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Advice On File Sharing For a Swedish MP?
theper writes "A little over a week from now, I have a dinner planned with an old friend and a member of the Swedish parliament. I know a thing or two about the internet, piracy and file sharing, and she's asked for my advice on new legislation on that subject. Her (and her party's) stance is not very controversial: Rights holders must get paid one way or another, and at the same time record companies has to change their old business models and must do more to keep up with technology. With this kept in mind, what advice should I give her?"
> Her (and her party's) stance is not very controversial: Rights holders must get paid one way or another,
You won't get much support for that from the Slashsheep. Information wants to be free - unless it's information about how much porn and music they've been downloading.
Piracy will always be there whatever restrictions and actions the industry might take. So, its better to make it easy and affordable to download and watch movies (take a hint from apple itunes store).
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
that the government shouldn't be responsible for sustaining someone's broken business model. The market should decide what that model should be and if a business can't adapt to changing market conditions, it deserves to die.
There are myriad ways that the **AA can adapt to piracy, most of them involve earning less than when they had direct control over distribution, but such are the winds of change. There are many cost reducing alternatives that they can entertain (pun intended), so I'm not sure they have trimmed the fat necessary for me as the consumer to feel too bad for them.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
IANAL (in Sweden or anywhere else), but I imagine that illegal file sharing in Sweden is illegal because it is in violation of Sweden's copyright laws. If this is the case, then any changes that your friend tries to make to the law should address all of the behavior governed by copyright law, not just file sharing. Part of the reason that file sharing has been such a big issue is that, when it became commonplace, existing legislation was ill-suited to it. So we have vast numbers of people engaging in behavior that is generally considered to be illegal, and companies are suing many people that have, by most accounts, done nothing wrong.
If you favor increased freedom to file share for consumers, then you should advocate increased freedom to share in general. New legislation should anticipate that new technologies will be created. That way, maybe there won't be another big mess twenty years from now.
This space reserved for administrative use.
If she's from Folkpartiet advice her to join another party preferably a non "Alliansen" party since Folkpartiet is a basically evil.
Now on the subject.
Free file sharing for noncommercial use
Free sampling
Shorter copyright period
Ban DRM
Remove "kassettavgiften"
More info here!
http://www.piratpartiet.se/politik/upphovsratt
The reason for copyright is the generation of new content to benefit society. We get stories on slashdot quite frequently about copyrights being placed on downright useless things (take down notices). That's an example of copyright being used merely to suppress the exchange of ideas and works against the original goal. We also hear about copyright being used as an excuse to prevent users from modifying their software/data for convenience's sake. That's an example of copyright being used to suppress creativity in order to(questionably) support an outside monopoly. The idea I'm trying to convey is that Fair Use as a strictly academic tool is behind the times. Copyright should be about granting a monopoly on distribution(real money making) not complete control of any copies/changes made to the original work. My idea of what could help with protecting this kind of use is some legal definition of a standard single user copyright that someone would have to sign a physical contract to override. Reserve rights for showing the material to small groups of people without charging, being able to modify one's own personal copy to suit one's needs, making personal copies that aren't redistributed, and reselling the original copy with all the standard consumer rights carried with it.
"Rights holders must get paid one way or another" is something the MPAA/RIAA says only.
Untrue. The real values are the ones that are not put into actual cash values, aka how well known a company is in the market and the loyalty they create through their customers.
Getting paid for your work is a shortsighted answer to a long term problem: Just because you charge people for something doesn't mean they care to buy it at all.
In contrast, radiohead's selling their cd online and nine inch nails doing the same should be a perfect example of this: they gave people the option to buy free and the real value was how they increased their worldwide presence, which is something that doesn't have a cash value.
Take away all rights from the record companies and watch the industry flourish. Technobrega in brazil is a great example of that.
It's especially likely that people will make copies of music and videos for friends, and not even consider that they might be doing anything wrong. The law should reflect this general consensus.
That said, there is a difference between sharing with friends and peer to peer networks. Although they don't cause major harm, I still don't think it's right for them to be encouraged. And there is a lot less public support for file sharing networks, apart from the file sharers.
Any draconian punishment should be entirely ruled out. Most of the pirates are kids who will grow out of it anyway. Any punishment that creates widespread sympathy for the perpetrator is generally too harsh. You could charge very small but easy to prove damages (parking ticket type amounts) for people who allow their internet connection to be used for illegal file sharing, or a levy on internet connections. The latter is rather unfair on those who don't share copyrighted media, and the former has potential privacy implications. Still, it seems a worthwhile starting point.
Tell your friend that laws regarding File Sharing should fall on the side of caution and focus on the crime rather than the technology.
