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Aussie Case Unlikely To Solve Piracy Riddle In Fast Broadband World
An anonymous reader writes "When some of Hollywood's biggest movie and TV studios took Australian ISP iiNet to court in 2008 — accusing it of facilitating piracy — it focused the eyes of the world downunder. Internet users and media companies alike were keen to see if the courts could figure out how to resolve the ongoing battle caused by easy, and essentially illegal, access to copyrighted material. After three and a half years and a number of appeals the high court judgement comes down on Friday, but it already looks like a failed attempt to solve an impossible riddle."
The piracy riddle is not impossible, but the two sides of the argument have taken irreconcilable positions. Zero respect for IP is not ideal, and neither is absolute authority to enforce IP rights in all media and devices.
Why can't we all just get along?
Nothing "impossible" about this "riddle":
You want me to police my customers for you? Fuck you, pay me.
You want me to hand over subscriber data without a court order? Fuck you, pay me.
You want me to block websites based on your sayso? Fuck you, pay me.
You want me to shut off paying customers because you don't like what they're downloading? Fuck you, pay me.
Two problems with disconnect as approved by the High Court, the RIAA/MPAA have to pay for it and they are liable for false disconnects.
If a business is affected that could be hugely expensive. Even residential users could stick them with a pretty massive civil suit. Online banking, online grocery shopping, online local government communications, social networking, remote working etc. total up the benefits of those services as losses to the consumer and the period of loss and the RIAA/MPAA could be in for some real pain.
Best way to tackle is to haul the ISP into court and get them to warrant the accuracy of the IP address time correlation to the tune of a million dollars (as the sole form of evidence), if it should prove inaccurate then they should pay a penalty.
Next up RIAA/MPAA will have to prove accuracy and full evidentiary proof of their accusation, not best guess, not paid per kick off bias and, not sounds like looks like (files names only is a fail). So they will hate it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Regarding TV 'piracy' in Australia, popular television programs are aired in the US/Canada days, weeks or months before here, so people download them in order to stay up to date. That said, many people (myself included) have subscription television that does eventually broadcast these programs, generally commercial free. Does downloading these programs ahead of their broadcast in Australia constitute piracy if you're paying for the subscription television services that eventually broadcast them?
With regards to film, movies can be delayed by as much as six months (to match 'summer movies' with the Australian summer) from their US debuts. Sometimes, the DVD becomes available overseas before a movie is shown in Australia! Obviously, this is absurd. Peer pressure in internet social groups to download and watch these films can be immense. Australians cannot be expected to have a popular movie 'spoiled' for them by idle chit-chat, nor should the other 95% of users who HAVE seen the movie be forced to keep quiet until Australians get a chance to see it. If release dates were universal, this would be far less of a problem.
However, since Australians already pay per-gigabyte (either through a cap or pre-paid) perhaps the easiest and best solution for all concerned is to whack on a modest per-GB tariff, similar to the Canadian levy on blank media, to be paid back to content producers. It would be controversial, but perhaps less riotous than attempting to police piracy and 'shut down' accused offenders without due process.
I think there is a lot of smoke around what this is about.
The idea is to get a ruling that makes an ISP responsible for the the abuse of copyright that happens on its servers. This would lead to the the ISPs being forced to pay licencing fees to the licence owners. The costs involved with keeping track of and processing the licencing fees from a few thousand ISPs would be much easier than chasing individuals. This would turn the Internet into a solid revenue stream for the licence holders, and allow it to succeed radio and television as a source of royaties and insure against the failure of payed content such as DVDs and iTunes.
At the moment ISPs are treated like telephone carriers, the MPAA etc. want them treated as broadcasters were so that they can extract payment in a way that they are comfortable with.
Australia is a good place to do this in the eye of the MPAA because they feel that they can bully and buy the result, which they can use as a landmark in the UK, and then show as an example to courts in the US.
This is not about stopping people from sharing content, they want people to keep doing that as their content is being viewed more often. What they want is to get payed for people viewing it, regardless of how they got it, while still not having to pay for the distribution.
From TFA "When put simply, it is clear that they are not really the bad guys. They are just trying to find a way ... any way ... to stop people stealing their content".
