I'm not arguing the merits for or against copyright here, but I think your arguments currently lack merit. You have given examples where someone deprives someone else of a valuable physical item or time, neither of which can be duplicated.
It's not hard to find examples that don't have that immediate deprivation element. Can someone take out holiday insurance, go enjoy a holiday when in fact nothing bad happens, and then refuse to pay the bill? Of course not, no insurer would provide insurance without charging up front, and no insurer would refund the premium after the fact if no claim was made and so the insurance was "unnecessary". Whether or not the insurer could still have offered coverage to other customers during the same period makes no difference to this.
In any case, creative work still has a deprivation aspect, it's just that the economics are different. With creative work, you typically have a high up-front cost for doing the creative part, and then low marginal costs for supplying the finished work. Copyright is useful because it allows amortization of that high cost among a relatively large number of contributors. That entire principle breaks if some of the contributors don't contribute.
Perhaps a better analogy to explain this idea would be paying a good speaker thousands for a relatively short talk at a corporate event. You mostly aren't paying for their time and presence on the day, the part that is necessary and can't be replicated. You're really paying a little bit for their time on the day, and the rest for all the experience and preparation that went into making that talk worthwhile.
that's a poor comparison to a teen downloading a movie since that act doesn't hinder them from selling it to someone else.
In isolation, no. But if everyone is allowed to do the same thing -- which seems only fair -- then it stops them from selling it at all, and that is permanently depriving them of the money to which they were legally entitled in return for others having access to their work. We're talking about markets and economics here. You can't just single out one person, remove their contribution, and say it doesn't really make any difference. You have to look at what happens if everyone follows the same rules, and what happens in this situation is statistically indistinguishable from some combination of theft and fraud: money that should have been in the creator's bank account at the end of the day isn't. Whether you choose to view it as stealing the money or as obtaining the benefit deceitfully because someone never intended to pay in return is rather an academic distinction at this point.
You are the one who equated it to a lost sale not me.
I'm not equating it to a lost sale. I'm assuming a general principle of everyone being subject to the same rules as everyone else in law, and claiming that under such a principle the behaviour you're condoning results in all sales being lost when taken to its logical conclusion. Since that is obviously not sustainable or a reasonable interpretation of the purpose of copyright law, your position must mean that someone is taking advantage of someone else and effectively putting the culprit above the law, and I see no ethical or practical justification for such special treatment.
In short, if everyone is equal and that includes being free to ignore copyright and not pay for works they obtain, the practical consequence is that the creators of those works don't get paid what they are due under the law in return for sharing their work. That means either someone stole their money, or someone obtained their work without intending to pay for it: theft or fraud. Everything else here appears to be either irrelevant to these fundamental details or a plea for special treatment where not all people are equal under the law and not everyone has the same rights and obligations as anyone else.
That one cases covers any rental or similar model, everything from PPV sporting events to binge-watching your favourite comedy show on Netflix via a playlist of the latest hits you enjoy from Spotify. It's hardly an insignificant market. I don't have useful stats to hand, but it may well cover the majority of new content consumption by now. Netflix alone represents a pretty substantial fraction of all Internet traffic today.
That's not "in the interests of all parties". It benefits only the company, and the measures enacted come at the people's expense. Especially so for legitimate paying customers since they are being punished/thwarted for a vague, ill-defined minority of bad actors.
Those legitimate paying customers you are so keen to protect may well be the ones footing the bill for the freeloaders. Reducing the market size will tend to increase the market price for the product. Someone is going to lose out if a lot of people don't pay their fair share, and it's going to be either the content creators/distributors, or the customers who do pay, or probably some combination of the two.
Please note that nowhere have I either supported or condoned extending the duration of copyright protection to the kinds of multi-lifetime silliness we see today, nor the games sometimes played around using derivative works as a vehicle for extending protections not otherwise granted. I'm as against these kinds of abuses as the next Slashdotter.
But serviscope_minor wasn't talking about purchasing a copy of the movie, they were talking about not being able to stream it from a legitimate source because of a technical limitation in their own connection that wasn't the streaming service's fault or responsibility. The work was available on a reasonable basis from a legitimate source, it's just that in this case someone didn't have the necessary equipment to benefit from that particular channel. It's not exactly practical to say that rightsholders must give up all technical protections on their works if they aren't willing to provide every work in a convenient format for every customer regardless of the work and costs involved in doing so!
As I've mentioned in a couple of other places in the discussion today, I think there's quite a difference both ethically and practically between adding DRM on something that is intended to be a permanent sale and using DRM to enforce temporary access rights in something that was never intended or advertised to be selling a permanent copy. A streaming service is almost certainly going to be in the latter category.
In Slashdot's home country, the copyright owner has standing to sue for statutory damages.
The US is anomalous in this respect, and I think many of us would agree that the US legal system allows far too much exploitation of copyrights when it isn't necessarily justified. Put another way, the problem here isn't the fundamental principle of copyright, it's the nature of the US legal system and its current implementation of that principle.
Even in the US system, my understanding is that someone has to have standing to bring a lawsuit for those statutory damages. In peripheral cases like orphan works, it's still not a problem.
I'm sure there must be other edge cases that slip through the net where someone might reasonably want access to a work and have no reasonable legal channel to get them right now, but again, I think we're talking about a tiny fraction of all copying that would infringe existing copyright laws here. While acknowledging the legitimacy of the complaint, I think it's also quite a detour from the main question of whether using DRM as a counter to widespread, actually infringing behaviour.
But fan mash-ups are a substantial fraction of videos that I fail to view on YouTube because they have been taken down on a notice of claimed infringement.
To be fair on that point, in most places they probably are infringing. Again, the US is anomalous in this respect, and indeed it has been frequently criticised for failing to meet its international obligations under the various IP treaties because of the relatively broad fair use provisions at home while simultaneously trying to export its aggressive/punitive penalty regime abroad.
