Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

Pabugs writes with news that popular torrent site Mininova has abandoned their attempts at filtering and simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service. According to their blog post, they were left "no other option than to take [their] platform offline" after a court ruling from August. "The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros."

Comments

And thus dies Mininova.

[Anonymous Coward]

Farewell.

And a huge FUCK YOU to the MPAA/RIAA.

Re:And thus dies Mininova.

[isama]

The MPAA/RIAA are not the ones to blame for this..
It was BREIN, the dutch RIAA... bastards.

Re:And thus dies Mininova.

[MacWiz]

Assholes like you have screwed the rest of us honest folk. If losers like you weren't pirating media and using them as intended...

By waiting to see the movies for free on television? Closing the torrent site has no financial benefit for anyone. This guy is not going to pay to see a movie either way. He has no effect on the theoretical "honest folk." I have no idea who these people are, but I'm relatively certain that none of which work for either the RIAA or MPAA.

I hope every ISP turns over scum like you over to the RIAA lawyers. Its going to be fun watching rats like you squrim as RIAA cracks down on the torrent sites.

Really? He didn't sound like he was squirming. Believe it or not, most of us can live without RIAA music. The RIAA, however, cannot live if their music does not reach peoples' ears. Ironically, this appears to be their goal.

It'll be even more fun to see sales drop another 15-20% this year because the RIAA is still fucking with people who used to be music fans. I support every effort to filter them out, block their songs and erase them from the Internet in order to speed up the process.

Re:And thus dies Mininova.

[rdebath]

This is stupid even for AC.

DRM doesn't stop the people who upload RIAA stuff to PB and mininova.

In fact shouting how strong your DRM is or especially actually having 'strong DRM' (ie something interesting) tends to get your files up there even sooner.

Just look at the Blueray fiasco.

All DRM does is stop you copying, and maybe, the kid next door, but probably not the one down the street.

Re:And thus dies Mininova.

[sprint907]

if you are honest, then what is the problem with DRM? pay once to listen on CD. pay once again to listen on yoru ipod, pay once again to listen on your car stereo. what is the problem?

Re:And thus dies Mininova.

[shentino]

There would be nothing wrong with DRM if it was fracking implemented properly.

But no. The MAFIAA vampires aren't happy just using it to stop piracy. They also use it to interfere with basic ownership rights, such as transferring from the CD to an iPod, or to your computer.

Hell we even had an article where they pretty much said "Who cares if the DRM auth servers go down? If they do, tough shit we don't care!".

DRM would be used even if there was no such thing as piracy. Piracy only gives the MAFIAA an excuse to rent-seek.

DRM is currently used only to rake in profits. Whether it does so by stopping piracy or by stopping people from legitimate uses, the problem is that the MAFIAA doesn't give a shit.

Also, it's been well proven that DRM doesn't work. Any moron can see that it only harms legitimate consumers, since the pirates just wait for one cracker to strip off the DRM. I think it speaks volumes that the MAFIAA still uses it knowing full well it doesn't work to prevent piracy.

i wonder...

[mrlarone]

...if they're working with a white or black list?

Re:i wonder...

[appleguru]

FTFS, whitelist: "simply deleted all torrents other than the legal ones they facilitate through their Content Distribution service"

Re:i wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah. Remember Suprnova? It is only a matter of time until something else replaces it.

Re:i wonder...

[thejynxed]

The last time I was on there, there was over 16 thousand torrents in the Games section alone.

That should give you a good idea.

Re:i wonder...

[sopssa]

Bah. Remember Suprnova? It is only a matter of time until something else replaces it.

I've always wondered about this. Pirates get all upset and "they are traitors!" when the website operators give up and move on with their lives under heavy pressure from lots of multinational corporations and governments.

But when something bad happens to the guys running these websites, everyone goes "bah. someone else will replace it" and everyone turns their back to them.

Is this a growth some few persons like to fight for on their free time against such a power?

Re:i wonder...

[Storchei]

suprnova -> mininova -> ultranova
XD

Re:i wonder...

[click2005]

1,320,433 according to Google's cache.

Re:i wonder...

[Cheapy]

Pirates already have an entitlement complex. Why would they want to do stuff for the sites they are using?

Re:i wonder...

[Snaller]

As long as there is an amoral copyright law people will rise up to fight it.

Re:i wonder...

[Imrik]

Or ignore it.

Re:i wonder...

[spyder-implee]

Better an entitlement complex than a prejudicial complex.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

Pirates already have an entitlement complex.

No, you've got it backwards.

Copyright holders have an entitlement complex: they expect to get paid over and over in the future for work they did decades in the past. They think one big hit entitles them to a free ride for the rest of their lives, and they think they're entitled to tell everyone else what they can or can't do with their own property.

Pirates only want to be able to freely exchange information. The only "entitlement" a pirate feels is the right to communicate. Pirates don't expect other people to change their behavior to benefit pirates; copyright holders do expect other people to change their behavior to benefit copyright holders.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

Copyright holders have an entitlement complex: they expect to get paid over and over in the future for work they did decades in the past.

What crap. A TON of pirated content happens to be recent movies, games, music, books, etc. Your argument is intellectually dishonest.

They think one big hit entitles them to a free ride for the rest of their lives

This is BS. Content creators invest millions each year into creating new content. A significant proportion of music,movies,etc are never going to become hits. The major incentive to continue pumping out new content is the hope that one of those investments will turn into a hit and pay off. That is the current business model in existence. The incentive of earning a lot of money seems to work in motivating people to create better content. Pirates are effectively destroying this incentive. Yes there will be people who will continue to create content and give it away for the "love of the art" or whatever (even they need to find a way to get paid). I haven't seen anything that will lead me to believe this is going to be anything but a small minority.

Pirates only want to be able to freely exchange information

So where are the "information wants to be free"-pirates who are hiring people to create content they like? Then they can exchange this information all day long on their terms. Why is it almost always "information" that somebody else paid millions of dollars to create? What is the percentage of 'legit' content to content violating copyright law? A cursory glance at TPB and other sites leads me to believe little to no popular content on those sites is of the legit kind.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

What crap. A TON of pirated content happens to be recent movies, games, music, books, etc. Your argument is intellectually dishonest.

No, it's quite honest. Don't you think the people who hold the copyrights on works released this year will still expect to be paid for copies ten or twenty years from now? Why would they act any differently from the people who hold copyright on works from past decades?

Besides, expecting to be paid today for work I did a year ago, a month ago, or a week ago is no better. It's still an attempt to enforce a contract on someone who wasn't a party to it at the time. I didn't ask Lady Gaga to record "Poker Face", so regardless of whether I listen to it or download it, why would I have any obligation to pay her for that effort?

Content creators invest millions each year into creating new content. A significant proportion of music,movies,etc are never going to become hits. The major incentive to continue pumping out new content is the hope that one of those investments will turn into a hit and pay off. That is the current business model in existence.

Yes, it's a stupid framework that barely qualifies to be called a business model. It's like calling "lottery player" a career. The major incentive to continue buying lottery tickets is the hope that you'll win the jackpot... but you probably won't. Why play the copyright lottery when you could be getting paid directly for creating art?

The incentive of earning a lot of money seems to work in motivating people to create better content.

You know what works just fine as an incentive in every other industry? The incentive of being paid for doing quality work. The best lawyers command a higher rate than the worst lawyers. The best carpenters get more work and get paid more for it. What makes you think artists can't muster up the motivation to do good work without special incentives that involve the rest of us giving up part of our free speech?

So where are the "information wants to be free"-pirates who are hiring people to create content they like?

They're on sites like Sellaband and Kickstarter.

Then they can exchange this information all day long on their terms.

Surely you've noticed that they can already exchange any information all day long on their terms. The question is, will content producers adapt to that reality, or will they remain in denial with a business model that depends on being the sole source of copies?

Re:i wonder...

[drinkypoo]

Content creators invest millions each year into creating new content. A significant proportion of music,movies,etc are never going to become hits. The major incentive to continue pumping out new content is the hope that one of those investments will turn into a hit and pay off. That is the current business model in existence.

Please explain why law should protect a business model which produces tons of crap. This is not the most efficient way to produce art, and I resent my tax dollars being used to place restrictions on my behavior to produce shitty music which can be sold to the maximum number of recipients.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

I didn't ask Lady Gaga to record "Poker Face", so regardless of whether I listen to it or download it, why would I have any obligation to pay her for that effort?

I see we're continuing the string of weak arguments. If you are not a consumer of her content, then you are free to ignore her work. Commercial artists record songs to sell them. If you are a consumer then you are expected to pay. You don't live in a vacuum and so as a member of society you can't just walk in and give yourself the right to pirate her work. Feel free to support record labels and artists that operate within an economic model that you agree with. If you don't want to live by the current rules, then be prepared to face the consequences. Society doesn't have to respect whatever rights you give yourself ad-hoc. You can't have it both ways.

You know what works just fine as an incentive in every other industry? The incentive of being paid for doing quality work. The best lawyers command a higher rate than the worst lawyers. The best carpenters get more work and get paid more for it.

And? Since digital content can't be technically stolen, you need copyright law to protect it. How does what you said change anything?

What makes you think artists can't muster up the motivation to do good work without special incentives that involve the rest of us giving up part of our free speech?

I have no clue what "free speech" is doing in this argument. This is about entertainment, not oppression.

Yes, it's a stupid framework that barely qualifies to be called a business model. It's like calling "lottery player" a career. The major incentive to continue buying lottery tickets is the hope that you'll win the jackpot... but you probably won't. Why play the copyright lottery when you could be getting paid directly for creating art?

They're on sites like Sellaband and Kickstarter.

Great. Problem solved then ! You can find like minded people such as yourself and as a group invest in whatever business model you agree with. Encourage new content to be created that isn't encumbered with whatever copyright law you disagree with. Why are you demanding that there shouldn't be a way whereby artists can get compensated by selling their goods and their rights protected through copyright? Surely there can be more than one business model so that it works for everyone?

The question is, will content producers adapt to that reality, or will they remain in denial with a business model that depends on being the sole source of copies?

That is irrelevant. If the current business model is a failure then the companies will die out. Thats how the free market is supposed to work. Why does it matter to you if they content producers stay afloat?

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

If you are not a consumer of her content, then you are free to ignore her work. Commercial artists record songs to sell them. If you are a consumer then you are expected to pay.

Yes, she expects me to pay and you expect me to pay, but why do your expectations create an obligation on my part?

If I mow your lawn without asking, merely expecting that you'll pay me once you've seen what a good job I did, does that mean you're obligated to pay? Or does it just mean I'm a fool who gave his labor away for free?

If you don't want to live by the current rules, then be prepared to face the consequences.

By consequences, I presume you mean the chance of being sued for infringement, which is about as likely as being struck by lightning. Not much preparation needed.

Since digital content can't be technically stolen, you need copyright law to protect it.

Nonsense. Artists don't need to protect the content they produce, any more than lawyers need to protect the things they say in court, or accountants need to protect the numbers they write down on tax forms. The real value is in their labor.

I have no clue what "free speech" is doing in this argument. This is about entertainment, not oppression.

Copyright is a restriction on speech. I'm surprised you didn't realize that.

Why are you demanding that there shouldn't be a way whereby artists can get compensated by selling their goods and their rights protected through copyright?

Because copyright law restricts everyone, whether or not they choose to use copyright themselves. Regardless of what business model I use to earn a living, there are still bits I'm not allowed to share and equipment I'm not allowed to have.

Surely there can be more than one business model so that it works for everyone?

Only if they can all compete on a level playing field. Since the business model of selling copies is given special protection by the government -- everyone else's speech is restricted in order to make it easier for you to sell copies -- what would be a similar way to protect the work-for-pay business model? Maybe force everyone to spend $X a year on artistic production whether they want to or not?

If the current business model is a failure then the companies will die out. Thats how the free market is supposed to work. Why does it matter to you if they content producers stay afloat?

I enjoy some of the content they produce, and I would rather see them adapt now so they're able to keep producing it, instead of clinging to a failed model and going bankrupt.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

Should we force all sorts of manufacturers in general to hand out copies of popular product designs for free after those designs have been in production for more than X years?

No, just like we shouldn't force artists to hand out copies of anything for free. If you want to charge $20 for a copy of a CD, go right ahead.

But we absolutely should stop them from interfering with other people's attempts to distribute those copies themselves. If your $20 CD isn't any better than the torrent I can download for free, you deserve to go out of business.

You may not have asked her to record her material but if you are downloading and listening to Lady Gaga's music you are obviously not indifferent to her work since you value it enough to put some effort (and a small amount of risk) into obtaining it illegally.

Sure, but how do you get from "I'm not indifferent to her work" to "I'm obligated to give her some of my money"?

I use the English language every day. Do I owe money to the descendants of everyone who invented the words I use?

I use electronics every day that rely on precise values of physical constants such as the speed of light. Does that mean I owe money to the descendants of the people who measured the speed of light?

I'm certainly grateful for the work they did, but they chose on their own to do that work, and if they wanted to get paid for their time, that's something they could have arranged when they did the work. It's not my responsibility to pay them, months or years or decades later, for work they did without any input from me.

Re:i wonder...

[shentino]

So in other words, making new content is like drilling for oil?

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

If I mow your lawn without asking, merely expecting that you'll pay me once you've seen what a good job I did, does that mean you're obligated to pay? Or does it just mean I'm a fool who gave his labor away for free?

If the RIAA were playing records in the public square and then walking around charging people for happening to be there listening to it, I'd say you have a point. Nobody is forcing you to download songs you don't want.

Artists don't need to protect the content they produce, any more than lawyers need to protect the things they say in court, or accountants need to protect the numbers they write down on tax forms. The real value is in their labor.

Agreed. However, there are lots of other industries where the primary value of an employee ISN'T in their labor, but in the information they produce. Most sciences and entertainment industries fall into that category.

The fact is that nobody would make major production movies if there were no copyright law. Making a movie like LOTR costs many millions of dollars. Nobody does something like that for fun. It isn't 12 actors on a stage - it is 12 actors plus 100 people on the camera crew, plus 25 electricians, plus 50 highly skilled guys going frame by frame editing effects, plus the guys feeding them, and so on... Nobody does that kind of thing in their spare time. Nobody is going to pay to commission a work like that just for their personal edification, either.

Ditto for the typical non-academic research lab in almost any industry. Sure, every industry will spend a little effort on R&D just on their own initiative. However, nobody is going to spend millions of dollars creating new products that anybody can knock off for 1/100th the cost. Your modern academic lab also benefits from this sort of thing as well - often indirectly. They might get funding from industry, or their university sells off the patents they obtain. They also rely on a flow of cheap labor (grad students), and they only exist because of lucrative jobs in the associated industries. Sure, there will still be scientists if there were no patents/etc, but there would not be nearly as many.

I enjoy some of the content they produce, and I would rather see them adapt now so they're able to keep producing it, instead of clinging to a failed model and going bankrupt.

Ok, go ahead and explain how to fund the next LOTR or whatever without the use of IP laws. I'm certainly all for fewer artificial restrictions on commerce - I just don't see how it is going to happen.

Don't get me wrong - I strongly dislike the ..AA's tactics. I'm all for some laws to reign things in a bit, including greatly reigning in the duration of copyrights. Patents should be shorter as well in today's age, although you do need to be careful there as not all industries move along at the same pace. When 0.01% of an album's revenue goes to the artist, there is something wrong with that. Also, music is far lower-labor to produce and I think we can do a lot more to reign things in without really damaging the amount of actual art that gets produced. Movies are a different problem - there are lots of issues around DRM/etc that need to be reigned in, but fundamentally a movie isn't the product of a couple of actors but a whole production company.

By all means let's cut down on the abuses. But I'm not sure that throwing the baby out with the bathwater makes sense. I'm all for maximizing the size of the "creative commons," but let's try to do that while avoiding the tragedy of the commons.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

Please explain why law should protect a business model which produces tons of crap.

That is a side issue. And I would argue that there would be no need to waste any tax dollars protecting these businesses if people weren't pirating them in the first place. The piracy came first, not the legal expenses.

If they produce tons of crap, nobody would buy it and they go out of business. Everybody wins.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

No. Its just drilling w/o knowing before hand whether oil is present underneath. If the content you produce becomes a hit then you ahve the 'oil'. Pirates do the equivalent of 'cloning' oil molecules and flood the market with them priced at $0 (or the cost of cloning) and in doing so, devalue the oil. However drilling is expensive. You need to procure services, material, equipment, labor, etc. You will get compensated only if you actually find oil.

Note that this is an analogy. If it were possible to clone oil. You wouldn't drill at all and just clone existing oil.

Re:i wonder...

[AmiMoJo]

Ah, the old "if no-one has to pay for it no-one will produce it any more" argument.

Thing is, last year twice as many movies were made compared with a decade ago. In 2007 (before the credit crunch) movies made record profits.

The only conclusion you can make from that is that file sharing increases revenue, or at worst has very little impact on it. If we can stop pretending that file sharing takes money away from artists (and even big media companies) then we can move this debate forward.

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

Please explain why law should protect a business model which produces tons of crap. This is not the most efficient way to produce art, and I resent my tax dollars being used to place restrictions on my behavior to produce shitty music which can be sold to the maximum number of recipients.

Uh, if it is so lousy, then why are so many people eager to download it?

If you think that listening to this kind of music rots the brain, or whatever, then you should be in favor of making it harder to obtain. Then maybe people will listen to "good quality" art instead. Whatever that is...

Re:i wonder...

[drinkypoo]

If they produce tons of crap, nobody would buy it and they go out of business. Everybody wins.

This is false because advertising works, which is to say that it causes people to purchase things they neither need nor indeed want by playing on their feelings of inadequacy. The primary techniques of propaganda employed to sell music in particular include Bandwagon, Glittering Generalities, Plain Folks, and Transfer; the informational technique of Repetition is somewhat central, as is control of Exposure — it's simply not possible to avoid the media unless you eschew public places. And of course, the masses of asses are always pleased to promote conformity through Peer Pressure. There are numerous scientifically-supported means and methods being used to cause people to consume products for which they have no actual desire, and to cause them to be thankful and ask for more. All of the ones I have listed are negative. How many positive results inherent to commercial music can you name?

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

If the RIAA were playing records in the public square and then walking around charging people for happening to be there listening to it, I'd say you have a point.

They essentially are. They broadcast music over the radio, on TV, etc., and then "charge" for it not by demanding money, but by demanding restrictions on what I can do with my own property unless I pay them money. Remember the scandal over "home taping"? Why should my right to use the record button on my own stereo require someone else's permission?

Nobody is forcing you to download songs you don't want.

No, but they try to force other people not to communicate certain facts to me, in an attempt to force me to pay someone I've never met for labor I never requested.

However, there are lots of other industries where the primary value of an employee ISN'T in their labor, but in the information they produce. Most sciences and entertainment industries fall into that category.

Not quite. Their primary value is in their ability to produce that information, i.e., their labor.

A real musician is a better artist than me, not because of the songs he has recorded in the past -- I can produce copies of his albums just as well as he can -- but because of his ability to produce songs in the future. One hour of his time in the studio is worth far more than one hour of my time. But once he leaves the studio, my time spent distributing copies is just as valuable as his; if he tries to make a living from distribution instead of production, he's in a market where he has no advantage except legal bullying.

Likewise, a scientist who measures the speed of light is valuable not because of the number he came up with, but because of the insight that he used to measure it. That insight cannot be copied, and it'll be valuable in the future when he's working on something else: when someone wants a new physical constant measured, that scientist will be first on the list of candidates. But the number itself has essentially no economic value... or do you think we ought to pay every time we use that number?

The myth is that nobody would make major production movies if there were no copyright law.

Fixed that for you. ;)

Making a movie like LOTR costs many millions of dollars. Nobody does something like that for fun. [...] Nobody is going to pay to commission a work like that just for their personal edification, either. [...] Ok, go ahead and explain how to fund the next LOTR or whatever without the use of IP laws.

I agree, no single person is going to pay to commission a work like LOTR. But millions of people together will. That's ultimately how movies are funded today, just not as directly.

The Fellowship of the Ring grossed around $870 million worldwide. Varying ticket prices and multiple viewings make it hard to gauge how many people bought tickets, but it's probably somewhere between 50 and 100 million. The movie had a budget of $93 million: if 10-20% of people who were interested in seeing it had contributed an average of $10 each, they could have funded the movie in advance.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

Uh, if it is so lousy, then why are so many people eager to download it?

You missed the point he was making. Try rereading the part he quoted. Here it is again for your convenience:

Content creators invest millions each year into creating new content. A significant proportion of music,movies,etc are never going to become hits. The major incentive to continue pumping out new content is the hope that one of those investments will turn into a hit and pay off.

"Tons of crap" refers to the "significant proportion" of works that are "never going to become hits": someone invested their own time and money making those works, but there isn't enough demand to justify that investment, so the end up losing money. The copyright-lottery-based business model encourages people to churn out tons of crap, whether there's a market for it or not, in the hopes that some tiny piece of it will become a hit and make up for the money they lost on everything else.

A business model based on identifying paying customers and then performing the work would not produce crap that people are unwilling to buy.

Howard the Duck cost $36 million to make, but consumers were only willing to spend $10 million at the box office. The copyright lottery resulted in a $26 million loss there, which meant some other movie had to make at least a $26 million profit to keep the studio afloat (i.e. people who see good movies have to pay extra to counter the losses incurred on bad movies). Under a more sensible business model, the producer would have either found a way to shoot that movie for under $10 million, or canned it and moved on to something people actually wanted to see.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

We're off on a tangent. I am not arguing that consumerism is good. I'm arguing that piracy is bad.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

The only conclusion you can make from that is that file sharing increases revenue, or at worst has very little impact on it.

Just because more movies were produced doesn't mean piracy hasn't or wont affect their revenue. If each and every person pirated the movie and they still double production every year then I'd agree.

If we can stop pretending that file sharing takes money away from artists (and even big media companies) then we can move this debate forward.

Nice strawman. File sharing _DOES_ take money away from artists. If you have a choice of $15 and $0 for an album that you like, quite a few people with questionable ethics would go for $0 (and thus taking money away from artists). However if the only option was $15, then some of those earlier people who 'bought' the album at $0 might buy it at $15 because there isn't an option. And some people who are honest about their "I wouldn't buy it anyway" rationale wouldn't buy it.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

But once he leaves the studio, my time spent distributing copies is just as valuable as his; if he tries to make a living from distribution instead of production, he's in a market where he has no advantage except legal bullying.

As I said earlier in the thread one of the main reasons they enter the studio is they are aware of the protections they would enjoy if they created something worth paying for. If they knew the information they created was going to be effectively worth $0 once they left the studio, they might not have agreed to record any songs.

Likewise, a scientist who measures the speed of light is valuable not because of the number he came up with, but because of the insight that he used to measure it. That insight cannot be copied, and it'll be valuable in the future when he's working on something else: when someone wants a new physical constant measured, that scientist will be first on the list of candidates.

Strawman. Theories/experiments are not developed/performed because the scientist enters into the field expecting to get paid for the result. They enter the field knowing fully well that they wont. (Well unless they can patent their discovery it I guess, but thats another discussion) Also, Theories/experiments are not analogous to movies,movies. Yes all of it is 'information' but its worth separating for clarity.

I agree, no single person is going to pay to commission a work like LOTR. But millions of people together will. That's ultimately how movies are funded today, just not as directly.

The Fellowship of the Ring grossed around $870 million worldwide. Varying ticket prices and multiple viewings make it hard to gauge how many people bought tickets, but it's probably somewhere between 50 and 100 million. The movie had a budget of $93 million: if 10-20% of people who were interested in seeing it had contributed an average of $10 each, they could have funded the movie in advance.

Yes, a lot of things _COULD_ have funded the movie. But they have never been shown to work. You think Microsoft is going to hire 1000 engineers and pay them $100,000/yr for their labor to create software and then just wait for $5 contributions from 20 million people to come in just so _one_ person with access to the binaries can then pirate the software to 600 million people? You might think this is a valid business model, but how about first demonstrating that it actually works and is sustainable? Yes 'donation' based software development might work for some people but it is the exception rather than the norm.

I personally would NEVER pay for anything in advance that I haven't sampled/'test driven' (in whatever legal way possible) or heard good things about from people who have tried it before me.

There are millions of movies, music albums, books, software and other items protected by copyright. If you want to show your economic model which can replace copyright law is sustainable you have to show that it can work for _all_ of them.

--

But the argument has shifted from "Why piracy is bad", to "Why copyright law is bad". I don't see why if you are opposed to copyright law, the only recourse you have is to break it.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

As I said earlier in the thread one of the main reasons they enter the studio is they are aware of the protections they would enjoy if they created something worth paying for. If they knew the information they created was going to be effectively worth $0 once they left the studio, they might not have agreed to record any songs.

But they do know that. They know their music can be copied as soon as it's released to the public. Anyone who's ever seen a tape recorder or a CD burner knows that.

They choose to go ahead with the copyright-lottery-based business model because they think they'll sell enough copies to turn a profit. Well, maybe they won't: piracy is just one of many reasons they might not sell as many as they'd like. When you gamble, you must be prepared to lose.

Theories/experiments are not developed/performed because the scientist enters into the field expecting to get paid for the result.

Exactly! Scientists get it: they expect to be paid for their labor, which can't be copied, instead of the information they produce, which can. Why don't artists get it?

Also, Theories/experiments are not analogous to movies,movies.

They're information that takes a lot of human effort to produce originally and can be copied at no cost afterward. That's analogous enough for the purpose of this discussion.

You think Microsoft is going to hire 1000 engineers and pay them $100,000/yr for their labor to create software and then just wait for $5 contributions from 20 million people to come in

Not quite. Why should Microsoft pay engineers to write software before they know who's going to pay Microsoft for it? That's just more gambling.

just so _one_ person with access to the binaries can then pirate the software to 600 million people?

It's not piracy if the creators have already been paid. Just like it's not piracy to copy the tax forms an accountant gives you: he gets paid for doing the work in the first place, not for each copy.

I personally would NEVER pay for anything in advance that I haven't sampled/'test driven' (in whatever legal way possible) or heard good things about from people who have tried it before me.

Then you must have a pretty austere life. Every time you hire someone to perform a service -- cut your hair, fix your car -- you're implicitly "paying in advance". You might not hand over the money immediately, but you enter a contract and you're obligated to pay once it's done.

As for waiting to hear good reviews of a new producer: good! Nothing would stop you from continuing to do that. If you have doubts about a particular artist, then let more adventurous customers pay him first and see if he does quality work. New artists can lower their prices to counter that effect, or they can release portfolios to demonstrate their talent.

There are millions of movies, music albums, books, software and other items protected by copyright. If you want to show your economic model which can replace copyright law is sustainable you have to show that it can work for _all_ of them.

Nonsense. A different system would produce different sets of works.

One reason is that copyright makes it illegal to distribute certain works, so some artists decide to produce something else other than what they really have in mind.

Another is that many items protected by copyright probably shouldn't have been made. Howard the Duck had a budget of $36 million, but moviegoers were only willing to spend $10 million to see it. Under a pay-for-production model, the producer either would've found a way to shoot it for less than $10 million, or would've cancelled the project and made something else.

The set of works we see today is not the "right" set of works in any objective sense. It's just the result of one particular set of incen

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

If you have a choice of $15 and $0 for an album that you like, quite a few people with questionable ethics would go for $0 (and thus taking money away from artists).

And yet when Radiohead offered that exact choice, they ended up making more than they'd made on any previous album.

A friend of mine has around 60,000 MP3s. Even if he could have found them all on used CDs, those CDs would cost over $20,000, a sum he would not and could not have spent on music. The majority of artists in his collection didn't lose a dime.

Re:i wonder...

[0ld_d0g]

Not quite. Why should Microsoft pay engineers to write software before they know who's going to pay Microsoft for it? That's just more gambling.

Well. So you want a system where every piece of work is delayed until content producers can gather up money to pay for the work ? And you think this can compete with the existing model in being enough of an incentive for people to produce better creative content? I would love to see the argument for that. A lot of the work is done on 'good faith' that people are going to respect copyright law.

It reminds me of a story that I read in a fascinating book by Kim Woo Choong (sp?) a few years ago titled 'Every street is paved with gold'. In that he recounts a story of being a poor newspaper delivery boy on the streets. He developed a strategy where he would run through the streets and hand the newspapers to customers without stopping to collect money as it took time to break change. After he ran out of newspapers, he would walk back and collect the money. He figured that while some people would take the newspaper and walk off without paying (or he would miss them on the walk back), there were enough of a minority to make his strategy still be profitable for the newspaper company.

Then you must have a pretty austere life. Every time you hire someone to perform a service -- cut your hair, fix your car -- you're implicitly "paying in advance". You might not hand over the money immediately, but you enter a contract and you're obligated to pay once it's done.

What I meant to say was I pay for goods when I have enough of a reason to believe that they are worth it, and I procure services with favorable reputations whenever possible. If its not possible to know before hand, then well, I cant do anything about that.

As for waiting to hear good reviews of a new producer: good! Nothing would stop you from continuing to do that. If you have doubts about a particular artist, then let more adventurous customers pay him first and see if he does quality work. New artists can lower their prices to counter that effect, or they can release portfolios to demonstrate their talent.

But this is fine on a small scale. If you require 200 million dollars to create an operating system, you cant rely on this model. Like I said, if you plan to propose a model that can replace the existing model you ahve to show that it can work first.

Nonsense. A different system would produce different sets of works.

Yes, but how is whatever you're proposing going to be better for the general population of consumers (other than the advantage of not needed to pay for distribution)? To be more specific what is incentive to produce better and better work? Is being compensated in proportion with distribution a bad thing?

No one said that was the only recourse. But piracy doesn't harm anyone (no more than boycotting copyrighted works) and it has positive consequences for consumers, so why not?

Sure, it's illegal. So is jaywalking.

There are many things I could do that I could 'get away with'. And I haven't claimed that I have never pirated anything. I unfortunately have earlier in my life, and I based that on faulty reasoning of being a poor college student among other things.

But I don't see where you get the argument that piracy has positive consequences for consumers. Lets say I like to listen to Radiohead and enjoy their music. If there were a large amount of piracy of their work and they got little to no revenue from sales, they would have to shut down and either leave the music business or come up with a new way to get paid. Now, if you're as successful as Radiohead, tons of people already know you and you can probably find another model that works for you, but if you're an upcoming indie band like "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band" and you kinda needed the money to feed your family (heh, yeah that cliche never dies out ! :P) , you're pretty much screwed.

Re:i wonder...

[drinkypoo]

I don't necessarily think piracy is good, or even that it is not bad (it can certainly be both at once) but that it is possibly justified. In a world of consumerism, it's a rational response and possibly the only justified one.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

So you want a system where every piece of work is delayed until content producers can gather up money to pay for the work ?

Ideally, yes.

And you think this can compete with the existing model in being enough of an incentive for people to produce better creative content?

Yes. People who do a good job can command higher prices, just like in every other industry.

Like I said before, what reason is there to think artists can't muster up the motivation to do good work without special incentives that involve the rest of us giving up part of our free speech? Everyone else does it.

What I meant to say was I pay for goods when I have enough of a reason to believe that they are worth it, and I procure services with favorable reputations whenever possible. If its not possible to know before hand, then well, I cant do anything about that.

Sure. But pretty much everyone does that too, and new producers still manage to enter the market. How do they do it? By lowering their prices and/or putting out some free samples. The problem of how to convince people to pay you for doing stuff is one that people have been solving for centuries.

But this is fine on a small scale. If you require 200 million dollars to create an operating system, you cant rely on this model.

Sure you can. If there's $200 million worth of demand for a new operating system, the money will be there: the free market is great at connecting supply with demand. If you have a hard time finding people to pay you, then maybe they don't really want a new operating system after all.

To be more specific what is incentive to produce better and better work?

The prospect of getting paid more, faster, for work you do in the future.

Is being compensated in proportion with distribution a bad thing?

Yes. It encourages overproduction, enticing producers to gamble, and it depends on passing laws that slow the pace of artistic progress (can't build on the works of others) and place needless restrictions on consumers (can't share certain numbers) and technological innovators (can't add certain features).

But I don't see where you get the argument that piracy has positive consequences for consumers. Lets say I like to listen to Radiohead and enjoy their music. If there were a large amount of piracy of their work and they got little to no revenue from sales, they would have to shut down and either leave the music business or come up with a new way to get paid.

First, most bands make little or nothing from album sales, they make their money from touring. The album is essentially advertising for concert tickets and merchandise. Wider distribution means more advertising, and if pirates are doing the distribution for you, then it's free advertising.

Second, one person pirating is not the same as everyone pirating. One person choosing to download a song instead of buying a copy is not going to make the band go broke.

Third, people tend to support artists they like in some form anyway. Radiohead offered an album for any price people cared to pay, including zero, and it brought in more money than any previous album. Even with widespread piracy, you'd still have people buying albums, tickets, and merchandise.

Even a band that doesn't tour, doesn't sell merchandise, and doesn't have the kind of fans who buy things just to support them can still make money by selling their labor, as long as people want them to keep recording. If they can't make money from any of those things, then maybe they aren't cut out to be professional musicians.

Finally, remember the context. We're talking about the positive consequences of piracy as compared to the alternative, which is boycotting copyrighted works. A boycott has exactly the same effect of depriving the artist of money. The difference is that a boycott

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

Sounds like the guys in my IT department at work who insist that it doesn't matter who you hire as long as you follow the right process. The process does matter, but the people matter too.

Where the creation of ideas is concerned it is even trickier. You can hire "innovative" ideas, but that doesn't mean that this guarantees that you'll be the one coming out with the next iphone killer, or whatever. The fact is that a group of 100 highly paid innovative people could miss an idea that some guy in his garage figures out in his spare time.

The RIAA is basically employing the venture capital approach - get your feelers into everything, and hope that you get lucky. Be liberal with your money, but also be demanding in your return.

I'm not really a big fan of the RIAA approach, but I'm not sure there is any other approach that is likely to generate consistent results.

My guess is that if you tried to do a marketing-requirements-construction approach (as you seem to advocate) to the iphone, you'd never get off the ground. How many people who now own an iphone would have vocalized their interest in such a product if it didn't exist at all (even in concept)? Most people don't know what they want - but they buy it when they see it. So, it isn't like you can just go out there and ask what kinds of movies people like and just come up with something that follows a formula...

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

They broadcast music over the radio, on TV, etc., and then "charge" for it not by demanding money, but by demanding restrictions on what I can do with my own property unless I pay them money. Remember the scandal over "home taping"? Why should my right to use the record button on my own stereo require someone else's permission?

Short of redistribution, I agree with you completely here. I'm all for legislation that strengthens and codifies fair use, and that should include DVRs/etc. I'm even fine with limited redistribution. DVR directly uploads to TPB, however, is pushing it.

By supporting limited copyright I give people incentive to create those shows in the first place. I think it is a fair trade. If those shows offend you so much, then don't watch them.

A real musician is a better artist than me, not because of the songs he has recorded in the past -- I can produce copies of his albums just as well as he can -- but because of his ability to produce songs in the future.

What about artists who only have a few great hits (that would be most of them)? Most scientists don't even have one truly great discovery, and almost nobody has more than 1 or 2. Your system assigns zero value to people before they create a great work, and then it assigns great value to somebody who will almost certainly never produce another great work. Sure, they're more likely to do so than some others, but it amounts to a big lottery, with lots of people not getting any benefit or sponsorship of any kind.

The Fellowship of the Ring grossed around $870 million worldwide. Varying ticket prices and multiple viewings make it hard to gauge how many people bought tickets, but it's probably somewhere between 50 and 100 million. The movie had a budget of $93 million: if 10-20% of people who were interested in seeing it had contributed an average of $10 each, they could have funded the movie in advance.

Yup, and they wouldn't have ended up with FOTR. They'd have put $100 million in some pool, and then hired some famous director to make some entirely different movie. Do you think that 1/10th of the people who bought FOTR tickets had even heard of Tolkien before the movie came out? They heard and saw that it was a great movie, so they bought tickets - perhaps more than once. The only people buying tickets before the films were made would be the slashdot crowd... :)

The sequels might actually have been fundable via this formula. However, since the production crew would already be paid before they even started filming they wouldn't really have incentive to make it as great a production as it was, since they get paid the same either way. Sure, they'd do a decent job so that they get future assignments, but pay-in-advance tends to create mediocre works in general. That's why start-ups almost always outperform established companies. And start-ups only work because they can make their profits AFTER the product goes to market.

Look, I'm all for having reasonable tradeoffs with IP rules. However, I do think that copyrights and patents, in limited form, tend to encourage far more innovation than they quell. Virtually all high-wage jobs depend on IP in some form. The main exception would be more trade-related jobs, and honestly quite a bit of that has to do with laws that artificially limit the pool of labor (just try to become a carpenter or a plumber and you'll find there is a lot more involved than buying tools and learning how to actually do the work - you can't even charge to cut hair without going through what is essentially a medieval trade guild in most places).

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

If those shows offend you so much, then don't watch them.

Not sure what you're talking about here. The shows don't offend me. The restrictions on my freedom (and on technological and artistic innovations) are what offends me, and I face those same restrictions whether I watch the shows or not.

