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Only 2 in 500 College Students Believe in IP
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "David Pogue of the New York Times has an interesting story about how fewer and fewer people believe that infringement is wrong. He mentions talks he gave back in 2005 where people were willing to believe that making backups of DVDs you own is wrong. Today, however, at his talks, he was only able to get two people out of a crowd of five hundred college students to say that downloading a movie or album is wrong. He goes on, like many before him, to bemoan the immorality of young people today, saying: 'I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
How else do they think the internet works?
So less than one percent believe in IP. If not Internet Protocol, which network layer protocol do they believe in?
But seriously, there are reasons not to believe in "intellectual property" even if you do believe in copyright. For one thing, "intellectual property" confuses copyright law, patent law, and trademark law..
as if there is some sort of basic right and wrong
I download music and movies because I hope to one day witness the entire industry come crashing down... but along the way I'd still like to hear and see what's going on
what I'm doing happens to be perfectly in the right, for me
but then again im completely crazy
Why not reduce this to 1 in 250 when reporting?
I go to a college that has about 800 undergrad. Like a small town, everyone knows everyone. I think we have one student that believes in "intellectual property." Most of us, being an engineering school, believe in the free flow of information. I would also like to remind everyone that intellectual property is a new concept, and had we had it years ago, we wouldn't have the works of Shakespeare and Newton.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
If *everyone* believes that something is not wrong..... doesn't that sorta necessarily make it so? I mean the end-result of that assumption being prevalent in the vast majority of people is the death of the record and movie industry. Movies and music won't go away. They will become controlled and disseminated by other means. Perhaps bands never do studio recordings of some tracks and charge a lot for live shows to make money. Perhaps the era of "big money" bands and movies is done with. Frankly, with computer technology, a skilled hobbiest can reproduce studio quality recordings if given good musicans. A skilled hobbiest can make compelling movies.... seemingly perhaps better than Hollywood studios. So what are we left with? Music and movies are better and cheaper and not controlled by monopoly conglomerates. uhm... Yay! SI
Corporations will have to figure out other streams of income.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
While copying media goes way back (remember the DAT tax or the fear that cassettes or VCRs would end the world?) before college students of today, the media conglomerates campaign against this type of crap is only really starting. With the RIAA making up its own commercials, getting laws passed by paying off lawmakers and adding so many fucking anti-infringement notices to their media that I burn DVDs just to rid myself of them.
In 30 years we might not see what we would expect. The RIAA and MPAA has deeper pockets than the nerd crowd and they have a lot more to lose.
No one here, or really anywhere else, could believe the RIAA would win that fucking case in Duluth and yet they did. For whatever reason there are still people out there that can be easily swayed by the bullshit that is strewn from the mouths of those douchebags.
I fear the worst. Support those artists that support freedom of music and media before your money is used against people just like you.
Or die. Horribly.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Dipping into the egg nog a bit early, are we?
First everybody will believe that IP doesn't exist. Even now many people (including reasonable nerds such as we are) believe that IP does not exist in the form it struggles to exist today.
The context of IP is changing and it has to change according to Internet rules. People think that it might seem unethical but the availability of sharing (especially when there is more than a single network node for each human being) cannot be just neglected by the trivial assumption that people should respect for IP.
I don't believe in IP and I don't think they deserve it. Is the amount of effort they are putting to produce a song, really worth the millions of dollars they are claiming that they must make?
No way.
That's why they will lose. That's why they are losing every second. And at some point, they will really understand that resistance is futile.
Internet will prevail
There's plenty of room at the bottom! Richard P. Feynmann
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
copyright, and patents too. last 5 years. no extensions. no exceptions. you get a 5 year monopoly on your creation or idea.
after that its fair game. public domain. and no. you cant gouge the hell out of us on price to make up for it. create more crap and get another 5 years for that instead.
the time of beyond lifelong copyright and patent protection needs to end. its sucking up way too much time and resources. and gains nothing for the world.
and we just dont want to listen to people whine anymore.
... all the people who write software and expect to be paid for it. The days for that are numbered, just as for music and movies.
People are always scared of what happens when children grow up.
That's one reason why I think that the politicians are trying to erode individual rights. They're scared shitless about what's going to happen when the children grow up and start making public policy.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Only two students in a class of 500 were willing to raise their hands. You could ask: Who wants money? and get a similar response.
The rest believe that Hillary is Santa Clause.
"What will happen then?"
Well, as more and more content is released under permissive licenses and that pool is getting larger everyday and is irrevocable short of making giving away your effort illegal... I guess we'll all turn into small contributers that others remix into great works. And in turn we'll remix others contributions into our own (maybe great) works. Kind of like a cottage industry on steroids. And we have the great tubes to thank by reducing the barrier to entry and more importantly providing a means to replicate information effortlessly and cheaply.
Shh.
Students, nay people see Tv shows broadcast over the air as fair game. and will always feel that way. If I record lost and give that copy to a friend in Germany there is no common sense logic that can say that I am stealing it. I got it for free, the advertisers paid for that show to be aired over public airwaves, they got the benefit of it and the station did as well, when I send Hans the DiVX copy he get's to enjoy the crappy local car lot ad's and coca-cola ad's as well. (yes I'm a lazy ass and dont strip the commercials out, boo hoo that's what 30 second skip is for)
Many feel bad a bit about downloading a pay tv only show like Dexter, but SOMEONE paid for the right to view it and record it. All the companies involved got their money.
And that is what people see, they see all this IP crap as nothing more than a extra greedy money grab. Almost everyone sees that Comedy central pulling youtube clips as 100% greed and when people see greed they retaliate against it.
As long as the media companies are acting insanely stupid and publically showing their insatiable greed this will not only continue but will grow in the opposite direction. If they keep it up we actually may see common folk caring about copyright to the point that they want copyright laws repealed.
The one dark nightmare that make media company executives wake up screaming at night.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Fewer and fewer people believing infringing is wrong" is not the same as "not believing in IP." I believe in the concepts of intellectual property, very strongly. However, the MPIA, RIAA, etc., have made fair use and reasonable pricing and distribution of profits to artists into such an absurdity, people can easily rationalize copying.
I think most people would believe that artists and their associated support network should retain their rights to their music or other works. And if things were available at reasonable prices, with reasonable ability to archive and move to new media, then people would pay, respecting the rights of the owners.
But $20 for a CD with one formulatic pop song that's a bit catchy, and a bunch of filler, makes rationalizing copying a lot easier than it should be.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Before anyone starts discussing the 2/500 statistic, remember that the interview method - asking an auditorium of college students to raise their hand - is not the best way to get a truthful response. The percentage of people who believe that downloading a movie/album illegally is wrong is probably much higher.
Yeah, generally it seems to be a pretty common idea. The laws and morality in people's heads does not include corporations. They aren't people and people do not think of them as people. So, it seems as though information should always be free... but if you want to make a penny on it you can't unless you own the property rights. Seriously, rather than asking them about if they think downloading copyrighted material is acceptable, toss in a question about selling downloaded media and see the objections flow.
However, if anybody is going to make any money on the product it is the corporations and this is iron clad.
As for the comments about Shakespeare, it was all security by obscurity. Play houses would steal other people's work by sending somebody with a good memory to go and write down the play as performed. This is where most of our records actually come from with the exception of Romeo and Juliet which was butchered so badly that it was published in order to get it right. If you look at the current ethic that the money making ability of IP goes to the owner, then it would allow people to have access to the plays but prohibit somebody else performing it. The article description of it as "immoral" is uncalled for. It certainly isn't as legally allowed, but the prohibition against sharing is non-existent whereas the prohibition against making money off somebody else's work without the owner getting a fair share is iron clad.
They are moral. They just do not respect the rights of corporations to do anything but make money. In fact, one could easily make the argument that torrents often get ratios above 1 (up/down), because it is required for the torrent to continue and as a moral imperative. What would happen if everybody stopped seeding after they had the file? The torrent would collapse. So morally (and I've actually seen that word used in this context) one needs to seed a torrent. Also, seeding is seen as giving respect to the torrent. That this is a good show/movie/album so *MORE* people should have it.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
The term "intellectual property" was regarded with similar comedy when Letterman moved to CBS. I think the joke was that the band couldn't be called The World's Most Dangerous Band anymore because that name was the "intellectual property" of NBC. It got a big laugh.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
"But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
They'll "grow up"/sell out like the Hippies and turn into reactionary fear freaks who will be as easily manipulated as all previous generations?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Submitter here. I'd have written IP out as imaginary property in the headline, or maybe even just copyright (which is all the article actually discusses), but I didn't have enough room for either route.
That said, you are correct that Stallman disagrees on calling it IP, even if you choose to subvert it by expanding it as imaginary property. However, my belief is that you'll never get people to stop clumping them together so long as law schools, where there's certainly no shortage of pedantry, are more than willing to lump them together. Thus, subversion is not the better option, it is the only option for those who dislike the term.
For what it's worth, trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights and patents all have various flaws. Trademarks allow far too little fair use and fair use is too hard to defend (unless you WANT to pay a law firm big money to establish what a "reasonable person" might believe). Trade secrets, well, the theory is fine, but they're essentially impossible to protect thanks to the internet. The laws give a false sense of security at best. If you don't believe me, find a geek who hasn't heard of 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. I have that stupid thing memorized. Copyrights, well, they'll live longer than I do, you can apparently copyright facts that aren't "facts" because they concern a work of fiction, I've yet to see anyone punished for sending out flat-out wrong DMCA notices no matter what the "perjury" part says. Patents, well, if they defended actual innovation, they might be somewhat reasonable. Why are they not legally able to take the fact that something was independently reinvented (possibly multiple times) as evidence of obviousness? It's not like anyone reads patents until they're sued for infringing upon them. They're written in incomprehensible legal gibberish that's no longer even marginally useful to an actual inventor...
So yeah, basically, I don't believe (i.e. trust) in any of that crap. They do exist, of course, but shouldn't. Not without a rewrite, but this time they should get people to examine the laws for perverse incentive and enforceability. Otherwise we have laws, but they do us no good. That's completely unreasonable, even if it's not hard to see how we ended up that way.
...and kids are stupid and naive.
One day their livelihood may rely on intellectual property and their attitude will change.
What will happen is that the public will no longer support 'rigorous enforcement' of IP laws by entities like RIAA and the law will change accordingly. On the other hand of RIAA/MPAA consistently pulls off decent PR and lobbying campaigns in the next 10, 20, 30 years the status quo may remain and they will retain their business model.
Copyright has becomes an indefinite license by holders, instead of expiring in set amount of time. If copyrights never expire, they will not get much respect.
The risible rhetoric that the "Intellectual Property" barons has been pushing for so long has been so plainly wrong that they don't even have the credibility left to make reasonable claims and be believed.
Insistently equating trespassing on someone's copyrights with armed robbery ("piracy") and "theft" when it plainly is neither for so long means that now a lot of people have trouble taking the whole concept of copyright seriously, unfortunately.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I believe the expression "Intellectual Property" was created solely to trip people up who were trying to engage in critical thinking about how
the products of human creativity should be regarded. It's designed to get unsophisticated (and lazy) thinkers to feel the same disapproval at making a copy of the music on someone's cassette say, as in stealing their cassette, or their stereo equipment, or their car. But, if you make a copy of someone's music, the person still has the music. It may not be ethical but it's just not the same as the theft of real property.
