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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..
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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Yes we would. (Since you didn't support your argument with any facts, I don't feel compelled to do the same.)
Personally, I think what will happen in 10, 20, and 30 years is that these college kids will finally get real jobs and realize that when folks steal their stuff without compensation, they don't get paid. Then they'll all bemoan the next generation who will be hacking copyright protection with their newfangled brain implants.
E pluribus unum
"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.
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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.
"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.
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.
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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.
Stricter enforcement, of course. A professor at the University of Utah law college describes how everybody infringes. It's a veritable goldmine!
The good stuff starts at the bottom of page 7 of the PDF.
I'd have to go look up exactly when copyright was conceptually founded (I believe someone posted in a article a couple of months ago that it has existed since the days of the Romans conceptually that puts it back into at least 1000AD or so), but it is explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. So it's been around since the late 1700's. I believe John Locke wrote about it prior to the 1780's or so. Johnson and Johnson is currently suing the American Red Cross over a trade mark registered in the 1890's. The U.S. Patent Office has been around since around the time of the founding of the United States. For instance, Abraham Lincoln was proud of the fact that he was a patent holder.
So at least two such concepts pre-date things like Women's Sufferage, or the concept that African American's shouldn't be held as Slave's in the South in the United States. Given those dates, I'm reasonable confident there is no one alive who remembers before the three concepts of Intellectual Property existed (alright, there might be a handful alive from the trademark date I quote, but I think trademarks pre-date the early 1890's, I'm just too lazy to go find out when).
So while you refer to them as "new"... You can only mean new in comparison to concepts like "bipedal humans that walk upright" or "humans forming civiliations and moving from hunter gather to agricultural modes of survival", and still be intellectually honest (or grossly uninformed on the concepts).
We have the works of Shakespeare and Newton, because they eventually fell into the public domain. Now, if you want to argue that current U.S. copyright law is just stupid, I'll back you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, as a citizen of the U.S. and the U.S. being a signer of the Berne Convention, means that Copyright Law can't be made to be sane. It could however be lowered to limits of the Berne convention, and then at least copyright would expire in 50 years after the work was published.
Assuming that Disney isn't successful forever, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck will fall into the public domain. The entire music catalog of the Beetle's will be in the public domain in Britain within the next 20 years (they refused to increase copyright past 50 years recently). The original works of Einstien, Dirac, Godel, Turing, Plank, Hemmingway, Authur Miller, Tennesse Williams and others should eventually fall into the public domain (contemporary notable scientists and and playwrights). Hopefully within my life time (the next 40-60 years). The works will be preserved as long as it takes to get them into the public domain. The sad part is that 99% won't be. Only the things that were recognized as great works at the time will be. Who knows, maybe Shakespeare had a truely great pupil lost to the sands of time. It'd be far easier for libraries and other archivest to preserve if they didn't have to worry about copyright being an issue. It'd be easier to stand on the sholders of giants if I could use giants who were alive during my lifetime...
Kirby
Personally I think what will happen in 10, 20, or even 30 years is that these industries will finally be so impacted by the devaluing of distribution and production that they'll have to change business models. I also personally think that morally, copyright infringement IS a bad thing as by removing yourself from those sales completely you hurt the whole line of people involved from point "hey guys i got this idea for a song" to "hey guys, ima buy this (album|song)". Sadly this includes the talentless middlemen who provide nothing towards the finished product beyond a cool building to record it in.
Imagine though, a world where recording studios spend their time headhunting TALENT and then marketing that talent to artists. I'm not just talking about the musicians themselves, but the mixers, the choreographers, every step in between. A company that was a firm reputed to have power content creating talent and just needed someone to insert content would always have tremendous value to humanity until art is officially dead. You can pretty much s/recording studios/movie industry/ as well.
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.
If a company such as this was created, was profitable, and gained serious investment backing i think the current boys club would have a bloody stroke on the spot.
Then there are TV studios, whose current model is to have their customers pay for the privilege of having their eyes sold off wholesale for the content they offer. To boot, it's always the SAME offerings from any cable company anywhere for the most part. Hopefully the pushes for a-la-carte content will shift this current situation but who knows.
I imagine a world where customers pay for the content they want to see, and stations shift their model to being paid to provide the best range of coverage for their local regional demographic. Skews of what is popular changes by region a fair bit, and there would be value in doing the research to find what is popular in what proportions to see how to allot ones budget on the rights from the creators.
Sadly, I do not actually believe any of this will come to pass in a means that benefits the consumers.
Also sadly, many see copyright infringement as the means to nudge the current top-heavy structure, but I still find most people are merely rationalizing their desire for free-as-in-beer content that isn't free. If one is truly so self-righteous about it, consume truly free content. There's only metric goat-loads of it out there.
Too bad most people also think Good Content == { Shiny Expensive Effects , TnA , Celebrities } exclusively.
A Merry X-Mas Rant from Lower Canuckia
Ice Cream has no bones.
Hey, a discussion of intellectual property on slashdot! This will surely cover new ground. I can't wait to learn what slashdot thinks!
So you implicitly agree with the GP. The basis for the present set of IP laws is the belief that people should have to pay for creative works in perpetuity for each and every discrete use of the works.
The belief that major corporations have the right to make a profit through IP, even if it harms the public, is not correct. The point of patents and copyrights are to promote the publics best interest by creating an incentive to create new works that benefit all. After a period, the works are then supposed to go into the public domain for use by anybody that wishes to use them.
The reason why so many young people don't believe in IP isn't that they think that the works aren't valuable, its that they don't think that they are as valuable as the corporations are wanting them to believe. Realistically, as Lincoln said, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." And that's what's happened, the media outfits in particular have pushed so far to force a profit that they've actually managed to undermine their position.
And to throw in a Star Wars quote: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
The media corporations largely brought this on themselves by pushing to extend their protection to beyond the average life expectancy of a person born on the day a work is created. If they wish to have people respect their rights, perhaps they should respect the rights of the public at large first. I have very little faith in them to ever do so.
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.
It would have surprised Shakespeare to learn that his plays were not the property of his theatrical company. It would have surprised him even more to see them performed by a rival.
You do not need to go to law when your patron is Elizabeth or James.
Copyright gave voice to writers of lower and middle class origins. Writers who were not independently wealthy, Writers who were not tenured professors or clerics.
Why? After all nothing was taken... It shouldn't be illegal, either.
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.
I realise I'm in the minority here but I'm in my late twenties and have enough disposable income to regularly buy music CD's or films on DVD. Generally if I want something in particular, I download it. Either way I never pay for it if it's from the major labels or studios. To some this is reprehensible but to me the action of giving any company associated with the RIAA money is worse.
If the artists were getting fairly compensated then maybe I would have come around. If they hadn't lobbies so hard for all these bullshit laws then I might not have these opinions today.
As far as I'm concerned: the artists can starve. Let this entire industry crumble. I have a sneaking suspicion that people would continue making music anyway, because it's what they love. Today a band can form, play some live gigs, press their own CD's, and still turn a profit. It might not be enough to live on if they don't get really famous, but you can make enough to recover your costs and then some. For most bands signed to the labels this never happens - they are left with a debt to pay off.
Anyhow, my original point was that hopefully the kids of today will be just as alienated by the kinds of tactics that we're seeing that they won't grow up and get with the program. A guy can dream eh?
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
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Something is intrinsically wrong when it can be shown that innocent people get hurt as a result of the actions of another. If someone is performing actions that hurt some innocent party, then they are wrong to perform those actions. Stealing music, such that those people who spent a part of their lives creating and distributing it do not receive compensation for their efforts, then those people are being hurt. They are, as it turns out, innocent of any wrondoing. Therefore, those people that are downloading music without compensating those people that created the music and promoted the music and distributed the music through legal channels are absolutely, positively, as a matter of absolute, "no relative morality applies" WRONG. What the future holds is less people willing to produce music for the rest of us to enjoy. Better get happy with your old copies of the Beatles and Led Zep, 'cuz there's not going to be that sort of effort put forth by people working like slaves (the Beatles were some of the most hardworking musicians in history - and it shows) to bring us memorable music.
