My apologies, that was a poor choice of words. Labour only won the popular vote because of contributions from outside England. They would indeed have taken power comfortably anyway under the current "first past the post" system.
In your other reply, you wrote:
Scotland's policies on [numerous subjects] will be decided by a party that is consistently polling third in Scotland.
Is that fair?
Well, that depends. If you accept the first past the post system, then yes, it's perfectly fair that the third party can swing the vote if the first and second parties disagree and neither has an outright majority. The fallacy of third party dominance arises because people forget that the first and second parties can vote together, in which case typically the third party's opinion will be irrelevant to the result.
Of course, then you have to get into whether the relative weight of parties in terms of votes they get in Parliament compared to popular support is reasonable, which it clearly isn't under first past the post.
Factually, you're correct about the way the system works, broken as it is (since it means votes count only towards electing a legislature, when in reality some, probably most, voters intend their vote toward electing an executive).
Nevertheless, in this specific case, whether Blair would be replaced by Brown was a huge issue at the last general election, and Labour were only returned to power after giving a very clear statement that this would not happen. Our laws do not provide for removing from power a political party that deliberately violates a promise given to the voters before an election, either, but such behaviour is still unethical and the party can no longer credibly claim to have a popular mandate if they do so; quite the contrary, in fact.
Both of the two largest parties in England have distinct tendencies to the right, certainly. The irony of that in the case of Labour is pretty impressive. I'm not sure how you could argue the same for the Lib Dems, though, given that they are almost diametrically opposite: every monetary policy they propose pretty openly bashes someone or other with above-average earnings in order to reduce taxes on their voters^W^W the lower paid or unemployed, their transport and environmental policies are heavily supportive of the little guy with limited money, etc.
Don't forget that there are major parties in the other regions outside those three as well, but their political goals are often heavily influenced by issues of devolution (or not) rather than your typical Westminster mess.
There are smaller parties that really are much more balanced in their views, but none currently has a critical mass in either public awareness or political power (such as even fielding a candidate in most areas) so some sort of major event would be needed to raise their profiles for them to make a difference: a big donor to give them advertising clout might do it, or some sort of well-managed merger between parties with broadly similar political views perhaps. I've always been curious what would happen if the smaller parties all pooled resources to run an advertising campaign pointing out that people don't have to vote for the big parties and showing how much more balanced the political landscape could become if some minor parties took a few seats in the Commons, but I suspect the big parties would counter with their usual "only parties X and Y have a chance in place Z" spin (which should be illegal IMHO, since it breaks the rules about stating facts) and this would be sufficient.
Encryption is no obstacle in Great Britain, home of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. If the authorities don't like anyone who uses encryption, they will simply demand the keys under RIP. If they don't like what they see or no key is provided, they will lock up the individuals concerned and throw away their own key, since the law essentially deems anyone using encryption guilty until proven innocent.
But then they showed how well they had learned their mistake under Blair by keeping Labor in power.
Oh, come off it. At the last election, the Labour Party came second in England. They only took power again because of the Scottish vote, and Scotland is not affected by several of Labour's more heinous policies because of devolution. In fact, only 22% of the electorate (37% of those who actually voted) supported Labour, which makes the absolute majority they received in Parliament an obscenity.
And that was when they still said Blair would serve a full third term, not the current administration who have no legitimate mandate whatsoever.
And in reply to your later post: yes, a significant number of votes for Labour do come from scroungers who don't contribute anything and live entirely off Labour's benefits hand-outs, but that's not what got them in for the third term. The largest opposition party managed to go through about 17 leaders in as many months or something prior to Cameron, so there was the little problem of who to vote for instead of Labour at the last general election. We simply don't have any significant moderate, central parties in the country today, despite the huge number of voters whose preferences appear to support one, so the anti-Labour vote split. Until someone manages to get a moderate, centrist party off the ground or there's an upset significant enough for one of the smaller parties to pick up some momentum, everyone in that category has no-one stepping up to represent them.
