Here we go again. The UK Government keep saying we want more high skilled jobs/technology/'digital' but we criminalise a huge percentage of the population that engage in basically harmless format shifting and render hardware start-ups[1] marginal.
Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?
To be fair, it was the government that passed a law to legalise such activity; it was the industry that challenged that law and the High Court that overturned it!
It's also the government that made such activity illegal in the first place through copyright law and excessively strict interpretation thereof. Without that, it wouldn't need a law to "legalise" it.
So other countries can frame laws that don't criminalise a large percentage of the economically active electorate. Why couldn't Call-Me-Dave? Have you got any insight/reasons?
Call-Me-Dave had to backtrack after making out he wanted to ban encryption and a bunch of smart computer scientists and cryptographers made him look foolish. I guess there in lies why Call-Me-Dave couldn't.
> Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?
Isn't that what was done, and the decision here is striking that law down? It looks like you can't frame a law that allows format shifting without paying the copyright holder of the work.
Correct. After all, the copyright holders (who are ultimately the creators, followed by their contractual assignees) are citizens too, so if the government renders their economic relations de facto obsolete (even if negligently rather than deliberately) then they are being discriminated against through no fault of their own.
Not sure I understand. We have a law that makes a large percentage if not a majority of UK adults criminals. How can that actually be taken seriously? By anyone?
Can you imagine what would happen if anyone was actually prosecuted?
Their point was that people don't respect laws when laws are as absurd as this one. It undermines peoples' beliefs that they should follow the law when:
1) It's absurd to the general population
2) It can't even be enforced
>undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws
Laws like this undermine the common-held belief that laws are important or relevant. Because everyone breaks the law and it's not enforced - which makes the law not important and not relevant.
My interpretation is that you agree with each other.
I think @hyperion2010's point was that this interpretation of law can't be taken seriously, and by extension that if this part of law can't be taken seriously then law in general is undermined.
Exactly, you've got Hobson's choice here: Pay for the content again on a new platform, or don't have the content.
I think implicit in Hobson's choice is that you can knock Hobson over the head and have your pick of any damn horse you like... which is the route you're proposing.
Well, since it's unenforceable, you can safely ignore it. The loser here is the government in that it's being slapped for failing to consider everyone's interests when drafting legislation - the ruling is not that ripping is bad, but there's no governmental mechanism for measuring or mitigating the impact on content providers. In short, it's not about you.
What the court is basically telling the government to do is to assign permanent responsibility to someone in the civil service (or set up some similar mechanism) for tracking the degree of copyright infringement that occurs and compensating injured parties, who are citizens or corporations in good standing with legal rights of their own. The government can't just facilitate a practice which will foreseeably result in some injury to one group of people and then leave that group at a legal disadvantage; it creates the opposite of a level playing field by saying that some peoples' economic interests are less important than others.
A lot of people make the argument that technology has changed the market, so content producers shouldn't expect to have their incomes protected, because we didn't protect the manufacture of buggy whips in response to the popularity of modern cars. But this is flawed reasoning. In a case like that, demand shifted away from horse-drawn vehicles (and their peripheral goods like buggy whips) towards mechanically-powered ones. In the case of music and movies, demand for the product has not shifted to something else - people still love to consume music, watch movies etc. What's different is that you can now frequently get the same product you wanted before, at the same level of quality, and enjoy it the same way, but without paying for it, if you are so inclined. In this case, technology hasn't altered the product itself, but rather the economic relations of product distribution.
So even if you are super cutting-edge as an artist/publisher, and you decide to make high-quality, device-agnostic digital copies of your work available to consumers from day 1, you are still faced with the problem that some consumers will decide to upload it to file-sharing sites, and many others will choose to download it and subsequently enjoy it without bothering to pay anything while you watch your sales dry up. The equilibrium price asymptotically approaches zero because sellers no longer have any control over the supply curve, so all of the economic surplus goes to consumers and little or none goes to producers, who are thus disincentivized from further creation because they are no longer able to make a living as before even though demand for their product may be as strong as ever.
Interestingly, when electronic music - ie recordings of electronic oscillators, filters and modulators, bleeps and bloops - first got going in the UK in the 1950s, the first creators were unable to get artistic credit because the body that administers royalties wouldn't accept the output as music or recognize a creative input, partly out of fear that mechanically produced music would destroy jobs for musicians who played conventional instruments, and in the 1980s there was a pushback from the musician's union against multi-timbral synthesizers/sequencers that could replace whole groups of musicians. Those really are anti-technology, anti-market initiatives but they ultimately went nowhere, notwithstanding that the rise in popularity of electronic music did result in some economic displacement.
