"13 years I screwed up, was 19 and messed with someone I knew who was 15. I was turned in out of spite from someone else. Guess what? A 15 year can't drop the charges. She even sent a letter to the judge saying she didn't want me to go to prison. Lucky me - he gave me 6 years instead of the ten the DA was asking for. Lost my career, my finances, my marriage. Was in prison surrounded by perverts with drug cases. You know what is considered acceptable behavior in there? Masturbating in front of officers. Finding yourself someone who isn't violent and making them your "punk". These are the folks who should be registered as sex offenders. Remember these things whenever you hear a rap song that glorifies prison life."
I think there is more to your story. While I don't think you should have served 6 years, I don't feel that sorry for you. At 19, I knew not to have sex with a 15 year old.
" Hell, there's probably quite a few on/. and I'm the only one with courage (or at least as much as someone posting as Anon COWARD can have) to post."
This much is obvious, since every time a child-porn or sex-offender related article comes up, there are countless number of posts trying to abolish any sort of sex-offender list and reduce the legal age of consent.
"1. This just gives them more reason to not update, and go underground."
I say good luck with this. "going underground" is more difficult than you may think.
"2. So many things these days get you labeled as a sex offender, that the odds are the person you're shunning is actually a decent human who had nothing to do with what your mind thinks."
so many things? getting a traffic ticket will not get you on the sex offenders list. Getting caught pissing in public might, so will having sex with an underage girl/boy. There are also varying levels of sex offenders, which is clearly displayed on all of the state search pages.
"Actually this slightly reminds me of another country and another time, where some parts of the population had to wear badges showing a yellow star, so everyone would know them..."
Are you actually trying to compare Nazi germany to having to register as a sex offender when you fuck little kids or show your penis in public?
"have you thought about the posibility that when robots do all the jobs that no one wants to do, productivity might increase by enough to allow all the people to live comfortably. Also I don't think that valuing people only by their economic worth is very nice."
It may not be "nice", but it needs to be discussed. If you have no education or skill, how will you make money if a robot can do the exact same thing? It's not like the need for money is going to magically disappear.
Even if this does happen, I would imagine the unions would have their say..and force companies to hire people anyway, even if it isn't necessary.
"Large businesses and media companies have tried to do to the Internet what they did to Christmas...turn it into a cash machine. Unfortunately, the Internet was not designed as a profit vehicle, it was designed to share information and facilitate communication. As a user above mentioned, there are plenty of people who contribute content for free, as I am doing now, or who host their own websites, as I also do."
Most free websites take content that is received from professionals.
"Personally, I look forward to the day when the net returns to a library and public square instead of a shopping mall, where I am charged for looking in the windows."
I don't. Without the commercialization of the Internet, we would not have the technology we have today (no high-speed Internet, Internet-enabled phones, Wifi). Not to mention the amount of jobs it created (and will create). If no money is involved, it needs funding and who is going to pay for it? the government?
I am fortunate enough to have lived through the beginning of the Internet (when it was only in universities), and I am glad the technology has advanced (and is still advancing).
"No, you have Stallman confused with open source evangelists. Stallman has always maintained that whether or not free software is "better" is irrelevant; that its being freer is which matters"
You are correct. So, Stallman doesn't care if software works, is more secure, or is technically superior. Only that it is "free".
I find it funny that he has to basically force people to use open source through laws.
"Have you seen the kind of absolute shit being put on your TV or being sold in record stores? The big media giants are collapsing because they're becoming increasingly less capable of producing things that aren't, at best, mediocre, or at worst, just plain bad."
All industries are suffering because the US is in a recession.
The only people I see hurt are small, independent record stores.
"And then they are billed more for studio time than the advance, making the advance effectively ZERO."
And who's fault is it?
like I said, it's now well known that you will get screwed when you sign a contract with a recording company. If you choose to do it anyway...it's your own fault. Kind of like smoking.
"The music and movie industries are by and large losing money because of a glut of cheap and free content online."
The only cheap and free content I see online is the same content produced by the movie and music industry but shared for free. Everything else is not that popular and not worth much to consumers.
"I'm not saying that piracy isn't causing money loss right now, but even if they could stop 100% of piracy, their paid content would still converge towards being nearly worthless."
