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The Semantics of File Sharing
ethericalzen writes "The LA Times has published an opinion article about the legal semantics and analogies of file sharing. The article includes arguments from those who believe file sharing is theft and those who strongly disagree. As it points out, the common analogies to theft are often incomplete or inaccurate. The author states, "balancing the interests of content creators against the public's ... is a much more complicated task than erecting a legal barrier to five-fingered discounts." He recognizes that it is not a trivial concept, and that the clamoring from both camps about definitions and moral boundaries will dictate how businesses and users function in the future."
So in other words its just an article that is what Slashdot is like every time an *AA story gets posted? Some calling it theft and others saying its not?
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
The last resort of the desperate Internet argument.
Still, this will either a) finally put down on paper that file sharing is not theft, or b) put down on paper that the exchange of copyrighted information is, in fact, theft, and then everyone is in a world of poop. My old VHS recordings of Red Dwarf and The Muppets will suddenly become a complicated legal quagmire.
Now, quagmire is semantically defined as...
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Some things really just need to be explained in terms of themselves. Computer networks are not highway systems. They're not houses. They're not cars, or floor waxes, or dishwashing detergents. They do a totally unique thing, using technologies and paradigms that didn't even exist before computers were invented to make use of them.
OF COURSE analogies don't work.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
It always amused me how the popular analogy from the other camp was "Oh, so if you want a car, it's okay to steal it is it?" So they can get all high and moral. But when you break it down and say "Okay, I'm going to make an exact duplicate of your car, never once depriving you of the usage of it. It will not inconvenience you in any way." The argument rather falls flat on it's face.
The whole "filesharing = theft" equation is almost entirely down to MPAA, RIAA and other organizations brainwashing people. Saying something a 1000 times doesn't make it true. If it did, downloading WOULD be theft by this point. But it's still copyright violation, which is why these groups, with their large political donations, have made copyright violation are far FAR harsher crime than theft ever was.
I break into your house and nick your Transformers DVD, at worst I'd probably go down for 30 days, unless I'm haibitual. Small fine probably. The charge will be breaking and entering, theft etc... I download Transformers from you instead, we BOTH face tens of thousands of dollars in fines, and many years in jail.
You're better off, from a jailtime perspective, heading into your local WalMart, nicking a few DVD's, then rape the cashier on the way out. You'll serve less time than if you get caught downloading the movie.
The semantic aren't really the issue here, as the powers that be want to have their cake AND eat it too. They want the association in the public eye to be IT'S THEFT! IT'S NO DIFFERENT THAN STEALING A CAR! But in the back rooms they know this is bullshit, and continue to push on with copyright violation punishments being exponentially increased.
What you or I call it is irrelevant.
"Downloading a movie off of the Internet is the same as taking a DVD off a store shelf without paying for it," adds the Motion Picture Assn. of America.
If this were true, the punishment would be the same.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
Any time you find weasel words and bad analogies going unchecked, follow the money trail. This isn't about artist's rights. If anyone gave a crap about that there'd be an uproar about unfair record contracts and middle men getting all the money. Basically in this case you have:
1) Artists who hope to get rich by gaming the system (as a few artists certainly have).
2) Middle men going to extreme measures (like bankrupting or jailing people, draconian drm) to protect their "right" to collect most of the money.
3) Lots of people who are happy to take content without compensating anyone for it.
There are exceptions but the status quo is pretty bad. Still, the human race has bigger problems. Pollution. Overpopulation. War. Disease. Compared to that this is all petty bullshit and a waste of words. All these people just need to stop grubbing for every last dollar and accept that sometimes life isn't going to hand them what they're due, what they're worth, or what they've earnt. Other people will take you for all that you're worth if they can - it doesn't give you the right to adopt the same attitude.
In other words: Life ain't fair. Get over it. There are many more important things than the latest film or pop song. Stop penalizing everyone you can to protect your own money grubbing arse.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Seriously. The copies have value (otherwise, why would you spend the time to get them?). When you download something, the result is that more people have these valuble copies. For some kinds of things, this may even increase the value of copies that other people already have (anything that has network effects). So by downloading a copy of something, you create value. The only catch is, the copyright holder isn't able to take out their cut.
Copyright violation is not theft. Period, and end of story. There is no semantical issue here, its simply not true.
Now, that said it may ( or may not ) be a civil offense, and even may become a criminal offense if the IP industry gets it way, but its not by definition theft nor will it ever be.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No.
Theft is Theft.
Copyright infringement is Copyright infringement.
Both illegal, but both very distinct and seperated.
Why do people not get this?
I have a word for "file sharing": I call it "speech". I have the Right (as in God-given, inalienable, fundamental, and/or natural -- take your pick) to repeat any speech that enters my realm of experience from any source.