Australia already has a legal framework in place for copyright holders to seek restitution from online infringers. It was included as part of the AU-US free trade agreement. All the studios need to do is get the IP address of the alleged offender, then get a court order for the ISP to hand over the details so the studio can take that individual to court. There's a framework in place for this to be nice and easy.
The crux of the matter is that after forcing this change of law on Australia, the studios have never bothered to use it. Instead they've decided they didn't really want that law anyway so are instead trying to bully the ISPs instead.
This case isn't about "piracy". It's about large corporations flailing around blindly because they're unsure of what they want.
The biggest issue is availability. There are so many times where I have wanted to pay hard-earned cash for product only to be knocked back with 'not available in your region' insanity. Thanks to being able to stream the same stuff fromYouTube from the 'official channel' makes this even more obnoxious.
The solution is simple: if you're going to release something, it must be available everywhere at the same time. Also, offer it for free with no DRM with the option of paying a reasonable sum and people will pay for it. I know this as I have been involved in the independant music business over here for nearly a decade now.
People want stuff to be convenient, regardless of price. Currently, piracy is the more convenient option for many situations. Make your product convenient and you will win.
Finally, there is a large portion of the market who do not have the ability to spend money on entertainment product. This is usually due to their being under sixteen years old and not eligible for credit cards and the like. These people are often the very ones that spread the awareness of your product furthest (just look at how McDonalds, for example, abuses such influence on a child's family and friends).
This whole argument is a stupid one: one group feels entitled to money, the other feels entitled to culture. The second group will always win.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
Nice sarcasm. I hope. Either that or by your ethos you have no right to claim wages/salary/benefits from your employer/social security provider (most probably the latter).
Publishing a copy of a book (without permission) was a crime in 1799, and it should still be a crime today. The author, and original publisher, are both damaged by lost revenue from their more difficult endeavor of creating the original content. Just because every person who has $500 to buy a PC can now copy huge digital works for fractions of a penny, does not erase the essence of intellectual property and its benefits.
The stupid extension of copyright duration and ridiculous relaxation of patent examination standards in recent years are also crimes that should be rectified, even if we will never be able to properly punish the perpetrators.
If "DRM free" really is a better way, let it prove itself in parallel with a respected DRM world. Ripping off DRM'ed works does nothing to prove the benefits of a completely DRM free world.
Obligatory Oatmeal: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
You have no reasonable expectation that I would have paid for your book if I couldn't copy it. If I couldn't I wouldn't have it. So you lost nothing.
Nobody is losing anything *TANGIBLE*.
It does not mean there is not a loss when somebody copies copyrighted material without permission. It's just that what is lost is intangible and most likely worthless to all but the copyright holder and the agents that represent him or her.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Funds dried up since Microsoft has pulled out of the astroturf market? Want penalty rates for having to endorse such appalling subjects? Join the AWU, the Astroturf Workers Union, and at least get decent pay for your perfidy. Our charter: "We're not doing it for the money, we're doing it for a shitload of money!" (apologies to Mel Brooks)
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
We've concluded that filesharing isn't stealing. See, I stated that as a fact and pretended as if that was the end of the debate. Doesn't that make me correct? Doesn't it!?
First off, piracy cannot be stopped. Not by technological means, and not by legal means. Some people simply refuse to pay for it, and they will always pirate. There is nothing you can do to stop it, and you already have all the legal means necessary to address that issue.
You can limit piracy to a small enough percentage that it doesn't materially affect sales. Make it easy to buy, easy to use, and cheap enough that, for most people, it's not worth the risk of getting caught making illegal copies.
That's the only thing that has ever kept piracy under control, regardless of technology. Printed books were cheaper and more convenient than hand copied books. When the photocopier came out, it was generally more expensive (and tedious) to copy a book than to just buy a legitimate copy. Records and tapes were cheap, piracy wasn't a major issue. And while CDs were more expensive than records and tapes, they offered greater quality, greater durability, and no easy way to copy them while maintaining the quality, so piracy in CDs was mostly from professional counterfeiting groups (whom you have the legal tools to stop). There was no DRM, you could make personal use cassettes and MP3s from your CDs.
