Slashdot Mirror
Why Web Pirates Can't Be Touched
gwoodrow writes "Forbes has a brief article about, essentially, the ultimate futility of fighting online pirates. From the article: 'As the world's largest repository of BitTorrent files, ThePirateBay.org helps millions of users around the world share copyrighted movies, music and other files — without paying for them ... That's illegal, of course — at least it is in the U.S. But when Time Warner's (nyse: TWX — news — people ) Warner Bros. studio accused them of breaking U.S. copyright law in 2005, the pirates gleefully reminded the movie company that they didn't live in America, but rather in the land of vikings, reindeer, Aurora Borealis and cute blond girls.' The article also touches on the many YouTube clones and AllofMP3.com."
...there aren't enough experienced online ninjas.
u-bend
It assumes that copyright law around the world will not eventually be in line with U.S. copyright law as per the wishes of the *AA
...it's because they all listen to MC Hammer. Without DRM, of course.
the land of vikings, reindeer, Aurora Borealis and cute blond girls.'
North Korea?
There should be a moderation category "Dumbest Comment EVER"
at least remove the stock ticker info when copying?
At some point the US will get pressured by the RMIA which will in turn force there home country to Hand them over to the US, It happened with the blogger from AU.
"the record labels have launched a lawsuit, asking for $150,000 for each stolen file, totaling $1.65 trillion [against allofmp3.com]"
How on earth can these people justify that figure? It's just insane, I hope the shit goes hard in the bastards
....
Should I point out thepiratebay doesn't really host any copyrighted material or did that argument get old already?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"Printer friendly" version.
It's also much more eyeball-friendly.
That sort of touching! I was thinking either the pirates were very ticklish or there were sanitary issues involved.
Please note for future reference
FTA:
From June to October 2006 alone, the Recording Industry Association of America says that 11 million songs were downloaded from the site. AllofMP3 claims those sales adhered strictly to Russian law, but that doesn't satisfy the RIAA; the record labels have launched a lawsuit, asking for $150,000 for each stolen file, totaling $1.65 trillion.
I'm sorry, did they say $1.65 trillion? The RIAA is off their rocker for sure. That much money is going to have to involve a war.
If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
But could you please justify and explain the statement you made: "You did deprive them - of money."
Please cite your references and explain any statistics quoted in your explanation. Please also quantify how much money the **AA have been deprived of by TPB. Please do this so that we can forevermore trust that the **AA member companies declining revenues and train-wreck-about-to-happen business model is doomed because of TPB and others like them.
If you can prove that this is driving the **AA member companies out of business beyond any doubt, I will start downloading music and movies illegally to help ensure a quick end to the **AAs of the world.
Thank you
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
What irony if they had just said... "we live in the Land of the Free, not the U.S."
(note to those who refer to the USA as America. America is not a country)
Honestly, who is really loosing out on pirating? Some would argue the musicians are. Last I checked Metallica (oops just violated the DRM, thought about them without having a license) STILL makes more money than any pirate. If the group is small all they should care about is that their music is getting more exposure. Some would argue the movie industry. I wont even go into the elevenity billion dollars the studios are still making despite pirating. If they would make more of a effort to get the movie to DVD quicker there would be less pirating imho. Who wants to take the chance of blowing 50$ (without snacks) for your family to see a movie that sucks, which quite a few now days do. Really though, when did the entertainment industry stop being about entertainment, and more about milking every cent out of it they can.
"the pirates gleefully reminded the movie company that they didn't live in America, but rather in the land of vikings, reindeer, Aurora Borealis and cute blond girls."
I'm moving. Vikings, blonde girls, AND pirates? Irresistible!
If I didn't have any intent to buy it if I couldn't aquire it otherwise (no good torrents, perhapse), then I didn't deprive them of anything at all. Now, there are legal (and moral?) issues with copywrite infringement - I'm not defending it - but in all honesty the copyright holders are not losing anything in a good majority of the cases. My only real defense to things like the Pirate Bay - in countries like the US - is that I am not willing to give up my legal abilities to share non-copyrighted information just to defend some pricks who have plenty of other options to defend their dying business model. Sorry, I get kind of infuriated when people post nonsense backed by stupid logic.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Just admit you're murdering. I would have so much less a problem with it if you didn't go down the "being an jerk is not murder since I didn't deprive anyone of life". You did deprive them - of years of happy life. If at least you'd admit it, I wouldn't care so much. It's just the stupid logic you guys use that is so infuriating.
