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US Survey Shows Piracy Common and Accepted
bs0d3 writes "A new U.S. survey sponsored by the American Assembly has revealed that piracy is both common and accepted. The surveys findings show that 46% of adults and 75% of young people have bought, copied, or downloaded some copyright infringing material. 70% of those surveyed said it's reasonable to share music files (PDF) with friends and family. Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%."
If it's OK for the media lobbies to steal our public domain works from us in perpetuity, then by all means let's even the score.
Once more into the breach for Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1841 & 1842:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
You'll find a commentary on the first speech with references on Kuro5hin.
And in a final bit of irony you can buy these 160 year old public-domain speeches printed in a paperback book for $21.24 from Amazon.com. So there is even no need for long onerous copyright if there's profit to be made in public domain works.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's too bad they're too busy downloading and sharing music to call their congressmen, threaten not to vote for them if they vote for SOPA/PIPA, and actually follow through on that threat on election day.
I suspect many people won't come forward
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
...music, DVDs, a cup of milk, a tool, a lawnmower, a car. People have been sharing media ever since the first record was pressed. Farmers have been sharing equipment since... the beginning of time. But you don't hear John Deere crying about it. All laws do is make a good deal of the population guilty of federal crimes. Ask Uncle Sam how well that fight against pornography worked. Or the war on drugs.
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
Whatever social value(s) the media industry was trying to impress upon us over the last 10 years have failed, and it's too late to re-educate the next generation of parents. It's only going to get worse from here, and they've spent a decade building animosity in their customers. They'll pass that animosity along to their children in terms of pirated Disney films, Dora the Explorer and whatever the next incarnation of Teletubbies are. Instead of selecting a VHS from the family video library, they'll be directed to the pirate bay or similar to find whatever obscure children's video isn't already on netflix on-demand.
The generational shift has already happened, and public favor is against the media industry. Something's gotta budge, and it isn't public opinion.
moox. for a new generation.
I wonder what percentage of people are directly hostile to the notion of copyrights? I know I am
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Ask Uncle Sam how well that fight against pornography worked. Or the war on drugs.
Or the war on alcohol - which is the greatest example of why the government does far more harm than good when it tries to tell people what they should want. Not only do the majority ignore the laws and do it anyways, but they also create a large number of violent criminals to supply said product to the masses.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
How long until someone files a DMCA complaint against this report?
If the cost of a product is higher than the cost of reproducing and distributing that product yourself, the cost of the product is obviously set too high.
If movies and music cost just pennies, but all or most of that revenue went to the actual artist, artists would most likely make MUCH more money, because people would be willing and able to purchase a much greater amount of products.
If this is right, then we IP Abolitionists just need to go up against impossibly wealthy entrenched interests to get the legal system fixed. Easy, right?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
In Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists it really shows how much things were different way back in 1974 - or one year after I was born. When I was growing up - in the heyday of the Commodore 64 - piracy wasn't even questioned one iota. Everyone did it, you pooled together $5 each from your circle of friends, bought a game, and promptly pirated it for everyone and drew a lot to see who would get the original. Back then DRM-cracking-copy-programs were legal and the hypocrisy of the times is that they would copy everything but themselves. You had to use a different copy program to copy a copy program for your circle of friends.
Now, it's different. We're slowly being taught that information is analogous to physical property. I'm coming around to it. I no longer pirate any software at all. If it wasn't for gaming I'd be 100% free software. I have a ways to go yet before I'm fully compliant but it's coming. Free software at it's core also depends on copyright, the protections afforded to commercial software are what also enables FOSS. If you're FOSS evangelizing you automatically should be a supporter of copyright.
Music, books, software: they are all different facets of the same thing. If someone wants to give their effort away - FOSS - then that is their right and it needs to be respected. If someone want's to charge for it it is the exact same right. You don't need it that bad if you don't want to comply with the license to acquire some information - go make it yourself and release it if you want under your own terms.
Shh.
Who coulda written a better title; I was like, "damn, I like pirating an shit" but then I realized pirating sucks because everyone does this and people lose lots and lots of money.
Dont copy that floppy. ( uh huh ) Home taping kills music ( to show my age ) Just don't upload to public sites (advice to my kids) Btw, the kids don't torrent, they don't need to.
Lending and copying aren't the same thing. If I lend I do not make a copy of said thing. Digital files are digital copies of a creative work, and because the file is duplicated, ie, a copy, it is then violating _copy_rights.
John Deere won't cry because you can't just _copy_ a tractor. It takes real work and real knowledge, time and skill to take one apart, figure all the pieces, all the compression, setup, etc., and build an exact copy.
I don't support the excessive fines and draconian attitude, and copyright holders should be limited in to how much legal intimidation they're allowed to.
The last sentence in the summary -- "Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%." -- is not accurate. Check page 8 of the PDF. There is a particularly harshly worded prompt which drew only 36% support, but in every other question there was higher support for internet filtering -- in some scenarios a majority support filters.
Wishing don't make it so.
The whole country is criminals. Put everyone in prison to stop the piracy!
Copyright is a bargain between the people and the creators and owners of content, in which the people grant a temporary and limited monopoly in return for the ultimate ownership of the content.
The people of the United States (and, for that matter, the rest of the world) have shifted the terms of that bargain some. It will take a while for their representatives to catch up, but they will.
The following was from a very recent discussion and is relevant to this. I release it to the public domain :-)
The public domain is valuable to society. Copyright was created to get more people to create content for the public domain. We seem to have forgotten that. Since we have damaging and abusive laws protecting Imaginary Property when the public domain has been harmed by special interest legislation, copyright holders can listen to the world's smallest violin.
I agree with strong copyright laws if the exclusive rights lasts for about 15 years, or whatever is reasonable for the market. Longer than that is simply corruption that needs to be corrected. But these days, with technology, convenience, and economies of scale that were never before possible, I am skeptical that we need any government laws to protect content producers. The laws protecting content produces harm the general public more than help in numerous ways.
A while ago, corporations could only exist if it was proven that their existence was a benefit to the public. Now, we write laws that protect the corporations from the general public. It seems like everything about laws these days are backwards.
The public's burden of corporate special interests is already quite high, and our corrupt political and economic system needs to either be reformed or loose credibility. To the degree that reform fails, the loss of credibility for a corrupt system is ethical. Luckily, we are not near any kind of breaking point yet, and I hope that someday the pendulum starts to swing the other way, but it is conceivable and historically probable that we the people continue to support a corrupt system until very painful and long lasting damage is done. Civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent resistance that can effect change. Its utilization can avoid later violent resistance. I like laws and a functioning government, and oddly enough, the best way to protect all laws is to sometimes break a few bad ones (nonviolently, of course). Interestingly, breaking laws is the only way that the justice system can correct these kind of things, but it seems to be sorely underused.
I personally do not commit copyright infringement, but I happen to be lucky enough to afford the ability to avoid copyright infringement. I cannot condemn copyright infringement when artificial scarcity is being inflicted upon the infringers by the lobbyists of the large content producers. To have sympathy for the large content producers and the corrupt system that inflicts harm onto others is to invite Stockholm syndrome.
Here's hoping that things improve, but things are not going to improve via complacency. These kinds of discussions are needed, and oddly enough, they are fueled by the conflict between the infringer and infringee. Humanity is flawed, and I prefer to be realistic about ourselves. I prefer philosophy that takes into account all systems rather than focusing on only a few (and ignoring the rest at potential detriment).
It's quite interesting that this report was timed for publication at the same time that intesnse debate on a variety of proposed legislative acts to "combat" piracy is taking place.
The American Assembly claims to be non-partisan, but releasing a report at the crux of intense scrutiny over orwellian language in PIPA and SOPA was a reckless move, or worse if their intentions were politically influenced.
The folks on Capital Hill don't listen to the common people.
Their only master is the 1% who can pay them.
From patent trolls to perpetual copyrights to SOPA to ..... those a_holes in Capital Hills are killing American ingenuity as we know it.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...music, DVDs, a cup of milk, a tool, a lawnmower, a car. People have been sharing media ever since the first record was pressed. Farmers have been sharing equipment since... the beginning of time. But you don't hear John Deere crying about it. All laws do is make a good deal of the population guilty of federal crimes. Ask Uncle Sam how well that fight against pornography worked. Or the war on drugs.
Uhhh... thank you, this raises the boulder from my chest... I was thinking only /.-ers had a... (how should I put it?...) pro-sharing mindset.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
To begin, we all agree that piracy is a form of stealing? A content creator loses out on a royalty every time someone downloads their material, though by the same token it's not as if by someone downloading this material they're inhibiting other people from accessing that same material.
Big media would rather avoid the elephant in the room and use piracy as the scapegoat for their broken business model. What I said above about not inhibiting someone else from accessing that material is a real game-changer. One that takes their old business model of controlling both content and distribution and renders it outdated and comparably inconvenient to consumers.
Consumers know what they'd like to see in response from big media, better pricing (Since you're no longer paying for the manufacturing of physical media, or the take from retailers and distributors), in a format that is versatile, agnostic and accessible to the consumer. Study after study quite clearly states that people are willing to pay a reasonable price for content as opposed to stealing it.
Rather than address their own failings and the thought that their business model broken for close to twenty years, big media would rather cut their own throats through unpopular campaigns, dirty politics, blatant lying and launching an expensive, pointless campaign against their own (potential) customers. Amazingly the only outcome of all of this has been an increase in piracy and how readily people will accept it as an alternative. Somehow big media in the process legitimized piracy in the eyes of the public.
Maybe if the RIAA and similar organizations spent more money on making music available at more reasonable prices and more easily, people wouldn't pirate as much? I looked at specifically the RIAA's public records of their yearly sales years ago...and when did they stop making money? Not when Kazaa and Limewire were around...it was about the same. They made less money when DRM started getting rampant and restricting how people could use their own CDs...it was remarkable how much they lost. Then, you have to think, where's all this cash coming from to pay for the lawyers to sue college kids who downloaded some Britney Spears song off some torrent site (as if that weren't embarrassing enough in and of itself, now the kid's in debt millions and have their life ruined). Then there's the cash for them to pay some mindless sheeple to go lobby for them. Does anyone remember how much LESS CDs cost years ago before they started throwing cash in every direction to try to stop pirating that didn't actually lose them that much to begin with? They're very likely spending more money kicking and screaming against the times changing (which, p.s. you can't prevent) than they would've lost if they just sat back and did nothing other than occasionally made some noise with scary tv commercials over how you can go to jail for the music on your iPod.
Frankly, SOPA doesn't deserve to pass if only because there probably isn't even one one old baggy senator in all of Capitol Hill that doesn't have some pirated song on his/her damn iPod. Honestly, I'm glad they did this survey. These industries should know: we don't care that you're losing money...because making millions but not millions as much as you used to when more than half this country is having trouble just finding work to feed their families doesn't make us feel a damn bit of pity for you. Settle for a damn Porche instead of a Ferrari, be happy, and shut the hell up while the rest of us just go on working our fingers to the bone just to give our kids the lives they deserve.
Internet Blocking has a higher approval rating then congress
You make a good point. In fact, people didn't have the equipment nor expertise needed to make copies of records back in the day either. But I do remember the controversy in the 1980s over the dual-cassette recorder (I was a teenager then). We went to the store, bought a pack of blank cassettes, and copied each other's music. The recording artists threw a fit and they were told to stick a sock in it. EVERYONE had copies. Everyone also had some originals. The same is true today. Somehow, the artists survived (and certainly didn't go hungry) during the 80s. The same is true today. Just ask iTunes and Amazon about all the (non-DRM) music they sell.
And if I make a copy of something, use it once and never again, what is the difference between this and lending, apart from the academic point you are trying to make?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Our government is ran by the people, yet we seem to be getting lost somewhere. I personally believe some forms of copyright are necessary, but if the majority of the people believe we should have none, then we should have none. At worst we should find a compromise that fits the will of most of the people. But it seems that the more the people feel copyrights are too restrictive, the more the laws become more draconian. I don't want to start an discussion of what is or isn't the best level of copyright protection, but I would like to say that if you disagree with a law, it's your job to let your representatives know it's bad and to try to get as many people that agree with you to tell them also. If you aren't proactive with your government you really aren't doing everything you can to let your side of the argument be heard and considered. If you aren't happy with a law, don't fall into the rut of thinking there is nothing you can do, but begin letting everyone know why it needs to be changed. You should be able to decide, rather then just be stuck to follow, on what course you want your legislature to steer the nation.
There is no such thing as intellectual property.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_attacked_by_Somali_pirates/ This is not acceptable, when in rest of the world there is an effort to curb piracy. It is appalling that in US public opinion piracy is acceptable. This is all due to Hollywood glorifying them through films like Pirates of the Caribbean.
