Sons of Anarchy Creator On Google Copyright Anarchy

theodp writes "Over at Slate, Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter argues that Google's anti-copyright stance is just a way to devalue content, which is bad for artists and bad for consumers. The screed is Sutter's response to an earlier anti-copyright rant in Slate penned by a lawyer who represents Google and is a Fellow at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute chaired by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt that receives funding from Schmidt and Google. 'Everyone is aware that Google has done amazing things to revolutionize our Internet experience,' writes Sutter. 'And I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Google are very nice people. But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives. Not a minute of effort or a dime of financing. Yet Google wants to take our content, devalue it, and make it available for criminals to pirate for profit. Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom generate millions of dollars in illegal revenue off our stolen creative work. People access Kim through Google. And then, when Hollywood tries to impede that thievery, it's presented to the masses as a desperate attempt to hold on to antiquated copyright laws that will kill your digital buzz. It's so absurd that Google is still presenting itself as the lovable geek who's the friend of the young everyman. Don't kid yourself, kids: Google is the establishment. It is a multibillion-dollar information portal that makes dough off of every click on its page and every data byte it streams. Do you really think Google gives a s**t about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content? Nope. You're just another revenue resource Google can access to create more traffic and more data streams. Unfortunately, those streams are now pristine, digital ones of our work, which all flow into a huge watershed of semi-dirty cash. If you want to know more about how this works, just Google the word "parasite."'"

Comments

Sour grapes

[nurb432]

Anti-copyright does work for the consumer. It works against content creators that want a stranglehold on their so-called IP. Sounds like hes scared his gravy train might derail and have to start working again and create new content for people..

Re:Sour grapes

[The Last Gunslinger]

Actually it works against content *publishers* (not creators) who have traditionally been the purveyors of grossly unfair contracts and all manner of unsavory business practices (e.g. we own perpetual license to any works you create, etc.) that leveraged their knowledge and access to distribution channels in order to live off the creative efforts of actual content producers. See also: Payola.

For this no-value-added middleman clown to accuse any other operation of being parasitic is the apotheosis of laughable hypocrisy.

Re:Sour grapes

[ATMAvatar]

Devalued content helps the consumer all the way up until the flow of new content stops, and there is no indication that it would, even in a world where all content was distributed for free. I might have more sympathy for the guy if the big content producers didn't also bribe Congress to extend copyright duration to a point where something produced in an average person's lifetime will not enter the public domain until after they're long dead.

Re:Sour grapes

[Jane Q. Public]

"Anti-copyright does work for the consumer. It works against content creators that want a stranglehold on their so-called IP. Sounds like hes scared his gravy train might derail and have to start working again and create new content for people.."

This.

Contrary to what OP and TFA say, the Google-lawyer article wasn't "anti-copyright" at all. It was anti-copyright-ABUSE, and anti-copyright-TROLLING. There is a pretty damned big difference. Leaving off those last parts is disingenuous to the point of lying.

Re:Sour grapes

[Jmc23]

No, some creators are quite happy giving away their stuff for free, especially when it's just a copy of 1's and 0's or IP.

Re:Sour grapes

[Jane Q. Public]

"Actually it works against content *publishers* (not creators) who have traditionally been the purveyors of grossly unfair contracts and all manner of unsavory business practices (e.g. we own perpetual license to any works you create, etc.) that leveraged their knowledge and access to distribution channels in order to live off the creative efforts of actual content producers. See also: Payola."

It's not either-or. Many "content creators" are their own publishers, and are responsible for at least as much copyright abuse as publishers-only. (We're looking at you, Disney.)

Re:Sour grapes

[Runaway1956]

One of my first jobs after I graduated high school was building homes. I also want to keep receiving benefits from my work. Would it be reasonable for me to charge ten cents every time someone walked into the house? The architect could get five bucks, the contractor could get two and a half bucks, the foreman could get a dollar, and me, the lowly helper, could get a dime. Sounds reasonable to me!

Re:Sour grapes

[kesuki]

the thing is anti copyright works for the small artist as well. there are thousands of 'youtube channels' where people get real money for doing youtube content, and google doesn't charge them a dime, but does have a license agreement. google dabbled in a crowd sourced tv channel (it might still be around not sure though)
with all we do over the web, why should dinosaurs who refuse to adapt from 'contracts' that give all the profit to copyright holders forever while the artist gets a few perks and a tiny amount of the profit. the system is broken copyright was 10 years originally and that was before computers, and yet publishers thrived, and e-publishing is almost a no brainer with writers using $200-$300 devices to do all their writing and the publisher should be able to make ebooks from that for less cost than real published books. and while ebooks are doing okay, they often sell higher than used books...
in a fair world there would be no copyright holders there would be artists and tip jars/royalties from distributors who do things like custom swag and custom cd-r or dvd+--r audio and royalties from corporations but not from individuals and while it sounds scary to the old guard people who actually create content would see massive profits if people actually used them. the record labels were against radio until copyright made it so they could charge radio stations huge fees. and now that anyone can download a movie and put it on removable media. with terrabyte hdds for $70 and dvd-recorders for $20 and dvd blanks for $6 for 25 discs home/indy distribution has never been cheaper... and make no mistake, the tools to create and edit content have never been cheaper or better than they are now, especially with many tools available as foss.
we don't need middlemen anymore and it scares them so they have pushed for internet radio and streaming as an 'alternative' to piracy, to take away ownership. and they won't stop there. smartphones are amazing, but people pay more fees for phones than before. they are meant as streaming devices with apis and apps unable it seems to even load a directory on a sd micro chip and build a playlist 'without syncing' and forcing it all over usb... i have a chinese tablet that can auto 'bless' a folder as long as it is the sd/tf drive but none of the android players i've seen are capable of auto detecting and 'blessing' a folder as a feature on my smartphone. so i have to 'sync' the phone to get music to play on it, and the phone has a crap usb chip that makes my 17gb music folder 6 hours to 'sync' when i can add a folder to the sd micro and it takes 30 minutes to copy to that and then no worry about useless DRM that route who can say with 'syncing' that they aren't adding drm to un drmed files as part of 'syncing' the music.

Re:Sour grapes

[MightyMartian]

Human culture existed for thousands of years before copyright, and during that long expanse there has been no lack of music, drama, prose, poetry, painting and sculpture. Strangely enough "content creators" did make a living.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of copyright law, I think, should be whether it is good for 'society' or not. Whether it is good for the content producer, the consumer, or google shouldn't matter quite as much as whether it is good for society as a whole. Would creative people keep producing new and wonderful content it the protection of their efforts were more limited, if their distributors and heirs were less rich? I think yes, because I think artists are internally driven to produce. It would be more difficult for them to produce works beyond a certain scale (where they need mega-millions to do what they want to do), but that might not be a bad thing. Would the big-bucks producers (Hollywood, Bollywood, big studios) keep financing big works if the duration of their protection were more limited? Again, I think so, just that they would need to keep working, rather than relying on the sale of articles out of their library. The effect of copyright law on Google, Hollywood Studios, or even the artists should be secondary to it's effects on creative production. So, short-term protection should be the order of the day imo, not long-term protection.

Re:Sour grapes

[The Last Gunslinger]

You illustrate my point. The suits at Disney responsible for lobbying and litigating IP rules are not the people creating characters and animating stories. And the fact that the company takes creative content (e.g. new stories) and uses their copyrighted character to act them out does not make them creators of content. It makes them thieves.

Show me the independent artist who is being serviced by today's 120-year copyright protections, and I'll show you a BitTorrent user who isn't pirating stuff.

Re: Sour grapes

[peragrin]

My concern isn't content creators but all the middle men who get paid several times what the creators do. Why does an eBook cost more than a regular book and the author gets a smaller piece?

The authors work is unchanged. The publisher/editors work remains unchanged. Only the delivery mechanism changes. I have always had a hard time believing that prepress, printing and shipping, costs less than prepress and uploading to a bunch of servers.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

what content have you created ? I mean other than douchey comments on slashdot ? Creating television ain't no gravy train.

Re:Sour grapes

[ShieldW0lf]

Anti-copyright does work for the consumer. It works against content creators that want a stranglehold on their so-called IP. Sounds like hes scared his gravy train might derail and have to start working again and create new content for people..

The world doesn't continue operating on the concept of free stuff, you idiot.

If you ever created anything you would want to continue receiving benefits from jt too.

Of course you have never created anything, you just sit in your mom's basement and jerk off.

I'm a creator of intellectual works. Some of my intellectual works help bring medicine to billions of people. I've never wanted to continue to receive payment for work I've done in the past.

If I want the creation to exist, I create it without being paid because I want it to exist, without compromise, exactly the way I envisioned it.

For example, I don't like seeing people in my community go hungry, so I helped build an urban farm where the volunteers feed themselves first and the excess goes to the food bank.

If I'm indifferent to the existence of the creation, I ask to be paid as I work, and when the problem is solved and the work is done, I move on, looking for other people who need my help.

But, you know... I'm just doing practical work that changes peoples lives in practical ways. It's nothing as grand as a fictional work aggrandizing a biker gang or anything like that.

It's really very straightforward. Sell what is scarce and you will get paid. Try to sell something that is naturally abundant and not only will you not get paid like you expect, but you will earn the justifiable scorn of your peers. And it will be your own stupid fault.

As far as Kurt Sutter is concerned... I'm not interested in contributing to support a police force that goes around shaking people down for money on his behalf. Based on the numbers, it doesn't appear that very many other people are interested either, and the law is slowly changing to reflect our views. So, it appears that he is pretty much fucked.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like he's scared his gravy train might derail and he'd have to get a real job.

FTFY

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

> I think yes, because I think artists are internally driven to produce.

Once they're no longer living in their parents basement, they're also driven to eat.

If you don't want to make provisions for your content creators to be paid, expect your music to be like the musician in the coffee shop, your books to be like fan-fic, and your movies to be closer to YouTube videos. Not all are terrible and some are excellent, but for most consumers, not a match for what they enjoy today.

I'm a programmer - I'd be upset if my Boss told me he was taking the code I wrote, but not paying me. And then told me it wasn't stealing, because I still had the source on my hard drive. So I understand if content providers don't see the difference between piracy and theft - I don't.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh - such sheep - don't even understand how you are being abused by Google.

First and foremost - there is NOTHING SUCH AS FREE. It doesn't exist. People have to be paid for whatever it is that they provide or they cannot afford to provide it. Google's idea of "free" is "we'll sucker you in and then mine you for every piece of personal data we can get and sell it off whether you like it or not". Google figures they will just suck other people dry, making a buck themselves along the way, and when the original content developers go bust and stop producing content, Google thinks they will just move on to suck other content providers dry. They are a parasite in the truest form of the word - trying to profit from other people's work without providing them any compensation for it.

Have no delusions, Google's revenue model is based on forcing people to deliver advertisements and reselling people's personal information. So Google is completely self-interested in trying to argue that they should be able to give away anyone else's work in order to sucker in people and make money off their naivete.

And sadly, all Google has to do is say "Free" (with a smirk) and watch the sheep start clamoring for more with no thought as to the consequences. The only people who benefit is Google and someday folks will wake up and find that the content developers have stopped. One can already see this happening now. How much of the "content" on the Internet is really new? Regurgitation of someone else's content is becoming endemic and the quality of much of that content is dropping rapidly. This is why paywalls are going up - because the people creating content need ways to ensure they are compensated for the work.

Unless, of course, you like the endless deluge of advertisements, SPAM and the inevitable wave of viruses/malware/trojans/phishing that comes with that...

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

That might be reasonable, if you weren't paid in the first place. In which case, you'd be working damn hard to make certain the house stood up long enough that you didn't starve to death. Might improve the build quality of most new houses!

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Indeed, the idea the absurd idea that artists might make based on what spoke to them, and if it appealed to enough people, allow them not starve, is an absurd misstep in history. Anyone with a brain knows that in order for artists to produce, they must produce only what appeals to those with money and power to patronize them, for *that* is the only way for an artists to survive.

No wonder the quality of the arts has dropped in the last 100 years. Time for this historical aberration to end.

Re:Sour grapes

[noh8rz10]

Agreed. I think it's good for society when awesome people can make a good living by doing awesome things. Whether you're a programmer or a musician or whatever, it's bad for society when you put down your instrument of choice because you have to go do a shift at starbucks because you need to get health insurance or pay rent (let alone a mortgage or college tuition).

I do not agree with some countries that subsidize artistic endeavors. Cuz then you have a selection of bureaucrats deciding which art is "art". But the laws regulating creative content should build an economy that rewards good work. to expect artists to make art just cuz is not fair, because everybody wants to make a living. maybe the GP should go back to completing his TPS reports, "just cuz".

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

what content have you created ? I mean other than douchey comments on slashdot ? Creating television ain't no gravy train.

I've created as much content as his shitty series has contributed to society.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating television ain't no gravy train.

In fact, his job seems more like shoveling horse manure. ANd then the automobile came along and eliminated those dirty jobs. We should do the same for his job.

Re:Sour grapes

[dryeo]

And how would going back to a 14+14 year copyright term hurt the average artist? They'd still get paid, just have to produce something new more regularly. Even the one hit wonders would make good money and if they sensibly invest it they still might never need to work.
In your case as a programmer for hire, it would mean that your Boss would be more motivated to keep you around and happy instead of taking your code (for a price) and milking it forever.

Re:Sour grapes

[viperidaenz]

If you produce something when you're 20, have kids when you're 30, copyright will still be in effect when you grand kids die of old age.

Re:Sour grapes

[DrJimbo]

Devalued content helps the consumer all the way up until the flow of new content stops, ...

Devaluing content until mercenary content creation gets starved out would be a great service to our culture and to humanity in general. Right now a bunch of ass-hats are raping our culture based on the ridiculous notion that anything that makes a buck is good and virtuous.

For example, imagine if people paid for films (or other content) after having experienced it. Micopayments could be seen as a form of applause. There would be much less demand for massive misleading advertising campaigns since misleading consumers would result in lowering revenue. In addition, these payments would be a form of voting for what future content gets created. If some people choose to take a free ride and never pay for anything, that's perfectly fine. It does not harm anyone else and it removes the freeloaders from the content creation gene pool. It is a win win.

The real evil of these copyright extremist is not that they are ripping us all off (which they are) the real evil is they are destroying our culture, replacing things made from love with things made solely (or mostly) to exploit others. They thrive in an unfair and unfree market where consumers have to buy their products like buying a pig in a poke. When it comes down to it, what they are afraid of and what they are fighting against is to have their products evaluated based on merit instead of a rigged system that brain washes people with massive advertising campaigns. In our totally upside down society, advertising is a business expense so we are subsidizing corporations to gobble up our limited time and attention.

It should be the other way around. If corporations want a piece of my limited time and attention then they should have to pay me to get it, just like I would pay a lawyer or a doctor to get their time and attention. There is no reason for corporations to have free access to these valuable resources. Your time and attention are limited and valuable. It is ridiculous that we are subsidizing corporations to consume them.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you need to change your business model. Get paid before you give him access to the code? Maybe not selling the code (generally code is just an artifact anyway) and just give him access to use it?

Piracy is about access. Other consequences are incidental. Theft is about acquisition and value.

Licensing has always been about economic exclusivity, which was useful in a different era. Shifting licensing to simply guarantee authenticity (basically trademark) and disposing of what we consider exclusive licensing, is a sustainable alternative. Will probably take a few generations, but you can see the trends in day-to-day consumption and culture.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

Once they're no longer living in their parents basement, they're also driven to eat.

If you don't want to make provisions for your content creators to be paid, expect your music to be like the musician in the coffee shop, your books to be like fan-fic, and your movies to be closer to YouTube videos. Not all are terrible and some are excellent, but for most consumers, not a match for what they enjoy today.

Copyright isn't the only way for artists to get paid. It may be the easiest and most secure but by far not the only one. When my current employment contract expires next year, I'm going to start my own company to prove that free culture can be profitable for creators.

I'm a programmer - I'd be upset if my Boss told me he was taking the code I wrote, but not paying me. And then told me it wasn't stealing, because I still had the source on my hard drive. So I understand if content providers don't see the difference between piracy and theft - I don't.

It's not stealing because you're absolutely free to stop writing more code for your boss when he stops paying you. That's what employment contracts are all about.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

A 28 year copyright term would probably not hurt productivity significantly.

I find the whole lengthening of copyright fairly obnoxious and would be fine with something reasonable (max 28 years or artists lifetime?).

But its use as as justification for piracy of recently produced stuff is near ludicrous. It's like justifying robbing someone because of US foreign policy.

Re:Sour grapes

[DexterIsADog]

Absolutely, that makes perfect sense.

You own those houses, right? You financed their construction, created your own design, executed it to produce the houses, and still own at least a share in them, correct?

No? Then your analogy is nonsense. Sit back down.

Re:Sour grapes

[Jane Q. Public]

"The suits at Disney responsible for lobbying and litigating IP rules are not the people creating characters and animating stories."

Ahem. Yes, they are. They build their own 3D animation studios. They hire their own artists (not up-and-coming talented bands or movie stars) in-house. Disney has almost always done it that way.

Yes, Disney *IS* the creator of that content, not just the publisher. You're splitting hairs that are so fine they're not even visible under a microscope.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

> I'm going to start my own company to prove that free culture can be profitable for creators.

It's not *impossible* to be able to survive providing free culture, but honestly, I hope you don't have anyone depending upon you for income, because the odds are not in your favor. Best of luck, anyway.

However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist. You might be able to make it as a businessman / artist on the side, but if fundamentally you can't get paid for your art, but only for your {merchandise, stage presence, likability, etc.}, then the market fundamentally changes, and probably not in a good way.

One thing becomes clear, like free-to-play games, the vast majority of money comes from a few real patrons with deep pockets. For artists who actually need to support themselves and, heaven forbid, a family, you survive not by producing work true to you, but by pleasing those few patrons upon which your livelihood depends.

I think the artistic community is *far* better served with a democratic model where a large number of people pay a little rather than a few people paying a lot. Artists still need to serve a community, but can draw upon a much larger group, and is dependent on no single customer.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

Indeed, the idea the absurd idea that artists might make based on what spoke to them, and if it appealed to enough people, allow them not starve, is an absurd misstep in history. Anyone with a brain knows that in order for artists to produce, they must produce only what appeals to those with money and power to patronize them, for *that* is the only way for an artists to survive.

No wonder the quality of the arts has dropped in the last 100 years. Time for this historical aberration to end.

No, the quality dropped because MAFIAA became the only patron around due to copyright law. The artists thus have to produce what appeals to MAFIAA executives (in other words, remakes of sequels of remakes of old blockbusters because the execs are ridiculously conservative bean counters who would make soviet culture committee look like the greatest art scholars in the world).

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to what OP and TFA say, the Google-lawyer article wasn't "anti-copyright" at all. It was anti-copyright-ABUSE, and anti-copyright-TROLLING. There is a pretty damned big difference. Leaving off those last parts is disingenuous to the point of lying.

The pro "big distributors" lobby is always going to keep trying on things. Basically, they come back every few months and throw some mud around then see demand laws against anybody they see with dirty clothes.

The most basic thing here is that, after the last anti-SOPA protests, the protesters gave up whilst getting nothing other than to be left alone. Once the law was cancelled, Google stopped funding free speech campaigning. Everybody just gave up and left. This means that the distributors lobby just keeps attacking from different angles and taking territory inch by inch.

The only way to deal with this is to demand clear legislation for the other side of copyright; we hear very much about the copyright holder's right to be looked after by the state for the rest of their life. We hear continually how the state should finance police to enforce their rights. How about the duties which accrue with that? How about big copyright holders having to acutally do something to encourage educational and fair use access to their works? How about an automatic release of of all works to the public domain if they are found to have done something which restricts future access to the works they are getting state protection over? E.g. if a work is found to have DRM applied to it then anybody who

If people from the freedom movement started to demand legislation for freedom and against DRM; started to provide specific bills and fought for them to be implemented; worked to replace all politicians who impeded these bills, then there might be a level of fear in broaching this issue. As long as there is nothing to loose, the distributors will keep trying to get more legislation until you are forced, by law, to license every word you ever say to them and pay for your own speech to be sent you your friends.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

It's not *impossible* to be able to survive providing free culture, but honestly, I hope you don't have anyone depending upon you for income, because the odds are not in your favor. Best of luck, anyway.

I know what I'm getting myself into and I'm prepared for the possibility that I'll fail. I should find out whether I've failed or not long before I run out of cash.

However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist. You might be able to make it as a businessman / artist on the side, but if fundamentally you can't get paid for your art, but only for your {merchandise, stage presence, likability, etc.}, then the market fundamentally changes, and probably not in a good way.

One thing becomes clear, like free-to-play games, the vast majority of money comes from a few real patrons with deep pockets. For artists who actually need to support themselves and, heaven forbid, a family, you survive not by producing work true to you, but by pleasing those few patrons upon which your livelihood depends.

My plan involves Kickstarter-style funding so that should not be a problem. Yes, my audience will make decisions for me with their wallets but I don't expect to depend only on a handful of individuals once my business takes off.

I think the artistic community is *far* better served with a democratic model where a large number of people pay a little rather than a few people paying a lot. Artists still need to serve a community, but can draw upon a much larger group, and is dependent on no single customer.

