I fully agree that the implications must be thought through, but I think you're setting up false dichotomies with your examples.
For example, it's perfectly possible to continue allowing things like reporters covering a story or taking selfies without violating anyone's privacy and giving Google or Facebook a running history of where everyone has been whether they like it or not. One simple solution would be adapting technology that mostly already exists anyway to slightly exaggerate the blurring of any recognisable figures in the background of the shot, who are probably somewhat out of focus anyway, enough to prevent facial recognition. Combine that with a social understanding that it's rude to go around uploading photos to the Internet, particularly with time/place metadata attached, unless you've hit the soften button first. Even if some people deliberately ignored that social convention for a while, if most people favoured it then it would still fix much of the involuntary tracking problem.
I tend to think that most security cameras are little more than security theatre anyway, so I'm not too bothered by the general idea of regulating their use. In any case, it needn't be a black and white ban. If the goal is to preserve the general principle of privacy, by maintaining approximately the traditional level of obscurity/anonymity, it would suffice to ensure that security cameras operated by the owners of premises or the local police were on closed circuits and the footage from them wasn't uploaded or processed other than in response to an actual security problem, in which case specific footage would be accessed and normal data protection rules could apply.
How is it that the home country of the author of 1984 just doesn't get it?
Plenty of us get it. Please remember that at no point did the general population of the UK ask for, support or condone this kind of behaviour, nor most of the other dubious things we've been hearing about lately that have supposedly been done in our name or for our protection.
Also, the previous administration went from being elected on a technicality with a heavy majority of the population not supporting them to having a leader who everyone was promised at the election wouldn't take over if they voted for the party in question. And obviously nobody directly elected the current coalition administration, which doesn't even seem to be able to honour what it said it would do in the coalition agreement upon which it was founded consistently, never mind what was in the manifestos of the two constituent parties that people actually voted for.
The last time we actually had anything resembling a government with a mandate in this country was nearly a decade ago, and they were the guys who then went to war, despite literally millions of people marching in the street to protest the decision, based on little more than trumped up rhetoric that proved to be every bit as made up as most of us always assumed it was.
How is it they are letting this kind of thing go on?
We demonstrably don't live in an effectively functioning democracy, by any credible definition of the term. Unfortunately, the political class have got very good at playing the game by the rules that currently exist and go to great lengths to avoid allowing those rules to change. Short of actually bringing down the government and replacing the system, hopefully in a non-violent way, this seems unlikely to change any time soon.
As long as we have that limited system, a handful of big issues will inevitably dominate the one vote we get every five years or so, and there are way too many people who are (reasonably enough) more concerned with things like not having their homes flooded or whether they can get their kids into a good school or whether the grandparents will get proper treatment if they have to go into hospital for those of us who also consider points of principle when voting to have a significant impact.
[Obscurity] has served as a substitute for the legal expectation of privacy
Yes, that's basically the change we have to consider today. The random, momentary sighting of a stranger in the street didn't matter when that was all it was. Now it does matter, and things that used to be OK as a result might not be so OK any more.
(a) being seen incidentally, as some anonymous person just walking down the street, by some other person walking the other way who doesn't know you from Adam/Eve and is about as concerned with you as you are with them, and
(b) being seen and permanently recorded, possibly without your knowledge that a recording has taken place or of who made it, with that recording then being stored, correlated with other information and data mined for arbitrary purposes, to be archived for all time and searchable on demand forever, by organisations with vastly greater power than any individual will ever have, for purposes unknown and possibly completely opposed to the best interests of the individual, hundreds of times from the moment you leave your home (or even within it, if you use any sort of communication) to the moment you return (or disconnect).
Do you really think the same safeguards to protect the concept of privacy are sufficient in a world where the latter happens as used to be appropriate in a world where the former was all you had to worry about?
I'm totally with you on where we are today, and certainly not suggesting we could somehow flip back to everyone serving their own stuff.
But consider what would have happened if ISPs had made more effort to support hosting functions rather than just downloading in the earlier days. Instead of many/most individuals relying on shared hosting sites like YouTube or Flickr or Medium, they could have been setting up their own personal sites using much the same kinds of tools and UIs, just provided by their own personal ISP instead. That ISP could have been collecting some modest extra recurring revenue from a large portion of its customer base for a substantial profit, and the world wouldn't be nearly so dependent on the whims of a handful of mostly privacy-invading, advertising-backed, not-always-so-reliable Internet giants.
Obviously we're too far down that road now to just turn around and go back overnight, but that still doesn't mean it's an unreasonable alternative that we couldn't move back towards more slowly and it still doesn't mean we should give a free past to those hugely profitable Internet giants when it comes to behaviour that would under normal circumstances clearly be against the law, just because it would be very expensive for them to adapt their business models to comply like everyone else.
That may be true of the US legal system, but clearly it is not necessarily true in general.
I'm afraid privacy in the presence of modern technologies is very much a worse-before-it-gets-better proposition. It takes a long time for large numbers of people to understand what the real implications are and also how much is just fear-mongering, particularly with the fast pace of technological developments we see today. It takes even longer for the worlds of politics and law to catch up.
Still, we're now seeing stories almost daily that the average guy or gal in the street can empathise with, not just things that can be mentally written off as someone else's problem. I think sooner or later, as you say, the pendulum will swing far enough to prompt a strong reaction. My biggest concerns at this stage are what will happen when those on the side of surveillance try to dig in before the change in direction, and how much damage will be impossible to completely make good because of the privacy that has already been lost.
Personally I feel that people who will physically assault a person for being part of a group they are not are much bigger pretentious assholes
If you come up to my family in the street and threaten them with violence, there is a significant chance that I will physically assault you. I have no desire to be violent to anyone in general, and I wouldn't be doing it because you were in a group. I'd be doing it if it appeared to be the most effective way to protect my family at the time, and as such it would also be legal.
It's far from clear that whatever was happening in this case would justify a violent response in the same way, but let's not pretend some people overreact like this just because someone else is in a different group. They probably do it because they feel threatened, because the other person was not perceived to be merely "minding their own business with their friends", and there is probably at least some justification for feeling that way.
Some time after that becomes the case (and it will), society will accept it.
Why? Just because we can do something, it doesn't mean we should. Just because we can do something covertly or otherwise get away with it, that doesn't make the behaviour any more acceptable.
