Now suppose a musician, a producer, a team of sound engineers, cover artists, a couple talent scouts, and the management to put them all together each contribute a little bit towards a great new album they expect you to pay for, but then you go and download it for free with LimeWire. How is that not theft, too?
They can "expect" all they want, but expectation does not create an obligation. A waiter, for example, can reasonably expect his customers to leave a tip, but refusing to tip isn't theft. Someone who cleans your windshield when you're stopped in traffic might expect you to pay him for it, but if you don't, you haven't stolen anything, you've only shown him to be a sucker. He has no right to demand payment unless he arranged it with you beforehand.
Hmm, if the fact that your opinion wasn't sollicited protects you against prosecution, I think there's an even stronger reason for protecting people who voted against.
Participating in the electoral process (or choosing not to) is close enough for me. Remember "no taxation without representation"? Those colonists weren't upset because they had to pay a tax they voted against, they were upset because they never had a choice: they were subjects, not citizens. There's quite a difference between voting for the guy who lost, and not being allowed to vote at all.
There's also a difference between being prosecuted as a juvenile and not being prosecuted at all.
The government derives its just power from the consent of the governed. If you're too young to vote, it's unjust to try you as an adult.
The Supreme Court disagrees
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It's theft in the same way that declining to pay for, say, your haircut, is theft of services; and it is indeed illegal. Check section 2319 here, the bit titled "Criminal infringement of copyright."
Wrong. "Theft of services" is an actual defined crime. "Criminal infringement of copyright" is not theft - see how the word "theft" doesn't appear anywhere in that phrase?
The Supreme Court ruled that copyright infringement is not theft in a 1985 case, Dowling v. United States:
Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud.
Copyright infringement is depriving the copyright holder of income, and is illegal. Giving bad reviews that cause people not to buy a movie is depriving the copyright holder of income and is not illegal. The fact that both giving bad reviews and copyright infringement both deprive the copyright holder of income does not mean that bad reviews are illegal, and neither does it mean that copyright infringement is not illegal. It doesn't even imply it - not even a little bit.
You're missing the point. People argue that copyright infringement is bad and should be illegal because it deprives the copyright holder of potential income. Logically, that suggests other activities that deprive copyright holders of potential income should also be illegal. The GP is correct to point out the absurdity of that argument.
Also- can anyone explain why data is still so damn expensive? I have a data capable phone w/bluetooth, I travel a fair bit...but I don't ever use the data service, because it's so incredibly expensive. 2-8MB runs you almost as much as the voice service does!
Sounds like you're getting screwed. With Verizon, I can use 1xRTT data almost anywhere (~90 kbps average, 144 kbps max) and with my America's Choice plan, it's billed just like a voice call - meaning it's free between 9PM-6AM and on weekends. If you use it all the time, they have an unmetered data plan for like $80 a month.
Re:What's the deal with GPS on cell phones?
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Wireless Positioning
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GSM also uses time slots.
Re:What's the deal with GPS on cell phones?
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Wireless Positioning
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GSM uses a time modulation technique, but it's been around since before phones had GPS capability.
The grandparent (a Verizon customer) uses CDMA, which also predates phones with built-in GPS receivers. It does depend on having accurate time at the towers, though, which GPS is useful for.
Re:What's the deal with GPS on cell phones?
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Wireless Positioning
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Check your phone's service menu. On my LG, I can get there by pressing Menu-0-000000. There's probably a test screen you can use to check your GPS information.. if the towers in your area support it. Note that not all positioning information is available on your phone - the tower plays a big part in finding your location when you use E911.
BFD. It's Apple's format and Apple's player. Until Apple becomes a monopoly in the online store and music player markets, neither you nor Real have any grounds for complaint whatsoever.
Ridiculous. As a potential customer, I have every right to complain about a vendor whose products lock me in to their other products. I may not be able to sue, but I'm sure as hell not buying an iPod, and neither are my friends or relatives if I have anything to do with it.
