"I really don't think your views are that far off the mark, but I see copyright being broader in the eyes of the original framers than you seem to state. The right for an artist to obtain value from the reproduction and performance of that artist's work is an integral part of copyright, and always has been."
You're absolutely right. Sometimes, I just get too repulsed by the 'property talk' that goes on and focus too much on the civic purposes of copyright. But, yes, it is most fairly a mediation between an artist and the public. It moderates between giving incentive to an author to provide whatever novel value they add, while eventually repaying and forward-paying the achronological 'public' which has added the rest of the value.
I don't quite agree with you on everything (NYTimes link was not an endorsement, just a citation to a random online journal to give an option; P2P can and should be used to advance culture and no, it doesn't bother me that permission is often not granted, as again the issue is not natural rights or authorial dignities but instead incentives), but it is good to hear a moderate voice.
I said "You are arguing as if there needed to be some positive impetus in order to 'free' creative productions from their rightful ownership. That is simply wrong in both a historical and conceptual interpretation of copyright. Information and artistic expression already will spread if unimpeded, and copyright's primary function is to make the incentives to produce small enough that that spread will be as unimpeded as possible."
It should say "...copyright's primary function is to make the restrictions small enough..." I didn't even want to comment on incentives, which are naturally also an aim of copyright. Incentive is good, to a reasonable extent. However, the incentives in retroactively extending copyright, or by changing it to lifetime plus whatever, is not adding incentives, period. It is just rewarding entrenched parties and destroying the purpose of copyright.
"Sure you can - you create it in the case o songs, books or programs, and you have rights to ownership. Just because someone can take a copy without taking the orginal doesn't make it any less a taking of your property."
You need to base your assertion on more than that. You are, however, in good company--even Lawrence Lessig asserts that copyright is a property issue, probably, like many, for reasons of intuition and common vocabulary--but I think that our insistence on applying physical property norms to the fundamentally different product of ideas and creativity is dangerous.
The fact is, today that conception of creativity as property is an intuition that allows laws like the DMCA and SBCTEA to be passed with little oversight and hardly a gesture to the public interest. The reason is, senators and many others wouldn't dare challenge the sanctity of 'property,' confirmed as it is by numerous international treaties and constitutions, norms, and basic human intuitions. But creativity is not personal property--it is a unique social and cultural product. It is dangerous to analogize this, because, as now, people talk about physical property even when they think they're talking about creative products.
That may have been its purpose originally. Like many other industries, such as the film and music industry, the impetus for the Conger's existence does not need to be detrimental to copyright. Citing a civic intent at the birth of the Conger does not excuse the fact of what they eventually did to limit and sell back to the public their participation in their own culture, with no discernible benefit and only restrictions to the encouragement of creativity.
"Yes and no. The law grants protections to those whom create original works. These protections include exclusive right to reproduce and perform those works. Barring non-commerical, personal use, making copies is wrong. P2P networking is not personal, thus is not exempted.
Bringing up arguments about eighteenth century "right to publish" is bogus. The first amendment automatically protects your right to publish. It even protects your right to parody a copyright work (although not to gain financially from such parody). As a previous post already said, Whatever helps you sleep at night "
The funny thing is, copyright as conceived in our constitution regards creative works--I said 'information' because that's a more basic designation than 'art' and is the most general subject of the Framer's Federalist paper discussions, but 'artistic' works if you insist-- as already belonging as much to the public who through generations of particapatory culture made current creativity possible as to the authors of that work.
The law does not grant protection to those who create "original" works in the strict sense if not the legal, because there are no original works. Every work is in some way derivative. Instead, the law grants temporary copy privileges to novel expressions, which is certainly tenuous ground no matter how you look at it. If you think there is 'genius' creativity, or are 'original' works out there, then you may be right to some small extent--but as the Framers correctly understood, the far larger influence is public culture that freely available.
You are arguing as if there needed to be some positive impetus in order to 'free' creative productions from their rightful ownership. That is simply wrong in both a historical and conceptual interpretation of copyright. Information and artistic expression already will spread if unimpeded, and copyright's primary function is to make the incentives to produce small enough that that spread will be as unimpeded as possible.
Copyright is a grant to protect one thing and one thing only--progress for the benefit of the public. That's what the constitution says, and you are free to disagree, but you better have better rationale than just an assumption that an author has a vague set of 'rights' that are granted by a spurious conception of total creativity of "original" works. At least the Framers listed their principles.
P2P is many things, but more studies are showing that, though the RIAA and copyright 'moral intuitionists' such as yourself don't want to hear it, P2P is culturally enabling a lot more than it is disabling, and regardless of trifling questions of legality is thus more of a boon to the true, real and forgotten purpose of copyright than it is an attack.
Please. You 'theft' nuts are why we're moving to a pre-Statute of Anne conception of copyright. You cannot look at information as property, and not end up at a situation where you advocate anything less than perpetual copyright.
Additionally, if you combine this with the insane but popular concept of creativity being a result of Foucoultian "genius," then you have a situation even worse than Conger-dominated England, circa 1708, where every literary work, like Shakespeare was inherited through a single publisher family and kept from the public for hundreds of years.