Now, that doesn't mean that if someone goes to the time and effort of creating new music that they don't have rights to it. But it's not the exact same thing as 'property'. Something like copyright law should be in place to protect and especially to encourage creative endeavor. But one shouldn't go overboard on it. Let's say, when George Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody In Blue" he assumed he would hold the copyright to it for 17 years. (I don't know the technical details, maybe copyright law was extendable then, or maybe Paul Whiteman commissioned the work so actually it was Paul Whiteman who had the rights. The details won't matter for illustrating my point.) Would George Gershwin have worked harder and made "Rhapsody In Blue" better if he'd known he and his heirs would have the rights until 100 years after his death? I doubt it.
Suppose they passed a law that said building contractors had to be paid $500,000 to build a house even if they would be willing to build it for only $200,000? That's what happens when you give copyright powers to people that are more than would be necessary to motivate them to create their best work. And that is the situation with current copyright laws.
Also, a lot of the pro-intellectual property types like to act as though only one person in the world could create some unique piece of work. It's harder to illustrate in the case of artistic works, but consider patents for inventions. By patenting an invention you restrict
other people not only from using your invention but also from inventing it themselves. There's the famous story of Alexander Bell beating some other inventor to the patent office with the invention of the telephone. It seems that Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin (and his team) independently invented the iconoscope (the essential electronic camera ingredient of television). So, patents and copyrights are a kind of kluge for encouraging invention but by restricting the rights of others to use their creations they also limit the freedom of others to invent them indepedently, and I think that's a significant inefficiency in the system, though I don't have a better alternative.
At any rate, this notion of 'Intellectual Property' has gotten so tied up in greed and arrogance that it has earned the contempt a lot of people feel for it.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The "immorality of young people today" argument is as old as Plato and Socrates. Every generation is (apparently) more immoral than the previous. Your point is?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Is David Pogue an RIAA spokesman? Anyway, I think the IP laws are extremely unfair for consumers. Groups like the RIAA, sony bono, Disney have been drawing up any copyright laws they want and getting congress to pass them without any democratic input for the past 100 or so years. The current laws so strongly favor big corporations and dont' consider consumer interests at all. People are beginning to wake up to this. People are getting so fed up with the unfairness of it that they completely ignore the laws.
Everytime I hear stuff like this I have to shake my head. How can any person claim to be moral while not recognizing that file-sharing is WRONG? I've had arguments with friend over this and it almost blinds me with rage every time. Now, don't get me wrong, I do it all the time. But I have the common sense to realize what I'm doling is wrong. I just don't care.
or as in or 'already broadcast a million times for free'??
I can see 'them' getting upset over the taping and release of a Still-in-the-theater movie. But once it's been shown on TV, for free, who cares. What's the practical difference between me taping a free, over-the-airwaves broadcast, and me downloading a copy that someone else taped??
You're lumping together legitimate backup copies with internet downloads. You are also combining "wrong", a moral decision, with "illegal", a legislative decision.
If you are going to use such intellectual bait & switch in trying to make your point, you'll get no respect from me & you lose all credibility.
Bugger off, mate.
One problem is that he neglected to say "illegally downloaded." There is nothing wrong with downloading movies. That is how some of them are distributed.
It is clear what he meant, but this is the kind of confusion that the MPAA uses to convince courts that P2P and Youtube et al have no legal purpose. If downloading movies is illegal, than P2P and Youtube really do have no legal purpose.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
...it's the same two brainless fuckers who believe in I.D.?
I used to like David Pogue. He never showed much computer savvy, but he really knew entertainment gear and gadgets. In the past 2 or 3 years, though, he's become John C. Dvorak -- making ridiculous and inflammatory statements in his column or on his blog just to drive traffic.
/. sends more traffic his way.
And like Dvorak, it's unfortunate that
"Bemoan"? I read the FA and Pogue does no such bemoaning. He does, however, point out the vast generational differences in attitudes towards intellectual property. He doesn't editorialize at all; something slashdot contributors and editors should try doing once in a while.
You sign away all your rights to all your designs and concepts (unless you are lucky or smart) to just get into a school or a job now.
How many ideas of yours have been bought and sold and have appeared on the big screen or TV... ? Or made people hundreds of millions in venture capital funds before you could sell the idea yourself?
And then they are going to complain about downloading some media you can't afford to watch?
Intellectual property was founded on a moral bargain. People gave up their right to copy other people for a limited time, in order to get other people to work harder to create new useful things and artwork. The problem is that corporate America is developing amnesia concerning the people's half of the bargain.
People have a fundamental moral right to copy others. Copying is at the core of human nature. It is a right not to be given up lightly. It's what two year olds do to learn how to act. It's what apprentices do. It's what old people do when they want to learn something new. Without copying, we're all just illiterates alone and naked in the woods.
Because of this, deciding what people should copy is highly important. Coming up with something great to copy is very valuable. It takes work to be a great rock band, or make a 42 inch plasma HD TV. Why would anyone go through all the work, if they get nothing?
Fine well and good. But why should the people give up their right to copy, when they don't see what they are getting in return? If Led Zeppelin was freely available without stigma, and the original Talking Heads music, and Beatles, and Van Halen, college students might be more easily persuaded that there is an actual bargain they are benefiting from when they don't copy the White Stripes, or newer stuff. They have to pay for some stuff, but other stuff they get free. Stuff more than 14 years old.
Taking someone's rights away without their consent, and without giving anything in return is immoral. It's really no wonder why, when subjected to an immoral act, college kids don't see anything immoral by responding in kind.
Join the IParty!
Over the past century, the content companies have learned from experience that they can control and dominate all aspects of their industry. They force-feed the public with crap music from acts that they browbeat into submission, taking tremendous chunks of the revenues through their position as middleman. They convince the public (or at least themselves) that they can dictate the terms of use for their products, even when the public has already paid a more-than-fair price for those products. They take for granted their position as arbiters of what's cool, and now that their position of dominance is under real threat, they're panicking.
There are already solutions - numerous ones - for getting fair payment to artists, technicians, promoters, etc., without fighting the masses who are interested in a wider variety of content and the ability to use that content in novel ways. The problem (for the content industry, anyway) is that those solutions in some way involve giving up control. They fear that losing that control means obsolescence, when in truth, it's the effort to cling to that control that will result in them being so far behind the times that they can't catch up.
There can be a place for the content executives in the future of the industry, but they have to be willing to let go of the total control they've grown addicted to, and be content with making money hand over fist while giving the customers what they want.
Back in college, a friend had a roommate who declared: If there's food in the fridge, I will eat it.
Culturally, we're selfish...so why should this be a surprise? Seriously, I must be some kind of bunny-humping commie for even saying this.
Hey, a discussion of intellectual property on slashdot! This will surely cover new ground. I can't wait to learn what slashdot thinks!
The problem is I also believe in ignoring it. Copyright was a deal in principle, You make your creations available to the public and in return we won't copy them without your permission. Available meant free to use as we would, for personal creativity, for review or just for entertainment. And the creations of that generation would be freely available to the next generation to build on.
And then they changed the deal. Creations are made available with EULAs which say we invoke copyright on our creation but you don't get any of the things you had on your side of the table. You can't modify this and you cannot review it. And it won't default into the creative pool until two lifetimes have past. But you must still honour the no copying premise, even though there is no value in that social contract for you anymore. Oh and it's a laugh that it will pass into the creative pool, because we DRM / copy protected it all, and we're not planning on publishing the source material ever, and even if we did it would be over 100 years out of date, but to be honest we couldn't be stuffed storing unprofitable material on deteriorating media for that length of time.
I don't have an issue with patent IP, other than the whole 'patenting processes and programs' malarky, but copyright was a social contract and 2 requirements of a contract seem to be a meeting of the minds, which there no longer is, and value on both sides, which yet again there no longer is.
If not Internet Protocol, which network layer protocol do they believe in?
The tubes.
Just because everyone is doing it doesn't make it right, it just makes a whole lot of people wrong.
What we see is classic demad-supply curve. File sharing (illegally) produces supply (you can download copyrighted material almost for free). Because it's that "cheap" (well, it's not purchased legally, and you can't deny that) we all use it. It's even so cheap that you download crap you don't even like or care for.
Once "everybody" stops paying for this content, studios stop producing new content (of course, there's no money in it). No content, no downloads, no theathers, no radios, no nothing. Nobody's gonna be happy about that, neither studios nor consumers.
So guess what happens? Studios will finally start to compete. You could finnaly legally buy a movie for what it's acctually worth. Of course, that means no more millions and millions of dollars for so called "stars". I mean, how is acting / performing worth that much? It's not. Plain and simple.
What's that? A bunch of college students see something they want and can get it without paying? And they're all over it?
Who would have known.
No, they simply don't care about "Intellectual Property" like the majority of every day people don't. All they care about is that there is some form of entertainment that they want and they can easily get it by downloading it. For free. It's maybe 1 in 1000 that you might find does it for media-shifting or time-shifting purposes but the majority are there because it costs nothing.
Another thing people that actually produce creative works have to be worried about is if the concept of plagiarism gets washed under, where students who cheat by copying chunks of Wikipedia into their assignments doesn't even cross them as wrong. Or once they get into companies, and think nothing of copying your GPL'd source code into their program, and violate the license blatantly because they don't respect copyright laws.
I was thinking to myself... what sort of nickname is IP for santa?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
This result makes perfect sense.
Here's why:
First, ask people if they think that listening to free music on the radio is "stealing". Almost nobody thinks that.
Now ask people what the difference is between listening to free music on the radio versus listening to music files they got free from P2P. They will say:
(1) The technology is different (FM analog encoding versus MP3 digital encoding).
(2) With P2P, you have much better control over what you listen to, and when.
So now we ask: Does having much better control over your listening schedule cause a "moral" behavior to change to an "immoral" behavior?
(Note that I'm not defending anybody -- I'm just trying to offer an explanatory model.)
--
Another way to look at it is this:
In order to "understand" that copyright infringement is wrong, you have to understand (and agree with) the legal doctrine behind copyright.
But you've got to realize that people don't obtain their feelings of "moral" and "immoral" by performing legal analysis.
They obtain their moral feelings based on primitive human emotional reactions.
The act of theft has a long history that reaches back to the dawn of human existence. The reptilian part of our brains reacts to the "wrongness" of somebody stealing from us and depriving us of our posessions.
But our generation is the first generation in human existence to encounter the idea of quick-n-easy copyright infringement -- the almost magical ability to instantly take something from someone, yet leave the original intact.
To view copyright infringement as "theft", you have to apply legal theory, or you need to create a rather sophisticated line of reasoning, such as: "if someone obtains an unauthorized distribution of my creative work, it could increase the probability that they will not purchase it from me".
Such sophisticated lines of reasoning don't impact the reptilian part of our brains. So we don't perceive this as "theft" from an emotional standpoint.
Anyone who says infringement is not wrong is saying that because they have never had anything they have created used without their permission.
A person/company who creates something has the right to put it in the public domain, release it under the [insert open license of choice here], etc and so on. But they have the equal right to place restrictions on it, and expect users of their creation to abide by those restrictions. If you don't like those restrictions, you have one valid option...don't use their creation.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Simple. In 10, 20, 30 years some of those people will own something or have invented a gadget or game or written a book which took years to research. (expand on this in your field, try music). Now someone is publishing that or using "your stuff" to make money, lots of money. It won't be so funny then.