And for the record, Labour have been smashed at every single election since they fluked their way back into office. It is clear what the people do want, but Labour didn't have the integrity to ask them by calling a general election when Brown took over, because their polling told them they hadn't a prayer of winning it.
The eternal optimist in me feels some will see this as a step too far.
Oh, I would think that's a fairly safe bet. The Information Commissioner will be all over it, and the public profile of his department is rising every time he speaks these days. The courts will be all over it, since blanket surveillance is going to be just a little difficult to reconcile with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Opposition are already all over it, since any sort of claims about adequate data protection by the government are a joke thanks to repeated media coverage of numerous major leaks in recent months. Speaking of the media, they'll love this too, as it's another good opportunity to bash the government while it's down. And all of those are before we even get to the practical issues like who is going to pay for all of this and the overheads it would impose on service providers, presumably at their own expense if historical moves are anything to go by.
Finally, of course, we have the guy in the street who gets to vote, and he's becoming a lot more aware of privacy and data protection issues at the moment. Fortunately, the government will probably be so busy looking for a new Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer after the summer recess that they won't be able to do much about this, and they're toast at the next general election anyway since it's pretty hard to find any major group of voters they haven't seriously upset lately in one way or another.
There simply aren't any compelling advantages to trusting some external, remote service with your data that can't be had by setting up your own centralised resources in-house and accessing them the same way, but there certainly are compelling disadvantages in terms of robustness and security. The "Google/Amazon will never break", "I trust Google more than my own guys with my data" claptrap doesn't hold much water in light of several recent incidents of significant downtime and/or data being compromised.
The thing is, as I see it, this one really is very simple. Most countries would consider TPB's position illegal. Currently, TPB have moved to a country where this is not so, but they use the Internet to continue supporting illegal activities in other countries. The traditional response by the international community to such a situation is to isolate the country sheltering those who are attacking the laws the other countries have in order to pressure that country into getting its house in order.
Given the power of those involved here, is it really so inconceivable that the international community would threaten to literally disconnect an entire country hosting services like TPB from the Internet? I say "threaten", because it seems almost certain that the country's government would bring their laws into line with the international concensus and close down TPB long before allowing the disconnection to happen. You could even wind up with a two-tier Internet, where any other country that refused to participate in the block would themselves be isolated. Since most people in the first world wouldn't miss all the spam and cyber-attacks from countries likely to be excluded as a secondary effect, this is doesn't seem entirely unrealistic either.
Of course, even if that approach is a little draconian for your credibility, there is a whole scale of things leading up to it, such as blocking encrypted traffic, bandwidth caps, and so on.
a) they have a flawed billing model, where they provide extremely high bandwidth at a flat rate and expect users not to use it
...which almost every major ISP does, at least in my country. Most users do not use the bandwidth continuously, so high peak bandwidth and high contention ratios work in the interests of most customers.
Actually, I wish the ISPs would all move back to a more realistic billing model. Then I could stop subsidising the P2P/BT freeloaders, who would have to pay many times what they currently do for their connections.
The fact is that [the balance] is eroding faster than anyone can see.
But is it, really?
It's easy to look at laws that extend copyright durations and prohibit DRM circumvention, and forget the rest. But you have to consider that in the Internet age, mass copying of music, video and software is taking place on an unprecedented scale. Systems like DRM are a (flawed) response to that, and laws prohibiting DRM circumvention are the next step when the flaws come to light. Personally, I'm not a fan of DRM for two or three quite specific reasons, and I think market forces will drive everyone toward better alternative approaches in the future, but in the meantime, it's not like companies invest time and money in investigating and implementing DRM without any motivation. Some people are ripping them off.
Likewise you can talk about copyright extensions, but several countries actually rejected the latest round of proposed extensions. Moreover, the UK, for one, is currently working towards opening up some daft laws that mean everyday and indeed industry-supported actions like format shifting are technically illegal. So it's not all one-way traffic.
OK, just stop with this one, please! TPB openly and repeatedly advertise their services directly to those who wish to break the law, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a heavy majority of the material identified by TPB is infringing.
