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."

Comments

Sixth column of a series

[Robotech_Master]

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.

Re:Sixth column of a series

[loquacious d]

But DRM radically reduces the value of legally-acquired media, while raising the value of pirated ones. Furthermore, I think there is a strong philosophical argument against the bare concept of DRM, as the rules it imposes restrict our actions to such a large degree as to remove our liberty as moral agents, preventing us from acting as moral agents at all.

The first point is one of utility. Case in point: cleaning out my inbox today, I found a note from the iTunes store that the Good, the Bad and the Queen's album is only $8 for a limited time. I almost jumped at it, even clicked the "Buy this album..." button (I'm a big Albarn/Gorillaz fan), and then, filling in my password, I stopped to think. "This is only 128kbits," I thought to myself. "That sounds kinda chintzy on my headphones. I won't be able to send good tracks to my friends, or upload them to the poolhall jukebox at my school. I won't ever be able to play them on non-Apple DAPs without even more of a quality loss, or make them into ringtones for my friends' phones, or possibly be able to even listen to them at all once Apple gets over this DRM nonsense in 10 years. Shit, I don't even know if this album is any good, the free single was only so-so. I have food to buy. Huh."

The problem with DRM'ed media, and this leads into my second point, is that you don't actually buy anything. If I buy a CD, or download an album off the internet, it is my property: I have the right to use it and abuse it, as far as my own system of morality allows. (For me this includes making mix CDs for my friends, emailing them hott traxx, dropping cool songs on my friends' iPods, playing on my radio shows, and all the uses I described above.) By restricting my use of the things I buy to a predefined set of "correct" actions, DRM removes my freedom to act as a moral agent.

So I fired up Soulseek and—well, you know the rest of the story. I will happily agree that stealing the music is less moral than paying for it (though the profit split of $0.80 to Apple, $6.50 to the RIAA, and $0.70 to Damon Albarn seems a little off to me, as I would really like Damon Albarn to be as rich as he needs to be to keep making music—the people demand a new Gorillaz album!). But for the reasons above I think it's less immoral than what the RIAA and iTunes do to me when I buy into their DRM.

That's my call, as a human being and a moral agent, and I should be free to make it. DRM restricts my freedom to a rigid set of rules, predetermined by a cartel of people completely removed from my life and reasons for action. We get the old saw: everything not compulsory is forbidden; everything not forbidden is compulsory. It destroys the possibility of agency, and in turn the possibility of any kind of moral action.

I: just want to listen to music, where and how I want to. I'm happy to pay for it (and I do, more than I should), as long as my rights of property and agency are respected. They: want to destroy my personhood with an absolute and top-down system of "morality".

Who's the bad guy?

indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:indeed

[Goaway]

You "used Windows and FairPlay stripped the DRM from it to access the AVI inside"?

There are no DRM'd formats with an "AVI inside". "FairPlay" is a DRM system used by Apple. It is certainly not a thing you can use to "strip the DRM from it and access the AVI inside" anything. There used to be a tool named "FairPlay", which worked on music files and not video files, and has long since been abandoned.

So no, I do not think anybody cares that your imaginary friends are copying this imaginary file.

He's got it right...

[dmayle]

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

Sounds Familiar

[cfvgcfvg]

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.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[ajs318]

That was what I was thinking -- it's just the same as the War On Some Drugs. Although most recreational drugs theoretically should cost pennies per dose (poppies, cannabis, hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti, coca and valerian all grow wild, and they're just the ones I can think off off the top of my head), the very fact that they are illegal introduces artificial scarcity and allows dealers to control prices. And such "legal" ways of getting high as there are, are a PITB. There are medicines you can buy from a pharmacy that will get you off your tits (e.g. Paramol {Paracetamol and Dihydrocodeine}; Benylin Chesty Coughs -- two drugs in one really, Original {Diphenhydramine} is a downer, Non-Drowsy {Guaifenesin} is a mild upper; Night Nurse {diphenhydramine, same ingredient as Benylin Original} and the perennial standby, Kaolin and Morphine mixture -- worth faking a tummy ache to be given a dose of) if you take enough of them, and of course there's booze ..... but getting p!$$&d really isn't quite the same thing. It's too dirty a "high". There are legal plant extracts but the reason that most of them haven't been banned is that they aren't really much cop (though Sida Cordifolia isn't bad ..... name's a bit off-putting if you speak French though).

Most of the crime is created in response to the problem of illegality. Junkies steal to buy heroin because it's sold at vastly inflated prices by dealers, they daren't seek help for fear of dropping their mates in the s#!t, and anyway they're already criminals just for having a toot so what's a bit of thieving between friends? Tobacco is more addictive than heroin (to the extent you can compare an illegal drug with a legal one), yet smokers are generally law-abiding. Apart from the ones who are bleeding the National Health Service dry by buying tobacco abroad ..... we should send them to Belgium to get treated if they get cancer ..... but I digress.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[ShieldW0lf]

The war on drugs is about ensuring that citizens are addicted to indigenous drugs, and that the profits are centrally controlled.

That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.

Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.

Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.

The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.

As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, cigarettes and cough syrup, which is just the way those on top like it.

The war on terror, on the other hand, is easy to fix.

Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.

The terrorists are after vengence because they have been and continue to be systematically wronged. By Americans.

Well, it might be too late now. I imagine there are a lot of orphaned children who aren't going to forget what was done to them.

Yeah... come to think of it... I think you guys are fucked.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[maxume]

FlySafe airlines would have to compete with FlyCheap airlines. Individuals could make their own choices about how much security they thought they needed in the air. A bunch of people would die, and FlyCheap's assets would be bought out by FlySafeEnough airlines.

(what percentage of people interact with 'the war on terror' anywhere else?)

It all depends on what value you assign to the lives of the various other people on the planet; if you use the apparent acceptable rate of car accident deaths(~1/10000 a year in the US), we are spending way too much on anti terror measures(the death rate due to terrorism is way lower than that for US citizens, even if you include 9/11 and soldiers dying in Iraq and so forth). Basically, the free market would ignore it and move on, much to the chagrin of the dead, but to the profit of the living.

Re:Sounds Familiar

[britneys 9th husband]

The problem is, when FlyCheap Airlines has one of its planes hijacked and flown into a skyscraper somewhere, that's a negative externality. The people in the building never got to choose how much security they needed. Should we allow the CheapNukes Power Plant to store nuclear materials in an unlocked building on the side of the road?

Re:Commodification

[Quantam]

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.

Isn't that what they want?

[ViX44]

Step 1: Complain about drop-in-the-ocean piracy for a decade.
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. ...apparently the ads and menu page were snuck into the DVD ISO standard when we were sleeping.

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.

Re:Isn't that what they want?

[ViX44]

I've worked part-time in a video store, so I watch films, new disks and old, frequently. Trends I've noticed include:

  Fade-in/fade-out. Seems to be a decendant of the old Macrovision system. I've seen it happen a few times, notably when I popped The Fox and the Hound (not the most recent issue) in the store's DVD player. I've run other films, Disney and otherwise, that played properly. Amongst customers, I've received multiple independent complaints of the fading problem specifically on academy (4:3) aspect discs -- they try the widescreen and it plays normally, so this may be a move to extinct academy.
  Glitched chapters. I bought my father Dances with Wolves -- the complete cut with the pretty box -- but he said it wouldn't play correctly, getting stuck or glitching in particular scenes. I ran it on my computer and there it too glitched and faulted. Both my father's player and the DVD drive I used were Sony, so let the conspiracy theories abound. Physical damage can cause read errors of course, but DwW was bad out of the box. I've handled similar complaints at work. Even if a disk isn't brand new and has hairline scratches, that isn't enough to cause catastrophic playback errors, when I've seen perfect playback from disks that look like they were used for air hockey.

As for worn discs, my store's policy is if a disc receives two complaints it's pulled, but for old fims that we rent off for free 80% of the time anyway, there is no replacement of the title. New films we'll give the customer a different disc of the same title, but if that fails as well, and often it does, there's not much we can do about it since the whole run doesn't work in particular players.

Re:Isn't that what they want?

[cptgrudge]

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.

So true. So very true. Whenever I see that, I feel this icky, semi-irrational anger at the device that dares defy me, when I know that it is an artificial block to keep me watching a preview or whatever. My anger is partly directed at the device, partly at the manufacturer, and partly at the movie studio that made the movie.

