The only reason they need the infrastructure is because people use
Yes.
And the lion's share of that need for more infrastructure is people using it a lot. Otherwise, they could use less infrastructure and provide lower prices
No. The majority of the cost of infrastructure is digging down fiber. Once that fiber is down you can send pretty much any amount of information on it with only some smaller differences in equipment cost.
In effect, you're the asshole who gets the filet mignon and wants to split the check. Uh, no.
No. You are the asshole who wants to pay less for driving on the shared neighbourhood road because you only drive on it once a week, even though you completly needed the road to get from your house to store.
Bottom line is, if there's a shared resource and you're using 100x as much as the average person, why the hell SHOULDN'T you pay more?
Yes, he should pay more. Assuming the average person uses 2GB/month and he is using 200GB/month. Then he should pay $8 more at 4 cent/GB (pretty fair rate). Of course, he is probably already paying $20 more because he is paying for the higher speed connection (that doesn't cost more for the internet company) while you are using the cheap low speed connection. That means that in reality he should be paying $12 less. So, he is subsidising you, and not the other way around. Who is the leecher now?
While I agree TWC is ripping people off, your assertion that it only costs $0.16 is stupid. First, they need to also pay electricity, pay for employees to take your service calls, employees to do line repairs, repair existing lines when they are damaged, the gas to get those trucks out to repair the line, the lease on the truck itself, and then still have enough for upgrades and to make a profit (there's nothing wrong with making profit... but the way they are going about it by overselling is not right either).
Pretty much all of that goes into BASE cost. That is cost that anyone on their network should pay just for subscribing to TW.
The only thing that should count towards data transfer fees is
* Cost for transfer on non peering networks (backbones usually) * Cost for upgrading to higher capacity routers * Possible extra energy costs
So what are the costs of those:
* $0.016/GB was what the grandparent estimated. And as some of the traffic can be peered or stay within the network, the actual cost for an ISP is less * 4-5% of the average subscribe fee if you believe the $150mil upgrade vs $4100mil revenue figures posted elsewhere in this slashdot discussion. * The extra energy costs are probably ignorable
However I look at it, there is simply no case to be made for the current TW caps (well, except that they want to make more profit and want to prevent internet TV).
With customers expecting to pay less and less for more and more
Yeah, those poor computer harddrive manufacturers. Why can't they charge $1/MB (or whatever) like in the good old times.
It's nowhere near so cut and dried. Pricing has been where it's at because everyone has been trying to kill or prevent competition.
No. Pricing has been where it is because send data around the world using fiber is damn cheap as long as you have put the fiber into ground once. The evidence is in countries like Sweden, Japan, Finland and South Korea. And it just gets cheaper each year.
Note specifically, that we are talking about capping, so we can directly throw any talk about digging costs out the window as irrelevant. Digging costs should be included in the base cost, not in some additional data transfer fee. And that basically invalidates the usual population density excuses.
Ok, I admit, installing new hardware also costs money and more with less population density, but far less so than digging. And such modernizing should be part of the regular maintenance schedule of a growing technology like internet.
But the truth is, that there are lots of interests that don't like the idea of cheaper bandwidth for different reasons. Maybe they are TV providers that could see their main market disappear. Or maybe they are selling expensive "business" connections that would become obsolete with new technology. But it is always the same. Without competition in some way (regulated or not), everything grinds to a halt because of greed of the current giants.
"You should remember that "free market" is an agenda-riddled ideology, no different then, say, Communism. Some of its tenets work, some of the time, given certain conditions, but it is not an All Encompassing Divine Solution To Everything And Anything as some would have it."
So true. And it is sad, because the free market is one of the more powerful tools realized in the human history.
But if you only have a hammer, every problem will start to look like a nail. And to extend on that. If all you have is a hammer and a broken saw, that doesn't mean you should use the hammer to split the plank. Instead you should fix the saw or get a new one.
No. It is just proof that a good percentage of the population have no moral objections to cheating.
Since the beginning of multiplayer gaming, maphacks, bots and other cheating devices have been created to serve weak minded losers. It has nothing to do with wether the game is fun or not.
If there is a way to gain an advantage by cheating, a certain percentage of the population will do so. How large of a percentage depends on the type of people in question, but I would wager that it is largely dependent on the behavior of leaders and public figures as well as cultural pressure.
Not all taxes, just income tax. By forcing people who work to pay tax on what they make you're penalizing them.
Umm, and who would you tax? Those who doesn't have work? I think I can see a small problem with that idea.
The main thing the state should tax is productivity, because that is the only thing that really is worth shit. And income is a good measure of productivity. As a bonus, you can also do it progressivly (with 80-90% at the top margin bracket) to ensures that all efficency increases benefits society as a whole, and not only the one inventing the efficency increase. History shows that high top bracket margin taxes aren't bad for the economy and instead generally seems to be positive. (probably because to much of a wealth inequality is bad, but I am only speculating on that one)
To complement income taxes you should also have some lower property taxes. Enough to punish those who don't use existing capital and resources productivly, but not so high that owning capital becomes burdensome and subject to frequent liquidity problems.
I have yet to see a real good reason for sales taxes except from the usual bullshitters. Sales taxes are messy, regressive and attacks the weakest link in the economy, which is that production doesn't work unless you have buyers.
What is looked down upon and which is plain villainous is making the efficency increasing discovey that allows you to fire everyone (not bad in itself), and earning millions and millions of dollars (not bad in itself) and then not being willing to share the profits of the efficency increasing discovery (villainous).
If you make a big discovery, you should expect to pay a good amount of the profits it makes in taxes (much more if you make the profits private). Is it fair? Yes. You were allowed to use resources, equipment and knowledge provided by the society. The society protected you and ensured that you could make the discovery in peace. It allows you to keep a good piece of profit to reward you efforts.
What society shouldn't allow is you taking all or next to all of the profits. Because, what is the good in society for that. A very similar reasoning goes for people who are allowed to play with huge amount of resources like most CEOs.
Well, they can't do much worse than the private sector banks all over the world that funneled billions and billions into worthless toxic assets.
And the goverment doesn't spend billions and billions of dollars advertising just so that the consumer can be convinced that product A is better than product B, even though they are both crap. And those billions of dollars doesn't even count in the time lost because of advertising pollution. Just TV advertising is responsible for tens of billions of lost man hours per year.
Also goverment functions general are less often underused.
Of course, if you live in a country with a coorporate run goverment, then I can't really help you. That is like the worst of all sides.
So now FDR was responsible for the stock market crash? This is just getting better and better.
FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years
I have read the god damn essay, and nowhere in it is there a mention of this so called 7 year prolonging. Of course, I don't expect you to have read the essay. Reading the sensationalist headline was probably enough. Interestingly enough, most people who link to that article, use it to critize the Obama stimulus package, even though the essay in question never said anything about the FDR stimulus being bad. The essay mainly focused on wagefixing combined with private trusts/monopolies being bad.
The essay does have a good point in that FDR allowed trusts to be formed resulting in monopolic behavior. It is one of the bigger criticisms of his policies, something which he in hindsight also came to see.
But I would still be heavily wary of trusting the theoretical model of Cole and Ohanian too much. Especially the exact numbers of their model that would make 1933-1936 the most golden years in US history in terms of GDP growth.
When FDR came to office in 1933, the unemployment was very high. Without some radical changes, you could have looked at something far worse. FDR tried several things. Some of which worked well, and some of which worked less well. In hindsight, he should of course only have choosen the things that worked well like stimulus, social security and high top bracket margin taxes.
They did? All it looks like is that the cable companies have been reusing their already existing infrastructure for internet purposes and charging huge amounts of money for the privilege.
