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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."
It's a Beige Alert!
...it's nice to see it in action once in a while.
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"
Berne, baby, Berne!
its stealing either way
What is the "it" to which the stealing belongs?
Okay, seriously: no, it is not. Copyright infringement is not theft. "Piracy," in the sense you're using the word, is not theft. And anyone who says it is has shown that they have nothing meaningful to say on the subject.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I don't condone piracy but I can understand it.
"...the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
How do they reach that conclusion? Every dollar I don't spend buying a song or book or movie is not necessarily a dollar I spend on some other piece of media. Those dollars go into the general fund, and get spent on food and gas and rent and utilities. If there's money left over, it goes to general entertainment, but that includes stuff like restaurants and bars and sports tickets and travel. Things that in no way support the people I didn't pay. Maybe some small percentage ends up buying some other piece of media, but it would be a very small percentage.
So now we've got one side claiming that piracy costs a quintillion dollars a year, and the other side claiming that it costs absolutely nothing. Can we please get some sane leaders to acknowledge the obvious fact: it costs the media companies something, but nowhere near what they claim? That it's bad enough that it should stay illegal, but not so bad that people's lives should be ruined over half a dozen songs? Why does everything need to be black and white?
Also they pay 'copyright tax' on every blank media, hdd and ssd sold that get redistributed to registered artists.
I never thought I would see the day a govt used this. I and many others will never give up free entertainment that is not live! I love that some one see's that we will always download and find ways around them no matter what so you should just let it go.
True, but practically all of the creative individuals you mention are the accountants that shit on the actual artists.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Stealing is the act of taking someone else's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of that property. This is not stealing in any way. There is no intention to permanently deprive anyone of anything.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
It's still getting something for nothing, and maybe you spend the same amount in entertainment, but its distributed totally differently. If you spend $100 on some blockbuster concert and then pirate 10 albums from smaller bands, the only one winning is the big act. Rationalize it any way you want, but its stealing either way.
And who's to say that the $100 would go to the smaller bands if there was no pirated content available? It's just as likely that the person pirates songs from smaller bands to sample them out and then goes and buys $100 worth of goodies from the ones that feel worth it. You can try and rationalize it any way you wish, but it simply isn't as clear-cut as people try to make it out to be.
Besides it's not theft. Hell, it's not even deprivation of income as you cannot just assume that the person would buy the content if it wasn't available for free. If anything it's often free advertising.
These are great results, but they apply only to a small number of European countries. The people who are about to say: "See! If only RIAA would back the fuck off they'd make the same profits anyway!" are completely unjustified in using this particular study to support their argument.
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries. Lots of people don't even lock their doors in Denmark; they leave strollers with children in them outside the store while they grab a gallon of milk. I'm not saying there are no criminals and no extreme downloaders, but in general there's more respect for others' property and more belief that everyone is in things together. It's not surprising that such people still spend a great deal of money on entertainment in addition to some downloading.
In the United States, however, it's totally different. Individualism and extreme selfishness are far more common. I know tons of people who download in excess of 5 times as much as they buy, and I myself download literally 99% of what I consume.
I'm not here to say that RIAA and the MPAA are right/wrong, or that they're making/not making enough money even with downloading; those are all separate talks. What I am saying is that a study about the Netherlands (this study is based on data from the Netherlands, which the Swiss consider highly analogous to their own country) doesn't prove a damn thing about intellectual property law or the state of entertainment businesses in the US, so stop drawing stupid parallels before you start.
I have wanted to move my servers for quite a while. No one is going to ask to look at your logs... You can proxy through there and enjoy their sane legal system...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I don't get this. Why would someone pay for something they already got for free? Are people really still using the argument that piracy is "free advertising?" The article claims that game pirates play more games and music downloaders visit more concerts, but that doesn't mean piracy is contributing to that--it just means that people who are more into games and music than average are therefore more likely to be obtaining them in as many ways as they can, piracy or otherwise. If there wasn't rampant piracy, how many more games would they be purchasing or albums would they be buying?
I mean, it's not as if a system works where everyone just works for free without any compensation. It's probably just too difficult and expensive for the Swiss government to try to squash piracy, so it's easier to throw up their hands. Plus, this article is posted on TorrentFreak, so it's not exactly an objective analysis.
I just don't get the mindset that not only thinks they are entitled to something they didn't pay for but also justifies it as some kind of culture movement, or a strike against the RIAA, or whatever. I've never respected that mindset. The only mindset I respect is the one that admits the basic human desire of getting something for free, because they're at least being honest about what exactly is happening. The lengths some people go to try to establish themselves as freedom fighters, setting up a "Pirate Party" or ranting about the evils of copyright (but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!) signifies a level of denial I can't even begin to imagine suffering under.
I'm posting an anti-piracy position on Slashdot, so I know I'm opening myself up to a possible modbombing of epic proportions, as this site has become extremely pro-piracy in the last 10 years (getting Linux software for free means everything must be free, apparently), but I felt like I should risk the karma and make whatever points needed to be made.
It's still getting something for nothing, and maybe you spend the same amount in entertainment, but its distributed totally differently. If you spend $100 on some blockbuster concert and then pirate 10 albums from smaller bands, the only one winning is the big act. Rationalize it any way you want, but its stealing either way.
First of all, no. It's not stealing. Stealing is the incorrect term. Nothing is being taken, information is being copied. If you want want to use a term, the one your looking for is copyright infringement.
Second, it's not copyright infringement because you can only break the law when the law says something is wrong. The government has come out to say a particular activity is not against the law.
Third, finally a body recognizes that money is not infinite. If you only have $100.00 to spend and you plan on spending it, there is no more money to be spent. If you choose to spend it all on a concert then so be it. There is no money left to buy any of those albums if you wanted to or not. You valued that concert more than those albums so that's where your money went. If other people value the concert the same way then it will be successful and make tons of money. Not everyone will think the same way. Some will value those albums more than some stupid concert and will buy albums. If they are good they more people will buy them. If they are crap then no one will buy them. If they are great then maybe I'll go to one of their concerts.
No, because that was not published information.
can still get you sued?
Why not just go out and buy the content? Just print up money on your computer. You wouldn't be stealing anything or depriving anyone of anything.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
With all the content passing through routers, shouldn't that be Cisco Inferno?
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software, and their right to get paid for producing the software.
... would that be alright with you ?
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time. When you pirate software, you are depriving the person or people who spent time developing that software of their time.
If you agreed to work for a company for 6 months, developing software, and when you were done, the company said "Well, sorry, we arent going to pay you that last $10,000 installment, get lost"
Stealing something requires that you deprive the owner of the right to posession. So, I can steal your car, and you are unable to drive. To steal a CD, that would require me to break into the music company's office, steal the master, destroy all copies, and then leave. That's not what I'm doing. I'm simply making an unauthorized copy. It is NOT stealing.
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.
Wait, what? Even if he objected to that, that doesn't mean that he would say that it was theft.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Sony, Apple and all their minions can go to hell. After all in Switzerland there is still open internet radio like this http://glb-stream11.streamserver.ch/1/rsc_de/mp3_128
Whereas here in backward north america us classical music folks are mostly screwed over by either itunes, silverlight crap, or locked out flash based shit stations. Of course I can always go back to Europe and get real music from great stations like http://lyd.nrk.no/nrk_radio_klassisk_mp3_h or better still, http://amp.cesnet.cz:8000/cro-d-dur.flac
So what if I record some or the content with vlc so I can listen later...who gives a shit. I do not redistribute or profit from my action.
Sony, Apple, Microsoft and all the RIAA assholes everywhere can go fuck themselves. What you have done to classical music world wide is inexcusable and I hope you suffer the consequences of your short sighted pop centric view of the listening public and music!
Your company just spent $10 billion dollars developing the next great widget that everyone will want to buy. The information copied allowed manufacturers in {cheap labor country Zuliwabee} to duplicate the plans, and produce the product without having invested the R&D money. All the investors are screwed, thats grandma and grandpas pension funds. The company closes down, and the people who produced the next great widget are all penalized for doing so.
Is this your idea of utopia ?
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software
The time they spent to produce the software is a constant, it doesn't change according to the amount of people using the software.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time. When you pirate software, you are depriving the person or people who spent time developing that software of their time.
Not really. A software product is already done, the time on it has been spent already whether or not you're using it. But the painter's time isn't used until you hire him to use it. As such your argument doesn't quite fly right. Comparing virtual things to physical things often doesn't work too well.
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software
No, you aren't. They already used that time, and of their own volition. The pirate had nothing to do with that.
and their right to get paid for producing the software.
How does that work? They still very much have that right. You haven't taken it from them. Someone else can still buy the software.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done.
Except, in that case, you've asked them to paint your house (asked them to do a job), and then not paid them. You've actually hurt (depending on how you define "hurt") them by directly wasting their time. Pirates are not people who ask artists to do jobs and then don't pay them. The artist takes the job of their own volition and the pirate has nothing to do with that (they're just potential customers).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Face it: Information is meant to be public.
This is a euphamism for "people like to get something for nothing."
So ... there will be no problem when I show up at your workplace headquarters, and photocopy every document and make a copy of every hard drive in your office for personal use then ?
Copyright infringement is not theft. Using racist language is not theft. Throwing stones through people's windows is not theft. Murder is not theft. Running a red light is not theft. Overcooking vegetables is not theft. Using gotos is not theft. Whether you think that any or all of those things are "a problem" does not depend on whether they are theft. You can think that something is the biggest and worst problem ever, without it being theft. Do you understand?
Yes, people do. Unfortunately, many resources are scarce given current technology. If we get to have a Star Trek economy (replicators, warp drives, practically limitless clean energy), than most of the things that are scarce will become plentiful.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If you start punish the wrong people (eg. downloaders) your are a very very bad person that tries to make the world even worse.
The time they spent to produce the software is a constant, it doesn't change according to the amount of people using the software.
The time required to produce the product is a constant indeed. But the expense is amortized by the number of people who will benefit from using the software. Copying and using software without paying for it, is similar to shoplifting, in the sense that, by you not paying for the right to use the product you stole, increases the price that people who do pay for the right to use an item. When you steal a candy bar from Walmart, the loss is spread to the customers who pay for their purchases.
Not really. A software product is already done, the time on it has been spent already whether or not you're using it.
This is just an excuse on your part. You are receiving the benefit of someone elses labor, without paying for it. It's the same situation if you screw the painter. You receive the benefit of his labor without paying him for it.
If a company hired you to work for them, and the company received the benefit of your labor, then refused to pay you for it, you would be outraged. But when you want to receive the benefits of other peoples labor without paying for it, you justify it by saying "It's okay because its really easy for me to copy it and receive benefit without payment."
By your logic, its okay for me to steal your car because I have a screwdriver and I know how to disable alarms and hotwire it. It only took 30 seconds. It was so easy for me to steal it that you don't deserve a car.
Copyright infringement may not be theft in a classic criminal court proceeding but it is a violation that can end up in Civil Court. Eliminate copyrights and you remove a great deal of the motivation for authors, musicians, and film makers to create and publish anything of worth. Authors can't focus all their attention on their writing projects if they have to commit time towards making an income from other jobs just to insure they can afford a living quarters, food, computers, and an Internet connection to to distribute their work. Musicians incur the same expenses as well as things like studio time, instruments, sound engineers, and other support personnel needed to produce their work. Entertainment film production can cost millions of dollars for equipment, actors, props, support personnel, CGI, and all of the other things needed to produce a quality film. Software related copyrights are in a "gray area" but those who create the software have invested their time and required an income to support their work.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time.
The difference is that you never promised anyone you would pay for the work.
You can try to extend that to the social contract, but then the analogy breaks down immediately because in the case of the painter, without your specific, individual promise to pay the work would not be done, but in the case of the author the work will be done whether any specific individual buys a copy or not. More to the point, society in general is upholding the social contract because people are still spending their entire entertainment budgets on entertainment.
Let's put it this way: Piracy is irrelevant as long as artists are getting paid. And they are.
In my case, a Wikileaks publishing would help a lot of people who buy my company's technology, and it would especially help the people who touch that technology.
By the way, my company uses Websense, and blocks any URL with the string "wikileaks" in it. So yeah, If I'm named personally, so be it. If a Blackwater guy gets named, so be it. Unlike the stateside folks, Blackwater/Xe employees are being paid $300,000 a year to have bullets fired at them.
The time required to produce the product is a constant indeed. But the expense is amortized by the number of people who will benefit from using the software. Copying and using software without paying for it, is similar to shoplifting, in the sense that, by you not paying for the right to use the product you stole, increases the price that people who do pay for the right to use an item. When you steal a candy bar from Walmart, the loss is spread to the customers who pay for their purchases.
