"Following an artistic creative passion didn't always used to imply fame&fortune..."
The music industry (along with most of the others) is a pyramid, with 1-2% at the top of the "fame&fortune" win-the-lotto pile, and everyone else underneath. Like a lot of people, you've been conditioned to see the "extreme" end of the spectrum, when the vast majority don't live there, and most would just like to be able to pay the rent.
The original summary mentioned music... and DVDs, so the topic isn't just "music".
Besides, I agree with him. If someone is prone to copying a CD or mp3 just because it's easy to do, then the likelyhood that they'd do the same with a movie, program, or game is extremely high. Music isn't the only thing flying along the 'torrents...
"Perhaps you should consider lobbying for alternate methods of compensation that lets you get paid anyway."
People who copy this stuff for free now aren't paying anyway, so how are alternate methods of compensation going to help? Someone with an "i'm entitled to it" mentality will just bypass those methods as well.
The problem comes down to:
1) People want it. 2) It's easy to steal. 3) There are little to no consequences for doing so.
First, I know precisely what an assurance contract is, and that model won't fly, as it assumes that N number of people will make a commitment up front for a product. While N number of people might agree to pay up front for a new Stephen King book (he is, after all, Stephen King), it doesn't help the new author with little or no fan base, the mid-tier author, or the unknown director or screenwriter. Further, the model is not scalable or sustainable, in that many, many, many people would have to continually browse sites and directories of authors and agree to pay for something they're not going to get for a year or more, as opposed to browsing Amazon, seeing a product you'd like, paying a reasonable amount, and having it the very next day.
Plus assurance contracts suffer from the "fan" problem. I may be a fan of one or two or three favorite authors, and as such donate to them, or engage in a assurance contract with them, but that's it. Conversely, I have over 500 books on the shelf behind me, and each and every one of those authors was "paid" for their work.
As to your own "denial of reality", bits are not just bits. If bits are all you want, I'll hook you up to a random static feed, and you can download all you want. But people don't want "bits", they want content, and continue in a state of denial if you want, but content still has to be created and produced.
BTW, go to your definitions and look up the free rider problem...
"...conflate rivalrous and excludable products with non-rivalrous and non-excludable..."
Here, I'll put this in terms that even a high-school freshman should be able to understand. It doesn't MATTER what the product is. X costs Y to create. If Y isn't paid, then X can no longer be produced.
Now, Y can be paid by up-front investment, in which case costs need to be recouped, and THAT can be done by by one person, or by many, many people "splitting" those costs into manageable pieces. But again, those costs MUST be recouped, or that product is driven from the market.
Now, you seem to think that we're going to get the same number of people who're capable of spending their own time and dollars to create the same number of products WITHOUT getting paid, or that enough people will "donate" money (look up the history of shareware), or that a mid-tier author can make a living getting paid for book readings or the like.
And I say that's preposterous. So until someone can come up with a model, or models, that will support the same amount of work, AND provide the incentives needed for its creation, then "information" can NOT be free.
BTW, I love how people use the word "information" to trivialize the fact that it's books, music, movies, software, and games we're talking about (e.g. products), and not a fact like Columbus hit the beach in 1492. (You can spread the latter around all you like.)
No, I admitted that I PAID for the work that I would enjoy, which equates to "respect". I they wanted to give that work away for free, fine. They didn't, I respected their wishes, and above all I didn't steal it just because I could.
"I must say, you are extremely poorly equiped to be judging the effectiveness of copyright law considering all the irrelevancies you try to drag in to confuse the issue, and your apparent lack of even a first year college understanding of economics."
Sticks and stones, my boy. Though I have to say you're the one who seems to be fuzzy on the concepts of supply and demand, capital investment, ROI, and so on...
And for every one you find I bet I can find ten who wrote bestsellers (how else could they retire?) and kept on writing. Face it. You lost this one.
