Hollywood might sell 50,000,000-100,000,000 tickets for a blockbuster hit, and that's just people going out to see the movie. Obviously many more people then see it for the first time on DVD/BD, or when it's shown on TV.
Can you cite any source that shows even 1% of that many people up in arms over standardising DRM?
It is out of the standard. Please RTFA and follow the links: this is a completely separate document that builds on, but does not modify, the HTML5 spec.
The vast majority of the Internet-going population hate DRM so much that they knowingly break the law to obtain more readily available formats
That's a mighty strong claim to make without citing any evidence to support it.
I contend that most people don't even know what DRM is, and use DRM'd media all the time without even realising it. Any time someone plays a movie on DVD or BD, or streams almost any commercial video from almost any major media organisation on-line, they are consuming DRM'd content. If your assertion were true, services like NetFlix and BBC iPlayer would be deserted and everyone would be getting rips of everything via BitTorrent. In reality, both NetFlix and iPlayer have been growing so fast that they represent a substantial proportion of the total Internet bandwidth consumed at peak times in some countries, while outside of geek world very few people have even heard of BitTorrent.
I further contend that the number of people who pirate DRM'd content only because it's DRM'd -- that is, people who would have been legitimate customers if the DRM was removed -- is tiny. And I write that as someone who neither pays for nor pirates content that is protected by forms of DRM I don't like.
You can make similar observation about other kinds of content, too. Steam dominates on-line game distribution, but uses DRM. Even the early ACII server problems -- a poster child for a user experience clusterfuck directly attributable to getting DRM wrong -- didn't stop people buying despite all the complaints.
In fact, music is basically the only major kind of content where market forces have driven most suppliers to non-DRM'd formats today, though e-books might be going the same way. In other news, these are also the only major kinds of content where the industry has figured out viable business models that compete effectively with pirates. In other other news, producing a chart-topping song or an e-book with high production values costs orders of magnitude less than producing a Hollywood blockbuster or AAA game. Not all types of content have the same economics, and not all types of content will support the same kinds of business model.
Just because a lot of people feel a certain way doesn't make them right.
No, but we're not talking about what's right, we're talking about what is common enough to justify standardisation.
And while you're at it, quit accusing everyone who dislikes DRM of theft.
I don't like DRM. In any case, if you read my post again, you'll notice that I made no such accusation, nor did I write anything even close to the other paraphrasing you used. My final comment, the tone of which was a direct parody of the post I responded to, was carefully qualified and is objectively and literally correct right up to using the word "worthless".
It is also rather ironic that in a thread where I have made quite a few carefully written posts -- several of which have been modded up -- and in response to a post of mine that you clearly didn't bother to read properly and that was itself "uncivilised" only to the extent that it parodied the post it replied to, you are accusing me of blanket discourtesy, and you are the one indulging in ad hominem attacks. Perhaps I was feeding a troll and should have known better, but at least I was making valid points in response. Then again, I suspect I'm feeding a troll again now, so I'll just stop there.
So you think a standards committee should favour the views of a relatively small minority who philosophically oppose any DRM, as opposed to the relatively large majority who consume DRM'd content all the time without objecting? You have an interesting idea of what standards are for.;-)
They aren't. Encrypted Media Extensions are described in a completely separate document, which is built on but does not modify the underlying HTML spec. You can find the draft proposal here.
If DRM is really that necessary, then they can make a plugin or standalone app to do it.
They have, several times over. That's the problem. It's wasteful, because there is no standard.
This is about what is appropriate and correct to have in a public standard.
Proprietary standards are useful too. As long as nothing is mandated in an open standard that makes it no longer open, I don't see the problem. In this case, for example, nothing would compel Mozilla (for example) to incorporate support for this technology in Firefox if they didn't want to, and Firefox users could still visit any HTML5 page and view any other content (including video content) exactly the same way.
Of course there are more people enjoying crappy movies than those standing for their rights.
What right is that, exactly? The right to benefit from someone else's hard work without having to give anything back?
You can quibble over middlemen taking the lion's share, but someone spent a lot of time and someone risked a lot of money investing in every blockbuster movie, AAA game, and so on. I don't think you can credibly claim that those products have no value when millions of people pay real money to enjoy them, and millions more rip them off so they obviously enjoy the products even if they don't pay for them.
And apparently you're one of them.
Please don't insult those of us who have been lifelong supporters of civil liberties, and who have experienced the real consequences of things like over-reaching government and terrorist attacks, by equating war and repressive regimes with not letting you watch a film without DRM. I promise you will not convince anyone of anything that way, other than possibly the nature of your character and the likelihood (or lack thereof) that you personally have ever actually suffered from the kinds of serious problems you trotted out for the catchy soundbite.
That's your choice and of course you're entitled to your opinion, but please don't force it on everyone else. A lot more people enjoy watching content produced by Hollywood than are up in arms over standardising DRM.
Browser makers have no obligation to help them perpetuate their broken business model.
There is nothing broken about a business model where someone provides something of value in return for being paid for it, as long as everyone understand the deal and is OK with it.
Apparently millions of people are happy to enjoy content that way right now, which is pretty strong indication that it is a working business model.
Let their content rot behind their own walls.
The content won't rot behind closed walls, any more than it does today. It will just cost more for everyone to get it, because the millions of customers who are happy to accept protected content and ultimately paying for everything will have to subsidise the development of many non-standard DRM platforms instead of only one standardised approach.
The Internet is not yours either, but if you leave us and the millions of people who enjoy our content alone, then none of this will affect you anyway.
Thanks,
The people who actually make the content
PS: If you want our content but not locked down so you can do things you aren't supposed to with it, please take the money you were never going to give us anyway because you're just another worthless pirate that way ---->/dev/null
Yeah that'll really go over well with the open source crowd.
So what do you suggest? DRM is not going to go away any time soon, no matter how much you might wish it to. Implementing any kind of reasonably secure DRM will necessarily require some secret component, even if it's only in your platform hardware and accessible via an open API.
If open source browsers don't want to work within that environment, they will offer a limited experience to their users compared to closed source alternatives that adopt the technology. And that's fine if they and their users are both happy to accept that experience because of a personal choice that keeping things open is a better philosophy.
It won't be the studios worrying about streaming and DRM implementations. It will be services that want to implement different kinds of pricing model, maybe pay-per-view or a NetFlix-style flat rate subscription, which have contractual obligations to protect the content and will inevitably pass on the cost of meeting those obligations to their customers.
DRM is going to happen, on a wide scale, for the foreseeable future, and if it's used responsibly that's not necessarily a bad thing (because without it those new business models are unlikely to work commercially, yet many people apparently prefer to pay for their content in those ways). The only result of not standardising DRM for philosophical reasons will be introducing inefficiency into the supply chain, which will ultimately cost consumers more for no benefit or in the worst case make a business fail instead of offering a service that consumers would have enjoyed.
