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The Case For Piracy

Posted by Soulskill on from the arrr-me-hearties dept.

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."

4 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Change cannot be stopped by paulsnx2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Change cannot be stopped by paulsnx2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Change cannot be stopped by AngryDeuce · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. I am no Pirate! by paulsnx2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!