As to your "motivations" side-track, doctors proably have "motivation" to do what they do too. But if they didn't get paid for it, few could afford to be one.
"...you would doom a whole society to billions of dollars of waste and inefficiency just because you want to believe that information should not be freely shared."
No, but I'm not about to kill the goose until I'm good and positive that viable alternatives exist. "Information" is not free. It costs time and money to produce, and as such has value in and as of itself. (Otherwise, you wouldn't persist in the idea it needs to be "shared" (stolen)). And I'll gladly exist in a utopian society where everything is free.... once EVERYTHING is free (food, rent, clothing, transportation, insurance, etc..)
So until that time, I will continue to pay for value received, and I will continue to respect our artist's and author's wishes (a trait you seem to lack), and I'll also continue to demand that others do the same.
Bottom line: (I know you love that term) Given a choice to stand with the few highly talented people who spend years creating everything that we love and enjoy, and the parasites who believe they're "entitled" to those efforts simply because, at the moment, they can steal that work from the safety of their parents basement with relative impunity, well...
ANSWER THE QUESTION ASKED. Since you've equated respect with paying a fee everytime a person's work product is used, why don't you pay them a fee every time you use your car or house?
I don't, and neither do you. Nor do I pay a fee every time I read a book or watch a DVD (everytime a person's work product is used). I did, however, PAY for that house, and that car, and that book, and that DVD. (Okay, I'm still paying for the house.)
Ask any of those whom you have cited who are still alive and they will tell you, and have already repeatedly told the other interviewers, that they do not write books for the compensation. They write because they want to, and sometimes because they have to, they are obsessed with it. For those people it doesn't matter what economic model is used in their case.
Talk about MY changing my argument. What happened to the model being broken because of ALL of the people who ONLY write one book and retire? Hell, I bet you'd have to do some significant research to name ONE famous author who wrote only one book and retired off their single hit.
As long as you're into statistics, here's one: Your child is 20 times more likely to be hit by lighting than abducted and/or molested by a random paedophile... but which one gets all the press?
Here's more: The odds are 70-90% (depends on the study) that he's NOT a stranger, and is known by the child and the family. The odds are 50/50 that he's a MEMBER of the family. And it's about 5,000% more likely that a child will be killed or seriously injured while participating in school sports. But again, which one gets all the press?
Yeah, they're "real", and they're a modern-day boogyman, all at the same time.
"The sad thing is that it's far easier to commit an "intellectual crime" like copyright or patent infringement without knowing you're committing a crime."
Right on! I mean, I SO thought that 500MB superman_returns.mpg file was a Linux distro!
"How is that any different from someone who spends years of effort, hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up a business only to have it fail because customers won't buy what he's selling? Just because he puts all that into his work doesn't mean society owes him squat."
Finally, something we can agree on. You're absolutely 100% correct. Society doesn't owe him a thing. And if I spend years writing a book that no one wants to buy, or producing music or a movie that no one wants to hear or see, then society owes me nothing either.
If, however, customers DO want what he's selling, then they'll buy it, yes? Because if they didn't want it, they wouldn't pay for it. If it had no value to them, they wouldn't pay for it.
And the same applies in my case. If they want to read my book, hear my music, see my movie, if they want that enjoyment. If they want to be transported into that world for a brief period of time. If they decide it has that value... then it, too, should be paid for, and not stolen.
I never said copyright is the only method that can fund creation. But I've yet to hear one that isn't wishful thinking, or one we've moved away from for good reason (patronage), or one that encourages new participants, or provides the same number of incentives to generate the diversity of choices we currently enjoy.
Or one, for that matter, that isn't a thinly disguised rationalization as to why theft is okay.
"That model encourages people who create high quality work to do it once and then retire on the ever lasting royalties."
Yeah, because I've noticed that the most popular people (King, Koontz, Clancy, Weber, JRR, Heinlein, etc.) ONLY wrote one book and retired...
"...creative people are paid for their effort all the time. Make-up artists, set designers, recording engineers, etc, all those jobs traditionally pay by the hour or by the production, not by royalties on copies.... There is no reason that some form of assurance contract can not be used to fund the development of big-ticket creations too."
Which assumes that the final product (e.g. the movie) will be paid for by the people who want to see it. Because unless it is paid for, those people aren't going to get paid either.
You're particulary dense, if you think that tens of thousands of people are going to individually decide that they're going to front the costs for hundreds of movie productions, based on nothing more than an idea and maybe a script. People want to see what they're paying for. You're going to send twenty dollars to a new author who has an "idea" for a book?
There's little wrong with the current system, where "big-ticket" items are funded by investors, who're paid back by millions of people, each judging the result and paying a small portion of the final cost because they think they're going to have a good time. The product is done. They can see what they're getting.
And yes, I do "respect" the people who built my house and car. If not, I would have had someone else build both. I also ended up paying a higher percentage of the costs for my "copy" of both, not to mention indirectly paying the architect and the automobile designer, and their suppliers, and so on.
Bottom line. The problem we have now is that some people think they're entitled to content for free because distribution is now "free". Production and creation, however, is most definitely NOT free, and that is what needs to be reconciled. And I doubt that "performances", part-time workers, and/or patronage is the answer, as those are models from which we've spent years moving away...
"Just like it is for all the other jobs in the universe."
Really? All of those jobs where you're self-employed, have no benefits, no paid insurance, no vacation pay, and spend years up front creating something in the hope that someone will see the value in it and buy it later on? Those kind of jobs?
"Who are you to decide I am not entitled to it anyway?"
In this case, let's say I'm the person who spent years of effort creating that work. Because without me that work would not exist. At all. Period.
And the "encouraging more public knowledge" portion of your rant is correct, although you forget that unless I can pay the rent and feed the kids, I'm not creating MORE work and adding to the whole. Moreover, had I not had some expectation of recouping my losses I probably wouldn't have created the first one. You may steal my work for free, but I can't steal food with the same expectations of not getting caught.
Finally, it's a matter of respect. If you don't like my work, fine, don't pay for it. I rolled the dice and lost. But to ignore my wishes AND steal my efforts simply for your own enjoyment (let me repeat that), SIMPLY FOR YOUR OWN ENJOYMENT, is the very definition of selfish, greedy, and immature.
It had better work, as I don't want my authors, singers, musicians, directors, actors, and so on working somewhere flipping burgers to make ends meet. I want them to spend ALL of their time (or as much as possible) creating new works for me to enjoy.
Books take years to write, and aren't going to get paid for just by readings at book signings. Not all musicians tour. Movies are multi-million-dollar investments, as are most major software and game titles. Moreover, those investments in time and money are made in the expectation, the hope, that they'll pay off. Without copyright, and without that potential payoff, the same level of investment is simply not going to be made.
As I said in another post, it's a question of morality and respect. If you have no respect for those who would create what you enjoy, then, in the end, you're going to get everything you're "entitled" to... which is nothing.
That's where we have to agree to disagree. Because without guys like Tamte, people would have nothing to steal. And because I think it's immoral take a guy's creative work without compensation. If he wants to give it away, fine. But if not, who are you to decide you're entitled to it anyway?
Human nature? Yeah, the selfish, greedy, immature side of it...
Slashdot Mirror
"The only way to be [completely] sure the system is malware-free is to completely wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system."
I say we take off and nuke 'em all from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Mind if we tell your boss he no longer needs to pay you? You still get to do the work, you just have no right to the money...
"Following an artistic creative passion didn't always used to imply fame&fortune..."
The music industry (along with most of the others) is a pyramid, with 1-2% at the top of the "fame&fortune" win-the-lotto pile, and everyone else underneath. Like a lot of people, you've been conditioned to see the "extreme" end of the spectrum, when the vast majority don't live there, and most would just like to be able to pay the rent.