Her position won't change on the issue of copyright infringement or wholesale piracy of intellectual property, so don't focus on that. Rather, direct her goals towards legally codifying the "fair use" rights of consumers, and spell out the processes that IP holders may and may not "defend" their property, such as requirements for DRM-based systems to expire gracefully to unlock the data upon the expiration of the copyright period, via a PGP style key that is issued by the government at the time of the application approval.
At the same time, recommend suggestions on how shorter protection times and stricter controls on what might be copyright-protected can actually benefit society as a whole. Advise her to consider legally recognizing licensing systems such as the GPL, Creative Commons, and Open Source. Fund public education programs to teach people about what options are available. Encourage non-profit endeavors that create content and release it unencumbered into the public domain.
The message that should be sent is that technology isn't a crime, and sharing information should be encouraged rather than punished. Carefully delineate what is and what isn't proper to be shared, then emphasize the benefits of an open society instead of protecting the interests of a few.
Respect copyrights, but respect the rights of your citizens more.
Ask her how she thinks "pirates" can be shut down without interfering with legitimate traffic. Ask her if she knows about the recent Media Defender DoS. The *AAs, aka "rights holders", are criminals that continue to abuse laws to shut down all alternate distribution channels. Any power given to them will be abused in a similar way. From there you can move the discussion to the benefits of free publication and copyright reform.
Before the modern era of easy bit-exact digital copies, people copied songs and movies from friends and off the TV/Radio.
With that in mind, if you can get her to grasp just one basic concept, convince her that P2P doesn't equate to piracy, it just makes the transfer of files (legal or otherwise) considerably more efficient.
A complete ban (even if effective, an unlikely possibility) on P2P would have very nearly no effect on actual piracy. It would simply drive people to other methods of copying media, whether online or off.
Shooting for a more rose-tinted view of what you might accomplish, I consider it critical for politicians to eventually understand what "piracy" actual entails; namely, that we have four basic categories of "pirates" - Samplers, collectors, casual users, and cheapskates.
- "Samplers" should count as Mass Media's best friend, because they
tend to buy a lot, and just want to see what they'll get before
spending their money.
- "Collectors" may or may not buy a lot, but as
they have the impossible goal of possessing a copy of everything,
they will not ever buy as much as they want. Whether or not to consider
them pirates in the negative sense depends on whether they collect to
replace buying, or merely to supplement what they can
afford.
- "Casual users", the majority of people IMO, don't care one
way or the other about piracy, and may not even realize what crosses
the line. They buy most of their content, but if a friend offers them
a copy of a new CD, they won't turn it down.
- "Cheapskates" alone I would consider the "bad" kind of pirate.
They pirate for the simple reason that they can get something for
free, rather than out of either love for the content, obsession to
"catch 'em all", or mere ignorance.
Of these, only the last category (and perhaps some of the collectors, who may well also count as cheapskates) represent actual lost sales.Until politicians understand that, we'll keep fighting this same battle. We'll keep winning, because they can't win, but we'll see more and more peripheral rights stripped away in the attempt.
Not that I condone illegal file sharing, but I think it would be nice if the government made sure that the awarded damages were limited to a certain amount above actual damages. That way, there would be no insane $220K verdict for 12 songs.
Of course, I'm sure the studios would find a way around that too (just look at movie accounting in the US - they have amazing ways of dividing everything up and marking it up all over the place so they are the only ones who can realize a profit - the movies are always losers).
However, at least there would be some limit against excessive damages and using people as "examples".
The first thing that the MP should understand is that not everything out there is copyrighted. A growing field of material enters public domain every day (belatedly, perhaps). Furthermore, sometimes things that are copyrighted are intended for distribution, and P2P networks can be a good, low cost method of distributing popular material. Finally, explain that systems for "detecting" copyrighted material (from producers that want it detected, anyway) are easily foiled by mechanisms from distributing Metollica albums to speeding them up by 0.0001% or shifting the pitch slightly or adding a couple of seconds of silence to the start/end/middle.
Finally, if she thinks that copyright infringement should be a criminal offense, tell her about the various cases (search slashdot) where major labels have been charged with it, and ask her whether she thinks that if it were criminal, "justice" would have been done.
I think the point that most consumers would agree on is that consumer rights shouldn't be taken away in some attempt to protect copyright holders that will inevitably be unsuccessful. For example, here in the U.S. under fair use doctrine, if I purchase music in some format, I should be able to transfer it to any other format of my choice for personal use, such as ripping a CD to MP3s. Various DRM schemes have been tried to prevent this in the past, but they don't work, and only serve to frustrate consumers, especially when they actually do something really bad like the Sony Rootkit fiasco.
