Does this mean if I have a radio with speakers in a public place I need to pay some kind of fee?
Yes, it does.
I know that businesses which have radios that their customers can hear pay a license fee, but what about people, say, on the beach listening to a boom box?
Their situation is no different. The law doesn't distinguish between a business playing the radio and any other person playing the radio; you aren't exempt from the insane restrictions of copyright just because you aren't making money.
Pretty fucked up, huh?
The only reason that part of the law is (sometimes) enforced against businesses and never against people with boom boxes on the beach is that businesses are easier to keep an eye on and they tend to have more money.
False. The 14th Amendment reads, in part, "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Any person, not any citizen; the writers knew the difference.
Why not? Most consumers make only barely rational choices based on a myriad of impulses they are hardly aware of.
I could give several reasons why I bought the phone I did. I'm just wondering what his reasons are for wanting an iPhone rather than the equivalent that his carrier already has.
What makes your choice any more or less rational than this persons?
I don't know, I never claimed it was. My choice was rational, and I'm assuming his was too.
People release their works under copyright with the understanding that you can obtain a copy through means the artists approves, but you cannot distribute copies. The artist is not expecting that you will pay them, but that you will not get a copy without paying them.
Anyone who releases their works with the "understanding" that other people can't distribute copies must've been living under a rock for the past few decades. Surely they know that anything they release will be copied, and that there's nothing they can do about it. They might wish that weren't the case, but they're releasing their works in the real world, not a fantasy world where unauthorized copying doesn't exist.
The artist has a right to demand how his product can be distributed. If you don't like it you just don't buy his product.
No, the artist does not have the right to demand how a third party may distribute his work. If Bob wants to tell me something, and I want to listen and write it down, why on Earth would Alice have the right to shut him up?
Sure, copying a CD deprives no one of anything. Someone breaking into your house but stealing nothing and damaging nothing deprives you of nothing, but I expect you would argue there is a violation of principle somewhere.
Yes, that's the difference between physical property (including land) and information. I only have so much room in my house, which means a trespasser is depriving me to some extent of the use of my house: I might not want to use it right now, but the trespasser doesn't know that, and my ability to do so is infringed nonetheless.
Information doesn't work that way. Someone who copies my work has absolutely no impact on my ability to do anything with it, not even in theory: what they do with their copy can't possibly affect what I do with my copy. The very concept of ownership is meaningless when applied to something that can be everywhere at once like that.
Yes, artistic works can be made in the absence of copyright, but I see no reason why you need to have things NOW as opposed to seven years from now.
But you do see a reason why you need to have things seven years from now as opposed to 25 years or 100 years, huh? Seven is the magic number because... why?
It seems to me that if seven is better than 100, then zero is even better still. Why should you have to wait at all?
I don't think it is a stretch to assume more works would be created with limited copyright than with none;
Perhaps, but the number of works created isn't the only measure of the policy. We also have to consider whether those works are the kind people want (rather than shovelware made as a speculative investment), how free people are to access and build on those works, and how free people are in general (in terms of speech rights and technical innovation).
On the other hand, I don't think your assumption is a safe one. Copyright doesn't just encourage the creation of some works, it also forbids the creation (or at least distribution) of other works. In terms of the sheer number of works, I suspect things like mashups and fan sequels would outnumber the works that were no longer made.
as for movies amateur works are well behind professional ones so that is one area where copyright is sure to have a major benefit to quality.
No, you're confusing "amateur works" with "works produced without copyright". Works produced without copyright can still be professional works, if the people involved are getting paid to produce them.
Any person who wishes to benefit from the copyright must either pay the price that the copyright holder asks, negotiate a better price, or simply not use it. . This is black and white, and quite simple to grasp.
Yes, that's what the law says. But in this case, the law is unjust. There is no legitimate reason for my speech rights to be subject to the copyright holder's whims.
The fact that it is easy to make digital copies, and redistribute them easily on the Internet has nothing to do with it. Just because you can click copy, paste, or hit the download/upload button, does not mean that you are entitled to the work.
That's true: I'm not entitled to have a copy of the work just because it's easy to share. I'm entitled to have a copy of the work because someone else who has a copy is willing to share it with me. He's entitled to tell me about his copy, I'm entitled to listen and write down what he's saying.
have you ever run a business? because if you had, you would realise that you only produce products in the hope that people BUY them.
Yes, of course they hope people will buy them. And I hope it won't rain tomorrow. If it does, who should I sue? If it's my responsibility to make a movie producer's hopes come true, whose responsibility is it to make mine come true?
the money to make a movie does not float down from the skies. Its an investment, made in the likely hope of a return.
But where does that return come from? The pockets of people who want to see the movie.
If everyone behaved like you, who is going to be stupid enough to invest even fifty thousand dollars into making a movie that nobody will pay for?
The same people who ultimately pay for movies now: the people who want to see them. $10 apiece from five thousand people is still $50,000 whether you collect it before production or at the box office.
So you are saying that if I hire a baby sitter and then refuse to pay, it is OK.
Nope. When you hire the baby sitter, you enter into a contract: you promise to pay for her labor. If you refuse to pay afterward, you will have broken the contract and defrauded her out of her time.
The baby sitter already did the job and there is no difference in extra labour, whether I pay or not.
There is a difference in extra labor based on whether you commit fraud or not. If you had been honest and said up front that you weren't going to pay, she could've spent her time doing something else.
