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Why Money Doesn't Motivate File-Sharers
nk497 writes "File-sharers aren't motivated by financial gain, but by altruism, according to an economist. Joe Cox, of the Portsmouth Business School, said those uploading content for others to share don't see what they're doing as illegal, meaning current tactics to deter piracy are doomed to fail. 'The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn't be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved.'"
This is news? Did anyone think that file sharers were making money?
Palm trees and 8
That's not the point of the media companies' campaigns against file-sharing and "piracy," though. Have you seen the FBI anti-copyright-infringement warnings? You can be punished whether or not you distribute copies of a copyrighted work for financial gain.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
The interviewee says that uploaders don't think that what they're doing should be illegal, not that they aren't aware of the legal ramifications or that education about the law would suddenly change everything.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
What about file shearing old games that are not for sale anymore? and no used copy's on ebay does not count or even the old copy in the bargain bin at the store.
That's not about the money it's about letting you find old stuff.
What'll they realize next? That DRM pisses off the customers more than it prevents piracy? That using the courts to extract profit is going to backfire eventually? That water is wet?
this report brings back my joy in the saying, "Information wants to be free".
What about file shearing old games...
Old games depilate you????
::begin self-plug::
Filesharing is a boon for people like myself. I do some writing (nothing released to the public yet, although once it is it will all be distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license) and also make some spacey-ambient and drone-type music. The music I make is freely available to all (both on Last.FM and in a torrent.) Since I care more about people hearing my music (and, in the future, reading my writing) rather than getting money for it, filesharing is perfect for me.
I've got a donate button on my site, but even after I officially put my stuff up for "sale", I will continue to ensure it's available for free. I've gotten my fair share of music and writings for free...I feel like I should contribute something back, know what I mean? ::end self-plug::
Living With a Nerd
Oh, I am sure most file-sharers understand that it is illegal. The billions of $$$ that our government wastes on anti-piracy, and sending Homeland Security after them.
But is it immoral? That is the real question. And most file-sharers do not feel it is immoral.
--
A large part of this is because we have been ripped off for decades by the music cartel (RIAA). Who has also been ripping off artists for even longer. When we're paying $15 for a $2 product and the artist is lucky to see a dollar. Somehow that cartel's claims that "we're stealing", fall on very deaf ears. And when we see lawsuits which fine someone $2.5 million for a few 99 cent songs - quite clearly in violation of the United States of America's Constitution. We lose any pity we might have for a corrupt industry whose business model is extinct. And if not for the fact that they have paid billions to buy off our government, would have been put out of business a decade ago.
There is a feeling of justification...
And maybe that's the solution. There are some games so well loved that they will always be with us. But ALL video games will likely remain copyrighted for at least the next few dozen years. What we need is a regulation like you have for trademarks. Rather than actively using and actively defending your trademark, you just have to actively make the property available for sale if it's the kind of work that's for commercial sale. If it goes off the market in all forms for x years, then it loses copyright status. Or at the very least, becomes legal to copy.
It would be tough wording it right, but there's a whole world out there of copyrighted content locked away behind publishers who see their properties as too unprofitable to sell. Digital distribution should put an end to that unprofitability - but console gaming would have to allow for first-class developers to release games without the restrictions of pressed discs or wii-ware.
Well, I don't think anyone would care nearly as much if you sheared copyrighted works.
After all, you probably need to go buy another copy after you go about doing that!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
A lot of people approve of piracy because its a defence against price gouging, the cost of many things that are pirated are ridiculous. I always use the example that 10 years ago CD's used to cost me 29 bucks.. because of piracy and the effort of curbing internet file sharing the price of CD's has dropped dramatically to 7-12 bucks. I dunno im a odd bird.. I approve of the piracy of music (free no profit) but I dont when it comes to games and movies..
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
At the most it could be immoral, although sharing things for people who may not be able to afford it otherwise would hardly seem so.
I paid to see about 3 movies in the cinema last year, and only two this year. The rest simply don't seem worthy of risking a $10 movie ticket, considering I don't have a disposable income.
I downloaded about 100 over the last two years however, and got some enjoyment from them. I would not be able to pay for the DVD's, and rentals are not a realistic option for me.
Likewise games. In the last 2 years I played Batman:Arkham Asylum which was horribly disappointing, MW2 which was fun but I finished it in about 5 hours, and don't care about multiplayer, Bioschock, which I thought was horribly overrated, Medal of Honor which was shorter than MW2, but without any redeeming features, and Fallout 3 and Fallout 3 NV. Out of those games the Fallout 3 games are the only ones I would pay for, but I still can't afford it. Even if I did pay for them, I would probably throw the game out, as the pirated versions are so much more convenient and bug free.
Given how well the content industries are doing financially, all the hubbub against copyright infringers just smacks of greed, and nothing else.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
All human action is, by definition, motivated by self-interest. Now then, what a person deems desirable can be anything--this can be a sense of satisfaction from perceived selflessness or even masochistic suffering. Indeed, the only criterion for voluntary exchange is the ex ante prospect of mutual subjective gain. After all, one voluntarily gives up only what one values less that the thing received in exchange.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I think most of us who come here know this already. It's an almost-established fact among this field. My concern on this interview is, who else will also read this? Are there anybody that previously don't know that will gain this knowledge? Are there any effect on them? I have not much confidence that those people in power may read Information Economics and Policy and rethink what they are doing right now seriously.