What about artists who only have a few great hits (that would be most of them)? Most scientists don't even have one truly great discovery, and almost nobody has more than 1 or 2.

What about them? Do you think someone who can only write one good song deserves a free ride for the rest of his life?

I think they deserve to get paid a fair price for the time they spent writing that one good song, and then if they want more money after that, they should either come up with another good song or find another line of work. Same as anyone else in any other industry. A barber who gives one great haircut, then nothing but mediocre haircuts after that, is not going to end up a millionaire. Why should he?

Your system assigns zero value to people before they create a great work, and then it assigns great value to somebody who will almost certainly never produce another great work. Sure, they're more likely to do so than some others, but it amounts to a big lottery, with lots of people not getting any benefit or sponsorship of any kind.

No... the current, copyright-based system is the lottery. You invest time and money into something without knowing if it'll pay off. Many will enter, few will win.

My system lets everyone assign their own value: no one has to do a lick of work without knowing exactly what they'll be paid for it. You won't become a millionaire overnight by surprise, but you won't waste your effort on something you thought was profitable only to find out that no one wants it, either.

Sure, they'd do a decent job so that they get future assignments, but pay-in-advance tends to create mediocre works in general.

Except in the thousands of industries where it doesn't, you mean?

Virtually all high-wage jobs depend on IP in some form.

They don't inherently depend on IP, they've just settled on that model out of convenience and laziness. The only people who would truly be out of a job in a world without copyright are copyright lawyers.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

The fact is that a group of 100 highly paid innovative people could miss an idea that some guy in his garage figures out in his spare time.

If you can come up with that idea in your garage in your spare time, then clearly you don't need the incentive of a government-enforced monopoly to get you to do it. That's a great example of how the purpose of copyrights (and patents) shifts from enticing people to create new works, which is at least a legitimate goal, to rewarding the first person to do something that would've been done anyway and enriching them at everyone else's expense.

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

No... the current, copyright-based system is the lottery. You invest time and money into something without knowing if it'll pay off. Many will enter, few will win.

This is hardly the case.

Look at the movie example - every person on the production crew earns an ordinary salary. For the most part they don't make a lot of money if the movie booms, and they don't lose anything if the movie busts. The production company can afford to pay them because it knows that some percentage of their movies will pay off, so they surf the peaks and the valleys. If you eliminated the incentive to create the movie, then nobody would get paid.

My system lets everyone assign their own value: no one has to do a lick of work without knowing exactly what they'll be paid for it. You won't become a millionaire overnight by surprise, but you won't waste your effort on something you thought was profitable only to find out that no one wants it, either.

The beauty of your system is that it works fine even with copyright laws remaining exactly as they are. Why don't you go ahead and start collecting bounties for 100 million dollar movies and see how that works for you? If your system works so well, then it will be able to compete effectively with the risk-based system we have now. If you have to abolish the current system to try out yours, that just tells me that you're unable to compete with it.

I don't think your system will ever work for movies, unless it becomes possible to do them on a small budget. However, I think your system might actually be plausible today for music, since it doesn't actually take that much in the way of resources to produce an album (you could ditch 80% of what most studios spend money on and still come out with a pretty nice product). You could collect bounties and release everything under the creative commons. I don't think your model will fail due to problems creating the music - your problem will be getting people to pay for something they can't sample in advance. However, if you let people sample it in advance, then you need copyright to be able to sell much of anything at all.

Except in the thousands of industries where it doesn't, you mean?

Name one. Virtually every industry that doesn't involve selling products AFTER they're made strives for exactly mediocre performance. When you hire a plumber does he do exactly the job he was paid to do, or does he try to make your pipes a work of art on the off chance that you'll be so impressed that you'll throw more money at him? In most non-content industries you also have the advantage that the products aren't very differentiated - any plumber in town can fix your sink and any who consistently messes up goes out of business. Not just anybody could create a movie like FOTR, and I'm not sure that if you hired Peter Jackson to do your next big hit that it would be likely to do as well. Lots of stuff came together that made it great, and it might never happen quite that way again. With copyright you can read the reviews and THEN decide whether to go see the movie 5 times. With a bounty system you can only hire Peter and hope it turns out for the best, and that you don't get King Kong instead.

They don't inherently depend on IP, they've just settled on that model out of convenience and laziness.

Convenience and laziness are just another way of saying it is the best way to get something done for the least effort - ie it is efficient! If you find a planet where EVERYBODY on it doesn't try to get by with the least effort possible maybe your system will work out just fine. I want my government to establish systems that are convenient and work best when we don't have to do any work at all - that means that it is practical. The alternative is systems that depend on idealism to work, and you can see where that got the Soviets...

I think they deserve to get paid a fair price for the time they spent writing that one good song, and then if they want more money after that, they s

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

This is hardly the case.

Look at the movie example - every person on the production crew earns an ordinary salary. For the most part they don't make a lot of money if the movie booms, and they don't lose anything if the movie busts. The production company can afford to pay them because it knows that some percentage of their movies will pay off, so they surf the peaks and the valleys.

Right: the production company is taking the risk, not the individual crew members. That doesn't change what I said. The risk is still there.

If you find someone to front you some money to play roulette, someone who'll take most of your winnings but let you off the hook if you lose, that doesn't mean you're not gambling. It just means you're gambling with someone else's money.

If you eliminated the incentive to create the movie, then nobody would get paid.

Of course, because getting paid is the incentive. That incentive exists under any system, as long as there's demand for new movies.

If you have to abolish the current system to try out yours, that just tells me that you're unable to compete with it.

It wouldn't be competing on a level playing field. The copyright-lottery model is subsidized by the money we spend to enforce copyright law and by the freedoms that law takes away.

If you want a fair comparison, why not abolish copyright and let people who choose that model bear the true costs of maintaining their position as the only distributor of copies? Why should everyone else have to give up their speech rights, technical innovations, and tax dollars just to prop up one particular business model? If that business model can't stand on its own, doesn't it deserve to fail and be replaced by one that can?

Name one [industry where pay-in-advance doesn't create mediocre works in general].

Accounting, mechanics, plumbing, teaching, medicine, landscaping, cooking... sorry, is that too many?

When you hire a plumber does he do exactly the job he was paid to do, or does he try to make your pipes a work of art on the off chance that you'll be so impressed that you'll throw more money at him?

He does exactly the job he was paid to do, and if he does it competently, that's not mediocre at all -- it's perfect.

When I go to a restaurant, I "pay in advance" by entering a sales contract as soon as I place an order. I specify what I want in general terms, and leave the creative decisions about presentation, spices and specific ingredients, etc. up to the kitchen. Generally it turns out pretty well.

With a bounty system you can only hire Peter and hope it turns out for the best, and that you don't get King Kong instead.

If you're really that concerned that you might not get what you paid for, then you can work out another payment arrangement that depends on some post-hoc measurement of quality. As long as you come to some kind of agreement before the work is done, the specific terms don't really matter: what matters is that there's an agreement to exchange work for money, and the people on both sides of that agreement are clearly identified.

Convenience and laziness are just another way of saying it is the best way to get something done for the least effort - ie it is efficient!

It's only efficient in a market that has already been seriously distorted. Without the expensive, stifling system of copyright law, it would not be efficient. Again, why should the rest of us have to sacrifice in order to make a business model that's ridiculous on its face seem efficient?

I want my government to establish systems that are convenient and work best when we don't have to do any work at all - that means that it is practical.

But that's not true of copyright at all. Copyright requires massive amounts of work: it's expensive

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

True enough, but what about start-ups? Lots of ideas are explored by start-up companies, who can only invest in ideas because if it pays off they can recoup their expenses. Banks wouldn't lend them the money they need if they didn't have any chance of a return.

Copyrights and patents with fair limits have worked well for hundreds of years. I'm all for getting rid of abuses in IP law (submarine patents, patents for the obvious, etc). However, I think that we're in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water here. The problem isn't that copyright exists, it is that we have stuff like insane statutory damages, 100 year copyrights, patents that last 17 years in industries that move on in 2, etc.

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

If you find someone to front you some money to play roulette, someone who'll take most of your winnings but let you off the hook if you lose, that doesn't mean you're not gambling. It just means you're gambling with someone else's money.

What is gambling? Taking a risk? Hardly!

What makes gambling dumb is when you take risks that have a calculated net loss. If there were a roulette game out there with odds in your favor, you'd be a fool NOT to play it. Well-executed movies do not have a guaranteed return, but they do have a strong net positive rate of return. Investing in movies (plural) is not a foolish move.

If you want a fair comparison, why not abolish copyright and let people who choose that model bear the true costs of maintaining their position as the only distributor of copies?

Simple - I want the government enforcing the laws - not some private company imposing its own laws. I think that the costs of enforcing the law is far outweighed by the benefits of IP law in general - when those laws have reasonable limits. I'm not in favor of $200k statutory damage claims against people who have not made a dime from copying works. I'm not in favor of Steamboat Willie still being under copyright. However, I see nothing wrong with the latest Harry Potter book not being available in 50 cent paperback editions in every store or for free on ubiquitous ebooks two weeks before the official release date.

He does exactly the job he was paid to do, and if he does it competently, that's not mediocre at all -- it's perfect.

Nothing on this world is perfect. It is in fact mediocre. In the fields you cited mediocre tends to be good enough (I'd question that for medicine, but that is a whole different mess). I think you'd still have mediocre services without IP law. What you wouldn't have is a lot of invention. Why would somebody come up with something better if the people who are paying them indicated that they'd be happy with something that already exists?

To go back to the example of commissioning FOTR - it wouldn't be commissioned in the first place because nobody realized that they even wanted it. In a bounty model the consumers are effectively the inventors, as they need to come up with the ideas they want people to pay for. In the real world, consumers are almost NEVER the inventors - they buy products they like, they don't come up with them.

If you're really that concerned that you might not get what you paid for, then you can work out another payment arrangement that depends on some post-hoc measurement of quality.

Uh, good luck with that. How would you define quality attributes for a movie like FOTR? Would you use some kind of a vote? The voters actually have incentive to NEVER find a work satisfactory, since that means that they keep the $100M and can commission another movie, while still enjoying the results of the now-bankrupt production company that made the first attempt. If they do it a few times then maybe nobody will go after that bounty, but that is no worse than if the bounty is paid in the first place. This is a great example of the tragedy of the commons - everybody has an incentive to exploit and nobody has an incentive to produce.

Without the expensive, stifling system of copyright law, it would not be efficient.

Ok, what is the cost of the law? I doubt it will exceed even the tax revenues from the industries that it fosters. At best you can argue opportunity cost from works that are not created due to infringement risks, but I think that those are pretty low when IP laws are suitably balanced. Note that I'm all for shortening copyrights and in many cases patents as well. I'm also for getting rid of abuses that amount to gaming the system.

Copyright requires massive amounts of work: it's expensive to enforce, a lot of time and money is sunk into DRM and other anti-piracy measures, and anyone creating a new work has to tread carefully to avoid borrowing too much from other works

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

What makes gambling dumb is when you take risks that have a calculated net loss. If there were a roulette game out there with odds in your favor, you'd be a fool NOT to play it.

Once in a while, sure, but you'd be just as much of a fool to make a career out of it. If you have a 1:1,000,000 chance of winning $1.5 million, the odds are in your favor, but most players will still lose. Expected value is not the same as actual value: that's why the insurance industry exists.

Why would somebody come up with something better if the people who are paying them indicated that they'd be happy with something that already exists?

Because in reality, people aren't only happy with things that already exist. They're happier with new things that they haven't seen before. People who can provide pleasant surprises will have no difficulty earning a living from it.

Don't think copyright solves this problem, though. Read any critique of the film industry and you'll see complaints that studios are too conservative, investing too much in predictable, lowest-common-denominator crap that sells a lot of tickets but doesn't innovate.

To go back to the example of commissioning FOTR - it wouldn't be commissioned in the first place because nobody realized that they even wanted it.

No one realized they wanted a film adaptation of one of the most popular fantasy epics of all time? You can't be serious.

In a bounty model the consumers are effectively the inventors, as they need to come up with the ideas they want people to pay for.

Not necessarily. The world is full of examples of hiring people to provide a service without knowing exactly what it'll be, from restaurants to CEOs. You can hire someone to use their own judgment, not just to go through a checklist of tasks you've laid out for them.

The consumers don't have to provide the ideas at all, in fact. If an artist has an idea he'd like to develop, he can go out looking for customers instead of waiting for them to come to him.

How would you define quality attributes for a movie like FOTR?

Hey, you're the one who's worried about getting something that doesn't meet your standards of quality. You tell me!

At best you can argue opportunity cost from works that are not created due to infringement risks, but I think that those are pretty low when IP laws are suitably balanced.

Don't forget the lost technological innovations, the cost of buying works in one new format after another because there's no simple and legal way to transfer them, and of course the cost of buying copies of works whose production has long since been paid for.

And don't forget that IP laws have never been suitably balanced, and certainly aren't today, so the cost of works that aren't created due to infringement risks is quite high in reality. That cost doesn't only apply to new works, either: many old works are no longer in print, but since the copyright holder is unwilling to reprint them, they're basically unavailable. Some works are also only available in modified form because of licensing issues (e.g. TV shows released on DVD without the original soundtracks).

Well, that is what we have today, except today you even get to listen to the work you're about to pay for BEFORE you pay for it.

No, it isn't what we have today. An artist doesn't know whether he'll get paid a fair price for his work until after he performs the work -- maybe even decades after. And the price he eventually gets paid has absolutely no relation to his standard of fairness: he can set the price per copy, but he has no control over how many copies he sells.

That's bad for the artist who spends a year making something and only earns $10,000. If he knew ahead of time he'd be making less than minimum wage, he would've done something else that year.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

Lots of ideas are explored by start-up companies, who can only invest in ideas because if it pays off they can recoup their expenses.

If someone else is exploring those ideas, they don't need a patent, because the ideas are already out there.

If no one else is exploring those ideas, they don't need a patent, because they'll have no competition.

The only potential harm is if they're so slow to start selling their new product that a competitor rises up before they've recouped their costs. And if we want to encourage people to form new markets where they might be run over by competitors, we could just guarantee their debts: there's no need to block future innovation for years just to put money in someone's pocket.

Copyrights and patents with fair limits have worked well for hundreds of years.

The years when copyright worked well were years in which it was practical for a few wealthy entities to mass-produce copies, but impractical for individuals to do it on their own. It was easy (and tolerable to the masses) to police copying when that only meant physically inspecting a handful of factories.

Now, everything can be digitized and reproduced at home by people who do it just for the sake of sharing, and copyright isn't working quite so well. Now enforcing copyright means keeping technology out of consumers' hands, snooping on private communications, and going after individuals who have no profit motive.

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

And if we want to encourage people to form new markets where they might be run over by competitors, we could just guarantee their debts: there's no need to block future innovation for years just to put money in someone's pocket.

However, to get a loan in the first place somebody needs to demonstrate that they're able to pay it back. How will the government decide which debts to guarantee, and which ones not to? Right now the approach is market-based - the lenders who get paid are the ones who back products that end up being successful in the market (granted, a market with an artificial imposition of monopoly pricing).

Will we have an innovation board that decides which inventions are innovate enough to get the reward? If you do that before loans are issued then there will be no problems securing the loans, but you probably would subsidize a lot of bad ideas (indeed, the guys making the invention get paid the same whether the idea pays off or not - since there won't be big bucks if it takes off without patents). If you issue the guarantees after a product is made then the loans will be much higher risk, and a product that ends up transforming the market could actually end up not getting a guarantee and being a loss to the inventors.

The only question is which costs society more - all those loan guarantees (and loss of entrepeneurial spirit), or the cost of patent licensing. I think that patent licensing costs aren't all that bad, when patents are limited to reasonable scopes and durations (which the current ones aren't).

I do agree that in many ways the current situation goes too far in favor of patent rights. You hit on a good point that some discoveries are inevitable, and we shouldn't make one guy rich and another guy poor just because the one came up with it two days before the other. However, I'm not convinced that the whole system needs to go away - you can dial IP laws up and down as much as needed. Indeed, if you really want to abolish copyright then I'd think that the first step would be to start shortening it and see how it goes.

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

No one realized they wanted a film adaptation of one of the most popular fantasy epics of all time? You can't be serious.

I am serious. How many people who saw the movies actually read the books (BEFORE the movie trailers came out)? Keep in mind that movies don't do well because of the slashdot crowd - they do well because of people with "normal" tastes.

Hey, you're the one who's worried about getting something that doesn't meet your standards of quality. You tell me!

I can't define my standards of quality, but I know if I see a trailer and read reviews and talk to friends whether it is worth it to pay for a movie. You're the one who proposed having standards of quality to decide whether to pay a bounty or not - I'm just pointing out that they're so subjective that it would be very difficult to implement in a way that somebody would spend $100M to create a movie. When you sign a contract for $100M worth of work you want the terms to be fairly concrete. Quality as it pertains to movies is not a concrete criteria.

That's bad for the artist who spends a year making something and only earns $10,000. If he knew ahead of time he'd be making less than minimum wage, he would've done something else that year.

Well, if the artist is doing it on their own then they're taking that risk on themselves. Their other option is to sign with a label and get a $60k advance, and then most likely they'd never see another dime whether they do well or not. In that case the label is taking on the risk. And, by the way, I'm all for reforms that make that arrangement less abusive to the artist.

It wouldn't be a problem if artists dropped the per-copy price to zero after they'd been fairly compensated, but of course no one does that.

Hey, I said I'm all for reasonable durations of copyrights, and that is as close to this as you'll get. You can't base it on some percentage profit or anything like that otherwise you'll end up with the Bell Labs approach - spend as much as you can to justify a rate hike to the PUC (although it did get the US a couple of Nobel prizes and the transistor).

Why is it that you can't point to a single quality of artistic labor that sets it apart from other labor that people get paid directly to perform?

You haven't asked me to. Here is one: the inability to objectively define the value of an artistic work. Some paintings sell for millions of dollars, and others sell for $25. If you come up with an algorithm that figures out the value of a painting (without relying on market-based data), then perhaps you'll have a way to reward artists without copyright. Artistic works are priced based on what the market will bear, and it is almost impossible to predict what this will be based purely on the physical properties and attributes of the art.

The same kind of problem applies to most forms of IP. You can't sell it for scrap, and it doesn't cost money to reproduce. However, most people would agree that ideas and concepts are valuable. IP law is a very imperfect way to assign actual dollar value to information. Your only alternatives to current IP laws are reforms in those laws, some other system that assigns dollar value to information that people can agree with, or a system that assigns no dollar value to information. I argue that the middle option is hard to do, and the latter option just doesn't make sense, as the fact that you're so eager to copy information just proves that it has actual value, and if it has value then you want to reward people for creating it.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

I am serious. How many people who saw the movies actually read the books (BEFORE the movie trailers came out)? Keep in mind that movies don't do well because of the slashdot crowd - they do well because of people with "normal" tastes.