Before the internet became popular, copyright did not very significantly encroach upon the territory of Free Speech. Now, no one can reasonably claim that copyright does not restrict Free Speech and education. Obviously, Free Speech is more important than copyright, just as Democracy is more important than monopoly privileges.
File sharing is Free Speech.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Every illegal download is a lost sale.
Their entitled to THOUSANDS OF TIMES THEIR ACTUAL LOSSES from every infringer they haul into court.
You can absolutely identify the infringing user and computer from nothing more than an IP address and a timestamp.
There is no other explanation for the overall decline in CD sales.
We're only doing this for the artists.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No. Theft is Theft. Copyright infringement is Copyright infringement. Both illegal, but both very distinct and seperated. Why do people not get this?
Either way, you're getting something you haven't paid for, so the distinction is lost on most people.
"No, having a copy of this CD isn't stealing because it's intellectual property!" doesn't make sense to most people.
How about "No, having a copy of this CD isn't stealing because I didn't take it away from anyone!"?This article gives a surprisingly nuanced and fair overview of the issues at hand. We've been over these things a million times on Slashdot, of course. Still, it's encouraging to see the greater public getting their heads around what really is a complex issue.
The one point I don't think gets mentioned nearly enough is the potential value of free copying to society. We hear plenty about the supposed cost. But in a world with liberal sharing of creative works, those works will get into the hands of many more people, including people of limited means. People will be exposed to amazing works they might have otherwise missed. Works will have to compete for attention based more purely on their content, rather than on the marketing muscle behind them. New works will be created that are inspired by, and in some cases built from, the numerous creative sources made available through sharing.
Best of all, free copying creates a worldwide decentralized backup system for these works. Many works will be saved which might have been otherwise lost because they were copyrighted for far longer than they were profitable.
We are witnessing the beginning of a new era, where creativity spews forth from all corners and mixes in many unexpected ways. Much of it will be crap, but some of it will be mind-blowingly fantastic. An environment of sharing with few restrictions will make this possible, and it will preserve the best of what is produced for generations to come.
The internet IS a peer to peer file sharing tool.
expandfairuse.org
have been giving away free content since inception. this is of course supported by advertising. the business model works just fine
business based on the distribution of books, dvds, cds, etc., meanwhile is based on the control of tangible media you need to manufacture, put on a truck, and ship to a store
what the internet did was force the radio/ tv economic model on the book/ dvd/ cd distributors
it's disruptive technology defined. and, unfortunately for entrenched business interests based on distribution of tangible media, completely irreversible and completely unstoppable
meanwhile, all of the moral arguments are complete bullshit. it's just a business earthquake, plain and simple. pointing to morality is merely crocodile tears on the part of some very powerful, but dying businesses
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's crap.
Stealing is a verb. It is an act that involves taking something to which you're not entitled. That's it. You are, once again, conflating theft (a legal construct which involves deprivation of property) with stealing (a verb). THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. You are also conveniently ignoring the fact that the onus under the law is on the person committing the act, not the impact on the owner.
It doesn't matter that the owner has more, even if there are infinitely many more. You aren't punished because someone has lost something; you're punished because you have committed a transgression against someone. We don't care, as a legal matter, whether you took a dollar from a dishwasher or from Donald Trump, who'd never even know it was gone. It's something that is legitimately and legally for sale, which you acquired without paying for. You have stolen. Idiotic semantic arguments (which use 'steal' and 'theft' interchangeably, but try to split hairs on fractional parts of hand-picked definitions) notwithstanding, there's no issue here.
This is worse than the utterly moronic "piracy is only on boats" horseshit that is scattered around Slashdot. Newsflash, Dexter: 'piracy' has been used in the modern sense since the 1880s. It's a word more deeply established than "computer".
The real problem here is that the RIAA exists in it's present form in the first place. Why should the distributor make most of the money? They aren't a hard working group of people that earn a small honest margin spreading the word about musicians, they are a cartel that controls the music industry. If I download, they have effectively done nothing anymore. They have offered no service, no physical media for my convenience, nothing at all. Why should they get any money? The one tiny thing they do for the artists is obsolete, only their totalitarian control of the industry keeps them where they are, and they are frightened because they know their currently existing power is the only thing keeping them around. If we bought direct from artists at several times what they make now from the RIAA, we'd be paying next to nothing for music, benefitting the artists more, and be exposed to more varieties of better music. I say steal from the RIAA until they rot and die and their bloated carcass has to be dynamited after washing up on the beach, just send a few $ to the artists.
If that's the assumption we're working with, then ok, sure.
I don't think i've bought an album without hearing what's on it in a long time though, and i'm really not likely to either. I prefer (morally, if you will) to support artists i like directly, and that's because i know the money won't actually make it to them otherwise.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Oh yes it would be!!
If such a replicator existed, then the manufacturers of cars, candy-bars and computers absolutely would be claiming copyright (or whatever kind of "intellectual property" they could muster) on their products.