There is a valid argument that technologies that have positive uses should not be prohibited just because they also have negative uses. That is a very important principle, but it does not apply here, because the Italian government is not going after BitTorrent technology, they are going after specific users of that technology whose publicly stated aim is a violation of Italian law. It's the difference between banning cars and banning drivers who think doing 90mph through a residential area is a legitimate use of cars. It's the difference between banning knives and banning the guy who sells combat knives outside a school known for its problems with violent pupils with a banner saying "If you don't like someone, just stab them!".
OK, strictly speaking, you're right. But in that sense, all IP laws are a form of censorship.
Are you objecting to people discussing what the law actually is, or discussing whether the law is right?
I'm not objecting to anyone discussing anything. I'm objecting to people breaking the law. Those people are free to pretend that they are on some moral crusade to justify that action, just as I am free to say their argument is a load of weasel words completely lacking in substance.
How about this: Admit that the system is unbalanced in favor of one party instead of posting that "everything's fine" on Slashdot.
Could you please give a link to a comment in this discussion where someone who is generally not on TPB's side on this one claims that "everything's fine"?
I obviously can't speak for anyone but myself, but I am very careful not to claim such things, not least because I don't for an instant believe them. Today's intellectual property frameworks are clearly flawed in many ways, and unbalanced at times. But that doesn't excuse rampant violation of a reasonable basic principle, which is what TPB openly advocates.
I've used TPB for legal torrents as well as the "illegal" ones.
I love the quotation marks there. Do they meant "I've decided that these laws don't apply to me"?
He's using public funding against what would be a "crime" between private parties. He's using the taxpayer's dollars to do the work the "harmed" party should be doing.
How is this any different to any police force and national prosecution authority taking action against someone who breaks any law? Certain aspects of copyright infringment have legally been criminal rather than civil issues for several years now in many jurisdictions, including the US and EU.
That's just a glorified ad hominem attack. TPB's openly admitted purpose for existing is in violation of Italian law. When you break the law, you forfeit certain legal protections and certain freedoms. A public official blocking them from helping people to break the law isn't fascism or censorship, it's simply enforcing the law, and some random group of people who don't agree with the law do not get to decide what is the law for an entire country.
Here's a newsflash for you: the authorities and big business have way, way more control over the Internet than you appear to realise. Companies like Google have the resources to index the entire web. Every major international pipe is controlled by one of a pretty small group of major telecomms companies. Despite the grand redundancy claims, there are plenty of single points of failure that will disconnect, or at least seriously inhibit, flow of data to or from entire countries.
You can make defiant noises about how impractical it would be for the authorities to police everything and how important net neutrality is, but TPB is the enemy here, because by its very existence and public position on openly breaking the law in most countries, it provides all the evidence that politicians and their major contributors need to justify not fighting for net neutrality and pushing for ever more surveillance and control.
A few years ago, there was all this talk about the Internet being some new, special place. Sorry, but it's neither above international agreements nor above individual countries enforcing their own laws and cutting off anyone who doesn't play nicely with their efforts to do so.
The world will be a better place for most people if the freedom that generally exists on the Internet is preserved, but if that freedom is abused by a vocal minority, the rest of us will all get shafted by the consequences.
The issue is the expectation that content production should be outrageously lucrative, to the tune of millions of dollars a year.
Who said there should be such an expectation? There's a whole scale, starting with "doesn't buy you one night's dinner", moving up through "doesn't pay the rent" until you get to "roof over head and eating nutritious food, but that's about it" and eventually "decent quality of life", long before anyone has dreams of becoming a millionaire. Until someone shows me real evidence to suggest otherwise, I claim that most professional artists would probably fall at the wrong end of this scale in the absence of copyright protections or other incentives to make their work economically worthwhile.
Small companies that manage to succeed become big companies.
That depends on your definition of "success". If "making it big" is your definition, then clearly you are right. If "pays a reasonable living wage to the owners/staff" is your definition, then no, most small companies that succeed do not make it big. The economy of most first world countries is dominated by small companies that never "make it big", yet do OK and pay their staff's salaries.
