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DRM Causes Piracy
igorsk recommends an essay by Eric Flint, editor at Baen Publishing and an author himself, over at Baen's online SF magazine, Baen Universe. In it Flint argues that, far from curbing piracy of copyrighted materials, DRM actually causes it. Quoting: "Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an 'economic epidemic' under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And... Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called 'online piracy,' it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward."
Other editorials in the series include
Column #1
Column #2
Column #3
Column #4
Column #5
All of which are available in their entirety, despite the "1/3 to 1/2" thing.
Good reading.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
What does lack of DRM cause? If there is no DRM, would people all of a sudden decide to go buy stuff instead of pirating it? Doesn't seem very likely to me.
Couple of weeks ago I bought a movie online, which turned out to be DRM infected so I could not play it under Linux. I had to use Windows and FairPlay stripped the DRM from it to access the AVI inside.
Do you think I care this movie is now being copied by my friends?
This article makes perfect sense on every aspect noted. This is exactly why MP3s are so heavily pirated. I must be honest though, I still purchase CDs when I find new music that I like, but I will never ever purchase MP3s with DRM protection.
I bought XIII and had to pirate it to play it in my laptop (without the CD)
I wanted to buy KT Tunstall's CD, but since I listen to my music on the computer, I had to pirate it (it's copy-protected)
My wife and I have a collection of some 200 CD's, all of which are ripped to my computer, but we haven't bought a new CD in almost a year.
There's a limit as to when we start pushing our customers too far, and they start to push back
It sure sounds alot like the reversed cause and effect of the "War on Drugs" or "War on Terrorism". Will the government ever learn to back off and let the free market guide itself? And yes, I know the *AA's are the ones pushing for more laws and arrests, but they wouldn't be succeeding without the blessing of the government.
Does not make too much sense to me.
1) Legal content can be easily found online.
2) DRM-protected content is cheap - cheaper than their physical equivalents.
3) Users who know what to expect will not be dissappointed. I know I am a happy iTunes + iPod user. Then again I do not spend my time inventing all sorts of scenarios how this model could be limiting my life when it is not.
(This sig intentionally left blank)
No. Bad analogy. Sexuality is simple evolutionary psychology. Given enough females, a male could produce perhaps 150 children a year, while a female could at most produce 1 (assuming no twins or other such anomalies). But for men to pass on their genes they require women. Thus, female sexuality IS a scarce commodity; there's nothing artificial about it.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Ever since I found out I could not play an DVD-audio on my PC when I have my connected digital speaker system, did you think I ever bought one DVD-audio?
Honestly, the response to the recent petition to the UK goverment to ban DRM almost sounded like it was produced for the goverment by the RIAA and Macrovision combined. The response in full:
Digital rights issues have been gaining increasing prominence as innovation accelerates, more and more digital media products and services come onto the market and the consumer wants to get access to digital content over different platforms. Many content providers have been embedding access and management tools to protect their rights and, for example, prevent illegal copying. We believe that they should be able to continue to protect their content in this way. However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.
It is clear though that the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded. It is reasonable for consumers to be informed what is actually being offered for sale, for example, and how and where the purchaser will be able to use the product, and any restrictions applied. While there is good reason to expect the market to reach a balance as these new markets develop, it is important that consumers' interests are maintained in the meantime.
Apart from the APIG (All Party Internet Group) report on DRM referred to in your petition, Digital Rights issues are an important component in other major HMG review strands on Intellectual Property, New Media and the Creative Economy. In particular, the independent Gowers Review of Intellectual Property commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published its report on 6th December 2006 as part of the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report. Recommendations include introducing a limited private copying exception by 2008 for format shifting for works published after the date that the law comes into effect. There should be no accompanying levies for consumers. Also making it easier for users to file notice of complaints procedures relating to Digital Rights Management tools by providing an accessible web interface on the Patent Office website by 2008 and that DTI should investigate the possibility of providing consumer guidance on DRM systems through a labelling convention without imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Step 1: Complain about drop-in-the-ocean piracy for a decade.
...apparently the ads and menu page were snuck into the DVD ISO standard when we were sleeping.
Step 2: Get DMCA on your side so you can make a criminal out of anyone at will.
Step 3: Sell defective products. When people are compelled to pirate on a larger scale because the Disney DVD they rented for the kids keeps fading in and out visually and audiably, or skips and dies on a particular scene...
Step 4: Point at all the new, higher piracy figures and dance around singing about how the piracy problem is getting worse and how you need more DRM power.
Step 5: Wait for the sheep to get used to the new order.
Fortunately, it's unlikely this will work. Look at DVD advertisements. I recently popped in Joe's Apartment (it was free and I like bad films) and there was not trailers, commercials, or even a stop at the menu screen. Straight to reel one. A short while back I was watching a new release (I forget the title) and it was telling me all about how the new HD-DVD (or Blueray, I wasn't paying much attention) is going to be worth buying new hardware at shocking prices because the disc will play the film immediately.
Thus, the cycle is complete; the studios received just enough annoyed customer complaints about the previews, ads, and intro garbage that they started making them skipable, or at least fastforwardable, and now they're going to temporarily give us immediate play back. Aren't we loved?
Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -- we've been tolerating them since '46. It's the fact that no one who pushes a button on a remote control wants to see a red X or Ø appear. They want action.
The more laws you have - the more crime you'll see.
It's true for me that the quality of downloaded movies is better than the dvd I can rent at blockbuster. I couldn't beleive all the CRAP that goes on DVDs now. It was an inconvenience before that I had to click play a couple of times through menus to watch the movie, but now there are COMMERCIALS!!! WTF!!! Scroll through a list of movies, double click on a file and have the movie start, vs keeping track of disks (I wont even mention scratched disks), navigating through menu systems, watching 10 minutes of commercials and previews I dont care about. Hmmm. Tough choice.
----
Squirrel
Now, since I have a iPod to begin with, buying into Apple's system is fine by me. If I had a different player, then I wouldn't be.
The fact of the matter is that a) Not all material is available via Apple, and b) even if it was, the entire notion of buying into Apple's system to screw the **AA is still robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Given enough females, I'm sure I could do better than 150 in the course of a year. I might need to take some vacation time when that year is up, however.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yiddish; Hebrew; Jewish
I got some coupons for free mp3 that came with chips I buy on regular basis. Big campaing, "free, legal MP3".
So I decided to "cash them in". So I login to the site described on the coupon. "Sorry, but this site requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher".
Then registration process, asking me for granny's dog's name and so on. Then confirmation email. Then it tells me to download their player. Then the files which are not MP3 but some of their own DRM'd format. And of course unplayable in anything but their crappy player. No way to use them in a portable mp3 player, no easy way of burning them to a CD (outside of ripping audio mixer channel) and of course no way of playing them on another computer, even with said player installed (need login). Ah, and no playback without network connection.
Thanks, no "Legal MP3", even for free, please.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Not too much more. You only have so much sperm :P
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Not so fast here. The ads may not have ticked you off the first time you played the disc. But what about the second time? After all, nobody buys a DVD to only play once.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Downloading happens because people like free stuff. Trying to analyze the marginal reasons for a few percent of them misses the earth-spanning forest for a few twigs.
1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable.
Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
What is DRMed and also "high-priced"? Songs are a buck on iTunes. Movies are twenty bucks on DVD. It may be more than you want to pay but it's not a vast amount of money.