No it wouldn't. Show me free alternatives to poplar movies/music that people are downloading.
Piracy is what causes paid content to approach $0.
do you see the top search terms? 99% are all paid, copyrighted, content. Go to any torrent site and it's the same.
"One of the biggest causes for the drop in TV viewing has been increasing use of things like YouTube, and I don't mean for watching TV shows. It's a case of one source of entertainment replacing another. Simple as that."
Some guy showing a picture of his cat has not replaced professionally produced television shows.
"I made a feature length movie a few years ago, and including paying the talent for their time, all equipment costs (purchasing), rights, location costs, etc. was in the single digit thousands. There are plenty of aspiring actors and actresses out there who will work for next to nothing for the opportunity to get their names and faces out there. There are plenty of people willing to help out in all sorts of ways, assuming you don't do production in a place where everybody is too worried about liability (like Califonria)."
Technology has gotten better over the years and people now expect more. This is why costs have increased to create a movie. The video game industry is another example of this. Would a game like space invaders or adventure sell on the xbox 360? Probably not. People want something more like halo.
"in an environment where distribution costs are near zero like the Internet---the millions of people who watched "Leave Britney Alone" tells us that people get a lot of entertainment out of cheap sources, too."
it's free (and nearly worthless), so it's like apples and oranges. Try charging people $5 to see it and tell me if it is still popular.
"Look what digital cameras have done to companies like Kodak, and this concept should become immediately obvious."
This is a terrible example. Kodak may have lost money because people are no longer buying film. But, Their content isn't being shared for free and downloaded. This is the difference. There is still a demand (and a market) for all of the music and movies being shared on the Internet. Proof can be found on torrent sites.
People won't share or download something that isn't worth anything. The more it appears on those sites, the more value it has (and..a market).
"Now that the cost of production and distribution is much, much lower"
Do you have proof of this? The cost of production has gone up, because people's expectations of a "good movie" has also gone up (because technology is better). How much do you think the latest star trek movie cost to produce? Distribution costs may have been reduced, but were they ever that high? The content (because it costs so much to produce) is always worth more than the blank media used to distribute it.
"Music and movies are commodities now"
Not true. A commodity would be something like corn, where anyone could *produce* it. The backstreet boys still sound different than N'sync, no matter how much you say otherwise. Also, copying is not the same as producing.
"If people are unable to get music by a particular artist, they'll just move on to somebody else"
it's called competition. This has been the case for many years.
"The law of diminishing marginal returns. The more content people have access to, the less the value of access to additional content. Therefore, even if people were not pirating content, the big media giants' content would eventually become nearly worthless anyway merely because of the availability of such vast quantities of legal free content online."
This may be true to some extent, but studio music that is professionally created will always be more popular than some piece of shit song written using a PC in some guys basement.
"Paying millions of dollars for a big name star made some sense when making a movie required millions of dollars in equipment and cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in film and development costs alone; these days, such a business model is an anachronism"
you keep talking about how cheap it is to make a film...with no proof. Have you heard of something called the screen actors guild? They require companies to pay actors a certain amount of money for each scene...which isn't cheap.
Hell, Almost all of Kevin Smith's movies cost at least $20,000 to produce (and this is considered cheap).
I couldn't get a production cost, however it made $2,122,561 and it was considered a flop, so I am assuming it cost more than this to produce it.
"There's no reason for somebody to release music through a big label except for the ability to reach their listeners"
Actually, this will force artists to go with big labels. Most independent artists make a living selling music (because they are not as well known, gigs pay out very little and merchandise doesn't sell as much). If they can't sell them anymore due to sharing, the only way to make a living is to sign with a big label.
"Given a choice between two commodities that provide similar gain, people naturally choose the cheaper commodity. Given two commodities with the same cost, people naturally choose the commodity that provides a bigger gain. This means that they will always tend towards the cheaper online content over more expensive content through other means unless the more expensive content is dramatically better to provide differentiation (making it no longer a commodity)."
We aren't talking about paid content with a different, free alternative. We are talking about paid content that you can get for free on the Internet. Most people, given the choice, will choose the free one. This says more about human nature than about the value of the content or the business model.
"Have you seen the kind of absolute shit being put on your TV or being sold in record stores? The big media giants are collapsing because they're becoming increasingly less capable of producing things that aren't, at best, mediocre, or at worst, just plain bad."
