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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 Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I am as anti-copyright-abuse as most here, but this has to be the stupidest thing I saw in this discussion. Do you think that music/movies/games/etc products are found in the forest before they are sold? What makes you think that the cost of the product should cover the "cost of reproducing and distributing" that product and nothing else? It does cost some money to create the product
Now if the costs were set to a more reasonable level (to cover cost of initial production, reproducing and distributing plus epsilon) and if all the artists were paid a reasonable amount (instead of the current rampant cheating) and if the DRM had been throttled back (so that games/DVDs were useable once again), then maybe people would start buying. Ah, a man can dream...
Kim Jong-un has higher approval ratings than Congress. But Congress doesn't care, because the electorate doesn't have the will to punish them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Or the war on poverty. Biggest failure of them all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
+ 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.
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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
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.
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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
Copyright is a form of stealing.
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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.