I play the piano. Over the years, I have collected 15,000 piano scores in PDF form, covering about 400 years of classical keyboard works. It’s like lint in the drier of the Internet. Much of it is not available anywhere for purchase, or even findable in libraries for circulation. Max Reger’s arrangement for two pianos of Wagner’s overture, for instance? Well, the Max Reger Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany has a copy
At the Van Cliburn piano competition, a couple years ago, I gave tiny thumb drives to some of the winners and said, “Enjoy.” Each thumb drive was smaller than my pinky but contained was the whole 15 GB trove. It blew their minds. Basically, every significant piano piece is in the pile.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Unlike XKCD, this IT crowd clip is actually obligatory.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
While there was some interesting thoughts here (although nothing particularly new), I think he still makes one of the funamental mistakes the copyright industry pushes for;
For the leechers, pretty obviously, the major motivation was financial. They wanted to acquire music or films without paying for it because it was cheaper than going out to buy it.
He is willing to accept that seeders might not be only interested in financial gain, but fails to consider that this might also be the case for some leechers (as other studies and real-world situations have suggested). The greater convenience of pirated media over a licensed version can be enormous. For example, there have been cases where material has been offered on a "pay-what-you-want-but-pay-something" basis and yes people still pirated the content; showing that there is a disproportionate difference between paying $0.01 (or £0.01) and not paying. For some this might be some principle of not paying and being cheap, but for others this may well be an issue of convenience.
As for the "pretty obviously" part, whenever someone states that something is obvious I recall something my analysis tutor said; "if someone is obvious, prove it; either it is obvious, in which case it won't take long, or it may turn out to be obvious, but untrue." Obviously this was in maths, which has much higher levels of proof, but it does seem that calling something "obvious" is a way of dismissing the converse without proper consideration.
The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn’t be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved.
Also, it is worth noting that in the UK there isn't necessarily any criminal act involved with unlawful file-sharing. Our copyright law is based on civil lawsuits and "actual damages", provided one avoids infringing in the course of business. Of course, this hasn't stopped the copyright industry from twisting our fraud laws to prosecute (unsuccessfully, in general) and persecute those allegedly involved in copyright infringement.
Why don't they count? Surely they're still available if you can pick them up in a bargain bin?
A shrink-wrapped software company I used to work for (and is long out of business) had a big poster on the wall of the office from the SPA with "Don't Copy that Floppy" on it.
At the beginning of every movie and the fast forward and skip disabled, there is a FBI warning about copyright.
That's why I rip all of my DVDs to straight video files and/or prefer downloaded movies. They don't have 10 minutes of unskippable commercials/warnings, some stupid menu that takes 60 seconds to load, then a bunch of stupid "extra features" that my kid can accidentally select instead of the movie.
IMO if you watch a legit movie, you get a worse experience. I have downloaded movies which I own DVDs for, just because it was faster than ripping it myself, and I was tired of shitty dvd menus.
> You can be punished whether or not you distribute copies of a copyrighted work for financial gain.
Even worse, my understanding is that you are liable even if you had no knowledge that you were infringing. This is based on something posted by another Slashdotter, who pointed out that copyright infringement is a special kind of tort (I think it was a statutory tort), and that means that there is no defense based on not having the intention to infringe.
This puts your average citizen in the situation where countless things he does every day might end up costing him up to $150K in court (or paying O($1K) to settle out of court). Considering that copyright law is obtuse ("Patry on Copyright" runs 5,500 pages and sells for over $1K), it's clear that something is wrong. See the paper (PDF) "Infringement Nation" by John Tehranian.
...from the findings-obvious-to-the-lay-person-but-will-be-routinely-ignored-by-big-content-even-if-proven dept: dehydrated water still a long way from market feasibility.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Back in the day, getting an album on tape and letting all your friends borrow it so they could copy it was an act of altruism. P2P is that, just more efficient.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So it's ok.
There are many ideas about what copyright is, or should be.
A paper by James Grimmelmann, The Ethical Visions of Copyright Law addresses this (found via his website The Laboratorium).
For some it is. Just look at the chunk of the USA right wing that I like to call the Cult Of Psychopathy. The kind for whom everything is measured in money, is only motivated by money, justified by money (at least judging by the "but it makes money for the investors!!!" argument as trumping any other moral consideration and verily being the line that separates good from evil), etc. And for whom any kind of social arrangement that isn't defined by even sending each other a bill for calling the cops when you see the neighbour's home being broken in, is either some kind of oppressive statism, some godless nazi-communist-fascist threat (don't ask them to actually know what "nazi", "communism" or "fascism" actually are,) or both.
I'll bet that for some the thought of people doing _anything_ without sending someone a bill, is surprising as heck, scary as heck, or both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeah, the only altruistic part seems to be "because I can" or "because it'll encourage people to share even more stuff so that I have more choice of stuff to illegally copy in future", neither of which is exactly altruistic. They might like to portray it as altruistic, but it is rather self-centred.
Also, most of them won't be motivated by financial gain, but they are motivated by a lack of financial loss. The majority of file sharers probably illegally copy games and music because they "can't afford" to buy the game and so just take it because they can (there is no physical barrier/loss/presence that can be detected or otherwise make it *feel* like a crime compared to shop lifting). That way they get to enjoy the product and not pay for it either. Kerching!
Libraries aren't illegal, but e-Libraries are.
On the flip side of that coin (Because I love exploring those) what would you do if someone swiped your music off your web site and started selling it as their own? I've actually seen that happen to a couple of artist friends in the past. Actually some magazine was doing that just recently, too...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While I think "sticking it to The Man" is a fine motivation, particularly when The Man is Jack Valenti's zombie, I don't think it's what most people describe as altruism.