The books had sold 100 million copies before the movies ever came out, and inspired countless other works, from tabletop and video games to school plays. Fifteen years ago, if you ran a poll of books that should be given movie adaptations, LOTR surely would've been near the top.

I can't define my standards of quality, but I know if I see a trailer and read reviews and talk to friends whether it is worth it to pay for a movie.

How do your friends know whether the movie is worth seeing? Ultimately, someone has to decide that the potential that it might be a good movie is worth the price of a ticket.

Here is one: the inability to objectively define the value of an artistic work. Some paintings sell for millions of dollars, and others sell for $25. If you come up with an algorithm that figures out the value of a painting (without relying on market-based data), then perhaps you'll have a way to reward artists without copyright.

Bzzt. Sorry, that's not unique to artistic labor. How do you objectively define the value of a haircut, a clean house, or a well-run company? What algorithm can tell you how much to pay a CEO or even a barber without relying on market-based data?

(Come to think of it, how can you objectively measure the value of anything without market-based data? A 20 ounce soft drink costs pennies to produce but regularly sells for $1.50 or more. The value is all subjective.)

However, most people would agree that ideas and concepts are valuable.

Exposure to ideas and concepts is valuable. Producing ideas and concepts is valuable. But the ideas and concepts themselves, not so much, at least in terms of dollar value. What is the Pythagorean Theorem worth? What is the number 69,105 worth? Those questions barely even make sense.

the latter option just doesn't make sense, as the fact that you're so eager to copy information just proves that it has actual value

Not at all. The fact that I'm unwilling to pay for a second copy proves that it doesn't have actual value! In fact, if I have a good enough memory, I might not even need the first copy once I've seen it.

Again, if it "just doesn't make sense" to assign no dollar value to information, then what is the dollar value of the number 69,105? What is the dollar value of the fact that Albany is the capital of New York? What is the dollar value of the comments in this thread?

There are situations where I might be willing to pay someone to tell me what the capital of New York is, but it would be insane to suggest that anyone owns that information and deserves to be compensated whenever it's copied or used.

and if it has value then you want to reward people for creating it.

Actually, I want to reward people for creating it even though it has no inherent value, much like I want to reward people for hauling my garbage away even though they're technically making me poorer. The service itself is what I find valuable.

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

How do your friends know whether the movie is worth seeing? Ultimately, someone has to decide that the potential that it might be a good movie is worth the price of a ticket. ...
Bzzt. Sorry, that's not unique to artistic labor. How do you objectively define the value of a haircut, a clean house, or a well-run company? What algorithm can tell you how much to pay a CEO or even a barber without relying on market-based data?

Ok, here is the problem with your argument:

I questioned how you can decide whether to pay a studio the $100M for making a movie. You suggested that you'd have defined standards of quality. I said that you couldn't define your standards of quality sufficiently well to form the basis for a $100M contract. You say that this isn't a problem because people spend $12 on a haircut without any concrete definition of what the quality of that haircut will be. Unfortunately, you need more rigor for a $100M contract than for a $12 contract.

How do you award a bounty for a $100M movie? In the copyright-based solution you don't - somebody makes a movie and people get to decide whether they want to pay to see it. In your solution everybody who chips in has to agree on how the movie will be made, and how it will be decided whether the money gets paid or not. The guy making the movie has to know whether it is likely that they'll collect the money or not, or they won't do the work. We're not talking about a haircut - we're talking about a major business transaction.

If you can't define standards of quality BEFORE people contribute and BEFORE somebody does the work, then few people will contribute, and nobody will do the work. Initially you might get some people who are willing to give it a try, but I think your model is destined to fail. There is nothing in fact preventing you from using your model today - just get people to donate to a bucket to commission some movie or song and then make it a work-for-hire and release the copyright to the public domain. The problem is that nobody will give you 50 cents for a song they haven't heard when they can go to Amazon and spend $1 on a song they have heard.

In an idealistic world your solution might seem better. However, this world isn't an ideal one, and your solution will amount to the tragedy of the commons. You're still legally able to implement it right now, and the fact that nobody has done so indicates that it isn't likely to work. I'd be happy if you proved me wrong. If you start turning out hit movies or songs I'll be happy to make some contributions to the fund.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

You say that this isn't a problem because people spend $12 on a haircut without any concrete definition of what the quality of that haircut will be. Unfortunately, you need more rigor for a $100M contract than for a $12 contract.

If that $100M contract is really just ten million $10 contracts, I don't think you do. If the movie turns out to suck, you're no worse off than if you got a bad haircut.

There is nothing in fact preventing you from using your model today - just get people to donate to a bucket to commission some movie or song and then make it a work-for-hire and release the copyright to the public domain. [...] You're still legally able to implement it right now, and the fact that nobody has done so indicates that it isn't likely to work.

It's hardly fair to expect the two models to compete head-to-head when one is heavily subsidized and the other isn't.

How do you propose to resolve that? Shall we take away the subsidy for people who choose the copyright-lottery model (i.e. require them to bear the true cost of maintaining their position as the sole supplier), or shall we impose a similar subsidy for people who choose mine (for example, require everyone to spend $X/year on artistic production whether they want to or not)?

When I brought this up before, your answer seemed to be "who cares, I like the subsidy." Well, fine, but don't expect your point about competition to be taken seriously when you're the one encouraging a subsidy for one model and not the other.

Re:i wonder...

[Rich0]

If that $100M contract is really just ten million $10 contracts, I don't think you do. If the movie turns out to suck, you're no worse off than if you got a bad haircut.

Unless you're the barber, who just spent the equivalent of 400 years giving haircuts and isn't paid a dime... :)

How do you propose to resolve that? Shall we take away the subsidy for people who choose the copyright-lottery model (i.e. require them to bear the true cost of maintaining their position as the sole supplier), or shall we impose a similar subsidy for people who choose mine (for example, require everyone to spend $X/year on artistic production whether they want to or not)?

I'm perfectly fine in considering the cost of copyright enforcement when evaluating how everything went. It isn't like the "free enforcement" really helps companies offer their product for less compared to the model you propose. It just makes sure they get paid after the fact.

Also, just how much money even gets spent on copyright enforcement? It is rare to hear news of the FBI doing almost anything regarding copyright, and most enforcement is civil in nature. I agree that the civil enforcement does cost society something in terms of court costs, but that also costs the plaintiff quite a bit of money as well, so it isn't like there is a huge financial handout going on. In any case, the most egregious use of that kind of enforcement has been the RIAA tactics and I'm all for banning that kind of stuff anyway.

If you can figure out how much the average taxpayer actually directly spends on copyright enforcement I'd probably be willing to concede that you can go ahead and have that money distributed in vouchers for everybody to spend on bounties for creative works. If you're lucky it might amount to a few dollars per taxpayer per year, or maybe a few tens of cents if you distribute it across people who don't pay taxes as well.

I still think the subsidy argument is a red herring - it isn't like that money goes towards actually making creative works for sale.

Re:i wonder...

[Mr2001]

It isn't like the "free enforcement" really helps companies offer their product for less compared to the model you propose.

It does help companies offer their product for less than they would if they had to pay the true costs of propping up their business model.

Also, just how much money even gets spent on copyright enforcement?

The cost isn't entirely monetary. We also subsidize the copyright lottery by giving up our rights, and by giving up the works and technical innovations that could be created if not for copyright. What is the value of being able to create backup copies of DVDs? What is the value of the ghost works that are never released or created? I'm not sure how to put a number on that, but whatever that cost is, we're paying it.

I agree that the civil enforcement does cost society something in terms of court costs, but that also costs the plaintiff quite a bit of money as well, so it isn't like there is a huge financial handout going on.

Er... sure there is. If I give you $10,000 to buy a car, and you choose a $20,000 model and pay the difference out of your own pocket, that doesn't mean I didn't give you $10k. Your cost doesn't cancel out my cost.

I still think the subsidy argument is a red herring - it isn't like that money goes towards actually making creative works for sale.

Actually, in effect, it does. Money is fungible. Every dollar a company doesn't have to spend propping up their business model is an extra dollar they can spend on production. There's ultimately no difference between (1) giving a company $10,000 to pay for production and letting them pay for enforcement on their own, (2) giving a company $10,000 for enforcement and letting them pay for production on their own, and (3) giving them $10,000 worth of enforcement services for free and letting them pay for production on their own.

If a company that relies on selling copies had to pay the true cost of maintaining its position as the sole provider of copies, it would have to pass those costs on to the consumer in the form of higher prices for each copy. The cost we all pay for copyright law -- in terms of dollars spent on enforcement as well as lost rights and works -- results in lower prices per copy. That's a subsidy.

Well, dang.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do those of us looking for not-legally avaliable stuff, like dubbed anime go now?

Re:Well, dang.

[tepples]

Where do those of us looking for not-legally avaliable stuff, like dubbed anime go now?

You could always go teach English in Japan.

Re:Well, dang.

[Khyber]

animefreak.tv, DUH.

Re:Well, dang.

[kklein]

Where do those of us looking for not-legally avaliable stuff, like dubbed anime go now?

You could always go teach English in Japan.

No thanks; we already have enough unqualified, illiterate, socially-retarded English "teachers" over here as it is.

Re:Well, dang.

[rdnetto]

That won't get you any anime dubbed in English, or even subbed. Fansubs are usually the only English versions available.

Re:Well, dang.

[tepples]

The point is to reduce the need for dubbed anime by learning the original language.

Re:Well, dang.

[rdnetto]

Or you could just use fansubs. From a legal point of view, they're (unauthorized) derived works of the originals, so they're typically only available on IRC/BT. It's worth noting though that many studios turn a blind eye to them since it's effectively free marketing to a demographic they wouldn't have reached otherwise. It's also worth noting that you can learn a surprising amount of Japanese simply by watching a lot of fansubs, though you'll be nowhere near fluent in it.

Debate!

[headkase]

There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic. We need to educate people to enable a wider debate. That is the only thing that will lead to fair change. Piracy is not the answer. There is a place for copyright that is not todays distorted parameters. Boycotting in the mean time is the answer, however, unless boycotting is whipped into shape it is also not the answer. Debate! Educate your friends and family it is a small start but it is the only way.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

The whole thing smells more and more like the old P&P RPG Paranoia. Everyone hates secret societies, everyone hates mutants, yet everyone is a mutant in a secret society.

I worked for our version of the RIAA for a while (I didn't mean to, they were part of the bundle of companies I had to support). My moment of "wtf" came when one of their lawyers approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.

My answer was "since you're suing people who know aynthing about flashing Nintendos or even do it, my answer has to be no". This is when he offered money...

Re:Debate!

[gowen]

You're trying to start an intelligent and informed debate on copyright? Based on the premise that some copyright is quite reasonable?

On Slashdot?

Good luck with that...

Re:Debate!

[Krneki]

The Pandora box was open a long time ago and since then the piracy has become more and more mainstream. Since the dawn of the net it has never, ever had a setback longer then a week, hell will freeze over before the piracy will see a decline.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

That shows a lack of principle. We are all fallible, I'm petty and arrogant all the time - especially here ;) - but if we want to improve our lot as a whole education is the only answer. It may be too late for us cynical and jaded adults but perhaps we can try an experiment with our children. Teach them to be responsible citizens. Start with restoring an actual functioning public domain. Then teach copyright obligations in civics classes to primary school students. It will never be easy as we all want what is best for us. But, collectively, we have to have room for compromise or we will all get nothing.

Re:Debate!

[srussia]

There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic. We need to educate people to enable a wider debate. That is the only thing that will lead to fair change. Piracy is not the answer.

You're not giving people enough credit. Sharing is the answer, and the're doing it. Copyright is going the way of "droit de seigneur" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_seigneur). Come to think of it, "copyright" in French is "droit d'auteur". Kinda makes the analogy a lot clearer.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

I have yet to get my +5, Troll but that does not keep me from trying.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

See this: Thread for all the nasty, posturing details. Truth can be established and boycotting is the only answer but that requires organization.

Re:Debate!

[Kharny]

non-commercial is a bit of an interesting misnomer.
If I would download every movie/piece of music i want to watch/listen too, is that non-commercial?

Up to a point, i agree that current copyright is problematic. There needs to be a reward for making things people want, limited in time/ownership maybe.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

The problem is "morals". And I don't mean antiquated decency laws or waggling index finger sermons, I mean examples and principles. When you see people who are allegedly moral models, from politicians to economic leaders to celebrities, be selfish, arrogant idiots who have nothing but their own agendas in their mind, people start to wonder why they should be different. It's not like they weren't in the past, but at the very least they kept the facade up that they don't. Politicians tried to appear honest and do their best for the country, economy leaders appeared like the ones that create jobs rather than sending them abroad and celebrities were "decent". And I'm not talking about their sex life, let them fuck who they want, but they were not primitive sluts that don't show off how you can be a bimbo and still be famous, as long as you have money.

So what should the average person think? All you see is crooked politicians, economy leaders that drive around in 200k cars while they eliminate your jobs and celebrities that are mostly known for how much they are a bumbling fool. Nobody gives a shit about country or society.

So why should you?

Re:Debate!

[ivoras]

There is obviously an issue with regards to copyright in our society. Millions and more are sharing all the time. This points the finger at the issue being systemic.

I'd rather look at the cause of this "issue" - i.e. *why* does it exist. And I'll offer an answer - because it is harder and harder to get rich quickly while staying legal. The fact that I download movies all the time didn't influence my moviegoing one bit - I still go out to the movies every week or two because of the experience and the company of friends - both of which suck over DIVX. My problem is that there usually isn't anything good out there to see. Some nights, we don't remember what we watched around 5 minutes after leaving the cinema! I doubt the problem is with a lack of quality writers or actors or directors - I think most of it comes from producers and other financiers trying to cram in special effects, political correctness and crowd-pleasing stories (especially endings) to try to maximize the profits, like art can be expressed by equations. I don't feel one bit bad about downloading "2012" but I watched Inglorious Basterds and Watchmen twice (just a recent example) and I have a hefty collection of (legal, bought) DVDs of good films and TV shows. My point is that that a significant part of the piracy issue (not all of it!) is the direct result of the fall in quality and resorting to formulaic "this script equals this much $$$" thinking on the part of producers.

I'm sure the same thing goes for music.

One other large thing is convenience - sometimes people just don't feel like going to the movies and it's easier to download the film right now and watch it than waiting months for it to come on DVDs, etc. It is human nature - the baby wants what it wants. There are surely more problems, but I have a feeling these two combined are the cause of over 50% of the piracy issues. Heck, solve the distribution issue (make it cheap and easy and at the same time worldwide as the cinema releases) and I'd bet that 40% of all piracy would simply disappear over night.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

I am doing something. See my signature. And I actually don't have anything to lose so I'm choosing to stick it to the man because I can. People can force change through virtue all that is needed is the appropriate vehicle. Slashdot almost gets there, see my signature for a vehicle-in-progress that would allow you to say fuck you in as neutral a setting as possible. Organization is the key. Individually we are relatively intelligent, collectively we are a juggernaut. All we need is the mechanism to arrive at fair truth. What policy maker will risk flying in the face of that? They'd be taken to the nearest tree and hanged. Figuratively of course, we are a democracy.

Re:Debate!

[gnasher719]

Some copyright is quite reasonable. What we need is a legalization of noncommercial copyright infringement. Leave the rest of copyright law perfectly as it is. I should be able to share all the files I want, but as soon as I start trying to make money doing that, that's when it should become illegal (as it is today).

I don't think there should be a distinction between commercial and non-commercial, there should be a distinction depending on the amount of damages, and obviously commercial copying would give more evidence of damages.

But consider what could happen if non-commercial infringement wasn't punished: Let's say Steve Jobs has an argument with someone who happens to be the boss of a record company. So Steve Jobs buys two dozen XServes, goes to a record store and buys all CDs made by that record company, plus orders all their back catalogue, hires someone to load these CDs onto the computers, then makes them available to the whole world, without asking for a penny. For a million dollars, he could drive that record company into bankruptcy. Completely non-commercial.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Because to fix it you have to start somewhere. I've decided to start with me.

Re:Debate!

[Kethinov]

non-commercial is a bit of an interesting misnomer.
If I would download every movie/piece of music i want to watch/listen too, is that non-commercial?

Yes. That constitutes a noncommercial, private use.

Up to a point, i agree that current copyright is problematic. There needs to be a reward for making things people want, limited in time/ownership maybe.

Granting copyright owners an exclusive right to profit from their works is reward aplenty. Legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement isn't going to cause massive market failures across the board, it'll just force people to stop selling digital bits for money and start getting more modern and creative with their business models.

Re:Debate!

[masmullin]

That was sort of dumb of you. The answer to ANY request an RIAA person has for you is "no"... not some big shpeel about "how you sue people who know stuff". Just say No and be done with it.

Eg.
Q:Could you help me flash my NintendoDS?
A:No

Q:Could you find me the latest cd on thepiratebay?
A:No

Q:Could you grab me a coke?
A:No

Q:Could you call 911 since I am about to go into cardiac arrest?
A:No

Q:Could you stop aliens from kidnapping my children?
A:No

Q:Could you give me the time of day?
A:No

See, its easy.

Re:Debate!

[drgould]

It may be too late for us cynical and jaded adults but perhaps we can try an experiment with our children. Teach them to be responsible citizens. Start with restoring an actual functioning public domain. Then teach copyright obligations in civics classes to primary school students.

Considering the abysmal state of education in the United States, teaching history would be a good start. Including American history (in America obviously), of which the Constitution and Copyright is a part.

Re:Debate!

[Kethinov]

I don't think there should be a distinction between commercial and non-commercial, there should be a distinction depending on the amount of damages, and obviously commercial copying would give more evidence of damages.

That distinction already exists today in our legal system and there already is an adjustment to the amount of damages awarded depending on whether or not an infringement is commercial.

But consider what could happen if non-commercial infringement wasn't punished: Let's say Steve Jobs has an argument with someone who happens to be the boss of a record company. So Steve Jobs buys two dozen XServes, goes to a record store and buys all CDs made by that record company, plus orders all their back catalogue, hires someone to load these CDs onto the computers, then makes them available to the whole world, without asking for a penny. For a million dollars, he could drive that record company into bankruptcy. Completely non-commercial.

You don't need a super rich person to do that, it's already being done today on dozens of bit torrent sites...