I can think of a few examples, like the language CDs I like (Pimsleur). They're expensive. But that's the minority of downloads. Again, DRM doesn't cause the infringement; it's the fact that these are expensive to produce and they're of great value, driving up the price. They'd be downloaded even without DRM.
3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.
Here he's got an argument, albeit a small one. iTMS is extremely convenient on 95%+ of the systems in the world, but not for Linux. And you can't buy its songs and use it on your non-iPod MP3 player.
But again, iPod owns the market, and so do Windows and Mac users. For the vast majority of illegal downloaders, you can't chalk it up either Linux or their MP3 player. Nor to the very few people who want to do something complicated, like edit the music.
Yeah, it happens. But mostly it's the fact that people like to get stuff for free, DRM or no DRM.
And then along comes Britney Spears to commoditize again. Although in her case I say decommoditization is the way forward.
Oh no... it's the future.
As counter-intuitive this sounds,DRM is actually achieving these goals in the end.
Cheaper alternatives always fare better in the long-term,when they have same or better quality.
Defeating DRM is valuable to every consumer.The companies designing the DRM think they can
protect something,that can be replicated for almost free(the Real cost of a copy,e.g. is the electricity spent copying to harddisk).
Only on Slashdot would this kind of tripe be regarded as 'Insightful'.
To the original poster - please explain to us how you 'decommoditize' sexual organs (are yours commodities too, assuming you have some?), and who the industry-Yids are, and what you mean by Yid? ?
To those who modded it insightful, I have to wonder what possible nugget of truth you feel could be hidden in this anti-semitic rant which seems to regard all females (and particularly wives?) as commodities??
Jim Baen died last summer, but Baen Books still gives away a huge number of books in completely unencrypted, un-DRM'd formats. I think I have bought well over $100 of their buyable e-books, because I can read them on anything I want, any time I want.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Hmm. I'm pretty sure that I could produce at least 2000 kids without really trying. Given enough attractive women (assuming 100% inception rate) and still having a day job. Without a day job, if I made it my only effort in life, I could possibly hit 3 times that.
And in case you're wondering, only some of my girlfriends complain about it.
I use an iPod and iTunes. But I've only bought three tracks through iTunes. I frequntly hover my mouse over the "buy it now" button, but I can't stand the idea of feeling financially locked into iPods. If there's a better player for me in 10 years, I don't want to abandon my purchased music when I switch. So I don't really buy from iTunes.
I still buy CD's, and legally trade CD's through LaLa. But a lot of songs I like, I just like the song, and I'm not paying $8-12 for a CD to get one song. No way.
So sometimes I check a CD out of the Library and rip a track off of it (usually in Apple Lossless codec) or, if the Library doesn't have the CD, sometimes I still grab a track off peer to peer.
I'd feel a lot worse about it if the music industry weren't so set on making music inconvenient, or if the band were getting more than a couple of cents of the purchase price anyway.
Sure, lecture me about moral absolutes, and that a few cents is still "stealing," or whatever. Its the same quandary that's stopping a lot of people from buying more music: people don't want to buy a whole album for one track, and they also don't want to buy music that's restricted to playing on some subset of available music players. Despite a plethora of new technologies facilitating the production, distribution, and playing of music, the RIAA companies seem dead set against allowing any real convenience, while pretending that DRM is providing them any real protection. They use DRM now- what tracks aren't available on p2p networks?
Stealing of Wii's can only occur under 3 conditions...
1> They are hard to find and thus valuable.
2> They are high priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
3> It's much easier to steal them than it is to wait and purchase a new one.
Guess what, LOCKS ON DOORS create these conditions in the first place! Oh, if only we lived in a socialist utopia where everybody could just print what they want and then there would be no crime.
Facetious?
You bet. But he's rationalizing theft of property because it's...ultimately... too inconvenient. If Sony wants to throw away their lead by making their products uber-expensive, THAT'S THEIR RIGHT.
If Metallica wants to throw away their popularity by over DRM'ing their music and supporting draconian copy rights, THAT'S THEIR RIGHT.
What's next, it's not right for the grocery stores to demand money for food? So it's okay to steal from them? Because that's what this guy is saying; That it's ok to steal if you feel that you're being shortchanged.
An excellent examination of the conditions leading to that phenomenon in modern electronic commerce, known colloquially as "fuck that."
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
No shit, Sherlock! Tell me more; how did you end up to this conclusion?! I so admire your genius!
Of course he gets modded down. I mean isn't calling someone a Jew a great insult in suburban America? its not anti semitic, its just denoting how they handle money, or how they strive to gain money.
Yes, I was being sarcastic, before someone reads that wrong.
You mad
My local library lends DRM infested AV materials, which in it self is reasonable. However, I have a friend who rents material to use on his palm which from what I'm told doesn't support these files. The only viable solution, other than investing in another pocket device, is to copy the media, strip the DRM so he can actually use it. Whats funny is he's actually an honest joe who does delete the material after it's been used, so he's not actually pirating it, only violating the DMCA.
Someone else would likely be tempted to keep these non-DRM copies, which they have to make to play them.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
"assuming 100% inception rate"
Assuming magic, I can do anything!
6 a day would be a feat(maybe not for the first several days, but how about on day 40? You can't use it if it falls off). 18 a day would be superhuman.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
>>And in case you're wondering, only some of my girlfriends complain about it.
King Henry VIII is that you?
I have bad news for the author: information still wants to be free
"There are some people out there, possessed by the firm delusion that "information wants to be free"--as if bits of data had legs and went walking about on their own..."
This is a strawman, and dumb. The contention that "information wants to be free" is a catchy way of saying "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural marginal cost is zero or practically indistinguishable from zero."
Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Ok... So you didn't check to see if it was DRMed and that if would play under Linux, but you went ahead and bought it anyway?
Sounds to me you are ether really stupid & shouldn't be using a computer, or are just spewing some crap for an "DRM IS EVIL" example?
No wonder people, like me, don't trust any anecdotal evidence posted on sites like this one...
Bollocks,
What the GP has noted from a more social perspective is actually valid on the physiological level. IIRC all ova in a female are completely developed before she reaches sexual maturity and after that dormant. During each ovulation one (usually) undergoes the final stage in its development and is secreted. No new ova are created.
At the same time male spermatocites which divide to produce spermatosoids are produced constantly (albeit at a decreasing rate) until the males die. New sperm is created all the time.
So the female vs male sexuality note is actually valid all the way down to the physiological and biochemical level. As far as procreation is concerned male sexuality is not a scarce resource. Female is.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I suspect that the record companies want more poiracy. Then they can get a blank CD/DVD/hard drive tax similar to the one in place on blank audio cassettes.
That's where the steady income lies, for them.
Hear, hear!
[Guns don't kill people. I do.]
That 100% inception rate is a hell of an exaggeration; last time I looked at the FDA statistics, only about 80% of "average" couples (so, we assume they have sex at the average American frequency of around 2-3 times a week) get pregnant in a year of having sex, without any birth control at all. The per-encounter impregnation rate is actually lower than you'd think...it just seems to always occur to people when they don't want it to.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It isn't DRM that's causing piracy, DRM'd products are failing in the market place.
It's the SHORTAGE of NON-DRM'D outlets.