This picture someone made says it all: http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/why-people-pirate-movies-steps-to-watching-video.jpg
Giving away something that somebody else made and who presumably doesn't want it given away (otherwise they would have done so) is *not* altruism. You can argue theft, copyright infringement, whatever, but it is in no way comparable.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The very first sentence:
File-sharers aren't motivated by financial gain, but by altruism
is overly generic. In practice, here's what TFA says:
For the leechers, pretty obviously, the major motivation was financial. They wanted to acquire music or films without paying for it because it was cheaper than going out to buy it.
What was interesting was the difference with the seeders, and it was quite apparent that financial motivations were nowhere near as prevelant; it was a kind of altruism.
So it only applies to those who deliberately upload.
File sharing is caused by DRM. Pirates' files work; discs and services don't. I'm not out to help anyone else (though I'll seed at least to 1.0, but that's a matter of ethics, not altruism), and I don't mind paying, but I sure as fuck mind paying and then getting something that I can't play. Let someone else worry about the headaches of DRM, whether it's reading a Blu-Ray or getting a PVR to work with a cable TV service. One person deals with the bullshit and a million people benefit from that work. It's about efficiency.
I just read a book by Daniel Pink called, "Drive" where he says that much of our behavior is a result of "intrinsic" rewards. Light reading, good info.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Uploaders are not motivated by money, nor altruism.
They are motivated by the social status boost conferred to those who are prolific leakers.
Or did you jump from 0 year old to 21 year old full aware of all law and implication ? Many 16 year old actually don't even KNOW that sharing is illegal. Heck long ago when I told somebody of my middle school that mass replicating K7 and giving them to friends is illegal, they panicked and destroyed the K7. No kidding. try to place yourself in otehr people shoe, and you will realize that SOME people can very well not know sharing is illegal, without having their head in sand.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It'll be far more than dozen years. Under current US laws, Pong will remain covered by copyright until around 2067, and that's for the original arcade version. Any port of it will have some minor changes, and thus the copyright will be longer. We do need better laws for orphan works, though, and 'life of the author' copyright terms should be exposed for the racist (and many other forms of prejudice) bullshit it is.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I can understand taking some one's copyrighted works and selling it as a counterfeit being illegal and just morally wrong. That, is stealing. I do not buy into the argument perpetrated by the BSA and **IA that sharing something without any compensation is wrong at all. This "if you saw or heard something I did, you owe me money" is as ridicules as it is constantly pounded into the public by these greedy people/organizations. I'm sorry, if I like it, then I will buy it, but if I just hear, or see, or tryout something and think it is shit! I do not owe you any money.
I find it amazing that the anti sharing campaign that of course has assimilated the bought and paid for legislators has been adopted by any rationally thinking person.
Dumb! Sheep!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Money Doesn't Motivate File-sharers.
Now think of a pirate. What are his motivations? Booty (money), rape, and pillage.
So as long as file sharers are not motivated by raping (Julian Assange doesn't count!) and pillaging then they should finally be off the hook and put to bed that stupid terminology!
You probably don't need that, just requiring people to spend $100 to renew the copyright every 7 years after the first 7 is probably enough.
Probably 99.99% the crap would fall out of copyright at that point. (Remember, every damn thing is copyrighted, with no action required.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
While there may be laws controlling the use of 'intellectual property', these vary widely between international states, and are often only covered by civil or 'tort' law.
Many people have the perception that a dispute between two parties under civil law is just that: a dispute. The state usually has no right to intervene in these cases.
Contrast this with criminal behaviour, where if a policeman spots you doing it, he's going to chase you and try to arrest you.
Take the example of squatting in England. 'Squatting' is legal: in certain cases you have the right to occupy property with out a licence from the freeholder. 'Trespass' however is covered by civil law and a freeholder may seek remedy from a court to seek eviction of squatters who are, by definition, trespassing. A policeman cannot arrest you for trespass or squatting.
So, although trespassing is covered by law, it is not a crime and most people would see it in this case as not illegal.
Indeed, many people see squatting as 'ethical', at least in some circumstances. This is evidenced by the fact mentioned above that as a squatter you are protected by the law and even have a right to adverse possession (the squatter gets the freehold after about 12 years, having shown material improvement to the property.)
Of course, this is in the context of England, where technically all land is owned by the Queen (who constitutionally is the state), and property 'owners' merely own a freehold, or license. If the freeholder is abusing their license and not utilizing the land, another citizen has a right to occupy it and put it to good use.
I think many file sharers reject the idea that they are acting unethically, criminally, or even illegally. They may accept that in future some party may seek remedy under civil law, but this would be a dispute arbitrated by a court, not a crime. I'm sure most would want to argue that 'data should be free, blar blar blar', and what is 'wrong' is the IP owners' restrictions.
is that it's just so damn convenient. Even if one could get physical discs for free at some physical location, it's still not as convenient as downloading them (This of course probably doesn't hold true for movies...yet).
What about file shearing old games that are not for sale anymore? and no used copy's on ebay does not count or even the old copy in the bargain bin at the store.
Name one.
Gog.com is releasing old games updated for XP, 32/64 Bit Vista and Win 7 on an accelerated schedule - and Gog is not alone in this.
The price of the ready-to-run - and DRM free - classic like Planescape: Torment or Duke Nukem 3D is typically under $10. Most support existing mods for high resolution graphics, wide screen support and so on.
Most come fully patched with free PDF manuals, MP3 soundtracks and other goodies.
I think it probably depends on the person and the circumstances. I doubt various scene groups are as interested in altruism as in competition and credit.
That's because they're in a gift economy, where prestige is gained by how much you give away.
'altruism' is pretty much a meaningless term in a society like that.
And I really mean 'meaningless', I am not attempting to say they aren't 'altruistic', I mean the word literally means nothing. How you show charity in such a society is to pretend the lesser gift they gave was better than the one you gave.
