You may be the first I have seen who compares piracy to being more like fraud than stealing. I don't understand your reasoning, could you elaborate?
Copyright is basically an economic tool. It creates a rule under which various economic effects result. Infringing copyright breaks those effects. While it's true that the money lost was "never really there", and therefore copyright infringement is not really the same as theft, the money should have been there according to the economics mandated by law.
Compare this with the situation of, say, a mis-sold financial product. A fraudster advises you to invest your pension in his poorly performing fund, which generates only a mild yield for you but a lot of profit for him from the fees. It is clear that you could have invested in a much better performing fund instead if you hadn't been deceived, giving you a much bigger annuity at retirement, and that the fraudster has profited from your misfortune. However, you haven't really lost that money, because you never really had it in the first place. Your actual loss is $0. You had a reasonable expectation that, according to the rules of our society, you would have had more money if you had not been cheated, but sadly reasonable expectations don't buy your granddaughter's birthday present.
How is it unfair to people who do their business legally?
It is unfair on those who pay for copyrighted works according to the rules, because they are subsidising others who do not. Please see my other post for why.
You're Google-fu must indeed be weak.
Sure, but it still turns up things like this, which debunks one of the most popular studies cited by the anti-copyright crowd fairly comprehensively (not only by suggesting entirely different conclusions from the same source data, but also by mentioning that the study's own authors revised their views later on).
There is far too much selective evidence quoting in this debate. It's entirely possible that in some cases, sharing a work freely has resulted in higher sales, because of the advertising effect or whatever other phenomenon. I'm not disputing that. But we also have to consider that there have been relatively few high-profile success stories where people have given work away for a while or offered some sort of choose-your-own-payment system. Most of them were doing it to make a point, and most of them were already somewhat well-known. It's quite possibile that they received abnormal sales because the people buying wanted to support the cause rather than actually buy the product, and there are plenty of other people who have tried that and reported a tiny fraction of people downloading their stuff actually paying anything at all for it. In short, it is certainly possible that piracy helps the artist in some or even many cases, but it is way too early to start assuming it does as a general rule.
You seem to imply that piracy will prevent the people who create high quality work from being able to pay their rent. That doesn't seem to match with the evidence. Care to elaborate?
Again, please see the examples in my other post, particularly the one about what's left of the PC gaming industry.
I'm not going to get into strawman debates about 100% piracy rates. You brought that up, not me.
The money argument is simple. Suppose an artist releases a work that ten people enjoy, and the artist makes $100 because 5 of those people paid the $20 asking price and the other 5 ripped it. Let's also suppose that all ten people actually value the work, and ignore any further copying by anyone who really was only sampling.
First, let's also suppose that $100 is a viable return, so the artist themselves isn't losing out. Even so, the five honest people have paid twice an equal share for the work and the five freeloaders have paid no share. The honest people are paying double, while the freeloaders are enjoying the work just as much but contributing nothing. The fact that not everyone here is paying their fair share is a concept any five year old can understand. That fact that if everyone behaved as the freeloaders did then there would be no way for the artists to make money is a concept any five year old can understand.
Now, suppose that $50 would not have been a viable return for the artist, so the product is only viable, given the freeloading, if others pay more than their fair share. That extra money that the honest people have to pay is money they can't spend on something else, so unless all of our hypothetical honest people are filthy rich and there is effectively no opportunity cost to paying more for this work, they really are losing out because of the freeloading.
Finally, suppose that $100 was not a viable return for the artist, but $150 would have been. That means even with the honest people still paying more than their fair share ($150/10 = $15 fair share, but the honest ones are still paying $20) the artist is losing out. This isn't sustainable, so either the artist realises ahead of time that they can't viably create the work (and everyone loses, honest and freeloader alike) or the artist makes the work anyway and takes the hit (and now both the artist and the honest consumers lose, and only the freeloaders win).
Really, you can play statistical games, and you can rationalise the freeloading as much as you like. You cannot change the bottom line that the honest people and/or the artist are always the ones who lose and the dishonest people are reaping the rewards while contributing absolutely nothing.
Why is piracy such a dire problem if musicians continue to make a living and new music continues to be produced?
Part of the problem with this debate is that a lot of people don't consider how widely copyright is applicable. Music performers are an easy case: they can give live shows as an alternative revenue stream.
But what about the composers and songwriters who wrote their work? They contribute a great deal of the final value in the performance, arguably more than the performer themselves in a lot of cases, and it might take a very long time and a lot of hard work to get the finished product as good as it can be. However, once anyone has performed that work for the first time, the cat is out of the bag.
What about authors? Are they supposed to spend a year writing a book, working with editors, getting the design done, being published, and then make their money on book signings at their local store?
If you want to see what effect this is having on entire industries, just look at PC gaming... what's left of it, that is. Most of the gaming market today is on consoles. Most of the high production value games on PC are either based entirely on-line or us obnoxious DRM schemes that are heavily tied to being on-line. And even those are mostly unoriginal franchises releasing a new version year after year and/or dumbed-down ports of console games. About the only parts of the PC gaming industry that seem to be thriving are modding (fine as long as you've got the original foundation to build on, of course) and puzzle games that cost far less to produce. Claiming that as a success is a bit like saying that it's a shame we can't afford to make Avatar any more, but at least people can still enjoy The Blair Witch Project.