If you alienate the consumers too much, you're going to see a larger drop in sales than you would have ever seen from piracy, and you will in fact drive consumers to find pirated versions that they can use as they please. There will always be someone who will crack every DRM and copy protection scheme so you're better off just leaving everything open. DRM'd CDs are especially stupid - you can always just run the output into an input line and directly record the audio.
For the music industry, they really just need to look at changing their business model. I had the idea years ago for having stores where people can go in, select the singles they want, and the store will burn/press a CD for them (from high quality masters), with custom labeling and liner notes. You could charge a $1-2 a track plus extra for printing and it would probably do pretty well. It might not do as well now that CD burners are standard hardware, but people might like that they can basically make custom mixes without having to buy the stuff off of iTunes and high-quality labels could be a plus.
For the movie industry, if they want to increase DVD sales, they should do 2 things: 1) Stop releasing 2 or 3 versions of the same DVD within a year of release. I've actually stopped buying DVDs when they first come out, because I fully expect a special edition or something similar to come out within 12 months. 2) Stop remaking movies and come up with something original and worth watching for once; if you remake a classic film, you can never live up to the classic, and if you remake a film that was already known for being bad, the remake will likely never be any good. There are a few exceptions to this rule (such as 3:10 to Yuma), but in general, remakes just cause disgust in film viewers when they hear about them, especially when the original is less than 20 years old.
For software, it's a bit trickier. There are certain people who will always steal software and find a way around DRM, so it's not really worthwhile to pile on a ton of DRM. You're better off following the newer model that is starting to show up: the illegal copy will still work, but you can't get any patches or updates and it will likely block online play for games. The problem I usually have with a lot of Windows software (especially games) is that I really want to see how well it run on my system before I set down $50 for it; I know a console game will work on my system, but PC games are unpredictable based on hardware configuration, and demos are scarce or require massive downloads. There are some online tools to help with this now, like http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/, but that doesn't cover all titles. While this is technically the old model, I'd suggest software publishers offer demo versions for $5-10 (or more for more expensive software) in stores, and include a voucher in the demo version worth the price of the demo version towards the purchase of the full version.
1) Anytime someone throws around the word "unauthorized" (in the context of copying, use, time- or format-shifting, etc.), you should immediately ask, "who gets to authorize that?" Looking at the various **AA cases in the USA and elsewhere over the years, their argument is always that they get to make that determination, even though it is definitely not always the case.
2) The following may be a terribly naive pipe dream, but I think there is a straightforward way to more or less eliminate "piracy" (in the sense of copyright infringement) virtually overnight. You'd need a marketplace that:
a) Has substantially all works in existence (music, movies, e-books, etc.), especially old, rare, and out-of-print titles;
b) Has a clean, well-designed search interface to those works, so that they are easy to find (iTunes isn't perfect, but it's at least decent);
c) Has a guaranteed fat pipe, so that one does not need to wait hours to download a big purchase;
d) Has guaranteed quality (say 256kbps AAC for audio and an equivalent for video), as well as perhaps basic metadata (track info, cover art, etc.);
e) Has modest prices (say 1 USD or 1 EUR for individual music tracks, and an equivalent for video);
f) Has no DRM (more on this below); and
g) Guarantees substantially the same privacy as you'd get with a cash transaction (i.e. no personally-identifiable watermarking or similar nonsense; of course financial details and IP address are necessary, but should not be retained beyond some minimal period of time).
Regarding DRM: if there is some place that offers all of the above, I really can't imagine too many people wanting to go through the trouble of finding a track from a questionable source (do they have the file? bitrate? encoding quality? skips/glitches? bogus file? download speed?) if they know they can get exactly what they want in this way. In other words, it's an economic solution rather than a technical one (and the latter is likely doomed to fail anyway, unless/until the lawyers are brought in -- see The Hymn Project).
Yeah, it's a pipe dream as I said. Speaking for myself only, though, I know that after Apple unleashed the Big Can o' Legal Whoopass (TM) on the Hymn Project, I've happily switched to buying legal MP3s from Amazon, and see little reason to go back. So any government action to foster the creation and development of such a marketplace would be a huge step.
/CF
First, stop trying to think about it as 'rights' and 'compensation'. If you strip out the propaganda, it's basically a privately held, government enforced taxation right on copying. The fact that we're not seeing it in the state budged doesn't mean the cost to the economy isn't there.
Once you realize it's just another taxation system in an odd form it's much easier to create a rational political discussion around it; what does this cost the taxpayers today? What do they get from it? Are we maximizing the creative wealth funded by this tax? Perhaps the money same money could be paying more artists and creative people? At what point is the public interest no longer served by handing more money to one creator, but rather putting a ceiling on the state-sponsored payouts and handing it downwards the long tail?