In any case, since the original point was about companies making "record profits" and this clearly doesn't apply to most small, indie game developers since only a very few ever will make it big, I don't really see your point.
But if the product is good enough, enough people will contribute to allow you to continue developing more product - and that's a win.
The first problem with your argument is that you take the above as an axiom, but what little evidence there is from people trying this approach isn't exactly an overwhelming endorsement of your position. And if you're wrong about that, your entire argument falls apart.
The second problem with your argument is that it relies on people producing an initial product as nothing but marketing. That's a lot of cost for no return. In particular, if someone only has one really great idea, your system provides no incentive whatsoever for them to share it.
Sure, but who said anything about a tax on real estate being reasonable?
How much do you think it would cost to buy copyright in Song of the South from The Walt Disney Company, a work that Disney has kept out of print for political reasons?
You'd have to ask Disney. But if they aren't doing anything with it and someone offered to take a political headache off their hands, why wouldn't they consider it?
Sure, but then rather few of them have to work speculatively for months before any hope of getting any money at all, either.
In markets where that is the case, there have to be different economic rules so people doing the work can expect a reasonable return on their investment, or the work won't get done. One possibility is to amortize the cost of development plus a reasonable profit over all the consumers instead of just the first one. Copyright is one mechanism through which this can be achieved.
And yet we can see from history (such as the airplanes mentioned in TFA...) that this doesn't happen reliably.
It might not happen 100% reliably, but if the only counter-example cited in the whole article is a scenario in one industry in one country from nearly a century ago, I'll take my chances. I note that the article cites multiple more recent examples where players in diverse markets have collaborated effectively for mutual benefit.
Much progress requires cooperation, and exclusive rights grant people the opportunity to forbid such cooperation.
Sure, but the only cost they can impose on competitors is losing the value of the exclusive invention, which for a lot of defensive patents isn't much, particularly since everyone knows the patent protection is unlikely to stand up in court and they're only filing because it's cheaper to pay the costs of seeking a defensive patent than it is to pay the legal costs of defending a court case against someone else who got it instead.
Forbidding co-operation if you have a valuable invention that you can license for royalties is usually against your own economic interests, which is why most big businesses have these cross-licensing deals rather than everyone stonewalling.
the questions are just how it compares to the benefit that comes from providing incentives for research, and whether there's a way to provide those incentives without the downsides of exclusivity.
I personally am certainly not claiming that patents or copyright are the only possible schemes for incentivising the creation and sharing of new products. There are other potentially viable schemes, such as public funding, but personally I prefer the idea of relying on market forces to the idea of higher taxes and allowing government to decide what works I might like to fund with my hard-earned cash when they take it away from me.
If anyone has a realistic alternative that doesn't require the exclusivity, doesn't screw the people doing the hard work, and still gets at least the same quantity and quality of works distributed to at least the same number people, I'm all ears. But the idea that everything should be free is just wishful thinking on the part of those who don't like paying for stuff. It can work sometimes because of the side effects, and it's certainly possible for some people to build a viable business model on that basis. But still, while running loss-leaders can be a useful technique, selling things at a price that doesn't recover the costs indefinitely will sink your company.
What we should be asking is? "Why should your industry making record profits despite non-scarcity?"
You assume, erroneously, that everyone who relies on copyright to make a living is part of some filthy rich megacorp. The megacorps can take care of themselves, but copyright is far more important to the small indie developer (which the guy posing this question is). How many rich small-time game developers have you met?
I think the argument should be viewed in the reverse, considering non-scarcity of said product once it is produced, why haven't prices of games come down?
Well, I'm not a genius, but if you take a look at the resources required to develop Crysis or Supreme Commander and compare them with the resources required to develop Tetris or Pacman, I think we can safely assume that today's AAA titles need a bigger development budget.
Slashdot Mirror
My apologies, that was a poor choice of words. Labour only won the popular vote because of contributions from outside England. They would indeed have taken power comfortably anyway under the current "first past the post" system.