What democratic model are you talking about? In the mainstream film and music market, all those people pay to MAFIAA. MAFIAA pays the actual artists and makes all the decisions about what new art will get funded.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

First, no artist was *ever* forced to go through the big labels. Until recently, they provide better access to the market place than anything else (and I think we're all better off because of it), but that is a *choice*. Big difference. Having your work pirated is *not* your choice.

Second, in the last 100 years, we've seen a huge increase in the variety of music, books and art that is generally available to the public that puts any other era in human history to shame. If the *IAA have successfully stifled creativity, it's pretty hard to tell. (Remember, the era of real RIAA power is 1960-1995, often considered the "golden age").

And lastly, the idea that pirating artist's music is justified because you don't like the RIAA makes about as much sense as piloting jet planes into buildings because you don't like American foreign policy. There's a massive logical disconnect between the action and the target of hatred.

Honestly, I find hatred of the RIAA pretty thin moral justification for stealing from artists. Honestly, I don't care if you're stealing. Maybe you can't afford the media (but can afford several hundred dollars for a computer to post here). But let's not pretend it isn't stealing, even if it's pretty low level.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Disney *IS* the creator of that content, not just the publisher. You're splitting hairs that are so fine they're not even visible under a microscope.

You mean all the stuff they took from the public domain, drew up some vision of the characters and now outright own the whole thing instead of the drawings they made? That kind of creation?

Re:Sour grapes

[king neckbeard]

The odds are not in your favor either way. A creative career has never been a stable choice, and models that are less dependent upon copyright tend to have more reasonable wealth distribution. Also, it's quite hilarious that you bring up the potential for artists producing non-representative works to please a small powerful group of wealthy people as if we aren't already in a state where that is rampant.

Re:Sour grapes

[JeffElkins]

Sutter's not a no-value-added middleman. He's the showrunner for SoA. Creator, primary writer,etc. I agree he's wrong-headed regarding IP, and a clown.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

And further to parent's illustration:

Mega-corporations can "live" forever. And that's who copyright law is really protecting.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Yeah, but Disney don't really need to pay their artists. There are loads of people in the world who draw and animate just for fun anyway, so it's not like using professionals is adding any real value.

Besides, just being associated with Disney will look great on their resumes when they apply for their next non-paying jobs, and while they're still at Disney they can even use the free PR to promote their live performances and make plenty to live on that way.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

make soviet culture committee look like the greatest art scholars in the world

Bad example:
The arts continued to flourish - on a globally competitive scale - under soviet communism. Music, dancing / ballet, etc

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how's life in the GOP these days?

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm firmly in the "reform copyright" camp. That is, I think copyright is a useful economic tool for promoting creation and distribution of new work, but the current implementation of copyright law is deeply flawed and no longer fit for purpose in most of the western world.

That said, I want to challenge this statement you made, because I think it's too strong:

However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist.

I don't think this is a black/white question, but rather a matter of probability, scale, and variety of options. Many people do make a living in creative industries without really relying on copyright all that much.

For example, most of the work I do is subject to copyright protection, and in some of my roles I would normally transfer the copyright to clients/customers at the end of a job. However, often neither I nor my customers much care about that, because if we're talking about software that is running on their web server or embedded in their device, it has much more practical protection against someone ripping it than copyright affords, and in any case the software would have limited value in isolation so there's not much incentive for others to copy it.

Not everyone in software works on projects where that would be the case, so for others copyright offers a better incentive. But in those cases, other models might also work. I have some hope for the crowd-sourcing idea, as the likes of Kickstarter have already shown that even quite substantial projects staffed by solid industry veterans can pull in a decent amount of funding to match. Potentially there's a lot of middleman removal as a pleasant side effect, all the while still allowing the overall cost of developing a moderately large project to be amortised over many customers (and unlike typical copyright-and-sale business models, potentially allowing different customers to contribute more or less according to their means, so perhaps better satisfying your "democratic model" criteria). I think we need a few more of the bigger projects to actually deliver before drawing too many conclusions here, and of course even the biggest are still orders of magnitude smaller than what copyright-backed industry has achieved, but the early signs look positive from here.

So while I'd agree that the scales proven so far and the odds of success are not as good without copyright as with it, at least for those kinds of creative work where copyright is fundamental to the existing business model anyway, I think it's too strong to say that you can't make a living as an artist without it. What we should be concentrating on is whether more people wind up making more and better work that is ultimately enjoyed by more people with different variations of copyright or other IP frameworks. The idea is to maximise creativity and productivity for the benefit of society as a whole, IMHO.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, you clearly haven't worked with artists, haven't you? There may be a ton of people out there who draw stuff for the fun of it. But each and everyone of those has their own visions and ideas to follow up on. If you want to do a bigger project with many of those people, you have to get them to commit to a common idea and a vision which is provided by someone else. This is HARD. You have to get them to suppress their own egos and ideas for the duration of that project. The best incentive to do that is money. So you either employ them to complete your work based on your idea or they will start to wander off and do their own thing.

In fact, I strongly believe that you haven't the slightest clue how the industry works. So please stop making such bullshit claims.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your argument all sounds perfectly reasonable until you consider that people have tried choose-your-own-price experiments before, and it turns out that almost no-one pays anything. People have given their stuff away for free and perfectly legally from the original source, and some people still pirate it from elsewhere!

So while I'm not for a moment defending today's absurd extremes of copyright, the one thing the copyright model has in general that your alternative proposal doesn't is that it actually works, which is slightly important.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

You just got Poe'wned.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

... expect your music to be like the musician in the coffee shop, your books to be like fan-fic, and your movies to be closer to YouTube videos. Not all are terrible and some are excellent, but for most consumers, not a match for what they enjoy today.

That sounds like a perfect match for what we enjoy today. Most new music, novels, etc. are terrible. A few are excellent.

Re:Sour grapes

[jd2112]

You illustrate my point. The suits at Disney responsible for lobbying and litigating IP rules are not the people creating characters and animating stories. And the fact that the company takes creative content (e.g. new stories) and uses their copyrighted character to act them out does not make them creators of content. It makes them thieves.

If Disney keeps on extending copyright, someday they will run out of public domain material to form the basis of new movies.

Re:Sour grapes

[geoskd]

I do not agree with some countries that subsidize artistic endeavors. Cuz then you have a selection of bureaucrats deciding which art is "art". But the laws regulating creative content should build an economy that rewards good work. to expect artists to make art just cuz is not fair, because everybody wants to make a living. maybe the GP should go back to completing his TPS reports, "just cuz".

So show me a system that gets the rewards to the people who are creating the content (also known as the hard part). The system we have now gives almost all of the rewards to the group that uses copyright to *prevent* easy distribution of works. It used to be that we needed these middle men because otherwise no one had the capital required to distribute works (also known as the expensive part). These are businessmen who used to provide value added, but no longer provide anything , and in fact now actively *remove* value from the product by preventing creator and consumer from interacting directly, and by preventing the end consumer from choosing how and when they want to use the content they have paid for. The Internet made the business model of the distributor obsolete, and yet we allow copyright to be used to subsidize these otherwise worthless human beings. They produce nothing, and they actively take from society without giving anything that anyone wants or needs.

All things considered, our society is worse off, with the continued support of copyright, than it would be without it. Now if someone comes up with something different, I'm all ears, but the copyright vs no copyright is a no brainer for anyone who can understand the bigger picture.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

As I read the drivel in TFA, I realised that Kirk Sutter is completely out of touch with reality and modern business practices. The guy is living in the past.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-copyright does work for the consumer. It works against content creators that want a stranglehold on their so-called IP. Sounds like hes scared his gravy train might derail and have to start working again and create new content for people..

Typical. And when those unpaid content creators decide they don't need to create content for free... you get no more content. Some people love to justify the theft of IP and rant against current models of distribution which involve paying for what you get. If you don't think it's worth it, don't pay. If enough people agree with you the price will go down. That's a market reaction. Stealing and saying "Dude, it's too much and I want it for nothing" is just theft and is "justified" like any other theft: "I want it and I don't want to pay for it so I took it".

As for it being sour grapes and, to quote you: "hes scared his gravy train might derail and have to start working again and create new content for people.."... why should he create more content if people are allowed to just steal it without compensating him? Where is his incentive to do so? For their pleasure? Really?

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

You illustrate my point. The suits at Disney responsible for lobbying and litigating IP rules are not the people creating characters and animating stories. And the fact that the company takes creative content (e.g. new stories) and uses their copyrighted character to act them out does not make them creators of content. It makes them thieves.

Show me the independent artist who is being serviced by today's 120-year copyright protections, and I'll show you a BitTorrent user who isn't pirating stuff.

Disney has it's artists chained to a desk and enslaved? Who knew. Well, no come to think of it. They pay them. Are they supposed to keep paying creative people and not make money? As for Disney being "thieves", that's the first their I ever heard of paying their "victims" IP rules may be screwed up and need revision but justifying the theft of IP "because Suits" is even more screwed up.

Re:Sour grapes

[DrJimbo]

Historically, the arts have been funded by patronage. The commercialization of the arts is a fairly recent phenomenon. Yes, many great artists have died penniless with their genius unrecognized. But that means they created out of love for their art and the need to express their genius not out of a desire for financial renumeration. In addition, original works of art are far more valuable than reproductions. So not only is there an innate desire in true creators to create, there is also an innate desire in others to reward this creation, after the fact. There is joy in the act of creation and there is joy in others when they appreciate what was created. I've been in movie theaters where the audience stood up and gave the movie standing ovation even though none of the creators were there to hear the applause. There is no doubt that at that point in time many people would have paid generously if making a payment was as easy as tapping a button on their phone. Films that moved people would be rewarded.

The notion that patronage does not work is only in the context of a world where the arts have been bastardized and exploited for monetary gain. Of course people who are embedded in the commercialization model will have a difficult time making the transition. This is a feature not a bug. It would be a benefit to have the exploiters weeded out so more genuine creation and genius can flourish. It is insane to for us to give the role of story-teller to Hollywood writers. They are not the people who should be teaching our children about relationships. Sex sells. Violence sells. But these are not the stories and myths we want our children to be raised on. The information we pass on to the next generation should not be based primarily on what is most titillating.

As the cost to copy, store, and transmit information continues to plummet, the commercialization model becomes less and less tenable, requiring draconian measure to give content owners more and more control over all aspects of information transfer and processing. It would require a fascist dictatorship over information.

OTOH, the patronage model becomes easier as information technology advances. It can be fueled by instant micropayments so everyone who chooses to can participate and vote with their wallets. In the long run it is the only sensible approach. But even in the short term, it is the only way I know of to stem the tide of cultural exploitation and destruction that the commercialization of the arts has caused.

Culture belongs to everybody. It is our birthright and it is the lifeblood of our civilization. It is crazy to lock it up tightly due to the fact that the cost of information transfer and storage is getting close to zero. The cost to our society and to our civilization for this lock-up is enormous because we are denying our children and our children's children their birthright. It is a form of cultural and societal suicide. The miracle of life is based on passing genetic information from one generation to the next. Human beings were able to supercharge this passing on of information by creating side-channels: art, language, history, science and the humanities, even religion. Evolution in these side-channel information transfers was staggeringly fast compared to genetic evolution. Stifling this form of evolution is the ultimate triumph of mediocrity over genius.

Re:Sour grapes

[cornicefire]

Please. Copyright only gives the producers control over the IP they create. If you want to create art and give it away that's your choice. But this is no different from the law saying that a carpenter can decide what happens to his or her work. If the carpenter wants to build something, the carpenter retains complete control and ownership until the carpenter decides to sell it or give it away. The IP laws just establish the same rules for artists. Again... if you don't like the so called stranglehold, why don't you just go make your own great films and put them in the public domain. Show Hollywood how it should be done. Prove that it can be done.

Re:Sour grapes

[cornicefire]

Of course it will stop. That's just a law of economics. If the artists can't make money to eat and pay for their health care, they'll get day jobs and have less time to create. This is already going on in the newspaper world where many papers have gone out of business. Now the web is dominated by aggregators like Slashdot that do little original reporting and much quoting. The same is true of movies. We've seen the death of small art films. The films winning at Sundance used to get great contracts and good distribution throughout the world. Now they're lucky to get a 1/10th of what they used to get. You're right that there will still be some random cat videos from folks and an occasional vanity project by someone with money to burn, but there is already a big change in the market for creativity and it will only get worse.

Re:Sour grapes

[cornicefire]

Yes, and the copyright model is also optional. If you want to create something and give it away, copyright doesn't get in your way. It says, "More power to you." The open source dreamers and the copyright fanatics can and do coexist. But if the copyright deniers get their way, only the rich will have the spare time to indulge in art.

Re:Sour grapes

[cornicefire]

Here here. The RIAA and the big content companies don't stop anyone from creating some amazing things and giving them away. But this rarely happens, if ever. Somehow everyone wants to see the fancy movies created by professionals who believe in copyright.

Re:Sour grapes

[Jane Q. Public]

I understand what you are saying, and I don't disagree with you. But they still did do the animation, the soundtrack, etc. Lots of movies are made about "true stories" or not-so-true stories and legends and myths. They're still movies, and they still required artistic input to make them.

Like the recent adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing". I thought it was pretty inventive, even if the story has already been told a few million times.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because making art is exactly the same as fetching coffee for the carpenter.

You retard.

Re:Sour grapes

[DexterIsADog]

I'm a creator of intellectual works. Some of my intellectual works help bring medicine to billions of people... ...when the problem is solved and the work is done, I move on, looking for other people who need my help.

Oh my god. Are you... are you... Bruce Banner?

Or maybe Dr. Sam Beckett?

Re:Sour grapes

[glasshole]

Yeah, but Disney don't really need to pay their artists. There are loads of people in the world who draw and animate just for fun anyway, so it's not like using professionals is adding any real value.

lol what.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there needs to be different tiers for copyright.

Person and commercial tiers, where personal copyright would expire after let's say 10 to 14 years. At that point, rights-holders wouldn't be able to sue consumers for privacy. They'd only be able to sue those who are providing it while generated any sort of revenue (even ad revenue).

Copyright should be made to be 14 years, with like 7 to 14 year renewals and a 50 year cap before becoming public domain. But an exception should be made for characters and whatnot, provided they are still being used for the creation of new stories.

This is just an idea, and it probably should be expanded.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I couldn't agree more. This is the thing that always winds me up about people who suggest that there is no evidence that copyright is working and the only way we can possibly tell if we'd do better without it is to completely scrap it and see what happens. If there are all these viable alternative models that are so much more promising as incentives to create and share new work, why aren't people already using them?

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it could be the RIAA/MPAA are distributor conglomerates so "everyone" only knows about their films while the rest have more limited advertising schemes. Yet still those fancy films aren't what "everyone wants to see" or they'd all be consistent financial successes (hint, they're not). Big distributors tend to be big producers which means they effectively gambling on many different projects and fund them out to a point that they've contractually deflected some/much of the financial risk of the losers and trapped some/much of the financial reward of the winners.

Until the internet, that was basically how it had to be. Now, it's still mostly similar because there's still some need to keep the signal to noise ratio down by having a short listed of "trusted" sources for new movies, music, etc. Really, the big complaint then is that Google is very much aiming to be one of those "trusted" sources and that's what the real complaint is about. They have advertising in-house, they already have a vast distribution network, and their flat-rate, no-contract approach to involvement* has kept a lot of content producers coming back. In the long term, though, I'd imagine Apple's approach of more rigorous filtering is going to end up being the long-term kicker for most people.

*Yea, Apple did it before Google and with music, no less. I can see the RIAA and MPAA shaking in their boots because Apple and Google have the sort of market capital to potential subsume both conglomerates. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon amazingly are already leeching away the up-and-coming talent which even further cuts away from their idea of invincibility. The oddity of it all, to me, is why a content producer would side against Google at this point when they're still offering much better rates than the RIAA/MPAA, but then I can only presume the "information wants to be free" culture of computer nerds frightens them into Google deciding it means "free for Google" and being worse than the RIAA/MPAA. That's quite possible and one reason Google Books is such a menace. But, then this is yet another example of why the GPL is superior to the BSD license (or something). :)

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That's all very noble and intellectual, but the simple fact is that in the real world, we all value different things to different extents. Money is the concrete, quantified representation of that value that we as a society have chosen to standardise.

You say that we don't want to be raising our children on stories full of sex and violence, and yet as you say yourself, sex and violence sell, so evidently lots of people do value those stories even if you don't or they're not valued as children's entertainment. In any case, I doubt most parents I know are planning to keep their kids safe from the evil that is Harry Potter as they grow up, and there's plenty of violence in those books.

I'm afraid you are imagining an idealised, deeply cultural world that doesn't exist even though you'd like it to, and then you are assigning the blame for its non-existence to the presence of mere economic niceties rather than the more fundamental cause, which is that the human condition just isn't as nice as you'd like it to be.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

ITS. NOT. STEALING. Nothing was deprived. Nothing was transferred through force or maliciousness.

I realize that to a creator, it may feel the same. That feeling is misleading you. This is one of those rare instances that you have to rethink a concept you've held through your life. In this case, digital technology and the Internet doesn't conform to your preconceptions. It might suck, but a society that doesn't track with the technological evolution of the times quickly gets left behind.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

I'm a programmer - I'd be upset if my Boss told me he was taking the code I wrote, but not paying me. And then told me it wasn't stealing, because I still had the source on my hard drive. So I understand if content providers don't see the difference between piracy and theft - I don't.

That's not "theft" that's slavery (or a civil contract braech). You have a contract to exchange work for money. If your boss changes that to work for free, that's slavery (or an internship). It's still not theft. Theft is when he pays you, then breaks into your bank account while you are asleep and takes the money back out. Good thing you are a programmer, you'd make a horrible lawyer.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

14 years, extendable by another 14 on application, provided the author/creator was human (not a corporation) and didn't assign copyright to a corporation in the first 14 years (except for self or family owned corporations).

Though I prefer something more silly like $0.01 for a month of copyright, doubling every month. Under $100 for a year of copyright. More than the sum of human wealth for 10 years.

Re:Sour grapes

[pepty]

Anti-SOPA != anti-copyright, something that seems to have escaped the OP.

Re:Sour grapes

[pepty]

How about going back to the old system: 14 year copyright, extendable for another 14 years?

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

I thought most of them worked well. People paid for the item when they could download it for free. I've never seen a choose-your-own-price where you agree to some payment (pre-authorizing a valid card to ensure it can work, like a one-clock service) then ask you to provide a number once you've had it for a month. Though shareware worked like that for years, and managed to survive. If it doesn't work, how do you explain shareware and freeware?

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

Yes, and the copyright model is also optional. If you want to create something and give it away, copyright doesn't get in your way. It says, "More power to you." The open source dreamers and the copyright fanatics can and do coexist.

So explain how giving away with copyright works? Someone takes your work. Changes it slightly, copyrights it, then sues you for copying them. The dreamers can't coexist with copyright unless they use copyright. Not copying something gives you no benefit, and additional liability.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but Disney don't really need to pay their artists. There are loads of people in the world who draw and animate just for fun anyway, so it's not like using professionals is adding any real value.

Besides, just being associated with Disney will look great on their resumes when they apply for their next non-paying jobs, and while they're still at Disney they can even use the free PR to promote their live performances and make plenty to live on that way.

Thirdly, most movies don't make money. Take Lord of the Rings, it may have grossed 3 Billion with a B dollars, but it didn't make a cent. http://www.pajiba.com/box_office_round-ups/10-movies-that-made-hundreds-of-millions-in-boxoffice-dollars-and-yet-somehow-showed-no-profit.php Just imagine how much lthey lose on regular movies that only gross a hundred million. The MPAA is practically* a charitable group dedicated to providing jobs to the cameraman and set designers of the world, not a for-profit entity.

* meaning "not".

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

First, no artist was *ever* forced to go through the big labels.

You sound like the people defending Ticketmaster. There was an act that couldn't get venues or insurance unless they paid the Ticketmaster Tax. They weren't "forced" to use Ticketmaster, they just weren't able to tour without them. I used to go to the UA theater when I was a kid (the theater is long gone, and I think they left the theater owning business) but yes, they would *only* show big label sanctioned movies.

There's a reason why Robert Rodriguez had to sell the rights to the completed movie El Mariachi to get it shown in a theater. The contracts blocked access to anyone but the big labels. I'm sure there were a handfull of theaters that were dollar theaters or the like that could show it, but they don't even if they "can". Instead, it gets bought and re-mastered for millions (for a sub $100k movie), and shows for a loss after making more than 10x the production cost of the movie (mostly lost to "sound" and "marketing").

Yeah, you aren't "forced" to go through a big label, but you'll never get your movie shown in the US unless you sell the rights to them or pay them millions for approval.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

> all those people pay to MAFIAA. MAFIAA pays the actual artists and makes all the decisions about what new art will get funded.

Okay, let's get a few things straight. Going with the labels or the studios is a *voluntary* decision. The option has always been there to go outside, and very few artists chose that route, mostly because the chance of success without a label or studio backing you was even smaller. One of the really interesting things is that technology has improved so that it's actually possible to do without them, which I think is a good thing. (I like artists to have the choice.)

However, if copyright is practically destroyed, then short of going to the patron model (which Kickstarter tends to devolve into where artists are concerned - it's easier to find the one fanatic $1,000 donor than find 100 $10 dollar supporters), the artist is screwed if they go it alone. No just selling it on the open market (well, you can, but at that point you're depending on charity).

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

I have to defer to your correctness of you nuance. You are absolutely correct on all points.