Second; forget trying to check for or control the copying. It doesn't matter what the Swedish state does in the end; the pressure has been strong enough for long enough that darknets are unavoidable. There are a few years left during which traffic will be monitorable at all, beyond that everything will be encrypted friend-to-friend-to-friend automated distributed searches and transfers. You'll never see anything but your closest friends, so everyone is protected against everyone else. Thanks for screwing the efficiency of the network for the next generation, but there we go.
Third, if you want to apply a fee, apply it where it's appropriate. Adding a fee to a broadband connection isnt appropriate; if you do, I want to get paid for commenting on slashdot. The place to tax is simply the one making money from the copy. Let anyone make copies and then tax ads on Pirate bay and hand the money to the creator of the copied material. Put a salestax on copied media in stores and let the stores themselves copy the material. Allow print-as-you-go bookstores, write-your-own-CD kiosks, etc, but hand the proceeds of a sales tax to the creators.
Oh, and like all transfer systems, the actual management of collection and payouts should be under state control, not in the hands of private interests like IFPI or the MPAA/RIAA corps. State-protected taxation rights in the hands of private corporations is the worst of two worlds; the private sector should always operate in unprotected competition, otherwise it can exceed even governments in waste.
I suggest looking into how libraries work and expanding their concept for the digital age. In my hometown there's a library with a very low subscription fee (regular ones don't have any) but it keeps up with the newest books and also has wide range of movies and music albums and even some PC games. I miss it a lot since there's no such thing in a city I live now - it kept me from breaking the law as often as I do now :)
I suspect that would be a very bad thing to say to someone who at this point is open to accepting guidance. I would stress that while some say "Rights holders must get paid one way or another", that it would be very wrong to assume guilt of theft on an innocent person's part and tax them in some way, such as for blank media that is used for perfectly legal personal data uses, taxes on Internet connections that are then handed over to the RIAA or MPAA, or restrictions on P2P networks that are used for many very legitimate uses.
I would also talk some about how the MPAA and RIAA have been greatly abusing their positions, acting much like racketters and threatening people when they have no proof, strong arming with threats of lawsuits, doing many illegal things to attack people's computers and networks, illegally planting files that they then claim represent copyrighted material, and outright having agents doing illegal denial of service attacks on completely legal businesses. It might not hurt to mention that the real artists and creators of the works in question have historically be cheated by the the companies that the RIAA and MPAA work for, and that the real creators of the works never see any profit from the RIAA and MPAA gangster like activity. Perhaps the RIAA and the MPAA deserve a much closer look before one delving into the issue of file sharing and how to separate the perfectly legal file sharing from that which might not be.
If you have made those points and the MP is still showing an interest in talking, you might want to get to the issue of "property" itself. I'll assume that your country or some local subdivision of it has some sort of tax on real property. If that's the case, you might want to ask why corporations can amass vast amounts of "intellectual property", expect the government to go out of it's way to provide special protections for it, and yet that property, which the corporations will insist is very real, is not taxed. Perhaps if any file sharing enforcement does need to be done, it should be financed by the people who want their property protected, not by the individuals who are doing perfectly legal file sharing (including artists who are trying to distribute their works and not fall under the control of the RIAA racketter labels who would cheat them of their rightful profits).
Please let us know how your evening goes.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Read up on and explain to her the benefits of pushing Creative Commons licensing as a GOOD thing. The "Creative Commons Noncommercial Clause" variant in particular is probably the best way to handle copyright period. IF there's any money to be made by the rights holders (A sucky song doesn't deserve shit imo.) then it's the rights holders that should get it. Any noncommercial use should be seen entirely as free publicity. (To expand a band's fanbase, which usually translates into greater profits.)
I am the legal owner of several thousand performances recorded on LPs (vinyl). I should be able to get this in digital format somewhere for a lot less (80-90% discount) that someone that would be purchasing the same performance for the first time. Why - because I have paid for the content once and am merely shifting format. This is and should be kept legal. The media monopolies for oligopolies (get your dictionary)want you to purchase something for full price every time they discontinue a format. This is their way of forcing you to purchase their product (actually the musician's product) every time they feel they need to change the format. There is something about this that seem inherently unfair. BTW I agree that the business model of the record/media companies is broken and the government should not be in the business of propping up broken business models.
You should enlighten said MP that such a position is very controversial. Simply put, trying to sell copies of media in the internet age is like trying to sell ice cubes to eskimos. We don't see many buggy whip makers, or sign painters anymore, and music publishers will go the same way. The only thing that is accomplished by standing in the way of history is the victimization of her citizens.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Personally, I think the "moral copyrights" are the single most important part of copyright law. In today's world, as long as you're willing to work, fame is easily translated into money.