Sorry, I wrote that post when it was late, and I guess what was meant as a bit of light-hearted ribbing doesn't translate well in a forum post.
To elaborate:
For-loops in C-family languages are built around control flow: you specify one or more control variables and explicitly test/update them on each go around a loop. This is very flexible, but in the common case that you just want to iterate over a sequence of values the for-each style loop used in many other languages, including JavaScript, is more explicit and usually much neater. You can translate between them to some extent, but only in the sense that for the C-style loop you can programmatically define the sequence you're iterating over on-the-fly while in for-each style you can simulate awkward combinations by generating the sequence ahead of time. Strictly spekaing, the C-style version is more powerful because it can also change the sequence on-the-fly while for-each loops typically lock the sequence down once they've started, though if you really have an algorithm that needs to do that then probably a for-each loop isn't the best tool to choose anyway. As a footnote, C++11 includes range-based for loops, so it can do something closer to the JS loop now as well.
Objects work very differently in JavaScript to how they work in C++ and similar languages. In JS, everything is very open and dynamic. You can add fields to and remove them from JS objects on-the-fly, where in C++ you have to specify exactly which members you want up-front as part of your class declaration and then any instance of that class is tied to those members forever. In C++ you would therefore use inheritance to model subtype relationships where you want to extend things, but in JS that kind of tool is unnecessary because if you want to extend an object's functionality you can just add to or modify the individual object. Where you do want some degree of sharing code between different objects, JS also offers a prototype mechanism, but it doesn't really have the concept that a given object is of some fixed type with fixed members at all.
Variables, scopes and functions work rather differently because JS doesn't use the block scoping that most languages, including those in the C family, do. Instead, scopes in JavaScript are primarily based on functions: define a variable in a function, and essentially it's visible anywhere in that function but not outside. Because JavaScript also supports (and frequently uses) functions defined inside other functions, which may be named or anonymous and may be called immediately or kept around as closures, this leads to a very different programming style when you want to implement things like modular design and data hiding. A good example is the popular JavaScript module pattern: I found some examples of the module pattern in this blog post. This also affects some fairly common operations like looping to add event handlers to multiple elements on a web page, where you'll often see each loop iteration "wrapped" in its own function that gets created, executed exactly once, and then forgotten, in order to avoid values used in earlier iterations being retrospectively updated by later ones so you're sharing more data between iterations than intended.
Besides some syntax differences, they're all almost *exactly* the same. Some languages force you to format your declarations and types differently, but a for loop is a for loop, an object is an object with procedures, variables, scope, and all of whatever features the language supports, doesn't support, or pretends to support.
Well, no.
It's a popular claim that once you've learned a couple of languages, you can learn any new one in a week/a day/five minutes. And yes, some languages do share very similar underlying concepts with slightly different syntax. But that's far from a universal truth, and comparing C or C++ with JavaScript is an excellent counterexample.
To use a programming language effectively in the real world, you need more than just the syntax. You need to know how libraries work, including knowing your way around the standard ones and knowing where to find any major external sources like centralised repositories. You need the idioms to make best use of the features each individual language provides. You need to know the tools to create, distribute, and maintain your code.
If all you've ever programmed is "enterprise" stuff using C++, Java and C# from say 5 years ago, then sure, everything looks pretty similar: it's all basically imperative in style and mostly static, with a similar flavour of OO plus a few templates/generics; you follow a similar edit/compile/debug cycle and use similar tools to compile and distribute code; and the biggest conceptual jump is probably going from native code to running in a VM. Likewise, if all you've ever programmed is some trivial Perl, Python and PHP to write web site back-ends, one language is as scripty as another: almost everything is dynamic and can be hacked around at run-time; there's little emphasis on defining formal types; REPLs are common for experimentation; there is little boilerplate, so small applications can have very neat code but larger applications start to get awkward for the same reasons; there are many tools built-in for things like network and database integration; and so on.
Now try writing in C, assembler, Java, Python, OCaml, Haskell, Prolog and Lisp, and tell me with a straight face that they're all the same! And getting back to JavaScript, let's consider your own examples. A for-loop isn't the same concept in JavaScript as in C and C++ (until recently, at least, or unless you look from a very high level at what the C-style for loop is really doing). The object system in C++ works completely differently to the object system in JS. The features for manipulating functions in C and C++ are far less expressive than those in JS. Variables and scope work completely differently in JS, which in turn gives rise to some very important idioms that are unlike anything in C or C++. And of course the type system itself has a completely different flavour in JS from the C and C++ world, so your types and declarations do too. But apart from being wrong about every single example you gave, sure, JavaScript is just like C and C++.:-)
Maybe programming since I was 10 just means I don't see the code anymore.
Yes, you are surely very special and no-one else on Slashdot has been programming since they were a kid...!
However, the company has to operate entirely outside of the reach of European legislation for that to apply. Some do, but any business with a European presence is subject to those laws, which actually covers a surprisingly large number of the big names: Facebook have an office in Ireland, PayPal (Europe) are registered as a bank in Luxembourg, all the giants like Microsoft and Google have European offices, etc.
The export restrictions are a more significant issue for smaller US companies that provide B2B services rather than dealing with customers directly, though. For example, a lot of US-based start-ups that make it easier for small businesses to accept credit card payments, handle customer relations, etc. have run into trouble offering their services to EU businesses because of the personal data export issue. These days, there is a specific safe harbour agreement with the US to make such commercial relationships easier as long as the US company is held to similar standards as they would be in Europe.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but being associated with Big Media is pretty much toxic for politicians right now.
Oh, and also in case you hadn't noticed, the EU hasn't actually signed ACTA yet. Technically they have until March next year, IIRC, though I expect someone will try to sneak it through in the very near future before the politicians realise it's too close to SOPA and PIPA (in some respects) and likely to cause similar grief.
Also, while the European Commission (the unelected guys who seem to be behind the secret negotiations) still publicly support ACTA, whether they can get it through the European Parliament (the elected guys who recently got new teeth under the Lisbon Treaty and seem to be enjoying exercising their powers) is a different question.
That's roughly what a lot of people said before the EU went after Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour, too. More than $1,000,000,000 in fines for defying sanctions later, those people had changed their tune.
Transferring personal data from inside the EEA to places outside like the US, where there are not such strong data protection rules, requires either the subject's consent or certain specific guarantees under a safe harbour agreement. Otherwise taking the data out is already illegal.
OK, you've asked for references, which isn't unreasonable. Let's try a few facts from the other side, then.
First, as I said before, old ways of thinking don't necessarily apply to the new digital world, where distribution and/or manufacturing costs can be 0, or negligible.
The marginal cost of distribution can be near zero, for sure. The fixed costs, however, certainly aren't.
