I don't think anyone has really argued that.
Yes they have.
The main argument "in favour" is that piracy doesn't affect sales - most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
That's not an argument "in favor" of piracy. Example: A company has zero piracy and 100,000 sales. Along comes piracy. Now, they have 1,000,000 pirates and 10,000 sales. In the second case, you can truthfully make the statement that "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place". In this imaginary example, 900,000 people wouldn't have bought it. But, another 90,000 people pirated it INSTEAD of buying it, causing sales to plumet 90%. Nobody's going to seriously accept the "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" argument because even if it's true, it doesn't address what companies are REALLY concerned about: losing sales due to piracy. All "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" really tells you is that each pirated copy wasn't a lost sale, rather, each pirated copy represents part of a sale - but that can still add-up to huge losses.
A community of 18,000 would amount to empty servers a lot of the time especially if the game is available globally.
Yeah, because 18,000 players means you'd never find anyone to play against. Anyway, the "enough players to play against" is the kind of argument a pirate might think is great (because it legitimizes their piracy), but no smart company is seriously going to accept that answer.
Only a very detailed statistical analysis of the numbers could tell you if it was a good or a bad thing, and even then people would still argue with the result.
In general, the people creating the media thinks it doesn't help. People who pirate like to pretend it does help.
I can make a pretty good guess at who's more biased between those two groups. The companies want to maximize their profit. This means if piracy helps them, they will want piracy. If piracy doesn't help them, they won't like piracy. So, companies benefit by following the facts wherever they lead. They have an interest in finding out the truth - whatever it is. And most companies agree: piracy harms them.
Pirates, on the other hand, benefit from piracy regardless of whether piracy hurts or harms companies. This puts them in a position where they should always claim (or convince themselves) that piracy helps companies - which makes them biased towards one single conclusion.
In the end, I don't buy that there are two sides to piracy claim.
That argument is irrelevant and also rather wrong.
In what way is it irrelevant and wrong? You claimed that pirates were principled activists reacting against unfair copyright. My point is simple: if copyright was "reasonable", or if copyright length hadn't been changed at all in the last 100 years, it would have zero effect on piracy - which goes to show that pirates aren't principled activists against unfair copyright. That's very relevant.
Stop pretending this is "civil disobedience".
Actually, I'd be 100 times more impressed with pirates if they made statements like "copyright should only exist for a reasonable amount of time; 20 years is a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, I refuse to honor copyright past 20 years, but fully respect copyright of all works less than 20 years old." The way things are right now is a bit like saying, "I don't like the way Walmart does business. Therefore, I'm practicing 'civil disobedience' when I steal this big-screen TV from Walmart." That raises the question: are you being principled, or are you merely using that as cover to get free stuff. The *right* way to protest is to boycott Walmart by not buying (or stealing). That shows that your protest isn't simply self-interest and greed masquerading as principles. Similarly, if you want to protest copyright, then you should neither buy nor pirate. When Black Americans in Georgia were angry with the segregated bus system, what did they do? They boycotted the bus-system and they *walked*. That was a principled boycott. They made their own lives harder to bring attention to the situation. Pirating is NOT making your own life harder, it's making it easier. Industries involved in copyright have zero reason to trust that your behavior will change even if copyright were "reasonable". Thus, they have very little impetus to change anything.
"Copyright is supposed to be for creators, not publishers!"
I think you'd be surprised by the number of creators who do keep their copyrights. Further, who owns the copyright seems to be irrelevant to pirates, anyway. I highly doubt any pirates could tell you whether a specific song, movie, or software was owned by the creator or the publisher. They just pirate it all with no regard for that question.
In the end, it sound more like excuses for piracy than any real argument; even if all of these things changed to meet your criteria, I highly doubt it would make much of a dent in piracy at all.
Buying needs to be easier than infringement.
How can buying ever be easier than copyright infringement? For one thing, copyright infringement means never having to pay money, and never having to type your credit card number into a form on the internet. That means pirating always has an inherent advantage over "paying for stuff".
So it is just fine that copyright, the agreement between "the people" and the creators... civil disobedience is what we are doing -- taking freely as we please in spite of bad law... It's not stealing. That's why they use the word "infringement." Stealing is depriving others of their property. That isn't what is happening.
Really what's going on here is that both sides are demanding more control. Don't pretend that pirates would respect "reasonable" copyright laws. If copyright was reduced to 5 years, pirates would still ignore it entirely. In fact, you admit as much when you say, "It's not stealing... Stealing is depriving others of their property."
Virus infected warez have been a fixture of the PC world for well over a decade now, if not longer, and it hasn't really made a dent in piracy.
How could you possibly know that virus infected warez has had zero effect on piracy? Yes, it hasn't (so far) been enough to stop piracy, but that's a different claim altogether than the one you're making.
Some of the problems I have with the "rational" decision of defecting:
- People want to be socially accepted and not disappoint others. Cooperation is better than defecting for accomplishing that.
- Most people have multiple interactions with people. If you defect, they have a chance to repay you. Over a long series of runs, you will be better off cooperating because whenever you defect, your partner will be out to get you next time. (Similarly, by extracting revenge on your player whenever he defects, you establish the idea that he will be punished whenever he defects, leading him to cooperate.) While the prisoner's dilemma might only be played for one round, we gain much of our intuition about cooperation and defecting from real life - which means we play a one-round game as if it is a multi-round game (like the real world).