Such societies tend to develop when there's almost no scarcity, but there is a little bit, so someone needs to go out and collect the stuff for people, and they get prestige for doing that and giving it away. But there's not enough scarcity to actually build a 'market' around that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If what they want is free, then money is worthless. It's a pretty simple barter arrangement. They share their own files so they get the files they need or want without having to use any money. If they don't use money, why would they want money? Get it yet? Money is worthless in some places in this world. This would be one of them. I have a reason to keep things legal, so instead of illegal versions of file sharing I use freeware, open source things like this OS I'm on. I legally traded skilled services for the hardware, and paid a tax on that as well. The entire computer hardware and software were free. The only money involved was mandated by the legal system, and they sure didn't motivate me in the least.
In light of Wikileaks, I've been reconsidering this.
Back in the 1980s when finding internet access or time on a machine faster than 1mhz was a huge achievement, "information wants to be free" meant "let us use your networks for non-commercial purposes that help them grow."
From hacking came a lot of good things. Better programming; increased security; cutting through the academic and business horse shit that locked technology into repetitive, categorical, and rather boring uses. From it also came some adventure and fun.
But now, hacking is more of an academic art than anything else. Research known exploits and run a fuzzer until you find an injection or overflow waiting to happen, then ta-da! You win. As a result, I don't think "information wants to be free" applies to hacking when you can make one phone call with your credit card and have fast internet access, and another phone call to get a computer 10,000 times faster than anything we had in the 1980s.
File sharing, while I love the idea of it, takes piracy from an elite who further the technology, and instead makes it an everyday way for much of America to steal its content. Many people are computer-literate now, and they're going online not to find rare and technical information, but to download movies, games and music. That's a different use entirely.
Wikileaks also strikes me as a case of "hackers" (if copying stuff to a thumb drive counts as "hacking") going too far in the wrong direction. Ultimately the exposure of diplomatic networks will increase instability and make the United States more inclined to be fascist, not the reverse. In addition, those who worked with the United States toward good causes are already feeling the hurt. "Information wants to be free" doesn't mean "and you can ignore the consequences."
Consider these cases:
1. I post 1.4gb of credit card numbers online in the ideal that it will destroy the financial system and create world anarcho-socialism.
2. You write a novel; it takes you two years. I post it online in Kindle, Nook and Sony reader formats.
3. You take out $20m in loans to make a movie or a video game, and you spend five years of your life on the project, hoping that you can leverage this into a career. I post your game or movie online before it is released.
We'll never know how sales are affected because we will never know if the people downloading would have bought it anyway, but what's really lost is the newness of the material. If your neighbor reads the newspaper, figures out which are the good stories, and then tells you about them while you're fishing, what incentive do you have to buy the newspaper?
We -- the hackers of today -- need to think long and hard about this. By destroying the ability of others to profit from their work, we may be sabotaging the very people we sought to empower all those years ago.
Just $0.02, or probably worth a lot less in this recession.
Futurist Traditionalism
Actually on a large time scale, artists making millions is an statistical anomaly. Go back 100 years and before, artist would make enough by performing. Replication of art and selling it wasn't a possibility. Come 20th century, they made millions by doing just that, replicating one time effort. Come 21st century, we are back to making money by performing.
On a large time scale, there really is no problem. Having said that, ever since iTunes and all, I find it easier paying and getting content instead of 5 days torrenting.
I keep thinking that, perhaps, one day we'll be able to do what we want to do with our time. If actors want to act, they'll do so without the guarantee of acquiring money (see local community theaters). If musicians want to play, they'll play. I guess it comes down to being able to create food and shelter for yourself -- you wait tables because you need a home, but you play music because that's what you love. I think it's great that popular musicians get paid for doing what they love, but it's sad that it's a necessity.
Sigh...not even sure what I'm trying to say other than I'm not sure what the end goal of a capitalistic society is. We're technologizing ourselves out of jobs, always have been. What happens when robots are doing all the work, creating the music and art? Aside from the robotics engineers, who's collecting a salary?
you ever try picking up a NES cartridge from either?
Ebay: it will just be a third party version of the ROM flashed onto a hacked flash, (thus making it as illegal as the version you were getting online)
Bargain Store: You'll buy every copy in the city, only to find out that ONE of them works, but the flash has been written to so many times you can't save a game.
Altruism is selfless concern for the welfare of others. I guess they don't count the artists who made the content they are enjoying for free, or in the long run the sad truth that they are slowly destroying said content. Rather than promoting the fear of legalities for file sharing, perhaps we should promote the fact that by using art for free you are only aiding to the downfall and cheapening of such art. You can argue fair use and copyrights notions all you want, it doesn't matter, if someone isn't paid for making art you will see less of it and less quality of it, guaranteed. By file sharing you are fulfilling a want for art and not paying for it. It doesn't matter if the artist never would have sold a single copy, if you had not been able to get the free art you probably would have purchased art from somewhere else, thus promoting the market for such art, and the teaching, learning, and advancement of technologies in such art. Sure if everything was free art would still exist, but you are kidding yourself if you think it would be even close to the quantity and quality it is now. The problem is the effects of sharing and the destruction of art is benign on the small scale, but on a large scale is malignant. People can't relate to this and thus share.
Oh, it's not yet illegal to lend books? Well, wait a few years, and leave your silly altruism out of it, because you can't let that get in the way of profits.
In a strictly technical sense, of course you're correct. But I don't think most file-sharers mean what you think they mean, when they claim they "don't see what they're doing as illegal"?