Since you can lend a DVD (but not copy it), how about a system that let's you lend a file:
Basically, while somebody is watching the movie, you cannot access it, that is, there are a limited number of licenses available and somebody who wants to watch a movie requests a license, so someone who has it, sends it. The file itself can be downloaded by the usual means, but at any single time there are no more active licenses (movie copies being watched) as there was copies sold. However, since most people do not watch a movie all the time, on a large network you could probably be able to share one license with 100 people. So, everybody pays a small subscription fee (which is used to buy new movies). However, I somehow doubt that the media industry would like this network any more than they "like" the pirate bay.
Of course, it would be impossible to make this system work in reality, because that would require working DRM, and as we know, DRM does not work.
You can't copy a tractor, but you can copy an audio amplifier. The older ones even had circuit diagrams in the user manuals.
You can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The results are based on interviews on landline and cellular telephones conducted in English with 2,303 adults age 18 or older living in the continental United States from August 1-31, 2011
2,303 isnt anywhere near a decent sample size. get a minimum of 100K people that are evenly geographically distributed and then we can talk. also, you are getting answers from people that are willing to waste their time on a stupid on the phone. as far as we know, they went to a single college and called the dorms.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
lets see... was it somewhere in between people writing about eric raymond's sexual adventures and people asking Rusty where the money went?
is that i did not look at the front page when i wrote it. i just remembered back to the sort of thing going on in the comments and story queue... eric raymond fan-fic was what popped to mind.
and so i go back there, 10 years later, looking at the front page... what is there? same damn thing. eric raymond fan fic.
Unfortunately, that's the whole point... it's all about justifying the buildup of the police state. From drugs all the way through reactions to terrorism.
You can in China...
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Unfortunately, that's the whole point... it's all about the justifying buildup of the police state. From drugs to reactions to terrorism.
I grew up buying vinyl instead of tapes as my dad had a great bazillion dollar setup (don't know how much, but thousands in '70s era money - hey, we even had a VCR that didn't support SLP and couldn't play friends' movie recordings from the pay channels), which included this perfect-sounding phonograph (all super-balanced floating on these cool legs so the base wouldn't cause it to skip) which we had hooked up to a very high-end tape recorder (even had a 8-track too, oh, and the receiver was a quadraphonic deal, but I never had any vinyl that took advantage of that as only one of our vehicles had 8-track, and we replaced it with tape before I was buying my own music). When I bought a vinyl album, I bought a high-end metal tape to copy it to and listen from. I'd wear out the tapes, then create new ones from the vinyl - which was the only time I ever used the vinyl. Still have all my vinyl, but no high-end phonograph to listen to them on.
Other than the metal tape copies, then next thing I remember doing was buying a 5-disc changer with my first summer job monies and a half-dozen CDs. Disc changer lasted about 10 years, receiver was in my daughter's room until recently while cleaning up - but half the time she'd rather listen to mp3's on her phone as it follows around in her pocket.
I own physical copies of all the music I have, or I have detailed records of when and where I downloaded music from (proving it was a free released from an artist, etc.). Not sure what my kiddos will do when they grow up and move out - hopefully the music industry will have solved this. Otherwise, I'll be deleting all the digital copies I have of physical CDs that I've given them when they move out (provided they even care to take them). I'm hoping my kids will continue in integrity, and I'm hoping the media dinosaurs can grow up and not go extinct.
Actually, my preference would be for artists to rise up and overthrow the labels and just deal with fans direct. I'd really rather just have my cash going to them and the folks behind the creation of the art.
The sample size is adequate for a 2% margin of error assuming the sample was sufficiently random.
margin of error = sqrt(1/n) assuming that npopulation, and sample is random.
You may have a point about the lack of randomness but the sample size is pretty good.
Brett
Until content publishers offer a simple, affordable, hardware neutral method of legally obtaining and owning every TV show, film and song ever created, over the Internet, pirates will have the advantage.
It's not quite that simple. People rebel against a law of that nature when they can see no benefit from the law. Government initiatives to iodize salt have been tremendously successful at reducing the incidence of goiter. Seatbelt laws are not widely flouted.
The problem with copyright is that the perceived social benefit is not there. Similarly, laws typically work better if they're fair. Since these laws obviously don't apply to the rich, don't expect anyone else to take them seriously either.
-- Darktan
If you want people to respect for copyright, copyright law, copyright holders, and copyright apologists are going to have to have respect for people. Otherwise, the public will just ignore it for being an idiotic, unreasonable law. If you don't like that, TOUGH, bits will never be more difficult to copy than they are today. Copyright exists for the sake of the public welfare and only for that sake, while benefiting authors is merely a means to an end.
Also, it's not being a douchebag to ignore the wishes of the author. In fact, the fair use coverage for parodies is an essential portion of free speech, which is the cornerstone of modern societies, and those protections are needed ESPECIALLY for uses of a work that go against the author's wishes. I understand that rightsholders often attack those foundations of liberty for their own gain (often having success when those exercising free speech don't have the funds to properly defend themselves), but the rightsholders are the ones being douchebags in such a situation.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Not really. That water is wet isn't exactly news either.
The more the greedy media corporations lobby the clueless politicians into making more and more absurd draconian laws, the more piracy will be accepted, simply as a form of rebellion against the lockdown.
If it was all about about making money for the creators of IP, they would adhere to the age-old laws of supply and demand. There's a demand and if you want to make money from it, you need to supply what's needed to fill the demand. But when the demand for electronic media arose they didn't create a supply to fill it; they created restrictions through lobbying and DRM in a seriously futile attempt to preserve the status quo. The demand is still there and now - as always - someone else steps in to fill it. Like the gangsters and mobsters filled the need for alcohol during prohibition, the file sharing pirates filled the need for electronic media.
Methods of delivery and protections against being caught surfaced. Napster. Bittorrent. The Pirate Bay. VPN... Technologies that didn't exist until the pirates needed them. Okay, VPN existed but got a huge boost when it became popular to use it to hide illegal downloads and to circumvent geo-discrimination. Now these technologies makes distribution of anything simple and hiding easy. Terrorists and pedophiles rejoice.
Congratulations! - You alienated your customers, made piracy common and accepted, gained nothing - and helped drive innovation that now enables terrorists and pedophiles to better hide and distribute their wares with ease and largely untraceable. I hope you're proud of your accomplishments!
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
So the people can't have what they want.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"Piracy" (in the context of copyrights) is defined as the act of illegally copying (and generally selling) for commercial profit!!!
PIRACY is a crime. Downloading is a civil infraction. They are NOT the same things, at all! And more than 99.9% of downloaders are NOT pirates.
When you conflate the two different concepts of infringement and piracy, you play straight into the hands of the content industry, which has been deliberately trying to confuse this issue for years.
STOP CALLING IT PIRACY, DAMNIT! It isn't. It's not the same act, it's not the same law.
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe seldom executed.
-Ben Franklin (yes THAT one)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You know what? Tom Cruise doesn't have the right to get 100 mil for prancing about in front of a fucking camera while a few 100 million people have to think about their bank balance before buying a sandwich. Take your opinion and kindly shove it up your arse.
Note that with 46% now committing the kind of crimes that can lose you your right to vote, the politicians are a little over half-way to eliminating the ability to vote them out of office.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You are right. The infinite, perfect reproduction of digital tools and culture is far, far better than mere lending. It's damn near magical! It is truly a quantum leap in civilisation, which makes it all the more repugnant that such a wonderful ability is locked away so that the proles can't do it. Anybody who wants that kind of restriction is essentially advocating for a modern day dark ages.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The recording artists threw a fit and they were told to stick a sock in it. EVERYONE had copies. Everyone also had some originals. The same is true today.
True, but back then it was a practical necessity, somebody had to have an original to copy from - generational copies sounded worse and so they would sell one copy to every clique in the network, if not to every person. Today that is only a social barrier, people only have originals because they choose to buy originals. If people decided to stop buying originals, well perfect copies would still be available on the Internet. We've seen it when prerelease games or movies leak to the Internet, from that single copy it can boom into millions faster than the blink of an eye. The courts don't have any chance to process a "war on pirates" that's much, much larger than the war on drugs and with far less public support. A few hundred thousands copyright holders can't control hundreds of millions of consumers if those consumers refuse to cooperate. The whole thing reminds me of the scene from the Gandhi movie where he tells people to make their own salt and the British arrest everyone and their mother, the prisons fill up with tens and tens of thousands of prisoners yet once millions and millions of Indians take that right for themselves, there's nothing the government can do to stop them. Copyright ends when we the people say enough is enough, and I don't mean through Congress. It ends when people stop respecting it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A quote I always remember from reading a computer magazine in the early 90s:
"If people could copy themselves a Porsche, they would."
They would, indeed.
By the same token creators seem to think they have the right to eat their cake and have it too. Once you share an idea, its no longer yours. That's how ideas work. You want to get paid for an idea ? Then sell it like people sell chairs, make one idea and expect to get one payment for it. Or find other ways to monetize your work , eg the average programmer doesn't get paid for ideas they get paid to produce stuff on demand.
Should photographs be illegal then? Should 3-d printers be illegal? Technology wipes away some businesses and creates new ones. We should be supporting new paradigms around technology instead of trying to make sure the old businesses can continue forever. Do you think anyone supported giving horseshoe manufacturers financial rewards when the car was invented? No, they just said "Wow look a new invention!" and ran with it. The world will be a better place without all the middlemen and women of the entertainment cartels.
Or the war on poverty. Biggest failure of them all.
I'm surprised libraries are not next. I can get movies, music, books and even audio books at the library for free; I can donate stuff to the library. We got those with a lot of fighting and the benefits of traditions started by our socialist founding fathers. The library is BARRED from digital books; why?? Barred from conversion of 1 type to another-- such as creating audio books for the blind of printed books they own. why?? Barred from digital distribution vs physical distribution, why?? If they can't do anything like non-profit publishing-- fine. But online distribution should be fine; you download and after 1 day you have to "return it" so another person can download; then it is not publishing but merely digital sharing without DRM. People rip CDs, DVDs, and even scan books from the library for decades...
New corrupt laws will make what was once a civil game to strike terror in down loaders into criminal law the STATE pays to freely go after people for the industry. It should remind you of drug law as well; we didn't care much about the drug users so we let them trample our rights and now....
I expect when somebody comes up with a brain erase technique they'll be trying to figure out how to charge you for REMEMBERING a song or chipping you and making you pay if you hum a melody.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
I think you're being a little optimistic about how recently piracy took off. The Internet has only accelerated what people were doing anyway.
In other news, major record labels now sell little more than over-produced poppy crap; high-end PC gaming today is little more than the 7th edition of a safe, high-value franchise that is only an awkward port of a console game anyway; and Hollywood movie studios are more enthusiastic about special-effect-laden blockbusters that work with 3D in cinemas and spawn a whole toy range than they are about telling interesting new stories using good quality acting.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You both make the real point, and why it leads to the perception that sharing is okay.
Copyrighted content used to be delivered by physical medium. It had separate value from that content. Those blank tapes cost money, blank CDs cost money too.
Digital came around and copies did not degrade, which meant that sharing was no longer limited to one or two "hops" before the quality was so low it was more preferable to buy a new copy.
In a way, Big Content fucked itself. It had the the last 50-60 years (ever since vinyl records were sold) to educate the public and put forth the perception that you were not buying the record as much as you were buying the right to listen to the record. Important distinction, which would have lead to a real understanding of just what copyright is, and what intellectual property is.
They did not want do to that, as that would have been logical, truthful, and fair. Anybody with a proof of purchase should have been able to walk into a store, or send a request, for a replacement copy and only paid for the cost of the medium, "printing", and shipping. Basically, a discount to get another copy back.
Maybe it was not that simple, but either way, public understanding of copyright was never very sophisticated.
Now that the content has been divested from the medium, in every sense, it's not a real surprise that the majority of people find sharing to be easy and "victim-less".
It was never possible to steal content, but now that you don't even need the physical medium, how do you retrain society to understand why it is important to pay for the works regardless of how cheap and easy it is to obtain a copy from an increasingly connected society where distribution channels are popping up as fast as new content?
At this point you don't even need blank CDs. An MP3 player and some external hard drives and all of the sudden your the fucking Library of Congress walking around with tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes nearly a million, in copyrighted content. Never mind that you could have only really afforded 1% of your library or less.
It's a serious problem. Society determines morality, not the other way around. I believe it is also referred to as the Elastic Clause in the US. Society has changed, but that does not seem to even slow down the push to destroy all of our freedoms to erect an impenetrable bulkhead to stop the erosion of profits for Big Content.
I support the idea to compensate artists, but quite frankly, it is becoming as hard to convince people of that as it is to educate them about copyrights in the first place.