The real cost of Avatar, probably the most profitable movie of all time and with no big-ticket stars to pay, was somewhere around $500,000,000 according to the New York Times. The accounts have done their thing, but it looks like it made somewhere around double that in real profit.
Both of these productions were spectacularly successful in commercial terms, setting records, but they still only made a fairly small multiple of their cost in profit, and someone still had to foot the 9-figure price tag to produce and market them for that to happen. And remember that we are talking about literally the best case here, the most commercially successful such products yet released. Most products will never be anything like this successful, and plenty do lose money.
Secondly, Our society does not necessarily reward producing value with money. lottery winners, heirs, people on welfare etc. Having money by no means you have produced or contributed something useful.
Sure, there are exceptions to the rule. Some people get into positions where they can write their own cheque with someone else's money. Some people invest a small amount for a chance to make it big and it pays off. (Of course, many more invest small amounts and get nothing back; no lottery is a net win for the punters.) Some people play economic games with bits on computers that never had real money behind them. We all know how those things have turned out.
But most real money actually flowing around the economy is not like that. It's down to people working to earn a living, and then enjoying spending what they earned. That's why governments get very worried when the economy turns bad, as it is at the moment, and everyone starts paying down their debts or hoarding savings rather than spending just at the time when more spending it needed to get the economy moving again.
At the end of the day, any way you dress it up, someone is spending real time and money to produce this content. If someone else is enjoying that content but doesn't contribute anything in return, that's a one-sided bargain. I don't see how to back that argument up with "sources"; it's an appeal to basic human decency and sense of fair play.
It's It's legal in Switzerland
It's It's legal in Canada
It's It's legal in The Netherlands
Their creative and consumption economies are not impacted by piracy, as that was often the reason to make it legal in the first place.
Hold on a minute, please.
The Swiss decided very recently not to change their laws regarding downloading of copyright content for personal use, based on a report that basically said that while their own economy wasn't suffering because of it, big media companies elsewhere were taking the real hit and should suck it up and adapt (without specifying how). In other words, they acknowledged that someone was losing out big time, but it wasn't in their country and meant their own people could spend more of their entert
No, I'm pretty sure it means exactly what I think it means. I cannot conceive of any realistic circumstances under which AWS would be completely shut down, with minimal notice, resulting in the permanent loss of most/all customer data in the way I was describing.
They are geographically diverse, so physical dangers like natural disasters can be mitigated within their system.
As for legal threats, even if ultimately the main Amazon legal entity is within US jurisdiction, the damage to the US from going after them in the way they went after megaupload.com would be catastrophic. Unlike Megaupload, many legit business and government services are built on AWS, making AWS the textbook case of an IT service that is now too big to fail.
If the government attempted to bring it down anyway, everyone in Big IT (not just Amazon) would seriously consider moving their operations abroad and paying taxes there instead, causing vast damage to the US economy. Silicon Valley would lose its status as the world's leading tech innovation centre, because investors would become very hesitant to back any small company that could be brought down the same way.
Aside from the long-term economic damage, you'd also have serious short-term disruption. Probably a lot of US government departments are using AWS for one system or another, and they would all go off-line. Better hope none of those systems are used to keep track of pensions, medical funding, education, or anything to which the word "veteran" can be attached, or someone's political career is over. Moreover, many US businesses are reliant on AWS, and they would all take a hit or outright fail too, causing even more economic and political damage.
And that is only the damage that would start in the ten minutes before an army of well-funded lawyers turned up at every court in the US to sue the federal government for more money than the GDP.
Out of curiosity, what harm do you considered is done if someone never would have paid for a sale?
I have two problems with that line of reasoning.
Firstly, it breaks the fundamental incentive underlying our entire economy: you have to produce value to earn money before you can enjoy value produced by other people when you spend that money.
Secondly, we have only someone's word for it that they would never really have paid for something even if there was no other way to enjoy it. I find that claim preposterous in many cases.
Piracy is decriminalized or legal in some places and there is not 100% piracy.
If piracy is decriminalised, then surely there is no such thing as piracy any more by definition, so I don't know what you mean here.
As above, piracy is legal and or decriminalized in many places. What you have stated has not come to pass, anywhere.
You've made similar claims several times in this discussion. There are more than 150 members of the World Trade Organisation, including pretty much the entire developed world, and under TRIPS all of those have basic minimum standards for things like legal copyright protections. There are only 200 or so countries in the world. So where is it that you claim piracy is legal, and how do their creative and consumption economies look compared to places like the US and Europe?
People tend to pay for things that they consider worth paying for.
The trouble is, as any researcher can tell you, what people say and what they do are frequently different things, whether intentionally or otherwise.
The only way to know for sure what people consider worth paying for is to give them no choice but to pay for it if they want it and see who pays. That will tell you, by definition, who really thinks it's worth the asking price.
When movies and games are still making hundreds of millions in net profit based on sales, then I don't really buy that.
They're only making those millions because of all the people who actually pay to see the movie or play the game. The pirates still aren't contributing anything, unless you want to pretend that they are somehow helping a multi-million-dollar production by generously offering free advertising that somehow reaches paying customers that the multi-million-dollar professional advertising campaigns that go with such productions do not.
Interference by legal authorities is always going to be tricky, and I suspect that at some point we will see new laws/regulations restricting the ability of authorities to seize hardware and not return data to third parties within a reasonable period, because otherwise the risk of this happening is a significant brake on the development of distributed/"cloud" services that are potentially quite lucrative in terms of tax revenue. As we've seen from the actions of Big Media regarding copyright, you can't count on your own innocence and the fact that your hosting service wasn't aware that another customer was breaking the rules to stop their entire operation being seized by over-zealous copyright cops. We can't have a situation where hundreds of small businesses are going under because one person using a particular cloud service was accused of peddling child porn or distributing material inciting terrorism or whatever else the root password to the Internet might be this week.
However, none of the Ts & Cs I saw restricted sudden closure of the service to those circumstances. As far as I could tell, they were free to take your money, and then just close down the service any time they wanted for any reason.
This falls directly into the 1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale fallacy.
No. Sorry, but that's just not true. I am talking there about the number of people who actually get to enjoy the work, without regard to how they obtain it, and about who is actually paying for it. Neither argument implies anything about hypothetical sales.
Repeated studies have shown that people who pirate the most material also buy the most.
Which tells us that people who like music/movies/games tend to be people who like music/movies/games. That's hardly surprising.
This makes the assumption that "people who pay" and "people who pirate" are not overlapping sets.
Not really. If you want to count people who pirate a work initially but then buy it as people who paid and not pirates, I'm happy to count the numbers that way. When we know for a fact that, for example, some games have 90+% piracy rates, I think calling it a 50/50 split between those who ultimately pay for the game and those who don't is still very generous to the pirate side.
The difference is that with piracy everybody gets five times as many albums given the same amount of disposable income.
