As I have said in many posts before, I don't support the abolition of copyright. Only a reform of copyright, which among other things recognises that copyright should only be intended to limit commercial exploitation of works.
Your entire post is a great example of why no copyright is a bad thing. Too bad that's not actually what I, Norwegian Venstre or the Swedish Pirate Party are advocating.:-)
You can't make a DVD-RIP (or HD-DVD rip or Blu-Ray rip) if no DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is out on the market.
The advent of HDTV is going to spoil people quality wise even more, making them demand higher-quality copies.
Distributing high-quality video on peer to peer is possible, but slow and rather complicated. I for one believe it could be done a lot better if those who produce movies today got their act together. And I'd be willing to pay too.
As it is, the pirated product is *better* than the commercial product. Sure, it's infinitely cheaper too. That doesn't mean I wouldn't pay for a high-quality video stream or fast download from the producer.
The fact that a copy is available for free on the Internet doesn't mean people won't pay for it given the opportunity. There are a lot of precedents of works available for free being able to make considerable money off donations.
It'd make much more sense to sell copies of the book online myself, even if the only thing that prevents my customers from making copies themselves is a kind request and the backing of the law.
Great idea! Cutting out the middleman is just what's naturally happening in much of the world.
However, the law is effectively toothless as it is. People *are* making copies en masse, and that's a good thing too. Because it gets your book into audiences it would never have reached before.
Consider this. How many people would have heard about your self-published work through any other medium if it hadn't been shared? You may make a lot more on a freely available book soliciting donations and selling hardcopies than on a much smaller number of guaranteed sales.
I just don't agree with that - and not because of DRM. I think many people are prepared to pay for entertainment they like - althuogh there'll always be a few tightarses.
I just think you made my point for me.
What I meant by "You can't make money off distribution" is that the business model of the record company, for example, is dead. There's no need for a distributor such as a record company where distribution of art is trivial.
This doesn't mean people aren't willing to pay. If an artist puts up music on his web page, letting me download it, and then solititing donations after the fact -- they first of all get a much larger part of the cake than they would otherwise. I know I have done this several times. Their cake may even be bigger. As you said, most people are prepared to pay for entertainment they like. There'll always be a few tightwads out there, true. But those same tightwads will be spreading buzz and the music to other people who aren't so tight.
"The argument of whether artists should be paid or not isn't really relevant to the discussion."
Of course it is - how can people dedicate their life to something if they can't eat? I'm not talking about pop music - I'm talking about real music - the kind of music that will disappear in the scenario you describe.
I'm not sure what kind of real music you're talking about, but many real musicians I've spoken to pretty much agree with my viewpoints.
And unfortunately, in the Real World, even today, people who dedicate themselves to producing music usually end up working regular jobs supporting themselves, and making very little on the actual production of recording and other work other than performances. This won't really change with copyright reform.
"I don't support commercial copyright infringement"
Can you elaborate on why this is? Seems like a double standard to me - either you support intellectual property or you don't. What about all those torrent/p2p websites and their advertising - why is that not commercial copyright infringement?
False dichotomy.
We don't believe somebody has the right to make money off somebody else's art. Every time somebody pays for an illegitimate copy, that is very real money that could have gone to the artist going to some profiteering middleman instead.
However, when a file is copied, nothing is lost by the artist, rather society is enriched by the increased preponderance and amount of art in their reach. A lot of the downloads of the Internet don't mean the person would have bought a copy of the work to start with. A lot of it is equivalent to the window shopping people did before the evil pirates invented the Internet. Like listening to FM radio, or listening to music in listening booths at record stores, or even borrowing a CD from a friend or god forbid, a music tape.
No, that's product placement, which incidentally already happens. Blame that on the pirates I gues...
Embedded advertising is when you place a little logo in the corner of the screen, just the same way as when you watch TV today. Instead of a logo for the Sci-Fi channel you could put in a logo for a sponsor or some kind.
