Indeed. And communism would work great if you could keep everyone motivated and working "as hard as they should", too. Communism fails as an economic system because it's not in any individual's personal interest to work extra hard because all the benefits go to the community (which means he only gets back a diluted slice of the benefits). I see the same problems with open-source. We're supposed to work for the betterment of society and old man Stallman hasn't offered up much in the way of financial incentives for creators. "Do it for society" is the best he's willing to give us. Thanks, but I live in a capitalist society because it just plain works better.
I hope you're making a joke to show how preposterous it is to claim "If there was no copyright, those licenses would be unnecessary". (Besides, your point is moot considering the fact that those are tiny binaries and technology exists to make it much harder to decompile binaries.)
If that's the case, don't expect to be profitable for that specific business model. They need to change their business to something that will make sense.
You want the government to create a law to protect your failing open source business model?
The government sets up systems so that trade can occur and the producers have an incentive. There are lots of laws we have made up by fiat, to produce the things that society wants/needs. Personally, I don't believe in anything called "natural law", but people have convinced themselves that "natural law" exists and then say that governments are just enforcing them. For example, I don't believe in any inherent law of land ownership or property ownership. We create them because they help society function better. One can easily imagine hippy-commune type of societies where everything is shared and no one owns anything. That kind of society is not evil or wrong. The ideas of property ownership and land ownership are created by fiat by mankind to help society function better. (No, they aren't created by "god" or "natural law".)
Also the "create a law" part your talking about is a centuries old existing law known as "copyright".
I'd also recommend that if you're going to dis copyright law, then you might as well be consistent and ditch all the laws surrounding intellectual property - including the FSF ideas about open source. Otherwise, you're talking about using government power to enforce your ideas about how software should be shared. So here's the question aimed right back at you: You want the government to create a law to support open source software? Sounds to me like you have created insufficient incentives for the producer, i.e. you've created a broken business model.
When I first read the summary, a red flag went off for me - and it was the fact that we're *only* talking about digital sales - and even worse, the summary talks about one subcategory of digital sales: "single track downloads". The summary seems to have ignored physical sales of music and whole album digital sales. My first thought was to question how the Canadian balance of physical to digital sales differed from other nations.
Also, talking about how the Candian digital sales is growing faster (percentage-wise) than the US could also be a red herring if the Canadian market for digital sales was very low five years ago. (Example: if you start with 10,000 digital sales per year five years ago, you can get 100% growth each year and still have lower overall digital sales than a country that was selling 1,000,000 sales five years ago and had 10% growth each year.) In fact, the MichaelGeist information confirms that this is what happened - i.e. that the Canadians digital sales numbers started much lower - when he says "Canada seems likely to pass the U.S. on per capita single track downloads in about 18 months". So, the chart Michael Geist produces showing six years of faster-than-US sales growth in "single track downloads" is really a chart showing that Canada is still playing catch-up. Also, I wonder how "single track downloads" differs from "digital sales" in general.
According to the Norway sample data (http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/RIN-samplepage-2012.pdf), digital sales account for 45% of total revenue and "single track downloads" accounts for 18% of digital sales. This means in Norway that "single track downloads" accounts for only 8.1% of revenue. This also raises a red-flag for me because it makes me think that "single track downloads" was a subcategory that Geist could seize on to paint a rosy picture, even if the total picture was different.
I've also noticed that a lot of comments on the Slashdot thread seem to think we're talking about "total sales" when were talking only about one component of music sales: "digital music sales" or "single track downloads".
As much as I hate when the music industry spins numbers (for example, assuming that one act of piracy equals one lost sale to calculate the amount of money lost to piracy), we should also acknowledge that the pro-piracy crowd spins their numbers as well. I'd look at the actual numbers, but the entire report is only available if you pay.
Whenever I read stuff like this, I know it's going to draw out all the triumphalist pirates. As someone who opposes piracy, here's how I see it -- let's say a bunch of criminals were writing software to steal your credit card numbers or bitcoin cash. Or let's say that biological viruses could talk. They'd talk about how they're going to win - how you can't stop Chinese or Russian hackers from stealing your personal data or your credit card numbers. Viruses would laugh about how your latest vaccine is going to be rendered ineffective and you should just give up because they're going to mutate and they're going to keep coming at you and kill as many human beings as they can. How would you feel? Would you give up or would it just double your conviction that hackers and biological viruses were scumbags - not only are they harming you but they have the audacity to add insult to injury? That's how I feel about it. Pirate triumphalism makes me feel angrier towards pirates and piracy -- just as you'd get angry if biological viruses like polio or HIV appeared on Slashdot and started taunting humans about how it's "going to keep mutating so you might as well give up".
I'm actually not sure if the statistic is about "habitual" law breaking. It was a little unclear from the article. It could be interpreted as "over half of PC users have, at one time in their life, knowingly used pirated software" or maybe it means "over half of PC users currently have at least one piece of pirated software on their computers". I really don't know what exactly the claim is.
Also, just so you know: roughly 2/3rds of Americans consider piracy to be "theft". Your claims about 60% habitually braking the law and most of the other 40% not giving a crap seems overblown.
"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of Likely U.S. Voters agree that someone who downloads a movie online without paying for it is stealing from the company that made the film. Eighteen percent (18%) do not view this free downloading as theft. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure."
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/january_2012/71_see_government_censorship_ of_internet_as_bigger_threat_than_illegal_downloading
> "I would, in fact, argue that the current traffic laws *are* broken as currently used."
I thought someone might counterargue that traffic laws need to be changed. You can argue that traffic laws should be changed/liberalized but you need to make some extreme changes to the laws to be consistent. You need to argue for the more extreme position of making the traffic laws so liberal that a large majority are *never* breaking them. I'm doubtful that you can do that without also making the roads much more unsafe. For example, maybe you can change the speed limits in neighborhoods from 25 MPH to 50 MPH, and the large majority of people would not travel over 50 MPH because it would be self-evidently dangerous (although I guarantee most teenage males would still break the speed limit for the thrill of driving fast - most of us have, at one time or another, taken a car out on a road and seen how fast it would go). But, putting 50 MPH speed limits in neighborhoods would drastically increase the danger of car accidents. I doubt there's a solution which changes the traffic laws so that most people would *never* violate them AND accomplishes the goal of keeping people driving safely.
I'd also bet that the *large* majority of people have, at one time or another, texted while driving (even I've done that, though over the past six months, I've been doing a good job of never doing that). It's dangerous for the driver, other people on or near the road. I also think it's perfectly fine for the police to give you a ticket if you are seen driving while texting.
I'd also say that breaking a law doesn't mean you disagree with it (as with the speeding example). Heck, if I had to accept the position of legalizing every law I've broken, it would be a bad world to live in. For example, when I was a kid, I shoplifted once. I do not agree with eliminating laws against shoplifting. I wouldn't be surprised if most people alive have, at least once in their life, shoplifted. This does not mean they condone it.
> If *most* of the population are criminals... is it really a crime?
I have to question that kind of logic. For one thing, I bet something like 99% of the population have broken traffic laws at some point - whether that means speeding or rolling through a stop sign or whatever. If your logic is correct, then we should get rid of a lot of traffic laws as well. Even worse, some recent reports say that more than 1 in 3 men in South Africa have admitted to rape (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-202_162-7092661.html). Assuming your logic is correct, South Africa is getting really close to legalizing rape.
I bet porn movies cost as much as the movies created by the MPAA, so that system would totally work. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh god, that's funny. I crack me up sometimes.
You sound like a libertarian complaining about how all taxes are theft and, therefore, inherently immoral. I also consider you equally bad at figuring out how to create a decent society or country since any good system relies on violating some "first principle" that you hold dear. It's like you've tied yourself up in spurious logic. Then again, maybe there's a method to your madness: you've figured out a way to pirate shit and salve your conscience with this kind of thinking.
I wonder if I can try it: hmmmm. Our food is the result of thousands of years of our ancestors' selective breeding. The earth and the sun and the air are what makes plants grow, and the earth belongs to all of us. How dare they charge us money for something that comes from nature and thousands of years of human farming? Damn it! I deserve to get everything I want from the grocery store for free! I understand that grocery stores can't survive with this kind of thinking, but the whole system is rotten and unethical from the ground up! It is not my fault that the system is unethical. I like your thinking, sqrt(2)! I could go a long way with these ideas!
> "Stop using scarcity [wikipedia.org] with something that is an unlimited resource."
Scarcity is used as a method to get you (the consumer) to pay for the entertainment, and creating entertainment costs money. If companies could create entertainment and give it away, and you'd generously donate to them so that they could get well-paid (preferably as well as they'd get paid under an "artificial scarcity" system), then they probably wouldn't have a problem doing that. (Assuming they aren't consumed by the fear that they're getting underpaid). The problem comes in when people don't/won't donate. It's easy to get into a comfortable situation where you simply aren't thinking about production costs of your entertainment. In that sense, "artificial scarcity" is the second-best solution in that it maintains enough income for the creators to continue to create. The best possible system is one where they give it away and you donate. But, if enough people aren't donating (and I don't personally believe they will) then the artificial scarcity model is the best result (while maintaining the economic viability of the businesses creating the "resource").
If you're going to complain about "artificial scarcity", I also think you should start complaining about a whole bunch of other stuff in society where "resources" are not fully utilized because they have a price tag attached to them. For example: more theaters aren't sold out for every show - force movie theaters to offer reduced price or free tickets to movies. Force greyhound buses to carry you around for free or reduced prices until all the seats are full. Force concerts to let in extra people if the show isn't sold out. Force rental property owners to offer their apartments for free or reduced prices if they aren't being occupied. Force amusement parks to let people in for free or reduced price until the park reaches capacity.
Personally, I think this system would fail because people would get good at showing up whenever these events aren't at full capacity. The end result is that you drive them out of business, which would make you guilty of mismanaging the economy in an attempt to "fully utilize our underutilized resources". I feel the same way about this "artificial scarcity of digital media" complaint - it would likely lead to bankruptcy, which results in nobody having access to those resources.
> "I'm surprised too, but I think this ruling is satisfying. After all, just because it's hard/impossible to find the people who actually committed the crime (or perhaps it's just a civil suit), that doesn't mean they should be able to successfully punish/sue the wrong people."
I don't agree with punishing the wifi owner for the actual crime of the person who uses their wifi, but I do think wifi should be locked down for a variety of reasons - including piracy, viruses, hacking, etc. I also think ISPs should be allowed to ban people's computers if they're part of a botnet to do DOS attacks or send spam or viruses. I actually think it's kind of stupid the way we've put virtually no effort into securing the computer infrastructure. Perhaps if someone's wifi is left open and crimes are committed, then the ISPs should be proactive in helping to ensure that people's wifi's are made reasonably secure. If people are intentionally not securing their wifis, then maybe a small fine (which is not connected to the crimes committed) which is attached to the monthly bill.
> "I wish that the media corporations stopped trolling and started creating some business models which actually make sense in this day and age. All others have already moved forward."
