Surely the point of civil disobedience is that if a law is unreasonable or the punishment excessive, a lot of people breaking the law and accepting the punishment anyway will overwhelm the system, thus making it impractical to fully enforce the law and demonstrating whatever fundamental injustice is present.
Breaking a law because you don't like that law but think you'll get away with it has very little to do with principled civil disobedience.
There are plenty of people who vote in ways contradictory to the available scientific understanding, and who may suffer seriously for it in the long term.
The trouble is that when we're talking about issues like climate change or over-reliance on limited natural resources, the rest of us are going to suffer along with them if we can't change their minds (or otherwise work around their objections).
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's the "publish or die" culture that is pervasive in academia that is the root cause here. The journals are just a highly visible artifact of the underlying problem.
It's not as if academics, including some very prominent ones, haven't been openly criticising the journal model and questioning its effectiveness for years. However, until the funding model catches up, many of those academics have their hands tied.
I have no problem with discussing the ideas or advocating your preferred outcome. In fact, I encourage everyone to do so, because constructive discussions about the pros and cons of different ways forward is exactly what we need right now. (I believe this is true regardless of which way someone voted in the referendum or why they chose to vote that way.)
But I don't see the point in just endlessly claiming the world will end after Brexit. Obviously the nature of any future relationship is important, but whatever happens, some things will be better for some people and some things will be worse for some people. That remains true even in the extreme cases of reversing the decision to leave or walking away with no deal and falling back on WTO rules for a while. When hardcore Remain voters say silly things about the world ending if we don't stay in the Single Market, or hardcore Leave voters says silly things about our society disintegrating because we let half a dozen immigrants in, they just look ill-informed and make it hard for anyone interesting in actually finding a good way forward to take them seriously.
We've seen this combination of negativity about any future deal and wishful thinking about reversing the leave decision since the day after the referendum. Please change the record, because regardless of where you stand on Remain vs. Leave, endlessly repeating this same position simply isn't constructive at this point. Your sig is ironic: it seems you are just hating without actually making much of an argument for anyone to rebut.
People have been claiming a backlash is build now that others have seen the light since about 24 June 2016. It's like the year of Linux on the desktop or the release of Half-Life 3.
In reality, there is very little evidence of "bregret" on the Leave side, and increasing evidence that about half of the people who voted Remain are now "re-leavers" who think the government should respect the result of the referendum and leave even though it isn't what they personally wanted.
Given that the Labour policy at the election was also to leave, while other major parties campaigned on a much more pro-EU position and didn't do particularly well this time, I think your argument that the surge in Labour support came from regretful Leave voters is unrealistic.
They will certainly remain a member for almost two more years.
There's nothing certain about it, in either direction. Neither an abrupt early exit under the current UK administration nor an effective extension through some sort of transition arrangement if negotiations are going well for all concerned but not yet concluded by the original deadline is out of the question at this point.
It seems we're actually in agreement about the studios doing OK with their current models.
Just for the record, I wasn't necessarily assuming that people were pirating more, merely suggesting it as one possible situation that is consistent with the data we have, and observing that if that is in fact what's happening (with fewer other people then picking up the extra bill that is keeping the movie studios in the money) then I don't think it's a healthy trend.
The EU is not one voice or a single point of power in government. EU mechanisms have been used to push through oppressive surveillance and recording laws as well. It's a complicated issue and there are people on both sides of the debate, in the EU administration just as anywhere else in politics.
Some of us are thinking of the children. We don't think any child should grow up in an authoritarian regime, afraid of their own government, hesitant about having an open mind and communicating honestly with their peers.
That may well all be true, though to balance things out we should probably also consider things like how much was being invested in the first place, how much of any changes in the bottom line were down to external factors like inflation and exchange rates, and so on.
But I'm still not quite sure what point you're trying to make here (or what point of mine you're intending to refute). My original contention was that if we're talking about digital distribution, you can only have a commercially viable business model selling at a very low price point if your production costs are relatively low and your market is relatively large, but in such cases that model can work. We still seem to be talking about movie studios making money in theatres here, which I think is a different situation because of the physical presence aspect.
As an aside, I don't really have a problem with movie studios making a lot of money if it's from legitimate customers willing to pay the asking price. That just means the studios are generating something that a lot of people find valuable and being rewarded for it, and isn't that how it's supposed to work? What I don't think is healthy is the idea that fewer and fewer people are actually paying for new works but they're each paying more and more real money. I don't see anything wrong with the studios aiming for this as a business model if it's what the market will bear, but there's something very dubious about more and more people enjoying things without contributing (and breaking the law in the process) while the honest customers who follow the law are paying more and more for the same things and supporting the freeloaders as well. That doesn't seem like a healthy, sustainable, fair trend to me.