Aren't we, the voters, the one who put in those politicians in the first place ?
Well, no.
Here in the UK, I get to vote for my MP, on a "first past the post" (aka winner takes all) system. My constituency really does float so my vote means something under this system. Many other people's votes do not.
If we were only electing local MPs, that wouldn't be so bad, but unfortunately the government will normally be formed by the party (or coalition) with the most MPs. Their leader becomes Prime Minister, determined by an average-of-averages, which did not necessarily win (or even close to win) the popular vote across the country as a whole.
Other Ministers are then basically decided by the PM, so they are appointed by someone whose own authority is an average of averages. Conveniently, you can get someone into the House of Lords, where they have legislative powers anyway and can be appointed to executive powers as well, without them having to actually win any election at all, so there's no guarantee that these Ministers ever actually had anyone but their political friends vote for them for anything.
The EU Commissioner is then appointed by the officials of that administration, so the EU Commissioner is an appointee who may never have been voted for by any member of the general public, determined by a bunch of appointees who may never have been voted for by any member of the general public, who were appointed by a Prime Minister who was only indirectly elected via an average-of-averages kind of system and may not actually command the majority of the popular vote because we only vote for one local MP on a winner-takes-all system that "loses" a lot of those votes at national level.
But apart from that, yes, we the voters are entirely responsible for this, it's our fault that these politicians are in place, and we could obviously remove them on a whim.:-)
As I said before, a lot of people who go to be EU Commissioners are politically connected but no longer electable back home. Maybe she started out that way too.
That said, during her time as Competition Commissioner, she went after Microsoft seriously. She also notably stepped aside in cases where the role gave a conflict of interests because she had previously worked in the industries concerned.
More recently, she has had the Digital Agenda portfolio, and she has several surprisingly-sensible-for-a-politician statements on things like open standards and software patents.
I'd say that means she has a much better record as an EU Commissioner than most, regardless of her track record back at home.
EU Commissioners are appointed by their home government based on arbitrary criteria. Here in the UK, for example, that means the only way to prevent such an appointment is to not elect the entire administration that makes the appointment anything up to five years earlier. Clearly no-one is really going to change their one vote for the national government to another political party just so that the wrong EU Commissioner doesn't get appointed 4.5 years later, so there is really no democratic mandate or accountability at all.
It's more like fraud. And fraud is a criminal offence with substantial penalties in many places, because it is damaging to the victims, is unfair to those who conduct their financial business legally, and can have severe economic consequences if done on a large scale.
Keep in mind that the word Piracy has existed for about 500 years, and only in the last decade or so has come to be taken as stealing.
Well, the first recorded usage of the term in the sense we're talking about is given in the early 1700s by most etymological dictionaries, so you're only off by three centuries. Hey, at least you were close.
Keep in mind piracy is legal in many countries, for good reason.
Which ones? And how successful are the creative industries in those countries?
It helps the artists. Almost every study about piracy posted on/. shows it leads to an increase in sales
Well, given that Slashdot readership is obviously neutral on this issue, I'm sure that's a representative sample of the literature.
I'm also struggling to find all those studies, but I suppose it's just that my Google-fu is weak. Maybe you could help me out by citing some of them?
Piracy is not going away. Piracy is inevitable.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of abundant high-quality work created by people who have rent to pay.
You see, it's *US* who have allowed the politicians we have elected to carry out all these bullshits.
The European politicians who are behind this sort of bullshit typically aren't elected in any meaningful sense. Indeed, quite a few EU Commissioners are very politically connected but basically unelectable in their own country; serial resigner Peter Mandelson was the UK's Commissioner for several years, for example.
There are also a few good ones, and I admit I'm a little surprised things have gotten this far with Neelie Kroes (who is normally well-informed and a voice of reason) currently serving as Commissioner for the Digital Agenda.
The only directly elected politicians in Europe are the MEPs. Let's hope they have a bit more spine than their colleagues. At least since the Lisbon Treaty one of the few significant improvements is that the MEPs do actually have real power, and seem to enjoy exercising it when it comes to getting in the way of the unelected Commissioners throwing their weight around.
Yes, I appreciate the legal position. I'm just observing that ethically, if we're talking about extraditing him to a system where he potentially faces a serious penalty, he should have a right to make a case before an English court with equivalent authority that he should not be extradited. Extradition is only a formality if you accept that the jurisdiction someone is being extradited to will deal with them as fairly as our own legal system, which is a very bad assumption for any legal system interested in justice to make (and obviously a joke in this particular case, though it's equally funny to think anyone in power here would acknowledge that).
Thanks, I learned something today. I was wondering why a Magistrates' Court ruling was being made by a District Judge.
BTW, I wonder whether this really is the appropriate court level. Perhaps it is, maybe because of the same conventions you mentioned, but the man reportedly faces up to five years in jail if he is extradited and then successfully prosecuted in the US. That sentence would normally merit a jury trial in a Crown Court in England, no? If so, a similar standard seems appropriate to decide whether extradition is justified under English law.