Artists who rely on copyright, on the other hand, do not have any sort of contract with their audience. If they don't sell any copies and they end up giving their labor away for nothing, they have no one else to blame: it was their own idea to do the work in the first place.
By that lagic any who is self employed or sets up their own business isn't entitled to payment.
If you decide to become a self-employed street performer who plays guitar on the sidewalk, or a self-employed landscaper who mows people's lawns without asking if they want it, you aren't entitled to any payment for that. That's labor, which is what I was talking about, but you seem to want to talk about goods instead.
If you open a shop selling T-shirts, no one is obligated to give you money just for being there. But you are entitled to keep your T-shirts until you decide to trade them (i.e. until someone pays you for them). If they don't like your prices, they can get an identical looking T-shirt from someone else.
If you open a web site selling MP3s, no one is obligated to buy them from you. You're entitled to keep your MP3s, but if people don't like your prices, they can get identical MP3s from someone else. Don't worry, you'll still have your copies!
Lets say I open a shop. Nobody asked me to. So anybody can walk in and steal things off the shelves?
Now do you see why this objection makes no sense? You're entitled to keep your property until someone persuades you to trade it. What you aren't entitled to do is stop people from getting identical things from another source.
Only a finite amount of labor went into your house, and that labor has already been performed.
Yup, that's why I don't have to pay the builders every time I open the door. They were paid when they built it, and they've long since moved on to new projects.
So get your bags packed, it's mine now.
That would deprive me of the use of my house. You haven't been paying attention, have you?
Someone paid Henry Ford[1] to build a car factory beforeheand?
The cars that came out of Henry Ford's factory belonged to Ford because they were made from materials that he owned.
If you make a physical product, then you own it, and that means you're entitled to either (1) keep it or (2) trade it to someone else on mutually agreeable terms. Physical property works that way because it can only be in one place at a time: someone has to own it, and it's up to them whether they want to transfer ownership. Information doesn't: the concept of ownership is meaningless when applied to something that can be everywhere at once, where no use can conflict with any other use, where you can't truly trade it because you still have it afterward.
Get real, the concept of free speech was that you could critice the king|pope|president without the government shutting you up.
That's a very narrow view of freedom of speech, and (thankfully) not one the courts have generally endorsed. You don't need profanity to criticize the President, for example, but it's protected by the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech covers the expressions you use as well as the ideas you express. Some people treat it as only the freedom to put forth controversial opinions, but I believe free speech means the freedom to speak even on trivial topics, and even when you're merely repeating what you heard somewhere else.
Paying the producer of the movie to watch it is one way to pay for the production of movies. You're arguing that this business model is fundamentally broken. Do you have an alternative?
The alternative is paying the producer of the movie to produce it in the first place. Once he's been paid and the movie has been released, it doesn't matter who distributes copies or how. He performed a service (made a movie) and was paid a price that he found acceptable, and if he wants to get paid again in the future, he can perform the service again (make another movie).
That's the overview. There are many ways to implement the details, but they all boil down to the basic question of how to collect the money and deliver it to the producer. Free markets are very effective at bringing buyers and sellers together (even without help from the government: see prostitution, drugs, etc.), so I think it would be fair to leave the explanation there, and let the market figure out the most effective way to make it happen.
But I'll go a step further and explain my personal favorite implementation idea: a social-type web site where fans can discover artists, learn about upcoming projects and give feedback, and contribute to the projects they want to see finished. Each project would have an estimated completion time and an asking price, fans would be able to contribute to any project as much or as little as they want, and the artist wouldn't be expected to work on the project until his asking price had been met. Users would be able to look at each artist's past work and community ratings to decide who to support; completed works would be made available as free downloads, possibly using an escrow system to guarantee the transaction. The site could support itself by taking a percentage of each project's asking price.
This might not be the most effective way to connect buyers and sellers - we won't really know until a sufficient number of artists abandon the copyright-based model to support competing pay-for-production systems. And we shouldn't expect it to fund exactly the same set of works we see today: perhaps we'll find out it's just too hard to raise $400 million to make the next Transformers movie if you have to do it $20 at a time. On the other hand, any model like this will work even if copyright is abolished, and abolishing copyright will allow new classes of works to be produced that aren't produced commercially today.
The "showing up uninvited" analogy to placing digital goods for sale, while a popular one, is ridiculous. A store is a store, a product is a product.
We were talking about labor, remember? Or are you abandoning that argument now that it isn't working?
An artist who records a song that no one asked for is in the same position as any other non-employee who does work that no one asked for. Neither of them are entitled to any payment for that labor, because they voluntarily gave it away. If they want to get paid, they can find a buyer and negotiate a price for their labor, like every other employee.
There is no great divide in abundance or copyability between online digital goods and more traditional items. Photocopiers and tape or wire recorders have been around for half a century. Photography for a century and a half. The printing press for centuries. All have been used for piracy, it is hardly a new phenomenon.
You're right, there's no great divide between online digital goods and traditional media. Online piracy is cheaper and easier, but fundamentally not much different from piracy that involves printing presses or tape recorders.
The great divide is between information and scarce products. Information can be detached from the medium it's recorded in: I can copy a file without taking the disk it's saved on. Making a copy requires essentially no resources beyond the cost of the medium, and doesn't interfere with anyone else's ability to make or use their own copies.
