That might be a good point except for the fact that the cost is balanced.
1: "who would otherwise not walk out of a retail store with an unpaid-for album."
group 1: Most of them would just walk out with nothing at all: net effect: zero. no lost sale, doesn't matter if they have it on their ipod afterwards or not, the loss to you is zero.
Group 2: Those who would walk out with the CD under their jacket but downloaded instead. Net effect: The music store is better off here. they didn't suffer a theft of a physical item which cost money to produce!
Group 3: People who download but still spend the same amount of money on CD's or itunes. Where before they would have bought 100 CD's now they buy 100CD's and download 10,000,000,000 tracks from the net. Net effect: zero.
Group 4: Those who have money, and increase their budget for music after getting into the habit of listening to music every waking minute due to P2P Net effect: Massive win for the music industry here.
Group 5: People who were never interested in music at all, started downloading pirated music, got into music and went out and bought their first CD.Start spending significant money on CD's as well as downloading. ( I'm in this group.) Net effect: Massive win for the music industry here.
Group 6: People who used to spend money on music but now only download and never pay for any music any more. Net effect: lost profits.
Now. all these groups are pushing and pulling at the profit margins. Now you'll have noticed that over the last few years that music sales have been skyrocketing like never seen before.
PIRACY HAS DONE NO HARM TO THE MUSIC INDUSTRY!!! SALES ARE UP, PEOPLE ARE LISTENING TO MORE MUSIC THAN EVER BEFORE!! anyone who cannot understand this is an idiot and/or an RIAA exec
well for one thing I've never noticed any kind of lack of people willing to play music for free. it's almost unique in that respect that it is one industry which would suffer little from loss of copyright. Well the lawyers/middlemen would be fucked and the mass produced boy bands would be gone.. this is sounding better and better. Going by the quality of some of the completely amature musicians (amature as in not paid, not in the derogatory sense which it often gets used)the quality and quantity of music wouldn't change much. And public performances would become much more common without fear of lawyers.
because while it isn't worth money to those people it is just above a youtube video of someone lighting their farts and staring at the wall, in that order. They wouldn't spend their money on it even if there was no piracy is all it means. How is this concept so very very very hard for certain people to understand.
Also- downloading a movie off TPB is less effort than going to the video rental place. Simple as that. Even if the video rental place halved their prices it would still be more effort to go there.
Hell I have no problem paying a subscription- I pay for a rapidshare account. It's convenience that matters to me and TPB is very very convenient for people. And since the rights holders seem to be represented by idiots who didn't jump in faster services like TPB and Rapidshare got there first and are now well dug in.
Same reason patents run out even if the person who filed them is still alive. Because we can take that away from him.
The only aspect of copyright which I believe should be kept rock solid is attribution. His name should still appear even if the copyright has run out and he isn't due money. That way even if it's 30 years down the line people will go "wow, what a great piece, what else has he published" and he gets to sell new records.
yet you haven't dealt with the problem or copies which are not exact.
Say some other author picks up some unpopular novel, goes through it with a fine tooth comb and fixes all the problems with the plot, characters, etc and republished it. What makes this different from the cheff taking the crap dish and improving it?
Or lock it to the first machine it's installed on.
The principles of competition still apply. 2 companies offering open source and selling support, do you buy the contract from the ones with a reputation for setting up buggy systems or the ones who make their money from providing occasional good service to 1000 companies rather than awful constant service to 10 companies.
"We do guarantee the right to pursue a business model unfettered, though."
So if I want to sell the fruit of my labour. Say shoes. I and others in the business find that I'm having a problem with low sales because people are re-selling the shoes second hand after using them for some time or getting them repaired.
By your logic - to preserve my "right" to pursue any business model I wish and have that model protected and helped along by law I should be able to demand that it be illegal to pass ownership of my product to another person or artificially prolong the life of the product beyond it's designed limit and so deprive me of future income.(imagine Nike suing shoe repair shops)Of course this model would violate your property rights since they're your shoes once you've bought them.
If you're trying to make money in an area which is doomed to failure because of new technology then you either find a new way to make money or get a different job. Twisting property rights to say "well even though you bought that it still doesn't really belong to you" is just a corrupt solution.
You cannot copyright food. (currently) Is this right? why?/why not?
To most people even the idea of copyrighting food is silly as it should be with most things so it makes for a good example.
Imainge you come up with a new dish say.... deep fried banana and shrimp served in an orange skin or some other weird crap. Nobody likes your restraunt because it's dark and dingy and almost nobody likes your dish because you're a crap cook.
but some big name cheff comes in one day, sits down and orders it.
2 weeks later you see him on his cooking show preparing "your" dish with a few minor changes and serving it in his well run popular resteraunt and people love it.