Again, this is one of those rather implausible assumptions that gets taken as read when making anti-copyright arguments. No-one really has an exactly fixed amount of disposable income to spend on media, other than a relatively small group who are really hard up and don't have much to spend on anything at all. People choose to spend money on a takeaway dinner rather than the DVD they're going to watch over dinner, or to go to see a live music gig rather than spend the same money downloading the tracks legally or buying the DVD of the show, or to buy high-end home cinema equipment to watch their Blu-Rayson rather than the Blu-Rays themselves. I find it very hard to believe that anyone who has the kind of equipment a lot of these people are buying and the kind of spare time to enjoy that much content doesn't also have enough money to pay for the content itself.
But they don't -- otherwise there would be a 100% piracy rate, and there isn't.
And that's where your entire position all falls apart. There isn't a 100% piracy rate only because other people obey the law and pay for their content. Every argument made in this discussion that piracy is not harmful or is even helpful is contingent on the fact that paying for everything is someone else's problem.
If we did legalise copying for personal/non-commercial use or completely get rid of copyright, so honest people were free to enjoy the same advantages as pirates claim today anyway, then piracy would no longer exist. No-one would have any legal obligation to pay for anything once the first few copies started floating around on the Internet ten minutes after the launch of the latest film. Paying for content would become purely a matter of convenience or charity.
Today the content producers are finally starting to get that convenience has value and services like iTunes, Spotify and Netflix have done well, and as this week has shown they can also take action against rip-off sites trying to compete for their audience. However, in a world where we condone/abolish piracy, anyone is free to set up a legal download service with all the same content as the original suppliers' services but charge hardly anything for it or fund it entirely through ads, because they don't have to make back the fixed cost of production before they start to make any profit. There is no way the guys spending all the money on production can beat the guys who don't on price, and they no longer have any other advantage. That reduces the incentive to pay for content to entirely a matter of charity/wanting to support the original artists, and experiments to date along those lines have been very hit-and-miss.
In any case, you seem to be equating a potentially lost sale with a lost sale, which is fallacious. Lets say someone pirates software that they honestly could not afford under any circumstances. If they never would have paid for the software, it can not be considered a lost sale.
While that is a common argument, I think it is fundamentally flawed. The entire point of money as a replacement for barter is that those who create more value one way or another will receive more money, which they can then use to pay for things that they in turn value. It is one huge incentive scheme. As soon as you say someone without money wouldn't have bought something they valued anyway, even if they had no other means of acquiring it and had to go without, you have completely ignored the incentive that if someone wants something valuable and can't afford it, they have to produce more value themselves to earn it.
(Clearly some people have managed to game the system by achieving positions where they decide on behalf of others how much value they themselves are generating and pay themselves accordingly, and others play economic games with money that is not really there at all in glorified pyramid schemes. As we've learned recently, sooner or later there are consequences to allowing people to get away with such actions, precisely because they do eventually screw up sensible economics for everyone. But this isn't really relevant to my argument above.)
Also, I don't for an instant believe that the overwhelming majority of pirates "honestly could not afford under any circumstances" to pay for what they're enjoying. That is an absurd claim. They might have to give up going to the cinema for a couple of weeks, or forego that nice bottle of wine at the restaurant, or buy a slightly slower PC to play the game on, but no-one is going to lose their home or have to take on a second job because they spent a few $10s they couldn't afford on a game or a movie or some new music. I'm sure that some people really couldn't afford to buy everything they pirate, but perhaps they should try living within their means or work harder to increase their spending power; see my general comments above.
I would say the analogy breaks down in that piracy does not involve any deception or misrepresentation. There is a pretty big difference in taking something for free and tricking someone into investing in a certain fund at their expense and your benefit.
I don't think it is so different, though. In either case, you are violating a social norm that has been codified in law. After all, has an artist (in the general sense) who sets out on a project in the expectation that it will be financially viable but who then doesn't get the money the law they are owed because of piracy not essentially invested in something that was not as valuable as it was made out to be?
You also fail to take into account one of the main reasons of the piracy increases sales argument, which is word of mouth. Those 5 freeloaders may each tell 5 of their friends, and if that causes even 6 of those 25 friends to buy the album then the artist is in a better position than he was without the freeloaders.
This is another popular argument that I never understand. If 5 freeloaders have all ripped your work without any of them paying you for it, why would we assume than more than 1-in-5 of the people they subsequently told about it would pay for the work?
Any advertising is only worth as much as the extra sales it ultimately generates. Arguing that a first generation of freeloading is OK because later generations will pay sounds an awful lot like one of those glorified pyramid schemes I mentioned.
I am somewhat skeptical of that site however as it doesn't seem to be terrible objective.
Sure, I'm not claiming it is either neutral or authoritative in general, just demonstrating that not all studies apparently supportive of p
The actual answer is (as always) to have backups of anything you feel is important.
Ironically, the specialist on-line back-up services seem to be among the worst offenders in terms of guarantees.
For example, we looked into this a few months ago, and one huge and very well known back-up service had Ts & Cs that seemed to say (quite clearly, IIRC) that if they decided to close down the service for any reason then they would have no obligation in terms of granting customers data access beyond letting you download what you could over the next 3 days. On a fully saturated leased line, with no-one else hitting their servers at the same time, you still couldn't download the volume of data that even their entry-level business packages supported within that time frame! And clearly in practice not everyone has a handy leased line available and it is highly unlikely that the back-up service's servers would stand up to their entire customer base trying to do that at once. They normally offer other ways to retrieve your data en masse if necessary, such as posting it on discs for a small fee, but those options all stop as soon as they announce the closure. Basically, they offer a back-up service that can disappear at any time without giving you a chance to retrieve everything, so better hope your office doesn't burn down around the time they decide to do that, then.
We didn't take out a contract. We did notice that while the above was the worst case of not really providing the advertised service at all, several of the other big name specialist off-site back-up services didn't seem to be much better. None of them actually promised to take steps such that even if they had to shut down at short notice for any reason there was a always a credible plan in place to get your data back to you.
One of my colleagues made a strong case that we should use something like encrypted files uploaded to AWS if we wanted cloud back-ups, for the simple reason that Amazon make most of their money elsewhere but rely on AWS themselves as well, which with their scale means it is inconceivable that the service would be shut off with the loss of data before we had chance to retrieve it. In the end, we decided (as we have with most other cloud services) that the whole idea didn't live up to the hype, and we opted to lease a dedicated server housed in someone else's data centre and we basically just do an automatic rsync from our normal servers to the back-up with suitable levels of encryption applied throughout.
Slashdot Mirror
And this statement is based on what exactly?
Well, basic arithmetic, for one thing.
Hollywood might sell 50,000,000-100,000,000 tickets for a blockbuster hit, and that's just people going out to see the movie. Obviously many more people then see it for the first time on DVD/BD, or when it's shown on TV.