The best example of that is a blogger with a popular site that brings in 60-70 bucks a day in Adsense. All of the material is from someone else and all the images are hotlinked to another sites. One of those sites is yours and now because that site is so popular you get to pay 10 dollars a month in extra bandwidth. You are a pro photographer and have invested lots of time and much $$ to work up your portfolio. Hey that site even sells your pictures. Nada to you.
I fit neither of the descriptions above so copy away. Will it be that much a non-issue when it affects you directly?
Please no comments about money not being everything. True to a point but not when you are late on your rent or car payment or mortgage. Yes Mortgage, from the french language meaning a death pledge, something you pay till death.
But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?
I'd say one of two things, either the media industry agrees to a compromise, in which they have to conceed just as much as the "pirates", or the media industry as we know it will cease to exist. Honestly I'd be happy with either scenario. It's not like all forms of media will suddenly evaporate just because people can't make millions anymore. Christ some actors are getting over $20 million for one film, and they want us to believe the MPAA is having a hard time because of piracy? Give me a break.
But this shouldn't be news to anyone here. Personally I welcome the future and the changes it'll bring, it's about time the media industry's death grip on entertainment is reset.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
In this whole discussion, both here on Slashdot and in the comments to the original article, nobody notices that "intellectual property" is just too abstract a concept for many people.
People will usually agree that if A produces something, then it is wrong to take it away with paying. And if A produces something, and B buys it, then it is wrong to take it away from B. But if, as mentioned in a comment to the original article, a nine year old makes a copy of a CD as a present for his grandfather, then this child sees _himself_ as the producer of the CD, just the same as he would see himself as the producer of a painted picture, or a pair of hand knitted socks.
I think people are quite willing to pay money to whom they see subconsciously as the "producer". So people pay for pay TV, they play for CDs or music from the iTunes store, they pay for watching movies. DRM is generally disliked because it stops me from "producing" music that my computer is quite capable of producing. But they find it quite Ok to do the "producing" themselves. It's the same as with people willingly paying lots of money in a restaurant, but on the other hand they wouldn't have the slightest bit of bad conscience trying to reproduce some especially good food from a restaurant in their own kitchen.
Intellectual property is just too abstract for most people.
You honestly think that a future where only the artists can reap huge profits from their work is one you'd be okay living in?
Hm. I would too.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Here's where everyone's wrong. At least as far as my personal experience goes. By the time I was a Freshman in college (back in '98), I had a collection of maybe 100 purchased CDs. I continued to purchase CDs at the rate of about 5-10 per year, because that's all I could afford as a student. But I downloaded maybe 1000 mp3s from Napster. The record companies did not lose any money from this action. Had I not downloaded those mp3s, I still would not have purchased the CDs that contained those songs. I downloaded music that I would not otherwise have purchased, for the simple reason that it was so damn convenient.
I feel that many (though not all of course) of today's college students are in the same situation. Record companies are living in a dream world if they think the average college student with a collection of several thousand mp3s would have actually purchased those songs if they had not been "available" to download for free. Record companies look at the number of songs being shared on the internet and count each one as lost revenue. I say that if most of those songs weren't shared for free, nobody would be listening to them.
Now that I'm finished school (well undergrad at least), I can afford to purchase all the music I like, and I no longer download pirated mp3s. My act of downloading/sharing mp3s in college may have been illegal, but it was not "immoral", because there was no victim. Record companies did not lose money, because I would not have purchased those songs/CDs anyway (I couldn't afford to). I benefited from listening to the music, and some of the bands benefited from gaining me as a fan - and now that I can afford to, I buy their albums and catch them on tour. So what's the problem?
The flip side of course is that not everyone is like me. Some people will download all their music and never buy a CD in their life. I say, if the RIAA is going to sue someone for downloading music, the "moral" thing would be to first check the size of that person's purchased music collection. I think they'd find that, in many cases, the biggest downloaders are also the biggest purchasers.
> "But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
The college students will graduate, get jobs, get mortgages and run up other debts, and struggle with the debt load vs. their wages. And they will change their attitude towards ownership and such, just as generations before them have.
Trust me, I know. I've watched 90something percent of my fellow hippie-era friends and acquaintances become right wing conservatives. If they'll do it, generations less committed to their own hubris are all the more likely to.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It's more moral to support the free exchange of information and content, and the consumer's right to do whatever they want with something they own, than it is to let greedy powermongers have all the control.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I think there's a division that people truly do not want to address: The notion of being paid for having ownership.
For the vast majority of us, we can understand, respect and appreciate the notion of being paid for the work we do. We work an hour or work a month, we do our jobs and we get paid. But then there's the other side of things that are deservedly despised. Does the word "landlord" carry a negative meaning? It usually does. Does the idea of "flipping" something disturb you at some level or somehow comes across as wrong? What about people who wait in line to buy a Nintendo Wii only to turn around and sell it for twice the price? Is it wrong? What about ticket scalpers? What about lenders? How about "management" or "executives"?
We've got this system we're living under where not only does owning something yield revenue, but the stuff that the average person can own is HIGHLY restricted. This is an overly simplified depiction, but in our system, relatively few people own everything and the rest of us pay to use it.
But while the majority of us do not respect "IP" the majority of us have been severely limited in the ways we can push back against the system that was built against us.
My brother tells me that life is a huge game and those that are winning get to make and change the rules..and keep them secret. Even so, the key to winning is knowing the rules and using them to your advantage. While I have to acknowledge the truth in that observation, I can't help but despise the road one must travel in order to become a winner of such a corrupt game.
The main idea of this story is to foreshadow a civil disobedience revolution against big media. The problem is that the disobedient will soon be marked forever as felons and will lose the right to vote and therefore cannot influence the future of government. While I would welcome to see massive civil disobedience resulting in a change in IP definition, laws and enforcement, I would be rather reluctant to participate myself... as would many others. Low participation rates guarantees failure. There must be a better way.
It's not that only 2 in 500 believe in IP. Only 2 in 500 care enough to raise their hand in public. More probably don't want to look bad in front of their peers, or didn't want to risk being held up as an example by the strongly biased speaker.
Young people are not immoral they are different moral, they will change the rules just like the current dominant generation did to their parents generation. This is called evolution, if you don't believe in that then tough luck, there won't be a rapture, you won't go through start and won't receive 50 dollar.
It'll be just like when, in the 1960's, most young people had a laid-back attitude towards drug use, which was illegal at the time. Now, 40 years later, those people are in power, and drug use is perfectly... uh... oh... wait. Never mind.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
Most likely, they'll do an about face when their paycheck depends on IP. Some of the will work for media companies and will suddenly "see the light" about copyright infringement. It's like how today's "conservatives" (whatever that means in today's context) were dodging the draft and speaking out against the Vietnam war when they were of drafting age. And how all the folks who smoked pot back in the sixties sear that it's bad for today's young people to do it.
In other words, not much will change. Kids will still use tech to circumvent copyright and execs and such will still preach against it.
Personally, i believe in limited IP (I'm age 34). I think it's a useful concept, but it's been abused. By abusing it, by extending it beyond it's intent, I have little sympathy for the IP royalty (pun intended) now. I'm not at all surprised today's college kids don't care.
Cheers.
I don't believe in IP either, thats why we still run X.25
They have successfully established themselves as Evil in the hearts and minds of all right-thinking people.
Wait, that wasn't what they were trying to accomplish? Could have fooled me.
I don't like how the author equates fair use and piracy with morality. People are getting jaded with corporations taking away their rights, and their jobs to make a profit. A week doesn't go by without hearing about some corporation letting go of thousands of Americans so they could save money using outsourcing or of a company suing their customers. The days of being a lifelong member of a company are gone, and with that went company loyalty. So it comes as no surprise to me that less and less people care about screwing over a corporation since less and less corporations care about screwing over their customers and employees. Equating that with some kind of moral decline among youth is wrong. Now switch those examples in the article over to a hypothetical stealing of a movie from your friend's collection and you're going to have a better test.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
People have decided if they can get it for free they shouldn't have to pay for it. The rationalizing agruments are either that they cost too much or some people make 20 mill a film. Very few people make 20 mill a film and percentile wise very few actors make 1 mill a picture. For everyone making north of 10 mill a film there's a 1,000 people making one side or the other of a grand a week and they at times only work three to six months out of the year. The people at the top are the last to take pay cuts not the first so it's the people at the bottom that suffer most. Already most production has moved out of country. Notice all the new Canadian stars? It's not because there are more Canadian actors all the production is done there and either they hire locals to save a buck or they are generally required to mostly hire locals. Entertainment can't survive the market shift since the new model seems to be make available free. People don't want more commercials but that would be one of the few revenues streams they'd be left. Expect radically more draconian security measures and more lawsuits in the near term because they will go down fighting but in the end everyone will loose because all that will survive are garage bands and Youtube fodder. Yes there will be some films made and some artists touring but expect ticket prices to expode. Video gaming is threatened as well so expect changes there. Network television as we've known it is half dead already and I doubt they'll be producing much original content past the next ten years. The movie industry may hang on for another 20 years in some form but expect average budgets to drop to 3 mill and they'll be a lot more like current TV than the big budget features people like to watch. I've heard models proposed like "well I'll pay a buck a piece for movies". Based on what I've seen even given that option most won't pay for it and given the budget of some blockbuster films every person in the country would have to buy a copy to break even. The math never works. The simple fact is people are unwilling to pay if they have options so the film industry and much of the music industry won't survive. You can't exactly do live performances on movies and theater attendance has been dropping off steadily. It's hit the break point where if they charge more people won't go. The problem is most films just count on breaking even in the theater then they make their profits off DVD sales. Take that away and they loose money. They can drop the budgets but do you want to pay $10 to get in and $5 for popcorn to watch a 3 mill movie? Most won't. I realize it's a troll argument and the good music and movie fairy is going to save us all but entertainment is driven by dollars. Take away the profit and the studios will be torn down for condos and the backers will get into the stock market and real estate. Can't happen? Anyone ever been to Century City? It was 20th Century Fox's backlot back in the day. I say by 2030 most of the studios will be bulldozed for condos and what little production that's happening will all be in India and China. Broadcast TV will be reruns with some cheapie reality shows but mostly infomercials. Worst case senario is it goes all infomercials, it's halfway there now.
Because they don't own any downloadable content.
.pdfs for free. However, when it came to deciding to charge for it (I'd like to make a few bucks for all my hard work). I wanted to make sure that the downloadable version they were getting could not just be downloaded once and passed on to every networking guy in IBM.
I've written plenty of documentation and books, and I've always given away the
Most of these kids that are being surveyed don't own any 'IP', songs, movies etc, whereby they could get revenue from each copy sold.
Just like your attitude towards kids/education changes when you have a kid of your own, your attitude changes when you've got content that you hope to get paid for.
Next thing you know they'll be thinking that it's OK to read a book or listen to a radio. Hell, next thing you know they'll be thinking it's OK to think. Then where will the poor media conglomerates be?
If you are going to dip into the egg nog, at least do it right. Drinking that pre-made swill is not recommended.
> The jury saw through it and punished them for it.
You're giving that jury a bit too much credit. One of the jurors was bragging about how he'd never used the internet before. All the rest wanted to give her the maximum fine, except for one who gave the minimum.