Now that their existing infrastructure no longer can handle the pressure of increasing demand, and all the money has been payed out in bonuses or funneled to sub contractors (who pay themself bonuses), they implement harder caps. Preferably while buying local monpoly laws from local goverments so that noone else can interfere.
Meanwhile ADSL and fiber building ISPs are scaling up and aiming for the future.
Atleast that is how it looks to me as an outsider living in Sweden. The $ per GB costs cited are simply far too high to be anything but a way to artifically hide last mile problems. Upgrading long distance bandwidth should mostly consist in changing equipment along existing fiber routes. Unless the state of the US fiber network is even more sad than I have been lead to believe.
There is a kind of meta exception to that reasoning.
By being transparent about whistleblowers you decrease the transparency by eliminating the whistleblowers. It is the same reason why being tolerant toward intolerant people isn't really a good idea. Or why you shouldn't really feel a need to respect people that doesn't respect others.
I do agree with your last sentence is good though. There is no reason for wikileaks to hide those providing them with services and other support. That is just the same lack of transparency that goverments and other organisations have.
OK, but then you should read the actual research, which happens to not discredit the FDR new deal spending . (which is what you were implying in your first post by responding to someone talking about fdr like spending)
What the research does critique is the cartelization that FDR created to stabilize wage prices. Coorporate-Goverment interaction. Similar stuff to what Obama is doing with the car and bank industry right now. Stuff that many free market leftwing people disagree with. Even FDR himself became concerned with it during his second term and began changing the legislation.
I still think calling the article (not the research) bullshit is very appropriate.
* Article: "By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high" * Original research paper: "Measured unemployment uctuated between 16 percent in 1934 to about 11 percent in 1939." * Revised research paper: "unemployment ranged between 9 and 16 percent between 1934 and 1939"
The article obviously didn't get its facts from the actual research paper.
Also, for the research itself. It very much suffers from being created with the mindset of supply side economics. Which becomes far more obvious when looking at the newspaper editorials that followed with the report. I still think the criticism from what you call "left wing rag" is valid. While the research itself has a very valid point (cartels are bad), it is rarely presented with that focus.
That article you referred to is a commonly used right wing bullshit article. I'll just respond with this link.
Beyond what is mentioned in the link I posted, I also want to say that I really find the 1936 vs 1943 laughable. Claiming that a right wing president could have gotten the 1933-1943 GDP growth in 1933-1936 just shows how insanely desperate the conservatives are. Well, atleast if you are going to lie, lie big.
"Right, because market-driven health care has never hurt anybody."
Only people that doesn't matter.
It is just like the right wings memo that claim that American health care is better because some Canadians go to the US. That of course completly ignores that the main selling point of national healthcare isn't that it is better for the lucky few who can afford to pay for US health care. It is that it is better for the large majority that really can't afford it. (also the canadian healthcare disapproval rate is quite low)
Still, back to the main topic. I don't trust Obama one bit. The biggest advantage over Bush is that he isn't a fundamentalist. But as most mainstream politicians he is stuck in the usual tunnelvision/corruption. I don't really care to distinguish between tunnelvision resulting from limited social circles and true corruption. They both lead to the same kind of non representative politics.
they just don't want to pay the price for bandwidth to the rest of the world
Bandwidth is cheap, very cheap. The only time it gets expensive is when relying on old outdated technology, like the very old T1/T3 technologies or the current last mile US networks. (On a seperate note. I truly cringe every time I see someone using T1s as way to show how expensive bandwidth is. It just shows how far behind the US is, not only in technology, but also mentality)
When you have a modern fiber network in place, shuffling relativly large amounts of data around is cheap. Not free, but nearly so compared to the costs of these old networks. The cost of Time Warner's laughable top tier at 40GB/month is at most a dollar of data transfer on a modern network. Probably less.
