On morality: given how widespread the piracy is, we probably shouldn't assert that the moral side of the things is obvious here.
Regarding the law, that's one way to look at that. Another way is that the role of copyright is about to change, and disobeying the law en masse might be one way to help that change.
(Disclaimer: I'm not much of a pirate myself, I have a US iTunes Store account despite living in Russia just to be able to buy music legally. Also I'm earning money by writing software. But being able to copyright music and software is not a given, it's just how things work today, and as the world changes, this concept will also evolve.)
The morality question isn't necessarily obvious, but the pervasiveness of a particular activity has nothing to do with its morality. Was slavery more morally correct when the majority approved of it, or at least looked the other way? Absolutely not.
Actually, it was. You can't judge the morality of practices from the past from your present point of view. You shouldn't be convicted that your morality is absolute and will always be the only correct one.
Not to mention that software piracy is on a completely other level than slavery.
> You can't judge the morality of practices from the past from your present point of view.
Cultural relativism is certainly a valid school of ethical thought — one with which I happen to disagree. On matters like piracy, which is certainly less detrimental to society than slavery was, the consequences for believing what is popular and what is right are relatively low. But to suggest that you can apply this principle across the board, in all situations, is, in my view, absurd.
You're suggesting there that we cannot judge anything that has happened in the past because our views on the matter are now different. But that means we cannot judge ANYTHING that has happened EVER because, by definition, now is different from then.
> You shouldn't be convicted that your morality is absolute and will always be the only correct one.
I'm not. I'm just not convinced that, because a certain activity is widespread, it is therefore morally correct.
What I try to say is that you can't judge both piracy and slavery from your present point of view. I feel that because in the past slavery was commonly accepted, that it was morally justified then. In the same way, given the huge proliferation of piracy, I feel that copyright infringement is somewhat morally justified now. This view might change and in the same way, the morality of piracy might change too. I would take the common views of society as the definition of what is morally justified and what isn't. It is possible you see this in another way and that is fine (and not absurd).
Also, this change in zeitgeist is continuous, not as discrete as you overstate it is. We are perfectly justified to judge what has happened yesterday. Judging what happened during World War II is murkier and judging what happened when slavery was still extant is an almost meaningless activity.
Morals are not natural laws. People did not generally feel guilty or immoral for using slaves until the morals themselves changed. Similarly today with piracy: it doesn't feel morally wrong enough to warrant legal action to the minds of many. There needs to be a larger discussion about what is intellectual property (in fact, whether it exists) in the digital age. Legal experts should be discussing these issues but they seem too occupied with chasing pirates.
If we are going to reduce morality to the way a majority feels about an issue, then in a democratic society, does it make any sense to differentiate between morality and legality? Shouldn't the democratic process eventually result in laws that reflect the morality of the majority? How can you say a law is immoral without taking a vote? For example, if the majority in California voted for Proposition 8, how can it be immoral?
(Note: I believe morals are natural laws. They are just not as easy to discern as physical laws because it is harder for us to be morally neutral observers.)
If we are going to reduce morality to the way a majority feels about an issue, then in a democratic society, does it make any sense to differentiate between morality and legality?
Of course it does, for two reasons: first, there is still a difference between the morality of an individual and of society as a group. Secondly, the fact that society fells something is wrong doesn't mean it has to feel OK with giving the State power to crush it. A good example is Free Speech.
Shouldn't the democratic process eventually result in laws that reflect the morality of the majority?
That would depend on a more pure and direct democracy. But generally they do; when the difference between them becomes too great, people tend to revolt.
But you should remember what I said above: people might feel its wrong to legally punish wrong actions. There's no contradictions in this.
How can you say a law is immoral without taking a vote? For example, if the majority in California voted for Proposition 8, how can it be immoral?
Assuming morality is relative, there's no such thing as an immoral law, because morality is not a property of a thing, but a relationship between a person (or a group of them) and that thing.
So I can say Proposition 8 is immoral, if I find it immoral. Which doesn't mean it's immoral for another person or society in general.
Note: I believe morals are natural laws.
I always found that interesting, because I never found any evidence for that. In what do you base your belief? Or is it pure faith?
The only problem I have with this article is this line:
"since when does that suddenly mean that you can decide that you are no longer going to pay for products that both legally and morally you are obliged to pay for, yet still use them?"
Legally obliged to pay for? Yes.
Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality.
> "Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality."
I assume, therefore, that you invite those with an interest in sadomasochism to inflict pain on you?
(No, I don't think sadomasochism and piracy are alike, but the idea of making and breaking laws based on what one person is happy to have done to them is IMO ridiculous.)
So, your boss will be happy he doesn't have to pay you. The question is how're you going to afford to live and how long will you work for someone who doesn't pay you anything?
Don't get me wrong I'm for communism and intentional communities; but are you really advocating that?
Your argument makes no sense. If my boss doesn't pay me, I'm not working for him. Thus, he is no longer my boss. How is that relevant to the morality issue of piracy? Do you mean in the sense that if I pirate something, the creator of that something doesn't get paid and thus doesn't create the thing that I pirated? But that argument is backwards. If you mean that no more things will be produced in a world with piracy, that's demonstrably false. We've had rampant piracy since the first printing press, the world we live in now is not free from piracy, yet there's more creative work created every year.
I think you summed it up perfectly. If your boss is no longer paying you, he has no right to your time. Just like with the pirated content, if you don't pay for it, you have no right to it.
Merriam-Webster:
"Definition of IMMORAL
: not moral; broadly : conflicting with generally or traditionally held moral principles"
Based on this, whether piracy is moral or not depends on people's opinions. I would argue that society does not consider copyright infringement to be especially immoral.
Sing 'Happy Birthday' in public without paying the guy who bought the company holding the copyright to it. Is your audience disgusted by this immoral act?
Now the owner of the company holding the copyright sues you for your unauthorized use of 'his' song. Would more people think that you acted immorally, or that the copyright holder is acting immorally?
But with the pirated content, the pirate never entered into an agreement to pay for the content.
Also, the creator of the pirated product has only lost a potential sale (one that I would argue that they don't have a right to anyway), whereas the unpaid worker has experienced a 'theft' of their time and work.
You have no idea what you are talking about, I'm guessing this is because you have never created anything worthwhile on which your livelihood depended. I'm sure you'd be quick to whine if your employer (assuming you are old enough to work) could decide whether or not you should be paid for your work after you had done it. I hope you congratulate the next person to steal from you with a cheery "well done, that's my morality too".
This misses the fundamental difference between someone choosing to distribute their work for free, and working under false promise of financial reward.
Ignoring the condescending tone of this comment, there are many 'creators' in the world who have no desire to personally profit from their work. That is not the issue being raised.
You have no idea what you are talking about, I'm guessing this is because you are too old to have grown up with tape trading, VHS copies of films and pirate cable. I have a contract with my employer, he is bound by that agreement to pay me. If he decides he doesn't want to, I stop working for him. If I write a book, no one is under contract to purchase and read it. I'd be happy if someone did, but I'd be foolish to assume that would happen when I started writing it.
I have created worthwhile things on which my livelihood depended, and those things have been cheerfully and rampantly pirated (piracy rates of video games estimated at +90%). And the company I worked for made great profits and paid me a nice bonus. Would it have made as much of a profit if those 90%+ of people who played the game, liked it, talked about it, reviewed it without paying for it, had never played it at all? I don't know. Would it have made more profit? I can't say. I doubt you can either.
As an employee, you have no basis for understanding the perceived loss that piracy incurs- you are paid 100% what you agreed upon for your creative efforts. Someone else is taking the risk and losing the profit. If you went to get your paycheck and found out that it was 40% lower than what you thought, you might feel some of that self-righteous anger that businesses are espousing.
More realistically the worst you will feel is a denied promotion, or lost a job because your company can't realize it's investment in you.
Unless you are directly culpable for the creation and distribution of a product and lose money on it because people won't honor your effort, you don't have a basis for passing judgment based on your personal experience (in other words, you're no expert :) ).
Now you are making a different argument, but I can argue just as effectively against this one. :)
In my role as copyright superhero have I not only worked as an employee at companies producing copyrighted works, I have also, personally, produced and sold copyrighted works that have, to some extent, been pirated. I have yet to feel any self-righteous anger. The only anger I might feel is a certain frustration where some of these copyrighted works have not been as successful as I would have wished them to be, but I would be foolish to lay the blame on piracy. More likely, the timing was not right and the quality was not high enough to ensure success.
Any business endeavor entails risk. I would hope that my employer has factored in piracy rates and other non-specific factors in the business plan before hiring me to create a video game for him. Sometimes, things don't work out as hoped and the result is a flop. That can happen for many reasons. I have yet to see a convincing argument where piracy was the reason something did not succeed. On the other hand, I can point to numerous examples were piracy was the deciding factor that let something become a success to begin with. The currently popular example is Minecraft, which spread entirely through word of mouth. How successful would that game have been if there had been no way to send it to a friend while telling them to check it out because it's awesome? I really doubt anyone would have known about it at all.
Well then, I stand corrected, you do have some basis for your statement. :)
Though it doesn't sound like you gained your livelihood from the production of such works. My dad is a farmer who wanted to pass on the farm to my brother. They had various communication issues, but one of the underlying complaints of my father was that my brother didn't understand the seriousness of being in business. He would say, "His nuts aren't in the ringer."
I don't think piracy ruins businesses. However, I don't think that anyone can make the argument that they ethically have the right to disregard the producer's terms for consuming their product, regardless of the form the product is in or how unreasonable those terms are. The creator of the product has the right to define their terms and if you violate his/her terms, it's a transgression. It's not a favor, a lesson, or a statement, you're taking without honoring their work in the way they've decided. Maybe it will turn out great for them in the end, maybe not- it doesn't matter, they set the terms and you violated them.
Piracy is parasitic, not productive, and everyone loses. We get these stupid censorship bills rolling through and resources are spent in trying to control the phenomena instead of innovating and addressing real issues.
Regarding Minecraft-- I did not realize that it was successful because it was pirated. I know that it got some good reviews on popular sites and I believe they sold a cheap development version and were successful because of this accessible model (versus a Microsoft approach). Wikipedia says that the developers decided to start their video game company and focus exclusively on it with the money they earned from their sales. To me, this does not sound like a pirate success story. It actually reinforces my belief that it absolutely requires resources to back any serious effort and this is something that piracy never provides.
No, I've never worked for myself as in paying the bills based on my own copyright, although not from a lack of trying. I, like many people, started out with dreams of fame and glory through music, but gave it up quite early as the risks involved in choosing that career far outweighed the potential benefit. Plus, this was during the first dot com bubble, so getting into computers seemed like a good deal.
I see you brought it back to a question of ethics, which is something that I think is ultimately not very interesting. Ask any horse-cart driver during the infancy of the car industry, and they would probably curse cars for being noisy and dangerous, and car drivers for being unethical and immoral for supporting this metal abomination. These days no one cares. In the same way, hopefully, we'll one day look back at the era of government anti-freedom bills and shake our heads in disbelief.
Because short of actually going into the heads of all the people who, unlike you, don't see piracy as a parasitic activity, what can you actually do about it?
It's so easy to copy works digitally that many people are no doubt doing it without realizing it. If you have a blog, and someone links to a youtube music video, and you like it and want to share the experience of seeing it with a friend.. you put a link to the video on your blog. But! Unbeknownst to you, that video was put there without the permission of the original creator, and you just committed a crime (by proxy, in this case, but a moral crime nontheless).
A short history of Minecraft, as told by me (guaranteed to be inaccurate in many ways):
Minecraft rose to fame by being heavily shared while in the alpha/beta stage at various indie game forums, 4chan, something awful and other places like these, from where the word of mouth spread wider and wider. From the start, it was for sale (I think for $10), it has never been a free game as far as I know. It was pirated like crazy from the beginning. By the time notch formed mojang, he was already a millionare from the sales of minecraft.
Of course he didn't become a millionare from the piracy directly. The piracy didn't stop him from becoming one, though. In fact, I don't think it's possible to say definitively what impact piracy really had, other than that it helped spread the word. Given the graphics of Minecraft, would millions of people buy it without trying it? Maybe. You say that piracy doesn't provide resources, but in this case it did provide that one elusive thing that every independent developer desperately needs: exposure.
I agree on ethics. No one can prove right or wrong, so it has limited charm. I think though, that most would understand that beyond ethics, piracy is directly compromising the agreement that the producer sets out- similar to lying or stealing in that it's not admirable behavior, regardless of how many Johnny Depp posters you have put up (like one of the pro-piracy blogs that was posted earlier.)
Don't get me wrong, I don't support these asinine bills, however I do see people who pirate as directly supporting them. Which is upsetting because they're creating a demand and a rationale for censorship, which affects everyone.
On the same note, I see bandied around that the bills creators don't understand the fundamental architecture of the Internet and the damage it would cause. I see, "pirates," as not understanding the fundamental architecture of capitalism and ignoring the damage it causes.
Specifically, the exchange of resources where both parties benefit.
If a provider wants exposure and wants to give away their product for exposure, that's up to them, not anyone else. And for digital products it's a hell of a lot easier to provide them public domain or open source than it is to sell them.