Kazaa isn't easy to understand, and the only evidence she used it at all was her email. Given the evidence collection "practices" discussed in the MediaDefender leaks, and the fact that they listed the wrong shared files the first time, I'm not overly inclined to trust that that was never added or manipulated to their "evidence." If you examine how fly-by-night these folks are via the above link, you'd understand my worry. And yes, I know that MediaDefender isn't MediaSentry, but I've yet to see how they're different in practice, especially given the information on the collaboration between the two which is mentioned in the above leak. But don't take my word for it, read it yourself. If you have any interest in these things at all, it's NOT boring.
The only thing that made her look guilty, IMHO, was listing the wrong year for the date her hard drive died. It died before they sent her any legal threats and she had the guy who replaced it testify that it really was replaced because it was dead.
I don't think someone deserves to have their life ruined to the tune of $222,000 over that. But that's why I donated to her legal defense fund.
However, it will take at least 2 generations to make a real impact.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Then they'll be more interested in protecting IP...
"I don't believe in it anyway!"
"What?"
"IP."
"Just a conspiracy of network engineers, then?"
Deep pockets can't hold progress back forever. Their business model is arcane.
Now, consider the situation of the RIAA and MPAA
- The marginal cost of distributing the content -- that is, the cost of one additional unit -- is very close to zero, so any gains from that may be seen as unfair.
- There is no violence involved in the "theft"
- The victim of the "theft" is not an individual but a corporation, an abstract entity that exists only as a legal convenience. These folks aren't mugging grandmothers.
- There is a long and elaborately developed popular wisdom -- which may well have considerable basis in reality -- that most of the money in the entertainment industry goes to assorted corporate sleazeballs who spend their lives ripping off artists, so the individuals truly responsible for the creative content get ripped off either way. Notice that we have a writers' strike? And happy campers who just love industry contracts such as Prince?
None of which favors the industry in the "fairness" category. Add the fact that unlike the Ultimatum Game, the individuals inflicting the "punishment" actually derive some small benefit from their actions, and the likelihood that the RIAA and MPAA will succeed in the long run is pretty close to nil, though like any wounded monster they will do plenty of damage in the process of going out of existance. But similarly, the idea that the demise of IP -- or more specifically, IP as it has been defined in just the past ten years or so -- means the collapse of civilization as we know it is equally misguided."All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
Isn't private data supposed to be... well... private?
I know.. I know.. Common sense need not apply, right?
"What about IP law?"
"Intellectual property? I don't believe it exists."
Bad puns gave me bad karma. =(
Your society failed them first.
The music they're downloading? It's crap for easily-fascinated imbeciles. Pop, hip-hop? Give me a break. Anyone with six months of musical training will tell you there's no brain growth in this garbage.
The books they're downloading? Pulp pumped out by underpaid writers on trendy topics as quickly as they can.
The software they're copying? When the manufacturer wants $400 for a simple application, who can afford it, especially if it barely works sometimes. It's a sad state of humanity that if aliens did attack, all of our software crashing at once in a panic would doom us faster than their death-rays.
So yeah, no one believes in IP, and they won't until (for the 2% who do) they end up needing it for income. Google AdSense works for now, but might not in the future, and so IP might be something they want. But for now, they've never seen anything so good it should be paid for you.
Anti-Globalism
Does the reverse hold true? If everyone believes something is right or true, is it simply made so? If everyone believes you're an underwear stealing child eating donkey fucker, is it true regardless of the facts? No...
The backlash here isn't because record labels and movie studios make money - it's because they've abused their "power", gone well above a fair profit and have made too much money. The simple fact that they have hired a rabid heard of lawyers to sue anything and everyone regardless of public opinion means that there is just too much money involved. How often have businesses sued their customers and gotten away with it for years at a time without serious impact to profit margins? They're used to making an unsustainable amount of profit, and now they'll do whatever it takes to hold on to it for as long as possible. Will lawyers, record labels, movie studios - middle men - ever go away? Not likely. The record labels and movie studios will alter their business practices when they have to, when the market dictates it. There will always be someone in the middle, the value adding reseller. Who knows, ISPs might turn out to be the next RIAA now that anyone can make a song or a movie. Look at Clear Channel, they own billboards, over 200 radio stations, 40 TV stations, and they produce concert tours. How long before they get into the ISP market, last mile connections to the home, or some other form of mass digital media delivery?
Fair use, though, isn't to allow you to take parts of a copyrighted work and use it in another work wholesale. Fair use is all about using things for purposes of critique
Fair Use also allowed for education, teaching, and for backups. Of course making a copy of a book for backups was actually more expensive than just buying a new copy.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Business models that don't depend on Federal criminal enforcement will evolve. We get cheaper and more convenient music. The corporate players in the current industry will adapt or die. The average musician will probably make a bit more money, though we'll have fewer "superstars" and no more manufactured "superstars". (i.e. nobody will ever replace Hannah Montana. How sad.)
Pogue might as well have lamented the passing of the horse 100 years ago. While it's ironic for someone to use the Internet to dispense punditocratic Old Wise Man views of the horrors of change, the Net lends itself to that sort of irony.
Times change and business models either change with them or wither away.
Tech Public Policy stuff
This is one of the direct results of scare tactics used by big corporations and governments everywhere. By sensationalizing and exagerating losses/damages, the RIAA, MPAA and others have essentially cried wolf so many times that many young people have decided to dismiss IP laws altogether. The problem here isn't mere apathy, it's disbelief and this disbelief will continue to propagate until governments/corporations start growing a pair and realizing who is really supporting who. By inflating prices unnecessarily, they have essentially forced many people to go without or steal. Not surprisingly, when forced to choose between the two, many young people choose to steal. Since record prices were already inflated and most of their friends are in similar situation, they don't see much/any harm it could cause and this line of logic gets applied to other forms of IP. This is similar to what i consider the TRUE gateway drug affect of marijuana. Sensationalized reports of damage from it hurts credibility when kids discover it is actually relatively harmless. Kid then proceeds to doubt similar reports about other drugs. This makes more sense to me than the common assumption that marijuana alone acts as a gateway (which is akin to saying cheeseburgers alone acts as a gateway to obesity). In either example the best mechanism to combat potential harm is information, understanding and honesty.
I support the GPL over BSD-style licenses because I don't like the idea of Free code being used to improve proprietary software,
I prefer BSD as, as a programmer, it allows me more freedom to do what I want with the software I program. This coming year I want to start a business in photography, and to make it easier to run the business I want to create some programs. If I'm going to spend much tyme writing the programs I'd like to be able to sell it to other photographers. Using a BSD style license I could make it harder for someone else to take my work and sell it as their own, whereas with a GPL I couldn't prevent anyone from selling the software themselves.
FalconShould there be a Law?
yeah, thats a good way to get statistics about this topic. Ask a crowd of college students whether they support MPAA and the rotten music industry around all your peers and friends. Im sure there will be a lot of people raising their hands! (sarcasm off)
By that logic, the law, then, should be slightly stricter than necessary and applied leniently. People will remain on the edge of what's legal, but lenient interpretation would then place the vast majority of those within the limits of what is acceptable. Liberalizing the law and making it more strictly enforced has made for a more predictable society, but it has also placed far too many people in prison and has created an atmosphere of despair.
There also needs to be a better understanding within Government and corporations alike as to whether they want short-term or long-term profits. They can't have both. If long-term gains are what really matter, then there are three question marks. Firstly, does piracy really have a long-term impact on sales?
(Not day-by-day sales, but overall. Will the number of copies sold over the lifetime of the product really be different, or will it merely change the sales figures from a high initial value that rapidly shrinks to being something that is much more uniform? If, over ten or twenty years, the total sales are absolutely identical then the companies have lost not a single sale. All they have lost is the interest they would have earned.)
Secondly, is the problem in the piracy itself or in the original investment?
(Profit is the return on investment. The more you invest, the better the product. The better the product, the more it will sell. However, the return will increase non-linearly. There is an optimum level. However, that ignores memory/associations. If you factor in what the customers expect, then the optimum will shift. If customers have had good experiences in the past, the next product is likely to get greater interest. Conversely, bad experiences will reduce interest. It is generally assumed that it is ten times easier to lose interest than to increase it, and that doing nothing is as bad as producing crap.)
Thirdly, is there a way to change the taxation system to curtail short-term profits but refund over the long-term?
(If the profits are no different whether the profits are immediate or distributed more evenly, especially if there are tax credits for investment and tax penalties for balance sheet rigging, then the RIAA and MPAA might, just might, back off. Their mode of operation would cost them too much.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Of course not, but that's not a completely arbitrary human concept which only exists for as long as it's supported by the population composing the society from which the concept arises."
And therein lies the problem with humanity. While "I'll believe it when I see it" carries more weight than "thou shall not". The belief that moral and ethical laws aren't as concrete as the physical laws. And the violation of them carry no consequences. Anyone with an attention span greater than a human life can plainly see that there are moral and ethical laws that are as involitable as E=MC^2 and carry as grave consequences when abused indescrimminantly.
Now as far as the story is concerned. I've pointed this out in the past. People who behave with the attitude mentioned grow up to become adults who can't be trusted. Trust is not what someone gives you when they can see you, but what you get when their backs are turned. Can I trust the public to respect my wishes when I can't observe them 24/7? Why should they in turn be respected and trusted? Do you all even see the corrosive effect the attitude has on the cohesiveness of society? You all are getting a surviellance society in part because you can't be trusted. And no I'm NOT just talking about government cameras.
Keep believing that your senses define right and wrong and "thou shall not" is some arbitrary concept and you'll get the foundationless society you all deserve.
I believe in IP Freely.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm a college student, and I believe in intellectual property, and understand its value to society, HOWEVER:
/yours/.
- I was raised in an analog world, and now have my youth in a digital one. In my analog world, if a TV show came on when I couldn't watch it, I simply programmed the VCR and listened to my parents whine that they didn't know how to do so. In the digital world, if I am to record it using consumer equipment, at one day, those who are NOT in charge (Remember, those that are, that is, the USC, said it was OK.) can take away my right to do so. Therefore, I'm not going to give them the chance. I will use BitTorrent to time and format shift my television viewing.
- In my analog world, the only rule for renting a video was "Be kind, rewind." In the new digital world, I'm also told that I will be prevented from copying the video for my own personal use. I never had any use to before - a movie rental is just a 2 mile drive and $3.00, but since you decided to prevent me from doing so, my curiosity was provoked, and I will now copy the video just to say that I can.
- In my analog world, if I didn't like all the crap on an album the shills are trying to sell, I could purchase the single, and probably get a B-side or two with it. Now, I can't. Furthermore, with digital distribution, I'm asked to take a quality hit in order to help defray the costs of the distributor. Not likely. I'll download it.
- In my analog world, if I hear a song that I like, I can call up my favorite radio station, ask the DJ to play it, and then tape it. Unfortunately, due to payola and the ClearChannel buyout of my entire county, sometimes I can't do that - but it is still my right under US case law! In the digital world, however, RIAA tries to require safeguards to keep me from doing that. Therefore, if I hear a song on internet radio, I'm going to have no qualms in downloading an MP3 version of it.
- In my analog world, $20 used to be able to get you two movie tickets, two sodas, and a big ol popcorn. Now, when I go, I'm carded for the R movie (I'm twenty-one), searched for a camera (and I'm a slim person), and then charged upwards of $35 for a low-quality (DLP) show in a sticky auditorium. Being searched for a camera in order to watch a movie is too much, so I'm going to download it.
