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Interview With Suren Ter From 'You Have Downloaded'
An anonymous reader writes "Suren Ter discusses privacy, piracy, and the future of filesharing. Suren produced the virally popular YouHaveDownloaded.com, which displays all downloads on the public BitTorrent network associated with an IP address."
When asked about his views on piracy: "Just like I told a French journalist and to the lady at the Washington Post, pirates are thieves and they do steal. Yeah yeah, 'when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file' — I get that BS. We all know that it’s BS too. However, SOPAs and PIPAs create tyranny. If given the choice between thieves and tyranny, I’d rather stay with the thieves."
Oh well I used to believe there was a difference between theft and copyright infringement; but now that someone's called the distinction BS I'm changing my views. Heh, my captcha is "proofs"
I'm just surprised this service hasn't been acquired by the MAFIAA. It could easily lead to the largest John / Jane Doe lawsuit ever filed; just make a little script to generate a legal document for every IP address matching one that downloaded something they think they own.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
..n. Of course, if you use it as an argument to say that 'pirating' is OK, then it's BS. But making the distinction surely isn't?
When I copy your DVD, you still have a copy that you can try to sell to someone else. When I can't copy your DVD for free, I won't pay for it, I won't bother acquiring it, I don't end up having it, and I haven't wasted my time watching it. You still have a copy. You still don't have my money. That's the difference.
The idea that you can sell your product and retain control over what people do with it. That's BS.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My result, dozens of recent and hundreds of historical "infringing" torrents later:
Hi. We have no records on you.
This means you are using a private torrent tracker or, of course, you may not be a torrent user at all! It happens. Please, entertain yourself. Feel free to see what other people have downloaded. The search box is on the top. If you have any friends who use torrents, use it to scare them off. We also have a widget that you can install in your website, blog or Facebook page. Or you can just send them a link to this site. They will see a table similar to what you see below. The only difference — they will see their downloads.
This is BS:
Hi. We have no records on you.
This means you are using a private torrent tracker or, of course, you may not be a torrent user at all! It happens. Please, entertain yourself. Feel free to see what other people have downloaded. The search box is on the top. If you have any friends who use torrents, use it to scare them off. We also have a widget that you can install in your website, blog or Facebook page. Or you can just send them a link to this site. They will see a table similar to what you see below. The only difference — they will see their downloads.
I have downloaded so much off Bittorrent, without any sort of "disguise" or "cloaking" - primarily because a grand total of [ 0 ] successful claims have been brought in the English courts.
Its been proven before and is still true. IP doesnt mean anything. I just put in my printers IP and it downloaded Twilight... I never knew my printer likes crap vampire movies
Are you trying to convince us you're BadAnalogyGuy?
I don't want my DNA sequence being shared, therefore I won't sell it. People who don't want their content being distributed can do the same.
Dilbert RSS feed
which displays all downloads on the public BitTorrent network associated with an IP address.
Bittorrent is a protocol, not a network. Failed my BS detector right there.
It's got trackers, which keep track of who has and needs which chunks, and that's it. You can always set up your own tracker (getting people to use it is another matter), and nobody knows who is using it except the people who are using it. There is no requirement for trackers to talk to each other, and I don't even know if there is even an option for that.
I'm pretty sure you can't even get info on who is participating in a particular torrent unless you ask the tracker specifically about that torrent, and that there's no wildcard mechanism to ask the tracker for a list which torrents it serves.
So they could download a bunch of .torrent files off of popular sites that are using popular trackers and snoop into those, but there's no way they can see everything.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
a) NAT
b) dynamic IP ranges
But authors are so full of themselves it hurts :). Good luck for them and maybe-buyers, once they try to litigate with mostly false data.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
For anyone who knows math, logic, or who is rational, can you please answer this question as to whether stealing becomes right if everything is owned?
You can argue semantics all you want, but the base argument is very simple and straight forward: Should you be allowed to take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with them?
If you answer Yes, nothing else needs to be discussed, people "own" nothing.
If you say No, then you need to start breaking down things to qualify what belongs to a person and what is effort. Since this simple question is overlooked to quibble about false analogies and traditional word meanings, very little useful dialogue tends to pop up in these conversations.
Not even the author of the work. It is a government-created *privilege* not a right, and it is revocable and limited in scope.
Someone who copies your work has not stolen anything..... they've merely infringed upon your government-granted monopoly. That's life and part of the cost of doing business (like when 80s-era Microsoft, Commodore, and others copied Apple OS's look-and-feel).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I expect to get flamed and modded down for this. But if I had any mod points right now, I'd mod Suren +5 insightful.
Well except, I could only mod him +1 insightful.
And except for the fact that making copies of music/movies you own and sharing with others isn't really piracy, but sharing with unlimited strangers is simply wrong, and y'all know it is. Whether you will admit it or not.
And except for the fact that breaking DRM to make legitimate copies of your stuff is totally not piracy and should by all accounts be a fair use right. Oh wait it is, except for that vile DMCA.
So, perhaps the Movie and Music industry brought some of this "piracy" on themselves. Still doesn't make filesharing of others copyrighted work right. I too prefer the "piracy" over tyranny. Until such time as media companies figure this out, they won't see one penny from me.
The idea that you can sell your product and retain control over what people do with it. That's BS.
I would like for anyone on Slashdot to logically and mathematically answer this from a consequence based risk analysis perspective.
Why is it wrong to download music if no one is hurt by your consumption of it? Is artificial scarcity worth it and why do we have to maintain artificial scarcity? Is it a religion or tradition to maintain artificial scarcity in certain industries?
I don't see how it's unethical. I do the math and I don't see the fans of music/movies/art losing, I don't see the artists/actors/ losing, as people will always go to concerts, movie theaters, or buy copies to see them before everyone else.
So what is the point? Can they squeeze a few percent more profits by artificial scarcity? Probably, but these profits aren't enough to justify putting the entire file sharing industry out of business and totally changing the face of the internet.
Nobody "took" anything. The content was bought and then shared.
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What good is tracking IP addresses when every computer on the internet can become a proxy so that it's impossible to know who downloaded what?
