It's disappointing how these measures always seem to be about protecting the rights of whichever host country is involved, while completely ignoring any intrusion/violation of the rights of visitors.
Yes, as I've said throughout, I would agree that the extensions to copyright duration are not justified. However, they are also almost entirely irrelevant to arguments about incentives, because the continued copyright doesn't actually translate to continued income.
Most income from most copyrighted works is made within the first few years. The vast majority of online piracy is infringing the rights to works released within the past few years. If you cut copyright duration to 20 years across the board tomorrow, the economic situation would barely change in most cases. If you removed copyright entirely, on the other hand...
Yes, exactly the same laws. If you think the system is loaded in favour of content creators, you are as free as anyone else to create new content of your own and benefit from that system if you can. Millions of people make their living this way and billions benefit from the results, so it's not as if this is some crazy niche rule, nor one law for the rich and another for everyone else.
Show me one single group of people who can work once and milk it forever.
Well, pretty much any investment-based business works this way. Landlords who rent out their properties are probably the most obvious example. However, I don't see how any of this is relevant to the matter at hand.
In practice, significant income from works under copyright rarely lasts for more than a relatively short time after the work is released, and of course even that is not guaranteed. Creating the potential for that income, and thus an incentive to create and distribute new work in the first place, is the main effect of having copyright laws. I suspect we would agree that the duration of copyright protection has probably been extended far more than it should have been, but the benefit of that extended protection is mostly illusory anyway.
So just to be clear, you're not actually saying that Google are routinely listening in to everyone's surroundings, you're saying that an optional voice-activated feature on Android devices sometimes has false positives on the trigger word if it's enabled and in those cases it may record a short part of the audio around the phone and send it back to Google the same as it would if you were actually intending to use the voice-activated feature? I think it's fair to say that one of these is quite different to the other.
As any cowboy will tell you "Screw with the bull, you get the horn."
That does cut both ways, though. Although plenty of people copy works illegally and never suffer any real penalty for it, those who do come onto the radar of rightsholders can be in for an expensive and very distressing time.
So it's not a personal law protecting your property because some other people have property too, but millions of people who work in creative industries are all getting special treatment?
If it's all so unfair, and the efforts of content creators are of such little value, the same laws do apply to you, and you're welcome to take advantage of them just like anyone else.
I was with you until you said copyright hasn't benefitted us. Given that most of the best quality and most widely distributed creative content we produce today is supported through copyright in one way or another, I don't think that argument stands up in the face of the evidence. Just compare a summer blockbuster with an amateur movie on YouTube, or fan fiction with a bestselling novel, or most community-developed FOSS with its commercial competition.
Art surely wouldn't go away completely without copyright, but unless some other model was developed for funding all the people whose effort goes into making creative works under copyright today, it seems reasonable to assume that both quantity and quality would drop sharply. There's very little stopping anyone from adopting a better model today if they wanted to, including old school approaches like the patronage model that paid for most demanding works before we had things like copyright. And yet almost no-one does, and those who've tried rarely reach even the same order of magnitude of funding, which I think is a pretty strong argument that we haven't actually found a better model yet.
That doesn't make sense. You're perfectly entitled not to pay for a copyrighted work that you don't find to be worth the asking price. What you're not entitled to do is have it anyway, even if you don't want to pay for it. If it truly has no value to you, then obviously the latter won't be a problem for you. But if you still want it even though you aren't willing to pay anything for it, it takes some serious mental gymnastics to argue that the work has value in one context yet not in another.
That's an argument that makes some sense in very limited circumstances, mainly those where works can be presented as live performances, which basically means music or live theatre.
Unfortunately, there is no equivalent for the work done by almost everyone who works in creative industries behind the scenes, or even as a direct creator of other types of work.
The problem we have is that, as you rightly say, the marginal cost for copying creative works is now close to zero, and people only look at that without considering the cost of creating the work in the first place. The copyright principle works pretty well as a way to amortize that initial cost over many people who will enjoy the finished product, but only if enough people play by the rules.
Because you can get away with charging full monopoly rents for your "work", you don't have to produce a new one to keep eating.
Only if your work continues to provide enough value to other people that the market is willing to keep paying for it indefinitely. A tiny number of people ever reach that point, and arguably those people have generated so much value for society that maybe they do deserve to be set up for life.
