Though modifying a console could make piracy possible, the justice system is supposed to punish people for what DOES happen, not what COULD possibly happen. E.g. if someone almost killed another they don't get charge for murder in the first degree.
Not necessarily. I think most people agree with laws that punish speeding, running red-lights, and driving drunk - even if no one ends up in an accident.
Services like Tor can be used to mask the identity of a child pornographer; however, the use of a service like Tor is not equivalent to downloading or sharing child pornography until the actual crime is committed. I'm for a reasonable enforcement of copyright, but only when an actual crime is committed.
Well, the problem with that is that the legal system must sometimes make 'upstream' activities illegal because the 'downstream' activities are harder to catch. For example, should it be illegal to stop people from printing counterfeit money? In some sense, you could say that printing money isn't a crime - rather, passing it off as real money is a crime. The problem is that if you allow someone (e.g. the Mafia) to print money, it will be very hard to catch them in the act of actually passing it off as real money. Even worse, they could startup a business selling counterfeit money to people around the world (with full disclosure that it is counterfeit). Those other people could buy it for (say) 10% of it's face value, then pass off the nearly-perfect counterfeit money as real. The printers aren't doing anything illegal, and the people passing-off the money as real would be located in markets all over the planet. It would be a legal nightmare to stop it -- unless you make the production of counterfeit money a crime in itself, even though printing counterfeit money is not directly a crime.
Wow. I guess piracy really doesn't hurt the digital content industries.
Oh wait. Two caveats:
(1) "Sales of recorded music fell 6%" (which means other digital industries that don't involve giving concerts shouldn't expect comparible results).
(2) A recent (July 13, 2009) study of UK piracy says "The analyst firm published a study on Monday that showed the numbers of those who regularly file-shared had dropped by a quarter between December 2007 and January 2009. The trend was particularly pronounced among 14-18-year-olds -- at the earlier date, 42 per cent were file-sharing at least once per month but at the latter date only 26 per cent were doing so."
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb20090713_439306.htm
None of your points show anything about people disrespecting copyright. The fact of the matter is that whether copyright was a 42-year copyright (as Macaulay advocated) or 100+ years doesn't make any difference to pirates' actual behavior. In many cases, I see pirates complaining about the existence of Intellectual Property in any form - i.e. they want free filesharing, with a copyright length of 0 minutes.
You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives. Of these persons few will be found among the rich and the noble. The rich and the noble are not impelled to intellectual exertion by necessity. They may be impelled to intellectual exertion by the desire of distinguishing themselves, or by the desire of benefiting the community. But it is generally within these walls that they seek to signalise themselves and to serve their fellow-creatures. Both their ambition and their public spirit, in a country like this, naturally take a political turn. It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright. http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos2
I hope more people at slashdot would recognize the way that copyright supports the creation of media.
"any and numerous classes of public benefactors continue ceaselessly to pour forth their flood of useful ideas, adding to the common stock of knowledge. No one regards it as immoral or unethical to use these ideas..."
Ideas are NOT copyrighted and have never been. If you think this is a decent argument against copyright, then you've already lost the argument. The only people who conflate "ideas" with "copyright" are people trying to drag you to a predefined conclusion.
Copyrights are parasitical in nature, they bleed resources off a society, they neither house, nourish, heal, clothe, transport nor provide energy or necessary infrastructure. If fact those resources as set aside to feed copyright only so long as the works produced do provide a real return of true value and merit
Those two statements are contradictory. Further, what you're saying with the first statement is that entertainment and all software (including software that is used to design buildings, educate, calculate financial numbers, run websites, or support the internet in general) is parasitical in nature. Copyrights are not "parasitical" - they support the creation of works that people want - and people them want enough to pay money for them. Copyrights provide a way for society to financially support these works collectively. Based on your view that entertainment and copyright being parasitical, I think you might be happier leaving slashdot and moving to an Amish community.
Here's the catch 22 of copyright -- How do you know if an artistic experience is worth your monetary support if you have not experienced it yet?
I guess I don't really see that as that large of a problem. Yes, it's true that you might be pretty disappointed by that movie, album, or software you bought. But, you aren't going-in completely blind. You can watch trailers, listen to music on the radio (or lookup songs on last.fm), download demos of software. Content creators go out of their way to help people see their product because we know it's helpful for buying decisions. Further, you can talk to people who've watched a movie, and lookup reviews on the internet. And, when you see "Michael Bay" attached to a movie - you should know that it isn't going to be worth your time. The flip-side of the problem is this: with piracy, it puts the content creators in the position of trying to get someone to pay for stuff after they've already got it. That's a tough position to be in. You can't give away 100% of your product, and then expect to be paid most of the time.
After all, it isn't only pirates who "do harm to the creator's ability to get paid for their work". Competing products also do that: if I spend $10 on a ticket to Terminator: Salvation -- or a CD, or a pizza -- that's $10 I can't spend on a ticket to Up. Reviewers do it as well: if Roger Ebert writes a negative review of Up, I'm less likely to buy a ticket. If we apply this definition fairly, we'll have to outlaw a lot more than just unauthorized copying.