It's already the case that you can easily find covert surveillance equipment and record what's going on if you want to. But if you actually used that technology to, say, listen in on someone's intimate conversation at the next table over, because your mic can pick up quiet voices better than a human ear, I think most people would consider that an invasion of privacy.
Just to keep this in perspective, please remember that my caustic comments about locking up executives were in relation to flouting a court ruling and comparing German judges to Nazis, not in relation to objecting to an unrealistic or abusive licensing regime.
I will have no sympathy for GEMA or the wider German government if their apparent belligerence and unreasonable stance on licensing causes reasonable Internet-based media companies to abandon the German market to the detriment of German citizens, nor if the reaction from those citizens hurts those authorities in the bank account and/or ballot box.
The government should pay experts to write the books and then put them in the public domain.
Would that be the same kinds of government that tend to ignore actual scientific advice on anything politically controversial like drugs or climate change and do their own thing anyway? I'm not sure having that kind of organisation meddling directly in educational materials is such a good idea.
Software is covered. If someone needs software written, they'll pay someone to do it.
Doesn't work. A lot of people benefit from using business software, but no small business could have afforded to pay Microsoft to develop Office on their own. You need a way to share the costs around large numbers of beneficiaries who each contribute only a relatively small amount. That's the major benefit of a system like copyright, when the system works.
And plenty of people already develop software for free, anyway.
The FOSS community and the software it's produced is just about the best example of why a volunteer-driven industry is insufficient. There are very few big success stories with open software development processes compared to the size of the industry as a whole. Where are the FOSS business admin software suites? Where are the FOSS AAA games? Even those open software projects that are successful are frequently just dubious quality clones of products developed with a commercial/closed model, created there's enough of a market to attract a lot of volunteer developers and where saving money and avoiding lock-in are the main motivations rather than any particular technical merit.
I'm not saying all FOSS is like this, of course, but pretending that the overall volume and quality of software produced with the FOSS model is better than the overall volume and quality produced with the traditional closed, commercial, copyright-backed model is just silly.
Professional training materials? Again, if organizations need those, they'll make them.
Same problem. If they had the experience in-house to do that, they wouldn't need to bring in professional training materials from outside experts. And producing good materials is going to be absurdly expensive if a single customer has to pay for it up-front and then either everyone else can just freeload off the back of that hard work or everyone else has to pay again to develop essentially the same work in a horribly inefficient closed system. Split the cost instead and everyone wins.
The free market is very versatile and has these things figured out already.
I disagree. If that were actually true, I'd probably be on your side of the debate, but I don't think the free market has got anywhere near solving these kinds of problems yet.
The sad thing is, I'm not sure why that should have been funny. We've substituted blink tags and under construction logos for YouTube comments and permanent betas. Is this really progress?
The experiment could be conducted to a satisfactory degree by ridding ourselves of copyright.
Why do we need to rid ourselves entirely of copyright before we can draw any useful conclusions? As I observed before, there is nothing about copyright law that requires a copyright holder to enforce their rights if some other model for creating and distributing material offers a better incentive. There should be ample evidence, even without changing anything at all, if copyright isn't an effective incentive and other models would do better. Given that the economic damage from removing copyright and then finding that it was actually working as intended could be much greater than the recent global financial crisis, you're still asking for the impossible.
I was clearly talking about sites with user contributed content there. Do you mean to say...
Why is that alternative such an absurd idea? Hardly anybody actually needs these centralised sites to host their content. We could just as well have maintained the earlier spirit of the Internet and in particular the Web, where people would publish their own material on their own sites, and technologies like links and search tools would let others find it and navigate around different content.
You're speaking all at once about "true cost of sharing" (what's that, anyways? How much must I pay for sharing what I created? Is this some kind of privilege?)
Yes, in the sense that the infrastructure used to serve your wonderful works of art to others was not created for free. The cost is low when shared between all Internet users, but someone has to pay for it sooner or later. Most of us do so by paying an ISP for access, and perhaps by paying for a domain name or a hosting account somewhere.
Got no money and no marketing skills? Get out and leave true art to people who can pay true cost of sharing!
If you've got no money, how are you accessing the Internet? Does your ISP pay for itself? Was your PC/tablet/whatever free?
Anyone who has the technical competence to get themselves onto the Internet, create a YouTube account, create a video, and get it uploaded for others to see, would also have had the technical competence to run some simple tool that set up a basic site on their personal hosting account and upload the video files to there instead, if the industry had moved in that direction.
These things only seem difficult today because it's not the norm. But if ISPs routinely offered you the chance to buy your own domain and hook it up to your site, and they all came with some sort of mini-dashboard-thing to set up a basic site and upload your photos/videos, people could use those tools just as easily as they use YouTube or Facebook today. It's not as if everyone would have to suddenly become a programmer/sysadmin/HTML guru or something.
You got there when you assumed they are against the law before it was even proven by, you know, the law.
I never made any such assumption. I just suggested that it wasn't unreasonable to hold anyone, including content hosting sites, accountable if they shared material that was in fact infringing. In other words, it's not obvious and self-evident that some sites that are widely used for illegal copyright infringement should be exempted from liability just because the infringing material was uploaded by a third party and happens to be inconvenient or prohibitively expensive for them to audit that material to confirm its legitimacy before they serve it up to large numbers of people down the very big pipes they control.
As for whether this really happens, remember Napster? Or the still-ongoing Viacom vs. YouTube case, for that matter.
You're right; so we either need to revamp copyright frameworks, or give up on using the Internet. Guess which one I pick?
The same one as the rest of us, I assume, though I think that's a false dichotomy.
To me, the appropriate change to copyright would simply be a dramatic reduction in the duration of copyright protection for most works, reflecting the fact that almost all of the economic benefit for works that are expensive to produce and widely distributed normally happens in the first few years after publication. Different rules could apply for types of works that by their nature make their returns more slowly, but based on the realistic economics of each industry rather than implausible arguments about hypothetical losses from rightsholders. Continuing to protect Star Wars, Mickey Mouse and the works of The Beatles in 2014 is clearly not necessary to promote the creation of new works, and it clearly wasn't necessary when those works were originally created either.
Attempts to restrict further use of works beyond that point through technological measures, or more generally the use of copy protection measures that might have that result (such as requiring the existence of a server to access a work when that server might later disappear) should IMHO result in immediate forfeiture of copyright protection and compulsory disclosure of an unrestricted copy of the work unless either the problem is corrected within a reasonable period or an unrestricted copy of the work is lodged in escrow with a national reference library or similar organisation for release into the public domain after the expiry of the copyright.