It doesn't work like that, you're just grasping for strawman arguments here. A candy bar is a physical object, it cannot just be copied. There is always a loss of material that is spent on manufacturing it, whereas there is no material loss at all when you copy a digital object. So of course the cost of the materials used to manufacture something is either absorbed by the budget assigned to it, or spread to the rest of objects being sold. But as there is no loss of materials and thus no costs of producing a digital object there is also no losses to be spread over.
This is just an excuse on your part. You are receiving the benefit of someone elses labor, without paying for it. It's the same situation if you screw the painter. You receive the benefit of his labor without paying him for it.
No, it's not an excuse. If you literally hire someone to use their time on you, then you are indeed depriving them of their time. But if that person uses their time with or without you involved then you cannot deprive them of their time since they're depriving it all by themselves.
If a company hired you to work for them, and the company received the benefit of your labor, then refused to pay you for it, you would be outraged. But when you want to receive the benefits of other peoples labor without paying for it, you justify it by saying "It's okay because its really easy for me to copy it and receive benefit without payment."
See above.
By your logic, its okay for me to steal your car because I have a screwdriver and I know how to disable alarms and hotwire it. It only took 30 seconds. It was so easy for me to steal it that you don't deserve a car.
No, you're depriving me of a physical object that I don't have accessible to me afterwards. If you however e.g. copy an ebook I have written I will still have the ebook in my possession, too.
You are using some fuzzy economics there. The economic impact of not buying and illegally downloading are identical, so it's just as much theft as not getting it at all.
The economics of theft and copyright infringement are completely different. If your argument has any merit at all, it can stand on it's own instead of free riding on the economic arguments of theft. People who call copyright infringement theft are either idiots or relying upon an appeal to emotion.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So you're building yet another strawman, right?
Industrial espionage is not a copyright violation, in fact you can commit espionage WITHOUT copyright violations. For example, if I steal a document from your company's safe and then use it to learn your $PROPRIETARY_DESIGNS then I won't be violating copyright as no new copies of your document would be made.
Besides, your scenario does not happen in the real life because either:
1) New widgets with $BILLIONS spent on R&D require complex supply chains and development setup.
2) Replicating widgets on which $BILLIONS were spent is not easy.
3) Replicating other company's widgets is self-defeating. You won't have in-house expertise to build newer and more advanced versions.
Because of all the harassment of the RIAA and MPAA, I won't go watch things in theaters anymore or buy music. I'm not pirating either. I simply stopped consuming because I feel rights holders are causing problems in society such as suing grandmothers for millions and lobbying congress for laws that impact the freedom of speech. I know I'm in the minority and they'll make money from others, but if we vote with our dollars, I'm done voting RIAA and MPAA.
God spoke to me
Because the government hates it you steal their gig.
Officially, the Swiss government has decided that they have no more right to get paid for each copy of that software than I have to get paid for your reading my post. Finally, the legal understanding has caught up with material reality: you can no longer treat strings of numbers (which is what a digital file is) as "things" in the physical sense. Technology briefly created a period where you could treat music as a "thing," technology has ended that period.
The person to whom you're responding did not say "piracy is right" or "there is absolutely no situation in which copyright infringement can cause anyone any kind of problem". He said that it is not the same thing as theft.
No, you're depriving me of a physical object that I don't have accessible to me afterwards. If you however e.g. copy an ebook I have written I will still have the ebook in my possession, too.
If Software/Music/Movie ABCD v2.0 costs $10 to create, and 10 people pay $1 for it to receive the benefit of it, everything is great, the world is utopia.
When NancyBoy the pirate enters the picture, and receives the benefit of ABCD without paying for it, he just stole $1, collectively, from the 10 people who paid to receive benefit. If NancyBoy the pirate had paid, the cost to the 11 benefit receivers would be $10/11 or approx $0.91. NancyBoy the pirate has stolen money, and permanently deprived 10 people of property.
The physical object argument does not matter, and here is why. A car started out as dirt in the ground. Someone had to mine the dirt, extract the iron, make steel, form it into a car, etc. When you buy a car, you are paying for the labor and time of people who molded dirt into a car. The same is true of software, movies, and music. You are paying for the labor and time of people who organized information and molded it into a product.
So in the short of things, they might just see how the other side lives right? Having to put forth talent while holding down other jobs, taking care of kids, and so forth? This is the way countless others have made it in this life so why not the ones who have had their fill?
I should add, that criminals, always have a justification for their actions. It doesn't make their actions any more or less damaging, it just allows them to continue their criminal activity and satisfy their own internal moral conflict.
Software is not just a "string of numbers" as proponents of copyright infringement claim. Software is in fact, stored knowledge, in a specific unique form. Knowledge that required time and effort to gather, assemble, and mold into a product. No different than gathering raw materials to produce a physical tool.
You are using the ease of which a transgression against a productive person can be made, as a justification for transgressing. "The software is really easy to copy, therefore, the people who created it have no right to payment." By this logic, a human life is remarkably easy to extinguish by any number of technological means, therefore, anyone who's life you decide to deprive them of doesn't deserve protection and you don't deserve punishment for having taken it.
Which is why when you point out that there is not a single person on the planet that has not used information created by other people without their express permission, right down to the words they use to make their justifications, they will tell you that THEIR use of other peoples intellectual creations don't count as theft. Only yours does.
Not GP, but yes, copyright infringement is not theft. It's debatable whether it's "piracy" or not; I've never known a file sharer to say "shiver me timbers". Yes, the MAFIAA are a bunch of douche bags who represent the middle men, not the original artists. Yes, intellectual property laws have, in recent times, gone bat fucking insane. All that being said...
Enjoying the creations of others without, in any way, supporting the people who produced said creations is still not right.
OK, I said my peace. Go ahead and flame this post and mod it into oblivion now.
A software developer is spending time, of her own volition, on the speculation that the time spent will be rewarded with purchases. This expectation driving her speculation comes from a very old social contract: copyright. An "agreement" between information producers and information users, brokered by governments, copyright offered content producers a limited period of exclusive copying so that they might profit from their work (not to guarantee it... quality and market would still matter), and to encourage content producers to make that speculation to promote "the useful arts and sciences" in our society. In exchange, the work would enter the public domain at the end of that limited period, benefiting all.
The social contract has been violated. Industrial alliances of gigantic corporate content copyright aggregators purchased laws from various governments, firstly, to extend the limited term, further and further, retroactively, until the point that to most living humans, the period of copyright is "permanent." Secondly, with the rise of better and better digital technologies, and the increased ease and lowered expense of information copying and distribution, the industrial alliances invented DRM to directly violate and damage the easily copied nature of information. The same alliances then purchased legislation against thwarting DRM, etc... Information restricted by DRM is information that cannot enter the public domain and become freely copyable, unless some non-DRM copy was stored in escrow or some such arrangement. Those who have violated the copyright social convention haven't even considered such an action, as their intention with regards to eroding the concept of "limited term" has become their way of life: hence the invention of the term "Intellectual Property."
The agreement a homeowner makes with a painter to paint the house is direct, simple, and real. House painters never purchased laws stating that they could, once hired at an hourly rate, paint half of the remaining job, each day, in perpetuity, and be paid for it. The "agreement" involved in the concept of copyright has been broken for a long time, by the content industries, and most people on the other end of that brokered-before-they-were-born "agreement" no longer support it and many rightly no longer honor it. Intelligent information producers have already started looking at other revenue models and incorporate the above facts in their speculative calculations before spending time on a work. So who gets "deprived" of something to which they have a "right?" The people are deprived of the public domain works they were due prior to every retroactive limit extension.
That is the worst metaphor I have ever heard. I think I've been trolled. Well played.
Authors can't focus all their attention on their writing projects if they have to commit time towards making an income from other jobs just to insure they can afford a living quarters, food, computers, and an Internet connection to to distribute their work. Musicians incur the same expenses as well as things like studio time, instruments, sound engineers, and other support personnel needed to produce their work.
Boo fucking hoo. The people that love to do that shit will do it no matter what, you can't keep them from it. And the people that do it because they are makin a buck, typically speaking are not really the ones anyone wants to hear from anyways so... yeah... waaa....
Have you see the amount of money they make via litigation?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
So, if I understand your logic correctly, you deprived me of the ability to build a house, the moment you purchased the exclusive right to use the land on which your house sits. Given that this exclusive right has been extended to you in perpetuity, so long as you continue to pay taxes on your land, I am being continually denied my right to build a house on your land, which used to be in the public domain. Given this situation, the proper course of action I should take, is to build my house on your land anyway, because I want it, and it used to be public land, and refuse to recognize your exclusive use rights ?
I'm curious about when wikileaks has published such information. Can you provide a citation?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It is a natural reaction for people to demonize that which they do not understand. It is also the nature of genius to be misunderstood.
I'm assuming you haven't heard about https://slashdot.org
It's a cool site where we talk about what idiots our employers are for deploying WebSense.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I searched about a dozen dictionaries and none listed "...with the intention of permanently depriving them of that property." for "stealing". It was mostly variations on taking someone else's property "unlawfully", "wrongfully", or "with the intention of keeping it." I don't want to get into the philosophy of what it means to "take" something, but I think it's safe to say that if the government says it's unlawful to, say, copy a song, then it is by definition stealing, and if they say it's not unlawful, then it is by definition not stealing.
As far as I know, this only applies to _downloading_; their view is that when an infringing copy is performed (and it works the same for counterfeit goods) the producer is to blame, not the consumer. Uploading, on the other hand, is still reprehensible.
So, Usenet or Rapidshare: safe. P2P, you are still screwed.
When you hire a painter, there's a contract. Copyright holders had a contract with ALL OF US. When one of us violates that contract it is indeed very much like not paying the painter.
Now notice that I used had. The past tense. That's because up until the late 90s I was fimly on the side of the content creators. Then Eldrid vs. Ashcroft and a number of other things convinced me that the contract was defective. It's part of the larger problem of corporate usurpation of our government in the US. Thus, the contract is abrogated on both sides.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What is the value of something that can be replicated perfectly, forever. For near zero cost...
Logic says... Near zero.
Anything else is just pure greed.
Just admit you're all a bunch of greedy fucks. And we'll admit we're 'stealing'. At least one of us will be honest.
Real artists want everyone to enjoy their performance regardless of monetary reward. Real artists are also pirates that have chosen to spend their money wisely. Real artists are not complaining about supposed theft of digital copies because the poor artist is well-known. Burn, Hollywood, Burn!
Pixels keep you awake!
No, it's a transliteration / misquote of "Information wants to be free."
This introduces a grand philosophical conflict as yet unresolved. I'm going to call it a troll, but a good one.
/BTW: its spelt "youfamism."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Of course, you ight end up with other business models, including croud-sourced 'pre-paid' works and ad-supported works. /need/ copyright to have creative works, it just /can/ make things easier.
You don't
What is the value of something that can be replicated perfectly, forever. For near zero cost... Logic says... Near zero.
If it's of no value, then why is there a debate over the subject ?
If it is of no value, then why do producers want protection from pirates ?
If it is of no value, then why do pirates want to copy it ?
As for the greed comment, this shows your lack of understanding. People work to make a profit, not because they are greedy ( although of course *some* people are in fact greedy ) but because of property taxes. In order to nest and reproduce ( ie build a house and raise a family ) a human being requires land. In order to use land, one must pay taxes on said land, annually. Taxes payable in currency, which is kept artificially scarce in order to promote production. This is why everyone has an "occupation." We literally spend our time, occupied, with an activity which benefits society, in order that society will allow us the use of land to nest and reproduce.
Welcome to natural selection as it applies to hairless social apes.
When you hire a painter, there's a contract. Copyright holders had a contract with ALL OF US. When one of us violates that contract it is indeed very much like not paying the painter.
The thing that I think is wrong with this analogy is that in one situation, someone is being asked by a party to complete a job and then not getting paid, and then in the other situation, no such thing is happening. They start the job and complete it without any interaction with the pirate.
All of us? Irrelevant. The pirate didn't give them any job.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Back when copyright expired in a reasonable period of time this might have been a reasonable argument - even though the fraction of benefit that fell on actual artists was less than one percent. Now it's not even that, and copyright is forever.
The social contract of copyright is to grant the artist a monopoly !for a limited and reasonable time! to encourage the art by making it more profitable. But art is art, and culture is the sum of our art. All art must enter the public domain if we are to advance as a culture. Art is what defines our culture. So the monopoly should be limited and brief, not endless and without scope.
So now some people break the law when they'd rather not. It's the law, not them, that's wrong. By assimilating illicitly this forbidden art they are advancing culture, which is a higher calling.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Interesting concept... again, a brokered "deal" where a sitting government officer of some sort removes land from the public domain and sells it to a private entity... but "the people" are compensated with the cash exchanged for that land. Most government brokered "deals" are far shadier than that, but let's imagine that the money went into some other public domain investment. So there was an equitable trade: the people lost the public use of that land parcel and got a new bridge somewhere instead, for example. And the deal is done at that time. This is an actual exchange, honored by both parties... it's respectable. It's not at all like what has happened to copyright.
And of course, we're talking land, physical space, subject to scarcity, which is the opposite of information, infinitely copyable. Oddly enough, exclusive use rights of land are quite often overturned in the interest of the public... not just eminent domain either. There's various "squatters rights" laws that allow for a parcel to change ownership if it has been occupied by a new entity for enough years without being noticed and evicted by the previous owner. To continue making analogies and pursue your question, shouldn't every work that falls out of publication for some set duration enter the public domain for preservation of our culture? The law recognizes that land parcels shouldn't just sit, deteriorating, used by no one, due to a forgotten ownership claim, etc... So even with the widely disputed "information is property" concept in play, there's plenty of precedent for the public good to be considered.
. . .That's called industrial espionage and it is in fact a serious crime. In most western countries it's enough to get you a very long prison term. The apples to oranges argument is really obnoxious. Nobody is saying it's OK to tromp around stealing information from your corporation. The Swiss have agreed that media (music, pictures, movies, etc) are legal to obtain through torrent and P2P sites along with other traditional routes that are called "piracy" because ultimately Swiss citizens still pay a vast amount into these industries.
Also, it's far more realistic for people to be pirating mega-hits than little known bands. Plus if anything has been shown over the last two decades is that smaller bands make more of their money touring than cutting albums. Cutting albums are for elite acts that can sell 10 million copies. Then their tours are really a promotional arm to their album sales.
I am aware of the origins of the term.
However, claiming that an abstract concept like information has a human desire, is alot like claiming love wants the frog by the creek to have sex with my cat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
I should add, that criminals, always have a justification for their actions.
So do people who don't believe that they're "criminals." I see the words "justification" quite a bit, as if it is a bad thing. But why are justifications necessary (they really aren't)? Perhaps people are just looking for a debate. Perhaps they want to convince other people to believe as they do. It doesn't mean that they believe what they're doing is 'wrong' or 'damaging'.
And keep in mind that copyright infringement isn't illegal everywhere.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
This has NEVER been true. This same argument has been applied to taxing those who make millions, that somehow this sort of regulation (or deregulation in this case) will discourage the creation and perpetuation due to lost revenue. Theoretically huge budget movies could be affected by long-term piracy but that's about the only area that could discourage investment due to lost revenue. To cut an album and then go tour is miniscule for an independent band, to make a funny movie or even a classic without it being an epic retelling of a Greek war or Lord of the Rings costs far less than what people think. Ideally this will shift media back towards a pay-for-play ideal where production costs will step back in line with profitability. For decades with the VCR movies have been able to recoup all losses in the box office by simply waiting it out. Music has a similar low overhead except for the mega-hits who spend ten times as much promoting it as they do recording it. The money in music though is in concerts and selling out smaller venues makes more sense than trying to fill a 30K arena every other night.
So your argument really has leg to stand on. You're playing into a false dichotomy in an effort to come across as the sensible middle. It doesn't work since the sensible argument is to do nothing about this sort of piracy and reinvent how you do business.
You must not be able to comprehend what TFA said. People still spend AS MUCH AS THEY CAN on entertainment. So the pirate could not pay NancyBoy the artist even if he wanted to. What the pirate did get was enjoyment from his NancyBoy 's product and NancyBoy the artist got some PR (maybe the pirate told all his friends to buy the album). Maybe in the future the pirate will consider buying NancyBoy the artists album because he really liked the last one, or maybe if the album goes on sale and the pirate can afford it he will buy it.
You seem to assume that every download is a lost sale and as its been shown over and over and over and over and over its not. I know for a fact that while I was a poor student that could not afford every game I wanted (I was still buying at least 2x more games then most people at the time) the good games i pirated I told friends that were not planning on buying that game that it was awesome and they should buy it (and they did so they got at least a few more sales then if I had not pirated the game). I buy a lot of old games on the steam sale even though I pirated them along time ago and don't want to replay them, I feel I owe the developers something and now I can afford to pay them so I do. While that is somewhat a rationalization because i'm sure that's not always the case, there is no way to equate digital content to physical objects. Software/Music/Films in the digital world are all fixed cost (bandwidth costs are almost nonexistent) which you would think means the price would go down? That's not the case because publishers are greedy as hell. I would buy so many more games if they cost say 30 instead of 60 and i'm sure alot more people would as well.
From a straight utilitarianism argument, as the study showed people still spend just as much on entertainment which means they have no extra money to spend. This means that publishers/artists are not going to get any less money from people pirating digital content. What it does mean is people are getting more happiness from the same income. So before we had 200$ = x happiness and now we have 200$ = 5x happiness. Its hard to argue that thats a bad thing when people are still spending all they can on entertainment.
the world is utopia.
It sounds like money is still necessary. I wouldn't call that a "utopia."
and permanently deprived 10 people of property.
What did they own that they no longer have access to?
When you buy a car, you are paying for the labor and time of people who molded dirt into a car.
That's completely irrelevant. When you steal a car, someone loses something (the car). When you download something, no one loses anything that I am aware of. Not time, money, or anything else, from what I see. Well, the artists might lose hypothetical profit, but I certainly wouldn't call that theft.
When someone walks past me on the sidewalk and doesn't give me all of their possessions, I don't call that theft. Sure, it's not a law that they have to, but that is irrelevant to my point. It's a loss of potential gain. I could have had all of their possessions of they would have given them to me. Yet, I wouldn't call that theft. I've lost nothing beyond the ability to believe that they would give me all of their possessions.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
To continue making analogies and pursue your question, shouldn't every work that falls out of publication for some set duration enter the public domain for preservation of our culture?
Absolutely. I do not at all think that copyrights should be extended for indefinite periods of time. This is the opposite extreme of allowing everyone to copy anything they desire, simply because they can.
There must be balance, as other people have pointed out.
If a society fails to protect the production of products, said society will not have nearly as many innovation useful products, products that the society relies on to exist in its current size and state. At the same time, if society fails to protect consumers of said products, then waste / abuse / corruption / fraud etc would be allowed to flourish.
I am not at all for indefinite copyright assignments, nor am I for severely punishing people who violate copyrights. There has to be a balance that benefits everyone, equally, and protects everyone, equally. Where that balance point is I do not know.
but the cost to produce the first copy is not.
Not the pirate's fault.
You do not have a right to derive benefit from that work without paying the cost.
A pirate might reply to this with: "That's the law right now. But I would like to have it and will do everything in my power to get it." Or something such as that.
Also, not everywhere is copyright infringement illegal (or at least criminal).
Would you consider it stealing to bail on a hotel bill because they have vacancy and you clean up after yourself? You did not cost them anything and you did not prevent anyone else from using the room. What about sneaking into a movie theater that's not full? The fact is you are deriving benefit while providing nothing in return and you are not entitled to do so.
I wouldn't consider any of those things stealing in the situations that you described.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
People have all different kinds of talent. For those artists that a mediocre it never becomes more than a hobby. But your right fuck art. Waste of time and energy. And if you decide to have kids you better figure out how to support them before you have them and cut your whining bullshit. Unless of course you don't know where babies come from in the first place. I contribute over $3000 a year in county taxes for education even though I do not have any kids.
Whee, what a fun game this debating stuff is!
Quoting an altered version of someone's words back at them is not debate, and anyone who says it is ... oh, hell, you know the rest.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That's a different issue best addressed in some thread where there are folks who care about this particular metaphysical concept. I might suggest that the posters on this thread might lead you to the resolution you crave.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm a Swiss citizen and I can confirm that while downloading is legal, uploading is technically illegal. On the other hand, mass-discovery methods to detect uploaders ARE illegal here as well, and there are no political intentions to criminalize copyright laws. Switzerland is a direct democracy, meaning that any new law that is passed may be challenged by the people by collecting at least 100K signatures (that's about 1.5% of the population) against it.
About two years ago, one of the three judges of our Supreme Court made it clear in an interview that he was personally against going after people for "personal copyright infringement", stating that when the majority of the people is found to be infringing some law, that law was likely to be biased against the general interest.
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."
What sort of entertainment products?
Entertainment products produced by who and where?
When your backers commit a substantial amount of money to a production, they expect to see a direct and measurable return --- or they take their busines elsewhere.
If it's of no value, then why is there a debate over the subject ?
If it is of no value, then why do producers want protection from pirates ?
If it is of no value, then why do pirates want to copy it ?
For 1 and 2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
For 3, it has a value exactly equivalent to the cost of copying it: virtually zero. For you to demonstrate value, you would need to demonstrate a willingness to pay were it unavailable for free. Or, you do not understand the nature of the term, "value"
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software, and their right to get paid for producing the software.
Now we know why it took Microsoft so long to release a new version of Windows (Vista), and even then it was crap.
Microsoft actually finished it two years after the release of XP, but somebody pirated it so MS had to start all over again. Same thing happened again. Finally, MS managed to create a new copy faster than the pirate could download it, that's why it was crap.
Or at least that's how it would work if downloading actually deprived the author of that time.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done.
There is a huge difference between this and software/music/movies. The painter has to put in work and time for each and every copy of the "painted house". If I want him to paint my house, he has to spend $x hours painting it. If my neighbor then decides to get his house painted, then the painter has to work for additional $x hours (assuming our houses are about the same size), in total he now had to work ${x*2} hours to paint two houses.
On the other hand, let's say I pay somebody to create some software, they spend $x hours doing it. Now my friend also wants that software, the programmer now only has to spend a few seconds making a copy, so, he spent ${x+0.001} hours making two copies, or ${(x+0.001)/2} hours per each copy. If somebody else now wants a copy, the "hours per copy" value goes down even more. So, I can save the programmer those few seconds and make a copy for my friend.
Now, let's say I'm the "friend". The programmer has already created the software and put in $x hours irreversibly. Somebody bought and paid for it. If I download a copy for free, it will not cause the programmer to put in additional hours (not even a microsecond) to what he already has put in, presumably for the other clients. And he can still sell the software to others.
The painter cannot paint somebody else''s house at the same time he is painting mine, so each copy costs the same, as opposed to software, where the first copy costs $a_lot and all other copies cost $0.
A painter also will not be able to paint one house and then get money for the rest of his life while doing nothing.
Are you actually trying to claim, that if it takes me 5 years to produce a software product, and I charge $1,000 for use of the software product, because it will save people the expense of producing their own at a cost of 5 years of effort and $500,000 of expense, that I am participating in "rent-seeking" behavior and attempting to manipulate a market ?
You are out of your mind.
As for my understanding of value. The information on a CD, which costs next to nothing to copy, can in fact be the result of billions of dollars worth of research and effort. It is you sir, who do not understand the nature of the term "value." Perhaps when you decide to produce a product of your own, instead of taking everything you can from other people at their expense without payment, your understanding will grow and mature.
What lower cost? Software does not lower in cost as more people pay for it, that would make to much sense?
You say you comprehend but you really don't. Let me try to explain it again. I have 200 to spend on games. I buy all the games I can for 200. I have no more money to spend on games so I pirate a game. I copied bits, they cost the game company 0 and I could not buy the game because I had 0 money. Now I have a game that I enjoy and it cost the company nothing. Ill say it again because you seem to not understand this part. People spend all they can on entertainment, the extra they get from pirating things is NOT A LOST SALE. They had no ability to buy that product because they already spend all they could on entertainment. Your comparing a limited resource to a unlimited resource and that does not work.
When you steal a candy bar from Walmart, the loss is spread to the customers who pay for their purchases.
When you steal a candy bar, the loss is the money Walmart paid to the manufacturer of said candy bar. I don't think anybody paid anything for my copy of $movie.
By your logic, its okay for me to steal your car because I have a screwdriver and I know how to disable alarms and hotwire it. It only took 30 seconds.
Yes. I have stolen many cars, however, I always left the originals in place, so the legit owner does not have to buy another car. However, I had to wait for him to buy a car before I could steal it. Now we both can drive the same car at the same time, to different destinations.
but the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.
So its ok not to pay for one thing, because the money might be spent on something else? Just because someone creates something, and publishes it doesn't mean you have the right to it for free.
That's completely irrelevant. When you steal a car, someone loses something (the car). When you download something, no one loses anything that I am aware of. Not time, money, or anything else, from what I see. Well, the artists might lose hypothetical profit, but I certainly wouldn't call that theft.
The pure act of simply downloading something, is a non issue. Download anything you want. Just don't use it. It is when you "download and use" that the act of denying others begins.