Difference is, you don't make an exact copy of your lanwmower to lend out, you give your one and only. If you lent out your one and only DVD, that's of course fine, and THAT's what people have been doing since the dawn of man.
But no, you are making an exact copy of the DVD (as the case may be) and "sharing" that. That has been going on since 1996, when digital copying (as in exactly the same as the original, for as many exact copies you want to "share".
I think you KNOW the difference, and you know it's just a game that you pretend there is none.
Nice number games there. Amongst young people, piracy is "common and accepted" by 70% of 75% - which is 52.5%. Read from those numbers what you like.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
"I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir, any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed, I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honourable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months."
A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 5TH OF FEBRUARY 1841
by Thomas Babington Macaulay
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm
We're starting to see the mass disrespect and outright rejection and breakdown of law and order because the laws are not (intended to be) in the public interest.
The law fought the public interest and the law lost.
You can't spell, slashdot.
'Relevant', not 'relevent'.
Amazon only sells the Kindle edition with DRM, the man searched long and hard over different bookstores and at last he found a bookstore that sold it without DRM.
Unfortunately this bookstore only sold to the USA. Our man searched again and found a proxy service in the USA to use to buy the book, he created a account, pressed "buy" and entered his credit card number.
Then the website said that his credit card was not from the right county and refused the sale.
So, after many hours of trying to buy a legal copy, our guy ended up buying a, probably illegal copy from eBay for 1/6th of the Amazon prize.
Does he feel bad about it? Yes, that the author did probably not get any money for this book, but the book, as he wanted, simply was not available.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Amazon only sells the Kindle edition with DRM, the man searched long and hard over different bookstores and at last he found a bookstore that sold it without DRM. Unfortunately this bookstore only sold to the USA. Our man searched again and found a proxy service in the USA to use to buy the book, he created a account, pressed "buy" and entered his credit card number.
Then the website said that his credit card was not from the right county and refused the sale.
So, after many hours of trying to buy a legal copy, our guy ended up buying a, probably illegal copy from eBay for 1/6th of the Amazon prize.
Does he feel bad about it? Yes he does feel for the author, that he probably not get any money for this sale, but the book, as he wanted, simply was not available.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Btw, I agree with the above quote from your reply.
Where did this mindset of 'my vote has to count, even if it is for an unwanted candidate' come from?
Is it ego? (yeah, see, I was right!)
Is it 'gotta have deh Money Shot'?
I don't get the idea that your vote 'is wasted' on a third, or even a fourth candidate, unless it has to do with the Electoral College vote here in the USA.
*rhetorical question time* ...can't we come up with a better voting system?
For ****'s sake, we put a man on the moon...we have an app for that, etc.,
The sad fact is, until the two-party system is discarded/obsoleted, it will not change.
Write-ins help, 3rd parties help, but until the critical threshold that enables the above to influence the current voting and public awareness is reached, and fear from the established politicians realise the occurrence, nothing will change.
But I still try to write in, vote the issues and 'track record' of the candidate, vote independent where I morally can, and most of all...'stick the Evinrude in the mud puddle, instead of a measly stick' to stir things up, and talk to people,...I am trying to 'do my part'.
*sad fact: I can't compete with the media*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
We almost didn't get them. When the first dual-cassette recorder was made available in the UK, the BPI sued the manufacturer (Amstrad), claiming that by providing a technology so potentially useful for copyright infringement to the general public Amstrad were authorising their customers to use the technlogy for infringement. It was a vicious battle, which Amstrad eventually won. A very close parallel to the Betamax case in US law.
Huh?... You ARE buying the record, a physical object. There's no such thing as a "right to listen". It simply does not exist just as there is no a "right to breathe". Copyright does not extend to this area because - as it was originally created - it is set to regulate publishers, not end-users.
Yes, the big media would like to brainwash everyone into thinking that copyright extends to a much larger area than it actually does and that there are no exceptions for fair use (and - judging by highly rated comments here on Slashdot, where people should know better - they have not been without success) but it does not make it a fact - it just might make the way for it to become a fact, since who would complain when something is put into law that was thought to be situation all along?
Of course, the current situation leaves one wondering that what are you actually buying from, say, iTMS. You are not buying a physical object and certainly no license to any rights - it seems, you pay for a service that you can download songs from their server.
Real life is overrated.
It was even worse[?] before then, youngster.
Mid to late 1960's, we recorded underground radio stations to cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tape decks.
Thus, by way of aforesaid underground stations, I was exposed to something other than the 'Top 40/Bubblegum' genre, like Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes instead of The Beatles, then there was MC5, White Rhino, Fat Mattress,Blue Cheer etc.(pre- Clear channel and their ilk)
Bottom-line:
If it's analog, it can be transcribed to digital, given the right ADC.
Piracy should be a moot point now in the digital internet stage....it's too easy for the determined.
Bottom line:
It has been happening since various metallic tape recorders, and probably before that.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Another relevant point: back in the day, making a GOOD quality copy was an expensive proposition, which (so the argument goes) is why the act of producing quality copies was legally protected. Today, exact or near-exact copies are CHEAP to produce, and so are arguably no longer deserving of much legal protection.
...which would have lead to a real understanding of just what copyright is, and what intellectual property is.
...it is non-existent. People were always buying records, tapes, paintings, etc. and not abstract "intellectual property". If the publishing industry would finally realize this they could make a lot of money. Examples:
+ Don't sell software, sell the printed and nicely written user manual. People will buy software rather than copying it if it comes with a comprehensive manual.
+ Don't sell video games, sell access to services like game servers, rankings, online community forums, automatic save game backup, or sell physical items like maps, "cheat sheets" (e.g. with keyboard shortcuts), manuals, etc.
+ Don't sell music, sell universal access to music and automatic storage/backup...for example, sell the service that people can access their music collection everywhere they go fro the "cloud".
+ Don't sell movies, sell a high-quality and reliable, location independent streaming service that allows you to watch a movie via streaming out of a collection of over 20000 movies of all time periods.
People are very well willing to pay for content as long as it is accompanied with some additional value. (That's the reason why real books are still being sold...people purchase the added value of having a physical book that is not immediately destroyed by a few drops of rain or some spilled coffee.)
You can't teach people that two wrongs don't make a right. If you can't even persuade a majority of people that it is not right to execute murderers, how do you hope to persuade them that it is not right to break a law they consider unjust?
Look at Pirates of the Carribbean: At World's End for an analogy. Everyone knows that piracy - the real kind, with boats - is pretty bad. Robbery, violence, kidnapping, and murder. Nobody cheers for robbers and murderers. So why did people root for the pirates? Because the people opposing them were portrayed as Complete Monsters. They were hanging people left and right for alleged association with pirates, murdering, extorting and stealing to get their way, and usurping democracy. The pirates were the good guys because the East India Company was evil. It was all the more beautiful as an allegory because Hollywood could never have made it on purpose.
From DMCA to SOPA, and from Andrew Tenenbaum to Jammie Thomas, the media industry has sabotaged its own image with deadly efficiency again and again. They have set themselves up as the villains of the piece. Nobody should be surprised that people consider it legitimate and morally right to illegally copy their product. They don't see it as stealing; they see it as fighting back.
So the support for internet filtering is higher than the approval rating for all of congress, no wonder they're hitching a ride.
BUT ITS A LOST SALE! Of course lending is bad - thats why it sales insode the cover of every book and dvd - lending not allowed.
But it works equally well for the artists if every fan pays $100 and possesses digital copies of 10000 tracks or if they pay $100 and possess copies of 10 tracks. The idea that everyone owns "tens of thousands of dollars worth" of music is based on an an artificial idea of what music is worth. Yes, for the sake of argument, artists need to be compensated, somehow, but that doesn't mean you have to pay some huge price for every piece of art you happen to store a copy of.
Nope, typically a much reduced quality copy is made. Assuming you want to both download in a reasonable span of time and view the file on less beefy hardware.
Fair enough. But people have also been sharing seeds (as in crop seeds) for tens of thousands of years. And those reproduce indefinitely, and for practical purposes the copies are exact.
People have also been sharing songs and poems for thousands or tens of thousands of years, and employed mnemonic techniques such as rhyming, alliteration and metre to ensure the lyrics are remembered exactly. Examples: the Iliad and the Odyssey, Icelandic sagas, thousands of folk songs and old poetry.
People had also been copying written texts for a few thousand years before copyright was invented. Examples: everything written by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and all other civilizations with the ability to write before the 17th century.
So, now it is cheap to copy a music record, how come the prices are so high then ? This is just a matter of capitalism, if there is someone that can provide me the product cheaper, I will get it from them (think in China products) if record industry lower their prices profit will increase, people need to learn more calculus and try to depend less on draconian laws.
You cannot expect a poor people think they are not worth hearing the song rich people can hear legally, so, lower the poor population and profits will increase too, but for them is cheaper buying congres men
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Lending and copying aren't the same thing.
You are right. The infinite, perfect reproduction of digital tools and culture is far, far better than mere lending. It's damn near magical! It is truly a quantum leap in civilisation, which makes it all the more repugnant that such a wonderful ability is locked away so that the proles can't do it.
Entitlement culture. The "proles" figure they're entitled to consume entertainment/media for free, as long as there is no direct loss imposed on the provider. (ie: it's ok to play a copied media file, but not ok to steal a DVD) Media companies and artists figure they're entitled to lifetime income from every single creative act. Seriously: JRR Tolkein's grandchilden lead a life of leisure because he wrote four damn books?
Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between. It is only fair to compensate the people who produced your entertainment, but the value of that entertainment degrades with each passing view. It's also fair to relinquish your claim to that copyright once the material has been ubiquitously distributed so others can build on it. If the producers can't earn a living wage, the number and quality of entertainers will fall. So, we have to have (and obey) copyright restrictions, and the only question is under what terms? 130 years is too long; 130 days is too short.
Excellent point. It is even hard to imagine the possibilities. Thought about something? just get to the net and you could have at the tip of your fingers all history, with every publication, attempts, failures, etc. It is even difficult to think how would search engines develop in such a world. We are crippling ourselves with all the different and often inaccessible indexes, pay-walls, etc. The benefit to society would be huge and almost certainly much larger than all the media industry together. What would happen to individual content providers would be difficult to estimate and some things would disappear, such as movies costing $200 millions (and usually shitty anyway). But the prize would be fantastic.
MOST people will pay a reasonable price for something they want.
Louis CK just made a standup comedy special himself. Paid for the production of a 1 hour commercial-quality standup video (about $250,000), and put it up on the internet asking $5 to download it. It did have that $5 paygate, to prevent the casual downloading freeloader, but it is totally drm-free, and available in HD.
The response has been so overwhelming that once he paid for production, he capped his own income from the exercise at $220,000. He paid his production people a bonus of $250,000 and still has money left over, so is donating all excess to a number of charities. He's *already* given them $280,000.
An extraordinary success powered by creativity and (significantly) a lack of greed on his part. Win win win.
It's almost like we don't need the middlemen. Hm.
-Styopa
First of all, Jack Sparrow is cool and is my favourite drunken character from any film. But on a more serious note, in the 1960's the term PIRATE was used because radio stations broadcast outside a country's waters to circumvent the law. Nicknamed 'pirate radio stations' due to their watery bases.
In the 80's Sony sold vcrs. Sony also sold tapes. Sony also made movies and music cassettes. In the 90's Sony essentially owned the DVD ROM drive market. They sold DVD/CD burners and blank DVDs and CDs. They also sold movies on DVD and music on CDs.
Now Apple controls to a large extent, the music industry through iTunes. Blueray is not anywhere near as popular as DVD despite the efforts to make it so and people are sick of paying through the nose for everything. The entertainment industry is a total rip-off. Bottom line is they are going to have to accept people aren't prepared to pay the prices they are demanding anymore, and have technology that means they don't have to.
The people are not 'pirates'. The people are the villagers who are sick of being plundered by the Entertainment industry (who willingly bombard children with adverts on Disney, Nickelodeon, Nick JR, etc). The Entertainment industry are more like the pirates and we are the villagers being taken for a ride. So now, the tables are turning.
Seems to me, companies who sell the tech to reproduce but tell everyone not to reproduce their content want to have their cake and eat it.
The Movie, Music, Media industry would like you to believe that the USA is a nation of criminals. Far too many USA politicians, when passing many laws, believe that the USA is a nation of criminals, and that protecting and bailing-out non-competitive plutocrat businesses' market share is best for the economy.
"The surveys findings show that 46% of adults and 75% of young people have bought, copied, or downloaded some copyright infringing material." ...) at work?