On the other hand, given such a reasonable downsizing of copyright to reflect the inexpensive and rapid distribution enabled by modern technology, I would also have no problem with actually enforcing copyright laws, as long as they were first clarified so that everyone could reasonably be expected to know whether their behaviour was lawful and so that the penalties for infringement were proportionate to a realistic level of assumed damage rather than the crazy arguments made be either side at the moment.
The only way to truly find out would be to get rid of copyright, but since you don't have a scientific mindset, you'll be opposed to that.
I'm all for science. I just have little time for someone whose only argument appears to be that no position has any merit unless an experiment he already acknowledged was impossible is conducted.
That works as a scientific principle, when "we simply don't know" is a perfectly acceptable conclusion. However, when you're talking about laws, you have to make some decision. Doing nothing until you have evidence you can never obtain is not an available option, because you can either choose to keep copyright or to get rid of it but you can't write a Heisenlaw. So in the absence of perfect, incontrovertible proof of the correct answer, all you can do is make the best guess you can based on whatever evidence you do have.
It is a fact that right now, today, millions of people are employed in creative industries, producing a higher volume of work than at any time in the history of humanity even controlling for population growth etc.
It is a fact that right now, today, the vast majority of the money that pays those people's salaries comes from selling copies of works that are subject to copyright.
It is a fact that in the recent past, experiments have been tried where works were offered on a choose-your-own-price model, approximating a situation where consumers were not legally compelled by a mechanism such as copyright to pay for them, and that typically the results of those experiments were that very few people contributed at an equal or higher level to the price many consumers pay in a similar context when the work is protected by copyright.
No, this is not a completely robust, 100% scientific, double-blinded, perfectly-controlled, alternative-realitied experiment. It's just the best data we've got today, based on actual facts like how much creative work is produced, where the money that funds that production comes from, and how it seems consumers behave in similar contexts when the copyright restrictions are removed. And on that basis, there's a strong argument in favour of maintaining some form of copyright in law as an economic incentive to support the creation and distribution of new works.
Now, if you've got more than your personal philosophical preferences to put in opposition to that, go ahead. But the argument for the basic principle of copyright is clear, and it's been generally supported by economic and political experts in many places for a long time despite the problems with practical enforcement. So if you want to convince anyone outside the choir you preach to, you'd better bring more than "the burden of proof is entirely on you and you haven't conducted an impossible experiment so I reject anything resembling rational evidence".
They made the decision on their own, and the people who infringed upon their copyright had nothing to do with it.
Of course they did. Laws don't make themselves. They are created by governments, and in democratic countries we all vote for those governments. If the people who want to have everything for free don't like copyright law, they can go vote for the Pirate Party and get it abolished.
What good would it do to toss aside all the benefits that you think came along thanks to copyright? That would be as dumb as rejecting a cure for cancer that was created by sacrificing babies after the deed had already taken place. That is, that would be irrational, but that's exactly what you are.
So the ends justify the means?
Should we also default on all government debt tomorrow? That would save a fortune in the short term, which could be spent on valuable things like healthcare or education instead of servicing loans.
What about negotiating with hostage takers? You get the hostages back, so that's got to be a good deal.
What about when someone facing a serious charge in court is known to be guilty because of evidence that was collected illegally? All evidence should be admissible if it helps us to know who's guilty, I guess.
Sometimes you have to do something you don't like today, because the alternative is having to do something you'll like even less tomorrow.
Furthermore, you have *zero* proof that copyright is actually beneficial.
Of course there is evidence of the benefit. Vast amounts of works are created and shared in our society that were possible because of copyright-backed economics. You can argue about the opportunity cost of our current system and whether another system might be better, but you can't dispute that a lot of stuff gets made and distributed as things stand.
However, if you're going to argue that another system would in fact provide a better economic incentive, promoting the creation or more or better works and their distribution to more people who can enjoy them, then the first thing you have to do is explain why no-one is already doing it. After all, as the creator of a work, you're perfectly entitled to let anyone have it without paying you if you want to, and not to enforce your copyright. Or you could use it to enforce a collaborative arrangement, like the GPL or Creative Commons. Or you could give away recorded performances in order to promote live ones you charge for. Or you could let people choose what, if anything, to pay for your recorded works so if they don't want to pay you anything they don't have to.
All of these things have been tried. There have been few successes, and many of those were for artists who were trying an experiment with new works after already making their name the old-fashioned way. The most promising alternative so far might be crowdsourcing, but even the biggest Kickstarter projects are still two orders of magnitude smaller in budget than the biggest Hollywood movies or AAA games.
*Real* property is physical and can be used without infringing upon other people's property rights.
Says who? That physical property you claim as your own was created from raw materials taken from the world around us, a world that belongs to us all. Why do you have any right to keep them exclusively for yourself? Even if you have possession of something right now, the default natural order of things is that if I have more friends or a bigger weapon I can take it from you and now I have possession of it instead, so why should government thugs protect you from that outcome?
It's ironic that you keep coming back to things like physical property and free markets and objecting to monopolies. The natural conclusion of a truly unregulated free market is often that one dominant supplier wins, and once competition has been eliminated that supplier has a monopoly indefinitely.
While it does apply, the problem is economic feasibility: a typical passenger car does not have the budget for million-dollar sensor and camera arrays with the computational power to put everything together correlated to driver head and eye position to make overlays line up correctly with whatever is outside.
Perhaps not yet, but the technology is already a lot closer and a lot cheaper than you might realise. Consider that luxury car models shipping today, or at least concept cars and tech demos, already use radar (parking sensors, adaptive cruise control systems, blind spot warnings), cameras (rear view displays, parking assistance complete with overlaid graphics, night vision complete with image recognition and hazard highlighting, lane drift detection), driver monitoring (alerts if eye movement patterns indicate loss of attention), the kind of pathfinding graphic overlays I mentioned before, and basic projection technology for dash-mounted HUDs. I've never seen state of the art versions in anything to do with cars, but modern eye-tracking technology used for things like usability testing with websites or experiments about how humans read is already impressively accurate, too.