Your logic could be applied to car insurance. You paid $300 for car insurance, then you purposefully destroyed your car and collected $10,000 for its value. You just committed fraud, which resulted in an increased expense to the insurance companies other customers, who now have to pay for the benefit that you received that you were not entitled to.
This is what you are doing when you "use" pirated software ( as opposed to your claim of just downloading it and letting it sit there). You are receiving benefit that you are not entitled to, at the expense of others who have not willingly granted you said benefits.
Plagiarism is not stealing either, but it is a form of fraud and deception.
But I suspect in this case he/she will be happy if you keep repeating those two lines (unchanged and in context) to the whole world, even if they are unattributed.
Yes you can (for instance swissvpn.net - untested by myself but heard from French cyber-refugees using it).
And as a Swiss citizen, I have to VPN through a Rackspace VPS that I rented mostly for Netflix! These (mostly) US copyright holders wouldn't want to accept my money otherwise, probably thinking I should pay them more, somehow, maybe, or not, in the future, if they suddenly want to... and that somewhat proves one of the points in TFA.
So, I'm sorry about paying you that money that you did not want in the first place, US copyright holders.
Isn't it ironic, don't you think... ? :-)
Stealing is the act of taking someone else's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of that property. This is not stealing in any way. There is no intention to permanently deprive anyone of anything.
The property rights in question are the copyright holder's exclusive right to control distribution --- and the right to profit from his work if he chooses.
You know you haven't paid for your copy.
You know you haven't paid for the right to redistrbute his work through the P2P nets.
You lnow you can't undo what you have done after the file has been uploaded to the P2P nets.
You know that if the feds do come down on you, you will cop a plea rather than risk a trial by jury. You know you are not Jamie Thomas and you are not going to be next year's poster boy for the EFF.
So you're saying that you're 100% right and that your arguments can't be debated? I have a word for that: "arrogant."
I believe I'm correct, too. I don't think that I can't be wrong, though. Where has that gotten you?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Whether you survive or not, I will still say hello to your wife....;-)
DON'T SHOOT, I was just kidding....I don't even know your wife!
*runs away*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
If anyone downloads music over the net illegally, i don't think the money spent on other stuff will ever reach the artist.
Why cant we just ignore the ones that demand money for listening, and support the ones that don't mind, like jamendo.com and the likes.
You just committed fraud
Exactly. "Fraud." I wouldn't say that you stole from the other customers.
Although, please enlighten me: how does this work for music, games, movies, and software? Your car example causes other people to lose many through your own actions, but how does it apply to a pirate who just listens to the music? They've done nothing that has affected the artist. They haven't crashed a car. They're separated from the artist.
Also, answer this: "When someone walks past me on the sidewalk and doesn't give me all of their possessions, I don't call that theft. Sure, it's not a law that they have to, but that is irrelevant to my point. It's a loss of potential gain. I could have had all of their possessions of they would have given them to me. Yet, I wouldn't call that theft. I've lost nothing beyond the ability to believe that they would give me all of their possessions."
You are receiving benefit that you are not entitled to
Quite irrelevant unless you're directly using up resources. The artist's decisions are his/her own. The only way I could see your example being relevant is if, say, a pirate connected to a game server. He's using up a tiny bit of the server's resources and taking up space in the server.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I think he named Blackwater and Xe. Go look up what they do, and you might understand why he named them and why he won't care that much about them and their "security contractors".
As for the military, I don't know how he feels about it, but in my opinion, assuming you're talking about the US war vs multiple countries, if you're a volunteer soldier and get killed in a very expensive tax-payer funded war, that is badly justified, that I disagree on, don't expect any great sympathy from me.
Even so, I'd probably give you more heartfelt sympathy than the politicians who sent you to die for their selfish purposes.
If soldiers are dying in those wars, the main blame belongs to the leaders who sent them there and the people trying to kick the soldiers out from their country. It certainly does not belong to Assange.
If Assange/Wikileaks sways public opinion so much that they stop the war, Wikileaks may actually save more lives. If a some soldiers have to die in the process, big fucking deal, that's what soldiers do.
Lastly, you need work on your guilt-trip technique.
Hint: in your case try using "civilians", rather than "the military" or "security contractors".
Actually, I wonder if theaters could promote a sliding scale - 5 mins before the doors close on tickets the price drops to 50%, 1 min before it's at 10% and 10s before it's at 0%. Might be an interesting scramble. Want to guarantee a ticket? Buy early! If it's a film you're not that bothered about, wait and chance it. But still it's not a good comparison - wear and tear on seats and you have a physical effect of being there which does not exist with a download.
Art was created by creative individuals long before we even had the reasonable copyright laws of old. Now that we have laws that only serve the entertainment industry middle-men, it is even less relevant. And is really the art of the 10% or so practitioners who get to make a living off it better than that of the hobbyists?
I see you, too, trot the old "think of the artists" argument, but given what meager fraction of a work's price the artist in general gets from a sale, most of them might as well have stayed amateur and held a well-paying ordinary job and made more money that way.
Unless you somehow can come up with an argument for why the salary of some director in Vivendi Universal has any effect on the quality of an artistic creation.
If 33% of the population are doing it then why would the government that represents those people want to make it illegal? It is a democratic country, one that ours could learn a lot from. This is not stealing in any way so why would the government want to get involved. Why does the US government get involved? because they are much more corrupt and easily bought. This should have remained civil action and the fact that a country sees it that way should not even be news.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
FINE and dandy dammit, this is /.
Are you actually trying to claim, that if it takes me 5 years to produce a software product, and I charge $1,000 for use of the software product, because it will save people the expense of producing their own at a cost of 5 years of effort and $500,000 of expense, that I am participating in "rent-seeking" behavior and attempting to manipulate a market ?
Yup. Precisely. Copyright is government enforced monopoly. The behavior to create revenue via monopolies is called rent-seeking. This is basic economics. I'm sorry that these words offend. That's just how it is.
Here's the problem: the copy cat is out of the box. You're not gonna put it back in. The question is, how do you provide an incentive for people to create something that costs $1M, but can be copied exactly for less than a cent? Furthermore, how do you provide that incentive without stealing from what is already in the public domain?
That's the real debate. How do you balance the need to have people recoup their investment into something that is trivial to copy, but don't create an environment that is best compared to the tariff situation in 18th and 19th century Germany? Grandstanding about pirates is not going to help.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
When NancyBoy the pirate enters the picture, and receives the benefit of ABCD without paying for it, he just stole $1, collectively, from the 10 people who paid to receive benefit.
No he did not.
If person A has $100 and pays $1 for the software, he now has $99. This is totally independent on the number of copies sold or copied without a license.
You seem to think there is some rule that the price of a product to the end consumer is costs divided by the number sold. But for an infinitely copyable product, any copy sold after that break-even point is called "profit". There is no "payback" to the people who purchased the earlier copies of it: If NancyBoy the pirate paid for his copy, no company I know of has a business model where each for the ten original customers get sent $0.09.
You couldn't possibly feed your family, if your customers ( or your companies customers ) had the means to just take the benefits of all your efforts without compensating you for them.
I would suggest that if someone finds themselves in a situation where they can't make enough money to feed themselves, they should look into a different business. Or do you somehow agree that everybody who makes an investment into anything has a right to make a profit? Here, I spent 10 grand on polishing a turd. I deserve to have people pay me enough to make my money back. Suddenly doesn't sound so great, does it?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Do note that Swiss pay a hefty copying levy. In particular, we pay a fee on the amount of memory in smart phones, iPods, MP3 players, and the like. This fee is supposed to be compensation for the copying that goes on. Since we've paid for it, it is really only fair that we are allowed to copy.
Also note: while downloading is legal, uploading is not.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Recorded music should be considered advertising for live performances. Not a gravy train for life. Everyday coders dont get this - the people who do the actual work. it's the software companies who can sell the work on. In the same vein, it's the recording industry who should profit, not the artists. So, who cares about the recording executives? Hands up? Thought so.
Face it: Information is meant to be public.
So you don't mind that Carrier IQ tracks your every move and you give your passwords to everybody who wants to know them?
-- Cheers!
as well as your future insurance rate increases to compensate for the loss by the insurance company. You may have defrauded them, but they get the last laugh when your cost per month jumps from $100 to $300.
There are 3 basic classes of consumers, not 2.
1. Those who pay for software, and use it.
2. Those who pirate software, but would pay for it if they couldn't pirate it.
3. Those who pirate software, but would not otherwise pay for it.
#3 seems to be what the Swiss decision is based on.
I know of has a business model where each for the ten original customers get sent $0.09.
Look at the Japanese health care / insurance system. People get refunded excess premiums paid which minimizes costs for everyone.
You are the one who is out of your mind. You don't get it. Complain to the universe about how easy it is to copy. It won't listen. Information is not scarce. And no petty human laws or technology can make it scarce. Moralizing to us will not change that. You deserve derision for demanding that we all conform to this view of how you think things should work, at great cost to us all, especially as you are totally unable to suggest any credible way to enforce this vision. Can't be done. Good thing too-- it's a horrible vision. When you were little, did you get really bent out of shape when your younger sibling copied everything you did?
You seem to have utterly failed to grasp that life is a bit more complicated than property rights and material goods, that there could exist things that do not fit those concepts. Just as you have failed to grasp that stealing is not the only kind of crime there is. Nor have you apparently listened to the various suggestions of how we could do it all. We can both freely copy information and fairly compensate creators for their work. But you don't believe that. Perhaps you think your livelihood depends on refusing to accept such a possibility.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
"Are you actually trying to claim, that if it takes me 5 years to produce a software product"
I won't go into what the other poster meant but I do mean that if you are going to spend five years of your effort you'd better have *in advance* a deal to monetize it. You could, for instance, have a talk to all those people you are going to save money for so they start paying you *now*. When your product is done, they'll get it and it's all done. Of course since they can replicate it virtually for free, you won't see a dime from then on. If you want to earn more money you'll have to work for it.
That's not only what most of the people already do, but it's overall better for society since equates the cost for society to the cost of production without siphoning it more than needed. Perfect Adam Smith capitalism.
Yes. The insurance company just shifts the cost to the customers. The same is true of software. The cost just gets shifted to the paying customers, while the pirates who don't pay but still use the software get a free ride and benefits of use they didn't pay for.
"You could for instance tie up someone with rope, deprive them from being able to listen to their favourite music cd. That would not be stealing would it?"
Of course not, are you kidding? Never in the whole History has been kidnapping or illegal retention equated to stealing.
"Taking something that is not yours without permission or consent is stealing."
No, it is not. It is obviously not. For once, it is not the "it doesn't belong to me" the part that defines stealing but "it does belong to someone else". Or did the one that registered a new mine steal something? Because the mine wasn't him prior to claim rights, was it?
On the other hand, it is not enough for stealing to get possesion of something that belonged to someone else, the first one has to be effectively deprived of the thing and of its fair usage and it has to be done without his authorization. Lacking just one of these elements (prior belonging, deprivation and unauthorization) it can't be stealing. And not, a hoped future benefit is not deprivation, and not, public communication makes not yours all future instances of the published thing.
In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by adding value. An example of rent-seeking is the limitation of access to skilled occupations imposed by medieval guilds.
Also
The simplest definition of rent-seeking is the expenditure of resources attempting to enrich oneself by increasing one's share of a fixed amount of wealth rather than trying to create wealth. Since resources are expended but no new wealth is created, the net effect of rent-seeking is to reduce the sum of social wealth.
Are you trying to say that a software products existence, like say, Autocad, is of no added value to society ? If engineers and draftsmen went back to pen and paper, the costs in time and labor would increase exponentially. For other scenarios, there are products that would never exist were it not for design software that facilitated their creation. That is why Autocad exists. Its existence does in fact add value. Also, the people who invested time and effort in creating Autocad, have created wealth. They have no merely manipulated social constructs, they have actually produced a product of value. This is definitely not rent-seeking.
As for the "monopoly" part of your argument, there is no monopoly on CAD software. Market forces will produce software that competes with Autocad, so it is also not a monopoly. Software patents, the mess that they are currently, is more likely to produce a monopoly. Copyright does no such thing.
Your murder analogy takes top prize for "terrible analogies from the entertainment industry fans". Are you guys running out of actual arguments?
There is NO cost to the copyright holder if someone pirates their stuff, unless they were running the servers it was pirated from. There is a loss of potential income, but income from sales are never guaranteed unless agreed-upon before the work is done. The anti-pirates might as well go after subsistence farmers in Africa that never have bought a CD in their life, for their non-payment as well. Or maybe a band like Train can go after Lady Gaga for "stealing" potential customers since many people bought Lady Gaga's albums instead of Train's...
There is no entitlement to success in business.
And again the comparing of unlicensed copying of digital files with stealing physical objects. Are you guys dense?
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.
... no costs of producing a digital object there is also no losses to be spread over.
Open up a text editor. Type the source code for Windows 7, compile it, debug it, and post the binary for the entire world to use for free.
Get back to us when your done, and you have the experience to determine how expensive of an effort that was.
Okay, let's thrash out the realm of Digital Products a bit more.
I also agree that the *costs* don't change, it's the *revenue* side that's the problem.
Producing digital products, including both music&movies and software, sinks all 100% of the costs up front. Then the producer is stuck trying to recover those costs. Previously, every issued copy was a sale, let's say 10% slippage from favors to friends, etc. So rephrasing the line above, "a digital product comes closer to breaking even and then making a profit the more people use it."
Now we get to you and your 200. Your mistake above was that we start with you at the beginning of your purchase cycle. You know about my game, you have 200 to spend... and you decide that my game is not worth spending it on to you. However, you still want to play it. (Since it's the "zero" that does strange things to lots of equation, let's say it's "worth a penny" that you dig up off the floor of your car.) You're now essentially walking up to me with the following theoretical conversation:
"Hi. I want to play your game. How much?"
"Hi. My price is $20."
"Hmm. Nah, I don't want to pay that."
"Okay. Have a nice day."
"No, I'm going to play it anyway. I copied my friend's CD."
"So when do I get my $20?"
"I dunno, I don't care. I'll tell a couple buddies, maybe they will buy a copy. I'm going to go play now, bye."
I'm pretty sure every downloader doesn't really think they have fully satisfied the requirements for their digital item. It's a gut level reaction to these upfront cost vs duplication cost changing equations. Admit it, there's a bit of "rebellious excitement" going on. Paying is "boring". Harnessing technology to copy it for free is "fun". So since we're still in thought experiment land, I'll send Security over to you and demand that you either pay me my $20 or delete "your" copy of the game.
Accounting and Game Theory have half solved this puzzle 40 years ago. It's a deliberate psychological refusal to allocate the Sunk Costs to make the digital item. You made your copy, so you purposely stop caring where my revenue comes from. It's not your right to make me "hope that if enough people copy the game to make it go viral, someone eventually will actually pay the real price for it". That *is* the modern emerging strategy, but you shouldn't be forcing me to delay my revenue at your whim.
This is the rough internal dialogue occurring in the minds of each and every downloader. "I've ripped my copy, I'm done. Your rent is not my problem". The last missing part is for you to provide me with something of *guaranteed* equal value to my purchase price, like a signature on a petition backed by someone who says "for every signature on this petition I'll grant the producer his purchase price in your name as a creative subsidy". By not providing that alternate value, THAT is the unstated implicit lost value caused by digital copying.
This is essentially the last word on the copyright dilemma at this time. It will occur with every digital item, times every downloader, forever until we get Non-Purchase methods of giving value back to the producers.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You are calling a software product, an idea, when it is in fact, the realization of an idea, not just an idea. Im sure it is difficult for you to differentiate between the two, because you seem to have lots of ideas, but none of them are based in reality.
In most cases, it's cheaper to simply erect a copy of your "widget's" factory. Fucking around with original designs requires good engineering work to understand them. Copying a factory doesn't.
The place called China can indeed reproduce pretty much anything. And cheaper, too, especially when they loosen up on the good ole QC.
Then again, China struggles on the innovation plane. It is easy for them to reproduce stuff, but not at all to actually invent something new.
So yeah, I’ve heard of China. Yet people still buy Apple’s iPhones instead of much cheaper Chinese knockoffs. I do wonder why, when it’s so dire as you make it to be.
Ignore this signature. By order.
No, no, it's "I dun just stole all yer comments!"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You are claiming there is no physical limit on software products. You are completely ignoring every physical aspect required to create the software in the first place. Programmers are a finite resource. Computers are a finite resource. Electricity is a finite resource. Office space is a finite resource. Food and housing and clothes and transportation to and from work are also. Everything required to produce the software you want so badly yet have no understanding of how it came to be, is a finite resource. You just can't see it, because you are ignorant, which, greedy lazy "other people owe me happiness" consumer, is some stupid shit to argue.
This is what many just don't get. People don't have an unlimited amount of money. The ridicolus amounts of money that publishers claim to use due to piracy doesn't exist. Most of the time, the amount of what people spend on entertainment is constant. When they can pirate films and music for free, they will spend the remainder to go to cinemas and concerts. Of course, that changes the structure of the whole business, with new players entering and the old ones losing money, and those who can't change will try to use legislation to stay in business.
You rented a campsite on public lands, and then built a brick house upon it, and then bribed the police to defend you staying there there in perpetuity.
Face it: Information is meant to be public.
How come you don't even disclose your name then? Or your credit card number? Your SSN?
Please, stop spreading little pink ponies.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Most clueless posting so far. Of course the GPL is valid in Switzerland.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The design and creation of a computer software product, by virtue of all that is required to support the humans who produce software, is a limited resource, and if you actually knew squat about software development you would realize this.
Truth is
I've been caught stealing;
once when I was 5...
I enjoy stealing.
It's just as simple as that.
Well, it's just a simple fact.
When I want something,
I don't want to pay for it.
I walk right through the door.
Walk right through the door.
Hey all right! If I get by, it's mine.
Mine all mine!
-- Copyright (c) Janes Addiction. All rights reserved.
You must have thought this was an instruction manual on how to behave, as opposed to, a cautionary tale and statement on the greed and selfishness of some and the detrimental effects the lack of personal responsibility and accountability can have on society as a whole.
The house painting analogy seems to be falling apart, so how about this... illegally downloading copyrighted media is like sneaking into a less-than full movie theater or concert. As long as your presence isn't preventing a paying customer from entering, you aren't "stealing" money from the artists, right? After all, the movie or concert was going to be performed anyway, with or without you there. Yet I think most of us would see sneaking in as theft, although no physical object was taken from an owner and not given back.
Both copyright and patents are legal monopolies. However, the market they create monopolies on is often very small. Autodesk has a monopoly on Autocad, not the CAD market as a whole. That's it's a monopoly that is very narrow in scope doesn't make it not a monopoly, it just means that said monopoly isn't very likely to be prosecuted by competition/antitrust law. Absent the interference by the government through copyright, anybody could sell Autocad, driving the per unit price down drastically. This is quite apparent in the pricing of generic drugs, and it would be apparent in works falling into the public domain, if only that happened for us.
As for rent seeking, it doesn't apply to the authoring itself, but rather, to trying to extract more money than free competition would allow via a legal monopoly after a work is finished. Rent seeking doesn't mean that the party seeking rent has never done anything productive, just that they aren't doing anything productive any more in a certain regard.
The Walt Disney company has been very productive in the past, and is productive today as well. However, by seeking retroactive copyright extensions, they were engaging in textbook rent seeking behavior. You might argue that copyright increases the number or perhaps the quality of works produced, you might even be dumb enough to think that adding 20 more years of protection to new works would encourage more works to be produced, but retroactive extensions can't possibly encourage more works to be produced, and thus, is clearly rent seeking.
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Hail our new brain toting Swiss Overlords!
It's more akin to saying water wants to flow downhill. Now, the water doesn't actually express any human desire either, but given circumstances that allow water to flow downhill, it will flow downhill. Likewise, the 'flow' of information tends to be from the one to the many, given circumstances that allow such a change in knowledge to occur. Public education and libraries exist to facilitate such flow of information. Even copyright and patents themselves have the ultimate goal of enriching the public in a manner that outweighs the social costs a legal monopoly brings, at least in the US legal tradition.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
How does murder fit into your argument? The universe has made it pretty easy and it is only petty human laws that prevent it.
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The original slashdot article is not about retroactive extensions. It's about Switzerland allowing people to use the products of other peoples efforts without payment. I went looking for statistics on the size of the swiss software industry, relative to other countries, but failed to find them. I did, interestingly enough, find a statistics on financial sector expenditures in IT, and they were quite large. It will be interesting to know what effects the swiss decision has on the industry. Only then can anyone determine if it's good, bad, or otherwise.
As for you using retroactive extensions as an example of rent seeking, I would agree with you that it is. Producing software products and charging a fee for their use, however, is not rent seeking, and is also not monopolistic behavior. It is producing a product of value in exchange for payment, same as any other service or product produced. If society determines that software producers, musicians, artists, and authors, do not have protections of copyright in order to recoup their expenses and investment, then I say fine, so long as I can eat the farmers crops, drive the car makers cars, wear the miners gold, and live in the carpenters house, all for free, without paying for the benefits the use of said items bring.
People who call copyright infringement theft are either idiots or relying upon an appeal to emotion.
Hey, now, that is unfair. A significant portion of them are both.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Sorry I didn't respond earlier, I dozed off.
When NancyBoy the pirate enters the picture, and receives the benefit of ABCD without paying for it, he just stole $1, collectively, from the 10 people who paid to receive benefit. If NancyBoy the pirate had paid, the cost to the 11 benefit receivers would be $10/11 or approx $0.91. NancyBoy the pirate has stolen money, and permanently deprived 10 people of property.
Again, economics doesn't work like that. If 10 people buy the software the company has just earned $10. If 10 people buy it, and one pirates it, the company has STILL earned $10. The amount of money earned doesn't change according to the amount of people using the software as money isn't some fluctuating variable. Besides, the company can't even know how many people are using the software anyways unless the pirates themselves report to the company, so again that's yet another reason for why it cannot work like that.
The physical object argument does not matter, and here is why. A car started out as dirt in the ground. Someone had to mine the dirt, extract the iron, make steel, form it into a car, etc. When you buy a car, you are paying for the labor and time of people who molded dirt into a car. The same is true of software, movies, and music. You are paying for the labor and time of people who organized information and molded it into a product.
Again, a car is made of physical materials. If the materials could simply be whipped out from thin air then your argument would be better, but as reality stands the materials are indeed a physical object and are needed to produce other physical objects. I would LOVE to see how you duplicate a car without it affecting the original one.
Of course I agree that the developers deserve to get paid for the work they've done, but that is a perfectly reasonable argument that doesn't depend on false pretenses and is perfectly fine on its own. But your other arguments are just bullsh*t, you are trying to associate material costs to something that doesn't have them, and you're similarly trying to assign theft to something that in no way or form affects the original or its owner.
Arguably what is being stolen in the case of 'piracy' is not the digital media itself but instead the money that should have been paid for the media.
The problem with digital media is that it's free to duplicate data, and thus there's no replication costs involved. If one looks only ever at the media there's clearly no deprivation of property involved. However that's not really what copyright is about.
Copyright is about granting and restricting the right to make copies of a work. The intent was to encourage authors to produce new works, by helping to ensure they'd get paid for the works they had produced. The laws were introduced because it was felt that it was too easy to make copies, even though at that time the cost to make copies was high.
The fact that copying is easier and cheaper now than ever doesn't significantly change the arguments involved for or against the existence of copyright laws. (There remain significant up-front costs involved in producing media, and these costs need to be recouped.) It can make a powerful argument in favour of lower digital media prices.
Obviously the current duration of copyrights are ridiculous. Any duration exceeding half of the average expected lifetime of the author is clearly patently absurd. This is why the original laws when formed were for 7 years with an optional 7 year extension - durations that I'm inclined to think should still be perfectly acceptable today.
Quite what effect the fact that making copies is free should have on the duration of copyrights is another question. Copyright durations were already stupidly excessively long before digital media arrived.
Thank you for pointing out that there is probably some inherent aversion (such aversion being a random variable, therefore having a distribution of values in any population) in humans against committing murder, which seems to be much less active with regard to copyright infringement. BTW, the same thing can be pointed out with respect to comparing infringement with (physical) theft --- therefore undermining arguments trying to make that equivalence.
All of those are naturally scarce resources. The scarcity created by copyright is artificial, and the ultimate goal of said scarcity is to benefit society. It might be worth considering how the printing press changed things. Before the advent of the printing press, making a copy required close to the same amount of labor as the creation of the original, and we had no copyright. The change the printing press brought about was not that it took more labor to author original works, but rather, that existing works could be copied with less labor. That someone else didn't have to do so much work didn't give the author the copyright, as such a statement makes no sense whatsoever. Rather, the change was thinking that by controlling the lower costs the printing press brought, the King and Church could proliferate pro-establishment works while squelching dissent, err, I mean, learning could be advanced.
Also, you haven't really quantified the matter of 'do not have the protections of copyright'. At what point do you feel that this happens? Anything shorter than eternity would be inferior to naturally scarce property. Or is it fine for the period to be brief, so long as such a period exists. How about two seconds for copyright? That's technically protection, but it is so little protection that it's not worth filing the paperwork.
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... no costs of producing a digital object there is also no losses to be spread over.
Open up a text editor. Type the source code for Windows 7, compile it, debug it, and post the binary for the entire world to use for free.
