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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 Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.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.
...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
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 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 !
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.
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."
IP abolition isn't necessarily any better than what we have now, what we need is real meaningful reform to the system. Throwing it out completely is both more work and less likely to happen. Take the terms back to an automatic 28 years with extensions as long as the author cares to file them. And cap that at 56 years for corporations and that would solve a lot of the trouble with copyright right there.
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...
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.
"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
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.
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
Those of the older generation are likely somewhat short. I wonder how many of those that said "No" traded tapes or sneakernetted when they were younger and such.
I've noticed this myself. My father was a professional musician for a lot of years, and by virtue of the fact that he made his living playing music he obviously feels very strongly about music piracy. Many a night have I listened to him and his friends from the industry rail against the pirates "stealing from artists."
But, even back in the days before the internet, I remember watching movies he had taped off of television, in some cases over a decade earlier. He had countless cassette tapes he had recorded off the radio or copied from LPs and later CDs, concerts he had recorded...he even had stuff he had copied onto reel-to-reel; it was so old it predated the cassette. Pointing this out to him when he gets on his rants about piracy yields little, as he seems to think it's different somehow. The fact that, in his youth, he was the dirty pirate just doesn't compute.
It's funny to me how, to people like my father, the justification for piracy has more to do with how difficult it is to do, or the quality of the copy, and not the act of pirating in itself, like it's okay as long as the copy is shitty and making it is time consuming. It wasn't until the internet came around and people started downloading that he really started having a problem with it, which is a little ridiculous to me, and a little hypocritical as well, but seems to be a mindset shared by many of his peers.
Copyright is a form of stealing.
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