I'm not immoral. The powers that be simply think the rules should change now because it's a new system, and I'm sorry, they're not going to. If you try to take away what rights I had, I'm going to disregard
Look at what Radiohead did with their album. By offering it at a fair price, without a damn record company, they were able to make double on it, as opposed to normal CD sales revenue. The reason people steal these things is because it's easy, and the prices for music are ridiculous.
I think we can assume that when "everybody" stops believing that will include the leaders of the RIAA, MPAA etc. If the leaders of those groups no longer believe in IP then they will naturally do something to change their business model.
So, either the business models will change from the inside or else "everybody" won't have stopped believing in IP.
that's how I see it anyway . . .
Look at the economics and you will see where the changes are really going to come.
Today, promotional advertising is a huge part of the economy. It supports printers, advertising companies, magazines, and all manner of newsletters and such. It enables radio stations to play music for free, network television to exist and is why things work as they do today. Promotion of music, movies, books and other "intellectual property" has an overall economic impact far greater than simply compensating creators for their work.
We stand on the edge of a new age where there will be no compensation. Today's young people understand that advertising is something they want no part of and object when they are subjected to it. The idea that you are paying $10 for a piece of plastic that cost $0.50 to make because of all of the promotion that went along astounds them. They want to get rid of the $9.50 so they could buy their music for $0.50. There are two problems with that idea.
The first problem is nobody is going to make the studio recording that results in the $0.50 piece of plastic without the promotion that went along with it. While we might not like advertising, we haven't reached the enlightened age where products reach out and grab people when they are needed. Without promotion - including but not limited to advertising - you just aren't going to see products.
The second problem is many people have seen the vastly different landscape away from commercial products called "free". You get your music for free, maybe download some other entertainment for free. With faster Internet connections it will all be free. Nobody is going to be paying that $0.50 - they want it all for free.
I would expect to see lots of people out of work. Anyone connected with promotion is going to be out of work pretty soon. I don't think it will even take 10 years. Expect to see a vastly expanded welfare state because there just isn't anywhere for these people to work. They aren't needed and have no skills useful in the future.
This is completely normal - high school and college students (in general, there are always exceptions) have no appreciation whatsoever for property rights of any kind or the idea that money or products might be worth something. We're just fleshy entitlement machines at that stage. There's just no context for it until you're out on your own and hold down a 'real' job for a while and learn the basics of budgeting and the idea of fair worth.
When I was in high school and college we made mix tapes (yes we had CDs, but burning wasn't cheap or easy) and pirated software with no concern at all. Now that I make my own living off software I appreciate the value of paying for useful software which has value added over open source. I also buy CDs because I want to support the artists I listen to; of course the value proposition there is changing, but there's still the basic idea of buying a product.
Asking college students if piracy is wrong is like asking Buddhists about Catholic heresies. It's just not meaningful except as a curiousity.
Hmmm.... ever hear of the terms ad hoc, generalization, and grasping at straws?
Think about the level headed people you are covering with your libelous statement.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I think this is a good movement. I do not believe that not paying the film company or the music producer is right. They should get paid. However I do wholeheartedly believe the RETAILER, together with the associated overhead expenses and the stupid restrictions that come with this method of distribution, should die.
Come up with a model where I can more or less directly pay to the studio/publisher after playing past the first quarter of the album or movie or reading past the first quarter of a book, and I will happily follow it. Yes I have my credit card ready -- to pay the creators only, and only for what I consume (not just download).
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
This "poll" was done by show of hands in a large lecture hall. As a college professor, let me tell you: unless you're a very good teacher, the number of students in a college class who'll raise their hands when asked *any* question, up to and including "do you have a pulse?" is 2. Doesn't matter how big the class is: if it's a 2 person class, both will raise their hands. In a 500-person class, it's still 2, 'cause 300 of them aren't paying attention, and 198 are chicken.
I could give a damned about the losses the corporations face when the music gets shared without them having to expend anything for that sharing to be achieved. We don't need their CD factories. We don't need their printing of the album liners. We don't need their marketing departments. We don't need them.
It is the musicians that suffer. This might include the artists for the album cover, too. I wish there was a way for them to be paid for the music we enjoy (in proper proportion to how much their particular music gets enjoyed).
However, the ones that sign with the big corporations that take 92% off the top have apparently already accepted that they are going to get shafted by the man. Then when together they get shafted by the public, it's the corporations that lose the most, as it should be since we don't need what they contribute to the process.
But we do have a start to this in places like CD Baby and Magnatune. People who listen to music should shift to these business models as much as they can.
As for movies, that's a bit harder, since there is a larger production model involved, with lots of people whose only connection is being employed by one or more businesses involved in the production. Still, we should look carefully at how much the real artists and workers make compared to the investors (who deserve a fair share for investing, but absolutely never the right to gouge).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
" First everybody will believe that IP doesn't exist. Even now many people (including reasonable nerds such as we are) believe that IP does not exist in the form it struggles to exist today."
There's a name for that "form". It's called greed. It's based on the premise that the speaker should get something of value at the expense of another member of society.
"The context of IP is changing and it has to change according to Internet rules. People think that it might seem unethical but the availability of sharing (especially when there is more than a single network node for each human being) cannot be just neglected by the trivial assumption that people should respect for IP."
Then why should anyone respect your IP?
"I don't believe in IP and I don't think they deserve it. Is the amount of effort they are putting to produce a song, really worth the millions of dollars they are claiming that they must make?
No way."
And yet no one on slashdot can see the obvious "but we can't leave it alone either". However much or little you value IP.You have always had the choice since the beginning to leave IP alone.
"That's why they will lose. That's why they are losing every second. And at some point, they will really understand that resistance is futile."
Funny how the "they will lose" and the "but I'm not hurting anyone" excuse collided so badly. Here let me drag the "free advertising" argument in for even greater contrast.
so should psilocybin/ lsd
but meth, coke, and heroin/ opiods must stay illegal for all time
all of the negatives of the drug war mean nothing when compared to what really hardcore addictive drugs do to people
and so marijuana will never be legal as long as mixed in with the marijuana legalization crowd (realistic, responsible people) are some really really ignorant souls about what the unholy trinity of meth/ coke/ heroin does to human beings
all drugs legal != intelligent drug policy
marijuana/ psilocybin/ lsd legal, meth/ coke/ heroin illegal = intelligent drug policy
not all drugs are equal, they must be evaluated on a substance by substance basis
if you don't understand that, you are idealistic and ignorant on the subject
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
he was only able to get two people out of a crowd of five hundred college students to say that downloading a movie or album is wrong. Doesn't this rather indicate that only two in five hundred college students are willing to publicly call many of their peers thieves? Somehow I have the feeling that if Mr. Pogue had instead asked the members of his audience to raise their hands if they believed that such a download is morally justified, he would not have had 498 respondents - and that if he had called for responses by secret ballot, the answer would likewise have been significantly different.
The real test in these cases is how the asshole worded the question. I bet he tweaked it to get the result he set out to get
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Corporations are the last entities that should be consulted regarding morality and ethics. They don't have any because you can't reconcile utility maximizing behavior with behavior that is contrary. Corporations are limited only by what they can get away with or what they think they can get away with. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,501040705-658372,00.html
What about the drug company's? Aren't there some African states that refused to be extorted on licensing arrangements for AIDS drugs? I know I'm supposed to be conditioned that protecting IP is good but isn't saving lives better?
I would expect corporations to want to protect assets. If they can condition the general public to believe...then their stock becomes more valuable which is what it's all about. The unfortunate thing is we let corporations get in a position to dictate morality and ethics when they should have no part in the debate.
I think young people could care less about IP because A: All the good ideas are taken anyways and B: Since they are all taken, how are us youngster's ever supposed to get ahead? Also, I'm completely disillusioned with capitalism. I think people should get 'partnership level wages' based on their position within the company, with the companies profit margin being mandated by the government and excess net profit being divided among employees each month. Minimum wage pisses me off, it's just another way of saying it's okay to fleece the people who actually create the products! And good luck finding a job with your new college diploma. If you get hired you'll wonder why you're learning a totally new skill set than you realized in college with that 20-40 grand you didn't have. College and University are a commercial business now, not education. So, when I download a Movie, a Game, or an App, or whatever, I do so knowing that the people that made it are richer than me, no matter how much they whine and cry about it, and I feel good that I am finally getting something from someone rather than always being taken from. It feels good to be my own Robin Hood. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Somebody with mod points, do the right thing. Vegeta99's post says it in a nutshell.
Could it be that we've come full circle? After all, Bach wasn't paid for works he had written, he was paid to write new things. I wonder what's better, a pop sensation that continues to get paid for one or two good albums over and over again, or a musician who makes a living because people want them to continue producing new and interesting things? Put another way, art is public property and always has been. We pay artists to contribute to our lives, not for the contribution. Encourage the verb, not the noun.
The problem with this is it would invert the power structure. This would put tremendous control into the hands of the actual content creators, as well as the various talented studio people. The companies would have to woo talent as being highly rated in terms of talent would be the only metric. This would create an environment where either studios have to woo potential content creators, or allow the creators to shop around. This would also create tremendous competition, with studios with price ranges for the already successful, ones who did well in their debuts, and ones who have to apply for a loan to even consider getting into he business to begin with (read: the ones who normally would have had to swallow whatever contract terms were to be had to have a significant chance of ever existing on the world stage). Granted, wealthy artists would then have a fair bit of leverage to create a new cartel that could suck, but then there ALREADY ARE artists producing completely independently.
I don't see this as much a problem as when it's the studios who have the power. Studios don't create, the artists create so they should have the power and get the money.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You claim "intellectual property" is a new idea? Maybe to you. Intellectual property is an umbrella term for several legal concepts including copyrights, trademarks and patents.
While the first known use of the term "intellectual property" is in an 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling, the history of copyright law goes back to the invention of the printing press and the increasing spread of literacy. The King of England created the Licensing Act of 1662 to prevent the illegal copying of written works at the time by unauthorized publishers. While this law was passed after Shakespeare wrote his works it was well before Sir Isaac Newton published or even first conceived his writings. Hence you arguments are WRONG.
Furthermore, the various laws that eventually led to the concept of Intellectual Property were passed to protect those that held the legal right to the works in question. Prior to these laws theft of ideas, writings, and concepts was uncontrolled. You call this theft "the free exchange of ideas". It's only free for those that steal the ideas. The person whose ideas you stole have endured an expense of time and energy and possible monetary loss. The whole point of these laws is to let the creator, inventor, discoverer of works determine the usage of their works. If they choose to let them be free to the public that is as much their right as if they choose to charge the public or exclude the public all together. You do not have a right to an others ideas or fruit of their labors in the same manor as you do not have a right to an others personal belongings.
None of the following makes sense: ... unless you do it in a place of business then the government supported RIAA-MAFIA can come and extort you.
...I could go on.
1) you buy a radio, you can play it for free. BUT if you play it at your office or coffee shop then you owe the RIAA money. Those songs are being BROADCAST, anyone can receive and amplify them
2) you buy a TV, you can watch it for free -- even NFL games (which are widely broadcast). BUT if you watch it at your office or bar then you better have "express written consent" to do so. This makes fascism sound almost reasonable by comparison. I mean, you bought the damn TV, the information is being broadcast, you didn't sign anything when you bought it saying how you would and wouldn't use it to receive those broadcasts yet you're beholden to these nutty laws pushed through by the "IP" holders.