I'm unclear how the existence of non-existence of DRM on the Kindle makes any difference in this case. He can't buy from the Amazon store. Okay. If Amazon only sold un-DRMed ebooks, then he still wouldn't be able to buy from the store. Further, the Kindle doesn't just display books purchased from Amazon. Any non-DRM ebook can be read on the Kindle. Further, he says that he can still read his purchased books on his Kindle. The main thing I dislike about the situation is the fact that he can't move his DRMed books off of the Kindle (say, in a few years when he wants a new ebook reader).
From the slashdot summary: "and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working." Where does it say that in the article? (Or is the Slashdot submitter's dislike of DRM causing him to interpret this as another "bad DRM" story?)
You can't seriously expect companies to continue making digital content while going into debt so that gamers can have games for free.
You don't seriously expect companies to completely honest with their press releases do you? The same companies that tout their record breaking sales numbers and then turn around and say that piracy is higher than ever and driving sales down?
I don't really understand how your argument is relevant. Maybe game companies aren't currently being hit hard with piracy. But, the real argument is not about game companies or the current state of game piracy. The real argument is about something much bigger: should piracy of intellectual property be acceptable? Even if (for the sake of argument) I accepted the premise that companies weren't getting hurt by piracy, it still doesn't tell you whether or not piracy *can* hurt companies. If we're talking about laws, then we're talking about systems that will be in place for decades. Essentially, you have to argue that piracy does not and will not ever harm companies no matter how much piracy increases.
DRM and copyright protection schemes have one purpose: increase control over the product for the producer.
I think the "DRM is about control" arguments are really just justifications to allow pirates to hate companies, and therefore, legitimize pirating. People don't want to be controlled. But, the reality is that companies don't care about controlling people. They care about earning a profit. Piracy undermines the ability of companies to get paid for work. Because the laws can no longer protect creators from the onslaught of piracy, companies have been going after technological solutions - DRM - to do what copyright law used to do. Saying "DRM is about control" is really about stirring up people's emotional desire to not be controlled, and create a backlash.
It seems to me that if a company spends $70 million dollars making Killzone 2 (and I'm not making that number up), and everyone pirates it ("because piracy doesn't hurt anyone"), then the company who made it ends up with $0 in revenue and $70 million dollars in debt.
For appropriately small values of "everyone." Sources I have found indicate that the studio has sold at least 1.1 million copies, which at $60 a pop almost covers that $70 million number. Of course that number is an exaggerated amount with the actual cost probably closer to $40 million. So they've already made a hefty profit.
(Technically, the price you pay - $60 - is not the money the developer earns. In fact, most major stores, like Best Buy, take about 50% of the shelf-price as their own earnings. Publishers also take a cut.) But, ignoring that, yes, in this case the developers earned back their investment. Had piracy been higher, this might not be true. Essentially, you're left arguing that piracy should be allowed because this game - in this particular case, under current rates of piracy - the developer earned back their investment, and therefore, higher rates of piracy won't hurt anyone.
Those poor bastards in millions of dollars of debt... I'm drafting a letter to my congressman right now to demand he put an end to piracy by the end of the year. This simply cannot continue.
Like I said, it's not about whether they turned a profit in this particular instance under current piracy rates. It's about whether or not piracy - in general - should be acceptable. Let's say we accepted piracy. Let's say that in 10 years, piracy rates resemble rate you see in, say, China or Vietnam - which is in the upper 90% range. If you think piracy should be acceptable, then what can you possibly say if businesses stop creating content because it has become unprofitable? You can't say anything - just throw up your hands and say, "gee, when everyone ignored copyright, it was great for a while, then the companies disappeared, and we're left living with content created in decades past - because we've seriously undermined the ability of companies to survive by creating new intellectual property."
I have no problem recognizing the mistake of mislabeling the results of a service as an object.
When you say "a service", I assume you're only thinking of music. People work for years and spend millions of dollars creating software, movies, books, and other works.
Where you suggest that "Walmart can make their own copies of music and sell it", I say Walmart can pay an artist to create new work which they can then sell.
They can already do that. Additionally, if Walmart pays a musician to create music through your patronage system, another store (e.g. Best Buy) can come along, take that music, make copies, and sell them. This means Walmart doesn't get a big advantage by paying a musician up-front to create music for them. At best, Walmart gets a 1 day head-start over everyone else.
There's actual freedom from lack of copyright. Think of all the amazing works that will never be created because the perfect song, image, text was held back from use by laws.
That's a bad argument against copyright because creators can decide whether or not they want to use copyright. They can use creative commons or they can simply release their work as public domain.
Your argument boils down to this: right now, the creators have three options, to put their work under: (A) copyright, (B) creative commons, (C) public domain. If we remove option A from the table, the creator is helped because copyright harms the creator. Your argument would only make sense if creators were *forced* to put all their work under copyright.
Your assumption is that the current system where people are paid through middlemen after the fact is the best system.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that copyright is a better system than a system where anyone can do anything with anyone else's work.
Drop the publishers and now you have direct access to audiences who are still willing to pay for things they like. It was a requirement in the past for distribution but with functionally infinite replication and near ubiquitous distribution for digital information the only missing piece is marketing.
That changes nothing. Creators can already do that. Eliminating copyright does not help the situation.