OK, if you mean any copy protection system at all then yes, in principle the movies I have on disc are typically protected by something.
But the context was whether you could buy a permanent copy of something. Those discs are mine, by law, and so is the copy of each work that is stored on them. They don't have any DRM in the sense of requiring some sort of connection to a remote authority to say it's OK before I can play them, and there is no possibility that they ever will. If the movie studio or the shop where I bought the movie goes bust, too bad, but I still have my disc.
Obviously there is still the issue that I can't easily back up the discs, which is not ideal, but I don't think this is at all the same situation as something like an online streaming service or an e-book that can be "revoked" remotely. There was also some talk of having players for newer formats able to store some list of known infringing discs and refuse to play them, but to my knowledge this has never made any practical difference, probably because it's easy to see ways that anyone actually using such a function could get into legal trouble over it.
I don't doubt your claims about theatre revenues -- I don't have any data to hand, so I'll take your word for it. This seems to be a slightly different case to the earlier discussion about market pricing, though, because with a movie theatre there's a physical presence aspect to consider as well as the work being viewed. You can't "pirate" a trip to the theatre as an alternative to whatever price they're asking for admission.
The closest analogy to doing so would probably mean if there were spare seats so you weren't displacing a paying customer, you could just sneak in and watch the movie without buying a ticket. After all, they were going to be showing that movie anyway, so they haven't really lost anything! But of course this ignores the costs incurred by the theatre to run their building and pay their staff and get the rights to show the movie in the first place and so on, all of which now have to be covered by whatever is charged to the honest customers. It's actually a pretty good analogy for copyright as a whole, except that in a theatre it's easier to catch someone who's breaking the rules.
I have a house full of movies and books acquired without DRM, many of them this year.
If we're talking about e-books specifically, then yes, I agree that is more of a problem. But in that case, I suspect it's a problem that could be solved simply through transparency and market forces.
I am increasingly of the view that tech industries should be subject to the same heavy regulatory rules on marketing and "packaging" as the tobacco industry. Sure, you can "sell" someone an e-book that you have the ability to delete remotely under dubious conditions, but only if half the total screen space on every web page in the sales process is given over to a large print, black-and-white message saying "YOU WILL NOT OWN THIS BOOK. It may be removed from your device at any time, without notice or refund."
Yes, maths is still maths (and this is why the argument for banning encryption is futile).
But you shouldn't have to risk jail time just for wanting to communicate with someone privately. That is not at all how civilized, free societies work.
Ariana Grande isn't going to be the one standing in front of thousands of constituents trying to figure out how to protect innocent citizens from being murdered
It's remarkably clear what needed to happen to prevent that particular attack, and the authoritarian dross Theresa May has been advocating since then certainly isn't it. The bomber was brought to the attention of the authorities on at least five occasions over a considerable period before the attacks, but the resources weren't there to follow up on a credible threat and we all know the tragic result.
At least the locals stood up that night and showed solidarity and support over anger and hatred, and the celebrities turned up a few days later to show that life goes on and we shouldn't give in to fear. That's two groups of people who are both doing better than our national government.
I also don't recall New Yorkers holding hands and singing kumbaya around the fucking campfire after the 9/11 attacks either.
And truly, the way the US responded to 9/11 was an example we should all follow, what with the vast numbers of innocents killed or injured in the resulting wars, destabilisation of an already precarious region of the world, and consequent creation of the largest terrorist threat to the West today.
The US leadership of the time would have done better to show some actual leadership, instead of just ramping up the anger and revenge and fear. The world would be a much, much better place today if they had.
The particularly shitty thing with these subscription based streaming services is that you're just renting content. You never 'own' any of it; and at the end you have fuck-all to show for your expense.
I don't have a problem with that in itself, as long as the deal is clear. I used to rent tapes or discs from bricks and mortar rental stores too, and I paid a lot less for something I was only interested in watching once that way than I would have if I'd had to buy everything as a permanent copy. That experience and hopefully enjoyment is what I had to show for my expense afterwards.
Where I think things get hazy is when something walks like a purchase and quacks like a purchase (and is priced like a purchase) but in fact is just some general licence-to-use thing when you read the small print that no-one reads. This is a particular evil with software, in my experience.
