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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 Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.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.
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.
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
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.
Nah, most voters would like to follow through with that threat but when presented with two bags of crap most just prefer to stick with the current bag of crap they have been voting for rather than try the new one.
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.
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 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 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 !
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.
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.
Copyrights themselves aren't the problem, copyrights that extend for decades without the creator having to extend them and without regard to the creator's interests that are the problem. The reality is that there's a bunch of content that's been abandoned by the owners that would have been public domain after 28 years previously, but now thanks to the super long automatic copyright terms isn't available to anybody.
That's not a feature of copyright, that's a feature of what happens when politicians give corporations what they want without concern for the consequences.
I don't think copyright inherently is a bad thing. And I don't think most people here save for the extremists and the uneducated would support its elimination altogether. But I think a lot of people would agree that it is, in its entirety, as it exists, ridiculous. From the length of the copyright term, to the punitive damages levied for infringement, to the wide-ranging destruction its enforcement causes, it cannot possibly be considered sanity, much less conducive to a functioning society. If anything, this ridiculousness around copyright has or soon will have a negative effect on creativity and productivity, where people are now too afraid to create new works because they're afraid somebody with deeper pockets is going to take them to court over it.
Copyrights need to be brought down to levels of sanity in all aspects. For the terms, fifty years irrespective of the author's lifetime is very generous. Any more and it starts becoming ridiculous again. For infringement, the punitive damages should be equal to the retail price per copy made and provably distributed. As for enforcement, it should remain a civil matter, and be applied only to situations of direct infringement. Organized, for-profit criminal copyright infringement can be addressed by real criminal statutes, including tax evasion and racketeering.
It is important to recognize that there is a role for the protection copyright allows. It is also important to recognize when the system of copyrights no longer serve that role.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I stopped agreeing with you there (it is not taking away anything from anyone), but if I hadn't stopped there, I would have stopped here...
First, I don't support any models that scale with the amount of people on a planet and that at the same time have 0 reproduction costs (yes, it is 0 if I can reproduce it myself).
Second, I fail to see how copyright currently provides an incentive to artists to produce more good works when clearly they stand to profit from their works forever.
Third, copyright keeps being retroactively extended -- not just extended, but also applied to works that accepted the earlier limits fully knowing they would become public domain at some point. To me that is simply showing no respect to spirit of the this law at all and clearly shows that those that stand to benefit from these changes don't give a fuck about the public domain.
Put all of those together, and I have absolutely zero problems to ignore this notion they call "copyright" whenever I please.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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 is never that simple. You see, copyright isn't the only issue in an election. I think it is safe to say that for most people copyright is a minor issue in an election so for most candidates and elected officials issues like this won't be discussed and the end result is that they (I could say all minor issues) are irrelevant to the election and will always be in this system. That's where lobbies with money come in: they can buy *very* cheaply the support of several congressmen because this issue is irrelevant to them.
You could add to the problem the US electoral system where each district has a single elected official. In most districts copyright is a very minor issue (in how many districts is copyright important enough to affect the income of a large part of the population in the district?) and completely irrelevant in the election.
In a complex industrialized society most issues are minor for most of the population and all these discussions that are always popping up reflect that. Democratic systems were created in a time were geography was by far the most important aspect. Today this is no longer necessarily true. I, living in Brazil, probably have more interests, perspectives and ideas in common with you, living in the other side of the world, than with my next door neighbor. Even though perhaps 5% of the population care and have the same views on copyright we will not have 5% of representatives on these issues. That's why lobbies are so effective.
I'm not proposing any solution because there is no simple solution and probably very few politicians would want to change anything but with Internet available to everyone new possibilities will arise even though I don't expect to see any change soon. The end result is that for the first time in history most of the world is under some sort of democratic regime but very few people feel represented in power.
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.
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.