Can you cite any source that shows even 1% of that many people up in arms over standardising DRM?
It is out of the standard. Please RTFA and follow the links: this is a completely separate document that builds on, but does not modify, the HTML5 spec.
The vast majority of the Internet-going population hate DRM so much that they knowingly break the law to obtain more readily available formats
That's a mighty strong claim to make without citing any evidence to support it.
I contend that most people don't even know what DRM is, and use DRM'd media all the time without even realising it. Any time someone plays a movie on DVD or BD, or streams almost any commercial video from almost any major media organisation on-line, they are consuming DRM'd content. If your assertion were true, services like NetFlix and BBC iPlayer would be deserted and everyone would be getting rips of everything via BitTorrent. In reality, both NetFlix and iPlayer have been growing so fast that they represent a substantial proportion of the total Internet bandwidth consumed at peak times in some countries, while outside of geek world very few people have even heard of BitTorrent.
I further contend that the number of people who pirate DRM'd content only because it's DRM'd -- that is, people who would have been legitimate customers if the DRM was removed -- is tiny. And I write that as someone who neither pays for nor pirates content that is protected by forms of DRM I don't like.
You can make similar observation about other kinds of content, too. Steam dominates on-line game distribution, but uses DRM. Even the early ACII server problems -- a poster child for a user experience clusterfuck directly attributable to getting DRM wrong -- didn't stop people buying despite all the complaints.
In fact, music is basically the only major kind of content where market forces have driven most suppliers to non-DRM'd formats today, though e-books might be going the same way. In other news, these are also the only major kinds of content where the industry has figured out viable business models that compete effectively with pirates. In other other news, producing a chart-topping song or an e-book with high production values costs orders of magnitude less than producing a Hollywood blockbuster or AAA game. Not all types of content have the same economics, and not all types of content will support the same kinds of business model.
Just because a lot of people feel a certain way doesn't make them right.
No, but we're not talking about what's right, we're talking about what is common enough to justify standardisation.
And while you're at it, quit accusing everyone who dislikes DRM of theft.
I don't like DRM. In any case, if you read my post again, you'll notice that I made no such accusation, nor did I write anything even close to the other paraphrasing you used. My final comment, the tone of which was a direct parody of the post I responded to, was carefully qualified and is objectively and literally correct right up to using the word "worthless".
It is also rather ironic that in a thread where I have made quite a few carefully written posts -- several of which have been modded up -- and in response to a post of mine that you clearly didn't bother to read properly and that was itself "uncivilised" only to the extent that it parodied the post it replied to, you are accusing me of blanket discourtesy, and you are the one indulging in ad hominem attacks. Perhaps I was feeding a troll and should have known better, but at least I was making valid points in response. Then again, I suspect I'm feeding a troll again now, so I'll just stop there.
So you think a standards committee should favour the views of a relatively small minority who philosophically oppose any DRM, as opposed to the relatively large majority who consume DRM'd content all the time without objecting? You have an interesting idea of what standards are for. ;-)
suggest not polluting HTML5 with this stuff.
They aren't. Encrypted Media Extensions are described in a completely separate document, which is built on but does not modify the underlying HTML spec. You can find the draft proposal here.
If DRM is really that necessary, then they can make a plugin or standalone app to do it.
They have, several times over. That's the problem. It's wasteful, because there is no standard.
This is about what is appropriate and correct to have in a public standard.
Proprietary standards are useful too. As long as nothing is mandated in an open standard that makes it no longer open, I don't see the problem. In this case, for example, nothing would compel Mozilla (for example) to incorporate support for this technology in Firefox if they didn't want to, and Firefox users could still visit any HTML5 page and view any other content (including video content) exactly the same way.
Of course there are more people enjoying crappy movies than those standing for their rights.
What right is that, exactly? The right to benefit from someone else's hard work without having to give anything back?
You can quibble over middlemen taking the lion's share, but someone spent a lot of time and someone risked a lot of money investing in every blockbuster movie, AAA game, and so on. I don't think you can credibly claim that those products have no value when millions of people pay real money to enjoy them, and millions more rip them off so they obviously enjoy the products even if they don't pay for them.
And apparently you're one of them.
Please don't insult those of us who have been lifelong supporters of civil liberties, and who have experienced the real consequences of things like over-reaching government and terrorist attacks, by equating war and repressive regimes with not letting you watch a film without DRM. I promise you will not convince anyone of anything that way, other than possibly the nature of your character and the likelihood (or lack thereof) that you personally have ever actually suffered from the kinds of serious problems you trotted out for the catchy soundbite.
That's your choice and of course you're entitled to your opinion, but please don't force it on everyone else. A lot more people enjoy watching content produced by Hollywood than are up in arms over standardising DRM.
Browser makers have no obligation to help them perpetuate their broken business model.
There is nothing broken about a business model where someone provides something of value in return for being paid for it, as long as everyone understand the deal and is OK with it.
Apparently millions of people are happy to enjoy content that way right now, which is pretty strong indication that it is a working business model.
Let their content rot behind their own walls.
The content won't rot behind closed walls, any more than it does today. It will just cost more for everyone to get it, because the millions of customers who are happy to accept protected content and ultimately paying for everything will have to subsidise the development of many non-standard DRM platforms instead of only one standardised approach.
Dear Wowsers,
The Internet is not yours either, but if you leave us and the millions of people who enjoy our content alone, then none of this will affect you anyway.
Thanks,
The people who actually make the content
PS: If you want our content but not locked down so you can do things you aren't supposed to with it, please take the money you were never going to give us anyway because you're just another worthless pirate that way ----> /dev/null
Yeah that'll really go over well with the open source crowd.
So what do you suggest? DRM is not going to go away any time soon, no matter how much you might wish it to. Implementing any kind of reasonably secure DRM will necessarily require some secret component, even if it's only in your platform hardware and accessible via an open API.
If open source browsers don't want to work within that environment, they will offer a limited experience to their users compared to closed source alternatives that adopt the technology. And that's fine if they and their users are both happy to accept that experience because of a personal choice that keeping things open is a better philosophy.
It won't be the studios worrying about streaming and DRM implementations. It will be services that want to implement different kinds of pricing model, maybe pay-per-view or a NetFlix-style flat rate subscription, which have contractual obligations to protect the content and will inevitably pass on the cost of meeting those obligations to their customers.
DRM is going to happen, on a wide scale, for the foreseeable future, and if it's used responsibly that's not necessarily a bad thing (because without it those new business models are unlikely to work commercially, yet many people apparently prefer to pay for their content in those ways). The only result of not standardising DRM for philosophical reasons will be introducing inefficiency into the supply chain, which will ultimately cost consumers more for no benefit or in the worst case make a business fail instead of offering a service that consumers would have enjoyed.