> What the court is basically telling the government to do is to assign permanent responsibility to someone in the civil service (or set up some similar mechanism) for tracking the degree of copyright infringement that occurs and compensating injured parties
How copying your own CD to listen in mp3 format is copyright infringement?
It isn't. I have no problem with anyone ripping stuff they paid for.
Ripping it and then shoring it with others who download it for free is copyright infringement. A percentage of people do that, and the court is saying that the government has an obligation to deal with that.
Whatever. Zero fucks given. I have no physical media and never will again. Not playing these games any more. I'll continue to steal stuff. If it is good, I'll buy the mp3 or go to a gig.
What about those newly defined criminals Amazon with AutoRip?
Seems likely Amazon (and Apple, etc) are the targets of this.
If they remove that feature and it causes 5% fewer CD tracks being ripped to mp3, then a few more music execs will get to look smug while clicking their associates through a ghoulish powerpoint next year.
If you really want to help music artists in particular, attend their shows, they make most of their money off gate.
Also, buy a copy or two of their albums, and whatever else they have. All that money goes right to the band. I always buy a CD and vinyl (if they have it) and then give away the CD if I already have more than one copy.
Then I sincerely hope someone else takes the same attitude towards your economic activity by helping themselves to it without compensating you, so that you gain some first-hand experience of what that feels like.
If you are in IT as a normal 9 to 5er then it is already happening as the larger corporations work to suppress wages, a downward pressure that is felt throughout the market. To say nothing of how much of one's economic productivity is stolen by being charged for services that others use via taxation (even when you don't count welfare; I'm talking things where big companies get corporate welfare and tax breaks with the burden falling on the average taxpayer).
I can't help you with your aesthetic dissatisfaction.
Perhaps you should only spend money on music to attend concerts, or save up your cash to buy a musical instrument instead of listening to recordings that provide only transient enjoyment.
I presume if you are stealing something (to use your phrase above) it is because you want it at the time you help yourself to it. If you suspect that you will quickly get sick of music, why not just spend the money on books instead? I mean, if I found that every time I bought fish and chips I felt sick afterwards I wouldn't start stealing it without paying, I would just stop eating it.
If you steal music in digital form without paying for it, of course it is not lost as with a physical object, but you have lowered the equilibrium price of the good by unilaterally increasing the overall supply.
Musicians, like many other professions (I could mention scientists as another example), are usually not into what they are doing because of the money. They sell their music because earning money enables them to play more music, not wasting their time with other work. So I'm not so sure they should mind, as long as they still make enough to keep it going.
Actually most people have some passion they would like to spend on instead of working. Maybe we could arrange it so that we all shared the boring work equally and then spend the rest of the time pursuing our passions? Then musicians could be musicians — and I could be what I want too!
It's not the fault of people in the arts that you don't enjoy your job. Also, creative work is still work. Writing a novel typically takes months of work, for example. I think it's quite reasonable to set a price and collect some money from people who want to read it.
I don't understand this attitude that someone else should provide you with free entertainment just because you chose a career that you don't find fulfilling. What is it that you want to be/do that you can't now?
«Choosing a career» is not always what happens. Do you think those who wash public toilets, just happened to have chosen that career?
Fact of the matter is, unless you're born rich or have aquired enough capital to live off other people's work, you need a job to get by. The ratio between shit jobs and cool gigs is increasing, and those who are worse off in the first place get the shittiest jobs — for less pay of course!
> Musicians, like many other professions (I could mention scientists as another example), are usually not into what they are doing because of the money.
You might want to run that one past the rappers, because I'm getting mixed signals from their videos..... ;-D
Oh, so because you feel the government is stealing your money you are OK with stealing the product of someone else's work to get back at the government?
Meanwhile, aren't you choosing to keep living in the UK or EU. Why don't you move to Monaco or some other low-tax jurisdiction?
I want to support artists and stuff, but the music industry is making it so hard for me to do that in good conscience with their anti-consumer stances.
No they're not. They're making it hard for the government to postpone addressing the fundamental economic changes imposed by zero marginal-cost distribution. Since entertainment media production is a substantial chunk of the UK economy at about £65 billion a year, it's not unreasonable to ask government to come up with a policy on it. Entertainment is cultural capital, and it brings in both direct revenue and indirect (eg tourism).