It wasn't that long ago (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act didn't exist in the 90's, remember!), that copyright law made it pretty clear that an infringement wasn't even considered a criminal matter unless proof was there of an intent to gain financially from the infringement. (Not only that, but there was a minimum number of infringements of a given work that had to be proven, too. That means, even if Joe Blow burnt a CDR copy of a commercial software program he bought, and charged his friend a fee for his time and trouble to copy it for him as a favor? Nope... not a criminal infringement because he only made that 1 copy.)
I think a lot of us (myself included) think THAT law basically made sense. If someone is so bent out of shape that somebody else is passing around FREE copies of their work, or that someone copied a few things for a friend, or even a few good friends? Address the issue in civil court. File a lawsuit against them yourself to make them stop! Not worth your time and money for a lawyer, you say? Ah! Then it sure as hell isn't worth the TAXPAYERS' money either ... so quit asking federal govt. to do your bidding for you by making it a criminal offense!
That's exactly what the DMCA accomplished though, and that's why plenty of people think it's BAD legislation that isn't worth respecting or following.
"File-sharers aren't motivated by financial gain, but by altruism, according to an economist. Joe Cox, of the Portsmouth Business School, said those uploading content for others to share don't see what they're doing as illegal, meaning current tactics to deter piracy are doomed to fail. 'The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn't be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved.'"
There's a word for individuals who practice altruism with creative content. It's called open source and unlike the "altruism" practiced by copyright infringers, it's done with the permission and respect of all parties concerned. Truly the distinction between selfish and unselfish. The "I made that's" versus the "I copied that".
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Even that is about the money. If you are having a great time playing through the games of a decade ago, then you arn't going go be out buying the latest hit. This is the same reason games companies loathe the second-hand market, why fashion companies change their look on a regular basis and Microsoft is extremally annoyed that Windows XP just refuses to become obsolete. The old low-cost things still compete with the new and expensive.
Those old carts don't use flash, they use SRAM with a battery soldered onto the cart. They cease to work when the battery fails due to age. Repair is a simple matter for anyone who knows how to use a soldering iron.
It's not that money doesn't motivate them, they *know* there's not money in it to begin with. Thus, they have no money motive AND no money expectation.
It's a fine difference, but it goes a long way. It's the difference between a teacher knowingly being underpaid because of his/her passion for education (s/he isn't motivated by money, but still needs it) and someone who gives up his/her career, goes to a 3rd world country, and serves as a freelance 1-room school teacher to share his/her education (where there would be no *expectation* of money).
File-sharers (the massive portion of them), in fact, actually PAY to share (internet connection, hard drive space, blank media, etc.).
But those distinctions are entirely too honest to use in a politicized court of law.
Can anything ever be altuistic, under those definitions? If a person gives a substantial sum of money to a hospital, is it altuism, or just wanting to be admired? Even if the donation is anonymous, the donator still gets a reward for themselves in the smug feeling of moral superiority it brings.
The Pirate Bay case was about the Pirate Bay admins, who are not - in this context - file sharers but - possibly - do make money from running the site. File sharers are those who put files in their shared folders in p2p apps, keep their torrents seeding after downloading them, and so on.
1 - There are more artists with record contracts than any time in recorded history. The barrier to entry for artists with recording contracts is lower because the barrier to running a label or a studio is lower.
2 - The license itself is the bad thing. If copyright law were limited to five years, most artists and labels wouldn't notice much difference - most of the profits on any given recording are made within five years. Furthermore, not everyone is enamoured of the GNU license, and it is not an obvious-good that you seem to think it is. I've had to re-invent the wheel a few times because the GNU license for the sources I would have otherwise wnated to use simply would have added an inappropriate burden for a project that wasn't even going to make money; adhering to the GNU contamination was burden enough. It has its place, but not every license is a good license for every project. The "pay a bunch of middlemen 95% of the album's profits" isn't a good license, either.
3 - Now you're arguing against yourself. In your GNU-centric world, "you professionals" wouldn't be paid a lot for certain tasks. Also, artists aren't paid a lot right now, as media publishers have turned copyright from being a tool to protect the public domain by ensuring that a nation's culture is fully available to it, into a scheme which accomplishes the exact opposite - ensuring that a nation doesn't have access to its culture. US copyright law wasn't created to protect the wealthy at the expense of the public interest and up-and-coming artists of all stripe, but that's all it's for now.
While I do buy music, I tend to buy it at shows where it is common for artists to keep the majority of the profits. This isn't a perfect solution, as I'll be the first to admit, and as anyone who listens to artists who don't actively tour knows. As it stands, copyright law is morally bankrupt, so I don't see how morality applies to your decision to adhere to it or not.
People should be paid for their work, but some work is more valuable than others. What is most important to you with regards to your favorite artist? The artist, or the record label who promotes and "discovers" them? While the latter has some value, the portion of the profits that the record labels have historically received is way out of line with the value of the service. Today, a strong major label is less important than ever to the "gatekeeper" function that it traditionally performed. There are more ways to discover music, and an extremely segmented and niche-centric marketplace makes that function a lot more appropriate to music journalism (professional and amateur) than whether a bunch of people at a record label think it will sell a million copies.
Even the record labels know this, which is why they create or purchase smaller labels with a more focused sound. There's no such thing as a "Universal sound", a "Warner sound" or a "Sony sound". Their role as gatekeepers isn't a valuable one, or if you disagree with me about that, it's certainly a [i]less[/i] valuable one than it ever has been. What better reason to re-balance the profit equation more in favor of the artists!
I'm not a big fan of levies on DVDs and iPods and such that are then distributed to the labels. Mostly, because it keeps the entrenched system going an would stifle innovation even more than now. I just don't trust the major record labels to distribute the funds fairly.