And just to be clear, I do find the copyright extensions are ridiculous. I'd be in favor of max(28 years, artists life), as I don't think longer than that causes much more art to be created.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

As I've said elsewhere, I'd be okay with max(28 years, artist's lifetime).

I don't think artists who are lucky enough to be successful should be denied what is essentially their only pension - the fruits of a lifetime worth of labor. While I can understand artists wanting to provide for their children, I think 28 years is probably sufficient to cover that end.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

And if I was a lawyer, I wouldn't be talking about piracy either.

I am not a lawyer, and the semantics of law are immaterial to this discussion.

But taking what does not belong to you is generally understood by almost every English speaker as theft - whether the theft is of a tangible item, the opportunity to economically exploit something you created, or even a person's freedom.

Re:Sour grapes

[Phrogman]

Ah this "no-value-added middleman" is the guy who created the show, researched it, wrote it, his wife is one of the main characters and he acts in it as well. He is by no stretch a "middleman". I am not saying I agree with him - haven't read the article yet even - but he definitely on the creator side of things.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

rip off bros grimm and put it under their own flag... yeah, real creative... not possible to credibly argue that disney is not a parasite

Re:Sour grapes

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Disagree that the distinction made is splitting hairs. The fact is that labels make money, and artists get a pittance. The fact is that Disney makes money, and the artists get a pittance. You want to say it is Disney that creates it, and Disney that publishes. The point made was that there are makers and takers, and having the takers contract the makers, or bringing them inside, doesn't change the dynamic. Control of distribution is a choke point. If you construct a choke point on any major flow, you control it. Totally. What good is it to get a phone call if they take away your mouth?

Re:Sour grapes

[civilizedINTENSITY]

How about 2 years? With a 3rd year renewal, but only 50% are renewable by lottery? No exceptions.

Re:Sour grapes

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I would also suggest that if every movie went into the public domain two years later, fewer people would violate copyright. If they could buy a DVD for $1, more DVDs would be sold, and almost nobody would bother to pirate. It wouldn't be cost-effective to pirate. It is inevitable. Laws can be bought, but you can't legislate away the tide.

Re:Sour grapes

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Well if that happened, it would be a contract violation, not theft. At least where I've worked, I can't claim to own anything even I think it up on my "own time". You don't own the code you typed. It isn't stealing. If they don't pay you, that still doesn't make it possible to steal their own code from themselves. But if they don't pay you, that is a contract violation. Likewise, content providers who want to claim copying a DVD is the same as shoplifting are lying. They go after people in civil court, not criminal court. If you really can't see the difference take a few law classes, or read some books.

Re:Sour grapes

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Most want reform, not abolition. I think a two year copyright would be sufficient. The way it is now, the value to be added to society for pretending that it is property isn't worth it. Where are the increases in the public domain that are the reason that we are willing to pretend? If they aren't there (and they aren't) then why pretend?

Re:Sour grapes

[Martin Blank]

That's an artifact of how movie accounting is done. The studios tack on so many fees and have access to so much of the gross that the subsidiary companies (almost always used when filming movies, with one created per movie) almost never show a net profit. The studios show a profit, of course, due to the "fees" they charge. So a movie production may rarely make a profit, but an individual movie, when factored through the entire revenue stream, often does (though many are spectacular failures and the studio loses money on them, too).

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Okay, given the deficit of imagination here, let me spell it out. My client tells me he will purchase program X for $Y.

Except my client takes the program and doesn't pay because he doesn't believe in copyright, and I've still got the original program, so he hasn't stolen anything (according to many pirates). I haven't lost the program - all I've lost is the ability to economically exploit it. And yet almost all of us will acknowledge I've had my work stolen.

Look, a 6-year old knows that someone who copies your work without your permission is stealing. It's only adults who try and dress it up so they don't have to feel bad about ripping people off so they can get free stuff. I don't care if people pirate, but if they are going to, at least they can be honest that they're stealing because they can get away with it, rather than dress it up in some self-righteous garbage.

Another irregular verb: I pirate his work, he steals my work.

Re:Sour grapes

[tlhIngan]

Anti-copyright does work for the consumer. It works against content creators that want a stranglehold on their so-called IP. Sounds like hes scared his gravy train might derail and have to start working again and create new content for people..

And yet, it seems wrong when the consumer that steals content turns out to be a middle man?

Lets reframe copyright protections from movies and music to software, as we clearly understand open-source and commercial software much better.

Let's take Linux. It's under copyright, and under terms that let you violate its copyright if you abide by them, i.e., the GPLv2.

Now, I am a company. Anti-copyright works for me, the consumer of Linux. It work against the content creators (programmers) that want a stranglehold on their so-called IP. (what, I have to distribute my hard earned modifications?!). Sounds like he's (Linus) scared his gravy train (Linux) might derail and have to start working again and create new content (code) for people.

Now that's just silly. And yet, no copyrights benefit companies and middlemen just that much more - for they can take Linux and package it up without having to release the source (the copyright arms the GPL - if you don't agree to the GPL, you're still free to use it under the terms of All Rights Reserved copyright).

Heck, a 2-year copyright that some people propose is just adequate - 2 year old kernel with Android (we're only talking about Android 4.2 here!) and I don't have to release source code? Sweet deal! Hell, most phones are still running 4.2 or older, and new ones are released all the time with it. So it's a great deal.

Even on servers or embedded appliance side, 2 year old code is still fairly useful. Ubuntu 12.04 with its hated Unity interface was released almost 2 years ago. Soon it woiuld be almost free and clear to distribute without source.

Re:Sour grapes

[gregor-e]

Theft is depriving someone of access to or enjoyment of something they otherwise would have had. In the example you constructed, your boss would otherwise have paid you a salary. By not doing so, your boss commits theft. Similarly, pirated content is contingent theft - if the downloader would otherwise have paid for the content being downloaded, then it is theft. That is the difference.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Like hell a 6-year old would consider it stealing. He might bitch 'he did the same as me!' but likely wouldn't care as long as he wasn't deprived himself of something. Or think it neat that 'you did it like me!'

Now a brainwashed 6yo parrot might use words like 'steal' or 'took', but the one I just asked just grabbed another piece of paper and drew something else not caring.

Re:Sour grapes

[gregor-e]

Heck, even just having a nominal annual renewal fee would revert the majority of content over to the public within a few years. Say, $50/year. If the exclusive right to sell a work isn't worth $50 to the rights-holder, having those rights obviously can't be all that motivating. It should revert to the public so anyone is free to have a go at getting whatever value they can out of it.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, you're the retard. Obviously, you've never been a carpenter, or a carpenter's helper. Let me help you. A carpenter's helper started out making fifty cents an hour more than a laborer. The helper got three raises in his first year, after the initial raise when his probation period ended. The helper was promoted from third class helper, to second class helper, to first class helper, and eventually became a journeyman carpenter himself. The laborers who fetched coffee are still laborers today, with no skills to speak of.

And, yes, a journeyman carpenter IS an artist. A master carpenter is even more of an artist.

You may stop believing that you are special any time now. Artists aren't all THAT very special!

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Disney is a corporation, the artists etc etc are the people.

The artists (ie. the "artistic input" in your terms) are the people that make stuff. Disney as a corporation is made of legal documents and money and therefore is not people.

Disney being made of money pays _people_ to make stuff, and then gets more money by selling stuff, but the people are what make the product.

This is not splitting hairs, this is more like unweaving a tangle.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

But taking what does not belong to you is generally understood by almost every English speaker as theft - whether the theft is of a tangible item, the opportunity to economically exploit something you created, or even a person's freedom.

Again, not law. Since you are talking things with legal repercussions, it's easier to use the "official" definitions. Stealing a car to joyride in it, until it's out of gas, then abandon it isn't "theft" Which is why there's generally a separate law for it (GTA, from the game ;). Same with theft of a service. Breaking (or sneaking) into a movie theater to watch a movie isn't "theft" so they invented a new term "theft of a service" (previously a form of trespass, but kicking them out is the only thing you can do with a first offender). But theft requires the intent to deprive the "owner" of the item. Copyright violations don't deprive the copyright owner of the item in question, so they can't be theft. But as you say you are not a lawyer and reject any definitions you don't like, regardless of what reality says.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

In your case as a programmer for hire, it would mean that your Boss would be more motivated to keep you around and happy instead of taking your code (for a price) and milking it forever.

In reality, your Boss will only hire you if everything you do is not your code but his.

If you don't like it, you are free to start your own business.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a programmer - I'd be upset if my Boss told me he was taking the code I wrote, but not paying me. And then told me it wasn't stealing, because I still had the source on my hard drive. So I understand if content providers don't see the difference between piracy and theft - I don't.

i agree with the thought but at the risk of sounding like RMS calling it "theft" is just hurting your cause.

ihe idea that everyone has to serve you is laughable. the idea that the entire world has to bow down to your ideas of how things work is immature, arrogant, and antisocial.

i agree with you because if you don't reward work that person will not magically get fed or sheltered or rewarded.

but calling it "theft" if someone doesn't chip in is just an imaginary idea that everyone is here to serve you.

it is 100% a lie. you need to get over the idea that you own everyone and they were all put here on earth for you. it makes me think you feel owned. that is sad but i can see why you would try to do it to others. take a step back into reality.

Re:Sour grapes

[horm]

Beckett Prime or Clone Beckett?

Re:Sour grapes

[sjames]

I'm not so sure even the big money projects would be harmed. Even the mega budget buster films either make a profit within 10 years or they never do (I mean an actual profit, not the Hollywood accounting where no movie has ever managed to break even).

.

Re:Sour grapes

[gl4ss]

going with all of the *AA is voluntary yes.

but, in large parts of the world(read: everywhere) if you intend to get paid for radioplays, public performances etc you will have to join. because even if you don't join the fuckers will still charge people for playing your music!

Re:Sour grapes

[sjames]

Are they still likely to be driven to eat 70 years after their death? Are they vampires?

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

How on Earth did this get modded 'Insightful'? It's myopic, and probably just a (good) attempt at trolling. Where to begin?
 
"Second, in the last 100 years, we've seen a huge increase in the variety of music, books and art that is generally available to the public" -> and most of that isn't in the public domain. In fact, the public domain has actually shrunk. Your point is effectively "more media is generally available, but most of it is not free unless explicitly authorised, even for derivative works". In fact, in the past 100 years copyright has extended to ridiculous lengths at the expense of society benefiting from the works without strings attached. That's called going backwards. Excuse me if I'm a tad underwhelmed.
 
"And lastly, the idea that pirating artist's music is justified because you don't like the RIAA" -> where did you get that idea? Perhaps it's because the content is region-locked. Perhaps it is because it's not available in your native language. Perhaps it's because it hasn't aired where you live. Perhaps it's because local prices are ridiculous. The list goes on.
 
Until content publishers start treating consumers on a level playing field, infringement (not stealing) is going to continue to occur. While publishers sell their content to "lock-in" providers, this will occur. Publishers don't mind that technology has granted them a minimal cost distribution platform, but cry poor when the same platform is used to deviate from their business model. Tough bikkies.
 
"But let's not pretend it isn't stealing" Not, it's not actually. It's called copyright infringement and it's very different from taking something that's someone else's and *depriving them of their physical possession*. It is, in fact, like taking an exact copy of something someone else had. Would I take a copy of someone's Ferrari? Tempting question. However, infringement, clearly, is not the same as stealing or theft.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

And just to be clear, I do find the copyright extensions are ridiculous. I'd be in favor of max(28 years, artists life), as I don't think longer than that causes much more art to be created.

Note that if copyright term is tied to the author's life and the term doesn't end decades after his death, it creates some very perverse motivations.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

I'm firmly in the "reform copyright" camp. That is, I think copyright is a useful economic tool for promoting creation and distribution of new work, but the current implementation of copyright law is deeply flawed and no longer fit for purpose in most of the western world.

I'm firmly in the "replace copyright with payright" camp (payright: no distribution monopoly, just a right to get a share of any revenue made off your work). The whole idea of securing income through a distribution monopoly is deeply flawed. I don't see how it could be implemented without all the negative side effects.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

Okay, let's get a few things straight. Going with the labels or the studios is a *voluntary* decision. The option has always been there to go outside, and very few artists chose that route, mostly because the chance of success without a label or studio backing you was even smaller. One of the really interesting things is that technology has improved so that it's actually possible to do without them, which I think is a good thing. (I like artists to have the choice.)

A very noteworthy observation is that the MAFIAA is working very hard to make that technology go away. First through SOPA, now through backroom deals with big advertisers and dominant payment processing companies.

However, if copyright is practically destroyed, then short of going to the patron model (which Kickstarter tends to devolve into where artists are concerned - it's easier to find the one fanatic $1,000 donor than find 100 $10 dollar supporters), the artist is screwed if they go it alone. No just selling it on the open market (well, you can, but at that point you're depending on charity).

Kickstarter-style model doesn't necessarily devolve into patron model. But building your audience takes time and skill.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

Yes, but the culture committee, which was famous for its artistic ignorance and incompetence, didn't contribute to that in the slightest.

Re:Sour grapes

[Solandri]

However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist.

I don't think this is a black/white question, but rather a matter of probability, scale, and variety of options. Many people do make a living in creative industries without really relying on copyright all that much.

For example, most of the work I do is subject to copyright protection, and in some of my roles I would normally transfer the copyright to clients/customers at the end of a job. However, often neither I nor my customers much care about that, because if we're talking about software that is running on their web server or embedded in their device, it has much more practical protection against someone ripping it than copyright affords, and in any case the software would have limited value in isolation so there's not much incentive for others to copy it.

Any artist in a work for hire situation (i.e. just about all of them) are in the same boat. Their copyright gets immediately transferred to whomever they're working for, so they're making a living in the creative industry without the benefit of copyright. (Don't get me wrong - I don't have a problem with this. There's no way to make a movie or video game if all the artists, actors, voice actors, programmers, production designers, editors, etc. all retained their individual copyright. A single person being fired could lead to a huge chunk if not all of the movie having to be scrapped and redone. I'm just pointing out that from the individual artist's perspective, they don't directly benefit from copyright.)

Whether the person who hired them would do so without copyright is a different matter. I can't see Disney doing so, at least not in the scale they do now. However commissioned work still functions without copyright. Wedding photographers used to shoot the wedding for free and charged you for the prints. If you wanted reprints or extra copies, you had to go back to the photographer and buy more prints, because he retained the copyright. Then scanners and photo printers happened. Rather than fight a hopeless battle, wedding photographers now charge for shooting the wedding, and just give you the digital pictures. While legally they still retain copyright, for all intents and purposes the transaction is handled as if copyright didn't exist. I see just as many wedding photographers today as before.

I think this is actually a good change. The IP industry is slowly moving away from the "work once, get paid forever based on how many copies you can sell" model which quite frankly was always silly. They're moving to the same model the rest of us live by - do some work and get paid for it. Want to get paid more? Do more work. Popular success still brings you more money under the new model; it's just in the form of volume of new work and people willing to pay you more for your work. Not in the form of being able to hit a button to print off 100,000 extra copies for sale. That's also the problem I see with TFA. Sutter argues as if the old model is his birthright, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rest of us don't live by that model. We live live by the model Google is pushing his industry towards.

Potentially there's a lot of middleman removal as a pleasant side effect,

A typical retail business works with about a 15% margin. So the fact that middlemen like Google, Apple, et al are skimming off 30% is pretty staggering. The fact that authors and musicians are embracing 30% because the traditional publishing industry skims off closer to 90% is absolutely disgusting.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

First, no artist was *ever* forced to go through the big labels. Until recently, they provide better access to the market place than anything else (and I think we're all better off because of it), but that is a *choice*. Big difference. Having your work pirated is *not* your choice.

Which is completely besides the point when we talk about quality from the end-users' perspective. The fact is that MAFIAA has complete control over mainstream distribution channels. So all the independent high-quality content that never reaches most of its target audience is irrelevant.

Second, in the last 100 years, we've seen a huge increase in the variety of music, books and art that is generally available to the public that puts any other era in human history to shame. If the *IAA have successfully stifled creativity, it's pretty hard to tell. (Remember, the era of real RIAA power is 1960-1995, often considered the "golden age").

If patents lasted more than a century and we were still living in the age of steam today because of it, it'd be equally hard to tell what today could look like with reasonable patent law. Progress of art mostly follows economic development (which allows more funding). But increase in quantity doesn't always result in increase of quality.

And lastly, the idea that pirating artist's music is justified because you don't like the RIAA makes about as much sense as piloting jet planes into buildings because you don't like American foreign policy. There's a massive logical disconnect between the action and the target of hatred.

Honestly, I find hatred of the RIAA pretty thin moral justification for stealing from artists. Honestly, I don't care if you're stealing. Maybe you can't afford the media (but can afford several hundred dollars for a computer to post here). But let's not pretend it isn't stealing, even if it's pretty low level.

Keep your ad hominem attacks to yourself. Thank you.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

It's loss of opportunity to economically exploit one's work in both cases. The difference is a matter of (significant) scale.

Or take a lower stakes example - my 10 year old friend plagiarizes my essay without permission and submits it. Now I will get an "F" if I submit mine. I still have my essay, but I've lost the ability to exploit it.

And of course, let's takes what *really* happens if copyright disappears. Corporations troll for artistic content that looks promising, copy it and put their name on it. They promote the hell out of it and sell it (albeit at bargain basement prices) as their own.

Get over it. When I was a kid, I pirated as well. I wanted lots of stuff, and I couldn't afford it all, so I stole it because I could get away with it with no danger to myself, and I could do it in my own home. But at least I wasn't a sad enough case to try to morally justify ripping off the publishers and artists with various garbage excuses about how I couldn't have afforded it all, so obviously I wasn't stealing.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Actually, no, I'm *not* concerned about the legal repercussions or legal definition. I am concerned about the moral, not legal justification for copyright theft.

I don't care whether people pirate or not. I do care that that they understand that it's a moral wrong. Not necessarily a huge wrong, but that it *is* a wrong, and they're doing it.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Yes. But so what? That makes the *AA pretty unpleasant. But it in no way justifies ripping off everybody from the artist on up who made it possible for you to listen to the music.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Actually, I'm fine with copyright of max(28 years, artist's life).

I have to say that I really have contempt for people who use something that is pretty artistically outrageous (lengthening of copyrights) as their excuse for stealing from contemporary artists. Disgraceful.

Re:Sour grapes

[pantaril]

However, no matter how optimistic you are, what becomes clear is that if copyright dies in a practical sense, you cannot make a living as an artist.

Well you can. For example if copyright is replaced with better government regulation which ensures money for artists without the unneeded and artificial limitation of sharing/copying.

Re:Sour grapes

[xclr8r]

I think it needs to be a fixed number of years or 14 + 14 implementation. If you start basing it off artist lifespans then 'terrible things might happen.'

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

I suspect that would take optimism pretty close to the physics equivalent of the speed of light :-). But point taken.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

The idea of an reasonably successful artist (say top 1% earning 20-30K a year) facing poverty even when the works of his youth are still selling well strikes me as unpleasant enough that I'd push for artist lifetime. Likewise, losing important income while you're trying to put your kids through college, etc. If an artist is *extremely* lucky, their work is their pension. Depriving them of it just seems cruel.

But I wouldn't claim a big moral division on either side. It's a matter of trade-offs for society.

Re:Sour grapes

[cavreader]

If he is not going to paid for the content he has already created what would be his motivation to create new content?

Re:Sour grapes

[AmiMoJo]

It's not *impossible* to be able to survive providing free culture, but honestly, I hope you don't have anyone depending upon you for income, because the odds are not in your favor. Best of luck, anyway.

Have you heard of YouTube? Lots of people give away high quality content for free on there. Music, movies, tutorials, video blogs etc. Some of them are big commercial companies, others are individuals. Some have adverts on their channels, some don't. There is no copy protection of their work and ripping is very, very easy. Other sides can even embed their videos on their own. Yet, somehow they still make plenty of money.

It's actually not that surprising. Free content has always been a very successful business model. Record labels love to give away music for free on the radio and TV. What annoys them is that now anyone can get in on this act, because they don't control YouTube in the same way they were able to control radio and TV. It's wonderful if you are not associated with a record label though, because you can promote yourself and gain fans (who generate revenue) without having to take out massive loans and sign away your copyrights.

Free doesn't mean no revenue, it just means no cost to access the basic content in a reasonably convenient format.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we been through this before?

The fashion industry doesn't have stupid copyright rules (save for company logos - you have the option of clearly identifying yourself) and it seems to be doing alright for itself.

You making a red and blue shirt, then me making a red and blue shirt... we can do this.

Re:Sour grapes

[sFurbo]

people have tried choose-your-own-price experiments before, and it turns out that almost no-one pays anything.

You have better tell that to Humble Indie Bundle, where the average (mean, I guess) payment is nearly 4 dollars at the moment. While I don't know what the median is, the top 10 contributors is only responsible for less than 1% of that, so "nearly no-one" paying anything doesn't seem to fit the pattern.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

It would not affect investment one iota. No one goes into a pitch meeting and says "You'll make your investment back in 120 years!" They would be laughed out of hollywood. Investors want the movie to turn a profit in the first month after release. Failing that, DVD sales save some movies, but even most DVD sales are in the first year or two after release. Movies with long tails are few and far between. And unpredictable to boot. No one counts on sales 10 years from now when deciding which movies to make (or whether to make a movie at all).