The divide between a song and a CD is the same as the divide between a song and a tape, or an LP, or a wax cylinder. Stealing a wax cylinder is wrong, because the rightful owner no longer has that cylinder. But recording a copy of the song onto your own wax cylinder is fine, because you're using your own time and materials, you're not depriving the owner of anything.
Do you photocopy textbooks to avoid paying for them? Did your parents pirate music on cassettes? If the answer is yes, that still doesn't make it legal, moral, or otherwise acceptable.
You're right, technically: it is moral and otherwise acceptable (though not legal), but not because of my actions or my parents' actions. What makes it moral is the fact that copying textbooks and copying cassettes doesn't deprive anyone of anything - the same thing that makes P2P file sharing moral.
In today's market, digital goods exist. They are as legitimate as any other.
You keep saying this as if the assertion that digital sales are "legitimate" makes copying immoral or unethical. It doesn't. It's "legitimate" to try to sell copies of files, but no one has any moral obligation to buy copies from you rather than getting them for free elsewhere.
What insult? Did you follow the link? Piaget's stages of cognitive development are very well established criteria. But you already knew that, right? Right?
Insults disguised as armchair psychology are still insults. But you already knew that, right?
Can your employer also invoke them and decide not to pay you for your labor? After all, while you worked at your job, no physical good was exchanged, so you didn't lose anything, right?
I work at my job because my employer has agreed to pay me for the work I do. If my employer decides not to pay, he will have broken that agreement. He will have used fraud to get labor out of me that I otherwise wouldn't have done: I will have been robbed of that time.
A better analogy to copyright infringement would be if you simply showed up uninvited at a job site, started working, and then demanded to be paid for your labor. The employer would have no obligation to pay you, because he never requested your labor or agreed to pay you: you would've voluntarily given away your time, even though you were hoping to get paid for it anyway.
Keep trying. Your flaw is that if taken to the extreme of all digital media being pirated, the creators would indeed be deprived of the fruits of their labor.
How silly. You might as well claim you're being deprived of the fruits of your labor when you mow your neighbor's lawn (without asking him first) and then he refuses to pay you.
They're only entitled to "fruits of their labor" when someone has agreed to pay for that labor beforehand. If I decide to spend my time making a movie, the only thing I'm entitled to afterward is a copy of that movie. My choice to perform labor doesn't obligate anyone else to pay me for it. Such an obligation can only come from a mutual agreement between me and the person who's paying.
Even if only a fraction of the output is pirated, the business model of selling digital goods is subverted.
So what? No one is required to make another person's business model work, especially such a foolish model as "work for free now, sell copies later", and especially when propping up that model requires ceding one's own right to communicate.
It is specious to insist that nothing is lost simply because a material item did not change hands.
No, it's just a straightforward application of the meaning of "lost". You can't lose something you never had. You can't lose money that belongs to someone else. You can, however, fail to convince someone to give you their money.
Music, video, games, etc. are digital information that required a great deal of labor to create.
Indeed they are. That's why it's so foolish to do all that labor for free and then pray that you can recoup your production costs by selling copies, especially when you know anyone can cut you out of the loop by making their own copies at home. The creation is the valuable part, not the copying.
Copying it without compensation or in violation of the artist's chosen license does indeed transfer a good from the artist to the thief.
More directly, it transfers a good from the uploader (who is almost certainly not the artist) to the downloader.
But "transfer" is not theft. When I tell you that the acceleration due to gravity on Earth is 9.8 m/s/s, I've transferred information to you, but I haven't lost anything. If you pass that information on to someone else without my permission, I still haven't lost anything.
Theft absolutely requires a loss. That's what makes theft a bad thing in the first place: not the fact that the thief gets something for free, but the fact that the rightful owner no longer has it. If you could wave a magic wand and make a copy of someone's car, few people would object to that (since it doesn't make them any poorer), and you'd have a hard time convincing anyone to call it an act of theft.
Most people have a better understanding of what theft is, and why theft is wrong, than you seem to. The best possible outcome of your line of argument is that you convince a few people that there are two kinds of "theft": the kind that's bad and the kind that isn't. Is that really what you want?
Keep denying it. You are stuck in the past. In this century, digital goods are a valid commercial entity.
I'm not the one who's stuck in the past. Copyright is an artifact of a relatively brief era when copying on a massive scale was practical for a few wealthy entities (who could afford printing presses, CD manufacturing plants, etc.) but not for the masses. Copyright is enforceable when you only need to keep an eye on factory owners who see copying as a business venture. But that era is gone: copying is now practical on a massive scale for anyone, the most dangerous copying (to the antiquated business model) is casual and noncommercial, and copyright is no longer enforceable without utterly decimating free speech and technical innovation.
It *is* theft. The movie was produced to make money.. and it is quite fair for them to expect that people won't just take it and not pay.
If I stand on the street corner playing the guitar and tambourine, hoping to make money, is it "theft" when people listen to the music without dropping a dollar in my hat?
Of course not. Just because you hope to make money doing something doesn't mean anyone is obligated to pay you for it.
If you want to get paid for making movies, there's a simple solution: don't make movies unless someone is paying you. As a professional programmer, I don't write code for free if I'm expecting to get paid for it. For every line of code I write, I know who wants it written and what they're paying me for it. This isn't a special talent I was born with; even movie producers can learn it.
Your example is childish and disingenuous because you are ignoring the labor that went into a product.