No, there is legitimate competition which harms a business, and there is illegitimate ways of harming a busines. They are NOT the same thing. Saying so would confuse "Walmart harmed my business by opening next to my store" with "shoplifters are harming my business by stealing things". The first one is legitimate. The second one is not. I'm not asking for stopping everything that could possibly harm someone's businesses. (I'm sure you know that's NOT what was arguing, so your point is an argument against something I never said or implied.)
By the way: here's the problem with your counterfeit money system - where you believe that someone should not be prosecuted for creating counterfeit money, only for trying to pass it off as "real". What your system does is allow someone to print counterfeit money. Then, they can advertise this counterfeit money (which is a perfect or near perfect copy of real money) to the general public - with full disclosure that the money is fake. They sell this money for 1/10th the value printed on the fake money. Millions of people all over the world buy it with the intention of passing it off as real money. Now, law enforcement all over the world has to deal with millions of people passing off fake (but perfectly / nearly perfectly copied) money to the public. This is a nightmare for the police because they have to catch everyone the first time they try to pass-off the money. The people passing-off the fake money as real can then pretend that they didn't know the money was fake (claiming they don't know where they got it - maybe from an ATM, or a store, etc). This allows them to avoid prosecution.
So, in your world, counterfeit money is rampant. The printers have a strong incentive to create fake money (they get paid lots of real money), and what they are doing is completely legal. The counterfeit-money buyers are acting illegally, but they're increasing their money 10-fold by this scheme, and they're difficult to catch and prosecute. Now, you've setup a situation where the entire system collapses.
I think the problem here is that your trying to construct a legal system based on "first principles" like "no deception" or "don't deprive people of things". Instead, you need to look at the society-wide effects of the legal system you propose. The problem is that it doesn't work very well, and leaves society worse-off -- even though all laws are derived form "first principles", and therefore, should (theoretically) produce a good society. In fact, you can't even justify the existence of government taxes based on first principles. The idea that taxes are theft would actually suggest that taxes shouldn't exist.
I'm not going to bother responding to the rest of your post because even though you're wrong, I have very little confidence that I can convince you that you are wrong. I also think that most people would agree with me, and would rather live in a society according to my proposed legal system than your proposed legal system. I don't see the point of running around trying to convince you that your system wouldn't work very well in the real world.
I don't see the problem with what they (Scopelight) were doing. As long as they are connecting to infringing websites, then authorities can go after the websites themselves (rather than the search engine).
I'll also add that this is not the same thing as PirateBay, since PirateBay is a torrent tracker - the people uploading/downloading information aren't websites, but they are located at an ever-shifting number of changing IP addresses. Heck, they could be at a coffeeshop's free wifi while filesharing - and who can possibly track them down? Further, the PirateBay goes out of their way to hide filesharers identities.
Artists like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have demonstrated that the patronage model works well for music.
I'm not sure that they've demonstrated anything. Radiohead's manager says they won't be repeating their stunt -- and it seems to have been exactly that: a publicity stunt. Even Trent Reznor has knocked Radiohead for doing the "free music" thing as a stunt. I have to wonder if Radiohead's manager considers the "pay what you want" thing to be a failed experiment. Regarding NIN: I don't know what Trent's thinking on the matter is. Maybe he just really likes the idea of free music for everyone, and maybe he feels like he has plenty of money - so if he losses income by supporting an idea he likes, then that's his charity for the world. Further, with as popular as NIN is, they can probably still pay their studio costs even if their revenue drops by 90%. (My own expectation is that more bands will release free music as a promotion for concerts. Like Coldplay, they will probably release live recordings, though, because they're cheap to make; much cheaper than studio recordings. Of course, they're also lower quality.)
Despite record levels of film piracy, both the quality and revenue in the film industry are near their historic peaks.
According to US and Canadian numbers, Box Office revenue did reach it's highest level in 2008. However, when you look at the numbers, you see that there's been very little growth since 2002. Box Office revenue has grew by 5% between 2002 and 2008 (6 year period; 0.9% average annual growth). On the other hand, it grew by 118% between 1987 and 2002 (a 15 year period; 7.9% average annual growth). Have movies experienced slower growth because of piracy? Maybe maybe not. I wouldn't claim that piracy hasn't had an effect (and that negative effect could get a lot larger if we legalize filesharing). At least we can say it hasn't dropped the bottom out of the industry (yet).
Source: http://www.natoonline.org/statisticsboxoffice.htm
Legalizing non-commercial sharing would merely acknowledge a right the public has already asserted.
Most people do not fileshare. This is not a right that the public has "already asserted". If you want to legalize actions based on the number of people doing them, I think you should start with eliminating speeding laws. Personally, I'm more opposed to internet filesharing than person-to-person piracy. Why? Because internet-based piracy is basically super-charging piracy, allowing the everyone in the world to get pirated material in an instant. Person-to-person sharing is inconvenient on a variety of levels, which means it can only do limited damage.