Customers have already voted with their wallets, the lower the DRM the higher the sales. So much so, the independants are a growing share of the market because they took the risk and the majors didn't.
DRM forces me to pirate every DVD movie I watch, whether or not I paid for it. I use ffdshow to handle volume normalization (so I can watch at 2AM, hear the talking, and not wake the neighbors when a bomb goes off) and brightness/contrast adjustments (my room isn't always at theater brightness levels). Apparently these features aren't useful for any legal purpose... at least that's what I gather from a system that only allows these A/V processors on pirated versions of the movie (works for nearly any format except DVD video).
Turning coffee into code.
The article introduces the reader to the reason to why the lack of DRM would not lead to mass piracy. It is because people in developed countries are (or at least used to) have a highly developed sense of ethics.
DRM came to play because there was a massive effort to engage in automated copyright infringement. We could have completely avoided DRM if cultural institutions, like Universities, came out against mass piracy. Instead the wanks in the academia came out spouting nonsense about how mass piracy was the new social revolution that would transform society.
Since our cultural institutions were lauding mass piracy, individuals wanted to be part of the technology revolution felt compelled to join in on the piracy frenzy.
The market for DRM was created by content owners looking at the mass piracy advocated by our social insitutations and decided that they needed excessively instrusive mechanisms to protect the content they created.
It was the mass automation of piracy coupled with social leaders egging people on that created the need for DRM. IMHO, if it were not for that idiocy, we could have gotten by enforcing copyright with the individual sense of ethics as this article contends.
Eric Flint's argument applies to books, where the electronic form is much less useful than the paper version. It doesn't apply to music and video, where the electronic form is more useful than the CD/DVD form to most people.
Principle 2: "The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them"
I can attest to this 100% - in a different, but similar area many are familiar with. My example is my experience with WindowsXP. When I lived in New Zealand, I could not afford the NZD$536 (USD$377) for XP home to keep my CS:S habit alive, so I used a 'less than legitimate' copy of XP. Anyway, when I moved to the US I thought I'd go legit only because after a visit to Frys i saw i could pick up XP off the shelf at (USD$199) - almost half the price. Even better I managed to get an OEM XP home for just over a hundred bucks.
Now there's no way I'm paying NZ$536 (USD$377) for an OS. No way. No way in hell. However, I was happy enough to part with a hundy for the OEM version. I didnt know of Linux at the time (now have 3 PC's on Ubuntu), but wanted XP to play CS:S and various other Windows games I'd paid for over the years (because they were well priced!!!)
So yeah, hopefully big business will wake up and smell the coffee one of these days.
I mean isn't calling someone a Jew a great insult in suburban America?
Not if the person in question is, in fact, a Jew.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Circumcision is child abuse.
That hollywood only exists because they moved to california to escape opressive patents and use the patented technology without paying rights holders..
That makes me giggle.
The real world situation is that you can get an improved service (faster download) a better product (no DRM) for a lower cost (free). Since you can't get cheaper than free and the product can be cloned at no cost their only real two choices are an improved service (larger selection, properly tagged, faster download speed etc) or indirect product revenue via product placement etc
That is simply the reality that they have to accept - few people in their right mind will buy an inferior product at a higher price while getting a worse service. Law suits are pointless against such a force of nature.
No non-interactive media (books, music, movies etc) can be protected as its contents can be cloned at one level or another. Software and similar interactive stuff are a different story as you can run parts of it server-side. For the other stuff for DRM to work, it would require a vanishingly unlikely agreement (conspiracy if you will) by software and hardware manufacturers to eliminate software-based cloning. And even then, there's nothing that can prevent me from hooking up my digital line out to my digital line in, be it audio or video. That battle was lost even before it began.
Instead of using this new medium to provide a new set of services, the music industry have made piracy all it is today - generally a better alternative.
Remember that on slashdot, females are a commondity because the people who write post like that and the mods who think those posts are insightful can only get sex or see see a female body if they pay for it, so they assume paying for it is the norm.
Are you saying that Jews and women might be human? Pfft. You are wasting your time. Eugenics has scientifically proven jews inferior just as the type of "social psychology" sited here has proven women are things whose only purpose is to reproduce. Your just all emotional because of the hormones, honey.
Absolutely. The first time through, it's nice seeing coming attractions for movies that will come out in a couple months or so. 5 years later, it's freaking annoying.
As for children's movies: I buy movies for my daughter so that she doesn't watch network TV commercials. Why the heck should she have to watch commercials on a DVD.
Now, if she watches a movie more than twice, I rip it and remove all the commercials. Eventually I'll get my home network set up and just have a movie server that wil rip our entire collection.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
But the article asserts that DRM causes more piracy. The summary of the article in the blurb does great injustice to the article by implying that but for the existence of DRM, there would be no piracy. That is frankly false. Piracy has been a problem since well before DRM (that's why they created it), and it would probably be one if DRM ceased to exist.
Personally, I think the key issue with piracy is not DRM, but the fact that piracy and copyright infringement are becoming an acceptable to increasingly commit. The result of this is a situation where the laws of society are arguably out of sink with its values. Situations like this are hard to maintain because we depend as much on societal stigma as we do on criminal punishment to deter most crimes. When stigma is lacking or low, we often try to make up for this by adding criminal punishment to increase deterrence.
The problem with this, of course, is that it creates a paradoxical situation where we punish people more for crimes we care less about (another example, non-violent drug offenses). Thus you end up with a situation where people are morally outraged, even fearful, at the threat of having the book thrown at them for a crime they do not consider "bad" at all.
The biggest problem though for copyright infringement is that society normally deals with "lesser" crimes like these by imposing fines on the violator like with speeding for instance. People speed, and when they get caught they pay the fine, go to traffic school, and continue speeding. To most, the fine and traffic school are just the transactional cost of speeding to them.
However, infringement is inherently tough to solve with fines, because it is an economic crime, not a behavioral one. A reasonable fine, the cost of purchasing the infringed material, would have at best a neutral effect on infringement society-wide. People would just infringe, take their chances, and worst case pay up if they get caught. However setting fines too high, as the current system arguably has them, has an even worse effect though, since your average infringer will tend to infringe more than otherwise, the logic being that "if getting caught for a little infringement is going to bankrupt me, I might as well get my money's worth by infringing a lot." Unreasonably high fines also create a situation where the infringed party inherently knows that the infringer is likely judgment proof (cannot pay the fines), further pissing them off. At this point, society tries criminal penalties as well as fines, which leads us to the current system we have.
Obviously solving this problem is a toughy. We could kill copyright infringement as a crime, much as we repealed Prohibition, but that could create other problems, such as disincentivizing creativty, or encouraging tighter DRM, as creators deal with the ramifications. I offer no solutions, but this is the problem as I see it.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Yes, I feel this way when my own ethnicity is insulted
Kiboko iz dat yooo?
A feat to you maybe. But really, there's only one valid way to test my claims. I think it's time to be scientific about this.
People decide to do things. "Piracy", in this case, is something a person decides to do. Each individual has the choice to act or not. DRM doesn't cause piracy. It probably creates incentives for piracy, but the choice still exists.
The whole [some factor] "causes" [some behavior] is simply an assault on free will and an invitation to elite social engineers to take away more freedom from people.
People behave the way they want to.
(Example: Did videogames "cause" the Columbine massacre, or did some kids decide to massacre some people?)
Having a 7-11 CAUSES robbery.