We might not see this stuff in an average family car next year, but it pushes down from the top of the market, and if there are obvious safety benefits that tends to happen relatively quickly. The headlights on the car I bought a decade ago were relatively good at the time. Today, about three major generations of headlight technology later, those lights would look like candles next to a floodlit sports stadium. Five years ago, if you'd talked about having lasers in headlights, most people would have thought you were crazy. In five years, I expect everyday family cars will be using that kind of technology, or one of the other recent innovations, or something even better that has come along in the meantime.
By the time car navigation systems become sophisticated enough to correctly model and represent the space around the driver and vehicle to provide genuinely enhanced security through situation awareness, it will likely be cheaper, simpler and safer to simply give cars auto-pilot.
Maybe, but I think the odds are against it. I suspect "augmented reality" displays for drivers will become reliable and useful enough to include in road-legal vehicles within the next five years, and that the technology will be reasonably common in a decade.
While we might also have things like automated convoy technology within that timescale, I'd guess it will be at least 15-20 years before fully self-driving vehicles are widely accepted on public roads, maybe more if there are serious accidents in the early days or it turns out that the only sufficiently safe and reliable technologies to operate at scale require the road network itself to be significantly updated and not just the vehicles. In any case it will probably be longer still before the average family can afford one, unless the technology gets good enough for governments to intervene on environmental or network efficiency grounds, and if we're jumping to full automation then whether we still use vehicles of the same sort of size/shape/capacity as we have today is another relevant question.
The answer is that the producers took a gamble that they could sell enough copies of the work to recoup the production costs and earn some profit.
Yes, they did, but they chose to play the game according to certain rules agreed in advance.
If they can't do that, well, that's their problem.
Not if they can't do that because you cheated. Then it's your problem, and if it goes to court, you'll lose.
If you don't like those rules (copyright law) then you can seek to change them, and maybe if enough people agree you'll have different rules next time. But then the producers get to decide if they still want to play by your new rules before they commit any time and resources to creating anything else.
On the other hand, if I can get a product from Supplier 1 for $5, or from Supplier 2 for $50, wouldn't economic theory dictate that I get it from Supplier 1?
Yes it would, but that only matters if both suppliers can actually make the same product. If Supplier 1 didn't, and instead stole it off the back of a lorry from Supplier 2 before selling it on to you in turn, then when the police turn up they're going to take the stolen property away and you are the one who's going to be out of pocket.
What you propose basically equates to making it only accessible to big labels.
Why? I have several personal domains, and each of my companies has more. None of these are on the scale of big labels, or anywhere close, yet all of them publish material of their own creation from their own facilities and all of them are responsible for their own content.
TL;DR: you're advocating "guilty until proven innocent" which would make it all but impossible for an average Joe to upload something for the world to see.
That's a mighty leap.
For one thing, as noted above, it's not impossible at all for an average Joe to upload something for the world to see, he'll just have to pay the true cost of sharing it. If he's not breaking any laws, he won't have any costs there. His ISP probably gives him a load of web space for free in most places, and he can wrap that in his own domain for a tiny amount of money each year. And if his material is really good and attracts a large audience requiring extra bandwidth, he'll easily be able to fund a bit of dedicated hosting through spin-off sales, advertising or other such arrangements, since he'll be free to make whatever arrangements he wants in this respect. All of this has been true for decades, and using these facilities requires different skills than uploading material to YouTube or Imgur or wherever, but not significantly greater or more difficult skills.
I suspect that the centralisation of content distribution that has happened because of high profile blogging and video sharing sites is in reality a net loss to our global, on-line society. It has created distortions and weaknesses in the Internet that weren't necessary, it has concentrated power and introduced single points of failure, but most of the benefits go to a new generation of middleman service that doesn't actually do any of the creative work that generates real value than the old middlemen like record labels and book publishers.
In any case, I'm not sure how you get from being forced to take responsibility for your actions if they are against the law to being guilty until proven innocent. It's more like not having a get out of jail free card when you're running a business that makes vast amounts of money by distributing content, much of which is being provided by people who don't have the rights to distribute it, when you know very well that this is happening and quite possibly your site only reached its dominant position by encouraging or at least turning a blind eye to such uses in its earlier days. Whatever the "greater good" arguments in favour of safe harbour arrangements today, I don't see why any of these services necessarily deserves that get out of jail free card.
The 'artists' *chose* to spend that money, and no one else.
Sure, and they made that choice when the rules said ripping them off and not paying them was illegal. You can't assume they would have made the same choice under other conditions.
Your precious little government-enforced monopolies that infringe upon private property and free speech rights are immoral and disgusting.
If you don't like that part of the economy, you're welcome to spend your life enjoying only things that weren't supported by this kind of immoral and disgusting work. Good luck with that.
While you're sitting in your hut constructed without the aid of modern tools or building methods, reading your favourite amateur author's barely edited books by firelight because you can't use any modern lighting technologies, assuming you have good vision because you won't be able to wear any sort of glasses or contact lenses, you might consider why you think it's not equally immoral and disgusting that you are allowed to claim some of the world's finite natural resources as your own private property and have government thugs to prevent people from coming along and taking it away while you're asleep tonight.
Ultimately, any kind of property, whether physical or intellectual, is just an artificial concept that we as a society choose to recognise and protect because we've concluded that life is better in some way if we do so. You just only seem to like that philosophy when it's to your advantage.
Of course, because the cost of creating knowledge works is entirely the near-zero marginal cost of distribution and not dominated by the sometimes multi-million dollar sunk costs of production, and it's absurd that we should have an economic policy that allows amortizing the latter cost over the entire consumer base.
Learn some basic economics, please. Or at least try the instant thought experiment of asking yourself, "If everyone acted in the way I'm arguing causes no loss, would there still be no loss?" If the answer is no, there was a loss, you just dumped it on someone else instead of paying your fair share.
What about works of practical value that aren't particularly enjoyable to create, but which are nevertheless of great value to society? See: much of the software world, most school textbooks and professional training materials, etc.
By that argument, nowhere in the world has the right to free speech. If you think you have it in the US, consider what would happen if you yelled "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, or made defamatory claims against a celebrity, or threatened to kill the President, or anyone else, or made a misleading public statement as an executive of a publicly traded company, or claimed to be a qualified doctor/lawyer/engineer when not in fact holding the required qualification, or wanted to give classified national security information to Wikileaks or a major national newspaper.
Slashdot Mirror
I fully agree that the implications must be thought through, but I think you're setting up false dichotomies with your examples.
