please point me in the direction of your criticism/parody/educational material.
I didn't think you could.
You're right, I'm not personally doing anything with HD content (not even watching it). Your argument falls apart, however, because there are plenty of people who do want to exercise their fair use rights for HD content. For example, someone who wants to make a backup of that brand new kids' movie instead of letting his kids ruin the original by sticking it in the toaster, or someone who wants to post a video review (complete with excerpts) of some new movie or show on his web site.
Your argument boils down to "I'm not using my fair use rights anyway, so I won't miss them." You can forfeit your own rights, but you sure as hell can't forfeit everyone else's.
you people bitch about DRM just so you have something to bitch about.
I bitch about DRM because even when it isn't limiting what I actually want to do right now, it's limiting what I can potentially do tomorrow or next year. Maybe you're happy to short-sightedly give up your future options in order to get something shiny today, but I'm not.
i see all this about DRM, i guess i just haven't been drinking the kool-ade but if you're not planning on copying the stuff why are you worried about DRM?
Not all copying is illegal, you know. Remember fair use? DRM makes it difficult (and illegal, under the DMCA) to exercise your rights for format shifting, criticism/parody, educational materials, personal backups, etc.
besides, as long as the component outputs are enabled on your HD reciever/dvd player (and there are HD-DVD players with component output) you won;t have any DRM problems.
Ah, of course, because the studios say they won't use the "image constraint token" for a few years. We can trust them, right? And in a few years, why, we can all just spend another $2000 for a TV that supports the latest DRM handshakes.
MS already replied to this report, saying it's BS and 32-bit versions of Vista will be fine.
Not exactly... they passed the buck. Windows Media Player won't go out of its way to block HD playback on 32-bit systems, but the HD decryption software can still use Vista's features to detect unsigned drivers and refuse to play. And they may just choose not to sign any drivers if they don't think 32-bit Windows provides enough "protection" against "malware" that people might use to, you know, gain access to the content they paid for.
You're forgetting the free rider problem: when you can't exclude non-payers from consuming the end product, what incentive is there for them to pay in the first place? That's especially true when there are a lot of small "investors," so that the work will be produced (or fail to do so) regardless of any individual contribution.
The incentive is that they know if they don't pay, they (slightly) lower the probability that the work will get created at all. The amount they'll be willing to pay depends on both their perception of how likely it is to get created without their contribution, and the value they personally place on the work's creation.
That first factor, however, may cancel out, because each person's belief that an artist will be able to record their next album without his contribution is related to that artist's popularity. If a popular band has a hundred thousand fans, then even if 90% of those fans figure "I don't need to pay, they'll surely get enough contributions", that still leaves 10,000 paying customers. A less popular band with only 1000 fans needs each one a lot more, but those fans will presumably be more willing to pay, since each person knows it's a lot less likely that others will pick up the slack.
That's very much like the problem with voting, which is partly why we see such low voter turnouts in large elections.
Interesting that you brought that up.. look at the success candidates have had in raising contributions online. They bring in millions of dollars from individuals who each know their $50 or $100 is just a small drop in the bucket.
How long would a mechanic stay in business if one customer could take the repair done to his car and give it to anyone else with the same car problem with little more than a couple of clicks?
He'd stay in business long enough to repair one car, so he'd have to charge enough for his work to make it worth going into business - just like I proposed for artists.
You speak of pooling money to make music or movies. How will that work? Remember, people contribute to political campaigns because they feel the will get something in return. Will the contributors be given free copies?
Everyone can be given free copies, because a band is in the business of writing and recording music, not the business of making copies. Once they've been paid a fair price for the time they put into recording the album, the band doesn't need to worry about how many people listen to it - it doesn't take any more work to write an album that 100,000 people will listen to than it does to make one that only 1000 people will listen to.
Who will be the contributors?
The contributors are people who want that album to be recorded, just like the contributors to a political campaign are the people who want that candidate to be elected. They're not directly getting anything in exchange for their money, they're just adding a small part to the total that will eventually pay off as a benefit for everyone.