So the industry is saying 'you're going to allow something that you know will facilitate copyright infringement and thus destroy sales, what is your policy to ensure that the creative people don't end bearing all the economic loss?' The answer might be a change in copyright rules, a tax on entertainment media (probably a bad idea) some sort subsidy for people who work in the arts (like France), favorable tax treatment for people who work in the arts (like Ireland, where artists are exempt from paying income taxes - yes really), or whatever.
As I have explained over and over again here on HN, changes in the marginal cost of distribution have no bearing on the cost of creation, ie making the original work. People still want to consume music, movies, books etc. as much as they ever did, and it takes creative people just as much effort to create such works as it always did, but the value of their property right has been eroded by forces outside their control or competence. So anyone who makes intellectual property is stuck with a completely different economic calculus from anyone engaged in creating physical property, and the government has so far failed to address this.
The main claim made by the music industry in this case was that when the law was introduced no provision was made to compensate copyright holders for the harm it would (allegedly) do them, and that the government failed to demonstrate that it had adequate evidence for claiming that it didn't need to because no substantial harm was done.
(Apparently there is some requirement, when the government brings in a new law, that those non-negligibly harmed by it should be compensated. I do not know the details. I would be interested to know on what occasions if any they've actually done this. I've certainly never heard, e.g., of anyone being recompensed because the government has introduced a new tax on the sale of an asset they hold a lot of -- but that might be quite a different situation because it doesn't exactly involve new laws.)
The judge, to be clear, didn't find that there is substantial harm. Only that the government hadn't adequately established that there isn't. This was a purely procedural matter.
The music industry made a bunch of other claims, on which the judge found in favour of the government. For instance, when assessing the harm done to copyright holders, the government essentially asked the question: would they actually sell fewer copies with a limited-private-use exemption in law than without? The music industry contended that instead "harm" should be measured by assuming that every copy taken is a sale lost. Unsurprisingly, the judge agreed with the government on this.
So it seems at least possible that the government may go away, lick its wounds, come up with a bigger pile of better evidence that a law of this kind will not in fact make any substantial difference to the music industry's profits, and then pass pretty much the exact same law again. I do hope so.
Or they might come up with a smaller easier-to-marshal body of evidence that the harm is really rather small, and pass a similar law that does compensate the music industry just a little.
I fear that actually they'll just drop the issue, though, and leave us with a stupid restriction that most of the population ignores and that no one is realistically going to be able to use to prosecute anyone anyhow.
In Germany, we just pay a fee on new media (SSDs, thumbdrives, phones, HDDs, blank CDs and DVDs, etc) which is given to the record companies and shared between the content creators.
So you pay them even if you don't use those to pirate their content? That doesn't sound any better.
Otoh, you are given permission to copy since you are already paying for it.
And if they make you pay for it anyway, that doesn't give them the incentive to release better media. As long as they release something they get payed.
Finland went one step further and that fee on blank media is now directly forked off the government's budget. As a result, I'll be paying for personal copies even if I never bought the original product nor any blank media.
And if they make you pay for it anyway, that doesn't give them the incentive to release better media. As long as they release something they get payed.
I suspect blank media revenue is distributed in proportion to entertainment media's popularity, although the levy approach solidifies that status of industry gatekeepers to some extent.
I like having a physical copy of things I really like and want to keep long term. More-so for movies, where the alternative has typically been DRM infested, than for music. But everything gets ripped the instant I get it into my house.
So, now that the masses have been (criminally) copying music and films into their computers roughly for a couple of decades and we've maybe ten years ago passed the point where music (and mostly films, too) are basically unconsumable unless they're in digital format, these people actually make a focused effort to shoot down a law that legalises this widely de facto usage, just to get back to the same old reality with a completely unenforceable situation that nobody cares about——based on the lack of court action, not even themselves?
They might see it as some sort of a moral victory but I had no idea they were so utterly out of touch with reality, for real.
60 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadHere we go again. The UK Government keep saying we want more high skilled jobs/technology/'digital' but we criminalise a huge percentage of the population that engage in basically harmless format shifting and render hardware start-ups[1] marginal.
Can we not frame a law that allows format shifting?
[1] http://www.brennan.co.uk/
Isn't that what was done, and the decision here is striking that law down? It looks like you can't frame a law that allows format shifting without paying the copyright holder of the work.