Trust me when I tell you that artists actually want the masses to get their messages, and that while money is nice few artist get rich. Pay up front for the new song/book/application and it's called patronage.
As a software developer (and therefore, someone who created copyrighted works), I don't believe that the "patronage" system works - not for the majority of intellectual works. I think it's a good way to seriously reduce the amount of creative works being created. Further, creators can already use a patronage system if they want to. Eliminating copyright doesn't help the situation.
Yes - it's bad if you are the creator, and it's bad if you're the public because creators aren't going to keep making stuff if they can't make a living.
Actually, I'm surprised that you'd question if any of this was bad - most pirates at least hold to the standard that some third party can't just take your work and earn a profit from it without paying you - that's earning a profit from the work of other people. If you accept that kind of practice, you're giving parasitic business models an advantage over businesses that create something. Is it really a good thing for our economy to reward people who act as parasites on the system, rather than being creators?
Copyright is not an unjust law. I agree that the length of copyright could be considered unjust, but that doesn't mean people can legitimately ignore it altogether. (Similarly, if laws are biased against minorities, it doesn't mean they can ignore *all laws* - just the unjust parts of them. This is why Rosa Parks could protest bad bus laws by refusing to get up from a bus seat, but it's not justified to commit big crimes under the umbrella of "US laws are unjust to Black people - therefore, we can legitimately ignore all of them".) Personally, I would be impressed if pirates who complain about overly-long copyright lengths only pirated stuff once it had passed "reasonable" copyright lengths (like 28 years or less). Of course, we all know that doesn't happen - pirates want the latest and greatest - stuff that would be illegal to pirate under reasonable copyright lengths.
Your comparison is inaccurate. Let's take an example - one from the world of software. You create some software. It costs you $10 million dollars. You have a million customers who each pay $10 for it. Now, you've made back your money - you break even. Most software companies are operating somewhere around break-even. Now, you introduce piracy. Half of your customers defect - they'd rather have it for free. So, you've got 500,000 customers now. Hopefully, you can get them to pay $20 for your software - otherwise, you'll go bankrupt making this software.
Now, to bring it around to your "clothes" and "apples" example:
You get the government on your side so they force everyone to pay a dollar for a shirt even though it costs much less to make one.
Wrong. The government doesn't get involved at all except to say that if you want a shirt you have to pay the asking price. Now, you think, "Gee, the company can ask whatever price they want - up to the 'normal' price of a shirt." This is wrong because if you start making lots of money, other people jump in and start doing the same thing you're doing. Prices fall because your competitor is undercutting your price. Eventually, prices fall until both of you are earning back your investments. In the software world, this means [development cost] = [price per customer] x [number of customers].
Your entire argument rests on talking about "shirts" and "apples". These are cheap and abundant goods. Stuff like software isn't cheap to make. It can cost millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce this stuff. People like to play a game where they say, "Making a copy costs nothing", but that ignores the fact that companies have to pay back development costs. Companies go into debt making this stuff. If people pirate, then they don't earn revenue, which means they can't pay-back their debt, which means they go bankrupt.
You complain that bits and bytes aren't worth anything. But, they are - otherwise, you wouldn't pay for them. They are entertainment. They are business software that helps you earn money. They are a lot of things, but "worthless" isn't one of them. If you think bits are worthless then you have no need to buy or pirate them.
"Fair use" or not, the fact is that P2P harms no one. It doesn't take anything away from the legitimate owner, and there's no lost profit either.
How do you figure? It seems to me that if a company spends $70 million dollars making Killzone 2 (and I'm not making that number up), and everyone pirates it ("because piracy doesn't hurt anyone"), then the company who made it ends up with $0 in revenue and $70 million dollars in debt. You can't seriously expect companies to continue making digital content while going into debt so that gamers can have games for free. The same argument applies to other forms of digital media.
You may also like my signature - taken from a news article:
Our legal system attempts to deal with information as a property that can be owned. It can not be owned.
That idea leads you to a very bad place.
It means that anyone can copy any work and sell it. For example: Walmart can make their own copies of music and sell it. It means any guy on the street can burn CDs full of movies and software, and then sell it for a a few bucks. It means that if you give your screenplay to a movie company in hopes of selling it to them, they can turn around and make a movie from your screenplay without paying you anything. And that same movie company can use music in their soundtrack that they never paid for. It means advertisers can use music in their commercials that they never paid for. It means movie theaters can charge movie-goers for movies that they never paid for. It means Barnes and Noble can print up their own copies of books, paying the original authors nothing.
In the end, you have to accept the fact that "information"* does have owners, or else you have to accept all kinds of very bad consequences.
* I prefer the term "digital content" or "digital creations" over "information" because the word "information" leads people to think about digital creations in a way that deprives the owner of ownership.
Copyright is just an incentive system, nothing more. Like all incentive systems it results only in driving over-production of the subsidized goods, at great expense to everyone in terms of actual wealth.
Not true. If you buy some copyright work, you are essentially saying "having your product is worth more than the money I'm spending for it". Both the artist and the consumer benefit. When you remove copyright, you are forcing creators to act like charities - creating far more value for the public than the public is paying them back. Copyright balances things out so that creators get back (in money) some of the value they've created for the world (in digital content).