Piracy started growing in the VCR age, because the movies were expensive. So, they introduced MacroVision, and the copy-prevention arms race began. They continued it with DVDs using CSS, and high release prices. Professional counterfeiting soared. Repeat mistake with HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Broadband internet access became common, and with prices still high for DVDs, digital piracy of DVDs started growing. People wanted to watch their DVD based movies on their newer portable digital devices, but they had no way to transfer the content, then they found they could download those movies. And if they were going to have to download a copy anyway, why buy the overpriced original that they weren't going to use?
Started to repeat the same mistake with digital music downloads, but eventually conceded on DRM. Notice what happened to sales after DRM was dropped from some labels starting in Jan 2007, they doubled, then doubled again in 2008, then when all the labels agreed to DRM free iTunes+ downloads in 2009, sales doubled again. How many billions of songs is Apple legally selling every year? ~4B. Granted, not all of that increase was due solely to removing DRM, but that was a key part of it. Apple's iTunes Store has also sold millions of feature length movies and hundreds of millions of TV episodes. Then, there is Amazon, licensed streaming music services, and other sellers.
TL;DR
Make it convenient, DRM free, and reasonably priced and 95%-99% of the potential market will pay for it. The ~1% who are committed to piracy will copy it no matter what you do. Technology changes rapidly, people are not willing to pay for the same material in a new format every few years, unless it's very cheap to do so. Until content distributors adapt a sales model that allows people to use their licensed media with any device they own that is capable of playing it, as many times as they wish to play it (or have a reasonable pay-per-view/rental model), piracy will continue to grow. All the attempts to limit it using DRM, technology, or laws will fail to slow piracy, in fact, they increase the incentive to seek out DRM free versions that are usually only available via "piracy". Resist that, and you'll soon find the market has gone elsewhere.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
are both damaged by lost revenue
They may or may not have lost potential profit. Whether they did or not depends on whether people would have bought their product.
I don't know if I agree with the word "damaged." I lose opportunities to gain (which is what potential profit is) all the time, but I would never say I was "hurt" or "damaged." Because I've really lost nothing. Now, I might feel disappointed (if I knew about it), and I certainly would have gained from it, but I didn't really lose anything I already had.
You have no reasonable expectation that I would have paid for your book if I couldn't copy it. If I couldn't I wouldn't have it. So you lost nothing.
That is indeed an argument, not a very good one I think, but you have made your point.
If I, as an author or artist, wanted you to have my book for free, I would have published it for free - see Cory Doctorow for extensive ramblings on the subject of getting paid for free work.
Back when, Bruce Springsteen had some vault copies of unreleased tracks released by pirates, he, too has been damaged by that, even though he was not seeking to make money from the unreleased tracks, his control of his public image was improperly taken away from him by people publishing works of his that they had no right to.
When the day comes that every room of every building has hundreds of cameras and microphones that record everything that goes on 24/7 in 3D high resolution / high fidelity and the content is all indexed, searchable and accessible to everyone, then, yes, I concede your point. As long as there exists a concept of privacy, that in itself is a form of intellectual property.
Nice troll, alas too easily idenitified as soon as you get to third sentence. 6/10
I agree with the first part but not necessarily the second or third. The reason publishing a book without permission (commercial piracy) is a crime is that the publisher is a large entity taking advantage of an individual who lacks the resources to pursue justice, hence the criminal statutes. By contrast, an individual sharing contents owned by a megacorp does not cause the same sort of harm.
So for individuals committing copyright violations, I would say that civil penalties are okay, but criminal penalties are an abomination.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's pretty obvious sarcasm.
Intellectual property is a completely artificial construct, not a natural right at all. (Rather obviously. If you disagree, have a look into its history.) Artificial constructs need to be adjusted from time to time. As anybody is able to publish today without the help of the copyright industry, its time has passed and keeping it alive with legislation does a lot more damage than good. In the case of the patent industry this is becoming blatantly obvious as well with over-broad patents that have zero inventive value and only serve to sabotage the competition. In the case of the media copyright industry, there is no reason for their existence anymore.