For example, it's perfectly possible to continue allowing things like reporters covering a story or taking selfies without violating anyone's privacy and giving Google or Facebook a running history of where everyone has been whether they like it or not. One simple solution would be adapting technology that mostly already exists anyway to slightly exaggerate the blurring of any recognisable figures in the background of the shot, who are probably somewhat out of focus anyway, enough to prevent facial recognition. Combine that with a social understanding that it's rude to go around uploading photos to the Internet, particularly with time/place metadata attached, unless you've hit the soften button first. Even if some people deliberately ignored that social convention for a while, if most people favoured it then it would still fix much of the involuntary tracking problem.
I tend to think that most security cameras are little more than security theatre anyway, so I'm not too bothered by the general idea of regulating their use. In any case, it needn't be a black and white ban. If the goal is to preserve the general principle of privacy, by maintaining approximately the traditional level of obscurity/anonymity, it would suffice to ensure that security cameras operated by the owners of premises or the local police were on closed circuits and the footage from them wasn't uploaded or processed other than in response to an actual security problem, in which case specific footage would be accessed and normal data protection rules could apply.
How is it that the home country of the author of 1984 just doesn't get it?
Plenty of us get it. Please remember that at no point did the general population of the UK ask for, support or condone this kind of behaviour, nor most of the other dubious things we've been hearing about lately that have supposedly been done in our name or for our protection.
Also, the previous administration went from being elected on a technicality with a heavy majority of the population not supporting them to having a leader who everyone was promised at the election wouldn't take over if they voted for the party in question. And obviously nobody directly elected the current coalition administration, which doesn't even seem to be able to honour what it said it would do in the coalition agreement upon which it was founded consistently, never mind what was in the manifestos of the two constituent parties that people actually voted for.
The last time we actually had anything resembling a government with a mandate in this country was nearly a decade ago, and they were the guys who then went to war, despite literally millions of people marching in the street to protest the decision, based on little more than trumped up rhetoric that proved to be every bit as made up as most of us always assumed it was.
How is it they are letting this kind of thing go on?
We demonstrably don't live in an effectively functioning democracy, by any credible definition of the term. Unfortunately, the political class have got very good at playing the game by the rules that currently exist and go to great lengths to avoid allowing those rules to change. Short of actually bringing down the government and replacing the system, hopefully in a non-violent way, this seems unlikely to change any time soon.
As long as we have that limited system, a handful of big issues will inevitably dominate the one vote we get every five years or so, and there are way too many people who are (reasonably enough) more concerned with things like not having their homes flooded or whether they can get their kids into a good school or whether the grandparents will get proper treatment if they have to go into hospital for those of us who also consider points of principle when voting to have a significant impact.
[Obscurity] has served as a substitute for the legal expectation of privacy
Yes, that's basically the change we have to consider today. The random, momentary sighting of a stranger in the street didn't matter when that was all it was. Now it does matter, and things that used to be OK as a result might not be so OK any more.
There is a difference between:
(a) being seen incidentally, as some anonymous person just walking down the street, by some other person walking the other way who doesn't know you from Adam/Eve and is about as concerned with you as you are with them, and
(b) being seen and permanently recorded, possibly without your knowledge that a recording has taken place or of who made it, with that recording then being stored, correlated with other information and data mined for arbitrary purposes, to be archived for all time and searchable on demand forever, by organisations with vastly greater power than any individual will ever have, for purposes unknown and possibly completely opposed to the best interests of the individual, hundreds of times from the moment you leave your home (or even within it, if you use any sort of communication) to the moment you return (or disconnect).
Do you really think the same safeguards to protect the concept of privacy are sufficient in a world where the latter happens as used to be appropriate in a world where the former was all you had to worry about?
I'm totally with you on where we are today, and certainly not suggesting we could somehow flip back to everyone serving their own stuff.
But consider what would have happened if ISPs had made more effort to support hosting functions rather than just downloading in the earlier days. Instead of many/most individuals relying on shared hosting sites like YouTube or Flickr or Medium, they could have been setting up their own personal sites using much the same kinds of tools and UIs, just provided by their own personal ISP instead. That ISP could have been collecting some modest extra recurring revenue from a large portion of its customer base for a substantial profit, and the world wouldn't be nearly so dependent on the whims of a handful of mostly privacy-invading, advertising-backed, not-always-so-reliable Internet giants.
Obviously we're too far down that road now to just turn around and go back overnight, but that still doesn't mean it's an unreasonable alternative that we couldn't move back towards more slowly and it still doesn't mean we should give a free past to those hugely profitable Internet giants when it comes to behaviour that would under normal circumstances clearly be against the law, just because it would be very expensive for them to adapt their business models to comply like everyone else.
That may be true of the US legal system, but clearly it is not necessarily true in general.
I'm afraid privacy in the presence of modern technologies is very much a worse-before-it-gets-better proposition. It takes a long time for large numbers of people to understand what the real implications are and also how much is just fear-mongering, particularly with the fast pace of technological developments we see today. It takes even longer for the worlds of politics and law to catch up.
Still, we're now seeing stories almost daily that the average guy or gal in the street can empathise with, not just things that can be mentally written off as someone else's problem. I think sooner or later, as you say, the pendulum will swing far enough to prompt a strong reaction. My biggest concerns at this stage are what will happen when those on the side of surveillance try to dig in before the change in direction, and how much damage will be impossible to completely make good because of the privacy that has already been lost.
Personally I feel that people who will physically assault a person for being part of a group they are not are much bigger pretentious assholes
If you come up to my family in the street and threaten them with violence, there is a significant chance that I will physically assault you. I have no desire to be violent to anyone in general, and I wouldn't be doing it because you were in a group. I'd be doing it if it appeared to be the most effective way to protect my family at the time, and as such it would also be legal.
It's far from clear that whatever was happening in this case would justify a violent response in the same way, but let's not pretend some people overreact like this just because someone else is in a different group. They probably do it because they feel threatened, because the other person was not perceived to be merely "minding their own business with their friends", and there is probably at least some justification for feeling that way.
Some time after that becomes the case (and it will), society will accept it.
Why? Just because we can do something, it doesn't mean we should. Just because we can do something covertly or otherwise get away with it, that doesn't make the behaviour any more acceptable.
It's already the case that you can easily find covert surveillance equipment and record what's going on if you want to. But if you actually used that technology to, say, listen in on someone's intimate conversation at the next table over, because your mic can pick up quiet voices better than a human ear, I think most people would consider that an invasion of privacy.