Just call it for the Authoritanism that it is. Mixing in left-right economics in it is just what those in power wants. The left blames the right. The right blames the left. And meanwhile the Authoritarians in power who are mostly left-right agnostic laugh as noone pays any real attention to them.
No, freedom is not about being able to do stuff that others agree with. Freedom is about being able to do stuff that others disagree with. Of course, most western people seem to have forgotten that, or never understood it in the first place.
Sometimes freedom clashes with the freedom of another and in those cases we need he law. But the law needs to weigh the relative freedoms closely and not allow the more important freedoms to conquer over lesser ones.
other parties are going to re-evaluate their stance on filesharing
The problem is that noone trusts the other parties any longer. They lied in the last election to keep the pirate party down. But now all their lies, both regarding integrity and file sharing have been exposed. It is going to be much more difficult for them the next time around.
If they can't afford something, why should they become entitled to it for free? Music and movies aren't required for survival. This isn't food/water/medicines/education we're talking about. Illegal downloaders are definitely not victims.
They sure as hell are victims. Their culture is robbed from out of under them by destructive laws that reduce the total spread of art for the purpose to further the traditional rich capitalistic interests.
Only an naive fool falls for the sweet talk about copyright creating more works of art. Economics says otherwise. Copyright at the best can create more variation, but the cost is that the total amount decreases due to inefficency of distribution.
Just like privatising all water supplies may give you more unique suppliers, but the over all amount of water supplied will go down.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like the legitimate way to have an advantage on an MMO is to have lots of time to kill. Spending 100 hours per week playing is not cheating.
Simple. If the Terms of Service of your MMO allows it, it isn't cheating. If they forbid it, it is cheating.
That's fantasyland
Well, what you posted is.
The only reason they need the infrastructure is because people use
Yes.
And the lion's share of that need for more infrastructure is people using it a lot. Otherwise, they could use less infrastructure and provide lower prices
No. The majority of the cost of infrastructure is digging down fiber. Once that fiber is down you can send pretty much any amount of information on it with only some smaller differences in equipment cost.
In effect, you're the asshole who gets the filet mignon and wants to split the check. Uh, no.
No. You are the asshole who wants to pay less for driving on the shared neighbourhood road because you only drive on it once a week, even though you completly needed the road to get from your house to store.
Bottom line is, if there's a shared resource and you're using 100x as much as the average person, why the hell SHOULDN'T you pay more?
Yes, he should pay more. Assuming the average person uses 2GB/month and he is using 200GB/month. Then he should pay $8 more at 4 cent/GB (pretty fair rate). Of course, he is probably already paying $20 more because he is paying for the higher speed connection (that doesn't cost more for the internet company) while you are using the cheap low speed connection. That means that in reality he should be paying $12 less. So, he is subsidising you, and not the other way around. Who is the leecher now?
While I agree TWC is ripping people off, your assertion that it only costs $0.16 is stupid. First, they need to also pay electricity, pay for employees to take your service calls, employees to do line repairs, repair existing lines when they are damaged, the gas to get those trucks out to repair the line, the lease on the truck itself, and then still have enough for upgrades and to make a profit (there's nothing wrong with making profit... but the way they are going about it by overselling is not right either).
Pretty much all of that goes into BASE cost. That is cost that anyone on their network should pay just for subscribing to TW.
The only thing that should count towards data transfer fees is
* Cost for transfer on non peering networks (backbones usually)
* Cost for upgrading to higher capacity routers
* Possible extra energy costs
So what are the costs of those:
* $0.016/GB was what the grandparent estimated. And as some of the traffic can be peered or stay within the network, the actual cost for an ISP is less
* 4-5% of the average subscribe fee if you believe the $150mil upgrade vs $4100mil revenue figures posted elsewhere in this slashdot discussion.
* The extra energy costs are probably ignorable
However I look at it, there is simply no case to be made for the current TW caps (well, except that they want to make more profit and want to prevent internet TV).