I was on reddit the other day and the creator of Isohunt mentioned several times that making money from piracy was the holy grail and he had no idea how to do it. (Yeah, Kim Dotcom got money off of piracy, though I'm sure he was earning far less than market value, which makes sense since he didn't have the burden of any costs of production.) So, here's your chance to give suggestions. Preferably ones that don't end up making a *lot* less money than the current system. For example, I recently read a suggestion that companies should put all their movies on something like Hulu for free (but ad supported). The problem is that ads aren't close to paying the bills once you include the cost of making movies and the bandwidth of sending them to you. The only reason ad-supported movies are even available on Hulu is because they're long past their prime, so they're being used to make a few extra bucks. Maybe the solution is to only create movies that cost less than $10 million to make - then, even if piracy grows and takes 90% of your profits, you could still get by. In many ways, I think that's a sad outcome for the movie industry. Even more worryingly, I've noticed a lot of articles talking about new ad-skipping technologies (http://www.dishtvblog.com/dish-news/the-dish-hopper-adds-all-new-feature-auto-hop-that-will-allow-for-a-commercial-skipping-option/) and several people I know have been talking about how they always skip the ads. Which makes me think: gee, people don't want to pay for their entertainment and they're becoming more empowered and pushy about being able to skip the ads, too. I wonder how anyone is supposed to pay for the costs of creating stuff?
So, I just thought I'd put that question there. It's easy to say "hey, you guys should figure out a way to...", but doing it is harder than saying it. I'm skeptical that there are any business models that can undercut piracy which don't also involve a large cut in revenues.
A currency whose only recourse for victims of theft is to shut up and stop using it. Where do I sign up?
Just like cash.
Which, by the way, is a good argument for not keeping stacks of cash around your house. Personally, I almost never have more then $60 in cash in my house or on my person at any time. Meanwhile, I hear about people having thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins on their computer.
Actually the tax is quite low - 50 years ago, the tax was a lot higher.
I'm sorry, but this is a lie. While the federal income tax rate itself might be "lower" than it was 50 years ago, that is only part of the picture.
Not a lie. The top income tax bracket was, indeed, higher 50 years ago than it is today. Between the mid 1930s and until 1980 (when Reagan came to power), the top income tax bracket ranged between 70% and 94% (the current top tax bracket is 35%). In fact, in 1943, there was a law put in place to make the top income tax bracket 100% (yes, the US government would take 100% of the money you earned over a certain amount), but the law was struck down before taxes were actually collected in April. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Federal_income_tax_rates_2
It really doesn't matter what "Federal Medicare and Social Security taxes along with State and Local income taxes tacked onto our paychecks" you count up. You simply aren't going to reach the equivalent of a 70% or a 94% tax bracket.
Are you sure it is the US that you are in? I can think of many adjectives to describe our sad republic, but "civilized" is not among them. Go do a "police brutality" search on youtube and then come back and boast about how civilized we are.
A contract requires consent. Please show me where I consented to this contract.
I agree. Society should do nothing at all to help you (including providing no medical care, no education, etc) until you are old enough to be considered a consenting adult (at the age of 18), at which time, you can sign your name with an "X" to agree to the contract (since you'll be too illiterate to actually write your name).
"Going Galt" is about far more than simply taxes. It's about political corruption and cronyism, and using the power of government as a tool of the powerful to crush competition and/or as leverage to demand a piece of the action and/or control over innovation. It's about rejecting redistributionist/collectivist tyranny.
The problem is that people have a subjective view of reality which is tied up in their own interests. The things they like are "good" and the things they don't like are "evil". Many rich people don't like paying taxes, so they construct a kind of false reality in their own minds where they are the victims of "political corruption and cronyism", thus justifying their own personal interests in not paying taxes. Personally, it seems to me like, to the extent that there is political corruption in the US, it being driven by the rich not by the poor (as much as conservatives would like to believe otherwise). All of this "going Galt" stuff just seems like personal interests being dressed up as "objective and rational responses to a system that oppresses the rich". I think the only reason this twisted view of the world has permeated below the super-rich class in society is because the conservative news has been pushing this narrative, and they've managed to hoodwink the middle class into believing that they are being oppressed. The fact that you call it "rejecting redistributionist/collectivist tyranny" shows just how deeply they've tricked you into their worldview.
"Yes, the U.S. Government is what makes tech companies successful. I'm sure that the $666.2 billion defense budget I mentioned earlier played such a huge role in the rise of Facebook."
Even though I want to agree with you about lowering the amount of money we're spending on defense, I think the more important point is that $666 billion is a fraction of the money spent by the US government (the budget is $3.5 trillion, by the way). All you did was pick out some part of the budget and said, "this part of the US budget didn't help Facebook succeed, therefore, nothing the government has done has ever helped them."
> "Now granted, I don't know jack about the Koch brothers except that they are rich and conservative."
Covert Operations
The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.
...
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
> To liberals [being rich and conservative], that's reason enough to hate them so those are the only real attacks I've seen leveled against them."
Oh, gee, you don't sound the least bit biased there.
> "So tell me, what have they done that is worthy of the pure, unadulterated hatred that you and others have towards these guys?"
Maybe because they've spent so much money creating "think tanks" to influence the media and give conservatives talking points. They want to abolish most of the government and social programs, including social security, medicare, medicaid, environmental protections, labor laws, undermine public acceptance of global warming, want to dramatically reduce taxes on people and corporations. They will effectively create a feeble government and replace that will a plutocracy of business owners who can pollute as much as they want. Its like they want a return to the year 1900 with dirty cities, child labor, no safety net for the poor or elderly, and at the top of it all are wealthy factory owners who control the government.
