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Swedish File-Sharers File For Religious Status
nloop writes "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden. Although this status has been denied once in the past the struggle for religious freedom from persecution continues. Aside from deeming CTRL+C CTRL+V as sacred symbols other beliefs include the flow of information being ethically right and closed source software being 'akin to slavery.'"
All who follow the mighty Jobs know that the only proper religious symbols are cmd-c, cmd-v
Look I get that companies providing content (or more accurately, managing content distribution) are acting like thugs. I even agree that individual copyright violations for personal use aren't that big a deal. But are we going to go so far as to support something this ridiculous? To read summaries like this you get the sense there isn't any value to intellectual property at all. If content producers know that anything they produce is "up for grabs", what incentive do they have to keep producing? Why is the idea of purchasing intellectual property of any sort, from software to movies, "akin to slavery"? Its economic privilege to assume they can just do it "as a hobby" or "contribute to open source". Open source has a place, but so does closed source. Fighting back against individual prosecutions is worthwhile and laudable. Framing those who wish to produce intellectual property and then charge for it as "slavers" is dishonest and counterproductive.
This is not the way to get the ethos behind file-sharing taken seriously. It's counter-productive and childish.
Wait, how is desiring to collect more entertainment than could ever be consumed in a human lifetime without compensating the creators not a form of personal greed?
Don't miss out on Member of European Parliament Christian Engström's suggestion for a religious version of the Beginning for this religion.
Short version:
1. There was chaos and soup.
2. Somebody in the soup learned to copy. Thus was Life.
3. Having learned to copy, they built magnificent things.
4. We honor the beginning by copying and building magnificent things.
Not bad, I think.
So what you're trying to tell us is that it already has a lot in common with a vast array of existing religions?
do you see the irony of requiring compensation on something that will not be ever used on a lifetime, and the same thing also being reproduceable/copiable faster than the original author can say 'copyright' ?
Read radical news here
So most of the western world is pretty fucked then
Yes, pretty much.
Circumcision is child abuse.
They seem as whacked out as any of the religious freaks out there...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
You refer to this question:
I guarantee it has been answered in the past ten years. You have just not been paying attention. But I will answer it again.
Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.
If my copy of it prevented you from having a copy of it, then grabbing up more than I need would be greed. Since that isn't the case, the word greed does not apply.
There you go, answered. You might disagree (and you would be wrong) but you can no longer claim that it hasn't been answered.
you don't get pagerank from slashdot, dickhole
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.
Movies aren't like oxygen. If people don't pay to watch them the businesses that make movies will do something else instead. Talking about the costs of making a copy (zero) and neglecting the cost of making the original movie (hundreds of millions of dollars) completely misses the point that the reason people are willing to invest money in making movies is because they expect to get that money back and more from selling the right to see it. If everyone pirated it rather than paying to see it there would be no reason to invest money in making future movies. Thus movies would not get made.
So the people that pirate are reducing the chance of future movies from being made by reducing the profits on the ones that exist. They are a bit like customers that go to a restaurant and eat their fill but don't pay - in the long run they will force the restaurant out of business. That could easily be described as greedy by other non free loading patrons. Not to mention by the owner.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You are free to believe in copying and preach about it all you want, but if you break the law, you will still get cuffed and jailed.
A cult may believe in human sacrifice or slavery or under-aged marriage or the execution of homosexuals. Thank god (or gov to be more accurate) it has never given them the right to do it.
Two points:
1) movies are not necessary for life, nor are they naturally-occurring phenomena in nature;
2) Greed has to do with an outsize desire for something; It doesn't require that you wanting (or taking) lots of it create a scarcity for someone else;
If you desire vast quantities of something which requires time, effort, and investment by other people to create, then yes, that is greed. The cost of duplication is a fractional amount of the value of the time and effort that went into creating it. And it's probably one of the smaller fractions, once you break it all down, and greed is marked by an intense desire to possess something, not by whether or not that something is scarce.
In your scenario they are depriving the restaurant of a physical object, copying data deprives no one of anything. If they could print out any amount of meals for the cost of running a computer yet did not lower prices (substantially), that could easily be described as greedy.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. - Einstein
Something being part of your religion does not necessarily make it not illegal. In the USA, the standard used would be the Lemon test. If file sharing was criminal-illegal (rather than civil law illegal) and the 'church' challenged this on first amendment grounds, the state would need to show:
1 the law had a secular legislative purpose
2 the law's primary effect is not to advance or inhibit religion
3 the must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion
An anti file sharing law would have no trouble passing these tests.