However, exposure doesn't pay the bills. I am self employed and I see similar sentiments expressed on a regular basis. Product or service provider, if what I provide is valuable enough for you to ask for or steal, I obviously don't need the exposure that bad. There was a $6,000 photograph post up earlier that expressed the same idea.
If you liked Minecraft, there is nothing to prevent you from paying for it and touting it. Minecraft is an especially relevant example because the developers set the bar so low in regards to price and people still pirated something they claimed to love? That's so bizarre to me- I want to support independent developers much more so than the big guys and they weren't asking for much.
Okay, so the problem that I'm seeing is that in your mind, you are equating a pirated copy with a lost sale. But that's an outdated and incorrect assumption, and hopefully one that time will deal with (when we've all grown up with infinite copies available from birth). A pirated copy is definitely not the same as a lost sale.
Plenty of people payed for and touted Minecraft, obviously. A huge category of people didn't pay, but still touted it.
Would that category of people have paid if piracy was impossible? Well, I've argued against that reality since making piracy impossible would most likely also make Minecraft impossible (since you'd have to distribute through government-approved channels). I don't see how someone could possibly create an independent product and be able to self-distribute if piracy is technically impossible. And arguably the environment that spawned and formed the successful indie game maker is heavily dependent on free and easy peer-to-peer sharing of information, code and software.
Secondly, clearly these people didn't have any moral issue with pirating the game while at the same time loving it. It may be bizarre to you, but a huge number of people will happily break the law if it's to their benefit, without feeling bad over lost sales. Most likely, these people wouldn't have paid even if they couldn't have had the game. They would just have gone without the game.
I'd even go so far as to say that generally acting in their own self interest with little regard to people outside their closest circle is a fundamental human behavioral constant, and it's shocking to me that this is so shocking to other people. You do know that children are starving to death in poor areas of the world? You certainly have the means to save at least one of them. Yet you don't, why? Because their plight is too remotely removed from you. You have no emotional connection to them.
Closing the emotional gap is key to exploiting the modern economy: see the success of pay-what-you-want schemes, where people end up paying more than they would have with a set price. I'd argue that this demonstrates another interesting detail: the humble bundle, which was available as pay-what-you-want, was heavily pirated! Why? It was essentially free already! Perhaps because people like to share, and the distribution model and the economic profit margins of the creator are both lesser forces than the innate emotional desires to have and to share.
I wouldn't equate a pirated copy with a lost sale, but that is an approach that the businesses behind SOPA/PIPA are doing and they are pursuing censorship as an end result. Whatever a pirate may say or intend, they are supporting their opponents argument for censorship in the form of, "lost sales."
Censorship is as morally baseless as piracy, but I do not like it either, and like piracy it has a negative effect on everyone.
Maybe sales would increase if something prevented piracy, maybe they wouldn't. I expect that they would increase a significant percentage, but probably not even close to 100%.
People everywhere act out of self interest all the time, not just some of the time, all the time. It's just that for some people self interest involves having the perception to see beyond the immediate benefit of an act. Others do not, and eat donuts until they have diabetes, sleep with their best friend's spouse, steal cars, and act on each impulse as soon as it arises.
That people act in ways that are short sighted and then try to explain away their shortsightedness is only human, but it's not admirable, and it does no public service.
I have nothing against anyone saying, "I breach the contract between provider and consumer. I'm a leech off of others labor. I inhibit growth that would otherwise occur. I take and give nothing back and then lie and say I would do otherwise if only X business did Y. I will only act fairly when forced to by a parent figure, which will probably be the government if I can get others to take on this attitude."
The same as I would have no problem with someone saying, "I'm a habitual liar and a cheat," versus someone saying, "I help people to be more careful and to investigate what it is told to them. I help people to be more cautious. I'm a Highwayman, a Bandit!"
I have long addressed the question of whether I'm going to live my life righting every wrong and looking for people to save. That I do not save kids in Africa, does not mean I haven't considered it. I live my life with integrity to what I value and I don't have to make elaborate arguments as to why, I just do the part that is mine.
The reason I'm shocked that Minecraft was pirated as you say, is that I see "pirates" complain that they would buy this product if it didn't have DRM or that product if the cost was reasonable. Here we have a project in its early stages that is valuable and made easy to attain. Will they support it. Will they help make it better? No, the lousy excuse is now exposure. And then, "Why isn't this thing finished yet!?" Ha, ha.
I don't disagree with your viewpoint, but I think there are more ways of looking at it. Taking a systemic view instead of focusing on the specific transaction in question - that is, look at the pirate, not the piracy - might shed some light on why I think that ultimately, piracy is not a destructive force:
There is research showing that pirates, on average, spend more money on the things they pirate than non-pirates. While this may sound counter-intuitive, on reflection it makes sense. There are those who pirate for the sake of pirating, lets call them hoarders. They download everything they can, with no intention to ever pay for any of it. These are not potential customers. The other category of pirates are people who, lets take music for example, who really love music. They spend a lot of money on music each month, but they also have an active network trading music with other enthusiasts. In fact, this trading network is what provides feedback and drives their interest in music to begin with. So the piracy, the downloading of music that they engage in, is the fuel that drives their consumption up beyond that of a regular, law-abiding consumer.
I'm not saying that this is the only truth, but the statistical evidence from several studies done on musical piracy (I recall one in particular done in Holland) supports this view.
So in this case, your characterisation of the pirate as a leech is not an accurate account. In fact, this pirate is the perfect customer, and it is the piracy that made him.
If you are creating something on which your livelihood depends, do so ‘under a promise of financial reward’. It would be foolish to do otherwise, isn't it?
But if you choose to publicly distribute your work—accept inevitable risks. Don't like that—go get a real job. You can do contract work writing music, or doing illustration / design.
More generally, if you want to be paid then do work under a contract. There are many cases where you will willingly accept promise of financial reward - look no further than Y Combinator - but you're a fool if you don't accept the risks or pretend you should be immune to the illegal actions (rather than seeking compensation after the fact, anyway).
Even in something like retail, your product can be stolen and there's no guarantee you'll get recompense. Yet laws regarding shoplifting have remained rather constant and non-draconian in all that time. The problem with the internet is that it's all too easy to get something without paying for it, but people all-too-often forget that the benefit of the internet is that nobody can deprive you of your goods (bandwidth notwithstanding).
Yeah, piracy sucks, but look at what other sectors of the economy have to deal with. Risk's everywhere; deal with it.
Another comment on HN[0] said it better, by citing Francis Ford Coppola:
> "We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.
> This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
> In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it."
A technicality, but if you commit copyright infringement you are not legally obliged to pay for it, you either have commited a crime or you are liable to be sued. You can't just download and then owe the person money. This isn't like when you go into a hair dresser, sit down, get your hair cut and now legally have to pay them.
Do me a favor, wouldja? Please cast this particular tenet of your moral code into the form of the golden rule. Exactly what are you doing to others that you would have them do unto you?
It is easier to steal a Twinkie than it is to wait in line and have to pay for it, and then wait for your change. Then you have all those damn coins in your pocket...
Maybe if you had to sign terms and conditions, you were unable to share it with friends, resell it and sometimes, sometimes you don't even get to eat it, because the wrapper wont recognize your hand!
My thoughts exactly. You can't force a privately-owned company to sell you the product the way you want it to be sold. It's their right to make money the way they see fit, and if they decide it's okay for them to lose some of the clientele over DRM, it's their choice.
Piracy in the name of protesting against DRM is borderline hypocrisy. As others already said, morality is subjective, but here are two other ways I'd personally support :
- don't use the product,
- pay for the license, pirate the product, get it touch with the company to explain your problem to them.
People looks for excuses, and I suppose conflating different things like speed limits, copyright and cryptography is some way to nullify their possible importance. These are not on the same level:
* speeding and more generally, driving misbehaviour are directly responsible for deaths.
* Pirating software and music never killed anyone, but is about maximizing profits for some corporations.
* limiting cryptography is about government control, and is almost only a political matter.
Law can change the way people behave, notwithstanding their agreement :
Speed limits have been enforced much more severely in France in the past few years and guess what, people are speeding much less now. I, myself, changed too: I used to drive at 180 kph quite casually, and I don't anymore. In the same time, road casualties fell significantly, though of course this is for a large part because cars are much safer than they used to be (thank you to Euro-NCAP).
Almost everybody complains about the speed limits, the radars everywhere, higher fines, but it's hard to deny that the policy was efficient, and that it's good.
Now copyright is an entirely different matter. Copyright is only about maximizing profits; extremely tight and severely enforced copyright, or the absence of it, wouldn't change our lives that much, anyway.
In the United States speed limits are not enforced for safety. They are instead a revenue stream for local government.
Relative speed kills, and if police were really concerned about safety they would prevent people from driving too slowly for traffic conditions as well as too fast.
I'll give you a similar example from recent news. Over the last few years, many towns have installed red light cameras. However, many local governments have discovered that red light cameras work too well.
After people got used to them, they stopped running red lights, and the revenue from citations dried up.
Guess what happened? Towns started removing red light cameras even though they enforced safer driving.
The reason that more cities don't do this is because it leads to a massive drop in revenue. In fact here is an article on 6 cities that were caught shortening yellow light duration to increase revenue.
... Speed limits are laws that are set up by well-paid lies?
By whom? That all-too-powerful "Let's drive slow" lobby?
I'm with you on the "When the law hurts the very people it's meant to protect, it's the right and responsibility of the people to fight against it" angle...
There are lobbying groups in favor of slower speed limits, but he's probably talking about local governments that use speed limits to generate revenue.
I solved this problem the "hard" way a long time ago. I don't use windows, at all, but GNU/Linux (Yeah, I'm this sort of guy, too).
And you know what, as time goes by it's actually less and less of an actual problem; heck, I was even able to buy games for my box this year, thank you Humble Bundle! OK, this isn't free software, but at least you don't feel like you've been anally raped with barbed wire.
And music? Well, I still buy CDs, mostly; the time when CDs came with DRM apparently faded away, so I don't even need to screen for this anymore (yes, I've actively boycotted some artists because of this for a while). From time to time, for music I don't actually care about, I buy mp3s from Amazon.
I don't write this to emphasize my moral superiority but to emphasize that it isn't that hard. You don't agree with their policy? don't buy the frigging stuff.
I did the same thing, some five years ago. But what if someone can't go to Linux or OS X because this person needs software that is Windows-only or doesn't have the time or knowledge to learn a new operating system? Just shouting "don't buy the frigging stuff" isn't going to stop them.
Frankly, when I first migrated I spent a long time making Wine to work properly with various pieces of software, and I finally never actually used it because there are alternatives to about everything. Maybe they're not always as good as their counterparts, but in the end they get the job done. I've shared word documents with OpenOffice, I've drawn billboards and websites with Inkscape and GIMP, and it's good enough.
I agree with you but I'm voting down. There's no need to use violent rape analogies when talking about someone requiring you to activate over the phone. Turn it down a notch please.
> when talking about someone requiring you to activate over the phone.
What about software that phones home and require some physical gizmo like a CD or dongle to use, after you've already spent a nice sum of money to acquire it? You're simply treated not like an amiable customer, but a thief, while actual thieves simply use it.
> What about software that phones home and require some physical gizmo like a CD or dongle to use, after you've already spent a nice sum of money to acquire it?
I still don't think this warrants comparison to rape.
I agree with you 100%. I haven't felt the need to be as extreme as you have gone, but any media I consume I either buy it or go without. More often than not, I find myself going without because I don't feel the price is worth it.
If people really wanted to take a stand they wouldn't buy OR pirate and would simply not consume. If everyone stopped consuming then changes would happen quickly.
If copyright were just to protect the investment of a company in development of an artist or product I'd broadly agree with this argument.
Where copyright seems objectionable to me, is where the initial cost of development was non-existent or large profits have been made for years. For example:
For some copyright to last 95 years seems more like profiteering than protection of the creative industries considering creation is often based on the work of others.
I don't condone piracy, but I think piracy would be far less socially acceptable if:
- the creator can be seen to benefit from their work
- copyright better resembled its original intent of protecting investment in the creation of something new and not staking ownership over the work of others.
That's an opinion. Stating opinion as fact is a worthless contribution, in fact a detriment, to healthy discussion.
I wouldn't argue that there's moral high ground here, I'd simply put it this way:
Anyone who thinks there is a better way to keep people from pirating music than to make the legal means of acquisition simple, affordable, and to not play games with release dates, is a fucking idiot.
The law is nothing but a piece of paper. I'm glad it exists, as it provides a framework that protects me from harm and allows me to life my live, but I feel no moral obligation at all to follow it.
This style of argumentation is starting to tire me. Obviously, this author thinks piracy is morally wrong. Other people have no such moral qualms about piracy. Both points of view are fine!
But implicitly or explicitly using morality as an argument for or against piracy is a bad style of argumentation and is almost an ad hominem. If I were to say that I am for piracy and someone told me that this was morally wrong, I would pay no attention to this person. But if he were to say that he personally feels piracy is morally wrong AND if he were to give me an argument as to why he feels that way, I would listen to this argument and at least think about it.
Except moral relativism is not any more defensible. Suppose the creator of a work asks you to pay for it, but a pirate chooses not to. Why shouldn't we call the pirate an asshole? They've disrespected the terms of use set by the author, as well as the author themselves.