Incorrect. Illegal copying doesn't deprive anyone of their labor (or cause them to labor against their will) any more than it deprives them of the work being copied.
Only a finite amount of labor went into that product, and the labor has already been performed by the time anyone has a chance to make a copy. Whether you buy a copy legally, download a copy illegally, or don't obtain a copy at all, the amount of labor doesn't change -- the artist does exactly the same amount of work, no matter how many copies are eventually made or how many of those copies are legal.
Another way to look at it is that the artist gains no benefit when people choose not to download his works. His life isn't any richer or easier when his work is seen by 10 paying customers than when it's seen by 10 paying customers and 500 pirates. The pirates cause him no extra effort and take nothing away from him.
This, by the way, firmly places you in a clinically pre-adolescent stage of cognitive development.
When you've posted a completely boneheaded argument, pretending to be a psychologist only makes you look worse. Please, keep it up!
To take my (in my opinion overly-generous) estimate of a high-budget under your system - $10m - adjusting for inflation the only film in the IMDb top ten that would have been made is "12 Angry Men". It's not only Dark Knight that we'd have missed out on - no Star Wars, no Godfather, no Pulp Fiction. No One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
I think it's a mistake to assume that these films could only have been made with the budgets they actually had. Science fiction films had been made for decades before Star Wars came along, for instance. With a smaller budget, you might not have ILM's fancy effects, but you could still tell the story.
I loved the film Dark Knight - I've seen it multiple times, I own the DVD, and if a sequel comes out I'll almost certainly go to see it. But if I got a letter from the studio asking for $20 to fund production of that sequel? I wouldn't pay. For one thing, I would be skeptical paying for a film before I knew if it would be any good.
Then sir, you are not as much of a fan as you think you are.
If my favorite bands asked me for $20 to support the production of their next albums, I wouldn't hesitate. I know I'm going to buy whatever they release anyway, so why should I care whether I pay before or after it's released? Likewise, I know I'm going to see the sequel to Dark Knight, so it doesn't matter to me whether I pay for production or pay for a ticket.
For another, I don't much like the idea that I pay but everyone gets what I pay for, it doesn't seem fair.
I don't understand this zero-sum attitude.
When I pay for something, I consider the benefit that it provides for me, not for anyone else. For example, if I maintain my lawn and that raises my neighbors' property values, I don't feel like I'm being ripped off -- I'm maintaining the lawn for my own reasons, and any benefit my neighbors extract can't take away from the benefit I receive. In fact, I might even consider it a bonus.
Thirdly, I don't really like the idea of sending money away on the possibility that something might happen.
Ah, maybe I haven't been clear on this point. The money you send away is payment for a service, not a gift or a speculative investment. You would be legally entitled to a refund if the service was not performed as agreed.
What are those costs?
Loss of access to past works: there are thousands of existing works which are unavailable to anyone who lacks the means to pay for a access, even though in many cases the authors are dead or retired, which means the copyright on those works is serving only to restrict access rather than to provide any benefit whatsoever to anyone except the authors or their heirs.
Loss of access to derivative works: fan sequels, mashups, etc. Even derivative works made by large studios are frequently tied up because of this, whether it's filmmakers arguing over the rights to a book or an old TV series being released on DVD with a crappy new soundtrack (or not at all) because even the producers no longer had permission to release the show in its original form.
Technological restrictions: every computer comes with software to back up purchased audio CDs, but 12 years after DVD-R was invented, you still have to go underground to find software to back up purchased DVDs, and you'll be breaking the law if you use it. Standalone DVD recorders can't do it either. And remember how much overhead there is in Windows Vista simply to prevent you from viewing content in an unapproved fashion, not to mention all the other DRM you're paying for when you buy a computer, TV, disc player, or iPod.
The reason I don't feel my rights have been threatened by movie copyrights is that it has no effect on my speech. Comparing it to banning adverbs is ridiculous; not once in my life
It's still luck and chance. the skill basically plays the odds but the odds aren't the end all say all of it. You can have better then an 80% chance of winning the pot and still loose to someone who made a better hand on the last card.
You could say the same about the insurance industry. You know that on average, only X% of drivers will get in a wreck in any given month, and if the average payout is $Y then you can charge $Z a month to come about ahead, but it's possible that every driver will get in a wreck on the same day and you'll go broke. That doesn't mean selling insurance is all about luck, or even mostly about luck.
Explain to me what skill makes that next card be a queen and not a fucking deuce? I'll wait.
The skill is in recognizing:
how likely it is that your hand will improve (based on knowledge of your hand and the remaining cards)
how likely it is that your opponent has or will have a better hand (based on inferring his range of hands from his behavior)
how likely it is that you can make him fold even if he has a better hand (based on your estimate of his hand and his personality, and what he thinks about your hand and your personality)
how much you should be willing to wager at any point, in light of all the above
The cards themselves are random. Every play carries some element of risk, which is why they're called bets. But a skilled player will make good bets -- the ones where the odds are in his favor -- and avoid bad bets. It takes skill to know which is which. This is more or less how insurance works, too: an insurer doesn't know whether or not any given house will burn down, but he can estimate the risk and if he's good at his job, he'll charge just enough in premiums to come out ahead in the long run.
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Does this mean if I have a radio with speakers in a public place I need to pay some kind of fee?
Yes, it does.
I know that businesses which have radios that their customers can hear pay a license fee, but what about people, say, on the beach listening to a boom box?