Will allow "me" to play "my" music on every device "I" own any time "I" want...
Anyone see a pattern here?
The original summary mentioned music... and DVDs, so the topic isn't just "music".
Besides, I agree with him. If someone is prone to copying a CD or mp3 just because it's easy to do, then the likelyhood that they'd do the same with a movie, program, or game is extremely high. Music isn't the only thing flying along the 'torrents...
"Perhaps you should consider lobbying for alternate methods of compensation that lets you get paid anyway."
People who copy this stuff for free now aren't paying anyway, so how are alternate methods of compensation going to help? Someone with an "i'm entitled to it" mentality will just bypass those methods as well.
The problem comes down to:
1) People want it.
2) It's easy to steal.
3) There are little to no consequences for doing so.
That's right. Millions of highly skilled people have scanned every line of every driver and eliminated every bug, error, and exploit in OS software.
BTW, have you heard that there's a new bridge in Brooklyn for sale?
First, I know precisely what an assurance contract is, and that model won't fly, as it assumes that N number of people will make a commitment up front for a product. While N number of people might agree to pay up front for a new Stephen King book (he is, after all, Stephen King), it doesn't help the new author with little or no fan base, the mid-tier author, or the unknown director or screenwriter. Further, the model is not scalable or sustainable, in that many, many, many people would have to continually browse sites and directories of authors and agree to pay for something they're not going to get for a year or more, as opposed to browsing Amazon, seeing a product you'd like, paying a reasonable amount, and having it the very next day.
Plus assurance contracts suffer from the "fan" problem. I may be a fan of one or two or three favorite authors, and as such donate to them, or engage in a assurance contract with them, but that's it. Conversely, I have over 500 books on the shelf behind me, and each and every one of those authors was "paid" for their work.
As to your own "denial of reality", bits are not just bits. If bits are all you want, I'll hook you up to a random static feed, and you can download all you want. But people don't want "bits", they want content, and continue in a state of denial if you want, but content still has to be created and produced.
BTW, go to your definitions and look up the free rider problem...
"...conflate rivalrous and excludable products with non-rivalrous and non-excludable..."
Here, I'll put this in terms that even a high-school freshman should be able to understand. It doesn't MATTER what the product is. X costs Y to create. If Y isn't paid, then X can no longer be produced.
Now, Y can be paid by up-front investment, in which case costs need to be recouped, and THAT can be done by by one person, or by many, many people "splitting" those costs into manageable pieces. But again, those costs MUST be recouped, or that product is driven from the market.
Now, you seem to think that we're going to get the same number of people who're capable of spending their own time and dollars to create the same number of products WITHOUT getting paid, or that enough people will "donate" money (look up the history of shareware), or that a mid-tier author can make a living getting paid for book readings or the like.
And I say that's preposterous. So until someone can come up with a model, or models, that will support the same amount of work, AND provide the incentives needed for its creation, then "information" can NOT be free.
BTW, I love how people use the word "information" to trivialize the fact that it's books, music, movies, software, and games we're talking about (e.g. products), and not a fact like Columbus hit the beach in 1492. (You can spread the latter around all you like.)
No, I admitted that I PAID for the work that I would enjoy, which equates to "respect". I they wanted to give that work away for free, fine. They didn't, I respected their wishes, and above all I didn't steal it just because I could.
"I must say, you are extremely poorly equiped to be judging the effectiveness of copyright law considering all the irrelevancies you try to drag in to confuse the issue, and your apparent lack of even a first year college understanding of economics."
Sticks and stones, my boy. Though I have to say you're the one who seems to be fuzzy on the concepts of supply and demand, capital investment, ROI, and so on...
And for every one you find I bet I can find ten who wrote bestsellers (how else could they retire?) and kept on writing. Face it. You lost this one.
