Piracy is the reason DRM exists. Next time I get burned by DRM, I'm coming to your house and punching you for not supporting the companies who are doing the work. And punching you a second time for suggesting that the pirate bay is part of the solution rather than part of the disease.
Democrats don't deny the Laffer curve, we deny the claim by Republicans that we're on the right side of the curve. I would actually say that Republicans don't seem to believe in the Laffer curve - it seems more like they believe in a straight line where tax revenue increases whenever you lower taxes, no matter where you're currently at. Why do I say that? Because Republicans are constantly complaining about wanting to lower taxes, but by historical standards, the US currently has one of the lowest tax rates of the past 80 years.
Both political parties are willing to throw science under the bus when it suits their agendas.
That's all good and fine, but - if we accept it as true - all it proves is that the Republicans have more of their beliefs in conflict with science than Democrats. If you don't believe me, then sit down and add up the number of issues where Republicans are against the science, and then add up the same thing for Democrats. I recently heard a discussion where they were attempting to figure out the level of bias on the Left and Right and they needed an issue where Democrats are largely in conflict with the science. The best candidates for the left are anti-nuclear power (which is actually a left-wing in the 1960s, I doubt it has much traction now) and some of the organic food, anti-genetically modified food, and anti-vaccine movements. All of them look pretty small, though. I bet you'd have a hard time arguing that these are issues where a majority of the Left agree with any of them. On the other hand, creationism and anti-global warming are majority opinions among Republicans.
http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-October%202008/dunlap-full.html http://www.gallup.com/poll/27847/majority-republicans-doubt-theory-evolution.aspx
I'd post something substantial, but the idiotic pro-piracy comments in this thread makes me realize that a lot of humanity only cares about doing whatever is in their own short-term personal interest and will masquerade their greed as 'logic and reason'. I especially love the comments that intentionally conflate the Pirate Bay with the Internet. Humanity is doomed with this kind of twisted rationalization. No wonder the world is as screwed up as it is. Yet, commenters never seem to realize that they're using the same kind of twisted logic as greedy Wall Street Bankers and CEOs of record companies.
before the game even goes up for sale, which I'm sure will generate additional revenue.
I assume you mean "pre-sales" rather than actual sales? Because they money has to be there for development before the game is released. I'm not sure what the time gap will be between the pre-sales and the release, but it seems like the kickstarter project is a "pre-sale" when you buy-in at the $15 amount.
It's already a company, they have other revenue sources through sales of their previous games, etc.
Perhaps. Although they've had a lot of lackluster sales numbers in the past, so I doubt they're flush with cash.
The kickstarter project says their goal was $400,000 ($300,000 for the game and $100,000 for the video documentary). I looked at the kickstarter page and saw a picture of the Double Fine team. There were 47 people in the picture. I have to ask - how do you pay 47 people with a budget of $300,000? I realize they're around $900,000 right now, but that's still only $19,000 per person, which would only get you a few months work. How are these numbers realistic? Or am I looking at it the wrong way -- should I (and everybody else on this thread) look at the kickstarter money not as funding the game's development, but as a way to create the startup funds for the game, afterwhich they'll be looking for lots of investors?
That said, this is still very cool, and I would be very surprised if this project didn't top the #1 slot for most funded
I happened to look up the most funded game project on KickStarter the other day. The top funded game (and you can question whether or not it's a "game" since it mostly seems to be about artificially intelligent creatures in a game world) came in around $56,000. So, yeah, Double Fine blew all the game projects out of the water. http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/video%20games/most-funded
> "After college, it was worse: not only were most of my coworkers male, but almost everyone (male and female) were already married."
I remember the crushing realization at an old job when it occurred to me that, even though there were about 70-80 people working in my office, there weren't any unmarried women within 10 years of my age at my work.
If this is true: "if you are using [a dating site], you are a freak", then isn't it necessarily true that "That does NOT mean you will only find freaks on dating sites." has to be a false statement?
If that's your step 1, then this is your step 2: get charged with contempt of court for deliberately destroying evidence in an effort to hamper an investigation.
"While we're dueling anecdotes, I was once able to fix a corrupted Word file for my mother that nobody could open because it confused their parser, and all their products have the same one. OO.o (at the time) was able to open and re-save the file so that it would work correctly, with no loss of formatting."
We had the same thing happen to us about ten years ago. Unfortunately, I've seen LibreOffice mangle document formatting too much to see it as an equivalent product - it's more like "sometimes it manages to beat out MS Office for this or that obscure situation, but generally it's worse". In fact, after installing the latest version of LibreOffice a few months ago, I had to wonder whether it's progressed at all in the past five years (I even considered the possibility that it has regressed). I was really disappointed that MSOffice seems to be pulling ahead rather than losing ground to LibreOffice. I almost never use MS Office, but I actually find myself much more comfortable using it despite the number of hours I've spent using LibreOffice. Sometimes I really wonder if the praise heaped on OpenOffice/LibreOffice is really gratuitous praise from Open Source advocates who want to believe it and want other people to switch to it.
As I've said before: I'm going to fund my next romantic comedy movie by selling action figures.
Point being: some things simply aren't setup well for merchandising. Merchandising - while it might bring in some money - it probably isn't going to bring in enough profit to pay for the upfront costs of making the digital media in the first place. Yeah, you can talk about merchandising, but how about if you name the top 100 movies and 100 software packages and then explain how they'll earn back their investment with merchandising. Sure, a movie Transformers *might* have a possibility of earning some money back from increased sales of Transformers toys (though I doubt that even they could earn enough to pay for the film), what about the "English Patient"? Even if you talk about massive markups (from $0.25 to make a lunch box to a cost of $30, which I'm sure both numbers are wrong) you still have to sell a huge number of them to make a decent profit. Avatar cost $400 million for production and marketing. How many Avatar lunchboxes do you have to sell again, to earn back that $400 million investment? Even if I accepted your "$29.75 of profit on ever lunchbox" claim (which I don't believe), you'd have to sell 13.5 million lunchboxes to earn $400 million. Given 310 million Americans, that's roughly 4.5 million Americans at each age. So, if you can sell an Avatar lunchbox to *every single 9, 10 , and 11 year-old* in the United States, then you can fund the movie budget.
Heck, even movies like Cloverfield or Avatar aren't going to be making much from merch. If they could be making money from merchandise, they'd already be doing it because every movie producer is going to jump at an opportunity that could bring in a few million dollars (which, by the way, is a small fraction of movie budgets).
Every single time the pirates state.. "make it playable on what I want to play it on and a reasonable price." that means 30 minute TV shows are $0.25 1 hour are $0.50 and Movies are $1.99
Some people say that. Other people say they're not going to pay, period. And some other people want crazy low prices - I recall one person wanting to pay ten cents.
The other problem is that it's not clear that your new system is better in terms of revenue. If X people watch for $2, and Y people watch for $0.25 then you need Y to be at least eight times larger in order to reach the same revenue. I'm not saying that we should try to help companies maximize their revenue, I'm just saying that if Y is only 4 times larger than X, then companies aren't going to be happy about cutting revenues in half and they aren't going to do it. Cutting revenues in half is going to make a lot of digital media switch from being profitable to being a loss. Imagine if you had a $10 million investment in a film - and I told you that you could make X or half of X. In the best case scenario, you earn quite a bit less money. In the worst case scenario, you switch from earning a few million dollars in profit from the movie to taking a few million dollar loss on it (I hope you didn't need that money).
I've argued with Masnick before. He makes the claim that if you give away everything digital, it makes your scarce products more valuable. But, he ends there. While he's right, he's *very* wrong about physical products making up for the shortfall in revenue when you give away your digital media. He seems to think that if you make a $10 million dollar software or movie that you can give it away for free, which will make all the physical stuff around the software or movie more valuable (like selling action figures or coffee mugs or something). He makes a bizarre leap to the conclusion that the increased sales of action figures and coffee mugs will more than makeup for that $10 million loss on creating the digital media in the first place. It's completely crazy that he won't admit the obvious flaw in his whole theory.