They did a few good things. I guess that pays for all the bad things they did and are attempting to do. From the same article:
Koch was the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential candidate in the 1980 presidential election, sharing the party ticket with presidential candidate Ed Clark. The Clark–Koch ticket promising to abolish Social Security, the Federal Reserve Board, welfare, minimum-wage laws, corporate taxes, all price supports and subsidies for agriculture and business, and U.S. Federal agencies including the SEC, EPA, ICC, FTC, OSHA, FBI, CIA, and DOE.... Koch is skeptical about anthropogenic Global Warming, and thinks a warmer planet would be good...
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
All their charitable giving wouldn't make up for the damage they'd do by dramatically reducing taxes on the rich. It's like someone giving you a few bucks to win your affection, then lobbying the government to cut their tax bills by millions, and we're supposed to go "well, he did give me a few bucks, I'm not allowed to think that their government lobbying is bad."
> "With your argumentation "lost sale" = "theft", you could also argue, that a negative [critique] in the newspaper is "theft", because it causes lost sales."
People are allowed to exchange meta-information about products in order to help other people make an informed decision about buying it. Piracy is getting a free copy of a product and then deciding whether or not you want to pay for it (which, very often, people skip the paying part because it adds nothing to their already-appropriated copy). Don't try to equate piracy with negative critiques.
Piracy also has similarities to other bad actions which are outlawed:
* Sneaking into a concert or amusement park or theater - hey, you can't "prove" they were going to buy a ticket, and their ears aren't soaking up sound so that other people can't hear it (non-rivalry). As long as the concert isn't so full that you're actually blocking paying customers from coming in, then this is similar to piracy. You could even make the argument that by sneaking in you're doing the band/park/movie a favor because you might recommend it to your friends or buy merchandise - which is pretty similar to the argument pirates use to say that they should be allowed to pirate.
* Sneaking onto a Greyhound bus without paying - again, you can't prove they would've bought a ticket, and as long as the bus isn't 100% packed - why not let people get away with this? Afterall, their presence on the bus has a negligible effect on the cost of running the bus (which was already travelling to your destination).
* Living in a house or apartment without paying rent - as long as someone leaves the place in as good of condition as it started (or pays for cleaners to come in afterwards), then why shouldn't people be allowed to squat whereever they want as long as it wasn't going to have actual paying tenents in the place?
On the other hand, if people give a concert or amusement park or movie or Greyhound a bad review so that people don't pay for those things - that's perfectly okay. Piracy is not like a bad review; it fits in with the other examples. Personally, I think the owner/management of the concert, amusement park, theater, greyhound bus, or apartment should have the right to chose whether or not someone is allowed in without paying and have the right to kick people out if they try to get in without paying. Similarly, I think content creators should have the same right to deprive people of their own digital creations if those people aren't going to pay - and I say that because I don't believe amusement parks, concerts, theaters, buses, apartments, or digital-content creation are going to survive very well if everyone can unilaterally decide that they want the product but don't want to pay (and who would want to pay for something you can get for free?)
> Line of support #1: correlation without causal evidence.
Pirate logic seems to be "never blame piracy for anything". Stop working out and start overeating, you get fat. Hey, hey - it's just "correlation not causal evidence". I think the fact that music sales peaked exactly six months after Napster was released and has declined 60-70% in the intervening 10 years, leading to the lowest music sales in forty years is a bit suggestive.
> Line of support #2: anecdote. Apparently, if you 'know plenty of people', why, that ought to be enough proof for anybody. What with only 7 billiion or so other people on this planet you presumably do not know, your 'plenty of people' that you know surely covers all the bases.
Yeah, that makes sense. You have to test any theory on 7 billion people in order to be sure. Give me a break. If someone drinks antifreeze and they drop dead - hey, it's not proof of anything unless we get 7 billion other people to do the same thing.
> Line of support #3: projection. Since you do or think a certain thing, everyone else must be doing and thinking the same thing. Another term for this is narcissism, but that's putting it nicely.
Resorting to insults, huh? I like how you walk about "science" and "evidence" and then use personal insults against people you disagree with. I heard the most important science debates in history were settled with personal insults. Also, it's funny how everyone I know who's a big fan of piracy also stopped buying stuff. Again, more of the "never blame piracy for anything" nonsense, and throw in some personal insults just to screw the conversation.
> Line of support #4: lack of use of iTunes music card. I'm not even sure what logical fallacy this falls under, but then again, I'm fairly sure this proves nothing. That's no worse than your other points, though.
Considering that I'd be more likely to use a gift card to buy music than pay actual money, yet I still don't even bother with the gift card, I think it shows how easy access to music undercuts any desire to pay for it.
> Please educate yourself on the meaning of 'evidence' and 'science' and then reassess your thoughts. These words do not mean what you think they mean; that much is obvious.
How about if you cut the crap and admit that you like free shit and you have to rely on talking shit about anyone who disagrees with you.
I'm not sure if Kickstarter is a "bubble" that will burst. But, I do think there might be a risk of Kickstarter plateauing. I could see two major reasons why kickstarter might start to stumble in the future:
If there start to be more projects that fail. Projects can fail for a large variety of reasons - I work in the games industry, and I've seen a lot of college-age people try to get game projects started only to have them unravel because of conflicts within the group, or someone got too busy with school or their girlfriend or underestimated the amount of work required to create their ambitious project, etc.
The second major reason is that there might be an increase in fraud - people setting up projects that are designed purely to take people's money and disappear. Kickstarter says they don't police what people are doing with the money (which makes sense, since it'd take a lot of effort to do that). Take, for example, this fraudulent project which fortunately ended up getting outed before they reached their goal (which means they got no money in the end):
"There was a fairly high profile hoax/scam thing on Kickstarter for “Mythic: The Story Of Gods And Men” that was swiftly pulverized by community sleuthing. As suggested previously, one is - in many cases - funding the “idea” of a game, ideas being a quantity in ready supply. If they had been less stupid, less obvious in their ruse, they could have taken in their eighty thousand dollars and then promptly evaporated. We may expect the next villain to utilize a more sophisticated approach." http://penny-arcade.com/2012/05/04
The "Mythic" game was *super* ambitious, but they only asked for $80,000. It was so ridiculous it just screamed "fraud", so I'm not surprised they got found-out. A more capable fraudster could do a lot better job about not putting up red-flags.
My first thought was that samzenpus really *LOVES* articles about piracy. Three in a row, samzenpus? Yeash.
Second: yes, piracy does hurt sales. There's decent evidence to show this is the case. One line of support comes from the large declines in music sales over the past ten years and the small declines in the US in movie revenue. A second line of support comes from the fact that I know plenty of people who think you're crazy if you buy music (or any digital media for that matter). For them, it just doesn't make sense to pay for something you can get for free on the internet. Personally, while I have never pirated music, I've been using Spotify for the past year or so and my music purchases have dropped to zero. If Spotify is a good proxy for piracy, then count me as one more person who would've seen my music buying habits drop to zero if I actually thought piracy was moral. Heck, I've got an iTunes gift card on my coffeetable that I've had for over a year, and I haven't used it because it's not even worth the hassle of typing it in - and it wouldn't even cost me any of my own money to actually use it!
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. And communism would work great if you could keep everyone motivated and working "as hard as they should", too. Communism fails as an economic system because it's not in any individual's personal interest to work extra hard because all the benefits go to the community (which means he only gets back a diluted slice of the benefits). I see the same problems with open-source. We're supposed to work for the betterment of society and old man Stallman hasn't offered up much in the way of financial incentives for creators. "Do it for society" is the best he's willing to give us. Thanks, but I live in a capitalist society because it just plain works better.
I hope you're making a joke to show how preposterous it is to claim "If there was no copyright, those licenses would be unnecessary". (Besides, your point is moot considering the fact that those are tiny binaries and technology exists to make it much harder to decompile binaries.)
The government sets up systems so that trade can occur and the producers have an incentive. There are lots of laws we have made up by fiat, to produce the things that society wants/needs. Personally, I don't believe in anything called "natural law", but people have convinced themselves that "natural law" exists and then say that governments are just enforcing them. For example, I don't believe in any inherent law of land ownership or property ownership. We create them because they help society function better. One can easily imagine hippy-commune type of societies where everything is shared and no one owns anything. That kind of society is not evil or wrong. The ideas of property ownership and land ownership are created by fiat by mankind to help society function better. (No, they aren't created by "god" or "natural law".)
Also the "create a law" part your talking about is a centuries old existing law known as "copyright".
I'd also recommend that if you're going to dis copyright law, then you might as well be consistent and ditch all the laws surrounding intellectual property - including the FSF ideas about open source. Otherwise, you're talking about using government power to enforce your ideas about how software should be shared. So here's the question aimed right back at you: You want the government to create a law to support open source software? Sounds to me like you have created insufficient incentives for the producer, i.e. you've created a broken business model.
When I first read the summary, a red flag went off for me - and it was the fact that we're *only* talking about digital sales - and even worse, the summary talks about one subcategory of digital sales: "single track downloads". The summary seems to have ignored physical sales of music and whole album digital sales. My first thought was to question how the Canadian balance of physical to digital sales differed from other nations.
Also, talking about how the Candian digital sales is growing faster (percentage-wise) than the US could also be a red herring if the Canadian market for digital sales was very low five years ago. (Example: if you start with 10,000 digital sales per year five years ago, you can get 100% growth each year and still have lower overall digital sales than a country that was selling 1,000,000 sales five years ago and had 10% growth each year.) In fact, the MichaelGeist information confirms that this is what happened - i.e. that the Canadians digital sales numbers started much lower - when he says "Canada seems likely to pass the U.S. on per capita single track downloads in about 18 months". So, the chart Michael Geist produces showing six years of faster-than-US sales growth in "single track downloads" is really a chart showing that Canada is still playing catch-up. Also, I wonder how "single track downloads" differs from "digital sales" in general.
According to the Norway sample data (http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/RIN-samplepage-2012.pdf), digital sales account for 45% of total revenue and "single track downloads" accounts for 18% of digital sales. This means in Norway that "single track downloads" accounts for only 8.1% of revenue. This also raises a red-flag for me because it makes me think that "single track downloads" was a subcategory that Geist could seize on to paint a rosy picture, even if the total picture was different.
I've also noticed that a lot of comments on the Slashdot thread seem to think we're talking about "total sales" when were talking only about one component of music sales: "digital music sales" or "single track downloads".
As much as I hate when the music industry spins numbers (for example, assuming that one act of piracy equals one lost sale to calculate the amount of money lost to piracy), we should also acknowledge that the pro-piracy crowd spins their numbers as well. I'd look at the actual numbers, but the entire report is only available if you pay.
Whenever I read stuff like this, I know it's going to draw out all the triumphalist pirates. As someone who opposes piracy, here's how I see it -- let's say a bunch of criminals were writing software to steal your credit card numbers or bitcoin cash. Or let's say that biological viruses could talk. They'd talk about how they're going to win - how you can't stop Chinese or Russian hackers from stealing your personal data or your credit card numbers. Viruses would laugh about how your latest vaccine is going to be rendered ineffective and you should just give up because they're going to mutate and they're going to keep coming at you and kill as many human beings as they can. How would you feel? Would you give up or would it just double your conviction that hackers and biological viruses were scumbags - not only are they harming you but they have the audacity to add insult to injury? That's how I feel about it. Pirate triumphalism makes me feel angrier towards pirates and piracy -- just as you'd get angry if biological viruses like polio or HIV appeared on Slashdot and started taunting humans about how it's "going to keep mutating so you might as well give up".