Their situation is no different. The law doesn't distinguish between a business playing the radio and any other person playing the radio; you aren't exempt from the insane restrictions of copyright just because you aren't making money.
Pretty fucked up, huh?
The only reason that part of the law is (sometimes) enforced against businesses and never against people with boom boxes on the beach is that businesses are easier to keep an eye on and they tend to have more money.
Due process only applies to citizens.
False. The 14th Amendment reads, in part, "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Any person, not any citizen; the writers knew the difference.
Sorry, I don't see any equivalent phones to the iPhone at T-Mobile. From my perspective, all the other offerings are inferior.
I see. Do you have any reasons for this determination?
You are perfectly free to jailbreak your iPhone and install all sorts of unapproved software on it. So far as I know, there's nothing illegal about it
Apple has claimed that it is illegal.
Why not? Most consumers make only barely rational choices based on a myriad of impulses they are hardly aware of.
I could give several reasons why I bought the phone I did. I'm just wondering what his reasons are for wanting an iPhone rather than the equivalent that his carrier already has.
What makes your choice any more or less rational than this persons?
I don't know, I never claimed it was. My choice was rational, and I'm assuming his was too.
Show me one phone that lasts 2 years also.
Kyocera QCP-3035
LG VX4400
LG VX7000
Samsung SCH-u740 (Alias)
Surely I'm not the only person who uses a phone for two years or more before replacing it.
Why would you want an iPhone on T-Mobile when you can already get an Android handset?
People release their works under copyright with the understanding that you can obtain a copy through means the artists approves, but you cannot distribute copies. The artist is not expecting that you will pay them, but that you will not get a copy without paying them.
Anyone who releases their works with the "understanding" that other people can't distribute copies must've been living under a rock for the past few decades. Surely they know that anything they release will be copied, and that there's nothing they can do about it. They might wish that weren't the case, but they're releasing their works in the real world, not a fantasy world where unauthorized copying doesn't exist.
The artist has a right to demand how his product can be distributed. If you don't like it you just don't buy his product.
No, the artist does not have the right to demand how a third party may distribute his work. If Bob wants to tell me something, and I want to listen and write it down, why on Earth would Alice have the right to shut him up?
Sure, copying a CD deprives no one of anything. Someone breaking into your house but stealing nothing and damaging nothing deprives you of nothing, but I expect you would argue there is a violation of principle somewhere.
Yes, that's the difference between physical property (including land) and information. I only have so much room in my house, which means a trespasser is depriving me to some extent of the use of my house: I might not want to use it right now, but the trespasser doesn't know that, and my ability to do so is infringed nonetheless.
Information doesn't work that way. Someone who copies my work has absolutely no impact on my ability to do anything with it, not even in theory: what they do with their copy can't possibly affect what I do with my copy. The very concept of ownership is meaningless when applied to something that can be everywhere at once like that.
Yes, artistic works can be made in the absence of copyright, but I see no reason why you need to have things NOW as opposed to seven years from now.
But you do see a reason why you need to have things seven years from now as opposed to 25 years or 100 years, huh? Seven is the magic number because... why?
It seems to me that if seven is better than 100, then zero is even better still. Why should you have to wait at all?
I don't think it is a stretch to assume more works would be created with limited copyright than with none;
Perhaps, but the number of works created isn't the only measure of the policy. We also have to consider whether those works are the kind people want (rather than shovelware made as a speculative investment), how free people are to access and build on those works, and how free people are in general (in terms of speech rights and technical innovation).
On the other hand, I don't think your assumption is a safe one. Copyright doesn't just encourage the creation of some works, it also forbids the creation (or at least distribution) of other works. In terms of the sheer number of works, I suspect things like mashups and fan sequels would outnumber the works that were no longer made.
as for movies amateur works are well behind professional ones so that is one area where copyright is sure to have a major benefit to quality.
No, you're confusing "amateur works" with "works produced without copyright". Works produced without copyright can still be professional works, if the people involved are getting paid to produce them.
Any person who wishes to benefit from the copyright must either pay the price that the copyright holder asks, negotiate a better price, or simply not use it.
.
This is black and white, and quite simple to grasp.
Yes, that's what the law says. But in this case, the law is unjust. There is no legitimate reason for my speech rights to be subject to the copyright holder's whims.
The fact that it is easy to make digital copies, and redistribute them easily on the Internet has nothing to do with it. Just because you can click copy, paste, or hit the download/upload button, does not mean that you are entitled to the work.
That's true: I'm not entitled to have a copy of the work just because it's easy to share. I'm entitled to have a copy of the work because someone else who has a copy is willing to share it with me. He's entitled to tell me about his copy, I'm entitled to listen and write down what he's saying.
have you ever run a business?
because if you had, you would realise that you only produce products in the hope that people BUY them.
Yes, of course they hope people will buy them. And I hope it won't rain tomorrow. If it does, who should I sue? If it's my responsibility to make a movie producer's hopes come true, whose responsibility is it to make mine come true?
the money to make a movie does not float down from the skies. Its an investment, made in the likely hope of a return.
But where does that return come from? The pockets of people who want to see the movie.
If everyone behaved like you, who is going to be stupid enough to invest even fifty thousand dollars into making a movie that nobody will pay for?
The same people who ultimately pay for movies now: the people who want to see them. $10 apiece from five thousand people is still $50,000 whether you collect it before production or at the box office.