Also keep in mind that artists have no natural right to compensation, that is also a purely artificial construct. The classical model is that they perform, and if people like it, they can donate. Or they can sponsor artists. That model has worked pretty well throughput history and basically the development of all arts. The pay-before-you-consume model pushed by the copyright industry is basically an attempt to compensate for bad quality (that people would _not_ donate for afterwards) and unrestricted greed. Yet, there is absolutely no risk that artists that produce things people like starving. This has been demonstrated numerous times by now. In fact, unlimited distribution over the Internet serves to give more obscure artists an audience that they could never get any other way. And while artists have no right to compensation, keeping them happy and productive _is_ desirable. There is however also zero need for artists to get rich. That is a modern perversion that served to diverse cultural diversity and basically is pushed by people getting rich off artists.
So there actually is not "riddle" to solve. There is just obsolete law to adjust, and not in favor of the copyright industry. Doing so would have tremendous cost, while the continued existence of the copyright industry has no benefit for society at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As long as there exists a concept of privacy, that in itself is a form of intellectual property.
No, it's not. The concepts and reasons for its existence are completely different. You can have privacy and not have intellectual property, and vice versa. You've set up a false dilemma here.
Even though the reasons for their existence are different, the concepts are not completely independent - for a different aspect of closely related issues, see:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/02/censorship-inseperable-from-surveillance
The world may change to one in which non-DRMed/IP work is more valuable to society as a whole, and the author, than DRMed/IP work, but I think DRM/IP will continue to be valuable to society as a whole for some time in many areas, including arts and entertainment.
You are wrong. Selling a copy of a work is/was a crime. At that time, publishing was always tied to selling. It is not anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You are wrong. Selling a copy of a work is/was a crime. At that time, publishing was always tied to selling. It is not anymore.
And many recent court decisions say that you are wrong, you do not have to sell a copy of a work to commit copyright infringement.
The lines need to be examined and redrawn, not erased entirely.
You were talking about historic law, and there you are wrong. Stop trying to change the subject. And I did not say anything about any lines.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You owe me $5 for going to the trouble of reading your post. I offer several means of payment, which do you prefer?
What's that you say? You don't intend to pay that? You've damaged me sir, you stole from me, that was money I could potentially have and do not! I will see you in court!
Does that sound ridiculous? I sure hope it does. Not giving someone money they could theoretically have had under certain circumstances is not the same as depriving them of property they actually currently possess. The second is theft, the first is not. Copying cannot be theft, because the original owner is not deprived of their property.
At the risk of a car analogy, imagine telling the police your neighbor stole your car, and it's in his garage right now. The officer arrives at your house, asking for a description of the stolen vehicle. You point to the car in your driveway. At this point, the officer looks confused-"Sir, did your neighbor return the car while I was driving over here?" "Well no, it's still in his garage!" "But sir, the car is in your driveway, you just pointed it out to me." "Well this one is, sure, but it's also in his garage! He bought the exact same make, model, color, everything, right down to the same leather seats!"
Sound ridiculous? That's because it is ridiculous. Theft requires that something be -taken away- from the original owner, not just that someone else has something just like it.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
How could these "civilized men" have recognised "intellectual property", when there was no such thing in existence for them to recognise? There was ideas, sure, but it wasn't "property" till they made it so.
Pardon my ignorance, but I've seen this before, and I've always been curious: what does it mean to start your post with "This."?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Except when he has so-called-stolen something, it's still there. The only people that think copyright infringement is theft are ignoramouses and corporate shills.
media sentry has started sending out notices in australia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaSentry
basically these people are worse than useless and send out notices without actually proving one way or another, on top of that the rights holders most often dont condone it as they actually share out their "media" to try and trap people...
australia is so far behind in terms of TV and film distribution and the local networks ie. channel 7 and ten are frankly pathetic in terms of content buying only formats and pretending they are australian... how many shows have they actually created (funded from the start) ?
they then just try and buy content cheap after everyone else has broadcast it and hope the consumer wont seek alternative methods to consume content
ask anyone in TV/Film "have you ever downloaded a film/tv" and the answer is yes... why not simply make it all available at roughly the same time ?
treating people badly wont get you very far...
give sonsumers what they want is a novel concept....
john jones
You won't pay. By extension most people won't pay. So, most artists won't get paid, and so no art will be created. No music. No painting. No novels. No movies. No games.
I think not. People will continue to make music/painting/novels/movies/games. Maybe not as many---but maybe not. Look at Youtube. All of that amateur stuff. Most is the utter dreck of Sturgeon's Law, but some is actually Not Too Bad.