If it costs $50,000 to make an album, that is $5 from 10,000 people, but what if a band only has a fan base of 1,000 people willing to donate for an album. That makes it $50.00 per person. Are you willing to pay $50.00 for an album?
Think about that a little harder. If the band only has 1000 fans willing to spend money on their music, how are they going to turn a profit selling copies for $15 on store shelves? They won't. Here's what'll happen: they'll sign up with a record label, they'll get an advance on royalties that will never materialize, and they'll end up owing that money back to the label and wishing they'd never recorded an album at all. If they look for funding ahead of time, at least they can realize it's unprofitable before they spend their own time and money on it.
If you contribute to the album fund what do you get in return?
The satisfaction of knowing you contributed to something worthwhile, and the ability to listen to it and share it with your friends when it's finished. If you decide not to contribute, you might still be able to listen to the album if/when it's released, but you're making it that much less likely that it ever will be, so your contribution gives you the assurance that it will be created and made available (or your money back).
Will the contributors get a free copy of the album, or will they have to buy the album as well as pay to produce it? Will they get a share of the profits from the albums? If so, how much?
The artist doesn't need to sell copies if he's already been paid for his work, so there's no profit from selling copies and no need to divide it into shares. Of course, there's nothing stopping an artist from selling CDs if he can distinguish them in some way from the freely available copies.. signing them, including free concert tickets or coupons for merchandise, etc.
... just like anyone else who performs a service. Performing songs, filming movies, etc. can use the same business model as fixing cars, preparing tax forms, or painting houses.
The only real difference is that creating an artistic work tends to involve a lot more effort, so it's hard for one person to fund an entire album out of his own pocket. But that's not really a problem, because you can assemble a group of people who are all interested in the album and have them pool their money together to fund it. (Look at political campaigns for a working example: they raise millions of dollars from a lot of small contributions, and those contributors don't even get anything for their money unless their candidate wins!)
The consumer electronics-Hollywood complex could [...] encrypt the high frequencies so that any other player model won't be able to play the copy at full quality
Another thing that helped the adoption of DVD was that prices of movies on DVD were substantially cheaper than they were on VHS. I remember "The Matrix" pretty much hovered around $9.99 ever since it came out.
That was still relatively late in the DVD game. The first few DVDs I bought (Austin Powers, Face/Off, 12 Monkeys) were $30 or more apiece.
By your argument, you're credit card info, social security number, date of birth, home address, IP address, username(s), password(s), encryption key(s), emails (and addresses), photos, documents, "confidential" information, and anything else that is stored on your computer or can be represented numerically is, in effect, public domain. [...] Of course, if your objection is that the woman was intentionally making these numbers available, whereas you are attmepting to hide "yours", I remind you that they are already available. Every single value entered in your computer is intentially placed in a storage device capable of being remotely accessed.
You're ignoring the difference between broadcasting information indiscriminately to the public at large, and sharing information discreetly with individuals under the shared presumption that they won't share it with anyone else (except as necessary to complete your transaction). You can't broadcast a song to the public over the radio and expect to still control its distribution.
Copyrights exist to encourage artistic expression, not suppress it. There's little incentive to spend your life creating art if you can't make money from it.
Who says you can't make money from creating art without copyright? Just because the common business model today is "write something, then charge for distributing copies of it" doesn't mean that's the only way it can work, or even the best way.
Really, this comes up all the time in such discussions, and it seems completely absurd to me. Imagine if you woke up in an alternate universe where, say, accountants spent their days picking companies and auditing them without being asked, but didn't share the results until the companies paid them, and the accountants argued that it should be illegal to share these financial details because they couldn't think of a better way to get paid for their work! Ridiculous, huh? But that's basically how the argument for copyright goes. In our universe, many artists think the only way they can get paid is to make it illegal for people to share their work, but they overlook the very simple alternative: find someone ahead of time who will agree to pay you for your effort.