Of course, this is all in Sweden, so different laws/precedent will apply.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
How about said authors do the right thing: Just /stop/. If you're not making money off of it, and you need said money, stop making things! Maby we'll end up with /less/ crappy movies and formula fiction. The only thing that would be left is A, things that were done for free /just because/, and B, stuff that relies on other buisness models(Like advertising - you don't pay to watch it). You might even see crowdsourced stuff: Pay upfront and everyone gets it. /lot/ less corporate parasitism.
Sure, you wouldn't have many 100m+ budget movies... but do you need it? People will figure out ways to do things cheaper, and you'd have a
I suspect we'd see a lot less crap, an overall reduction in total volume, and a better signal-to-noise ratio. And that's a good thing.
Wait, how is desiring to collect more entertainment than could ever be consumed in a human lifetime without compensating the creators not a form of personal greed?
You've seriously never had a single answer to this in ten years?
It's not greed based for an archivist, a genre-fan, a generous person, anyone annoyed at the concept of missing Shakespeare plays, people who want different files but who want to help seed for others, people studying a subject or era, someone collecting media for a group trip, anyone making a time capsule,...
In a digital world where having more is having more chances to share, having more is good, not greedy. No hoarding or denying of access is involved.
No it is not. For the same reason you don't shoot shoplifters.
Emotions! In your brain!
Sweden is. As in, you may laugh about it.
Emotions! In your brain!
So, in your view, musicians, authors, software developers, movie and TV creators are just like trees - who neither desire payment, nor have a need to buy food or shelter?
No, but if you keep making up enough lies, maybe some day you'll get one right, even if only by accident.
Out of curiosity, what do you do, and what do you think of people who think you shouldn't be paid for doing it?
I'm not some idiot "creator" who creates things no one wants then complains no one buys it. I am an "employee." That's where I show up when they tell me to and they send me money. "Creators" who want that also get to do that. It's called a "job." Or just create works that are commissioned.
Why do artists want to get paid forever for something they did once long long ago? And you call us freeloaders? We work for a living.
Learn to love Alaska
The way Hollywood's been remaking Scandinavian and Swedish films you could argue they're just taking back what's theirs :-)
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
copying data deprives no one of anything
What about the person/group/corporation that originally created the data? Do you think it costs no money or time to make a movie? Do they just push a button and the Automatic Movie Generator Machine System spits one out? Well that machine cost them money, too. And what about the people who built that machine. That took years of R&D.
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something. Sure, you're copying data rather than taking it, but that's why there's something called "licensing". It costs money to produce entertainment media and licensing is how you recoup your investment.
(Does this mean I agree with how the **AA are handling things? No. They're a bunch of assholes that need to be shot. But that doesn't mean piracy isn't depriving them of money. And that doesn't make Kopimism or whateverthefuck any less stupid.)
he reason people are willing to invest money in making movies is because they expect to get that money back and more from selling the right to see it
They don't make money and haven't for the longest time yet they still keep making movies so obviously they aren't doing it to make money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
People still want films that haven't been made yet. So, in a world where you can't get people to pay for something after it's been made, pay will occur, mostly, before, rather than after production - which is how it used to be with music and theater.
Think "Kickstarter" was known producers and directors: if enough fans want something, they pay five or ten dollars and it goes into an escrow account until the film is made. If it stinks, the reputation-capital of the people involved drops and they have trouble getting funded for their next project.
This restores things like music and film making to what they should be: a service. Otherwise, the film industry is a textbook case of what is called "rent-seeking behavior."
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something.
Oh please, not this one again.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars? Had I offered you 0.1 * n dollars you would've spit in my face...
What if I copy your movie as an alternative to not watching it at all?
These are both perfectly reasonable and likely situations.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
So not only can the pirates watch movies for free, but they also reduce the chances a multi-billion dollars CGI piece of crap will be released in the future ? Sounds like a win-win to me.
What if I copy your movie as an alternative to not watching it at all?