Failing to lock my car door CAUSES auto theft.
Having a pussy & looking nice CAUSES rape.
Being alive CAUSES murder.
"In it Flint argues that, far from curbing piracy of copyrighted materials, DRM actually causes it.
There's just one fault with that. If one assumes that DRM causes piracy? Then that means that there was no piracy before there was DRM. I'd like to see Mr Flint address that quandry.
I'm 25 and whack it about 12 times a day. I have sex 4-5 times a week.
Whenever I read about piracy, I always remember this scene from Amazon Women on the Moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k
"Your gut feeling flies into the face of the actual facts. But this is what we've been saying all along - "piracy actualy PROMOTES sales"..."
There's no "actual facts", just circumstantial evidence.* Maybe the "facts" don't mean that piracy promotes anything, but that the number of honest people rise above the unethical noise. Let's find out if piracy continues to promote when the unethical majority outstrips the minority honest.
*And this is made even harder with geocontent-hiding P2P programs.
Techcrunch lead me to Silicon Valley Documentary, it was offered by a service that did not put any DRM on the file(they used a 5 second pre-roll with my name on it and some sort of watermarking by deleting specific bits in the movie).
Long story short, I paid $8 for the movie file (730X400 Mp4) and watched the movie. I liked it so much I wanted to share it with my buddy. I could have easily FTP'd it to him, but I didn't....instead I sent him $8 via paypal (8.24 exactly...damn them and their 3%) to get the file himself and he did.
Moral of the story, the content producer gave me something I wanted at a reasonable price without trying to limit how, when, where and on what I watch it, I turn have no desire to P2P this...instead I promote it to my friends and tell them where they can get it themselves.
What a difference a little trust makes.
No matter how low you price a movie or CD, it will always be too expensive for somebody. You can save money on anything by stealing it.
There are two reasons why people pirate media: 1) It's easy. 2) It's free. 3) There are no repercussions (for the vast majority of people who do it). That's it, that's all. It's not a big secret. People want stuff for free. If people could get away with copying TV's or cars for the cost of materials, most would do that also, regardless of legality.
DRM doesn't promote piracy. Piracy was around before computers. Piracy was prevalent before there was any sort of DRM on CD's (and there still isn't DRM on most CD's). The reason DRM sucks is because it's a huge pain in the ass and does absolutely nothing to prevent large scale piracy. That's reason enough to dislike it without making shit up about how it causes piracy. Piracy has been around much longer than DRM.
It's a shame this part of the article was quoted, because it's really his weakest point. The rest of his article basically says, "Selling unrestricted, open media creates more revenue than piracy takes away" which is a much stronger argument.
The McDonalds food will make them too fat to be able to successfully fight. It's a win-win.
When it became apparent that making digital copies was a close to free as things can get, all of society should have embraced and adapted it and adapted TO it. Instead, we got DRM and hyperinflated prices, enforced (legally) Luddism. Content distributors seriously dropped the ball and should have just gone on to find something else to do, it is now up to society to drag our technology back from those who are the real thieves, because in the LONG term, our collective use, and our rights in general, of using advanced technology trumps even their copyrights and laws and profits. There are some simple basic precepts here, number one is-humans are allowed to embrace new useful technology. No one group or industry should be allowed to steal it from the rest of the human race, which is exactly what they are attempting to try and do and failing at, but creating misery along the way.
I will attempt an analogy: If tomorrow "we" came up with the zero point backyard Mr. Fusion universal cheap/free energy source, something that would immediately revolutionize travel, heating and cooling, manufacturing, etc, all the things we use energy for now, should we A)severely limit the use, restrict hell out of it, make it illegal in all sorts of situations to use it because the entrenched energy industries and their profits would suffer, or B) use it and get those folks to go on to do something else?
The entertainment and otherwise "digital products" industries (software would have to be included, as well as books, etc, anything which can now be cheaply reproduced by the billions of copies) are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their products in copied digital form are worth barely a tiny bit more than the cost of replication,and as such, that should be the financial cost for other humans to accumulate "copies".
We are in a transition stage where old world pricing models established back when making copies was actually a lot more tedious and expensive and took some effort, now..it just isn't so. There is obviously still *some* expense, but it is way less than 1% of what it was one generation ago.
There is no perfect solution that will satisfy everyone at this exact time, there are quite legitimate points of view to be addressed all over in this situation, but the gestalt is-we have made such a *profound and significant* technological breakthrough here that has the potential to greatly enrich all of mankind that we should NOT artificially hobble and cripple it, that is the worst possible way to deal with it.
DRM, extraordinarily high prices for cheap copies, laws against making copies, crippled and defective by design hardware, etc are all rather silly from a future historical perspective. It really *is* enforced flat-earth styled Luddism.
The lack of product activation is a feature worth not paying for.
Or worth paying for if it wasn't excessive. If there was a full featured version of XP that didn't require product activation and it only cost $10 more, that's the version I'd get to run in a VM (Linux is my OS of choice). But I won't have anything to do with any product that requires activation or requires bullshit 'Genuine Advantage' call home spyware. Those are absolute deal breakers. I don't know why people put up with it.
Loose lips lose spit.
That doesn't explain why the US government has so aggressively gone after marijuana cultivation here in the US. It also doesn't explain why the extremely powerful tobacco lobby keeps losing in court battles, or how these profits are "centrally controlled."
Umm... you do know that crystal meth is produced in the United States, right? You seem to also imply that the only reason cocaine is illegal almost everywhere stems from the fact that coca leaves don't come from the United States. Perhaps that's right, if you assume that cocaine is a benign substance, and there's a globe-spanning conspiracy to keep this beneficial substance from citizens everywhere.
By that logic, the fact that so many Americans can't do without coffee should be serious cause for alarm. Time to crank up the Blackhawks, bring the SEALs down to Columbia, and lets take control of those coffee fields!
Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?
That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!
Yes, because The Sinister Cabal that runs America has made it so. The tobacco lobby is totally unrelated to the fact that in many southern states, the biggest cash crop is tobacco. Voters there probably don't want to promote the interests of tobacco growers. They've been forced to do so by The Man. Likewise, the alchohol distributors have effectively maintained a monopoly by keeping foreign-supplied beer, wine, whiskey, and every other form of alchohol out of America. Oh, wait. They haven't.
Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.
Absolutely right. It wasn't until the US pulled out of Northern Ireland that the terrorism there and in the UK stopped. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction were terrorizing Italy and Germany until the US military left Europe. The Basque ETA. The Pakistani groups operating in India. Abu Sayyaf. All of these groups obviously will disappear as soon as the CIA disappears and the US military ends all its foreign presence.
Again, you see through the nuance quite clearly. There are no opportunists in the world of terrorism. These are all idealogically committed individuals, ready to give their lives for higher principles. Certainly none of them are using terrorism as a vehicle to further profiteering or mere power grabs. I think we can all agree that any problems that occur anywhere in the world are the result of America's negative influence.
You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I know what you are trying to say but you are playing right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA and the like with these statements.
Ripping a CD you bought to put the music on your mp3 player is NOT piracy. Yes the RIAA likes to call it that, wich is why they want to add a tax on mp3 players and want to force you to rebuy a track for each piece of equipment you buy it on.
That CD you play on your stereo, a itunes track for your PC, the ring tone version for your phone and so on.