I think going back to patronage as it was done before the 20th century is the way to go. Except that every consumer with disposable income could become a micro-patron. The internet makes it easy for musicians to put up a button on their site to facilitate micro-donations. The more popular the music the more money you make. Movies could also be financed up-front, although it's arguably more difficult.
Of course, we're not there yet. The recent Paypal debacle (cutting of Wikileaks) stresses the fact that private micro-payment services aren't yet trustworthy. They should be common carriers -- like the ISPs -- and only freeze assets upon an order issued by a court of the artist's country.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Leachers feel guilt for taking music without paying anything for it. Deep down they know that they are theifs. The file sharing society lies to leachers and tells them they can remove this guilt by seeding. "Your not a taker you give back to society with your data." Leachers become seeders and guilt is "removed" from the society. This is part of the reason some file sharers come off as so self righteous. This is not unique to file shares. The same effects occur in organized crime, Wall Street, and currupt goverments.
Not really. If they're being sold second hand then the publisher isn't getting any money for them. If the publisher isn't getting any money for the copies that are being legally sold then why shouldn't there be a free version available? I guess you could argue that it would devalue the copies that do exist but I'd say that's a pretty weak argument.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
They are motivated by a sense of ethics and pride. Prices for digital goods are no longer set by supply and demand, there is no negotiation process the digital "market economy". Prices are mainly driven by what Alvin Tofler identified as "power". The end user has to accept the price set by the seller or else. Companies must be profitable but who says they have to make billions of dollars in profits rather than hundreds of millions?
Just because no direct monetary gain is observed, does not mean the activity is altruistic. Those who share files gain in the form of *receiving* more shares from others, and perpetuating the mindset that sharing is okay. The way bit torrent is set up requires file hoarders to also be file sharers, does it not?
Altruism means being charitable. I don't think the word can apply here, because they are giving away something which is not theirs to give.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
GoG's selection is very, VERY small.
Not saying they aren't doing a good thing, but saying "Name One." and using GoG as a counterexample isn't really as airtight as you might think.
But, since you asked: Xwing Vs TIE Fighter
File sharers are motivated by free stuff and hoarding. It is not more complicated than that.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I see it as efficiency and growth. It is done for gain, but the "sales of units" kind that you appear to be thinking of is perhaps the least to be gained.
Traditional distribution channels are very expensive compared to the Internet. Costs a lot of money to stamp plastic disks, and package them with artwork, physical protection against handling, anti-theft devices, and copy protection too. And then there's more expense to ship, store, and display all this. And to track and manage physical inventory. And yet more to dispose of all the waste material. Used to be a running joke how AOL was filling our landfills with disks.
There's yet more cost with traditional distribution. Perhaps some users want to digitize the content, for entirely legit reasons. Scanning, OCR, the "analog hole", etc. are poor and costly seconds to having a perfect copy of a master. I expect that as the barriers fall, we'll see ever more creative uses, to the benefit of us all. Hard to guess what we may be missing out on. But a digital library is a start, and a huge one. No more being limited by the number of copies the library has, or stores being sold out thanks to initial runs being too limited, or hassling with book returns, late fees, and other relics of the physical.
Why should we bear all these totally unnecessary costs, and put up with being denied the myriad benefits ranging from the obvious and immediate to the growth and flowering of our potential? Not for the sake of a broken business model! I envision the return of artistic endeavor to the public. Thanks to technology, artists can succeed without the big organizations. Consider Susan Boyle. It was the Internet that enabled the world to learn about her, faster than any of the traditional media could have managed, and despite any gatekeeping they might have wished to exercise. It's opened a lot of doors, which the entrenched interests have been fighting against for decades. Down with the cultural gatekeepers!
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I think what it really comes down to is now much you spend when you fill up your available space. Maybe its a computer (2 TB hard drive is not uncommon to see in a new computer today) or iPod (64 GB music player lets say). 2 TB can hold with system files around 2500 720MB riped movies which costs $57,000 @ $20 a piece. (roughly). For Music its 13,000 songs for $1 a piece for a total of $13,000. To the rich these numbers mean nothing. But to someone who took 7 months to get a $300 iPod it means something. (For those of you know dont know this is the middle class) So what is the solution to this problem? Netflix. Cheap and unlimited. Excellent for the middle class for movies. There are multiple music services that people can obtain cheap to listen to good legal music. But what is this? Comcast wants to block services you pay for like Netflix if you stream. Whats next? Snail mail will block netflix because it takes up too much space in the mail trucks? Now whats left?.......hmmm.....OH YEAH an over pirced movie ticket. Or an over price blu-ray with "digital copy" for $30. Its like you pay for two movies! Isnt it GREAT! You can watch it at work while you get fired for watching movies on your 3 inch screen while you are not typeing on your keyboard doing usless work. Well thats not good because humans benefit from doing hours of mindless work. So now what!?! You have no money for any entertainment. Think hard. Ah-HA! Leach off your parents network and watch movies for free using file sharing! See that was not so hard was it.
"Such societies tend to develop when there's almost no scarcity, but there is a little bit, so someone needs to go out and collect the stuff for people, and they get prestige for doing that and giving it away. But there's not enough scarcity to actually build a 'market' around that."
This reminds me of the economic liberal thought that one should take wealth and redistribute it. Trouble is, at present there isn't any unclaimed "wealth" left to go forth and collect, so they wind up stealing physical wealth (as taxes) from others.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
From TFA...For the leechers, pretty obviously, the major motivation was financial. They wanted to acquire music or films without paying for it because it was cheaper than going out to buy it.
Probably true for some..but not all.
Other reasons to download
No DRM
Legal copy out of "print" or otherwise unavailable in your country
In this new age of information, exact data duplication and instant worldwide distribution is easy, cheap and commonplace.