Did the people do it knowingly or is this the global underground economy (stolen property, drugs, piracy [litteral/figurative]
"70% of those surveyed said it's reasonable to share music files (PDF) with friends and family." ... then at that time&place they copy&share is it good marketing or a crime? The same child later that week buys the album+, but the child is made a criminal by USA corporate-welfare law. This bullshit is sick.
Is this a piracy problem or a market competition problem? A child likes a song some friend played
"Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%." Should the USA Congress a/o States brake the internet further for USA corporate-welfare purposes?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
You're goddamn right it's alright to share music with family. What, I have the cash to buy a cd I want that my sister would enjoy as well, but can't buy herself? Then she gets a copy. I own THAT COPY of the album, thus I do what I want with MY LEGAL COPY.
End of story.
For the LAST time: sharing IS NOT selling. Piracy is ripping off someone else and selling for a profit. Sharing does not have the profit element, but the lobbyists have clouded the issue. Don't believe the media and corporate lies. Changes to loosen antiquated and pro-corporate copyright laws are what need to be enacted instead of dangerous, manipulative, heinous acts such as SOPA.
Well I am surprised that they had to even run a survey to find this out! Simply stand in any office, school hallway or even outside school pickup with the parents and you'll soon find out that the number who don't use torrents/usenet to knock stuff off is only slightly higher than the number of people with 3 legs!
Bears/woods, popes/cars, water/wet, shit/smells and other statements of the bloody obvious!
How many times must I repurchase Return to Forever's music? I've bought 4 different formats for the same work. Where's the fucking study on that shit?
Who exactly are the pirates?
+ Don't sell software, sell the printed and nicely written user manual. People will buy software rather than copying it if it comes with a comprehensive manual.
Sorry, but that doesn't work. The manual will be scanned and distributed as a PDF alongside with the software.
Services work, though.
Dilbert RSS feed
Copying itself is not magical, nor a quantum leap in civilisation. Copying is only a tool. Its value depends entirely on what there is to copy.
In every form of entertainment or scholarship that I use I see the value of paying for content. If people don't have to pay, and consequently don't pay, it seems to me that something will be lost.
Paying for recordings is what allows (or unfortunately, increasingly what allowed) professional musicians to practice for 8 hours a day. Yes, some musicians can make a living from huge concerts; yes, musicians can reach a reasonable level practicing only weekends. But I like orchestras as well as rock bands, Elman as well as Eminem. If we have neither patronage nor music sales how do they survive?
Paying for books is what allows professional authors and professional editors. Books that can be sold very cheaply (and survive piracy) are, by necessity, almost invariably short and with mass-market appeal. I like those but I also like long, challenging fiction and well-researched reference books. Quick thrillers can survive by selling thousands of copies for pennies each; can difficult works? Can specialist works of reference?
I'm all for making culture and education available to everyone, but if what that means is making available to everyone only what appeals to almost everyone, and losing the rest because it can't pay for itself that doesn't seem such a big step forward.
Hardly. We have lifted millions from third world poverty to first world poverty. No small feat. I am sick of you idiots complaining about that. Maybe you would like to know starvation? God has a sense of humor you know...
I feel like saying piracy is accepted on the internet is the same as saying crime is typical in a bad neighborhood.
This is why the copyright holders should just kill the incentive to pirate by selling media cheap and DRM-free. It'll make them more money too.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hi-res rips are much more common these days. The copy is also better than the original in that the ads and anti-piracy warnings are stripped out and any copy protection or DRM is removed.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well with the complicated and screw ball copyright laws I am sure everyone is a pirate. If you listen to RIAA, If I buy a cd and copy it to my mp3 player I am a pirate.
Do I download movies off the torrent? No, there hasnt been a good movie made in many years so why bother. part of the "movie" experience is going to the theater to see it. Even with my 60" tv you dont get that.
Do I steal software? I manly use linux and open source software so no. I am sure I might have crossed a few lines in the past.
DO I steal music? I am sure someone view I do, but I feel I buy the right to listen to a song/CD, The devices I choose to listen to it on shouldnt matter or how my copies I have on my personal devices shouldnt matter.
Even when you aren't talking about copies, the content industry gets annoyed with sharing. Selling that book or CD you purchased to someone else? That should be made illegal because it costs them sales! Libraries lending books to people for free? How awful! More lost sales!!!
If John Deere acted like the RIAA/MPAA/Publishing Companies, they'd tell you that you're just buying a license to use their tractor and you can't loan it or sell it to anyone for any reason. (Of course, if it breaks, you can't just retain the license and get one that works.... You need to buy a license to a new one.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Not only that, but nature has a way of "sharing" seeds between farmers without the farmers even putting in any effort. In fact, if you wanted to specifically *NOT* share any seeds (say, due to Monstato threatening lawsuits), you'd have to take extreme measures to prevent natural sharing from happening.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Since you can lend a DVD (but not copy it), how about a system that let's you lend a file:
This is an interesting idea but are you aware that the precedent for this would probably be the videos you used to borrow from the likes of blockbuster. In this case though the copies of the films that they had to buy in order to make them available for hire also cost them a shit load more upfront.
You can bet that even though this was hire not lend the movie studios would fail to see the difference and would charge more for any copy that had this mechanism built in. The truth is that all their lobbying about "losses" is really just about them lobbying to make the world work they way they want to make the most money. Just like Wall St always lobbies for less regulation and companies involved in environmental pollution always try and argue against things like the EPA existing.
I dont read
Yes, I am entitled to use my property as I see fit. That includes using my CD burner to make a copy of my CD. Your assertion that you have a right to have control over this private transaction is an entitlement complex on your part.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They did not want [to brainwash the public about copyrights], as that would have been logical, truthful, and fair
Copyrights are and have always been a regulation on industry, and have never and will never be appropriate for policing the behavior of individual people. The age of copyrights is dead because every individual person is in a position to mass produce perfect copies of covered works in the privacy of their homes, and send those copies to other people at high speed. We have entered a post-industrial age for the production of art and useful science, and copyright law has been rendered obsolete.
Why else do you think DRM is being pushed? The big media companies know that nobody outside of the industry gives copyright a full second's thought when they make copies of music and movies for their friends or even for complete strangers on the Internet. DRM exists as the industry's answer to post-copyright reality, a response to the "problem" of people being able to make copies en masse and the ineffectiveness of legal processes in stopping that sort of behavior.
I support the idea to compensate artists, but quite frankly, it is becoming as hard to convince people of that as it is to educate them about copyrights in the first place.
Most people fully support the idea of compensating artists for their creative work, but they do not see copyrights as being imperative for that. People routinely pay to go to live concerts, or leave money in a street performer's box/hat, or buy a CD from a band they like. Copyright has nothing to do with it; people understand that artists need to eat and will give money to artists they think do a good enough job to be paid for it. People are voting with their wallets, not thinking about copyright law.
Palm trees and 8
It's individual, non-commercial copying of copyrighted material for personal use, and, although it's technically illegal, it should be tolerated as long as there is no financial gain. If the movie studios want to control copyright infringement, they should be working to round up the people behind the massive number of counterfeit DVDs being sold at flea markets and on the street corners of major cities. That's where the real criminals are and that's where the money's being made. Extortion of money from individuals who download videos and music for personal use isn't helping their image and doesn't seem to stop the file sharing.
Generational copy quality didn't really matter back them. People were listening to tiny transistor radios, and equipment that has no fidelity, even studio gear was pretty poor.
The advantage of copying was people got to hear stuff they'd never get to hear on the radio. Manufactured bands weren't taking up 90% of the air time, they were a novelty. Bands knew they'd have to gig, unlike today's "recording artists", bedroom studios are the norm and most "musicians" can't play basic chords, let alone perform in front of a live audience.
Music has also died because there are far more ways for us to spend money now. We buy movies and TV shows on cheap plastic disks, the gaming industry is now bigger than the west's movie industry. We're buying new devices all the time, bigger HDTVs, media players, consoles, tablets/pads, cell phones every two years, computer gear and software. Music simply isn't that important to a lot of the public anymore. The days of putting on a song or album and sitting down are long gone. Music is nothing more than muzzak, something to add background noise at best.
Actually it does. First there was no copyright. The only thing stopping people from freely copying anything that they saw was the time and expense that was involved in making such copies entirely manually. Then the printing press was invented, which made it economically possible for anyone with a printing press to do wide scale copying of a work. The cost of a printing press was somewhat prohibitive already, but ultimately copyright came into being as a further means of ensuring that others would not copy somebody's work. In the 20th century, copying started getting much easier... the cost of buying a printing press alone was no longer a barrier to copying itself, and more people started choosing to disregard copyright, at their convenience. When works started becoming digital, the problem only skyrocketed. Content producers responded to this problem by making their works more difficult to copy. This had the side-effect of also making it more difficult to do legitimate things like back up the data, but there was little recourse. By the turn of the 21st century, new laws had been proposed and some had already been passed which made certain acts criminal. The laws will only become increasingly draconian as long as people keep disregarding them... and of course, the more draconian the laws become, the more people *DO* disregard them, because they are perceived of as unfair or wrong.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I believe this is the Netflix business model...
...I pirated this. Torrent. Why would I pay $5 when it's free elsewhere? I would have to be an idiot. So no "casual freeloaders" (me) were prevented. Even if they gave up legislating against copyright infringement, and totally rewrote the existing laws to our benefit, I would still be an idiot to pay for these free data.
I thought it was obvious I was talking about the U.S. literal War On Poverty program, which is a failure as it failed abjectly to achieve its aim. Please don't hate me for pointing out failures.
Which one of these would that be?
Just saying... even if his project worked out (and for most people, it doesn't - Louis CK was already popular and had a large following, and a comfortable enough living style to go into this adventure without wondering what to do if it didn't pan out at all), what if every single download from TPB were instead that $5 purchase? I guess the charities would be even happier. What would it take to get those pirates on board with that purchase? Lower the price to $3? $1? How many would have to purchase to offset for the lower price? How would that affect future productions? etc.
That's basically the game the studios are playing - and right now they're still convinced that their tiered pricing model (expensive at launch, $3 in the bargain bin a few months down the road, and everything in between) nets them (the studios, not the kid on the floor bringing coffees) more income than if they started out with a $5 pricing from the get-go. Unfortunately (for us) they can't just risk an experiment where they start selling all of their new productions at $5 for, say, 2 months to see if that would get them a greater net income - because if they don't, raising the prices will just make everybody who did purchase at $5 (prior consumers as well as pirates who decided that $5 wasn't a bad dea) go 'wtf?' at the bumped-back-up prices and risk turning them (back) to piracy.
If you make shoes and I start making shoes, your shoes are now worth less due to my competition (increase in supply), but I haven't done anything wrong.
If you make bit patterns and I make bit patterns, your bit patterns are now worth less due to my competition (increase in supply), but I still haven't done anything morally wrong, although I might have broken an unjust law that is attempting to override the laws of economics.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I would argue that if society at large feels that something is okay, then it is okay. If we the people do not feel that we are being harmed then we are not being harmed.
I think that the big problem is that people don't understand the inherent problems that so-called "non-commercial" copyright infringement brings to the very principles of copyright, and how such infringement actually harms society.
Copyright is supposed to be a time-limited exclusive right to decide who else may copy that work. There are explicit exemptions, such as fair use, but the very notion of 'exclusive' means that nobody else is doing it... so if you copy a copyrighted work without permission, you are encroaching on that exclusivity, and thereby weakening the worth of copyright for all copyright holders, since the promise of that exclusivity is getting compromised by the public. Copyright holders might then be inclined to resort to other means to protect their interests, such as DRM, which only serves to anger and alienate their customers... but other than that, the only exclusivity they could be offered at all is to just not publish and distribute in the first place.
The reason that exclusivity is important is that it provides an avenue for creating an incentive for people to publish their works. Without it, the only avenue that would exist is that if you published anything at all, your work would automatically be considered public domain. While there is no shortage of people who *do* place their works into public domain, the fact that a majority of people do not do this, even among people who intend for their work to be freely available and distributed, suggests that copyright is actually perceived of as valuable by most people who do produce content. And if copyright were eliminated entirely, there would only be a significant drop in the number of works produced per year, all that would be left is public domain content. If one looks at the current state of content that is actually copyright-free, however, one notices that there is a sharp contrast in the average quality between it and most copyrighted content. In a world without copyright, one would therefore have to work much harder to find the relatively few public domain works that actually had any merit and were worth obtaining in the first place.