HOWEVER that is NOT what you are legally required to do.
As far as downloading a crack to run software that you bought, in free countries were politicians are not in the pocket of industry, this is 100% legal. Imagine it would be illegal for you to take the tape out of a cassette player and put it on a spindle player instead. For that matter, imagine the police tried to arrest you for breaking into your own car.
The actions you claim to have done DO NOT fall under piracy (well unless you did them whole boarding a vessel with a cutlass between your teeth), they are fair use actions that your a perfectly entitled to do.
To even call this piracy is to give the RIAA and MPAA exactly what they want, that consumers think that limits can be put on what can be done with products you own.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There is now a high level of suckage on your iPod. You need to download some Kittie or Otep and put that on your iPod to counteract.
I brought stuff from iTunes until the DRM started to piss me off. Then I learned to use utorrent.
~= scwizard =~
The major problem with your theory is the "massive effort to engage in automatic copyright infringement" -- the earliest possible example being Naptster -- not only post-dates DRM (by decades) but post-dates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which was pushed to give DRM the force of law).
"The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one."
Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
If you make something scarce, it develops a "black market". If you could get the sonds you want, in good quality, maybe with a little artwork or something for $1US, you wouldn't waste time trying to find it on the net, now, would ya?
How do people forget supply and demand so easily? See also: Minimum wage. DRM is an artificial market force, and one that is, or soon will be, broken to allow everyone on the black market to have it.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
And when that female is looking to become impregnated and reproduce, it makes sense for her to behave illogically and to be manipulative and to otherwise do her best to seize control of the relationship, because the whole deal is a huge investment for her while the male could possibly just walk away.
Any sentiment I have that is disparaging towards females is because they insist on attempting to seize control of any and all relationships in which they are involved, be it romantic, just friends, or sexual and for the purpose of reproduction. One way I like to say it, is that they will constantly try to take your balls away from you and if they succeed they will hate you for it.
Scarcity and legal-market street price are not dependent on DRM.
I can just as easily sell a CD for $2 as $200 with or without DRM, and I can just as easily do a large manufacturing run as a small one.
DRM does make the product less useful and therefore generally less valuable.
If you are going to manage your digital rights, do it using add-on features, such as technical support, exclusive club memberships, or rebate coupons on future products. Don't do it with the base product.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I say be glad. It's better to know up-front where someone is coming from, particularly if they're coming from a hateful place such as that.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
The only way your post makes any sense is if you completely misunderstood me. By "you only have so much sperm" I meant you can only produce sperm at so great a rate. And the optimal rate for fertility is sex 2-3 times per week, hence the 150 children a year statistic mentioned previously.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
The only way you could get that kind of yield is through artificial insemination, which would cost an insane amount for that many times. You can only produce sperm at so great a rate, and I'm nearly positive that the most fertile man to ever live could not produce enough sperm for 2000 productive intercourses a year.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
DRM was never meant to stop piracy, that was just a thinly veiled excuse...
DRM is meant to squeeze more money out of paying customers.
The only piracy it will stop, is the casual copying that goes on between schoolkids.
I remember the old games that used a printed code wheel, or made you enter codes from a manual... I lost the manuals so often that i ended up using cracked versions even if i had bought the original games.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
My lock is on my door, DRM is thier lock on my stuff.
Remove DRM and piracy continues,paying customers still pay,but more will be interested. Keep DRM and piracy continues,but over time more paying customers are alienated.
Music DRM came after online file sharing was out of control. Movie DRM was a direct result of overseas counterfeiting.
Dude, your wife isn't lovely, and your daughters aren't beautiful, despite your delusions to the contrary - trust me on this (and it has nothing to do with their being Jewish: Generally, a guy that asserts such in any online forum is incorrect and it's a good general rule to follow).
But, GOOD for you, for standing up for them, even when they weren't the direct target of what was obviously flamebait.
Now, go away, please? With a 4-digit UID, you should be ashamed to have responded.
Well, unless you bought the account on eBay, of course.
The marijuana prohibitions started because hemp competed with other rope and paper making trades.
Yep. That's domestic politics. I was merely pointing out that the parent was wildly off base in his string of assumptions. As for whether pot is legal in the US or not, that's a separate issue. Personally I think it should be legal. From what I've seen, it is far less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol, and it is only a "gateway drug" because it and other much more harmful substances are lumped into the "forbidden fruit" category.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
So ... I get it. The Koran didn't say a word about Islamic believers killing those they perceived as so-called "infidels" until after the Americans and their CIA started interfering with other countries. Only then was all that infidel language added in........
Ummm, R-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-gggggghhhhhhhtttttt..... Ohhhkay....
Oh by the way, if you're that gullible and misinformed, come stop by and visit. There's a bridge in my hometown I can sell you at a really reasonable price.
I think some eBook DRM places a watermark into the eBook with your personal info so they can track it down to you if you spread it over a filesharing network, etc. It won't prevent it from being copied from machine to machine. I think that is a better way of preventing piracy than copy protection.
Still a lot of people use piracy as a "try before you buy" way of demoing software or media before buying it, or using the pirated version because it lacks the copy protection, etc.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
At .99 cents a song, I can and am happy to buy any music I want via iTunes. I dont care one jot about Apples DRM. I like iTunes as a player. The thing is that virtually nothing on iTunes Store is interesting enough for me to spend money on. Maybe $40 for all of 2006 (plus they had that prize giveaway). The music I like is imported... which gets really expensive.
Tell ya what I do spend good money on... hardware and books.
Hmm. I'm pretty sure that I could produce at least 2000 kids without really trying. Given enough attractive women (assuming 100% inception rate) and still having a day job. Without a day job, if I made it my only effort in life, I could possibly hit 3 times that.
Now there's an interesting thought. The priesthood is having all these problems with priests molesting kids because of the requirement for celibacy and the basic problem of fundamental sexual desire. But what if this desire could be overridden? If they made initiates have sex 18 times a day for a few weeks straight, that might completely kill the desire for sex (yes, you can indeed have too much sex). Hmmmmm...
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
...is a moron. Piracy has been happening forever. Even if programs/music/whatever didn't have any form of protection, using it/downloading it/whatever, is still piracy if you didn't pay for it.
Fucking piece of shit Slashdotters thinking the deserve everything ever created, just because....all for nothing...
Maybe some people have no sense of morality at all, but I deleted my pirated copy of Galactic Civilizations after reading about the Stardock vs Starforce controversy.
In this case, the lack of DRM has directly reduced piracy, and I'm too optimistic to believe I'm the only honest person on this planet (even considering I'm not too honest for pirating it in the first place).
Since every human is guilty of something. I think we should just declare summarily all humans are guilty. Sentence the earth and all life on it to death. And fuck it all. Let's have a nuclear oblivion party. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck all this shit. Abiding by the law is supreme. Zeig Heil. Now where's my damn money. Or I'll break your god damn legs and take liberties with yer wife in front of your kids...
Oh humanity, where is the love? Fuck all this legal nonsense and let's forgive, forget, work together, take care of eachother and go after the people hoarding all the resources. Who gives a shit any more. We have the capacity make sure every one has their basic needs met, housing, water, food. Let's get our priorities straight...
Anti-semitic doesn't mean "anti-jewish". A Semite is someone of middle-eastern descent. Thus, anyone from that region of the world is a Semite, and some who is anti-semitic is someone who is anti-"person-from-the-middle-east".