Most/.ers oppose criminalization of personal file sharing
What does "personal" filesharing mean? I think you mean "public" filesharing - i.e. uploading and downloading with random people you don't know on the internet. As far as I can tell, the only piece of copyright you support is laws against selling pirated material for a period of 10 years. That seems like a pretty thin version of copyright, and I'd feel dishonest if I described that as "in favor of the general concept of copyright" (as mentioned two comments above). The copyright you're describing can pretty much be summed up as "never prohibit anything I want to do with copyrighted material; only prohibit selling it, and I don't want to do that anyway".
I also contend that I have the right to share any facts I know, about my property or otherwise, except in cases where serious harm to another person would result from the spread of those facts (and sometimes even then). "Serious harm" would include bodily harm (sharing nuclear launch codes) and severe invasions of privacy (sharing medical info).
And spreading copyrighted material does harm to the creator's ability to get paid for their work - which in turn, leads to harming society because it is poorer for the loss of creative works when creators go elsewhere. There's been a lot of discussion about whether filesharing harms creators (I think it does), but I see a lot of pirates arguing that selling pirated goods harms the creator while filesharing does not. Since you agree with selling pirated goods, how do you justify harming the creator by selling pirated material with the idea of not harming someone through the release of information?
Further, you do admit that the release of certain information can be a violation of privacy, plagarism, etc. What you are doing to make those judgments is treating "electrons on your piece of metal" as more than just bits - you are treating it as "information". You are allowing yourself to think about the data wholistically, rather than just a collection of bits. Thus, you've now broken your own earlier argument that you should be able to treat information as just a bunch of electrons on a piece of metal you own. I guess we can put the "just electrons on metal" argument to rest once and for all.
In some sense, you can think of copyrighted material as being under a kind of loose NDA (non-disclosure agreement). As someone who is involved in running a business, I'm sometimes in a position where I have to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to see certain information. The reason they want me to sign a non-disclosure agreement is because release of that information could harm that other business in some way. I see copyright as being a lesser version of that. It protects businesses and creators. Copyright helps to avoid the harm caused by piracy (and you already agree that "causing harm" is a legitimate reason for restricting the spread of bits), which, in turn, allows us to create the stuff that society wants. It's a bargain that we've struck.
We might compare it to laws against shoplifting. While you might argue that shoplifting is "wrong", let's imagine that stealing has no moral implications at all. Let's say that we live in a society where "sharing" is the ideal thing to do. And let's ignore the fact that shoplifting deprives the owner of their copy. Is there any reason to restrict shoplifting? Yes, if the existence of shoplifting drives stores and factories out of business, leaving society with no products at all. If it ultimately leaves society poorer in the long run, then laws against shoplifting are a good thing. I see copyright in much the same light.
You might say that information should only be restricted when the release of that information results in "Serious harm" or "severe invasions of privacy", but now you're talking about drawing a line on a continuum. Society has always supported laws designed to improve the state of the community, even if they fall into neither of those two categories. Laws against spam, for example. Spam is just sending bits around the internet. It results in harm by clogging our inboxes. It's clear that allowing spam to go unrestricted harms us all.
In fact, I could go into a whole discussion showing how copyright law improves society by allowing creators to recoup their contribution to society. If 10,000 people are willing to pay a creator $10 for something he created, then each of them place a value of at least $10 on that product. On average, they might place a value of $20 on that product. This means society (as a whole) has benefited by $200,000 from that creation. And, if someone is contributing something worth $200,000 t
Not quite.
A car is legitimate property because it can only be in one place at a time. If I take your car, you don't have it anymore.
Keep in mind the context of the discussion: the context was this - copyrighted media does not occur in a vacuum; we are all creatures of our own culture; and so, things that I create are influenced by our common culture. The argument that he was making was that digital content cannot be copyrighted or 'monopolized' because (in some ways) it sprang from our common culture - it did not originate 100% from my own mind. My argument, then, was about whether or not a thing needed to be 100% the product of our own mind/labor in order to have certain special rights over it. My answer is "no", and then I illustrated with physical property that that particular line of argument doesn't hold up.
Your argument, on the other hand, isn't so much a rebuttal of what I was saying as it is a completely different argument against intellectual property.
A farmer owns his crops not because he designed them from scratch at the molecular level -- he didn't -- but because they grew out of seeds, soil, fertilizer, and water that all belonged to him already. Likewise, a car company owns the cars they make because those cars were made from steel and other materials the company already owned
That may be, but where did this "ownership" come from in the first place? If I wanted to get all hippy, I could say that the universe belongs to all of us. Any attempts of a farmer to claim he *owns* seeds, soil, or water are really a 'theft' from humanity and the earth's creatures. Attempts by car companies to take iron from the earth and claim 'ownership' of it is to steal the earth from beneath our feet and sell it back to us. Of course, I'm not honestly arguing this - I'm just illustrating that drawing soil and iron from the earth could be comparable to drawing ideas from our common culture.