Surely two countries have gone to war for less than $1.65 trillion. On a side note, let's not forget that Russia has oil. [and don't call me Shirley]
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Thank you Forbes! I didn't know about "sites like Alluc.org, VideoHybrid.com, Peekvid.com, TVlinks.co.uk and YouTVPC.com"!
Okay, TPB doesn't host any pirated content, it merely points to pirated content. The *AA contends that's still bad. Whatever.... But what about Forbes? They just told me about all these other sites I didn't know about. Forbes just provided me a directory to illegal content. Doesn't that open them up to lawsuits? Journalistic freedoms don't apply when aiding a "crime?"
"You're not balancing your internal energy with the environment." -Gary Busey
Because "stealing" is illegal in the US, the US govt could make laws to prevent credit card companies from processing transactions involving the purchase of these illegitimate MP3's (allofmp3.com). Didn't the US just pass laws to prevent such transactions for the offshore gambling websites?
However it's not actually stealing. It's copyright infringement. And unlike gambling, copyright infringement is not illegal.
That's why it's illegal for me to use my Mastercard to gamble online, but I'm free to use it to buy from AllOfMP3.com. There really is nothing the govt can do short of forcing ISPs to block the IP range of these "pirate" websites. Do we have a politician stupid enough to even attempt that legislation? Something tells me that in California, we do, and it's just a matter of time.
Interestingly, the estimated GDP of the entire Russian Federation in 2006 was $1.727 trillion using the purchasing parity power scale; nominal GDP is even less at $979 billion in 2006 [1]. Somehow, even if they win, I don't think the RIAA is going to be collecting on that bill anytime soon.
A fair part of it would be, no doubt about it, but one of the big costs of a war is getting all that stuff that soldiers need to the war zone. A modern army has a long tail and almost all of that stuff is both heavy and consumable. Add to that the fact that you have to replace equipment at a faster rate (especially in desert environments with fine dust-like sand like Iraq and Saudi Arabia), you're going through a lot more ammo than you would in a peacetime training environment and the fact that you're having to pay your soldiers hazardous duty pay and a lot of little costs really start to add up. Especially if you're granting no-bid contracts to your buddies.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
WTF? What idiots modded this insightful? what do you not understand. Nobody cares if you buy a DVD instead, or if you make your own CD, its when you take the CD AND USE it and do NOT pay for it, that we have a problem. It's really not complex. If something is priced at X dollars by the person who made it, and you want that thing, you PAY for it or you don't have it. Anything else is just a load of pseudo-intellectual waffle to justify taking other peoples hard work for free.
Why is this concept so beyond otherwise intelligent people? because they will rationalise any bullshit if it lets them take stuff for free.
Be honest. Your taking stuff and not paying for it, because you think you wont get caught. Any other debate on the issue is just window dressing.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
*pinky finger to mouth*
WTF is a bloody stock symbol doing in a /. summary?
But when Time Warner's (nyse: TWX -- news -- people ) Warner Bros. studio accused them...
It's annoying enough to trip over them when reading mainstream US news sites. Can we please keep them away from Slashdot? If I need the stock symbol for a company I either already know it because I'm an investor and it's my job to be elbow-deep in such arcana, or I can Google for it. If you really want to add it, use a bloody hyperlink instead of making the text unreadable with parenthesised shit.
as valid.
not only every country's representatives are presold suck-ups to big buck. surprise, surprise, RIAA member crooks, you might have bought laws in united states for harassing "the people", who are the reason united states was founded for, but, look, your walled does not leverage any weight in many other countries. oh you poor riaa crooks you.
Read radical news here
RMS is a bit rabid for my tastes, but he does make a point to be precise about language, and refuses to talk to people who won't be similarly precise.