Sorry, I wrote that post when it was late, and I guess what was meant as a bit of light-hearted ribbing doesn't translate well in a forum post.
To elaborate:
For-loops in C-family languages are built around control flow: you specify one or more control variables and explicitly test/update them on each go around a loop. This is very flexible, but in the common case that you just want to iterate over a sequence of values the for-each style loop used in many other languages, including JavaScript, is more explicit and usually much neater. You can translate between them to some extent, but only in the sense that for the C-style loop you can programmatically define the sequence you're iterating over on-the-fly while in for-each style you can simulate awkward combinations by generating the sequence ahead of time. Strictly spekaing, the C-style version is more powerful because it can also change the sequence on-the-fly while for-each loops typically lock the sequence down once they've started, though if you really have an algorithm that needs to do that then probably a for-each loop isn't the best tool to choose anyway. As a footnote, C++11 includes range-based for loops, so it can do something closer to the JS loop now as well.
Objects work very differently in JavaScript to how they work in C++ and similar languages. In JS, everything is very open and dynamic. You can add fields to and remove them from JS objects on-the-fly, where in C++ you have to specify exactly which members you want up-front as part of your class declaration and then any instance of that class is tied to those members forever. In C++ you would therefore use inheritance to model subtype relationships where you want to extend things, but in JS that kind of tool is unnecessary because if you want to extend an object's functionality you can just add to or modify the individual object. Where you do want some degree of sharing code between different objects, JS also offers a prototype mechanism, but it doesn't really have the concept that a given object is of some fixed type with fixed members at all.
Variables, scopes and functions work rather differently because JS doesn't use the block scoping that most languages, including those in the C family, do. Instead, scopes in JavaScript are primarily based on functions: define a variable in a function, and essentially it's visible anywhere in that function but not outside. Because JavaScript also supports (and frequently uses) functions defined inside other functions, which may be named or anonymous and may be called immediately or kept around as closures, this leads to a very different programming style when you want to implement things like modular design and data hiding. A good example is the popular JavaScript module pattern: I found some examples of the module pattern in this blog post. This also affects some fairly common operations like looping to add event handlers to multiple elements on a web page, where you'll often see each loop iteration "wrapped" in its own function that gets created, executed exactly once, and then forgotten, in order to avoid values used in earlier iterations being retrospectively updated by later ones so you're sharing more data between iterations than intended.
Besides some syntax differences, they're all almost *exactly* the same. Some languages force you to format your declarations and types differently, but a for loop is a for loop, an object is an object with procedures, variables, scope, and all of whatever features the language supports, doesn't support, or pretends to support.
Well, no.
It's a popular claim that once you've learned a couple of languages, you can learn any new one in a week/a day/five minutes. And yes, some languages do share very similar underlying concepts with slightly different syntax. But that's far from a universal truth, and comparing C or C++ with JavaScript is an excellent counterexample.
To use a programming language effectively in the real world, you need more than just the syntax. You need to know how libraries work, including knowing your way around the standard ones and knowing where to find any major external sources like centralised repositories. You need the idioms to make best use of the features each individual language provides. You need to know the tools to create, distribute, and maintain your code.
If all you've ever programmed is "enterprise" stuff using C++, Java and C# from say 5 years ago, then sure, everything looks pretty similar: it's all basically imperative in style and mostly static, with a similar flavour of OO plus a few templates/generics; you follow a similar edit/compile/debug cycle and use similar tools to compile and distribute code; and the biggest conceptual jump is probably going from native code to running in a VM. Likewise, if all you've ever programmed is some trivial Perl, Python and PHP to write web site back-ends, one language is as scripty as another: almost everything is dynamic and can be hacked around at run-time; there's little emphasis on defining formal types; REPLs are common for experimentation; there is little boilerplate, so small applications can have very neat code but larger applications start to get awkward for the same reasons; there are many tools built-in for things like network and database integration; and so on.
Now try writing in C, assembler, Java, Python, OCaml, Haskell, Prolog and Lisp, and tell me with a straight face that they're all the same! And getting back to JavaScript, let's consider your own examples. A for-loop isn't the same concept in JavaScript as in C and C++ (until recently, at least, or unless you look from a very high level at what the C-style for loop is really doing). The object system in C++ works completely differently to the object system in JS. The features for manipulating functions in C and C++ are far less expressive than those in JS. Variables and scope work completely differently in JS, which in turn gives rise to some very important idioms that are unlike anything in C or C++. And of course the type system itself has a completely different flavour in JS from the C and C++ world, so your types and declarations do too. But apart from being wrong about every single example you gave, sure, JavaScript is just like C and C++. :-)
Maybe programming since I was 10 just means I don't see the code anymore.
Yes, you are surely very special and no-one else on Slashdot has been programming since they were a kid...!
True.
However, the company has to operate entirely outside of the reach of European legislation for that to apply. Some do, but any business with a European presence is subject to those laws, which actually covers a surprisingly large number of the big names: Facebook have an office in Ireland, PayPal (Europe) are registered as a bank in Luxembourg, all the giants like Microsoft and Google have European offices, etc.
The export restrictions are a more significant issue for smaller US companies that provide B2B services rather than dealing with customers directly, though. For example, a lot of US-based start-ups that make it easier for small businesses to accept credit card payments, handle customer relations, etc. have run into trouble offering their services to EU businesses because of the personal data export issue. These days, there is a specific safe harbour agreement with the US to make such commercial relationships easier as long as the US company is held to similar standards as they would be in Europe.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but being associated with Big Media is pretty much toxic for politicians right now.
Oh, and also in case you hadn't noticed, the EU hasn't actually signed ACTA yet. Technically they have until March next year, IIRC, though I expect someone will try to sneak it through in the very near future before the politicians realise it's too close to SOPA and PIPA (in some respects) and likely to cause similar grief.
Also, while the European Commission (the unelected guys who seem to be behind the secret negotiations) still publicly support ACTA, whether they can get it through the European Parliament (the elected guys who recently got new teeth under the Lisbon Treaty and seem to be enjoying exercising their powers) is a different question.
That's roughly what a lot of people said before the EU went after Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour, too. More than $1,000,000,000 in fines for defying sanctions later, those people had changed their tune.
Transferring personal data from inside the EEA to places outside like the US, where there are not such strong data protection rules, requires either the subject's consent or certain specific guarantees under a safe harbour agreement. Otherwise taking the data out is already illegal.
OK, you've asked for references, which isn't unreasonable. Let's try a few facts from the other side, then.
First, as I said before, old ways of thinking don't necessarily apply to the new digital world, where distribution and/or manufacturing costs can be 0, or negligible.
The marginal cost of distribution can be near zero, for sure. The fixed costs, however, certainly aren't.
The real cost of Avatar, probably the most profitable movie of all time and with no big-ticket stars to pay, was somewhere around $500,000,000 according to the New York Times. The accounts have done their thing, but it looks like it made somewhere around double that in real profit.