Sorry, that's utter nonsense. Nothing prevents you from buying an iRiver or a Dell DigitalDJ or a Rio or an mp3 Walkman and buying music from Wal-Marts site or Buymusic.com or Napster or Real or even buying a regular pressed cd and putting it in whatever format you want.
Well, nothing except the DMCA or your contract with those other music stores. Napster's Terms & Conditions, for example, lets you burn CDs but forbids you to "copy, distribute, or transfer the track from that CD to any other media or device". If you're going to disregard that contract, you may as well disregard copyright law too and just get the files from your favorite P2P service.
Or is your point simply that you can choose not to buy an iPod, and instead get a player that works with more than one music store? Oh boy. You can choose not to get a Windows machine, a diamond ring, cable TV, or a phone line too, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the anticompetitive practices in those industries.
Right off that bat, your analogy fails. Mechanics are not content producers.
Content producers aren't creating a product, they're performing a service, much like a mechanic. Writing a song, playing an instrument, and mixing tracks - all services. Directing a film, acting in it, and editing it - all services.
Yup, and I'm willing to bet the rates at which they would charge that skill out are well beyond your pocket.
I'm sure they are. That's why I have no dreams of hiring a studio to produce a movie just for me. Instead of paying $10 million myself, I could pay $10 along with a million other people.
This sort of reminds me of the executive mentality - anything you can't do must be easy, right? Therefore it must not be worth much. In your case you've taken it all the way to free.
Who said anything about free? The studio is free to ask for as much money as they want to cover production costs and profit, and the moviegoing public can decide if they want to fund it.
The only thing that isn't worth much is what I can do easily - making a copy. Once the movie has been made, a DVD with a copy of that movie on it is worth little more than a blank DVD-R, because I can make my own with a few minutes' time and some readily available information.
The duplication costs are so little as to be ignorable anyway. You've offered to take the least burdensome piece of the process away, and in exchange you offer removing, or at least reducing, the reward.
You're mistaken. Their reward is whatever they negotiated it to be (with whoever agreed to pay for production) before they started work on the project.
You're speaking of a communistic approach to content creation. As a content creator myself, my response is "Make me." I intend to make money with my talent, whether you want me to or not.
I do want you to. Nothing about the system I've described would prevent you from making money with your talent. The studio sets their own price, and the public decides whether to pay for the studio's services or not: that's not "communistic", it's a free market.
Thing is, though.. as a content consumer, a computer owner, and a human being capable of expressing and analyzing abstract information, I refuse to grant you veto power over which pieces of information I choose to duplicate or distribute, simply because you want to charge me for permission. It's ridiculous to expect money from everyone who uses or copies a certain number, even when the number is 4 GB long and can be fed into a DVD player to reproduce a movie. Coming up with the movie in the first place is what takes talent, and it's possible (and IMO preferable) to reward you directly for it.
I'll finish up with a question for you - what exactly (aside from vanishingly small sums of theoretical money) do you contribute to content production?
I write software both for a living--per hour or per job, not per copy--and as a hobby (freeware/OSS). I've made only brief stabs at producing music and video content, but they've given me enormous respect for the difficulty of the process and the people who do it.
Sorry you couldn't understand it. Let me try a simple analogy.
If you need your car fixed, you take it to a mechanic. You discuss what needs to be done and what it'll cost, and once the job is done, so is your business relationship. He doesn't do the work for free and then charge you a few bucks every time you use the car; what you need from him is his skill at diagnosing and repairing car trouble, so you pay him directly for that. If he wants to get paid again, he finds another car to fix instead of trying to squeeze more money out of the work he already did.
What I need from the movie industry in general is their skill at crafting movies. I'll happily chip in to fund the production of something I think I'll like, but I don't want to pay anyone else to give me a copy of it once it's finished; I can copy bits and burn DVDs myself. Paying directly for the production, rather than paying after the fact for a copy, makes intuitive sense and as a business model it's completely immune to piracy.