So: It is NOT theft, or stealing. It is copyright infringement.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It would be hilarious if they did try to collect that 1.65 trillion. I can just imagine it:
AllOfMp3/PirateBay/et al: "We don't charge anything near that for our service, we just make enough on ad banners to justify paying for most of our server accounts and bandwidth"
RIAA: "Then we will force you all into servitude for the rest of your lives, and your children's lives!"
AllOfMp3/PirateBay/et al: "But we're geeks! There's a very high likelihood that we won't ever have kids!"
RIAA: (thinking) "Hmm...this may be true, and if it is, we'll probably only be able to collect on several million, and that's nowhere near 1.65 trillion...guess we'll have to go back to backdooring college kids and grannies computers again, and up the ante to 150k per file"
The scariest, yet most hilarious, thing about that is that from all indications, that could actually happen. (I say hilarious, because it shows exactly how insane and out of touch with reality the RIAA really is)
Not true, individual pirates often do suffer the effects. Its just that there are too many of them. Imagine us saying we want to wipe out jaywalking but with only enough enforcement to catch 1 out of every million or so...
you typed this:
you probably meant to type this:
it's a pretty common mistake, those keys are so close together. i accidentally type that all the time.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Artists are really caught in the middle at this point. The organizations that claim to represent their interests have violated the public trust and the public interest, by extending copyright into perpetuity. They have thus destroyed the basis on which copyright is granted in the first place. The social contract is broken, and thus, natural rights take over. The natural right of free speech. This is not a case of not liking their distribution license, they have cast off the right to even bargain such points. Artists must (and many are) divorce themselves from the organization that have created this situation if they wish to regain legitimate right to copyrights. For it is now broken.
However it's not actually stealing. It's copyright infringement.
No. It's not. In Russia, the law allows allofmp3.com to operate by making use of a compulsory licensing scheme, not unlike what the copyright board wants to foist upon internet radio (though, in that case, the costs are absolutely outrageous, and intended to shut operators down). So, allofmp3.com pays some fee to the Russian copyright whozits, and thus they are allowed to operate legally. Calling this "stealing" or "copyright infringement" is plain and simply wrong, and author of the article is clearly showing their bias by reporting it as such.
It's not pseudo intellectual. Theft requires you to actually take something from someone, and deprive them of the use of that thing. "Piracy", as it is today online (and perhaps incorrectly termed), is making an exact copy (or, frequently, an inferior copy; if it was superior I think that's called "competition") of something.
Now, let's use the slashdot car analogy. If you made a car, and then I came along with a technology that can exactly (or almost exactly) produce a copy of that car by pointing a little device at it, result would be that you have a car and I have a car that looks almost, if not exactly, like your car. I haven't deprived you of anything, so it isn't theft.
This is of course why the legal fiction of "intellectual property" has become such a hot topic in the last 10 years or so. The feeling is that if I made something, under the "old" commercial system, in order for someone else to get that thing (during the tenure of my patent or copyright), someone must pay me for it since I am the only one who knows how to do it, has the equipment to do it, employ the people who have the knowledge to make it, etc. But now with digital things, anyone with the proper tools can make a copy and not have to pay me for it. Now, while that must suck, I've yet to understand why people feel entitled to make money from "stuff" they have. Enter DRM, which attempts to make people unable to make their own from "my" original. The result of this is the folks that put images on public webpages and then get mad when people copy them straight from the webpage (now, the cases where someone takes a piece and represents it as their own original work fall under copyright, which I tend to be more sympathic to, but wish the Sonny Bono Act never happened; plus that's just lame), leading to all those silly Javascript tricks on images to try and prevent right-clicking.
Sure, in an ideal world we'd all make little things and buy them from each other, and all would be well. However, that's not how it works in the world of digital stuffs. The artificial scarcity that makes physical goods producers able to (to an extent) manipulate their asking prices is, by the nature of the medium severely limited. Yet, online content producers find ways to make respectable livings without silly DRM schemes. The key is, of course, to offer something people want at a price they are comfortable paying. There's lots of ways to do this. However, pricing Photoshop at $700 for a single license (and wondering why everyone and their brother copies it instead of buying it) probably isn't the best way to do it (for one example).