So how does an author "perform" a book? How does a director "perform" a movie? How does Bungie "perform" Halo? Your party platform sucks badly. It's so shortsighted and ill-considered as to be beyond belief. Even with regards to music, how does a song writer (not performer) get paid in accordance to the popularity of his song?
"Performing a work" can mean a lot more than simply standing on a stage playing an instrument. The choice of words may have been ill-conceived, but what I meant to say is that you always have the right to charge for your *labour*, and that's nothing I want to remove from anybody. We also don't want to forbid people from selling copies of their own works.
I should also clarify something from the start. The Pirate Party does not want to abolish copyright, merely reform it. We want to narrow the scope of copyright only to cover commercial duplication of a work, and we also want to reduce the length of copyright to somewhere between 5 and 20 years after the publication of the work.
With this background, let's take your examples one at a time.
How does one "perform" a book? I guess that depends on the type of book. For a work of non-fiction, maybe some technical writing, you can be hired by a firm who publishes technical books to write a book on that particular subject. You'd get paid for your labour, and that's pretty much what's reasonable in the rest of the world. Of course, that only works if you have a patron willing to pay you for your labour.
What if you don't? Let's consider what happens with the current system of copyrights. The person writes a book, with no guarantee whatsoever of any revenue, sends his manuscripts to a bunch of publishers, and if he's very lucky, gets a deal. This is far from a guaranteed source of money as it is. This is irrespective of whether you're covered by current or by proposed reformed copyright.
The difference with reformed copyright is that promotional copies of your book will be available on the Internet for browsing, a very useful tool when deciding to buy a hardcopy online. (That's one thing missing with online bookstores today -- you can't browse in them, usually.) Sure, the person could theoretically get the file, and read it on his screen, or even print it on his laser printer. It shouldn't be too hard to sell hardcopies given those pretty poor options.
The fact that a book is available for free online isn't really much different from your local public library really, except it's a lot more accessible, and not only limited to the more popular titles.
In fact, I have bought lots of books this way, by reading them online first, and then ordering them off the net. Many of these purchases simply wouldn't have happened if I couldn't browse them online first.
How does a director "perform" a movie? Well. He doesn't. But he gets paid to direct the movie by a movie studio, who in turn makes money on the movie by showing them in movie theaters. The movie theater experience is something a lot of people like to pay for. Movie studios on average break even and even turn a profit even before the movie hits DVD.
How does Bungie "perform" Halo? Ah, well, that one is a little more difficult. But I can tell you how Blizzard are "performing" World of Warcraft, by selling subscriptions to an online world.
And how does a songwriter get paid in proportion to his popularity? He would have signed a deal with the artist in question performing his song to give him compensation according to whatever deal they work out. Sure, there'll be MP3's floating around on P2P of it too. But that doesn't matter, because people will still pay to download the songs directly from the artist as long as they're in a nice interchangable format. Why? Because P2P can suck, and the convenience might be worth the money.
I assume the song writer could even sign a deal with the artist in question giving him a percentage of whatever the artists get through live performances, similar to how
Are you really saying that the people producing media, who are in an exclusive position to be permitted to make a profit of what they're distributing can't do a better job than a bunch of random people on the Internet?
I for one can think of a lot of things that suck majorly with peer to peer which could easilly be rectified if the actual people producing the content came out and distributed it on the Internet properly.
I don't know if anybody in this discussion is advocating a abolision of copyright.
The Swedish Pirate Party, which I am a member of, advocates a reduction in the term of copyright to somewhere betweeh 5 or 20 years after the work has been produced, as well as a reduction in scope of copyright only to cover commercial copying.
This is a far cry from abolishing copyright.
And as far as I know, Norway's Venstre doesn't want to abolish copyright either, they also want it reformed, not abolished.
It's funny how this "point" is always bandied about by those who want to abolish copyright protections, and yet the vast majority of of music (/movies/books/whatever) that are being pirated are created by artists who are out to make money.
Seems to me that artists who aren't out to make money could already freely distribute their work or allow it to be copied for free. In fact, I'd think that they would have a better shot at it now than if we got rid of copyright protection, since they wouldn't have to compete in that arena with the money-loving artists that you look down on. Strange how it doesn't seem to work that way...