I'm also a bit concerned that in time we might move to rental being the only way to get access content even if you'd prefer to have a permanent copy and be willing to pay a fair price for it. However, so far, I see little evidence that this is likely to happen any time soon; there's a big enough market for buy-to-own that the content producers even run big money ad campaigns about it, while simultaneously also releasing it through other channels. Again, software is a notable exception, but the pros and cons of SaaS models also seem to be reliably opening gaps in the market for providers willing to supply their software on a more traditional, permanent basis, so I think the jury's still out on this one too.
Thank you for posting that. I'm not sure whether it should make any difference to the ethical or practical position here, but it's certainly a significant detail that was omitted from the original summary.
Yes, the Japanese in particular seem to have a much more enlightened view of parenting and more generally how to look after young children than certain heavily controlling trends in the West.
I'm not sure that such cultural differences excuse the kind of intrusions we're talking about here, though. I see no evidence that fingerprinting all children is somehow necessary to preserve their safety or security. Indeed, the examples you just gave yourself seem to show clearly that it is not.
Probably because they're afraid. Remember, as an expert on the subject infamously observed, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
(That was Gestapo founder Hermann Goering, for those who missed the reference. The original comment was about the futility of relying on popular elections to avoid a war that the political leaders want, but the principle seems just as relevant in this context.)
The current lurch towards authoritarianism in Europe is profoundly disturbing. You really would think Germany of all places would know better than to give in to the politics of fear.
It is also rather depressing that here in the UK, apparently Ariana Grande has a more mature view of the attacks in Manchester and the appropriate response to them than Theresa May.
Doesn't that rather negate the argument that they need to provide their content in convenient formats and through convenient channels to be more successful, then? It seems like their current policies, customer-hostile as they often seem to be, are working.:-(
Is that really still true for an average, worth watching but not smash hit, kind of movie? Cinemas in my area have been struggling for a long time to get that first $10 (or its UK equivalent in my case) and the trend seems to be shifting away from buying permanent copies on disc (for significantly more than our equivalent of $10) to online services with rental library models such as Netflix (where you're paying way less than $10/movie unless you're a very light user). Meanwhile, I think Avengers 17: CGI vs. The Infinitely Rehashed Plot is due out in a month or two, to be followed by the critics predictably saying that no-one makes original movies any more and it's all just endless series and reboots now.
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Surely the point of civil disobedience is that if a law is unreasonable or the punishment excessive, a lot of people breaking the law and accepting the punishment anyway will overwhelm the system, thus making it impractical to fully enforce the law and demonstrating whatever fundamental injustice is present.
Breaking a law because you don't like that law but think you'll get away with it has very little to do with principled civil disobedience.
There are plenty of people who vote in ways contradictory to the available scientific understanding, and who may suffer seriously for it in the long term.
The trouble is that when we're talking about issues like climate change or over-reliance on limited natural resources, the rest of us are going to suffer along with them if we can't change their minds (or otherwise work around their objections).
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's the "publish or die" culture that is pervasive in academia that is the root cause here. The journals are just a highly visible artifact of the underlying problem.
It's not as if academics, including some very prominent ones, haven't been openly criticising the journal model and questioning its effectiveness for years. However, until the funding model catches up, many of those academics have their hands tied.
I have no problem with discussing the ideas or advocating your preferred outcome. In fact, I encourage everyone to do so, because constructive discussions about the pros and cons of different ways forward is exactly what we need right now. (I believe this is true regardless of which way someone voted in the referendum or why they chose to vote that way.)
But I don't see the point in just endlessly claiming the world will end after Brexit. Obviously the nature of any future relationship is important, but whatever happens, some things will be better for some people and some things will be worse for some people. That remains true even in the extreme cases of reversing the decision to leave or walking away with no deal and falling back on WTO rules for a while. When hardcore Remain voters say silly things about the world ending if we don't stay in the Single Market, or hardcore Leave voters says silly things about our society disintegrating because we let half a dozen immigrants in, they just look ill-informed and make it hard for anyone interesting in actually finding a good way forward to take them seriously.
We've seen this combination of negativity about any future deal and wishful thinking about reversing the leave decision since the day after the referendum. Please change the record, because regardless of where you stand on Remain vs. Leave, endlessly repeating this same position simply isn't constructive at this point. Your sig is ironic: it seems you are just hating without actually making much of an argument for anyone to rebut.
People have been claiming a backlash is build now that others have seen the light since about 24 June 2016. It's like the year of Linux on the desktop or the release of Half-Life 3.
In reality, there is very little evidence of "bregret" on the Leave side, and increasing evidence that about half of the people who voted Remain are now "re-leavers" who think the government should respect the result of the referendum and leave even though it isn't what they personally wanted.