In your other reply, you wrote:
Scotland's policies on [numerous subjects] will be decided by a party that is consistently polling third in Scotland.
Is that fair?
Well, that depends. If you accept the first past the post system, then yes, it's perfectly fair that the third party can swing the vote if the first and second parties disagree and neither has an outright majority. The fallacy of third party dominance arises because people forget that the first and second parties can vote together, in which case typically the third party's opinion will be irrelevant to the result.
Of course, then you have to get into whether the relative weight of parties in terms of votes they get in Parliament compared to popular support is reasonable, which it clearly isn't under first past the post.
Factually, you're correct about the way the system works, broken as it is (since it means votes count only towards electing a legislature, when in reality some, probably most, voters intend their vote toward electing an executive).
Nevertheless, in this specific case, whether Blair would be replaced by Brown was a huge issue at the last general election, and Labour were only returned to power after giving a very clear statement that this would not happen. Our laws do not provide for removing from power a political party that deliberately violates a promise given to the voters before an election, either, but such behaviour is still unethical and the party can no longer credibly claim to have a popular mandate if they do so; quite the contrary, in fact.
Both of the two largest parties in England have distinct tendencies to the right, certainly. The irony of that in the case of Labour is pretty impressive. I'm not sure how you could argue the same for the Lib Dems, though, given that they are almost diametrically opposite: every monetary policy they propose pretty openly bashes someone or other with above-average earnings in order to reduce taxes on their voters^W^W the lower paid or unemployed, their transport and environmental policies are heavily supportive of the little guy with limited money, etc.
Don't forget that there are major parties in the other regions outside those three as well, but their political goals are often heavily influenced by issues of devolution (or not) rather than your typical Westminster mess.
There are smaller parties that really are much more balanced in their views, but none currently has a critical mass in either public awareness or political power (such as even fielding a candidate in most areas) so some sort of major event would be needed to raise their profiles for them to make a difference: a big donor to give them advertising clout might do it, or some sort of well-managed merger between parties with broadly similar political views perhaps. I've always been curious what would happen if the smaller parties all pooled resources to run an advertising campaign pointing out that people don't have to vote for the big parties and showing how much more balanced the political landscape could become if some minor parties took a few seats in the Commons, but I suspect the big parties would counter with their usual "only parties X and Y have a chance in place Z" spin (which should be illegal IMHO, since it breaks the rules about stating facts) and this would be sufficient.
Encryption is no obstacle in Great Britain, home of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. If the authorities don't like anyone who uses encryption, they will simply demand the keys under RIP. If they don't like what they see or no key is provided, they will lock up the individuals concerned and throw away their own key, since the law essentially deems anyone using encryption guilty until proven innocent.
But then they showed how well they had learned their mistake under Blair by keeping Labor in power.
Oh, come off it. At the last election, the Labour Party came second in England. They only took power again because of the Scottish vote, and Scotland is not affected by several of Labour's more heinous policies because of devolution. In fact, only 22% of the electorate (37% of those who actually voted) supported Labour, which makes the absolute majority they received in Parliament an obscenity.
And that was when they still said Blair would serve a full third term, not the current administration who have no legitimate mandate whatsoever.
And in reply to your later post: yes, a significant number of votes for Labour do come from scroungers who don't contribute anything and live entirely off Labour's benefits hand-outs, but that's not what got them in for the third term. The largest opposition party managed to go through about 17 leaders in as many months or something prior to Cameron, so there was the little problem of who to vote for instead of Labour at the last general election. We simply don't have any significant moderate, central parties in the country today, despite the huge number of voters whose preferences appear to support one, so the anti-Labour vote split. Until someone manages to get a moderate, centrist party off the ground or there's an upset significant enough for one of the smaller parties to pick up some momentum, everyone in that category has no-one stepping up to represent them.
And for the record, Labour have been smashed at every single election since they fluked their way back into office. It is clear what the people do want, but Labour didn't have the integrity to ask them by calling a general election when Brown took over, because their polling told them they hadn't a prayer of winning it.