Even more so, nothing is lost. End result is that it is more sharing than stealing. If you could share a apple with someone hungry without loosing it, why would you refuse? Any sane person under those circumstances would stop trying to sell apples, unless they could provide some kind of scarce value add to the whole.
No, if we seriously take that attitude, then if everyone pirated everything, creators would not be in a position to create entertainment for you. It's just not financially viable. The analogy to food and hunger isn't a good one. It's entertainment and people want a constant flow of NEW entertainment (unlike food, where, if we could create an infinite number of apples then humanity will always have an infinite number of apples). If it costs $100 million to create new software, a new movie, etc, and everyone pirates it, then the creator can't pay off his debts and creators learn pretty quickly to stop making stuff. But, society wants new stuff. This puts everyone at an impasse.
> The RIAA completely misunderstood Napster. they saw money being lost not a chance at making more money. It took 6 years and one billion itunes downloads before they realized just how badly they fucked up.
The music companies were always screwed - it didn't matter what choices they made. Music revenues have done nothing but decline in the past 10 years. Saying that iTunes did it right is missing the fact that digital music sales have not compensated for the loss of physical sales. Mathematically speaking, for every $100 decline in physical music sales over the past ten years there has been an $18 increase in digital music sales. It's not a winning strategy. At best, it's making the best of a bad situation.
(Sorry, I get annoyed when people like to explain the music industry's decline as a result of "not moving to digital sales" when it seems like the real culprit was always what the music industry thought it was: a fast, global internet combined with piracy. The music industry was not wrong about Napster.)
because if enough legitimate users rise up, doesn't it throw the entire position of megaupload only "existing for piracy" into question?
I wouldn't think the question of "did MegaUpload exist ONLY for piracy" is really that important. If pirate websites could protect themselves from takedown by hosting a few files that are legitimate (not copyright infringing), then that's a huge loophole in the system. Suddenly a pirate site could say, "Yeah, 99.9% of our content is copyright infringing, but I had a few people upload a few of their own files and that protects our entire site from takedown, because any takedown makes you guilty of harming those legitimate files."
""Hed explained that Rovio sees it as "futile" to pursue pirates through the courts, except in cases where it feels the products they are selling are harmful to the Angry Birds brand, or ripping off its fans."" and " When that's not the case, Rovio sees it as a way to attract more fans, even if it is not making money from the products. "Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.""
Except that in the XDA case, what they're doing is removing advertising and "optimizing the app for better performance". Removing advertising is not "harmful to the Angry Birds brand" and it's not "ripping off its fans".
Really? A company that sells their product for a dollar finds it's uneconomical to drag pirates into court? Besides, it's easy for people to buy Angry Birds since it's easily searchable in the AppStore, and most people would find it way more trouble than it's worth to try to pirate it and save themselves a few bucks. They have a huge convenience advantage over pirates.
I have a question about this. Let's say that some group was doing something that we all legitimately disagree with. Let's say that some criminal organization was involved in money laundering, stealing and selling credit card numbers, distributing viruses and controlling those viruses using servers hosted on Sealand, etc etc. What would we hope/expect that governments would do to Sealand in those cases? Would/Should governments just throw up their hands and say, "Well, they're a sovereign nation, we can't do anything about it."?
I'm just curious because it seems like we either have to say:
- Sealand is sovereign and can do whatever they want (regardless of any real damage they do to anyone or everyone), or
- Sealand's sovereignty is dependent on not doing illegal/bad things and governments could (fairly or not) come down on Sealand for doing those things - and this could involve capturing people on Sealand and putting them on trial, cutting off internet access, etc.
> I find the argument that people will stop making music when others are allowed to distribute that music to be an extremely depressing position. I think people will still create music and art.
I actually think that music is a special case. People aren't going to stop making music if anyone can distribute it. The music business is unusual in that there are multiple revenue streams for music: music sales (to consumers), music licensing (for commercials, movies, etc), and live music. If music sales to consumers were eliminated, the other revenue streams would still exist. I think software and movies are in a different position because there are no "software concerts" or "movie concerts". They make their money from selling digital copies. This makes them much more dependent on the one revenue stream called "selling digital copies".
Didn't you just say "Eliminating copyright will largely eliminate most of the time and money investment that goes into creating works" ? Why would you want to partially eliminate it then? That choice would just contribute to the negative view:
I don't believe so because creators make most of their money early in the sales cycle anyway. If copyright was 20 years instead of 100 years, then the creator will miss out on: sales after the creator is dead and sales long after sales numbers have declined. I started selling my own software about 3 years ago. Sales numbers peaked the first month and have declined since then. I'm not selling much anymore. I figure I've probably made 90-95% of the sales I'm ever going to make and this is only 3 years after the product's release. If copyright on software was 10 or 20 years instead of 100+ years, I could say, "I make 99% of the money that I would've made, so it's not a big deal. It's not like I need another 80+ years to try to scratch out anther 1% in sales."
> Perhaps in a poorer society the lack of copyright law would result in "cheap work". Or perhaps it will result in a world where the popularity of music and art isn't determined by corporate bottom lines trying to edge in on fads to make a quick dollar, but will instead be created by people who really enjoy the practice and do so in their free time.
Those people can make music right now. Copyright isn't stopping them.
> You say a copyrightless world would be dominated by "cheap work", you must live in a country where the radio music and television shows aren't the talentless work played in the USA.
I disagree that radio music and television shows are dominated by talentless people. I think that's overly cynical. My own opinion is that I don't qualified to judge all music for all people. If people's goal is to find music that they enjoy listening to, and music like Justin Beiber and Nickelback fulfill that role, then even if I'm not personally interested in listening to that music, I still think it has value because it makes other people happy. I don't feel that my tastes mean that I'm right in some objective way, or that those people need to be educated to listen to "real music" like [insert the name of your or my favorite band here].
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin: the best way for hackers to steal your money over the internet.
Piracy is the reason DRM exists. Next time I get burned by DRM, I'm coming to your house and punching you for not supporting the companies who are doing the work. And punching you a second time for suggesting that the pirate bay is part of the solution rather than part of the disease.
Democrats don't deny the Laffer curve, we deny the claim by Republicans that we're on the right side of the curve. I would actually say that Republicans don't seem to believe in the Laffer curve - it seems more like they believe in a straight line where tax revenue increases whenever you lower taxes, no matter where you're currently at. Why do I say that? Because Republicans are constantly complaining about wanting to lower taxes, but by historical standards, the US currently has one of the lowest tax rates of the past 80 years.
Both political parties are willing to throw science under the bus when it suits their agendas.
That's all good and fine, but - if we accept it as true - all it proves is that the Republicans have more of their beliefs in conflict with science than Democrats. If you don't believe me, then sit down and add up the number of issues where Republicans are against the science, and then add up the same thing for Democrats. I recently heard a discussion where they were attempting to figure out the level of bias on the Left and Right and they needed an issue where Democrats are largely in conflict with the science. The best candidates for the left are anti-nuclear power (which is actually a left-wing in the 1960s, I doubt it has much traction now) and some of the organic food, anti-genetically modified food, and anti-vaccine movements. All of them look pretty small, though. I bet you'd have a hard time arguing that these are issues where a majority of the Left agree with any of them. On the other hand, creationism and anti-global warming are majority opinions among Republicans.
http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-October%202008/dunlap-full.html
http://www.gallup.com/poll/27847/majority-republicans-doubt-theory-evolution.aspx
I'd post something substantial, but the idiotic pro-piracy comments in this thread makes me realize that a lot of humanity only cares about doing whatever is in their own short-term personal interest and will masquerade their greed as 'logic and reason'. I especially love the comments that intentionally conflate the Pirate Bay with the Internet. Humanity is doomed with this kind of twisted rationalization. No wonder the world is as screwed up as it is. Yet, commenters never seem to realize that they're using the same kind of twisted logic as greedy Wall Street Bankers and CEOs of record companies.
before the game even goes up for sale, which I'm sure will generate additional revenue.