For example in the music industry, it is common for artists to be poorly paid. Popular bands are often barely living above the poverty line based on the revenues earned from their CDs sales (the piracy issue that receives the most attention). In reality, most performers earn the majority of their money either through long term ownership of the rights to their music (which they are often forced or tricked into signing away with their first recording deal), or through revenues generated by concerts and collateral merchandising.
The important lesson to learn is that piracy has little direct impact on recording artists. The majority (90-95%) of the money goes to the music labels and middlemen.
Similarly, it's long been known that movie studios somehow manage to never make any money on any movie. In large part this explains why movie actors get such huge upfront fees. If they agree to a lesser fee with a percentage of the residuals, there just never seem to be any. Thus by the very nature of the business piracy mostly affects the producers who are the only people still making money after the movie has been released. The only time an actor or director is actually hurt by piracy is when they are also a producer for the film.
The people who argue for expanded copyright laws, almost always use the excuse that the laws are not to benefit themselves but to benefit people you actually like. However, in all truthfulness, any benefits will be hijacked by the labels and the studios long before it gets to anyone else.
Much of the real argument over copyright is about control and manipulation rather than making things better for the creators of artist content. Stronger copyright laws benefit the centralization of artist production into the hands of a few groups. When they band together they can afford high paid lobbyists and lawyers. The lobbyists work to further tip the field in favour of the labels and the lawyers harass anyone who has success outside of their oligopoly with the simple intent of ruining them through frivolous lawsuits and thus protection the oligopoly.
Weaker copyright laws (up to a point) actually benefit the artists by weakening the label's hold and thus making it less desirable to deal with them unless they're offering a reasonable deal. Legal protections against circumvention disproportionately benefit the people who deal with masses of content and thus the cost of the security mechanism can be amortized across all the handled content. Thus it is a centralizing factor, and when combined with another seemingly innocent centralizer that requires video or music players to only play "authorized" content, you can easily see how the copyright protection mechanism has been turned into a competitive advantage that favors the established parties, and thus has raised the barrier to entry to the artistic industries and simultaneously have limited competition. Weaker copyright laws can also make it less desirable for the labels to pressure the artists into giving the rights to their work to the labels as a condition of working with the label. If the rights are worth less financially, then there is simply less incentive for the labels to wrestle control away from the actual creators.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The only service the music industry provides reasonably is marketing and promotion. Technology has made distribution trivial. In effect, they use their monopoly on distribution to get people to pay for the service they provide to the musicians.
Nothing Dead Here.
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The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
This one is a bigger deal in the US than in other countries.
Someone sharing a file should not be fined their entire life's savings. Slap them with a small fine and let them go in peace.
Let's just call him the "unhappy consumer". He is 'forced' to download the pirated copies because they are superior to what he can buy (DRM could be one reason, or ease of download, or visual quality, or availability in the case of tv shows).
Later on this week my airship is scheduled to dock in the United States, and my high school and childhood friend has invited me to dinner to ask for, among other important things, my guidance on crafting new copyright legislation. Did I mention my friend is the President of the United States? After dinner I will take him and his wife on a scenic airship ride over to Camp David, followed by a visit to the Cheneys. (My Dad and Dick grew up together and spent a lot of time hunting together. My Dad would have been 75 today). What should I tell them?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Simply make sure the law says this: if you give someone copyrighted information for profit in any way then its illegal unless the owner is compensated. If you give someone copyrighted information not for profit, (IE after expenses net = 0) then its legal so long as it give credit to the original copyright owner/s. Also if possible the government could charge a levy on data storage material (say $1 on pack of cd's ect.) that goes to paying the artists ( and artists only, not *iaa) to recoup any believed profit loss.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
The majority of musical artist make the vast majority of theyr earnings off of live events and appearences. So the artist themselves are not the ones being hurt by p2p. Rather it is the distribution networks known as music lables. Bands such as "the smashing pumpkins" and Radiohead have taken to signing up with indie lables and giving out free music (smashing pumpkins have a deal with the lma, allowing for legal bootlegs of live performances a la greatfull dead). These distribution networks need to find a better source of legal revenue, perhaps embedded advertisements, or simply corporate sponsership (ever movie title followed by a "brought to you by" for instance). The current method of payment extraction simple will not hold in the face of technology - givin freedom and privacy are to still stand. The only solution is adaptation.
People on slashdot are often bright and knowledgeable about technology, but suck at seeing the other person's point of view. Make sure you get just as much education about the recording industry's arguments! It doesn't matter if they're stupid arguments. She's heard them, and she may not be able to see that they're stupid. And it never hurts to assume, no matter how dumb you think your opponents are, that they understand your position and have already constructed counterarguments. What flaws might they have pointed out in your own reasoning and beliefs.