The most profitable computer game of all times is Grand Theft Auto IV, which Wikipedia claims took over 1000 people and more than three and a half years to complete, with a total cost estimated at approximately $100 million. It made an order of magnitude more in gross revenues, but by the time you knock out the cuts for distribution channels, marketing expenses, tax, etc. the real profit is only a modest fraction of that.
Both of these productions were spectacularly successful in commercial terms, setting records, but they still only made a fairly small multiple of their cost in profit, and someone still had to foot the 9-figure price tag to produce and market them for that to happen. And remember that we are talking about literally the best case here, the most commercially successful such products yet released. Most products will never be anything like this successful, and plenty do lose money.
Secondly, Our society does not necessarily reward producing value with money. lottery winners, heirs, people on welfare etc. Having money by no means you have produced or contributed something useful.
Sure, there are exceptions to the rule. Some people get into positions where they can write their own cheque with someone else's money. Some people invest a small amount for a chance to make it big and it pays off. (Of course, many more invest small amounts and get nothing back; no lottery is a net win for the punters.) Some people play economic games with bits on computers that never had real money behind them. We all know how those things have turned out.
But most real money actually flowing around the economy is not like that. It's down to people working to earn a living, and then enjoying spending what they earned. That's why governments get very worried when the economy turns bad, as it is at the moment, and everyone starts paying down their debts or hoarding savings rather than spending just at the time when more spending it needed to get the economy moving again.
At the end of the day, any way you dress it up, someone is spending real time and money to produce this content. If someone else is enjoying that content but doesn't contribute anything in return, that's a one-sided bargain. I don't see how to back that argument up with "sources"; it's an appeal to basic human decency and sense of fair play.
It's It's legal in Switzerland
It's It's legal in Canada
It's It's legal in The Netherlands
Their creative and consumption economies are not impacted by piracy, as that was often the reason to make it legal in the first place.
Hold on a minute, please.
The Swiss decided very recently not to change their laws regarding downloading of copyright content for personal use, based on a report that basically said that while their own economy wasn't suffering because of it, big media companies elsewhere were taking the real hit and should suck it up and adapt (without specifying how). In other words, they acknowledged that someone was losing out big time, but it wasn't in their country and meant their own people could spend more of their entert
No, I'm pretty sure it means exactly what I think it means. I cannot conceive of any realistic circumstances under which AWS would be completely shut down, with minimal notice, resulting in the permanent loss of most/all customer data in the way I was describing.
They are geographically diverse, so physical dangers like natural disasters can be mitigated within their system.
As for legal threats, even if ultimately the main Amazon legal entity is within US jurisdiction, the damage to the US from going after them in the way they went after megaupload.com would be catastrophic. Unlike Megaupload, many legit business and government services are built on AWS, making AWS the textbook case of an IT service that is now too big to fail.
If the government attempted to bring it down anyway, everyone in Big IT (not just Amazon) would seriously consider moving their operations abroad and paying taxes there instead, causing vast damage to the US economy. Silicon Valley would lose its status as the world's leading tech innovation centre, because investors would become very hesitant to back any small company that could be brought down the same way.
Aside from the long-term economic damage, you'd also have serious short-term disruption. Probably a lot of US government departments are using AWS for one system or another, and they would all go off-line. Better hope none of those systems are used to keep track of pensions, medical funding, education, or anything to which the word "veteran" can be attached, or someone's political career is over. Moreover, many US businesses are reliant on AWS, and they would all take a hit or outright fail too, causing even more economic and political damage.
And that is only the damage that would start in the ten minutes before an army of well-funded lawyers turned up at every court in the US to sue the federal government for more money than the GDP.
Out of curiosity, what harm do you considered is done if someone never would have paid for a sale?
I have two problems with that line of reasoning.
Firstly, it breaks the fundamental incentive underlying our entire economy: you have to produce value to earn money before you can enjoy value produced by other people when you spend that money.
Secondly, we have only someone's word for it that they would never really have paid for something even if there was no other way to enjoy it. I find that claim preposterous in many cases.
Piracy is decriminalized or legal in some places and there is not 100% piracy.
If piracy is decriminalised, then surely there is no such thing as piracy any more by definition, so I don't know what you mean here.
As above, piracy is legal and or decriminalized in many places. What you have stated has not come to pass, anywhere.
You've made similar claims several times in this discussion. There are more than 150 members of the World Trade Organisation, including pretty much the entire developed world, and under TRIPS all of those have basic minimum standards for things like legal copyright protections. There are only 200 or so countries in the world. So where is it that you claim piracy is legal, and how do their creative and consumption economies look compared to places like the US and Europe?
People tend to pay for things that they consider worth paying for.
The trouble is, as any researcher can tell you, what people say and what they do are frequently different things, whether intentionally or otherwise.
The only way to know for sure what people consider worth paying for is to give them no choice but to pay for it if they want it and see who pays. That will tell you, by definition, who really thinks it's worth the asking price.
When movies and games are still making hundreds of millions in net profit based on sales, then I don't really buy that.
They're only making those millions because of all the people who actually pay to see the movie or play the game. The pirates still aren't contributing anything, unless you want to pretend that they are somehow helping a multi-million-dollar production by generously offering free advertising that somehow reaches paying customers that the multi-million-dollar professional advertising campaigns that go with such productions do not.
Interference by legal authorities is always going to be tricky, and I suspect that at some point we will see new laws/regulations restricting the ability of authorities to seize hardware and not return data to third parties within a reasonable period, because otherwise the risk of this happening is a significant brake on the development of distributed/"cloud" services that are potentially quite lucrative in terms of tax revenue. As we've seen from the actions of Big Media regarding copyright, you can't count on your own innocence and the fact that your hosting service wasn't aware that another customer was breaking the rules to stop their entire operation being seized by over-zealous copyright cops. We can't have a situation where hundreds of small businesses are going under because one person using a particular cloud service was accused of peddling child porn or distributing material inciting terrorism or whatever else the root password to the Internet might be this week.
However, none of the Ts & Cs I saw restricted sudden closure of the service to those circumstances. As far as I could tell, they were free to take your money, and then just close down the service any time they wanted for any reason.
This falls directly into the 1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale fallacy.
No. Sorry, but that's just not true. I am talking there about the number of people who actually get to enjoy the work, without regard to how they obtain it, and about who is actually paying for it. Neither argument implies anything about hypothetical sales.
Repeated studies have shown that people who pirate the most material also buy the most.
Which tells us that people who like music/movies/games tend to be people who like music/movies/games. That's hardly surprising.
This makes the assumption that "people who pay" and "people who pirate" are not overlapping sets.