The eternal optimist in me feels some will see this as a step too far.
Oh, I would think that's a fairly safe bet. The Information Commissioner will be all over it, and the public profile of his department is rising every time he speaks these days. The courts will be all over it, since blanket surveillance is going to be just a little difficult to reconcile with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Opposition are already all over it, since any sort of claims about adequate data protection by the government are a joke thanks to repeated media coverage of numerous major leaks in recent months. Speaking of the media, they'll love this too, as it's another good opportunity to bash the government while it's down. And all of those are before we even get to the practical issues like who is going to pay for all of this and the overheads it would impose on service providers, presumably at their own expense if historical moves are anything to go by.
Finally, of course, we have the guy in the street who gets to vote, and he's becoming a lot more aware of privacy and data protection issues at the moment. Fortunately, the government will probably be so busy looking for a new Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer after the summer recess that they won't be able to do much about this, and they're toast at the next general election anyway since it's pretty hard to find any major group of voters they haven't seriously upset lately in one way or another.
Only wimps back up to /dev/null. Real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it. ;-)
It was never anything else.
There simply aren't any compelling advantages to trusting some external, remote service with your data that can't be had by setting up your own centralised resources in-house and accessing them the same way, but there certainly are compelling disadvantages in terms of robustness and security. The "Google/Amazon will never break", "I trust Google more than my own guys with my data" claptrap doesn't hold much water in light of several recent incidents of significant downtime and/or data being compromised.
The thing is, as I see it, this one really is very simple. Most countries would consider TPB's position illegal. Currently, TPB have moved to a country where this is not so, but they use the Internet to continue supporting illegal activities in other countries. The traditional response by the international community to such a situation is to isolate the country sheltering those who are attacking the laws the other countries have in order to pressure that country into getting its house in order.
Given the power of those involved here, is it really so inconceivable that the international community would threaten to literally disconnect an entire country hosting services like TPB from the Internet? I say "threaten", because it seems almost certain that the country's government would bring their laws into line with the international concensus and close down TPB long before allowing the disconnection to happen. You could even wind up with a two-tier Internet, where any other country that refused to participate in the block would themselves be isolated. Since most people in the first world wouldn't miss all the spam and cyber-attacks from countries likely to be excluded as a secondary effect, this is doesn't seem entirely unrealistic either.
Of course, even if that approach is a little draconian for your credibility, there is a whole scale of things leading up to it, such as blocking encrypted traffic, bandwidth caps, and so on.
a) they have a flawed billing model, where they provide extremely high bandwidth at a flat rate and expect users not to use it
...which almost every major ISP does, at least in my country. Most users do not use the bandwidth continuously, so high peak bandwidth and high contention ratios work in the interests of most customers.
Actually, I wish the ISPs would all move back to a more realistic billing model. Then I could stop subsidising the P2P/BT freeloaders, who would have to pay many times what they currently do for their connections.
The fact is that [the balance] is eroding faster than anyone can see.
But is it, really?
It's easy to look at laws that extend copyright durations and prohibit DRM circumvention, and forget the rest. But you have to consider that in the Internet age, mass copying of music, video and software is taking place on an unprecedented scale. Systems like DRM are a (flawed) response to that, and laws prohibiting DRM circumvention are the next step when the flaws come to light. Personally, I'm not a fan of DRM for two or three quite specific reasons, and I think market forces will drive everyone toward better alternative approaches in the future, but in the meantime, it's not like companies invest time and money in investigating and implementing DRM without any motivation. Some people are ripping them off.
Likewise you can talk about copyright extensions, but several countries actually rejected the latest round of proposed extensions. Moreover, the UK, for one, is currently working towards opening up some daft laws that mean everyday and indeed industry-supported actions like format shifting are technically illegal. So it's not all one-way traffic.
OK, just stop with this one, please! TPB openly and repeatedly advertise their services directly to those who wish to break the law, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a heavy majority of the material identified by TPB is infringing.