+1 to you, and this is correct. The industry doesn't get called out by Congress when it claims billions of dollars of lost revenue by people who wouldn't have paid either way.
Of course, I've come to believe that intellectual honesty is a cognitive luxury for most people; especially politicians.
Read again, I didn't say you couldn't call the pirate an asshole. But in this article, and in many others, this is presented as an argument and not as the insult/opinion it is.
Besides, more often than not these terms are not set by the author of the work, but by for example a music label. Most artists of popular contemporary music don't hold the copyright to their own work any more.
"if you want to protest the crappy way these companies treat their customers, don't buy their stuff. but you can't have your cake and eat it. protest by not using or having it at all. they have something you want; even if you don't agree with their methods, it is still theirs to decide what to do with. all you are doing is supporting the industry in their drive to stamp out pirates; instead, support legal ways of obtaining this content through spotify and others. "
The one fault I see with this argument (mainly related to music) is this: There is no way to simply boycott the the recording companies' products without boycotting the artists as well. Recording companies have a monopoly on the artists they cover. While US contract law supports this arrangement, the model is broken in today's world of digital distribution.
The next best thing may be to only buy used CDs. Then you legally get the music AND annoy them at the same time.
Of course, you COULD actually boycott the artists. There are tons of independent musicians on the internet you can support. If you think that only the big label ones are worth your time and money, then clearly your opinions on the big labels themselves are unfounded.
(Just to be clear, all of the above "you"s refer not to the parent, but to everyone in general)
Recording companies have a monopoly on the artists they cover.
And that's the artist's choice. The artist could choose to distribute their work in some other fashion. So, if you want the artist's product, you have to buy it via the means chosen by that artist.
I don't know about the morals of this but I do know that if we hadn't pirated as gratuitously for the last 10 years we wouldn't have DRM or Walled Gardens to the extent we do today.
I think the content industries will decide we can't be trusted with our toys anymore and move them all to the cloud where we can peek at them for a monthly fee.
In my experience as a consultant and graphic designer (actually fronting for my wife, I'm not really a designer), everyone who isn't a young internet-savvy type just freaks out at the idea that people might "steal" stuff of their website. They constantly ask if there is way to let users/visitors see PDFs or other parts of their website without people being able to download them.
I, of course, tell them that downloading is actually an unavoidable requirement to the user seeing anything at all, etc. Some simply don't post as much as they would have.
My point is that DRM would likely always be the first idea a content owner thinks of when they consider putting something on any digital medium.
(Also consider that DRM existed long before the internet, in the earliest software and games. It just wasn't as fancy.)
I don't really understand these posts that simply declare that the correct choice is not to use their stuff, that piracy is wrong, and it's not your choice.
I happen to agree with the overall conclusion that one should seek alternatives in these cases, but this is just an argument by shouting. It's foolish to simply declare, "it's not your choice". Clearly, people think it is their choice. If you want to convince them, you had better back it up with reasoning. The right to control is simply not an obvious, mostly-universally-held right like the right not to be murdered or the right to physical property.
The copyright debate is getting awfully stale. I wish the participants would come up with something new to say instead of just constantly declaring that piracy is not allowed on one side and that piracy doesn't hurt anybody on the other side.
I agree. It seems folks have dug in and staked out their positions, much as they have with abortion, and are now just screaming at each other from across the chasm. Awfully stale indeed.
At the same time, some positions are clearly less informed than others. And there seem to a fair number of mindless idiots on either side, serving no purpose aside from getting the mindless idiots on the other side so riled up that the screaming din makes intelligent debate exceedingly difficult in any remotely public setting.
The reality is that copyright law evolved over the course of three centuries during which the ability to duplicate and distribute was exceedingly capital-intensive, and therefor, practiced only on an industrial scale, by well capitalized industrialists. Not surprisingly, the law became industrial law, with all the trappings (like expensive corporate lawyers) that are par for the course at that level, but entirely out of reach for independent citizens.
Regardless of your position, we can all agree that if the power to duplicate and widely distribute HAD been available to independent citizens for the last 300 years, then the contours of copyright law (if there even were such a thing) would look VERY different today.
In truth, copyright law - as it exists - is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with a democratic society in which citizens have the power to duplicate and distribute at virtually no cost. Trying to make it work would be like trying to impose a law that only permits domestic imports via rail on the state of Hawaii.
So now that we have the internet, the law needs to change - a lot. And under a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, it's pure insanity to think that the people won't have a major say in deciding exactly how far property right should be allowed to go in the intellectual realm.
We already place very firm boundaries on their scope by way of Fair Use, limited terms, support for the Public Domain, and so on. And it's high time we placed a few more.
I would put your position into the "clearly less informed" camp, sorry.
Copyright originally was created as a legal concept shortly after the invention of the printing press* because individual small printers were making and selling copies of other people's books. At that time (about 400 years ago), there were no "well capitalized industrialists." The industrial revolution had not even happened yet, and the few corporations that existed at all were captives of the sovereign rulers who created them.
In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies. That is how it was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for instance, although at that point in time it was already an old concept. The idea that it has always been (or is even today) a matter of industrial law is not accurate.
> In truth, copyright law - as it exists - is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with a democratic society in which citizens have the power to duplicate and distribute at virtually no cost.
This is the exact opposite of how public policy works. It is the very ease of copying that creates the need for a legal framework to regulate it. Before the printing press existed, copyright did not exist either--because it was not needed.
In a free society where copying is free, the most precious thing is original throught, original opinion, original content. That is the last true scarcity, and must be protected. Otherwise how are we to distinguish one citizen from another?
* BTW it is worth spending some time reviewing the history of the printing press and the impact it had on the world. I would argue that it was much more of a revolution than the Internet has been so far, although of course the Internet is still in its early stages of development.
I mean, here you are calling people "uninformed" while asserting that the printing press was invented "about 400 years ago", which would be around 1612. In reality Gutenberg's press went into operation around 1450. That's 562 years ago, meaning you're off by more than a century and a half.
You do a bit better with copyright law. The first appearance of law that grants the right to copy to the author was, of course, the Statue of Anne (1709/10, depending on whether you're referring to the Julian calendar that was in effect in England at the time, or the Gregorian calendar which has since become the international standard). Here, you're only off by a century.
Unfortunately for your theory, it's a century in the wrong direction. In reality, there were a solid 260 years between the appearance of the press, and the emergence of individual copyright, and that's not "shortly after" by any definition.
Even if you start the clock in 1493, which is when the publishing business as such really came into its own with Anton Koberger, you're still off by a factor of more than 200 years. So any idea that individual copyright appeared as an immediate and necessary consequence of the press's invention is unsupported by the facts, as is the idea that there's never been a significant amount of time in which one existed without the other.
For the record, the rest of your theory is as sketchy as your grasp of history - especially the bit about protecting "thought and opinion". Those are two things that Copyright absolutely DOES NOT protect. Nor has it ever. So clearly you've still got a lot of work to do, but that's all the time we have today.
"At that time (about 400 years ago), there were no "well capitalized industrialists...and the few corporations that existed at all were captives of the sovereign rulers who created them."
Again, not so! Indeed, 400 years ago is when some of the fierest and best capitalized industrialists known to man emerged. Specifically, I'm talking about the Dutch East India Company - a private corporation which commanded a heavily armed fleet several times larger than those of the competing French and British Crowns combined. And it was wind-powered industrialization that supported the assembly-line techniques that made their ship yards so incredibly productive.
Obviously, theirs was a relatively limited enterprise - certainly nothing compared to what we now refer to as the Industrial Revolution. But that difference is a function of having wind rather than coal to run their mills, not the application of the techniques, or the systematic accumulation and pooling of capital needed to apply them. In terms of the capital-intensive industrial operations needed to run them, and a chartered corporation to manage it, the VOC (as it was known) was a force unlike any the world had seen, utterly dominating both the global trade routes to the East Indies, and the flow of commerce moving through their ports. Phillip II of Spain waged a furious fight to maintain his colonies in the Netherlands, but the idea that he did so successfully is the opposite of reality. When the Dutch finally sued for peace, they did so as a republic.
Getting back to the press - while I mentioned that the business aspect of if got off the ground in 1493, Anton Koberger's family didn't continue it when he died. Though it was profitable, it remained baffling to his relatives, who had - and continued - to trade in gold. In terms of the flow of ideas, the most influential presses emerged in Venice. This was a city that had it's own long history with industrialization. Specifically, the Arsenal, which is where it pioneered the heavy industrial techniques needed to build the fleets with which it dominated the Mediterranean throughout the Crusades.
This unmatched foundation in assembly-line work was easily transferred to publishing operations, which the Venetians also turned into an industry. It would be some time before work of equal quality and sophistication was produced North of the Alps. And Venice, of course, was a republic. Kings (and Popes, and Princes) were dominated by the Venetians, not vice versa.
Incidentally, nobody who actually knows what they're talking about refers to Kings as "sovereigns" until after 1648, and the Peace of Westphalia, which is what established the concept of the sovereign state as such; one (theoretically) secure in its borders and (again, theoretically) free from the external authority of the Pope. Ergo, the sovereignty.
Given the general magnitude of your historical ignorance, this must seem like a minor point, but still. I actually do know about this stuff, and hearing references to "sovereigns" operating in the early 17th century is like nails on a chalkboard. It's a bit like hearing people discus life in the "American States" circa 1720.
Oh wait, I just found ANOTHER error. Or at least another expression of the same big error.
"In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies."
Assuming that you mean "from the beginning of printing" this is the EXACT opposite of reality. In England, where the Statue of Anne was passed, the privilege to copy accrued to guilds, not individuals.
Admittedly, I'm stretching definitions a bit since the guilds didn't have a 'right' either - it really was a privilege, and one granted by Royal Charter. Moreover, they weren't companies in the sense that we use that word today. But they were certainly incorporated entities seen as separate and distinct from any persons in particular. And they dominated the publishing trade for the better part of two centuries. The notion that lawful control of the ability to copy has "always" accrued to the individual is just so spectacularly wrong.
I'm sorry to go on like this, but I really can't remember a time when I came across another human who managed to pack so many layers of historical ignorance into such a small space. To cap if off by referring to others as "uninformed" just ices the cake. If you want to avoid looking like a complete idiot, avoid the use of history to ground your ideas about copyright. Seriously, it's like watching Kim Kardashian trying to play Scrabble in French and not understanding why "nobody lets me win".
Well you've obviously got a better working grasp of names and dates than I do, but I think you're mistaking precision for accuracy.
The Statute of Anne vested the copy monopoly explicitly in the author. Prior to that, guild members had the exclusive "right" to "copy" a manuscript, yes--but first they had to individually purchase the license to do so, from the author.
This is what I mean when I say that copyright (in the modern, IP sense) ultimately accrued to the author. There was not much time following Gutenberg when it was legal for printers to copy whatever the heck they wanted. Recognition of authorship was a social norm that predated the printing press, and was very soon incorporated into the regulation of the new technology.
To return to my broader point, try this thought experiment. Take snapshots of copying technology and IP law at 50 year intervals up to today. It doesn't matter if you start at 1450 or 1709. What you will find is that over time the marginal cost of copying has declined, and the legal protection of an author's IP has strengthened. Yet you're trying to argue that for some reason that trend will suddenly reverse. I don't see why it would.
"Well you've obviously got a better working grasp of names and dates than I do,"
Understatement of the week.
"but I think you're mistaking precision for accuracy."
Those are synonyms, making this a distinction without a difference. You either fail to grasp logic, or basic English. I'm not sure which. Regardless, neither of these words refer to your grasp of history, nor your ability to ground theory within it. I'm not "mistaking" anything for anything, as your concept is demonstrably devoid of both.
"This is what I mean when I say that copyright (in the modern, IP sense) ultimately accrued to the author. "
Stop lying. You meant no such thing and you know it. Indeed, you very clearly said the opposite. Specifically. "In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies."
And again "copyright (in the modern, IP sense)" means the legal ability duplicate, distribute, and creative derivatives from. Those were activities that the guild system specifically BARRED authors from doing. To say their need to buy manuscripts means that, effectively, these privileges "accrue" to the author is not true. And about "buying licences"; there were no licences to buy. You just made that up.
Let's remember the whole point of your original argument; that copyright - as an individual right - has "always" been the authors, and that our legal tradition has recognized "since the very beginning of printing." As noted, this is completely counter to reality. And now you're saying this isn't really what you meant, but sort of is because of these imaginary "licences"? Aside from the guild's charters, there were no licences. Only physical ownership and control of the manuscripts themselves, which was exchanged for money on unfavorable terms from the only legal buyers in town. Yes, that was a crappy system. No, it didn't give authors their due. And it ended in 1709, which is about two and a half centuries after the advent of movable type. Moving on.
"There was not much time following Gutenberg when it was legal for printers to copy whatever the heck they wanted."
True, but that had everything to do with censorship by the Church, and not respect for the rights of authors. Indeed, those two interests have tended to be at sharp odds. See my point above about authors and rights and who could do what "at the very beginning".
"Recognition of authorship was a social norm that predated the printing press, and was very soon incorporated into the regulation of the new technology."
If a custom pertaining to simple credit is your example of early copyright (i.e. what prevailed for the first 260 years), then you simply have no idea what copyright even covers. Just...none.