I assume you mean "pre-sales" rather than actual sales? Because they money has to be there for development before the game is released. I'm not sure what the time gap will be between the pre-sales and the release, but it seems like the kickstarter project is a "pre-sale" when you buy-in at the $15 amount.
It's already a company, they have other revenue sources through sales of their previous games, etc.
Perhaps. Although they've had a lot of lackluster sales numbers in the past, so I doubt they're flush with cash.
The kickstarter project says their goal was $400,000 ($300,000 for the game and $100,000 for the video documentary). I looked at the kickstarter page and saw a picture of the Double Fine team. There were 47 people in the picture. I have to ask - how do you pay 47 people with a budget of $300,000? I realize they're around $900,000 right now, but that's still only $19,000 per person, which would only get you a few months work. How are these numbers realistic? Or am I looking at it the wrong way -- should I (and everybody else on this thread) look at the kickstarter money not as funding the game's development, but as a way to create the startup funds for the game, afterwhich they'll be looking for lots of investors?
That said, this is still very cool, and I would be very surprised if this project didn't top the #1 slot for most funded
I happened to look up the most funded game project on KickStarter the other day. The top funded game (and you can question whether or not it's a "game" since it mostly seems to be about artificially intelligent creatures in a game world) came in around $56,000. So, yeah, Double Fine blew all the game projects out of the water.
http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/video%20games/most-funded
> "After college, it was worse: not only were most of my coworkers male, but almost everyone (male and female) were already married."
I remember the crushing realization at an old job when it occurred to me that, even though there were about 70-80 people working in my office, there weren't any unmarried women within 10 years of my age at my work.
If this is true: "if you are using [a dating site], you are a freak", then isn't it necessarily true that "That does NOT mean you will only find freaks on dating sites." has to be a false statement?
A while back, the EFF proposed a similar payout scheme which would allow pirates to voluntarily pay a monthly fee and the money would get paid out to creators who's work was pirated based on the number of downloads. It sounds a lot like the EFF's suggested plan.
https://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing
If that's your step 1, then this is your step 2: get charged with contempt of court for deliberately destroying evidence in an effort to hamper an investigation.
I think it took a little more than "encrypting" to put this woman on trial.
"While we're dueling anecdotes, I was once able to fix a corrupted Word file for my mother that nobody could open because it confused their parser, and all their products have the same one. OO.o (at the time) was able to open and re-save the file so that it would work correctly, with no loss of formatting."
We had the same thing happen to us about ten years ago. Unfortunately, I've seen LibreOffice mangle document formatting too much to see it as an equivalent product - it's more like "sometimes it manages to beat out MS Office for this or that obscure situation, but generally it's worse". In fact, after installing the latest version of LibreOffice a few months ago, I had to wonder whether it's progressed at all in the past five years (I even considered the possibility that it has regressed). I was really disappointed that MSOffice seems to be pulling ahead rather than losing ground to LibreOffice. I almost never use MS Office, but I actually find myself much more comfortable using it despite the number of hours I've spent using LibreOffice. Sometimes I really wonder if the praise heaped on OpenOffice/LibreOffice is really gratuitous praise from Open Source advocates who want to believe it and want other people to switch to it.
As I've said before: I'm going to fund my next romantic comedy movie by selling action figures.
Point being: some things simply aren't setup well for merchandising. Merchandising - while it might bring in some money - it probably isn't going to bring in enough profit to pay for the upfront costs of making the digital media in the first place. Yeah, you can talk about merchandising, but how about if you name the top 100 movies and 100 software packages and then explain how they'll earn back their investment with merchandising. Sure, a movie Transformers *might* have a possibility of earning some money back from increased sales of Transformers toys (though I doubt that even they could earn enough to pay for the film), what about the "English Patient"? Even if you talk about massive markups (from $0.25 to make a lunch box to a cost of $30, which I'm sure both numbers are wrong) you still have to sell a huge number of them to make a decent profit. Avatar cost $400 million for production and marketing. How many Avatar lunchboxes do you have to sell again, to earn back that $400 million investment? Even if I accepted your "$29.75 of profit on ever lunchbox" claim (which I don't believe), you'd have to sell 13.5 million lunchboxes to earn $400 million. Given 310 million Americans, that's roughly 4.5 million Americans at each age. So, if you can sell an Avatar lunchbox to *every single 9, 10 , and 11 year-old* in the United States, then you can fund the movie budget.