Re:Sour grapes

[Travelsonic]

It's loss of opportunity to economically exploit one's work in both cases

Personally, just a side note, I've seen people use that alone to justify the position of it being theft - it annoys the hell outta me since the criterion those people use is idiotic - legitimate, legal competition does the same, but their reasoning would label it such. Heh, sidetracks from the discussion at hand, pay no mind. :P

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

Before you start speaking about ripping artists off, read this article. Nobody is entitled to hold our culture hostage for his own profit. If the law says otherwise, the law needs to change.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it wouldn't. Work For Hire won't go away, and probably shouldn't. But with Work For Hire, both sides know what's going on.

Re:Sour grapes

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The one that gets me, as a New Evangelism, Marxism Tendance Reinhard Catholic, is the Roman Catholic Church itself. Hopefully now that publishing rights and revenue streams have been taken out of the hands of the Vatican Secretary of State, bloggers who provide MP3 readings of documents for the blind won't be nailed with cease and desist letters anymore.

If you are Catholic and care about the faith, or are a blogger who wants to stick up for right-to-quote from powerful religions, sign Brandon Vogt's petition for a clear ruling now that the curia has changed

Re:Sour grapes

[Marxist Hacker 42]

"it's easier to find the one fanatic $1,000 [ Traditional cell phone cost per year] donor than find 100 $10 dollar supporters)"

But finding the 100 $10 supporters, is a measure of how worthwhile the project is going to be from a popularity/fame standpoint.

Re:Sour grapes

[aestrivex]

The difference is, there *are* BitTorrent users who aren't pirating stuff (I didn't say there are many). Most of the BitTorrent users who use BitTorrent to download legal content also probably use it for piracy, but I bet there are some that dont want to be traced running trackers and make sure to only use it for downloading freely available software such as linux disk images.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

you got to be kidding me. Trying to make Disney executives seem human. As if they can tell there kids what they really do.
Disney is one the lowest nastiest cut throat corporate scum companies you could imagine. "The suits at Disney" have only one motivation: money.
They make the apple suits(or whatever they wear) look like saints.
To give "them" credit for the love and passion of artists (who disney is of course fucking) is total fucking bullshit.
"splitting hairs"??? what, do you work for them or something? (full disclosure please)

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So for a project that isn't exactly typical in this space (it's very high profile, has an element of charitable donation linked to it, etc.) the current situation is that you get 9 games for an average of $3.84, presumably less a few cents in processing fees and the like for the sale mechanics, so each game is netting maybe $0.40 per sale, less than the cost of a candy bar. I wouldn't say that's exactly compelling evidence of how much customers value all the work that went into making those games!

Also, unless I've misunderstood the model here, the Humble Bundles are DRM-free but still subject to copyright, and moreover they're only available on this deal for a limited time and then get withdrawn so you can't buy them any more, removing those works from the market. Again, not only relying on copyright but actively restricting availability of the works as part of the promotional model doesn't seem to be a strong argument in your favour here.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There have been a few moderately successful pay-what-you-want offerings, though it's worth looking at how many of those were from artists who (a) had already made their name the other way, and (b) didn't actually need any more money so had relatively little to lose by risking it.

But even for established artists, things don't always work out as they hoped with these experiments.

I'm not sure we really have enough data yet to draw robust conclusions, but it does seem clear already that pay-what-you-want isn't going to be some sort of spectacularly successful, obviously better model for increasing economic incentives to create and share works.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I wouldn't object to trying your version on ethical grounds, but as a practical matter, wouldn't it be even harder to administer? Who gets to decide how to share the revenues from different works among the various contributors? For that matter, how do you even specify and report revenues "made off" creative works? For all its sins, at least copyright is relatively clear in what is and isn't covered, and the most disagreement you're likely to get between the lawyers or accountants is a debate about whether a particular situation constitutes fair use or the equivalent.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't mind an extension beyond the end of the artist's life either, as if they die suddenly then I don't think it's unreasonable for their immediate estate to enjoy the benefits of their work just like everyone else, but with a copyright model any such benefits are built up over time and not available up-front.

For that reason, I'd be more in favour of something very simple like N years as a flat limit for works, no matter who holds the copyright, and where N is chosen to allow reasonable returns for different kinds of works without locking them up for longer than necessary to provide a decent incentive to create and share them in the first place.

(Actually, I tend to favour making all long-term copyright non-transferrable and moving to some sort of exclusive distribution or marketing rights than last no more than a year or two and may then be renewed or not by the artist as they wish, to protect against freeloading middleman organisations who exploit the artist by buying up very long-term rights to their work for a pittance and then exploit the public by locking up the work for all that time. But that's another topic for another day.)

Re:Sour grapes

[JesseMcDonald]

I don't think artists who are lucky enough to be successful should be denied what is essentially their only pension - the fruits of a lifetime worth of labor.

If they want a pension they can buy one (more commonly known as an "annuity") with the money they bring in up front. This is no reason to grant them a distribution monopoly for life at the expense of others' natural rights.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think the point here is that if you want to adopt a more community-driven scheme, for example, then copyright doesn't stop you. We have successful models for this such as the GPL, BSD/MIT-style licences, and Creative Commons. While these are basically legal tricks to get the desired result in a world that has copyright, I think it's fair to say they've been quite successful legal tricks and they're reasonable well and widely understood among their respective target audiences.

Re:Sour grapes

[JesseMcDonald]

My client tells me he will purchase program X for $Y.... Except my client takes the program and doesn't pay because he doesn't believe in copyright, and I've still got the original program, so he hasn't stolen anything.... I haven't lost the program - all I've lost is the ability to economically exploit it. And yet almost all of us will acknowledge I've had my work stolen.

If by "almost all of us" you mean "people who agree with me"... well, that's obvious. Otherwise, no, you haven't had your work "stolen". Not legally, not morally. Unless your client agreed to a contract to purchase the program from you, you never had any claim to the money you expected to sell the program for at the end, just the program itself, the actual product of your labor, which you still have. The just reward for producing something is you have the product and can use it as you please; there is nothing inherently exclusive about the arrangement, particularly when it comes to non-scarce goods like information.

Now, if you did have a contract in place (which would have been the smart way to arrange matters, as opposed to working on speculation) then the promised money became yours when you delivered the program. At that point the client is in possession of your money, and if they refuse to turn it over to you on request then they are withholding your property from you and actual theft has taken place. You don't need copyright for that, of course, just regular property rights and contract law.

Re:Sour grapes

[Agent0013]

If they are so extremely lucky, then why would they be facing poverty after 28 years? If their works were so popular that they are one of the top earners then they should have millions in the bank by then.

Re:Sour grapes

[im_thatoneguy]

Devalued content helps the consumer all the way up until the flow of new content stops, and there is no indication that it would, even in a world where all content was distributed for free

When shows cost tens of millions of dollars to produce (It's estimated that Game of Thrones costs $50-100m per season) you HAVE to make money to produce the content. Yeah if you enjoy watching shitty YouTube videos of people jump cutting multiple takes of a sentence into a spastic auctioneer rant then there will always be content. If you want high quality content like Game of Thrones or Sons of Anarchy then the only way you can continue that is if the producers can make at least $100 million off of their investment.

Otherwise Netflix will charge $1 per month for bandwidth and pay no-one for the content. Even Netflix's house of cards is only profitable because only Netflix can distribute it. If Netflix could just stream Game of Thrones for free without paying HBO then everyone would do it through Netflix and skip the $15 / month to HBO too.

The only reason that Intellectual Property has ANY value is because of the monopoly it's granted on sales. Without it, nobody will produce anything that can't be directly monetized or else another very large corporation with powerful distribution channels will destroy them.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

So it's immoral to look over someone's shoulder? I should pay for my own paper, and the guy at work whose paper I'm reading is Kim Dotcom, enabling copyright infringement world-wide, and I'm some worthless paper hacker who should be in jail?

Non-destructive use of already-made product doesn't seem to be morally wrong, unless you say "on a computer" and people can't use basic logic anymore.

I didn't realize that the Dentist who buys magazines is colluding with patients to devalue magazines everywhere.

Re:Sour grapes

[Jane Q. Public]

"Disney is a corporation, the artists etc etc are the people."

Irrelevant. You are tossing out the entire context of this thread.

By this logic, you could also say that Chrysler does not make automobiles, and Apple does not make computers.

In a very technical, ridiculously hair-splitting sense you are correct, but in a way that is irrelevant to the whole point of the conversation that is going on here.

Re:Sour grapes

[civilizedINTENSITY]

No. Your work was not stolen. No part of "take (the property of another or others) without permission" occurred. Your property was not taken. The software of which you speak isn't property in any real sense. However, you had an agreement, and for whatever reason, that agreement was violated. The reason the agreement was violated can't change the fact that it was a contract dispute, not theft. What you are trying to do is redefine "steal" and/or redefine "property" so that one can "steal" something without taking it, or depriving you of it. This is a point of view that lots of money and marketing is going into, but all the propaganda in the world won't change the fact that you are wrong. It isn't stealing. No physical property was taken from you without permission. You gave permission, under an agreement, to be paid and that pay was not forthcoming. You could say they stole your money. That would be theft.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

The law should be written so that commercial distributors need to sign a contract with the author and the author can't block it by making absurd demands. The law should be intentionally vague so that judges have enough space for punishing the side that's being unreasonable. If the distributor is trying to avoid paying anything, the judge should include every last cent that can be linked to the work in question in the base revenue from which the author will get a share and set the author's percentage high. On the other hand if the author is trying to block the contract, the judge should set a very low percentage and exclude any money from the base revenue where the link with the work in question isn't absolutely clear. In case of orphan works, if the distributor puts into escrow the usual percentage he pays to other authors, judges should uphold that as "good enough" when the author later shows up and asks for more (but that doesn't mean the author can't negotiate a higher percentage of future revenues or some other formula for calculating payments in his contract).

BTW, payright is equally clear in what is and isn't covered - commercial use is covered, anything else is not. The only thing that isn't clear is how much it will cost the distributor if he doesn't sign a contract first. On the bright side, the judge can't make you pay millions when you didn't make a single cent.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think copying their work was as easy as clicking a couple things though

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

The problem is that then you have the pro-copyright people pointing out that the anti-copyright people still use copyright to protect their works. "Why don't they release them into public domain if they don't like copyright?" is the common complaint. And the problem is that without those legal tricks, they can lose control over their creation (not a problem) to a person who locks them out and makes a profit from it exploiting others (a problem).

My stance is that abolising copyright and patents would leave us better off than we are now. I've seen nothing that goes against that, other than personal opinions that assert otherwise.

Re:Sour grapes

[redlemming]

The idea of an reasonably successful artist (say top 1% earning 20-30K a year) facing poverty even when the works of his youth are still selling well strikes me as unpleasant enough that I'd push for artist lifetime.

This objection can be addressed quite easily, without invalidating the 14 year concept.

We have the following rules:

If any organization or person is getting money (or other consideration) for anything involving some person's creative work, that person has a right to get a share of the gross for their lifetime (excepting those uses that fall into the fair use rights category). The law specifies that share, and provides an easy mechanism to contact the author of a work. No transfer of this right to organizations is permitted.

Thus, any individual will get some money for any creative work they do: nobody else can every legally take all the profit from this work. Once the work stops selling, the public can copy it freely, provided they don't turn around and make money off those copies.

Some details would need to be worked out as to when this could be transferred to one's heirs in the event of an early death.

Penalties apply if a reasonable effort isn't made to contact the party whose work one is using. If a person can't be contacted, the money must be set aside in some protected manner (probably with an independent third party) for a LONG period of time.

The "share" might consist of both a minimum and a percentage, to handle some of the obvious corner cases. In the event a team is responsible for creating a work, something would need to be done to determine who gets what (but everybody participating in the creative work is entitled to a share).

There are a few details that would need to be worked out, but on the whole this would be vastly superior to the current system (which, as it clearly involves all kinds of ethics problems with respect to the legal professional, can certainly be considered to violate the right to ethical practice of law and thus violates the 9th Amendment).

This rule works well with the 14 year term, but we might even have it apply from the moment the work is created. Starting it after 14 years means that an exclusive contract is possible for early distribution of the work, which has both advantages and disadvantages for the individual and society, and might require some regulation.

A similar approach can be taken with respect to patents.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

The example you gave indicated that it was a commercial failure, not an experimental one. There's a gap between monopoly pricing and "fair" pricing. That some musician has no concept of economics doesn't mean it was a failure. It just means his expectations were wrong.

Pay what you want is the model of the freemium games. You can play them and unlock most (or all) content without paying. But some people choose to pay. Pay what you want is that model. The game is worth more when you pay more for it, according to those that pay. The same is true of the pay-what-you-want offerings. Scott Adams tried it as well, and declared it a failure when a "free" book was discovered on a torrent site. There was no way to capture how many (if any) saw it on the site, read it, then went back to the author to buy a copy after. But it was instantly assumed that the pirated book was "lost revenue" even for a free book.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sorry, I don't think I'm following your logic here. In a system without copyright (or any replacement we haven't mentioned) anyone would be free to take the creation of anyone else and make a profit from it if they could find a way to do so. I don't see how this is any different to the situation today, except that with copyright someone who wants to give their work away freely-with-restrictions (GPL etc.) can do so and their wishes are legally enforceable for as long as the copyright lasts.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Pay what you want is the model of the freemium games. You can play them and unlock most (or all) content without paying. But some people choose to pay.

But a lot of freemium games aren't really playable without paying, and calling them free is little more than (misleading) marketing. See the recent Dungeon Keeper fiasco for a particularly heinous example.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

Sorry, I don't think I'm following your logic here. In a system without copyright (or any replacement we haven't mentioned) anyone would be free to take the creation of anyone else and make a profit from it if they could find a way to do so.

Yes. But they couldn't lock you out of your own creation. Much like Disney takes Public Domain stories, makes a movie from them, then aggressively persues those who copy the Public Domain story in a manner Disney doesn't like. In a post-copyright world, Disney could take anyone else's work and copy it all they like, but they couldn't then lock anyone else out from it. In practice, some early anti-copyright advocates managed to have some people take their work, modify it, then spread it around with copyright protections, then block the original author from distributing edited versions of their original work. The original author couldn't prove in court that they didn't see the modified (and copyrighted) version before they edited their original work.

I don't see how this is any different to the situation today, except that with copyright someone who wants to give their work away freely-with-restrictions (GPL etc.) can do so and their wishes are legally enforceable for as long as the copyright lasts.

Other than it's impossible to give it away without restrictions, and not have copyright used against them later against that same work.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

Yes, some games are unplayable, regardless of the pay model. Some die by DRM. I own Spore, but ended up illegally downloading it so that I could actually play it (well, my kids play it). And Dungeon Keeper is playable, theoretically. But it was a poor balance of pay to play. I'm not sure how building a crappy game (delays and hurdles built in) has to do with some of the most profitable games in recent history being "free" (Clash of Clans, Hobbit, and others).

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But this whole idea you keep coming back to about somehow taking someone else's work and actually using copyright against them isn't actually supported by copyright law anywhere I know. It's certainly not part of the principle of copyright law as originally conceived or as defended to some extent by people like me today.

Really, what you're talking about is just some bullies abusing the (almost invariably US) legal system because they have a big war chest. In that kind of legal system, they could just as easily do that to you because they decided you were breathing their air, and you'd still lose. But you'd lose because you lacked the resources to fight them effectively, not because the law was actually on their side in any way.

I think you're aiming at the wrong target here.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Yet, somehow they still make plenty of money.

Indeed, there are dozens of people who are making enough to live on off of YouTube! No wonder it's a replacement for an industry that allows tens of thousands to make a living!

Look, I'm obviously exaggerating, but not by a whole lot. Google isn't distributing a whole lot of money compared to the entire music industry. To be honest, your attitude smacks of having the car industry collapse, and telling the workers they should make hand-crafted bicycles instead. It's simply condescending.

Now maybe that's the way the industry is going, and many will suffer. But pretending YouTube is an adequate replacement is just a kick in the teeth to those actually trying to earn a living in the industry. (Or you're very young and have no concept of economics, in which case, my apologies for getting annoyed.)

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Actually that's an interesting point. I'll have to be careful about equating the two. It's the manner of competition that matters.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Don't think there's much to disagree with there. The idea that the RIAA enjoys special protections in law seems absurd. It is also likely to be short-lived. The cost of having terrible contracts is that it makes going one's own way, which is becoming more practical (although still very difficult), very attractive.

I won't mourn the loss of the big labels, but given that I am aware of most of the music I buy *because* of the label's efforts, it would be rather hypocritical of me to enjoy the fruits of their labor, but refuse to compensate them for it.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

However, if you want to actually make a living, popularity isn't important *unless* it results in revenue. It's a nice ego-boo, but if you want to put a roof over your kids' heads and food on their table, you can't put popularity in the bank.

(I always laugh at the "I love his work so much, I've pirated everything he's ever done." It's usually done with such sincerity.)

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

As I pointed out elsewhere, the idea that one's work can be selling well, but you are living in poverty just strikes me as wrong enough that I prefer the artist at least own their work for the duration of their lifetime. After all, *very* few artists are successful for more than a few years, and I consider the body of an artists work to be their pension.

Also, can you imagine what it would be like to have your song suddenly appearing in all sorts of ads for products you hate? For publishers to start paying hacks to write new stories for the characters that you breathed life into?

I know too many artists that would be shattered by the experience. However, I'd not argue it as a matter of morality. Just a matter of preference.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

I would disagree with "no reason". I have enough respect for the artistic process and for artists to understand what having your music involuntarily turned into advertisement jingles would do to many artists. The involuntary commercialization of what is often part of one's soul is troubling enough, that I would say it balances others' natural rights.

But I don't claim this as grand truth, just preference.

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

If you're in the top 1%, you're probably earning 20-30K a year. Not millions. Don't mistake the top 0.0001% with the top 1%.

But perhaps earning tens of thousands a year is so much money that you find it acceptable that the publishers can now stop paying him, and companies that wish to use his work no longer need compensate him.

But I don't believe it's so. (So, not a matter of morality, just my preference.)

Re:Sour grapes

[west]

Obviously, as this gets finer and finer, and eventually it becomes trivial. You'll have to decide for yourself where that occurs.

As an analogy, most people would say that going 100 miles over the speed limit in a residential zone is dangerous and immoral. So is going 50 mph over. Well, going 10 mph *is* more dangerous, just not a lot. Maybe it's a little immoral to raise the danger to adults and children in the neighborhood just so you can get somewhere a little faster. Then what about 5 mph? 2 mph? 1 mph?

We're adults here. We can use our judgement. (But I reserve the right to criticize the guy who's fine with going 25mph over the speed limit when they're kids about.)

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

Speeding is immoral? Never. Endangering people is immoral, but the speed isn't. Owning a firearm isn't immoral. Firing a firearm isn't immoral. Firing at someone likely is, depending on circumstance. But that seems to be a distinction you can't make. copying is *never* immoral, but stealing is. You equate the two. I don't. People associate owning a firearm with being eager to use it, so some people consider owning a firearm to be immoral, especially if there are children in the house or other factors. That you associate speeding with unsafe driving doesn't make it true. That you equate sharing with stealing doesn't make it true either.

Though you did seem to agree that sharing isn't stealing, so long as it's below your personal threshold. You sound like the person with cruise control set at 62 in a 55 in the fast lane, illegally blocking others. Anyone going faster than you is speeding, so you don't have to move over for illegal drivers. But the law proves you wrong. You could get pulled over and given two tickets. Too fast (speeding) and too slow (in the fast lane), at the same time. No, you aren't the morality police. You don't get to personally set the threshold of "immoral". And if it requires this much discussion, it likely should be 100% legal and discouraged (like abortion and drugs, two other topics full of people trying to push their morality on others).

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

But this whole idea you keep coming back to about somehow taking someone else's work and actually using copyright against them isn't actually supported by copyright law anywhere I know. It's certainly not part of the principle of copyright law as originally conceived or as defended to some extent by people like me today.

Then explain how it works with derivative works. Is a new unique work, put in the Public Domain by the author still in the Public Domain if someone alters it to improve on it? As Aladdin is copyrighted by Disney, I'd say yes. So if the author of the Public Domain work makes their own derivative work, they can be sued by the makers of the other derivative work. Some early software ended up with those problems. That's why the "tricks" like BSD/GPL were come up with.

That you don't know how copyright works around derivative works doesn't mean it's not part of the law.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think it's important to separate several different aspects of protecting and incentivizing artists somewhere around this point in the debate. My personal view is that copyright is best used as a purely economic tool, to provide economic incentives. You can certainly argue for other protections on ethical grounds, perhaps most obviously the right of an artist to be given credit for their work or not to be associated involuntarily with any related work they weren't involved with. Reasonable people could disagree on the point you made as well, where derivatives works that aren't to the artist's taste are created; should the artist retain eternal control of their own ideas, or should freedom of expression and the creativity of others take precedence? But I don't think these latter ideas really belong in the realm of copyright. It's not the right tool for the job, and I don't think it serves multiple masters well.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Is a new unique work, put in the Public Domain by the author still in the Public Domain if someone alters it to improve on it?

Yes. That is the very essence of being in the public domain.

That you don't know how copyright works around derivative works doesn't mean it's not part of the law.