You think you are being 'common sense' and 'intuitive' in a lawyer-speak, responsibility-shirking world when you use words like 'theft.' But you of course don't realize that you're just taking an ultimately simple-minded approach that is absolutely inimical to the ideals of copyright that Framers like Madison and Jefferson intended when it was created--to be a civic-minded engine for progress, emphatically NOT a grant of property.
"That's the general problem with Lessig, EFF, etc. They're just as bad as the RIAA when they act as if they're speaking on behalf of artists' interests.
You'll have to forgive me, but I really don't see what the problem is. Lessig supports copyright to a limited extent, but (as evinced by his implicit support of unimpeded remixing) he believes in advancing creativity more than copyright as an end in and of itself. His words and actions on his blog support this, though it may indeed be argued to be counterproductive to support a CC license that allows a 'no derivative' clause. However, that isn't your argument.
Your argument is that Lessig wishes to empower the 'artists' via a 'no derivative' CC clause, but contradicts himself when he simultaneously argues for a cultural freedom to 'remix' art. In that sense, you're confusing speaking on the 'artists' behalf with speaking on the 'publishers' behalf. (I speak of these as different roles -- I don't deny a single person may often take on both.) Lessig wants to empower the artists by expanding creativity, and that is the sensible aim of copyright law.
However, a 'no derivative' clause is a negative clause. It prevents creativity from taking place while a lack of a 'no derivative' clause does not prevent or preclude the original. If someone remixes a song, the original still remains. The 'vision' is not compromised unless someone tries to pass off the remix as the original, which is far short of the extent of the 'no derivative' clause.
Finally, yes, Lessig appears to support the CC license. However, this is not a human rights issue, and as I said, it may make sense for him to support the license if the net effect is positive for creativity.
If he has explicitly said "I support the 'no derivative' clause," (and if so, I would love to see it) then he's contradicting himself. Otherwise, there's no reason to think he isn't just being pragmatic and supporting a license whose positive aspects outweight the negative.
It is indeed possible to create a Creative Commons license that bars someone from creating derivative works. However, this isn't entirely a contradiction. It may be a compromise meant to allow the maximum public benefit to be created under current copyright conditions (which limit derivative works). The idea that Lessig is amenable to compromise despite having stronger believes which he expresses in his blog doesn't prove that he's being hypocritical.
The fact is, if you look at this, you see that the license includes a notice that fair use is still protected, and that the CC license with "no derivative" clause does so in order to facilitate copying and sharing. It is still closer to Lessig's position than current copyright law.
I do believe and agree that in this area, compromise like what Lessig may be endorsing with the CC license (and like copyright law itself has been doing for the last hundred years) might create confusion about what the 'principles' of copyright law are. This surely will make some of us uncomfortable -- especially those of us who believe that copyright is supposed to make some sort of moral/logical sense, and not merely be a pragmatic engine for creativity.
However, as we've already seen, copyright does not operate under any principles except to enable more creativity than it disables. Copyright is not a moral law. It does not have unimpeachable logic that directs its content. Thus, Lessig need not either be totally black or white, and does not contradict himself by agreeing to less than he wishes for in his blog--since copyright allows [sorry, I can't help it] "gray" principles.
I'm saying it is childish, and meglothymic for people to download something that they didn't or don't have rights to.
I indeed have uses for the benefits of a RIAA and MPAA free world. I do feel that some things should be shared....such as information and public source. But what i can not condone even if i was a blue collar laborer is the theft of creative reproduction.
I've had a lot of conversations about copyright, and it never fails to amaze me how misunderstood copyright law is by people nowadays. The 'theft' theme continues to pop up. People seem to adopt the notion that copyright infringement is theft, and I understand that it's an attractive idea, especially ever since the completely misguided term 'intellectual property' entered the common vocabulary.
However, you should understand that the Framers of the constitution entertained and roundly rejected any notion of copyright as a moral right, and hence on equal terms with physical theft. They have moral rights to copyrighted material in England, not in the US. Here, copyright is a temporary grant of power in order to further creativity. It has absolutely no basis in any Foucaltian concept of author as actual creator with a moral, ownership stake in their creations. Rather, the Framers understood that copyright is not a grant of nature, but of man. Yet nothing less than a natural right would allow for the property-style protection that you need in order to make the word 'theft' make sense.
It also doesn't take a genius to realize that information is a nonrivalrous resource that does not deplete when shared. It is thus fundamentally different from physical property, and cannot be 'stolen' in any but the most misleadingly analogous sense of the word.
My own position is that you did not see the light and come to understand copyright better. You simply became convinced, probably through the copious amount of 'property' language that we increasingly use to talk about information, that information and copyrighted work was or could be functionally the same as property (sadly like almost everyone else I talk to in today's copyright-fearing world). It is an easy argument to accept, insofar as it requires very little actual thought and just 'clicks' in the minds of people who already understand regular property. Heck, you don't have to do any actual analysis at all. Even many filesharers accept it as well (and just share in guilt). But it is logically and, insofar as it inappropriately confers moral standing to essentially a pragmatic law, morally corrupt to talk this way.
"I've become a productive internet user that hasn't had a file sharing program on my computer for 2 years now."
This is a common theme. This is what Siva Vaidhyanathan would say a move from "Copyright Poor" to "Copyright Rich."
In sum, you learned what you know, whether you realize it or not, from a very large body of publicly available once- or still-copyrighted material. Like the early United States, the early motion picture/recording industries, you benefitted from various 'loose' copyright protection effects. Now that you produce content, however, your tune has changed. Now that the money being made is your own, you are protective. This is unsurprising and completely rational for obvious reasons. Your position, which is now closer to a moral right position (see your "creative mind" indignant comment), is nonetheless not realistic in terms of how creativity works, and was rejected at the time of copyright's creation in the US.
Thus, I urge you to remember that as much as 'social benefits' have a bad name and are usually used more for rhetorical purposes than in actual arguments, usually those who are seeking to remove those benefits are those who have no need of them (anymore).
"Again, it's fun to hate the RIAA, but when you get familiar with the details of the alternatives, they can get pretty creepy."
There are other options than "hating the RIAA" and "choosing social-benefit-harming alternative payment methods."
And, yes, I don't think individuals trading files on P2P should require payment or should be liable under current copyright infringement law -- law that is created to punish commercial publishers of unauthorized content. The entire concept of regulating personal noncommercial use is more persuasive in the abstract and especially so if (like you) you hold copyrights you feel are being diluted by such sharing, but the devil's advocate has a strong positiong when you realise:
A) commercial distribution, thanks to market forces, can easily be more efficient and convenient and thus more attractive than P2P, as soon as content industries stop screaming bloody murder and trying to control personal uses and instead focus on their original purpose--distributing music to fans
and
B) the social benefit that is being provided--that of exposing citizens and artists to more perspectives and enriching society through the dissemination of ideas *and* expressions-- is wholly honorable, and has outweighed commercial concerns since the time of the Federalist papers when Jefferson made his oft-quoted 'when my friend lights his taper to mine' argument against strong copyright.
Copyright law is created for social benefit, not personal reward. Personal reward is a side effect, the latter enacted to encourage the former. There has not been a cogent or persuasive argument that says P2P is any different from other 'technology' shocks of the past, from piano rolls to home mix tapes to VHS time-shifting -- and there's no reason to think that just because a person can download a CD or film online that that means that the publisher is being deprived of a sale.
Further, because culture itself is now locked up via copyright more than any other time in history, there's a very strong argument for P2P as a release valve to head off self-perpetuating class divisions. But all of these arguments are only meant to add up to one thing, which is sufficient to justify P2P under copyright law, if someone would take the unpopular but absolutely necessary position of the Framers: P2P enables more creativity and social participation than it disables, and therefore should be allowed to remain free (as in speech) in the place of any protection system, technological or legal, that would be placed on it and would inhibit the free exchange it provides.
"Unfortunately, gropus like the EFF want you to keep thinking about this as no more than a struggle with an Evil Oligopoly, but the same stuff applies to every author protected by copyright."
It sounds like you're doing exactly what you're accusing the EFF of doing. If you want to engage in substantive dialogue rather than gross generalizations, talk about what you find wrong with their clearly labelled premises and conclusions.
Personally, I think the concept of a tax is incorrect as well. However, if you've read The Future of Ideas by Lessig, or Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, you might be more amenable to look at copyright historically, and see that the EFF is actually taking a dangerous route by allowing any compromise in this area (because in the 20th and 21st centuries, the public's side always compromises, while the copyright holder's side always has remained relatively rigid. The result is less and less rights for a public that wishes to participate in culture and not simply consume).
Copyright is an important law, but it is not a moral black/white law, and it has always functioned best when it is loose. As heretical as it sounds to today's ears (inculcated as we have been with an increasingly propertized concept of copyright over the last few decades), I don't think noncommercial usage should require payment, and I think stepping back from a 'solution' that is the only solution we should allow. Any other fix, via a tax or a 'smart' internet which charges and monitors for copyrighted-work transfer, would be a much more serious loss to all the public, including and especially future artists, than noncommercial personal copying.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that Nintendo has been making quite a hefty sum of money reissuing games on the GBA, and thus it should be equally unsurprising that Nintendo is primarily going after GBA emulation rather than the recent (and spectacular) Dolphin Gamecube emulator.
However unsurprising it is, this is the side of Nintendo that has always been there. I buy tons of their stuff, and no other company consistently produces innovative games, but they've always had an overactive corral of lawyers, and have spearheaded efforts to do far worse--such as outlaw sales of used copies and rentals in Japan, just to name some of their even more egregious efforts.
"Peter Jackson simply wanted to put so much more in that he couldn't get away with showing in theaters"
Surprisingly untrue. Read this interview from a few months ago:
Q: What's the definitive version of these films?
JACKSON: The theatrical versions are the definitive versions. I regard the extended cuts as being a novelty for the fans that really want to see the extra material.
" I don't think most people have an issue with kicking in an extra $20 for DVD-playing, a hard drive, and a broadband adapter."
Except that I think a majority of people in the console-buying demographic already have a hard drive (with a PC connected to it) and a DVD player (seeing as they can be had for $29 on their own now). Finally, the broadband adapter, good only for the console and requiring a separate connection, really isn't for the impulse-buy crowd. The features the XBox has don't really seem to be all that impressive anymore, and because the normal impulse buyer won't mod their XBox into a Linux media player and already have a DVD player, I don't see much of an advantage in getting an XBox for those features.