Star trek just made $72.5 million this weekend. Also, the other flaw in you argument is that shitty music, movies, and software will not be pirated.
Has illegal software increased or decreased in the past couple of years?
"When 90% of the cost of an item has nothing to do with the so-called 'artist,' piracy barely impacts the artist at all."
Artists aren't forced at gunpoint to go with a recording label. Many times, they are also advanced money from the label before the album even is made.
"Especially when, in the case of movies, they are all paid upfront and thanks to Hollywood accounting (read: Sony CEO ripping them off further) never see a share in profits even if their contracts say they should"
Now you are just making shit up. The screen actors guild was created for this very reason. Look it up.
"I defend piracy because the MAFIAA deserve to starve. If 'artists' (most of this so-called group are anything but, consisting more of Uwe Boll types) want a fair deal from me, they need to offer me one."
You sound like a thief that has many excuses as to why you like to steal. Good job.
"See also NIN."
i'm glad you brought this up. Did you know he tried this with another artist and it completely failed:
"But it won't make much money. The 28,000 people who have purchased the album so far are less than the number that paid for the CD four years ago, and despite the money going right to Reznor and Williams, it's not pure profit. They had to pay for studio time, engineers, the creation of the download site, and bandwidth (including for those who paid nothing). The result is that "nobody's getting rich off this project."
so you have one experiment by one artist that worked reasonably well. I'm still not convinced that this is a viable model.
"I find a funny twinge of discomfort in reading this, because it almost seems like you are implying that "infringement" is worse than "theft"
Infringement is worse than theft. With theft, you lose one physical object. With mass infringement, you may lose your entire business (more and more people know they can get it for free and as a result, don't pay, torrent/free sites may also get higher keywords than the original site..and lose potential customers).
"It's a distribution problem. The old model is obsolete, and these idiots have lived like kings on it for too long."
It's not a distribution problem. It's a thief problem. Even if you offered a movie in all the proper formats for download (only if you paid for it). Piracy would not be reduced. In fact, it would probably increase.
see: Itunes. Did this stop people from illegally copying music?
"I do think there's an entitlement problem. I just think it's the other way around. You have these old dinosaurs of the industry who've been the gate keepers of media production for so long, they don't know how to react to a little competition."
You're joking..right?
Competition would be small independent artists selling their music online through myspace/social networking sites outside the norm of a recording label.
Torrent sites that leech off of the actual artists are just thieves.
"these guys will either have to take control of the distribution and make a profit of it, or someone else will."
Eventually, this will just hurt the consumer. We will just get less quality art, movies, software, and music because there will be no profit in it.
"Personally I get angry when someone complains that their intangible item is taken. I've been a vendor. I've paid for equipment and have been stiffed, have items physically stolen, that in some cases had to end up paying tax on. I WISH I had a product where having stuff stolen from me does not directly risk my ability to do business. I'm sure my situation does not compare, but I think this question falls under the reality check topic."
At least if a physical object is stolen, you can just buy another physical item. When software is pirated, it could potentially ruin the entire business. This is because the spread of the "Free version" influences people to download it for free instead of buying it. This can clearly be seen by just putting this guys book into google. Potential buyers will see the free version first.
"People who read technical books greatly add the technical abilities of our society. That's something a society should encourage. As copying becomes easier and easier to do my suggestion would be that the world government compensate authors according to some valuation based on readership and technical evaluation of merit. Information should, by and large, be free."
why can't people just pay for the fucking book if they want to read it?
and who do you think would pay to compensate these authors? I will make it easy for you: your taxes.
"They give the false impression that there is a market where there isn't one."
Something that is unknown and not wanted is generally not pirated or shared. So, if he is able to find his book online, someone must find it good enough to share and therefore, there is a market. How much of a market? It's hard to tell either way because of piracy.
"This is like kids passing around copies of Photoshop or Autocad."
and why are they passing around photoshop and autocad? (hint: They are two of the most popular windows applications and definitely have markets). These are terrible examples.
If you aren't willing to pay for something (and the original author wants you to pay them), then don't use it or download it. Otherwise, it has value to you and you should pay for it.