In short, no, it isn't theft unless you change the meaning of the word. Like the pony express, if a company can't adapt their business practices in the face of new technology, they're gonna go out of business. No one is entitled to a profit.
oh please... you are missing out the description of your brave new world business model. Where nobody gets paid for creating ANYTHING that can be easily copied. Do you have ANY idea how much work is involved in making something like Photoshop, or The lord Of The rings? or Halo? Why the fuck is anyone going to spend any money on making entertainmnt if it can be freely copied without compensation?
let me guess, you dont care, because like most copyright infringers, you dont make creative content for a living, and are just loving the excuse to take other peoples work for free arent you?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I think it is rather that you don't understand. Companies do care if their revenue drops for any reason because their business is there to generate revenue. It's usually at that point that those who can blame copyright-infringement do, rather than face the real issues (poor product/high price/punishing your customers) that plague their revenue stream.
And nobody is -taking- the cd you refer to. By your logic I should have to pay to listen to a friend's music in their home...
Also, throwing insults at those who disagree with you doesn't magically transform your viewpoints into facts.
The problem is that there is absolutely no proof that file-sharing decreases revenue at all. Rolling Stone published an article that showed those who file share are more likely to spend the most money on music (not CDs in particular, but concerts, band t-shirts, etc.). I, for one, would not be such a huge Dream Theater fan if my friend hadn't of burned me a copy of Train of Thought to introduce me to the band. I downloaded a few songs off their CDs and now I am a proud owner of every single album and anxiously awaiting Systematic Chaos. There are tons of bands that people have introduced to me this way and I have spent tons of money on music and I'm sure I will continue to do so. And yes, I encourage people to buy music or attend concerts if they like the band.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
He may not make creative content for a living, but that doesn't make his point any less valid.
I personally make a lot of creative content, preform publicly and even market my works all without requesting any monetary contribution.
I realize that others may be profit motivated, but a lot of musicians simply play for fun.
There wouldn't be any lack of music or a lack of films if the MAFIAA closed tomorrow and the studios closed their doors.
If that were to happen you may indeed see a cultural revolution of sorts where Britteny Spears and Spiderman 4 are replaced with actually creative works.
Copyright infringement is not theft. Theft is a violation of criminal law. Copyright infringement is a violation of civil law. Thieves can be arrested; copyright infringers can only be sued. The Forbes article calls it theft and stealing in imitation of the *AA propaganda, but endless repetition of this erroneous use doesn't make it correct.
There's also the muddying of the waters that most people who pirate expensive software wouldn't buy it so the makers of the expensive software have not lost a sale. However without the pirating of their software they would lose market share which can have value if it leads to ubiquity of the software pirated to the detriment of their competition.
Gotta love frothing rants in response to well-reasoned arguments, but I'll respond in spite of it.
oh please... you are missing out the description of your brave new world business model. Where nobody gets paid for creating ANYTHING that can be easily copied.I suspect that you've deliberately misunderstood and are intentionally misrepresenting my statements, since I didn't write that. However, if you make paper airplanes and try to sell them, should no one else be able to make copies of your paper airplane?
Do you have ANY idea how much work is involved in making something like Photoshop, or The lord Of The rings? or Halo? Why the fuck is anyone going to spend any money on making entertainmnt if it can be freely copied without compensation?Because by and large consumers like to pay for the Real Thing. This is the idea behind the Windows Genuine Advantage bit, though obviously it was clumsily implemented. If you have a shitty product, no one is going to buy it. Should we be also legally guarantee that if someone makes something, they will get revenue from it, even if it sucks?
Lord of the Rings cost a ton to make, but also made a hojillion dollars in merchandising, home video releases, etc. Why? Quality product and merchandising that consumers wanted, and it was all sold at a price they wanted to pay. Photoshop may indeed cost a lot to make, but it's obviously not sold at a price consumers want to pay. Adobe's answer to this, it seems, was to make Photoshop Elements. PSE is up to version 4.0 I think, so it at least hit some sort of pricing sweet point.