Along the same lines, if I learn some information (say, someone sends it to me over the internet) and use it to rearrange bits on my hard drive, the hard drive still belongs to me. If I then want to describe that pattern of bits to someone else (say, send it to them over the internet), I believe I'm entitled to do so: surely I have the right to share facts about a chunk of metal I own, right?
When you describe this as "rearranging bits" you're actually generalizing the situation and depriving bits of meaning. Once you've done that, you can make a variety of arguments that are true in general, but may be false in more specific cases.
For example: I could describe stabbing someone as "rearranging molecules". Then, once I've made that generalization, I can say, "Are we going to make laws against rearranging molecules?" Yet, the specific case (stabbing someone) should be illegal. Similarly, you could describe child pornography as "just a bunch of bits on my hard drive", then argue that sequences of bits should not be illegal. Or, I could counterfeit money, and call it "just a sequence of ink and paper". Or, I could download a book, replace the authors's name with my own, and then say that I'm only changing bits on my own device, and then pass it to others while claiming "I have the right to share facts about a chunk of metal I own" - and what's wrong with that? So, what you are doing by generalizing the situation is stripping things of meaning - meaning that is important.
In fact, if your argument about "bits" was true, then not only would filesharing be legal, but it should be legal to sell pirates media as well, since pirated media is just a particular sequence of bits. When you define it that way, it seems absurd to allow a creator to have a monopoly over sales. (I don't know if you agree with the idea of selling pirated media. Most pirates seem to disagree with it, but not all of them do.)
1. I didn't setup the copyright system, so don't blame me for "[fucking] us over".
2. I'm not defending the excessively long copyright lengths that we see. Personally, I think ten or twenty years is plenty. What I'm arguing about is the idea that copyright lengths should be eliminated, or filesharing legalized. What those things do is effectively reduce copyright lengths to 0 seconds. Heck, I've toyed with the idea of putting my own work under a much shorter copyright length (like a 14-year founder's copyright) or something shorter. Why would I do that? Simply because I don't agree with current copyright.
You don't deserve to get paid for all the stuff you create!
You deserve to get paid for the things you create that people find valuable enough to pay you for.
I agree 100%. The fact that I work on a project for several years entitles me to exactly $0. However, I do think I deserve a chance to setup prices for my work. The consumer can choose to accept that deal or reject it. The existence of piracy / ignoring of copyright, on the other hand, eliminates my ability to negotiate at all. It's like walking into a store and telling a shopkeeper that he can either set prices I accept or I'll simply take the item. Of course, there's no reason for me (as a consumer) to ask reasonable prices at all - I can say, "sell me this car for $1, or I'll take it", and the seller has no negotiating leverage at all. Piracy / no copyright, then, eliminates the creator's ability to negotiate at all, and gives the consumer complete and total control over the transaction - no matter how unreasonable they want to be.
And you should always offset your mentality by the fact that you didn't create anything in a vacuum. The creation might have been written down by you, but it was created by all of society, in an abstract sense.
I see what I'm doing as "value added". My years of work are the "value added" part.
Besides, you could easily apply those same concepts to "real" property. Take land-property as an example: the earth was here long before humans. Therefore, any attempts to put up a fence and call this "mine" or "yours" is wrong. The farmer sells crops - but he didn't construct the seeds ex-nihilo, he didn't sit down and design the genetics, he didn't create the sunlight or the soil. Therefore, farmers should not be entitled to sell crops. They should not have the benefit of laws that prevent people from taking them without paying him, because he was not 100% responsible for creating the food. And your car? It's made mostly of glass and metal. The metal was pulled out of the ground. The glass is made from sand. It's all from the earth - not created by man. Therefore, land-property, food crops, and anything made of glass and metal cannot be "property" - because no one constructed them in a vacuum. Once you bring in "value added", suddenly cars and crops become legitimate property. The same goes for the digital world.
Those of us who are creators are very alarmed by statements like this. You might as well tell me that I don't deserve to get paid for all the stuff I create - no matter how great it is. Is it really a good idea to undermine the ability of digital creators to even earn a living? Without intellectual property, I end up spending years working on stuff and essentially giving it away to the world - while my mortgage company comes and pounds down my door. Why am I not entitled to a small amount of protection in the marketplace, so that I can earn a living from my hard work?
Based on my reading of the article, they aren't threatening to sue individuals for "public performance". Rather, they are using this as a ploy to wrangle more fees out of the phone companies. Quotes like "you're violating copyright law by 'publicly performing' it without a license." are inaccurate. Afterall, if you look at the article, it's part of a court document involving AT&T - which shows who this is aimed at (i.e. not you, the consumer) I will say that it sounds greedy, but it sounds more like a legal maneuver to get paid more, rather than an attack on the consumer. But, congratulations to the EFF for getting everyone up in arms.
Sorry NewYorkCountryLawyer,
In the "real world", the case would not have been dismissed. It would've ended with a guilty verdict in small claims court.