I'm not sure what the best/most practical solution to this one is. There's a legitimate grievance in some sense, but any realistic way forward would also need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Like various other posters today, your argument seems to assume the only way anyone ever legally acquires creative content is through a permanent purchase. In that situation, I agree that DRM is much less relevant. But there are a lot of other financial models for distributing creative content, and some form of restriction is the only way you stop the temporary ones like pay-per-view or subscription libraries turning into the same thing as a purchase but without actually paying for it.
Because they will absolutely disappear. That is the entire reason for pushing DRM, and all the financial whining is just a convenient vehicle for the agenda.
No, it isn't, no matter how much people keep repeating it or ignoring the more reasonable applications of the same technology. One significant benefit of DRM is that it enables financial models other than outright purchase, which can be in the interests of all parties to the deal. Another benefit is that it can be quite effective at deterring casual infringement by the many people who simply don't understand the rules or know what they're even supposed to pay for. There's nothing morally wrong with either of those applications, and they don't necessarily harm any legitimate customers. Neither has anything to do with some bogeyman being able to switch something off after you already paid for a permanent copy, which I would agree is not a fair system and should be challenged.
I have a shitty internet connection by EU standards, though there are people with worse. It's bad enough that for example streaming video is more or less unwatchably bad.
You also can't watch a film if you don't have a screen. You have to buy a device that can show the film to enjoy it. That doesn't mean the distributor has to give you free admission to your local theatre instead, though. I think you're confusing two quite separate issues here.
Then why isn't the copyright statute written to acknowledge that the copyright owner is losing "maybe nothing"?
In some places, it is. As a civil matter, in many jurisdictions a rightsholder could only sue for actual damages, and in the kinds of situation you're talking about there either wouldn't be anyone with standing to sue or the actual damages would be zero anyway.
Even if the majority of violating acts are clearly harmful, if there are an identifiable minority of violating acts that aren't provably harmful, it's still unjust to ban them.
Unfortunately, it's not practical for a functioning legal system to work on such an absolute basis.
For example, as a driver I have an above average level of training and experience, I drive a well-maintained vehicle with above average performance, and I have an excellent record of safe driving over many years. Should my judgement therefore supersede statutory limits about speeds, passing stop signs or red lights, etc? In isolation, that would probably do little if any harm, but looking at the system as a whole, setting reasonable hard limits also does me relatively little harm while providing clear, unambiguous guidance to everyone about what the rules are, which is also a valuable result.
What's the "at least one legal channel" for, say, the rights to make fan-made mashups of popular recorded music as a comment on the similarity of their compositions?
Maybe there isn't one, at least not without doing some work. But surely you're not suggesting this sort of activity is more than a tiny fraction of copying that gets done?
It's also worth pointing out that in most places in the world, there isn't a generic fair use mechanism as there is in the US, and instead the permitted acts of copying or related uses of protected works are specifically enumerated (and, in some cases, mechanisms for enabling those acts are also specifically provided).
This is why I carefully wrote "and nothing better to replace it".
I'm in no way attached to today's copyright system as some sort of global maximum for how well we can incentivize the ultimate end goal of producing more and better works. I think the practical implementations today have many problems, for both producers and consumers, and in particular I have no more time than probably most people here do for the corruption of the basic principle that Big Media lobbyists have achieved in recent times, including the forever-minus-one-day extensions. (Compulsory licensing is a more difficult question. In theory it might be a good thing, but in practice I am wary of requiring anyone to surrender the control they have of their work by law without also providing real enforcement of their rights at government expense.)
If there were a better system to support those who were doing the work to create new things we can all enjoy, I would be the first to support it. I just don't think we've found one yet, and in the meantime, I have little time for those who exploit the current system at the expense of those who create the works they enjoy and/or those who do pay honestly to support them.
It's called reductio ad absurdum. The point is to take an argument to its logical conclusion, and show that if that conclusion is obviously silly then the argument doesn't work.
You can argue that if a single person didn't purchase a work but instead enjoyed it via an illegal copy, no money was lost. Maybe they told their friends and resulted in some extra sales. Maybe they could never have afforded it anyway. There are plenty of rationalisations that get thrown around if you only consider a single case in isolation.
But you can't argue that if everyone did that then the system would still work, and so if you look at the big picture, necessarily people who break the rules must be causing harm to some degree, because collectively they are responsible for the creator losing out on all their money.
Where the harm falls is not determined by this thought experiment. Maybe it's the creator losing out. Maybe the work remains commercially viable but only because everyone who does pay honestly is picking up the slack and therefore paying a higher price than what the market rate should be for the work if everyone was contributing their fair share. But someone is necessarily losing out as a result of the freeloaders' actions. The infringement cannot be a "victimless crime".
I'm not American, but in any case, where copyright is a criminal offence throughout the world it is typically only for large-scale commercial infringement that any public authority would intervene.
It's incorrect to argue that the teenager with $10,000 "worth" of movies squirreled away on his hard disk is guilty of anything akin to fraud because there has not been anything in the way of misrepresentation. It's also facile to argue that said teen deprived a company of more money then he's earned in his entire life. There are no possible circumstances under which the studio would have got the money from the teenager equivalent to the full price of all of the films.
If that same kid walked into a car showroom and drove off with a new vehicle that they couldn't possibly have paid for, no-one would say the showroom hadn't lost out because it was never going to make that money anyway.
If that kid hired a world class DJ to play at their birthday party but then at the end of the night said sorry but they haven't earned the DJ's appearance fee in their entire lives and they can't pay up, no-one would say the DJ hadn't lost out because they hadn't left any physical goods behind and they never really had any chance of getting the money.
Copyright is an economic tool. It works by establishing economic incentives to do things we consider useful to society, specifically creating and distributing more and better works. If you just ignore the side of the deal where someone actually pays the asking price for their copy, the whole system fails. The kid who doesn't have the money might not represent a lost sale right now, but that doesn't mean it's OK to just take something you can't afford. Our entire economic system would collapse if that behaviour was accepted more generally.
Without reference to whether it's right or wrong to pirate, it's certainly wrong to argue that the company has lost money which never existed.