Out in the open in a public place, such as a sidewalk, bar, or a grocery store - there isn't an expectation of privacy.
Apparently there is, even if the law doesn't currently recognise it. Maybe that law is out of date and should be changed.
Just to keep this in perspective, please remember that my caustic comments about locking up executives were in relation to flouting a court ruling and comparing German judges to Nazis, not in relation to objecting to an unrealistic or abusive licensing regime.
I will have no sympathy for GEMA or the wider German government if their apparent belligerence and unreasonable stance on licensing causes reasonable Internet-based media companies to abandon the German market to the detriment of German citizens, nor if the reaction from those citizens hurts those authorities in the bank account and/or ballot box.
The government should pay experts to write the books and then put them in the public domain.
Would that be the same kinds of government that tend to ignore actual scientific advice on anything politically controversial like drugs or climate change and do their own thing anyway? I'm not sure having that kind of organisation meddling directly in educational materials is such a good idea.
Software is covered. If someone needs software written, they'll pay someone to do it.
Doesn't work. A lot of people benefit from using business software, but no small business could have afforded to pay Microsoft to develop Office on their own. You need a way to share the costs around large numbers of beneficiaries who each contribute only a relatively small amount. That's the major benefit of a system like copyright, when the system works.
And plenty of people already develop software for free, anyway.
The FOSS community and the software it's produced is just about the best example of why a volunteer-driven industry is insufficient. There are very few big success stories with open software development processes compared to the size of the industry as a whole. Where are the FOSS business admin software suites? Where are the FOSS AAA games? Even those open software projects that are successful are frequently just dubious quality clones of products developed with a commercial/closed model, created there's enough of a market to attract a lot of volunteer developers and where saving money and avoiding lock-in are the main motivations rather than any particular technical merit.
I'm not saying all FOSS is like this, of course, but pretending that the overall volume and quality of software produced with the FOSS model is better than the overall volume and quality produced with the traditional closed, commercial, copyright-backed model is just silly.
Professional training materials? Again, if organizations need those, they'll make them.
Same problem. If they had the experience in-house to do that, they wouldn't need to bring in professional training materials from outside experts. And producing good materials is going to be absurdly expensive if a single customer has to pay for it up-front and then either everyone else can just freeload off the back of that hard work or everyone else has to pay again to develop essentially the same work in a horribly inefficient closed system. Split the cost instead and everyone wins.
The free market is very versatile and has these things figured out already.
I disagree. If that were actually true, I'd probably be on your side of the debate, but I don't think the free market has got anywhere near solving these kinds of problems yet.
The sad thing is, I'm not sure why that should have been funny. We've substituted blink tags and under construction logos for YouTube comments and permanent betas. Is this really progress?
The experiment could be conducted to a satisfactory degree by ridding ourselves of copyright.
Why do we need to rid ourselves entirely of copyright before we can draw any useful conclusions? As I observed before, there is nothing about copyright law that requires a copyright holder to enforce their rights if some other model for creating and distributing material offers a better incentive. There should be ample evidence, even without changing anything at all, if copyright isn't an effective incentive and other models would do better. Given that the economic damage from removing copyright and then finding that it was actually working as intended could be much greater than the recent global financial crisis, you're still asking for the impossible.
I was clearly talking about sites with user contributed content there. Do you mean to say...
Why is that alternative such an absurd idea? Hardly anybody actually needs these centralised sites to host their content. We could just as well have maintained the earlier spirit of the Internet and in particular the Web, where people would publish their own material on their own sites, and technologies like links and search tools would let others find it and navigate around different content.
You're speaking all at once about "true cost of sharing" (what's that, anyways? How much must I pay for sharing what I created? Is this some kind of privilege?)
Yes, in the sense that the infrastructure used to serve your wonderful works of art to others was not created for free. The cost is low when shared between all Internet users, but someone has to pay for it sooner or later. Most of us do so by paying an ISP for access, and perhaps by paying for a domain name or a hosting account somewhere.
Got no money and no marketing skills? Get out and leave true art to people who can pay true cost of sharing!
If you've got no money, how are you accessing the Internet? Does your ISP pay for itself? Was your PC/tablet/whatever free?
Anyone who has the technical competence to get themselves onto the Internet, create a YouTube account, create a video, and get it uploaded for others to see, would also have had the technical competence to run some simple tool that set up a basic site on their personal hosting account and upload the video files to there instead, if the industry had moved in that direction.
These things only seem difficult today because it's not the norm. But if ISPs routinely offered you the chance to buy your own domain and hook it up to your site, and they all came with some sort of mini-dashboard-thing to set up a basic site and upload your photos/videos, people could use those tools just as easily as they use YouTube or Facebook today. It's not as if everyone would have to suddenly become a programmer/sysadmin/HTML guru or something.
You got there when you assumed they are against the law before it was even proven by, you know, the law.
I never made any such assumption. I just suggested that it wasn't unreasonable to hold anyone, including content hosting sites, accountable if they shared material that was in fact infringing. In other words, it's not obvious and self-evident that some sites that are widely used for illegal copyright infringement should be exempted from liability just because the infringing material was uploaded by a third party and happens to be inconvenient or prohibitively expensive for them to audit that material to confirm its legitimacy before they serve it up to large numbers of people down the very big pipes they control.
As for whether this really happens, remember Napster? Or the still-ongoing Viacom vs. YouTube case, for that matter.
You're right; so we either need to revamp copyright frameworks, or give up on using the Internet. Guess which one I pick?
The same one as the rest of us, I assume, though I think that's a false dichotomy.
To me, the appropriate change to copyright would simply be a dramatic reduction in the duration of copyright protection for most works, reflecting the fact that almost all of the economic benefit for works that are expensive to produce and widely distributed normally happens in the first few years after publication. Different rules could apply for types of works that by their nature make their returns more slowly, but based on the realistic economics of each industry rather than implausible arguments about hypothetical losses from rightsholders. Continuing to protect Star Wars, Mickey Mouse and the works of The Beatles in 2014 is clearly not necessary to promote the creation of new works, and it clearly wasn't necessary when those works were originally created either.
Attempts to restrict further use of works beyond that point through technological measures, or more generally the use of copy protection measures that might have that result (such as requiring the existence of a server to access a work when that server might later disappear) should IMHO result in immediate forfeiture of copyright protection and compulsory disclosure of an unrestricted copy of the work unless either the problem is corrected within a reasonable period or an unrestricted copy of the work is lodged in escrow with a national reference library or similar organisation for release into the public domain after the expiry of the copyright.