Given that the Labour policy at the election was also to leave, while other major parties campaigned on a much more pro-EU position and didn't do particularly well this time, I think your argument that the surge in Labour support came from regretful Leave voters is unrealistic.
They will certainly remain a member for almost two more years.
There's nothing certain about it, in either direction. Neither an abrupt early exit under the current UK administration nor an effective extension through some sort of transition arrangement if negotiations are going well for all concerned but not yet concluded by the original deadline is out of the question at this point.
It seems we're actually in agreement about the studios doing OK with their current models.
Just for the record, I wasn't necessarily assuming that people were pirating more, merely suggesting it as one possible situation that is consistent with the data we have, and observing that if that is in fact what's happening (with fewer other people then picking up the extra bill that is keeping the movie studios in the money) then I don't think it's a healthy trend.
The UK isn't out of the EU yet. It will most likely remain a member for about two more years.
The EU is not one voice or a single point of power in government. EU mechanisms have been used to push through oppressive surveillance and recording laws as well. It's a complicated issue and there are people on both sides of the debate, in the EU administration just as anywhere else in politics.
Some of us are thinking of the children. We don't think any child should grow up in an authoritarian regime, afraid of their own government, hesitant about having an open mind and communicating honestly with their peers.
That may well all be true, though to balance things out we should probably also consider things like how much was being invested in the first place, how much of any changes in the bottom line were down to external factors like inflation and exchange rates, and so on.
But I'm still not quite sure what point you're trying to make here (or what point of mine you're intending to refute). My original contention was that if we're talking about digital distribution, you can only have a commercially viable business model selling at a very low price point if your production costs are relatively low and your market is relatively large, but in such cases that model can work. We still seem to be talking about movie studios making money in theatres here, which I think is a different situation because of the physical presence aspect.
As an aside, I don't really have a problem with movie studios making a lot of money if it's from legitimate customers willing to pay the asking price. That just means the studios are generating something that a lot of people find valuable and being rewarded for it, and isn't that how it's supposed to work? What I don't think is healthy is the idea that fewer and fewer people are actually paying for new works but they're each paying more and more real money. I don't see anything wrong with the studios aiming for this as a business model if it's what the market will bear, but there's something very dubious about more and more people enjoying things without contributing (and breaking the law in the process) while the honest customers who follow the law are paying more and more for the same things and supporting the freeloaders as well. That doesn't seem like a healthy, sustainable, fair trend to me.
OK, if you mean any copy protection system at all then yes, in principle the movies I have on disc are typically protected by something.
But the context was whether you could buy a permanent copy of something. Those discs are mine, by law, and so is the copy of each work that is stored on them. They don't have any DRM in the sense of requiring some sort of connection to a remote authority to say it's OK before I can play them, and there is no possibility that they ever will. If the movie studio or the shop where I bought the movie goes bust, too bad, but I still have my disc.
Obviously there is still the issue that I can't easily back up the discs, which is not ideal, but I don't think this is at all the same situation as something like an online streaming service or an e-book that can be "revoked" remotely. There was also some talk of having players for newer formats able to store some list of known infringing discs and refuse to play them, but to my knowledge this has never made any practical difference, probably because it's easy to see ways that anyone actually using such a function could get into legal trouble over it.
I don't doubt your claims about theatre revenues -- I don't have any data to hand, so I'll take your word for it. This seems to be a slightly different case to the earlier discussion about market pricing, though, because with a movie theatre there's a physical presence aspect to consider as well as the work being viewed. You can't "pirate" a trip to the theatre as an alternative to whatever price they're asking for admission.
The closest analogy to doing so would probably mean if there were spare seats so you weren't displacing a paying customer, you could just sneak in and watch the movie without buying a ticket. After all, they were going to be showing that movie anyway, so they haven't really lost anything! But of course this ignores the costs incurred by the theatre to run their building and pay their staff and get the rights to show the movie in the first place and so on, all of which now have to be covered by whatever is charged to the honest customers. It's actually a pretty good analogy for copyright as a whole, except that in a theatre it's easier to catch someone who's breaking the rules.
I have a house full of movies and books acquired without DRM, many of them this year.
If we're talking about e-books specifically, then yes, I agree that is more of a problem. But in that case, I suspect it's a problem that could be solved simply through transparency and market forces.
I am increasingly of the view that tech industries should be subject to the same heavy regulatory rules on marketing and "packaging" as the tobacco industry. Sure, you can "sell" someone an e-book that you have the ability to delete remotely under dubious conditions, but only if half the total screen space on every web page in the sales process is given over to a large print, black-and-white message saying "YOU WILL NOT OWN THIS BOOK. It may be removed from your device at any time, without notice or refund."