"How is this relevant to the cost of creating copies? In this day and age it is the inherent nature of information that the full cost is in creating the first copy, all subsequent copies are effectively free of cost."
The first person to purchase a game isn't charged $1,000,000. Each person pays a small amount so the original company can make up the cost of creating it (and hopefully, a profit).
"Publishers will need to find a means of getting customers to finance the first copy, it is only a matter of time before the amortization scheme finally keels over and dies."
I guess if you want to see the entire gaming industry destroyed, you can keep promoting your ideals.
The people copying and sharing digital IP aren't actually creating anything new and in the long run, are only hurting themselves (if they actually enjoy playing good games).
The "scheme" is a good business model. A company creates something of value, and if you like it, you pay for it (and if you don't like it..you don't download it or pay for it).
Don't worry, eventually all software will be service-based.
"The Automobile was the "death" (well there are very, very few manufacturers any more) of the carriage and buggy whip industries too"
Only...the automobile was itself a new product. People downloading shit for free still need the original producers to create the content. They are merely making copies, not producing something new.
so please come up with an argument that actually makes sense.
"But this isn't caused by piracy, this is the very nature of digital information. The cost, and value, of one extra copy is always going to be negligible now that we have ubiqutous and efficient machinery for producing such."
you aren't producing anything, you are making digital copies. It is still just as difficult to create the original.
If you purchase a video game in the store, would you like to get a blank cd in the box? Or do you want the actual content on the cd too? You are saying that it is only worth the media it is printed on, which is just not the case.
And yes it is caused by piracy.
If you want to take a look at the world of games without commercial backing, look at tuxRacer. It will be the future of the industry if companies know they will not be able to make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
"13 years I screwed up, was 19 and messed with someone I knew who was 15. I was turned in out of spite from someone else. Guess what? A 15 year can't drop the charges. She even sent a letter to the judge saying she didn't want me to go to prison. Lucky me - he gave me 6 years instead of the ten the DA was asking for. Lost my career, my finances, my marriage. Was in prison surrounded by perverts with drug cases. You know what is considered acceptable behavior in there? Masturbating in front of officers. Finding yourself someone who isn't violent and making them your "punk". These are the folks who should be registered as sex offenders. Remember these things whenever you hear a rap song that glorifies prison life."
I think there is more to your story. While I don't think you should have served 6 years, I don't feel that sorry for you. At 19, I knew not to have sex with a 15 year old.
" Hell, there's probably quite a few on /. and I'm the only one with courage (or at least as much as someone posting as Anon COWARD can have) to post."
This much is obvious, since every time a child-porn or sex-offender related article comes up, there are countless number of posts trying to abolish any sort of sex-offender list and reduce the legal age of consent.
"1. This just gives them more reason to not update, and go underground."
I say good luck with this. "going underground" is more difficult than you may think.
"2. So many things these days get you labeled as a sex offender, that the odds are the person you're shunning is actually a decent human who had nothing to do with what your mind thinks."
so many things? getting a traffic ticket will not get you on the sex offenders list. Getting caught pissing in public might, so will having sex with an underage girl/boy. There are also varying levels of sex offenders, which is clearly displayed on all of the state search pages.
"Um, here's a thought: if he wasn't a registered sex offender, this app wouldn't have helped."
Um, here's a thought: When he gets caught the first time and is put on this list, it may save the next person from getting raped/molested.
"Actually this slightly reminds me of another country and another time, where some parts of the population had to wear badges showing a yellow star, so everyone would know them..."
Are you actually trying to compare Nazi germany to having to register as a sex offender when you fuck little kids or show your penis in public?
Seriously?
"have you thought about the posibility that when robots do all the jobs that no one wants to do, productivity might increase by enough to allow all the people to live comfortably. Also I don't think that valuing people only by their economic worth is very nice."
It may not be "nice", but it needs to be discussed. If you have no education or skill, how will you make money if a robot can do the exact same thing? It's not like the need for money is going to magically disappear.
Even if this does happen, I would imagine the unions would have their say..and force companies to hire people anyway, even if it isn't necessary.
"Large businesses and media companies have tried to do to the Internet what they did to Christmas...turn it into a cash machine. Unfortunately, the Internet was not designed as a profit vehicle, it was designed to share information and facilitate communication. As a user above mentioned, there are plenty of people who contribute content for free, as I am doing now, or who host their own websites, as I also do."