With customers expecting to pay less and less for more and more
Yeah, those poor computer harddrive manufacturers. Why can't they charge $1/MB (or whatever) like in the good old times.
It's nowhere near so cut and dried. Pricing has been where it's at because everyone has been trying to kill or prevent competition.
No. Pricing has been where it is because send data around the world using fiber is damn cheap as long as you have put the fiber into ground once. The evidence is in countries like Sweden, Japan, Finland and South Korea. And it just gets cheaper each year.
Note specifically, that we are talking about capping, so we can directly throw any talk about digging costs out the window as irrelevant. Digging costs should be included in the base cost, not in some additional data transfer fee. And that basically invalidates the usual population density excuses.
Ok, I admit, installing new hardware also costs money and more with less population density, but far less so than digging. And such modernizing should be part of the regular maintenance schedule of a growing technology like internet.
But the truth is, that there are lots of interests that don't like the idea of cheaper bandwidth for different reasons. Maybe they are TV providers that could see their main market disappear. Or maybe they are selling expensive "business" connections that would become obsolete with new technology. But it is always the same. Without competition in some way (regulated or not), everything grinds to a halt because of greed of the current giants.
"You should remember that "free market" is an agenda-riddled ideology, no different then, say, Communism. Some of its tenets work, some of the time, given certain conditions, but it is not an All Encompassing Divine Solution To Everything And Anything as some would have it."
So true. And it is sad, because the free market is one of the more powerful tools realized in the human history.
But if you only have a hammer, every problem will start to look like a nail. And to extend on that. If all you have is a hammer and a broken saw, that doesn't mean you should use the hammer to split the plank. Instead you should fix the saw or get a new one.
No. It is just proof that a good percentage of the population have no moral objections to cheating.
Since the beginning of multiplayer gaming, maphacks, bots and other cheating devices have been created to serve weak minded losers. It has nothing to do with wether the game is fun or not.
If there is a way to gain an advantage by cheating, a certain percentage of the population will do so. How large of a percentage depends on the type of people in question, but I would wager that it is largely dependent on the behavior of leaders and public figures as well as cultural pressure.
Not all taxes, just income tax. By forcing people who work to pay tax on what they make you're penalizing them.
Umm, and who would you tax? Those who doesn't have work? I think I can see a small problem with that idea.
The main thing the state should tax is productivity, because that is the only thing that really is worth shit. And income is a good measure of productivity. As a bonus, you can also do it progressivly (with 80-90% at the top margin bracket) to ensures that all efficency increases benefits society as a whole, and not only the one inventing the efficency increase. History shows that high top bracket margin taxes aren't bad for the economy and instead generally seems to be positive. (probably because to much of a wealth inequality is bad, but I am only speculating on that one)
To complement income taxes you should also have some lower property taxes. Enough to punish those who don't use existing capital and resources productivly, but not so high that owning capital becomes burdensome and subject to frequent liquidity problems.
I have yet to see a real good reason for sales taxes except from the usual bullshitters. Sales taxes are messy, regressive and attacks the weakest link in the economy, which is that production doesn't work unless you have buyers.
Not really.
What is looked down upon and which is plain villainous is making the efficency increasing discovey that allows you to fire everyone (not bad in itself), and earning millions and millions of dollars (not bad in itself) and then not being willing to share the profits of the efficency increasing discovery (villainous).
If you make a big discovery, you should expect to pay a good amount of the profits it makes in taxes (much more if you make the profits private). Is it fair? Yes. You were allowed to use resources, equipment and knowledge provided by the society. The society protected you and ensured that you could make the discovery in peace. It allows you to keep a good piece of profit to reward you efforts.
What society shouldn't allow is you taking all or next to all of the profits. Because, what is the good in society for that. A very similar reasoning goes for people who are allowed to play with huge amount of resources like most CEOs.
Well, they can't do much worse than the private sector banks all over the world that funneled billions and billions into worthless toxic assets.