Copyright infringement is only a "problem" because a few industry dinosaurs have become dependent on charging for copies. The skill of making music, movies, and TV shows isn't in being able to press the button on a CD duplicator, folks - a trained monkey can do that. They need to get off their asses and move to a business model where they get rewarded for creating content, not duplicating it.
We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod(R), and we are investigating the implications of their actions under the DMCA and other laws.
Not exactly the strongest threat ever made, but there you go.
I was referring to the music, not the sound quality. Sorry if that wasn't clear, but hey, it didn't really fit into the razor analogy.;)
The major label music that most people want isn't available as MP3s or other open formats - you can buy it in Apple's DRM format or some other store's DRM format. For an iPod owner, the only legal alternatives to buying the tracks from iTMS are buying them in a different format and converting them by hand (filing down the competitor's razor blades) or abandoning your musical tastes.
We are more capable of spreading our seed than any other race, especially any other large mammal (yes, you could say that cockroaches and bacteria are more advanced by taht definition, but cockroaches and bacteria aren't going to Mars unless we bring them, deliberately or otherwise.)
So far, we haven't spread any seed on Mars, and we still have a long way to go to catch up to insects or bacteria here on earth.
Of course, there's another pretty potent argument: If anyone else gets all fussy and wants to be the most advanced, we have the capacity to nuke them off of the face of the earth.
Haven't you heard that only cockroaches (and Twinkies) will survive a nuclear holocaust?
Since when did Apple send out legal threats to anyone who released mp3's, wavs, or even unprotected aac's? Those all fit in Apple's "razor" just fine, thank you.
Cute. Apple has threatened those who attempted to distribute music in Apple's DRM format (i.e. Real). Other stores don't want to release unencrypted MP3s, WAVs, or AACs for the same reason Apple doesn't. Sorry, the fact that the iPod can play MP3s doesn't excuse Apple's anti-competitive practices.
That's like complaining Gillette has a monopoly on Mach-3 razor blades, except that Apple's razor can also use generic blade cartridges. It just can't be used with the proprietary DRM'd WMA blades of the other razor makers.
Remember, the other razor makers tried to make replacement blades that would fit in Apple's razor, but Apple shut them down with legal threats. And while you can buy generic blade cartridges, they're generally perceived to be poor quality - the only way to get a good shave from your Apple razir without buying Apple's blades is to buy a different proprietary blade and file it down by hand so it'll fit.
If it had been a program that you had written - your "intellectual property" - then you'd be screaming bloody murder if someone had distributed it without your say-so - and you'd be right to do so.
No, I wouldn't. I can't own a sequence of bits any more than I can own my height in inches or the route I drive to work. It's information. If you put a certain number into your DivX player, it'll show you Star Wars Episode III, but no one created that number; it'd do exactly the same thing if George Lucas had never been born.
To those who say, "Well, they can afford it, so what's the harm?", I say, "The harm is done to the concept of intellectual property."
Good. It's a bankrupt concept and the sooner it's gone, the better.
Even if it had a.0000001% change you are still: 1)Taking something that is not yours and 2)Distributing it which will take even more money away from the studio.
First, we all "take something that is not ours" every day. I bet you're breathing air right now. Is that air yours? Are you afraid that the rightful owner is going to break down your door someday and ask why the hell you turned all his oxygen into carbon dioxide? I don't think so - not everything has an owner.
Second, we can't assume that any effect this had on the movie's revenue was negative. There are a few well-known examples in the music industry where file sharing has obviously been beneficial: Radiohead never made it into the Top 20 here until their album "Kid A" was leaked onto the internet months before its official release, and then when it came out for sale, it debuted at #1.
Do you say that stealing 20 dollars is not bad because the company is worth billions.
No, stealing 20 dollars is always bad when you're taking it away from someone.
What if it is a start-up company and you steal the companies big money maker 1,000 dollar software?