So, they've only lost all the money the kid did have but didn't pay plus the money the kid could have earned in the future and paid then?
I'd like a nice, big house to throw parties in, but right now I can't afford one where I want to live. So, I have an incentive to work hard and save up, and then in the future maybe I do get to buy what I want. That's how life works.
I also don't see why it's relevant and your arguments don't fit the bill even slightly.
The point is that there are more ways to distribute creative works than just selling permanent copies, and sometimes the economics work out better for everyone in the cheaper but more restricted cases. But that only works if the cheaper cases actually are restricted in some enforceable way, so people can't just rent something for a fraction of the full purchase price but then keep it forever anyway.
The point is that alternative models to permanent purchases are both viable and useful for all parties involved. You mentioned Netflix, and yes, Netflix is better value in some countries that others. But the fact remains that if I want to enjoy binge-watching a TV show on Netflix today, I can do so from the comfort of my own home, in return for a small fee per month. A few years ago, enjoying the same content at the same rate would have meant going into town, renting one tape/disc with probably 2-4 episodes at a time from the rental store for a night or two, assuming that no-one else had already hired the one I wanted that night so it wasn't available, and still paying more than half of my entire monthly Netflix fee for each tape/disc.
I addressed this point in response to your earlier comment. Orphan works and the like are fair points, but the vast majority of cases where infringement and DRM are relevant issues don't fall into those edge cases.
Until recently, most tickets' only DRM-like feature was difficult-to-forge authentication features like a holographic ribbon. Now they are all the way up to bar (or grid) codes which are authenticated against a centralized database, wow! Rental of most things other than media involves no DRM.
Sorry, perhaps my point wasn't clear. The point I was trying to make was that alternative models to just purchasing everything permanently can be useful for all parties involved. Renting lets someone enjoy a work they might only want to see once while saving money relatively to a permanent purchase, for example.
On the other hand, people who copy a piece of media can actually increase its value, by increasing its popularity.
This is just a pyramid scheme argument. Hey, buddy, if you let me have the work you spent time and money creating for free, I'll tell all my friends, so they can have it for free as well! You'll be rich in no time!
Copyright infringement is fundamentally different from theft, which is why it is an entirely separate and distinct body of law.
It's really not that fundamentally different. As I pointed out elsewhere, it's directly equivalent economically to paying for legal access to a work, enjoying it per the agreed deal, and then stealing the money back from the person who provided the work.
It's a convenient rationalisation to say that no money changed hands or would ever necessarily have changed hands, but that's no better than arguing that it's OK to hire someone to provide a service but then refusing to pay for it afterwards.
Whether you equate this with theft or fraud therefore depends on your perspective, but the idea that copyright infringement is some sort of victimless crime or has no economic impact just doesn't stand up. One way or another, you are ripping someone off by not honouring your side of the deal, and in any commercial situation, that results in a financial loss to the person who did honour their side.
Since copyright is a legal right and not a natural right (even to people who actually believe in natural rights) the question is whether society would derive more benefit from not having copyright than it does from having it.
Agreed. Copyright is an economic tool to advance the true goal, which is people enjoying more and better creative works. But until we have a better system -- and while it's certainly possible that one day we will, I see little evidence that we have found one so far -- copyright remains a useful tool for that purpose, and like any legal right it only works if people play by the rules, voluntarily or otherwise.
The music industry has certainly distributed a lot of music to a lot of people, but it also has exploited a lot of artists who never got paid much at all for their labors, which is what you're arguing for, right? The movie industry makes big movies that it's currently difficult to imagine being made any other way (though only because it hasn't been done yet) consistently plays funny games with economics so that it doesn't have to pay its fair tax burden.
Surely we all condemn those exploitative actions? But this is clouding the issue. Those funny money accounting practices aren't dependent on how the exploiter acquired its money in the first place.
In those cases, maybe nothing. But let's be honest, most infringement of DRM-protected works is not that situation at all. The vast majority of online infringement is copying works that are recent and readily available via at least one legal channel.
Your logical fallacy is that of the ridiculous example, because everyone doesn't do that.
There is nothing logically fallacious about a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Even if they did, then people would have to get paid through other means, like touring.
And how does an orchestral music composer make their money by touring? An independent game developer? The artist who drew the illustrations for that game's web site? A textbook author? That textbook's editorial team? The thousands of people who contribute to a summer blockbuster movie but aren't the famous lead actors, producers and directors?
The entire point of copyright is that it's an economic instrument. It produces commercial incentives to create and distribute new works, and those commercial incentives allow for paying all the other people who do the behind the scenes jobs necessary for that creation and distribution to happen. You can't just replace entire creative industries and the millions who work in them with a few famous headline acts and charging admission.
Today, work can be funded in a broad variety of means, including crowdsourcing, advertising, direct sales, public performance for hire, public performance for donations, absolutely gratis since the costs have come down so much and so many more people have the necessary skills... Which is why even if we had no copyright law, there would still be content created.
Unfortunately, none of those alternative methods has yet proven to be anything like as effective at supporting the creation and distribution of new works as the copyright model. That is why, if we had no copyright law and nothing better to replace it, less content would be created and overall the content would be of lower quality.
I'm not saying content creation would suddenly stop without copyright; obviously that's not true. I'm not saying there's no way we could ever have a better system. I'm just saying we haven't figured one out yet, on the evidence so far, and in the meantime copyright (and by extension, reasonable mechanisms for enforcing it, just like any other legal right) does appear to be relatively effective at what it's supposed to do: incentivize the creation and distribution of more and better works.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, nothing was stolen.
Of course it was. The economic effect is literally no different to paying for a work legally, enjoying that work as allowed by the deal, but then stealing that money back from the person who provided it to you.
The fact that in the copyright case the money never changed hands in the first place doesn't change the fact that one side is honouring the deal while the other side is not. If you hired someone to provide a service, say cleaning your house or insuring your car against theft, but then refused to pay after the service had been provided as agreed, no-one would seriously claim that was OK because nothing had really been lost by the person who provided the service.