The proxy service could be built into file sharing apps themselves or created as a chrome plugin which uses onion routing to hide file sharers behind other file sharers and then download the file in bits and pieces and reconstruct it. This could even be done in a way so it looks like ordinary port 80 traffic.
Sure, why not. It's not like my DNA is full of proprietary code or is some kind of artistic expression.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
"Should you be allowed to" is virtually never a valid question. We should be allowed to do everything except what we AREN'T allowed to do. Most reasonable rationales for why something should not be allowed are based off of harm caused or intended to be caused. If I stab you, that harms your body, so that is something we should not permit. There is no such harm with copying, so it shouldn't inherently be stopped like actual theft should.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Work filter blocked for "Proxy Avoidance"
I'm curious about the site. I entered to see what had agreggated on me (yes, I download quite a bit).
Instead I was struck with such a list of crap movies that I felt it was bordering on slander.
But nothing I've actually downloaded. And I have a fixed ip.
The site doesn't seem to work very well. And I'd hate to get sued by MAFIAA for allegedly downloading "Superhero Movie".
I looked.
I've had this IP for awhile and I (and especially my gf) have never downloaded Nirvana's Greatest Hits. False positives.
I've even received notices of abuse from my Internet provider for Vampire movies that I have supposedly torrented. Nuh-uh. More false positives.
We now live in a world where anyone can be turned into a criminal by simply appending an IP address onto a file.
Should fingerprint scanners be used to allow someone to download and listen to a particular song or watch a particular movie or unlock a particular game?
You can argue semantics all you want, but the base argument is very simple and straight forward: Should you be allowed to take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with them?
If you answer Yes, nothing else needs to be discussed, people "own" nothing.
If you say No, then you need to start breaking down things to qualify what belongs to a person and what is effort. Since this simple question is overlooked to quibble about false analogies and traditional word meanings, very little useful dialogue tends to pop up in these conversations.
Except that information != physical property. You can't compare the two because they behave in totally different methods. For instance I can't simply copy a chair by right clicking o it, the same is not true for information. All there person's effort went into making the first copy. Once it's made there is no additional effort expended in the copying of said idea.
This is the problem though, people want to treat information as physical property with defined rights of ownership. Well unfortunately you physically can't. The best you can do is lock down every information channel and force everything into a DRM mandated system. The damage to the free flow of general ideas (i.e. ones that people may not even be trying to own) is obvious and catastrophic.
We need to find a way to reward the initial creation of an idea, not it's distribution.
You jumped ahead of the question. You are already defining bought, shared, ownership, content and implicitly effort. The point is the base definitions do not work any more, the technology and methods of distribution have moved beyond the scope of our general legal understanding. Copyright has been used to try and combat that, but it is flawed in many ways. Start from the beginning, define everything with your logic and see what you get.
As it currently stand the purchase once and give away free to everyone is not sustainable. What do you propose those industries do then? I'm not saying it's gonna happen tomorrow, but outline to me how "sharing" would not eventually kill these intangibles based industries we all love so much?
Well, the key is that if you spend all your time debating whether or not copyright infringement is theft, you never actually have to discuss whether copyright infringement is wrong. Arguing definitions lets you avoid addressing the real issues!
Check out my world simulator thingy.
You can argue semantics all you want, but the base argument is very simple and straight forward: Should you be allowed to take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with them?
If you answer Yes, nothing else needs to be discussed, people "own" nothing.
If you say No, then you need to start breaking down things to qualify what belongs to a person and what is effort. Since this simple question is overlooked to quibble about false analogies and traditional word meanings, very little useful dialogue tends to pop up in these conversations.
Except that information != physical property. You can't compare the two because they behave in totally different methods. For instance I can't simply copy a chair by right clicking o it, the same is not true for information. All there person's effort went into making the first copy. Once it's made there is no additional effort expended in the copying of said idea.
This is the problem though, people want to treat information as physical property with defined rights of ownership. Well unfortunately you physically can't. The best you can do is lock down every information channel and force everything into a DRM mandated system. The damage to the free flow of general ideas (i.e. ones that people may not even be trying to own) is obvious and catastrophic.
We need to find a way to reward the initial creation of an idea, not it's distribution.
Why not pay them to create ideas?
Others said torrents throw in a few sprinkles of fake IP addresses. They should throw in a lot more! Maybe when we have a few more grannies 'downloading' The Hangover 3 and Eminem people will start to realize this IP address thing is garbage. I only hope the government isn't too dumb to figure out this list is worthless.
Their website says my home IP address downloaded two files I've never heard of: ... p.BRRip.Xvid.AC3-SiNiSTER (2.08 GB)
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine - EP (45.02 MB)
30 Minutes or Less.2011.7
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine? Lol. I'm a fricking skinny white guy. I'd much rather listen to Pink Floyd or Foo Fighters than some heavy rap. But I just bought the CDs instead of downloading them. Maybe I'm actually funding the real root problem by giving the **IAA groups my money.
Most of us are in favor of punishment for insider trading, yet there is no harm done in those transactions. Most of the time all that happens is some stock changes hands and everyone continues to have something. Certainly nothing like physical harm is done. The insider doesn't want to destroy the system or anything. They just want to make some money. Chances are the stock may still be worth something later. What's the harm in that?
Sharing and buying are not incompatible:
As it currently stand the purchase once and give away free to everyone is not sustainable.
You're falling for the mental trap they've set up. That situation simply won't happen. People who share also pay: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
Hell, they buy it even before it's made: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure/
The "copyright or bankruptcy" dichotomy is simply false. Maybe there will be less money to go around, but that's all.
You know who will really suffer? People who sell shit and don't take refunds, because pirates try before they pay. But should we really give a crap about them?
Dilbert RSS feed
From the site:
"Don't take it seriously The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything."
But how do you about adressing real issues if people argue with mismatched and illogical definitions?
Who will pay them, who will decide how much, who will decide which ideas are worthy of payment at all, who will decide what kind of ideas are wanted...?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's the problem. If you can't agree on a common definition for things, you can't move forward in the discussion. Problem is, both sides know this, so the situation never gets resolved. "It's stealing!" "No, it's infringement!" "Same thing!" "No it isn't!" ad nauseum.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."