And why do the artists do it? Gasp! People do things Without Being Paid! Maybe they do it for the fame. Or sheer ego.
Or they find other ways of being paid. Patrons. Concerts. Merchandise. Advertising.
My point is that if you abolished copyright, you would certainly disrupt things, but you would NOT abolish art. You might not even disrupt things as much as you might think.
Music, great music, existed before the Statute of Anne (1710). Monteverdi, Corelli, Purcell, Couperin, Vivaldi, Telemann, Bach, Scarlatti, Handel---all born before 1710. There was a time before copyright.
Are you merely being sarcastic and arguing that piracy hurts artists? In that case, we should find a better way than the current copyright regime to reward artists, because the current copyright regime doesn't work very well.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Copyright was, when first invented, a way for a writer or inventor to recover value for their creative work. They got a couple decades of protection, then their copyright vanished.
Nobody else had copyright. Musicians had to perform, because phonographs weren't invented. Same with acting and just about everything else.
Then technologists invented ways to capture music, make movies. Somebody thought it would be a good ideas to allow copyrights on the product of new technology. The promoters invented regulatory capture (see Wikipedia) and because the technology to copy was expensive, nobody cared much.
But the markets have grown. And the time to get the product to market has shrunk. And the copy technology has gotten very cheap.
So to get the same reward, artists only need to charge one tenth or one hundredth the price from each sale.
But the bad old mpaa and Riaa and the rest have gotten used to getting big $ for their property. They don't want to lose their Porsches and Malibu beach house.
Look fellas. The game is up. Go find another scam. The artists are already direct selling. The writing is on the wall.
And there is your problem: It is not "your" book. It is a book you created, but you have zero natural rights to it. You have the right to claim you created it though and to prevent others from claiming the same, unless they accidentally have created the same book. Any and all "damage" that results from others copying it is not damage to you at all, as you do not have any natural claim to compensation. The only natural rights you have is to a) not create the book and b) not publish it after creation. Everything else is purely artificial.
That said, there is some reason to compensate artists for works the public likes and that are to the public benefit. There is no reason at all to compensate publishers, though, that went out the window with the Internet. And there is no reason to model the compensation of the artist on the sale of physical goods. In fact there are rather good reasons not to.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The complete debate is backwards. Mandatory compensation for creatives is a purely artificial thing. If it is removed, nobody is losing anything, things are just back to the natural state of things.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If you want to make identical copies, with no loss to me, of all my stuff... Go ahead, you don't even need to break it, I'll let you copy to your heart's content. Doesn't hurt or bother me in the slightest.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I am not in the business, but suspect that there is a wide variation in cost of movie production. Spending huge amounts on production does not seem to correlate strongly with success. I also suspect that cartoon type movies (Shrek etc) could be made quite cheaply as software and voice generation technology is developed. Eventually the biggest issue (and cost) 9f production would be the creative writer, or maybe the creative producer/director. Even the actors could well become synthesized electronic images.
I personally prefer the experience of a movie theatre to the small screen. I suspect others might also. So producers should learn to budget to profit from theatre shows, and sell downloads for a dollar or $2 as additional profit.
If "DRM free" really is a better way, let it prove itself in parallel with a respected DRM world.
DRM-free really is a better way, but not in the way you're thinking. With DRM, a device that you own is obeying someone else's commands, against your wishes. Without DRM, your devices obey you, not someone else. Frankly, this principle is more important than the entire entertainment industry.
The job of the legal system is not to solve riddles or problems of society, but to enforce the laws.
There is a solution!
1. Create a National Broadbank Network, call it NBN,
2. spend billions of dollars forcing the entire country to migrate to it even though they're perfectly happy with ADSL
3. Give control to Stephen Conroy put block off all the sites with ideas he disagrees with
4. And give control to the Media cartel to shutdown anyone downloading content without paying them royalties
Terrified? Ok.
Don't panic.
There is one more.
5. Vote Labor out of existence, the Libs shut the wretched NBN thing down and and we all go back to ADSL. VICTORY!
It seems to me that non DRM audio entertainment and video games are starting to make some significant headway
What recently published video games without digital restrictions management would you say are "mak[ing] some significant headway"? I thought all console games, all PC games on the Steam service, and all iPhone and iPad games still used DRM.