As to your "motivations" side-track, doctors proably have "motivation" to do what they do too. But if they didn't get paid for it, few could afford to be one.
"...you would doom a whole society to billions of dollars of waste and inefficiency just because you want to believe that information should not be freely shared."
No, but I'm not about to kill the goose until I'm good and positive that viable alternatives exist. "Information" is not free. It costs time and money to produce, and as such has value in and as of itself. (Otherwise, you wouldn't persist in the idea it needs to be "shared" (stolen)). And I'll gladly exist in a utopian society where everything is free.... once EVERYTHING is free (food, rent, clothing, transportation, insurance, etc..)
So until that time, I will continue to pay for value received, and I will continue to respect our artist's and author's wishes (a trait you seem to lack), and I'll also continue to demand that others do the same.
Bottom line: (I know you love that term) Given a choice to stand with the few highly talented people who spend years creating everything that we love and enjoy, and the parasites who believe they're "entitled" to those efforts simply because, at the moment, they can steal that work from the safety of their parents basement with relative impunity, well...
ANSWER THE QUESTION ASKED. Since you've equated respect with paying a fee everytime a person's work product is used, why don't you pay them a fee every time you use your car or house?
I don't, and neither do you. Nor do I pay a fee every time I read a book or watch a DVD (everytime a person's work product is used). I did, however, PAY for that house, and that car, and that book, and that DVD. (Okay, I'm still paying for the house.)
Ask any of those whom you have cited who are still alive and they will tell you, and have already repeatedly told the other interviewers, that they do not write books for the compensation. They write because they want to, and sometimes because they have to, they are obsessed with it. For those people it doesn't matter what economic model is used in their case.
Talk about MY changing my argument. What happened to the model being broken because of ALL of the people who ONLY write one book and retire? Hell, I bet you'd have to do some significant research to name ONE famous author who wrote only one book and retired off their single hit.
"Fuck you. ... just more proof that you are backed into a logical corner and have to resort to emotional and specious accusations to get out."
Now THAT's funny...
"No coach thinks raw talent alone will win the olympics, it takes practice, practice, practice, and more practice."
Close. Too many people think practice makes perfect, when in reality, most people who do so simply perfect their mistakes.
"Nor will a privileged imbecile be able to govern a nation."
We're doing the case study on that right now...
As long as you're into statistics, here's one: Your child is 20 times more likely to be hit by lighting than abducted and/or molested by a random paedophile... but which one gets all the press?
Here's more: The odds are 70-90% (depends on the study) that he's NOT a stranger, and is known by the child and the family. The odds are 50/50 that he's a MEMBER of the family. And it's about 5,000% more likely that a child will be killed or seriously injured while participating in school sports. But again, which one gets all the press?
Yeah, they're "real", and they're a modern-day boogyman, all at the same time.
"The sad thing is that it's far easier to commit an "intellectual crime" like copyright or patent infringement without knowing you're committing a crime."
Right on! I mean, I SO thought that 500MB superman_returns.mpg file was a Linux distro!
"How is that any different from someone who spends years of effort, hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up a business only to have it fail because customers won't buy what he's selling? Just because he puts all that into his work doesn't mean society owes him squat."
Finally, something we can agree on. You're absolutely 100% correct. Society doesn't owe him a thing. And if I spend years writing a book that no one wants to buy, or producing music or a movie that no one wants to hear or see, then society owes me nothing either.
If, however, customers DO want what he's selling, then they'll buy it, yes? Because if they didn't want it, they wouldn't pay for it. If it had no value to them, they wouldn't pay for it.
And the same applies in my case. If they want to read my book, hear my music, see my movie, if they want that enjoyment. If they want to be transported into that world for a brief period of time. If they decide it has that value... then it, too, should be paid for, and not stolen.
I never said copyright is the only method that can fund creation. But I've yet to hear one that isn't wishful thinking, or one we've moved away from for good reason (patronage), or one that encourages new participants, or provides the same number of incentives to generate the diversity of choices we currently enjoy.