The artists you mention have one huge advantage. Mainstream media coverage.
The fact that the mainstream media covers them in a much larger extent means they get the fame, and the large sales, and therefore the large numbers of downloads that goes with it.
Like it or not, these commercial artists are our current culture, but I for one wouldn't mind it changing and developing and transforming itself into something else. It always does anyway.
I get translated to the Swedish chef? This is because I linked to a Youtube clip with the muppets a few posts back isn't it?:-) Great. Just great.
Anyway, it's not really a question of business models. They will attend to themselves. There's nothing in law mandating a central cartel of large record companies distributing music, for example. As reality changes, law changes, and so the business models will change with it.
The fact is that everything today can be and will be copied, and it makes no sense try to keep the technology bottled up as it is. Business will find a way, it always does.
Because they didn't have a choice in where they were born, and whether they were born at all. We have a responsibility to look after our own, at least by making sure we're not *actively* screwing them over.
So, it's OK to make free copies of my software, but you are willing to pay for a live performance?
In that case, I think I'll book Stockholms Konserthus for a very special performance of Der WindowServer, with some very special appearances from little-seen system software.
I must say, the idea sounds intriguing.:-)
Seriously though, I'll just repeat a segment of an earlier post I made:
I never said the performances should be live. A programmer can get a good job maintaining software, if there is insufficient public interest to do this. This is especially the case for a lot of vertical-market stuff like industrial control, billing, payroll, business administration and a lot of boring stuff like that. In addition to that, there are a lot of cases out there of programmers being paid to work on open source. And there are a lot of business models out there that don't rely on the income generated by sales of the programs itself. And they somehow manage to pay their programmers through other sources of income.
All good points. This doesn't disqualify movie theaters as a business model, though.
Movie theaters need to get their act straight too, but that's a seperate discussion really.
The common thread in the entire discussion I guess is for the entertainment industry to stop mistreating the few loyal customers they still have. You can attract a lot more flies with honey than vinaeger.
Video is harder to justify. Certainly, high-value stuff like Star Wars III would be impossible. Of course, good low-budget stuff like Star Wars IV would still be very doable. I've also heard that cheap anime is "only" tens of grand per episode. So film might survive, if it were funded by hardcore fans.
You're forgetting about movie theaters.:-) They'll still want to stay in business, and therefore finance creation of high-budget motion pictures.
Maybe if some jerk distributes an unknown work to a million people, another thousand people will buy his book. Better than zero.
And unfortunately, the law doesn't stop this from happening today. The law is toothless. Either you give it more teeth, and make your country into a police state, or you let go.
Now try to tell a writer how they're going to get paid, when it will be perfectly legal to scan and post a book after sale number one. Once more, for the learning disabled; Copyright is not about money at all, it is about the author getting to decide how to distribute their work, not a bunch of I want it free'ers.
Please tell a writer how they're going to get paid, when there's no guarantee that the manuscript he sends out to a bunch of publishers will be accepted or not.
Not tell him what a great chance he could have of making *some* money by putting his book out on Internet, and selling hardcopies to interested parties.
This business model works. I have bought several books (technical books, but the idea should extend to fiction too) using this exact method.
Sure, you can't get paid for every single person who reads your book. Just like the way you can't get paid by every single person who listens to your music as they walk past you on the street. The Internet has made everybody a street performer, whether they like it or not. The only way to stop that from happening is not to perform.
I think that if you want people to make good art, they need to be paid for it.
I've never said they shouldn't be paid for it. I'm just saying they can get paid for it in better ways than by limiting the natural flow of media in today's world.
Unfortunately for the artists, and catastrophically for art distributors, you can't make money off distribution any more. Not changing the law isn't going to change that. The world changes, doors close, other doors open. When the storm comes, you can either build a wind shelter or a wind mill.
The argument of whether artists should be paid or not isn't really relevant to the discussion. The difference is how they're going to get paid. Getting paid for art is damn hard today as it is, and to be honest, I don't really think copyright reform is going to change that a lot.