Since DRM fails at its core stated purpose, I'd say there's something else afoot in providing for that revenue.
This is a common argument, but it's easily defeated. DRM is very effective at limiting casual infringement, and that is already a huge win for content creators in the modern digital world.
In music, especially, we have demonstrable proof in iTunes, Amazon, etc, that no DRM has actually caused increased legal sales.
What proof? Correlation does not imply causation, and I've never seen anything that would go beyond showing a correlation here.
Even even if we did have such proof, selling popular music online has the almost unique property that you can often do it profitably while still charging only a very small amount for each copy, if you can then make up the overall revenue on volume. Unfortunately, very few other kinds of work enjoy the same financial advantage. Popular fiction might, and maybe a few other cases, but it doesn't work so well for either works with very high production costs (big budget movies, large software applications, etc.) or relatively small markets (niche music interests, academic textbooks, etc.).
Otherwise, for every GOG where you've got a significant number of people who might go out of their way to support DRM-free products, there is a Steam that shows most people just don't care as long as the DRM doesn't get in the way too much, and one of these has much, much more content available than the other. As someone who does buy DRM-free works and is willing to pay a fair price for them, this saddens me, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm clearly in a minority on this one.
No, it really isn't. This is just basic logic. For example, if everyone did as the infringers do, taking a copy of a work without paying for it, would the creators receive any compensation at all, never mind more than they would have received if everyone just paid directly?
We have libraries for more than 2 kiloyears and they never needed DRM.
And how many of those libraries could buy one copy of a work and then provide infinite copies simultaneously for all of their visitors to keep? Indeed, how many bought works at all? How many works did they even have, and how many libraries were there?
When it took a skilled artist thousands of hours to produce a single duplicate copy of a book, everything was copy-protected, yet somehow society and culture survived.
When the only way to fund such work was patronage of one kind or another, the creation, reproduction and distribution of substantial works was a viable profession for only a few people, and far less work was created, and it was enjoyed by far fewer people.
If you want to have a reasonable debate about the merits or otherwise of copyright in the 21st century, it's helpful to talk about the economics and society of the 21st century as well.
OK, so can we also stop complaining when people refer to copyright infringement as fraud or theft, and start prosecuting it as a criminal offence rather than treating it as a civil matter? After all, it typically does have the overall effect of permanently removing compensation from a legitimate rightsholder for the benefit of the infringer, and you can only dress it up as "they might not have bought it anyway" or "the rightsholder didn't actually lose anything" if you're willing to completely ignore economics while discussing a concept that exists precisely to apply something like the economic incentives of physical works to creative works as well.
Also, can everyone who refers to all DRM as defective by design please confirm that they have never rented anything in their lives, nor bought a one-off ticket to visit somewhere or to see something? Because while applying DRM on works you're supplying as a permanent purchase is one thing, some form of restriction is necessary in practice for any business model that works on a less permanent basis. Far from being exploitative, those business models have been some of the most successful of the Internet age at both providing sustainable revenues for producers and providing more, cheaper and more easily accessible content to consumers.
The point is to force the system to give you due process, so you clog up the courts or tribunals involved with whichever law is objectionable to the extent that they can no longer function effectively. It makes perfect sense. But of course it only works if the law actually is bad enough that many people are willing to openly defy it and risk the consequences in order to bring the system down.
For casual personal or in-house business things, I use OSS all the time. I'm a big fan of the idea of community-developed software, and in particular of the kind of sharing culture and collaboration that was much harder when I was younger but is now enabled by the Internet.
For important things in business, we pay for good software and for reliable interoperability, even though that sometimes means a lot of money for something closed source.
The reality is that a lot of commercial business software is still better than the community-driven OSS equivalents. In other cases, OSS equivalents for business software might not exist at all.
However, even if the OSS equivalent exists and is broadly of a similar standard in isolation, it can still be a big risk for a business if collaboration is an issue. The cost of one small import/export glitch converting to the industry standard format can easily waste more time and money than the cost of buying the standard software outright. Worse, it might not waste any time and money, and instead result in data loss or corruption that doesn't get noticed.
Ironically, with the trend towards software-as-a-service and trying to rent us big name business software instead of just selling us a licence, the professional/closed source world is now making its offering much riskier anyway, which means in those cases we might as well experiment with other options including OSS if there are good enough alternatives available.
I don't think our two positions are incompatible. My argument was just that those who don't respect the science and choose to go against it will probably suffer in the long run, but are still dangerous because they can easily bring everyone else down with them. Yours seems to be that there's too much bad science or political pseudoscience clouding the issues, which I would also agree with.
If you want to look at it that way, part of the problem is that often people on both sides of an issue have dressed things up or failed to address reasonable dissent, even if not to the same degree.
The credibility of science among non-scientists has clearly been undermined in recent years. Part of that is because the scientific community hasn't always had its own house in order, publishing far too much supposedly peer-reviewed research that turned out not to be reproducible at all when someone actually tried.
There's also a danger of lies of omission, publishing only the impressive results or the borderline results that still favoured whoever was funding the research, without also publishing the research that didn't find anything particularly remarkable or even produced evidence contrary to the anticipated result.
Then of course there's the often low standard of popular science reporting, where carefully worded conclusions written by diligent scientists are stripped of all subtlety and qualification by the headline writers. Suddenly a promising result in an early trial of some new personalised medicine technique is no longer just encouraging for the researchers and grounds for more advanced trials, it becomes "the cure for cancer within five years" or something similarly exaggerated.
These kinds of distortions don't need to happen and be reported in popular media very often to start eroding the trust of non-experts in science as a whole. Then we start to get people latching onto anomalies and thinking that the effectiveness of vaccines or the changes happening in our climate are matters of faith or subjective debate, even if the overall balance of scientific evidence is compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not arguing the merits for or against copyright here, but I think your arguments currently lack merit. You have given examples where someone deprives someone else of a valuable physical item or time, neither of which can be duplicated.
