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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?'"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.