That said, here are some talking points for you:
*Current U.S. copyright law creates read-only culture, which is a problem. See law professor Lawrence Lessig's excellent articles for more (and listen to his speeches).
*Copyright is incompatible with free speech (see Freenet creator Ian Clarke's articles and speeches). IMHO, this is the most important consideration.
*Her party is absolutely right: people should get paid for doing valuable work. The problem is that many people see copyrighted works as goods when actually the creation of copyrightable works is a service. I'm not about to claim books and CDs aren't property (they are), but when someone believes that photocopying a book is stealing, it puts too much emphasis on the duplication phase of getting copyrighted works to other people and not enough emphasis on the creation stage. Duplication of information-carrying media is cheap, and people can do it for themselves. The valuable service of coming up with new information is what authors and artists ought to be paid for, and many of the problems in the copyrighted information industry stem from the fact that the law and the businesses do not recognize this essential fact.
Also, don't forget to have a good time at dinner. She's your friend, so don't talk her ear off about copyright. Eventually, she may come to a decision (if she hasn't already) or her buffer will fill up and she won't be able to take anymore tech talk for the evening. At that point, be prepared to switch to a different topic of conversation, unless you want to be known as "that lobbyist that used to be my friend."
I think going directly towards the copyright holders' situation is the wrong answer - clearly in a world where their product can multiply like rabbits on viagra, they will have a tougher time making money. Instead, focus on the fact that their rights shouldn't recieve successively stronger and stronger protection to the cost of everyone else even if it just maintains the status quo. Point out a few hard facts like:
1. Mass-market DRM has never worked. Last now AACS/BD+ has been broken, using the most powerful military grade encryption (AES) even though it was one of the highest priorities of the new HD format.
2. Internet bandwidth and general storage has and continues to increase at an exponential rate. Unless you tried to insinuate that being a heavy user equals pirate people's ability to share will only increase.
3. While there is public P2P, a lot of material is exchanged between friends in private communication and they have no shame of it. Even if public P2P could be restrained, the sharing of copyrighted information would go on.
Then move on to some consequnces of this:
1. Most people affected by DRM are customers, not pirates. They have been using the excuse of copyright infringement to restrict trade and price discriminate through artifical region barriers, they have made it all but impossible to backup media, use a home server, fotward through ads and so on, protected by the EUCD (in Sweden, DMCA in US). They have extended their control over copying to a limited use license and through activiation, banning software auctions and other means tried to stop second-hand copies. If they abuse the protection they have been given by law, why should they not lose it?
2. Piracy has become so commonplace, it would be near impossible to enforce as it would require prosecuting a large percentage of the population. In response, the copyright holders have requested stronger and stronger reactions (in the US 1.5mio$/infringement + jail time), faster and less verification (DMCA takedowns), creation of private police-like forces (copyright cops) and the ability to enact penalties (disconnection from Internet) without going through the courts. For one the penalty should fit the crime, not punishing one because they fail to catch other copyright infringers, secondly it's a threat to the legal security of the entire population. Third, it's a message that you can buy yourself justice through spending enough money, or in other words that the general public deserve less protection from the courts and the law. That is so fundamentally wrong as you can get it.
3. Because copyright infringement to a great deal involve private communication, there has (together with terrorism) been a strong push towards a surveilance society where everyone is recorded whether innocent or not, like in the EU Data Retention Act, that the copyright holders have asked to use to catch copyright infringers. In addition, it has led to strong opposiition towards open wireless networks, free email accounts, encryption systems (in the UK, you will go to jail for not giving or not knowing the keys) and many other technologies which while popular and practical for the average person makes copyright enforcement difficult. Societies where the state keeps records of everyone have been called many things like totalitarian, orwellian, communist - or in collaboration with industry - fascist, none of which is positive. Sweden may think it'll succeed where others went wrong, to create a mass surveilance society only used for good but it will fail. Scraping a little of the iceberg like The Pirate Bay will only push it a little out of sight, the price of actually taking on copyright infringement will come at a heavy price of freedom and privacy as you try to channel everything into what can be surveilanced and recorded.
Why have I talked about all these before I come to a "solution"? (You may have to skip ahead to here if they lose patience) Well, because the answer is this: Protect consumer rights. Protect due process and the le
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Since you seem to be on the fence with this issue, I'll tell you what I think.
If an entity distributes copyrighted material and makes a profit doing so, then a portion of the profit should go to the copyright holder. If an entity gives away copyrighted material, then said entity has no obligation to compensate the copyright holder.