So you are saying that if I hire a baby sitter and then refuse to pay, it is OK.
Nope. When you hire the baby sitter, you enter into a contract: you promise to pay for her labor. If you refuse to pay afterward, you will have broken the contract and defrauded her out of her time.
The baby sitter already did the job and there is no difference in extra labour, whether I pay or not.
There is a difference in extra labor based on whether you commit fraud or not. If you had been honest and said up front that you weren't going to pay, she could've spent her time doing something else.
Artists who rely on copyright, on the other hand, do not have any sort of contract with their audience. If they don't sell any copies and they end up giving their labor away for nothing, they have no one else to blame: it was their own idea to do the work in the first place.
By that lagic any who is self employed or sets up their own business isn't entitled to payment.
If you decide to become a self-employed street performer who plays guitar on the sidewalk, or a self-employed landscaper who mows people's lawns without asking if they want it, you aren't entitled to any payment for that. That's labor, which is what I was talking about, but you seem to want to talk about goods instead.
If you open a shop selling T-shirts, no one is obligated to give you money just for being there. But you are entitled to keep your T-shirts until you decide to trade them (i.e. until someone pays you for them). If they don't like your prices, they can get an identical looking T-shirt from someone else.
If you open a web site selling MP3s, no one is obligated to buy them from you. You're entitled to keep your MP3s, but if people don't like your prices, they can get identical MP3s from someone else. Don't worry, you'll still have your copies!
Lets say I open a shop. Nobody asked me to. So anybody can walk in and steal things off the shelves?
Now do you see why this objection makes no sense? You're entitled to keep your property until someone persuades you to trade it. What you aren't entitled to do is stop people from getting identical things from another source.
Only a finite amount of labor went into your house, and that labor has already been performed.
Yup, that's why I don't have to pay the builders every time I open the door. They were paid when they built it, and they've long since moved on to new projects.
So get your bags packed, it's mine now.
That would deprive me of the use of my house. You haven't been paying attention, have you?
Someone paid Henry Ford[1] to build a car factory beforeheand?
The cars that came out of Henry Ford's factory belonged to Ford because they were made from materials that he owned.
If you make a physical product, then you own it, and that means you're entitled to either (1) keep it or (2) trade it to someone else on mutually agreeable terms. Physical property works that way because it can only be in one place at a time: someone has to own it, and it's up to them whether they want to transfer ownership. Information doesn't: the concept of ownership is meaningless when applied to something that can be everywhere at once, where no use can conflict with any other use, where you can't truly trade it because you still have it afterward.
Get real, the concept of free speech was that you could critice the king|pope|president without the government shutting you up.
That's a very narrow view of freedom of speech, and (thankfully) not one the courts have generally endorsed. You don't need profanity to criticize the President, for example, but it's protected by the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech covers the expressions you use as well as the ideas you express. Some people treat it as only the freedom to put forth controversial opinions, but I believe free speech means the freedom to speak even on trivial topics, and even when you're merely repeating what you heard somewhere else.
Paying the producer of the movie to watch it is one way to pay for the production of movies. You're arguing that this business model is fundamentally broken. Do you have an alternative?
The alternative is paying the producer of the movie to produce it in the first place. Once he's been paid and the movie has been released, it doesn't matter who distributes copies or how. He performed a service (made a movie) and was paid a price that he found acceptable, and if he wants to get paid again in the future, he can perform the service again (make another movie).
That's the overview. There are many ways to implement the details, but they all boil down to the basic question of how to collect the money and deliver it to the producer. Free markets are very effective at bringing buyers and sellers together (even without help from the government: see prostitution, drugs, etc.), so I think it would be fair to leave the explanation there, and let the market figure out the most effective way to make it happen.
But I'll go a step further and explain my personal favorite implementation idea: a social-type web site where fans can discover artists, learn about upcoming projects and give feedback, and contribute to the projects they want to see finished. Each project would have an estimated completion time and an asking price, fans would be able to contribute to any project as much or as little as they want, and the artist wouldn't be expected to work on the project until his asking price had been met. Users would be able to look at each artist's past work and community ratings to decide who to support; completed works would be made available as free downloads, possibly using an escrow system to guarantee the transaction. The site could support itself by taking a percentage of each project's asking price.
This might not be the most effective way to connect buyers and sellers - we won't really know until a sufficient number of artists abandon the copyright-based model to support competing pay-for-production systems. And we shouldn't expect it to fund exactly the same set of works we see today: perhaps we'll find out it's just too hard to raise $400 million to make the next Transformers movie if you have to do it $20 at a time. On the other hand, any model like this will work even if copyright is abolished, and abolishing copyright will allow new classes of works to be produced that aren't produced commercially today.
The "showing up uninvited" analogy to placing digital goods for sale, while a popular one, is ridiculous. A store is a store, a product is a product.
We were talking about labor, remember? Or are you abandoning that argument now that it isn't working?
An artist who records a song that no one asked for is in the same position as any other non-employee who does work that no one asked for. Neither of them are entitled to any payment for that labor, because they voluntarily gave it away. If they want to get paid, they can find a buyer and negotiate a price for their labor, like every other employee.
There is no great divide in abundance or copyability between online digital goods and more traditional items. Photocopiers and tape or wire recorders have been around for half a century. Photography for a century and a half. The printing press for centuries. All have been used for piracy, it is hardly a new phenomenon.
