"it's when it starts becoming the primary means of distribution that matters."
By the very nature of torrents it scales exactly to demands. no matter if you're really popular or virtually unknown it will be exactly as available on torrents.
"If you look at the revenue curve for any work of art, it peaks at the point of highest interest. It is also at that point that you will find the most torrents for that work."
And your conclusion from this rather than being "then people get bored of it and become less interested" is that the torrents have destroyed everything. wow. talk about self delusion.
"And good art takes a lot of time"
as does coming up with a good recipie or designing a good outfit yet both chefs and fashion designers do fine without copyright on their work.
"I know plenty of talented people who simply don't have the resources to continue their work at the level they feel capable of because they cannot get the backing of any investors (labels, grants, etc), because there is very little chance of a reasonable ROI right now. No one will back an expensive PR campaign because they have no faith that music or independent film is a profitable enterprise at the moment."
Join the queue. you may have been living under a rock these last few years but everyone is in the same boat, whether you want to open a stall selling hats or produce an album. but I'm sure you think you're special and being extra victimized by the cruel cruel world.
First of all, that's one of the most self-serving snobbish things I've read in a long time
it's also true.
Why pay for something you are not sure about when you can grab it on a torrent/p2p site for free?
good question, which poses the quandary of why, despite such a system being in place legal music distribution has been growing every year and even digital distribution has been growing year after year. It's because, simply, people still do buy legal music all the time even if it's possible to get it off torrents.
but I'm sure your failure as an artist can be fully explained by torrents ignoring the number of your peers who seem to have done fine despite them.
You argue based on how you feel the world must be but reality such as the continuous growth in music sales year after year contradict your delusions.
First of all, the profit margin for music sales is minuscule.
or even zero if you sign with a major record, not for them of course, just for the artist.
would you just say, "profit isn't important"?
no, I'd say "profit and copyright are are still far far less important than civil rights" feel free to spin that in any crazy way you feel like.
First of all, fuck you.
I'll take that as a yes. Fail utterly and blame it all on the pirates so you could convince yourself that without them you'd have been a hit?
You are showing your true colors as someone who knows nothing about art aside from the fact that you can get it for free as long as no one shuts down your fav sharing site.
WAAAAAAHHHH!!
as a matter of fact I do get my music free. From jamendo. it's quite a nice service. I don't much like torrents though, too much hassle when I can get it for free far more easily and legally.
For whatever reason, you feel you are somehow entitled to other people's work, not because it's right, but because its simply possible.
I feel exactly as entitled to a book of sheet music as I do to a book of recipes, fortunately for chefs the law doesn't see them as similar. I do know that while the vast majority of full time musicians in the UK are at or bellow the poverty line the same cannot be said of professional chefs. Both
If I had a pile of capital I could make do on a tiny fraction of what I do now. If I had less money than I do now my cost of living would probably be far higher.
If I had a few hundred thousand lying around I could buy a property outright with no mortgage at which point I could be that guy "getting by on 10% less salary than you do", hell probably 25% or even 50% if I invested it in similar things which may not generate revenue but do reduce expenditure. Without that few hundred K there's either rent or mortgage interest.
The richer you are the easier it is to spend less. And that's the point you seem to have missed.
Where I currently live is a bit outside the city, we need to be running a car to be able to live here and it costs a bit more so we need that extra bit of money.
In this place the bills are low now because it's a well insulated newer building. In the last place I lived the bills were terrible because it was in a shitty part of town and was poorly insulated.
In my old place I'd buy stuff when it was on sale but when you only have one small cupboard and the corner of a room to store stuff I could never keep as much non-perishable as I'd like so I couldn't take advantage of those same supermarket discounts nearly as much as I can now.
I love to cook, unfortunately the last place only had a shitty little ancient electric hob with no oven in which to make my own bread or roasts. Again with the storage I could keep a little flour but didn't have the room for all the stuff I can keep to have now.
The last place I lived was out of necessity, I needed somewhere within walking distance of where I was working.
It's very easy to look down on people while ignoring the reasons they can't take advantage of the same things you can.