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?
Copyright infringement isn't "stealing". One important distinction is that when something is stolen, the person or organization from which it is stolen is deprived of an object of value. When copyright infringement occurs, whoever owned the relevant intellectual property rights is not deprived of anything except possibly for potential income. And the statistics on downloading vs. legal sales (which basically show that the former doesn't do much if anything to actually decrease the latter) seem to demonstrate that the potential income in question would only rarely, in the absence of infringement, translate into actual income.
The vast majority of people who don't believe that downloading a movie off of BitTorrent is immoral will almost certainly tell you that shoplifting is immoral. And the above-mentioned difference is a large part of the reason for that.
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I'd have to go look up exactly when copyright was conceptually founded
The first modern copyright law (as opposed to the stationers' copyright, which was a different animal) was the Statute of Anne, enacted in England in 1710. The very basic underlying principles are related to (though quite distinct from) patent law, which dates back to the Venetian Patent Ordinance of 1473. However, we do know that the very fundamental concept of patent law dates back to at least circa 215 BCE -- sort of. There was this joke about the Sybarites, who were Greek colonists who had, some centuries earlier, lived on the Italian peninsula, and who were infamous for their luxurious lifestyle. The joke was that if a chef in Sybaris invented a new recipe of merit, he could have the exclusive right to make that food for one year. This was intended to encourage chefs to create new recipes which would then ultimately be enjoyed by everyone once the period of exclusivity ended.
but [copyright] is explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution
Well, not explicitly. The word copyright never appears; it's just an "exclusive right" granted to authors for their writings. The term 'copy right' was already known, though; in fact, Congress had used it prior to the drafting of the Constitution. But this is neither here nor there.
The U.S. Patent Office has been around since around the time of the founding of the United States. For instance, Abraham Lincoln was proud of the fact that he was a patent holder.
Well, no. The United States was founded in 1776, but the United States did not grant patents or have any power or means for doing so, until 1789, and even then the first US patent law wasn't enacted until 1790, effectively creating the Patent Office. Lincoln wasn't around until quite some time later.
but I think trademarks pre-date the early 1890's, I'm just too lazy to go find out when
Trademarks are ancient, probably dating back to before recorded history. Federal trademarks are of more recent vintage.
We have the works of Shakespeare and Newton, because they eventually fell into the public domain.
Actually, copyright didn't exist in Shakespeare's time, and as far as I know, Newton never sought any. More importantly, we have their works because they published them or because noble pirates pirated them, thus happening to preserve them for us.
Now, if you want to argue that current U.S. copyright law is just stupid, I'll back you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, as a citizen of the U.S. and the U.S. being a signer of the Berne Convention, means that Copyright Law can't be made to be sane.
All we have to do is withdraw from Berne. The political branches can do this fairly easily if they choose. It's far from impossible, and since the one most called-for copyright reform is for terms shorter than Berne permits, I think we can anticipate withdrawal for sure. I look forward to it, as Berne is worthless.
It'd be far easier for libraries and other archivest to preserve if they didn't have to worry about copyright being an issue.