Get back to us when your done, and you have the experience to determine how expensive of an effort that was.
Good job trying to completely misrepresent what I said. Let's do it this way: find that ebook you bought in Explorer (or whichever filemanager you happen to use) and copy it. Then make another copy. And another. Now, how much did that cost you? Or the person who wrote it? Zero? Oh, shoot, that's right: duplicating a digital object costs nothing.
What you don't have to pay out for music, movies and games in Switzerland, you have to pay out for food. I was applying for a position at CERN at one point (didn't get very far into the process, gave up as I realised I wasn't interested enough in particle physics to fight for the place) - the advice they give to visitors is "If you want to go shopping, go to France"
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
but the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.
The Swiss should know. The MAFIAA keeps their money in their banks to avoid tax collectors.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
This is essentially the last word on the copyright dilemma at this time. It will occur with every digital item, times every downloader, forever until we get Non-Purchase methods of giving value back to the producers.
What you mean like directly donating to the artists of a product without going through the corporate execs who suck 90% of the profits away? Could that actually be done? Going up to a person and paying them? I think it's a bit farfetched to think us mortals could just pay artists/developers/actors/etc. /sarcasm
But seriously. Not purchasing a product != Not paying money for it.
The music industry gives ~10% of the revenue to the artists, the rest goes to people who _DO NOT ACTUALLY ADD ANY ARTISTIC VALUE TO IT_ Why would it be moral, much less desirable to pay such leeches? We live in an age, where being an professional artist/developer etc. does not cost significantly more than doing said activity in free time. A keyboardist needs there instrument regardless of whether or not they have a CD on the shelves, and if they can compose music, they will. I for one create electronic music and yet.. noone pays me for it! How could this be? Someone doing something purely because they enjoy doing it? Blasphemy!
When NancyBoy the pirate enters the picture, and receives the benefit of ABCD without paying for it, he just stole $1, collectively, from the 10 people who paid to receive benefit. If NancyBoy the pirate had paid, the cost to the 11 benefit receivers would be $10/11 or approx $0.91. NancyBoy the pirate has stolen money, and permanently deprived 10 people of property.
I can confirm this. I happen to know NancyBoy, so I searched and found an obscure $10 album which had sold precisely 9 copies. I bought a copy myself and later lent it to NancyBoy for a few minutes to make a copy for himself (purely for the sake of science, I assure you. I don't condone this sort of behaviour in general). I then checked my bank balance and - lo and behold - 10c had been deducted from my account.
I told NancyBoy about the experiment and convinced him to buy a copy legally. I gave him $8.91 which, along with the $1 he had recently acquired somehow, was exactly enough for him to pay for a copy. I checked bank account again and found that it had increased by 9c.
Anyway, the point is that parent's example checks out, and that copyright infringement is theft rather than a distinct crime/illegal activity in its own right.
P.S. I keeping the name of the album and artist secret because if the pirates discovered it then it could bankrupt me.
(P.P.S. apologies to fsckmnky for the tongue-in-cheek reply. BTW, I do know that apologising ruins the effect, but that's just the way I am.)
The multiple layers serve a purpose: they promote the product to people who don't live their lives on the Internet. Some genres of music are popular with people who rarely or never listen to music on the Internet. The major labels are especially skilled at getting music into rotation on big corporate FM radio. It just so happens that a recording artist can't have it both ways, both self-promotion on the Internet and label promotion on media other than the Internet, because major labels stipulate exclusive rights to an artist's entire output.
selling out smaller venues makes more sense than trying to fill a 30K arena every other night.
But then that becomes difficult when your music is popular among high school students and college underclassmen, whom the smaller venues won't admit because the smaller venues depend on alcoholic beverage sales. What kind of all-ages concert venue other than these 30K arenas is commonly used?
sometimes just creating a controversy is art.
thus, pirating is art.
thus pirating is copying that artistic performance without license! double pirates!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
ranting about the evils of copyright (but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!)
I see two differences. First, a lot of the works that copyfighters rant about are old works whose copyright should have expired in their opinion, such as the film Song of the South. United States copyright under the Copyright Act of 1790 lasted 28 years, with a maintenance fee due at the end of the fourteenth. Had the copyright term not been extended four times since then, everything published before 1983 would have entered the public domain. The GNU project didn't even start until 1984.
Second, if copyright in computer programs were to disappear, all software either would be free or could be made free by college students who disassemble and document software as a hobby.
I cannot speak for everybody, but at least with me your statement is more than true.
I listen to a wide variety of music, but metal and its extreme forms are my favorite genre overall. And most of the bands I love I would never had heard about if it wasn't for piracy. Bands like that aren't much played on the radio and I as a stundent can't really afford to buy unkown albums to sample them out.
So, what I do is I pirate much of the works of larger bands that I know are doing well and I support them by paying 50-100 dollars of their concert tickest every once in a while when they happen to come around here and perhaps by buying a t-shirt.
But the cds that I buy are mostly from smaller, unkown bands that a friend or a friend of a friend has recommended and I have decided they're worth supporting. I also subscribe to Spotify premium which alone costs me 120 euros a year but allows me to listen to thousands of artists on my cellphone (I don't even use my mp3-player anymore). And even thouygh I haven't bought a dvd in over a year, I go to the movies a lot.
So yes, I pirate a lot of stuff. But despite that and largely because of that I spoend a lot money on music and art in general, I haven't done exact figures but a fair estimate (counting all the cds, concert tickets, plays, movies and so on) would be that in the past year I've spent in between 500-700 euros on art. I'd gladly spend even more, but I can't afford it,
These (among huge concerns for things like privacy) is also the reason why I am a member and a supporter of the Finnish Pirate Party.
Just my 2 (euro)cents on the matter.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Indeed. People in general (i.e. on both sides of the debate) tend to forget that we *choose* what kinds of behaviour we wish to encourage, or discourage, as a society based on our natural aversions and beliefs about how those choices will affect us all. There are no absolute moral positions when it comes to copyright as it is an artificial construct designed to produce certain outcomes in society. Either side is capable of losing the argument when they forget that.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
My argument is simple: What the hell happened to honest work?
I go to concerts all the fucking time, and spend a lot of money on them. I haven't bought a single cd/movie/whatever since the 90's. I am a huge Pink Floyd fan, but I haven't paid for even one of their records. Yet I have just purchased tickets to go see Roger Waters. I paid roughly 500 dollars for a front row ticket. You can purchase their entire discography and then some with that money.
I go to concerts and to the movies, I go to the theater. I pay for actual work, and actual value. I'm not going to pay for bits.
And I live by those same values. I have a software development company. We sell actual custom-made hardware with our products in it, and turn-key solutions. Abakus is our ERP software. You can download it for free under the GNU/GPL3. You can also purchase a beautiful acrylic box that comes with Abakus preinstalled, or pay monthly for our cloud-hosted solution.
The reason we are seeing this battle is that if you go to concerts the artists get paid. If you purchase a disk, the money goes to the RIAA.
There are 3 basic classes of consumers, not 2.
1. Those who pay for software, and use it.
2. Those who pirate software, but would pay for it if they couldn't pirate it.
3. Those who pirate software, but would not otherwise pay for it.
#3 seems to be what the Swiss decision is based on.
I agree to an extent, but that that list is not exhaustive. I can think of a few more off the top of my head:
4. Those who pirate the software and pay for it, but would not otherwise have paid for it
5. Those who pirate the software and pay for it, but would have paid for it anyway
6a. Those who pay for software but don't use it except to make and sell illegal copies
6b. Those who make and sell illegal copies without having paid
6c. Customers of #6a and #6b (special cases of #2 and #3, some of whom believe to belong to #1)
I have a vague, unsubstantiated suspicion that, excluding #6c, #2 is vastly overestimated; and that #4 and #5 may in fact collectively exceed #1.
Also, you haven't really quantified the matter of 'do not have the protections of copyright'. At what point do you feel that this happens?
I expect copyright to expire no later than when the net present value of the future revenue that the copyright owner expects to realize from the sale of copies becomes negligible, when considered along with the typical market performance of the medium. For example, movies and video games do most of their sales in the first year, so what is the net present value of future revenue from the film Song of the South or the video game Earthbound?
we *choose* what kinds of behaviour we wish to encourage
No, the MPAA-owned* news channels choose for us by choosing which candidates for federal office are deemed electable, and the MPAA-owned news channels choose what kinds of behavior we are even aware of when we step into the voting booth. Copyright expands because it benefits the owners of the medium by which people learn about the officials who expand copyright.
* And foreign counterparts.
Information that has previously been published "wants to be free". The only use I can see for publishing someone's banking or tax identification number is to make fraudulent use of someone's identity.
So if you go on holidays, and I take your car without permission, but return it before you get back, then it's not stealing?
If you managed to use zero fuel and put zero miles of wear and tear on it and to return it before I wanted to use it next, then I probably wouldn't call it stealing.
or if you have sex with a women while she's passed out drunk, it's not really rape.
I don't have the time at this second to go into a full analysis of date rapes assisted by alcohol and/or flunitrazepam. But for one thing, a chance of spreading VD (sexually transmitted infections) and one's seed is still rape.
So how would one get a recording onto FM radio without the help of these usurious lenders?
its stealing either way
Okay, seriously: no, it is not. Copyright infringement is not theft. "Piracy," in the sense you're using the word, is not theft. And anyone who says it is has shown that they have nothing meaningful to say on the subject.
That would be a straw man. The grandparent didn't claim it was theft. He claimed it was stealing. I checked a couple of online dictionaries, and they all contain something like this:
to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
Clearly, the grandparent feel someone is appropriating words or music without right.
You are completely right about the missing apostrophe; however, that rule is so unintuitive that I'll forgive anyone for giving it a miss :)
Personally, I am no fan of the current copyright situation, but that is a separate matter.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
They are the real bankers(not funny money bank of america), they have 1200 tons of gold backing their currency (enough to back 20% of their currency) and their adult males keep fully automatic rifles at home. They also have direct democracy and really awesome fondue...did i also mention they have universal healthcare.
Don't you get it? Every time a song is copied, someone loses money. No wonder we have a financial crisis!
Far harsher systems of control have been overthrown by those who chose not to go along with them.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Actually I didn't know about the https setup.
Oddly however, when I go to https://slashdot.org it redirects me to the http:// URL.
I even allowed slashdot in NoScript just in case, and still get the same behavior.
FireFox 3.6 still (Since the firefox v6-8 listing of my plug ins that are now incompatible is longer than the v8 feature list)
Same in IE 9 with no add ins, although I never signed in my account from IE.
Is the SSL site still in testing/beta or something?
The Swiss, realizing that they didn't have many resident inventors, but were next door to Germany, signed the treaty... and then gave no patent protection to their own inventors. Or any others.
That lasted for a few years until Germany got really angry and threatened to cut off trade.
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software, and their right to get paid for producing the software.
So you are claiming that since I have no need for your software, will not be using your software, will not be downloading or installing your software... That I am a theif because I deprived you of your time spent making it, and your right to make money by producing software?
In that case you owe me a few million dollars.
I just now wrote a Hello World program, and it's price I just set to 10 million.
You state I have a RIGHT to be paid for this.
You best pay up, before I sue you for depriving me of my right to make money off my software., and for you stealing my time I spent writing it.
What? You don't want to pay me for the software you already said I have a RIGHT to be paid for, despite you not wanting it?
Even after you claim you MUST compensate me for my time?
Hypocritical criminal scum.
I can accept that stealing might not be the correct term. But the concept of ownership of some type of knowledge or art seems reasonable to me and I think to most people in our societies. If I try to sell a piece of fake art as if it were an original of some other artist, that's fraud and it's seen as something that harms someone in some way. If I sneak into a theater without paying, people consider that something along the lines of stealing, even if the play isn't sold out and I've not actually bumped a paying customer out of their seat.
In the end I think it's a matter of finding the right balance that works for the greatest good of everyone in our society. Copyright attempts to encourage innovation so that society in general can benefit from that innovation. We certainly have received the benefits of that innovation. I'm sure that it's gone too far in many cases (patent trolls, seemingly endless copyrights), but it certainly seems better than the bad old days of the jealously guarded secrets of the trade guilds where that knowledge was kept secret as a way of protecting their financial interests.
Just my 2c
The point of monopoly claim is for that this specific implementation of autocad you're distributing. Your copyright is your monopoly to distribute and permit distribution of copies. No one but copyright owner can do this according to copyright laws. That is the basis of copyright - monopoly.
This really is completely unarguable. It's a simple fact. What you should be arguing is a far more defensible position of "my monopoly is created as means to generate profit from my work, and if I didn't have this profit I would have no incentive to get the work done in the first place". This direction of argument reduces the argument to rather idealistic points of view of "right to profit" vs "right to knowledge". Historically humanity needed BOTH to advance, which means that a balance between the two will have to be found.
