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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?"
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
Yes, most of us want information that should be public (such as everything related to the government, which we fund and is supposed to belong to us) to be freely available. That other kind of information should not be publicly available since it is information about private citizens.
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
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.
Many slashsheep are programmers, and likely not software pirates. Many are musicians and also realize that copyright infringement is wrong. But most also understand the American Home Recording Act and know damn straight that they can make copies of music for their friends, and dislike bullies like the RIAA. Most are also intelligent and believe that examining their own computer's RAM and operation is an inalienable right no matter what a EULA says.
Most are also suspicious of trolls like you, so someone had to make this response.
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.
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".
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 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.
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
I think you just touched on a more fundamental problem, that copyright is a flawed model of intellectual property protection in this digital age, where you have to copy data just to enjoy it. We make incidental copies whenever we put a CD in the CD player, which copies the data to its memory. We make copies when we put the music on our iPods, or on our computers. We make so many incidental copies during the course of normal usage, that it no longer makes sense to target the act of copying as a control point for intellectual property protection.
Sooner or later, we will have to change to Accessright protection, where particular individuals license access to content under various terms, if we want to continue to facilitate the monetizing of intellectual property content, since merely copying has lost all relevance. Now it's only a question of striking a workable balance between the property rights of licensors and licensees, and to safeguard the privacy of users of the accessright licensing system. Once this is taken care of, we will be ready to move forward with a general intuitive understanding of IP protection again. As it is now, we're trying to fit an outdated model onto an incompatible distribution medium.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)