That's like saying having SEX causes AIDS - ridiculous.
This probably wouldn't work. First of all, the pedophilia rate is highest among married men. So if anything celibacy helps keep priests on the strait and narrow. Secondly, our appetite most pleasures increases the more we indulge that appetite. Forcing inmates to go on sex binges would more than likely lead to their brain becoming dependant on the hormones that are released by sex. In short, it would get them physically addicted even if they became psychologically adverse to it.
An interesting quandry. For the public to use technology to commit dishonest acts is seen as a right. For content creators to use technology in self-defense (much like locks are used as self-defense) is seen as hurting themselves.
"His not saying everyone deserves their product for free, he's saying using DRM is going to negatively impact their bottom line."
I'm waiting for society to realize that piracy is going to "negatively impact [it's] bottom line."*
*For those of the myopic persuasion, I'm not just talking about money.
That is utter bullshit... Piracy was already triving before DRM was introduced... Most people who buy DRM based stuff won't have any problems with it... It's the bitching nerds who keep screaming and trying to defend their actions, but it wouldn't matter if it hadn't DRM, because they would even copy it more as it's much easier to copy non-DRM stuff...
Nice, take a slight at an ethno-religious group, play on a guy who chooses to voice his disgust at the remark that he felt was directed at his ethno-religious beliefs, and slight him even more by espousing you beliefs on a religious ceremony, by asking his to ponder your personal beliefs on circumcision. Nice...I applaud you...to bad I didn't have any mod points left to bring you even more off topic. Some things are personal choice, deal with it. Now if you were circumcised by your parents choice and don't like it, sorry. If you had a botched procedure and it caused you to lose normal function, I understand your reasonings here. But if you feel so strongly voice your opinion intellectually, don't just point us over to a site advocating making a procedure that is either a religious matter or a traditional matter illegal by law. That offends me personally. If you want it to change inform people, don't ask for more laws to invade my rights to carry on a religious or social tradition. The arguments your organization sites against circumcision just are not enough to justify mandating new laws. Laws just get in the way of living. I'm sorry that this bothers a small number of you, but I assure you you are not in the majority here.
;)
just my 10 bits
Now about DRM causing piracy... I can see that. Lets make a law banning DRM
"But look at some of the books on eReader [ereader.com]. For instance, A March into Darkness by Robert Newcomb [ereader.com]. $17.95 for the DRM'd ebook at eReader, $17.79 for the unprotected hardcover at Amazon [amazon.com]. Granted, this probably isn't the best example because the list price for the hardcover is actually $26, and you can knock 10% off the eReader price by using their newsletter discount code, but it only took me two minutes of searching to find it. If I wanted to look longer, I could probably find a lot more egregious examples."
And what's "egregious" about paying for the cost of creation? Apparently schools have stopped teaching about "mass production", so I'll explain it here. Mass production is a way of distributing the costs of creation across a wide economic base, so that the majority can afford the item in question.* Your item also costs a little bit more because of that "intangible" (but people are willing to pay for it) convenience. At least you all have a choice.
*I'll leave it as a later exercise as to what happens when the economic base shrinks due to "fruit picking".
"[Security] was never meant to stop [crime], that was just a thinly veiled excuse...
[Security] is meant to squeeze more money out of paying customers.
The only [crime] it will stop, is the [boys will be boys] that goes on between schoolkids."
So how many here are willing to give up their security, so that the "honest" can exercise their "fair rights" to listen to your stereo anywere they want?
"I remember the old games that used a printed code wheel, or made you enter codes from a manual... I lost the manuals so often that i ended up using cracked versions even if i had bought the original games."
Yeah! It's always someone elses fault that you're careless.
I didn't mod it either insightful or flamebait, and I would find the poster's antisemitism and misogamy repulsive if it wasn't simply foolish in someone bright enough to understand the basics of market theory. However, you apparently don't understand how the original poster is using the word comoditization, and it is a standard and quite acceptable use, some economists would even say the preferred use. Please allow me to elaborate.
In this use, not all saleables are commodities. Most objects or services for sale have prices well above the level they would if they were priced as commodities. In fact a commodity price is effectively the bottom level price for things in that economy, usually as indexed to some reasonably objective standard, such as the energy cost to produce item X. Commodities have low profit margins. Things that are generally commoditized are nearly ubiquitous in their era, and proportionately cheap compared to whatever else anyone is buying, usually because there are many sources of supply and those sources either can't or for some reason haven't entered into a cartel or otherwise found some ways to create barriers to entry or fix prices.
Medical services, for example, are very far from a commodity - reducing the educational requirements for doctors, preventing doctors from associating in mass, or at least from using the AMA as a means of lobbying legislatures, or removing laws prohibiting some alternative medical practices would all be steps that would in theory shift medical care closer to commodity pricing. (Note that a shift towards commoditization, in such case, may have other, undesirable consequences).
Fancy foodstuffs such as french wines are normally far from commoditization. Basic foodstuffs such as dried beans are very close to absolutely commoditized. So's Sam's Choice generic soda in 2 liter bottles. Steaks in New York are pretty durned far from commodity status. Steaks in El Paso TX are at very near commodity prices. A 30" plasma display is much farther from commoditization than a 15" CRT display.
Of course sexual organs are close to commodities by this definition. There's lots of them around, certainly no one has a corner on the market, and they are sold (well usually offered for very short term lease) by at least some posessors. In market theory, prostitution should show a lot of tenedencies towards commodity pricing. It categorically does - for example, the average base price for a sex act by the lowest grade of prostitute marches, and apparently always has marched, in near perfect lockstep with the price of a fix, whether it be a crack rock today, a pint of Gin in the 1890's in the Whitchapel district of London, or a pot of beer in Babylon 4,000 years ago.
And yes, the RIAA and MPAA do have strong concerns that the price of media will drop to near commodity levels as it becomes obvious there is overwhelming supply and demand is predicated on an illusion of scarcity. Saying 'fear' might be metaphorical, but personally, I don't think that word is too strong at all.
Who is John Cabal?
Forget about the euphemism. Use a name that actually describes what DRM is... Digital Restriction Measures.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I had to pirate a (second) copy of civ 3 to be able to play it under wine. I read in the interview here that they were sticking with safedisc for civ 4 regardless of how many problems it caused for legitimate users. Whoops, looks like you just lost my sale.
I am trolling
Are you anti-semitic? Not only do show no respect for Jewish beliefs, but you want his son to get HIV?
Freedom is assumed. Then they try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
Information may want to be free, but we can't always get what we want.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Personally, I saw DMCA (pdf), passed in 1998, as an attempt to clarify rules, to set industry standards. Most of the talk I heard on DMCA prior to its passing was about laws related to publishing software or making hardware specifically to circumvent copyright protection devices or to remove copyright information from works. The 1998 DCMA was about the computer industry trying to find a way to curb the development of technology specifically for violating copyrights. It was not really aimed at the individual. It was aimed at corporations.
The copyright-pirating as a culture war thing was a completely different issue. That was an attempt to simply swamp the whole system. The really ugly stuff like the DRM software embedded in music formats came after the piracy-revolution. If that revolution had not happened, I believe that we would be seeing a much saner industry today.
The piracy culture war was basically a statement that a radical group would not play by the rules passed. That gave the culture warriors on the right the chance to stomp on everybody's head.