Yes, as I mentioned in another post, I have no sympathy for this guy whatsoever. Regardless of whether his actions were technically illegal, it seems likely that he was knowingly profiting (and profiting substantially) from helping other people to break the law. I'm only commenting on the implications for the rule of law of the general principle here.
It doesn't set any sort of legal ruling, of course, but no judge can overrule common sense. If there is a case against him under the law in England, let them bring that case under the laws of England to an English court. If there is not, *$#! off.
They had a chance to bring that case, and they declined to do so. It doesn't take a genius to draw the obvious inference from that, and if that inference is wrong, the authorities can still bring the case -- to an English court, under English law.
It's worth keeping in mind that this decision was made in a Magistrates' Court. That is basically the lowest court in England: as the name suggests, most of the decisions are reached by magistrates, who are lay people offering their services rather than legally trained judges, and do not involve a jury. The penalties that can be handed down in such courts are also typically very limited compared to a Crown Court (to which more serious cases can be referred if the magistrates consider it necessary for the interests of justice because they cannot impose a sufficient penalty themselves).
It sounds like this wasn't a typical case for such a court, but the implication is still that this is only the first step down a long road. I imagine there are several rounds of appeals to go through before the guy in question is in any danger of actually leaving British soil. Those will involve a lot more people who are legally trained and who can spot the obvious (you would think) implication of allowing someone to be extradited for allegedly breaking a US law on British soil but not, apparently, a British one.
It looks like this is actually worse than a treaty merely being one-sided in the requirements for proof. This is about someone who committed acts in the UK that were not illegal in the UK (let us assume, given that his equipment was taken by British police in November 2010 but no criminal charges followed). His actions might have been illegal in the US if they had been committed in the US, but as far as I can tell, they were not and this all happened entirely in the UK. But the US is apparently trying (and currently succeeding) to get him extradited anyway.
Extradition is supposed to be about not letting a criminal flee to another jurisdiction to escape justice. It is not supposed to be about making someone in one country guilty of any offence they commit according to the law in any other country with which an extradition treaty exists.
Just to be clear, I am utterly lacking in sympathy for this guy. I don't for an instant believe he was either ignorant of copyright law or doing this purely out of the kindness of his heart, and if he was making a significant amount of money off the back of helping people to break the law then throw the whole damn book at him. But it should be our book if he did this in our country. The legal principle that anyone can be extradited from a country when their actions committed in that country were not against the law in that country is very, very dangerous.
What do antitrust actions based on their business practices have to do with selling out user security? Antivirus vendors threatened to bring such an action against Microsoft if they bundled Microsoft Security Essentials, an antivirus and antimalware package, with Windows. Providing a built-in security scanner with the OS is hardly anti-user-security.
4. Legislate a reasonable version of the basic idea of copyright, provide simple, reasonably priced ways for people to do things in compliance with that new law, and combine all of this with a sensible public information campaign and a high profile enforcement campaign targeting people who are clearly having a go.
This is likely to reduce casual/uninformed infringement, which is probably quite a lot of it, because who teaches teenagers about copyright before giving them an Internet connection? Just look at how many people blatantly violate copyright on YouTube but then add a message saying "I don't own this, no copyright infringement intended" or something. These people clearly have no clue what copyright actually says or why what they are doing is illegal (if it actually is).
The combined approach is also likely to win back some respect from people who are doing things that are basically reasonable but technically illegal because the law is dumb, like making back-up copies or format shifting or including thirty seconds of pop music that was playing in the background during their kid's birthday party in a YouTube video of the party. When copyright holders start complaining about people singing "Happy Birthday" in public or playing a copyrighted piece of music in a piano shop while trying out an instrument, they're not hurting anyone but their own cause.
That in turn means you can concentrate enforcement efforts on those who are actually doing obviously wrong (per the law) things, like ripping a prerelease copy of the latest movie and putting it on BitTorrent or running a file sharing site for illegal music distribution on a massive scale.
But to do this, you have to be obviously fair in your arguments, and you have to make a reasonable case in a way that people can understand, not shove it in their face. Think of the campaigns we have for road safety here in the UK, which have made drunk-driving socially unacceptable, not those really annoying unskippable messages at the start of DVDs, which only make a pirated version of the DVD that doesn't have them more appealing.
And in places like Spain and France, they might get it, at least for as long as the current administrations last (which probably won't be very long given the other troubles in Europe right now).
Most of us are just going to tell them where to go, though. There is definitely a feeling of resentment building among the people who care that there are too many one-sided deals with US going on here in Europe, often to do with privacy (travel data, banking data, etc.). For now, they get away with it because there are not enough people who care to bring down governments at the next elections. If you switch off Facebook for a day to make the point, the wailing from the population will increase from a few percent to all-but-a-few percent.
I'm trying to work out whether you are being deliberately patronising/accusatory/insulting, or whether it's a function of culture or perhaps not speaking English as a first language. In any case, I have never encountered a productive answer to the generic question or a particularly interesting follow-up conversation, either when someone has asked me or when someone on an interview panel I've been on has asked an applicant.
I guess I (and every other interviewer and applicant involved) must be unthinking, lacking in drive, and unable to interpolate things out. Well, either that, or it's just a lousy interview challenge that invariably leads to carefully inoffensive but ultimately empty answers, rather like the armchair psychology stuff. So, tell me about your greatest weakness?