I wouldn't be so sure. The U.S. Government got Al Capone on tax evasion.
If it can be used as a means to further punish somebody, or the only means to punish somebody, it will be used.
Can you imagine what would happen if anyone was actually prosecuted?
1) It's absurd to the general population
2) It can't even be enforced
>undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws
Laws like this undermine the common-held belief that laws are important or relevant. Because everyone breaks the law and it's not enforced - which makes the law not important and not relevant.
I think @hyperion2010's point was that this interpretation of law can't be taken seriously, and by extension that if this part of law can't be taken seriously then law in general is undermined.
I'm now severely tempted to stop buying and start pirating, seeing as I'll be a criminal either way.
I think implicit in Hobson's choice is that you can knock Hobson over the head and have your pick of any damn horse you like... which is the route you're proposing.
What the court is basically telling the government to do is to assign permanent responsibility to someone in the civil service (or set up some similar mechanism) for tracking the degree of copyright infringement that occurs and compensating injured parties, who are citizens or corporations in good standing with legal rights of their own. The government can't just facilitate a practice which will foreseeably result in some injury to one group of people and then leave that group at a legal disadvantage; it creates the opposite of a level playing field by saying that some peoples' economic interests are less important than others.
A lot of people make the argument that technology has changed the market, so content producers shouldn't expect to have their incomes protected, because we didn't protect the manufacture of buggy whips in response to the popularity of modern cars. But this is flawed reasoning. In a case like that, demand shifted away from horse-drawn vehicles (and their peripheral goods like buggy whips) towards mechanically-powered ones. In the case of music and movies, demand for the product has not shifted to something else - people still love to consume music, watch movies etc. What's different is that you can now frequently get the same product you wanted before, at the same level of quality, and enjoy it the same way, but without paying for it, if you are so inclined. In this case, technology hasn't altered the product itself, but rather the economic relations of product distribution.
So even if you are super cutting-edge as an artist/publisher, and you decide to make high-quality, device-agnostic digital copies of your work available to consumers from day 1, you are still faced with the problem that some consumers will decide to upload it to file-sharing sites, and many others will choose to download it and subsequently enjoy it without bothering to pay anything while you watch your sales dry up. The equilibrium price asymptotically approaches zero because sellers no longer have any control over the supply curve, so all of the economic surplus goes to consumers and little or none goes to producers, who are thus disincentivized from further creation because they are no longer able to make a living as before even though demand for their product may be as strong as ever.
Interestingly, when electronic music - ie recordings of electronic oscillators, filters and modulators, bleeps and bloops - first got going in the UK in the 1950s, the first creators were unable to get artistic credit because the body that administers royalties wouldn't accept the output as music or recognize a creative input, partly out of fear that mechanically produced music would destroy jobs for musicians who played conventional instruments, and in the 1980s there was a pushback from the musician's union against multi-timbral synthesizers/sequencers that could replace whole groups of musicians. Those really are anti-technology, anti-market initiatives but they ultimately went nowhere, notwithstanding that the rise in popularity of electronic music did result in some economic displacement.
How copying your own CD to listen in mp3 format is copyright infringement?
Ripping it and then shoring it with others who download it for free is copyright infringement. A percentage of people do that, and the court is saying that the government has an obligation to deal with that.
And the music industry will ask themselves why there is such piracy.
Well done, they are doing everything possible to be irelevants and to die
What about those newly defined criminals Amazon with AutoRip?
If they remove that feature and it causes 5% fewer CD tracks being ripped to mp3, then a few more music execs will get to look smug while clicking their associates through a ghoulish powerpoint next year.
If you really want to help music artists in particular, attend their shows, they make most of their money off gate.
Also, buy a copy or two of their albums, and whatever else they have. All that money goes right to the band. I always buy a CD and vinyl (if they have it) and then give away the CD if I already have more than one copy.
Then I sincerely hope someone else takes the same attitude towards your economic activity by helping themselves to it without compensating you, so that you gain some first-hand experience of what that feels like.
If I buy a book for £6 I get a few days if not a couple of weeks of enjoyment out of it. This is good. Well done authors.
If I buy a £1 music track I get perhaps 20 minutes a week out of it for a few weeks before I burn it out.
Perhaps you should only spend money on music to attend concerts, or save up your cash to buy a musical instrument instead of listening to recordings that provide only transient enjoyment.