Again, something that is far easier if we dump Berne.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's kind of scarry to see this attitude (IP = imaginary) coming from american students. Forget right and wrong for a moment and think about survival and self-interest. Apparently these students don't realize that the country they live in has no other real 'industry' anymore. We have offshored a the vast majority of production, and we are in the process of offshoring services (call centers, more to come). Sure, there will always be some level of 'physical' work needed - but it has dwindled, and our economy exists now primarily based on the concent of intellectual property - because it's the main thing we produce in this country. Without it the US economy would fall apart. Those of you not from the US may chose to dismiss this out of hand, but it is also true for many other 'first world' nations to varynig degrees. It's one thing for chinese companies to ignore intellectual property and sell iPod clones in China. If we toss out the concept of IP in the US and they can sell those clones back to the US (and other first world nations that currently respect IP) then Apple goes out of business. I'm talking about exact iPod clones made by the same plants making them for Apple, if you're truely throwing out IP let's even put the apple brand on them and the Apple phone support number while we're at it - it's not "real" property, right? The same applies to many companies whose primary creations are intellectual.
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
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.
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.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Ummmm...no. He might've been pissed off (perhaps gotten involved in sword fight or an act of petty revenge), but the playhouses & writers of those times copied & ripped each other off all the time - Shakespeare is well-known for the amount of stuff he ripped off from his contemporaries.
Here and here are links which mention the copyright context in Shakespeare's time. The first link is specifically about Shakespeare & describes how he had to fight to make money from his plays, and the 2nd mentions Shakespeare briefly in the context of an argument of why copyright is a good idea (which I don't necessarily agree with), but both of them are fairly straightforward that copyright as we know it did not exist in Shakespeare's time, and that he did not depend on copyright in order to make a living.
Realistically, as Lincoln said, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Abe shot first!
Who is John Cabal?
Networks will take less chances, since under current broadcasting there are a number of eyes on a station just because of what time it is, and what show precededs or follows. On demand means the network needs the show to be a hit, before they even air it; so you'll end up with the same formulaic stuff, except there's no possibility of a groundbreaking "gem" emerging from the riff-raff. Shows like "Seinfeld" would be cancelled before it could become a hit because the money to make the next episode didn't show up.
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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.
To not use their products at all (or as little as possible) is even better, thus making you not a freeloading thief, nor a supporter of the MAFIAA. That's what I do.
The trouble is that a lot of this stuff is just part of our culture. As a nerd particularly things come up as a kind of humour (overdone by shows like Family Guy IMHO) where people make obscure references to films, shows and music. That's not all there is to it of course but it's a part.
Films like Full Metal Jacket, or Lord of the Rings. I didn't go to see it in the cinema but I did download lotr. Reading the book just doesn't cut it in this sense (of course it's better, that's not what I'm saying). I'm sorry but I just can't reconcile cutting out the studios altogether and still being friends with my friends and part of society.
In a cultural sense the labels and studios really have us by the balls. They own our culture.
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?
"People can still sell their intellectual labor even without "intellectual property" laws - and the labor is where the value comes from."
Well Sparky, since you're so friggin' bright, perhaps you can tell us how an author would make the money to reimburse him or her for the time and effort spent in writing that novel.
As far as clones, perhaps you don't understand the concept. It's taking something and duplicating it, not creating a product which simply performs the same functions.
"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."
And here you demonstrate your utter lack of understanding of the world. How the hell would Apple pay their researchers? From the generous donations of people such as yourself, who altruistically want the world to progress?
At least be honest so you don't have to conjure up lame rationale. You just want the cheapest version of something and are willing to support rip-off scumbags to get it.
"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)..."
Not if they don't rip it off. What part of creating your own product do you have such a hard time with? Oh yeah, I already answered that. Paying for the result.
"If the artists were getting fairly compensated then maybe I would have come around."
That sir, is a baldfaced lie. The tenor of your screed belies your verbiage. See the following:
"As far as I'm concerned: the artists can starve."
I just want my cookies and I want them free!
"I have a sneaking suspicion that people would continue making music anyway, because it's what they love."
They love eating and sleeping under roofs too, but you don't give a crap about that, only getting freebies. That love argument is only put forth by the uncreative in order to shaft the creative.
"Today a band can form, play some live gigs, press their own CD's, and still turn a profit."
As long as they do every damned thing on their own and don't decide to hire out any portion of the process thereby freeing themselves of drudgery and making more time available to create. Oh, and adding that cost to their product, thereby making it less free for you.