The 5 years question is really just asking if you intend to move up the management or technical ladder.
Then why not just ask that directly? It might lead to a mutually interesting conversation, and at the very least you're either both going to be more confident in your fit or both going to know immediately that it's not going to work out.
These are my personal interview red flags for a software developer job, starting with the most likely to result in me throwing the interview/leaving early/declining any offer:
Hiring is based on brain teasers, $-based certifications, or other similarly irrelevant criteria.
Wants to know my current salary. (Bonus point: Doesn't give any indication at the same time of the likely compensation if I'm offered the job. Extra bonus point: Makes clear that the salary range given in the job ad was wildly optimistic.)
Won't show me an example of their production code, real documentation, etc. when given a reasonable opportunity to do so.
In each case, someone is skirting what matters, instead of finding out as fast as possible whether we are really a good fit and a mutually satisfactory hire might result.
Making a movie or game these days costs far more than it usedto.
Sure, but prices are also higher, and I doubt inflation explains the full difference in either case. Moreover, with modern technology, the marginal cost of these products is near zero, and the potential market is larger and better able to access the content.
As you say, it's about ROI, but what we see right now is often going for the "safe bet" even if a new idea could potentially generate better returns. The risk aversion is endemic, because you can't count on even a great new product being a success commercially if 90+% of the "sales" are actually pirated copies that generate no revenue.
If people actually paid for things they like and didn't just rip everything off whether they really like it or not, then there would be more money going into the creative industries and better feedback about what is actually worth something to the public, which can only result in better products in the future. That's how copyright is supposed to work. But of course, that relies on everyone accepting the deal as fair, and right now it's being openly abused by both sides.
Thank you, that looks like a neater solution for the problem than what we've used before (though it's still third party software making up for Windows 7 not doing something that Windows XP does out of the box, so I think my original point is still valid).
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
I think you're being a little optimistic about how recently piracy took off. The Internet has only accelerated what people were doing anyway.
In other news, major record labels now sell little more than over-produced poppy crap; high-end PC gaming today is little more than the 7th edition of a safe, high-value franchise that is only an awkward port of a console game anyway; and Hollywood movie studios are more enthusiastic about special-effect-laden blockbusters that work with 3D in cinemas and spawn a whole toy range than they are about telling interesting new stories using good quality acting.
Exactly. On my new PC, I have Windows 7. On my older PC, I see no reason to move from Windows XP.
On a direct comparison, Windows 7 does some everyday things in ways I like significantly better, the taskbar/jump lists for example. Then again, it also has several really annoying changes in the basic UI where I wonder what they were thinking. The updates to folder windows are mostly backward steps, IMHO. And as far as security goes, I can't run some scripts properly by double clicking from a folder view, yet they run fine if I open a command prompt in the same folder and type the script's name. Similarly, I can't xcopy-install utilities and such into their natural home under Program Files using one interface, but it's fine using the other. I'm a professional software developer who's been using Windows since it wasn't even an OS, and I can't figure out what the hell their security policies actually are for everyday operations any more, so what hope do non-geeks have? In any case, there is nowhere near enough benefit on balance to justify spending hard cash on an upgrade.
Moreover, Windows 7 just doesn't do some things any more that XP does. My other half has some old DOS era games she enjoys playing from time to time, but Windows 7 can't run them (without installing a whole VM and FreeDOS or something similarly dramatic). In XP, they just work. I do appreciate that Microsoft spend a lot of time and money maintaining backward compatibility for a very long time, but the fact is that they have chosen to break it in some cases in Windows 7, and that is a black-and-white loss if you happen to want to run the older stuff. Ditto for older hardware (where by older, in some cases I mean not very old at all but the vendor is an ass and never released Windows 7 drivers so you have to buy their new model instead).
There also seem to be a lot of hard to predict and half-explained networking issues with some of the "better" techniques they introduced with Windows 7, such that if you have an unfortunate combination of devices your transfer rates will be orders of magnitude slower than they should be. Again, most people probably won't notice, but this is a very serious problem if you do run into it and can't get any of the workarounds to fix it. And again, I've never seen so much as a blog post talking about how these new technologies actually make any noticeable improvement in Windows 7, so it's either a draw or a clear loss for Win7.
Sure, but you can't build an Aston Martin Rapide for the price Toyota charge for the Corolla.
It's not about how much you charge, it's about whether the price you charge is reasonable for what you're selling. Unfortunately, a consumer's idea of "reasonable" is often different to a business owner's (and, in fairness, the business owner is usually the more realistic judge here, notwithstanding certain large businesses who are obviously price gouging on some popular brands).
The thing is, it sounds like this project is directly related to the OP's role. Even in jurisdictions that don't allow "we own your soul" contracts, something directly relevant to the performance of the employee's normal duties would usually be covered by the basic IP clauses in an employment contract and would be enforceable in most places. And frankly, that's not so unreasonable.
If it's unrelated work done on your own time and at no cost to your employer, that's a different question. If it's related to work and inevitably based on knowledge gained from work, then holding it over the employer for additional compensation is not only likely to lose (it's probably already their IP) but to get you fired (for breaking the basic employer-employee trust relationship, if none of the several other possible reasons).