On a side note, what would you think of China mass-producing cheap copies of Volvo cars, and exporting them to the world? That'd be a bit of a knock to the Swedish economy...
I don't support commercial copyright infringement, and neither does my party. But, conversely, if somebody found a way to reproduce cars for free -- I'd take two please.:-)
Yeah, and as a guy who actually PRODUCES digital work, may I point out that I don't believe that YOU, sir, have an inherent right to take my work, which takes me a huge amount of time to create, redistribute it, and not pay me for work that I created. (And here's a thought, dumbshit: how the fuck do I "perform" my 3D computer graphics work live? How does a programmer "perform" writing an application in front of you? Guess once the original "performance," i.e., the act of creation, is finished, you think it's fair game to simply copy it as many times as you want and redistribute it?)
I never said the performances should be live. A programmer can get a good job maintaining software, if there is insufficient public interest to do this. This is especially the case for a lot of vertical-market stuff like industrial control, billing, payroll, business administration and a lot of boring stuff like that. In addition to that, there are a lot of cases out there of programmers being paid to work on open source. And there are a lot of business models out there that don't rely on the income generated by sales of the programs itself. And they somehow manage to pay their programmers through other sources of income.
As for 3D graphics work. I am not sure exactly what field of work you work in, but assuming for a moment that you work in some kind of animation, motion pictures for example, movie production will still be able to make money. The big money in movies these days aren't in DVD:s (they're just cream on the top), but on movie theater showings. And I assume that the company wanting to make a new movie to show in said theaters will hire you to do the actual job, not through empty promisises of future royalties.
But maybe you work in 3D graphics like CAD for some kind of industrial application, or maybe even architectural. In all these cases, you have a right to charge for your *work*. Just like anybody else. Because I sure as hell am not saying you should do your work for free.
I love how these Eurotrash kids who probably want the Almighty Socialist State to provide them with Cradle-to-Grave Everything would undoubtedly get pissed off as hell if some group of people actually took THEIR benefits, without contributing anything to the commonweal. Hey Mr. Pirate -- whatever happened to the amazing socialist concept of people actually being PAID for their LABOR? Or are you actually advocating "heartless capitalism," where the fruit of someone's labor is simply taken from them, and they're "exploited?" Help us out here, dude. Or is it okay to rip off working artists if "the masses" are doing it?
Look. I'm not out to stop you for getting paid for your labour. Nothing wrong with that.
I'm not convinced unlimited private copying of digital data is a rip-off. As far as I see it, it's just a great channel for marketing, not to mention giving a great social benifit in the form of a publically accessible media library. But then again, maybe you think public libraries for good old fashioned books is a bad idea and unfair to the authors.
Either way, irrespective of what the law says, for better or worse, unlimited copying of digital data is here, and it unstoppable. When the storm comes, there are two kinds of people out there. Those who build wind shelters, and those who build windmills.
And yeah, I know I'm gonna get modded as a troll or flamebait (assuming that the mods actually let my message through at all) but Jesus Christ, this Swedish Pirate guy is a tool.
Moderators can not delete posts on slashdot. The only case I know of when a post has been deleted on slashdot has been in response to a copyright claim by the church of scientology. (Irony of all things...)
And I always browse at -1 anyway. The moderation system fucking sucks. I'd rather not have a bunch of random people with mod points this week to decide what I should read.
I was aware of pharmaceutical companies giving generous samples to doctors as advertising. But I don't think pharmaceutical companies give a rats ass about poor and elderly people. If they did, they wouldn't be raising such a stink over generic drugs in third world countries.
Pharmaceutical companies are only charitable when it suits their own purposes.
I'm very familiar with how early printing presses work. I just didn't feel it neccessary to go into details.
Either way, neither the Xerox machine nor the printing press (early or modern) are in the same degree as revolutionary as the Internet. Both might as well be just as clunky by modern standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Strawman.
:-)
As I have said in many posts before, I don't support the abolition of copyright. Only a reform of copyright, which among other things recognises that copyright should only be intended to limit commercial exploitation of works.