And the goverment doesn't spend billions and billions of dollars advertising just so that the consumer can be convinced that product A is better than product B, even though they are both crap. And those billions of dollars doesn't even count in the time lost because of advertising pollution. Just TV advertising is responsible for tens of billions of lost man hours per year.
Also goverment functions general are less often underused.
Of course, if you live in a country with a coorporate run goverment, then I can't really help you. That is like the worst of all sides.
The CEO who is capable of only marginally improving productivity can generate billions of dollars
But noone has been able to show a real relation between CEO pay and performance so using the supply & demand argument is flawed.
When did it become government's job to make sure everyone's pay is fair?
Since the majority wants fairness to some degree because they realize that it makes the society as a whole more stable and pleasant.
I know, it sucks that people worse than you want to have some freedom also. Freedom should only be for have's and not have not's.
So now FDR was responsible for the stock market crash? This is just getting better and better.
FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years
I have read the god damn essay, and nowhere in it is there a mention of this so called 7 year prolonging. Of course, I don't expect you to have read the essay. Reading the sensationalist headline was probably enough. Interestingly enough, most people who link to that article, use it to critize the Obama stimulus package, even though the essay in question never said anything about the FDR stimulus being bad. The essay mainly focused on wagefixing combined with private trusts/monopolies being bad.
The essay does have a good point in that FDR allowed trusts to be formed resulting in monopolic behavior. It is one of the bigger criticisms of his policies, something which he in hindsight also came to see.
But I would still be heavily wary of trusting the theoretical model of Cole and Ohanian too much. Especially the exact numbers of their model that would make 1933-1936 the most golden years in US history in terms of GDP growth.
When FDR came to office in 1933, the unemployment was very high. Without some radical changes, you could have looked at something far worse. FDR tried several things. Some of which worked well, and some of which worked less well. In hindsight, he should of course only have choosen the things that worked well like stimulus, social security and high top bracket margin taxes.
They built out some infrastructure
They did? All it looks like is that the cable companies have been reusing their already existing infrastructure for internet purposes and charging huge amounts of money for the privilege.
Now that their existing infrastructure no longer can handle the pressure of increasing demand, and all the money has been payed out in bonuses or funneled to sub contractors (who pay themself bonuses), they implement harder caps. Preferably while buying local monpoly laws from local goverments so that noone else can interfere.
Meanwhile ADSL and fiber building ISPs are scaling up and aiming for the future.
Atleast that is how it looks to me as an outsider living in Sweden. The $ per GB costs cited are simply far too high to be anything but a way to artifically hide last mile problems. Upgrading long distance bandwidth should mostly consist in changing equipment along existing fiber routes. Unless the state of the US fiber network is even more sad than I have been lead to believe.
There is a kind of meta exception to that reasoning.
By being transparent about whistleblowers you decrease the transparency by eliminating the whistleblowers. It is the same reason why being tolerant toward intolerant people isn't really a good idea. Or why you shouldn't really feel a need to respect people that doesn't respect others.
I do agree with your last sentence is good though. There is no reason for wikileaks to hide those providing them with services and other support. That is just the same lack of transparency that goverments and other organisations have.
OK, but then you should read the actual research, which happens to not discredit the FDR new deal spending . (which is what you were implying in your first post by responding to someone talking about fdr like spending)
What the research does critique is the cartelization that FDR created to stabilize wage prices. Coorporate-Goverment interaction. Similar stuff to what Obama is doing with the car and bank industry right now. Stuff that many free market leftwing people disagree with. Even FDR himself became concerned with it during his second term and began changing the legislation.
I still think calling the article (not the research) bullshit is very appropriate.
* Article: "By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high"
* Original research paper: "Measured unemployment uctuated between 16 percent in 1934 to about 11 percent in 1939."
* Revised research paper: "unemployment ranged between 9 and 16 percent between 1934 and 1939"
The article obviously didn't get its facts from the actual research paper.