Like always with game consoles, it just comes down to the games- I want to play a lot of Gamecube games, but I don't really want to play many XBox games. Gamecube at $99 is a steal because you have things like Viewtiful Joe, Zelda, Metroid, Mario (Kart), etc...Honestly, somebody correct me if I am missing something, but I haven't seen even one must-buy game for the XBox since Panzer Dragoon Orta.
"--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
This confuses me. VBR is consistently more space efficient given the quality you get. Why on earth would you see VBR as a negative?"
Yeah, this comment caused some confusion with another guy, and I posted my explanation in a different reply here. This was an opinion formed from a test I did awhile back, and it was old enough that by now it is more an intuitive than scientific belief.
Still, it seems like in any lossy VBR compression scheme, such errors are bound to occur. I mean, you see this more observably in video compression, where VBR often introduces artifacting during scene changes. A song also has aural "scene changes," and thus a VBR control mechanism is only as good as its psychoacoustic model's prediction, analyzation and reverse-prediction (which is to say, not perfect). That's the general criticism. However, yeah, I may in fact not know what I'm talking about with the current specific LAME versions. =)
VBR is the only way to go for a high quality/size ratio, and the only settings that would be better than --alt-preset standard is preset extreme (which doesn't really gain much in quality, only size) or just flat out 320kbps (preset insane)."
Well, yeah, it's a question of efficiency. I did a paper for a Psychoacoustics class I took last year, and when I did some spectral analyzations and listening tests of VBR encoded MP3s that I had modified (by adding different frequencies that would be masked according to the psychoacoustic model), I found that older LAME sometimes discarded audible sound in the VBR encode that was retained in the CBR mode. I couldn't entirely explain what was causing it, but it didn't happen in CBR encodes.
That said, that was an older version, and I haven't done extensive cross-version LAME testing, since this stuff is probably much improved. My personal rips are an admittedly insane 320 kbps--just because I have the HD space and that way I don't have to make sure I'm not missing anything.
Of course, another post here mentioned that Warp is thinking of lossless, even 24-bit(!) versions, so they're waaaay ahead of me already.
I clicked over to the site and just decided to look up Plaid, one of my favorite artists. And, lo and behold, there was an EP vinyl release, Booc, that I hadn't even heard about. I could download individual tracks for $1.35, or the whole 4 song set for $4.29.
I clicked on the Add to Cart link for the set (ignoring the preview streams, since honestly, I would buy it anyways), and after checking the privacy policy (nothing will be sold, bartered, sent to you, etc for any reason) I tried to create a new account. I was told my email was already in use, and found out that the old regular warprecords.com accounts were conveniently auto-generated for bleep.com, so I just signed in, passed through the normal checkout stuff, entered in my credit card, and two clicks later I had the option of downloading individual tracks or a ZIP of all the music.
I opened this ZIP and found that they were named "01.mp3; 02.mp3" and so on. Sort of annoying, that. The quality is standard 128-320 kb/sec VBR MP3. Winamp gave the MP3s the following properties:
MPEG 1.0 layer 3 (VBR)
44100Hz Joint Stereo
CRCs: No
Copyrighted: No
Original: Yes
Emphasis: None
The ID3v1+2 tags were entered in fully, and included the following description in "encoded by":
LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard
AFAIK, LAME is the best encoder out there, so Warp apparently knows what they're doing. The MP3s sound great. One caveat--when you buy a song or album, you are buying *that download*. Downloads did not remain in any way accessible after the initial post-purchase links were accessed, so you had better hope the download doesn't get broken or lost.
The Good
--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
--No DRM (obviously)
--Fast download
--Easy to use store and site navigation
--ID3 Tags fully filled out
--Album prices are great
The Bad
--Generic filenames
--Downloads aren't held as permissions on the site for redownload later
--Single download prices could be better (blame UK conversion)
All in all, I liked Warp before and that might influence how useful this site is to me, but I was satisfied with only a few very small problems, and am looking forward to more downloads.
"You could say "but I wasn't going to buy it anyway, so they're not losing a sale!" Good luck getting anyone to listen to that."
I'll happily listen to that. First of all, copyright infringement is not theft. Let's be clear that the legal definition of theft is simply not the legal definition of copyright infringement. This is not a point to be argued, it is a fact of the law.
If, however, you believe it is a moral argument you are making, then fine, believe all you want that spreading information is morally wrong. Such a position appears absurd to me, as it did to the founding Framers of the Constitution who created the copyright clause and knew it must be a pragmatic balance between the healthy human urge to share and seek information and the need for pragmatic safeguards to maintain creativity. Absent that interpretation, you have 'moral rights' to creative works, which is a profoundly confused concept when people depend on those before them for the creative milieu from which they were inspired.
Additionally this causes you to pass off the 'loss of a sale,' a potential injury, as morally/legally equivalent to a real injury of say, actually depriving someone of their actual goods, insofar as both are the unequivocal 'evil' of theft. I suppose you could introduce degrees of culpability into your definition of theft for it to maintain coherence, but why bother? It'd be like repairing a split rope with a strand of hair, and won't solve the fundamental problems I just mentioned.
The MPAA's primary achievement this last century is changing the public awareness to believe such a change is reasonable, that such an "infringement-is-theft" perspective is reasonable and correct. This way of thinking is profoundly confused and completely unworkable for anyone except the current copyright holding corporations who enacted this shift of understanding, and why should they care that this has the final effect of destroying all future creativity by unrealistically sanctifying current copyrights?
You have a responsibility to others, and future generations who will depend on the creativity of today for their own, to not swallow this popular 'infringement-is-theft' ideology so readily; to reject this shortcut to dealing with the complications of an actual understanding of copyright. Please consider this next time you feel compelled to speak about something that 'sounds like theft to you.'
That's my main question. If intuition serves, then those subpoenas would be wrongfully obtained and a case couldn't proceed based on them. Naturally, the RIAA still has the option they've always had, namely that of filing a lawsuit to lawfully obtain personal info. For the 200-odd people who are now facing the RIAA 'dentists' (heh), it seems like these cases will be thrown out purely on procedural grounds.
Naturally, if this ruling stands, I see no other possible result than to either force the RIAA to do just that--file lawsuits before recieving personal info--, or to stop shaking down end users through threats of multi-million dollar lawsuits.
...that a P2P system might only let Canadian users share with US users and vice versa. Then the RIAA could only 'catch' Canadian uploaders and the CRIA could only 'catch' American uploaders.
I honestly don't know how international law would affect this, or even if such a thing is technologically possible, but jurisdiction issues would be a nightmare. What, would they have to involve Interpol? Would the court systems from either country really allow a lawsuit to proceed when the crime was committed in the other country? Or would the CRIA and RIAA start mass extriditions? It'd be a really interesting thing to set up.
"specifically the most important question of how many copies can be made"
I believe the article said or strongly implies that copies cannot be made. Pure speculation, but I assume that this means that it's some system whereby when a file is copied, the DRM dictates that the original must be destroyed.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right. Sometimes, I just get too repulsed by the 'property talk' that goes on and focus too much on the civic purposes of copyright. But, yes, it is most fairly a mediation between an artist and the public. It moderates between giving incentive to an author to provide whatever novel value they add, while eventually repaying and forward-paying the achronological 'public' which has added the rest of the value.
I don't quite agree with you on everything (NYTimes link was not an endorsement, just a citation to a random online journal to give an option; P2P can and should be used to advance culture and no, it doesn't bother me that permission is often not granted, as again the issue is not natural rights or authorial dignities but instead incentives), but it is good to hear a moderate voice.
It should say "...copyright's primary function is to make the restrictions small enough..." I didn't even want to comment on incentives, which are naturally also an aim of copyright. Incentive is good, to a reasonable extent. However, the incentives in retroactively extending copyright, or by changing it to lifetime plus whatever, is not adding incentives, period. It is just rewarding entrenched parties and destroying the purpose of copyright.
You need to base your assertion on more than that. You are, however, in good company--even Lawrence Lessig asserts that copyright is a property issue, probably, like many, for reasons of intuition and common vocabulary--but I think that our insistence on applying physical property norms to the fundamentally different product of ideas and creativity is dangerous.
The fact is, today that conception of creativity as property is an intuition that allows laws like the DMCA and SBCTEA to be passed with little oversight and hardly a gesture to the public interest. The reason is, senators and many others wouldn't dare challenge the sanctity of 'property,' confirmed as it is by numerous international treaties and constitutions, norms, and basic human intuitions. But creativity is not personal property--it is a unique social and cultural product. It is dangerous to analogize this, because, as now, people talk about physical property even when they think they're talking about creative products.
That may have been its purpose originally. Like many other industries, such as the film and music industry, the impetus for the Conger's existence does not need to be detrimental to copyright. Citing a civic intent at the birth of the Conger does not excuse the fact of what they eventually did to limit and sell back to the public their participation in their own culture, with no discernible benefit and only restrictions to the encouragement of creativity.
Bringing up arguments about eighteenth century "right to publish" is bogus. The first amendment automatically protects your right to publish. It even protects your right to parody a copyright work (although not to gain financially from such parody). As a previous post already said, Whatever helps you sleep at night "
The funny thing is, copyright as conceived in our constitution regards creative works--I said 'information' because that's a more basic designation than 'art' and is the most general subject of the Framer's Federalist paper discussions, but 'artistic' works if you insist-- as already belonging as much to the public who through generations of particapatory culture made current creativity possible as to the authors of that work.
The law does not grant protection to those who create "original" works in the strict sense if not the legal, because there are no original works. Every work is in some way derivative. Instead, the law grants temporary copy privileges to novel expressions, which is certainly tenuous ground no matter how you look at it. If you think there is 'genius' creativity, or are 'original' works out there, then you may be right to some small extent--but as the Framers correctly understood, the far larger influence is public culture that freely available.
You are arguing as if there needed to be some positive impetus in order to 'free' creative productions from their rightful ownership. That is simply wrong in both a historical and conceptual interpretation of copyright. Information and artistic expression already will spread if unimpeded, and copyright's primary function is to make the incentives to produce small enough that that spread will be as unimpeded as possible.
Copyright is a grant to protect one thing and one thing only--progress for the benefit of the public. That's what the constitution says, and you are free to disagree, but you better have better rationale than just an assumption that an author has a vague set of 'rights' that are granted by a spurious conception of total creativity of "original" works. At least the Framers listed their principles.
P2P is many things, but more studies are showing that, though the RIAA and copyright 'moral intuitionists' such as yourself don't want to hear it, P2P is culturally enabling a lot more than it is disabling, and regardless of trifling questions of legality is thus more of a boon to the true, real and forgotten purpose of copyright than it is an attack.
