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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 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"
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.
Also they pay 'copyright tax' on every blank media, hdd and ssd sold that get redistributed to registered artists.
I don't condone piracy but I can understand it.
Yeah, well... I condone quantum mechanics, but I don't understand it.
I only have 1 anecdote, but for sure I would not spend money on buying TV series on DVD if I didn't download some of the series first.
I have spent hundreds on TV series in the past 4 years that was only spent because I could preview the show via download.
I had never spent a dime on a DVD and didn't intend to until I started downloading.
So for some people at least, the industry don't lose one red cent of money from downloading, but instead makes money it would have never made if downloading didn't exist.
Wax on, wax off baby!
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.
You're missing the point, either deliberately or not by a mistake. First of all, with or without pirated content you're still going to pay for food, gas, rent and utilities, so you cannot count that money. Nor can you count the money you wouldn't use on media anyways. Secondly, they mean the money you'd use on media you're likely to spend on media anyways, with or without pirated content available. There are of course always individuals who differ from the general norm, but it does hold true for the general populace.
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!
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.
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.
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.
It depends what you mean by 'costs'.
Fundamentally the Swiss argument is correct.
Let's say you spend 10% of your disposable income on music. Now Napster comes along and you download all your music for free, depriving record company executives - I'm sorry, starving artists - that 10% of your disposable income.
Now, the key question is: what do you do with the savings?
Your piracy is only ultimately 'costing' the overall economy anything if you then reduce your working hours and take a pay cut that exactly offsets the money you would otherwise have spent on music. If instead you do the same amount of work and take the money and do something else with it - anything else - then the overall world economy has lost precisely nothing. That money winds up going to someone, somewhere. It stays in the system. It isn't magically destroyed.
There's some interesting subsidiary questions, of course. Like 'what do you spend the money on instead'? At _this_ specific point the Swiss argument is on somewhat shaky ground; I'm not sure they sufficiently proved that the money would be spent on other entertainment products. It would seem more reasonable that maybe people would spend it on _other_ discretionary spending instead. Maybe clothes, put it towards a car, drinks - it doesn't really matter. The point is that if you take the saving and spend it on something else, you're now not just 'costing' the specific music artists in question money, you're 'costing' the entire entertainment industry money.
This is the key point: this is really what the entertainment industry is worried about. And to a degree it's a legitimate worry. Making it very easy to pirate stuff probably _does_ cost the entertainment industry some amount of money, overall, compared to what they could theoretically make if it wasn't possible. It's a complex argument, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but the point of view that it does can at least be sustained.
Now, the entertainment industry is of course entirely self-serving and therefore attempts to portray this specific loss of economic activity in their sector as if it is some sort of magic overall loss to the economy. It Costs X Billion Dollars, they say - though those X Billion Dollars are not, as we've already seen, magically destroyed. They just go somewhere else. It Costs X Hundred Thousand Jobs - again, it probably doesn't. The jobs just wind up in some other sector.
However, the entertainment lobby again has a legitimate argument - to some degree, in some jurisdictions. See, you can make the argument that there is an overall cost to an even bigger entity than 'the entertainment industry' - it can be reasonably sustained that there's some degree of overall concrete negative effect on the economies of specific countries. Particularly those countries which are dominant in the entertainment industry.
Now maybe it becomes a little more clear why America is always pushing for jackbooted copyright laws: America is at the forefront of the worldwide entertainment industry. Hollywood probably represents a huge net trade surplus to the American economy: lots of people who aren't Americans spend part of their disposable income on American movies, American music and so on. Maybe if you go spend that money on clothes instead, more of it winds up in China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a computer instead, more of it winds up in...er, China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a vacation to Beijing instead...hey, okay, I kid. But you see the point. While it's almost inarguably true that piracy does not have any overall impact on the global economy, it's certainly plausible to argue that, to some degree, it hurts America and benefits just about everyone who isn't America.
That degree is probably proportionally tiny. But you can bet it's a scare card the entertainment lobby plays as hard as it can to politicians.
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.
. . .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.
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.
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.
I don't get this. Why would someone pay for something they already got for free?
Added value. Most people are not going to download full BluRay iso from the net, but .avi's that lack extra features, extra languages, resolution, quality, etc. thus buying the movie again after having verified that it's actually worth to have will still give some things they haven't seen yet. This might of course only apply to a lesser degree to other media.
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
That however doesn't mean that it is not contributing to that. A heavy movie watcher will get their movies through all available channels, some of them might be piracy, because there simply isn't any commercial offering that offers him what piracy does.
I just don't get the mindset that not only thinks they are entitled to something they didn't pay for
Well, most people pirate simply because they can, a lot because they don't have the money, some because they like to try before they buy, some because they want to "catch'em all", etc. In essence there are lots of reasons why people might pirate. It's not about entitlement, but simply about availability.
Also, do you have a clear conscience while forwarding through commercial breaks on a TV recording? As that's pretty much the same thing as piracy, at least morally speaking.
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 signifies a level of denial I can't even begin to imagine suffering under.
There is no level of denial. Copyright is not something 'God given" or "law of nature", it's something that was established to benefit society. The problem today is that fighting piracy is causing far more harm then good and has absolutely no benefit to society. It also has lead to a lot of invasion into privacy and other corrupt laws.
(but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!)
That's about deriving profits from other peoples work, while not following the license. Very different thing. Your average pirate isn't all that big of a fan of commercial piracy either.
Irony with that of cause is that current laws drive people into commercial piracy, as services like Rapidshare, Megaupload and whatever provide better privacy protection then Bittorrent.
How do they reach that conclusion?
Maybe if you read the fucking article you wouldn't have to guess.
In summary "The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don't spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary."
They actually did surveys and have figures to back that up. But don't let facts get in the way when they go against your preconceptions.
You know, I'm Dutch. Nowhere I've lived does anyone leave the stroller outside the store, people would consider anyone who did so careless. What I have noticed however is the total idiocy of Americans when they hear the word socialism, it's like the magic word to turn their brains inside out; if you so much as mention the word that conflicts with their very deeply held belief in their governmental system they perform the same acts of miraculous mental gymnastic that extremely religious tend to do.
People here are greedy, people are shit, individualist, selfish. You know what? They're still human. Hey imagine, we also have crime and stuff.
Please try and decipher the world without adhering to socialism as some antagonizing feature for ideas. If I go out of a job, I am fucked just as you are. I pay insurance every month to make sure I can afford a doctor and dentist. I also pirate, I pirate the shit out of things; especially popular american culture. All my money goes to artists who rise above that level of discourse. I pay my taxes happily knowing that some people benefitted from that education 'socialist' me provides so I can enjoy the fruit of their labor instead of watching something made to appeal to some total zombie.
There will always be a difference between any two countries, but please don't draw utterly stupid and uneducated conclusions from brainwashed guesswork. And thanks to socialism you can even disagree with me because I speak your language. Ace.
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.
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.
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.