3) you can sing "happy birthday" to your friends and family on their birthday. BUT if you go to a restaurant the people working there can't sing "happy birthday" to anyone w/o paying extortion money to the RIAA.
The IP laws are crazy. You're not trying to keep the song "happy birthday" secret, you're BROADCASTING it so everyone can hear it. Then you tell people they're not allowed to sing it themselves w/o paying you money to do so -- like you have a license on their lungs or air or something.
These are the crazy IP laws that will radically change in the next 10, 20, 30 years as the kids behind us grow up and the old "the internet is full of tubes" people finally die.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
The internet has made the import and export of goods instant. Other countries really dont care about IP laws. Knock offs are imported into the usa all the time and sometimes better than the original. Now its the digital age, the same has happened, but much, much faster. Other countries will also improve on the digital files. So I guess you can make all the laws you want, they are not enforceable in a worldwide economy. Personally, IP laws mean nothing to me, and a great deal of people from my generation feel the same. Tomorrow, we will be the leaders of this country
I thought I was going insane, being the only one to make the point the AC just did. I find Stallman's criticism to be truly bizarre. Do the people who reject "intellectual property" reject *all* umbrella terms? Like "significant other" and "toiletries"?
... just one question: Is ownership of radio waves "imaginary property"?
"People who refer to this mythical 'toiletry' are utterly confusing the difference between toothbrushes, razors, and shampoo."
I even debated a guy who argued against the term "intellectual property" on the grounds that you have to be more specific in court, all while citing someone who wrote a paper on intellectual property that used the term in the lay sense and broke it down into all the sub-types.
As for the "imaginary property" chant
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
i recognize every single negative of the war on drugs you can enumerate, a million more you don't, and i will acknowledge for the sake of rhetoric a few fanciful and imaginative negatives
and yet still, when we talk about ONLY the very highly and addictive substances (not just highly addicting, like nicotine, or just inebriating, like lsd, or moderately addictive inebriating, like alcohol) then we are talking about a ball of detrimental effects, due to the chemicals themselves, that is in fact worse than all of the negatives of the drug war
that's real life, on complex hard choices, not just drugs, the choices are all about various shades of grey. the drug war has negatives, no drug war has negatives. in real life, you do not get to choose between shit and roses, but pick which pile of shit smells less. for some drugs, like marijuana, a state of no drug war has less negatives, but still has negatives. for other drugs, like heroin, a state of drug war has less negatives, but still has negatives
welcome to reality, its messy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If a big company wants the IP of a small company, it buys the small company because it's cheaper, garners no negative press, plus they hire the talent that created the IP in the first place so now they work for them.
There are dozens of such examples of small companies bought by large companies: PayPal, Picassa, Macromedia, YouTube, ... the list goes on.
And there are examples of big companies stealing from the little guy. MS has been sued a number of tymes for patent infringement. Luckily they lost, or settled, some.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I would suspect, to a large degree, this has less to do with really believing in IP than simply hating the RIAA and MPAA. This is a situation the RIAA and MPAA have brought entirely on themselves in the way that they've treated people (a great many of them, their customers), since the moment Napster got sued. They made haste in suing, root-kitting CDs, suing more and suing more and so on and so on. They've done nothing but treat their entire customer-base as adversaries and thieves. Why would anyone give a rat's ass about them after that kind of treatment? People will make justifications (rationalizations) for why they think copying a CD or DVD is okay. But I think that in many cases, that's probably just to cover over the fact that their real reason is probably just hate for the RIAA and MPAA. And to me, that's as valid an excuse as any. Show me any business that makes a habit of suing its customers that can succeed for very long? (With the exception of "necessary" industries. (Insurance?))
Just like we did when we allowed Disney to indefinitely extend his copyright?
Similarly, it's a shame that one of most well-known United States signs of IP, the "Happy birthday," song, was copyrighted in 1935 and will have 2030.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
I don't hear anyone complaining about that obscure IP tidbit. YES, THAT INCLUDES OUR GENERATION AND TWO GENERATIONS BEFORE. We think IP's going the user's way? Nope. It's going the corporate way. My guess is these kids and their kids will just balance out the corporation force, but most likely they'll just sell out to The Law, like you say.
"Something is intrinsically wrong when it can be shown that innocent people get hurt as a result of the actions of another"
Well, I'd say that copyright laws with terms of ~ one hundred years or more can be shown to hurt innocent people (most of us) by making culture scarce and expensive for them. Therefore those laws are 'intrinsically wrong'.
I'd also say that when lawmakers and big companies push the ticket too far, i.e. by extending copyright terms whenever Disney wants, it's only logic that the 'innocent people' finds ways around the problem.
the problem is, it requires balance between the sphere of intellectual output that is monetized, and that which naturally belongs to the sphere of shared common cultural riches. it need s afaster retirement timeline to private ownership obsolescence, and a rational realization of what cannot be controlled and owned (file trading on the internet)
as if these means somebody won't still make money, and good money! it is just that the old models won't work anymore, and the corporations are nervous about the unknown
but in the current world, the legions of lawyers representing the corporations, and the congressmen they buy (sonny bono, et al) push the scales firmly in the direction of irrational monetization. in a world where i cannot play "happy birthday" without paying someone, something is seriously broken
it is not that the students don't respect morality. it is that the students don't respect a legal system that is seriously broken and doesn't reflect morality. current ip law is nothing more than an overextended farce. it is not that it shouldn't be respected, but that there is no reasonable way to respect it
somehow, there must be a tension of powers between shared public wealth, and private corporate wealth. there is no such mechanism to legally reflect this tension in the current world. and so all we have is the the ever increasing encroachment of corporate ownership into what should naturally be public spheres of public ownership. and so none of corporate ownership is respected. when naturally some of it should, but not the overextended monstrosity that the corporations currently expect
and it is not up to the corporations to restrain themselves. it is their job to squeeze money out of every possible nook and cranny. that is what corporations to do, that is their nature, it is not their nature, nor should we expect it of them, to restrain themselves. it is our job to restrain them, so they do not become cancerous growths. and we, the legal world and our legal frameworks, are not currently doing that. so we must begin doing that then, so that some of private ownership is respected, not none of it, as currently is the case, because current private ownership laws overreach in time and in venue
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is going to be a great play!
Read Stephan Kinsella's essay: Against Intellectual Property
kids don't care that Britney is not able to keep a Gulfstream IV, and has to replace it with a smaller Gulfstream III, which doesn't have a remote control for its surround sound DVD system.
Copyright is a bargain between producer and consumer, not a right. The producer creates something of interest, and the consumer promises, in return for getting the interesting thing, not to copy it for a period of time. Right now, the producers are demanding that consumers never copy it ever. They're breaking the bargain, so the consumer isn't sticking to his side of the bargain.
http://blog.russnelson.com/economics/a-bargain-not-a-right.html
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"Yes, I would. And I would add that it is not the laws' job to make your business model work."
No, it's the laws job to ensure an equal base for a business model to work. Piracy is not an equality. It's using the hard work of others against them in an unfair transaction.
"This is taken from the point of view that neither the seller nor the buyer should be restricted by the law from doing what they want with their personal property for the period it is in their possession."
Well except for the fact that piratebay doesn't exist for the purposes of "personal property", but to aid an illegal and unfair act.
Only heroes raise their hands. Heroics don't pay off at midterms. Then again, that's never stopped me from shooting: off my mouth, myself in the foot, my hand into the air. YMMV. It could also be that everyone else is brain dead, which would explain quite a bit... -- 1 of 2 students who raise their hand to ambush trick questions.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Now, if some Chinese factory wants to make cloned iPods, put their own name on them, and sell them back to us, good for them! If they can sell the same product at a lower price than Apple, they deserve that income. It's called competition.
You might respond that Apple has to charge more because they have to pay for the research that went into designing the iPod, and I wouldn't disagree. But it's not my fault, or any other potential iPod owner's fault, that Apple chose to structure their business that way: paying the researchers out of money that might materialize down the road someday.
They're in the same boat as a musician who records a song for free and then hopes to get paid later by selling copies. It's a flawed business model, trading actual money today for imaginary potential money next year (when you may not be in a position to compete with others who are selling the same thing), and anyone who gambles like that has to be prepared to lose.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
i said i accept every negative you say about the war on drugs
and then you go and enumerate what i already know
the war on drugs, when it comes to meth, heroin, or coke, is still better than accepting these 3 hardcore addictive drugs into society
if you don't understand or accept or consider what those drugs do to real human lives, you simply do not have a valid opinion
go ahead and enumerate to me the negatives of coke, heroin, or meth on human lives, and then tell me again that the negatives of the war on drugs is still worse, and then i might consider you worthy of talking to
but too many of the type who say "all drugs should be legal" go on and on about the negatives about the war on drugs, and don't say ONE SINGLE BAD THING about the effects of hardcore addictive drugs themselves on human lives and in terms of human suffering
which means their opinions are instantly invalid and flawed and delusional. perhaps the addiction-driven rationalizations of an actual hard core drug addict, in fact
as if society makes some drugs illegal just because uptight social conservatives don't want people to have fun
if only that was reality
in the case of marijuana, society in fact is deeply flawed and racist in the origins of the laws against marijuana (and not alcohol? which is a worse drug than marijuana in addiction and negative effects?)
but when it comes to heroin, coke, and meth, you have to look at what these drugs actually do to people. it frankly zombifies them
and so these substances must be fought. the human toll in misery from marijuana, alcohol: not worse than the misery of a war on these substances. but herion, coke, meth: the human toll in misery of the war on these drugs is LESS WORSE than then human toll in misery of the actual effects of these substances on human lives
to not understand that is to have no real life experience with these drugs
i've seen what these drugs do to lives that would otherwise be rich, and ar enow permanently hobbled
you can't make laws against people cheapening their own lives. people will always go to these hardcore drugs, no matter how much you educate them. and so they must be fought, forever
and this is still cheaper, in actual dollars and in quantities of human nisery, than tolerating heroin/ coke/ meth, in any way
study what hard core addiction does to people
weigh the value of that effect to its proper due
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Here is how it works... I download your shit off the internet for free. If I like it I will go to your concert when you come around my town. If I *really* like your record and I have money I will buy it...sometime. Unfortunately, I am poor so that is not going to happen right now.
Notice that the author never actually says what group he was speaking to, just "100% young people". Given his topic, does anyone else think he either made up the part about 500 people showing up, or they were forced to attend and didn't feel like raising their hands? Or they're from one of those groups where if someone already has their hands up, you don't raise your own because you don't want to stand out? And can anyone else vouch for the numbers present, or the response of the audience?
If he wrote a review of a new cell phone with a particular feature, we'd demand to know the model or at least some examples. But to take this kind of conclusion from an unverifiable, and somewhat unbelievable anecdote? I think the article is alarmist, and easier to write based on such an anecdote than it would be based on verifiable facts.
when George Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody In Blue" he assumed he would hold the copyright to it for 17 years. (I don't know the technical details, maybe copyright law was extendable then
In Gershwin's tyme copyright was 14 years with 1 14 year extension possible.
By patenting an invention you restrict other people not only from using your invention but also from inventing it themselves.
This is one of the problems I have with patents. If two people independently invent something at the same tyme whoever patents it first can prevent the other from benefiting from the invention.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The OP is framing this discussion improperly. This shouldn't be a discussion about morality or ethics; this should be a discussion about what is and what will continue to happen.