"A guy can dream eh?"
Of cookies, music and videos he doesn't have to pay for. I know you're lying because if you actually thought as you write, you would simply not access the talents of say Pink Floyd and rely exclusively on artists who press their own CDs. Instead, you sneak around and rip them off because you really do want their stuff, you just want it free.
No, Berne is insane already. We need much shorter, fixed terms of years with renewals (where the maximum possible term is still shorter than Berne). We need to narrow the scope of copyright (e.g. architectural copyright needs to go). We need strict formalities, including registration, publication, deposit, and notice. We need to broaden exceptions to copyright in order to bring it in line with the public norms that exist as to works, unless there's some case where the public norm is so odious that it cannot be left to stand (not that I'm aware of any such). We need to get rid of sections 104A and 106A.
There is, in fact, a whole laundry list of things to do. Shorter terms is just one of them, and IMO, not even the absolute most important of them.
But all those people who want anything less than life+50 -- such as the people who (for whatever reason) want to return to the original 14+14 term -- necessarily support withdrawal from Berne. So there really does seem to be some support for it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's Poisson, since fundamentally you're dealing with counting statistics. In the limit of large N (as in, 5000 out of 1000000), it is very nearly Gaussian, but for small N the difference becomes important. (One way to see this is to notice that the Gaussian distribution has tails that extend to infinity on both ends, while our probability distribution has to go to zero at zero.)
This is the same way Microsoft uses piracy to dominate, if everybody uses their software (legally or not) then they control the market and people don't look for real alternatives.
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Your "Where is it written" was quite funny, but your anon reply calling AlterTick a "dimwit" was rude and plain wrong and warrants a Supreme smackdown.
A Supreme Court smackdown to be precise, dimwit.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 establishes both patents and copyrights and it does so upon the exact same basis.
Fox Film Corp. v Doyal, 286 U.S. 123, 127 (1932)
The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.
U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. 334 U.S. 131, 158 (1948);
Repeats the above quote verbaitim.
Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975);
Again repeats the above quote verbatim.
Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 429 (1985);
The monopoly privileges that Congress may authorize are neither unlimited nor primarily designed to provide a special private benefit. Rather, the limited grant is a means by which an important public purpose may be achieved.
And for the coup de grace, Feist Pub. v. Rural Telephone., 499 U.S. 340, 349 (1991)
The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
Game. Set. match. Smackdown.
Any benefit given to creators is merely a means to an end.
Any benefit obtained by creators is purely incidental to the intended purpose of public benefit.
I would have to Google more to quote the exact Supreme Court ruling, but the Supreme Court has explicitly stated providing a benefit to creators is an invalid and unconstitutional purpose for any patent/copyright law. A law to provide benefit to creators at the expense of the public or independent of public benefit would be unconstitutionally NULL AND VOID.
Creators have absolutely no inherent right to obtain patents or copyrights. Patents and copyrights would not exist at all, other than the public willingly chooses to do so for their own intended benefit. All such creations original lie in the public domain, they are temporarily lifted out of the public domain by the PUBLIC's grant of patent/copyright, and the creation is required to fall back to the public domain and return to public ownership. The patent/copyright grant is only given because the public believes it is in its self interest to do so, they only continue to be granted so long as the public considers it in their self interest to continue granting them, and they only exist and only last so long as the public considers it in the public's benefit that they do so.
While "all" may benefit, this is a secondary result
No. It is the sole purpose. Any profit or other benefit obtained by creators does not even rank as "secondary", any profit or benefit to creators is a mere side effect.
If we had a magic fountain spouting a limitless supply of creative works, then professional authors and inventors would be in the exact same employment boat as buggywhip makers. They would be free to engage in creation as a hobbyist if they happen to enjoy doing so, and they would be perfectly free to sell their work if someone happens to want to buy it, but they would have no entitlement to any special protection to sue anyone for anything.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.