Most free websites take content that is received from professionals.
"Personally, I look forward to the day when the net returns to a library and public square instead of a shopping mall, where I am charged for looking in the windows."
I don't. Without the commercialization of the Internet, we would not have the technology we have today (no high-speed Internet, Internet-enabled phones, Wifi). Not to mention the amount of jobs it created (and will create). If no money is involved, it needs funding and who is going to pay for it? the government?
I am fortunate enough to have lived through the beginning of the Internet (when it was only in universities), and I am glad the technology has advanced (and is still advancing).
"No, you have Stallman confused with open source evangelists. Stallman has always maintained that whether or not free software is "better" is irrelevant; that its being freer is which matters"
You are correct. So, Stallman doesn't care if software works, is more secure, or is technically superior. Only that it is "free".
I find it funny that he has to basically force people to use open source through laws.
"Have you seen the kind of absolute shit being put on your TV or being sold in record stores? The big media giants are collapsing because they're becoming increasingly less capable of producing things that aren't, at best, mediocre, or at worst, just plain bad."
All industries are suffering because the US is in a recession.
The only people I see hurt are small, independent record stores.
"And then they are billed more for studio time than the advance, making the advance effectively ZERO."
And who's fault is it?
like I said, it's now well known that you will get screwed when you sign a contract with a recording company. If you choose to do it anyway...it's your own fault. Kind of like smoking.
"Some torrent didn't steal Wolverine, a dishonest employee did."
True, but the torrent sites still made the torrent available to the masses. They are just as responsible.
"The music and movie industries are by and large losing money because of a glut of cheap and free content online."
The only cheap and free content I see online is the same content produced by the movie and music industry but shared for free. Everything else is not that popular and not worth much to consumers.
"I'm not saying that piracy isn't causing money loss right now, but even if they could stop 100% of piracy, their paid content would still converge towards being nearly worthless."
No it wouldn't. Show me free alternatives to poplar movies/music that people are downloading.
Piracy is what causes paid content to approach $0.
here is a simple example: http://www.torrentomega.com/Popular-torrents-complete-list
do you see the top search terms? 99% are all paid, copyrighted, content. Go to any torrent site and it's the same.
"One of the biggest causes for the drop in TV viewing has been increasing use of things like YouTube, and I don't mean for watching TV shows. It's a case of one source of entertainment replacing another. Simple as that."
Some guy showing a picture of his cat has not replaced professionally produced television shows.
"I made a feature length movie a few years ago, and including paying the talent for their time, all equipment costs (purchasing), rights, location costs, etc. was in the single digit thousands. There are plenty of aspiring actors and actresses out there who will work for next to nothing for the opportunity to get their names and faces out there. There are plenty of people willing to help out in all sorts of ways, assuming you don't do production in a place where everybody is too worried about liability (like Califonria)."
Technology has gotten better over the years and people now expect more. This is why costs have increased to create a movie. The video game industry is another example of this. Would a game like space invaders or adventure sell on the xbox 360? Probably not. People want something more like halo.
"in an environment where distribution costs are near zero like the Internet---the millions of people who watched "Leave Britney Alone" tells us that people get a lot of entertainment out of cheap sources, too."
it's free (and nearly worthless), so it's like apples and oranges. Try charging people $5 to see it and tell me if it is still popular.
"Look what digital cameras have done to companies like Kodak, and this concept should become immediately obvious."
This is a terrible example. Kodak may have lost money because people are no longer buying film. But, Their content isn't being shared for free and downloaded. This is the difference. There is still a demand (and a market) for all of the music and movies being shared on the Internet. Proof can be found on torrent sites.
People won't share or download something that isn't worth anything. The more it appears on those sites, the more value it has (and..a market).
"Now that the cost of production and distribution is much, much lower"
Do you have proof of this? The cost of production has gone up, because people's expectations of a "good movie" has also gone up (because technology is better). How much do you think the latest star trek movie cost to produce? Distribution costs may have been reduced, but were they ever that high? The content (because it costs so much to produce) is always worth more than the blank media used to distribute it.