Actually, when people have lower infant mortality and longer lifespans, they tend to have fewer children. When death rates are high, there seems to be some desire to protect the existence of the next generation by having lots of children. Lookup a map of infant mortality and birthrates. Places like Africa, where mortality is high, is where the birthrates are also high.
All of this leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion: decreasing death rates leads to lower population growth.
I foresee a whole army of self-deluded crackpots peddling "cures" that they discovered in their basements. No doubt, the establishment will ignore them and their ingenious remedies which are sure to shake-up the entire medical industry. Or, at least, that's how they will interpret things.
> "This movement could someday lead to bottom-up remedies for disease"
Let's hope they aren't doing any actual testing on humans or animals.
Funny, back in 2006, Cory Doctorow wrote an article titled: "Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google", where he says:
Google's new Book Search promises to save writers' and publishers' asses by putting their books into the index of works that are visible to searchers who get all their information from the Internet.
Oh, and congratulations on getting yourself on slashdot, again, "anonymous reader" (aka Cory Doctorow). You are truely a master of self-promotion. Clearly, Doctorow has a talent for creating controversial stories to raise his status and visibility on the internet. It isn't really about the consistency of his views, but rather, saying whatever is going to get himself in the news.
Slashdot Mirror
Though modifying a console could make piracy possible, the justice system is supposed to punish people for what DOES happen, not what COULD possibly happen. E.g. if someone almost killed another they don't get charge for murder in the first degree.
Not necessarily. I think most people agree with laws that punish speeding, running red-lights, and driving drunk - even if no one ends up in an accident.
Services like Tor can be used to mask the identity of a child pornographer; however, the use of a service like Tor is not equivalent to downloading or sharing child pornography until the actual crime is committed. I'm for a reasonable enforcement of copyright, but only when an actual crime is committed.
Well, the problem with that is that the legal system must sometimes make 'upstream' activities illegal because the 'downstream' activities are harder to catch. For example, should it be illegal to stop people from printing counterfeit money? In some sense, you could say that printing money isn't a crime - rather, passing it off as real money is a crime. The problem is that if you allow someone (e.g. the Mafia) to print money, it will be very hard to catch them in the act of actually passing it off as real money. Even worse, they could startup a business selling counterfeit money to people around the world (with full disclosure that it is counterfeit). Those other people could buy it for (say) 10% of it's face value, then pass off the nearly-perfect counterfeit money as real. The printers aren't doing anything illegal, and the people passing-off the money as real would be located in markets all over the planet. It would be a legal nightmare to stop it -- unless you make the production of counterfeit money a crime in itself, even though printing counterfeit money is not directly a crime.
Wow. I guess piracy really doesn't hurt the digital content industries.
Oh wait. Two caveats:
(1) "Sales of recorded music fell 6%" (which means other digital industries that don't involve giving concerts shouldn't expect comparible results).
(2) A recent (July 13, 2009) study of UK piracy says "The analyst firm published a study on Monday that showed the numbers of those who regularly file-shared had dropped by a quarter between December 2007 and January 2009. The trend was particularly pronounced among 14-18-year-olds -- at the earlier date, 42 per cent were file-sharing at least once per month but at the latter date only 26 per cent were doing so."
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb20090713_439306.htm
None of your points show anything about people disrespecting copyright. The fact of the matter is that whether copyright was a 42-year copyright (as Macaulay advocated) or 100+ years doesn't make any difference to pirates' actual behavior. In many cases, I see pirates complaining about the existence of Intellectual Property in any form - i.e. they want free filesharing, with a copyright length of 0 minutes.
Let's not forget other things he wrote:
You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives. Of these persons few will be found among the rich and the noble. The rich and the noble are not impelled to intellectual exertion by necessity. They may be impelled to intellectual exertion by the desire of distinguishing themselves, or by the desire of benefiting the community. But it is generally within these walls that they seek to signalise themselves and to serve their fellow-creatures. Both their ambition and their public spirit, in a country like this, naturally take a political turn. It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos2
I hope more people at slashdot would recognize the way that copyright supports the creation of media.
Ideas are NOT copyrighted and have never been. If you think this is a decent argument against copyright, then you've already lost the argument. The only people who conflate "ideas" with "copyright" are people trying to drag you to a predefined conclusion.
Those two statements are contradictory. Further, what you're saying with the first statement is that entertainment and all software (including software that is used to design buildings, educate, calculate financial numbers, run websites, or support the internet in general) is parasitical in nature. Copyrights are not "parasitical" - they support the creation of works that people want - and people them want enough to pay money for them. Copyrights provide a way for society to financially support these works collectively. Based on your view that entertainment and copyright being parasitical, I think you might be happier leaving slashdot and moving to an Amish community.
I guess I don't really see that as that large of a problem. Yes, it's true that you might be pretty disappointed by that movie, album, or software you bought. But, you aren't going-in completely blind. You can watch trailers, listen to music on the radio (or lookup songs on last.fm), download demos of software. Content creators go out of their way to help people see their product because we know it's helpful for buying decisions. Further, you can talk to people who've watched a movie, and lookup reviews on the internet. And, when you see "Michael Bay" attached to a movie - you should know that it isn't going to be worth your time. The flip-side of the problem is this: with piracy, it puts the content creators in the position of trying to get someone to pay for stuff after they've already got it. That's a tough position to be in. You can't give away 100% of your product, and then expect to be paid most of the time.