What if those digits, when fed into a JPG renderer, form a picture of child porn? Is that OK in your mind, since it's really just a number? In fact, an entire child porn movie could be represented as a single (albeit, very large) number. So that makes it exempt from regulation, in your eyes?
Well, it's funny that you picked that. The harm in child porn comes from the child abuse that's perpetrated in order to make it, not from the content itself - much like the work that artists are trying to get paid for is the work they perform in order to create the original content, not the act of making copies (which is what they actually end up getting paid for under the current copyright regime).
In theory, with an advanced enough renderer and enough effort, you could recreate every shot of a child porn movie as CGI and it'd be absolutely indistinguishable from the original. It'd even be representable by the same number. And IIRC, the US Supreme Court has slapped down every law against "virtual child porn", so it'd be legal to share that number as long as you could prove it was rendered by a computer.
An email sent from Osama bin Laden to Ramzi Yousef, telling him where to find the bomb supplies, and which flights to bomb, could be represented as a single number. Are you arguing that such an email should be inadmissible as evidence of charges of terrorism, because it can be depicted as a number?
Don't be ridiculous.
Try taking that advice yourself. You're the one bringing up admissibility of evidence, I'm just saying you can't own a number, and it's ridiculous to share information with the public (by broadcasting a song over the air, for example) but still expect to control its distribution.
That's a stupid analogy. Science is public knowledge, and science advances when the knowledge is freely used and spread.
Just like culture and human happiness advances when artistic works are freely enjoyed, spread, and built upon to create new works.
Art is an expression of an artists own life, views, beliefs, hopes, dreams etc.
Hoarders love to repeat that romantic gibberish, but sorry: information is information. The bytes on a CD are, guess what, information. If you call someone on the phone and read them off the list of digits, eventually they'll be able to put together their own copy of the song. The desire to prevent someone from sharing those digits is no more justified than the desire to stop them from sharing the digits of pi.
They have every right to protect their work, since it's uniquely theirs.
Uniquely theirs? Ha. Every artist draws something from the work of others; no one grows up in a vacuum.
It's not automatically everybody's right to own it just because they're too cheap to pay for it.
Correct - it's nobody's right to own it. You can't own a number.
Just because it's hard to come up with certain information doesn't mean it shouldn't be "Free". Consider all the work that went into calculating the speed of light, or pi, or the age of the universe... now imagine if everyone who wanted to use any of those figures had to pay the heirs of the people who discovered them!
Somehow, I suspect Diebold's ATMs are in fact the lowest quality acceptable to the banks who use them and the lowest cost.
That may be. But the point is, the lowest quality acceptable to the banks is still much higher than the lowest quality acceptable to the folks who approve electronic voting machines.
How about hiring enough enforcement personell that you can take any warez distributors down within minutes? Physically unfeasible, theoretically possible.
Nope, that's only one form of infringement. There are other forms that aren't visible to the public and can't possibly be detected or prevented without invasive actions. What are you going to do about people copying CDs and DVDs at home for their friends - search everyone leaving a house? How about encrypted transmissions between private individuals over the internet?
The difference is that you didn't put any effort into giving your competitor that gas while with the song Britney (or the RIAA) did 99% of the work and that competitor merely clicked "copy".
So what? That work is in the past; no one forced Britney to record the song, but since she did, the work is done and the bits are out there. Making more copies today doesn't retroactively make her work any harder in the past.
As a customer you'd encourage people to stop making music and only leech other people's music.
Or maybe you'd encourage them to arrange payment before they start working, like everyone else who provides a service.
Cingular's phone != T-Mobile's phone. Cingular has the option of offering a superior product or making it cheaper, a copyright holder cannot do that when competing against illegal copying as that competitor would just take any improvements and copy them without own expenses.
If they're the same model, then they are ==. They're even more similar than Britney's CD is to some random P2Per's MP3, because at least in that situation, you can choose between a physical disc with artwork and uncompressed PCM audio, and a lossily-compressed audio file with no extras whatsoever.
And Britney certainly can compete with free copying. She could put an autographed pair of panties in each CD case, for example, or a coupon good for free shipping at her online store. She can't do anything to make the bits themselves more attractive, but she can attract customers by selling something besides information.
Everyone else is allowed to compete on the same terms: Make your own goddamn music if you want to sell it!
That's hardly competition, and it's a pretty ridiculous thing to say anyway. What if the mayor of your town decided that only his son could sell club sandwiches - would it be a good excuse if he said "Invent your own goddamn sandwich if you want to sell it!" Would that statement magically transform his anticompetitive action into a competitive one?
The fact is, copyright is a government-granted monopoly, and monopolies are the opposite of competition. Just like there's no good reason to say only one person can combine these ingredients to make this sandwich, there's no good reason to say only one person can transmit these bytes in this order... unless you just want to abuse your power to benefit one person at everyone else's expense.
Because otherwise you encourage people to not create anthing new and instead hope that some idiot tries to do that for them.
People seem to be pretty dumb, or lazy, in this hypothetical world you're describing. Don't they realize that they can get paid in exactly the same way as everyone else who provides a service: by charging for the service itself?
Not regarding that one good but you do get the choice to buy something else. Property is opt-in for the owner, not other people. If you're the only one in your town who doesn't want to share his car with others, is it okay if they just take yours?
No, but there's a good reason why it's not okay: because that would leave me without a car. Making a copy is okay, and if everyone else in town can come up with a way to copy my car, more power to them.
The law doesn't do much about mugging either but noone proposed additional laws for that.
Mugging happens in public. You can enforce laws against mugging just by patrolling public places, and guess what, that's what police do. Theoretically, if your city spent enough money, they could put a cop on every corner 24 hours a day, and muggings would go down a lot without invading anyone's privacy. The same is not true of copyright - the only way to even enforce it in theory is to invade people's homes and equipment.
I'm not talking about stealing, I'm talking about demanding the advantage a contract gives you without fulfilling the obligations.
All right, suppose I offer you a contract: I'll sell you gas for your car at $20 a gallon for the next six months. You decline, and you go and buy gas from someone else at $3 a gallon. Under your logic, that's "demanding the advantage a contract gives you without fulfilling the obligations" - you don't like my terms, so you're going to someone else who offers you the same thing on better terms.
But it's fine, right? Because you're not taking gas out of my tanks, depriving me of anything or causing me any extra trouble, you're getting it from someone else. Just like if you download a Britney song from Kazaa, you're not taking it off Britney's hard drive, or using any of her bandwidth, etc... you're getting it from someone else.
If you unlawfully acquire a song the copyright holder loses the option of selling it to you. With isolated cases that may not mean much but if enough people do it that destroys the market the copyright holder wanted to sell his good to.
If you're against that, you're against competition. When you buy a phone from Cingular, doesn't T-Mobile lose the option of selling it to you? When you buy a used Camry from Crazy Eddie, doesn't Wacky Larry down the street lose the option of selling you his used Camry? When you buy a satellite dish, doesn't Comcast essentially lose the option of selling you cable?
May not be anything like theft but works pretty well as an anticompetitive measure, i.e. if it didn't violate copyright it should violate antitrust laws.
You've got it backwards. Copyright itself is an anticompetitive measure: a work can only be sold or given away by the copyright holder; everyone else is banned from competing.
Copyright adds an option for the artist, the option to use it. If you want to do the service model and waive all restrictions copyright lets you place you have the freedom to do so. It's completely opt-in.
Er.. a system that allows one person to opt himself and everyone else in isn't exactly "opt-in". The rest of us don't get a choice.
The wrapper moves it from service to good category.
But as we know, it doesn't need to be moved. Millions of people earn a living by providing services as nothing more than services.
No, those [invasive laws] are unnecessary. The [copyright] law itself provides and enforces all power a copyright holder will ever need, the ones who demand more and more technical or legal additions just want a special treatment they're not entitled to (if the law let them they wouldn't need the extra crap, if the law doesn't let them they shouldn't be able to either).