Our old laws do not coincide with the capabilities of today.
Think of it this way: I am a programmer, I work on open-source software. I get paid to do so. I only get paid when I do work. I have also worked on closed-source applications, I also only got paid for the work I did on those products.
I don't get paid when I sit on my ass and let people copy the past work I have done. I place adverts on my documentation & distribution sites to recoup the costs of hosting the data -- I get paid when the work of serving the data takes place, and I must pay to have machines online that make my data available.
I don't get paid when duplicates are created using other people's hardware. I do get paid for my work when I assist other people in the use of software with their hardware.
A janitor does not get paid when they are not cleaning. A football player does not get paid if their contract expires and they no longer play football. A barber does not get paid when they are not cutting hair. A construction worker does not get paid when they are not building. A police officer does not get paid when they are not on duty.
Artists should, and do get paid when they work. When a painter paints a painting they can sell the original. When an author pens a book or script, they can sell it to a publisher (many times they are paid in advance). When a musician plays for an audience or recording studio they are doing work, they get paid.
When a publisher is mass producing a book of paintings, a novel, or an album of songs the artist is not working, they get paid a small fraction of what the publisher makes, if anything at all. An artist may help production via book-signings, appearing at sales events or displaying their art in exhibitions; This is work for which they should and do get paid.
In the age of information "publishing" is so cheap, easy, and commonplace that anyone can do it, and basic economic principals are observed: No matter the demand, as supply approaches infinity cost tends toward zero.
Economics are no different today than before the information age. The only thing that has changed is that we all have our own affordable data duplication machines. This has brought the cost of copies down to nearly nil.
How many times were these words copied between routers before you saw them? All Internet traffic, even iTunes data, is copied many times before it reaches the destination. The old copy laws simply can not be upheld -- Are all the router operators between the Amazon MP3 server and my PC subject to their EULA or even copyright law?
If cheap & reliable robotic janitors become commonplace, janitors have less work to do, and the janitorial industry changes appropriately. Automobile assembly line workers have already been through this transition.
Bottom line: Eventually artists & authors will only get paid when they do work, just like anyone else. They will not be able to capitalize on money generated by distribution of copies of their prior work.. Copies are infinitely available, and therefore worth nil.
Since cheap & reliable data copiers have become commonplace, the copy-business must be reformed. No matter how much the copy industry resists the change, they can't fight economics and technology forever. The media industry must, and will change to accommodate the new age; Payment models will be reformed.
We live at the cusp of the new age, the stresses we feel are expected.
File sharing is a way to freely distribute content. That is not illegal. What is illegal is distributed copyrighted material.
If file sharing is equated to piracy, then this has a direct consequence on the freedom of information: any information shared electronically in the form of files (i.e. all free content out there) would be subject to strict control.
The article clearly states that they don't see what they are doing as immoral, not that they don't see what they are doing as illegal. They are altruists, not just stupid. This is a pretty important distinction. If they didn't think they were doing something illegal, that's a whole different story.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I dont own one of these fancy modern television set or dvd players and i am too lazy to go outside. So i sit here and wish it was possible to buy moving pictures without leaving my too comfortable chair. There is a legend that this is possible to buy in the lands far away from here, but the path to the digital shoppe is guarded by a sign saying "Not available in your country".
Exactly. If I couldn't RIP my DVDs I wouldn't buy or watch any. In a time where we have 1TB hard disks for 50$ they are really expecting me to stand up to my shelf, search a DVD, insert the DVD to a DVD player, go through the menu to watch a movie? I just open my Videos folder with more then 100 movies, look through the RIPs and select a movie which I like to watch. I didn't even bother to convert the DVD RIP to a AVI file anymore.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
So you've added a third group of people the government must serve, and whose interests compete with those of the file sharers and the RIAA, as well. Thanks for underscoring my point.
Or were you disagreeing?
...because they are giving away something which is not theirs to give.
They give Time.
Movies need to be ripped and transcoded. Books need to be scanned for OCR (and proofread afterwards). TV episodes need to be DVR'd, and later gathered together into seasons. Sheet music needs to be played and recorded. Games need NoCD cracks.
I believe your analogy is flawed however, and you touch on those reasons a bit in your closing argument.
When a master chef prepares a meal or a master hairdresser cuts your hair, what you are purchasing is their services. Recipes and pictures of hair styles don't matter because it takes a skill that limited individuals possess to reproduce their work. If we view recipes as the music produced, it would be more a situation where the song and chords are known to the public, and you have dozens of bands popping up to do covers of the work. For software, it would be more that the concepts and theories are known and various clones are produced by smaller software shops (in video games for example, think of all those bad RTS clones that try to mimic Starcraft or Warcraft). These individuals can use the "recipes" or "pictures" to reproduce it, but they can't create something identical to what the masters produced. However, those individuals may take those chord progressions, those game examples, and evolve it into something new to advance the field.
However, file-sharing is different because technology has created what you referred to as the "autocooks" and enabled us to create perfect or near perfect reproductions of the final product. We're not replicating the recipes here, we are replicating the actual food itself. The master chef is driven out of business because people no longer have to go into his restaurant to taste his skill, they can simply go get an exact replica. The same goes with the hair stylist. Now those individuals can theoretically survive by simply innovating and producing faster than the autocooks and autohairdressers can replicate their craft or by making their services available to the small fraction who's still willing to pay at exorbitant markups to make up for loss of quantity, but for most, it becomes near impossible to keep up with that game in a sustained manner. That's the challenge that filesharing brings, and that is what copyright is supposed to protect against.