Moreover, you have already broken the copyright laws by your land grab extensions of time and coverage
Erm... What? By definition, those extensions were changing the law, not breaking it. I agree with you that a lot of the terms have become unreasonably long and some of the laws should be changed. However, I also don't think that matters very much in the context of piracy, because most piracy is of works that are recent and won't be affected by the "land grab", as you call it, for several decades.
Be thankful that we still feel sorry enough for you to spend as much as we do on it. We have no debt to pay for you when you broke the rules decades ago.
Your attempt to tar millions of people working in creative industries with the same brush is crude and illogical. If you think you shouldn't have any debt to pay to those people when you enjoy the fruits of their labour, feel free to campaign to get the laws changed to something you consider fair. If you succeed, good for you. But if you don't, or if you don't even try and just choose to break any rules you happen not to like, maybe you should be thankful that your name hasn't come up with one of the big content creators that has the resources to take real action against you. At some point you might find out the hard way that you're not above the law.
The value in the works. If people are copying them then presumably they find then beneficial in some way. Maybe they're entertaining. Maybe they're informative. Maybe they're useful tools.
Whatever actual value the works have comes from the people who create them. It wouldn't exist otherwise. We can debate the economics around compensating those people (or not) but the fact that all of the value originates with the creators is objective and undeniable.
As I've commented elsewhere in this discussion, there are some legitimate concerns about scope creep and having copyright maximalists making the laws, but that doesn't mean everyone, or even most people, making copyrighted works or relying on copyright protection as a basis for creative industries has somehow broken the implicit bargain that copyright represents.
Likewise, someone posting the same few examples of people who have been successful in other ways every time this debate comes up doesn't change the fact that by far the majority of our commercially created works today are supported by copyright one way or another (as, for that matter, are most open source or community-licensed works). Show me the high school math textbook that experts spent two years writing that was funded by some other means, or the business admin software, or basically anything that is useful but not necessarily enjoyable to create. Or just look at the production values of fan fiction, amateur videos, hobbyists computer games, or band recordings made in their garage because they couldn't afford a studio.
Except that the vast, vast majority of works being pirated are recent, and would still have been covered by even the original copyright periods of centuries ago.
And plenty of those works aren't created by Big Media industries with vast budgets.
And any argument about copyright only applying to copies making money has to take into account that when these laws were first developed, that was basically the only kind of copying there was.
There are legitimate concerns about scope creep in copyright, Disney laws, and so on. But the idea that those somehow justify rampant piracy is not credible.
Interesting theory. Is there any data to support it? Anecdotally, I feel like things are going the other way and the advent of services like YouTube and Spotify and of the Internet more generally means people are far less limited to mainstream entertainment these days.
But they aren't market forces. Economic markets are two-sided. This is a game where only one side is playing by the rules, and the strategy continues to work only as long as that one-sided situation remains.
Where individuals are merely consuming the product without spending there is no punishment for R&D, it is only less profitable (and of course A would not be happy).
The trouble with this argument is that beyond a certain point, the R&D ceases to be profitable at all, and so it stops, and then everyone (including those who would benefit from the work, whether they were going to pay for it or not) loses out.
Copyright as an economic tool actually serves two quite distinct purposes here. It does prevent one commercial party from piggy-backing on another's work as you described. But it also incentivizes doing that work in the first place. In particular, it makes it viable to do relatively expensive work and make it available at relatively cheap prices, as long as the market is big enough that the total from all those low payments still covers the costs.
But making easier to get the legal alternative generally works a LOT better.
Most people who say that have never tried to do it.
It is true, up to a point, for mass market products. For example, if you region-lock your content so it isn't legally available in some places, of course you're creating an incentive for people to find it through other means.
It is not nearly so true for small works in niche markets created by individuals or small groups. These are typically readily available for reasonable prices and with far less encumbrance direct from the original creators, yet still people will blatantly rip them off.
An artist that can not survive on what people are willing to give does not deserve to be able to live of his art.
Most artists already can't live off their art directly. For every Hollywood A-lister, Grammy award winner or YouTube star there are countless bit-part players, local bands and casual vloggers who are just trying to make a bit extra to fund their creative work.