It's frustrating because I can't actually do anything about it to effect a change. If I stop buying movies made by that particular studio, they'll have no idea why. They may figure that people dislike their movies, they may figure that piracy is hurting sales, or they may come up with with some other reason except the real one, because my reason is beyond what they think will cause consumers grief enough to stop buying.

Instead, they market the "removal" of the irritant as a "feature" of a new format and continue to keep me from convenient device shifting. This is BULLSHIT. I'm done with it, so take note, movie industry players, hardware and content alike. I will never buy one of the new format discs. I'll rent and rip, from Blockbuster or Netflix or whatever. My home media server is the end of the line for them. A post-DVD format disc will never be bought, let alone a dedicated player for the TV. They lose. I'll build a petabyte RAID array to dump ripped movies before I pay them another dime.

They give me an non-DRM alternative that I can download, and I'll return to being a paying customer.

Re:Nonsense

[flyingfsck]

Many Baen books are available on-line for free. They found that whenever they relesae a free book, sales of all books of that author increase and the sales of the free book takes off. The fact is that people like the value of a real book, while the online version gives them a chance to read some books in a series and evaluate the author.

So whether it makes sense or not is moot. Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.

Re:Nonsense

[El Cubano]

1) Legal content can be easily found online.

Only if you use their choice of OS, their choice of browser, their choice of media player, their choice of hardware, etc.

2) DRM-protected content is cheap - cheaper than their physical equivalents.

I'm not to familiar with music, but ebooks sure don't follow this. I've often seen paper books for $60 and their electronic equivalents for $50. Only $10? I don't think so. Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks. Now you have server costs (much smaller than distribution costs for real books). So, it may cost slightly less, but is certainly not cheaper considering what you are giving up. Of course, you still have to be using their choice of software (OS, reader, etc), as few outfits provide unencumbered ebooks in PDF format or something.

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.

Users expect to be able to use and move their stuff around. That is sadly not always possible. iTunes may be the exception, but I don't know not having used it personally.

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

[Dunbal]

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.


      And of course, you're completely mistaken. I remember back when PC's were brand new, in the late 70's - every single one of us had a pirated copy of Microsoft's "Flight Simulator" program. Guess what - enough people actually paid for it (it was a good program!), and Microsoft continued to push out new versions. The Flight Simulator division at MS is still alive and well today - despite all the piracy.

      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"...

Laws == Crime

[sinistre]

The more laws you have - the more crime you'll see.

dvds

[Pompatus]

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.

Must agree here.

[SharpFang]

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.

Re:Isn't that what they want? Not Quite!

[Nom du Keyboard]

Frankly, I don't think it's really the ads that ticked people off -

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.

Re:Mostly rubbish

[Robotech_Master]

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.

That's part of Flint's point. If there's no ebook version of it at all, a for-sale DRM-free ebook version of it is so "rare" as to be unavailable. But if it's available with DRM, then a for-sale DRM-free ebook version of it--which is, again, what people want--is also so rare as to be unavailable.

If I'm looking for an apple, and you offer me a cart full of oranges and say, "See, there's plenty of fruit," it's still not going to satisfy my desire for an apple.

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.

Songs are the exception, and that's mainly because Steve Jobs bullied the music companies into going with the 99 cent price point. You can bet they'd raise the prices if they could. And even Steve Jobs doesn't like DRM any longer; neither does Bill Gates.

But look at some of the books on eReader. For instance, A March into Darkness by Robert Newcomb. $17.95 for the DRM'd ebook at eReader, $17.79 for the unprotected hardcover at Amazon. 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 anyway, with Baen able to sell their ebooks profitably for $5 or less each without killing print book sales, even of their hardcovers, there's no earthly reason an ebook should cost $10, let alone $18, apart from the dual evils of pricey DRM (do you know how much eReader charges for their ebook services? People I know who've checked on it say it's quite a lot) and publishers not wanting ebooks to "cannibalize" print sales.

However

[Mateo_LeFou]

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.

Re:However

[Kadin2048]

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.

Moreover, there is an information-theory perspective as well, involving the inherent nonconservative nature of information in its most basic forms. Digitization brings "information" closer to that basic form, by detaching it more thoroughly from physical media (books, tapes, etc.) and allows its basic attributes to come forward.

There's nothing you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.