Even under copyright, the creators are producing more value for the world than they are earning back in money (because of the "having your product is worth more than the money I'm spending for it" part of consumer behavior).
You need to demonstrate then that it is essential for copyright to exist in order for this to happen.
This is an arguing technique known as "Shifting the burden".
There's a strong case that simply being first-to-market and being known as the genuine article is enough to make a profit, albeit a smaller one.
There's a lot more covered under "copyright" than "articles". Books, movies, music, software, etc - all of these things are covered under copyright. "Being first to market" has virtually no value past the first 24 hours. Many of the things covered under copyright are valuable for a much longer period of time than the first 24 hours. Do you really think that Microsoft could earn back their costs on Windows based simply on the people willing to pay a couple hundred dollars within the first 24 hours? Do you think 3D Studio (retail cost: $3000) is going to earn back their money based on "first to market" before being quickly undermined by free copies that appear on the web within hours?
First of all, I have never met a single musician who writes music with any kind of expectation of profit. Profit is never the motive.
I had to assume you're only working with small-time musicians, then. Copyright doesn't really help musicians until they start to gain a little bit of fame. And I've definitely heard musicians - small enough that you've never heard of them, but large enough that they're recording music - defend copyright vigorously.
As a song-writer our biggest challenge is distribution. Getting radio play is nearly impossible for an independent artist. The Internet has helped tremendously, but we still have to labour really hard to get our songs up on all of the music sharing sites. Even then, few people bother to listen to us because there's so much out there that people put up their filters and wait for their friends to recommend new stuff etc.
To go back to the economic argument, if radio stations and Internet start-ups did not have to worry about copyright then web-sites, and DJs and radio stations would play and share much more music than they do now. People probably wouldn't share much more, since most people share copyrighted music in spite of the law, but in theory artists would get much more exposure while having to do less. As a result, the better musicians could conceivably get a fan-base much more easily, doors would open for them and their prospects as a professional musician would widen
Copyright is not forced on you. You have the right to opt-out of copyright. You can go creative commons. You can declare that your work is public domain. There are even some publishers trying to make this system work (i.e. the musicians give-away their music for free; you can pay if you want, companies cannot use it for free - which is a creative commons licence). You can't use "musicians would be helped with no copyright" as an argument against copyright - because musicians *choose* whether or not they want their work under copyright.
In conclusion, the only people who actually benefit from copyright are the distributors. Musicians are not distributors. It's a hard business to distribute music, and it's much harder thanks to copyright. That's it's whole point. To keep competition out. Disturbingly, competition in the mainstream music industry almost always includes the artists themselves.
I think a lot of people would disagree with you. Maybe you're argument was only meant to apply to musicians, but as a software developer, there's not much sense in continuing to write software if I'm not protected with copyright.
And this is no joke, there is only 1 industry big enough to take on the MPAA/RIAA and that is the porn and video game (whats left of it, the MPAA/RIAA have been busy buying up all the game companys) industry. Make no joke about it, those 2 have to unite for the common good of the people.
Huh? I didn't know the MPAA/RIAA were buying up game companies. Anyway, the video game industry hates pirates, too. The game industries are most definitely on the side of copyright - actually, most everyone (with a few exceptions) who makes digital content wants copyright enforced and piracy eliminated. (I could provide you a long list of game companies - big and small - complaining about piracy.) Why do you think game companies use DRM? It's because they desperately want to protect their existence against the onslaught of non-paying pirates. The game companies are not going to align themselves against the RIAA/MPAA. They simply have too much common interest in protecting copyright (as they should).
It assumes that, since exchange of information, learning from each other, passing on of culture, sharing things you like with people you like and P2P-ing have been basic human deeds and activities from the beginning of time, they are moral by nature.
Nonsense. If you did business with someone and they shared your credit card number, you'd quickly decide otherwise. Exchanging ideas is good, but when you get down to the level of detail that you're copying entire works, you're screwing the creator.
The problem is that all your talk about "artificial scarcity" ignores the fact that it costs money to make this stuff. If you keep on with that filesharing, you'll get to really know what it means to have digital content that is scarce - nothing is more scarce than stuff that doesn't get made because you insisted on not paying for it.
Artificial scarcity, like in "you must not use your own copy machine and must pretend you didnt have one in order for someone else's yesterday's copying-based business model can still work like it were still needed"
I have to wonder why you're not copying dollar bills. Oh no - another instance of "artificial scarcity". Clearly, it's your right to make counterfeit money.
The 3000% figure has been talked about a lot, but I don't think it's all that persuasive. First of all, as far as I can tell, the 3000% increase is not an increase of 3000% in total sales. It's a 3000% increase in sales compared to the days or weeks preceding it (on a "per-day" sales basis). For example, if Left 4 Dead sold 1000 copies a day for the first three months, then dropped to 100 sales per day after that. The 3000% increase would be sales of 3000 copies over a single day. And if you go back and look at my example numbers, 3000 copies is only about 3% of the total copies sold.
So, the 3000% increase figure isn't that impressive - except for the fact that it shows the sales of a game experiencing lagging sales after release can be temporarily spiked. It certainly doesn't point to pricing games lower in general.
I'm using the word "artist" to mean anyone living on their creativity - and given the context ("Piracy encourages you to be an artist, not a professional."), his statement actually applies to anyone and everyone making digital content. This includes: digital "artists" in the traditional sense, musicians, movie producers, TV producers, software developers, etc. And, yes, as a software developer, I do hope to earn a living based on creating digital content (software).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone has really argued that.