The Disney situation with Aladdin is a textbook example of what I'm talking about. It seems reasonable to me for them to claim copyright over their interpretation of Aladdin -- a specific film they created, or the particular style they use to depict the character visually. These are original creations of their own making. But the idea that no-one else can tell a story that was first published at least a century ago because copyright somehow forbids it is crazy, an absurd abuse of the legal mechanism, and as I mentioned, it seems to be primarily a US thing where Disney vs. Little Guy is unlikely to end well in practice no matter the merits of Little Guy's case.

Re:Sour grapes

[Dishevel]

7 years with a 7 year extension.

Fuck you people and your 50 fucking year cap.

Re:Sour grapes

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Popularity is what leads to media sales rather than media piracy.

Re:Sour grapes

[Stuarticus]

I'm going to start my own company to prove that free culture can be profitable for creators.

Great, are you going to do all that shit for free? Or are you just going to "set up a company" then try and get others to do all the creative work so you can slim something off what they do like a real pro?

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

Neither of the above options.

Re:Sour grapes

[next_ghost]

Also, can you imagine what it would be like to have your song suddenly appearing in all sorts of ads for products you hate? For publishers to start paying hacks to write new stories for the characters that you breathed life into?

I know too many artists that would be shattered by the experience. However, I'd not argue it as a matter of morality. Just a matter of preference.

MAFIAA does all of the above all the time. MAFIAA holds copyright to everything they've funded, not the authors (while most authors technically own the copyright, they had to assign complete control over it to MAFIAA to get funding). So I fail to see your point.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

You contradict yourself. Read your first and second sentences (ignoring "yes" as a sentence). You state that modified Public Domain is still Public Domain, then state that modified Public Domain is copyrightable. Disney didn't invent the genie. Disney didn't invent the blue genie. But Disney asserts ownership over the funny blue genie.

But the idea that no-one else can tell a story that was first published at least a century ago because copyright somehow forbids it is crazy, an absurd abuse of the legal mechanism, and as I mentioned,

When the system is so ripe for abuse, the system is flawed. In this case, the system is so flawed that we'd be better off if the system was abolished.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't see any problem here.

The original work, having entered the public domain, is free for anyone to enjoy. Anyone may also create derivative works from it.

For a specific derivative work, the new aspects are then subject to copyright in the normal way. Derivatives specifically of that work (i.e., not merely other derivative works of the original, but something that is based on the derived, copyrighted work) are similarly subject to copyright in the normal way.

There is nothing in copyright law anywhere I know that contradicts this, not even in the lasts-almost-forever jurisdictions. Anyone telling you otherwise might have expensive lawyers you can't afford to argue with, but they don't seem to have the law itself on their side. And yes, that system is broken IMHO, but as I've noted previously, it's broken much more widely than just copyright.

Incidentally, are you sure Disney didn't originate the blue genie representation? I can find plenty of references to the Aladdin story going back many decades before Disney's film, but nothing about that specific variation so far.

Also, while you keep referring to how ripe this system is for abuse, my google-fu has failed to locate any cases of Disney actually suing people just for writing a story about Aladdin based on the original work, either. Citations welcome.

Re:Sour grapes

[AK Marc]

For a specific derivative work, the new aspects are then subject to copyright in the normal way. Derivatives specifically of that work (i.e., not merely other derivative works of the original, but something that is based on the derived, copyrighted work) are similarly subject to copyright in the normal way.

You are right in theory. But I don't live in a spherical frictionless vacuum.

Also, while you keep referring to how ripe this system is for abuse, my google-fu has failed to locate any cases of Disney actually suing people just for writing a story about Aladdin based on the original work, either. Citations welcome.

The only ones I know of where the creator was sued by someone else who created a derivative work were in software, not movies. But it happens, and there's nothing you can do about it, unless you have deeper pockets then the one suing you. If you release a "beta" and then someone else fixes all the bugs in it before you do, when you release your next version, you can either prove it was impossible to have copied from the other person's version, or you'll be found guilty of copyright violations. for making uncreative changes to your own original work. That's how it does work, and that's within the copyright laws you mention.

Re:Sour grapes

[Anonymous Coward]

I still think 50 year cap would be fine, but I also don't think it should be criminal or (or sueable) after 10 to 14 years for a consumer to pirate said material. The person "seeding", "selling", or obtaining revenue from it in any way is another matter entirely.

Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Google is Evil, just like lobbies like MPAA.

What they don't understand is that, by their crazy behavior, those "content creators" and their irrealistic desires are actually helping Google, Amazon, Apple which are the new superpowers.
Above all, they are alienating and angering the people which are supposed to buy what they are creating.

Uhhh... no

[Anonymous Coward]

The artist is not the one being gored by the presence of Google.... the impact is not to artists themselves but to the the antiquated business models of labels and studios.

The labels and studios are the whale oil salesmen at the dawn of the age of electricity. How well did the campaign's against electricity work for them? Adapt... or die in a Darwinian spiral.

Re:Uhhh... no

[ThatAblaze]

Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom generate millions of dollars in illegal revenue off our stolen creative work.

This is hilarious, coming from a guy who writes a TV show about a gang of convicted felons who make millions of dollars in illegal revenue selling guns. You would think he of all people might be a little sympathetic to the idea of people stepping outside the law to provide a service when there is enough demand to do so.

Re:Uhhh... no

[viperidaenz]

Maybe Google should charge him royalties.

Re:Uhhh... no

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break this to you, but it's actually a fictional TV show.

Re:Uhhh... no

[gmueckl]

And the show is more about the hidden costs of that "business" and the related lifestyle...

Re:Uhhh... no

[Anonymous Coward]

Sutter's actually a flaming anti-gunner liberal profiteering off violence porn/pulp fiction.

Funny shit.

Re:Uhhh... no

[ThatAblaze]

Well, the hidden cost of downloading his show or offering it for download on the internet and the related lifestyle seems to be something he is also failing to consider. And you would think he would consider it since, as you say, it is a central theme of his "art."

lets just agree completely with what he said

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't matter. sure google is making money off of it. so is pirate bay with its porn ads.

if they didn't, a thousand other people would. unless you are seriously going to rewind the clock
to 1970 and only allow distribution and playback of analog, concrete media, you're just gonna
have to get paid some other way or go out of business

its perfectly fine to point this out, but are you saying there is some other option?

Re:lets just agree completely with what he said

[Waffle Iron]

unless you are seriously going to rewind the clock to 1970 and only allow distribution and playback of analog, concrete media,

I fondly remember my collection of concrete records. They had a uniquely gravelly sound that can't be duplicated by any digital technology. Sadly, I eventually got rid of them all because they were just too damned heavy to lug around.

Re:lets just agree completely with what he said

[Anonymous Coward]

its perfectly fine to point this out, but are you saying there is some other option?

The "other option" is that people like him get massive amounts of taxes and fees imposed on Internet companies and search engines. That's the way it works elsewhere and that's what people like him are lobbying for.

Change your business model!

[drfuchs]

I'm sure if you just start selling Sons of Anarchy t-shirts over the web and ship them out of your garage, you'll be fine!

Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[BlueMoss]

Is Kim Dotcom a convicted felon, as Kurt Sutter claims? What case has he been convicted of, that makes him a felon? It seems he is still fighting extradition and other challenges in New Zealand. Where and when was he convicted of a felony regarding content, copyright or intellectual property?

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[casings]

Allow me to post the wikipedia article you were too lazy to search: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

In 1994, he was arrested by German police for trafficking in stolen phone calling card numbers. He was held in custody for a month, released and arrested again on additional hacking charges shortly afterwards. He was eventually convicted of 11 counts of computer fraud, 10 counts of data espionage, and an assortment of other charges. He received a two-year suspended sentence – because he was under age at the time the crimes were committed.[29] The judge in the case said the court viewed his actions as "youthful foolishness."[30]
In 2001, Schmitz bought €375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company Letsbuyit.com (de) and subsequently announced his intention to invest €50 million in the company.[31] The announcement caused the share value of Letsbuyit.com to jump[32] and Schmitz cashed out, making a profit of €1.5 million. One commentator suggested that Schmitz may have been ignorant of the legal ramifications of what he had done, since insider trading was not made a crime in Germany until 1995,[29] and until 2002 prosecutors also had to prove the accused had criminal intent.[33]
Schmitz moved to Thailand to avoid investigation[12] where he was subsequently arrested on behalf of German authorities.[30] In response, he allegedly pretended to kill himself online, posting a message on his website that from now on he wished to be known as "His Royal Highness King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire".[30][34] He was deported back to Germany where he pleaded guilty to embezzlement in November 2003 and, after five months in jail awaiting trial, again received a suspended sentence (of 20 months).[33] After avoiding a prison sentence for a second time, he left Germany and moved to Hong Kong in late 2003.[12]

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[Pseudonym Authority]

He was convicted of insider trading and embezzlement, and some computer crime I don't really remember. Whatever it was, it was not relevant and used dishonestly by the crybaby idiot in TFA to imply that it was in the context of copyright. Reading this emotion-appealing hyperbole collection makes me kinda regret trying to defend copyright just yesterday.... I hate both sides of this `debate'.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[nedlohs]

He was convicted of computer fraud and embezzlement. There was no claim made that he was felon due anything related to content, copyright of intellectual property.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[rainer_d]

AFAIK: stock fraud. Back in Germany. A dot.com bubble thing. And before that, he got in trouble for hacking servers/networks (turned it into a pent-test business and sold it for big bucks - that's how he got rich the first time).
He's a colorful personality.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everywhere I go. I get slandered, libeled. I hear words I never heard in the Bible

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[milkmage]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

He rose to fame in Germany in the 1990s as an alleged hacker and internet entrepreneur. He was convicted of several crimes, and received a suspended prison sentence in 1994 for computer fraud and data espionage, and another suspended prison sentence in 2003 for insider trading and embezzlement.[12]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

he's kind of a slug, dude. he is not your anti-DMCA champion, he's a common fucking thief.

"Where and when was he convicted of a felony regarding content, copyright or intellectual property? ...hasn't been, but he committed Securities fraud - insider trading is a crime way beyond any kind of IP violation.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone has done anything wrong, they can never do anything right! Thankfully, we have people like milkmage who have never done anything wrong in their lives to help us understand this.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[Anonymous Coward]

*cough*Gravenreuth connection*cough*

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[Anonymous Coward]

But were these crimes felonies (or whatever the german equivalent is) at the time?

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[AK Marc]

And do they count if his record is officially cleaned of some of them? He had the earlier ones sealed.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[AK Marc]

Then how is it relevant? I had a conviction for "speeding" for 35 mph in a 55 mph zone in Texas when all traffic laws were misdemeanors (they've since been switched to administrative non-crime infractions). So how is it relevant in *any* discussion to refer to me as a convicted criminal? Perhaps if I were to get sued in Texas for my part in a traffic crash, but certainly not for a copyright discussion. The fact that it's brought up implies some relevance, or else the speaker is a douche.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[nedlohs]

It's not, but it's standard "see that guy is a bad".

If he was a convicted (or even just accused) child molester you can be sure that would get a mention too.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Two incidents of fraudlike behavior (including one of the idiocy of 'he'just a yoot') so is it surprising he would go into business distributing copyrighted works without paying the authors?

Ironic -- Hollywood is in southern CA so the execs could flee to Mexico if Tom Edison and his movie patents caught up with them.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[Stan92057]

"Quote"In 1994, he was arrested by German police for trafficking in stolen phone calling card numbers."End Quote".

Dude, hes a stinking criminal no matter how much you try to sugarcoat his crimes.

Re:Is Kim Dotcom a Convicted Felon?

[nedlohs]

arrested != convicted, but that's was the starting of what led to the computer fraud conviction I believe.

Consoring

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically what he is telling us is that google should be censoring for free and out of their kindness of their hearts for the benefit of the poor, poor honsest everyday man MAFIAA?

Non sequitur

[Stellian]

It's so absurd that Google is still presenting itself as the lovable geek who's the friend of the young everyman. Don't kid yourself, kids: Google is the establishment. It is a multibillion-dollar information portal that makes dough off of every click on its page and every data byte it streams. Do you really think Google gives a s**t about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content? Nope. You're just another revenue resource

That may all be true, but that does not change the fact that Sutter is also part of the establishment and also looking at viewers as a revenue stream. Google vs Hollywood are two bears fighting over a beehive, and we are the bees. Pick your side carefully, when the fight is over someone eats the honey and it's not you or me.

Re:Non sequitur

[viperidaenz]

I'd rather the bear who wins based their fight on freedom and not restriction.

Freedom Honey sounds much better than DRM Honey, even if it does have a dirty hippy sound to it.

Re:Non sequitur

[radarskiy]

"Google vs Hollywood are two bears fighting over a beehive, and we are the bees. "

And carry to the analogy further: if they would stop trampling the bees, everyone could have more honey.

There is a primitive mercantilist view of economics that says that money that someone else made is necessarily money that I lost. This view underpins most anti-capitalist actions, both leftist and rightist.

Re:Non sequitur

[Anonymous Coward]

+1000

This is the heart of it. Proponents of copyright and patents have a fundamental fear of free markets. If they can't understand how a free market would allow artists to prosper, then they assume it would be impossible. But they fail to ask the same questions regarding _everything_ else in our capitalist society. They're obsessed with the risk of people copying a work, oblivious to the fact that almost every other economic actor in our society lives with that exact same risk--that somebody will steal your idea, preventing you from making a return on your sizable investment.

These same people also, ironically, undervalue the value of marketing, sales, and the contingent evolution of success. Digital distribution is not zero cost, not by a long shot, and that's totally irrespective of costs in shipping bits. Google makes hundreds of billions of dollars helping people to find and effectively copy stuff--when the actual copying is supposed to be free.

And in a society where you can make billions selling bottled water in a saturated market with dozens of other bottled water sellers, how can you not laugh at the idea that artists and inventors need special protection?

Re:Non sequitur

[Anonymous Coward]

And carry to the analogy further: if they would stop trampling the bees, everyone could have more honey.

There is a primitive mercantilist view of economics that says that money that someone else made is necessarily money that I lost. This view underpins most anti-capitalist actions, both leftist and rightist.

to carry the analogy further:

the capitalists always trample the bees, and they always become the most anti-capitalist themselves once they have power.

no different than any other system. power corrupts. doesn't matter who or what or when or why or how.

"stolen creative work"

[gIobaljustin]

I would like to know how that's even possible, but this sort of person is one who relies entirely on emotion, and not someone who's capable of rational thought.

Interesting open book on the opposite side

[amaurea]

This book argues quite convincingly, based on current and historical examples, that copyrights and patents are a net negative to society.

Re:Interesting open book on the opposite side

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been reading slashdot for years, i never understood the ridiculous opposition to patents. Sure, they need reform, but they exist for a purpose. Copyright though should not be what it is. I'm drunk too.

Re:Interesting open book on the opposite side

[amaurea]

The purpose of patents is noble and laudible, but sometimes things don't end up working as intended. For a long while, doctors thought bleeding patiens was the best cure to all ills, but we now know that bleeding doesn't work, and only harms the patient. So despite the purpose of bleeding being ever so noble, what actually came of it was harmful.

Evaluating the overall effect of patents is a lot of work. The book I cited attempts to do so, but a bigger, more scientific investigation is needed. But I think the burden of proof should be on those advocating for patents. Monopolies should be avoided as much as possible (especially monopolies on abstract things like how to solve a problem), so one really should prove empirically that patents both achive their purpose, and that the harm does not outweigh the benefits, before creating any more than necessary.

At least patents have a time limit, though (unlike copyright (when's the next extension scheduled for again?)), so in that aspect they are better than copyright. But a striking example of the problems of patents (software patents in particular) is that what is widely considered to be the best h.264 encoder, the free software program x264, is illegal in many countries due to not paying license fees to the MPEG licensing authority (and this wouldn't work with the free software development model anyway). The same applies to other ffmpeg projects, and stuff in mplayer and many other very popular programs. These do not break copyright, and were not plagiarized from anybody - they just implement public standards.

Re:Interesting open book on the opposite side

[Anonymous Coward]

2018, twenty years after 1998's twenty year retroactive extension. The United States will have to harmonize with Mexico's copyright length of life + 100 years before 2019 or works from 1924 might enter the public domain.

googled

[Anonymous Coward]

If I google parasite it gives me Kurt Sutter.

Attitude

[JamesA]

With an attitude like that it's no wonder the series got worse each season.

And should Google be your internet police?

[Stan92057]

And should Google be your internet police? Why should Google make sure YOUR content isn't being stolen. Sorry but that's YOUR jobs unless you PAY Google or anyone else to police your works. Nothing is free in this world that includes you hiring people to police your content. I don't steal or share stuff im not soposta i learned that from my parents at a very young age. Why do so many people today think its ok and fix it.

Re:And should Google be your internet police?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't steal or share stuff im not soposta i learned that from my parents at a very young age. Why do so many people today think its ok and fix it.

The issue at hand is a very subtle one that is not often found in Slashdot comments. I'll share the details below but it'll go over most people's heads so don't worry if you can't understand it.

*ahem*

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS NOT STEALING.
STEALING IS NOT COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.

Re:And should Google be your internet police?

[AK Marc]

Because it's "stealing" like students writing down teacher's notes from the chalkboard.

There have been so many lies by big copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been so many lies put forward by bit copyright, including the MPAA/RIAA, all of the trillionaire owners who fund them, and they have paid so many congress critters hundreds of billions to get elected just so that they can skew copyright to last a trillion millennia. And this article is one more of the same. They call people who use Google parasites; they even label Google a parasite, but who are the ones who take content, which is already in the public domain, and then turn around and lock it up? The MPAA/RIAA! And these groups do it on behalf of the *REAL PARASITES*. If copyright terms were sane (1 generation), then the artist would still get paid, the work would be appreciated by all, and the next generation could rightly create new content based on the old. NO! These rat bastards try to milk dead rocks. Artists who's grand children are already dead have their content locked up by these parasites "IP is Mine, mine, my precious". And until sanity returns to the world, these clown show outfits deserve to be reviled and killed off. They do nothing to society, and in fact are a parasite on the world.

"Anarchy"

[Oysterville]

Funny coming from someone who does a show of that name. It's just pretend anarchy.

Establishment.

[jythie]

So why is being 'the establishment' such a horrible thing? As individual consumers, or even groups of consumers, we are pretty powerless. Our best stragety is generally supporting the established power who's goals align the best with our own. Yeah, Google is doing what is in Google's best interests, the MPAA/RIAA are doing what is in their best interests, and the combined media/ISP companies are doing what are in their best interests. As consumers we are not going to fight any of them directly, but we can get behind the one who we are served best by.

Not a minute or dime?

[tricorn]

Google contributes quite a bit, just because its software doesn't mean it's not creative.

I'd be willing to bet that he uses free software all the time. Why doesn't he think that's a worthwhile contribution?

Sounds like a whiner.

[Z00L00K]

Kurt Sutter seems to be a whiner that can't understand that they have to adapt and make the customers feel appreciated for purchasing the content.

One of the first things that must go away is those extremely annoying copyright warnings that we are forced to see when we have bought the film, but are nowhere to be seen on "pirated" movies. Only thing those warnings are good for is to know that now it's a good time to do #1 & #2 before I watch the movie.

Re:Sounds like a whiner.

[mobby_6kl]

>Kurt Sutter seems to be a whiner

You have no idea! He's a bitter asshole who's constantly butthurt over his shitty show losing out critically to Justified, as actors have input on the making of that show, unlike his baby which is a pure reflection of his stupid vision. He goes on asinine rants and recruits actors from other shows only to kill them off in humiliating ways.

You lost me at...

[Anonymous Coward]

You lost me at Kim Dotcom...

Doesn't pass the laugh test

[Frater 219]

But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives.

You never use a search engine while writing? They're awfully handy for fact-checking, looking up sources, and so on.

But I suppose those sorts of activities are not required these days ....

Re:Doesn't pass the laugh test

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty obvious that you've never seen an episode of sons of anarchy so let me explain.
There is absolutely no need for googling anything while creating this show. If you had ever watched this so called tv show you would know that it has all the wit of a story written by a 4-year old with a crayon, completely flat one dimensional characters and to top it off law enforcement are all acting like they are severely mentally challenged and on top of that they are all corrupt so that the shows good guys (the bad guys) can always get away with pretty much acting like a terrorist organisation.
So you see, there is no need for google, just make sure that the actors are over the top with your version of what macho is and the rest doesn't matter.
The only mystery is why people watch this and enjoy it, but then again plenty of people watch soap operas.

Re:Doesn't pass the laugh test

[macemoneta]

Software / hardware development and design are creative processes as well. I guess that 'devaluing creative work' only applies to your own content. Google has figured out how to make money while giving the fruit of those creative processes away, something that the content industries have been fighting as long as they have existed.

Re:Doesn't pass the laugh test

[thunderbird32]

There's also this thing called YouTube, which has allowed many creatives to get their work out into the public and, most germane to this article, monetized.

What profit?

[wonkey_monkey]

Yet Google wants to take our content, devalue it, and make it available for criminals to pirate for profit.

Who's paying for pirated content? Will piracy go away if no-one can profit from it?*

* Rhetorical. No, it won't.

Re:What profit?

[west]

Actually, if *no one* can profit from it? Then yes it will. (Okay, it would be highly diminished.)

Luckily, there are a *lot* of ways to profit from piracy. Provide bandwidth, blank CD's, blank diskettes, blank tapes, hard drives, computers, video players, on-site advertising, virus/worm infection vectors, etc., etc., etc.