Also, for the research itself. It very much suffers from being created with the mindset of supply side economics. Which becomes far more obvious when looking at the newspaper editorials that followed with the report. I still think the criticism from what you call "left wing rag" is valid. While the research itself has a very valid point (cartels are bad), it is rarely presented with that focus.
That article you referred to is a commonly used right wing bullshit article. I'll just respond with this link.
Beyond what is mentioned in the link I posted, I also want to say that I really find the 1936 vs 1943 laughable. Claiming that a right wing president could have gotten the 1933-1943 GDP growth in 1933-1936 just shows how insanely desperate the conservatives are. Well, atleast if you are going to lie, lie big.
"Right, because market-driven health care has never hurt anybody."
Only people that doesn't matter.
It is just like the right wings memo that claim that American health care is better because some Canadians go to the US. That of course completly ignores that the main selling point of national healthcare isn't that it is better for the lucky few who can afford to pay for US health care. It is that it is better for the large majority that really can't afford it. (also the canadian healthcare disapproval rate is quite low)
Still, back to the main topic. I don't trust Obama one bit. The biggest advantage over Bush is that he isn't a fundamentalist. But as most mainstream politicians he is stuck in the usual tunnelvision/corruption. I don't really care to distinguish between tunnelvision resulting from limited social circles and true corruption. They both lead to the same kind of non representative politics.
"It's nothing new folks, everyone knows the most popular search word on the Internet."
What everyone "knows" is usually wrong.
they just don't want to pay the price for bandwidth to the rest of the world
Bandwidth is cheap, very cheap. The only time it gets expensive is when relying on old outdated technology, like the very old T1/T3 technologies or the current last mile US networks. (On a seperate note. I truly cringe every time I see someone using T1s as way to show how expensive bandwidth is. It just shows how far behind the US is, not only in technology, but also mentality)
When you have a modern fiber network in place, shuffling relativly large amounts of data around is cheap. Not free, but nearly so compared to the costs of these old networks. The cost of Time Warner's laughable top tier at 40GB/month is at most a dollar of data transfer on a modern network. Probably less.
Well, I think he still has a far higher credibility than if his username was "genericceo".
Procuring it for free, when the artist expressly forbids it, is stealing
No, it isn't. I can't steal something that you don't own. The artist only owns the copies that he posess. All other copies are owned by other people.
The issue is not about improving our selection of music or movies.
Improving the selection by reducing the total spread. Idiocy.
socialist-fascist tyranny
Just call it for the Authoritanism that it is. Mixing in left-right economics in it is just what those in power wants. The left blames the right. The right blames the left. And meanwhile the Authoritarians in power who are mostly left-right agnostic laugh as noone pays any real attention to them.
No, freedom is not about being able to do stuff that others agree with. Freedom is about being able to do stuff that others disagree with. Of course, most western people seem to have forgotten that, or never understood it in the first place.
Sometimes freedom clashes with the freedom of another and in those cases we need he law. But the law needs to weigh the relative freedoms closely and not allow the more important freedoms to conquer over lesser ones.
other parties are going to re-evaluate their stance on filesharing
The problem is that noone trusts the other parties any longer. They lied in the last election to keep the pirate party down. But now all their lies, both regarding integrity and file sharing have been exposed. It is going to be much more difficult for them the next time around.
If they can't afford something, why should they become entitled to it for free? Music and movies aren't required for survival. This isn't food/water/medicines/education we're talking about. Illegal downloaders are definitely not victims.
They sure as hell are victims. Their culture is robbed from out of under them by destructive laws that reduce the total spread of art for the purpose to further the traditional rich capitalistic interests.
Only an naive fool falls for the sweet talk about copyright creating more works of art. Economics says otherwise. Copyright at the best can create more variation, but the cost is that the total amount decreases due to inefficency of distribution.
Just like privatising all water supplies may give you more unique suppliers, but the over all amount of water supplied will go down.