He's removed the black hairy bits which put everyone off your version and he's marketing it better.
You would be very very pissed but just because your pissed doesn't mean you get to have the courts shut him down.
The public benefit because they get the well prepared and marketed version rather than your poorly prepared shite.
Now replace "dish" with "story", "resteraunt" with "publishing house" or "shop" and "black hairy bits" with "plot holes and poor writing style and spelling"
somehow I see more resteraunts as I walk down the street than book publishers despite such an "unfair" system.
I'm wondering what orifice this "natural right" was pulled from.
"Since art is so easily copied, the right of an artist to attempt to sell copies of his work, free from interference, must be protected by law. "
Or just as validly you could say
Since art is so easily copied, either artists who's works can be easily copied should work out a better revenue model, say a performance based one or get a real job.
A food dish can be copied fairly closely yet I see no special law protecting chefs from having their works copied by each other or by the evil ready meal companies.
Imagine this: I come up with a new dish which is very popular and people flock to my restraunt as long as I can forbid anyone else from making something similar. Otherwise other chefs will copy me right away and evil companies will mass produce ready meals which copy my dish then I'll go out of buisness and the children they will spit on me as I lie dying in the gutter!
Odly enough I've never downloaded a book, for some reason I like to own a paper book as do most people and as I said, it should last long enough to get your books on the shelf or songs into ipods.
You mean just like with disney and Grimm's Fairy Tales? Those unpleasant parodies of our beloved disney stories?
Or how they themselves stole Sleeping Beauty from Charles Perrault or how he himself took the story from Giambattista Basile?... and on and on.... tell the same story better and people will choose your version. Simple as that.
If I wrote a book "harry potter and the toaster" following on from the popular series and published it how many sales would I get assuming I didn't try to pretend it was written by JK which would be covered under trade mark as far as I know.
If every studio can make a film about it freely which one do you think the fans will get excited about? Joe blogs version or the one which the author has agreed to help produce of course.
There wouldn't be a franchise and the authors participation in other projects ends up being worth more.
It moves the focus from trying to leech more and more out of old work and towards creating new things which people like. Authors who can consistantly produce good work would be fine.
How many millions do book companies make by printing and selling shakspeare? I'm fairly sure I saw a big section dedicated to books and plays written in that era in my local bookstore....
Simply a set of sounds. Yes. exactly. 100%. Utterly utterly correct.
You might have put effort into making that patern but then I put effort into drawing a giant picture in the sand. it's still just paterns in little bits of broken rock and that doesn't mean I own your sand if you make the same patern. You're free to spend a year making your collection of bits on your hard disk which you own but you don't own my hard disk and I can arrange them however I like.
And who said anything about taking anything from you? You're perfectly free to keep it where I cannot see, I have no right to break into your house and take your information but if you choose to give it to me, sell it to me or show it to me then I can do whatever the hell I like with the knowledge.
My argument is that it should be up to the creator to decide how long they wish to enforce copyright for. They want to enforce it for 50 years, fine. Refile something every 5-10 years and be done with it. If they can't be bothered to file, copyright expires. It should not be up to a bunch of people who are not involved in the creation of a thing to decide how long the creator should have rights to it.
they be able to sell the rights? yes? since they're "property"
You know what would happen then- companies would spring up which just buy up all the cheap copyrights they can and set up an automatic system for refreshing them. (unless you think there should be a significant fee to get time added) it's a winning investment since it pays off forever and you can make sure it never expires. These companies would add no value. zero ziltch nada and people would be forever walking on egshells for fear of violating some ten thousand year old copyright and getting sued into oblivion.
While I'm on the same side of the argument I feel I must poke a hole in this.
"i pay taxes which funds the government that protects your property rights, so who the hell do you think you are, that you should keep benefiting for 10+ years from the protection i afford them? Your car should be free for anyone to take from your driveway 10 years after it's been bought!"
I have no problem paying to see performances and sponsoring artists is an old tradition which worked quite well during the renaissance with no copyright around.
What is a problem is a claim that you own something in my head.
That you can charge me for making certain sounds in public for no other reason than you made those sounds first.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be a good point except for the fact that the cost is balanced.
1:
"who would otherwise not walk out of a retail store with an unpaid-for album."
group 1: Most of them would just walk out with nothing at all:
net effect: zero. no lost sale, doesn't matter if they have it on their ipod afterwards or not, the loss to you is zero.
Group 2: Those who would walk out with the CD under their jacket but downloaded instead.
Net effect: The music store is better off here. they didn't suffer a theft of a physical item which cost money to produce!
Group 3: People who download but still spend the same amount of money on CD's or itunes. Where before they would have bought 100 CD's now they buy 100CD's and download 10,000,000,000 tracks from the net.