I disagree. I think the invasive laws are a natural consequence of copyright, because copyright is basically unenforceable today without them. When even the cheapest Wal-Mart PCs can copy CDs and DVDs, and the populace is increasingly willing to do so even though it's illegal, copyright law has little effect on its own. You can't stop someone from making copies in his basement unless you post a guard in his house - or require hardware manufacturers to build guards into his equipment.
Well, that's how it works with every business. Getting paid without your product making money means you're an employee instead of an employer.
Nope. Employees don't have to pay their wages back if it turns out the work they did wasn't as useful to the bottom line as it seemed... but that's exactly how royalty advances work. Employers don't ask for your paycheck to be paid back; that's what payday loan sharks do.
But neither party should be able to circumvent the deal. You don't break into their house and steal their money, they don't take your product for free.
The reason stealing is wrong is that you're taking something away from its owner, depriving him of it. If I put my car up for sale, and someone magically makes a copy instead and drives off in an identical car (leaving me with the original), I might be sad because I didn't get paid, but he hasn't really done anything wrong.
That's why we had to codify things like theft. Because unlawfully acquiring something is usually much more profitable than paying for it.
We had to outlaw theft because when your physical property is "unlawfully acquired", you don't have it anymore. If it could be copied and used by many people simultaneously like information can, we wouldn't need laws against that either.
Interesting. I don't think that's the case in the US.
I assume the UK copyright laws have exemptions for the "copies" your software (or your CD player with anti-skip buffer) makes as it plays a file (CD) you've legally purchased?
Again, yes it is. Copyright is the right to make and distribute copies. Possession has nothing to do with it.
And saying that the data is only copied once, at the sending end, proves that you know little about how computers work.
Gosh, you're right, it's a wonder I've managed to make a living as a programmer and network admin for nearly a decade.
The copies which copyright concerns itself with are the ones that are fixed in a persistent medium. Paper counts. Hard drives and CDs count. RAM doesn't count, electrical signals on network cables don't count, and router buffers don't count. Under those criteria, there's one copy before the file is sent (on the sender's hard drive), and two copies afterward (another one on the receiver's hard drive).
Of course, both of these things are such petty offences that no one actually cares, given that you aren't committing more wholesale violation, but strictly from an academic standpoint, could you provide some sort of citation, especially for the "legal to download"?
I think this is one of those absence-of-evidence, evidence-of-absence things. There are no examples of anyone being prosecuted solely for downloading (AFAIK), and common sense dictates that if the uploader is making a copy by sending the file to the downloader, then the downloader isn't making a copy, because there's only one copy being made.
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You're right, I'm not personally doing anything with HD content (not even watching it). Your argument falls apart, however, because there are plenty of people who do want to exercise their fair use rights for HD content. For example, someone who wants to make a backup of that brand new kids' movie instead of letting his kids ruin the original by sticking it in the toaster, or someone who wants to post a video review (complete with excerpts) of some new movie or show on his web site.
Your argument boils down to "I'm not using my fair use rights anyway, so I won't miss them." You can forfeit your own rights, but you sure as hell can't forfeit everyone else's.
I bitch about DRM because even when it isn't limiting what I actually want to do right now, it's limiting what I can potentially do tomorrow or next year. Maybe you're happy to short-sightedly give up your future options in order to get something shiny today, but I'm not.
Not all copying is illegal, you know. Remember fair use? DRM makes it difficult (and illegal, under the DMCA) to exercise your rights for format shifting, criticism/parody, educational materials, personal backups, etc.
Ah, of course, because the studios say they won't use the "image constraint token" for a few years. We can trust them, right? And in a few years, why, we can all just spend another $2000 for a TV that supports the latest DRM handshakes.
Not exactly... they passed the buck. Windows Media Player won't go out of its way to block HD playback on 32-bit systems, but the HD decryption software can still use Vista's features to detect unsigned drivers and refuse to play. And they may just choose not to sign any drivers if they don't think 32-bit Windows provides enough "protection" against "malware" that people might use to, you know, gain access to the content they paid for.