It's not hard to find examples that don't have that immediate deprivation element. Can someone take out holiday insurance, go enjoy a holiday when in fact nothing bad happens, and then refuse to pay the bill? Of course not, no insurer would provide insurance without charging up front, and no insurer would refund the premium after the fact if no claim was made and so the insurance was "unnecessary". Whether or not the insurer could still have offered coverage to other customers during the same period makes no difference to this.
In any case, creative work still has a deprivation aspect, it's just that the economics are different. With creative work, you typically have a high up-front cost for doing the creative part, and then low marginal costs for supplying the finished work. Copyright is useful because it allows amortization of that high cost among a relatively large number of contributors. That entire principle breaks if some of the contributors don't contribute.
Perhaps a better analogy to explain this idea would be paying a good speaker thousands for a relatively short talk at a corporate event. You mostly aren't paying for their time and presence on the day, the part that is necessary and can't be replicated. You're really paying a little bit for their time on the day, and the rest for all the experience and preparation that went into making that talk worthwhile.
that's a poor comparison to a teen downloading a movie since that act doesn't hinder them from selling it to someone else.
In isolation, no. But if everyone is allowed to do the same thing -- which seems only fair -- then it stops them from selling it at all, and that is permanently depriving them of the money to which they were legally entitled in return for others having access to their work. We're talking about markets and economics here. You can't just single out one person, remove their contribution, and say it doesn't really make any difference. You have to look at what happens if everyone follows the same rules, and what happens in this situation is statistically indistinguishable from some combination of theft and fraud: money that should have been in the creator's bank account at the end of the day isn't. Whether you choose to view it as stealing the money or as obtaining the benefit deceitfully because someone never intended to pay in return is rather an academic distinction at this point.
You are the one who equated it to a lost sale not me.
I'm not equating it to a lost sale. I'm assuming a general principle of everyone being subject to the same rules as everyone else in law, and claiming that under such a principle the behaviour you're condoning results in all sales being lost when taken to its logical conclusion. Since that is obviously not sustainable or a reasonable interpretation of the purpose of copyright law, your position must mean that someone is taking advantage of someone else and effectively putting the culprit above the law, and I see no ethical or practical justification for such special treatment.
In short, if everyone is equal and that includes being free to ignore copyright and not pay for works they obtain, the practical consequence is that the creators of those works don't get paid what they are due under the law in return for sharing their work. That means either someone stole their money, or someone obtained their work without intending to pay for it: theft or fraud. Everything else here appears to be either irrelevant to these fundamental details or a plea for special treatment where not all people are equal under the law and not everyone has the same rights and obligations as anyone else.
And that's it. Exactly one case.
That one cases covers any rental or similar model, everything from PPV sporting events to binge-watching your favourite comedy show on Netflix via a playlist of the latest hits you enjoy from Spotify. It's hardly an insignificant market. I don't have useful stats to hand, but it may well cover the majority of new content consumption by now. Netflix alone represents a pretty substantial fraction of all Internet traffic today.
That's not "in the interests of all parties". It benefits only the company, and the measures enacted come at the people's expense. Especially so for legitimate paying customers since they are being punished/thwarted for a vague, ill-defined minority of bad actors.
Those legitimate paying customers you are so keen to protect may well be the ones footing the bill for the freeloaders. Reducing the market size will tend to increase the market price for the product. Someone is going to lose out if a lot of people don't pay their fair share, and it's going to be either the content creators/distributors, or the customers who do pay, or probably some combination of the two.
Please note that nowhere have I either supported or condoned extending the duration of copyright protection to the kinds of multi-lifetime silliness we see today, nor the games sometimes played around using derivative works as a vehicle for extending protections not otherwise granted. I'm as against these kinds of abuses as the next Slashdotter.
But serviscope_minor wasn't talking about purchasing a copy of the movie, they were talking about not being able to stream it from a legitimate source because of a technical limitation in their own connection that wasn't the streaming service's fault or responsibility. The work was available on a reasonable basis from a legitimate source, it's just that in this case someone didn't have the necessary equipment to benefit from that particular channel. It's not exactly practical to say that rightsholders must give up all technical protections on their works if they aren't willing to provide every work in a convenient format for every customer regardless of the work and costs involved in doing so!
As I've mentioned in a couple of other places in the discussion today, I think there's quite a difference both ethically and practically between adding DRM on something that is intended to be a permanent sale and using DRM to enforce temporary access rights in something that was never intended or advertised to be selling a permanent copy. A streaming service is almost certainly going to be in the latter category.
In Slashdot's home country, the copyright owner has standing to sue for statutory damages.
The US is anomalous in this respect, and I think many of us would agree that the US legal system allows far too much exploitation of copyrights when it isn't necessarily justified. Put another way, the problem here isn't the fundamental principle of copyright, it's the nature of the US legal system and its current implementation of that principle.
Even in the US system, my understanding is that someone has to have standing to bring a lawsuit for those statutory damages. In peripheral cases like orphan works, it's still not a problem.
I'm sure there must be other edge cases that slip through the net where someone might reasonably want access to a work and have no reasonable legal channel to get them right now, but again, I think we're talking about a tiny fraction of all copying that would infringe existing copyright laws here. While acknowledging the legitimacy of the complaint, I think it's also quite a detour from the main question of whether using DRM as a counter to widespread, actually infringing behaviour.
But fan mash-ups are a substantial fraction of videos that I fail to view on YouTube because they have been taken down on a notice of claimed infringement.
To be fair on that point, in most places they probably are infringing. Again, the US is anomalous in this respect, and indeed it has been frequently criticised for failing to meet its international obligations under the various IP treaties because of the relatively broad fair use provisions at home while simultaneously trying to export its aggressive/punitive penalty regime abroad.
I'm not sure what the best/most practical solution to this one is. There's a legitimate grievance in some sense, but any realistic way forward would also need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Like various other posters today, your argument seems to assume the only way anyone ever legally acquires creative content is through a permanent purchase. In that situation, I agree that DRM is much less relevant. But there are a lot of other financial models for distributing creative content, and some form of restriction is the only way you stop the temporary ones like pay-per-view or subscription libraries turning into the same thing as a purchase but without actually paying for it.