Also, just so you know: roughly 2/3rds of Americans consider piracy to be "theft". Your claims about 60% habitually braking the law and most of the other 40% not giving a crap seems overblown.
> "I would, in fact, argue that the current traffic laws *are* broken as currently used."
I thought someone might counterargue that traffic laws need to be changed. You can argue that traffic laws should be changed/liberalized but you need to make some extreme changes to the laws to be consistent. You need to argue for the more extreme position of making the traffic laws so liberal that a large majority are *never* breaking them. I'm doubtful that you can do that without also making the roads much more unsafe. For example, maybe you can change the speed limits in neighborhoods from 25 MPH to 50 MPH, and the large majority of people would not travel over 50 MPH because it would be self-evidently dangerous (although I guarantee most teenage males would still break the speed limit for the thrill of driving fast - most of us have, at one time or another, taken a car out on a road and seen how fast it would go). But, putting 50 MPH speed limits in neighborhoods would drastically increase the danger of car accidents. I doubt there's a solution which changes the traffic laws so that most people would *never* violate them AND accomplishes the goal of keeping people driving safely.
I'd also bet that the *large* majority of people have, at one time or another, texted while driving (even I've done that, though over the past six months, I've been doing a good job of never doing that). It's dangerous for the driver, other people on or near the road. I also think it's perfectly fine for the police to give you a ticket if you are seen driving while texting.
I'd also say that breaking a law doesn't mean you disagree with it (as with the speeding example). Heck, if I had to accept the position of legalizing every law I've broken, it would be a bad world to live in. For example, when I was a kid, I shoplifted once. I do not agree with eliminating laws against shoplifting. I wouldn't be surprised if most people alive have, at least once in their life, shoplifted. This does not mean they condone it.
> If *most* of the population are criminals... is it really a crime?
I have to question that kind of logic. For one thing, I bet something like 99% of the population have broken traffic laws at some point - whether that means speeding or rolling through a stop sign or whatever. If your logic is correct, then we should get rid of a lot of traffic laws as well. Even worse, some recent reports say that more than 1 in 3 men in South Africa have admitted to rape (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-202_162-7092661.html). Assuming your logic is correct, South Africa is getting really close to legalizing rape.
I bet porn movies cost as much as the movies created by the MPAA, so that system would totally work. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh god, that's funny. I crack me up sometimes.
You sound like a libertarian complaining about how all taxes are theft and, therefore, inherently immoral. I also consider you equally bad at figuring out how to create a decent society or country since any good system relies on violating some "first principle" that you hold dear. It's like you've tied yourself up in spurious logic. Then again, maybe there's a method to your madness: you've figured out a way to pirate shit and salve your conscience with this kind of thinking.
I wonder if I can try it: hmmmm. Our food is the result of thousands of years of our ancestors' selective breeding. The earth and the sun and the air are what makes plants grow, and the earth belongs to all of us. How dare they charge us money for something that comes from nature and thousands of years of human farming? Damn it! I deserve to get everything I want from the grocery store for free! I understand that grocery stores can't survive with this kind of thinking, but the whole system is rotten and unethical from the ground up! It is not my fault that the system is unethical. I like your thinking, sqrt(2)! I could go a long way with these ideas!
> "Stop using scarcity [wikipedia.org] with something that is an unlimited resource."
Scarcity is used as a method to get you (the consumer) to pay for the entertainment, and creating entertainment costs money. If companies could create entertainment and give it away, and you'd generously donate to them so that they could get well-paid (preferably as well as they'd get paid under an "artificial scarcity" system), then they probably wouldn't have a problem doing that. (Assuming they aren't consumed by the fear that they're getting underpaid). The problem comes in when people don't/won't donate. It's easy to get into a comfortable situation where you simply aren't thinking about production costs of your entertainment. In that sense, "artificial scarcity" is the second-best solution in that it maintains enough income for the creators to continue to create. The best possible system is one where they give it away and you donate. But, if enough people aren't donating (and I don't personally believe they will) then the artificial scarcity model is the best result (while maintaining the economic viability of the businesses creating the "resource").
If you're going to complain about "artificial scarcity", I also think you should start complaining about a whole bunch of other stuff in society where "resources" are not fully utilized because they have a price tag attached to them. For example: more theaters aren't sold out for every show - force movie theaters to offer reduced price or free tickets to movies. Force greyhound buses to carry you around for free or reduced prices until all the seats are full. Force concerts to let in extra people if the show isn't sold out. Force rental property owners to offer their apartments for free or reduced prices if they aren't being occupied. Force amusement parks to let people in for free or reduced price until the park reaches capacity.
Personally, I think this system would fail because people would get good at showing up whenever these events aren't at full capacity. The end result is that you drive them out of business, which would make you guilty of mismanaging the economy in an attempt to "fully utilize our underutilized resources". I feel the same way about this "artificial scarcity of digital media" complaint - it would likely lead to bankruptcy, which results in nobody having access to those resources.
> "I'm surprised too, but I think this ruling is satisfying. After all, just because it's hard/impossible to find the people who actually committed the crime (or perhaps it's just a civil suit), that doesn't mean they should be able to successfully punish/sue the wrong people."