I think the punishment here is perhaps disproportionate, but I agree with the sentiment. It's far better to go after the people who knowingly share things with widespread audiences than anyone else in the infringement set-up.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be the first I have seen who compares piracy to being more like fraud than stealing. I don't understand your reasoning, could you elaborate?
Copyright is basically an economic tool. It creates a rule under which various economic effects result. Infringing copyright breaks those effects. While it's true that the money lost was "never really there", and therefore copyright infringement is not really the same as theft, the money should have been there according to the economics mandated by law.
Compare this with the situation of, say, a mis-sold financial product. A fraudster advises you to invest your pension in his poorly performing fund, which generates only a mild yield for you but a lot of profit for him from the fees. It is clear that you could have invested in a much better performing fund instead if you hadn't been deceived, giving you a much bigger annuity at retirement, and that the fraudster has profited from your misfortune. However, you haven't really lost that money, because you never really had it in the first place. Your actual loss is $0. You had a reasonable expectation that, according to the rules of our society, you would have had more money if you had not been cheated, but sadly reasonable expectations don't buy your granddaughter's birthday present.
How is it unfair to people who do their business legally?
It is unfair on those who pay for copyrighted works according to the rules, because they are subsidising others who do not. Please see my other post for why.
You're Google-fu must indeed be weak.
Sure, but it still turns up things like this, which debunks one of the most popular studies cited by the anti-copyright crowd fairly comprehensively (not only by suggesting entirely different conclusions from the same source data, but also by mentioning that the study's own authors revised their views later on).
There is far too much selective evidence quoting in this debate. It's entirely possible that in some cases, sharing a work freely has resulted in higher sales, because of the advertising effect or whatever other phenomenon. I'm not disputing that. But we also have to consider that there have been relatively few high-profile success stories where people have given work away for a while or offered some sort of choose-your-own-payment system. Most of them were doing it to make a point, and most of them were already somewhat well-known. It's quite possibile that they received abnormal sales because the people buying wanted to support the cause rather than actually buy the product, and there are plenty of other people who have tried that and reported a tiny fraction of people downloading their stuff actually paying anything at all for it. In short, it is certainly possible that piracy helps the artist in some or even many cases, but it is way too early to start assuming it does as a general rule.
You seem to imply that piracy will prevent the people who create high quality work from being able to pay their rent. That doesn't seem to match with the evidence. Care to elaborate?
Again, please see the examples in my other post, particularly the one about what's left of the PC gaming industry.
I'm not going to get into strawman debates about 100% piracy rates. You brought that up, not me.
The money argument is simple. Suppose an artist releases a work that ten people enjoy, and the artist makes $100 because 5 of those people paid the $20 asking price and the other 5 ripped it. Let's also suppose that all ten people actually value the work, and ignore any further copying by anyone who really was only sampling.
First, let's also suppose that $100 is a viable return, so the artist themselves isn't losing out. Even so, the five honest people have paid twice an equal share for the work and the five freeloaders have paid no share. The honest people are paying double, while the freeloaders are enjoying the work just as much but contributing nothing. The fact that not everyone here is paying their fair share is a concept any five year old can understand. That fact that if everyone behaved as the freeloaders did then there would be no way for the artists to make money is a concept any five year old can understand.
Now, suppose that $50 would not have been a viable return for the artist, so the product is only viable, given the freeloading, if others pay more than their fair share. That extra money that the honest people have to pay is money they can't spend on something else, so unless all of our hypothetical honest people are filthy rich and there is effectively no opportunity cost to paying more for this work, they really are losing out because of the freeloading.
Finally, suppose that $100 was not a viable return for the artist, but $150 would have been. That means even with the honest people still paying more than their fair share ($150/10 = $15 fair share, but the honest ones are still paying $20) the artist is losing out. This isn't sustainable, so either the artist realises ahead of time that they can't viably create the work (and everyone loses, honest and freeloader alike) or the artist makes the work anyway and takes the hit (and now both the artist and the honest consumers lose, and only the freeloaders win).
Really, you can play statistical games, and you can rationalise the freeloading as much as you like. You cannot change the bottom line that the honest people and/or the artist are always the ones who lose and the dishonest people are reaping the rewards while contributing absolutely nothing.
Why is piracy such a dire problem if musicians continue to make a living and new music continues to be produced?
Part of the problem with this debate is that a lot of people don't consider how widely copyright is applicable. Music performers are an easy case: they can give live shows as an alternative revenue stream.
But what about the composers and songwriters who wrote their work? They contribute a great deal of the final value in the performance, arguably more than the performer themselves in a lot of cases, and it might take a very long time and a lot of hard work to get the finished product as good as it can be. However, once anyone has performed that work for the first time, the cat is out of the bag.
What about authors? Are they supposed to spend a year writing a book, working with editors, getting the design done, being published, and then make their money on book signings at their local store?
If you want to see what effect this is having on entire industries, just look at PC gaming... what's left of it, that is. Most of the gaming market today is on consoles. Most of the high production value games on PC are either based entirely on-line or us obnoxious DRM schemes that are heavily tied to being on-line. And even those are mostly unoriginal franchises releasing a new version year after year and/or dumbed-down ports of console games. About the only parts of the PC gaming industry that seem to be thriving are modding (fine as long as you've got the original foundation to build on, of course) and puzzle games that cost far less to produce. Claiming that as a success is a bit like saying that it's a shame we can't afford to make Avatar any more, but at least people can still enjoy The Blair Witch Project.