If I'd grown up in a family who were stuck in such a small, run down and poorly equipped home then I wouldn't even automatically follow those steps, fortunately I grew up in a home where the benefits of good insulation were obvious, my parents have the space to store bargins and the facilities to do their own cooking and to teach me to cook. I fall into similar habits to yours without even thinking about it. Many people don't and they've not got the experiences of how to take advantage things those above the poverty line have to save money. Hell here are enough older men who don't even know how to do more than boil an egg, they don't know where to start.
from her description the work involved looking for regular peaks on the chart: (every 10 inches this peak appears,every 17 inches this peak appears.... oh and so every 170 inches BAM, this huge peak appears where they combine here and that's the thing which cracks a nut or damages something etc)
sheet music is merely a series of instructions for which keys to press on a keyboard and when, there are as many/few pleasing combinations of taste as of sound.
"Therefore, recipes of high value are not published"
[citation needed]
people keep some recipes secret but it's more about ad campaigns than any real secrecy. there's no shortage of drinks indistinguishable from coca cola nor chicken indistinguishable from KFC.
And there are chefs who publish lots of "high value" recipes , hell my favourite restaurant chain sells a cookbook with their entire menu with every detail of how to cook every dish.
you're arguing based on a fantasy. some chefs keep a handful of recipes secret but in most cases they're recipes which have been published and are perfectly available if you know where to look. Even my own mothers "secret" family cake recipe is merely something from a magazine published 50 years ago.
My grandparents on one side were gardeners. My grandparents on the other were small farmers. Neither of my parents ever got a university degree though my father did help write the material for some of the early computer science degrees after he got a job at a university as an operator. Both of them had a knack for math which appears to be a useful skill in life.
For a good few years my father worked crappy manual labour jobs along the lines of hosing the blood off the machinery in slaughter houses which paid the bills until he got a chance to get a job as a computer operator and gradually moved sideways into programming. My mother worked doing something I'm not very familiar with involving her and an office full of other women trawling through thousands of meters of paper tape from testing helicopters looking for resonances which might cause parts to fail.
Luckily they were both quite bright and driven people and my father retired this year after turning down a head of department job at a major university, they're quite financially well off now. all 4 of their children have university qualifications of varying levels and pretty good incomes right from the start.
yet sheet music is covered by copyright and a musician playing a popular piece in person with their own skill and own effort reproducing the work by hand is just as guilty under copyright law as someone who uploads an MP3.
They are far closer to the example of the chefs yet they must pay royalties while the chefs need not.
The paragraph of text of a recipe is subject to copyright like almost any other block of text. The information,ie the ingredients and the actual steps are not.
it is not legal to copy the instructions on how to prepare, combine, and cook them, and claim them as your own work. It absolutely is legal to write your own instructions which convey the same information (ie how long to cook, at what temperature) and you can do whatever you want with them including claiming it as your own though that may be unethical.
The block of text which describes a recipe is copyrightable. The recipe and the information of what steps to follow absolutely is not.
Most people don't have the privilege of just deciding to have more money.
I do happen to be lucky enough to have the means to make sure I have enough money to tide me over for a reasonable time but I'm not so arrogant as to delude myself that everyone is in a similar position.
Many people get stuck living hand to mouth despite spending wisely and despite living as modest a life as is possible. My parents spent years living barely above the poverty line despite both of them working and both of them living in a 1 room apartment with no furniture other than a bed and a table.
And being poor makes it harder to spend less. With a little extra money and a little extra time you can afford to buy lots of some food when there's a good sale. Storage space hits that one as well, you can't buy 6 months worth of toilet paper when it's on sale for a third the normal price when you live in a tiny single room with no extra space. With the money to buy and run a car you have far more jobs available to you and you can go to cheaper shops.
but if you can't escape the hand to mouth stage then you'll get stuck spending more and getting less.
it's not merely a choice as you so arrogantly imply. People end up in poverty often through no fault of their own and it can be very hard to escape.
and people buy recipe books to study, prepare the dishes in private, whatever. I'm not being obtuse, you're being intentionally dense and ignoring the point.
you've not explained why one is worth of copyright protection while the other is not.
I meant in any debate not taking place on slashdot or similar forums. did you actually read the rest of my post beyond that line? My whole argument was that people are very creative and productive even without any kind of copyright protection for their work.
Recipes and pictures of hair styles don't matter because it takes a skill that limited individuals possess to reproduce their work.
and yet if I perform a copyrighted piece of music in public with an instrument using skill and personal effort I still have to pay royalties. And strangely the same is not true if I copy someone dish or hairstyle.
People who are making lots of money under any current system will always be against it and money talks so it's not going to change. But it's interesting to think about.