Your entire post is a great example of why no copyright is a bad thing. Too bad that's not actually what I, Norwegian Venstre or the Swedish Pirate Party are advocating.
You can't make a DVD-RIP (or HD-DVD rip or Blu-Ray rip) if no DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is out on the market.
The advent of HDTV is going to spoil people quality wise even more, making them demand higher-quality copies.
Distributing high-quality video on peer to peer is possible, but slow and rather complicated. I for one believe it could be done a lot better if those who produce movies today got their act together. And I'd be willing to pay too.
As it is, the pirated product is *better* than the commercial product. Sure, it's infinitely cheaper too. That doesn't mean I wouldn't pay for a high-quality video stream or fast download from the producer.
The fact that a copy is available for free on the Internet doesn't mean people won't pay for it given the opportunity. There are a lot of precedents of works available for free being able to make considerable money off donations.Great idea! Cutting out the middleman is just what's naturally happening in much of the world.
However, the law is effectively toothless as it is. People *are* making copies en masse, and that's a good thing too. Because it gets your book into audiences it would never have reached before.
Consider this. How many people would have heard about your self-published work through any other medium if it hadn't been shared? You may make a lot more on a freely available book soliciting donations and selling hardcopies than on a much smaller number of guaranteed sales.
What I meant by "You can't make money off distribution" is that the business model of the record company, for example, is dead. There's no need for a distributor such as a record company where distribution of art is trivial.
This doesn't mean people aren't willing to pay. If an artist puts up music on his web page, letting me download it, and then solititing donations after the fact -- they first of all get a much larger part of the cake than they would otherwise. I know I have done this several times. Their cake may even be bigger. As you said, most people are prepared to pay for entertainment they like. There'll always be a few tightwads out there, true. But those same tightwads will be spreading buzz and the music to other people who aren't so tight.I'm not sure what kind of real music you're talking about, but many real musicians I've spoken to pretty much agree with my viewpoints.
And unfortunately, in the Real World, even today, people who dedicate themselves to producing music usually end up working regular jobs supporting themselves, and making very little on the actual production of recording and other work other than performances. This won't really change with copyright reform.False dichotomy.
We don't believe somebody has the right to make money off somebody else's art. Every time somebody pays for an illegitimate copy, that is very real money that could have gone to the artist going to some profiteering middleman instead.
However, when a file is copied, nothing is lost by the artist, rather society is enriched by the increased preponderance and amount of art in their reach. A lot of the downloads of the Internet don't mean the person would have bought a copy of the work to start with. A lot of it is equivalent to the window shopping people did before the evil pirates invented the Internet. Like listening to FM radio, or listening to music in listening booths at record stores, or even borrowing a CD from a friend or god forbid, a music tape.
No, that's product placement, which incidentally already happens. Blame that on the pirates I gues...
Embedded advertising is when you place a little logo in the corner of the screen, just the same way as when you watch TV today. Instead of a logo for the Sci-Fi channel you could put in a logo for a sponsor or some kind.
Games: Sell subscriptions to online services rather than selling shiny discs with game data on it.
"Performing a work" can mean a lot more than simply standing on a stage playing an instrument. The choice of words may have been ill-conceived, but what I meant to say is that you always have the right to charge for your *labour*, and that's nothing I want to remove from anybody. We also don't want to forbid people from selling copies of their own works.
I should also clarify something from the start. The Pirate Party does not want to abolish copyright, merely reform it. We want to narrow the scope of copyright only to cover commercial duplication of a work, and we also want to reduce the length of copyright to somewhere between 5 and 20 years after the publication of the work.
With this background, let's take your examples one at a time.
How does one "perform" a book? I guess that depends on the type of book. For a work of non-fiction, maybe some technical writing, you can be hired by a firm who publishes technical books to write a book on that particular subject. You'd get paid for your labour, and that's pretty much what's reasonable in the rest of the world. Of course, that only works if you have a patron willing to pay you for your labour.