Aren't we, the voters, the one who put in those politicians in the first place ?
Well, no.
Here in the UK, I get to vote for my MP, on a "first past the post" (aka winner takes all) system. My constituency really does float so my vote means something under this system. Many other people's votes do not.
If we were only electing local MPs, that wouldn't be so bad, but unfortunately the government will normally be formed by the party (or coalition) with the most MPs. Their leader becomes Prime Minister, determined by an average-of-averages, which did not necessarily win (or even close to win) the popular vote across the country as a whole.
Other Ministers are then basically decided by the PM, so they are appointed by someone whose own authority is an average of averages. Conveniently, you can get someone into the House of Lords, where they have legislative powers anyway and can be appointed to executive powers as well, without them having to actually win any election at all, so there's no guarantee that these Ministers ever actually had anyone but their political friends vote for them for anything.
The EU Commissioner is then appointed by the officials of that administration, so the EU Commissioner is an appointee who may never have been voted for by any member of the general public, determined by a bunch of appointees who may never have been voted for by any member of the general public, who were appointed by a Prime Minister who was only indirectly elected via an average-of-averages kind of system and may not actually command the majority of the popular vote because we only vote for one local MP on a winner-takes-all system that "loses" a lot of those votes at national level.
But apart from that, yes, we the voters are entirely responsible for this, it's our fault that these politicians are in place, and we could obviously remove them on a whim. :-)
As I said before, a lot of people who go to be EU Commissioners are politically connected but no longer electable back home. Maybe she started out that way too.
That said, during her time as Competition Commissioner, she went after Microsoft seriously. She also notably stepped aside in cases where the role gave a conflict of interests because she had previously worked in the industries concerned.
More recently, she has had the Digital Agenda portfolio, and she has several surprisingly-sensible-for-a-politician statements on things like open standards and software patents.
I'd say that means she has a much better record as an EU Commissioner than most, regardless of her track record back at home.
EU Commissioners are appointed by their home government based on arbitrary criteria. Here in the UK, for example, that means the only way to prevent such an appointment is to not elect the entire administration that makes the appointment anything up to five years earlier. Clearly no-one is really going to change their one vote for the national government to another political party just so that the wrong EU Commissioner doesn't get appointed 4.5 years later, so there is really no democratic mandate or accountability at all.
Firstly, it is copying. It isn't stealing.
It's more like fraud. And fraud is a criminal offence with substantial penalties in many places, because it is damaging to the victims, is unfair to those who conduct their financial business legally, and can have severe economic consequences if done on a large scale.
Keep in mind that the word Piracy has existed for about 500 years, and only in the last decade or so has come to be taken as stealing.
Well, the first recorded usage of the term in the sense we're talking about is given in the early 1700s by most etymological dictionaries, so you're only off by three centuries. Hey, at least you were close.
Keep in mind piracy is legal in many countries, for good reason.
Which ones? And how successful are the creative industries in those countries?
It helps the artists. Almost every study about piracy posted on /. shows it leads to an increase in sales
Well, given that Slashdot readership is obviously neutral on this issue, I'm sure that's a representative sample of the literature.
I'm also struggling to find all those studies, but I suppose it's just that my Google-fu is weak. Maybe you could help me out by citing some of them?
Piracy is not going away. Piracy is inevitable.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of abundant high-quality work created by people who have rent to pay.
You see, it's *US* who have allowed the politicians we have elected to carry out all these bullshits.
The European politicians who are behind this sort of bullshit typically aren't elected in any meaningful sense. Indeed, quite a few EU Commissioners are very politically connected but basically unelectable in their own country; serial resigner Peter Mandelson was the UK's Commissioner for several years, for example.
There are also a few good ones, and I admit I'm a little surprised things have gotten this far with Neelie Kroes (who is normally well-informed and a voice of reason) currently serving as Commissioner for the Digital Agenda.
The only directly elected politicians in Europe are the MEPs. Let's hope they have a bit more spine than their colleagues. At least since the Lisbon Treaty one of the few significant improvements is that the MEPs do actually have real power, and seem to enjoy exercising it when it comes to getting in the way of the unelected Commissioners throwing their weight around.
Yes, I appreciate the legal position. I'm just observing that ethically, if we're talking about extraditing him to a system where he potentially faces a serious penalty, he should have a right to make a case before an English court with equivalent authority that he should not be extradited. Extradition is only a formality if you accept that the jurisdiction someone is being extradited to will deal with them as fairly as our own legal system, which is a very bad assumption for any legal system interested in justice to make (and obviously a joke in this particular case, though it's equally funny to think anyone in power here would acknowledge that).
Thanks, I learned something today. I was wondering why a Magistrates' Court ruling was being made by a District Judge.
BTW, I wonder whether this really is the appropriate court level. Perhaps it is, maybe because of the same conventions you mentioned, but the man reportedly faces up to five years in jail if he is extradited and then successfully prosecuted in the US. That sentence would normally merit a jury trial in a Crown Court in England, no? If so, a similar standard seems appropriate to decide whether extradition is justified under English law.