Meanwhile, the former book publishers, no longer able to utilize their former guarantee of exclusivity (at least insomuch as with copyright it is a crime to violate that exclusivity for the duration of the copyright) as a means of producing a possible income from content, will probably have to stop printing books almost entirely. Practically all content offered by publishers would be digital... and more than likely laced with advertisements throughout... simply because the publishers would have no other means by which to secure their income. Electronic readers would likely be programatically designed to pause every 15 minutes or so, and display an ad to the reader, which the reader would be completely powerless to skip without aborting using the content entirely. The relatively low price point of such readers, as well as the lack of alternative commercial-free content would tend to cause the public, hungry for new content, to look past the limitations and simply consume such works eagerly. General purpose programmable computers would be prohibited from connecting to any public network without a special government granted license to do so, and working on free and open source software would likely be seen as a "terrorist activity", where the intent is to compromise the safety and security of the society's electronic infrastructure. The relatively few physical books that are printed would likely have to be either funded by a benefactor or else subsidized by some organization, and would therefore only tend to reflect or promote certain agendas. In the end, free speech would be sharply curtailed.
That distopia is a society without copyright. It is one that the general public which is indifferent to copyright is creating for themselves, and I fear that they will ultimately achieve it.
But of course, some might suggest that "non-commercial" copyright infring
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just like the Volstead Act, any attempt at stopping filesharing is ultimately doomed, and these figures prove it. When an overwhelming majority of the population engages in an activity, and a minuscule percentage of people support legislation against that activity, resistance on the part of corporations, and their minions in government and law enforcement, is a futile waste of valuable resources.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I like Luis CK's comedy. Still, I usually don't buy comedy specials, I watch them on Comedy Central or Netflix. When I saw his plans for this though, I made sure to buy a copy. It was 5 dollars. I had throw-away money in my paypal that easily covered it. I was glad I did. With that 5 bucks I got both a standard def and a high def digital copy, and I streamed it with my chromebook in bed one night before I went to sleep. What's better... he had a very fat pipe feeding his downloads and stream. My 35/35 fiber line was maxed out, and for a normal website to do that is rare. Yes, I was even getting those speeds at the peak of the sales for this show.
So convenient and easy to copy someone else's work. I never needed to because I was smart.
Wow. I have no idea how you got modded informative at all.
You are buying both the record and a legal entitlement granted by the copyright holder. Copyrights don't regulate publishers as an entity specifically, and solely in that scope. Those are just the middlemen. What a copyright allows is the copyright holder to control distribution, hence, they can control the publishing. Publishing is the act of creating copies......
From Wikipedia so you don't have to try and read the entire Title 17 from the US gov website:
to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies (including, typically, electronic copies)
to import or export the work
to create derivative works (works that adapt the original work)
to perform or display the work publicly
to sell or assign these rights to others
to transmit or display by radio or video[13]
First line allows the copyright holder to control the publishing of the work. 2nd line does as well.
3rd line controls derivative works, not to be confused with Fair Use. A parody is a special form of derivative use.
4th and 5th lines is what is being granted as a legal entitlement to the consumer when they compensate, aka provide consideration in a contract to the copyright holder.
It's highly humorous that you complain that Slashdot should know better when you don't even understand how copyright works.
As far as your references to online subscription services like Netflix, iTunes, and Zune what you have bought was a subscription governed by their Terms of Use. The copyright holders grant these corporations, through their proxies (aka Big Content), the right to sell or assign rights to others on their behalf. They allow by contract temporary rights to "display and perform" the works with your computer.
I'm simply amazed that you thought you were only buying a physical object, and a not also a representation (display or performance) of a copyrighted work. Your actions are controlled by law through copyrights, also known as legal entitlements. Unless the copyright holder grants you permission to do so, which they do by granting you legal entitlements they are in turn allowed to grant under copyright law, you are not allowed to enjoy the work.
Thank You.
You are the absolute best example of the confusion and misunderstanding of copyright that exists in the public.
You are talking about value. I am merely pointing out, that at retail prices (which is what they are selling for), people walking around with multi-TB libraries with nearly a million MP3's might actually have nearly a million dollars of value.
We can disagree with the copyright holder as to what the value is, I am only pointing out that for the average file sharer, they possess far more than they ever could have afforded at retail prices set by those copyright holders.
Note that the ancient Greeks had a form of copyright(?) on recipes on food made for the public. Once a new food was made, the chef had a 1 year license to make that specific dish before others could copy him/her.
Unfortunately, the source for this is at IU Bloomington's Lilly library. I do not recall the book at this time.
Just makes it easier for the feds to strip everyone of their rights when they make piracy a criminal ( not civil ) offense.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We're working on copying tractors.
My good sir, the war on poverty is going swimmingly. Just look at how many more people we have put into poverty by declaring a war on them.
I got here through a series of tubes
The media companies are selling (and generating) artificial scarcity. Historically, each time technology makes a leap the previous owners of the 'goods' work as hard as possible to stop the new tech that makes the 'goods' too cheap. Like folks attempted to stop the printing press when it was new (giving a peasant the possibility to own a book? Horrors!). But new tech changes the game. Copying of data is now free (for all practical purposes) and of course we all know you cannot even view or hear the 'goods' without copying it from here to there (multiple times in some cases) inside whatever device you are working with!
And the notion that the copyright owner can stop you from copying from one device you own to another you own is...just crazy. Nobody accepts that. We know it's wrong to prevent us so we do it. Every day. Copying is unavoidable, really.
Please continue to try to fight the perversion of language too: no copyright issue involves folks with guns hijacking a ship. Call it the copyright issue it is (not that the newspapers will pick it up that way, but try...)
People had also been copying written texts for a few thousand years before copyright was invented. Examples: everything written by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and all other civilizations with the ability to write before the 17th century.
I am not defending nor arguing against copyright here, but I do wish some people would bother to learn something about history before citing it.
First of all, modern copyright was invented just as soon as the technological means arose that created the supposed problem with "intellectual property," i.e., as soon as the printing press really got going in the late 1400s. There were quite a few copyrights granted and lawsuits filed in many cities in Italy, Germany, and other places in Europe by the early 1500s.
However, the first copyright "lawsuit," I believe, was over a copy of an Irish manuscript in the 6th century or so. Generally, if you wanted a copy of a manuscript from a monastic library during medieval times, you would be charged a significant fee. Obviously, much of that went to pay for the fact that scribes had to make and copy the book by hand, but monasteries were known to charge a lot for the privilege of copying a particularly interesting or rare manuscript.
As for ancient Rome, Greece, etc., generally a slave would be paid to copy a manuscript, and usually one needed to pay the owner of said manuscript at least for the cost of that slaves' work, and a reluctant owner of a rare manuscript certainly might charge a fee just for the privilege of making a copy.
You may not think of all these things as "copyright," but they are effectively the same thing as modern copyright was established as -- a way to pay for the medium and cost of copying an item.
Whether you're paying a slave to copy a manuscript, or a monk, or a scribe, or you're paying a publisher of an early press to typeset or engrave the plates to be copied and bound, you're paying for the copying process. Payment to the author or whatever was a secondary concern and only became significant once it became fairly cheap and universal to use the printing press... however, payment to the owner of the thing being copied has been around since ancient times.
Our copyright system is of course more pervasive and differently structured today, but pretending it didn't exist in any form before the 17th century is a stupid and ignorant statement that betrays your allegiance to the anti-copyright propaganda, rather than a knowledge of actual history.
I will grant that modern copyright tries to create "artificial scarcity" of "authorized" copies, but that's all it does. Paying for the privilege of making a copy (or having one made) is nothing new, though.
4th and 5th lines is what is being granted as a legal entitlement to the consumer when they compensate, aka provide consideration in a contract to the copyright holder.
When I buy a CD or a DVD, I do not enter into any contract. Next.
Unless the copyright holder grants you permission to do so, which they do by granting you legal entitlements they are in turn allowed to grant under copyright law, you are not allowed to enjoy the work.
That's funny, I just turned on a radio and listened to a song. I didn't pay anything, nor did I enter into a contract. You are full of shit, and full of yourself with your high-and-mighty interpretations of law. So, let me help you: The US code does not grant entitlements to CONSUMERS, but to DISTRIBUTORS. A public (as opposed to a private) performance is in essence a DISTRIBUTION. Likewise, when Netflix streams content, they are DISTRIBUTING. Copyright law grants nothing to the end user. When I buy a CD, I have purchased a CD, not a license, or listening rights, or any other absurd bullshit that you claim. Go back to law school.
I think this says that the common definition of piracy does *not* include doing things you could do with a physical copy, like lending it to your friend or sharing it within your family.
Unless you're paying me to listen, you can't beat free.
Knowledge is power. People in general don't want power evenly distributed - they want it for themselves.
Everybody having everything isn't going to happen outside StarTrek.
(What Would Kirk Do?)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No. The problem is people got used to pirating. And now it's very hard to go back. Because, to be reduced from huge easily obtained libraries of "free" content, to paying $1 per only one song, invokes frustration. So it will take generations to curb it, and in fact I don't believe it will go away, at least not for audio/video content. Btw. I don't pirate ever since I have music on youtube, using it as inexhaustible playlist - so that, too, is one of problems for content owners.
Meantime, I'm happy that musicians are again oriented more on live performance, it ought to be their primary job but the incredible sales of vinyl, cassettes and cd's (in that chronology) also allowed artists to earn money without even singing in public.
It's almost like we don't need the middlemen. Hm.
It's almost like you don't know what you are talking about. These kind of examples float around all the time, but they prove nothing. This kind of stunt is easy to pull for someone already famous, but impossible for a new/unknown artist.
Now you can make an argument that people should stay local with smaller audiences. You can make an argument that we need a different middleman that charges reasonable fees for their work. There are many valid points -- but saying "look, he just posted his video and made craploads of money, why can't everyone do it" is not one of those valid points.
Because he's right and you're wrong.
No. There is no legal entitlement granted by the copyright holder when they sell you a "phonorecord" (the legal term for an artifact embodying an audio recording), aside from title to that particular phonorecord. There are legal effects of holding title to that phonorecord.
Merely buying the phonorecord does not give you the right to publicly perform (play) it.
You cannot buy a "display" or "performance", though you can pay to see a display or hear a performance, or even to have a performance put on for you. You can, however, privately enjoy any copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder, though you might need permission from the owner of the particular copy. If you steal a CD and play it in the privacy of your own car, you have not committed any violation of copyright.
In a way, Big Content fucked itself. It had the the last 50-60 years (ever since vinyl records were sold) to educate the public and put forth the perception that you were not buying the record as much as you were buying the right to listen to the record. Important distinction, which would have lead to a real understanding of just what copyright is, and what intellectual property is.
So if it was damaged in any way they'd give me a new copy? And if it was remastered? And I'd have the right to listen to it on any device?
You're both wrong.
Sheesh. Try reading Title 17.
No. There is no legal entitlement granted by the copyright holder when they sell you a "phonorecord" (the legal term for an artifact embodying an audio recording), aside from title to that particular phonorecord. There are legal effects of holding title to that phonorecord.
Did you read what you just wrote?
You said 1 !=1 in the first sentence and then proceeded to contradict yourself in the 2nd sentence with 1 == 1.
How did those legal effects originate? Leprechauns? Were Skittles and rainbows involved?
Those legal effects you are referring to originated from the sale of a copyrighted work wherein the copyright holder granted certain legal entitlements to you as part of the sale.
The physical phonorecord was 1 part of the sale, the legal entitlements were another.
You can, however, privately enjoy any copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder
No. You Can't.
That's the whole idea of copyright in the first place. It is *not* just the control of making copies of the work, the distribution of copies, but also the performances and displays of the work.
Reading the book in your own home, looking at the art being "displayed", and listening to the phonograph being "played" are all acts that are covered under the copyright and are available to be controlled.
Permission from the owner? Of what?
The physical medium?
No you are talking about the First Sale Doctrine and transfer of legal entitlements. When I "lend" you my book, I am also "lending" you my legal entitlements. This is not a problem in the case of a physical medium because it was a transfer in every sense of the word. I cannot read the book while you have it.
However, when it comes to an electronic copy of the book three acts of infringement have occurred:
1) Duplication - I, along with you, created a copy of that book. People want to make it extremely complicated, but the end result is that the 1's and 0's that made up the copyrighted book were copied from me to you. It would depend greatly on the technology employed, but it the responsibility could be shared between us for that act.
2) Distribution - Technically, because I allowed a copy to made, or may have encouraged it by making it available, it could be argued that I was committing the act of distribution. Debatable, to be sure. In the past distribution without profit was not considered criminal infringement, but at a large scale it is now.
3) Display - Now that you have a copy you are displaying it (people have really tried to make the whole thing complicated with memory, registers, sound cards, buffers, etc) without authorization from the copyright holder.
I love you guys. You prove my point better than I ever could because of your complete lack of understanding how Title 17 actually works.
There was no reason to fully understand it when only industries and those with expensive equipment could make copies. I am not surprised that you don't understand and are still limited, or blocked, by the physical medium.