Unfortunately, this model will only encourage greater use of DRM. Can anybody improve upon it?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If she's interested in furthering her political career and running her country better than others at the same time (which most well-intentioned politicians really are interested in), then she needs to consider this:
Would Sweden be better served giving into demands of the USA's RIAA and MPAA organizations, whom through campaign donations and lobby coziness with our government are a cheaply acquired and paid-for type of mercenary force seeking to enforce copyright laws of the US primarily for their own gain (see Machiavelli's The Prince); OR, would Sweden be better served building their own industry that supports and protects its citizens (ALL of them, not just entertainers) from the machinations of those who would desire additional buying power not just in the US, but in Sweden as well?
What has happened is that some people are forced to buy genetically engineered seeds, and it is piracy for them to use normal seeds. The bottom line is that copyright law should never force someone into food dependence.
It is also important to think about whether lifeforms or DNA sequences should be copyrighted. I'm not even talking about engineered lifeforms/DNA, but copyrighting DNA sequences found in nature, something a lot of U.S. pharmaceuticals are doing.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
Right after I posted this I found a highly relevant link. Seed piracy, "It doesn't look right for them to have a patent on something that you can grow yourself"
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
Ultimately, if a movie has to be reproduced on a display it will be possible to copy it. Adding more restrictions will just cause administrative trouble, increase costs, and drive the file sharers (those that share copyrighted material) into more secretive ways to share files. But the one thing to keep in mind is: what is the PURPOSE of copyright? Right now the movie and music industry is desperately trying to persuade the world that copyrights are meant to guarantee a monopoly on an artwork. The actual reason for copyright law is to afford a minimal amount of protection for an artist so that he may continue to produce his art. By all means, introduce strong legislation to protect copyright holders, but reduce the amount of time a copyright can stay in effect. If a company makes one movie, and cashes in on that movie for the next 70 years without making anything anymore, in my opinion it doesn't deserve to maintain the copyright. Originally it was in the range of 7-15 years, perhaps it's time to lower the bar again
Tell her no one need to push the record companies to adopt new business models. Instead, they should be obligated to let new business models develop unimpeded. The problem is not that record companies and so-called "rights" organizations hinder true competition and new business model development. Back in the day when we lacked modern technology, some of these companies and organizations could facilitate commerce. Today, they stand in the way, purely out of fear that if new copyrighted work could compete on a level playing field with every other copyrighted work, independent artists would thrive, and licensees could cherry-pick lesser known artists for a fraction of the cost of blanket licenses -- like paying only for the terrific dessert instead of the entire buffet. Today, our technology could make it simple for copyright owners to allow any business to compete on the same level playing field -- just post your "wholesale" price for a stream or a download, and collect the money without trying to appoint winners and losers, or own a piece of the consumer connection. Let the "retail" end set the retail prices - whether supported by ads, bundled, marked up, marked down, or what have you. Nothing in the copyright act of any nation - or in any copyright treaty - gives the copyright owner the right to protect business models instead of copyrights, or to choose which businesses should "win" in a non-competitive marketplace. Tell her to approach this from the standpoint of antitrust and copyright misuse, so each work stands on its own and not as part of a "leveraged" collective that makes every work "average", and both artists and the public will benefit handsomely.
Aire Libre
In the second sentence of my post, the work "not" should not be there. Quite a difference that makes.
Aire Libre
Tell her to use BitTorrent. Open file shares are old school and insecure...
That is all.
...I know, because I am one. You see cheapskates like me will not buy music - period. If we can get it for free, then why not? But to spend actual money on it? No.
You see, cheapskates realize that you don't actually need music. You can go on just fine without. $20 for an album with 1 or 2 good songs on it is a price that makes us cringe in horror. I've bought less that 10 albums in my life, and the only ones where I felt I actually got my moneys worth were a couple of "greatest classical hits" collections I bought on sale. (~40 musical pieces out of which >50% were good for ~$5). I tried a few other albums as well, but my disappointment in them caused me to stop buying music completely. Soon after that I discovered these .mp3-thingies that you (back then) could download from lots of web- or ftp-sites. Finally the price was right.
In other words, if there is piracy the music industry won't be getting any money from us, and if they manage to completely kill piracy (yeah, right) they still won't be getting any money from us - we're that cheap.
I believe that what the industry is trying to by fighting piracy is to prevent the "casual pirates" from becoming regular ones - which is what tends to happen when p2p becomes more and more mainstream.
Just my $0.02
If she's going to Almedalen this year, she's more than welcome to look us up. We're even having a seminar on copyright's cost to society.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Hej!
I like to compare filesharing to abortion. Bear with me.
To me the moment of conception is the only unique point in a life. After that it's just shades of gray, the child/fetus is more or less likely to survive outside the womb, legislation states it's legal to abort the pregnancy or not. Based only on this abortion should be illegal.