Is the next stop how the drug trade would be undiminished if no-one made any money off of that?

Re:What profit?

[Overzeetop]

Actually, the bigger question is that, if the "pirates" are making so much fucking money on this second-rate content (compressed, poorly packaged, difficult to find, and onerous to collect), how is it that the content creator, which have the ability to make acquisition super-easy are not able to see a dime from their work?

The simple answer is that the entire landscape for distribution has changed, and the laws are still written as if it were pre-internet.

Re:What profit?

[Overzeetop]

How much money is made on illicit alcohol in the US?

Re:What profit?

[Immerman]

You forgot the most important way to profit - the way which can't be eliminated no matter what you do: Getting free stuff. So long as people can give a copy of their movie/software/music to their friends, thus enriching their friends at no expense to themselves, piracy will continue. They did it with mix tapes and VHS long before the internet or mp3s, and they won't stop any time soon. The internet and digital content simply make a time-honored tradition even easier and removes the degradation inherent in analogue copies. And short of shutting down the internet I don't see any way to put the genie back in the bottle.

And so long as security geeks can earn street cred by making it easy for people to bypass copy protection and do what they want with the content they paid for, copy protection will always be a joke.

Fortunately most adults understand that you need to pay people if you want them to keep making cool stuff, and are even willing to pay a reasonable price for quality content, so there is hope. The content industries simply have to wise up to the facts that:
- They can't stop piracy.
- Most piracy is done by people who wouldn't pay for it anyway, so represents zero losses
- Copy protection only harms your paying customers, making piracy more appealing in comparison
- Content targeting purchase by juveniles (of any age) who don't really understand the broader economic considerations of piracy may end up suffering far more from piracy than more mature content - I imagine a far smaller percentage of "Planet Earth" copies are pirated than of "Transformers 2". Deal with it.

Re:What profit?

[west]

Well, i was addressing the original assertion - piracy will continue if no-one profits from it, but aside from that, I pretty much agree with everything you said.

However, a few points:

Fortunately most adults understand that you need to pay people if you want them to keep making cool stuff, and are even willing to pay a reasonable price for quality content, so there is hope.

I see that a lot in older people. But I find the sentiment less common among those who grew up not even understanding there was such a thing as copyright. It's why piracy doesn't upset me all that much, but the idea that people aren't willing to accept that what they're doing is wrong bothers me a lot.

We all do things we acknowledge are morally wrong (except those who are emotionally 10 year-olds - *everything* they do is morally justified in their own head). But that also means there's an ethical nudge in the direction of proper behaviour when the cost isn't so (relatively) high. If you don't believe it's wrong at all, then there's no reason to *ever* go legit.

The other point is that I have no objection to minimal copy protection. Copy protection, even stuff that is easily circumvented, provides a discouragement factor to the most casual of copying. I do remember a friend assuming that if it wasn't copy protected, then that must mean that the publisher was explicitly giving permission for it to be pirated. I suspect that attitude is not all that uncommon.

If there's some difference between the purchased and the pirated product, it also provides some incentive for people to purchase something rather than get it from a friend.

Of course, I am no fan of draconian copyright protection.

Re:What profit?

[Immerman]

I can't say I've actually encountered many adults who could afford to purchase content that aren't at least somewhat aware of the issue. They may pirate a lot, but they'll also buy stuff, especially from indie bands where the money actually goes to the band rather than 90+% to the labels (and that's assuming the labels honor their obligations, and there's plenty of evidence that they rarely do)

As for copy protection, back in the day plenty of software had a "please don't copy" splash screen at start-up or shut down, especially the full versions of shareware titles. Today most movies come with that tedious annoying "no copying" warning at the beginning, and there's no reason you couldn't print something on the CD/DVD as well/instead. Revise the splash screens to point out the simple fact that content needs funding to be created and I think you've done about as much as you can. If somebody decides to copy it anyway then all the copy protection in the world won't help - within weeks of release all the standard copying tools will have added support for whatever new tweaks were added to the DRM. Meanwhile so long as the DMCA and its ilk exist honest open source software will be legally restricted from supporting legitimate media because they can't legally comply with the licensing restrictions. Maybe,*maybe* the most trivial of DRM could be acceptable, if only to ensure that copiers have to use special tools, highlighting that they are doing something unintended by the providers. But who is going to want to intentionally install DRM on a new release that's known to have been completely ineffective for years?

Meanwhile, plenty of places are making good money selling completely DRM-free content, even new releases. iTunes, Good Old Games, etc as a few examples. In fact IIRC media sales are at an all-time high, despite all the bellyaching about piracy, so clearly it can be done. There is a cultural problem at play, but I would say it's in the culture of the vast majority of distributers, rather than the population at large.

Re:What profit?

[west]

> But who is going to want to intentionally install DRM on a new release that's known to have been completely ineffective for years?

I find the Apple system works well. It's can be easily circumvented if necessary, but for most people, it's just easier to operate within the ecosystem.

Re:What profit?

[AK Marc]

You forgot the most important way to profit - the way which can't be eliminated no matter what you do: Getting free stuff. So long as people can give a copy of their movie/software/music to their friends, thus enriching their friends at no expense to themselves, piracy will continue. They did it with mix tapes and VHS long before the internet or mp3s, and they won't stop any time soon.

And "mix tapes" are illegal, as illegal as P2P, but smaller scale, so the record companies actually encouraged it. Legal is if you sit there and witness the private (not public) mixing and it isn't recorded.

I have a CD "for promotional use only" somewhere laying around, I don't even remember what it is. But I could mix that, or play it publicly without licensing issues. Won it in a radio contest. Short of some fringe cases like that, there isn't much you can do with your media that's legal.

Re:What profit?

[AK Marc]

You forgot the most important way to profit - the way which can't be eliminated no matter what you do: Getting free stuff. So long as people can give a copy of their movie/software/music to their friends, thus enriching their friends at no expense to themselves, piracy will continue. They did it with mix tapes and VHS long before the internet or mp3s, and they won't stop any time soon.

And "mix tapes" are illegal, as illegal as P2P, but smaller scale, so the record companies actually encouraged it. Legal is if you sit there and witness the private (not public) mixing and it isn't recorded. I have a CD "for promotional use only" somewhere laying around, I don't even remember what it is. But I could mix that, or play it publicly without licensing issues. Won it in a radio contest.

Re:What profit?

[AK Marc]

I see that a lot in older people. But I find the sentiment less common among those who grew up not even understanding there was such a thing as copyright. It's why piracy doesn't upset me all that much, but the idea that people aren't willing to accept that what they're doing is wrong bothers me a lot.

The older people are lying and your memory is faulty. "piracy" (sharing media, without regard to established business wishes) is ancient. Your parents, the "older people" did it as kids. They'd share what they could. They'd build play houses that looked like ones in the Sears catelog, shamelessly ripping off Sears's IP. The only reason they remember it differently is that the technology wasn't around then. "Share your things" is encouraged in kindergarden. It isn't until you get older when selfishness is taught by the older generation.

It all reminds me about my dad. He'd go ballistic about my driving (I had a much better record than him), and eventually Mom told us about him being a street racer when he was younger. He only stopped when both his parents were killed in separate car crashes the same year when he was about 21. So he was a car-modifying greaser doing street racing from 12 to 21 (or so), but when his 18 year old son gets his car backed into in a parking lot, he goes off on "responsibility" for 6 hours of lecture. That's the intellectual consistenct that the "older people" have. We haven't had generations grow out of it, but I expect that age does correlate with lowered piracy, and not because there's something wrong with the young. Every generation has thought the one behind them was the worst generation ever. If everyone was right, then civilization is doomed. More likely every "old person" is wrong. So no, I don't place much weight on someone's opinion just because they were born first.

Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Fringe]

The problem is Disney. The last Copyright Extension Act increased copyrights to 120 years. The original U.S. copyright length, in the Copyright Act of 1790, was for 14 years with the potential for one renewal for another 14, and only if the author was still alive.

Corporations have taken over copyright, and it's not currently fixable due to their power. We can destroy copyright and then rebuild more easily than we can wrestle the monied interests into compromise.

Google is a problem for both sides, but that isn't a bad thing... having two enemies duke it out, weakening each other without impacting you, is a good thing.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[QuasiSteve]

While I agree that the extension of copyright terms is a huge problem in terms of things like remixes/rehashes/reimaginings of existing content (not that this has actually stopped people from Rule 34'ing every Disney Princess in a multitude of ways), for most "zomg piracy, our copyrights!" discussions it is not a factor; the vast majority of 'piracy' is of recent things with a very clear drop-off as you go further back in time.

In the case of Sons of Anarchy, season 1 of that series hasn't even passed some of the original copyright terms. ( Getting there, though, just another year or so ), so even if one were to argue that copyright duration terms should be limited to what they were way back when (5/7 years), he'd still be voicing his concern.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[hibiki_r]

Well, it's just as illegal to download an episode than is 1 year old, than it is to download one that is 50 years old. If the punishment is the same, why wouldn't you download the latest stuff?

He'd be voicing the concern no matter what, because he believes he is better served by infinite copyright.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not kid ourselves. You are not pirating content that is 50 or 75 years old. You are pirating content that was released yesterday, a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. Old episodes of I Love Lucy and F Scott Fitzgerald novels aren't the most popular downloads on The Pirate Bay. It's The Game of Thrones, and movies that are currently in the theaters.

You just point at 50 year old content not being in the public domain to give you the moral justification to violate copyright on even the newest content. If copyright were just 14 years, you still have people pirating new releases. Just as any excuse will serve a tyrant, any excuse will serve a pirate or a thief.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Immerman]

Not necessarily - if I could download content from 14 years ago free and clear of legal encumbrance, then I'd probably watch a lot more old content, it's not like modern content has improved dramatically, and there's no shortage of old classics I've never gotten around to watching, thus reducing the temptation to pirate anything. Of course that only makes the problem worse for the media giants - their problem is not specifically piracy, but that I'm not paying for their new content. And for that I can only say that until they start offering a quality product at a reasonable price I won't be buying much regardless.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily - if I could download content from 14 years ago free and clear of legal encumbrance, then I'd probably watch a lot more old content, it's not like modern content has improved dramatically, and there's no shortage of old classics I've never gotten around to watching, thus reducing the temptation to pirate anything.

Did it improve *at all*?

*cough* 8.0 stars in 1968 *cough* 5.7 stars in 2001 *cough*
*cough* 6.5 stars in 1980 *cough* 4.9 stars in 2009 *cough*
*cough* 7.5 stars in 1987 *cough* 6.7 stars in 2014 *cough*
*cough* 7.5 stars in 1990 *cough* 6.3 stars in 2012 *cough*

The real issue with 14 year copyright terms is what's my 2 year old going to watch when he grows up?

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[tragedy]

not that this has actually stopped people from Rule 34'ing every Disney Princess in a multitude of ways

"Disney" characters like Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty, or the Little Mermaid? You mean all of those public domain characters? Sure, Disney created their own versions of them. Then used the existence of their versions to pretty much lay claim over those characters entirely.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Arker]

"Well, it's just as illegal to download an episode than is 1 year old, than it is to download one that is 50 years old. If the punishment is the same, why wouldn't you download the latest stuff?"

Because I wanted to watch something that doesnt suck?

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Immerman]

Well, I didn't want to rub it in...

As for your two year old, perhaps he could watch the same stuff you did, unless the media industry actually makes something *better*? Just think, with the complete library of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers on your laptop you might not have to listen to him watching those same three episodes of Blues Clues (or whatever is popular these days) over and over and over, and over again. And any new popular media would have a fair chance of actually being *better* than the old classics, after all they're trying to get you to pay for something that's competing with free versions of the historical high water marks of the genre.

For media targeting adults/young adults it's a bit difference since things like cultural relevance come into play far more strongly, giving new media an advantage. But still - I can't tell you the number of times I've happily watched reruns of old shows that were actually good rather than new tripe.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Anonymous Coward]

I still think the solution is making copyright for 14 years for free, then renewable for as long as you want for a yearly fee. Fail to pay the fee, and it goes into public domain. Mickey Mouse can stay copyright forever, that's fine, but all of the small/non-profitable stuff should fall into public domain.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[dk20]

And there you have one of the key problems with "content providers".

If they are not stealing from the public domain (Disney) they are doing sequels, prequels, and remakes.

Similar for music. Who buy's CD's anymore? Back in the day you would often find a CD with a few new songs and a bunch of filler which often was availble on otehr disks. Why would I pay full price for a CD if the artist cant be bothered releasing new material?

As for the "rent takers"... News flash, times are changing and your days are probably numbered. You can find a way to stay relevent, or fight it in courts but it is hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

Here's a thought, stop trying to "make a movie by numbers" and release something new?

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[dk20]

My kids play the piano and occasional i try to find sheet music for them.

Amazing to see how much stuff from beethoven is locked behind a pay-wall or "copyright protected" book.

Let me guess, Beethoven is still pulling in royalties for his stuff? HINT: he was Born on December 1770 and died a long time ago.

Even if they were "pirating content that is 50 or 75 years old" someone would see it is relevant and "package" it together in an attempt to find a way to extend the copyright term. See the Disney model and how much of their catalog came from the public domain. Now they did it, you cant use the same storyboard as its protected.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Anonymous Coward]

And there's the rub, isn't it? These days, new content increasingly competes against ALL created since recording was available. I can get recording from 100 years ago. And if I prefer those, I don't buy new content. Back when there was radio, records, and 3 TV networks, it was a lot harder to get to the old content. Now its all out there.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[Immerman]

Well, it certainly sets the bar higher for anyone trying to make money selling new content, but I don't see why they should get preferential consideration. After all it works out wonderfully for everyone else.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[hondo77]

Who buy's CD's anymore?

People who spell "buys" without an apostrophe.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[dk20]

Oh boy, you responded to a 2 day old post to correct some sort of minor error? Sure added a lot of value to the conversation, and a great use of your time as well.

Re:Disruption works when evolution fails.

[hondo77]

Kinda like the same value of your response to my post, eh?

um

[arbiter1]

"Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom" Last I checked he wasn't convicted of anything and most crap they are trying to put him in jail was keeping stuff on megaupload servers he was asked to by the federal government. On top of that big corp music industry DMCA'ed a music megaupload paid for and owned copyright to cause they were asshurt.

Re:um

[casings]

Just because he hasn't been convicted in this current case, doesn't mean he isn't a convicted felon.

In 1994, he was arrested by German police for trafficking in stolen phone calling card numbers. He was held in custody for a month, released and arrested again on additional hacking charges shortly afterwards. He was eventually convicted of 11 counts of computer fraud, 10 counts of data espionage, and an assortment of other charges. He received a two-year suspended sentence – because he was under age at the time the crimes were committed.[29] The judge in the case said the court viewed his actions as "youthful foolishness."[30]
In 2001, Schmitz bought €375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company Letsbuyit.com (de) and subsequently announced his intention to invest €50 million in the company.[31] The announcement caused the share value of Letsbuyit.com to jump[32] and Schmitz cashed out, making a profit of €1.5 million. One commentator suggested that Schmitz may have been ignorant of the legal ramifications of what he had done, since insider trading was not made a crime in Germany until 1995,[29] and until 2002 prosecutors also had to prove the accused had criminal intent.[33]
Schmitz moved to Thailand to avoid investigation[12] where he was subsequently arrested on behalf of German authorities.[30] In response, he allegedly pretended to kill himself online, posting a message on his website that from now on he wished to be known as "His Royal Highness King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire".[30][34] He was deported back to Germany where he pleaded guilty to embezzlement in November 2003 and, after five months in jail awaiting trial, again received a suspended sentence (of 20 months).[33] After avoiding a prison sentence for a second time, he left Germany and moved to Hong Kong in late 2003.[12]

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

"Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom"
Last I checked he wasn't convicted of anything and most crap they are trying to put him in jail was keeping stuff on megaupload servers he was asked to by the federal government. On top of that big corp music industry DMCA'ed a music megaupload paid for and owned copyright to cause they were asshurt.

Apparently you were too lazy to do an internet search on Kim Dotcom. See his Wikipedia entry for his convictions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_dotcom#Criminal_investigations

Amusing that you were too lazy to use Google in an article about how Google makes it easy to find information and content.

Re:um

[viperidaenz]

None of his previous convictions have anything to do with copyright and they all happened over a decade ago (blah blah blah clean slate acts in dozens of countries etc)

programming isn't creative?

[Anonymous Coward]

the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives. Not a minute of effort or a dime of financing.

Google has done a lot to help programmers and promote programming. G Groups, G Code, SoC, Talks, con sponsorship, Golang, GWT, and tons more free code to help you turn your dreams into reality.

Furthermore, I guess Kurt Sutter has never heard of YouTube or he thinks having a free, globally accessible, unlimited video platform with built in revenue generating capabilities (YouTube) doesn't help creatives in any way. Or maybe he thinks that storage and bandwidth are free.

Re:programming isn't creative?

[Immerman]

The problem is you're using "Creatives" in an unjustifiably restricted context that only covers 99.99% of creative human endeavor. He's using it in the much more inclusive meaning of the 0.003% who have convinced major media conglomerates to fund high-dollar productions of their derivative vision, and created something of insufficient quality for most people to justify paying for.

Re:programming isn't creative?

[Anonymous Coward]

WIN!

wait wait wait

[ganjadude]

'Everyone is aware that Google has done amazing things to revolutionize our Internet experience,' writes Sutter. 'And I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Google are very nice people. But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives. Not a minute of effort or a dime of financing.

I cant even begin to tell you how many items I would never know about if it were not for google and other search engines. To say they add no value is a joke Ive found more movies and music i never would have given a chance to from them, and yes paid for some of it!

The problem is ads, not downloading

[Animats]

What might solve the Google problem is to increase the penalties for attaching advertising to someone else's work. People who make content available for downloading but don't put ads on it are doing it as a hobby, and they're not going to become too big, because serving that data costs money. It's the ones who pirate material and add ads that are the problem. They're doing it as a business.

Like YouTube.

Re:The problem is ads, not downloading

[BronsCon]

Yes, because YouTube searches for content to steal. Right.

Actually...

Wrong. If it's on YouTube, it's there because someone, somewhere, uploaded it to YouTube and, in doing so, certified that they had the right to do so and agreed to allow YouTube to attach ads to it. That person, the one who uploaded the content they had no right to upload the content, who had no right to agree to allow ads to be attached to it, is the one who is in the wrong; they are the one Kurt Sutter should be pissed at, not Google, who provides a service that allows people to upload their own content. YouTube works on trust, and that trust has been violated, but Google has kept up their end of things; if you see your content on YouTube and you did not authorize its presence there, Google will remove it, but you have to make them aware of it, first.

Re:The problem is ads, not downloading

[viperidaenz]

Except YouTube gives part of the ad revenue back to the content producer.

Like a content distributor

Re:The problem is ads, not downloading

[viperidaenz]

You can also tell Google it's yours and they'll give you a share of the ad revenue.

Re:The problem is ads, not downloading

[cornicefire]

Actually, Google could do much, much more. They could actually punish the people who upload illegal copies. They could force people to log in with their Google account and they could require them to give their legit name. Then they could enforce some three strikes rule that booted someone from Google for uploading bad video. But they don't do any of this. They make uploading so easy yet they make filing a DMCA request take hours of work. Is it any surprise what happens more often? They could also share the names of the felons with the victims. They do this for other crimes. Why not copyright?

Re:The problem is ads, not downloading

[BronsCon]

How do you propose they punish people who upload illegal copies? Kill their account? They'll just create a new one. Sue them? Not their content, no grounds to do so. Require their legit name? Good, you did suggest that. And they tried it. How would any of it be enforced? It's trivial for me to get a new IP address, a new free email with any number of providers, and create a new Google account.

They don't make DMCA requests take hours, the law does. And they don't share the names of the felons uploading content that does not belong to them because those felons do not exist; it's not a felony, or even a misdemeanor, but a civil infraction, which means that, while illegal, it is actually not a crime at all.

But that just fucks up your world view, so you'll go ahead and ignore it, now, won't you?

Who the hell ...

[PPH]

... is Kurt Sutter? I Googled the name, but nothing related came up.

Re:Who the hell ...

[viperidaenz]

The first hit I was was an excerpt from wikipedia

Kurt Leon Sutter (born May 5, 1960) is an American screenwriter, director, producer, actor and douche bag.

Re:Who the hell ...

[ThatAblaze]

So.. you attempted to use google to get collaborative information about an article that claimed that google was giving out information too freely, and you failed to find the information you were looking for. Irony?

Flat

[Anonymous Coward]

As a counter-argument, that falls completely flat. The lawyer's argument is relevant and well-reasoned, if a little on the abrasive side, while Sutter's argument only has abrasiveness on its side.

Lesser of two evils

[kaldari]

I would much rather have Google in charge of what is available on the internet than Hollywood and the MPAA. If the content mafia had their way, I'm sure the entire internet would be shut down by now. These are the same people who wanted to make VCRs illegal after all. The claim that Google is "anti-copyright" is ridiculous. Remember, Google owns YouTube, the site that gave all these content companies a back door to delete content at will. And what did the content companies do with this power? They blatantly abused it and deleted anything related to their copyrights regardless of whether it was fair use or not (even NASA videos). Now the content companies want that same power over the entire internet. No thanks.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

"Not a minute of effort or a dime of financing."

http://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/creator-benefits.html

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

This entire article is flaimbait with a small group behind it with an agenda.. A bit mixed but there is some sort of agenda... A bit of propaganda.