-- Howard Scott
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It breaks the notion of the market as a level playing field. All investors should have access to the same information. Therefore, all investors except those with the inside information, are disadvantaged and thus opened to potential financial harm.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Read that as Saren at first. Too much Mass Effect for me. :3
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/31/scotland-gets-first-file-sharing-conviction
and the article also alludes to "This is the fifth conviction in the UK for filesharing. Four of the five man team behind the BitTorrent tracker OiNK pleaded guilty to filesharing in early 2010. "
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Who said I was interested in buying it? I got all I needed from the free hair samples you left in my car last week. By the way, I was sorry to hear about the robbery at your home. It's unfortunate that the robber uploaded all of your private data to a file sharing site, but at least they caught him and made him compensate you for the cost of the media. On the plus side someone got a hold of that novel you were working on and even fixed the downer ending you were in the middle of writing. It was a real hit and the guy is already getting donations to write a sequel. I'm not sure I'll read that one though, he says it's going to contain a lot of crossover elements from his favorite anime.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Not only that, but after a decade or so of seeing this war out in the open, all DRM and similar systems do is to create an arms race that only ultimately disadvantages non-technical consumers. Look at eBooks. It is trivial to break the locks for anyone with even as a modicum of technical knowledge so that they can view eBooks from one source to another, thus enabling technically-capable consumers, but also, ironically, opening it up to actual pirates.
Nothing is accomplished other than that consumers who can't figure out how to break the locks to do what they want with the data being screwed over.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm pretty sure he knows all that. Perhaps you missed his point?
For me, some copyright violations are ethical and most aren't. My ethics probably also disagree with the law on finer details of what constitutes Fair Use. In general I try to follow the though.
Ethics and Laws are fundamentally different though. Law simply implies somebody with authority made a rule for others to follow. Ethics implies a value judgment and will vary somewhat from person to person. The ethics here aren't a simple black and white case of right or wrong. If it were, our discussions on the topic would be short. But right or wrong, it's illegal to violate copyright, so long as the copyright laws are applicable to you. And that's the issue to both those who support and those who are against copyright as it stands today. Legal Ethical and Illegal Unethical unless the world is ideal.
It's a scam; the insider is selling something, knowing that it will lose its value. It's akin to selling a broken product, or better, one which will break soon after the customer bought it.
People that want it. I want a some songs to party to. I call up DJ Bob and say, "Hey man, I'm having a party. Here's $N1. Can you provide me with N2 hours of entertainment for that?"
Kickstarter is another method. A developer says, "I'd like to make this game. Do you want it?" "Yeah, I want it. Here's what I'll pay." If it's funded, it happens. They cover the costs of development. Any lost sales to sharing don't matter. They got paid what it cost to make the product. Maybe a little more.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Yes if it was willingly offered. No if it was taken from his server, secure accounts or other forum where he had the reasonable expectation of privacy.
If you display your work for free or for hire...you don't own it anymore. You're free to make as much money as you can from it, but morally I don't feel concerned if people are using your material for other purposes. What the law says is another matter, but these laws aren't for my people.
We need to find a way to reward the initial creation of an idea, not it's distribution
Your right, but there is slightly more since that reward has to come from somewhere.
We also need to find a way to share the rewarding for the initial creation of an idea amongst the people who find the idea useful fairly. Maybe not everyone should have to contribute something to the reward but someone has to, how do you choose who contributes and who does not?
Do you just allow people to contribute whatever they feel like? Surely that relies on everyone being honest wanting to give something back and unfortunately this is not currently the case in the world we live.
I dont read
Civilization is based on the principle that you take somebody else's effort and use it, improve it and teach your children about it. If humans wouldn't copy each others behavior and products, we'd still be "sitting in trees eating bananas". Copyright was "invented" to protect the small man against big corporations getting off with the brink of the money of what their effort was. It took less than 100 years for corporations to find a way to bend that concept to their benefit and essentially screw the small man out of almost all of the money. For every millionaire music artist, there are thousands that ended up paying more to the record company than making their record cost in the first place. For every millionaire music artist, there are at least three millionaire music industry executives. Try finding funding for a movie that won't make the movie industries millions for certain. It's not about how much it will make the actors or the people making the movie, or if there might be a profit in it at all, or even the artistic value of the movie. It's about profit for big record companies, that will all go to people that won't need to work a day of their life anymore and still not be hungry, needy or poor.
Maybe, just maybe, there is virtue in copyrighting medication, but that industry tends to be mostly focused on erection pills and symptom suppression, not on curing important diseases.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I think a lot of people miss the point here. The authors of the site call it "a joke", but that's only because the extent of the monitoring is small, and the ability to trace to a dynamic IP (which is most of us) is largely nonexistent. An organization with a bit more presence could grab MUCH more information, and/or find a way to sync with you in real time.
This site is really a warning about how much personal data is leaked- assuming you consider your IP personal- when you use torrenting. There are ways around this (discussed in this thread), but I really think the folks who check and say "well, it thinks I downloaded this video about making wine, but I never did, so the site is useless" are missing what the site implies is actually possible.
And it is true, it is plain theft of a purchase.
It would be like going in to a shop, scanning some bread with some futuristic device, then printing your own one right there, and not paying either.
You are still consuming a piece of content, be it food or music, without an official transaction happening. It is outside the avenues that said creator opened up for you to consume it.
Note that I say this even though I myself do it, because of the last part of up, the fact that content producers have a narrow avenue of output for their content, which forces me to find other ways.
Worse still, even though I want to pay them, I'd have to go through a billion hurdles just to do so, and would probably still get punished for it!
Not hard to get someone to handle donations to your company, set it up on a site, done.
Honestly, I cannot wait hard enough for the internet content age. It is on its first steps at the moment.
With projects like Kickstarter being a huge success just there for Double Fine Adventure, now Wasteland 2 (which is fantastic to hear about), with projects like Vodo and Netflix trying to create content from donation-based funding, and many music sites, things are looking up.
Who knows where we will be in a decade from now, or 2 decades and beyond.
Yeah, sometimes the amateur productions are a little shaky, but the fact that it exists and it likely wouldn't have on TV, for example, because of a niche market , it automatically makes it a better avenue for hundreds of differing genres that aren't mainstream.
More bad analogies. There's no inconsistency between supporting laws condemning people who distributed data obtained by illegal means and not support copyright. Your argument is absolutely flawed.
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Here is what it really boils down to -- most of what is "stolen" would NOT have been bought by the thief in the first place. So, zero loss from the standpoint that there is no "missing item" and near zero loss from the "opportunity cost" standpoint as well. In most cases at least. Even better, a lot of people will "steal" to sample something before buying it. This is why the movie industry claiming billions in losses (more than they have ever even made) despite having record years makes little sense. because the action of pirating is not as near as harmful as they seem to think/make it out to be.
Moreover, rather than trying to fight how things are, these companies/industries need to learn how to work with it to their advantage. I see most piracy as good marketing myself. Movies that get heavily pirated tend to also do very well in the box office, likely because of the attention received from pirating. Wolverine would be a good example. Bands get exposure to audiences that would have NEVER even heard of them, much less bought them, from pirating. Software, like autocad, can become kings of their domain because of the ease of piracy (well, in autocad's early days at least.)
So not only is there NOWHERE NEAR the loss calculated by these industries, but there is also a gain that is never accounted for. And here we are spending massive efforts and $$$ trying to fight something that we can't win and obviously don't understand the consequences of. So, *no*, it is not as black and white as you seem to think.
> You can argue semantics all you want, but the base argument
> is very simple and straight forward: Should you be allowed to
> take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with
> them?
Sure. The progress of all of human history would not exist otherwise. Even much celebrated "innovators" and "inventors" stood on the shoulders of others.
Copyright exists to serve the public good. It was never meant to be a form of property.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why should I give a damn thing about the industries? Do the industries care about me? Do they care about the workers they fire when they move manufacturing to overseas sweatshops? Do they care about how they make their own country poorer when they move their capitals into tax havens? Did we care when cars destroyed the economy of the horse? A failed business model must be failed for a reason, and therefore it's best to let it die.
If people love the industry so much, then those who do can pay for it by themselves. It's absurd that the Government must pass laws, spend money to uphold them, and limit the freedom of all its citizens, to create an imaginary property for those industries to sell.
All property, tangible or not, exists only because the Government defines and protects it. Tangible property needs to be protected because it can't be duplicated. Intellectual property hasn't that problem.
Except there is harm done to one or more party. The buyer(s) that ends up buying the stock ends up paying a higher price than they would have if they had known the same information as the seller. We can pretty accurately nail down a specific victim(s) and a specific amount of harm inflicted.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yeah yeah, 'when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file'
The real issue here is not that copying is stealing or otherwise a lost sale, the real deal is that the world has changed and the business model for media creation and distribution is DEAD. FULL STOP. No ammount of lobbying, no matter how many laws Hollywood can get of their payed puppets will change that. It's like the railroad owners of 19th century were sen't on destroying that new "invention" called automoviles and trucks that let anybody achieve transportation without giving them their share. Let's face it, I can go to the west coast without needing you, train company. Let's face it, I can get content without needing you, big media company. BUT!!!!! Big media produces the media I want, and the actors, directors producers etc. etc. needs their food too, so... What is needed is a new way to monetize content CREATION, note the word creation, not DISTRIBUTION. Nowadays distribution is FREE, as the roads are "FREE"... you owned the railroads, but you don't own the roads anymore, so for everybody's sake, stop trying to charge me for using the road and go invent some new way to get my money (Sell gas, sell insurance for my car, and so on). Because, like it or not, being fair or not, being legal or not, charging for distributing media is NO LONGER POSIBLE, and trying to "regulate" this is like trying to pass a law that abolishes gravity... it will not work.
As a software engineer and a musician, I disagree with your assessment that "no one is hurt by your consumption". It's the tragedy of the commons. If just you download my software, or download my song for free, Your right, I'm not really hurt. But the problem comes when that behavior becomes widespread. Software is hard work, and so is music. I need someway to be paid for those efforts. With software in particular, There isn't always one person that is willing to pay 500,000 dollars for a piece of software without that kind of return. Something like Photoshop: no one person wants to fund that, and just let everyone else copy it. But it still a useful piece of software that is worth something to a lot of people. So how else do you do it? You make it so everyone that wants it pays a piece of it. And when you download it for free, that 1) is not fair to the people that do pay, and 2) is not fair to the people who developed that software. You're saying that their hard work is worth nothing to you, but you still want the work. The "It's not stealing" argument is BS. You can argue it all you want, and it is actually an easy point to argue, but that doesn't mean you're not just trying to explain away why people like me should give you our work for free.
Yeah -- on both sides. This is why copyright proponents spend so much time declaring theft += copyright infringement, so they don't have to formulate a persuasive argument as to how the total harm done by a (small, yes) restriction on EVERY SINGLE PERSON's property rights(1) is justified by the increased "incentive", AKA profits, for megacorps(2) to put out new remakes of the same old ideas, and even to retain their control of old works indefinitely.
In a world of tea-partiers (who hate (1) on pop-libertarian grounds) and OWS (who hate (2) on a variety of pop-liberal grounds), current copyright law is far from a safe sale. If everyone in the US who bothers to consider piracy at all (whether from practical, semantic, legal, or moral grounds) started concerning themselves with what level of copyright is morally acceptable, it's likely it would be cut way back (probably not abolished, as I'd like, but I'm a freaky libertarian radical), likely below Jefferson's limit, the median life expectancy from the age of maturity; he took 21 as the age of maturity, and came up with a 19-year limit; we might take 18, and come up with perhaps as much as 30 years. (The logic is that the dead have no right to rule the living, so each generation can only make laws affecting the time in which they remain mostly alive.)
I'm not overly familiar with insider trading, but if I understand it correctly the harm comes in the form of devalued stocks for everyone except the insider.
Information may want to be free, but IP producers want to pay the mortgage.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No you dont you liar! You make a playlist of mp3s and play them in your favourite player completely without paying a cent.
Football Odds
Seeing as you're an AC I doubt that this is even useful, but you should answer the question asked, not the question you wish you were asked.
The truth is that the best way to reward the creators of content is to have the consumers pay for the content they consume. There is no other method that even comes close to being as good.
You use the Kickstarter model.
It's really not that difficult to figure out.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Suren Ter (me) I’m a producer of the site. Like a movie producer, I made the site. Ruslan is a visionary. He did the necessary research and invented the technical tricks. Ilia is a programmer. He does the code. You see those tables, html and widgets? He did it. Me? I don’t do code, I don’t do research, I don’t do design — I do sites. Drop me a message if you’d like.
This guy's attitude is right in line with any "producer." They market other people's work to earn fame and/or money for themselves. Now, the two programmers, they actually MADE something and I don't see them complaining about "IP theft." A producer makes money from selling the product, the more money the product makes, the more successful they are. Actual creative minds (the programmers in this case), might make a bit of money, might get a job offer, but most importantly they have pride for having created something! Suren has nothing without being the gatekeeper.
Well, what would happen is this (applies to both music and software):
- Those in it for the money get out of it
- Those in it for the love stay in it
- The world will find balance, because
- Either everyone is fine with the new situation
- Or there becomes a renewed demand for engineers/musicians.
Now, the days of middle men and a lifetime of royalties, selling one piece of software a million times, may be be coming to an end. There will however always be people paying for an engineer to solve their problems, or a musician to perform at their venue.
But even this is exaggerated, since we're far from there yet. Do you think the average Joe would not prefer to spend a dollar and instantly watch the new episode of House at 1080p on his big screen TV ? Or pay 4,95 for iPhoto on his iPad ?
The BS is that the content is not available, we still have prehistoric models of region-based releases and 'this item is not available in your country' BS, and deal with stupid DRM schemes that only hurt the paying customers (so why become one?)
Apple has already shown there is a market for software and media content, the fact that it is easier to torrent something than pay a reasonable amount for it is what the problem is.
Sensi fucks Kerry Louise in the Jacuzzi.mp4 (280.26 MB) Nov, 2011
Ahahaha, looks like someone wasn't quite working that day.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Don't forget that the mythos around Robin Hood was stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
When you cause your storage hardware to take on a unique information pattern that I brought into being, and you have copied this pattern against my will and consent, you now have an actual physical instance of my pattern, one that can do real work and/or really entertain you, that I am 100% justified in erasing from your storage hardware -- by force. After all, by your own reasoning, you don't own the pattern, so you have no right to retain or maintain it, and consequently you have no right to protect the physical instantiation you have caused to come into being.
If you don't like the terms I offer in exchange for providing that pattern to you, then you can legitimately refuse the terms and the pattern. If you take the pattern anyway, you have now qualified for a visit from the police, who operate -- quite correctly -- under the guidance of the constitution, which specifically provides for legislative mechanisms to protect those who generate new value for society in the form of art or invention.
Society will always benefit from invention; society will always be harmed by discouraging inventors. This means that your simplistic so-called philosophy that "information patterns cannot be owned" will always be at odds with society. Legally speaking, the behavior you champion here should result in fine, and/or imprisonment when detected -- and that is just how things should be.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Is he a monkey and does he eat cheese?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Original AC here. And yes using AC on purpose, as I rather people attack my ideas and words contextually then myself or things I have said in the past. Anyways on topic:
My point is the question is flawed as are the answers. I know my answers and my thoughts, but I am sick of reiterating them, so instead I reduced it to what I thought the base case was and presented it as an alternate question to the inherently flawed one often presented. My goal is not necessarily to replicate my own thinking, but to see if anyone else does or comes up with something better.
If you reduce it all to square one and start building up all these ideas concerning intellectual property how would the system work compared to our current one which is slapped together from various ideas and concepts?
More often then not, arguments concerning intellectual property ignore the spirit and try to argue the letter, I feel that is getting us nowhere.
That all said, this conversation thread has already given me an idea that I hope to try in the near future that may be another path that can alleviate some of these issues.
Exactly. "We all know that it’s BS too." Fuck that guy.
What's the difference between me downloading a movie or going over to a friend's house to watch his copy? Either way, I wasn't going to pay $14.95 for it. I've never bought a movie. And the few times I go to the movie theater it's the dollar theater, or $1.20 redbox. If I could watch any VCD quality movie I wanted for $1, I would pay it, because that's what it's worth to me. And I do, when possible. I pay for netflix.
Point is, watching a movie is not a crime. Neither lending a book, nor humming a tune. Civil disobedience I say! You can pry my eyes and ears from my cold dead hands.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Nobody "took" anything. The content was bought and then shared.
It was bought because of a mass-market pricing structure, assuming everyone that wants a copy will buy a copy.
Under the assumption that few will buy but all will share, that $15 DVD to recoup investment and make it worth the investment in production (as opposed to, say, commodity speculation) simply could not exist. In that world we're looking at maybe a $150,000 DVD. And if one DVD cost twice a typical household income, would the purchaser be so cavalier about sharing? Look at the prototype / advance review video game market. There are folks out there with rare EEPROM cartridges that would never agree to having them dumped -- and preserved by the act of copying and sharing -- because that reduces the value of their find. (or would expose the bit rot that has already occurred)
I mean, I'll happily share my sandwich to the sandwichless: a real physical thing, but I wouldn't as easily share my home to the homeless, even if sharing doesn't affect my enjoyment of it.
My IP address is copyrighted. Prepare to be hit with thousands of DMCA notices, my friend.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
As it currently stand the purchase once and give away free to everyone is not sustainable. What do you propose those industries do then?
Don't try to sell music, sell CDs and use the MP3s as advertising. Don't try to sell novels, sell books. Copyright used to only apply if a work was "fixed in a tangible medium" and I posit that bits over a wire are not tangible.
Read Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the matter, it's in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom iinm (either the preface or afterword). You can read it for FREE, just visit your local public library or download it from boingboing. Doctorow credits his success and status as a NYT best seller to the fact that he puts his work on the internet for free. It works for him, it could work for music or movies, too.
The problem is that the publishers' own greed is killing them. The RIAA would have embraced Napster if they didn't already have radio. Most indies love to have their stuff shared.
As Doctorow points out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.
You can't make piracy go away, but you can use it to sell goods.
Free Martian Whores!
Personally, I'd flip on satellite radio... because I don't keep many MP3s. I have Last.FM (through RhythmBox... no ads, and if I really want to hear a song from my selection on there, I can skip forward a bit and usually get it), and a Sirius subscription. Really though, there are places that pay people to play music for their customers. Bands can usually book gigs and if they get popular enough, venues. There are ways for "artists" to make money. They just don't want to work for it... who blames them. If you could do something one time and profit off it the rest of your life, wouldn't you?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Under the assumption that few will buy but all will share
Flawed assumption. File sharers buy, a lot: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
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As a software engineer and a musician, I disagree with your assessment that "no one is hurt by your consumption". It's the tragedy of the commons. If just you download my software, or download my song for free, Your right, I'm not really hurt. But the problem comes when that behavior becomes widespread. Software is hard work, and so is music. I need someway to be paid for those efforts. With software in particular, There isn't always one person that is willing to pay 500,000 dollars for a piece of software without that kind of return. Something like Photoshop: no one person wants to fund that, and just let everyone else copy it. But it still a useful piece of software that is worth something to a lot of people. So how else do you do it? You make it so everyone that wants it pays a piece of it. And when you download it for free, that 1) is not fair to the people that do pay, and 2) is not fair to the people who developed that software. You're saying that their hard work is worth nothing to you, but you still want the work. The "It's not stealing" argument is BS. You can argue it all you want, and it is actually an easy point to argue, but that doesn't mean you're not just trying to explain away why people like me should give you our work for free.
I'm a software engineer and musician too. Nice try.
As a musician I know most money isn't made from digital sales. In fact every musician knows this. And software patents don't actually make it easier for software developers.
And also the problem is that Photoshop costs so much that everyone I know has to take out a loan to buy it. If we simply don't have the money to buy every single song we listen to then it's not our fault it's your fault and the markets fault.
I'm all for spreading the wealth but when the wealth doesn't exist what is there to spread?
He called it "BS."
Surely his opponents have all changed their minds now? They know in their hearts that they're 100% wrong.
If someone else called "stealing" "murder," I would try to correct them on that, too. If you don't like that, then stop using words that I feel are incorrect.
Except, of course, it isn't, the implications are completely different, and even the law thinks they're completely separate issues. Just like with copyright infringement. The only difference is that people take "rape" already seriously as is, so it doesn't have to try to _co-opt_ the term for another, separate crime. 'cause that's what the whole business with conflating copyright infringement with theft is _all about_. Nobody gives a shit about copyright infringement, so they try to leech off the badwill for the word "theft". Hell, maybe they should just say that copyright infringement is raping the artist. It's just as true, and there's even more badwill to be gathered.
Only reason they don't is that it'd take an even bigger moron to buy it.
So fuck this douche with his support for the copyright newspeak.
Well, what would happen is this (applies to both music and software):
- Those in it for the money get out of it
- Those in it for the love stay in it
- The world will find balance, because
- Either everyone is fine with the new situation
- Or there becomes a renewed demand for engineers/musicians.
Now, the days of middle men and a lifetime of royalties, selling one piece of software a million times, may be be coming to an end. There will however always be people paying for an engineer to solve their problems, or a musician to perform at their venue.
But even this is exaggerated, since we're far from there yet. Do you think the average Joe would not prefer to spend a dollar and instantly watch the new episode of House at 1080p on his big screen TV ? Or pay 4,95 for iPhoto on his iPad ?
The BS is that the content is not available, we still have prehistoric models of region-based releases and 'this item is not available in your country' BS, and deal with stupid DRM schemes that only hurt the paying customers (so why become one?)
Apple has already shown there is a market for software and media content, the fact that it is easier to torrent something than pay a reasonable amount for it is what the problem is.
Digital sales and licensing structures can change. People can be paid. We might even get paid more when all is said and done, it depends on how we structure it.
But the way the record industry is currently set up, even most big time stars aren't getting paid.
Well, the key is that if you spend all your time debating whether or not copyright infringement is theft, you never actually have to discuss whether copyright infringement is wrong.
Why can't you do both?
Aside from when you're arguing with people who say things like, "Copyright infringement is theft. Theft is bad. Therefore, copyright infringement is bad." of course.
File sharing is not inherently illegal in its own right. It has both legal and illegal applications. How does this site distinguish between copyrighted and non-copyrighted materials, if at all?
The site is littered with phrases along the lines of "You used bitTorrent, therefore you are bad" -- presupposing that BitTorrent use is always illegal.
Since the web site's rhetoric presupposes that all BitTorrent use is illegal, I find it hard to immagine that its data gathering is any more selective. Anybody know?
the moment we have full-scale mass replicators, every tangible goods industry will be changed forever.
...
All property, tangible or not, exists only because the Government defines and protects it.
That may be what is practical. However, the right of ownership is a intrinsic right recognized by most thinkers who brought us the Enlightenment. Somehow those fundamental intrinsic rights, like right to life seem to be threatened species even in the US these days, when a member of judiciary Attorney General Eric Holder thinks a criminal or a soldier is not entitled to the protections of national and international laws.
I'm not supporting the industry, I'm supporting the artists who shouldn't be able to sell their rights to a company in today's world where we have the internet. Unless somewhere, in a super-secret location a gigantic ADSL adapter starts to blink the yellow light and the internet becomes a scarce resource to be shared only at no-internet refugee camps.
Tangible property needs to be protected because it can't be duplicated. Intellectual property hasn't that problem.
Just wait when 3D printing becomes more established and flexible. I bet all hell breaks loose when people buy items only to be scanned and duplicated and then return the original items to the stores.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Insider trading is fraud. Most of the time, when insiders trade, is that somebody on the 'outside' gets skinned and cleaned of their hard earned savings. It's a way to scam the market, just like those 'pump and dump' emails we get spammed with, just another way to find more suckers to finance your 3rd yacht and 5th vacation house. It's illegal for a reason, and if 'nobody gets hurt', it wouldn't be, not with the kind of money they're talking about.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Except it's really not a problem, because there IS a common definition.
Fact: copyright is entirely a legal construct
Fact: the legal term for illegally copying something that is copyrighted is "infringement". It is not and never has been "theft".
If you're going to accept the legal construct of copyright, you must also accept how that law defines it.
There is no argument. There is only what is correct, and what is not.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
If Photoshop seems overpriced to you, there's a very good chance that you could do whatever you're trying to get done in The GIMP or Paint.net.
For those who actually do need it, Photoshop more than pays for itself.
artificial scarcity is the biggest problem, i think. they want to argue it has the same rights as a physical good (copyright is theft), but they don't want to apply the basic economics to its near infinite quantity (which should drive prices into the ground) that would apply to a physical good.
If people love the industry so much, then those who do can pay for it by themselves.
You may not know it, but once you strip away all of the incredible exaggeration and unrelated content from your post, the above statement perfectly summarizes your position:
As long as paying for created works is Someone Else's Problem, you're happy to pirate it.
I'll call you on your elitist BS. This used to be probably true, back during the days when only a few monks or scribes could write. But when we have the scourge known as Facebook, not to mention YouTube and Twitter, every damn Net-connected person is a producer of IP. Oh, yeah, you'd probably say it's mediocre IP, but so is much of the rubbish that comes from Hollywood and the RIAA. So, are you suggesting that we pay only for those works that have been certified as worthy of some dubious award (Nobel, Oscar, etc)?
The difference between my YouTube video and that of Lady Gaga is the massive promotion behind hers.
perhaps we need another word. i agree that "theft" as legally defined for centuries does not really work in an "economy of abandunce" (there's another term that needs rethinking - the word economy implies scarcity).
that said, harm doesn't just disappear in an economy of abundance - the scarcity then becomes the market itself. a product can be duplicated infinitely, but there's only so many people out there who can buy or download it. it's interesting what this guy says about initial copies being watermarked and traceable to the original leaker. that is a good idea IMHO.
i'm a digital liberal to be sure, but i work for a small(ish) film/TV distributor, and let me tell you, when "The Hunter" appeared online, we wanted to kick whoever leaked it right in the tits. it's a shitty thing to do. we send out review copies to people for PR purposes, and one of the scumbags goes and uploads it to some torrent site. there's no reason not to sue that person for any manner of things, though i agree that "theft" is not a satisfying thing to nail the dickhead(s) with. also, chasing regular Joes that further shared the file is futile - that's attacking our market. it's the fuckhead in the press who got the review copy that should be accountable, and a unique watermark is a great way to prove who it was.
Ah, so your solution is, if people are creative enough to be able to make a living in selling their creative works, don't? Go get a job doing something else, like flipping burgers in McDs or greeting people at WM. Don't go and write that music, or novel or book or movie or computer game, because people would rather take their hard work and give it away for free than pay them, or their overlords who pay them.
Don't try to sell music, sell CDs and use the MP3s as advertising.
Who would buy CDs? Why spend money on a less convenient medium? Sales of CDs hasn't necessarily dropped because of piracy, it's that people use services like iTunes and Zune to buy music because it's way more convenient. If you don't have to pay for mp3s then that's even more of a reason not to buy CDs.
Except that information != physical property. You can't compare the two because they behave in totally different methods. For instance I can't simply copy a chair by right clicking o it, the same is not true for information. All there person's effort went into making the first copy. Once it's made there is no additional effort expended in the copying of said idea.
Ok sweet, you go spend $300 million to make Avatar and then we'll all take the free copy, then once i've watched it go spend another $300 million to make a sequel to give me for free.
Yes, and energy stocks will fly through the roof.
However, the right of ownership is a intrinsic right recognized by most thinkers who brought us the Enlightenment.
The right to restrict the communication of third parties is not.
So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month.
You mean like they bought all my scientific publications by asking me to sign away my rights otherwise nothing will get published?
I either would have no career, or I had to sign. Is that theft? No..but neither is it fair.
No, people will pay even if they share. The idea that you need copyright to make a living from creative works is flawed.
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The FSF believes that use of software per se does not require a license, anymore than a license is needed to read a newspaper. They believe that it is perfectly legal to use software without agreeing to any sort of EULA, contrary to what proprietary software makers would lead you to believe.
The paragraph in the GPL above simply makes it explicit that anyone can run an unmodified GPL program for any reason. It doesn't mean that the authors of the license believe that use wouldn't be allowed if that paragraph weren't there.
Just for the heck of it, I tried searching for downloads of known 100% legal content -- Linux distributions, kernels etc.
Sure enough, there are people (well ok, IP addresses actually) accused of being thieves because they downloaded perfectly legal materials. Nowhere on Ter's web site did I see a single mention of the distinction between merely using file sharing (which is legal) and using it to violate copyright laws (which is not).
This distinction is apparently unknown to Suren Ter, or more likely deliberately ignored. His rhetoric clearly states that if you ever use file sharing, under any circumstances, you are a thief!
What a bozo!
Should you be allowed to take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with them?
If they have given you those efforts of their own free will, then yes, you should. If someone gives me a hammer that they made, I can use it as I like. If someone gives me a copy of some software that they wrote, I can use it as I like.
You're falling for the mental trap they've set up. That situation simply won't happen
Absolutely, I was actually arguing with a friend who is a lawyer recently about the piracy issue who has little to no knowledge of IP issues and when I brought up public domain and the fact that works again need to fall in reasonable measures of time into the public domain, the first thing that he said was that "can you imagine what the world would be like if people could only own their copyrights for 30 years? there would be no entertainment industry" to which my answer was that it was only a recent occurrence for documents NOT to fall in to the public domain and he thought that I was making it up. He also fell in to the fake sustainability argument that is drawn up.
That's the beauty of jokes -- you can make them out of anything.
Or claim anything is a joke when it isn't.
Fortunately, there is meta-moderation on Slashdot, exactly for this kind of censor wannabes.
You can argue semantics all you want, but the base argument is very simple and straight forward: Should you be allowed to take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with them?
O really? But apparently it is OK to take another person's effort in exchange of a physical object that embodies an idea, then screw them over telling them they don't really own that. Even worse, you not only get to tell me what I can do with copy I got, but also what I can do with other stuff I honestly payed for, devices capable of turning recordings into sound and visual artifacts and/or capable of interpreting series of instructions, or capable of exchanging information with other people. Can't you see how much your stubborn and unnatural insisting on existence of "intellectual property" stains and poisons wider and wider areas of my life and everyone's life, sniffing and meddling into everything? How about I hand you my efforts (earned money) over in exchange for your, but if you want to restrict what I do with "your", you have to let me restrict what you do with mine and more?
We also need to find a way to share the rewarding for the initial creation of an idea amongst the people who find the idea useful fairly.
No we don't, because obviously no idea is useful to everyone ... fairly. There are always those who need it more badly then others. Whoever needs it urgently and relies on it being done, supports it. If none needs it that bad to step up and suck up the fact that there'll be others who freeload, then it is not done, as it shouldn't be. Effort is spent on things whose importance is above whining threshold.
Someone who wanted an instant backup, who wanted high quality cover art and liner notes. Someone who like to display his or her music collection on shelves. If they quadrupled the sampling rate and doubled the bit depth, audiophiles would buy them because they would truly be high fidelity if played through audiohphile quality equipment (especially speakers).
How is a download "more convinient" than unwrapping a CD, putting it in the drive, and clicking?
I can legally get as good a quality rip as an iTunes download by simply sampling the radio. The music is already free. Selling music is like selling air -- it's free and nobody needs to buy it... except scuba divers and welders and people with COPD.
Free Martian Whores!
Personally, I'd flip on satellite radio... because I don't keep many MP3s. I have Last.FM (through RhythmBox... no ads, and if I really want to hear a song from my selection on there, I can skip forward a bit and usually get it), and a Sirius subscription. Really though, there are places that pay people to play music for their customers. Bands can usually book gigs and if they get popular enough, venues. There are ways for "artists" to make money. They just don't want to work for it... who blames them. If you could do something one time and profit off it the rest of your life, wouldn't you?
Speaking as an artist, artists don't profit from digital sales. This is why you don't see artists coming out supporting the RIAA except for the superstars who sell millions of Albums and who have no business sense.
Someone who wanted an instant backup, who wanted high quality cover art and liner notes. Someone who like to display his or her music collection on shelves. If they quadrupled the sampling rate and doubled the bit depth, audiophiles would buy them because they would truly be high fidelity if played through audiohphile quality equipment (especially speakers).
Audiophiles certainly would, i reckon you're definitely right there, there's a market for that, the question is whether it's big enough to support the industry.
How is a download "more convinient" than unwrapping a CD, putting it in the drive, and clicking?
Obviously because I don't have to go out to a shop and buy it or buy it online and wait for it to be delivered. If i want it i can just download it straight away.
I can legally get as good a quality rip as an iTunes download by simply sampling the radio.
Well again, it's convenience, if it's on digital radio and the song you want happens to come on when you want it and you're recording it, then yes, but that's hardly convenient.
and give some regard for the fact that it's people like me these laws are designed to support.
Uh, sir, I've got a Michael Eisner on line three who would like to talk to you about that...
(i.e., it's people like you that these laws should be designed to support, but it's people like Eisner that these laws are designed to support -- designed by the best lobbyists money can buy.)
Then the question becomes are all intangibles actually just expressions of ideas and therefore naturally unlimited in the range of distribution for the benefit of society and mankind? Instead of limited use IP like we have now, there could be a registry of invention and ideas placing no value to the fact of who became first and emphasizing the description and long term storage of the expression, with maximum amount of context preserved. A valuable expression would be rewarded out of tax income flowing from the increase of economic activity and charitable contributions relating to the idea during the life time of the natural person who made the expression. There would be no benefit in stealing ideas as each derivation would be a unique additional idea to the registry.
Bananas are not seedless. Slice a banana down the length in the center, and you'll see the seeds. They're very small.
Those aren't real seeds, though -- they're where the seeds would be, if the banana had any seeds. No modern cultivated food-grade banana has real, viable seeds, precisely because they're so big and hard that you really wouldn't want to try eating a banana that did. See this image for an example of a wild variety with real seeds.
Have a look at the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World for more fruity fun.
What does it mean to distribute data obtained illegally? It's just data isn't it? They caught the theif and he gave you back all of your ones and zeros even, what everyone else has is just a copy and all copyright law was abolished, remember? Even with an "all-or-nothing" copyright law where obtaining data illegally is protected you'll need to prove that you have NEVER sold or given any of that information to ANYONE because I could argue that the copy I have was given to me by someone else who you sold or gave that data to legally, and not from the theif.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Oh, but I wasn't saying we should go out against people who got the data from the thief, just against the thief himself. Sorry if I wasn't clear. No, if I got my private data copied by a burglar or cracker, I wouldn't demand that third-parties to stop its distribution.
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Most highly rated comments are repeating the tired old mantra of "zOMG piracy isnt thef!!" Wouldn't it be great to see more comments that actually address the other issues with piracy?
Sure there are real differences between theft and piracy. There's also real differences in the marriage of two different genders and the same gender, but spending all your time focusing on that is pretty pedantic when the bigger issues are sitting next to the elephant in the room.
But he's right. There would be no entertainment industry. Such a thing is a fairly recent invention. Sure there's always been public entertainment, plays and such, but they generally relied on the patronage model.
People wouldn't stop creating, it's too powerful of a human instinct, but they would create much less simply out of the necessity to do other things that do generate income,
1. Solar cell charges battery.
2. Battery runs mass replicator.
3. Mass replicator makes newer, better, more energy-efficient solar cells.
4. ???
5. PROFIT. Virtually infinite energy, all from the sun, for however many billions of years it has left...
Now, you were saying?