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Now suppose a musician, a producer, a team of sound engineers, cover artists, a couple talent scouts, and the management to put them all together each contribute a little bit towards a great new album they expect you to pay for, but then you go and download it for free with LimeWire. How is that not theft, too?
They can "expect" all they want, but expectation does not create an obligation. A waiter, for example, can reasonably expect his customers to leave a tip, but refusing to tip isn't theft. Someone who cleans your windshield when you're stopped in traffic might expect you to pay him for it, but if you don't, you haven't stolen anything, you've only shown him to be a sucker. He has no right to demand payment unless he arranged it with you beforehand.
It's morally OK too, but that has nothing to do with whether you call it theft. ;)
Hmm, if the fact that your opinion wasn't sollicited protects you against prosecution, I think there's an even stronger reason for protecting people who voted against.
Participating in the electoral process (or choosing not to) is close enough for me. Remember "no taxation without representation"? Those colonists weren't upset because they had to pay a tax they voted against, they were upset because they never had a choice: they were subjects, not citizens. There's quite a difference between voting for the guy who lost, and not being allowed to vote at all.
There's also a difference between being prosecuted as a juvenile and not being prosecuted at all.
The government derives its just power from the consent of the governed. If you're too young to vote, it's unjust to try you as an adult.
Wrong. "Theft of services" is an actual defined crime. "Criminal infringement of copyright" is not theft - see how the word "theft" doesn't appear anywhere in that phrase?
The Supreme Court ruled that copyright infringement is not theft in a 1985 case, Dowling v. United States
Copyright infringement is depriving the copyright holder of income, and is illegal.
Giving bad reviews that cause people not to buy a movie is depriving the copyright holder of income and is not illegal.
The fact that both giving bad reviews and copyright infringement both deprive the copyright holder of income does not mean that bad reviews are illegal, and neither does it mean that copyright infringement is not illegal. It doesn't even imply it - not even a little bit.
You're missing the point. People argue that copyright infringement is bad and should be illegal because it deprives the copyright holder of potential income. Logically, that suggests other activities that deprive copyright holders of potential income should also be illegal. The GP is correct to point out the absurdity of that argument.
iTunes can crack the DRM on files from competing music stores? First time I've heard of that. I don't suppose you have a link?
Also- can anyone explain why data is still so damn expensive? I have a data capable phone w/bluetooth, I travel a fair bit...but I don't ever use the data service, because it's so incredibly expensive. 2-8MB runs you almost as much as the voice service does!
Sounds like you're getting screwed. With Verizon, I can use 1xRTT data almost anywhere (~90 kbps average, 144 kbps max) and with my America's Choice plan, it's billed just like a voice call - meaning it's free between 9PM-6AM and on weekends. If you use it all the time, they have an unmetered data plan for like $80 a month.
GSM also uses time slots.
GSM uses a time modulation technique, but it's been around since before phones had GPS capability.
The grandparent (a Verizon customer) uses CDMA, which also predates phones with built-in GPS receivers. It does depend on having accurate time at the towers, though, which GPS is useful for.
Check your phone's service menu. On my LG, I can get there by pressing Menu-0-000000. There's probably a test screen you can use to check your GPS information.. if the towers in your area support it. Note that not all positioning information is available on your phone - the tower plays a big part in finding your location when you use E911.
The pusher robot says shoving is the answer. But can we really trust him?
NO! He is malfunctioning.
Vote Shover Robot in 2006. Together, we can protect the future.
BFD. It's Apple's format and Apple's player. Until Apple becomes a monopoly in the online store and music player markets, neither you nor Real have any grounds for complaint whatsoever.
Ridiculous. As a potential customer, I have every right to complain about a vendor whose products lock me in to their other products. I may not be able to sue, but I'm sure as hell not buying an iPod, and neither are my friends or relatives if I have anything to do with it.