Way to go, Mr. Joe Football! Participate in a substantive discussion by attacking the use of facts!
"I prefer to steal Babbage's, but thats just me."
Please. You 'theft' nuts are why we're moving to a pre-Statute of Anne conception of copyright. You cannot look at information as property, and not end up at a situation where you advocate anything less than perpetual copyright.
Additionally, if you combine this with the insane but popular concept of creativity being a result of Foucoultian "genius," then you have a situation even worse than Conger-dominated England, circa 1708, where every literary work, like Shakespeare was inherited through a single publisher family and kept from the public for hundreds of years.
You think you are being 'common sense' and 'intuitive' in a lawyer-speak, responsibility-shirking world when you use words like 'theft.' But you of course don't realize that you're just taking an ultimately simple-minded approach that is absolutely inimical to the ideals of copyright that Framers like Madison and Jefferson intended when it was created--to be a civic-minded engine for progress, emphatically NOT a grant of property.
You'll have to forgive me, but I really don't see what the problem is. Lessig supports copyright to a limited extent, but (as evinced by his implicit support of unimpeded remixing) he believes in advancing creativity more than copyright as an end in and of itself. His words and actions on his blog support this, though it may indeed be argued to be counterproductive to support a CC license that allows a 'no derivative' clause. However, that isn't your argument.
Your argument is that Lessig wishes to empower the 'artists' via a 'no derivative' CC clause, but contradicts himself when he simultaneously argues for a cultural freedom to 'remix' art. In that sense, you're confusing speaking on the 'artists' behalf with speaking on the 'publishers' behalf. (I speak of these as different roles -- I don't deny a single person may often take on both.) Lessig wants to empower the artists by expanding creativity, and that is the sensible aim of copyright law.
However, a 'no derivative' clause is a negative clause. It prevents creativity from taking place while a lack of a 'no derivative' clause does not prevent or preclude the original. If someone remixes a song, the original still remains. The 'vision' is not compromised unless someone tries to pass off the remix as the original, which is far short of the extent of the 'no derivative' clause.
Finally, yes, Lessig appears to support the CC license. However, this is not a human rights issue, and as I said, it may make sense for him to support the license if the net effect is positive for creativity.
If he has explicitly said "I support the 'no derivative' clause," (and if so, I would love to see it) then he's contradicting himself. Otherwise, there's no reason to think he isn't just being pragmatic and supporting a license whose positive aspects outweight the negative.
The fact is, if you look at this, you see that the license includes a notice that fair use is still protected, and that the CC license with "no derivative" clause does so in order to facilitate copying and sharing. It is still closer to Lessig's position than current copyright law.
I do believe and agree that in this area, compromise like what Lessig may be endorsing with the CC license (and like copyright law itself has been doing for the last hundred years) might create confusion about what the 'principles' of copyright law are. This surely will make some of us uncomfortable -- especially those of us who believe that copyright is supposed to make some sort of moral/logical sense, and not merely be a pragmatic engine for creativity.
However, as we've already seen, copyright does not operate under any principles except to enable more creativity than it disables. Copyright is not a moral law. It does not have unimpeachable logic that directs its content. Thus, Lessig need not either be totally black or white, and does not contradict himself by agreeing to less than he wishes for in his blog--since copyright allows [sorry, I can't help it] "gray" principles.
I've had a lot of conversations about copyright, and it never fails to amaze me how misunderstood copyright law is by people nowadays. The 'theft' theme continues to pop up. People seem to adopt the notion that copyright infringement is theft, and I understand that it's an attractive idea, especially ever since the completely misguided term 'intellectual property' entered the common vocabulary.
However, you should understand that the Framers of the constitution entertained and roundly rejected any notion of copyright as a moral right, and hence on equal terms with physical theft. They have moral rights to copyrighted material in England, not in the US. Here, copyright is a temporary grant of power in order to further creativity. It has absolutely no basis in any Foucaltian concept of author as actual creator with a moral, ownership stake in their creations. Rather, the Framers understood that copyright is not a grant of nature, but of man. Yet nothing less than a natural right would allow for the property-style protection that you need in order to make the word 'theft' make sense.
It also doesn't take a genius to realize that information is a nonrivalrous resource that does not deplete when shared. It is thus fundamentally different from physical property, and cannot be 'stolen' in any but the most misleadingly analogous sense of the word.
My own position is that you did not see the light and come to understand copyright better. You simply became convinced, probably through the copious amount of 'property' language that we increasingly use to talk about information, that information and copyrighted work was or could be functionally the same as property (sadly like almost everyone else I talk to in today's copyright-fearing world). It is an easy argument to accept, insofar as it requires very little actual thought and just 'clicks' in the minds of people who already understand regular property. Heck, you don't have to do any actual analysis at all. Even many filesharers accept it as well (and just share in guilt). But it is logically and, insofar as it inappropriately confers moral standing to essentially a pragmatic law, morally corrupt to talk this way.
This is a common theme. This is what Siva Vaidhyanathan would say a move from "Copyright Poor" to "Copyright Rich."