All I'm advocating here is for copyright law to face reality. Noncommercial copyright infringement in the form of file sharing is never going away. If we just legalize it already we can start focusing on how to build business models that can coexist with it rather than playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

You have hit the nail right on the head. Industry in the form of the RIAA and MPAA is not meeting the needs of their customers. I want to download all my movies with none of that idiotic DRM, I want a public domain so that others can pick up the ball and continue where the current holder doesn't, I want many more things as well. But RIAA and MPAA members only want one thing: money. How they get it is control and they are playing a maximization game. What they fail to realize is that there are other agents out there and they have pissed some of us off. They shouldn't have pissed me off because I have nothing better to do than snipe at them all day all over the web wherever appropriate.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Quid pro quo

Re:Debate!

[tepples]

The Pandora box was open a long time ago

The box of Pandora isn't even packed, let alone shipped or opened.

Re:Debate!

[Anonymous Coward]

+1. If more people learned the power of saying "no" the world would be a better place.

Q: Want to work a 60 hour week for 30 hour pay?
A: No

Q: Want to let us look after your money so we can leverage it and then give you a tiny fraction of the profit?
A: No

Q: Want to borrow some of that money to buy an overpriced house?
A: No

The only reason "no" is not a viable answer to any of these and many similar questions is because there are far too many suckers who are willing to say "yes."

Re:Debate!

[icebraining]

And stop with the stupid after copyright. It's not like Miles Davis can benefit from any copy of Kind of Blue sold today. The purpose of copyright is to provide a source of revenue for the creator, so more people will create stuff, not for some label can profit more.

Re:Debate!

[MachDelta]

Q:Could you call 911 since I am about to go into cardiac arrest?
A:No

Depending on where you live, that answer may technically be illegal. Plenty of countries and a few states (oh and Quebec too) have a "Duty to rescue" law which, in a nutshell, states that you must attempt to assist an individual in peril provided that it doesn't also put your life at risk. At the very least, you would be expected to call for help.

It's all semantics though. I can't imagine any decent human being simply standing there and watching while another human has a heart attack, no matter who they work for.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Hooray! Now all I need are four Under-rated's! Thank you mister mod you have validated my complete existence.

Re:Debate!

[Maxo-Texas]

Morals have always been for the common people and not for the powerful.

It's just easier to catch the president of france breaking copyright law while pushing Draconian copyright laws these days.

I think the combination of computers, cameras, and suppression of computer and camera evidence against the powerful (re: england) will put the nail in the coffin and we will indeed end up with an endless future of a boot on the face of humanity.

Re:Debate!

[Znork]

There is a place for copyright

I used to think that, but I don't any more. Any monopolies handed out by the government and whose cost is borne by the public and the distributed economy will be treated as of interest for the receiving stakeholders only, and thus will permanently expand as the paying parties will not be represented in discussions around the issue. See the claims about IP jobs 'lost' to piracy, yet where are the discussions about jobs among plumbers, pizzamakers or other branches of the economy when copyright shifts money and resources from one part of the economy to the other? Are those branches represented when it's arbitrarily decided that they should be deprived of resources in favour of media industries? Copyright creates no resources, it merely redistributes them.

So no, there is no place for copyright. Any honest industry or creators support scheme requires that it be managed within the normal budget of governments and, like any other redistribution scheme, have its benefits weighed against its costs, and accounted for to the public. No other government scheme has anywhere close to as bad efficiency of copyright; if any other program had less than 5% of funding going to the actual intended beneficiaries there'd be an uproar.

That's not to say there can't be reasonable schemes for encouraging creativity; the easiest would simply be mandatory licensing which dispenses of any contracts no matter what outlet or reproduction, and simply requires a percentage (50-75%, for example) of any revenue derived from the copying to be paid to the creators (via a public agency, such as the IRS, not through private entities like in radio, and modulated by policy). Then it would also be easy to manage reasonable cost/benefit levels (should there be a ceiling on payouts and the rest spread along the long tail to encourage more production, for example, how many years of payout is the optimum to keep creative material flowing, etc).

Boycotting is not enough, the corrosive effect of corruption on politics is too strong, and politically it's only used to claim that anyone boycotting is pirating anyway. But it's certainly a right thing to do; paying for anything from the RIAA/MPAA corps means supporting the type of corruption going on as ACTA and other back-room deals, which I find utterly unacceptable by now.

Re:Debate!

[Plekto]

Some copyright is quite reasonable. What we need is a legalization of noncommercial copyright infringement. Leave the rest of copyright law perfectly as it is. I should be able to share all the files I want, but as soon as I start trying to make money doing that, that's when it should become illegal (as it is today).

The interesting part here is that the person in question wouldn't have paid for the product anyways, unless it was something that was critical to their work or life(ie - physical item like a light bulb). And entertainment isn't. People will just go elsewhere if the price is too high. For instance, I could have seen my favorite band in concert, but at $140 a ticket, it was too expensive. Since there was no "free" option either, I simply opted out. I heard that they only sold about 2/3 of the total tickets as well. I didn't cost the promoter a sale. There were no damages. I just went elsewhere.

This is a critical point for the producers to understand. Copying isn't a lost sale. I never would have been a sale at all anyways.

So what's the upside? How many of us have bought something after playing a demo or listening to a sample of the music online? Getting exposure for your product means a lot lately, and that means you have to give it away to attract new listeners or viewers. Attempting to squash it will just end up making people spend their money elsewhere. And in this economic climate, you'd think that the major studios and recording companies would figure this out. If they thought it was bad before, with these continuing tactics, they're in for a rude awakening.

My son doesn't even care about watching TV much any more or music on the radio. He watches YouTube for entertainment because it's free. I doubt if he'll even bother to download music at this rate or buy a single CD before he's 18. They just simply put, lost a future customer because there are better free alternatives out there without the idiocy and rules to deal with. He gets $5 a week and that's like gold to him. Spending it on music is the last thing he wants to do at this point. So it goes to his guitar or his bike or video games... all physical things, since YouTube and other similar sites(he likes those free Java-driven game sites for instance) offer him an enormous number of ways to waste time for free.

Even I have never downloaded a single music or movie file. Because there's an almost unlimited amount of better stuff out there for free. I pay a lot of money per month for a fast connection and to be honest, I'd rather watch some crazy video on YouTube (was watching old Battlebots segments for instance last night with my son(who now wants to build a Battlebot - heh)) than more of the boring drek that Hollywood puts out. And I'd rather go out to one of the local bars around town to hear some *live* music than waste it on a CD.

I've seen only three movies in a theater this last year. With online content and 80+ channels of Cable TV, I just don't need music or movies in my life at this point.

Note - since I do live in a major urban area, yes, it is simply a matter of going down the street to find entertainment, so I admit that that's a factor in my favor.

Re:Debate!

[Maxo-Texas]

Let's see.

Imagine that other human being destroyed your life and put you in prison for five years.

How about, your children were sexually abused while in child protective services and one committed suicide.

Of course, if the law requires that I go get help, I'd have

to

go
.
.
.
get
.
.
.
help
.
.
.
as
.
.
fast
.
.
.
.
as
.
.
.
.
possible.

I've done the non-vengeance thing and I've done the vengeance thing and let me tell you, vengeance was damn sweet and I have no regrets. It's the only thing that made me smile now and then for a couple years while I recovered back to human.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

Unfortunately, when you're working for them, such a denial of service could be seen as a refusal to work. Which not only could cost you your job but also seem a bit suspicious. And ya know, this time and age suspicion is all you have to raise to be a criminal.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

I thought that duty to rescue only applies to fellow humans and not RIAA lawyers?

Re:Debate!

[mpe]

The exclusive distribution rights granted by copyright were meant to give you an exclusive right to profit from your work. Copyright law when originally drafted could not anticipate a scenario where copying cost nothing, so they simply assumed that any copy must have a profit motive which as of the advent of consumer electronics is no longer necessarily the case.

Note also that the concept of copyright originates with a machine which could make cheap copies if you wanted many copies of the same thing. Being able to separate "content" from "media" means that the cost of copying is trivial and having a global telecommunications network means that distance isn't a significent issue. The latter being something which movie companies and broadcasters appear to be unable to get a handle on. Except when it comes to broadcasting news and sporting events. Where innovative use of communications technology has long been the norm.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

I tend to agree, but, I'm willing to make a deal. Give me a fair term before public domain takes effect and in return I will accept a limited term of copyright. Not todays term which is effectively forever when compared to an individuals life-span.

Re:Debate!

[Mad Leper]

When you say "customers" you do realize that unless you are a Musician/Artist then you are not technically a customer of the RIAA or MPAA.

These organizations exist to serve the marketing and distribution needs of their true clients, which are the content corporations and individual Artists who sign with them. I believe that to date they have only concerned themselves with legal action against those people or websites who distribute material in violation of the exclusive agreements they hold with their clients.

Bottom line, if you feel that you've been treated unfairly by the MPAA or RIAA, contact your favorite band, actor or movie producer and let them know you demand justice. Targeting the MPAA/RIAA in this case is like blaming the supermarket for the declining quality of your Pop-Tarts.

Re:Debate!

[Turzyx]

Erm, it seems like you are trying to set up a debating app/feature on Facebook.

On Facebook. Right.

Facebook 'boycotts' and e-petitions do nothing. It's too easy for people to 'get involved' in a so called movement when all they need to do is press the 'I agree' button; it's also easy to ignore it too.

What you have to remember is that you are ultimately fighting polititians. Most polititians and judges cannot get their head around the principles of fair use because they have been inundated with RIAA/MPAA lobbyists, and subjected to dubious 'expert' testimony.

The only thing that can be done to change anything is to vote accordingly. If a political party does not exist that supports your goals, help create one. You don't even have to win anything - as soon as an appreciable number of people have voted for a party on the back of a few policies, it's obivous that the larger ones will change their stance to attract those voters.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

I'll give you some background. Where I live, Newfoundland, Canada, there is a province wide radio station: same broadcast for everyone. They have a 1-800 number you can call into. It is a debating forum at heart, it is called Open Line. It has a very balanced and intelligent moderator running the show for people to engage with. It is insanely popular here. Everyone listens to it and enough people call into it that it has built its own momentum for issues of the day. People call in and address what pisses them off. Politicians also call in all the time when they get sniped to refute or otherwise manage the issue. When a politician, or policy maker, calls they are put right through to address the issue. Everyone else gets in a queue but eventually does get their say (1-800 number..). This program enables a feedback mechanism that works extremely well here. Perhaps our history and culture explains how it came to be established. In the 1990's our primary industry, fishing, collapsed as the stocks were not properly managed from a government and citizen perspective. This sowed the seeds of doubt and lead people to question authority. As the inertia grew more people jumped on the band-wagon. As a result now that this singular institution is established in our culture our government functions better because of it. This is a lesson that can be drawn from us. It deserves to be shamelessly copied, my signature proposes implementing it on the web. I'm not a good mechanic however so I am asking for your help - please add your opinion to it.

Re:Debate!

[aplusjimages]

educate them with what? What information do you want me to tell them? Seriously.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

That is a very good point. And an alternate method of attack! Thank you.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

If you don't have something to contribute you can always criticize where you know opinions are wrong! And I'm not being snide, that is an essential thing to do: how else are we to improve our arguments?

Re:Debate!

[geminidomino]

Not everywhere in the US. In Pennsylvania, for example, "Depraved Indifference" can be tantamount to "involuntary manslaughter."

 

Re:Debate!

[El_Muerte_TDS]

If more people learned the power of saying "no" the world would be a better place.

No

Re:Debate!

[TheDarkMaster]

... And when I say that lawyers should be killed, I are modded down... Funny world.

Re:Debate!

[TubeSteak]

But consider what could happen if non-commercial infringement wasn't punished: Let's say Steve Jobs has an argument with someone who happens to be the boss of a record company. So Steve Jobs buys two dozen XServes, goes to a record store and buys all CDs made by that record company, plus orders all their back catalogue, hires someone to load these CDs onto the computers, then makes them available to the whole world, without asking for a penny. For a million dollars, he could drive that record company into bankruptcy. Completely non-commercial.

And that's why the law has a threshold beyond which civil infringement becomes a criminal matter.
IIRC, it's $1,000 (retail) of content distributed during a 180 day period.

Re:Debate!

[leenoble_uk]

That reminds me, when are George, Cosmo, Elaine and Jerry getting out?

Re:Debate!

[antonyb]

Yeah, we'll need to teach 'em Latin too.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Thats why we have to hold "them" (whoever they may be) to the task with the tools at our disposal.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

If it applies to the GPL it applies to Microsoft too.

Re:Debate!

[PeterBrett]

But there are already laws against tortuous interference.

Re:Debate!

[GF678]

I can't imagine any decent human being simply standing there and watching while another human has a heart attack, no matter who they work for.

But what if it was Hitler having the heart attack?

* Yes, thread Goodwined, but worth it!

Re:Debate!

[Have Brain Will Rent]

In the 1990's our primary industry, fishing, collapsed as the stocks were not properly managed from a government and citizen perspective.

Not to mention from the perspective of the fish!

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Bwaha! Now you deserve a +5 Funny for coming out of left field!

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

If you had a time machine and knew before the fact I'd let the bastard die. But from the present, you can't judge what is only potential. And no matter how horrific the events if they had not happened we would not have (hopefully) learned their lessons.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Here is the issue of right and wrong. It takes effort to produce a work. It does not matter if that effort can be replicated infinitely, what you are stealing is the effort, the chain of money that leads back to someone paying their rent. Or buying a house. In a wider context, once we have found a suitable replacement for capitalism itself then we can invalidate things that make it go such as copyright.

Re:Debate!

[BlueStrat]

What policy maker will risk flying in the face of that? They'd be taken to the nearest tree and hanged. Figuratively of course, we are a democracy.

Not just "figuratively". The founders of the US foresaw the federal government growing outside of the role(s) and scope they intended. This is why they included the 2nd amendment. So that when a bloated & corrupt government stopped being the Peoples' servant and fancied itself our master, the People could revolt and start decorating the trees along the Mall in Washington DC with politicians.

It used to be that politicians were restricted by fear of the People. That is no longer the case, and the politicians have lost their fear of the People. It's time to change that, before a tipping-point is reached where the system cascades into a full totalitarian state.

To keep those in government honest, it's necessary that they feel a tiny frisson of fear whenever they look out their cushy DC office window at a tree. Mortal fear of death/imprisonment is the only reliable way to keep those in government from using the reins of power to enhance their own personal power and feed their greed at the expense of the Peoples' freedoms.

"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

I'd love to see a campaign to start dedicating "Jefferson trees" along the Mall in Washington DC to individual politicians. It could be fun. Say, a fruit tree for Barney Frank, and a walnut tree for Pelosi?

Strat

Re:Debate!

[RobertM1968]

Definitely incorrect. There are laws in many cities and states where if you do not at the least report a crime, you can be found contributory (in some locales, to the same extent as the actual perp). Inotherwords, lets say you witness a hit and run, and then do nothing... you can be found contributory to the crime - and if that person dies, in some locales, you can be charged with manslaughter (in addition to the actual person who committed the crime).

And as others have stated, some locales have similar laws pertaining to depraved indifference.

Re:Debate!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure a multipronged effort forcing ISPs to log packets and rat out people going to certain sites, chips on computers to force "trusted computing" down everyone's throats, prison terms that are longer than violent crimes for noncommercial infringement, more DMCA restrictions to clamp down on cracks, and more Draconian DRM would put a stop to piracy.

Gee, isn't all this in the leaked ACTA law?

As of now, piracy may be an issue on PCs, but remember: The pirates are losing. HD satellite has yet to be cracked. Same with HDCP. Blu-Ray is an arms race between Slysoft, cracking title by title, and the CSS wonks. The PS3 is has shown to be hackproof going on three years. The XBox 360 might have been cracked, but cracked boxes get tossed off of XBL fast. Even on the PC, StarForce games have yet to be cracked. Splinter Cell made almost 4 years ago still requires you to physically yank out IDE controller cables in order to get the "patch" to run.

Even with torrents, there are very few solid sites to go and find clean torrents, unless you are lucky enough to be in the zero day scene already and have private tracker access. A number of "torrent" sites just point you to some site that asks for your name and credit card, just like the old days of "Insta-DDL here" where the only thing available by "DDL" was drive-by malware.

It may not be tomorrow that it will only be a select few (the same people who would have +o on a constant basis #warez on efnet in bygone times) that have the ability to use a pirated version of the next Adobe CS15 suite, but that day is coming up. Of course, once piracy is pushed to the fringes, don't expect price drops anytime soon. I'm sure Microsoft Office will go back to the pricing levels it was at in the early versions ($2000 a copy).

Re:Debate!

[vlad30]

what headkase says is correct you have to debate AND be vocal call the radio stations not just the one you listen to and email you politicians for a recent example of this power you hold google "ETS Australia" a email campaign has caused many politicians in Australia to change and question their position on climate change to the point of resignation and the opposition leader looks to lose his leadership If all they here are the vocal minority thats what hey listen too. The Majority must speak up

Re:Debate!

[j00r0m4nc3r]

... And when I say that lawyers should be killed, I are modded down... Funny world.

You're modded down because they should be maimed, not killed.

Re:Debate!

[bigngamer92]

Q: Want to let us look after your money so we can leverage it and then give you a tiny fraction of the profit? A: No

Okay Coward, tell me what you propose to do with the leftovers of your last paycheck?

Re:Debate!

[an unsound mind]

A lot of StarForce games have been cracked. The issue here is that pirates know to avoid those games far and wide; cracked or not cracked. If they had the money to throw away they'd pay for new hardware, they'd have enough money to buy all the games they wanted without a moment of thought.

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

There needs to be a reward for making things people want, limited in time/ownership maybe.

There already is a reward: it's called being paid to work. Copyright is unnecessary. An artist can be rewarded for making art in exactly the same way a carpenter is rewarded for making houses or an accountant is rewarded for doing your taxes.

Re:Debate!

[bzipitidoo]

We should replace copyrights and patents with some other system. Reforming it by measures such as reducing monopoly lengths to sane amounts, reducing the scope of the monopolies, and spelling out what can be copyrighted doesn't go far enough. The entire notion of owning an idea is fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a legal foundation that supports this inherently ridiculous notion, vested interests will continually seek to expand it, and engage in rent seeking, and destructive actions such as threats, actual lawsuits, gaming of the justice system, lobbying against the public interest, blackmail, barratry, suppression, deliberate crippling of devices, and censorship. And insincere advertising and publicity campaigns that play us for suckers over "fairness" for the poor starving inventors and artists. Such arguments are like debating health care for slaves, without getting to the meat of that issue, that slavery should not exist. "If you don't buy enough cotton, our slaves will go hungry!" Do note that I favor the continued existence of trademarks, and oppose plagiarism.