Heck, even movies like Cloverfield or Avatar aren't going to be making much from merch. If they could be making money from merchandise, they'd already be doing it because every movie producer is going to jump at an opportunity that could bring in a few million dollars (which, by the way, is a small fraction of movie budgets).
Every single time the pirates state.. "make it playable on what I want to play it on and a reasonable price." that means 30 minute TV shows are $0.25 1 hour are $0.50 and Movies are $1.99
Some people say that. Other people say they're not going to pay, period. And some other people want crazy low prices - I recall one person wanting to pay ten cents.
The other problem is that it's not clear that your new system is better in terms of revenue. If X people watch for $2, and Y people watch for $0.25 then you need Y to be at least eight times larger in order to reach the same revenue. I'm not saying that we should try to help companies maximize their revenue, I'm just saying that if Y is only 4 times larger than X, then companies aren't going to be happy about cutting revenues in half and they aren't going to do it. Cutting revenues in half is going to make a lot of digital media switch from being profitable to being a loss. Imagine if you had a $10 million investment in a film - and I told you that you could make X or half of X. In the best case scenario, you earn quite a bit less money. In the worst case scenario, you switch from earning a few million dollars in profit from the movie to taking a few million dollar loss on it (I hope you didn't need that money).
I've argued with Masnick before. He makes the claim that if you give away everything digital, it makes your scarce products more valuable. But, he ends there. While he's right, he's *very* wrong about physical products making up for the shortfall in revenue when you give away your digital media. He seems to think that if you make a $10 million dollar software or movie that you can give it away for free, which will make all the physical stuff around the software or movie more valuable (like selling action figures or coffee mugs or something). He makes a bizarre leap to the conclusion that the increased sales of action figures and coffee mugs will more than makeup for that $10 million loss on creating the digital media in the first place. It's completely crazy that he won't admit the obvious flaw in his whole theory.
Even more so, nothing is lost. End result is that it is more sharing than stealing. If you could share a apple with someone hungry without loosing it, why would you refuse? Any sane person under those circumstances would stop trying to sell apples, unless they could provide some kind of scarce value add to the whole.
No, if we seriously take that attitude, then if everyone pirated everything, creators would not be in a position to create entertainment for you. It's just not financially viable. The analogy to food and hunger isn't a good one. It's entertainment and people want a constant flow of NEW entertainment (unlike food, where, if we could create an infinite number of apples then humanity will always have an infinite number of apples). If it costs $100 million to create new software, a new movie, etc, and everyone pirates it, then the creator can't pay off his debts and creators learn pretty quickly to stop making stuff. But, society wants new stuff. This puts everyone at an impasse.
> The RIAA completely misunderstood Napster. they saw money being lost not a chance at making more money. It took 6 years and one billion itunes downloads before they realized just how badly they fucked up.
The music companies were always screwed - it didn't matter what choices they made. Music revenues have done nothing but decline in the past 10 years. Saying that iTunes did it right is missing the fact that digital music sales have not compensated for the loss of physical sales. Mathematically speaking, for every $100 decline in physical music sales over the past ten years there has been an $18 increase in digital music sales. It's not a winning strategy. At best, it's making the best of a bad situation.
(Sorry, I get annoyed when people like to explain the music industry's decline as a result of "not moving to digital sales" when it seems like the real culprit was always what the music industry thought it was: a fast, global internet combined with piracy. The music industry was not wrong about Napster.)