Copyright does protect those people too. Indeed, given the costs of enforcement, copyright is most useful for protecting them against the kind of exploitation you described, when the damages they might receive could actually justify taking action to enforce the rights.
But the reality is that most of those people, if they are going to make a living in creative industries, are not doing it on their own but as part of the larger creative community. Have you ever watched the credits all the way through at the end of a blockbuster movie? Do you ever stop and think about just how many people are involved in making that movie, beyond the directors and producers and starring cast? All of those other people, often thousands of them, also worked for possibly several months to bring you a couple of hours of entertainment. Those people only got their fees paid because the studio expects to make money on the film so it could afford to hire them. It's an investment on the studio's part, and like any investment it's only made if there's a good chance of getting a worthwhile return.
Maybe those people don't deserve to "live off their art", but if you pull the rug out from under the current system without providing some other way to make these projects commercially viable, all that's going to happen is millions of film fans won't get to enjoy a blockbuster next year, and thousands of people who would have been happy to make a blockbuster for them will be flipping burgers or complaining about how robots and foreigners are taking all the low-end jobs these days. How is that a win for anyone?
You have to admit it is VERY obvious that there is little, if any, support for this law.
Except among the people who are actually doing the work and generating all the value, you mean?
Most of us might care very little about a law that says your physical property is yours and someone else can't just pick it up and walk off with it if they want to. I imagine you have stronger feelings on the subject.
The trouble with your economic model is that it's ignoring the one-sided nature of piracy. It's OK to argue that work is worth what someone will pay for it and the market will determine that rate, but that is predicated on the idea that you don't get the benefit if you don't pay the cost.
The entire economic model fails if you say that someone can enjoy the benefits of another's work without having to make any choice about what it's worth because they don't have to pay anything at all. Obviously that is unsustainable if the whole market does the same thing, and in the middle ground the freeloaders are just distorting the market and potentially increasing the price paid by those who do support the work.
How about "for non-commercial use only" as the discriminating rule for copying? Seems like that would get right at the heart of the ethics of the situation.
It's worth pointing out that this undermines alternative models like PPV and subscription streaming libraries, which have been some of the most successful ways of getting people (legal) access to more content at lower prices. If everyone can just save whatever they want, there's no difference between these models and selling a permanent copy of every work, so the pricing can't allow for the different cases and either the prices for the services go up or the services fail because their previously useful business models are no longer viable. Either way, probably everyone loses.
It's all very well saying that business models have no inherent right to exist, and I agree, but the point of systems like copyright is to promote creation and distribution of new works. If we remove the current incentives without providing a useful alternative, then either works won't get made, or they won't be as good, or fewer people will get to enjoy them. In practice, a lot of small-scale producers would probably stop, while the big movie blockbusters or games would continue but the movies would be spoiled even more by blatant product placement and the games would come with even more dependencies on online systems that keep failing.
As an alternative, maybe we should teach our kids that not everything in life is free, and you can't always have what you want immediately on demand. There's a very unhealthy attitude that is widespread in a young generation today that has never known a world without the Internet and cell phones and home delivery services when they order online and all that, and it carries over into other areas as well. Obviously this is a much broader issue than how we fund creative work, but it's all related.
You're being paranoid. The likes of Amazon and Google aren't routinely recording everything you say and uploading it to the mothership. For a start, that would almost certainly be illegal in some places, and in any case they'd be discovered very quickly given the amount of data involved. We should certainly be aware of the risks with these modern devices that have both sensors and communications capabilities, and I think both the security of the devices and consideration for their privacy in normal operation will probably cause problems from time to time until we figure things out, and I think new laws will probably be required to safeguard personal privacy more effectively in places that don't already have them. However, let's focus on what is actually happening and what should be done about that, not some alternative reality in which every device was already hacked and every big service provider was scanning everything all the time.
You may not like it, but the world does not stand still.
The world has never stood still, but there have also always been things we could do but accepted that we shouldn't. That principle is behind everything from common decency and good manners to statutory protections and penalties for illegal acts.
There is nothing different about improving surveillance technology, and there is no reason we should just accept that using modern technology to intrude into our everyday lives is or should be acceptable either ethically or legally merely because the technical capability is now available.
Slashdot Mirror
It's disappointing how these measures always seem to be about protecting the rights of whichever host country is involved, while completely ignoring any intrusion/violation of the rights of visitors.