The existence of intellectual property laws distorts more than markets, it warps how society thinks. Ideas are incredibly overvalued, and people behave idiotically over the matter, keeping "valuable" info secret, and engaging in mad scrambles to stake out territory, as if clear lines can be drawn around an idea, as if any idea could be independent of all other ideas, and for fear of somehow losing out. It's an ongoing land rush like Oklahoma had when it was first opened, only there is no land to be grabbed, and no turf to defend but for the artificial turf created by the legal system, and no possible way to stop trespassing whether deliberate or accidental, or even know where the lines are, and so whether a trespass has occurred. When it must be figured out, has to be done on a case by case basis with long, expensive court battles, and even that process often gets it wrong. And it's tough to debate when some people refuse even to be civil about it and instantly scream "socialism" or "communism" as if copyrights and patents were the only possible way to handle art and science in a capitalist system. Removing all basis would, I feel, be the only way to really resolve things once and for all. An example of warped thinking was an experience I had with a collectible card game. At a tournament, I attempted to use proxies. I did indeed have the actual cards, but the other players still objected. Why? I wish I'd buttonholed a few of them and pinned them against the wall until they could elucidate just exactly why, but the most coherent objection I heard was that if they allowed the proxies it would somehow made their collection of real cards less valuable. I suspect some didn't really object in principle, they were simply seizing upon it as a pretext to cause me difficulties in hopes of improving their changes against me, perhaps by forcing me to play without the proxies. No one would object to home made chess pieces on such grounds, why the fuss over the collectible cards?

The details of the replacement system would have to be worked out, but the basic idea is, in a word, Patronage. Centuries ago there were no intellectual property laws, and we nevertheless advanced. We might not want to return to that state of affairs, we might wish to encourage art and science more than they are already inherently encouraged-- an useful invention is its own reward, in proportion to its usefulness-- and so want some system to achieve that, but in a more inclusive, open way that cannot be so easily turned against its purpose or misused for entirely unrelated purposes, as has happened with the current messy system. Remember that the patent system at the least is intended to be a bargain in which the inventor goes public in exchange for compensation, which, unfortunately, takes the form of protection from competition. A deal that gives inventors incentive to publish is good, but it is not so valuable that we should cripple ourselves to secure it. Patents are like offering to sell your left foot to buy a shoe.

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

Here is the issue of right and wrong. It takes effort to produce a work. It does not matter if that effort can be replicated infinitely, what you are stealing is the effort, the chain of money that leads back to someone paying their rent.

No, you aren't stealing the effort: it's already been performed, voluntarily. "Stealing the effort" would have to involve something like kidnapping an artist and forcing him into slavery.

If the artist wants to get paid for his effort, then why is he doing it before anyone has agreed to pay him?

In a wider context, once we have found a suitable replacement for capitalism itself then we can invalidate things that make it go such as copyright.

Capitalism works just fine in every other industry with no need for anything like copyright. People have been getting paid for the work they do for centuries. The secret is to not do any work until someone agrees to pay you for it.

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

Piracy is not the answer. There is a place for copyright that is not todays distorted parameters. Boycotting in the mean time is the answer

Piracy: producer doesn't get money, consumer gets to enjoy content.
Boycott: producer doesn't get money, consumer doesn't get to enjoy content.

They're both the same for the producer, but one is worse for the consumer. Why is lose-lose a better "answer" than lose-win?

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

You wish you could twist the eloquence and express yourself with a veracity I exhibit to my peers. I am grown up. When I was a child I played with childish things, now that I am an adult I have put them away and I play with concepts. You should do the same, it would improve your lot as a person.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

If the situation was one-on-one then not doing the work until paid would be the pragmatic choice. However, with multiple parties some will pay and some will not but the work was still performed. The worker still has to buy food, is it fair to deprive them of quality of life they had the potential to acquire from their efforts? I will stand by my belief that we need copyright, however, if you can invalidate capitalism then I will expire copyright.

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Because with a boycott you remove any suggestion of selfish motives from the equation. That would keep you from being in front a judge right off the bat but even if it didn't no-one would be able to question that you acted out of virtue and demonstrated nobility.

Re:Debate!

[sonicmerlin]

God, you are totally misinformed and a complete idiot. The founding fathers ripped apart the original constitution, the Articles of Confederation, because it was way too weak and didn`t allow for a powerful central government. They understood that as times changed so did the need for a larger, more centralized power. You`re an idiot for warping history to fit your own narrow-minded, bizarre belief system.

Re:Debate!

[BlueStrat]

God, you are totally misinformed and a complete idiot. The founding fathers ripped apart the original constitution, the Articles of Confederation, because it was way too weak and didn`t allow for a powerful central government. They understood that as times changed so did the need for a larger, more centralized power. You`re an idiot for warping history to fit your own narrow-minded, bizarre belief system.

I will ignore the personal insults. Before you act oh-so-informed and dismissive of other viewpoints, perhaps you should read Thomas Payne's "Common Sense" and the Federalist Papers.

Thomas Jefferson also spoke about precisely these things.

It probably wouldn't hurt for you to also read "Arguing With Idiots" by Glenn Beck. I will refrain from any cheap shots linking the books' title with your posts.

Strat

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

If the situation was one-on-one then not doing the work until paid would be the pragmatic choice. However, with multiple parties some will pay and some will not but the work was still performed.

Again, that work is only performed when the artist chooses to perform it. No one's forcing him to do anything.

It doesn't matter how many parties there are, or how many of them pay. What matters is how much money they pay in total.

If the artist needs $500 to live on this week, it doesn't matter whether he finds one person to pay him $500 or five hundred people to pay him $1 each. It also doesn't matter if after he's collected that $500, another thousand or million people enjoy his art for free: he's already been paid a price he considers fair for his effort.

Re:Debate!

[Ploum]

You are implying that lawyers are part of the so-called "humans". While it's evident that religious zealots, dictators, maniacs, economists and murderers are humans, I'm still not convinced about lawyers and all my experience seems to prove that they are not.

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

That only works if you have the chance and the ability to prove that you really are boycotting - otherwise you'll just be accused of being a pirate anyway.

There are also other ways to demonstrate nobility: living by the same rules you expect others to live by, for instance. If you work in a field affected by copyright, but you earn a living without relying on the ability to restrict copies, then you're putting your money where your mouth is.

Finally, is it really such a big deal if you're suspected of having "selfish motives"? Everything is at least partly selfish anyway. I don't just want more freedom for other people, I want more freedom for myself too.

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

So, where does the money to pay the artists come from?

From some subset of the people who benefit from the artists' work. Mostly, those are the same people who buy copies today (who benefit by gaining access to a new work), although there are others who'd also have an incentive to pay (e.g. a Blu-Ray player manufacturer benefits a little bit from every new movie that comes out on Blu-Ray).

Re:Debate!

[TheDarkMaster]

Damn... You are rigth, my fault!

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

Off the cuff, so if your employer said: "You only need $500 a week to get by..." Would you still agree with what you said?

Re:Debate!

[headkase]

I want freedom too. However when you are making your case before a Judge you need to have all the cards on your side. Or you will not enact the change you desire. Boycotting is the answer, but, today it is ineffective because of lack of organization and common cause. It can be made better so to solve the issues I propose we begin with debate to define them, establish a common set of values and principles to guide them, be a proponent of a common cause people can organize around, and take what is ours.

Re:Debate!

[hicksw]

This doesn't scale very well to representatives of larger constituencies.

Re:Debate!

[shentino]

How do you suggest we do that?

"Our" congress critters are already bought and paid for.

We need to attack the root of the problem and push for lobbyist reform. Otherwise any move we make is just going to get bribed off the table.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

The question is, would it change history? And if, for better or worse?

Personally, I'd make sure he survives. Imagine some intelligent, able strategist takes his place. I'd fear for England.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

AFAIK, at least concerning the laws that apply to me, I do not have to endanger myself to help or rescue someone else. I.e. you can gleefully watch a RIAA lawyer burn to ashes in his house because you'd have to endanger yourself to rescue him. After I call emergency services, of course, but I can't be held responsible for being so terribly nervous that I mixed up street names and sent every available fire engine to the other end of town... erh... I mean, hypothetically speaking, of course...

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

And rightfully so! Killing RIAA lawyers is for some odd reason still illegal and none of them is worth doing time for. Be creative and enhance accidents, don't kill them outright.

Re:Debate!

[Opportunist]

Hey, hey, not fair. There are very human, caring and sensible lawyers.

We're talking RIAA lawyers here. Completely different beast.

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

Off the cuff, so if your employer said: "You only need $500 a week to get by..." Would you still agree with what you said?

Absolutely.

See, in employment, the negotiation comes before any work is done. If a potential employer thinks I only need $500 a week and is unwilling to pay more, I'm going to say "no thanks" and look for a better offer.

It would be very, very stupid of me to work all week without discussing pay, and wait until the end of the week to start pleading with my boss to pay me more than $500. I'd have no leverage in the negotiation, since I've already done the work, and he'd have no obligation to pay me anything at all, since I did the work voluntarily without anyone promising to pay for it.

So we discuss pay up front, and we form a contract. Now if I do X hours of work, I know I'm entitled to be paid $Y, and if he doesn't pay, I can take him to court and show the judge his signature. If he decides $Y is too much, he can try to negotiate different terms for work I do in the future, but he still owes me $Y for the work I did under the old terms, because that's the amount he already agreed to pay.

Re:Debate!

[Mr2001]

However when you are making your case before a Judge you need to have all the cards on your side. Or you will not enact the change you desire.

Copyright isn't going to be changed by a judge, it's going to be changed by the legislature. And they're not going to care whether the people demanding change are pirates or boycotters, they're just going to care whether there are enough of them to sway an election.

Re:Debate!

[masmullin]

No

Re:Debate!

[RobertM1968]

Well...

(1) As I said, it only applies to certain jurisdictions... my point was the blanket statement above does not apply to all US (or even non-US citizens)

(2) I doubt such laws would apply to RIAA lawyers, as I doubt they could ever qualify as human by any stretch of the imagination.

(3) ;-)

Re:Debate!

[Uberbah]

My answer was "since you're suing people who know aynthing about flashing Nintendos or even do it, my answer has to be no". This is when he offered money...

You didn't finish the story....is that when your screen name kicked in?

Re:Debate!

[bzipitidoo]

How? You're right, our own system would never do this on its own, and certainly not with a plate jammed full of other issues like health care reform, 2 wars, climate change, and a fragile economy. No, they will have to be pushed into doing anything about IP laws. Here are 3 ways. Unfortunately, none of them are quick.

The most likely way is generational differences. Consider the demographics of the Pirate Party. A century from now, history students will be awed at the immensity of our blindness to what will seem so obvious to them, and the MAFIAA and their laws will be but a bad memory from the past. The Internet hasn't been available to the masses long enough yet for everyone to have really understood the implications.

Next may be competition between nations. The West might be motivated to reform if, say, Brazil or China or India got so tired of paying and paying and paying for everyone else's intellectual property that they set up their own totally different, patronage based system, and it worked so well that most of the great engineers and scientists of the world started moving there.

The 3rd way, and most unlikely, is extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo. It took the Civil War to end slavery in the US, and the nation withstood many years of simmering before the war erupted. And then it took many more decades before the former slaves achieved real equality. I can't see IP laws ever generating as much antipathy as slavery, but not impossible. Rather, extreme copyright may lead to movements similar to the labor movement with their labor unions, and the strikes and other forms of social unrest. That doesn't seem too likely either, but more likely than outright war.

Re:Debate!

[Maxo-Texas]

There really wasn't any point in responding to a couple anonymous cowards.

But.. since you have chipped in.

My post was in two parts and had two major points.

1st. my point was there are many terrible things that can happen to you that absolutely allow you to let another human being die (and feel good about it). It wasn't meant to imply that I had had those experiences but were the first examples that came to my head of cases where I would not only watch someone die but be able to assist them on their way without remorse.

There should have been a line between the first part (which was hypothetical) and the second part which is history.

2nd. you always hear that revenge is bad, people who engage in revenge should dig two graves, etc. etc. I'm an old fart and I've taken extreme revenge on other dudes twice in my life and both times felt extremely sweet. Turning the other cheek is not always the best policy when someone dicks you over. The results in each case were quick and very gratifying. Those friends who knew of the events only expressed happiness and admiration of the fact that I was able to act. If someone dicks you over, you stick it in, twist it, and break it off without being an idiot and losing control.

Another site will replace it.

[purpledinoz]

Mininova replaced Suprnova, and Mininova will be replaced by another site. It's like playing whack-a-mole, except there are 1000 moles and 1 hammer.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The only reason why it is so difficult is because the process takes so long. You can get a new site up in 2 hours, and after 2 days have the word spread around the world. Until the law can match that speed of taking the sites down, they will always be ahead. Conventional methods of *any sort* really haven't proven useful when applied to the Internet. Music and movie industries have to adapt, and so will countries, laws, and their law enforcement branches. Luckily for the pirates they are slow to act.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Anonymous Coward]

In some other countries servers that holds torrents (=links) are not ilegal because the copyrighted material are not stored on the server, and the normal people has some rights than protects them.
Yes, we can run, but being hunted is not fun...

Re:Another site will replace it.

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I don't know, quality of (public) torrent sites has been on the decline for a while. Now with demonoid still down, mininova dead and the piratebay in limbo what will replace them ? This feels like after Napster when the last of the replacements like audiogalaxy were running out of steam.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[antdude]

Now that TPB and Miniova are no longer cool. What good public sites are left these days?

Re:Another site will replace it.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The internet is actually a smaller place than most people think. When it comes to any given field, no matter how large, there are really only a few dozen major sites to consider. Sometimes less.

How many large torrent trackers are there really? Twenty, Thirty? I doubt it's over a hundred. Depends on your definition of large perhaps, but I'll make mine; A tracker which hosts TV, Movies, Music, Games and Software, and which has a large number of seeders and leechers (>10000). How many of these site are there? I estimate that there are about a dozen who really count.

Throw out as many platitudes as you like, but the RIAA et al are putting the bittorrent genie back in the bottle. Technology has not kept pace with legal manoeuvres and one by one the top sites are being shut down. With them goes the hundreds of thousands of technically inexperienced seeds and leechers need to keep torrents healthy. Trackers need critical mass for torrents to be useful, but this mass makes them an easy target for legal action.

This is still whack a mole, but the ratio of moles to hammers is, at most, 10:1. The decline of bittorrent began with the Pirate Bay but it will not stop there. Without major changes to how it is centralised, bittorrent will go the way of napster before it and you'll be back to getting your stuff on irc again.

The Net has changed. The Chinese government has proven that the internet and its users can be brought to heel on a massive scale. Netizens in general, and in particular the geeks whose obligation was to defend the network, have shown though lack of innovation that they are not going to defend users freedoms, anonymity or rights online. We'd all rather give our data to webhosts, ISPs, and Google; trusting them not to betray us. Technology has given power back to the big players, and not delivered on its promise to ordinary people.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[just_a_monkey]

Good one, narc. ;-)

Re:Another site will replace it.

[nstlgc]

Yes, because obviously we haven't had a decent piracy hub since Napster and Audiogalaxy went down. I think you just answered your own question :-)

Re:Another site will replace it.

[nstlgc]

You must be looking at another Internet than I am sir.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mininova replaced Suprnova, and Mininova will be replaced by another site. It's like playing whack-a-mole, except there are 1000 moles and 1 hammer.

Next up: Moderatelysizednova.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Anonymous Coward]

torrentz.com

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet is actually a smaller place than most people think. When it comes to any given field, no matter how large, there are really only a few dozen major sites to consider. How many large torrent trackers are there really? I estimate that there are about a dozen who really count.

Throw out as many platitudes as you like, but the RIAA et al are putting the bittorrent genie back in the bottle. Technology has not kept pace with legal manoeuvres and one by one the top sites are being shut down. Trackers need critical mass for torrents to be useful, but this mass makes them an easy target for legal action.

This is still whack a mole, but the ratio of moles to hammers is, at most, 10:1. The decline of bittorrent began with the Pirate Bay but it will not stop there. Without major changes to how it is centralised, bittorrent will go the way of napster before it and you'll be back to getting your stuff on irc again.

The Net has changed. The Chinese government has proven that the internet and its users can be brought to heel on a massive scale. Netizens in general, and in particular the geeks whose obligation was to defend the network, have shown though lack of innovation that they are not going to defend users freedoms, anonymity or rights online. Technology has given power back to the big players, and not delivered on its promise to ordinary people.

Ah, for mod points. Great points all. The aphorism that "the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it," always struck me as unfounded and self-congratulatory. China finally proved that it isn't true. And the assertion that "a new torrent site will replace " is equally unfounded. The last bulwark was demonoid and it's been down for the last 2 months. There needs to be decentralization and anonymization for torrent sites to continue to provide the service they do now.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[ShooterNeo]

Hint : there's several piracy methods that are going strong right now that have never been touched.

IRC is better than torrent sites ever were for obscure stuff
usenet is faster and more reliable for just about anything, but it costs money for access
megaupload/rapidshare link sites are the hottest new piracy method, and work very well for sharing recent and/or popular files. They work a lot better than torrents because you don't have to seed.

And this is just internet piracy. If the government were to REALLY crack down, then swapping 2 terrabyte hard drives between friends is a heck of a lot more time efficient than the old days of copying floppies and cassette tapes.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[MikeBabcock]

Luckily the RIAA/MPAA think the way you do.

I've connected to at least fifty trackers in the last few months, and I doubt I've connected to all of them.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Mathinker]

...

And this is just internet piracy. If the government were to REALLY crack down, then swapping 2 terrabyte hard drives between friends is a heck of a lot more time efficient than the old days of copying floppies and cassette tapes.

Ah, good, I'm glad that someone else besides me has started to wave the face-to-face-copying-is-mega-efficient-now flag.

You forgot to add that face-to-face copying, while being backed up with internet-based "social networking" for finding the shortest path to the content you want is much, much better than the old times when we only found out who had what by perusing their record collection in person.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[ShooterNeo]

With the monstrous hard drives, you could swap collections such as "every watchable TV drama aired between 2000 and 2005" or "top 1000 songs by month 1970-2009" or "best 100 PC games published in last 5 years by metacritic scores" and so forth. Takes a lot less time to transfer the data if it's plugged into your machine by SATA or eSATA cable than it does by a typical broadband connection.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[jonbryce]

Maybe you need to look at something other than Bittorrent. Bittorrent was never really designed for what the RIAA / MPAA / BSA call "piracy" anyway.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Dunbal]

learn to google?

Re:Another site will replace it.

[martin-boundary]

You're a glass half empty kind of guy, right? Here's another take on the exact same circle of ideas:

The internet is actually a smaller place than most people think.