No, that's just another way to describe the so called "intrinsic value" - it's the effort you have to put in to create yet another copy of a product.
While for instance the effort you have to put in to create yet another car is still high, even if you have all the documentation, and all the tools, because the steel and alloy, the plastics and electronics cost money, and it's still a labour intensive task to mount them together to get a working car, the intrinsic value of yet another copy of a 3:20 min track of music is very low, because the effort to create said copy is approaching (but still not reaching) zero.
Economic theory yields that every product, given enough copies are made and asked for, will be valued in the long term with its intrinsic value.
The information Carrier IQ tracks is not published. So no - collecting information and not sharing them with the public is not ok. Collecting information and keeping them secret to get an advantage against all the others not having those information is not ok either.
Does FM radio even matter anymore?
Yes, because it works in a car or bus.
We've got all sorts of music streaming services.
Which don't work in the car unless you subscribe to an expensive data plan. Some genres of music are more popular among people who don't use smartphones. Or should all independent recording artists switch to genres currently popular among the iPhone/Droid set?
The scarcity created by copyright is artificial
The scarcity is not created by copyright. X amount of real, scarce, food, clothing, water, housing, and computers, are required to create a digital work. This expense is born by the author of said digital work. Copyright serves to allow said author to recoup this very real expense.
People who claim "It's digital, I can just copy and share it at no cost." fail to finish the statement. The complete statement is "It's digital, I can jut copy and share it at no cost to me. Screw the author and his expense for creating the original copy."
The multiple layers serve a purpose: they promote the product to people who don't live their lives on the Internet.
...and so why are people who live their lives on the internet having to pay for this, exactly? The majority of people consuming this type of entertainment DO live their lives via social media these days. For those few who still listen to the radio and then go buy the music in a B&M store, wouldn't it make MORE sense to level the playing field, and prevent the radio lock-in and payola corruption we currently have in place? After all, it's that payola you're arguing to protect. You're saying that self-promotion won't work because these big labels have a racket going that's funded by the current model that prevents it.
Instead of protecting the racket, doesn't it make more sense to fix the problem?
Of course, the labels (big and indy) do more than just get your music on the airwaves... they also do strategic market integration, organise and coordinate global release schedules, bring together visual, audio, written and performing artists, etc. But they do this as a paid service. They could still offer these services to artists without requiring lock-in (you don't buy the entire package from us with this glitzy cash advance, you don't get nuthin') like they do today. This isn't acceptable in any other form of business, and in the tech industry, many companies have been taken to task for doing exactly this.
Your point about murder, and your assertion that morals are all relative, makes the same sort of mistake the copyright extremists make. You've simplified the argument too much and made an equivalence between things that aren't equivalent at all. Yes indeed, both murder and copying are easy to commit, the first time. We all must sleep sometime. It is even easier to cut off your own hand, or commit suicide. But there, the similarities end. Unlike copying, murder is not easy to get away with. Nor is it so easy to make a net profit from murder. Hardest of all is to make a business of it, to do it repeatedly, for gain. The easiest people to murder are the ones who trust you. But they are members of your group, and they will no longer be able to contribute to the welfare of same, so you've suffered a clear loss, whatever the deed gained you. And for so long as you are suspected, you will not be trusted, by anyone, which is a huge, huge hit to your welfare, as well as the opportunity to commit murder again. We didn't really choose to be this way. Evolution has shaped us so. Anyone who trusts a known murderer is likely to become a candidate for a Darwin Award. The universe does not make prevention so easy. It's rather like karma. The chickens will come home to roost.
A better comparison is between copying and sex. From time to time, authorities have attempted to regulate sex in various ways. They've ranged from the ridiculous and unenforceable such as anti-sodomy laws, to China's one child policy, which is not a law against sex per se, but only a consequence of sex, and one that cannot be easily denied, which makes the law enforceable. Copying is even easier to commit and harder to enforce against than sex. Two people can have sex, and if they keep it private and don't tell, no one else will ever know unless there are consequences such as a baby or a debilitating disease. Copying has no equivalent consequences.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The general interest can tip the other way due to external pressure, however. It isn't just a change of conscience that is making the Swiss change banking privacy laws to help the US collect taxes.
Yes, the scarcity of copies of a work is created by copyright. That's why endless copies of a work can be made. If I were so inclined, I could literally make a million copies of my 'Free as in Freedom' PDF on my computer. You can argue that artificially making copies of a work is justified under certain conditions, but the scarcity is completely artificial.
Again, let's look at things before the printing press. There was no real regulation of producing copies. If I owned a copy and had the ability or resources to pay someone else to, I could make and distribute more copies as I pleased and nobody would date accuse me of wrongdoing. There was no artificial scarcity, and the limits of making copies were due to a limited number of scribes only being capable of a limited amount of output. The change the printing press brought wasn't on the author's side, but rather, on the scribe's side, so nothing would inherently change for the author like it did for the scribe.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You are ignoring the very real scarcity of the original copy. In doing so, you are saying "the creations of artists, authors, and software engineers have no value, therefore, I an entitled to them." Free as in freedom is fine, so long as the creator has granted you those rights. Free as in you did what you want regardless of law, or the rights of the creator, is just another "I am entitled to your work" socialist taker argument.
You said entitled twice and brought up socialism. It's quite clear you are an idiot behind help, and this conversation won't go anywhere productive. I kindly ask, that, as an author myself, you quit trying to make authors look like jackasses.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
That ended well before you think it did. If people thought they could wait out copyright and download anything from 1983 or earlier without legal problems, and most stuff from 1997 or earlier, we might be more honest. And the industry wouldn't be so mind-bogglingly afraid of the internet becuase they would have incentive to create new works for revenue, not mine 70 year old material for rent seeking. But we'll never know how that changes things.
The contract was a one-sided EULA negotiated on our behalf without our consent, and I did not ratify it. Indefinite extensions make the copyright term effectively unlimited, especially for a normal person's lifetime, and therefore unconstitutional. Also, I don't see music and movies covered anywhere, but eBooks are, according to the original word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
I am following the legal law of the land, unconstitutional laws be damned.
I worked at a company where it turned out the office supplies manager was previously a drummer for a band which had had a number of songs in the Australian top 40, basically what the public would classify a band which was relatively successful.
I asked him why he stopped. Simply put, the hours where long and crap, he was away from family and friends for months on end touring over seas and well, he got better money being an office supply manager. The amount of money that manages to get through to the average 'successful' band is pretty pitiful all things considering due to the amount of money the record companies and the *AA organisations take off the top is pretty crazy and is the main cause for the lack of money getting through to the average artist.
With that said, having fans tell him that they downloaded his bands music and thought it was great was very annoying for the obvious reasons.
This is essentially the last word on the copyright dilemma at this time. It will occur with every digital item, times every downloader, forever until we get Non-Purchase methods of giving value back to the producers.
I hate to break it to you, but we already have non-purchase (and pre-production) methods of giving value back to the producers. The only impediments to using these methods across the board are vested interests who are locked into the current purchase methods and don't want to take the hit on their currently functioning-very-well-thank-you-very-much business model. They already have enough power and clout that they're finding methods of perpetuating their model which are in turn affecting our social structure, such that the argument you made actually makes sense to a lot of people... and they never realise all the assumptions the argument's conclusions ride on.
The entire concept of "forcing me to delay my revenue at your whim" shows how far our society has shifted. In MOST lines of work, we ask for a contract that guarantees revenue in an on-going basis. Even contract work generally doesn't wait until the contract is completed before all "debts" are called in.
Believe it or not, I work in an industry that produces no physical product, similar to the entertainment industry. The results of my work are sold to millions of people, and my company makes a nice profit. However, society at large also benefits from my work, and a lot of the core information generated by my work enters the public domain daily.
Why does this work? Because if I stopped producing intellectual property today, all the work I did in the past would eventually lose relevance in the current cultural space. Unless society is stagnant, there is a continual demand for new ideas and new implementations of old ideas.
Something else to remember: the entire concept of purchasing and product value is a fabrication. If people find that they make less money based on what they do, they have to personally decide if it is worth doing that. If they decide it's worth doing, that means they'll be contributing product into their society with fewer demands on society, so society as a whole benefits. If they decide it's not worth doing (for example, I've never sold any music for personal profit despite the fact that I'm a fairly decent musician), they can choose to produce for some other reason, or choose to do something else with their free and not-free time.
The reason we have inflation in western society is that there is a gap between actual value of work and the amount being paid to certain segments. Since this gap has to be filled from somewhere, it is usually filled by devaluing the currency of the other market segments... in essence, stealing from the balanced segments to prop up the inflated segments.
Getting back to my point... the common reason a producer of intellectual goods sets, say $20 as the value they're willing to charge for a product is that that's the top value they feel they need to be enriched by that the market will bear. If the next guy over is selling a similar game for 99 cents, and so is the guy beside him, the average cost in that segment is significantly lower, and the guy charging $20 is going to find that the market won't bear the price. Propping up that price effectively skews the market segment and causes inflation -- he is in fact stealing from society at large to attempt to gain an advantage.
Society's response is to: give him the advantage (happens all the time) and let everyone else cover the discrepancy in order to enrich society with the products of his work, ignore his demands and take the product at or below market value (also happens all the time) toward the same ends, or ignore the product altogether, thus resulting in a lot of effort that a single person is hoarding from society as a whole, as they've produced a work based on those who came before them, and then given none of the results back to society to enrich it.
The
A painter also will not be able to paint one house and then get money for the rest of his life while doing nothing.
Depends on the painter and the house... if the paint job becomes famous and he charges people to view it, he could indeed get money for the rest of his life while doing nothing.
Of course, the more likely result would be that someone else would charge people to view it and make money for the rest of their life while doing not much (eg. Sistine Chapel).
Just saying ;)
In my link I put the trailing "." on the hostname. That's an error. Try again without the trailing ., as it messes with some browsers' certificate authentication.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I suspect various governments around the world will bow to the vested interests of media companies and introduce a copyright tax/levy on all entertainment products. The big issue is just how much of the revenue obtained from such an indirect tax would go the government and how much would go the media companies.
You must be retarded or something. Every time I make a point you reply with "well if I stole this physical good then..." and that argument is completely different then anything related to software and digital goods. I'm going to say this one more time even though it will most likely do no good because you seem to not be able to even process basic information well enough to even understand the argument. Say I have enough money to buy food, I spend it on food. I have no money left over. I cant buy your product even if I wanted to. Your not going to get money from me regardless if I want to pay it or not. Because the software is digital I download it. It COSTS NOTHING to you and you would never get money from me ever because I don't have that money to give. You still have your item and now I have one and the only cost copying it was for me to pay power and storage. You lost no money because I downloaded the software and you would never get any money from me doing so. Your going to develop the software regardless if I download it or not because any good business man knows their target market and if I don't have the ability to pay i'm not in that target market ( if you develop software for people who cant pay your not going to make any money in the first place). Your not banking on selling the software to me because you know I cant pay. You have lost nothing and I have gained something. If you cant understand this example then I hope you and people like you die off fast so the rest of us can work for a better world without people like you fucking it up and slowing down progress.
You must know nothing about business. Software development is a sunk cost. Your never going to get that money back. By your logic once the cost of development is covered the software should be free right?
The problem with that argument is that if I was never going to buy it its still not a lost sale (you were not getting my 20 regardless). The strength if that argument is that maybe if I did not have the option of downloading I would buy it. This is where I think the way digital goods are sold could change to make buying something i wanted more likely. As many people have pointed out (and something I know iv done) they download something to try it first. The problem with that is once you have it downloaded its easy to say "well ill buy the next one because I have something else I can spend that money on right now". I think part of the cause for this is because you cannot return software (games especially). If I buy a board game and it does not live up to my expectations I can return it. If I buy a shitty game (DNF is a prime example) i'm stuck with it. Most games don't release demos anymore and even if they do they only show the parts that are decent.
Gabe Newell pointed out recently that price does not make a huge difference for pirates and its more that its harder to buy stuff then it is to download it. While I don't agree with that completely it does have a lot of truth to it. There is a lot of risk related to buying a game, it might suck and im still going to be stuck with a shitty product that was not what was advertised. If you make a shitty physical product and everyone who buys it returns it your going out of business any make no money. If you make a shitty game and advertise the shit out of it your going to make money (you might not make another game but you will already have the cash you got from that first shitty game), and something is wrong with that system.
So if the law says it's ok, then it's not stealing. So you can no longer equate software piracy and stealing in Switzerland.