Publishing a copy of a book (without permission) was a crime in 1799, and it should still be a crime today. The author, and original publisher, are both damaged by lost revenue from their more difficult endeavor of creating the original content.
I disagree. Copying and sharing of public information should be legal. By preventig it, you are greatly damaging technological, cultural and social progress. With internet, we have a tool which could bring the colective human knowledge to any human on the planet NOW. The benefits, which come from the ability to freely share and copy information, build upon it, fork it etc. would be enormous and something totaly new and unimaginable would come out of it (i wouldn't be afraid to compare it to printing press or internet invention). Those benefits are artificaly limited by current copyright laws and so the current copyright is wrong.
And i'm not even talking about other issues like privacy invasion, money wasted on lobbying and litigations, valuable content being lost because copyright holders don't care about it anymore etc.
Copyright could be rewritten so that it doesn't limit the flow of information (creators can be paid from taxes, the money distribution would be problematic but the problems would be far lesser then the problems of current copyright), so no, i don't thing that the current state of copyright is good solution and it shall definitely be reformed in near future.
Note: i love to "consume" intelectual property works like anyone else, so i definitely think that there shall by some legislation which would provide financial compensation for creators of valuable works. I just think that this legislation can't limit the benefits of technological progress. It can't freeze us in the past.
They date from a time when selling music on a large scale needed access to record-pressing factories, big chain store contracts, fleets of distribution trucks
If you're selling to a demographic less likely to have high-speed Internet access, such as jazz or pop-standards to the over-50 set or country music to rural dwellers, you still need the "record-pressing factories, big chain store contracts, fleets of distribution trucks", and the like at least until brick and mortar stores allow people to carry in a PC or digital audio player and buy music.
Besides, you didn't mention promotion. The major labels have long-term relationships with the major FM radio station holding companies, and listening to web radio while away from Wi-Fi coverage, such as in a vehicle, needs a smartphone and data plan. Not everybody is willing to pay $30 extra per month for this yet.
Motion pictures released direct to video are ineligible for Oscars because they're not publicly exhibited in an LA theater. Is there an industry-recognized award for such motion pictures at all?
nothing can prevent me from using a microphone to record my speakers or a camera to record my TV
Other than the fact that a video game is interactive. Viewing a Let's Play of a video game is not a close substitute for playing the game yourself.
People installing cameras in their houses (or being forced to) has absolutely nothing to do with copyright. And you implied that it does.
If you don't have a camera in every living room, how can you be sure that people aren't giving private, unlicensed performances of copyrighted works? Sounds absurd, but just because today's movies are mostly licensed for unlimited private performance does not mean that single viewing licenses are not possible or practicable within the law. First we can start with a DRM scheme that "doesn't invade privacy" /sarcasm, while "protecting the rights" of the content creators to only show a movie once for $15.99. When pirates get around the DRM using the 8Kx4K video cameras embedded in their cell phones to make an analog copy of the movie and re-displaying it, obviously the studios will have a reason to tap into the ubiquitous video camera fabric that's built into every new home and monitored by the police "for your safety." It sounds absurd, but the studios are already creeping toward the realm of wiretapping to make sure you're not streaming content through your internet connection.
Obviously, I hope, I don't think we should ever go there, but it is one possible future.
Even though the reasons for their existence are different, the concepts are not completely independent - for a different aspect of closely related issues, see:
I'd prefer a more direct example, as I don't agree with censorship or surveillance. But really, you can be against intellectual property in the traditional sense and for privacy. It's completely possible.
I agree that it is possible to feel the emotions "against IP" and "for privacy", but in real-life implementation, the two will rub against each other. Violations of privacy are, in a sense, a violation of IP. The act of taking images of you in the shower is a violation of your privacy, the act of publishing those images on the internet is moving toward the IP realm.
but I think DRM/IP will continue to be valuable to society
When has it been valuable? The DRM part, I mean.