In sum, you learned what you know, whether you realize it or not, from a very large body of publicly available once- or still-copyrighted material. Like the early United States, the early motion picture/recording industries, you benefitted from various 'loose' copyright protection effects. Now that you produce content, however, your tune has changed. Now that the money being made is your own, you are protective. This is unsurprising and completely rational for obvious reasons. Your position, which is now closer to a moral right position (see your "creative mind" indignant comment), is nonetheless not realistic in terms of how creativity works, and was rejected at the time of copyright's creation in the US.
Thus, I urge you to remember that as much as 'social benefits' have a bad name and are usually used more for rhetorical purposes than in actual arguments, usually those who are seeking to remove those benefits are those who have no need of them (anymore).
There are other options than "hating the RIAA" and "choosing social-benefit-harming alternative payment methods."
And, yes, I don't think individuals trading files on P2P should require payment or should be liable under current copyright infringement law -- law that is created to punish commercial publishers of unauthorized content. The entire concept of regulating personal noncommercial use is more persuasive in the abstract and especially so if (like you) you hold copyrights you feel are being diluted by such sharing, but the devil's advocate has a strong positiong when you realise:
A) commercial distribution, thanks to market forces, can easily be more efficient and convenient and thus more attractive than P2P, as soon as content industries stop screaming bloody murder and trying to control personal uses and instead focus on their original purpose--distributing music to fans
and
B) the social benefit that is being provided--that of exposing citizens and artists to more perspectives and enriching society through the dissemination of ideas *and* expressions-- is wholly honorable, and has outweighed commercial concerns since the time of the Federalist papers when Jefferson made his oft-quoted 'when my friend lights his taper to mine' argument against strong copyright.
Copyright law is created for social benefit, not personal reward. Personal reward is a side effect, the latter enacted to encourage the former. There has not been a cogent or persuasive argument that says P2P is any different from other 'technology' shocks of the past, from piano rolls to home mix tapes to VHS time-shifting -- and there's no reason to think that just because a person can download a CD or film online that that means that the publisher is being deprived of a sale.
Further, because culture itself is now locked up via copyright more than any other time in history, there's a very strong argument for P2P as a release valve to head off self-perpetuating class divisions. But all of these arguments are only meant to add up to one thing, which is sufficient to justify P2P under copyright law, if someone would take the unpopular but absolutely necessary position of the Framers: P2P enables more creativity and social participation than it disables, and therefore should be allowed to remain free (as in speech) in the place of any protection system, technological or legal, that would be placed on it and would inhibit the free exchange it provides.
It sounds like you're doing exactly what you're accusing the EFF of doing. If you want to engage in substantive dialogue rather than gross generalizations, talk about what you find wrong with their clearly labelled premises and conclusions.
Personally, I think the concept of a tax is incorrect as well. However, if you've read The Future of Ideas by Lessig, or Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, you might be more amenable to look at copyright historically, and see that the EFF is actually taking a dangerous route by allowing any compromise in this area (because in the 20th and 21st centuries, the public's side always compromises, while the copyright holder's side always has remained relatively rigid. The result is less and less rights for a public that wishes to participate in culture and not simply consume).
Copyright is an important law, but it is not a moral black/white law, and it has always functioned best when it is loose. As heretical as it sounds to today's ears (inculcated as we have been with an increasingly propertized concept of copyright over the last few decades), I don't think noncommercial usage should require payment, and I think stepping back from a 'solution' that is the only solution we should allow. Any other fix, via a tax or a 'smart' internet which charges and monitors for copyrighted-work transfer, would be a much more serious loss to all the public, including and especially future artists, than noncommercial personal copying.
However unsurprising it is, this is the side of Nintendo that has always been there. I buy tons of their stuff, and no other company consistently produces innovative games, but they've always had an overactive corral of lawyers, and have spearheaded efforts to do far worse--such as outlaw sales of used copies and rentals in Japan, just to name some of their even more egregious efforts.
Surprisingly untrue. Read this interview from a few months ago:
Q: What's the definitive version of these films?
JACKSON: The theatrical versions are the definitive versions. I regard the extended cuts as being a novelty for the fans that really want to see the extra material.
Except that I think a majority of people in the console-buying demographic already have a hard drive (with a PC connected to it) and a DVD player (seeing as they can be had for $29 on their own now). Finally, the broadband adapter, good only for the console and requiring a separate connection, really isn't for the impulse-buy crowd. The features the XBox has don't really seem to be all that impressive anymore, and because the normal impulse buyer won't mod their XBox into a Linux media player and already have a DVD player, I don't see much of an advantage in getting an XBox for those features.
Like always with game consoles, it just comes down to the games- I want to play a lot of Gamecube games, but I don't really want to play many XBox games. Gamecube at $99 is a steal because you have things like Viewtiful Joe, Zelda, Metroid, Mario (Kart), etc...Honestly, somebody correct me if I am missing something, but I haven't seen even one must-buy game for the XBox since Panzer Dragoon Orta.
Yeah, this comment caused some confusion with another guy, and I posted my explanation in a different reply here. This was an opinion formed from a test I did awhile back, and it was old enough that by now it is more an intuitive than scientific belief.
Still, it seems like in any lossy VBR compression scheme, such errors are bound to occur. I mean, you see this more observably in video compression, where VBR often introduces artifacting during scene changes. A song also has aural "scene changes," and thus a VBR control mechanism is only as good as its psychoacoustic model's prediction, analyzation and reverse-prediction (which is to say, not perfect). That's the general criticism. However, yeah, I may in fact not know what I'm talking about with the current specific LAME versions. =)
wtf?