No comment on my "counterfeit money" section?
No, there is legitimate competition which harms a business, and there is illegitimate ways of harming a busines. They are NOT the same thing. Saying so would confuse "Walmart harmed my business by opening next to my store" with "shoplifters are harming my business by stealing things". The first one is legitimate. The second one is not. I'm not asking for stopping everything that could possibly harm someone's businesses. (I'm sure you know that's NOT what was arguing, so your point is an argument against something I never said or implied.)
By the way: here's the problem with your counterfeit money system - where you believe that someone should not be prosecuted for creating counterfeit money, only for trying to pass it off as "real". What your system does is allow someone to print counterfeit money. Then, they can advertise this counterfeit money (which is a perfect or near perfect copy of real money) to the general public - with full disclosure that the money is fake. They sell this money for 1/10th the value printed on the fake money. Millions of people all over the world buy it with the intention of passing it off as real money. Now, law enforcement all over the world has to deal with millions of people passing off fake (but perfectly / nearly perfectly copied) money to the public. This is a nightmare for the police because they have to catch everyone the first time they try to pass-off the money. The people passing-off the fake money as real can then pretend that they didn't know the money was fake (claiming they don't know where they got it - maybe from an ATM, or a store, etc). This allows them to avoid prosecution.
So, in your world, counterfeit money is rampant. The printers have a strong incentive to create fake money (they get paid lots of real money), and what they are doing is completely legal. The counterfeit-money buyers are acting illegally, but they're increasing their money 10-fold by this scheme, and they're difficult to catch and prosecute. Now, you've setup a situation where the entire system collapses.
I think the problem here is that your trying to construct a legal system based on "first principles" like "no deception" or "don't deprive people of things". Instead, you need to look at the society-wide effects of the legal system you propose. The problem is that it doesn't work very well, and leaves society worse-off -- even though all laws are derived form "first principles", and therefore, should (theoretically) produce a good society. In fact, you can't even justify the existence of government taxes based on first principles. The idea that taxes are theft would actually suggest that taxes shouldn't exist.
I'm not going to bother responding to the rest of your post because even though you're wrong, I have very little confidence that I can convince you that you are wrong. I also think that most people would agree with me, and would rather live in a society according to my proposed legal system than your proposed legal system. I don't see the point of running around trying to convince you that your system wouldn't work very well in the real world.
I don't see the problem with what they (Scopelight) were doing. As long as they are connecting to infringing websites, then authorities can go after the websites themselves (rather than the search engine).
I'll also add that this is not the same thing as PirateBay, since PirateBay is a torrent tracker - the people uploading/downloading information aren't websites, but they are located at an ever-shifting number of changing IP addresses. Heck, they could be at a coffeeshop's free wifi while filesharing - and who can possibly track them down? Further, the PirateBay goes out of their way to hide filesharers identities.
I'm not sure that they've demonstrated anything. Radiohead's manager says they won't be repeating their stunt -- and it seems to have been exactly that: a publicity stunt. Even Trent Reznor has knocked Radiohead for doing the "free music" thing as a stunt. I have to wonder if Radiohead's manager considers the "pay what you want" thing to be a failed experiment. Regarding NIN: I don't know what Trent's thinking on the matter is. Maybe he just really likes the idea of free music for everyone, and maybe he feels like he has plenty of money - so if he losses income by supporting an idea he likes, then that's his charity for the world. Further, with as popular as NIN is, they can probably still pay their studio costs even if their revenue drops by 90%. (My own expectation is that more bands will release free music as a promotion for concerts. Like Coldplay, they will probably release live recordings, though, because they're cheap to make; much cheaper than studio recordings. Of course, they're also lower quality.)
According to US and Canadian numbers, Box Office revenue did reach it's highest level in 2008. However, when you look at the numbers, you see that there's been very little growth since 2002. Box Office revenue has grew by 5% between 2002 and 2008 (6 year period; 0.9% average annual growth). On the other hand, it grew by 118% between 1987 and 2002 (a 15 year period; 7.9% average annual growth). Have movies experienced slower growth because of piracy? Maybe maybe not. I wouldn't claim that piracy hasn't had an effect (and that negative effect could get a lot larger if we legalize filesharing). At least we can say it hasn't dropped the bottom out of the industry (yet).
Source: http://www.natoonline.org/statisticsboxoffice.htm
Most people do not fileshare. This is not a right that the public has "already asserted". If you want to legalize actions based on the number of people doing them, I think you should start with eliminating speeding laws. Personally, I'm more opposed to internet filesharing than person-to-person piracy. Why? Because internet-based piracy is basically super-charging piracy, allowing the everyone in the world to get pirated material in an instant. Person-to-person sharing is inconvenient on a variety of levels, which means it can only do limited damage.