On the other hand, given such a reasonable downsizing of copyright to reflect the inexpensive and rapid distribution enabled by modern technology, I would also have no problem with actually enforcing copyright laws, as long as they were first clarified so that everyone could reasonably be expected to know whether their behaviour was lawful and so that the penalties for infringement were proportionate to a realistic level of assumed damage rather than the crazy arguments made be either side at the moment.
The only way to truly find out would be to get rid of copyright, but since you don't have a scientific mindset, you'll be opposed to that.
I'm all for science. I just have little time for someone whose only argument appears to be that no position has any merit unless an experiment he already acknowledged was impossible is conducted.
That works as a scientific principle, when "we simply don't know" is a perfectly acceptable conclusion. However, when you're talking about laws, you have to make some decision. Doing nothing until you have evidence you can never obtain is not an available option, because you can either choose to keep copyright or to get rid of it but you can't write a Heisenlaw. So in the absence of perfect, incontrovertible proof of the correct answer, all you can do is make the best guess you can based on whatever evidence you do have.
It is a fact that right now, today, millions of people are employed in creative industries, producing a higher volume of work than at any time in the history of humanity even controlling for population growth etc.
It is a fact that right now, today, the vast majority of the money that pays those people's salaries comes from selling copies of works that are subject to copyright.
It is a fact that in the recent past, experiments have been tried where works were offered on a choose-your-own-price model, approximating a situation where consumers were not legally compelled by a mechanism such as copyright to pay for them, and that typically the results of those experiments were that very few people contributed at an equal or higher level to the price many consumers pay in a similar context when the work is protected by copyright.
No, this is not a completely robust, 100% scientific, double-blinded, perfectly-controlled, alternative-realitied experiment. It's just the best data we've got today, based on actual facts like how much creative work is produced, where the money that funds that production comes from, and how it seems consumers behave in similar contexts when the copyright restrictions are removed. And on that basis, there's a strong argument in favour of maintaining some form of copyright in law as an economic incentive to support the creation and distribution of new works.
Now, if you've got more than your personal philosophical preferences to put in opposition to that, go ahead. But the argument for the basic principle of copyright is clear, and it's been generally supported by economic and political experts in many places for a long time despite the problems with practical enforcement. So if you want to convince anyone outside the choir you preach to, you'd better bring more than "the burden of proof is entirely on you and you haven't conducted an impossible experiment so I reject anything resembling rational evidence".
They made the decision on their own, and the people who infringed upon their copyright had nothing to do with it.
Of course they did. Laws don't make themselves. They are created by governments, and in democratic countries we all vote for those governments. If the people who want to have everything for free don't like copyright law, they can go vote for the Pirate Party and get it abolished.
What good would it do to toss aside all the benefits that you think came along thanks to copyright? That would be as dumb as rejecting a cure for cancer that was created by sacrificing babies after the deed had already taken place. That is, that would be irrational, but that's exactly what you are.
So the ends justify the means?
Should we also default on all government debt tomorrow? That would save a fortune in the short term, which could be spent on valuable things like healthcare or education instead of servicing loans.
What about negotiating with hostage takers? You get the hostages back, so that's got to be a good deal.
What about when someone facing a serious charge in court is known to be guilty because of evidence that was collected illegally? All evidence should be admissible if it helps us to know who's guilty, I guess.
Sometimes you have to do something you don't like today, because the alternative is having to do something you'll like even less tomorrow.
Furthermore, you have *zero* proof that copyright is actually beneficial.
Of course there is evidence of the benefit. Vast amounts of works are created and shared in our society that were possible because of copyright-backed economics. You can argue about the opportunity cost of our current system and whether another system might be better, but you can't dispute that a lot of stuff gets made and distributed as things stand.
However, if you're going to argue that another system would in fact provide a better economic incentive, promoting the creation or more or better works and their distribution to more people who can enjoy them, then the first thing you have to do is explain why no-one is already doing it. After all, as the creator of a work, you're perfectly entitled to let anyone have it without paying you if you want to, and not to enforce your copyright. Or you could use it to enforce a collaborative arrangement, like the GPL or Creative Commons. Or you could give away recorded performances in order to promote live ones you charge for. Or you could let people choose what, if anything, to pay for your recorded works so if they don't want to pay you anything they don't have to.
All of these things have been tried. There have been few successes, and many of those were for artists who were trying an experiment with new works after already making their name the old-fashioned way. The most promising alternative so far might be crowdsourcing, but even the biggest Kickstarter projects are still two orders of magnitude smaller in budget than the biggest Hollywood movies or AAA games.
*Real* property is physical and can be used without infringing upon other people's property rights.
Says who? That physical property you claim as your own was created from raw materials taken from the world around us, a world that belongs to us all. Why do you have any right to keep them exclusively for yourself? Even if you have possession of something right now, the default natural order of things is that if I have more friends or a bigger weapon I can take it from you and now I have possession of it instead, so why should government thugs protect you from that outcome?
It's ironic that you keep coming back to things like physical property and free markets and objecting to monopolies. The natural conclusion of a truly unregulated free market is often that one dominant supplier wins, and once competition has been eliminated that supplier has a monopoly indefinitely.
They may have infringed upon some copyrights, but they don't deserve to have their whole lives destroyed for that.
Of course not. The current legal position in the US is absurd.
While it does apply, the problem is economic feasibility: a typical passenger car does not have the budget for million-dollar sensor and camera arrays with the computational power to put everything together correlated to driver head and eye position to make overlays line up correctly with whatever is outside.
Perhaps not yet, but the technology is already a lot closer and a lot cheaper than you might realise. Consider that luxury car models shipping today, or at least concept cars and tech demos, already use radar (parking sensors, adaptive cruise control systems, blind spot warnings), cameras (rear view displays, parking assistance complete with overlaid graphics, night vision complete with image recognition and hazard highlighting, lane drift detection), driver monitoring (alerts if eye movement patterns indicate loss of attention), the kind of pathfinding graphic overlays I mentioned before, and basic projection technology for dash-mounted HUDs. I've never seen state of the art versions in anything to do with cars, but modern eye-tracking technology used for things like usability testing with websites or experiments about how humans read is already impressively accurate, too.