Re:However

[Have Blue]

There's one important fact that the free culture argument tends to neglect. Sure, a copy of a movie costs effectively zero. But the original has a cost that's decidedly nonzero. Information doesn't grow on trees, it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.

Re:However

[bit01]

it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.

And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.

With copyright law as it currently stands the cost of pretty much any mass market information is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of production. In other words, highly inefficient production with massive losses in marketing, controlling distribution and policing.

I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.

Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).

---

Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.

Re:However

[Yartrebo]

And why is copyright automatically trotted out as the best way of getting it paid for?

Copyright is extremely inefficient. It deters other innovation (generally by smaller and more creative people and firms) by making borrowing material very hard. Copyright sends many times (about 10x) more money to middlemen (CEOs, advertising, lawyers, trade groups, profits, retailers, etc) than to production. Copyright also leads to monopolies and censorship - both commercial and government. 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.

Just about any other system, including having a free-for-all, is going to work better than the current system.

Re:However

[StrongAxe]

And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.

So, next time you want to make a $6 million dollar movie, you can distribute it for free as long as you can get everyone on the planet to mail you 1/10 of a cent up front to help you produce it. Good luck with that.

Re:However

[Bert64]

I would differentiate between intellectual property and property, because when someone takes your property you are deprived of it.
In the natural order of things, someone would need to physically take your property and deprive you of it, yet you can share intellectual property with as many people as you wish and still retain it yourself. Education is fundamental to society, and keeping information (which is all intellectual property really is) secret is detrimental to society as a whole... Imagine if the caveman who discovered fire hadn't told anyone else how to do it?
Societies and the human race have prospered and advanced due to sharing information, but that continued advancement is slowed by the greedy few who want to keep information secret for their own benefit at the cost of society as a whole.

As for scientifically justifying a copyright period, i would imagine by studying the relative pros and cons of each length of time, although it's very subjective depending on what information is being copyrighted.

About profiting off the back of someone else's work... What do you call fair compensation? Many large companies generate huge profits from people's works, while giving those people a miniscule cut. Also, do you think someone should be able to continue making ridiculous profits indefinately? Surely there's a point where it's no longer fair compensation, and now they;re just ripping people off.

Whatever system is used, it should be more consumer-friendly than the current copyright laws... The current laws allow copyright holders to charge anything they want, continue doing so for ridiculously long periods of time, and both restrict supply and discriminate as to who is allowed to buy copies and what they pay. (and yes, i consider media which costs far more in europe and comes out several months after the us to be racial discrimination)

Re:However

[Digital Vomit]

I'd be willing to pay my share plus the shares of nine other people to fund a movie that sounds interesting.

Re:However

[mrchaotica]

Second, you're missing the point. "Real property" and "intellectual property" are different

Ah, I see. So when I wrote "The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course", which part of that point was I missing?

You were missing the point that it makes no sense to speak of "taking someone else's property" in the context of "Intellectual Property," because it makes the false presumption that "Intellectual Property" is actually property. In other words, you're saying "P implies Q," but failing to realize that P is false.

Please read up on basic economics. I would be happy to debate this subject with you, but until you have at least an elementary understanding of that field and how today's intellectual property laws fit into it, I do not see how I can illustrate the hole in your argument logically.

My argument is one based on the physical reality of the universe; economics is irrelevant to it. In addition, you can't use "today's intellectual property laws" to justify themselves; that's a circular argument.

As a starting point, consider that any time and money spend creating a work has an opportunity cost associated with it.

Yep, I completely agree.

Then consider that just because someone shares some information without themselves profiting from doing so, the act may still damage the commercial value of that information to others.

I agree here too.

Combine these two basic ideas and you start to build a more detailed economic picture that shows how a copyright holder can indeed be damaged by others sharing their work without compensating them, even if they still have a copy of the work themselves.

If we first postulate that a "copyright holder" exists, then yes, I can indeed see how he can be damaged, economically. Now, here's the problem: it doesn't make sense, physically speaking, for any such "copyright holder" to exist in the first place!

Your entire argument seems to be based on the presumptions that copyright exists and that it's possible to enforce. You then argue that, from those presumptions, that copyright infringement has negative consequences for the copyright holder, etc. In addition, you explain how copyright is desirable in terms of ethics (e.g. by giving authors fair credit for their work). That's all fine and dandy; I'm not disagreeing with any of it.