The fact of the matter is that companies want the right to sell whatever product or service they like, without being compelled to package those products and services in any way by the government. In this particular case, they're lobbying government to correct the slight of omission against the industry—that is, they feel victimized as no one is really helping them stop so-called "illegal" downloads from occurring and it's law enforcement's duty to step in.
Well I personally believe that any business should have the right to sell whatever they want, packaged any way they want (a broad and untrue generalization if ever there was one, to be sure—certainly we don't want to go back to the early 20th Century robber barons, so there have to be some controls in place to deal with monopolies and such). And I don't support any action that would compel me, were I to start a business, to package my products or services in any particular way. What I sell and how I sell it is a problem for the free market to solve, not government. What companies further want, and will never have, is the right to sell whatever they want packaged any way they want free of restrictions from the customer. This, quite simply, will never happen in any business. At the end of the day, in a capitalist democratic republic, the people can and always will vote with their dollars, and I don't believe that's going to change any time soon, nor should it. We can argue ethics until we're blue in the face, but it won't change reality...specifically, if people don't want to pay for what you're selling and there's an easier, more convenient way to get it, then that's what's happening. Forget about asking Is it right? Is it fair? Instead, try: Is it moot?
Businesses ought to be smart enough to sell customers the products and services they want in the way the customers want them packaged...this isn't rocket science, it's just good business. Music companies used to sell us music, and if you had the tools, you could legally make as many reel-to-reel or cassette tape copies as you wanted, provided they were for your personal consumption (turns out that it's considered "personal consumption" if you take your music over to a friend's house and play it there). Practically, the music companies may not have liked the idea of the time-honored tradition of guys making their sweeties mix tapes from copyrighted CDs...but they were smart enough, after some initial friction I'm sure, to lay off and let things unfold naturally. Sure, they included toothless legalese and mostly kept up a facade of controlling things, but everyone—and I do mean everyone, including those in the biz—regarded such restrictions as quaint. So how did this work out for business? Why didn't the mix tape deep-six their profits? Because mix tapes signal emotional investment to the sweetie-in-question for one big reason: they take time and effort. Music companies that provided music to customers in a way that they found convenient and enjoyable could still generate a good buck.
This time, however, it's completely different (much like it was completely different all the other times, too: cassette deck, reel-to-reel, VCR, CD-R, etc). The fact of the matter is, music companies want to sell people rights nowadays, not music—the right to play this song on this device, the right to transfer this song from device 1 to device 2. But people don't want to pay for these rights...customers want to pay for music. Dealing with companies to buy a legal abstraction is too troublesome when all people want is music, same as they've always had. Since the companies aren't selling music, though, the only way to get it is to steal it. These companies are all too willing to dig into their war chests to pro
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
I think you're taking entitlement to content as some kind of sacred right. Culture, in all its forms, has been historically not free (although it is arguably far more free now than in the past). Now I hate the *AA as much as the next guy, but I don't think that music and movies should just magically be free. That's absurd on it's face. And the quality of music/movies these days isn't so great that I'd say "humanity" is losing out on their content (do you really think tens of millions of people benefit that much from the dribble that comes from pop artists?).
I (and I believe most rational people) have no problem paying a reasonable sum for goods and services. I happily reward good service with extra dollars. The problem with the *AA (aside from their strong arm law tactics) is that the quality of their products is shit and not reflected in the cost of a purchase.
The high demand for content/culture is why they get away with this crap. People need to take a step back, a deep breath, and control their desire to consume media immediately and for free. Seriously, it is possible to go a day without music/TV. I've done it.
then i have no argument with you. the argument i have is with those who think it should be legalized
unless you think it can be fought, and be legalized, at the same time. which is absurd
if you think fighting heroin and legalization can coexist, you don't understand that what motivates people to take something like heroin is a cheapening of their own lives. everyone cheapens their life at some point in their life. it is in fact normal, to cheapen yourself at one point or another, a sort of psychological experimentation. but if heroin is there during that time of weakness, then at that moment in time, you have been given a gateway to a lifetime of zombiehood, because of a brief time period of experimentation? not morally or tactically expedient then to make heroin freely available
in which case, the primary observation is that you must decrease exposure to heroin anyway possible. legalizing it increases exposure, and so legalization is an impossibility if minimizing harm is your goal
every single other tool you have in fighting something like heroin, every single tool and methodology, real and imagined, falls secondary to the most important method: minimize exposure
exposure to the drug itself is the worst problem, because that's all heroin needs
and so legality is never possible if you indeed agree it should be fought
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While the baby boomers are the primary voter base, and the woodstock-turned-corporate-shills generation continues to be in charge of the government at all levels. I think the generation that does not see IP infringement as a crime is in for a rude awakening. Maybe in 30 years, but if they are anything like the free love hippie generation, they will sell out in their old age.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It is something I've thought about over the years. I think that this might be true for say, Photoshop, or windows. If nobody could pirate it hardly anybody would use it and they'd go out of business. For music I'm not convinced of this and here's why:
If some newbie gets onto P2P for the first time and can't find whatever crud it is they listen to then they're going to get frustrated and leave without discovering the joy of all the eclectic and wonderful music out there. They'll just go back to itunes with its crappy catalog. Back in the days of napster it had a great social aspect via its little chat rooms that caused an indie music explosion, yet if you couldn't get the songs you wanted from napster you never would have ended up in those rooms. Now that aspect is diminished but at least once someone gets the hang of the pirate bay they might start browsing through the torrents and grab something that sounds interesting. They might even buy the album as a result. Who knows, it might not even be owned by Sony.
A second reason I'll never stop doing this has nothing to do with 'fighting the man' or such, it's just that I really love music and want to share it with as many people as possible. Not many people are sharing some of the albums I have so I like to keep it out there for more people to experience, no matter who owns the rights. I wouldn't have heard one hundredth of the music I've heard without piracy.
If everybody (using p2p) stuck to their guns on this issue in the way you're suggesting, P2P would be gone in a short time and everybody would be back to getting screwed again. Short of a revolution the RIAA's control of music distribution isn't going away just by a few people not listening to it.
Coke, meth, heroin are illegal now. And yet they have still caused all the misery you speak of. The drug war has not resulted in any decrease in the misery or addiction. In fact, the drug war has made these things worse; that is a documented fact of history that keeps repeating itself.
Let us hope that may be they will change IP laws to make actual sense? (I'm talking about copyright)
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Somehow the whole discussion here takes the side of the consumer who would like to have something for free. Fine. However, did you ever though about where it comes from?
In central Europe we have a problem with MythTV because the electronic program guide is hard to come by. So, I though I could develop such a service. The cost side was quickly estimated. My time for the development, the time to maintain the service, the cost to collect the program information (some TV stations demand money for this information). A quick look showed that the market would be big enough to sustain a business case based on a moderate monthly fee for my service.
The results of a quick survey were disastrous: Many people easily agreed to pay 5-10 EUR per year because they could share the program information with four, five friends. In the end, I had to factor in the people just sharing the information from the service. Due to this, there was no market left, the business case collapsed.
No, I did not spend my time and my money to develop an electronic program guide for MythTV in central Europe.
Did you ever though at how many maybe useful things we do not have because your attitude as a consumer did not make it worthwhile?
No, that's not the worst-case example.
Worst-case example would be something like
"Make thousands of perfect countefeit copies of a DVD
and make heavy dollars selling them."
I think a lot of students would have raised hands here.
But he didn't ask that question.
He just wanted to show how immoral today's youth is,
and that question would have spoiled this.
somewhere in here lies the irony of the matter. regardless of law, it's simply not scarce anymore and since it's ubiquitous, it's now worth nothing. or at least a lot less than it was back in the day when it arrived in a 12" chunk of plastic.
itunes has to be the ultimate proof of the ridiculousness of this digital revolution. we are led to believe that digital music is worth $1.00 per song? it's not even the real thing (compressed) and what do you get with a purchase - the right to listen to a facsimile of music. it's no wonder people download music with regard to the rights of the copyright owner.
in the future, the price of digital music will be corrected. in fact, when I talk to my friends that run record stores, there seems to be a revolution at foot. CDs are being dumped en masse. Why? the guess is that people are realizing that they can make facsimiles of the music on their CDs to play on their sub-audio devices (computers/ipods) AND sell the CDs for cash. this makes even more music available at a lower price than new purchases - in an exchange offers only the sellers - prior cd owner and record store - profit.
the irony in all of this - the cachet of vinyl is increasing because it is a physical item. and scarce. seems to me that making money from music is a losing game.
www.itjerk.com
And I can't wait for that cottage industry 21st century style to dominate the overgrown corporations of the 20th century. I would mod you up if it was my mod day.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
The concept of morality is defined in the greater scope of society, not only within a specific sector. When politicians are corrupted and steal, corporations steal or "steal" by getting all the profits for themselves, when Nike and said companies sell their 10 dollar sweatshop-produced shoes for 200 bucks, when money is god and our culture can be described with one simple word ("capitalism"), why do we expect young people to have any morals? who is moral enough to accuse youngsters of being immoral?
Hey, now that I think about it, let who is without sin cast the first stone.
It isn't a moral issue, it's an economic issue.
For centuries, people have been willing to pay for good, great and less than good art. However you measrues it, what set it apart was the fact that you knew that you could not produce anything as original or creative. Art, in all its forms, was, and is, a scarce resource. Art will continue to be a scarce resource. That scarcity creates an incentive to create art and an incentive to acquire art. (The simplistic argument that "true" artists are blind to the economic aspect of their work and create only because they are compelled by some mystic force is naive.)
People now have the means to copy and widely redistribute art, whether or not they have permission to do that. It's only natural that they quickly decide that they aren't behaving immorally. At the least, that's the obvious way to rationalize the guilt.
But the production of art -- good, bad, whatever -- has always been intimately linked to the economics of distribution. If you want to see, hear or feel art, someone usually had to pay. That created revenue that funded the creation of new art. It was, and remains, our way of determining what we like.
Severing that link means people who create art may stop creating art. Sure, technology now allows everyone to create what they think is art and distribute it around the world. But, what I'm capable of creating isn't art, and, almost certainly, what you're capable of creating isn't art.
A world where artists can't protect their work is a world with a lot less art, and it's a world with a lot of Everyman rubbish masquerading as art.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
For the N+1'th time: *copyright infringement is not stealing*. It's copyright infringement. It's making a copy that the law doesn't authorize. That's not the same thing as actually taking something away from someone. Not to mention that DRM doesn't allow the consumer the freedom to do with the content what they want to.
People have to devise business models that don't rely on being able to sell copies of things that inherently have near zero unit production cost (the incremental cost of producing another copy of a recorded song is near zero -- note that I am specifically ignoring the development cost here). It's a fairly basic principle that in a competitive market the price of a good eventually falls to its incremental production cost. Trying to impose an artificially high price in this situation leads to a black market. Either everyone is going to be a criminal, or this artificial scarcity has to be broken and a solution friendlier to the market has to be found.
There are other business models, though:
* Use recorded music to promote live concerts. Under this model, a musician uses recordings as essentially advertising for live performance. That's a good that cannot be copied -- Neil Young is the only Neil Young, and for many people there is no possible substitute, for example.