Today's article seems to understand that individuals are not the threat to the welfare of copyright holders. It is only the mechanized violation of copyright that poses a threat.
Reading your post, it makes me think. What exactly is the problem with government interfering with the market? What makes it so different to other market forces? I mean, even if he government stayed right away, these companies would still be trying to do the same damn thing: lock you in and lock out competition. They'd just try it from a different angle (like DRM or collaboration with hardware companies). What difference does the government make?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
This is perfectly fair, however, what's happening is that the at-risk business model really isn't practical anymore. Once the movie is made, it's difficult to monetize it, because copying it is trivial.
I don't really have any problem with people trying to make movies, or even to make money by making movies. That's a legitimate occupation in my book.
What I have a problem with, is when they try to alter the economic and technological landscape in order to make it easier for them to use a particular business model. That's where I draw the line. I could think of a lot of ways that I could change the world that would make it easier for me to make money, but that's just not how it works. The rest of us basically have to work within reality as it's presented to us, and we have to figure out ways of making money and otherwise surviving within that.
The content producers want to, and are petitioning (read: bribing) government for, is to entrench their business model at the expense of other possibilities, and at the expense of a whole lot of other things besides (not least of which is my freedom to do whatever the hell I want with the equipment I've purchased).
There's nothing inherently wrong with their business model, it just may not work. They're welcome to try, but if it doesn't work, I expect them to pick up and go back to the drawing board and figure out another way to finance movies, if making movies is what they want to do. For them to instead pour a ton of cash into, and generally mess up and corrupt, government, in order to keep a flawed business model around, is unacceptable.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In my opinion this meme of commodification, whilst it may be a useful economic tool, is best left to economists, as for the majority of posters I have seen on Slashdot it seems to have come to mean 'cheap stuff', being unaware of course of the Marxist origins of the term, and without the nuances attached in your post above. Wives (which the original poster specifically targetted in his post, probably just to troll better) are not commodities, and do not sell sex in any meaningful sense, except on Slashdot of course. You had to resort to prostitutes as an example (where it is more relevant obviously). So your entire post is I'm afraid irrelevant as an explanation for this troll.
and surprising.
I'd expect that at $15, nobody would bother to print a 250 page textbook because that would be at least 1/2 of a $40 ink cartridge plus paper, plus the extra hassle of either setting the printer to print duplex or having to deal with a PITA physical book held together with document clips and printed on only one side of the page. Plue whatever the value the student assigns to his time.
Tech Public Policy stuff
What's this politically correct bullshit about tolerating others' traditions at all cost? Fine, then let's not annoy those africans who want to mutilate their daughters either. What about the Skoptzy, the russian castration cult... and the Thuggee, the indian murdering thieves cult... poor misunderstood folks, huh?
If you're that offended, it's simply because you fail to fathom the evil that this "tradition" does. Many jews already do, and some are very vocal supporters of the anti-circumcision movement. Look into it if you don't believe me.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I don't respect anyone's beliefs, if "respect" means "not opposing a blatant violation of human rights".
About HIV, there's thing called "condom", haven't you heard of it?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Since my slightly-to-intelligent Denon cd player refused to play Sony cd's and Sony did not respond to my emails, the only option I had was or to rip the cd's or to download them. I choose the latter for convenience.
I purchased Supreme Commander last week from Amazon, the first disk didn't seem to have anything on it so I ordered a replacement thinking there was some manufacturing defect.
The next disk was the same, basically Securom stopping me from reading the disk. So the fix was to make an ISO of the disk on one of my Linux boxes and then install from this using my key, and download a no-cd crack. The game now works, but my media is useless.
The only person suffering here is the legitimate end user, if I had pirated the game in the first place I would have ended up using the same methods above, the only thing I get is a CD key for online play. Support has been next to useless, handy tips like remove nero and the like are suggested, if I don't want Nero on my PC I wouldn't have installed it in the first place!
We had culture produced without copyright for millennia. Seems we still have greek and roman classics...
You see, the *AA use money as their bottom line. They are merely a channel between people who want the culture and the people making the culture. Now they can connect nearly directly and the *AA aren't needed: their money earnt is less. So they see it as the result of piracy (which had been going on in the way it has always been) to justify why they are still needed: we will protect you.
Your problem seems to be that you want to make the few pirates and personal sharers the 100% of the public, in the same way as the 80%+ of music/music middlemen apply DRM and are 100% behind the creation of new laws to protect their privilege.
99% aren't going to use dishonest means to get the works if the works are made available in a valuable format.
100% of the *AA are going to use dishonest means to protect the works and cause the 99% to see it as more profitable to take than to pay.
He's not trying to justify piracy, he's trying to justify his company's policy of publishing eBooks in HTML and RTF format with no DRM. Preaching to the choir with this group, but not amongst his competitors.
We are the 198 proof..
... was in the early '80s. I bought a copy of the game "Wizardry" for the Apple II, and the "copy protection" was so extreme that only way I was able to get a copy that worked reliably was to find one of the local "pirates" and get him to give me a cracked copy. Which he was only too happy to do: he was tickled pink to be asked to write a cracked game *on top of the original diskette*.
Yep, I got my cracked copy on my original foil-labelled serial-numbered floppy. Why not? It wasn't doing me any good any other way.
DRM is just the latest spin on copy protection, and it's just as counterproductive.
It's a shame this part of the article was quoted, because it's really his weakest point.
It's not his point at all. He didn't say "DRM causes piracy", he said "DRM causes MORE piracy".
DRM doesn't CAUSE piracy, but it sure PROMOTES it.
Exactly, sorta.
As a free-culture advocate, here's what I do upon pointing out that the marginal cost of digital goods is zero. I get out my pencil and start trying to think of ways to cover the Initial Cost.
If I've been drinking, the first thing I jot down might be: "get everyone on the planet to mail you 1/10 of a cent up front". But (even if I've been drinking) I quickly cross that out as unrealistic.
I jot down stuff about patronage by rich individuals, by well-to-do groups and how these might be organized. I jot down stuff about tangential, rivalrous goods that could be sold (ye olde T-shirts and swag strats) to wider audiences. I jot down stuff about reducing the cost of production...
Generally, about this time, some "Insightful +3" comes by and contributes, thus:
Hey, you idiot! The marginal cost is zero, but the initial cost isn't!! So you're wrong!!
or
Idiot! Getting everyone to mail you 1/10 of a cent is unrealistic!!!!!
It's really frustrating.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Aha! That's what I always suspected: “anti-Semitism” is merely the failure to worship Jews, let alone oppose them.
Quoth Nietzsche: “Das Heil kommt von den Juden” (Salvation comes from the Jews).*
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* Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 24.
You all are speaking nonsense to me. Sure, DRM and the RIAa sound evil in theory, but this doesn't affect me at all. I buy a CD, I put it on my iPod, (or buy it from iTunes and put in on the iPod) with Microsoft XP and Microsof t2003. Simple. No fancy Mac, Linux or Vista crap. No mysterious ripping, burning, P2P, torrenting, etc. I buy a DVD, I watch it on my DVD player, on my TV screen, not on a portable laptop in the middle of the forest. Simple. DRM does not affect me. All this stuff sounds good in theory, with supply/demand, market forces, etc, but practically speaking, its nonsense.