All I'm disagreeing with is your claim that "intellectual property" is the same thing as "real property." If we had Star Trek-style replicators, then I'd agree with you (and, of course, extend my claims to include "real property" as well). But we don't, so the fact that "intellectual property" is inherently copyable while "real property" isn't causes them to be different in a very significant way. The consequence of that fact -- which is a feature of physical reality, not economics -- is that your postulates (that copyright can exist and be enforced) are false and the whole argument is moot. In other words, yes, P -> Q, but ~P, so you have (so far) failed to prove Q!

For someone so clued up about logical fallacies, you're very quick to use an appeal to the masses. In fact, your final claim is demonstrably false, given that I am a counterexample. The recent success of legal on-line music services suggests that I am not the only one.

My "final claim" wasn't a claim. Or at least, it wasn't a claim made for the purpose of justifying the rest of my argument. Still, you're right that I overstated it when I said "everyone" (which I meant in a colloquial sense).

Also, which "success[ful] online music services" are you referring to? The ones that don't use DRM (e.g. eMusic, AllOfMP3), the ones that aren't actually successful (e.g. PlaysForSu

Re:However

[KDR_11k]

Imagine I'm holding a rock. The physical reality of the fact that I'm holding (i.e., owning) it prevents anyone else from holding (i.e., owning) it at the same time. Moreover, I can use that piece of property without having to give it to anyone else first (for example, I can tie it to the end of a stick and go kill an antelope with it). Moreover, I can only use it if I haven't given it to someone else.

Yes but society as a whole would benefit if anyone could take that rock the moment you put it down and you could take it back the moment he puts it down. Most tools are owned by many households despite being in actual use only for a short period of time. Society would greatly benefit if we would just have a number of tools that belong to society (a sufficiently large number, of course) that everyone can use if he needs them and overall we'd get by with less tools. Same for food, some people starve while others have more than they need. Why not make food property of society and give it to those who need it? Oh, wait, that's communism and people don't seem to like it.

For the same purpose it can be argued that a copyrighted work is no longer useful if it gets distributed freely among others because it no longer has a resale value. To a corporation there is no value in the notes Britney sings other than their resale value. Additionally, 99% or more of the copyrighted works wouldn't have an actual benefit to society even if freely available. The value to the creator as e.g. a story is pretty much nil since he knows the entirety of it the moment he wrote it. The author already has that information and no need to write it down and show it to others except for gains coming from that sharing (recognition, profit, etc) that he'd lose if copyright was no longer there.

Both physical and intellectual property exists because people have a way of thinking of both physical objects and ideas as theirs. Society's laws are formed around the ideas society holds about how the world should work. People think that others shouldn't be allowed to steal their ideas and implement it as a law, people later realize that means they can't steal other people's ideas either and complain.

Re:However

[nine-times]

I've also been thinking about all this recently from the standpoint of the expense of resources. The use of natural resources, the expense of pollution, the expense of the distribution chain, internet bandwidth, and even hard drive space. It's odd to think about in these terms, since it's usually painted as an issue of consumer rights vs. corporate profitability, or as the desires of the audience vs. the needs of the consumer.

However, the pictures changes if, for a moment, we re-imagine it as a problem for society to solve: how do we efficiently manage the distribution of recorded arts? For the sake of argument, lets disregard the other concerns, such as managing who is authorized to view what, or financial reimbursements to artists. Just think of the problem of distribution of information, as though it's assumed that the information is free.

Suddenly it becomes clear that physical distribution, in this day and age, is *stupid*. We have this huge network at our fingertips, and we're going to waste materials on manufacturing millions of CDs? Many of those CDs are going to ripped to MP3 and then sit on a shelf. For what purpose? We use land and materials to build physical record stores (and Best Buy), we use the materials for the actual media, we pay people to search/maintain the inventory, there's the trucks and the shipping, and all that crap. Think of all the man-time and materials wasted.