MacroVision (ok, ARM in this case) effectively boosted the income of the video tape rental business, while simultaneously having a minor negative impact on the quality of the delivered product. Even though it is broken, CSS on DVDs does slow down many people from copying and keeps them as RedBox customers instead of trading hard drives full of bootlegs with their friends. I posted above about my experience with "non-DRM iTunes," in my case I revolted and went back to .mp3s due to the "cost of learning" how to access my files, but I'm sure a lot of Apple customers just click "buy now" a second time and pay the credit card bill without looking when it comes, paying for the convenience rather than figure out how to copy/organize the files they already own. In the iTunes case, the right to copy is there, but the iTunes software presents a "cost of learning how to access your rights" that is a weaker, but still profit increasing in many cases, form of DRM.
Similarly for video games - though DRM in video games has often been intrusive enough to "jump the shark" into making piracy more attractive and widely practiced, sometimes to the detriment of the game publishers. Pre-effective DRM video games (think: 8 bit computer era) had a horrible time turning profit for anything with significant production value, WoW has very effective DRM and seems to be quite valuable to its owners.
Where's the value to society? When a studio spends $100M making a movie, that's $100M worth of jobs created. Sure, indie film producers can also make movies for a tiny fraction of the cost, but they also produce a tiny fraction of the employment and spin-off industries. There are thousands of computer programmers employed in the CGI business... I'm not saying that indies are all crap bec
And there is your problem: It is not "your" book. It is a book you created, but you have zero natural rights to it.
If you want to live in that primeval forest, I'd like to let you do that, follow the link in my sig. I'd rather spend most of my time living in post-Amish civilization. Having said that, there's also the hyper-lawyered, mega-corp extreme we're heading toward that I hope backs down a little in your direction before it implodes.
To complete the pedantic circle, I was responding to the implications of "is" in your "is/was."
I think we actually understand each other, even though we do not agree.
Piracy, smiracy as long as we get paid. That's the tune of the MPAA/RIAA. They really could care less about piracy only about the money. They will lose in the end.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Copyright could be rewritten so that it doesn't limit the flow of information (creators can be paid from taxes, the money distribution would be problematic but the problems would be far lesser then the problems of current copyright).
While I like your utopian vision, I don't think I want to live in the transition period where the kind of kinks you're proposing get worked out...
I wasn't talking about compensation. I was talking about exclusivity.
Exclusivity is not at all an artificial thing.... a creator of a work has inherent exclusivity to control who is allowed to copy that work if he or she chooses not to distribute the work to anyone, or to restrict its distribution to a smaller set of the population.
When somebody else copies the work without permission, by very definition of the word "exclusive", the exclusivity is compromised.
Obviously, the choice to widely distribute can adversely impact that exclusivity, so as encouragement for the copyright holder to publish, and the general public to benefit from the distribution of the work, copyright exists as a social contract to allow the creator to keep some of his or her exclusivity for a limited time, while at the same time gaining some notoriety. It's supposed to be win-win. If the social contract is not adhered to, the creator loses incentive to utilize it, and if he or she still desires control over their work, they will either not publish at all, or voluntarily limit their distribution of the work to a subset of the population that they can have at least some measure of confidence will not destroy their exclusivity. The only other recourse to attempt to retain their exclusivity, is to try to directly limit unauthorized copying by making it harder to do. In addition to this latter choice being a largely wasted effort on account of people who will certainly determine ways to bypass the publisher's limitation, it usually has the upshot of making the work more difficult to use, or requiring special circumstances for use of the work that might not be as convenient for consumers. This, in turn, causes the consumer to actually *disrespect* the publisher's rights, and ends up only further eroding copyright.
In a world without copyright, the only works that would generally be published would be so heavily laden with DRM as to be all but unusable by many people.... and those without DRM would have to have been funded by some benefactor, or else sponsored by entities such as the government... which is liable to result in effective censorship of what content the general public can have unrestricted access to. While self-publication would, of course, be possible with the internet (or whatever communication technology succeeds it), it is likely that such self-published works that have some real quality to them would be lost amidst a never-ending deluge of cat videos, spam, and pornography. The occasional gem would still occasionally surface... but it would still tend to reflect the creator's ability to market their work or increase its visibility than it would be a reflection of its underlying worth or merit.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Piracy is not the problem. Piracy is merely a symptom of a broken business model. Fix the outdated way you do business and piracy won't be an issue.