let me guess, you dont care, because like most copyright infringers, you dont make creative content for a living, and are just loving the excuse to take other peoples work for free arent you?Ahh, strawmen. I make plenty of creative content. Don't make much money from it, but I do make it. But let's apply this to a well-known set of intarwebs content creators: Gabe and Tycho of Penny-Arcade. They're on record (as a matter of fact in writing at the back of their first hardcopy collection, of which there are 3 so far, and I've bought all 3 because of the added value in buying them at a decent price) as saying that hiding your content from your users because you're afraid they'll take it is kinda silly (which I tend to agree with, and why I think the subscription based Modern Tales group goes about the whole thing the wrong way - and why I think PVP's add-on animated subscription featurettes are a great idea; you get the meat for free, and if you want the dessert you shell out a little cash for it). PA was once in dire straits due to the ad network collapses and the loss of revenue thereof. They didn't have the financial resources to go down the failing route of the RIAA and MPAA, instead they adapted and are thriving to this day. None of their strips require you to pay for them, and there's no silly DRM preventing you from doing Save-As on a strip. Even so, people pay cold hard cash to get their books and their merchandise. Why? Cuz they know how to make what their target audience wants and what price their audience will shell out for extra stuffs.
I seriously doubt we will be needing much from the US in 20 years from now. The US is rapidly making itself irrelevant, not to mention the laughing stock of the world. Here in Europe, we snicker at your stupid patent laws, your incredibly corrupt political system which borders on a theocracy, your gas guzzling cars and RIAA's jihad on their own citizens. I could go on about the lack of gun control, your disrespect for the environment, your unprovoked actions in Irak and general disrespect for other forms of government and human rights. Pretty soon all the US will have left to export is natural resources (food stuffs), entertainment (which we'll just copy), lots of posturing (which we'll just ignore) and law school graduates (which we won't be needing).
Last I ckecked, payment, or lack therefore was irrelivant in copyright infringement, and permission or lack therefore to share a copyrighted work was the big stickler in what is/isn't coopyright infringement. Either things have changed stupidly, or people are being bulshitted.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Let's be absolutely, one hundred percent, crystal clear about one thing: Unauthorized copying is not piracy.
What is piracy? Piracy is when someone takes goods, that are legally protected by property rights, and that are being transported from one place to another, without authorization from the owner of the goods, depriving the owner of those goods from their use and economic value.
What is unauthorized copying? Unauthorized copying is taking a pattern of information that is legally protected by copyright and is fixed on a physical substrate, and creating a similar or identical pattern of information on another physical substrate, without permission of the copyright holder, in a manner that does not have a statutory exemption from copyright protection. (Whew!)
As you can see, these things are quite distinct from one another. I don't believe that they are even comparable. The use of the term "Piracy" to describe "Copying a protected work without permission of the copyright owner" is misleading, pejorative and dishonest.
Whether or not you support actual physical piracy (yarrrr, matey) and whether or not you support unauthorized copying, if you want to have an honest debate you should use correct terminology.
I ((mostly)) listen to indie bands. But I also enjoy older stuff from the major labels. So I either pirate the music I want that comes through the labels (no, I don't feel bad about it, the musicians would have seen maybe all of 2% of the money I might have spent on one of their albums), or, if and only if I like a good number of the songs on a cd, I buy the cd and feel guilty of providing the recording industry more money to use in their war against the consumer. No, it's not a perfectly idealistic way to combat the labels, but it's a helluva lot better than 90% of blind sheeple that don't even realize that it might be an issue. And I'm ok with that.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Even better: Pirates should just confess to attempted murder. They're trying to kill off the entire commercial music industry.
Oh, wait, that would be really fucking stupid.
Theft and copyright infringement are different offenses and should be handled differently just as property rights and copyrights are handled differently.
Calling copyright infringement stealing is simply a means for copyright holders to frame the debate in such a way that they can more easily claim more power for themselves. If you assume the two are equivalent, then many of the arguments against increased intellectual property protections start to sound absurd. Should my neighbors have fair use rights to my bicycle? Should my car enter the public domain and be free for anyone to use after a certain amount of time? Of course not.
But if we call it stealing, then we the people are put in a position where we have to justify what we do with the copyright holders' "property", when instead it's the copyright holders who should have to explain why the government should send people with guns and badges to arrest people for copying a computer file.
I'd rather you didn't take it. That would be stealing.