Most /.ers oppose criminalization of personal file sharing
What does "personal" filesharing mean? I think you mean "public" filesharing - i.e. uploading and downloading with random people you don't know on the internet. As far as I can tell, the only piece of copyright you support is laws against selling pirated material for a period of 10 years. That seems like a pretty thin version of copyright, and I'd feel dishonest if I described that as "in favor of the general concept of copyright" (as mentioned two comments above). The copyright you're describing can pretty much be summed up as "never prohibit anything I want to do with copyrighted material; only prohibit selling it, and I don't want to do that anyway".
And spreading copyrighted material does harm to the creator's ability to get paid for their work - which in turn, leads to harming society because it is poorer for the loss of creative works when creators go elsewhere. There's been a lot of discussion about whether filesharing harms creators (I think it does), but I see a lot of pirates arguing that selling pirated goods harms the creator while filesharing does not. Since you agree with selling pirated goods, how do you justify harming the creator by selling pirated material with the idea of not harming someone through the release of information?
Further, you do admit that the release of certain information can be a violation of privacy, plagarism, etc. What you are doing to make those judgments is treating "electrons on your piece of metal" as more than just bits - you are treating it as "information". You are allowing yourself to think about the data wholistically, rather than just a collection of bits. Thus, you've now broken your own earlier argument that you should be able to treat information as just a bunch of electrons on a piece of metal you own. I guess we can put the "just electrons on metal" argument to rest once and for all.
In some sense, you can think of copyrighted material as being under a kind of loose NDA (non-disclosure agreement). As someone who is involved in running a business, I'm sometimes in a position where I have to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to see certain information. The reason they want me to sign a non-disclosure agreement is because release of that information could harm that other business in some way. I see copyright as being a lesser version of that. It protects businesses and creators. Copyright helps to avoid the harm caused by piracy (and you already agree that "causing harm" is a legitimate reason for restricting the spread of bits), which, in turn, allows us to create the stuff that society wants. It's a bargain that we've struck.
We might compare it to laws against shoplifting. While you might argue that shoplifting is "wrong", let's imagine that stealing has no moral implications at all. Let's say that we live in a society where "sharing" is the ideal thing to do. And let's ignore the fact that shoplifting deprives the owner of their copy. Is there any reason to restrict shoplifting? Yes, if the existence of shoplifting drives stores and factories out of business, leaving society with no products at all. If it ultimately leaves society poorer in the long run, then laws against shoplifting are a good thing. I see copyright in much the same light.
You might say that information should only be restricted when the release of that information results in "Serious harm" or "severe invasions of privacy", but now you're talking about drawing a line on a continuum. Society has always supported laws designed to improve the state of the community, even if they fall into neither of those two categories. Laws against spam, for example. Spam is just sending bits around the internet. It results in harm by clogging our inboxes. It's clear that allowing spam to go unrestricted harms us all.
In fact, I could go into a whole discussion showing how copyright law improves society by allowing creators to recoup their contribution to society. If 10,000 people are willing to pay a creator $10 for something he created, then each of them place a value of at least $10 on that product. On average, they might place a value of $20 on that product. This means society (as a whole) has benefited by $200,000 from that creation. And, if someone is contributing something worth $200,000 t
Keep in mind the context of the discussion: the context was this - copyrighted media does not occur in a vacuum; we are all creatures of our own culture; and so, things that I create are influenced by our common culture. The argument that he was making was that digital content cannot be copyrighted or 'monopolized' because (in some ways) it sprang from our common culture - it did not originate 100% from my own mind. My argument, then, was about whether or not a thing needed to be 100% the product of our own mind/labor in order to have certain special rights over it. My answer is "no", and then I illustrated with physical property that that particular line of argument doesn't hold up.
Your argument, on the other hand, isn't so much a rebuttal of what I was saying as it is a completely different argument against intellectual property.
That may be, but where did this "ownership" come from in the first place? If I wanted to get all hippy, I could say that the universe belongs to all of us. Any attempts of a farmer to claim he *owns* seeds, soil, or water are really a 'theft' from humanity and the earth's creatures. Attempts by car companies to take iron from the earth and claim 'ownership' of it is to steal the earth from beneath our feet and sell it back to us. Of course, I'm not honestly arguing this - I'm just illustrating that drawing soil and iron from the earth could be comparable to drawing ideas from our common culture.
When you describe this as "rearranging bits" you're actually generalizing the situation and depriving bits of meaning. Once you've done that, you can make a variety of arguments that are true in general, but may be false in more specific cases.
For example: I could describe stabbing someone as "rearranging molecules". Then, once I've made that generalization, I can say, "Are we going to make laws against rearranging molecules?" Yet, the specific case (stabbing someone) should be illegal. Similarly, you could describe child pornography as "just a bunch of bits on my hard drive", then argue that sequences of bits should not be illegal. Or, I could counterfeit money, and call it "just a sequence of ink and paper". Or, I could download a book, replace the authors's name with my own, and then say that I'm only changing bits on my own device, and then pass it to others while claiming "I have the right to share facts about a chunk of metal I own" - and what's wrong with that? So, what you are doing by generalizing the situation is stripping things of meaning - meaning that is important.