"Music and movies are commodities now"
Not true. A commodity would be something like corn, where anyone could *produce* it. The backstreet boys still sound different than N'sync, no matter how much you say otherwise. Also, copying is not the same as producing.
"If people are unable to get music by a particular artist, they'll just move on to somebody else"
it's called competition. This has been the case for many years.
"The law of diminishing marginal returns. The more content people have access to, the less the value of access to additional content. Therefore, even if people were not pirating content, the big media giants' content would eventually become nearly worthless anyway merely because of the availability of such vast quantities of legal free content online."
This may be true to some extent, but studio music that is professionally created will always be more popular than some piece of shit song written using a PC in some guys basement.
"Paying millions of dollars for a big name star made some sense when making a movie required millions of dollars in equipment and cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in film and development costs alone; these days, such a business model is an anachronism"
you keep talking about how cheap it is to make a film...with no proof. Have you heard of something called the screen actors guild? They require companies to pay actors a certain amount of money for each scene...which isn't cheap.
Hell, Almost all of Kevin Smith's movies cost at least $20,000 to produce (and this is considered cheap).
Clerks: $27,575 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks)
mallrats: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallrats)
I couldn't get a production cost, however it made $2,122,561 and it was considered a flop, so I am assuming it cost more than this to produce it.
"There's no reason for somebody to release music through a big label except for the ability to reach their listeners"
Actually, this will force artists to go with big labels. Most independent artists make a living selling music (because they are not as well known, gigs pay out very little and merchandise doesn't sell as much). If they can't sell them anymore due to sharing, the only way to make a living is to sign with a big label.
"Given a choice between two commodities that provide similar gain, people naturally choose the cheaper commodity. Given two commodities with the same cost, people naturally choose the commodity that provides a bigger gain. This means that they will always tend towards the cheaper online content over more expensive content through other means unless the more expensive content is dramatically better to provide differentiation (making it no longer a commodity)."
We aren't talking about paid content with a different, free alternative. We are talking about paid content that you can get for free on the Internet. Most people, given the choice, will choose the free one. This says more about human nature than about the value of the content or the business model.
"Have you seen the kind of absolute shit being put on your TV or being sold in record stores? The big media giants are collapsing because they're becoming increasingly less capable of producing things that aren't, at best, mediocre, or at worst, just plain bad."
Star trek just made $72.5 million this weekend. Also, the other flaw in you argument is that shitty music, movies, and software will not be pirated.
Has illegal software increased or decreased in the past couple of years?
"When 90% of the cost of an item has nothing to do with the so-called 'artist,' piracy barely impacts the artist at all."
Artists aren't forced at gunpoint to go with a recording label. Many times, they are also advanced money from the label before the album even is made.
"Especially when, in the case of movies, they are all paid upfront and thanks to Hollywood accounting (read: Sony CEO ripping them off further) never see a share in profits even if their contracts say they should"
Now you are just making shit up. The screen actors guild was created for this very reason. Look it up.
"I defend piracy because the MAFIAA deserve to starve. If 'artists' (most of this so-called group are anything but, consisting more of Uwe Boll types) want a fair deal from me, they need to offer me one."
You sound like a thief that has many excuses as to why you like to steal. Good job.
"See also NIN."
i'm glad you brought this up. Did you know he tried this with another artist and it completely failed:
see: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/01/gettin-niggy-with-it-reznor-releases-numbers-for-online-experiment.ars
My favorite part:
"But it won't make much money. The 28,000 people who have purchased the album so far are less than the number that paid for the CD four years ago, and despite the money going right to Reznor and Williams, it's not pure profit. They had to pay for studio time, engineers, the creation of the download site, and bandwidth (including for those who paid nothing). The result is that "nobody's getting rich off this project."
so you have one experiment by one artist that worked reasonably well. I'm still not convinced that this is a viable model.
"Parent is AC and intentionally inflammatory. Don't feed the trolls."
also, people should know that on slashdot opposing groupthink=troll.
"I find a funny twinge of discomfort in reading this, because it almost seems like you are implying that "infringement" is worse than "theft"
Infringement is worse than theft. With theft, you lose one physical object. With mass infringement, you may lose your entire business (more and more people know they can get it for free and as a result, don't pay, torrent/free sites may also get higher keywords than the original site..and lose potential customers).