Yes they have.
The main argument "in favour" is that piracy doesn't affect sales - most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
That's not an argument "in favor" of piracy. Example: A company has zero piracy and 100,000 sales. Along comes piracy. Now, they have 1,000,000 pirates and 10,000 sales. In the second case, you can truthfully make the statement that "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place". In this imaginary example, 900,000 people wouldn't have bought it. But, another 90,000 people pirated it INSTEAD of buying it, causing sales to plumet 90%. Nobody's going to seriously accept the "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" argument because even if it's true, it doesn't address what companies are REALLY concerned about: losing sales due to piracy. All "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" really tells you is that each pirated copy wasn't a lost sale, rather, each pirated copy represents part of a sale - but that can still add-up to huge losses.
A community of 18,000 would amount to empty servers a lot of the time especially if the game is available globally.
Yeah, because 18,000 players means you'd never find anyone to play against. Anyway, the "enough players to play against" is the kind of argument a pirate might think is great (because it legitimizes their piracy), but no smart company is seriously going to accept that answer.
Only a very detailed statistical analysis of the numbers could tell you if it was a good or a bad thing, and even then people would still argue with the result.
In general, the people creating the media thinks it doesn't help. People who pirate like to pretend it does help.
I can make a pretty good guess at who's more biased between those two groups. The companies want to maximize their profit. This means if piracy helps them, they will want piracy. If piracy doesn't help them, they won't like piracy. So, companies benefit by following the facts wherever they lead. They have an interest in finding out the truth - whatever it is. And most companies agree: piracy harms them.
Pirates, on the other hand, benefit from piracy regardless of whether piracy hurts or harms companies. This puts them in a position where they should always claim (or convince themselves) that piracy helps companies - which makes them biased towards one single conclusion.
In the end, I don't buy that there are two sides to piracy claim.
That argument is irrelevant and also rather wrong.
In what way is it irrelevant and wrong? You claimed that pirates were principled activists reacting against unfair copyright. My point is simple: if copyright was "reasonable", or if copyright length hadn't been changed at all in the last 100 years, it would have zero effect on piracy - which goes to show that pirates aren't principled activists against unfair copyright. That's very relevant.
Stop pretending this is "civil disobedience".
Actually, I'd be 100 times more impressed with pirates if they made statements like "copyright should only exist for a reasonable amount of time; 20 years is a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, I refuse to honor copyright past 20 years, but fully respect copyright of all works less than 20 years old." The way things are right now is a bit like saying, "I don't like the way Walmart does business. Therefore, I'm practicing 'civil disobedience' when I steal this big-screen TV from Walmart." That raises the question: are you being principled, or are you merely using that as cover to get free stuff. The *right* way to protest is to boycott Walmart by not buying (or stealing). That shows that your protest isn't simply self-interest and greed masquerading as principles. Similarly, if you want to protest copyright, then you should neither buy nor pirate. When Black Americans in Georgia were angry with the segregated bus system, what did they do? They boycotted the bus-system and they *walked*. That was a principled boycott. They made their own lives harder to bring attention to the situation. Pirating is NOT making your own life harder, it's making it easier. Industries involved in copyright have zero reason to trust that your behavior will change even if copyright were "reasonable". Thus, they have very little impetus to change anything.
"Copyright is supposed to be for creators, not publishers!"
I think you'd be surprised by the number of creators who do keep their copyrights. Further, who owns the copyright seems to be irrelevant to pirates, anyway. I highly doubt any pirates could tell you whether a specific song, movie, or software was owned by the creator or the publisher. They just pirate it all with no regard for that question.
In the end, it sound more like excuses for piracy than any real argument; even if all of these things changed to meet your criteria, I highly doubt it would make much of a dent in piracy at all.
Buying needs to be easier than infringement.
How can buying ever be easier than copyright infringement? For one thing, copyright infringement means never having to pay money, and never having to type your credit card number into a form on the internet. That means pirating always has an inherent advantage over "paying for stuff".
"Calling it stealing is nothing less than propaganda"
You mean like "sharing"?
So it is just fine that copyright, the agreement between "the people" and the creators ... civil disobedience is what we are doing -- taking freely as we please in spite of bad law ... It's not stealing. That's why they use the word "infringement." Stealing is depriving others of their property. That isn't what is happening.
Really what's going on here is that both sides are demanding more control. Don't pretend that pirates would respect "reasonable" copyright laws. If copyright was reduced to 5 years, pirates would still ignore it entirely. In fact, you admit as much when you say, "It's not stealing... Stealing is depriving others of their property."
Virus infected warez have been a fixture of the PC world for well over a decade now, if not longer, and it hasn't really made a dent in piracy.
How could you possibly know that virus infected warez has had zero effect on piracy? Yes, it hasn't (so far) been enough to stop piracy, but that's a different claim altogether than the one you're making.
Some of the problems I have with the "rational" decision of defecting:
- People want to be socially accepted and not disappoint others. Cooperation is better than defecting for accomplishing that.