Now that we are in the digital age, it really is important for you to understand, along with everyone else, just what copyright is.
Before you try coming back to me, READ TITLE 17. There is the original, and then the changes made in 1976. Read the whole thing, which is about 30-40 PDF documents on a government website and then we can have some legal arguments as to their interpretations.
Dude, your Messiah Complex is showing. Didn't I see you on a street corner screaming at passersby, handing out your little pamphlets that inform people that you, and only you, know the proper interpretation of the Bible ... excuse me, the law? You are DELUDED. Title 17 says sweet fuck-all about anyone granting anyone the right to view or hear anything. Lay of the drugs. You are a fanatic.
I know 2nd responses are faux pas here, but also consider this:
Why does the NFL go after small groups of private citizens trying to display Sunday football games on large screens in church gatherings?
That would seem to be pretty damn private to me. However, there have been court cases regarding it. We are not talking about sports bars either, but groups of private citizens where there are no business interests or products being sold.
The arguments the NFL makes in court are precisely about the legal entitlements you deny exist.
Not saying it is right or wrong, but it is awfully hard to win in court if copyright law did not allow for the control of the "display" in private settings.
But what if the mechanism was built in the system, not the media, that is, I rip the DVD, destroy it and share the rip using the system I described. The licenses wouldn't be stored at a central server (like in a library), but in the individual PCs until someone requests it, that could be done without central server too. So, basically just like a big club where people share their movies (either have them at one location or just bring the ones that others asked), but digital.
So, what I'm getting at is the notion that "a copy is a separate product" and "you buy a license, not a movie". I don't think that anybody would object to people sharing cars this way (or even making money from lending cars), but when it's movies it's different. Then maybe a copy is not a separate product (like a car). The movie industry seems to want to have it both ways:
1. Copying the movie is the same as stealing a car.
2. Lending a movie is in no way similar to lending a car.
3. Buying a movie is in no way similar to buying a car, as you own the car but not the movie.
Incidentally, my good friend, copyright itself could be reasonably considered to be a socialist program, as the aim of the system is to benefit society, so as a staunch supporter of copyright, you are a supporter of a socialist system, whether you are aware of this or not.. I'm sure you can find a firearm quite cheaply at Wal-mart.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You know, the war on poverty ended 20 years ago. One could even argue it ended 30 years ago. You'd think it was still here if you only listen to talk radio and don't do your own research.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550
This is not a new topic of conversation. Early SF pioneer George O. Smith in the "Venus Equilateral" series, last book I think, had to deal with the problem of people and the value of the "original copy" vs. the duplicate. It was effectively the original idea that progressed into Star Trek transporter technology.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
They are not.
4th does not say "to perform or display the work" but "to perform or display the work publicly". Without the "publicly" bit you do not need any license, however, if you really want to perform it publicly, buying a record is not enough: buying a CD does not entitle you to play it at your club, your radio or to have it playing in your stage play. If you want to do that, you have to pay to the local performance rights organization (it's BMI, ASCAP and SESAC in the USA) - usually quite a bit more than that you pay for the CD.
And since you don't have these rights, of course, you can not sell them.
So, in the end, you buy only a physical object, because to use it privately you do not need any license and buying the CD does not grant you license to do anything that requires one.
Real life is overrated.
I am googling this guy to buy his standup video right now. I really like good standup and I really *really* like the idea of paying reasonable amounts for good media without milddle men.
Another favourite crew of mine that does media this way is Alterna Films. They do (really good) snowboarding movies. Their latest one is Hello World (my programmer buddies laughed at the name), which sells in HD for $7.99 and has no DRM.
You know how I keep my material from being pirated. I keep it secret. Works every time.
Ownership of information is not a Right. In fact, it's not even a possibility.
Why do you think it's not right to break a law that you consider unjust? I believe it is the duty of every citizen to oppose unjust laws, and civil disobedience is one prominent way to do that. If the law is unjust, it deserves to be broken. People who break it might then get thrown in jail, which would help draw attention to the unjust nature of the law.
Simply by existing, unjust laws damage the very fabric of society (by decreasing citizens' respect for the rule of law). Laws are artificial things, made by people. We should respect them when they make sense, and oppose them in every possible way when they trample our rights or are fundamentally unjust, as the current copyright laws in most countries are.
I immediately googled this guy to get his stuff. I like standup comedy and I *really* like DRM-free media at a reasonable price with no middle man.
For those interested, another good source is Alterna Films who make professional snowboarding movies. Their really good, sponsors include Quicksilver and Billabong and the camera work is excellent. The latest film called "Hello World" (my programmer buddies laughed at the name) is downloadable in HD for $7.99 and has no DRM.
which is the greatest example of why the government does far more harm than good when it tries to tell people what they should want.
No, I'd say the War on Drugs is far, far worse. I mean, in Prohibition they didn't have people's decapitated bodies being hung from overpasses in mid-town, or Federal agents seizing entire hotels from lawful owners because a booze transaction occurred in one room behind closed doors.
At this point you don't even need blank CDs. An MP3 player and some external hard drives and all of the sudden your the fucking Library of Congress walking around with tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes nearly a million, in copyrighted content. Never mind that you could have only really afforded 1% of your library or less.
It's a serious problem.
How is it a considered a PROBLEM that any human with internet access can access and download a billion times more information than any of the great Libraries of the world ever held, for free? HOW is that a problem, even if it does make it harder for some artists to become millionaires, when humanity as a whole benefits enormously?
I mean for fuck's sake, the human species is advancing so fast now thanks to the Internet and free and open exchange of information. Why the fuck would any sane person want to put up toll booths to limit that? That's exactly what has happened to everything else in our societies, and the strangehold of it has been what's holding us back. We need to take out the fucking toll booths from everything and the let the market do its work. Humanity will advance itself regardless of the existence of copyright law.
Wow. I have no idea how you got modded informative at all.
You are buying both the record and a legal entitlement granted by the copyright holder.
No. Just fucking NO. This is the propaganda you've been LED to believe. This is the nonsense propaganda you are currently PARROTING as the truth, but just because you've been duped into believing it is so, does not make it so.
People cannot OWN ideas, nor is it good for our society to try and enable them to do so. Setting up artificial barriers on trade in this manner ends up causing more harm than it solves.
When I buy a CD, I own the physical object, and the data on it. Oh, the RIAA says I don't? Well fuck them because I do own it, and there's not a goddamn thing anyone will do to stop me from doing whatever I please with this data, including give copies of it to all 3 million of my friends if I so desire. Don't like it? Don't fucking upload it.
At this point, after so many abuses by the RIAA/MPAA/patent trolls/idiots/government, and the lengths these cocksuckers have gone through to sue grandmothers and amputees for everything they own just to make an example, there is absolutely no possible way that anyone can possibly convince me I'm somehow in the wrong for copying bits from one computer to another. Sorry, not buying it. I've grown up literally my entire life having benefited enormously from pirated software and media that first my father, then I never could have otherwise afforded, while doing absolutely no harm to anyone in the process.
Legions of millions of people stand behind me in agreement. These assholes trying to make us feel guilty and ashamed for piracy have already lost the war, whether they realize it or not. It's a damn shame some fools insists on parroting their lies (and bought and paid for legislation, which isn't fit to wipe my ass with) all the way to the bitter end.
I'm pointing out a fine distinction.
And that's the distinction: they were not separate parts. They are inseparable.
PUBLIC performance. PUBLIC display.
No, they are not. That's exactly the point I am making. The copyright holder cannot grant you license to do those things, because the copyright holder does not have the exclusive right to do those things. All of those things are outside the scope of copyright. Read 17 USC 101 and 17 USC 106.
I am explicitly NOT talking about First Sale. There's no need to bring first sale into it. First sale excepts lending of particular copies from the distribution right for owners of those copies. Private performance and display, including reading a book (that is, displaying it to oneself), are simply outside the scope of copyright.
Because they're a bunch of assholes. As to why they might be able to win (besides having better lawyers):
From 17 USC 101 ...to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered"
"To perform or display a work "publicly" means--
Most churches I know are open to the public, and even if they weren't, there's a lot of room for argument about what constitutes the "normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances".
I think his point was that enforcing a "right to listen" is morally wrong, and that the recording companies only got away with having laws worded this way because previously there was always a physical attribute to the content you buy, so the consumer doesn't consider the song "a right to listen", however sees it as "i purchased this flat disc with rased bumps in it, if i put this in a record player then i can hear a tune i like". i paid for physical something, and now i have a physical something that i can do what i want with, because i own it!
we both know that the law is not written to be morally correct.
an analogy would be if i'm a carpenter and i have a very skilled way of whittling wood, 20 years ago i sold you a chair for $100, its your chair, i can still whittle my wood and make money selling chairs, no government intervention required.
skip forward to today, where CNC machines are standard household appliance. i still have my skill of whittling wood, i can either, "sell" my ability to an engineer who would convert my whittling skills to a CNC equivilant digital version, but i can only make money if the government enforces it.
my other option is to not have a digital copy of my chair (i don't have to give it out you know) and then charge a premium for original content, or custom work. because everyone can just download chairs now, but my 40 - 50 years of skill is always going to be better quality then the cookie cutter response, so i can now charge $400-$500 and my service changes from a consumer service to a premium service. maybe you want fancy chairs to draw a big crowd?
alternatively, i could freely give out my base chair design out on the internet with a suggesting custom jobs (think concert) come at a premium and generate my work from that way.
3 different options to have the actual generator of the valuable item maintain profit.
only one requires extensive government support (and your tax dollars), only one maintains a middle man that is just not nessisary these days. only one option requires foreigners in sovereign countries to follow our law in their own land for the system to even work.
unfortunately, its the system they are running with :/
are you the same guy that estimates the street value of drugs when the cops make a big bust? maybe a mobile phone salesman regarding the "$10000 value" of the mobile plan only costing $30 a month?
now, i don't know about you, but in east ubexiztan(made up country so i don't have to find 1 of the hundred out there, china? i thought all art is public works in communist countries? at least at one stage it was.) there is no legal requirement to pay a create of works if you store a copy.
by that metric, the individual is carrying around nearly $100 worth of hardware and probably $300 worth of data? (data transmission does actually have a value, unlike the pattern your copying, which is made up.).
so your value only exists in the heads of people who think they deserve that much, the real value is quite considerably lower.
. If the producers can't earn a living wage, the number and quality of entertainers will fall.
considering entertainment is hardly a job producing industry, not a vital service, nor even a real necessity.... why should it get more legal protection than any other industry?
Surely if a form of entertainment cant sustain itself, it needs to die.
I'm going to loose more sleep because we don't have a Neil Armstrong of our time, not because we don't have a George Lucas.
100%!
I'm entitled to line up my 1's and 0's however i desire and for whatever reason. You're not entitled to money just because they match something you came up with first if you parse them through a whole bunch of conversion processes.
musicians are entitled to whatever was agreed to transfer the digital information to the 3rd party. if there is no agreement then there is no entitlement, i never signed an agreement to say "yes, your song is worth this much and i will pay that to have on going access to this pattern, and i give you full rights to remove this pattern from my hardware should you see fit".
Obviously the law doesn't see it this way, but at this stage its safe to assume that the law isn't in societies interests at all, so also a moot point.
so what your saying is... cookie cutter responses would be wildly distributed, but custom work, specific work or low volume high quality work would need to be paid for upfront before it can exist..
Compared to now where cookie cutter responses have the financial support of the masses so they also have high quality and a distributed price tag, which reduce the demand for custom and specific work... which means less professionals and more monopolies thanks to reduced demand in the custom and once of sectors (the biggest driver of small business, which is the backbone of all modern economies).
yeah, i don't see the down side. i earn more money as a professional in the industry if there is no value in over-engineering a product to suite everyone (and take my customers out from under my feet), the average professional stands to make more money in the industry.
If you make shoes and I start making shoes, your shoes are now worth less due to my competition (increase in supply), but I haven't done anything wrong.
this only works if you start making different shoes. legally you wouldn't be able to duplicate the shoes and just sell them as they would be considered counterfeit.
the only reason this is justified, is because only the biggest players can produce the shoes cheaper than the original manufacturer, the power slips up if you allow copying, only the bigger players can out produce the smaller ones.
however, if everyone was capable of making shoes (or for a much better example, following a recipe to make a meal), that would mean the power slips more towards the consumers and smaller players (like the professionals in the industry, for example chiefs), which IMO, justifies dropping copyright (like how there is no copyright for recipes) copyright is to avoid monopolies of power to allow the free market to encourage innovation, at the expense of the other smaller players having flexibility with content.
if that copyright is preventing a slip towards empowering the smaller entities (who innovate much more than the big entities) to maintain the monopoly of the biggest players... its sort of exactly the opposite of what we want to achieve with the laws.
