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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?'"
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.