Many reasons to hate on Google

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many reasons to hate Google (just the fact that they're in bed with the CIA/NSA is enough), but I don't think this is one of them.

I agree with

Everyone is aware that Google has done amazing things to revolutionize our Internet experience,' writes Sutter. '[...] But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives. Not a minute of effort or a dime of financing.

but they don't do anything that requires them to!

Granted, Google is a juggernaut that should have been stopped years ago, but saying that "Google wants to take our content, devalue it, and make it available for criminals to pirate for profit" is just frothing at the mouth. Sutter is a nutter.

Proof the Google Gives a s**t

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think Google gives a s**t about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content?

Yes! That is why they walked away from China.

Now let's talk about those lost Dr. Who episodes. Or would you rather address the copyright that every orchestra applies to their redition of a Mozart tune.

Re:Proof the Google Gives a s**t

[number17]

Yes! That is why they walked away from China.

They're back baby!

Software

[Anonymous Coward]

I've haven't gotten all the way through because ucla's server's are slower than shit, but from what I've seen, the author spends all of his time on software patents and copyright and explaining how those are wrong.

Since you've read the whole thing, how does he address music, fine art, writing (especially fiction), etc ...?

That seems the gist of all these arguments: they are only applicable to software.

Re:Software

[amaurea]

I have not read the whole thing yet. Only about 1/3 or so. But the parts I've seen talk of non-software too. For example, even in the very first paragraph of the introduction there is an example of patents slowing down the progress of steam engine technology and the speed of its adaptation. See also page 24+ in chapter two.

The reason why there is so much focus on software in the book might be that that is a field that until recently was free of patents, and so provides us with a very clear example of how a field can proper without them. It also means that one can compare the rate of invention in software and algorithms before and after the introduction of software patents to see if patents serve their intended purpose or not. In other fields, patents were introduced much longer ago, making this more difficult.

You want my sympathy?

[MikeRT]

Make it clear to me that you don't see my property rights as being in contention with your rights. You can start by disavowing any federal legislation that tells me what I can do with my property including tinkering, modifying and resale of the same. Get your DMCA-padded mits off my physical property and stop lobbying for restrictions on my computerized devices.

Until then all I hear is "blah blah blah I want to violate your rights for profit blah blah blah."

Re:You want my sympathy?

[Areyoukiddingme]

Get your DMCA-padded mits off my physical property and stop lobbying for restrictions on my computerized devices.

Seriously. My coworker told me all about what you have to do these days to get original source digital audio to play properly from so-called "legitimate" sources. I've never owned a TV or a BlueRay player, so I've never had to deal with all the HDCP bullshit. I was appalled. Why does ANYBODY put up with that shit?

Re:You want my sympathy?

[drinkypoo]

For most people you just insert cable A into socket B and push play. They don't give a fuck. If their disc gets scratched up they will throw it away and buy another one or watch something else. If you just buy the overpriced shit in the store then it all works, especially if you buy all the same brand.

Re:what? youre a cluless cunt

[Runaway1956]

RIAA contributes nothing good to society and freeloads off of all content creators period

yes I said it, RIAA contributes nothing good to society. peroid.

all they do is make their money off of others hard work.

sounds like you work for RIAA, or suck the shit out of their anus on the regular?

Tool

[wisnoskij]

What a tool.

Re:Tool

[Anonymous Coward]

And such a fettered tool at that.

Correction for you, Mr. Sutter.

[BronsCon]

Do you really think Google gives a s**t about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content? Nope.

Actually, yes. If we couldn't speak freely, Google couldn't index and profit from it.

Google is right for if everything i multi million

[ralphaostrander]

I am sure not going to pay more for internet connection and in fact am thinking about cutting this cord too. I dont think any internet connection at all is worth more than 10 bucks.

Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Bob9113]

SoA bitching about Google

Google bitching about copyright

Apple bitching about Samsung

Microsoft and Google bitching about each other

Sprint ripping off the warrantless surveillance program

University of Phoenix poisoning the student loan program

The Koch brothers and friends are always bitching about the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance when they work full time. I'm a lot more sick of the rich and their sense of entitlement to be a little richer, often with a little government intervention needed to get them there.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a lot more sick of the rich and their sense of entitlement to be a little richer, often with a little government intervention needed to get them there.

Now you've done it. You're gonna give some temporarily embarrassed* Slashdot millionaire a sad.

*I'm not misquoting Steinbeck, I'm correctly quoting me riffing on Steinbeck.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[stenvar]

The Koch brothers and friends are always bitching about the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance when they work full time.

I've never seen the Koch brothers "bitch" about "bout the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance". Citation?

The Koch brothers, like most people who believe in classical liberalism, simply believe that government financing of programs like health care and retirement is simply not sustainable; what they are "bitching" about is Democrats pushing through legislation that is good for their short term political gains but in the long term will invariably result in "the bottom 90%" not being able to get good health insurance.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Vinegar Joe]

Funny how the people who scream about the evil Koch brothers never have a word to say about George Soros and his puppet occupying the White House.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how you guys use Soros as a strawman every time someone DARES to talk bad about the Koch brothers. Don't you have a real rebuttal you can use?

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Attila Dimedici]

It's funny how people bitch about the Koch brothers while ignoring the 58 people and groups who spend MORE money to influence politics (the majority of which donate to Democratic Party campaigns).

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Anonymous Coward]

Koch Brother fan are you?

Take a look at this graph that maps the political machinations of the Koch boys; and see if you still are afterwards:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/A_Maze_of_Money.png

They are inherently dishonest, just as the day is long...

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Anonymous Coward]

So when you can't provide evidence to support one smear, you simply make up another one.

I don't see any difference to Soros, except that that the policies that Soros advocates are far more self-serving and destructive.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Alsee]

Yep. It was George Soros who planted the fake Obama birth notices in Hawaiian newspapers.

-

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

The Koch brothers, like most people who believe in classical liberalism, simply believe that government financing of programs like health care and retirement is simply not sustainable;

It is no more or less sustainable than 100% participation in private insurance. Stating that government financing of "insurance" is not sustainable is stating that everyone having "insurance" itself is not sustainable. That's a different problem from government funding.

Given their focus on blaming the government and not solving the problem they state exists makes me doubt all that comes from them. They aren't internally consistent. And it shows.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[stenvar]

It is no more or less sustainable than 100% participation in private insurance.

Private insurance is constrained by market mechanisms: insurers can only offer what makes financial sense, and customers and investors can punish bad insurance companies. Government or tax payer financing of insurance kills those market mechanisms; it removes the only mechanism by which we can actually constrain and punish badly behaving corporations.

Given their focus on blaming the government and not solving the problem they state exists makes me doubt all that comes from them.

They are trying to solve the problem, namely by taking away government control of health care (and other parts of our lives) and handing it back to individuals and markets.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

Governemnt control doesn't have to kill anything. You are comparing the best free market (we don't havE) to the worst possible governemnt (which we don't have).

They are trying to solve the problem, namely by taking away government control of health care (and other parts of our lives) and handing it back to individuals and markets.

So they claim that the state of health care prior to ACA was the best in the world? The best it could be? Better than any government-controlled system possible? The people had the "power", and the result was people suffering under a poor system.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

It's funny how people bitch about the Koch brothers while ignoring the 58 people and groups who spend MORE money to influence politics (the majority of which donate to Democratic Party campaigns).

How many of the 58 Democratic donators also donate Republican? Last I looked, most big business donated to both. It doesn't matter who wins if you buy out all candidates.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Attila Dimedici]

While some of the 58 donate Republican and some of the 58 split their donations, the majority spend their political money on Democrats.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

That 58 (presuming you are using the opensecrets.org list) are *NOT* a majority Democrat as you assert. That, and the list is people who pay cash to parties, candidates, and PACs, not those who spend independent money on original research and release that as "independent", implying unbiased. That spending isn't required by law to be disclosed, so can't necessarily be counted. The count is the dollars that can be explicitly counted, disclosed as required by law. It doesn't count anything that doesn't trigger certain election law regulations, and so wouldn't reflect the majority of the work by the Kotch Brothers, but does put ActBlue at the top, as they are a cash-handling organization, everything it does triggering the "rules" opensecrets.org used.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[stenvar]

Governemnt control doesn't have to kill anything.

Government control means eliminating market mechanisms; that's the whole point of government control of anything.

So they claim that the state of health care prior to ACA was the best in the world? The best it could be?

The US hasn't had a free market in health care in more than a century. ACA has simply moved us from one corrupt, highly regulated system to an even more corrupt, highly regulated system.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

The government is eliminating market mechanisms like fraud. We'd be so much better off with no regulations at all. Keeping the poor multi-billionaires down by preventing mass fraud against the desperate. If they aren't millionaires, they obviously are inferior humans who deserve it.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[stenvar]

The government is eliminating market mechanisms like fraud.

Fraud isn't a market mechanism.

We'd be so much better off with no regulations at all. Keeping the poor multi-billionaires down by preventing mass fraud against the desperate. If they aren't millionaires, they obviously are inferior humans who deserve it.

Spare me your ignorant sarcasm. It's people like you who are condemning large portions of the US to poverty and inadequate medical care.

The problem with healthcare isn't evil multi-billionaires (they aren't affected by health care legislation at all), it's evil people like you.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

Fraud isn't a market mechanism.

Are contracts a market mechanism? As they are enforced by the government. Or are you just "No True Scotsman"ing me, where any counter-point I mention will be excluded from your moving target argument?

It's people like you who are condemning large portions of the US to poverty and inadequate medical care.

Not me. I saw so many loonitarian pricks and teabaggers getting power, I left the US. You have the country you deserve. I live in a place with lower taxes, universal free health care, and scores higher in livability and freedom indexes. Get more pay less. All you have to do is stop drinking the loonitarian koolaid and look around. Of course, your mental illness will not allow you to think.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[stenvar]

I live in a place with lower taxes, universal free health care, and scores higher in livability and freedom indexes. Get more pay less. All you have to do is stop drinking the loonitarian koolaid and look around. Of course, your mental illness will not allow you to think.

Wonderful! You found yourself a tax shelter in some small, rich enclave. There are plenty of those around: Norway, Monaco, Singapore, New Zealand, you name it. Why can't the rest of the world live just like you do? Let them eat cake! Yet, you lack the balls to actually give up your US citizenship because deep down you know that the place you're living right now is built on sand.

Are contracts a market mechanism? As they are enforced by the government.

Market mechanisms are the interactions by which buyers and sellers arrive at efficient allocations of goods and services in a free market. Contracts and government enforcement of contracts are not "market mechanism", nor are they even necessary for market mechanisms to operate.

Or are you just "No True Scotsman"ing me, where any counter-point I mention will be excluded from your moving target argument?

Your claim that pre-ACA, we had a free market in health care is ludicrous. You have made no argument to support your ludicrous claim. Once you do make an argument, we can have a debate. Given that you are struggling with basic economic concepts like "market mechanism", I won't hold my breath.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

Yet, you lack the balls to actually give up your US citizenship because deep down you know that the place you're living right now is built on sand.

No, it's because the US actively punishes ex-citizens, and can revoke renunciation at will. You *can't* give up US citizenship with certainty. You can only renounce, and hope that the US recognizes it, and if they do, make sure to never visit family back in the USA. If the US wasn't actively persecuting ex-citizens, I'd renounce. And the number of small rich enclaves is increasing as the US declines. Why live in the US for the Great Fall, when you could live in a better place and always be free to return if the US improves?

Market mechanisms are the interactions by which buyers and sellers arrive at efficient allocations of goods and services in a free market. Contracts and government enforcement of contracts are not "market mechanism", nor are they even necessary for market mechanisms to operate.

A contract sounds like a documentation of "interactions" to unambiguously define trade. I still don't understand how the documentation of a market mechanism isn't a market mechanism.

Or are you just trying to prove my "no true scotsman" hypothesis?

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's because the US ....

You can try to kid yourself in whatever way you like. Let's just recap that you fled to a little, wealthy tax oasis and now opine on how much better the US would be if it only adopted the same free spending ways. Your approach to economics is sitting in your palace and pronouncing "let them eat cake!".

A contract sounds like a documentation of "interactions" to unambiguously define trade. I still don't understand how the documentation of a market mechanism isn't a market mechanism.

Well, it's clear that your understanding of economics is essentially non-existent, so I'm not sure how to help you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Or are you just trying to prove my "no true scotsman" hypothesis?

You don't have a "hypothesis". You just have a bunch of phrases you use randomly, hoping that someone will mistake your ramblings for an argument.

Re:Entitlement of The Wealthy

[AK Marc]

It's not a wealthy tax oasis, but whatever lies you have to tell to get through your pathetic little life...

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

they copy write anarchy ,
as there's no defence to total anarchy ,
there's no control to anarchy ether ,
so why they expecting someone to pay for there anarchy that implies they should not
is that not what you would call a set up

Content has no value, only gatekeeping

[Anonymous Coward]

Content has no value, as any Amazon Kindle self-published author will attest. What has value is gatekeeping, the ability to create artificial scarcity and then charge for content. Precision is needed to frame this debate - what the person who wrote the article (who is this guy?) is saying is that Google destroys models of artificial scarcity by allowing people to bypass gatekeepers and their mechanisms for creating artificial scarcity. To make money off of content, corporations need to make people want it, and then make it scarce enough that people will pay for it. When artificial scarcity is removed, the result is a glut of content that has no value, such as the Amazon Kindle self-published slush pile - the "want" is not being created for this slush.

Primary Pleader

[the eric conspiracy]

Primary pleaders they are called sometimes by Congress. That is people who come before committees asking for some legislation that will benefit them directly.

Justifiably they are given a great dose of skepticism (but probably not enough).

Please, no more articles based on the writings of a primary pleader.

Re:what? youre a cluless cunt

[ShieldW0lf]

google contributes nothing good to society and freeloads off of all content creators period

I like my Nexus 5. I'm new around here, and I find it very helpful finding my way around the city. I hitchhiked all the way across the continent a few months ago, and Google Maps helped me find my way.

What did YOU contribute?

yea

[Anonymous Coward]

media grooming

I'm sorry, you just lost your credibility

[viperidaenz]

Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom generate millions of dollars in illegal revenue off our stolen creative work

Yes, he's a criminal.
He sold stolen phone cards.
He was convicted of insider trading.
He was convicted of securities fraud.

But nothing he has been convicted, or even faced a trial for has anything to do with copyright.

Don't like google, start your own search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing how the anti-copyright brigade insists on telling other people how to run their business and at the same time continue to feel entitled to the product of the said business for free. If you hate google, start your own distributed search engine, then don't go crying on Slashdot that the results suck and its overrun by spam. Gee who'd thought that running a search engine would be so hard. Quit bitching that Youtube is content-IDing the video of your cat doing the macarena. You paid nothing for youtube, you are entitled to NOTHING. If you don't like it, go on Kickstarter to fund your own video content site. But as usual the opponents of copyright are unwilling to put their money where their mouth is and fund content and a distribution system that doesn't violate someone else's intellectual property. They just like to steal content and whine how life is unfair when they get swatted down for it.

Google is not a villian in this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kurt Sutter may have "created" Sons of anarchy, etc, but he is part of an industry that believes one Mr or Ms writer has written their respective prose, and has been paid for their work-for-hire, that Mr. Sutter gets the exclusive rights forever.

Google provides an index to stuff, including copywrited stuff. DMCA requires that websites take down stuff when notified of violation. Kurt Stutter is just looking for another revenue stream.

"Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom"

[Vinegar Joe]

Bullshit. Your argument just went out the window with that line.

the creative folks of Hollywood

[stenvar]

That rant would be a lot more convincing if it came from someone who (1) actually produced something creative, and (2) who could make a convincing argument that he has actually been harmed by Google.

So far, I see the whinings of a third-rate author whose works aren't infringed by Google and who has probably benefited enormously from publicity due to Google, not to mention that he and others creating "his" show probably use Gmail and other Google tools.

Economics

[Mitaphane]

It sounds like Kurt Sutter has not thought about the economics of his industry. There is more media (tv shows, movies, albums, etc.) than ever before in human history. The tools to create and distribute are cheaper than they have ever been. At the same time, the amount of time people have to consume media has either stayed the same or shrank, if one considers other new forms of media created over the last few decades. The laws of supply & demand dictate than an ever-increasing supply with shrinking (or stagnant) demand leads to cheaper prices.

Google has no effect on these forces at work. It is a value added service that sits on top of the content ocean of the web. Even if it tried to be the right hand arm of US copyright enforcement, it couldn't stop people who have more time than money on hand (a big contributor to piracy demand) or the economics of piracy hubs. Where there is infringing copyright accessible through Google, it has mechanisms (e.g. YouTube Content ID, DMCA takedowns, etc.) in place to take it down. I don't see what else Mr Sutter expects from Google other than to be scapegoat for piracy on the web.

Don't hate the playa, hate the game.

Re:Economics

[Arker]

You are far too easy on him.

"Where there is infringing copyright accessible through Google"

This is a null case. Google is not the internet, the phrasing suggests total ignorance.

Keep incentives high for content producers

[hessian]

I have no love for Hollywood or the publishing industry, but content producers need something to concentrate audience for promotional purposes.

Even more importantly, if we encourage piracy, the person we're ultimately going to harm is the content producer, specifically the independent ones. Big publishing and movie houses will find a way around Google, but the little guy will not.

When that happens, people will stop pursuing content production as a career because they won't be able to survive. This means that the best people will avoid this career.

See what's already happening to writers:

http://www.theguardian.com/boo...

Re:what? youre a cluless cunt

[viperidaenz]

He contributed poor spelling.
Perhaps he should have used a spell checker. Chrome has one (so does IE and Firefox even though I'm typing this in Firefox and it's telling me I'm spelling Firefox wrong and suggests I change it to Firebox.).

Re:what? youre a cluless cunt

[dryeo]

Google came up with a very good search engine and financed it with small unobtrusive ads. That is why I started using Google along with most other people. You can say that wasn't a good contribution to society all you want but the numbers say you're wrong.

Kim Dotcom

[saleenS281]

Was accused, not convicted, but why let the details get in the way. Copyright has become bastardized to the point of exhaustion. Copyright's original intent was to allow the creator to make money off their works for a set period of time at which point the works would become public domain. As with everything else in this country, the right and powerful decided that we really shouldn't actually have public domain, and convinced congress to just keep extending copyright's time limit to the point where it's basically non-existent. By the time something hit public domain these days, it's so irrelevant so as to be basically worthless in almost all cases.

Copyright never should've been allowed to last longer than the creator's lifetime (and quite frankly I think the original 14 years plus another 14 was more than enough). Anything more is simply a bastardization of the original intent. You *MIGHT* be able to convince me that it should be extended to cover their spouse's lifetime for the rare circumstance in which an artist dies prematurely, but outside of that... it's all a corporate money grab.

Re: Kim Dotcom

[Anonymous Coward]

He was convicted of other offenses previously you fucking dumbass.

Re:Kim Dotcom

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright never should've been allowed to last longer than the creator's lifetime (and quite frankly I think the original 14 years plus another 14 was more than enough).

Actually, I do buy the "even terminal cancer patients should have a good chance of making a book deal for the sake of his heirs" argument for extending copyright beyond the lifetime of the creator.

What doesn't make sense, in contrast, is tying the copyright expiration date to the author's death date. The clock should start with publication (so if somebody writes ahead of his own time, he has the choice to just not publish for a while). If one really wants to continue cashing in on the same work, one should do so by putting out extensive notes or revisions or sequels or other significant added value. The scope of a publishing deal as well as the copyright contract with the public should not depend on the death date of an author.

By the way: Sholem Secunda sold the copyright for "Bej mir bistu shejn" (actually, the whole opera containing it) for $20. It was made a megahit while he himself was struggling. When the first copyright term ran out, he reregistered and made a late windfall. And so there was at least some recompensation for the first time he was screwed over. With current terms, he'd have been screwed terminally.

You know: copyright providing an incentive for the creation of new or at least amended works rather than early retirement. Music publishers have worked with short copyright spans for centuries and have been able to significantly increase the quality of playing material in order to have people buy new scores rather than taking/copying their old ones. It worked well enough to keep a large collection of music publishing houses in the game, even banking most of their business on the typesetting of manuscripts out of copyright.

Now? They are dying out. Best quality engravings are from the early 19th century up to about the seventies. The time gap where nothing entered the public domain anyway has been so large that the good engravers of classics became jobless and their skills don't really transfer to the computer typesetting area since the stuff typeset with computers does not actively compete with the old plates that have stayed copyrighted for too long.

Re:Kim Dotcom

[gnasher719]

Copyright never should've been allowed to last longer than the creator's lifetime (and quite frankly I think the original 14 years plus another 14 was more than enough). Anything more is simply a bastardization of the original intent.

I have a job, I get paid, and a not insignificant amount of that money goes to a pension scheme, so I get money when I stop working. With copyrighted works, the financial success comes from the number of copies that you can sell. Why would it be reasonable to limit this to the copies you can sell in the first year, or the first 14 years? It's part of the deal: Creating the copyrighted work gives you the right to exploit it for a long time. Removing that right retroactively is the same as reducing your salary retroactively and telling you to return half your salary. Or everything in your pension fund. Reducing the time now means that we will end up with works that can be exploited in a short time and have no lasting value. Throw-away culture. That's already visible and a real problem in the eBook market where the market is overrun by cheap works without any value.