Because they will absolutely disappear. That is the entire reason for pushing DRM, and all the financial whining is just a convenient vehicle for the agenda.
No, it isn't, no matter how much people keep repeating it or ignoring the more reasonable applications of the same technology. One significant benefit of DRM is that it enables financial models other than outright purchase, which can be in the interests of all parties to the deal. Another benefit is that it can be quite effective at deterring casual infringement by the many people who simply don't understand the rules or know what they're even supposed to pay for. There's nothing morally wrong with either of those applications, and they don't necessarily harm any legitimate customers. Neither has anything to do with some bogeyman being able to switch something off after you already paid for a permanent copy, which I would agree is not a fair system and should be challenged.
I have a shitty internet connection by EU standards, though there are people with worse. It's bad enough that for example streaming video is more or less unwatchably bad.
You also can't watch a film if you don't have a screen. You have to buy a device that can show the film to enjoy it. That doesn't mean the distributor has to give you free admission to your local theatre instead, though. I think you're confusing two quite separate issues here.
Then why isn't the copyright statute written to acknowledge that the copyright owner is losing "maybe nothing"?
In some places, it is. As a civil matter, in many jurisdictions a rightsholder could only sue for actual damages, and in the kinds of situation you're talking about there either wouldn't be anyone with standing to sue or the actual damages would be zero anyway.
Even if the majority of violating acts are clearly harmful, if there are an identifiable minority of violating acts that aren't provably harmful, it's still unjust to ban them.
Unfortunately, it's not practical for a functioning legal system to work on such an absolute basis.
For example, as a driver I have an above average level of training and experience, I drive a well-maintained vehicle with above average performance, and I have an excellent record of safe driving over many years. Should my judgement therefore supersede statutory limits about speeds, passing stop signs or red lights, etc? In isolation, that would probably do little if any harm, but looking at the system as a whole, setting reasonable hard limits also does me relatively little harm while providing clear, unambiguous guidance to everyone about what the rules are, which is also a valuable result.
What's the "at least one legal channel" for, say, the rights to make fan-made mashups of popular recorded music as a comment on the similarity of their compositions?
Maybe there isn't one, at least not without doing some work. But surely you're not suggesting this sort of activity is more than a tiny fraction of copying that gets done?
It's also worth pointing out that in most places in the world, there isn't a generic fair use mechanism as there is in the US, and instead the permitted acts of copying or related uses of protected works are specifically enumerated (and, in some cases, mechanisms for enabling those acts are also specifically provided).
This is why I carefully wrote "and nothing better to replace it".
I'm in no way attached to today's copyright system as some sort of global maximum for how well we can incentivize the ultimate end goal of producing more and better works. I think the practical implementations today have many problems, for both producers and consumers, and in particular I have no more time than probably most people here do for the corruption of the basic principle that Big Media lobbyists have achieved in recent times, including the forever-minus-one-day extensions. (Compulsory licensing is a more difficult question. In theory it might be a good thing, but in practice I am wary of requiring anyone to surrender the control they have of their work by law without also providing real enforcement of their rights at government expense.)
If there were a better system to support those who were doing the work to create new things we can all enjoy, I would be the first to support it. I just don't think we've found one yet, and in the meantime, I have little time for those who exploit the current system at the expense of those who create the works they enjoy and/or those who do pay honestly to support them.
It's called reductio ad absurdum. The point is to take an argument to its logical conclusion, and show that if that conclusion is obviously silly then the argument doesn't work.
You can argue that if a single person didn't purchase a work but instead enjoyed it via an illegal copy, no money was lost. Maybe they told their friends and resulted in some extra sales. Maybe they could never have afforded it anyway. There are plenty of rationalisations that get thrown around if you only consider a single case in isolation.
But you can't argue that if everyone did that then the system would still work, and so if you look at the big picture, necessarily people who break the rules must be causing harm to some degree, because collectively they are responsible for the creator losing out on all their money.
Where the harm falls is not determined by this thought experiment. Maybe it's the creator losing out. Maybe the work remains commercially viable but only because everyone who does pay honestly is picking up the slack and therefore paying a higher price than what the market rate should be for the work if everyone was contributing their fair share. But someone is necessarily losing out as a result of the freeloaders' actions. The infringement cannot be a "victimless crime".
I'm not American, but in any case, where copyright is a criminal offence throughout the world it is typically only for large-scale commercial infringement that any public authority would intervene.
It's incorrect to argue that the teenager with $10,000 "worth" of movies squirreled away on his hard disk is guilty of anything akin to fraud because there has not been anything in the way of misrepresentation. It's also facile to argue that said teen deprived a company of more money then he's earned in his entire life. There are no possible circumstances under which the studio would have got the money from the teenager equivalent to the full price of all of the films.
If that same kid walked into a car showroom and drove off with a new vehicle that they couldn't possibly have paid for, no-one would say the showroom hadn't lost out because it was never going to make that money anyway.
If that kid hired a world class DJ to play at their birthday party but then at the end of the night said sorry but they haven't earned the DJ's appearance fee in their entire lives and they can't pay up, no-one would say the DJ hadn't lost out because they hadn't left any physical goods behind and they never really had any chance of getting the money.
Copyright is an economic tool. It works by establishing economic incentives to do things we consider useful to society, specifically creating and distributing more and better works. If you just ignore the side of the deal where someone actually pays the asking price for their copy, the whole system fails. The kid who doesn't have the money might not represent a lost sale right now, but that doesn't mean it's OK to just take something you can't afford. Our entire economic system would collapse if that behaviour was accepted more generally.
Without reference to whether it's right or wrong to pirate, it's certainly wrong to argue that the company has lost money which never existed.
So, they've only lost all the money the kid did have but didn't pay plus the money the kid could have earned in the future and paid then?