What if you don't? Let's consider what happens with the current system of copyrights. The person writes a book, with no guarantee whatsoever of any revenue, sends his manuscripts to a bunch of publishers, and if he's very lucky, gets a deal. This is far from a guaranteed source of money as it is. This is irrespective of whether you're covered by current or by proposed reformed copyright.
The difference with reformed copyright is that promotional copies of your book will be available on the Internet for browsing, a very useful tool when deciding to buy a hardcopy online. (That's one thing missing with online bookstores today -- you can't browse in them, usually.) Sure, the person could theoretically get the file, and read it on his screen, or even print it on his laser printer. It shouldn't be too hard to sell hardcopies given those pretty poor options.
The fact that a book is available for free online isn't really much different from your local public library really, except it's a lot more accessible, and not only limited to the more popular titles.
In fact, I have bought lots of books this way, by reading them online first, and then ordering them off the net. Many of these purchases simply wouldn't have happened if I couldn't browse them online first.
How does a director "perform" a movie? Well. He doesn't. But he gets paid to direct the movie by a movie studio, who in turn makes money on the movie by showing them in movie theaters. The movie theater experience is something a lot of people like to pay for. Movie studios on average break even and even turn a profit even before the movie hits DVD.
How does Bungie "perform" Halo? Ah, well, that one is a little more difficult. But I can tell you how Blizzard are "performing" World of Warcraft, by selling subscriptions to an online world.
And how does a songwriter get paid in proportion to his popularity? He would have signed a deal with the artist in question performing his song to give him compensation according to whatever deal they work out. Sure, there'll be MP3's floating around on P2P of it too. But that doesn't matter, because people will still pay to download the songs directly from the artist as long as they're in a nice interchangable format. Why? Because P2P can suck, and the convenience might be worth the money.
I assume the song writer could even sign a deal with the artist in question giving him a percentage of whatever the artists get through live performances, similar to how
I am currently an Electrical Engineering student, and I also have a job at the side as a part-type sysadmin.
:-)
In other words, who knows exactly.
Are you really saying that the people producing media, who are in an exclusive position to be permitted to make a profit of what they're distributing can't do a better job than a bunch of random people on the Internet?
I for one can think of a lot of things that suck majorly with peer to peer which could easilly be rectified if the actual people producing the content came out and distributed it on the Internet properly.
I don't know if anybody in this discussion is advocating a abolision of copyright.
The Swedish Pirate Party, which I am a member of, advocates a reduction in the term of copyright to somewhere betweeh 5 or 20 years after the work has been produced, as well as a reduction in scope of copyright only to cover commercial copying.
This is a far cry from abolishing copyright.
And as far as I know, Norway's Venstre doesn't want to abolish copyright either, they also want it reformed, not abolished.
Norsk Venstre isn't socialist. Don't confuse socialism with social liberalism. :-)
:-)
If anything, by US terms, they're closer to Libertarians than anything.
Whether that makes you for or against DRM is up to you. But holding opinions depending on who happens to share those opinions is counterproductive.
By the way, I hear enjoys breathing air. Maybe you should consider that next time you take a breath?
The fact that the mainstream media covers them in a much larger extent means they get the fame, and the large sales, and therefore the large numbers of downloads that goes with it.
Like it or not, these commercial artists are our current culture, but I for one wouldn't mind it changing and developing and transforming itself into something else. It always does anyway.
I get translated to the Swedish chef? This is because I linked to a Youtube clip with the muppets a few posts back isn't it? :-) Great. Just great.
Anyway, it's not really a question of business models. They will attend to themselves. There's nothing in law mandating a central cartel of large record companies distributing music, for example. As reality changes, law changes, and so the business models will change with it.
The fact is that everything today can be and will be copied, and it makes no sense try to keep the technology bottled up as it is. Business will find a way, it always does.
Bork, bork, bork!
Because they didn't have a choice in where they were born, and whether they were born at all. We have a responsibility to look after our own, at least by making sure we're not *actively* screwing them over.