Yes, as I mentioned in another post, I have no sympathy for this guy whatsoever. Regardless of whether his actions were technically illegal, it seems likely that he was knowingly profiting (and profiting substantially) from helping other people to break the law. I'm only commenting on the implications for the rule of law of the general principle here.
It doesn't set any sort of legal ruling, of course, but no judge can overrule common sense. If there is a case against him under the law in England, let them bring that case under the laws of England to an English court. If there is not, *$#! off.
They had a chance to bring that case, and they declined to do so. It doesn't take a genius to draw the obvious inference from that, and if that inference is wrong, the authorities can still bring the case -- to an English court, under English law.
It's worth keeping in mind that this decision was made in a Magistrates' Court. That is basically the lowest court in England: as the name suggests, most of the decisions are reached by magistrates, who are lay people offering their services rather than legally trained judges, and do not involve a jury. The penalties that can be handed down in such courts are also typically very limited compared to a Crown Court (to which more serious cases can be referred if the magistrates consider it necessary for the interests of justice because they cannot impose a sufficient penalty themselves).
It sounds like this wasn't a typical case for such a court, but the implication is still that this is only the first step down a long road. I imagine there are several rounds of appeals to go through before the guy in question is in any danger of actually leaving British soil. Those will involve a lot more people who are legally trained and who can spot the obvious (you would think) implication of allowing someone to be extradited for allegedly breaking a US law on British soil but not, apparently, a British one.
It looks like this is actually worse than a treaty merely being one-sided in the requirements for proof. This is about someone who committed acts in the UK that were not illegal in the UK (let us assume, given that his equipment was taken by British police in November 2010 but no criminal charges followed). His actions might have been illegal in the US if they had been committed in the US, but as far as I can tell, they were not and this all happened entirely in the UK. But the US is apparently trying (and currently succeeding) to get him extradited anyway.
Extradition is supposed to be about not letting a criminal flee to another jurisdiction to escape justice. It is not supposed to be about making someone in one country guilty of any offence they commit according to the law in any other country with which an extradition treaty exists.
Just to be clear, I am utterly lacking in sympathy for this guy. I don't for an instant believe he was either ignorant of copyright law or doing this purely out of the kindness of his heart, and if he was making a significant amount of money off the back of helping people to break the law then throw the whole damn book at him. But it should be our book if he did this in our country. The legal principle that anyone can be extradited from a country when their actions committed in that country were not against the law in that country is very, very dangerous.
What do antitrust actions based on their business practices have to do with selling out user security? Antivirus vendors threatened to bring such an action against Microsoft if they bundled Microsoft Security Essentials, an antivirus and antimalware package, with Windows. Providing a built-in security scanner with the OS is hardly anti-user-security.
You did miss a possibility there:
4. Legislate a reasonable version of the basic idea of copyright, provide simple, reasonably priced ways for people to do things in compliance with that new law, and combine all of this with a sensible public information campaign and a high profile enforcement campaign targeting people who are clearly having a go.
This is likely to reduce casual/uninformed infringement, which is probably quite a lot of it, because who teaches teenagers about copyright before giving them an Internet connection? Just look at how many people blatantly violate copyright on YouTube but then add a message saying "I don't own this, no copyright infringement intended" or something. These people clearly have no clue what copyright actually says or why what they are doing is illegal (if it actually is).
The combined approach is also likely to win back some respect from people who are doing things that are basically reasonable but technically illegal because the law is dumb, like making back-up copies or format shifting or including thirty seconds of pop music that was playing in the background during their kid's birthday party in a YouTube video of the party. When copyright holders start complaining about people singing "Happy Birthday" in public or playing a copyrighted piece of music in a piano shop while trying out an instrument, they're not hurting anyone but their own cause.
That in turn means you can concentrate enforcement efforts on those who are actually doing obviously wrong (per the law) things, like ripping a prerelease copy of the latest movie and putting it on BitTorrent or running a file sharing site for illegal music distribution on a massive scale.
But to do this, you have to be obviously fair in your arguments, and you have to make a reasonable case in a way that people can understand, not shove it in their face. Think of the campaigns we have for road safety here in the UK, which have made drunk-driving socially unacceptable, not those really annoying unskippable messages at the start of DVDs, which only make a pirated version of the DVD that doesn't have them more appealing.
And in places like Spain and France, they might get it, at least for as long as the current administrations last (which probably won't be very long given the other troubles in Europe right now).
Most of us are just going to tell them where to go, though. There is definitely a feeling of resentment building among the people who care that there are too many one-sided deals with US going on here in Europe, often to do with privacy (travel data, banking data, etc.). For now, they get away with it because there are not enough people who care to bring down governments at the next elections. If you switch off Facebook for a day to make the point, the wailing from the population will increase from a few percent to all-but-a-few percent.
I'm trying to work out whether you are being deliberately patronising/accusatory/insulting, or whether it's a function of culture or perhaps not speaking English as a first language. In any case, I have never encountered a productive answer to the generic question or a particularly interesting follow-up conversation, either when someone has asked me or when someone on an interview panel I've been on has asked an applicant.