100% agree with your point though, nothing morally wrong with copying a pattern, you don't need to owe someone something because it already existed elsewhere.
When I buy a CD or a DVD, I do not enter into any contract. Next.
Copyright law covers your actions whether you agreed to it or not.
That's like saying since you never agreed to a speed limit, you can do 100 mph on the road without consequence. Next.
That's funny, I just turned on a radio and listened to a song. I didn't pay anything, nor did I enter into a contract.
You did not have to pay anything. The radio station did. You are still in a contract whether you like it or not.
Copyright law creates legal entitlements with or without your approval, involvement, participation, etc.
Dude, your Messiah Complex is showing. Didn't I see you on a street corner screaming at passersby, handing out your little pamphlets that inform people that you, and only you, know the proper interpretation of the Bible ... excuse me, the law? You are DELUDED. Title 17 says sweet fuck-all about anyone granting anyone the right to view or hear anything. Lay of the drugs. You are a fanatic.
You people are hilarious. That part in Title 17 about display and performances has nothing to do with you performing acts amazingly similar to display and performance huh?
LOL.
You people prove my point more than anything, which is the average person understands zilch about Title 17 and copyright.
I am not defending the RIAA, MAFIAA, or promulgating any kind of propaganda whatsoever. In fact, my greater understanding of copyright law is what allows me to fight more effectively.
People CAN own ideas. It's called a patent. People can also own expressions of ideas, also known as art.
Your opinion is not one that I share. It is a GREAT idea to allow people to own ideas, and expressions, TEMPORARILY. It encourages them to make more and allows them to feed their families. I can understand you sentiment to an extent since copyright has been pushed towards the extreme while harming the consumer.
That does not mean the very idea of compensating the artist and allowing them to control distribution, performance, and displays of their work for a small period of time is a fundamentally bad idea.
In this case "ownership" is really just semantic, because what is really happening is that copyright law (Title 17) says that they can treat their copyrights as real property (ownership) and enumerates a number of rights they have to control many different aspects of the copyrighted work.
When you think you own the data on the CD, you are wrong. What you own is a legal entitlement to said data. It is an important distinction.
I think it is hilarious you are all fighting this so hard without even seeing the benefit of the correct interpretation.
It's not as bad as you think. Not at all. In fact, it is so much better.
Getting rid of the notion that you bought the physical medium only, is a major step forward.
I almost find it curiously strange that so many people are fighting this correct interpretation of Title 17 so hard, and it amazingly proves my point better than I ever could.
If you considered that you purchased a legal entitlement to the work, you could also consider that it is permanent and transferable. First Sale Doctrine? It's something that you own because you gave consideration for it.
Who cares about the physical medium. It was just the delivery mechanism. Since you bought that CD and the legal entitlements, it means you have the right to make as many backup copies as you want. You can "medium shift" all you want to your hearts desire. Transcode it from WAV, to MP3, to g729 (I dunno why...), to some form of Morse code if you want.
Sky is the limit. As long as you don't sell or distribute the copyrighted work, you are free to do whatever you want with it in your own private home as long as you want. Also known as peaceful enjoyment, another legal concept.
Why would you fight that? Why would you even want to fight that?
The way I look at it, once I paid the Beatles once for the full Album, I can download new copies as many times as I want. Burn as many copies as I want. Put it on flash drives, MP3 players, etc.
The legal entitlement sets you free. Physical mediums lock you down.
What gives? :)
P.S - I have a few dozen video games that are still in shrink wrap. I only purchased them for the legal entitlements. Once I had them, I downloaded the pirate version so I did not have to keep the CD in the drive all the damn time and kept the ISOs backed up on NAS protected with RAID 5. I see those physical mediums as just proof of purchase for the legal entitlements.
Value is a perception. I would not pay 1c for Britney Spears, while some people would pay retail.
Why are you under the impression that I am setting the value? I was not consulted when determining the MSRP for the music being sold.
My only point, was at the value set by others, nobody could possibly afford the libraries they have built.
You can disagree with it all you want. If you walked into a grocery store and took $500 worth of groceries and left a $20, you argument before the judge about "real value" won't go too far.
My whole point that people want to fight so hard is that you bought the rights to that copyrighted work. It just came delivered on the physical medium.
Who gives a shit about the medium. Once you obtained those legal rights, you can do whatever the hell you want with the copyrighted work in your own home, and in your own property, as long as you don't infringe upon the other rights. Namely, distribution, duplication, sale, etc.
In a way, Big Content fucked itself. It had the the last 50-60 years (ever since vinyl records were sold) to educate the public and put forth the perception that you were not buying the record as much as you were buying the right to listen to the record. Important distinction, which would have lead to a real understanding of just what copyright is, and what intellectual property is.
So if it was damaged in any way they'd give me a new copy? And if it was remastered? And I'd have the right to listen to it on any device?
YES. ABSOLUTELY. FUCK YES.
That's the WHOLE POINT I WAS TRYING TO MAKE!!!!!!!!!!
You purchased the legal entitlement to enjoy the work. That DOES mean you can make as many backup copies as you want on any medium you choose to do it with. You gave them money right? That was consideration, and what has always been the case, is that they delivered the right to you to enjoy that work.
So yes. You always should have been able to prove ownership of those legal entitlements and just paid a reasonable fee for the replacement cost, or just made a copy yourself from anywhere else.
If you purchased a music album and then lost the data, you are 100% entitled to go get it again by whatever means necessary. Including so-called piracy.
Why should you have to keep buying physical copy after physical copy just because the medium was damaged?
It's just like the bullshit with Microsoft. Why do you keep paying for that fucking OS license when you get a new computer when the old one is perfectly good and transferable to the new machine?
People throw away millions of dollars each year in software licenses for XP, Vista, Windows 7, etc. because they don't understand that either. I scrape those certificates off the machine, laminate them, and then stick them right back inside the machine when I do rebuilds. I'll be damned if MS is going to double, triple, and quadruple bill me just because I upgraded the machine a couple of times or bought a new one.
Same concept with a music CD.
HOW is that a problem, even if it does make it harder for some artists to become millionaires, when humanity as a whole benefits enormously?
This really depends on your philosophy on how to construct an advanced society. I would love to live in a Utopia like Star Trek where technology has reached the point that all famine and disease has been cured and there is no need for war. A meritocracy where people don't expend effort for any material rewards, but to contribute back to all of society.
However, the world we live in sucks a whole lot more.
I can't go into a grocery store and just walk out with whatever I want and need at the moment just because I can say I am a doctor and I heal people. It takes money to convince the store to let me leave with the materials.
People have to eat and support their families. Open source can work as long as it supported in some way financially. That is quite often a job separate from the work, corporations that are funding the project, or companies like RedHat that are selling support. It's also quite possible to build up such a reputation with an open source project that consulting contracts, book deals, lectures, etc. could provide a comfortable lifestyle.
That won't work for music, books, and movies. There needs to be some form of compensation to the copyright holder.
To that end, I support reasonable copyrights. Not what we have now, but I do support the idea of letting them control the work temporarily and then returning it back the Public Domain.
You were kind of dismissive about the artist, but how does humanity continue to benefit when the artists have no incentive? They are going to have to find a day job, because you are certainly not going to pay them right?
Again, copyrights have shifted towards the extreme end, and have largely been perverted. That does not make the premise invalid.
If you have another idea on how to protect and foster innovation and creative works, I am all ears. Let me know.
Meantime, I'm happy that musicians are again oriented more on live performance, it ought to be their primary job but the incredible sales of vinyl, cassettes and cd's (in that chronology) also allowed artists to earn money without even singing in public.
Not unless the artist owned the label. Part of the problem is Big Content crying like a little bitch about the poor little artists and stealing billions from them with questionable accounting practices. Look how much they still owe artists in Canada.
Those sales give a pittance to the artist.
Same problem with health care. The middlemen, bureaucracy, and insurance costs inflate a 5c Band Aid to $50. If an artist made 25 million sales at 50c a piece that is a hugely comfortable lifestyle when you consider they might have 2 or 3 really popular tracks on an album.
The artists are being fucked, and piracy is the least of their problems.
Some of them are getting it though and bypassing the labels. Every "experiment" I have heard about has been pretty damn profitable.
Then maybe a copy is not a separate product (like a car). The movie industry seems to want to have it both ways:
1. Copying the movie is the same as stealing a car.
2. Lending a movie is in no way similar to lending a car.
3. Buying a movie is in no way similar to buying a car, as you own the car but not the movie.
The big difference is that if you buy a car, you get to drive round in it and it carries on being useful for many years. If you buy a movie then chances are you watch it once, realise it was dross then it sits on a shelf for an eternity until you get round to clearing out old crap. Even if it was the best move in the world you still can only sit through it so many times before utter boredom sets it just after the opening titles.
With a business model like this car analogies just don't cut it.
I dont read
If only they could win the war on wars...
Not really. You can make a crappy knock off that you can try and pass off as the real thing...
But that's probably a trademark violation, not a copyright violation.
They are going to have to find a day job, because you are certainly not going to pay them right?
Yep. Nobody has a right to make a living at any given profession. Only a free market has any right to decide where resources are allocated, NOT the industry through government coercion at the point of a gun.
If you have another idea on how to protect and foster innovation and creative works, I am all ears. Let me know.
Easy. Don't do a goddamn thing. Legalize everything, abolish the concept of "intellectual property", and let people copy everything as they will. What, do you think people are going to stop making music just because they actually have to work hard to make a living at it? If anything, the quality of music will increase, because all the untalented assholes will be forced into other industries, while the people who truly love to do it and make great music will prosper. They don't do it for the money, they do it for the GLORY. But they'll make a shit ton MORE cash, if they're actually good, because live performances (you know, the origin of the word performer) will always be relatively rare and lucrative. And now they won't have fifty seven goddamn industry middle men holding their fucking hands out wanting a cut.
What, were you under the impression music, books, etc didn't exist before the advent of copyright law?
We all copy information freely in our personal lives. There isn't a single thought in your head that is entirely yours; it's all based on information copied for free from the outside world. This is humanity works, learns, and grows as a species. What if we had to pay every single time we listened to a song, or heard a speech, or watched a television show, or experienced anything other than complete silence? What a hellacious world that would be.
Yet that's exactly what these assholes want, and seek to achieve by pushing copyright law on us. It's a war, and there is either one or two possible outcomes--freedom, or slavery. Every year that passes, we seek deeper and deeper into tyranny, and copyright law is only one of many tools used by tyrants to oppress us. At this point, the only sane position to be held is to be against copyright law. Throughout my life I've made it a point to explicity disobey any law which is wrong or unjust. Therefore, I am certainly not going to pay copyright law any respect, at least until this despicable government is overthrown and more sane limits are put on this horrible law.
You people prove my point more than anything, which is the average person understands zilch about Title 17 and copyright.
What do you mean by "you people"? I'm not a "people", I'm a person who understands copyright quite well. It's a tool used by dictators to shackle their serfs. It might have been a great concept in theory once, but in present execution it has long since surpassed the bounds of reason and gripped this nation in tyranny. Fuck Title 17. I'll use that shit to start a fire and burn the whole building down. I think it's hilarious you want to argue semantics about another dictatorial law when this nation is in the middle of a crisis far larger than just copyright.
Your idea just flat does not work and is partly the reason why are we not having this discussion on a colony in another star system.
What, were you under the impression music, books, etc didn't exist before the advent of copyright law?
Not nearly as much. You don't know your history do you?
It was called arts patronage. Wealthy people sponsored artists and commissioned the works. In simpler terms for you, they paid for that shit. All of the great philosophers, artists, sculptors, inventors, sought out and were supported by wealthy patrons. Leonardo Davinci ring a bell for you? Want to go back further? Socrates? How about further than that? The Pyramids.
While I share your sentiment about the middlemen wanting their cut for nothing, you don't need to use that anger to destroy the copyright system entirely. Reform it, absolutely, destroy it? No.
They don't do it for the money, they do it for the GLORY
Great. So what do they do for the FOOD?
Your idea only works in the world of Star Trek where there is a seemingly endless supply of energy and replicators. Clean water, healthy food, adequate shelter and clothing, practically non-existent violent crime.
Sure...... in that world what the hell else would you do with your day except be an artisan, a scientist, a cook, a philosopher, etc.
We don't get there over night.
In the mean time you need to figure out how to live. The life of a starving artist does not sound that appealing to me. Neither does being a starving artist and having some big fat cat with money rip off your music, make a ton of cash with his own performers, and leave you still starving.... with all the glory of being the person that did it first.
Copyrights were originally designed to foster works by allowing the artist to be protected from big and small alike. You don't need a patron if you can create the work, find somebody with equipment to duplicate it, and legally pursue remedies against anybody that would attempt to profit from your work.