* The "street performer protocol" -- provide the next song, or chapter of a book, or movie, only when people have paid enough for the previous one. That means you have to give away enough freebies to get recognized, then "I'll release the next song when people have paid $10,000 for this one". It certainly at least reduces the potential unlimited upside (although music that's being released directly by the artist might find people more willing to pay even after release than when it's being released by a large recording company). But most of us don't exactly have an unlimited upside from our work; why should creative artists be any different?
What this does is effectively charge a price for the scarce good -- the work that hasn't been released yet.
Stephen King tried a variation on this that didn't work maybe 5 years ago, and then tried to use it as a proof that SPP won't work. The variation was to only release the next book if 75% of the people who downloaded the previous one paid for it. Can you see why that's not even remotely the same thing? He wasn't putting a price on the next book, without caring who paid for it; he was still trying to impose a royalty model with perhaps a 25% discount. For the SPP to work correctly, you have to specify *only* the total price for producing the next work. If you want more money, raise the price for the work after that.
If this spells the end for large entertainment conglomerates, it's a small loss (at most) to everyone else. Like anyone else in a declining sector of the economy (buggy whips, anyone?), they can find something else to do. They're essentially only acting as middlemen in a market that doesn't need that kind of thing.
"Yeah, generally it seems to be a pretty common idea. The laws and morality in people's heads does not include corporations. "
Maybe because they're ignorant? What's that you say? Yes they're ignorant because they've been repeatedly lied to both on slashdot and elsewere that this whole issue involves nothing but corporations. But the holders of IP aren't just corporations, but individuals like you and me. Even if money is never lost, the loss of trust and respect is even more important for the continued existance of a society that depends on both.
(its christmas day, time for a little rant!) :D
:D
It amazes me how companies consistently seem to want to invade our private lives.
The creation of a company is nothing more than a legal identity granted by the will of government through statue. Companies gain reduced (often "no") individual liability for its workers.
(Admittedly the world is changing and legislation like the Companies Act in the UK has coded the quasi common law liability into something a little more structured - holding directors at risk)
but nonetheless, companies are given more protection and freedom from dealings than consumers dealing with other consumers because liberal trade relations are good for business.
in turn we ask for companies to play fair. We let them self regulate to the nth degree. Occasionally we let them have the benefit of the doubt. When they are too controlling or unfair we look to regulate - think of contracts and the Unfair Contract Terms (and Conditions) Act.
media cartels are now becoming too demanding on our personal and social life. the limited monopolies we offer them in copyright, contract and patent (the realm of so called 'ip laws' - a layman's grouping of the three. the term "ip law" does not exist in any definition of law) are encroaching and overreaching their limitations. IP is only an assurance mechanism for companies - an assurance of no competition. It is not a controlling method for the end user. In a free market the consumer picks the retailer and agrees with their terms; they should not be automatically subjected to cartel demands!
in the future we will see more restriction on the way companies operate and influence our private lives (private use of our assets!) and more oversight. Law is generally a 5 to 10 years behind the pace of technology - and the speed of adoption of technology is frightening!
i predict that sooner rather than later everyone will have a portable media device, and much like the phone, if we are too restricted on what we do with it, legislation will step and make our use permissible.
After all, we don't have to care about IP when IP is a concern for companies not our private lives.
Have a Happy Christmas Slashdot, I'm off to party
Matt
I'm currently a college student. The current senior class' views are probably what you would expect. They know copyright infringement is illegal but they don't particularly care and go on downloading their movies and music anyway. Their attitudes are similar to their ones on alcohol; don't get caught.
The freshman however, can not even *conceive* of it being wrong. It's like talking to someone who thinks the posted Speed Limit isn't the law and if you say it is they refuse to believe you even after being pulled over. If this one anecdote is part of a greater trend it does not bode well for any buisness that relies on copyright
If you think making money is immoral, might I suggest you move to a different country?
The slashdot summary doesn't help, by tying their commentary against Mr. Pogue to a link that has nothing to do with the Pogue article. Instead, the second link sends us to an unrelated article, that appears to be accredited to Mr. Pogue, even though he said no such thing. Come on slashdot editors, get with it already.
Clearly, there are a number of people here and elsewhere that desire for easily duplicatable artistic works to be available for as large a number of people to enjoy as the ease of duplication makes feasable.
At the moment, the regular market is not providing this, leading to black market solutions.
But the problem with the black market solution, and also the "get rid of copyright entirely" solution is that the pendulum swings too far the other way, removing the ability for people to become professional artists would reduce the amount and quality of such works.
CC addresses part of this issue by providing a means for artists to donate all or part of their work to the public domain, but their scope and means are not adequate to the problem at hand.
What we really need is an organiation (or many) charged with the task of buying works into the public domain. It should not be too difficult to estimate the total monetary value of the various works and thus the total remaining monetary value. If a rights-buying organization offered the remaining monetary value, a rights-holder would be irrational not to sell and realize the remaining value *now* rather than letting it trickle in.
Since there is little profit in this area, such organizations would probably have to be funded mostly by donation, and with limited budgets, would have to carefully choose the works purchased. I propose that one method would be to maximize the total monetary value of works purchased. Such an organization would eventually snap up the more popular works, but mostly quite a ways into the tail due to limited budgets. Another organization could buy "good" works, for whatever value of good that they choose, etc.
Such organizations could be established right now under the current copyright framework, so where are they?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
10, 20, years from now -- I'd like to see how old the professor is -- I bet he was copying Cassette tapes like mad when he was in college but he conveniently lapses that memory to strike a blow for the Recording Industry and maybe pull a grant or two. The music industry has been stealing from performers since the 30's -- If you were black, your music was not played in public and purchased for peanuts and re-recorded under white performers and they became mega-stars. Copying has been "okay" since the technology existed, 8-tracks, Cassettes, even CD's - its just the Internet has provided a "mass market" for trading and now, suddenly it's not fair to the RIAA, etc. People, including the Professor's generation have been copying for over 30 years........ Morality is a steady measurement - its been the same since Socrates days -- only the noble cry unfair when peasants hunt their lands for food. Mule
That is how you responded. I'm confused because I didn't see the person say anything about copying software and making a couple changes.
Whatever rules have been made, there's a fundamental difference: when you steal something from someone, that person no longer has possession of it. Copyright infringement may reduce the value of something, but it doesn't actually prevent the copyright holder from using it.
They'll "grow up"/sell out like the Hippies and turn into reactionary fear freaks who will be as easily manipulated as all previous generations?
Contrary to glorifications, most young people in the late 60s and early 70s were not hippies. They were regular folks who required no sell out to be who they are today.
Ethics and morality is subjective. Some believe in law and intellectual properties that were created to benefit a few. I guess they now believe in Utilitarianism where the right thing to do is the thing that benefits the majority. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
Insofar as there is a shift in the moral zeitgeist it does exclude the corporations but includes the artists. Corporations are viewed as pathetic middlemen who want 15 dollars for something I can burn for a dime. Artists however are to be praised and loved. If anything, the young people tend to want the artists to be the sole beneficiary of the work even when they legally don't own the rights themselves. I've heard many a diatribe against the RIAA on the grounds of artists rights. That above the 10 cents the product costs 100% of that should go to the artist. Though, even that goes back to freedom of information, rather than the non-moral agency of corporations. So the question becomes how does an artist make money on a product which, due to a moral paradigm shift, is no longer required to be bought to be enjoyed and could only be sold by the artists themselves? How does one make money off an army of followers who don't pay for their information?
It has nothing to do with trust or respect or about cheating artists out of money. In fact, the response is flipped in this regard. If it is a good artistic work (movie, song, album) people are more likely to give away more copies for free. How does one make money off a system where the spread of information is directly related to the information's merit, and the popularity thereof is viewed as the reward rather than profit?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Yes there is a difference between the two acts, but the point is that they are similar in the sense that we as a society have arbitrarily created rules for a reason. In the case of copyright it is to motivate people to expend their capital and energy and produce something in the hopes that value will be created. In the case of real property it is to motivate people to expend their capital and energy to produce something in the hopes that value will be created. Both of these allow our economy to function.
The fact that the copyright holder can still use their work is really not the issue, the issue is exactly what you stated and that is that the value may be reduced.
on both ends = PROFIT$ ... somewhere.
RR
"It has nothing to do with trust or respect or about cheating artists out of money. In fact, the response is flipped in this regard. If it is a good artistic work (movie, song, album) people are more likely to give away more copies for free. How does one make money off a system where the spread of information is directly related to the information's merit, and the popularity thereof is viewed as the reward rather than profit?"
It has everything to do with trust and respect. Money is just how some choose to demonstrate that. For example if I as a musician decide of my own free will sign a contract with Sony BMG for exclusiveness? Someone sitting in the middle of nowere with their P2P client running distributing my music worldwide is basically saying they don't respect my ability to make decisions for myself. That would truelly be an odd position for a forum that talks about individual freedom. It's also a lost of trust in that my "customers" can't be trusted to honor their part of the bargain that I released my music under. We already have a working system of reward/punishment. Not liking the price is part of that system. Downloading it for free in an effort to circuvent that system is not.
I'm not sure exactly what question was asked to get that 2-in-500 response. It would be interesting to know for obvious reasons.
There could be many reasons for that response, like mistrust in IP laws, the awareness that music middle-men (producers) suck profits from performers, things like that. It would depend on the context of the question.
How about murder?
Are you adequate?
Progress.
It's about time somebody made this point.
Laws, in a democracy, are supposed to be made by governments that are of the people and for the people.
I'm annoyed at this article for the underlying assumption that copyright infringement = theft, while offering absolutely nothing to back up that assertion.
The reason that people don't see non-commercial private infringement as immoral or wrong is that, not only is it not "wrong" or "immoral", it's not even an ethical/moral issue. It's at best an economic issue, or an administrative issue.
Copyright has been broken ever since it's been applied to the behavior of individual citizens. Copyright law wasn't originally concerned with the actions of private citizens, it was concerned with the actions of publishers.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Thanks for all the advice (everyone). I have a license for Photoshop versions 1-4, but I don't think they allow upgrades to the latest one for one cheap upgrade price. But yeah, that's always a good strategy.
You may be able to find PS 6 or 7 that is an upgrade, then use it to upgrade to CS3. You may find something you can upgrade at a computer show, you can check out Super Computer Sale for any sale events near you. I learned from another /.er months ago that you can also find old versions, full as well as upgrades, of PS on eBay.
My college has Macromedia Studio 8 (or whatever it's called) for $75. I could buy that and upgrade to CS3 I bet, for substantially less than full retail.
You've got to be careful and check the versions, both as I say about above at computer shows or on eBay as well as what the college sells. If you plan to upgrade, and I bet most will upgrade eventually, you need to make sure the version you buy is upgradeable. Educational versions are not typically upgradeable. For instance I got Macromedia Studio with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Freehand through college however it specifically states on the license and packaging that it's not upgradeable. If you look at what eBay has you want to make sure if you buy from eBay what you buy specifically states it is a full or upgradeable version. There are some unopened boxes listed but if it is opened then it's a good idea to make sure the seller has a License Transfer Agreement filled out from Adobe. Otherwise you may not be able to upgrade.
Should there be a Law?
They are learning from all the evil corporations that rule the world that morality is just another obstacle, just like laws, when it comes to business and money. Not all companies are like this, but a lot of the big famous ones CERTAINLY are. =[ Government doesn't really help... no Kyoto signing for instance?
-1 overrated. Doesn't understand the post he was replying to. Doesn't understand the basic economics of paying people for their work. Relies on the same tired, defeated arguments we see all the time.