(My only potential problem is the price of DVDs, and also not being able to view a missed TV show, but I assume Tivo will take care of that for me)
... And other cheap shareware type programs, all heavily pirated and distributed through pirate sites or p2p, and this includes key makers to unlock the legit shareware versions you download as well as full blown versions that have had any sort of locks removed.
Software is pirated because there are people with the technical know how who want this stuff for free, even if they're quite capable of paying for it. Yes, there are some big ticket items that are pirated a lot like Photoshop, Windows, etc, but there are just as many cheap software products that are pirated heavily, ask any shareware developer about it.
I'm against DRM just as much as anyone else, but lets not start trying to blow smoke up peoples asses like RIAA or MPAA does.
You dumbass. The word 'anti-semitic' does, in fact, mean 'anti-jewish', or, more specifically, 'jew-hater'.
Why? Because that's what it was coined to mean, fairly recently, and that's what people use it to mean. You cannot deconstruct words into their root forms and argue that the roots mean the word means something different, language doesn't work that way.
In your universe, a 'light switch' is a misnomer because it's actually controlling electricity, not 'light', and an 'automobile' would include those subway trains that drive themselves, but not cars.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Again, your theories are destroyed by the timeline. DVD-CSS -- which counts as "really ugly stuff" -- pre-dates the DMCA and your so-called "piracy revolution". So does Macrovision -- a secondary purpose of the DMCA being to protect that scheme. The DMCA wasn't about the computer industry trying to find a way to curb the development of technology specifically for violating copyrights. It was about curbing the development of technology for disabling DRM schemes. And since it doesn't take a corporation to develop such technology, merely an individual, it doesn't make sense to claim the DMCA was aimed at corporations. Nor has it been used in practice as such -- e.g. while Elcomsoft is a (small) corporation, but it was the individual Dmitry Sklyarov who they went after first.
As for the "stomping", the "stomping" has been done largely using two laws passed prior to Napster. One, the DMCA, and two, the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 -- the latter being the one which criminalizes copyright violation not done for profit, by counting the value of the copyrighted good as financial gain. You can't blame post-Napster pirates for that stomping.
You're right about one thing -- many people (if a "radical group", a rather large one consisting of everyone who has knowingly traded copyrighted work or used DVDShrink and its like) have effectively made the statement that they will not play by the rules passed. But why should they? The rules were bought and paid for by their opponents... are they supposed to just sit back and say "well, they bought those rules fair and square and now we should just quietly obey them?"
Welcome to "Your Rants Online". I'll point out, Mr minority that copyright is for everyone. Not just all the entities you just listed. Your "free-for-all ignores that.
"Just about any other system, including having a free-for-all, is going to work better than the current system."
Except for the fact that you don't make any distinction between the "current system" and the previous system. You just make bold statements that you don't have to support. The historical record shows that copyright as an idea works and it works well, otherwise you wouldn't have a house of plenty to enjoy.
"Copyright also leads to more advertising by restricting alternative distribution (compare TV via P2P and over the air), and advertising is a terrible way to raise money for anything."
It's a good enough suggestion for Wikipedia apparently. Guess the "beggers" model doesn't work so well.
Well, one could cut down the ink price quite a bit by using a Canon printer which uses separate ink tanks and either buying refilled cartridges and/or doing one's own refilling with high-quality ink (I do both) . . . but since I get paid for my time, I still wouldn't print out a $15 textbook.
Of course, that'll be a moot point when someone comes up with an e-book reader suitable for textbooks. I use my Palm PDA as one for most fiction I buy / download, but a 160x160 screen with 4 gray-scale levels per color is NOT something I'd want to use on a textbook where I actually need to see the illustrations.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I do the same, I use the wonderful DVDShrink to rip the bits of the disk you want to watch; by stripping off the useless soundtracks etc it can make even long movies fit onto a 4.7GB disk.
Given that my wife mildly abuses DVDs and my young son has no concept of caring for them, it's also a vital step in protecting my "investment".
If the studios, movie or music, actually lived by their concept that we are buying licenses to watch or listen, and not the media + freedom to do what we want with the content for personal use (rip, backup, sample etc) then they would be willing to replace the media in the event of damage at cost.. e.g. US$1 inc P&P for swap old for new. In the past when I've had a damaged disk I've yet to be able to get it fixed and have to take a backup of a friend's, or download.
I was working with Lotus Notes and other data replication technologies well before the Napster revolution. I went to conferences about the various technologies. What I experienced before the Napster revolution was a great deal of talk about finding ways to balance the needs of the content creator with the replication technology. What I experienced was a lot of thoughtful peopld engaged in quality discourse.
During the great file sharing revolution, I kept meeting people talking about stupid ideas like Napster spelling the end of property ownership. I had someone grab my CD collection and upload it on a Napster without asking my permission, much less the permission of the copyright owners. Where once there was discourse with people making effort to understand different positions on the issue, we went through a spell where any attempt to address the desire of artists to get paid for their creation was met with invective. For that matter did you notice how the other reply to my post was just anonymous swearing at me simply for suggesting that self restraint should be sufficient DRM.
BTW: I disagree with your assessment that there was no effort to balance the needs of content creator and consumers in copyright law. What I saw happen was a great deal of quality discourse that involved consumers, content creators and technology firms engaged in discourse on ways to bring the technology out to the public without having the market implode.
The quality discourse in the pre-Napster era was shouted down during the Napster idiocy. There was a period where you could not even mention both sides of the debate without being cursed at.
Yes, all of your posts are correct. There was a great deal of debate before Napster. Most of the technologies currently in play have roots in technologies before Napster. During Napster days, the quality debate was shouted down and we have been in action/reaction mode since.
As for your assertion that DRM is entirely about big business wanting to beat on and rape consumers. The original motivation for most DRM style applications prior to Napster was a belief that if you found effective ways to restrict the use of a product, that you would be able to sell it for less. For example, Movielink has two types of movie downloads. One is a "rent" program; where the file automatically deletes itself. The other is a more expensive "buy" action where you have the movie for as long as your hard drive lasts. The more restrictive thing where you have the movies for three days saves the consumer money.
I don't know where you heard all this pre-Napster quality discourse, but none of it got translated into anything the rest of us saw. All we saw was the WIPO Copyright Treaty, developed in your metaphorical (or perhaps actual) smoke-filled rooms, the DMCA (implementing the WIPO treaty, passed by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate, without debate), the NET act (which put individual copyright violators on the same footing as mass for-profit violators), and the like. We saw DVD-CSS, developed mostly to prevent the export of CDs from one market to another. We saw the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, continuing the trend of indefinite copyright. By the time Napster came around, there was no longer any balance -- the playing field was stacked entirely in favor of the copyright owner. That was the state of the law when Napster hit the scene, and that is the state of the law today. If the other side has been doing a lot of shouting since then, it's largely because it was ignored and steamrolled before.
You've got DRM exactly backwards, too. The motivation for DRM-style applications is a belief that if you found effective ways to restrict the use of a product, that you could sell it for MORE. Or sell it more often.
The anti-semitism wasn't the failure to worship Jews, it was the (joking) accusation that he wanted them to get HIV.
Clearly, quoting Nietzsche doesn't make you any smarter in the rest of your post.
Ad hominem aside (ye always resort thither), did you fail to grasp Nietzsche’s irony?
“Anti-Semitism: failure to worship Jews;” I dare you to come up with a better definition.