Or one, for that matter, that isn't a thinly disguised rationalization as to why theft is okay.
"That model encourages people who create high quality work to do it once and then retire on the ever lasting royalties."
... There is no reason that some form of assurance contract can not be used to fund the development of big-ticket creations too."
Yeah, because I've noticed that the most popular people (King, Koontz, Clancy, Weber, JRR, Heinlein, etc.) ONLY wrote one book and retired...
"...creative people are paid for their effort all the time. Make-up artists, set designers, recording engineers, etc, all those jobs traditionally pay by the hour or by the production, not by royalties on copies.
Which assumes that the final product (e.g. the movie) will be paid for by the people who want to see it. Because unless it is paid for, those people aren't going to get paid either.
You're particulary dense, if you think that tens of thousands of people are going to individually decide that they're going to front the costs for hundreds of movie productions, based on nothing more than an idea and maybe a script. People want to see what they're paying for. You're going to send twenty dollars to a new author who has an "idea" for a book?
There's little wrong with the current system, where "big-ticket" items are funded by investors, who're paid back by millions of people, each judging the result and paying a small portion of the final cost because they think they're going to have a good time. The product is done. They can see what they're getting.
And yes, I do "respect" the people who built my house and car. If not, I would have had someone else build both. I also ended up paying a higher percentage of the costs for my "copy" of both, not to mention indirectly paying the architect and the automobile designer, and their suppliers, and so on.
Bottom line. The problem we have now is that some people think they're entitled to content for free because distribution is now "free". Production and creation, however, is most definitely NOT free, and that is what needs to be reconciled. And I doubt that "performances", part-time workers, and/or patronage is the answer, as those are models from which we've spent years moving away...
"Just like it is for all the other jobs in the universe."
Really? All of those jobs where you're self-employed, have no benefits, no paid insurance, no vacation pay, and spend years up front creating something in the hope that someone will see the value in it and buy it later on? Those kind of jobs?
"Who are you to decide I am not entitled to it anyway?"
In this case, let's say I'm the person who spent years of effort creating that work. Because without me that work would not exist. At all. Period.
And the "encouraging more public knowledge" portion of your rant is correct, although you forget that unless I can pay the rent and feed the kids, I'm not creating MORE work and adding to the whole. Moreover, had I not had some expectation of recouping my losses I probably wouldn't have created the first one. You may steal my work for free, but I can't steal food with the same expectations of not getting caught.
Finally, it's a matter of respect. If you don't like my work, fine, don't pay for it. I rolled the dice and lost. But to ignore my wishes AND steal my efforts simply for your own enjoyment (let me repeat that), SIMPLY FOR YOUR OWN ENJOYMENT, is the very definition of selfish, greedy, and immature.
You are NOT entitled.
It had better work, as I don't want my authors, singers, musicians, directors, actors, and so on working somewhere flipping burgers to make ends meet. I want them to spend ALL of their time (or as much as possible) creating new works for me to enjoy.
Books take years to write, and aren't going to get paid for just by readings at book signings. Not all musicians tour. Movies are multi-million-dollar investments, as are most major software and game titles. Moreover, those investments in time and money are made in the expectation, the hope, that they'll pay off. Without copyright, and without that potential payoff, the same level of investment is simply not going to be made.
As I said in another post, it's a question of morality and respect. If you have no respect for those who would create what you enjoy, then, in the end, you're going to get everything you're "entitled" to... which is nothing.
If you can't figure out why games made for a protected, proprietary piece of hardware are harder to copy...
"...morality has nothing to do with it..."
That's where we have to agree to disagree. Because without guys like Tamte, people would have nothing to steal. And because I think it's immoral take a guy's creative work without compensation. If he wants to give it away, fine. But if not, who are you to decide you're entitled to it anyway?
Human nature? Yeah, the selfish, greedy, immature side of it...