- Most people have multiple interactions with people. If you defect, they have a chance to repay you. Over a long series of runs, you will be better off cooperating because whenever you defect, your partner will be out to get you next time. (Similarly, by extracting revenge on your player whenever he defects, you establish the idea that he will be punished whenever he defects, leading him to cooperate.) While the prisoner's dilemma might only be played for one round, we gain much of our intuition about cooperation and defecting from real life - which means we play a one-round game as if it is a multi-round game (like the real world).
I'm unclear how the existence of non-existence of DRM on the Kindle makes any difference in this case. He can't buy from the Amazon store. Okay. If Amazon only sold un-DRMed ebooks, then he still wouldn't be able to buy from the store. Further, the Kindle doesn't just display books purchased from Amazon. Any non-DRM ebook can be read on the Kindle. Further, he says that he can still read his purchased books on his Kindle. The main thing I dislike about the situation is the fact that he can't move his DRMed books off of the Kindle (say, in a few years when he wants a new ebook reader).
From the slashdot summary: "and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working." Where does it say that in the article? (Or is the Slashdot submitter's dislike of DRM causing him to interpret this as another "bad DRM" story?)
I don't really understand how your argument is relevant. Maybe game companies aren't currently being hit hard with piracy. But, the real argument is not about game companies or the current state of game piracy. The real argument is about something much bigger: should piracy of intellectual property be acceptable? Even if (for the sake of argument) I accepted the premise that companies weren't getting hurt by piracy, it still doesn't tell you whether or not piracy *can* hurt companies. If we're talking about laws, then we're talking about systems that will be in place for decades. Essentially, you have to argue that piracy does not and will not ever harm companies no matter how much piracy increases.
I think the "DRM is about control" arguments are really just justifications to allow pirates to hate companies, and therefore, legitimize pirating. People don't want to be controlled. But, the reality is that companies don't care about controlling people. They care about earning a profit. Piracy undermines the ability of companies to get paid for work. Because the laws can no longer protect creators from the onslaught of piracy, companies have been going after technological solutions - DRM - to do what copyright law used to do. Saying "DRM is about control" is really about stirring up people's emotional desire to not be controlled, and create a backlash.
(Technically, the price you pay - $60 - is not the money the developer earns. In fact, most major stores, like Best Buy, take about 50% of the shelf-price as their own earnings. Publishers also take a cut.) But, ignoring that, yes, in this case the developers earned back their investment. Had piracy been higher, this might not be true. Essentially, you're left arguing that piracy should be allowed because this game - in this particular case, under current rates of piracy - the developer earned back their investment, and therefore, higher rates of piracy won't hurt anyone.
Those poor bastards in millions of dollars of debt... I'm drafting a letter to my congressman right now to demand he put an end to piracy by the end of the year. This simply cannot continue.
Like I said, it's not about whether they turned a profit in this particular instance under current piracy rates. It's about whether or not piracy - in general - should be acceptable. Let's say we accepted piracy. Let's say that in 10 years, piracy rates resemble rate you see in, say, China or Vietnam - which is in the upper 90% range. If you think piracy should be acceptable, then what can you possibly say if businesses stop creating content because it has become unprofitable? You can't say anything - just throw up your hands and say, "gee, when everyone ignored copyright, it was great for a while, then the companies disappeared, and we're left living with content created in decades past - because we've seriously undermined the ability of companies to survive by creating new intellectual property."
I have no problem recognizing the mistake of mislabeling the results of a service as an object.
When you say "a service", I assume you're only thinking of music. People work for years and spend millions of dollars creating software, movies, books, and other works.
Where you suggest that "Walmart can make their own copies of music and sell it", I say Walmart can pay an artist to create new work which they can then sell.
They can already do that. Additionally, if Walmart pays a musician to create music through your patronage system, another store (e.g. Best Buy) can come along, take that music, make copies, and sell them. This means Walmart doesn't get a big advantage by paying a musician up-front to create music for them. At best, Walmart gets a 1 day head-start over everyone else.
There's actual freedom from lack of copyright. Think of all the amazing works that will never be created because the perfect song, image, text was held back from use by laws.
That's a bad argument against copyright because creators can decide whether or not they want to use copyright. They can use creative commons or they can simply release their work as public domain.
Your argument boils down to this: right now, the creators have three options, to put their work under: (A) copyright, (B) creative commons, (C) public domain. If we remove option A from the table, the creator is helped because copyright harms the creator. Your argument would only make sense if creators were *forced* to put all their work under copyright.
Your assumption is that the current system where people are paid through middlemen after the fact is the best system.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that copyright is a better system than a system where anyone can do anything with anyone else's work.
Drop the publishers and now you have direct access to audiences who are still willing to pay for things they like. It was a requirement in the past for distribution but with functionally infinite replication and near ubiquitous distribution for digital information the only missing piece is marketing.
That changes nothing. Creators can already do that. Eliminating copyright does not help the situation.
Trust me when I tell you that artists actually want the masses to get their messages, and that while money is nice few artist get rich. Pay up front for the new song/book/application and it's called patronage.
As a software developer (and therefore, someone who created copyrighted works), I don't believe that the "patronage" system works - not for the majority of intellectual works. I think it's a good way to seriously reduce the amount of creative works being created. Further, creators can already use a patronage system if they want to. Eliminating copyright doesn't help the situation.
Yes - it's bad if you are the creator, and it's bad if you're the public because creators aren't going to keep making stuff if they can't make a living.