The incentive is that they know if they don't pay, they (slightly) lower the probability that the work will get created at all. The amount they'll be willing to pay depends on both their perception of how likely it is to get created without their contribution, and the value they personally place on the work's creation.
That first factor, however, may cancel out, because each person's belief that an artist will be able to record their next album without his contribution is related to that artist's popularity. If a popular band has a hundred thousand fans, then even if 90% of those fans figure "I don't need to pay, they'll surely get enough contributions", that still leaves 10,000 paying customers. A less popular band with only 1000 fans needs each one a lot more, but those fans will presumably be more willing to pay, since each person knows it's a lot less likely that others will pick up the slack.
Interesting that you brought that up.. look at the success candidates have had in raising contributions online. They bring in millions of dollars from individuals who each know their $50 or $100 is just a small drop in the bucket.
He'd stay in business long enough to repair one car, so he'd have to charge enough for his work to make it worth going into business - just like I proposed for artists.
Everyone can be given free copies, because a band is in the business of writing and recording music, not the business of making copies. Once they've been paid a fair price for the time they put into recording the album, the band doesn't need to worry about how many people listen to it - it doesn't take any more work to write an album that 100,000 people will listen to than it does to make one that only 1000 people will listen to.
The contributors are people who want that album to be recorded, just like the contributors to a political campaign are the people who want that candidate to be elected. They're not directly getting anything in exchange for their money, they're just adding a small part to the total that will eventually pay off as a benefit for everyone.
Think about that a little harder. If the band only has 1000 fans willing to spend money on their music, how are they going to turn a profit selling copies for $15 on store shelves? They won't. Here's what'll happen: they'll sign up with a record label, they'll get an advance on royalties that will never materialize, and they'll end up owing that money back to the label and wishing they'd never recorded an album at all. If they look for funding ahead of time, at least they can realize it's unprofitable before they spend their own time and money on it.
The satisfaction of knowing you contributed to something worthwhile, and the ability to listen to it and share it with your friends when it's finished. If you decide not to contribute, you might still be able to listen to the album if/when it's released, but you're making it that much less likely that it ever will be, so your contribution gives you the assurance that it will be created and made available (or your money back).
The artist doesn't need to sell copies if he's already been paid for his work, so there's no profit from selling copies and no need to divide it into shares. Of course, there's nothing stopping an artist from selling CDs if he can distinguish them in some way from the freely available copies.. signing them, including free concert tickets or coupons for merchandise, etc.
Correct, I didn't. But then neither did most people, so you can't really say below-VHS pricing was one of the things that made people switch to DVD.
... just like anyone else who performs a service. Performing songs, filming movies, etc. can use the same business model as fixing cars, preparing tax forms, or painting houses.
The only real difference is that creating an artistic work tends to involve a lot more effort, so it's hard for one person to fund an entire album out of his own pocket. But that's not really a problem, because you can assemble a group of people who are all interested in the album and have them pool their money together to fund it. (Look at political campaigns for a working example: they raise millions of dollars from a lot of small contributions, and those contributors don't even get anything for their money unless their candidate wins!)
Damnit, don't give them any more ideas!
That was still relatively late in the DVD game. The first few DVDs I bought (Austin Powers, Face/Off, 12 Monkeys) were $30 or more apiece.
You're ignoring the difference between broadcasting information indiscriminately to the public at large, and sharing information discreetly with individuals under the shared presumption that they won't share it with anyone else (except as necessary to complete your transaction). You can't broadcast a song to the public over the radio and expect to still control its distribution.
Who says you can't make money from creating art without copyright? Just because the common business model today is "write something, then charge for distributing copies of it" doesn't mean that's the only way it can work, or even the best way.