Then don't watch it. The movie studios don't make money from you watching their movie, they make money from you BUYING their movie.
The Swedish government collects taxes and then gives them to various religious. If I recall correctly you can opt out, but the government then just keeps the money anyway. So creating a religion which supports your views may not be such a crazy thing after all. If it lampoons the established religions which at the end of the day are no more sensible so much the better.
You are not recalling correctly. Swedish citizens automatically become members of the Swedish Church at birth. As a member of that church, one pays a specific tax that goes directly to the Swedish church, not any other religious foundation. It is perfectly possible to opt out of being a member of the Swedish Church and then one does not pay any such tax anymore.
Well, to be honest, neither are you =) Since the separation of the Swedish church and the Swedish state in 2000, children do not automatically become members of the Swedish church (unless both parents are members or something like that, IIRC).
What GP could have gotten mixed up is the compulsory leftover of the old church tax even if you opt out: the funeral fee or begravningsavgiften, which is about 0.07%. That tax pays for your funeral and makes sure there is somewhere to put your grave when your time comes (without any christian bling-bling if you are not a church member, of course).
.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars?
Yes you have. You (as an average person) might have bought the movie at a later point in time when you did have n dollars.
Statistically, some people will actually save up money in order to buy the movie so, statistically, you ARE depriving them of money. Not n dollars but rather n * chance_of_somebody_saving_up_money_and_buying_it_later dollars.
Now it could be that you as an individual simply don't want to save up money in order to buy something. But if that is the case, then we're discussing moral values, not economics.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yes you have. You (as an average person) might have bought the movie at a later point in time when you did have n dollars.
No, as you yourself wrote, I MIGHT end up buying the movie later on. This is an uncertainty and neither you nor I can say how likely it is that this person would later have purchased the movie.
And while you try to twist it into "it's all about economics" the truth is that morality is also a part of this, if I feel a movie isn't worth my money but I have a choice between pirating that movie and watching paint dry I may still choose to pirate and watch the movie. You may consider this inherently wrong but I just don't see it.
There's also the fact that it may not be a "want" but a "can" in the saving money department. That is to say, a person with a very low income may very well choose to pirate a movie rather than going without (and please, if you come back with a reply about how this person should clearly get a second job rather than waste his/her time watching movies then may I suggest you kill yourself and spare the world of your cynical asshattery? (Yes, I've heard that "counter-argument" way too many times to count)).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The main failure of the Western world is believing that you're not engaged in abuse of your fellow man just because you outsource poor treatment of workers which you would find unacceptable (and illegal) in your own country.
If WTO wanted to live up to its ostensible aims, it would equalise the playing field across countries by requiring broadly equal worker treatment across countries engaged in free trade. In fact, all it has produced is a careful concoction of newspeak and slave management.
I'd still rather have this than Scientology.
Scientology wants all your money. Kopimism wants you to keep it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something.
Oh please, not this one again.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars? Had I offered you 0.1 * n dollars you would've spit in my face...
What if I copy your movie as an alternative to not watching it at all?
These are both perfectly reasonable and likely situations.
Not THIS argument again. People downloading movies aren't too poor to pay to watch them. They're just too cheap to pay to watch them. If something costs n dollars, and you have n*0.1 dollars, either wait until it costs less or you've saved more. It's easy to say "I wouldn't have bought it anyway," when you plan from the start to download it rather than buying it.
You folks always talk about the cost of producing movies/books/music, as if it were of any relevance to the debate. The cost of producing anything is an economic risk that lies squarely with the producer. Whether you are recording an album or manufacturing a car is irrelevant. What we should be talking about is the value of things. People pay significant premiums to have an Adidas logo on their running pants or a BMW sign on their car. The retail prices of both the pants and the car have very little to do with the cost of producing either but everything to do with how much people are willing to pay for having them, ie.: their value.