I presume if you are stealing something (to use your phrase above) it is because you want it at the time you help yourself to it. If you suspect that you will quickly get sick of music, why not just spend the money on books instead? I mean, if I found that every time I bought fish and chips I felt sick afterwards I wouldn't start stealing it without paying, I would just stop eating it.
If you steal music in digital form without paying for it, of course it is not lost as with a physical object, but you have lowered the equilibrium price of the good by unilaterally increasing the overall supply.
Actually most people have some passion they would like to spend on instead of working. Maybe we could arrange it so that we all shared the boring work equally and then spend the rest of the time pursuing our passions? Then musicians could be musicians — and I could be what I want too!
I don't understand this attitude that someone else should provide you with free entertainment just because you chose a career that you don't find fulfilling. What is it that you want to be/do that you can't now?
Fact of the matter is, unless you're born rich or have aquired enough capital to live off other people's work, you need a job to get by. The ratio between shit jobs and cool gigs is increasing, and those who are worse off in the first place get the shittiest jobs — for less pay of course!
You might want to run that one past the rappers, because I'm getting mixed signals from their videos..... ;-D
Meanwhile, aren't you choosing to keep living in the UK or EU. Why don't you move to Monaco or some other low-tax jurisdiction?
the music industry sometimes reminds me of creationists, blind to reality
It's like 2002 all over again
So laugh at <silly group of people> all you want. You are only laughing at yourself.
Edit: Lawfully purchased monty python DVDs doubly support this point of view.
So the industry is saying 'you're going to allow something that you know will facilitate copyright infringement and thus destroy sales, what is your policy to ensure that the creative people don't end bearing all the economic loss?' The answer might be a change in copyright rules, a tax on entertainment media (probably a bad idea) some sort subsidy for people who work in the arts (like France), favorable tax treatment for people who work in the arts (like Ireland, where artists are exempt from paying income taxes - yes really), or whatever.
As I have explained over and over again here on HN, changes in the marginal cost of distribution have no bearing on the cost of creation, ie making the original work. People still want to consume music, movies, books etc. as much as they ever did, and it takes creative people just as much effort to create such works as it always did, but the value of their property right has been eroded by forces outside their control or competence. So anyone who makes intellectual property is stuck with a completely different economic calculus from anyone engaged in creating physical property, and the government has so far failed to address this.
What? And this is why the media industry is seeing as anti consumers.
But most of the meat is in this earlier one: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/basc...
The main claim made by the music industry in this case was that when the law was introduced no provision was made to compensate copyright holders for the harm it would (allegedly) do them, and that the government failed to demonstrate that it had adequate evidence for claiming that it didn't need to because no substantial harm was done.
(Apparently there is some requirement, when the government brings in a new law, that those non-negligibly harmed by it should be compensated. I do not know the details. I would be interested to know on what occasions if any they've actually done this. I've certainly never heard, e.g., of anyone being recompensed because the government has introduced a new tax on the sale of an asset they hold a lot of -- but that might be quite a different situation because it doesn't exactly involve new laws.)
The judge, to be clear, didn't find that there is substantial harm. Only that the government hadn't adequately established that there isn't. This was a purely procedural matter.
The music industry made a bunch of other claims, on which the judge found in favour of the government. For instance, when assessing the harm done to copyright holders, the government essentially asked the question: would they actually sell fewer copies with a limited-private-use exemption in law than without? The music industry contended that instead "harm" should be measured by assuming that every copy taken is a sale lost. Unsurprisingly, the judge agreed with the government on this.
So it seems at least possible that the government may go away, lick its wounds, come up with a bigger pile of better evidence that a law of this kind will not in fact make any substantial difference to the music industry's profits, and then pass pretty much the exact same law again. I do hope so.
Or they might come up with a smaller easier-to-marshal body of evidence that the harm is really rather small, and pass a similar law that does compensate the music industry just a little.
I fear that actually they'll just drop the issue, though, and leave us with a stupid restriction that most of the population ignores and that no one is realistically going to be able to use to prosecute anyone anyhow.
Otoh, you are given permission to copy since you are already paying for it.
And if they make you pay for it anyway, that doesn't give them the incentive to release better media. As long as they release something they get payed.
That sounds even worse.
I suspect blank media revenue is distributed in proportion to entertainment media's popularity, although the levy approach solidifies that status of industry gatekeepers to some extent.
They might see it as some sort of a moral victory but I had no idea they were so utterly out of touch with reality, for real.