I don't agree with punishing the wifi owner for the actual crime of the person who uses their wifi, but I do think wifi should be locked down for a variety of reasons - including piracy, viruses, hacking, etc. I also think ISPs should be allowed to ban people's computers if they're part of a botnet to do DOS attacks or send spam or viruses. I actually think it's kind of stupid the way we've put virtually no effort into securing the computer infrastructure. Perhaps if someone's wifi is left open and crimes are committed, then the ISPs should be proactive in helping to ensure that people's wifi's are made reasonably secure. If people are intentionally not securing their wifis, then maybe a small fine (which is not connected to the crimes committed) which is attached to the monthly bill.
> "I wish that the media corporations stopped trolling and started creating some business models which actually make sense in this day and age. All others have already moved forward."
...", but doing it is harder than saying it. I'm skeptical that there are any business models that can undercut piracy which don't also involve a large cut in revenues.
I was on reddit the other day and the creator of Isohunt mentioned several times that making money from piracy was the holy grail and he had no idea how to do it. (Yeah, Kim Dotcom got money off of piracy, though I'm sure he was earning far less than market value, which makes sense since he didn't have the burden of any costs of production.) So, here's your chance to give suggestions. Preferably ones that don't end up making a *lot* less money than the current system. For example, I recently read a suggestion that companies should put all their movies on something like Hulu for free (but ad supported). The problem is that ads aren't close to paying the bills once you include the cost of making movies and the bandwidth of sending them to you. The only reason ad-supported movies are even available on Hulu is because they're long past their prime, so they're being used to make a few extra bucks. Maybe the solution is to only create movies that cost less than $10 million to make - then, even if piracy grows and takes 90% of your profits, you could still get by. In many ways, I think that's a sad outcome for the movie industry. Even more worryingly, I've noticed a lot of articles talking about new ad-skipping technologies (http://www.dishtvblog.com/dish-news/the-dish-hopper-adds-all-new-feature-auto-hop-that-will-allow-for-a-commercial-skipping-option/) and several people I know have been talking about how they always skip the ads. Which makes me think: gee, people don't want to pay for their entertainment and they're becoming more empowered and pushy about being able to skip the ads, too. I wonder how anyone is supposed to pay for the costs of creating stuff?
So, I just thought I'd put that question there. It's easy to say "hey, you guys should figure out a way to
Which, by the way, is a good argument for not keeping stacks of cash around your house. Personally, I almost never have more then $60 in cash in my house or on my person at any time. Meanwhile, I hear about people having thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins on their computer.
Not a lie. The top income tax bracket was, indeed, higher 50 years ago than it is today. Between the mid 1930s and until 1980 (when Reagan came to power), the top income tax bracket ranged between 70% and 94% (the current top tax bracket is 35%). In fact, in 1943, there was a law put in place to make the top income tax bracket 100% (yes, the US government would take 100% of the money you earned over a certain amount), but the law was struck down before taxes were actually collected in April. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#Federal_income_tax_rates_2
It really doesn't matter what "Federal Medicare and Social Security taxes along with State and Local income taxes tacked onto our paychecks" you count up. You simply aren't going to reach the equivalent of a 70% or a 94% tax bracket.
Dear sir, please get some perspective: "Steven Pinker on the myth of violence" http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
I agree. Society should do nothing at all to help you (including providing no medical care, no education, etc) until you are old enough to be considered a consenting adult (at the age of 18), at which time, you can sign your name with an "X" to agree to the contract (since you'll be too illiterate to actually write your name).
The problem is that people have a subjective view of reality which is tied up in their own interests. The things they like are "good" and the things they don't like are "evil". Many rich people don't like paying taxes, so they construct a kind of false reality in their own minds where they are the victims of "political corruption and cronyism", thus justifying their own personal interests in not paying taxes. Personally, it seems to me like, to the extent that there is political corruption in the US, it being driven by the rich not by the poor (as much as conservatives would like to believe otherwise). All of this "going Galt" stuff just seems like personal interests being dressed up as "objective and rational responses to a system that oppresses the rich". I think the only reason this twisted view of the world has permeated below the super-rich class in society is because the conservative news has been pushing this narrative, and they've managed to hoodwink the middle class into believing that they are being oppressed. The fact that you call it "rejecting redistributionist/collectivist tyranny" shows just how deeply they've tricked you into their worldview.
Even though I want to agree with you about lowering the amount of money we're spending on defense, I think the more important point is that $666 billion is a fraction of the money spent by the US government (the budget is $3.5 trillion, by the way). All you did was pick out some part of the budget and said, "this part of the US budget didn't help Facebook succeed, therefore, nothing the government has done has ever helped them."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
> To liberals [being rich and conservative], that's reason enough to hate them so those are the only real attacks I've seen leveled against them."
Oh, gee, you don't sound the least bit biased there.
> "So tell me, what have they done that is worthy of the pure, unadulterated hatred that you and others have towards these guys?"
Maybe because they've spent so much money creating "think tanks" to influence the media and give conservatives talking points. They want to abolish most of the government and social programs, including social security, medicare, medicaid, environmental protections, labor laws, undermine public acceptance of global warming, want to dramatically reduce taxes on people and corporations. They will effectively create a feeble government and replace that will a plutocracy of business owners who can pollute as much as they want. Its like they want a return to the year 1900 with dirty cities, child labor, no safety net for the poor or elderly, and at the top of it all are wealthy factory owners who control the government.
From http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer -
All their charitable giving wouldn't make up for the damage they'd do by dramatically reducing taxes on the rich. It's like someone giving you a few bucks to win your affection, then lobbying the government to cut their tax bills by millions, and we're supposed to go "well, he did give me a few bucks, I'm not allowed to think that their government lobbying is bad."
