The Case For Piracy

An anonymous reader writes "A mainstream media outlet has published an article called 'The Case for Piracy. The writer shows how copyright has been hijacked by corporations and that publishers are their own worst enemies. 'One of the main reasons we all have anti-piracy slogans embedded in our brains is because the music industry chose to try and protect its existing market and revenue streams at all costs and marginalise and vilify those who didn't want to conform to the harsh new rules being set.' There's a lot in the article that Slashdot readers can relate to, and it's interesting that so many replies seem to agree with the author."

Comments

Change cannot be stopped

[paulsnx2]

The fundamental problem Strong Copyright has with piracy is that technology is going to *continue* to advance. This will make copying even easier in the future than it is now. Encryption and Peer to Peer networks are going to increase in power, and will be easier to use.

The only way to maintain Strong Copyright is through government force. Increasingly it isn't about stopping people from doing "bad things" like "stealing" content. Instead it becomes a Government managed and controlled system for collecting income for a few favored parties.

Strong Copyright is about protecting the public. It is about protecting the few at the top that can rake in the dough.

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[paulsnx2]

"Strong Copyright is *not* about protecting the public"

sheesh.... No matter how hard I try to proof read, I still screw up! We need to be able to edit our own posts Slashdot!

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[Moryath]

The secondary problem with "strong copyright" is that copyright has become disconnected from the lifetime of the medium on which the performance/art/work is rendered.

Copyright is what now, 95 years for "work for hire" and life-of-author-plus-70 for independent? Compare that to the sales lifetime (or even TWICE the sales lifetime) of a standard video game console - a "decade lifetime" is pushing it. Atari 2600's and original NES units are considered antiques. Good luck even FINDING a working Vectrex.

Hell, even for non-gaming - a while back Slashdot had a story about a guy who built a homebrew Cray-1 replica. His biggest problem? FINDING SOFTWARE TO TEST IT WITH. Nobody kept the discs around, and the few discs that are even findable today have succumbed to bit-rot.

From that article:
After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted the Computer History Musuem and they didn’t have any either. They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90s. I filed a couple of FOIA requests with scary government agencies that also came up dry. I wound up e-mailing back and forth with a bunch of former Cray employees and also came up *mostly* dry. My current best hope is a guy I was able to track down that happened to own an 80 MB ‘disk pack’ from a Cray-1 Maintenance Control Unit (the Cray-1 was so complicated, it required a dedicated mini-computer just to boot it!), although it still remains to be seen if I’ll actually get a chance to try to recover it.

Under current "copyright", his asking for software copies is technically a violation of copyright.

"Copyright" has ceased to be what it originally was. The promise of copyright is that the protected creation is protected for a limited time, WHENCE IT SHALL ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND BE AVAILABLE. Increasingly, copyright has instead become a fucking scam to promote forced obsolescence and premature death-of-product and prevent even historians from preserving the work for posterity.

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[blahplusplus]

Strong Copyright is NOT about protecting the public. It is about protecting the few at the top that can rake in the dough.

No doubt about this, the truth is the public can't defend itself the money power because only a small portion of the population even understands the issues correctly to make any kind of sound decision regarding policy.

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[paulsnx2]

Copyright extends 70 years after the Content Producer is dead and buried. If more than half the term is after they are dead, how is that an incentive for the producers of works of art to keep producing?

Have you bought a new Cash album lately? Watched a new Hope movie? A new Carry Grant film?

How about a new hit from the folks that brought you "Happy Birthday?" (I would have used their name, but we don't really know who wrote it, but Time Warner Music still gets 2 Million a year off its copyright anyway).

I think there would be more incentive to produce if Content Providers had to compete with a larger body of free work. Their stuff would have to be better to sell, but hey! They could actually use "Happy Birthday" in their movie without paying Time Warner Music (That Great Content Producer!) 10 grand for the right to use a song written in the late 1800's.

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[AngryDeuce]

It is about protecting the public by keeping an incentive for the produces of works of art, to keep producing. That incentive is financial compensation.

Funny, art was created for thousands of years before it was turned into a commodity. The common theme of "no one will create if they don't receive compensation for it!" is simply not true: Look at all the free software that is all over the web. Look at all the self-produced music all over Youtube. Look at all the self-produced artwork on DeviantArt. Look at all the self-produced novels being printed via Amazon.

What we're seeing today is a bunch of huge corporations that wrested control of artistic works they didn't in themselves create and attempt to hold on to the rights to it forever, long after the death (and often against the wishes of) the person that actually created it. Piracy is helping destroy their monopoly on content dispersal through mainstreaming other methods of distribution.

So yes, while we can all shed a tear for the millions of Metallica songs that were stolen via Napster (I guess), I think we're missing the greater benefits to society as a whole that came out of it. Not so good for Big Media, and not so good for the lucky few content creators they allow to become wealthy in order to attract more content creators they can suck up into the machine, but good for consumers.

We've been making art since we first started scratching designs into rocks and painting on cave walls...and I am quite sure that the concept of paying for said art came much, much later.

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[paulsnx2]

No, the length of copyright is an incentive for the investors (I would say publishers/labels/studios/etc. ) to take ownership of the copyrights, and deny the creators compensation at all.