There are plenty of reasons that the current system is flawed with various third parties that exploit the artists and craftsmen, and there's plenty of room for new paradigms to replace the existing copyright and trademark system. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a successful alternative system executed that would maintain the scale of industry that we want and that the mainstream population is ready to accept.
Bargain bin != second hand (at least not to me). Supermarkets have bargain bins. Places like Woolworths have bargain bins. Shops like Game used to have bargain shelves (all the white label stuff) until they decided overpriced console bling was the way to go. Second-hand games are different.
So you're comparing donation of large sums of money to organisations that actively improve the lives of people to the act of leaving a file in your BitTorrent share because you have the bandwidth and want to get more stuff in future? That's somewhat of a stretch, IMO.
Agreed.. the only pain for me is sometimes TV series DVDs, as they tend to do weird things with their file structure and it's hard to tell the episode info without watching a portion of each show on each disc... I've been doing some rips to .ISO, but that has the same disadvantages as the original. But it's an interim step as I will eventually rip just the episodes without extras.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
If a man feels he shouldn't have to pay for movies, a man not only has the right to download Toy Story 3, he is obligated to do so.
Yup, definitely what Jefferson had in mind there.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
(maybe creativity thrives even more when protected?)
Trite, but true -- Necessity is the mother of all invention.
So I would argue that protection is not conducive to creativity, and instead very likely has the effect of inhibiting creativity by removing most motivation to do the work to implement creative ideas.
Just my 2p.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Yes, altruism, but not "sticking it to the man." I can give you something that cost nobody anything and do? That's altruism.
Those downloading are "sticking it to the man", but downloading is legal, and if it weren't it would be impossible to catch. The uploaders are the altruists.
Free Martian Whores!
The exact style and content of his music is largely irrelevant.
I beg to differ!
Jonathan Coulton writes lyrics targeted to a technologically savvy audience, and distributes online, exactly where his target market is available. He has the perfect storm of content distribution and audience demographic.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
It's a difference of scale. One is vastly bigger than the other, but that does not make them different.
That'll be $5, please.
Personally, I think music artists should only get paid by doing concerts.
Digital copies of their music should be distributed far and wide, for free, as advertising for the live shows. Radio plays music for free over the air. The difference between radio and file sharing is only separated by convenience. It is much more convenient to get the specific song you want, when you want it, then to wait for it to play on the radio.
I would be willing to pay a convenience fee to whatever services is streaming and/or storing the music, but the copy of the music, in and of itself, should not have any value. Once something can be copied with zero effort, it is foolish to rely on that copy as your source of revenue. The same should apply for movies. Make the content available through reasonably priced, convenient channels (netflix, hulu, etc.. ) and I'll gladly pay a convenience fee. But the copy of the movie should not have any inherent worth.
Movie theaters with full meals, nicer chairs, and beer, do very well here in Portland. http://www.mcmenamins.com/
They don't play the latest movies though. I'm assuming it is too costly to have the latest blockbuster. They wait a while, then show it. Movie studios shooting themselves in the foot again.
Make going to the movies an experience again (pub theaters, kid theaters with play areas, etc..) and rely on that showing (concert) to make your money.
Except that the law is not unjust. The extent and the penalties are.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
In addition to technical resources, time spent collecting and assembling the stuff into easily and usefully distributable form, and telling people about it.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
One has an obvious improving effect on the lives of people, the other is an optional extra that people like to have but which can be supplemented with alternatives (including versions that are legitimately acquired). I'll let you decide which is the hospital and which is the BitTorrented content.
It's like saying donating a banquet to 1000+ homeless people for a month is the same as not finishing all of your meal in a restaurant - there's some similarities in terms of food and availability, but one has a huge and important benefit, the other is related but not important in the grand scheme of things.
Sigh...not even sure what I'm trying to say other than I'm not sure what the end goal of a capitalistic society is.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "capitalistic", because different people mean different things, but here's one take.
One meaning of "capitalism" might be equivalently named "Economic rationalism"; that is, the meta-policy of doing what makes sense under the assumption that the theories of economics are an reasonably accurate model of the world.
That includes free markets as they optimize [consumer surplus + producer surplus]. It also includes regulation to internalize externalities, and to limit the deadweight losses of monopoly and with [mono=oligo and/or poly=psony], and deadweight losses (inefficiencies) of cartels. There are arguments to be made that economic rationalism includes copyrights ("the incentive to produce is not big enough without"), and there are arguments against ("the first-mover advantage is incentive enough").
In my view, it also includes some results of behavioral economics. People are generally risk-averse, let's take that into account when shaping society. The utility of money seems to be sub-linear, which seems to favor redistributing wealth until everyone is equal. There might be arguments based on negative incentive effects against that, though.
Now, the purpose or end-goal of this?
Well, the set of values one might pick up from an economics textbook is "don't impoverish people", i.e. make the sum of all wealth and happiness* across people as large as it can go; favor the policies that enhance rather than diminish wealth and well-being.
(* economics tends to favor the measurable, in particular wealth. In that sense, it's the guy looking for his keys under the lamp rather than where he dropped them, because of the favorable lighting conditions.)
So, in that interpretation, the goal of capitalism doesn't exist; it has no goal. It is the tool by which we achieve the social goal of making as many people as happy as can be.
(Now, whether it exists anywhere and whether it works are two different questions...)
I've never taken an economics course, but from what you wrote there it seems that what we are currently doing isn't so much capitalism as...umm...feudalism? The wealth is certainly not trying to be spread, at least not by the wealthy. There seem to be enough of them that they can have it exchange hands amongst themselves without worrying too much about how the rest of us work out. They benefit from the non-wealthy through quantity not quality of our expenditures. If less of us are spending, it does affect them.
Anyway, interesting post. :-)