I'd like a nice, big house to throw parties in, but right now I can't afford one where I want to live. So, I have an incentive to work hard and save up, and then in the future maybe I do get to buy what I want. That's how life works.
I also don't see why it's relevant and your arguments don't fit the bill even slightly.
The point is that there are more ways to distribute creative works than just selling permanent copies, and sometimes the economics work out better for everyone in the cheaper but more restricted cases. But that only works if the cheaper cases actually are restricted in some enforceable way, so people can't just rent something for a fraction of the full purchase price but then keep it forever anyway.
The point is that alternative models to permanent purchases are both viable and useful for all parties involved. You mentioned Netflix, and yes, Netflix is better value in some countries that others. But the fact remains that if I want to enjoy binge-watching a TV show on Netflix today, I can do so from the comfort of my own home, in return for a small fee per month. A few years ago, enjoying the same content at the same rate would have meant going into town, renting one tape/disc with probably 2-4 episodes at a time from the rental store for a night or two, assuming that no-one else had already hired the one I wanted that night so it wasn't available, and still paying more than half of my entire monthly Netflix fee for each tape/disc.
I addressed this point in response to your earlier comment. Orphan works and the like are fair points, but the vast majority of cases where infringement and DRM are relevant issues don't fall into those edge cases.
Until recently, most tickets' only DRM-like feature was difficult-to-forge authentication features like a holographic ribbon. Now they are all the way up to bar (or grid) codes which are authenticated against a centralized database, wow! Rental of most things other than media involves no DRM.
Sorry, perhaps my point wasn't clear. The point I was trying to make was that alternative models to just purchasing everything permanently can be useful for all parties involved. Renting lets someone enjoy a work they might only want to see once while saving money relatively to a permanent purchase, for example.
On the other hand, people who copy a piece of media can actually increase its value, by increasing its popularity.
This is just a pyramid scheme argument. Hey, buddy, if you let me have the work you spent time and money creating for free, I'll tell all my friends, so they can have it for free as well! You'll be rich in no time!
Copyright infringement is fundamentally different from theft, which is why it is an entirely separate and distinct body of law.
It's really not that fundamentally different. As I pointed out elsewhere, it's directly equivalent economically to paying for legal access to a work, enjoying it per the agreed deal, and then stealing the money back from the person who provided the work.
It's a convenient rationalisation to say that no money changed hands or would ever necessarily have changed hands, but that's no better than arguing that it's OK to hire someone to provide a service but then refusing to pay for it afterwards.
Whether you equate this with theft or fraud therefore depends on your perspective, but the idea that copyright infringement is some sort of victimless crime or has no economic impact just doesn't stand up. One way or another, you are ripping someone off by not honouring your side of the deal, and in any commercial situation, that results in a financial loss to the person who did honour their side.
Since copyright is a legal right and not a natural right (even to people who actually believe in natural rights) the question is whether society would derive more benefit from not having copyright than it does from having it.
Agreed. Copyright is an economic tool to advance the true goal, which is people enjoying more and better creative works. But until we have a better system -- and while it's certainly possible that one day we will, I see little evidence that we have found one so far -- copyright remains a useful tool for that purpose, and like any legal right it only works if people play by the rules, voluntarily or otherwise.
The music industry has certainly distributed a lot of music to a lot of people, but it also has exploited a lot of artists who never got paid much at all for their labors, which is what you're arguing for, right? The movie industry makes big movies that it's currently difficult to imagine being made any other way (though only because it hasn't been done yet) consistently plays funny games with economics so that it doesn't have to pay its fair tax burden.
Surely we all condemn those exploitative actions? But this is clouding the issue. Those funny money accounting practices aren't dependent on how the exploiter acquired its money in the first place.
In those cases, maybe nothing. But let's be honest, most infringement of DRM-protected works is not that situation at all. The vast majority of online infringement is copying works that are recent and readily available via at least one legal channel.
Your logical fallacy is that of the ridiculous example, because everyone doesn't do that.
There is nothing logically fallacious about a reductio ad absurdum argument.
Even if they did, then people would have to get paid through other means, like touring.
And how does an orchestral music composer make their money by touring? An independent game developer? The artist who drew the illustrations for that game's web site? A textbook author? That textbook's editorial team? The thousands of people who contribute to a summer blockbuster movie but aren't the famous lead actors, producers and directors?
The entire point of copyright is that it's an economic instrument. It produces commercial incentives to create and distribute new works, and those commercial incentives allow for paying all the other people who do the behind the scenes jobs necessary for that creation and distribution to happen. You can't just replace entire creative industries and the millions who work in them with a few famous headline acts and charging admission.
Today, work can be funded in a broad variety of means, including crowdsourcing, advertising, direct sales, public performance for hire, public performance for donations, absolutely gratis since the costs have come down so much and so many more people have the necessary skills... Which is why even if we had no copyright law, there would still be content created.
Unfortunately, none of those alternative methods has yet proven to be anything like as effective at supporting the creation and distribution of new works as the copyright model. That is why, if we had no copyright law and nothing better to replace it, less content would be created and overall the content would be of lower quality.
I'm not saying content creation would suddenly stop without copyright; obviously that's not true. I'm not saying there's no way we could ever have a better system. I'm just saying we haven't figured one out yet, on the evidence so far, and in the meantime copyright (and by extension, reasonable mechanisms for enforcing it, just like any other legal right) does appear to be relatively effective at what it's supposed to do: incentivize the creation and distribution of more and better works.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, nothing was stolen.
Of course it was. The economic effect is literally no different to paying for a work legally, enjoying that work as allowed by the deal, but then stealing that money back from the person who provided it to you.
The fact that in the copyright case the money never changed hands in the first place doesn't change the fact that one side is honouring the deal while the other side is not. If you hired someone to provide a service, say cleaning your house or insuring your car against theft, but then refused to pay after the service had been provided as agreed, no-one would seriously claim that was OK because nothing had really been lost by the person who provided the service.
Since DRM fails at its core stated purpose, I'd say there's something else afoot in providing for that revenue.
This is a common argument, but it's easily defeated. DRM is very effective at limiting casual infringement, and that is already a huge win for content creators in the modern digital world.
In music, especially, we have demonstrable proof in iTunes, Amazon, etc, that no DRM has actually caused increased legal sales.
What proof? Correlation does not imply causation, and I've never seen anything that would go beyond showing a correlation here.
Even even if we did have such proof, selling popular music online has the almost unique property that you can often do it profitably while still charging only a very small amount for each copy, if you can then make up the overall revenue on volume. Unfortunately, very few other kinds of work enjoy the same financial advantage. Popular fiction might, and maybe a few other cases, but it doesn't work so well for either works with very high production costs (big budget movies, large software applications, etc.) or relatively small markets (niche music interests, academic textbooks, etc.).
Otherwise, for every GOG where you've got a significant number of people who might go out of their way to support DRM-free products, there is a Steam that shows most people just don't care as long as the DRM doesn't get in the way too much, and one of these has much, much more content available than the other. As someone who does buy DRM-free works and is willing to pay a fair price for them, this saddens me, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm clearly in a minority on this one.
Citation needed.
No, it really isn't. This is just basic logic. For example, if everyone did as the infringers do, taking a copy of a work without paying for it, would the creators receive any compensation at all, never mind more than they would have received if everyone just paid directly?
We have libraries for more than 2 kiloyears and they never needed DRM.
And how many of those libraries could buy one copy of a work and then provide infinite copies simultaneously for all of their visitors to keep? Indeed, how many bought works at all? How many works did they even have, and how many libraries were there?
When it took a skilled artist thousands of hours to produce a single duplicate copy of a book, everything was copy-protected, yet somehow society and culture survived.
When the only way to fund such work was patronage of one kind or another, the creation, reproduction and distribution of substantial works was a viable profession for only a few people, and far less work was created, and it was enjoyed by far fewer people.
If you want to have a reasonable debate about the merits or otherwise of copyright in the 21st century, it's helpful to talk about the economics and society of the 21st century as well.
OK, so can we also stop complaining when people refer to copyright infringement as fraud or theft, and start prosecuting it as a criminal offence rather than treating it as a civil matter? After all, it typically does have the overall effect of permanently removing compensation from a legitimate rightsholder for the benefit of the infringer, and you can only dress it up as "they might not have bought it anyway" or "the rightsholder didn't actually lose anything" if you're willing to completely ignore economics while discussing a concept that exists precisely to apply something like the economic incentives of physical works to creative works as well.
Also, can everyone who refers to all DRM as defective by design please confirm that they have never rented anything in their lives, nor bought a one-off ticket to visit somewhere or to see something? Because while applying DRM on works you're supplying as a permanent purchase is one thing, some form of restriction is necessary in practice for any business model that works on a less permanent basis. Far from being exploitative, those business models have been some of the most successful of the Internet age at both providing sustainable revenues for producers and providing more, cheaper and more easily accessible content to consumers.
The point is to force the system to give you due process, so you clog up the courts or tribunals involved with whichever law is objectionable to the extent that they can no longer function effectively. It makes perfect sense. But of course it only works if the law actually is bad enough that many people are willing to openly defy it and risk the consequences in order to bring the system down.
For casual personal or in-house business things, I use OSS all the time. I'm a big fan of the idea of community-developed software, and in particular of the kind of sharing culture and collaboration that was much harder when I was younger but is now enabled by the Internet.
For important things in business, we pay for good software and for reliable interoperability, even though that sometimes means a lot of money for something closed source.
The reality is that a lot of commercial business software is still better than the community-driven OSS equivalents. In other cases, OSS equivalents for business software might not exist at all.
However, even if the OSS equivalent exists and is broadly of a similar standard in isolation, it can still be a big risk for a business if collaboration is an issue. The cost of one small import/export glitch converting to the industry standard format can easily waste more time and money than the cost of buying the standard software outright. Worse, it might not waste any time and money, and instead result in data loss or corruption that doesn't get noticed.
Ironically, with the trend towards software-as-a-service and trying to rent us big name business software instead of just selling us a licence, the professional/closed source world is now making its offering much riskier anyway, which means in those cases we might as well experiment with other options including OSS if there are good enough alternatives available.
I don't think our two positions are incompatible. My argument was just that those who don't respect the science and choose to go against it will probably suffer in the long run, but are still dangerous because they can easily bring everyone else down with them. Yours seems to be that there's too much bad science or political pseudoscience clouding the issues, which I would also agree with.
If you want to look at it that way, part of the problem is that often people on both sides of an issue have dressed things up or failed to address reasonable dissent, even if not to the same degree.
The credibility of science among non-scientists has clearly been undermined in recent years. Part of that is because the scientific community hasn't always had its own house in order, publishing far too much supposedly peer-reviewed research that turned out not to be reproducible at all when someone actually tried.
There's also a danger of lies of omission, publishing only the impressive results or the borderline results that still favoured whoever was funding the research, without also publishing the research that didn't find anything particularly remarkable or even produced evidence contrary to the anticipated result.
Then of course there's the often low standard of popular science reporting, where carefully worded conclusions written by diligent scientists are stripped of all subtlety and qualification by the headline writers. Suddenly a promising result in an early trial of some new personalised medicine technique is no longer just encouraging for the researchers and grounds for more advanced trials, it becomes "the cure for cancer within five years" or something similarly exaggerated.
These kinds of distortions don't need to happen and be reported in popular media very often to start eroding the trust of non-experts in science as a whole. Then we start to get people latching onto anomalies and thinking that the effectiveness of vaccines or the changes happening in our climate are matters of faith or subjective debate, even if the overall balance of scientific evidence is compelling.
But the presence of either the other important software I run on Windows or macOS today or some actually compatible and similarly useful equivalents.
The success of Linux on the desktop hasn't really been about Linux itself for a long time.
open source science
...may be the ultimate demonstration of how community-driven projects struggle to raise enough money to remain viable.