In the UK most full time musicians are at or close to the poverty line, the same can not be said about professional chefs.
And perhaps part of the reason is that while when I go for a night out there's normally live music being performed in the clubs and pubs along with food and drinks being served the performers often have to pay a significant chunk of their income in royalties to various companies if they're playing popular songs. The chef in the back doesn't have to do the same whenever he prepares a popular dish.
oh I'm not totally against copyright, it's more of an interesting thought experiment. Copyright really makes quite a lot of sense when it comes to books and that's where it's started. But gradually it's scope has expanded to cover more and more things, many of which are far far harder to defend. At every step along the way someone has been saying "we work hard too, why is their work considered more special" and so copyright grows to cover everything.
My example works better for sheet music than for MP3's and live performances rather than recordings yet you'll get a DMCA for sheet music or your own performance of a piece of music like like you will for hosting an MP3.
the very fact that this short paragraph of casual musing that I'm writing now is automatically copyrighted and thus shares all the protections that used to be reserved for a book which someone might take years to write is a travesty.
I'd also argue that political campaign material should be ineligible for copyright and that "fair use" should have far more leeway when it comes to political speech since as it stands if you reproduce a large quantity of a candidates more embarrassing material to use against them they can go after you with copyright laws and copyright claims can destroy anonymous protest as a bogus copyright claim has be be challenged non-anonymously.
You paint an unrealistic and simply dishonest scenario.
You start to see a bit of interest on itunes turn into a steady flow, until all of a sudden your revenue starts to decline just as people start posting the album on the various torrent sites.
things turn up on the torrent sites immediately. They'll be up there as soon as you release anything that gets any attention at all. Of course bad artists like to convince themselves that in fact they're fantastic and the only reason they're not making millions is piracy but the fact is that there has always been piracy, it's been part of the net since the first few universities were connected to it and the first few BBS's got hooked up.
and yet there's no shortage of people who've made a lot of money selling things which could potentially be pirated easily.
What would I do about the problem of web piracy? almost nothing at all. If the only thing those police were there for was to shut down market stands selling trademarked football kits then I'd be against them too for the reasons you outlined. It's only because of all the other various physical crimes and dangers they're there to prevent that I accept them as nescesary. The internet has no such physical threats. the only thing threatened is profit margins.
Let me guess, you're a poor artist or developer or some such who's convinced of the genius of his own work but blames his failures on piracy right?
Even then it's utterly false since insanely vast quantities of recipes flow into the public domain all the time. There's no shortage of variations on any dish you can imagine out there shared freely.
Fresh meat and food more interesting than a bowl of potatoes was also a rare event for anyone but the nobility if you look at history. As were meals prepared by a professional. It used to be that you could only get such things if you could afford to hire a cook. Now both are easily and cheaply available to everyone who can walk into a cafe with a trivial quantity of money.
You're attributing all improvements to copyright just as you can be sure if recopies had been allowed to be copyrighted 300 years ago all the improvements to diet and food in general would now be atributed to copyright in the little alternate world.
right while the other side try to dress up filesharing as not sharing. You could call copyright infringement "rape" and it would be just as misleading and untrue though it would sound far worse.
I put this post up before with a few more spelling mistakes but I think it might fit this topic too...
You know I sometimes wonder if the world would be a richer or poorer place without copyright, plenty of things would be different certainly and those who make their money from the current system will of course tell you the world would be a poorer, worse off world for it.
It's almost taken as a given that the world would have less creativity without copyright but I do wonder.
If the chef at your local restaurant had to pay royalties whenever he used a recipe published by a celebrity chef would you have a tastier and more enjoyable meal? What if he risked being sued into the ground if he created a derivative work by altering the recipe slightly without a license? or would you just have a more bland, unoriginal, uninspired and ultimately vastly more expensive meal?
If your hairdresser had to pay royalties whenever some kid comes in with a magazine picture and says they want their hair to "look like that". Would everyone have far more interesting hairstyles or would it just cost far more and see people getting sued for doing their own hair at home in a copyrighted style?
Both these things are creative and also involve a skill much like storytelling or playing a musical instrument and in both cases I've heard of people trying to get copyright protections extended to cover them.
Imagine a world where in the 17th century someone had decided that recipes and cooking should fall under copyright along with books. You can be sure that were someone to call for it's repeal 300 years later there would be no lack of "professional recipe composers" who would talk about how much work they put into working out new recipes and the time and effort it takes and how we're bad people for implying that they haven't worked hard and that they somehow don't deserve a cut whenever someone follows their recipes.
of course in a world where we're all free to take someone elses recipe, use it, copy it, publish it or even claim it as our own we know very well that fuck all harm has been done to the industry for the lack of legal protection on such creativity. We live in a world where everyone has family recipes but hardly anyone has family music.
In a world where such legal protections existed and nobody ever knew such an open and unprotected situation as we have in this world it would be very easy to claim that there would be no creativity, no well paid chefs and that setting up a kitchen would be pointless since someone else would just copy the chefs recipes.
Similarly it's taken almost as a given that the world would have less good books, less good stories and less origionality without copyright but try questioning that even for a moment.
Of course someone is going to complain that composing and cooking a good meal can't be compared to composing and playing a good piece of music because..... well just because!
Who knows, the flip side of my argument is that perhaps if recipes had been made copyrightable 300 years ago and someone could charge you money every time you used their recipe there would have been more investment in automatic food preparation(for the sake of consistency, avoiding unintentionally creating unlicensed derivative works and accounting of who has used what recipe) and we'd all have autocooks like we all have MP3 players and every meal would be up to the standards of a master cheff.
People are brought being told again and again and again that sharing is good and that they should share their things with each other.
And then they grow up and get in trouble for doing what is lauded elswhere in life. and to make it even more absurd it's when they're sharing things which are infinitely sharable where nobody is deprived of anything by the sharing.
The problem is that copyright law does not flow smoothly from anything natural in human psychology nor in normal human society. Humans share music, stories and culture like they breath, it's as if the drive is built in at a low level of the human brain.
Copyright is an awkward legal hack put in place to keep book publishers happy hundreds of years ago and it remains an ugly hack.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, I'll gladly accept an internet where simply nobody has the absolute power to stop anyone from communicating and swapping information even if piracy is common as a result and lots of publishers scream and shout about how terrible it is when the alternative is an internet where piracy is stamped out at the cost that by necessity anyone with the power to stamp down on someone sharing one kind of information also has the capability to stamp down on someone sharing other kinds.
Civil rights are simply infinity more important to me than copyrights.
People claim that there's no overlap between copyright and censorship yet I see stories of politicians using copyright law to stop their opponents from using exact copies of their own campaign literature (from earlier elections or earlier in the same campaign when they were after the extremist voters) against them.
I see governments using copyright law and anti-piracy law to raid opposition NGOs and parties on the fairly safe bet that no matter how good they've been amongst the thousands of bits of software in any office there's always going to be some kind of expired license or violation of a license agreement somewhere.
Once you have a system in place to knock a site off the net or block it with the click of a button it becomes extremely tempting to use it for any site. Don't believe me? please point to any of the countries which have implemented blocking or filtering systems where it has not been abused. Any of them.
You keep dismissing government abuses as if they're meaningless but I'd prefer no abuses of civil rights even if the RIAA and their ilk scream, shout and stamp their feet because there's no need for any.
You complain about others not caring about your copyrights in favor of them wanting free stuff. well you're choosing the abuses, that you yourself admit always happen, that my civil rights will suffer for nothing more than your own desire to make a quick buck.
I care less about your greed than I do about my right to free speech.
99.99% of torrents could be copyrighted stuff but I still care more about the other 0.01% and am not willing to sacrifice it for the sake of your profit margin.
The constitution grants these rights, and 99.99% of the people of the US will never have to worry about them being suspended.
That is so so reassuring to know.
You're basically arguing a variant on the old favorite that the government only goes after bad people so we shouldn't worry about any power we give it or how much it abuses that power. With a bonus of implying that advocates for civil rights and personal privacy are just "people who don't like a particular restriction on their bad behavior"
nice casual dismissal of the mistakes and abuses too.
may I suggest you finish up with a rounded "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" just to make the whole set.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot offer a directory of drug dealers
[citation needed]
I'd be curious which law exactly stops you from publishing a list of drug dealers phone numbers.
"it's when it starts becoming the primary means of distribution that matters."
By the very nature of torrents it scales exactly to demands.
no matter if you're really popular or virtually unknown it will be exactly as available on torrents.
"If you look at the revenue curve for any work of art, it peaks at the point of highest interest. It is also at that point that you will find the most torrents for that work."
And your conclusion from this rather than being "then people get bored of it and become less interested" is that the torrents have destroyed everything.
wow.
talk about self delusion.
"And good art takes a lot of time"
as does coming up with a good recipie or designing a good outfit yet both chefs and fashion designers do fine without copyright on their work.
"I know plenty of talented people who simply don't have the resources to continue their work at the level they feel capable of because they cannot get the backing of any investors (labels, grants, etc), because there is very little chance of a reasonable ROI right now. No one will back an expensive PR campaign because they have no faith that music or independent film is a profitable enterprise at the moment."
Join the queue.
you may have been living under a rock these last few years but everyone is in the same boat, whether you want to open a stall selling hats or produce an album.
but I'm sure you think you're special and being extra victimized by the cruel cruel world.
First of all, that's one of the most self-serving snobbish things I've read in a long time
it's also true.
Why pay for something you are not sure about when you can grab it on a torrent/p2p site for free?
good question, which poses the quandary of why, despite such a system being in place legal music distribution has been growing every year and even digital distribution has been growing year after year.
It's because, simply, people still do buy legal music all the time even if it's possible to get it off torrents.
but I'm sure your failure as an artist can be fully explained by torrents ignoring the number of your peers who seem to have done fine despite them.
You argue based on how you feel the world must be but reality such as the continuous growth in music sales year after year contradict your delusions.
First of all, the profit margin for music sales is minuscule.
or even zero if you sign with a major record, not for them of course, just for the artist.
would you just say, "profit isn't important"?
no, I'd say "profit and copyright are are still far far less important than civil rights"
feel free to spin that in any crazy way you feel like.
First of all, fuck you.
I'll take that as a yes.
Fail utterly and blame it all on the pirates so you could convince yourself that without them you'd have been a hit?
You are showing your true colors as someone who knows nothing about art aside from the fact that you can get it for free as long as no one shuts down your fav sharing site.
WAAAAAAHHHH!!
as a matter of fact I do get my music free.
From jamendo.
it's quite a nice service.
I don't much like torrents though, too much hassle when I can get it for free far more easily and legally.
For whatever reason, you feel you are somehow entitled to other people's work, not because it's right, but because its simply possible.
I feel exactly as entitled to a book of sheet music as I do to a book of recipes, fortunately for chefs the law doesn't see them as similar.
I do know that while the vast majority of full time musicians in the UK are at or bellow the poverty line the same cannot be said of professional chefs.
Both
If I had a pile of capital I could make do on a tiny fraction of what I do now.
If I had less money than I do now my cost of living would probably be far higher.
If I had a few hundred thousand lying around I could buy a property outright with no mortgage at which point I could be that guy "getting by on 10% less salary than you do", hell probably 25% or even 50% if I invested it in similar things which may not generate revenue but do reduce expenditure.
Without that few hundred K there's either rent or mortgage interest.
The richer you are the easier it is to spend less.
And that's the point you seem to have missed.
Where I currently live is a bit outside the city, we need to be running a car to be able to live here and it costs a bit more so we need that extra bit of money.
In this place the bills are low now because it's a well insulated newer building.
In the last place I lived the bills were terrible because it was in a shitty part of town and was poorly insulated.
In my old place I'd buy stuff when it was on sale but when you only have one small cupboard and the corner of a room to store stuff I could never keep as much non-perishable as I'd like so I couldn't take advantage of those same supermarket discounts nearly as much as I can now.
I love to cook, unfortunately the last place only had a shitty little ancient electric hob with no oven in which to make my own bread or roasts.
Again with the storage I could keep a little flour but didn't have the room for all the stuff I can keep to have now.
The last place I lived was out of necessity, I needed somewhere within walking distance of where I was working.
It's very easy to look down on people while ignoring the reasons they can't take advantage of the same things you can.
If I'd grown up in a family who were stuck in such a small, run down and poorly equipped home then I wouldn't even automatically follow those steps, fortunately I grew up in a home where the benefits of good insulation were obvious, my parents have the space to store bargins and the facilities to do their own cooking and to teach me to cook.
I fall into similar habits to yours without even thinking about it.
Many people don't and they've not got the experiences of how to take advantage things those above the poverty line have to save money.
Hell here are enough older men who don't even know how to do more than boil an egg, they don't know where to start.
it was some UK organisation.
not sure which.
from her description the work involved looking for regular peaks on the chart:
(every 10 inches this peak appears,every 17 inches this peak appears.... oh and so every 170 inches BAM, this huge peak appears where they combine here and that's the thing which cracks a nut or damages something etc)
no, you simply evaded the question.
sheet music is merely a series of instructions for which keys to press on a keyboard and when, there are as many/few pleasing combinations of taste as of sound.
"Therefore, recipes of high value are not published"
[citation needed]
people keep some recipes secret but it's more about ad campaigns than any real secrecy.
there's no shortage of drinks indistinguishable from coca cola nor chicken indistinguishable from KFC.
And there are chefs who publish lots of "high value" recipes , hell my favourite restaurant chain sells a cookbook with their entire menu with every detail of how to cook every dish.
you're arguing based on a fantasy.
some chefs keep a handful of recipes secret but in most cases they're recipes which have been published and are perfectly available if you know where to look.
Even my own mothers "secret" family cake recipe is merely something from a magazine published 50 years ago.
My grandparents on one side were gardeners.
My grandparents on the other were small farmers.
Neither of my parents ever got a university degree though my father did help write the material for some of the early computer science degrees after he got a job at a university as an operator.
Both of them had a knack for math which appears to be a useful skill in life.
For a good few years my father worked crappy manual labour jobs along the lines of hosing the blood off the machinery in slaughter houses which paid the bills until he got a chance to get a job as a computer operator and gradually moved sideways into programming.
My mother worked doing something I'm not very familiar with involving her and an office full of other women trawling through thousands of meters of paper tape from testing helicopters looking for resonances which might cause parts to fail.
Luckily they were both quite bright and driven people and my father retired this year after turning down a head of department job at a major university, they're quite financially well off now.
all 4 of their children have university qualifications of varying levels and pretty good incomes right from the start.
yet sheet music is covered by copyright and a musician playing a popular piece in person with their own skill and own effort reproducing the work by hand is just as guilty under copyright law as someone who uploads an MP3.
They are far closer to the example of the chefs yet they must pay royalties while the chefs need not.
The paragraph of text of a recipe is subject to copyright like almost any other block of text.
The information,ie the ingredients and the actual steps are not.
it is not legal to copy the instructions on how to prepare, combine, and cook them, and claim them as your own work.
It absolutely is legal to write your own instructions which convey the same information (ie how long to cook, at what temperature) and you can do whatever you want with them including claiming it as your own though that may be unethical.
The block of text which describes a recipe is copyrightable.
The recipe and the information of what steps to follow absolutely is not.
Most people don't have the privilege of just deciding to have more money.
I do happen to be lucky enough to have the means to make sure I have enough money to tide me over for a reasonable time but I'm not so arrogant as to delude myself that everyone is in a similar position.
Many people get stuck living hand to mouth despite spending wisely and despite living as modest a life as is possible.
My parents spent years living barely above the poverty line despite both of them working and both of them living in a 1 room apartment with no furniture other than a bed and a table.
And being poor makes it harder to spend less.
With a little extra money and a little extra time you can afford to buy lots of some food when there's a good sale.
Storage space hits that one as well, you can't buy 6 months worth of toilet paper when it's on sale for a third the normal price when you live in a tiny single room with no extra space.
With the money to buy and run a car you have far more jobs available to you and you can go to cheaper shops.
but if you can't escape the hand to mouth stage then you'll get stuck spending more and getting less.
it's not merely a choice as you so arrogantly imply.
People end up in poverty often through no fault of their own and it can be very hard to escape.
and people buy recipe books to study, prepare the dishes in private, whatever.
I'm not being obtuse, you're being intentionally dense and ignoring the point.
you've not explained why one is worth of copyright protection while the other is not.
I meant in any debate not taking place on slashdot or similar forums.
did you actually read the rest of my post beyond that line?
My whole argument was that people are very creative and productive even without any kind of copyright protection for their work.
Recipes and pictures of hair styles don't matter because it takes a skill that limited individuals possess to reproduce their work.
and yet if I perform a copyrighted piece of music in public with an instrument using skill and personal effort I still have to pay royalties.
And strangely the same is not true if I copy someone dish or hairstyle.
People who are making lots of money under any current system will always be against it and money talks so it's not going to change.
But it's interesting to think about.
In the UK most full time musicians are at or close to the poverty line, the same can not be said about professional chefs.
And perhaps part of the reason is that while when I go for a night out there's normally live music being performed in the clubs and pubs along with food and drinks being served the performers often have to pay a significant chunk of their income in royalties to various companies if they're playing popular songs.
The chef in the back doesn't have to do the same whenever he prepares a popular dish.
oh I'm not totally against copyright, it's more of an interesting thought experiment.
Copyright really makes quite a lot of sense when it comes to books and that's where it's started.
But gradually it's scope has expanded to cover more and more things, many of which are far far harder to defend.
At every step along the way someone has been saying "we work hard too, why is their work considered more special" and so copyright grows to cover everything.
My example works better for sheet music than for MP3's and live performances rather than recordings yet you'll get a DMCA for sheet music or your own performance of a piece of music like like you will for hosting an MP3.
the very fact that this short paragraph of casual musing that I'm writing now is automatically copyrighted and thus shares all the protections that used to be reserved for a book which someone might take years to write is a travesty.
I'd also argue that political campaign material should be ineligible for copyright and that "fair use" should have far more leeway when it comes to political speech since as it stands if you reproduce a large quantity of a candidates more embarrassing material to use against them they can go after you with copyright laws and copyright claims can destroy anonymous protest as a bogus copyright claim has be be challenged non-anonymously.
You paint an unrealistic and simply dishonest scenario.
You start to see a bit of interest on itunes turn into a steady flow, until all of a sudden your revenue starts to decline just as people start posting the album on the various torrent sites.
things turn up on the torrent sites immediately. They'll be up there as soon as you release anything that gets any attention at all.
Of course bad artists like to convince themselves that in fact they're fantastic and the only reason they're not making millions is piracy but the fact is that there has always been piracy, it's been part of the net since the first few universities were connected to it and the first few BBS's got hooked up.
and yet there's no shortage of people who've made a lot of money selling things which could potentially be pirated easily.
What would I do about the problem of web piracy? almost nothing at all.
If the only thing those police were there for was to shut down market stands selling trademarked football kits then I'd be against them too for the reasons you outlined.
It's only because of all the other various physical crimes and dangers they're there to prevent that I accept them as nescesary.
The internet has no such physical threats.
the only thing threatened is profit margins.
Let me guess, you're a poor artist or developer or some such who's convinced of the genius of his own work but blames his failures on piracy right?
Even then it's utterly false since insanely vast quantities of recipes flow into the public domain all the time.
There's no shortage of variations on any dish you can imagine out there shared freely.
Recipes are meant to be implemented. You know, cooking.
and sheet music is supposed to be played.
If sheet music were copyright restricted, why would anyone perceive value in that sheet music?
Please actually read my whole post from start to finish before replying.
Fresh meat and food more interesting than a bowl of potatoes was also a rare event for anyone but the nobility if you look at history.
As were meals prepared by a professional.
It used to be that you could only get such things if you could afford to hire a cook.
Now both are easily and cheaply available to everyone who can walk into a cafe with a trivial quantity of money.
You're attributing all improvements to copyright just as you can be sure if recopies had been allowed to be copyrighted 300 years ago all the improvements to diet and food in general would now be atributed to copyright in the little alternate world.
right while the other side try to dress up filesharing as not sharing.
You could call copyright infringement "rape" and it would be just as misleading and untrue though it would sound far worse.
In the UK most full time musicians are close to or bellow the poverty line.
http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/most_musicians_are_on_poverty_line.html
can the same be said of full time chefs in the UK?
I put this post up before with a few more spelling mistakes but I think it might fit this topic too...
You know I sometimes wonder if the world would be a richer or poorer place without copyright, plenty of things would be different certainly and those who make their money from the current system will of course tell you the world would be a poorer, worse off world for it.
It's almost taken as a given that the world would have less creativity without copyright but I do wonder.
If the chef at your local restaurant had to pay royalties whenever he used a recipe published by a celebrity chef would you have a tastier and more enjoyable meal?
What if he risked being sued into the ground if he created a derivative work by altering the recipe slightly without a license?
or would you just have a more bland, unoriginal, uninspired and ultimately vastly more expensive meal?
If your hairdresser had to pay royalties whenever some kid comes in with a magazine picture and says they want their hair to "look like that".