Apparently the perception of media's value has changed over the last decades. Where the producers - or more to the point: the distributors - see the value stable or even going up, the consumers see it going down. Way down. Films, music, books have become a commodity. IMDb gives 4,579 films released in 1970 and 20,578 in 2010. Those numbers may not be completely representative but they do get the point across: There is so much media competing with each other that the value of individual works has decreased. Add to that the vastly reduced cost of reproduction and you end up with a product which is seen as almost worthless by its supposed consumers.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
The above is actually a much more important point than it seems. According to this guy (about 9 mibutes in) the Copenhagen summit consensus panel estimated that loosening of trade barriers and subsidies in the US and EU would result in pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in only 2-3 years and result in massive gains for the world economy. This would result also in wages going up in third world countries, making outsourcing less profitable and in turn putting money in the pockets of workers in the first world countries. The reason this isn't done is because it is more profitable for the corporations operating in those countries to have this poverty. To bring this train of thought back on topic, economically, sharing and globalism have an end result of making everyone better off. The question with copyright law as with free/fair trade is corporate profits vs social gains. Now choose.
Yesterday, I downloaded and watched a national geographic show on "ape genius." It was primarily focused on the chimpanzee but also made comparative mention of the bonobo and human toddlers and a few other apes as well.
What it was showing was that there are many, many things that the apes have in common with humans but then asked the question (the real topic of the video) "what is the thing that let us explode intellectually while the other apes did not?" They can learn and do all sorts of things so why not?
Turns out, they lack an instinct for teaching and learning. We have that, and they do not. And teaching and learning is all about sharing -- information sharing. Without it, we would be at the same level as the other apes.
So what are the copyright people doing? Putting a price and making it a crime to exercise our very instincts -- instincts which pre-date modern humanity.
"So the people that pirate are reducing the chance of future movies from being made by reducing the profits on the ones that exist."
I can live with Tom Cruise only getting 50,000$ per movie.
You missed the point of his question. The greed is not the collecting, but rather the lack of compensating the creators. It requires effort to produce ideas and why should taking risks to create ideas not be rewarded. While I don't agree with much of how copyright is currently enforced, it is substantially important to reward those who create and is greedy to expect them to work for nothing by simply consuming what they make without providing some compensation for it.
AJ Henderson
If the only thing that prevents the collapse of the Western World is protection of intellectual property, then be sure to have a good bug-out location.
Maybe I'm just too jaded, but relying on intellectual property that can be copied digitally, perfectly within a few seconds is probably not the most sustainable basis for an economy.
When all you have is something that can be multiplied a millionfold within a few hours, you're hosed. Sorry to break it to you, but it's true.
Of course we can make laws and enforce them, but unlike physical crimes like theft and murder, it is no real harm done, but all hypothetical musings on "potential lost sales". And it is nothing but statistics and vague guesswork. I think many people have bought real, genuine Bluray-discs of movies they already possessed pirated copies of. Actual loss of sale = 0, probably even better, since they may not ever heard of that movie before. And I think many people have seen pirated copies of movies they would have never spent a single dime on and regretted every minute of time wasted for it. Actual loss of sale = 0 as well.
You cannot make reliable assumptions on potential sales lost. Therefore, you cannot judge about a fair punishment on it. Something that cannot be punished fairly cannot not be punished without hurting tangible, actual rights. If the business model of the Western world relies on that, I'd sell my stock in them, fast.
because the way copyright is being massively, willfully infringed is a violation of the social contract.
No, thats just how the world works and always has been working. Before the Internet people would lend books to friends, record stuff from TV or radio and so on. Copying and lending stuff has always been done without the copyright holder consent, it wasn't even illegal most countries. The thing that changed with the Internet is that you can now lend your stuff to the whole world at once. Its not the behaver of sharing that has changed, but the underlying technology that makes it a lot easier.
And while the enforcing is troublesome, the underlying and biggest problem is simply the timescale of copyright, copyright that last longer then a human lifetime means that you essentially no longer have a public domain of culturally relevant stuff. And that is a big issue for society, as cultural goods essentially become controlled by a few big cooperations.
I just have a hard time having sympathy for people who take the position that their greed is somehow morally correct.
Greed implies ownership and possession, keeping things for oneself. Sharing things with the world is as far away from greed as you can get.
Depends what you're outsourcing.
Software development can be cheaper but often isn't.
Sewing cheap clothes is clearly significantly cheaper.
Many manufacturing activities are a lot cheaper.
Is it unfair? Yes, I get to buy a t-shirt for around ten minutes wages, and the shop I bought it from gets a 40% markup on it too. Meanwhile the person making it can't afford a computer..