Actually, I'm surprised that you'd question if any of this was bad - most pirates at least hold to the standard that some third party can't just take your work and earn a profit from it without paying you - that's earning a profit from the work of other people. If you accept that kind of practice, you're giving parasitic business models an advantage over businesses that create something. Is it really a good thing for our economy to reward people who act as parasites on the system, rather than being creators?
So we shouldn't protest unjust laws?
Copyright is not an unjust law. I agree that the length of copyright could be considered unjust, but that doesn't mean people can legitimately ignore it altogether. (Similarly, if laws are biased against minorities, it doesn't mean they can ignore *all laws* - just the unjust parts of them. This is why Rosa Parks could protest bad bus laws by refusing to get up from a bus seat, but it's not justified to commit big crimes under the umbrella of "US laws are unjust to Black people - therefore, we can legitimately ignore all of them".) Personally, I would be impressed if pirates who complain about overly-long copyright lengths only pirated stuff once it had passed "reasonable" copyright lengths (like 28 years or less). Of course, we all know that doesn't happen - pirates want the latest and greatest - stuff that would be illegal to pirate under reasonable copyright lengths.
Your comparison is inaccurate. Let's take an example - one from the world of software. You create some software. It costs you $10 million dollars. You have a million customers who each pay $10 for it. Now, you've made back your money - you break even. Most software companies are operating somewhere around break-even. Now, you introduce piracy. Half of your customers defect - they'd rather have it for free. So, you've got 500,000 customers now. Hopefully, you can get them to pay $20 for your software - otherwise, you'll go bankrupt making this software.
Now, to bring it around to your "clothes" and "apples" example:
You get the government on your side so they force everyone to pay a dollar for a shirt even though it costs much less to make one.
Wrong. The government doesn't get involved at all except to say that if you want a shirt you have to pay the asking price. Now, you think, "Gee, the company can ask whatever price they want - up to the 'normal' price of a shirt." This is wrong because if you start making lots of money, other people jump in and start doing the same thing you're doing. Prices fall because your competitor is undercutting your price. Eventually, prices fall until both of you are earning back your investments. In the software world, this means [development cost] = [price per customer] x [number of customers].
Your entire argument rests on talking about "shirts" and "apples". These are cheap and abundant goods. Stuff like software isn't cheap to make. It can cost millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to produce this stuff. People like to play a game where they say, "Making a copy costs nothing", but that ignores the fact that companies have to pay back development costs. Companies go into debt making this stuff. If people pirate, then they don't earn revenue, which means they can't pay-back their debt, which means they go bankrupt.
You complain that bits and bytes aren't worth anything. But, they are - otherwise, you wouldn't pay for them. They are entertainment. They are business software that helps you earn money. They are a lot of things, but "worthless" isn't one of them. If you think bits are worthless then you have no need to buy or pirate them.
"Fair use" or not, the fact is that P2P harms no one. It doesn't take anything away from the legitimate owner, and there's no lost profit either.
How do you figure? It seems to me that if a company spends $70 million dollars making Killzone 2 (and I'm not making that number up), and everyone pirates it ("because piracy doesn't hurt anyone"), then the company who made it ends up with $0 in revenue and $70 million dollars in debt. You can't seriously expect companies to continue making digital content while going into debt so that gamers can have games for free. The same argument applies to other forms of digital media.
You may also like my signature - taken from a news article:
might as well say p2p is fair use, the riaa/miaa think that someone bringing over a dvd/cd to watch with you is stealing...right?
That's a strawman argument.
Our legal system attempts to deal with information as a property that can be owned. It can not be owned.
That idea leads you to a very bad place.
It means that anyone can copy any work and sell it. For example: Walmart can make their own copies of music and sell it. It means any guy on the street can burn CDs full of movies and software, and then sell it for a a few bucks. It means that if you give your screenplay to a movie company in hopes of selling it to them, they can turn around and make a movie from your screenplay without paying you anything. And that same movie company can use music in their soundtrack that they never paid for. It means advertisers can use music in their commercials that they never paid for. It means movie theaters can charge movie-goers for movies that they never paid for. It means Barnes and Noble can print up their own copies of books, paying the original authors nothing.
In the end, you have to accept the fact that "information"* does have owners, or else you have to accept all kinds of very bad consequences.
* I prefer the term "digital content" or "digital creations" over "information" because the word "information" leads people to think about digital creations in a way that deprives the owner of ownership.
Copyright is just an incentive system, nothing more. Like all incentive systems it results only in driving over-production of the subsidized goods, at great expense to everyone in terms of actual wealth.
Not true. If you buy some copyright work, you are essentially saying "having your product is worth more than the money I'm spending for it". Both the artist and the consumer benefit. When you remove copyright, you are forcing creators to act like charities - creating far more value for the public than the public is paying them back. Copyright balances things out so that creators get back (in money) some of the value they've created for the world (in digital content).
Even under copyright, the creators are producing more value for the world than they are earning back in money (because of the "having your product is worth more than the money I'm spending for it" part of consumer behavior).
You need to demonstrate then that it is essential for copyright to exist in order for this to happen.
This is an arguing technique known as "Shifting the burden".
There's a strong case that simply being first-to-market and being known as the genuine article is enough to make a profit, albeit a smaller one.