VBR is the only way to go for a high quality/size ratio, and the only settings that would be better than --alt-preset standard is preset extreme (which doesn't really gain much in quality, only size) or just flat out 320kbps (preset insane)."
Well, yeah, it's a question of efficiency. I did a paper for a Psychoacoustics class I took last year, and when I did some spectral analyzations and listening tests of VBR encoded MP3s that I had modified (by adding different frequencies that would be masked according to the psychoacoustic model), I found that older LAME sometimes discarded audible sound in the VBR encode that was retained in the CBR mode. I couldn't entirely explain what was causing it, but it didn't happen in CBR encodes.
That said, that was an older version, and I haven't done extensive cross-version LAME testing, since this stuff is probably much improved. My personal rips are an admittedly insane 320 kbps--just because I have the HD space and that way I don't have to make sure I'm not missing anything.
Of course, another post here mentioned that Warp is thinking of lossless, even 24-bit(!) versions, so they're waaaay ahead of me already.
I clicked on the Add to Cart link for the set (ignoring the preview streams, since honestly, I would buy it anyways), and after checking the privacy policy (nothing will be sold, bartered, sent to you, etc for any reason) I tried to create a new account. I was told my email was already in use, and found out that the old regular warprecords.com accounts were conveniently auto-generated for bleep.com, so I just signed in, passed through the normal checkout stuff, entered in my credit card, and two clicks later I had the option of downloading individual tracks or a ZIP of all the music.
I opened this ZIP and found that they were named "01.mp3; 02.mp3" and so on. Sort of annoying, that. The quality is standard 128-320 kb/sec VBR MP3. Winamp gave the MP3s the following properties:
MPEG 1.0 layer 3 (VBR)
44100Hz Joint Stereo
CRCs: No
Copyrighted: No
Original: Yes
Emphasis: None
The ID3v1+2 tags were entered in fully, and included the following description in "encoded by":
LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard
AFAIK, LAME is the best encoder out there, so Warp apparently knows what they're doing. The MP3s sound great. One caveat--when you buy a song or album, you are buying *that download*. Downloads did not remain in any way accessible after the initial post-purchase links were accessed, so you had better hope the download doesn't get broken or lost.
The Good
--Quality encoding, even if it is VBR.
--No DRM (obviously)
--Fast download
--Easy to use store and site navigation
--ID3 Tags fully filled out
--Album prices are great
The Bad
--Generic filenames
--Downloads aren't held as permissions on the site for redownload later
--Single download prices could be better (blame UK conversion)
All in all, I liked Warp before and that might influence how useful this site is to me, but I was satisfied with only a few very small problems, and am looking forward to more downloads.
I was an MP3.com artist and for obvious reasons wanted to opt out. Here's the link.
I'll happily listen to that. First of all, copyright infringement is not theft. Let's be clear that the legal definition of theft is simply not the legal definition of copyright infringement. This is not a point to be argued, it is a fact of the law.
If, however, you believe it is a moral argument you are making, then fine, believe all you want that spreading information is morally wrong. Such a position appears absurd to me, as it did to the founding Framers of the Constitution who created the copyright clause and knew it must be a pragmatic balance between the healthy human urge to share and seek information and the need for pragmatic safeguards to maintain creativity. Absent that interpretation, you have 'moral rights' to creative works, which is a profoundly confused concept when people depend on those before them for the creative milieu from which they were inspired.
Additionally this causes you to pass off the 'loss of a sale,' a potential injury, as morally/legally equivalent to a real injury of say, actually depriving someone of their actual goods, insofar as both are the unequivocal 'evil' of theft. I suppose you could introduce degrees of culpability into your definition of theft for it to maintain coherence, but why bother? It'd be like repairing a split rope with a strand of hair, and won't solve the fundamental problems I just mentioned.
The MPAA's primary achievement this last century is changing the public awareness to believe such a change is reasonable, that such an "infringement-is-theft" perspective is reasonable and correct. This way of thinking is profoundly confused and completely unworkable for anyone except the current copyright holding corporations who enacted this shift of understanding, and why should they care that this has the final effect of destroying all future creativity by unrealistically sanctifying current copyrights?
You have a responsibility to others, and future generations who will depend on the creativity of today for their own, to not swallow this popular 'infringement-is-theft' ideology so readily; to reject this shortcut to dealing with the complications of an actual understanding of copyright. Please consider this next time you feel compelled to speak about something that 'sounds like theft to you.'
Naturally, if this ruling stands, I see no other possible result than to either force the RIAA to do just that--file lawsuits before recieving personal info--, or to stop shaking down end users through threats of multi-million dollar lawsuits.
I honestly don't know how international law would affect this, or even if such a thing is technologically possible, but jurisdiction issues would be a nightmare. What, would they have to involve Interpol? Would the court systems from either country really allow a lawsuit to proceed when the crime was committed in the other country? Or would the CRIA and RIAA start mass extriditions? It'd be a really interesting thing to set up.
I believe the article said or strongly implies that copies cannot be made. Pure speculation, but I assume that this means that it's some system whereby when a file is copied, the DRM dictates that the original must be destroyed.
Wow, the MPAA isn't playing games this time. To think all this time the appeal was a feint!