There is a valid argument that technologies that have positive uses should not be prohibited just because they also have negative uses. That is a very important principle, but it does not apply here, because the Italian government is not going after BitTorrent technology, they are going after specific users of that technology whose publicly stated aim is a violation of Italian law. It's the difference between banning cars and banning drivers who think doing 90mph through a residential area is a legitimate use of cars. It's the difference between banning knives and banning the guy who sells combat knives outside a school known for its problems with violent pupils with a banner saying "If you don't like someone, just stab them!".
Enforcing the law or not, it is censorship.
OK, strictly speaking, you're right. But in that sense, all IP laws are a form of censorship.
Are you objecting to people discussing what the law actually is, or discussing whether the law is right?
I'm not objecting to anyone discussing anything. I'm objecting to people breaking the law. Those people are free to pretend that they are on some moral crusade to justify that action, just as I am free to say their argument is a load of weasel words completely lacking in substance.
How about this: Admit that the system is unbalanced in favor of one party instead of posting that "everything's fine" on Slashdot.
Could you please give a link to a comment in this discussion where someone who is generally not on TPB's side on this one claims that "everything's fine"?
I obviously can't speak for anyone but myself, but I am very careful not to claim such things, not least because I don't for an instant believe them. Today's intellectual property frameworks are clearly flawed in many ways, and unbalanced at times. But that doesn't excuse rampant violation of a reasonable basic principle, which is what TPB openly advocates.
I've used TPB for legal torrents as well as the "illegal" ones.
I love the quotation marks there. Do they meant "I've decided that these laws don't apply to me"?
He's using public funding against what would be a "crime" between private parties. He's using the taxpayer's dollars to do the work the "harmed" party should be doing.
How is this any different to any police force and national prosecution authority taking action against someone who breaks any law? Certain aspects of copyright infringment have legally been criminal rather than civil issues for several years now in many jurisdictions, including the US and EU.
That's just a glorified ad hominem attack. TPB's openly admitted purpose for existing is in violation of Italian law. When you break the law, you forfeit certain legal protections and certain freedoms. A public official blocking them from helping people to break the law isn't fascism or censorship, it's simply enforcing the law, and some random group of people who don't agree with the law do not get to decide what is the law for an entire country.
I love these wishful thinking posts.
Here's a newsflash for you: the authorities and big business have way, way more control over the Internet than you appear to realise. Companies like Google have the resources to index the entire web. Every major international pipe is controlled by one of a pretty small group of major telecomms companies. Despite the grand redundancy claims, there are plenty of single points of failure that will disconnect, or at least seriously inhibit, flow of data to or from entire countries.
You can make defiant noises about how impractical it would be for the authorities to police everything and how important net neutrality is, but TPB is the enemy here, because by its very existence and public position on openly breaking the law in most countries, it provides all the evidence that politicians and their major contributors need to justify not fighting for net neutrality and pushing for ever more surveillance and control.
A few years ago, there was all this talk about the Internet being some new, special place. Sorry, but it's neither above international agreements nor above individual countries enforcing their own laws and cutting off anyone who doesn't play nicely with their efforts to do so.
The world will be a better place for most people if the freedom that generally exists on the Internet is preserved, but if that freedom is abused by a vocal minority, the rest of us will all get shafted by the consequences.
The issue is the expectation that content production should be outrageously lucrative, to the tune of millions of dollars a year.
Who said there should be such an expectation? There's a whole scale, starting with "doesn't buy you one night's dinner", moving up through "doesn't pay the rent" until you get to "roof over head and eating nutritious food, but that's about it" and eventually "decent quality of life", long before anyone has dreams of becoming a millionaire. Until someone shows me real evidence to suggest otherwise, I claim that most professional artists would probably fall at the wrong end of this scale in the absence of copyright protections or other incentives to make their work economically worthwhile.
Small companies that manage to succeed become big companies.
That depends on your definition of "success". If "making it big" is your definition, then clearly you are right. If "pays a reasonable living wage to the owners/staff" is your definition, then no, most small companies that succeed do not make it big. The economy of most first world countries is dominated by small companies that never "make it big", yet do OK and pay their staff's salaries.