There's a lot more covered under "copyright" than "articles". Books, movies, music, software, etc - all of these things are covered under copyright. "Being first to market" has virtually no value past the first 24 hours. Many of the things covered under copyright are valuable for a much longer period of time than the first 24 hours. Do you really think that Microsoft could earn back their costs on Windows based simply on the people willing to pay a couple hundred dollars within the first 24 hours? Do you think 3D Studio (retail cost: $3000) is going to earn back their money based on "first to market" before being quickly undermined by free copies that appear on the web within hours?
That's wrong. Lessig wants to make filesharing legal. He's doing a lot more than trying to shorten copyright lengths back to "the original length".
First of all, I have never met a single musician who writes music with any kind of expectation of profit. Profit is never the motive.
I had to assume you're only working with small-time musicians, then. Copyright doesn't really help musicians until they start to gain a little bit of fame. And I've definitely heard musicians - small enough that you've never heard of them, but large enough that they're recording music - defend copyright vigorously.
As a song-writer our biggest challenge is distribution. Getting radio play is nearly impossible for an independent artist. The Internet has helped tremendously, but we still have to labour really hard to get our songs up on all of the music sharing sites. Even then, few people bother to listen to us because there's so much out there that people put up their filters and wait for their friends to recommend new stuff etc.
To go back to the economic argument, if radio stations and Internet start-ups did not have to worry about copyright then web-sites, and DJs and radio stations would play and share much more music than they do now. People probably wouldn't share much more, since most people share copyrighted music in spite of the law, but in theory artists would get much more exposure while having to do less. As a result, the better musicians could conceivably get a fan-base much more easily, doors would open for them and their prospects as a professional musician would widen
Copyright is not forced on you. You have the right to opt-out of copyright. You can go creative commons. You can declare that your work is public domain. There are even some publishers trying to make this system work (i.e. the musicians give-away their music for free; you can pay if you want, companies cannot use it for free - which is a creative commons licence). You can't use "musicians would be helped with no copyright" as an argument against copyright - because musicians *choose* whether or not they want their work under copyright.
In conclusion, the only people who actually benefit from copyright are the distributors. Musicians are not distributors. It's a hard business to distribute music, and it's much harder thanks to copyright. That's it's whole point. To keep competition out. Disturbingly, competition in the mainstream music industry almost always includes the artists themselves.
I think a lot of people would disagree with you. Maybe you're argument was only meant to apply to musicians, but as a software developer, there's not much sense in continuing to write software if I'm not protected with copyright.
And this is no joke, there is only 1 industry big enough to take on the MPAA/RIAA and that is the porn and video game (whats left of it, the MPAA/RIAA have been busy buying up all the game companys) industry. Make no joke about it, those 2 have to unite for the common good of the people.
Huh? I didn't know the MPAA/RIAA were buying up game companies. Anyway, the video game industry hates pirates, too. The game industries are most definitely on the side of copyright - actually, most everyone (with a few exceptions) who makes digital content wants copyright enforced and piracy eliminated. (I could provide you a long list of game companies - big and small - complaining about piracy.) Why do you think game companies use DRM? It's because they desperately want to protect their existence against the onslaught of non-paying pirates. The game companies are not going to align themselves against the RIAA/MPAA. They simply have too much common interest in protecting copyright (as they should).
It assumes that, since exchange of information, learning from each other, passing on of culture, sharing things you like with people you like and P2P-ing have been basic human deeds and activities from the beginning of time, they are moral by nature.
Nonsense. If you did business with someone and they shared your credit card number, you'd quickly decide otherwise. Exchanging ideas is good, but when you get down to the level of detail that you're copying entire works, you're screwing the creator.
The problem is that all your talk about "artificial scarcity" ignores the fact that it costs money to make this stuff. If you keep on with that filesharing, you'll get to really know what it means to have digital content that is scarce - nothing is more scarce than stuff that doesn't get made because you insisted on not paying for it.
Artificial scarcity, like in "you must not use your own copy machine and must pretend you didnt have one in order for someone else's yesterday's copying-based business model can still work like it were still needed"
I have to wonder why you're not copying dollar bills. Oh no - another instance of "artificial scarcity". Clearly, it's your right to make counterfeit money.
The 3000% figure has been talked about a lot, but I don't think it's all that persuasive. First of all, as far as I can tell, the 3000% increase is not an increase of 3000% in total sales. It's a 3000% increase in sales compared to the days or weeks preceding it (on a "per-day" sales basis). For example, if Left 4 Dead sold 1000 copies a day for the first three months, then dropped to 100 sales per day after that. The 3000% increase would be sales of 3000 copies over a single day. And if you go back and look at my example numbers, 3000 copies is only about 3% of the total copies sold.
So, the 3000% increase figure isn't that impressive - except for the fact that it shows the sales of a game experiencing lagging sales after release can be temporarily spiked. It certainly doesn't point to pricing games lower in general.
Your breakdown isn't close to realistic. I could understand your mod-up if it was tagged "+5 funny".
I'm using the word "artist" to mean anyone living on their creativity - and given the context ("Piracy encourages you to be an artist, not a professional."), his statement actually applies to anyone and everyone making digital content. This includes: digital "artists" in the traditional sense, musicians, movie producers, TV producers, software developers, etc. And, yes, as a software developer, I do hope to earn a living based on creating digital content (software).
Piracy encourages you to be an artist, not a professional.
I assume you mean "starving artist".