Net effect: zero.
Group 4: Those who have money, and increase their budget for music after getting into the habit of listening to music every waking minute due to P2P
Net effect: Massive win for the music industry here.
Group 5: People who were never interested in music at all, started downloading pirated music, got into music and went out and bought their first CD.Start spending significant money on CD's as well as downloading. ( I'm in this group.)
Net effect: Massive win for the music industry here.
Group 6: People who used to spend money on music but now only download and never pay for any music any more.
Net effect: lost profits.
Now. all these groups are pushing and pulling at the profit margins. Now you'll have noticed that over the last few years that music sales have been skyrocketing like never seen before.
PIRACY HAS DONE NO HARM TO THE MUSIC INDUSTRY!!! SALES ARE UP, PEOPLE ARE LISTENING TO MORE MUSIC THAN EVER BEFORE!!
anyone who cannot understand this is an idiot and/or an RIAA exec
well for one thing I've never noticed any kind of lack of people willing to play music for free. it's almost unique in that respect that it is one industry which would suffer little from loss of copyright. Well the lawyers/middlemen would be fucked and the mass produced boy bands would be gone.. this is sounding better and better. Going by the quality of some of the completely amature musicians (amature as in not paid, not in the derogatory sense which it often gets used)the quality and quantity of music wouldn't change much. And public performances would become much more common without fear of lawyers.
Don't bother. this never seems to get through to people.
A download is not a lots sale.
A million downloads and getting 1 sale you wouldn't have got otherwise is a gain.
but these days business students get taught how to brown-nose not anything practical (unless you count that as practical)
With the horse and buggy manufacturers it was transport people wanted.
Cars did it better.
With music companies it's entertainment people want.
P2P delivers it better than DRM loaded crap.
guess which will win.
Just for an examle: how do you think this guy felt?
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=9630
should patents last for however long the inventor lives?
because while it isn't worth money to those people it is just above a youtube video of someone lighting their farts and staring at the wall, in that order.
They wouldn't spend their money on it even if there was no piracy is all it means.
How is this concept so very very very hard for certain people to understand.
Also- downloading a movie off TPB is less effort than going to the video rental place.
Simple as that.
Even if the video rental place halved their prices it would still be more effort to go there.
Hell I have no problem paying a subscription- I pay for a rapidshare account. It's convenience that matters to me and TPB is very very convenient for people. And since the rights holders seem to be represented by idiots who didn't jump in faster services like TPB and Rapidshare got there first and are now well dug in.
as would the cheff, this validates copyright as it stands how? feeling bad is not a basis for law.
Same reason patents run out even if the person who filed them is still alive.
Because we can take that away from him.
The only aspect of copyright which I believe should be kept rock solid is attribution. His name should still appear even if the copyright has run out and he isn't due money. That way even if it's 30 years down the line people will go "wow, what a great piece, what else has he published" and he gets to sell new records.
yet you haven't dealt with the problem or copies which are not exact.
Say some other author picks up some unpopular novel, goes through it with a fine tooth comb and fixes all the problems with the plot, characters, etc and republished it. What makes this different from the cheff taking the crap dish and improving it?
Or lock it to the first machine it's installed on.
The principles of competition still apply.
2 companies offering open source and selling support, do you buy the contract from the ones with a reputation for setting up buggy systems or the ones who make their money from providing occasional good service to 1000 companies rather than awful constant service to 10 companies.
In other words. your argument is a joke.
Because your boss has paid you to. Same reason you scrub the floor if he tells you to.
if a company needs custom software they'll have someone make it. if they don't want their competitors to get it they'll keep it confidential.
pretty simple.
"We do guarantee the right to pursue a business model unfettered, though."
So if I want to sell the fruit of my labour. Say shoes.
I and others in the business find that I'm having a problem with low sales because people are re-selling the shoes second hand after using them for some time or getting them repaired.
By your logic - to preserve my "right" to pursue any business model I wish and have that model protected and helped along by law I should be able to demand that it be illegal to pass ownership of my product to another person or artificially prolong the life of the product beyond it's designed limit and so deprive me of future income.(imagine Nike suing shoe repair shops)Of course this model would violate your property rights since they're your shoes once you've bought them.
If you're trying to make money in an area which is doomed to failure because of new technology then you either find a new way to make money or get a different job. Twisting property rights to say "well even though you bought that it still doesn't really belong to you" is just a corrupt solution.
You cannot copyright food. (currently)
Is this right?
why?/why not?
To most people even the idea of copyrighting food is silly as it should be with most things so it makes for a good example.
Imainge you come up with a new dish say.... deep fried banana and shrimp served in an orange skin or some other weird crap.
