I'm sure) to piracy and the one reason why I still do it. Even if I really wanted to support that TV show, sometimes it's just not possible (Case in point: The comedy show "The Class", it's simply nowhere available on DVD or similar, yet all episodes are on The Bay. How am I supposed to not torrent that stuff if I wanted to watch it?).
From my point of view the content that the artivle is talking about is the equivalent of candy.
By pirating this content you are the same as a child stealing candy. The analogy is obviously imperfect because a shop owner is directly damaged by the physical theft but my point is that a child does not need sweets. And 'pirates' do not need bland tv shows distracting them from so many other things in this world that are more deserving of time.
'Pirates' just seem to be sadder version of consumers who don't even help the economy. Little black holes taking and giving nothing back.
I feel sadness that these people try to justify their activities and ally themselves with the SOPA protests.
I like to pay for my stuff, most software I use is either OSS or I payed for it. I have tucked a way in the attic over 500 CD's. I didn't buy any CD in the last 8 years or so. I used to download all the music I liked (but I still go to concerts). Than emusic came along and I used that, until lots of labels stopped using it and it became more expensive. Now I'm a happy Spotify user. So I didn't download music in the last 4 years or so. The only thing that is left is movies and TV-series I download a lot (and still go to the movies). I tried Jaman but there is not allot of quality content (I did get 3 credits free but never used it since movies I liked where not available in my country).
I would pay 50~100 euro per month for a all you can eat package providing that episodes are available with in a week of first broadcast (not in my country but global) and movies are available with in a month after showing in the theater. I asked around (yes very scientific) and most people would to that to.
So I have this money to give to the industry (max 1200 euro per year) but there is no service to give the money to. You could say go rend a movie (if you still can find such a place) but I refuse to pay 5 euro for a sloppy movie (the best movies I see in the theater any ways). You could say buy the movie but I'm not willing to pay 20 euro for a single Blu-ray. If tomorrow I could not download movies and TV-series any more I still wouldn't do that). In almost every other industry products follow demand but apparently the entertainment industry thinks they are above basic free market economics.
I cannot sympathise with the OP on the whole. The music and publishing industries, though kicking and screaming, are on the whole evolving. The film industry hasn't figured out heads from tails, but neither did Kodak and we don't call their incompetence evil.
Where I converge is on the fury and destructiveness inherent in SOPA/PIPA. This rather-burn-Berlin-than-see-her-fall attack on America's (and through legislative export, the world's) creative and innovative centres is selfish and un-forgivable.
I also cannot help but notice the parallels in social malignancy between the banks Dodd used to regulate and the MPAA he commands today.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadThey might say "you could never get every movie/album/piece of software in one place like that! It would be an organizational nightmare!" Given no other option, however, they will be forced to innovate.
I own Blu-rays that have anti-piracy ads that I can't skip through before I watch the movie. That alone shows how screwed up this situation is.
Heheh, and yet The Pirate Bay (and lots of others), have a single site with lots of things. It might be a nightmare, but not only can it exist, but it does exist.
I am always amazed that the pirate/P2P swarm essentially distributes thousands and thousands of films/tv shows/music for free. Distribution is now free! You don't need to pay to copy your bits! Your users will do it for you, for free!
The problem that does persist (if it's a problem at all) is that the perceived value of recorded music has dropped, other forms of entertainment has taken the crown. The nineties are over, and it's not coming back, sadly the record industry thinks it's still possible.
You wish! Maybe for the US, UK and Germany, but I live in Slovenia, an EU, very highly developed (in terms of internet/mobile coverage and bandwidth) country, but since there's only 2 million of us, no one bothers to try to sell us things.
Thank god I have friends in the UK that can buy music for me. However, after reading this post, I think I won't buy it any more, until it becomes user friendly.
Not to mention that Linux users still have a very poor legal selection even in big rich countries (like UK).
They don't need users, they need customers. Without customers you go out of business, even if you have a zillion users.
I'd happily pay a recurrent, if modest, sum of money for the ability to legally and easily download not only newer but, more importantly, older and more obscure movies and television series to my computer in the form of convenient unencumbered .avi|.mkv|.mp4 files, from a catalog whose selection and quality matches the level of service of the 2010's.
If MAFIAA offered that, with a credible promise that the material will be there ten years from now, I would not only pay for the content but not bother to stash a single file onto my external hard disk. Because of the high level of sophistication when it comes to the selection, quality, and availability of the content it would be far more convenient to just pay again to redownload what I want to see again.
Pay-per-view is exactly what the studios are dreaming of but it's not going to happen through restrictions, but through unrivalled convenience only.
I have only two options... to buy bootleg copies off the street, or visit tpb/demonoid. Buying bootleg copies off the street is actually cheaper because of the very high cost of bandwidth/data here, but I pay an extra USD$50/mnth for a higher datacap for the convenience of downloading.
Also, iTunes/appstore doesn't support my country, so I can't buy from there either.
I no longer pirate music, ive paid for spotify for over 2 years now, i get music wherever i want on any device and its great, i wish they had metallica and acdc but theres youtube for that.
I no longer pirate software, linux got good at "just working" and i've been using ubuntu for years now. I use google docs and other SaaS apps and pay for really good apps like dropbox.
I no longer pirate games, mainly because i'm not much of a gamer, but i have paid for some indie games like SPAZ, Minecraft, QUBE, Darwinia etc because they're indie and the money goes to the developer and the price point is much more reasonable than the big games that come with heavily restrictive DRM.
I still download TV Shows, but not as much as i used to because of BBC iPlayer and similar initiatives, its mainly American TV i download, i've actually no idea if this is illegal or not, considering most of the shows are put on the american networks websites for streaming too.
For films there are LoveFilm, Netflix (now in the UK), iPlayer does some films now as does youtube, but i still think films are the category that is lacking the most, but also a really tough nut to crack, but hell, if it can be done with music, it can be done with films.
So, in my opinion, innovation and me feeling good about giving money to actual people rather than conglomerates is what has stopped me from pirating as much as i used to and thats the key.
However I still do pirate movies because they are extremely expensive and I know of no way how to watch them online for smaller prices. I still pirate TV shows because there is no way I could watch them otherwise (that I know of at least). Music, well.. much less than I used to.
Luckily it is not illegal to download a movie or a song, but it is still not right. I guess.
http://www.cineworld.co.uk/unlimited
* iPlayer runs through Flash, it has to because of DRM (the iPhone version gets around this I think). I use a relatively recent Macbook Pro and the playback performance is dreadful. Even on my beasty iMac the HD versions of shows were stuttery at best, so I was forced to use the SD version. Normally I'm quite happy downloading and watching an SD broadcast of a show in full-screen, but in iPlayer the quality of the upscaling is so bad that it's distracting.
* Shows are quite often available on torrent sites before they're available through iPlayer (discounting watching content as it airs), this is especially true of HD content.
* Despite living in London, my internet connection simply isn't reliable enough to handle streaming without occasional buffering, even with SD. So my preferred approach is to download a show rather than stream it. I've generally found that downloading into iPlayer Desktop is slower than using a torrent site. As well as the fact that VLC doesn't eat my CPU like Adobe Air does.
By comparison, I'm a happy customer of Spotify, and I'm more than happy to pay for a video equivalent. I've tried Netflix now that it's out here, but the Silverlight player is as bad as Flash when it comes to CPU usage. The quality of the Netflix streams is pretty poor too, I've yet to manage to get it enable streaming in HD.
Frustratingly I would happily pay to access US and UK TV shows in the same way that I pay for music via Spotify, but the media companies aren't interested in taking my money. They are too busy trying to sue us and censor the internet instead.