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[green1]

Why doesn't anyone dispute short term protection?

For that vast majority of human history there was no such thing as copyright, or trademark, or patent, and the world did just fine.

When Shakespeare wrote his plays you were free to watch a play, and then get your troupe of actors together and reproduce it exactly in another theatre with no legal ramifications.
When Beethoven wrote his symphonies you could copy the sheet music and have your own orchestra play it.
Think of all the art in any form that existed back then. Think of the inventions that happened despite a lack of any protections.

Why shouldn't we dispute the whole concept of protection for imaginary property? Nobody has ever provided any proof that it provides a net societal benefit, but much damage to society is obvious in it's enforcement.

Re:Change cannot be stopped

[Opportunist]

There is nothing the public could possibly have to gain from strong copyright. Balanced copyright I can see, but once the balance has been tipped towards "stronger", the public is the loser.

A balanced copyright allows creators to actually create and live off their creation. Which is not only ok, it's pretty much mandatory in our time and age where (aside of music) most content is a matter of investment. Computer programs and movies are a matter of spending a lot of dough in their creation. If that money cannot be recovered, they will not be produced. Don't quote me the "love for art" or similar things. They will produce a few Blair Witch Projects and Worlds of Goo, or other low budget movies and games, but as we all know the majority of good, quality movies and games comes from a lot of people spending a lot of time doing a lot of work they don't really do for the "love of it". For the "love of it", you'll get what the programmer or the movie director wants to do. Which is surprisingly rarely what the customer actually wants to see or play.

But copyright went overboard, we're at the point where it's no longer just to recover the money spent. Copyright is about control today, more than ever before. How many movies, how many games are simply gone because whoever created them doesn't want to sell them to you? How many ideas, characters and plots cannot be brought back to life because those that had an idea to use them are not allowed to use them, and who may doesn't want to for whatever reason?

This is where copyright failed, and where it hurts the public. Balanced copyright means more content. Stronger copyright leads to less in the long run.

To be fair

[Baloroth]

Copyright is good. Linux uses it, news sources use it, our society practically requires it to function properly. Good copyright, that is, copyright that promotes the progress of science and the useful arts. Not the life+70 (or whatever the hell it is now, I can't even keep track) bullshit we have now. That? That hinders science and progress and promotes stagnation. That's all that does. Piracy? Well, it's a counter-active force to a broken system, which is itself broken conceptually. It is a practical, if unfortunate, necessity.

To all media companies out there: give us what we want (not broken with DRM) and when we want it (not 9 months to 3 years later), and you'll see piracy decline significantly. Oh, and make new innovative product rather than coasting off the work of an earlier genius (Disney, that comment is directed precisely at you.)

I suppose this is too much to ask. So, then, is paying for the same old recycled crap the media produces. So, people won't.

Re:To be fair

[QuasiSteve]

Give us what we want, when we want it, and where we want it.

Okay...
what - Everything!
when - Now!
where - Everywhere!

Very well. That will be $15/movie, $2.50/episode of a series and $1.99/song, you can log into our media portal and pay via credit card and paypal.

Not acceptable, right?

That's because you forgot two...
price - Preferably free, but we're not unreasonable pirates - $2.50 for a movie, $0.50/episode of a series and $0.02/song (think of it as promotion, we'll be more likely to go see live concerts and buy merchandise - honest!)
how - Nothing against portals, but we're not too keen on you lot having all of our data and you'd just be doing it wrong anyway by trying to shove crap at us instead of the content we want. So instead, allow anonymous public downloads from an open searchable system (interfacing with imdb and the like would be grand, thanks) and use payment processors to allow anonymous payments for the service. Yes, that does sound like an honor system - why do you ask? Do we not seem like honorable pirates?

I am no Pirate!

[paulsnx2]

I don't download music, I don't torrent music, I don't P2P music.

I am a model citizen.

More about me:

* I am over 50
* I have bought maybe 10 Albums/Cassettes/8-Tracks/Digital Downloads in my *Entire* life.

Wouldn't the music industry love having an entire market of folks just like me!

New Rules

[should_be_linear]

Internet restored old rule: You can make money as an artist IF you are willing to perform your art in LIVE and there is audience willing to pay for it. There was brief window in history, like 100 years, where this rule was changed in a strange way: it was enough to perform ONCE, make recording of it, and then sell recordings instead of performances. This model could work only when sharing of data was difficult. That model is going away, with or without crying loud or imposing (never quite working) copyright walls. It is really bad for films, for example, you cannot perform it live. But, cinemas and broadcasters are giving lots of money to film industry for broadcasting rights. They will only loose "DVD money". I think think they will survive just fine.

Confused about who the customer is

[Maximum Prophet]

Contempt for customers

He then goes on to demonstrate several instances of where the local TV stations screwed the audience.

You are not TV's customers. You are the product being sold to the advertisers.

One Time Warner exec when so far as to say that people who TiVo shows and fast forward through the commercials are thieves. (As well as people who switch channels, or use the euphemism during a break)

If TV exec's could Ludovico you, they would.