You're right, there's no great divide between online digital goods and traditional media. Online piracy is cheaper and easier, but fundamentally not much different from piracy that involves printing presses or tape recorders.
The great divide is between information and scarce products. Information can be detached from the medium it's recorded in: I can copy a file without taking the disk it's saved on. Making a copy requires essentially no resources beyond the cost of the medium, and doesn't interfere with anyone else's ability to make or use their own copies.
The divide between a song and a CD is the same as the divide between a song and a tape, or an LP, or a wax cylinder. Stealing a wax cylinder is wrong, because the rightful owner no longer has that cylinder. But recording a copy of the song onto your own wax cylinder is fine, because you're using your own time and materials, you're not depriving the owner of anything.
Do you photocopy textbooks to avoid paying for them? Did your parents pirate music on cassettes? If the answer is yes, that still doesn't make it legal, moral, or otherwise acceptable.
You're right, technically: it is moral and otherwise acceptable (though not legal), but not because of my actions or my parents' actions. What makes it moral is the fact that copying textbooks and copying cassettes doesn't deprive anyone of anything - the same thing that makes P2P file sharing moral.
In today's market, digital goods exist. They are as legitimate as any other.
You keep saying this as if the assertion that digital sales are "legitimate" makes copying immoral or unethical. It doesn't. It's "legitimate" to try to sell copies of files, but no one has any moral obligation to buy copies from you rather than getting them for free elsewhere.
What insult? Did you follow the link? Piaget's stages of cognitive development are very well established criteria. But you already knew that, right? Right?
Insults disguised as armchair psychology are still insults. But you already knew that, right?
Can your employer also invoke them and decide not to pay you for your labor? After all, while you worked at your job, no physical good was exchanged, so you didn't lose anything, right?
I work at my job because my employer has agreed to pay me for the work I do. If my employer decides not to pay, he will have broken that agreement. He will have used fraud to get labor out of me that I otherwise wouldn't have done: I will have been robbed of that time.
A better analogy to copyright infringement would be if you simply showed up uninvited at a job site, started working, and then demanded to be paid for your labor. The employer would have no obligation to pay you, because he never requested your labor or agreed to pay you: you would've voluntarily given away your time, even though you were hoping to get paid for it anyway.
Keep trying. Your flaw is that if taken to the extreme of all digital media being pirated, the creators would indeed be deprived of the fruits of their labor.
How silly. You might as well claim you're being deprived of the fruits of your labor when you mow your neighbor's lawn (without asking him first) and then he refuses to pay you.
They're only entitled to "fruits of their labor" when someone has agreed to pay for that labor beforehand. If I decide to spend my time making a movie, the only thing I'm entitled to afterward is a copy of that movie. My choice to perform labor doesn't obligate anyone else to pay me for it. Such an obligation can only come from a mutual agreement between me and the person who's paying.
Even if only a fraction of the output is pirated, the business model of selling digital goods is subverted.
So what? No one is required to make another person's business model work, especially such a foolish model as "work for free now, sell copies later", and especially when propping up that model requires ceding one's own right to communicate.
It is specious to insist that nothing is lost simply because a material item did not change hands.
No, it's just a straightforward application of the meaning of "lost". You can't lose something you never had. You can't lose money that belongs to someone else. You can, however, fail to convince someone to give you their money.
Music, video, games, etc. are digital information that required a great deal of labor to create.
Indeed they are. That's why it's so foolish to do all that labor for free and then pray that you can recoup your production costs by selling copies, especially when you know anyone can cut you out of the loop by making their own copies at home. The creation is the valuable part, not the copying.
Copying it without compensation or in violation of the artist's chosen license does indeed transfer a good from the artist to the thief.
More directly, it transfers a good from the uploader (who is almost certainly not the artist) to the downloader.
But "transfer" is not theft. When I tell you that the acceleration due to gravity on Earth is 9.8 m/s/s, I've transferred information to you, but I haven't lost anything. If you pass that information on to someone else without my permission, I still haven't lost anything.
Theft absolutely requires a loss. That's what makes theft a bad thing in the first place: not the fact that the thief gets something for free, but the fact that the rightful owner no longer has it. If you could wave a magic wand and make a copy of someone's car, few people would object to that (since it doesn't make them any poorer), and you'd have a hard time convincing anyone to call it an act of theft.
Most people have a better understanding of what theft is, and why theft is wrong, than you seem to. The best possible outcome of your line of argument is that you convince a few people that there are two kinds of "theft": the kind that's bad and the kind that isn't. Is that really what you want?
Keep denying it. You are stuck in the past. In this century, digital goods are a valid commercial entity.
I'm not the one who's stuck in the past. Copyright is an artifact of a relatively brief era when copying on a massive scale was practical for a few wealthy entities (who could afford printing presses, CD manufacturing plants, etc.) but not for the masses. Copyright is enforceable when you only need to keep an eye on factory owners who see copying as a business venture. But that era is gone: copying is now practical on a massive scale for anyone, the most dangerous copying (to the antiquated business model) is casual and noncommercial, and copyright is no longer enforceable without utterly decimating free speech and technical innovation.
It *is* theft. The movie was produced to make money.. and it is quite fair for them to expect that people won't just take it and not pay.
If I stand on the street corner playing the guitar and tambourine, hoping to make money, is it "theft" when people listen to the music without dropping a dollar in my hat?
Of course not. Just because you hope to make money doing something doesn't mean anyone is obligated to pay you for it.