Also, users needing to rely on the hard drives in their home computer to store a specific copy of a top-40 hit or a Hollywood movie is nonsense. Right now, the top movie on iTMS is "The Prestige". Consider for a moment if I had bought that movie from iTunes 20 minutes before my hard drive died. Now, why should I need to keep a copy on my local hard drive? The movie has already been ripped, and the data exists elsewhere on the Internet. In order for me to download the movie again would only cost in used bandwidth, but those costs can be mitigated, ironically, by the sheer number of people downloading it. I'm sure that it's obvious to everyone here that the solution is P2P (bittorrent).

It's become clear to me that for a society concerned with using resources efficiently, sharing information via P2P networks is a solution that's almost too good to be true. I'm not just talking about hippy-talk "conservation" in the environmentalist sense. I'm talking about the human resources, the expense of intellectual thought, and the money spent. Overall, those resources, too, would be more efficiently managed through P2P distribution.

Now, some people would complain that jobs would be lost, but that's inherent in using human resources efficiently. Some of the human resources currently spent on these distribution issues are being spent unnecessarily. That we don't break windows makes less work for the window-makers, but breaking windows does not generate wealth. (Yes, I guess I'm suggesting that the MPAA/RIAA have become an example of the broken-window fallacy, and therefore create a net-loss for society)

Re:If DRM causes piracy...

[Thangodin]

This reminds me of the old days of the Commodore 64, when the copy protection schemes sent the disk drive head skating over to track 0. The C64 had no sensor to keep the head in bounds, so it would slam against a hard stop, throwing the head out of alignment, quickly ruining the drive (constant realignment gradually made the drive unusable.) Even if you bought a legit copy of software, you had to use a cracked version or you would destroy your drive. Eventually most people gave up on buying the software altogether.

In fact, the reason that most of the people I know didn't buy a copy of XP, and won't buy Vista, is the heavy handed DRM attached to it, which requires you to get permission from Microsoft to run your computer after 5 hardware changes. I can make 5 hardware changes in 5 minutes when I'm testing hardware. There is no way that I am going to spend half the night on the phone calling Microsoft. If I'm having a problem with hardware, I don't need the additional aggravation. I have a legit copy on my laptop--which never changes hardware--but I'll never install one on my desktop machine.

Call me a stickler for language...

[OakLEE]

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.

Re:In the beginning, there was...

[Robotech_Master]

RTFA. The submitter's blurb simplifies Flint's point to the point of incorrectness. DRM didn't and doesn't cause piracy--there would be piracy without it. But it does promote piracy--there is more piracy with it than there would be without it. Flint himself never claims that DRM "causes" piracy.

Reductionism rules!

[Infonaut]

The war on drugs is about ensuring that citizens are addicted to indigenous drugs, and that the profits are centrally controlled.

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."

That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.

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.

Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.

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!

Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.

Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?

The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.

That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!

As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, cigarettes and cough syrup, which is just the way those on top like it.

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.

The war on terror, on the other hand, is easy to fix.

Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.

Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.

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.

The terrorists are after vengence because they have been and continue to be systematically wronged. By Americans.

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.

Well, it might be too late now. I imagine there are a lot of orphaned children who aren't going to forget what was done to them.

You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents

THAT IS NOT PIRACY

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Protecting our interests...

[shmlco]

"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.

Not wrong, just possibly flawed.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Statement: Insightful. Sarcasm: overrated

[DavidTC]

The really fun thing about any copyright discussion here is watching one set of people arguing 'What is needed', namely, how we 'need' copyright law, against people who say that copyright law is a violation of their rights, past people who are arguing 'What is true', that copyright law used to rely on a level of inconvenience that is now gone and thus is almost totally unenforceable.

We may, indeed, need copyright law to continue to encourage content producers. That is totally orthagontal to whether or not enforcing copyright law is possible in a digital world.

If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, you can argue that you 'need' to reduce your speed before you hit the ground, and you'd be correct. You could argue that free-falling is kinda fun, and you'd be right too. Or you could argue that you have no way to do the first thing, and you'd also be correct. Sometimes there is not actually a 'correct' solution.

We may, indeed, smash into the ground so hard we destroy quite a lot of produced content. Arguing that we 'shouldn't' do that is rather surreal, considering we already jumped from the plane.

If everyone works together, they might be able to invent, at least, a hang glider or at least aim for a lake. But we have way too many people arguing about what 'should' happen, without considering that there is absolutely no way to do what they think 'should' happen so perhaps they should aim for something a bit more likely.