Believe it or not, it is a much better system than arts patronage.
As everything else though, it gets corrupted over time. We just need to realign copyrights with their original intent. That's all.
We all copy information freely in our personal lives. There isn't a single thought in your head that is entirely yours; it's all based on information copied for free from the outside world. This is humanity works, learns, and grows as a species. What if we had to pay every single time we listened to a song, or heard a speech, or watched a television show, or experienced anything other than complete silence? What a hellacious world that would be.
No fucking shit. That's why I said I cherish the Public Domain above all else. However, there is nothing wrong with allowing an artist the opportunity to profit for their works for a short period of time, like say, 10 years. Disney should have no copyrights for anything past 1980 at most in my opinion, and furthermore, I don't respect copyrights older than 30 years.
It's truly hilarious to me that so many people jumped on me like I was fucking Hitler resurrected for simply informing them that they have rights beyond the physical medium. It's so much better and flexible if you think for one little second about its implications.
You only compensate the artist once, and you have the rights to the copyrighted work to peacefully enjoy it, forever, or more specifically the life of the copyright.
It might be impossible at $5 for an unknown, sure.
Then again, maybe at $1.29 it wouldn't be: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/bed-intruder-song-feat.-kelly/id386478006
(the 'bed intruder mashup' has sold over 100k copies, making the unknown original artist and the mashup artists a combined $100,000)
THAT'S THE POINT OF THE INTERNET - COST OF ENTRY IS NEARLY ZERO.
You can argue all day that the 'middlemen' provide a service, winnowing the 99.9% crap artists so the rest of us don't have to. To some degree you'd be right, but then again these middlemen brought us Dane Cook (not funny), Creed (not talented), and Roseanne Barr (neither funny nor talented) - so what 'service' are they providing again to justify their MASSIVE financial parasitism in the middle of the producer/consumer chain?
Thanks, I'll cheerfully crowdsource my preferences among friends that agree and enjoy the trickle of talent we find for a minimal investment of $.
-Styopa
As for ancient Rome, Greece, etc., generally a slave would be paid to copy a manuscript, and usually one needed to pay the owner of said manuscript at least for the cost of that slaves' work, and a reluctant owner of a rare manuscript certainly might charge a fee just for the privilege of making a copy.
You may not think of all these things as "copyright," but they are effectively the same thing as modern copyright was established as -- a way to pay for the medium and cost of copying an item.
That's not at all like modern copyright. In ancient times, you paid for access to a particular physical copy, not for a right to manufacture copies. The money went to the owner of that physical copy, not the author.
Modern copyright was instituted to grant a legal right to the *author*, to ensure he got paid for his work (or at least that was the official reason). If you buy a copyright license, it doesn't pay for the medium, labour, or access to the original - those are separate from copyright in the modern sense.
I'm not familiar with the Italian and German copyright lawsuits in the early 1500's, but generally, before the Statute of Anne, copyright was a right granted to the *printer*, not the *author*, which makes it different from modern copyright. I.e, the state granted printers the right to print certain books (and not others), which functioned both as a privilege and as a censorship device.
The ancient Greek and Roman system is what will happen if we abolish modern copyright - people will pay for having easy access to originals, so they can read them or make their own copies at will.
On the other hand, do people take the term "pirate" so seriously? When someone says "pirate", I think of someone in 17th century garb and a parrot on their shoulder. To me, it sounds more quaint than dangerous. But your mileage may vary.
4th and 5th lines is what is being granted as a legal entitlement to the consumer when they compensate, aka provide consideration in a contract to the copyright holder.
No, you do not gain the right to perform or display a work publicly (4th line) when you buy a copy. For example, you're not allowed to play a song on the radio or on a scout meeting just because you bought a copy.
You are allowed to perform and display the work privately, for example, to your family and close friends, but not because you provided compensation to the creator. It's because private use falls outside the scope of copyright, and is allowed by default.
Likewise, you do not gain the right "to sell or assign copyright" when you buy a copy. That would mean you could buy one copy of Harry Potter and then sell the rights to publish it to the nearest publisher.
When you buy a copy, you only gain the right to sell or assign that particular copy. Re-sale has been found by courts to fall outside the exclusive rights granted to the creator (the so-called "first sale doctrine").
In short: You ARE buying a physical object and nothing else, unless the product comes with a legally valid shrink-wrap license.
No, listening to something does not mean you enter into a contract, by the farthest stretch of the law. Copyright law doesn't work by automatically forming contracts between the creator and the people who use their creation. The person who listens to a song on the radio doesn't break copyright law, because listening to a work is not one of the exclusive rights granted to the creator. It's allowed by default. No contract is needed.
It's only if you wish to manufacture copies or perform a work publicly that you need to enter into a contract with the copyright holder.
Non-profit organisations are usually considered public. Even a private club, for example, a film club you can only join if you're specifically invited, is considered "public" for the purposes of copyright law.
If you just gathered a few friends in your home and kept any organisations outside it, you'd most likely be ok.
I think his point was that enforcing a "right to listen" is morally wrong, and that the recording companies only got away with having laws worded this way because previously there was always a physical attribute to the content you buy, [...]
But the law isn't, and has never been, worded that way. The law makes it very clear that copyright only grants the creator an exclusive right to do a certain, limited number of things, and private use is not one of them. The only confusion stems from the propaganda of the copyright lobby, not the language of the law.
The way I look at it, once I paid the Beatles once for the full Album, I can download new copies as many times as I want. Burn as many copies as I want. Put it on flash drives, MP3 players, etc.
The legal entitlement sets you free. Physical mediums lock you down.
But that makes it your personal legal theory, not the one the legal system currently uses. The language of the copyright law makes it clear that it only regulates the creation of physical copies, public performance, and a few other related rights. It doesn't talk about "ownership" or "title" to a song or a film. It doesn't talk about licenses being awarded on-the-fly when you buy a physical copy.
Your legal theory is similar to the "bundle of rights" theory promoted by some libertarians, but that won't help you if you're prosecuted for downloading pirated versions of a game you already bought. Under the current legal system, that's illegal.
Many customers prefer a printed manual, and shelling out a few dozen dollars for it is a small cost compared to what their employees' time is worth.
After all, there are still people who buy printed versions of books which have been in the public domain for decades, such as the works of Shakespeare, Homeros, Jane Eyre, Frank Baum, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, etc.
Printed manuals will probably not be the main source of income for most software firms, but it's one way to get revenue. My bet is that most free software firms will charge for customising their software for individual clients.
I would love to live in a Utopia like Star Trek where technology has reached the point that all famine and disease has been cured and there is no need for war. A meritocracy where people don't expend effort for any material rewards, but to contribute back to all of society.
Yes, if only we had some kind of replicator technology in real life that instantly copied any goods, there'd never be any shortage and no need to charge for them.
People have to eat and support their families. Open source can work as long as it supported in some way financially. That is quite often a job separate from the work, corporations that are funding the project, or companies like RedHat that are selling support. It's also quite possible to build up such a reputation with an open source project that consulting contracts, book deals, lectures, etc. could provide a comfortable lifestyle.
It already works for music. Lots of bands put up their music on the Internet for free, and earn money from concerts and merchandise. Check out jamendo.com, for example.
In the entire United States, only around 200 authors can live on their writing alone; the rest earn money from things like lectures and teaching, or have a day job.
There are sites that give away university-level text books for free and put advertising in them.
If you think about it, it's nothing new. TV networks have given away their programming for free by stuffing it with advertising for more than half a century.
There have been cases where high-quality copies of movies have leaked out early, such as the screener of the first Spider-Man movie, but if the movie has been good, it has still done very well at the theatre. The presence of downloadable copies doesn't seem to noticeably affect people's willingness to go to the theatre.
Paying for recordings is what allows (or unfortunately, increasingly what allowed) professional musicians to practice for 8 hours a day. Yes, some musicians can make a living from huge concerts; yes, musicians can reach a reasonable level practicing only weekends. But I like orchestras as well as rock bands, Elman as well as Eminem. If we have neither patronage nor music sales how do they survive?
In Sweden, the income per artist has increased by 30% during the last decade, and in Norway by over 60%, despite the number of artists also increasing. In the United States, the number of music albums produced has more than doubled in the last decade.
Classical orchestras already derive most of their income from sponsorships, subsidies and concerts, not from selling copies, so not much would change for them if copyright was abolished.
Paying for books is what allows professional authors and professional editors. Books that can be sold very cheaply (and survive piracy) are, by necessity, almost invariably short and with mass-market appeal. I like those but I also like long, challenging fiction and well-researched reference books. Quick thrillers can survive by selling thousands of copies for pennies each; can difficult works? Can specialist works of reference?
I'm all for making culture and education available to everyone, but if what that means is making available to everyone only what appeals to almost everyone, and losing the rest because it can't pay for itself that doesn't seem such a big step forward.
That will never happen, because people make, and have always made, art because of the need for self-expression. The vast majority of artists have never been able to life off their art. Money does not motivate people to create art; at best, it provides the artist a means to devote themselves to their art full-time, and at worst, it turns a good artist into a mass-producer.
Selling copies is just one of many ways to derive revenue from your art. Music artists derive revenue from concerts and merchandise. Authors derive revenue from things like lectures, writing courses, book signings and merchandise. Graphic artists derive revenue from doing commissions. Writers of educational material put advertisements in their book. And so on.
I'm an aspiring writer myself, but I have no illusion about the chances of deriving significant income from my writing. That's always been very rare.
Even when you aren't talking about copies, the content industry gets annoyed with sharing. Selling that book or CD you purchased to someone else? That should be made illegal because it costs them sales!
True. The content industry tried to sue the people who rented out video cassettes, then the people who sold used video games, claiming it violated their copyright.
They'll try anything that has a chance of earning them more revenue, no matter how dubious or short-sighted it is.
I may have misunderstood your post - if so, my apologies. If not though I don't think I agree with your point because I think you are looking at art with mass-market appeal and extrapolating. So that it's clear what I mean let me explain.
If I have understood you correctly you are saying that content-producers (I am going to avoid the term 'artists' because I'm not sure that that would cover the authors of, for example, reference books) do not need income from selling copies because there are other ways to make money - among others concerts, tours, book-signings, merchandise and lecturing. Secondly you say that even if they can't make a real living that is fine, because content-producers are motivated by a desire for self-expression and not by money. I disagree with both of these suggestions.
Taking first the idea that there are ample other revenue sources, the question here I think is for whom? I would argue that the alternative sources of revenue are generally only available to mass-market content-producers. To make my point clear let me give you the example of three books from my bookshelf:
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1104 pages, fiction)
Snuff by Terry Pratchett (384 pages, fiction)
Defending Possession Proceedings by Nic Madge et al (840 pages, non-fiction)
Of these three authors Pratchett is, I think, the only one who could have derived any real revenue from the alternative streams you propose. His work (and I don't mean to criticise it at all) has a large 'cult' and mass-market following that lends itself to conventions, signings and merchandise. Infinite Jest is an excellent book - it was ranked as one of the best books of the 20th Century - but it's a weighty piece of post-modern literature and, with the best will in the world, isn't going to sell a lot of merchandise. DPP is a bit of an odd-one out. It's a practitioner's text for housing lawyers so merchandise and signings are out of the question(!), but equally it is very unlikely to have brought in any particular income for its authors (at least compared to their salaries as judges and lawyers). The difference with DPP is that as a practitioner's text it has to be scrupulously accurate and comprehensive, meaning that a significant expense will have been editing and fact- and reference-checking. The editors need to be paid and can hardly sign copies or lecture off the back of their role.
My point is this: while there is a subset of content that lends itself to alternative revenue streams there is a lot of content that does not. Reasoning that some content producers have found a different way to make money and so all could is fallacious.
This doesn't matter at all, of course, if your second point holds true: if people don't need to make money from their content then it doesn't matter if they can't. Again, though, I don't think that this is a true statement outside a subset of content-production. The dichotomy here I would suggest is between professional and non-professional content production.
There are some forms of content or art that can be produced non-professionally. Content that requires mastery of your subject or instrument, however, generally cannot - not because professional statute confers some sort of magic ability but because the time that is needed to master something is more than you can commit on a non-professional basis. As before, this doesn't always matter. There are genres of music where charisma or style matter more than technical ability, just as in fiction a good plot can be enjoyable even if the writing isn't the most refined. But what you can't do is reason from that that technical mastery never matters. There is a lot of music that requires enormous technical brilliance; there is fiction that relies on exceptionally refined prose. The fact that hobbyists can develop flash games in their spare time - and that those games can be good - does not mean that the same is true of GTA: IV, with its hundreds of coders and $100m development budget.
I hope I've managed to make my point clearly (if not succinctly).