But based on the social consequences of making abortions illegal most modern societies don't do that. And that is my paralell with filesharing: the only moral standpoint is that the copyright holder of material should decide how that material can be used. That is an absolute. But the consequences of giving up the right of communicating digitally anonymously without being eavesdropped by government (and private!) agencies is too high a price to pay. So since we can't (or shouldn't) control the data people send to each other we can't (and won't) stop filesharing. That is the situation everbody needs to face and act upon.
All models of economy for the content providing industry that relies on monitoring the data people send each other on the Internet are (rightly so) doomed to fail.
I have a funny taste: I rarely like a whole album of an artist. Michael Jackson, Prince, Billy Joel, Genesis. Just one or two songs I like.
:-(
So I'm willing to pay for the music I like, but I'd rather pay for just what I want to have and listen to, and not for the 90% of the songs on the album that I do not want. This has become possible in the digital age!
With "old fashioned" production and distribution of CDs, a big percentage of what I pay go to production and distribution of the physical CD. Among others to the shop owner. In the digital age, this is no longer neccesary. So, I'd like to be able to buy songs, not for $1 a piece (which is the same price as $10 for an album with 10 songs) but for much less.
The record companies should see, that even if they drop the prices, they can earn a lot more money. If you're selling a product that costs $9 to make, and you sell it for $20, and are considering dropping the salesprice by 50%, you're dropping 90% of your margin! So a 50% cost reduction for the consumer costs a factor of 10 in income for the company. However, if you're selling bits, the costs of reproduction of the product are minimal. So selling for $0.50 instead of $1.00, reduces costs for the consumer by 50% (causing an increase in demand), at a reduction in income (per song) for the company for almost the same 50%.
How to change legislation to promote my ideal scenario, I don't know.
The original poster posits two points:
1) Rightsholders must be paid
2) Record Companies must change
to which I want to add a third:
3) Citizens set the terms
Rightsholders must be paid
Yes, but for the current value, rather than sustaining some rate received in the past. And via a mechanism to be defined, not necessarily an existing method. Neither the unit revenue nor the total revenue of yesterday is guaranteed tomorrow in any business.
Record Companies must change
Yes, perhaps even disappear. It may be that existing business ideas are simply unsustainable in future.
Citizens set the terms
Business systems don't stop with the manufacturer and distributor because unless the users want the offerings, neither will survive. The users, in their role as citizens, set the terms of the copyright deal through their government.
Copyright fell into trouble when photocopying came into being, but that analog process did little damage. Consider:
Original As good as it gets
1st duplicate Knowably a copy
duplicates of duplicates Spotty, shrinking
No incidental copying needed to use the material
Then we got a miracle. Because society kept funding research we got digital copying with digital error correction. Copies became cheap, ubiquitous, and perfect.
Original As good as it gets
1st duplicate Like the original
duplicates of duplicates Like the original
Incidental copying required to use the material
What nature had denied us in the analog world was our gift in the digital world. Untold riches lay before every person - infinite distribution of perfect copies of ones work at nearly zero cost. And a network to spread them around the world in an instant.
Now we must face the fact that a compromise system of manufacture and production, devised in an analog era and protected by the constraints of analog technology, breaks when those limits are surmounted. Economists warned us that marginal costs would tend to zero, but we failed to understand.
In the future, the distribution of work and the distribution of revenues in publishing businesses will shift. I suspect creators will find themselves doing more, manufacturers will become more like contract manufacturers in electronics, and distributors will be networks. But that's just my guess.
With regard to sharing files, file-sharing should not be regulated at all. File-sharing is not illegal, immoral, or fattening. Not everyone wants to enforce their copyright, and some offer generous licenses in sharing their copyrighted materials.
Two kinds of file transfers are of concern:
1) Sharing legally protected files against the wishes of the owner.
This is classic copyright infringement.
2) Transfer of ownership versus multiplication of ownership.
Transfer is straightforward first-sale doctrine and should simply be explicitly legalized. Multiplication of ownership is classic infringement.
Limited sharing has always gone on informally and will no doubt continue. I think it's best ignored.
Massive sharing against the owner's wishes is damaging infringement. But I think it dangerous to establish a prima facie event other than actual provable multiple distribution. That puts the ball squarely in the supplier's court - find a way to mark your files such that they are provably yours and from a specific first sale.
--Kirt
Copyright shouldn't enable a new landowning class. What's happening with American copyright laws is that they are being used by a small group of people to own and charge rent on American culture.
Copyright law needs to be modified to strike a compromise between the need for an information worker or artist to make a living, and the need for a people to freely exchange their shared culture. If copyright owners want strong restrictions; they should also have to release works into the Public Domain in 5-10 years. Copyright owners need to demonstrate that they really need 100+ years to make a profit on their works.
No, I will not work for your startup