BBC iPlayer Global is a joke. I have to navigate the Germany Apple Store (in German), sign up for a German iTunes account and my UK issued credit card is refused, even though the billing address held with the credit card company is correctly registered to my German address.
US internet companies struggle with the concepts of locale, language and applicable regional law. The whole issue is complex and nobody gets it right. It is often forgotten that where someone lives is not directly related to the language they speak (or preferred language). I find legally binding terms and conditions hard enough to understand in English, let alone in German. Legally, that is still my problem. Should it be? Do I need to see ads in German Google? Accept Language anyone??? http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...
If you don't agree with the methods used by companies to sell their products DON'T then take it anyway, you're showing people WANT the product but aren't willing to pay, so what's the best solution? Make it harder to pirate / try to block pirating.
This guy and everyone else who refuses to just not consume media they can't get on terms they and the companies agree with are the reason we have all this SOPA crap.
If the latest Rihanna album is $10 and you're only willing to pay $1 instead of then pirating DON'T get it, just ignore it, if everyone did this we'd have no problems, then media companies would either adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong, they wouldn't then fight the internet.
This guy and everyone else who follows the same point of view is essentially trying to blackmail media companies, how about instead you just move on. You have no right to the media they produce and if you're unhappy with what they want for it MOVE ON. If Sony want to sell the latest album from band x for $1,000 that's their choice, you have no right to that album.
They have no right to force everyone else to conform to absurd rules made to preserve their profits.
I stopped when I realized that while I could afford it, all of these services were inferior to the ones I was used to. I will gladly pay for a product that is better than its free counterpart. I will even pay for a product that I could pirate, but I will not pay more to watch ads and listen to music on only a limited number of DRM-supported devices.
See how silly this sounds?
The problem with digital media is that it's very easy to copy. You can't just copy a car.
There are tons of website offering free music. So just support those artists instead of the ones charging too much for an inferior service.
Yup! And that's why comparing digital piracy with car theft is also equally silly.
Note, I don't have a hard stance on this. Counterfeiting drugs, etc. is wrong for obvious reasons. Coming up with a similar argument for entertainment media is a bit less tenable.
When the MPAA and RIAA cede the moral high ground by acting like idiots (suing 12-year olds, pushing for high criminal charges, SOPA/PIPA, etc.), it makes it more difficult to make a moral argument for the industry.
The everything free argument is crap. But given that I pay for songs on iTunes but pirate TV shows because Derp Studios refuses to put it anywhere online, the user case is valid.
So I think the discussion should be about the copyright law. Not about "I think this service sucks so I will get an illegal copy".
Don't get me wrong. I think it's absurd that you can get a penalty of $10.000 for downloading a MP3. I think the copyright rules should change.
But I think it's silly to fight a law by disobeying it. It will give the MPAA good ground to say "see they are pirates".
"I think it's silly to fight a law by disobeying it"
I agree with the sentiment that this should not be a first response. But if the intent is to deprive the studios of revenue while sticking a finger to them with the intention of encouraging them to back down, then it is a valid strategy (with precedence). Given the radicalisation of the MPAA, however, I don't see that as being likely.
So I agree with you in practice, but diverge in principle.
http://donttradeourlivesaway.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/brazil...
Problem with counter-feit drugs is the usual quality checks aren't present. This can lead to ineffective or even harmful drugs that patients take while thinking they are getting the real thing.
Not yet, but the technology is rapidly improving. With the right equipment (3d scanner, 3d printer), you can copy basic items at home today. It is only a matter of time.
With the right technology, why wouldn't you copy a car? A car only has value because of its inherit scarcity. If you could copy a car, it wouldn't be worth anything (aside from the cost of materials required to perform the copy).
> See how silly this sounds?
Yes, that completely hyperbolic, not analogous example sure does sound silly!
That was a waste of 50+30 minutes of my time, which was more than half of the entire movie. And I even paid 10 freaking bucks for it.
This was the moment when I realized that I probably won't go to a movie theater more than once a year from now on.
This doesn't mean that I now will go on and pirate the movie. There's still iTunes and I don't need to see a movie on release day, but it was a great example for how companies mess up the user experience.
The irony is that some theaters show something like a self-commercial with the saying "Cinema - that's what movies are made for".
Disclaimer: This happened in Germany. The movie-watching experience in the US was way better to me. No commercials, only a few trailers.
So even if he ignores it, he is still paying them money because media companies can't adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong.
(Fiction, I know, but one can dream...)
At least that is what is supposed to do. In reality ... well you might want to learn German for that and read this interesting tidbit about the rights holder association of Germany (GEMA): hxxp://www.musiker-online.de/Newsdetails.newsdetails.0.html?&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=267&tx_ttnews[backPid]=10&cHash=226c5da554
No, it's not fiction. I live in Spain and we have a similar tax. It taxes private copys, which are defined as
1. The work must be publicly available.
2. It must be done by a physic person (as opposed to an organization)
3. For private use, i.e. not broadcasting to an open audience allowed (but I can play it in my house with my friends).
4. Access to the work must have been obtained legally. 5. Must be non-profit.
6. The receiver of the copy cannot be a collective. So I can buy a CD and make a copy to all of my friends. They can do the same, and so on (a copy of a legal bought CD is legal).
According to some experts, P2P falls into a gray area, or it used to before they changed the law. I'm sure they will refine it progressively, but I won't stop downloading while I pay my copy tax for USB STICKS, BLANK CDs & DVDs, MP3 PLAYERS, HDDs AND EVENT PRINTERS AND PAPER.
Anyway the general attorney throw a paper stating that downloaders shouldn't be prosecuted.
One time, years ago, some members of an internet freedom organization, got a laptop with WIFI and, after calling the police to inform them of the fact, they mounted a table in the street and downloaded copyrighted works, offering free copys to whomever passed near, to show that it's legal.
There is an exception, however: Software is not covered under the private copy, so it would be illegal to copy software (being myself a developer, I have never undertood the differentiation).
The funniest part is that this tax is directly collected by private entities (our *AA counterpart), which have in the higher seats crappy artists which decide how to share the collected money (i.e. between themselves and their dearest friends). Some of them, like Alejandro Sanz, are arguably very crappy, but at least they are artists (for some definition of the word). But some others, like Teddy Bautista (ex president, now convict for different forms of stealing) or Ramoncín, AFAIK haven't composed or sung a song in the last decades.
No. Upvote and explain why the author is wrong. We need to educate more people about piracy and intellectual property.
Will life stop if you don't watch the latest episode of Community? Probably. Give it a go. If you die I have dibs on your $2000 Macbook Pro, $800 iPhone, $250 Sennheiser headphones, etc. The very phrase 'Because you are messing with my life' in this context shows how much is wrong with the current culture.
These companies are destroying civilisation? I've asked this question before: If I create a piece of software and ask you to not use it without purchasing it, will you do that? Very few people seem to be able to answer yes. The people who can't answer yes are those who are ruining civilisation. There is so much hyperbole in this article ("Messing with my life was not enough. You are even trying to destroy one of the pillar of our society: education.") I'm not quite sure if it's satirical or not, hah.
Steve Jobs mentioned that in the end it comes down to the person knowing they've done something wrong after they've tried to rationalise their way out of it ("BUT IT'S NOT STEALING" or whatever the latest fad is).
During high school I pirated a hell of a lot of software, videogames, music, movies—everything. I still bought more video games than most people will in their life times but that in no way balances what I pirated. I've stopped (All I have left is to make a list of the music I have and listen to in order to delete it all and slowly purchase it, which I've started doing). I either pay for something, borrow it or go without.
The funny thing is, I don't like these big corporations either. I wish people would stop treating them as large, mythical and faceless entities but talk to the people behind the door. Until both sides come to understand each other and seek that communication they [we] will forever be at war.
I don't support SOPA nor do I support blatant pirates.
It shouldn't be required of just the RIAA to use technology properly but everyone. If someone makes music you like, and they're not attempting to rob, respect them. $1 is not much for a song you enjoy.
But the truth of course is that they saw huge benefits throughout the years as it became cheaper and cheaper for them to produce and distribute the music.
Where is your sympathy for all the truckers, records store people etc. that lost their jobs because of digitalization?
I personally have more sympathy for them, the musicians will always have the music. Whether they will be able to live from it is another thing.
The smart ones will.
>Where is your sympathy for all the truckers, records store people etc. that lost their jobs because of digitalization?
Of course I do have sympathy for them but humanity has to move forward. We are living in a disruptive age – much like those in the beginning of the Industrial Age. Humanity will need to adjust. This really is another subject for another story and doesn't hold relevance to the topic of piracy.
>I personally have more sympathy for them, the musicians will always have the music. Whether they will be able to live from it is another thing.
This makes no sense. You are condemning musicians to the same fate as those you mentioned. The only difference is that potential future truckers and HS/college students at record stores won't suffer because there will be new jobs created but the artist always will.
The world does not need more starving artists.
We live as you say in a disruptive age and this applies in no small part to artists.
As with regards to the starving artists.
Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
They are very different than those the labels push to become big stars today.
What i mean with they will alway have art is this.
The trucker will loose their job and that's pretty much it. The artists will always be able to do art whether they get paid for it or not.
You're playing a game that has nobody's interests at hand.
Yes I'm saying this because 'truckers' are going to get left behind. You still haven't answered the question of whether we should live in the digital age or not.
>Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
You're playing a game against my argument. All artists struggle but do you want them to become eternally poor?
>Let me remind you that the kind of artists that actually have spent many years becoming good have always been struggling and always needed to do live gigs.
Do you or many know the difference? Are most making the distinction and buying indie products? I can already tell that they are not.
Plus I have both a product out (cost money), a service out (free), have a design agency.
I don't say that artist shouldn't make money. I think they should when they work. But claiming that it's somehow a right for musicians to keep reaping the benefits of digital distribution but not those related to it, is in my mind wrong and not serving the anyone.
Truckers and musicians who don't conform to the new reality is going to be left behind.
It's really that simple. Of course they will try and get the government to protect their interest and it will have people helping them defend that.
But it's not a fair game.
And artist neither are nor will be eternally poor. It's a poor argument. There will always be people who make money on their creations, they will just have to do it differently than what we do today.
Technology is always a double edged sword. No one, not even artist can escape that.
Who gave it to them? I dont think that we ever, as a society, ever fundamentally _agreed_ to the existence of such exclusivity rights. Yes they are in the constitution, yes they are in the lawbooks, but the people at large never fundamentally agreed that such rights should be in there. The decision process was always top-down, never bottom-up. They are not a result of peoples morality, but of a interest-driven, behind-closed-doors development process. Those laws dont map the will of the people, of your fellow citizens, but of a few, but influential stake holders. Such rights are not democratically backed. If you would ever have a referendum on copyright policy, you would probably lose them.
You're ok with that, right?
If you really believe what you say, you'd delete all your pirated music right now. Either that, or you might modify your views a bit.
I don't understand how that fits with finishing making the list. If you can keep some pirated music around since high school, and now longer so that you can make a list, can't I download a little to see if I like it? If it's good, I'll pay to go to a concert or buy the tracks off Amazon. ":)"
Don't forget that people might upvote a post not because they agree, but because they're interested in the discussion that follows. At least, it's why I upvoted the post. I hadn't completely made up my mind and arguments like yours convinced me.
If Rihanna and others don't want their music to be pirated they shouldn't make it digital.
It is not a naturally given right you know to create an album once and then sell it in millions. It's an opportunity.
Rihanna could release her music on vinyl only but it would still be recorded and converted to an MP3 and up on torrents in a matter of hours, digital has nothing to do with it.
The business model they would probably switch to in the case of no copyright would be to distribute a small amount of the music for free but if you want to hear the rest you have to attend a live concert where you would be searched for recording devices on entry.
Would you prefer that model?
I supposes breaching the terms of the GPL would be 'honourable' too.
I don't understand what that has to do with GPL at all.
Would you feel comfortable walking past an artist trying to graft a living selling paintings/prints in a street stall, then against his wishes take a picture of them and tell him you're going to share these with your friends so they don't have to buy his work? Does that seem honourable to you?
Also consider a situation whereby two parties had a contract dictating the terms of how some artistic work could be used. There's obviously nothing wrong with this since both parties have agreed to the contract. Then say some third party illegally acquires the work and makes it available elsewhere. Seems fair that at this point we can rely upon copyright to protect the work of citizens. Just like you have privacy rights and defamation rights and so on.
Everything in the world is essentially just a bunch of atom, too. By this logic you can probably do anything you want and never be wrong, right?
Regarding your first point, yes, since we're speaking about ethics here, it's morally acceptable to disregard wishes of authors to restrict your freedom of handling copies of their published work, as long as doing this is good for people and makes no harm to authors.
Seriously, what is wrong with people's moral compasses with regards to sharing? Is this the result of brainwashing by publishers? OK, laws are laws, but morals? They have nothing to do with laws. Oh the mighty author, should I apologize to you (or, perhaps, go to jail) for signing your songs before you died + century?
"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off."
It's fine to be angry about the approach large copyright holders take to piracy - suing consumers, encouraging the extradition of 23 year old UK citizens for linking, throwing cash at politicians to try to push through obscene laws like SOPA/PIPA. I'm angry about it. It's a horribly reactive, staid approach to a changing world that just isn't going to net them any long-term profitability.
What's not fine is in your mind elevating your piracy to the level of a significant political protest. It might make you feel better about it, but it really doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.
So while I personally would rather do without (similar to using Linux/Gimp vs pirating Windows/Photoshop etc.) and think that piracy in many ways strengthens the hand of the copyright owners by suffocating legitimate alternatives (again see Linux/Gimp vs pirated XP/Photoshop) I think that encouraging and legitimizing widespread piracy could well be the only "significant political protest" with any chance to succeed.
Riots and revolutions tend to happen in the summer, maybe copyright will only change if some people get to watch Transformers for free. I can live with that.
People's rights are man made, so they are debatable.
As you say, rights are often malleable - and reevaluating and redefining them (from both sides of this debate) should be an ongoing process.
You could of course make the case that our democracy is too imperfect to accept the letter of any particular law as a direct expression of the will of the people without applying your further judgement.
Laws can be inconsistent, unjust or inappropriately applied and that's why we have the courts to make those judgements. Unfortunately, access to the courts is very unequal, particularly in the case of civil law. It's always been like this, hence breaking the law has always been the poor man's expensive lawyer and lobbyist at the same time.
Of course this argument could be used as a blanket excuse for breaking any law. Personal judgement just can't be replaced by any system.
Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).
I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments:
If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get more widely known, more famous).
Some compare pirating a DVD with going to a masseuse/prostitute and not paying her/him afterwards. This analogy is not correct - the expectation/social contract is that I have to pay you after I receive a service, and if I don't pay you, you are worse-off because you don't have money that you would otherwise have. However, people that pirate movies/music are not automatically lost revenue - probably they would buy less than 10% (just a guess) of entertainment content that they download/consume through piracy.
A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her.
When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. (yes, you can say it does indirectly through some convoluted story, but that's always debatable)
The future economy will be more about directly personalized experiences and services that cannot be copied, or are much less interesting when copied, instead of trivial fan-outs of information. It is all about scarcity. Better to let that sink in than try to preserve what is already lost, at the cost of freedom.
(edit: why do I say future? It is already the present for many of us)
But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio.
> It is all about scarcity.
Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship.
Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.
Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.
Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case.
Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes.
Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.
Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways.
Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past.
Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince.
A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though.
Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough".
There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk.
Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense.
Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in.
These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities:
1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do).
2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough").
3. Fail.
None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.
I think that was a common sentiment at the end of each "age". How to go from here, all the alternatives suck from our point of view. I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
At a certain point, the ends don't justify the means anymore. DMCA was ok-ish, but I think we reached that point with SOPA and similar laws. Especially as those means are the same as can be used to censor other things, and will very likely be abused for that, with the militarization happening all over the world.
So that solution falls under (3) fail as well. Which leaves the other options, including those we haven't thought of yet. People are creative and will find ways to get by...
I think there's potential there, but there would need to be a dramatic cultural shift so it didn't just become a case of anything "good enough" was done, with no meaningful incentive to put the final polish to turn good works into great ones. Take a look at the Open Source software community today: it's full of "good enough" products, which do the basic jobs perfectly well for a lot of people, but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.
> But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.
Unfortunately, that isn't really true. It would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology. It's just that I (and, I suspect, most other people here) would prefer not to accept the unfortunate side-effects that come with compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges.
Yes, the edge cases, the personalization, the polishing. There will always be work in that. Adapting systems to their specific surroundings. Every place, every person is unique, and has specific demands. That's what I meant with the cookie-cutter stuff going away.
it would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology
Sure, but is just as easy to avoid copyright enforcement with the current technology. And for those desperate there is always the analog hole. That kind of summarizes the DRM "war".
compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges
Because that'd effectively be an Orwellian world. So we'd need to go to a total surveillance state, centrally controlled world, just to make sure things keep working as they do now. Just to make some people happy at the expense of the rest. That's not only inhuman, but very unstable as well.
"Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways."
This is not a strong argument. I could equally look at the time of the enlightenment and say "if people weren't forced to give their money to the Catholic church, think of all the lovely buildings and choral music we'd be denied. Therefore - people should be forced to give money to the church!"
In the case of copyright, you need to consider this opportunity cost. i.e. things we don't have because copyright has made them impossible. As with the church example, there is also a significant cost of freedom.
There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.
Which you haven't cited, I notice.
If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards. Obviously you can give lots of examples where this has been done successfully to back up your case, then?
I'll take another angle. Live-and-let live should be the default case. Copyright is an intrusion on this. If someone wants to drive a tank through freedom by introducing something like copyright, then the onus is on the tank drivers to make the case that the benefits justify the intrusion on freedom.
I've never seen a remotely reasonable attempt at putting that case. The best you get is claims that people wouldn't produce things unless they had vast legal protections and that's plainly false. Mendelssohn wrote symphonies. I write code, in a commercial setting, with copyright not being the justification for it.
Handel is an even better example, because it's well documented that he rearranged lots of previous stuff. We wouldn't have any record of some of those earlier tunes had he not repurposed them in his own works. Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ could not be performed or distributed under current western-world copyright law.
"If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards."
When you have copyright law it creates a powerful lobby group and any attempt at reform will come up against them. Much as with my discussion about the church above - an institution that impeded progress and freedom, but which fought ferociously to retain privilege at every step.
What could cause the dam to break would be a major economic slump and a desperate move to try something new to attract smart people. Or something like SOPA may be a step too far, and cause Sweden or New Zealand or Singapore or a special economic zone in China to make a play at being a free-state-style intellectual capital.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...
Sure, let's have a very pedentic notion of stealing and keeping framing the debate around 'stealing'.
OK... "taking something which isn't yours and/or you don't have permission to take". In most minds, that's the same as stealing, hence the standard use of the word 'stealing'. But substitute the phrase above for 'stealing' and, imo, it becomes harder to justify. Just because I an not doing an actual verifiable economic harm to someone doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but doesn't make it right either.
So you can talk about right versus wrong, good versus evil and so on, but clearly something stinks about this picture, which is why I don't blame "pirates" for justifying their acts, as their acts are justified.
And, how fucked up is it that restaurants are afraid of singing "Happy Birthday to You"? Are those singing it thieves?
But copyright infringement is not stealing. You could make an argument about it if the period was still 14 years (i.e. the author has only 14 years to collect revenue from it, so if you want it either pay up or wait 14 years, which is doable). But that's not the case.
Also, discussing the morality of copyright infringement is also important, as copyright infringement does not rob the owner of the item itself. It only duplicates it.
It's not taking, either.
I'd argue that property exists because things (apples, cars, gym equipment) have limitations on their use. If I eat an apple, you can't. If you grow a crop on this property, you can't. While he uses this gym equipment, they can't.
Even in historical contexts where there has been no effective government (silk road, dark ages iceland), ideas of property have evolved that are strikingly consistent, because it extends from realities of the world.
As states developed, they came to give stronger definition to property law. But then people who were well-connected to government decided that it would be a good idea to extend these convenient powers to things which were not property, sometimes by falsely labeling them as property.
So it comes down to who has control over the language.
Is property a distinct idea, or is it just a bundle of whatever rights the government of the day declares it to be.
And if you choose the latter, if the government says that black is white, is it so?
I'd like to extend on this concept and add ownership into equation.
In the example with an apple. I own it, therefore only I can eat it. It is my property. Now what happens if I give the apple to somebody else? It's their property now, so you would naturally assume they own it? And therefore they can eat it.
Alas, it's not the case with music/etc. I bought a CD with music, but it appears that I don't own it. I cannot listen to it in public (Happy Birthday to You), nor I can give it to someone else (lend DVD to a friend for a pint).
So this doesn't work out very well, the CD is my property, but I don't own it? To me owning means having right to do whatever I please with it. Imagine if blending an iPhone would become a criminal offence...
I'll try to explain what I mean by anti-right though I'm unpracticed here.
(1) Society is oriented around a presumption of live-and-let-live. Most laws give rights that state the boundary of live-and-let live, and these are positive rights.
(2) In the case of copyright, only the creator has the ability to live-and-let-live in the context of the protected thing: everyone else is restricted from it. Hence, this is a negative right, or "anti-right".
When rights and anti-rights clash, you get nasty situations develop where they can't all be true at the same time.
i.e. in order to make IP anti-rights work, the laws need to inhibit 'real' property rights.
i.e. I am not allowed to do things with magnetic signals in the privacy of my own home because that impedes an anti-right that the government has granted to someone else.
If you build complex software with a permissions model that contains both positive and negative permissions (i.e. where a user has a permission that is "can't see" something rather than being a positive right), you'll find similar nasty situations develop.
Obviously this is a strange concept since the contents of the CD are a physical part of the CD itself.
If you ever have something stolen from you, you'll quickly realize the difference between theft and copyright infringement.
Debates such as these keep orbiting around the definition of stealing because the term keeps getting used for copyright infringement out of lazy thinking or in order to facilitate an agenda.
Stealing is intrinsically "wrong" from a societal perspective because it puts those who take by force into a better position than those who earn by earning it, which is not sustainable.
Whether anyone is put into a worse position by copyright infringement (e.g. in the form of illegal downloading of music) is up for debate. But any serious debate should avoid the term stealing to describe the issue at hand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good -- shut down today in SOPA protest
With a club good there is a tangible thing such as a running machine. By my use of it, you are unable to use it. But we judge the tradeoff to be worth it because we don't each want to go out and buy a gym.
That is unlike copyright where the cost of making a copy is nothing, and may even increase the value of the copied data through network effects.
> Examples of club goods include private golf courses, cinemas, cable television, access to copyrighted works, and the services provided by social or religious clubs to their members.
Also this definition on econport.org;
> Club Goods: Goods that are excludable but non-rival, or non-subtractable. This means that while certain people can be excluded from the consumption of a good, one person's consumption of it does not diminish another person's.
The point is; people say copyright violation is stealing, is isn't stealing, and arguments occur. To have a good conversation about it, it's useful to distinguish club good from private goods, because then we can talk about the difference between "unauthorised access to a club good" (piracy) and "unauthorised posession of a private good" (theft).
You're not using your flat, it's there anyway, you've not lost anything, nothing has been broken or damaged, he's gone before you're back so it's fine right?
Let's use another example. I order food, but don't eat all I get. If you will eat it, I would be very glad, as it wouldn't go to waste.
After all, at the time they created it the legal and commercial framework, as well as the social norms, said that they could expect payment from anyone who consumed their work.
Why are you allowed to override their expectations yet someone using your property without your permission isn't allowed to override yours?
Do you have any evidence that the costs outweigh the benefits?
And without exception, all of those "pirates" that I know have much larger legal bluray and record collections than I do.
In this case $0 or even a negative value amount is what you can plug into something. Why? Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.
However, what they pay with is with their time and attention.
I used to know someone who managed a movie theater. He would sneak us into movies quite often. Good and bad. And quite often after coming out of the movie I felt like wanting "my free back".
Let's say an artist is unknown and I am a customer that has quite a few connection ( a blog with a large following perhaps ). Then what would make sense is for me to pay a negative amount ( the artist would pay me to spend my time listening to his new cool record in the hopes that I might spread the news about it ).
FWIW, the only album I've paid for in years was a pay-what-you-want deal. I paid something like $3. Which was all that was left in my bank account after I paid my rent and bought groceries for that month - I'm a college student.
(Studies have shown that the sales-displacing effect of piracy in music ranges from 42% to no effect at all[1]. If all piracy could be prevented, that's an awfully large deadweight loss)
[1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~rtelang/SmithTelang.pdf
So then, what if I am willing to pay for it?
I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.
If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.
So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!
If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.
If it's not available I have no real issue with getting it illegally.
Frankly if the media companies adopted day and date releases worldwide for content and worked to make their back catalogues widely available through convenient means (by which iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on count) a lot of the best arguments in favour of piracy dry up.
You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:
"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."
Why do you seek out and watch the content made by people you violently despise?
When I explain that I don't really like piracy I get some very strange looks.
I think people often overestimate how many people are willing to consider ethics at all in purchasing decisions. I know plenty of otherwise nice and decent people who would happily purchase a product that they knew was made by child slavery, hell people even joke about it.
It seems that considering the consequences of your actions isn't hip anymore once consumerism is involved.
I would gladly pay double the price for Netflix Canada if the service was as good as it is in the states. I don't mind paying for something if it provides me a good service, but it doesn't. Netflix canada is a steaming pile.
So, "Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future." is impossible because if big companies like Netflix can't even do it, no amount of money is going to help the situation.
EDIT: Turns out it's canada's fault, not the us's when it comes to why we don't get hulu/netflix/etc.
Do you also apply this principle to sex?
What about borrowed books, good views, jokes, ideas, intelligent conversation, exercise?
Yes people can choose to make their work available for free, and that's great. But that choice again lies in the person who created the work, not the person who consumes it.
And to be perfectly clear, I have no delusion that piracy will ever go away. It's a fact of the digital world. My point is pirates should not delude themselves into thinking what they do is justified. It's not.
However, I don't think the rest of your points are strong. People might not want to pay for apples, but that doesn't give them the justification to steal them. That's not because they don't value them - clearly they do. Or else they wouldn't want them.
Copying is different to stealing because in copying you don't deprive the creating from anything apart from completely arbitrary rights that the law grants to them.
It may also be worth raising that there's room for a difference between protection of 1. privacy (this photo is of me and I don't want it released because that would be invasive to a reasonable definition of privacy); 2. first release (I created something but it's personal, I haven't released it to anyone, and don't want people redistributing it - this is an anti-right, but more reasonable than the next one); 3. Protection of publishers (I create something, and the government gives me a monopoly over all copies and derivatives of it to such an extent that government invades people's civil liberties to protect my business models).
Copying isn't stealing, so yea, it's different.
As for the final paragraph, all of those are rather easily solved by realizing that information will be copied whether you like it or not. If you don't want it out there, don't release it. Fake government monopolies on information copying is a dying model, the death throws of the old guard trying to cope with a world they don't understand. Information will be free, eventually.
You have a right to exercise. You don't have the right to walk into Gold's Gym and use their facilities without paying. I don't have the right to enter your home and use the equipment in the basement.
You have a right to have mutually consensual sex with someone else without paying. You don't have the right to rape a prostitute if they only offer sex for money because you didn't want to pay. I don't have the right to demand sex from your family.
You have the right to borrow a book from your friend if he's willing to lend it to you. You don't have the right to borrow your buddy's book without their permission just as you don't have the right to walk into a bookstore and borrow their books without permission. I don't have the right to take your books from you.
city41 wrote "If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it." in the context that "it" is copyrighted work that is offered for sale, not just anything. You know it as well as everyone here.
But I do believe that if somebody has something you want and they only offer to you for a price (be it money or otherwise), you don't have a right to it for free, pretty much whatever "it" is. (assuming they have the right to that control in the first place obviously) See biot's comment for eloquent point-by-point explanation.
Why? Where did that right comes from. Who legislates enjoyment? Or are you saying it is a moral law?
If you only have to pay the price of one day's lunch for access to a library of content, then downloading a title rather than watching it on its official outlet will reduce subscription fees and thus impact revenue sharing. So rather than buying less than 10%, there may in fact be no threshold at which pirating becomes more practical, once the initial monetary threshold (being able to afford the subscription fee) is met.
Therefore, copyright infringement can result in a much stronger loss in revenue than you presume, even though I personally agree that it doesn't constitute "stealing", as no physical good has been removed and appropriated illegally. However, what that copyright infringement can do is impede or obstruct certain consumer-favoring (IMO) business models from being viable.
It's possibly true, in my opinion, that sharing in a gray area of material whose market has not yet matured may increase visibility and have future benefits, but no company which deals with content producers and the platform to deliver content can afford to acknowledge this to the content producers or to the audience without risking legitimizing copyright infringement and therefore delegitimizing their own business (which is why I'm not disclaiming where I work, other than it is familiar with these issues).
Not that I'm arguing that there should be no such thing as sharing, but making the moral argument to justify it that stealing isn't putting the company in a worse position is a poor rationale. It's not true and it's not something that can be defended against in public.
Nor am I arguing that piracy will make or break a business. If it's big enough to be popular, it may be big enough to grow a legitimate market faster than the illegitimate alternative. However, this also relies on cooperative content producers and an audience willing to pay for the content. It's a tricky balance but the reality is that while violation of copyright may not produce economic devastation on its own, neither is it devoid of any impact.
tl;dr: Reasonable people should pay for content available to them that they enjoy, especially when affordable.
The challenges are about control of limited distribution and promotion channels. This is a vicious territory and a zero-sum game. This helps to explain why that space cultivates nasty people. The sort of person who would have no qualms about grinding an artist down as much as possible.
There's an endless supply of naive, highly skilled, high-ego artists who will do anything to get a 'contract' to get access to distribution. Money is not a key motivator to these people, but some might like the traditional media model if it gives their produce an advantage over equally skilled but less connected mindshare competitors. This is particularly true where the performing artist is just a front for a composition and marketing team.
Fasion is an industry with a similar dynamic to media, but even less emphasis on the quality of content. And - surprise surprise - it's famously dominated by a nasty kind of person.
What you're saying sounds to me like artists don't deserve to get a larger share because what they do simply isn't the most difficult part of actually making money.
At the end of the day it may just be a completely normal function of supply and demand. Many people can easily supply what mainstream radio stations play all day long.
If you want to create and sell CDs then you can do this now. I've got friends who self-publish "classical" music performances and make (not much) money from it by getting good reviews in trade magazines and selling CDs at concerts. Or you could give your music away and sell mugs and tshirts and tickets to performances.
Or there's the model that city-based orchestras do - make margin by selling tickets to concerts and having a distribution agreement with a local music shop or radio network for recordings. e.g. http://www.aso.com.au/recordings.html
No, it's more akin to various kinds of fraud. So that's OK then, I guess.
> Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).
That is simply nonsense. Even musicians signed to the big record labels or authors whose books are distributed by major publishers do a lot better than that if their work is a success. Artists using small-time/independent distributors can do better, and these days plenty of works are self-published and self-promoted, sending the lion's share of the profit back to the artist.
A few new music artists do sign contracts so one-sided it's absurd, I agree, and they wind up never making any money at all or even paying some of the costs themselves. But that's usually because they let a big record label screw them, which would have happened regardless of the cut they thought they were going to get.
Those same big record labels are still paying several percent to any successful artists who have a half-decent agent/lawyer. More importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, small/indie record labels don't have the power to play those kinds of legal games even if they want to. Again, anyone signed to one is probably getting a lot more than that "fraction of a percentage point".
So, while I agree with you that the major distributors often offer little value today while taking far more of a cut than they deserve, I stand by my original point that it's silly to attack copyright because the original artists only get <1% as a cut. That just isn't true for anyone successful who doesn't let themselves get played.
But artists do get just a tiny part of the money people pay. Take TLC as a well known example: they were a huge seller, yet they got bankrupt, largely because of how their record company treated them:
>CrazySexyCool eventually sold over 11 million copies in the US, and became one of the first albums to ever receive a diamond certification from the RIAA, and won a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Album and a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group for "Creep". However, in the midst of their apparent success, the members of TLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 3, 1995. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLC_%28band%29)
Take Courtney Love's rant about where the money goes as another (well known) example: http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
I agree with the OP: I'm sure that if they could get away with it, the record companies would most definitely prefer to pay the artist nothing at all.
If an artist is getting screwed by a label/studio is a problem between them and the label/studio. If, as a consumer, you feel bad for the artist, I don't think the solution is to pirate the work, but instead to let the artist and label/studio know you want to support the artist and not the label/studio and thus be a consumer for things that you feel are more fair to the artist. (e.g. concerts?)
The artist might have unfortunately sold some of their rights to the label/studio for exposure, promotion, etc. and in return don't get as much money as they (or the consumers) think they deserve. Next time, they'll probably deal with a different label/studio…
In fact, it's very similar to the situations between entrepreneurs and VCs… you take some money, sell some rights because that's your only way to make it big. Once you make it big, you might realize that you got screwed and think you deserved more. Next time, you'll either still have made enough money/fame to strike it on your own, or you'll work with better VCs.
With regard to your second point, I again argue that there needs to be a separation between the debate over how copyright holders operate and the legalities of piracy. Failure to do that means that the analysis breaks down when we're not talking about the big evil conglomerate music companies that screw artists over and everybody loves to hate. Do you feel comfortable with your assertions above if we're talking about an indie game developer, or TextMate author Allan Odgaard?
We need to emphasize that filesharing is a form of sampling for most people, and that they would never buy 99% of the content that they fileshare for free, and that they often do buy that 1%, and that even if the consumer doesn't buy your content/distribution, you're still better off for the potential word-of-mouth promotion and other exposure facilitated.
In reality, filesharing operates on the same principles as YouTube, which the studios and record companies also attempted to kill as just another pirate avenue before it was legitimized by Google and entered mainstream acceptance; they now (mostly) see YouTube as a promotional platform with the same understanding that it's about "sampling", that most people won't buy 99% of the stupid videos they watch on YouTube, but that some people will buy that 1%. The RIAA/MPAA members use YouTube in hopes that their content will be that 1% that provokes individuals to go purchase related merchandise.
The only difference is that YouTube makes the "filesharing" piece invisible and people feel that they are sharing videos instead of files, and this makes YouTube tenable for mainstream use. BitTorrent and other filesharing networks operate on the same set of principles, but they are harder to use and control, so they remain targeted when there is essentially no difference from a consumer standpoint other than barrier to entry.
Of course this leaves out the production costs entirely and probably a whole lot more. I'm not an economist, but I think this is a fatal flaw in the business model of most entertainment companies.
I left the costs etc out of the equation, which is obviously a wrong thing to do.
From Wikipedia: . . . supply is determined by marginal cost. Firms will produce additional output as long as the cost of producing an extra unit of output is less than the price they will receive.
. . . demand curves are determined by marginal utility curves. Consumers will be willing to buy a given quantity of a good, at a given price, if the marginal utility of additional consumption is equal to the opportunity cost determined by the price, that is, the marginal utility of alternative consumption choices. The demand schedule is defined as the willingness and ability of a consumer to purchase a given product in a given frame of time.
In my experience, the pro-piracy argument from economics is at best an imperfect understanding of supply and demand and at worst, the person making the argument just heard the words "supply and demand" and filled in the rest from his own imagination. The "Law of Supply and Demand" is not an actual thing. It's the juxtaposition of "Law of Supply" and the "Law of Demand"
Supply (as opposed to the supply curve) is dictated by demand, not the other way around. If the demand for a good rises, then supply will be increased to meet the demand. If demand for a good drops, supply will be decreased to the level of demand.
To your question, the entertainment companies are under no illusions that the demand curve for any particular product is going to stay the same. They expect that over time, the demand for any given thing will decrease. They know that Britney Spears new album will sell a shit-ton of copies for the first week after it drops and by the same time the following year, everyone who wanted it will have it and sales will be virtually non-existant. Their business model is geared toward a limited lifecycle for any given product, which is why they make continual investments in new products.
When you steal a car, that one car is stolen. No big deal. If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down. This is because most people will quickly and easily be able to get it for free. Revenue will go down as a result of this and instead of having the loss of an individual copy of that product, the entire product line loses money. Something that just doesn't happen with physical products.
The same principal can be applied to the news: Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.
Do you have any evidence to support this? Both the movie [0] and gaming [1] industries are making record profits.
>Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.
Well, not exactly. I assume you're referring to consuming news online, which is supported by advertising -- it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution.
[0] -- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...
[1] -- http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/06/gaming-expected-t...
Being involved in multiple small companies. When we allowed cracks to work, sales slowly went down to nothing. When the cracks were stopped, low-and-behold, sales went back up because people weren't able to get it for free. I've seen it too many times to think it's a coincidence. Huge companies like Microsoft and Adobe can take the hit, but a small company will be destroyed.
"it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution."
So you are telling me that the fact that I can get pretty much all my news for free (from hundreds of sources) has no effect on a company that tries to sell me the same thing for a few dollars?
I never said it was piracy. I was saying that it's an example of the same effect: When something is easily available for free, less people will end up purchasing it.
In addition to this, when piracy goes unchecked it creates a culture of acceptance (IE: it's not a bad thing) and less people will end up buying.
Everyone loves to defend piracy and yet many of those same people hate big corporations. It's a funny thing because eventually, that's all that will be left.
I no longer get involved with apps. I only do web services. It's better for me because I now get monthly reoccurring income. Eventually, I think most companies will go this route and piracy will be a non-issue.
What exactly is stolen? Certainly not the piece of music, film, or knowledge: unlike spaghetti, those are abundant, non-conflicting goods. Nor the exclusivity, for it is only destroyed. Nor secrecy or privacy, for the piece of knowledge or art is public already.
This is not theft. This is infringing a state granted monopoly. It doesn't make it a good idea, mind you. Upholding the law is generally a good idea. But unlike plain theft, it's not obviously wrong either.
grellas made an excellent post the other day about the nature of physical property rights vs intangible property rights [1]. The general gist is that declaring one "fundamental" and the other "not-fundametal" is sophistry; both are considered important to society and both are and will continue to be protected by law.
In my opinion, the existence of both physical and IP property rights is a social good - it's defining the boundaries of those rights that becomes the tricky part. I don't think we're hitting the right balance worldwide at the moment, but I also don't think we should be swinging violently towards SOPA or conversely anarchy.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3463640
Grellas is right to point out that current laws turn a range of intellectual goods into property. We shouldn't forget however how they do this: by enforcing scarcity when the default was abundance. By the way, you can get abundance back by breaking the law.
I reject the terms "property" and "theft" when talking about ideas and recordings because they are abundant by default. By using those words, they make you think in terms of scarcity. They skew your perception of the issues, then exploit that bias. This is why I insist that others do not use the word, "it's GNU/Linux" style. Even if you know what you meant, many people don't, and it has consequences. (In the same vein, I remind people not to say "internet" when talking about the world wide web alone. If you believe you "have the internet" as long as you can run a web browser, you won't notice nor protest when your ISP starts blocking TCP ports.)
I also reject copyright and patents altogether. Not because they are not property by default, and therefore illegitimate (I find this argument very weak). I reject them because I believe they do more evil than good. Most probably, they are more a hindrance than a help for our economy and our technological development. Not to mention the inevitable loss of individual liberties, which humans tend to value by themselves.
Overall, I believe scarcity should be abolished whenever possible. If we get to the point where there is so much abundance that life is not fun any more, then we'd have a good reason for scarcity. (Video games provide an example: god mode, unlimited ammo, and free experience points tend to spoil the game. I'm still tempted by the cheat codes, but I think twice before I type them.) But right now scarcity is a problem to be solved. Copyright and patents are part of that problem (or at least a symptom).
I understand your point about artificial scarcity and appreciate that you find copyrights and patents a net detriment rather than a net benefit. In the current scheme of things, I would have to agree with you on that point in some instances (especially with respect to software patents, many pharmaceutical patents, and the length of copyright). Overall, however, I believe that the idea of intellectual property is a sound one that's been distorted over the course of legal history thanks to the influence of powerful rights holders and a lack of ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.
So given that, you are right, he doesn't refute (1.) (2.) or (3.) at all!
And yes, property is a right, one of far greater importance to political liberty than is generally allowed. And intellectual property is property. The placement of economic activity _outside_ the direct control of the state prevents the state from entirely dominating the society.
Now, SOPA is a really bad bill, because DNS filtering is a free speech nightmare. If you make me choose between speech rights and property rights, I'm taking the speech right, it's the foundation of everything else. The willingness of show biz and its lackeys to mess with speech rights demonstrates a disturbing greed and / or ignorance.
But that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's a complicated world, and technology is revising the everyday realization of our rights and responsibilities. We aren't going to work our way through that with a black-and-white simplification of the debates.
I downloaded a lot when I was a student, when I began to work I decided I did not have the "I'm poor" excuse any more and I began buying CDs of bands I like. I stopped buying CDs after I got my first DRMed one. I thought "ok, this is stupid, I don't want to be part of this any more".
Only recently I have discovered the real harm that copyright laws and lobbyists are doing to the society. They are criminalising sharing. Think a bit about it. We have to stand against them. Now there are copyright restrictions on SCIENCE papers. It is effectively a danger to our society.
Here in France a law was proposed to display on CDs price tag how much the artist receives when you buy a CD. It was voted down by lobbyists' minions. That alone says a lot.
Once you realize this line exists, paying for music is no longer "the right thing to do" but an evil act, at least as evil as supporting sweat shops and Amazon deforestation.
Whether you continue to pirate music or simply stop listening to it is one's personal choice, but buying already ceased being the moral choice.
I'm willing to guarantee that most don't know the labels that most artists belong to. Some are indie and are not involved with the RIAA. Should they be punished as well?
You're not any different from from those you preach against.
Pirating only gives those on the other side the impression and ammunition to say 'we are creating great things that people steal we just need to force them pay.' Not using their works at all is the only way to win.
How is it stealing if they can still have that something?
You compose a song. I copy that song. You still have that song. If I'd taken away a recorder with your only master copy of it, then I would have stolen it.
Because that's not a decision you should get to make. The cost associated with creating most things isn't in raw materials alone but man hours that went in to produce it, and the author is entitled to ask for whatever they think their hard work and their end product are worth. Is the benefit of getting that product not worth the price they're asking? Here's a novel idea; you don't buy the product and don't get the benefit. It is worth the price? Then vote with your wallet and buy away. Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.
So who gets to make it. I guess that means you'd agree with MPAA claims some 16 year old kid out there can be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they downloaded a couple of songs. What if they sue them for $100M, is that valid? If the defendant gets to unilaterally re-define and attribute semantics to words and decide what the punishment is do you think that makes sense?
> Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.
Why doesn't it. It makes a pretty big difference. Not at the point of transaction but during a dispute. If someone steals your song does it mean you can ask for $100M from them claiming you lost potential profit because it was going to be a hit song. How do you decide what one copy is worth? That is the key question. Sorry, but "it is worth whatever the seller says is worth, is bullshit". If that hypothetical teenager didn't copy the song, do you think the record company would be $100M richer. How do you prove that?
If we invent a technology that allows us to read thoughts, should you be allowed to read them without the thinkers permission? The thinker still has their thoughts. What about disseminate them via torrents? Would that be "fair"? Is that the society we want?
What about monitoring conversations via surveillance means? The speakers still have their conversation. Should we be allowed to a) surveil anyone and b) distribute that surveillance digitally as the surveilled still have their conversation?
The time is close approaching where such questions will need to be asked and I see little difference between piracy of songs, movies or other artistic expression and the extraction and distribution of thoughts against the owners wishes. The only real difference is that the artists chose to let it out into the world in a way the pirate didn't like. One way was via concert/itunes/cd/dvd, another way could be a conversation with a friend. Both ways the pirate says they have the right to use it how they want - original thinker be damned.
In my view it comes down to respect. While technically it's not stealing, you're still an asshole for using others thoughts without their blessing.
I can imagine the day where someone hacks into your laptop, records you in a compromising position, shares it with the world and shrugs and says "how is it stealing if you still have that something"? I just copied your dignity.
Not all that can be stolen is a thing.
Good example and I agree. But I think it should be called something else rather than theft. Because one issue with this is how much have you lost after something was copied. That's the law suit side of this. Grandmas are being asked to pay hundreds of thousands of $ because their grand-kids downloaded Lady Gaga songs. By calling it "stealing" they are able to convince juries and judges that this is the equivalent of grandma breaking into a bank and taking $100k worth of gold and then speeding away. You see the problem?
Certainly relaying those thoughts for free can possibly limit potential opportunities to futher sell the right to 'listen to those thoughts' (assuming that anyone of those listening in for free would be prepared to pay for it). But this 'intellectual rape' thing you are trying to paint here just doesn't hold water since they are already granting permission to 'read their thoughts' for money.
These files containing ip that are being illegally copied all across the web are things which were already being distributed in various forms, albeit with artificial scarcity mechanisms in place to force payment per copy.
Just because they are already granting permission to "read their thoughts" for money doesn't give anyone license to just do what they want does it?
I fail to see how the users choice on how to distribute files grants pirates license to go against the thought originators wishes.
Note I'm not saying I agree with this - but I find it interesting to think about the opposite viewpoint to my own as it helps me rationalise my position.
If someone argues against copyright, you cannot defend it by invoking 'stealing'. The 'stealing' here is not removing of anything in any normal sense. It is infringement of, or disobedience of, copyright -- which of course would not exist if there were no copyright. There is no basic harm.
You might say it would be difficult to pay for production with other economic arrangements. But that is a matter of comparing economic efficiency; it has nothing to do with stealing.
Even alcohol seems questionable often times. I am fairly confident I have yet to buy a bottle of gin/vodka/whiskey that hasn't been somehow meddled with. After all, if I put it in the freezer it always freezes.
After writing this I guess I realize it is somewhat OT but it does signify that you have a major problem when the fake is nearly indistinguishable from the real.
Countries like china often start copying everthing an then start to innovate themselfs skip a century (or half) and its the other way around.
Having said that I think it is also quite difficult for the "greedy" companies to sell in these countries at the price points that would have suitable returns. This is because of the fact that the masses in these countries simply cannot afford to pay that much. This does not necessarily mean they should suffer for it.
So, pirates are actually heroes in these regions no matter what anybody says because a genuine audience/market for them exists in poor/sanctioned countries around the world. SOPA or whatever other concoction they have in the rabbit hat, would do very little to affect the usual business of the day.
I envy you Americans for Netflix, we have nothing like that here.
There are some strict rules around in Germany that defined at what time a movie may be released on DVD after it has hit cinemas. I think it is 6 months. Renting the movie might in some occasions be possible a couple of weeks earlier. Though, that has never mattered to me. Waiting on the DVD release or for it's TV premiere are pretty much the same for me. Although, I guess there is also a minimum period for DVD sales before it is shown on TV.
The only option to get the content I am looking for is through megavideo/piratebay.
With the films, happen the same. If I use my iTunes spanish account, the content is delayed 6 months, no tv shows and all of them in spanish. If I use a German account, I only get German content.
I pay spotify premium since two years ago. But for tv shows and films. The only content i can get is from sites like megavideo/piratebay, etc.
This industry is the only one that doesn't offer to the client what the client wants. Easy.
I pity the 14 million "edge case" Catalan speakers in Spain.
Accordingo to this:
http://www.caib.es/conselleries/educacio/dgpoling/user/catal... (sorry, spanish) there are around 7 million Catalan speakers in all europe (including Spain, Andorra, France and Italy).
Your argument holds, still. Indeed, I'm pretty sure most content is available in Catalan here in Spain. I would be more worried about the italian ones, or even the french.
I'm sure there are other examples, but the general rule should be that language is a preference and not geographically forced.
Take this ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xj4jS8cho
This the truth...
You spent an hour to go to the shop's and buy it / waited a day for delivery He spent 15 minutes downloading it.
You have to sit though ad's you cannot skip. You have to watch a 39 second anti-piracy ad on a legitimate DVD. You have to wait 30 seconds for the title menu to load because some moron decided to show clips of the film you want to fecking play before it appears!
He is already 5 minutes into the film.
------------------
Its horrible.
As for the rest of the arguments I disagree.
1) Because you don't use my money well
It doesn't matter how they spend there money. They are provided a product that you want. If they didn't exist the product wouldn't exist.
"Everything else was probably diluted in stuffs I don't need: packaging, distribution, transport, marketing,"
If they didn't market you wouldn't have heard about it. If they didn't pay for distribution you wouldn't be able to get it. If they didn't pay for packaging you would receive a scratched, perhaps broken CD...
2) Because you are messing with my life
"Worst, you will use my money to sue me in court because I would have downloaded something that I didn't want to buy anyway!"
Yeah.. your like stealing their stuff? Why shouldn't they come after you? If you don't want it don't download. If you download it.. don't pretend you didn't want it.
"With the change left, you will pay lobbyists to ensure the governments make stupid and dangerous laws."
The politicians pass the law's. I see nothing wrong with the music / film industry lobbying to protect their interest's. Where it gets scary is when politicians act on the side of lobbyists without considering the wider picture.
3) Because you are destroying the whole society
I agree there are problems but I completely disagree that these problems are all caused by the film and music industry. I didn't know EMI signed teachers for their lectures?
Finally...
"If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off. In your arrogance, you are hurting the fundamental value of freedom only to save your little petty interests."
I guess big hollywood movies and the majority of career musicians can fuck off as well aye?
I can understand those who claim that what they are doing isn't thievery.
I can understand those that don't accept the idea of intellectual property in general.
But for you to both buy into the philosophy that what you are taking is valuable, and ought to be protected---then still steal it proudly..... that is one thing I can't understand.
Aren't people supposed to want to be good?
Many people believe that punishing people whom in their eyes are doing wrong is a good and righteous act, irregardless of any local law. In the legend of Robin Hood, Robin is generally seen as a "good person" and the hero in most tellings, despite being a thief and a criminal.
In the past I bought a MC and then I bought a CD. I paid twice for the same work. Did the shop offer me a discount? No.
Do I get a discount when I watch the same movie twice in a cinema or if I buy a DVD after I have seen the movie in the cinema? No.
Do I get easy access to mp3 if I buy a CD? No.
The movie/music industry simply sends the wrong signals...
Does that count as piracy?
When I hear about stuff like this, along with people's multi-terabyte arrays of content, I wonder if they actually listen/watch much of it. Movie/Record companies are worrying that this all got "stolen" but if it was never viewed was it actually "stolen"?
Almost purely philosophical as answering in the negative would inherently cripple the enforceability of copyright laws. But interesting nevertheless given the party line is the IP grants a purchaser a licence to consume the content.
There is always going to be a music and or movie business, as human beings since the dawn of time have fawned over larger then life figures. THere is a business around this (Justin Bieber) and there always will be.
(Fun fact: Availability was what "drove" me into piracy in the first place. There was a TV-show which had aired about a year earlier, which I had missed then but wanted to see. I tried every legal way to obtain it that I could think of, because I believed piracy was wrong at the time, but it was simply not for sale. In the end, I ended up with my first torrent downloading.)
This is also the very reason that that drove me (and thousands of others too, I'm sure) to piracy and the one reason why I still do it. Even if I really wanted to support that TV show, sometimes it's just not possible (Case in point: The comedy show "The Class", it's simply nowhere available on DVD or similar, yet all episodes are on The Bay. How am I supposed to not torrent that stuff if I wanted to watch it?).
By pirating this content you are the same as a child stealing candy. The analogy is obviously imperfect because a shop owner is directly damaged by the physical theft but my point is that a child does not need sweets. And 'pirates' do not need bland tv shows distracting them from so many other things in this world that are more deserving of time.
'Pirates' just seem to be sadder version of consumers who don't even help the economy. Little black holes taking and giving nothing back.
I feel sadness that these people try to justify their activities and ally themselves with the SOPA protests.
I would pay 50~100 euro per month for a all you can eat package providing that episodes are available with in a week of first broadcast (not in my country but global) and movies are available with in a month after showing in the theater. I asked around (yes very scientific) and most people would to that to.
So I have this money to give to the industry (max 1200 euro per year) but there is no service to give the money to. You could say go rend a movie (if you still can find such a place) but I refuse to pay 5 euro for a sloppy movie (the best movies I see in the theater any ways). You could say buy the movie but I'm not willing to pay 20 euro for a single Blu-ray. If tomorrow I could not download movies and TV-series any more I still wouldn't do that). In almost every other industry products follow demand but apparently the entertainment industry thinks they are above basic free market economics.
Where I converge is on the fury and destructiveness inherent in SOPA/PIPA. This rather-burn-Berlin-than-see-her-fall attack on America's (and through legislative export, the world's) creative and innovative centres is selfish and un-forgivable.
I also cannot help but notice the parallels in social malignancy between the banks Dodd used to regulate and the MPAA he commands today.