Artist of old also received "stipends" or "commissions" for the work they produced. And everyone clamoring for free music and films seem to forget there is already a mechanism in place to obtain these songs and movies. It's commonly referred to as radio or TV. Before the Internet people recorded from these mediums for free. That ability still exists. And how would someone be able to justify investing millions of dollars to create a film and then have it eleased for free to anyone who wants to copy it? How would musicians justify spending money on professional recording studios and instruments if they know the end product is going to be instantly free to anyone who wants it?
Yup. Precisely. Copyright is government enforced monopoly.
All property, in general, is government enforced monopoly. There's probably a car parked outside of your house that you think as "yours". The only reason why someone can't just get inside and drive away - making it "his" - is because we, as a society, have decided that it's a bad idea, and have granted you the right to claim that car as your possession and to restrict other people from using it - i.e. a "monopoly" on that particular car - and provide the force that is necessary to enforce said right.
The only way in which copyright (and patents, trademarks etc) is different from the arrangement above is that it's much harder to enforce. At that point, yes, we have to come up with some pragmatic way of making it all work for everyone involved, just as you say. But there's no fundamental difference regarding the nature of arrangement, or the moral and ethical implications of breaking it. It's pure social contract in both cases.
when the majority of the people is found to be infringing some law, that law was likely to be biased against the general interest.
This!
If the majority of the population breaks a law regularly, it's the law that's wrong.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If I go to the library and take out a DVD for viewing (all the DVDs I want from the local library for $25/yr.
I can make a copy, I can watch and renew the lib loan as long as there is no reserve for the book. I think this the same as a book. I recognize the author or copyright holder does not make money on my borrowing, but in some cases the library buys additional dvds with my annual fee.
So, I think that as long as I don't resell the material, it is OK. You say not? Well, I can buy a DVD and lend it to many friends, or have a beer party and have many friends watch the same movie.
What is right??
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
It is producing a product of value in exchange for payment, same as any other service or product produced.
Slight quibble, with most goods or services, you sell them and when the sale is complete, you have no right to determine what is done with them by the buyer afterwards. Your examples of crops, cars, gold, and houses all are yours to sell at any price or give away after the sale is complete.
That isn't to say that you are wrong about the fairness of it. Copyright is an attempt to treat information as a product and ignoring it means that the work produced with the expectation of copyright protection is devalued when that protection isn't given. Switzerland has chosen not to extend protection that is offered in many other places. It may be that artists and craftsmen there will choose to produce work only if they are granted fair compensation before releasing their work, and that could end up making the artists more money than they would elsewhere, thus making it a Mecca for the aspiring artist. Where else can you go and demand fair payment before release? On the other hand, a global market may mean that it is simply more cost efficient to import (piracy included) work from outside, thus eliminating the incentive to produce there.
As a software writer (albeit minuscule) I can certainly appreciate the draw of producing work based on what it might be worth to the buyer rather than hoping that other people will choose to pay later. I'd rather have a clear cut contract to produce a software product that does X in exchange for Y, than producing X hoping that Y^n will come to pass.
As a side note, this is what SaaS is all about and why I believe it has started becoming so popular. When you use a hosted service (as we do in my professional life) you aren't paying for the right to use X software so much as you are for using X services for a period of time. Napster is a perfect example of a SaaS gone wrong and there is much to learn from it. What if Napster had chosen/had to pay the artists up front for distribution and the method had been just a part of the business model? Metallica and Madona could have made a huge sum of money by licensing their work for distribution through Napster if they'd received a gross fee based on trends. If Napster had done this then it might be a big player today instead of a historical footnote.
"Give me product to distribute, and if it does well, I'll pay you Y per instance."
"No, you figure out what it is worth to have X and pay me that, and THEN I'll give it to you."
Which one is fair? It seems that Switzerland is banking on it being the second.
I am the son of a farmer. I've never observed my father to receive payment after he sold his crop because people bought it or failed to receive payment after he sold it because it wasn't distributed well later.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
You can have the benefits of my labor for free when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
That was my thought, too, at least generally. I think if you create something and you want compensation for its use, you should be able to expect that.
Where I have a problem with the whole thing is organizations like the RIAA suing for millions when someone does download songs or a movie. If I walk into a store and steal a DVD and get caught, I get fined a few hundred perhaps. But not millions.
I have even more of a problem with GEMA, the German equivalent of the RIAA. They not only think they own the music of commercial artists, they think they own all music. So, if I play my own music that I wrote in a local bar, they still require me to pay them (according to a musician I spoke with recently). I personally think the RIAA and the GEMA should be declared illegal and music theft be handled just like any other theft. If they find you "stole" music and there is proof of it, you should pay a fine commensurate with the same fine you'd pay if you shoplifted and be done with it.
That move the risk to people that have a much harder time evaluating it, and incur insane transaction costs. It is significantly easier to evaluate "Do I want to pay for specific software X that let me do Y today" than "Will the software that this write in five years be what I need in five years? Will this guy even be able to write software?"
So due to the transaction costs, it is not better for society, though I think you're right that it would be if there were no transaction costs.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
"So due to the transaction costs, it is not better for society"
It seems you are implying that when the risk is in the side of the producer there're not costs for society. Bad news: the costs are exactly the same since a failed project is a failed project anyway.
But the basis of marketplace-like capitalism is that both producers and consumers are perfectly informed of their options which is less the case when there are production efforts that are invisible for the consumer. Add to this that the "trick" for license-based business is that while the production costs are bounded, benefits are not. That's what allowed to the owners of the software giants from the eighties-nineties to become some of the richest people of the world in record time spans. Whenever you see net benefits going well over 100% you can bet capitalism is not working as expected and society as a whole has a worse deal.
M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
There are not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.
Hubert H. Humphrey
One can only hope.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Permanence is wholly irrelevant to theft. stealing is the act of taking away something from somebody that the taker had no lawfully recognized right to do. That's all there is to it.
A copyright infringer is depriving the copyright holder of some measure of the exclusivity that they were supposedly going to have by utilizing copyright in the first place. Since exclusivity, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, when somebody else does, that exclusivity is compromised. (Permanently, even.)
Of course, one might want to counter with the notion that this exclusivity is intangible and therefore not eligible to be equated with any real value. Ultimately, however, the tangibility of something is irrelevant to its perceived value by a given individual. You can rightfully be expected to receive compensation for somebody else expecting use of your own time, for example... as time is definitely intangible, and one's own time is often of great value to them. Admittedly, the analogy to time breaks down quickly, because about the only way your time can be taken from you is if you are murdered... which is such an exponentially more serious crime than the theft of any property as to render the argument on whether that time which was taken has any value to be moot. Nonetheless, the only real finicky issue with something that is intangible is that its measure of value is going to be very subjective. At best, you might be able to argue that such intangible things are not really "property"... but that does not mean that they cannot be taken away from somebody. And if they are taken by somebody who has no lawfully recognized right to do so, then it's entirely reasonable to call such an action "theft".
Children aren't really property either (not in any sense of real "ownership", at least)... but they can definitely be stolen... Admittedly, there is another lawfully recognized term for the act, "kidnapping", but that does not mean that it is not a type of theft.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"It's digital, I can jut copy and share it at no cost to me. Screw the author and his expense for creating the original copy."
Well to be fair there was no cost to the author to create the 'copy' either.
So what artists, photographers, writers, etc should be charging for is the 'creation' of art not the sale of a copy that cost nothing to make.
Or what the creators should so is leverage the infinite copy ability to drive sales of things that are not infinite. Like the support of your software, see Red Hat for an example. Who knows your stuff better than you do? THAT is the scarce good that simply can't be replicated easily or infinitely.
The photographer should be publishing his pictures far and wide to drive more people to purchase his 'skill' at taking pictures. As the internet shows, this is not a common skill but something fairly rare. Selling the digital 'copy' is just selling something it took you nothing to create, and yes that is morally wrong.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I HATE that people teach that plagiarism is stealing, when it is in fact a fraud, deception [which, while it can lead to stealing/theft is not theft in of itself] - it logically drove me nuts because I KNEW that the labeling neither fit the act, nor actually emphasizes the problem with plagiarism properly - a job that fraud does much better. Glad to think I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Your comparison of using digital goods to eating farmer's crops, using cars, etc still fails majorly to grasp the difference that makes such simplifications overly simplified and, IMO of course, erroneous.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Take a beginners course on production inputs.
That is insightful. I'd mod you up if I could.
Temporarily adopt an unacceptable position to force an opponent to execute an expensive move in your favour.
Excellent strategy! Well spotted if this turns out to be the case.
In the mean time, it will be interest to see how this plays out for the profit margins of media companies for Swiss sales.
IIRC sales are usually on the increase right before this type of sanity is killed. Napster? Morpheus? .. firstly 1) Can't be purchased and secondly 2) are deemed to be 'illegal'. )
(and yes, for the record, I purchased a playstation 2 and got Final Fantasy X just because of several AMV music clips featuring FFX. Same goes for several anime series including Inuyasha... it's a real pity that AMV videos and the like
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
There's a media executive somewhere in the US who's blaming Europe's economic crisis on this realistic, rational approach to copyright law.
I can also see them signing all of their letters with their name and the slogan: Fuck facts, I'm rich.
Hey mods/metamods, Flamebait is not a disagree mod. This is a statement of fact, thus I fail to see why it would deserve a Flamebait mod.
A friend of mine makes music. He's been on the local radio station, and more recently some other stations across the country. AFAIK, without any major label backing.
Beyond that, the relationships between radio and studios changed. Online radio, for example, is something the studios want to *CHARGE* for, as opposed to using them for promotional purposes.
Add to that, in many places playing music from the radio in a coffee shop or whatever still requires a special license, even though anyone could tune it in for free individually.
Music execs wonder why their house of cards is falling... some of the above are just a few examples.
Weird, it still doesn't work and keeps redirecting to the http version.
I actually ended up typing it by hand in IE initially, and after reading your reply tried typing it by hand in firefox too.
I dunno why slashdot hates me, but it doesn't want to give up the goods.
I do have an account obviously, and I do not have advertisements disabled even though they give the option. I am not a paid/subscriber account though.
So if I download stuff from a server in Switzerland, do the laws of Switzerland apply or do the laws where I live apply?
How many brilliant film producers are going to front a couple of million dollars to see their work through completion?
"So due to the transaction costs, it is not better for society"
It seems you are implying that when the risk is in the side of the producer there're not costs for society.
That's not my view at all; I'm sorry that it came off that way. The part that was implied and probably shouldn't have been is that a more closely estimated risk has a significantly lower cost than one that's less closely estimated. This is a common economic theory; it is generally considered that higher risk (variation) goes with a need for higher returns (see e.g. modern portfolio theory).
I also think there's several reasons why the risk will be lower if taken by the software developer rather than through contracts for future payment. As a software developer, I can change the scope of the project. I can start out with something that I think will be a Windows program, and then if Mac becomes popular among my target group, I can switch to having a user interface for Mac (only) instead. Or I can switch to a web interface. Or I can switch my product around, and instead of having it target general music enthusiasts, I can find that my beta DJ users love it and would be willing to pay a significant price for it, while the general music lover says "Meh." In the worst case, the developer can cancel it if it takes too long to develop. However, if I'm going to pay for somebody to develop something, I am not willing to pay for "We'll deliver it on some platform; and it will do something that some people are interested in." I want a specific set of features, for a specific platform. This adds risks for the developer, as they lose flexibility.
There's also the important part of time delayed delivery and customer circumstances changing. If I have something that takes a while to develop, it's likely that some of the potential customers have moved on to other things, while some new customers have come along. As an extreme example, if I'm developing a game that target 12-13 year old girls and it takes four years to develop, *all* potential customers will have moved on and been replaced by new customers. As a less extreme example, I might have switched to wanting my software on the Mac or on the web or on Android - while having paid for what seemed reasonable at the time. This adds risks for the customer.
Bad news: the costs are exactly the same since a failed project is a failed project anyway.
But the costs of a failed project are different, and the value of the money is different. As an example, if I'm in a startup, software that I can use now has a high value, and cash in hand has high value - while software that I get delivered in a while has much less value.
But the basis of marketplace-like capitalism is that both producers and consumers are perfectly informed of their options
I think you're thinking of what defines a perfect market / perfect competition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition)?
which is less the case when there are production efforts that are invisible for the consumer. Add to this that the "trick" for license-based business is that while the production costs are bounded, benefits are not. That's what allowed to the owners of the software giants from the eighties-nineties to become some of the richest people of the world in record time spans. Whenever you see net benefits going well over 100% you can bet capitalism is not working as expected and society as a whole has a worse deal.
You're thinking of "increasing return to scale". That's certainly one of the violations, but there's also violation of "Homogeneous products", "Perfect information", and probably some others.
In the specific case of Microsoft, they manipulated the market by tying their product to another product (CPUs), making sure that if anybody else wanted to sell a competing product, that product would have to be bough *in addition to* Microsoft's product.
As for ne
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.