"It's a distribution problem. The old model is obsolete, and these idiots have lived like kings on it for too long."
It's not a distribution problem. It's a thief problem. Even if you offered a movie in all the proper formats for download (only if you paid for it). Piracy would not be reduced. In fact, it would probably increase.
see: Itunes. Did this stop people from illegally copying music?
"I do think there's an entitlement problem. I just think it's the other way around. You have these old dinosaurs of the industry who've been the gate keepers of media production for so long, they don't know how to react to a little competition."
You're joking..right?
Competition would be small independent artists selling their music online through myspace/social networking sites outside the norm of a recording label.
Torrent sites that leech off of the actual artists are just thieves.
"these guys will either have to take control of the distribution and make a profit of it, or someone else will."
Eventually, this will just hurt the consumer. We will just get less quality art, movies, software, and music because there will be no profit in it.
"Personally I get angry when someone complains that their intangible item is taken. I've been a vendor. I've paid for equipment and have been stiffed, have items physically stolen, that in some cases had to end up paying tax on. I WISH I had a product where having stuff stolen from me does not directly risk my ability to do business. I'm sure my situation does not compare, but I think this question falls under the reality check topic."
At least if a physical object is stolen, you can just buy another physical item. When software is pirated, it could potentially ruin the entire business. This is because the spread of the "Free version" influences people to download it for free instead of buying it. This can clearly be seen by just putting this guys book into google. Potential buyers will see the free version first.
"Piracy doesn't hurt sales as much as obscurity does."
They are nearly the same.
obscurity: nobody knows about your book and you get $0.
piracy: a very low percentage buy, but your sales numbers race toward $0 as it becomes easier and easier for people to find it on google.
"People who read technical books greatly add the technical abilities of our society. That's something a society should encourage. As copying becomes easier and easier to do my suggestion would be that the world government compensate authors according to some valuation based on readership and technical evaluation of merit. Information should, by and large, be free."
why can't people just pay for the fucking book if they want to read it?
and who do you think would pay to compensate these authors? I will make it easy for you: your taxes.
"They give the false impression that there is a market where there isn't one."
Something that is unknown and not wanted is generally not pirated or shared. So, if he is able to find his book online, someone must find it good enough to share and therefore, there is a market. How much of a market? It's hard to tell either way because of piracy.
"This is like kids passing around copies of Photoshop or Autocad."
and why are they passing around photoshop and autocad? (hint: They are two of the most popular windows applications and definitely have markets). These are terrible examples.
If you aren't willing to pay for something (and the original author wants you to pay them), then don't use it or download it. Otherwise, it has value to you and you should pay for it.
"How is this relevant to the cost of creating copies? In this day and age it is the inherent nature of information that the full cost is in creating the first copy, all subsequent copies are effectively free of cost."
The first person to purchase a game isn't charged $1,000,000. Each person pays a small amount so the original company can make up the cost of creating it (and hopefully, a profit).
"Publishers will need to find a means of getting customers to finance the first copy, it is only a matter of time before the amortization scheme finally keels over and dies."
I guess if you want to see the entire gaming industry destroyed, you can keep promoting your ideals.
The people copying and sharing digital IP aren't actually creating anything new and in the long run, are only hurting themselves (if they actually enjoy playing good games).
The "scheme" is a good business model. A company creates something of value, and if you like it, you pay for it (and if you don't like it..you don't download it or pay for it).
Don't worry, eventually all software will be service-based.
"The Automobile was the "death" (well there are very, very few manufacturers any more) of the carriage and buggy whip industries too"
Only...the automobile was itself a new product. People downloading shit for free still need the original producers to create the content. They are merely making copies, not producing something new.
so please come up with an argument that actually makes sense.
"But this isn't caused by piracy, this is the very nature of digital information. The cost, and value, of one extra copy is always going to be negligible now that we have ubiqutous and efficient machinery for producing such."
you aren't producing anything, you are making digital copies. It is still just as difficult to create the original.
If you purchase a video game in the store, would you like to get a blank cd in the box? Or do you want the actual content on the cd too? You are saying that it is only worth the media it is printed on, which is just not the case.
And yes it is caused by piracy.
If you want to take a look at the world of games without commercial backing, look at tuxRacer. It will be the future of the industry if companies know they will not be able to make a profit.