Yes, maths is still maths (and this is why the argument for banning encryption is futile).
But you shouldn't have to risk jail time just for wanting to communicate with someone privately. That is not at all how civilized, free societies work.
Goering founded the Gestapo. Himmler took over about a year later.
Ariana Grande isn't going to be the one standing in front of thousands of constituents trying to figure out how to protect innocent citizens from being murdered
It's remarkably clear what needed to happen to prevent that particular attack, and the authoritarian dross Theresa May has been advocating since then certainly isn't it. The bomber was brought to the attention of the authorities on at least five occasions over a considerable period before the attacks, but the resources weren't there to follow up on a credible threat and we all know the tragic result.
At least the locals stood up that night and showed solidarity and support over anger and hatred, and the celebrities turned up a few days later to show that life goes on and we shouldn't give in to fear. That's two groups of people who are both doing better than our national government.
I also don't recall New Yorkers holding hands and singing kumbaya around the fucking campfire after the 9/11 attacks either.
And truly, the way the US responded to 9/11 was an example we should all follow, what with the vast numbers of innocents killed or injured in the resulting wars, destabilisation of an already precarious region of the world, and consequent creation of the largest terrorist threat to the West today.
The US leadership of the time would have done better to show some actual leadership, instead of just ramping up the anger and revenge and fear. The world would be a much, much better place today if they had.
The particularly shitty thing with these subscription based streaming services is that you're just renting content. You never 'own' any of it; and at the end you have fuck-all to show for your expense.
I don't have a problem with that in itself, as long as the deal is clear. I used to rent tapes or discs from bricks and mortar rental stores too, and I paid a lot less for something I was only interested in watching once that way than I would have if I'd had to buy everything as a permanent copy. That experience and hopefully enjoyment is what I had to show for my expense afterwards.
Where I think things get hazy is when something walks like a purchase and quacks like a purchase (and is priced like a purchase) but in fact is just some general licence-to-use thing when you read the small print that no-one reads. This is a particular evil with software, in my experience.
I'm also a bit concerned that in time we might move to rental being the only way to get access content even if you'd prefer to have a permanent copy and be willing to pay a fair price for it. However, so far, I see little evidence that this is likely to happen any time soon; there's a big enough market for buy-to-own that the content producers even run big money ad campaigns about it, while simultaneously also releasing it through other channels. Again, software is a notable exception, but the pros and cons of SaaS models also seem to be reliably opening gaps in the market for providers willing to supply their software on a more traditional, permanent basis, so I think the jury's still out on this one too.
Thank you for posting that. I'm not sure whether it should make any difference to the ethical or practical position here, but it's certainly a significant detail that was omitted from the original summary.
Yes, the Japanese in particular seem to have a much more enlightened view of parenting and more generally how to look after young children than certain heavily controlling trends in the West.
I'm not sure that such cultural differences excuse the kind of intrusions we're talking about here, though. I see no evidence that fingerprinting all children is somehow necessary to preserve their safety or security. Indeed, the examples you just gave yourself seem to show clearly that it is not.
Geez....why would the populace stand for this?
Probably because they're afraid. Remember, as an expert on the subject infamously observed, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
(That was Gestapo founder Hermann Goering, for those who missed the reference. The original comment was about the futility of relying on popular elections to avoid a war that the political leaders want, but the principle seems just as relevant in this context.)
The current lurch towards authoritarianism in Europe is profoundly disturbing. You really would think Germany of all places would know better than to give in to the politics of fear.
It is also rather depressing that here in the UK, apparently Ariana Grande has a more mature view of the attacks in Manchester and the appropriate response to them than Theresa May.
Doesn't that rather negate the argument that they need to provide their content in convenient formats and through convenient channels to be more successful, then? It seems like their current policies, customer-hostile as they often seem to be, are working. :-(
Is that really still true for an average, worth watching but not smash hit, kind of movie? Cinemas in my area have been struggling for a long time to get that first $10 (or its UK equivalent in my case) and the trend seems to be shifting away from buying permanent copies on disc (for significantly more than our equivalent of $10) to online services with rental library models such as Netflix (where you're paying way less than $10/movie unless you're a very light user). Meanwhile, I think Avengers 17: CGI vs. The Infinitely Rehashed Plot is due out in a month or two, to be followed by the critics predictably saying that no-one makes original movies any more and it's all just endless series and reboots now.