Not really. If you want to count people who pirate a work initially but then buy it as people who paid and not pirates, I'm happy to count the numbers that way. When we know for a fact that, for example, some games have 90+% piracy rates, I think calling it a 50/50 split between those who ultimately pay for the game and those who don't is still very generous to the pirate side.
The difference is that with piracy everybody gets five times as many albums given the same amount of disposable income.
Again, this is one of those rather implausible assumptions that gets taken as read when making anti-copyright arguments. No-one really has an exactly fixed amount of disposable income to spend on media, other than a relatively small group who are really hard up and don't have much to spend on anything at all. People choose to spend money on a takeaway dinner rather than the DVD they're going to watch over dinner, or to go to see a live music gig rather than spend the same money downloading the tracks legally or buying the DVD of the show, or to buy high-end home cinema equipment to watch their Blu-Rayson rather than the Blu-Rays themselves. I find it very hard to believe that anyone who has the kind of equipment a lot of these people are buying and the kind of spare time to enjoy that much content doesn't also have enough money to pay for the content itself.
But they don't -- otherwise there would be a 100% piracy rate, and there isn't.
And that's where your entire position all falls apart. There isn't a 100% piracy rate only because other people obey the law and pay for their content. Every argument made in this discussion that piracy is not harmful or is even helpful is contingent on the fact that paying for everything is someone else's problem.
If we did legalise copying for personal/non-commercial use or completely get rid of copyright, so honest people were free to enjoy the same advantages as pirates claim today anyway, then piracy would no longer exist. No-one would have any legal obligation to pay for anything once the first few copies started floating around on the Internet ten minutes after the launch of the latest film. Paying for content would become purely a matter of convenience or charity.
Today the content producers are finally starting to get that convenience has value and services like iTunes, Spotify and Netflix have done well, and as this week has shown they can also take action against rip-off sites trying to compete for their audience. However, in a world where we condone/abolish piracy, anyone is free to set up a legal download service with all the same content as the original suppliers' services but charge hardly anything for it or fund it entirely through ads, because they don't have to make back the fixed cost of production before they start to make any profit. There is no way the guys spending all the money on production can beat the guys who don't on price, and they no longer have any other advantage. That reduces the incentive to pay for content to entirely a matter of charity/wanting to support the original artists, and experiments to date along those lines have been very hit-and-miss.
In any case, you seem to be equating a potentially lost sale with a lost sale, which is fallacious. Lets say someone pirates software that they honestly could not afford under any circumstances. If they never would have paid for the software, it can not be considered a lost sale.
While that is a common argument, I think it is fundamentally flawed. The entire point of money as a replacement for barter is that those who create more value one way or another will receive more money, which they can then use to pay for things that they in turn value. It is one huge incentive scheme. As soon as you say someone without money wouldn't have bought something they valued anyway, even if they had no other means of acquiring it and had to go without, you have completely ignored the incentive that if someone wants something valuable and can't afford it, they have to produce more value themselves to earn it.
(Clearly some people have managed to game the system by achieving positions where they decide on behalf of others how much value they themselves are generating and pay themselves accordingly, and others play economic games with money that is not really there at all in glorified pyramid schemes. As we've learned recently, sooner or later there are consequences to allowing people to get away with such actions, precisely because they do eventually screw up sensible economics for everyone. But this isn't really relevant to my argument above.)
Also, I don't for an instant believe that the overwhelming majority of pirates "honestly could not afford under any circumstances" to pay for what they're enjoying. That is an absurd claim. They might have to give up going to the cinema for a couple of weeks, or forego that nice bottle of wine at the restaurant, or buy a slightly slower PC to play the game on, but no-one is going to lose their home or have to take on a second job because they spent a few $10s they couldn't afford on a game or a movie or some new music. I'm sure that some people really couldn't afford to buy everything they pirate, but perhaps they should try living within their means or work harder to increase their spending power; see my general comments above.
I would say the analogy breaks down in that piracy does not involve any deception or misrepresentation. There is a pretty big difference in taking something for free and tricking someone into investing in a certain fund at their expense and your benefit.
I don't think it is so different, though. In either case, you are violating a social norm that has been codified in law. After all, has an artist (in the general sense) who sets out on a project in the expectation that it will be financially viable but who then doesn't get the money the law they are owed because of piracy not essentially invested in something that was not as valuable as it was made out to be?
You also fail to take into account one of the main reasons of the piracy increases sales argument, which is word of mouth. Those 5 freeloaders may each tell 5 of their friends, and if that causes even 6 of those 25 friends to buy the album then the artist is in a better position than he was without the freeloaders.
This is another popular argument that I never understand. If 5 freeloaders have all ripped your work without any of them paying you for it, why would we assume than more than 1-in-5 of the people they subsequently told about it would pay for the work?
Any advertising is only worth as much as the extra sales it ultimately generates. Arguing that a first generation of freeloading is OK because later generations will pay sounds an awful lot like one of those glorified pyramid schemes I mentioned.
I am somewhat skeptical of that site however as it doesn't seem to be terrible objective.
Sure, I'm not claiming it is either neutral or authoritative in general, just demonstrating that not all studies apparently supportive of p
The actual answer is (as always) to have backups of anything you feel is important.
Ironically, the specialist on-line back-up services seem to be among the worst offenders in terms of guarantees.
For example, we looked into this a few months ago, and one huge and very well known back-up service had Ts & Cs that seemed to say (quite clearly, IIRC) that if they decided to close down the service for any reason then they would have no obligation in terms of granting customers data access beyond letting you download what you could over the next 3 days. On a fully saturated leased line, with no-one else hitting their servers at the same time, you still couldn't download the volume of data that even their entry-level business packages supported within that time frame! And clearly in practice not everyone has a handy leased line available and it is highly unlikely that the back-up service's servers would stand up to their entire customer base trying to do that at once. They normally offer other ways to retrieve your data en masse if necessary, such as posting it on discs for a small fee, but those options all stop as soon as they announce the closure. Basically, they offer a back-up service that can disappear at any time without giving you a chance to retrieve everything, so better hope your office doesn't burn down around the time they decide to do that, then.
We didn't take out a contract. We did notice that while the above was the worst case of not really providing the advertised service at all, several of the other big name specialist off-site back-up services didn't seem to be much better. None of them actually promised to take steps such that even if they had to shut down at short notice for any reason there was a always a credible plan in place to get your data back to you.
One of my colleagues made a strong case that we should use something like encrypted files uploaded to AWS if we wanted cloud back-ups, for the simple reason that Amazon make most of their money elsewhere but rely on AWS themselves as well, which with their scale means it is inconceivable that the service would be shut off with the loss of data before we had chance to retrieve it. In the end, we decided (as we have with most other cloud services) that the whole idea didn't live up to the hype, and we opted to lease a dedicated server housed in someone else's data centre and we basically just do an automatic rsync from our normal servers to the back-up with suitable levels of encryption applied throughout.