Seriously though, I'll just repeat a segment of an earlier post I made:
I never said the performances should be live. A programmer can get a good job maintaining software, if there is insufficient public interest to do this. This is especially the case for a lot of vertical-market stuff like industrial control, billing, payroll, business administration and a lot of boring stuff like that. In addition to that, there are a lot of cases out there of programmers being paid to work on open source. And there are a lot of business models out there that don't rely on the income generated by sales of the programs itself. And they somehow manage to pay their programmers through other sources of income.
Their *profits*, yes. But it is my understanding that even without all the after-cinema sales, they'd still break even.
All good points. This doesn't disqualify movie theaters as a business model, though.
Movie theaters need to get their act straight too, but that's a seperate discussion really.
The common thread in the entire discussion I guess is for the entertainment industry to stop mistreating the few loyal customers they still have. You can attract a lot more flies with honey than vinaeger.
Maybe if some jerk distributes an unknown work to a million people, another thousand people will buy his book. Better than zero.
And unfortunately, the law doesn't stop this from happening today. The law is toothless. Either you give it more teeth, and make your country into a police state, or you let go.
Not tell him what a great chance he could have of making *some* money by putting his book out on Internet, and selling hardcopies to interested parties.
This business model works. I have bought several books (technical books, but the idea should extend to fiction too) using this exact method.
Sure, you can't get paid for every single person who reads your book. Just like the way you can't get paid by every single person who listens to your music as they walk past you on the street. The Internet has made everybody a street performer, whether they like it or not. The only way to stop that from happening is not to perform.
Unfortunately for the artists, and catastrophically for art distributors, you can't make money off distribution any more. Not changing the law isn't going to change that. The world changes, doors close, other doors open. When the storm comes, you can either build a wind shelter or a wind mill.
The argument of whether artists should be paid or not isn't really relevant to the discussion. The difference is how they're going to get paid. Getting paid for art is damn hard today as it is, and to be honest, I don't really think copyright reform is going to change that a lot.I don't support commercial copyright infringement, and neither does my party. But, conversely, if somebody found a way to reproduce cars for free -- I'd take two please.
As for 3D graphics work. I am not sure exactly what field of work you work in, but assuming for a moment that you work in some kind of animation, motion pictures for example, movie production will still be able to make money. The big money in movies these days aren't in DVD:s (they're just cream on the top), but on movie theater showings. And I assume that the company wanting to make a new movie to show in said theaters will hire you to do the actual job, not through empty promisises of future royalties.
But maybe you work in 3D graphics like CAD for some kind of industrial application, or maybe even architectural. In all these cases, you have a right to charge for your *work*. Just like anybody else. Because I sure as hell am not saying you should do your work for free.Look. I'm not out to stop you for getting paid for your labour. Nothing wrong with that.
I'm not convinced unlimited private copying of digital data is a rip-off. As far as I see it, it's just a great channel for marketing, not to mention giving a great social benifit in the form of a publically accessible media library. But then again, maybe you think public libraries for good old fashioned books is a bad idea and unfair to the authors.
Either way, irrespective of what the law says, for better or worse, unlimited copying of digital data is here, and it unstoppable. When the storm comes, there are two kinds of people out there. Those who build wind shelters, and those who build windmills.Moderators can not delete posts on slashdot. The only case I know of when a post has been deleted on slashdot has been in response to a copyright claim by the church of scientology. (Irony of all things...)
And I always browse at -1 anyway. The moderation system fucking sucks. I'd rather not have a bunch of random people with mod points this week to decide what I should read.
Anonymous Cowards start at 0 points.
:-)
He hasn't been modded down. Nobody felt the need to use a mod point to mod him up. That's all.
I was aware of pharmaceutical companies giving generous samples to doctors as advertising. But I don't think pharmaceutical companies give a rats ass about poor and elderly people. If they did, they wouldn't be raising such a stink over generic drugs in third world countries.
Pharmaceutical companies are only charitable when it suits their own purposes.
I'm very familiar with how early printing presses work. I just didn't feel it neccessary to go into details.
Either way, neither the Xerox machine nor the printing press (early or modern) are in the same degree as revolutionary as the Internet. Both might as well be just as clunky by modern standards.