> "With your argumentation "lost sale" = "theft", you could also argue, that a negative [critique] in the newspaper is "theft", because it causes lost sales."
People are allowed to exchange meta-information about products in order to help other people make an informed decision about buying it. Piracy is getting a free copy of a product and then deciding whether or not you want to pay for it (which, very often, people skip the paying part because it adds nothing to their already-appropriated copy). Don't try to equate piracy with negative critiques.
Piracy also has similarities to other bad actions which are outlawed:
* Sneaking into a concert or amusement park or theater - hey, you can't "prove" they were going to buy a ticket, and their ears aren't soaking up sound so that other people can't hear it (non-rivalry). As long as the concert isn't so full that you're actually blocking paying customers from coming in, then this is similar to piracy. You could even make the argument that by sneaking in you're doing the band/park/movie a favor because you might recommend it to your friends or buy merchandise - which is pretty similar to the argument pirates use to say that they should be allowed to pirate.
* Sneaking onto a Greyhound bus without paying - again, you can't prove they would've bought a ticket, and as long as the bus isn't 100% packed - why not let people get away with this? Afterall, their presence on the bus has a negligible effect on the cost of running the bus (which was already travelling to your destination).
* Living in a house or apartment without paying rent - as long as someone leaves the place in as good of condition as it started (or pays for cleaners to come in afterwards), then why shouldn't people be allowed to squat whereever they want as long as it wasn't going to have actual paying tenents in the place?
On the other hand, if people give a concert or amusement park or movie or Greyhound a bad review so that people don't pay for those things - that's perfectly okay. Piracy is not like a bad review; it fits in with the other examples. Personally, I think the owner/management of the concert, amusement park, theater, greyhound bus, or apartment should have the right to chose whether or not someone is allowed in without paying and have the right to kick people out if they try to get in without paying. Similarly, I think content creators should have the same right to deprive people of their own digital creations if those people aren't going to pay - and I say that because I don't believe amusement parks, concerts, theaters, buses, apartments, or digital-content creation are going to survive very well if everyone can unilaterally decide that they want the product but don't want to pay (and who would want to pay for something you can get for free?)
> Line of support #1: correlation without causal evidence.
Pirate logic seems to be "never blame piracy for anything". Stop working out and start overeating, you get fat. Hey, hey - it's just "correlation not causal evidence". I think the fact that music sales peaked exactly six months after Napster was released and has declined 60-70% in the intervening 10 years, leading to the lowest music sales in forty years is a bit suggestive.
> Line of support #2: anecdote. Apparently, if you 'know plenty of people', why, that ought to be enough proof for anybody. What with only 7 billiion or so other people on this planet you presumably do not know, your 'plenty of people' that you know surely covers all the bases.
Yeah, that makes sense. You have to test any theory on 7 billion people in order to be sure. Give me a break. If someone drinks antifreeze and they drop dead - hey, it's not proof of anything unless we get 7 billion other people to do the same thing.
> Line of support #3: projection. Since you do or think a certain thing, everyone else must be doing and thinking the same thing. Another term for this is narcissism, but that's putting it nicely.
Resorting to insults, huh? I like how you walk about "science" and "evidence" and then use personal insults against people you disagree with. I heard the most important science debates in history were settled with personal insults. Also, it's funny how everyone I know who's a big fan of piracy also stopped buying stuff. Again, more of the "never blame piracy for anything" nonsense, and throw in some personal insults just to screw the conversation.
> Line of support #4: lack of use of iTunes music card. I'm not even sure what logical fallacy this falls under, but then again, I'm fairly sure this proves nothing. That's no worse than your other points, though.
Considering that I'd be more likely to use a gift card to buy music than pay actual money, yet I still don't even bother with the gift card, I think it shows how easy access to music undercuts any desire to pay for it.
> Please educate yourself on the meaning of 'evidence' and 'science' and then reassess your thoughts. These words do not mean what you think they mean; that much is obvious.
How about if you cut the crap and admit that you like free shit and you have to rely on talking shit about anyone who disagrees with you.
If there start to be more projects that fail. Projects can fail for a large variety of reasons - I work in the games industry, and I've seen a lot of college-age people try to get game projects started only to have them unravel because of conflicts within the group, or someone got too busy with school or their girlfriend or underestimated the amount of work required to create their ambitious project, etc.
The second major reason is that there might be an increase in fraud - people setting up projects that are designed purely to take people's money and disappear. Kickstarter says they don't police what people are doing with the money (which makes sense, since it'd take a lot of effort to do that). Take, for example, this fraudulent project which fortunately ended up getting outed before they reached their goal (which means they got no money in the end):
The "Mythic" game was *super* ambitious, but they only asked for $80,000. It was so ridiculous it just screamed "fraud", so I'm not surprised they got found-out. A more capable fraudster could do a lot better job about not putting up red-flags.
My first thought was that samzenpus really *LOVES* articles about piracy. Three in a row, samzenpus? Yeash.
Second: yes, piracy does hurt sales. There's decent evidence to show this is the case. One line of support comes from the large declines in music sales over the past ten years and the small declines in the US in movie revenue. A second line of support comes from the fact that I know plenty of people who think you're crazy if you buy music (or any digital media for that matter). For them, it just doesn't make sense to pay for something you can get for free on the internet. Personally, while I have never pirated music, I've been using Spotify for the past year or so and my music purchases have dropped to zero. If Spotify is a good proxy for piracy, then count me as one more person who would've seen my music buying habits drop to zero if I actually thought piracy was moral. Heck, I've got an iTunes gift card on my coffeetable that I've had for over a year, and I haven't used it because it's not even worth the hassle of typing it in - and it wouldn't even cost me any of my own money to actually use it!