I wouldn't think the question of "did MegaUpload exist ONLY for piracy" is really that important. If pirate websites could protect themselves from takedown by hosting a few files that are legitimate (not copyright infringing), then that's a huge loophole in the system. Suddenly a pirate site could say, "Yeah, 99.9% of our content is copyright infringing, but I had a few people upload a few of their own files and that protects our entire site from takedown, because any takedown makes you guilty of harming those legitimate files."
Except that in the XDA case, what they're doing is removing advertising and "optimizing the app for better performance". Removing advertising is not "harmful to the Angry Birds brand" and it's not "ripping off its fans".
Really? A company that sells their product for a dollar finds it's uneconomical to drag pirates into court? Besides, it's easy for people to buy Angry Birds since it's easily searchable in the AppStore, and most people would find it way more trouble than it's worth to try to pirate it and save themselves a few bucks. They have a huge convenience advantage over pirates.
I have a question about this. Let's say that some group was doing something that we all legitimately disagree with. Let's say that some criminal organization was involved in money laundering, stealing and selling credit card numbers, distributing viruses and controlling those viruses using servers hosted on Sealand, etc etc. What would we hope/expect that governments would do to Sealand in those cases? Would/Should governments just throw up their hands and say, "Well, they're a sovereign nation, we can't do anything about it."?
I'm just curious because it seems like we either have to say:
- Sealand is sovereign and can do whatever they want (regardless of any real damage they do to anyone or everyone), or
- Sealand's sovereignty is dependent on not doing illegal/bad things and governments could (fairly or not) come down on Sealand for doing those things - and this could involve capturing people on Sealand and putting them on trial, cutting off internet access, etc.
> In a society where no piracy can happen, it cannot possibly be free.
I think companies are more concerned with whether or not rampant piracy can happen, not whether every single instance of piracy can be stopped.
> I find the argument that people will stop making music when others are allowed to distribute that music to be an extremely depressing position. I think people will still create music and art.
I actually think that music is a special case. People aren't going to stop making music if anyone can distribute it. The music business is unusual in that there are multiple revenue streams for music: music sales (to consumers), music licensing (for commercials, movies, etc), and live music. If music sales to consumers were eliminated, the other revenue streams would still exist. I think software and movies are in a different position because there are no "software concerts" or "movie concerts". They make their money from selling digital copies. This makes them much more dependent on the one revenue stream called "selling digital copies".
Didn't you just say "Eliminating copyright will largely eliminate most of the time and money investment that goes into creating works" ? Why would you want to partially eliminate it then? That choice would just contribute to the negative view:
I don't believe so because creators make most of their money early in the sales cycle anyway. If copyright was 20 years instead of 100 years, then the creator will miss out on: sales after the creator is dead and sales long after sales numbers have declined. I started selling my own software about 3 years ago. Sales numbers peaked the first month and have declined since then. I'm not selling much anymore. I figure I've probably made 90-95% of the sales I'm ever going to make and this is only 3 years after the product's release. If copyright on software was 10 or 20 years instead of 100+ years, I could say, "I make 99% of the money that I would've made, so it's not a big deal. It's not like I need another 80+ years to try to scratch out anther 1% in sales."
> Perhaps in a poorer society the lack of copyright law would result in "cheap work". Or perhaps it will result in a world where the popularity of music and art isn't determined by corporate bottom lines trying to edge in on fads to make a quick dollar, but will instead be created by people who really enjoy the practice and do so in their free time.
Those people can make music right now. Copyright isn't stopping them.
> You say a copyrightless world would be dominated by "cheap work", you must live in a country where the radio music and television shows aren't the talentless work played in the USA.
I disagree that radio music and television shows are dominated by talentless people. I think that's overly cynical. My own opinion is that I don't qualified to judge all music for all people. If people's goal is to find music that they enjoy listening to, and music like Justin Beiber and Nickelback fulfill that role, then even if I'm not personally interested in listening to that music, I still think it has value because it makes other people happy. I don't feel that my tastes mean that I'm right in some objective way, or that those people need to be educated to listen to "real music" like [insert the name of your or my favorite band here].