Abolisment of IP would require a return to the patronage model. Wherein the wealthy pay artists to make whatever they want, and everyone else just makes do with that same content. I'm not convinced that's actually a better system than what we have now.
Anyone still reading this thread please mod parent up... for examples of society where the wealthy dictate basically everything, look at modern day Panama, Columbia, hell most of central and south America. It's better for some, much worse for most, and even the wealthy in Columbia still flee to avoid problems like kidnapping of their children for ransom (yes, recently... a large number of them have moved to Key Biscayne in Miami, paradise they call it because their children can play in the street without fear of being kidnapped - they pay upwards of $5M for a home... not something that every Columbian can do.)
Not being part of the 1%, I'd rather direct society toward benefiting the majority - it's really better for everyone in the end.
.... NO, just no. PEOPLE ACTUALLY talk like that SERIOUSLY, combined with the fact that sarcasm doesn't travel well online, how is it obvious?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
The last paragraph is a dead giveaway.
I'm afraid your analogies fail as well, and I think the post reading one does work. Here's why.
On the sideshow ride, there is no way to know, when you sneak on, if you'll be taking a seat from a paying customer or not. The important difference, though, is that it's possible you would be at all-the number of seats on the ride are limited (scarce), while the number of copies are essentially unlimited (non-scarce). That's why you can't compare copies to ride seats, or candy bars, or anything else that's limited in supply. With these marvelous machines capable of making copies at high speed of anything that can be digitized, copies of any digital information are no longer scarce, unless we artificially make them so.
Your second analogy is that of, essentially, a verbal contract between you and I. You began work on my car specifically because I promised you $100 for it. If you complete the work satisfactorily, and I stiff you on half the money, that's fraud and breach of contract.
However, that's again a flawed analogy. No one from Dreamworks called me up to say "Hey, look, we've got this great movie idea, but we wanted to negotiate what you'd pay for it before we start work." They didn't begin work on it at my request, or based on a contract and promise to pay from me. A more appropriate analogy here, to go back to car washing, would be the guys in New York that come up and start washing your windows without asking, and then expect payment. They didn't begin their work at my request, and I'm under no obligation whatsoever to pay them-I never made an agreement with them. If they do a good job, I still might out of being nice, but I'm not obligated. And that's where you say they "demand" payment-well, yes, some of them do, but in this scenario, I'm under no obligation to oblige them. Asking nicely will work much better than a demand in that scenario.
That's where we're back to the "reading the post" analogy. The person who made that post didn't contract with me to read it after it was finished. The author of that post has no obligation to pay me just because I say so. Similarly, a person who makes a movie, writes a book, etc., doesn't do so under contract with me. If I enjoy them, I probably will "drop a couple bucks in the guitar case," unless they become so obnoxious and demanding that I don't want to give them a nickel.
I generally will pay for things I like, if they're made available easily enough and without onerous DRM, and they're not through an organization pulling these shenanigans. As you said, it's not always lost sales. Several years back, my sister burned me a CD of an independent band she'd come to quite like. Well guess what? I came to quite like them as well, and since then have attended several of their shows, gotten a couple T-shirts, recommended them to others, etc. If not for that CD, I probably would never even have heard of them, and even if she'd just mentioned them, it probably wouldn't have been enough for me to seek them out and pay for a CD. Did she harm them by burning that CD, or do them a service by giving them free publicity?
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Yet another option would be to provide online play and charge for it.
For one thing, without copyright, anyone can write compatible server software. For another, how would the developer derive revenue from those people who choose to play the single-player portion of a video game while a passenger in a vehicle?
That'd make you biased too :)
God spoke to me
If the AI is on the server side, analyzing the stream gives you nothing.
If the AI is on the server side, and the game is real-time (unlike your example of Chess), the player's experience will be poor because of the 500 ms pings of some satellite or cellular Internet connections. Your game will also be viewed as expensive because of the $50 per month mobile broadband subscription (for PC games) or $30 per month upgrade from mobile voice to mobile voice and data (for smartphone games) needed to play it while a passenger in a vehicle.
If supply dwindles to nothing while demand exists, a solution will be found.
What kind of solution to this problem will be found? Or by "if" do you mean "when and only when"?
Again, no it isn't - people really talk like that in this debate, on this subject matter.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot