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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%."
Searched for 16% and found the source of mistake: support for punitively restricting a convicted person from using the Internet is at 16%. Plain old content filtering is more popular -- 60% in favor of some scenarios.
I feel bad for the artists and other content creators, but I suspect they'll survive the transition better than the parasites.
Think again !
Average stage lifespan for a garden-variety artist is 3 years.
Those parasites have lived much more than that.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Actually, this kind of abuse is exactly a feature of copyright. The economic reasoning is simple enough that it is covered in microeconomics introduction. The problem is similar with all regulations that create monopolistic profits.
This is money you get in excess of what you'd be making in a fully efficient, competitive market. Since this is money in excess of the cost of all factors of production (and, btw, that includes the return on your investment in R&D), you don't get extra profit by spending it on your main business. Instead, you're better off if you spend that extra lobbying for activity that extends the regulations that give you the extra profit.
The problem is made worse because this kind of behavior (called rent-seeking activity, if memory serves) is not self-correcting. Since distribution of cost and benefit is extremely uneven (small cost to many people vs. large benefits to very few large publishers in the case of copyright), there is very little in terms of political incentive for change.
Here in California, abolishing write-ins gets proposed every couple of years and there. Many states have some severe hoops to jump through before a candidate can be written in. Regardless, the funding in many campaigns for the two major parties ensures that the populace only really knows their names and not any information about "fringe" candidates. Even the people themselves cast allegations of "throwing away votes".
I ask: Do you know who you will write-in if your congress-critter votes to pass SOPA? Can you name who you will vote for instead to your critter when you complain/threaten?
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Absolutely the "slap on the wrist" in Canada shows that it's cheaper to steal millions of songs and make vast amounts of profit from them, than to steal 22 songs or whatever and just listen to them. Of course, private copying is still legal in Canada, and that is done by stealing money from photographers and computer programmers and anyone who has backed up their files to a burned CD.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc