Let's cut the crap... you think people who invent things have no right to control their inventions, their thoughts. You want them to freely distribute them to people like you so you can freely exploit them and make millions. In your great world, people have no rights to their thoughts or ideas.
Thank you for clarifying. You believe that patents are a natural right. Not a legal right created by society to achieve a particular effect, but a natural right deriving from some moral axiom. Whether or not patents actually achieve what they're supposed to is secondary.
This is an extraordinary claim. It is quite contrary to the purpose of the law, and raises a number of significant ethical questions (e.g. if patent rights are natural rights, what is the justification for term limits?) Moral rights have been linked to copyright (though not in the U.S., where the constitution leaves no room for them). Not to patents. It appears to me you have bought into an ideology that confuses your self-interest with a moral right (while possibly mixing up two very different kinds of law - namely, patent and copyright). But there's no arguing with belief and self-interest. It's enough to clarify what your argument is really about.
As for making me making millions from someone else's patents, I can't even imagine a situation in which that might happen. I want quite different things from life. My self-interest is only involved here as a member of a free and healthy democratic society. One in which the system for producing life-saving drugs is more efficient and less corrupt, for example.
You say that businesses like big pharma "play all these dirty games, because if they don't, their competitor will eat their lunch." Sure. This is unsurprising and irrelevant to public policy. All that matters is whether these "dirty games" are in the public interest - specifically, do the benefits of the patent system exceed the harm inflicted by the dirty games. Your insistence on taking a moralistic stance ("ethical" vs "unethical", "theft" of inventions) obscures this basic question. Patents are a tool. The question we need to answer is not whether the businesses that use them are good or bad (though I admit I slammed big pharma) - it is whether the tool is effective. For pharmaceuticals, I have argued that the answer is "No."
You keep avoiding this question. Instead you mix in moralistic claims. You tell a nice myth about how before patents even existed, "long ago, inventors were strongly opposed to leeches copy-catting their inventions and making a buck stealing their ideas." By that logic, the historical absence of patent laws was a moral wrong. Never mind the history of patents as favored monopolies, or that the idea of "intellectual property" is historically recent. The fact is, inventors were not taken robbed: they knew the risks and benefits, and made their choices accordingly.
When I explain why inventors have no right to the patent system, you respond that "several patents earn their owners millions, if not billions . . . eliminating patent law will be far worse than seizing personal real-estate property for them." Just a moment. Did we create patent law for their benefit, or for the benefit of society? If we started with no patent system, then instituted one, there would also be people who stood to loose millions. Was it therefore wrong to create the system?
Drop the moralizing, or own up to an extraordinary claim that patents are a moral right. I'm sure patents have led to useful inventions. That's meaningless when the costs are not considered. You need to address the real issue of whether patents provide a net benefit. I have outlined the pervasive damage they have inflicted when it comes to pharmaceuticals. I have pointed to evidence (Levine) that the problem is much wider. You have declined to take the matter seriously, caricaturing abuse as "0.0001%" of the total. That is a ridiculous number - one that would not be true even of the most effective policy instruments. Perhaps I am wrong (really). Perhaps you have better evidence. Perhaps there are specific fields where the net benefit is clear. Or maybe abstract theory and a story of "long ago" are good enough for you.
Do you propose banning knives for cutting vegetables just because they are sometimes used as a murder weapon?
Listen to yourself. This is hysterical. You don't make a single cogent argument. You don't even respond to my proposal for public funding.
Let's be clear, because your example is insidious. It implies that eliminating patent law would be akin to seizing personal property. If I own a knife, then it is my personal property. So long as I don't break any laws, it is mine to do with as a I choose. Anyone proposing to ban it or take it away from me must have a significant justification.
Patents are nothing like this. They are a policy instrument used by government to achieve certain ends. A government choosing not to make use of them is not a matter of "banning" anything. Patents are only legitimate and useful to the extent that they achieve the objectives they are intended to achieve. You do not have a right to patent laws. This is merely a question of choosing the right tool for the job.
The question, then, is first: do patents do what they're supposed to do, and second: is there a better tool for the job. I referred to economist David Levine. He answers "no" to the first, and provides a convincing array of evidence. As to the second, I have pointed to another tool that works better. Public funding of research is not known for the kind of thorough corruption evidenced in the proprietary pharmaceutical sector. And because it is not dependent on patents, the benefits of drugs are not subject to the huge additional costs of monopoly.
But hey, since you made a ridiculous comparison I'll make one too. With a choice between a knife and a chainsaw to cut vegetables, would you choose the chainsaw even though you kept losing fingers?
the younger generation is starting to simply ignore the multitude of imbecilic laws passed by the respective legislatures of the U.S. and the E.U. I sure hope it continues. Eventually the old people will die off . . . Then things can change.
Keep that thought. It will take time. Who wins out in the end will depend to a large extent on whose ideas are dominant. The ideology of intellectual property has great power right now. We need to fight that - to keep our arguments strong and keep spreading them, so that when the time comes we win the battle of ideas.
If we become complacent - if we assume that all it takes is a generation growing older, then we will lose. What happens if the next generation grows up not knowing the kind of cultural or technological freedom we did? What if they change our minds one by one? What if they buy off the leaders among us? Our opponents - the RIAA, the MPAA, the ESA, the BSA and the rest - their time horizon is measured it quarters. If we play the long game, play it hard and don't give in, we can win.
I'm depending on it. I can't imagine that a democratic society could possibly enforce the kinds of controls that are being proposed and pushed into law.
stop download or buying commercial works, stop creating and distributing commercial works
Right. Because every time you distribute a proprietary work you increase its value. It's what Bill Gates said: if you don't buy Windows, he would prefer to see you copy it illegally rather than use something else. Any form of dependency on big media increases the power they have over us.
But let's be realistic here. We can't just walk away from our culture (which is why what they are doing is so utterly wrong.) Avoid their stuff to the extent reasonable. Otherwise, minimize the money you send their way: some of it will certainly be used against you. Use your money and your distribution to encourage the free ecosystem.
Two quibbles. First, not all CC licenses are free. Second, it's perfectly possible for commercial works to use CC licenses.
Patents are a disaster. Economist David Levine has a catalog of devastating evidence and arguments. David Heller writes that "Almost half of patents litigated to judgment are invalidated; of those found valid, half are found not to be infringed." Just think of the costs of that for a moment. Most inventions are small and incremental, not original and earth-shattering. And if you're the little guy, forget about it: if RIM couldn't fight off bogus patent threats, what hope do little guys have?
But the real scandal is the drug industry.
No pharma company is going to spend billions of dollars developing a cure for AIDS just to get five years of profits.
Right now we have drug companies that:
Spend most of their money on marketing and relatively little on researching new drugs.
A large proportion of the money spent on drug development is to work around competitors' patents.
Of the remainder, most of it is for more profitable chronic conditions rather than more serious ailments.
A good chunk of their research is publicly funded anyway.
Many new drugs are minor tweaks of existing drugs.
Significant life-saving drug development is blocked by a rat's nest of patents.
Drug researchers, both commercial and academic, routinely ignore patents that would prevent them from using proprietary research techniques.
They market intensively to doctors, wining and dining them at huge expense. The hire drug pushers to form personal relationships with doctors in order to increase their sales. Keep in mind that doctors are not their customers: they are corrupting the doctors so that we, who lack expertise, will spend money where we otherwise would not.
They corrupt doctors, researchers and academic institutes who do trials on the efficacy and safety of their drugs. In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, a former editor (iirc) of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine said the rot was so extensive that drug trials are basically worthless.
They threaten and remorselessly attack those who criticize them. For example, Merck drew up a "hit list" of doctors critical of Vioxx, aiming to discredit them.
They use every trick in the book to block exports of generic medications to AIDS-ravaged third-world countries where millions die unable to pay for drugs, even though such exports are explicitly permitted under international law.
This is what they do with the profits from patents. These guys are the big tobacco of the 21st century. Please tell me why paying monopoly rents for drugs from a corrupt industry that's not particularly interested in saving lives is better than at-cost drugs researched with public funding.
In my local Fair Copyright group we have debated whether it's reasonable to describe a Canadian DMCA as "criminalizing everyday Canadians." In legal jargon, the meaning of the term "criminal" is quite specific, and does not include most copyright infringement. However, in regular English the meaning of "criminal" is broader, including most lawbreaking regardless of whether it is civil or criminal in a legal sense. Lawyers don't get to change the meaning of English words just because they have need of detailed technical jargon. Your response to my argument suggests that this argument holds water. Most people are not lawyers: for them, the legal distinction is irrelevant - criminal simply means illegal. This is something I need to know. I want to make clear and effective arguments without being deceptive.
Certainly some works are better - often much better - than others. I only said the popularity of a work is largely due to the audience. The greater the popularity of a work, the greater the effect.
That does not mean that works do not have inherent qualities, nor that those qualities vary greatly, nor that many artists are brilliant people whose contributions to society are essential. Those things are all true. But the greater popularity and hence value (social and economic) of a film like, say, Star Wars compared to, say, Once Upon a Time in the West, is mostly - perhaps nearly all - due to the audience.
Why do you "like" one piece of music more than another. Why do all your friends pass it along. It's because of something inherent in the "work itself", isn't it?
Yes, but it is also due in large part to what I bring to the music, the circumstances in which I heard it, how my friends and I relate to each other around music, and so on.
There is a study I read about online which I would really like to locate again. Participants were divided into two groups, and listened to a number of pieces of music. Each then rated the music. In the control group, the listeners did not communicate with each other. But in the experimental group they could see the ratings assigned by other people. The result was dramatic: preferences clustered in the group where the participants communicated among themselves. Furthermore, in different runs of the experiment the ratings for the same songs varied widely.
The field of cultural studies provides lots of support for the importance of interpretation and meaning-making by the audience. The audience is never really passive. In reality, they are active collaborators in art. That's probably why, like artists, they care so passionately about it.
You argue that p2p levels the playing field and lowers the barriers to entry. But that is not neutral at all: it benefits some more than others. Attention is a scarce resource. At some point people must decide where to put their attention and time - and, at least as importantly, where to put their heart. Because that emotional meaning-making increases the meaning of the music to them, to their friends, and so on to other people. For the scenario you describe to come true, in which both hits and unknown increase in popularity, one of two things must happen: the middle must be squeezed, or the role of music in society must change.
Now for a quibble. You call p2p nothing more than a distribution channel. This obscures that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon, one that is qualitatively different from what came before. By making it easy for you and your friends to listen to all share your tastes in music (without passing around mix tapes or buying CDs), it collapses the time and the space that separate what you like from what they like. It will not only increase popularity of hits (as I described), it will also change the dynamic. Just as cell phone use cut into candy bar sales, just as television drew people away from social interaction with their neighbors, so changing the accessibility, diversity, and pervasiveness of music - and of talk about, interaction with, and meaning-making around music - so changing these things will change the role of music. It might do so in a negative way. We cannot know this simply from theorizing about it. We need experience and empirical evidence.
Sorry. Bouncy three year-old on my arm when I clicked "Submit".
The phenomenon described in the article saddens me, but it is supported by theory. I have worried about this based on my limited reading about network theory. The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience. If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.) So you end up with a small number of hits and a large number of also-rans. This is a power law distribution with its long tail. It explains why success in hit-driven fields is so unpredictable: much of the value doesn't come from the original work.
The thing is, the easier it is for the audience to communicate among themselves (whether to talk about the work, or to actually distribute it), the larger the effect can be. When distribution and communication become easier, this enables the further concentration of attention on the hits. That seems to be the phenomenon described here. Someone else perhaps can comment on reasons this might not happen. I certainly find I read more widely as a result of blogs and the Internet, so it's not necessarily all bad.
Another consequence of this argument is that copyright is unjust. Popularity is not just an arbitrary metric. It actually reflects real value being created. As people listen to a piece of music, for example, they increase its cultural significance. They associate it with events in their lives. They attach meaning to it. They reinterpret it. When a creative work becomes a hit it is transformed, acquiring significance and meaning and value it didn't have before. Think of the tune to the American national anthem for example: it was once just a drinking song. Here in Canada we can see this clearly with the old theme to Hockey Night in Canada. Over the years people came to see it as the soundtrack to their lives.
Well, copyright reserves the profits from and control over a hit for its authors. Nix that: typically it reserves them for a few big media companies. Regardless though, the audience who created so much of that value - indeed in many cases the vast majority of that value - are locked out. The rightsholders free-ride on the effort of others, while those others are not permitted to transmit the meanings and value they gave to the work. From that perspective, one approach might be to open up those hits to reinterpretation by others (i.e. derivative works). Then instead of being locked out by the structure of the network, indie artists can be part of it (and leverage it for their own works). And in fact we are seeing a lot of this with remixes - creativity that copyright places outside the law.
The phenomenon described in the article saddens me, but it is supported by theory. I have worried about this based on my limited reading about network theory. The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience. If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.) So you end up with a small number of hits and a large number of also-rans. This is a power law distribution with its long tail. It explains why success in hit-driven fields is so unpredictable: much of the value doesn't come from the original work.
The thing is, the easier it is for the audience to communicate among themselves (whether to talk about the work, or to actually distribute it), the larger the effect can be. When distribution and communication become easier, this enables the further concentration of attention on the hits. That seems to be the phenomenon described here. Someone else perhaps can comment on reasons this might not happen. I certainly find I read more widely as a result of blogs and the Internet, so it's not necessarily all bad.
Another consequence of this argument is that copyright is unjust. Popularity is not just an arbitrary metric. It actually reflects real value being created. As people listen to a piece of music, for example, they increase its cultural significance. They associate it with events in their lives. They attach meaning to it. They reinterpret it. When a creative work becomes a hit it is transformed, acquiring significance and meaning and value it didn't have before. Think of the tune to the American national anthem for example: it was once just a drinking song. Here in Canada we can see this clearly with the old theme to Hockey Night in Canada. Over the years people came to see it as the soundtrack to their lives.
Well, copyright reserves the profits from and control over a hit for its authors. Nix that: typically it reserves them for a few big media companies. Regardless though, the audience who created so much of that value - indeed in many cases the vast majority of that value - are locked out. The rightsholders free-ride on the effort of others, while those others are not permitted to transmit the meanings and value they gave to the work. From that perspective, one approach might be to open up those hits to reinterpretation by others (i.e. derivative works). Then instead of being locked out by the structure of the network, indie artists can be part of it (and leverage it for their own works). And in fact we are seeing a lot of this with remixes - creativity that copyright places outside the law.
Yes, some of it is. Some. That's why I was very careful to say that most infringement is civil (check the post title). The vast majority of infringement is non-commercial distribution - which is, so far as I know (IANAL), a civil offense - not a criminal one. This clearly sets infringement in general, and filesharing in particular, from theft.
Wow indeed. Now it's rated as troll -1. That is unkind and unworthy of the mods. For what it's worth, while I think you are very wrong about a serious issue and have replied in no uncertain terms, I don't think you're trolling. Your point of view is legitimate. Wrong - harmful even, but legitimate. And by all indications, honestly held.
For anyone else reading this: We need to hear from guys like this. He has laid out a widely-held point of view, one that he honestly shares, and he has stayed in the conversation. If we wish to be taken seriously, we must take those we disagree with seriously also. By debating with folks like this we develop our positions, strengthen our arguments, and learn from each other so that we can debate more effectively elsewhere. Sometimes we may find out we are wrong: we certainly can't be confident that we are right if we don't take that chance. Whether they know it or not, folks like this do us a real favor. We shouldn't chase them out of town.
Tell me, if infringement equals stealing, why wouldn't the law just call it that?
Exactly. Legally speaking, theft is criminal. Most copyright infringement is civil. It's not just the terms that differ - these are entirely different classes of law.
I think music is a bad example here because small bands are rather common. Organizing to make your own music -- even with high production values -- is really not outside of the reach of the common person. TV and movies take a lot more people, a lot of whom are not in star positions. I do not necessarily disagree with you, just you have chosen a bad example for your argument.
Good point. I could suggest YouTube videos instead. My son loves Thomas the Tank Engine. We sometimes show him a bit on YouTube. He points to the clip he wants to see. Often he prefers the "fan video" to the professionally-produced one. Then he watches another kid, just like him, playing with a toy train set and telling a story.
As I see it though, the essential reason that culture is so important is not that it is good in-and-of-itself, but the social functions it performs. I recognize that Hollywood films and TV shows are not so easy for fans to produce. But the question I would ask is not, "how do we preserve them as they are" but "how do we perform their social functions." The form itself is not important - it will change. Music might well substitute for many of the functions of TV. So might sport. Narrative and stories are very important to human beings and to human societies - so important that I can't imagine how we could stop them from being told. But the way we have expressed stories changes. Epic poetry gave way to theater gave way to the invention of the novel gave way to movies made room for TV. The terrible danger with maximalist copyright is that its zeal to preserve an unchanging form (well, actually the zeal to preserve business models, but this is the argument) will hinder the human activity, participation, and engagement that really matter. I think that would be (is) a tremendous blow against human freedom.
They are all violations of property rights - that is what unites them. Whether it's fraud or copyright infringement is irrelevant to the question of whether it violates rights and should be prosecuted.
Where do you get the idea from that attribution is a property right? If I say, "I wrote that AC post on Slashdot", and you say, "No you didn't", do you really think you are violating my property rights? Indeed, what makes attribution a "right" at all? What makes lying about authorship of a creative work a violation of rights right, while lying about, say, educational attainment or marital status aren't? Or are those (property) rights also?
I know of two theories of rights. Pragmatists hold that rights are created by societies in order to achieve certain ends. So the government can create an attribution right (as it does in countries with moral rights), and that brings the right into being. But as I said, that's not the case for attribution in the U.S., so unless you're talking about another jurisdiction your claim holds no water.
The second theory holds that there are natural rights. So the right to attribution is not something human beings invented - it is already there. We can know it exists by derivation from axiomatic truths or religious doctrine. For copyright, there is the idea of the "sweat of the brow" - that by mixing her labor with the physical world to create something, the artist gains certain rights over it. (As it happens, this is awfully close to Marx's argument that capital exploits workers.) But this explanation faces tremendous obstacles. The "something" the artist mixes her labor with is other ideas by other people. For this not to be a rights violation itself, those ideas must be in a commons (the public domain). By what right, then, can she remove something from the commons and make it exclusive to herself? If the commons is owned by everyone, than she would need the permission of the community - and we're back awfully close to government-created rights. If they are owned by no-one, then the community has no business interfering. Then government cannot interfere, and those rights must be perpetual, and... uh, looks to me like there could be no public domain in the first place.
I'm afraid your claim that attribution is a *right* is just that - a claim that you have repeated with nothing to back it up.
If this rebellion against copyright comes to pass, nobody will create anything as polished as what we see and hear today.
If this were true (I don't know that it would be), how bad would that be? In other words, how important is it that our entertainment be polished?
I'm not going to make the full argument here, but I'll throw out some thoughts.
The pyramids are great works of architecture. Wonders of the world. But we don't build them anymore. The cost is not worth the benefit. (As it happens, one of those costs was slave labor.)
I love television. I prefer good TV shows to good movies. Has TV made the world a better place? Research strongly points to television as a reason for a collapse in social and political participation since the 1960s. There's no question of abolishing television, but should we step in and enforce onerous regulations in order to preserve it as it is?
What is better: listening to highly polished music, or learning to make music and playing for your friends? We used to *do* culture instead of simply observing it. Most people could sing or play an instrument. Many more played sports. Drawing was a basic skill for educated people. But we were not professional artists. We were not usually able to both compose the song *and* sing it. We drew on the culture around us, and transformed it to enrich our lives. Now our entertainment is provided to us, and for the most part we don't contribute. Copyright as it stands entrenches that passive role because wit forbids us from most forms of participation - particularly when we use the everyday digital media and technology through which we live our lives and connect with the people we care about.
If I plagiarize your book. . . [or] take credit for it then I have violated your rights and the government should go after me.
Funny thing. In the U.S. at least, taking credit for someone else's work is not a copyright infringement. Fraud perhaps, dishonest yes, but copyright no. Nor, as economist David Levine argues, should there be a special law for that: private law is fully up to the task, even harsher than anything the government might do. If you are a tenured academic (his example) or a journalist and you plagiarize, you could be out of a job. If you commit fraud, there's a law for that. If you lie persistently, it reflects on your character. Sure, lies can do tremendous harm. Think of how much damage they can do in romantic relationships. But we don't have laws for that. We shouldn't. The honest truth is that copyright (all of it in the U.S., 99.9% of in jurisdictions that respect moral rights) is about money. Preventing plagiarism is a totally bogus argument for copyright.
I fully oppose those people who would like to take it a step too far, and claim that there's no such thing as intellectual property, no property rights, that people don't have the right to the product of their own ideas
Copyright was created as a monopoly privilege, not a property right. In recent years maximalists have waged an ideological campaign to redefine copyright. The individual property rights position is radical. In the U.S., it is also well outside what the constitution allows: copyright is a regime intended to further the public interest (advancement of arts and sciences), *not* preserve or create some kind of individual rights. That individual "moral rights" approach is from the European (particularly French) tradition, and has been rejected by the United States. Lawrence Lessig (who is quite moderate) asserts that the only justification for copyright is the creation of works that would not otherwise exist.
You can talk about the foundation of copyright in moral rights in theory, but in practice it is almost never used for anything other than economic gain: and in fact promotes control and consolidation by media companies to the exclusion of all others - including artists.
It wasn't until quite recently (the 19th-20th centuries) that the idea of moral rights and individual originality even made sense. Many cultures still don't recognize it. It's a product of a particular culture at a particular moment in history. In practice, it creates all sorts of inconsistencies. It's a romantic notion that has very little to do with how creativity actually operates. It's interpretation and fleshing-out by courts has led to extremely weird and contradictory outcomes. For example, a doctor can patent your genes without your consent because he is the "creator" of his discovery. I can film people being shot in a demonstration, and *I* own the images - they have no right to them. But if those people are performing theater, all of a sudden copyright steps in. Copyright demands hard boundaries between what is "mine" and what is "yours", when no such hard boundaries really exist. Governments can create laws and call them "rights", but they are legal fictions, not reflections of some preexisting reality.
Better? What has that to do with anything? What does it even mean? Nothing I said has anything to do with being "better" than anyone.
What I care about is the kind of society I live in. It's about the kind of people around me, how I treat them and how they treat me. More: everyone has done wrong. Someday it may be me or someone I care about who is caught in the machinery of justice. When that happens, I hope I will see justice done, not vengeance. Me being some kind of "better" wouldn't do me a damn bit of good. Call me "worse" for all I care. It does not affect my argument one bit.
In what kind of world may vengeance be fun? Our world. History is drenched with it. The cheers and parties when criminals are executed. The bloodthirst of the Roman arena. The celebration and entertainment of public hangings in our countries only a few generations ago. What would you like to see done to the banksters who robbed our government and broke our economy? Vengeance is satisfying. It can be fun. And when the government does it, utterly destructive.
the point is, regardless of who the person is you are holding in prison, you have to live by your -OWN- standards.
Thank you. How we treat bad people is not about them, it is about us. Saddam deserves to suffer for his crimes. But when we surrender to the bloodthirsty urge for vengeance (which can be satisfying, even - as in this case - fun), it is ourselves we corrupt. Saddam does not matter: he is beyond redemption. It is we who matter. If we treat the foulest human beings with a level of decency (decorum, seriousness), then we make it easy to respect each other. If, on the other hand, we give in to our baser instincts, we lay the groundwork for lashing out selfishly whenever it feels good.
Want to respect Saddam's victims? Then prosecute and punish him with all the seriousness, formality, and consideration you can muster. The kind of immature self-gratification described here ultimately dismisses those he tortured and killed. Their persecutor was an evil man, not a clown.
(P.S.: Just in case someone misreads me, I loved the movie. There's a big difference between that and the legitimate serious acts of the American people's political representatives and government.)
They do not have control over the broader role playing game market. Others can put together rules, stories, and arts to create competing products.
As for any product there is some substitutability: cell phones compete with chocolate bars for youth spending, for example. But by that's not a very useful definition of monopoly. Furthermore, intellectual works are a special case because they benefit from network effects. The more people play D&D, the greater the value of D&D to those who already play. That's actually the main source of value. So it is very, very hard to compete with an established product. You could come up with an OS with all Windows' features, but without a user base it wouldn't be worth much at all. The value is in the network, not in the product itself. Similarly for D&D. It's nice in theory to say a bit of competition is possible, but in practice intellectual monopolies are extremely strong.
Prices are set by supply and demand, not by direct cost per unit.
Actually, market competition pushes price toward the marginal cost of production. At least that's the theory, and it's part of the justification for copyright. In practice it seldom works out that way. In any case, they have have a copyright monopoly, so they have complete control over supply and they don't have a whole lot of worries about competition.
What we have here is copyright failure. Copyright was created solely for the benefit of society the public. (At least that's the case in the U.S.: other countries have moral rights. But in this case we have work-for-hire for a company legally required to place profit above all else, so the moral rights issue is moot.) Here we have copyright working to do the opposite of what it is intended to do. Copyright failure.
Mind, with illegal filesharing their control over supply is illusory. They're acting as though they had a monopoly, but they don't. Which, as so many have pointed out, is why this is so stupid.
Continued undermining of the social contract is a serious problem. Social collapse often happens when people no longer find the current regime in their interest, and simply stop supporting it. Every time the social contract is violated, as it is in the case of copyright, as it is with the bailouts of the financial sector, people turn away. I don't think the risk is that they will revolt, but that if there is a credible challenge to the existing system they will simply fail to act to preserve it. Most revolutions are the work not of the masses, but of a relatively small group. They are able to succeed when the population lacks the conviction to oppose them. Thus many Romans welcomed in the barbarians. Hitler was allowed to become chancellor even though most Germans did not support him. A minority in the American colonies was able to foment revolution. The Communists became a credible threat in China when the Nationalists failed to act effectively against the Japanese. And so on.
When the change happens, it is a phase change, not a gradual transformation. A dynamic system like a society follows a pattern. It never exactly repeats itself, it is in constant flux, yet it can be bounded. Most perturbations are not sufficient to break the pattern - but when they are, the system leaves the pattern, and stabilizes around a new pattern. Just as an economy can handle a lot of stress and maintain high employment, but with enough of a shock it can stabilize in a new depression pattern of low employment.
This is my relatively uniformed opinion - I haven't read enough in this area - so it may be tainted by superficial pop intellectualism. But it does worry me. Persisting with law that is neither supported not observed by the majority of the population serves to undermine the rule of law. Continued evidence of the deep corruption of the system wears away at support for it. The process may seem quiet, but it does have consequences.
Mind you, the Russian scholar you cite is operating in fantasy land. He thinks the American midwest will join Canada and Alaska will be annexed by Ruassia. I'm Canadian, and I can tell you that's just plain nuts.
radical 'intellectuals' such as yourself know nothing of the "typical person" . . . 'psudeo-intellectual' radicals have no shame, nor a firm grasp on reality
Please. I have met a number of real intellectuals - scholars in relevant fields of study, including economics, philosophy, communication, library science, and law. Not one of them would agree with the grandparent. At one conference session on the topic, a radical professor declared that copyright should be abolished. There was not a word of opposition. Only Friday night I listened to a lecture by a visiting economist (David Levine) saying the same thing from the not-so-radical perspective of neoclassical economics. I have been harshly critical of copyright, yet my professors often suggest I am too soft - that I underemphasize the extent to which copyright favors corporate control over the interests of artists and citizens.
I believe the head of the Swedish Pirate Party has said the brains in this debate are on our side. He is right. The evidence does not support strong copyright. The theory does not support strong copyright. Numerous government studies do not support strong copyright. When activists protest excessive copyright regulation, we find the other side does not even try to engage in rational debate. Often they say nothing at all. When they do respond, they ignore our critiques or they make ignorant claims. Recently a lawyer critiquing the film RiP: A remix manifesto was so ignorant as to suggest that today's Internet would not exist if programmers had not had copyright to ensure they were paid for their work!
I will not say there is no relatively objective scholarly support for strong copyright. There must presumably be some, but I have have not seen it[1]. I have encountered exactly one kind of supporter for radical copyright (other than those with no clue of the issues): people who for whom strong copyright is in their interest, or who believe (often mistakenly) that it is. No disinterested intellectuals, no one representing the public interest. The grandparent makes nothing more than a statement of interest and opinion, with no argument and no significant evidence.
[1] I do want to see contrary arguments - if you know of sound ones (by which I mean honest and competent, whether you think they are correct is another matter), tell me.
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Thank you for clarifying. You believe that patents are a natural right. Not a legal right created by society to achieve a particular effect, but a natural right deriving from some moral axiom. Whether or not patents actually achieve what they're supposed to is secondary.
This is an extraordinary claim. It is quite contrary to the purpose of the law, and raises a number of significant ethical questions (e.g. if patent rights are natural rights, what is the justification for term limits?) Moral rights have been linked to copyright (though not in the U.S., where the constitution leaves no room for them). Not to patents. It appears to me you have bought into an ideology that confuses your self-interest with a moral right (while possibly mixing up two very different kinds of law - namely, patent and copyright). But there's no arguing with belief and self-interest. It's enough to clarify what your argument is really about.
As for making me making millions from someone else's patents, I can't even imagine a situation in which that might happen. I want quite different things from life. My self-interest is only involved here as a member of a free and healthy democratic society. One in which the system for producing life-saving drugs is more efficient and less corrupt, for example.
You say that businesses like big pharma "play all these dirty games, because if they don't, their competitor will eat their lunch." Sure. This is unsurprising and irrelevant to public policy. All that matters is whether these "dirty games" are in the public interest - specifically, do the benefits of the patent system exceed the harm inflicted by the dirty games. Your insistence on taking a moralistic stance ("ethical" vs "unethical", "theft" of inventions) obscures this basic question. Patents are a tool. The question we need to answer is not whether the businesses that use them are good or bad (though I admit I slammed big pharma) - it is whether the tool is effective. For pharmaceuticals, I have argued that the answer is "No."
You keep avoiding this question. Instead you mix in moralistic claims. You tell a nice myth about how before patents even existed, "long ago, inventors were strongly opposed to leeches copy-catting their inventions and making a buck stealing their ideas." By that logic, the historical absence of patent laws was a moral wrong. Never mind the history of patents as favored monopolies, or that the idea of "intellectual property" is historically recent. The fact is, inventors were not taken robbed: they knew the risks and benefits, and made their choices accordingly.
When I explain why inventors have no right to the patent system, you respond that "several patents earn their owners millions, if not billions . . . eliminating patent law will be far worse than seizing personal real-estate property for them." Just a moment. Did we create patent law for their benefit, or for the benefit of society? If we started with no patent system, then instituted one, there would also be people who stood to loose millions. Was it therefore wrong to create the system?
Drop the moralizing, or own up to an extraordinary claim that patents are a moral right. I'm sure patents have led to useful inventions. That's meaningless when the costs are not considered. You need to address the real issue of whether patents provide a net benefit. I have outlined the pervasive damage they have inflicted when it comes to pharmaceuticals. I have pointed to evidence (Levine) that the problem is much wider. You have declined to take the matter seriously, caricaturing abuse as "0.0001%" of the total. That is a ridiculous number - one that would not be true even of the most effective policy instruments. Perhaps I am wrong (really). Perhaps you have better evidence. Perhaps there are specific fields where the net benefit is clear. Or maybe abstract theory and a story of "long ago" are good enough for you.
Listen to yourself. This is hysterical. You don't make a single cogent argument. You don't even respond to my proposal for public funding.
Let's be clear, because your example is insidious. It implies that eliminating patent law would be akin to seizing personal property. If I own a knife, then it is my personal property. So long as I don't break any laws, it is mine to do with as a I choose. Anyone proposing to ban it or take it away from me must have a significant justification.
Patents are nothing like this. They are a policy instrument used by government to achieve certain ends. A government choosing not to make use of them is not a matter of "banning" anything. Patents are only legitimate and useful to the extent that they achieve the objectives they are intended to achieve. You do not have a right to patent laws. This is merely a question of choosing the right tool for the job.
The question, then, is first: do patents do what they're supposed to do, and second: is there a better tool for the job. I referred to economist David Levine. He answers "no" to the first, and provides a convincing array of evidence. As to the second, I have pointed to another tool that works better. Public funding of research is not known for the kind of thorough corruption evidenced in the proprietary pharmaceutical sector. And because it is not dependent on patents, the benefits of drugs are not subject to the huge additional costs of monopoly.
But hey, since you made a ridiculous comparison I'll make one too. With a choice between a knife and a chainsaw to cut vegetables, would you choose the chainsaw even though you kept losing fingers?
Keep that thought. It will take time. Who wins out in the end will depend to a large extent on whose ideas are dominant. The ideology of intellectual property has great power right now. We need to fight that - to keep our arguments strong and keep spreading them, so that when the time comes we win the battle of ideas.
If we become complacent - if we assume that all it takes is a generation growing older, then we will lose. What happens if the next generation grows up not knowing the kind of cultural or technological freedom we did? What if they change our minds one by one? What if they buy off the leaders among us? Our opponents - the RIAA, the MPAA, the ESA, the BSA and the rest - their time horizon is measured it quarters. If we play the long game, play it hard and don't give in, we can win.
I'm depending on it. I can't imagine that a democratic society could possibly enforce the kinds of controls that are being proposed and pushed into law.
Right. Because every time you distribute a proprietary work you increase its value. It's what Bill Gates said: if you don't buy Windows, he would prefer to see you copy it illegally rather than use something else. Any form of dependency on big media increases the power they have over us.
But let's be realistic here. We can't just walk away from our culture (which is why what they are doing is so utterly wrong.) Avoid their stuff to the extent reasonable. Otherwise, minimize the money you send their way: some of it will certainly be used against you. Use your money and your distribution to encourage the free ecosystem.
Two quibbles. First, not all CC licenses are free. Second, it's perfectly possible for commercial works to use CC licenses.
Patents are a disaster. Economist David Levine has a catalog of devastating evidence and arguments. David Heller writes that "Almost half of patents litigated to judgment are invalidated; of those found valid, half are found not to be infringed." Just think of the costs of that for a moment. Most inventions are small and incremental, not original and earth-shattering. And if you're the little guy, forget about it: if RIM couldn't fight off bogus patent threats, what hope do little guys have?
But the real scandal is the drug industry.
Right now we have drug companies that:
This is what they do with the profits from patents. These guys are the big tobacco of the 21st century. Please tell me why paying monopoly rents for drugs from a corrupt industry that's not particularly interested in saving lives is better than at-cost drugs researched with public funding.
In my local Fair Copyright group we have debated whether it's reasonable to describe a Canadian DMCA as "criminalizing everyday Canadians." In legal jargon, the meaning of the term "criminal" is quite specific, and does not include most copyright infringement. However, in regular English the meaning of "criminal" is broader, including most lawbreaking regardless of whether it is civil or criminal in a legal sense. Lawyers don't get to change the meaning of English words just because they have need of detailed technical jargon. Your response to my argument suggests that this argument holds water. Most people are not lawyers: for them, the legal distinction is irrelevant - criminal simply means illegal. This is something I need to know. I want to make clear and effective arguments without being deceptive.
Certainly some works are better - often much better - than others. I only said the popularity of a work is largely due to the audience. The greater the popularity of a work, the greater the effect.
That does not mean that works do not have inherent qualities, nor that those qualities vary greatly, nor that many artists are brilliant people whose contributions to society are essential. Those things are all true. But the greater popularity and hence value (social and economic) of a film like, say, Star Wars compared to, say, Once Upon a Time in the West, is mostly - perhaps nearly all - due to the audience.
Yes, but it is also due in large part to what I bring to the music, the circumstances in which I heard it, how my friends and I relate to each other around music, and so on.
There is a study I read about online which I would really like to locate again. Participants were divided into two groups, and listened to a number of pieces of music. Each then rated the music. In the control group, the listeners did not communicate with each other. But in the experimental group they could see the ratings assigned by other people. The result was dramatic: preferences clustered in the group where the participants communicated among themselves. Furthermore, in different runs of the experiment the ratings for the same songs varied widely.
The field of cultural studies provides lots of support for the importance of interpretation and meaning-making by the audience. The audience is never really passive. In reality, they are active collaborators in art. That's probably why, like artists, they care so passionately about it.
You argue that p2p levels the playing field and lowers the barriers to entry. But that is not neutral at all: it benefits some more than others. Attention is a scarce resource. At some point people must decide where to put their attention and time - and, at least as importantly, where to put their heart. Because that emotional meaning-making increases the meaning of the music to them, to their friends, and so on to other people. For the scenario you describe to come true, in which both hits and unknown increase in popularity, one of two things must happen: the middle must be squeezed, or the role of music in society must change.
Now for a quibble. You call p2p nothing more than a distribution channel. This obscures that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon, one that is qualitatively different from what came before. By making it easy for you and your friends to listen to all share your tastes in music (without passing around mix tapes or buying CDs), it collapses the time and the space that separate what you like from what they like. It will not only increase popularity of hits (as I described), it will also change the dynamic. Just as cell phone use cut into candy bar sales, just as television drew people away from social interaction with their neighbors, so changing the accessibility, diversity, and pervasiveness of music - and of talk about, interaction with, and meaning-making around music - so changing these things will change the role of music. It might do so in a negative way. We cannot know this simply from theorizing about it. We need experience and empirical evidence.
Sorry. Bouncy three year-old on my arm when I clicked "Submit".
The phenomenon described in the article saddens me, but it is supported by theory. I have worried about this based on my limited reading about network theory. The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience. If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.) So you end up with a small number of hits and a large number of also-rans. This is a power law distribution with its long tail. It explains why success in hit-driven fields is so unpredictable: much of the value doesn't come from the original work.
The thing is, the easier it is for the audience to communicate among themselves (whether to talk about the work, or to actually distribute it), the larger the effect can be. When distribution and communication become easier, this enables the further concentration of attention on the hits. That seems to be the phenomenon described here. Someone else perhaps can comment on reasons this might not happen. I certainly find I read more widely as a result of blogs and the Internet, so it's not necessarily all bad.
Another consequence of this argument is that copyright is unjust. Popularity is not just an arbitrary metric. It actually reflects real value being created. As people listen to a piece of music, for example, they increase its cultural significance. They associate it with events in their lives. They attach meaning to it. They reinterpret it. When a creative work becomes a hit it is transformed, acquiring significance and meaning and value it didn't have before. Think of the tune to the American national anthem for example: it was once just a drinking song. Here in Canada we can see this clearly with the old theme to Hockey Night in Canada. Over the years people came to see it as the soundtrack to their lives.
Well, copyright reserves the profits from and control over a hit for its authors. Nix that: typically it reserves them for a few big media companies. Regardless though, the audience who created so much of that value - indeed in many cases the vast majority of that value - are locked out. The rightsholders free-ride on the effort of others, while those others are not permitted to transmit the meanings and value they gave to the work. From that perspective, one approach might be to open up those hits to reinterpretation by others (i.e. derivative works). Then instead of being locked out by the structure of the network, indie artists can be part of it (and leverage it for their own works). And in fact we are seeing a lot of this with remixes - creativity that copyright places outside the law.
The phenomenon described in the article saddens me, but it is supported by theory. I have worried about this based on my limited reading about network theory. The popularity of a cultural work is largely a result not of any inherent qualities of the work itself, but of of the activities of the audience. If I like a piece of music, I am likely to tell my friends. They tell their friends, and so on and so on. (This is preferential attachment in a scale-free network.) So you end up with a small number of hits and a large number of also-rans. This is a power law distribution with its long tail. It explains why success in hit-driven fields is so unpredictable: much of the value doesn't come from the original work. The thing is, the easier it is for the audience to communicate among themselves (whether to talk about the work, or to actually distribute it), the larger the effect can be. When distribution and communication become easier, this enables the further concentration of attention on the hits. That seems to be the phenomenon described here. Someone else perhaps can comment on reasons this might not happen. I certainly find I read more widely as a result of blogs and the Internet, so it's not necessarily all bad. Another consequence of this argument is that copyright is unjust. Popularity is not just an arbitrary metric. It actually reflects real value being created. As people listen to a piece of music, for example, they increase its cultural significance. They associate it with events in their lives. They attach meaning to it. They reinterpret it. When a creative work becomes a hit it is transformed, acquiring significance and meaning and value it didn't have before. Think of the tune to the American national anthem for example: it was once just a drinking song. Here in Canada we can see this clearly with the old theme to Hockey Night in Canada. Over the years people came to see it as the soundtrack to their lives. Well, copyright reserves the profits from and control over a hit for its authors. Nix that: typically it reserves them for a few big media companies. Regardless though, the audience who created so much of that value - indeed in many cases the vast majority of that value - are locked out. The rightsholders free-ride on the effort of others, while those others are not permitted to transmit the meanings and value they gave to the work. From that perspective, one approach might be to open up those hits to reinterpretation by others (i.e. derivative works). Then instead of being locked out by the structure of the network, indie artists can be part of it (and leverage it for their own works). And in fact we are seeing a lot of this with remixes - creativity that copyright places outside the law.
Yes, some of it is. Some. That's why I was very careful to say that most infringement is civil (check the post title). The vast majority of infringement is non-commercial distribution - which is, so far as I know (IANAL), a civil offense - not a criminal one. This clearly sets infringement in general, and filesharing in particular, from theft.
Wow indeed. Now it's rated as troll -1. That is unkind and unworthy of the mods. For what it's worth, while I think you are very wrong about a serious issue and have replied in no uncertain terms, I don't think you're trolling. Your point of view is legitimate. Wrong - harmful even, but legitimate. And by all indications, honestly held.
For anyone else reading this: We need to hear from guys like this. He has laid out a widely-held point of view, one that he honestly shares, and he has stayed in the conversation. If we wish to be taken seriously, we must take those we disagree with seriously also. By debating with folks like this we develop our positions, strengthen our arguments, and learn from each other so that we can debate more effectively elsewhere. Sometimes we may find out we are wrong: we certainly can't be confident that we are right if we don't take that chance. Whether they know it or not, folks like this do us a real favor. We shouldn't chase them out of town.
Exactly. Legally speaking, theft is criminal. Most copyright infringement is civil. It's not just the terms that differ - these are entirely different classes of law.
Good point. I could suggest YouTube videos instead. My son loves Thomas the Tank Engine. We sometimes show him a bit on YouTube. He points to the clip he wants to see. Often he prefers the "fan video" to the professionally-produced one. Then he watches another kid, just like him, playing with a toy train set and telling a story.
As I see it though, the essential reason that culture is so important is not that it is good in-and-of-itself, but the social functions it performs. I recognize that Hollywood films and TV shows are not so easy for fans to produce. But the question I would ask is not, "how do we preserve them as they are" but "how do we perform their social functions." The form itself is not important - it will change. Music might well substitute for many of the functions of TV. So might sport. Narrative and stories are very important to human beings and to human societies - so important that I can't imagine how we could stop them from being told. But the way we have expressed stories changes. Epic poetry gave way to theater gave way to the invention of the novel gave way to movies made room for TV. The terrible danger with maximalist copyright is that its zeal to preserve an unchanging form (well, actually the zeal to preserve business models, but this is the argument) will hinder the human activity, participation, and engagement that really matter. I think that would be (is) a tremendous blow against human freedom.
Where do you get the idea from that attribution is a property right? If I say, "I wrote that AC post on Slashdot", and you say, "No you didn't", do you really think you are violating my property rights? Indeed, what makes attribution a "right" at all? What makes lying about authorship of a creative work a violation of rights right, while lying about, say, educational attainment or marital status aren't? Or are those (property) rights also?
I know of two theories of rights. Pragmatists hold that rights are created by societies in order to achieve certain ends. So the government can create an attribution right (as it does in countries with moral rights), and that brings the right into being. But as I said, that's not the case for attribution in the U.S., so unless you're talking about another jurisdiction your claim holds no water.
The second theory holds that there are natural rights. So the right to attribution is not something human beings invented - it is already there. We can know it exists by derivation from axiomatic truths or religious doctrine. For copyright, there is the idea of the "sweat of the brow" - that by mixing her labor with the physical world to create something, the artist gains certain rights over it. (As it happens, this is awfully close to Marx's argument that capital exploits workers.) But this explanation faces tremendous obstacles. The "something" the artist mixes her labor with is other ideas by other people. For this not to be a rights violation itself, those ideas must be in a commons (the public domain). By what right, then, can she remove something from the commons and make it exclusive to herself? If the commons is owned by everyone, than she would need the permission of the community - and we're back awfully close to government-created rights. If they are owned by no-one, then the community has no business interfering. Then government cannot interfere, and those rights must be perpetual, and... uh, looks to me like there could be no public domain in the first place.
I'm afraid your claim that attribution is a *right* is just that - a claim that you have repeated with nothing to back it up.
If this were true (I don't know that it would be), how bad would that be? In other words, how important is it that our entertainment be polished?
I'm not going to make the full argument here, but I'll throw out some thoughts.
The pyramids are great works of architecture. Wonders of the world. But we don't build them anymore. The cost is not worth the benefit. (As it happens, one of those costs was slave labor.)
I love television. I prefer good TV shows to good movies. Has TV made the world a better place? Research strongly points to television as a reason for a collapse in social and political participation since the 1960s. There's no question of abolishing television, but should we step in and enforce onerous regulations in order to preserve it as it is?
What is better: listening to highly polished music, or learning to make music and playing for your friends? We used to *do* culture instead of simply observing it. Most people could sing or play an instrument. Many more played sports. Drawing was a basic skill for educated people. But we were not professional artists. We were not usually able to both compose the song *and* sing it. We drew on the culture around us, and transformed it to enrich our lives. Now our entertainment is provided to us, and for the most part we don't contribute. Copyright as it stands entrenches that passive role because wit forbids us from most forms of participation - particularly when we use the everyday digital media and technology through which we live our lives and connect with the people we care about.
Funny thing. In the U.S. at least, taking credit for someone else's work is not a copyright infringement. Fraud perhaps, dishonest yes, but copyright no. Nor, as economist David Levine argues, should there be a special law for that: private law is fully up to the task, even harsher than anything the government might do. If you are a tenured academic (his example) or a journalist and you plagiarize, you could be out of a job. If you commit fraud, there's a law for that. If you lie persistently, it reflects on your character. Sure, lies can do tremendous harm. Think of how much damage they can do in romantic relationships. But we don't have laws for that. We shouldn't. The honest truth is that copyright (all of it in the U.S., 99.9% of in jurisdictions that respect moral rights) is about money. Preventing plagiarism is a totally bogus argument for copyright.
Copyright was created as a monopoly privilege, not a property right. In recent years maximalists have waged an ideological campaign to redefine copyright. The individual property rights position is radical. In the U.S., it is also well outside what the constitution allows: copyright is a regime intended to further the public interest (advancement of arts and sciences), *not* preserve or create some kind of individual rights. That individual "moral rights" approach is from the European (particularly French) tradition, and has been rejected by the United States. Lawrence Lessig (who is quite moderate) asserts that the only justification for copyright is the creation of works that would not otherwise exist.
You can talk about the foundation of copyright in moral rights in theory, but in practice it is almost never used for anything other than economic gain: and in fact promotes control and consolidation by media companies to the exclusion of all others - including artists.
It wasn't until quite recently (the 19th-20th centuries) that the idea of moral rights and individual originality even made sense. Many cultures still don't recognize it. It's a product of a particular culture at a particular moment in history. In practice, it creates all sorts of inconsistencies. It's a romantic notion that has very little to do with how creativity actually operates. It's interpretation and fleshing-out by courts has led to extremely weird and contradictory outcomes. For example, a doctor can patent your genes without your consent because he is the "creator" of his discovery. I can film people being shot in a demonstration, and *I* own the images - they have no right to them. But if those people are performing theater, all of a sudden copyright steps in. Copyright demands hard boundaries between what is "mine" and what is "yours", when no such hard boundaries really exist. Governments can create laws and call them "rights", but they are legal fictions, not reflections of some preexisting reality.
Better? What has that to do with anything? What does it even mean? Nothing I said has anything to do with being "better" than anyone.
What I care about is the kind of society I live in. It's about the kind of people around me, how I treat them and how they treat me. More: everyone has done wrong. Someday it may be me or someone I care about who is caught in the machinery of justice. When that happens, I hope I will see justice done, not vengeance. Me being some kind of "better" wouldn't do me a damn bit of good. Call me "worse" for all I care. It does not affect my argument one bit.
In what kind of world may vengeance be fun? Our world. History is drenched with it. The cheers and parties when criminals are executed. The bloodthirst of the Roman arena. The celebration and entertainment of public hangings in our countries only a few generations ago. What would you like to see done to the banksters who robbed our government and broke our economy? Vengeance is satisfying. It can be fun. And when the government does it, utterly destructive.
Thank you. How we treat bad people is not about them, it is about us. Saddam deserves to suffer for his crimes. But when we surrender to the bloodthirsty urge for vengeance (which can be satisfying, even - as in this case - fun), it is ourselves we corrupt. Saddam does not matter: he is beyond redemption. It is we who matter. If we treat the foulest human beings with a level of decency (decorum, seriousness), then we make it easy to respect each other. If, on the other hand, we give in to our baser instincts, we lay the groundwork for lashing out selfishly whenever it feels good.
Want to respect Saddam's victims? Then prosecute and punish him with all the seriousness, formality, and consideration you can muster. The kind of immature self-gratification described here ultimately dismisses those he tortured and killed. Their persecutor was an evil man, not a clown.
(P.S.: Just in case someone misreads me, I loved the movie. There's a big difference between that and the legitimate serious acts of the American people's political representatives and government.)
As for any product there is some substitutability: cell phones compete with chocolate bars for youth spending, for example. But by that's not a very useful definition of monopoly. Furthermore, intellectual works are a special case because they benefit from network effects. The more people play D&D, the greater the value of D&D to those who already play. That's actually the main source of value. So it is very, very hard to compete with an established product. You could come up with an OS with all Windows' features, but without a user base it wouldn't be worth much at all. The value is in the network, not in the product itself. Similarly for D&D. It's nice in theory to say a bit of competition is possible, but in practice intellectual monopolies are extremely strong.
Actually, market competition pushes price toward the marginal cost of production. At least that's the theory, and it's part of the justification for copyright. In practice it seldom works out that way. In any case, they have have a copyright monopoly, so they have complete control over supply and they don't have a whole lot of worries about competition.
What we have here is copyright failure. Copyright was created solely for the benefit of society the public. (At least that's the case in the U.S.: other countries have moral rights. But in this case we have work-for-hire for a company legally required to place profit above all else, so the moral rights issue is moot.) Here we have copyright working to do the opposite of what it is intended to do. Copyright failure.
Mind, with illegal filesharing their control over supply is illusory. They're acting as though they had a monopoly, but they don't. Which, as so many have pointed out, is why this is so stupid.
Continued undermining of the social contract is a serious problem. Social collapse often happens when people no longer find the current regime in their interest, and simply stop supporting it. Every time the social contract is violated, as it is in the case of copyright, as it is with the bailouts of the financial sector, people turn away. I don't think the risk is that they will revolt, but that if there is a credible challenge to the existing system they will simply fail to act to preserve it. Most revolutions are the work not of the masses, but of a relatively small group. They are able to succeed when the population lacks the conviction to oppose them. Thus many Romans welcomed in the barbarians. Hitler was allowed to become chancellor even though most Germans did not support him. A minority in the American colonies was able to foment revolution. The Communists became a credible threat in China when the Nationalists failed to act effectively against the Japanese. And so on.
When the change happens, it is a phase change, not a gradual transformation. A dynamic system like a society follows a pattern. It never exactly repeats itself, it is in constant flux, yet it can be bounded. Most perturbations are not sufficient to break the pattern - but when they are, the system leaves the pattern, and stabilizes around a new pattern. Just as an economy can handle a lot of stress and maintain high employment, but with enough of a shock it can stabilize in a new depression pattern of low employment.
This is my relatively uniformed opinion - I haven't read enough in this area - so it may be tainted by superficial pop intellectualism. But it does worry me. Persisting with law that is neither supported not observed by the majority of the population serves to undermine the rule of law. Continued evidence of the deep corruption of the system wears away at support for it. The process may seem quiet, but it does have consequences.
Mind you, the Russian scholar you cite is operating in fantasy land. He thinks the American midwest will join Canada and Alaska will be annexed by Ruassia. I'm Canadian, and I can tell you that's just plain nuts.
Please. I have met a number of real intellectuals - scholars in relevant fields of study, including economics, philosophy, communication, library science, and law. Not one of them would agree with the grandparent. At one conference session on the topic, a radical professor declared that copyright should be abolished. There was not a word of opposition. Only Friday night I listened to a lecture by a visiting economist (David Levine) saying the same thing from the not-so-radical perspective of neoclassical economics. I have been harshly critical of copyright, yet my professors often suggest I am too soft - that I underemphasize the extent to which copyright favors corporate control over the interests of artists and citizens.
I believe the head of the Swedish Pirate Party has said the brains in this debate are on our side. He is right. The evidence does not support strong copyright. The theory does not support strong copyright. Numerous government studies do not support strong copyright. When activists protest excessive copyright regulation, we find the other side does not even try to engage in rational debate. Often they say nothing at all. When they do respond, they ignore our critiques or they make ignorant claims. Recently a lawyer critiquing the film RiP: A remix manifesto was so ignorant as to suggest that today's Internet would not exist if programmers had not had copyright to ensure they were paid for their work!
I will not say there is no relatively objective scholarly support for strong copyright. There must presumably be some, but I have have not seen it[1]. I have encountered exactly one kind of supporter for radical copyright (other than those with no clue of the issues): people who for whom strong copyright is in their interest, or who believe (often mistakenly) that it is. No disinterested intellectuals, no one representing the public interest. The grandparent makes nothing more than a statement of interest and opinion, with no argument and no significant evidence.
[1] I do want to see contrary arguments - if you know of sound ones (by which I mean honest and competent, whether you think they are correct is another matter), tell me.