Yes, as I've said throughout, I would agree that the extensions to copyright duration are not justified. However, they are also almost entirely irrelevant to arguments about incentives, because the continued copyright doesn't actually translate to continued income.
Most income from most copyrighted works is made within the first few years. The vast majority of online piracy is infringing the rights to works released within the past few years. If you cut copyright duration to 20 years across the board tomorrow, the economic situation would barely change in most cases. If you removed copyright entirely, on the other hand...
The same laws?
Yes, exactly the same laws. If you think the system is loaded in favour of content creators, you are as free as anyone else to create new content of your own and benefit from that system if you can. Millions of people make their living this way and billions benefit from the results, so it's not as if this is some crazy niche rule, nor one law for the rich and another for everyone else.
Show me one single group of people who can work once and milk it forever.
Well, pretty much any investment-based business works this way. Landlords who rent out their properties are probably the most obvious example. However, I don't see how any of this is relevant to the matter at hand.
In practice, significant income from works under copyright rarely lasts for more than a relatively short time after the work is released, and of course even that is not guaranteed. Creating the potential for that income, and thus an incentive to create and distribute new work in the first place, is the main effect of having copyright laws. I suspect we would agree that the duration of copyright protection has probably been extended far more than it should have been, but the benefit of that extended protection is mostly illusory anyway.
So just to be clear, you're not actually saying that Google are routinely listening in to everyone's surroundings, you're saying that an optional voice-activated feature on Android devices sometimes has false positives on the trigger word if it's enabled and in those cases it may record a short part of the audio around the phone and send it back to Google the same as it would if you were actually intending to use the voice-activated feature? I think it's fair to say that one of these is quite different to the other.
Details please.
As any cowboy will tell you "Screw with the bull, you get the horn."
That does cut both ways, though. Although plenty of people copy works illegally and never suffer any real penalty for it, those who do come onto the radar of rightsholders can be in for an expensive and very distressing time.
So it's not a personal law protecting your property because some other people have property too, but millions of people who work in creative industries are all getting special treatment?
If it's all so unfair, and the efforts of content creators are of such little value, the same laws do apply to you, and you're welcome to take advantage of them just like anyone else.
I was with you until you said copyright hasn't benefitted us. Given that most of the best quality and most widely distributed creative content we produce today is supported through copyright in one way or another, I don't think that argument stands up in the face of the evidence. Just compare a summer blockbuster with an amateur movie on YouTube, or fan fiction with a bestselling novel, or most community-developed FOSS with its commercial competition.
Art surely wouldn't go away completely without copyright, but unless some other model was developed for funding all the people whose effort goes into making creative works under copyright today, it seems reasonable to assume that both quantity and quality would drop sharply. There's very little stopping anyone from adopting a better model today if they wanted to, including old school approaches like the patronage model that paid for most demanding works before we had things like copyright. And yet almost no-one does, and those who've tried rarely reach even the same order of magnitude of funding, which I think is a pretty strong argument that we haven't actually found a better model yet.
That doesn't make sense. You're perfectly entitled not to pay for a copyrighted work that you don't find to be worth the asking price. What you're not entitled to do is have it anyway, even if you don't want to pay for it. If it truly has no value to you, then obviously the latter won't be a problem for you. But if you still want it even though you aren't willing to pay anything for it, it takes some serious mental gymnastics to argue that the work has value in one context yet not in another.
That's an argument that makes some sense in very limited circumstances, mainly those where works can be presented as live performances, which basically means music or live theatre.
Unfortunately, there is no equivalent for the work done by almost everyone who works in creative industries behind the scenes, or even as a direct creator of other types of work.
The problem we have is that, as you rightly say, the marginal cost for copying creative works is now close to zero, and people only look at that without considering the cost of creating the work in the first place. The copyright principle works pretty well as a way to amortize that initial cost over many people who will enjoy the finished product, but only if enough people play by the rules.
Because you can get away with charging full monopoly rents for your "work", you don't have to produce a new one to keep eating.
Only if your work continues to provide enough value to other people that the market is willing to keep paying for it indefinitely. A tiny number of people ever reach that point, and arguably those people have generated so much value for society that maybe they do deserve to be set up for life.
Moreover, you have already broken the copyright laws by your land grab extensions of time and coverage
Erm... What? By definition, those extensions were changing the law, not breaking it. I agree with you that a lot of the terms have become unreasonably long and some of the laws should be changed. However, I also don't think that matters very much in the context of piracy, because most piracy is of works that are recent and won't be affected by the "land grab", as you call it, for several decades.
Be thankful that we still feel sorry enough for you to spend as much as we do on it. We have no debt to pay for you when you broke the rules decades ago.
Your attempt to tar millions of people working in creative industries with the same brush is crude and illogical. If you think you shouldn't have any debt to pay to those people when you enjoy the fruits of their labour, feel free to campaign to get the laws changed to something you consider fair. If you succeed, good for you. But if you don't, or if you don't even try and just choose to break any rules you happen not to like, maybe you should be thankful that your name hasn't come up with one of the big content creators that has the resources to take real action against you. At some point you might find out the hard way that you're not above the law.
All what value?
The value in the works. If people are copying them then presumably they find then beneficial in some way. Maybe they're entertaining. Maybe they're informative. Maybe they're useful tools.
Whatever actual value the works have comes from the people who create them. It wouldn't exist otherwise. We can debate the economics around compensating those people (or not) but the fact that all of the value originates with the creators is objective and undeniable.
As I've commented elsewhere in this discussion, there are some legitimate concerns about scope creep and having copyright maximalists making the laws, but that doesn't mean everyone, or even most people, making copyrighted works or relying on copyright protection as a basis for creative industries has somehow broken the implicit bargain that copyright represents.
Likewise, someone posting the same few examples of people who have been successful in other ways every time this debate comes up doesn't change the fact that by far the majority of our commercially created works today are supported by copyright one way or another (as, for that matter, are most open source or community-licensed works). Show me the high school math textbook that experts spent two years writing that was funded by some other means, or the business admin software, or basically anything that is useful but not necessarily enjoyable to create. Or just look at the production values of fan fiction, amateur videos, hobbyists computer games, or band recordings made in their garage because they couldn't afford a studio.
Except that the vast, vast majority of works being pirated are recent, and would still have been covered by even the original copyright periods of centuries ago.
And plenty of those works aren't created by Big Media industries with vast budgets.
And any argument about copyright only applying to copies making money has to take into account that when these laws were first developed, that was basically the only kind of copying there was.
There are legitimate concerns about scope creep in copyright, Disney laws, and so on. But the idea that those somehow justify rampant piracy is not credible.
Interesting theory. Is there any data to support it? Anecdotally, I feel like things are going the other way and the advent of services like YouTube and Spotify and of the Internet more generally means people are far less limited to mainstream entertainment these days.
That is hilarious. Thanks.
But they aren't market forces. Economic markets are two-sided. This is a game where only one side is playing by the rules, and the strategy continues to work only as long as that one-sided situation remains.
Where individuals are merely consuming the product without spending there is no punishment for R&D, it is only less profitable (and of course A would not be happy).
The trouble with this argument is that beyond a certain point, the R&D ceases to be profitable at all, and so it stops, and then everyone (including those who would benefit from the work, whether they were going to pay for it or not) loses out.
Copyright as an economic tool actually serves two quite distinct purposes here. It does prevent one commercial party from piggy-backing on another's work as you described. But it also incentivizes doing that work in the first place. In particular, it makes it viable to do relatively expensive work and make it available at relatively cheap prices, as long as the market is big enough that the total from all those low payments still covers the costs.
But making easier to get the legal alternative generally works a LOT better.
Most people who say that have never tried to do it.
It is true, up to a point, for mass market products. For example, if you region-lock your content so it isn't legally available in some places, of course you're creating an incentive for people to find it through other means.
It is not nearly so true for small works in niche markets created by individuals or small groups. These are typically readily available for reasonable prices and with far less encumbrance direct from the original creators, yet still people will blatantly rip them off.
An artist that can not survive on what people are willing to give does not deserve to be able to live of his art.
Most artists already can't live off their art directly. For every Hollywood A-lister, Grammy award winner or YouTube star there are countless bit-part players, local bands and casual vloggers who are just trying to make a bit extra to fund their creative work.