Nobody likes your restraunt because it's dark and dingy and almost nobody likes your dish because you're a crap cook.
but some big name cheff comes in one day, sits down and orders it.
2 weeks later you see him on his cooking show preparing "your" dish with a few minor changes and serving it in his well run popular resteraunt and people love it.
He's removed the black hairy bits which put everyone off your version and he's marketing it better.
You would be very very pissed but just because your pissed doesn't mean you get to have the courts shut him down.
The public benefit because they get the well prepared and marketed version rather than your poorly prepared shite.
Now replace "dish" with "story", "resteraunt" with "publishing house" or "shop" and "black hairy bits" with "plot holes and poor writing style and spelling"
somehow I see more resteraunts as I walk down the street than book publishers despite such an "unfair" system.
I'm wondering what orifice this "natural right" was pulled from.
"Since art is so easily copied, the right of an artist to attempt to sell copies of his work, free from interference, must be protected by law. "
Or just as validly you could say
Since art is so easily copied, either artists who's works can be easily copied should work out a better revenue model, say a performance based one or get a real job.
A food dish can be copied fairly closely yet I see no special law protecting chefs from having their works copied by each other or by the evil ready meal companies.
Imagine this: I come up with a new dish which is very popular and people flock to my restraunt as long as I can forbid anyone else from making something similar. Otherwise other chefs will copy me right away and evil companies will mass produce ready meals which copy my dish then I'll go out of buisness and the children they will spit on me as I lie dying in the gutter!
[citation needed]
From what I've read I was under the impression that there were no copyright laws protecting Shakespeare and his works during the Elizabethan era.
Odly enough I've never downloaded a book, for some reason I like to own a paper book as do most people and as I said, it should last long enough to get your books on the shelf or songs into ipods.
You mean just like with disney and Grimm's Fairy Tales? Those unpleasant parodies of our beloved disney stories?
Or how they themselves stole Sleeping Beauty from Charles Perrault or how he himself took the story from Giambattista Basile?... and on and on.... tell the same story better and people will choose your version. Simple as that.
If I wrote a book "harry potter and the toaster" following on from the popular series and published it how many sales would I get assuming I didn't try to pretend it was written by JK which would be covered under trade mark as far as I know.
If every studio can make a film about it freely which one do you think the fans will get excited about? Joe blogs version or the one which the author has agreed to help produce of course.
There wouldn't be a franchise and the authors participation in other projects ends up being worth more.
It moves the focus from trying to leech more and more out of old work and towards creating new things which people like. Authors who can consistantly produce good work would be fine.
How many millions do book companies make by printing and selling shakspeare? I'm fairly sure I saw a big section dedicated to books and plays written in that era in my local bookstore....
unless the left hand side of the graph is say "energy wasted"
yes, yes you should work for a living just like I and most of the human race already do.
Simply a set of sounds. Yes. exactly. 100%. Utterly utterly correct.
You might have put effort into making that patern but then I put effort into drawing a giant picture in the sand. it's still just paterns in little bits of broken rock and that doesn't mean I own your sand if you make the same patern.
You're free to spend a year making your collection of bits on your hard disk which you own but you don't own my hard disk and I can arrange them however I like.
And who said anything about taking anything from you? You're perfectly free to keep it where I cannot see, I have no right to break into your house and take your information but if you choose to give it to me, sell it to me or show it to me then I can do whatever the hell I like with the knowledge.
My argument is that it should be up to the creator to decide how long they wish to enforce copyright for. They want to enforce it for 50 years, fine. Refile something every 5-10 years and be done with it. If they can't be bothered to file, copyright expires. It should not be up to a bunch of people who are not involved in the creation of a thing to decide how long the creator should have rights to it.
they be able to sell the rights? yes? since they're "property"
You know what would happen then- companies would spring up which just buy up all the cheap copyrights they can and set up an automatic system for refreshing them. (unless you think there should be a significant fee to get time added) it's a winning investment since it pays off forever and you can make sure it never expires. These companies would add no value. zero ziltch nada and people would be forever walking on egshells for fear of violating some ten thousand year old copyright and getting sued into oblivion.
While I'm on the same side of the argument I feel I must poke a hole in this.
"i pay taxes which funds the government that protects your property rights, so who the hell do you think you are, that you should keep benefiting for 10+ years from the protection i afford them? Your car should be free for anyone to take from your driveway 10 years after it's been bought!"
I have no problem paying to see performances and sponsoring artists is an old tradition which worked quite well during the renaissance with no copyright around.
What is a problem is a claim that you own something in my head.
That you can charge me for making certain sounds in public for no other reason than you made those sounds first.
Shakespeare seems to have produced pleanty of work despite others being free to copy his work at the time.
Pleanty of companies do quite well producing items which are not protected by copyright or patent in any way.