Sorry, that's utter nonsense. Nothing prevents you from buying an iRiver or a Dell DigitalDJ or a Rio or an mp3 Walkman and buying music from Wal-Marts site or Buymusic.com or Napster or Real or even buying a regular pressed cd and putting it in whatever format you want.
Well, nothing except the DMCA or your contract with those other music stores. Napster's Terms & Conditions, for example, lets you burn CDs but forbids you to "copy, distribute, or transfer the track from that CD to any other media or device". If you're going to disregard that contract, you may as well disregard copyright law too and just get the files from your favorite P2P service.
Or is your point simply that you can choose not to buy an iPod, and instead get a player that works with more than one music store? Oh boy. You can choose not to get a Windows machine, a diamond ring, cable TV, or a phone line too, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the anticompetitive practices in those industries.
TCSEC has apparently been superseded, and Windows 2000 is rated at Common Criteria level 4 out of 7.
Right off that bat, your analogy fails. Mechanics are not content producers.
Content producers aren't creating a product, they're performing a service, much like a mechanic. Writing a song, playing an instrument, and mixing tracks - all services. Directing a film, acting in it, and editing it - all services.
Yup, and I'm willing to bet the rates at which they would charge that skill out are well beyond your pocket.
I'm sure they are. That's why I have no dreams of hiring a studio to produce a movie just for me. Instead of paying $10 million myself, I could pay $10 along with a million other people.
This sort of reminds me of the executive mentality - anything you can't do must be easy, right? Therefore it must not be worth much. In your case you've taken it all the way to free.
Who said anything about free? The studio is free to ask for as much money as they want to cover production costs and profit, and the moviegoing public can decide if they want to fund it.
The only thing that isn't worth much is what I can do easily - making a copy. Once the movie has been made, a DVD with a copy of that movie on it is worth little more than a blank DVD-R, because I can make my own with a few minutes' time and some readily available information.
The duplication costs are so little as to be ignorable anyway. You've offered to take the least burdensome piece of the process away, and in exchange you offer removing, or at least reducing, the reward.
You're mistaken. Their reward is whatever they negotiated it to be (with whoever agreed to pay for production) before they started work on the project.
You're speaking of a communistic approach to content creation. As a content creator myself, my response is "Make me." I intend to make money with my talent, whether you want me to or not.
I do want you to. Nothing about the system I've described would prevent you from making money with your talent. The studio sets their own price, and the public decides whether to pay for the studio's services or not: that's not "communistic", it's a free market.
Thing is, though.. as a content consumer, a computer owner, and a human being capable of expressing and analyzing abstract information, I refuse to grant you veto power over which pieces of information I choose to duplicate or distribute, simply because you want to charge me for permission. It's ridiculous to expect money from everyone who uses or copies a certain number, even when the number is 4 GB long and can be fed into a DVD player to reproduce a movie. Coming up with the movie in the first place is what takes talent, and it's possible (and IMO preferable) to reward you directly for it.
I'll finish up with a question for you - what exactly (aside from vanishingly small sums of theoretical money) do you contribute to content production?
I write software both for a living--per hour or per job, not per copy--and as a hobby (freeware/OSS). I've made only brief stabs at producing music and video content, but they've given me enormous respect for the difficulty of the process and the people who do it.
Sorry you couldn't understand it. Let me try a simple analogy.
If you need your car fixed, you take it to a mechanic. You discuss what needs to be done and what it'll cost, and once the job is done, so is your business relationship. He doesn't do the work for free and then charge you a few bucks every time you use the car; what you need from him is his skill at diagnosing and repairing car trouble, so you pay him directly for that. If he wants to get paid again, he finds another car to fix instead of trying to squeeze more money out of the work he already did.
What I need from the movie industry in general is their skill at crafting movies. I'll happily chip in to fund the production of something I think I'll like, but I don't want to pay anyone else to give me a copy of it once it's finished; I can copy bits and burn DVDs myself. Paying directly for the production, rather than paying after the fact for a copy, makes intuitive sense and as a business model it's completely immune to piracy.