However, if you come by and wave a magic wand and create yourself exact duplicates, it wouldn't bother me.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You are completely correct in that information is the new currency. But the United States is wrong in how it deals with that currency.
Manufacturing has always been plagued by scarcity. For instance, in the US and Canada and Europe, there's a scarcity of cheap labour. So stuff that can be sent overseas is sent overseas. But overseas, there's a scarcity of knowledge in areas of research, development, automation, and quality control. So anything that is heavy on those things either have a heavy knowledge and personnel export, or they are kept at home.
My background is manufacturing in Canada, and I can tell you this: typical tool and die, mould-makers and other rather simple (comparatively) stuff is going to China and India, and complicated, highly technical, highly automated products like aerospace are staying here. In fact, traditional trades are slowing right down, but aerospace is absolutely booming in Ontario.
The problem is that information has no such scarcity and flows easily away. Whether this information is media or trade knowledge. While we may have the cultural upper hand right now, and while we may have the automation and quality control upper hand right now, information like that won't take long to get to China and other low-wage regions.
So in all their wisdom, our lawmakers have collectively decided to stop that flow as best they can. Whether they can stop it is yet to be seen, but from what I can see, it's doomed to fail. Or, put another way, artificial scarcity is just that: artificial and easily overcome.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
They are 'online enablers' at the most. We can debate all day long if its right to 'copy', but all these people are doing are offering LINKS... nothing more, nothing less.
Thats like holding Ford liable beacuse they sell cars, that could be used in a hold up, or to run someone over.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Ah, but it is not AllofMP3.com depriving you of your royalties. Those royalties are sitting in an escrow account in Moscow collecting dust because the RIAA doesn't want to accept the cash. Accepting the cash would mean they would need to dispurse them to you with a very small cut for themselves. They want more of the money to go to them and not to you.
Just because your record label doesn't want to pay you the royalties AllofMP3 has collected on your behalf that doesn't mean they don't give you 'jack shit' for your music, it just means you are either too dumb to collect the check or more likely you hired a RIAA member to act as your agent and they are not collecting the money for their own reasons. It is also quite likely that you aren't talking about your music at all, but a recording whose copyright you sold to an RIAA member, in which case you have a contract dispute with them, not a dispute with AllofMP3.com
But all this aside, AllofMP3 is a good lesson in why we can't continue selling copies of music. What they are doing is selling music at prices that make sense in their economy, actually they are a bit pricey for Russia. What they are doing is practicing arbitrage. Arbitrage is the what drives the global economy and trying to stop it is a fools errand (see DVD region codes and various other failed schemes attempted in the last 500 years).
So what to do? Well we can differentiate the product line, sell cheap and expensive versions of the same thing, Tide comes in bags in third world countries and bottles in first world countries. It's the same stuff, but if our local Stop-n-shop started selling Tide in bags you would expect to pay less. This can only account for a 25-30% markup in the rich countries, and the income differential is more like 1000%, so to maximize your income you price for the rich countries and sales in the rest of the world go to a very tiny market segment. BTW This is basically how textbooks work today, they are printed only in paperback in some countries and only in hardback in other countries. But with things as easily and cheaply copied as music we won't be able to keep it out of poor childrens hands like we do textbooks (Try to convince someone living on a $2 a day that they are an evil pirate and should pay $25 for each CD, the $0.25 they do pay is a major outlay.) At my local deli all the detergent bottles have Spanish directions and the batteries are from Israel (Duracells, shipped from here to the Middle East and back).
We can try to attach a social stigma to buying things cheap, "Oh, you have the J.C. Penny Madonna? I have the Gucci Madonna!" This only goes so far.
We can sell everything close to 3rd world price, say $0.50. I don't imagine this would be popular with most copyright holders.
We can move to a donation model. I've considered this myself and from what I can gather from the stats you can expect to get about 10% buy in if you can hold their attention. Your market expands maybe 4x, and you can't increase the donation amount much above current sale price, so your take falls to about 50% of current take. Plus there is the business risk of trying this out, what if everyone just listens to your particular album a couple times and then toss it, they may not give you a donation. And there is a fairness issue, I don't mind people paying less because they have less, but I do mind the millionare moocher.
We can move to a survey based royalty system. You could keep payments to artists about the same as they are now and increasing each year as the music "buying" world gets bigger. In this system each government would pay the artist on a local scale based on the number of people listening to the artists music in that country. This would have to be paid out of taxes, perhaps CD-ROM and internet connection taxes, perhaps just the general fund. This would be the fairest system to artists and consumers alike, but would be opposed because of the 'taxes are evil' growd and because in this scheme the artist gets the royalty and pays it to the label
Of course I am! Spending money doesn't guarantee success (see Mission Earth for a good example) But name a blockbuster movie that DIDN'T involve a billion-dollar budget.
Give me a definition of a blockbuster. Is Clerks a Blockbuster? It's made well over 1000% of its production cost (~20K to make, financed on credit cards, grossed boxoffice of around $2 million and that doesn't even come close to its total profit to date from home video and merchandising). I can't even name a movie that had a billion dollar budget in adjusted dollars.
Sure can. China has over a BILLION people. China also has crap for Intellectual Property law. Are you going to tell me that despite having 5 TIMES the population of the United States, that a decent movie idea hasn't come out of there? And, perhaps you could tell me where the epicenter of the large, booming Chinese movie industry is?
Wow, talk about missing the mark with your example. First off, the Chinese movie industry is pretty extensive considering that a huge percentage of their population is essentially living in third world conditions. Secondly, the means of distribution are severely limited in terms of venues due to little things like censorship review boards. Third off, China has been through several social upheavals in the last 100 years that have turned their society upside down, not to mention having had many art forms (at the least) suppressed. Piracy is waaayyyy down on the lists of factors that keep China from making "Armageddon".
Where's the Chinese version of the Matrix? Their movie industry is weak and pathetic.
Aside from the fact that a ton of the conventions used in the Matrix came from chinese and japanese cinema, it seems that you equate "expensive and pretty" with "good". China has lots of good movies, they're just not massively expensive to make. Furthermore, the Matrix really didn't break new ground in terms of movie making aside from Bullet Time. In terms of plot and cinematic ideas, the basis goes back to 19th century philosophy, if not further (i.e. Plato's Cave). Not to mention that the Wachowski brothers deliberately based the visual look on Ghost in the Shell (making the conceptual designer watch the GitS movie and say 'we want it to look like that' - literally).
No, but later in this post you imply that very strongly when you write: Anyone can make anything, but they are not and should not be entitled to make money from it. What part of my "straw man" argument is not well supported by a statement like this?
I said they are not entitled to make it. Entitlement means that simply by making something, they *entitled* to make money off it. If I make a little doodle and put it on a website, no one is obligated to pay me anything for it. I can *try* to make money off it, but I probably won't. That is the difference. I didn't say everything should be free, I said no one should be entitled to profit.
Pay close attention: Copying copyrighted materials in an infringing way reduces the likelyhood of a purchase of that material. In an indirect way, such activities take away the profit potential of said created material. I know it's a very difficult concept for you to understand, and that's why words like "idiot" come to mind. Sorry you're taking it personally. Feel free to call me a "shill" or something if it makes you feel better.
You seem to be a person who has a hard time controlling their temper. Unfortunate.
Your reasoning is questionable. By that same thought process, I can argue that competition is theft, since they take away the potential profits of a creator. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft would like this to be true in, say, the realm of IIS vs Apache.
Because they created it. It's theirs. We want to encourage more to be created so we all have something to enjoy. I like good quality software, (like Linux, OpenOffice, KDE) good quality books (Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, et
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
ah right, so you just take it for free, and pretend it's a moral decision. Nice, why dont you email the bands whose music you love and tell them its all their fault they dont earn anything. they will appreciate hearing from you.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
"However, what if I toiled away hours on end trying to sell something that had no value based on its level of scarcity? Would you say I was foolish?"
And with that the entire market for people trying to sell their work goes down the drain. The value of software is not defined by its scarcity (as it has none). Its value is determined by a) how much it will help you and b) and cost of development, support, infrastructure, salaries, etc.
If you want his product then it has value to you. If something has value to you then you are willing to barter for it or will take it. Your morals will dictate which path you choose.