Would everyone have far more interesting hairstyles or would it just cost far more and see people getting sued for doing their own hair at home in a copyrighted style?
Both these things are creative and also involve a skill much like storytelling or playing a musical instrument and in both cases I've heard of people trying to get copyright protections extended to cover them.
Imagine a world where in the 17th century someone had decided that recipes and cooking should fall under copyright along with books.
You can be sure that were someone to call for it's repeal 300 years later there would be no lack of "professional recipe composers" who would talk about how much work they put into working out new recipes and the time and effort it takes and how we're bad people for implying that they haven't worked hard and that they somehow don't deserve a cut whenever someone follows their recipes.
of course in a world where we're all free to take someone elses recipe, use it, copy it, publish it or even claim it as our own we know very well that fuck all harm has been done to the industry for the lack of legal protection on such creativity.
We live in a world where everyone has family recipes but hardly anyone has family music.
In a world where such legal protections existed and nobody ever knew such an open and unprotected situation as we have in this world it would be very easy to claim that there would be no creativity, no well paid chefs and that setting up a kitchen would be pointless since someone else would just copy the chefs recipes.
Similarly it's taken almost as a given that the world would have less good books, less good stories and less origionality without copyright but try questioning that even for a moment.
Of course someone is going to complain that composing and cooking a good meal can't be compared to composing and playing a good piece of music because..... well just because!
Who knows, the flip side of my argument is that perhaps if recipes had been made copyrightable 300 years ago and someone could charge you money every time you used their recipe there would have been more investment in automatic food preparation(for the sake of consistency, avoiding unintentionally creating unlicensed derivative works and accounting of who has used what recipe) and we'd all have autocooks like we all have MP3 players and every meal would be up to the standards of a master cheff.
People are brought being told again and again and again that sharing is good and that they should share their things with each other.
And then they grow up and get in trouble for doing what is lauded elswhere in life.
and to make it even more absurd it's when they're sharing things which are infinitely sharable where nobody is deprived of anything by the sharing.
The problem is that copyright law does not flow smoothly from anything natural in human psychology nor in normal human society.
Humans share music, stories and culture like they breath, it's as if the drive is built in at a low level of the human brain.
Copyright is an awkward legal hack put in place to keep book publishers happy hundreds of years ago and it remains an ugly hack.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, I'll gladly accept an internet where simply nobody has the absolute power to stop anyone from communicating and swapping information even if piracy is common as a result and lots of publishers scream and shout about how terrible it is when the alternative is an internet where piracy is stamped out at the cost that by necessity anyone with the power to stamp down on someone sharing one kind of information also has the capability to stamp down on someone sharing other kinds.
Civil rights are simply infinity more important to me than copyrights.
People claim that there's no overlap between copyright and censorship yet I see stories of politicians using copyright law to stop their opponents from using exact copies of their own campaign literature (from earlier elections or earlier in the same campaign when they were after the extremist voters) against them.
I see governments using copyright law and anti-piracy law to raid opposition NGOs and parties on the fairly safe bet that no matter how good they've been amongst the thousands of bits of software in any office there's always going to be some kind of expired license or violation of a license agreement somewhere.
Once you have a system in place to knock a site off the net or block it with the click of a button it becomes extremely tempting to use it for any site.
Don't believe me?
please point to any of the countries which have implemented blocking or filtering systems where it has not been abused.
Any of them.
You keep dismissing government abuses as if they're meaningless but I'd prefer no abuses of civil rights even if the RIAA and their ilk scream, shout and stamp their feet because there's no need for any.
You complain about others not caring about your copyrights in favor of them wanting free stuff.
well you're choosing the abuses, that you yourself admit always happen, that my civil rights will suffer for nothing more than your own desire to make a quick buck.
I care less about your greed than I do about my right to free speech.
99.99% of torrents could be copyrighted stuff but I still care more about the other 0.01% and am not willing to sacrifice it for the sake of your profit margin.
The constitution grants these rights, and 99.99% of the people of the US will never have to worry about them being suspended.
That is so so reassuring to know.
You're basically arguing a variant on the old favorite that the government only goes after bad people so we shouldn't worry about any power we give it or how much it abuses that power.
With a bonus of implying that advocates for civil rights and personal privacy are just "people who don't like a particular restriction on their bad behavior"
nice casual dismissal of the mistakes and abuses too.
may I suggest you finish up with a rounded "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" just to make the whole set.