Re:Kim Dotcom

[saleenS281]

And your job pays you over and over again for the work you did your first day on the job? Or do they expect you to keep producing additional work to get paid?

This isn't a salary cut, it's the reality for everyone with a job. You don't get paid indefinitely for something you did 50 years ago. There's no reason that copyright should be any different.

So, what does Sutter want?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read Sutter's article.
So, what does Sutter want Google to do?
Does he expect Google to block all searches to the phrase "Sons of Anarchy"?
Or does he want "Sons of Anarchy" altogether banned from youtube?
I certainly agree there should not be entire episodes on youtube, but there's already laws in place for that.
Does he want no clips from the show on youtube? I believe that present law and historical practice does allow short quotes of any work and that clips are just that.

Troll

[cyberthanasis12]

Now troll is the story itself.
Nice.

Is Google anti-copyright?

[walterbyrd]

As I understand it:

A long time ago, Google made some books public.

Not just any books, books that had nobody to send royalties to. Books which have been out of print a long time. Nobody was hurt.

Google competitors used shills to manufacturer a big fuss about it. People who don't know about believed the shills.

Just like librarians!

[Anonymous Coward]

The nerve of them, providing card catalogues that potential copyright infringers can use to look up works on various topics prior to illegally copying them.

Android

[joeboomer628]

Android development was bought by Google and released as an open source project. The licensing allows anyone to modify it for their own use without copyright fees. I do not believe that they are losing money on it and many companies and individuals have reaped benefits from it.

Sons of crap

[GarretSidzaka2467]

I think he's just mad that I wouldn't even bother watching his garbage if it was free, delivered on my doorstep by a magical rainbow donkey Okay maybe the donkey would be cool

"antiquated copyright laws"

[Kaenneth]

Please, let us have our antiquated copyright laws, 14-21 year term would be great.

Kurt Sutter, a comedian...

[Anonymous Coward]

He mentions the myriad of people working hard for him creating their content...
but neglects to say the they're covered under "work-for-hire" and will receive nothing
other than their wage; no residual income from their work. ...The more you know...

Lesser of two evils, yo

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think Google gives a s**t about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content? Nope.

Of course they don't. On the other hand, they haven't spent the last decade buying legislators in an attempt to turn my personal computer into a machine I don't actually control to protect their "property".

Re:what? youre a cluless cunt

[cornicefire]

Actually Google didn't create the Nexus. It pretty much copied much of the iPhone's look and feel. Then it hired some company in Taiwan to make it.

View from a writer who is starting his career

[jonfr]

I'm just starting my writing career and as such I have not sold many copies of my short story that I have published now.

The larger problem is not Google or Disney. It is the culture of free or close to free material that has been created in the past few years. The $0,99 books are good example of this. While people still have to pay for things in real life they have to get income. This applies to writers as it does to anyone else. People now have unrealistic expectation of what items cost when they are digital. It is not the cost of distribution that is the issue. It's the cost of living for the writer in question. This is also why many old time writers (and other types of artists) are having hard time adjusting to new times and the digital age.

The digital publishing is not without it's problem. It's only at certain price range that I can get 70% of the sale price. Where I sell my e-books if I go over 12,99€ (or local equal) I only get 45% (still better then the physical copy returns) of the price directly in my pocket and this out before I pay local taxes of that income. If I sell paper version of my book, the e-book has to be 20% cheaper then the paper copy. If I want to make a decent living from writing I have to sell a lot of copies. I might one day do so, but so far it has not happened.

Let's be clear on copyright. Today it's set-up to service the corporations. Not the actual content creators, regardless if that are writers, visual artist or music creators. That is why it's so long and that is why it's always getting extended. There is nothing complex about this issue and never has been. DMCA type laws are also good example of this. I am not sure if they help people like me, a lone writer with no lawyers or the financial resources to stop anything if an book gets torrented (in fact, that might actually help me I guess). Since DRM lock are no good since they get stripped away from the e-book. People who did not buy the e-book in the first place are also the people how are unlikely to do so at later stage.

At last. The shameless plug of my first published short story. It's DRM free.

Link: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook...

Re:View from a writer who is starting his career

[Anonymous Coward]

The larger problem is not Google or Disney. It is the culture of free or close to free material that has been created in the past few years. The $0,99 books are good example of this. While people still have to pay for things in real life they have to get income. This applies to writers as it does to anyone else. People now have unrealistic expectation of what items cost when they are digital. It is not the cost of distribution that is the issue. It's the cost of living for the writer in question.

I disagree with your opinion. It is not a problem with a "culture of free". Quite the opposite IMO based on how many and how much people pay for authentic BS (sports tix/memorabilia, blu-rays and other DRM'd content, cable TV vs OTA and internet-only service).

Let's be clear on copyright. Today it's set-up to service the corporations. Not the actual content creators, regardless if that are writers, visual artist or music creators. That is why it's so long and that is why it's always getting extended. There is nothing complex about this issue and never has been. DMCA type laws are also good example of this. I am not sure if they help people like me, a lone writer with no lawyers or the financial resources to stop anything if an book gets torrented (in fact, that might actually help me I guess). Since DRM lock are no good since they get stripped away from the e-book. People who did not buy the e-book in the first place are also
the people how are unlikely to do so at later stage.

So I was right and you were wrong! Unless this is not the "larger problem"?!

You can't have it both ways. In an economic war, YOUR side is not going to get MY money.

At last. The shameless plug of my first published short story. It's DRM free.

Good luck and I appreciate that you at least see part of the problem. Please realize that the other half of the problem isn't "the people" or their "culture of free".

Re:View from a writer who is starting his career

[jonfr]

The problems are in the basic sense two or three. I am not sure. One of the problem is that people creating the content are not getting paid. This applies mostly to writers and musicians. I am not sure the status of actors in this regards. One of the problem is also copyright grab of corporations this is done via exclusive agreements that remain valid for number of years sometimes decades. There are often also agreements that means (common in the music industry) that means the corporations them self own the copyright not the creator. This has also been taking place in book publishing. It's bad and I don't think it's getting any better in this regards. There is also no point in having copyright 90 years after authors death. Unless when you view it from the corporation preservative. Since corporations can and do last for hundreds of years this amount of time is no issue at all. As for my published material, it's all going to be publish domain sometimes at the start of next century if it's not grabbed by some corporation (I plan on doing my best to stop that from happening).

The there is the public. Today public want the free lunch. I don't have much problem with that if the supplier is willing as often is the case. Sometimes it's not. Piracy isn't a problem since it increases sales of DVD and blue-ray's. So I don't technically have a problem with it. People who don't intend to buy the music, show series or films are not going to start to do so just because they downloaded the material in the first place (it just gets watched and then deleted in most cases). As Netflix has shown this is also an service problem. People are willing to pay for entertainment if it's at low price and easy to access. What the Sons of Anarchy doesn't understand is the service issue. If his shows are getting pirated it's because they are not easy to find or access.

Here is an news about the end of the free launch. This applies to more then just internet companies, http://www.economist.com/node/...

Ha Ha -

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just as well stop reading at 'creatives'; anyone who uses this term seriously to refer to artists and writers is invariably going to be a self-important windbag with nothing valuable to say.

Kim Dotcom

[future assassin]

Ok ok let me get this out of the way first. This is coming from a guy who is gloryfying biker gangs and makes money from stories written about their life style. WHat a fucking douche bag.

>Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom generate millions of dollars in illegal revenue off our stolen creative work.

Even though I could care less about Kim (do like is MegaCar and Kimble websites as they were pretty cool at Flashes early days) you'+d think this guy would take a look at why Megaupload and other sites like it are so succesfull and why putting draconian resctictions on your conetent just makes people ingnor you and not want to give you money.

Re:what? youre a cluless cunt

[DexterIsADog]

Actually Google didn't create the Nexus. It pretty much copied much of the iPhone's look and feel. Then it hired some company in Taiwan to make it.

Google copied from some other company, and then hired an Asian company to manufacture it?

Those bastards! That's *Apple's* business model!

Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

"But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives. Not a minute of effort or a dime of financing"

Yeah... no "creatives" ever made any money from being a YouTube (google owned) sensation. All that free hosting and publicity has just been horrible for unknown creatives. I mean Justin Beiber, Psy, ... they never made a dollar because of YouTube

Although with the examples I just used I kind of wish they didn't offer that free service to the world.

I really wish there was a cure for stupidity.

Why I pirate Sons of Anarchy in high def...

[Rick in China]

Because when I go to FX's website, I get this: "Thank you for your interest in FX Networks This site is currently only available to viewers living in the United States." Because the show, which I really like, isn't on any TV channels local to me. Because I'd rather not wait for a 3rd party service to make the episode available and have to deal with that 3rd party service. Fix the delivery methods available, Sutter, and you'll make *more* money.

What if..

[Z80a]

Copyright was something untransferable and automatically assigned to everyone that is directly responsible for the creation of the content in first place?

Re:What if..

[Euphorinaut]

That's an interesting and tempting concept, but who is really the creator of a movie? How do you determine what share of the content is owned by which contributers, and most importantly, how could you keep the RIAA and MPAA funding companies from arguing that they didn't really as a whole instigate the creation of the content? And if not, how would large projects like movies be funded?

New Line refused to pay Peter Jackson for LoTR

[Dan667]

kurt sutter is lying. Money does not get back to the content creators, it goes to middle men and movie studio CEOs. When you start looking into the details you see hollywood accounting is letting these leeches steal legally from those that create content. It is well understood that music bands don't make their money from the sell of their music, but mostly from their live shows. So where does all that money go? Not to the content creators. This is an old dying business model that kurt sutter is clinging to and I am glad is changing.

Re:New Line refused to pay Peter Jackson for LoTR

[Euphorinaut]

If you don't believe Dan667, check out the musicians who aren't able to turn a profit until they start giving their music away for free and asking for donations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20...

Re:what? youre a cluless cunt

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't kid yourself, kids: Google is the establishment. It is a multibillion-dollar information portal that makes dough off of every click on its page and every data byte it streams. Do you really think Google gives a s**t about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content? Nope. You're just another revenue resource Google can access to create more traffic and more data streams"

The man DOES make a valid point here...

Slate article is not an anti-copyright rant.

[Euphorinaut]

If you didn't want a major coffee vending chain to be able to refuse you service simply because the movie or music industry doesn't like the field of work you are in and wants to make your life difficult, would this qualify you as being anti-copyright? The only difference in having your payment services shut off rather than your coffee, is that when the industry gets your service shut off, defending your rights becomes a less realistic goal. If you're not breaking a copyright law, you're not breaking a copyright law. If he's not defending people breaking copyright law, it's not an anti-copyright rant.

Sounds good to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all for having more diverse music scene, more diverse movie scene, and more diverse book scene. I'm not sure how your job works, but I get paid by the hour. The company gets the code I write. What I write on my free time I don't show to anyone if I don't want anyone to steal it. Perfectly possible for author to write a book and never show it to anyone. Mu sicians make most of their money from live gigs and merchandise (if they were smart and retained the right to sell crap themselves) anyways. Just spread any recordings for free(radio, youtube(they already do?), mp3(why is this a problem?), whatever).

Actors can do theatre, book writers? No idea, maybe publish your writings in a monthly subscription format? I bet people would have paid for early access to harry potter.

Where's the debate?

[Anonymous Coward]

The discussion on this article is really disappointing. Karl Sutter makes some lucid, (seemingly) reasonable points in his article, but only one incidental comment (Kim Dotcom has not been convicted) has been directly tackled. Based in the response, it seems that Karl is the clear winner in the debate, having attracted not better than ad hominem or straw man attacks in response, e.g.

"Funny coming from someone who does a show of that name. It's just pretend anarchy."
"hilarious, coming from a guy who writes a TV show about a gang of convicted felons"
"content *publishers* (not creators) who have traditionally been the purveyors of grossly unfair contracts and all manner of unsavory business practice"
"you'll never get your movie shown in the US unless you sell the rights to them or pay them millions for approval"

Is that the best we've got?

Automobile analog:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time for the automobile industry to take responsibility for all the bank robberies facilitates by cars. They should be taxed for simplifying access to the banks.

Never mind that the cars bring quite more business in than robbers: as long as the car industry is thriving, it is obviously doing it by providing illicit getaways from bank robberies and consequently they should, like, pay half of their proceeds to the banks.

Several banks have gone bankrupt in the last decade, and it is mandatory to drive a hard line against car-supported robbery by levying robbery taxes on every car sold, to be handed to the ailing banking institutions.

Short sighted programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

This was considered insightful? Low bar for that apparently. Content creators use Google's platform for free and can get paid from Google while creating a fan base. The work isn't less good, it's more niche and more personal. There are still a lot of people who rise to the top and create careers out of free and people then are willing to pay them to keep creating. That's the way it should be. Supply and demand and the supply is so much that the demand doesn't value the vast majority of the content because honestly, even the crap you paid a lot for is utter garbage.

On top of that your programmer job is exactly the opposite of the copyright system. You don't get paid royalties for programs you create no matter how much money you make. So I agree let's make this like a programmer job and only let the artist get paid once and not in perpetuity and then tell me how much sense copyright makes.

Bad analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

The artists working for other people generally are paid...bad analogy. A better one for poor artists would be working as a carpenter and then working up to building houses, which still means you don't get paid forever and no it wouldn't improve the quality of the houses just make them more expensive. Kind of like music, television, etc.

Compromise with _Reason_?

[fygment]

How about if copyright protected the rights of the creator ... not his estate or corporate sell out 70+ years later. So when the creator dies (including a corporation being dissolved), then the art becomes open source. But right now the copyrights seem to extend in to perpetuity and even in the shorter term, userous prices on the art simply mean a person may never have a hope of ownership and so encourages theft where the risk of punishment is low.

Re:Compromise with _Reason_?

[gnasher719]

How about if copyright protected the rights of the creator ... not his estate or corporate sell out 70+ years later. So when the creator dies (including a corporation being dissolved), then the art becomes open source.

And why would that make any sense? A 20 year old writer gets about 60 years of copyright protection, and a 70 year old only gets 10 years? Unless the 20 year old has an car accident, and his pregnant wife has no money to feed her children?

Reinstate public domain & we'll talk

[Anonymous Coward]

ever since they suspended public domain, i have felt zero guilt about "stealing" their content.
They welched on their side of the bargain, so i see no reason to hold up my side.

As soon as Mickey Mouse becomes public domain, i will stop pirating.

Interesting side note... the movie "Metropolis" -was- in the public domain, but now its not... How the fuck does that work?!?

So "once a thief..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever read/watch Les Miserables?

He is right

[djdavetrouble]

I totally watch bittorrent'd scene eps of Sons of Anarchy..... I didn't google them though.

Copyright can devalue content

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the content on the Internet (and TV and radio) has no value - at least to me. Either I'm not exposed to it, or it's just nothing that I care about. In some cases, there's copyrighted material I consciously avoid because the subject matter is annoying (Fran Drescher's nanny voice, for example). An anti-copyright stance in those situations, doesn't devalue the content at all, -- it might even have the opposite effect if someone can transform it into something else that I might be able to see or might provoke interest.

More importantly, there's an entire class of copyrighted materials that have no value to me unless I can use them to include into my own projects. There's lots of music that I'd never normally sit down and listen to, but I might incorporate into a home video or presentation, given the opportunity. I'd love to hack away at a system for making written transcripts of news broadcasts automatically and archive them (to simplify the type of work the DailyShow interns do), and open-source the archive -- but it has no value to me outside the academic / hobby interest. The fact of the matter is that a.) commercial entities do issue take down notices for online content, and b.) licensing content legitimately for such trivial uses as backing music for a video your grandmother's birthday is nigh impossible.

When a local community group wanted to hold a community Christmas sing-a-long - for free, I figured that we'd go the legit route and get permission. It took some hunting to find the proper contact information, but we did get it. However, they wouldn't license the music for a single use and had no license that applied to the specific situation - they were not willing to discuss or negotiate and suggested we just go with whichever seemed to us closest to our situation. Going with the school band performance license (we had no band or performers per se, but we projected the words on the wall for everyone), we would have to pay an annual fee plus a per-performance fee for the permission, we'd have to designate a legal representative of the organization to file the paperwork and submit quarterly reports on our use of the works along with any necessary payments - so long as the organization existed. So, in essence, they expected us to make a shell corporation for the single performance, fill out 8 pages of paperwork, pay a fee, then dissolve the corporation -- which, per their rep, was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We just said "screw it" and held the community sing-a-long anyway.

Give me a way to stuff a nickel in the tip-jar and I'll do it. If I have to hire a lawyer to make a cat video - that's devaluing a copyrighted work.

It's Simple

[carrier lost]

If you can't make money off copies of your work, don't release copies of your work.

Musicians should only perform live and Hollywood movies should only be shown in theaters.

The rest of us like our internet just the way it is, thank you very much.

Fundamental issue...

[ZorinLynx]

One fundamental issue is that corporations have this crazy idea that it's the job of companies like Google, ISPs and cloud service providers to enforce their copyrights.

Umm, it's NOT. It's the job of the content owners to enforce their copyrights, send take-downs, and so on.

Companies like Google, ISPs, cloud service providers, etc. do not have the time or resources to enforce copyright. We can't expect them to without driving the cost of service even higher than it already ridiculously is.

(Of course, the fact that Comcast now owns NBC means that the ISP and content owner are one.. which blurs this thinking and is also quite dangerous; I'm still pissed that regulators let that happen.)

Short Term Thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-copyright does not work for the consumer since a significant number of people won't spend a lot of effort and time creating new content if unenforcible copyright prevents them from profiting sufficiently from their work. Get off the short term thinking bandwagon.

hypocrisy at its finest

[handofpwn]

"Do you really think Google gives a s**t about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content? Nope. You're just another revenue resource"

To this I would ask, does anyone really believe this guy gives a sh*t about the quality of content or the rights of Hollywood actors and playwrights? He is just trying to make more money by shutting down access to his content. He criticizes Google for doing exactly the same thing as him- trying to make more money. The difference is that Google does it without writing articles that treat the reader like an uneducated spoiled child.

Re:hypocrisy at its finest

[RightSaidFred99]

If you've read most of the responses, most of you are uneducated, spoiled children. Of course he is trying to make more money by shutting down access to _his_ content. It's his fucking content.

This is the generation of entitled douchebags.

[RightSaidFred99]

Reading these comments it's striking to me just what a bunch of entitled, sniveling little cunts people are becoming. Look, I don't blame Google for piracy either and can say that this guy is slightly off topic, but fundamentally his point is solid with regards to content creators getting screwed over by the "gimme" generation.

Information does not want to be free. Sorry you entitled dirty hippies, someone worked to create that content. And claiming that they just need to change their business model is like claiming that Bitcoin will never work because it should not be protected. I mean, information wants to be free so if I can bamboozle or hack my way into your private key all your Bitcoin are belong to me. Sorry, you should find a better business model.

I do have a problem with the DMCA and other bought laws, but I have almost no problem with copyright laws and strong enforcement of such including suing people who directly host and make pirated content part of their business.

Oh really

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me then pirate his entire series, put it up on torrent sites and then steal his series underpinning blatantly into another more lame series and see if he sues.

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

you are really dumb. i'm not going to expand on that. you should probably just read what you wrote...

Re:wow

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You too, I guess.

Movie trailers

[phorm]

I don't really know anyone who watches actual shows on youtube, just the odd clip here and there of various scenes.
What I do see is a lot of people watching movies/TV trailers, etc. Guess what, those are driving up interest in the video market, and MAKING you money, not the opposite.

Re:Movie trailers

[BronsCon]

BINGO!

google?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should someone explain to Sir Douchebag that google indexes sites. If you can find a google hosted pirate site, bravo Sir, but the rest of us, who live in this crazy place called REALITY, google is an indexing service, who merely indexes sites on the internet to allow us to find them easier. And, in fact, google goes to great lengths to try to strip out pirated links from their search results.

I read the whole quoted piece fully expecting him to started demanding that "the internet" stop stealing his jerbs.

what an asshat,

P.S. be thankful people pirated your crappy half assed show, at least SOMEONE was watching it. And lets be clear, but for your screw the customer pay us per episode or DVD income, we've stolen NOTHING from you. No Sir, we've stolen from the advertisers who paid for YOUR SHOW to spam their ads, which of course you have no control over me actually watching to begin with.

If you show didn't suck, I'd buy it on dvd/bluray like all the other shows I pirate then purchase, but your show sucks, it's weak, night court in it's 5th season weak. Get over yourself and move on to another career if that's all you have to offer.

Google = fences

[Anonymous Coward]

If you steal something, then take it to a man, and he knows it's hot, and sells it, is he a criminal? Google use weight of numbers to avoid this comparison: "we cannot possibly be held accountable for xyz, it's just an algorithm. How could we ever check that much video?" These arguments are lame from a company minting money by circumventing the law, much like the circumvent tax. We do what we are required. If you set up a small website and did what google do you'd be shutdown. DMCA'd into oblivion. But by being rich criminals Google avoid the spotlight, just as top criminals can mix with the rich and powerful. Forget the copyright-free speech debate, that's what Google hope you'll defend them with. While people are willing to put up with it the will continue. Slowly they make their businesses more legitmate washing off the stink.

Of course you may wish to defend them, but I find it morally reprehensible.