If you want to get paid for making movies, there's a simple solution: don't make movies unless someone is paying you. As a professional programmer, I don't write code for free if I'm expecting to get paid for it. For every line of code I write, I know who wants it written and what they're paying me for it. This isn't a special talent I was born with; even movie producers can learn it.
Your example is childish and disingenuous because you are ignoring the labor that went into a product.
Incorrect. Illegal copying doesn't deprive anyone of their labor (or cause them to labor against their will) any more than it deprives them of the work being copied.
Only a finite amount of labor went into that product, and the labor has already been performed by the time anyone has a chance to make a copy. Whether you buy a copy legally, download a copy illegally, or don't obtain a copy at all, the amount of labor doesn't change -- the artist does exactly the same amount of work, no matter how many copies are eventually made or how many of those copies are legal.
Another way to look at it is that the artist gains no benefit when people choose not to download his works. His life isn't any richer or easier when his work is seen by 10 paying customers than when it's seen by 10 paying customers and 500 pirates. The pirates cause him no extra effort and take nothing away from him.
This, by the way, firmly places you in a clinically pre-adolescent stage of cognitive development.
When you've posted a completely boneheaded argument, pretending to be a psychologist only makes you look worse. Please, keep it up!
The Wii is around twice as powerful as the GameCube, with improvements to the CPU and GPU, not to mention Bluetooth and Wifi.
To take my (in my opinion overly-generous) estimate of a high-budget under your system - $10m - adjusting for inflation the only film in the IMDb top ten that would have been made is "12 Angry Men". It's not only Dark Knight that we'd have missed out on - no Star Wars, no Godfather, no Pulp Fiction. No One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
I think it's a mistake to assume that these films could only have been made with the budgets they actually had. Science fiction films had been made for decades before Star Wars came along, for instance. With a smaller budget, you might not have ILM's fancy effects, but you could still tell the story.
I loved the film Dark Knight - I've seen it multiple times, I own the DVD, and if a sequel comes out I'll almost certainly go to see it. But if I got a letter from the studio asking for $20 to fund production of that sequel? I wouldn't pay. For one thing, I would be skeptical paying for a film before I knew if it would be any good.
Then sir, you are not as much of a fan as you think you are.
If my favorite bands asked me for $20 to support the production of their next albums, I wouldn't hesitate. I know I'm going to buy whatever they release anyway, so why should I care whether I pay before or after it's released? Likewise, I know I'm going to see the sequel to Dark Knight, so it doesn't matter to me whether I pay for production or pay for a ticket.
For another, I don't much like the idea that I pay but everyone gets what I pay for, it doesn't seem fair.
I don't understand this zero-sum attitude.
When I pay for something, I consider the benefit that it provides for me, not for anyone else. For example, if I maintain my lawn and that raises my neighbors' property values, I don't feel like I'm being ripped off -- I'm maintaining the lawn for my own reasons, and any benefit my neighbors extract can't take away from the benefit I receive. In fact, I might even consider it a bonus.
Thirdly, I don't really like the idea of sending money away on the possibility that something might happen.
Ah, maybe I haven't been clear on this point. The money you send away is payment for a service, not a gift or a speculative investment. You would be legally entitled to a refund if the service was not performed as agreed.
What are those costs?
Loss of access to past works: there are thousands of existing works which are unavailable to anyone who lacks the means to pay for a access, even though in many cases the authors are dead or retired, which means the copyright on those works is serving only to restrict access rather than to provide any benefit whatsoever to anyone except the authors or their heirs.
Loss of access to derivative works: fan sequels, mashups, etc. Even derivative works made by large studios are frequently tied up because of this, whether it's filmmakers arguing over the rights to a book or an old TV series being released on DVD with a crappy new soundtrack (or not at all) because even the producers no longer had permission to release the show in its original form.
Technological restrictions: every computer comes with software to back up purchased audio CDs, but 12 years after DVD-R was invented, you still have to go underground to find software to back up purchased DVDs, and you'll be breaking the law if you use it. Standalone DVD recorders can't do it either. And remember how much overhead there is in Windows Vista simply to prevent you from viewing content in an unapproved fashion, not to mention all the other DRM you're paying for when you buy a computer, TV, disc player, or iPod.
The reason I don't feel my rights have been threatened by movie copyrights is that it has no effect on my speech. Comparing it to banning adverbs is ridiculous; not once in my life
It's still luck and chance. the skill basically plays the odds but the odds aren't the end all say all of it. You can have better then an 80% chance of winning the pot and still loose to someone who made a better hand on the last card.
You could say the same about the insurance industry. You know that on average, only X% of drivers will get in a wreck in any given month, and if the average payout is $Y then you can charge $Z a month to come about ahead, but it's possible that every driver will get in a wreck on the same day and you'll go broke. That doesn't mean selling insurance is all about luck, or even mostly about luck.
Explain to me what skill makes that next card be a queen and not a fucking deuce? I'll wait.
The skill is in recognizing:
The cards themselves are random. Every play carries some element of risk, which is why they're called bets. But a skilled player will make good bets -- the ones where the odds are in his favor -- and avoid bad bets. It takes skill to know which is which. This is more or less how insurance works, too: an insurer doesn't know whether or not any given house will burn down, but he can estimate the risk and if he's good at his job, he'll charge just enough in premiums to come out ahead in the long run.
You're welcome.