We might not see this stuff in an average family car next year, but it pushes down from the top of the market, and if there are obvious safety benefits that tends to happen relatively quickly. The headlights on the car I bought a decade ago were relatively good at the time. Today, about three major generations of headlight technology later, those lights would look like candles next to a floodlit sports stadium. Five years ago, if you'd talked about having lasers in headlights, most people would have thought you were crazy. In five years, I expect everyday family cars will be using that kind of technology, or one of the other recent innovations, or something even better that has come along in the meantime.
By the time car navigation systems become sophisticated enough to correctly model and represent the space around the driver and vehicle to provide genuinely enhanced security through situation awareness, it will likely be cheaper, simpler and safer to simply give cars auto-pilot.
Maybe, but I think the odds are against it. I suspect "augmented reality" displays for drivers will become reliable and useful enough to include in road-legal vehicles within the next five years, and that the technology will be reasonably common in a decade.
While we might also have things like automated convoy technology within that timescale, I'd guess it will be at least 15-20 years before fully self-driving vehicles are widely accepted on public roads, maybe more if there are serious accidents in the early days or it turns out that the only sufficiently safe and reliable technologies to operate at scale require the road network itself to be significantly updated and not just the vehicles. In any case it will probably be longer still before the average family can afford one, unless the technology gets good enough for governments to intervene on environmental or network efficiency grounds, and if we're jumping to full automation then whether we still use vehicles of the same sort of size/shape/capacity as we have today is another relevant question.
The answer is that the producers took a gamble that they could sell enough copies of the work to recoup the production costs and earn some profit.
Yes, they did, but they chose to play the game according to certain rules agreed in advance.
If they can't do that, well, that's their problem.
Not if they can't do that because you cheated. Then it's your problem, and if it goes to court, you'll lose.
If you don't like those rules (copyright law) then you can seek to change them, and maybe if enough people agree you'll have different rules next time. But then the producers get to decide if they still want to play by your new rules before they commit any time and resources to creating anything else.
On the other hand, if I can get a product from Supplier 1 for $5, or from Supplier 2 for $50, wouldn't economic theory dictate that I get it from Supplier 1?
Yes it would, but that only matters if both suppliers can actually make the same product. If Supplier 1 didn't, and instead stole it off the back of a lorry from Supplier 2 before selling it on to you in turn, then when the police turn up they're going to take the stolen property away and you are the one who's going to be out of pocket.
What you propose basically equates to making it only accessible to big labels.
Why? I have several personal domains, and each of my companies has more. None of these are on the scale of big labels, or anywhere close, yet all of them publish material of their own creation from their own facilities and all of them are responsible for their own content.
TL;DR: you're advocating "guilty until proven innocent" which would make it all but impossible for an average Joe to upload something for the world to see.
That's a mighty leap.
For one thing, as noted above, it's not impossible at all for an average Joe to upload something for the world to see, he'll just have to pay the true cost of sharing it. If he's not breaking any laws, he won't have any costs there. His ISP probably gives him a load of web space for free in most places, and he can wrap that in his own domain for a tiny amount of money each year. And if his material is really good and attracts a large audience requiring extra bandwidth, he'll easily be able to fund a bit of dedicated hosting through spin-off sales, advertising or other such arrangements, since he'll be free to make whatever arrangements he wants in this respect. All of this has been true for decades, and using these facilities requires different skills than uploading material to YouTube or Imgur or wherever, but not significantly greater or more difficult skills.
I suspect that the centralisation of content distribution that has happened because of high profile blogging and video sharing sites is in reality a net loss to our global, on-line society. It has created distortions and weaknesses in the Internet that weren't necessary, it has concentrated power and introduced single points of failure, but most of the benefits go to a new generation of middleman service that doesn't actually do any of the creative work that generates real value than the old middlemen like record labels and book publishers.
In any case, I'm not sure how you get from being forced to take responsibility for your actions if they are against the law to being guilty until proven innocent. It's more like not having a get out of jail free card when you're running a business that makes vast amounts of money by distributing content, much of which is being provided by people who don't have the rights to distribute it, when you know very well that this is happening and quite possibly your site only reached its dominant position by encouraging or at least turning a blind eye to such uses in its earlier days. Whatever the "greater good" arguments in favour of safe harbour arrangements today, I don't see why any of these services necessarily deserves that get out of jail free card.
The 'artists' *chose* to spend that money, and no one else.
Sure, and they made that choice when the rules said ripping them off and not paying them was illegal. You can't assume they would have made the same choice under other conditions.
Your precious little government-enforced monopolies that infringe upon private property and free speech rights are immoral and disgusting.
If you don't like that part of the economy, you're welcome to spend your life enjoying only things that weren't supported by this kind of immoral and disgusting work. Good luck with that.
While you're sitting in your hut constructed without the aid of modern tools or building methods, reading your favourite amateur author's barely edited books by firelight because you can't use any modern lighting technologies, assuming you have good vision because you won't be able to wear any sort of glasses or contact lenses, you might consider why you think it's not equally immoral and disgusting that you are allowed to claim some of the world's finite natural resources as your own private property and have government thugs to prevent people from coming along and taking it away while you're asleep tonight.
Ultimately, any kind of property, whether physical or intellectual, is just an artificial concept that we as a society choose to recognise and protect because we've concluded that life is better in some way if we do so. You just only seem to like that philosophy when it's to your advantage.
Of course, because the cost of creating knowledge works is entirely the near-zero marginal cost of distribution and not dominated by the sometimes multi-million dollar sunk costs of production, and it's absurd that we should have an economic policy that allows amortizing the latter cost over the entire consumer base.
Learn some basic economics, please. Or at least try the instant thought experiment of asking yourself, "If everyone acted in the way I'm arguing causes no loss, would there still be no loss?" If the answer is no, there was a loss, you just dumped it on someone else instead of paying your fair share.
What about works of practical value that aren't particularly enjoyable to create, but which are nevertheless of great value to society? See: much of the software world, most school textbooks and professional training materials, etc.
By that argument, nowhere in the world has the right to free speech. If you think you have it in the US, consider what would happen if you yelled "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, or made defamatory claims against a celebrity, or threatened to kill the President, or anyone else, or made a misleading public statement as an executive of a publicly traded company, or claimed to be a qualified doctor/lawyer/engineer when not in fact holding the required qualification, or wanted to give classified national security information to Wikileaks or a major national newspaper.