The top of the iceberg is always small, as popularity in social networks resembles a power law. The network itself is for all practical purposes unlimited. Like the iceberg, if you chop off the top, it rises slightly and you have a new top (which is again small).

Throw out as many platitudes as you like, but the RIAA et al are putting the bittorrent genie back in the bottle.

Believe it or not, this is actually a good thing. The internet, like any large system, has a lot of inertia. People use what's good enough for as long as they can, and it is only by being forced to change that legacy technology with lots of users has a chance to be replaced.

In a hierarchical organization, change happens by fiat from the top down. In an anarchic place like the internet, shutting down servers through legal attacks serves the same purpose. It sucks for the server operators, but it forces users to try out newer and different solutions, which are often designed to fix old flaws. If you like analogies, the RIAA is like a fire that cleans out the deadwood.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[mister_playboy]

Here you are babbling about large trackers... you did know Mininova didn't even run a tracker, right? It was just an index... hence why it was so large.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[PMBjornerud]

In a hierarchical organization, change happens by fiat from the top down. In an anarchic place like the internet, shutting down servers through legal attacks serves the same purpose. It sucks for the server operators, but it forces users to try out newer and different solutions, which are often designed to fix old flaws. If you like analogies, the RIAA is like a fire that cleans out the deadwood.

Grandparent is pessimistic because he thinks piracy can be stomped out.

I believe the opposite, but I am still a pessimist. I am pessimistic because I worry about what will happen when the pirating masses will go underground when they are labeled as criminals.

BitTorrent is elegant but not really trying that hard to hide what it is transferring. Consider it a solution when Napster failed: The centralized server was the weakest link, so the new protocol operated without a centralized server.

The attack now is on surveillance on peer transfers. There is a solution, there have just not been any need for it yet. Distributed hash tables, strong encryption, onion routing. (Outlaw encryption? Hello, Steganography.)

The pessimistic part:
Treating masses like criminals accomplishes nothing except hiding the heavy criminals. The tools that will be created for safe piracy will likely also make it that much easier to transfer any other information, be it terrorist briefings or child porn.

Much like the prohibition era, trying to apply a law against the will of the masses will not accomplish much except benefiting criminals.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Maybe you need to look at something other than Bittorrent. Bittorrent was never really designed for what the RIAA / MPAA / BSA call "piracy" anyway.

Nothing's designed for piracy, it's just a side-effect of efficient data transfer. If you make it easy for people to share things they will. I've gone largely "legit" anyway but some things are still easier to track down on the "gray market" so it's nice to have the option.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[shirotakaaki]

Your entire statement is garbage. Mostly based on the fact that Mininova is not and never was a tracker. TBH I stopped reading when you even mentioned a tracker.

Re:Another site will replace it.

[Xest]

"The internet is actually a smaller place than most people think."

No, actually, the internet is a much larger place than most people think. Most people think like you, that there are only a few sites for each topic, and not much beyond that. The fact is it's simply not true. English language sites are all most people know and yet English language sites now account for less than 60% of the entire internet, that means there's a whopping amount of sites out there in foreign languages that most people never ever actually stumble across.

"How many large torrent trackers are there really? Twenty, Thirty? I doubt it's over a hundred. Depends on your definition of large perhaps, but I'll make mine; A tracker which hosts TV, Movies, Music, Games and Software, and which has a large number of seeders and leechers (>10000). How many of these site are there? I estimate that there are about a dozen who really count."

It doesn't matter, the trackers aren't really going down because they've not for the most part been the target of litigation, only the public facing index sites have. So the state of seeders/leechers on these trackers hasn't really changed, all that has changed is how you must find a torrent to connect to such a tracker.

"Throw out as many platitudes as you like, but the RIAA et al are putting the bittorrent genie back in the bottle."

You're possibly right but only in the case of the most paranoid inexperienced people who live in the most strict of countries like Britain- do you really think Canadians, South Americans, or many Asians care when their governments have shown no real interest in stopping them? but what they haven't done is put piracy back in the bottle as many people move to other networks and methods of distribution, like usenet.

"Technology has not kept pace with legal manoeuvres and one by one the top sites are being shut down."

See my above points for a response to this. Effectively all that is being shut down is technology that hasn't kept pace, but that doesn't mean technology as a whole hasn't kept pace because there are plenty of sites and methods of transfer still thriving. An example is The Pirate Bay's switch to DHT, it's old tech got sent offline, but it's new tech. has worked around that.

"With them goes the hundreds of thousands of technically inexperienced seeds and leechers need to keep torrents healthy. Trackers need critical mass for torrents to be useful, but this mass makes them an easy target for legal action."

Go to http://btjunkie.org/ and scroll down to most popular, look at the seeders and leechers figures. Does that really look unhealthy to you? Does it really look like legal action has had any measurable effect?

"The Chinese government has proven that the internet and its users can be brought to heel on a massive scale."

No it hasn't, Iran has more strict monitoring and filtering than even China since the elections and look how well they were able to stop protests and prevent footage of their government sponsored milita killing civilians getting out, hint: not at all. At best they've stopped people stumbling on things they don't want them to see, they've been able to do nothing to prevent determined searchers or to prevent communication between dissidents.

"Netizens in general, and in particular the geeks whose obligation was to defend the network, have shown though lack of innovation that they are not going to defend users freedoms, anonymity or rights online."

Now this I actually agree with, and I'll admit I'm partly responsible myself in not doing more. I think we have got lazy, complacent, I think there is much more we could do. There are people out there who are still doing a great job though although again they seem more focussed on anti-censorship in places like Iran and China than assisting piracy- perhaps the old defenders of the internet grew up and tend towards these more important causes now? I have to admit the decline of the assembly language programm

This may kill their CDN

[Guspaz]

Most of the success from the CDN service relied on the fact that millions of users visiting Mininova for general torrents would also be exposed to the CDN torrents. With Mininova's general torrent index deep-sixed, traffic will plummet to a tiny fraction of what it was before, and activity on CDN torrents will drop correspondingly.

While this means that users of the CDN won't get any extra exposure, it's still a useful service for pure distribution (they handle the tracking and seeding). Unfortunately, with no revenue stream, mininova won't be able to support that for long.

Re:This may kill their CDN

[jlarocco]

It's not like they had a revenue stream before. Bandwidth is their only cost, and with a fraction of the traffic, their costs are going to plummet.

Besides, even if they go broke, they'll still be better off than if they had to pay a 5 million euro fine.

On a side note, where are all the "But I only use torrents for legal stuff" people? From the impression people like to give most of the time, only listing legal torrents should be a huge plus. LOL!

Re:This may kill their CDN

[Guspaz]

Bandwidth isn't cheap, but that's besides the point. The problem is that their content distribution service involves seeding content, and it's free.

Seeding requires a significant amount of bandwidth. The initial up-front investment in bandwidth is probably only 2-3x the size of the upload, but the long tail is the killer; when there are no more seeds left, mininova has to keep supplying bandwidth. This adds up.

In the end, they'll end up having to provide hundreds of megabits of bandwidth at least, with almost no revenue.

Whack-A-Mole

[TubeSteak]

So Mininova is gone. The King is dead. Long live the King!
The media industries have been playing Whack-A-Mole with the internet since Napster and nothing has changed.
As long as they don't get any ISP level laws passed, let them have their minor victories.

Re:Whack-A-Mole

[Chatterton]

Yes, Whack-A-Mole is fun. But as a user, where is the next mole?

Re:Whack-A-Mole

[thejynxed]

They won't even stop people even if they get ISP level laws, which is what ACTA does.

That combined with torrent clients steadily moving away from the central-server weakness, they can have fun with their content filtering.

Lots of luck stopping DHT + PEX. They haven't been able to stop eDonkey/eMule and the like (which also uses DHT), and that has been around for years before the Bit Torrent protocol was even written.

It's not just whack-a-mole, it's a complete exercise in futility coming from organizations that are rapidly heading the way of the dinosaur.

Re:Whack-A-Mole

[infolation]

Demonoid, when it returns from the ashes.

Re:Whack-A-Mole

[Nursie]

*cough*nntp*cough*

Also there are places like isohunt, but they're not a tracker. There are other P2P techs in the pipeline, such as oneswarm, but in order to truly darken p2p traffic we need faster connections and to put up with slower, multi-hop transfers.

Re:Whack-A-Mole

[daveime]

EMule / EDonkey stopped itself, without any outside help. Last time I checked (over a year ago), there was 1 decent search server, and about 1000 spam servers that fed you millions of dummy hits to any search term, only to send you a WMV virus.

The benefit of centralised servers was in the "trust" value, and the ability to see the comments of other sharers. Bad torrents were quickly detected as such, and good torrents were evident by the numbers of seeds / leeches.

Decentralised searches rely on the premise that unscrupulous entity isn't going to poison the results with spam, viruses and crap with titles like "2012 good movie guaranteed clean honest mate would I lie to you.wmv"

Re:Whack-A-Mole

[TyIzaeL]

As long as they don't get any ISP level laws passed, let them have their minor victories.

Don't go giving them any ideas...

This is great

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always annoying to have loads of stolen software music and films come up when I am searching for a torrent.
Having mininova get rid of all the illigal stuff will make it much easier and more pleasant to use. Legitimate stuff gets buried as there is so much more stolen stuff.

I hope other torrent sites follow suit, even just for the ease of use reasons.

At least the judge is sane

[T Murphy]

The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements

After seeing the Google/Italy article, it's nice to see that sanity holds elsewhere.

Re:At least the judge is sane

[Koby77]

Hopefully in future cases, however, the judges will see that filtering is not feasible from a technical standpoint. It doesn't matter if you're found not responsible and must filter, or guilty and are forced offline. Both result in the same outcome. So why should someone found not responsible for a problem be forced to walk the plank?

This hearkens back to the Betamax vs Universal case (yes I know this is a Dutch case). The burden is on the RIAAs of the world to prove infringement and then deal with it (and in a legal manner as well).

well this sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe gnutella can save us like it did after napster went down the drain. this really bites, though. how many major indexers are left?

Re:well this sucks

[julesh]

how many major indexers are left?

Only about 30. There was an order-of-magnitude increase when suprnova bit the dust. I'm gonna guess that when all the best of the current crop are gone (or, as looks likely to happen with TPB now, become so unreliable that you'd prefer to look elsewhere) it'll happen again.

Not too sorry to see Mininova die

[Chris Tucker]

Mininova included far too many torrents on private trackers. Sort of defeating the purpose of BitTorrent, actually.

No great loss, all things considered.

Re:Not too sorry to see Mininova die

[Dr. Spork]

I agree in principle, but in practice things tend to be less elegant. I expect to see an increase of private trackers, because their hosts will not be the huge, tempting targets that Mininova and TPB were. This means that we'll all join exclusive, secret societies online and share files that way. It's not more egalitarian, etc., but it's probably more sustainable and seems more like a bunch of overlapping communities, which is sort of nice.

Re:Not too sorry to see Mininova die

[Alarindris]

Right on, half of their torrents are dead anyway.

Re:Not too sorry to see Mininova die

[Chris Tucker]

I think you might be correct in your Insightful comments.

(those with mod points, please mod Dr. Spork's comments up. Thank you.)

Re:Not too sorry to see Mininova die

[IgnoramusMaximus]

That is a fallacy. A lot of tiny (compared to the size of the Internet) "secret societies" are ineffective because the odds of individuals in these back-water bushes actually having the stuff that you want are minuscule. If people are actually foolish to believe that hiding in some pseudo-"secret" mouse-hole is going to improve things, then the imaginary-property crowd would be victorious by the means of the one of the oldest tricks in the book: "divide and conquer".

R.I.P

[Fox Tox]

Rest in peace Mininova, thanks for the great times, you will be greatly missed. :(

Odd Physics

[Farmer Tim]

Apparently a mininova does collapse into a black hole...

Same droppings, different pile

[tepples]

The MPAA/RIAA are not the ones to blame for this..
It was BREIN, the dutch RIAA... bastards.

Same droppings, different pile. The nine members of the MAFIAA (Sony, GE, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, National Amusements, Vivendi, WMG, and EMI) are the same no matter which country they operate in.

Re:Same droppings, different pile

[Philip K Dickhead]

Heh.

The tracker with one torrent: Minnova.

Re:Same droppings, different pile

[PizzaAnalogyGuy]

Yep, RIAA/MPAA have their fingers everywhere. The only reasonable anti-piracy entity is BSA which mostly just goes against piracy sellers and those who use pirated apps in corporations/work.

Let me tell you a true story from real life.

While traveling the endless lands of The Barrens and sipping my Mountain Dew drink with ices, I remembered a note my mother left for me in my childhood. It was on the fridge door, with a lovely heart magnet on top of it. I read the note and it said she'll be late home today and she had left me a good salad to eat in the fridge. But that is bad food. I didn't want to eat bad food. I wanted a PIZZA. But I was scared. I truly was. It was the first time I had to go against an authority and it was the first time I had to make a tough decision myself - what kind of a pizza to order. I went to Google and typed in "pizza". There was a nice lady that asked from me what kind of a pizza I would like to have. I just mumbled something along the lines of.. Sliced ham, bacon, pineapple and roasted red peppers with provolone cheese on a parmesan crust.. Family size, pan pizza! And one Mountain Dew. And some chocolate ice cream with strawberries! She said "I'll be there in 20 mins". I felt like a man and went back to my computer.

The thing I'm trying to say here is that whatever they will try, someone will get around it and do what he wants. So did I.

Re:Same droppings, different pile

[retchdog]

It's been around for over 10 years, man. 22-10=12.

Re:Same droppings, different pile

[vonsneerderhooten]

pffft..... look at his UID! it's in the millions!!!!

"search item" type:torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

So mininova turns into www.legaltorrents.com. What they could do though it just de-reference the links, but keep the torrent names in the list. That way people could simply do a websearch on them. That way the only way to take them down would be to outlaw web searches :)

Another site already replaced it

[Anonymous Coward]

kickasstorrents.com

Oh no! What will I do?

[DJCouchyCouch]

Mininova is gone!

If only there'd be some kind of alternative! I guess I'll just have to rely on sumotorrent, btjunkie, eztv, fenopy, isohunt, seedpeer, torrentz, torrentbox, torrentdownloads.net, torrent portal, torrentreactor.net, torrentreactor.to, alivetorrents, demonoid, boxtorrent, animelab, animesuki, kickasstorrents, torrentplaza, movietorrents, torrentomega, flixflux, overget, superfundo and all the other sites I can easily find on google by doing a simple search.

I hope I'll be able to survive!

Re:Oh no! What will I do?

[Krneki]

You forgot Google with file:torrent.

Re:Oh no! What will I do?

[everynerd]

Demonoid site is down, but the trackers have been revived.

Re:Oh no! What will I do?

[Pteraspidomorphi]

box is now called bakabt. animesuki is only a meta-index, but look into scarywater or nyaatorrents. I hope that helps with your survival ;)

Re:Oh no! What will I do?

[jones_supa]

Actually I think you mean filetype:torrent.

Re:Oh no! What will I do?

[Krneki]

You are correct, funny tho it does work with file too.

Re:Oh no! What will I do?

[Slashed Dot]

actually, eztv was down as of a week ago. seems it's been down a fair bit now, too. unsure of the reasons.

Typo in summary

[dvh.tosomja]

> Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

Mininova Removes All Torrents ...Here, fixed that for ya

Re:Typo in summary

[julesh]

> Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

Mininova Removes All Torrents ...Here, fixed that for ya

What do you mean? They've still got a couple of linux distros left. And some songs by bands you've never heard of.

Penalizing legal uses?

[Oshawapilot]

Here in Canada we pay a huge levy on blank CD media, MP3 players, and virtually any other media capable of holding music. This "goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers' personal copying. ", as per the Cnet article here http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html

Therefore, this shutdown is infringing on my legal right to download music.

Meh, there's always ISOhunt, or like everyone else has already said, plenty of other choices.

Re:Penalizing legal uses?

[julesh]

Therefore, this shutdown is infringing on my legal right to download music.

You have no such right. The levy is extortion, plain and simple, not part of a bargain that gives you rights.

What is a copy?

[tepples]

[A record label lawyer] approached me and asked if I knew anything about flashing a Nintendo DS for their kids so they can play copies.

By "copies", do you include homebrew games that implement the same rules as a non-free commercial game? Would Lockjaw, for instance, be considered a "copy" of Tetris DS?

ObTopic: I've seen torrents of just homebrew. I imagine they'd go away too because Nintendo would object to including them in "Content Distribution" on patent grounds.

Re:What is a copy?

[Opportunist]

The problem is that, homebrew or not, altering the DS alone is already considered illegal in some countries. Yes, altering something that you legally bought and should by any means own, i.e. altering your property, is illegal. So even if he asked for homebrew my answer would have had to be "no". But he directly and bluntly asked for a way to play what they labeled pirated copies.

I'm curious...

[naasking]

...how can Mininova not be liable for any copyright infringing links, but still be ordered to remove the links? If they're not liable for that content, then they shouldn't have to remove anything.

Re:I'm curious...

[denis-The-menace]

because their name was not google

Re:I'm curious...

[Zoxed]

> ...how can Mininova not be liable for any copyright infringing links, but still be ordered to remove the links?

A few guesses: because they do not have the money/lawyers/energy to continue the fight, or they do not want the personal risk of being hit by a massive fine or because they have had a good run and know that alternatives will popup anyway ...

Re:I'm curious...

[Kjella]

Pardon me if this post contains legal reality and not how it should be. Copyright infringement under US law is a strict liability offense, that means that even if you can prove you had no idea you were violating copyright you are still liable at a minimum of 200$/work and up to 30000$/work. However, ISPs are covered by some common carrier-like protections - the legal term has a specific meaning and ISPs are not common carriers - that grant them relief from liability if they meet certain conditions. Without going into much detail, one of these conditions is to respond to DMCA takedown requests. If they do not comply with that requirement they will default back to standard copyright law, which says they are liable.

Re:I'm curious...

[uniquegeek]

An important but sad lesson to be learned for *any* matter: legalities, rights, and law mean dick all if you don't have the money to fight for them.

There is also stress to consider. It's a difficult, long-term process likely to drive many people insane.

and as usual...

[v1]

And as happens so often, a judge basically says "Well, technically what you're doing isn't illegal, but I still don't like what you're doing, and people are breathing down my neck to do something about you, so stoppit or we're going to bring the legal system down on you anyway. We may not be able to make it stick, but we certainly can make your life hell in the attempt." Surrender your rights and we'll leave you alone - persist and we'll make you regret it. Wonderful legal system we have here.

Judges that make rulings like that need to either be re-educated, or removed. Their job isn't to make the law, but to judge whether or not you've broken a law. (except in trial by jury, and then they don't even get that) Whether or not they like what you're doing, or whether or not they think what you did should be illegal isn't supposed to have anything to do with it. If they're more interested in writing the law, they need to give up their bench and run for senator.