Really, this comes up all the time in such discussions, and it seems completely absurd to me. Imagine if you woke up in an alternate universe where, say, accountants spent their days picking companies and auditing them without being asked, but didn't share the results until the companies paid them, and the accountants argued that it should be illegal to share these financial details because they couldn't think of a better way to get paid for their work! Ridiculous, huh? But that's basically how the argument for copyright goes. In our universe, many artists think the only way they can get paid is to make it illegal for people to share their work, but they overlook the very simple alternative: find someone ahead of time who will agree to pay you for your effort.
Well, it's funny that you picked that. The harm in child porn comes from the child abuse that's perpetrated in order to make it, not from the content itself - much like the work that artists are trying to get paid for is the work they perform in order to create the original content, not the act of making copies (which is what they actually end up getting paid for under the current copyright regime).
In theory, with an advanced enough renderer and enough effort, you could recreate every shot of a child porn movie as CGI and it'd be absolutely indistinguishable from the original. It'd even be representable by the same number. And IIRC, the US Supreme Court has slapped down every law against "virtual child porn", so it'd be legal to share that number as long as you could prove it was rendered by a computer.
Try taking that advice yourself. You're the one bringing up admissibility of evidence, I'm just saying you can't own a number, and it's ridiculous to share information with the public (by broadcasting a song over the air, for example) but still expect to control its distribution.
Just like culture and human happiness advances when artistic works are freely enjoyed, spread, and built upon to create new works.
Hoarders love to repeat that romantic gibberish, but sorry: information is information. The bytes on a CD are, guess what, information. If you call someone on the phone and read them off the list of digits, eventually they'll be able to put together their own copy of the song. The desire to prevent someone from sharing those digits is no more justified than the desire to stop them from sharing the digits of pi.
Uniquely theirs? Ha. Every artist draws something from the work of others; no one grows up in a vacuum.
Correct - it's nobody's right to own it. You can't own a number.
Unfortunately, that article is a hoax.
Just because it's hard to come up with certain information doesn't mean it shouldn't be "Free". Consider all the work that went into calculating the speed of light, or pi, or the age of the universe... now imagine if everyone who wanted to use any of those figures had to pay the heirs of the people who discovered them!
That may be. But the point is, the lowest quality acceptable to the banks is still much higher than the lowest quality acceptable to the folks who approve electronic voting machines.
Long before touch screen voting, they were making ATMs. They're not going out of business any time soon.
I suppose you also think the same about people who prefer DVDs to VHS, or CDs to FM radio, or FM to AM...
Yes, we do. There's a significant difference in quality between properly encoded 96 kbps and 160 kbps; you don't have to be an audiophile to hear it.
Nope, that's only one form of infringement. There are other forms that aren't visible to the public and can't possibly be detected or prevented without invasive actions. What are you going to do about people copying CDs and DVDs at home for their friends - search everyone leaving a house? How about encrypted transmissions between private individuals over the internet?
So what? That work is in the past; no one forced Britney to record the song, but since she did, the work is done and the bits are out there. Making more copies today doesn't retroactively make her work any harder in the past.
Or maybe you'd encourage them to arrange payment before they start working, like everyone else who provides a service.
If they're the same model, then they are ==. They're even more similar than Britney's CD is to some random P2Per's MP3, because at least in that situation, you can choose between a physical disc with artwork and uncompressed PCM audio, and a lossily-compressed audio file with no extras whatsoever.
And Britney certainly can compete with free copying. She could put an autographed pair of panties in each CD case, for example, or a coupon good for free shipping at her online store. She can't do anything to make the bits themselves more attractive, but she can attract customers by selling something besides information.
That's hardly competition, and it's a pretty ridiculous thing to say anyway. What if the mayor of your town decided that only his son could sell club sandwiches - would it be a good excuse if he said "Invent your own goddamn sandwich if you want to sell it!" Would that statement magically transform his anticompetitive action into a competitive one?
The fact is, copyright is a government-granted monopoly, and monopolies are the opposite of competition. Just like there's no good reason to say only one person can combine these ingredients to make this sandwich, there's no good reason to say only one person can transmit these bytes in this order... unless you just want to abuse your power to benefit one person at everyone else's expense.