Copyright infringement is only a "problem" because a few industry dinosaurs have become dependent on charging for copies. The skill of making music, movies, and TV shows isn't in being able to press the button on a CD duplicator, folks - a trained monkey can do that. They need to get off their asses and move to a business model where they get rewarded for creating content, not duplicating it.
I was referring to the music, not the sound quality. Sorry if that wasn't clear, but hey, it didn't really fit into the razor analogy. ;)
The major label music that most people want isn't available as MP3s or other open formats - you can buy it in Apple's DRM format or some other store's DRM format. For an iPod owner, the only legal alternatives to buying the tracks from iTMS are buying them in a different format and converting them by hand (filing down the competitor's razor blades) or abandoning your musical tastes.
We are more capable of spreading our seed than any other race, especially any other large mammal (yes, you could say that cockroaches and bacteria are more advanced by taht definition, but cockroaches and bacteria aren't going to Mars unless we bring them, deliberately or otherwise.)
So far, we haven't spread any seed on Mars, and we still have a long way to go to catch up to insects or bacteria here on earth.
Of course, there's another pretty potent argument: If anyone else gets all fussy and wants to be the most advanced, we have the capacity to nuke them off of the face of the earth.
Haven't you heard that only cockroaches (and Twinkies) will survive a nuclear holocaust?
Since when did Apple send out legal threats to anyone who released mp3's, wavs, or even unprotected aac's? Those all fit in Apple's "razor" just fine, thank you.
Cute. Apple has threatened those who attempted to distribute music in Apple's DRM format (i.e. Real). Other stores don't want to release unencrypted MP3s, WAVs, or AACs for the same reason Apple doesn't. Sorry, the fact that the iPod can play MP3s doesn't excuse Apple's anti-competitive practices.
That's like complaining Gillette has a monopoly on Mach-3 razor blades, except that Apple's razor can also use generic blade cartridges. It just can't be used with the proprietary DRM'd WMA blades of the other razor makers.
Remember, the other razor makers tried to make replacement blades that would fit in Apple's razor, but Apple shut them down with legal threats. And while you can buy generic blade cartridges, they're generally perceived to be poor quality - the only way to get a good shave from your Apple razir without buying Apple's blades is to buy a different proprietary blade and file it down by hand so it'll fit.
Indeed it did... here's a review.
If it had been a program that you had written - your "intellectual property" - then you'd be screaming bloody murder if someone had distributed it without your say-so - and you'd be right to do so.
No, I wouldn't. I can't own a sequence of bits any more than I can own my height in inches or the route I drive to work. It's information. If you put a certain number into your DivX player, it'll show you Star Wars Episode III, but no one created that number; it'd do exactly the same thing if George Lucas had never been born.
To those who say, "Well, they can afford it, so what's the harm?", I say, "The harm is done to the concept of intellectual property."
Good. It's a bankrupt concept and the sooner it's gone, the better.
Even if it had a .0000001% change you are still: 1)Taking something that is not yours and 2)Distributing it which will take even more money away from the studio.
First, we all "take something that is not ours" every day. I bet you're breathing air right now. Is that air yours? Are you afraid that the rightful owner is going to break down your door someday and ask why the hell you turned all his oxygen into carbon dioxide? I don't think so - not everything has an owner.
Second, we can't assume that any effect this had on the movie's revenue was negative. There are a few well-known examples in the music industry where file sharing has obviously been beneficial: Radiohead never made it into the Top 20 here until their album "Kid A" was leaked onto the internet months before its official release, and then when it came out for sale, it debuted at #1.
Do you say that stealing 20 dollars is not bad because the company is worth billions.
No, stealing 20 dollars is always bad when you're taking it away from someone.
What if it is a start-up company and you steal the companies big money maker 1,000 dollar software?
What, they only had one copy?