In fact, if your argument about "bits" was true, then not only would filesharing be legal, but it should be legal to sell pirates media as well, since pirated media is just a particular sequence of bits. When you define it that way, it seems absurd to allow a creator to have a monopoly over sales. (I don't know if you agree with the idea of selling pirated media. Most pirates seem to disagree with it, but not all of them do.)
Which gets down to the issue: what about inte
1. I didn't setup the copyright system, so don't blame me for "[fucking] us over".
2. I'm not defending the excessively long copyright lengths that we see. Personally, I think ten or twenty years is plenty. What I'm arguing about is the idea that copyright lengths should be eliminated, or filesharing legalized. What those things do is effectively reduce copyright lengths to 0 seconds. Heck, I've toyed with the idea of putting my own work under a much shorter copyright length (like a 14-year founder's copyright) or something shorter. Why would I do that? Simply because I don't agree with current copyright.
I can provide you with a long list of creators complaining about piracy, if you would like.
I agree 100%. The fact that I work on a project for several years entitles me to exactly $0. However, I do think I deserve a chance to setup prices for my work. The consumer can choose to accept that deal or reject it. The existence of piracy / ignoring of copyright, on the other hand, eliminates my ability to negotiate at all. It's like walking into a store and telling a shopkeeper that he can either set prices I accept or I'll simply take the item. Of course, there's no reason for me (as a consumer) to ask reasonable prices at all - I can say, "sell me this car for $1, or I'll take it", and the seller has no negotiating leverage at all. Piracy / no copyright, then, eliminates the creator's ability to negotiate at all, and gives the consumer complete and total control over the transaction - no matter how unreasonable they want to be.
Yes, small.
I see what I'm doing as "value added". My years of work are the "value added" part.
Besides, you could easily apply those same concepts to "real" property. Take land-property as an example: the earth was here long before humans. Therefore, any attempts to put up a fence and call this "mine" or "yours" is wrong. The farmer sells crops - but he didn't construct the seeds ex-nihilo, he didn't sit down and design the genetics, he didn't create the sunlight or the soil. Therefore, farmers should not be entitled to sell crops. They should not have the benefit of laws that prevent people from taking them without paying him, because he was not 100% responsible for creating the food. And your car? It's made mostly of glass and metal. The metal was pulled out of the ground. The glass is made from sand. It's all from the earth - not created by man. Therefore, land-property, food crops, and anything made of glass and metal cannot be "property" - because no one constructed them in a vacuum. Once you bring in "value added", suddenly cars and crops become legitimate property. The same goes for the digital world.
Those of us who are creators are very alarmed by statements like this. You might as well tell me that I don't deserve to get paid for all the stuff I create - no matter how great it is. Is it really a good idea to undermine the ability of digital creators to even earn a living? Without intellectual property, I end up spending years working on stuff and essentially giving it away to the world - while my mortgage company comes and pounds down my door. Why am I not entitled to a small amount of protection in the marketplace, so that I can earn a living from my hard work?
Based on my reading of the article, they aren't threatening to sue individuals for "public performance". Rather, they are using this as a ploy to wrangle more fees out of the phone companies. Quotes like "you're violating copyright law by 'publicly performing' it without a license." are inaccurate. Afterall, if you look at the article, it's part of a court document involving AT&T - which shows who this is aimed at (i.e. not you, the consumer) I will say that it sounds greedy, but it sounds more like a legal maneuver to get paid more, rather than an attack on the consumer. But, congratulations to the EFF for getting everyone up in arms.
Sorry NewYorkCountryLawyer, In the "real world", the case would not have been dismissed. It would've ended with a guilty verdict in small claims court.
Actually, when people have lower infant mortality and longer lifespans, they tend to have fewer children. When death rates are high, there seems to be some desire to protect the existence of the next generation by having lots of children. Lookup a map of infant mortality and birthrates. Places like Africa, where mortality is high, is where the birthrates are also high.
All of this leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion: decreasing death rates leads to lower population growth.
I foresee a whole army of self-deluded crackpots peddling "cures" that they discovered in their basements. No doubt, the establishment will ignore them and their ingenious remedies which are sure to shake-up the entire medical industry. Or, at least, that's how they will interpret things.
> "This movement could someday lead to bottom-up remedies for disease"
Let's hope they aren't doing any actual testing on humans or animals.
Funny, back in 2006, Cory Doctorow wrote an article titled: "Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google", where he says:
Google's new Book Search promises to save writers' and publishers' asses by putting their books into the index of works that are visible to searchers who get all their information from the Internet.
Oh, and congratulations on getting yourself on slashdot, again, "anonymous reader" (aka Cory Doctorow). You are truely a master of self-promotion. Clearly, Doctorow has a talent for creating controversial stories to raise his status and visibility on the internet. It isn't really about the consistency of his views, but rather, saying whatever is going to get himself in the news.