Senators make laws and place restrictions on police and judges. Citizens break laws. Police arrest citizens that appear to have broken laws. Juries (/judges) interpret law and decide if citizens have broken a law. Judges insure a fair trial. Problem here is everyone wants a piece of everyone else's action. Oh if it only weren't for that pesky "separation of powers" thing...

Re:and as usual...

[otherwhere]

Sorry if doubly posted. Damn third world ISPs. Ever been to the Netherlands? It's not the United States, believe it or not. Their judicial history and mindset is different than yours, or more accurately, what you perceive those of your country to be (I'm assuming from your solipsism that you're American). They don't consider the American '"separation of powers" thing' so pesky as it doesn't apply to them. And if you think judges don't make new law in the U.S.A. and neither are they supposed to, you are sorrily mistaken, young v1. They are not supposed to use their powers of compulsion to harass people whose behavior they abhor into acquiescing to non-existent laws, but that's a very different thing.

Re:and as usual...

[mister_playboy]

Citizens break laws.

Your matter-of-fact statement is utterly chilling. Yet this is exactly the mindset many governments and corporations (are they really still separate entities?) have adopted.

What a unjust world...

Re:and as usual...

[v1]

Was just thinking a little more on this and have also concluded that the only thing judges "make" is "precedence", which just lends credit to their particular interpretation of the law.

Re:and as usual...

[YttriumOxide]

I find your comments and your sig to be in an interesting juxtaposition...

LegitTorrent

[tepples]

How they knew which torrents were illegal?

Some of these trackers have "LegitTorrent" services designed for publishers of quality works that aren't blatant copyright infringements. Mininova just deleted every torrent that wasn't in its LegitTorrent section.

Not all bad

[orkysoft]

Now, I didn't really know Mininova before this. I had heard of it, but that's about it.

I did visit the site just now, and I saw lots of items about music that I'd never heard of.

Maybe it can become a good site to find new music from non-RIAA signed artists, who generally don't have much of a marketing/distribution platform? RIAA, meet foot, gun.

Re:Not all bad

[MikeBabcock]

I've used mininova for a long time, they were a great site for finding TV episodes I'd missed.

Re:Piracy IS the answer {was "Debate!}

[headkase]

But unless there is mass revolt, and there won't be without education and a common cause, then the collusion of big business and government can pick themselves up, ignore the truth, and carry on.

Black Thursday!

[Tumbleweed]

Alas, poor MiniNova, I knew him well...

Oh well, that's life in the big city. *shrug*

Mininova Removes All Copyright-Infringing Torrents

[uvajed_ekil]

...and bittorrent users remove all bookmarks to mininova. NEXT!

Not necessarily

[Mathinker]

> But, collectively, we have to have room for compromise or we will all get nothing.

I can think of a lot of futures where this is not true.

For example, the future where copyright law is unchanged, infringement is rampant and unenforceable, and the content industry merely has to scale down because of lowered profits.

Or the future where the content industry pushes copyright law so out of whack that no one infringes, but their profits are just as lowered because many people are so afraid of the possible penalties they totally avoid buying their products and instead go for the safe indie products which have CC/alternative licensing and/or viewing the content only in ephemeral ways (like on television or a movie screen).

BTW, when I finished school I was a model "responsible citizen" in that I would never have thought to break any laws. Now that I am an adult, I see that the simplistic "law == morality" equivalence is far from being correct. So you might have a big problem in your plans, there, eh?

Re:Not necessarily

[headkase]

Its a balance between where you choose to go and where you end up. They may be functionally equivalent but I prefer the former.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

[Reziac]

I liked this comment from TFA:
=============
Here is an idea, since these great websites are taken away from us one by one and our freedom along with it.

Maybe we need a more "legal" approach to file sharing.

I propose to have a site that would have deals with distributors to have their tvshow/movies/music etc. in torrent form on the site. In exchange for a percentage of the money made by ads. And also the idea that if someone really likes a product they will probably buy it. I think there is alot of people who buy the cd/dvd after they download it if they like it.

That way end users keep getting great content for free, and artists/distributors keep getting paid.

Distributors, instead of looking at file sharing like an enemy, you could look at it as an advertising opportunity.
=============

Obviously works for me....
[eyeing wall of DVDs I've bought]

They were lucky

[FlyingGuy]

Quoted from the TorrentFreak website..

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

This is what got them into trouble, besides, "Aiding and Abetting", (spare me the jurisdictional nonsense please) since even companies that don't seriously object to their software ending up on torrent sites start looking at the bottom line and looking at all the money someone else is making from their product and they are not getting a cut of it.

Greed on all of the parties sides is the problem. If the torrent sites, pointers, indices's, maps, sources, call them what you will because the notion of a site pointing to the place to get illegal copies of software and the actual place the binary resides is a very very blurry legal line indeed, would start cutting checks to the people who actively sell their software which cost them real money to produce, this then might be something that simply goes on with no one complaining.

B&W Tiles

[pinery]

• If I have two headphone audio jacks coming out of my MP3 player.. should I pay double for the download? How about if I charge for use of the extra jack?
• If my brother lends me his blu-ray scifi disc for Friday night.. should I be fined $10,000? ..how about if I charge people to watch it in my clandestine home theatre?

Re:B&W Tiles

[Renraku]

Don't you worry your precious little head, the RIAA/MPAA has you taken care of. If they had their way, there'd be no way to use the first sale doctrine on movies or music. Instead, music and movies would require a key to be read by a device, and the entirety of that work, from then on, could only be played on that device, evermore. All consumer electronics capable of having inputs or removable media would have to 'phone home' when it receives a key, to see if it's already in use.

Oh, yeah, they wouldn't want to PAY for the authentication infrastructure and servers and bandwidth, so they'd jack prices up 2x and then change systems every few years, forcing you to buy the CD again under a new key scheme to be able to listen to it.

And yes, loaning movies to a friend is 'public viewing' since its being viewed by third parties, though I don't think it's been prosecuted unless it's viewed by your 200 friends in the town square.

Time to move to Freenet...

[FreenetFan]

Freenet is where the next generation of filesharing will happen. It's working very well at the moment, Speeds are pretty good and there is a lot of content. Files of 1GB can be easily downloaded in a day, just queue them up. And of course there is a lot of chat on the forums, just like Usenet used to be.

It is a lot more user friendly than it used to be, although the Slashdot crowd are the kind of people who will be the early adopters.

Re:Time to move to Freenet...

[FlyingGuy]

It will work, for a while.

Then it will suffer that same fate as usenet did with massive amounts of spam and drive the coasts of keeping it up and running until it collapses under it's own weight, much like usenet did.

Distributed systems work well when they are controlled or at least carefully health monitored.

Bandwidth isn't free and never will be and so someone or some group of people must bear the costs and at some point it will be like usenet and become prohibitively expensive because you are not just moving text ( as was initially envisioned by usenet ( with some minor binary file movement ) you are moving massive amounts of data in the form of large binaries..

As long as Freenet stays in the background noise it will survive, after that it will be shutdown, not by any central authority, but by the users themselves.

If TPB had been quiet, under the radar ( picked a different name ) and not been thumbing their noses at the rest of the world they might still be there.

Re:Time to move to Freenet...

[FreenetFan]

Freenet has already thought of those problems you describe!

Usenet was fairly centralized, but Freenet works in a similar way to Bittorrents in that the more people that use it, the faster it goes. And it is totally decentralized so there are no costs other than your computer and internet connection, which you have already. You can configure how much bandwidth to allocate to Freenet, and it doesn't require excessive amounts.

And there are spam-resistant forums on Freenet. Instead of messages going to a central place, users publish their own messages to their own place, and other users pick them up from there. So if someone spams, you just don't bother picking up their messages. There is also a web of trust so spammers can be identified collaboratively rather than each person having to flag spammers separately. There are some extra tricks to speed it up and enable it to scale, but it seems to work pretty well in practice.

Freenet's old message forum (Frost) is spammable, but the new ones are called Freenet Message System (FMS) and Freetalk, and they are highly spam resistant.

Freenet is designed from the ground up to assume a minority of its users will be malicious, and takes steps to allow for that. Data flows around in encrypted chunks of 32kB and these could be small messages or large binaries. You really should try out Freenet, it covers all the objections you made.

The only real threat to Freenet is a legal one, of governments making it illegal or blocking its traffic. But even then it has a Darknet mode, where you only connect to trusted friends, and the UDP traffic is designed to be difficult to fingerprint. If it comes to it, the next step would be steganography, where Freenet traffic is disguised as some other form of traffic.

Re:Time to move to Freenet...

[FlyingGuy]

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't objecting, merely opining based upon what information I had and the history of usenet.

It will be interesting to watch as freenet matures to see if it really catches on, and then what the unintended side affects of it popularity will be, if any.

From what you have described it sounds like FidoNet with a lemmon twist.

Um what?

[Alarindris]

Your idea is retarded and will never work.

LeTS JuST GIvE iT aWAY FoR FREE!!! LOLOLOLO!!! THATS THE ANSWER!!

Re:Um what?

[eiMichael]

If there is enough of it for everyone to have one for damn near free (and there most certainly is), then why should we pay for it?

Seriously. What if light bulbs were everywhere? You just go outside hold out your hand and *poof* you have a new light bulb. And if you think hard enough you get just the one you're looking for. Why would anyone continue to pay for light bulbs?

Re:Um what?

[Plekto]

You missed the point. The reality is that like it or not, the producers and studios have to give at least some of it away for free just to compete with the enormous amount of free entertainment that is currently easily available without strings or copyright issues. Or else they just get lost in the noise. That doesn't mean that it has to be the full version or perfect quality, of course. Nobody said that. Some companies do this by having low quality but free samples of the songs on the various websites(go to most bands' websites - almost all have streaming music or similar), some by playing part of the song, some by having demos and the like(especially true for a game - try to find one without a single demo), and some just give it away for free to grow faster(often true with brand new independent bands)

You have to market your product to the widest possible audience to compete and the studios just don't get it that the harder they force the issue, the more people just simply opt out and do other things for their twenty minutes a day of entertainment. YouTube is free. Dozens of java game sites are free or a tiny monthly fee. 80+ channels of Cable TV, Satellite radio, video games(plus MMOGs)... the list is enormous. It's no longer a few studios controlling most of the content like in the 70s or 80s, which is when most of their board members started in the business. It's sheer chaos with tens of thousands of small and large sources all yelling and screaming for their piece of fame and attention.

http://www.youtube.com/shows%5D
Even commercial firms are beginning to do exactly this.
http://www.youtube.com/show/topgear
Even the BBC is giving content away for free. They finally understand. And these are real TV shows. You don't even need Cable TV any more - just a fast connection. I could spend 24 hours a day watching new stuff just here and still not see a small fraction of what's available.

And this is just YouTube. Multiply that times a hundred or more.

Future consumers like my son and his friends don't even see a need at all to even consider them. Zero interest at all. Not even on their radar, because it costs money and free(and legal) entertainment is everywhere. Shoot, my son won't even stay still for ten minutes to listen to an entire song, let alone a CD. His entire view of "entertainment" is different than previous generations.

Tip of the iceberg

[Mathinker]

You've made a good start, but forgotten all the rest of the bad things of copyright law.

• Ridiculous statutory damages.
• Fair use is relatively useless because its boundaries are only prescribed by the courts, not by copyright law itself. The law itself should clearly define a "safe" area for fair use of various types of works (but not limit fair use to that definition, only).
• It is impossible to check if what you think is an original creation is actually just a derived work, since there are no registration requirements for copyrighted works. If your creation turns out to be a derived work, you shouldn't be liable for unreasonable damages.
• Currently accepted usage of most copyrighted works requires copying them (to various players/devices, between locations within your house, to offsite backup) yet this copying is actually illegal (since copyright law was designed in an era when copying was difficult and blatantly infringing).
• Copyright law varies widely from country to country but the net is international in nature.
• Copyright law has expanded to restrict and criminalize behavior which only enables others to infringe on copyright, and the extent of this expansion is only defined by the courts, enabling litigation-happy companies to effectively extort money from a section of the public which they would struggle to actually prove guilty. But lack of due diligence in pursuing copyright claims is not effectively punished.

Re:Tip of the iceberg

[headkase]

You are now officially in charge of that branch! Please sub-delegate your individual points. Each of us can only do so much but collectively we can chip anything away!

Hard to find good music

[Sirusjr]

The problem here is not piracy but that most of the music that is easy to buy is worthless drivel. I have to pirate in order to know what is good before I order it. I listen to mainly soundtracks, heavy metal, and Japanese Pop. Now the problem is that most good heavy metal is NOT originally from the US (few exceptions like Fool's Game and Future's End but they are the minority). Imports for game soundtracks are usually at least $30 and up to $50 after the conversion from Yen to Dollars. This isn't so bad because most $40 soundtracks from Japanese games are also 2-4 discs and each disc is actually a full 80 minutes unlike US releases with 40 minute discs. Anime soundtracks though are usually $25-30 and are single disc releases. Thus because of the price of buying this stuff I have to know for sure this is something good before I buy it. The only way to do that is to either pirate everything first and buy the good stuff or to buy everything and find out that half of it sucks and I doubt very many people have the money to do that. It is somewhat easier when you are aware of the good composers out there because then you can be a little more sure that the album you order is good but that isn't very reliable either. This leaves me with a choice between buying nothing and having nothing to listen to or pirating everything and buying something. I would think the businesses would rather get my money after I have educated myself the only way I can than not get my money at all. Sure I could play every single game, watch every single movie, and watch every single series of anime in existence to determine the quality of a soundtrack but that is completely impractical and often times the soundtracks that are the best are also for movies/anime/games that are not so good. Until there is a change in the way things work I don't see how I have any other option here.

Re:Hard to find good music

[mdwh2]

All the "But I wouldn't buy it anyway" people are full of shit. Lets say nobody was able to pirate Windows tomorrow. According to that deranged logic, all of those people will switch to switch to Linux/BSD/OSX/etc since they weren't going to buy it anyway.

You fail at basic logic. Firstly not everyone says "But I wouldn't buy it anyway". Secondly, even if that was true, your claim only shows that some of them are lying, not all of them.

If it was impossible to pirate Windows, then I bet that at least some people would switch to alternatives cheaper than buying Windows.

As for the rest of your post, last time I looked, if sales dropped, the record industry don't give more - they simply blame it on piracy.

Re:Hard to find good music

[Sirusjr]

Thats the problem, they don't have any good way to try before you buy. Best thing I get is 20 second samples in TERRIBLE quality on amazon. That isn't going to give me a very good idea what I want. Plus I don't even get samples when importing from Japan but of course you didn't even bother to address my main points.

Re:Hard to find good music

[Sirusjr]

If there was no piracy they would only really sell the stuff that is already selling and all the niche markets would dry up and they would still find a way to blame it on piracy. I have actually bought a few albums based on full tracks available to stream on bands myspace pages. They turned out to be good because I can get a pretty good idea based on a few tracks. The problem is a lot of groups either have short samples or terrible quality samples and either way I don't get a very good idea what I am buying.

Let me get my video camera...

[TiggertheMad]

I can't imagine any decent human being simply standing there and watching while another human has a heart attack, no matter who they work for.

You called that one, I sure couldn't just stand there and watch. I mean, how often do you get a chance to kick a RIAA person WHILE they are having a heart attack?

NO!

[incognito84]

Demonoid, tick.
The Pirate Bay, tick.
Mininova, tick.

RIP.

In Soviet Russia...

[nicospoul]

Mininova removes YOU

I can just see it now.

[Rod Beauvex]

Their ad revenue drops to near zero, and they go dark in a month or two. They had better have a good back-up business plan.

Re:I can just see it now.

[cenc]

yea, they are likely just waiting for the raid check to finish on their servers on some Caribbean island.

re: Piracy is not the answer

[King_TJ]

Well, I've maintained for decades now that "piracy" is actually a "normal" condition, and expected behavior, given the circumstances. There is so much intellectual property out there (with more being creating CONSTANTLY), it's simply a case where the creator of any one work just can't expect or demand ALL people who make use of their content to go through legal channels and purchase it at the asking price.

It seems to me that the desire to "maximize profits" (greed, essentially) is the only reason they keep trying to strike at anyone deemed to be a "key player" in redistributing copyrighted works illegally. But even if they succeeded in taking down ALL of the torrent sites that offered any copyrighted material and all of the web sites offering direct downloads of same, and even every ftp site they could locate .... it wouldn't change the individual's belief that it's "ok" to make a free copy of a piece of intellectual property here or there, as he/she wants one and has ready access to copy it.

I'm not so sure there's that much "educating" that still needs to be done here? Sure, SOME people probably don't really understand the issues at all .. but they're probably not the ones at the heart of the problem either, right?

It seems to me that most people have a pretty good (if only basic) understanding of what's going on. We all "get" that authors of works wish to be compensated fairly for them. The thing is though? We generally believe they already ARE getting fair compensation, DESPITE all the "rampant piracy" going on. Everyone I know who one could accuse of "pirating a lot of material" is also BUYING a lot of material. The people interested enough in music to download albums off Usenet or P2P sharing networks and build up a library ALSO tend to own hundreds of purchased CDs and go to concerts. The big "software pirates" often spend FAR more than the typical consumer on computer-related goods and often even have jobs in the industry where they make key decisions of purchasing of corporate software licenses. And I think as time goes on, you're going to find the same thing with the e-books.... People managing to pirate book content for their Kindles or other readers tend to be avid book readers who own a huge collection of dead-tree publications.

Personally? I tend to think the answer lies not in trying to leverage the legal system to "strong arm" more people into paying, but by offering quality content at a good price - and ACCEPTING the fact that it's "ok and normal" for there to be "one illegal copy in use for each one someone buys from you". Most of us have to put in 8 hours of work each and every day to keep bringing in a paycheck. Content creators have it better than most of us, because once they put in X amount of time on a work and complete it, it keeps generating money for them for a period of time far longer than the time-frame they actually spent creating it.

Re:Aw man!

[Imrik]

Why do so many people have the impression that everything is available for sale.

I prefer legal torrents anyway.

[pinkushun]

GPL (and all related FOSS licenses) is the best shit in the world. For everything else I'll pay the artist their dues. Simple. Don't be a Cheap-skate.

Did I miss something?

[firesyde424]

If the judge has ruled that Mininova did not violate any laws, how does he have the legal foundation to order them to enforce a law that they have not broken?

Whups, Got a Little Delete-Happy

[Ranger Rick]

In your haste to sell out, you also removed my copyrighted material that I posted myself. Thanks for "helping" an aspiring independent artist like me!