Also, who are you to say "very soon" about anything? Haven't we already established that your grasp of actual history is a confused and distorted mess of near bottomless error? Given your hilariously awful track record, you have no business making assertions about specific timeframes without clear citations.
"To return to my (now demolished) broader point, try this thought experiment..."
I've got a better idea. Instead of acting like a person who is quite literally moronic, why don't you take a moment to realize that you have been completely and totally schooled. Everything, from your grasp of history, to your understanding of words, to the honesty of your arguments, to the clarity of your theoretical understanding has just been handed back to you in shit covered shreds, and now there is a smoking crater where your credibility used to be.
This is where the normal, decent, reasonably self-respecting human would think "Wow, I really put my foot in it. I actually have no idea about any of this stuff. The worst part is that I didn't even realize how clueless I was. And there I was, starting of my remarks to others with snide personal insults about who belongs "in the uninformed camp". Instead of continuing to behave like an idiot, I'm going to spend some time actually learning about all this, and then, perha...
I apologize in advance for the nitpick, but this is one of those things that just bugs me.
Accuracy and precision are not synonyms. Accuracy refers to how close you are to the true value. Precision refers to how narrow your claimed value is.
As applied to history, the statement that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at 9:33:12AM Mountain Time on July 4th, 1953 is extremely precise, but horribly inaccurate. Meanwhile, the statement that the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor in 1941 is accurate, but not very precise.
"Clearly, people think it is their choice."
And that is where the author disagrees. People think it is their choice to either pay or not pay and get for free without consequences. That is wrong. If you choose to download without paying, you can't take the moral high ground because what you did is wrong.
This is just the kind of junk I'm talking about. I get that the author disagrees. The problem is that neither he nor you back it up with any reasoning. You're just declaring that you're right and that anyone who disagrees is wrong. What's the point of that?
The simple fact is that copyright infringement is not a universally-agreed wrong the way e.g. murder is. If you want to convince people that it should be, that's fine, but if you argue from the assumption that it already is, that's circular reasoning and won't convince anyone.
Is it moral to wear shoes into a Indian temple? How do you argue that without going circular?
If you ask me, the only moral arguments that aren't going to be circular are those that are based on Utilitarianism (or some similar form of Consequentialism). Of course, the parties debating then have to agree on this basic premise, or they are going to get nowhere fast. But, if you ask me, those who reject all forms of Utilitarianism are just profoundly kidding themselves. This fact is shown quite clearly by the fact that no one would accept a moral theory that results in the most miserable of all possible worlds, even if it seemed at the start that the premises of the moral theory were reasonable ones. E.g., property rights being amongst the most important rights, or what have you.
I agree that it gets tough (although I think the Golden Rule answers the temple question, and a lot of others). The thing is, in this case, they aren't even trying.
The whole "you don't have a choice" bit rests on the assumption that piracy is immoral, and the posts themselves serve simply to remind people of that. It's rather condescending, and entirely pointless if they don't accept the assumption that piracy is immoral, which they almost certainly do not.
It can't quite be the Golden Rule .. "Do unto others as you'd have done unto you". I'm an atheist. I have zero holy places to profane. And yet I do think it is immoral to profane someone's holy place, despite my belief that it is a social creation.
I don't believe many serious people would ascribe to this 'GR' moral logic: "I don't care if someone appropriates my creations" (because I give mine away, or I have none) ergo "I am morally sound in appropriating others creations."
I agree with you that it may be pointless to argue piracy is immoral with someone who thinks it is moral. However, I don't think it is actually condescending to have that as a base assumption.
The Golden Rule just needs a little more depth to be applied here. You have zero holy places, but if you had property, you'd want people to respect it. Therefore, you should respect other people's property.
I think it's very much condescending if you treat the immorality of piracy as a base assumption held by both parties. If you treat it simply as your own base assumption, that's fine. But treating it as a base assumption of the other side and then arguing against their behavior based on that qualifies in my book.
It's not perfect; indeed, it's a 'messy compromise'. Currently, one that's tilted too far in favor of producers. However, consumers should also realize that producers can't just create stuff for free: it takes time to write books, lots of money to do movies, and selling music helps bands do what they do full-time, rather than as a hobby, and thus create more music that you, a fan, presumably are happy with.
I'm not sure what the 'right' answer is, but I have a feeling that it won't be simple and 'easy', but rather a bit messy. I think that easy access to 'legit' stuff is definitely part of the solution though. By making the legal route the easiest one, it takes away a big excuse.
Something more people need to think about is life "at the margin", in the economics sense of the term. Don't think about Lady Gaga and Windows and stuff like that: think about people who are on the edge between making a living with some form of IP and having to pursue it only as a hobby.
Ok I see the difference. I'll answer more to your point. When a person creates a work, they have a right to decide how that work is given to others. They can leave it in their closet. They can sell a couple copies to friends. They can give it away to everyone and say "if you like this, please give me a dollar!" They can say, "here is one copy for you but I want it back if you ever decide you don't want it any more." The creator of the work can place whatever restrictions they want on the work.
That is my basis for calling people wrong. People who pirate argue that they disagree with the creators choice for how a work should be distributed. Thus because they disagree with it, they will just take it anyway. That is why it is wrong.
No, you're just asserting it without backing it up again. "[Creators] have a right to decide how that work is given to others." You just state this, as if it's a universally held fact, and then base the rest of your post off of it. Clearly a whole lot of people do not believe that creators have a right to decide this.
I think that's only part of the argument. The other part is that, regardless of what's right or wrong, the OP thinks that using the software/service perpetuates it, and choosing not to pay for it isn't enough.
That's an excellent point, and in fact that's why I think people should cease consuming this content altogether rather than pirating it. If that was the focus of the argument, it would be great. But sadly, everyone who might listen will be turned off by the bit that goes, "you can't just choose to pirate stuff, because you just can't."
On the anti-piracy side there are two groups: The first are artists who believe, without any evidence, that they can make more money when copyright is enforced.
The second are people start out assuming that the right to control information is a moral right. They then derive the ethical implication that people shouldn't pirate.
On the pro-file sharing side there are two groups. The first are libertarian-inclined utilitarians, which require people to prove actual harm before something should be outlawed or have tried to start a tech company and been threatened with a patent lawsuit. Every piece of evidence not created by the middle-man industry I've ever seen has supported their position.
The second are people who oppose the idea of "intellectual property", starting from moral principles such as freedom of expression, utility maximization or historic precedent.
There is no need to come up with anything new to say: the conclusion one comes to depends on what principles one uses to derive ethical implications. Intellectual property is morally wrong, declares one side. Intellectual property is a moral imperative, declares the other. It is impossible for either to convince the other, since neither is basing their arguments on a rational basis where facts or evidence might play a role.
Anyone who might be convinced doesn't care, probably because they are just ignoring stupid laws anyway.
I totally agree. However I think we should include a third group in the pro-file sharing side: people who don't have the money to pay for content or just wont because they're cheap. The problem is that the anti-piracy side mostly sees this group instead of the other ones and that's why, imho, they claim that pirating is like stealing and that it causes the same damage.
Of course if you have nothing you can buy nothing so the producer would get no harm, but this is rarely the case.
I was a bit vague on this point but let me be more clear. "Don't have any money" doesn't mean having 0$ in your bank account, at least in this argument; it means that you are not willing to use the money you have to buy some things because in your opinion you have little money (compared to what you want to buy), so you decide to spend it for things you care about and can't get for free. Now, imagine a scenario where you can't get those things for free. In this scenario, you distribute your money differently in order to be able to buy the products you need. I can assure you there there are many people I know that have the money buy they tell me they don't have it to buy certain products, so they pirate it. They are being cheap. If they couldn't get those things for free they would pay for them. This kind of people cause harm to the producers.
Talking about a real example: in my country (Italy) many people have breakfast at bars with 2-3 euros and nobody will question this price. At the same time these people don't want to pay for a 99 cents song that will entertain them for days. This is something wrong and I see why producers want to change this kind of behavior. The problem is they are "doing it wrong" by enforcing (or trying to enforce) laws that protect things that just can't be protected anymore.
There are people who want things for free. However before the internet those were the people trading bootlegs, buying $2 CDs from sketchy catalogs, borrowing cds from the library or friend, watching MTV, listening to the radio or simply not listening to music. I would argue that they are no more supportive of piracy than any other form of free entertainment.
Additionally, I don't believe most of them support piracy because they want free stuff (there are some horders out there, but that's an actual mental illness/tv show). Most of the people who "like free stuff" support piracy because they value the entertainment they get. By far the biggest group here are teenagers, and it appears that the more music teenagers without money download the more music they will buy legally later in life.
Right now teenage unemployment was 25% last summer and that's just among teenagers who wanted to work. Unpaid internships seem to have become the norm. If we don't give teenagers a way to get the medium of exchange we shouldn't be surprised that they develop parallel economies. That said, if they weren't going to buy music anyway or, as most studies find, people buy more music in the presence of file sharing, it doesn't imply that there is any theft going on or that creators are damaged in any way by more value being derived from the work they already did.
I think record companies see their control over the airwaves and their kingmaker roll slipping away. Like publishers, they are progressively less relevant and the services they do provide aren't worth nearly the percentage of profits they charge their artists. They don't need to believe it is theft for them to cynically exploit the argument in order to remain relevant.
Is this a separate anti-intellectual property view:
I like content and am greedy for it. Copyright helps me get more content by providing incentive. This is the benefit.
Whatever these are benefits of copyright, the practical collateral costs (to privacy, freedom, making everyone a criminal etc) of enforcing copyright law make it not a worthwhile.
I would group those people in with creators who think that copyright means they'll earn more money. That is, people who are swayed by arguments appealing to the "common sense" that "artists should make money off their work" without specific evidence in support of their views.
Since copyright can be used to prevent content creation (for example, cover performances, sequel novels written by other people or derivative works) it isn't at all obvious that copyright leads to more content. The internet has led to more music and better music being made, according to the recent study I saw comparing radio play of new music over time. Webcomics make most of their money selling books of comics available for free on the web. For most of human history we functioned under a deliver-first, pay-later or -indirectly method of exchange; the internet has allowed this model to scale almost without limit for goods with zero marginal cost.
I agree. This article is a perfect example of argumentum ad nauseam[1]: if you repeat something enough, it must be true! Since this is a logical fallacy, this argument is not wrong--it's invalid.
One can say that record labels brought the piracy problem on themselves by looking to create barriers to content while pirates worked to create access to content.
However, it's erroneous for an individual to argue that he has a right to pirate because the industry created barriers to their own content. It's counterproductive to the anti-censorship movement.
Instead, we should focus on the fact that the music industry has been anti-effective and is now using censorship to compensate for their reluctance to change.
You're right, and it's just as erroneous for an individual to argue that he has a right to payment every time someone shares a new copy of his creation.
Competing interests will often be in conflict, and that's what we're seeing in this debate. You can safely translate "a right to piracy" to "no moral obligation to respect copyright". Once the moral argument is dismissed, all that remains is pragmatic conflict resolution.
One side could be destroyed, a compromise could be found, or a protracted conflict could ensue. In any case, moral arguments from either side are mostly useless.
The law is just a thing I follow to avoid inconvenience, when necessary. It's completely distinct from my morality. And, my morality simply does not see copying as stealing, pirating, thermonuclear mass-murder, or whatever blood curdling words you use to label it. It remains copying, and is fine.
Why don't you see it as immoral or stealing? These companies spend millions on these movies, countless people work on them and depend on them for their wages (not just the actors, but the support crew, the caterers, the make up artists, the lighting crew, editing, post production, script writers, casting agents, location scouts, etc etc). They then charge people a small price for the right to view their work (either in the form of a subscription to Netflix, a movie ticket, an iTunes sale, or a DVD). Yet you think it's moral and fine to have this without paying the authors?
Because people who don't pirate stuff are subsidising those who do and if nobody paid for anything, new stuff wouldn't get made (or at least it wouldn't be available from those people who relied on the income from sales to make a living).
I'd really like to hear your explanation for why you have no obligation. Just because pirating isn't theft in the technical sense, it doesn't mean you're excempt from paying for someone else's work if you use it for their intended purposes. (as in downloading a song and listening to it)
You cannot equate taking a cd and lending it to a friend to taking the contents of a cd and giving it away to a million people that you do not know. Sharing involves one party having to sacrifice and the other having to benefit, not both parties benefiting with absolutely no loss. You know, like sharing your lunch with someone. One sacrifices something so another can benefit. Stop redefining the meaning of the word.
This is (and I don't mean to offend anyone) more of a deep-rooted psychological problem more than anything else. As people get used to an act, such as piracy, for example, and develop a natural comfort and tendency with it, they have already convinced themselves that what they are doing is not at all immoral or wrong, and would use all available tactics in their arsenal to justify what they are doing.
Piracy isn't as desirable as a straight boycott of the parties that are currently trying to break the Internet, but at least pirates aren't feeding the beast.
Those companies deserve complete destruction for what they have done
They have tried to destroy the internet, remember yesterday? As long as they exist they will keep on trying and as an existential threat to the internet I can't see how anyone can excuse continued support for them in any way. Better a boycott, but failing that piracy is still more ethical than feeding the beast.
Not if the item was produced by a a party other than the parties pushing for SOPA and its ilk. I think piracy is generally bad, I just think financing groups that want to destroy the internet is worse. Think of it as a transmogrification of the MPAA mandated warnings at the beginning of movies telling you that if you buy from pirates you're supporting drugs / terrorism / human smuggling / pick your poison.
If you buy from SOPA supporters, you're supporting the death of the internet.
I think the big drivers of music consumption must still depend on traditional media and corporations in a big way. Otherwise we'd have tech specialists hooking up directly with musicians and together they would have delivered the death blow to the traditional music distributors already.
I think what's missing is the combination of talent-search + promotion. Most users just won't be proactive about searching through a bunch of no-name bands to find some music worth listening to.
Ok. I hope I'm not going against the rules of HN discourse here but I'd like to go out on a limb and say any article in which the author doesn't bother capitalizing the first word in his sentences is not an article I'm going to bother to read. One of the few things I miss about the world before the internet is a proper adherence to grammar. If he were ESL, I would be more forgiving, but this post just smacks of lazy writing.
you won't take 2 minutes to read the article for what it's worth, but will take 3+ minutes to write that you won't read it because he didn't capitalize his first word? haha.
edit: removed all capitalization so you can reply to me about how you won't read my comment because i am too lazy to capitalize a word.
It's an 85 word comment. Unless the author is unusually slow at typing (which is quite unlikely given the largely programmer-based audience here), it probably took them about a minute to write the comment.
Lack of capitalisation interrupts the way you read a block of text. People make poor design choices all the time, and this is one of them.
More more poking fun at the fact that he took more time to reply about why he wont read the article (which is ridiculous) than it would have taken to just read it and respond with valuable input instead of being snobby about it.
Reading this article, let alone reading and responding with valuable input, takes more time than writing a two-line comment, and not just because it's hard to scan sentences written without capital letters.
It appears to be a style of his site. There isn't a single capital letter to be found. It's intentional rather than lazy, although it doesn't make it any less grammatically incorrect.
Intentional or not it makes people look upon his content as immature. You're not trying to win the opinions of like minded individuals, you're trying to sway opponents and to do that you have to work on their terms (formal, coherent writing)
I'd say he was probably going for more uniqueness factor. Lack of care of capitalization, shows just that - lack of care and possible desire to break the norms.
You would be right if his goal was to impress someone but I doubt that was intention of his blog.
It does go against the rules -- you are supposed to post interesting comments. If you don't want to read it, that is fine: simply close the tab and move on. No need to make a fuss.
I would say you are being equally lazy as a reader. Do you stop reading when someone writes "ain't", or uses a slang term, or something else that doesn't conform precisely to Strunk & White?
I'm not exactly willing to die on this hill, though -- the article is not very good in any case.
It's obviously a deliberate choice, there are no capital letters on his entire site. I don't know much about the OP but in the design world the style isn't that alien.
It originated in the 20s and 30s in the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayer was one of the more prominent supporters, designing typefaces that contained no uppercase letterforms at all. He even experimented with designing entirely new alphabets that were phonetically based.
Jan Tschichold was another Bauhaus guy experimenting in the same realm. From Wikipedia: "Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. ... The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters."
It's interesting that it was born out of choices made to German, where they have many more capital letters in each sentence than we do in English. Regardless, it's clearly a stylistic choice, and one that the OP might even have to work harder to maintain, if he is accustomed to writing in sentence case.
There's that old saying that you must first learn the rules and then you can break them. That is exactly what is going on here, and the OP isn't unique in this. Throughout my time at design school many of my teachers, who had been educated by Bauhaus instructors, would email in only lowercase—they adopted the style. And others have adopted it from them (here's one of my design school friends' site: http://traceychan.net/ where she has).
That's fine for typeset print where other aids to scanning are used, such as a double space between sentences. HTML, though, removes the double space. Which means you have to consciously read every single word rather than scan and parse it in bulk.
To a fast reader, without visual cues it is a jumbled mess. I gave up after forcing myself to read three sentences.
I skipped it for the same reason. I knew it was a stylistic choice, but I still didn't care to read what he had to say. I probably would go back and put up with it if the comments here made it seem like he had anything new to say on the piracy topic anyway, but I'm getting the opposite impression.
Agreed--not a good design decision whether intentional or not. This works for logotype sometimes, but your eye needs the capitalization to make the reading easier and to help you identify where you're at in the text (especially longer text).
Someone mentioned 3D printers in another post and got downvoted for it. But think about it.
You invested a lot of time into creating an object everybody likes. People can get it in a online shop and it will be send to there address.
Now a clever guy scans the object with a 3D scanner and is putting the model online. Everybody can now downloading the model on The Pirate Bay and print it at home.
And they all say: "fuck that online store, it is way too much hassle and costs too much".
It's a difficult discussion. Therefore I think it's way to easy to just call making a copy not stealing.
Are we paying for a Premium or are we paying for the thing we actually want?
They're taking things into their own hands by installed junk- and malware on my product.
They're assuming I'm a thief before I've even walked through the door. Why should I pay for the time they wasted to deal with people who do purportedly "break the law."
Moreover, it's not like with the music or software industries, these people lock themselves inside ivory towers and come out with a genius idea. Granted, there are genius ideas worth protecting, but those ideas protect themselves by their own internal integrity and passion of the thinker/creator/etc. Copyright law gives creators an artificial sense of entitlement, and the idea that their content is privileged somehow. That's the _default_ for a majority of the products we buy. And it simply isn't obviously true. There's too much clutter in the market as it stands for people to argument from absolutism like with in this article.
A majority of this copyright discussion has an unrealistic assumption about _the state of things as they are now_. There's no transparency in these products. No sincerity.
Not that I disagree with a word of this article, but he's accepting the premise of those two articles: that the distribution mechanisms are a worse UX than pirating. My response:
Are you high? Once upon a time I pirated content, he's an approximate recap of what my expierience looked like:
* Search pirate bay
* Look at 2000 results, none of which look right.
* Ok, found one.
* Crap it's French with Arabic subtitles.
* Ok this one looks good.
* Shit, no seeders.
* Ok, this one has seeders and is english.
* Go get a bagel because it's going to take an hour to download.
Here's the UX of Netflix, rdio, or hulu:
* Search.
* Press play.
In my time using Netflix, rdio, hulu, and last.fm for my media needs there has been one title I couldn't find.
EDIT: I'll be clear, my comments on these services apply exclusively to the US, I know nothing about the status of these services elsewhere.
Then again Netflix isn't available in Europe and there are huge holes in the catalogue of any streaming service. With that said I think Netflix will be huge in Europe or at least in my native Sweden. As for your pirate bay experience here is how it goes today:
1. Search for content.
2. Sort by seeders.
3. Click magnet link.
4. Start streaming from uTorrent.
If its "available" in the UK in the same way that it is "available" in Canada then you're lying to yourself.
They gimp the offerings on the foreign netflix due to licensing issues and it really hurts the service. I tried netflix but cancelled because the catalog of things aren't worth it.
Well, that's fine for people in the US. But for everyone else (i.e., the vast majority) for whom Hulu, netflix, etc are not available, the legal onlines alternatives are for the most part crap or missing the content you want.
Agreed that the UX of existing sites have much better UX than the pirating options. However a much more common experience on Netflix is:
* Search
* Whoops, this movie isn't available on streaming.
On Hulu:
* Search
* Only the last four episodes are available.
The content distributors are strangling themselves because they're trying to protect their existing means of distribution and refuse to adopt new ones that people actually want to use and pay for.
> The content distributors are strangling themselves because they're trying to protect their existing means of distribution and refuse to adopt new ones that people actually want to use and pay for.
In 2008 Starz and Netflix entered into an agreement where Netflix would be able to license and distribute Starz media for $30 million. Said contract expired, Netflix offers $300 million to renew, and Starz rejects the offer under the premise that their content is worth more.
Now Starz, like HBO (eg. HBO Go), is planning to roll out their own streaming service--which I would say is both an attempt to protect their means of distribution as well as an effort to adopt to new models.
As an aside, I tried to use HBO Go a few weeks ago...and was prompted to enter the details of my cable tv service in order to gain access. I didn't have the time/patience to proceed and decided to read instead.
All I can say is if every content distribution company expects users to pay a separate fee, etc, for streaming content they're SOL. Evidence of Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and the like show that people prefer one-stop shopping.
Pirate Bay isn't the only way to find torrents. Private networks (such as what.cd for music) are hilariously easy to use, and generally much quicker than public torrents.
Not only that, but they always have a surplus of seeders and the quality of the music (or movie, or TV show, depending on the tracker) is always of the quality it says it is.
I don't know what you're talking about, I do most of my searches on Pirate Bay only once, then sort descending by seeds (which not only indicates which is fastest to download, but also which is the most popular) ... then the download is over in 5 minutes.
333 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadRegarding the law, that's one way to look at that. Another way is that the role of copyright is about to change, and disobeying the law en masse might be one way to help that change.
(Disclaimer: I'm not much of a pirate myself, I have a US iTunes Store account despite living in Russia just to be able to buy music legally. Also I'm earning money by writing software. But being able to copyright music and software is not a given, it's just how things work today, and as the world changes, this concept will also evolve.)
Not to mention that software piracy is on a completely other level than slavery.
Cultural relativism is certainly a valid school of ethical thought — one with which I happen to disagree. On matters like piracy, which is certainly less detrimental to society than slavery was, the consequences for believing what is popular and what is right are relatively low. But to suggest that you can apply this principle across the board, in all situations, is, in my view, absurd.
You're suggesting there that we cannot judge anything that has happened in the past because our views on the matter are now different. But that means we cannot judge ANYTHING that has happened EVER because, by definition, now is different from then.
> You shouldn't be convicted that your morality is absolute and will always be the only correct one.
I'm not. I'm just not convinced that, because a certain activity is widespread, it is therefore morally correct.
What I try to say is that you can't judge both piracy and slavery from your present point of view. I feel that because in the past slavery was commonly accepted, that it was morally justified then. In the same way, given the huge proliferation of piracy, I feel that copyright infringement is somewhat morally justified now. This view might change and in the same way, the morality of piracy might change too. I would take the common views of society as the definition of what is morally justified and what isn't. It is possible you see this in another way and that is fine (and not absurd).
Also, this change in zeitgeist is continuous, not as discrete as you overstate it is. We are perfectly justified to judge what has happened yesterday. Judging what happened during World War II is murkier and judging what happened when slavery was still extant is an almost meaningless activity.
(Note: I believe morals are natural laws. They are just not as easy to discern as physical laws because it is harder for us to be morally neutral observers.)
Of course it does, for two reasons: first, there is still a difference between the morality of an individual and of society as a group. Secondly, the fact that society fells something is wrong doesn't mean it has to feel OK with giving the State power to crush it. A good example is Free Speech.
Shouldn't the democratic process eventually result in laws that reflect the morality of the majority?
That would depend on a more pure and direct democracy. But generally they do; when the difference between them becomes too great, people tend to revolt.
But you should remember what I said above: people might feel its wrong to legally punish wrong actions. There's no contradictions in this.
How can you say a law is immoral without taking a vote? For example, if the majority in California voted for Proposition 8, how can it be immoral?
Assuming morality is relative, there's no such thing as an immoral law, because morality is not a property of a thing, but a relationship between a person (or a group of them) and that thing.
So I can say Proposition 8 is immoral, if I find it immoral. Which doesn't mean it's immoral for another person or society in general.
Note: I believe morals are natural laws.
I always found that interesting, because I never found any evidence for that. In what do you base your belief? Or is it pure faith?
"since when does that suddenly mean that you can decide that you are no longer going to pay for products that both legally and morally you are obliged to pay for, yet still use them?"
Legally obliged to pay for? Yes.
Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality.
I assume, therefore, that you invite those with an interest in sadomasochism to inflict pain on you?
(No, I don't think sadomasochism and piracy are alike, but the idea of making and breaking laws based on what one person is happy to have done to them is IMO ridiculous.)
Don't get me wrong I'm for communism and intentional communities; but are you really advocating that?
Based on this, whether piracy is moral or not depends on people's opinions. I would argue that society does not consider copyright infringement to be especially immoral.
Sing 'Happy Birthday' in public without paying the guy who bought the company holding the copyright to it. Is your audience disgusted by this immoral act?
Now the owner of the company holding the copyright sues you for your unauthorized use of 'his' song. Would more people think that you acted immorally, or that the copyright holder is acting immorally?
Also, the creator of the pirated product has only lost a potential sale (one that I would argue that they don't have a right to anyway), whereas the unpaid worker has experienced a 'theft' of their time and work.
Ignoring the condescending tone of this comment, there are many 'creators' in the world who have no desire to personally profit from their work. That is not the issue being raised.
I have created worthwhile things on which my livelihood depended, and those things have been cheerfully and rampantly pirated (piracy rates of video games estimated at +90%). And the company I worked for made great profits and paid me a nice bonus. Would it have made as much of a profit if those 90%+ of people who played the game, liked it, talked about it, reviewed it without paying for it, had never played it at all? I don't know. Would it have made more profit? I can't say. I doubt you can either.
More realistically the worst you will feel is a denied promotion, or lost a job because your company can't realize it's investment in you.
Unless you are directly culpable for the creation and distribution of a product and lose money on it because people won't honor your effort, you don't have a basis for passing judgment based on your personal experience (in other words, you're no expert :) ).
In my role as copyright superhero have I not only worked as an employee at companies producing copyrighted works, I have also, personally, produced and sold copyrighted works that have, to some extent, been pirated. I have yet to feel any self-righteous anger. The only anger I might feel is a certain frustration where some of these copyrighted works have not been as successful as I would have wished them to be, but I would be foolish to lay the blame on piracy. More likely, the timing was not right and the quality was not high enough to ensure success.
Any business endeavor entails risk. I would hope that my employer has factored in piracy rates and other non-specific factors in the business plan before hiring me to create a video game for him. Sometimes, things don't work out as hoped and the result is a flop. That can happen for many reasons. I have yet to see a convincing argument where piracy was the reason something did not succeed. On the other hand, I can point to numerous examples were piracy was the deciding factor that let something become a success to begin with. The currently popular example is Minecraft, which spread entirely through word of mouth. How successful would that game have been if there had been no way to send it to a friend while telling them to check it out because it's awesome? I really doubt anyone would have known about it at all.
Though it doesn't sound like you gained your livelihood from the production of such works. My dad is a farmer who wanted to pass on the farm to my brother. They had various communication issues, but one of the underlying complaints of my father was that my brother didn't understand the seriousness of being in business. He would say, "His nuts aren't in the ringer."
I don't think piracy ruins businesses. However, I don't think that anyone can make the argument that they ethically have the right to disregard the producer's terms for consuming their product, regardless of the form the product is in or how unreasonable those terms are. The creator of the product has the right to define their terms and if you violate his/her terms, it's a transgression. It's not a favor, a lesson, or a statement, you're taking without honoring their work in the way they've decided. Maybe it will turn out great for them in the end, maybe not- it doesn't matter, they set the terms and you violated them.
Piracy is parasitic, not productive, and everyone loses. We get these stupid censorship bills rolling through and resources are spent in trying to control the phenomena instead of innovating and addressing real issues.
Regarding Minecraft-- I did not realize that it was successful because it was pirated. I know that it got some good reviews on popular sites and I believe they sold a cheap development version and were successful because of this accessible model (versus a Microsoft approach). Wikipedia says that the developers decided to start their video game company and focus exclusively on it with the money they earned from their sales. To me, this does not sound like a pirate success story. It actually reinforces my belief that it absolutely requires resources to back any serious effort and this is something that piracy never provides.
I see you brought it back to a question of ethics, which is something that I think is ultimately not very interesting. Ask any horse-cart driver during the infancy of the car industry, and they would probably curse cars for being noisy and dangerous, and car drivers for being unethical and immoral for supporting this metal abomination. These days no one cares. In the same way, hopefully, we'll one day look back at the era of government anti-freedom bills and shake our heads in disbelief.
Because short of actually going into the heads of all the people who, unlike you, don't see piracy as a parasitic activity, what can you actually do about it?
It's so easy to copy works digitally that many people are no doubt doing it without realizing it. If you have a blog, and someone links to a youtube music video, and you like it and want to share the experience of seeing it with a friend.. you put a link to the video on your blog. But! Unbeknownst to you, that video was put there without the permission of the original creator, and you just committed a crime (by proxy, in this case, but a moral crime nontheless).
A short history of Minecraft, as told by me (guaranteed to be inaccurate in many ways):
Minecraft rose to fame by being heavily shared while in the alpha/beta stage at various indie game forums, 4chan, something awful and other places like these, from where the word of mouth spread wider and wider. From the start, it was for sale (I think for $10), it has never been a free game as far as I know. It was pirated like crazy from the beginning. By the time notch formed mojang, he was already a millionare from the sales of minecraft.
Of course he didn't become a millionare from the piracy directly. The piracy didn't stop him from becoming one, though. In fact, I don't think it's possible to say definitively what impact piracy really had, other than that it helped spread the word. Given the graphics of Minecraft, would millions of people buy it without trying it? Maybe. You say that piracy doesn't provide resources, but in this case it did provide that one elusive thing that every independent developer desperately needs: exposure.
Don't get me wrong, I don't support these asinine bills, however I do see people who pirate as directly supporting them. Which is upsetting because they're creating a demand and a rationale for censorship, which affects everyone.
On the same note, I see bandied around that the bills creators don't understand the fundamental architecture of the Internet and the damage it would cause. I see, "pirates," as not understanding the fundamental architecture of capitalism and ignoring the damage it causes.
Specifically, the exchange of resources where both parties benefit.
If a provider wants exposure and wants to give away their product for exposure, that's up to them, not anyone else. And for digital products it's a hell of a lot easier to provide them public domain or open source than it is to sell them.
However, exposure doesn't pay the bills. I am self employed and I see similar sentiments expressed on a regular basis. Product or service provider, if what I provide is valuable enough for you to ask for or steal, I obviously don't need the exposure that bad. There was a $6,000 photograph post up earlier that expressed the same idea.
If you liked Minecraft, there is nothing to prevent you from paying for it and touting it. Minecraft is an especially relevant example because the developers set the bar so low in regards to price and people still pirated something they claimed to love? That's so bizarre to me- I want to support independent developers much more so than the big guys and they weren't asking for much.
Plenty of people payed for and touted Minecraft, obviously. A huge category of people didn't pay, but still touted it.
Would that category of people have paid if piracy was impossible? Well, I've argued against that reality since making piracy impossible would most likely also make Minecraft impossible (since you'd have to distribute through government-approved channels). I don't see how someone could possibly create an independent product and be able to self-distribute if piracy is technically impossible. And arguably the environment that spawned and formed the successful indie game maker is heavily dependent on free and easy peer-to-peer sharing of information, code and software.
Secondly, clearly these people didn't have any moral issue with pirating the game while at the same time loving it. It may be bizarre to you, but a huge number of people will happily break the law if it's to their benefit, without feeling bad over lost sales. Most likely, these people wouldn't have paid even if they couldn't have had the game. They would just have gone without the game.
I'd even go so far as to say that generally acting in their own self interest with little regard to people outside their closest circle is a fundamental human behavioral constant, and it's shocking to me that this is so shocking to other people. You do know that children are starving to death in poor areas of the world? You certainly have the means to save at least one of them. Yet you don't, why? Because their plight is too remotely removed from you. You have no emotional connection to them.
Closing the emotional gap is key to exploiting the modern economy: see the success of pay-what-you-want schemes, where people end up paying more than they would have with a set price. I'd argue that this demonstrates another interesting detail: the humble bundle, which was available as pay-what-you-want, was heavily pirated! Why? It was essentially free already! Perhaps because people like to share, and the distribution model and the economic profit margins of the creator are both lesser forces than the innate emotional desires to have and to share.
Censorship is as morally baseless as piracy, but I do not like it either, and like piracy it has a negative effect on everyone.
Maybe sales would increase if something prevented piracy, maybe they wouldn't. I expect that they would increase a significant percentage, but probably not even close to 100%.
People everywhere act out of self interest all the time, not just some of the time, all the time. It's just that for some people self interest involves having the perception to see beyond the immediate benefit of an act. Others do not, and eat donuts until they have diabetes, sleep with their best friend's spouse, steal cars, and act on each impulse as soon as it arises.
That people act in ways that are short sighted and then try to explain away their shortsightedness is only human, but it's not admirable, and it does no public service.
I have nothing against anyone saying, "I breach the contract between provider and consumer. I'm a leech off of others labor. I inhibit growth that would otherwise occur. I take and give nothing back and then lie and say I would do otherwise if only X business did Y. I will only act fairly when forced to by a parent figure, which will probably be the government if I can get others to take on this attitude."
The same as I would have no problem with someone saying, "I'm a habitual liar and a cheat," versus someone saying, "I help people to be more careful and to investigate what it is told to them. I help people to be more cautious. I'm a Highwayman, a Bandit!"
I have long addressed the question of whether I'm going to live my life righting every wrong and looking for people to save. That I do not save kids in Africa, does not mean I haven't considered it. I live my life with integrity to what I value and I don't have to make elaborate arguments as to why, I just do the part that is mine.
The reason I'm shocked that Minecraft was pirated as you say, is that I see "pirates" complain that they would buy this product if it didn't have DRM or that product if the cost was reasonable. Here we have a project in its early stages that is valuable and made easy to attain. Will they support it. Will they help make it better? No, the lousy excuse is now exposure. And then, "Why isn't this thing finished yet!?" Ha, ha.
There is research showing that pirates, on average, spend more money on the things they pirate than non-pirates. While this may sound counter-intuitive, on reflection it makes sense. There are those who pirate for the sake of pirating, lets call them hoarders. They download everything they can, with no intention to ever pay for any of it. These are not potential customers. The other category of pirates are people who, lets take music for example, who really love music. They spend a lot of money on music each month, but they also have an active network trading music with other enthusiasts. In fact, this trading network is what provides feedback and drives their interest in music to begin with. So the piracy, the downloading of music that they engage in, is the fuel that drives their consumption up beyond that of a regular, law-abiding consumer.
I'm not saying that this is the only truth, but the statistical evidence from several studies done on musical piracy (I recall one in particular done in Holland) supports this view.
So in this case, your characterisation of the pirate as a leech is not an accurate account. In fact, this pirate is the perfect customer, and it is the piracy that made him.
But if you choose to publicly distribute your work—accept inevitable risks. Don't like that—go get a real job. You can do contract work writing music, or doing illustration / design.
Even in something like retail, your product can be stolen and there's no guarantee you'll get recompense. Yet laws regarding shoplifting have remained rather constant and non-draconian in all that time. The problem with the internet is that it's all too easy to get something without paying for it, but people all-too-often forget that the benefit of the internet is that nobody can deprive you of your goods (bandwidth notwithstanding).
Yeah, piracy sucks, but look at what other sectors of the economy have to deal with. Risk's everywhere; deal with it.
> "We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.
> This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
> In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it."
[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491678
A technicality, but if you commit copyright infringement you are not legally obliged to pay for it, you either have commited a crime or you are liable to be sued. You can't just download and then owe the person money. This isn't like when you go into a hair dresser, sit down, get your hair cut and now legally have to pay them.
Piracy in the name of protesting against DRM is borderline hypocrisy. As others already said, morality is subjective, but here are two other ways I'd personally support :
- don't use the product,
- pay for the license, pirate the product, get it touch with the company to explain your problem to them.
Also it misses the point that some laws are passed being backed up by well-paid lies. So breaking the law can no longer be any moral issue.
Example: * speed limits * never-ending copyright * exporting cryptography
* speeding and more generally, driving misbehaviour are directly responsible for deaths.
* Pirating software and music never killed anyone, but is about maximizing profits for some corporations.
* limiting cryptography is about government control, and is almost only a political matter.
Law can change the way people behave, notwithstanding their agreement :
Speed limits have been enforced much more severely in France in the past few years and guess what, people are speeding much less now. I, myself, changed too: I used to drive at 180 kph quite casually, and I don't anymore. In the same time, road casualties fell significantly, though of course this is for a large part because cars are much safer than they used to be (thank you to Euro-NCAP). Almost everybody complains about the speed limits, the radars everywhere, higher fines, but it's hard to deny that the policy was efficient, and that it's good.
Now copyright is an entirely different matter. Copyright is only about maximizing profits; extremely tight and severely enforced copyright, or the absence of it, wouldn't change our lives that much, anyway.
Relative speed kills, and if police were really concerned about safety they would prevent people from driving too slowly for traffic conditions as well as too fast.
I'll give you a similar example from recent news. Over the last few years, many towns have installed red light cameras. However, many local governments have discovered that red light cameras work too well.
After people got used to them, they stopped running red lights, and the revenue from citations dried up.
Guess what happened? Towns started removing red light cameras even though they enforced safer driving.
http://www.browardcountyduilawyers.com/broward-county-dui/fo...
It's also not really a libertarian no government issue, because red light cameras are basically privatizing traffic enforcement.
It's no secret that companies sell these systems by promoting them as revenue generators.
Furthermore, there are plenty of other ways to decrease red light violations. The most effective is to increase the duration of the yellow light.
According to this report "Straight through violations drop 92 percent after yellow lights are extended by one second in Loma Linda, California."
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/30/3055.asp
Here's some more info on increase yellow light duration.
http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shorteni...
The reason that more cities don't do this is because it leads to a massive drop in revenue. In fact here is an article on 6 cities that were caught shortening yellow light duration to increase revenue.
http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shorteni...
By whom? That all-too-powerful "Let's drive slow" lobby?
I'm with you on the "When the law hurts the very people it's meant to protect, it's the right and responsibility of the people to fight against it" angle...
But speed limits? That is your line in the sand?
And you know what, as time goes by it's actually less and less of an actual problem; heck, I was even able to buy games for my box this year, thank you Humble Bundle! OK, this isn't free software, but at least you don't feel like you've been anally raped with barbed wire.
And music? Well, I still buy CDs, mostly; the time when CDs came with DRM apparently faded away, so I don't even need to screen for this anymore (yes, I've actively boycotted some artists because of this for a while). From time to time, for music I don't actually care about, I buy mp3s from Amazon.
I don't write this to emphasize my moral superiority but to emphasize that it isn't that hard. You don't agree with their policy? don't buy the frigging stuff.
Frankly, when I first migrated I spent a long time making Wine to work properly with various pieces of software, and I finally never actually used it because there are alternatives to about everything. Maybe they're not always as good as their counterparts, but in the end they get the job done. I've shared word documents with OpenOffice, I've drawn billboards and websites with Inkscape and GIMP, and it's good enough.
What about software that phones home and require some physical gizmo like a CD or dongle to use, after you've already spent a nice sum of money to acquire it? You're simply treated not like an amiable customer, but a thief, while actual thieves simply use it.
I still don't think this warrants comparison to rape.
If people really wanted to take a stand they wouldn't buy OR pirate and would simply not consume. If everyone stopped consuming then changes would happen quickly.
I'll still have to have Windows for things I can't do in Linux, but other than Games, that's a pretty small list.
Where copyright seems objectionable to me, is where the initial cost of development was non-existent or large profits have been made for years. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Royalty_a...
For some copyright to last 95 years seems more like profiteering than protection of the creative industries considering creation is often based on the work of others.
I don't condone piracy, but I think piracy would be far less socially acceptable if: - the creator can be seen to benefit from their work - copyright better resembled its original intent of protecting investment in the creation of something new and not staking ownership over the work of others.
Pirating last weeks blockbuster isn't.
I wouldn't argue that there's moral high ground here, I'd simply put it this way:
Legal means of acquiring music is pretty simple. Legal DRM Free MP3 downloads are built into my music player and I'm a linux user.
This style of argumentation is starting to tire me. Obviously, this author thinks piracy is morally wrong. Other people have no such moral qualms about piracy. Both points of view are fine!
But implicitly or explicitly using morality as an argument for or against piracy is a bad style of argumentation and is almost an ad hominem. If I were to say that I am for piracy and someone told me that this was morally wrong, I would pay no attention to this person. But if he were to say that he personally feels piracy is morally wrong AND if he were to give me an argument as to why he feels that way, I would listen to this argument and at least think about it.
It's that simple.
What I'm not okay with is when industry groups distort facts by trying to get one crime confused as a completely separate crime.
Make no mistake.. both are crimes, but the attempt is to bring the loaded meanings of one term to a completely different word.
It's factually incorrect, and it needs to stop.
It's that simple.
Of course, I've come to believe that intellectual honesty is a cognitive luxury for most people; especially politicians.
Besides, more often than not these terms are not set by the author of the work, but by for example a music label. Most artists of popular contemporary music don't hold the copyright to their own work any more.
The one fault I see with this argument (mainly related to music) is this: There is no way to simply boycott the the recording companies' products without boycotting the artists as well. Recording companies have a monopoly on the artists they cover. While US contract law supports this arrangement, the model is broken in today's world of digital distribution.
The next best thing may be to only buy used CDs. Then you legally get the music AND annoy them at the same time.
Of course, you COULD actually boycott the artists. There are tons of independent musicians on the internet you can support. If you think that only the big label ones are worth your time and money, then clearly your opinions on the big labels themselves are unfounded.
(Just to be clear, all of the above "you"s refer not to the parent, but to everyone in general)
And that's the artist's choice. The artist could choose to distribute their work in some other fashion. So, if you want the artist's product, you have to buy it via the means chosen by that artist.
I think the content industries will decide we can't be trusted with our toys anymore and move them all to the cloud where we can peek at them for a monthly fee.
In my experience as a consultant and graphic designer (actually fronting for my wife, I'm not really a designer), everyone who isn't a young internet-savvy type just freaks out at the idea that people might "steal" stuff of their website. They constantly ask if there is way to let users/visitors see PDFs or other parts of their website without people being able to download them.
I, of course, tell them that downloading is actually an unavoidable requirement to the user seeing anything at all, etc. Some simply don't post as much as they would have.
My point is that DRM would likely always be the first idea a content owner thinks of when they consider putting something on any digital medium.
(Also consider that DRM existed long before the internet, in the earliest software and games. It just wasn't as fancy.)
I happen to agree with the overall conclusion that one should seek alternatives in these cases, but this is just an argument by shouting. It's foolish to simply declare, "it's not your choice". Clearly, people think it is their choice. If you want to convince them, you had better back it up with reasoning. The right to control is simply not an obvious, mostly-universally-held right like the right not to be murdered or the right to physical property.
The copyright debate is getting awfully stale. I wish the participants would come up with something new to say instead of just constantly declaring that piracy is not allowed on one side and that piracy doesn't hurt anybody on the other side.
The reality is that copyright law evolved over the course of three centuries during which the ability to duplicate and distribute was exceedingly capital-intensive, and therefor, practiced only on an industrial scale, by well capitalized industrialists. Not surprisingly, the law became industrial law, with all the trappings (like expensive corporate lawyers) that are par for the course at that level, but entirely out of reach for independent citizens.
Regardless of your position, we can all agree that if the power to duplicate and widely distribute HAD been available to independent citizens for the last 300 years, then the contours of copyright law (if there even were such a thing) would look VERY different today.
In truth, copyright law - as it exists - is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with a democratic society in which citizens have the power to duplicate and distribute at virtually no cost. Trying to make it work would be like trying to impose a law that only permits domestic imports via rail on the state of Hawaii.
So now that we have the internet, the law needs to change - a lot. And under a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, it's pure insanity to think that the people won't have a major say in deciding exactly how far property right should be allowed to go in the intellectual realm.
We already place very firm boundaries on their scope by way of Fair Use, limited terms, support for the Public Domain, and so on. And it's high time we placed a few more.
Copyright originally was created as a legal concept shortly after the invention of the printing press* because individual small printers were making and selling copies of other people's books. At that time (about 400 years ago), there were no "well capitalized industrialists." The industrial revolution had not even happened yet, and the few corporations that existed at all were captives of the sovereign rulers who created them.
In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies. That is how it was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution for instance, although at that point in time it was already an old concept. The idea that it has always been (or is even today) a matter of industrial law is not accurate.
> In truth, copyright law - as it exists - is fundamentally and irredeemably incompatible with a democratic society in which citizens have the power to duplicate and distribute at virtually no cost.
This is the exact opposite of how public policy works. It is the very ease of copying that creates the need for a legal framework to regulate it. Before the printing press existed, copyright did not exist either--because it was not needed.
In a free society where copying is free, the most precious thing is original throught, original opinion, original content. That is the last true scarcity, and must be protected. Otherwise how are we to distinguish one citizen from another?
* BTW it is worth spending some time reviewing the history of the printing press and the impact it had on the world. I would argue that it was much more of a revolution than the Internet has been so far, although of course the Internet is still in its early stages of development.
I mean, here you are calling people "uninformed" while asserting that the printing press was invented "about 400 years ago", which would be around 1612. In reality Gutenberg's press went into operation around 1450. That's 562 years ago, meaning you're off by more than a century and a half.
You do a bit better with copyright law. The first appearance of law that grants the right to copy to the author was, of course, the Statue of Anne (1709/10, depending on whether you're referring to the Julian calendar that was in effect in England at the time, or the Gregorian calendar which has since become the international standard). Here, you're only off by a century.
Unfortunately for your theory, it's a century in the wrong direction. In reality, there were a solid 260 years between the appearance of the press, and the emergence of individual copyright, and that's not "shortly after" by any definition.
Even if you start the clock in 1493, which is when the publishing business as such really came into its own with Anton Koberger, you're still off by a factor of more than 200 years. So any idea that individual copyright appeared as an immediate and necessary consequence of the press's invention is unsupported by the facts, as is the idea that there's never been a significant amount of time in which one existed without the other.
For the record, the rest of your theory is as sketchy as your grasp of history - especially the bit about protecting "thought and opinion". Those are two things that Copyright absolutely DOES NOT protect. Nor has it ever. So clearly you've still got a lot of work to do, but that's all the time we have today.
Class dismissed.
"At that time (about 400 years ago), there were no "well capitalized industrialists...and the few corporations that existed at all were captives of the sovereign rulers who created them."
Again, not so! Indeed, 400 years ago is when some of the fierest and best capitalized industrialists known to man emerged. Specifically, I'm talking about the Dutch East India Company - a private corporation which commanded a heavily armed fleet several times larger than those of the competing French and British Crowns combined. And it was wind-powered industrialization that supported the assembly-line techniques that made their ship yards so incredibly productive.
Obviously, theirs was a relatively limited enterprise - certainly nothing compared to what we now refer to as the Industrial Revolution. But that difference is a function of having wind rather than coal to run their mills, not the application of the techniques, or the systematic accumulation and pooling of capital needed to apply them. In terms of the capital-intensive industrial operations needed to run them, and a chartered corporation to manage it, the VOC (as it was known) was a force unlike any the world had seen, utterly dominating both the global trade routes to the East Indies, and the flow of commerce moving through their ports. Phillip II of Spain waged a furious fight to maintain his colonies in the Netherlands, but the idea that he did so successfully is the opposite of reality. When the Dutch finally sued for peace, they did so as a republic.
Getting back to the press - while I mentioned that the business aspect of if got off the ground in 1493, Anton Koberger's family didn't continue it when he died. Though it was profitable, it remained baffling to his relatives, who had - and continued - to trade in gold. In terms of the flow of ideas, the most influential presses emerged in Venice. This was a city that had it's own long history with industrialization. Specifically, the Arsenal, which is where it pioneered the heavy industrial techniques needed to build the fleets with which it dominated the Mediterranean throughout the Crusades.
This unmatched foundation in assembly-line work was easily transferred to publishing operations, which the Venetians also turned into an industry. It would be some time before work of equal quality and sophistication was produced North of the Alps. And Venice, of course, was a republic. Kings (and Popes, and Princes) were dominated by the Venetians, not vice versa.
Incidentally, nobody who actually knows what they're talking about refers to Kings as "sovereigns" until after 1648, and the Peace of Westphalia, which is what established the concept of the sovereign state as such; one (theoretically) secure in its borders and (again, theoretically) free from the external authority of the Pope. Ergo, the sovereignty.
Given the general magnitude of your historical ignorance, this must seem like a minor point, but still. I actually do know about this stuff, and hearing references to "sovereigns" operating in the early 17th century is like nails on a chalkboard. It's a bit like hearing people discus life in the "American States" circa 1720.
"In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies."
Assuming that you mean "from the beginning of printing" this is the EXACT opposite of reality. In England, where the Statue of Anne was passed, the privilege to copy accrued to guilds, not individuals.
Admittedly, I'm stretching definitions a bit since the guilds didn't have a 'right' either - it really was a privilege, and one granted by Royal Charter. Moreover, they weren't companies in the sense that we use that word today. But they were certainly incorporated entities seen as separate and distinct from any persons in particular. And they dominated the publishing trade for the better part of two centuries. The notion that lawful control of the ability to copy has "always" accrued to the individual is just so spectacularly wrong.
I'm sorry to go on like this, but I really can't remember a time when I came across another human who managed to pack so many layers of historical ignorance into such a small space. To cap if off by referring to others as "uninformed" just ices the cake. If you want to avoid looking like a complete idiot, avoid the use of history to ground your ideas about copyright. Seriously, it's like watching Kim Kardashian trying to play Scrabble in French and not understanding why "nobody lets me win".
The Statute of Anne vested the copy monopoly explicitly in the author. Prior to that, guild members had the exclusive "right" to "copy" a manuscript, yes--but first they had to individually purchase the license to do so, from the author.
This is what I mean when I say that copyright (in the modern, IP sense) ultimately accrued to the author. There was not much time following Gutenberg when it was legal for printers to copy whatever the heck they wanted. Recognition of authorship was a social norm that predated the printing press, and was very soon incorporated into the regulation of the new technology.
To return to my broader point, try this thought experiment. Take snapshots of copying technology and IP law at 50 year intervals up to today. It doesn't matter if you start at 1450 or 1709. What you will find is that over time the marginal cost of copying has declined, and the legal protection of an author's IP has strengthened. Yet you're trying to argue that for some reason that trend will suddenly reverse. I don't see why it would.
Understatement of the week.
"but I think you're mistaking precision for accuracy."
Those are synonyms, making this a distinction without a difference. You either fail to grasp logic, or basic English. I'm not sure which. Regardless, neither of these words refer to your grasp of history, nor your ability to ground theory within it. I'm not "mistaking" anything for anything, as your concept is demonstrably devoid of both.
"This is what I mean when I say that copyright (in the modern, IP sense) ultimately accrued to the author. "
Stop lying. You meant no such thing and you know it. Indeed, you very clearly said the opposite. Specifically. "In addition, from the very beginning, copyright was an individual author right that accrued to people, not companies."
And again "copyright (in the modern, IP sense)" means the legal ability duplicate, distribute, and creative derivatives from. Those were activities that the guild system specifically BARRED authors from doing. To say their need to buy manuscripts means that, effectively, these privileges "accrue" to the author is not true. And about "buying licences"; there were no licences to buy. You just made that up.
Let's remember the whole point of your original argument; that copyright - as an individual right - has "always" been the authors, and that our legal tradition has recognized "since the very beginning of printing." As noted, this is completely counter to reality. And now you're saying this isn't really what you meant, but sort of is because of these imaginary "licences"? Aside from the guild's charters, there were no licences. Only physical ownership and control of the manuscripts themselves, which was exchanged for money on unfavorable terms from the only legal buyers in town. Yes, that was a crappy system. No, it didn't give authors their due. And it ended in 1709, which is about two and a half centuries after the advent of movable type. Moving on.
"There was not much time following Gutenberg when it was legal for printers to copy whatever the heck they wanted."
True, but that had everything to do with censorship by the Church, and not respect for the rights of authors. Indeed, those two interests have tended to be at sharp odds. See my point above about authors and rights and who could do what "at the very beginning".
"Recognition of authorship was a social norm that predated the printing press, and was very soon incorporated into the regulation of the new technology."
If a custom pertaining to simple credit is your example of early copyright (i.e. what prevailed for the first 260 years), then you simply have no idea what copyright even covers. Just...none.
Also, who are you to say "very soon" about anything? Haven't we already established that your grasp of actual history is a confused and distorted mess of near bottomless error? Given your hilariously awful track record, you have no business making assertions about specific timeframes without clear citations.
"To return to my (now demolished) broader point, try this thought experiment..."
I've got a better idea. Instead of acting like a person who is quite literally moronic, why don't you take a moment to realize that you have been completely and totally schooled. Everything, from your grasp of history, to your understanding of words, to the honesty of your arguments, to the clarity of your theoretical understanding has just been handed back to you in shit covered shreds, and now there is a smoking crater where your credibility used to be.
This is where the normal, decent, reasonably self-respecting human would think "Wow, I really put my foot in it. I actually have no idea about any of this stuff. The worst part is that I didn't even realize how clueless I was. And there I was, starting of my remarks to others with snide personal insults about who belongs "in the uninformed camp". Instead of continuing to behave like an idiot, I'm going to spend some time actually learning about all this, and then, perha...
Accuracy and precision are not synonyms. Accuracy refers to how close you are to the true value. Precision refers to how narrow your claimed value is.
As applied to history, the statement that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at 9:33:12AM Mountain Time on July 4th, 1953 is extremely precise, but horribly inaccurate. Meanwhile, the statement that the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor in 1941 is accurate, but not very precise.
Imho the economics of scarcity that is behind copyright is morally problematic. Thus breaking copyright laws could be right under some circumstances.
Also see the following for some more reasons, and some alternatives: http://wybowiersma.net/pub/papers/Wiersma,Wybo,Enclosures_of...
The simple fact is that copyright infringement is not a universally-agreed wrong the way e.g. murder is. If you want to convince people that it should be, that's fine, but if you argue from the assumption that it already is, that's circular reasoning and won't convince anyone.
There are psychology researchers doing work in this area: http://www.yourmorals.org/aboutus.php
Is it moral to wear shoes into a Indian temple? How do you argue that without going circular?
If you ask me, the only moral arguments that aren't going to be circular are those that are based on Utilitarianism (or some similar form of Consequentialism). Of course, the parties debating then have to agree on this basic premise, or they are going to get nowhere fast. But, if you ask me, those who reject all forms of Utilitarianism are just profoundly kidding themselves. This fact is shown quite clearly by the fact that no one would accept a moral theory that results in the most miserable of all possible worlds, even if it seemed at the start that the premises of the moral theory were reasonable ones. E.g., property rights being amongst the most important rights, or what have you.
The whole "you don't have a choice" bit rests on the assumption that piracy is immoral, and the posts themselves serve simply to remind people of that. It's rather condescending, and entirely pointless if they don't accept the assumption that piracy is immoral, which they almost certainly do not.
I don't believe many serious people would ascribe to this 'GR' moral logic: "I don't care if someone appropriates my creations" (because I give mine away, or I have none) ergo "I am morally sound in appropriating others creations."
I agree with you that it may be pointless to argue piracy is immoral with someone who thinks it is moral. However, I don't think it is actually condescending to have that as a base assumption.
I think it's very much condescending if you treat the immorality of piracy as a base assumption held by both parties. If you treat it simply as your own base assumption, that's fine. But treating it as a base assumption of the other side and then arguing against their behavior based on that qualifies in my book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
It's not perfect; indeed, it's a 'messy compromise'. Currently, one that's tilted too far in favor of producers. However, consumers should also realize that producers can't just create stuff for free: it takes time to write books, lots of money to do movies, and selling music helps bands do what they do full-time, rather than as a hobby, and thus create more music that you, a fan, presumably are happy with.
I'm not sure what the 'right' answer is, but I have a feeling that it won't be simple and 'easy', but rather a bit messy. I think that easy access to 'legit' stuff is definitely part of the solution though. By making the legal route the easiest one, it takes away a big excuse.
Something more people need to think about is life "at the margin", in the economics sense of the term. Don't think about Lady Gaga and Windows and stuff like that: think about people who are on the edge between making a living with some form of IP and having to pursue it only as a hobby.
That is my basis for calling people wrong. People who pirate argue that they disagree with the creators choice for how a work should be distributed. Thus because they disagree with it, they will just take it anyway. That is why it is wrong.
On the anti-piracy side there are two groups: The first are artists who believe, without any evidence, that they can make more money when copyright is enforced. The second are people start out assuming that the right to control information is a moral right. They then derive the ethical implication that people shouldn't pirate.
On the pro-file sharing side there are two groups. The first are libertarian-inclined utilitarians, which require people to prove actual harm before something should be outlawed or have tried to start a tech company and been threatened with a patent lawsuit. Every piece of evidence not created by the middle-man industry I've ever seen has supported their position. The second are people who oppose the idea of "intellectual property", starting from moral principles such as freedom of expression, utility maximization or historic precedent.
There is no need to come up with anything new to say: the conclusion one comes to depends on what principles one uses to derive ethical implications. Intellectual property is morally wrong, declares one side. Intellectual property is a moral imperative, declares the other. It is impossible for either to convince the other, since neither is basing their arguments on a rational basis where facts or evidence might play a role.
Anyone who might be convinced doesn't care, probably because they are just ignoring stupid laws anyway.
Additionally, I don't believe most of them support piracy because they want free stuff (there are some horders out there, but that's an actual mental illness/tv show). Most of the people who "like free stuff" support piracy because they value the entertainment they get. By far the biggest group here are teenagers, and it appears that the more music teenagers without money download the more music they will buy legally later in life.
Right now teenage unemployment was 25% last summer and that's just among teenagers who wanted to work. Unpaid internships seem to have become the norm. If we don't give teenagers a way to get the medium of exchange we shouldn't be surprised that they develop parallel economies. That said, if they weren't going to buy music anyway or, as most studies find, people buy more music in the presence of file sharing, it doesn't imply that there is any theft going on or that creators are damaged in any way by more value being derived from the work they already did.
I think record companies see their control over the airwaves and their kingmaker roll slipping away. Like publishers, they are progressively less relevant and the services they do provide aren't worth nearly the percentage of profits they charge their artists. They don't need to believe it is theft for them to cynically exploit the argument in order to remain relevant.
I like content and am greedy for it. Copyright helps me get more content by providing incentive. This is the benefit.
Whatever these are benefits of copyright, the practical collateral costs (to privacy, freedom, making everyone a criminal etc) of enforcing copyright law make it not a worthwhile.
Since copyright can be used to prevent content creation (for example, cover performances, sequel novels written by other people or derivative works) it isn't at all obvious that copyright leads to more content. The internet has led to more music and better music being made, according to the recent study I saw comparing radio play of new music over time. Webcomics make most of their money selling books of comics available for free on the web. For most of human history we functioned under a deliver-first, pay-later or -indirectly method of exchange; the internet has allowed this model to scale almost without limit for goods with zero marginal cost.
Links?
[1]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/argumentum_ad_nauseam
However, it's erroneous for an individual to argue that he has a right to pirate because the industry created barriers to their own content. It's counterproductive to the anti-censorship movement.
Instead, we should focus on the fact that the music industry has been anti-effective and is now using censorship to compensate for their reluctance to change.
Competing interests will often be in conflict, and that's what we're seeing in this debate. You can safely translate "a right to piracy" to "no moral obligation to respect copyright". Once the moral argument is dismissed, all that remains is pragmatic conflict resolution.
One side could be destroyed, a compromise could be found, or a protracted conflict could ensue. In any case, moral arguments from either side are mostly useless.
Why doesn't it scale?
Well, the pirates aren't asking the buyers to subsidise them.
> new stuff wouldn't get made
Fine by me.
If you buy from SOPA supporters, you're supporting the death of the internet.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/is-trade...
Over time, that bargain has been severely corrupted by those industries.
Piracy is the consequence.
I'm sure that with time, and a more balanced approach to the granting of such monopolies, piracy will become less and less of a problem.
I think what's missing is the combination of talent-search + promotion. Most users just won't be proactive about searching through a bunch of no-name bands to find some music worth listening to.
edit: removed all capitalization so you can reply to me about how you won't read my comment because i am too lazy to capitalize a word.
Lack of capitalisation interrupts the way you read a block of text. People make poor design choices all the time, and this is one of them.
You would be right if his goal was to impress someone but I doubt that was intention of his blog.
I'm not exactly willing to die on this hill, though -- the article is not very good in any case.
I guess we all have our little pet peeves :-)
It originated in the 20s and 30s in the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayer was one of the more prominent supporters, designing typefaces that contained no uppercase letterforms at all. He even experimented with designing entirely new alphabets that were phonetically based.
Jan Tschichold was another Bauhaus guy experimenting in the same realm. From Wikipedia: "Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. ... The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters."
It's interesting that it was born out of choices made to German, where they have many more capital letters in each sentence than we do in English. Regardless, it's clearly a stylistic choice, and one that the OP might even have to work harder to maintain, if he is accustomed to writing in sentence case.
There's that old saying that you must first learn the rules and then you can break them. That is exactly what is going on here, and the OP isn't unique in this. Throughout my time at design school many of my teachers, who had been educated by Bauhaus instructors, would email in only lowercase—they adopted the style. And others have adopted it from them (here's one of my design school friends' site: http://traceychan.net/ where she has).
I quite like the style myself.
To a fast reader, without visual cues it is a jumbled mess. I gave up after forcing myself to read three sentences.
You invested a lot of time into creating an object everybody likes. People can get it in a online shop and it will be send to there address.
Now a clever guy scans the object with a 3D scanner and is putting the model online. Everybody can now downloading the model on The Pirate Bay and print it at home. And they all say: "fuck that online store, it is way too much hassle and costs too much".
It's a difficult discussion. Therefore I think it's way to easy to just call making a copy not stealing.
Edit: the post by randomdata: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479581
They're taking things into their own hands by installed junk- and malware on my product.
They're assuming I'm a thief before I've even walked through the door. Why should I pay for the time they wasted to deal with people who do purportedly "break the law."
Moreover, it's not like with the music or software industries, these people lock themselves inside ivory towers and come out with a genius idea. Granted, there are genius ideas worth protecting, but those ideas protect themselves by their own internal integrity and passion of the thinker/creator/etc. Copyright law gives creators an artificial sense of entitlement, and the idea that their content is privileged somehow. That's the _default_ for a majority of the products we buy. And it simply isn't obviously true. There's too much clutter in the market as it stands for people to argument from absolutism like with in this article.
A majority of this copyright discussion has an unrealistic assumption about _the state of things as they are now_. There's no transparency in these products. No sincerity.
Are you high? Once upon a time I pirated content, he's an approximate recap of what my expierience looked like:
* Search pirate bay
* Look at 2000 results, none of which look right.
* Ok, found one.
* Crap it's French with Arabic subtitles.
* Ok this one looks good.
* Shit, no seeders.
* Ok, this one has seeders and is english.
* Go get a bagel because it's going to take an hour to download.
Here's the UX of Netflix, rdio, or hulu:
* Search.
* Press play.
In my time using Netflix, rdio, hulu, and last.fm for my media needs there has been one title I couldn't find.
EDIT: I'll be clear, my comments on these services apply exclusively to the US, I know nothing about the status of these services elsewhere.
Total time consumed maybe a minute.
They gimp the offerings on the foreign netflix due to licensing issues and it really hurts the service. I tried netflix but cancelled because the catalog of things aren't worth it.
* Search
* Whoops, this movie isn't available on streaming.
On Hulu:
* Search
* Only the last four episodes are available.
The content distributors are strangling themselves because they're trying to protect their existing means of distribution and refuse to adopt new ones that people actually want to use and pay for.
In 2008 Starz and Netflix entered into an agreement where Netflix would be able to license and distribute Starz media for $30 million. Said contract expired, Netflix offers $300 million to renew, and Starz rejects the offer under the premise that their content is worth more.
Now Starz, like HBO (eg. HBO Go), is planning to roll out their own streaming service--which I would say is both an attempt to protect their means of distribution as well as an effort to adopt to new models.
As an aside, I tried to use HBO Go a few weeks ago...and was prompted to enter the details of my cable tv service in order to gain access. I didn't have the time/patience to proceed and decided to read instead.
All I can say is if every content distribution company expects users to pay a separate fee, etc, for streaming content they're SOL. Evidence of Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and the like show that people prefer one-stop shopping.
Edit: typo
Here's the UX of Netflix, rdio or hulu for me:
* content not available in your area