I guess I (and every other interviewer and applicant involved) must be unthinking, lacking in drive, and unable to interpolate things out. Well, either that, or it's just a lousy interview challenge that invariably leads to carefully inoffensive but ultimately empty answers, rather like the armchair psychology stuff. So, tell me about your greatest weakness?
The 5 years question is really just asking if you intend to move up the management or technical ladder.
Then why not just ask that directly? It might lead to a mutually interesting conversation, and at the very least you're either both going to be more confident in your fit or both going to know immediately that it's not going to work out.
These are my personal interview red flags for a software developer job, starting with the most likely to result in me throwing the interview/leaving early/declining any offer:
In each case, someone is skirting what matters, instead of finding out as fast as possible whether we are really a good fit and a mutually satisfactory hire might result.
Making a movie or game these days costs far more than it usedto.
Sure, but prices are also higher, and I doubt inflation explains the full difference in either case. Moreover, with modern technology, the marginal cost of these products is near zero, and the potential market is larger and better able to access the content.
As you say, it's about ROI, but what we see right now is often going for the "safe bet" even if a new idea could potentially generate better returns. The risk aversion is endemic, because you can't count on even a great new product being a success commercially if 90+% of the "sales" are actually pirated copies that generate no revenue.
If people actually paid for things they like and didn't just rip everything off whether they really like it or not, then there would be more money going into the creative industries and better feedback about what is actually worth something to the public, which can only result in better products in the future. That's how copyright is supposed to work. But of course, that relies on everyone accepting the deal as fair, and right now it's being openly abused by both sides.
Thank you, that looks like a neater solution for the problem than what we've used before (though it's still third party software making up for Windows 7 not doing something that Windows XP does out of the box, so I think my original point is still valid).
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
I think you're being a little optimistic about how recently piracy took off. The Internet has only accelerated what people were doing anyway.
In other news, major record labels now sell little more than over-produced poppy crap; high-end PC gaming today is little more than the 7th edition of a safe, high-value franchise that is only an awkward port of a console game anyway; and Hollywood movie studios are more enthusiastic about special-effect-laden blockbusters that work with 3D in cinemas and spawn a whole toy range than they are about telling interesting new stories using good quality acting.
Exactly. On my new PC, I have Windows 7. On my older PC, I see no reason to move from Windows XP.
On a direct comparison, Windows 7 does some everyday things in ways I like significantly better, the taskbar/jump lists for example. Then again, it also has several really annoying changes in the basic UI where I wonder what they were thinking. The updates to folder windows are mostly backward steps, IMHO. And as far as security goes, I can't run some scripts properly by double clicking from a folder view, yet they run fine if I open a command prompt in the same folder and type the script's name. Similarly, I can't xcopy-install utilities and such into their natural home under Program Files using one interface, but it's fine using the other. I'm a professional software developer who's been using Windows since it wasn't even an OS, and I can't figure out what the hell their security policies actually are for everyday operations any more, so what hope do non-geeks have? In any case, there is nowhere near enough benefit on balance to justify spending hard cash on an upgrade.
Moreover, Windows 7 just doesn't do some things any more that XP does. My other half has some old DOS era games she enjoys playing from time to time, but Windows 7 can't run them (without installing a whole VM and FreeDOS or something similarly dramatic). In XP, they just work. I do appreciate that Microsoft spend a lot of time and money maintaining backward compatibility for a very long time, but the fact is that they have chosen to break it in some cases in Windows 7, and that is a black-and-white loss if you happen to want to run the older stuff. Ditto for older hardware (where by older, in some cases I mean not very old at all but the vendor is an ass and never released Windows 7 drivers so you have to buy their new model instead).
There also seem to be a lot of hard to predict and half-explained networking issues with some of the "better" techniques they introduced with Windows 7, such that if you have an unfortunate combination of devices your transfer rates will be orders of magnitude slower than they should be. Again, most people probably won't notice, but this is a very serious problem if you do run into it and can't get any of the workarounds to fix it. And again, I've never seen so much as a blog post talking about how these new technologies actually make any noticeable improvement in Windows 7, so it's either a draw or a clear loss for Win7.
Maybe because it's affordable enough to buy?
Sure, but you can't build an Aston Martin Rapide for the price Toyota charge for the Corolla.
It's not about how much you charge, it's about whether the price you charge is reasonable for what you're selling. Unfortunately, a consumer's idea of "reasonable" is often different to a business owner's (and, in fairness, the business owner is usually the more realistic judge here, notwithstanding certain large businesses who are obviously price gouging on some popular brands).
The thing is, it sounds like this project is directly related to the OP's role. Even in jurisdictions that don't allow "we own your soul" contracts, something directly relevant to the performance of the employee's normal duties would usually be covered by the basic IP clauses in an employment contract and would be enforceable in most places. And frankly, that's not so unreasonable.
If it's unrelated work done on your own time and at no cost to your employer, that's a different question. If it's related to work and inevitably based on knowledge gained from work, then holding it over the employer for additional compensation is not only likely to lose (it's probably already their IP) but to get you fired (for breaking the basic employer-employee trust relationship, if none of the several other possible reasons).
I think the punishment here is perhaps disproportionate, but I agree with the sentiment. It's far better to go after the people who knowingly share things with widespread audiences than anyone else in the infringement set-up.