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Swiss Gov't: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal
wasimkadak writes "One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet, and — since last year — the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published, and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
Interesting that one of the more famous copyright conventions is named after a Swiss city.
A government that makes a common sense. Time to move to Swiss
Very interesting stats and observation
However, these people donâ(TM)t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary. "
My favorite part
"The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die"
It would depend on who is helped and hurt by those actions. If my company was doing nothing wrong, then the leaker should be fired and sued. However, if the company was killing people or something, then they did the world a favor.
I was just thinking about this today. How fucking great would it be to have royalties coming in on all the COBOL Y2K fixes I made for the next hundred years, or if I shouldn't survive that long, to have them go to my family.
You act as if you are entitled to make a profit.
You are not. You are entitled to try to produce a value-proposition with a customer, to negotiate a quid-pro-quo for your labor. It is up to you to come up with an effective business model given global realities, including the reality that, in Switzerland at least, the government is not going to limit the right of people to copy things. The rent-seeking involved is your demand that governments - globally - criminalize the copying of information.
There was a brief historical window in which information could be treated like a product, because of the difficulty in moving that information from one medium to the next. The medium was the actual product, and it still is. The information can not be, not anymore. You will have to adjust.
Personally? I think that the public/academic sector is best suited for creating useful software, and providing a living for artists and musicians, as well. With their output then being released into the public domain.