People seem to be pretty dumb, or lazy, in this hypothetical world you're describing. Don't they realize that they can get paid in exactly the same way as everyone else who provides a service: by charging for the service itself?
No, but there's a good reason why it's not okay: because that would leave me without a car. Making a copy is okay, and if everyone else in town can come up with a way to copy my car, more power to them.
Mugging happens in public. You can enforce laws against mugging just by patrolling public places, and guess what, that's what police do. Theoretically, if your city spent enough money, they could put a cop on every corner 24 hours a day, and muggings would go down a lot without invading anyone's privacy. The same is not true of copyright - the only way to even enforce it in theory is to invade people's homes and equipment.
All right, suppose I offer you a contract: I'll sell you gas for your car at $20 a gallon for the next six months. You decline, and you go and buy gas from someone else at $3 a gallon. Under your logic, that's "demanding the advantage a contract gives you without fulfilling the obligations" - you don't like my terms, so you're going to someone else who offers you the same thing on better terms.
But it's fine, right? Because you're not taking gas out of my tanks, depriving me of anything or causing me any extra trouble, you're getting it from someone else. Just like if you download a Britney song from Kazaa, you're not taking it off Britney's hard drive, or using any of her bandwidth, etc... you're getting it from someone else.
If you're against that, you're against competition. When you buy a phone from Cingular, doesn't T-Mobile lose the option of selling it to you? When you buy a used Camry from Crazy Eddie, doesn't Wacky Larry down the street lose the option of selling you his used Camry? When you buy a satellite dish, doesn't Comcast essentially lose the option of selling you cable?
You've got it backwards. Copyright itself is an anticompetitive measure: a work can only be sold or given away by the copyright holder; everyone else is banned from competing.
Er.. a system that allows one person to opt himself and everyone else in isn't exactly "opt-in". The rest of us don't get a choice.
But as we know, it doesn't need to be moved. Millions of people earn a living by providing services as nothing more than services.
I disagree. I think the invasive laws are a natural consequence of copyright, because copyright is basically unenforceable today without them. When even the cheapest Wal-Mart PCs can copy CDs and DVDs, and the populace is increasingly willing to do so even though it's illegal, copyright law has little effect on its own. You can't stop someone from making copies in his basement unless you post a guard in his house - or require hardware manufacturers to build guards into his equipment.
Nope. Employees don't have to pay their wages back if it turns out the work they did wasn't as useful to the bottom line as it seemed... but that's exactly how royalty advances work. Employers don't ask for your paycheck to be paid back; that's what payday loan sharks do.
The reason stealing is wrong is that you're taking something away from its owner, depriving him of it. If I put my car up for sale, and someone magically makes a copy instead and drives off in an identical car (leaving me with the original), I might be sad because I didn't get paid, but he hasn't really done anything wrong.
We had to outlaw theft because when your physical property is "unlawfully acquired", you don't have it anymore. If it could be copied and used by many people simultaneously like information can, we wouldn't need laws against that either.
Interesting. I don't think that's the case in the US.
I assume the UK copyright laws have exemptions for the "copies" your software (or your CD player with anti-skip buffer) makes as it plays a file (CD) you've legally purchased?
Cite? I don't believe it is in the US.
Again, yes it is. Copyright is the right to make and distribute copies. Possession has nothing to do with it.
Gosh, you're right, it's a wonder I've managed to make a living as a programmer and network admin for nearly a decade.
The copies which copyright concerns itself with are the ones that are fixed in a persistent medium. Paper counts. Hard drives and CDs count. RAM doesn't count, electrical signals on network cables don't count, and router buffers don't count. Under those criteria, there's one copy before the file is sent (on the sender's hard drive), and two copies afterward (another one on the receiver's hard drive).
I think this is one of those absence-of-evidence, evidence-of-absence things. There are no examples of anyone being prosecuted solely for downloading (AFAIK), and common sense dictates that if the uploader is making a copy by sending the file to the downloader, then the downloader isn't making a copy, because there's only one copy being made.