Sure it would be a stupid idea, and sure it wouldn't work ... but since when has that stopped people?
What the real problem is is the view in our society that monetary value is the ultimate achievement, that piece of paper with the number on it or the number in your bank account has no more real value than the ASCII code of the song you download
Apparently you don't understand money. Yes, some people may value the piece of green paper, but it's not the paper or what's printed on it that is important.
The important part is what the money represents.
Yeah, I could trade you 10 cows for a new car, but what if I don't want your car. What if I simply want to give you the 10 cows for the promise that you will give the car to whomever I denote. It's really a standardized form of bartering.
There's no place like
You're both quite correct.. Money is supposed to be a representation of personal bartering power, and it is also becoming increasingly abstracted from the physical medium it's used to represent. These two things aren't mutually exclusive at all, and that poses some interesting issues.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Copyrights have a certain commercial value, which is derived from the saleability of whatever the copyright applies to, and the fact that the copyrighted work should be unavailable from anywhere else. You can buy and sell them as much as you want, but the copyright will be commercially worthless unless its potential for money-making is used. that potential is in the form of sales, where money is handed over in exchange for a copy of the work. Value is exchanged for value.
Every time you pirate a CD, you are undermining the copyright. You have created another source from which copyrighted works can come, which eats into the value of the copyright itself. You are gaining the value of the copyrighted work, yet there is no equivalent exchange. The copyright holder ends up with a slightly depreciated version of what he owned before you pirated the work. You are stealing value from the copyright holder for your own gratification.
But that's just the way I rationalise it. I can see why people would not see piracy as stealing. I was pretty sympathetic to your viewpoint right up until here:You have. They have entitlements to their fair share, being the ones who have and who are paying for those copyrighted works, and their distribution. They are the ones lowering the barrier of entry for artists. They spend lots of money promoting artists, encouraging them, and risking their all important finances (they're a corporation after all) in doing so. They at least deserve some money if you like the music.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
What was the RIAA doing in the 70's and 80's, during the explosion of home taping where everyone and their mothers were making mix-tapes for their friends and relatives ? Did they run around suing everyone that just happened to own a dubbing deck ?
The problem is that today, the concept of "friend" has expanded far beyond the dozen classmates and neighbors. On the internet, everyone is your "neighbor". The music industry was not prepared for this social shift, and the retail world doesn't have any idea how to adapt - it's quite likely not even possible. Distributors, wholesalers, retailers, they've all become obsolete overnight. Who needs a middleman when you can service the customer directly and all it takes is a free (or cheap) web host ?
The internet effectively disembowels a trillion-dollar industry with a single mouse click. If we must use analogies, then how about the farmer's market ? You go directly to the producer, pay a much better price for fresher produce. The grocery chain gets nothing, the truck drivers get nothing, the ad agency gets nothing... but the farmer's market, unlike the internet, is tied to a very specific physical location. You can't buy fresh tomatoes unless you live near the market. On the web, you can buy anything anywhere from anyone, and that's why the RIAA is in trouble. It's one company vs the world.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It used to be that if you wanted to hear music you had to;
A. Learn to play or know someone who does
B. Wait for someone who was able to play to come by.
Since we live in a capitalist system the way to get them to come was to pay them. Been that way since forever really.
Up until about 1950 or so being a Musician was a respectable profession. You could make enough to live on. And you didn't have to go on tour, the speakeasy or night club paid you well enough.
Then along came Record Companies.
Now if you know a Musician, he or she is treated kind of like a Junkie without the fun of the Heroin. They have to have second "REAL" jobs. Artists are in the same boat. People had real paintings on their walls and you could make a real living at it. Oh and Actors too, don't forget them. And Stagehand, Ushers, ticket takers, bouncers, barkeeps, cigarette girls, hatcheck girls, etc etc etc....
Record Companies threw all these people out of work but thats ok, because they could hear music on phonographs and radios, watch TV and Movies in the theater and the productions values were much better but the plots kept going down hill. You get the picture. If not watch a movie called That Thing You Do! (1996) Pay attention and you will understand what I am getting at.
Fast Forward, but before the Computers and CDs, then DVDs. Most of the people who threw those people out of work back in the 50's realized in the 70's that they were next. Nobodies could make their own music and publish in on cassettes. DIRECTLY TO THE PUBLIC!!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning:_Parental_Advisory
Hello RIAA/MPAA
Well they claim that downloaders are putting people out of work, but how come the Chemical Brothers shows are always sellouts and the never get airplay? Celine Dion and Barbara Streisand tickets sell for $200 a pop. Bands don't make money from records anymore, they make if from shows. Like they used to. The ones I know (I'm from Seattle) like it that way. Give it some time, well do in the MPAA too. Seriously Hollywood blows chunks.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23