Copyright does protect those people too. Indeed, given the costs of enforcement, copyright is most useful for protecting them against the kind of exploitation you described, when the damages they might receive could actually justify taking action to enforce the rights.
But the reality is that most of those people, if they are going to make a living in creative industries, are not doing it on their own but as part of the larger creative community. Have you ever watched the credits all the way through at the end of a blockbuster movie? Do you ever stop and think about just how many people are involved in making that movie, beyond the directors and producers and starring cast? All of those other people, often thousands of them, also worked for possibly several months to bring you a couple of hours of entertainment. Those people only got their fees paid because the studio expects to make money on the film so it could afford to hire them. It's an investment on the studio's part, and like any investment it's only made if there's a good chance of getting a worthwhile return.
Maybe those people don't deserve to "live off their art", but if you pull the rug out from under the current system without providing some other way to make these projects commercially viable, all that's going to happen is millions of film fans won't get to enjoy a blockbuster next year, and thousands of people who would have been happy to make a blockbuster for them will be flipping burgers or complaining about how robots and foreigners are taking all the low-end jobs these days. How is that a win for anyone?
You have to admit it is VERY obvious that there is little, if any, support for this law.
Except among the people who are actually doing the work and generating all the value, you mean?
Most of us might care very little about a law that says your physical property is yours and someone else can't just pick it up and walk off with it if they want to. I imagine you have stronger feelings on the subject.
The trouble with your economic model is that it's ignoring the one-sided nature of piracy. It's OK to argue that work is worth what someone will pay for it and the market will determine that rate, but that is predicated on the idea that you don't get the benefit if you don't pay the cost.
The entire economic model fails if you say that someone can enjoy the benefits of another's work without having to make any choice about what it's worth because they don't have to pay anything at all. Obviously that is unsustainable if the whole market does the same thing, and in the middle ground the freeloaders are just distorting the market and potentially increasing the price paid by those who do support the work.
We already can watch them for free.
Sure you can, as long as enough other people are still paying for you. The term "freeloading" is remarkably accurate in this context.
How about "for non-commercial use only" as the discriminating rule for copying? Seems like that would get right at the heart of the ethics of the situation.
It's worth pointing out that this undermines alternative models like PPV and subscription streaming libraries, which have been some of the most successful ways of getting people (legal) access to more content at lower prices. If everyone can just save whatever they want, there's no difference between these models and selling a permanent copy of every work, so the pricing can't allow for the different cases and either the prices for the services go up or the services fail because their previously useful business models are no longer viable. Either way, probably everyone loses.
It's all very well saying that business models have no inherent right to exist, and I agree, but the point of systems like copyright is to promote creation and distribution of new works. If we remove the current incentives without providing a useful alternative, then either works won't get made, or they won't be as good, or fewer people will get to enjoy them. In practice, a lot of small-scale producers would probably stop, while the big movie blockbusters or games would continue but the movies would be spoiled even more by blatant product placement and the games would come with even more dependencies on online systems that keep failing.
As an alternative, maybe we should teach our kids that not everything in life is free, and you can't always have what you want immediately on demand. There's a very unhealthy attitude that is widespread in a young generation today that has never known a world without the Internet and cell phones and home delivery services when they order online and all that, and it carries over into other areas as well. Obviously this is a much broader issue than how we fund creative work, but it's all related.
You're being paranoid. The likes of Amazon and Google aren't routinely recording everything you say and uploading it to the mothership. For a start, that would almost certainly be illegal in some places, and in any case they'd be discovered very quickly given the amount of data involved. We should certainly be aware of the risks with these modern devices that have both sensors and communications capabilities, and I think both the security of the devices and consideration for their privacy in normal operation will probably cause problems from time to time until we figure things out, and I think new laws will probably be required to safeguard personal privacy more effectively in places that don't already have them. However, let's focus on what is actually happening and what should be done about that, not some alternative reality in which every device was already hacked and every big service provider was scanning everything all the time.
You may not like it, but the world does not stand still.
The world has never stood still, but there have also always been things we could do but accepted that we shouldn't. That principle is behind everything from common decency and good manners to statutory protections and penalties for illegal acts.
There is nothing different about improving surveillance technology, and there is no reason we should just accept that using modern technology to intrude into our everyday lives is or should be acceptable either ethically or legally merely because the technical capability is now available.