In any case, since the original point was about companies making "record profits" and this clearly doesn't apply to most small, indie game developers since only a very few ever will make it big, I don't really see your point.
But if the product is good enough, enough people will contribute to allow you to continue developing more product - and that's a win.
The first problem with your argument is that you take the above as an axiom, but what little evidence there is from people trying this approach isn't exactly an overwhelming endorsement of your position. And if you're wrong about that, your entire argument falls apart.
The second problem with your argument is that it relies on people producing an initial product as nothing but marketing. That's a lot of cost for no return. In particular, if someone only has one really great idea, your system provides no incentive whatsoever for them to share it.
So does the tax on real estate.
Sure, but who said anything about a tax on real estate being reasonable?
How much do you think it would cost to buy copyright in Song of the South from The Walt Disney Company, a work that Disney has kept out of print for political reasons?
You'd have to ask Disney. But if they aren't doing anything with it and someone offered to take a political headache off their hands, why wouldn't they consider it?
Sure, but then rather few of them have to work speculatively for months before any hope of getting any money at all, either.
In markets where that is the case, there have to be different economic rules so people doing the work can expect a reasonable return on their investment, or the work won't get done. One possibility is to amortize the cost of development plus a reasonable profit over all the consumers instead of just the first one. Copyright is one mechanism through which this can be achieved.
And yet we can see from history (such as the airplanes mentioned in TFA...) that this doesn't happen reliably.
It might not happen 100% reliably, but if the only counter-example cited in the whole article is a scenario in one industry in one country from nearly a century ago, I'll take my chances. I note that the article cites multiple more recent examples where players in diverse markets have collaborated effectively for mutual benefit.
Much progress requires cooperation, and exclusive rights grant people the opportunity to forbid such cooperation.
Sure, but the only cost they can impose on competitors is losing the value of the exclusive invention, which for a lot of defensive patents isn't much, particularly since everyone knows the patent protection is unlikely to stand up in court and they're only filing because it's cheaper to pay the costs of seeking a defensive patent than it is to pay the legal costs of defending a court case against someone else who got it instead.
Forbidding co-operation if you have a valuable invention that you can license for royalties is usually against your own economic interests, which is why most big businesses have these cross-licensing deals rather than everyone stonewalling.
the questions are just how it compares to the benefit that comes from providing incentives for research, and whether there's a way to provide those incentives without the downsides of exclusivity.
I personally am certainly not claiming that patents or copyright are the only possible schemes for incentivising the creation and sharing of new products. There are other potentially viable schemes, such as public funding, but personally I prefer the idea of relying on market forces to the idea of higher taxes and allowing government to decide what works I might like to fund with my hard-earned cash when they take it away from me.
If anyone has a realistic alternative that doesn't require the exclusivity, doesn't screw the people doing the hard work, and still gets at least the same quantity and quality of works distributed to at least the same number people, I'm all ears. But the idea that everything should be free is just wishful thinking on the part of those who don't like paying for stuff. It can work sometimes because of the side effects, and it's certainly possible for some people to build a viable business model on that basis. But still, while running loss-leaders can be a useful technique, selling things at a price that doesn't recover the costs indefinitely will sink your company.
What we should be asking is? "Why should your industry making record profits despite non-scarcity?"
You assume, erroneously, that everyone who relies on copyright to make a living is part of some filthy rich megacorp. The megacorps can take care of themselves, but copyright is far more important to the small indie developer (which the guy posing this question is). How many rich small-time game developers have you met?
I think the argument should be viewed in the reverse, considering non-scarcity of said product once it is produced, why haven't prices of games come down?
Well, I'm not a genius, but if you take a look at the resources required to develop Crysis or Supreme Commander and compare them with the resources required to develop Tetris or Pacman, I think we can safely assume that today's AAA titles need a bigger development budget.
Or maybe it just didn't occur to them that sharing amongst their friends is immoral.
And yet strangely, when they get a job, they expect to get paid for their own work.